The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture 9780199593736, 0199593736

Table of contents :
Cover
The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Introduction: Literary Culture and the Victorians
Part I Ways of Being: Identity and Ideology
The Individual and Subjectivity
1. The Victorian Subject: Thackeray’s Wartime Subjects
2. Life .Writing and the Victorians
Political Cultures and Classes
3. Politics and the Literary
4. The Literature of Chartism
5. Liberalism and Literature
6. Globalization and Economics
7. Political Economy
Sexing the Victorians
8. The Victorians, Sex, and Gender
9. The New Woman and Her Ageing Other
10. Unspeakable Desires: We Other Victorians
11. Victorian Masculinities, or Military Men of Feeling: Domesticity, Militarism, and Manly Sensibility
Placing the Victorians
12. Empire, Place, and the Victorians
13. Organic Imperialism: Fictions of Progressive Social Order at the Colonial Periphery
14. The Strange Career of Fair Play, or, Warfare and Gamesmanship in the Time of Victoria
15. British Women Wanted: Gender, Genre, and South African Settlement
16. ‘The London Sunday Faded Slow’: Time to Spend in the Victorian City
Part II Ways of Understanding: Knowledge and Belief
Religion and the Shaping of Belief
17. Religion, the Bible, and Literature in the Victorian Age
18. Religion and Sexuality
19. Religion and the Canon
20. Religion and Education
Science and the Shaping of Knowledge
21. Beyond Two Cultures: Science, Literature, and Disciplinary Boundaries
22. Science and Periodicals: Animal Instinct and Whispering Machines
23. Victorian Natural Science and the Seashore
24. ‘You’ve Got Mail’: Technologies of Communication in Victorian Literature
Part III Ways of Communicating: Print and Other Cultures
Material and Mass Culture
26. Literature and the Expansion of the Press
27. Materiality in Theory: What to Make of Victorian Things
28. Celebrity Culture
Aesthetics and Visual Culture
29. Victorian Aesthetics
30. Emotions
31. Aestheticism and the Politics of Pleasure
32. Illustrations and the Victorian Novel
33. Art and the Literary
25. The New Cultural Marketplace: Victorian Publishing and Reading Practices
Theatrical Culture
34. Victorian Theatre: Research Problems and Progress
35. Victorian Theatre: Power and the Politics of Gender
36. Melodrama On and Off the Stage
37. Henry James’s Houses: Domesticity and Performativity
index

Citation preview

T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

V IC TOR IA N L I T E R A RY C U LT U R E

The Oxford Handbook of

VICTORIAN LITERARY CULTURE Edited by

JULIET JOHN

1

3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2016 The moral rights of the author‌have been asserted Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2016940756 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​959373–​6 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

In Memory of Dan Jacobson (1929–​2014) and Sally Ledger (1961–​2009) who each brought so much that is good to life and literary culture

Acknowledgements

My first thanks go to Jacqueline Baker for inviting me to edit this Handbook and for showing the loyalty and patience she has always shown me during its long duration. Second, I must thank the OUP editorial teams in Oxford and New York—​principally, Rachel Platt, Molly Davis, Eleanor Collins, and Lauren Konopko—​as well as the copy-​ editors at Newgen for doing an exemplary job in preparing the essays for publication. I would also like to thank all the contributors: bringing the book to fruition has been a much longer haul than any of us originally envisaged and those who submitted their work on time have shown quite outstanding levels of tolerance which exemplify the collegiality of today’s Victorian studies. For this, I am extremely grateful. Academically, I owe most thanks to my trusty readers, Matthew Bradley, Alice Jenkins, and Ruth Livesey, as well as to Helen Maslen, for expert research assistance and to Helena Goodwyn for her meticulous editing. During the gestation of the Handbook, I moved institutions and geographical areas from the University of Liverpool to Royal Holloway, University of London, and I owe thanks to colleagues and friends in both places and elsewhere for professional and personal support of various kinds as I attempted to manage a big project, a big move, and indeed a big family: Tim Armstrong, Paul Baines, Dinah Birch, James Cutler, Andrew Derrington, Kelvin Everest, Hilary Fraser, Holly Furneaux, Regenia Gagnier, Sophie Gilmartin, Robert Hampson, Ann Heilmann, Nicki Hitchcott, Avril Horner, Stephen James, Jackie John, Rebecca John, Carol Jones, Kim Edwards Keates, Norbert Lennartz, Mark Llewellyn, Gail Marshall, Frank Maslen, Bob Patten, Dominic Rainsford, Kiernan Ryan, Julia Thomas, Vera Tolz, Pierre Wassenaar, and Cathy Waters. And thank you to my family—​Calum, Iona, Hamish, and Seren—​as always for making me keep work in perspective and for moving, with all that the move has entailed.

Contents

List of Figures List of Contributors

xiii xv

Introduction: Literary Culture and the Victorians Juliet John

 1

PA RT I   WAYS OF B E I N G :  I DE N T I T Y A N D I DE OL O G Y  The Individual and Subjectivity  1. The Victorian Subject: Thackeray’s Wartime Subjects Rae Greiner

 27

2. Life ​Writing and the Victorians Trev Broughton

45

Political Cultures and Classes  3. Politics and the Literary Josephine M. Guy

 65

4. The Literature of Chartism Ian Haywood

 83

5. Liberalism and Literature Lauren M. E. Goodlad

 103

6. Globalization and Economics Ayşe Çelikkol

 124

7. Political Economy Kathleen Blake

 142

x   Contents

Sexing the Victorians  8. The Victorians, Sex, and Gender Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

 161

9. The New Woman and Her Ageing Other Teresa Mangum

 178

10. Unspeakable Desires: We Other Victorians Kate Flint

 193

11. Victorian Masculinities, or Military Men of Feeling: Domesticity, Militarism, and Manly Sensibility Holly Furneaux

 211

Placing the Victorians  12. Empire, Place, and the Victorians Patrick Brantlinger

 233

13. Organic Imperialism: Fictions of Progressive Social Order at the Colonial Periphery John Kucich

 251

14. The Strange Career of Fair Play, or, Warfare and Gamesmanship in the Time of Victoria Lara Kriegel

 268

15. British Women Wanted: Gender, Genre, and South African Settlement Melissa Free

 284

16. ‘The London Sunday Faded Slow’: Time to Spend in the Victorian City Alex Murray

 310

PA RT I I   WAYS OF U N DE R S TA N DI N G : K N OW L E D G E A N D B E L I E F  Religion and the Shaping of Belief  17. Religion, the Bible, and Literature in the Victorian Age Emma Mason

 331

Contents   xi

18. Religion and Sexuality James Eli Adams

 350

19. Religion and the Canon Matthew Bradley

 367

20. Religion and Education Mark Knight

 384

Science and the Shaping of Knowledge  21. Beyond Two Cultures: Science, Literature, and Disciplinary Boundaries Alice Jenkins

 401

22. Science and Periodicals: Animal Instinct and Whispering Machines  416 Sally Shuttleworth 23. Victorian Natural Science and the Seashore Amy M. King 24. ‘You’ve Got Mail’: Technologies of Communication in Victorian Literature Elizabeth Meadows and Jay Clayton

 438

 458

PA RT I I I   WAYS OF C OM M U N IC AT I N G : P R I N T A N D OT H E R C U LT U R E S  Material and Mass Culture  25. The New Cultural Marketplace: Victorian Publishing and Reading Practices Robert L. Patten

 481

26. Literature and the Expansion of the Press Joanne Shattock

 507

27. Materiality in Theory: What to Make of Victorian Things John Plotz

 522

xii   Contents

28. Celebrity Culture John Plunkett

 539 Aesthetics and Visual Culture 

29. Victorian Aesthetics Jonah Siegel

 561

30. Emotions Carolyn Burdett

 580

31. Aestheticism and the Politics of Pleasure Ruth Livesey

 598

32. Illustrations and the Victorian Novel Julia Thomas

 617

33. Art and the Literary Hilary Fraser

 637 Theatrical Culture 

34. Victorian Theatre: Research Problems and Progress Katherine Newey

 659

35. Victorian Theatre: Power and the Politics of Gender Kerry Powell

 675

36. Melodrama On and Off the Stage Jim Davis

 686

37. Henry James’s Houses: Domesticity and Performativity Gail Marshall

 702

Index  717

List of Figures

32.1

32.2

32.3

33.1

33.2

George du Maurier, ‘“They will never ripen now,” repeated little Miles, sorrowfully’, 109 mm x 107 mm, wood engraving by Joseph Swain. Illustration for Florence Montgomery, Misunderstood (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1874), facing p. 37.

623

John Everett Millais, ‘Never is a very long word’, 169 mm x 106 mm, wood engraving by the Dalziels. Illustration for Anthony Trollope, Orley Farm (London: Chapman and Hall, 1862), vol. II, facing p. 77.

625

Jane Sexey, ‘He little knows how he’s frightened us’, 109 mm x 76 mm, wood engraver not identified. Illustration for Jane Sexey, A Slip in the Fens (London: Macmillan and Co., 1873), facing p. 181.

634

Frederic Leighton, Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna is Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence, 1853–55, National Gallery, on loan from the Queen’s Collection. Royal Collection Trust/ © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013.

638

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Study for ‘Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante’, 1852 © Tate, London 2013.

644

List of contributors

James Eli Adams is Professor of English & Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (1995) and A History of Victorian Literature (2009), and the co-​editor, with Andrew Miller, of Sexualities in Victorian Britain (1996). He is also the author of numerous articles, chapters, and reviews on Victorian literature and culture, and from 1993–​2000 he co-​edited the journal Victorian Studies. Kathleen Blake is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Washington, author of Play, Games, and Sport: The Literary Works of Lewis Carroll (1974), Love and the Woman Question in Victorian Literature: The Art of Self-​Postponement (1983), and Pleasures of Benthamism: Victorian Literature, Utility, Political Economy (2009). She is editor of Approaches to Teaching George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1990) and has published essays on a range of Victorian writers. Matthew Bradley  is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. His research primarily focuses on Victorian culture and religion. His publications include the Oxford University Press World’s Classics edition of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (2012), and a co-​edited collection of essays, Reading and the Victorians (2014). He is currently writing a history of Victorian imaginings of the end of the world. Patrick Brantlinger, former editor of Victorian Studies, is James Rudy Professor of English, Emeritus, at Indiana University. His most recent books are Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians (2011) and States of Emergency: Essays on Culture and Politics (2013). Trev Broughton  is Senior Lecturer in English and Related Literature at the University of York. She has a long-​standing interest in nineteenth-​century Life writing, has published Men of Letters, Writing Lives (1997) and edited the four-​volume set of essays on Autobiography for the Routledge Critical Concepts series (2007). Her edition of some of Margaret Oliphant’s biographical writings, including selections from the Edward Irving, is published in the Pickering Chatto Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant. She is co-editor of Journal of Victorian Culture. Carolyn Burdett is Senior Lecturer in English and Victorian Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She is author of Olive Schreiner (2013) and co-​editor of The Victorian Supernatural (2004). Her work on emotions and psychology includes editing

xvi   List of contributors a ‘New Agenda’ for Journal of Victorian Culture on ‘Sentimentalities’ (2011) and an issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century on Psychology/​Aesthetics (2011). Her current book project is Coining Empathy: Psychology, Aesthetics, Ethics, 1870–​ 1920 for which she was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2012–​13. She is editor of the online journal, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. Ayşe Çelikkol is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Bilkent University, Turkey. She is the author of Romances of Free Trade:  British Literature, Laissez-​Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century (2011). Her essays on nineteenth-​century British and American literature have appeared in ELH:  English Literary History, American Literature, Victorian Poetry, and Partial Answers. Her current book project explores the enchantment of modern life in Victorian Britain. Jay Clayton  is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English, and Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University. He has published books and articles on Romantic poetry and Victorian novels, contemporary American literature, film and digital media, science and literature, and medicine, health, and society. His book, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture (2003), focused on the depiction of computers, information technology, and cyborgs from the Victorian era to the twenty-​first century. Jim Davis  is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick. His major research interest is in nineteenth-​century British theatre and his most recent books are Comic Acting and Portraiture in Late-​Georgian and Regency England (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Theatre and Entertainment (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). He is the editor of Victorian Pantomime: A Collection of Critical Essays (2010)—​the first academic book devoted exclusively to this topic—​and Lives of Shakespearian Actors: Edmund Kean (2009). He is also joint author of a study of London theatre audiences in the nineteenth century, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatre-​going 1840–​1880 (2001). He has published a wide range of book chapters and refereed articles in his research field. Current research projects include a two-​volume edition of nineteenth-​century dramatizations of Dickens (with Jacky Bratton) for Oxford University Press and a study of cultural exchange between Britain and Australia 1880–​1960 (with Australian academic Veronica Kelly). Kate Flint  is Provost Professor of Art History and English at the University of Southern California. She is author of The Woman Reader 1837–​1914 (1993), The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (2000), and The Transatlantic Indian (2009), as well as many articles on Victorian and early twentieth-century cultural history, literature, and visual culture. She is currently completing ‘Flash! Photography, Writing, and Surprising Illumination,’ and working on two new projects: one on the ordinary and the overlooked, and the other on the transnational currents of art in the nineteenth century.

List of contributors    xvii Hilary Fraser  holds the Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth-​Century Studies and is Dean of Arts at Birkbeck, University of London. Her most recent book is Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century: Looking Like a Woman (2014). Earlier books include Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature (1986), The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (1992), English Prose of the Nineteenth Century (with Daniel Brown, 1997), and Gender and the Victorian Periodical (with Stephanie Green and Judith Johnston, 2003). She is currently writing a book for Oxford University Press on art writing. She is President of the British Association for Victorian Studies. Melissa Free  is an Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University, where she teaches nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century British literature and postcolonial studies. Her essays have appeared in edited collections and journals, including Genre, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and Joyce Studies Annual. New work is forthcoming in Victorian Studies and Conradiana. Her current project is a book-length study of gender, race, and generic innovation in British South African litera­ture from the First Boer War through the First World War. Holly Furneaux  is Professor of English at Cardiff University. She is author of Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities (2009). She is also co-​editor, with Sally Ledger, of Dickens in Context (2011) and editor of John Forster’s Life of Dickens (2011). Her next book, Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch and Masculinity in the Crimean War (Oxford University Press) will be out in spring 2016. Lauren M. E. Goodlad is the Kathryn Paul Professorial Scholar of English and Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana where she is also Provost Fellow for Undergraduate Education. Her books include Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (2003), the co-​edited ‘Mad Men’, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (2013), and The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience (2015). She is also the editor of Worlding Realisms, a forthcoming special issue of Novel: A Forum on Fiction as well as the co-​editor, with Andrew Sartori, of The Ends of History (2013), a special issue of Victorian Studies. Rae Greiner  is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she is editor of the journal Victorian Studies. The author of Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-​Century British Fiction (2012), she is interested in the relation between history and literary form and in the vagaries of mental life. Her book in progress, Stupidity After Enlightenment, is a study of stupidity’s value for British scientists and authors circa 1750–​1940. Josephine M. Guy  is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Nottingham. She has published monographs on various aspects of nineteenth-​century literary history and has edited a collection of source documents, The Victorian Age (1998, 2002); her most recent publications in this area (in collaboration with Ian Small) are The Routledge Concise History of Nineteenth-​Century Literature (2011) and The Textual Condition of

List of contributors    xix a book provisionally entitled Pictures for Posterity:  The Making of Heritage in the Nineteenth-​Century Novel. Amy M. King  is Associate Professor of English at St. John’s University, Queens, NY. She is the author of Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel (2003, 2007), as well as articles in journals such as Common Knowledge, Victorian Studies, Victorian Review, Romanticism and Victorianism Online, Novel, ELN, and BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-​Century History, 1775–​1925. She is finishing a book project entitled The Divine Commonplace: Natural History, Theologies of Nature, and the Novel in Britain, 1789–​1865. Mark Knight  is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. His publications include Chesterton and Evil (2004), Nineteenth-​ Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (with Emma Mason, 2006), and An Introduction to Religion and Literature (2009). He has edited several volumes, most recently The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion (2016), and he is currently finishing a monograph, Good Words: Evangelicalism and the Victorian Novel. Lara Kriegel  is Associate Professor of History and English at Indiana University, where she is also the Director of the Victorian Studies Program. Kriegel is the author of Grand Designs: Labor, Empire and the Museum in Victorian Culture (2007), as well as several essays and articles on material culture, museum history, social class, and imperial formation. She is currently at work on a book called War Without Heroes, which considers the Crimean War and its afterlife. John Kucich  is Professor of English at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He is the author of Excess and Restraint in the Novels of Charles Dickens (1981), Repression in Victorian Fiction:  Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot (1987), The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction (1994), and Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class (2007). He has also edited, with Dianne F.  Sadoff, Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century (2000), and he is the editor of Fictions of Empire (2002). With Jenny Bourne Taylor, he has co-​edited The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume Three: 1830–​1880 (2012). He has also written numerous essays on Victorian literature and culture. Ruth Livesey is Reader in Nineteenth-​ Century Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her publications include Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–​1914 (2007) and the co-​edited volume The American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture (2013). She is currently completing a book entitled Writing the Stagecoach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-​Century British Literature and is an editor of the Journal of Victorian Culture. Mark Llewellyn is Visiting Professor in English at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. His research interests are focused on the nineteenth century and contemporary literature and culture. His publications include The Collected Short Stories of George Moore: Gender and Genre (with Ann Heilmann, 2007), the collections Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women’'s Writing (with Ann Heilmann, 2007) and

xviii   List of contributors Nineteenth-​Century Literature (2012). She has also published widely on Oscar Wilde and since 2000 has been a contributing editor to the Oxford University Press edition of the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, bringing out in 2007 an edition of Wilde’s critical writings (vol. IV); she is currently editing a volume of some of his plays. Ian Haywood is Professor of English at Roehampton University, London. He has published widely on radical politics and popular literature in nineteenth-​century England, including three editions of Chartist fiction (published by Ashgate), numerous articles on George W. M. Reynolds, and The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People 1790–​1860 (2004). His other books include Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation 1776–​1832 (2006), The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-​Century England (2012; co-​edited with John Seed), and most recently Romanticism and Caricature (2013). His current research interests include political caricature in the early Victorian period, the visual culture of Chartism, Spain and Romanticism, and literary illustration in the Romantic period. Ann Heilmann  is Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University, having previously held professorial chairs at Swansea and Hull. The author of New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-​Wave Feminism (2000), New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird (2004), and Neo-​Victorianism (with Mark Llewellyn, 2010), she has co-​edited (also with Llewellyn) a critical edition of the short stories of George Moore (2007) and most recently an essay collection on George Moore: Influence and Collaboration (2014). She has also (co-​)edited three other essay collections, as well as four multi-​volume anthology sets, on Victorian to contemporary women’s writing and Victorian to Edwardian (anti)feminism. The general editor of Routledge’s History of Feminism and Gender and Genre series, and the academic editor of a forthcoming database, Routledge Historical Resources: The History of Feminism, she is now working on a cultural history of James Miranda Barry in Victorian and neo-​ Victorian biographilia. Alice Jenkins  is Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Glasgow and works mainly on the emergence of the knowledge economy in the nineteenth century. Publications include Space and the ‘March of Mind’: Literature and the Physical Sciences, 1815–​1850 (2007) and an edition of Michael Faraday’s essays, Michael Faraday’s ‘Mental Exercises’: An Artisan Essay-​Circle in Regency London (2008). She is the co-​founder and first Chair of the British Society for Literature and Science. Juliet John is Hildred Carlile Chair of English Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is Director of the Royal Holloway Centre for Victorian Studies and was previously Director of the Glastone Centre for Victorian Studies, which she founded. She has published widely on Victorian literature and culture. She is the author of Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture (2001) and Dickens and Mass Culture (2010). She has edited numerous books and editions, most recently (with Matthew Bradley) Reading and the Victorians (2015) and is Editor-​ in-​Chief of Oxford Bibliographies: Victorian Literature. She is currently working on

xx   List of contributors Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-​Century Literature (with Dinah Birch, 2010). Mark’s most recent book is the co-​authored (with Ann Heilmann) Neo-​Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-​First Century (2010). Teresa Mangum is Professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa where she also directs the University of Iowa Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. She is the author of Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (1998) and numerous articles on representations of Victorian late life—​human and animal—​and the editor of A Cultural History of Women: Volume 5: The Age of Empire, 1800–​1920. She co-​edits a book series, Humanities and Public Life, for the University of Iowa Press. Gail Marshall  is Professor of Victorian Literature and Director of the Victorian Studies Centre at the University of Leicester. She is the author of Actresses on the Victorian Stage (1998), Victorian Fiction (2003), and Shakespeare and Victorian Women (2009), and has edited books on George Eliot, the fin de siècle, and Shakespeare and the nineteenth century. She is currently working on a monograph on the literature and culture of 1859. Emma Mason is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her books include Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (2006), Nineteenth Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (with Mark Knight, 2006), The Cambridge Introduction to Wordsworth (2010), Elizabeth Jennings:  The Collected Poems (2012) and Reading the Abrahamic Faiths:  Rethinking Religion and Literature (2015). She is co-​editor of The Oxford Handbook to the Reception History of the Bible (2011), and The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature (2009), and with Mark Knight, general editor of Bloomsbury's series, New Directions in Religion and Literature. Elizabeth Meadows is Senior Lecturer in English and the Assistant Director of Vanderbilt University’s Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy. Her current book project examines how various authors use marriage to problematize the social and material power of literary form in Victorian literature and culture. She thanks the American Council of Learned Societies for support enabling her to complete this chapter. Alex Murray  teaches in the School of English at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of Landscapes of Decadence: Literature and Place at the Fin de Siècle (2016) and edited, with Jason Hall, Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle (2013). He is currently writing a book on the relationship between aesthetics and conservatism in the period 1880-​1940. Katherine Newey  is Professor of Theatre History at the University of Exeter. She is a scholar of nineteenth-​century British literature and culture, specializing in popular theatre and women’s writing, and has published widely on the Victorian theatre and culture. Publications include Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain (2005), and John Ruskin and the Victorian Theatre, co-​authored with Jeffrey Richards (2010).

List of contributors    xxi Robert L. Patten  is Senior Research Scholar at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He has written extensively about the works of Charles Dickens and the graphic artists Hablot Knight Browne and George Cruikshank, and also published essays on Charlotte Brontë, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Makepeace Thackeray, Victorian illustration, nineteenth-​century print culture, and the concept of authorship in the industrial era. A recent book, Charles Dickens and ‘Boz’: The Birth of the Industrial-​Age Author (2012), received the Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. John Plotz  is Professor and Chair of English at Brandeis University. He is the author of The Crowd (2000) and Portable Property (2008), and his current project is entitled ‘Semi-​Detached: The Aesthetics of Partial Absorption’. He recently published his first children’s book, Time and the Tapestry: A William Morris Adventure (2014). John Plunkett  is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Exeter. His publications include Queen Victoria—​First Media Monarch (2003), the co-​edited, with Andrew King, Victorian Print Media: A Reader (2005) and Popular Exhibitions, Science and Showmanship 1820–​1910 (2012), co-​edited with Joe Kember and Jill Sullivan. He is currently working on a book of nineteenth-​century visual entertainments, covering the panorama, diorama, peepshow, and magic lantern, provisionally entitled, Picture Going: Popular Visual and Optical Entertainments 1820–​1914. Kerry Powell  is the author of Acting Wilde (2009), preceded by Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s (1990) and Women and Victorian Theatre (1997. He edited the Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre (2004) and is co-​editor with Peter Raby of Oscar Wilde in Context (2013). He is Professor of English at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. Joanne Shattock  is Emeritus Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Leicester. She is general editor of The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell (2005–​06) and is co-​ editor with Elisabeth Jay of The Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant (25 vols. 2011–​16). Other works include The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers (1993) and the third edition of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature 1800-1900 (1999). Her latest publication, Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press (2016). Sally Shuttleworth  is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. She was Co-Director of the Science in the Nineteenth-Century periodical project which produced an index to the science content of a range of periodicals (http://​www.sciper.org/​), and three books in the area. She has published extensively on Victorian literature and science. Her most recent work is The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science and Medicine, 1840–​1900 (2010). She is currently directing two research projects on nineteenth-​century science and culture: ‘Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-​ Century Perspectives (www.diseasesofmodernlife.org) and ‘Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries’ (www.conscicom.org).

xxii   List of contributors Jonah Siegel  is Professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-​Century Culture of Art (2000) and Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the Art-​Romance Tradition (2005), and editor of The Emergence of the Modern Museum: An Anthology of Nineteenth-​Century Sources (2007). Julia Thomas  is Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University, UK. She has worked extensively on Victorian visual and material culture and her books include Victorian Narrative Painting (2000), Pictorial Victorians:  The Inscription of Values in Word and Image (2004), and Shakespeare’s Shrine:  The Bard’s Birthplace and the Invention of Stratford-​upon-​Avon (2012). She is Director of the AHRC-​funded Database of Mid-​Victorian Illustration (http://​www.dmvi.org.uk) and The Illustration Archive (www.illustrationarchive.cardiff.ac.uk).

I n t rodu ction Literary Culture and the Victorians Juliet John

When the idea of a Handbook of original essays on Victorian literary culture was first put to me by Oxford University Press, my first thought was to wonder about the proposed title. What might be understood by the phrase ‘literary culture’, and specifically ‘Victorian literary culture’? Did the Victorians have a ‘literary culture’ and, if so, how might it be characterized? The broad and generic title seemed fraught with difficulty, not least because in the key phrase ‘Victorian literary culture’, two unstable and contested adjectives work to qualify an abstract noun—​culture—​which is itself unstable and contested. As Raymond Williams demonstrated so brilliantly more than half a century ago, in the long nineteenth century, the meaning of the word culture underwent several changes, all tending to reinforce a shift from culture understood as ‘a culture of something’ to ‘culture as such, a thing in itself ’.1 The Victorian period witnessed the first serious attempts, in Isobel Armstrong’s words, ‘to conceptualise the idea of culture as a category’.2 Most memorably, Matthew Arnold’s momentous effort, in Culture and Anarchy (1869), to define culture as a ‘study of perfection’, as spiritual ‘sweetness and light’, accorded a special place to literature. Indeed Arnold, as the first Professor of Poetry at Oxford, left his imprint not only on cultural theory but also on the origins of English literature as a discipline, most notably on the writings of F. R. Leavis in the twentieth century whose own elevation of literature became the symbol for so much that seemed to be wrong with the discipline of English literature from the 1950s onwards. Contemporary constructions of literature and culture are thus rooted if not entangled in the uncertain soil of the Victorian period, even though in the 1830s, for example, when Queen Victoria came to the throne, the novel genre, which formed the basis of Leavis’s

1 

Culture and Society, 1870–​1950 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958), p. xvi. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), 3. Armstrong is talking specifically about Victorian poetics here. 2 

2   Introduction ‘great tradition’ of literature over a century later, did not feature in the ‘Literature’ reviews sections of newspapers. Non-​fiction prose, so often omitted from university undergraduate Victorian literature syllabi today, was securely ‘literary’ but novels were not.3 The term ‘Victorian’, to the uninitiated, seems less abstract than the ideas of culture or the literary but the adjective carries with it a great deal of cultural, political, and emotional baggage in the contemporary cultural consciousness, within and without the academy. Victorian studies has never reached agreement on the idea that the adjective relates literally to the study of the reign of Queen Victoria. The rise of fin de siècle studies in the last thirty years has in some ways literalized our definition of the term ‘Victorian’ by allowing for the study of movements like Decadence and the New Woman which were part of the rich cultural tapestry of Victoria’s reign, but had previously seemed to pose such a challenge to traditional notions of Victorianism that they were routinely omitted from university courses. Fin de siècle studies is just one area of several that has worked to transfigure and expand definitions of the term ‘Victorian’—​spatially, via notions of the cosmopolitan and the global, and temporally, through dialogue with modernism and the ‘neo-​Victorian’. Writing at the millennium, John Lucas insisted that There is a strong case for arguing that, except in the most rigorously controlled of contexts, ‘Victorian’ and ‘Victorianism’ are terms we could well do without. […] ‘Victorian’ in particular is used to imply a cultural and political homogeneity which […] never existed.4

It is telling that only sixteen years after Lucas made this remark, the word ‘Victorian’ is very far from a byword for cultural and political homogeneity in the academy. Victorian studies today embraces heterogeneity; there is a generosity, curiosity, and inclusivity about its spirit. The corollary of this relaxed pluralism and indeed precondition for it, is a certain elasticity about spatial, temporal, and disciplinary parameters. And yet if today’s Victorian studies has rendered itself accommodating by moving beyond some of the territorial debates of its past, why does the idea of ‘Victorian literary culture’ give pause for thought? Or even for discomfort. Why does it matter if the unstable triumvirate of terms that is ‘Victorian literary culture’ necessitates a willing suspension of pedantry on the student’s or critic’s part? Why does it matter that the notion of ‘Victorian literary culture’ demands an effort of critical will, first, to ensure that the phrase means something, and second, to accept that it means many things, to many different readers? Surely it is part of what feels like a new critical generosity to go with the flow. And yet there is something in the title of this volume that stops the flow. And that is the word ‘literary’. This may seem peculiar given that many (though by no means all) of this volume’s contributors have institutional homes in Departments of English and/​ 3 

See F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962). ‘Republican versus Victorian: Radical Writing in the Later Years of the Nineteenth Century’, in Juliet John and Alice Jenkins (eds), Rethinking Victorian Culture (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000), 29–​45 (p. 29). 4 

Introduction   3 or Literature. But it is the idea of the literary that invokes a long history in Victorian studies, and in English and cultural studies more generally, of intellectual conflict rather than cooperation. The Victorian period gave ballast to the emerging academic discipline of (English) Literature, and as several of this volume’s contributors attest, it did so by investing the idea of the literary with a moral and spiritual significance which aligned it with the immaterial and the religious, as well as (by an inflected process of association) the high cultural.5 ‘The cult of literature’, as William McKelvy has demonstrated, ‘developed in intimate collusion with religious culture and religious politics.’6 In the phrase ‘sweetness and light’, Arnold sought to associate culture with religion—​which ‘enjoin[s]‌and sanction[s] the aim which is the great aim of culture, the setting ourselves to ascertain what perfection is and to make it prevail’—​and with poetry (‘It is by making sweetness and light to be characters of perfection that culture is of like spirit with poetry’).7 A century later, F. R. Leavis was the most vocal proponent of Arnold’s view that culture was in some ways ‘beyond religion’.8 Leavis positioned the discipline of English literature as ‘a centre of consciousness […] for our civilisation’, because he believed that it could preserve a ‘living culture’ against the fragmenting effects of the modernity.9 Leavis’s belief that literature (as the most important manifestation of culture) was the supreme means of protecting civilization and civilizing individuals was more mainstream among literary critics than his maverick reputation can seem to suggest. What set him apart was the undisguised dogmatism of his supremacist claims for literature. Leavis preached intensely about literature as the means to individual and social salvation because he perceived, rightly in many ways, that the elevation of the literary taken quietly for granted by many literary critics (even those outside the Arnoldian tradition) was under threat. Critics of Leavis would and of course did argue that he was the threat. In his open hostility to mass culture and his aggressively selective use of the term ‘Literature’ to describe authors that he deemed worthy of belonging to his self-​fashioned ‘great tradition’, Leavis seemed to turn ‘literary culture’ into a battleground rather than a near sacred space. Cultural studies evolved to remedy the exclusion of popular culture from ‘literary’ study as well as the universalist, apolitical assumptions of Leavisite, 5  The University of Edinburgh claims the oldest Department of English in the world, offering courses in ‘rhetoric and belles lettres’ in the eighteenth century—​http://​www.ed.ac.uk/​schools-​departments/​ literatures-​languages-​cultures/​english-​literature/​about/​department [last accessed 1 April 2016]. However, Charlotte Mitchell’s history of University College London’s English department makes clear both the importance of the nineteenth century in building English literature as a discipline named as such and how complex and gradual the emergence of English as a discipline was in the changing university context in the nineteenth century—​http://​www.ucl.ac.uk/​english/​department/​history-​of-​the-​ english-​department [last accessed 29 May 2015]. 6  The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774–​1880 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 35. 7  Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (1932; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 47, 54. 8  Culture and Anarchy, 48. 9  F. R. Leavis, Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962), 30, 27.

4   Introduction New Critical, and liberal humanist traditions. The Marxist critic Raymond Williams is regarded by many as the founding father of British cultural studies, though his work grew out of, and in response to, the intellectual climate of the Faculty of English at Cambridge, where he studied and was Professor of Drama for some years. Cultural studies insisted that culture and its criticism were always subject to the workings of politics and power and, through a focus (post-​Williams) on ‘mass’ culture, took seriously the tastes of the many which Leavis regarded as a threat to the values of traditional ‘civilization’.10 Cultural studies was of course fuelled by the rise to mainstream prominence of critical theory more generally from the 1960s onwards. The advent of theory meant that the idea of the literary as a distinct and somehow transcendent space was everywhere under threat: feminism, Marxism, postcolonialism, New Historicism, Foucauldian criticism are just some of the theoretical schools that contested the values which had initially underpinned the Victorian establishment of literary criticism as a discipline. In her essay in this volume, Josephine Guy succinctly sums up the political objections that drove the backlash against the liberal humanist foundations of literary study: the assumption that the domain of the literary is above or beyond the domain of the political looks naïve at best; at worst, it seems itself to be suspiciously political in that it conveniently disguises the ways in which literariness—​or more accurately, the distinguishing of certain kinds of works as possessing a literary identity—​may be deeply ideological insofar as such labelling serves the needs of particular interest groups by normalizing the values which those works embody. Denying the label literature to some kinds of writing could, after all, be a useful way of marginalizing them. (69)

The swing from a humanist tradition of literary criticism which positioned literature above politics through a theoretical turn which sees all literature as political (or often subject to politics as the greater force) gives some sense of why the idea of ‘literary culture’ is challenging—​especially when deployed as the conceptual umbrella for a seminal volume of today’s Victorian studies scholarship. Ideological differences about what constituted literary and cultural study ran so deep that the parent discipline of English studies and its rebellious child cultural studies agreed to go their separate ways in many institutional contexts in the second half of the twentieth century. As recently as the millennium, in his foreword to Rethinking Victorian Culture, John Sutherland commented from his then vantage point as the Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English in the Department of English at University College London: When he heard the word ‘culture’, Goering is supposed to have said, he reached for his revolver. Victorianists of my generation may feel much the same when they hear the term ‘cultural criticism’.11 10  See Leavis, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (Minority Pamphlet No. 1; Cambridge: Minority Press, 1930). 11  John and Jenkins (eds), Rethinking Victorian Culture, p. xv.

Introduction   5 The aversion to the label ‘cultural criticism’ of a critic who has done much to expand notions of Victorian literary culture and its criticism, tells us a great deal about the extent of the tribal feeling and habits of self-​identification which grew out of the formative debates in the establishment of English and cultural studies as disciplines, whatever the reality of critical practice. It would be wrong, however, to suggest that the challenges posed by the idea of Victorian literary culture have been generated solely by querulous infighting among academics. Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy was so titled because of the pressures he felt in his own day on his ideal of culture as a cohesive force. Q. D. Leavis devoted a chapter of her Fiction and the Reading Public to ‘The Disintegration of the Reading Public’ in the Victorian period, effectively blaming Dickens for what David Vincent calls ‘the collapse of a common literary culture’.12 Josephine Guy’s comments on modern scepticism about the framing of the ‘literary’ as a metapolitical space are made in the context of observations about the ‘persistent and sometimes draconian attempts’ in the Victorian period ‘to police literary culture, activities which only make sense in a climate in which literary works were recognized to have significant social consequences’ (69). This is nowhere more obvious than in the division legally imposed by the 1737 Licensing Act for more than a century between the ‘legitimate’ theatres royal and the other ‘illegitimate’ theatres. Even after the 1843 Theatres Regulation Act officially ended this use of performance space to impose cultural division and hierarchy, plays still had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for scrutiny. The phrase ‘legitimate’ Drama was still used by critics pining for the nation’s playwrights to produce higher quality or ‘literary’ work. For much of the nineteenth century, however, the impermanence of the theatre, as well as what Kate Newey calls its ‘thingness’ (Chapter 34, 661), seemed to contemporary observers to position its offerings outside the realm of the ‘literary’. So the Victorian period did not represent any kind of golden age of ‘a common literary culture’ if by ‘common’, we mean homogenous, and Victorians were no more united in agreement over what constitutes a literary culture than we are. Q. D. Leavis is far from the only voice who argues that the period in fact witnesses not an age of cultural integration but the disintegration of a more cohesive culture. Sally Ledger and Paul Schlicke among other critics, for example, have pointed to the 1840s as witnessing a split which Ledger figures as between radical (minority) culture and commercial (mass) culture and Schlicke as a schism between ‘the old rural pastimes’ like fairs and rural markets and ‘large-​scale spectator entertainments such as music-​hall and professional sport’.13 The ‘disintegration of the reading public’ which Q. D. Leavis laments, refers of course not to radical or folk culture but to the canonical or ‘minority’ literary culture, to use F. R. Leavis’s term, which can be homogenous or common because it is common to a few, or 12 

Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), 151–​202; Vincent, ‘Dickens’s Reading Public’, in John Bowen and Robert L. Patten (eds), Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 176–​97, at 192. 13 Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Schlicke, Dickens and Popular Entertainment (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985), 4–​5.

6   Introduction more accurately uncommon. It relies on ‘a very small minority’, on whom ‘the discerning appreciation of art and literature depend’: Upon them depend the implicit standards that order the finer living of an age, the sense that it is worth more than that […]. In their keeping […] is the language, the changing idiom upon which fine living depends, and without which distinction of spirit is thwarted and incoherent. By ‘culture’ I mean the use of such language.14

Such a language-​based, hierarchical model of ‘culture’ of course thrives best when it is clear which art and literature is at stake and who has the ‘discerning appreciation’. As John Plunkett makes clear in his essay for this Handbook, the huge growth of literacy and the literary marketplace which took place in the Victorian period gave rise to an expanded literary and cultural realm, and this ‘went hand in hand with the creation of numerous distinct literary fields, each with their own conventions, authors, and readers’ (543). Cultural inclusivity is thus not the same as cultural cohesion. Indeed, the radical changes in the social, political, and economic structures of nineteenth-​century Britain which moved the country towards a modern democracy had complex effects on the cultural sphere. Industrialization, the Reform Bills, the intensification of capitalism, the increase in literacy, the move to universal education, and changes to the legal system, are just some of the major historical developments which began or gathered pace in the early nineteenth century. These changes enabled a cultural revolution which gave more and more people access to ‘culture’, and developments in the publishing trade in the 1820s and 1830s meant that books and newspapers reached further down the social scale in the early Victorian period than ever before.15 Sharply falling book prices, for example, led to a broader readership, and a higher cultural status for the novel, partly impelled by the size of its readership. The novel thus rose up the literary generic hierarchy at the same time that it reached down the sociological ladder. The cultural revolution did not confine itself to the book trade or to the fortunes of the novel, however. Chittick reports optimistically and in many ways accurately that ‘the democratization of politics was not only reported but also reflected in the press’.16 Important in this process was the dramatic proliferation in the number of cheaper journals in circulation (many with intellectual aspirations), the advent of ‘penny dreadfuls’, cheap weeklies, and (by the end of the century) comics. Greater access and choice led to a more inclusive but variegated cultural marketplace. The paradoxical effects of this are familiar to twenty-​first-​century inhabitants of a more established mass culture: as Plunkett explains, the ‘democratisation of the press’ hailed by Chittick, resulted in ‘a 14 

F. R. Leavis, Mass Civilization and Minority Culture, 3–​5. Until 1830, for example, the cheap fiction market had largely been left to small and disreputable publishers like the Minerva Press, but in June 1829 when Tom Cadell issued the Author’s Edition of the Waverley novels in five-​shilling volumes, ‘he inaugurated the vogue of inexpensive recent fiction imprints’: Elliott Engel and Margaret F. King, The Victorian Novel Before Victoria: British Fiction During the Reign of William IV, 1830–​1837 (London: Macmillan, 1984), 5. 16  Kathryn Chittick, Dickens and the 1830s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 24. 15 

Introduction   7 profession increasingly divided between a few “star” names and an undifferentiated “mass” of hack writers’ (557). And if the nineteenth century was the first age of literary celebrity, it did not follow that all ‘literary’ writers were celebrated or influential. Indeed, as Isobel Armstrong analysed so influentially in the early 1990s, poets in particular tended to experience a contraction of influence and a diminution of status as the market for culture expanded. In the new literary environment in which numbers of readers mattered as never before, the poet’s specialist craft struggled to compete with seemingly more accessible media. In Victorian Poetry, Armstrong describes the Victorian poet’s ‘modern’ consciousness of his/​her ‘secondary’ role in a culture which was no longer the undisputed preserve of the elite: ‘To be modern’, as she puts it, ‘was to be overwhelmingly secondary.’17 If there can be little doubt about the ‘difficult intangibility’ (Chapter 19, 369), to use Matthew Bradley’s term, of the idea of Victorian literary culture, it is this very difficult intangibility which makes OUP’s preferred title for this volume an inspired choice, particularly at this moment in the history of Victorian studies. While the combined insights of this volume offer the reader difficulty and multiplicity rather than simplicity and clarity, the Handbook nonetheless contends that the concept of Victorian literary culture is meaningful. It suggests that it is time to allow the prodigal idea of the literary to rebalance our critical conversations, as both distinctive and integral to a broader sense of literary culture as well as cultural formations. It is particularly important that we do so now, in the grip of a global economic crisis, when the market has proved itself other than sacrosanct but its logic, paradoxically, is everywhere being reinforced. A crude application of this logic doubts the value of the arts and humanities because they do not seem to fit models of utility and economic productivity which underpin notions of common sense that the market has naturalized. The long nineteenth century of course felt itself to be in the first throes of a clash between the logic of political economy and that of the arts, dramatized oppositionally for polemic effect by Dickens in Hard Times (1854) and to some extent propelling Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. Both these texts have been seen—​rightly or wrongly—​as promoting the superiority of what we might call artistic or cultured thinking over utilitarian or economic logic and in so doing to suggest a fundamental divide between two incompatible world views. Supremacist cultural logic is subject to accusations of elitism, simplification, or lack of realism and it is perhaps because of this that contemporary defenders of the arts have tended to be wary of revisiting the warnings, rehearsals, and indeed arguments of our nineteenth-​century ancestors, so pertinent in many ways to current-​day dilemmas. Yet scholars of the Victorian period are in a position to play a leading role in articulating the value of the arts and humanities today, armed with the perspective of a particularly resonant retrospect. And there seems an emerging sense now that a case can and should be made for the distinctive value of literary culture, and that this can be done via a mode of 17 

Victorian Poetry, 3.

8   Introduction cultural analysis which is dialogic and historically situated rather than binary and universalist. The idea of ‘Victorian literary culture’ foregrounded by this volume’s title encourages this integral thinking and raises the key questions underpinning not only Victorian literary and cultural studies but also our historical understanding of modern cultural formations: for example, what was Victorian literary culture? How did the Victorians see ‘Literature’ and ‘Culture’? How do we? What makes the period so important to our understanding of the history of ‘literary culture’? How do Victorianists today justify the value of their work and the importance they place on the literature and culture of this particular era? There are important claims we can make for the uniqueness of the Victorian period in the history of literature, culture, and literary culture. One is that it witnessed what Guy calls ‘an insistent questioning about what constituted literariness’ (Chapter 3, 74–5). The idea of ‘the literary’ mattered as never before and the period produced answers which have framed debate ever since. The same can be said about culture. It was in the Victorian period that culture became ‘a thing in itself ’—​except the ‘thing in itself ’ that was culture was habitually defined in relation to the literary and vice versa. ‘Literary culture’ thus became the object of particular scrutiny, as Armstrong explains: ‘since the very notion of a culture was new, and the idea of the minority intellectual, this entailed constructing the idea of culture and defining in particular what a literary culture was’.18 It is thus perhaps no surprise that it was in the Victorian period that the study of post-​ classical literature and culture was consolidated in university education.19 One of the reasons they seemed to matter was that particular historical and material conditions conspired to allow a more pervasive and mainstream literary culture to exist than at any time previously or since. In the new age of literacy which had yet to experience the counter-​attractions of the moving image and mass technological media, readers and writers wielded unrivalled power. What characterizes the period is not then some intangible quality that its literature possesses but the extent to which Victorian literature and the broader culture had to be integrated and mutually constitutive. To argue for the unique breadth and power of Victorian literary culture is not to argue that its literary culture was cohesive; nor is it to posit one particular definition of the literary. But it is to argue the following: the broader culture was literary to an unrivalled extent; literature felt under a new pressure to be culturally porous if it was to avoid ‘secondariness’; it was for the last time possible to avoid ‘secondariness’, but only if attention was paid to the large numbers of readers who participated in competing constructions of the ‘literary’. It was possible, that is, for literary writers to have demonstrable and broad social impact. The extent to which literary culture in the Victorian period was integrated, constitutive, influential, and permeative was unprecedented and will not reoccur in a globalized, multimedia, mass culture. Victorians like Arnold were thus attempting to capture something new whose pastness was imminent. The attempted reification of the idea of culture in the period was therefore a centrifugal response to centripetal forces, a rhetorical attempt to invoke the idea of the literary as a mystical demarcator of 18  19 

Victorian Poetry, 27. See n. 5 above.

Introduction   9 a special cultural sphere in the face of the reality of a literary culture which was in fact newly and temporarily pervasive. There is a new appetite today for explaining why literary culture continues to matter in a changed context where its ‘secondariness’ rather than its centrality tends to be assumed. There is moreover a wholeness of approach to so doing which the rise of interdisciplinary study in the last thirty years has facilitated. The conflict between theory and humanism and the other oppositional debates which grew from it (history and politics vs. aesthetics, high vs. low culture, English vs. cultural studies, etc.) have given way to a less dramatic but more integrated, nuanced academic landscape. Critical theory has become naturalized in the arts and humanities, its insights informing the work of all literary and cultural criticism to a greater or lesser extent. Its assimilation has paradoxically allowed for the revisiting—​and more importantly, re-​evaluation—​of concepts whose humanist or New Critical inheritance theory had persuaded many to distrust, avoid, or devalue: thus aesthetics, form, emotion, character, for example, are all back on the critical agenda. Less revisionist attention has been paid, interestingly, to the idea of the literary. The literary has been for too long the elephant in the room of an English studies more at home with an idea of itself as interdisciplinary than with the founding values of the literary discipline which led to its establishment. This volume suggests that intellectual conditions are currently ripe for a reassessment of the idea of Victorian literary culture. In 2003, Josephine Guy identified with admirable clarity a binary habit which can attend approaches to literary history: A certain sort of literary history can take as given a particular definition of literary identity and value and proceed to document and interpret in any one period those works which answer to such a label; alternatively, another sort of literary history can be conceived more critically, as a mode of analysis which seeks to uncover the historical processes whereby at any one moment in time only certain sorts of works come to be labelled and valued as literature. Choosing between these two possibilities in turn rests upon assumptions about the relationship between literary history and other accounts of the past, such as social, intellectual, economic or political history.20

The evidence of this volume suggests that contributors feel less pressure to choose between attaching a particular value or definition to the literary and acknowledging that the idea of the literary is always a historical construction. While there seems to be consensus that there are always historical processes in play ‘whereby at any one moment in time only certain sorts of works come to be labelled a literature’, there is an increasing willingness to claim, with Guy, ‘sympathy with the idea that there is a quality to aesthetic experience which cannot be collapsed wholly into the political or ideological’ and to explore the ‘literary’ dimensions to this experience.21 Not all contributors would 20  Review of Philip Davis, The Oxford English Literary History. The Victorians. Volume 8: 1830–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), Reviews in History, 336 (2003)—​http://​www.history.ac.uk/​ reviews/​review/​336 [last accessed: 10 March 2015]. 21  Review of Philip Davis, The Oxford English Literary History. The Victorians. Volume 8: 1830–1880.

10   Introduction embrace this aesthetic turn but neither would they attribute its rise to a new Leavisite agenda. What is stirring is a desire to wrest the literary from its humanist past without denying that past. Discussions of the ‘literary’ inevitably involve a reaching for nebulous notions of belief, emotion, creativity, and imagination, which are steeped in an Arnoldian and Leavisite tradition—​and indeed, as several contributors explore, in a religious past. The idea of the literary can also encourage value judgement, morally inflected critique which current critical orthodoxy tends to position as less sophisticated and ideologically aware (or less truthful) than political analysis. But there is no necessity that concepts should carry past ideological baggage in perpetuity: as theoretically informed literary and cultural critics, we should know that. Some of the best new work today is on affect and religion, for example, two areas seemingly at odds with the historicist, politicized, and materialist approaches that have pervaded Victorian studies for some time. But the fact that they seem ‘at odds’ is in fact the source of their value. Much has been written in recent times about the need to replace a suspicious or ‘symptomatic reading’ in respectable critical practice with less cynical and adversarial reading practices.22 The most prominent model proposed to replace the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’—​or our professional habit, post-​theory, of reading against the grain—​is the practice of ‘surface reading’ which tries to rediscover the grain.23 ‘Surface reading’ has had its detractors, most notably, one of the contributors to this volume, John Kucich, who has mounted a fine defence of the value of the hermeneutics of suspicion.24 The fact that several contributors to this Handbook, by contrast, seek to move beyond both suspicion and surface reading to discover a new ‘amicable reading practice’ (Chapter 17, 343), in Emma Mason’s words, suggests that Victorianists are far from united not just about what the literary is but also about how we should approach it.25 What is notable, however, is the interest in exploring concepts that seem at odds and the acceptance of difference. In practice, moreover, the differences between Victorianists are less schismatic than headline arguments imply. Mason’s emergent theory of reading the Victorians, for example, is driven by a desire to respect and understand the terms in which Victorians understood their own religious and literary experiences as grounded in ‘compassionate and affective aspects of faith that are not objectively measurable’ (333). Her intention is to ‘complement historical and social perspectives’ (333) rather than to posit a naïve universality or apoliticism. Similarly, Mark Knight’s proposed practice of ‘sympathetic reading’ 22 

The idea of a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ derives from Paul Ricoeur who identified in the interpretative habits of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud a ‘school of suspicion’—​see Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, trans. D. Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 32. 23  Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus suggest a new practice of ‘surface reading’ in place of ‘symptomatic’ or suspicious reading in their ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations, 108 (2009), 1–​21. 24  Kucich, ‘The Unfinished Historicist Project: In Praise of Suspicion’, Victoriographies, 1 (2011), 58–​78. 25  Mason argues that we should read ‘with kindness and care’ (333). She is primarily referring to the reading of Victorian religious writing but she seems to suggest that ‘amicable’ reading should inform literary response more generally.

Introduction   11 emerges not from a blanket rejection of critical suspicion but from his alertness to the ‘danger in allowing the hermeneutics of suspicion to be our exclusive or primary mode of interpretation’ (386). Kucich’s defence of suspicion is actually predicated on ‘a situated understanding of a text’s cultural difference’, construing suspicion as ‘an effort of sympathetic understanding’.26 His own account in this volume of ‘organic imperialism’ gives weight to literary alongside cross-cultural agency, arguing for novels’ ‘unique ability to demonstrate how models of social order were transformed through colonial encounters, because they particularize individual relationships to social structures’ (254). What these Victorian critics are currently grappling with then is how far it is possible or desirable to make the leap of imagination, faith, or belief that allows us to understand in the most meaningful way a literary culture both at odds with our own and constitutive of it. The evidence of this Handbook suggests to me neither a dominant hermeneutics of suspicion, nor an abandonment of suspicion among Victorianists (nor indeed an acceptance of ‘surface reading’), but a critical practice which balances suspicion with affective and intellectual generosity. The volume is in fact characterized by a hermeneutics of integrity, a word which I use both because and in spite of its associations with moral earnestness, to suggest a wholeness of critical approach which allows not simply for a committed consciousness of one’s own moral, political, and aesthetics beliefs, but also for a willingness to inhabit and understand the beliefs of others. To adapt the words of Paul Ricoeur, ‘Perhaps I cannot incorporate the other’s interpretation into my own view, but I can, by a kind of imaginary sympathy, make room for it’.27 Victorianists today seem confident enough to be at odds—​not to be at loggerheads, but to accept shared ownership of ideas through respect for, and recognition of, the views and agendas of others, other times, and indeed other selves. This is a wholeness of approach that interdisciplinary study should allow for but that disciplinary histories have sometimes seemed to work to block. Thus, an acceptance of multiplicity and complexity, a post-​tribalism, characterizes the new phase we are in. The possibility of a literary critical ‘third way’ consequently emerges in many of the essays in this volume which posits a model of literature as both dialogic and distinct. If we are thinking about politics, for example, then literature is both political and distinctive as a mode of experiencing and understanding (and we can equally discern this post-​tribalism in attitudes to art or science, among other modes of perception or understanding explored along with the literary in this volume). The work in this Handbook all seems to be characterized by an impulse to be faithful to the then as well as the now. It seems to respect or believe in the force of the idea of the literary as a form of creative verbal expression whose parameters and boundaries are constantly in flux, subject to continuous disintegration and recreation under the myriad pressures of its own and surrounding impulses to innovate, critique, and imagine the world as otherwise. In the idea of ‘literary culture’ explored afresh here, the ideas of the ‘literary’ and 26 

‘The Unfinished Historicist Project’, 73. ‘The Conflict of Interpretations: Debate with Hans-​Georg Gadamer’, in A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdes (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1991), 216–​41, at 241. Mark Knight also discusses this remark in his essay in this volume. 27 

12   Introduction the cultural are enmeshed and integrated; paradoxically, they are dependent on each other for the dual impulses to identification and self-​definition or distinction which the twinned terminology of the label ‘literary culture’ seems to suggest. Self-​definition will always of course be as elusive as achieved integration. In the idea of ‘literary culture’, the twin terms are necessarily together and at odds; drives to sameness and difference, integration and separation are held in a dialectic which is both cohesive and stressed. The paradoxes underlying the idea of literary culture in many ways echo those underpinning interdisciplinary thought more generally. In the phrase ‘literary culture’, for example, ‘literary’ is an adjective and ‘culture’ is a noun: does this suggest that the idea of the literary, as the qualifying term, is secondary to the more substantive ‘culture’, or does word order give the word ‘literary’ primacy? Interdisciplinarity in Victorian studies (and the arts and humanities more generally) has become normative in research if not in institutional contexts; Victorian studies, for example, has internalized the findings and methodologies of cultural studies to the extent that, as in the Victorian period, literary and cultural thought is thoroughly interdependent. But interdisciplinarity nonetheless performs a process of integration which is by definition incapable of completion. As several contributors to this Handbook make clear, interdisciplinarity is a concept and practice which purports to wholeness but is always at odds. Alice Jenkins’s essay ‘Beyond Two Cultures: Science, Literature, and Disciplinary Boundaries’, for example, captures the intellectual and methodological challenges and possibilities that have preoccupied ‘literature and science studies’ as a ‘distinct and separately constituted body of scholarship’, which is nonetheless part of the ‘mainstream’ of Victorian studies (401). Her identification of ‘analogy’ and ‘causation’ as ‘two fundamental problems in the explanatory procedures of literature and science studies’ (401) could equally be applied to other interdisciplinary areas of Victorian studies: the relationship between art and the literary explored so consummately by Hilary Fraser, for instance, or that more specifically between illustrations and the texts in which they sit by Julia Thomas. Does one influence the other in a process of causation, and if so, what are the implications in terms of power of the order of cause and effect? And is analogy any less problematic a methodological model in avoiding the idea of origin and influence that propels causation, at eschewing the elevation of one mode of seeing or understanding over another? The ‘inter’ in interdisciplinarity indicates, literally, a space in between, neither one ‘discipline’ nor another but a new linking sphere. Jenkins’s essay makes clear why any space between is never entirely distinct but always dependent for its modes of speaking and understanding on its origins in disciplinary thought, and indeed on the idea of origins. If the idea of analogy is more successful at avoiding causal thinking, it risks eliding difference with sameness and eliminating the possibilities of a new[er] space between. Where two terms or disciplines are yoked together, it is in fact impossible to avoid the visible shaping force of preference, priority, judgement, and power. There are limits even to sympathetic or ‘kind’ reading practices, for example, as there should be; otherwise, even what Mason calls ‘pastoral’ (333) response eschews criticism and judgement, undermining the values which constitute its claims to worth. The best current work in Victorian studies seeks to balance the exercise of preference with a ‘situated

Introduction   13 understanding’ of the preferences of others. The essays in this Handbook wield judgement with integrity; they ‘make room’ for the opinions of others with diverse acts of ‘imaginary sympathy’ which suggest the exercise of individual taste and judgement within a surprisingly cohesive hermeneutics. Thus though Sally Shuttleworth and Alice Jenkins both embrace interdisciplinary literature and science studies, Shuttleworth advocates that the future of the field rests on ‘an essential partnership between science and the humanities’ (437), while Jenkins looks for anomaly, asking: ‘how do we draw the bounds of literature and science studies; is there any kind of writing in the nineteenth century that is not potential material for us?’ (415). Similarly writing about the relationship between visual and literary culture in the period, Fraser emphasizes that ‘the Victorian period was an era of extraordinarily fertile exchange between the literary and visual arts’ (639) while Thomas argues for an ‘emergent illustration studies’, which regards illustration as ‘a distinct object of criticism’ requiring specific critical procedures (621). Victorian studies has thought of itself for some time as habitually interdisciplinary but there is a growing mood of self-​reflection about the nature of this interdisciplinarity and the ‘disciplines’ from which it purports to be constituted, as well as about the processes and languages adopted to merge and negotiate disciplinary paradigms. Fraser draws on Walter Pater’s discussion of the German concept of Anders-​streben to explore modern theoretical attempts to understand the ways in which ‘image/​text interactions enable a transcendence of the dimensional limitations of each individual art form’ (654–5). Pater suggests the idea of a metamorphic continuum or spectrum within the arts: although each art has thus its own specific order of impressions, and an untranslatable charm, while a just apprehension of the ultimate differences of the arts is the beginning of aesthetic criticism; yet it is noticeable that, in its special mode of handling its given material, each art may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art, by what German critics term an Anders-​streben—​a partial alienation from its own limitations, through which the arts are able, not indeed to supply the place of each other, but reciprocally to lend each other new forces.28

The attraction of this idea for those attempting to rethink the idea of ‘literary culture’ within a predominantly interdisciplinary Victorian studies is that it allows for an effort to understand distinctiveness whilst refusing to reify or petrify difference. It makes room for an element of the ‘untranslatable’ in aesthetic experience whilst allowing for the shaping processes of cultural and indeed historical change. It enables an idea of literary culture which is the product not only of socio-​historical conditions and philosophical will, but also of an aesthetic instinct or intelligence. For scholars wishing to further understanding of literary culture and indeed of aesthetic experience more generally, there has been an array of difficulties: the Arnoldian and Leavisite baggage of such discussions; the rise within the academy of a model of professionalism associated with rationalist and scientific paradigms; and the more general binary habits of debate which tended (until the 28 Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan Library Edition, 1910), 133–​4.

14   Introduction relatively recent upsurge of theoretically informed interest in ‘intangibles’ such as affect) to associate an interest in the intangible with an apolitical and ahistoricist outlook. Isobel Armstrong’s criticism has done a great deal to break down these binary assumptions within Victorian Studies. Her plenary talk at the 2014 British Association of Victorian Studies annual conference at the University of Kent was a forensic and passionate dissection of the ways in which in the rise of historicism in the last thirty years in Victorian studies has created a rather unbalanced practice of interdisciplinarity whereby texts are seen to be subject to the originary force of History (with a capital H), and aesthetic analysis has thereby occupied a secondary space as the product of historical forces.29 In arguing that it is time for a rebalancing which emphasizes the creative agency of the aesthetic, she is not relegating historicist modes or claiming to be able to evade the logic of causation explored in this Introduction, but neither is she invoking analogy. She is inviting Victorianists to show boldness and integrity in reinstating the aesthetic more prominently into our pictures of the Victorian past. The aesthetic is clearly important to rethinking the idea of literary culture but its movement in and out of focus in this volume suggests its integration or commingling in today’s Victorian studies with other ways of seeing. While introductions such as this invite vision statements about the future of the field, the tendency of ‘visions’ to date suggests that a visual analogy may have more longevity than a vision. The kaleidoscope is perhaps the most evocative symbol for Victorian literary culture viewed through the ages, suggesting as it does its original meaning, ‘observer of beautiful forms’, invoking the machine age, and ‘constituted from pattern and randomness, freedom and repetition, order and chance’.30 It is fitting that the kaleidoscope was a nineteenth-​century invention named so in 1817 by the Scottish inventor David Brewster, and first given figurative and literary life by Byron, who had received one as a gift from his publisher, John Murray.31 The union it suggests of beauty and new technology reminds us of the polymathic or ‘interdisciplinary’ map of the nineteenth century and partly explains its symbolic power during 29  The V21 Collective seeks to frame a ‘Victorian Studies for 21st Century’ by offering theoretical and formalist alternatives to ‘positivist historicism’, though the combative tone of its manifesto is somewhat at odds with its professed desire to interrogate ‘habitual oppositions’—​see http://​v21collective.org/​ manifesto-​of-​the-​v21-​collective-​ten-​theses/​ [last accessed 2 June 2015]. 30  http://​www.oxforddictionaries.com/​definition/​english/​kaleidoscope [last accessed 13 June 2015]. Etymologically, it is made up of elements from the Greek words kalos ‘beautiful’, eidos ‘form’, and skopein ‘to look at’—​also the root of scope. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830–​1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 342. 31  The Oxford English Dictionary defines this figurative meaning as ‘A constantly changing group of bright colours or coloured objects; anything which exhibits a succession of shifting phases’, linking this definition to Byron’s use of the term in Don Juan (1819): ‘This rainbow look’d like hope—​Quite a celestial kaleidoscope’ (II. xciii. 165). Oxford Dictionaries and others define the figurative use of the term more broadly to mean, ‘A constantly changing pattern or sequence of elements’—​http://​www. oxforddictionaries.com/​definition/​english/​kaleidoscope [last accessed 13 June 2015]. See Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and His Friends: Memoir and Correspondence of the Late John Murray, with An Account of the Origin and Progress of the House, 1768–​1843, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1891), i. 397–​9, for the correspondence between Murray and Byron about the kaleidoscope.

Introduction   15 the industrial era.32 Most memorably, seeking to capture the experience of modernity in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863), Baudelaire described the flâneur among the crowd as ‘A kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness’.33 In cultural terms, the ways in which the centrifugal forces of the kaleidoscope attempt to impose shape, definition, and stasis in the face of centripetal forces which seek to decentralize and destabilize the picture invoke the forces that drove attempts like Arnold’s to ‘capture’ and centralize culture. In literary terms, the constant movement between the margins and the centre and out again suggests the processes, always subject to history, of canonicity. The kaleidoscopic picture of Victorian literary culture to follow taps into the multiplicity and instability that both critical theory and period-​based scholarship have foregrounded in Victorian models of identity and culture. Approaches such as feminism, Marxism, queer theory, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, and New Historicism have enabled a metamorphic pluralism of research questions. Likewise, the application of information technology to literary study has begun a process of canon expansion which is potentially endless as texts become increasingly available and ‘new’ texts are published online. Electronic resources have, moreover, facilitated interdisciplinary study, enabling easier access to resources in the theatrical and visual arts, for example, and facilitating dialogue between print and other cultures. This collection aims to harness these developments without neglecting more familiar texts and debates, which are themselves subjected to emergent modes of critical scrutiny rather than simply reiterated. Again, though it seeks to reflect the impact of a variety of new ways of thinking about and viewing the Victorians, it also revisits the old with the benefit of academic hindsight. It brings ‘modern’ values to bear on the Victorians as well as demonstrating the Victorian roots of this modernity. This Handbook aims to indicate, moreover, where theoretical or technological developments have had a particularly significant impact on Victorian studies. Work on Darwin and the history of science has been a major current of intellectual enquiry in the field; though such has been the focus on Darwin, as Amy King explains, that now ‘[t]‌he field increasingly seeks to disturb the centrality of Darwin’ (441). An interest in 32 

All the figurative uses of the term listed in the OED are from the nineteenth century.The literary and symbolic suggestiveness of the kaleidoscope has been discussed by Robert Crawford and Helen Groth among others. See Robert Crawford, The Beginning and the End of the World: St Andrews, Scandal and the Birth of Photography (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2011), 7–​8; and Helen Groth, ‘Kaleidoscopic Vision and Literary Invention in an “Age of Things”: David Brewster, Don Juan, and “A Lady’s Kaleidoscope” ’, ELH 74 (2007), 217–​37, at 217. Crawford discusses Macaulay’s use of the invention ‘as an image for the poet’s consciousness’, for example, as well as its application to Turner, Holman Hunt, and Robert Chambers. Groth examines various metaphorical usages to suggest ‘the cosmopolitan gaze’, ‘standardised market driven spectatorship’ (218), the age itself, and Byron’s own association between the kaleidoscope and ‘a moment of potential transformation, a fleeting prophetic vision of hope and natural beauty that borders on the sublime’ (220). 33 In The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), 10. Armstrong argues that he used the image to convey ‘the ludic freedoms he sought to define as “modernity” ’ (Victorian Glassworlds, 255), though she reminds us later that ‘the kaleidoscope also thematises the limits of experience and change’ (342).

16   Introduction identity politics—​national identity, class, gender, and sexuality—​has been integral to thinking about this age of empire, reform, and early women’s rights agitation. There is a significant upswell of interest in place, space, and the urban, which brings the insights of cultural geography together with what Alex Murray calls the ‘city space provided by literary texts’ or, drawing on Robert L. Patten, the ‘ “hermeneutics of literary geography” ’ (313–14).34 The study of popular, material, and visual culture in an age of rapid cultural expansion has reshaped our sense of the Victorian field, as many of the essays published here attest. While the study of religion has at times been submerged by the revisionist tide, it is now making its voice heard, as the strong section on religion in this Handbook makes clear. The writings of Foucault have had an enormous impact on thinking about the nineteenth century in various fields (madness, bureaucracy, sexuality, prisons, surveillance), but most fundamentally in Victorian studies, perhaps, on conceptions of the individual. Interestingly, the influence of Foucault is implicit and naturalized rather than obvious in this Handbook, essays by Rae Greiner and Trev Broughton suggesting new ways of thinking about ‘the Victorian subject’ in its own terms rather than solely as a discursive and ideological construct. Jonah Siegel’s fine exploration of the historical, pre-​Victorian roots of the problems attending current attempts to ‘recognize the aesthetic aspirations of the Victorians’ argues that in our inevitable inability to resolve them, ‘we may find more than failure. We may begin to recognize the form of our inherited Victorian aesthetics’ (579). There are surprises (war, old women), an expert section on politics and economics, and a concluding section on theatrical culture which suggests deep veins of unexplored territory in Victorian studies, unexplored because the theatre was so often excluded from the category of the literary. The fact that theatrical and literary studies in the period have so often been constructed as ‘at odds’ means that this book does not conclude comfortably. It does not in fact purport to conclude but hopes to suggest, deepen, and provoke, to leave both trails and gaps. Some of those gaps were apparent and became more so in the years that it took this volume to grow to completion (if not conclusion). The Victorians’ place in time has become a resonant and multidimensional area of research, ‘neo-​Victorianism’ in particular occluding the more familiar interest in the blurred boundaries between the Victorians and their immediate predecessors the Romantics or their modernist successors. Interest in how the Victorians have been constructed through today’s creative arts has become so widespread in fact that neo-​Victorianism is already conflicted about its own status: is it a subfield of Victorian studies or closer to postmodernism? At the millennium, before ‘neo-​Victorianism’ became the label formally attached to creative and self-​conscious contemporary reworkings of Victorian material, John Sutherland identified ‘a strikingly new topic of critical discussion’ in such attempts.35 But do they, in fact, 34  Patten, ‘From House to Square to Street’, in Helena Michie and Ronald R. Thomas (eds), Nineteenth Century Geographies: the Transformation of Space from the Victorian Age to the American Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 191–206, at 192. 35  ‘Foreword’ to Alice Jenkins and Juliet John (eds), Rereading Victorian Fiction (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000), pp. xi–​xii, at p. xi. Sutherland’s identification of this ‘strikingly new topic of critical discussion’ is often omitted in familiar accounts of critical neo-​Victorianism which tend

Introduction   17 represent a new field? Neo-​Victorianism’s historicizing of the present echoes in some respects the prominent recent interest in the ways in which the Victorians constructed themselves as makers and objects of ‘heritage’ and fashioned their own past. Work in this area now goes beyond classicism and medievalism to an interest in the practices, politics, and affective significance of the heritage and museum industries today and in the Victorian period, which arguably witnessed the birth of the heritage industry as we now understand it. All this post-​millennial focus on the Victorians and time has in common an interest in the framing of the Victorians by themselves and others as both subjects and objects of the historical (or heritage) gaze. There is much to suggest that reading internationally is the expanded future of Victorian studies, with all the possibilities and challenges that this poses for new critical practices shaped by notions of sympathy and integrity. Where languages are unknown, academic cultures are only partly alike or understood, then the barriers to a ‘situated understanding’ are more than temporal. These challenges are worth the attempt, even if we can never fully overcome them. In the effort to do so, we may need to situate our tightly held notions of rigour, professionalism and scholarship more relatively. If we want to develop a better understanding of how George Eliot, for example, has been read in a global context, we may have to accept that the picture and quality of evidence will sometimes be patchy, ‘amateur’, and anecdotal.36 The expansion of the literary field enabled by reception studies can moreover engender a complex repositioning of the literary textual base as more remote and less familiar, even while translation studies draws attention back to the activities of language and the textual base which was perceived as the source of value in the first place. Literary study of the canon still underpins the survival and indeed popularity of Victorian literature in global classrooms. The increasingly prevalent interest in immaterialism or the ‘intangible’ in the Victorian period has been driven by the renewed attention to affect as well as by the felt value of revisiting Victorian self-​conceptualizations with the benefit of post-​Victorian shifts in knowledge and understanding. It is thus perhaps inevitable that religion should once more have become a major current in Victorian studies. What will be interesting, however, given the ‘theologically lite’ (397) (to borrow Mark Knight’s phrase) inheritance of many of today’s students and indeed scholars, is whether renewed attention to Victorian religion among critics will result in more curriculum time devoted to this area in our universities. Ours is an age of information overload where we expect access to knowledge to be quicker and easier; the intellectual and reading stamina necessary for many students to access Victorian religious debate could mean that it remains an elite though cutting-​edge area to start with the 2007 Exeter conference Neo-​Victorianism: The Politics and Aesthetics of Appropriation, the 2008 establishment of the Journal of Neo-​Victorian Studies, and Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn’s Neo-​Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-​First Century, 1999–​2009 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 36  The Bloomsbury series The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe represents a major advance in scholarly understanding of international global reception; the problems faced in compiling its volumes—​of translation and incomplete records—​are exacerbated when reception beyond Europe is mapped.

18   Introduction of academic enquiry. Nineteenth-​century theatre studies perhaps has more chance of a higher profile in the mainstream of Victorian studies as digital technology makes available an expanded archive of materials through which we can flesh out our cultural maps of the period. The factors which made theatre peripheral to literary culture—​its commercialism and ‘thingness’—​arguably make it accessible in the current age of mass culture. Though Victorian studies has embraced materialism and science, there is no doubt more we can do in these areas. Eco-​criticism has grown so much as to become established though it is certainly not exhausted. Mathematics, as Alice Jenkins has suggested, is an area of Victorian studies that is virgin territory for many excluded by the disciplinary barriers that still structure Western education. If Victorianists engage with science in very particular ways, at the other end of the disciplinary spectrum, Victorian critics appear to engage very little with artistic practitioners. In this respect, neo-​Victorian artists are pioneering. Methodologically, would scientists and installation artists, for example, regard the staple offerings of Victorian studies as operating at the interdisciplinary cutting edge? This seems unlikely. There are still, it seems, limits to our interdisciplinariness as there are to our conceptualizations of disciplinariness. As academic fields are so often self-​defining, blind spots can occur which are more obvious to futurity and to those at a remove from debates and (inter)disciplinary histories which become naturalized. While much of this Introduction has focused on debates between academics within the Victorian research field, we should remember that the shape and future of the field looks different when we take full account of the fact that the reality of Victorian studies—​even within the academy—​is shaped by forces outside it. I am not talking here about the greater political forces of class, race, and gender which are so widely understood but about the ‘smaller’, more contingent influences of educational policy and institutional politics (with a small ‘p’). It is here that the fraught status of ‘Victorian literary culture’ comes sharply into focus. The controversial recent remodelling of the school syllabus in the UK by Michael Gove, the former Secretary of State for Education, made the study of ‘literary heritage’, exemplified in the main by Shakespeare and nineteenth-​century literature, core to a new secondary school curriculum, particularly to public examinations taken at 16 and above. The forceful privileging of Victorian literature on the national secondary curriculum was in one way a vote of confidence in its public ‘value’. But this value was articulated as a conservative (with a big and a small ‘c’) response to the perceived occlusion of the literary in the classroom by identity politics and the downgrading of cultural ‘heritage’ beneath a trendy presentism. While the Leavisite echoes of this move were opposed by a large majority of teachers and educationalists, including Victorianists, in the UK, the move should give pause for thought. Politicians, teachers, students, and funders play a large role in shaping the curriculum as well as the canon and the Victorian period seems to have become an important battleground for competing visions of the future as well as the past. When viewed through the multiple perspectives which comprise this prism, conceptions of Victorian literary culture are so much at odds that the field of Victorian studies starts to lose even heterogeneous coherence.

Introduction   19 For some conservative British politicians, the Victorian literary past and its ‘great’ works need saving. The compulsory foisting of heavyweight Victorian works on sociologically mixed cohorts of students as young as 14 has of course been troubling to professional Victorianists well versed in the politics of canon formation and wary of the coercive veneration of a certain version of ‘national’ heritage attempted through this act of educational engineering. But for all that, attention to the literature of the Victorian period by future generations of students is not something that we can necessarily take for granted. The increasing avoidance of longer Victorian texts by students, and the refashioning of many university curricula to accommodate the decline in reading stamina, suggests that there is a decline in attention. While numbers of staff and students in Victorian studies are currently healthy, there is an increasing reluctance to support projects that are seen as ‘literary’ and this reluctance has largely gone unchallenged. Single-​author research, similarly, is all too often assumed to be at odds with the prevailing spirit of interdisciplinarity, despite an acknowledgement of the polymathic world of the Victorian writer and the importance of the idea of authorship for the Victorians themselves as an organizing principle. The recent job search for a successor to John Jordan, the Director of the Dickens Universe at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for example, gained institutional approval under the title Professor of Nineteenth-​ Century English Literatures in Global/​Transnational Perspective. The title suggests a gap between the perspective of the institution and that of the hundreds of Dickensians attracted to the Dickens Universe each year by interest in an author they know to be dead but whose works they believe to have transnational, global significance. But literary culture and its organizing principles need not be positioned oppositionally in relation to the prevailing modes of interdisciplinarity in today’s academy, and presentism can work dialogically rather than deterministically as we seek to balance our own knowledge with that of the past. This balancing can never be assumed, however, and must always be self-​conscious. Thus, while it is common to celebrate the expansion in knowledge of the past that new technology can enable, the information overload that can accompany the digital revolution can also mean that selective pathways through the mass of new text(s) are forged, often by academic experts or the priorities of institutions and funding bodies, to the detriment of paths not taken. There is also the danger of forgetting or of not wanting to know what the Victorians knew or valued. In this respect, the ‘expansion’ of our map of Victorian cultural landscape which my own research has worked to further has brought far greater attention to the cultural and historical margins but a diminished interest in, and understanding of, ‘high Victorianism’. The ‘sages’ or writers of non-​fiction prose valued as teachers during the period are now largely passed over on undergraduate courses which tend to be packed with ‘identity politics’, but ‘lite’ on theology and indeed Classics. Even George Eliot, the high priestess of realism and the novelist who during her own period boasted the highest cultural capital, seems to be losing her automatic claim to prominence. While it seems difficult to imagine that Eliot will ever go unread, school and university syllabi increasingly give the long, heavy ‘great’ works like Middlemarch (1871–​2) or Daniel Deronda (1876) a wide berth. It is tempting to argue that today’s ‘revolution’ away from Leavisite literary studies to a broader

20   Introduction cultural studies represents a renewal in the sense of a return to the earlier interdisciplinary map of the Victorian period; but more accurately, today’s interdisciplinarity has evolved rather than revolved, submerging the polymathic map of the Victorian period beneath a rather different contemporary schema. There is of course much to be applauded in the wholeness of critical approach that has allowed today’s heterogeneous and capacious field of Victorian studies to evolve. The challenges to Victorian ideologies and cultural hierarchies that have allowed multiple and marginalized voices to be heard have undoubtedly enriched our sense of then and now. But thinking and reading with integrity demands that we continue to be both self-​ conscious and self-​critical about our own efforts at ‘sympathetic understanding’. It is inevitable and desirable that we remake the past, but self-​suspicion ensures that historicism is always something other than narcissism. There are signs, as this Introduction has argued, of a growing self-​consciousness among Victorianists of their uneasy neglect of the idea of literary culture; there are also signs of a desire to remedy this neglect. To do so is important partly because literary culture (and indeed the idea of literary culture) has provided Victorian studies with its base as well as its baggage. Yet there is much to imply, not least from the perspective of the coming future, that the literary culture which has sustained Victorian studies and given it much of its contemporary cultural force, is in a more precarious state than the prolific energies and rude health of work in the Victorian field would suggest likely. At a time when the perceived value of the arts and humanities is increasingly questioned, it need not signify a return to Arnoldianism to remind ourselves that Victorian literary culture has been fundamental to Western industrial and post-​industrial conceptions of literature and culture. The ironic after-​effect of the tradition of critical humanism has been to effect an occlusion of the literary. The challenge for Victorianists today is to articulate the value of literary culture in ways that go beyond the humanist and heritage accounts which have historically colonized this territory. In its exploration of Victorian ways of being, understanding, and communicating, this Handbook is a collective effort at new ways of seeing.

Acknowledgements I am extremely grateful to Matthew Bradley, Alice Jenkins, and Ruth Livesey for commenting so thoroughly on drafts of this Introduction, and to Helen Maslen for research assistance.

Select Bibliography Armstrong, Isobel, Victorian Glassworlds:  Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–​ 1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Armstrong, Isobel, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993).

Introduction   21 Arnold, Matthew, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1932; 1994). Best, Stephen, and Marcus, Sharon, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations, 108 (2009), 1–​21. John, Juliet, and Alice Jenkins (eds), Rethinking Victorian Culture (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000). Kucich, John, ‘The Unfinished Historicist Project: In Praise of Suspicion’, Victoriographies, 1 (2011), 58–​78. Leavis, F. R., Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (Minority Pamphlet No. 1; Cambridge: The Minority Press, 1930). McElvy, William, The English Cult of Literature:  Devoted Readers, 1774–​ 1880 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007). Ricoeur, Paul, Freud and Philosophy, trans. D. Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society, 1870–​1950 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958).

Pa rt  I

WAYS OF B E I N G Identity and Ideology

The Individual and Subjectivity

Chapter 1

The Victoria n Su bj e c t Thackeray’s Wartime Subjects Rae Greiner

Thinking Subjects In Victorian Subjects (1991), the literary critic J.  Hillis Miller reminded his readers of an etymological fact: that to be a subject is to be ‘thrown under’—​to be, as it were, beside oneself. Like literature, with its capacity to tell one story while calling forth another (and another), subjects are beside or something other than—​are non-​identical to—​themselves. No person is at any given moment equal to all that she has ever been. Subjects of investigation or debate (say, academic subjects) are always changing and incomplete. In emphasizing the unfixed and unfinished quality of human subjects—​ the ways in which ‘the self is always subject to something other than itself, something beneath it or beyond it that may be experienced more as an abyss than a ground’—​Miller unsettled any sense of subjects, especially human ones, as stable or fully knowable, even to themselves.1 At the same time, the phrase ‘Victorian Subjects’ knits together several salient meanings at once by pointing to the subjects studied and popularized by scholars of the Victorian period, as well as those that were important to the Victorians themselves. These include the development of a political ideal emphasizing individual self-​ governance, as illustrated by the passage of the Reform Acts of 1832, 1867, and 1884–​5, which by expanding voting privileges redefined political subjectivity and paved the way for universal suffrage; and England’s imperial mission, dramatically expanding global empire by increasing the number of persons and places subject to Queen Victoria’s rule. For the purposes of this essay two subjects take precedence. The first is history, a subject important to many nineteenth-​century writers in Britain (about which more later). The second is among the more lasting and debated of Victorian inventions: the liberal

1 

J. Hillis Miller, Victorian Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), viii.

28    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture subject, a type of person and a particular understanding of personhood that was central to a number of cultural and political theories affiliated under the banner of political liberalism. Although ‘subject’ is a contested term insofar as it is taken to refer to distinctly modern, Enlightenment ideas of personhood, some scholars argue that Victorian political liberalism produced a distinctive kind of subject by promoting the belief that one’s private psychology and personal store of memories, thoughts, and emotions defined personhood as individual and unique.2 Rather than conceiving of people in terms of their relationships to a family, community, geographical locality, social class, or belief system, the liberal subject thriving at the Victorian mid-​century was, pre-​eminently, a self. Driving this phenomenon was a new sense of the political value of personal opinion or taste. As Elaine Hadley writes, political liberalism involved an understanding of individualism as ‘synonymous with choice, with predilection, with judgment’. Habits of thought and ‘moralized and moralizing qualities of mind’ now designated the self. To be ‘an individual capable of self-​government, visible as a citizen in the public sphere, one needed character’, which consisted of ‘certain mental capacities’.3 Where the Romantic philosopher and legal reformer Jeremy Bentham considered questions of taste and aesthetic judgement inconsequential to legislative or policy matters, the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill considered people’s ‘likings and dislikings’ to be ‘full of the most important inferences as to every point of their character’. As he wrote in ‘Bentham’ (1838), a person’s tastes showed him ‘to be wise or a fool, cultivated or ignorant, gentle or rough, sensitive or callous, generous or sordid, benevolent or selfish, conscientious or depraved’.4 In stressing how certain ‘mental capacities’ enable political and personal selfhood, Mill sought ways to better develop ‘character’, those qualities of mind, feeling, and judgement cultivated by the best sorts of subjects. For Mill and other Victorians, good character depended on one habit of mind in particular, the ability to generalize, to step outside the self and take on perspectives other than one’s own. To use the terms with which we began, we might say that this understanding of character requires the self actively to subject itself to something (and somebody) else, for the mentality most worth pursuing thinks with other, and different, minds. As Mill puts it, ‘the collective mind does not penetrate below the surface, but it sees all the surface; which profound thinkers, even by reason of their profundity, often fail to do’ (‘Bentham’, 147–​8). No ‘whole truth is possible’, he continues, ‘but by combining the points of view of all the fractional truths, nor, 2  See, for instance, Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). For an early post-​Victorian account of Victorian individualism, see Carle C. Zimmerman, ‘The Nineteenth Century Atomistic Family’, in Family and Civilization (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947), 141–​164. 3  Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-​Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 7. 4  John Stuart Mill, ‘Bentham’, in John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, Utilitarianism and Other Essays, ed. Alan Ryan (London: Penguin, 1987), 132–​176, at 173. Further references to this essay will be given in the text.

The Victorian Subject: Thackeray’s Wartime Subjects    29 therefore, until it has been fully seen what each fractional truth can do by itself ’ (151). To comprehend an abstract concept such as ‘national character’, for instance, requires a level-​headed mentality that can ‘rise to that higher generalization’ rather than remain blinkered by a ‘fractional’, too-​narrow imagination or personal experience (157). Despite being one of ‘the two great seminal minds in England of their age’ (Coleridge is the other), Bentham had in Mill’s view failed so entirely in this endeavour that ‘other ages and other nations were a blank to him for purposes of instruction’ (132, 149). A ‘half-​ thinker’, he was incapable of generalizing about human experience. Having ‘never been made alive to the unseen influences which were acting on himself, nor consequently on his fellow creatures’, he ‘den[ied] or disparage[d]‌all feelings and mental states of which [he had] no consciousness’ in himself (149–​151). As much as he prefers ‘complete thinkers,’ however, Mill also sees value in thinking by halves. ‘We have a large tolerance for one-​eyed men, provided their one eye is a penetrating one,’ he writes; ‘if they saw more, they probably would not see so keenly’. Bentham had turned this deficit to such advantage that Mill concludes, ‘Almost all of the rich veins of original and striking speculation have been opened by systematic half-​thinkers’ (‘Bentham’, 151). By beginning ‘all his inquiries by supposing nothing to be known on the subject’, Bentham made his mind a blank, a vantage from which he could better cut through the errors of habit and customary trains of thought (145–​146). Mill’s interest in the virtues of half-​thinking may resonate with readers of Victorian fiction—​say, the novels of George Eliot, which consider both the problems and benefits of mental smallness. If better known for her attempts at expanding human sympathy, which often in her fiction requires overcoming egotism to inhabit perspectives other than one’s own, Eliot also depicts the darker subjectivities of those who cannot shut others out. Latimer, the narrator of The Lifted Veil (1859), is a twisted version of the ‘complete thinker’, a miserable clairvoyant who cannot help but take in others’ thoughts. Here and elsewhere in her fiction, as when in Middlemarch (1872) she describes human unconsciousness of the sound of grass growing, the squirrel’s heartbeat, and numberless other noises buzzing around us, Eliot expresses gratitude at being ‘well wadded with stupidity’, for such stupid obliviousness enables human thriving, and survival.5 It shelters us against bombardment by all that the sensorium filters out. At the same time, fin-​de-​siècle novelists looking back on the period perceived a related, less advantageous stupidity at the heart of the novelistic enterprise. Henry James portrayed Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope as versions of the half-​thinking genius whose novels, despite certain achievements, failed to abstract from mundane experience general insights into human mental life. In James’s view, Dickens’s characters weren’t complete people but were (to use Mill’s term) ‘fractional’ at best (‘Bentham’, 151). All weird gestures and verbal tics, they lacked psychological depth, were mere forms: animate, but devoid of life. Trollope’s portrayals of contemporary life were accurate and abundantly detailed, but they too ‘vulgarize[d]‌experience’ by dealing ‘wholly

5 

George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 182.

30    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture in small effects’.6 Trollope offered a ‘multitude of real things’ but did not generalize from them, having failed to observe ‘great things’ as well as small (James, ‘Miss Makenzie’, 70–​ 73). Of Trollope’s Miss Makenzie (1865), James writes: It may be said […] that the emotions which depend upon such facts as these cannot be too prosaic; that as prison discipline makes men idiots, an approach, however slight, to this kind of influence perceptibly weakens the mind. We are yet compelled to doubt whether men and women of healthy intellect take life, even in its smallest manifestations, as stupidly as Miss Mackenzie and her friends. (‘Miss Makenzie’, 71; original italics)

Trollope dumbs down his readers with trivial details left unexamined, prosaic sentiments un-​elevated by reflective thought (‘Miss Makenzie’, 73). Of another Trollope novel, The Belton Estate (1865), James writes, ‘People and things are painted as they stand,’ but in the flesh only: ‘men healthy, hearty, and shrewd, but […] utterly without a mind’.7 Trollope, he concludes, ‘is simply unable to depict a mind in any liberal sense of the word’ (‘Belton Estate’, 127; original italics). The coming pages consider these broad themes—​the cultivation of (good and bad) mental habits, the merits and demerits of stupid, too-​ trivial, or egotistical understanding—​in relation to the narration of historical, specifically wartime, experience in a selection of writings by the essayist and novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–​63). Thackeray is today perhaps best known for the biting social satire of novels such as Vanity Fair (1847–​8). Adopting a snob persona in such early works as Snob Papers (1846–​7), and publishing under satirical pen names such as George Savage Fitz-​Boodle, Thackeray had by mid-​century crafted himself as tastemaker and social critic. As Hippolyte Taine would write in 1866, Thackeray ‘calls on us with a mocking pleasantry to look at the baseness and stupidity of poor human nature’, which he saw everywhere he looked.8 Yet everyday English stupidity of the sort lampooned in Vanity Fair is not Thackeray’s principal target in certain of his wartime works. The following pages consider Thackeray’s interest in stupid, ‘fractional’ understanding in relation to the wartime contexts in which these works were written and set. The early years of Thackeray’s literary career saw the publication in England of a substantial number of war memoirs and autobiographical writings, some written by men of rank, but also—​for the first time ever—​by enlisted men. Despite their historic achievement, however, the first literate army could not be understood as fully intelligent. For although their writings were admired by some, others saw in them a widespread—​or widely worried over—​ representational flaw: the narrowness of view they afforded, which was too partial, local,

6 

Henry James, ‘Miss Makenzie’, in Notes and Reviews, ed. Pierre de Chaignon La Rose (Cambridge, Mass.: Dunster House, 1921), 68–​76, at 75. Further references will be given in the text. 7  Henry James, ‘The Belton Estate’, in Notes and Reviews, 124–​131, at 126. Further references will be given in the text. 8  Hippolyte Taine, ‘M. Thackeray’, The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1 (1866), 210–​214, at 212.

The Victorian Subject: Thackeray’s Wartime Subjects    31 or small. That the same complaint can be made of Thackeray’s wartime fictions, which are fashioned as the memoirs of knuckleheaded men, suggests that it is one he took pains to invite. The remainder of this essay asks of Thackeray’s one-​eyed soldiers: to what uses are their perceptual limitations put?

Wartime Subjects Thackeray was among the first Victorians. Around the mid-​1830s, roughly coincident with Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne (in 1837), he began publishing his first journalistic work, having by now gambled away an inheritance and abandoned his studies for a career in law. But born in Calcutta to Anglo-​Indian parents in July 1811, then sent to England in 1816 to attend English schools (where he was, by his own account, a mediocre student), Thackeray came of age in the Romantic era. A painful, unsettled period defined by the Napoleonic Wars (1803–​15) and their aftermath, these were revolutionary years during which many global contests were fought.9 Many of Thackeray’s novels qualify as historical fiction and, in keeping with novelistic conventions of the time, are set in these and in earlier, tumultuous decades in British history. The protagonist of The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. (1852), for instance, fights in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–​14) and engages in a series of doomed efforts to restore James Francis Edward Stuart, Prince of Wales (the ‘Old Pretender’), to the throne. Finally, Thackeray’s literary career took off around 1848, an unprecedented ‘Year of Revolution’ during which a series of political conflicts occurred across Europe and beyond. If it is for these reasons unsurprising that soldiers feature so centrally in Thackeray’s early work, less obvious is why they should be so obtuse. A case in point is the moral idiot and protagonist of The Tremendous Adventures of Major Gahagan (1838–​9), an Irishman serving in the British army and stationed in India, arriving in 1802 ‘at our barracks at Dum Dum’.10 Gahagan announces early in his narrative that he is ‘a gentleman, and live[s]‌at least in DECENT society’, but soon reveals that he murdered his own brother in a duel over a ‘very trivial dispute’ involving a gold toothpick-​case (4). From there, Gahagan spins increasingly tall tales of callous murder and mass casualty, claiming gruesome responsibility for killing 134 elephants by severing their trunks with a single shot, or for the deadly assault on one Loll Mahommed, felled by 117 Spanish olives fired in the absence of bullets. His cavalier attitude towards the devastation he

9  Including, to name only a few, the First Anglo-​Burmese War (1823–​6), the Decembrist Revolt in Russia (1825), the Java War (1825–​30), the Russo-​Persian War (1826–​8), the Liberal Wars (1828–​34) which involved Portugal, Spain, France, and the UK, the July Revolution (1830), several American Indian wars, and colonial uprisings such as the Baptist War between white settlers and slaves in Jamaica (1831–​2). 10  William Makepeace Thackeray, The Tremendous Adventures of Major Gahagan (Lexington, Ky.: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013), 8. Further references will be given in the text.

32    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture wreaks—​‘killing these fellows was sheer butchery’ he drily relates of the death of 700 men, all but forty of them ‘bayoneted as they ran’—​is amplified to comic effect by his habit of precise calculation, a numerical hyperrealism that comes across as ridiculous (23). He enumerates, for instance, ‘no less than three hundred and eighty-​eight tails’, each one attached to an elephant standing ‘twenty-​five feet high’ and carrying a ‘two-​storied castle on its back’, with ‘sleeping and eating rooms for the twelve men that formed its garrison’ (52). Gahagan’s moral judgement—​and narrative—​is off balance, overrun by ‘a multitude of real things’, small rather than large (James, ‘Miss Makenzie’, 70). This imbalance is also reflected in his expressions of wounded disbelief towards those who doubt the accuracy of his account (Gahagan, 23). Insisting that he has not ‘willfully perverted history’, Gahagan denies deviating from the facts: ‘No: though my narrative is extraordinary’, he writes, ‘it is nevertheless authentic: and never never would I sacrifice truth for the mere sake of effect’ (19, 22). Men and women of healthy intellect cannot be expected to take life as stupidly as this. Gahagan’s facts cannot be believed, but then neither can other tropes and events drawn less from life than from literary models: the hero-​in-​disguise—​Gahagan blackens his face and hands with ‘Burgess’s walnut catsup’ to pass as a famous Indian warrior—​or the marriage between Gahagan and his Belinda that closes the book (Gahagan, 49). The novel lampoons the falsifying conventions of many genres and modes, including the sentimental novel, as when the fictional ‘editor’ interrupts the narrative to announce having ‘dock[ed] off ’ twelve-​and-​a-​half (of thirteen) pages of writing. While accurately capturing Gahagan’s feelings, he explains, these pages nevertheless overdo it: the event described had lasted ‘at the very most not ten seconds’ (68). Grave flaws in Gahagan’s character are revealed not only in his many acts of overt cruelty but also in errors of ‘taste’: his unchecked feeling, but also his lazy reliance on artificial literary conventions. Physical violence and violations of taste are linked. In bringing war crimes and aesthetic crimes together, Thackeray may also be registering the difficulties of using existing literary models to express wartime experience. ‘Writing the simple TRUTH’ of war seems increasingly impossible with each mode, genre, or convention—​mythic, heroic, sentimental, Gothic—​Gahagan tries. Where olives and Dutch cheeses become bullets, considerations of taste and of war are literally one and the same, and Gahagan won’t let us forget that his is wartime writing through and through. Describing himself as ‘alone, in the most inaccessible and most bomb-​ proof tower of our little fortalice’, seated at the ‘desk where I write’, he exclaims: ‘Meet implements for a soldier’s authorship!—​it is CARTRIDGE paper over which my pen runs so glibly, and a yawning barrel of gunpowder forms my rough writing-​table’ (Gahagan, 48). Personal egotism only partly explains Gahagan’s thick-​headedness. For a sense-​fracturing wartime also warps his narrative of martial life, insinuating itself so fully into his story that it supplies the very instruments with which he writes. If Gahagan’s memoir is a product of wartime in an exaggerated sense, the stupid soldier-​memoirist and the challenges of representing wartime were themes to which Thackeray would return. His second full-​length novel, Barry Lyndon, published serially in Fraser’s Magazine in 1844, features a callous Irish soldier cut directly from the

The Victorian Subject: Thackeray’s Wartime Subjects    33 Gahagan cloth, and subsequent writings offer variations on that theme. Although the sensitive, devoted Esmond of Henry Esmond is far less brutal than Gahagan, it isn’t hard to see him as another refashioning of the type, for his narrative too betrays remarkable misapprehension of his own experience. While his fidelity to an imbecilic prince can be explained on widespread political and religious grounds—​as his narrative (and history) demonstrates, Esmond is hardly alone in supporting that particular lost cause—​his memoir details other and more pointed oblivions, as in his long-​unrecognized passion for his stepmother, Lady Castlewood, harboured yet overtly repressed throughout his retrospective narration, and hinted at only by proxy as an infatuation with his cousin Beatrix. The love Esmond describes in his memoir’s final, hurrying paragraphs as a kind of knowing felt in ‘the highest faculty of the soul’ seems anything but.11 And it isn’t the first time Esmond admits to utterly missing out on a momentous experience. At the Battle of Blenheim (of 1704), Esmond manages to behold the ‘two great armies facing each other in a line of battle’, and ride ‘with orders from one end to the other of the line’, only to be ‘knocked on the head […] almost at the very commencement of this famous day’ (238). Details of the ensuing fight are dutifully recorded, but they are not details he remembers, for beyond that moment, ‘Mr. Esmond knows nothing; for a shot brought down his horse and our young gentleman on it, who fell crushed and stunned under the animal; and came to his senses he knows not how long after, only to lose them again’ (238–​239). It is with great irony that Esmond names unconsciousness as the ultimate memento mori. It occurred, he says, ‘as if to make his experience in war complete’ (238). Thackeray links what might seem merely individual opacities—​in this case, the repression of taboo inclinations—​with other and more impersonal suppressions of wartime experience. The subjects of history, even mass catastrophe, can remain unremembered or incomplete. Major events can at times go unrecorded, as happens here of a final effort to restore the exiled king. Though Thackeray invents the incident, he suggests that such things might have occurred but left no trace. As ‘the little army disappeared into the darkness out of which it had been called’, Esmond writes, so too does any proof of the men’s involvement: ‘there had been no writings, no paper to implicate any man’ (Henry Esmond, 450). At the same time, using paper to fill in historical gaps presents other problems. Esmond wants his narrative to bear witness to the disappearances of wartime, the ‘thirty thousand […] slain and wounded’, the ‘dreadful slaughter’ that leaves him and his fellow soldiers mute. ‘We dared not speak to each other, even at table, of Malpaquet, so frightful were the gaps left in our army by the cannon of that bloody action’, he writes (318–​19). Poetic conventions, however, produce their own blanks. Of Joseph Addison’s The Campaign (1705), commemorating the Battle of Blenheim, Esmond complains that the poem’s wartime murders are ‘done to military music, like a battle at the Opera’, exclaiming: ‘You hew out of your polished verses a stately image of smiling victory; I tell you ’tis an uncouth, distorted, savage idol [… .] You great poets should show it as it

11 

William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., ed. Donald Hawes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 462. Further references will be given in the text.

34    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is—​ugly and horrible, not beautiful and serene’ (255). Once again, when war crimes and aesthetic crimes come together, ‘fractional’ understanding results. In this, the novel recalls Sir Walter Scott’s The Antiquary (1816), another historical novel of wartime (1794) and written after Scott’s visit to the recently bloodied field at Waterloo. Addressing a young soldier as ‘my dear Hector’, the obstinately single-​minded antiquary, Jonathan Oldbuck, tries bombastically to convince his new friend of the value of old poems in times of war: ‘in the strange contingencies of the present war which agitates every corner of Europe, there is no knowing where you will be called upon to serve’, he states; so ‘what could be more convenient than to have at your fingers’ ends the history and antiquities’ of those many nations in which you may fight? With a one-​eyed insistence on seeing only the poetical side of battle, Oldbuck envies the soldier’s chance to visit the ‘mother of modern Europe, the nursery of those heroes’ who ‘smiled in death’, extolling, ‘How animating […] at the conclusion of a weary march to find yourself in the vicinity of a Runic monument, and discover you had pitched your tent beside the tomb of a hero!’ When the soldier replies that he’d rather pitch his tent near a poultry-​ yard, Oldbuck laments, ‘No wonder the days of Cressy and Agincourt are no more.’12 For key reasons, battles over literary representations of history had new relevance in the era of Scott (who, only forty years older than Thackeray, lived until 1832). One had to do with changing conceptions of war and the mentality needed to comprehend it. As Mary Favret has shown, the 1771 Encyclopedia Britannica ‘grants thirty-​eight pages to moral philosophy and forty to the science of midwifery’, yet it ‘accords a mere sentence to the ancient art of war, and that sentence treats warfare as human failure’.13 The entries for ‘military’ and ‘soldier’ each receive half a sentence, that on ‘militia’ only slightly more. But in the third edition, of 1797, the entry ‘War’ runs to eighty-​eight pages. War there is declared ‘a great evil’, but it is also now ‘inevitable and often necessary’. Moreover, an entirely new subject appears. Just as war had ‘become itself encyclopedic’, the kind of soldier it required needed to possess encyclopedic understanding—​a ‘comprehensive genius’—​of that ‘science of sciences’, war. Favret explains that this ‘new evaluation of the man of war and his place in the realm of knowledge is confirmed elsewhere, outside the Anglophone world’, by the German naturalist and philosopher Lorenz Oken, who in Elements of Physiophilosophy (1810–​11; trans. 1847) describes ‘the art of War [as] the highest, most exalted art; the art of freedom and of right’. As in poetry, he writes, ‘all arts have been blended, so in the art of war have all sciences and all arts’.14 ‘We are a far cry from the thought that war brings confusion and perplexity’, Favret concludes; ‘on the contrary, war has become the highest operation of intellect’.15

12 

Sir Walter Scott, The Antiquary, ed. Nicola J. Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 292. On Scott’s historical method and alternatives to it, see Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 13  Mary Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 181–​182. 14  Quoted in Favret, War at a Distance, 183. 15 Favret, War at a Distance, 183.

The Victorian Subject: Thackeray’s Wartime Subjects    35 At around the same time, history’s written record began to include personal histories of persons great and small. The early decades of the nineteenth century saw a surge of interest in biography and autobiography, though these genres were not clearly defined.16 As James Treadwell notes, though the Quarterly reported in 1809 on ‘an epidemical rage for autobiography’, and while in Sartor Resartus (1833–​4) Thomas Carlyle described ‘these Autobiographical times of ours’, the conventions of Life writing in this period were in flux.17 Some readers found memoirs overly intimate, their contents offensively small. For them, even such works as Jean-​Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782) revealed what should have remained private, the petty littleness of their human subjects and the vulgarity of personal life.18 While Carlyle cheered John Wilson Croker’s 1831 edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, saying, ‘this Book of Boswell’s will give us more real insight into the History of England during those days than twenty other Books, falsely entitled “Histories,” which take to themselves that special aim’, even Croker complained that the lives ‘of second-​and third-​rate people’ were flooding the literary market.19 Many believed that, to be worthwhile, autobiography must serve some public purpose. Autobiographies thus usually made their public aims explicit: ‘documentation of experiences that appear to have some public interest (as in many travel memoirs), exhortations to the reader to learn from a pattern of industry or virtue’ and the like; they had ‘little to do with self-​expression’.20 An ‘unfolding of the inner life, whether understood psychologically or rhetorically, accounts for virtually no published texts from the period’, Treadwell explains. Among ‘the most characteristic gestures’ of the era’s Life writing ‘is an outright denial of self-​expression’.21 In such a context, the memoirs of common soldiers occupy a complex position with respect to matters of taste and representational value. Unequipped with the ‘comprehensive genius’ required of their commanders, such men would have smaller purviews. Yet because they described wartime, their narratives were not merely personal but offered local insight into globally significant events. Though it has long been noted that Thackeray’s fictional memoirs are modelled on such literary works as Jesse Foot’s The Lives of Andrew Robinson Bowes, Esq. and the Countess of Strathmore (1810) and the Memoirs of Casanova (appearing in 1822), he was also likely capitalizing on this recent trend.22 Of the Peninsular War of 1808–​14, the historian Neil Ramsey writes, ‘None of Britain’s earlier wars had produced anything like this outpouring of soldiers’ writing’,

16  See Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–​1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) on nineteenth-​century biographical interest. 17  James Treadwell, ‘Reading Romantic Autobiography’, Nineteenth-​Century Prose, 28, no. 2 (2001), 1–​27, at 4. 18  See Treadwell, ‘Reading Romantic Autobiography’, on the confusion of early reviewers of Rousseau’s Confessions. 19  Thomas Carlyle, ‘Boswell’s Life of Johnson’, in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, 30 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1904), xxviii, 80. Cited in Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 296. 20  Treadwell, ‘Reading Romantic Autobiography’, 2. 21  Treadwell, ‘Reading Romantic Autobiography’, 2–​3. 22  Also relevant is the novel’s debt to accounts of real-​life criminals, such as Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild (1743), and to satirical Irish portraiture such as Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800).

36    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture diaries and reminiscences ‘on a large scale and in great numbers’, written and published by infantrymen and private soldiers.23 Many of the most popular were those of common soldiers whose military escapades gave them something worth writing about, and whose ‘plain soldier-​like manner’ of writing was seen to authenticate their accounts. ‘Rather than marking the soldier’s incapacity as an author,’ Ramsey writes, ‘lack of polish and simplicity were increasingly viewed as indicative of homely, true, and markedly British sentiments, in which the soldier’s “plain, unvarnished tale” told of an inherently adventurous life’.24 Unlike the ‘“dry, confused, and uninteresting” reportage of an official dispatch’, the soldier’s memoir held for some the piquancy of the novitiate’s unrefined but honest report.25 In response to the 1826 publication of the Naval Sketch-​Book, a reviewer in Blackwood’s wrote: ‘Dang your Spenserian stanza—​your octosyllabics—​ your long and shorts; your heroics and blank-​verse, feckless as blank cartridge—​but give us Jack himself […] spinning a long yarn’.26 Detractors found many things to hate in these amateur works, not least their bad poetry, lack of style, and habit of self-​aggrandizement. In a memoir excerpted in Blackwood’s, an officer asks why so many published accounts of recent military events were nonetheless ‘so intolerably dull’, concluding that it was because their writers were ‘for ever heralding the exploits of [their] own little squad or battalion […] and disgusting us, who care nothing about him, with some story of a rifleman sending a bullet through his thick legs, or a lancer breaking his sabre on his still thicker skull’.27 These were writings by what were called, in military slang, a ‘newcome’ or ‘Mr. Newcome’, an inexperienced or young soldier (the term appears in another of Thackeray’s fictional memoirs, The Newcomes of 1855). More often, the charge against such writings was that they failed at what was representationally most important: generalizing from private experience. They could not possibly add to a more global understanding of war’s causes, mechanisms, or effects. The London Magazine said of Joseph Donaldson’s Recollections of an Eventful Life, chiefly passed in the army (1824), ‘a private soldier is not in a situation to give, from his own experience, a general account of a war. He sees nothing but detached incidents, and if he describes more he must rely upon newspapers and despatches—​a task he had better leave to others.’28 Exciting as were these tales of travel and adventure, they could depict only the particulars of war, seen in stupid isolation. They could not help anyone understand war as an abstraction—​not what caused it, how to win or how to end it. What they could provide, however, was insight into individual 23 

Neil Ramsey, The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780–​1835 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 1. Military officers too were sometimes viewed as lacking the ‘refinement, education, and virtues’ required of professional authors. Vicesmius Knox argued in 1795 that the military had given rise ‘to many instances of illiterate fine gentlemen’ (quoted in Ramsey, Military Memoir, 60). 24 Ramsey, Military Memoir, 67. 25 Ramsey, Military Memoir, 64. 26  Quoted in Ramsey, Military Memoir, 68. 27  ‘Campaigns of the British Army at Washington &etc, by an Officer’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 9, no. 50 (1821), 180–​187, p. 180. 28  ‘The Eventful Life of a Soldier’, London Magazine, 3 (1825), 363–​380, p. 380.

The Victorian Subject: Thackeray’s Wartime Subjects    37 suffering on the ground. ‘If we had no other reason for recommending these little volumes’, the London Magazine concludes, ‘it would be sufficient that they will instruct unthinking people in the real nature of war and military glory’.29 With this in mind, we turn to Barry Lyndon, a strange, early novel in which Thackeray takes up such considerations in earnest. Originally The Luck of Barry Lyndon, Esq., the novel was republished as a single volume in 1856 with a telling new name: The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., of the Kingdom of Ireland. Unlike Scott, who typically relied in his historical novels on third-​person omniscience, Thackeray turns once again to ‘limited’ narration, the first-​person account of a common soldier. Like those narrow-​minded, hidebound subjects against whom Mill’s ideal liberal subject was defined, Barry’s class and familial loyalties prevent him from seeing beyond his own experience or generalizing from it—​at least, most of the time. In representing another, altered version of the ‘Dum-​Dum’ soldier, Thackeray faces squarely the challenges of historical narration, challenges that had been compounded in the tumultuous recent decades out of which the early Victorian period took shape. In identifying the Seven Years’ War (1756–​63)—​ Barry’s war—​with the beginning of a new conception of wartime, Favret characterizes these years in a way that helps to clarify what have seemed to readers of Barry Lyndon the novel’s inconsistences and mistakes. With its newly massive geographical scale, she explains, war could no longer be understood by way of discrete events or even distinct temporalities: here and there, then versus now. Wartime is now ‘an affective zone, a sense of time that, caught in the most unsettled sort of present, without knowledge of its outcome, cannot know its own borders’.30 The final pages see Barry Lyndon as Thackeray’s first major attempt at capturing the ‘real nature’ of this history and this wartime: spatially dispersed and time-​scrambled, war not so much intellectually—​or individually—​ comprehended as collectively experienced and felt.

Barry Lyndon’s War An Irish soldier serving first with the English army, then with the Prussian, during the Seven Years’ War, Barry Lyndon tells a story that moves in and out of wartime, including the Peninsular War, the American Revolutionary War (in which Barry’s stepson, Bullingdon, fights), and the Napoleonic campaigns occurring during the last years of his life. An inveterate scoundrel who, in latter days, from a cell in the Fleet Street prison, recounts a career of treachery and wrongdoing, he fumes throughout that his ancient pedigree failed to guarantee him the prosperity he deserves. Declaring his family ‘so old, noble, and illustrious’ that ‘no gentleman in Europe […] has not heard of the house of Barry of Barryogue, of the kingdom of Ireland’, Barry exclaims, ‘my family was the 29 

‘The Eventful Life of a Soldier’, 374.

30 Favret, War, 18. On Thackeray’s historiographic techniques, see David Kurnick, Empty

Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

38    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture noblest of the island, and, perhaps, of the universal world’.31 Like Gahagan, Barry is shameless. His hypocrisy knows no bounds. An acknowledged murderer, liar, and thief, he insists to the last on exonerating his wicked behaviour. Defending a phantom honour, he sees his worst actions as justifiably done. Not for him Pip’s late, grave realization, ‘the inaptitude […] had been in me’.32 In his final, bitter remarks, Barry regrets only his poverty: ‘we manage to eke out a miserable existence’, he complains, ‘quite unworthy of the famous and fashionable Barry Lyndon’ (Barry Lyndon, 307).33 Though he seems a cruel moral idiot, a half-​thinker committed only to his own pleasures and class, Thackeray’s early readers didn’t know quite how to take Barry—​or Barry—​a fact which may explain certain revisions Thackeray made to the text. From the single volume, Thackeray eliminated several editorial asides present in the original, having been put there, according to one of his biographers, Gordon Ray, to ‘put obtuse readers on the right track’.34 Thackeray had resorted to ‘the inartistic device’ of explanatory footnotes, many of which offer seemingly needless warnings of the implausibility of Barry’s claims, because readers reading the novel serially took Barry at his word: ‘Thackeray’s motives for telling the story were misunderstood and his irony taken literally’, says Ray.35 James Brander Matthews voices a similar complaint in his 1901 The Historical Novel and Other Essays, where he lambasts Thackeray for speaking ‘out of his own mouth’ thoughts that could not possibly belong to Barry, such as ‘the reflections upon the horrors of war at the end of the fourth chapter’. Though Matthews is unusual in considering Barry Lyndon Thackeray’s best book, he criticizes Thackeray for explaining in editorial footnotes what should be obvious: Thackeray ‘sinks’ to new lows when, for instance, instructing readers that Barry is ‘no mere hero of romance, but a callous brute’. According to Matthews, an author ‘must heartily despise his audience if he feels called upon to come before the curtain, pointer in hand, and expound the real meaning of his drama’.36 That he thinks his readers very stupid indeed if he believes they could so entirely miss the truth about Barry is a possibility Thackeray appears to admit when he says that he has failed ‘to take this great stupid public by the ears’.37 31  William Makepeace Thackeray, The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., ed. Andrew Sanders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3. Further references will be given in the text. 32  Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Margaret Cardwell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 439. 33  Thackeray found writing the novel difficult, describing ‘B.L.’ as ‘lying like a nightmare on my mind’, and writing from his travels to Malta: ‘Wrote Barry but slowly and with great Difficulty’; ‘Wrote Barry with no more success than yesterday’; ‘Finished Barry after great throes late at night’ (Barry Lyndon, 4). In Walter Jerrold, ‘Biographical Note’, Barry Lyndon, by William Makepeace Thackeray, Penn State Electronic Classics Series, 2008, 3–​7, online, http://​www2.hn.psu.edu/​faculty/​jmanis/​thackeray/​barry-​ lyndon6x9.pdf [last accessed 4 March 2013]. 34  Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811–​1846 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1955), 346. See also Ray’s The Buried Life: A Study of the Relation between Thackeray’s Fiction and His Personal History (London: Oxford University Press, 1952). 35 Ray, Thackeray, 346. 36  James Brander Matthews, The Historical Novel and Other Essays (1901; Detroit: Gale Research, 1969), 159. 37  Quoted in Ray, Thackeray, 347.

The Victorian Subject: Thackeray’s Wartime Subjects    39 But Barry’s stupidity—​or occasional lack thereof—​is most at issue in those passages Matthews singles out for being so frustratingly out of character, passages in which the constitutionally one-​eyed Barry engages in rather more complete thinking by generalizing about his wartime experience. The end of c­ hapter 4 is one such moment in which Barry grows keenly conscious of the horrors of battle. ‘Such knaves and ruffians do men in war become!’ he declares; ‘It is well for gentlemen to talk of the age of chivalry; but remember the starving brutes whom they lead—​men nursed in poverty, entirely ignorant, made to take a pride in deeds of blood’: ‘It is with these shocking instruments that your great warriors and kings have been doing their murderous work in the world’ (Barry Lyndon, 71). Noble sentiments these, yet prior to this Barry brutalizes nearly everyone he meets. His viciousness is well in place before he flees Irish shores—​though not even these are sheltered from wartime effects. ‘I did not stop to break his bones, as I would on another occasion’, Barry says of an English dragoon encamped at his Castle Brady, who injures his feelings with a minor verbal insult. Moments later, Barry sees his cousin Nora strolling with a young English captain, Quin, and becomes jealously enraged: ‘I was resolved to pass [my blade] through the body of the delinquents, and spit them like two pigeons’, he says (31). After he is tricked into believing that he has murdered Quin in a duel, Barry finds himself on the run, but without regrets: ‘I did not dream of the death of Quin, as some milksops, perhaps, would have done; indeed I have never had any of that foolish remorse consequent upon any of my affairs of honour’: ‘he is a fool to be ashamed because he wins’ (49). But Barry is broke, and so he joins the English army, which in these times is no more troubled by Barry’s crimes than he is. Approaching a sergeant, Barry admits ‘frankly that […] he had killed an officer […] and was anxious to get out of the country’, but adds: ‘I need not have troubled myself with any explanations; King George was too much in want of men to heed from whence they came’ (62). The wretched military conditions and worse company in which Barry finds himself seem to bother him more than does the sanctioned violence he is soon called upon to commit. Though ‘it calls the blush into [his] old cheeks to think’ of the ‘ploughmen, poachers, [and] pickpockets’ with whom he served under the British crown, it is with far less shame that Barry reports slaying ‘a poor little ensign’ at the Battle of Minden, a boy ‘so young, slender, and small, that a blow from my pig-​ tail would have dispatched him, I think, in place of the butt of my musket, with which I clubbed him down’ (62, 70). Barry’s depravity is hard to square with his high-​minded condemnations of war. In the main, he draws no parallels between the King’s carnage and his own, instead scourging war’s out-​scale horrors without counting himself among the destroyers of the peace. He sneers that while the public admires ‘the “Great Frederick”’ for his ‘military genius’, I, who have served him, and been, as it were, behind the scenes of which that great spectacle is composed, can only look at it with horror. What a number of items of human crime, misery, slavery, to form that sum-​total of glory! I can recollect a certain day, about three weeks after the battle of Minden, and a farm-​house in which

40    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture some of us entered; and how the old woman and her daughters served us, trembling, to wine; and how we got drunk over the wine, and the house was in a flame, presently: and woe betide the wretched fellow afterwards who came home to look for his house and his children! (Barry Lyndon, 71)

Yet if life ‘behind the scenes of […] that great spectacle’ gives Barry but a ‘fractional’ insight into war’s causes, tactics, or effects, comprehensive knowledge of war, the novel suggests, may also be a delusion. As Gillian Russell writes of the years 1793–​1815, ‘Part of the politics of making war possible has involved the privileging of the vision of the civilian audience: the viewer at home must “see” more than even the ordinary soldier in the field, assuming the position of a Wellington or a Napoleon.’38 But public speeches, theatrical spectacles, military parades, and mass print might also leave the public overconfident in its understanding, with an inflated sense of what it knows. Barry Lyndon refuses this, offering instead the highly circumscribed view of one on the ground who understands little. In a scene later reworked as the Battle of Blenheim, of which Esmond ‘knows nothing’ (Henry Esmond, 238), Barry engages in the Battle of Minden but in a place ‘two miles off ’ from that fight. ‘[N]‌one of us soliders of the line knew of what had occurred until we came to talk about the fight over kettles in the evening, and repose over a hard-​fought day’, Barry explains; ‘It would have been easy for me to have said I  was present’ (Barry Lyndon, 70; original emphasis). But he does not. Recounting instead how he steals from the little ensign’s corpse ‘fourteen louis-​d’or, and a silver box of sugar-​plums’, Barry reasons: if ‘people would tell their stories of battles in this simple way, I think the cause of truth would not suffer by it. All I know of this famous fight of Minden (except from books) is told here above’ (70–​1). In Barry Lyndon, where ‘fisticuff facts’ are chronicled on nearly every page, national history is never unbound from Barry’s littleness and distortions (17). But wartime also causes his one-​eyed obstinacy, and class loyalties, to fray. Barry during wartime allies himself with ‘the Fencibles’, members of the volunteer army, saying, ‘all my sympathies are in the ranks’ (100). Bemoaning the fading away of ‘the old times’, Barry’s scorn cuts both ways: even as he complains aristocratically that Napoleon was ‘conquered in his turn by our shopkeepers and cheesemongers of England’, he also sees that ‘Bonaparte brutalized Europe with his swaggering Grenadiers’ (134). And where Scott’s Waverley (1814) ends in national reconciliation, Barry’s memoirs detail the war crimes Scott leaves out. Some readers ‘will cry out […] that I am encouraging insubordination and murder’, Barry remarks after defending an attempt at desertion by thirty men, led by a disaffected Frenchman; but had they served as privates in the Prussian army from 1760 to 1765, they would not be apt to take objection. This man destroyed two sentinels to get his liberty; how many

38 

Gillian Russell, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics and Society, 1793–​1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), n.p., Oxford Scholarship Online, http://​www.oxfordscholarship.com.ezproxy.lib.indiana. edu/​view/​10.1093/​acprof:oso/​9780198122630.001.0001/​acprof-​9780198122630 [last accessed 10 April 2013].

The Victorian Subject: Thackeray’s Wartime Subjects    41 hundreds of thousands of his own and the Austrian people did King Frederick kill because he took a fancy to Silesia? How many men, in later days, did Napoleon Bonaparte cause to die by shot or steel, or cold or hunger, because he wished to make himself master of Russia? (100)

Barry refuses to give ‘any romantic narrative of the Seven Years’ War’ because the Prussian army was ‘composed for the most part of men hired or stolen, like myself, from almost every nation in Europe’, kidnapped and sold by recruiters who ‘market in human flesh’ (101, 80). An important effect of this inconsistency in Barry’s character is that the rage, pain, and confusion recorded in his memoir are not his alone. Desolation and horror exceed and surround him, as in a stretch of Germany that, five years into the war, is ‘desolate beyond all description’, a ruthless ‘seller of men’ having so ‘exhausted the males of his principality, that the fields remained untilled, [and] even the children of twelve years old were driven off to the war’ (Barry Lyndon, 80). While in Waverley, a distance of sixty years enables a more measured relation to the national past, the passing of time does little to temper the wartime feelings of Barry and his fellows. ‘For God’s sake, don’t talk of that time’, cries a French officer whom Barry encounters some decades later; ‘I wake up from my sleep trembling and crying even now’ (Barry Lyndon, 102). As Barry comments, the punishment of soldiers had been so ‘incessant’, especially for ‘the broken-​ spirited yokels who had been forced or coaxed into the service’, that it was in peace ‘more cruel than in war’ (102, 95–​96). Not only Barry’s pain but also his obliviousness is widespread. In this wartime, it seems, the two are impossible to entirely unlink. ‘It would require a greater philosopher and historian than I am to explain the causes of the famous Seven Years’ War’, Barry writes, ‘and, indeed, its origin has always appeared to me so complicated, and the books written about it so amazingly hard to understand, that I have seldom been much wiser at the end of a chapter than at the beginning’. With the arrival of Pitt as prime minister, ‘all of a sudden […] the rest of the empire applauded the war as much as they had hated it before’, he continues; ‘“the Protestant hero,” as we used to call the godless old Frederick of Prussia, was adored by us as a saint a very short time after we had been about to make war against him [… .] Now, somehow, we were on Frederick’s side’ (Barry Lyndon, 67). Not knowing why he is fighting, Barry longs for death—​‘a general action and ball to finish me’—​adding, ‘I looked to hear my own death march played’ (68–​9). Several chapters into his memoir, Barry adds, parenthetically, that the conflict he has been describing was ‘afterwards called the Seven Years’ War’, a reminder of all that is impossible to know from within wartime: how long it lasts, what to call it, when it ends (80). With this in mind, we can consider another of the novel’s apparent flaws, a series of chronological errors so pronounced that it is hard to know whether the mistakes are Barry’s or are part of Thackeray’s design. As Terence McCarthy points out, it is impossible to say when Barry dies. It may be in 1807–​8, after Barry has lived

42    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture ‘nineteen years an inmate of the Fleet Prison’ (Barry Lyndon, 307). But Barry cannot have died then, since he is not dead in 1811 when his estate falls into the hands of the Tiptoffs. Barry may have written his memoirs ‘about 1800’, as Fraser’s readers were told. Or, as we learn in ­chapter 17, he may have written them in ‘about the year 1814, in that calm retreat which Fortune had selected for the author at the close of his life’ (Thackeray, Barry Lyndon, 10, 247). Or he may have written them in 1833.39 Through some rather ingenious math, McCarthy even manages to show that Thackeray’s dating makes it possible to surmise that the memoirs were compiled by the fictional editor ‘in about 1851—​seven years after the novel’s publication!’40 Though some readers have been persuaded by the enormity of such errors to conclude that they are intentional—​perhaps a by-​product of the chronic liar’s inability to keep track of his own lies—​this would be, in McCarthy’s view, wrong. ‘Thackeray’s own carelessness must ultimately undermine any theory of the intentional inconsistency of Barry’s chronology,’ he says. While Thackeray would go on to ‘commit much graver chronological sins than these’, Barry Lyndon’s many mistakes are ‘more regrettable than similar inconsistencies in other novels, like Jane Eyre […] where the drama remains at a personal level’.41 The problem here is historical as well as aesthetic. While Barry ‘insists on the reliability of his assertions, neither he nor Thackeray takes the trouble to make the memoirs historically possible, nor to make any real artistic use of their inaccuracy’.42 Yet it is possible to rank this chronic problem among those measures taken by the novel to capture wartime. Perhaps by stunning its readers, stupefying our intelligence, the novel seeks to elicit a structure of feeling in which time, unbound by official timetables or political stops and starts, extends its shocks well past the moment at which war officially ceased. Returning again and again to the subjects of wartime in the uneasy peace that follows and, in his case, precedes war, Thackeray seems committed to making wartime palpable to even those readers who take up the novel in an hour of peace. Not even McCarthy is immune. Although he eventually decides that the novel’s chronological errors ‘pass entirely unnoticed by average reader’, he also describes feeling ‘bombarded with dates’. He leaves the impression of having been assaulted by the novel’s ‘mad chronology’ and seems exhausted by the effort undertaken to comprehend this ‘monstrously inaccurate’ work.43 McCarthy may be right that Thackeray, with a ‘general disregard for matters of chronology altogether’, simply lost the story’s temporal thread and that this is why the second edition contains fewer of such errors than the first.44 But the novel may also frustrate

39 

Terence McCarthy, ‘Chronological Inconsistencies in Barry Lyndon’, English Language Notes, 21, no. 2 (1983), 29–​37, at 37. 40  McCarthy, ‘Chronological Inconsistencies in Barry Lyndon’, 36. 41  McCarthy, ‘Chronological Inconsistencies in Barry Lyndon’, 35. 42  McCarthy, ‘Chronological Inconsistencies in Barry Lyndon’, 37. 43  McCarthy, ‘Chronological Inconsistencies in Barry Lyndon’, 34. 44  McCarthy, ‘Chronological Inconsistencies in Barry Lyndon’, 37.

The Victorian Subject: Thackeray’s Wartime Subjects    43 one historicizing imperative by inventing another, refusing to make the memoirs historically possible in matters of dating, or even, thanks to Barry’s lying, to make them true, so as to make them historical in another way, by depicting ‘real’ history. As Ina Ferris argues, ‘both the scientific and sentimental turns’ in Romantic era historiography ‘agreed in valorizing the witness-​narrative’, because each ‘understood historiography less as a synthetic mode of explanation and evaluation than as the collection and collation of primary documents through which access to the lived past could be gained’. Thus, in an important way, ‘history’s business was coming to be seen to be the “real” as much as the “true”’: or, more precisely, the true now had to take the real into account, as had not been the case when new histories were mostly derived from previous ones. Under an emergent historicism that posited historical change as substantial rather than superficial, the reality of the past was understood to inhere in an alterity to which material ‘remains’ provided access. At the same time, the truth of the past continued to be (as it always had been) a matter of present determination, that is, a function of the judgment of the historian.

These ‘two imperatives of history’, the real and the true, implied different kinds of authorship and different formal protocols.45 Where old ‘literary remains’, such as Romance, could be internalized ‘with only minimal effort’, having occupied ‘a transtemporal aesthetic realm confirming identification across time’, historical remains resisted any easy translation into discourses of permanence and continuity. The ‘real’ might be that which could not be assimilated, not ‘gathered into a structure of some kind’ or made intelligible.46 Where Barry Lyndon struggles to make sense of the crumbling world around him, where his guiltless conscience cannot be judged entirely apart from the bloody battlefield of his life, the story he tells immerses its readers in what may be seen as productive confusions. By disordering the familiar conventions of historical novels such as Scott’s, by rewriting recent history for a new era newly resistant to clear-​cut historical thresholds and tidy conclusions, perhaps Thackeray hoped to make palpable a ‘fractional’, inassimilable subject, the lived stupefactions and half-​understandings of historical—​historical-​ as-​subjective—​experience. If Barry remains to the end a throwback of an earlier era, unwilling to think like a good liberal subject—​too much ego, with a never disinterested stance—​Barry Lyndon, understood as a product of wartime, may offer something else: a feeling of embodied personhood that, extending beyond individuals, inheres in a people or shared moment rather than a self.

45 

Ina Ferris, ‘Scholarly Revivals: Gothic Fiction, Secret History, and Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner’, in Jillian Heydt-​Stevenson and Charlotte Sussman (eds), Recognizing the Romantic Novel: New Histories of British Fiction, 1780-​1830 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 267–​284, p. 272. 46  Ferris, ‘Scholarly Revivals’, 274.

44    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture

Select Bibliography Favret, Mary, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Hadley, Elaine, Living Liberalism:  Practical Citizenship in Mid-​Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Matthews, James Brander, The Historical Novel and Other Essays (1901; Detroit: Gale Research, 1969). Mill, John Stuart, and Jeremy Bentham, Utilitarianism and Other Essays, ed. Alan Ryan (London: Penguin, 1987). Miller, J. Hillis, Victorian Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). Phillips, Mark Salber, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–​1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Ramsey, Neil, The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780–​1835 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). Ray, Gordon, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811–​1846 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1955). Russell, Gillian, The Theatres of War:  Performance, Politics and Society, 1793–​1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Trumpener, Katie, Bardic Nationalism: the Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Chapter 2

Life Wri t i ng and the Victoria ns Trev Broughton

Writing in 1862 to Isabella Blackwood, sister of her publisher John Blackwood, the recently widowed Margaret Oliphant remarked I don’t yet know exactly when the book of the season, as you so flatteringly call it, is to be out [ … .] I do believe I have done my best, and the issue will most likely be more critical and important to me and my bairnies than anything I have ever done. For their sake I regard with a little awe and trembling this new step into the world. [ … ] I must say in confidence that I should be much disappointed if this book does not make some little commotion. There never was such a hero—​such a princely, magnanimous, simple heart.1

While the success of today’s misery memoirs and ghostwritten celebrity Lives raises scarcely an eyebrow, we might be nonplussed to find a two-​volume biography of Edward Irving, a Scottish millenarian preacher once celebrated, then disgraced, but dead for thirty years, contending with Great Expectations and Lady Audley’s Secret for ‘book of the season’ in 1862.2 Granted a little mutual buttering-​up between a writer and her publisher’s family, the letter reminds us that Life writing,3 in various forms, was significant to the Victorians both as fashionable talking point and as serious cultural intervention. Their often uncritical respect for the reputation of the deceased (Life writing was nearly always published after the death of its subject, often by relatives), their unspoken assumption that biographical length correlated to biographical significance, and their generous padding of miscellaneous documentation, have between them stifled the 1  Margaret Oliphant to Isabella Blackwood [n.d.], in Autobiography and Letters of Mrs Margaret Oliphant, ed. Mrs. Harry Coghill, introd. Q. D. Leavis (1899; Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1974), 183–​4. References to this edition given hereafter in parentheses. 2  Margaret Oliphant, The Life of Edward Irving, Minister of the National Scotch Church, 2 vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862). References to this edition given hereafter in parentheses. 3  I use the term ‘Life writing’ to include the overlapping genres of memoir, biography, autobiography and edited correspondence, as well as their various subgenres and hybrid forms.

46    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture reputation of Victorian Lives. They come down to us not so much shapeless as a particular shape: the coffin. According to the familiar narrative, this realization begins almost at the moment of Victoria’s death, with Gosse’s description of biography as a ‘monstrous catafalque of two volumes’ (1901).4 It is then confirmed by Lytton Strachey in his influential Eminent Victorians (1918): the Victorian Life is ‘two fat volumes [ … ] as familiar as the cortege of the undertaker’.5 The nail is retroactively hammered home by William Gladstone’s widely quoted dismissal of John Cross’s George Eliot’s Life, as Related in her Letters and Journals (1885), ‘It is not a Life at all. It is a Reticence, in three volumes.’ The provenance of the last epithet is telling: the source for Gladstone’s dinner-​party quip is the ‘Three Monumental Figures’ chapter of E. F. Benson’s 1930 memoir As We Were: A Victorian Peep-​Show, a genealogy that aptly combines the twin modernist urges to solidify the Victorian Life into cliché and to peer behind for its supposed repressions.6 To this vociferous consensus one might retort that many nineteenth-​century commentators, notably Gladstone, and including Oliphant herself, were as aware as their modernist successors of the mortifying effects of indiscriminate prolixity and over-​discriminate respectability, and argued forcefully for a more rigorous approach to biographical ethics and aesthetics. One might point out, too, that like the novel, Life writing was subject to the power of the circulating libraries to enforce anodyne propriety and a multi-​volume format on any author aspiring to commercial success. Such special pleading, however, does not explain biography’s popularity or the commotion Oliphant anticipated. It is worth pausing to consider why the mid-​century might have been an exciting and profitable time to write a Life. By the time Oliphant came to it, biography was already a hybrid genre, straddling the outer limits of print culture and balancing, with greater or lesser success, rival understandings of the purpose and potential of the published Life. Since the seventeenth century, the various Protestant denominations had fostered and circulated spiritual Lives, especially edited journals and conversion narratives, after their own models of Christian progress and according to their own cultures of exemplarity. Religious memoirs had benefited from and contributed to nineteenth-​century evangelicalism in all its forms, promising not just wholesome leisure (the provincial ladies in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife [1864] chat about the newest patterns in crochet and the latest popular memoir of a departed evangelical curate), but guidance and inspiration. ‘People buy, by the million, those well-​intentioned publications—​it is to be supposed that people also read them,’ wrote Oliphant in 1858, before complaining that an unaccustomed reader loses himself in those wildernesses of words, and finds nothing but tedium and vexation in books which, if they truly did what they undertake to do, should be safe companions and counsellors for every one, examples of all the manifold and unlimitable diversities of the Christian and the human life.7 4 

Edmund Gosse, ‘The Custom of Biography’, Anglo-​Saxon Review, 8 (March 1901), 195. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (London: Chatto and Windus, 1918), i. 6  E. F. Benson, As We Were (London: Longman, Green, 1930), 111. 7  [Margaret Oliphant], ‘Religious Memoirs’, Blackwood’s, 83 (June 1858), 705. 5 

Life Writing and the Victorians    47 By the mid-​century, the hagiographical tradition had competition, with a multitude of subgenres and approaches jostling for attention and legitimacy. The post-​Romantic fascination with identity and genius (and especially with the minutiae of authorship) had in part been fuelled by, and certainly contributed to, the cachet of Life writing: a development to which changes in copyright legislation, and the transmission to literary legatees of a longer interest in their benefactor’s sales, lent fiscal urgency. With its emphasis on the truth and moral import of experience, including secular experience, the German Bildungsroman had circulated from Goethe, via Carlyle and Coleridge, to George Henry Lewes and George Eliot, bringing with it a revitalized sense of what was possible in the written life. Meanwhile the anecdotal, table-​talkative model of James Boswell’s 1791 Life of Samuel Johnson, still revered by many as foundational of ‘English’ Life writing, had undergone a resurgence with the publication in 1831 of John Wilson Croker’s edition. John Forster’s critically acclaimed Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) propelled the ‘Life and Times’ format, with its relish for social context and commentary, into the cultural mainstream even as it prompted controversy about the kinds of property vested in biographical evidence. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), also widely respected, was generating its own cottage industry of commentary, rebuttal, and revision. Exemplary Lives of worthy citizens, individually in pamphlets and collected in anthologies, had long been staples of the ‘useful’ knowledge offered to working-​class, female, and juvenile readerships, and at this moment were being reconfigured by Samuel Smiles as the motor for aspirational ‘self-​help’. Missionary Lives were cross-​fertilizing with travel narratives to feed the appetite for entertaining, dramatic, and informative modes of cultural self-​congratulation. In 1858–​9, ‘biography and history’ together with ‘travel and adventures’ made up around 35 per cent of Mudie’s new stock of volumes for his vast circulating library. Together these constituted a heterogeneous, complex, and vibrant cultural field.8 8 

A few examples must suffice to indicate the scholarship in this huge field. On the hagiographical tradition and religious memoirs see for instance Christopher Tolley, Domestic Biography: The Legacy of Evangelicalism in Four Nineteenth-​Century Families (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Linda H. Peterson, Traditions of Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), especially ­chapters 1–​3 on women’s contribution to various branches of spiritual autobiography; on the fascination with lives of geniuses, and the role of Romanticism in the ‘rise’ of Life writing, see James Treadwell, Autobiographical Writing and British Literature, 1783–​1834 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); on the legacy of Romanticism for biography, see Arthur Bradley and Alan Rawes (eds), Romantic Biography (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). Ian Hamilton, Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography (London: Random House, 1993) makes a persuasive case for the impact of changes in copyright on the Life writing industry. On the transmission of Goethean ideas and tropes in Britain and their influence on Eliot, Froude, and other biographers, see Elinor S. Shaffer, ‘Shaping Victorian Biography: From Anecdote to Bildungsroman’, in Peter France and William St Clair (eds), Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 115–​34. On the surprising persistence of Boswell’s Johnson in the ninteenth-​century biographical canon, see Richard D. Altick, Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 73–​4. On the role of biography in the construction and policing of disciplinary boundaries, see David Amigoni, Victorian Biography: Intellectuals and the Ordering of Discourse (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993). Linda H. Peterson discusses Gaskell’s innovations in Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market

48    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Oliphant’s appearance as the biographer of Edward Irving was to mark, she hoped, a watershed in her status as author. Though not yet thirty five, Oliphant had been publishing novels—​one, sometimes two a year—​as well as frequent non-​fiction essays for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine since 1849, and had been supporting her family of three children entirely by her pen since her husband’s illness and death in 1859. She had been signing some of her fiction since the mid-​1850s and had recently adopted the emphatically married name Mrs Oliphant, with which she hallmarked what she considered her most valuable work. Although the nature of cultural value, and what it meant to do one’s ‘best’ as a working mother, were and remained vexed questions for Oliphant, authorship itself, even authorship as a woman with ‘bairnies’ to consider, was not the issue here. At stake was a sense that Lives mattered, and mattered differently from the other genres to which she turned her hand. Edward Irving would, she hoped, consolidate her importance not just as a novelist, but in the arena of public debate. It would make her mark as a writer of substance, and enable her to contribute directly and openly to that most Victorian of discussions: who counted as a hero?9 In few of the nineteenth-​century manifestations of Life writing had there emerged a decisive distinction between (what we might now recognize as) autobiography and biography. The favoured titles fudged the author–​subject relationship, and hence questions of cultural and economic agency as well as perspective: Life of, Memorials of, Memoirs of, and later Reminiscences of. With few exceptions, those who put the Lives of near contemporaries before the public presented themselves less as authors manufacturing a product for the marketplace than as executors, dutifully passing on a legacy from a departed relative, friend or colleague, to posterity. The nature of that bequest was the deceased’s exemplary conduct and evolving outlook, rendered chronologically and in his or her own words. This four-​cornered myth of editorial selflessness, narrative completeness, subjective transparency, and public benefaction—​what we might call the dominant ideology of nineteenth-​century Life writing—​was, like all ideologies, unstable and contested.10 From Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–​4) to Henry James’s The Aspern

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 131–​50. On the Smilesian tradition of Life writing and its pedagogic uses, see Juliette Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth-​Century ‘Hidden’ Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 65–​111; on anthologies of Lives, see Alison Booth, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004). On missionary Lives, see Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered, 175–​82. The figures for Mudie’s stock come from Guinevere Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1970), 38. 9  The debate over the conditions and uses of heroism in political, spiritual, and cultural life was galvanized by the work of Thomas Carlyle, notably his lecture series published as On Heroes, Hero-​ Worship and the Heroic in History (London: Fraser, 1841). 10  Oliphant consistently critiqued the kind of biography that was ‘a series of funeral orations […] broken up by bits of narrative of a corresponding kind’ ([Margaret Oliphant], ‘New Books: Biographies’, Blackwood’s, 121, no. 736 [February 1877], 183–​4). For a contemporary exploration of some of the model’s horizons, particularly its emphasis on successiveness, see Philip Davis, ‘Why Do We Remember Forwards and Not Backwards?’, in Vincent Newey and Philip Shaw (eds), Mortal Pages, Literary Lives: Studies in Nineteenth-​Century Autobiography (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996), 81–​102.

Life Writing and the Victorians    49 Papers (1888) and J. M. Barrie’s Tommy and Grizel (1900), fiction restlessly probed the myth’s vanishing points, its productive incoherencies, and its severely bracketed erotics. More recently, critics such as Holly Furneaux have begun to explore ‘the queer possibilities of the biographical form’ itself, showing how the very terms of the genre, posthumousness, editorial passivity, succession and posterity, enabled the generation of rich and versatile languages of—​often non-​heteronormative—​love and longing.11 One reading of Oliphant’s choice of Irving as a subject is as a way of sidestepping biography’s funereal atmosphere. Writing much later of the ‘ethics of biography’, she would argue that ‘he who has been dead twenty years, has, as it were, emerged from death altogether. He has been, and to our senses is, no longer; but the mystery and awe have departed.’12 The span of a generation, in other words, lifted the task from the moral, where personal loyalty and indebtedness should hold sway, to the ethical, where judicious evaluation might be possible. At the time she accounted for the project in divergent ways: ‘great personal attraction towards the man for one thing, and a great desire to do him justice with the world’, ‘a rather liberal offer from my London publisher’, and the feeling that this work would be a great relief and refreshment to my mind at such time as this when the heavy griefs of my own life disgust me often at those light troubles of fiction which it is my trade to make and to mend—​Such a work, just now, would I am sure invigorate and strengthen me.13

A professional author already, but one who prided herself on working in ‘the little second drawing-​room where all the (feminine) life of the house goes on’ (24), Oliphant construed biography as a new kind of labour: vigorous, outward-​looking, productive. In opting for a subject that required active research outside her own archive, she aligned herself with those biographers whose understanding of the task went beyond mere mediation, to encompass matters of evidence and interpretation, as well as questions of moral agency and accountability, and of the relationship between the individual and society. In other words, she aspired to join the ranks of those who, like Thomas Carlyle, practised biography and history as branches of the same endeavour. David Amigoni has traced the complex role of biography in the discursive and institutional genealogies of ‘literature’ and ‘history’ as disciplines in the nineteenth century.14 As a largely self-​educated woman Oliphant was marginal to such debates, though with 11  Holly Furneaux, ‘Inscribing Friendship: John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens and the Writing of Male Intimacy in the Victorian Period’, Life Writing, 8, no. 3 (2011), 243–​56. See also Oliver S. Buckton, Secret Selves: Confession and Same-​Sex Desire in Victorian Autobiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 12  M. O. W. Oliphant, ‘The Ethics of Biography’, Contemporary Review, 44 (July 1883), 78. 13  Letter from Margaret Oliphant to Miss Martin (5 March 1860). See Edward Irving Letters, 25–​8, Archives of Regent Square United Reform Church, in the care of the United Reformed Church History Society and held in the library of Westminster College, Cambridge. I am grateful to Barbara Waddington of the Lumen Church for introducing these papers to me and to the trustees of these Archives for permission to reproduce quotations. 14 Amigoni, Victorian Biography, passim.

50    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture the example of Gaskell’s Brontë before her, and an established reputation of her own, she was emboldened, as Gaskell had been, to travel around the country interviewing strangers, collecting documents, and visiting relevant locales. While the offer of a sympathetic ear to a garrulous interviewee could be presented as an extension of her ‘feminine’ sensibilities (‘like the art of driving a hoop, that I give a little touch now and then, and my victim rolls on and on’ [79]), she saw her role as biographer as both requiring and to a degree entitling her to suspend some of the proprieties of her class and gender. Though she began her enquiries with Irving’s kin by marriage, with whom she had a distant cousinship, she soon went further afield, tracing his networks and contacting his acquaintance. She investigated his library records, tracked down correspondence, read satirical pamphlets, presbyterial court records, and newspaper reports. She bemoaned the ‘terrible amount of sermons which I have to read and remember. If Irving had been an ordinary preacher I must have succumbed long ere now’ (173). The bold decision to call upon the renowned Thomas Carlyle for information about his friend Irving—​to ‘beard the lion in his den’ rather than writing to him or relying upon an intermediary—​ she attributed to the ‘courage that comes to one when one is about one’s lawful work, and not seeking acquaintance or social favour’ (75). The sense of enfranchisement Oliphant experienced from this ‘lawful work’, and from the twenty-​plus-​year moratorium between herself and Irving’s passing, had limits. In her research, as in Life writing at the time, the boundaries between amateur and professional, between private and public, were unpredictable and porous. With multiple reputations at stake, those boundaries were transected by informal relationships of patronage, dependency, and collaboration: factors still undertheorized in literary histories of the genre.15 For her respondents, furthermore, Irving occupied living memory—​ a term that seems to have come into circulation in the law courts in the 1820s—​and thus their evidence could be as compromised, or as perverse, as the graveside pieties she had sought to displace. She frequently found herself enmired in the ‘wilderness of words’ she so detested in parochial biography. She recounted later how, holed up in the gloomy guest room of the manse at Rosneath, known in the minister’s family as ‘a field to bury strangers in’, she was confronted by, not the expected cache of Irving letters, but a mass of ‘diabolical handwriting, which was not Irving’s at all [ … ] but only letters addressed to him’. She feelingly recalled ‘the chill that grew upon me, and the gradual sense of utter stupidity that came upon me’ (74). The very pleasure of reminiscence sometimes misled her interlocutors into confidences they would not want to see in print. Jane Welsh Carlyle, for instance, followed up the intimate conversation they had on first meeting in the summer of 1860 with a letter on 2 December confessing that she had forgotten ‘you were seeking information 15 

These ideas have, however, been pursued in work on self-​representation and its relationship to various generic, social, and psychological ‘others’: see for instance Martin Danahay, A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth-​Century Britain (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993); Liz Stanley, The Auto/​Biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/​ Biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992).

Life Writing and the Victorians    51 about Edward Irving to put into a Book, and almost everything I told you about him was “betwixt woman and woman”—​under seven seals of secrecy!’16 Oliphant wrote back on 28 December, patiently reiterating her plea for ‘publishable information’. On about 29 April 1861 Jane sent her one of Irving’s letters, accompanied by more prevarications: If you were here—​beside me—​I dare say I might give you some of the details you want—​your questions would suggest them—​or they would suggest themselves in the natural course of conversation. But to write them down—​to order—​all in a row, with ‘the reciprocity all on one side’—​the idea of ‘to be printed’ lowering over me—​Oh my Dear!17

It is hard to imagine a more devastating critique, or a more effective queering, of the genre’s premises. Oliphant replied on 7 May that such ‘letters and references’ were ‘so many coals of fire’: to be handled with care, if at all. However she acknowledged a mite ruefully that a certain hard-​headedness was an occupational hazard: ‘I suspect there must be no creature so entirely devoid of feeling as an unfortunate litterateur in search of materials.’18 At the time she joked ‘in the profoundest confidence’ of her intention ‘to disclose the tribulations of a historian in search of information to the sympathetic world’; later she would ‘remember making the discovery already noted—​which, of course, I promulgated to all my friends—​that every one I saw on this subject displayed the utmost willingness to tell me all about themselves, and quite a secondary interest in Irving’ (184, 76). The code-​switching in such anecdotes between confidentiality and broadcast, between formal and informal (so that the ‘historian’s’ relationship to the ‘sympathetic world’ is continually renegotiated) finds Oliphant quietly theorizing her own role in mediating Irving’s affective significance to the public, or perhaps, to adapt Lauren Berlant’s formulation, in forging an ‘intimate public’ receptive to memoir as a genre.19 It is worth noting, however, that she places as much emphasis on the ‘historical’ as the ‘sympathetic’ here. The ‘profoundest confidence’ disclosed earlier was addressed to the minister of Rosneath, whose collaboration we have already noted. Her encounter with Revd Robert Herbert Story (1835–​1907) is interesting for the collision it illuminates between rival conceptions of Life writing itself: as a practice, as a genre, as an occupation. Most biographers of Oliphant concur in detecting a mutual attraction between the recently widowed Oliphant and the young minister when, in the winter of 1860, he

16  The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (ed.), Ian Campbell, Aileen Christianson, and David Sorenson, xxxvii (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 64 (emphasis in the original). I am grateful to Aileen Christianson and Dale Trela for pointing me towards this episode. 17  The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, xxxvii. 37, 156. 18  Mrs Oliphant’s side of the correspondence is given in D. J. Trela, ‘Jane Welsh Carlyle and Margaret Oliphant: An Unsung Friendship’, Carlyle Annual, 11 (Spring 1990), 34–​5. 19  See Lauren Berlant and Jay Prosser, ‘Life Writing and Intimate Publics: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant’, Biography, 34, no. 1 (Winter 2011), 180–​7; see also Kay Ferres, ‘Gender, Biography, and the Public Sphere’, in France and St Clair (eds), Mapping Lives, 303–​20.

52    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture called on her in Edinburgh to offer his help in her research on Irving. Story was born after Irving’s death, but his father, also a minister, also a Robert Story, whose biography he was writing, had been a close friend of Irving’s. The unmarried Robert Herbert invited her to the manse to stay with himself and his mother. After an initial short visit (in the dreaded burial ground for strangers), Oliphant rented a house nearby for the summer and the two families shared expeditions to local beauty spots while the aspirant biographers compared notes about working methods and the value of visiting local sites. There’s a consensus that they flirted at this time, and an impression that at some stage Story proposed to Oliphant and was rejected, perhaps because, despite her grief, despite financial pressure and the trials of lone parenthood, she was rather enjoying being in charge of her life.20 By what must have seemed a remarkable coincidence, the pair were working at the same time on the same period of Scottish ecclesiastical history, on biographies of two figures, both ministers of the Church of Scotland, who were friends, had friends in common, whose stories overlapped in important ways, and whose archives were reciprocally relevant. They could be useful to each other, though of course they were also potential rivals in the marketplace. They helped each other. Story patiently explained the fine questions of doctrine upon which Edward Irving’s alleged heresy, and consequent expulsion from his natal Church, hung, while Oliphant listened to and commented on his manuscript as it progressed.21 Both their subjects, in different ways, were evangelicals. As ministers in the Church of Scotland, Robert Story and Edward Irving came from a distinctive religio-​political culture with its own cautious take on evangelicalism, but could not help being influenced by the atmosphere of seriousness and the culture of self-​review it brought to early nineteenth-​century religious life.22 Christopher Tolley has given the name ‘Domestic Biography’ to the mode of Life writing that emerged from this kind of milieu. This was not primarily biography about the domestic, for though familial ties and culture were implicitly at its heart, it was shaped by reticence about domestic life and marriage. Rather, it was a practice of biography founded within and powered by the culture of early nineteenth-​century evangelicalism, and based on the middle-​class, educated family as a cherished repository of documents, as a site of pride and source of instruction, and as a privileged channel of values from generation to generation. The impulse could be and was shared among members of the family firm: ministers commemorated their predecessors in the manse or vicarage, and as part of their rite de passage junior statesmen or military officers would write up their departed seniors. Domestic biography in this sense is ‘a family prerogative and involves a sympathetic 20 

See Vineta Colby and Robert A. Colby, The Equivocal Virtue: Mrs. Oliphant and the Victorian Literary Market Place (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1966), 77–​8; Elisabeth Jay, Mrs Oliphant: ‘A Fiction to Herself ’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 21  [Elma Story and Helen Constance Story], Memoir of Robert Herbert Story (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1909), 53. 22  Irving’s phase as a celebrity preacher brought him into contact with many prominent evangelicals such as Zachary Macaulay and William Wilberforce. He was, however, mistrustful of the politically reformist and organizational elements of the movement.

Life Writing and the Victorians    53 family readership’.23 The evangelical emphasis on spiritual experience and conversion, and on regular self-​examination and moral accountability, lent itself to intensive self-​ documentation and family archive. Tolley enumerates some of the genres generated by this impulse: memoirs, deathbed narratives, autobiographical reminiscences, travel journals, diaries, memoranda of conduct, collections of letters, notes on genealogies, to which one might add documents intended for public consumption such as speeches, sermons, pamphlets, and authorized biographies.24 Like other biographers of their generation, both Oliphant and Robert Herbert Story had access to considerable archives, spanning not only the spiritual progress of their subjects, but political movements and important waves of revivalism as well as crises in the history of the Church of Scotland.25 Oliphant’s biography quoted directly and generously from a huge range of sources, and included what was at the time regarded as a coup: a whole chapter devoted to Irving’s private letter-​journal addressed to his wife. In the course of their collaboration, the novice biographers shared friends and acquaintances, and in doing so unknowingly exchanged biographical projects. Story shared with Oliphant his friends the Tullochs, to whom she had recently been introduced by the Blackwoods in St Andrews. The Tullochs were to become, along with the Blackwoods and the Storys, Oliphant’s closest friends in Scotland, especially the theologian John Tulloch, principal of St Mary’s College (University of St Andrews) whose biography she would later write.26 Story also introduced her to the noted preacher Robert Lee, whose biography Story would write, complete with—​notwithstanding her impression of him as ‘a galvanic cast-​iron man, quite unworthy of a mile’s walk through the rain’ (174)—​a preface by Oliphant.27 When we add to this that Tulloch would later review Oliphant on Irving and Story on Story; that Story would review Oliphant on Irving, and later Oliphant on Tulloch, and that Oliphant would review Story on Story, the expansive sociability of these months in the west of Scotland begins to look like an inward-​looking micro-​industry for the production and consumption of ecclesiastical memoirs. The impression is misleading. ‘There never was such a hero’, Oliphant had boasted. One of the many legacies of the ‘Stracheyan turn’ away from nineteenth-​century modes of Life writing has been the repudiation of the narrowly defined, self-​congratulatory criteria of ‘eminence’ it supposedly endorsed and circulated. Juliette Atkinson has shown that Victorian categories of importance were surprisingly flexible and capacious: extending, 23 Tolley, Domestic Biography, 6.

24 Tolley, Domestic Biography, 56–​7. 25 

Story subtitled his Memoir of the Life of the Rev. Robert Story (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1862) ‘Including passages of Scottish Religious and Ecclesiastical History during the Second Quarter of the Present Century’. 26  Mrs Oliphant, A Memoir of the Life of John Tulloch (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1888). In a further turn of the biographical wheel, Tulloch’s son would later write an obituary of Oliphant. See W. W. Tulloch, ‘The Reader’, The Bookman, 12, no. 71 (August 1897), 113–​15. 27  See Mrs Oliphant, ‘Introduction’ to Robert Herbert Story, Life and Remains of Robert Lee, 2 vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1870), vol. i, pp. xi–​xxiv.

54    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture within limits, to working-​class as well as middle-​class achievement, celebrating quiet distinction as well as public acclaim, and accommodating heroic failure as well as success. For Atkinson, Oliphant’s Edward Irving occupies the heroic-​failure category, and certainly the tragic arc Oliphant plots for his career, with its rise to national celebrity and power, and its martyrdom to overwork, misjudgement, and disappointment, suggests this.28 The heroic is, of course, a social and spatial concept as well as a historical and narrative one. As Oliphant noted, Thomas Carlyle, foremost advocate of ‘heroes, hero-​worship and the heroic in history’, had regretted in his obituary the ‘Scottish uncelebrated Irving’, and she distinguished throughout the biography between the hysteria of his (mainly) metropolitan followers and the wistful sorrow of the ‘sober Scotch remnant’ (ii. 196) who could sympathize with him but not, in the end, agree with him.29 Recent work on Life writing, as well as identifying marginalized, colonized, and diasporic subjects and voices, has investigated Life texts—​including those of the ‘White, male, middle-​class’30—​through the lens of ‘critical geographies’, examining how ‘subjects are embedded in national imaginaries and in transnational and global circuits of exchange and identification’.31 In the case of Oliphant’s account of Edward Irving, we might situate both author and subject within the demographic drift from provincial Scotland to metropolitan England. Further, given Scotland’s education system, with its wider access at school and university level, we might see both as participating in a socially diverse Scottish intelligentsia as it asserts itself over the cultural life of the English capital.32 From the opening lines, in which she juxtaposes the 1792 of the ‘outcries and struggles’ of Revolutionary France with that of ‘the peaceful little Scotch town’ of Irving’s birth, Oliphant highlights locality, but also, to a surprising degree, relatedness. Oliphant proceeds to emphasize Irving’s ‘long-​established local kindred’ while acknowledging

28 Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered, 131–​9. Oliphant was herself quite prepared to ‘reverse

the laws of literary magnitude’, reviewing Smiles’s Life of a Scotch Naturalist—​a celebration of a working-​ class autodidact, and for Oliphant a ‘record of success in unsuccess’—​ahead of Frances Kingsley’s piously commemorative Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memorials of his Life. See ‘New Books: Biographies’, 183, 176. 29  The phrase is from Thomas Carlyle’s unsigned obituary ‘Death of the Rev. Edward Irving: II’, Fraser’s Magazine, 11, no. 61 (1835), 102. 30  The allusion here is to Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle-​Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity, 1992). 31  Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Intepreting Life Narratives, 2nd edn. (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 222. See also Frédéric Regard (ed.), Mapping the Self: Space, Identity, Discourse in British Auto/​Biography (Lyons: Université de Saint-​ Étienne, 2003); Iain McCalman, Jodi Parvey, and Misty Cook (eds), National Biographies and National Identity (Canberra: HRC, ANU, 1996). 32  Liam Upton points out that Irving’s Scottishness, and hence his version of nationalism, was partial and exclusive: rooted in Lowland folk culture; provincial-​cosmpolitan but at odds with the cerebral and secular elements of the Scottish Enlightenment; fiercely Protestant (and hence hospitable to Britishness), anti-​Jacobite, and, until the very end of his life, completely identified with the traditions and practices of the Church of Scotland. See ‘ “Our Mother and Our Country”: The Integration of Religious and National Identity in the Thought of Edward Irving (1792–​1834)’, in Robert Pope (ed.), Religion and National Identity: Wales and Scotland c. 1700–​2000 (Cardiff: University of Wales, 2001), 242–​67.

Life Writing and the Victorians    55 certain forefathers who were French Protestant refugees (i. 1). Nineteenth-​century biography’s characteristic stress on genealogy is often read as part of a master narrative of succession and entitlement; it is just as persuasively seen as a claim to rootedness and recognition in the face of the threat of dispersal and dispossession. But here even ‘long-​established local’ credentials are shown to be a function of geographical negotiation: the families on both sides claim no wealth except ‘a little patriarchal foundation of land and cattle, from which the eldest son might perhaps claim a territorial designation if his droves found prosperous market across the border’ (i. 1, 3).33 Writing in the wake of David Livingstone’s hugely popular Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857), Oliphant draws connections between Irving’s missionary revivalism and the more explicitly colonial endeavours of the Annan boys with whom he grew up: his brother John, a medical officer in the East India Company ‘struck down by jungle fever’ (i. 4); his neighbour Hugh Clapperton, ‘the African traveller’ whose ‘adventurous instinct’ Oliphant identifies as an influence on her subject. Of these three boys, ‘not one lived to be old; and their destinies are a singular proof of the wide diffusion of life and energy circling out from one of the more obscure spots in the country’ (i. 21–​2). She persistently identifies Irving’s missionary impulse with the constraints of Scottish provincial life and the lure of colonial endeavour: ‘The countryman of Mungo Park and schoolfellow of Hugh Clapperton’ who ‘loved his country with a kind of worship’ nevertheless longs to find ‘room for a missionary according to the apostolic model’ (i. 87). Harnessing the countervailing discursive energies of mission and of home, Oliphant, in a striking reversal, represents the metropolis as Irving’s version of the colonial encounter, his personal ‘contact zone’.34 In one of the biography’s most vivid passages, she evokes an image of the notoriously tall and imposing Irving relaxing in a Bloomsbury square: There are various doubtful traditions in existence which describe how he used to be seen lying upon the sooty London grass of the little oasis in Burton Crescent, his great figure extended upon the equivocal green sward, and all the children in those tiny gardens playing about and around him, which was most like to be the case, though I will not answer for the tale. This entire district, however, most undistinguished and prosaic as it is, gathers an interest in its homely names, from his visible appearance amid its noise and tumult. His remarkable figure was known in those dingy, scorched streets, in those dread parallelograms of Bloomsbury respectability. The greater number of his friends were collected within that closely populated region, to which the new Church in Regent Square now gave a centre, as it still gives

33 

Many examples could be given of the ways genealogy signified to readers of Victorian Lives. On the way, for instance, Jane Welsh Carlyle’s teasing assumption of a ‘gypsy’ ancestry was taken up and circulated within biographies, and indeed enlisted by a late-​Victorian pro-​gypsy advocate James Simson in The Gipsies, as illustrated by John Bunyan, Mrs. Carlyle, and others. And do snakes swallow their young? (New York and Edinburgh: Miller, MacLachlan and Stewart, 1883), see Aileen Christianson, Jane Welsh Carlyle, Biography and Biographers (Edinburgh: The Carlyle Society, 2008), 14–​16. 34  Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 4.

56    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture a centre to a little Scotch world, half unaware, half disapproving, of Irving, who tread the same streets, and pray within the same walls, and are as separate and national as he. (ii. 74–​5)

Though it draws as generously on the tonalities, rhythms, and descriptive skills of the novelist as on the repertoire of the biographer, the passage illustrates the way Life writing, here freely hybridizing travel narrative, missionary memoir, and local antiquarianism, could work and rework the grounds of identity, the conventions of recognition of self and other. The scene derives its piquancy from unexpected juxtapositions and oxymorons, from sudden shifts in tense and focalization, and from snags in the reader’s sense of who knows what. The familiar ‘green sward’—​with its echo of Cockney romanticism—​can be ‘sooty’ and ‘equivocal’; ‘respectability’ can be ‘dread’; a ‘homely’ locality can borrow the glamour of an ‘oasis’ from Irving’s presence. For all its emphatic topographic knowingness, the sketch invites the reader to consider what, in this time of migration, urbanization, and colonization, when folk memories and local gossip contend with other less ‘doubtful’ ways of knowing, constitutes a ‘centre’, a ‘world’, a ‘home’? The biography can be read as an extended meditation on what it means to be ‘separate and national’. It has been argued that religious memoirs—​‘personal, immediate, and unworldly’—​were the antithesis of national biography.35 For Oliphant, they were a site for mapping identities, a way of imagining community. When her work on it was completed, the confidence her biography had lent her emboldened Oliphant to angle for a favour she had never hitherto received from John Blackwood, her Edinburgh publisher. Would he, she wondered aloud to his sister Isabella, grant ‘that friendly office which he has done to almost all his contributors except myself, I mean get me a review?’ (185). He would and did, as did too the editors of most of the major, and some of the minor, periodicals of the day. As a signed work of non-​fiction in receipt of national press coverage, The Life of Edward Irving brought to Oliphant welcome publicity, sales, and serious consideration as an author. Meanwhile she lobbied hard on Story’s behalf with publishers. First she besieged John Blackwood (‘now pray be merciful. Once upon a time we too were young [ … ] I will be your devout bedeswoman—​can you resist such a feminine appeal?’ (174–​5)) and when that failed took Story to see her established London publisher Blackett and her new one Macmillan. Macmillan agreed to take on Story’s book.36 When his Life of his father came out, Story was swept up by the Oliphant publicity machine. The coincidence of their publication date and overlapping subject matter allowed for joint reviews, and Story thus benefited from respectful notice in prestigious journals otherwise inaccessible to a first-​time author. John Tulloch did the honours in the Edinburgh Review, reading his friends’ books together, though Edward Irving earned

35 

Colin Matthew, ‘Dictionaries of National Biography’, in McCalman et al. (eds), National Biographies and National Identity, 2. 36  The Blackett contact would prove useful the following year when Story needed a publisher for Poems by a Parson (1863) and again in 1870 when his Life and Remains of Robert Lee was completed.

Life Writing and the Victorians    57 thirty-​four pages to Robert Story’s one.37 With the bit between her teeth, Oliphant suggested Story as a possible reviewer of her book for the newly launched Macmillan’s Magazine. The suggestion was taken up, and Story’s review appeared in May 1862 (‘My first article in a leading magazine’, he crowed).38 She volunteered herself to the same organ as reviewer of Story’s memoir of his father, and, her offer declined and the promised review by another hand failing to materialize, smuggled a latish plug for her friend’s book into Macmillan’s under the title ‘Clerical Life in Scotland’. As George J. Worth has recounted, for Oliphant this essay, combined with Macmillan’s own favourable opinion of her Irving, marked the start of an almost forty-​year career as Macmillan’s contributor.39 Where Story discreetly signed himself ‘R.S.’, Oliphant insisted that, contrary to Macmillan’s usual practice, her article show ‘no name please—​not even initials’, presumably to counter any public suspicion of a ‘mutual admiration-​and-​aid society’.40 Their plugs for each other’s biographies in Macmillan’s are revealing. Story’s review of Oliphant’s Irving was admiring. In it, Story confesses to ‘a certain misgiving’ that Irving’s biographer was to be the ‘distinguished novelist’, doubting whether ‘feminine genius, however versatile and keen’ could master the necessary theological debates. Oliphant’s attempt may not be ‘methodical and exhaustive’—​that would have been ‘little short of a miracle’, but it is nonetheless ‘admirable: here and there a little too detailed and lovingly minute, as was natural in a female biographer; but, on the whole, presenting a most living, consistent, vivid picture of Irving’. But the lack of ‘method’ is ‘inevitable, probably, in a feminine biographer, who must needs digress from the most abstract heights to chronicle the birth of a baby, or the minutiae of a summer excursion’.41 Oliphant, a writer of far greater scope and experience, couched her praise for the ‘skill and grace’ of Story’s execution within a wide-​ranging essay outlining the distinctive features of the Church of Scotland, ‘Clerical Life in Scotland’. While she did not qualify her praise for Story, she did, in a passage about another Scottish ecclesiastical memoir, quietly defend an approach that was not all ‘heights’. Commenting on A. H. Charteris’s Life of the Rev. James Robertson (1863), she complained of the ‘whirl of public occupation, dispersing with its stony glare all the softer lights and shadows of human character’. ‘Mr Charteris describes the subject of his memoir as possessing warm affections and a genial nature; the evidences of them are swallowed up in the records of work which it requires a deeper knowledge of the recent proceedings of the Church of Scotland than we possess to decipher clearly.’42 Their differing approaches are clearly gendered, with Story seeing domestic affection as a feminine supplement to the main narrative, and Oliphant regarding it as both a key index of personality and a context necessary to the legibility of ‘public occupation’. The second point is crucial in differentiating their approaches: for 37  [John Tulloch], review of ‘The Life of Edward Irving’, Edinburgh Review, 116, no. 236 (October. 1862), 426–​60. 38  [Elma Story and Helen Constance Story], Memoir of Robert Herbert Story, 53. 39  George J. Worth, Macmillan’s Magazine, 1859–​1907: ‘No Flippancy or Abuse Allowed’ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 101, 98–​146. 40 Worth, Macmillan’s Magazine, 1859–​1907, 101. 41  R.S., ‘Edward Irving’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 6, no. 31 (May 1862), 72, 76. 42  [Margaret Oliphant], ‘Clerical Life in Scotland’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 8, no. 45 (July 1863), 219.

58    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Oliphant the point of biography is not to conciliate an existing audience but to make a new one: to prove that ‘Clerical Life in Scotland’ might be appealing outside the manse and the General Assembly, and might contribute to the self-​understanding of differently ‘national’ constituencies. This episode of coy flirtation by critical applause throws dappled light on the sexual politics of mid-​century journalism. For my purposes here, however, it is mainly interesting for what it suggests about the proliferating and overlapping subgenres of, and audiences for, biography, and for the way Life writing could fit into divergent writing lives. While Story, with his university education and the comfortable manse conferred on him by his father’s patron the Duke of Argyll, was of the two the more securely ensconced in the middle class, it was Mrs Oliphant who was the senior partner where authorship was concerned. It was Oliphant who took Story to tea with his hero Thomas Carlyle in Cheyne Row.43 And it was Oliphant who badgered her editor friends to give Story commissions: ‘I wish you would shake that young man up and make him do magazine work. If you would only get him into harness, I am sure he would prove a valuable addition to your team.’44 Meanwhile she was maximizing the return on her investment in Irving. Just as she had ploughed ideas and research from her earlier Blackwood’s essays—​on ‘Religious Memoirs’ (June 1858), on ‘Edward Irving’ (November 1858), and on ‘Sermons’ (December 1858) into her biographical work, so she recycled her thinking on biography and clerical life in essays on Dean Ramsay of Edinburgh (‘Scottish National Character’, June 1860) and on Irving’s friend, the missionary Joseph Wolff (August 1861). Even the two sightseeing trips she took with Story during their collaboration were fictionalized for Blackwood’s as ‘Three Days in the Highlands’ (August 1861) and ‘Among the Lochs’ (October 1861).45 By 1869, Oliphant’s research on the Gareloch revival—​directly borne out of their joint investigations into Irving and Story senior—​had been reconfigured as the fictional three-​decker The Minister’s Wife. By contrast, for all Oliphant’s efforts to launch him on the literary scene, Story’s career in authorship remained narrowly focused. While both were of course ambitious to reach an audience beyond their literal family, I suspect they parted company over the extent to which Life writing should in some sense remain ‘in house’, the memorialization of the ‘family firm’, the continuation of a family tradition, and the perpetuation of a stable set of ‘family values’. Apart from his parsonic poems, and a pamphlet on ‘Health Haunts of the Riviera’ (1881), Story never stretched himself as an author beyond sermons, Scottish ecclesiastical biography, and history, nor left behind what Tolley calls the ‘corporate ethos’ of domestic biography.46 Robert Herbert Story is visible to us now within a distinct genealogy of domestic biography: his father had been the biographer of his saintly 43 

[Elma Story and Helen Constance Story], Memoir of Robert Herbert Story, 54; see also Worth, Macmillan’s Magazine, 1859–​1907, 101. 44  Undated letter, probably 1862, quoted in Colby and Colby, The Equivocal Virtue, 79. 45  See [Elma Story and Helen Constance Story], Memoir of Robert Herbert Story, 46. 46 Tolley, Domestic Biography, 2.

Life Writing and the Victorians    59 parishioner Isabella Campbell in 1829, his daughters would in turn memorialize him in 1909. Meanwhile he kept authorship in the family by marrying novelist Janet Leith Maughan in 1863. In an undated letter to Story during the process of writing the biography, Oliphant had written, I am ashamed to think how often I have made you go over the same ground with my reiterated applications for help, but the sublimity of the moral spectacle afforded by two rival authors thus fraternally consulting, and on one side helping each other, will, I hope, afford consolation to your feelings, as, when our lives are written, I have no doubt it will edify the world.47

This view of himself as Oliphant’s ‘rival’ was no doubt flattering to Story. It is arguable whether Story’s theological and ecclesiological pointers were as indispensable to her venture as Oliphant’s contacts, business savoir faire, and knowledge of the market were to his. But the very fact of the trade-​off was itself exciting. Meeting as the representatives of Edward Irving and Robert Story senior, they could explore ways of working and of interacting that would otherwise be inaccessible to a middle-​aged widow and a young minister. Whether they construed their collaboration as a meeting of minds, a mutual education, or in Oliphant’s deliberately teasing version of the fantasy, a temporary suspension of professional competition, it offered unforeseen possibilities of heterosociality. But for the transaction to work as a friendly quid pro quo, Oliphant had to play down what must have been obvious to both: the divergence in their conceptions of both biography and the role of biographer. The process had given Oliphant a glimpse of a quaint world in which exemplarities (‘moral spectacles’) were manufactured and managed by loyal, local authors primarily for loyal, local customers; where an amateur biographer, buoyed by a steady income, the prospect of promotion, and the probability of a cosy desk in university administration, could afford to inhabit an authorial niche, and to have more regard for a modest reputation conserved between generations than for sales. It must have seemed an all-​too-​cosy alternative to the realpolitik of the biographical marketplace as she had understood it. Her own vision and practice was, as we have seen, very different. For Oliphant, while it might be pleasant to satisfy Irving’s friends and family, this would not satisfy her. She aimed to persuade readers not just of the heroism of Irving as an individual, but of the significance of Scottish history, and of distinctively Scottish systems of class mobility, education, and religious organization for a broader debate about national identity. As the century progressed, Life writing, especially biography, did not just map the possibilities of national belonging and exclusion, it also participated, through such large-​scale projects as the English Men of Letters series and the Dictionary of National Biography, in the formation of an uneven and contested but recognizably ‘national’ official culture. Throughout her career, Oliphant would find in Life writing a way of interrogating the 47 

[Elma Story and Helen Constance Story], Memoir of Robert Herbert Story, 53.

60    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture assumed ‘Englishness’ of that culture: her final biography would be the story of Irving’s Glasgow mentor Thomas Chalmers: Preacher, Philosopher, and Statesman (1893), published, significantly, for Methuen’s English Leaders of Religion series. By the time she had finished with it, the Irving story was in circulation everywhere from the heavyweight reviews Edinburgh and Blackwood’s to the popular rag Leisure Hours, and would receive the double-​edged accolade of a sceptical response in Thomas Carlyle’s Reminiscences.48 Procrustean and commodious, a cultural field rather than strictly a genre, biography proved in her hands continuous with essay-​writing, fiction, and cultural commentary. It would also, ultimately, prove generative in her own reminiscences. Looking back in 1894, after the death of her last surviving child Cecco, she would describe ‘the future biographer of Irving’ as a disconcertingly ‘young person, rather apt to be led astray and laugh with the young people’: How strange it is to me to write all this, with the effort of making light reading of it, and putting in anecdotes that will do to quote in the papers and make the book sell! It is a sober narrative enough, heaven knows! and when I wrote it for my Cecco to read it was all very different, and now that I am doing it consciously for the public, with the aim (no evil aim) of leaving a little more money, I feel all this to be so vulgar, so common, so unnecessary, as if I were making pennyworths of myself. Well! What does it matter? (75)

If she had ever aspired to be the subject of full-​scale, reverential domestic biography, that was now no longer a possibility, though the ‘Autobiography’ cobbled together by her second cousin, the Canadian novelist Annie Walker Coghill, from her manuscript reminiscences, bulked out to a single volume with some letters, is one of the jewels of nineteenth-​century Life writing.49 The Edward Irving episode suggests that this tradition was never really in her sights. On 11 October 1861, as the project drew to a close, she had written to Isabella Blackwood, ‘I like biography. I have a great mind to set up that as my future trade and tout for orders. Do you know anybody that wants his or her life taken? Don’t fail to recommend me if you do’ (176). Looking ahead with characteristic 48 

See for example ‘The Life of Edward Irving’, Athenaeum (19 April 1862), 525–​6; ‘ “Life of Edward Irving” by Mrs. Oliphant’, Christian Remembrancer, 44, no. 118 (1862), 291–​332; [J. Tulloch], ‘Mrs. Oliphant’s Life of Edward Irving’, Edinburgh Review, 116, no. 236 (1862), 426–​60; [C. K. Paul], ‘Edward Irving’, Fraser’s Magazine, 67, no. 397 (1863), 62–​73; [W. L. Collins], ‘The Life of Edward Irving’, Blackwood’s, 91, no. 560 (1862), 737–​57. ‘Edward Irving’, Leisure Hour, 566 (1862), 696–​700; ‘Edward Irving. II.’, Leisure Hour, 567 (1862), 714–​17. James Anthony Froude (ed.), Reminiscences by Thomas Carlyle, 2 vols. (London: Longmans Green, 1881), i. 69–​338. 49  See Linda H. Peterson, ‘Audience and the Autobiographer’s Art: An Approach to the Autobiography of Mrs. M. O. W. Oliphant’, in George P. Landow (ed.), Approaches to Victorian Autobiography (Athens, O.: University of Ohio Press, 1979), 158–​74; Gail Twersky Reimer, ‘Revisions of Labor in Margaret Oliphant’s Autobiography’, in Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck (eds), Life/​ Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 203–​20; Elisabeth Jay, ‘Freed by Necessity, Trapped by the Market: The Editing of Oliphant’s Autobiography’, in D. J. Trela (ed.), Margaret Oliphant: Critical Essays on a Gentle Subversive (Selingrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1995), 143–​4.

Life Writing and the Victorians    61 elasticity, she could envisage Life writing on a par with the newly emergent business of commercial photography: one might briskly ‘take’ a life as one might ‘take’ a portrait. She could foresee, with a twinkle in her eye, that the relationship between subject and biographer might be shaped by mutual interests, by an expansive sense of what ‘national’ biography might encompass, and by a free market in reputations. She could imagine biography as something riskier, and more exciting, than the pious record of departed worth.

Acknowledgements The author would like to thank the participants of the conference celebrating the work of Joanne Shattock, 26 November 2011, for their thoughts on this work, as well as Joanne herself and Lis Jay, peerless Oliphant editors.

Select Bibliography Altick, Richard D., Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1965). Amigoni, David (ed.), Life Writing and Victorian Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). Atkinson, Juliette, Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth-​Century ‘Hidden’ Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Booth, Alison, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Broughton, Trev Lynn, Men of Letters, Writing Lives (London: Routledge, 1998). Danahay, Martin A., A Community of One:  Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth-​Century Britain (New York: SUNY Press, 1993). Gagnier, Regenia, Subjectivities:  A  History of Self-​ Representation in Britain, 1832–​ 1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Marcus, Laura, Auto/​ Biographical Discourses:  Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). Peterson, Linda H., Traditions of Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999). Tolley, Christopher, Domestic Biography:  The Legacy of Evangelicalism in Four Nineteenth-​ Century Families (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

Political Cultures and Classes

Chapter 3

P olitics and th e L i t e ra ry Josephine M. Guy

Separate Spheres ‘Nothing can be more unlike in aim, in ideals, in method, and in matter, than are literature and politics.’ So claimed the journalist, biographer, and (from 1883 to 1908) Liberal MP, John Morley, during an address delivered at the Mansion House on 26 February 1887 to the London Society for the Extension of University Teaching.1 Morley went on to cite a number of cases which might have seemed, like his own, to contradict this assertion: men like William Ewart Gladstone and Arthur Balfour—​someone of a different political persuasion would likely have included Benjamin Disraeli—​who, Morley suggested, were just as capable of ‘earning their bread as men of letters’ as they were as politicians. Nonetheless the idea that literature and politics were discrete spheres of intellectual activity, requiring different skills and embodying different values, would have resonated with many of Morley’s contemporaries, not least because for much of the Victorian period the dominant way of thinking about the literary, and about artistic culture in general, was in terms of its opposition to the localism, sectarianism, and corruption commonly held to characterize contemporary political life. In that same address Morley wearily described politics as a ‘field where action is one long second-​best, and where the choice constantly lies between two blunders’ (190), an attitude perhaps unsurprising given that Gladstone’s second Liberal government had recently been supplanted by a Conservative-​Liberal-​Unionist coalition led by Lord Salisbury. In Henry James’s The Tragic Muse (1890), Nick Dormer sees matters in much the same way: fulfilling his ambitions to be a painter, an element of the ‘dreaminess’ that defines his character, requires that he ‘throw up’ his newly won seat in the Commons, thereby

1  The quote occurs near the beginning of the address which was reprinted in John Morley, Studies in Literature (London and New York: Macmillan, 1891), 189–​228. Subsequent references appear in the text in parentheses.

66    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture relinquishing any aspiration for a political career.2 That a choice between art and politics is one that has to be made is accepted by his family—​his mother Lady Agnes exhorts him not to ‘mix up things that are as wide asunder as poles’ (170)—​even though (and with the exception of his sister Biddy) it perplexes and disappoints them that Nick opts for what in their eyes is the manifestly inferior occupation. These values are apparently shared by Nick’s fiancée Julia Dallow, whose lack of interest in all things cultural, in what she terms ‘caring so much for the fine arts’ (191), is of a piece with her fascination with political life and her determination, through Nick, to exercise political influence (the only way in which she can, as a woman, be part of the political process). In an early encounter Nick half-​humorously accuses her, ‘you’re so political’, going on to observe: ‘but you haven’t an idea, you know—​to call an idea. What you mainly want is to be at the head of a political salon; to start one, to keep it up, to make it a success’ (76–​7). For Nick, politics is power, nothing more; by implication, intellectual activity—​‘ideas’—​is confined to the sphere of art, an opposition apparently endorsed by Julia’s later confession: ‘I hate art, as you call it. I thought I did, I knew I did.’ It is this hatred, as much as the sexual jealousy provoked by her surprise encounter with Nick and his ‘lolling’ model, the actress Miriam Rooth, which leads Julia to break off their engagement. She is, as Nick puts it, ‘the incarnation of politics’, and the tragedy of her life, he realizes, is that her hoped-​for second husband has turned out to be a mirror image of her first, the latter having been a man whose ‘flat, inglorious taste for pretty things [and] indifference to every chance to play a public part’ had been the ‘mortification of her youth’ (297–​8). Nick also describes Julia in these terms—​as ‘a very political woman’—​to Mr Carteret who had ‘sat for fifty years in the House of Commons’ and, as the childless friend of Nick’s late father, is Nick’s putative benefactor, or ‘providence’ (61) as Nick phrases it, using his wealth to live through Nick in a manner not dissimilar to that of Julia. When Nick reports that Julia’s diplomat brother Peter Sherringham, who is then working ‘as a secretary in Paris’, happens to take ‘a great interest in the theatre’, Carteret is described as ‘looking as if he scarcely understood’ (204); the aesthetic sensibilities of this man of politics turn out to be just as blunted as those of Nick’s ‘political woman’. However, in the novel’s denouement we discover that Sherringham, despite that enthusiasm for the theatre, also senses the need to make choices, demanding of Miriam, with whom he is infatuated, that she can be the wife of a diplomat or pursue a career on the stage, but not both. His entreaty to her is an ironic reiteration of the opposing value-​systems that earlier separated Julia and Nick: ‘Give it up—​give it up’, he stammers: ‘I’ll marry you tomorrow if you’ll renounce [… .] The things of my profession—​of my life—​the things one does for one’s country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one’s immersed in them, and more exciting than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you’ll see what they are, they’ll take 2  Henry James, The Tragic Muse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 9. Subsequent references are to this edition and appear in the text in parentheses. James made numerous small-​scale stylistic revisions to The Tragic Muse when it was republished in the 1908 New York ‘Definitive Edition’; the text of the Penguin edition, which was first brought out by Rupert Hart-​Davis in 1948, is preferred here on historical grounds, because it reprints the 1890 first edition.

Politics and the Literary    67 hold of you [… .] The stage is great, no doubt, but the world is greater [… .] We’ll go in for realities instead of fables, and you’ll do them far better than you do the fables.’ (463–​6)

But Miriam refuses to ‘see’; or rather, she perceives more clearly than Sherringham the sexual double standards underlying the sacrifice he requires of her, and so rejects his proposal, preferring her art over his politics. In that choice it might seem that The Tragic Muse largely endorses Morley’s suggestion of a fundamental incompatibility between literature and art on the one hand, and politics on the other, while at the same time suggesting that it is the former sphere of activity which has the higher value because it offers rewards more enduring than the ‘second-​best’ of politics. However, in dismissing Sherringham, Miriam betrays a ruthless self-​knowledge which aligns her more closely with Julia’s ambitions than with those of Nick, and it is these traits which are a key element of the sexual attraction of both women to their conspicuously vacillating and partly self-​deceived men. As Nick acknowledges when Julia rejects him: The fact that she could drop him even while she longed for him—​drop him because it was now fixed in her mind that he would not after all serve her determination to be associated, so far as a woman could, with great affairs; that she could postpone, and postpone to an uncertainty, the satisfaction of a gnawing tenderness and judge for the long run—​this exhibition of will and courage, of the large plan that possessed her, commanded his admiration on the spot. (297)

Each woman may operate, or hope to operate, in opposing arenas, but in both of their chosen domains—​whether politics or the theatre—​success seems to depend on the selfsame qualities: a determination that can seem callous, a facility for promotion (whether of oneself in Miriam’s case, or of another in Julia’s), and, of course, money. In the late nineteenth century art as much as politics needs what Nick vulgarly terms ‘cash’: no poète maudit, his South Kensington studio, ‘incongruous as such a retreat might seem in the case of a member of Parliament’ (61), is paid for by other people’s money (that of Carteret and later of Julia), and his commissions for portraits come about through political contacts: he paints the ‘wives and daughters’ of his constituents and, in a decisive act of patronage, eventually Julia herself. By the same token, Miriam’s magnetic performances, her ‘triumphs’, seem to be due as much to clever marketing as to innate acting flair or learned craftsmanship—​to, that is, the good offices of the ‘indispensable’ and ‘practical’ actor Basil Dashwood, whose familiarity with the ‘actual theatre’, with ‘receipts and salaries and expenses and newspaper articles’, leads Sherringham to muse on how matters that were of ‘superficial concern’ to him could, for Miriam, be ‘the natural air of her life and the essence of her profession’ (326–​7). That Miriam ends up marrying Dashwood rather than Sherringham further reinforces Dashwood’s claim, underwritten by his ‘talk of the shop’ and ‘expansiveness of the commercial spirit’, to know more about Miriam than anyone else, ‘as if he [rather than Sherringham] had invented or discovered her, were in a sense her proprietor or guarantor’ (329). Ultimately, then, The Tragic Muse suggests that the spheres of art and politics, far from being completely ‘unlike in aim, in ideals, in method, and in matter’, may in practice be

68    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture discomfortingly close, certainly when they are considered in the light of an emergent professionalism, a phenomenon that had come about through a fundamental transformation over the course of the Victorian period in the conditions of literary, artistic, and theatrical production. At the heart of that transformation was a new accommodation between art and the market, one which brought with it precisely the kind of contingency that defined—​and in the view of many, marred—​political life. In the opening of the novel the mercurial aesthete Gabriel Nash alludes to these changed conditions when asked whether he still ‘writes’: ‘I haven’t the least desire for that [… .] Literature, you see, is for the convenience of others. It requires the most abject concessions. It plays such mischief with one’s style that really I have to give it up.’ When the conversation turns to a career in politics Nick, anticipating Nash’s response, suggests: ‘That, no doubt you’ll say, is still far more for the convenience of others—​is still worse for one’s style.’ Nash’s personal solution to this conundrum is that ‘merely to be is such a métier’; he proudly claims to have ‘no profession […] no état civil’ (27–​8). But this is not a position endorsed by the narrative voice. Nash is, after all, something of a parody or exaggeration of the aesthete, his ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’ just another form of the parasitic, proxy-​ influence practised by Julia or Carteret.3 Indeed at the novel’s close Nash appears as a rather pathetic figure; in a delicately ironic passage the reader is invited (through Nick’s musings) to see that Nash’s other-​worldliness, which was an essential part of his attraction as Nick’s ‘private philosopher’, is in practice indistinguishable from failure: Nick, at any rate, never discovered [Nash’s] academy [… .] There were moments when he was moved to a degree of pity by the silence that poor Gabriel’s own faculty of sound made around him—​when at least it qualified with thinness the mystery he could never wholly dissociate from him, the sense of the transient and occasional, the likeness to vapour or murmuring wind or shifting light. It was for instance a symbol of this unclassified condition, the lack of all position as a name in well-​kept books, that Nick in point of fact had no idea where he lived, would not have known how to go and see him or send him a doctor if he had heard he was ill. (505)

By the close of the nineteenth century, and despite legislation such as the 1854 Corrupt Practices Act and successive extensions to the franchise, anxieties about the debasement both of politics and of literary and artistic culture by the ‘commercial spirit’ associated with professionalism were rife. In this respect it is significant that the elliptical, indirect method of narration in The Tragic Muse never fully divulges to the reader the nature of either Nick’s or Miriam’s talent; their achievements are mediated through the eyes of characters whose critical credentials are consistently called into doubt. As a result we have no firm idea whether their artistry is indeed any ‘greater’ than the ‘great affairs’ of politics that Sherringham and Julia aspire to (‘greatness’, like ‘sacrifice’, is a loaded term in this novel, one which has no secure referent). By leaving unresolved the 3 

Modern readers are often tempted into viewing Nash as a parody of Oscar Wilde, an identification which has, however, been contested; see e.g. D. J. Gordon and John Stokes, ‘The Reference of The Tragic Muse’, in John Goode (ed.), The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James (London: Methuen, 1972), 81–​167.

Politics and the Literary    69 question of what happens to the integrity of art or literature when they become, like politics, a form of paid work, The Tragic Muse questions Morley’s assumed separation of the literary from the political while simultaneously showing why that opposition may never have seemed more desirable, certainly for artists and writers. In this way, James is able, in a sense, to have his cake and eat it: to show how art (like politics) may be corrupted and artistic (like political) ambition self-​deluded, but without completely foreclosing the possibility of an aesthetic that can transcend the limitations of political expediency.

The Political Functions of the Literary Modern critics, too, have been sceptical about Morley’s opposition between the literary and the political. Most obviously, and as explained later, this scepticism derives from the strong evidence throughout the Victorian period of persistent and sometimes draconian attempts, both official (though legislation) and unofficial (through those commercial pressures that worried James), to police literary culture, activities which only make sense in a climate in which literary works were recognized to have significant social consequences, and where reading was never thought of simply as a private activity, nor just as a means of entertainment.4 Seen in this context, the assumption that the domain of the literary is above or beyond the domain of the political looks naïve at best; at worst, it seems itself to be suspiciously political in that it conveniently disguises the ways in which literariness—​or more accurately, the distinguishing of certain kinds of works as possessing a literary identity—​may be deeply ideological insofar as such labelling serves the needs of particular interest groups by normalizing the values which those works embody. Denying the label literature to some kinds of writing could, after all, be a useful way of marginalizing them. Second, there are many Victorian literary works, particularly those of prose fiction, which take as their subject matter explicitly political themes and which often have an overt campaigning element to them. Well-​known examples include the critique of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act and the degrading conditions of the workhouses in Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–​9) and Frances Trollope’s Jessie Philips (1842–​3), Elizabeth Gaskell’s portrayal of poverty and the violent class conflict associated with Chartist agitation in Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1854–​5), Charles Kingsley’s exposure of exploitative employment practices in the clothing or ‘sweating’ trades in Alton Locke

4  Nineteenth-​century reading practices have been the subject of a number of studies; see in particular Kate Flint, The Woman Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, 1995); Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literary in Nineteenth-​Century British Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); and Mary Hammond, Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England: 1880–​1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).

70    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture (1850), a theme later taken up by Margaret Harkness writing under the pen name of John Law in A City Girl (1887), and Charles Reade’s vivid descriptions of the conditions in contemporary mental asylums in Hard Cash (1863) and A Terrible Temptation (1871), topics which had earlier been important in the subplots of the now forgotten, but at the time immensely popular, Peter Simple (1832–​3) by Frederick Marryat and Valentine Vox, the Ventriloquist (1840) by Henry Cockton. In other works of Victorian fiction, such as Anthony Trollope’s The Three Clerks (1857), George Eliot’s Felix Holt (1866–​7), and George Meredith’s Beauchamp’s Career (1875) (a novel which was first serialized in the Fortnightly Review under Morley’s editorship),5 it is the limitations of the political process, whether they are to do with reforms to the civil service and the electoral system, or the lifestyle of a politician, which are of interest. Then there are also numerous but less direct examples of political engagement, such as the way in which the portrayal of the schoolteacher Bradley Headstone in Our Mutual Friend (1864–​5) has been held to comment on the educational policies of Sir James Kay-​Shuttleworth and the 1862 Revised Code, or the means by which sensation fiction in general, and novels like Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1862–​ 3) in particular, provided a forum in which allegedly ‘unspeakable’ topics like domestic violence could be addressed to the extent, it has been argued, of influencing contemporary legislation.6 Finally, there are instances where literary devices, especially those associated with Victorian melodrama, were used in explicitly political discourses, such as the radical writings of the anti-​Poor Law movement.7 How are these uses of literature and of literary tropes as vehicles to address, or to intervene directly into, topical political debates to be reconciled with Morley’s sense of an inherent opposition between the ‘aim’ and ‘ideals’ of the literary and the political? In the view of many Victorian writers, including Dickens, Gaskell, Kingsley, and Eliot, it was precisely the assumption that the literary was a privileged discourse—​one able, as Morley optimistically put it, to ‘awake the diviner mind’ (202)—​that made literary art an ideal medium to engage with political issues. In this definition, literature appeared to possess the potential to overcome the partisan character of contemporary political debate while at the same time exposing what was popularly viewed as the gross malfunction of contemporary political and legal institutions. It is worth reiterating that even the sceptical James does not entirely abandon this idea, although he identifies this property 5  As well as being influenced by Morley’s writings on the ‘new radicalism’ in the Fortnightly Review, Meredith’s portrayal of Nevil Beauchamp’s political ambitions drew on the experiences of Frederick Maxse; a member, through his maternal lineage, of the Berkeley family, Maxse controversially (and unsuccessfully) stood for the Radical interest at Southampton in the general election of 1868. 6  See e.g. accounts of these novels in, respectively, Lauren Goodlad, Victorian Fiction and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), and Marlene Tromp, The Private Rod: Marital Violence, Sensation, and the Law in Victorian Britain (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000). 7  An identification persuasively argued for by Sally Ledger, ‘Radical Writing’, in Joanne Shattock (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1830–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 127–​46; see also Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–​1885 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995).

Politics and the Literary    71 of the literary with different formal features from those found in the realist novel, and suggests that the ‘truth’ which literature can disclose is provisional and relative rather than quasi-​divine. As he explains in his essay ‘The Future of the Novel’ (1899), the ‘strength’ and ‘life’ of the ‘prose picture’ is that it can ‘do simply everything’, its ‘plasticity, its elasticity are infinite’. James goes on: ‘[i]‌t has the extraordinary advantage—​a piece of luck scarcely credible—​that, while capable of giving an impression of the highest perfection and the rarest finish, it moves in a luxurious independence of rules and restrictions’, and in that independence it is of course quite unlike politics.8 In other words, a basic assumption concerning the autonomy of the literary, understood as a category of writing, could encompass widely divergent views about what constitutes literary form or style (including whether one should be prescriptive about such matters), as well as differing views about the nature of the experience or knowledge which engagement with the literary was held to vouchsafe—​a point to which I will return. In the early and mid-​decades of the nineteenth century this special quality predicated of the literary was particularly valued in works directed towards those groups in the population, including women, the working classes, and ethnic and religious minorities, whose voices were largely excluded from the political process. It is exactly this view of the literary which appears to underlie the emergence of nineteenth-​century subgenres like religious ‘conversion’ literature and the ‘industrial’ or ‘social-​problem’ novel. In this last example, fiction was held to provide an alternative, and in some ways superior, forum in which to examine anxieties about contemporary class conflict and the mysterious workings of the market—​those social problems which contemporary politicians were conspicuously failing to resolve. As Gaskell explained in her ‘Preface’ to Mary Barton, when deciding to write a ‘work of fiction’, her ‘first thought was to find a framework […] in some rural scene’; but as she reflected on the ‘unhappy state of things’, a new subject urgently pressed upon her: that of giving utterance ‘to the agony of suffering’ with a view to speeding up ‘public effort […] in the way of legislation’.9 Although some contemporary reviewers were ambivalent about the consequences of what the Athenaeum termed Gaskell’s attempt to ‘make Fiction the vehicle for a plain and matter-​of-​fact exposition of social evils’, most recognized the potential of this use of the literary—​Gaskell’s desire, that is, to address political topics but without writing what a notice in the Examiner termed a ‘political novel’.10 In reference to ‘the modes of thought and the conflict of tendencies generated’ by ‘our Northern seats of manufacturing industry’, an unsigned piece in the Prospective Review stated that a ‘phenomenon so vast and startling—​so ominous of good or of ill to future generations—​demands a literature, at once for its interpretation and guidance’.11

8  Henry James, ‘The Future of the Novel’, in James, The House of Fiction, ed. Leon Edel (London: Rupert Hart-​Davis, 1957), 53. 9  Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, ed. Thomas Recchio (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co.), 5. 10  These reviews are reproduced in Gaskell, Mary Barton, 365–​8. 11  Also reproduced in Gaskell, Mary Barton, 374.

72    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture This distinction between a ‘political novel’, and a novel which uses literary devices to provide an alternative engagement with political topics, takes for granted precisely that ontological distinction between the literary and the political assumed by Morley: it was what Morley referred to as its ‘non-​practical’ qualities, or what the Prospective Review described as ‘the license conceded to art for the sake of making a deeper impression on the imagination’, which made the literary, for many Victorians, a uniquely useful medium for engaging in political debate. Moreover, this quality of the literary was never more important than when literature was being used for what modern commentators see as explicitly party-​political ends. In the case of traditions of Chartist poetry and later of socialist utopian fiction the imaginative resources of literature were an essential vehicle for persuading readers of the possibility of achieving social change. This was particularly so for a figure like William Morris; an active campaigner and energetic public speaker, fiction and poetry became increasingly significant vehicles for his polemic following events like the Trafalgar Square ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre in November 1887 which had seemed to make the ‘reality’ of revolution in Morris’s lifetime an ever more distant prospect. But it was not only radical writers who utilized the literary in this way: Disraeli’s ‘Young England’ trilogy of novels also used fictional tropes as propaganda for his one-​nation Toryism. For modern critics, however, the question of whether works like Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847) or Morris’s A Dream of John Ball (1888) and News from Nowhere (1890) are ‘political novels’, or examples of literary devices being used (to appropriate the words of the Prospective Review) for ‘interpretation and guidance’, is moot. What will matter more is the validity of the different politics articulated in these novels and the effectiveness of the rhetorical devices used for their expression. In other words, describing the ways in which the Victorians understood the connection between the domains of the political and the literary is a different matter from analyzing the politics of any particular Victorian poem, novel, or play. This last task involves determining whether or not Victorian literary works functioned in the ways claimed for them, an undertaking which is complicated by the fact that among modern theorists there is significant disagreement both about the general relationship between the literary and the political and the political functions of individual Victorian works. These disagreements, which have tended to centre on the interpretation of Victorian fiction (rather than of poetry or drama), have given rise to the following questions: can the use of certain formal devices provide a means of exposing the limitations to, or fractures in, contemporary political ideologies, even if, as Pierre Macheray suggested, this may occur unintentionally? Or do the formal properties of literary works merely function to replicate and normalize those ideologies, socializing readers into the values of a dominant culture, as some Marxist critics of Victorian realism have claimed? What role did literary works play in what have been identified (using Foucault’s terminology) as Victorian ‘regulatory’ discourses, such as those which controlled mental, physical, and sexual health, as well as the management of pain, risk, finance, criminal behaviour, and urban sanitation. To date, these continue to be contested issues, and it is beyond the scope

Politics and the Literary    73 of the present chapter to engage with them in detail.12 What can be attempted, however, is the more modest task of mapping Victorian attitudes towards the interrelatedness of the literary and the political, and describing the political implications of that Victorian understanding. Taken together, these areas of enquiry provide a useful purchase on why the topic of politics and the literary proved to be so contentious in this period of literary history, as well as why, at the end of the nineteenth century, both a politician (Morley) and a writer (James) felt it to be sufficiently important to bring to public attention.

The Politics of Literary Taste The remainder of this chapter will concentrate on describing competing definitions of literary taste in the Victorian period, and the reasons why, and mechanisms by which, a critical elite attempted to control literary culture. A useful place to begin is with the processes of Victorian canon formation and the discrepancies between Victorian literary taste and modern evaluations. These can be glimpsed in the changing reputation of a writer like Thomas Carlyle; although held in high esteem in early-​and mid-​nineteenth-​ century literary circles, relatively little of the diverse oeuvre of the ‘sage of Chelsea’ is read today, or read in any detail, certainly outside university syllabuses. By the same token, works that are now taken to be modern classics, such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, sold poorly and received mainly negative reviews on their first publication. One reason for these differences is that the main (but not exclusive) moulders of literary opinion for much of the Victorian period were middle-​and upper-​class men.13 The early decades of the nineteenth century had witnessed the rise of a new type of professional critic. Enfranchised by a rapidly expanding periodical press, they saw it as their business, as Walter Bagehot phrased it, to tell ‘the modern man […] what to think’,14 and they typically undertook that task with a keen sense of the role which reading played 12  A brief outline of these positions is given in Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, A Concise History of Nineteenth-​Century Literature (London: Routledge, 2010), 79–​90. Central to these disagreements are arguments about form. In recent years both early Marxist and some Foucualdian interpretations of Victorian literary works have been criticized as reductive and insensitive to the subtleties of formal devices. Moreover, critics who have voiced these complaints often seek, either implicitly or explicitly, to reinstate Victorian literary works as a privileged discourse. An exemplary instance is the recent research of Isobel Armstrong; much admired for her revaluations of Victorian poetry she has now turned her attention to the novel in a bid to reclaim this medium, too, as a site of radical critique. These concerns were outlined in a paper entitled ‘Thinking a Democratic Imaginary in the Nineteenth-​Century Novel’ delivered at a Colloquium to Celebrate the Works of Joanne Shattock (26 November 2011), University of Leicester. 13  The contribution of female voices to nineteenth-​century critical debate, of figures like Anna Jameson, Margaret Oliphant, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, Mary Ward, and Eliza Lynn Linton, has only been recognized relatively recently. 14  Walter Bagehot, ‘The First Edinburgh Reviewers’, in Bagehot, Literary Studies, ed. R. H. Hutton, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Green, 1884), i. 2; quoted in Joanne Shattock, ‘The Culture of Criticism’, in Shattock (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 77.

74    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture in socialization, evaluating literary works in relation to contemporary class and gender norms—​an activity which had a more formal counterpart in the application of the laws against blasphemy and obscenity and the continued legal control of the public stage through the office of the Lord Chamberlain. As might be expected, among professional critics and public officials alike there were particular concerns about the reading and theatregoing habits of women and the working classes—​that is, the activities of those groups whom middle-​and upper-​class men had most interest in controlling. By the mid-​decades of the century, the lowering of the cost of books combined with increased leisure time and improved literacy meant that both these groups, and especially the latter, had much greater access to reading materials than ever before, including a variety of radical writing. A boom in theatre building in the late 1820s and 1830s, especially in London’s East End, led to the working classes having their own dramatic entertainments. Of greatest appeal for this last group was stage melodrama, a form, as Sally Ledger has argued, that was ‘forged as an aesthetic of protest in the French Revolution’ and which acquired, as one of its defining characteristics over the course of the Victorian period, an idea of ‘working-​class solidarity in response to external threats to working-​class domesticity’.15 Together with the popularity of the lurid tales of murder and criminality that appeared in the penny dreadfuls, and the later and more widespread successes of literary subgenres that drew upon these forms, such as sensation and detective fiction, fairy, ghost, and adventure stories—​these preferences were indicative of tastes that were markedly different from those of a professional critical elite who complained constantly about the alleged lack of discrimination of general or ‘ready’ readers (to use Swinburne’s term),16 as well as those readers’ excessive susceptibility to what were deemed inappropriate influences. A recurring preoccupation of various Select Committee hearings into the Victorian stage was the class composition of the audiences and the respectability (or otherwise) of the theatrical entertainments on offer. Concerns centred on the music halls which had proliferated in the East End initially in the 1830s and 1840s; numbers increased again following a further wave of theatre building in the 1860s. The easy availability of alcohol in such venues—​which was a major attraction for the mainly working-​and lower-​middle-​ class men who patronized them—​engendered an often lively, carnivalesque atmosphere in which the boundaries of what was considered ‘polite’ taste were constantly and deliberately transgressed. It is no accident that for much of the Victorian period it was rarely conceded that contemporary drama, or much popular fiction and poetry, even possessed a literary identity, in part because of the impermanence associated with performance culture, but also, one suspects, because of its association with values to which that critical elite was hostile. In these ways the growth of popular cultural forms over the course of the nineteenth century was accompanied by an insistent questioning about

15 

Ledger, ‘Radical Writing’, 128. The phrase is used in Swinburne’s discussion of reactions to Robert Browning’s poetry in a digression in his 1875 essay on George Chapman. 16 

Politics and the Literary    75 what constituted literariness—​that is, about those features which defined literary style as well as the subject matter thought appropriate to a literary work. At issue, too, was the normative role literature played in social life. By the late 1880s and 1890s literary culture in general was widely perceived, certainly by that elite, to be in a state of crisis. Of interest, however, is not so much the ‘reality’ of any such crisis; after all, the abundance and variety of reading materials and dramatic entertainments made available by the nineteenth-​century explosion in print culture and the expansion in theatre building were probably viewed in exactly the opposite terms by the majority of readers and theatregoers. More significant are the politics at play in its identification. In the writings of early-​and mid-​Victorian critics, pre-​eminently those of Carlyle and, a little later, Matthew Arnold, the need to control contemporary literary sensibilities was framed in terms of a larger rhetoric of social disintegration and impending anarchy, one that can be traced back to anxieties provoked by the French Revolution, and the attempt by conservative critics to contain its potentially disruptive impact on British culture through conflating popular activism with the irrationality of the mob. For these commentators, it could seem but a short step from the disregard for all forms of institutional authority that had been exhibited at the Parisian barricades to the sense of ‘social freedom’, as Michael Booth terms it,17 on display in some elements of Victorian popular entertainment, especially, as noted, in the theatre. At issue was a deep apprehension about growing class antagonisms, in which anxieties about cultural as well as political challenges to middle-​and upper-​class interests were sublimated into the uncontrollability of mass taste—​that dense and enveloping aggregation of inchoate views which threatened to overwhelm the educated opinions of a self-​styled ‘rational’ minority. Of course on occasion, particularly in the later decades of the century, these attempts to police literary taste can seem like little more than the exercise of cultural snobbery, the association of popular literary forms with what Grant Allen viewed as a deplorable ‘decay’ in literary standards,18 acting as a thin disguise for the professional critic’s unease about his own waning influence in the face of a range of competing opinion-​formers. These included, from the late 1870s onwards, a new type of literary journalist who wrote for cheap dailies and weeklies, and whose favoured forum was the pithy and, it was condescendingly suggested, less considered review, as opposed to the discursive essay which had been the mainstay of the expensive monthlies and quarterlies and the critical medium of Arnold and Carlyle. In voicing such complaints, figures like Allen conveniently overlooked the ways in which literary critical discourse—​and therefore attempts to define literary value—​had always been subject to ideological manipulation, whether through the Victorian practice of journalistic anonymity (which held sway until the late decades of the century), the editorial imposition on contributors of a corporate voice (many Victorian periodicals were overtly party-​political), the age-​old practice of log-​rolling, or the related habit of individual critics posting multiple 17  Booth is describing music-​hall entertainments; see his Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 11–​12. 18  Allen, ‘The Decay of Criticism’, Fortnightly Review, 37 (1882), 339–​51.

76    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture reviews of the same works, thus potentially limiting or distorting the range of opinion available to the reader.19 In the writings of a later generation of commentators, most famously Max Nordau, the main target was not popular culture, but its polar opposite: figures associated with a literary and artistic avant-​garde. The reasons, however, were broadly similar and centred, once again, on the perceived threat of these movements to established culture, or—​more precisely—​to its very possibility, and therefore to the potential of the literary to function, as Arnold’s rhetoric implied, as a form of social engineering. It is relevant, for example, that writers associated with the Decadent and Symbolist movements had explicitly taken their cue from external (and often French) influences, and they typically disseminated their work—​whether through private theatre clubs or specialist, limited edition publishing—​in ways which guaranteed their restriction to a like-​minded coterie. In the writings of Walter Pater this exclusiveness seemed to be justified by what amounted to a privatization of literary experience in which the responsibility of the critic was limited to describing a work’s appeal only in relation to a particular individual: ‘What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me?’, Pater famously asked in the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance (1873).20 For Pater, the responsibility of the literary artist was solely to ‘his sense of fact rather than the fact’, to the ‘representation of such fact as connected with soul, of a specific personality, in its preferences, its volition and power’21—​a definition of literary creativity in stark contrast to Arnold’s proposition in the ‘Preface’ to the first edition of his Poems (1853) that it was the ‘eternal objects’ of poetry, actions ‘which most powerfully appeal to the great primary affections’ and to the ‘elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race’, that gave it value. For Arnold, ‘an allegory of the state of one’s own mind’ could ‘never’ produce ‘a great poetical work’;22 by contrast, Pater’s arresting description of critical appreciation in the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance was that of ‘the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world’ (187–​8). For Oscar Wilde, literary art was simply the ‘most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known’, its main function being the expression of difference, and the danger from which it needed protection was the ‘barbarous authority’ of ‘the community’.23 At stake for those critics like Arnold, Allen, and Nordau who prized literary works because of their potential to engage with social and especially national life, and ultimately for their promotion of a cultural homogeneity, was the assumption that the literary was a realm of absolute value. It was only by virtue of this property that works of 19  Such practices have not prevented modern critics, notably Laurel Brake, arguing for the vibrancy of debate in the Victorian periodical press; see Brake, Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1994). 20  Walter Pater, The Renaissance, ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), pp. xix–​xx. Subsequent references appear in the text in parentheses. 21  Walter Pater, ‘Style’, in Appreciations (London: Macmillan, 1912), 10. 22  Matthew Arnold, Selected Poems and Prose, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Dent, 1993), 117, 121. 23  The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, iv. Criticism, ed. Josephine M. Guy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 248.

Politics and the Literary    77 literature could be claimed to counteract what was perceived as a tendency towards sectarianism, whether religious, political, or cultural in origin, and thereby promote social cohesion. However, it was exactly this property of the literary that seemed to be threatened by the growth of literary coteries, especially those which, like the Aesthetic movement, understood the special character of the literary to reside in its ability to articulate a unique subjectivity, and so too to testify to the relative nature of experience. Nordau interpreted this apparent eschewal of mainstream opinion as a form of self-​belief that was pathological, an asocial tendency that amounted to what he termed in Entartung (1892) an ‘incapacity’ to adapt ‘to existing circumstances’ and which was a symptom, in his view, of mental degeneracy. Moreover it was a characteristic which avant-​garde writers and artists shared with what he referred to as ‘revolutionists and anarchists’ and which identified them, in Nordau’s eyes, with a wholesale process of national degeneration. As with early-​and mid-​nineteenth-​century reactions to the growth of popular literary forms, we find at the end of the Victorian period a similar conflation of political and cultural activity, although in this last case the cause was held to be biological as much as social, leading to an altogether more apocalyptic identification of elements of contemporary literary and artistic practice with the concept of the fin de siècle and, ultimately, the ‘fin du globe’. Nordau’s rhetoric is extreme, and the influence of his Entartung (translated into English as Degeneration in 1895) can be overestimated. There is nonetheless a significant element of continuity between his diagnosis of cultural disintegration and the anxieties exhibited earlier by Arnold, one which is perhaps easier to appreciate in the more measured voices of writers like William John Courthope or William Shairp. Both Shairp and Courthope were establishment figures who followed Arnold in holding the position of Professor of Poetry at Oxford; both responded to the suggestion that literary culture was in a state of ‘morbid’ decline—​to use the term then current—​by calling for the development of a more ‘healthy’ and unifying national literature, one which would exemplify what at the time was contentiously termed the ‘noble English style’. Looking back from the vantage point of 1901, and invoking again the seismic impact of the French Revolution, Courthope, in the conclusion to his Oxford lectures (published as Life in Poetry: Law in Taste) characterized the century just past in terms of the rise to prominence of what he called the ‘master passion’ of ‘Liberty’, defined as a desire for ‘complete freedom of action’.24 In Courthope’s view, this ‘leaving [of] each man as a separate unit to think, speak and do as he likes’ had come to pervade all aspects of social life: political (in the form of ‘democracy’), religious (in the form of a sectarianism that disempowered the ‘corporate Religion of the State’ or Anglican Church), and cultural. Moreover, although ‘simple and attractive at the outset’ it had been the cause of ‘a thousand difficulties’, including what Courthope identified as the current ‘multiplicity and 24  William Courthope, ‘Conclusion’, in Life in Poetry: Law in Taste (London: Macmillan, 1901); repr. in Josephine M. Guy (ed.), The Victorian Age: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (London and New York: Routledge, 1998, 2002), 446–​59; subsequent references are to this later edition and appear in the text in parentheses.

78    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture self-​contradiction of modern tastes, and the complete absence of any recognised standard of judgment in contemporary literature’. His remedy for this cultural laissez-​faire, encapsulated, he suggested, in the popular maxim de gustibus non est disputandum, was to re-​establish an ‘authoritative standard’. It was based on a conflation of Aristotle’s ‘Law of the Universal’ with Courthope’s own idea of a ‘Law of National Character’, explained as a ‘social instinct which compels the artist unconsciously to individualise his idea of the Universal in the light of the race tendencies, the methods of education, and the political history and character of the nation to which he belongs’. Courthope asserted that ‘man is a great painter or poet, and his work becomes a monumental standard by reference to which the quality of other artistic work produced in his nation can be judged’ only insofar as his sense of the ‘Universal’ represents ‘faithfully the sum of national life’. Like Arnold before him, Courthope was attracted to a concept of ‘the Universal’ as a standard of literary taste because it was ‘something absolutely existing in itself ’, even if it could ‘only be reflected through the medium of minds differing in constitution and character’ (452). The idea that cultural and social fragmentation might be countered through an overtly politicized process of canon formation helps explain the appearance in the late decades of the century of multi-​volume projects like Courthope’s own History of English Poetry (1895–​1910), T. H. Ward’s The English Poets (1880–​94) and English Prose Selections (1893–​7), as well as Edmund Gosse’s A Short History of Modern English Literature (1898) and George Saintsbury’s A Short History of English Literature (1898). These undertakings in turn found a counterpart in persistent, if initially unsuccessful, efforts in the 1880s and 1890s to institutionalize the study of literariness through the incorporation of English as a new subject in universities, an ambition which was part of an ongoing process of reformation and expansion in higher education that had begun in the 1850s. Surprisingly, perhaps, Arnold had opposed this last development, having been sceptical of the idea that literary study could or should be part of the academy; two decades later, Courthope took the opposite view, complaining that in the mid-​and late-​nineteenth century universities had abnegated their social responsibility for what he termed the ‘training of taste’, retreating instead into a monastic pursuit of ‘Self-​Culture’ (455). For the modern reader, the identification of both ‘democracy’ and ‘self-​culture’ with a destructive, antisocial spirit—​in Arnold’s resonant phrase, that habit of ‘each man doing as he likes’—​may seem odd. But what united these groups—​Swinburne’s ‘ready reader’ of popular fiction with Nordau’s avant-​gardist and Courthope’s ivory-​tower academic—​ was an apparent refusal, in the eyes of their detractors, to pay due respect to the judgements of those attempting to regulate literary culture. A further and related threat to these regulatory ambitions was what was perceived as the rampant commercialization of literary culture that had accompanied the dramatic growth of the nineteenth-​century publishing industry alluded to earlier. In diagnosing the ‘anarchical conditions of things’, Courthope had run together a ‘passion for novelty’ and ‘the instinct of democracy’ with what he referred to as ‘the commercial interest’: all three factors, in his view, favoured ‘the assertion of [an] unrestricted liberty of taste’ which threatened ‘civilisation and refinement’ (454). The problem, as Courthope and

Politics and the Literary    79 others perceived it, was to do with the way the mechanisms behind the expansion in the literary market from the late 1830s onwards had made profitability from literary publishing dependent on the volume of sales—​on numbers of units sold. In this environment literary success—​indeed, even the possibility of becoming a published author—​seemed increasingly to depend on crude sales figures alone, on the ability of an author to appeal to as large a number of readers as possible. Moreover, in practice, profits from literary works were mainly driven by the lucrative reprint market; as a consequence, works of poetry, fiction, and drama tended to be packaged and repackaged in an inventive array of formats in order to increase their sales, practices which required a more explicit use of advertising techniques and the willingness of writers to participate in marketing processes, to the extent of selling themselves as much as their works. Here both work and author alike became commodities, a process which was routinely disparaged for ruining the careers of young writers by promoting or ‘booming’ them far beyond any talent they might possess and encouraging the production of formulaic works. This perceived commodification of literature, where literary works seemed to be treated like any other disposable consumer good, was thus further grist to the mill of those hostile to the development of popular literary forms. Or, to be more accurate, invoking an opposition between the values of commerce on the one hand, and those of Courthope’s ‘civilisation’ on the other, was a convenient way of legitimating some tastes at the expense of others. Any perception of cultural decline—​whether it is attributed to a commercialization and/​or a democratization of taste—​must assume, even if silently, some earlier, unsullied state of literary grace from which contemporary practice has fallen away. In this respect, it is salutary to be reminded that the ‘civilized’ or ‘purist’ writer (as Peter McDonald has termed it25) who stood aloof from the market rarely, if ever, existed, certainly in the Victorian period. As historians such as Tom Mole have argued, the cult of the author as media celebrity can be dated back at least as far as the Romantics;26 by the same token, the private correspondence of figures rarely associated with monetary gain, like Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, and Robert and Elizabeth Browning, shows that they were deeply concerned with the profitability of their writing, and tailored works for particular markets. In the Victorian period, anxieties generated by the collapsing together of literary and economic value might therefore be better recast in terms of the frustrations of arbiters of taste at their inability to use price as a way of policing literary culture. When, as in the eighteenth century, books were expensive and print runs relatively small, it was easier for a critical elite to dictate literary standards, even if, in practice, the cultural homogeneity to which those standards claimed to testify was illusory. By the second half of the nineteenth century the dramatic fall in price of reading matter had brought a whole range of new agents—​both as readers and authors—​into the literary marketplace, and as a result traditional cultural hierarchies and traditional conceptions 25  See Peter D. McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice: 1880–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 26  See Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutics of Intimacy (Houndmills: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2007).

80    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture of cultural authority were inevitably and irrevocably challenged. That this occurred simultaneously with, and was partly prompted by, a recognition (as I have suggested) of the enormous potential, given a much more literate populace, for works of literature to shape social and national life, only served to heighten critics’ anxieties about their loss of influence. Paradoxically, the ideas of a single or monolithic literary culture and of a single, homogenous literary readership—​such as we see underlying Courthope’s proposals for a national literature—​were most desirable at precisely the moment when the competitive nature of the mid-​and late-​nineteenth-​century literary marketplace made them manifestly unrealizable. It is in this discrepancy between ambition and reality that power operates, and the gap between politics and the literary that Morley insists upon begins to close.

Conclusion This tension between the realities of Victorian reading and theatregoing practices on the one hand, and contemporary prescriptions concerning the social function of the literary on the other, is perfectly caught in Morley’s celebration of what he terms ‘the spread of literature’ as measured in the ‘numbers of books that are taken out from public libraries’, and his simultaneous lament that what is being read is ‘not all that we could wish’ (202). ‘[T]‌he point’, Morley explains in his Extension lecture, ‘is not that men should have a great many books, but that they should have the right ones’ (205)—​when ‘right’, of course, is to be defined by figures like Morley (or Arnold or Allen). In a manner reminiscent of Courthope, Morley then draws an analogy between literature and commerce. ‘Many people’, he suggests, ‘think of knowledge as of money’; he goes on to explain that they want their experience of literature to be as cheap as possible, cheap both in terms of the cost of a book and in terms of the time spent reading it. As a counter to this consumerist attitude, Morley advocates spending a longer amount of time reading fewer works; appreciation of the literary, in his view, is derived from a process of repeated reading: ‘most books worth reading once’, he points out, ‘are worth reading twice, and—​what is most important of all—​the masterpieces of literature are worth reading a thousand times’. Lists of such ‘masterpieces’, often in the form of ‘a Hundred Best Books’, abound in the later part of the Victorian period, as do works like Charles Francis Richardson’s The Choice of Books (1881), a volume which Morley recommends on account of the fact that it provides a guide to the ‘region of pure literature’ (209).27 Ironically, however, this identification of literary taste with a principle of limitation—​ the assumption that less is always more—​rather than circumventing the commercial values that Morley and Courthope deprecate turns out to be barely distinguishable from 27  Morley mistakenly gives Frederic Harrison as the author of this volume; On the Choice of Books was also the title of Thomas Carlyle’s inaugural address as rector of Edinburgh University; it was reprinted from The Times in 1866 by J. C. Hotten.

Politics and the Literary    81 them, for in the abundance of a consumerist society the highest form of worth always equates with that which is most scarce. There was a further difficulty with Morley’s position: what distinguished his prescriptions for quality over quantity from the reverence for exclusivity that issued in what Courthope and Nordau had viewed as an unhealthy ‘self-​culture’? Where was one to draw the line between a literary ‘masterpiece’ that required what Morley termed ‘reading with reflection, comprehension, and memory all alert and awake’ (206) and the kinds of textual difficulties typically referred to by the pejorative term ‘obscure writing’, and that were held to be a consequence of a pathological self-​absorption, one deliberately cultivated, in the view of critics like Nordau, so as to be impenetrable to, and thus incapable of being appreciated by, the general reader?28 Likewise, when was the material rarity associated with the production of expensive, hand-​printed, de-​luxe editions, as well as, in the late decades of the century, a thriving rare-​book trade, a sign of literary value—​an accolade (as writers from Carlyle to Thomas Hardy saw matters) which distinguished a work from the disposability of popular culture thus helping to safeguard its value for posterity? And when were such publishing practices merely a cynical marketing ploy: expensive-​looking books were often cheap to produce and there is evidence that some publishers, notably the Bodley Head, printed more copies than advertised in a limited run in order to increase the profits from alleged rarity. In short, the politics underlying complaints about a decline in literary standards over the course of the Victorian period were more complex than a simple opposition between popular and elite interests. As significant was the competition between elites; or, to be more accurate, between different concepts of elitism and different forms of exclusivity, each of which predicated a distinct role for the literary in social life. For Arnold, Allen, Courthope, and Morley, it was only by dint of the absolute literary ‘standards’ which they arrogated to themselves the authority to fix, that literature, as Arnold phrased it, could aid the ‘cultivation of the sympathies and imagination’, the ‘quickening of the moral sensibilities, and the enlargement of the moral vision’. For Pater the literary could also promote an ethical attitude, but only by virtue of attuning the individual to the provisional and relative nature of all knowledge—​to be sympathetic, we might say, to difference. For Wilde, too, literary art had a social value; paradoxically, however, it was one which centred on the way it facilitated Individualism, or the development of personality. When Wilde describes the value of literary art as being inversely proportionate to its utility, he meant its appropriation for non-​aesthetic ends (Wildean Individualism is realized in lives which, as he puts it in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ (1891), are ‘free [and] beautiful’). In different ways these arguments all endorse that separation between the literary and politics to which Morley draws attention, but for reasons which the modern commentator will see as profoundly self-​interested and also, therefore, as profoundly political. 28  See e.g. Allon White, The Uses of Obscurity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981); and Josephine M. Guy, ‘The Politics of Obscurity’, in The British Avant-​Garde: The Theory and Politics of Tradition (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 81–​97.

82    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture

Bibliography Brantlinger, Patrick, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-​Century British Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). Erikson, Lee, The Economy of Literary Form:  English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing: 1800–​1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Flint, Kate, The Woman Reader 1837–​1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, 1995). Guy, Josephine M., and Ian Small, ‘The British “Man of Letters” and the Rise of the Professional’, in A. Walton Litz, Louis Menand, and Lawrence Rainey (eds), The Cambridge History of Criticism, vii. Modernism and New Criticism (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000), 377–​88. Hammond, Mary, Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England: 1880–​ 1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). Jordan, John O., and Robert Patten (eds), Literature and the Marketplace: Nineteenth-​Century British Publishing and Reading Practices (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1991). Raven, John, ‘The Promotion and Constraints of Knowledge:  The Changing Structure of Publishing in Victorian England’, in Martin Daunton (ed), The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 263–​86. Sutherland, John, Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995). Vincent, David, The Rise of Mass Literacy:  Reading and Writing in Modern Europe (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). Weedon, Alexis, Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market, 1836–​1916 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).

Chapter 4

The Literat u re of Chart i sm Ian Haywood

There is a moment in Elizabeth Gaskell’s industrial novel Mary Barton (1848) where the tragic hero John Barton sits down to read ‘an old Northern Star borrowed from a neighbouring public house’.1 He is absorbed in the paper’s support for the Ten Hours Bill, but had he wanted to read something a little more entertaining, elevated, or inspiring, he could have turned straight to the ‘Arts’ pages of the paper. There he would have found a rich selection of poems including the contributions of now forgotten Chartist scribblers, texts by more established Chartist ‘laureates’, and a range of complete and excerpted works by canonical authors (Burns, Byron, and Shelley being particular favourites). The Chartist poems on offer ranged from the overtly didactic, agitational, and rousing—​such as ‘The Lion of Freedom’, a song composed by Thomas Cooper to celebrate the release of the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor from prison in 1841 (‘The lion of freedom comes from his den, | We’ll rally around him again and again’)—​to seemingly non-​political ‘Parnassian’ lyrics which, despite their lack of radical subject matter, demonstrated the aspirations of Chartists to compete with or appropriate the emotional, moral, and aesthetic conventions of mainstream literary culture. Chartist poetry was evidence that the working class was both intelligent and sensitive: the poetic imagination was irrefutable proof that the politically excluded masses had both an impressive level of education and a refined sensibility, qualities denied to them by an intransigent political establishment that believed (or asserted) that the masses were intellectually, culturally, and politically immature. (Thomas Carlyle, for example, described Chartism as the ‘inarticulate cries’ of a ‘dumb creature in rage and pain’.2) Had John Barton lived a little longer he could have seen these humane credentials amply illustrated in a full-​length Chartist novel, Thomas Martin Wheeler’s Sunshine and Shadow, serialized in the Northern Star from 1849 to 1850; Barton may even have taken some solace and counsel from seeing the hero 1 

2 

Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (London: Penguin, 1970), 123. Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (1840), in Selected Writings (London: Penguin, 1988), 149–​232, at 189.

84    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture of that story, Arthur Morton, survive a string of personal and political setbacks. A fuller appreciation of Chartist literature could have saved Barton’s life. The Chartist movement was first and foremost a mass campaign to secure political rights for the majority of the (male) British population who were excluded from the so-​ called ‘Great’ Reform Bill of 1832, but the Chartist vision of a more just and equal society was also intensely literate. To begin with, at the core of its programme was a simultaneously real and symbolic document, the sacred ‘Charter’, a radicalized Magna Carta that represented an attempt to give Britain a proper written constitution: in the words of Joseph Radford, the Charter was the ‘land-​mark of ages—​sublimely grand’; like a biblical scripture it was ‘deeply engraved On the high-​beating hearts of millions enslav’d’.3 The three colossal petitions that were presented to Parliament in 1839, 1842, and 1848 comprised hyperbolic expressions of what might be termed Chartist ‘logo-​cracy’, a faith in the political power of the written word. To take the 1842 petition as an example: how could the government ignore the demands of over 3 million signatures, almost a third of the adult population and three times the size of the existing electorate?4 Nor was the spreading of the Chartist gospel limited to the flagship weekly newspaper the Northern Star: from the late 1830s to the mid-​1850s, the Chartist movement spawned dozens of substantial and more ephemeral periodicals and newspapers in addition to pamphlets, addresses, collections of poetry and stories, decorative membership cards, and ‘galleries’ of portraits—​in total, a flourishing and relatively autonomous print culture. Chartists were only too aware that they had inherited the democratic mission of the ‘grand march of the intellect’ from their reforming predecessors, the corresponding societies of the 1790s, the ‘heroic’ radical journalism of the Regency and Peterloo years, and the ‘unstamped’ wars of the 1830s. Friedrich Engels was so impressed by this aspect of working-​class culture in the 1840s that he concluded that ‘the proletariat has formed upon this basis a literature, which consists chiefly of journals and pamphlets, and is far in advance of the whole bourgeois literature in intrinsic worth’.5 As the veteran Chartist Allen Davenport stated in the conclusion to his autobiography (1845): What a change has come over the spirit of this country since the days of my youth [… . W]e now see young men scarcely out of their teens, taking part in discussions and delivering lectures on subjects, where a considerable portion of learning is 3  Joseph Radford, ‘The Charter’, Northern Star (2 January 1841); reprinted in I. V. Kovalev, An Anthology of Chartist Literature (Moscow, 1956), 96–​7. On the historical evolution of the Charter, see Miles Taylor, ‘The Six Points: Chartism and the Reform of Parliament’, in Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson, and Stephen Roberts (eds), The Chartist Legacy (London: Merlin Press, 1999). 4  These figures are taken from Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 205. 5  Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845 in German; translated into English 1892; London: Grafton, 1984), 165–​6. See also H. Gustav Klaus, The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working-​Class Writing (Brighton: Harvester Press), 49; Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 36–​9; Ian Haywood, The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print Politics and the People 1790–​1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch. 6.

The Literature of Chartism    85 required [… .] And will the government and legislature of this country still look on and remain stationary, while every thing is changing around them?6

Davenport’s self-​conscious celebration of the ‘intellectual struggle that is being made by the working classes’ is just one of a number of manifesto-​type declarations that litter the Chartist press and Chartist literary texts. These statements show with great clarity the importance that Chartists placed on challenging the bourgeois hegemony of literature. The Chartist Circular declared in 1840 that ‘When the people shall have their own authors and press, to do them justice, they will sweep away the corruptions of literature from the haunts of social life, and the proud motto of Knowledge and Equality shall wave triumphantly on the noble banner of Literary Reform’. The leading Chartist author Thomas Cooper declared in his periodical Cooper’s Journal or Unfettered Thinker in 1850 that ‘It now becomes a matter of the highest necessity, that you all join hands and heads to create a literature of your own’, while the renowned Chartist poet Ernest Jones stated that ‘Chartism is marching into the fields of literature with rapid strides [… .] We say to the great minds of the day, come among the people, write for the people, and your fame will live for ever’.7 Though Chartism was as much the culmination of a longer period of democratic struggle as it was a new beginning, the explosion of ‘cheap’ popular publishing in the 1830s and 1840s gave Chartism an unprecedented opportunity to reach huge numbers of people across the length and breadth of the country. At the peak of its popularity in the late 1830s the Northern Star may have been read (and heard) by hundreds of thousands of Chartists. This was a formidable and commanding audience not only for Chartist orators, whose speeches were reproduced and recycled in the paper, but also for aspiring poets and writers. Indeed, the Northern Star was regularly overwhelmed with an unsolicited ‘jackass load of poetry’ and frequently had to remind its readers that contributions were judged on literary merit rather than mere solidarity.8 This high-​minded attitude reflected the important role that literature played in the Chartist ‘imaginary’.9 Poetry (and to a lesser extent fiction) was the highest expression of an individual’s creative and human potential: in the words of the ‘red republican’ Gerald Massey, poetry was ‘to be lived […] with its beauty and its plenty, its freedom and its happiness’.10 Chartism took from the Romantics the notion that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world,11 and it is no coincidence that many of its leading activists were

6  The Life and Literary Pursuits of Allen Davenport, ed. Malcolm Chase (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994), 27–​8. 7  Chartist Circular (15 February 1841); Cooper’s Journal or Unfettered Thinker, 1, no. 9 (1850), 129; The Labourer, 2 (1846), 95. 8  See Mike Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), ch. 3. 9  According to Sanders, the ‘Chartist imaginary […] both underpins the agency enjoyed by, and constitutes the unique form of historical knowledge embodied in, Chartist poetry’ (The Poetry of Chartism, 6). 10  Cited in Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789–​1794 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 68. 11  This famous phrase by Percy Shelley is from his essay A Defence of Poetry (1821).

86    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture also journalists, writers, editors, and publishers. The careers of Ernest Jones, Thomas Cooper, Thomas Martin Wheeler, George Julian Harney, W. J. Linton, Gerald Massey, and (more controversially) George W. M. Reynolds are equally notable for their political and literary achievements. These writers now comprise the core ‘canon’ of Chartist literature: their prominence, celebrity, and sheer volume of publications have placed them at the forefront of critical attention. On the other hand, as Mike Sanders cautions, it is misleading to focus solely on the ‘labour laureates’ at the expense of the forgotten writers who filled the poetry columns of the Northern Star week by week for over a decade.12 Sanders’s book The Poetry of Chartism has done an admirable and convincing job of celebrating the literary qualities and political efficacy of a very wide range of forgotten Chartist poetic texts. His determination to do critical justice to the Chartist poetic legacy follows on from the pioneering work of I. V. Kovalev, Martha Vicinus, and Anne Janowitz and establishes a new gold standard for the analysis of Chartist poetics.13 Yet, as already noted, Chartist literary production was more extensive than the material Sanders covers. The rest of this chapter will try to cover the full range of the ‘literature of Chartism’ including both poetry and fiction, indicating which areas of Chartist print culture may still be under-​researched.

Poetry Chartist poetry is in a critically healthy state and continues to attract the attention of both literary scholars and labour historians. Major literary studies include Sanders’s The Poetry of Chartism, Anne Janowitz’s Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, Ulrika Schwab’s Poetry of the Chartist Movement, Brian Maidment’s The Poorhouse Fugitives, Mary Ashraf ’s Introduction to Working Class Literature in Great Britain, and Martha Vicinus’s The Industrial Muse. Chartist poetry also features in Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789–​1794, and in Isobel Armstrong’s Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics.14 Book chapters and articles dedicated to Chartist poetry include Timothy Randall, ‘Chartist Poetry and Song’; a special issue of Victorian Poetry on ‘The Poetics of the Working Classes’ containing four articles on Chartist poetry (Stephanie Kuduk, ‘Sedition, Criticism and Epic Poetry in Thomas Cooper’s The Purgatory of Suicides’; Ronald Paul, ‘In Louring Hindustan: Chartism and 12 Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism, ch. 1.

13 Kovalev, Anthology; Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth-​Century British

Working-​Class Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1974); Anne Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 14  Ulrike Schwab, Poetry of the Chartist Movement: A Literary and Historical Study (London and Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishing, 1993); Brian Maidment, The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-​taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1987); Mary Ashraf, Introduction to Working Class Literature in Great Britain (Berlin: GDR, 1978); Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge 1996).

The Literature of Chartism    87 Empire in Ernest Jones’s the New World’; Kelly Mays, ‘Slaves in Heaven, Laborers in Hell: Chartist Poets’ Ambivalent Identification with the (Black) Slave’; Mike Sanders, ‘Poetic Agency: Metonymy and Metaphor in Chartist Poetry 1838–​1852’), Roy Vickers, ‘Chartist Election, Holy Communion and Psalmic Language in Ernest Jones’s Chartist Poetry’; Pamela K Gilbert, ‘History and Its Ends in Chartist Epic’.15 These critical investigations have been complemented by the work of Chartist historians who have provided invaluable biographical and contextual studies. Important books include Miles Taylor’s Ernest Jones, Chartism and the Romance of Politics and The Victorian Working Class Writer by Owen Ashton and Stephen Roberts; the Chartist press is the subject of Owen Ashton and Joan Allen’s edited collection of essays Papers for the People.16 Chartist poetry has often been divided into two types and phases: in the period of the late 1830s and early 1840s, poetry’s role was to mobilize and inspire a developing mass movement by providing an accessible discourse of class-​consciousness and solidarity to complement and enhance the ‘bread and butter’ ideological work of meetings, speeches, rallies, and print publishing. The poetry derived its power and persuasion from a vigorous simplicity and energy, the deployment of popular tropes inherited from oral and biblical tradition, the stark antitheses between good and evil (rulers and slaves), the sonorous use of the collective pronoun, and the idealistic appeal to a utopian future cleansed of class struggle. In Armstrong’s assessment, the poetry’s ‘impersonal language of hope and energy’ transformed ‘the deliberately banal material it worked with’.17 Vicinus calls this initial phase ‘exhortative and inspirational’, a view echoed by Armstrong’s phrase ‘millenial confidence’.18 The second phase of Chartist literary development saw the rise of the ‘laureates’ and the replacement of the collective voice with a self-​conscious lyricism and a tone of poetic elevation modelled on Byron and Shelley. In Janowitz’s words, the poetry became ‘less militant and more analytical’ though it retained its roots in the ‘communitarian’ impulses of the radical Romantic lyric.19 Chartist poets were unembarrassed by the adoption of High Romantic modes: as Ashraf notes, Chartists regarded ‘any poetry written or unwritten as a form of common property’ and ‘to fashion beautiful visions’ was to ‘compensate for poverty by noble ideas’.20 A striking illustration of this determination to harness existing poetic models is the Politics of Poets series that ran in the English Chartist Circular in 1839. Shakespeare, 15 

Timothy Randall, ‘Chartist Poetry and Song’ (1999), in Ashton, Fyson, and Roberts (eds), The Chartist Legacy, 171–​95; Victorian Poetry, 39, no. 2 (2001), special issue: ‘The Poetics of the Working Classes’; Roy Vickers, ‘Chartist Election, Holy Communion and Psalmic Language in Ernest Jones’s Chartist Poetry’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 11, no. 1 (2006), 59–​83; Pamela K. Gilbert, ‘History and Its Ends in Chartist Epic’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 37, no. 1 (2009), 27–​42. 16  Miles Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism and the Romance of Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Owen Ashton and Stephen Roberts, The Victorian Working Class Writer (London: Mansell, 1999); Owen Ashton and Joan Allen (eds), Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press (London: The Merlin Press, 2005). 17 Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 194–​5. 18 Vicinus, Industrial Muse, 95; Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 192. 19 Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, 151–​2. 20 Ashraf, Introduction to Working Class Literature, 52, 37–​8.

88    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Milton, Marvell, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron are all appropriated for a democratic poetics.21 In the work of Schwab, Maidment, Janowitz, and Sanders, the neat distinction between agitational and ‘literary’ Chartist poetry has been challenged, refined, and to an extent discarded. Three further issues have become central. First, there is a renewed emphasis on the lyrical tradition inherited from Romanticism, both as a space for meditating on passing events and as a means of elevating the collective role of the poetry: as Janowitz notes, ‘Chartist poetry offers a utopian counter-​statement to the notion of lyric as the terrain of landscaped solitude and secular transcendence through the extension of the unencumbered self, and whose conventional representations are modelled on the romantic poets’.22 In Chartist poetics, self-​discovery emerges from collective struggle. Second, there is a recognition that some Chartist poems (defined by author or place of publication) are not overtly political in their subject matter—​as Maidment notes, many poems were deigned to have a ‘cathartic effect rather than the persuasive one, so that the social aggression in the poem was sublimated or acted out rather than developed into action beyond the poem’,23 though this view has been challenged by Sanders who regards all Chartist poems as carrying political agency. Third, there is a new appreciation of the ways in which the structural complexities and patterns of Chartist poetry are attempting to negotiate a range of ideological problems including the patriarchal construction of gender roles (Armstrong is wary of the ‘battle image’ deployed by many Chartist poems, and Jutta Schwarzkopf sees Chartism as politically weakened by its conservative approach to gender, though the majority of critics are more forgiving of this allegedly unenlightened aspect of Chartist values24). The most important shift in studies of Chartist poetry is this willingness to regard the texts as worthy of close readings. Schwab sees all Chartist poems as having an ideological ‘nucleus’ or structure of feeling around which a variety of poetic genres are deployed to create ‘pensiveness’ or reflection.25 These ideas have some critical mileage, though Schwab’s fondness for ‘unity’ of form and content now seems methodologically old-​fashioned. Sanders uses Marxist theory to argue that poetry was a means to overcome the alienating effects of Victorian capitalism and connect both poet and reader in a simultaneously political and humanizing struggle: the best criticism of Chartist poetry will therefore show the ‘political effect of poetical affect’ and this can only be achieved through a series of detailed close readings of individual poems. Sanders admits that at first sight many Chartist poems can seem ‘rather crude and simplistic’ and therefore lacking in the ‘political ambiguities and ambivalences’ that are usually considered to be ‘the characteristics of “real” poetry’, but his analysis of the tripartite structure of 21 

In a similar vein, the Northern Star ran two series in 1840 called ‘Chartism from Shakespeare’ and ‘Chartism from the Poets’. 22 Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, 143. 23 Maidment, Poorhouse Fugitives, 37. 24 Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 194–​5. Jutta Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991). 25 Schwab, Poetry of the Chartist Movement, 26.

The Literature of Chartism    89 ‘negation, opposition and transformation’ in many poems and his discussion of the Chartist appropriation of sublime and pastoral tropes refutes any notion of Chartist poetry as ‘failed’ Victorian literature.26 Inevitably and understandably, the ‘aesthetic turn’ in Chartist poetry criticism has led to a revaluation of the ‘labour laureates’ Thomas Cooper, Ernest Jones, W. J. Linton, and Gerald Massey (and, though Sanders cautions against this tendency, his final chapter is on Massey). Thomas Cooper’s most remarkable achievement was his polemical ‘epic’ The Purgatory of Suicides (1845), supposedly composed while he was incarcerated in Stafford jail for allegedly inciting miners to riot during the General Strike of 1842 (as Cooper notes wryly in his Preface, ‘My persecutors have, at least, the merit of assisting to give a more robust character to my verse’27). Each of the twelve books of this eccentric and furiously autodidactic poem comprises a vignette of the contemporary political scene followed by a dream-​vision of a Dantean Hell inhabited by suicides from both classical and modern times. One moment in the poem can be cited to illustrate Cooper’s extravagant satirical imagination. In Book 3 he consigns the Tory minister Castlereagh (recognizable to many Chartist readers from his prominent role as Murder in Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy (1819) ) to the same serpent-​infested cell as Judas. The heated dialogue between the two is both sensational and entertaining. Judas fires volley after volley of abuse at his vile cellmate;   Thou feel’st thy portion just; but like a lithe   And eager adder, ’neath the planted hoof   Of forest steed or ox, dost twist and writhe,   With madd’ning agony. Hah! How aloof   Thou stood’st from mercy, while on earth! Disproof   That millions starved and suffered, thy false tongue   Forged, daily: not a tear-​drop in behoof   Of suffering from thy stony eyes was wrung   For one of all the thousands that thy treachery stung!28

Chartists had long memories and many historical scores to settle. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the obscurity and complexity of Cooper’s poem has attracted some negative responses from the moment it was published. In an early review of the poem, Douglas Jerrold regretted ‘the perpetual display of learning and allusions to subjects that can only be familiar to persons more than commonly well read, and not to the class with which the author so specifically delights to connect himself ’. As Vicinus notes, it is ironic that Cooper advised budding Chartist poets to ‘use plain words’ and avoid ‘inflation of expression—​over-​swelling words—​sound without sense—​and exaggerated sentiments’.29 These attacks on Cooper’s erudition ignore the fact that he made 26 Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism, 13, 29. 27 

Thomas Cooper, The Purgatory of Suicides: A Prison-​Rhyme (London: James Watson, 1850), 3.

28 Cooper, The Purgatory of Suicides, 100. 29 Vicinus, The Industrial Muse, 112, 109.

90    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture significant efforts to keep the cost of the volume as low as possible and that he provided explanatory notes to assist his readers.30 Kuduk Weiner interprets the poem’s lofty aesthetic ambitions as ‘part of a larger integration of the popular movement with the middle-​and upper-​class advocates of radical reform’, though there is no evidence that this was Cooper’s intention.31 Ernest Jones was perhaps the most self-​conscious of all the Chartist poets, as he seems to have plotted his ascendancy to the ‘laureate’ role with care and skill. Unlike Cooper, Linton, and Massey, Jones was born into an aristocratic background, but as Janowitz shows, the radical Romantic lyric provided Jones with the cultural vocabulary and authority to manage and capitalize on his ‘conversion’ to Chartism.32 Jones noted in his diary in 1846: I am pouring the tide of my songs over England forming the tone of the mighty mind of the people. Wonderful! […] I am prepared to rush forth, fresh and strong, into the strife or struggle of a nation, to ride the torrent or to guide the rills if God permits.33

Like Cooper, Jones produced many types of Chartist poems ranging from songs and prison lyrics to his internationalist epic The New World (1851). Perhaps his best known and most popular poem is ‘Song of the Low’ (1852):   We’re low, we’re low—​mere rabble, we know,   But at our plastic power,   The mould at the lordling’s feet will grow   Into palace and church and tower—​   Then prostrate fall—​in the rich man’s hall,   And cringe at the rich man’s door.   We’re not too low to build thy wall,   But too low to tread the floor.34

Numerous critics have pointed to the echoes of Shelley’s ‘Song to the Men of England’ (1819), but less attention has been given to the ironic consequences of inverting the point of view: where Shelley addresses the people (‘Men of England, wherefore plough | For the lords who lay ye low?’), Jones ventriloquizes the slave mentality of the dejected ‘rabble’. It is hard to imagine that much pleasure could be derived from the performing of this song (and its mimesis of degradation) without an awareness of the strategic, specifically literary nature of the satire.

30 

See the Preface to the 1847 second edition, Purgatory, 8. A cheap edition of the poem was published by the veteran radical bookseller James Watson in 1847. 31  Kuduk Weiner, Republican Politics and English Poetry, 68. See also Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 214–​17. 32 Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, 177–​78; see also ch. 6 passim. 33  Cited in Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, 179. 34 Kovalev, Anthology, 175.

The Literature of Chartism    91 Jones’s most neglected poem is actually his most ambitious. His ‘epic’ The New World (1851), later reissued as The Revolt of Hindostan (1857) to take stock of the Indian Mutiny, is only now beginning to receive due critical attention.35 Jones claimed sensationally that the poem—​a utopian vision of world revolution and the collapse of imperialism—​had been written in jail with his own blood. He placed the poem at the beginning of his periodical Notes to the People as a gesture of radical defiance and optimism in a political climate of post-​1848 European counter-​revolution. One of the most remarkable features of the poem is its Wellsian prediction of technological marvels including motorized flight and control of the weather. Jones sees climate control as a means to alleviate famine and pestilence but his benign imagining of the melting of the polar ice caps and the restoration of an antediluvian climate teeters on the brink of ecological satire (‘And frostsmokes, fleeting forth from each icy cape, | To Greenland yield once more the cherished grape’). This poem remains one of the jewels in the Chartist crown and is certainly worthy of further study. W. J.  Linton has received less critical attention than Cooper, Jones, and Massey, despite the fact that his output was massive: before he died Linton donated twenty volumes of his collected writings to the British Library.36 Linton was an ardent republican, an internationalist, and the producer of two innovative Chartist periodicals, The National (1839) and the English Republic (1851–​5). One of his talents was unique among Chartist writers and activists: as one of the Victorian period’s most gifted wood engravers, he participated in the visual revolution in popular print culture that occurred concurrently with the Chartist movement. In addition to engraving illustrations for the pioneering Illustrated London News (founded in May 1842, just before the General Strike), Linton was intimate with the Punch circle of artists and writers. He put this satirical experience to good use in the first part of his remarkable yet neglected illuminated poem Bob Thin; or the Poorhouse Fugitive (1845). The poem attacks the new Poor Law and the workhouse system by showing an honest artisan transformed into a pauper, but the originality of the text lies in its stunning array of grotesquely inventive capital letters that dance down the margin of the page like a parodic medieval manuscript. The second part of the poem is a quasi-​religious vision of a socialist Utopia in which the visual style shifts from the carnivalesque to the ‘floricultural’ in a manner anticipatory of William Morris. Linton’s contribution to the radical visual culture of the nineteenth century is still not fully appreciated: he played a vital role in reviving the reputation of William Blake by acting as chief engraver for Alexander Gilchrist’s important biography of Blake (1863); and by training the socialist artist and designer Walter Crane he also influenced the visual style of the Arts and Crafts movement in the last quarter of the century. It would not be an exaggeration to say that there has never been such a propitious time to study Chartist poetry. The poetry columns of the Northern Star are now easily accessible in digital form, while websites such as Minor Victorian Poets and Authors and Chartist 35  See Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, 186–​7; Paul, ‘In Louring Hindustan’; Gilbert, ‘History and Its Ends in Chartist Epic’. 36  The best discussion of Linton’s poetry to date is Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, 195–​216.

92    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Ancestors have made a wealth of literary texts and other Chartist documents freely available.37 John Goodridge’s monumental Labouring-​Class Poets reprint series and ancillary website has further augmented the expanding Chartist canon.38 I want to end this section, however, by drawing attention to a forgotten Chartist ‘epic’ that seems to have slipped through all the bibliographical nets. In 1839, at the height of the Chartist disturbances in Birmingham, Capel Lofft Junior self-​published Ernest; Or Political Regeneration, a book-​ length verse narrative about a German peasant who rebels against the local aristocracy and inaugurates a quasi-​socialist redistribution of the land. Superficially, this vision of agrarian justice may have seemed remote from the urban struggles of Chartism in 1839, but the poem’s allegorical celebration of physical force and expropriation of property was nothing short of literary dynamite. Faced with possible prosecution (the precise details are unclear), Lofft withdrew the poem, but not before it attracted the attention of the clerical journalist H. H. Millman who subjected the poem to an extensive, forty-​page denunciation in the Tory Quarterly Review.39 Ironically, this review has done much to preserve the poem’s ‘underground’ reputation. Millman’s article opens with an unambiguous declaration that Ernest ‘is the Chartist epic poem. It represents the growth, the heroic struggles, the triumph of Chartism’. Millman suspects that the poem is ‘rapidly and extensively, though cautiously and secretly, disseminated in the lower strata of society, or among the initiates’. Moreover, Millman acknowledges that the poem contains passages of ‘great beauty’ that merit ‘unreserved praise’. This makes the poem even more dangerous and hinders the aim of the review: to ‘read the Riot-​act of sober criticism’. The further irony is that the conventions of periodical reviewing undermine Millman’s ideological intervention: by quoting the poem extensively, the review reconstitutes rather than obliterates the ‘immense bulk’ of the absent Chartist text.40 A well-​researched recent article by Mark Allison has finally begun to address the unjust marginalization of this intriguing poem and its reception.41

Fiction42 As Timothy Randall has pointed out, Chartist writers faced the challenging task of chronicling a revolutionary political and social movement in an apposite ‘artistic 37  A free online edition of the Northern Star is available at Nineteenth-​Century Serials Edition: http://​ www.ncse.ac.uk/​headnotes/​nss.html Both Minor Victorian Poets and Authors (http://​gerald-​massey.org. uk/​) and Chartist Ancestors (http://​www.chartists.net/​) are free sites. 38  John Goodridge (ed.), Nineteenth-​Century English Labouring-​Class Poets, 3 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1995). Goodridge is also the editor of the Labouring-​Class Writers database: http://​human. ntu.ac.uk/​research/​labouringclasswriters/​Index.htm 39  [H. H. Millman], ‘Ernest, or Political Regeneration’, Quarterly Review, 65 (1839–​40), 153–​93. 40  [Millman], ‘Ernest, or Political Regeneration’, 153, 155, 168, 158, 159. 41  Mark Allison, ‘The Importance of Ernest: Poetic Vanguardism and Popular Revolution in Capel Lofft’s Forgotten Epic’, Nineteenth Century Literature, 67, no. 3 (2012), 285–​311. 42  The following discussion of Chartist fiction draws on my previous work in this area, and the reader is referred to the relevant introductions to my three volumes of Chartist fiction (all published by

The Literature of Chartism    93 form’.43 But whereas Chartist poets could draw on both Romantic and plebeian models to aid them in their task, there was no equivalent tradition of popular political fiction. This might explain why there is comparatively little Chartist fiction until the appearance of several full-​length novels in the so-​called ‘late’ period around 1848. This lag is usually explained in generic terms: in the early stages of the campaign, poetry was the most appropriate mode to inspire and direct the Chartist imagination. Poems were more easily composed and published and could therefore respond more quickly to events (see, for example, both Janowitz’s and Sanders’s excellent discussions of the poems written in response to the Newport Rising of 183944). Poems could both ventriloquize the ‘voice of the people’ and explore the inner life of the poet. Stories, on the other hand, required a credible hero and sufficient print space to develop a meaningful narrative. All these factors posed serious obstacles to aspiring Chartist authors. Once Chartism had endured sufficiently to become a period or passage of history in its own right, it became what Bakhtin calls a ‘chronotope’, a configuration of time and place that provided a canvas for dramatic plotting and (to a lesser extent) character development. But in its early stages it was entirely logical that the first tentative Chartist steps into fiction took the form of ‘pre-​novelistic’ discourses, notably the vignette or sketch, moral fable, and short story.45 These early tales were often thinly disguised pieces of propaganda in which the reader’s identification with the usually tragic fate of the main character was meant to enhance the moral and political message. Authors could also draw on the emerging phenomenon of cheap popular fiction by depicting class-​based clashes and struggles in melodramatic and sensational ways, though the movement had to wait until the advent of George W. M. Reynolds in the late 1840s for the full realization of the Chartist ‘best-​seller’. Despite its callowness, early Chartist fiction is not devoid of critical interest. Two conventions that are deployed by most stories can be noted here: the abject masculine hero and the deus ex machina. Even though the first phase of Chartism (the period covering the first two petitions of 1839 and 1842) was both formidable and militant, Chartist authors conceived of heroism and the ‘condition of England’ it personified in essentially tragic terms. One motivation behind this approach was to establish as quickly as possible a popular demonology and martyrology in tune with the heinous new era of Whig modernization and betrayal. In ‘Will Harper: A Poor Law Tale’ and ‘The Widow and the Fatherless’, two stories that appeared in Cleave’s

Ashgate) for more detailed analysis: see The Literature of Struggle: An Anthology of Chartist Fiction (1995), Chartist Fiction (1999), and Chartist Fiction, ii (2001). 43  Randall, ‘Chartist Poetry and Song’, 191. 44 Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism, ch. 4; Anne Janowitz, ‘The Chartist Picturesque’, in Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (eds), The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 261–​81. 45  Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 52–​67, 84–​258.

94    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Gazette of Variety in 1838, the central scene is a confrontation with the workhouse overseer.46 The hero Will Harper is a respectable artisan who is crushed by the forces of unemployment, poverty, and—​finally and most humiliatingly—​the workhouse system. Written during the first year of Chartism’s existence, these two stories show that the movement was fighting for both political rights and socio-​economic justice. Harper’s fate is the ne plus ultra, the nightmare of pauperization that faced all respectable Chartist breadwinners. His decline into drink, neglect, and crime is not presented as a morality fable of personal failure but as a warning that economic and social injustice will continue without a truly representative political system that redistributes wealth: this message does not have to spelt out as it is implicit in the story’s Chartist credentials that derive from its place of publication. (Cleave was a veteran of the unstamped wars who also published the important English Chartist Circular, at half a penny the cheapest of all Chartist periodicals.) On the other hand, the absence of political levers and class agency within the stories leaves a void which can only be filled by the most contrived of all devices, the sudden appearance of benign help and resources. In this case Harper’s widow is rescued from pauperdom by a benevolent gentleman who (for once) is not a seducer, though it is her graceful figure which attracts him. The gender imbalance in the story is conspicuous (though not of course unique to Chartist fiction), as the widow is not allowed to be either a true victim or a heroine who controls her own destiny; she is certainly a survivor, though ultimately with middle-​class male support. Some feminist critics such as Jutta Schwarzkopf have criticized Chartist literature for its conservative portrayal of gender,47 and it is probably the case that the widow’s polite redemption was designed to raise the chivalrous hackles of the male Chartist reader, though other Chartist stories, notably Ernest Jones’s Woman’s Wrongs, take an innovative look at the Victorian oppression of women. The turbulent events of 1839–​40 saw Chartist riots in Birmingham, an uprising in Newport, and mass arrests and transportations. Faced with state retaliation, the safest way for Chartist authors to introduce more successful or ‘physical force’ heroic action was to displace the narrative setting in various ways: historically, geographically, and, in one spectacular case, into the realms of fantasy. Several stories in the Chartist Circular in 1840 looked back to the revolutionary Romantic period. ‘The Revolutionist’ describes the battle for Paris in the early stages of the French Revolution and, with a complete disregard for historical accuracy, the tale shows how a young ‘operative’ becomes a spontaneous revolutionary leader. A pair of stories about the two Irish rebellions of 1798 and 1803, ‘The Defender: An Irish Tale of 1797’ and ‘The Rebel Chief: A Scene in the Wicklow Mountains’, are more authentic works of historical fiction, incorporating factual references, political analysis, and even some Gaelic dialogue.48 The two tales reflect

46 See The Literature of Struggle, 26–​37. 47 

See Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement.

48 See The Literature of Struggle, 60–​92.

The Literature of Chartism    95 the importance of Ireland in Chartist politics and literature: the repeal of the Union of 1800 was one of the demands of the 1842 petition; the Northern Star was named after the newspaper of the United Irishmen (probably due to the fact that Feargus O’Connor was the nephew of Arthur O’Connor, a United Irish leader); and one of Linton’s poetry collections was entitled Ireland for the Irish. Ireland was a constant source of outrage, fear, and admiration: outrage at colonial repression and exploitation; fear that a similar fate awaited the English working class if the Charter failed; and admiration at Irish resistance to tyranny. Understandably, Chartist authors were reluctant to preach an openly insurrectionist message, but in some rare cases, Chartists were presented with an unambiguous narrative of triumphal physical force. This was the case with Thomas Doubleday’s allegorical fantasy Political Pilgrim’s Progress, a serialized reworking of Bunyan’s classic that appeared anonymously in the radical Newcastle newspaper the Northern Liberator between January and March 1839. A separately published version sold around 6,000 copies, making it a local best-​seller. The story’s publication coincided with the first Chartist convention, and it is clear that the tale’s idealization of physical force was meant to influence the direction of Chartist policy. As the General Convention of the Industrious Classes convened in London in February 1839, Doubleday’s hero Radical left the City of Plunder and grasped his musket in readiness for his apocalyptic battle with Political Apollyon. Doubleday may have chosen religious fable and satire as disguises for a seditious message, but his imitation of Bunyan was also guaranteed to strike a chord with the radical reader. According to E. P. Thompson, Bunyan’s fable ranked alongside Paine’s The Rights of Man as a ‘foundation text’ of the English working class.49 Its enduring appeal stemmed from its inherently democratic values, vernacular language, witty imagination, and its promise of a better life to come. The Promised Land in Doubleday’s allegory is the City of Reform, a place where ‘every man possessing common industry was able to earn an ample livelihood, and bring up his family in ease and comfort’.50 This nostalgic Cobbett-​influenced fantasy of artisanal independence underpinned the mythology of mainstream, constitutional radicalism throughout the Chartist period and beyond. The core of its appeal was the reconstitution of Chartist masculinity, the antidote to the alienating and degrading forces of industrial capitalism and political corruption. In addition to advocating physical force, Doubleday may also have been responding to allegations of Chartist cowardice in the conservative press. Figaro in London, for example, lampooned the Chartist Convention as ‘a very cowardly set of political poltroons [… . T]he sight of a policeman scatters the mob of Chartists like chaff before the wind’, and similar smears would resurface in 1848.51 But Doubleday also met with a forceful literary riposte from within the ranks of Chartism. Between May and July 1839, Alexander Sommerville issued Defensive Warnings to the People on Street Warfare, a story that uses 49 

See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin, 1977), 34–​8. Chartist Fiction, 58–​9. 51  Figaro in London, 8 (1839), 201, 250, 147. 50 

96    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture fictional reportage to imagine the perilous consequences of a Chartist uprising. (Ernest Jones included a similar vision of urban slaughter in his novel De Brassier: A Democratic Romance.)52 Sommerville’s text was also a reply to Colonel Macerone’s popular manual of streetfighting, Defensive Instructions for the People (1832). While these internal divisions about the use of physical force give Political Pilgrim’s Progress an added charge, the modern reader is likely to be offended by the story’s anti-​Semitic portrayal of ‘jew-​ jobbers’, a feature that shows a negative aspect of Doubleday’s indebtness to William Cobbett. Important as they are, none of these ‘heroic’ stories provided a model for the development of what we can call Chartist anti-​realism, a mode of fictional representation that sought to portray ordinary lives in remarkable political circumstances and that consciously refused the customary narrative consolations of a happy ending and the settlement of property. The breakthrough came in the mid-​1840s with Thomas Cooper’s innovative short story ‘ “Merrie England”—​No More!’ (1845).53 This tale, composed in prison like The Purgatory of Suicides, shows a brief skirmish between a group of Chartist stockingers and a local recruiting sergeant. The Chartists force the sergeant to hand back one of their sons, but this fleeting triumph over an emissary of state power is not reflected in the story’s ending: There is no tale to finish about John or his lad, or Jem and his wife. They went on starving,—​begging,—​receiving threats of imprisonment,—​tried the ‘Bastille’ for a few weeks,—​came out and had a little work,—​starved again; and they are still going the same miserable round, like thousands in ‘merrie England’. What are your thoughts, reader?54

This is more than just an open ending: Cooper’s stumbling prose enacts the lack of narrative and social resolution. The story shows that Chartist authors had an acute understanding of the ideological significance of narrative forms and the means to challenge and subvert them (compare Cooper’s story to the deeply flawed representation of Chartism in Disraeli’s ‘two nations’ novel Sybil, published in the same year).55 Cooper established a new level of confidence and sophistication for aspiring Chartist authors.56 Just four years later the Northern Star serialized the first full-​blown Chartist novel, Thomas Martin Wheeler’s Sunshine and Shadow: A Tale of the Nineteenth Century. 52 

The Literature of Struggle, 106–​30, 148–​57. The Literature of Struggle, 53–​9. 54  The Literature of Struggle, 59. 55  For an interesting reading of Cooper’s short stories as a ‘broken’ Bildungsroman, see Greg Vargo, ‘A Life in Fragments: Thomas Cooper’s Chartist Bildungsroman’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 39, no. 1 (2011), 167–​81. See also Rob Breton, ‘Ghosts in the Machina: Plotting in Chartist and Working-​Class Fiction’, Victorian Studies, 47, no. 4 (2005), 557–​75. 56  In 1843 the Northern Star was still expressing reservations about the value of reading novels: ‘We think novel reading, at the best, only an indifferent substitute for a worse occupation of time. But we are not ignorant of the fact that however we may moralise, many hundreds of new-​born intellects of modern improvement and enlightenment look out for novels with avidity’ (28 January 1843). 53 

The Literature of Chartism    97 Wheeler’s novel appeared in thirty-​seven weekly ‘communions’ between March 1849 and January 1850. Wheeler proclaimed the originality of his project in the first instalment:  [the] fiction department of literature has hitherto been neglected by the scribes of our body, and the opponents of our principles have been allowed to wield the power of imagination over the youth of our party, without any effort on our part to occupy that wide and fruitful field.57

Unlike Charles Kingsley, whose novel Alton Locke (1850) can be regarded as a counterblast to Sunshine and Shadow, Wheeler had no intention of writing Chartism’s obituary, but he needed a narrative method that would allow him to present both the subjective experience of the central characters and the objective historical features of Chartism’s decade of existence. His solution was to focalize a ‘History of Chartism’ through the depiction of ‘one of yourselves struggling against the power of adverse circumstances’.58 This proletarianization of the Bildungsroman opened up the techniques of realism to the passions and discourses of political protest (and, as will be shown, Reynolds achieved the same result by more spectacular means). Though each chapter is short, Wheeler rarely loses an opportunity to launch into a passionate diatribe against a social or political injustice. Taking his cue from incidents in the story, he lambasts a whole range of Victorian evils including the oppression of women within marriage, the corruption of Parliament, the venality of the mainstream press, the perpetuation of plantation slavery in America, and the aristocratic ambitions of the new moneyed middle classes (the villain of the story is a wine merchant who becomes a peer). In one sense, Wheeler was using his story as the equivalent of an oratorical platform, but he was also integrating the fictional world of the story into the Northern Star’s discursive matrix. The same emphasis on the determining forces of history and politics is also applied to the hero Arthur Morton, whose character development is closely related to the fortunes of Chartism. (His love affair with the villain’s sister, for example, could not have occurred if Arthur had not fled England to avoid being arrested for his participation in the 1839 disturbances.) This methodology had the added advantage of making best use of the limited space available to Wheeler for complex character development.59 Though Arthur’s fate is determined by external forces, the depiction of his inner life justifies Wheeler’s claim that Chartists are capable of ‘high and generous inspirations’.60 By writing a Chartist love story, Wheeler was rebutting the post-​1848 stereotype of the debased or deluded 57 

Chartist Fiction, 72. Chartist Fiction, 192. 59  Left-​wing critics have judged Wheeler’s sketchy characterization rather harshly. See Jack B. Mitchell, ‘Aesthetic Problems of the Development of the Proletarian-​Revolutionary Novel in Nineteenth-​ Century Britain’, in David Craig (ed.), Marxists on Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 245–​66; Martha Vicinus, ‘Chartist Fiction and the Development of Class-​based Literature’, in Gustav Klaus (ed.), The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), 7–​25. 60  Chartist Fiction, 192. 58 

98    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Chartist malcontent: ‘Chartism is the offspring of the imagination; the feelings must be aroused before reason will summons judgment to its assistance, and never was a cause more hallowed by refined feelings, by chivalrous devotion, and disinterested purity, than the Chartist cause’.61 Wheeler’s anti-​realism was a significant achievement, though it still relied on elements of the familiar romance plot. Chartist novelists could only modify rather than abandon the narrative conventions of romance: the core elements of exciting (if far-​ fetched) plotting, class villainy, heroic struggle, and sexual intrigue could be retained so long as the text remained committed to and conscious of a Chartist critique. Ernest Jones published two political ‘romances’ in his own periodicals: The Romance of a People (1847) and De Brassier: A Democratic Romance (1851–​2).62 The Romance of a People, was a protest against the Russian annexation of the Polish republic of Cracow in 1846; in 1854 it was reissued in cheap format as The Maid of Warsaw (1854). De Brassier gained some notoriety in Chartist circles, as its charlatan aristocratic hero was thought to be a thinly veiled portrait of Feargus O’Connor. Thomas Frost’s The Secret, published in O’Connor’s unstamped penny periodical the National Instructor in 1850, was another blatant conflation of implausible romantic plotting and Chartist reportage.63 Frost’s hero is Ernest Rodwell, a compositor and physical-​force Chartist who falls in love with Lizzie Vincent, a seduced maid. The ‘secret’ of the story’s title refers to the fact that Lizzie, like Disraeli’s Sybil, is a changeling. She is actually Lady Alicia, heiress to a fortune, but rather than give Ernest up, she renounces her title and the two are married. The shakiness of the plot suggests a strong degree of escapism, though the persistent use of the new term ‘proletarian’ and the narrator’s barbed attacks on class enemies keep the tale within Chartist readers’ horizon of expectations. As these examples show, the Chartist novel was one of the most memorable literary highlights of ‘late’ Chartism. The proliferation of long fiction both reflected and stimulated the demand for sustained, exciting narratives. Some critics have implied that this heavy investment in fiction derived from the defeat of Chartism as a mass movement: on the one hand, as if they were fighting a desperate rearguard action, Chartist authors pampered the movement with a consolation prize of undiluted sensation and escapism; on the other hand, the novels show that Chartism was already changing from an active movement into a period of history and a canvas for fictionalization. In John Plotz’s words, Sunshine and Shadow was ‘engineered to fail’.64 But this kind of critical approach underplays the extent to which ‘late’ Chartism represented a significant reinvigoration and reradicalization of the movement, and this sharp swing to the political left found a potent literary expression in the range and scope of the Chartist novel. Perhaps the

61 

Chartist Fiction, 124. The Romance of a People (1847) appeared in The Labourer; De Brassier: A Democratic Romance (1851–​2) was published in Notes to the People. 63  The story appeared in the first volume of the National Instructor, 2 vols. (1850–​1). 64  John Plotz, ‘Chartist Literature’, in David Scott Kastan (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, i (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 440–​4, at 443. 62 

The Literature of Chartism    99 most significant breakthrough came from one of the most controversial ‘late’ recruits to Chartism, George W. M. Reynolds. Reynolds was already an established popular novelist and publisher when he burst onto the Chartist scene in March 1848.65 A renegade from the upper middle classes, Reynolds had led a chequered literary career in the sometimes murky world of the new mass fiction. He made his mark with Pickwick Abroad (1839), a plagiarism of Dickens, and followed this success with a voluminous quantity of original fiction that catered for the sensational appetites of the rapidly expanding, lower-​class urban reading public. His talents as an editor and popular publisher were demonstrated when he boosted the circulation of the London Journal (1845–​1928) and set up his own periodical, Reynolds’s Miscellany in 1846. Reynolds laced all these publications with an ardent republicanism, a racy exposure of upper-​class ignominy that translated readily into melodramatic formulae, and a commitment to popular enlightenment that rivalled the more conservative ideology of ‘useful knowledge’ advocates such as Charles Knight. When the French Revolution of February 1848 revived the fortunes of Chartism, Reynolds seized the opportunity to become a radical political leader. During the course of an anti-​income tax meeting held in Trafalgar Square in central London, Reynolds literally stormed the platform and demanded support for Chartism and the French Revolution. His inflammatory rhetorical skills were no longer confined to the printed page and the enraged crowd went on the rampage. Reynolds shot to Chartist prominence, and though his debut was not welcomed by many of the movement’s established leaders, he became an instant celebrity. Unlike other Chartist ‘laureates’, Reynolds already commanded a vast following of loyal fans, and he stood in the unique position of being able to mobilize this army of readers into support for the movement. Within weeks of his ascendancy to the highest ranks of Chartism, Reynolds re-​ enacted his Chartist coup in the pages of his phenomenally successful series The Mysteries of London (1844–​8). In the manner of a modern ‘newsflash’, he interrupted the story to announce both the French Revolution and his own messianic rise to Chartist fame. The radical disjunction between the ongoing fictional narrative and the dramatic political priorities thrust up by historical crisis was emblematized on the page: in a series of long footnotes containing newspaper reports from both France and London (including accounts of his speech in Trafalgar Square), Reynolds emblazoned a new type of popular literary culture in which fictional seriality was permeated by the immediate demands of political exigency.66 In one sense this was not a huge leap for his readers who were already schooled in his publications’ mix of entertainment and instruction, but the historical moment supercharged the disruption of the reading experience. This

65  The following discussion of Reynolds draws on chs. 6–​9 of Haywood, The Revolution in Popular Literature. 66  Rob Breton argues that the ‘generic fusion’ of ‘affective and analytical discourses’ in Chartist periodicals was ‘continuous with earlier working-​class expressions in England’ (‘Genre in the Chartist Periodical’, in Aruna Krishnamurphy (ed.), The Working-​Class Intellectual in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-​ Century Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 109–​28, at 117, 110).

100    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture dislocation was most evident in the incongruity between some of the stylized, melodramatic illustrations and the re-​engineered text. In one example, the same page contains a conventional image of romantic intrigue and the Six Points of the Charter. Given the importance of illustrations for the lesser educated reader, this mismatch may initially have caused some consternation, but the deeper point was that the cure for London’s melodramatic ‘mysteries’ was exactly what the Chartists were fighting for: greater political and social equality. Reynolds converted the page into a dynamic circuit of fiction and ‘news’, politics and pleasure, writing and speech. In order to grasp the scale of this achievement, one only has to consider the controversy that would have been ignited if Dickens had incorporated a similar radical diatribe into the monthly instalments of Dombey and Son. Dickens was only too aware of Reynolds’s popularity, and Household Words was one of several liberal periodicals established to counter Reynolds’s hold over a vast readership.67 But Reynolds also met resistance from within the Chartist laureateship. Reynolds’s main Chartist competitor was Ernest Jones, who published several serialized novels in his periodical Notes to the People. Unlike Reynolds, Jones had an uneasy relationship with popular culture. While Reynolds celebrated the continuity between his two careers in his inaugural speech in Trafalgar Square in March 1848 (‘in all the novels and romances he had written, he had never failed to push forward the great rights of humanity’), Jones agonized about taking a populist step too far, prefacing the first volume of Notes to the People in 1851 with a promise ‘not to pander to the sensuality of the public by meretricious writing—​not to degrade the literature of democracy to the level of the street walker [… .] Democracy is so holy, it must not be coupled with anything impure’.68 Despite these reservations, Jones knew that to boost the sales of his periodical he had to provide something more spicy and ‘meretricious’ than the usual fare of political essays and high-​minded poetry. To that end he published his innovative portmanteau novel Woman’s Wrongs (1852), a series of four (later five) stories that expose the oppression of women in different social classes.69 Following Victorian cultural conventions, Jones charts the tragic demise of respectable women ground down or betrayed by circumstances, and several of the stories contain both ‘streetwalkers’ and ‘impure’ couplings. But Jones’s radicalism lies in his refusal to condemn the heroines for their actions. After one of his heroines (a young milliner) has succumbed to her lover’s advances, Jones

67  In the ‘Preliminary Word’ to the first issue of Household Words Dickens attacked Reynolds (though not by name) as one of the ‘Bastards of the Mountain, draggled fringe on the Red Cap’ (Household Words: A Weekly Journal, 1 (30 March 1850), 1–​2). For discussions of the validity of Dickens’s low opinion of Reynolds, see Sally Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 163–​77; and Juliet John, ‘Reynolds’s Mysteries and Popular Culture’, in Anne Humpherys and Louis James (eds), G. W. M. Reynolds: Nineteenth-​Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 161–​78 (see 163–​5, 176–​7). 68 Haywood, Revolution in Popular Literature, 176; Jones, Notes to the People, p. xvi. 69 See Chartist Fiction, ii for the full text of Woman’s Wrongs. For a rare critical discussion of the novel, see Sally Ledger, ‘Chartist Aesthetics in the Mid Nineteenth Century: Ernest Jones, a Novelist of the People’, Nineteenth-​Century Literature, 57, no. 1 (2002), 31–​63.

The Literature of Chartism    101 declaims: ‘that young girl was better, more virtuous, more good—​aye! more pure—​than ninety-​nine out of every hundred of the sanctimonious tyrants who, in their self-​righteous morality, would trample that appealing spirit down into the street!’70 Woman’s Wrongs was clearly aimed at women readers and may even have been designed to dislodge some of Reynolds’s loyal female readership. This aspect of Chartist and radical fiction contravenes most of the assumptions about the gendered basis of Victorian reading habits and merits further investigation.

Drama? Though Chartism itself was undoubtedly a dramatic historical narrative, the almost complete absence of Chartist plays can perhaps be explained by the significant resources required to mount stage productions.71 Thomas Cooper’s ‘Shakespeare Chartist Association’ performed Shakespeare plays (often with Cooper in the lead), though these would have been very modest in scale. The only Chartist play known to exist is John Watkins’s verse drama about the 1839 Newport rising, John Frost. Written shortly after the actual events, an excerpt of the text was published in the Northern Star in 1841, but the play was never performed, perhaps due to fear of prosecution.72 Unless a cache of previously unknown Chartist plays comes to light, Watkins’s fugitive text will remain as the sole, tantalizing example of Chartist drama.

Conclusion The digitization of the Northern Star and the growing availability of online Chartist texts will hopefully sustain and facilitate a healthy critical interest in Chartist literature. But I want to end with a note of caution. One of the dangers of the relative ease with which students and scholars can now search for and retrieve Chartist literary texts (particularly those that appeared in periodicals) is the failure to engage fully with Chartist historiography: a weak grasp of the relevant debates and events can lead to misleading or superficial claims for a text’s political agency.73 Thankfully, Malcolm Chase’s Chartism: A New History provides a highly readable narrative and a wealth of information that will surely make it the starting point for students who are coming to Chartism for the first time.

70 

Chartist Fiction, ii. 58. Paul Thomas Murphy, Towards a Working-​Class Canon: Literary Criticism in British Working-​Class Periodicals, 1816–​1858 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994), ch. 5, esp. p. 152. 72  The excerpt from the play was reprinted in Kovalev, Anthology, 83–​5. 73  See Malcolm Chase, ‘Digital Chartism: Online Sources for the Study of Chartism’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 14, no. 2 (2009), 294–​7. 71 

102    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Chase’s book enables any Chartist text to be located and contextualized within the larger chronology of Chartism’s changing fortunes. The ‘literature of Chartism’ was, after all, a ‘literature of your own’.

Select Bibliography Armstrong, Isobel, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge 1996). Breton, Rob, ‘Ghosts in the Machina: Plotting in Chartist and Working-​Class Fiction’, Victorian Studies, 47, no. 4 (2005), 557–​75. Chase, Malcolm, Chartism: A New History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Haywood, Ian (ed.), The Literature of Struggle: An Anthology of Chartist Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1995). Haywood, Ian (ed.), Chartist Fiction:  Thomas Doubleday, ‘The Political Pilgrim’s Progress’; Thomas Martin Wheeler, ‘Sunshine and Shadow’ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). Haywood, Ian (ed.), Chartist Fiction, ii. Ernest Jones, ‘Woman’s Wrongs’ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). Janowitz, Anne, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1998). Sanders, Mike, The Poetry of Chartism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Vargo, Greg, ‘A Life in Fragments:  Thomas Cooper’s Chartist Bildungsroman’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 39, no. 1 (2011), 167–​81. Vicinus, Martha, The Industrial Muse:  A  Study of Nineteenth-​ Century British Working-​ Class Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1974).

Chapter 5

Liberalism a nd Literatu re Lauren M. E. Goodlad

I Was the Victorian era’s literary culture ‘liberal’? As with so many questions on this topic, the answer depends on how one defines the key term. Liberalism in the sense of a political agenda attached to a party did not fully exist until the years between 1847 and 1868, when the Whigs effected their transition into Liberals. By the late 1850s, writes Jonathan Parry, the Liberal Party had shed the appearance of narrow aristocratic interests to become a natural ‘ruling force’ in British politics.1 Yet, in 1886 when the Liberals split over home rule in Ireland, the demise of liberalism as a coherent platform was already clear. Old-​school liberals who continued to favour rigid individualism and laissez-​faire increasingly migrated to the Conservatives. In the late Victorian and Edwardian years, progressives inside and outside Parliament began to promote a ‘New’ Liberalism determined to alleviate poverty, adopt collectivist notions of social agency, and moderate imperial policy. But long before these movements culminated in the welfare state of the post-​war epoch, the Labour Party (founded in 1900) along with socialist groups of various stripes had supplanted the Liberal Party as the base for such political aspirations. As George Dangerfield argued in The Strange Death of Liberal England, Liberalism’s tenure as a ruling force in British politics expired in the years before the First World War.2 One result of the relatively short-​lived history of institutionalized liberal politics in Britain is a striking difference in terminology on different sides of the Atlantic. Whereas left-​leaning politics in the United States are usually called ‘liberal’, the same term is often 1  Jonathan Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 167. 2  George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935; Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997).

104    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture used by social democrats in the UK and Europe to describe free-​market ideologies or neo-​liberalism. Though it is sometimes discussed under neutral-​seeming terms such as ‘modernization’, neo-​liberal orthodoxy elevates market forces to the arbiter of all human affairs. As the geographer David Harvey puts it, neo-​liberalism ‘proposes that human well-​being can best be advanced by liberating individual freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’.3 This position is ‘neo-​liberal’ because of the insistent return to the classical economic doctrines that prevailed prior to the regulatory and redistributive policies implemented between the late nineteenth century and the post-​war decades.4 Thus, despite significant differences between the two periods, one finds uncanny echoes of the Victorian rhetoric of liberal individualism in the political discourse prevalent since the Reagan–​Thatcher years. Considered as a political philosophy, ‘liberalism’ encompasses a diverse range of referents. Although John Locke, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and J. S. Mill are its best-​known British propounders, the civic republican tradition (as J.  G. A.  Pocock has extensively demonstrated) exerted a major impact on the political developments of Britain and the United States.5 The influence of Kant, Hegel, and other German Romantics, is also important to grasping the panoply of Victorian-​era liberal thought. Under the sign of British Idealism, exemplified by the influential work of T. H. Green, this school of philosophy dominated the British academy from the mid-​Victorian decades through the First World War, providing intellectual impetus for the transition from individualist to collectivist conceptions of the social world.6 Yet even before Green’s case for a holistic social ontology, John Stuart Mill, Britain’s most famous ‘liberal’ (though generally considered a radical in his time), had already anticipated the move towards eventual embrace of cooperative ‘socialism’ in some form. Although he is sometimes 3  David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2. The economist Joseph Stiglitz concisely describes neo-​liberalism as a ‘simplistic model of the market economy’ in which ‘Adam Smith’s invisible hand works, and works perfectly’; Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 2002), 74. But the so-​called free market of today is, in fact, heavily subsidized by government, and industrializing economies have historically relied, and continue to rely, on concerted state activity. 4  Yet, as Regenia Gagnier reminds us, few eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century political economists ‘were prepared to say, as free marketers have been boasting’ since the fall of the Soviet Union that the market ‘was the highest form of society’; The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 9. 5  J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For a comprehensive discussion of civic republicanism, a political philosophy (connected to thinkers from Aristotle and Machiavelli to Mazzini and Arendt) which focuses on citizen participation and the kind of democratic and social institutions which foster it, see, for example, Erik Olsen, Civic Republicanism and the Properties of Democracy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). 6  Following Green’s example, Hegel is usually the dominant influence in British Idealism. As Andrew Vincent notes, Green shared ‘Kant’s appreciation of the self-​conscious agent’, but ‘criticized Kant’s doctrine of the agent’s manifold independence’; ‘Becoming Green’, Victorian Studies, 48, no. 3 (Spring 2006), 488–​504, at 492.

Liberalism and Literature    105 mischaracterized as a proponent of Locke’s possessive individualism, an Enlightenment idealist like Kant, or a classical utilitarian like his mentor Bentham, Mill was in fact the progenitor of a hybrid modern liberalism that blended civic republicanism, historicism, German Romanticism, and the legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment, with a utilitarian theory renovated to focus on the collective good, not individual happiness.7 Thus, according to Raymond Williams, Mill’s effort to syncretize these modern inputs represents ‘a prologue to a very large part of the subsequent history of English thinking’.8 In On Liberty (1859), a work inspired partly by the Romantic thought of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Mill argued that a ‘rich, diversified, and animating’ culture facilitated ‘the tie which binds every individual to the race’.9 From the standpoint of the broad modern history Williams’s study describes, ‘liberalism’ shares strong affinities with, and is arguably inseparable from, a number of long-​ evolving and large-​scale ethico-​political ideals, processes, and endeavours. Frequently tied to (or defined in terms of) a democratic political structure, ‘liberalism’ can also signify a theory of progress, freedom, equality, or tolerance; a universalizing perspective; a cosmopolitan ethics; a procedural ethics rooted in theories of democratic consent; or an ideological basis for globalizing capital and/​or promoting (or rejecting) imperial pursuits. Of course, a liberalism defined to be all of these things at once quickly begins to contradict itself—​a problem that scholars sometimes address in their analyses. But even when the tensions and contradictions internal to liberalism in its various guises are not the main object of a particular study, scholarship on the topic should, at the very least, acknowledge the plurality of liberal discourse. As the political theorist Wendy Brown remarks, liberalism is ‘a nonsystematic and porous doctrine subject to historical change and local variation’.10 The point is not that scholars cannot tender specific arguments about liberalism, but that such arguments should specify the dimensions of liberal thinking or practice to which they apply. Although not all analyses of liberalism need to adopt historicist methods, the fact of liberalism’s variability over time cannot be ignored without a sacrifice of coherence and accuracy. And while not all scholarship need be comparative, almost any discussion of the topic can benefit from a basic awareness of the many differences between, for example, the ‘liberalism’ of French, Haitian, Bolivian, or Italian revolutionaries; early Victorian Whigs; evangelical missionaries in Jamaica; 7 

See, for example, Gal Gerson, ‘Liberal Feminism: Individuality and Oppositions in Wollstonecraft and Mill’, Political Studies, 50, no. 4 (September 2002), 794–​810; and Lauren M. E. Goodlad, ‘“Character Worth Speaking Of ”: Individuality, John Stuart Mill, and the Critique of Liberalism’, Victorians Institute Journal, 36 (2008), 7–​45. 8  Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–​1950 (1958; New York: Columbia Univerity Press, 1983), 49. On Mill’s ‘positive view of what the life of the individual should be’ in comparison to Green’s more developed notion of positive freedom, see Peter Nicholson, ‘The Reception and Early Reputation of Mill’s Political Thought’, in John Skorupski (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 464–​497, at 488. 9  John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Edward Alexander (1859; Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 1999), 109. 10  Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 141.

106    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture working-​class Chartists; Irish republicans; trade unionists; Prussian intellectuals in the German Empire; Indian nationalists; pan-​Africanists; African American claimants to civil rights; Tea Party advocates in the present-​day United States; and liberal detractors of Islam in Western Europe. While ‘liberal’ discourse is, thus, contextual and multivalent, the specifically literary reference points of the term are hardly reducible to political platforms, economic doctrines, philosophical stances, or ideological agendas—​however various and particular. Consider, for example, a single passage from Walter Pater’s Winckelmann chapter in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). In a text first published in the Westminster Review in 1867 Pater describes Winckelmann’s first contact with classical antiquities: Hitherto he had handled the words only of Greek poetry, stirred […] by them, yet divining beyond the words some unexpressed pulsation of sensuous life. Suddenly, he is in contact with that life, still fervent in the relics of plastic art [… .] Winckelmann here reproduces for us the earlier sentiment of the Renaissance. On a sudden the imagination feels itself free. How facile and direct, it seems to say, is this life of the senses and the understanding, when once we have apprehended it! Here, surely, is that more liberal mode of life we have been seeking so long, so near to us all the while.11

As James Eli Adams observes, the passage ‘daringly insinuates the subversive power of an erotic liberation’ in a text that constructs ‘a model of homoerotic desire’ alongside a particular history ‘that authorizes its pleasures’.12 Without dissenting from that interpretation, I suggest that Pater’s invocation of ‘that more liberal mode of life’ extends beyond the stake in homoerotic desire in simultaneously standing for a liberal ideal expressed in various forms of Victorian literature. Considered in this light, it is doubtless obvious that while The Renaissance was written during the crest of the Liberal Party’s political ascendancy, Pater’s ‘liberal mode of life’ is hardly compassed by the conventional tenets of liberal individualism: for example, normative self-​help, the ‘night-​watchman’ state, laissez-​faire capitalism, ‘free’ trade, or methodological individualism.13 Instead, The Renaissance is part of that broader tradition of liberal thought (often designated as humanism) which Lionel Trilling has defined as ‘a large tendency rather than a concise body of doctrine’.14 11  Walter Pater, The Renaissance, ed. Donald Hill (1893; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 146–​147. 12  James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 169–​170. 13  For defence of the ‘night-​watchmen state of classical liberal theory’, which enforces contracts and protect citizens ‘against violence, theft, and fraud’, see Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 26. ‘Methodological individualism’ is usually defined to describe outlooks that consider individuals as the basic unit for social analysis—​in contrast to the methodological holism that views society collectively. 14  Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Doubleday, 1949), pp. vi–​vii.

Liberalism and Literature    107 As such, Pater’s evocation of a desired ‘liberal mode of life’ helps us to explore a division crucial to grasping liberalism’s conceptual complexity. This is the tension between negative and positive conceptions of freedom:  often characterized as the distinction between a freedom from external interference and the freedom to partake in or cultivate various practices, pleasures, and pursuits. Whereas negative liberty derives from classical liberalism where its historical task was to break down the regulatory structures of mercantilism and the ancien régime, positive liberty is often associated with the mid-​ to-​late-​Victorian turn towards collectivism. As Ellen Meiksins Wood has argued, the historical priority of negative liberty makes the Anglo-​American democratic tradition distinctly different from the conditions that gave rise to democracy in ancient Greece. Athenian democracy was achieved by breaking down the ‘division between rulers and producers’ through the enfranchisement of what had been a peasant class—​constituting freedom as a condition of citizenship and vice versa. By contrast, England’s Magna Carta marked the assertion of aristocratic privilege over the Crown on the one side and a disempowered multitude on the other. The notion of ‘popular sovereignty’ which emerged, unlike the Athenian demos, centred on the circumscribed power of this hereditary elite. The result was to enshrine not only exclusivity but also anti-​statism as a cardinal feature of English freedom—​that is, the freedom of feudal landowners to hold the royal state at bay.15 As Pater’s passage reminds us, the same principle of negative freedom could be invoked (as it was in Britain in the 1960s) to curb the state’s power to regulate sexuality. The point of Wood’s analysis is not, however, to dismiss the importance of challenging state intrusion, but to show how English democracy had to rediscover a foundation for the broader-​based citizenship that had been integral to Athenian democracy. This is why the advent of positive freedom—​germinal in Mill’s drift towards cooperative socialism and articulated more fully in Green’s Hegelian idealism—​is usually considered a defining moment in the transition to social democracy. When ‘we speak of freedom’ as ‘the greatest of blessings’ and ‘the true end of all our effort as citizens’, Green observed in a well-​known 1881 speech, We do not mean merely freedom from restraint or compulsion. We do not mean merely freedom to do as we like irrespectively of what it is that we like. We do not mean a freedom that can be enjoyed by one man or one set of men at the cost of a loss of freedom to others. When we speak of freedom as something to be so highly prized, we mean a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying, and that, too, something that we do or enjoy in common with others. We mean by it a power which each man exercises through the help or security given him by his fellow-​men, and which he in turn helps to secure for them. When we measure the progress of a society by its growth in freedom, we measure it by the 15  Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 205. Especially relevant here is c­ hapter 7: ‘The demos versus “we, the people”: from ancient to modern conceptions of citizenship’. Of course, citizen equality in Athens was made tenable in large part by a non-​citizen class of slaves.

108    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture increasing development and exercise on the whole of those powers of contributing to social good with which we believe the members of the society to be endowed; in short, by the greater power on the part of the citizens as a body to make the most and best of themselves.16

Green’s definition of freedom combats the notion of liberty as a purely negative (and, thus, impoverished and atomistic) ethico-​political ideal. The second sentence—​‘We do not mean merely freedom to do as we like irrespectively of what it is that we like’—​ answers Matthew Arnold’s equation, in the second chapter of Culture and Anarchy (1867–​9), of British liberty with a dangerous predilection towards ‘Doing as one Likes’. Although Arnold describes this anarchic tendency as pervasive among Britons of every station, he regarded it as especially pernicious in the working classes who, at the time of his writing, were agitating for enlargement of the parliamentary franchise. Unlike their counterparts on the Continent, he emphasized, British labourers were not required to perform military service. Hence, in contrast to a French populace that learns ‘the idea of public duty and of discipline’ from soldiering, the British working classes, according to Arnold, were insubordinate, ‘raw and uncultivated’.17 Culture and Anarchy thus joined George Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) and Walter’s Bagehot’s The English Constitution (1866–​7) in voicing liberal opposition to expansion of the franchise just months before the Tories successfully steered the Second Reform Act through Parliament. By contrast, Green’s conception of citizenship as a social orientation towards the common good enabled him to embrace the adult male democracy that had become all but inevitable in the years leading up to the Third Reform Act (which enfranchised rural working men in 1884). Freedom as Green defined it could not be ‘enjoyed by […] one set of men at the cost of a loss of freedom to others’ because only a situation of relative equality among citizens could enable the mutual empowerment that underlay his optimistic social ontology. Civic equality required not only the right to vote but also educational and economic opportunities sufficient to enable ‘citizens as a body to make the most and best of themselves’. This definition of positive freedom derived from Hegel’s idea of Sittlichkeit (ethical life) which holds that the condition of citizenship should reconcile individual liberty with participation in and, thus, development through the community—​ensuring what Green describes as the ‘power which each man exercises through the help or security given him by his fellow-​men, and which he in turn helps to secure for them’.18 This collectivist view of the individual makes his or her poverty inimical to the community in diminishing ‘the whole of those powers of contributing to 16 

T. H. Green, ‘Lecture on Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract’, in Collected Works of T. H. Green, ed. Peter Nicholson (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1997), iii. 370–​371. 17  Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 53–​212, at 84. 18  On Green’s Hegelianism, see Ben Wempe, T. H. Green’s Theory of Positive Freedom (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004). On Hegel’s idea of Sittlichkeit, see G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood and trans. H. B. Nisbet (1820; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Liberalism and Literature    109 social good with which we believe the members of the society to be endowed’. In 1893, the Cambridge economist Alfred Marshall illustrated how far these ideas had eroded the doctrinaire self-​help of the early Victorian era: ‘extreme poverty’, he testified before Parliament, ‘ought to be regarded, not indeed as a crime, but as a thing so detrimental to the State that it should not be endured’.19 To be sure, Green (who died in 1882 at the age of 45) never specified the means by which an enlarged male franchise transforms a market society predicated on private ownership of property into a body of substantively equal citizens each of whom enjoys the ‘positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying’. Nor does he explain how this citizenry determines which practices and pursuits are ‘worth doing or enjoying’ without trampling on diversity and individual liberty. Still less does Green’s philosophy address the unfreedom of non-​citizens such as women or the colonized subjects of Britain’s expanding empire. In the 1890s, these questions were taken up by a variety of New Liberals, trade unionists, and socialists who were alike in sharing a philosophical commitment to positive freedom underwritten by a holist social ontology. Indeed, Marx and Engels had already epitomized that commitment in their 1848 Manifesto which envisioned ‘an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’.20 This is not to ignore the differences between the New Liberal adumbration of social democracy and the Marxist vision of communism. Whereas New Liberals looked to the expansion of state welfare and to redistributive measures like the People’s Budget of 1909 to ensure a free body of citizens, Marxists (among other socialists) looked to the radicalization of the social body through the elimination of private property and the collectivization of wealth. Marxism never developed into a prominent influence on nineteenth-​ century British politics. Yet, among the Victorian era’s diverse socialist and utopian thinkers, one finds Oscar Wilde writing in 1891 that ‘Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-​operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and ensure the material well-​being of each member’.21 According to Wilde, the greatest potential benefit of this transformation of the social would be ‘Individualism’: that is, the ability of each to ‘choose [a]‌sphere of activity that is really congenial […] and gives [one] pleasure’ and, in doing so, contributes positively to ‘all Humanity’.22 That Wilde envisioned the collectivization of wealth and the universalization of freedom to entail the perfection of a socially beneficial ‘Individualism’ suggests how deeply syncretic liberalism of the Millean kind runs through the British imagination of ‘that more liberal mode of life’ which Pater evoked in the 1860s. Indeed, both 19 

Evidence of Professor Alfred Marshall, Monday, 5 June 1893, in Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Royal Commission on the Aged Poor, 3 vols. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1895), i. 544. 20  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Marx–​Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (2nd edn., New York: Norton, 1978), 469–​501. 21  Oscar Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, in The Artist as Critic: The Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 255–​289, at 257. 22  Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, 257.

110    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Pater and Wilde mark the influence of On Liberty’s powerful idealization of an individuality constituted through—​and, in effect, liberated by—​participation in the social and civic. In a sentence that any aesthete might have written, Mill declared: ‘It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it and calling it forth […] that human beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation.’23

II So far this discussion has adhered to the usual contours of writing on ‘Victorian’ literary culture in emphasizing the discourse and practices particular to the British Isles. On closer inspection, however, it is already clear that ‘liberalism’ is an intrinsically transnational discursive constellation which requires reference to Celtic as well as English ideas, Continental as well as utilitarian philosophy, and classical as well as Anglo-​American republican ideals. But scholars must also recognize that British liberalism arose in conjunction with, and was therefore embedded in, material structures that included the Atlantic slave trade (abolished in Britain in 1807), the rise and post-​abolition decline of the West Indies sugar colonies, the colonization of Ireland, white settlement in temperate regions such as North America and Australia, a teeming commercial dominion in Latin America and East Asia, as well as an ever-​expanding and gradually formalized territorial empire on the Indian subcontinent and, eventually, Africa. The relation between liberalism and these diverse and evolving projects of expansion—​as of capitalist globalization more generally—​is dauntingly complex but essential to understanding liberal tensions and transformations over the course of the nineteenth century. In Liberalism and Empire:  A  Study in Nineteenth-​Century British Liberal Thought, Uday Singh Mehta proffers detailed analysis of early nineteenth-​century thinkers such as James Mill and Thomas Babington Macaulay in order to argue that liberalism is an intrinsically dominatory ideology, the hallmark of which is a Lockean imperviousness to the plurality of human experience.24 Since that time, Jennifer Pitts has suggested a more historically specific approach premised on the assertion that liberalism ‘does not lead ineluctably either to imperialism or anti-​imperialism’.25 Thus, while James Mill and Macaulay were pro-​imperial ideologues, eighteenth-​century precursors such as Adam Smith, Bentham, and (as Mehta also notes) Edmund Burke typically opposed imperialism. In the mid-​Victorian era, advanced liberals such as J. S. Mill and John Morley

23 Mill, On Liberty, 109. 24 

Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-​Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 25  Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 4. See also Andrew Sartori’s superlative review essay, ‘The British Empire and Its Liberal Mission’, Journal of Modern History, 78 (September 2006), 623–​642.

Liberalism and Literature    111 by and large approved the paternalistic logic of a ‘civilizing mission’ in India, whereas contemporaries such as Charles Dilke (the author of Greater Britain, 1868) and Anthony Trollope (the novelist and travel writer) tended to support white settlement colonies while expressing serious misgivings about the rule of non-​European peoples in the global south.26 By the turn of the century, New Liberals like J. A. Hobson were characterizing imperialism as the corrupt product of ‘industrial and financial interests’ determined to acquire access to ‘private markets’ at the public’s expense.27 Such varying attitudes towards imperialism responded not only to shifting historical circumstances but also to the disparate practices in question. The terms ‘imperialism’ and ‘colonialism’, in other words, refer to a sprawling web of structures that developed over centuries in response to particular economic, geopolitical, and cultural rationales. Either term can be used to describe, for instance, the subjugation of Ireland, Scotland, or Wales; the enthusiasm for a worldwide ‘Greater British’ network of white settlement colonies; or the seizing of the African Cape Colony in 1806 to protect the geopolitically valuable long route to India (after which South Africa became a desirable location for British settlers and, after 1867, the site of lucrative diamond mines). Moreover, the quest for commercial dominion, though seldom pursued with the goal of extending territorial sovereignty, involved the use of naval power to impose ‘free’ trade in regions such as China (where two nineteenth-​century wars were fought to open ports to the trade in opium). Britain’s self-​appointed efforts to police the slave trade created yet another set of opportunities to advance the nation’s geopolitical agenda while in pursuit of humanitarian projects.28 By far the most common Victorianist interest in imperialism has concerned the territorial empire of conquest which arose in South Asia under the auspices of the East India Company—​a mercantilist trading concern that gradually morphed into a bureaucratic governing apparatus before being abolished after the Indian rebellion of 1857–​8. This monumental uprising helped to usher in the more systematic ruling practices of the New Imperial era, much of which was implemented under Conservative leaders including Benjamin Disraeli (prime minister in 1868 and 1874–​80), the Earl of Lytton (viceroy of India between 1876 and 1880), and the Marquess of Salisbury (who was secretary of state for India in 1868 and cabinet minister or prime minister during much of the period between 1874 and 1902). The formalization of the British Raj was, thus, well under way in

26  On Dilke and other ‘Greater British’ liberals, see Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–​1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). On Trollope in this vein, see Goodlad, The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), ch. 2. 27  J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study, ed. Philip Siegelman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), 106. 28  See, for example, Andrew Porter, ‘Trusteeship, Anti-​Slavery, and Humanitarianism’, in Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, iii. The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 198–​221. For a penetrating study of informal empire in Central America, see Robert Aguirre, Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

112    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture the decade before the Berlin Conference (1884–​5) launched the infamous ‘scramble for Africa’. In The Expansion of England (1883), a nearly contemporaneous set of lectures, the liberal historian J. R. Seeley made the famous remark that Britons ‘seem[ed], as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind’.29 That Seeley made this claim more than twenty-​five years after the 1857 rebellion and six years after the Tories made Victoria the empress of India suggests the extent to which Britons in general, and liberal Britons in particular, had disavowed the signs that the country they upheld as a beneficent trading power and beacon of liberal progress had, for some time, been an aggressive imperial state. The comforting notion that British expansion was, at heart, commercial and pacific had been the overarching message of metropolitan spectacles like the Great Exhibition in 1851 and the London International Exhibition in 1862. Such events helped to forge the proud conviction that the diffusion of Britain’s political and economic institutions was giving rise to a harmonious world economy. Thus, the roughly twenty years of Liberal Party political ascendancy between the end of the rebellion and the split over Irish home rule were also a time of mounting public confusion as liberal-​minded Britons, few of whom deeply understood the structures of global expansion, struggled to reconcile the growing reality of imperial violence with the idealized ‘empire of free trade’ which had so readily characterized the first half of the century.30 So-​called liberal imperialism is therefore a challenging but important topic for literary scholars to engage. If ‘liberal’ support for the empire generally meant enthusiasm for the globalization of trade, it only sometimes entailed the full-​blown embrace of territorial rule authorized by the paternalistic idea of the civilizing mission. Self-​styled liberals might praise white settler colonialism as distinct from such rule, or they might fuse these projects, conceiving Britons as destined to settle and spread free trade in the world’s temperate zones while civilizing non-​whites in the southern hemisphere. In regard to India, liberal ideologies of governance could involve unbending allegiance to anglicizing agendas (James Mill), or could resemble Tory strategies of ‘engraftment’ which claimed to blend Indian and British traditions (J. S. Mill).31 Liberals might thus adhere to Enlightenment universalism by rejecting racial essentialism, or they might embrace the pseudoscientific category of ‘race’ (as increasingly happened after the failure of the post-​abolition economies of the West Indies and the Indian ‘mutiny’ were attributed to racial flaws). And whereas liberal racialists might join Tories in offering racial difference to justify a territorial empire, they might instead shrink from long-​term rule over alien peoples (Trollope and Seeley). Negotiating such tensions, high-​minded liberals might 29  J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England, ed. John Gross (1883; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971). 30  See, for example, Bernard Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism: Classical Political Economy, The Empire of Free Trade and Imperialism, 1750–​1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); and David Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. ch. 5. 31  On Mill and imperialism, see, for example, Lynn Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995).

Liberalism and Literature    113 exhort their countrymen to meet the highest possible standard of imperial ethics, or urge them to recognize that territorial empires were invariably corrupt and corrupting. Discussing liberalism and its contradictions could therefore involve an almost infinite parsing of tensions and debates alongside the overarching narrative of increasing ideological fissure. For even as the Liberal Party came into its own in the 1850s it was beset by a series of imperial crises that began with the Indian rebellion and went on to include the Governor Eyre controversy in Jamaica, the Ilbert Bill debate (a liberal measure to enable Indian judges to preside over European defendants), and the split over Irish home rule. These signs of the profound dissonance between imperialism and liberal emphases on freedom and equality either divided liberals (as did the split over Ireland) or resulted in the failure of liberal positions in a climate of increasing racism (for example, vindication of Eyre’s brutal repression in Jamaica and the failure of the Ilbert Bill to survive opposition). ‘It is not by chance’, writes the historian Thomas Metcalf, ‘that the era of greatest imperial enthusiasm, from 1885 to 1905, was also a period of Conservative predominance in British politics.’32 When a generation of English-​educated Indians such as Debendranath Tagore (father of the famous philosopher) began to claim the kind of governing power which Macaulay had foretold in his ‘Minute on Indian Education’ (1835), the unwillingness of India’s rulers to make good on the promise of their ‘civilizing mission’ became all too clear. Erstwhile supporters of British rule such as J. S. Mill began to lament the reactionary influence of imperialism on India: rejecting an offer to take part in Indian governance after the abolition of the East India Company, Mill turned to more proximate affairs. As a radical Liberal MP in the 1860s, he proposed the enfranchisement of British women, the reform of Irish land, and the decriminalization of Fenian political prisoners.33 At the turn of the century, New Liberals began to criticize territorial imperialism—​albeit in writings often riddled with contradiction. For all its notable trenchancy, Hobson’s Imperialism was no call for European exit from Africa. If Western governments simply renounced their colonial projects, Hobson reasoned, the effect would be to ‘abandon the backward races to [the] perils’ of ‘private plunder’.34 Sounding more like Mill and Macaulay than their critic, he insisted that ‘there can be no inherent natural right in a people to refuse that measure of compulsory education which shall raise it from childhood to manhood in the order of nationalities’.35 Thus, while Hobson realized that 32 

Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 65. See also Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 33  On Mill’s support for ‘revolutionary land legislation’ in Ireland, see E. D. Steele, ‘J. S. Mill and the Irish Question: Reform, and the Integrity of the Empire, 1865–​1870’, Historical Journal, 13, no. 3 (September 1970), 419–​450, at 419; on his years in Parliament, see Bruce L. Kinzer, Ann P. Robson, and John M. Robson, A Moralist In and Out of Parliament: John Stuart Mill at Westminster, 1865–​1868 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); and on the reactionary influence of British rule, see Mill, ‘Maine on Village Communities’, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson, 32 vols. (1871; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), xxx. 213–​228. 34  J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (1903; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), 231. 35 Hobson, Imperialism, 229.

114    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture imperialism was legitimating exploitation under the guise of ‘care and education’, his response, in the final analysis, was the hope for a more authentic civilizing mission.36 Then, too, Hobson also evinced the kind of anti-​Semitism to which Liberals had become remarkably prone in the years since Disraeli’s imperial policies became the object of strident partisan critique.37 Beginning with his criticism of the Boer War, he became one of the most high-​minded exponents on record of the theory that ‘a small group of international financiers, chiefly German in origin and Jewish in race’ were sufficiently powerful to manipulate Europe’s foreign policy.38 Though he was more circumspect in Imperialism, reluctant perhaps to perpetuate what he referred to as ‘Judenhetze’ (Jew-​baiting) in his earlier work, he continued to warn his readers that a ‘cosmopolitan organization’ of financiers, ‘situated in the very heart of the business capital of every State’, was controlled by ‘men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience’—​a statement unlikely to be lost on Europe’s Jew-​ baiters.39 Thus riven by deep-​seated imperial and racial tensions and challenged from the Left by trade unionism and socialism, liberalism’s political agenda underwent its ‘strange death’ in the early twentieth century, its progressive elements eclipsed by or subsumed into the emergent project of social democracy. Nonetheless, if liberalism remains a subject of ongoing interest for nineteenth-​century scholarship, one reason is the burgeoning exploration of liberalism in India (and other postcolonial locales): not as passive receptacle of British ideas, but as co-​shaper of metropolitan thought and contributor to a hybrid body of world liberalism. For example, Sukanya Banerjee, a literary scholar, focuses her analysis of imperial citizenship around four leading figures:  Dadabhai Naoroji, a founding member of the Indian National Congress; Mohandas Gandhi who, as a young transplant to South Africa, argued for equal citizenship for Indian settlers; Cornelia Sorabji, a legal advocate for Indian women in purdah; and Surendranath Banerjea, one of the first native entrants to the Indian Civil Service.40 In a comparable study of Indian as well as British liberal thought, the historian Theodore Koditschek demonstrates how intellectuals including Banerjee, the older Tagore, and R. C. Dutt reconfigured their Macaulayan principles so as both to radicalize and Indianize their cultural and political agendas.41 Reversing the logic of orientalism, Lynn Zastoupil’s Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain shows how the life and work of Roy, a celebrated early-​nineteenth-​century Indian philosopher, religious reformer, and champion of the free press (who died in 1833 during a visit to Britain), not only rendered British liberalism in a form that later independence movements could 36 Hobson, Imperialism, 243. 37 

On Liberal anti-​Semitism, see, for example, Anthony Wohl, ‘Dizzi-​Ben-​Dizzi: Disraeli as Alien’, Journal of British Studies, 34, no. 3 (July 1995), 375–​411. 38  J. A. Hobson, The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Effects (New York: Macmillan, 1900), 189. 39 Hobson, The War in South Africa; and Hobson, Imperialism, 57–​59. 40  Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-​Victorian Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 41  Theodore Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-​Century Visions of a Greater Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Liberalism and Literature    115 adapt, but also co-​created such thought in what was, to some degree, an Indo-​European public sphere.42 As C. A. Bayly writes in the most recent study in this vein, despite ‘the profound inequalities of foreign rule, Indian understandings of liberalism and modernity were fed […] back to the West, influencing British, European and American attitudes to the world’.43 In his study of liberalism’s turn to the concept of ‘culture’ in eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century Bengal, Andrew Sartori takes this historiographic project in a decidedly global direction. Subject to the commodifying effects of capital, Sartori shows, the writing of the Bengali intellectual Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, which engaged Seeley’s work on Western religion, demonstrates a particular instance of the impact of global material structures. In the 1880s, when Bankim turned from British liberalism to a specifically Hindu articulation of universalism—​drawing on Seeley’s commentary in so doing—​Bankim ‘was not challenging Western universalism from a colonial outside of native particularity’ but, rather, ‘attempting to participate in a metropolitan rethinking of specific liberal modes of universalism that no longer seemed adequate to a changing historical situation’.44 What is salient, in other words, is not the mere fact of a Hindu challenge to Western universalism but, rather, the evidence that Bankim’s Hindu universalism and the Seeleyan disenchantment which enabled it sprang from historical conditions with which both the Bengali and the British thinker were ‘respectively grappling [ … ] more or less contemporaneously’.45 Hence, with capitalist globalization as its organizing structure, Sartori offers a framework for the transnational analysis of liberalism which takes us beyond the agonistic dyad of colonizer and colonized.

III Given such various referents and the multiple theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches that enliven them, Victorianist literary study of liberalism has, unsurprisingly, taken numerous forms in the last fifteen years. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society, my own contribution to the topic, is a historicist study that shows why the Victorian era’s profoundly anti-​ statist culture requires a more nuanced account of liberalism and British literature than is likely to emerge from scholarship heavily indebted to Michel Foucault’s analyses of modern discipline on the Continent. Foucault’s later essays on liberalism and ‘governmentality’, the book proposes, provide more fruitful guides for probing the paradoxes 42 

Lynn Zastoupil, Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 43  C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 4. 44  Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 128. 45 Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History, 129.

116    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture of governance which haunt fiction by Frances Trollope, Dickens, Harriet Martineau, Anthony Trollope, George Gissing, and H. G. Wells along with debates over poor law, public health, educational, and civil service reform. At the same time, scholars have begun to make a robust case for reconsidering the ethico-​political value of a ‘liberal’ literature (in the broad humanist sense evoked by Trilling). Notable among such studies is David Wayne Thomas’s Cultivating Victorians which explores the connection between liberalism and aestheticism. An explicitly recuperative work, Thomas’s book sets out ‘to get past the reduction of aesthetics to ideology while still giving ideological critique its due’.46 The operative figure for this enterprise is Immanuel Kant who makes aesthetics a constitutive feature of critique (integral to such noteworthy theoretical projects as Hannah Arendt’s work on judgement, Jürgen Habermas’s continuation of the Enlightenment’s ‘incomplete’ modernity, and Seyla Benhabib’s feminist revision of the latter enterprise).47 Thomas’s neo-​Kantian focal points, however, are the liberal aesthetics particular to the nineteenth century including Victorian literati like Arnold, Eliot, J. S. Mill, John Ruskin, and Wilde. Although his purpose is to demonstrate the critical ‘agency’ such examples facilitate, the result is not a straightforward celebration of Kantian autonomy. For example, analysing Wilde’s articulation of the human condition as ‘at once absolutely free and […] absolutely determined’ in De Profundis (written in Reading Gaol in 1897), Thomas refuses to explain this oxymoron as the product of a man imprisoned for non-​normative sexual conduct. To the contrary, Wilde’s statement, he suggests, is a representative instance of how the ‘modern liberal vision of agency can be understood and practised’ which speaks to the author’s playful ironization of the limitations of artistic originality—​a ‘self-​location in paradox’ which helps to explain the enduring fascination with Wilde.48 One finds a comparable effort to explore Victorian literature’s resources for a capacious liberal thought in Amanda Anderson’s influential study, The Powers of Distance:  Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment.49 Whereas Thomas’s focus is aesthetics, Anderson’s is ethics: in particular, the ethos of detachment which enables ‘cosmopolitanism’ to thrive in the works of essayists like Arnold and J. S. Mill; novelists like Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, and Eliot; and playwrights like Wilde. In defining cosmopolitanism, The Powers of Distance is in dialogue with contemporaneous theoretical works such as Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah’s Cosmopolitics: Thinking and 46 

David Wayne Thomas, Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), p. ix. 47  For Kant’s work on aesthetics, see his Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (1790; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987); for Arendt, see Lectures on Kant’s Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); for Habermas, see ‘Modernity—​an Incomplete Project’, in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-​Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 3–​15; and for Benhabib, see Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992). 48 Thomas, Cultivating Victorians, 165, 184. 49  Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

Liberalism and Literature    117 Feeling beyond the Nation.50 Anderson’s definition is, thus, less to do with the modes of transnationality specific to Victorian-​era capitalism and imperialism than with the present-​day renovation of Enlightenment ethics in a form that recognizes the importance of embodiment. Her approach to cosmopolitanism explores literary works that exemplify ‘reflective distance from one’s original or primary cultural affiliations, a broad understanding of other cultures and customs, and a belief in universal humanity’—​a focus on ethos that extends to her more conceptual writing in The Way We Argue Now:  A  Study in the Cultures of Theory.51 This ethical approach has inspired several discussions of British literature including Christopher Keirstead’s study of Victorian poetry as the vehicle for a cosmopolitan universalism tempered by respect for cultural difference.52 In Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the Relation of Part to Whole, 1859–​1920, Regenia Gagnier combines similar ethical concerns with a focus on late Victorian aestheticism:  her ‘genealogy of liberalism’ demonstrates how creative thinkers like Wilde, William Morris, and Friedrich Nietzsche envisioned cosmopolitanism as a kind of holistic and communally embedded individualism.53 As Julia M. Wright and I noted in a special issue on ‘Victorian Internationalisms’, the term cosmopolitanism has a complex history extending back to classical Greece.54 Moreover, the classical and Enlightenment-​era notion of cosmopolitanism as world citizenship was often in tension with the nineteenth century’s emphasis on nationality. Cosmopolitan unrootedness implicitly calls into question the modern nation-​ state’s work of constituting sovereignty within specific boundaries (cultural as well as geographic). By the same token, the ideal of world citizenship highlights the exclusions endemic to the Victorian civic order—​including the reluctance to enfranchise working-​ class men, women of any class, and colonized subjects (whom, as we have seen, even Hobson described as children ‘in the order of nationalities’55). In part for these reasons, nineteenth-​century usages of ‘cosmopolitan’ often tend towards the pejorative, signifying those deracinating modern forces that threaten to disrupt sovereign nations from within and without. Tellingly, the Oxford English Dictionary’s first entry for the word, takes capital, rather than human personality, for its object.56 50  Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 51  Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 52  Christopher Keirstead, Victorian Poetry, Europe, and the Challenge of Cosmopolitanism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011). 53  Regenia Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence, and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–​1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010). 54  Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Julia M. Wright. ‘Introduction and Keywords’, ‘Victorian Internationalisms’, Special issue of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (November 2007) http://​ id.erudit.org/​iderudit/​017435ar [last accessed 1 September 2013]. 55  J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (New York: Gordon Press, 1975), 223–​285, at 229. 56  The reference is to The Principles of Political Economy, in which J. S. Mill averred that ‘capital is becoming more and more cosmopolitan’; Collected Works, ii. 588. This picture of an increasingly homogenous global modernity is even more vividly articulated in a second 1848 usage of ‘cosmopolitan’ (not cited by the OED). For Marx and Engels, capitalism’s need to ‘nestle everywhere, settle everywhere’

118    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture These tensions between cosmopolitan ethics and the instrumentality and violence of an expanding empire are explored in one of the most sophisticated studies of the topic to date, Tanya Agathocleous’s Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century. Whereas Gagnier’s window into the relation of part and whole is the communally embedded individual, Agathocleous’s focus is the oscillation between worm’s-​eye and bird’s-​eye views: from the ‘visible world of the polis’ or city, to the ‘invisible, idealistic world of the kosmos’.57 Her study of ‘cosmopolitan realism’—​defined as the merger of concrete city with imagined world—​extends from William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1850) to Dickens’s multi-​plot novels, Henry James’s proto-​modernist fiction, Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective narratives, and William Morris’s utopian romance. Agathocleous thus provides an account of the diverse literary forms through which the phenomenon that we today call globalization was experienced by the nineteenth-​ century readers of the most ambitious metropole of its day. What happens when this worlded city itself becomes a kind of alien place? When the word ‘cosmopolitan’ appears in Trollope’s The Prime Minister (1876), it is used by an English landowner to describe the dubious rootlessness of a man who ‘isn’t of [his] sort’—​one Ferdinand Lopez.58 Such pejorative meanings, in which ‘cosmopolitan’ stands not only for the social impact of capitalism, but also, by extension, for the attributes of pernicious others (such as Jewish speculators and financiers), became a kind of fixture of later Victorian liberal discourse. In Trollope’s fiction of the 1870s, Gladstone’s contemporaneous Midlothian campaign, and turn-​of-​the-​century imperial critiques like Hobson’s, one finds this rhetoric used not only to reprobate Disraeli’s policies but also to associate the less desirable features of global capitalism with the un-​English and foreign. Thus, in 1879, Gladstone described a plutocratic class of ‘hybrid or bastard men of business’ bound to one another ‘by the bond of gain; not the legitimate toil of hand or brain’ and driven by an amoral ‘pursuit of material enjoyment’.59 In my new has ‘given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption’ the world over, displacing ‘old-​ established’ cultures and social relations in favour of ‘new industries’, ‘new wants’, and the ‘universal inter-​dependence of nations’ (Manifesto, 476). 57  Tanya Agathocleous, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. xvi. 58  Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister, ed. David Skilton (1876; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), 141. 59  W. E. Gladstone, ‘Lord Rector’s Address’, in Political Speeches in Scotland, November and December 1879 (Edinburgh: Andrew Elliott, 1879), 237–​238. Unlike Trollope and Hobson, Gladstone did not use ‘cosmopolitan’ to describe this ‘hybrid’ business class, perhaps because his opponent Disraeli had used the term in 1872 to align the Liberal Party’s ‘cosmopolitan principles’ with Continental influence as opposed to the ‘Imperial’ greatness sought by patriotic Tories; see ‘Conservative and Liberal Principles; Speech at Crystal Palace, June 24, 1872’, in Selected Speeches of the Late Right Honourable the Earl of Beaconsfield, ed. T. E. Kebbel, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1882), ii. 534. According to Peter Cain, this often anti-​Semitic mode of mid-​to-​late-​Victorian liberal critique was the effect of Disraeli’s ‘re-​activation’ of a popular radicalism ‘not seen since Cobden’s day’; see ‘Radicalism, Gladstone, and the liberal critique of Disraelian “Imperialism” ’, in Duncan Bell (ed.), Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-​Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 215–​238, at 216.

Liberalism and Literature    119 book, The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic:  Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience, I connect these liberal anxieties over foreignness and ethical malaise to a genre of naturalistic fiction whose principal British exemplar was Trollope. The naturalistic ‘narrative of capitalist globalization’, I suggest, focalizes the perception of breached individual and national sovereignties by concentrating the effects of capitalist globalization in cosmopolitan figures such as Emilius in The Eustace Diamonds (1871–​3), Melmotte in The Way We Live Now (1874–​5), and, most tragically, Lopez.60 The use of ‘sovereignty’ to capture the ideals at stake for many mid-​Victorian liberals exemplifies yet another current motif in Victorianist scholarship: the multifaceted interest in political theory. Manifest in the neo-​Kantian theoretical investments of Anderson and Thomas, the turn to political theory takes a different form in Kathy Alexis Psomiades’s ongoing exploration of how Victorian anthropology helped to naturalize a gendered form of the social contract that underwrote the liberal order.61 At the same time, poetry scholars such as Stephanie Kuduk Weiner and Julia F. Saville have demonstrated how in-​depth familiarity with political philosophy—​especially the civic republican tradition elucidated by historians such as Pocock and Eugenio Biagini—​ is crucial to elucidating the contemporary movements that animated poetry from William Blake and the Chartist Thomas Cooper, on to mid-​Victorian poets including Robert Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, and Algernon Charles Swinburne.62 Although nineteenth-​century republicanism celebrated civic virtues deemed important to rescuing British politics from the impact of bourgeois materialism, it was especially active in connection with liberationist movements like the Italian Risorgimento (whose most famous champion was Giuseppe Mazzini, the exiled leader of a failed revolution in 1848). The republican strain in British politics thus shaped a variety of transnational poetic encounters—​from support for Italy’s emancipation in the 1840s and 1850s to the growing enthusiasm for Walt Whitman’s homosocial republican poetry in the 1880s and after—​even as it influenced novelists including Eliot and George Meredith. Recent literary engagement with this strong civic current includes such diverse studies as Mike Sanders’s exploration of Chartist poetry, Daniel S. Malachuk’s discussion of Eliot’s use of ‘Risorgimento mythology and […] republican womanhood theory’ in Romola (1862–​ 3), Richard Dellamora’s look at how homophile understandings of friendship inflected democratic politics, and, in a more Foucauldian vein, Pamela K. Gilbert’s work on the

60 

As one of the most prolific and most political Victorian novelists, Trollope is the object of a thriving literary scholarship interested in liberalism, one recent example of which is Margaret Markwick, Deborah Denenholz Morse, and Regenia Gagnier (eds), The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope’s Novels (London: Ashgate, 2009). 61  Kathy Alexis Psomiades, ‘The Marriage Plot in Theory’, Novel, 43, no. 1 (Spring 2010), 51–​59. 62  See Julia Saville, ‘Cosmopolitan Republican Swinburne, the Immersive Poet as Public Moralist’, Victorian Poetry, 47 (Winter 2009), 691–​7 13; and Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789–​1874 (Basingstoke, Palgrave 2005). For a recent example of Biagini’s work on republicanism, see ‘Neo-​roman Liberalism: “Republican” Values and British Liberalism, ca. 1860–​1875’, History of European Ideas, 29 (2003), 55–​72.

120    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture novel as a medium through which the citizen’s body became the site for a biopolitical focus on public health.63 In Malachuk’s Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism, the turn to political theory becomes a turn to moral philosophy.64 Perhaps the most polemical of the recent efforts to recuperate select aspects of Victorian liberalism, the book rebuts a range of sceptical standpoints, from Richard Rorty’s pragmatism to Michel Foucault’s post-​ structuralist analysis of power. As he explores the writings of J. S. Mill and Arnold as well as American contemporaries such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Malachuk finds affirmation of the idea ‘that human beings, with the help of the state, can achieve an objective moral perfection’. A more concertedly literary use of moral philosophy, this time modelled on the example of Stanley Cavell, is at the heart of Andrew H. Miller’s The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-​century British Literature.65 Miller defines moral perfectionism as a ‘means of improvement […] in which individual transfiguration comes not through obedience to […] codes, but through openness to example—​through responsive, unpredictable engagements with other people’.66 By extending this open-​ended ethos to literature, Miller describes an ‘optative’ mood (defined as ‘the retrospective assessment of lives one has not lived’) at work, for example, in Robert Browning’s poetry and Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846–​8).67 Though the book does not weigh in on liberalism per se, Miller’s evocation of the perfectionist strain in Victorian literature complements the ethical discussions developed through Anderson’s focus on liberal detachment, Thomas’s on aesthetics, and Malachuk’s on liberalism’s will-​to-​improvement. These ethical and aesthetic perspectives anticipate yet another innovation in recent scholarship:  an interest in the lived dimensions of liberalism. As Bayly notes, the Indian liberals of Victorian-​era Calcutta and Bombay, ‘were not simply trying to build institutions or author a political language; they also sought to create a new subject’. ‘The lived life of ideas’, he continues, ‘is important […] because it is this performative aspect of liberalism which provides the intermediation between intellectual and social history.’68 Indeed, a performative focus is also the aim of Elaine Hadley’s Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-​Victorian Britain. Through a method she aligns 63  Mike Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Daniel Malachuk, ‘Romola and Victorian Liberalism’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 36, no. 1 (2008), 41–​57, at 42; Richard Dellamora, Friendship’s Bonds: Democracy and the Novel in Victorian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Pamela K. Gilbert, The Citizen’s Body: Desire, Health, and the Social in Victorian England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007). 64  Daniel S. Malachuk, Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 2. Even if one cannot accept his arguments on behalf of moral objectivism, Malachuk’s survey of liberal political theory in his opening chapters offers a lively introduction to the topic. 65  Andrew H. Miller, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-​century British Literature (2008; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). 66 Miller, The Burdens of Perfection, 3. 67 Miller, The Burdens of Perfection, 111. 68 Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 132.

Liberalism and Literature    121 with ‘historical epistemology’, Hadley’s work stands out for its determination not to passively replicate liberal ideas such as ‘diversity of opinion’ or ‘free thought’, but, instead, to regard them as ‘formal principles that structure what is thinkable as liberal’.69 This is not the kind of formalism which focuses on qualities of writing such as style or genre (the intermittent focus on literature, including close readings of novels by Trollope and Eliot, does not differ much from the writing on Gladstone’s speeches or essays in the Fortnightly Review). Nor does Hadley’s discussion of liberal formalism dwell for long on the familiar tension between the liberal commitment ‘to inclusion’ and ‘an era of increased political heterogeneity’.70 Instead, her focus is on how a certain formalism inflects ‘mid-​Victorian liberalism’s conception of cognition’ as it ‘uniformly relocates the generative site of rationality from the highly idealized public sphere of collaboration, debate, and circulation to an equally idealized private site of cognition, mental deliberation, and devil’s advocacy’.71 Readers of Biagini, J. W. Burrow, Pocock et al. and of Victorianist scholars of republican poetry will understandably question the extent to which this ‘relocation’ from public argument to private cognition took place.72 But even if one needs to insist that Hadley is describing an important strain or mood in mid-​Victorian liberalism and not the more comprehensive formulation her language sometimes suggests, one will be rewarded by her elaboration of ‘abstracted embodiment’ as a constitutive feature of Victorian life. In Hadley’s own words, abstracted embodiment is a ‘purposefully paradoxical neologism’ developed to ‘encompass liberalism’s desire for a political subject who is abstract (and capable of abstract thought) but also individual, abstract and yet concretely materialized, “free,” though in its place’. This is the optic for the book’s ambitious effort ‘to specify the peculiarly sociocognitive contributions of this era of political liberalism and thereby 69  Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-​Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 31, 28. 70  Living Liberalism, 50. This aspect of liberalism’s problematic formalism, familiar from the critiques of feminists and critical race theorists among others, is, of course, largely anachronistic for Hadley’s mid-​Victorian focus. At a time when many liberals were prone to marking the differences between male landowners and their counterparts in business, the salient point was not the formal pretence to universal citizenship (which rightly concerns scholars working on democracies in and after the twentieth century)—​but, rather, the various kinds of cultural, racial, ethnic, and sexual essentialisms that were mobilized in defence of overt exclusions and long-​standing hierarchies. 71  Living Liberalism, 50. 72 Burrow’s Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988) demonstrates the persistence of strong republican and Scottish Enlightenment strains in Victorian liberalism at least to the 1860s. But even without stipulating any republican derivation for the continued investment in public ‘collaboration, debate, and circulation’, the assertion that liberals of any stripe would idealize ‘private’ cognition and deliberation in isolation from public discussion remains questionable (not least since mental deliberation and public discussion are hardly mutually exclusive). Hadley is more persuasive in suggesting the difficulty of realizing liberal ideals through public enactment than in arguing that private cognition was idealized at the expense of such public forums as were available—​as if in enjoining reflection and internal dialogue, liberals were simultaneously welcoming isolation from actual dialogue in the spheres of public and civic participation. Mill, to name one important example, goes out of his way to insist on the importance of live discussion and debate throughout the second chapter of On Liberty.

122    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture to deepen our account of liberalism’s genealogy more generally’.73 That Hadley does not try to substantiate the claim that the mid-​Victorian era’s version(s) of lived liberalism were any more ‘peculiarly sociocognitive’ than, say, the Indian counterparts described in Bayly’s study, the liberalism of Trilling’s time, or even the neo-​liberalism of the present day is, I suspect, part of the book’s subtle appeal. There is an implication, though never an assertion, that we should consider liberalism’s unlivable reliance on abstraction to be endemic—​not unique to the version of liberalism developed in Hadley’s examples from the 1860s and 1870s. And so we should consider it. Reading the book, one is inspired to ponder a host of interesting questions the stimulation of which may be one of the finest achievements of Hadley’s work along with the rich body of criticism to which it responds. For example, what would ‘living liberalism’ look like if we chose Pater’s erotic encounter with classical art to exemplify liberalism’s embodiment? Does literary form have any impact on the lived aspects of liberalism: is poetry more or less conducive to concrete embodiment than novels like Phineas Finn (1867–​8)? Sensation fiction more than realism? Serialization a more or less embodying medium than novels published in toto like Eliot’s Felix Holt? Then too, the book provokes methodological questions: for example, would the observation of abstraction be different if the method itself were less distanced from the lived effects of dramatic events like the Governor Eyre debate (which absorbed Mill during the late 1860s); from the systemic features of commodification; or from capitalist debacles such as the stock market crashes and financial crises that recur in mid-​ Victorian fiction?74 Moreover, would abstraction seem so unlivable if instead of an abstract individual’s focus on abstract thought the sociocognitive abstraction in question were an imagined identification with people of different genders, races, religions, and nationalities? What was it like to live a liberal (or socialist) political orientation less focused on achieving disinterested thought and more on eradicating poverty, building citizenship, organizing labour, enfranchising women, achieving sexual liberty, or promoting a more richly aestheticized ‘liberal mode of life’? Finally, in terms of a longer liberal arc, if we take seriously Hadley’s method of theorizing ideas as ‘formal principles that structure what is thinkable as liberal’, how might these formal principles differ if the ideas in question (instead of diversity of opinion) were, for example, equality of opportunity, social justice, or human rights? To be clear, I do not pose these questions to insulate mid-​Victorian (or any other) liberalism from trenchant critique. As this essay has strived to show, critique (though itself embedded in contexts that scholarship on liberalism can help us to identify) is an enterprise that the study of liberalism requires, not least at a time when social democracy is under attack and market capitalism and anti-​statism are proclaimed as freedoms of the highest order. Nor do I pose these questions because I believe that the answers will provide some exemplary Victorian roadmap to utopia. Rather, along with Hadley 73 

Living Liberalism, 18. On financial crises, see, for example, Tamara S. Wagner, Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Plotting Money, 1815–​1901 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010). 74 

Liberalism and Literature    123 I believe that the study of liberalism can be helpful to an overarching project of historical epistemology, defined by Mary Poovey as a history of ‘the assumptions and conventions that constitute the epistemological field that underwrites the salience acquired by identity categories at various times. […] This epistemological field allows for the production of what counts as knowledge at any given moment. This field changes over time.’75 A historical epistemology of the dynamic mid-​Victorian decades would, of course, require elaborating the assumptions and conventions of social actors who did not inhabit the lifeworld of upper-​middle-​class men in the British metropole. A historical epistemology of liberalism, moreover, would require an account of multiple discourses developed over long arcs of time and diffused and hybridized across wide spans of geopolitical space. Finally, a historical epistemology would require elucidation of the social relations and structures through which this discursive field of assumptions and conventions ‘changes over time’. In this way, literature and the lived life of ideas informs that important bridge, touched on by Bayly, between ideas about liberalism (and about politics in general) ‘at any given moment’ and the social relations and structures that sustain their change over time.

Select Bibliography Anderson, Amanda, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Bayly, C. A., Recovering Liberties:  Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Gagnier, Regenia, Individualism, Decadence, and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–​1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010). Goodlad, Lauren M.  E., The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic:  Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Goodlad, Lauren M. E., Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). Hadley, Elaine, Living Liberalism:  Practical Citizenship in Mid-​Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Harvey, David, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Mantena, Karuna, Alibis of Empire:  Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Parry, Jonathan, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Thomas, David Wayne, Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).

75 

Making a Social Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 2, quoted in Hadley, Living Liberalism, 31–​32 n. 65.

Chapter 6

Gl obaliz at i on and Ec on omi c s Ayşe Çelikkol

In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels articulated the global character of capitalism with stunning clarity:  ‘The need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.’1 As the drive for profit compelled entrepreneurs to seek markets in distant lands, new regions were continually integrated into the capitalist order. From the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth, Britain played a special role in this world system. Prior to the long nineteenth century, Dutch merchants had controlled financial networks, but their power waned as the Dutch government struggled for sovereignty. In the late eighteenth century, Britain established a new regime of power by seamlessly combining territorial and capitalist expansion. The tributes that Britain secured through its vast territorial holdings in the Indian subcontinent, Australia, Africa, and North America were invested in financial networks in Continental Europe as well as South America and the Middle East. Through the course of the nineteenth century, Britain became the centre of the world economy by attracting foreign surplus capital to London, exporting domestic capital via bankers and brokers for high returns, and developing a bustling entrepôt system in which shipping companies from various parts of the world utilized British ports. With capitalist expansion came an increased awareness of wide-​scale interconnection, often driven by the desire to invest lucratively. In and beyond Britain, individuals paid much attention to seemingly distant developments: By the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century, world commodity prices were the central reality in the lives of millions of Continental peasants; the repercussions of the London money market were daily noted by businessmen all over the world; and 1 

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 6.

Globalization and Economics    125 governments discussed plans for the future in light of the situation on world capital markets.2

Circulating swiftly and widely, news items alerted individuals to the ways in which developments in any one particular locale were dependent upon events taking place elsewhere. It was not always the drive for profit that motivated individuals to attend to what took place beyond the borders of the nation. Inheriting Enlightenment values, many Britons professed an ethical commitment to the well-​being of people living in distant lands and debated which commercial practices would best serve the interests of nations around the world. Extensive webs of commercial and financial exchange not only provided the material structure in which the Victorians found themselves embedded, but also constituted a topic of private reflection and public debate. Although the material fabric of everyday life was transformed by wealth derived from foreign markets, to be more fully cognizant of the global scope of economic transactions, individuals had to rely on representations. Alongside such financial signifiers as stock share certificates, literary narratives that portrayed overseas speculation, maritime travel, and colonial adventures, enabled Britons to grasp an economic system whose geographical scope exceeded the limits of their day-​to-​day experience. Drawing attention to the ways in which local experiences were embedded in wider social and economic frameworks, Victorian literature registered and cultivated an awareness of global formations, while at the same time questioning whether commercial and financial ties could suffice to forge meaningful interconnection. What we might in retrospect call global consciousness in the nineteenth century flourished in part through the realist novel’s well-​known claim to chronicle provincial life. To be sure, by focusing on local customs and manners, Victorian novels could posit a British—​or sometimes exclusively English—​way of life. Recent literary criticism recognizes this pattern, but relates it to Britons’ growing desire to understand their nation’s destiny in terms of its relation to the rest of the world. As James Buzard argues in his revisionist account, realist fiction by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, and others asserted a national identity precisely because steady territorial and capitalist expansion turned Britishness into a cultural export, threatening to divest it of its presumed distinctness.3 The faster commodities and people moved across national borders, the stronger was the desire to reassess the significance of local and national attachments. Epitomizing Victorian realism’s focus on local community, George Eliot’s Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–​2) explores how provincial lives become integrated into larger frameworks, commercial, professional, and even philosophical. Residents of Middlemarch must turn their gaze to distant lands to manage their own affairs. When the Reform candidate Mr Brooke invites the electorate to ‘look all 2  Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 18. 3  James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-​Century British Novels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

126    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture over the globe […] “from China to Peru,” ’ he parades his credentials: ‘I’ve been in the Levant, where some of your Middlemarch goods go—​and then, again, in the Baltic.’4 The speech meets a mocking echo, accompanied by laughter from the crowd. As his reference to commerce falls flat, Mr Brooke fails to establish the worldly wisdom that he values so highly. More successful in this respect is the narrator, who relentlessly invites connections between the local and the global, for instance in Lydgate the physician’s credo that ‘a man’s mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object glass’ (602). Just like Lydgate, who wishes to ‘do good small work for Middlemarch, and great work for the world’, the narrator zooms in and out between the particular and the general, always positioning the human subject in extensive social webs (139). Foiling the narrator’s success in establishing interconnection, Mr Brooke’s failed campaign speech invites a critique of facile ties of commerce: however extensive commercial networks may be, they offer only an empty echo of the moral endeavour to connect the self to distant others. Capitalism’s inability to inspire adequate global consciousness also surfaces in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846–​8), in which the eponymous merchant treats the world as if it were nothing more than a vast market: ‘The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed to float their ships.’5 This piece of free indirect speech conjures up a totalizing vision that subsumes the entire universe under the profit-​driven ego. The narcissistic tendency to render the world subservient to the self also surfaces in the history of Mrs Pipchin, the old lady in Brighton who keeps the boarding house where Mr Dombey sends his son. Her acquaintances discuss her husband’s death: ‘Her husband broke his heart in—​how did you say her husband broke his heart, my dear? I forget the precise circumstances.’ ‘In pumping water out of the Peruvian Mines,’ replied Miss Tox. ‘Not being a pumper himself, of course,’ said Mrs Chick (104)

It is speculative investment in the mines that leads to Mr Pipchin’s death, but ‘Miss Tox had spoken of him as if he had died at the handle’ (104). Miss Tox’s comment conflates the physical operation of the mines with the act of investing in them from a distance. As this conflation suggests, for the Pipchin family and their circle, the mine is not so much an actual entity in its own right as an abstraction that is easily reducible to its contribution to their own lives. Both present and absent in the text, the Peruvian mines cannot become concrete: ‘Mrs Pipchin’s husband having broken his heart of the Peruvian mines was good. It had a rich sound’ (104, emphasis mine). The world of commerce appears to cultivate self-​absorption despite its vast geographical scope. Inviting 4  George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 474. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically by page number. 5  Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 2. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically by page number.

Globalization and Economics    127 an awareness of this paradox, the novel provides the critical global perspective that its narcissistic characters lack. As Victorian literature weighed the significance of commercial interaction across distance, it considered the source of the nation’s wealth, attended to acts of violence that made British economic prowess possible, and offered reassuring fantasies of equitable exchange. Had the nation become dependent on foreigners? Was national self-​ sufficiency possible or desirable? Could commerce generate equitable ties of mutual help? Literary works that raised and addressed these questions employed complex narrative strategies to represent extensive webs of economic activity whose vast scope eluded the individual desire to comprehend them. Violent acts that brought one region of the world into forced interdependence with another haunted these texts, inspiring fantasies of self-​sufficiency or dreams of equitable commerce alongside critiques of domination. The following sections turn to actual practices of exchange and production (slavery, the opium trade, ‘free’ trade, high finance, and colonization) and explore literary forms and tropes (Gothicism, mythological imagery, the theme of speculation, and treasure-​hunt plots) that disclose—​or obscure—​asymmetrical and forced economic relations involved in each practice. Before I begin to explore these connections, however, I will briefly discuss some challenges presented by the effort to historicize globalization.

Historicizing Globalization One of the controversies surrounding globalization today is whether late capitalism, thriving on technologies and organizations peculiar to the twentieth and the twenty-​ first centuries, has introduced a definitive break with global formations of the past. In contemporary political theory, whereas David Held and Anthony McGrew argue that round-​the-​clock finance markets and transnational corporations in late capitalism have given rise to a state of interconnection qualitatively different from what former stages of capitalism had to offer, Paul Hirst and Graham Thompson contend that the world economy in late capitalism is a direct continuation of the international system established in the nineteenth century.6 As Anthony Giddens summarizes, for some scholars, ‘continuities with the past are much greater than the differences’, while others ‘see a world breaking radically with the past’.7 Such cross-​historical comparison is far beyond the scope of this essay, but what this controversy makes clear for us is that the endeavour

6 

David Held and Anthony McGrew, ‘Introduction’, in Held and McGrew eds., The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate (New York: Polity Press, 2000), 3–​4, 24–​5; Paul Hirst and Graham Thompson, Globalization in Question: The International Economy and the Possibility of Governance (New York: Polity, 2001), 2. See also Jan Aart Scholte, Globalization: A Critical Introduction (New York: St Martin’s, 2000), 19, 20. 7  Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 3.

128    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture to historicize globalization must recognize the peculiarities of each epoch, examining materialities and ideologies that emerge and mutate in specific historical moments. Even a cursory look at political economy, the discourse that sought to disclose the putatively universal laws governing the accumulation of wealth, would reveal that Victorian economic discourse, like its present-​day counterparts, explored processes of globalization—​although the term itself did not come into use until the 1960s. For example, in Principles of Political Economy (1848), John Stuart Mill discussed the migration of capital, highlighting that it was not only the exchange of goods but also production itself that could involve two or more nations. While he acknowledged that capital did not ‘remove to remote parts of the world as readily, and for as small an inducement, as it moves to another quarter of the same town’, he also asserted that ‘to France, Germany, or Switzerland capital moves almost as readily as to the colonies’. ‘The inducement of a very great extra profit’ could even motivate entrepreneurs to invest in ‘countries still barbarous, or, like Russia and Turkey, only beginning to be civilized’.8 Mill claimed that in addition to maximizing profit, the liquidity of capital transformed culture and affect: ‘capital is becoming more and more cosmopolitan; there is so much greater similarity of manners and institutions than formerly, and so much less alienation of feeling, among the more civilized countries’ (507). Even though circuits of production and consumption expanded through violent acts of conquest and subjugation, Mill, like many of his contemporaries, remained optimistic about both the nature of such expansion and the cognitive and cultural shifts that it would inspire. With processes of production and exchange cutting across national borders in the past as they do in the present, how can we address transformations in capitalist formations across centuries? World system theory, which maintains that global capitalism consists of consecutive cycles of accumulation, offers one model capable of accommodating change and continuity at once. Focusing on continual restructuring, Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi argue that Dutch, British, and American powers each established their own hegemony by restructuring the world economy.9 While the Dutch hegemony in the long seventeenth century rested on establishing control over worldwide financial networks, Britain in the long nineteenth century introduced a territorialist approach, whereby the acquisition and governance of colonies provided funds for haute finance—​the bustling system of banking, credit, and investment in Europe. Subsequently, the American regime of power—​already in decline in the second half of the twentieth century—​produced transnational corporations that resist state authority.10 World system theory on its own does not illuminate cultural developments that

8 

John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (New York: Prometheus Books, 2004), 537. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically by page number. 9  Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis’, in Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-​Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1–​36; Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 2010), 1–​14. 10 Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 37–​85.

Globalization and Economics    129 accompanied capitalist expansion, but it does reveal the crucial role that historicist perspectives need to play in discussions of globalization. Victorian studies, a field whose very name announces a historical framework, highlights material and ideological contingencies in its approach to global formations. What scholarship on nineteenth-​century contact zones and border-​crossings must negotiate is in part the vexed relation between the nation state and capitalism. Historically, the two were mutually enabling: the nation state guaranteed private property rights and facilitated the accumulation of capital, securing its own existence in doing so. However, the power of the nation state arguably declined in the twentieth century, as transnational corporations and non-​governmental organizations became increasingly influential.11 Whatever the eventual fate of the nation state may be—​many scholars argue convincingly that its presumed decline is nothing but a myth—​it was a ruling power on the world stage in the nineteenth century, and its sovereignty overlapped with, and even warranted, transnational exchange.12 In referring to the transnational, I aim to indicate the presence of alliances and networks that cannot be contained within the bounds of individual nation states, but do not imply a political or ideological move beyond nationhood. To address the complex ways in which nationhood and the transnational were interrelated, Lauren Goodlad and Julia Wright choose to employ ‘internationalism’, which ‘describes any outlook, or practice, that tends to transcend the nation towards a wider community, of which nations continue to form the principal units’. Goodlad and Wright seek to acknowledge the nation state’s efficacy as a mode of political organization while at the same time treating it ‘as the product of transnational, translocal, regional, and post-​colonial conditions of possibility’.13 As a critical paradigm, internationalism does not preclude powerful state apparatuses or national identity, but considers them in relation to material and ideological flows across national borders to suggest that the national and the transnational are mutually constitutive. As Goodlad and Wright point out, this use of ‘international’ revises the nineteenth-​century connotations of the term and places them under critical scrutiny. If, for many Victorians, the international arena offered a venue for showcasing the nation’s presumed superiority in manufacturing and technology, current critical practices seek to offset that tendency by refusing to contain economic production and artistic invention within the borders of the nation state. Cosmopolitanism, which has gained increasing prominence in Victorian studies after Amanda Anderson’s Powers of Distance (2001), similarly nods towards the mutually constitutive relation between the national and the global. At times, ‘cosmopolitan’ for 11 

Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 12  Hirst and Thompson, Globalization in Question, 256–​80; Michael Mann, ‘Has Globalization Ended the Rise and Rise of the Nation-​State?’, Review of International Political Economy, 4, no. 3 (1997), 472–​96. 13  Perry Anderson, ‘Internationalism: A Breviary’, New Left Review, 14 (2002), 5–​25, at 6; quoted by Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Julia M. Wright in ‘Introduction and Keywords’, RaVon: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, 48 (2007), 1–​34, at 2 (part of a special issue on Victorian Internationalisms, ed. by Goodlad and Wright).

130    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture the Victorians signalled utopian loyalty to a worldwide community of human beings; at others, it signified spatial mobility and compression, as embodied in the city of London.14 Both of these senses conjured up ideologies of nationhood. Cosmopolitan sentiment made possible ‘profound reflection on how different forms of affiliation—​to family, community, nation, and world—​might best be practiced’.15 Cosmopolitan spaces such as the the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace were a matter of national pride, attesting to the prowess of the far-​reaching empire that turned the capital city into a crossroads for the world. Agathacleous notes, ‘the Exhibition provided an occasion to celebrate not only London’s cosmopolitanism but that of the nation’.16 In addition to exposing complex relations among global, national, and local networks, cosmopolitanism undertakes the difficult task of relating material structures to individual affect. For Lauren Goodlad, the Victorians’ cosmopolitan ethos of care is inseparable from the geographically uneven development that they witnessed. Cosmopolitan subjects were aware of, and responded to, geopolitics. Further, it was narrative and other symbolic engagements of geopolitics that articulated, perhaps obliquely, a ‘redemptive cosmopolitan ethics’. For Goodlad, ‘geopolitical aesthetics’—​the realm offering symbolic expressions of capitalist formations—​is where we encounter both the wide-​scale structure of capitalism and the subjective experience of it.17 Regenia Gagnier similarly maintains that Victorian cosmopolitanisms, however focused they might be on individuals’ inner worlds and their ethical goals, did not ignore material reality. By definition ‘concerned with the right relation of the self to the other’, cosmopolitan subjectivity emerged by recognizing and critiquing domination.18 Seeking to establish fair and symmetrical forms of interconnection, cosmopolitanism draws attention to existing ties between the self and the distant other, which capitalist ideology, for all its fetishization of global transactions, often obscures or undermines.

Slavery, the Opium Trade, and Gothic Secrets When England’s overseas trade relations had a conspicuously exploitative character, the role they played in generating the nation’s wealth was nothing less than haunting. The 14 

Tanya Agathocleous, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 2–​3. 15  Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 119. 16 Agathocleous, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century, 37. 17  Lauren Goodlad, ‘Cosmopolitanism’s Actually Existing Beyond; Toward a Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 38 (2010), 399–​411, at 407, 406 (part of Editors’ Topic: Victorian Cosmopolitanisms, ed. by Tanya Agathocleous and Jason R. Rudy). 18  Regenia Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence, and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–​1920 (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 144.

Globalization and Economics    131 very language that described colonial ties betrays the desire to suppress the benefits that Britain accrued through colonization. The word ‘dependency’, which from the seventeenth century onwards denoted ‘a subordinate place or a territory, especially a country or province subject to the control of another’, reflects the imperialist ideology according to which colonized territories depended on the metropole for commercial and technological advancement, as well as moral and intellectual guidance.19 What this term conceals—​profits accrued in the metropole through exploitation—​loomed large in the public conscience, surfacing not only in economic writing centring on national wealth, but also in fictional narratives that assessed moral character and social respectability. The Abolition Act of 1833 outlawed slave labour in the West Indies, but profits accrued from slavery were of course already in circulation in the British Isles by that point. John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy reveals the predicament of investing capital whose source remains unknown and may have originated from slave labour. Discussing accumulation, Mill first notes, ‘In a rude and violent state of society it continually happens that the person who has capital is not the person who has saved it, but someone who […] possessed himself of it by plunder’ (92). Then he transitions into the case of slavery, signalling through the conjunction that he is now addressing a more advanced economy: ‘And even in a state of things in which property was protected, the increase of capital has usually been, for a long time, mainly derived from privations […] not voluntary. The actual producers have been slaves’ (93). With moral weight, he writes of the ‘slender humanity’ of the masters, but his subsequent comments make slave labour disappear from the scene. Capital is continually ‘used and destroyed’ in the process of production and reproduced through the investment of newly acquired surplus. As a result, Mill claims, ‘the greater part, in value, of the wealth existing in England has been produced by human hands within the last twelve months’ (97). Even as the ‘perpetual reproduction’ of capital draws attention to the way in which capitalist processes unfold over time, it also marks a break between the past and the present, connoting cleansing, as if reinvestment wiped out the history of primitive accumulation (97). As Mill’s Principles suggests, in the Victorian period, the history of slavery in the West Indies prompted meditations on the hold of the past and the possibility of breaking it. Diachronic processes of capitalism—​what Mill evokes by ‘the perpetual reproduction of capital’ and what world system theorists call cycles of crisis and restructuring—​tend to remain elusive in everyday economic transactions. But the novel, a narrative form that typically traces the unfolding of events across time, was well poised to capture and foreground them. In particular, novels with Gothic elements, which characteristically hint at past acts of transgression that bear their mark on the present, provided fertile grounds for disclosing circuits of violence that underwrote national wealth. Wilkie Collins’s Armadale (1866), for example, employs Gothic conventions to represent the history of colonial plantations in the West Indies. In the convoluted plotline of this sensation novel, family secrets are imbricated in an economy based on slavery,

19 

Oxford English Dictionary, http://​www.oed.com [last accessed 25 August 2013].

132    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture in which the older generation was complicit. The young protagonist, Allan Armadale, shares his name with a man his age, whom he knows only as Ozias Midwinter. The shared name results from an intricate set of events that took place in the West Indies in the past. Armadale’s and Midwinter’s families are tied up with fortunes amassed from slave labour, which has brought some members of the families in conflict, motivating them to employ fraud and assume one another’s name. Even though the young men have only limited awareness of this history, they seem to be under a curse that condemns them to repeat the acts of violence and replicate the feelings of hatred that gripped the older generation. The plot revolves around the question of whether the legacy of the past, inherited from a historical moment evidently tainted with moral failure, will exert its hold on the young men’s lives. In an inspiring reading of the novel, Nathan Hensley points out that ‘Armadale chart[s]‌the contemporary global order from its genesis in the eighteenth-​century traffic in slaves to its modern “free” phase.’ The novel ‘expunges the dark past that it outlines, sealing it in the past in order to welcome a modern contractual present’.20 Even as the novel reveals the extent to which slavery haunted the British collective consciousness, it also reassures its audience of the possibility of leaving the past behind. The Gothic trope of the family secret draws attention to the suppressed geopolitics of profit. Just as Armadale presents the colonial histories of Armadale’s and Midwinter’s families as a curse, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) turns Rochester’s ties to the West Indies into a haunting past that cannot be hidden. As Jane finds out, as the younger son in an aristocratic family, Rochester married the daughter of a West Indian planter for financial reasons. References to Rochester’s Creole wife subtly but constantly hint at slavery, not only because her fortune is derived from slave labour, but also because she herself is figured as the racial other, embodying characteristics that were typically attributed to blacks in racist discourse. Her ‘black and scarlet visage’, ‘swelled black face’, and ‘swelled and dark’ lips racialize the threat that she poses to Rochester’s happiness.21 Susan L. Meyer argues that the secret that Rochester keeps under lock and key involves the nation’s complicity in slavery: The story of Bertha, however finally unsympathetic to her as a human being, nonetheless does indict British colonialism in the West Indies and the ‘stained’ wealth that came from its oppressive rule. When Jane wonders, ‘what crime … live[s]‌ incarnate’ in Rochester’s luxurious mansion ‘which can be neither expelled nor subdued by the owner,’ the novel suggests that the black-​visaged Bertha, imprisoned out of sight in a luxurious British mansion, does indeed ‘incarnate’ a historical crime.22

20 

Nathan K. Hensley, ‘Armadale and the Logic of Liberalism’, Victorian Studies, 51, no. 4 (2009), 607–​ 32, at 625. 21  Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 310, 285, 284. 22  Susan L. Meyer, ‘Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre’, Victorian Studies, 33, no. 2 (1990), 247–​68, at 255, 254.

Globalization and Economics    133 When Brontë was composing Jane Eyre, British West Indian slaves had been fully emancipated. From the post-​emancipation perspective, slavery belonged to the past, but was no less haunting for that reason. Capital may have a tendency to be ‘used and destroyed’ for reinvestment as Mill would have it, but in the world of the Gothic each of its incarnations leaves a trace. Another Gothic novel that points towards explotative transactions in faraway lands is Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–​7), in which the protagonist, Arthur Clennam, returns to England in 1827 after trading in China for decades at the height of the infamous opium trade. The narrator is provocatively silent on the exact occupation of Arthur and his father in China.23 Historically, British tradesmen smuggled massive amounts of opium into China in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, succeeding in doing so despite all the measures that the Chinese government took to prevent it. Dickens was writing for an audience who would be familiar with the topic of Sino-​British commerce, as the Second Opium War—​an attempt to legalize the lucrative trade—​broke out while he was working on the instalments. Even though the state sought to legalize the opium trade, the public sentiment widely condemned the mercantile desire to turn profits at the expense of moral and physical suffering in Chinese society. In Little Dorrit, Arthur’s suspicious past—​the narrator’s failure to disclose it hints at unspeakable iniquities—​casts doubt upon the respectability of the Clennam house, which stands as much for moral uprightness as commercial success.24 A modern Gothic castle, the Clennam house with its stagnant atmosphere and deserted rooms turns into a ruin when it eventually burns down. Even though the collapse of the house is not connected to the Clennams’ economic activities in China, it initiates the process of renewal that Mill’s ‘perpetual reproduction’ of capital promises, rendering the past conveniently forgettable.

Free Trade and Myths of Mutuality Precisely because capitalism requires the continual integration of new markets into the system, wealth in any one location becomes dependent on transactions that take place elsewhere. For Britain, this dynamic produced a peculiar mix of dependence and sovereignty: the nation needed to trade with foreigners to establish its status as the world’s most powerful economic force. As merchants, financiers, and the state chose to enter transnational deals that they judged profitable, the nation’s wealth came to rely on foreign resources and markets. The violent mechanisms of acquisition that haunted Britons prompted them to seek mutually beneficial transactions in the world market. For many 23  Xu Wenying, ‘The Opium Trade and Little Dorrit: A Case of Reading Silences’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 25 (1997), 53–​66. 24  Ayşe Çelikkol, Romances of Free Trade: British Literature, Laissez-​Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 125–​8.

134    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Victorian liberals, it was free trade that guaranteed the equitable treatment of people around the world. The popular advocacy of free trade in the Victorian period owed much to political economic treatises published in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Following Adam Smith, James Mill and David Ricardo condemned prohibitively high tariffs and duties on importation. They argued against the mercantilist principle that importation was detrimental to national wealth and insisted that the state should not interfere with foreign commerce. In the 1830s and especially in the 1840s, the Corn Laws, which virtually prohibited the importation of grain, became the target of free trade proponents, with the leaders of the national Anti-​Corn Law League insisting that protective legislation served the landed interest at the expense of all the other classes. The Leaguers maintained that free trade would have prevented the Irish potato famine of 1845. After the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, free traders sought to repeal the Navigation Laws, which restricted foreign ships from trading in British waters. For liberals of the mid-​Victorian period, free trade was the perfect antidote to slavery and other ‘aspects of the old Empire’, including colonial monopolies like the East India Company.25 Free trade entailed the right to choose between employers, buyers, sellers, or transporters; for this reason, its advocates championed the cause as the antithesis of forced labour on the one hand and trade monopolies on the other. They promised peace and harmony around the world; however, once free trade measures were implemented from the 1840s to the 1860s, the resulting system did not usher in the age of mutuality that its early advocates had anticipated. When Britain opened its domestic market to commodities from all over the world, ‘British rulers created worldwide networks of dependence on, and allegiance to, the expansion of wealth and power of the United Kingdom’.26 Precisely because Britons built railways and provided shipping services for the rest of the world, and other nations found in Britain a market for their natural resources and other goods, Britain single-​handedly restructured the interstate system to suit its own needs and interests. However inequitable the results of free trade turned out to be in the second half of the nineteenth century, from the 1810s to the 1840s liberal rhetoric emphasized the need for reciprocity between sovereign nations. Political economists presented free trade as a system of symmetrical dependence. ‘All commerce is founded on a principle of reciprocity,’ wrote J. R. McCulloch in the Edinburgh Review.27 Innumerable defences of free trade treated the world economy as if it consisted of nothing more than the sum of individual acts of barter. France, for example, ‘had the advantage in the gift of soil and climate’ and Britain was ‘superior in her manufactures and artificial productions’; hence, ‘[h]‌aving each its own distinct staple—​having each that which the other wanted […] they were like two great traders in different branches, [and] they might enter into a traffic which 25  Frank Trentman, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 165. 26 Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 56. 27  John Ramsay McCulloch, ‘Navigation Laws’, Edinburgh Review, 38 (May 1823), 478–​94, at 493.

Globalization and Economics    135 would prove mutually and greatly beneficial’.28 Boasting an ethics of symmetry, myths of barter obscured the processes of ruthless competition and lucrative financial intermediation that characterized the market economy. While free traders praised mutual dependence by describing the global market economy as an expanded form of primitive barter, protectionists, who supported legal restrictions on importation, valued self-​sufficiency. In the early nineteenth century, the conservative political economist William Spence defended the Corn Laws on the basis that Britain’s ‘riches, her greatness, and her power, are wholly derived from sources within herself, and are entirely and altogether independent of her trade’.29 Such isolationist ideas persisted in the 1830s and 1840s. For example, for the novelist and entrepreneur John Galt, ‘a reciprocal system, such as that of the free-​tradists’, was not feasible. In defense of the Navigation Laws, Galt wrote, ‘I should […] be glad to learn how our ships can be increased by permitting the ships of foreigners to come to our shores.’30 Arguing that Britain should secure its monopoly in the shipping industry, Galt found that reciprocal relations would weaken the national economy. Protectionists’ efforts, however, did not prevent the state from adopting free trade measures such as the repeal of the Corn Laws and, later, of the Navigation Laws. Poets and fiction writers extended political economy’s relatively secular treatment of free trade by offerings myths of barter and reciprocity that drew upon ancient Greek and Christian narratives. Ebenezer Elliott, who published a volume of poems to protest restrictions on the importation of grain, helped to establish this trend. His Corn Law Rhymes (1830) most directly highlighted the ways in which protectionist legislation impoverished rural and industrial labourers within Britain, but Elliott also offered a global perspective that ascribes religious significance to commercial interconnection between distant lands. Addressing God, the speaker of his radical hymn, ‘Oh Lord, How Long’, laments restrictions on international trade and pleads, ‘Methinks, thy nation-​wedding waves | Upbraid us as they flow.’31 Sanctioned by the marital metaphor, commercial bonds between nations appear timeless and natural, and any attempt to sever them seems to oppose God’s will. Through a Christian lens, Elliott redeemed those circuits of dependence that protectionists deemed unpatriotic. He presented self-​sufficiency as an illusion and maintained that international commerce served God, as well as the needy. This vision found fuller expression in the fiction of Harriet Martineau, which famously popularized principles of liberal economics. In ‘Sowers, Not Reapers’ (1834), ‘The Loom and the Lugger’ (1834), and Dawn Island (1846), Martineau embraced commerce with foreigners as congruent with the Christian call to love one’s neighbours.32 28 

John Ramsay McCulloch, ‘A Free Trade Essential to the Welfare of Great Britain’, Edinburgh Review, 32 (July 1819), 48–​74, at 58. 29  William Spence, Britain Independent of Commerce (London: W. Savage, 1808), 52. 30  John Galt, ‘The Free Trade Question’, Fraser’s Magazine, 6 (November 1832), 593–​8, at 595. 31  Ebenezer Elliott, The Splendid Village: The Corn Law Rhymes and Other Poems (London: Benjamin Steill, 1833), 33, 34. 32 Çelikkol, Romances of Free Trade, 67–​70.

136    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture The theme of mutual exchange also surfaced in R. H. Horne’s epic poem Orion (1843), which relocated free trade principles to the world of ancient Greek gods and goddesses. Like Britons, Ithacans in Orion benefit ‘by the skill | Of their artificers in iron and brass, | And by their herds of goats and cloud-​woolled sheep’. Commerce assures the even distribution of goods around the world (‘With other isles the Ithacans exchanged, | And each was well supplied’), with the eponymous protagonist, whose epitaphs are ‘The Worker’ and ‘the Builder-​up of things’, eventually becoming immortal.33 The sacredness of trade in Orion matches the embrace of exchange as a Christian value in Elliott’s and Martineau’s works. Ascribing an enchanting aura to a modern economic phenomenon, literary myths of free trade complemented liberal economic discourse’s emphasis on mutual help.

High Finance and the Theme of Speculation For the liberals of the 1830s and 1840s, international commercial competition, if unfettered by tariffs and duties, would herald the end of colonial monopolies in South East Asia and terminate slave labour in the New World; however, in the mid-​and late-​ Victorian period Britain’s commercial dealings with sovereign states—​especially in South America and the Middle East—​intersected with practices of conquest and subjection. Indeed, Britain invented a new regime of power precisely by combining territorial expansionism with laissez-​faire in an unprecedented manner.34 Wealth derived from the colonies fed into European circuits of banking and lending. For example, on the Indian subcontinent, Britain forcibly acquired labour power and natural resources along with direct payments. The state used part of these extractions to buttress the territorial empire, but imperial tribute was also ‘siphoned off in one form or other to London, to be recycled through circuits of wealth through which British power in the Western world was continually reproduced and expanded’.35 The colonies constituted a major source of the capital that Britain invested all over the world, in stock exchanges and the loan sector. In theory, territorialism (annexing new lands for the sake of geographical expansion) does not have to coincide with high finance (the investment of liquid capital in the money market), but in the nineteenth century the former came to sustain the latter. Boosted by tributes secured through colonial governance, finance capitalism matured from the 1870s onwards. The world economy entered a phase in which capital ‘sets itself free from its commodity form and accumulation proceeds through financial deals’.36 To 33 

Richard H. Horne, Orion: An Epic Poem (London: J. Miller, 1843), I. ii. 5–​6, 35–​9. Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (New York: Verso, 2005), 73–​4. 35 Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 55. 36 Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 6. 34 

Globalization and Economics    137 invest profit, capital-​owners increasingly opted to keep part of their gains liquid, so as to channel it into the money market rather than trade or production. Much of surplus capital was not converted into new commodities. Institutions of high finance mediated between nation-​based powers, placing them in balance with one another to secure the survival of the international system. ‘Independent of single governments, even of the most powerful, [high finance] was in touch with it all; independent of the central banks, even of the Bank of England, it was closely connected with them,’ writes Polanyi.37 As territorial colonialism and high finance became mutually sustaining, new inter-​ regional connections burgeoned in the world economy. With colonial ports facilitating British merchants’ dealings with China, the Ottoman Empire, and newly independent states in South America, webs of commercial dependence expanded swiftly around the world, giving rise to economic circuits that were made possible by, but not contained within, empires. The vastness and intricacy of economic circuits challenged the effort to represent them. From the subjective point of view, activities as material as production, distribution, and exchange could appear infinitely abstract. Like capitalism’s expansive nature, its increasing reliance on high finance—​processes of lending, banking, and the stock exchange—​invited abstraction. As money became decoupled from the commodity form in this new stage of capitalism, economic investment seemed to have little to do with actual objects of exchange. Anxieties produced by the elusiveness of high finance found ample expression in the Victorian novel, particularly in the theme of speculation. In Anthony Trollope’s novels, the ubiquity of speculative investments indexes the capitalist tendency to build a world of abstraction. Portraying corrupt adventurers who float shares of fake business ventures, Trollope draws attention to the moral risks of financial intermediation. Consider, for example, the way Melmotte manipulates the public in The Way We Live Now (1874–​5). He invests in a railway project that he knows will not materialize, for the purpose of benefiting from shares that will skyrocket once the British public judges the project lucrative. The ‘scheme in question’ concerns ‘a South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway, which was to run from Salt Lake City, thus branching off from the San Francisco and Chicago line—​and pass down through the fertile lands of New Mexico and Arizona, into the territory of the Mexican Republic’. As Melmotte’s scheme reveals, the physical distance between the goods and the investors contributes to the public’s failure to recognize fraud. Mr Fisker, the mastermind behind the scheme, is convinced that Melmotte can make a fortune ‘before a spadeful of earth had been moved’.38 However focused The Way We Live Now may be on a specific act of fraud, it discloses the logic of capitalism at large: not unlike the dishonest scheme in which Melmotte participates, even the most proper transactions in high finance do not attach themselves to material goods. High finance relied extensively on representations, including paper money, stock shares, cheques, IOUs, and other paper documents comprised of textual and graphic

37 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 10. 38 

Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (New York: Penguin, 1994), 67, 68. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically by page number.

138    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture signifiers. In addition to standard certificates of debt or investment, rumours and advertisements were forms of representation that played important roles in the finance economy.39 They shaped public opinion, which in turn influenced prices, regardless of their accuracy. In The Way We Live Now, Mr Fisker ‘display[s]‌his programme, his maps, and his pictures’ to recruit Mr Melmotte, who is not at all concerned with whether the text and the pictures have real-​life referents (72). Investors in Britain could not directly witness construction in America, even if it existed; as a result, flashy pictures hold more authority in a global economy than they could in a local one. Historically, failed investments and fraudulent schemes gave rise to a widespread mistrust of representation. In her interdisciplinary study on credit, Mary Poovey argues that this situation put pressure on novelists to position their work as a legitimate kind of fiction fundamentally different from the kind involved in finance, which in turn gave rise to the generic differentiation between economic and literary writing that many readers tend to take for granted today.40 If, in the finance economy, signifiers mattered more than the things they claimed to represent, realist novels such as Trollope’s exposed that pattern and offered a moral critique of it. As in The Way We Live Now, in The Prime Minister (1876) to aspire to wealth is to manipulate representations. The novel’s morally suspect Ferdinand Lopez declares that his ‘property consists of certain shares of cargoes of jute, Kauri gum, guano, and sulphur,’ speaking of paper certificates as if they were no different from land or material goods.41 For Lopez, the more abstract one’s property, the better: ‘What is the use of money you can see? How are you to make money by looking at it?’ (401). Melmotte and Lopez reveal the penchant for abstraction that was at the heart of finance capitalism. Both characters are marked as ethnic others, with abundant hints that they may have Jewish origins. The figure of the Jew bears the burden of the ills of finance capitalism, even though that system was key to Britain’s economic prowess in the nineteenth century.

Imperial Expansion and the Treasure Plot The cross-​fertilization of colonial conquest and finance capitalism turns into a plotline in the imperial romance, a genre that became highly popular in the late nineteenth 39 

Cannon Schmitt, ‘Rumor, Shares, and Novelistic Form: Joseph Conrad’, in Nancy Henry and Cannon Schmitt eds., Victorian Investments: New Perspectives on Finance and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 182–​201, at 184; Nancy Henry, ‘“Rushing Into Eternity”: Suicide and Finance in Victorian Fiction’, in Henry and Schmitt (eds), Victorian Investments, 161–​81, at 164. 40  Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth-​and Nineteenth-​ Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 25–​42. 41  Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister (New York: Penguin, 1994), 395. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically by page number.

Globalization and Economics    139 century. Imperial romances reflected Britain’s accelerated overseas expansion in that era, which brought Rhodesia, Egypt, Cyprus, and many other parts of Africa and the Middle East under British control. Perhaps two of the best known works in this genre, Robert L.  Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), feature adventurous—​but respectable—​Englishmen who come into possession of diamonds or gold coins after strange and dangerous encounters abroad. In the metropole, the portable valuables that the Englishmen bring back are transfigured into money and other kinds of capital. In closure, the treasure plot converts precious metals and stones into abstract bearers of value, floating them free of the history of their acquisition in distant lands. Neither Treasure Island nor King Solomon’s Mines is set in a British colony; nonetheless, they both evoke territorial expansionism. In these novels, middle-​class Britons self-​ righteously fight indigenous populations—​or rivalling settlers—​and establish control over the territories they visit. As Patrick Brantlinger notes, King Solomon’s Mines ‘does not even hint’ that the lost civilization that the adventurers discover ‘should become […] part of the British Empire’.42 Nonetheless, when the Englishmen ‘penetrate into the unknown’ and facilitate a transition from tyranny to fair governance there, their rhetoric replicates colonizers’ perception of their mission.43 Similarly, the disciplined manner in which the protagonists secure their hold over the island in Treasure Island and their compassionate treatment of their enemies reflect those qualities that champions of colonization ascribed to colonial administrators. If protagonists in the imperial romance operate within the value system of colonialism, then the diamonds and gold coins that they bring home stand in for profits derived from territorial expansion. In King Solomon’s Mines, the Englishmen can invest the diamonds they acquire in Kukuanaland only after the narrative formally announces its termination. Once the oveseas adventure is over, ‘here, at this point, I shall end my history,’ announces the colonial hunter and trader Quatermain, explaining how he ‘bid farewell to all who have accompanied me through the strangest trip’ (290). After this narrative break, a letter from one of the other adventurers discloses that London dealers, upon seeing the diamonds, advise them to ‘sell [by] degrees, for fear [they] should flood the market’ (291). The African adventure is thus formally separated from the sale of the diamonds in London. The treasure that the adventurers claim as their own assumes a new life in the metropole, mimicking the channelling of colonial tributes into the world of high finance. The gold coins that the team of Englishmen recovers in Treasure Island also evoke the investment of colonial tributes. The titular treasure is indeed no more the rightful property of the middle-​class men who acquire it than it is of the pirates who buried it. Only a small boy, the protagonist accidentally comes into possession of a treasure map 42  Patrick Brantlinger, Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 136. 43  H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (New York: Puffin, 1994). All subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically by page number.

140    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture hidden in a pirate’s chest. The magistrate and the squire to whom he shows it decide to set sail towards the island where the treasure is buried, taking the boy along with them. Once on the island, the team overcomes the pirates who have come to claim what their formidable captain once buried. The triumph of the middle-​class team owes to their discipline and ability to strategize.44 While the pirates’ nature leans towards excess, middle-​ class adventurers ‘use [the treasure] wisely’: ‘Captain Smollett is now retired from the sea. Gray not only saved his money, but, being suddenly smit with the desire to rise, also studied his profession; and he is now mate and part owner of a fine full-​rigged ship.’45 The ‘wise’ investment of riches not only enables the profits to multiply, but also retrospectively justifies the initial acquisition of the plundered coins. As in King Solomon’s Mines, in Treasure Island the plot replicates in symbolic form what Mill describes as the perpetual rebirth of capital: the investment of precious stones and metals provides a clean slate, announcing a new phase in the protagonists’ lives. Novelistic closure hermetically seals the imperial adventure, as if it were possible to separate colonial economics from its metropolitan exchange. Romance adventures such as King Solomon’s Mines and Treasure Island involve two competing processes, embedding and abstraction. The treasure plot embeds metropolitan wealth in wide-​scale frameworks that include regions peripheral to capitalist development. But once the precious stones and metals from Africa and the Pacific islands arrive in the British Isles, they turn into abstract bearers of value that betray no trace of their origins. These two narrative strategies—​embedding and abstraction—​indeed characterize the literary engagement of global economic formations at large. Gothic novels, for example, tend to draw attention to past acts of violation lurking behind present riches, but they also signal the possibility of leaving that past behind. A similar ambiguity surfaces in the popular speculation plot. Financiers’ blatant disregard for material production is the target of moral criticism, yet the narrative itself, consisting only of linguistic signifiers, can never effectively bridge the gap between the abstract and the material. Through the interplay of embedding and abstraction, the global consciousness inspired by Victorian literature revolves around its own tenuousness and questions the conditions of its own possibility.

Select Bibliography Agathocleous, Tanya, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Anderson, Amanda, The Powers of Distance:  Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). Arrighi, Giovanni, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 2010). 44  Naomi J. Wood, ‘Gold Standards and Silver Subversions: Treasure Island and the Romance of Money’, Children’s Literature, 26 (1998), 61–​85. 45  Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (New York: Penguin, 1999), 190.

Globalization and Economics    141 Brantlinger, Patrick, Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Buzard, James, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-​Century British Novels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Çelikkol, Ayşe, Romances of Free Trade:  British Literature, Laissez-​Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Gagnier, Regenia, Individualism, Decadence, and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–​1920 (New York: Palgrave, 2010). Goodlad, Lauren, ‘Trollopian “Foreign Policy”: Rootedness and Cosmopolitanism in the Mid-​ Victorian Global Imaginary’, PMLA 124 (2009), 437–​54. Hensley, Nathan K., ‘Armadale and the Logic of Liberalism’, Victorian Studies, 51, no. 4 (2009), 607–​32. Hirst, Paul, and Graham Thompson, Globalization in Question: The International Economy and the Possibility of Governance (New York: Polity, 2001). Meiksins Wood, Ellen, Empire of Capital (New York: Verso, 2005). Young, Paul, Globalization and the Great Exhibition:  The Victorian New World Order (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Chapter 7

P olitical E c onomy Kathleen Blake

‘New Economic Criticism’ Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen put a name to a new departure in their 1999 collection The New Economic Criticism.1 Victorian studies has long attended to money matters in Victorian literature, with its obvious concerns with ‘get[ing] a living’ (page 1 of Great Expectations, 1861), inheritance, the marriage market, work, capital, the Industrial Revolution, trade, fortunes made and lost, peers, parvenus, and paupers. Such attention has grown through the influence of feminist criticism, class analysis, and postcolonialism. And there has been the ‘linguistic turn’ towards analysis of sign systems—​if of words, then also of numbers. But with all this attention, on the subject of money itself Victorian studies has long wrung its hands and pointed its finger. Critics have hailed what they saw as a ‘literature of the age of capital [that] was thick with detractors’,2 or else they have acted as whistle-​blowers on ‘self-​betrayal’ within would-​be literary indictments of a commercial age.3 These samples come from the 1990s. There has been a change of tone since. In The Body Economic: Life Death and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel, Catherine Gallagher observes that ‘literary critics are now more curious and tolerant about economic logic than they were at any time in the twentieth century’.4 In Pleasures of Benthamism: Victorian Literature, Utility, Political Economy I applaud this shift and seek to advance it. As I see it, ‘Victorian studies exhibits a high-​cultural leaning in the

1 

Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen (eds), The New Economic Criticism: Studies at The Intersection of Literature and Economics (London: Routledge, 1999). 2  Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 4. 3  Patrick Brantlinger, Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–​1994 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 168. 4  Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and The Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 192.

Political Economy   143 modern period and in the postmodern period a leaning towards ideology critique, whether right or left largely oppositional to Utilitarian, capitalist, liberal, bourgeois, values.’ But take a fresh look and ‘literature does not appear so much to challenge or else unwittingly collude with bourgeois philistinism […] A view takes shape of a broadly Benthamite, capitalist, and liberal age in pursuit of utility alike in commerce and industry and in socio-​economic-​political reforms, in good measure favourable to freedom and levelling in terms of class and gender.’5 Jonathan Rose asks whether ‘we are now witnessing the emergence of something quite unprecedented—​a capitalist criticism’ versus a criticism of capitalism.6 This marks a departure from the genteel Leavisite tradition and from the Marxist tradition that has fed post-​structuralism, Foucauldian criticism, and cultural studies. In their essay in The New Economic Criticism Regenia Gagnier and John Dupré call for precision in grasp of economic models on the part of non-​economists, i.e., literary critics. This has been subpar, with the exception of working knowledge of Marx. Gagnier sets a higher standard in her book Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society.7 While Nancy Henry and Cannon Schmitt hesitate to call a number of contributors to their essay collection ‘capitalist critics’, they note ‘the degree to which most […] concentrate less on a critique of Victorian capitalism per se than on overlooked dimensions of the culture of investment’.8 Francis O’Gorman says of his collection that it ‘is neither in love with the market, nor hostile to it’.9 After the financial meltdown of our own time, one might expect an up-​tick in outraged studies on Victorian crashes. But, if anything, consciousness has risen of the importance of the ‘real economy’. The mild tone of a number of works of new economic criticism marks a significant revision. Still, Marx and a censorious view loom large in Elaine Freedgood’s The Ideas in Things.10 Mary Poovey in Genres of the Credit Economy still concludes that literature at the end of the nineteenth century ‘denies virtually every relation except critique between imaginative writing and the market’ and leaves a legacy of just such distancing and disdain to literary criticism.11 Gallagher places literature in a more participatory role in capitalist culture. But while declaring ‘tolerance’, she still places political economy in an unflattering light. She calls it ‘the dismal science’, a familiar byword but of dubious credibility considering its

5  Kathleen Blake, Pleasures of Benthamism: Victorian Literature, Utility, Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 26–​7. 6  Jonathan Rose, ‘Was Capitalism Good for Victorian Literature?’, Victorian Studies, 46 (2004), 489–​501, at 489. 7  Regenia Gagnier, The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 8  Nancy Henry and Cannon Schmitt (eds), Victorian Investments: New Perspectives on Finance and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 2. 9  Francis O’Gorman (ed.), Victorian Literature and Finance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 9. 10  Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006). 11  Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-​Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008),

144    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture far-​from-​creditable source in Thomas Carlyle’s ‘The Nigger Question’.12 Gallagher concludes with the thought that ‘the dismal science’ spawned a ‘dismal culture’.13 Themes of new economic criticism take shape in rereadings, regroupings, and rediscoveries of texts—​the rediscoveries being mainly of economic writings hitherto little known and little valued by Victorianist critics. Many literary rereadings are of ‘standards’, especially of fiction and non-​fictional prose. The subgenre of the Condition-​of-​ England novel holds interest, but there is range beyond that. Prose writers of social comment like Carlyle, J. S. Mill, Matthew Arnold, and John Ruskin come under consideration. One would expect more re-​evaluation of well-​known texts by Mill in light of widening awareness of his capitalist principles. Knowledge and a measure of appreciation of Adam Smith are growing, with a spur from historian Emma Rothschild.14 As concerns Thomas Malthus there remain more reluctance and distaste. Malthus might be voted most dismal. But study of Malthus is increasing, for instance, on the part of Gallagher, and more is certainly worth doing here. Bias and neglect continue as yet little changed regarding Jeremy Bentham, a figure allied as a utilitarian with political economy. I am the virtually lone standard-​bearer for Bentham. Mill as a political economist of the Smithian ‘classical school’ garners attention, but more acknowledgement is needed of the tie-​in to his utilitarianism. We see more on David Ricardo, also of the classical school, as in work by Claudia Klaver,15 though not yet enough. We see quite a lot of Karl Marx, but a great deal less than we used to. We see William Stanley Jevons, the ‘neoclassical-​school’ economist—​here Gagnier is a leading light. We see popularizers of political economy like Harriet Martineau, treated by Freedgood,16 and writers of the financial press like Walter Bagehot, treated by Poovey. Attention to connections between economic theory and concrete practices and policies is sometimes more, sometimes less. More such would expand understanding of the ‘political’ in political economy. Vis-​à-​vis the political, critics should face up considerably more than they do to political economy and empire. Gallagher is not alone in spending far less time on ‘authorial effects’ in economic than literary texts.17 Exceptions are Rothschild, Blake, Klaver, Freedgood,18 Poovey, and Gail Turley Houstson.19 Smith as stylist has been garnering appreciation, if most often in passing—​he is an easy, vivid, irresistibly intelligible writer. Mill will repay more stylistic analysis for his verbal elegance and power and 12 

Thomas Carlyle, ‘The Nigger Question’ (1849), in Works, ed. H. D. Traill, centenary edn., 30 vols. (New York: AMS, 1969), xxix. 348–​96, at 354. 13 Gallagher, Body Economic, 184. 14  Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). 15  Claudia C. Klaver, A/​Moral Economics: Classical Political Economy and Cultural Authority in Nineteenth-​Century England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003). 16  Elaine Freedgood, Victorian Writing About Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 17 Gallagher, Body Economic, 5. 18 Freedgood, Victorian Writing About Risk. 19  Gail Turley Houston, From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Political Economy   145 his argument a fortiori. The darker, sometimes stricken eloquence of Malthus deserves much greater attention, and also Bentham’s love-​hate tangling with language, his word coinages, his playful, ironic, or scathing wit, his passion for system. I will proceed to some key principles of political economy that set key themes of new economic criticism. Political economy is becoming better known, which is very much to the good. But for many the exploration is truly of new ground, and this ground extends out into a very large and complex theoretical system in dynamic interaction with practical and policy actualities that are equally large and complex. It is not surprising that understanding can be piecemeal, or focus narrowed for manageable scope. I  offer a step back for a scan of the big picture, with my own observations on fundamentals of the theory as they interlock with each other and with historical specifics, and my own observations on what has and can be done to place the literature of the period in this grand-​scale, endlessly fascinating context.

Self-​Interest and Sympathy Self-​interest—​personal, strong, and predominating—​is a known principle in the conceptual systems of Smith and Bentham—​interest in ‘value-​in-​use’ or ‘utility’, i.e., satisfaction, pleasure. Less known but becoming more so is the principle of sympathy in Smith. This figures in interrelation with self-​interest, namely, as sympathy with others and interest in their sympathy with ourselves. Smith describes the dynamic in his account of the ‘impartial spectator’. This dynamic is the generator of ‘moral sentiments’. Not nearly so well known is sympathy according to Bentham. Again, this involves the interest for the self of regard turned on others and others’ regard turned on ourselves, and this forms a dynamic generating ‘the moral sanction’. Rothschild gives a sense of the Smithian conceptualization in the title of her book Economic Sentiments. This fuses the Smith of self-​interest and economics—​The Wealth of Nations (1776)20—​with the Smith of sympathy and morality—​The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).21 For a concerted case conjoining Smith and Bentham on interest as a mental function that is economic in nature see Stephen Engelmann’s Imagining Interest in Political Thought: Origins of Economic Rationality.22 For a concerted case conjoining Smith and Bentham on interest and sympathy see my Pleasures of Benthamism. To pick out one key text for Bentham, that would be Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789),23 and I will 20 

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. R.H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), i. 21  Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976). 22  Stephen G. Engelmann, Imagining Interest in Political Thought: Origins of Economic Rationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 23  Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), ed. J. H Burns and H. L. A. Hart (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).

146    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture add ‘Table of the Springs of Action’ (1817)24 and ‘Manual of Political Economy’ (1793).25 Bentham being so poorly understood by literary scholars, even new economic critics, let me also recommend Bentham scholar Philip Schofield’s Bentham: A Guide for the Perplexed.26 Tagging along with sympathy as an under-​recognized principle for Smith and Bentham is imagination. Many Victorianist literary scholars might line up with Romanticist John Whale in thinking of literature of the period as a pushback against—​ per Whale’s book title—​Imagination Under Pressure,27 that is, as a pushback against unimaginative-​utilitarianism-​cum-​political-​economy. Very different is Engelmann, who, in the title of his book, links ‘imagining’ to ‘interest’ as part of ‘economic rationality’. For him, imagination is most clearly at work in expectation—​time projection of interest. Great Expectations might come to mind. He loops imagination in with critical self-​consciousness as well. The latter is prominent in my book. Critical thinking is integral to the interplay of interest and sympathy, and it is at the heart of exchange, which runs on imaginative projection—​the projection that others have interests as well as we do ourselves, and that they have viewpoints on us and our interests as we do on theirs. This ties the critical thinking promoted by Mill in ‘On Liberty’ (1859) to his utilitarian political economy in Principles of Political Economy (1848).28 Another instance of imagination—​tied to the interest-​sympathy dynamic, tied to expectation, tied to exchange, tied to critical thinking—​is projection of costs and benefits. But to return to interest in its more primary sense, not transmogrified in interaction with sympathy, Gagnier puts that front and centre. ‘The insatiability of human wants’ is her book’s title phrase. She harks back to Smithian classical-​school political economy, with some allusion to utilitarianism, while focusing mainly on the later nineteenth-​ century neoclassical economics of Jevons, as in his Theory of Political Economy (1871).29 She stresses utility that is always ‘for someone’. It is subjective, stripped of a sense of the intrinsic as the basis of value and stripped of a sense of commensurability vis-​à-​vis utility that is ‘for someone’ else.30 This is the context for her analysis of a turn-​of-​the-​century transition towards a more avidly insatiable market society with a consumerism affecting literature and other cultural forms. For Gagnier, Arnold uneasily holds the line against this transition; Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and the Decadents cross over it. A contrast is observable with Gallagher in her book from a past decade, The Industrial Reformation 24  Jeremy Bentham, ‘A Table of the Springs of Action’ (1817), in Deontology, together with A Table of the Springs of Action and Article on Utilitarianism, ed. Amnon Goldworth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 5–​115. 25  Jeremy Bentham, ‘Manual of Political Economy’ (1793), in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring, 11 vols. (Edinburgh: Tait, 1838–​43), iii. 33–​88. 26  Philip Schofield, Bentham: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2009). 27  John Whale, Imagination Under Pressure, 1789–​1832: Aesthetics, Politics, and Utility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 28  J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy (1848), in Collected Works, ed. John M. Robson et al., 33 vols. (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1963–​91), ii–​iii. 29  William Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy (1871; 5th edn., New York: Kelley & Millman, 1957). 30 Gagnier, Insatiability of Human Wants, 44–​5.

Political Economy   147 of English Fiction. Gagnier and other new economic critics make it appear much more doubtful that, as Gallagher would have it, middle-​class literature and culture of the latter part of the century had discredited the ‘interests of the “ordinary self ”’ to favour disinterested gentry values.31 One bastion of sympathy versus interest had been located by earlier critics in the private sphere of the middle-​class home with its female ‘angel in the house’, separated from the public socio-​economic-​political sphere of men and providing an antidote to it. Bringing feminist and class analysis to this, Gallagher,32 also Nancy Armstrong,33 probed equivocations within the angel’s role, and Elizabeth Langland34 found private-​ sphere angels to be the bolsterers of the public sphere, giving it cover as they seemingly bowed out of it.

Economics of the Gift For more on sympathy, I will turn to gift theory. This is not part of political economy as such but provides a revealing contrast. In gifts selfish interest appears to be in abeyance and selfless sympathy to prevail. Gift exchange is archaic, largely at odds with and superseded by capitalism. Marcel Mauss in The Gift (1925)35 points out that an economic exchange rationale does exist in gift giving, but, as Pierre Bourdieu explains in ‘Symbolic Capital’,36 there must be ‘misrecognition’ of the economic for the proper functioning of gift exchange. Mauss and Bourdieu attest to the rooting of gift economics in older hierarchical social relations, and David Cheal37 and Margot Finn38 trace its partial persistence within emergent capitalism. This is especially notable where women are concerned. Jack Amariglio points to the uncertainty of return for a gift, which is unsecured by a contract such as secures a loan. But he calls such uncertainty a ‘ghost’ that is never entirely absent from any credit-​debt transaction.39 That political economy seeks to rein in an economics

31 

Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832–​1867 (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1985), 266–​7. 32 Gallagher, Industrial Reformation. 33  Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 34  Elizabeth Langland, Nobody’s Angels: Middle-​Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 35  Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1925), trans. Ian Cunnison, introd. E. E. Evans-​Pritchard (New York: Norton, 1967). 36  Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Symbolic Capital’, The Logic of Practice (1980), trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 112–​21. 37  David Cheal, The Gift Economy (London: Routledge, 1988). 38  Margot C. Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 39  Jack Amariglio, ‘Give the Ghost a Chance! A Comrade’s Shadowy Addendum’, in Mark Osteen (ed.), The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disciplines (London: Routledge, 2002), 266–​79.

148    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture of gifts is evident in its general promotion of contracts and in key legislative initiatives. One example of such initiatives is rationalization and restriction of government charity to the poor, with arguments out of Malthus and application in the 1834 Poor Law reform. Another is cutback in patronage in government hiring and funding systems in the Church and Civil Service, with Mill an important spokesman40 and various applications including the 1870 Order in Council for competitive Civil Service exams. In Pleasures of Benthamism I explore gift economics still operative alongside rising capitalism in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860). At issue are balances of power and balances of cost and benefit accruing to the different parties. I consider gifts involving men and more especially women and trace the shading of Maggie’s ‘selfless’ sympathy with others into self-​sacrifice. Here the association of gift giving with Christian morality comes in—​insofar as Christ gave away his life for sinners. There is deep-​ level resistance to Christian asceticism in political economy and utilitarianism, with the weight and legitimacy they give to the interest of each self. Bentham is scathingly direct in his indictment of asceticism such as that taught by Christianity. Mill is more circumspect. Still, gift exchange often stops short of wholesale giveaway. It operates under the veil of misrecognition to generate some recompense on both sides. In Giving Women Jill Rappoport treats gift giving in application to Jane in Jane Eyre, Esther in Bleak House, and Lizzie in ‘Goblin Market’ (1847, 1853, 1862), and she carries over to female gift experiences in Anglican sisterhoods, in New Woman eugenics, and in the gift-​book market in ladies’ annuals. She distinguishes instances of more or less reciprocal benefit from ones of one-​sided burdening with cost and sacrifice.41

Supply and Demand, Food and Population, Cost and Benefit Principles of supply and demand operate in all sorts of arenas. But as political economy teaches, beginning with Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798, enlarged 1803)42 the demand for and supply of food are fundamental—​matters of flesh and blood, life and death, the viability of the population. Malthus’s is a scarcity model premised on the lesser rate of expansion for agricultural production than human reproduction. His theory is daunting but not fatalist or bereft of moral sentiments. Population need not be brought back into balance with food by the sanctions of famine, war, vice, and disease. 40 

J. S. Mill, ‘Reform of the Civil Service’ (1854), in Collected Works, ed. Robson et al., xviii. 205–​11. Jill Rappoport, Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 42  Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1803), ed. Donald Winch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). See also Malthus, Principles of Political Economy Considered with a View to Their Practical Application (1820; Boston: Well and Lilly, 1821). 41 

Political Economy   149 A moral sanction can be put into effect, namely ‘moral restraint’. At the personal level this means, during Malthus’s day, later marriages, and further along in the century, birth control. At the level of public policy it means the reform of Poor Laws that subsidize large families and undercut the standard of living of individuals and workers as a whole. Sans reform, according to Malthusian logic, demand for food would rise beyond supply, causing higher food prices and hunger. And supply of labourers would rise beyond demand for them, causing falling wages, unemployment, and, again, hunger. The other classical-​school economists go on for pages on food, too. For instance, the corn yield per acre from the most to the least fertile fields, set in light of Malthus’s theory of population, becomes crucially important to Ricardo’s theory of rent, which figures in turn into his thinking on free trade in Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817).43 When I discussed Gagnier’s book, with its focus on the neoclassical school and late-​ century literature, I cited her emphasis on a lesser sense of the intrinsic in the value of consumer objects. This is suggestive of post-​scarcity, dematerialized thinking. Hark back to Malthus and consumption regains association with intrinsic value, with food, the material, the ‘real’ economy. A revisitation of literature’s engagement with Malthus, food, and population appears in a reading of Adam Bede (1859) by Lana Dalley.44 The novel contrasts the prudential delayed marriage of Adam and Dinah to the disastrously imprudent liaison of Hetty and Arthur. For a comic touch, it describes Bartle Massey’s fretting over the puppies of his too-​frequently littering dog that may eat him out of house and home. And of course it builds to tragedy, describing Hetty’s desperation over a new human mouth to feed and her murder of her child. Dalley steps into the earlier ‘separate spheres’ debate as a new economic critic. She contests any notion of a female domestic sphere even putatively separate from the economic, given women’s direct, literal economic involvement through food and motherhood. This betokens Malthus. So does the ‘body’ in Gallagher’s Body Economic. Gallagher coins the terms ‘bioeconomics’ and ‘somaeconomics’—​the former for physical life itself, the latter for physical sensations. She foregrounds not food but sexuality and parenthood, particularly motherhood. Maybe it isn’t surprising that, with her Malthusian focus, she reaches general conclusions about a dismal science and dismal culture. But in my view, if it isn’t surprising, that is only because of a still-​dominant misconception of Malthus as pure doomsayer. Malthusian agendas that are positive in terms of practical personal and policy applications hardly figure in Gallagher’s book, such as concerning moral restraint and Poor Law reform. Gallagher does recognize a ‘eudaemonic’ or pleasure-​oriented strain that links Malthus with utilitarians and also with Romantic poets for valuing sexual sensation. This brings me around to cost and benefit. As Gallagher looks at novels addressing the 43 

David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), in Works and Correspondence, ed. Piero Sraffa and M. H. Dobb, 11 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951–​73), i. 44  Lana L. Dalley, ‘The Economics of “a Bit o’ Victual”, or Malthus and Mothers in Adam Bede’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 36 (2008), 549–​67.

150    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Malthusian condition by Dickens and Eliot she sees a very big pile-​up of costs. Benefits, positive trade-​offs, practical personal and political ameliorations, disappear from view. She ends with a chapter on ‘the aesthetics of sacrifice’. The ‘eudaemonic’—​pleasure, benefit, utility, value-​in-​use—​fall out of the account.

Cost and Benefit, the Labour Theory of Value, Capital, Say’s Law But for political economists and utilitarians the unremitting task is to do the accounting, to project—​i.e. imagine—​what belongs in the tally, to critically examine, to undertake cost-​benefit analysis. Addressing labour, political economists and utilitarians conceive it as a cost only undertaken for its benefit in production of goods for consumption or sale or wages by which to buy other goods. This holds for the classical school and also for Marx, but not so strongly for the neoclassical school, which is more focused on consumption than production and thus pays less attention to cost in labour. Both The Body Economic and Pleasures of Benthamism connect literary renderings of work to classical economics. Work is hard. It carries cost, as appears in Carlyle’s insistence on an arduous Gospel of Work even in his jeu d’espirit Sartor Resartus (1834), and Dickens’s portrayal of even the circus performers of Hard Times (1854) as toilers for a living. Gallagher’s study finds costs that run very high; mine, by contrast, a net in the black between cost and benefit. Capital is frequently referred to in new economic criticism, but rather loosely, without the sustained grasp of the principle that should be expected. Capital constitutes past labour power saved and applied in aid of present labour. Phrases from Marx ‘s Capital (1867)45 capture this—​‘dead labour’ used as a ‘means of production’. Labour is at the heart not only of present work but of capital, and it is the creator of value, of benefits that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Thus the labour theory of value. This dictates a close correlation of prices on the market with labour/​capital costs. Further, in the pleasure-​oriented, non-​ascetic viewpoint of capitalism, labour can and should be recompensed for the costs incurred to create benefits: for the sweat of the brow, and for the delay or risk of entire forgoing of consumption in saving and investing capital. Indeed, benefits can and should exceed costs: in wages to the labourer, profits to the capitalist, and goods to the consumer. I will cite two studies, one again my own, that address saving and show the bearing of Say’s law. Both treat Eliot’s Mill on the Floss. For Deanna Kreisel, Maggie’s self-​sacrificial spirit, her ascetic courting of cost, is not so much antithetical to capitalism—​this, by contrast, is my

45 

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867), trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. C. J. Arthur (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1992).

Political Economy   151 emphasis—​as part of its spirit of saving.46 Malthus expresses some concern over a possible excess of capital saving for its own sake. But Say’s law rules out the prospect of saving that exceeds opportunities for profitable investment, and Ricardo and the classical economists after him support Say. They theorize that production is limited by the capital available to invest, rather than by demand, in effect, holding demand to be ‘insatiable’, so that any amount of capital saving can be profitably invested in producing the supply to meet the demand. Still, the problem vis-​à-​vis capital and demand is not so fully resolved in political economy. Malthus—​also Ricardo and, more and more insistently, Mill—​advocate a boost in demand on the part of the working class, that is, rising expectations for their standard of living, lest this class ‘people down’ to mere subsistence. Per a reading of mine, Mill addresses limited demand in the extrapolated sense of demand for liberty (as itself a utility) in ‘On Liberty’. Per a reading of Gallagher’s (in Body Economic), Eliot seeks out stylistic innovations for Daniel Deronda (1876) in the face of sated demand for novels of the type she had previously written. Studies of latter-​century consumerism like Gagnier’s paint a picture of a culture eager to prompt demand. At the same time studies of investment spanning the period like the Henry-​Schmitt collection show a culture hardly in decline in respect of opportunities for investing capital.

Free Trade, Rent Theory A good part of the reason capital investment remains vibrant is free trade. Free trade is the signature policy of laissez-​faire, much promoted by political economists and utilitarians back to Smith and Bentham. Free trade favours labour organized according to division of labour, the purpose being efficiency, to achieve greater productivity at lower cost. For the same purpose, it favours competition and frowns on monopoly. Malthus’s principle of population provides Ricardo with a stepping stone towards his own further theorization of free trade. He articulates the principle of ‘comparative advantage’ between producers in wide international markets. The key battle is over free trade in corn (wheat), the key victory the 1846 Corn Law Repeal. Lifting duties that protect home-​grown grain from foreign competition enjoying ‘comparative advantage’ means importation of this foodstuff to meet the demand of a rising population and redeployment of that population from work in agriculture to work in industry and commerce. It is in industry and commerce that Britain gains its own comparative advantage. There is reduced cost of grain grown in advantageous conditions and reduced cost of bread to workers, who now earn more in factory and commercial jobs. They have more to spend. Non-​food demand goes up, driving up opportunities for capital investment, and driving up production, which is to say supply. As free trade boosts imports it boosts exports as well. Britain becomes the workshop of the world. There is increased investment and production of supply to satisfy increased foreign as well as British demand. 46  Deanna Kreisel, ‘Superfluity and Suction: The Problem with Saving in The Mill on the Floss’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 35 (2001), 69–​103.

152    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Ayşe Çelikkol explores some of the implications in her Romances of Free Trade.47 Foremost for her is the balancing act between individual self-​interest and competition on the one hand and mutual benefit on the other. She considers the smugglers of romance tales as an advance guard of free traders and sailors like those in Captain Marryat’s nautical fiction as exemplars of a kindred enterprising individualism. In ‘Dawn Island’ (1846) Harriet Martineau describes the benefits all around from the coming of a merchant ship to an eastern isle. Trade is associated not only with a welcome and peaceable exchange of goods but also with the benignancy of nature, love, and an improved lot for women. In the British setting of Shirley (1849) Brontë depicts more tensions. There is the overbearingness—​including to women—​of the individualist master of the textile mill Robert Moore, plus his conflicts with his workers. There is also his dissociation from Englishness—​including from the countryside that his factory intrudes upon—​through his involvement in a market that is global. He faces a Napoleonic-​era embargo that cuts off his US cotton supply, threatening unemployment for his workers and his own bankruptcy. In Çelikkol’s reading, Brontë represents the end of the embargo and freeing up of trade as just as important to re-​establishment of harmony at novel’s end as the caring intervention of women. Gender, labour, and love relationships and the relationship to country are not altogether resolved. Moore, if more spontaneous, is still pretty tough and detached, his factory still rather a blot on the landscape. Even so, Brontë describes a scene that is ‘romantic—​with a mill in it’. From free trade I will move to rent. The two are interrelated. Free trade and rent theory are both strongly formulated by Ricardo making use of Malthus and then advanced further—​much further as regards rent—​by the Mills. As discussed, Corn Law Repeal lends momentum to Britain’s shift from an agriculturally-​based to an industrially-​ commercially-​based economy. Agriculture had been the mainstay of the great landlords, the gentry and aristocratic owners of a vast extent of British land. Rent theory holds that landlords’ rent—​their take on the grain sales from land they lease out to farmers—​derives from a kind of natural monopoly. Population grows but not the amount of fertile land. Poorer land comes under cultivation, but grain from lower-​and higher-​yielding fields alike sells at a single price, which goes up as demand increases. Rising costs for capital investment, including more labour to cultivate poorer land, fall on the farmer, not the landowner. The farmer gets declining profit from greater investment in what still remains lesser productivity per acre. The worker gets work and wages, but bread gets costlier. Meanwhile the landlord gets rising payoff from rising prices on all grain. The landlord gets a windfall—​rent. Rent is not based on capital—​the product of past work saved and put in service of present work. Nor is it based on such present work. As J. S. Mill says, the landlord grows rich in his sleep. Corn Law Repeal cuts into this monopoly. It brings agricultural land in far places (the US, Russia) into competition with British land. Free trade in the form of Corn Law Repeal cuts deep, while with

47 

Ayşe Çelikkol, Romances of Free Trade: British Literature, Laissez-​Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Political Economy   153 a gradualist thrust. Rent theory does not, at first, generate legislation so damaging to landlords. But Mill becomes an anti-​rent crusader on behalf of land-​tenure and land-​ tax reform.48 Legislative actions ensue, like the 1870 and 1881 Irish Land Acts and Lloyd George’s 1909 People’s Budget, and these mark a more and more aggressive taxation of land that bears very heavily against the landlord class. David Cannadine describes the process in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy.49 For a literary reading addressing rent, I will cite a chapter of mine on Bleak House. The novel treats the great landlord Sir Leicester Dedlock and inheritance cases involving land in Chancery, a court cherished by Sir Leicester as a bastion of his landed order. The slum Tom All Alone’s is in Chancery—​city residential tracts as well as country estates participated in the economics of rent. The slum landlord Mr Krook rents out rooms far gone in decay, untouched by work or investment but paying out to him all the same. The novel’s anti-​rent, anti-​landlord messages include the humbling of the Dedlocks, the decrying of Tom All Alone’s, the spontaneous combustion of Krook, and the rise of a family formerly in service to the Dedlocks now bringing forth a captain of industry.

The Commodity The product of industry, the commodity, loses some of the character of a thing that has been produced by work with the late-​century neoclassical critique of the labour theory of value. And it takes a leap in the theorization of Marx to become the commodity fetish. However, for classical economists, also for Marx, products are produced by work with the aid of capital, saved product of past work serving as means of present production. At the same time, Marx charges capitalism with hiding this, such that work, workers, and the human relation of exchange of labour in exchange of products disappear from view. Perceived in alienated, reified form, dissociated from its source in labour, the product becomes less product than commodity, even fetish. Marx on the commodity fetish and Freud on the fetish more generally join in a mix of influences on new economic criticism that includes Walter Benjamin on Parisian department stores, historians on the Crystal Palace as display case for the world’s wares, Foucault on the surveying eye, Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson on spectacle and simulation, Lacanian and Derridian psychoanalysis cum semiotics, and a gamut of structuralism, post-​structuralism, cultural studies, and postmodernism. Dating to the 1990s are a number of studies like Andrew Miller’s Novel’s Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative.50 48 

J. S. Mill, ‘Land Tenure Reform’ (1871), in Collected Works, ed. Robson et al., v. 687–​95. David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 50  Andrew H. Miller, Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 49 

154    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Studies since 2000 include Christopher Lindner’s on Fictions of Commodity Culture, with a Marxist focus,51 and Gagnier’s on turn-​of-​the-​century consumer society, with a focus on neoclassical theory. Gordon Bigelow takes notice of the neoclassical school too, though he traces a late nineteenth-​century consumerist attitude to earlier in the period and ultimately to individualist, subjectivist Romanticism.52 Krista Lysack discusses themes of shopping in women’s writing, including shopping with no aim to buy the commodity at all, which, according to her, signifies resistance—​to the subjection of women, to capitalism.53 Other critics are much more concerned with really-​demanded, really-​supplied, real-​ economy products. There is nobody like Malthus to rematerialize a sense of the commodity. Thus Gallagher’s Body Economic insists on the body. Freedgood’s Ideas in Things insists on the ‘thingness’ of things represented on the pages of Victorian literature, which no doubt registered in more material terms for Victorians than for us at our remove in time. The materiality she wants to recover is that of the work of making things. This harks back to the labour theory of value. There is a Marxist tendency in Freedgood’s emphasis on exploitative labour relations embodied in things, such as the calico curtains described by Elizabeth Gaskell in Mary Barton (1848). These carry ideas of hard mill work, the imperial connection to India, and a history as a trade-​good in the slave trade. But, unlike Marx, more like classical-​school economists, Freedgood believes labour relations do figure in the commodity under Victorian capitalism and that the commodity as referenced in literature would be apprehended in these terms by Victorian readers, not just as a fetish. It is we who miss too much, while we can learn to see better from criticism like hers. I too seek to rematerialize the commodity in Victorian literature for present readers and critics. The economics of cloth provides a very good reminder of the material. Consider, say, the Philosophy of Clothes that gives the measure of the age in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and themes of the British-​Indian textile trade, textiles as leading edge of industrialization, and the tie-​in to empire in Gaskell’s Cranford (1853) and Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World (1916). For me, the theoretical focus is classical political economy including its Benthamite aspect, stressing value-​in-​use, utility (satisfaction of interest, pleasure), and the odds of maximizing benefit over cost.

Money and Credit If the commodity can sometimes seem to lack materiality, so even more can money and credit. From Smith on, classical economists theorize wealth not as silver and gold, or

51  Christopher Lindner, Fictions of Commodity Culture: From the Victorian to the Postmodern (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2003). 52  Gordon Bigelow, Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 53  Krista Lysack, Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women’s Writing (Athens, O.: Ohio University Press, 2008).

Political Economy   155 money, or credit and debt instruments, but as the productions of labour with the help of capital. It is these productions that have the much larger claim to material substance. In The Financial System in Nineteenth-​Century Britain, Mary Poovey sets out writings by Bagehot, editor of The Economist, and others on currency, credit, debt, and banking.54 Margot Finn55 gives a history of changing practices for securing credit-​debt obligations. These go from older forms reliant on gift economics and trust in character, to newer capitalist forms reliant on abstractions like contracts. Latter twentieth-​century theoretical commentators such as Marc Shell and Jean-​Joseph Goux dwell on the representational nature of precious metals, coins, paper money, and written obligations and draw a comparison to the representational nature of language and literature. In the 1990s, Patrick Brantlinger explores such a comparison with attention to Victorian literature and culture.56 The O’Gorman collection concerning finance shows the continuing concern of new economic critics with money and credit. The dominant emphasis in this area is on abstract, dematerialized representation, the linguistic-​discursive functioning of money and credit that makes these strangely literary in themselves and apt subjects for literature and literary criticism. So we get Poovey’s Genres of the Credit Economy. Poovey perceives an evolution of genres in economic writing and literature. These emerge, divide, and contest ground with each other, but, says Poovey, serve a common aim—​to mediate and manage what is threatening within the credit economy. The threat stems from the ‘problematic of representation’. The problematic of representation is inherent in a banknote that purports to be grounded on gold by a mechanism of credit or credibility but may prove irredeemable during a run on banks. It is likewise inherent in literature, which purports to be grounded on something real and of value while it too depends on credit or credibility, and, lacking that, may prove worthless for real-​world purposes. The problematic runs along a ‘fact-​fiction continuum’. Poovey describes poles that move further and further apart according to processes of ‘factualization’ and ‘fictionalization’. Economics more and more naturalizes fiction as fact. An example is the 1844 Bank Charter Act. It bolstered belief in the Bank of England by guaranteeing the notes of country banks and restricting its own note-​issue to a ratio with gold reserves. Its paper money came to seem as good as gold, still a fiction but less subject to doubt. This held up quite well even in bad times when the Act had to be suspended. Economic writing also ‘factualizes’ in this way. During the panic following the failure of the bill-​broking house Overend and Gurney, Bagehot writes to restore confidence. He adopts a stance of general survey, not descending to particulars such as naming the failed company, and deploys other devices of style to convey expertise and the assurance that the system, being so systematic, must be sound. Work by critics such as Freedgood and Klaver provide building 54  Mary Poovey (ed.), The Financial System in Nineteenth-​Century Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 55 Finn, Character of Credit. 56 Brantlinger, Fictions of State.

156    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture blocks for the analysis. Freedgood in Victorian Writing About Risk points to palliation of economic anxiety in Martineau’s popular illustrations of political economy in didactic story form. Klaver in A/​Moral Economics points to abstraction of style in Ricardo’s writing as a source for the growing authority of economic discourse. For Poovey, writings on the economy, while suggesting that someone comprehends it, actually encourage cultural toleration of ignorance, acceptance of ‘factualization’ as fact. For her, literature does something of the same thing by different means, especially in the novel. Though full of real-​world references including talk of money, the novel is ever more intensively ‘fictionalizing’. So Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice (1813) sets a money plot in motion that carries plenty of threat to her heroine but blocks a reader’s ability to track this plot or worry about it. The narrative transforms financial to romantic threat and resolves the latter. According to Poovey, Victorian literature assumes a stance of polar removal from and opposition to economics and economic writing, a stance that is then assumed by critics as well. Such a critical stance has been familiar enough in Victorian studies over the years. But some new economic critics question whether it is very on target in application to Victorian literature, whether it is very true to what we actually encounter when we read this literature. Poovey herself tells a tale of participation in the credit economy on the part of literary as well as economic genres, namely, through covert collusion in sustaining credibility by hiding threats. Gail Turley Houston is also concerned with threats involving money, credit, and financial panics, but she thinks these often show up right out in the open in economic writing and in literature and are not so different in the way they are cast. Marx and Bagehot and other writers in the financial press provide examples of a language of spectres, vampires, and lurking terrors. Such is the language of the Gothic, too, as in R. L. Stevenson’s ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1886, 1897, 1857). So there is not such a cover-​up but plenty of attention to the bad news of financial crisis.

‘Political’ Economy—​and Empire Besides the commodity fetish and money and credit, there’s the real economy—​work, capital saving and investment, production, consumption—​with personal and society-​ wide impacts where capitalist culture looks for some good news. The ‘political’ in political economy means Smith’s and Bentham’s theorizations on behalf of the wealth of the individual and the nation at large, the greatest happiness of the greatest number. It means Malthus’s proposed correctives to a population problem affecting everyone. It means Ricardo’s attention to taxation, naming it right along with political economy in his book’s title. Economic theory became less ‘political’ with neoclassicism, though Jevons still calls his book The Theory of Political Economy. Political economists and utilitarians backed measures that are overtly economic while at the same time political. I have already noted a number of these that saw legislative

Political Economy   157 action: Poor Law reform, the Bank Charter Act, Corn Law Repeal, the Order in Council for competitive Civil Service exams, the Irish Land Acts, the People’s Budget. The landowning aristocracy declined and fell. The general standard of living, including that of the working class, rose.57 Political economists and utilitarians also backed measures that are not so overtly economic, where the ‘political’ appears uppermost. But as measures advancing democracy these also have economic impact: extension of the vote, seen in Reform Bills of 1832, 1867, and 1884 (with Mill attempting unsuccessfully to include women in the 1867 Bill), and extension of popular education, seen in Forster’s 1870 Education Act and subsequent legislation. There is tremendous pace and magnitude of political-​economic transformation by century’s end. Rothschild notes how often the word ‘liberty’ appears in Smith’s writing. Bentham and the Mills launched the ‘Philosophic Radicals’ that J. S. Mill helped fold in with the Whigs to form the newly named Liberal party. Mill pens ‘On Liberty’ to champion and showcase free critical thinking, which, by the same mechanism as the free market per his economics, advances the individual and the general good. All this by way of observing that political economy, incorporating its utilitarian aspect, is part and parcel of liberalism. Many Victorian authors, as I see it, participate in a liberalism infused with its ideas. Still, the ‘political’ in liberal political economy includes connection with empire. After all, both Mills were employed by the East India Company. Postcolonial scholars in political science and other disciplines see blind contradiction or hypocrisy betraying a fundamentally authoritarian core of liberal imperialism,58 or else they see a core that includes liberating components,59 or else fundamentally anti-​imperialist principles in Smith and Bentham abandoned for a ‘turn to empire’ by the Mills,60 or else an imperialist component strong in Bentham and James Mill but mitigated by Mill Jr. as he sets distance between himself and these forebears.61 These views are far from reconciled, and the jury is still out. But new economic critics would do well to confront the issues as squarely. One sees more these days on empire from economically minded critics. This is only right considering that empire is so clearly bound up with the economic. Take rent theory, a favourite of mine, and its very consequential application to land tenure and taxation. This theory derives in good part from an interchange of critical thinking between Ricardo and James Mill. The exchange displays the crucial quotient of imagination, too, in its engagement with a sharply unfamiliar foreign perspective.

57  W. D. Rubinstein, Britain’s Century: A Political and Social History 1815–​1905 (London: Arnold, 1998). Roderick Floud, The People and the British Economy, 1830–​1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 58  Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-​Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 59  Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). 60  Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 61  Lynn Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994).

158    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture In his History of British India62 Mill analyses the existing Indian land system and the ill effects of Britain’s imposition of a British-​style regime. With input from Ricardo on rent, Mill develops new ideas for a better solution, and here Mill Jr. adds critical-​imaginative momentum. This is by going back to the Indian system with adaptations and innovations. The result is a British-​Indian hybrid for incremental implementation in India from the 1840s, and, what is more, back-​importation for implementation in Ireland and England from the 1870s. So we see the Irish Land Acts and the People’s Budget and the tremendous economic-​political power shift that I have previously described from landlords to the middle and working classes. This exemplifies a ‘political’ factor that is—​even operating within imperialism with all the paradoxes involved—​authentically liberal. It tallies with a great deal else in political economy.

Select Bibliography Blake, Kathleen, Pleasures of Benthamism:  Victorian Literature, Utility, Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Çelikkol, Ayşe, Romances of Free Trade:  British Literature, Laissez-​Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Freedgood, Elaine, The Ideas in Things:  Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Gagnier, Regenia. The Insatiability of Human Wants:  Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Gallagher, Catherine, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and The Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Henry, Nancy, and Cannon Schmitt (eds), Victorian Investments: New Perspectives on Finance and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), Poovey, Mary, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth-​and Nineteenth-​ Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Poovey, Mary (ed.), The Financial System in Nineteenth-​Century Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Rappoport, Jill, Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Woodmansee, Martha, and Mark Osteen (eds), The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics (London: Routledge, 1999).

62  James Mill, The History of British India (1818), abr. and introd. William Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). See also J. S. Mill, Writings on India, in Collected Works, ed. Robson et al., xxx.

Sexing the Victorians

Chapter 8

T he Victoria ns , Se x , and Gende r Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

In ‘Virgin Soil’ (1894) the New Woman writer George Egerton offers a narrative from girlhood to married life in two exchanges between a mother and her daughter. The first conversation is an aborted one: the mother is ‘scarcely less disturbed’ than her daughter, whose bridegroom is waiting downstairs in the family home; ‘flushing painfully, making a strenuous effort to say something to the girl, something that is opposed to the whole instincts of her life,’ the mother finds herself unable to speak beyond fragments: ‘You are married now, darling, and you must obey’—​she lays a stress upon the word—​‘your husband in all things—​there are—​there are things you should know—​ but—​marriage is a serious thing, a sacred thing’—​with desperation—​‘you must believe that what your husband tells you is right—​let him guide you—​tell you—​’.1

The girl, with ‘anxious impatience’, demands to know ‘What is it?’ but the duty-​bound mother cannot make explicit her knowledge. Five years later the daughter confronts her mother on the truths withheld: about marriage, the relationship between men and women, and the sexual claims a husband may lawfully make:  ‘He has stood on his rights; but do you think, if I had known, that I would have given such insane obedience, from a mistaken sense of duty, as would lead to this? I have my rights too, and my duty to myself; if I had only recognised them in time. Sob away, mother; I don’t even feel for you.’2

A compact conjoining of ideas around motherhood, the condition of women, the dom­ estic, sexuality, the law, and gendered and generational divides, Egerton’s tale encapsulates 1 

George Egerton, ‘Virgin Soil’, in Egerton, Keynotes and Discords, ed. Sally Ledger (Birmingham: Birmingham University Press, 2003), 127–​34, at 127. 2  Egerton, ‘Virgin Soil’, 133.

162    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture the difficulties faced by reader or critic in separating out the complexities of Victorian ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’. Against a backdrop of change and dissonance, the Victorians saw considerable upheaval across normative codes of social, sexual, and gendered behaviour. One cannot set these changes apart from wider issues: religion, science, class, and empire all had a role to play in the growing resistance to established discourses and the invocation of new approaches to the position of women, men, and sexuality. In this chapter we want to look at some current themes in Victorian gender and sexuality studies and place them into the contexts of the multiple cultural frameworks, identities, and discourses on rights that circulated in the period. Public debates developed from earlier contexts, such as the intellectual challenge posed by the eighteenth-​century ‘Bluestockings’, the equality discourses of the French Revolution, and the political writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the first British feminist manifesto, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Closer to the start of the Victorian period, the Queen Caroline Affair of 1820, which saw George IV thwarted in his attempt to have his wife convicted of adultery in order to obtain a divorce, has been identified as an event which sparked widespread outrage and advanced calls for social reform related to women.3 The sharp legal differentiation between the sexes in favour of men—​in educational provision, access to the professions, marriage, child custody, property and citizenship rights—​ended only in the early twentieth century. Encompassing the variety of social and cultural changes across the Victorian landscape therefore necessitates an awareness of the periods both before 1837 and after 1901. Yet it is between these two dates that the richness and diversity of modern understandings of gender and sexuality took shape. While ‘new’ sexualities and gender positions were not entirely novel in themselves, the amount of attention devoted to questions of gendered and sexed selfhood and subjectivity grew exponentially during the years of Victoria’s reign. The focus of this chapter is ‘the massive and heated debate around sexuality [and gender] which took place in the […] nineteenth […] century’.4 While Sheila Jeffreys dates this debate to the latter years of the century, the foundations of the oppositional positions embraced by many late Victorians and the solutions to the dilemmas they proposed can be traced to much earlier decades. Such debates were often figured in the literature of the time in its broadest sense, with poetry and prose presenting particular challenges and opportunities for new ways of thinking. In a post-​Foucauldian critical context heavily influenced by the disciplinary knowledge conceptualized in The History of Sexuality (1976), there can be a tendency to obscure the disordered and contradictory nature of sexualized and gendered power relations during the nineteenth century. The return in Victorian studies to historicist modes on the one hand and affective discourses on the other poses specific problems for the assessment of gender and sexuality within the period. While thirty years separate two definitional publications by Steven Marcus (1966) and Michael Mason (1994), the last twenty years have demonstrated a shift from both 3  Susie L. Steinbach, Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture and Society in Nineteenth-​Century Britain (London: Routledge, 2012), 37–​8, 133. 4  Sheila Jeffreys, ‘Introduction’, in Jeffreys (ed.), The Sexuality Debates (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 1.

The Victorians, Sex, and Gender    163 feminist and queer perspectives on the nineteenth century into a more fluid and fluctuating dynamic of cultural and social complications in sexing the Victorians. This shift goes beyond the juxtaposition in the popular imagination between stereotyped Victorian prudery and the growth in pornographic materials, and reflects something of the tension in attempting to understand the nineteenth-​century past, even through its literature, as a ‘knowable’ experience. What Lynda Nead has termed the ‘myths of sexuality’ in female representation5 can be extended into the mythical nature of the debates which we perceive to have defined the Victorians’ understanding of their bodies and identities. The limited opportunities for women in the early years of the period have often been placed into the context of the ways in which the female body was portrayed as subject to emotions unbecoming of virginal purity or domestic satisfaction. Ruskin’s ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ (1865) presented the dutiful (middle-​class) woman determinedly serving her husband as part of a harmonious division of labour and love, yet his simultaneous aesthetic appreciation of the female pure form and his mythic repulsion at its real-​life fleshliness is itself part of the Victorian über-​narrative around sex and desire.6 Even as Ruskin and others poeticized and thus desexualized the relationship between women and men, the Victorians were conceptualizing women as a body that, individually and collectively, undermined purity and decorum. Cultural and medical discourse on female madness underlined the scientific objectives of locating the mysteries of female sexuality in a distorted sense of sexualized, bodily impurity. The physicality and reproductive function of the female body and any desires it might harbour were causes of deep male anxieties. Normative sexuality revolved around reproduction, generating ideas of the female’s responsive duty and the male’s naturalized need rather than desire. Even within marriage female passion and sexual longing transgressed against codes of domestic sexuality; active and ‘uncontrolled’ female sexuality was conceived as ‘the major, almost defining symptom of insanity in women’.7 Such regulation of female sexuality, within or outside of marriage, could take extreme forms: recommended treatment for sexually responsive menopausal women included ‘injections of ice water into the rectum, introduction of ice into the vagina, and leeching of the labia and the cervix’.8 A prominent example of medical interventionism was Isaac Baker Brown, who referred fellow practitioners to the excision of the clitoris as a panacea for female depression, insomnia, abdominal pain, uterine complaints, sterility, and even constipation. That ‘[u]‌sual operation’,9 which he performed with indulgence until his expulsion from the Obstetrical Society in 1867, is described in On Some Diseases of Woman Admitting Surgical Treatment (1866). As Brown writes: 5 

Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). 6  See Robert Hewison, John Ruskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) for a rebuttal of the myth. 7  Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–​1980 (London: Virago, 1985), 74. 8 Showalter, The Female Malady, 75. 9  Isaac Baker Brown, ‘Case IV’, On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy and Hysteria in Females (1866), in Jeffreys (ed.), The Sexuality Debates, 14.

164    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Enlargement of the clitoris, [ … ] always attended by abnormal irritability, is a condition of [ … ] frequent occurrence [ … ] and is for the most part brought on by self-​ abuse [ … . ] The radical cure of the habit is, however, fortunately in our hands [ … . ] The necessity for the [ … ] amputation of the clitoris, when much enlarged, has been recognised by surgeons generally; but I would go further and say, that this operation should be resorted to in all cases where that organ is found in an abnormal state.10

Normalizing discourses were, however, in tension in this period. Female masturbation and sexual desire as outlined here were seen as needing discipline and extirpation at the same time as both male ‘self-​abuse’ and male degeneracy/​effeminacy were viewed as constitutive of impotence.11 Such early formulations of sexualized knowledge frequently represented sex as an urge in need of control and the libidinal as inherently lascivious and corrupting not only for the individual but also as part of a wider social threat. Female hysteria was a long-​standing subject of public and literary debate. Visitors flocked to Bedlam to view the inmates, including in 1851 Charles Dickens, who visited the Christmas Ball at St Luke’s Hospital and noted the different ‘types’ of women to be found there: There was the brisk, vain, pippin-​faced little old lady, in a fantastic cap [ … . T]here was the old-​young woman, with the dishevelled long light hair, spare figure, and weird gentility; there was the vacantly-​laughing girl, requiring now and then a warning finger to admonish her; there was the quiet young woman, almost well, and soon going out [ … . ] The experience of this asylum did not differ, I found, from that of similar establishments, in proving that insanity is more prevalent among women than among men.12

Dickens’s comments here are interesting precisely because he rationalizes the scene before him as one that is to be expected and, moreover, typical. Each of the individual women becomes a ‘type’ and the very diversity of age, appearance, and experience registers the fact that madness, as Elaine Showalter has illustrated, is a ‘female malady’.13 But women did not have to be imprisoned in asylums to be considered insane. The domestic sphere of the home could itself become a prison in both literal and metaphorical terms. The madness of Bertha Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) provided the focus of Gilbert and Gubar’s influential revisionist reading of nineteenth-​century female authorial subjectivity.14 Religion and race both come into play here: when Rochester 10  Baker Brown, On Some Diseases of Woman Admitting Surgical Treatment (1866), in Jeffreys (ed.), The Sexuality Debates, 27. 11  Angus McLaren, Impotence: A Cultural History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007), 128–​30. 12  Charles Dickens, ‘A Curious Dance Round A Curious Tree’, Household Words, 11 (1852), 362–​9, at 367. 13 Showalter, The Female Malady; also Jane Ussher, Women’s Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness? (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 63–​94. 14  Sandra Gilbert and Susan M. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-​Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale, 1979).

The Victorians, Sex, and Gender    165 admits his relationship with Bertha, he refers to her ‘sin’, her ‘obnoxious’ tastes, ‘her cast of mind common, low, narrow, and singularly incapable of being led to anything higher’. His wife’s vices, he declares, ‘sprang up fast and rank: they were so strong [as to elude control … ] Bertha Mason,—​the true daughter of an infamous mother,—​dragged me through all the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a wife at once intemperate and unchaste’.15 The rationale provided for Bertha’s incarceration bears relation to Dickens’s mid-​Victorian categorization of the types (and ages) of women’s insanity, yet even at the end of the century solitary confinement was still prescribed as a palliative for female depression. This is exemplified in a chilling story by the American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In fictive diary entries ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892) records a woman’s descent into madness following her husband’s imposition of Silas Weir Mitchell’s rest cure: a treatment that condemned middle-​class women to immobility and imprisonment in their home or a sanatorium. Patients were fed five substantial meals a day and forbidden any form of mental or physical activity, including reading, writing, even needlework, and sitting up in bed.16 Regular food intake may well have addressed anorexia, a disorder first diagnosed in 1873;17 yet the treatment also mimicked the conditions of pregnancy and infancy. A second childishness was thus imposed on women that, if it made them docile and manageable, was also liable to heighten or even trigger symptoms of insanity. The problem for women in the eyes of the male medical establishment lay in their bodies. In an earlier generation, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) had illustrated male scientists’ desire to conquer nature, coded female in its ability to create, to give birth. Throughout the nineteenth century the same problem is figured in literary and cultural texts: while motherhood and reproductive power are venerated as according women their role and status within society, they also always constitute a threat to masculinity. Women’s sexual desires therefore needed to be separated from the physical value encapsulated by their reproductive function. It was this which prompted so much debate on the issue of whether a ‘normal’ woman could or should have sexual feelings. Female desire was displaced into reproductive impulses. Authors of fiction addressed social issues relating to a wider crisis in gender relations and understandings of sexuality in a variety of ways. The Brontës’ work reflects this diversity, from Jane Eyre with its madwoman in the attic and its independent heroine who will not submit to a man the way traditionally expected of a wife, through the passionate intensity of the relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), to Anne Brontë’s escapee mother in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), a wife who slams the door on her abusive and alcoholic husband, abducts the child that is legally his, and compels him to sign over custody rights to herself. These novels can all be read through the lens of the emerging discourse that challenged

15 

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Richard J. Dunn (New York: Norton, 2001), 260–​1.

16 Showalter, The Female Malady, 138–​40, 127. 17 Showalter, The Female Malady, 127.

166    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture traditional models of male rights and female responsibilities and engaged with the potentially destructive nature of unfulfilled as opposed to unchecked sexual desire. Like Baker Brown, William Acton’s The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1875) pathologized female sexuality; his commentary on masturbation asserts that ‘the majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind. What men are habitually, women are only exceptionally.’ These exceptional women were categorized as either criminal (prostitutes) or insane (nymphomaniacs).18 The sexual double standard and a division between the spheres of public and private, domestic and professional, amplified notions of gender difference around the physicality of the body even at a time when social changes were advancing a cause of more direct action for increased female access to (higher) education, the professions, and other areas of life. The case is illustrated by another prominent physician, Henry Maudsley’s, insistence that a university education inflicted irreparable damage on women’s mental and physiological health and, by impairing the reproductive system, was injurious to the collective body politic of society. Academic study, Maudsley proclaimed, foredoomed women to ‘lifelong suffering’ by ‘incapacitat[ing] them for the adequate performance of the natural functions of their sex [ … ] by reason of the development of their reproductive functions, they will be the more easily and the more seriously deranged’.19 That Maudsley’s influential article coincided with a particularly active phase in women’s struggle for medical training20 indicates the strength of male establishment fears of prospective professional competition. Often it was in attempting to engage the medical profession in particular that women could be seen to reposition gender normativity. James Miranda Barry, the army surgeon who at his death in 1865 was discovered to be a woman, served as evidence of the speciousness of medical arguments which called female professional ability into question.21 The start of the Victorian age saw limited opportunities for women:  girl, then woman; wife and mother; spinster (possibly), governess, widow—​ but all these served as middle-​class positions; for the working classes the choices, even for married women, were often a lot starker and included prostitution. In the course of the period, both single and married women gained significant ground, in terms of higher education, entry to the professions,22 and, for wives, the (limited) right to divorce,

18  William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1875), in Jeffreys (ed.), The Sexuality Debates, 61. 19  Henry Maudsley, ‘Sex in Mind and in Education’ (1874), in Katharina Rowold (ed.), Gender and Science: Late Nineteenth-​Century Debates on the Female Mind and Body (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1996), 41; see female medical responses in the same volume, and Rowold’s The Educated Woman: Minds, Bodies, and Women’s Higher Education in Britain, Germany, and Spain, 1865–​1914 (London: Routledge, 2010). 20  Catriona Blake, The Charge of the Parasols: Women’s Entry to the Medical Profession (London: Women’s Press, 1990), 114–​55. 21  Rachel Holmes, Scanty Particulars: The Mysterious, Astonishing and Remarkable Life of Victorian Surgeon James Barry (London: Penguin, 2002). 22  Philippa Levine, Victorian Feminism 1850–​1900 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), 26–​81.

The Victorians, Sex, and Gender    167 child custody, and property. The stark nature of differences around marriage law began to undergo changes during the latter half of the century, influenced by prominent cases such as that of Caroline Norton.23 While co-​equal parenting rights did not come into force until 1925, the Norton case in the 1830s highlighted the legal double standard as it applied to marital violence and child custody; its impact in terms of the Infant Custody Acts (1839, 1873, 1886), which introduced and extended wives’ (relative) custody rights,24 and the civil divorce Acts that began with the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act were important in raising issues that would come to dominate wider cultural concerns about equality and justice between the sexes. Further reforms were implemented under the Married Women’s Property Act (1870), but not until 1882 were women granted independent rights over property and separate income from their husbands.25 Women’s access to divorce remained circumscribed until the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1923, for adultery—​the grounds on which men could seek a divorce—​was not deemed sufficient grievance for wives, who had to prove further aggravating causes: bigamy, cruelty, incest, sodomy, bestiality, or desertion without cause for over two years.26 Where fiction, drama, and poetry explored mounting calls for equality in the narratives of personal experience, movements in politics, economics, and science responded to social change by creating new models of categorizing individuals. In social and political discourses, mid-​Victorian philosophers and women’s rights campaigners sought to explore the possibilities of a different, more egalitarian relationship between the sexes. In ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors’ (1868) Frances Power Cobbe wrote about the way in which democratic rights were withheld from women by classifying them as socially or mentally defective: To a woman [ … ] who is aware that she has never committed a Crime; who fondly believes that she is not an Idiot; and who is alas! only too sure she is no longer a Minor, there naturally appears some incongruity in placing her, for such important purposes, in an association wherein otherwise she would scarcely be likely to find herself.

23  Barbara Caine, English Feminism 1780–​1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 66–​70; Caroline Norton, ‘From English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century’ (1858), in Harriet Devine Jump (ed.), Women’s Writing of the Victorian Period 1837–​1901: An Anthology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 78–​88. 24  Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 131–​55. Full co-​equal parenting rights did not come into force until 1973. Under the Guardianship of Infants Act of 1925 a father remained the sole legal guardian of his children until a case went to court, at which stage co-​equal rights were applied. See Angela V. John, Turning the Tide: The Life of Lady Rhondda (Cardigan: Parthian, 2013), 377–​8. 25  Lee Holcombe, Wives & Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth-​ Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 229; Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law. 26  Maeve E. Doggett, Marriage, Wife-​Beating and the Law in Victorian England (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 100.

168    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Cobbe’s article illustrates the extent to which the ‘minority’ status of women was enshrined in the legal position of nonentity they occupied vis-​à-​vis their husbands: By the common law of England a married woman has not legal existence, so far as property is concerned, independently of her husband. The husband and wife are assumed to be one person, and that person is the husband.27

In highlighting how women ceased to exist within domestic frameworks even though they were thought to reach their culmination in familial and social duty, Cobbe’s comments provide the narrative connection between the mother and daughter, the old and the new, female subjects that gained renewed topicality in Egerton’s ‘Virgin Soil’ in the 1890s. While there were voices that challenged these ideas, like Eliza Lynn Linton in her articles ‘The Girl of the Period’ (1868), ‘The Modern Revolt’ (1870), and ‘Modern Man-​Haters’ (1871),28 Cobbe reinforced the growing numbers of reformers intent on addressing the prevailing inequalities. An even more powerful social document for the feminist cause was John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), which proclaimed that the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—​the legal subordination of one sex to the other—​is wrong itself, and [ … ] one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; [ … ] it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.29

The language of ‘disability’ deployed by Mill and the context in which he placed the emphasis on the ‘one’ towards ‘the other’ without invoking the words male and female served to humanize the issues, remaining concrete to the example but also abstract as a concept. None of these political or social statements should be seen in isolation from the literary culture of this period. George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–​2), published shortly after Mill’s polemic, is partly the story of a woman’s development within social structures which curtail her potential. Owing its design to questions of novelistic and scientific experiment, the novel questions the continuity of historical models of female selfhood by scrutinizing what happens if we place a character with a personality structure like St Theresa into an early-​nineteenth-​century British provincial context. Indeed, the relevance of religious historical narratives to contemporary understandings of sex and 27  Frances Power Cobbe, ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors’ (1868), in Susan Hamilton (ed.), Criminals, Idiots, Women, & Minors: Nineteenth-​Century Writing by Women on Women (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 1995), 110–​11. 28  All reproduced in Valerie Sanders and Lucy Delap (eds), Victorian and Edwardian Anti-​Feminism, 4 vols. (London: Routledge, 2010), vols. i and ii. 29  John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869; London: Virago, 1983), l.

The Victorians, Sex, and Gender    169 gender is important.30 In a society where all that women are expected to aspire to is marriage and motherhood, domesticity and happy subordination to a husband, the modern saint feels out of place but also alienated from a history or tradition of female role models. As a result all the energy that seeks for an outlet is displaced into marriage. Dorothea herself has internalized the patriarchal idea that women can only achieve their desire to lead a purposeful life through the medium of a husband: For a long while [Dorothea] had been oppressed by the indefiniteness which hung in her mind [ … ] over all her desire to make her life greatly effective. What could she do, what ought she to do?—​she, hardly more than a budding woman, but yet with an active conscience and a great mental need [ … ]. ‘I should learn everything then,’ she said to herself [ … . ] ‘It would be my duty to study that I might help him the better in his great works [ … . ] It would be like marrying Pascal. I should learn to see the truth by the same light as great men have seen it by.’31

Attached to a man in order to find a sense of individual attainment, Dorothea, like many other women of the period, is to discover part of her tragedy in precisely such a formulation, because Casaubon (and society) will not endorse a woman’s desire for learning and meaningful occupation when she takes on the role of wife. The educational but also cultural, social, and ethical waste of female contribution beyond the domestic and the familial were fundamental factors in energizing women writers’ narratives about female potential and its dissociation from achievement and personal growth. Domesticity, the ideology of separate spheres, and the symbolic figure of the ‘Angel in the House’—​a term coined in Coventry Patmore’s poem of that title (1854–​61)—​were all concepts that acted as constraints on women’s prospects and their rights. In Patmore’s words, ‘Man must be pleased; but him to please | Is woman’s pleasure; down the gulf | Of his condoled necessities | She casts her best, she flings herself.’32 Virginia Woolf was later to satirize this idea when she wrote that the domestic goddess ‘was utterly unselfish [ … . ] She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it—​in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others.’33 To Woolf, as to the late-​Victorian generation of women before her, the Angel had to be killed for the independent girl and professional woman to be born. That this domestic angel could harbour murderous impulses which attacked the very heart of the home was brought to the fore by the 1860s appetite for sensation fiction which, in the wake of Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), often identified the innocuous, childlike beauty who aspired to nothing higher than adorning the hearth 30  John Maynard, Victorian Discourses of Sexuality and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 31  George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Bert G. Hornback (New York: Norton, 2000), 18–​19. 32  Coventry Patmore, ‘Sahara’, The Angel in the House (London: Macmillan and Company, 1863), 109. 33  Virginia Woolf, ‘Professions for Women’ (1931), in Michèle Barrett (ed.), Virginia Woolf: On Women and Writing (London: Women’s Press, 1992), 59.

170    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture as the demon who struck disaster and destruction from within. If sensationalists went to great lengths to explode all-​too comfortable clichés about women and femininity, they nevertheless habitually closed their texts with the punishment of the deviant woman and the restoration of the old patriarchal order (a notable counter-​example is Louisa May Alcott’s pseudonymous thriller ‘Behind a Mask’ of 1866). It was not until the New Woman novels of the 1880s and 1890s that female characters were simultaneously endowed with subversive drives and the intellectual acumen to articulate an explicit feminist challenge to the status quo. Women as girls, wives and mothers, spinsters, companions, or governesses: all these types of character appear in Victorian novels either in order to reinforce prevailing cultural stereotypes or to contest them. It is striking how much fiction of this period involves a female protagonist having to find employment as a governess, schoolteacher, or companion—​Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette (1853), Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–​3), and Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861), to name only a few. Such a position, particularly that of governess or lady’s companion, left the woman concerned in a kind of limbo: on the one hand, because of her proximity to the family for which she worked, she was not a servant; on the other, that very proximity meant that to the servants she was almost part of the family. In a liminal position, women employed in this way were a useful asset to the family (having a governess for one’s children was a social status symbol), while their unmarried state was a constant threat to the stability of the domestic space, more so when, as often happened, they were engaged following the death of the children’s natural mother, usually in childbirth. Towards the end of the period Henry James’s novella ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1897) unpicks both the sanity of its governess protagonist and the fraught social and psychological position in which such a woman finds herself. By the close of the century, with novels and social documents by Victorian feminists and New Women writers like Emma Frances Brookes (A Superfluous Woman, 1894), Mona Caird (The Daughters of Danaus, 1894; The Morality of Marriage, 1897), Mary Cholmondeley (Red Pottage, 1899), Ella Hepworth Dixon (The Story of a Modern Woman, 1894), Sarah Grand (Ideala, 1888; The Heavenly Twins, 1893; The Beth Book, 1897), Olive Schreiner (The Story of an African Farm, 1883; Woman and Labour, 1911), and others, women were prepared to address social concerns arising from gender and sexuality in a far more direct fashion. But like their ‘Old Woman’ rivals, New Women embraced a variety of different and at times contradictory perspectives (Egerton’s work is a case in point). These ranged from sociopolitical narratives informed by Victorian feminist interest in women’s educational and professional aspirations, and concerns about sexual oppression (the double moral standard, marital inequality and unhappiness, sexual and medical abuse, the threat of syphilitic contagion through reckless husbands, women’s escape into and demise in madness), to explorations of ‘free love,’ new lifestyles, and sexual experimentation. Diversity was also key to the way in which popular and aesthetic modes of cultural engagement with the New Woman intersected with each other. Thus short experimental fiction associated with fin-​de-​siècle decadence, allegorical writing, and epic poetry, often in invocation of classical antiquity, displayed the

The Victorians, Sex, and Gender    171 same interest in exploring transgressive femininities as was evidenced in consumer culture’s fascination with the morally and sexually disinhibiting effects of the New Woman’s enthusiasm for the latchkey, bicycle, and rational dress, and the potentially injurious repercussions of academic study and professional career planning on marriage, motherhood, and the health and continuance of the ‘race’.34 Anti-​feminists like Mary Ward, Linton, and Walter Besant contributed to the genre to launch a defence of traditional patriarchal values in counter-​narratives which castigated feminists and other left-​wing campaigners as sexual anarchists.35 Male writers like Grant Allen, Arnold Bennett, and H. G. Wells claimed allegiance to feminism only to advance arguments for the imperative for women to refocus their energies on the reproduction of the species. Among the feminist writers, where Schreiner’s philosophical aesthetic developed new modes of writing (‘dreams’, as she termed them) and juxtaposed utopian with foreclosed choices for the female subject and her body in texts like The Story of an African Farm (1883), Dreams (1890), and From Man to Man (posth. 1926), Grand projected a feminized notion of New Womanhood, utilizing traditional narrative forms to explore subversive plots (syphilis-​infected or transvestite bodies, gender bending and homosocial desire in The Heavenly Twins, 1893), while Caird drew on classical myth to offer a radical feminist critique of marriage and motherhood.36 If the principle of free love—​pre/​extramarital sex and cohabitation—​was endorsed by some advanced writers and feminists, even members of the Legitimation League, an organization founded to support illegitimate children and offer support to unmarried partners, felt obliged to admit that women faced considerably higher risks than men. A prominent example is the socialist Edith Lanchester’s committal to a lunatic asylum in 1895 following her refusal to marry her lover.37 While Lanchester was set free at the instigation of socialist friends, the ‘free union’ of Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor ended with suicide after she discovered Edward Aveling’s clandestine marriage to another woman.38 34  See Ann Ardis, New Women: New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Ann Heilmann, New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-​ Wave Feminism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Iveta Juosva, The New Woman and the Empire (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005); Rita Kranidis, Subversive Discourse: The Cultural Production of Late Victorian Feminist Novels (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995); Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism as the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Carolyn Christensen Nelson (ed.), A New Woman Reader (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2001); Patricia Marks, Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers: The New Woman in the Popular Press (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990); T. D. Olverson, Women Writers and the Dark Side of Late-​Victorian Hellenism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (London: Routledge, 1992); Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-​Victorian England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000). 35  Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991). 36  Ann Heilmann, New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 37  Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism & Sexual Morality 1885–​1914 (London: Penguin, 1995), 156–​61. 38  Ruth Brandon, The New Women and the Old Men (London: Secker & Warburg, 1990), 133–​59.

172    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Nor did fictional heroines fare much better: in Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm Lyndall spectacularly regresses from feisty child rebel to teenage anorexic in the wake of her pregnancy and the death of her illegitimate baby. Given the disproportionately high stakes for women, feminist writers were more likely to embrace social purity feminism, a movement which advocated premarital chastity for both sexes alongside a maternalist programme of social renovation.39 Social purity feminists argued that rather than desiring freedom to engage in sexual experimentation, women required freedom from being subjected to non-​consensual sexual activity. Indeed, rape in marriage did not exist as a legal category. Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and other feminists’ endeavour to lobby for the introduction of marital rape as a criminal offence was rejected, given that ‘consent [was] immaterial’ in the case of wives40 (it was not until 1990 that the criminal law was amended). The ‘horror made manifest’41 of such legalized ‘nightly degradation’42 looms large in New Woman fiction, where husbands are shown breaking down the locked doors of their wives’ bedrooms and forcing themselves onto them in a state of inebriation. The bodily revulsion from the imposition of conjugal (male) rights is also a prominent aspect of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), whose New Woman character Sue throws herself out of a window rather than submit to her lawful husband’s loathsome advances. Other male authors were depicting a different version of female desire and sexuality. The sexualized women of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) are divided into the neat categories of the homely, wifely, devoted, yet intellectually suppressed and professionally aspirational, Mina Harker and the voluptuous, sex-​driven, femme fatale figures of the female vampires and the easily vampirized, all-​too-​sensual Lucy Westenra. As Richard Dellamora (1990) has argued, the repositioning of masculine desire in relation to aestheticism and the end-​ of-​the-​century moment has especial relevance to the reading of the displacement of sexuality onto the Gothicized other, with texts like Stoker’s novel underlining not only fears of the feminine but anxious stirrings around male sexuality too. Frequently, masculinity was seen as under threat from women and subject to dangers of its own design.43 Writers of the latter part of the century sought to investigate sexual problems with the same drive as the earlier Victorians had explored questions around the condition of the nation. Stoker’s Dracula, Henrik Ibsen’s play Ghosts (1881; first English staging 1891), and Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893) are explicit critiques of a sexual lasciviousness which has infected the body politic of society: they are works about the spread of syphilis, a disease, then incurable, which reached epidemic levels in the last quarter of the nineteenth

39 Bland, Banishing the Beast; Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth-​

Century: Rational Reproduction & the New Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 40  Justice Hawkins, quoted in Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law, 185. 41 Iota, A Yellow Aster (London: Hutchinson, 1894), 145. 42  Egerton, ‘Virgin Soil’, 155. 43  Angus McLaren, ‘Introduction’ to The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870–​1930 (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1997); James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1995).

The Victorians, Sex, and Gender    173 century and was considered to put the country’s military capability at threat. To contain the risk of transmission and protect army personnel by enabling access to ‘safe’ prostitutes, three Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869) authorized a special police force in garrison towns to subject any woman believed to be a prostitute to a gynaecological examination. Found diseased, she was committed to a ‘lock hospital’ (prison); if healthy, she was registered as a common prostitute and required to return for regular check-​ ups. Men were exempt from examination. Once again the law distinguished between the rights of men and the sexual functions of women. To feminists, prostitution ‘reform’ in the guise of the Contagious Diseases Acts constituted a fundamental threat to the position of women as human beings.44 The Acts in effect legalized prostitution and allowed the state to assert rights of ownership over (presumed) prostitutes’ bodies rather than seeking to curb male impulses towards the purchasing of sex that had caused the original problem. Josephine Butler’s campaigns against the Acts eventually succeeded with their repeal in 1886, but the fact that male politicians had been prepared to enact them and, alongside prominent women doctors, saw such actions as reasonable illustrates the paradoxes of Victorian concepts of progress in the period. The tension here revolves around the ways in which male sexual activity which involved buying the female body remained ‘acceptable’, while the ‘impurity’ of that female body allowed it to become an object of state control and enforced ‘inspection’. This is also, of course, an issue of class: if middle-​class women were ‘Angels in the House’, then working-​class women had to be the devils in the gutter. But as W. T. Stead demonstrated in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1885 in his sensationalist articles on girl child trafficking, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, the affordability of the young girl’s sexualized body was open to those with the power to purchase. We might also perceive here one of the fundamental contradictions of the period. Despite the existence of a female monarch as ‘mother’ of the nation, women were not seen as the equals of men and could, as in the case of the Contagious Diseases Acts, be subjected to institutionalized abuse. But it was not only women, their sexual desires (or lack thereof), and the sexual threat they posed to men which became a focus for increased attention. Male homosexuality and the anxieties it prompted were a key feature of the literature of the 1880s and 1890s. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), the plays and short stories of Oscar Wilde and his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley, the decadence of the Yellow Book, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) all illustrate a fin-​de-​siècle unease with issues of gender and sexuality, and yet also a desire to explore society’s deep-​set ‘dis-​ease’ with these issues. While the discourse surrounding the ‘real’ subjects of these narratives was in some sense hidden beneath a textual veneer, social critics nevertheless made the connection between increasingly complex understandings of the ‘deviant’ behavior at the heart of cultural production and the works of an individual like Wilde. Max Nordau summed up the entire period as one of ‘degeneration’, and it was a degeneration fuelled by a provocative aesthetic which

44 

Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution in Victorian Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

174    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture undermined traditional gender roles and sexual identities and which was found in the art—​especially the literature—​of the period.45 As studies of decadence indicate, the late-​ Victorian period highlighted specific social and cultural dangers and anxieties around sexual and gender identities,46 but these should not be viewed in isolation from a narrative of unease that had developed over previous decades. Much scholarly attention has been focused on questions of the queering of desire and sexuality. The traces of such ‘subversive’ desires in textual and sexual form can be discerned across the Victorian period, and critical work over the last twenty years has sought to unpick some of the complexities of applying contemporary theoretical and conceptual frameworks onto the nineteenth century. From the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men (1985) through to Sharon Marcus’s Between Women (2007),47 there has been a significant interest in the development of new attentiveness to the sexual and gendered behaviours of the Victorians, specifically in relation to non-​normative models of identity and the performativity of masculinity and femininity and their associated sexual desires. Influenced by theorists such as Judith Butler,48 Victorianists have looked more closely at instances of gender and sexual subversion in mainstream and canonical texts. Holly Furneaux’s work on Dickens49 is a prominent recent example; new approaches to more obviously ‘queered’ writers of the period have also brought forward novel aspects of overt self-​construction around subversive modes of being and loving.50 As Furneaux’s study demonstrates, different forms of affective family relationships could serve as domestic alternatives for same-​sex and asexual relationships. Renewed attention to the family as a site of sexual experience and the formation of gendered thought and belief structures has been at the forefront of a number of studies concerned with questions of incest. Leonore Davidoff ’s analysis of sibling relationships and their ‘potentially erotic content’51 builds upon her earlier work with Catherine Hall on bourgeois family formation52 at the same time as studies by Adam Kuper on bourgeois cousin marriage among the Darwins, Galtons, and Wedgwoods53 and the role of the familial in 45 

Max Nordau, Degeneration (1895; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968).

46 Showalter, Sexual Anarchy (1990); Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of

Sexual Danger in Late-​Victorian London (London: Virago, 1992). 47  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 48  Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990) and Undoing Gender (London: Routledge, 2004). 49  Holly Furneaux, Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 50  See two books on Wilde: Alan Sinfield’s The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Joseph Bristow (ed.), Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend (Athens, O.: Ohio University Press, 2009). 51  Leonore Davidoff, Thicker than Water: Siblings and Their Relations, 1780–​1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 197, especially ‘Sibling Intimacy and the Question of Incest’, 197–​224. 52  Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–​1850 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987). 53  Adam Kuper, Incest & Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009).

The Victorians, Sex, and Gender    175 marriage plots in the works of Austen, Gaskell, and the Brontës by Mary Jean Corbett,54 have underlined problems of gender and sexual identity across even normative standards of cultural engagement within and outside the family setting. The role of childhood as both the formative stage in the development of gendered identities and the isolationist time in which future patterns of gendered behavior and sexual desire are formulated became more regulated in the Victorian period. Sally Shuttleworth has explored the contexts for childhood development, including a sense of social expectation around gender identity.55 The presence and absence of children in Victorian texts raises continual questions about the mixed messages of Victorian approaches to sexuality and family. Yet social models of childhood themselves fluctuated between acknowledgement of gendered roles and the dissociation of childhood from such processes. Thus the inculcation of muscular Christianity ideals in Charles Kingsley’s Two Years Ago (1857) and Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) might be read as an attempt to deflect baser masculinity into aggressive forms of physical activity with a moral purpose. Partly this sought to enhance a notion of masculinity that at that very moment found itself in profound crisis. John Tosh’s work on middle-​class men indicates some of the problems associated with trying to construct male identities in the period when so much attention was spent in defence of masculinity via an attack on women.56 This can also be discerned in the interrogation of men’s gender masquerades by focusing on physical identifiers such as beards and self-​conscious attempts to articulate the nature of male roles such as the soldier.57 The latter issue of roles within both social and familial contexts has led to incisive new approaches to Victorian fatherhood, such as Valerie Sanders’s 2009 study.58 Scholarly discourse around masculinity in the Victorian period has become a more pressing issue for contemporary Victorian studies.59 Older models, and indeed the Victorians’ own description, of ‘manliness’ serve multiple purposes that often mask specific identity performances, especially when formulated in conjunction with questions of religion, class, and economics. Where in the early years of the Victorian period bachelorhood was viewed as the norm, by the 1860s male singledom had turned deeply problematic, to the point where masculinity came to be identified as a state defined by marriage.60

54  Mary Jean Corbett, Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2008). 55  Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840–​1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 56  John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-​Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 57  Susan Walton, Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-​Victorian Era: Charlotte Yonge’s Models of Manliness (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). 58  Valerie Sanders, The Tragi-​Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Trev Lynn Broughton and Helen Rogers (eds), Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 59  Christopher Lane, The Burdens of Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); David Alderson, Mansex Fine: Religion, Manliness and Imperialism in Nineteenth Century British Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). 60  Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861–​1913 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1.

176    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture The Victorian era was the age of categorization. While the pornographer Henry Spencer Ashbee was creating his encyclopaedia of pornography (the Index Librorum Prohibitorum) under the pseudonym Pisanus Fraxi, the same category drive was developing into aspects of what we might now call sociology and included the emergent discipline of sexology,61 the study of different types of desire, fetish, and ‘deviations’ from the heterosexual norm in the late 1880s and 1890s in the writings of Richard von Krafft-​Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and Edward Carpenter. Recent studies of sexology by Heike Bauer62 and renewed attention to the lives of unconventional late Victorians like Carpenter63 have illuminated how revised discourses of female sexuality were often prefigured through sublimated investigation of male homosexuality, including in its relation to classical reception studies64 and approaches to a tradition of the love that Wilde famously invoked as unable to speak its name. This in turn would influence and be influenced by the end-​of-​century discourses of Freudian psychoanalysis.65 This same desire to determine types led the criminologists Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero to write The Female Offender in 1893: a book which describes women lawbreakers as more ferocious than males precisely because their criminality is a more significant contravention of normative codes of womanhood, but which simultaneously casts their transgression as a reflection of a femininity which was constructed as inherently deviant. While the Victorian period has been subject to close attention to issues of gender and sexuality by scholars in the field, there remains scope for further scholarship and editorial recovery work. In light of the multiplicity of narratives still under-​sourced, renewed focus on the complexities of relations between and within the sexes beyond normative and non-​normative sexual activities offers opportunities for exploration. Questions of celibacy and asexuality, the multiple aspects of Victorian pornography, the social and ethical choices of ‘domestic’ arrangements throughout the period in terms of elective families or alternative life choices, and the frequently marginal but nevertheless spectral presences in canonical and non-​canonical texts may provide new directions for innovative work. Fatherhood and other male identities present fruitful perspectives based on the foundational work of recent studies, along with a richer recognition of the variety of significations encapsulated by the term ‘family’ within such a large chronological time frame.

61  Lisa Z. Sigel, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815–​1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002). 62  Heike Bauer, English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion, 1860–​1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (eds), Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998) and Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998). 63  Sheila Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (London: Verso, 2008). 64  Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 65  Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, 1989).

The Victorians, Sex, and Gender    177 Ultimately, the complexities of what happened behind Victorian bedroom doors as opposed to the public (and recorded) sexual and gendered lifestyles might be accommodated by the Victorian and Edwardian actress Mrs Patrick Campbell’s comment that it doesn’t really matter what people do ‘so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses’.66

Select Bibliography Caine, Barbara, English Feminism 1780–​1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Dellamora, Richard, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan M. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-​Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). Griffin, Ben, The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture, and the Struggle for Women’s Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Groag Bell, Susan, and Karen M. Offen (eds), Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, 1750–​1950, 2 vols. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993). Marcus, Steven, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-​Nineteenth-​ Century England (1966; London: Transaction, 2009). Mason, Michael, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Miller, Andrew, and James Eli Adams (eds), Sexualities in Victorian Britain (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1996). Mort, Frank, Dangerous Sexualities:  Medico-​Moral Politics in England since 1830, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2000). Shanley, Mary Lyndon, Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Showalter, Elaine, Sexual Anarchy:  Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1990).

66 

Alan Dent, Mrs Patrick Campbell (London: Museum Press, 1961), 78.

Chapter 9

The New Woma n a nd H e r Ageing Ot h e r Teresa Mangum

Though the date of the first use of the phrase ‘New Woman’ to categorize a late nineteenth-​century field of novels, plays, poetry, essays, and journalism is debated, the intention of the label is not.1 The new woman emerges in opposition to the traditional woman. Defenders of middle-​class femininity like Eliza Lynn Linton viewed the phrase as a badge of shame; advocates of social and fictional reform adopted it as a badge of honour. What we as literary scholars have generally overlooked, however, is the more obvious opposition between new and old. Viewing the ever expanding field of New Woman literature through the lens of age studies brings the frequent preoccupation with ageing in this literature into view. Given that Victorian conceptions of traditional femininity were implicitly rooted in representations of virginal youth or youthful motherhood, it stands to reason that traditional femininity would be at odds not only with sexual experimentation, variant sexual identities, gender inequities in education, employment, political participation, and the law, but also with old age itself. The struggle between the New Woman and the old woman is particularly vexed, however, because this opposition divides a woman against herself—​specifically, against her own future. Ageing in New Woman literature has received scant attention from scholars,2 but the broader study of ageing and nineteenth-​century British Victorian literature has been greatly enriched in recent years. In Women Writers and Old Age in Britain, 1750–​1850,3 Devoney 1  Doug Kirshen, ‘The New Man in the Age of the New Woman: May 1894–​February 1895’, Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, 119 (Spring 2011), 26–​48. See also Ellen Jordan, ‘The Christening the New Woman: May 1894’, Victorian Newsletter, 63 (Spring 1983), 19–​21; and Michelle Elizabeth Tusan, ‘Inventing the Woman: Print Culture and Identity Politics During the Fin-​de-​Siècle’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 31, no. 2 (Summer 1998), 169–​182. 2  Andrea Charise is currently writing a book about ageing that will include a chapter on the New Woman. She works with very different materials; the chapter will be a significant contribution to age studies and New Woman studies. 3  Devoney Looser, Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–​1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

The New Woman and Her Ageing Other    179 Looser vividly demonstrates the value of studying changes in subject matter and style over a writer’s lifetime by focusing on the late work of a group of long-​lived, early nineteenth-​ century women authors. Kay Heath’s Aging by the Book: The Emergence of Midlife in Victorian Britain4 and Karen Chase’s Victorians and Old Age5 flesh out the stages of women’s lives—​real and imagined—​in energetically researched studies of literature, culture, and late life. In this essay, I focus on the powerful grip anxieties about ageing had on the increasingly diverse field of texts that form the New Woman phenomenon. Fin-​de-​siècle female poets from the period captured the potential consequences for single women once they transitioned from being a ‘young person’ to being a spinster.6 Even when focused on the struggles of young women, realistic New Women novels sometimes include secondary characters that convey ageing not only as a physical phenomenon but also as an affective, social, economic, and relational influence on a character’s identity, options, and functions, within the plot. Nowhere is the fear of ageing more prominent than in those novels where New Women characters and plots intersect with late nineteenth-​century Gothic novels, whether they are situated in the urban or actual jungle. At the end of the century, numerous circumstances combined to rivet public attention upon the elderly. Although the census was taken every ten years dating from 1841, statistics did not refer to individuals’ ages and therefore draw attention to age as a category until 1881. The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure has demonstrated that at the time an individual’s chronological age emerges as bureaucratic data, the birth rate was falling. Consequently, though the life span did not actually increase for most people until the 1920s and 1930s, by the 1890s the decline in births meant that the public perceived the numbers of elderly people to be rising and their lives to be lengthening.7 Moreover, the elderly were assuming a character not only of dependency, but also of profligacy and failure. Charles Booth’s sociological research exposed the plight of the English poor during the 1880s and 1890s and the fact that a large percentage of England’s paupers were over 60. Booth also compiled widely publicized reports that circulated in the form of government publications, pamphlets, and finally as the volume The Aged Poor in England and Wales (1894). Public dismay over the suffering of the ‘aged poor’ inspired the national Poor Law Commission to hold a forum for the discussion of the elderly as a social problem. Hearings were held during the 1890s and covered widely by the press. Faced with the needs of the elderly and the cost of providing welfare for retired people with little income, the government, social organizations, and the press tried to tie down the age at which one became old. Both to ‘protect’ the elderly from overburdening labour and to protect industry from what were coming to be seen as degenerate, ineffectual elderly labourers, the government and industrial leaders very publicly fought proposed pension plans. In 1895 the Old Age Pensions Committee only 4  Kay Heath, Aging by the Book: The Emergence of Midlife in Victorian Britain (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009). 5  Karen Chase, Victorians and Old Age (London: Oxford University Press, 2009). 6  Ana Parejo Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005) and Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-​Victorian England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000). 7  Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost, Further Explored (3rd edn. New York: Scribners, 1974).

180    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture arrived at the age of 65 by claiming that ‘This age and this measure appear to be those as to which there is most concurrence of opinion.’8 In 1908, when Parliament finally passed the Old Age Pensions Act, the arbitrariness of 65 was further illuminated when the House of Commons settled on the fi ­ gure 70 in order to save the government money.9 While social and statistical discourses established the category of old age that gave rise to ‘the aged’ as an imagined class, biomedical theories of ageing pathologized old age and provided many of the traits that would be woven into literary characterizations of age later in the century. Both female bodies and aged bodies suffered when medical discourse coalesced with moral and pseudoscientific rhetorics of degeneration and devolution. The parameters of this bio-​culture of ageing were established by conflicting scientific and popular theories of ageing that were conflated not only in popular periodicals such as The Argosy, Popular Science Monthly, and The Spectator, but also in The Lancet and other medical journals. Stephen Katz provides an impressive analysis of the role medical discourses played in the representation of old age in his Foucauldian study Disciplining Old Age: The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge.10 Despite the rise of clinical medical research, particularly in France and Germany, popular beliefs in the possibility for greatly prolonged life abounded. The potential promise not of immortality but of extended life spawned a host of books and articles either investigating claims of prolonged life or offering advice to ensure longevity. Scientific attempts to forestall ageing rivalled the Gothic qualities of novels like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). In the clinical hospitals of Paris, Jean-​Martin Charcot and Elie Metchnikoff trained their microscopes on the tissues of the patients (and bodies) who formed their largest population—​the elderly. During the 1870s, Charcot conducted studies at the Saltpêtrière of diseases among older women: he determined that certain diseases occurred only in older people and that other, widespread diseases were more virulent among the old.11 The focus in the medical sciences on deterioration linked all too easily with theories of degeneration endemic to late Victorian constructions of the Other from the characterization of alcoholic, disease-​ridden urban working classes, to attacks on the New Woman, to fears that colonists would succumb to savagery, to eugenic arguments for selective marriages. The most popular New Woman novels appear to sidestep these clamouring discourses on ageing because they are intent on rewriting the mid-​century Bildungsroman, a plot so devoted to youth that protagonists seldom achieve middle age, much less what Victorians 8 

Janet Roebuck, ‘When Does “Old Age” Begin? The Evolution of the English Definition’, Journal of Social History, 12 (1979), 416–​428, at 3. 9  Karen Chase provides a detailed history of the forces at work in shaping the experience of old people in Victorians and Old Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), especially in the opening chapter, 1–​62. 10  Stephen Katz, Disciplining Old Age: The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996). 11  Jean-​Martin Charcot and Alfred L. Loomis, Clinical Lectures on the Diseases of Old Age, trans. Leigh H. Hunt (New York: William Wood, 1881); and Elie Metchnikoff, The Prolongation of Life: Optimistic Studies, trans. P. Chalmers Mitchell (London: William Heinemann, 1907).

The New Woman and Her Ageing Other    181 referred to as ‘the grand climacteric’ in the case of women.12 The best-​selling New Women novels by writers committed to a feminist agenda, like Sarah Grand, tended to compare and contrast the ways that each individual within a group of female characters struggled against social, political, and educational constraints. Grand’s two most widely read books, The Heavenly Twins (1893) and The Beth Book (1897), revealingly subtitled as Being a Study from the life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius, epitomize this feminist cannabilizing of the Bildungsroman and in the case of The Beth Book, the Künstlerroman. In these novels and plays, few of the chief female characters remain interesting beyond the youthful moment in which each sets a course for adult life through crucial choices. In the case of The Heavenly Twins, the strongest female character becomes a ventriloquist for a husband the character has urged into Parliament; the eponymous Beth sacrifices a literary career to be a feminist orator committed to gender justice in The Beth Book. Even George Gissing, who first seems willing to foreshadow an active, meaningful late life for women, checks this impulse by naming his character Rhoda Nunn. Even though Rhoda chooses a career in service to other women over a desirable husband, the title, The Odd Women (1893), resists readers’ attempts to imagine a good old age for the character. In these novels, as in much of New Woman fiction focused on young women, readers are left with no ground on which to build counterfactual imagining of these youthful characters’ distant futures as old women even as late life forms a kind of Bildungsroman ballast. In retrospect, it is intriguing that so many of these novels were written by men and women authors who themselves were well into midlife. The repressed old age of the Bildungsroman is unleashed when the New Woman enters late nineteenth-​century Gothic landscapes. The plot logics of dystopias and nightmares enabled illogical connections among the discourses I have been describing so that ‘the aged’ began to be constructed as a socio-​economic group analogous to ‘the poor’ or ‘the working class’ at the very moment when middle-​class intellectuals begin to biologize social problems by dismissing poverty and class conflict as evidence of degeneration and depravity. The substitution process which leads to the conflation of physical deterioration and moral degeneration was the focus of numerous studies of Victorian culture in the 1990s, but there degeneration and decadence are often code for sexual deviance or the intersection of race and sex.13 Class is also assimilated into fears

12  Roe Sybylla discusses climacteric theory in ‘Situating Menopause within the Strategies of Power: A Genealogy’, in Phillipa Rothfield, Paul Komesaroff, and Jeanne Daley (eds), Reinterpreting Menopause: Cultural and Philosophical Issues (New York: Routledge, 1997), 200–​221. One of the most useful contemporary sources is British gynaecologist Edward John Tilt’s The Change of Life in Health and Disease: A Clinical Treatise on the Diseases of the Ganglionic Nervous System Incidental to Women at the Decline of Life, which was published in multiple editions from 1857 to 1883. 13  See for instance Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, 1848–​1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); William M. Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 1880–​1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Steven Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

182    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture of degeneration, but the further tendency to incorporate ageing into representations is seldom noted. The form taken by this vampiric class suggests that unwittingly both capitalists, who demanded forced retirement, and social reformers like Charles Booth, who urged the government to provide a pension plan for the deserving ‘aged poor’, helped call into being the faceless, dehumanizing conception of old people as a class, a step towards their further transformation into more complexly constructed forms of Otherness.14 Of all the desires feared in older people, the possibility that sexual desire might be prolonged with age provoked the greatest anxiety. Dr Allan McLane Hamilton, writing in 1883, characterizes the expressions of sexual desire in older men as behaviour ‘amatory, obscene’, adding that ‘such a man is fond of telling of the adventures of his youth and living again its gallant frivolities. His leer is lascivious and he goes about with unbuttoned clothes and is lost to all shame.’15 As historian Carol Haber notes, older men who demonstrated continuing sexual enthusiasm were likely to be suspected of ‘slovenliness, exhibitionism, and child molesting’.16 These signs were read in the courts as evidence of a man’s incompetence to manage property or to write a binding will. Older libidinous women were generally depicted as harmless but absurd or as revolting femmes fatales. Ironically, the fear of those who seem to possess the secret of longevity resonates even in periodical essays that ostensibly celebrate the pleasures of old age. Repeatedly, these essayists begin by offering kindly advice but end by chastising the long-​lived for their surviving desires. In one article, ‘Restlessness in Old Age’, published in The Spectator in 1903, the writer forcefully condemns the unwilling older person: A man […] of fiery energy, whose days have been spent in conflicts, may redouble his efforts at the prospect of their years [… . ] They cannot be content, like Bacon, to leave nations and the next ages or to suffer gladly that others should complete what they have begun.17

Two years later, in The Academy William Knight tries to enforce the stoicism he preaches with his quiet threat: ‘Age is to be honored by us if it lessens […] love for the pleasures of the senses, which must still remain with us, but are wisely moderated more and more.’18 He scorns those who cling to life as ‘avaricious’, arguing that the ‘collecting mania’ is appropriate to youth not age. To demand pleasure and participation in the world is to become ‘usurpers’.19 In this middlebrow periodical literature, characters and plots are being fabricated into narratives of the proper and improper ‘aged’. Impropriety is then 14 

Charles Booth, Old Age Pensions and the Aged Poor: A Proposal (London: Macmillan, 1899). Allan McLane Hamilton, A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence (London: Bermingham & Co., 1883), 27–​28. 16  Carol Haber, Beyond Sixty-​Five: The Dilemma of Old Age in America’s Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 17 [Anon.], The Spectator (28 November 1903), 901. 18  William Knight, ‘A Literary Causerie: De Senectetute’, The Academy and Literature, 1746 (21 October 1905), 1103–​1105, at 1104. 19  Knight, ‘A Literary Causerie’, 1104–​1105. 15 

The New Woman and Her Ageing Other    183 hyperbolized into an invasion of decaying bodies stirred by degenerate, perverse, irritable lusts; of weak childlike minds or dangerously eclectic, electric memories; of near supernatural staying power; and of unfathomable equipoise between life and death. The ‘unnatural’ drive to desire, to control, and to dominate and tyrannize a nation of the young is marked by uninhibited racism and hunger for imperial conquest in several of H. Rider Haggard’s Gothic imperial adventure novels. While Haggard’s novels are often seen as antithetical to New Woman literature, as is often the case in Gothic fiction, strong female characters that might have been heroic in a New Woman novel are cast as figures of excessive horror. In Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) a centuries-​ old anusi, or witch, Gagool, uses her age and knowledge to dominate king after king. Gagool has none of the conventional feminine powers of youth or beauty. She is so old that her body has shrivelled into a monkey-​like figure of indeterminate sex or color, as age asserts itself as her primary identity. As she slyly explains, long life itself guarantees her terrible control of a majestic lost tribe of African warriors: ‘I have done the bidding of many kings […] till in the end they did mine.’20 Gagool magically sustains her life by offering beautiful, young virgin sacrifices to mountains known as ‘the Old Ones’. Even her name, composed of the syllables Gag and Ghoul, evokes the visceral and visual responses to decrepitude. In Haggard’s 1886 novel, She, the title character discovers a mysterious column of fire deep in Africa which gives her not immortality but thousands of years of prolonged life. Though She (or Ayesha), unlike Gagool, possesses the appalling, destructive beauty of the Siren, both characters are marked as deeply dangerous to the young because their long lives allow the accumulation of vast knowledge and profound boredom—​particularly with the vagaries of the ‘young’. In the case of She, time teaches her detachment from, and disdain for, human suffering, impatience with world religions, necrophilic passions, and—​most outrageously—​a desire to wrest England from that other long-​lived queen, Victoria. Her death literalizes, horrifically, the temporal confusion of the period as the narrator (the self-​consciously middle-​aged) Holly, recalls: Smaller she grew, and smaller yet, till she was no larger than a monkey. Now the skin was puckered into a million wrinkles, and on the shapeless face was the stamp of unutterable age. I never saw anything like it; nobody ever saw anything like the frightful age that was graven on that fearful countenance, no bigger now than that of a two-​months’ child, though the skull remained the same size, or nearly so, and let all men pray they never may, if they wish to keep their reason.21

Here, theories of evolution fuse with fears of devolution; ageing threatens to slide backward as it relentlessly advances forward. Anticipating Dracula, these parasitic, long-​ lived female characters illuminate the unsuspected, corrupted power of old women. 20  H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (1885), ed. Gerald Monsman (Peterborough: Broadview, 2002), 205. 21  H. Rider Haggard, She (1886), ed. Andrew M. Stauffer (Peterborough: Broadview, 2006), 261–​262.

184    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Frequently, Victorian vampire narratives fused popular and scientific proscriptions for prolonged life with medical accounts of the degenerative physical effects of late life. Dracula (1897), the vampire master narrative, goes even further.22 The undead turn the young into cattle; none are more deadly than the ancient women in Dracula’s castle. Steven Arata characterizes Dracula as the arch-​imperialist in reverse.23 Dracula investigates Britain—​reading every text from the classics to the train schedule—​then he plots his overthrow of English youth, who sustain him with their blood in life and become his army in death. Yet the vampire subjugates not just England, but English youth—​men as well as women. In effect, the vampire populates the fantasized spaces between parasite and predator, desire and perversity, life and death that constitute the psychic landscape of Victorian gerontophobia.24 He or she lives to desire and control, and Dracula is particularly obsessed with dominating young women. He is drawn to Lucy Westenra as a representative idyllic, innocently flirtatious ‘young person’ over whom Victorian traditional and New Women so often fought in fiction. However, his greatest desire is reserved for the New Woman figure, Mina Harker, whose intellect and skills (including typewriting) tempt him to make her forever old by making her forever young. This fantasy is clarified through a comparison with ‘Good Lady Ducayne’, a short story by Mary Elizabeth Braddon that appeared in the popular sensation magazine The Strand in February 1896. Lyn Pykett has argued convincingly for deep connections between sensation fiction and New Woman,25 and that connection can obscure the New Woman qualities of sensation heroines. Here the mysterious, horrific feature that marks the vampire—​the transference of blood from parasite to host—​is a surreptitious medical treatment which allows a wealthy 100-​year-​old woman to purchase long life (echoing the scenes in which Lucy’s suitors give blood to save Lucy Westenra, while Dracula repeatedly drains her blood). In Braddon’s short story, Lady Ducayne pays an Italian doctor to chloroform a series of young female companions and siphon their blood into her veins. When the story begins, two young, impoverished, lower-​middle-​class girls have died. By the story’s end, a third, Bella Royston, is rescued by an admirer, young Dr Stafford, who foils the plot of his medical rival. Ironically, Lady Ducayne appears first and last to Bella as a ‘fairy godmother’:  she pays exceptional wages and Bella’s doctor-​admirer eventually blackmails her into providing Bella with a dowry. Yet physically Lady Ducayne frightens and repulses Bella and the other younger characters: Bella recoils from her ‘Claw-​like fingers, flashing with jewels’, and Dr Stafford, who as a doctor

22 

Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897), ed. Glennis Byron (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1998). Stephen Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’, Victorian Studies, 3 (1990), 621–​645. 24  See the introductory chapter by Robert N. Butler in Why Survive? Being Old in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1975) and Kathleen Woodward’s psychoanalytic explanation for gerontophobia in Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 25  Lyn Pykett, The Improper Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (New York: Routledge, 1992). 23 

The New Woman and Her Ageing Other    185 should be immune to physical signs of illness or ageing, is spurred to verbal violence at his first sight of Lady Ducayne: that narrow parchment mask. He had seen terrible faces in the hospital—​faces on which disease had set dreadful marks—​but he had never seen a face that impressed him so painfully as this withered countenance, with its indescribable horror of death outlived, a face that should have been hidden under a coffin-​lid years and years ago.26

Like the best of what Kathleen Spencer has called ‘urban gothics’, ‘Good Lady Ducayne’ melds Gothic tradition and contemporary sources of fear—​in this case, medical and technological—​in the depiction of blood transfusions and in implicit allusions to the injection theories of Elie Metchnikoff and his followers.27 Whereas scientists tend to focus on restoring men’s virility, Braddon’s story recasts virility as a motivation. In this case, a female character is motivated by an oddly sexless drive. Female independence is terrifying in this story because that drive is focused on sustaining life, rather than reproduction, for this woman who has achieved wealth and power along with old age. A second and later story takes the literary convention that permits the vampire to shape-​shift to a quite different extreme. The vampire in Ulric Daubeny’s 1919 short story, ‘The Sumach’, is a tree sprung of a stake once used to destroy a human vampire. There are numerous examples of such vampiric botany; however, in ‘The Sumach’ the cultural repulsion towards the ageing body is permitted especially extravagant exaggeration once displaced onto plant tissue. Moreover, the displacement allows for the expression of the fear that should the ageing body be revivified, with false youth would come fearful desires.28 As in ‘Good Lady Ducayne’, the serial killing of young women leads to the discovery of a vampire. Irene Barton moves from suburban London to an estate after her cousin dies suddenly. She finds herself drawn to an enormous sumach that varies from green to crimson. While sitting under its boughs, she begins to have strange fantasies that commingle her absent husband, Hilary, and the tree: Presently she dropped asleep, and in a curiously vivid manner, dreamt of Hilary; that he had completed his business in London, and was coming home. They met at evening, near the garden gate and Hilary spread wide his arms, and eagerly folded them about her. Swiftly the dream began to change, assuming the characteristic of a nightmare. The sky grew strangely dark, the arms fiercely masterful, while the face

26 

Elizabeth Braddon, ‘Good Lady Ducayne’ (1896); repr. in Glennis Byron and Glennis Stephenson (eds), Nineteenth-​Century Stories by Women (Peterborough: Broadview, 1993), 73–​99, at 94. 27  Kathleen Spencer, ‘Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneration Crisis’, ELH 59 (1992), 197–​225. 28  Ulric Daubeny’s ‘The Sumach’ was first published in his only short story collection, The Elemental: Tales of the Supernormal and the Inexplicable (1919). It was reprinted in Richard Dalby’s anthology Dracula’s Brood (London: HarperCollins, 1987), 294–​296, at 294.

186    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture which bent to kiss her neck was not that of her young husband: it was leering, wicked, gnarled like the trunk of some weather-​beaten tree.29

The sexualized decrepitude of the tree becomes more pronounced in its second attack: relentless, stick-​like arms immediately closed in upon her, their vice-​like grip so tight that she could scarcely breathe. Down darted the awful head as a wild beast on its prey. The foul lips began to eat into her skin [… . ] She struggled desperately, madly, for to her swooning sense the very branches of the tree became endowed with active life, coiling unmercifully around her, tenaciously clinging to her limbs, and tearing at her dress.30

Here, as in Dracula, a young woman’s contact with decrepitude produces unnatural ageing. When May (whose very name associates her with spring and youth) looks in the mirror, she sees a bloodless face, white lips, and her ‘skin hung flabby on the shrunken flesh, giving it a look of premature old age’.31 The sumach threatens her with preternatural, suffering ageing, which her young husband finds sufficiently horrifying to burn down the tree. This parasitic clinging to life, at the expense of young women, threads throughout vampire narratives, including Dracula. What makes Dracula especially fascinating in relation to New Woman fiction is that the threat of ageing is transferred from the female to the male body, even as ageing threatens to emasculate men. Both Dracula and his arch-​rival, Professor Van Helsing, are older men marked by unusual vigour, intelligence, determination, and fascination with the young. All of the other elderly figures conveniently (and cooperatively) die: Jonathan Harker’s employer Mr Hawkins appropriately leaves his practice to his pseudo-​son, whom he describes in a letter to Dracula as ‘a young man, full of energy and talent […] he is discreet and silent, and has grown to manhood in my service’.32 Arthur Goldaming’s aristocratic father and Lucy’s wealthy mother likewise die, bequeathing all they own to the heir who stands in for youth and nationhood—​the new Lord Arthur. In contrast, both Van Helsing and Dracula express ambivalence about ageing and forge their identities around their sense of impending old age. Van Helsing suits the young because he uses his wisdom to serve their interests, because he poses little sexual threat, and because he repeatedly soothes his young colleagues with apologies for his age and infirmity. He threatens to succumb to the erotic pull of the three centuries-​old vampire women he ultimately destroys at the end of the novel. Despite these occasional lapses, however, he finally embodies the appropriate relation of old to young in his service, devotion, and harmless—​even demeaning—​ foreignness as well as in his courtliness to young women. Even his access to the culture of old age permits him to serve the young, for his own old age permits him to interpret 29 

Daubeny, ‘The Sumach’, 295. Daubeny, ‘The Sumach’, 296. 31  Daubeny, ‘The Sumach’, 296. 32 Stoker, Dracula, 48. 30 

The New Woman and Her Ageing Other    187 Dracula to the others. It is he who denounces the vampire’s primitive ‘child-​brain’ and characterizes the vampire’s behaviour as obsessive, repetitive, and ego-​driven. What Van Helsing fails to see is that the qualities he attributes to infantilism could as easily insinuate senility. On the other hand, Van Helsing’s analysis can also be seen as a rather desperate attempt to assert his superiority over this intellectual, well-​read, heroic, glamorous, if ages-​old aristocrat who, instead of being either an unruly child or a senile degenerate, could just be a virile, voracious, gender-​bending, life-​loving elder. In contrast to Van Helsing, Dracula possesses all of those qualities most feared in his ‘undead’ social counterparts—​old people. Our attention is drawn to Dracula’s age in Jonathan Harker’s first vision of the Count. He sees ‘a tall old man, clean-​shaven save for a long white mustache’ who is distinguished by courtly but antiquated manners.33 In the famous description of Dracula that follows, Jonathan is principally impressed by his peculiar teeth and his color because these ‘showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years’.34 Dracula, like Van Helsing, remarks on his age repeatedly. He delights in ancient ‘races’, ancient battles, ancient homes, explaining, ‘I seek not gaiety nor mirth, not the bright voluptuousness of much sunshine and sparkling waters which please the young and gay. I am no longer young.’35 Because Jonathan cannot imagine being at once old and vigorous or ‘saturnine’, he underestimates the Count. Despite evidence of the Count’s strange powers, Jonathan refuses to accept his host’s transgressions of the boundaries between youth and age until this prosaic young man actually glimpses Dracula in his coffin. The Count’s extension, even reversal, of the ageing process rouses Jonathan’s horror, but he is most horrified by the three seductive and overwhelming wives Dracula has held through the centuries. The novel documents Dracula’s vacillating age, which becomes a kind of contagion. He longs to infect young women—​ particularly New Women—​with a virulent, dangerous form of ageing and taunts the young men who seek to destroy him: ‘My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side.’36 Dracula’s desperate, parasitic search for youth as well as life—​what Franco Moretti has called his capitalist takeover and Steve Arata has called reverse colonization—​is also Dracula’s desire to constitute his own empire of ageing, but ageless aged women—​a startling inversion of the New Woman whom he favours as prey.37 One explanation for the characterization of older people as at once (and paradoxically) incompetent and predatory is that late Victorian notions of power relations were so deeply inflected by the power dynamics of empire that other, unrelated power relations, including gender dynamics, were often interpreted through the arguments that justified imperialism. The language and imagery used to describe ‘the aged’ as a collective, undifferentiated, faceless generation frequently associated that imagined group 33 Stoker, Dracula, 46.

34 Stoker, Dracula, 48. 35 Stoker, Dracula, 54.

36 Stoker, Dracula, 347. 37 

Moretti, ‘The Dialectic of Fear’, New Left Review, 136 (1982), 83–​108; and Arata, Fictions of Loss.

188    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture with colonized people who refused to yield their land, wealth, and power (and even desirable sexual partners) to superior, desirous beings (the young). These younger generations believed confidently in their right to subjugate older people when they were perceived to be obstacles to social, civilized, progressive development. In the fiction of the period, this paradigm, reinforced by the anonymous panoramic sweep of sociological surveys and the dispassionate, microscopic medical theories of ageing, led to the conceptualization of older people as a unified class, a particular culture, a group marked by physical signs and social habits to be interpreted by the medical community, and a people unwilling to yield generational territory and its riches. That these powerful aged figures could be female, as in the case of Lady Ducayne, or feminized, as Van Helsing fears, aligns old age and femininity with dangerous, non-​productive power. Ultimately, like all the villains in Gothic fiction who indulge in transgressive behaviours, older people who threaten to invade the places and pleasures of the young are violently punished. Though the transgressions of age against young women are significantly heightened by the violation of other taboos—​related to sex, gender, class, nationality, and race, for example—​in Gothic fiction, the form of punishment often signals a particular animosity towards unyielding age. Gagool is crushed beneath the stone entrance to King Solomon’s Mines when she tries to imprison and destroy the young, British, white, male heroes of the novel. The ancient She undergoes horrific devolution in retribution for masking her old age with youth when the column of fire that first prolongs her life then exacts revenge for her abuse of time’s laws. The sumach gets the axe. Stabbed and beheaded, Dracula disintegrates to dust. In these sudden, vicious, spectacular scenes, the decomposing body that threatens the New Woman figure with unnatural ageing becomes a searing indictment of those caught poaching upon the young. In sharp contrast, a very different body of New Woman literature approaches women and ageing through comedy. Anticipating and now often included among New Women writers, Contance Caroline Woodhill Naden (1858–​89) embodied the intersections of art and science that shaped New Woman fiction. Naden attended Birmingham and Midland Institute in 1879, where she received honours in both art and biology.38 She attended Mason Science College in 1881, where she studied ‘physics, chemistry, botany zoology, physiology, and geology’ and developed an interest in Herbert Spencer’s arguments for evolution.39 She was active in the suffrage movement and in supporting medical education for women in both England and India and published articles on philosophy and science as well as two volumes of poetry, Songs and Sonnets of Springtime (1881) and A Modern Apostle, the Elixir of Life, the Story of Clarice, and Other Poems (1887). Many of Naden’s poems offer a biting account of the ways ageing penalizes women even as she uses wit to surface a female character’s deep knowledge of science as well as her silent intelligence.40 ‘The Lady Doctor’ opens with a gossipy aside that launches the tale 38 

William R. Hughes, Constance Naden: A Memoir (London: Bickers & Son, 1890).

39 Hughes, Constance Naden, 17. 40 

Patricia Murphy, ‘Fated Marginalization: Women and Science in the Poetry of Constance Naden’, Victorian Poetry, 40 (2002), 118–​119.

The New Woman and Her Ageing Other    189 of a 17-​year-​old girl’s decision to reject a suitor in order to pursue her dream of becoming a doctor: ‘Saw ye that spinster gaunt and grey, | Whose aspect stern might well dismay | A bombardier stout-​hearted?’ (ll. 1–​3).41 Immediately after, we learn the price she has paid: ‘The golden hair, the blooming face? | And all a maiden’s tender grace | Long, long from her have parted’ (ll. 4–​6) Gaining knowledge, she has lost not only youth, but femininity. She forgets ‘each maiden wile’ (l. 58) and shows no ‘gentle sympathy’ (l. 64). As the speaker somewhat bitterly summarizes, ‘She seems a man in women’s clothes’ (l. 65) now lost in regret for a loving home. While the poem on its own would seem to reinforce the worst stereotypes advanced against the New Woman, the poem acts as an angry critique of the cruel choices women are forced to make in order to be loved when put in conversation with Naden’s more overtly sardonic poems about women and science. In ‘Love Versus Learning’ the female narrator first adores a clever young scientist with an Oxford MA, then starts listening to him listen to her: ‘My logic he sets at defiance | Declares that my Latin’s no use | And when I begin to talk Science | He calls me a dear little goose’ (ll. 30–​ 32). The narrator then begins her own scientific investigation into the Darwinian trap of desire: ‘For love is his law of attraction, | A smile his centripetal force’ (ll. 48–​49). The tension between the desirability of even the most intellectual and progressive of young New Women and the threatening loss of her powers with age is perhaps sharpest in a ‘strange waking vision’ (1. 1), ‘The Elixir of Life’, in which a beautiful young woman is offered an elixir by an older lover with the promise (which she hears as a threat) that they can be together for ever. The young woman, recognizing herself as fully human, failed, intent on pursuing passion, and disloyal to her 20-​centuries-​old lover, rejects the offer even as she is rejected. Though the poem skirts the issue, here as in Naden’s other poems, an intelligent woman is confronted with a choice between youthful intensity and the unknown nature of a long independent life. Sexual and social challenges alike are intensified and invested with exaggerated and miserable consequences through the association of those consequences with fears of ageing, especially ageing alone. The use of comedy to surface the bond between the New Woman’s younger and older selves is especially pronounced in a group of novels I discuss elsewhere as ‘the rejuvenescence’ plot.42 These novels explore the promises science offered in the late nineteenth century for the restoration of youth through sometimes outrageous elixirs, such as 72-​ year-​old French physiologist Charles Edourard Brown-​Sequard’s self-​injections with ground testicles of young dogs, which were later marketed as Dequarine or Spermine.43 41 

The Complete Poetical Works of Constance Naden (London: Bickers and Son, 1894), 79–​84. Teresa Mangum, ‘The Unnatural Youth of the Old “New Woman”’, in Katharina Boehm and Anne-​Julia Zwierlein (eds), The Cultural Politics of Ageing in the Nineteenth Century: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2013), 75–​91. 43  Brown-​Sequard describes his research in ‘The Effects Produced on Many by Subcutaneous Injections of Liquid Obtained from the Testicles of Animals’, The Lancet, 2 (1889), 105. Nicole L. Miller and Brant R. Fulmer provide an excellent overview in ‘Injection, Litigation and Transplantation: The Search for the Glandular Fountain of Youth’, Journal of Urology, 177, no. 6 (2007), 2000–​2005. See also A. J. Cussons, C. I. Bhagat, S. J. Fletcher, and J. P. Walsh, ‘Brown-​Sequard Revisited: A Lesson from History on the Placebo Effect of Androgen Treatment’, Medical Journal of Australia, 177, no. 11–​12 (2002), 678. 42 

190    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Charlotte O’Conor Eccles’s The Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore (1898), published under the pseudonym Godfrey Hall, is an especially outrageous example.44 Eccles was herself a champion of elderly women. As a journalist, she wrote about the poor quality of women’s education and gender inequities in the workplace, publishing in major venues such as the Pall Mall Gazette, the New York Herald, Blackwood’s Magazine, and the Nineteenth Century.45 Eccles was a strong advocate for an insurance plan for single women, for example in an article titled ‘How Women Can Easily Make Provision for Their Old Age’ in the Windsor Magazine. The article was important enough to be reported on by other magazines, such as the New Zealand Graphic and Ladies Journal.46 In The Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore a stereotypical ‘old maid’ undertakes an all-​too-​successful rejuvenation treatment, overdosing on an elixir and regressing to infancy. The novel exposes the grotesqueness of a central premise of rejuvenescence: the assumption that youth, generally valued for its ephemeral nature, would be appealing if permanent. The punning title suggests the importance of signs of youth and age. The action turns on two unmarried sisters in their fifties who become despondent about the physical signs of ageing that set them apart from the youthful New Woman character in their boarding house. As wonderfully named Augusta Semaphore and her sister are discussing whether they should use cosmetics and hair dyes to conceal signs of ageing, they stumble upon an advertisement in the Ladies Pictorial. The ‘widow of an eminent explorer’ offers to sell ‘a single bottle of water from the Fountain of Youth, vainly sought in Florida by Ponce de Leon’, promising ‘Its marvellous rejuvenating properties cannot be exaggerated. By its means a person of seventy may regain, after six small doses, the age of eighteen.’47 The sisters imagine they can have what they perceive as the best of both worlds: a youthful body and the memories and wisdom of a long life: ‘To be at once young and experienced; could anything surpass it? Pitfalls might be avoided, amusement sought, a course of conduct followed after a fashion impossible to anyone who was eighteen or twenty for the first and only time in life. To get all one’s chances over again, and to be assured of missing none of them, what luck! What unexampled good fortune!’48 However, when Augusta drinks an excessive dose, her rejuvenesence pushes far past the young person she intended, transforming her into a terrifying baby, whose intelligent expression belies her helplessly infantile body. Eventually, Prudence ends up

44  Godfrey Hall [Charlotte O’Conor Eccles], The Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore (1897), illustrated by Etheldred B. Barry (Boston: L. C. Page and Company, 1898). 45  See Lorna Sage, Germaine Greer, and Elaine Showalter (eds), The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 212. Charlotte O’Conor Eccles describes the challenges faced by women journalists in her article on ‘The Experiences of a Woman Journalist’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 153 (June 1893), 830–​838; repr. in Andrew King and John Plunkett (eds), Victorian Print Media: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 330–​334. 46  Charlotte O’Conor Eccles, ‘How Women Can Easily Make Provision for Their Old Age’, Windsor Magazine, 1 (January 1895), 315–​318. 47 [Eccles], Miss Semaphore, 30. 48 [Eccles], Miss Semaphore, 49.

The New Woman and Her Ageing Other    191 in court, charged with illegitimacy and neglect; she is saved when Augusta suddenly and dramatically ages into her older self, just in time to testify in her sister’s defence.49 Chastised, the sisters turn their backs on make-​up, hair dye, and in Prudence’s case ‘unduly girlish […] ways and dress’.50 While they may be comic figures, ultimately they have the opportunity to gather the kind of wisdom only longer lives can provide. In that sense, these old new women have a far more satisfying and extended life than most of their New Women counterparts. In the novels I have been discussing the New Woman confronts the old woman only under fictional conditions of horror or hilarity. For the most part, the more popular New Woman texts seem to exist on a plane that has little imaginative space for representations of a New Woman’s late life. One stunning example, however, offers a brilliant, if heart-​rending, account of the continuities between the old and New Woman and an excellent conclusion. The poet Alice Meynell wrote a number of intriguing poems about women and ageing, but ‘A Letter from a Girl to Her Own Old Age’ (1875), written when she herself was still in her twenties, offers a uniquely poignant account of bridging the division within the self between a young woman and her aged other self. Over her own lifetime, Meynell traversed a life from Catholic convert to poet, periodical editor, essayist, and mother of a large family. In the early twentieth century, she protested against imperialism and participated actively in the Women Writer’s Suffrage League. But even as a very young woman, she grasped the value of living with a sense of one’s future aged self. ‘A Letter from a Girl to Her Own Old Age’ is composed of a series of rhyming triplet stanzas that hold past, present, and future together tercet by tercet. The speaker calls to her future self: ‘Listen, and when thy hand this paper presses, | O time-​worn woman, think of her who blesses | What thy thin fingers touch, with her caresses’ (ll. 1–​3).51 Steeped in the youthful miseries of ‘this one sudden hour of desolation’ (l. 11), the speaker casts time in spatial terms as skies, clouds, plains, and mountains of effort between her present and future self. That future self, rather than haunting youth with loss and misery, weeps for the youthful struggles of ‘the girl; such strange desires beset her’ (l. 37). In a moment of humility deeply at odds with the presentist preoccupations of much New Woman fiction, the young speaker seeks to master her intense momentary pain by placing it in the context of a longer trajectory. She welcomes her future self ’s compassionate tears. That comfort ultimately is reversed when the young speaker encourages her older self to forget the younger self, blurring the two together in a final stanza in which the younger’s ‘filial fingers thy grey hair caresses, | With morning tears thy mournful twilight blesses’ (ll. 41–​42). This recognition of the impossibility of separation from the future self has much to teach us about the nature of ageing and feminine subjectivity even today.

49 [Eccles], Miss Semaphore, 430–​432. 50 [Eccles], Miss Semaphore, 239. 51 

The Poems of Alice Meynell: Complete Edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 17–​19; repr. from Preludes (1875).

192    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture

Select Bibliography Ardis, Ann, New Woman, New Novels:  Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990). Chase, Karen, The Victorians and Old Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Heilmann, Ann, New Woman Fiction:  Women Writing First-​Wave Feminism (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000). Jusova, Ivetá, The New Woman and the Empire (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005). Katz, Stephen, Disciplining Old Age:  The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996). Ledger, Sally, The New Woman in Fact and Fiction (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 1997). Looser, Devoney, Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–​1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Mangum, Teresa (ed.), A Cultural History of Women in the Age of Empire, vol. v (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Richardson, Angelique, and Chris Willis (eds), The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-​de-​ Siècle Feminisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Thane, Pat, The Long History of Old Age (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005).

Chapter 10

Un speakable De si re s We Other Victorians Kate Flint

How might desire be said to speak? It can be quite eloquent without employing verbal language—​present in a sudden blush, in a glance that’s held a moment too long, in the touch of a hand laid upon another’s arm, even before one considers more passionate gestures. When it does have an audible voice, desire may be mutual and ecstatic, even if—​or especially if—​two protagonists know that they are engaging in the forbidden, like William Morris’s Guenevere describing how she kissed Launcelot one spring day: ‘“I scarce dare talk of the remember’d bliss, | When both our mouths went wandering in one way, | And aching sorely, met among the leaves.”’1 Desire is not limited by place, or class, or marital status, or its object. It can be found in the bedroom of the suburban villa as readily as in the brothel or the Turkish baths or the girls’ boarding school; it may be directed towards a stranger or towards a new hat in a plate glass window—​that is, if one acknowledges that sexual and emotional desire can bleed into the insatiable amount of wanting that forms the basis of consumer society. To speak of one’s desires—​whether in the present, or in the past (as with Guenevere)—​can be an act of honesty, courage, and self-​knowledge. But what makes desire unspeakable? Most obviously, one associates the term with forms of desire—​or perhaps, more accurately, forms of fulfilment—​that are prohibited, whether by law or by custom, in a particular culture. Most particularly, the concept of the unspeakable has been linked with male homosexuality ever since Lord Alfred Douglas published his ‘Two Loves’ in the Chameleon in 1894—​or, more precisely, since Oscar Wilde quoted it in his first 1895 trial for sodomy and ‘gross indecency’.2 In the poem, the narrator dreams of a beautiful naked youth, who kisses him on the lips in a sunlit garden, feeds him grapes, and then offers to show him ‘shadows of the world | And images of life’. They come upon two young men, one joyful and one pale and sighing. The 1  William Morris, ‘The Defence of Guenevere’, in The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858; London: Ellis and White, 1875), 8–​9. 2  The literature on Wilde’s trials is extensive, but see especially Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Towards a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1993).

194    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture narrator is made unutterably sad by this second youth, wreathed in moonflowers pale as lips of death, and I fell a-​weeping, and I cried, ‘Sweet youth, Tell me why, sad and sighing, thou dost rove These pleasent realms? I pray thee speak me sooth What is thy name?’ He said, ‘My name is Love.’ Then straight the first did turn himself to me And cried, ‘He lieth, for his name is Shame, But I am Love, and I was wont to be Alone in this fair garden, till he came Unasked by night; I am true Love, I fill The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame.’ Then sighing, said the other, ‘Have thy will, I am the love that dare not speak its name.’3

In this chapter, I  will be exploring the ‘unspeakable’ status of male homosexual desire in the Victorian period, and the ‘unspeakability’—​for many different reasons—​of lesbian desire as well. ‘Unspeakable’ certainly needs its quotation marks, because such an exploration of lust and shame, affection and passion, devotion and casual sex necessarily means examining all the many ways in which it was made apparent—​whether in coded literary references or private correspondence or courts of law. But the topic cannot be approached without also recognizing the unspeakable, or unwritable, nature of many aspects of heterosexual desire as well, and the repercussions that this had, especially for realist fiction.4 Nor can it be treated apart from other forms of queer and perverse forms of pleasure seeking, from flagellation to the consumption of pornography—​the sexual fantasies and modes of gratification that, when they were exposed and discussed at length by Steven Marcus and Ronald Pearsall in the 1960s, exploded all popular myths about the Victorians being prudes.5 Desire is a tricky term. Whilst it can refer to sexual drives on their own, more frequently it is tangled up with emotion, whether coexisting with romantic love (or confused with it), or provoked by jealousy or unattainability. Desire cohabits with other linked drives and urges. For the New Woman writer George Egerton (Mary Chevalita Dunne), for example, women’s maternal instincts were, or at least should be, stronger than their sexual ones. What’s more, for something to be potentially speakable, even if

3 

Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘Two Loves’ (1892), repr. in Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions, 2 vols. (New York: printed and published by the author, 1916), ii. 551. 4  Consider, especially, the ‘Candour in English Fiction’ debate, in which Walter Besant, Eliza Lynn Linton (from a conservative point of view), and Thomas Hardy discussed the impossibility of writing freely about sexual desire in fiction given current publishing conditions. New Review, 1 (1890), 6–​21. 5  Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-​Nineteenth Century England (New York: Basic Books, 1966); Ronald Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969).

Unspeakable Desires: We Other Victorians    195 it has to be hinted at rather than spoken out loud, it has to be recognized by the person who might, given the optimum personal or publishing circumstances, be able to utter it. If one denies, or does not understand, one’s desires and their objects, they have the capacity to erupt in strange and unpredictable places. And what of Charles Dodgson’s (Lewis Carroll’s) fascination with prepubescent girls, or J. M. Barrie’s yearning after boys, or boyishness? If we are to call this ‘desire’, to what degree is the desire sexual, or, rather, sublimation or projection of some related wish—​to avoid the implications of adulthood, say? Desire, too, can be for an intangible object—​perhaps for the past: desire to be as one was before one made an irreversible decision; before one’s green forest glade was built over by a factory; before one’s loved ones were dead—​or it can be projected onto the future. Finally, to desire is to want, to yearn for, to lust after—​it does not in any way imply or promise fulfilment. Rather, along with desire comes frustration, self-​censorship, repression. If sated satisfaction is one possible outcome of desire, so, too, is shame and self-​ loathing. Satiation itself is, in any case, only a temporary state: desire will reassert itself. Certain Victorian desires were increasingly nameable, if not speakable, because of the ways in which they were codified within legislation and policed on the streets. By the end of the century, they were being described and categorized by sexologists. Naming a desire does not, of course, call it into being: what is more, plenty of desires go unregulated and undisciplined. But such legal and academic commentary had the effect of consolidating views about what was considered ‘normal’ and what was considered ‘deviant’ across a whole range of areas relating to sexuality, intimacy, family relationships, and the circulation of sexual knowledge. The earlier writings of Michel Foucault were influential through their claim that the law effectively produced certain categories—​such as that of the homosexual—​rather than merely regulating the pre-​existent, and Nancy Cott explains that the rulings handed down by courts of law (and widely disseminated in newspapers) have framed people’s actual and hypothetical expectations about what they might expect and demand when it comes to intimate relationships.6 But as various commentators have pointed out, it can be very unreliable, or at least very partial, to privilege the law as a site of cultural production in such areas. Quite apart from the fact that ‘the law’ isn’t an impersonal entity, but is influenced by the individual perspectives, friendships, and biases that its practitioners bring to their decisions, many subcultural activities go on under its radar, and do so way before, and alongside, the cases that end up in court.7 And necessarily, if desire flourishes energetically in the imagination—​a central thesis of this chapter—​law has no direct purchase here. On the other hand, there is no denying that certain pieces of legislation, and certain prosecutions that followed from them, did a great deal to bring ‘unspeakable’ 6  Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3 vols., i. An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (1976; London: Allen Lane, 1979); Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 8. 7  See Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries 1870–​1930 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997); and Rictor Norton, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity (London: Cassell, 1997).

196    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture behaviour very prominently before the public. Most notable here were Section 11—​ more commonly known as the Labouchère Amendment—​of the Criminal Law Act of 1885, which made ‘acts of gross indecency’ between men punishable by up to two years’ hard labour, and ensuing criminal trials—​not just those of Wilde in 1895, but, say, the Cleveland Street case of 1889, in which telegraph delivery boys were implicated in a male prostitution ring. Discussion of this scandal, as Kate Thomas has shown, raised an issue which has continued to be at the heart of many much more recent debates about sexuality:  where are borderlines to be drawn between public and private when it comes to sexual activities?8 Particularly with the rise of the New Journalism towards the end of the century, with its emphasis on the sensational (both in the news that it covered directly, and in the topics that were chosen for articles and editorials), information and opinion about a whole variety of sexual practices were disseminated. But far earlier in the century, anyone who followed the reports of trials that were printed in The Times or the Daily Telegraph could learn about all manner of sexual behavior. Especially once the Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes began hearing cases in the summer of 1858—​once they were empowered to grant divorces, rather than marriages being dissoluble only through individual Acts of Parliament—​all kinds of information about clandestine heterosexual activity were readily available. As William Forsyth put it in Novels and Novelists of the Eighteenth Century (1871), the ‘polluting details’ contained in newspaper reports of divorce court proceedings, ‘if dressed up in fiction, and sold as novels, would lead to a prosecution by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, or a seizure under Lord Cambell’s Act’ (the allusion is to the anti-​obscenity legislation of 1857).9 Such journalism fed a different kind of desire: one for knowledge and for vicarious thrills. Indeed, it was particularly pernicious, Forsyth maintained, because it allowed readers to imagine, vividly, the scenes involved. Much information about sexual desire could be found in medical literature—​not all of it reliable, helpful, or accurate. One thinks of the gynaecologist William Acton’s by now infamous statements, in The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1857) (male reproductive organs, that is), that ‘The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind […]. As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband’s embraces, but principally to gratify him; and, were it not for the desire of maternity, would far rather be relieved from his attentions.’10 The naming and knowledge of same-​sex desire in British medical circles followed from

8 

Kate Thomas, Postal Pleasures: Sex, Scandal, and Victorian Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 49. In addition to Thomas’s book, pp. 39–​69, for the Cleveland Street scandal, see H. Montgomery Hyde, The Cleveland Street Scandal (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1976). 9  William Forsyth, Novels and Novelists of the Eighteenth Century (London: John Murray, 1871), 41. 10  William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life: Considered in Their Physiological, Social, and Moral Relations (3rd edn., London: Churchill, 1862), 101–​102.

Unspeakable Desires: We Other Victorians    197 developments in the growing field of psychology on the Continent. In 1864 and 1865, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs published a series of five booklets, Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmannlichen Liebe (Researches on the Riddle of Male–​Male Love), in which he coined what was to become the influential term ‘uranism’ to describe homosexual love. Derived from the Greek ouranios, or ‘heavenly’, it gave a particularly idealized, spiritual spin to homosexual attraction. His theories were influential, also, because they were predicated on the notion of inversion. An ‘urning’—​that is, a male homosexual—​possessed, according to him, an anima muliebris virile corpora inclusa (a female soul in a male body). This definition not only led to homosexuality being seen in relation to a conventional binary male–​female divide, but it also drew attention to the notion of hiddenness and secrecy. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explains in her groundbreaking Epistemology of the Closet, late-​nineteenth-​century gay writers often presented sexual identity as a secret that could not be divulged. The vocabulary in which same-​sex desire was conceived locates this hiddenness within the body, as well as within the confines of social convention. More importantly, though, in the context of this drive towards classification and pathologization is the way in which Sedgwick emphasizes how most societies—​and Victorian society was no exception—​ have incoherent and inconsistent views of sexuality. Desire—​by no means reliable and constant in its object—​has a tendency to be co-​opted by the categories that are used to describe and control it. Ulrich’s vocabulary was highly influential in naming desire. Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal employed similar language to that of Ulrich in his ‘Die conträre Sexual empfindung’ (‘Contrary Sexual Feeling’) of 1869—​indeed, he drew considerably on the earlier work—​and both writers influenced Richard von Krafft-​Ebing’s 1886 Pyschopathia Sexualis, which included a number of case studies of man–​man and woman–​woman relationships. In turn, this work fed directly into Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds’s Sexual Inversion (1897; first published in German as Das konträre Geschlechtsgefühl in 1896, and considerably expanded in 1915 to take account of new theories, especially Freudian ones). In many ways, Ellis’s theories—​suggesting, broadly speaking, that attraction to someone of the same sex means that one’s trapped in the wrong body—​have proved to have more bearing on transgender studies than on gay and lesbian ones.11 But in his time, his ideas were groundbreaking. Rather than seeing homosexuality as a form of degeneration, or as a psychological or medical pathology, all women and men were positioned on a continuum—​in the opinion of the latest physiologists who write on sexual issues, the reader is informed, ‘each sex contains the latent characters of the other or recessive sex’12 (one can see here the germ of Virginia Woolf ’s notions about androgyny). For Ellis, ‘the basis of the sexual life is bisexual, although its

11  See Heather Love, ‘Transgender Fiction and Politics’, in Hugh Stevens (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 148–​164, at 149. 12  Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 6 vols., [with John Addington Symonds] ii. Sexual Inversion 3rd edn. (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1915), 79.

198    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture direction may be definitely fixed in a heterosexual or homosexual direction at a very early period in life’. The case studies that Sexual Inversion presents concentrate on those whose desires are fixed on people of the same sex. Take History III, F. R., English, aged 50, who is fascinated by a 23-​year-​old clerk in the same office. ‘He has little to recommend him but a fine face and figure, and there is nothing approaching to mental or social equality between us. But I constantly feel the strongest desire to treat him as a man might a young girl he warmly loved. Various obvious considerations keep me from more than quasi-​paternal caresses, and I feel sure he would resent very strongly anything more. This constant repression is trying beyond measure to the nerves, and I often feel quite ill from that cause.’13 His chief pleasures and source of gratification, F. R. says, come from going to the Turkish and other baths, ‘wherever, in fact, there is the nude male to be found’, but he has difficulty in meeting others with ‘the same tendency’ there, apart from a couple of obliging attendants. It’s hard to know whether he is shy, or himself unappealing when naked, or whether, as doesn’t seem likely from other evidence, he was indeed in a strong minority. Whatever the reason, there seems to have been more desire than sexual satisfaction involved, except when, on occasion, he reached orgasm under the hands of a shampooer. Sexual Inversion was not a widely available book, although it circulated freely among those who were most interested in its subject matter, and who maybe found echoes of themselves in its case studies, and welcomed its non-​judgemental, non-​moralizing stance.14 Although its actual influence on homosexual subcultures might have been limited, it most certainly demonstrated how both male and female same-​sex desire could be written about in a straightforward, non-​encoded, non-​sensationalized fashion. Not everyone saw it this way, though. Symonds’s literary executor (Symonds died in 1893) tried to ban its publication. In 1898, George Bedborough, the editor of the Adult, was prosecuted for selling this ‘certain lewd wicked bawdy scandalous and obscene’ volume (to an undercover policeman), and even if this case was inseparable for the fact that the monthly meetings of the Legitimation League, the Adult’s parent organization, allowed various anarchist groups to congregate and speak, it served to highlight the difficulties of openly publishing and distributing material dealing with sexual behaviour. All the same, the Adult, like the Westminster Review and the University Magazine and Free Review, disseminated knowledge and opinion through its discussion of issues like free unions, the naturalness of male promiscuity, and female sexual desire.15 Especially after the Wilde trials, however, there was very little mention of homosexuality in these publications. 13 

Ellis and Symonds, Sexual Inversion, 95. For the publication history of Sexual Inversion, see the introduction by Ivan Crozier to Ellis and Symonds, Sexual Inversion (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 15  See Anne Humpherys, ‘The Journals that Did: Writing about Sex in the 1890s’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 3 (2006), www.19.bbk.ac.uk [last accessed 1 September 2014]. 14 

Unspeakable Desires: We Other Victorians    199 This desire to impart information in a tolerant and objective way could be found in Ellis’s other writings on sexual matters that formed what were to be the remaining five volumes of the Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Ellis himself discovered at the age of 60 that what made him excited was seeing a woman urinate (his very companionate marriage to the lesbian Edith Lees was certainly not, as he put it drily in his autobiography, ‘a union of unrestrainable passion’).16 These volumes are remarkable for the clear-​headed and non-​sensational way in which many varieties of sexual practices and preferences—​ including his own—​are described and documented. There exist plenty of descriptions and fantasies that are far more heated than the accounts supplied by Ellis and that tell of certain particular forms in which sexual desire could be whipped up, including accounts of flagellation and punishment. Flagellation was especially enjoyed, it would seem, by those who, like the poet Algernon Swinburne, had first been introduced to it at school—​in his case by a tutor who was an expert on metre. ‘Flagellation in the public schools’, wrote Ronald Pearsall, ‘was a conspiracy, a ritual that marked off the upper classes with a savage precision.’17 Specialist brothels catered to flagellants; literature was produced that catered to enthusiasts (like St George H. Stock’s Romance of Chastisements, 1866); and Swinburne himself—​whose commitment to expressing physical passion in poetry extended, however, far beyond this particular area of pleasure—​wrote some very down-​to-​earth poems on the subject, including the 94-​ stanza-​long ‘Reginald’s Flogging’: “The twigs are long and the switches are strong, | The shoots are straight and lithe; | First a stripping and then a whipping, | And oh! this bottom will writhe, father, and oh, this bottom will writhe.”18 The cultural and psychological implications of masochism as they connect with broader desires to dominate have been well discussed by John Kucich in his Imperial Masochism.19 Members of the mid-​ Victorian ‘Cannibal Club’—​who included anthropologists and writers—​produced pornography that depended in part for its thrills on racial subjugation. Swinburne’s interest in flagellation (pursued in practical terms at an establishment in St John’s Wood where two outwardly respectable women swished away) was consolidated by his reading of the Marquis de Sade, whose writings he encountered through the extensive erotic library of his friend Richard Monckton Milnes. As the contents of this library indicate, this was but one form—​albeit a flourishing form—​of erotic interest. Pornography circulated in many guises, aimed at different classes and purses, ranging from books of erotic engravings imported from Paris to cheap pamphlets. Some texts—​ such as medical textbooks and works of anthropological investigation—​both served their ostensible ends of providing information and also offered up material that plenty 16  Havelock Ellis, My Life (London: Heinemann, 1940). For Ellis’s biography, see Phyllis Grosskurth, Havelock Ellis: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1980). 17 Pearsall, Worm in the Bud, 411. 18  [Algernon Charles Swinburne], ‘Reginald’s Flogging’, in The Whippingham Papers (1887; London: Birchgrove Press, 2012), 64. 19  John Kucich, Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

200    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture found titillating. The growth in pornography was greatly aided by technologies in printing, reproduction, and distribution that enabled its dissemination. Nor was its audience solely male. An article in the Daily Telegraph in June 1857 spoke with disgust—​real or feigned—​at the horrors of London’s Holywell Street and Wych Street, centres of the pornographic trade (the date is significant: the Obscene Publications Act, Britain’s first legislation against pornography, was introduced in September of that year): It is positively lamentable passing down these streets to see the young of either sex—​ often, we blush to say, of the weaker—​and in many cases evidently appertaining to the respectable classes of society, furtively peeping in at these sin-​crammed shop-​ windows, timorously gloating over suggestive title-​pages, nervously examining insidious placards, guiltily bending over engravings as vile in execution as they are in subject.20

Yet it is never easy to determine the precise link between pornography and desire. It may be used to jump-​start a flagging libido, or to cater—​in private—​to some specialist fantasy that its user would not wish to share more publically. It may simply be used to relieve boredom—​a state named by Adam Phillips as ‘desire for desire’.21 In this blurred hinterland of desire, the wishes expressed by Ellis’s History III, F. R., that he could treat his office clerk ‘as a man might a girl he warmly loved’, start to look relatively straightforward. Or do they? As Sexual Inversion demonstrates, late nineteenth-​century sexology tended to conceive of homosexual relations in terms of pre-​existent gender binaries (in passing, one should note that the terms ‘homosexual’ and ‘homosexuality’ were only coined in the late 1860s, so discussion of earlier same-​sex desire and practice lacked what are now familiar terms). If a man desired another man, or a woman another woman, it seemed to many logical—​even inevitable—​according to this line of thinking, that one member of the dyad must appear—​or inwardly think of themselves as being—​‘feminine’, and the other ‘masculine’. Alan Sinfield has pointed out the illogicality inherent in this reasoning: if a man desires sex with another man, he must be feminine—​and the equation with male homosexuality with effeminacy intensified during the late nineteenth century. But were both participants equally to desire sex with another man, then ‘the idea of effeminacy as the defining characteristic of same-​sex passion’ is complicated, to say the least.22

20 

Daily Telegraph (17 June 1857), 3; quoted by Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-​Century London (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 184. As well as Nead’s book, pp. 149–​215, for Victorian pornography see Walter Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987); Marcus, Other Victorians; Pearsall, Worm in the Bud, 447–​507; and Lisa Sigel, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815–​1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001). 21  Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 13. 22  Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (London: Continuum, 1994), 43.

Unspeakable Desires: We Other Victorians    201 Indeed, prior to the late nineteenth century—​in Renaissance or eighteenth-​century culture, say—​effeminacy and foppishness might signal all kinds of effete vanity without necessarily indicating sexual preference, even if, at the same time, the presence of ‘molly houses’ in eighteenth-​century London—​taverns where gay and cross-​dressing men could meet and hook up—​indicated that there was some continuity in this association. Those molly houses—​like Mother Clap’s, which flourished in Holborn between 1724–​ 6—​clearly suggest, however spasmodic, the existence of something that we might term a homosexual subculture, certainly in London, way before the Victorian period. By the late eighteenth century, we learn of defined cruising sites, like Bird Cage Walk, in St James’s Park, where men would signal to one another through the positioning of their hands, the display of a white handkerchief—​‘By means of these signals they retire to satisfy a passion too horrible for description, too detestable for language.’23 Such sites become much easier to document in the nineteenth century through the increasingly vigilant activities of the police (the Metropolitan Police Force was founded in 1829). In theory, buggery, as a criminal offence, was punishable by death until 1861, when the sentences were ‘lightened’ to between ten years and life imprisonment. If in general there was the attitude that men could do what they wanted with each other’s bodies in private, police hunted down and harassed men who looked in public places for their sexual partners. One side-​benefit of this from the historian’s point of view, as H. G. Cocks has demonstrated, is that the press and court records offer us a huge amount of information about male homosexual activity, about areas frequented by male prostitutes and by men seeking relationships with other men—​many of these overlapping with the consumerist centres in the West End of London.24 Such records, too, also provide a glimpse, however fleeting, of such events as the drag balls of the early 1850s at the Druid’s Hall, near St Paul’s; and they show that popular response to such flamboyantly cross-​dressing individuals as Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park—​Fanny and Stella—​who were arrested in women’s clothing at the Strand Theatre in April 1870, was as much one of tolerant laughter as of scandalized recoil (the origins of British enthusiasm for the drag queen and the pantomime dame run deep, and deserve more exploration).25 They show how frequently homosexual activity crossed class boundaries, too. And the locations that they point to as sites for such activity are replicated in the real street names and pubs and Turkish baths alluded to in, say, the 1881 pornographic novel Sins of the Cities of the Plain, or G. S. Street’s 1894 fictional Autobiography of a Boy. As Matt Cook has shown, other sites in imaginative writing, such as the bachelor chambers of Vernon Lee’s 1896 short story ‘Lady Tal’ (in which the ‘dainty but frugal’ 23  George Parker, A View of Society and Manners in High and Low Life, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, 1781), ii. 87–​88, quoted in Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 9. 24  H. G. Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the 19th Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003). 25  For an especially insightful treatment of the Boulton and Park case, see William A. Cohen, Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1996), 73–​129.

202    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Jervase Marion is supposedly modelled on Henry James), acted as coded locations for those in the know. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and the anonymous—​quite probably multiply authored—​gay novel Teleny (1893) offer a meshing of place with actual or potential sexual activity that likewise would speak directly to those with a sexually specific knowledge of London.26 This heterogenous London mapping of male homosexual activity was one in which the possibility of achieving the immediate ends of sexual desire was always present. So was the potential for flirtation and pursuit. ‘The city’, Mark Turner has written, ‘is an active force, an agent that creates certain kinds of behavior, true to the modern urban sensibility.’27 A sizeable, fluid population fostered a culture of looking, of speculating, of anonymous sexual encounters, both homo-​and heterosexual. The language in which homosexual culture was rendered recognizable stretched across social milieux, from the careful display of a handkerchief or a glance held a little on the long side, to the terms—​derived from Plato, drawn from familiarity with sculpture and fresco—​that originated in a far more socially exclusive world: that of the established universities (of course, the two worlds were not at all mutually exclusive when it came to sexual encounters).28 An enduringly influential way of conceiving of homosexual relations, and of celebrating them, was established through the cult of Hellenism. Classical scholars wielded a disproportionately strong influence because of their positions in the academic establishment. Together with their broader literary and aesthetic community, they put forward the extremely positive interpretation of homosexuality that they found within Greek art and literature: ideas that fed directly into Oscar Wilde’s theories about the inseparability of intellectual and physical beauty, and that supported homoerotic friendship.29 Freedom of thought; freedom to love—​these were the ideals of, say, Walter Pater’s 1864 essay ‘Diaphaneitè’, or John Addington Symonds’s ‘A Problem in Greek Ethics’ (1873), inspired by the poetry of Walt Whitman, and published as ­chapter 3 in the German edition of Sexual Inversion (it appeared as an appendix in the first English edition, and subsequently was dropped). Oscar Wilde’s trials cast a shadow, however, over the sort of aesthetic appreciation that could be coded as queer. Katharine Bradley—​half of the lesbian aunt–​niece couple who wrote and published poetry as ‘Michael Field’—​penned a letter to the (heterosexual) art historian Bernard Berenson in 1895 in which she said that ‘I tremble to think how difficult in the face of this Oscar business, it will be to go on singing the praise of youth & beauty & all those things that from the beginning of the world have been

26 Cook, Culture of Homosexuality, 31, 103–​116, and passim.

27  See Mark Turner, Backward Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 127. 28  Although there were limitations to this influence: Pater and Symonds both had their Oxford careers blocked by the classicist Benjamin Jowett because of their relationships with students. 29  See Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1994).

Unspeakable Desires: We Other Victorians    203 priceless to every artist’.30 But virilizing aesthetics could be located in non-​Hellenic culture, too. The language of heroic manliness and of homosocial loyalty and influence that was such a prominent feature of Greek writing joined with the vocabulary of chivalry and knighthood that underpinned manly roles within the Empire, in order to consolidate a non-​feminized version of ideal manhood.31 As well as the idealized soldier’s finely honed body, the physique of the actual working man likewise provided the object of admiration, whether in the person of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Harry Ploughman’, who appears like a breathing statue, Hard as hurdle arms, with a broth of goldish flue Breathed round; the rack of ribs; the scooped flank; lank Rope-​over thigh; knee-​nave; and barrelled shank—​32

or the less elegant, but seemingly far more sexually accessible ‘thick-​thighed hot coarse-​fleshed young bricklayer with the strap round his waist’ celebrated by Edward Carpenter.33 Moreover, Patrick O’Malley has convincingly argued that ‘there is a persistent conjunction of tropes of Catholicism with those of non-​normative sexual expression or identity in the literary, artistic, and polemical culture of nineteenth-​century Britain and Ireland’, and that, in particular, the Gothic—​whether architectural or literary—​may be seen as ‘a privileged rhetoric for the nineteenth-​century coupling of Catholicism and sexual deviance’.34 Yet Hellenism’s strong influence on British queer culture was not just limited to gay men. Its endorsement of same-​sex love, its claims on modernity, and its valuing of a personal and emotional response to art fed into the works of notable lesbian writers, including ‘Michael Field’, and the novelist and writer on aesthetics Vernon Lee.35 The recovery and translation of new fragments of Sappho’s poetry (and especially the impact of Henry Thornton Wharton’s 1885 Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation) emphasized her importance as woman’s lyric voice, imitated and celebrated by L.E.L. (Letitia Landon), Felicia Hemans, Swinburne, Christina Rossetti, Michael Field, Catherine Dawson, and others.36 More particularly, Sappho gave voice to a woman who desired women—​and indeed, who could not always speak her love. 30 

Katharine Bradley to Bernard Berenson, Good Friday 1895, Bodleian Library, MS Eng Lett. d 408; quoted by Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 158. 31  See David Alderson, Mansex Fine: Religion, Manliness and Imperialism in Nineteenth Century British Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); and Julia F. Savile, A Queer Chivalry: The Homoerotic Aestheticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000). 32  Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose (London: Penguin, 1953), 64. 33  Edward Carpenter, Towards Democracy (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1905), 69. 34  Patrick R. O’Malley, Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3. 35  See Evangelista, British Aestheticism. 36  See Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

204    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Fragment 31—​here translated by Symonds—​expresses her anguish on seeing the woman whom she loves with her new, male partner: Yea, my tongue is broken, and through me and through me ’Neath the flesh, impalpable fire runs tingling; Nothing sees mine eyes, and a noise of roaring Waves in my ear sounds.

‘Lost in the love trance,’37 Sappho’s desire is conveyed in terms of physical turmoil. But in general, it is harder to uncover the traces of lesbian physical desire in the Victorian period than it is to locate its male counterpart. First, lesbian relationships were never illegal, and hence they rarely surface in the press or law courts—​with the notable exception of the 1864 Codrington divorce. Although the relationship between Helen Codrington and Emily Faithfull was only referred to as having alienated relations between Codrington and her husband (a coded term that was usually applied to adultery with a male lover), it was implicitly a central issue.38 Second, the terms in which girls and women often expressed their passionate friendship for one another can make it hard to distinguish—​should one wish to distinguish—​erotic desire from emotional commitment. Indeed, aspects of the discussion that originated in the 1970s about what constitutes lesbianism, and how it might be expressed, helped to make this a very confusing area at precisely the same moment that developments in women’s history and literary studies were vastly expanding the canon, and providing far more information than was previously in circulation about the daily lives of many women. Even a single influential article could be made to point in several directions. As Sharon Marcus explains in her very helpful opening chapter to Between Women, ‘for every scholar who cites [Carroll Smith-​Rosenberg’s 1975 article] “The Female World of Love and Ritual” to explain that Victorian women could have relationships with each other without incurring social stigma, another uses it to prove the sexlessness of the most passionate, enduring, and exclusive love affairs’.39 Chief among the works that championed the cause of women’s romantic friendships—​ in which emotional passion predominates over genitally oriented sexual connection—​ was Lilian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men.40 Martha Vicinus’s Independent

37  Sappho, Fragment 31, trans. John Addington Symonds (1883), in Henry Thornton Wharton, Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings and a Literal Translation (2nd edn., London: David Stott, 1887), 65. 38  See Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women who Loved Women, 1778–​1928 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 69–​82. 39  Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), 31. Marcus refers to Carroll Smith-​Rosenberg, ‘The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-​Century America’, Signs, 1, no. 1 (1975), 1–​29. 40  Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981).

Unspeakable Desires: We Other Victorians    205 Women offered a detailed discussion of the many different sorts of communities in which women’s close friendships flourished, from women’s schools and colleges to convents, nursing establishments, and settlement houses; her Intimate Friends revisits many of the relationships that Faderman treated, and showed that there was frequently far more of a sexual component to the couples that she discusses than Faderman made out.41 She writes, for example, of energetic sexual activity that Anne Lister engaged in with various neighbouring aristocratic women in North Yorkshire in the 1820s, and of the transnational literary and artistic community in Rome in the 1860s—​electric with desire and jealousy—​which included the actress Charlotte Cushman and the sculptors Emma Stebbins and Harriet Hosmer among its members. Women certainly lived with other women in relationships that were described as ‘marriages’, whilst more generally, women were expected to touch, caress, and fondle each other (think of Esther stroking Ada’s hair in Bleak House, 1852−3; think of Jane Eyre putting her arms around Helen Burns’s waist, kissing her, nestling up to her on her deathbed). As Marcus, again, puts it, ‘Precisely because Victorians saw lesbian sex almost nowhere, they could embrace erotic desire between women almost everywhere. Female homoeroticism did not subvert dominant codes of femininity, because female homoeroticism was one of those codes.’42 Whilst Eve Sedgwick could usefully, and very influentially, distinguish between homosocial and homoerotic friendships between men—​the former often involving extraordinarily close bonds as co-​workers, or mentor–​pupils, or members of the same military unit or gentleman’s club, often cementing these bonds through the mediating influence of a woman; the latter involving definite genital contact—​very often no such neat dividing line can be drawn when it comes to women’s expression of desire, even though relationships that involved direct touching of sexual organs were, in practice, probably quite distinct from ones that stopped at fervent caresses and protestations of love. Christina Rossetti’s strange poem Goblin Market (1859) is an allegory about the dangers of giving way to sensual temptation (which only leads to wanting more: after tasting goblin fruit, Laura ‘sat up in a passionate yearning, | And gnashed her teeth for balked desire, and wept | As if her heart would break’) and about the need to find the strength to combat these desires. Lizzie, her sister, returns from her trip to the goblins, obdurately resisting their ripe fruit, their squeezes and caresses, and embraces Laura, inviting her to kiss and suck at the pulp and juices that the goblin men have smeared all over her face: She cried ‘Laura,’ up the garden, ‘Did you miss me? Come and kiss me. Never mind my bruises, Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices 41  Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–​1920 (London: Virago, 1985), and Intimate Friends. 42 Marcus, Between Women, 113.

206    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Squeezed from goblin fruits for you, Goblin pulp and goblin dew. Eat me, drink me, love me; Laura, make much of me.’43

If this seems overstated, to say the least, as an expression of affection between sisters; if it has subsequently become something of a talisman for lesbian desire, its power amplified by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s illustration of the two girls in bed together, mid-​Victorian readers do not seem to have seen anything improper, anything unspeakable, in the actions here described. On the other hand, when Michael Field, in their sonnet ‘It was deep April’, write how they ‘took hands and swore,| Against the world, to be| Poets and lovers evermore,’44 both women knew exactly what was at stake in proclaiming their relationship, but its details, however heartfelt their attachment, are poetically coded.45 In ‘Unbosoming’, for example, they describe desire, and its fulfilment, in decidedly horticultural terms: The love that breeds In my heart for thee! As the iris is full, brimful of seeds, And all that it flowered for among the reeds Is packed in a thousand vermilion-​beads That push, and riot, and squeeze, and clip, Till they burst the sides of the silver scrip, And at last we see What the bloom, with its tremulous, bowery fold Of zephyr-​petal at heart did hold.46

In lesbian writing, as elsewhere, desire itself very often finds its strongest expression when it fails to encounter—​or to have any possibility of encountering—​such an eruption in a bower of bliss. Edith Simcox, who yearned for (and totally failed to receive) more than George Eliot’s affectionate friendship, who sat at her feet, called her (until Eliot asked her to desist) ‘Mother’ (a term that, of course, complicates the layers of emotion), and cherished even her slightest touch, wrote of the delicious pain her suffering caused her in quasi-​religious terms: ‘we tread barefoot and the stones are

43 

Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market (1859), in Goblin Market: And Other Poems (2nd edn., London: Macmillan, 1865), 15, 25. 44  Michael Field, Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses (rev. edn., London: George Bell and Sons, 1893), 100. 45  For Michael Field’s use of metaphor, see Chris White, ‘“Poets and Lovers Evermore”: Interpreting Female Love in the Poetry and Journals of Michael Field’, Textual Practice, 4, no. 2 (1990), 197–​212, and ‘Flesh and Roses: Michael Field’s Metaphors of Pleasure and Desire’, Women’s Writing, 3, no. 1 (1996), 47–​62. Michael Field are well placed in their cultural context by Marion Thain in ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 46  Michael Field, Underneath the Bough, 99.

Unspeakable Desires: We Other Victorians    207 sharp, we fall, the ground is a flame, the air is a suffocating smoke, invisible demons ply their scourges: there is one strange pleasure in the agony—​to feel sharp flames consuming what is left in us of selfish lust’.47 Some late Victorian novels, like Ethel M. Arnold’s Platonics (1894) or Emma Frances Brooke’s Transition (1895), triangulate two women’s intense feelings for one another with the pressures to conform to heterosexual society. Some lesbian poets, like Amy Levy, masked their jealousy in various ways. Her ‘To Lallie (Outside the British Museum)’ (1884) opens with enthusiasm: Up those museum steps you came, And straightway all my blood was flame, O Lallie, Lallie! The world (I had been feeling low) In one short moment’s space did grow A happy valley. There was a friend, my friend, with you; A meagre dame, in peacock blue Apparelled quaintly: This poet-​heart went pit-​a-​pat; I bowed and smiled and raised my hat; You nodded—​faintly.48

Desire could not be more firmly squelched. This masking, of course, is a double one. Feelings hide behind a facetious stance and jaunty metre, and—​that raised hat gives the game away—​lesbian desire is transposed into the socially safe voice of an apparently male poet. Indeed, speaking as a man was one strategy that lesbian writers could easily adopt in order to write of their desires and frustrations—​or, indeed, to find a language for them at all. I have argued elsewhere that one of the problems for women-​identified writers in the Victorian period, where the language of sexual desire falls so very close to that of passionate female attachment, is to know, to name, to speak exactly what it was that they were feeling.49 No wonder this became couched in elaborate metaphors. It was not, after all, as though heterosexual women were regularly openly and easily able to express sexual desire, either (except in pornographic fantasy). The problem for many lesbians—​or women to whom we would now give that name, even if it isn’t one that they would have used to label themselves at the time—​was exacerbated by uncertainty over the viability, even the nature, of their emotional and sexual yearnings 47 

Edith Simcox, diary entry, 29 December 1878, in A Monument to the Memory of George Eliot: Edith Simcox’s ‘Autobiography of a Shirtmaker’, ed. Constance M. Fulmer and Margaret E. Barfield (New York: Garland, 1998), 69. 48  Amy Levy, ‘To Lallie (Outside the British Museum)’ (1884), in The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy, 1861–​1889, ed. Melvyn New (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 381. 49  Kate Flint, ‘The “Hour of Pink Twilight”: Lesbian Poetics and Queer Encounters on the Fin-​de-​ siècle Street’, Victorian Studies, 51, no. 4 (2009), 687–​7 12.

208    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture and fantasies, and over the availability of a shared linguistic framework in which to express them. But there were some strategies in which desire could be at least vicariously experienced. Since ‘woman-​authored poetry addressing women was often reviewed as though the speaker had adopted a male voice; by the same token, of course, a woman-​identified reader could easily practice queer reading, aligning herself with a heterosexual male poetic speaker’.50 Such queer reading is not just the prerogative of the lesbian. It may just as easily be practised by the gay man—​why not position oneself, temporarily, as Maggie Tulliver, reluctantly thrilling to the touch of Stephen Guest taking her hand into the crook of his arm in the lane outside the Moss’s farm—​‘Her lips and eyelids quivered—​she opened her eyes full on his for an instant, like a lovely wild animal timid and struggling under caresses’—​yet knowing she must renounce her cousin’s acknowledged suitor.51 Or why not abandon oneself to a different form of excess, that of style? ‘The homosexual’s “classic” pursuit of style’, D. A. Miller has written, ‘is, among other things, his heroic way of rising to meet the fate projected on him […] by a culture fearful of the extreme, exclusive, emptying, ecstatic character of any serious experience of Style?.’52 Stylistic excess is both substance and vehicle of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). One of the many enjoyments that this novel offers up is the fact that it can be read on several levels, queer and non-​queer—​a story of the fatal, quasi-​Faustian influence of one man over another; a tale of the insidious and ultimately futile worship of surface over depth—​or a work that celebrates surfaces, acting a part, knowing the power of art and artifice, and that recognizes the sheer hedonistic, narcissistic, amoral appeal of living profoundly in the moment. These divergent, even contradictory readings may be seen as closely related to Wilde’s far more wide-​reaching love of paradox, and of leaving explanations open (one might contrast it with his 1889 short story, ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’, in which he was far less ambiguously writing a gay story, outing the sex of the addressee of Shakespeare’s sonnets). What one might think of as his queer commitment to stylistics goes beyond this, however, and certainly beyond the flamboyant, self-​promoting, ostentatious style that he and other aesthetes displayed in dress.53 As William A. Cohen has noted, Wilde might have been ‘recklessly unconcerned’ when it came to protecting himself in his private life, but in his prose, he rendered homosexuality far less legible (with a few notable exceptions, like ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’). ‘The mutual and reciprocal relation between the two formations of unspeakability—​the sexual and the literary’, writes Cohen, ‘coalesce[s]‌in Wilde’s writing.’54 Wilde’s art is distinguished by its availability to interpretation, by its refusal of the obvious, for the ways in

50 

Flint, ‘The “Hour of Pink Twilight”’, 693. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860; London: Penguin, 2003), 468. 52  D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 8. 53  For homosexuality and aestheticism in general, see Richard Dellamora’s Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). 54 Cohen, Sex Scandal, 192. 51 

Unspeakable Desires: We Other Victorians    209 which it invites the reader’s sympathetic subjectivity in a range of suggestive, and often indeterminate, ways. This chapter needs a coda. As Heather Love argues in Feeling Backward, ‘longing for community across time is a crucial feature of queer historical experience’.55 She underscores what is, for her, the most problematic feature of this, which is not an attachment to identity, but a desire to search for positive images, for encouraging, upbeat, pioneering versions of ourselves in the past. We need to acknowledge, she tells us, the degree to which shame, and repression, and the holding of dark secrets—​of wanting to keep things unspoken, even to oneself—​formed a part of queer history. In other words, in attempting to bring out queer voices from the past, in giving a voice to unspeakable desires, we need to be careful that we are not, in the end, imposing desires of our own for a history and literature that said more than it could or wanted to say. In his writing on aesthetic criticism, Wilde privileges the role of the critic over that of the author, since, he believes, his is the more inventive, the more creative role. Paradoxical and parasitic though this may seem, it is in many ways a way of liberating the reader, and of granting the gay male or lesbian reader the power to open up a text, and make it their own. Tennyson’s passionate attachment to Arthur Hallam, as expressed in In Memoriam, or Esther’s fetishization of Ada’s hair, may or may not be expressive of homosexual relations. The reader can make the unspoken within the text as vocal as he or she wishes. And yet, as readers, we must be alert to the fact that we may be pursuing our own urges to identify with women and men from an earlier period, and need to recognize our own relative disappointments at not finding the articulate versions of our predecessors that we might have hoped to locate. We can fantasize, we can project—​but in doing so, we must acknowledge the degree to which these actions are, in themselves, symptoms of frustrated desire.

Select Bibliography Cook, Matt, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–​1914 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2003). Dowling, Linda, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1994). Love, Heather, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). Marcus, Sharon, Between Women:  Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Marcus, Steven, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-​Nineteenth Century England (New York: Basic Books, 1966). Nead, Lynda, Victorian Babylon:  People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-​Century London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 55 

Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 37.

210    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Pearsall, Ronald, The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Between Men:  English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Sinfield, Alan, The Wilde Century:  Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (London: Continuum, 1994). Vicinus, Martha, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–​1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Chapter 11

Victorian M as c u l i ni t i e s , or M ilitary Me n of Feeli ng Domesticity, Militarism, and Manly Sensibility Holly Furneaux

Victorian Masculinities: The Emergence of a Field The last twenty years have seen scholarship on masculinities develop as a major field within Victorian studies. John Tosh, a leader in this field, describes how in 1994 the idea of a history of masculinity was ‘eccentric and provocative’; a decade later, by contrast, it had become ‘a recognised area of enquiry’.1 After an understandable reluctance to appear to affirm patriarchy by means of a focus on men, scholars began to apply increasingly nuanced theories of gender as a cultural construction to the experience and representation of manliness in the nineteenth century. While, as Tosh summarizes, early work focused on the predominantly male arena of empire building and all-​male spaces, especially public schools, youth organizations, and clubs, more recent scholarship has benefited from the feminist critique of an overly rigid model of separate spheres.2 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s 1987 social history of men’s position within complex, overlapping networks of family and business was an important milestone, inspiring

1  John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth Century Britain: Essays in Gender, Family, and Empire (London: Pearson, 2005), 1. 2  See, for example, Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993), 383–​414.

212    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture projects across a number of disciplines.3 Subsequent work on masculinity has dealt with major areas of reassessment and development in Victorian studies: work and domesticity, and the extent to which these were experienced as separate spheres, Victorian families, war and attitudes towards militarism, empire, and the role of feeling in public and private life. This chapter endeavours to extend several of these lines of enquiry. It begins with a concern central to the Victorians, and a staple of early important critical work on manliness:  the composition of the gentleman. Through W.  M. Thackeray’s lovable gentle officer, Colonel Newcome, and responses to this character through the long nineteenth century, the chapter brings together debates about the behaviour appropriate to each class and the democratization of manly virtue, with questions of military might and army reform. Recent attention to the private lives and experience of Victorian men takes up a turn to affect in Victorian studies, through which a new and nuanced emphasis has been placed on feeling and the gendering of emotion. I continue this turn in a perhaps unexpected direction, examining a mid-​nineteenth-​century preoccupation with the emotional experience and eloquence of military men. In The Newcomes (1853–​5) and in Victorian culture more widely, I will argue, these concerns are brought together in a previously overlooked figure: the military man of feeling. Tracing the popularity of this figure through the long nineteenth century I question the accepted idea that the Victorian period witnessed a decided stiffening of the upper lip, as captains of industry and empire builders had no time for public displays of feeling. In a 2012 BBC documentary Ian Hislop presented the Victorian period as the ‘heyday’ of emotional restraint. The documentary identified the Crimean War (1853–​6) as a turning point, at which the stiff upper lip became democratized as officers and men were commended for their stoicism.4 In that war, though, as we shall see, the opposite impulse is also apparent, as an ideal of the military man of feeling crossed ranks. In this essay I question the abiding stereotype of the emotionally buttoned-​up Victorian male, and challenge an idea, expressed in the Victorian period and familiar in our own, that feeling has no place in war.

‘The company of gentlemen’, part 1: The Newcomes: A Most Respectable Family Colonel Newcome was singled out for special commendation by reviewers throughout the later half of the nineteenth century. Protagonist of The Newcomes, Thackeray’s most 3  Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1790–​1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987). 4  Ian Hislop’s Stiff Upper Lip: An Emotional History of Britain, Episode 2, ‘Heyday’, BBC 2, 9 October 2012. The strap-​line for this episode ‘How the Victorians made the stiff upper-​lip a genuinely national characteristic’ (www.bbc.co.uk/​programmes/​b01n7rh4) is a neat shorthand for the received view of the emotional history of the period.

Domesticity, Militarism, and Manly Sensibility    213 popular work with Victorian readers, Colonel Newcome inspired readerly devotion. In his obituary for Thackeray, Anthony Trollope declared that ‘The Newcomes stands conspicuous for the character of the Colonel, who as an English gentleman has no equal in English fiction. […] Colonel Newcome is the finest single character in English fiction.’5 Such responses echoed the enthusiastic appraisals of this figure within the novel. Despite his shortcomings the Colonel incites particular devotion in Arthur Pendennis, the principal narrator and putative editor of the text, and is widely praised by other characters. He is described by fellow military men as ‘one of the bravest officers that ever lived’ and as ‘one of the kindest fellows’,6 while widows are attracted to ‘a man so generally liked […] with such a good character, with a private fortune of his own, so chivalrous, generous, good looking’ (55). Though closer to an ideal of character than is usual in Thackeray’s work—​Dobbin, the commended military gentleman of Vanity Fair (1847–​ 8) is the other notable exception—​the Colonel is clearly shown to have faults. These include, perhaps most tragically, his failure to see women for themselves, as he prefers to view romance through an unrealistic chivalric lens. The Colonel’s excessive idealization of women results in his promotion of his beloved son’s disastrous marriage. Given that another of the novel’s central critical enquiries is the trading of women as property on the marriage market, the Colonel’s failures to value women as individuals is presented as a clear character flaw.7 Reviewers, however, tended to ignore this, instead replicating the adoration expressed for the Colonel in the novel. Early responses praised the Colonel as a ‘noble creation’; ‘within the whole scope of fiction there is no single character which stands out more nobly’.8 These celebratory readings (which continued, as we shall see, until at least the First World War) participated in an active debate, to which Thackeray’s novel self-​consciously contributed, about the characteristics of the ideal Victorian gentleman, and the appropriate components of martial and civil manliness.9 In this family saga, or roman familial, Thackeray signals his participation in contemporary debates about the constitution of the gentleman by carefully differentiating the styles of masculinity adopted by the leading males of this family. The novel’s full

5 

Cornhill Magazine (February 1864). Quoted by R. D. MacMaster, ‘Composition, Publication and Reception’, in W. M. Thackeray, The Newcomes, ed. Peter Shillingsburg (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 371–​90, at 385. 6  W. M. Thackeray, The Newcomes (London: Dent, 1994), 67. Subsequent references are to this edition and are given in parenthesis in the text. 7  For readings that identify Thackeray’s critique of the marriage market as a central concern of the novel see Michael Lund, Reading Thackeray (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988); and Donald Hall, Fixing Patriarchy: Feminism and Mid-​Victorian Male Novelists (New York: New York University Press, 1997). 8  The Times, 29 August 1855; George Smith, Edinburgh Review (January 1873), both quoted by MacMaster, ‘Composition’, 384–​5. 9  I’ve explored the centrality of the question of what makes a gentleman to mid-​Victorian culture, and the ways in which literary explorations of the topic are often routed through plots of physical and emotional gentleness, particularly via narratives of male nursing, in ‘Negotiating the Gentle-​Man: Male Nursing and Class Conflict in the “High” Victorian Period’, in Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn (eds), Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth Century Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 109–​25.

214    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture title, The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family, edited by Arthur Pendennis Esq., alerts us to this concern with ‘most respectable’ status from the outset. Colonel Newcome’s city banking twin stepbrothers take mutually defining roles. While Hobson ‘affected the country gentleman’ and was ‘pleased to be so taken—​for a jolly country squire’, Brian ‘looked like the “Portrait of a Gentleman at the Exhibition,” as the worthy is represented: dignified in attitude, bland, smiling, and statesmanlike, sitting at a table unsealing letters, with a despatch-​box and a silver inkstand before him, a column and a scarlet curtain behind’ (61–​2). Characteristically Thackeray presents both modes as poses, approximations of recognizable models of manliness.10 A  third major type or style of the period the novel surveys (the late eighteenth century to the 1840s), the dandy, is represented by Brian’s son Barnes, ‘a fair-​haired young gentleman, languid and pale, and arrayed in the very height of fashion’ (63). In describing these masculine performances, Thackeray emphasizes affectation, fashion, looking like, being taken for, and life modelling art. In this he anticipates Judith Butler’s now classic theoretical work on the inauthenticity of gender. In Hobson’s, Brian’s, and Barnes’s varied performances of gentlemanliness, ‘the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means’.11 In the trappings of sober business (letters and despatch box) and furnishings connotative of wealth and social standing (silver inkstand) with which the narrator imaginatively surrounds Brian in the artist’s impression, complete with the column and scarlet curtain of the studio, the effortful work of gender fabrication is apparent. Thackeray, then, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, establishes at the outset of his study of what makes a gentleman that the gentleman is a social construct, a label attached via social consensus rather than arising from any innate or unchanging qualities. Nonetheless, the quest to identify the qualities and qualifications of the perfect gentleman is a major concern of this tale of social newcomers, and the dominant concern in readers’ responses to the novel. Colonel Newcome, who for Trollope and many other readers was the ‘English gentleman’ with ‘no equal’, has a somewhat contradictory stance on the extent to which the gentleman is born or made, which accurately reflects the broader cultural confusion on this issue. Unlike his pompous stepbrothers, who are attached to a spurious family etymology through which they can trace themselves to a ‘surgeon to Edward the Confessor’, the Colonel is realistic about the recent wealth of his family from his father’s successes in weaving and merchandising. The Colonel delivers the following major ‘lesson’ to his young son Clive, in a novel also deeply concerned with forms of education: ‘I think every man would like to come of an ancient and honourable race [… .] As you like your father to be an honourable man, why not your grandfather, and his 10  The historical significance of stylization and theatricality is emphasized in James Eli Adams’s Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1995). 11  Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London, 1990), 173.

Domesticity, Militarism, and Manly Sensibility    215 ancestors before him? But if we can’t inherit a good name, at least we can do our best to leave one, my boy; and that is an ambition, please God, you and I will both hold by.’ (71)

Here good birth is desirable but not essential to the possession of a ‘good name’, which may also be achieved through effort, and is an ideal to aspire to. As Robert Colby put it, in a groundbreaking early critical study of Thackeray, ‘in emphasising through the colonel that respectability is something transmitted rather than inherited, Thackeray did his part to bring gentillesse within the purview of the middle-​class’.12 Elsewhere, though, the Colonel is less flexible in his thinking, and he certainly rules out the possibility of a more radical social mobility suggested by the working-​class gentleman, a figure explored through characters such as the eponymous hero of Dinah Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman (1856) and Charles Dickens’s Pip and Joe (Great Expectations, 1860–​1). Colonel Newcome has a strict code of conduct that he expects those born into the landowning classes to abide by; deviation from this code is a major cause of his frustration with the coarseness of Fielding, a favourite novelist of Thackeray’s: ‘If Mr Fielding was a gentleman by birth’, says the Colonel, ‘he ought to have known better; and so much the worse for him that he did not’ (42). Here, and throughout the novel, Colonel Newcome insists on strict delineations of social and military rank, suggesting that to be a gentleman—​here defined by class and occupation—​is the ‘lot’ of some men but not others: ‘I am as little proud as many in the world, but there must be distinction, sir; and as it is my lot and Clive’s lot to be a gentleman, I won’t sit in the kitchen and boose in the servant’s hall’ (41). Clive expresses an instinctive understanding of such ‘distinction’, which seems, though Thackeray is explicit that Clive’s theory is not fully coherent, to depend on character and personal, rather than social, worth: ‘It isn’t rank and that; only somehow there are some men gentlemen and some not’ (70). These half-​articulated and contradictory ideas represent what Arlene Young has described as a broad concern in the mid-​nineteenth century with whether ‘manners’ could take precedence ‘over lineage as the essential defining quality of gentlemanliness’.13 Robin Gilmour places Thackeray at the heart of his authoritative study of The Idea of the Gentleman, seeing this topic as ‘a major, perhaps the major, concern of Thackeray’s fiction’.14 Gilmour documents how Thackeray and his contemporaries posed ‘testing questions about the constituent elements of the gentleman. How important were birth and breeding in making a gentleman? Was heredity more important than environment […]? Could a “natural gentility” exist without the patent of birth, and if so, how

12  Robert Colby, Thackeray’s Canvas of Humanity: An Author and His Public (Columbus, O.: Ohio State University Press, 1979), 264. 13  Arlene Young, Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel: Gentlemen, Gents and Working Women (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 37. 14  Robin Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), 38.

216    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture much was this a matter of moral qualities and how much a matter of education and fine clothes?’15 Such questions were asked with increasing intensity in the mid-​century in debates around the Reform Act of 1867. As Keith McClelland has shown, ‘the axial figure’ in the enfranchisement controversy was ‘the “respectable working man”: could he be trusted if he was to be given the vote? How was he to be differentiated from the “rough” or “unrespectable”?’16 These questions around trust and differentiation were, in part, resolved through a yoking of respectability with reason, with an emphasis on ‘rational recreations’ and temperance.17 Middle-​class ideals of manly self-​discipline, forged to legitimate the increasing social power of that class, and an evangelically informed bourgeois emphasis on restraint and asceticism, were thus conceptually extended, with the vote, to a section of working-​class men.18 The effects of the extension of a masculine ideal of restraint and temperance—​of habits and feelings—​are accounted for in the standard chronologies of a shift, usually dated to the 1850s and 1860s, as Philip Collins described it, ‘from manly tear to stiff upper lip’.19 In his recent work on expressions of male feeling, Thomas Dixon follows Collins’s chronology of ‘a move away from the culture of sentimentality from the 1860s onwards’.20 Julie-​Marie Strange places this shift, in which it became less acceptable for men to weep in public, a little later in the century to the 1880s; she links it to a rise in ‘muscular Christianity’ which ‘emphasised a vigorous masculinity in the face of anxieties about the decline of Empire and the degeneration of Britain as a nation’.21 British military prowess was already being tested during the period in which The Newcomes was composed and published. Serialization of The Newcomes began in October 1853, at the same time as Russian hostilities against Turkey. Monthly parts continued throughout the Crimean War, which saw a historically unlikely alliance of Britain with France and the Ottoman Empire. The final part was issued in August 1855, a month before the Russians surrendered Sebastopol.22 The novel’s exploration of civilian and military styles of gentlemanliness takes on a particular urgency in the context of

15 Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman, 33. 16 

Keith McClelland, ‘England’s Greatness, the Working Man’, in Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 72. For a cross-​European consideration of the relationship between military service and suffrage, see chs. 1 and 2 of Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagerman, and John Tosh (eds), Masculinities in Politics and War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 17  McClelland, ‘England’s Greatness, the Working Man’, 115. Stefan Collini documents an increasing politicized emphasis on ‘character’ in this period, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–​1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 18  On the centrality of the ascetic self-​discipline in professional-​class formations of masculinity see, for example, Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints. 19  Philip Collins, From Manly Tear to Stiff Upper Lip: The Victorians and Pathos (Wellington, NZ: Victoria University Press, n.d.), based on a 1974 lecture. 20  Thomas Dixon, ‘The Tears of Mr Justice Willes’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 17, no. 1 (2012), 1–​23. Dixon notes that ‘weeping judges became virtually extinct after the mid-​Victorian period’, 10. 21  ‘The Myth of Britain’s Stiff Upper Lip’, BBC News Magazine, 16 February 2011. 22  The war officially ended with the ‘Peace of Paris’, signed in March 1856.

Domesticity, Militarism, and Manly Sensibility    217 wider debates about whether by being a nation so fit for trade, Britain had become unfit for war. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning declared, ‘if we cannot fight righteous and necessary battles, we must leave our place as a nation, and be satisfied with making pins’.23 In the Crimean War, the infamous arena of officer ‘blunder’, the heroism of ranking soldiers in appalling conditions was widely applauded. The mismanagement of the war led to widespread calls for reform of government and army, and the formation of the short-​lived Administrative Reform Association, of which Thackeray was a member. While the war was the immediate catalyst for the foundation of the association, its aims were wider—​the reduction of jobbism in the military and all areas of government, so that roles were allocated according to ability rather than social rank. The largely middle-​class membership of the association promoted the efficiency of industry as more successful than leadership based on aristocratic hierarchy and ability to pay. James Eli Adams has noted the attention that Thackeray gives to a reformist class-​based shift in military masculinities in Vanity Fair: Whereas George Osborne envisions himself as a throwback to the traditional, aristocratic gentleman, compounded of martial valour, dashing presence and unlimited credit, William Dobbin incarnates a humbler ideal, more suited to an emergent middle class. [… .] He finds fulfilment in duty (military and domestic) and kindness to the weak.24

Like Dobbin, who is briefly resurrected in The Newcomes to confirm the Colonel’s credentials—​‘there is not a more gallant or respected officer in the service’ (132)—​the Colonel’s caring behaviour, informed by the values of home and domestic fiction, is suitable for a democratized army. One of the aims of the Administrative Reform Association was realized a decade and a half later in the Cardwell reforms to overturn the system of bought commissions. This made army leadership a more accessible prospect to working men.25 In the aftermath of the Crimean War, as Alan Skelley has shown, formal reforms were supplemented by a range of efforts to improve the education and quality of leisure time for ranking soldiers, with an emphasis on increasing the appeal of ‘rational recreations’ of reading rooms, lectures, etc., so that they became preferable to the canteen. These changes, and education reforms, were ‘an important aspect of the army’s transition from an earlier uncaring, fiercely disciplined body to a more humane organisation with greater provision for the welfare of its men’.26 In the course of these reforms, the qualities of the ranking soldier, and his capacity for self-​discipline and self-​help, came under scrutiny similar to that given to the working man in the approach to the 1867 Reform Act. 23 

Quoted by Stefanie Markovits in the context of wider views of war as a relief from a ‘long and dreary commercial period’—​The Crimean War in the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 93. 24  James Eli Adams, A History of Victorian Literature (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009), 118. 25  Anthony Bruce, The Purchase System in the British Army, 1660–​1871 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1980). 26  Alan Ramsey Skelley, The Victorian Army at Home: The Recruitment and Terms and Conditions of the British Regular, 1859–​1899 (London: Croom Helm, 1977), 117.

218    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Surprisingly, though, in this climate of increased emphasis on manly restraint, and this period of acute anxiety about the efficiency of the British army, the military figure most applauded was notable, not for a stiff upper lip, but for a particular capacity for feeling. While figures like Carlyle were carving out spaces for civilian heroism through a transposition of warrior language into civic life, an overhaul of the martial ideal took place through an application, across a wide range of cultural forms, of civic and, especially, domestic and familial ideals, to the soldier. As Adams argues, Carlyle’s famous phrase ‘Captains of Industry’ ‘gained wide cultural currency because it attached to the economic power of the entrepreneur the status of a traditional martial ideal and thereby solidified the social authority of what had been at best a fragile norm of manhood under an aristocratic ethos contemptuous of trade’.27 During the same period, however, the impetus also went the other way towards the civilizing of the soldier through the transposition of middle-​class values into the traditionally aristocratic hierarchy. Though Colonel Newcome inspired unambivalent celebration, and often provoked powerful emotional reactions—​a review in The Spectator, for example, speaks of the tears shed over the Colonel’s death, and popular accounts reported that Thackeray had been found weeping by his housekeeper after writing this scene28—​the gentlemanly ideal he represents is far from simple. Composite of competing traditions of approved manliness, the Colonel reinterprets the aristocratic ideal of the noble officer for a more bourgeois age and for a predominantly middle-​class audience, and takes the eighteenth-​century man of feeling into an era in which manly restraint and reason was, so the accepted chronology goes, more recommended than manly tears and emotional response. The air of nostalgia and anachronism with which Thackeray imbues this character, who is perceived by others in the novel as old-​fashioned, suggests the difficulties of constituting an ideal gentleman in a period which celebrated difficult-​to-​reconcile models of masculinity, from domestic sensitivity to imperial aggression. While the Colonel draws upon old-​fashioned literary models of manliness—​he styles himself after The Spectator’s ‘old English gentleman’ Roger de Coverley and Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, and is known in India as Don Quixote—​his infusion of feeling and of bourgeois civilian values into his admired version of military manliness is, as we shall see, very much of the age.

‘The Colonel at home’: Fatherly Feeling Using the figure of a military man who has served a full career in the East India Company and whose primary emotional connection is to his son, Thackeray explores 27 Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, 6. 28 

The Spectator, 18 August 1855; Colby, Thackeray’s Canvas of Humanity, 393 n. 58.

Domesticity, Militarism, and Manly Sensibility    219 the constitution of the gentleman through his public position as servant of empire and domestic role as father. Having decided not to remarry after his own painful experience of being stepmothered, the widowed Colonel Newcome resolves to be ‘father and mother too’ (56) to Clive. Though the gentleman was, in one sense, a public category that defined social status, this novel, like many others of the period, is more concerned by the embodiment of gentle manliness within the private sphere. Colby notes the prevalence of chapter titles, such as ‘The Colonel at Home’ that direct the reader to the significance of the domestic, and connect the novel to the numbers of contemporary domestic dramas promoted in the accompanying Newcomes Advertiser.29 Indeed, the Colonel’s homecoming inaugurates the narrative. During his Indian posting, the Colonel had felt obliged to send his young son to England for his education and the protection of his health. The novel turns around the Colonel’s efforts to create a more meaningful relationship with his son, who, after a seven-​year absence, is now a young man. The Colonel endeavours, to use John Tosh’s categorization of dominant styles of Victorian fatherhood, to move from the model of ‘absent’ father, separated, in this case reluctantly, from his children in order to fulfil his professional commitments, to ‘intimate’ fatherhood.30 Indeed, Thackeray anticipates Tosh’s scale of diverse fathering modes: ‘Our good Colonel was not of the tyrannous but of the loving order of fathers’ (199). Following Tosh, a growing body of work has continued to dispel an unhelpful but persistent image of the autocratic Victorian paterfamilias. Valerie Sanders’s wonderful study of Victorian fathers, through their own testimony of letters and diaries, challenges the stereotype by ‘changing the perspective from which’ the father ‘is viewed’.31 In Colonel Newcome, Thackeray offers a detailed account of the affects of fatherhood as experienced by the father himself, which dwells on the emotional intensity of the Colonel’s feeling for his son. Colonel Newcome is bereft at his separation from young Clive. Thackeray describes the Colonel’s ‘constant longing affection’, his ‘grief and loneliness’ at parting, ‘his tender and faithful heart’. ‘The kind father had been longing’ for their reunion ‘more passionately than any prisoner for liberty, or schoolboy for holiday’. ‘With that fidelity which was an instinct of his nature, this brave man thought ever of his absent child, and longed after him’ (54). In his repeated emphasis on ‘longing’ and the attempt to capture its intensity through analogy, Thackeray makes a concerted effort to convey the rarely documented emotional experience of military fathers: Strong men, alone on their knees, with streaming eyes and broken accents, implore Heaven for those little ones, who were prattling at their sides but a few hours since. 29 Colby, Thackeray’s Canvas of Humanity, 360.

30  John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-​Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 87. 31  Valerie Sanders, The Tragi-​Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 3. For other important accounts of the emotional diversity of Victorian fatherhood, see Trev Lynn Broughton and Helen Rogers (eds), Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007).

220    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Long after they are gone, careless and happy, recollections of the sweet past rise up and smite those who remain: the flowers they had planted in their little gardens, the toys they played with, the little vacant cribs they slept in as fathers’ eyes looked blessings down on them. (54)

Much affected by this early separation, the Colonel’s fatherly feeling extends beyond biology: The experience of this grief made Newcome’s naturally kind heart only the more tender, and hence he had a weakness for children which made him the laughing stock of old maids, old bachelors, and sensible persons; but the darling of all nurseries, to whose little inhabitants he was uniformly kind:  were they the Collector’s progeny in their palanquins, or the sergeant’s children, tumbling about the cantonment, or the dusky little heathens in the huts of his servants round his gate. (55)

Unlike his other, more firmly delineated, relations the Colonel’s weakness for children discriminates neither by class nor race, and throughout the novel he is observed forging alliances with children, both related and not: ‘Besides his own boy, whom he worshipped, this kind colonel had a score, at least, of adopted children, to whom he chose to stand in the light of a father’ (59). This adoptive parenting registers the professional hazard of army life, as the Colonel stands father to those children whose parents have died or must remain distant at imperial posts. It also places him in a longer tradition of the paternally sensitive military man, with his forename perhaps referencing the most socially committed of these, Captain Thomas Coram, a retired naval officer who set up the Foundling Hospital after being horrified by the regularity of his encounters with abandoned children on the London streets.32 Although wartime is usually associated with a hardening of feeling, commended by The Critic in 1847 as preferable to the ‘social plague’ of sentimentalism which is said to gain an ascendancy in peacetime, Colonel Newcome’s expansive capacity for emotional response is with the grain of Crimean War period narratives.33 During this conflict, a wide range of cultural forms presented the military man not as less susceptible to sentiment, but as intensely so. The soldier as adoptive father was a popular motif, with paintings like John Everett Millais’s L’Enfant du Régiment (1854–​ 5) and the revival of Donizetti’s opera La Fille du Régiment from which Millais takes his subject (reopened in London 1856), resonating with Newcome’s choice to ‘stand in the light of a father’ to numbers of children. Such narratives contributed to a wider focus on, and celebration of, the military man’s emotional experience and 32 

I discuss Captain Coram in the context of tender elective fatherhood in Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), ch. 1. 33  ‘Sentimentalism’, Critic, 6 (December 1847), 370. Carolyn Burdett places this piece in a context of broader journalistic critiques of sentiment at mid-​century in her introduction to ‘New Agenda: Sentimentalities’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 16, no. 2 (2011), 187–​94, at 188.

Domesticity, Militarism, and Manly Sensibility    221 eloquence.34 In the Colonel’s reliance on eighteenth-​century models of sensibility, Thackeray explicitly draws the man of feeling into questions not just of what makes a gentleman, but of what constitutes appropriate military masculinity.

‘The company of gentlemen’, Part 2: Military Men of Feeling The Colonel is a composite figure, in which models of the military man from Thackeray’s own life and extensive reading of military histories are fused with eighteenth-​century fictional men of sentiment. The character is based in part on Thackeray’s stepfather, Major Carmichael Smyth, and on a complex literary legacy.35 Colonel Newcome’s personal literary heroes, as we have briefly seen, are eminent figures of eighteenth-​century politeness and sensibility. The Colonel’s indispensable portable reading stacks up to a hefty pile: ‘“The Spectator”, “Don Quixote”, and “Sir Charles Grandison” formed a part of his travelling library’ (41). Thackeray details the reasons for the Colonel’s textual selection: ‘“I read these, Sir”, he used to say, “Because I like to be in the company of gentlemen; and Sir Roger de Coverley, and Sir Charles Grandison, and Don Quixote are the finest gentlemen in the world”’ (41). Thackeray emphazises the formative effects of Colonel Newcome’s reading of Samuel Richardson’s novel, variously presenting the Colonel’s ‘gracious dignity’ as Grandisonian behaviour (209, 515). In Sir Charles Grandison (1753) Richardson self-​ consciously tried to the address the question of ‘What makes a good man?’ This hero is presented in the preface as ‘the example of a Man acting uniformily well thro’ a variety of trying scenes’ and as a ‘Man of TRUE HONOUR’.36 In showing the triumph of male virtue, Richardson strives, as John Mullan has shown, to revise the gendered implications of his earlier Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748), in which ideal feeling and behaviour are firmly the province of ‘the fair sex’.37 Richardson’s hero offers an ideal in which right sentiment is always met by right action—​charity, sacrifice of time and self-​interest, and

34 In Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-​Victorian Era: Charlotte Yonge’s Models of Manliness,

Susan Walton has documented Yonge’s emphasis on gentle soldiering (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). I’ve explored Dickens’s use of a sentimental tradition in his story of tender soldiers in the Christmas number of his journal in the first year of the Crimean War in ‘Household Words and the Crimean War: Journalism, Fiction and Forms of Recuperation in Wartime’, in John Drew (ed.), Charles Dickens and the Mid-​Victorian Press (Buckingham: University of Buckingham Press, 2013), 245–​60. 35  Thackeray’s daughter Anne Ritchie commented that her ‘step-​grandfather had many of Colonel Newcome’s characteristics’. Quoted by MacMaster, ‘Composition’, 384. Peter Shillingsburg characterizes Thackeray as having ‘both admired and condescended to’ his military stepfather. William Makepeace Thackeray: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 57. 36  Samuel Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 4. 37  John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 81–​3.

222    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture sage advice. He is a prelapsarian man of feeling, before Henry Mackenzie and others elaborated schemes by which a heightened capacity to feel only unevenly translated into social action, more often dissolving in a flood of tears cathartic to the weeper but rarely of benefit to the wept-​for.38 As a figure famous for his combination of right feeling with right action, Sir Charles Grandison makes a significant contribution here to the broader debate about the role of feeling in military masculinity. Another partial model for Colonel Newcome is offered by J. H. Stocqueler’s conduct book for officers, The British Officer: His Positions, Duties, Emoluments and Privileges (1851), which, as Colby has shown, Thackeray had read. Both Colonel Newcome and Stocqueler’s ideal officer, Colby argues, ‘exemplify the aristocratic ideal of chivalry in a modern bourgeois setting’.39 Stocqueler calls for a capacity for feeling and pleasure combined with disciplined restraint, anticipating the emphasis on moderation and rationality in the reform debates about the working man’s character in the next decade: [He] must be urbane in manners and courteous to all; he must be just and honourable in his most trifling dealings. […] Without being either a stoic or ascetic he should look with scorn on that mindlessness which seeks for artificial excitement, or the worse gratification of avaricious rapacity. […] But while scorning these low vices, our ideal, if grave with the grave, should be cheerful with the cheerful; should laugh with the gay and witty, but never with the envious and malicious.40

While participating in the discussion of the character of the ideal military man, the Colonel’s prized books present a particularly pacifistic model of manliness to carry into battle. Sir Charles Grandison and Don Quixote famously explore the limitations of aristocratic codes of chivalry. While the Don finally abandons chivalry, Sir Charles Grandison proves his gentlemanliness by refusing to fight a duel. Both novels reject violence as a means of settling differences or asserting honour. It is telling that Colonel Newcome evades questions from his nephew and niece about how many people he has killed, turning their attention instead to a more reparative aspect of conflict, the heroism of an army surgeon who, when a fever broke out on a transport ship, ‘devoted himself to the safety of the crew, and died himself ’ (192). He continues with one of the novel’s only descriptions of military action, with a paean to

38 

In ‘The Effects of Religion on Mind of Sensibility’, Mackenzie, best known for The Man of Feeling (1771), praised his own work for its ‘power of awakening the finer feelings, which so remarkably distinguish the composition of a gentleman’ (The Mirror, 19 June 1779). Here a capacity for ‘finer feeling’, irrespective of right action, becomes a defining characteristic of the gentleman. On the growing critique of the self-​serving indulgences of sentimental responses in the later decades of the eighteenth century, see G. J. Barker Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 39 Colby, Thackeray’s Canvas of Humanity, 365. 40  J. H. Stocqueler, The British Officer: His Positions, Duties, Emoluments and Privileges (London, 1851), 1–​2.

Domesticity, Militarism, and Manly Sensibility    223 non-​violent, self-​sacrificing courage:  ‘What heroism the doctors showed during the cholera in India; and what courage he had seen some of them exhibit in action; attending the wounded men under the hottest fire, and exposing themselves as readily as the bravest troops’ (192). This turn to plots of non-​violent war heroism is typical of a range of narratives of the Crimean War period, in which the fathering or healing soldier is a recurrent feature. A rather different message, however, is explicit in Colonel Newcome’s other favourite reading. Though modelling himself on the pacifistic Sir Charles Grandison, the Colonel’s other cherished book is Robert Orme’s History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan (1763, 1778). Orme chronicled the activities of the East India Company in the eighteenth century, having served with the company through his career. He was instrumental in sending the 1757 military expedition headed by Robert Clive to Calcutta to avenge the alleged Black Hole incident of the previous year, in which over 100 British prisoners of war were said to have died. In Patrick Brantlinger’s description of it, Orme’s history, as is typical of imperialist writing, ‘turned violence and rapacity into virtues, treating acts of aggression as acts of necessity and self-​defence’.41 The book is formative to Colonel Newcome’s career, and to the plot of the Newcomes. As a boy ‘he had a great fancy for India; and Orme’s History, containing the exploits of Clive and Lawrence, was his favourite book of all in his father’s library’ (23). This is a more traditional model of soldierly reading, in which the reading of military exploits is a catalyst for a performance of them. As Maria Edgeworth put it in her 1809 Essays on Professional Education: A species of reading, which may be disapproved of for other pupils, should be recommended to the young soldier. His imagination should be exalted by the adventurous and the marvellous. Stories of giants, and genii, and knights and tournaments, and ‘pictured tales of vast heroic deeds’, should feed his fancy. He should read accounts of ship-​wrecks and hair-​breadth scapes, voyages and travels, histories of adventures, beginning with Robinson Crusoe, the most interesting of all stories, and one which has sent many a youth to sea.42

Orme’s book has this kind of formative effect on Newcome’s choice of an army career; after reading it he ‘would be contented with nothing but a uniform’ (23). Colonel Newcome imagines a continuation of this line of inspiration, planning, as one possible future, for his own Clive that ‘he can go into the army, and emulate the glorious man after whom I named him’ (57). Near the close of the novel the family copy of this book again becomes significant to the future of the Newcomes, as a later will of the Colonel’s stepmother is found inside the book. This will leaves property to his son Clive, old Mrs Newcome having apparently become reconciled to her soldier stepson, having read

41  Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–​1914 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), 81. 42  Quoted in Sharon Murphy, ‘Imperial Reading? The East India Company’s Lending Libraries for Soldiers, c. 1819–1834’, Book History, 12 (2009), 74–​99, at 76.

224    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture this celebration of military prowess. In his old age the Colonel shows how memorized passages from this book have remained with him all his life. The section he selects for recitation delights in the triumph of British energy and might over the French and the Marathas, an Indian warrior caste, here called Morattoes:  ‘The two battalions advanced against each other cannonading, until the French, coming to a hollow way, imagined that the English would not venture to pass it. But Major Lawrence ordered the sepoys and artillery—​the sepoys and artillery to halt and defend the convoy against the Morattoes’—​Morattoes Orme calls ’em. Ho! ho! I could repeat whole pages, sir. (758)

What then are we to make of this schism? How do we read this fascination with apparently oppositional books; on the one hand the central text of eighteenth-​century masculine sensibility advocating pacifism as the greatest form of courage, and on the other bloodthirsty military history celebrating imperial oppression? The conflicting messages of the Colonel’s formative reading point to the unresolved tensions within a new bourgeois model of military masculinity, which could embrace feeling and value domesticity and caring roles, such as the intimate father, but also needed to be capable of violently dispatching the enemy. The Colonel’s mixed literary heritage, which is so formative of his career and character, prepares him to be a military man (Orme) of feeling (Richardson et al). Thackeray’s gentle officer proved to be a popular figure in wartime. Colonel Newcome takes his place alongside a range of gentle heroes as a personal favourite of serving soldiers in the Crimea and beyond.

Campaign Heroes: Battlefield Reading and Military Masculinity The Colonel’s reading patterns reflect those of actual servicemen. In her work on the libraries established by the East India Company in the 1820s and 1830s, Sharon Murphy notes that supplied material was supplemented by personal collections, as ‘soldiers, particularly officers, frequently brought a selection of books with them to India’.43 Murphy notes that many library titles ‘were evidently chosen as particularly appropriate for soldiers, either because they would contribute to their moral improvement or stimulate their desire for adventures in foreign lands’.44 Many first-​hand accounts, though, 43 

Murphy, ‘Imperial Reading?’, 77. Had Thackeray placed Colonel Newcome’s East India career twenty or so years later, he could have pictured his hero borrowing another of his favourite reads Don Quixote from the company’s library (see Murphy, ‘Imperial Reading?’, 77, 87, for the popularity of this title). 44  Murphy, ‘Imperial Reading?’, 84.

Domesticity, Militarism, and Manly Sensibility    225 from those serving in the Crimean War, express different motivations for the selection of campaign reading material. Charlotte Yonge’s novels were (unlikely) favourites. As Susan Walton has noted, Yonge’s novel Heartsease (1854) was the last book read by Lord Raglan, commander of the British army in the Crimean War, before his death in the campaign; it was lent to him by a naval captain who was a close friend.45 Meanwhile The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), Stefanie Markovits points out, ‘was the most requested novel among officers in the hospitals in the Crimea’.46 Charlotte Yonge’s brother Julian, serving in the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, was happy to report home that ‘nearly all the men in his regiment had a copy’.47 The Heir of Redclyffe features a plot of anger and aggression rerouted into healing and the surrender of selfishness; self-​sacrifice, in the form of a willingness to preserve a former enemy’s life at the expense of one’s own, is central. The hero, Sir Guy, risks and finally loses his life nursing his former rival back to health; in his constant sickbed attendance, Guy contracts the fever and only saves his patient at the expense of his own life. In her study of Yonge, Alethea Hayter cites an example of ‘an officer in the guards [who was] asked in a game of “Confessions” what his prime object in life was, [and] answered that it was to make himself like Guy Morville, hero of The Heir of Redclyffe’.48 The popularity of Yonge’s work with military men suggests a different trajectory to military reading to that offered by conventionally militaristic accounts of ‘do and die’ (l. 15), as represented by what stands as the most famous text of the period, Alfred Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ (1854).49 Tennyson famously reprinted his poem in a ‘soldier’s version’ when a chaplain at the front requested copies: ‘It is the greatest favourite of the soldiers—​half are singing it and all want to have on black & white—​so as to read—​what has so taken them’.50 Even this poem, usually seen as a straightforward patriotic valorization of military courage and self-​sacrifice, incorporates, as Trudi Tate has shown, an unease with its own glamorization.51 Tate argues that such unease is generated by a conflicted view of military masculinity, in which it is not clear how the values of an aristocratic code of martial honour, seen in glorious action and extermination in this poem, can be retained in a more democratic army of bourgeois efficiency. The aristocratic cavalry officers of the charge are shown to be outmoded at the same time as their courageous code is mourned. Thackeray’s novel, as we have seen, navigates this difficult transition in ideals of military masculinity, and the unresolved conflict in the Colonel’s

45 Walton, Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-​Victorian Era, 13. 46 Markovits, The Crimean War in the British Imagination, 78. 47 

Christabel Coleridge, Charlotte Mary Yonge: Her Life and Letters (London: Macmillan, 1903), 183. Alethea Hayter, Charlotte Yonge (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996), 2. 49  The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 3 vols. (Harlow: Longman, 1987). 50  Tennyson quotes the chaplain’s request in a letter to John Forster, 6 August 1855, quoted in Edgar Shannon and Christopher Ricks, ‘“The Charge of the Light Brigade”: The Creation of a Poem’, Studies in Bibliography, 38 (1985), 1–​44, at 8. 51  Trudi Tate, ‘On Not Knowing Why: Memorialising the Light Brigade’, in Helen Small and Trudi Tate (eds), Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis 1830–​1970: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 160–​80. 48 

226    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture oppositional formative texts creates a similar unease to that which Tate observes in Tennyson’s poem.52 The Newcomes is drawn explicitly into discussions of soldier reading by John Everett Millais’s Peace Concluded (1856). Millais’s painting depicts, in part, the competing forms of wartime reading as a returned Crimean officer reads the announcement of peace in The Times, having discarded a number of Thackeray’s The Newcomes in its distinctive yellow wrapper. G. A Lawrence brings together Yonge and Thackeray as reformative reading in his novel, a year later, of an intensely violent hero, Guy Livingstone (1857). Here the hero’s physical excesses are, at least partially, revised by his account of gendered readerly affect: Very old and very young women, in the plenitude of their benevolence, are good enough to sympathize with any tale of woe, however absurdly exaggerated; but men, I think, are most moved by the simple and quiet sorrows. […] We yawn over the wailings of Werther and Raphael; but we ponder gravely over the last chapters of The Heir of Redclyffe; and feel a curious sensation in the throat—​perhaps the slightest dimness of vision—​when reading The Newcomes, how that noble old soldier crowned the chivalry of a stainless life, dying in the Grey Brother’s gown.53

The kind nobility of Colonel Newcome is sufficient here to move the otherwise unmovable male. Livingstone’s (almost) tearful response to the death of Colonel Newcome parallels the grief expressed by Thackeray’s first readers over the death of this hero, and participates in a continuing celebration of the Colonel’s quiet power to generate sentimental response.

Colonel Newcome in the First World War The position of the Colonel as Britain’s favourite gentleman was confirmed in the early twentieth century. Enthusiasm for the Colonel’s character became eloquent again in a wide-​ranging public debate about which actor was fit for the role when Michael Morton’s adaptation of the novel was staged in 1906. In a style familiar from the 1850s reviews, the Colonel is deployed in wider discussions about commended forms of manliness and national character. Beerbohm Tree, most famous for his performances as charismatic villains, was controversially cast. A piece in the Daily Mail asked, ‘Should Mr Tree be Allowed to Play Colonel Newcome?’, and began the discussion by recognizing the 52  Ambivalence about the sufficiency of militarism in securing male identity is located even within the Colonel’s favourite celebrant version of bellicosity. Orme’s enthusiasm for Clive of India is qualified by the biographical details of Clive’s early attempts on his life, and suicide at age 49. 53  George Lawrence, Guy Livingstone, or ‘Thorough’ (London: Daily Telegraph, n.d.), 337.

Domesticity, Militarism, and Manly Sensibility    227 difficulty of representing ‘a truly loveable man’: ‘how shall it be possible to put upon the stage that most tender and pathetic character in the whole of modern English literature, Colonel Newcome’.54 The article continues with a sneering critique of Tree, in which the ability to present feeling is insidiously connected to national character:  Colonel Newcome ‘needs to be played with a depth of feeling which has never been displayed by Mr Tree. “Adsum” in that guttural accent which has become identified through the playing of characters such as Svengali and Fagin would border on the absurd.’ Tree is, it seems, too ‘guttural’, and—​so the not so subsumed subtext goes—​insufficiently English (Tree was the son of a German emigrant father, and had anglicized his stage name by adding a partial translation of his father’s name Beerbohm) to play this hero of ‘English literature’. The World responded to this controversy with a mischievous squib which played upon the ‘shady’ qualities, the word invoking race as well as the villains for which he was known, of Tree:  Some folks are sighing  And sadly crying  That it must really be  Dramatic quackery  To tinker Thackeray  And serve him up with Tree.  But those who’re sobbing  With hearts a-​throbbing  Might surely wait and see  Though tears be blinding  They might be finding  Naught shady about Tree.55

Surely enough Tree made a triumph of the role, and was particularly commended for his performance of feeling. The Evening Citizen applauded his ‘manly pathos’, while the Glasgow Record proclaimed ‘he has done nothing so absolutely beautiful as his study of Colonel Newcome. It is a vivid portraiture, mostly of golden devotion, entirely permeated by the spirit of this most loveable of fictional creations.’56 Interviewed in the Pall Mall Gazette, Tree emphasized the gentleness of this gentleman character, as well as his understanding of the significance of the Colonel’s national heritage: ‘that fine old English gentleman, the gentlest of moderns, the lineal descendent of Don Quixote’.57 He went on to confirm that heart rather than head governed his interpretation of the role: ‘I 54 

H. A. Mitton, ‘Should Mr Tree be Allowed to Play Colonel Newcome?’, Daily Mail, 18 May 1906. Held by Bristol University Theatre Collection, HBT/​TB/​000034. 55  ‘Umbrage and the Umbrageous’, World, 22 May 1906. Bristol University Theatre Collection, HBT/​ TB/​000034. 56  Evening Citizen, 18 September 1906; Glasgow Record, 18 September 1906. Bristol University Theatre Collection, HBT/​TB/​000035. 57  ‘Interview with Mr Behrbohm Tree’, Pall Mall Gazette, 17 May 1906. Bristol University Theatre Collection, HBT/​TB/​000037.

228    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture don’t know that I have thought so much about the Colonel’s character, as that I have felt it.’ This public debate around the 1906 stage adaptation shows a persistent valuation of manly feeling through the supposed high point of ‘stiff upper lip’ mentality. Here the Colonel’s capacity for emotion is invoked, surprisingly, as a matter of national pride. In an era of decreasing confidence in Britain’s ability to retain its colonial ‘possessions’, the most gentle of soldiers remained a popular hero. Figured as an anachronism from his mid-​Victorian inception, the Colonel continued to channel collective cultural fantasies about a passed golden age of ideal gentlemanly character and manly feeling. If this ‘fine old English gentleman’ is old-​fashioned, the emotional response to the character was very much ongoing, as Tree’s testimony—​‘I have felt it’—​shows. Tree’s success in this role was further confirmed a decade later when, in a revival during the First World War, the play achieved its greatest popularity. He toured Canada and the United States with the play in the winter of 1916–​17, reaching the New Amsterdam Theatre, New York, with it on 10 April 1917. Here he interpolated a toast to the British navy within the play to great applause, and added ‘And let us not forget our friends across the seas’, to bring the house to a standing ovation.58 The New York Times echoed reviews of a decade earlier, praising ‘Sir Herbert’s portrait of the Colonel, a performance that is genuinely charming and alive with a heartiness that is as admirable as it is surprising’. Tree went on to appear in the role on a night in aid of mutilated soldiers at the Metropolitan Opera House.59 The playscript, of which a copy is held at the Drama Archive at Bristol University, confirms that playwright Morton considered the Colonel’s literary legacy to be essential to the delineation of his character; despite the pressure to abridge the substantial novel into a play-​length script, Morton retained much of the Colonel’s discussion of his favourite books. The stage Colonel’s exclamation ‘Sir Roger de Coverley, Sir Charles Grandison, and Don Quixote are the finest gentlemen in the world!’ is accompanied by a direction: ‘moves over to table tinkering with various books’. The production’s property plot is precise in the provision of three books, and so it is (just) possible that a sufficiently zealous props person may have secured a copy of Richardson’s novel for use in this scene. In this way, the exemplary gentle man of the eighteenth century, Sir Charles Grandison, triumphs through a complex, contested history of preferred military reading, to appear on an occasion that perfectly capitalizes on the Richardsonian combination of right feeling with benevolent response: a benefit for First World War wounded soldiers. While the conflict between a pacifistic model of military masculinity—​which met the requirements of new bourgeois ideals of manly character at home and at war—​and the realities of warfare remained unresolved, the emotional significance of the military man of feeling persisted, even, and especially, in times of conflict. Beerbohm Tree’s deployment of Thackeray’s Colonel to benefit wounded soldiers in the First World War, is a fitting legacy for a figure which embodied a wider cultural desire to transform narratives 58 

59 

‘Sir Herbert Tree as Colonel Newcome’, New York Times, 11 April 1917. McMaster, ‘Composition’, 390.

Domesticity, Militarism, and Manly Sensibility    229 of war violence into domestic plots of care via the military man of feeling. Colonel Newcome’s legacy has something still to teach us in this militaristic age about the long history of ambivalence and precariousness within ideals of combative masculinity.

Acknowledgments I spoke about sections of this research in papers at the University of Leeds and Lincoln University. I am grateful for all the generous, formative responses from those present.

Select Bibliography Adams, James Eli, Dandies and Desert Saints:  Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Broughton, Trev Lynn, and Helen Rogers (eds), Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1790–​1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987). Dudink, Stefan, Karen Hagerman, and John Tosh (eds), Masculinities in Politics and War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). Furneaux, Holly, ‘Negotiating the Gentle-​Man: Male Nursing and Class Conflict in the “High” Victorian Period’, in Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn (eds), Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth Century Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 109–​25. Gilmour, Robin, The Ideal of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London:  Allen and Unwin, 1981). Sanders, Valerie, The Tragi-​ Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009). Tosh, John, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-​Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Tosh, John, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth Century Britain:  Essays in Gender, Family, and Empire (London: Pearson, 2005). Walton, Susan, Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-​Victorian Era:  Charlotte Yonge’s Models of Manliness (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). Young, Arlene, Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel: Gentlemen, Gents and Working Women (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).

Placing the Victorians

Chapter 12

Em pire, Pl ac e , and the Victoria ns Patrick Brantlinger

‘Place’ can mean either geographical location or a position within a social hierarchy, including gender, race, and social class. In Victorian literature and culture, the global reach of the British Empire was frequently countered by emphases on England, the local, and ‘home, sweet home’. Definitions of ‘Englishness’ can expand to include all of Britain or can just as readily contract to a version of ‘collective identity privileging the English soil of the “sceptered isle” or, more regularly, certain quintessentially English locales’.1 Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, ‘the English’, depending on which ideological potion they swallow, can shrink to the size of a village or mushroom to encompass much of the rest of the world. Regarding social hierarchies, the Victorians believed that race and gender were versions of destiny, fixed for all time. One’s social class, however, could be altered through ‘self-​help’, education, bad luck, or many other factors. Gender was supposedly preordained: men and women had to adhere to conventional sexual and gender behaviours; as the fate of Oscar Wilde shows, deviations from the norm could be disastrous. Race, too, was seen as preordained. In The Races of Men (1850), Dr Robert Knox affirmed ‘the unalterable character of races’: every race in its place for ever.2 This opinion was contradicted, however, by the evidence of racial hybridity and by the theory of evolution.3 Charles Darwin contended that races were not separate species; that over long periods of time they were malleable; and that the differences between the races were far less significant than those between individuals within any race. Nevertheless, race continued to be a major mode of categorization that helped the British express their imperial 1 

Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 12. 2  Robert Knox, The Races of Men (1850; Miami: Mnemosyne, 1969), 181. 3  See Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).

234    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture prowess. From the natural history of the Enlightenment to the Darwinian revolution, supposed experts arranged the races in hierarchies, with the white or ‘Caucasian’ race at the top and the non-​white races at lower degrees of inferiority. And the best of the white race, the British told themselves, were the Anglo-​Saxons. Yet everything in the 1800s, even races, seemed to be evolving, in motion. Nature might be permanent; as a sort of generalized place, it encompassed everything, although throughout Britain woodlands and seashores were dwindling under the impact of urbanization and industrialization. As 1800s wore on, nature seemed increasingly to be elsewhere, in overseas jungles or on distant frontiers. In much of the world, however, the British were making their mark through exploration, conquest, and colonization. Voyaging on the Beagle in the 1830s, gathering evidence that he would shape into The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin found British residents at many ports in South America, Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia—​residents who offered him hospitality and served as guides. Coming down the Rio Plata to Buenos Aires, Darwin remarks:  ‘How different would have been the aspect of this river, if English colonists had by good fortune first sailed up the Plata! What noble towns would now have occupied its shores!’4 Within the empire or beyond it, by the 1830s the British were themselves beginning to seem like a force of nature as they spread throughout the world.

‘An Age of Transition’ Even before Darwin, ideas about evolution and geological as opposed to biblical time made many Victorians aware that everything in the universe, humanity included, was in flux. As the title character in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Empedocles on Etna’ (1853) puts it, Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play; Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away; Allows the proudly-​riding and the foundering bark. (ll. 257–​60)

The fiery tumult in the crater of Etna serves as a symbol of energy and mutability. Communing with nature had been a source of stability and illumination for Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley. As early as the 1840s, however, for Arnold, Tennyson, and other Victorian writers, ideas about evolution were already suggesting that nature was hardly a trustworthy source of permanence and humane values. Tennyson feared that it was instead ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’, as he wrote in ‘In Memoriam’ (l. 15): the 4 

Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), 140.

Empire, Place, and the Victorians    235 dinosaurs had devoured each other in their ‘primal slime’, and humans might also be doomed to extinction. Besides evolution, such a pessimistic view, starting around 1870, was reinforced by entropy and the prospect of the eventual heat-​death of the universe—​ an idea that Darwin for one found terrifying. Victorian writers frequently asserted that their own period was changing more rapidly than past periods—​though every age underwent change, the nineteenth century was an unprecedented ‘age of transition’. New technologies of displacement—​railways, steam navigation, the postal service, telegraphy—​were celebrated as signs of progress. Yet these innovations also evoked desires to slow down, stabilize, or even reverse the processes of change. The great ship of history appeared to be accelerating and the Victorians believed they were at its helm, but there was much anxiety about where it was headed. Utopia? Shipwreck? A landfall on the coast of mediocrity? At the start of the 1800s, most people in Britain spent their entire lives near the places they were born. By the end of the century, millions had changed places either within Britain or beyond it, often emigrating to the colonies or the United States. Even the most stable, enduring places—​country villages, for instance—​were affected by industrialization, the rapid expansion of cities, and the new modes of transportation and communications. Two decades before the advent of railways, Sir Walter Scott’s Heart of Midlothian (1818) begins by describing a mail coach as a sign of modern times, knitting Scotland and England into a greater Britain. ‘The times have changed’, says the narrator, ‘in nothing more […] than in the rapid conveyance of intelligence and communication betwixt one part of Scotland and another.’ What was true in Scotland in 1818, as improved roads and coaches stitched localities together, was true throughout the burgeoning empire. Many of the factors that worked to unite Great Britain, however, also contributed to the growing independence of the colonies of white settlement and eventually, as well, of India and other non-​white colonies. Improvements in navigational technology, including steam-​powered paddle wheelers, helped open entire continents to conquest and to the processes of modernization. In 1838 an observer opined that James Watt would have been proud to see the ‘hundreds of steam-​vessels’ plying the world’s rivers and ‘carrying the glad tidings of “peace and good will toward men” into the dark places of the earth which are now filled with cruelty’.5 The invention that, probably more than any other, gave the Victorians the idea that theirs was an age of transition was the steam-​powered locomotive.6 In 1860, William Makepeace Thackeray wrote that ‘gunpowder and printing tended to modernise the world. But your railroad starts the new era. […] We are of the age of steam.’7 The railway boom began in the 1830s. Set in that decade, George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) recounts 5 

Quoted in Daniel Headrick, Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 178. 6  Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 7  Quoted in Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 3.

236    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture how a group of peasants try to prevent surveyors from measuring the land for a new railway. Caleb Garth turns them back, telling them they cannot halt the forward march of progress. By the 1870s, Britain was covered with train tracks, railway stations, and telegraph lines. Travel by rail, however, was often perceived as dangerous and as destructive to the environment. In Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848), building a railway tears up entire London neighbourhoods like Stagg’s Gardens, and the villainous James Carker is killed by a locomotive. The haunted Signalman of Mugby Junction dies in the same way (the junction exists only because many train tracks pass through it on their way to other destinations). Dickens published the Mugby Junction stories in the Christmas number of All the Year Round for 1866, the year after he had himself been in a train wreck at Staplehurst. He escaped injury, but ten passengers were killed. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853), Captain Brown dies when he bravely rushes in front of a train to save a little girl who has wandered onto the tracks. And Isabel Vane, the adulterous heroine of Mrs Henry Wood’s best-​selling East Lynne (1861), is disfigured and almost killed in a train crash in France. By mid-​century, many Victorians had experienced travel by rail. In the 1840s, Thomas Cook used the new means of transportation to inaugurate the tourist industry, bringing as many as 165,000 people to the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. In 1855, Cook also began taking British tourists to the Continent. Tourism and travel to all parts of the world were facilitated by steam navigation, developing simultaneously with railways. For those who could afford it, travel to remote destinations became an increasingly popular mode of instruction and amusement. Travel guides by John Murray and Karl Baedeker quickly became indispensable to the Victorian tourist. Both explorers’ journals and travelogues—​the differences between them were often unclear—​were enormously popular. Literary figures frequently travelled abroad and wrote about their experiences. Thackeray penned The Paris Sketchbook (1840), The Irish Sketchbook (1843), and Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1846). Dickens published American Notes (1842), Pictures from Italy (1846), and the sketches that make up The Uncommercial Traveler (1860–​9). The most widely travelled Victorian novelist was probably Anthony Trollope, who wrote a series of books on the West Indies (1859), North America (1862), Australia (1873), and South Africa (1878). Trollope emphasizes the ties—​racial, religious, historical—​that unite British colonists throughout the empire and make them loyal to the home country. Trollope thus addresses an idea that other late-​Victorian travellers also emphasized, starting with Charles Wentworth Dilke in Greater Britain (1868). Like Trollope and Dilke, in Oceana, or England and Her Colonies (1886), James Anthony Froude takes up the theme of Anglo-​Saxon unity throughout the world, including the United States. And in The Expansion of England (1883), Sir John Seeley, notably excluding India, stresses that the ‘English Empire’ is bound together by ‘English blood’.8

8 

Sir John R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (1883; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 110–​11.

Empire, Place, and the Victorians    237

‘Stately Homes’ One response to experiencing change and feeling transitory was to identify with specific localities and times in the past, including entire historical ages. Another was to stress ‘home’, often evoking nostalgia for what Felicia Hemans in 1827 called ‘the stately Homes of England’: How beautiful they stand, Amidst their tall ancestral trees, O’er all the pleasant land!9

Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice and the other great houses in Jane Austen’s novels were centres of aristocratic wealth, prestige, and historical longevity. As Edward Said noted, however, Mansfield Park, in Austen’s novel of that name, is maintained through a slave plantation in Antigua.10 In emulation of the aristocracy, successful businessmen and authors often purchased or built mansions in the countryside: Scott’s Abbotsford and Dickens’s Gadshill are examples. At the same time, rural cottages were often celebrated as sites of nostalgic remembrance and longing. William Butler Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (1896) captures this sentiment: I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made, Nine bean-​rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, And live alone in the bee-​loud glade.

Yeats’s pastoral dream-​cabin differs greatly, of course, from the ramshackle cottages of many peasants, such as the tenant farmers on Mr Brooke’s estate in Middlemarch. Brooke claims to be a reformer, yet he charges ‘rackrents’ and does nothing to repair broken-​down gates. The idyllic cabin of Innisfree differs even more from Irish hovels as these were being torn down while starving peasants were evicted during the Great Famine of 1845–​50. An amusing variation on stately homes and rustic cottages is Wemmick’s ‘Castle’ in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861). Jaggers’s law clerk lives in the unappealing suburb of Walworth. He invites Pip to have dinner with him there and to meet his father, ‘the Aged P’. According to Pip: Wemmick’s house was a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted like a battery mounted with guns. […] I think it was 9  Felicia Hemans, Selected Poems, Prose, and Letters, ed. Gary Kelly (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2002), 334. 10  Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 84–​97.

238    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture the smallest house I ever saw: with the queerest gothic windows […] and a gothic door, almost too small to get in at.11

The Castle has a miniature moat and bridge and a miniature cannon, ‘the Stinger’, which goes off at nine o’clock every evening, much to the Aged P’s delight. Wemmick has constructed all of its tiny, castle-​like features. Of his son’s handiwork, the Aged P exclaims: ‘This is a fine place of my son’s, sir [… .] This is a pretty pleasure-​ground, sir. This spot and these beautiful works upon it ought to be kept together by the Nation, after my son’s time, for the people’s enjoyment.’ (196)

Through Wemmick’s ‘Castle’, Dickens makes gentle fun of the cliché that ‘a man’s home is his castle’ and also of bourgeois attempts to emulate the aristocracy. The Gothic features of Wemmick’s tiny abode poke fun as well at the champions of Gothic architecture such as John Ruskin, for whom architecture expressed the ‘taste’—​and therefore the morality—​of ages and nations. Ruskin abhorred modern, industrial architecture. He contended in The Stones of Venice (1851–​3) and elsewhere that the Middle Ages—​or what Dickens mocked as ‘the Good Old Times’—​expressed the highest moral and spiritual values. The workmen who built Gothic cathedrals, Ruskin argued, expressed their freedom and faith in the many idiosyncratic features of that style, while modern workmen were ‘slaves’ to machinery and standardization. For Ruskin, the Renaissance had inaugurated a period of cultural decline that continued into the 1800s. In contrast, for Robert Browning, Walter Pater, and other Victorians, during the Renaissance individualism and the arts flourished, opening the path for progress to Victorian times and beyond. Just as not all country cottages lived up to the pastoral ideal expressed by Yeats, so not all ‘stately homes’ exuded the best aristocratic values. Chesney Wold, the Dedlocks’ estate in Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), is a case in point. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Thrushcross Grange is undermined by thwarted passion, revenge, and death. And in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Edward Rochester, coming from Jamaica with a fortune based on slavery, imprisons his mad ‘Creole’ wife in the attic of Thornfield Hall. The elements of Gothic fiction in all three novels suggest the motif of the haunted house—​frequently an aristocratic mansion full of gloomy, ancestral portraits with a torture chamber or dungeon in its bowels. The narrator of Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’ (1842) does not possess that stately home. He is instead shut out, like the young Catherine and Heathcliff spying through a window of Thrushcross Grange. Tennyson’s lovelorn narrator dreams of escaping to an Edenic island ‘in dark purple spheres of sea’:

11  Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 195. Further references to this edition are given in the text.

Empire, Place, and the Victorians    239 There methinks would be enjoyment more than in this march of mind, In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind. (ll. 165–​6)

He stops short, however, at the thought of rejecting the advances of his age. He also decides that, if he had children by ‘some savage woman’ (l. 168), he would be a traitor to his race: ‘But I count the gray barbarian lower than the Christian child’ (l. 174). He will never allow himself to be ‘Mated with a squalid savage’ (l. 177). On the contrary, he asserts, ‘Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay’, invoking the stereotype of the Chinese as stationary or backward, having ceased to progress (l. 184). Renewing his vision of the future ‘and all the wonder that would be’, the narrator decides Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range, Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change—​

a reference to the new railways, which Tennyson at first thought ran in grooves rather than on rails (ll. 181–​2).

Empire and Race The renewed faith of the narrator in ‘Locksley Hall’ focuses on technological innovations, which he thinks are the results of his race and the British Empire. Tennyson saw all three—​race (English or Anglo-​Saxon), technological advances, and the empire—​as causally linked. Anglo-​Saxonism, or the English version of white supremacy, permeated Victorian culture. The ancient Anglo-​Saxons had supposedly discovered democracy in the forests of Germany, but they were also bold adventurers and conquerors of all the inferior races they encountered in the world. The Anglo-​Saxons—​the Anglo-​Saxons liked to tell themselves—​were the only race that knew how to conquer and govern wisely ‘the lesser breeds without the law’, as Rudyard Kipling called supposedly uncivilized and unchristian peoples such as the Filipinos.12 But while many Victorians including Tennyson believed that what their empire meant to the rest of the world was progress, civilization, and Christianity, the rest of the world did not necessarily see it that way. After all, prior to 1833 and the abolition of slavery, the British participated in the slave trade and, like Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park or Rochester in Jane Eyre, practised slavery on their plantations. And slavery was a main source of the racism that accompanied imperial domination throughout the Victorian 12 

‘Lesser breeds without the law’ is a line from Kipling’s poem ‘Recessional’. In ‘The White Man’s Burden’, Kipling advised Theodore Roosevelt and the Americans to take over the Philippines from Spain as its colonial overlords. The Filipinos, he believed, were among the ‘lesser breeds’. But most Filipinos were already civilized and Christian.

240    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture period and beyond. In many Victorian accounts, race is the main causal agent in history. Sidonia, the Jewish sage in Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Tancred (1847), explains: ‘All is race; there is no other truth’—​an opinion echoed by Robert Knox. Sidonia has just told Tancred: ‘A Saxon race […] has stamped its diligent and methodic character on the century. And when a superior race, with a superior idea to Work and Order, advances, its state will be progressive’.13 Unlike most praise-​singers of the Anglo-​Saxons, however, Disraeli did not consider them the most ‘superior’ race. For the future prime minister, that was instead the ‘Arabian’ race, whose most superior branch were the Hebrews. Thus did Disraeli counteract the anti-​Semitism he faced throughout his career as both a writer and a politician. Many other Victorians agreed with Robert Chambers, who in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) declared that the non-​white races were retrograde and that only the white race was capable of progress: ‘In the Caucasian or Indo-​European family alone has the primitive organization been improved upon. The Mongolian, Malay, American, and Negro, comprehending perhaps five-​sixths of mankind, are degenerate.’14 Other self-​proclaimed experts on race agreed with Chambers, many adding that the Anglo-​Saxons were the most superior branch of the white race. The apparent proof of that stereotype was the success of the British in conquering territories and planting colonies around the world. They were the greatest ‘imperial race’ in history because they had forged the most extensive empire ever known. By 1850, the opinion that history was a matter of race conflict rather than Marx’s class conflict was widespread. Race also played a central role in categorizing social classes within Britain. This was most evident in regard to the Irish peasantry and urban poor, who were viewed by the English as an inferior race—​they were Celts, not Anglo-​ Saxons—​and they were often portrayed as apelike. In attempts to classify non-​English and non-​European peoples, Victorians reduced variety and complexity to specific traits and behaviours, with the implication that these are ‘unalterable’, to use Knox’s term. A project like the eight-​volume People of India (1868–​75), an encyclopedic effort to identify through photography every type of Indian from untouchables to maharajas, suggests that its typology is permanent. Similar to the mug shots in late Victorian criminological texts, which claimed that many criminals could be identified by facial and other physical traits, so the images in People of India look like dozens of portraits of Indians fixed in amber. Race might not be unalterable, but to pin down each type of colonized person in a changeless hierarchy, always subordinated to British rule, is an expression of racist and imperialist wishful thinking. Sub-​Saharan Africans, too, were depicted as unalterable types:  they were all savages, uncivilizable without help from Europeans, and in some accounts they were also cannibals. There might be differences between ‘noble savages’ such as the Zulus 13  Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred; or, the New Crusade (1847), Bradenham Edition of the Novels and Tales of Benjamin Disraeli, x (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934), 148–​9. 14  Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844; New York: Humanities Press, 1969), 309.

Empire, Place, and the Victorians    241 and supposedly ignoble ones like the Hottentots, but all black Africans were much more alike than unlike. If they weren’t a separate species, they were, many held, closer to chimpanzees than to Anglo-​Saxons. Australian Aborigines were even lower on the racial totem pole than Africans. Ironically, towards the end of the 1800s two speculations about the Aborigines seemed to contradict this stereotype. The first was the notion that the Aborigines were an archaic branch of the Aryan race. And the second was that the white colonizers of Australia might gradually, over generations, degenerate until they became indistinguishable from the Aborigines.15 In contrast to what some supposed might be the inevitable degeneration of ‘the imperial race’ especially in the tropics, along with many other writers Charles Kingsley in Westward Ho! (1855) celebrated the heroism and valour of their Anglo-​Saxon forebears. In Kingsley’s novel, which he considered a prose ‘epic’, Elizabethan adventurers win their way against all foes in Brazil and on the high seas. Its protagonist, Amyas Leigh, is ‘a symbol, though he knows it not, of brave young England longing to wing its way out of its island prison, to discover and to traffic, to colonize and to civilize, until no wind can sweep the earth which does not bear the echoes of an English voice’.16 A ‘Saxon’ from Devonshire, Amyas is at once an uncouth ‘savage’, mowing down his enemies, and a natural ‘gentleman’—​presumably the mix that adds up to today’s ‘English’ colonizers. He and the other Saxon heroes defeat the diabolical Spaniards at the time of the Spanish Armada (1588) and found the British Empire, all in a fell swoop. Tennyson, also a believer in the virtues of the Anglo-​Saxon race, worked for years on a poem simultaneously idyllic and epic that sought to locate English identity in the age of chivalry and the Knights of the Round Table. Idylls of the King interprets the mythic realm of King Arthur, located somewhere in Wales, as a forerunner of the empire, an identification manifest in Tennyson’s dedication of the poem to Queen Victoria. But Arthur and his knights were, according to the medieval sources on which the poet drew, ‘Cymrian’ or Welsh—​Celtic rather than English. Moreover, although Tennyson downplays these aspects of the Arthurian material, many of Arthur’s enemies were Anglo-​ Saxons. Rather than stressing their accuracy, Tennyson is content to set Idylls in a dim and misty past. He is quite definite, however, about the relationship between his epic and ‘England’s’ colonies of white settlement: The loyal to their crown Are loyal to their own far sons, who love Our ocean-​empire with her boundless homes For ever-​broadening England, and her throne In our vast Orient, and one isle, one isle, That knows not her own greatness [… .]  (ll. 27–​32)

15  Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), 182. 16  Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho! (1855; New York: Dodd, Mead, 1941), 21.

242    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture ‘England’ may be ‘one isle’, but ‘ever-​broadening England’ and ‘her boundless homes’ are everywhere. In Race and Empire, Jane Samson notes that by 1900, in both Britain and the United States, ‘proclamations of Anglo-​Saxon superiority reached fever pitch, and helped to drown out the rising volume of colonial nationalism’. She adds that the eugenics movement, begun by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton in the 1860s, sought ‘to preserve the alleged Anglo-​Saxon […] purity of the mainstream population’ in Britain, its colonies of white settlement, and the United States through immigration restrictions and through eliminating ‘the unfit’ who were supposedly degrading the race. Despite Nazism and the Holocaust, she notes, ‘compulsory sterilisation legislation remained on the books in some countries until after the 1950s’.17

Emigration and Social Mobility The metaphor of the colonies as ‘homes’ in Tennyson’s ‘Dedication’ to Idylls points to emigration, a major demographic phenomenon and also literary theme throughout the nineteenth century. Emigration agents and societies disseminated much propaganda about the colonies, and correspondence from the colonists to those who remained in Britain was also a major source of information about the empire and other places of overseas settlement.18 Many literary works also deal with characters moving to the colonies or the United States and establishing new homes. Sometimes these emigrants return to Britain to tell about their experiences abroad. Novels featuring emigration include Catherine Parr Traill’s Backwoods of Canada (1836), Charles Rowcroft’s Tales of the Colonies (1843), and Henry Kingsley’s Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn (1859), among many others. People’s motives for leaving Britain, however, did not reflect well on conditions in Britain—​that is, in what many emigrants continued to think of as ‘home’. Some forms of emigration were forced: peasants fleeing starvation during the Irish Famine, for example, or convicts transported to Australia, like Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations. In the early 1850s the editor of the Illustrated London News, Charles MacKay, wrote a number of ‘popular songs’ about emigration. MacKay’s ‘The Emigrants’ captures the ambivalence of that topic. To its collective speakers, the Canadian colonies promise a prosperity that they were unable to achieve at home. In ‘mother England, we had toil and little to reward it’, but in Canada there shall plenty smile upon our pain, And ours shall be the mountain and the forest, 17 

Jane Samson, Race and Empire (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2005), 73. Eric Richards, Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland since 1600 (London: Hambledon and London, 2004), 131–​40. 18 

Empire, Place, and the Victorians    243 And boundless prairies ripe with gold grain. Cheer, boys! cheer! for England, mother England! Cheer, boys! cheer! united heart and hand!—​ Cheer, boys! cheer! there’s wealth for honest labour—​ Cheer, boys! cheer! in the new and happy land!19

While extolling the possibilities abroad, authors often criticized poverty and unemployment in Britain. In literature ‘the lands of the Empire were an idyllic retreat, an escape from debt or shame, or an opportunity for making a fortune’, writes Raymond Williams.20 Good characters, like the heroine and her fiancé in Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), are rewarded with improved circumstances abroad—​in their case, in Canada. And the feckless Mr Micawber, in Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849), is able to prosper and gain respectability in New South Wales. Magwitch also prospers in Australia, though as a transported convict he can’t gain respectability—​a key reason why he wants to turn Pip into a gentleman. Most Victorians could not afford to be tourists, though for many of the poor emigrating was a matter of desperation. During the Irish Famine of 1845–​50, roughly 1 million peasants died of starvation or diseases caused by malnutrition. But 1.5 million emigrated, many to die in ‘coffin ships’ before they could come ashore in North America. Novels about the famine such as William Carleton’s The Black Prophet (1847) and The Emigrants of Ahadarra (1848) illustrate the ‘national calamity’ and depopulation that befell the Irish poor at mid-​century and long after. Trollope’s Castle Richmond (1860) is also a famine novel; like many English observers, however, he considered the catastrophe a providential blessing that, precisely through depopulation, would at last bring prosperity to Ireland. Further, Castle Richmond offers an interesting variation on the motifs of ‘stately homes’ and cottages. The residents of the Castle seem to do all they can to alleviate suffering among the cottagers, but their charity is ineffectual: the latter die of starvation in great numbers. The Castle folk, moreover, apparently bear no responsibility whatsoever for the famine, which Trollope interprets as a natural disaster.21 Throughout the 1800s, millions were lured to the colonies by the prospect of establishing better lives for themselves and their families. While Irish peasants were fleeing starvation, the gold rushes in California and Australia gave an added spur to changing places by crossing oceans. Charles Reade’s It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1856) features two characters, the honest farmer George Fielding and the thief Tom Robinson, forced 19 

In Chris Brooks and Peter Faulkner (eds), The White Man’s Burden: An Anthology of British Poetry of the Empire (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), 178. 20  Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 281. 21  Crop shortages, such as the failure of the potato crops in Ireland in the late 1840s, can lead to famines. But they do not cause famines. Instead, at least in modern times, including the nineteenth century, they are caused by inadequate relief measures. Modern historians of the Great Irish Famine agree that the relief measures—​both private charity and official ones—​were inadequate. There is still debate about whether this inadequacy was tantamount to genocide.

244    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture to emigrate to Australia, where they team up and strike it rich in the gold fields before returning to Britain. And Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s enormously popular ‘sensation novel’, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), tells the sad story of George Talboys, an impoverished soldier, who leaves his wife behind while he also travels to Australia and strikes it rich before returning home. By that time, his beautiful young wife has changed her name and married into the aristocracy. George confronts her, but she shoves him into a well and leaves him for dead. She is punished for her adultery, attempted murders, and social class transgression when she is finally unmasked and placed in a Belgian insane asylum for the remainder of her life. That prosperity could be achieved on an individual basis in England, Scotland, and even Ireland nobody doubted. Samuel Smiles’s gospel of ‘self-​help’ and ‘thrift’ aimed to help people move up in the social class hierarchy. Though race and gender were ‘unalterable’, that was not true of class. But often in Victorian literature, as Lady Audley’s Secret suggests, attempts to scale the class pyramid are condemned as fraudulent. The moral in many narratives including Great Expectations is that one should stay in one’s place—​it seemed perilous to Dickens and other Victorian authors to aspire to rise above one’s social class. The fawning social climbing that Thackeray satirized in The Book of Snobs (1848) and in Vanity Fair (1848) expresses a similar opinion. So, too, in Samuel Warren’s best-​selling Ten-​Thousand a Year (1841), the fraudulent rise of Tittlebat Titmarsh, a cockney draper’s clerk, is punished like Lady Audley by his unmasking and his winding up in an insane asylum. Charles Kingsley declared that the moral of Alton Locke (1850) ‘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’.22 And in George Gissing’s Demos (1886), Richard Mutimer betrays socialism and his working-​class roots, also ‘with consequences’. Though issues involving social mobility are among the most prominent in Victorian novels, plays, and poems, the movement is usually downhill:  it was much easier for Victorians, both real and fictional, to fall from their positions in the class hierarchy than to rise. Many Victorian writers experienced insolvency at some point in their lives. Harriet Martineau began writing to earn a livelihood because of her father’s bankruptcy. Thackeray’s family lost a fortune with the collapse of an Indian bank, an experience he renders in fictional terms in The Newcomes (1853); he blames that loss on Indian skullduggery, personified by the villainous Rummon Loll. Dickens’s father’s impecuniousness landed the family in debtors’ prison; young Charles was sent to work at Warren’s shoe-​blacking establishment, temporarily ending his education. Dickens recalled this experience as emotionally shattering. The plight of the so-​called ‘fallen woman’ is also represented in Dickens’s novels by such characters as Little Em’ly and Martha Endell in David Copperfield. Positions on the social scale weren’t set in concrete, but dreams of upward mobility were more than matched by the fear of falling, which appears to have been universal.

22 

Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke (1850; New York: Macmillan, 1889), p. xxix.

Empire, Place, and the Victorians    245

Exploration and Adventure By the time of General Gordon’s death at Khartoum in 1885 and the Scramble for Africa among the European nations, imperialism had become a major topic for Victorians. Seeley famously declared that ‘England’ had acquired its empire ‘in a fit of absence of mind’, a phrase some historians take to mean that before the 1880s Victorians paid little or no attention to India, the colonies, and imperial expansion. This is hardly accurate. Especially for those living in London, there were many sources of information about the empire. Newspapers were probably the main source, but by the 1830s lectures, sermons, panoramas, museums, and plays were all purveying information—​not always accurate—​about Africa, Asia, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. The Great Exhibition of 1851 devoted roughly half its space to products from Britain and its colonies. Later exhibitions focused entirely on the empire and the colonies. Advertising often utilized imperial motifs. And many names of places in the empire became famous, even legendary: Botany Bay; Afghanistan, the Punjab, and Bengal; Singapore and Sarawak; Khartoum and Omdurman. During the Indian ‘Mutiny’ or Rebellion of 1857–​8, ‘the well at Cawnpore’ acquired an infamy at least as great as that of ‘the Black Hole of Calcutta’.23 And after the relief of the town of Mafeking during the Second Anglo-​Boer War, the wild celebrations in British cities inspired the new term ‘mafficking’. The ‘scramble’ for African territories among the European powers began in the 1880s. But from mid-​century forward, European explorers, aided by quinine, mapped and described what the Victorians called ‘the Dark Continent’. The explorers were also aided by Africans, who were not so bloodthirsty and diabolical as they were often portrayed. The main danger to Europeans in central Africa continued to be disease. Throughout their journeys, explorers hired porters and guides and relied on the hospitality of the societies they encountered. David Livingstone met little resistance from the Africans he encountered; most were helpful and hospitable. ‘As a rule the “discovery” of sites like Lake Tanganyika’, writes Mary Louise Pratt, ‘involved making one’s way to the region and asking the local inhabitants if they knew of any big lakes, etc., in the area, then hiring them to take you there, whereupon with their guidance and support, you proceeded to discover what they already knew.’24 Victorian writing about Africa usually treats geographical exploration and colonization as the ever-​advancing march of civilization and Christianity. Starting with publication of his Missionary Travels (1857), Livingstone quickly became a popular hero—​both the legendary explorer of ‘the Dark Continent’ and the missionary martyr. Other white 23  At Cawnpore (Kanpur), Nana Sahib’s men slaughtered English women and children and threw their corpses into a well. This seemed to prove to the British public that all Indians were treacherous and cruel. Similarly, in 1756, after Indian soldiers had captured Fort William in Calcutta, they locked 146 Englishmen into a small cell, where most of them died of heat stroke and suffocation. 24  Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 202.

246    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture explorers may not have been viewed as saints, but they were all celebrated as heroes. Beyond supposedly bringing the light of civilization to ‘the Dark Continent’, they claimed to be trying to put a halt to slavery within Africa, which gave their expeditions at least a patina of humanitarianism. Besides publication of their journals, sponsorship by the Royal Geographical Society, founded in 1830 to advance imperial knowledge and expansion, contributed to their fame and glory. Exploration provided a major pattern for the adventure fiction, usually aimed at young male readers, that offered innumerable depictions of untamed savages and the bravery and perseverance of the British. From the 1830s on, such fiction featured brave English lads sailing the high seas, exploring jungles, confronting cannibals, and opening new frontiers for the empire. Captain Frederick Marryat’s midshipmen yarns and the many melodramas about heroic Jack Tars were prototypes for adventure novels by Robert Ballantyne, W. H. G. Kingston, G. A. Henty, and many others. From 1855 on, journals such as Boys of England and Boys of the Empire proliferated, foregrounding feats of juvenile derring-​do by Jack Harkaway and Tom Wildrake among others. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) were among the most popular adventure novels aimed at a young male readership, and they are still read today. Haggard also wrote She (1887), Allan Quatermain (1887), and many other adventure tales set in a mythical southern Africa. Although he lived for a time in Natal and the Transvaal, Haggard was not an explorer, but his white heroes typically discover lost civilizations, founded by Phoenicians or other white or light-​skinned people, overrun by black savages. Perhaps the most interesting boy hero in Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction is Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, who in the 1901 novel named for him is an Irish street urchin in India. Kim’s infectious love of adventure and apparent Indian identity make him an ideal espionage agent for the British secret service. Kim’s racial inferiority (from Kipling’s perspective) is an advantage as he travels the Grand Trunk Road with a Tibetan lama. Kim serves as the lama’s chela or disciple, taking his Buddhism seriously. But he also takes spying seriously. The threat to the Raj comes from Russian and French agents; most of the Indians Kim encounters are loyal, obedient subjects of British rule. There is no hint in Kipling’s tale that Indian independence was on the horizon. Though explorers’ journals and boys’ adventure fiction are what is ordinarily identified as the literature of empire, there aren’t many works of Victorian literature focused mainly on places and events in Britain that don’t also offer at least a glimpse of overseas possibilities. ‘The Earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in’, writes Dickens in the 1848 novel named for the firm; ‘Rivers and seas were made to float their ships’.25 Like Kipling, Thackeray was born in India, and in several of his fictions including The Newcomes he writes about British characters who have served the Raj. In Vanity Fair (1848), for example, Jos Sedley is a tax collector in the Indian province of Boggley-​ Wallah, and William Dobbins’s regiment is part of the East India Company’s forces.

25 

Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (1848; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 2.

Empire, Place, and the Victorians    247 Even a simple domestic tale like Gaskell’s Cranford, concerning a group of spinsters who have rarely ventured beyond their village, shares a world-​spanning, imperial perspective with Vanity Fair and Dombey and Son. Captain Brown has served in India, and so have Majors Gordon and Jenkyns. Samuel Brown, who shows up in Cranford as the Italian ‘conjuror’ Signor Brunoni, has also served in the East. And Miss Mattie’s long-​ lost brother Peter returns from India to thrill the old ladies with tall tales, including one about accidentally shooting an angel in the Himalayas. Through much of the 1900s, scholars underestimated the centrality of the empire and the colonies in all Victorian culture. If a novel or play wasn’t about the exploration of central Africa or life in British India, then it wasn’t imperialist. Many Victorians, however, believed their empire was one on which ‘the sun never set’ and never would set. Yet, especially late in the period, they worried about its possible decline and fall—​even about its decline and fall through its success. What would it mean, for example, if exploration and adventure came to a halt, because all the ‘dark places’ of the earth had been mapped and tamed or civilized? Would the ‘romance’ of discovery, conquest, and colonization become a thing of the past, never to be experienced again? In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), Marlow says that central Africa is no longer the ‘blank space’ on the maps he had daydreamed over as a boy: ‘It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names.’ This, Conrad believed, was hardly a cause for rejoicing. For one thing, it spelled the end of genuine adventure. For another, European incursions into Africa were not producing the light of civilization; on the contrary, ‘it had become a place of darkness’. Marlow is not referring to the dark skins or benighted mental condition of Africans, but to the lies, violence, and exploitation they were being subjected to in Belgian King Leopold’s private colony, the so-​called ‘Free State’ of the Congo. When he travelled there in 1890, Conrad witnessed some of the genocidal forced labour regime imposed by Leopold’s troops. And as Marlow says at the start of his narrative, London itself had once been a ‘place of darkness’, suggesting that it still might be ‘dark’ ten years later and perhaps long after that.

Slums and Suburbs Throughout the Victorian period, explorations into regions of darkness were also going on within Britain itself. From the 1820s on, the slums of London and other major cities were subjected to the scrutiny of middle-​class writers like Dickens, Gaskell, and G. W. M. Reynolds, author of the highly popular 1840s series, The Mysteries of London. Slums were evidence that, even if the empire was progressing through exploration, colonization, and its supposed ‘civilizing mission’, much work remained to do at home. Was it even possible to civilize the poor, the unemployed, the slum dwellers of London or Manchester? Often, too, in writing about British cities, characters at the bottom of the social hierarchy are depicted as a separate ‘race’, rooted in poverty because biologically inferior. In London Labour and the London Poor (1861–​2), Henry Mayhew identified the

248    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture street people he interviewed as an uncivilized ‘wandering tribe’.26 Civilized people had permanent occupations and homes (they were, in other words, middle or upper class). Even though many of them also had homes (however humble), the street people seemed to be nomadic. Many were Irish; some of them were Indians, Malays, and Africans. In The Heart of the Empire (1901), Charles Masterman writes that life in the great cities of Britain has produced ‘a new race […] the “City type”’. Instead of the healthy life in ‘the spacious places’ of an England close to ‘the processes of Nature’, urban life has produced a ‘race’ of ‘stunted, narrow-​chested, easily wearied’ individuals ‘seeking stimulus in drink, in betting, in any […] conflicts at home or abroad’. ‘Thirty years of elementary school teaching’, Masterman continues, have given the members of this ‘race’ ‘the power of reading, and a dim and cloudy capacity for comprehending what [they read]. Hence the vogue of the new sensational press’.27 Masterman is thinking not just of the urban poor; he has in mind an even larger phenomenon, the emergence of the modern masses—​T. S. Eliot’s ‘hollow men’, who dwell not just in the slums of the inner cities, but in the ever-​expanding suburbs, or rather in the vast ‘desert’ that stretches between the inner cities and the respectable suburbs. What are the characteristic features of these unknown regions? To the first gaze of the casual visitor descending from a different Universe some ten or twenty minutes away by rail, they present a spectacle sufficiently depressing. [The visitor finds himself] in the heart of the mysterious terra incognita. Interminable rows of mean streets diverge in every direction. […] The first impression obtained is of the utter ugliness of it all. (15–​16)

‘The heart of the Empire’, according to Masterman, is a place of ‘multitudinous Desolation’ (16). The other contributors to The Heart of the Empire echo these themes. According to them, the ‘New Imperialism’, too often degenerating into ‘jingoism’, deflected attention and money from reforming urban conditions and poverty at home. Meanwhile ‘old England’ and ‘Nature’ have slipped into the past as cities, slums, and suburbs expand. ‘The agricultural labourer is now fast disappearing’, writes historian George Trevelyan in the final essay, ‘Past and Future’. Forced off the land into the cities, ‘He has suffered city change into something poor and strange. […] He apes what he does not understand,—​ what indeed no one can understand, for it has no meaning,—​the variegated, flaunting vulgarity of the modern town’ (Heart of the Empire, 405). Almost everything English, Trevelyan adds, has been cockneyfied or vulgarized.

26  That the behaviours of the poor in Britain’s urban centres resembled ‘savagery’ was widely claimed by many writers besides Mayhew. And exploring where and how they lived was frequently likened to exploring ‘the Dark Continent’, as in William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890). 27  C. F. G. Masterman (ed.), The Heart of the Empire: Discussions of Problems of Modern City Life in England (1901; London: Harvester Press, 1973), 7–​8. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text.

Empire, Place, and the Victorians    249 The racialisation of the poor and the slums in Victorian cities in the 1850s and 1860s was, hence, a prelude to future developments. From about that time, these include the burgeoning and sprawl of suburbs, abetted by the railways. As Todd Kuchta indicates in Semi-​Detached Empire, ‘the rapid rise of suburbia and the slow but steady decline of empire [were] intimately linked and mutually articulated historical trajectories’. If the slums of the inner cities were disturbing to middle-​and upper-​class sensibilities, so were the suburbs. Observers began to recognize that ‘an increasingly suburban nation’ was degenerating ‘into an uncanny afterimage of its own colonial territories’. In his important extension of Williams’s The Country and the City, Kuchta writes: ‘Suburbia is both the epitome and the antithesis of the nation’s home—​on the one hand quintessentially English, on the other hand bristling anxiously over its perceived inferiority.’28 From the end of the 1800s to the Second World War, the suburbs of London, Manchester, and Britain’s other major cities were often equated with petit-​bourgeois mediocrity and the decline and fall from imperial greatness. After the Second World War and the slow, painful end of the empire, sizeable numbers of immigrants from the colonies—​India, Pakistan, Jamaica, Nigeria—​began coming to Britain and many of these occupied city neighbourhoods which white residents were abandoning for the suburbs. The phenomenon of ‘the empire strikes back’ has caused a racist and nationalist backlash, also fuelled by the consciousness of Britain’s loss of imperial greatness. These processes are explored in much postcolonial British literature—​in Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, for example, or Haneif Kureshi’s The Buddha of Suburbia. In his brief remarks about postcolonial literature by authors from Africa and Asia, Williams writes:  ‘What has been officially presented, to English readers, as savagery followed by terrorism, is seen in its real terms:  so many different rural societies—​ unidealised, containing their own tensions—​invaded and transformed by an uncomprehending and often brutal system’.29 And what used to be touted as Britain’s imperial greatness is now commonly seen in the terms that Masterman and his fellow authors set forth: at ‘the heart of the Empire’—​or what was once the empire—​the poverty, squalor, and meanness of today’s slums and suburbs.

Select Bibliography Baucom, Ian, Out of Place:  Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). Freeman, Michael, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1999). Headrick, Daniel, Power over Peoples:  Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

28  Todd Kuchta, Semi-​Detached Empire: Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1800 to the Present (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 5. 29 Williams, The Country and the City, 286.

250    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Kuchta, Todd, Semi-​Detached Empire: Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1800 to the Present (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010). Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes:  Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). Richards, Eric, Britannia’s Children:  Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland since 1600 (London: Hambledon and London, 2004). Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993). Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). Young, Robert, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995).

Chapter 13

Organic Im pe ria l i sm Fictions of Progressive Social Order at the Colonial Periphery John Kucich

Over the past two decades, empire studies has largely overcome tendencies to view metropole and periphery as oppositional, which had encouraged earlier critics either to indict imperial domination or to celebrate resistant subjects ‘writing back’ to or ‘mimicking’ the empire.1 Instead, much recent criticism views colonial spaces as what Philip Morgan calls ‘an entire interactive system, one vast interconnected world’.2 Such criticism has enabled us to see how colonial encounters produced hybrid conceptions of race and gender, through which cultures mutually constituted one another.3 These valuable new perspectives have inspired less attention, however, to issues of social order and class. Although a few scholars have examined how colonial encounters transformed social models, the allure of sexual and racial hybridity as critical topics has eclipsed efforts to understand how competing ideas about social order interrogated, revised, and bled into one another at sites of cross-​cultural exchange.4 Indeed, many critics continue to perpetuate static conceptions of social dualism: some sustain Edward Said’s thesis that

1 

Bill Ashcroft et al. (eds), The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-​Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989); Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, in Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 85–​92. 2  Philip D. Morgan, ‘Encounters between British and “Indigenous” Peoples, c. 1500–​c. 1800’, in Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern (eds), Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–​ 1850 (London: UCL Press, 1999), 68. 3  See, e.g., Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) or Angela Woollacott, Gender and Empire (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 4  An exemplary exception is Srinivas Aramavudan, Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-​De-​Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), also explores how colonial interaction transformed social networks.

252    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture colonizers constructed their societies in opposition to the ‘others’ they exoticized; some, less inclined to view colonialism hegemonically, perform what David Cannadine has called the ‘construction of affinities’, in which metropolitans and natives are assumed to have made sense of one another by accentuating whatever social structures they already had in common.5 Either approach misses an opportunity to explore how cultural intersections transformed conceptions of social order. What has completely escaped revision is the notion that the British imagined empire along the lines of an organic social model that remained traditionally conservative despite cross-​cultural contacts. To be sure, since the medieval period, English society often conceived itself as a hierarchical order in which differentiated members of the social body were united by serving the common good. Often affiliated with Anglican theology and Tory politics, organicism made inequality seem beneficent through what Cannadine calls a ‘carefully graded ordering of rank and dignity’, which inscribed individual distinctions within a national ethos of cohesiveness.6 Although ‘organic’ metaphors have been used in many senses by social theorists, this specific conception of a social body in which stratification and collaboration reinforce one another was often promoted by paternalist and authoritarian ideologies. It was, indeed, this traditional organic model that Edmund Burke famously placed at the foundations of empire. Attacking ‘arbitrary power’ at the opening of Warren Hastings’s impeachment, Burke argued that ‘We are all born in subjection, all born equally, high and low, governors and governed, in subjection to one great, immutable, pre-​existent law […] by which we are knit and connected in the eternal frame of the universe’.7 Although he resisted theoretical abstractions, whenever Burke spoke of imperial order he invoked organic metaphors, placing empire within a cosmic chain of being. Affirming ‘the absolute necessity of keeping up the concord of this empire by a Unity of Spirit, though in a diversity of operations’, Burke applied the organic model to imperial politics generally, viewing the empire as an aggregate of states subordinated to one central authority.8 He also applied it to the ordered ranks within specific colonies, arguing that the continuity of class structures sanctified social order. This vision militated against widespread mobility: ‘the road to eminence and power, from obscure condition, ought not to be made too easy’, he claimed, because without generational succession ‘the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken’.9

5  See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). Among the useful critiques of Said’s binarism, see Dennis Porter, ‘Orientalism and its Problems’, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-​Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 150–​61. David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. xix. 6  David Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 19. 7  Edmund Burke, ‘Speech on Opening of Impeachment’, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford, 9 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), vi. 264–​460, at 350. 8  Edmund Burke, ‘Speech on Conciliation with America’, in Writings, iii. 102–​69, at 136. 9  Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in Writings, viii. 53–​293, at 101, 145.

Organic Imperialism   253 Many have argued that, in Burke’s wake, nineteenth-​century imperialists saw the formal hierarchies of empire as all the more attractive because they perpetuated overseas a conservative order that was under threat at home. As Francis Hutchins observed, colonial life ‘seemed to offer the prospect of aristocratic security at a time when England itself was falling prey to democratic vulgarity’.10 In fact, besides fortifying themselves against individualist, democratizing, and inclusive social pressures, colonial authorities often propped up the organic model by forcing native societies to conform with it. Nicholas Dirks claims, for example, that historically fluid, nuanced conceptions of ‘caste’ were rigidified in nineteenth-​century India to naturalize British control over what was portrayed as a permanently stratified, pre-​modern society—​in part, by strenuous British associations of caste with religious rather than secular authority, which made it seem timeless.11 Construing organic hierarchy as an exclusively conservative means of imperial ordering, however, overlooks the profound transformations organicism underwent during the nineteenth century, as it responded to both domestic and global pressures. Organicism acquired elasticity as new forms of social mobility and egalitarianism pervaded domestic life, for example. As I  have argued elsewhere, mainstream novelists such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot transformed the organic ideal from a paternalistic ethos into an ameliorative formula for moderating the worst aspects of social inequality.12 Though these writers never questioned the legitimacy of class stratification, they softened the friction between ranks by emphasizing compassionate collectivity, social fluidity, and individual opportunity rather than hierarchical authority.13 Sally Shuttleworth has demonstrated, moreover, that the biological sciences infused nineteenth-​century conceptions of organic processes with elements of evolution, change, and growth, which, in turn, endowed organic social metaphors with new dynamism.14 As Bruce Robbins has argued, social mobility was also reimagined by nineteenth-​century writers as intrinsic to the common good. From Robbins’s perspective, that transformation made organic thought, in its most progressive forms, a precursor of welfare state principles, which moderate inequality without abolishing it.15 These liberalized conceptions of organicism were sometimes adopted by colonized subjects and played back at the British in a slightly different key. Pheng Cheah, in seeking to recover ‘a more progressive genealogy’ for organicism, notes that postcolonial nationalist movements borrowed from the British the notion that if ‘individualistic interests are

10  Francis G. Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 199. 11  Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), esp. 3–​60. 12  John Kucich, ‘Modernization and the Organic Society’, in Kucich and Jenny Bourne Taylor (eds), The Oxford History of the Novel in English, iii. 1820–​1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 343–​60. 13  Kucich, ‘Modernization and the Organic Society’, 343–​60. 14  Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-​Century Science: The Make-​Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 15  Bruce Robbins, Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

254    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture sacrificed so that the ideal of community can be incarnated and given objective existence’, that ethos would ‘[bind] together the nation qua organic whole’.16 My central argument is that nineteenth-​ century British conceptions of empire employed an increasingly progressive organicism, which was further developed through confrontations with indigenous societies. By ‘progressive’, I refer to both individualist and inclusive social energies, which came to be deeply incorporated within organic thought. I will first trace the tensions between conservative and progressive versions of organicism in imperial writing. I will then discuss the progressive organicism that sea adventure fiction mythologized as a national ideal. Although my focus throughout is British writing, I will conclude by exploring the transformations these organic models underwent when they intersected non-​Western societies, as represented in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1899) and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901). Novels have a unique ability to demonstrate how models of social order were transformed through colonial encounters, because they particularize individual relationships to social structures, dramatizing conflicts between individual desire and social role. For that reason, they constitute an important record of the impact colonial intersections had on the evolution of social thought.

Organic Mutability Although Burke has been enshrined as the originator of an organic imperial ideology promising unity within diversity, his pragmatism compelled him to emphasize hierarchical order in some colonial contexts, but liberal plurality in others. He thought India should be subjected to a strict order of subordination, for example, because it could not be assimilated to British culture. ‘[T]‌hese people are the most unalliable to any other part of the creation’, he wrote; ‘a great gulf is fixed between you and them [… a] gulf [… of] manners, opinions and laws’.17 Ironically, given his championing of class stability in Britain, Burke saw this gulf as the product of an overly rigid caste system that bound Indians to factional interests, making paternalistic British rule necessary to unify the country.18 But whereas Burke located India within the ‘empire of preservation and improvement’, he viewed pre-​revolutionary America as part of the ‘empire of liberty’.19 Empire might be ‘the aggregate of many States, under one common head’, but in America ‘the subordinate parts have many local privileges and immunities’.20 ‘The very idea of subordination of parts’, he argued in the case of America, ‘excludes [the] notion 16 

Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 19. 17  Burke, ‘Speech on Opening’, 302. 18 Dirks, Castes, 10. 19  David P. Fidler and Jennifer M. Welsh, ‘Introduction’, in Fidler and Welsh (eds), Empire and Community: Edmund Burke’s Writings and Speeches on International Relations (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999), 22. 20  Burke, ‘Speech on Conciliation’, 132.

Organic Imperialism   255 of simple and undivided unity. England is the head; but she is not the head and members too.’21 Perhaps the most striking political manifestation of the flexibility of Burke’s organicism was his endorsement of free trade for Ireland and America, as contrasted with his orthodox Tory support for commercial monopoly in India. From its very beginnings, then, organic imperialism had both conservative and progressive potentials, depending on which half of the unity/​diversity dyad rose to ascendancy. Some writers, of course, employed predominantly conservative versions of imperial organicism. Lauding the hierarchical structure of Australian society, for example, in contrast to American egalitarianism, Anthony Trollope proclaimed: In the Australian colonies the British mode of thinking prevails as to education, politics, and social position; whereas, in the United States, the ideas of the people at large are not our ideas. In the States all the institutions of the country tend to the creation of a level, to that which men call equality,—​which cannot be attained, because men’s natural gifts are dissimilar […] the colonies are rather a repetition of England than an imitation of America.22

Trollope enthused about the emergence of an Australian landowning class: ‘They now form an established aristocracy, with very conservative feelings, and are quickly becoming as firm a country party as that which is formed by our squirearchy at home’ (ii. 466). He was particularly pleased by what he considered the paternalism of this class, which ensured that workers were ‘sufficiently fed’ (i. 167) and that ‘in most of the occupations specified shelter is afforded’ (i. 170). Writing about Tasmania, he declared: ‘I must say of this colony, as I have and shall say of all the others, that it is a Paradise for a working man’ (ii. 42). Whenever Trollope noted democratic tendencies in settler colonies, he deplored them. He despised the entrepreneurialism of the Australian gold fields, for example, because they undermined rank: ‘There are what we call “gentlemen”, and what we call “workmen”. But they dress very much alike, work very much alike, and live very much alike. And, after a while, they look very much alike’ (i. 85). He regarded such levelling as a great loss: Gentility itself,—​the combination of soft words, soft manners, and soft hands with manly bearing, and high courage, and intellectual pursuits,—​is a possession in itself so valuable, and if once laid aside so difficult to be regained, that it should never be dropped without a struggle. I should be sorry to see a man I loved working in a gold-​ mine. (i. 86)

Trollope’s cautionary novel John Caldigate (1879) follows a dispossessed English gentleman who makes a fortune in the gold fields only to have the tawdry details of his 21 

Burke, ‘Speech on Conciliation’, 158. Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, 2 vols. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1873), ii. 253. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text. 22 

256    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture life there haunt his return home. Threatened with blackmail by his low former associates, including a woman who claims to be his common law wife, Caldigate’s gentility is restored chiefly through the love of the upper-​class English domestic angel he marries, who defends him against the stains of his fortune-​hunting past. Like many of Trollope’s novels, this Australian tale teaches the lesson—​as the narrator of Framley Parsonage (1860) puts it—​that a gentleman is unable ‘to touch pitch and not to be defiled’.23 In his South African writings, the authoritarian dimensions of Trollope’s reverence for class distinction emerged prominently because he could not imagine an organic society that included non-​whites. In his view, Africans were incapable of respecting rank, and must be coerced into submission: ‘Prestige in a highly civilized community may be created by virtue […] but, with the native races of South Africa, prestige has to be created by power.’24 He opposed all attempts to assimilate Africans, encouraging that they be suppressed—​‘if not otherwise, then by force’ (ii. 159)—​and that the benefits of civilization not be extended to them ‘without something of tyranny’ (i. 331). Trollope also regarded the Boers as a savage race (citing as one reason their supposed enslavement of Africans), and he argued that they, too, could never become full-​fledged citizens. Defending the annexation of the Transvaal in 1877, he proclaimed of the supposedly shiftless Boer settler: ‘Now he knows that he will have a leader’ (ii. 62). Trollope recommended a confederation of semi-​autonomous states in both Canada and Australia, replicating the Burkean vision of imperial politics. But he declared such a confederation undesirable in South Africa because its heterogeneous population lacked any ‘identity of interest’ (i. 343). Other observers of South Africa, however, promoted a progressive inclusiveness precisely by invoking the organic model. James Froude advocated the enfranchisement of the Boers on the grounds that they already constituted an organic society, along traditional English lines. Speaking of the Boers as having ‘planted themselves’ in the Transvaal, where their culture ‘took root’, Froude celebrated their internal organic order.25 On their treatment of Africans, he invoked images of feudal harmony between masters and servants: ‘Their slaves were household servants, much like what serfs used to be in England. They lived under their master’s roof, or in houses on his estate, and were part of the family’ (11). Defending the Boers’ work ethic and communal ethos against the spectre of individualist anarchy depicted by Trollope and others, he claimed: ‘The people are tied to their respective districts, and are made to maintain themselves and their families. It was the law in England once; it was the law all over Europe down to these latter days of liberty and enlightenment’ (12). Froude argued that Africans as well as Boers should be granted self-​governing states, and urged that they 23 

Anthony Trollope, Framley Parsonage (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 494. Anthony Trollope, South Africa, 2 vols. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1878), i. 329. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text. 25  James Anthony Froude, Two Lectures on South Africa (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1880), 7. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text. 24 

Organic Imperialism   257 be united with the white populations of the Cape Colony and Natal in a larger confederation. This prescription, however democratic, retained an affinity with Burkean organicism by insisting that such a confederation would only survive if subjected to centralized British oversight.26 In the hands even of conservative defenders of empire, organicism could be invoked to argue for granting certain colonies independence. The historian John Seeley, who famously remarked that Britain had innocently acquired its empire in ‘a fit of absence of mind’, drew a sharp contrast between settler colonies, created through what he described as a natural expansion of population and bound by communal ties, and colonies won through conquest.27 Seeley thought that the era of imperial conquest had been ‘wanting organic unity and life’, but that in the nineteenth century most colonies had been integrated as subordinate members of a beneficent political whole, in a manner ‘analogous to the family bond’ (74). India, however, appeared to be an ‘unnatural’ colony because it possessed ‘no notion of a public good, of a commonweal’, thus retaining no ‘moral unity’ (319). Like Burke and many others, Seeley believed the system of caste guaranteed that ‘each class or interest inquires how it separately is affected by our ascendancy’, such factionalism destroying ‘corporate life’ (321). Unlike Burke, however, Seeley also perceived that British rule had damaged Indian royal and intellectual classes, preventing them from taking their place in an orderly chain of command. Arguing that British rule in India ‘does not seem at first sight to be of the nature of organic growth’ (296), Seeley recommended withdrawal. Such was the power of the organic model that even staunch anti-​imperialists invoked it in defence of colonial liberation. The socialist J. A. Hobson, a fierce critic of empire, argued that international relations should consist of a ‘peaceful, profitable intercommunication of goods and ideas among nations recognizing a just harmony of interests’.28 Claiming that imperialism disrupted that harmony by unleashing unrestrained international competition, Hobson also indicted it for benefiting the wealthiest interests at the expense of the social body as a whole. He echoed James Mill in referring to colonialism as ‘a vast system of outdoor relief for the upper classes’ (51). Nevertheless, Hobson imagined a legitimate form of imperialism based on organic principles. Arguing that the ‘interference’ of imperial nations with ‘lesser races’ could be justified if it were ‘directed primarily to secure the safety and profit of the civilization of the world, and not the special interest of the interfering nation’ (252), he claimed that such interference would contribute to ‘the welfare of humanity as an organic unit’ (233). Globalizing Burkean organicism, Hobson argued that a governing international body should oversee the whole ‘imperial federation’ (328) to maintain national disinterest. The organic ideal fuelled Hobson’s critique of contemporary imperialism: ‘the actual situation is, indeed, 26 Froude, Two Lectures, 80–​2.

27  J. A. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (Boston: Little, Brown, 1905), 10. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text. 28  J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (1902; London: Allen & Unwin, 1954), 12. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text.

258    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture replete with absurdity’ (237). But the fact that a socialist like Hobson imagined international utopia in organic terms indicates what surprisingly progressive forms nineteenth-​ century organicism could assume. Although they inevitably carried nostalgic overtones of a pastoral, golden age, organic models took on an array of political potentials, many of them substantially liberalized, in the imperial context. As I shall argue in the next section, this plasticity had a great deal to do with increasing tensions at the intersection of domestic and colonial worlds between hierarchically organized social unity and both individual liberty and inclusiveness. Popular novelists who projected these tensions on a global stage reconciled them at the level of national myth.

Reconciling Hierarchy with Individualism: Sea Adventure Fiction Because sea adventure fiction typically focused on an insulated community of white British crews that were nevertheless engaged on imperial business, its reflections on social structure inevitably mediated between domestic and colonial pressures. It offered a perfect laboratory to imagine how an authentically British social order might adapt to global challenges. Although some critics have strained to find the seeds of anti-​ imperialist critique in British sea fiction, most agree that the genre was deeply jingoistic.29 Its consistently imperialist ideology makes it all the more remarkable that the social order these novels consistently endorsed was a progressive version of organicism. No author typifies nineteenth-​century British sea fiction better than Frederick Marryat, whose popular Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836) is a virtual treatise on progressive organicism. Certainly, the novel leans in conservative political directions by celebrating the navy’s global dominance and demystifying radical egalitarianism. Its early chapters show Jack Easy’s childhood to have been poisoned by his father, who preaches universal equality, advocates working-​class revolution, encourages agricultural incendiarism, allows poachers on his land, does not collect rents—​and, eventually, goes insane. Jack, initially called ‘Equality Jack’ when he espouses his father’s views aboard ship, becomes convinced that the observance of ‘duties and rank’ is what makes the British navy powerful.30 Captain Wilson, his surrogate father, explains that a ship’s chain of command is

29  Nicholas Rankin, Dead Man’s Chest: Travels after Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Faber & Faber, 1987), 159, takes the former view; classic examples of the more common opinion are Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979); and Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (London: Unwin Hyman, 1991). 30  Frederick Marryat, Mr. Midshipman Easy (London: J. M. Dent, 1906), 85, 54. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text.

Organic Imperialism   259 a great chain of being, in which ‘everyone is equally obliged to obey’ (54). The narrator confirms that only because Jack ‘learned to obey’ was he later ‘fit to command’ (351). After his discharge, Jack restores order on his father’s estate and enters Parliament as a Conservative. Denouncing opposition to class inequality, he declares: ‘I consider that it is to this inequality that society owes its firmest cementation […] each doing his duty in that state of life to which he is called, rising above or sinking in the scale of society according as he has been entrusted with the five talents or the one’ (365–​6)—​an allusion to the Book of Matthew’s parable in which servants, entrusted with varying amounts of money in accordance with their abilities, confirm the policy’s wisdom through the differences in what they achieve with it. But the novel’s organicism is liberalized in two complementary ways. First, as the parable implies, the navy is a meritocracy in which everyone finds ‘the level which his natural talent and acquirements will rise or sink him to’ (96). But the navy is more than simply ‘a meritocratic community that yet preserves hierarchy’, as Margaret Cohen calls it; the navy actually encourages ambitious rule-​breakers if their individualism benefits the whole.31 When Jack disobeys orders to retreat and captures a Spanish warship as a result, he is offered additional freedoms—​the Governor of Malta tells him: ‘You must have more adventures, and come back and tell them to me’ (218). Secondly, the novel attacks despotic authority, affirming an ethos of equal opportunity. Jack, a champion of the weak, deposes the bullying mate, Vigors, to his shipmates’ delight; and Captain Tartar’s ‘abuse of power’ (213) results in his death in a duel, freeing Jack from his persecutions. The navy also tolerates racial inclusivity: the Ashanti prince, Mephistopheles Faust (or ‘Mesty’)—​once pressed into slavery, then freed but treated nearly as a slave aboard British ships—​is allowed to ascend through the ranks on his own merits to become Jack’s right-​hand man. Marryat himself ran for Parliament as a Liberal. His fiction consistently invoked tensions between individual ambition—​what his first novel, Frank Mildmay (1829), called ‘a high spirit in a good cause’—​and hierarchical order.32 But he portrayed the navy as an organic community in which social order is enriched by individualist excess, and by the energies of socially peripheral, newly incorporated figures. Frank’s admiral refers to his defiance of orders as ‘enterprise’ (144), rather than condemning it, and he looks with great favour on any disobedient act that turns up trumps—​a pattern repeated regularly in novels such as Peter Simple (1834), Poor Jack (1840), and Masterman Ready (1841). R. M. Ballantyne extended this formula in The Coral Island (1857) by naturalizing progressive organicism in the social instincts of a group of young boys, and by dramatizing how South Seas natives could be integrated into such an order. Cast away on a desert island, the three boys—​Jack Martin, Ralph Rover, and Peterkin Gay—​casually establish a hierarchical order based on their distinctive talents but infused with collaborative spirit. Jack is the natural leader, Ralph the meditative strategist, and Peterkin 31 

Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 166. Frederick Marryat, Frank Mildmay (London: J. M. Dent, 1905), 127. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text. 32 

260    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture the cheerful underling and best hunter. ‘[T]‌hings very opposite and dissimilar in themselves, when united, do make an agreeable whole’, Ralph muses. ‘[W]e three on this our island, although most unlike in many things, when united, made a trio so harmonious that I question if there ever met before such an agreeable triumvirate’.33 Ralph adds a dash of individualist enterprise to this order, however, when he is kidnapped by pirates. Relishing the freedom to act entirely on his own, Ralph steals the pirate ship and sails it back to the island single-​handedly to rescue his two mates, before turning his prize over to Jack’s command. While the first half of the novel describes perfect organic order on the island—​‘none of us wished to be delivered from our captivity’ (168)—​the second half focuses on the murderous tyranny of cannibal chiefs, which the boys come upon in sailing from island to island. They convert a tribe of cannibals to Christianity, and turn them into an orderly, harmonious society under the authority of a native Christian prince. They also incorporate some of the converts into an extended hierarchy aboard their own ship—​with Jack as captain, the other two boys as mates, and the natives as ordinary seamen. The novel’s simplistic social allegory thus patterns itself after a basic strategy of British colonialism, which sought to incorporate indigenous peoples within British organic hierarchies by ruling through rather than over them.34 The most popular work in the genre, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), demonstrates how lessons about progressive organicism learned overseas could strengthen domestic social hierarchies. Although Stevenson’s novel focuses on conflicts among white characters, it shows how marginalized social elements might illuminate the weaknesses of legitimate authority as well as help remedy them, tracing a trajectory of influence, from periphery back to metropole, that will become the focal point of my concluding discussion of Lord Jim and Kim. Christopher Harvie once described Treasure Island as a conservative parable of embattled social order, with its gentlemanly figures and their loyal crew fending off a mutinous rabble.35 More particularly, the novel indicates that domestic authorities brought this crisis upon themselves through their complacency. Too sure of their authority at home (Dr Livesay at one point turns a rampaging Captain Flint into a ‘beaten dog’ by calmly threatening to try him at the next assizes), the doctor and the overly generous Squire Trelawney fall prey to better organized piratical conspirators.36 Captain Smollett, whom the squire hires to pilot his treasure-​hunting ship, points out numerous breakdowns in the chain of command that jeopardize their mission:  the captain was not properly informed of the nature of the voyage; that information was leaked to strangers by the squire; the captain was not allowed to choose his own crew; 33 

R. M. Ballantyne, The Coral Island (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 124. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text. 34 Cannadine, Ornamentalism, 61. 35  Christopher Harvie, ‘The Politics of Stevenson’, in Jenni Calder (ed.), Stevenson and Victorian Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), 121. 36  Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 13. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text.

Organic Imperialism   261 and the chief mate is ‘too free’ (52) with the men. After the pirate-​infested crew mutinies, the captain demands ‘discipline’ (109) from the squire and doctor as the remaining loyal characters defend their island stockade, and the two gentlemen eagerly submit—​ the squire confessing his previous laxity and declaring: ‘I await your orders’ (69). This reconstituted social hierarchy fights a superior number of pirates to a stand-​off, thanks to its new-​found respect for rank and order. After rushing the stockade in an uncoordinated, self-​defeating attack, the pirates ‘vote’ (153) their leader out, demonstrating how quasi-​democratic groups quickly revert to anarchy when confronted by strong hierarchical authority. The novel also shows, however, that traditional British order needs an infusion of the individualist spirit and resourcefulness energizing the pirates. Stevenson’s boy-​hero, Jim Hawkins, is fascinated by the adventurous creativity of Long John Silver; as he watches Silver manipulate his underlings with one fabrication after another, Jim marvels at this ‘remarkable game’ (113). Silver himself mocks his own band in these terms: ‘You hasn’t got the invention of a cockroach’ (155). Jim emulates Silver by indulging his own capricious instincts and improvising successes out of fortuitous circumstances. Although it has been commonly claimed that the novel’s loyal characters survive by pure luck, Jim’s creative responsiveness to unanticipated circumstances proves his adventurism to be providential: ‘Every step’, Dr Livesay tells him, ‘it’s you that saves our lives’, adding that Jim’s seemingly capricious impulses have had ‘a kind of fate in them’ (161). Crucially, those impulses often involve disobedience: Jim goes ashore with the pirates against the captain’s orders, which leads serendipitously to his discovery of Ben Gunn, the castaway who later helps save the day; more strikingly, he deserts his post in the stockade on a whim, without planning the great coup that eventuates from this desertion: his single-​ handed theft of the pirates’ schooner. This plot device, borrowed from Ballantyne, reinforces an important theme of the earlier novel and of sea fiction generally:  that individuals in organic societies may in good conscience break out of the ranks and act on their own if their independence benefits the whole. As Jim tells himself: ‘Possibly I might be blamed a bit for my truancy, but the recapture of the Hispaniola was a clenching answer, and I hoped that even Captain Smollett would confess I had not lost my time’ (142). Smollett does not quite endorse Jim’s free-​spirited improvisations. ‘You’re a good boy in your line’, the captain tells him, ‘but I don’t think you and me’ll go to sea again’ (178). Smollett’s disapproval underlines the transgressive nature of Jim’s individualism. But the squire and doctor, having relearned the importance of a disciplined chain of command, also come to appreciate the vitality of spontaneous, unruly individualism, which turns Jim into what the captain calls their ‘born favourite’ (178). Moved by an inclusive spirit also foreign to the captain, the two gentlemen share the treasure equally with Ben, a former pirate, and Abraham Gray, a reformed mutineer—​which further underscores their incorporation of piratical energies within domestic society. Traditional order may prevail, but it is significantly liberalized, a pattern that nineteenth-​century sea fiction elevated to the status of heroic myth by erasing apparent tensions between hierarchical order, on the one hand, and heroic individualism, social mobility, and inclusiveness, on

262    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture the other. Rather than exploring conflicts between these principles, it made their fusion appear natural, unproblematic—​and always victorious.

Transforming Organic Order: Lord Jim and Kim While sea fiction veiled the tensions between conservative and progressive organic ideals by mythologizing their compatibility, more ‘serious’ fiction illuminated and transformed those tensions through cross-​cultural encounters. Although many have regarded Lord Jim as a critique of heroic individualism, for example, the novel uses cultural contrasts to dramatize a more fundamental crisis in Western conceptions of organic order, and the notions of individual honour and duty they uphold.37 When Marlow, the novel’s primary narrator, first describes Jim’s redemption of his lost honour in the Polynesian state of Patusan, the ‘privileged man’ who hears the tale objects to the idea of ‘acquired honour’, the ‘self-​appointed’ nature of Jim’s heroism, and the ‘love sprung from pity and youth’ that inspired it. He also claims that self-​sacrifice for the sake of non-​whites ‘was like selling your soul to a brute’. ‘In other words,’ Marlow writes to him two years later, ‘you maintained that we must fight in the ranks or our lives don’t count.’38 We never hear the final judgements of this unnamed figure, who stands in for the reader when he receives Marlow’s written conclusion to Jim’s story, but that conclusion challenges the belief that ‘we must fight in the ranks’ by opposing Patusan’s communal order to the progressive version of organicism characteristic of adventure fiction. Like the protagonists of sea fiction, Jim believes in the seamless compatibility of heroism and duty, a belief derived from his youthful reading of ‘light literature’ (5)—​even though, like those protagonists, his individualism is relatively radical: he wants to be ‘better than anybody’. Yet Conrad’s novel dissociates heroism from dutifulness, exposing the latter as an inadequate foundation for the former. On the one hand, the novel demystifies any purely existential conception of individual courage. As Jim says to Marlow, referring to his apparent cowardice when he deserted a merchant ship that appeared ready to sink: ‘What would you have done? What! You can’t tell—​nobody can tell’ (68). Marlow admits that only ‘accident, hazard, Fortune’ (234) determine whether one is considered brave. Addressing Jim’s fear that his desertion proved him not ‘good enough’, Marlow claims: ‘Nobody, nobody is good enough’ (233). He confronts the auditors of his story: ‘I—​who have the right to think myself good enough—​dare not. Neither does any of you here, I suppose?’ (237). The cataclysmic nature of this insight is demonstrated by 37 

Classic examples are Ian Watt, ‘The Ending of Lord Jim’, Conradiana, 11 (1979), 3–​21, at 52; and Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 206–​80. 38  Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 247–​8. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text.

Organic Imperialism   263 the suicide of Captain Brierly, who holds ‘silent inquiry into his own case’ (44) during Jim’s trial, comes to a verdict of ‘unmitigated guilt’, and, unable to live with such knowledge, drowns himself. On the other hand, though, the novel reveals the illusoriness of a progressive organicism that tries to bolster heroic individualism by inscribing it within a status-​conscious professionalism—​what Marlow refers to as ‘the fellowship of the craft’ (95). As a French naval officer tells Marlow: ‘Man is born a coward’, but being observed by fellow professionals and following their example elicits honourable action; as he explains, ‘one may get on very well knowing that one’s courage does not come of itself ’ (108). Personal courage is a mirage, but, as the officer puts it: ‘The honour … that is real—​that is!’ The novel consistently associates this grounding of heroic honour in professional duty with gentlemanliness, and the personal and social stability guaranteed by rank. ‘He came from the right places’, Marlow says in defence of Jim, ‘he was one of us’ (32), and, indeed, Jim’s gentlemanly family is said to rest secure in ‘the established order of the universe’ (249). Brierly argues that the standards of gentlemanly authority, in turn, depend upon its code of honour: ‘we must preserve professional decency or we become no better than a crowd of tinkers going about loose’ (50). But professionalism evidently offers Brierly no more consolation than his existential inquiry into his personal valour, which suggests that the novel views efforts to derive heroism from gentlemanliness and vice versa as an unsustainable, archaic endeavour. On Jim’s ship, the Patna, multinational capitalism erodes the organic basis for gentlemanly professionalism. The Patna is ‘owned by a Chinaman, chartered by an Arab, and commanded by a sort of renegade New South Wales German’ (10); as a result, its mercenary chain of command observes no ideals of heroism or duty. As Jim puts it, ‘I wasn’t given half a chance—​with a gang like that’ (91). It would be difficult to imagine a more inorganic world than the Patna, in which the white crew is ‘isolated from the human cargo’ (12) and in which, in the moment of Jim’s crisis, ‘no order’ was given (72). As his narrative recounts anecdotes that confirm in various ways the debased nature of commercial seamanship, Marlow himself becomes plagued by ‘the doubt of the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct’ (37); eventually, he despairs of ‘the fellowship of these illusions’ (94), because, as he puts it, in no other line of work is ‘the illusion more wide of reality’ (95). Marlow broods increasingly, late in the novel, about ‘keeping my place in the ranks of an insignificant multitude [… .] How little that was to boast of!’ (244). ‘Fighting in the ranks’, it seems, cannot guarantee individual heroism if gentlemanly professionals have become an ‘insignificant multitude’, their code of conduct reduced to an anachronistic abstraction. Patusan, too, is an inorganic world, from the standpoint of orderly rank. Doramin, who exercises supreme authority, is ‘only of the nakhoda or merchant class’ (187); the local rajah is too corrupt and fearful to command; Sherif Ali, the barbarian warlord, is a parodic semblance of religious authority. Social disorder pervades the community. Regarding the household of Doramin’s wife, Jim comments: ‘her daughters, her servants, her slave girls […] impossible to tell the difference’ (187). But Patusan embodies a pre-​modern organic order indifferent to status. What compels Jim to embrace the

264    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture community is his ability to fuse heroic ambition with intensely personal love, rather than rank. The ring of ‘eternal friendship’ (170) that Jim’s patron, Stein, gives him as an introduction to Doramin becomes the harbinger of a living, human ring of friendship, which encompasses Doramin, Doramin’s son Dain Waris, and Jim’s lover, Jewel. Jim’s personal, affective ties to these figures bridge the gap between narcissistic ambition and communal service. He generalizes that conjunction through his feelings for the entire society: he ‘seemed to love the land and the people with a sort of fierce egoism’ (181), and, in turn, he is ‘received into the heart of the community’ (188). In moments of crisis aboard merchant ships, Jim’s notions of professional duty prove so abstract that they paralyse him. But in Patusan, motivated by impulsive feelings for others, he acts instinctively. Without premeditation, he leaps over the rajah’s palisade to throw himself on Doramin’s friendship, trusting that Stein’s friend will become his as well. To liberate the community from Sherif Ali, he concocts and launches a raid with lightening speed; ‘all at once I saw what I had to do’, he explains, and Marlow comments: ‘this power that came to him was the power to make peace’ (190). These heroic acts, issuing from the immediacy of friendship, love, and care for community, root Jim in a version of organic interdependence that Marlow regards ambivalently: ‘all these things that made him master had made him a captive, too’ (181). But its personal, affective immediacy makes this organic order a more effective platform for individual heroism than the ‘craft’ or stature of gentlemanly professionalism—​and, as James Chandler observes, it marks Lord Jim as more interested in sympathetic identification than any other Conrad novel.39 In Patusan, the words ‘duty’ and ‘honuor’ are not talismanic; they are, in fact, rarely spoken until the arrival of the man who brings Jim down: the ironically named Gentleman Brown. Manipulating what he calls Jim’s sense of ‘infernal duty’ (279), Brown preys on his residual faith in Western ‘fellowship’. Pleading to Jim that his pirate crew are ‘men like himself ’ (278), and speaking duplicitously of ‘common blood’, ‘common experience’, and ‘common guilt’ (283), Brown makes demands on Jim’s sense of honour, arguing that he should take mercy because he is ‘too white to serve even a rat so’ (278). Brown’s invocation of gentlemanly concepts of fair play paralyses Jim. His lingering reverence for duty and honour conflicting with his personal distrust of Brown, Jim shocks the community by declaring: ‘in this business I shall not lead’ (287). Taking advantage of this relapse into indecisiveness, Brown revenges himself on what he sees as the class affront standards of duty and honour represent. Betraying his gentlemanly bargain, Brown ambushes and kills Dain Waris, which compels Jim to martyr himself, ironically fulfilling the code of genteel professionalism, by presenting himself before Doramin to be shot in the name of ‘a shadowy ideal of conduct’ (304). Jim’s personal affections in Patusan—​articulated instructively through Marlow’s own growing affection for Jim—​expose the limitations of the abstract standards of conduct upon which progressive Western organicism depends. Of course, Patusan is hardly an

39 

James Chandler, ‘On the Face of the Case: Conrad, Lord Jim, and the Sentimental Novel’, Critical Inquiry, 33 (2007), 837–​64, at 859.

Organic Imperialism   265 accurate representation of Polynesian social order. Jim’s warrior-​like fearlessness and boundless love for his people are phantasmal recreations of feudal lordship, set against an impressionistic landscape of primitive social disorder. Conrad used this fictional configuration to critique a liberalized organicism grounded in archaic class ideals. But Patusan is an artificial instrument of that critique, not either a utopian or a realistic alternative. Kim, however, does offer a utopian vision of an amalgamated Western and Eastern organicism—​in part, by echoing Conrad’s critique of impersonal hierarchical order.40 Before noting that parallel, though, we should observe that Kipling represents Indian and British societies as mirror images of progressive organicism. On the one hand, much like sea fiction, Kipling’s novel represents radical individualism and British social order as perfectly reconcilable—​in this case, through the secret service. Kim discovers his identity within the service’s chain of command: repeatedly asking ‘Who is Kim?’, he discovers that he and the other agents are ‘all on one lead-​rope […] the Colonel, Mahbub Ali, and I’.41 Mixing organic images of chains, ropes, and woven fabrics to describe this order, Kim sees it as modelling unity in diversity for India as a whole: ‘it runs like a shuttle throughout all Hind […] and I am Kim—​Kim—​Kim […] in the middle of it all’ (224). Yet the service thrives on the improvisational resources of agents acting largely on their own. As Said observed of Colonel Creighton: ‘What survives of Clive and Hastings is their sense of freedom, their willingness to improvise, their preference for the informal over the formal.’42 Kim displays such freedom repeatedly, crossing caste lines at will, thus enacting what Zohreh Sullivan calls a ‘fantasy of omnipotence’.43 His colleague Hurree Babu also improvises elaborate self-​performances, notably by tormenting a pair of French and Russian spies while pretending to be their guide: ‘What a beast of wonder is a Babu!’ (281), Kim exults. Mahbub Ali, too, is adept at spontaneous self-​performance; he also defends Kim’s truancies: ‘it is a great wrong to break that colt to a heavy cart’ (113), he tells Creighton. On the other hand, although Indian society is portrayed as obsessed with racial and caste status, Indians, too, are remarkable for individual expression, unconventionality, and self-​transformation. The Kulu widow, for example, under pretence of making a holy pilgrimage, contrives to see the world despite customary restrictions on women. Of female types, she says: ‘Once I was that one, and now I am this’ (276). The lama, although observing caste narrowly and mapping the hierarchical orders of being in his chart of the Wheel of Life, freely wanders India on a personal quest for a holy river—​a quest paralleling Kim’s search for identity. As we have noted, too, Hurree, Mahbub, and other

40 

Debates about Kipling’s sociological accuracy are usefully summarized by Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 75–​91. 41  Rudyard Kipling, Kim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 117, 119. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text. 42  Edward Said, ‘Introduction’ to Kipling, Kim (London: Penguin, 1987), 33. 43  Zohreh T. Sullivan, Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 447.

266    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Indian agents display colourful capacities for adventurous improvisation, upon which the secret service depends. Indeed, British and Indian progressive organicisms merge perfectly in the service—​above all, through Kim himself. But in Kim, the two social orders also supplement one another. The British offer their capacity for exemplary technocratic and professional order. As Kim and the lama observe a British regiment pitch camp, they are awe-​struck by its efficiency: ‘behold the mango-​tope turned into an orderly town as they watched!’ (81) Carousing British soldiers might resemble ‘a festival in Lahore city’, but they differ in that ‘they fell in on the platform next morning in perfect shape and condition’ (98). British technocratic and professional order, it turns out, is vital to the unification of Indian society. Although Indians complain that the railway introduced by Britain compels them to sit ‘side by side with all castes and peoples’ (28), for example, Kim orchestrates this enforced comradeship into a moment of great conviviality in the novel’s famous train scene. Similarly, the Grand Trunk Road, improved and maintained by the British for military purposes, becomes ‘a river of life’ in which ‘all castes and kinds of men move’ (57). Most of all, British military order suppresses the seditious forces that Kipling portrays as threats to Indians and British alike. What India offers in turn, like Conrad’s Patusan, is the organic bond of personal affection. India is frequently called ‘a kindly land’ (35), its people a ‘gentle, tolerant folk’ (32). Even Indians’ habitual verbal invective only thinly veils a culture of affections: ‘In my country’, Kim chides an insulting servant, ‘we call that the beginning of love-​talk’ (66). Significantly, Creighton is unable either to express or feel love for Kim: he does not act ‘in any way for love of thee’ (132), says Mahbub. By contrast, the lama, Mahbub, Hurree, and Kim all confess their affections unreservedly, and the novel demonstrates how galvanizing mutual love can be for the secret service. ‘Thy fate and mine seem on one string!’ Mahbub exclaims to Kim, before confessing: ‘I love thee. So says my heart’ (143). If, as Said charged, Kipling never properly articulated the conflicts between India and the West, that was because he wanted to see the two cultures as complementary, which enabled him to imagine organic order as the product of their reciprocal inclusiveness.44 Beyond critiquing professional and technocratic impersonality, non-​Western organic cultures in Lord Jim and Kim implicitly challenge late nineteenth-​century functionalist versions of organicism that were emerging in modern sociology, as formulated by Herbert Spencer and Émile Durkheim. Conceiving stratification in terms of occupational niches through which individuals might freely pass, early sociology described industrialism as a liberalized organic order in which interdependent labour functions knit society together while permitting individual mobility. Theorizing stratification in occupational rather than class terms, late nineteenth-​ century sociology rendered organic order, if anything, even more impersonal than did social hierarchies—​like gentlemanly professionalism—​that depended on the

44 

Said, ‘Introduction’, 23.

Organic Imperialism   267 relatively fixed class position of beneficent individuals. Late-​century progressive organicism took increasingly impersonal forms, in part, to escape its traditional, authoritarian past. But colonial fiction used cross-​cultural encounters to demonstrate that if a liberalized organicism was to endure in the West, this was hardly a sufficient strategy.

Select Bibliography Aramavudan, Srinivas, Guru English:  South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Bristow, Joseph, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (London: Unwin Hyman, 1991). Cannadine, David, Ornamentalism:  How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2001). Cannadine, David, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1999). Chandler, James, ‘On the Face of the Case:  Conrad, Lord Jim, and the Sentimental Novel’, Critical Inquiry, 33 (2007), 837–​64. Cheah, Pheng, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Cohen, Margaret, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Dirks, Nicholas B., Castes of Mind:  Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Gandhi, Leela, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-​De-​Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Green, Martin, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979). Kucich, John, ‘Modernization and the Organic Society’, in Kucich and Jenny Bourne Taylor (eds), The Oxford History of the Novel in English, iii. 1820–​1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 343–​60. Robbins, Bruce, Upward Mobility and the Common Good:  Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Roy, Parama, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978).

Chapter 14

T he Strange C a re e r of Fai r Pl ay, or, Wa rfa re and Gamesma nsh i p i n t he Tim e of V i c toria Lara Kriegel

In November 1914, just as the first hard winter of the First World War was setting in, The Bookman paid tribute to the work and words of Henry Newbolt. A dabbler in poetry and prose, Newbolt found his way into letters at the fin de siècle as a minor literary figure. During the 1890s, he had penned a cache of texts that struck a chord as they engaged a range of rowdy and robust topics. His earliest efforts included a story that told of a fantastical effort to rescue Napoleon from the island of St Helena. A later venture into prose, The Twymans (1911), offered a glimpse of the progress of the schoolboy in the tradition of Tom Brown’s School Days (1857). But George Sampson, a critic for The Bookman, noted that prose fiction was not ultimately ‘the right vehicle for [Newbolt’s] best abilities’, His verses, on the other hand, seemed to have the capacity to ‘influence thousands’. Catchy in their vigour, skilled in their metre, and timely in their sentiment, the ballads that comprised the volume Admirals All (1897) recalled the sporting spirit, the bellicose pride, and the adventuresome nature made famous by better-​known contemporaries, including Robert Louis Stevenson and, more especially, Rudyard Kipling.1 Because of his timeliness, The Academy had, at the moment of the collection’s publication, deemed Newbolt to be a ‘very lucky man’, one who had been ‘swept into popularity on the tide of that dominant patriotic impulse in literature’ owing its rise to the ‘genius’ of others.2 In a similar vein, The Athenaeum had lauded Newbolt’s ‘ballad verse’, though it had found but few examples in Newbolt’s volume of what might rise to the level of a ‘poem’. Too mired was Newbolt, it seemed, in the specifics of his moment and in the baseness of 1 

2 

George Sampson, ‘The Reader: Henry Newbolt’, The Bookman, 47, no. 278 (November 1914), 35–​39. ‘The Island Race’, The Academy, no. 1387 (3 December 1898), 371.

Warfare and Gamesmanship in the Time of Victoria    269 politics.3 Newbolt was an unlikely poet on many counts. In fact, The Bookman described him as someone who looks rather like a ‘barrister suffering lifelong regret because he did not enter the Church’.4 These limitations of talent and accidents of history notwithstanding, Newbolt had, by the time of the First World War, made something of a name for himself. Specifically, he had attained minor celebrity for his ‘Vitaï Lampada’ (1892).5 Appearing subsequently in Admirals All (1898), the poem endures as a tribute to the sporting spirit of Victorian warfare even today. A piece worthy of recitation, it condensed avid patriotism into memorable metre. The poem, which likened the cricket match to the battlefield, famously urged its listeners to ‘Play up, play up, and play the game’. In so doing, it conjoined gamesmanship and warfare, as so many previous Victorian writers had.6 As a work of art, The Athenaeum had noted at the time of its release, it was inferior to the productions of Browning and Tennyson.7 But, from the vantage point of November 1914, The Bookman cautioned against the luxuries of aestheticism at a moment of war, as it accorded praise to the verse. ‘In this time of national trial by fire, we might do worse than make these noble words our prayer,’ it noted, as it lauded the condensation of popular sentiment into memorable metre. And of its author, Newbolt, it claimed that he had written much ‘of which every Englishman may be proud’. Indeed, there was nothing in his corpus ‘of which the country men of Sidney, Nelson and Gordon need be ashamed’, it noted, as it marshalled images of military heroes on sea and land from bygone ages both near and far.8 Writing in The Bookman in the year 1914, George Sampson was, clearly, well aware of the demands of war, that ‘unintelligent barbarism’, not least among them, the necessity of calling a nation to arms, particularly before the institution of mandatory conscription in the year 1916.9 As a critic, he must, too, have had some sense of the challenges and choices that came with putting war into print, an effort that touched the careers of many Victorian men, and some women, of letters. Across the century, novelists, journalists, and poets had all experimented with matters of distance and presence, and humanity and temporality, as they sought to narrate or versify warfare and so to bring it to the attention of a democratizing and diversifying reading public.10 Time and again, authors 3 

‘Admirals All and Other Verses’, The Athenaeum, no. 3665 (22 January 1898), 111–​112. Sampson, ‘Henry Newbolt’, 35–​39. 5  Henry John Newbolt, ‘Vitaï Lampada’, Columbia Granger’s Poetry Database, EBSCOhost, http://​ ezproxy.lib.indiana.edu/​login?url=http://​search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.lib.indiana.edu/​login.aspx?dire ct=true&db=jgh&AN=00000086905&site=ehost-​live [last accessed 11 June 2013]. 6  Megan A. Norcia, ‘Playing Empire: Children’s Parlor Games, Home Theatricals, and Improvisational Play’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 29, no. 4 (Winter 2004), 294–​314. 7  ‘Admirals All and Other Verses’, 111–​112. 8  Sampson, ‘Henry Newbolt’, 35–​39. 9  Sampson, ‘Henry Newbolt’, 35–​9. 10  See, e.g., Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Stephanie Markovits, The Crimean War in the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Kate McLoughlin, The Cambridge Companion to War Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 4 

270    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture settled on the vehicle suggested by Newbolt—​that of likening battles of various sorts to matches, sports, or games. Perhaps, too, they had believed in the justness of a war fairly fought. And maybe they had found reassurance in the temporal and spatial boundaries that the seemingly steady comparison with sport fostered in thinking about the potentially limitless contours of war. Regardless, they presaged the work and words of European cultural critic Johann Huizinga, the author of Homo Ludens (1938), who noted that ‘fighting, as a cultural function’ had at its heart a ‘ritual character’, a ‘play-​quality’, and an immersive aspect.11 The work of a minor poet and a middling writer, Newbolt’s ‘Vitaï Lampada’ is perhaps the best known expression of the ‘games ethic’ that became manifest in mid-​nineteenth-​ century poetry and fiction, where it was associated with several writers, most notably Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson, but also Thomas Hughes, G. A. Henty, and Thomas Marryat, to name others. Linked to the thought of Thomas Arnold, an eminent Victorian, the games ethic was expressive of the notion that what happened on the playing fields of England informed what occurred on the battlefields of Europe and empire. The ideal received its first, and most decisive, iteration in Thomas Hughes’s 1857 bildungsroman, Tom Brown’s School Days, which was published just after the end of the Crimean War and in the year of the First Indian War of Independence.12 Afterwards, it would enjoy a remarkable popularization in the press, with its growing segmentation directed to audiences including youth. It would also see development in the novelistic subgenre of muscular Christianity, which directed might towards right in tales that appealed to a middling, and most often male, readership. By the turn of the century, it would witness a transition into what Bradley Deane has recently called a ‘play ethic’ when it came, especially around and after the Second Anglo-​Boer War, to be associated with imperial adventure, eternal boyhood, and institutions like the Boy Scouts.13 It would face its dissolution during the First World War, not shortly after The Bookman published its paean to Newbolt’s ‘Vitaï Lampada’. Just as it heralded the end of an epoch, the war would, it seems, put to rest the games ethic, too. The games ethic itself has not pined for commentators and critics. But one aspect that has yet to receive sufficient exposition and exploration is the notion of ‘fair play’, which is suggested by Newbolt’s ‘Vitaï Lampada’. Associated in Huizinga’s mind especially with the samurai, the qualities of ‘chivalry, loyalty, courage and self-​control’ were also essentially English and ostensibly British.14 In all earnestness, the satirical Punch proclaimed in 1878 that the ‘love of fair play’ resided ‘in the bosom of every Briton’.15 And the ever-​ trenchant Saturday Review declared it a ‘national characteristic’.16 The term was bandied 11 

Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1938; Boston: Beacon Press: 1955), 89. 12  Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days: By an Old Boy (1857; London: Macmillan, 1868). 13  Bradley Deane, ‘Imperial Boyhood: Piracy and the Play Ethic’, Victorian Studies, 53, no. 4 (2011), 689–​7 14. 14 Huizinga, Homo Ludens. 15  ‘Fair-​Play’, Punch (16 March 1878), 120. 16  ‘Dear at the Money’, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 3, no. 68 (1857), 142–​143.

Warfare and Gamesmanship in the Time of Victoria    271 about in the pages of the nineteenth century’s expanding press, and in its novels, too. In Tom Brown’s School Days, as we shall see, it rose to the level of an organizing concept; it would remain as such in the genres of muscular Christianity and the boy’s bildungsroman. In the later nineteenth century, it would become a meme of sorts in social criticism and war commentary. An exemplary lingua franca, it transmuted into a form of pedagogy and a mode of critique. Honing in on ‘fair play’ as an aspect of the games ethic does not only allow for a refinement of our understanding of its articulation. More significantly, it enables a reconceptualization of the place of warfare in Victorian and post-​Victorian culture, particularly on the occasions when the Victorians faced European adversaries, namely, the Crimean War of 1854–​6, the Anglo-​Boer War of 1899–​1902, and the Great War of 1914–​18, fought after the age had ended. Similarly, the notion of ‘fair play’ helps to bring into focus the ways in which other conflicts, whether skirmishes among Continental nations themselves or Victoria’s so-​called ‘little wars’ across the globe, came to inflect domestic culture.17 Over the past quarter-​century, historians of Victorian imperialism have shown, with great force and efficacy, the ways in which European empire shaped the domestic landscape and its cultural productions.18 A similar argument can be made regarding the endeavour of Victorian warfare, particularly as it is parsed through the literary and print culture of the day. If the British Empire shaped the metropole in the Victorian age, so too did the nation’s wars, which were fought at a distance. Understanding as much allows us a starting point for providing a new assessment of the Victorian age that reconceives its topical preoccupations and reconsiders its temporal boundaries.

Games Victorianists Play, or Victorian Studies and the Games Ethic This endeavour becomes all the more significant when it is informed by an understanding of the particular contours of scholarship on the ‘games ethic’, and with it, the related notions of play and fun. This area of analysis is particularly remarkable for its development in lockstep with the broader enterprise of Victorian studies. As such, it provides an index of sorts to the shifting concerns and paradigms of the discipline as it evolved from the beginning of the twentieth century. Remarkably, even the earliest critics to imagine a scholarship on the Victorian age bear this out. In the process, they render unanticipated complexity to articulations of the games ethic. For instance, in 1901, just as Victoria’s reign came to an end, Hamish Stuart offered a fascinating understanding of the games 17 

This phrase is taken from the title of Byron Farwell’s Queen Victoria’s Little Wars (London: Allen Lane, 1973). 18  See, e.g., Antoinette Burton, Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose (eds), At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

272    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture ethic, and with it, a notion of fair play, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Notably, he yoked this understanding not simply to football—​his ostensible object of analysis—​but also to warfare, and even to a Victorian era, explicitly described as such. As he launched his discussion, Stuart imagined a ‘historian’ looking back on the age. ‘When he comes to deal with the Victorian era’, Stuart noted, such a historian would ‘hail it’, of course, as ‘the golden age of football’. Moreover, he would understand it as ‘the age also during which the citizen soldier, trained to manliness in the playing-​fields, first voluntarily abandoned the shop for the sword, to show how fields were won in the great game of war’. For Stuart, the sporting spirit offered a potential salve for the ailments of the current era with all of its commercial excess. As vehicles for cultivating ‘manliness’, sport and war, it seemed, had the potential not just to promote ‘physical and moral strength’, but even to stave off ‘the sinking of self ’. In his mind, these promises were best held out by the game of football, particularly as it was played in England, and in Britain more generally. There, the ‘sense of fair play, and of playing the game’, noted Stuart as he nodded to Newbolt, always held sway. In Stuart’s view, the Continental powers, particularly France and Germany, stood to benefit from Britain’s example of fair play, most immediately on the football pitch, but also in international diplomacy. Stuart’s linkage of the pursuit of sport to the arts of war here is decisive. That said, it is also quite complex—​perhaps more complex than our examinations of the Victorian games ethic have allowed us to see thus far. Indeed, Stuart suggested that, together, sport and war might curb the excesses of the current era, bringing men from trading floor onto the playing field in robust unison, and from there, perhaps, even on to glorious battle in the manner of Christian soldiers. But things shifted in the face of the reality of escalating tensions; Stuart intimated as well that sport might stave off a Continental war of the sort that destiny seemed to predicate. In the end, a football fellowship among nations, and one, moreover, dictated by fair play, Stuart suggested, might offer a ‘better guarantee to peace in Europe’ than any possible treaty.19 In his paean to the games ethic, Stuart credited the English public schools of the first half of the nineteenth century with the development of football, and with this, of the spirit of fair play. Less than two decades after Stuart wrote, in 1918, Lytton Strachey, whom we might consider to be the first scholar of Victorian studies, sustained this understanding as he rendered further complexity to the lineage of the games ethic. In the introduction to his Eminent Victorians, Strachey famously quipped, ‘the history of the Victorian age will never be written. We know too much about it.’20 He sought to exert control over this vast body of literature by offering four interlocked biographical studies that characterized the era as they marshalled criticism, irony, and camp.21 One of the figures thrust into the spotlight by Strachey was Thomas Arnold, the renowned head of 19 

‘The Football Nations’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 169, no. 1026 (April 1901), 489–​504, esp. 494. 20  Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (1918; New York: Modern Library, 1999), 1. 21  Simon Joyce, ‘On or About 1901: The Bloomsbury Group Looks Back at the Victorians’, Victorian Studies, 46, no. 4 (Summer 2004), 631–​54.

Warfare and Gamesmanship in the Time of Victoria    273 Rugby School, who exemplified those Victorian qualities of ‘energy, earnestness, and the best intentions’. It was Arnold who had redirected public school education away from classical scholarship and towards character formation. Namely, Arnold devoted himself to transforming each pupil into ‘a Christian’ and ‘an Englishman’.22 For Arnold himself, the undertaking was particularly linked to the chapel. Posterity, however, has eternally linked this endeavour to the playing field. Misunderstood or not, the mission of the ‘earnest enthusiast’, as laid out by Strachey in 1918, remains central to our understandings of the pursuit of the games ethic and the injunction of fair play.23 Recognition of these complexities would recede by the 1950s, just as the academic study of the Victorian era was cohering as an academic pursuit in North America, as the inauguration of the journal Victorian Studies in 1957 evinces. By that time, a consolidated games ethic, underwritten at least implicitly by a notion of fair play, had taken shape as a discrete ideal, or perhaps a commodity, that was representative and even exemplary of its age. To appreciate this fact, we need only look to an article written by Sir Charles Tennyson and appearing in the second volume of Victorian Studies in 1959. Tennyson contended there that Britain, the workshop of the world, did not simply teach the world to toil. It also ‘taught the world to play’. In his paean to sport, Tennyson traced the diffusion of rugby football, cricket, and golf—​the ‘great games of the world’—​ through the British Empire, across the Atlantic Ocean, and around the globe. If Strachey had come to his study of the period through a stance of wry reflection, Tennyson offered his in a mode of patriotic defence. In his account, Tennyson sought to defend the British Empire’s legacies as a guardian of sporting spirit and fair play at the very moment of its demise. Although the empire was on its way to dissolution, he suggested, it left its mark in unanticipated ways. Drawing not only on patriotism, but also on the modernization theory that was so pervasive at the time of the article’s writing, Tennyson noted that the spread of sport wrought by the British Empire had proven to be a physical and psychological boon for the globe. Granted, English sport and attendant notions of fair play would become the subject of clever adoption and critique by postcolonial critics like C. L. R. James, who wrote about cricket and class, and postcolonialism and politics, a few years later.24 But Tennyson’s understanding of sport’s essential Englishness remained untouched. A ‘world-​wide social revolution initiated by the Victorians’, he reflected, its lessons of patient vigour and fair play seemed to offer countless benefits to a world facing the challenges of rapid urbanization, mass government, and international competition 100 years on.25 Tennyson’s brief sketch suggested that the spirit of good gamesmanship and of fair play travelled, disembodied, across the world, not unlike the civilizing mission that seemed to propel it. A few decades after Tennyson wrote, a host of scholars revisited the 22 Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days, 80.

23 Strachey, Eminent Victorians, 175, 183, 201, 181. 24 

C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (London: Stanley, Paul and Company, 1963). Sir Charles Tennyson, ‘They Taught the World to Play’, Victorian Studies, 2, no. 3 (March 1959), 211–​222. 25 

274    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture games ethic. They were not content, however, to accept it as a product that migrated, purely and effortlessly, across the world, or even the nation. Prompted instead by social history and the attendant category of class, not to mention by its engagement with ideals of rational recreation, social control, and leisure studies, they offered models and case studies that spotlighted the transmission and transformation of the idea. The subfield of sports history, particularly as practised in the United Kingdom, has provided fertile ground for such explorations from the 1970s onwards. Exemplary here is the broad, varied, and remarkably germinal corpus of J. A. Mangan, who has rendered attention to social structure and cultural transmission, perhaps most notably, though hardly exclusively, in his The Games Ethic and Imperialism, first published in 1986.26 But Mangan’s work did not simply seek to understand the notion’s movement around the globe; it also considered its transmission, and with it, its transformation, across Britain and within classes. For instance, Mangan addressed the movement of the games ethic from the public schools of the nation’s elite to the grammar schools of the middle and lower middle classes. The latter environment was informed, particularly, by the Protestant work ethic, which exerted a particular influence on styles of play. If the pupils in the public schools ‘played energetically’, those enrolled in grammar schools played ‘circumspectly’.27 This pithy reflection is suggestive of the ways in which the context for gamesmanship—​and here I include the venues for playing and the populations that played—​ comes to shape the very style, form, and content of the pursuit. This is a matter that has been further clarified by women’s and gender historians. They may, at the outset, have sought to make a bid for inclusion by shifting the focus to the public schools attended by girls in the late Victorian age, where such pursuits as gymnastics, golf, fencing, and bowling predominated. More than an appreciation of extension, the ultimate effect, and continued challenge, of thinking about gamesmanship through gender has been to move scholarly attention away from the playing field, however defined, and into the more informal spaces of the home, with its gardens, card tables, and nurseries. The shift in venue prompted originally by the attention to women’s history, but extending well beyond this pursuit to consider the activities of adults—​both male and female—​ and children—​both boys and girls—​has vast implications. To turn away from the ‘male homosocial space’ of the playing field to the feminized zone of domesticity is to shift our attention from ‘rule-​bound games like Cricket’ to ‘party games and home theatricals’, among others.28 If procedure and prowess predominate in the first instance, it is imagination and improvisation that invigorate the latter. The implications of this shift—​for the archives we use and for the texts that we read, or for the questions we ask and the 26 

J. A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and the Spirit of Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (1986; London: Routledge, 1998). 27  J. A. Mangan, ‘Grammar Schools and the Games Ethic in the Victorian and Edwardian Eras’, Albion, 15, no. 4 (Winter 1983), 313–​35, esp. 334–​335. See also Nancy Fix Anderson, The Sporting Life: Victorian Sports and Games (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2010); J. A. Mangan, A Sport-​Loving Society: Victorian and Edwardian Middle-​Class England at Play (London: Routledge, 2006). 28  Norcia, ‘Playing Empire’, 294; Kathleen E. McCrone, ‘Play Up! Play Up! And Play the Game! Sport at the Late Victorian Girls’ Public School’, Journal of British Studies, 23, no. 2 (Spring 1984), 106–​134.

Warfare and Gamesmanship in the Time of Victoria    275 ideals we foreground—​are vast. Among other things, they ask that we consider the contours of play and the valences of fairness. Literary critics too, have arrived at such a conclusion as they have assessed the games ethic and sought, to move beyond its orthodox understandings, ultimately calling into question the narrative of improvement that it implied. Within literary studies, contemplation of the games ethic centres, typically, around a cluster of writers, including Thomas Hughes, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Louis Stevenson. A variety of paradigms, including Marxism, the new historicism, gender theory, and queer theory, have long enabled considerations of these writers. More recently, a heightened concern with empire has pressed our understandings forward. Particularly fruitful have been studies that examine the difference that empire made for the games ethic as the nineteenth century progressed towards its end and, not incidentally, towards the Second Anglo-​Boer War. Recently, Bradley Deane argued that the familiar games ethic of the mid-​century moment transmogrified into a play ethic at the fin de siècle. As it moved away from the liberal imperatives of the mid-​ century moment, Deane holds, the British imperial project divested itself of the civilizing mission, associated with such virtues as fair play; as a response, popular fiction, especially that written for youths, offered up a host of characters, including Kim and Peter Pan, who engaged in ludic pursuits as they remained in a state of permanent boyhood. John Kucich has similarly unsettled lingering assumptions regarding the edifying influence of empire in his provocative readings of Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky and Company stories (1899), as he has pointed to the sadomasochistic tendencies so evident in the group dynamics of boys, imperial or not.29 Regenia Gagnier put it nicely when she noted that, ‘as the century progressed, the Christianity seemed to melt away from the athletic project, leaving only the muscle’.30 But even as these texts, and the critics who write about them, have dislodged the surety of the improving assumptions embedded in the games ethic, they have borne out the notion that the world of the fin de siècle was certainly a world at play. The notion of a world at play has particular connotations that have been taken up recently by literary critics and historians alike as they have sought to understand the nineteenth century as a modernizing moment, rather than a traditional one. One of the most powerful articulations of this matter is that on offer by Matthew Kaiser, who has sought to reconceive the literary and cultural terrain of the Victorian age. Rather than a backward-​looking moment characterized by toil, Kaiser has sought to portray the Victorian era as a forward-​oriented age that was full of play. It is not just that the Victorians were at play, Kaiser asserts. Additionally, they inhabited a world that was, itself, in play—​that is, in flux and action.31 Such a notion liberates us from the assumption that the Victorians were inherently, unceasingly earnest. It also asks that we 29 

John Kucich, ‘Sadomasochism and the Magical Group: Kipling’s Middle-​Class Imperialism’, Victorian Studies, 46, no. 1 (Autumn 2003), 33–​68; Kucich, Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy and Social Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 30  Regenia Gagnier, ‘From Fag to Monitor; or, Fighting to the Front’: Art and Power in Public School Memoirs’, Browning Institute Studies, 16 (1988), 15–​38, esp. 20. 31  Matthew Kaiser, The World in Play: Portraits of a Victorian Concept (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011).

276    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture consider the relationship between the Victorian age and modernity more generally, and ultimately to set our sights on fun. On this score, historian Peter Bailey has noted that fun is ‘play commodified’, stripped of its spontaneity and subjected to the regimes of industrial capitalism and rational recreation.32 In this rendition, fun does not, as Huizinga once asserted, ‘resist […] all logical interpretation’.33 Instead, it may be a critical linchpin for tracing the splintering of the games ethic as it moved, on the page and in practice, from the nineteenth into the twentieth century.

The Rise and Fall of Fair Play, or from Tom Brown to Tommy Atkins Assessments of the games ethic that developed across the second half of the nineteenth century often focus upon Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days, which elevated the ethos of fair play to an organizing principle of plot and character development. At its publication in 1857, the British Quarterly Review welcomed Tom Brown’s School Days as a ‘a capital book, brimful of the blithesomeness, frolic, and fun of boyhood’.34 The tale of an English lad at Rugby School delighted a reading public that included boys young and old. A few months after its publication, the text quickly found its way into a second edition. It had the capacity to capture multiple audiences. On the one hand, it was a mere ‘series of pictures of various parts of boy life’, to use the words of the Edinburgh Review. On the other, its pages contained ‘matter[s]‌for deep and earnest reflection’, as the Monthly Religious Magazine declared.35 A tribute to the life of Thomas Arnold, who sought to soften the barbaric tendencies of the upper classes, the narrative is a paean to the innovations of the great reformer at Rugby School. A celebration of the ideas of Charles Kingsley, who argued for the virtues of a vigorous life, the story is an endorsement of the notions of muscular Christianity, so popular at mid-​century. As Thomas Hughes recounts the youth of his alter ego, Tom Brown, a scion of the rural England of the 1830s, he lays out the ground rules for the ideal education of an utterly English boy capable of the unmistakably English practice of fair play. Indeed, it is not ‘to ram Latin and Greek into boys’, but to make them ‘good English boys’ and ‘good future citizens’.36 32  See, notably, Peter Bailey, ‘Entertainmentality! Modernising Pleasure in a Leisure Industry’, in Simon Gunn and James Vernon (eds), The Peculiarities of Modernity in Imperial Britain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), 119–​33. See also Bailey’s ‘“A Mingled Mass of Perfectly Legitimate Pleasures”’: The Victorian Middle Class and the Problem of Leisure’, Victorian Studies, 21, no. 1 (1977), 7–​28. 33 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 3. 34 ‘Tom Brown’s School Days: By an Old Boy’, British Quarterly Review, 52 (October 1857), 513. 35 ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’, Edinburgh Review, 107 no. 217 (January 1858), 172–​93, esp. 173–​4; SWB, ‘Thoughts on Tom Brown’s Life at Rugby’, Monthly Religious Magazine and Independent Journal (1 September 1857), 205. 36 Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days, 59.

Warfare and Gamesmanship in the Time of Victoria    277 To this end, Tom learns to fight the good fight, to challenge bullies, and to be good rather than fierce. It is not principally in the classrooms, but rather in the spaces of the playing field and the boarding house where this education is ideally wrought, with its pivotal moments enabling individual and collective cultivation. Such was Hughes’s narrator’s understanding of sport itself. In a game such as rugby, invented at the school by William Webb Ellis, the ‘delicate strokes of play’ provide a view of a boy’s true nature. ‘As endless as are boys’ characters’, proclaims Hughes’s narrator, ‘an old Boy’ himself, ‘so are their ways of facing or not facing a scrimmage at football’.37 And the English public school was, as mentioned, in the business not simply of molding minds, but at least as significantly, of honing character. According to the narrator, this enterprise was best accomplished through team sports like cricket and rugby football. But Thomas Hughes’s narrator makes a bid for the performance of physical prowess, and with it, of character, in other, more seemingly atavistic games too, most notably, the fist fight, much maligned by mid-​century. Although the Society of Friends and friends of civilization both urged the English to forsake the barbaric fist fight, it was, in truth, the ‘natural and English way for English boys to settle their quarrels’, just so long as the opponents were engaged in what Hughes called a ‘fair match’. Fighting was good for the ‘temper’, not to mention for the ‘backs and legs’. Ultimately, it was the Christian thing to do—​particularly when performed within the boundaries of that quintessentially English notion of fair play, which promised to counter bullying, arbitrariness, and tyranny.38 This paean to fair play, whether in football or fighting, led the erudite Edinburgh Review to dismiss the notion that such boyhood pursuits were ‘mere amusements’. These games were, instead, ‘exercises and tasks’, indeed ‘performances’, to use the narrator’s very own words, of great importance to individual and society, to nation and empire, and to justice and truth. By working in multiple temporalities, Thomas Hughes established this understanding as both timely and timeless. In some regards, the text is a romantic idyll, with the action set in a bucolic 1830s England, untouched by the railways and reforms of the ‘newfangled present’. As such, it established the performance of physical prowess in sport and games as a timeless English ideal while appealing to ‘human nature’ writ large.39 In other ways, the bildungsroman is a response to the exigencies of the 1850s, with references to the recent Great Exhibition and ongoing international conflict sprinkled throughout. Certainly, a domestic readership that had just witnessed the tragedies of the conflict in the Crimea, one that was presently tracking the horrors of the First Indian War of Independence on the subcontinent, would have well understood the narrator’s assertions: first, that ‘fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man’ and second, that ‘everyone who is worth his salt has his enemies who must be beaten’. Among these, the narrator counted not only internal demons, the ‘evil thoughts and habits within’, but also external menaces, 37 Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days, 106–​7.

38 ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’, Edinburgh Review, 173. 39 ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’, Edinburgh Review, 173.

278    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture like ‘Russians’ and ‘Border-​ruffians’.40 Not incidentally, it was a commonplace in the later nineteenth century to hold that these were among the many groups incapable of rising to the level of fair play. Russians, Turks, Boers, and Africans all stood beyond the pale of fair play, whose natural preserve was the ‘parks and platforms’, not the ‘prairies and the pampas, the jungle and the savannah’.41 Although it was, on the whole, critical of the prosaic nature and middlebrow qualities of Tom Brown’s School Days, the Edinburgh Review did note a certain ‘genius’ to the ‘system’ popularized in the pages of the novel, wherein the games of the public school prepared the pupils for larger eventualities of greater consequence.42 Other writers made the connection as well. During the Crimean War, journalists referred to the battles and manoeuvres, whether on sea or land, as ‘games’ that were, variably, ‘safe’ and ‘weary’.43 This so-​called games ethic, which linked physical performance and individual character to national habits and imperial maintenance, had enjoyed a clear exposition in Tom Brown’s School Days. It would continue to be a staple of education, first in the public school and later in the grammar school, well into the twentieth century, featuring centrally in novels and memoirs into the interwar years.44 We are quite familiar, at this point, with the ways in which the games ethic, and the attendant notion of fair play, proliferated. Tom Brown’s School Days helped to usher in the genre of muscular Christianity, whose authors, including Charles Kingsley and others, foregrounded these matters. Additionally, after the passage of Forster’s Education Act in 1870, a popular press directed explicitly to children, and particularly boys, would take up as one of its primary areas of interest the ‘games ethic’, exploring it through examinations of team sports like rugby and cricket, elite activities including tennis and golf, popular pursuits such as boxing and boating, skilled games like darts and archery, and games of mental acumen, most notably chess. Magazines like Boys’ Life and Chums employed publications about games as jumping-​off points for broader explorations of national character, English and otherwise. They contrasted the English predilections for athleticism and fair play to Continental tendencies towards artifice and cunning. And they used games as an avenue for crafting early ethnography, whether of Afghans, Italians, or Chinese.45 Scholars of the Victorian age are less aware, however, about the extent to which the ethos of fair play reverberated through the Victorian press, which addressed topics of domestic and international reach, of social and political importance, 40 Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days, 268, 282–​283.

41  ‘Fair-​Play’, Punch (16 March 1878), 120; ‘Among the Bechuanas’, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 14, no. 355 (1862), 201–​202. 42 ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’, Edinburgh Review, 173. 43  Leader Comment, John Bull, no. 1751 (1 July 1854), 406; ‘The War: Attack on the Crimea’, John Bull, no. 1764 (30 September 1854), 610; ‘Second Account’, Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (15 October 1854), 11; ‘Balaklava’, Lady’s Newspaper, no. 409 (28 October 1854), 268. 44  Regenia Gagnier, ‘From Fag to Monitor’. 45  See, e.g., T. P. Hughes, ‘Afghan Games’, Boy’s Own Paper, no. 149 (19 November 1881), 125–​6; ‘Games of All Nations’, Child’s Companion, no. 178 (1 August 1879), 114.

Warfare and Gamesmanship in the Time of Victoria    279 and of monumental and trivial freight in the later nineteenth century, as it sought to reach an increasingly variegated readership.46 During these years, Victoria’s army engaged in a host of ‘little wars’ throughout the empire, including the so-​called ‘Great Game’ in central Asia. Simultaneously, Europe’s nations competed in a variety of military and diplomatic escalations. All the while, fair play became a refrain—​indeed, a meme of sorts—​in the British press. It was touted, time and again, as the ‘boast of Britons’, evident in all aspects of life.47 This most English of notions was a yardstick with multiple purposes. It was an index of civilization. It was the fruit of liberalism in moderation. It was the sign of a responsive government, one that enabled fairness in representation and judiciousness in protection. It also conveyed a sort of portable justice or common sense. Certainly, its many uses in the nineteenth-​ century press—​whether in satirical publications, in letters to editors, in songs for boys, or in impressionistic essays—​bear this out. Invoked in myriad contexts, it conjured not just levelness of playing field, but also sanity of discourse, fairness in representation, and judiciousness in opportunity. It came, as the century wore on, to apply, in particular, to the press, suggesting an even hand in coverage, an avoidance of sensationalism, and a commitment to truth.48 Significantly, it allowed Britain to claim a premium on moral certitude and political righteousness within an increasingly fractious globe over the latter half of the nineteenth century. Had the American Revolution not occurred, one contributor to the Saturday Review maintained, the very course of the country’s Civil War would have been averted, as the nation would have maintained the English characteristic of free play. As it imagined a counterfactual history of sorts, the Saturday Review noted that ‘a race would have grown up imbued with the English principle of fair play’, that is, ‘amenable to the give-​and-​take practice which equity and good humour equally recognize among us, loving a good fight, but loathing as alike and unmanly the arts and arms of the rowdy and the assassin’.49 Fair play was a stance, too, that allowed Britain to keep a critical distance from its Continental neighbours and potential antagonists. Looking with criticism and concern upon the machinations of the Franco-​Prussian War of 1870, one commentator would ask just where the line lay between the ‘superfluous horrors’ of modern warfare and the valiant practice of ‘fair play’. Such a query forecasts a growing fascination and preoccupation in the British press with the steady rise of German statecraft, diplomacy, and militarism at the century’s end. With its emphasis on strategy, it seemed to prioritize ruthless cunning over fair play. In the face of these developments, however, a belief in 46  See, e.g., P. A. Dunae, ‘Boys’ Literature and the Idea of Empire, 1870–​1914’, Victorian Studies, 24, no. 1 (1980), 105–​21; William N. Weaver, ‘“A School-​Boy’s Story”: Writing the Victorian Schoolboy Subject’, Victorian Studies, 46, no. 3 (Spring 2004), 455–​487. 47  ‘Fair Play’, Examiner, no. 3699 (1878), 1607–​8; ‘Fair-​Play’, Punch (16 March 1878), 120. 48  See, e.g., ‘Sentimental Politics’, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 18 no. 475 (1864), 686–​8; E. Wylie, ‘Militancy and Fair Play’, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 116, no. 3012 (1913), 80–​81. 49  ‘Results of the First American Revolution’, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 12, no. 322 (1861), 656–​658.

280    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture the virtue of fair play seemed to prevail in many quarters, and early twentieth-​century advocates argued that it should be extended to horses, Arabs, and enemy combatants, even if they were not capable of expressing the same.50 Just as notions of gamesmanship proliferated at the turn of the century, so too did portrayals in literature, where considerations of play seem to move away from the ideal of fairness and towards cunning, trickery, and domination instead. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865), for instance, was just one text to foreground the mastery of rules over the imperative for judiciousness. Kipling’s Jungle Books (1894), too, placed the apprehension of internal rules front and centre.51 On the whole, Kipling’s own corpus evinces a proliferation of arenas for play and attitudes regarding gamesmanship as it considers the progress and process of empire. The novel Kim (1901), of course, opens with its protagonist, who ‘loves the game for its own sake’, in a state of play.52 In their attention to the education of youths, the stories that comprise Stalky and Company prioritize the sadomasochistic tendencies of the group—​evident, albeit underexplored in earlier texts such as Tom Brown’s School Days—​over the elevating qualities of the games ethic. And finally, poems like ‘Tommy’, which echo the better known ‘White Man’s Burden’ (1899) in their sentiment, suggest that the agents of the state, whether imperial administrators or British soldiers, are somehow being ‘played’ in a game that is beyond their control. First published in 1892, ‘Tommy’ draped its trenchant critique in metre reminiscent of a music hall song: ‘O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, go away”; | But it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins,” when the band begins to play.’53 In lines such as these, Kipling provided the strong sense that the rank-​and-​file British soldier, whose image was consolidated in the prototype of ‘Tommy Atkins’ at the century’s end, enjoyed respect when on parade or in the line of battle, though not while living his daily life. The grim realities of soldierly life and of imperial wars would be laid bare during the Second Anglo-​Boer War, fought between 1899 and 1902. In this war, the British Army looked to imperial and colonial troops ultimately to secure its victory, so exposing the ill-​equipped nature of its own forces, whether collectively or individually. During the campaign, the British Army engaged in the inhumane and infamous practice of concentrating Boer women and children in camps, where some of these civilians would meet their deaths. Throughout the empire, the excesses of jingoism were rife, as jubilations over the victory at Mafeking in 1900 attest. It seems, in many respects, that the very ideal of fair play, upheld by Newbolt just a few years before, had run its course by the time of the Anglo-​Boer War. There is, perhaps, no better artefact of this understanding that Thomas Hardy’s ‘Drummer Hodge’ (1899), which presages the literature of the First 50 

See, e.g., ‘Results of the First American Revolution’, 656–​8; ‘Among the Bechuanas’, 201–​2; ‘Told in Gallant Deeds’, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 119, no. 3096 (1915), 227. 51  Carole Scott, ‘Limits of Otherworlds: Rules of the Game in Alice’s Adventures and the Jungle Books’, Childrens’ Literature Association Quarterly (Proceedings, 1990), 20–​24. 52  Deane, ‘Play Ethic’. 53  Rudyard Kipling, ‘Tommy’. Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry, EBSCOhost, http://​ezproxy.lib. indiana.edu/​login?url=http://​search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.lib.indiana.edu/​login.aspx?direct=true&db =jgh&AN=00000040098&site=ehost-​live [last accessed 11 June 2013].

Warfare and Gamesmanship in the Time of Victoria    281 World War as it takes the form of a eulogy to a young Wessex drummer, a mere boy, who was killed and buried, coffin-​less, before he could even gain his bearings on the distant soil of the ‘broad Karoo’.54 Whether buried by friend or foe, we cannot be sure. We can be certain, however, that poor Hodge fell so quickly, and so young, that he never had the chance to play the game. In the face of these developments, it was imperative to reinvigorate and rehabilitate the spirit of fair play. Certainly, this endeavour had taken shape even before the onset of the Second Anglo-​Boer War, with the institution of the modern Olympic Games in 1896. The first decade of the twentieth century—​and the year 1908, in particular—​would see the continuation of these efforts. In that year, the first of the modern Olympic Games to be held in London debuted, as did the organization of the Boy Scouts.55 Founded by Robert Baden-​Powell, a hero of the Second Anglo-​Boer War, the Boy Scouts sought to reinvigorate the games ethic and so to rehabilitate the boys of Britain by cultivating not just their skills and muscles, but also their characters and imaginations. Powell expounded his programme in the legendary Scouting for Boys (1908). There, as in the institution more generally, he sought to restore the practice of honour, and with it, the ideal of ‘fair play’. It was a quality that ‘a scout should value’ more than anything. ‘Britons, above all other people, insist on fair play,’ he quipped. ‘If you see a big bully going for a small or weak boy, you stop him because it is not “fair play”,’ cautioned Baden-​Powell. An extra-​legal concept, ‘fair play’ was, as Baden-​Powell explained, ‘an old idea of Chivalry’ inherited from the ‘knights of old’. It fell to Britons to uphold it, for ‘other nations’ were ‘not so good’. The case of a Boer soldier who shot an already-​ wounded Englishman during the Anglo-​Boer War attests as much. ‘That Boer had no chivalry in him,’ noted Baden-​Powell. Thankfully, Major MacLaren would live to tell the tale, and even to become a Boy Scout manager, that ultimate guardian of fair play. With the institution of the Boy Scouts, fair play thus became a form of pedagogy in the wake of war’s excess.56

Goodbye to All That, or the Last Victorian The outbreak of the Great War would provide yet one more chance to assert the possibilities of fair play, as the publication of The Bookman’s homage to Newbolt indicates. But 54 

Thomas Hardy, ‘Drummer Hodge’, Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry, EBSCOhost, http://​ ezproxy.lib.indiana.edu/​login?url=http://​search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.lib.indiana.edu/​login.aspx?dire ct=true&db=jgh&AN=00000088096&site=ehost-​live [last accessed 11 June 2013]. 55  Jerold J. Savory, ‘Politics and the Playing Field: Sports and Statesmen in Punch: 1880s to World War I’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 21, no. 1 (Spring 1988), 23–​31. 56  Robert Baden-​Powell, Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship (1908; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. 223.

282    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture any hope for valiant gamesmanship expressed at the war’s outset would, of course, give way all too soon to a sense that a generation had been betrayed, or, ultimately, played. The poetry of the Great War is, of course, known for its manifold expressions of this matter. Wilfred Owen’s wry and prophetic ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ (1917) trenchantly suggested that the lies told to a nation were at odds with fair play.57 By evoking a sense of ironic wonder, Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘They’ (1917) stripped any remaining veneer from hopes of warlike glory, as it recounted the homecoming parade of crippled and blinded boys with a mimicked, if sarcastic, childlike wonder.58 Finally, John Galsworthy’s painfully tragic story, ‘Told by the Schoolmaster’ (1926), offers a trenchant refusal of any promise of fair play as held out by the narrator of Tom Brown’s School Days. Here, an underage soldier is spurred by patriotic fervour and schoolboy dreams to lie about his age so that he might pursue the glories of war. The harshness of battle and the pregnancy of his wife lead him to desertion, and ultimately to execution.59 In the First World War, ultimately, fighting did not enable the sporting spirit. Perhaps fittingly, though, the sporting spirit provided a critique, or at least a counterpoint, to war itself. Take, for instance, the mythologized, and perhaps apocryphal Christmas Truce Soccer Match of 1914. Allegedly condoned by officers and played on the Western Front, it suggested that the possibilities for fair play existed, in truth, not in battle, but outside its confines. And it provided a poignant reminder of the follies of war. One man to garner first-​hand experience in both the Anglo-​Boer War and the First World War was Winston Churchill, who would go on to become a protagonist of Britain’s twentieth century as he served as prime minister from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. As someone born in 1874, he spent his first quarter-​century growing up at the end of Victoria’s reign. He served as a war correspondent in South Africa and later went on to spend time in the trenches in the First World War. It is therefore provocative and productive to consider Churchill in relationship to the Victorian age, perhaps, indeed, as the last Victorian. Known for his radio addresses, his Second World War speeches, and his defence of a waning empire, Churchill rarely appears in this light. But his famed ‘Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat Speech’, offered to parliament when he became prime minister at the outset of the Second World War, recast the muscular Christianity of a bygone era for a mass audience. And, as a Cold Warrior, Churchill made the claim that democracy was, in essence, the equivalent of ‘fair play’.60 Offered a century after the games ethic coalesced, such remarks attest to the long-​standing resonance of ‘fair play’ and the long shadow of the Victorian age. 57  Wilfred Owen, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry, EBSCOhost, http://​ ezproxy.lib.indiana.edu/​login?url=http://​search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.lib.indiana.edu/​login.aspx?dire ct=true&db=jgh&AN=00000008276&site=ehost-​live [last accessed 11 June 2013]. 58  Siegfried Sassoon, ‘They’, Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry, EBSCOhost, http://​ezproxy.lib. indiana.edu/​login?url=http://​search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.lib.indiana.edu/​login.aspx?direct=true&db =jgh&AN=00000008851&site=ehost-​live [last accessed 11 June 2013]. 59  Barbara Korte, The Penguin Book of First World War Stories (London: Penguin, 2007). 60  Winston Churchill, Never Give In! The Best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches (New York: Random House, 2007).

Warfare and Gamesmanship in the Time of Victoria    283

Select Bibliography Anderson, Nancy Fix, The Sporting Life:  Victorian Sports and Games (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2010). Bailey, Peter, ‘Entertainmentality! Modernising Pleasure in a Leisure Industry’, in Simon Gunn and James Vernon (eds), The Peculiarities of Modernity in Imperial Britain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011). Deane, Bradley, ‘Imperial Piracy and the Play Ethic’, Victorian Studies, 53, no. 4 (2011), 689–​7 14. Favret, Mary A., War at a Distance:  Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Hall, Catherine, and Sonya Rose (eds), At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Huizinga, Johann, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1938; Boston: Beacon Press: 1955). Kaiser, Matthew, The World in Play: Portraits of a Victorian Concept (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011). Kucich, John, Imperial Masochism:  British Fiction, Fantasy and Social Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). McLoughlin, Kate, The Cambridge Companion to War Writing (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009). Mangan, J. A., The Games Ethic and the Spirit of Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (1986; London: Routledge, 1998). Markovits, Stephanie, The Crimean War in the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Weaver, William N., ‘“A School-​Boy’s Story”:  Writing the Victorian Schoolboy Subject’, Victorian Studies, 46, no. 3 (Spring 2004), 455–​487.

Chapter 15

B ri tish Wome n Wa nt e d Gender, Genre, and South African Settlement Melissa Free

This essay brings together three areas that until fairly recently had received scant attention from scholars of the British Empire: female emigration, ‘white settler colonies’, and emigration literature.1 While emigration itself has long engaged imperial historians, female emigration only began to capture their interest in the late 1970s. While settler colonies have long been studied in a nationalist context (as part of, say, Canadian history or South African literature), the empire’s own ‘privileging of India’ persisted even in the vast majority of the new historicism and burgeoning new imperial history of the late twentieth century.2 While travel literature and the imperial adventure novel, ‘wild adventure[s]‌’ that Olive Schreiner long ago noted appealed most to the ‘stay-​at-​homes’, have been the subject of numerous works since cultural studies brought the ‘lower brow’ into scholarly purview, emigration fiction, except when read in the context of nation-​ building, was also neglected until the present century.3 Examining fictions of white female settlement in southern Africa, I  attend to the truly ‘kinetic’ nature of my subjects: authors, heroines, and texts that reflect the ‘translocal’ nature of empire. Theorized by Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton in Moving Subjects, the translocal as it is applied to empire suggests not only economic, political,

1 

By emigration literature, I mean writing about immigration and settlement. Saul Dubow, ‘How British Was the British World? The Case of South Africa’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37, no. 1 (2009), 1–​27, at 3. Important exceptions include Dane Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–​1939 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987); Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–​1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); and Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-​David (eds), Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class (London: Sage, 1995). 3  Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (London: Penguin, 1995), 29; further page references will be given in parentheses in the text and notes preceded by SAF. Gertrude Page, Where the Strange Roads Go Down (London: Hurst, [n.d.]), 53; further page references will be given in parentheses in the text and notes preceded by SR. 2 

Gender, Genre, and South African Settlement    285 and cultural movement, but also identities, subjectivities, and loyalties formed, transformed, and flowing across the ‘webs of empire’.4 As it is applied to the texts I examine, the translocal provides a framework for reading beyond the bounds of national histories, in which settler colonies are viewed as either elsewhere Englands or emergent nations; it considers instead the interdependence of national–​imperial cultural formations. Robert Dixon, Richard Phillips, Janet C. Myers, and several of the contributors to Tamara Wagner’s Victorian Settler Narratives have taken a similar approach, but where they loosely signal a connection between genre and empire—​generally in an Australian context—​I offer a concrete assessment of that relationship in the context of southern Africa.5 My claim is that Schreiner, H.  Rider Haggard, and Gertrude Page, the former a self-​identified ‘English South African’ and the latter two authorial informants, British authors who spent time in southern Africa and wrote about the region as insiders, bolstered female, even feminist, subjectivity through generic innovation that is an effect of the translocal.6 Employing new fictional forms to solve markedly gendered problems, these authors not only imagine new spaces for British settler women beyond the matrimonial and the maternal; they also anticipate generic developments generally associated with the metropole. This is a case not simply of exchange, but of more complex movement: by reworking metropolitan sociopolitical problems in an ostensibly colonial context, which entails the introduction of additional concerns, genres develop, only to be transformed over time and across the empire. What follows is an overview of emigration to the settler colonies during the period, with a special emphasis on white women and southern Africa; a brief discussion of emigration literature and recent scholarship on the subject; and, finally, an explanation of the ways in which the generic innovations of Schreiner, Haggard, and Page reflect the translocal concerns, investments, and identities of their authors. 4  Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, ‘Introduction: The Politics of Intimacy in an Age of Empire’, in Ballantyne and Burton (eds), Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 1–​28, at 3, 10; Tony Ballantyne, ‘Race and the Webs of Empire: Aryanism from India to the Pacific’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2, no. 3 (2001), https://​muse.jhu.edu/​login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/​journals/​journal_​of_​colonialism_​ and_​colonial_​history/​v002/​2.3ballantyne.html [last accessed 14 December 2015]; see also John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-​System, 1830–​1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. vi, 6. I use the term southern Africa because it includes land claimed by the British South Africa Company in 1890 (later Rhodesia), which was part of what the British considered South Africa until the unification of its other South African colonies in 1910. I employ South African rather than southern African as a possessive for the British colonies in the region, inclusive of Rhodesia, except when otherwise indicated. 5  Robert Dixon, Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation in Anglo-​Australian Popular Fiction, 1875–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (London: Routledge, 1996); Janet C. Myers, Antipodal England: Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009); Tamara S. Wagner (ed.), Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-​Century Literature (Gender and Genre 5; London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011). 6  Olive Schreiner, The South African Question by an English South African (Chicago: Sergel, 1899).

286    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture

British Emigration, 1815–​1914: Who, Where, When, Why, and How Between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the beginning of the First World War, somewhere between 16 and 23 million people emigrated from Britain.7 Though they came from a variety of backgrounds and went to destinations across the globe, most were young adults, urban, working class, and male.8 The majority went unassisted (independent of any organization or government support), as free subjects (rather than as convicts), and did not return.9 By far the most popular destination was the United States, followed by Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and southern Africa.10 Only in the decade after the 1815 Treaty of Paris, compelled by economic depression, a surging population, and social unrest, did the imperial government directly finance emigration on a large scale—​to southern Africa, Canada, and Australia.11 For the remainder of the period its unofficial policy was ‘to avoid positive intervention, while broadly sanctioning Imperial colonization and discouraging emigration to the United States’, the erstwhile colony and expanding rival that shared a border with Canada.12 Colonial emigrants, for the most 7  Given the indeterminacy of records, assessments of the exact figures vary. See Marjory Harper, ‘British Migration and the Peopling of the Empire’, in Andrew Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, iii. The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 75–​87, at 75; Stephen Constantine, ‘Empire Migration and Social Reform 1880–​1950’, in Colin G. Pooley and Ian D. Whyte (eds), Migrants, Emigrants and Immigrants: A Social History of Migration (London: Routledge, 1991), 62–​ 83, at 64; Stephen Constantine, ‘Introduction: Empire Migration and Imperial Harmony’, in Constantine (ed.), Emigrants and Empire: British Settlement in the Dominions Between the Wars (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 1–​21, at 1; and W. A. Carrothers, Emigration from the British Isles (London: Cass, 1966), 305–​306. 8  Colin G. Pooley and Jean Turnbull, Migration and Mobility in Britain since the Eighteenth Century (London: University College London Press, 1998), 277; Carrothers, Emigration, 253; A. James Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen: Genteel Poverty and Female Emigration, 1830–​1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 177; Diana C. Archibald, ‘Angel in the Bush: Exporting Domesticity through Female Emigration’, in Rita S. Krandis (ed.), Imperial Objects: Essays on Victorian Women’s Emigration and the Unauthorized Imperial Experience (New York: Twayne-​Simon and Schuster Macmillan, 1998), 228–​247, at 229; Susan Jackel (ed.), A Flannel Shirt and Liberty: British Emigrant Gentlewomen in the Canadian West, 1880–​1914 (Vancouver and London: University of British Columbia Press, 1982), p. xv. 9  Archibald, ‘Angel’, 242. 10 Darwin, Empire, 4. 11  Harper, ‘British Migration’, 79; Keith Williams, ‘“A way out of our troubles”: The Politics of Empire Settlement, 1900–​1922’, in Constantine (ed.), Emigrants and Empire, 22–​44, at 22. 12  Harper, ‘British Migration’, 77. There were some exceptions: ‘The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 […] allowed Boards of Guardians to assist the emigration of those in need’ and ‘the Local Government Board revived the use of the emigration clause of the Poor Law between 1880 and 1913, mainly to send children to Canada. The Home Office likewise dispatched some […] schoolchildren abroad initially under the Reformatory and Industrial Schools Act of 1891 and later the Children’s Act of 1908. In addition, the Unemployed Workmen’s Act of 1905 allowed for the funding of assisted emigration’ (Constantine, ‘Introduction’, 2, 3). The government was also involved in the transport of indentured labourers across various part of empire, from India to southern Africa, for example.

Gender, Genre, and South African Settlement    287 part, funded their own journeys, though a variety of forms of assistance, including low-​ interest loans, subsidies, free passages, and land, were available from charitable societies, colonial governments, trade unions, and commercial companies, such as shipping lines. Selection or nomination was required of those who received assistance: the former meant approval by an emigration society or colonial representative, who checked for such qualifications as ‘good character’ and robust health, and the latter, the vouching of a colonial friend or relative, who would also be expected to cover a portion of their fare.13 Critical push factors in British emigration during the period included population growth and economic downturns, following 1815, as well as in the 1840s, 1870s, and 1880s; ‘industrialization and […] rural–​urban shift’, which led to unemployment and overcrowding; ‘unjust land laws and changes in land tenure’, particularly in the Scottish Highlands; and famine, most notably in Ireland.14 Pull factors included the prospect of land, space, elevated economic and social status, relaxed social customs, a better climate, and improved health. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, imperialist rhetoric—​articulated in particular by colonial governments, the imperial government, the press, and emigration societies—​increasingly stressed the importance of strengthening the bonds of empire’s component parts, and thus the whole, through emigration. By the end of the century even ‘eugenic arguments’ had come into play.15 The Second Anglo-​B oer War (1899–​1902), in which the Boers and the British fought over republics that the former had founded, proved far more costly, deadly, and lengthy than the British had anticipated. Emphatically giving the lie to the empire’s unassailability, this inconvenient truth compelled colonials, emigrationists, and politicians alike to encourage not only ‘swamp[ing] the Boers’ in South Africa, but also ‘preserv[ing] Greater Britain for the Anglo-​Saxon stock’ in the Antipodes.16 The relative popularity of emigrant destinations was steady but not without flux across this hundred-​year period, with changes in the appeal of one affecting changes in the appeal of others. Mineral discoveries, economic growth and decline, drought, and the waxing and waning of colonial government-​sponsored emigration were some of the key interrelated factors shaping trends in migration. The discovery of gold in Australia and the United States in the 1840s and 1850s, New Zealand in the 1860s, Canada in the 1860s and 1890s, and southern Africa in the 1880s caused surges in emigration to these respective destinations. The 1880s also saw a reduction in government-​sponsored emigration to New Zealand, as well as economic depression in Australia and the United States, which in turn compelled economic decline in Canada. The net effect was that 13 

Jan Gothard, Blue China: Single Female Migration to Colonial Australia (Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2001), 14. 14  The quotation is from Helen R. Woolcock, Rights of Passage: Emigration to Australia in the Nineteenth Century (London: Tavistock, 1986), 25; Harper, ‘British Migration’, 76, 80–​81. 15  Harper, ‘British Migration’, 81. 16  ‘The Need of Women Colonists in South Africa’, letter, Saturday Review (20 September 1902), 364–​ 365, at 364; Oswald P. Law and W. T. Gill, ‘A White Australia: What It Means’, Nineteenth Century and After, 55, no. 323 (1904), 146–​154, at 154.

288    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture ‘South Africa received a considerably greater number of British emigrants than either Canada or Australia’ in that decade.17 Emigration also occurred between colonies. For instance, some of the men and women who came to South Africa from the dominions during the Second Anglo-​Boer War, respectively to fight and to teach English to Boer children in concentration camps, took advantage of emigration schemes to settle permanently.18 Emigration, in other words, was a translocal affair affected not only by push factors from one’s site of departure and pull factors to one’s chosen (but not necessarily final) destination, but also by push factors in other locations that made pull factors comparatively stronger. A web of movement, the empire was itself situated in an increasingly globalized space of exchange. From the start, colonization had been a particularly gendered affair:  (white) men explored, set up trading stations, and established military outposts, although, given Britain’s strong interest in the proliferation of its own ‘race’, British women were necessary for settlement. In 1849 emigrationist Edward Gibbon Wakefield remarked, a ‘colony that is not attractive to women, is an unattractive colony’.19 Two years later, the census revealed that there were 0.5 million more women than men in Britain, ‘a statistical surplus’ of ‘redundant’—​shorthand for unmarried—​women for which society had little use.20 Given the limited roles and occupations available to women, particularly in the middle classes, redundancy was also an economic problem, not least for the women themselves. The solution that W. R. Greg famously proposed in an 1862 National Review article was female emigration to the colonies. Although a number of emigration societies specifically for women emerged between the middle of the century and the First World War, the bulk of Britain’s colonial-​bound emigrants continued to be male. Thus, as the empire expanded, so, too, did the ratio of both colonial men to women and metropolitan women to men. By 1911 there were 1.3 million more women than men in Britain and 0.75 million more white men than white women in the self-​governing dominions, a

17 

Charlotte Macdonald, A Woman of Good Character: Single Women as Immigrant Settlers in Nineteenth-​Century New Zealand (Wellington: Williams, 1990), 4; the quotation is from Carrothers, Emigration, 238. 18  Great Britain, Further Correspondence Relating to Affairs in South Africa (In continuation of [Cd. 903], January, 1901) (Cd. 1163) (London: HMSO, 1902); Eliza Reidi, ‘Teaching Empire: British and Dominions Women Teachers in the South African War Concentration Camps’, English Historical Review, 120, no. 489 (2005), 1316–​1347, at 1342. 19  Qtd. in Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen, 45. 20  Nan H. Dreher, ‘Redundancy and Emigration: The “Woman Question” in Mid-​Victorian Britain’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 26, no. 1 (1993), 3–​7, at 3; W. R. Greg, ‘Why Are Women Redundant?’ National Review, 14, no. 28 (1862), 434–​460. The census further revealed that two-​thirds of Britain’s female population between the ages of 20 and 24, one-​third between 24 and 35, and more than two-​fifths between 24 and 40 were unmarried (Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-​Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 4). Though ‘redundancy’ was primarily equated with single women in Britain after mid-​century, it had earlier been used by the House of Commons Select Committee on Emigration in 1826 to describe the unemployed (Oliver MacDonagh, Emigration in the Victorian Age: Debates on the Issue from 19th Century Critical Journals (Westmead, England: Gregg, 1973), p. v).

Gender, Genre, and South African Settlement    289 cause of concern for an empire invested in racial demarcation.21 By this time, there were also more occupational opportunities available for women—​since the late nineteenth century, hospitals, shops, and offices had begun hiring women.22 Nonetheless, single women not only remained, in the eyes of most, a social problem; with the rise of the New Woman and the suffragette, they were increasingly a source of anxiety. Female emigrationists faced an intensified version of the same concerns all emigrationists did:  generating metropolitan support, meeting the expectations of colonial employers and governments, and attracting emigrants. Metropolitans accused emigrationists of ‘stripping Britain of the brain and sinew of its population’, and, when it came to working-​class women, of ‘servant-​stealing’.23 Colonials accused them of sending unqualified, unprepared, even dissolute emigrants. They complained of working-​class men and women who lacked specialized skills and middle-​class women who lacked the will to undertake hard work. The question of character, long an issue of importance to colonials, was raised more often and more aggressively when it came to single female emigrants, especially those who were working class.24 And while the widespread prophylactic use of quinine starting in the 1850s boosted migration, making emigration increasingly ‘respectable’, the character of single female emigrants remained a subject of scrutiny.25 In order to attract what they considered the ‘right sort of woman’, female emigration societies stressed colonial opportunities not only for employment, but also for ‘marriage, home-​building, self-​fulfillment, [and] moral guardianship, [as well as] imperial and racial duty’.26 These emphases varied over time and from organization to organization. Some societies focused on middle-​class women, others on the working classes, some on supplying governesses, others on servants, some on southern Africa, others on the Antipodes, and so on. The possibility of marriage, never a selling point in the few feminist societies that existed, was touted more frequently at the turn of the century, as was the female civilizing mission, which entailed carrying British culture, upholding the morality of male colonials, and bearing their children.27 In addition to drumming up support in the metropole, developing networks in the colonies, and soliciting (and selecting) emigrants, female emigrationists established training colleges in Britain, set 21 

Jean Jacques Van-​Helten and Keith Williams, ‘“The Crying Need of South Africa”: The Emigration of Single British Women to the Transvaal, 1901–​10’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 10, no. 1 (1983), 17–​38, at 21. 22 Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen, 152. 23  Harper, ‘British Migration’, 75; Julia Bush, Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power (Women, Power and Politics; London: Leicester University Press, 2000), 152; cf. New Horizons: A Hundred Years of Women’s Migration (London: HMSO, 1963), 112. 24 Macdonald, Woman, 16. 25  Margaret Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 25. 26  Julia Bush employs this phrase in the title of an article she wrote on the subject, but it should be noted that it appeared regularly in nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century emigrationist literature (‘“The Right Sort of Woman”: Female Emigrators and Emigration to the British Empire, 1890–​1910’, Women’s History Review, 3, no. 3 (1994), 385–​409); Bush, Edwardian Ladies, 147. 27 Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen, 142, 162, 163; cf. Bush, Edwardian Ladies, 159.

290    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture up hostels in Britain and the colonies, attempted to insulate single women from men aboard ship (hiring matrons as supervisors, working with the imperial government and shipping companies to segregate the cabins of single men and women), and arranged for the colonial reception of emigrants.28 The first major influx of British emigrants to southern Africa, a site of European interest since the 1600s, though only a British colony since 1806, took place in 1820, with the arrival of 4,000 men, women, and children (another 1,000 would follow in the next two years).29 This government-​sponsored scheme was only moderately successful. Many of the new colonists, negotiating with the large indigenous and Boer populations, attempting to farm with insufficient resources and experience, and besieged in the early years with drought, felt that the government had neither adequately informed them about nor prepared them for the hardships of settlement.30 Though there was some independent immigration in the next several decades, South Africa, as one 1888 guidebook put it, largely ‘dropped out of the emigrant’s ken’ until the discovery of vast quantities of diamonds in the 1860s and gold in the 1880s.31 From then until the outbreak of the Second Anglo-​Boer War, they arrived in droves from across the empire (many came from other sites as well). After the war, the imperial government, colonial governments, emigration societies, and South African luminaries like Cecil Rhodes encouraged soldiers to stay and women to immigrate, at first to strengthen their numbers against the Boers and then, reconciliation appearing the only ‘politically viable’ option, with the Boers against the indigenous.32 Thousands settled in South Africa between 1902 and 1904, but this period of mass migration and ‘artificial prosperity’ was followed by a six-​year depression, during which, although emigration societies continued to have some success, ‘departures from South Africa exceeded arrivals’.33 With the 1910 Unification of South Africa—​bringing together the four colonies of Natal, the Orange River, the Transvaal, and the Cape—​there was again a rise in immigration, which quickly tapered off with the start of the First World War. 28 

See Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen; Gothard, Blue China; and Jackel (ed.), Flannel Shirt. The Portuguese, Dutch, and British all landed ships on the Cape of Good Hope in the 1600s. And though in 1620 the British even planted a flag on the shore of this ‘half-​way house to India’, it only became a European colony in 1652, when the Dutch East India Company took formal possession for Holland (Dorothea Fairbridge, A History of South Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1918), 29). The Dutch then ceded it to the British in 1795, took it back in 1802, and turned it over once again in 1806. The thousands of Dutch-​, German-​, and French Huguenot-​descended settlers who had made the Cape their home, as well as many thousands more indigenous, thus became British subjects. 30  See ‘Memorial to Lord Bathurst From a Number of British Settlers, 10th March, 1823’, Cape Illustrated Magazine, 6, no. 1 (September 1895), 44–​46. 31  Castle Line Handbook and Emigrant’s Guide to South Africa (London: Curie, 1888), 30. 32  Dubow, ‘How British’, 14. On South African immigration in this period, see, in particular, Van-​ Helten and Williams, ‘“Crying Need”’; Cecillie Swaisland, Servants and Gentlewomen to the Golden Land: The Emigration of Single Women from Britain to Southern Africa, 1820–​1939 (Oxford: Berg and University of Natal Press, 1993); and Brian L. Blakely, ‘Women and Imperialism: The Colonial Office and Female Emigration to South Africa, 1901–​1910’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 13, no. 2 (1981), 131–​149. 33 Carrothers, Emigration, 250. 29 

Gender, Genre, and South African Settlement    291

Emigration Literature The discursive encouragement of immigration to southern Africa, as with other sites of settlement, took many forms, amongst them emigration guides, personal narratives, emigration society publications, journalism, and fiction. Of course, not all emigration literature is emigrationist, or ‘booster literature’. And of course, a settler novel, whether emigrationist or not, is quite a different genre than, say, the emigration society brochure. What the forms listed above have in common is that they reflect the translocality of settlement. And inasmuch as emigration literature often manifests ‘a paradise complex’, the best of it explores sociopolitical shifts in ways that engender generic innovation.34 Thus, the New Woman novel, the female colonial romance, and the empire romance, all of which were concerned with the place of women, emerged in an imperial South African context. While booster literature took off after 1815,35 settlement fiction did not become popular until much later in the century. In 1871, G. A. Henty, a well-​travelled metropolitan (but never a settler) and enormously popular writer of boys’ fiction, published the first of his many stories focused on one or more boy settlers. In 1883, with the hugely successful release of The Story of an African Farm, Schreiner became the first colonial literary celebrity. In 1887, Haggard published his only South African realist novel, Jess, which was for nearly thirty years thereafter among the most widely read of all his works.36 In the 1890s, the prolific Bessie Marchant began to publish stories of girls’ settlement. And by the time that Seven Little Australians, by Australian novelist Ethel Turner, was published in 1894, ‘books were appearing in significant numbers that were actually set entirely in the colonies, written by authors […] who were themselves colonials’.37 By the end of the century, fictions of settlement, written by colonial authors like Schreiner, authorial informants like Haggard, and metropolitans like Marchant, had become an important part of the literary landscape, both juvenile and adult. Scholars have identified a number of tropes that commonly appear in these narratives (with greater frequency and intensity the more emigrationist the story) and in 34  The quotations are from James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-​World, 1783–​1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 153. 35 Belich, Replenishing the Earth. 36  Evidence of Jess’s popularity includes but is not limited to the fact that the novel went through three editions in its first year of publication; earned Haggard a bonus from his publishers (D. S. Higgins, Rider Haggard: A Biography (New York: Stein, 1981), 117); had reached at least its twenty-​seventh edition by 1912, not counting, in Haggard’s own words, ‘the countless numbers in cheap form’ (H. Rider Haggard, The Days of My Life: An Autobiography, vol. 1, ed. C. J. Longman (London: Longmans, 1926), 266); and sold more than 64,000 copies between 1911 and 1916 (Morton Cohen, Rider Haggard: His Life and Works (London: Hutchinson, 1960), 233). Over sixty years after it was published, ‘it still ha[d]‌a steady sale in cheap editions’ (Lilias Rider Haggard, The Cloak that I Left: A Biography of the Author Henry Rider Haggard (London: Hodder, 1951), 128). 37  Judith Rowbotham, Good Girls Make Good Wives: Guidance for Girls in Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 215.

292    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture emigration literature more broadly. These include the domesticating and morally elevating influence of women; the open spaces, natural beauty, and healthy outdoor life of the colonies; ‘the joys of horse-​riding’; ‘more equal marriages’; ‘social equality and advancement’; ‘increased movement and freedom’; the need for adaptability and hard work; early hardships; the rewards of perseverance; and the relative absence of the indigenous.38 In reading Antipodean, Canadian, and South African emigration literature, I have identified several additional tropes: the magic of the landscape, the longing of the departed to return, and the wish of girls and women to have been born male. I have also identified three tropes particular to South African narratives of female settlers, which appear in different combinations in the various texts I will discuss: the heroine as symbol of South Africa, the heroine’s awakening into womanhood, and significant relationships between women. Aside from their focus on South African female settlers, the common thread that binds the narratives I  examine is the attempt to resolve a translocal crisis through generic innovation. Schreiner, Haggard, and Page do more than merely explore new terrain; they map it through genre, tracking and tackling sociopolitical problems through the expansion of literary form. My reading of their work is indebted to related scholarship on colony and gender; colony and genre; and, in a handful of instances, on colony, gender, and genre. Unlike Coral Lansbury, Diana Archibald, LeeAnne Richardson, Terri Doughty, and Megan Norcia, the first two of whom remain rooted in the canon and all of whom primarily focus on metropolitan-​identified authors, I  examine authorial informants with more complex ideological and geographic identities. Unlike Dixon, Myers, Lansbury, and Kristine Moffat, I  focus not on the Antipodes, but on southern Africa, where the substantial presence of a non-​British European-​descended population complicated British colonization.39 Unlike Phillips, whose unique geographic-​literary exploration of the relationship between adventure fiction, domestic fiction, and gender focuses on boys and men, I am concerned with girls and women. Building on and contributing to this emerging body of work, I offer translocal readings of South African settlement fictions that elucidate their cultural-​ imperial relevance, principally in regard to the place of women and the development of literature.

38 Bush, Edwardian Ladies, 161, 160; Williams, ‘“A way out”’, 27; Myers, Antipodal England, 121. 39 

Coral Lansbury, Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth-​Century English Literature (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1970); Diana C. Archibald, Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in The Victorian Novel (Columbia, MI: University of Missouri Press, 2002); LeeAnne M. Richardson, New Woman and Colonial Adventure Fiction in Victorian Britain: Gender, Genre, and Empire (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2006); Terri Doughty, ‘Domestic Goddesses on the Frontier; or, Tempting the Mothers of Empire with Adventure’, in Wagner (ed.), Victorian Settler Narratives, 193–​205; Megan A. Norcia, ‘Angel of the Island: L. T. Meade’s New Girl as the Heir of a Nation-​ Making Robinson Crusoe’, The Lion and the Unicorn, 28, no. 3 (2004), 345–​362; Kristine Moffat, ‘Agents of Empire and Feminist Rebels: Settlement and Gender in Isabella Aylmer’s Distant Homes and Ellen Ellis’s Everything Is Possible To Will’, in Wagner (ed.), Victorian Settler Narratives, 41–​53.

Gender, Genre, and South African Settlement    293

Olive Schreiner and the New Woman Novel The Story of an African Farm is a logical place to start my analysis but only for reasons of chronology, since both author and text are the odd ones out. Unlike authorial informants Haggard and Page, Schreiner, the daughter of emigrants (German father, British mother), was herself South African-​born. Though she would later spend years in Britain and Europe, she wrote African Farm (as a teenage governess) before she had set foot abroad. Despite the pride she took in her British South African identity, Schreiner, unlike Haggard and Page, was not an advocate of colonial emigration. And while African Farm tells the story of settler life, it differs from the others novels I examine in suggesting that the land never wholly yields, either materially or metaphorically, to the hands of British interlopers.40 Lyndall, then, may represent the colony that seems never, in Schreiner’s narrative, to flourish, but she is neither its saviour, unlike Haggard’s female settlers, nor, unlike Page’s, its strength. Correlatively, while the other novels under discussion suggest that southern Africa is a place of enhanced opportunity for British women, African Farm depicts British South African womanhood as a position of weakness, relative to white men, if also one of power, relative to children and non-​whites. The prototypical New Woman novel, ‘the forerunner of all the novels of the Modern Woman’ (as W. T. Stead famously deemed Schreiner’s novel in 1894), was a textual attempt to confront the trauma of growing into this ambivalent position. Challenging the fantasy of colonial freedom through the depiction of thwarted promise, the New Woman novel thus emerged not in the metropole but in a distant colony.41 The novel announces the New Woman’s birth and emergent self-​consciousness through the figure of Lyndall, who conceives of herself and her desires in political terms and aspires to become, though is unable finally to operate as, a self-​sustaining agent outside the home. As a poor, orphaned, rural, largely uneducated child, she admires Napoleon, who ‘once […] was only a little child, then he was a lieutenant, then he was a general, then he was an emperor’ (SAF, 47). ‘We will not be children always’, she tells Waldo, the orphaned child of German emigrants, ‘we shall have the power too, some day’ (SAF, 127). Four years at boarding school fail to empower Lyndall in the ways she had hoped, though they do teach her that gender is the principal cause of her disempowerment. ‘If Napoleon had been born a woman’, she remarks after her return, ‘he would 40 

See Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Stephen Gray, Southern African Literature: An Introduction (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979). 41  W. T. Stead, ‘The Novel of the Modern Woman’, Review of Reviews, 10 (1894), 64–​74, at 64. Contemporary critics routinely identify African Farm as the first New Woman novel and Schreiner as ‘the “mother” of the New Woman fiction’ (Sally Ledger, ‘The New Woman and Feminist Fictions’, in Gail Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 153–​168, at 163).

294    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture have risen, but the world would not have heard of him as it hears of him now’, for he could only have ‘rule[d]‌in the dark, covertly, and by stealth, through […] men’ (SAF, 192). Lyndall channels her disappointment into a preoccupation with ‘the position of women […]; it is the only thing about which I think much or feel much’ (SAF, 187). Her central arguments, which read like a roster of those articulated by the metropolitan New Woman in the following decade, are: female education ‘cultivate[s]’ ‘imbecility and weakness’; female intelligence is undervalued and underutilized; women, employed only as ‘ill-​paid drudges’, lack the opportunity to do interesting work; women are judged by their appearance, but even beauty is a curse; marriage is for women a kind of slavery, though ‘old maidenhood[,] […] a name that in itself signifies defeat’, has scant advantages; and, denied the freedom of boys and men, women have few real choices in life (SAF, 185, 190, 194). ‘Shape[d]’, ‘compressed’, and ‘fitted’ for their domestic duties from childhood, ‘they are nicely adapted machines for experimenting on the question, “Into how little space can a human soul be crushed?”’ (SAF, 189, 185). Cogent, eloquent, and prescient though Lyndall’s expatiations are, they are not supported by a plan of action to implement change. She recognizes that society not ability hampers the female sex, predicts that society will eventually change, and aches to live in ‘the future’, when ‘perhaps, to be born a woman will not be to be born branded’, but she does nothing to bring that future about (SAF, 188). If she desires a ‘time […] when each woman’s life is filled with earnest, independent labour’, why, Waldo reasonably asks, ‘do you not try to bring that time? […] When you speak, I believe all you say; other people would listen to you also’ (SAF, 195). Notwithstanding this encouragement, Lyndall does not lead, organize, or even participate in a group. She forms bonds with no women, white or of colour, and fails utterly to make any connection between gendered and racial subjugation. Deeply entitled and filled with contradictory impulses, Lyndall does little for herself and less for others. She does not work as hard as Em. She does not try to make the most of her education. She does not hesitate to appropriate her cousin’s fiancé. She does not consider joining Waldo in search of employment beyond the farm. She uses both Gregory and RR, who surely has at least some right to the child she prevents him from seeing. Sustained by RR’s money and nursed by Gregory’s hands, Lyndall, often imperious and most comfortable in the role of ‘queen’, does not offer significant assistance to anyone.42 She desires ‘the knowledge and power of the male’, but also ‘yearn[s]‌for the signifiers of femininity’43—​‘real diamonds’, for instance, ‘pure, white silk, and little rosebuds’ (SAF, 45, 46). She does not want to marry—​to be ‘h[e]ld […] fast’, ‘to [be] master[ed]’—​but 42 

SAF, 181. Preparing to run off with RR, Lyndall leaves the sum of her fortune behind for her cousin. ‘Fifty pounds for a lover!’ Lyndall remarks to herself of her own dubious generosity. ‘A noble reward!’ (SAF, 242). On at least one occasion, Lyndall does return money that RR sends her, but given that she leaves the farm with none of her own and winds up on her own in the Transvaal with ‘heaps of money’, she must have willingly kept at least some he has given her (in addition to benefitting from that which he sends the landlady privately for her care) (SAF, 271). 43  Patricia Murphy, Time is of the Essence: Temporality, Gender, and the New Woman (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), 219.

Gender, Genre, and South African Settlement    295 she can conceive of loving so ‘that to lie under the foot of the thing [she] loved would be more heaven than to lie in the breast of another’ (SAF, 236, 238, 232).44 She is attracted to the arts but ‘fail[s] to establish any calling or vocation’. She bears a child out of wedlock, but then, ‘like so many other Victorian heroines, goes into a decline’.45 From one vantage point, Lyndall’s sense of entitlement is an affirmation of the inherent equality of women, the fulcrum of her refusal to compromise; from another, it reflects both her limited perspective, her belief in the inherent superiority of whites in general and the English in particular, and her self-​involvement. Social restrictions, though the primary, are thus not the only cause of her failure to establish a viable path for herself, to grow into the woman she desires to become; her own imperiousness, narrow scope, and self absorption are also contributing factors. So while Lyndall’s failure to thrive legitimates the necessity of feminist rebellion, it also reflects the youthful, privileged, colonial, English female subject’s inability to think beyond herself. One wonders if this inability is only Lyndall’s, or whether it was also Schreiner’s, who, in this earliest work, gives no sign of recognizing that the plight of colonized peoples in any way resonates with that of white women.46 With her limited access to weapons of social warfare—​useful education, female community, and alliances with other groups of the oppressed—​and her chronic self-​ involvement, Lyndall cannot solve the problem that Schreiner confronts:  the lack of opportunity for colonial women. She awakes not into a satisfying awareness of colonial womanhood, but rather into the realization that adulthood will not, after all, improve her lot. Though Lyndall is a far cry from the ‘female ideal’ of the domestic novel, her transformation from theorizing to acting subject, from observer to agent, is a failure.47 She dies, not a stronger version of, but rather ‘a frail of shadow of herself ’.48 Though 44 

The eponymous heroine of Schreiner’s novel Undine (begun in 1873, published posthumously in 1928) similarly claims, ‘I don’t want to be loved; I only want to love something’ ((New York: Harper, 1928), 133). Schreiner expressed similar sentiments in a personal letter: ‘No one will ever absorb me and make me lose myself utterly, and unless someone did I should never marry’ (letter to Erilda Cawood, 24 April 1878, qtd. in Olive Schreiner, Olive Schreiner Letters, vol. 1: 1871–​1899, ed. Richard Rive (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 22). 45  Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-​Century Women Writers (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), 26; Laurence Lerner, ‘Olive Schreiner and the Feminists’, in Malvern van Wyk Smith and Don Maclennan (eds), Olive Schreiner and After: Essays on Southern African Literature in Honour of Guy Butler (Cape Town: Philip, 1983), 67–​79, at 74. 46  Later in life, Schreiner would develop an interest in the plight of Africans. For example, in the early twentieth century, she resigned from the Women’s Enfranchisement League on the basis of its refusal to advocate for the enfranchisement of women of colour (First and Scott, 262). And in her 1908 article, ‘The Native Question’, she expressed her ‘oppos[ition] [to] a Union of South African states because of the colour bar in the proposed constitution’ (in Carol Barash (ed.), An Olive Schreiner Reader: Writings on Women and South Africa (London: Pandora, 1987), 186–​197, at 186). See also Thoughts on South Africa, written primarily between 1890 and 1892 (First and Scott, 197), in which she reflects on her early racism and the change in her ‘feeling towards the native races [as a result of] increased knowledge’ (Olive Schreiner, Thoughts on South Africa (New York: Stokes, 1923), 17). 47  Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: The Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 9. 48  Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (eds), Sexchanges, vol. 2, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 60.

296    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture a feminist critique of sexual and social mores, African Farm is ultimately entrenched in the generic frame of the domestic novel it obliquely critiques. Schreiner may have yearned for the independence that echoed rhetorically throughout (white) South Africa, but faced with the stark reality of adult womanhood, she recognized its contingency, in regard to gender if not (yet) to race.49 Marking an end as much as a beginning, African Farm registers the incipient demise of the domestic novel as well as its long-​standing authority. Like Lyndall, it imagines a different future that it cannot quite reach.

Rider Haggard and the Female Colonial Romance Claiming an expertise predicated on and a British identity enhanced by his experience in southern Africa, Haggard was the quintessential authorial informant. His ‘literary shadow’, as one contemporary reviewer noted, ‘is an African one, acquired by actual travel under the sun of Africa, and it sticks to him’.50 Between 1877 and 1879, Haggard worked in the colonial administration: first as a secretary to Sir Henry Bulwer, governor of Natal; later as an assistant to Sir Theophilus Shepstone, special commissioner to the Transvaal; and later still, in his own right, at ‘barely twenty-​one years of age’, as master and registrar of the High Court of the Transvaal, after its 1877 annexation from the Boers. He was not only present when Shepstone annexed the Boer republic; he himself raised the British flag publically there for the first time. It was a story he told many times, initially to his mother, to whom he wrote: ‘It will be some years before people at home realise how great an act [the annexation] has been, an act without parallel’. Planning to settle permanently in southern Africa, Haggard left the colonial service to farm ostriches, married on a visit to England, and returned with his wife to his Natal farm, very near the Transvaal border, in December 1880, to find ‘the Transvaal in open rebellion’.51 Their arrival thus coincided with the start of the First Anglo-​Boer War (1880–​1), which ended just fourteen weeks later with the signing of a treaty in Haggard’s own farmhouse.52 Highly critical of the hasty British surrender, Haggard believed that ‘Downing-​street and the power behind it took [the war] lying down, for I fancy that had the matter been left in the hands of the English colonists there would have been a different tale to tell’. ‘Pain[ed]’ by a ‘betrayal, the bitterness of which no lapse of time ever can solace or even alleviate’, and ‘believing that soon or late the British power was doomed to failure and probably to extinction there’, Haggard returned with his family to England.53 49 

See note 46, above. ‘She’, review of She by Rider Haggard, Saturday Review (8 January 1887), 44. 51 Haggard, Days, 108, 107, 175. 52  Harry How, ‘Illustrated Interviews: No. VII: Mr. H. Rider Haggard’, Strand Magazine (January 1892), 3–​17, at 13. 53  ‘Mr. Rider Haggard on Anglo-​Africa’, Daily Telegraph (24 April 1894), 3; Haggard, Days, 265, 194; Rider Haggard, ‘Boers are Loyal, Says Rider Haggard’, New York Times, 18 October 1914, C4. 50 

Gender, Genre, and South African Settlement    297 Set in the Transvaal between 1880 and 1881, Jess enabled Haggard to confront the trauma that impelled his transformation from colonial subject to authorial informant, from colonial in residence to colonial in exile. Published four years after African Farm (and two years after King Solomon’s Mines had made him famous), it has much in common with Schreiner’s novel. They both tell the story of orphaned relatives and age-​ mates, one submissive, one independent, on a remote South African farm. Both signal a crisis of identity in their authors, a colonial female who anticipates authority but is constrained by social politics and a colonial male who anticipates loyalty but is constrained by imperial governance, respectively. Making an implicit comparison between the weakness of a vacillating imperial policy and the focused determination of the South African frontierswoman, Jess contemns the former while extolling the latter. The novel’s central, impassioned drama—​Frank Muller, a Boer leader, vs the Crofts, an English colonial family—​plays out as a version of the war in miniature. Entwining the personal and the political, Jess asserts the interests of British South Africans, ‘we far away people [who] are only the counters with which they play their game’.54 The British South African that Haggard once was, Jess represents this colonial position, one which after Britain’s surrender Haggard could not endure, either as a British-​identified citizen of an Afrikaner republic, or as a proud British subject humbled by imperial surrender.55 Through Jess’s heroics, Haggard not only enacts a fantasy of recovery; he also redresses his shame—​‘the highest sort of shame, shame for my country’—​by shaming the mother country for its failure of commitment.56 Recuperating farm and family, both ‘deserted’, like the Transvaal, by Britain, Jess is at once that which protects and that which is in need of protection, both the power that Britain failed to supply and the territory to which Britain failed to supply it (J, 226). A late-​century angel of the frontier rather than a mid-​century angel of the house, Jess acts in the service of both family and country, fighting to preserve a colonial domesticity that enables greater freedom for women, even while it demands greater sacrifice. At the ‘outbreak of hostilities’, she finds herself 200 miles from her family’s farm, trapped on the outskirts of a besieged Pretoria, where she ‘begin[s]‌to lose faith in relieving columns that never came. “If we don’t help ourselves”’, she tells John Niel, a recently retired army captain new to the colony, ‘“my opinion is that we may stop here till we are starved out”’ (J, 147, 179). Unlike Niel, who can ‘enroll himself in the corps of mounted volunteers, known as the Pretoria Carbineers’, Jess cannot directly participate in the events taking place around her (J, 156).57 Niel’s contributions, however, like those of all the novel’s 54 

H. Rider Haggard, Jess (New York: McKinlay, 1887), 59; further page references will be given in parentheses in the text and notes preceded by J. 55  In this period, the Boers began to call themselves Afrikaners, meaning African-​born in Afrikaans. 56 Haggard, Days, 201. Haggard described the novel as ‘a living record of our shame in South Africa, written by one by whom it was endured’ (Days, 265). 57  During the Anglo-​Zulu War (1879), Haggard was a lieutenant and adjutant of the Pretoria Horse, then ‘about sixty strong, and for the most part composed of Colonial-​born men of more or less gentle birth’ (H. Rider Haggard, ‘An Incident of African History’, Windsor Magazine (December 1900), para. 22, qtd. in Gerald Monsman, H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier: The Politics and Literary Contexts of His African Romances (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 2006), 38; cf. How, ‘Illustrated Interviews’, 11).

298    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Englishmen, are negligible. Given that the skirmishes in which he participates, like the major battles taking place further afield, ‘were not, on the whole, creditable to our arms, perhaps the less said about them the better’, opines the narrator (J, 159). On one such excursion, Niel ‘was slightly wounded by a bullet which passed between his saddle and his thigh’, summing up, in effect, Haggard’s estimation of imperial (in)efficacy during the war (J, 162). Nursing a wounded Niel back to health, Jess takes matters into her own hands, bargaining for a pass to travel home. When she finds that her family’s farmhouse has been burnt to the ground, her uncle convicted of treason, and her sister blackmailed by Muller into accepting his proposal of marriage, Jess again takes charge. More steadfast, committed, and capable than the imperial government, Jess steps up because it does not. Playing the roles of judge, warrior, and executioner, she thwarts not only Muller’s personal but his political ambitions as well. Trying him in an imaginary court, Jess ‘arraigned the powerful leader of men before the tribunal of her conscience, and without pity, if without wrath, passed upon him a sentence of extinction. But who was to be the executioner?’ (J, 314). After a failed attempt to enlist a family servant, Jess, ‘a strong woman [with] a will of iron’, does the job herself (J, 300).58 ‘Not shrinking from crime and daring to face death’, as an approving reviewer wrote in 1887, Jess murders Muller for the sake of the family that England forsook.59 Though not directly narrated, her attack on Muller, alone in his tent in the dead of night, is conveyed through ‘the flash of falling steel’, ‘the red knife in [Jess’s] hand’, and an unattributed ‘shriek’—​is it Jess? is it Muller’s?—​that ‘must have awakened every soul within a mile’ (J, 326). The dark of night, the sleeping chamber, the stain of blood, the piercing cry make Jess not a femme fatale but, like the Biblical Jael and the Deuterocanonical Judith, a war hero.60 For if a dead Muller cannot execute the aged Uncle Silas or force Bessie to become his wife, neither can he pursue his political aspirations, which include ‘driv[ing] the Englishmen out of South Africa’ and ruling over a Boer-​governed Transvaal (J, 190). Equipped with tenacity and a knife, Jess solves—​but only symbolically—​the problem that Haggard confronts: Britain’s concession to the Boers. Contrasting courageous female action with an ‘emasculated’—​Haggard’s word—​imperial policy, Jess celebrates the traditionally masculine acts of its heroine (J, 135). Generating a new kind of heroine, one with the strength—​of body, mind, and character—​to rival man and empire alike, the novel reflects Haggard’s belief in the colony’s ability to produce empowered subjects regardless of gender. Ultimately, then, his evocation of female potency, though unconcerned with women’s rights, expands colonial femininity. Merging adventure 58 

By having Jess look first to ‘the Hottentot Jantjé’, the Croft family servant whose parents and uncle Muller murdered in his presence twenty years earlier, to execute the offending man, Haggard not only further justifies his assassination; he also gives readers time to come to terms with the heroine’s surprising new role (J, 37). We thus have the chance to accept Jess as ‘practically […]a murderess’ before accepting her as an actual one (J, 317). 59  ‘Novels of the Week’, review of Jess by Haggard, Athenaeum (19 March 1887), 375. 60  Beheading Holofernes while the two are alone in his tent, Judith saves the Hebrew city of Bethulia from the Assyrians.

Gender, Genre, and South African Settlement    299 and domesticity through the figure of the modern settler heroine, the text breaks with the conventions of the domestic novel, producing feminist effects even in its attempt to shore up colonial domesticity. It thus forecasts his female-​driven adventure novels, Benita: An African Romance (1906) and The Ghost Kings (1908), in which he not only extends the parameters of colonial domesticity but also formulates a new genre: the female colonial romance.61 Where, two decades earlier, Haggard had been troubled by Britain’s hasty surrender in the First Anglo-​Boer War, he was, following the Second Anglo-​Boer War, concerned with maintaining the dominance that victory had brought. In an interview six months before the end of the later war, he suggested that an ‘influx of [British] population would’ be necessary to ‘protect […] the loyals’ and ‘to hold South Africa’. As he told The Times four years later, shortly before the former Boer republics were granted self-​government, he supported ‘land settlement in South Africa on a large scale of Anglo-​Saxon families as opposed to the emigration of single men’.62 Though not specifically encouraging the emigration of single British women, Haggard was explicitly advocating the emigration of British women. At the same time, Haggard was concerned about metropolitan female agency. Britain’s ‘superfluous women’, he claimed, generated unwelcome ‘female competition’ in the workforce. ‘Already in the press, in literature, in society appear tokens of an uprising’, he complained of women’s agitation for change. ‘When at last she has conquered at the polls, and as a political factor occupies the place that her numbers will give her, what then?’63 A response to his unease about both Britain’s position in South Africa and female agency in Britain, the female colonial romance enabled Haggard imaginatively to redirect feminist energy—​from metropole to colony, from self (as he saw it) to service, from suffragism to soil. In these texts, the relation ‘between the domestic reader and imperial space’ is one of attempted mastery not only over colonial territory and autochthonous subjects, as it is in the male imperial romance, but also over British women, who are themselves agents of empire; for while the female colonial romance allows for both

61 

Benita was published in the United States as The Spirit of Bambatse: A Romance. The first American edition (The Spirit of Bambatse: A Romance (The Works of H. Rider Haggard; New York: McKinlay, 1906)) is the one that I am using. Like Benita, The Ghost Kings was published in the US (in some editions) under another title, The Lady of the Heavens. I am using the original (British) edition: The Ghost Kings (London: Cassell, 1908); further page references will be given in parentheses in the text preceded by GK. 62  Frederick A. McKenzie, ‘After the War: Mr. H. Rider Haggard’s Prophecies’, Daily Mail, 7 December 1901, p. 8; H. Rider Haggard, ‘Mr. Rider Haggard on the Transvaal Constitution’, The Times, 7 August 1906, p. 8. 63  Haggard qtd. in Ernestine Evans, ‘Britain’s “Superfluous Women” Driving Men Out, Says Haggard’, New York Tribune, 22 July 1916, pp. 1–​2, at 1. On the phrase ‘superfluous women’, see Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 11; and Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 3, 10. Rider Haggard, ‘A Man’s View of Woman’, review of Woman: The Predominant Partner, by Edward Sullivan, African Review of Mining, Finance, and Commerce (22 September 1894), repr. in Haggard, She, ed. Andrew A. Stauffer (Ontario: Broadview, 2006), 337–​340, at 340.

300    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture female and indigenous strength, it does so with the counter-​intuitive aim of harnessing both.64 Nonetheless, in celebrating the accomplishments of female colonials, Haggard suggests opportunities for women beyond the more ostensibly political ones for which many were fighting in the metropole. Freed from the constraints of the metropole, Haggard’s colonial heroines do not ‘regress’, as do so many fictional male adventurers; rather, they carve out a new space for female authority, reinventing femininity as they reinforce the empire.65 Saviours of a land that values their strength, Haggard’s colonial heroines transcend domestication in their efforts to domesticate it on empire’s behalf. The eponymous heroine of Benita journeys with her father to Bambatse, a Makalanga fortress on the Zambesi River, at an unspecified time in the 1870s. The Makalanga, ‘a peaceful agricultural people’, seek her father’s assistance (in the form of guns) against the aggressive Matabele, then ruled by Lobengula; her father, in turn, seeks hidden treasure, buried by the Portuguese.66 Proving to be the spirit incarnate of a young Portuguese woman who has haunted Bambatse since her family died there six generations earlier, Benita locates the treasure, liberates herself and her father from captivity (by a German Jew depicted in anti-​Semitic terms) and her lover from death (at the hands of the Matabele), and secures the Matabele’s promise that they will leave the Makalanga in peace, thus making the region safer for all.67 Rachel Dove, the heroine of Ghost Kings, journeys to Zululand to rescue Noie, a young part-​Zulu girl, who has been kidnapped; is held captive by Dingaan, King of the Zulus, who seeks her advice regarding the encroachment of the Boers, then engaged on the Great Trek 64 

Nicholas Daly, Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 26. 65  Though there had been ‘a brief debate on the subject of women’s suffrage in the Cape Legislative Assembly’ in 1892, the issue was not taken seriously in South Africa until 1907, when it came before the Cape House of Assembly, where it was defeated sixty-​six to twenty-​four. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1889, was ‘the first society to advocate actively [for] women’s suffrage’, when it ‘established a “Franchise Department”’ in 1895, which led to the Cape Town Women’s Enfranchisement League in 1907 (Cheryl Walker, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in South Africa (Cape Town: Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, 1979), 22–​23). For discussions of male ‘regression’ (or ‘going native’), see Norman A. Etherington, ‘Rider Haggard, Imperialism, and the Layered Personality’, Victorian Studies, 22, no. 1 (1978), 71–​87, at 79, 83; Christopher Lane, The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 61; Brantlinger, Rule, 261, 268–​270; and Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Going Native in Nineteenth-​ Century History and Literature’, in Brantlinger, Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 65–​85. 66 Haggard, Spirit, 90. 67  The southernmost branch of the Mashona, the Makalanga are a Shona-​speaking people who had early contact with the Portuguese and were decimated by the Matabele over the course of many years, beginning in 1826, when Moselekatse split with the Zulu King, Chaka. See George McCall Theal, The Beginning of South African History (London: Unwin, 1902), 211–​212; and ‘The British South Africa Company Historical Catalogue and Souvenir of Rhodesia Empire Exhibition, Johannesburg, 1936–​37’, http://​bsac.greatnorthroad.org/​bsac.pdf [last accessed 3 November 2015]. Anti-​Semitism, a frequent trope in British South African fiction of the period, was often employed to offload avarice, in particular, onto those other than Anglo-​Saxons.

Gender, Genre, and South African Settlement    301 of the 1830s; travels to the (fictitious) land of the Ghost-​people, where she becomes involved in the region’s internal disputes; and liberates her lover from captivity. Elsewhere, I discuss the genre in detail, but space here allows for an analysis of only one of its central features: a particular manifestation of female friendship that I term mystical feminism.68 The heroines of Haggard’s female colonial romances possess innate psychic powers, which are strengthened by their spiritual affiliation with other women. What these female–​female relationships facilitate and what the colonial heroine manifests is mystical feminism. A manifestation of wisdom, insight, and authority in the female colonial, it is an enabling condition rather than, simply, the anxious, misogynistic depiction of woman as occult, irrational, and selfish evinced by ‘“She-​who-​must-​be-​obeyed”’.69 Rather than demonizing the woman or the feminine, mystical feminism empowers both in the British colonial, channelling female strength towards expanding colonial domains of safety and influence, and implicating her in imperialism. To some degree this phenomenon, like the affiliation between woman and land, or woman and indigenous, naturalizes the association between femininity, indigeneity, and the mystical, but by valorizing mystical feminism, the colonial romance also implicitly valorizes the potency of female-​ female and indigenous-​colonial synergy. The bonds that enable mystical feminism transcend not only race and culture, but also matter and time. Rachel’s ‘power of prescience […] came to her from her mother’, who had inherited ‘the second sight’ from her own mother (GK, 28, 3). Noie, whose father was one of the Ghost-​people, the psychic tribe after whom the book is named, also has psychic abilities. When, on the first day of their acquaintance, she tells Rachel, ‘Your fate and mine are intertwined […], for our spirits are sisters which have dwelt together in past days’, Rachel affirms only her affection: ‘Well, Noie, I love you, I know not why’ (GK, 80–​81). Though far from an acceptance of Noie’s conviction, her words gesture, if ever so slightly, towards a levelling of status. Through spirit not blood, Rachel is herself connected to the Ghost-​people, in whose destiny she plays a crucial role. Though a woman leads the tribe, a man can rule through her, which is precisely what Eddo, one of its priests, attempts to do. Seeking to take advantage of Rachel’s vulnerable state—​having found the murdered bodies of her parents and concluded that a similar fate has befallen her lover, Rachel has essentially dissociated or, in the language of the text, ‘her spirit had gone’—​Eddo aims to ‘make her mouth to speak my words, and her pure eyes to see things that are denied to mine, even the future’ (GK, 296). His paramount goal is to establish Rachel as the new Mother of the Trees (a role currently held by Noie’s great-​aunt Nya), so that, as Rachel says once she regains her senses, ‘thou wilt rule and I do thy bidding. […] I will have none of

68  See Melissa Free, ‘“It is I Who Have the Power”: Settling Women in Haggard’s South African Imaginary’, Genre, 45, no. 3 (2012), 359–​393. Thanks to Genre—​in particular Tim Murphy, the journal’s editor—​for permission to reprint several passages from my essay here. 69 Haggard, She, 84.

302    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture it’ (GK, 313). But until she is able to fend for herself, Noie and Nya defend her from Eddo’s manipulations through their psychic power. In the bodiless travel that she several times undertakes, Rachel is enabled, indirectly, by her own mother and, directly, by Nya. Because of her psychic maternal lineage, Rachel is able to see her lover (in the depths of a pool) making his way to her in Zululand, to speak to him in his dreams, and, finally, to guide him towards the land of the Ghost-​people. Because of her connection to the Mother of the Trees, the latter is ‘thrice’ able ‘to sen[d]‌her into […] trances’, so that her ‘Spirit’ may seek her lover (GK, 336, 339, 336). In one instance, accompanied by Noie, who ‘follow[s] […] where [her] Sister goes’, Rachel’s soul travels to ‘a region where all life was forgotten, beyond the rush of the uttermost comet, beyond the last glimmer of the spies and the outposts of the universe’, to the City of the Dead (GK, 318, 319). Not until her female allies have died, however, does Rachel reconnect with the living man, for mystical feminism enables but is ultimately not compatible with the colonial domesticity that closes out the text. Impelled by the dual exigencies of South African anglicization and thwarting metropolitan female agency, Haggard shunted feminist energy from Britain’s streets to South Africa’s veldt in the pages of his fiction. Strengthening and expanding the British sphere of influence on the South African frontier, his colonial heroines are in no way self-​consciously feminist; they contribute to the imperial project rather than advocate improvements for their own condition, but they do so with an authority rarely seen and elsewhere not affirmed in the pages of British adventure. After Ghost Kings, however, Haggard abandoned the genre for reasons about which we can only speculate. His efforts had been successful in terms of both generic innovation and sales.70 South Africa’s unification; the election of Louis Botha, former Boer general, as its first prime minister; and the consolidation of the (primarily Afrikaner) South African Party, all in 1910, may have been factors, for while South Africa remained part of the empire, it became increasingly clear that British emigration there had neither led to anglicization nor assured Anglo-​leadership. Perhaps the female colonial romance, like New Girl fiction, was a victim of the relative return to gender norms that followed the First World War.71 Perhaps Haggard came to recognize the political implications of the agency with which he had endowed his colonial heroines. Regardless of his reasons for abandoning the genre, the female colonial romance yielded feminist effects as a reaction to the feminism it sought to contain. In doing so, it anticipated a new generation of fictional women, like John Buchan’s Mary Lamington and other First World War-​era spies, whose influence would extend beyond garden gate and Dover’s cliffs alike.

70  In Haggard’s lifetime, at least six editions of Benita were issued in the United Kingdom (others appeared in Germany, Sweden, Poland, the United States, and Britain’s colonies) and seven of Ghost Kings. 71  See Sally Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–​1915 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 187.

Gender, Genre, and South African Settlement    303

Gertrude Page and the Empire Romance While Haggard sought to circumvent the growing authority of metropolitan women, Page sought to expand it. Respectively redirecting and extending the New Woman’s purview, both authors saw emigration to southern Africa as a solution to her demands. Though clearly influenced by New Woman novelists, Page, like the heroine of her first novel, Love in the Wilderness: The Story of Another African Farm (1907)—​whose subtitle self-​consciously invokes Schreiner’s novel—​was ‘not at all an agitator for Woman’s Rights’. And though she noted both the ‘superfluous number’ of women ‘at home’ and the ‘great demand for wives’ in Rhodesia, neither was she, unlike many female emigrationists, preoccupied with promoting colonial marriage.72 Nor was she particularly concerned with either the ‘racial motherhood’ or ‘moral influence’ that many of her contemporaries felt it was women’s duty to provide.73 Rather than advocate for enhanced metropolitan professional, educational, or political opportunities for women; colonial marriage; or the propagation of the British ‘race’ or culture, Page posits Rhodesian domesticity as an emancipatory modernity for white women. In a series of fourteen articles for the Empire Review, an intra-​imperial London-​based journal that focused on contemporary domestic and imperial politics and social concerns, and twelve successful Rhodesian novels, Page functions as a mentor to her imagined readers, ‘women who start bravely out from England to face difficulties and disappointments they cannot even conceive in the old country’.74 Delineating both the ‘pitfalls’ such women face and the means of transcending them, Page models the authority that she suggests is available to women through colonial trial (SR, 228). Page was an early emigrant to the colony, the large-​scale British incursion into which was initiated in the late 1880’s by Rhodes, South African immigrant, diamond magnate, and politician. In 1888, he secured exclusive prospecting and mining rights in the region for his British South Africa Company (BSAC), from Lobengula, leader of the Matabele. In 1889, he acquired trading, colonizing, policing, governmental, infrastructural, and other administrative rights from Queen Victoria. And in 1900, 300 BSAC police, 350 indigenous bearers, guides, and servants, and 186 ‘paramalitary settlers’ (armed men who had been ‘promised 3,000 acres and 115 gold claims’ apiece) penetrated the region.75 Over the subsequent decade, the BSAC brutally decimated the indigenous 72 

Gertrude Page, Love in the Wilderness: The Story of Another African Farm (London: Hurst, [n.d.]), 83; further page references will be given in parentheses in the text and notes preceded by LW. Page, Jill’s Rhodesian Philosophy; or, The Dam Farm (London: Hurst, [n.d.]), 177; further page references will be given in parentheses in the text preceded by JRP. Page, ‘Life in Rhodesia’, Empire Review, 14, no. 81 (August 1907), 38–​42, at 42. 73 Ledger, New Woman, 64; Alicia M. Cecil, ‘The Needs of South Africa: Female Emigration’, Nineteenth Century and After, 51, no. 302 (April 1902), 683–​692, at 692. On ‘imperial motherhood’, see Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, History Workshop Journal, 5, no. 1 (1978), 9–​66. 74  Gertrude Page, ‘Second Impressions of Rhodesian Farm Life’, Empire Review, 10, no. 56 (September 1905), 136–​146, at 140. 75  Robert H. MacDonald, The Language of Empire: Myths and Metaphors of Popular Imperialism, 1880–​1918 (Studies in Imperialism; Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994),

304    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture population—​which had been 0.5  million (compared to a white population of 1,500) in 1891—​while ‘prospectors and settlers arrived, claims were pegged out […], mines opened, farms marked off, [and] trading stations built’.76 When Page and her husband arrived in early 1904, somewhere between 12,000 and 16,000 whites had already settled there, and the ratio of women to men was roughly 1:4. By 1911, the number of whites had risen to 23,000, and the gender ratio was somewhere between 1:2 and 1:3.77 By 1923, the year that marked the end of BSAC governance and the commencement of self-​rule (which Page, who had died the previous year, had so steadfastly supported), there were 35,000 whites in the country.78 Since Page and her husband had limited resources and farming ventures in Rhodesia were slow to yield profit, it was a decade before they accrued enough capital to buy a farm of their own, and another eight years before they saw a return on their investment.79 In less time than it took the couple to purchase a farm, the woman who had ‘introduced’ Rhodesia to ‘English readers’ had amassed ‘a wider circle of readers’—​including British royalty and parliamentarians—​‘than any other writer on South Africa’.80 By the time of her death, she had sold at least 2.5 million copies of the nearly twenty novels she had

114, 115; the quotations are respectively from Anthony Chennells, ‘Imagining and Living the Exotic: A Context for Early Rhodesian Novels’, Journal of Literary Studies, 19, no. 2 (June 2003), 137–​150, at 137; and Martin Green, Dreams of Empire, Deeds of Adventure (New York: Basic, 1979), 399, n. 16. 76  Deborah Kirkwood, ‘Settler Wives in Southern Rhodesia’, in Hilary Callan and Shirley Ardener (eds), The Incorporated Wife (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 143–​164, at 146; MacDonald, Language, 118. 77  The settlement figures are from Jock McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902–​1935 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), 88, 219, n. 19. McCulloch puts the 1911 gender ratio at 1:3 in Black Peril and 1:2 in ‘Empire and Violence, 1900–​1939’, in Philippa Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire (Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 220–​239, at 228. According to Deborah Kirkwood, there were 23,606 whites in Rhodesia in 1911 and the female-​to-​male gender ratio was 1:2 (‘Settler’, 146). According to McCulloch, there were roughly 0.5 million blacks in Rhodesia in 1911 (Black Peril, 13–​14); Kirkwood puts that figure at 0.75 million (‘Settler’, 146). In the century’s first decade, female emigration societies emigrated approximately 300 (mostly single) women to Rhodesia (Van-​Helten and Williams, ‘Crying Need’, 31). 78  Donal Lowry, ‘“Shame Upon ‘Little England’ While ‘Greater England’ Stands!”: Southern Rhodesia and the Imperial Idea’, in Andrea Bosco and Alex May (eds), The Round Table, The Empire/​ Commonwealth and British Foreign Policy (London: Lothian Foundation Press, 1997), 305–​341, at 306, 310. 79  Beatrice Powell, Preface, Gleanings from the Writings of ‘Gertrude Page’ (London: Hurst, 1920), pp. v–​viii, at p. vii. Page’s husband, George Alexander ‘Alec’ Dobbin, is unnamed in Page’s articles the few times he is mentioned. 80  Manfred Nathan, South African Literature: A General Survey (Cape Town: Juta, 1925), 225; S. G. Liebson, ‘The South Africa of Fiction’, The State, 7, no. 2 (1912), 135–​139, at 139. Frederick Glyn, 4th Baron Wolverton, praised The Edge O’ Beyond (1908) in the Daily Telegraph (‘The Novels of Gertrude Page’, advertisement, in The Rhodesian, by Page (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1912), 14). Walter Long, MP recommended Jill’s Rhodesian Philosophy to King George V (Untitled, Buluwayo Chronicle, 15 July 1910, p. 3). Page was a favourite author of the King’s wife, Queen Mary, who had ‘read most of her books’ (‘Death of Miss Gertrude Page’, Bedfordshire Times and Woburn Reporter, 7 April 1922, [n.p.]). Page, whose first novel followed Cynthia Stockley’s Virginia of the Rhodesians (1903) by four years, was the second Rhodesian immigrant to publish a novel. Nathan, however, perhaps reflecting Page’s greater influence

Gender, Genre, and South African Settlement    305 published, twelve of which were set in Rhodesia, two of which had been dramatized and staged in London, and three of which had been made into films.81 Though, like Enid Davenport, the heroine of Love in the Wilderness, Page affirms her distance from ‘Woman with a capital W’, the limitations of the private sphere, the injustice of divorce laws, the hypocrisy of the sexual double standard, the importance of female community, and the merits of the suffragettes are consistent themes in her work (LW, 83). Enid, for example, like Lyndall, craves ‘freedom […]. Always she had rebelled instinctively against […] conventionality’ (LW, 4). At the death of her benefactress aunt, the unmarried Enid must choose between going to Rhodesia to live with her married sister (who herself had emigrated to Rhodesia as a single woman) and staying in England, where she could ‘earn her living in a [domestic] situation, or [in] a woman’s profession’ (LW, 3). Her decision to emigrate is not motivated by the desire to find a husband; indeed, she rejects the idea that ‘love is […] the main object of a woman’s life’, that ‘women love sacrifice’, and that it is their duty—​or pleasure—​to function as ‘housekeeper[s]‌’ to ‘lordly’ husbands (LW, 96, 191, 95, 83). She seeks, rather, like many of Page’s female characters, to escape ‘the narrow limits of the home country’ (LW, 9). Page’s narratives of white Rhodesian women centre not on courtship, home maintenance, motherhood, or marriage, but on transformation into colonial maturity, a position of some licence. Determined not to function as ‘white slaves of their household’, her protagonists strive to attain satisfaction, not through ‘sacrifice’ but through assertion; security, not through dependence but through resilience; and pleasure, not through maternity but through participation in the larger world (LW, 88, 191). The demands requisite to a successful Rhodesian farming venture complement a woman’s desire, as Page tells it, for greater personal liberty. Adaptability is essential. Women who ‘come out’ with ‘fantastic, high-​flown notions that embody chiefly flowers and sunshine, and beautiful aristocrats […], and milk and honey’ are invariably disappointed (LW, 165; SR, 39). Those, however, with ‘staying power’ and ‘grit’ develop the ‘pioneer spirit’ needed to ‘grapple[ ]‌with’ the ‘petty cares and worries and annoyances’ for which she will be richly recompensed (LW, 153, 46, 63). More than one of Page’s seasoned heroines points out the necessity of earning the favour of a country that ‘doesn’t give much away for nothing’ (LW, 153). ‘She gives you a jolly bad time at first, to see if you are worth bothering about’, one such character contends, ‘and if you win through she suddenly turns round and smiles at you, and compensations crop up in all directions’ (JRP, 72–​3). Able to ‘think and act with a freedom not possible in the old country’, the Rhodesian female immigrant finds she can ‘attain to a freshness of individualism, untrammelled by any ancient written, or unwritten law: [can] in short be [her]self ’ (LW, 4–​5). Transformed into someone for whom challenges are easily met, she comes to look upon the metropolitan woman, and readership, wrote in 1925 that Stockley ‘followed in the footsteps of Gertrude Page’ (South African Literature, 225). 81  Powell notes that by 1920 Page’s sales in books ‘already exceed[ed] two million copies’ (Gleanings, p. v). According to Colin Black, ‘her total sales exceeded 2 ½ million copies’ (The Legend of Lomagundi (Salisbury: North-​Western Development Association, 1976), 61).

306    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture ‘mediocre[,] suburban, and los[t …] in the crowd’, as a shadow version of the contented woman she has become (JRP, 155).82 If unrealistic expectations are the female emigrant’s greatest impediment, sexual transgression is her greatest temptation. Though broadly speaking, Page condones neither adultery nor premarital sex, she tantalizes readers with these illicit possibilities. Rhodesian farm life can be lonely, husbands are preoccupied, social checks are limited, and women, unlike men, are too often ‘devoid of occupation’, like hunting, to engage them (SR, 189). ‘These very facts make extenuating circumstances’, attests Jo Latham, the veteran heroine of Where the Strange Roads Go Down, who, after ten years in Rhodesia, does ‘not judg[e]‌[its] women one way or the other’ (SR, 228). Of Nita, the recently arrived newly-​wed emigrant who has left her husband for her lover,83 Jo says, ‘of course […] she hasn’t been very wise or very brave, but perhaps we shouldn’t have been in her place. Anyhow, the odds have been against her’ (SR, 213, my emphasis). After all, Jo has earlier suggested, many women new to the colony ‘find a solution [to its challenges] in finding a lover’ (SR, 45). The emphasis on the inevitability of temptation and the justification of its consideration allow the reader to envisage this ‘intoxicating’ possibility for herself: to imagine, for instance, the ‘sense of power’ Nita feels in the presence of her lover (SR, 165). Even Jo considers leaving her husband when her old lover reappears. If restraint often wins out—​and it does not always—​the circumstances of Rhodesian settler life certainly facilitate consideration of the sexual opportunities to which they give rise. Strange Roads, to stay with this example, ostensibly commends the women’s eventual choices—​a more mature Nita returns to her husband and the seasoned Jo never leaves hers—​but it nonetheless correlates Rhodesia with sexual opportunity for women. This is true, as well, for both The Edge O’ Beyond (1908), in which the heroine leaves her neglectful husband permanently for her lover without the reproval of narrator or text, and Love in the Wilderness, in which the narrator attempts to forestall the reader’s condemnation of Enid, who considers running off with an unhappily married man. ‘How can [those who have not been tempted] truly judge? The woman who fought a long, losing game and then gave in, may she not yet be stronger than the woman who never fought at all, never had any occasion to fight, never had the smallest knowledge of what the temptation might be?’ (LW, 248). In Page’s Rhodesia, it would seem, temptation is not merely inevitable; it is all but requisite for the British female immigrant to achieve the kind of self-​knowledge, experience, and authority possessed by the veteran. The guidance of such a veteran, respected but unconventional, married but not necessarily to her first love, is crucial for the young, callow female settler who is sure to falter and will need help getting back on track. The former serves multiple functions, for

82  It is not just suburban life of which Page is critical for women; even London is ‘dull, artificial and generally absurd’ and country villages, for unmarried women anyway, are ‘empty [and] monotonous’ (SR, 13; Rhodesian, 143). 83  Here as elsewhere I use the term lover as Page did, to suggest not a sexual but a romantic partner.

Gender, Genre, and South African Settlement    307 not only does she prevent the ‘ill-​equipped’ novice from ‘compromising her[self] past redemption’; she also demonstrates the authority the newcomer may one day achieve through the mentorship that she provides (SR, 64, 213). Without Jo’s assistance, Nita would likely have remained with her lover, just as in Love in the Wilderness, Enid, without female guidance,84 would likely have run off with hers; for among the factors contributing to the possibility of sexual transgression is ‘isolation’ from other women (LW, 255). The narrator of Love goes as far as to blame Enid’s predicament on those women who ‘had left her to herself so long’ (LW, 255). ‘Was it not partly their fault?’ (LW, 254). ‘Was she not therefore the more free to choose her own path?’ (LW, 255). The mentor’s pedagogical role, compelled by her desire to save the neophyte ‘for the sake of the country, as well as her own sake’, hinges on her intention to ‘care for the well-​being of the women of Rhodesia’ (SR, 213, my emphasis; 17). Page conflates not only individual and country, but also domestic and farming advice with ‘moral’ instruction, ‘heat, and dust, and flies, and worry’ with sexual opportunity, and withstanding the former with navigating the latter (SR, 39). Page’s experienced female settlers repeatedly insist that colonial life is harder for the woman than it is for the man, that frustration may lead her to ‘do something desperate’, and that ‘nothing good is to be had without paying for it’ (SR, 51; JRP, 129). One wonders whether Page’s metropolitan readers did not in some ways covet the struggles of her heroines, who, in a land where ‘big things happen’, fell under a ‘spell’ that compelled them to ‘“play with fire”’, bringing them ‘strangely close to the great heart of the world’ (LW, 262, 253, 189, 247). Indeed, as Page depicts it, the price of colonial maturity is as titillating as the purchase. Transformed from ‘a drawing-​room young lady’ into a woman, from a ‘butterfly’ into a ‘person’, someone frivolous into someone sound, the experienced Rhodesian heroine gains entry into a colonial sisterhood in which she may help to guide others through sexual minefields that she has herself traversed.85 Page’s novels continued to explore the issue of female desire that African Farm had made an acceptable subject for literature. They thus paved the way for the empire romance, a short story genre that flourished in the British periodical press in the 1920s. Sometimes set in southern Africa, the empire romance ‘promised [the emigrant] not only a challenging life but also, it is hinted, genuine excitement’. As in Page’s earlier incarnations, sex is implied, but not explicit, ‘domestic figures are very few’, women are usually depicted ‘outside the home’, and ‘the ideal heroine […] can face hardship like any man’.86 The odds may be against women in these short stories and Page’s novels, but the challenges they face are the very means of deliverance from the suffocating restrictions of the metropole they fled.

84  Though Enid’s sister, the type of woman who ‘perhaps […] delay[s]‌[women’s] progress’, cannot serve as an apt mentor to Enid, she does provide her with their mother’s journal, which, offering evidence of a similar temptation narrowly withstood, enables Enid to withstand her own (Page, LW, 295). 85  SR, 35; Gertrude Page, The Edge O’ Beyond (London: Hurst and Blackett, [n.d.]), 278. 86  See Billie Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1988), 140–​144; the quotations are from 144 and 140.

308    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture

Conclusion An emphasis on the future is a critical characteristic of settler societies, which, generally lacking a common origin, need another concept around which to coalesce.87 In The Story of an African Farm, the future for women remains to be built. Leaving behind a roadmap for the intellectual, desiring female subject, Lyndall is like the hunter in the allegory articulated by Waldo’s stranger: she builds the stairs on which others will climb to reach a destination that she herself cannot. One hears an echo of this allegory—​‘they will climb, and by my stair!’ (SAF, 168)—​in a 1913 review of African Farm (and two newer South African novels), initially published in South Africa, a paper with offices in London and South Africa alike: [N]othing is more noticeable in these three novels than the evolution of woman and the freedom and equality she claims in the new nation. By the very accidents of environment the Afrikander [sic] woman walks beside—​and not behind—​the man. The Heroines of these tales [. . .] have alike evolved from the muddy places of existence into a charming and intellectual womanhood, they have ‘built their own ladders to reach the sky’, thus asserting their equal right with men to drop a worn-​out past behind them, and where women face the world as untrammelled by conventional restrictions as men, the country is a strong one [. . .].88

For this anonymous writer, using Schreiner’s novel to chart the cultural history of a ‘new nation’, South Africa is itself the future, ‘strong’ because modern, and modern because un-​‘conventional’ in its gender dynamics. Unlike Schreiner, Haggard sought not to facilitate but to reroute female agency, and in so doing to thwart the future that metropolitan women were increasingly demanding. Nonetheless, as his novels of South African settlement—​and female authority—​so clearly demonstrate, even a misogynist effort to harness female power can produce feminist effects. For Page, the future is a reward at once enabled by and promised to female emigrants who ‘go out […] in a soldier’s spirit’, for if ‘be[ing] prepared […] is half the battle’, resisting temptation is the other. In both of these efforts, women must help their ‘sister[s]‌of the lonely veldt’. In so doing, they not only ‘help [Rhodesia] to win through to the great future that should be hers’; they help themselves to greater authority.89 Just as the heroines of the novels I have discussed by Schreiner, Haggard, and Page become ‘ancestor[s]‌instead of […] mere descendent[s]’—​an opportunity held out to British women emigrating to southern Africa at the turn of the century—​so the novels

87 

See Stasiulis and Yuval-​Davis (eds), Unsettling, 19. ‘South African Writers’, 1913, South African Stories and Sketches (South Africa Handbook, 73; London: South Africa, [n.d.]), 9–​16, at 10–​11; emphases added. 89  Gertrude Page, ‘Life in Rhodesia’, Empire Review, 11, no. 65 (June 1906), 448–​457, at 456; Page, ‘Second Impressions’, 137; Page, Rhodesian, 31. 88 

Gender, Genre, and South African Settlement    309 in which they appear become models rather than mere progenitors.90 Responding to translocal crises largely informed by concerns about gender, Schreiner, Haggard, and Page generate new literary forms—​the New Woman novel, the female colonial romance, and the empire romance—​that continue to transform as they circulate throughout the webs of empire.

Bibliography Ballantyne, Tony, and Antoinette Burton (eds), Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009). Belich, James, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-​World, 1783–​1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Free, Melissa, ‘“It is I  Who Have the Power”:  Settling Women in Haggard’s South African Imaginary’, Genre, 45, no. 3 (2012), 359–​393. Hammerton, A. James, Emigrant Gentlewomen: Genteel Poverty and Female Emigration, 1830–​ 1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1979). Harper, Marjory, ‘British Migration and the Peopling of the Empire’, in Andrew Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, iii. The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 75–​87. Myers, Janet C., Antipodal England:  Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009). Strobel, Margaret, European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991). Swaisland, Cecillie, Servants and Gentlewomen to the Golden Land: The Emigration of Single Women from Britain to Southern Africa, 1820–​1939 (Oxford: Berg and University of Natal Press, 1993). Wagner, Tamara S. (ed.), Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-​Century Literature (Gender and Genre 5; London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011). Williams, Keith, ‘“A way out of our troubles”: The Politics of Empire Settlement, 1900–​1922’, in Stephen Constantine (ed.), Emigrants and Empire: British Settlement in the Dominions Between the Wars (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 22–​44.

90 

May Hely-​Hutchinson, ‘Female Emigration to South Africa’, Nineteenth Century and After, 51, no. 299 (January 1902), 71–​97, at 84.

Chapter 16

‘The L ond on Su nday Faded Sl ow’ Time to Spend in the Victorian City Alex Murray

The Victorian city, London in particular, was a space of dynamism and development; the movement of people and goods both in and through the Victorian city marked it out as the paradigmatic space of modernity. This movement, flux, constant growth and change made the Victorian city, in some sense, unknowable. Sherlock Holmes’s desire in ‘A Case of Identity’ to ‘fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city’ is the desire for legibility mirrored in the nineteenth century’s cartographers and nascent sociologists who would try and tackle ‘the Great Wen’.1 Part of the difficulty in tracing the city, in mapping its contours, was that its flows were so dominated by the movement of capital; trade and commerce transformed the city constantly over the nineteenth century. The city that Dickens captured in Sketches by Boz in the mid-​1830s was not the same city that Doyle’s Holmes attempted to grasp in the 1890s. One only needs to glance at the different Londons of the Greenwood map of 1827 and Booth’s infamous map of 1889 to see the extent to which the city had grown and developed over the course of the nineteenth century, erasing its medieval shape and structure. This change was so rapid that many felt it over the course of their lifetimes; G. K. Chesterton noted in 1914 the disappearance of ‘old’ London: ‘it is very hard indeed to find London in London’.2 Any attempt to capture the city needed to be alive to the paradoxical constancy of change that characterized London as the ‘the centre of a global commerce that was subjugating the rest of the world’, according to Lynda Nead.3 Yet there was one time, every week, when the frenetic 1 

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 2009), 190. G. K. Chesterton, London, With Ten Photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn (London: privately printed, 1914), 10. 3  Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-​Century London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 3. 2 

Time to Spend in the Victorian City    311 pace of the city slowed, the capital of modernity turned its back on the age of speed and the machine and became incontestably boring. In the nineteenth century Sunday was the most vexatious day of the week. A resurgent sabbatarian movement had campaigned throughout the early part of the Victorian period to have the day made the preserve of worship and reflection, yet the working classes of the city wanted the day for the leisure, sport, and shopping they were denied during the week. Over the course of the century the London Sunday was characterized by an erosion of the very essence of the city as the centre emptied out and the parks and leisure grounds of the suburbs became full of life. For London writers, from Dickens through to Wilde, the London Sunday was a paradox and a problem, the day of the week when there was time to spend, but nothing to spend it on. In what follows I will suggest that the London Sunday destabilizes the maps of the city that have been produced by recent studies in the cultural geography of the Victorian city. On Sundays another London was glimpsed, a city haunted by the pre-​ Victorian ghosts of an agrarian life that over the course of the century many millions had left behind as they were drawn into the vortex of Victorian Babylon.

Mapping Victorian London If Sundays were anomalous and inescapable to the Londoners of the Victorian period they hold a far-​from-​omnipresent place in recent attempts to map the cultural geography of the city. Over the past twenty years London has developed and changed in literary studies from being a place where literature was written, and about which it was written, to a singular literary space. London literature has become a distinct entity, separate from English literature broadly conceived; it has its own conferences, journals, and book series.4 Of all the periods in literary history it is the Victorian period that holds the greatest sway over the collective cultural imaginary. It was a time radically different from our own, yet strangely familiar. There is enough romance in Victorian London for it to be the preserve of escapist fantasy in neo-​Victorian novels and period television drama, yet it gave birth to the infrastructure and shape of the city as we know it today. As historian Jerry White argues, the Victorians, ‘more than people in any preceding era, provided the mental and physical map by which London was still read and understood by Londoners, a map more concerned with divisions and barriers than links and bridges’.5 If the London of today is still recognizably Victorian, then it is important to emphasize that, as Raymond Williams suggests, it ‘cannot be described in a rhetorical gesture of repressive uniformity’, marked instead by ‘miscellaneity and randomness’.6 Williams 4 

See the Literary London Journal, the Annual Literary London Conference, and the Literary London Society at http://​www.literarylondon.org/​ There is also a Bloomsbury Studies in the City series which focuses largely on London literature. 5  Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People (London: Penguin, 2002), 5. 6  Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 153, 154.

312    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture notes here, of course, the vibrant heterogeneity of weekday London. The crushing conformity of mid-​Victorian Sundays in London has never fitted in particularly well to our idealized narratives of life in the city. The increasing utilization of paradigms from cultural (and physical) geography that has characterized studies of the city in the past fifteen years marks a shift in methodology. The development of urban studies as a discipline is difficult to plot but it is safe to assume that the rise of historical materialist methodologies in the 1960s changed the way in which numerous academic disciplines read the history and culture of cities. Despite these difficulties in pinpointing a definite beginning, 1973 marks a watershed year when two important books were published; Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City and the first volume of Jim Dyos and Michael Wolff ’s edited collection The Victorian City: Images and Realities. Dyos and Wolff brought together historians and literary scholars who developed a range of methodologies for exploring the tensions between the idealized image of the city in literature and art and the often-​neglected squalid material conditions of life in the city. Williams’s study, which is still in print today, underscored the symbiotic relationship between city and country which was the necessary condition for the massive urban expansion of the nineteenth century. Over the course of the next twenty-​five years there was a general increase in studies of the Victorian city, including key works in feminist criticism such as Judith R. Walkowitz’s City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-​Victorian London (1992) and Deborah Epstein Nord’s Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation and the City (1995), as well as more specific period studies such as Karl Beckson’s London in the 1890s (1992). The late 1990s saw a dramatic rise in the study of London literature more generally, and of Victorian London in particular. Part of this was cultural—​after fifty years of population decline following the Second World War London was reborn. The rapidly accelerating gentrification of the city saw an increasing interest in the history and culture of a London that was disappearing with every new warehouse conversion. The period also saw the rise in the self-​conscious manufacture of ‘literary London’ by authors such as Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair and academic criticism soon followed. In Victorian studies there was an increasing use of paradigms from cultural geography and urban studies, transforming the ways in which literary historians thought about space. This in turn reflected the ways that those areas of study had been transformed by the importation of frameworks from Continental philosophy as the work of Foucault, Lefebvre, de Certeau, and Bachelard had come to politicize space through a critique of the hegemonic logic of maps and mapping. This work was often coupled with an increasing awareness that the growth of the Victorian city was achieved only at the expense of those colonies and protectorates from which wealth and tributary had been extracted. For many writers towards the fin de siècle the grandeur and prestige of London was forever to be haunted by this exploitation and inequality; in works such as the Sherlock Holmes stories or Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) it indeed appeared, as Joseph McLaughlin observes, ‘that the foreign had come home’.7 The radical mapping of cultural geography 7 

Joseph McLaughlin, Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 26.

Time to Spend in the Victorian City    313 was characterized by an attempt to read creative explorations of urban space in relation to those more rationalizing and objective maps of the period, such as those of Charles Booth’s Inquiry into Life and Labour in London (1886–​1903). As Simon Joyce puts it, the city is mapped ‘in literal ways by surveyors, architects, builders and cartographers; and in more figurative ways by novelists, journalists, sociologists and government legislators’.8 ‘Mapping’, for Joyce and others, is a methodology for reading literary texts intrinsically bound with the rise of historicism. The attempt to read the texts of the Victorian period in relation to the physical spaces of their own time is one that has a tendency to privilege the minutiae of historical experience over the pull of narrative. Robert Mighall, for instance, presents his study of Victorian Gothic fiction as an ‘Alternative “passport” to the geography of the Gothic’ that focuses on the ‘historical, geographical, environmental and discursive factors’ to remap the Victorian Gothic.9 The alternative entry into city space provided by literary texts, the ways in which culture engaged in processes of ‘cognitive mapping’—​to use Kevin Lynch’s term, later appropriated by Fredric Jameson—​was often marked by a focus on the small details, the points at which texts worked to expose space as unknowable and unmappable. It was arguably a partial form of cultural cartography, one that was to be complicated, and in many senses rejected, with the publication of Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–​ 1900 (1998). Moretti’s book is a bold attempt to move beyond mapping as a metaphor and to instead make it a methodology. His production of a hundred or so maps, charting for instance the London addresses of characters in Jane Austen novels, produces a means of reading literary geography at the broader level of narrative rather than at the detailed level of textual description. His chapter on cities, focusing in particular on Dickens’s London, reveals the geographies of class and capital that underpin the structure of Dickens’s representation of the city. Moretti’s investigation of urban spaces is motivated by two interrelated questions of legibility: ‘given the over-​complication of the nineteenth-​century urban setting—​how did novels “read” cities? By what narrative mechanisms did they make them “legible” and turn urban noise into information?’10 He begins with the more simple, straightforward narratives of ‘silver fork’ novels of the period 1812–​40, which effectively only map one half of London—​the west—​with Regent Street creating an impermeable barrier of class and capital between two Londons.11 Dickens’s great achievement, according to Moretti, was to create a much more complex city space which is still marked by a spatial logic, but that structures movement and exchange. Moretti’s maps illustrate that Dickens’s city spaces are clearly demarcated: the upper classes are confined to the west of London, the working poor to the inner east, and the middle classes occupy the City of London during working hours 8 

Simon Joyce, Capital Offenses: Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 4. 9  Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. xiv. 10  Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–​1900 (London: Verso, 1999), 78–​9. 11 Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 83.

314    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture before retreating to the suburbs in the evenings. As Moretti puts it: ‘At London’s two extremes, in other words, life and labor coincide: social classification—​class—​is always unmistakably present. But in the middle the work/​home dialectics allow Dickens’ middle class to have truly two lives: a public one in the workplace—​and a private one at home.’12 Moretti’s challenge is in thinking the spatial politics of the literary text in radically new ways by taking a macro-​view of narrative, mapping the movement of multiple narratives in order to begin to understand the ways that class is arranged through space. The lure of mapping narrative is one that, arguably, loses the local in the text, the small details that make literature so evocative in describing the spaces of lived experience. Robert L. Patten suggests that we need to develop a ‘hermeneutics of literary geography’ in order to recover the aesthetic. He argues that we need to focus on ‘the made environments (houses, parks, streets) within the text, the made environment of the text (principally, formats), and the made environment of reading (the spaces, times and social constructions of readerly activity)’.13 Patten’s call to return to the aesthetics of space, to focus on the specifically literary and linguistic rendering of urban geographies is one that Julian Wolfreys has championed in the three volumes of Writing London. For Wolfreys, approaching the city through a deconstructive and phenomenological lens, the writing of London performs the alterity and ambivalence at the heart of the city itself:  ‘Writers in the nineteenth century understood the event of London, and responded in their writing of the capital by writing of the city’s very unpredictability.’14 Being alive to the unpredictability of the capital is, however, paradoxical; an essential restlessness can then become an ahistorical feature of a timeless London. The difficulty that mapping has, whether it is an attempt to plot the ‘tactics’ of resistance to mapping, or to create counter-​maps of narrative, is that it wants to treat space as being strangely uniform in its heterogeneity. Yet London not only changed radically throughout the period, but changed even more radically over the course of the week, even a day. To map the city with any great accuracy would be impossible. It is not just the question of detail; Lewis Carroll was well aware of this in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893) where Mein Herr relates the problem of his kingdom’s creation of a map on a scale of a mile to a mile.15 The folly of mapping for Carroll was in the illusion of accuracy. For our own attempts to map the Victorian city it is, I want to suggest, imperative that we pay attention to those Victorian debates, such as those over the life of the city on a Sunday, to return to the micro-​level of lived experience that any cultural geography must confront.

12 Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 120.

13  Robert L. Patten, ‘From House to Square to Street’, in Helena Michie and Ronald R. Thomas (eds), Nineteenth Century Geographies: The Transformation of Space from the Victorian Age to the American Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 192. 14  Julian Wolfreys, Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens (London: Macmillan, 1998), 17. 15  Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (London: Macmillan, 1893), 169.

Time to Spend in the Victorian City    315

The Dreary Victorian Sunday Debates over the observance of the Sabbath have, as Stephen Miller observes, been ongoing ever since antiquity but never more so than in post-​Reformation England.16 The Protestant religion had always been more observant of the fourth commandment than Catholicism and other Continental faiths, and the growth of sabbatarianism over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had attempted to transform Sunday into a day or rest and worship, rather than a day of leisure. The fourth commandment dictated that the faithful must ‘Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day [is] the sabbath of the LORD thy God’ (Exodus 20:8–​11). There is a complicated history of the emergence of Sunday as the Sabbath, with Saturday favoured in the early Church as the seventh day. The debates over Sunday worship were always theological as much as political and economic and it was these three competing forces that were responsible for the series of controversies over Sunday observance during the mid-​Victorian period. The Victorian Sunday was, as John Wigley notes, a thoroughly middle-​class invention, ‘an insecure class’ whose ‘religious outlook lacked the tolerance of the upper and the common sense of the lower class. They were prey to extreme ideas and notions, and Sabbatarianism gave them fixed and immutable standard with which to judge the rest of their countrymen.’17 This insecurity gave rise to a radical and fundamentalist sabbatarian movement that attempted to control, absolutely, the lives of all Victorians on Sundays. Church service could not be enforced, but the propriety of the middle classes was to become translated into an increasing political power which would see numerous campaigns to stop any mirth or movement on the Lord’s day, from travelling on railways to visiting museums. Such was the reach of the sabbatarians that no Victorian was immune from the repercussions of their attempts to enforce the sanctity of Sundays. Charles Dickens was a passionate advocate of Sunday as a day both of observance and of rest and pleasure. Early in his career he published a pamphlet, pseudonymously as Timothy Sparks, titled ‘Sunday Under Three Heads’ (1836), which contained three vignettes of Sunday life—​the first as it was, the second as it would be if Lord’s Day Observance Society parliamentary campaigners such as Sir Andrew Agnew had their way, the third as Dickens imagined it would be if church observance in the morning was coupled with ‘rational pleasure and needful recreation’ for the rest of the day.18 It is London and ‘many other large manufacturing towns’ that, Dickens concedes, are blighted by Sunday drunkenness, crime, and squalor.19 Yet, as Dickens observes, there 16 

Stephen Miller, The Peculiar Life of Sundays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). John Wigley, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 183. 18  Charles Dickens, ‘Sunday Under Three Heads’, in Reprinted Pieces (London: Chapman & Hall, 1911), 319–​55, at 353. 19  Dickens, ‘Sunday Under Three Heads’, 333. 17 

316    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is little difference to the days of the week for those of the criminal classes and to legislate against them would be ineffectual and lead to the impoverishment of Sundays for the majority of working people. So if vice can scarcely hope to be eradicated in St Giles or Drury Lane, where should the Londoner spend his or her Sundays? The model for the ideal Sunday is found by Dickens in a small village some 70 miles to the west of London. In this bucolic setting Dickens observes a small community walking to church, followed by a game of cricket. It is all ruddy cheeks and good humour, a rural idyll, a pre-​modern life whose death knell, for many, was rung by the mass migration of the rural working classes into towns and cities, London in particular. The ideal bucolic Sunday of the small country village was to be repeated by Dickens shortly after in Oliver Twist (1837–​9) when Oliver’s period of convalescence with the Maylies in an unnamed hamlet sees a radically different Sunday from those he had spent in either the workhouse, where it was marked out only by the addition of a half-​roll to his diet, or the godless world of Fagin’s den: ‘and when Sunday came, how differently the day was spent, from any way in which he had ever spent it yet! There was the little church, in the morning, with the green leaves fluttering at the windows: the birds singing without.’20 As Dickens notes in ‘Sunday Under Three Heads’, ‘It is such scenes as this, I would see near London, on a Sunday evening.’21 What Dickens advocates here as an ideal would increasingly become a reality by the fin de siècle; the London Sunday necessitates the overcoming of London itself, the escape from the city to Hampstead or Highgate, leaving the city empty of the human and inhuman rhythms of trade and capital. Trade and capital were at the heart of many of the great protests and parliamentary debates over Sunday observance. As many commentators noted, Dickens included, there were very different Sundays for the wealthy and the working classes. Interdictions against Sunday labour, such as Agnew’s, were clear in their exemption of domestic staff. The upper classes were hardly going to cook their own Sunday dinner. One interested observer of the London Sunday was Karl Marx, who witnessed the Sunday trading riots in Hyde Park on 25 June 1855 and again on 2 July of the same year. The riots represented, for Marx, an understandable response from the working poor of London to the oppression and inequality foisted upon them by Parliament and the ruling classes. As Marx wrote in Neue Oder Zeitung, ‘there is a conspiracy of the Church with monopoly capital [ … . ] The workers get their wages late on Saturday; they are the only ones for whom shops open on Sundays. They are the only ones compelled to make their purchases, small as they are, on Sundays. The new bill is therefore directed against them alone.’22 For Marx, as for Engels, Sundays were the exception that confirmed the rule, the day of leisure which the bourgeoisie was attempting to use to control and confine the actions of the working classes. Having spent their weeks being exploited in wage labour, the day 20 

Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (London: Penguin, 2003), 262. Dickens, ‘Sunday Under Three Heads’, 352. 22  Karl Marx, ‘Anti-​Church Movement Demonstration in Hyde Park’, Neue Oder Zeitung, 28 June 1855, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on Britain (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953), 414–​420, at 415. 21 

Time to Spend in the Victorian City    317 of rest denied them the opportunity to spend those meagre wages. The Sunday trading riots of 1855 were another symptom that the class warfare that had so recently plagued the Continent was fomenting in London. For Frederick Engels, Sunday schools represented, in educational terms, a continuation of this control and oppression. The lack of compulsory education resulted in Sunday teaching failing to provide the repetition and continuity necessary for real educational progress.23 Sunday teaching failed through a lack of regularity to achieve any great educational benefit; an activity partaken only on a Sunday could only ever show up the lack of learning during the week. Yet it wasn’t just the exceptional events of Sundays that marked them as incongruous with the working week. The church bells of London have long been observed as one of the defining features of the city; the great bells of churches such as St Mary-​le-​Bow have such an iconic place in the city’s history. Yet for Charles Dickens, the tolling bells of Sundays in London were the torment of a working people whose one day of recreation was dominated by the power of the Church. The first glimpse of the city in Little Dorrit (1855–​7), one of his most enduring London novels, paints a bleak image of the city ground to a halt: It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close, and stale. Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick-​and-​mortar echoes hideous. Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look at them out of windows, in dire despondency. In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the Plague were in the city and the dead-​carts were going round. Everything was bolted and barred that could by possibility furnish relief to an overworked people. No pictures, no unfamiliar animals, no rare plants or flowers, no natural or artificial wonders of the ancient world—​all TABOO with that enlightened strictness, that the ugly South Sea gods in the British Museum might have supposed themselves at home again.24

It is one of Dickens’s most evocative introductions to the city, those set-​pieces that establish the themes to follow over the course of the novel in the very fabric of London. Here the sabbatarian injunction against trade, drinking, and general recreation works to project the conditions of incarceration and control suffered by the Dorrits in the Marshalsea onto the city as a whole. The lack of recreation for working people suggests that the sabbatarian politics that control life in the city are no more ‘enlightened’ than the superstitious faiths of the South Seas. And there is an ironic reflection on one of the broader sabbatarian debates of the period: in 1840 the Radical MP Joseph Hunt had campaigned to have the British Museum open on Sunday afternoons for the education and recreation of the poor. This case was taken up again in 1855 and 1856 by Sir Joshua Walmsley. On both occasions the Lord’s Day Observance Society campaigned vociferously and successfully to have the proposals challenged in Parliament.25 Dickens’s allusion to this specific 23 

Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in Britain (London: Penguin, 2005), 139. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (London: Penguin, 2003), 43. 25  See Wigley, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday, 53, 69. 24 

318    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture context establishes the target of his social critique, yet the passage works, through its satire of the language of both Gothic convention (references to the plague) and religious piety (‘penitential garb of soot’) to ironically frame Arthur Clennam’s return to London as a return of sorts to the sterile yet deathly quarantine he has left in Marseilles. A key element in this construction of London as a prison house is the synaesthetic excess; touch (the heaviness of the sultry summer atmosphere) bleeds into aural confusion (the cacophonic church bells) to obscured vision (the view from a window). This excess is importantly far removed from Dickens’s usual London, awash with the noises, smells, tastes, and sights of capital, of which there are many famous examples.26 Sensory excess is so deadening here that those South Sea gods, inanimate and lifeless as they are, stand in for the inhabitants of the city. When we find out, a little later in this chapter, that Arthur Clennam’s mother is something of a sabbatarian it is part of a general picture of her as a distinctly unpleasant woman. Sabbatarians in Dickens are always hypocritical, those who would feign follow the word of the Lord when their actions suggest a complete lack of Christian charity. It is in stark contrast to the Clennam household that the Marshalsea is paradoxically full of life on a Sunday. Being a debtor’s prison, outside the movement of capital (and with it its control), the Marshalsea is unaffected by the cloying middle-​class injunction against Sunday trade and leisure. Here John Chivery makes his Sunday offering of cigars to Mr Dorrit and there seems to be little worship taking place. The claustrophobic, repressive force of the London Sunday is, strangely, not always to be found in the churches of the city. In The Uncommercial Traveller (1861) we are given an account of Dickens’s expeditions around London churches of a Sunday, sampling them from the grand to the decomposing. These visits change with the seasons, summer rewarding the tourist with a defamiliarizing spectacle: ‘On summer Sundays, in the gentle rain or the bright sunshine—​either, deepening the idleness of the idle City—​I have sat, in that singular silence which belongs to resting-​places usually astir, in scores of buildings at the heart of the world’s metropolis, unknown to far greater numbers of people speaking the English tongue, than the ancient edifices of the Eternal City, or the Pyramids of Egypt.’27 Here the church is also a burial ground, a fitting place to find oneself on a London Sunday; surrounded by death and silence as the city has been deserted for those far more bucolic settings that we saw Dickens romanticize in ‘Sunday Under Three Heads’. These aural extremes will continue to characterize Sundays well into the twentieth century, the tolling bells continuing to reverberate out into the uncanny silence of a city void of life, a necropolis.28 26  A Christmas Carol has, to my mind, one of the most evocative portraits of the city as phantasmagoria of capital, a technique Dickens arguably borrowed from the Arabian Nights. See Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings (London: Penguin, 2003), 75–​6. 27  Charles Dickens, ‘City of London Churches’, in Dickens’ Journalism, iv. ‘The Uncommercial Traveller’ and Other Papers 1859–​1870, ed. Michael Slater and John Drew (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2000), 116. 28  On Dickens’s Necropolis, see Andrew M. Stauffer, ‘Ruins of Paper: Dickens and the Necropolitan Library’, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, 47 (October 2007), http://​www.erudit.org/​revue/​ ravon/​2007/​v/​n47/​016700ar.html [last accessed 19 August 2013].

Time to Spend in the Victorian City    319 The deathly quiet of London is thrown further into relief for Dickens when compared to the gaiety and bustle of a city such as Paris on a Sunday. In the opening chapter of Pictures from Italy the Parisian Sunday is full of life, compared to the deadening conformity of London: There was, of course, very little in the aspect of Paris—​as we rattled near the dismal Morgue and over the Pont Neuf—​to reproach us for our Sunday travelling. The wine-​ shops (every second house) were driving a roaring trade; awnings were spreading, and chairs and tables arranging, outside the cafés, preparatory to the eating of ices, and drinking of cool liquids, later in the day; shoe-​blacks were busy on the bridges; shops were open; carts and waggons clattered to and fro; the narrow, up-​hill, funnel-​ like streets across the River, were so many dense perspectives of crowd and bustle, parti-​coloured nightcaps, tobacco-​pipes, blouses, large boots, and shaggy heads of hair; nothing at that hour denoted a day of rest, unless it were the appearance, here and there, of a family pleasure-​party, crammed into a bulky old lumbering cab.29

The scene here is marked by trade, consumption, and movement, all of which were denied to Londoners on a Sunday. Dickens pays particular attention to the wine shops:  despite their ‘roaring trade’ there is no drunken licentiousness as a result of Sunday drinking. The only outward sign of this being a day of rest is the rare sight of families leaving the city for the day in a cab. Otherwise Paris is as it would be during the week, full of energy and vitality which throws the constraints of London, which has recently been left behind, into sharp relief. The deadening effect of the London Sunday would be recorded throughout the mid-​Victorian period. George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889), set in the slums around Clerkenwell during the 1870s, sees Sundays again marked by the cloying presence of religion and the long-​fading hopes of radical political action that had marked the 1840s and 1850s. Sidney Kirkwood in his youth had ‘found much satisfaction in spending his Sunday evenings on Clerkenwell Green, where fervent, if ungrammatical, oratory was to be heard, and participation in debate was open to all whom the spirit moved’.30 As Peter Ackroyd has observed, Clerkenwell has always possessed a radical identity. Part of the Ossulstone hundred of Middlesex, lying just outside the jurisdiction of the City of London, it was a place of refuge for those attempting to escape persecution from the city. In the Victorian period it was the site of numerous Chartist rallies and was the home to the Iskra newspaper on which Vladimir Ilyich Lenin worked while in exile in London in 1902–​3. As Ackroyd notes, ‘Clerkenwell persists in London’s history as a kind of shadowland, therefore, complete with its own recognisable if ambiguous identity.’31 The energy of reform alluded to in Gissing’s novel is, one presumes, the series of Chartist rallies of 1848, many of which began on Clerkenwell Green. But by the 1870s when the action of the plot takes place, the 29 

Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (London: Penguin, 1998), 8–​9. George Gissing, The Nether World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 53. 31  Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), 474. 30 

320    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture energies of reform seem to have been exhausted and the London Sunday has returned to a dreary drudge. The same church bells that signalled oppressiveness for Dickens are ringing loudly in this once radical area of London: ‘A Sunday morning. In their parlour in Burton Crescent, Mr and Mrs Joseph Snowdon were breakfasting. The sound of church bells—​most depressing of all sounds that mingle in the voice of London—​intimated that it was nearly eleven o’clock.’32 The sound of church bells here invades the quiet domesticity, a reminder that middle-​class Sunday was to be forever dominated by the spectre of the Sunday service. As Dickens reminded his readers, it was only outside the city—​away from the tolling bells—​that Sunday could become the space of rational recreation and relaxation that it ought to be. It was not to be too long before the tone and tenor of the London Sunday changed, as sabbatarianism began to lose much of the political clout that had made it such a powerful force for so much of the century. We can clearly see the beginnings of this in James Thomson’s poem ‘Sunday in Hampstead’ (1863) where Sundays are becoming increasingly secular for the lower-​middle-​class speakers of the poem. High on Hampstead Heath, looking down on London on a fine May Sunday, they experience a freedom denied to them during the week: Through all the weary week, dear, We toil in the murk down there. Tied to a desk and a counter, A patient stupid pair! But on Sunday we slip our tether, And away from the smoke and the smirch; Too grateful to God for His Sabbath To shut its hours in a church. Away to the green, green country. Under the open sky; Where the earth’s sweet breath is incense And the lark sings psalms on high. On Sunday we’re Lord and Lady, With ten times the love and glee Of those pale and languid rich ones Who are always and never free.33

Thomson, an atheist, suggests that nature is the most logical place of worship for those low-​wage workers for whom the city below could only ever symbolize oppression 32 Gissing, The Nether World, 319. 33 

James Thomson, ‘Sunday at Hampstead’, City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems (London: Reeves and Turner, 1880), 79.

Time to Spend in the Victorian City    321 and suffering. The freedom they have in the countryside is a freedom from capital, a freedom from London itself as they escape to a pastoral setting which is the very antithesis of the city.

The Fading Sunday of the Fin de Siècle Sundays, by the fin de siècle, had increasingly become marked out as a time for leisure, although it was always to be a leisure marked by a lack of consumption. As the sabbatarian movement waned and Sundays became ever more secular in their structure, involving a short church visit in the morning followed by a day of visiting or activity, the absent heart of Sundays became ever more noticeable. Churchgoing was no longer the centre of Sundays, yet as a city filled with churches London would feel a Sunday void. A walk through the City of London on a Sunday was a disorientating experience; where they were so accustomed to seeing the profane energy of capital and commerce, the Londoners each Sunday would see eerily empty streets and even emptier churches. The rhythm and movement of capital that, as we have seen, are so necessary in mapping the city, are gone and the city no longer seems so unknowable. What were the writers and scribes of the city to do on such a day when the city on whose energy they relied was a pale imitation? In George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), the aspiring novelist Edwin Reardon, whose working day never ends, finds his energy curtailed by Sundays in London. Relying in many ways on the action and energy of the city, Sunday is antithetical to his writing: ‘as a rule he made it a day of rest, and almost perforce, for the depressing influence of Sunday in London made work too difficult’.34 For Gissing’s hack novelist the city has a creative power of its own that is drained away on a Sunday. As Nicholas Freeman has argued, a particular ‘discourse of the urban’ developed in and around the fin de siècle, a ‘specialized language of urban life’ that transformed how we think about cities.35 Yet on Sundays that discourse seemed inappropriate as the urban life force of the city was sapped away. In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890–91) the Sunday energies of old, whether religious or political, have lost all their power. After the Sunday trading riots of 1855, and then again the Chartist demonstrations of 1867, Parliament granted in 1872 the Parks Authority permission to allow public meetings to take place in Hyde Park. Since then Speaker’s Corner, the north-east corner of the park near Marble Arch, has become home, every Sunday, to oratory feats—​some memorable, most forgettable—​that had by the 1890s already become a tired institution. Lord Henry sees a Sunday speaker as a quaint sight that is part of the myriad impressionistic offerings of the city: ‘London is 34 

George Gissing, New Grub Street (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 141. Nicholas Freeman, Conceiving the City: London, Literature and Art, 1870–​1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3. 35 

322    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture very rich in curious effects of that kind. A wet Sunday, an uncouth Christian in a mackintosh, a ring of sickly white faces under a broken roof of dripping umbrellas, and a wonderful phrase flung into the air by shrill hysterical lips—​it was really very good in its way, quite a suggestion.’36 The pathetic theatre of the event is suggestive; Sundays are no longer dominated by the church, yet beyond the regulated space of the houses of worship there lies the dismal offerings of the radical antinomian Christian and his pallid flock. This is not the diverse Dissenting tradition of the eighteenth century that nurtured Blake but a reminder that the power of religion had waned—​Lord Henry thinks he should tell the ‘prophet’ that Art has a soul while man does not. If the London Sunday revealed a city sapped of energy, it also allowed for an unfamiliar, sinister side of the city to emerge. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) it is the Sunday walks of Mr Utterson and Mr Enfield that offer the space in which to reflect on the ‘strange case’. The novella frames the comparative quiet of a Sunday as being as unnatural as the dramatic transformation of the good doctor into the sinister Hyde. On one of those Sundays when even they ‘resisted the calls of business’, they turn down the byway that is ‘empty of passage’.37 The eerie quiet of the street mirrors the notorious 3 a.m. incident that Mr Enfield relates. It is on a further Sunday walk that they see the horrific transformation of Dr Jekyll take place and hurry again through the deserted byway to a thoroughfare that was not so devoid of traffic. Sundays in London here take on an uncanny Gothic quality, the day on which the (un) natural order of things has been disturbed. If London on Sundays could be home to the uncanny stillness, it was more often experienced as a tedious boredom, especially by foreign visitors. In Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima (1887), the languorous summer Sunday in London emphasizes a peculiarly British quality: The aspect of South Street, Mayfair, on a Sunday afternoon in August, is not enlivening, yet the Prince had stood for ten minutes gazing out of the window at the genteel vacancy of the scene; at the closed blinds of the opposite houses, the lonely policeman on the corner, covering a yawn with a white cotton hand, the low-​pitched light itself, which seemed conscious of an obligation to observe the decency of the British Sabbath.38

This ‘decency’ is one that James repeatedly erodes over the course of the novel, a novel in which a surprisingly large amount of the action takes place on Sundays. James plots the tension between leisure and religious observance that dominated Sunday in the city, a tension that manifested itself in what he would elsewhere describe as the ‘rigidities of custom’. In an essay on London, written in 1888, James explains that his first encounter with the city was on ‘the end of a wet, black Sunday’, as he made his

36 

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York: Norton, 2007), 177. Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 6. 38  Henry James, The Princess Casamassima (London: Penguin, 1987), 233. 37 

Time to Spend in the Victorian City    323 way from Euston through to Morley’s Hotel in Trafalgar Square.39 The London Sunday on which James first arrived was 28 February 1869 and in his letter to his mother a few days later he describes himself as ‘abjectly, fatally homesick’.40 It is only a few days before he writes to his sister of being ‘crushed’ under the ‘inconceivable immensity’ of London, but it is striking that twenty years on, and throughout his fictional work, the London Sunday of his arrival casts a pall over his impression of a city that endlessly fascinated him.41 James’s bleak London of the 1860s was to be a far cry from the light, airy days of the fin de siècle. For his compatriot, the Irish-​American poet Louise Imogen Guiney, the London Sunday was a play of the presence and absence of religious faith. Yet for Guiney, as a staunch Roman Catholic, empty churches were not to be seen solely as a symbol of an increasingly secular society. For Guiney the ‘bare ruin’d choirs’ of monasteries and small Catholic churches symbolize the quiet, endangered faith of the recusancy. In her poem ‘Sunday Chimes in the City’ (1895), she laments the bells of the London churches echoing out with no congregations to heed their call: Across the bridge, where in the morning blow The wrinkled tide turns homeward, and is fain Homeward to drag the black sea-​goer’s chain, And the long yards by Dowgate dipping low; Across dispeopled ways, patient and slow, Saint Magnus and Saint Dunstan call in vain: From Wren’s forgotten belfries, in the rain, Down the blank wharves the dropping octaves go. Forbid not these! Tho’ no man heed, they shower A subtle beauty on the empty hour, From all their dark throats aching and outblown; Aye in the prayerless places welcome most, Like the last gull that up a naked coast Deploys her white and steady wing, alone.42

It is a poem marked by a seeming melancholy and emptiness, yet there is an ambivalence here. The first stanza establishes a tone of regret and longing, the ‘dispeopled ways’ suggesting a city lifeless and a faith departed. The second stanza, however, makes it clear that the ‘subtle beauty’ needs no witness, and that the music seems welcome most of all

39 

Henry James, ‘London’, in Essays in London and Elsewhere (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1893), 4, 1. 40  Henry James, ‘To Mary Walsh James, 2, 5 March 1869’, in The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855–​ 1872 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), i. 224. 41  Henry James, ‘To Alice James, 10, 12 March 1869’, in The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855–​1872 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), i. 233. 42  Louise Imogen Guiney, ‘Sunday Chimes in the City’, Happy Ending: The Collected Lyrics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 167.

324    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture in the ‘prayerless places’ of the city. The lone, last gull seems portentous, having somehow failed to take shelter from the storm. Yet the questions remains, why is the city so empty, and where are the congregations that once obeyed the call to service? As suggested earlier, the changes in the English Sunday from the mid-​century to the fin de siècle were responsible for the increasingly empty churches as many chose to spend their day of rest in the parks and leisure gardens around the city. Guiney explains in her essay ‘Quiet London’ that the inhabitants of the city have transformed the meaning of Sunday: the dreary English Sundays of old complaint, what idyllic opportunity wastes itself at the door! Hampstead and Blackheath are efflorescent with the populace, but dark London wears her troth-​plight ring of meditation. Her church-​bells, indeed, speak: there is a new one at every turning, like the succession of perfumes as you cross a conservatory, and felt as a discord no more than these. Good to hear are the chimics of S. Giles Cripplegate, the aged bells of S. Helen, with their grace-​notes and falling thirds, the great octave-​clash of Wren’s cathedral, which booms and sprays like the sea on the chalk-​cliffs almost within its sight.43

The themes from ‘Sunday Chimes in the City’ are repeated here, yet the tone is lighter and the empty city doesn’t seem as foreboding as it had been earlier. There is a sensual confusion here, yet not one that appeared as cloying as it had in Dickens; the evanescence of the church bells is heightened through the analogy to perfume and the wafting odour here evokes incense, and with it Guiney’s ever-​present reflection on the Catholic history of England; the clouds of perfume suggest a harmonic unity to the city, hardly discordant. It is on these deserted Sundays that London can once again become the home of a silent, recusant faith. This nostalgia is suggested in the solemn ‘troth-​plight’ of meditation. It is characteristic of Guiney to use such unusual and archaic words, evoking here Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and, more importantly, Algernon Charles Swinburne’s 1881 verse drama Mary Stuart, specifically Mary’s denunciation of the Privy Court’s authority and jurisdiction; she is answerable to no mortal body, having been ‘trothplight’ to her cause.44 The archaism is compounded by ‘chimics’, which appears to have the meaning of both chime and chimera, as well as being a modern rendering of chymic, a possible reference to the ‘chymic ray’ of Marvell’s ‘Eyes and Tears’ (1681). The ethereal, almost revenant qualities of the bells in Guiney’s poem and essay suggest a London Sunday that is now empty, lacking the deadening call to worship that had tormented Dickens and his characters. That the population no longer attend church on a Sunday is underscored by Aubrey Beardsley’s claim that the Brompton Oratory was ‘the only place in London where one can forget that it is Sunday’.45 With Sunday fast

43 

Louise Imogen Guiney, ‘Quiet London’, Patrins (Boston: Copeland and Day, 1897), 200. Algernon Charles Swinburne, Mary Stuart: A Tragedy (New York: Worthington, 1887), 126. 45  Aubrey Beardsley, Under the Hill and Other Essays in Prose and Verse (London: John Lane, 1904), 63. 44 

Time to Spend in the Victorian City    325 becoming associated with a day of leisure it is in the church that one can escape the secular injunction to frivolous fun. Alice Meynell’s essay on ‘The London Sunday’ (1898) suggests that the uniformity of the very phrase fails to capture the variety of impressions the city offers up to the observer. Sundays in London are ‘little understood’, as the seasons, the location, and the weather all play a part in creating multiple experiences of London on Sundays. It is precisely ‘experience’ that is lacking in those who decry the London Sunday—​if only they had experienced London in as much depth and breadth as our narrator (we assume) they would have a greater grasp of the heterogeneity of the city. The London that appears here, as in many of the essays in Meynell’s short collection, is a product of an impressionism that attempts to evoke the spirit of London rather than to describe it in copious detail. It is perhaps telling, though, that Meynell wants to measure the light, breezy London of the fin de siècle against that of Dickens, noting that the service at St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, is as poorly attended as it had been in Dickens’s time: ‘in this open church there are but three people, exceedingly devout; but the old woman, the beadle, the gloom are gone’.46 The qualities of movement, of light reflecting off objects, infuse Meynell’s vignettes of contemporary London in the late 1890s.

The Fading Sunday By the end of the century the London Sunday had changed, seemingly beyond recognition. The parliamentary debates that had made Sunday trading such a prominent political issue had moved on and the increasing centrality of transportation and shopping had changed the ways in which many experienced the day. Sundays in London had been both unique and exceptional but were now going the way of many other traditions as the city entered ‘the American Century’. Yet in the tolling bells of the city there was to be a reminder of the past, and this past could not be dismissed so easily. Arthur Symons captured this in the final stanza of his poem ‘Impression’ (1895): Outside, the dreary church bell tolled, The London Sunday faded slow; Ah what is this? What wings unfold In this miraculous rose of gold?47

The unfolding wings of freedom that emerge here are tempered by an awareness that ‘The London Sunday faded slow’. In the twenty-​first century the London Sunday is still in a process of fading. The Sunday Trading Act of 1994 transformed the experience of

46  47 

Alice Meynell, ‘The London Sunday’, London Impressions (London: Archibald Constable, 1898), 3. Arthur Symons, Silhouettes (London: Leonard Smithers, 1896), 15.

326    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Sunday for many, but the restrictions on larger stores opening for no more than six hours is a reminder that the anomalous Sunday of old has yet to fade entirely.

Select Bibliography Dickens, Charles, ‘Sunday Under Three Heads’, Reprinted Pieces (London: Chapman & Hall, 1911), 319–​55. Doyle, Arthur Conan, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 2009). Freeman, Nicholas, Conceiving the City: London, Literature and Art, 1870–​1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Joyce, Simon, Capital Offenses:  Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003). McLaughlin, Joseph, Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000). Mighall, Robert, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction:  Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Moretti, Franco, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–​1900 (London: Verso, 1999). Nead, Lynda, Victorian Babylon:  People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-​Century London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). Wigley, John, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980). Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Wolfreys, Julian, Writing London:  The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens (London: Macmillan, 1998).

Pa rt  I I

WAYS OF U N DE R STA N DI N G : K N OW L E D G E A N D  B E L I E F

Religion and the Shaping of Belief

Chapter 17

Religion, th e Bi bl e , and Literature i n t h e Victoria n Ag e Emma Mason

While religion has long been important for the study of Victorian culture, many literary critics argue that it has become the ‘dominant issue’ of the period.1 Literary forms shape religious debate as literary texts resound with religious references and biblical quotations: prayers, liturgies, hymns, and choral music communicate Victorian faith in both aesthetic and devout terms. For those who study the relationship between religion and literature in the period, two approaches dominate: critics tend to either track the development of a religious doctrine, quotation, or set of religious principles in one or more literary texts; or else assess the way in which literary forms and categories shape and influence religious ideas and doctrines. Most critics would argue that their research works in both directions, as they seek to find reciprocity between religion and literature that informs a specific point they want to make. Such reciprocity is apparent even in the period: the Tractarians John Keble, John Henry Newman, and Isaac Williams, for example, formulated the doctrine of reserve through their engagement with contemporary poetry and poetics; while Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins, who explored reserve poetically and prosodically, also acquainted themselves with the doctrine as a theological idea and belief.2 Similarly, just as the Victorian novel form served to shape the sermons and confessional writings of nineteenth-​century ministers and theologians, so the fictional content of many novels drew on partisan representations of particular kinds of believers and creeds. From Charlotte Yonge’s chivalric Anglo-​Catholics to George Eliot’s sympathetic Methodists, Charles Dickens’s hysterical Evangelicals to 1  T. Wright, ‘The Victorians’, in A. Hass, D. Jasper, and E. Jay (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Literature and Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 148–​63, at 148. 2  E. Mason, ‘Christina Rossetti and the Doctrine of Reserve’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 7, no. 2 (2002), 196–​219.

332    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Charlotte Brontë’s malevolent Catholics, the presentation of faith positions in the novel transformed the genre into what Margaret Maison calls ‘the pulpit, the confessional and the battlefield’ of theology.3 An education in religious terms and ideas enables us to make sense, for instance, of the attraction of reserve for Rossetti or the prejudicial presentation of Catholicism by Brontë, and in doing so nuances our interest in these writers and opens out precisely why religious debate was so urgent in the period. One might generically describe such readings as historical, and the often highly self-​conscious nature of the representation of religion in literature and literature in religion suggests that the methodologies underpinning such interdisciplinary research have tended towards new historicism and cultural formalism. In the next section, ‘Religion and Literature’, I outline several examples of significant interventions in historical and cultural readings of both, and survey the way in which scholars have explored the resonance of doctrines, religious practices, and acts of worship as a way to read the content and form of literary texts. While I emphasize the centrality of such context for our reading of ‘religious’ writing of this period, I also consider the limits of this methodology for assessing the experiential or immaterial elements of religion. Words like ‘love’, ‘spirit’, ‘faith’, and ‘grace’, recurrent as they are in Victorian religious texts, either lose some of their meaning when addressed as historical building blocks of denominational affiliations, or dissolve into a glib gospel when reduced to the state of emotions. In ‘Rhythmic Spirits’, I appraise this issue by offering a reading of Keble’s 1833 ‘National Apostasy’ sermon to explore his own struggle to articulate what he means by the word ‘spirit’ in an address with clear political implications regarding the state of the Anglican Church. As I argue, Keble defers his explanation of what he means and feels by the ‘spirit’ into discussions of church doctrine, history, ethics, politics, nationhood, and sensibility: he is only able to incarnate his perception of spirit through the rhythm and form of his poetry. This example illuminates the importance of prosody, affect theory, and phenomenology for literary critics interested in religion, a group of methodologies that come together in the term ‘theopoetics’. Like much of the work I review here, theopoetics is founded in Christian thought and while I follow suit, the act of establishing the importance of religion in this period enables research into all religions, Abrahamic, Dharmic and beyond.4 Here, however, I would like to ask what is distinctive about how religion and literature encourages us to read, not only interdisciplinarily, but also in a discerning and kindly manner derived from its expression of the lived meaning of faith. In my final section, ‘Pastoralism’, I suggest that we might think, first, about taking seriously those who believed, without explaining faith away as naivety or as a ‘desperate measure that people resort to when the stakes are high and they have exhausted the usual techniques for the causation of success’;5 and second, about engaging in a pastoral language of 3 

M. Maison, Search Your Soul, Eustace: Victorian Religious Novels (London: Sheed and Ward, 1961), 5. See, for example, E. Mason (ed.), Reading the Abrahamic Faiths: Re-​thinking Religion and Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 5  S. Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 556. 4 

Religion, the Bible, and Literature in the Victorian Age    333 kindness and care inherent to Christian expression that might guide our reading of religious texts. I make a case for a ‘pastoral’ way of reading religious writing that might complement historical and social perspectives while also granting us a way to think about the compassionate and affective aspects of faith that are not objectively measurable. In proposing a methodology that refuses to split the subjective from the objective, I draw on the work of Martin Heidegger, whose nondualist approach to human ‘being’ and our dwelling in the world is based on his own training in both Catholicism and Taoism. For some readers, thinking through Heidegger to imagine a pastoral practice of reading will appear improbable and even repugnant, especially in light of the recently published Schwarzen Hefte and their complicating of his association with Nazism and anti-​semitism.6 Heidegger’s political commitment to National Socialism in the early 1930s is as undeniable as his ‘spiritual resistance’ and ‘opposition to the principles of the National Socialist world-​view’ he proclaimed a few years later: the latter cannot redress the former.7 I do think, however, that Heidegger’s notions of care and caring-​for found one way of thinking a pastoral consciousness that seeks an attentive exchange with texts, a ‘poetizing dialogue’ in which we can explore both our experience and understanding of what we read.8 Such consciousness might then enable a reading practice that side-​ steps the meretricious interpretations of a certain kind of virtuoso critic for a patient and communal thinking that lends itself as much to Victorian religion’s profession of ‘love’, ‘spirit’, ‘faith’, and ‘grace’ as to the context in which these words signify.

Religion and Literature Research into religion and Victorian literature has followed the methodological trends that have shaped literary studies over the last thirty years. Seminal studies written by George Landow and Hilary Fraser in the 1980s sharpened critical interest in an area considered exhausted and conservative by a newly politicized and theorized field.9 Their work engendered a series of studies that viewed religion through the fashionable

6 

On the current controversy surrounding Heidegger, see P. Trawny’s publication of Heidegger’s Schwarzen Hefte (‘black notebooks’), in M. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, IV: Abteilung: Hinweise und Aufzeichnungen, Band 94: Überlegungen II–​VI, Schwarze Hefte 1931–​1938 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014); and E. Faye, The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–​1935, trans. M. B. Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 7  M. Heidegger, ‘Letter to the Rector of Freiburg University, November 4, 1945’, in R. Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1998), 61–​66 at 64–65; and see R. Polt, ‘Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger’s Secret Resistance’, Interpretation, 35.1 (2007), 11–​40. 8  See M. Heidegger, Introduction to Philosophy—Thinking and Poetizing, trans. Phillip Jacques Braunstein (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011). 9  G. P. Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art and Thought (Boston: Routledge, 1980); H. Fraser, Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

334    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture lens of sexuality, allowing scholarship on masculinity and spirituality, or Christian manliness, to flourish.10 Just as literary critics started to express interest in religion as a cultural phenomenon of the Victorian period, the study of ‘religion and literature’ was revitalized by a group of scholars who were both committed to theology and also worked on nineteenth-​century literature. One cannot underestimate the influence of Michael Wheeler, Elizabeth Jay, David Jasper, and Terry Wright (the last three all involved in the establishment of the journal Literature and Theology) on the development of what is now a burgeoning research area.11 While general works on religion and literature by Susan Zemka, Julie Melnyk, Carolyn Oulton, and Jude Nixon pushed the emergent interdisciplinary subject forwards, scholarship quickly adapted to incoming methodologies (like new historicism and cultural formalism), while also reflecting on how religion itself had come to establish the very field of literary studies.12 In The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers 1774–​1880, for example, William McKelvy argues for the theological heritage of print culture and reading by relocating authorship in a vocation at once sacred and ‘literary’, immersed in cultural dialogue between religion and literature. In refusing to collapse political secularization and the ‘decline’ of religion, McKelvy shows that the faltering status of the church was not commensurate with agnosticism and that the ‘cult’ of literature ‘developed in intimate collusion with religious culture and religious politics’.13 Critics also began to recognize that far from being an ideological smokescreen for various repressed issues, religion in its many forms was considered by the Victorians as both an intellectually challenging and emotionally profound arena. For example, in her discussion of ‘spiritualism’ Christine Ferguson argues that the ‘presence’ Victorians ‘encountered in the séance room’ was not the ‘metaphorical place-​holder’ for modernity, technology, and gender indeterminacy critics often want it to be: ‘For converts’, she writes, ‘the spirit world was absolutely 10 

J. Maynard, Victorian Discourses on Sexuality and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); D. Alderson, Mansex Fine: Religion, Manliness and Imperialism in Nineteenth-​Century British Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); A. Bradstock (ed.), Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); N. Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); see also M. W. Carpenter, Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies: Women, Sexuality, and Religion in the Victorian Market (Athens, O.: Ohio University Press, 2003). 11  M. Wheeler, St John and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), Ruskin’s God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Heaven, Hell and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); E. Jay, The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth Century Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); and see, for example, D. Jasper and T. Wright, The Critical Spirit and the Will to Believe: Essays in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989). 12  S. Zemka, Victorian Testaments: The Bible, Christology and Literary Authority in Early-​Nineteenth-​ Century British Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997); J. Melnyk, Women’s Theology in Nineteenth-​Century Britain: Transfiguring the Faith of Their Fathers (New York: Garland, 1998); C. Oulton, Literature and Religion in Mid-​Victorian England: From Dickens to Eliot (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003); J. V. Nixon, Victorian Religious Discourse: New Directions in Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004). 13  W. R. McKelvy, The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers 1774–​1880 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 35.

Religion, the Bible, and Literature in the Victorian Age    335 real, an ontologically stable state whose existence gave meaning to the structures and processes of earth life and whose disincarnate inhabitants could, according to some, be weighed and measured.’14 Such critical willingness to take the immaterial on board has enabled the study of ethics, morality, and sentimentality, as well as religion. Terry Eagleton, a ‘convert’ to the religion and literature nexus, recalls how ‘for a long time cultural theorists avoided the question of morality as something of an embarrassment. It seemed preachy, unhistorical, priggish and heavy-​handed. For the harder-​nosed kind of theorist, it was also soppy and unscientific.’15 Commenting on this passage, Jasper notes that Eagleton’s summary of the field draws attention to the way critics dismissed religious studies because it purported to be ‘about belief, not about thinking’.16 Yet the divide between ‘thinking’ and ‘believing’ has been considerably dismantled by both the revival of phenomenology in the study of philosophy and literature; and also by research into individual writers whose letters, diaries, memoirs, and notes, as well as their ‘literary’ output, reveal deep and profound commitments to faith positions that can no longer be dismissed as fallacy. Christina Rossetti, Charlotte Yonge, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, and G. K. Chesterton were among the first to be taken seriously as Christian thinkers; while others, like the Brontës, became a site to understand both faith (in the form of their Methodism) and hostility (in the form of their anti-​Catholicism).17 Attending to religious writing also allowed the inclusion of many previously ignored writers—​Frederick William Faber, Dora Greenwell, Adelaide Anne Procter, William Barnes, Charles Tennyson Turner—​as well as illuminating the works of familiar writers like Anne Brontë, Robert Browning, and Amy Levy through their religious concerns.18 Assessment of these concerns has been founded on mainly literary-​historical research into the denominations to which these writers were affiliated or later converted. Literary historians have unearthed a wealth of source material in reading diaries, sermons, hymns, liturgies, prayers, and 14  C. Ferguson, ‘Recent Studies in Nineteenth-​Century Spiritualism’, Literature Compass, 9 (2012), 431–​40, at 435. 15  T. Eagleton, After Theory (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 140. 16  D. Jasper, ‘Interdisciplinarity in Impossible Times: Studying Religion through Literature and the Arts’, in H. Walton (ed.), Literature and Theology: New Interdisciplinary Spaces (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 5–​18, at 8. 17  D. D’Amico, Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender and Time (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999); D. Roe, Christina Rossetti’s Faithful Imagination: The Devotional Poetry and Prose (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006); B. Dennis, Charlotte Yonge, a Novelist of the Oxford Movement: A Literature of Victorian Culture and Society (Lampeter: Mellen, 1992); G. Budge, Charlotte M. Yonge: Religion, Feminism and Realism in the Victorian Novel (Berne: Peter Lang, 2007); M. Johnson, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Tractarian Poetry (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997); J. Muller, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism: A Heart in Hiding (London: Routledge, 2003); J. Killeen, The Faiths of Oscar Wilde: Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005); M. Knight, Chesterton and Evil (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004); M. Thormählen, The Brontës and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); D. Peschier, Nineteenth-​Century Anti-​Catholic Discourses: The Case of Charlotte Brontë (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). 18  Levy’s Judaism has driven the enthusiastic return to her work in the last ten years; see C. Scheinberg, Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

336    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture homilies that have helped the modern reader to understand what constituted, and separated, low church from high, Methodists from evangelicals, Presbyterians from Quakers, and Tractarians from Roman Catholics. Such debates necessarily point back to a Reformation moment with which many Victorian writers are concerned, a factor that at once requests critics to historicize religion outside the confines of the nineteenth century even as it also reveals the shared beliefs of Christians across periods.19 Rossetti’s debt to George Herbert, for example, is as significant as Hopkins’s debt to Rossetti, while Oxford Movement poets such as Keble and Isaac Williams show themselves to be as dependent on pre-​Reformation English Catholicism as they are on Romanticism. What is striking about religious practice in the Victorian period is the way in which it is shaped and understood through literature. All of the main Christian denominations, for example, can make a claim for being the most ‘literary’ of religions, although the Oxford Movement’s sense of poetry as synonymous with religious truth renders it the most likely contender for the crown. Its leading figures—​Keble, John Henry Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey, and Isaac Williams—​were all poets, as well as preachers and Oxford academics, and outlined their collective theology in scholarly and literary pamphlets called Tracts for the Times (1833–​41). While the Tracts reached a fairly limited audience, the poetry that emerged from this movement was, as Stephen Prickett states, ‘the most successful ever written in English’ after Shakespeare: Keble’s The Christian Year alone annually sold over ten thousand volumes for at least fifty years after its publication in 1827.20 Keble’s Lectures on Poetry too evolved William Wordsworth’s lyric theory into a religious poetics adopted by Rossetti, Greenwell, Faber, and Hopkins, and at the same time laid an aesthetic foundation for the reintroduction of ceremony and ritual into the Anglican Communion. This was founded on a rejection of Roman aesthetics, and the Oxford Movement was initiated by Keble’s dismissal of the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) in his ‘Assize’ sermon on ‘National Apostasy’ (1833). Here Keble celebrated ‘The One Catholic and Apostolic Church’, and declared that its authority was inherited through sacramental transfer from Jesus to the apostles to bishops, without the meditation of the Pope. While Keble and Newman alike were dependent on doctrinal argument to elevate the modern Anglican Church as the inheritor of early Christianity, the strength of their position was fortified by an appeal to a liturgical and spiritual affect borrowed from the poetics of Wordsworth and Coleridge. For Newman, Tractarianism was a feeling within or ‘“spirit afloat”’ that ‘rolls through all things’ like a silent ‘motion and a spirit’: God reveals himself through ‘real things unseen’ that are expressed through poetry and doctrinally understood through ‘reserve’.21 Reserve ruled that God’s scriptural laws should remain hidden to all but the faithful, indicating that devotional writing and biblical

19  See D. Janes, Victorian Reformation: The Fight over Idolatry in the Church of England 1840–​1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 20  S. Prickett, ‘Tractarian Poetry’, in R. Cronin, A. Chapman, and A. H. Harrison (eds), A Companion to Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 279–​90, at 279; J. Keble, The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holydays Throughout the Christian Year, 2 vols. (Oxford: J. Parker, 1827). 21  J. H. Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1865–​6; London: Penguin, 1994), 100.

Religion, the Bible, and Literature in the Victorian Age    337 exegesis should protect religious truth through metaphor, figure, and allegory. For Keble, poetry fulfilled this purpose: it is ‘the indirect expression in words, most appropriately in metrical words, of some overpowering emotion’ and so able to obliquely conjure faith rather than spilling it like so many undemanding evangelical novels and pamphlets.22 One cannot dismiss this as straightforward elitism: Tractarianism’s dependence on prosody to encode biblical phrase and liturgy demanded that the believer read and listen with care and learning, and so promoted education to enable this; and reserved expression also enabled many women writers—​Yonge, Rossetti, Procter, and Greenwell—​to think and write about theology seriously under the guise of a restrained and gentle mode.23 As Tractarianism evolved into ‘Anglo-​Catholicism’ in the mid-​nineteenth century, it began to engage a wider community through visible devotion, the articulation of faith through images and decoration, and flower missions to the poorest areas of Britain.24 Alongside it was the development of evangelicalism, a revivalist movement that emerged in the eighteenth century and, like Tractarianism, understood its mission to disseminate the ‘evangel’ or gospel as originating in the early church. Comprising a number of denominations unable to fully subscribe to the Thirty-​Nine Articles (such as Calvinists, Arminians, some Methodists), evangelicalism notoriously defies neat definition. Most evangelical groups, however, shared a commitment to conversionism (lives are changed through engagement with the gospel), biblicism (the Bible as God’s revealed word), crucicentrism (a belief in the atoning sacrifice of Christ on the cross), and activism (the enactment of the gospel in society and politics).25 It is this last sense of political responsibility to social issues like slavery, poverty, child exploitation, and rights for women that captured the imaginations of writers like Dickens, Hannah More, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Margaret Oliphant, Mrs Henry Wood, and Anthony Trollope. While Dickens parodied the extremities of evangelicalism’s social fervour (in Bleak House’s (1852–​3) Mrs Jellyby, for example), and Ruskin and Eliot critiqued its anti-​intellectualism, writers like Thomas Reid praised it for engendering a basic and simple set of beliefs accessible to all.26 Certain aspects of evangelicalism troubled commentators more than others: the belief in human sinfulness, for example, was critiqued by Dickens in David Copperfield (1850) and Brontë in Jane Eyre (1847); while the elevation of the Bible as truth sparked debate with a German higher criticism invested in reception, interpretation, and hermeneutics. At the same time, questions of reading practice were energized by an evangelical commitment to scriptural dissemination and missionary imperialism that extended to reflection on how the ‘word’ was experienced. The evangelical testimony, for example, 22  J. Keble, ‘Life of Sir Walter Scott’, British Critic (1838), in Keble, Occasional Papers and Reviews (Oxford and London: James Parker and Co., 1877), 1–​80, at 6. 23  See, for example, R. Styler, Literary Theology by Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). 24  B. Seaton, The Language of Flowers: A History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995). 25  D. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 2–​3. 26  E. Jay (ed.), The Evangelical and Oxford Movements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 16.

338    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is charged by an emotional intensity many readers would recognize from sensation fiction and so distrust as theatrical display.27 While evangelicalism sought to distinguish its affective impact from that of the novel, it inadvertently forced debate on how the believer should read, feel, and make sense of the Bible’s various formal experiments. However they were translated in the period, the parables, miracles, poems, and prayers that comprised scripture demanded imaginative work from even the most literal reader, as both Isaac Watts and Robert Lowth established in their eighteenth-​century commentaries on hymnal and sacred writing.28 Recent criticism has been sharply aware of the formal innovations of religious writing. In Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion, for example, Kirstie Blair explores the impact of poetic (as well as musical and architectural) form on contemporary structures of worship, and argues that ecclesiastical practice was frequently shaped by poetic debate just as church liturgy and architecture was influenced by Victorian poetry. In Victorian Parables, Susan Colon considers novelists like Dickens and Yonge to think about their experimentation with the stories and complexities of the parable as a cultural and ethical currency able to challenge conventional morality. And Charles LaPorte’s Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible examines the impact of higher criticism on the poetic experiments of writers including Barrett Browning, Tennyson, and Clough.29 F. Elizabeth Gray even interrogates how we decipher the religious texts that ‘count’ as worthy of critical attention in the first place: ‘Why do we need to examine Victorian women’s religious poetry? There’s a lot of it; a lot of it is very much the same; a lot of it is quite frankly doggerel; and even when “good” poets write it, their secular verse holds much more appeal for the modern taste.’30 Evangelicalism, of course, worked hard to guard against the aestheticizing and spiritualizing away of their faith, a danger to which they saw their adversary, Roman Catholicism, fall prey. The glut of anti-​Catholic clichés circulated by evangelicals, Anglicans, and Tractarians twisted Catholicism into a kind of decadence that was associated with and reaffirmed by writers like Joris-​Karl Huysmans and Oscar Wilde.31 27 

See A. N. Porter, Religion versus Empire: British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–​1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); J. Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–​1940 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002); M. Knight, ‘Sensation Fiction and Religion’, in P. Gilbert (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Sensation Fiction (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2011), 455–​65. 28  See, for example, R. Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1787), trans. G. Gregory (Boston: Joseph T. Buckingham, 1815); and I. Watts, Hymns and Spiritual Songs in Three Books (London: Strahan and Rivington, 1773). 29  K. Blair, Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012); S. Colon, Victorian Parables (London: Continuum, 2012); C. LaPorte, Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011). 30  F. E. Gray, Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry (London: Routledge, 2010), 3. 31  See S. M. Griffin, Anti-​Catholicism and Nineteenth-​Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); P. O’Malley, Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); M. LaMonaca, Masked Atheism: Catholicism and the Secular Victorian Home (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008); and D. Fisher, Roman Catholic Saints and Early Victorian Literature: Conservatism, Liberalism, and the Emergence of Secular Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).

Religion, the Bible, and Literature in the Victorian Age    339 There is no question that Catholicism’s impact on Victorian culture is aesthetic as well as theological, but a focus on the former tends to obscure how central notions of sacramentalism and Trinitarianism were to Catholics such as Aubrey De Vere, Kenelm Digby, Coventry Patmore, Michael Field, Alice Meynell, and G. K. Chesterton, as well as Huysmans and Wilde. For many Catholics, cradle and convert, their faith system protected them against an increasingly materialistic, technological, and scientized politics of progress: Vatican I (1869–​70), for example, explicitly granted new import to ‘mysteries’ like the Annunciation, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the Eucharist, drawing attention to the immaterial. Catholics were also keen to distinguish themselves from esoteric mysticisms like Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s theosophical movement, which, for Blavatsky’s heir, Annie Besant, as well as writers like Marie Corelli and Rider Haggard, blurred into Tibetan Buddhism and occult philosophy. This blurring also obscured the specificity of Buddhism and Hindu tradition, and many Western writers, philosophers, and theologians misread Dharmic religion as pantheism, nihilism, and later, existentialism.32 As Tennyson argued, a familiarity with the ‘great religions of the world’ would sustain, not threaten, Christianity, a point revealed by his own engagement with Confucius, the Qur’an, Hinduism, and Buddhism.33 The implications of Heidegger’s bringing together of West and East in his writing echoes this position. Before turning to Heidegger, however, I address the question of whether modern criticism can think its way through the subjective and objective presentation of religion in the Victorian period. Specifically, I link Keble’s decision to convey ‘spirit’ through poetry to Heidegger’s model of rhythm as a form of ‘rest’ on which his meditative and receptive model of thinking the environment is based.

Rhythmic Spirits The expression of religion in Victorian texts is, I think, acutely aware of its potential to enact a unique kind of thinking not easily slotted into wire-​drawn categories of history or aesthetics. Religious texts sometimes slip away from critical conceptualization because they often embody a subjective experience, the meaning of which is defeated by an attempt to step back and describe it: any number of descriptions might apply but the unity of the experience is lost in attempted objectivity. Keble addresses this problem head-​on in his ‘National Apostasy’ sermon, already referred to in the context of Tractarianism, and which I explore here to think through the challenge of nineteenth-​century religious faith to literary analysis. Keble trusts that faith is a way into thinking the unity of subject and object (feeling and thought, faith and reason), and argues that the ‘whole mind’ of the believer should be committed to thoughts ‘of a devotional kind’: consciousness becomes 32  See T. Masuzama, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 33  See Blair, Form and Faith, 189–​96.

340    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture a hallowed entity, one that dwells within a synthesis of letter and spirit.34 Yet to sustain this faithful consciousness, Keble argues, the believer must neglect thoughts of ‘public concerns, ecclesiastical or civil’, thereby splitting civic from holy life, and reimposing a model of the believer who thinks about society discretely (and outside his or her faith). The opening couple of lines of Keble’s sermon, for example, attempt to voice a religious commitment to ‘things supernatural and miraculous’, but instead invoke history, intertextuality, politics, reading practices, and ethics: Keble tells us that his sermon is preached from the pulpit of St Mary’s in Oxford on 14 July 1833; is biblically based (it begins with a quotation from 1 Samuel, ends with a short passage from Acts 4, and includes numerous lines from Ezekiel, Deuteronomy, Hosea, Luke, and the Psalms); is against the current state of the Anglican Church; and defines ‘the minds of Christians’ as ‘devoted’ listeners and readers who habitually read the Bible as an ethical act. Daily bible reading in particular is described as that which teaches ‘the good’ (1 Samuel 12:23) by requiring the believer to stand against the intrusion of the State into spiritual concerns. Keble seems able only to gesture towards ‘things supernatural and miraculous’. By contrast, he is distinctively ‘material’ in his defence of the moral command of the Church as it is documented in the ‘records of the elder Church’—​its Reformation, the disbanding of the monasteries, and the erosion of the supernatural within Anglicanism. Rather than outlining in detailed terms what a commitment to the supernatural looks like, then, Keble turns to history (the Reformation), theology (a brief discussion of Judaic revelation), and ethics (the importance of ‘civil wisdom and duty’ in the practice of Christianity). Keble leaves the supernatural on the periphery in his sermon, then, and even more so when he begins to address the ‘spirit’. In the context of Keble’s work, the ‘spirit’ is connected to the ‘Creator’ God and is invoked through the idea of the Holy Spirit, ‘truth’, and the divine essence of the Triune God. But when we examine how Keble describes the spirit, we see its definition morph into either the moral and ethical questions already discussed; or into issues of sensibility, that is, the ‘sweetness with firmness’ that Keble thinks ideally constitute the ‘energy’ and ‘temper of a perfect public man’. Keble’s dualistic approach to the believer is not dissimilar to the predominant way of thinking through religious questions in modern criticism: the immaterial or experiential dimension of religion is more accessible when materialized as another discourse. Thus Keble turns to emotion as a way into the supernatural and spiritual, arguing that the believer who feels God as ‘sweetness’ can access his ‘supernatural aid’ and find protection against ‘malevolent feeling, of disgust’, which is ‘apt to lay hold on sensitive minds’. As a Wordsworthian, Keble suggests that good feeling is developed through habit, the ‘daily and hourly duties’ of ‘piety, purity, charity, justice’. Only an emotionalized ‘remonstrance’—​‘calm’ and ‘distinct’—​can help ‘when the Church landmarks are being broken down’, indicating an affective command to do ‘all as a Christian, to credit and advance the cause he has most at heart’. This rhetoric of the heart is an example of a particular kind of religious mode that relies on feeling, and so triggers modern readers to understand religion as feeling or sentiment, a connection that has spurred some of the most interesting recent work on religion in this period. 34 

J. Keble, ‘National Apostasy’ (1833); all references are to the online copy at http://​anglicanhistory. org/​keble/​keble1.html [last accessed 10 March 2012].

Religion, the Bible, and Literature in the Victorian Age    341 Methodism is read through enthusiastic feeling, the Quakers associated with quietude, the Tractarians understood through religious and poetic reserve, and evangelicalism aligned with sentimentalism. The history of religious music too, so rich in the nineteenth century, is opened up by theories of affect as developments in the hymn, choir, church organ, and religious ensembles communicate the experience of God through praise, harmony, and rhythm. But does reconfiguring religion, or religious faith, as music, emotion, or affect reify its concerns yet again into another set of ideas? While accessing religion through other discourses is undoubtedly interesting, it evades what is different about the question of religion from other interdisciplinary concerns in the period. Both religion and literature share a capacity to go ‘beyond the materiality of facts’ into a ‘new metaphysics’, but other disciplines also create routes into (re)imagining the world, both those we are familiar with (like science, history, politics, economics, geography, gender, sexuality) and also those we are coming to know (like ecocriticism, eudaemonics, affect theory, cartography, and medicine).35 Specificity of language in and between discourses, practices, and belief systems always provides a unique way of thinking; so what does the relationship between religion and literature offer that is distinct from other modes of inter-​and multi-​disciplinary Victorian studies? Keble might answer that religion is inherently poetic, and that while he cannot describe the spirit in prose sermons, he can conjure or incarnate it in poetic form. In this sense Keble is theopoetic, as is Tractarianism: both anticipate the modern meaning of this term as it describes a methodology reliant on the poematic to sound out and think through religious ideas and beliefs.36 Theopoetics is especially concerned to find in poetic language the embodiment of religious experience and then assess how such experience signifies to different believers and readers. Keble, for example, is invested in discussing the spirit as a Christian intent on defending what he understands to be the true Church: in this context, the spirit is that which will guide him and those who are dutiful enough to join him in committing to God through Christian practice. Keble and others describe the details of this commitment in sermons and the Tracts for the Times in so far as this prose prescribes the believer with a set of laws and religious practices to follow. The question of how to communicate the experience of the spirit, however, remains obscure and abstract when rendered in prose. Keble turns to poetry to conjure the spirit in metre, repetition, and biblical paraphrase and does so specifically through poems written for daily reading, his collection The Christian Year (1827) allowing the believer to feel present in both material and spiritual time at once. This experience is regulated, however, into an order of sound and rhythm, as the ‘dedication’ poem that opens The Christian Year illustrates: Fountain of Harmony! Thou Spirit blest, By whom the troubled waves of earthly sound Are gathered into order, such as best Some high-​souled bard in his enchanted round 35 

A. Hass, ‘Discipline Beyond Disciplines’, in Walton (ed.), Literature and Theology, 19–​36, at 35. See L. B. C. Keefe-​Perry, ‘Theopoetics: Process and Perspective’, Christianity and Literature, 58, no. 4 (2009), 579–​601. 36 

342    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture May compass, Power divine! Oh, spread Thy wing, Thy dovelike wing that makes confusion fly, Over my dark, void spirit, summoning New worlds of music, strains that may not die. (ll. 9–​16)

Like the neat, orderly lines of Keble’s poems with their ‘waves’ of ‘earthly sound’, the spirit is ‘gathered into order’ here, and conveys an aesthetic religious experience open to all believers willing to engage with God through a reserved, wondrous, and poetic belief. Unlike modern theopoeticians, however, Keble could assume a faithful readership. Current theopoetics often tends towards abstraction, distorting Heidegger’s religious phenomenology into a metaphysical language that purports to describe the ‘spirit’ but substitutes the practice of description with metaphors of unknowability and emptiness. Thus the theologian Thomas J. J. Altizer invokes the ‘void’ as a way to explore a post-​theological modernity in which God is dead but not forgotten: he argues that poets like Dante, Milton, and Blake allow believers ‘to say Yes to absolute nothingness’ and so ‘discover plenitude in the void’.37 Where Altizer threatens to erase religion with ontology, Keble sustains the experience of faith by presenting his personal ‘spirit’ as a ‘void’ (l. 15) that is filled by God’s ‘Spirit’ (l. 9) and blessed by sound and order. The spirit he struggled to articulate in prose becomes rhythm itself, and is rooted back into time (rather than transcending it) as a daily reading experience the believer can always rely upon as a way of comprehending being with God as at once proximate and ascendant.38 Heidegger develops Keble’s rhythmic spirit as a way of being in time through his understanding of a meditative thinking that is non-​objectivizing, peregrinating, and open to religious ideas. For him, rhythm ‘does not mean flux and flowing, but rather structure. Rhythm is what is at rest’, and, echoing Keble, ‘gathers’ us into a state wherein we can think.39 Heidegger’s once held political views violate the terms of this meditative thinking; and yet his philosophy has the potential to bring together a theological language of care with a focus on human ‘being’ to address the question of how we might speak about words like ‘spirit’. While the consequence of action pursued in the name of ‘spirit’ can be good or bad, its signification in nineteenth-​ century Christian texts is synonymous with care, love, hospitality, goodness, benevolence, thankfulness, belonging, and truth, as well as the idea of God. In this sense, the poetic is conceived of as a pastoral praxis, rather than the grounds for what the likes of John Middleton Murry and T. S. Eliot would later twist into a series of lofty 37 

T. J. J. Altizer, Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006), pp. xvi, xviii. 38  I engage here with Isobel Armstrong’s reading of rhyme and the ‘advent of Christianity’ in ‘Meter and Meaning’, in J. D. Hall (ed.), Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century (Athens, O.: Ohio University Press, 2011), 26–​52, at 34. 39  M. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: HarperOne, 1971), 149–​50.

Religion, the Bible, and Literature in the Victorian Age    343 scuffles over the relationship of poetry to revelation.40 Here is where Heidegger’s meditative, ‘poetized’ thinking is so suggestive, privileging as it does a felt receptivity and invitational mode of interpretation over one that mines the text for facts or affirmation. In other words, religious metaphors encourage the reader to refrain from calculating the use-​value of a thing or a text for a particular argument, and instead engender an amicable reading practice. In ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954), for example, Heidegger exposes those modes of thinking that refuse feeling and meditation to calculatively rationalize the world as an endless parade of expendable resources. His example is the River Rhine, whose ‘industrial’ meaning as power source is compared to its ‘literary’ meaning as hymn in Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem ‘The Ister’ (1803/​5).41 Developed into a hydroelectric power plant, the river stands polluted and misused; praised and loved as part of one world by Hölderlin, the river is protected and sheltered, its hymn form a ‘path for the spirit to follow’ (l. 35).42 After this reading, we might assess any given reference to the spirit in nineteenth-​ century religious writing as more open to sensation, care and experience than translation and analysis. Instrumental, analytic thinking computes the word ‘spirit’ and attempts to fix that signifier into interpretation; meditative thinking hears the word ‘spirit’ and becomes attuned to it, encouraging the reader to discern and listen to its meaning. The first is quantifiable and allows critics to measure it in a written, published form; the second is experiential and allows critics to develop an attention and awareness that sustains relationships with others, both in the classroom and outside. Both are imperative in reading nineteenth-​century religious writing: discerning, hearing, and attending forge a way into unfamiliar religious phenomena; while interpreting, scrutinizing, and fact-​gathering allow the dissemination of this discernment in communicable form. The field of religion and literature is sustained by both measurable analyses, studies that help us to understand the framework in which Victorians practised faith, and experiential attention, in which we think compassionately about their phenomenological belief in God. Critics are not as open to the second methodology, however, in part because pressures to produce override the desire to experience; but there also remains a reluctance to study faith positions in earnest without a degree of scepticism. Christina Rossetti’s relationship to spirit is a case in point, presented in her poetry as love and grace, but often read otherwise. She makes frequent references to the spirit in her 40 

For the Eliot-​Murry debate on poetry and religion, see D. Goldie, A Critical Difference: T. S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry in English Literary Criticism, 1919–​1928 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 41  The editor of the primary translation of Hölderlin’s poems, Richard Sieburth, gives the date as either summer 1803 or 1805, Hymns and Fragments by Friedrich Hölderlin, trans. R. Sieburth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 267. 42  M. Heidegger, The Question of Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977), 16; for an accessible English translation of Hölderlin’s poem, see http://​jacketmagazine.com/​27/​ hold-​trans-​2.html [last accessed 6 April 2012].

344    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture poetry, drawing on material metaphors of energy and magnetism, immaterial metaphors of illumination and sound, and doctrinal allusions to reserve. In ‘Martyrs’ Song’ (1863), for example, she invokes ‘God the Spirit’ as a being ‘Whom words cannot utter’ and who ‘hold[s]‌us up | That we may drink of Jesus’s cup’ (ll. 28, 41–​2): the spirit is like an electromagnetic field, one that defies gravity by holding the believer in place during a Eucharistic moment of bodily communion with God. In ‘From House to Home’ (1858), however, she suggests that spirit signifies sound, ‘spirit-​ discerning eyes like flames of fire’ belonging to the angel with whom she sings and communes in the poem, their song reciprocally echoing between them ‘Calls and recalls and echoes of delight’ (ll. 46, 54). In other examples, the spirit becomes a silent shield to protect her from the world, as in ‘Shut Out’ (1856, ll. 17–​20), or a marker of humility, as in ‘Three Stages’ (1848–​54, l. 23), both protecting her faith in accordance with the doctrine of reserve. And yet her perhaps most complex reference to spirit—​in ‘The Convent Threshold’ (1858)—​abandons metaphor for meditative affection, persisting in reading the spirit through love even as it appears in the form of a nightmarish ‘Fire-​footed’ ghoul. It appears in her dream ‘drunk with knowledge’ and writhes under cloven-​snaked hair as it is forced to ‘grovel down | And lick the dust of Seraphs’ feet’ (ll. 100–​4). This image, paired with the narrator’s self-​depiction as a sinner ‘soiled with mud’ (l. 7) but committed to repentance (l. 51), has sparked numerous readings of the poem as a scene of child abuse, illness, Gothic romance, martyrdom, the horrors of conventual life and of the struggle between earthly and spiritual desires. Yet Rossetti repeats the word ‘love’ throughout the poem to elevate the spirit’s religious meaning, invoking it as that part of the human, which, in falling before the angels, learns that love enables relationalism as well as interpretation: For what is knowledge duly weighed? Knowledge is strong, but love is sweet; Yea all the progress he had made Was but to learn that all is small Save love, for love is all in all. (ll. 105–​9)

Denouncing calculative thinking for loving thinking, Rossetti educes the spirit as that which marks the point in the poem from which the narrator turns to ‘old familiar love’ (l. 148). Her progress towards love, like the spirit’s, is not easy and the poem’s countless hermeneutic traps indicate that turning to interpretative thinking is quite a bit more interesting than ending up in an everyday, ordinary, and much-​repeated address to care and affection. Rossetti suggests, however, that her petition to the spirit, that part of her which seems to call beyond the threshold, is about understanding religion through love, and perceiving criticism as a narration of kindness as much as cleverness.

Religion, the Bible, and Literature in the Victorian Age    345

Pastoralism There are, of course, several critics who already address religion through a hermeneutics of kindness by using pastoral models of care or grace as a template for interpretation. Francis X. McAloon, for example, offers a pastoral reading of Hopkins as a source of care in his The Language of Poetry as a Form of Prayer: The Theo-​Poetic Aesthetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins.43 Beginning with an analysis of prayer as a spiritually transformative experience, McAloon argues that its repeated practice allows for a meditative thinking that for him enables and sustains a mode of ‘being’ delineated by ‘tenderness’.44 This being engages with God through the ‘paschal imagination’, one that learns how to willingly enter into a mysterious participation with Christ by reading, or praying, poetry. For McAloon, this reading experience and actively-​engaging imagination grants, not simply a sharing of an aesthetic moment, either between poet and reader or those with whom we read, but also the possibility of encountering God’s grace. This encounter is not solely a philosophical one, as he turns from theory to practice by writing up the details of a case study of a troubled young man referred to only as ‘Philip’. In a series of interchapters, Philip is presented as a figure who is transformed from a state of ‘personal estrangement’ to one of comfort and love by engaging with Hopkins’s strangeness: McAloon suggests that Hopkins’s poems minister to Philip and disclose a different way of being than the unsettled and alienated one in which he is stuck.45 Hopkins’s poetry is presented as a perplexing, sometimes disturbing, form of relief that can only be discerned through a reading that sees the poem as an incarnation of hope and renewal: it is sensorily immediate, charitable, and thus able to speak to individuals under-​represented in faith communities. Many secular readers will find such a way into Hopkins uncomfortable: McAloon has a clear Christian agenda and expresses a love of poetry based on what he perceives as its capacity to foster (Catholic) conscience and compassion in students. Dennis Sobolev echoes McAloon, though, in his willingness to think through the ‘authenticity’ of Hopkins’s faith; as does Adrian Grafe in his promotion of ‘religious awareness’ as a way of experiencing poetry.46 Is a reading practice that engages the solicitude of spirit as well as the imagination useful in our assessment of religion in Victorian culture? I would like to conclude by answering ‘yes’ to this question, and suggest that a pastoral or altruistic politics has an equal place with cultural and social politics in literary studies and its reception of nineteenth-​century texts. 43  F. X. McAloon, The Language of Poetry as a Form of Prayer: The Theo-​Poetic Aesthetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2008). 44 McAloon, Language of Poetry, 2. 45 McAloon, Language of Poetry, 93. 46  D. Sobolev, The Split World of Gerard Manley Hopkins: An Essay in Semiotic Phenomenology (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2011); A. Grafe (ed.), Ecstasy and Understanding: Religious Awareness in English Poetry from the late Victorian to the Modern Period (London: Continuum, 2008): Hopkins is one of three poets (with T. S. Eliot and Geoffrey Hill) that Grafe believes shape the expression and experience of religious awareness in twentieth-​century poetry.

346    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Pastoralism describes a way of reading based on receptivity to the text that refrains from prejudging it within preconceived formulae that the critic wishes to prove. This receptivity thus necessitates a process of unlearning, that describes one way in which the reader can feel immersed in a specific network of practices with which he or she might be unfamiliar, or even uncomfortable, before a particular problem or idea can be addressed. Rather than elucidating what already feels familiar in a text, the reader unlearns old habits to engage in new material, while also suspending the desire to interrogate and unravel the text by thinking with it. Heidegger uses the analogy of teaching to clarify this process, suggesting that the teacher should not ‘have a larger store of information’ than the student, to whom he or she hands down ‘useful information’, but instead ‘lets nothing else be learned than—​learning’, that is, a shared experience of reading together. This phenomenological pedagogy concerns a close listening to the text that allows a ‘joyful’ relation to it, not in the sense that the text’s content must always be cheery, but in that the reader takes his or her bearings from a benign relationalism.47 For Heidegger, the approach connotes at once ‘meditating and caring’; but also Gelassenheit, a word he borrows from Meister Eckhart (who uses it to mean a leaving of all things to God) to think beyond wilful and deferential interpretation to an indwelling-​with the text, other beings and the world.48 In such indwelling, the reader is liberated through the ideas that emerge from his or her encounter with the text in friendly or loving terms, an approach elucidated by Amos Wilder’s suggestion that we model our reading practice and experience on that of the disciples (who are, despite their closeness to Jesus, often chastised by him for not listening properly).49 Or we might turn to Marilynne Robinson, who philosophizes religion and literature through an openness to all perspectives founded in her understanding of Christianity as community. In her essay ‘Wondrous Love’ (2012), for example, she offers a reading of C. Austin Miles’s late Victorian hymn ‘In the Garden’ (1912), that shines with an understanding of relationalism as both the subject matter of religious verse and the critical practice most likely to fathom religious content: The old ballad in the voice of Mary Magdalene, who ‘walked in the garden alone’, imagines her ‘tarrying’ there with the newly risen Jesus, in the light of a dawn which was certainly the most remarkable daybreak since God said, ‘Let there be light’. The song acknowledges this with fine understatement: ‘The joy we share as we tarry there /​None other has ever known’. Who can imagine the joy she would have felt? And how lovely it is that the song tells us the joy of this encounter was Jesus’s as well as Mary’s. Epochal as the moment is, and inconceivable as Jesus’s passage from death to life must be, they meet as friends and rejoice together as friends.50

47 

M. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, trans. J. Glenn Gray (London: Perennial, 2004), 15, 31. M. Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1949), in D. F. Krell (ed.), Heidegger: Basic Writings (New York: HarperCollins, 1977), 213–​265 (p. 224); and ‘Ἀγχιβασίη: A Triadic Conversation on a Country Path between a Scientist, a Scholar, and a Guide’, in Country Path Conversations, trans. B. W. Davis (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010), 1–​104, at 94ff. 49  A. Wilder, Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976). 50  M. Robinson, ‘Wondrous Love’, in When I Was a Child I Read Books (London: Virago, 2012), 125–​41, at 125. 48 

Religion, the Bible, and Literature in the Victorian Age    347 Robinson, like Wilder, engenders a sense of pastoral vocation and understanding through fellow feeling that chimes more with the Victorians than, for example, obscure theories of unachievable hospitality that show little charity to the reader.51 Like the agricultural term ‘pastoralism’, a pastoral criticism must express care for what it immediately tends, as well as supporting writing emergent from territories not always associated with production and use-​value. At the same time pastoral criticism must acknowledge its more negative potential to be manipulated as a mode of instruction and pedagogy to which not everyone is open. In doing so it might figure religion as a way of thinking attention, care, and friendship, as well as a mode of power and missionary inculcation. As W. H. Fremantle wrote in 1886: ‘When we can rise above the mere money relation or the thought of getting on in the world, and can look at our work according to its proper effects, we find in every calling the exercise of care for men in God’s name.’52 For our own impatient, time-​anxious generation, we might read Bruno Latour as rephrasing Fremantle in his suggestion that religion is a way of directing attention back towards care ‘by systematically breaking the will to go away, to ignore, to be indifferent, blasé, bored’.53 Pastoralism finds an affinity, not only with specific critics like Heidegger, Robinson, and Latour, but also with work associated with the affective turn:  affect theory’s endeavour to theorize ‘authentic’ feeling, for example, parallels the problem I address here of exploring ‘authentic’ faith or ‘real’ feelings of love, care, and spirit. Affect theory has helped to shift the hermeneutics of suspicion that surrounded authenticity by working with phenomenology, psychology, ethnography, and ‘emotionology’ to address how emotions circulate and adapt to material spaces and places, as well as how they are transmitted, expressed, constructed, and felt.54 In a manner instructive for work on nineteenth-​century religion, it asks that the modern reader refuse to collapse his or her own acquaintance with emotions onto their expression in the past, even as he or she respects that expression occurred and reverently engages with it. An astute example of pastoral thinking in affect theory is Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects.55 Stewart moves away from the sometimes excessively scientific models of affect theory to evolve it into a mode of critical storytelling able to sympathetically perceive and attend to the minutiae of the affective dimensions of everyday life. An anthropologist, Stewart enacts Heidegger’s meditative thinking by patiently detailing moments of

51 

See, for example, J. Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000) and On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (London: Routledge, 2001). 52  W. H. Fremantle, ‘The Pastoral Function of Christians’, Good Words, 27 (1886), 714–​20, at 714. 53  B. Latour, ‘“Thou Shall Not Freeze-​Frame” or How Not to Misunderstand the Science and Religion Debate’, in J. D. Proctor (ed.), Science, Religion and the Human Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 27–​48, at 36. 54  See P. N. Stearns with C. Z. Stearns, ‘Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards’, American Historical Review, 90 (1985), 813–​36. 55  K. Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

348    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture everyday life through a ‘nomadic tracing’ and poetic ‘attunement’ to present moment experience.56 This focus on attunement to the experience of a text finds resonance in other affective theories (such as Teresa Brennan’s transmission of affect or Lauren Berlant’s materialism of compassion), as well as theology (Stanley Hauerwas’s politics of gentleness) and literary studies (Isobel Armstrong’s radical aesthetic as well as her recognition of the ‘somatic pressure’ of poetic sound).57 Brennan, Berlant, Hauerwas, and Armstrong all require the reader to approach the text with care and attention, and, like the religion and literature scholars with which this chapter began (Wheeler, Jay, Jasper), they are either associated with the field of Victorian studies, or owe a particular debt to the study of the nineteenth century. Even Hauerwas, who does not write directly about literature, confesses that his search for a Christian identity was partly shaped by his excited reading of Trollope’s novels.58 Yet while scholars seem happy enough to engage with positive theories of affect, like compassion or attention, they are not as willing to think through their practice and origin in the nineteenth century as acts of faith, even though the majority of Victorians attributed benevolence to God. As Berlant argues in her introduction to a collection of essays on compassion: ‘No doubt many readers of this volume will not feel comfortable in the faith-​based society that is now being offered as the ground of the good. But this does not mean that they are somehow superior to or untouched by the contemporary culture of true feeling that places suffering at the centre of being and organizes images of ethical or honourable sociality in response.’59 I am not suggesting that the Victorian expression of religious faith should convince modern readers one way or another about the boundaries of the relationship between religion and goodness or moral law. I do think, however, that to study religion and literature is to consider that it teaches us something more than the doctrinal and ecclesiological bases of specific branches of faith and the related political consequences of its practice in worship or social action. The Victorians themselves consistently negotiate the relationship between religion and ‘true feeling’ through literature and as such highlight a practice of reading and interpretation based on compassion, care, and attention. It is with the same respect that we are free to engage with their literary output, reading its content, context, and form in the spirit of the experience of faith it bestows.

56 Stewart, Ordinary Affects, 6. 57 

T. Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); L. Berlant (ed.), Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (London: Routledge, 2004); S. Hauerwas, with J. Vanier, Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2008); I. Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); and Armstrong, ‘Meter and Meaning’, 26–​52. 58  S. Hauerwas, Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdman, 2010), 134. 59  L. Berlant, ‘Compassion (and Withholding)’, in Berlant (ed.), Compassion, 1–​13, at 7.

Religion, the Bible, and Literature in the Victorian Age    349

Select Bibliography Blair, Kirstie, Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012). Colon, Susan, Victorian Parables (London: Continuum, 2012). LaPorte, Charles, Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible (Charlottesville:  University of Virginia Press, 2011). Mason, Emma, and Knight, Mark, Nineteenth Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Wheeler, Michael, St John and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Chapter 18

Religion and Se x ua l i t y James Eli Adams

At least since Eden, the conjunction of religion and sexuality has been a vexed one. Their points of contact often suggest a clash of incommensurate worlds: the natural and the supernatural, the material and the spiritual, the human and the divine. Despite continual struggles to reconcile the two realms—​to embody the spirit, to sanctify the flesh—​ conflict has reigned, from the Garden through anathemas of the ‘unclean’ through the ‘vile body’ of Philippians through various ascetic regimens to modern-​day fundamentalist faiths. The tensions between religion and sexuality have been well-​nigh proverbial in understandings of Victorian England, which was one of the most fervently religious of post-​Enlightenment cultures but also a culture whose very name has become a byword for ‘prudish’ or ‘repressive’. Yet the frictions reflect the peculiar intimacy of the relationship. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, as throughout most of Western history, sexuality was understood predominantly in religious terms, in moral understandings and disciplines derived from contemporary faith; that faith in turn was dominated by the theological mysteries of incarnation, of a divinity made flesh. In England, a country with an established church, faith was at issue in every part of social and political life. Even the minority who forswore religious allegiance not only remained steeped in the inheritances of the Bible but often devoted themselves to moral commitments that seemed a form of secular faith: hence ‘the gospel of work’, ‘the religion of humanity’, and related blazons. Over the course of the century, the governance of the body and its pleasures gradually passed from religion to science, in a momentous shift perhaps most influentially (albeit melodramatically) analysed by Michel Foucault.1 But Foucault’s history of sexuality slights the persistence of religion in Victorian understandings of the body and its desires, and with it the pivotal importance of the body within the history of Victorian religion. The crisis of Victorian religion, Dominic Erdozain has recently argued, turned on ‘the problem of pleasure’, and that crisis installed desire at the very heart of Victorian cultural reflection. The history that follows turns on the impact of Evangelical faith, particularly as it informs two subsequent developments in Victorian Christianity: Tractarianism, which 1 

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, i. An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990).

Religion and Sexuality     351 was widely received as a form of Anglo-​Catholicism (and thus subjected to the familiar anathemas of Rome), and ‘muscular Christianity’, which was centrally concerned to rescue the body from the suspicions of both Evangelicals and Tractarians. This emphasis entails a focus on sexuality in the broadly Foucauldian sense of a ‘discourse’, a more or less explicit articulation of norms concerning the body as a locus of desire, and a focus on religion articulated in sectarian movements or affiliations, and the conflicts among them. This focus of course neglects more personal records of Victorians grappling with confusion and self-​doubt that conjoined religious and sexual anxieties (and fulfilment), crises about which John Maynard has written especially well.2 But the connections between sexuality and faith are more vivid and accessible in large public conflicts, not only in direct address of the issues, but in more oblique logics bound up with the labelling of deviance. In Victorian religious controversy, opponents were frequently attacked for ‘perversion’, which denoted a turning away from truth, but which readily insinuated forms of sexual transgression that could be understood (often confusingly) as a turning away from both God and nature. The stigma of deviance frequently reveals the anxieties informing defences of the orthodox or customary, but it also gives unusual public notice to, or at least glimpses of, proscribed forms of sexuality. Stigma thereby may become a vehicle of recognition and solidarity for the marginalized populations drawn to those unorthodox forms. This dynamic has given Victorian religious discourse a central place in histories of queer sexuality. It is worth anticipating, finally, an imbalance in this history that reflects the Victorian gendering of religion and sexuality. As many commentators have noted, the late eighteenth century brought a momentous realignment of age-​old stereotypes of gender. Woman, traditionally figured as a creature of unreflective appetite, is transfigured in Victorian domestic ideology into a figure of self-​denying, nurturing sympathy, whose influence helps to regulate masculine desire, which is now seen as the more disruptive force. This stereotype of femininity helps to explain the peculiar horror aroused by prostitution, but that reaction also reflects an understanding of feminine virtue as instinctive, whereas male sexuality was relegated to the control of the will. Thus while illicit female sexuality causes greater moral disturbance, male sexuality typically becomes a locus of more concerted, often virtuoso discipline, in which religious sanctions have more obvious force. Moreover, those sanctions are inflected by sectarian allegiance and conflict, and crises of faith, that are seen as the peculiar province of men—​not merely of the clergy, but of the independent intellect that claimed ‘manliness’ in part through wrestling with doubt, while exempting women from that struggle. As so often, Tennyson’s In Memoriam epitomizes the distinction: Leave thou thy sister when she prays, Her early Heaven, her happy views; Nor thou with shadow’d hint confuse A life that leads melodious days. (xxxiii. 5–​8)

Of course this is the official story. Women writers knew better. 2  John Maynard, Victorian Discourses of Sexuality and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

352    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Any effort to capture the distinctive emphases of Victorian culture must begin well before the birth of the monarch, with the emergence of the Evangelical movement in England. Beginning with the charismatic ministries of John Wesley and George Whitfield in the 1740s, which were addressed primarily to working-​class and Dissenting audiences, Evangelicalism represented a newly personal and fervent piety, which rejected the complacent deism that dominated the Church of England at the outset of the century. Evangelicals insisted that the experience of faith, far from being a matter of merely intellectual assent, must fully engage the heart. True faith was founded on a harrowing consciousness of one’s own sinfulness, which led one to embrace in utter humility and gratitude the significance of Christ’s atonement—​a recognition typically experienced as a profound conversion, a transfigured understanding of oneself and the world. Near the end of the century, this newly energetic piety made its way into elite circles of the Church of England, most notably through the leadership of William Wilberforce, whose Practical View of Christianity (1797) has been called ‘the Bible of Evangelicalism’. Although personal salvation was the focal point of Evangelicalism, Wilberforce and his fellows also directed their energies against ‘the malignity of sin’ in a wider world, and Evangelicals spearheaded the campaign against slavery and supported laws governing factory labour, among other important social reforms. Evangelicalism exerted an even more diffuse and powerful influence as it informed an idealization of well-​ordered domestic life, which became a foundation of Victorian culture. As a letter in the Christian Observer put it in 1805, ‘Happiness is a fireside thing. It is a thing of grave and earnest tone; and the deeper and truer it is, the more it is removed from the riot of mere merriment.’3 That last phrase is telling, however, as it equates ‘mere merriment’ with ‘riot’. Evangelical stress on the importance of the heart in religious faith was coupled with an increasing suspicion of all forms of pleasure outside worship. Thus Evangelicals typically forswore novels and the theatre, and attempted to prohibit nearly all forms of leisure activity on Sundays, which they believed should be reserved for devotion. This last stance, known as Sabbatarianism, aroused particular resentment among the poor, whose six-​day working week left them no other time for recreation. Hence as Evangelical influence expanded, it became popularly associated with a stern and unrelenting moral vigilance, enforced by the prospect of eternal punishment, in which pleasure was a lure to damnation. As Leslie Stephen recalled of his Evangelical father, ‘He once smoked a cigar, and found it so delicious that he never smoked again.’4 This aura of gloomy repression was evoked in a host of important Victorian novels, from the Clennam household in Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1856) to the nightmarish childhood of Ernest Pontifex in Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1903). The specifically sexual burden of Evangelical discipline is vividly captured in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane 3  Cited in Dominic Erdozain, The Problem of Pleasure: Sport, Recreation, and the Crisis of Victorian Religion (Woodbridge, Sussex: Boydell and Brewer, 2010), 72. 4  Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–​1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 239.

Religion and Sexuality     353 Eyre (1847) in the figure of Reverend Brocklehurst, for whom the girls of Lowood School should be inspired by ‘the torments of the martyrs’ rather than nourishment for their ‘vile bodies’, and who is inflamed at the sight of hair that curls naturally: ‘we are not to conform to nature’, he objects, and accordingly the hair, emblem of the girl’s emergent sexuality, ‘must be cut off entirely’.5 Brocklehurst’s hypocritical rigour is of course exorbitant, but it is central to the novel’s significance as a cultural fable, in which the heroine achieves a sexual fulfilment rescued both from Brocklehurst’s severity and from the virtuoso repression of the aspiring missionary St John Rivers, as well as from an opposing threat, the unrestrained desire embodied in Bertha Mason. Jane Eyre also captures a second historical development crucial to our topic, the emergence in the eighteenth century of a new ideal of marriage, in which financial interest and kinship were less important than deep personal affection and respect between husband and wife. Historians have referred to this ideal as ‘companionate marriage’, but Helena Michie helpfully proposes the term ‘conjugal marriage’, which registers the new stress on shared interests and understanding while more clearly acknowledging the specifically sexual component of an ideal marriage.6 In this regard, the new understanding of marriage was very much in keeping with Evangelical stress on the power of the feelings. (Jane Eyre captures this connection between love and devotion when Jane worries that her passion for Rochester has become ‘idolatry’.) Although marital sexuality remained governed by the Biblical imperative to be fruitful and multiply, the new emphasis on conjugality opened a horizon where sex in marriage might be its own reward, untethered to procreation. Of course that prospect merely formalized what was widely experienced: scholars have estimated that as many as two-​fifths of all nineteenth-​ century brides were already pregnant at the time of marriage.7 This eye-​opening fact points to the challenge of distinguishing between moral prescription and actual sexual history. Still, although there would be relatively little explicit acknowledgement of the intrinsic pleasures of sexuality (save in the writings of Bentham and other iconoclasts) until birth control became widely accessible after 1860, we glimpse that recognition in contemporary reaction to Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Malthus famously argued that human reproduction will tend to outstrip food supply, and therefore the very future of mankind depends on the regulation of human sexuality, or what Malthus called ‘moral restraint’—​a conclusion that led Carlyle to dub economics ‘the dismal science’.8 This programme may remind us, first of all, that models of self-​ discipline were not confined to Evangelicalism. Indeed, Michael Mason has argued that in the early nineteenth century ‘explicit anti-​sensual attitudes tended above all to emanate from secularist and progressive quarters’.9 Asceticism flourished in the emergent

5 

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (London: Penguin, 2006), 75–​6. Helena Michie, Victorian Honeymoons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 19–​21. 7  Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 72. 8  Thomas Carlyle, ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’ (1850), in Carlyle’s Complete Works, 20 vols. (Boston: Estes & Lauriat, [n.d.]), xvi. 298. 9  Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3. 6 

354    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture discourse of political economy (which was deeply attuned to Evangelical thought, as Boyd Hilton has shown) as well as in contemporary political radicalism, such as that of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, for whom sex was suspect as an ‘animal’ function at odds with a distinctly human rationality.10 Ironically, however, a broad range of Evangelicals and non-​conforming believers were deeply offended by Malthus’s views, not because they made sexuality a central feature of healthy life, but because his recommendations confounded both Biblical precept and the pleasures of companionate marriage.11 A similar reaction would recur at mid-​century with the resurgence of the ideal of a celibate clergy—​a stance that aroused vehement resistance across the Protestant spectrum. Such responses suggest that early Victorian anti-​sensualism is best understood not as a discomfort with sexuality per se, but as a mode of regulation aiming to ensure its confinement to marriage—​a vigilance that in itself acknowledges the power of sexual desire. This vigilance was most vividly displayed in the Victorian obsession with prostitution, and, more broadly, in the peculiar prominence of the ‘fallen woman’ as an icon of Victorian culture. The draconian stigma of ‘fallenness’ depended on a countervailing ideal of sexual purity, famously embodied in images of domestic womanhood sometimes so idealized that they strained against corporeality itself. Although the domestic ‘angel’ owed a good deal to Evangelical models of the well-​ordered home, the figure often seemed a form of surrogate deity; as the ever-​quotable Leslie Stephen wrote to his first wife, she existed ‘in the place where my saints ought to be’.12 Certainly feminine virtues were hallowed with a redemptive power, akin to that of divinity, which resisted the moral degradation of a fallen world. Thus in Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838), the ethereal Rose Maylie (‘earth seemed not her element’) is juxtaposed with the young prostitute, Nancy, in a binary that suggests the interdependence of the two icons. Even Rose is shadowed by a vague sexual stigma derived from her unknown parentage, while Nancy ultimately redeems herself through her maternal, self-​sacrificing devotion to young Oliver. Of course this devotion leads directly to her murder by Sykes, which enacts a recurrent, unsettling logic of Dickens’s novels: the apotheosis of feminine self-​denial is death, which makes domestic womanhood seem akin to martyrdom. Nancy’s character also hints at Dickens’s interest in what became known as ‘Magdalenism,’ programmes to ‘reclaim’ prostitutes and set them on the road to respectable lives. As Mason notes, this humanitarianism was distinctive to Victorian Britain, and depended not merely on Christian charity, but on a belief in environmental influence, and hence the possibility of reformation, at odds with Evangelical commitment to the innate depravity of mankind.13 The power of circumstance figures centrally in novelistic representations of ‘fallenness’, in which illicit sexuality is typically bound up 10 

Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–​1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 11 Mason, Victorian Sexual Attitudes, 2–​3. 12 Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind, 389–​90. 13 Mason, Victorian Sexual Attitudes, 113.

Religion and Sexuality     355 with social marginality, with material or emotional vulnerability, and writers accordingly appealed to a moral charity defined by contrast with a censorious piety often identified with the Biblical Pharisees. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), for example, when the family to whom the heroine has given devoted service learns that she has an illegitimate child by a lover who reneged on a marriage promise, the father expels her as a ‘defilement’, and even the daughter who has been her close friend reacts ‘with all a Pharisee’s dread of publicans and sinners, and a child’s cowardliness—​that cowardliness which prompts it to shut its eyes against the object of terror, rather than acknowledge its existence with brave faith’. The Dissenting minister who has sponsored Ruth, by contrast, declares, ‘I take my stand with Christ against the world’, only to be rewarded by the family forswearing further attendance at his chapel.14 Even in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859–​85), where nothing extenuates Guinevere’s infidelity with Lancelot, save the contrast of his erotic energy with the ‘cold’ and ‘passionless’ king, Arthur nonetheless proclaims, ‘Lo, I forgive thee, as Eternal God forgives’—​though not before publicly declaring her shame and banishing her from his house (‘Guinevere’, ll. 541–​2). The judgement Arthur passes on Guinevere, which likens her transgression to ‘a new disease’ that ‘creeps, no precaution used, among the crowd’ (ll. 515–​16) and holds her personally responsible for the downfall of Camelot, captures the crucial importance of marriage as a foundation of social order, and hence the urgency of the sexual discipline that sustains it. Like the epithalamium that concludes In Memoriam (1850), Idylls of the King celebrates marriage as a microcosm; it is the consummate welding of troth and truth, personal fidelity and divine presence, which underwrites the coherence and meaning of human life. This view helps to explain the Victorian preoccupation with chivalry, which also was central to the contemporary reframing of the ideal of the gentleman. Chivalry as the Victorians liked to imagine it strikingly bridges the ‘separate spheres’ of public and private life: romantic devotion could become a foundation of purposeful action in the political realm, and a mirror of divinity itself. Thus ‘that fair Order of my Table Round’, Arthur recounts, vowed To lead sweet lives in purest chastity, To love one maiden only, cleave to her, And worship her by years of noble deeds Until they won her; for indeed I knew Of no more subtle master under heaven Than is the maiden passion for a maid. (‘Guinevere,’ ll. 471–​6)

The poem makes plain the challenges of such devotion, in which virginity itself is eroticized, but it also urges the necessity of what may seem an impossible rigour. When such ‘worship’ is betrayed by sexual waywardness, it brings down the divinity incarnated in and as Arthur. 14 

Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth (London: Dent, 2001), 271, 293–​4.

356    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture The proper ordering of sexual desire, then, is a foundation of national well-​being, political, moral, and religious. Indeed, in In Memoriam, sexuality crowns the evolutionary scheme with which the poem closes, as the epithalamium imagines a child being conceived on the wedding night and coming to represent ‘a closer link | Betwixt us and the crowning race’ (Epilogue, ll. 127–​8). While Tennyson may have been unusually ardent in this commitment to marriage as a cornerstone of civilization, his poetry helps to explain the readiness with which sexual anxieties flared up in Victorian controversies outwardly far removed from domestic life. This was especially true in ongoing polemic surrounding the place of Roman Catholicism in England. Since the sixteenth century, English identity had been affirmed in emphatically Protestant terms. Hence debate over ‘Catholic Emancipation’ in 1829 (which removed a host of political disabilities affecting Catholic subjects) and the restoration of a Roman Catholic hierarchy in Westminster in 1851 (tellingly dubbed ‘the Papal Aggression’) revived long-​standing mistrust of Catholicism as a threat to English sovereignty, both national and domestic, and that threat was commonly linked to perverse or predatory sexuality. Auricular confession in particular seemed to elicit a treacherous secrecy within domestic life, exposing ‘the sacredness of the hearth to a harsh and prying curiosity’, in the words of the Archbishop of York.15 As confession undermined the authority of the paterfamilias, ‘producing reserve and estrangement where there ought to be perfect freedom and openness’, as Samuel Wilberforce urged, it posed a special danger to women: ‘bachelor priests prying into all the inmost feelings and most secret thoughts and acts of maidens and wives’ were liable to incite the very feelings they ostensibly sought to quell, as ‘the very reduction of sins of impurity to language […] must result in making them the fuel of fresh sin, and in fanning the flames of temptation’, an Evangelical magazine warned.16 Thus arose a paradox blazoned in numerous Punch caricatures, where the celibate priest, hovering in the shadows of the middle-​class home, becomes a figure both emasculated and sexually predatory. Such images drew on centuries of anti-​Catholic invective, within which the Roman clergy were frequently caricatured as hypocrites wallowing in sexual incontinence. That stereotype had a very wide currency in Protestant Britain, from Elizabethan drama to the Gothic novel; Patrick O’Malley has demonstrated the remarkably persistent association of Catholicism across the century with both sexual deviance and Gothic narratives of ‘an eruption of the past within the present’.17 Such works help to explain why paranoid fantasies of Catholicism had a prominence in Victorian culture that far outstripped the numbers and influence of actual Catholics. That prominence marks an unexpected resonance in the familiar Protestant demonization of Rome as ‘the whore of Babylon’: like

15  Cited in Desmond Bowen, The Idea of the Victorian Church: A Study of the Church of England, 1833–​ 1889 (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1968), 33. 16  Cited in John Shelton Reed, Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-​Catholicism (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), 197–​8. 17  Patrick O’Malley, Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Religion and Sexuality     357 the fallen woman, the Catholic priest serves as a scapegoat through which the culture might cast out troublesome desires, but the alien presence turns out to be surprisingly difficult to banish. Thus the idealizations of Victorian domesticity, that ‘place of Peace’, as Ruskin famously dubbed it, are deeply shaken when a Catholic priest enters that sanctuary, as if all the anxieties of the Victorian patriarch were incarnated in that intrusive figure.18 At the same time, however, religious stereotypes could be put to more constructive use, not to simply denounce transgressive desire, but to foreground its tenacity, perhaps even its ubiquity, in human life—​which might well amount to an apology for that desire. This dynamic informs several great monologues of Robert Browning that draw on mid-​Victorian religious debate. In ‘The Bishop Orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church’ (1845), the dying speaker muses deliriously over the beautiful woman whose conquest was the culmination of his eminently worldly life, which presumably produced the ‘sons’ he addresses. The poem clearly draws on anti-​Catholic stereotypes, but its interest is not hypocrisy so much as the power of sexual and aesthetic pleasure, which is thrown into particularly sharp relief within a religious vocation that disavows such pleasure. In ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ (1855), Browning goes even further in reclaiming proscribed pleasures, conjuring up a robust male sexuality, and an art fuelled by its energies, in the figure of an ostensibly celibate monk. From the bravura opening of the poem, in which the artist-​monk addresses the night watch that has cornered him outside a brothel, Fra Lippo offers an exuberant defence of naturalism in painting that is grounded in bodily appetite: ‘zooks, sir, flesh and blood, | That’s all I’m made of!’ (ll. 60–​1). Resisting the hypocritical strictures of his Friar, who indulges his own appetites with his ‘niece’ while insisting that art must make beholders ‘forget there’s such a thing as flesh’ (l. 182), Lippo grounds his art in ‘the value and significance of flesh’ (l. 268), and audaciously suggests that an art informed by that lesson has a redemptive power that might displace the Church: ‘If I drew higher things with the same truth! | That were to take the Prior’s pulpit place, | Interpret God to all of you!’ (ll. 309–​11). Catholicism in Browning’s art thus epitomizes, in the phrase of another of his Catholic speakers, Bishop Blougram, ‘the dangerous edge of things’ (‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ (1855), l. 305), in which the ostensibly alien or transgressive turns out to seem uncomfortably familiar, perhaps disturbingly satisfying, thereby yielding insight into otherwise neglected or disavowed aspects of the everyday. In early Victorian culture, so deeply affected by Evangelicalism, the neglected or disavowed could be most comprehensively summed up as pleasure. In this regard, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ calls on anti-​Catholic discourse to mount an implicit attack on Evangelical discipline—​which for many early Victorians also came to seem a denial of flesh and blood. That a celebration of the body in the face of repression could turn the Catholic and the Evangelical into a common foe points to an unexpected but momentous logic in early Victorian culture, which is played

18 

John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (1865; Orpington, Kent: George Allen, 1880), 91–​2.

358    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture out most strikingly in the upheaval within the Church of England that became known as the Oxford Movement. The Oxford Movement, or Tractarianism (from a series of Tracts for the Times published from 1833 to 1841), began as a protest of Anglican clergy against ‘liberalism’, a growing secularism focused in the increasing assertion of State control over the Church. Many clergy shared this concern, which in effect extended the Evangelical Revival that had jolted Anglican clergy out of an age in which ‘the Church’ was a career path of least resistance (witness Wickham in Pride and Prejudice (1813) or Fred Vincy in Middlemarch (1869–​72)). John Henry Newman, however, grounded his defence of clerical autonomy in ‘apostolical succession’, the transmission of priestly authority through direct inheritance from St Peter, and this seemed to many Protestants a gesture of affiliation with Rome. That impression was reinforced as Tractarians urged a return to priestly celibacy, the cultivation of ‘reserve’ among the faithful, and even a renewal of religious orders for both men and women. Such discourse was all the more disturbing as it emanated from Oxford, which was still in effect a national seminary for the Church of England, and had at its command the immensely powerful rhetoric of the charismatic Newman, who was vicar of the University Church, St Mary’s. The movement was denounced by a wide range of clergy: Thomas Arnold in an 1836 Edinburgh Review article dubbed them ‘the Oxford Malignants’, as worse than avowed enemies of the Church, something more akin to traitors in its midst. But a number of young or aspiring clergymen experienced excruciating crises of allegiance, as the traditional anathema of Catholicism (including the sexual innuendo) warred with Newman’s personal charisma and his transfiguring vision of an elite priesthood. One such man was Charles Kingsley, whose ordeal helped to shape what became known as ‘muscular Christianity’. At the height of the Oxford Movement, in the early 1840s, the newly ordained Kingsley was unnerved by the seductive power of Newman, whose strenuous piety, particularly his celebration of priestly celibacy, seemed to undermine the virility of Kingsley’s own calling—​and to underscore his own seemingly ungovernable desires. Out of this deeply personal anxiety, Newman developed a broadly Carlylean rhetoric of heroism into a creed aimed above all at rescuing the body from what he called the ‘popular Manichaeism or Gnosticism’ of the Tractarians (whom Kingsley, in a familiar gesture, conflated with Roman Catholics). His opponents, Kingsley argued, envisioned man as ‘a spirit accidentally connected with and burdened by an animal’, whereas ‘the Creed of the Bible’ envisioned man as ‘a spirit embodied in flesh and blood’.19 Tellingly, this argument closely parallels that of Browning’s Fra Lippo; more broadly, the stress on embodiment, on the sanctity of the flesh and the human ‘animal’ as a manifestation of spirit, implicitly rebuked what many saw as a similar denigration of the body and its pleasures within Evangelicalism. This congruence helped to give Kingsley’s writing an enormous popularity, particularly in novels such as Alton Locke (1850) and Westward Ho! (1857), which depict an

19  Charles Kingsley, The Life and Works of Charles Kingsley, 19 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1902), ii. 267, 266.

Religion and Sexuality     359 unselfconscious faith expressed largely through impulsive physical strength and ‘animal spirits’. Although the tag ‘muscular Christianity’ was bestowed in irony, Kingsley’s thought resonated not only within many personal crises of faith, but within a new appreciation of recreation and leisure in mid-​Victorian culture, itself a transformation of Evangelical discipline registered above all in the burgeoning of organized sport. The new athleticism became central to the ethos of the expanding public schools, whose celebration of the vigorous male body took on additional urgency in the wake of the Crimean War (1854–​6) and the Indian Mutiny in 1857, twin jolts to national self-​confidence. In 1857 Kingsley’s friend Thomas Hughes published a hugely influential novel, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, which inaugurated the genre of ‘the school story’ by celebrating a distinctly muscular faith, which would merge its hero’s boisterous physical prowess with the more reflective piety of his friend Arthur. Tellingly, however, Arthur’s faith is that of an invalid, and seems unwitting testimony to the waning of the (broadly Evangelical) spiritual discipline of Thomas Arnold, the Headmaster of Rugby during Hughes’s years there. All the energy of the novel flows from the headlong pugnacity and exuberance of Tom, and it is hard not to read the book as an unwitting sanctification of the body and its impulses. Those impulses of course included the erotic, which were underscored when the Saturday Review celebrated Kingsley as ‘the great Apostle of the Flesh’—​this apropos of a volume of poetry entitled Andromeda, ‘the production of one who enters as heartily into what is rather priggishly called the “sensuousness” of the Homeric life as Walter Scott does into chivalry’.20 Although the very disdain for the ‘priggish’ captures a significant distance from evangelical discourse, other commentators were unsettled by the implication that the new ‘muscularity’ tacitly licensed male profligacy. Thomas Hughes, in his 1860 sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford, carefully defended his hero from this imputation. But the new prominence of the male body naturally entailed increasing attention to its proper governance. Thus Hughes felt obliged to insert a footnote in Tom Brown’s Schooldays underscoring notice of ‘one of those little pretty white-​handed curly-​headed boys, petted and pampered by some of the big fellows, who […] did all they could to spoil them for everything in this world and the next’. ‘I can’t strike out the passage,’ Hughes amplified; ‘many boys will know why it is left in.’21 This clear insinuation of homoerotic conduct and other forms of ‘impurity’ would become an increasingly anxious preoccupation over the latter decades of the century. But it also provided an added rationale for athleticism, as an outlet for energies otherwise liable to be turned to ‘uncleanness’. Of course such alternatives were less readily available to women, but they were widely believed to be less necessary. In a departure from age-​old images of woman as the creature of unbridled appetites, it was male desire that was now thought to be most in need of regulation. But women novelists were keenly attentive to the burdens of baffled desire, which they frequently explored through models of religious discipline. Thus in Jane Eyre the hypocrisy of Brocklehurst is set against the fervent, ascetic piety of Helen Burns, who is a paragon of Christian resignation in her submission to cruel punishment. Although

20  21 

[Anon.], ‘Kingsley’s Andromeda ’, Saturday Review, 5 (1858), 594–​5. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 233.

360    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture initially mystifying to the instinctively pagan Jane, who can’t reconcile such endurance with her fierce sense of justice and longing for companionship, some version of Helen’s piety ultimately seems to inform Jane’s efforts to master her desire for Rochester, which are rewarded with a more modulated but reciprocated passion, in which she requests and receives divine blessing. The results are famously less happy in George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss (1860), where young Maggie Tulliver’s struggle with her frustrated longings (a thinly veiled recounting of Mary Ann Evans’s youthful evangelicalism) leads her to take up the example of The Imitation of Christ (c.1420). Though she struggles to live up to this pattern of renunciation, it cannot finally quell her ‘illimitable wants’, and she yields to Philip Wakem’s insistence that she is merely shutting herself up in ‘a narrow self-​delusive fanaticism’ and that it is ‘mere cowardice’ to ‘seek safety in negations’—​criticism that echoes familiar objections to Catholicism generally, and to cloistered life in particular.22 Maggie’s struggle, like the rise of muscular Christianity, reflects the ebbing of evangelical fervour, as the deep suspicion of pleasure gave way to reflection on its proper forms. This was the focal point of an epochal cultural shift, which could be felt even in the realm of economics, where political economy’s focus on dynamics of production and forms of deferred gratification gave way in the 1870s to the so-​called ‘marginal revolution’ in economics, which turned attention to dynamics of consumption. ‘The age of atonement’, in Boyd Hilton’s phrase, was giving way to an age of incarnation. That distinction is rather too pat, however, to do justice to the potential erotic satisfactions of discipline itself, which is an inescapable feature of Victorian earnestness. Tennyson might parody ascetic pleasure in his monologue of the ‘pillar saint’, ‘St Simeon Stylites’ (1830) (widely taken to be a hit at the Cambridge evangelical Charles Simeon) but the power of such pleasure is brought home in the undercurrent of masochism informing the ordeals of Maggie and Jane, and even more vividly in the Apostle of the Flesh himself. Kingsley’s writings and illustrations record a fascination with the very asceticism he attacked in the Tractarians; his papers in the British Museum include written and visual fantasies of erotic suspense and fulfilment—​including naked men and women nailed to crosses—​which he produced for his fiancée, Frances Grenfell (who when they first met was about to enter a Tractarian sisterhood).23 In the vogue for novels set in the early Christian epoch, which was prompted by mid-​century religious controversy, a central allure seems to have been not merely doctrinal conflict but the chance to offer startlingly explicit scenes of martyrdom, which figure centrally in novels from Kingsley’s Hypatia (1851) and Wiseman’s Fabiola (1854) up through Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885). (Noting this fascination, the French viewed flagellation—​which was central to public school discipline—​ as ‘le vice anglais’.) The ascetic strain was more subtle in Gerard Manley Hopkins, but it was clearly central in his decision to convert to Catholicism, and an early poem bound up with that decision, ‘The Habit of Perfection’ (1866), evokes a paradoxically sensual allure in renunciation itself: 22 

George Eliot, The Mill on The Floss (London: Penguin, 1985), 338, 340. Susan Chitty, The Beast and the Monk: A Life of Charles Kingsley (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974), 74–​80. 23 

Religion and Sexuality     361 Shape nothing lips; be lovely-​dumb; It is the shut, the curfew sent From there where all surrenders come Which only makes you eloquent. (ll. 5–​8)

Another literary achievement largely built around Christian renunciation or submission, the poetry of Christina Rossetti, frequently evokes a paradoxical, charismatic power in such postures, as in ‘A Study (A Soul)’ (published posthumously, 1904), which strikingly parallels Rochester’s fascinated responses to Jane Eyre: She stands alone, a wonder deathly white, She stands there patient, nerved with inner might. Indomitable in her feebleness, Her face and will athirst against the light. (ll. 11–​14)

Although the poetry of Coventry Patmore, Tennyson, and the Brownings continued to explore the intersections of eros and agape, from the 1850s a growing body of literature took Christianity to be inimical to human desire, and declared allegiance instead to varieties of pagan thought. ‘Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath’: so Algernon Charles Swinburne, the most ardent priest of this new church militant, whose poetry celebrates the sadomasochistic pleasures of erotic longing too exorbitant to satisfy, while aligning itself with the Roman speaker of ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ (1866), who bemoans the spread of Christianity (l. 35). But more nuanced versions of the tension were developed in a wide range of reflection on the place of Greece in contemporary culture. John Stuart Mill, for example, was a man of markedly ascetic temper, who worried in his diary that ‘any great improvement in human life is not to be looked for as long as the animal instinct of sex occupies the absurdly disproportionate place it does therein’. In On Liberty (1859), however, Mill commended ‘Pagan self-​ assertion’ for cultivating the breath of human faculties and desires, unlike a ‘Christian self-​denial’ devoted to ‘crushing out’ those faculties and encouraging a ‘pinched and hidebound type of human character’.24 A similar emphasis shaped the founding text of British aestheticism, Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), which explores the epoch that marks, in Pater’s words, man’s ‘reassertion of himself, that rehabilitation of human nature, the body, the sense, the heart, the intelligence’ in opposition to the medieval (and Christian) tendency ‘to depreciate man’s nature […] to make it ashamed of himself ’.25 As the body and its pleasures take centre stage, these dualisms of Greek and Christian tellingly recast Kingsley’s opposition of Protestant and Catholic. 24  John Stuart Mill, The Spirit of the Age, On Liberty, The Subjection of Women (New York: Norton, 1997), 89. 25  Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry; The 1893 Text (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 31.

362    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Pater, however, even as he aligned himself with the pagan world, went on to explore potential rapprochements between Christianity and the realm of the senses. Marius the Epicurean (1885) in effect revisits Swinburne’s ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ from the vantage of a young pagan who finds himself captivated by early Christianity, particularly the beauty of its austere ritual—​again hinting at the erotic pleasure informing the ascesis that Pater repeatedly evokes as both an intellectual and an artistic discipline. Interest in ancient Greece was most provocative as it provided an apology for male same-​sex desire. (The lesbian desire represented by Sappho was more easily marginalized.) The growing prominence of male–​male desire in the Victorian age of course had a number of causes. With the rise of athleticism, homoerotic pleasure was an almost inescapable feature of tributes to the virile male body, conjoining writers as disparate as Kingsley and Pater.26 At the same time, more glancing and troubled insinuations of transgressive male sexuality were an important strain in the reception of Tractarianism, which has posed a special challenge in understanding the emergence of homosexual identity and culture in Victorian England. In the later decades of the century, as Tractarianism developed into ‘ritualism’—​a term reflecting more elaborate and ornate modes of ceremony—​its services attracted a disproportionate number of single men and women. For both groups the devotion clearly offered forms of community outside the family, but scholars (here reproducing a familiar Victorian asymmetry) have presumed male participation was more sexualized. This interpretation is derived in part from early attacks on Tractarian ‘effeminacy’, as in a Kingsley letter of 1851: In all that school there is an element of foppery, even in dress and manners; a fastidious, maundering, die-​away effeminacy, which is mistaken for purity and refinement; and I confess myself unable to cope with it, so alluring is it to the minds of an effeminate and luxurious aristocracy.

David Hilliard has influentially claimed that ‘effeminacy’ here represents ‘the usual nineteenth-​century caricature of male homosexuality’, and his claim has been widely cited.27 Tellingly, however, Hilliard’s article offers no evidence for this conclusion, and in fact Kingsley clearly uses the term here, as throughout his writings, in a long-​standing sense designating a male person or institution weakened by self-​indulgence or idleness (thus Hazlitt in 1822 instanced Keats in his article, ‘On Effeminacy of Character’28). As Alan Sinfield has forcefully argued, ‘effeminacy’ does not become clearly linked to homosexuality until the 1895 trials of Wilde, who had taken up the aristocratic ‘foppery’ Kingsley decries.29 In the initial reception of the Oxford Movement, ‘manliness’ 26 

James Eli Adams, ‘Muscular Aestheticism’, in Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 149–​81. 27  David Hilliard, ‘UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo-​Catholicism and Homosexuality’, Victorian Studies, 25 (1981–​2), 181–​210. 28  In William Hazlitt, Table Talk (London: Everyman, 1959), 248–​55, at 254. 29  Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

Religion and Sexuality     363 remained a social rather than a sexual epithet, bound up above all with the ‘openness’ of the gentleman, which the Tractarians allegedly betrayed in a subtlety and reserve linked to that of the Catholic priesthood. Indeed, Newman himself exploited these associations in his early polemic: ‘We Englishmen like manliness, openness, consistency, truth,’ he wrote in 1840; ‘Rome will never gain on us until she learns these virtues’.30 This is not to deny that Tractarianism had a powerful allure for men attracted to other men—​which was due in part to the social structure of the movement. Like the Catholic priesthood, the Tractarians represented an elite brotherhood that defined itself through the shared possession of arcane and unorthodox values, the most central of which might be held in reserve from the public eye. More elusive, however, is the moment at which this appeal came to be popularly associated with same-​sex desire. Even a priestly dedication to celibacy, unsettling as it was to Kingsley, initially aroused little antagonism in clerical circles—​which may seem surprising until one considers that in the 1830s all Fellows of Oxford colleges were still required to be unmarried, celibate priests of the Anglican Church. But by 1864, the rhetoric of muscular Christianity had encouraged a more overtly sexual attack. In the infamous review that would give rise to Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, Kingsley blithely pronounced that ‘Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy’, and that ‘Father Newman informs us that cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given to the saints to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage’.31 Rather than a strenuous spiritual discipline, celibacy has become a dearth of the ‘brute male force’ expressed in marriage, and withdrawal from that institution is linked in turn to a ‘cunning’ secrecy and deception. As in the contemporary worry over auricular confession, secrecy itself is becoming sexualized. More precisely, secrecy is treated as if it were always ultimately a form of sexual knowledge; we are well on our way to the rhetoric of the closet—​which was, after all, the space of the father-​confessor. A further explanation for the increased visibility of male same-​sex desire resides in the appeal to ancient Greece as a moral authority in conflict with Christianity. As Linda Dowling has pointed out, apologists for ‘homosexuality’ (as it was soon to be labelled) exploited a tacit dissonance within English Hellenism: if one appealed to Greece as the primary locus of ‘culture’, and an ethos more hospitable to the range of human possibility than most forms of Christianity, why should its example not also justify homoerotic practices, which had been fundamental to structures of education and value immortalized in Plato?32 Pater’s essay ‘Winckelmann’ (1867) offers an early, characteristically guarded gesture in this direction, quoting from the Phaedrus in the original Greek to align Winckelmann and ‘the Hellenic tradition’ with pederastic education. Wilde acknowledged the example more provocatively, if still obliquely, throughout his writing, perhaps most notably in his 30 

Ian Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 188. Charles Kingsley and John Henry Newman, ‘A Correspondence’, in John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, ed. David J. De Laura (New York: Norton, 1968), 298. 32  Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 31 

364    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture arch punning on ‘Dorian’ beauty. But Wilde’s career also bears out the ongoing appeal of Catholicism as a model for the organization of homoerotic desire: it was not a narrowly theological interest that led him to repeatedly request Newman’s writings while in prison. Of course, in prison he also turned to a different model of Christianity: in De Profundis the suffering Christ becomes a paradigm for the mortifications brought about by his own wayward desire and the intolerance of the puritanical culture he had affronted. The clash of Greece and Jerusalem also structured what may be the bleakest of Victorian conjunctions of religion and sexuality, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). The novel repeatedly invokes Mill’s writing, both in defence of individual freedom and in attacks on Christian asceticism, but the novel offers no escape from a censorious regime of respectability, save in the blithely unreflective animality of Arabella. Jude’s aspirations to a religious career are repeatedly derailed by the power of desire, ‘commonplace obedience to conjunctive orders from headquarters, unconsciously received’, as the narrator puts it, while his cousin and Shelleyan epipsyche, Sue, shrinks from the weight of Christian ritual, especially marriage.33 Sue looks instead to an imagined Greece for an ethos of liberated desire (embodied in her carefully guarded statues of Venus and Apollo), and perhaps as a refuge from desire itself. But Sue and Jude are repeatedly confounded by a punitive surveillance that seems to track their every move, and regards even their brief happiness together (and the children it produces) as damning defiance of the world that gives and is given in marriage. With the death of her children, Sue bows to this verdict, and the novel concludes with Sue’s return to her former husband, whom she finds physically repugnant, to submit to marital sex as a form of self-​mortification, while the delirious Jude expires chanting verses from Job. The effect is a sort of anti-​epithalamium, which leaves in ruin Victorian celebrations of marriage as the consummate union of sexual fulfilment and religious faith. For all its bleakness, Hardy’s novel echoes widespread attacks on marriage associated with the late-​century rise of the ‘New Woman’ (of whom Sue is an arresting example). In the most vehement protests, sexual and social liberation depended on an escape both from marriage and from the religion that sanctified it. Thus Amy Levy, in ‘A Ballad of Religion and Marriage’ (1888), looked forward to a future in which ‘Marriage must go the way of God’. Levy’s hope was one of many directed towards a world more accommodating of lesbian desire, a world in which women living together would not be ‘odd’, and certainly this prospect became more palpable in the latter decades of the century. Many women who enjoyed new forms of sexual freedom, however, continued to find support in religious faith. Mona Caird, whose 1888 article ‘Marriage’ ignited a firestorm by proposing ‘free marriage’, defined that concept not in opposition to Christian marriage, but against an influence she charged with ‘destroying the religious sanctity of marriage’ and with it ‘the ideal of spiritual union which the religious conception implied’—​namely, Martin Luther.34 An ‘ideal of spiritual union’ might accommodate 33 

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (London: Penguin, 1998), 39. Mona Caird, ‘Marriage’, in Carolyn Christensen Nelson (ed.), A New Woman Reader (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2001), 191. 34 

Religion and Sexuality     365 a great variety of passionate attachments that, however unconventional, could draw support from Biblical precept and tradition. Thus communities of single women could transfigure traditional denigrations of the spinster through renewed celebrations of celibacy as a model of Christian asceticism (a commitment George Gissing explored in The Odd Women (1893)). More strikingly, Martha Vicinus has demonstrated the importance of Christian faith in passionate sexual attachments between women: Mary Benson, wife of the austere and emotionally distant Archbishop of Canterbury, found fulfilment in a long-​standing relationship with the daughter of his predecessor, while the lovers Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, aunt and niece who wrote as ‘Michael Field’, shifted their allegiances from ancient Greece to Rome, as they were increasingly drawn to the pleasures of asceticism.35 If Hardy’s Sue thus seems an unusually pessimistic version of the New Woman, liberated from existing institutions but adrift in her unaccommodated desires, she may have a more epochal significance as she heralds the growing medicalization of religion itself. In the wake of William James, Freud, and others, faith will increasingly come to be seen as a displacement or disordering of sexual desire. Hardy himself anatomizes this notion in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), where Alec d’Urberville in his rake’s progress briefly becomes an itinerant Methodist preacher, a calling which crumbles at his renewed contact with Tess. But of course we have seen this scepticism emerging much earlier, in a great deal of the anti-​Catholic propaganda that presents Roman priests as creatures of salacious desire. Over the course of the century, such attacks in effect became generalized to the point that, as Max Weber noted, religious faith itself came to seem ‘effeminizing’, a recourse for ‘the person who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man’.36 Thus the complex Victorian intersections of religion and sexuality point us to the ongoing battle over secularization, and remind us that the struggles of the Victorians remain in many ways our own.

Select Bibliography Alderson, David, Mansex Fine:  Religion, Manliness, and Imperialism in Nineteenth-​Century British Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). Bradley, Ian, The Call to Seriousness:  The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians (New  York: Macmillan, 1976). Erdozain, Dominic, The Problem of Pleasure:  Sport, Recreation, and the Crisis of Victorian Religion (Woodbridge, Sussex: Boydell and Brewer, 2010). Hall, Donald E. (ed.), Muscular Christianity:  Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Jay, Elizabeth, The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-​Century Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).

35  Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women who Loved Women, 1778–​1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 85–​112. 36  Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 155.

366    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Mason, Michael, The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Maynard, John, Victorian Discourses of Sexuality and Religion (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1993). O’Malley, Patrick, Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Reed, John Shelton, Glorious Battle:  The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-​Catholicism (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996). Roden, Frederick S., Same-​Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Vance, Norman, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Chapter 19

Re l igion and t h e  C a non Matthew Bradley

Religious disputes have for so long a time touched the inmost fibre of our nation’s being, that they still attract great attention, and create passions. [But the] moral is that whoever treats religion, religious discussions, questions of churches and sects, as absorbing, is not in vital sympathy with the movement of men’s minds at present. Matthew Arnold, letter of 18811

The issue of religion’s relationship with literary culture has never been more urgently debated than it was by the Victorians, living as they did at the historical moment when the whole idea of a ‘literary culture’—​the work it should perform, the values it should embody—​was attempting to bring itself into positive definition for the first time. In On Heroes, Hero-​Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), Thomas Carlyle saw the peculiar heroism of the man of letters as the type of heroism in most vital sympathy with the spirit of the mid-​nineteenth century, confidently predicting that literary heroism would become ‘one of the main forms of Heroism for all future ages’.2 In the 1850s, drawing on Comte’s Religion of Humanity, John Stuart Mill pondered the thought that the ‘religious’ element in our lives might actually be our desire for the imagined approbation of those figures we respect from the past; and that these can be anyone who can provide us with ‘ideal conceptions grander and more beautiful than we see realized in the prose of human life’, whether that be Socrates or Jesus Christ.3 Matthew Arnold, the Victorian period’s most influential voice on the subject of what a literary culture might be (and what it might be for), likewise takes for granted religion’s subordinate role as a limited

1 

Matthew Arnold, The Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996–​2002), v. 142. 2  Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-​Worship and the Heroic in History (London: Chapman and Hall, 1897), 154. 3  ‘The Utility of Religion’, in John Stuart Mill, Three Essays on Religion: ‘Nature’, ‘The Utility of Religion’ and ‘Theism’ (2nd edn., London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1874), 109, 103. The essay was not published in Mill’s lifetime.

368    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture principality within the new empire, in Culture and Anarchy (1869). Arnold’s twin notions of culture and of religion have in common that they are both ‘a search for perfection’,4 but culture ultimately encompasses religion because it is ‘a harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature, and is not consistent with the over-​development of any one power at the expense of the rest’.5 For Carlyle, Mill, and Arnold—​as for increasing numbers of Victorian thinkers as the century progressed—​ whatever was connoted (however imperfectly) by ideas like ‘culture’ or by categories like ‘the literary’, they all to some extent contained religion. Religion is consistently reinscribed as an element that exists within these categories, which encompass and redefine it; usually, religion exists as an imperfect or partial originator of the cultural or literary ‘something more’ which is only now coming to full growth or recognition. This rightly concerns the authors of Nineteenth-​Century Literature and Religion: An Introduction. Mark Knight and Emma Mason begin their volume by pointing out that this widespread Arnoldian narrative expands religion’s influence at the cost of limiting its scope and caricaturing its essence.6 Yet any originating manifestation, or any centre of growth, always retains the potential to suggest certain kinds of primacy over that which positions itself as having outgrown or encompassed it. Carlyle’s man of letters may be wresting possession of the earth from the religious heroes of old, but the development of his dominion remains rhetorically anchored to the religion it is supposed to be displacing: explicating and echoing Fichte’s analysis of the ‘true Literary Man’, Carlyle describes the nature of this literary heroism in almost exclusively religious terms. Characterized by his ‘sacredness’, he is ‘the world’s Priest:—​guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the Waste of Time’.7 Religious imagery and figure remain puzzlingly untranslated. And having decided that religion was culture seen in just one of its many aspects in 1869, Arnold’s next four major works—​St Paul and Protestantism (1870), Literature and Dogma (1873), God and the Bible (1875), and Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877) were all works of biblical exegesis. Religion, in Victorian debates about culture, very rarely stays in its assigned place. Indeed, religious discussions, institutions, history, and practice may have been in Arnold’s view ‘out of vital sympathy’ with current thought in the mid-​nineteenth century, but they were at least concrete matters of fact in the way that his fledgling ‘culture’ was not. At the beginning of Literature and Dogma, Arnold makes much of the fact that the ‘precision and definiteness’ in dogmatic or scholastic religion is a chimera, and (despite appearances) a good deal less precise than the apparent vagueness of culture, and of ‘letters’.8 But there is more to ‘definiteness’ in religion than specific metaphysical

4 

Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–​77), v. 91. 5 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 94. 6  Mark Knight and Emma Mason, Nineteenth Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–​2. 7 Carlyle, On Heroes, 157. 8  Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, in Complete Prose Works, vi. 165.

Religion and the Canon     369 claims. The irony of the Arnoldian approach is that it marshalled the historical and empirical facts of religious belief and practice into the all-​encompassing embrace of an idea which was as yet unformed, intangible, and heavily dependent on an act of volition (we might even say belief), to call it into any kind of positive being. This tension is a deeply felt one in much nineteenth-​century thinking about the relation between religion and culture. Carlyle’s description of the man of letters oscillates uncertainly between a narrative in which ‘the literary’ encompasses religion, and a mode of expression that seems to point to the exactly opposite dynamic. Similarly, in much Victorian writing, the old religious forms refuse to resolve themselves obediently into signs to signify this new narrative, of religion as an early and partial manifestation of the wider impulse towards culture. On the contrary, religion in Victorian writing frequently remains awkwardly central to an overall structure whose apparent tendency is to decentre and contain it. I wish to argue in this essay that key to this tension—​between the difficult tangibility of religion in the Victorian period and the difficult intangibility of the literary culture that claimed to encompass it—​is the notion of canon. I take ‘canon’ here to be any kind of real-​world grouping that is deemed central, animating, and legitimating to the wider environment in which that grouping exists. Arnold is fundamentally a canonical thinker, particularly when it comes to matters of literary culture, as Northrop Frye pointed out long ago in Anatomy of Criticism (1957).9 In Arnold’s essay on ‘The Literary Influence of Academies’ from Essays in Criticism (1864), while recognizing that setting up any central institutional authority in literary matters ‘has many enemies in human nature’, he nevertheless argues for the benefits of an English equivalent to the French Academy, which ‘sets [literary] standards in a number of directions, and creates, in all these directions, a force of educated opinion, checking and rebuking those who fall below these standards, or who set them at nought’.10 Arnold’s need for an organized and materialized centre which literary culture should radiate out from is characteristic, even while he struggles with the difficulties presented by the possibility that such organizational power ‘may be said to be obstructive to energy and inventive genius’.11 But canon, of course, was a word understood by the nineteenth century primarily in its religious sense. Tricia A. Lootens in Lost Saints: Silence, Gender and Victorian Literary Canonization (1996) has assessed the relationship between religious ideas of ‘canon’ and their literary counterpoints in subtle and arresting detail. Her particular interest is canonization in the sense of sainthood, and how much the formation of ‘canonical’ figures in literature owed to the discourses of saintly canonization, and indeed vice versa. These range from the most explicit—​Comte’s famous positivist calendar for example, based on the Catholic calendar of saints, but with three months devoted to remembering literary achievements—​to the more elusive ways that female writers like Elizabeth Barrett 9 

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1957), 9–​10: ‘he does not even seem to suspect the existence of a systematic criticism as distinct from the history of taste’. 10  Matthew Arnold, ‘The Literary Influence of Academies’, in Complete Prose Works, iii. 235, 241. 11  Arnold, ‘The Literary Influence of Academies’, 239.

370    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Browning and Christina Rossetti posed peculiar problems for literary ‘canonizing’ mechanisms.12 My approach differs from that of Lootens in two principal ways. Firstly, I shall take my overarching definition of canon (any kind of real-​world grouping that is deemed central, animating, and legitimating to the wider environment in which that grouping exists) into two obvious types: canon as defined by a particular text or set of texts, and canon as located in the personality and teaching of a key individual or founder. Secondly, I will be confining myself to examining some of the ways that Victorian writers attempted to relate ‘literature’ and ‘religion’ to one another in various canonical relationships, i.e. relationships between the real-​world grouping and the wider culture it is supposed to define or legitimate. My subject is thus as much the various conceptualizations of the terms ‘literature’ and ‘religion’ in the Victorian period—​and their shifting relationships—​as it is those subjects themselves. Since what I aim at is an examination of how shifting definitional parameters operated, hopefully this mitigates a certain (deliberate) looseness in the way I deploy those terms. My emphasis is on Christianity, although the relationship of Christianity to other faiths must be part of any debate about canon, and which I touch on briefly here in relation to Islam. One last methodological point: my choice of examples has, in part, a polemical motive, following Frank Kermode’s well-​known argument that religious canons are important in alerting literary critics to the role of institutional norms in regulating literary interpretative practice.13 As Victorian non-​fictional prose falls further out of the pedagogic canon of Victorian literary studies (at least at undergraduate level), I here stake my own small claim for its increased centrality. Much of the excellent recent critical work on Victorian religion has focused on poetry and poetics,14 but for many Victorians, prose writing was still the primary theatre of religious debate. I shall in particular be returning to Arnold as a touchstone throughout, not only because of his key role in establishing Victorian conceptualizations of the relationship between religion and the literary, but also because many of his ideas and assumptions clearly explore the difficulties inherent in exploring the relation of legitimacy to illegitimacy, and that of any apparently defining material centre to its radiating periphery.

The Canon as Text(s) In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), both Mr Brocklehurst and Jane are Bible readers. Having failed to catch Jane out for not knowing her Bible at all, Brocklehurst 12 

Tricia A. Lootens, Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 15–​18, 116–​182. 13  Frank Kermode, ‘Institutional Control of Interpretation’, Salmagundi, 43 (1979), 72–​86. 14  For example, Kirstie Blair, Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Religion and the Canon     371 professes himself shocked that she isn’t reading the right parts of it. She does not like the Psalms but prefers instead the more apocalyptic parts of the Bible, principally the Books of Revelation and Daniel.15 Brocklehurst’s objection is in spite of the fact that his own imagination is clearly animated by biblical apocalyptic. Berating her for these rash textual choices, he advises her to pray to God to ‘take away your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh’ (echoing God’s promise to Israel in an apocalyptic prophecy given to Ezekiel 36:26), and when he then upbraids her for lying, he cries that ‘all liars will have their portion in the lake burning with fire and brimstone’ (Revelation 21:8).16 It is easy to read the scene as emblematic of the Christian Bible’s central and canonical position in Victorian culture, a shared point of contact for unwanted child and headmaster-​clergyman alike. Timothy Larsen is one recent critic who takes this position.17 Yet of course—​and as Jane and Brocklehurst’s encounter suggests—​the Bible was just as much a site of canonical disruption in the Victorian period as it was a reassuring centre. Wendell V. Harris argued that the parallel between religious and literary canons is inappropriate because the entelechy of any religious canon is always towards closure (i.e. establishing a final and definitive set of texts),18 but this is not a dynamic that would have been recognized by many Victorians. If the Bible ever was a closed canon or even near to being one, it was opened by higher critical techniques in a more public manner than ever before. Many critics, most notably Stephen Prickett and David Jasper, have argued that the development of biblical hermeneutics in the eighteenth century led to a change in attitudes towards the biblical canon’s relationship with the literary.19 As it was revealed as ever more textually volatile, Jasper writes, The Bible then begins to emerge as part of a great ‘secular’ literature whose canon is shifting and continually needs to be reassessed within culture and society, and as its ancient and coherent religious authority is deconstructed so new and unexpected energies are released which are more difficult to define but which we ignore at our peril.20

Jane Eyre also demonstrates that the question of biblical canon is not simply about higher critical questions of which books of the Bible, or which parts of those books, can be legitimated and on what grounds. The Book of Revelation goes on to becomes a structuring text around which Jane organizes her emotional and imaginative life in the novel, but Brontë is demonstrably equivocal about how far it can be contained in this

15 

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 33.

16 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 34. 17 

Timothy Larsen, A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 18  Wendell V. Harris, ‘Canonicity’, PMLA 106, no. 1 (January 1991), 111. 19  Stephen Prickett, Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and David Jasper, The Sacred and Secular Canon In Romanticism (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999). 20 Jasper, The Sacred and Secular Canon, 2.

372    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture structure. It is after hearing St John Rivers quote the Book of Revelation in a sermon that Jane decides, albeit temporarily, to go with him, describing the sermon as having ‘thrilled me strangely’.21 Kevin Mills sees the ending of the novel as an apocalyptic vision that offers Jane a vision of earthly destiny versus spiritual fulfilment.22 But the status of the biblical text itself, and its relation to its status as a central text in the formation of her own consciousness, is also at stake here.23 As David Jasper puts it in relation to Romanticism: As the notion of canon in many ways is ‘de-​canonized’ and we enter upon a new world fearful of its own freedoms and relativities, so the sacred canon re-​emerges insistently, elusively, and powerfully.24

However powerful, Jane’s encounter with the originating text ultimately acts to draw her further towards St John and his stern religiosity, and away from her own emotional fulfilment. The Christianity that forms the animating root of her imagination thus stages an all-​too-​solid external return. Jane’s devotion to the apocalyptic parts of the Bible provides a base and a framework through which she can experience the world, but with the appearance of this other St John, of Marsh End not of Patmos, the Revelation text flashes back into literal presence as a potential block to that experience, and to Jane’s overall development. Its sudden, potentially disabling presence in her life outside herself, acts as a reminder that such materialized ‘canons’ can assert their power over the individuals and the frameworks that grow out of them with powerful suddenness. A number of critics have seen the main literary result of the destabilization of the biblical canon by the higher criticism as an increased sensitivity to issues of textual indeterminacy in other literary texts.25 Suzy Anger in particular has interestingly extended the idea of the eighteenth century’s revolution in biblical hermeneutics to what she sees as a late-​nineteenth-​century ‘reinstitutionalizing of textual hermeneutics […] in a secular form that we can recognize as the study of literature’.26 While valuable, this approach still of course assumes a certain kind of canonical dynamic between the Bible 21 

Jane Eyre, 416. Kevin Mills, Approaching Apocalypse: Unveiling Revelation in Victorian Writing (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2010), 26. 23  Simon Marsden has argued persuasively that Jane actually substitutes the Creation myth for Rivers’s Book of Revelation at the end of Jane Eyre, part of a ‘structural archetype’ of Edenic return that manifests itself in Brontë’s heroines until Villette (1853). Simon Marsden, The Earth No Longer A Void”: Creation Theology in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë’, Literature and Theology, 25, no. 3 (2011), 237–​251. 24 Jasper, The Sacred and Secular Canon in Romanticism, 2. 25  See, for example, Suzy Anger, Victorian Interpretation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Charles LaPorte, Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011); Suzanne Bailey, Decomposing” Texts: Browning’s Poetics and Higher-​Critical Parody’, in Jude V. Nixon (ed.), Victorian Religious Discourse: New Directions in Criticism (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 117–​129; and also Knight and Mason’s reading of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone in terms of evangelical anxiety in Nineteenth-​Century Religion and Literature, 130–​133. 26 Anger, Victorian Interpretation, 3. 22 

Religion and the Canon     373 and other literature (i.e. developments in biblical criticism radiate out, reshaping and defining wider perceptions of non-​biblical writing). Yet this is a dynamic that is persistently called into question by Victorian writers themselves, particularly Arnold. In the Preface to the first edition of Literature and Dogma (1873) he rewrites Christian textual canon-​formation in literary terms: There was a time when books were read as part of the Bible which are in no Bible now; there was a time when books which are in every Bible now, were by many disallowed as genuine parts of the Bible. St Athanasius rejected the Book of Esther, and the Greek Christianity of the East repelled the Apocalypse, and the Latin Christianity of the West repelled the Epistle to the Hebrews. And a true critical sense of relative value lay at the bottom of all these rejections. No one rejected Isaiah or the Epistle to the Romans […]. The books rejected were such books as those which we now print as the Apocrypha, or as the Book of Esther, or the Epistle to the Hebrews […] Now, whatever value one may assign to these works, no sound critic would rate their intrinsic worth as high as that of the great undisputed books of the Bible.27

Here, literary sensibility becomes the organizing principle of Christian textual history. Indeed, it is Arnold’s wider project in Literature and Dogma to make the category of the ‘literary’ the true legitimating canon of Christianity, providing a new centre for the now radically decentred Bible, and inverting the traditionally-​conceived canonical relationship between the Bible and the literary text. Yet his well-​known definition of literary language as given in Literature and Dogma, and elsewhere, is of ‘language thrown out at an object of consciousness not fully grasped, which inspired emotion’.28 This seems appropriate to him because ‘if the object be one not fully to be grasped, and one to inspire emotion, the language of figure and feeling will satisfy us better about it […] than the language of literal fact and science’. It is, of course, a definition designed to recast the Bible as a key literary text. The problem is that this definition builds in the idea that the ‘literary’ qualities of language are not the paths to any type of meaningful knowledge about the world; on the contrary, the category of the ‘literary’ in Arnold’s definition disappears in precisely inverse proportion to knowledge. God is the most literary figure of all, because the most unknowable. (Arnold even calls him at one point a ‘literary term’.29) Thus ‘literary language’ in Arnold exists in a strange tension, where it is cast not only as a canonical principle that encompasses and legitimates all religious discourse, but also as no principle at all. Far from being the centre of the universe, ‘the literary’ is rather the expression of ignorance about the universe. A practical demonstration of this had been in evidence some years before in Arnold’s attitude to that famous mid-​Victorian attempt to form and promote an exclusively literary canon, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (Lootens calls Palgrave ‘a kind of Chief Canonizer’30). The Treasury project certainly looked like lending legitimacy to the idea 27 Arnold, Complete Prose Works, vi. 160. 28 Arnold, Complete Prose Works, vi. 189. 29 Arnold, Complete Prose Works, vi. 171. 30 Lootens, Lost Saints, 4.

374    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture of a decisive textual canon from which a literary culture might spring, and differed from previous poetry collections (as Palgrave announced confidently in his preface), in that its criteria was to be literary quality alone. The point was an Arnoldian-​sounding one, ‘to include in it all the best original Lyrical pieces and Songs in our language, and none beside the best’.31 Although Arnold felt that the selection in the Treasury showed a ‘delicacy of feeling’ that was ‘indisputable and quite rare’, Palgrave’s own accompanying notes contained, according to him, ‘certain freaks and violences’ which marred the collection.32 These were mainly down to ‘his [Palgrave’s] feeling himself too much left to take his own way, too much without any central authority representing high culture and sound judgment’. Interestingly, Charles LaPorte reports that when the New Revised Version (NRV) of the Bible was issued (the New Testament in 1881, and the complete Bible in 1885), the main controversy that arose was in relation to the scholarly apparatus, not the text of the NRV itself: the editors’ decision to note, for example, that several manuscripts of Mark 15:39 have ‘truly this man was a Son of God’ rather than the more traditional ‘the Son of God’. As LaPorte says, this shows the editors of the NRV taking ‘a controversial critical position in their decision to acknowledge the unfixed nature of premodern manuscript culture’.33 Arnold’s objections to what he sees as Palgrave’s over-​ personalized notes feel similar, a resistance to seeing ‘literary’ judgements brought into positive being, and the demand for a yet higher, abstracted authority to police them. Indeed, Arnold’s apophatic approach to the idea of the literary, a definition that works by establishing what it is not, leaves a gap in his work that he increasingly filled with the very religious canon it was designed to move beyond. After Literature and Dogma, Arnold’s next project, God and the Bible (1875), devoted almost half its length to the historical circumstances around the formation of the Bible canon, and mostly to the higher critical question of the authorship of St John’s Gospel.

The Canon as Personality An idea that can be found relatively often in Victorian non-​fictional prose is ‘living belief ’, or variations thereupon. In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill wrote that free discussion was essential in order to maintain the vitality of any idea, or it became simply a mechanical formula: ‘Instead of a vivid conception and a living belief, there remain only a few phrases retained by rote.’34 He remarks that this is illustrated particularly well in the experience of ethical doctrines and religions, which are ‘full of meaning and vitality to those who originate them, and to the direct disciples of the originators’, but which, 31 

Francis Turner Palgrave, preface to The Golden Treasury (Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1861), unpaginated. 32  Arnold, ‘The Literary Influence of Academies’, in Complete Prose Works, iii. 252. 33 LaPorte, Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible, 101. 34  John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: Penguin, 1985), 101.

Religion and the Canon     375 as Christianity has, end up as ‘dead beliefs, without ever being realized in the imagination, the feelings, or the understanding’.35 In ‘Science and Culture’ (1880), T. H. Huxley referred to the ‘living belief ’ in Christianity of the past, to contrast with the present, in a similar vein.36 In 1873, Max Müller remarked that, Whenever we can trace back a religion to its first beginnings, we find it free from many of the blemishes that offend us in its later phases. The founders of the ancient religions of the world, as far as we can judge, were minds of a high stamp, full of noble aspirations, yearning for truth, devoted to the welfare of their neighbours, examples of purity and unselfishness. What they desired to found upon earth was but seldom realised, and their sayings, if preserved in their original form, offer often a strange contrast to the practice of those who profess to be their disciples.37

Just as Mill and Huxley saw this story best exemplified in modern Christianity, Müller saw it best exemplified in modern Hinduism, which he also saw as a once vital faith reduced to a mechanical betrayal of itself. But the popularity of a ‘living’ belief, a belief that is characterized in an organicist metaphor and which exists in close relation to its charismatic founders, is significant. Jan Gorak argues that Pauline Christianity is the great innovator as regards the idea of a ‘living’ canon. Moving beyond the classical usage of canon, as indicating a set of rules or measures, and the Jewish use of canon, as a set of texts that define a community, St Paul reimagines the canon and transforms it ‘from a classical pedagogic instrument into a dynamic, unpredictable, transcendent mission ultimately identified with Christ himself ’.38 Since St Paul, as Gorak has it, the question for Christianity has been whether canon ‘refer[s]‌to a codified set of rules or to the charismatic possibility offered by the example of Jesus’.39 The question of whether the borders of individual personality might be workable tools to create a canonical centre for religious experience thus again takes the idea of canon into the border between the religious and the literary. The Victorian Bildungsroman novel is obviously implicated in this tension, and some of its most famous and successful examples, of course, are narratives of specifically religious development, from Newman’s narrative of a young man’s conversion to Roman Catholicism in Loss and Gain (1848) to J. A. Froude and Mrs Humphry Ward’s narratives of doubt, The Nemesis of Faith (1849) and Robert Elsmere (1888) respectively.40 But Gorak’s question, of whether the Christian canon should be located not in a set of prescriptive texts 35 Mill, On Liberty, 103. 36 

T. H. Huxley, Science and Culture And Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1881), 12. Max Müller, Preface to Chips from a German Workshop, 4 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1867), i, xxiii. 38  Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea (London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone, 1991), 23. 39 Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon, 31. 40  Of particular note from the perspective of modern canon formation is the fact that none of these three novels are currently in print, despite Robert Elsmere in particular being one of the best-​selling novels of the Victorian period. 37 

376    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture but within the personality of Jesus, itself raises another question: the competition. What of other religions, other charismatic founders? The difficulty in maintaining Jesus’s personality as the canonical centre of Victorian religion which plays out across the Victorian period is not a question of internal discussions about that personality and its relation to Christianity alone. A number of critical studies have traced the relation between Islam and the Victorians.41 The number of practising Muslims living in Britain in the Victorian period was very few,42 but this inevitably licensed Islam—​or Mahometanism, the more personality-​driven label commonly used in the nineteenth century—​as more freely available for imaginative use. Carlyle’s inclusion of Mahomet in Heroes and Hero-​ Worship was agenda-​setting, and it is telling that he begins the essay by saying that ‘We have chosen Mahomet not as the most eminent Prophet; but as the one we are freest to speak of ’.43 And in Carlyle’s hands, Mahomet’s Islam is definitely a living belief: Not that Abstractions, logical Propositions, be correctly worded or incorrectly; but that living concrete Sons of Adam do lay this to heart: that is the important point. Islam devoured all these vain jangling Sects; and I think had right to do so. It was a Reality, direct from the great Heart of Nature once more. Arab idolatries, Syrian formulas, whatsoever was not equally real, had to go up in flame,—​mere dead fuel, in various senses, for this which was fire.44

Or, more pithily: ‘a bastard kind of Christianity, but a living kind; with a heart-​life in it; not dead, chopping barren logic merely!’ and, by way of climax to the essay, ‘Arabia shines through long ages over a great section of the world. Belief is great, life-​giving’.45 Where Islam fails is in its transference of sacred personality to sacred text. Throughout, Carlyle stresses the unliterary nature of both founder and book, stressing that Mahomet himself could not read, and describing the Koran as ‘as toilsome reading as I ever undertook’: A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-​ windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite;—​insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran. We read in it, as we might in the State-​Paper Office, unreadable masses of lumber, that perhaps we may get some glimpses of a remarkable man. […] Mahomet’s followers found the Koran lying all in fractions, as it had been written down at first promulgation; much of it, they say, on shoulder-​blades of mutton, flung pell-​mell 41  Peter Almond, Heretic and Hero: Muhammad and the Victorians (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1989); Clinton Bennett, Victorian Images of Islam (London: Grey Seal, 1992); and most recently Shahin Kuli Kattik, Islam and the Victorians (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2008). 42  See Gwilym Beckerlegge, ‘Followers of “Mohammed, Kalee and Dada Nanuk”: The Presence of Islam and South Asian Religions in Victorian Britain’, in John Wolffe (ed.), Religion in Victorian Britain, v. Culture and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 221–​267, for details. 43 Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-​Worship, 43. 44 Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-​Worship, 64. 45 Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-​Worship, 63, 77.

Religion and the Canon     377 into a chest: and they published it, without any discoverable order as to time or otherwise;—​merely trying, as would seem, and this not very strictly, to put the longest chapters first. […] Yet with every allowance, one feels it difficult to see how any mortal ever could consider this Koran as a Book written in Heaven, too good for the Earth; as a well-​written book, or indeed as a book at all; and not a bewildered rhapsody; written, so far as writing goes, as badly as almost any book ever was!46

The Koran text ‘lying all in fractions’ must have been a potent higher critical image in the early nineteenth century, and one which clearly demonstrates the uneasy absent presence of Christianity and of Jesus here—​the prophet and religion that he is less free to speak of—​throughout Carlyle’s essay. Islam may be a ‘bastard’ kind of Christianity, but it serves as a warning of a religion of living belief descending into deadening dogma in the absence of direct contact with its founder. Carlyle firmly locates the authenticating canon of Islam within Mahomet himself, and raises profound doubts that its sacred text is up to the task of satisfactorily expressing that personality—​in effect, he denies the Koran claims to true canonicity. In Heroes and Hero-​Worship, Christ’s personality is in one sense made sacred by its absence, but in another, every description of Mahomet’s personality suggests a silent comparison and adjustment in the reader’s relation of Mahomet to Christ. What Carlyle does, however, is ensure that the unfolding and expression of Mahomet’s personality is hermetically sealed from the idea of the literary; emphasizing the Koran’s incoherence and crudity, Mahomet’s illiteracy, and so on. This is in very strong counter-​distinction to the way that the canonical elements in the personhood of Christ were to be developed over the Victorian period, as Jesus biography became one of its most familiar and dominant modes. Owen Chadwick lists J. R. Seeley’s Ecce Homo (1864) F. W. Farrar’s Life of Christ (1874), and Alfred Edersheim’s Talmudically inspired The Life and Times of Jesus Messiah (1883) amongst others,47 and more recently, the numerous appearances of Christ in late-​Victorian and early-​twentieth-​century fiction have been analysed by Jennifer Stevens in The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination (2010). Stevens demonstrates that these mid-​century approaches to the life of Christ paved the way for Gospel material to enter the sphere of the ‘literary’ without insuperable difficulty. According to her, Edwin Abbott’s novel Philocritus: Memoirs of a Disciple of the Lord of 1878 is the first British novel to feature Jesus as a central character, and formed the beginning of a growing trend for dramatizing Gospel narratives in late nineteenth-​century popular literature by writers such as Joseph Jacobs, Marie Corelli, and Oscar Wilde.48 Dickens contributed early to the genre, writing a Christ fictionalized narrative called The Life of Our Lord in the 1840s, although he forbade publication of it in his own lifetime (it was originally written to read aloud to his children).49 46 Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-​Worship, 64–​65. 47 

Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2 vols. (London: A and C Black, 1970), ii. 64–​68. Jennifer Stevens, The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination 1860–​1920 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 97–​138. 49  Charles Dickens, The Life of Our Lord (London: Associated Newspapers, 1934). For an extended discussion of the work in the Victorian religious context, see Gary College, Dickens, Christianity, and ‘The Life of Our Lord’: Humble Veneration, Profound Conviction (London: Continuum, 2009). 48 

378    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture This development of a literary expression of personality as the key to religious canonicity is evident as early as David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu. In the first and second editions (1835, 1836), Strauss had asserted that the person of Christ was the centre for a necessary historical realization that the whole idea of God was in essential unity with humanity; Christ was thus to some degree a historical accident, or at the very least the product of a historical inevitability. In the third edition (1838), however, Strauss significantly altered his position: Christ was no longer the passive, one-​man result of a play of historical forces, but an altogether more Carlylean figure, a genius who ‘stands next to Orpheus and Homer, not only next to Moses but also Mohammad—​indeed, where he dare not scorn the company of Alexander and Caesar, of Raphael and Mozart’. Key, however, is that Strauss argues much more strongly for the canonical centrality of religion to this wider culture of which Jesus is an animating part: To be sure, this unsettling association will be partially annulled by the consideration that within the various spheres in which the divinely inspired creative power of genius can unfold, that of religion is not merely the midpoint of a circle, because in religion alone the divine Spirit touches man in immediate self-​consciousness, but in all other spheres through some sort of agency—​of ideas, images, colours, sounds, etc.50

‘The midpoint of a circle’ sets up the figure of the religious founder as the tangible centre of all else that follows, and then sets up Christ as the centre of that centre: ‘even within the religious domain’, Strauss says, Christ ‘as the founder of the highest religion, transcends the other religious founders’. He also denies that Christ can be decentred. As the starting point for our sense of the unity between human and divine, and with this idea appearing with ‘greater creative power’ in Jesus than any other individual, ‘having penetrated and transfigured his entire life uniformly and without perceptible darkness’, the idea that ‘the starting point of a sequence in the realm of the spiritual life is also to be considered the greatest’51 is taken as proven. Strauss removed this material from the fourth edition (1840), feeling he had capitulated too far to his orthodox detractors, but this model of Christological canon continued to serve for many Victorians, even though this material was never included in George Eliot’s English translation of Strauss (1846). Many of these ‘third edition’ ideas, however, were recast in Ernest Renan’s notorious Christ biography Vie de Jésus (1863), which extended still further the idea of literary canonicity as the key to Christ’s religious canonicity. Indeed, the popularity of Christ biography in the nineteenth century might well be said to be due to the perceived damage that biblical criticism had inflicted on a

50  David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, trans. George Eliot (London: SCM Press, 1973), 799. As Eliot translated the 4th edition, the extracts here are translated in a note by John C. Shelley. 51 Strauss, The Life of Jesus, trans. Eliot, 801.

Religion and the Canon     379 purely textual canon, but it nevertheless carried with it the implication that texts, or at least parts of texts, could be valued as unambiguously ‘expressive’ of Christ’s personality, a Romantic definition of literary writing that became vitally important for those that saw Christ’s own personality as the real key to the Christian canon. In the Vie de Jésus (1863), Renan argued along Straussian lines for Christ as the first and greatest incarnation of the essential interconnectedness of divine and human. It famously denied the reality of Christ’s miracles, but a large part of the book’s agenda was to urge more strongly the aesthetic and literary component of Christ’s appeal as the authentic key to Christianity. ‘[Christ] did not preach opinions’, Renan says, ‘he preached himself ’,52 and if not quite exactly a person of Arnoldian sweetness and light, ‘his tenderness of heart transformed itself into an infinite sweetness, a vague poetry, a universal charm’.53 For all the controversy it caused regarding the miracles question, Renan’s model of Christ’s beautiful personality as a new stable centre for the Christian canon, and discernible through the Gospel evidence, remained influential in England. The anonymously published Ecce Homo (1866), written by a professor of Latin at the University of London, John Robert Seeley, claimed similarly that the beautiful and the true personality of Christ could and should communicate itself through a ‘critical weighing’ of evidence and likelihoods from the Gospels if the truth of Christianity were to be discovered.54 The critical qualities of ‘sweetness’ and ‘charm’ in Renan’s own writing were clearly crucial to the development of Arnold’s project of critical work in the 1860s and 1870s,55 but the sweetness and charm of Renan’s Jesus were more ambiguously received by Arnold. His Christ life was described by Arnold elliptically in ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (1865) as ‘a synthesis, perhaps premature, perhaps impossible, certainly not successful’.56 Nevertheless, he still describes it as, with all its difficulty, a fresh synthesis of the New Testament data,—​not a making war on them, in Voltaire’s fashion, not a leaving them out of mind, in the world’s fashion, but putting a new construction upon them, the taking them from under the old, traditional, conventional point of view and placing them under a new one57

What is important here is the reassertion of the textual canon of Christianity against Renan’s radical claims for the canon-​as-​personality; Renan’s book is reinscribed by Arnold as presenting a new view which should encourage us to reinterpret the New Testament data, but certainly not to question its centrality. Arnold’s canonical anxiety in 52 

Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus, trans. unattributed (London: Mathieson and Company, [1890]), 46.

53 Renan, The Life of Jesus, 44.

54  [J. R. Seeley], Ecce Homo: A Survey of the Life and Work of Jesus Christ (London: Macmillan, 1866), v. 55  See Donald D. Stone, Communications With The Future: Matthew Arnold in Dialogue (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 57–​61. 56 Arnold, Complete Prose Works, iii. 278. 57 Arnold, Complete Prose Works, iii. 279.

380    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture relation to Renan and the biblical texts is very strong elsewhere in his work, suggesting that perhaps the failure of the Vie de Jésus is precisely in proportion to its demands that we decentre the Gospel texts: St Paul and Protestantism begins with a strong assertion against Renan that St Paul’s dominance as the foremost interpreter of Christianity is ending (‘the reign of the real St Paul is only just beginning’),58 and in Literature and Dogma, the only mention of Renan is to question his assertion that St John’s Gospel is a near-​ wholly invented narrative. (Arnold’s argument is that it is precisely the oddity and difficulty of the Gospel that shows it to be an accurate representation of Jesus, so clearly are the ideas out of the writer’s reach.59) Indeed, Renan’s near-​total absence from Literature and Dogma is in a way remarkable, a work clearly written in the shadow of Renan’s Christ biography. In Arnold’s ‘Literary Influence of Academies’ essay, Renan had provided many of the structures that Arnold had been happy to follow in recommending an institution to establish a purely literary canonicity. But in Literature and Dogma, the textual canon of Christianity in relation to ideas of the literary asserts itself, and problematically so. Throughout the book, Arnold intimates that the key to Christ’s personality might be his own, personal literary sensibility; the narrative he tells is of Jesus communicating in metaphor and figure the mechanics of an internal, personal transformation, but of these metaphors and figures being misinterpreted by the Gospel writers and others as specific predictions of a coming apocalypse, rather than an expression of personality. As Arnold says, with some relief, ‘the more we regard the reporters of Jesus as men liable to err […], the less need have we to make Jesus a co-​partner in their eschatology’.60 Indeed, apocalyptic expectation, and the idea that Jesus believed in its literal truth, present obvious difficulties for the model of Christ’s incarnated personality as-​canon, because Jesus would appear thus to have historically denied the worth and longevity of the world of which he is supposed to constitute the defining root and centre. Nevertheless, the tension in Arnold’s attempt to embody Christ’s personal canonicity within the canonical Christian texts (against Renan’s development of latent ideas in Strauss) is obvious. In a way, this is the more obvious tension in Literature and Dogma. There is perhaps another, which I alluded to earlier. Strauss was right when he called an ‘unsettling association’ the categorization of Christ with a group of figures which included Mozart and Raphael—​and Mohammad. When Carlyle had described the prophet’s ‘great fiery heart, seething, simmering like a great furnace of Thoughts [which] was not a juggler’s’,61 his passion for righteousness, his prophetic power, and his essential unliterariness, he was describing the antithesis of what the personality of Jesus became in these later accounts. From sweetness and charm in Christ to sweetness and light in culture, Arnold’s hopeful Jesus—​who could embody simultaneously the canons of both culture and Christianity and in both their personal and textual aspects—​was threatened not only by the thorny tangibility of the biblical canon, but perhaps also on the other by Mahomet’s counter-​ example. Islam was clearly on Arnold’s mind in this period, and demonstrably in 58 Arnold, Complete Prose Works, vi. 5.

59 Arnold, Complete Prose Works, vi. 271.

60 Arnold, Complete Prose Works, vi. 260. 61 Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-​Worship, 67.

Religion and the Canon     381 relation to ideas about canonicity. In ‘The Literary Influence of Academies’, for example, Arnold’s illustration of why England needed a centralizing academy to ensure literary standards is actually Renan’s—​the poor quality of scholarship on Mahomet and Islam in American and English scholarship as compared to the German and French.62 In the section of Literature and Dogma where Arnold describes the literary factor in determining the biblical canon, the Koran is taken as a counter-​example: This, indeed, is what makes the religious watchword of the British and Foreign School Society: The Bible, the whole Bible and nothing but the Bible! so ingeniously (one must say) absurd; it is treating the Bible as Mahometans treat the Koran, as if it were a talisman all of one piece, and with all its sentences equipollent.63

And while working on the proofs for Literature and Dogma in 1871, he gave a lecture on the performances of what he called ‘A Persian Passion Play’ (later an essay added to Essays in Criticism). This was the nineteenth-​century phenomenon, recounted in a book by Arthur de Gobineau, the French aristocrat and writer, in which groups of Muslims would enact the death of Imam Hussein at Kerbela. In Arnold’s article, we find a clear cross-​current between Islamic religion and the claims of cultural life in this theatrical event, but Islam’s textual canon is again ruthlessly excluded from the category of the literary: In Christendom one need not go about to establish that the religion of the Hebrews is a better religion than the religion of the Arabs, or that the Bible is a greater book than the Koran. The Bible grew, the Koran was made; there lies the immense difference in depth and truth between them!64

While wresting back the textual canon as part of a ‘cultured’ Christianity from Renan on the one hand, Arnold simultaneously casts the textual canon of Islam as fixed and dead, isolated from the dynamic growth that is the essence of cultural development. While attempting to harmonize text and personality as canonical in Christ, both text and personality are cast as uncanonical in Islam. Mahomet himself is never talked about directly in relation to the Islamic religion, thus preserving by omission Carlyle’s account of the essential unliterariness of his personality. Indeed, this focus on Imam Hussein and his sacrifice in the play (seeing himself as the rightful heir to Mahomet’s Caliphate, he and his supporters are murdered en route to claim it because they refuse to submit to submit as a captive and trust in God alone) is seen by Arnold as being in fact a permeation of Christ’s personality into the canons of Islam: I have elsewhere often said, two signal powers: mildness and sweet reasonableness. […] Of this the Imams have nothing, except so far as all mildness and self-​sacrifice 62 Arnold, Complete Prose Works, iii. 243–​244. 63 Arnold, Complete Prose Works, vi. 160. 64 Arnold, Complete Prose Works, vii. 35.

382    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture have in them something of sweet reasonableness and are its indispensable preliminary. This they have, mildness and self-​sacrifice; and we have seen what an attraction it exercises. Could we ask for a stronger testimony to Christianity? Could we wish for any sign more convincing that Jesus Christ was, indeed, what Christians call him, the desire of all nations?65

Conclusion Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) is a novel that appears to offer closure, and of a tragic kind, on the Victorian debate about the relation between religion and culture. Most obviously, Sue Bridehead is an apostle of culture, whose knowledge of the Bible and modern criticism is sufficient to allow her to rearrange and cut up her New Testament into correct chronological order, but which remains only part of an overall economy of self-​education which includes reading radical modern poets like Swinburne together with the Greek and Latin classics. Jude’s aim is likewise to escape Arnoldian provinciality and establish a broad base of cultural education (except that he begins with the classics and then moves to reading the Greek New Testament and patristics). But crucially, by the end of the novel this order has broken down, as religion refuses to stay subordinate in this economy and becomes all too damagingly central to both Sue’s and Jude’s lives, through Sue’s hysterical readoption of biblicist Christianity. The real tragedy of this maleficent return, as Hardy sees it, is that religion’s time is past in any case. There is a famous scene when Jude first arrives in Christminster/​Oxford and he feels the living presence of the great men associated with the city, a mix of the great religious and literary thinkers including Keble, Addison, Newman, Swinburne, and, of course, Arnold—​whose opening remarks from the Essays in Criticism on Oxford act as a physical reminder of ‘the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection’.66 But in a perhaps less famous scene, not long after he meets Sue, Jude asks her how she can bear to leave a city in whose history ‘such men as Newman, Pusey, Ward and Keble, loom so large?’ Sue responds by echoing, in a far more devastating way, the view expressed in Arnold’s 1881 letter with which I began this essay, that questions of religion in this cultural economy were no longer in ‘vital sympathy’ with men’s minds: ‘Yes they do,’ she replies; ‘But how large do they loom in the history of the world?’67 Perhaps larger than we think, or at least larger than some late-​Victorian novels tell us. Hardy’s viewpoint is a familiar modern one—​religion as a psychological crutch which proves itself in the long run to be a damaging delusion, and Victorian non-​ fictional prose on the subject as an outdated irrelevance by the end of the century. Yet 65 Arnold, Complete Prose Works, vii. 38–​39. 66 

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1999), 66.

67 Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 84.

Religion and the Canon     383 this narrative is misleading. Arnold, for example, made a further significant intervention on the biblical canon question after Literature and Dogma in God and the Bible, a detailed historical study which David Jasper has seen as anticipating a number of trends in deconstructive literary studies and postmodern theology.68 The turn of the Victorian century saw William James, consciously positioning himself in the Victorian tradition of non-​fictional prose writing, pick up many of these ideas in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), within the emergent academic discipline of the philosophy of religion.69 To take Jude the Obscure (a novel, of course) as symbolic of closure on the continued relevance of these Victorian approaches to religion in prose is to play precisely into that narrative where religion is a partial manifestation of mankind’s developing intellectual powers, which then requires recasting into a secular culture that can encompass and contain them—​the very narrative that the Victorians themselves had such difficulty in stabilizing and maintaining.

Select Bibliography Anger, Suzy, Victorian Interpretation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). Arnold, Matthew, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–​77). Carlyle, Thomas, On Heroes, Hero-​Worship and the Heroic in History (1841; London: Chapman and Hall, 1897). Gorak, Jan, The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea (London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone, 1991). Jasper, David, The Sacred and Secular Canon In Romanticism (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999). LaPorte, Charles, Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011). Lootens, Tricia A., Lost Saints:  Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996). Prickett, Stephen, Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Stevens, Jennifer, The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination 1860–​1920 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010). Strauss, David Friedrich, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, trans. George Eliot (London: SCM Press, 1973).

68 

David Jasper, The Sacred and Secular Canon In Romanticism, 88–​99, 112–​115. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). In his introduction to Pragmatism (1907), James remarks that it was Mill ‘from whom I first learned the pragmatic openness of mind and whom my fancy likes to picture as our leader were he alive today’. William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 18. 69 

Chapter 20

Re l igion and E du c at i on Mark Knight

Learning about the relationship between religion and education in Victorian literary culture is not as straightforward as one might think. An immediate difficulty is definition: how widely should we interpret the terms ‘religion’ and ‘education’, and what sort of material can reasonably be categorized under these headings? Even if we answer the question of definition in a restricted manner, the amount of material remains overwhelming and this problem only increases when we remember that books were not the only medium of religious education. Then there are questions to be asked about the prejudice of our teachers. Those who educate us—​including fictional characters, historical thinkers, contemporary classroom instructors, and the writers of Oxford Handbook essays—​bring with them a particular view of the world, with the potential to illuminate and mislead concurrently. In the case of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), the narrator’s bias is apparent when she reflects on the ‘church-​like’ aspect of her new place of learning and notes the inscription over the door: ‘Lowood Institution.—​This portion was built a.d.——​​, by Naomi Brocklehurst, of Brocklehurst Hall, in this country.’ ‘Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.’  —​St Matt. v. 16.

She continues:  ‘I read these words over and over again:  I  felt that an explanation belonged to them, and was unable fully to penetrate their import.’1 Here, as elsewhere in the novel, Jane’s first person narrative is more pointed than she lets on: hypocrisy is presented as the rule at Lowood, ‘the aptly named school of life where orphan girls are starved and frozen into proper Christian submission’.2 The Reverend Brocklehurst is the main villain at this stage of the text but he is far from being the only person in the novel to cast religious education in a bad light. St John Rivers’s missionary vocation takes on an ominous note when he uses theological instruction to try and coerce Jane into being 1 

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2000), 49. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-​Century Literature Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 344. 2 

Religion and Education     385 his wife, and even the articulate and admirable figure of Helen, whom we first encounter reading Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), leaves us wondering exactly what sort of lessons religion has to offer. Although there is a long tradition of scholars exposing the bias of Jane’s narration, there are limits to their critical suspicion. It is surprising how often Jane’s largely negative account of religion is taken at face value. One explanation for scholars trusting the religious element of Jane’s narration is the number of other writers in the period who register similar concerns about the narrow education Christianity inspires. In Bleak House (1852–​3) and David Copperfield (1849–​50), for instance, Dickens describes the failure of a religious education through figures such as the Reverend Chadband and Mr Murdstone. Such shortcomings are the subject of a more sustained critique in Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1903), a novel in which the narrator satirizes the religious upbringing of the Pontifex family. Recalling the early-​nineteenth-​century religious instruction he endured with Theobald Pontifex, the narrator recalls: The Day of Judgment indeed, according to the opinion of those who were most likely to know, would not under any circumstances be delayed more than a few years longer, and then the whole world would be burned, and we ourselves be consigned to an eternity of torture, unless we mended our ways more that we at present seemed at all likely to do.3

Later on, when Theobald uses religious stories as a means of training his own children to submit to his will, the narrator asks: How, let me ask, was it possible that a child only a little past five years old, trained in such an atmosphere of prayers and hymns and sums and happy Sunday evenings—​to say nothing of daily repeated beatings over the said prayers and hymns, etc., […]—​how was it possible that a lad so trained should grow up in any health or vigorous development?4

The cumulative effect of these novels is to confirm Jane’s interpretation of religion in the Victorian period as a predominantly negative affair. Thackeray’s narrator in Vanity Fair (1847–​8) appears to offer a convenient way of summing up the problem when he recounts two episodes: the first, when George’s father expresses parental discipline by crossing his son’s name out of the flyleaf of the family bible, figures religion as the site of austere paternal authority; the second, when Rebecca Sharp throws away the copy of Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) she is given on leaving Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies, suggests that the regulatory authority of religious education needs to be cast off by those who would seek to make their own way in the world.5 But as Thackeray’s narrator continually reminds us, Becky Sharp is a poor role model and readers of Victorian literature would do well to think more carefully about the lessons they take away regarding Victorian religion and education. Patrick Brantlinger acknowledges the need for caution when he writes: ‘Just as the society Vanity Fair depicts is a charade, so is the 3 

Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1903), 42.

5 

William Thackeray, Vanity Fair (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1983), 284, 10.

4 Butler, The Way of All Flesh, 136.

386    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture novel, because in a society in which both written and spoken language are ordinarily shallow, hypocritical, or deceitful, the novel written from within that society, whether it provides a truthful representation or not, will perforce also be shallow, hypocritical, and so on.’6 The limited perspective of Thackeray’s narrator does not invalidate everything that is relayed to us through the pages of Vanity Fair but it does complicate our interpretation. Critical direction about the subjects in need of critique has to be thought about with at least some recognition of the prejudices of the person we are reading. We also need to consider the prejudices operating in our own contemporary setting, not with a view to erasing them altogether but in an attempt to appreciate how they influence our reading. The nuances of religious faith are not easily recovered by scholars with little experience of church life and/​or no theological training. But the bigger problem for readers who want to learn about the Victorian period is our suspicion of anything that challenges our individual autonomy. For many, the attraction of Jane Eyre is the way in which its narrator implicitly justifies our own dislike of anyone telling us what we should do: I am sure I am not alone in finding it easy to identify with Jane’s reflex reaction against authority. The hermeneutics of suspicion offers a methodological justification for individual resistance to authority because it presumes that we know better than the person who is telling us something. Critical suspicion can be helpful, and I am aware that I have employed this sort of reading in the first few paragraphs of this chapter. Yet there is a danger in allowing the hermeneutics of suspicion to be our exclusive or primary mode of interpretation. Although John Kucich has mounted a spirited and sophisticated defence of the hermeneutics of suspicion and urged readers of Victorian literature to continue to read in this vein, being suspicious of everything we read can mask the predilection within us all to ignore the elements of a text that are out of line with our preconceptions.7 Kucich tells us that ‘a situated understanding of a text’s cultural difference’ is the reason why suspicion ‘can be construed as an effort of sympathetic understanding’.8 Yet critical readings of Jane’s religious education repeatedly call this logic into question by failing to see religion as anything more than oppressive ideology. More often than not, suspicion does not give rise to sympathy, and the latter needs to be restored to our reading and take its place alongside the former. As Paul Ricoeur puts it: ‘Perhaps I cannot incorporate the other’s interpretation into my own view, but I can, by a kind of imaginary sympathy, make room for it.’9 A sympathetic reading of Victorian religion and education involves trying to appreciate why Victorian proponents and practitioners of religion and education

6 

Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-​Century British Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 128. 7  See John Kucich, ‘The Unfinished Historicist Project: In Praise of Suspicion’, Victoriographies, 1, no. 1 (2011), 58–​78. 8  Kucich, ‘The Unfinished Historicist Project’, 73. 9  Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Conflict of Interpretations: Debate with Hans-​Georg Gadamer’, in A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 216–​ 241, at 241.

Religion and Education     387 wrote and said the things they did. Common to all of them was a commitment to the value of instruction and a conviction that the interpretative communities in which we learn are not inherently opposed to an individual’s intellectual development. There were also different perspectives, however, and religious Victorians had a multitude of views as to what sort of instruction was desirable. For some, such as William Booth, the only religious instruction needed was a call to conversion: in the early years of his ministry Booth saw other forms of education as a potential distraction from an individual’s need for the regenerating work of Christ. Other Christians, such as Hannah More and Sarah Trimmer, thought that a proper education and godly instruction worked hand in hand and were connected by their mutual concern for teaching individuals to live according to God’s law. Elsewhere in the evangelical tradition, groups such as the Religious Tract Society tried to confront the question of what constituted Christian instruction as they extended their publishing activity in response to the rise (and perceived threat) of the cheap press. As Aileen Fyfe explains in her seminal work on the Religious Tract Society, the society ‘had to decide what sort of knowledge was suitable for educating the working classes of Britain and convincing them of the continuing relevance of Christ to their lives’.10 The answers that the Religious Tract Society came up with changed over the years but the society consistently recognized the importance of ‘secular’ forms of knowledge, such as natural history and geography, and sought to explain how these related to Christian doctrine. The range of theological attitudes to learning highlights the limitations of seeking common ground between religion and education. While most communities of faith were committed to some form of education, religious belief was not the same as education. Nor was education an exclusively religious concern. The two aspects of Victorian life bore similarities but one cannot press a claim for their shared vision too far, and it is important to remember that views on their relationship varied considerably throughout the nineteenth century. Dinah Birch offers a helpfully nuanced summary when she writes: Schooling was sometimes meanly oppressive, but it might bring a generous learning that could transform lives at the deepest level. Often, like religion, education mixed all of these capabilities, evolving complex patterns of influence that made it difficult to sustain a single perspective on its cultural role. What does emerge with clarity from these disputes is that Victorian education was animated by many of the ideals that had previously found their home in religious faith, in ways that often account for the passion with which ideals of learning were pursued. Religion and education may have often found themselves at odds, but they were never wholly separate.11

10  Aileen Fyfe, Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 68. 11  Dinah Birch, Our Victorian Education (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 43.

388    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Tracing the ‘complex patterns of influence’ spoken of by Birch is, at one and the same time, what makes the relationship between religion and education so interesting and so difficult. Although there are obstacles to thinking clearly about religion and education, there seems little doubt that religious organizations and individuals rooted in the Christian faith were the primary instruments for learning in the Victorian period. There are exceptions to this claim, of course, from the literacy work undertaken by freethinkers throughout the nineteenth century to the secular educational ethos of institutions such as Froebel College, set up by followers of Friedrich Fröbel in 1892.12 Yet it is almost impossible to overstate the influence of belief on educational practice and innovation in the period. In the case of higher education, opportunities to study centred round the Anglican Church. There were significant restrictions at Oxford and Cambridge universities for anyone outside the Established Church: Nonconformists, for example, were not allowed to graduate until 1856, and it was not until the Universities Tests Act of 1871 that ‘all degrees and offices (except those tied to holy orders)’ were opened ‘to men of any religion or none’.13 When alternatives spaces were set up, as with University College London (UCL, established in 1826), the space was not as secular as many historical accounts later described it, at least not according to a modern understanding of the term secular. Dissenters and Jews were among the prominent backers of this new metropolitan university, and the vision for University College London was initially understood as non-​Anglican rather than non-​religious. Moreover, the creation of UCL also galvanized the Anglican commitment to higher education in London, with the creation of King’s College London in 1829. There were plenty of Anglicans with an inclusive vision for higher education. Soon after being forced to leave his academic post at King’s College London in 1853, F. D. Maurice helped establish the Working Men’s College and served there as unpaid principal for many years. Maurice’s own experience at King’s makes it clear that not everyone was tolerant of different perspectives but he was far from being the only Anglican with a commitment to the education of others. Fellow Anglicans sought to extend educational opportunities through evening classes and other extracurricular tuition. One of the authors to benefit from such opportunities was Thomas Hardy, who took an evening class in French at King’s College London in the mid-​1860s. From the little we know about this episode, the experience was a positive one for Hardy. Yet this did not prevent him from writing about the problems of a higher education system that was largely controlled by the Established Church. The sense of exclusion was exacerbated by the Church of England’s unique position as the main ecclesial body in England and an institution with close ties to the State: it was sometimes difficult to tell whether the lack of educational opportunity for part of the population was the result of concern about perceived 12  For an impressive study of nineteenth-​century freethinkers, see Joss Marsh, Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-​Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 13  Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2 vols. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1970), ii. 443.

Religion and Education     389 theological heterodoxy or cultural snobbery. In Jude the Obscure (1895), Hardy registers the inevitable confusion between belief, culture, and social class when he describes Jude’s frustrated desire to be part of Christminster. Unfortunately for Jude, he is destined to remain on the outside, an exclusion that he feels more forcefully when he finally goes to work in the town where he has previously dreamed of studying: ‘Only a wall divided him from those happy young contemporaries of his with whom he shared a common mental life; men who had nothing to do from morning till night but to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. Only a wall—​but what a wall.’14 A different response to being at the margins of nineteenth-​century higher education was for religious groups and figures outside the Church of England to articulate their own vision of what a university education might entail. The most famous example was John Henry Newman, who published the first version of The Idea of a University in 1852, seven years after he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. A later expanded edition of this work was published in 1873. As Frank Turner observes, ‘Two primary themes inform The Idea of a University’: ‘first, Newman’s contention that a university must include theology as part of its curriculum and, second, his assertion that a university should teach universal knowledge as an end in itself ’.15 Newman presented his theological vision as an alternative to places of learning in which knowledge was subordinated to partisan and professional interests. It was a view of theology shaped by what Newman understood to be the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, but he believed that this ecclesial influence enabled universal knowledge rather than impeding it. Summarizing Newman’s understanding of the universal knowledge made possible by theological science, Gerard Loughlin explains: ‘This was not the universality of the Enlightenment, which resides in the knowing subject who would comprehend all things encyclopaedically, but of an older tradition that looked to know the universe, and through the universe, the universe’s creator, who alone has universal knowledge.’16 Outside the world of higher education, educators were shaped by their religious beliefs in all sorts of ways. The well-​known figure of Thomas Arnold, headmaster at Rugby School, saw education and religion as ‘two aspects of the same thing—​a system of instruction towards moral perfection’.17 Others had a different emphasis. Birch presents the writer and educationalist Elizabeth Sewell as an example of a practical-​based approach to religion and education, noting how Sewell’s Principles of Education (1865) combined a ‘religious tone’ with ‘a business-​like guide to running a girls’ school’.18 Other religious educationalists, such as the evangelicals that Khim Harris focuses on in his 14 

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 132. Frank M. Turner, ‘Newman’s University and Ours’, in John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, ed. Frank M. Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 282–​301, at 286. 16  Gerard Loughlin, ‘Theology in the University’, in Ian Ker and Terrence Merrigan (eds), The Cambridge Companion to John Henry Newman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 221–​ 240, at 232. 17  David Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning: Four Studies on a Victorian Novel (London: John Murray, 1961), 2. 18 Birch, Our Victorian Education, 100. 15 

390    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture book Evangelicals and Education, were more interested in promoting ‘sound’ doctrine than they were in developing moral perfection.19 Evangelicals were not the only ones with a view regarding the meaning of ‘sound’ doctrine, however, and one finds a radically different theology at work in the schools founded by Nathaniel Woodard in the second half of the nineteenth century. Woodard’s Tractarianism was expressed through the Gothic architecture of his school buildings and the incorporation of liturgical practice into pupils’ daily life.20 In addition to formal institutions built for the education of middle-​class children, there were various attempts by Christians to extend educational provision, including Sunday schools and ‘Ragged schools’. The first of these was especially important, with Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, voicing the opinion of many when he wrote in 1868: ‘No agency of religion and humanity was more universally supported or ardently supported […] wherever great efforts were made for Christianizing and humanizing the people, the Sunday-​school was a chosen instrument of service.’21 Julie Melnyk estimates that, ‘In the mid-​Victorian period, from 1831 to 1870, Sunday school attendance continued to increase, rising to about three and a half million’, and Owen Chadwick confirms the significance of the movement when he writes: ‘Sunday Schools reached their climax in the seventies and eighties. Some believed them to be the most important and effective of the religious influences upon the English population.’22 The education provided by Sunday schools was often quite simple: most commonly it involved learning and repeating hymns and passages of Scripture, in morning and afternoon sessions organized before and between church services. Although the lack of training among those in charge meant that they were ‘less effective than the teachers encountered on weekdays […] there were efforts at raising standards, notably through the Sunday School Union […] which printed uniform lessons that became widely used’.23 Whereas Sunday schools sought to instruct children across the social classes, Ragged schools were an attempt to provide free schooling to those who could not afford an education.24 Although the numerical reach of Ragged schools was quite limited, the movement was a key step in the move to make education more widely available in England. With Sunday schools and other faith-​based educational initiatives, Ragged schools were an important stepping stone to the 1870 and 1880 Education Acts and the subsequent 19  Khim Harris, Evangelicals and Education: Evangelical Anglicans and Middle-​Class Education in Nineteenth-​Century England (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2004). 20  See the discussion of Woodard’s work in Brian Heeney, Mission to the Middle Classes: The Woodard Schools, 1848–​1891 (London: SPCK, 1969). 21  Bishop of Oxford [Samuel Wilberforce], ‘Our Sunday-​Schools—​How to Use Them’, Good Words, 9 (1868), 258–​63, at 258. 22  Julie Melnyk, Victorian Religion: Faith and Life in Britain (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008), 90; Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, ii. 257. 23  David W. Bebbington, The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon and Moody (Downers Grove, Ill.: Inter-​Varsity Press, 2005), 104. 24  For a more detailed account of the Ragged school movement, see C. J. Montague, Sixty Years in Waifdom; Or, the Ragged School Movement in English History (London: Charles Murray, 1904).

Religion and Education     391 emergence of the State as the dominant sponsor of schooling. The Ragged school movement owed a great deal to religious figures motivated by what they saw as the biblical emphasis on helping the poor. One such figure was the Scottish evangelical clergyman Thomas Guthrie, whose apologetic for combining social support with tuition —​‘feed him, in order to educate him’—​was more advanced in its pedagogical insight than many detractors realized.25 Guthrie’s argument was one that he rooted in his reading of the Christian tradition: ‘Let Christian men answer our Lord’s question; let everyone who is a parent think of it: “What father, if his child ask for bread, would give him a stone?”’26 Another evangelical, Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, took up the work of Ragged schools and although the movement found plenty of support from those outside the evangelical tradition, including Dickens, it remained indebted to its evangelical supporters. Advocates of the Ragged school movement were not alone in recognizing that education involved more than the things that we read when we are taught formally in school. Churches educated their congregations in other ways, both tacitly, by encouraging spiritual habits and rituals, and through more explicit modes of religious instruction that also took place outside the classroom. Christians learnt about their faith and the world at large through religious activities at home (e.g. family prayers), through personal devotional aids (e.g. John Keble’s The Christian Year, first published in 1827 but reprinted throughout the century and frequently imitated by other writers), and through regular participation at church in acts of liturgy and the celebration of the Eucharist.27 Churches also instructed people in the Christian faith through less regular events, such as baptismal services, marriage ceremonies, and funerals. The popularity in the period of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer provides one indicator of the different ways in which the Word of God was mediated for those attending church. While the Book of Common Prayer was a written text, it was experienced in corporate worship more than it was read as an act of personal contemplation.28 Another medium through which Victorians received their religious education was hymns. While these circulated widely in written forms, their primary expression was being sung in the context of corporate worship. A significant amount of what the Victorians knew about God came via song rather than a direct reading of the Bible. This had a number of significant implications, including an emphasis on ‘affect’ and the elevation of the personal experience enabled through music, and the development of a theological space to which women could contribute more easily. In contrast to written biblical exegesis, which remained a largely male preserve in the period, ‘women hymn-​writers became much more important’ as the nineteenth century unfolded and they helped 25 

Thomas Guthrie, A Plea for Ragged Schools (7th edn. Edinburgh: John Elder, 1847), 13.

26 Guthrie, A Plea for Ragged Schools, 17. 27 

For further discussion on the reception of The Christian Year, see Joshua King, ‘John Keble’s The Christian Year: Private Reading and Imagined National Religious Community’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 40, no. 2 (2012), 397–​420. 28  Kirstie Blair discusses the nineteenth-​century reception of the Book of Common Prayer in her book Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

392    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture shaped the beliefs of the Church.29 Among the countless female hymn writers to exert a significant theological influence on the nineteenth century were Christina Rossetti (‘In the Bleak Midwinter’, 1871), Charlotte Elliott (‘Just As I Am’, 1835), Frances Ridley Havergal (‘Take My Life and Let It Be’, 1874), Cecil Frances Alexander (‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, 1848), and the American Fanny Crossby (‘To God Be the Glory’, 1875). There were some notable female preachers in the period, such as Catherine Booth, but for the most part an earlier tradition of female Methodist preachers had to find other means through which to deliver a theological message, as Christine Krueger has shown.30 Karen Dieleman gives us a rich example of this phenomenon when she traces Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s understanding of her role as a poet-​preacher.31 As Dieleman acknowledges, Barrett Browning’s interest in the metaphor of preaching was made possible by the important place of the pulpit in nineteenth-​century life. Preachers from different denominations were some of the best-​known orators of the period. Edward Irving, Charles Spurgeon, Thomas Chalmers, Robert William Dale, John Cumming, and many others regularly attracted large audiences, in individual churches and at shared venues such as the evangelical Exeter Hall on the Strand in London. Styles of preaching varied considerably, from the relatively staid Dale, who always insisted on reading his pre-​written sermon, to the more charismatic Irving, whose fascinating life story was subsequently told in two volumes written by Margaret Oliphant. Celebrity preachers were popular throughout the period and although most eschewed the sensational modes of performance favoured by Revivalists on the other side of the Atlantic, they still displayed considerable awareness of their audience. J. C. Ryle’s introduction, in a sermon given at Exeter Hall for the ‘working classes’, is a prime example: ‘The first remark I have to make is this: We have every one of us an undying soul. I am not ashamed to begin my sermon with these words […] In an age like this, I feel it is the bounden duty of the minister of Christ to […] press first principles upon the attention of those to whom he speaks.’32 Ryle’s attention to what he considered to be the needs of his congregation was paralleled throughout the land by local preachers. The weekly homilies delivered by since-​ forgotten ministers were an important part of the religious education of the nation. While a figure such as Charles Dickens is sometimes seen to stand outside the Church, he was, as Valentine Cunningham reminds us, a man who spent a lot of time inside places of worship listening to preachers.33 The educational effect of hearing

29  J. R. Watson, The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 339. See also, Ian Bradley, Abide With Me: The World of Victorian Hymns (London: SCM Press, 1997). There were some exceptions to the male dominance of written biblical exegesis. See Timothy Larsen, A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 30  Christine L. Krueger, The Reader’s Repentance: Women Preachers, Women Writers, and Nineteenth-​ Century Social Discourse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 31  Karen Dieleman, Religious Imaginaries: The Liturgical and Poetic Practices of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christine Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012). 32  J. C. Ryle, ‘What Shall A Man Give in Exchange for His Soul?’, in Exeter Hall Sermons for the Working Class (London: Patridge and Co, 1857), 58–​59. 33  Valentine Cunningham, ‘Dickens and Christianity’, in David Paroissien (ed.), A Companion to Charles Dickens (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 255–​276, at 255.

Religion and Education     393 homilies on a regular basis is evident in the multitude of religious and biblical references that pervade Dickens’s novels and also in the moral lessons that he sought to communicate through his writing. These lessons are pervaded by spiritual vocabulary, both in the novels written for public consumption and also The Life of Our Lord (1846), the moral rendering of the Gospel that Dickens produced for his children. Gary Colledge tells us that ‘Dickens concurred with a commonly held view of educators of his day that one of the benefits of knowledge was greater appreciation and reverence for God’.34 Although Dickens’s relationship to the Christian faith is more complex and ambiguous than this isolated quotation conveys, the ‘moral’ quality of Dickens’s work would have been quite different without his immersion in the language of the Christian tradition and the time that he spent listening to the preachers of his day.35 Sermons resound throughout Victorian literature, from the Reverend Jabez Branderham’s imaginary discourse in Wuthering Heights (1847) to the homilies provided by Dinah Morris and Arthur Vincent in Adam Bede (1859) and Salem Chapel (1863) respectively.36 Instances of preaching can be found in poetry too, as in the extract of the sermon from Fra Celestino in Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868–​9). But it was the novel in which the role of preaching came to the fore, and it is in this form that we see a genre described variously by critics as the preacher novel or sermon novel. These were works of fiction in which preaching took centre stage and in which the novel became a type of sermon. As Tamara Wagner observes, ‘a growing number of religious writers took to the novel genre as a medium to propagate their agenda by capitalizing on its cultural impact as an easily disseminated form of instruction’.37 On some occasions, the intended audience was a particular religious community that might be interested in certain doctrinal disputes, as in the case of one of the best-​known mid-​century examples of the genre: John Henry Newman’s Loss and Gain (1848). At other times, the preaching that echoed in fiction owed more to formal similarities between the sermon and the novel. Writers such as Anthony Trollope, Charles Kingsley, Ellen Wood, and Thomas Hughes wrote in a recognizably religious tone without explicitly engaging in theological matters. Commenting on Hughes, Birch observes that ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays is not only a book about teaching; it is designed to teach, and also to preach. Hughes, like Trollope, does not shrink from the sermon as his model.’38

34  Gary Colledge, Dickens, Christianity and The Life of Our Lord: Humble Veneration, Profound Conviction (London: Continuum, 2009), 45. 35  For further discussion of how Dickens’s work engages with religious thought, see Dennis Walder, Dickens and Religion (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981); and Janet L. Larson, Dickens and the Broken Scripture (Athens, OH: University of Georgia Press, 1985). 36  For a good introduction to the Victorian sermon, in its oral and written form, see Robert H. Ellison, The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken and Written Sermons in Nineteenth-​Century Britain (Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1998). 37  Tamara Wagner, ‘The Victorian Sermon Novel: Domesticated Spirituality and the Sermon’s Sensationalism’, in Robert H. Ellison (ed.), A New History of the Sermon: The Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 309–​338, at 311. 38 Birch, Our Victorian Education, 62.

394    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture The novels of Charlotte Yonge and George MacDonald are arguably more complex in the ways they inherit the form of the sermon. Rather than presuming that the sermon instructs its audience through unambiguous didacticism, Yonge and MacDonald explore other ways of teaching readers. Yonge’s sermonizing is indebted to her Tractarian theology. Defending Yonge against critics who fail to see the value of religion in her literature, Gavin Budge and Elisabeth Jay have argued for the aesthetic and theological complexity of Yonge’s typological reading of Scripture.39 More recently Susan Colon has turned to Yonge’s use of the parabolic form and considered how this is shaped by the Tractarian doctrine of reserve: ‘what religion and literature have in common is that both conceal their meaning as well as reveal it, or conceal it while revealing it’.40 Reading The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) as a ‘retelling of the parable of the Pharisee and the publican from Luke 18’ and ‘also a parable in its own right’, Colon shows how the novel ‘reconfigures the types from the biblical parable in order to deliver a similarly disruptive, even offensive, message of moral confrontation to readers’.41 When the final section of the novel challenges readers by asking them to sympathize with the hypocritical Philip Morville’s repentance, readers are resistant. But, Colon argues, this is ‘Yonge’s master-​stroke as a parabolist’: ‘in the reader’s resistance to Philip’s transformation, the novel exposes the reader’s own likeness [… .] Readers’ reluctance to sympathize with the changed Philip points to their secret Pharisaical sense of moral superiority to him.’42 George MacDonald is another writer who shows evidence of having thought carefully about the sort of theological teaching that can be accommodated by fiction. In his day MacDonald was sometimes criticized for the amount of preaching in his novels, and it is easy to understand why some reviewers were unimpressed by the overt religious lessons on offer in works such as Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood (1867). But MacDonald’s educational vision for his writing was usually more ambitious and there is a considerable range to his work. The literature he wrote for children, such as At the Back of the North Wind (1871) and The Princess and the Goblin (1872), provide especially rich explorations of the possibilities for the theological imagination. These works use extensive symbolism to allude to the work of the Holy Spirit and God’s providence, and do so in a manner that takes them well beyond the limited schema of allegory rendered by John Bunyan in The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). As MacDonald put it in the epigraph on the title page of Dealing with the Fairies, a collection of short stories for children published in 1867, the teaching that permeates his fiction is one ‘where more is meant than meets the ear’.43 Writing in an essay on ‘The Imagination: Its Function and Its Culture’, also published (initially) in 1867, MacDonald elaborated on the theological end of the teaching his writing conveyed: ‘For repose is not the end of education; its end is a noble unrest, an even 39 

Gavin Budge, Charlotte M. Yonge: Religion, Feminism and Realism in the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007); Elisabeth Jay, ‘Charlotte Mary Yonge and Tractarian Aesthetics’, Victorian Poetry, 44, no. 1 (2006), 43–​59. 40  Susan Colon, Victorian Parables (London: Continuum, 2012), 47. 41 Colon, Victorian Parables, 42. 42 Colon, Victorian Parables, 59. 43  George MacDonald, Dealing with the Fairies (London: Alexander Strahan, 1867), title page.

Religion and Education     395 renewed awaking from the dead, a ceaseless questioning of the past for the interpretation of the future, an urging on of the motions of life.’44 Writing for the British Quarterly Review in 1868, one reviewer praised the ‘very good preaching’ in MacDonald’s books and described the Scottish writer as the ‘reverse of a sceptic’, explaining: ‘He can sympathise […] with doubt, but, for his own part, he seems literally to be destitute of the faculty of dubitation. The universe for him beams and blazes with the light of God.’45 The comparison is a reminder that sermon novels found a counterpart in novels exploring doubt and/​or the loss of religious belief. I am reticent to say too much about the latter, in part because of the way in which such work has often been used to underwrite a questionable trajectory of secularization, and also because it is easy to overstate the significance of personal struggles between faith and doubt in Victorian culture. Personal belief went through lots of changes but it is not the case that vast hordes of Victorians moved neatly or consciously from faith to unbelief.46 Nevertheless, this was the experience of some and there is value in using Margaret Maison’s rubric of ‘Lost Faith’ to group together novels that relay such personal struggles with unbelief.47 In the case of Mary Augusta Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888), education plays a major role in undermining a previously held set of beliefs. Although T. R. Wright is correct in his observation that ‘the lengthy theological conversations Elsmere undergoes with Wendover, with his tutor Grey […] and with his wife are probably less important, and less interesting to a reader than Elsmere’s inner conflict as he moves slowly from a supernatural to a full “natural” or “human” Christianity’, intellectual arguments are given a prominent place in the text, as Wright goes on to acknowledge, with ‘Grey, for example’, assuring Elsmere that ‘the pain of “parting with the Christian mythology” is all part of “the education of God”’.48 By presenting these intellectual arguments in the way that it does, Robert Elsmere provides a vision of religious education that is readily consumed by modern critics of a secular persuasion. Christopher Lane is right when he observes how the plot of Robert Elsmere was echoed by other novels of the period. Yet the story of education leading individuals away from religion in the Victorian era has become more prominent in our modern imaginary than its history justifies.49 The author of Robert Elsmere was the niece of Matthew Arnold, a figure who did much to shape the reception of religion within the emerging discipline of English Literature. 44 

George MacDonald, Orts (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1882), 1. [Anon.], ‘Review’, British Quarterly Review, 47 (1868), 1–​34, at 20, 12. 46  Timothy Larsen reminds us that close personal examinations of one’s beliefs could result in conversion to religious faith as well as the loss of that faith. See Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-​Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 47  See Margaret M. Maison, Search Your Soul, Eustace: A Survey of the Religious Novel in the Victorian Age (London: Sheed and Ward, 1961), especially part 2. 48  T. R. Wright, ‘The Victorians’, in Andrew Hass, David Jasper, and Elisabeth Jay (eds), The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 148–​163, at 156. 49  Describing these ‘near-​identical plots’, Lane writes: ‘A clergyman loses his faith, to the consternation of parishioners, wife, and himself, before finding comfort in a secular alternative better fitting his temperament and beliefs.’ Christopher Lane, The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 151. 45 

396    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Like the figure of Jane with whom this chapter began, Arnold’s reading of religion brings with it a particular perspective, one that has become so engrained in the story we tell ourselves about the relationship between religion and literature that we find it hard to see the limitations. For Arnold, the aim of religion is ‘to ascertain what perfection is and to make it prevail’.50 This is an extremely broad definition of religion and the ‘large expanse of territory’ it affords comes ‘at the cost of sustaining religion as anything other than human culture’.51 But religion is not synonymous with culture any more than it is synonymous with education. By assigning the same purpose to religion and culture, Arnold inadvertently lays a foundation for the replacement of religious education by the Arts (including English Literature). When Arnold calls ‘religion a more important manifestation of human nature than poetry, because it has worked on a broader scale for perfection, and with greater masses of men’, he means to affirm the importance of religion.52 Yet the growth of literature’s influence in the years after Culture and Anarchy (1869) leaves the judgement open to revision, and Arnold’s thought plays no small part in making religious education appear anachronistic to a later generation of thinkers who find the Arts just as capable of teaching us about culture, if not more so. G. K. Chesterton observes that Arnold ‘seems to have contemplated a melting away of the doctrines of the Church and even of the meaning of the words’ and it is the vague vocabulary employed by Arnold that proves so detrimental to our understanding of nineteenth-​century religion.53 Using the terms ‘sweetness and light’ to describe the cultural perfection he pursues, Arnold praises the ‘flexibility’ of such language over the ‘blind belief in some machinery or other’ that he associates with ‘fanatics’ and ‘religious organisations’.54 While some readers may want to say ‘amen’ to such criticism, the ‘light’ spoken of by Arnold does no more justice to the Christian tradition than religious fanaticism. Part of Arnold’s legacy is to prevent us from seeing nineteenth-​century belief as clearly as we might. The theoretical questions asked in recent decades about the work of Arnold’s ‘liberal humanism’ may have gone some way to helping us rethink the place of religion in intellectual life, and cruder models of secularization may have crumbled under the pressure of contributions by scholars such as William McKelvy, who insists that the cult of literature ‘developed in intimate collusion with religious culture and religious politics’ rather than ‘grow[ing] up in a space left vacant by religion’. And yet, we still find it difficult to comprehend the theological specificity of Victorian vocabulary.55 The problem with Arnold’s ‘enlightened’ perspective is that it blinds us to the distinctiveness of nineteenth-​century religion. In this respect it occludes our vision in a 50 

Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 36. Mark Knight and Emma Mason, Nineteenth-​Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3. 52 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 41. 53  G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (1913; repr. London: Williams and Norgate, 1928), 76. 54 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 45. 55  William McKelvy, The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774–​1880 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 35. 51 

Religion and Education     397 similar way to Jane Eyre. Throughout Brontë’s novel the trope of light marks the personal freedom craved by the narrator and moves a series of theological issues into the background: on the first page Jane sits at a window seat and finds spiritual consolation in non-​religious material; later, she rejects all possibility of Lowood possessing the light spoken of in its inscription, preferring instead to find mystical inspiration in the eyes of Helen Burns: ‘What a strange light inspired them! What an extraordinary sensation that ray sent through me! How the new feeling bore me up!’56 Towards the end of the novel, when Jane contends ‘with my inward dimness of vision’ and calls out to Heaven for direction, she is answered by a quasi-​religious voice sounding like Rochester’s, speaking after he has been blinded and after Jane is left free to see the world in the way she wants.57 In these instances and others, the light that Jane shines forth bears a limited resemblance to Christianity, whilst relying on the audience’s recognition of that faith for much of its linguistic force. Like Arnold’s vision of ‘sweetness and light’, Jane’s vision has its attractions and testifies to the experience of Victorians who moved away from more formal expressions of religious belief. Such departures from the doctrinal tradition of the Christian faith find their apogee in the position of Ludwig Feuerbach, who claimed that the essence of religion was anthropological and that belief in God is a projection of human aspirations.58 Yet this view is not one that was shared by the majority of Victorian Christians, who believed instead that revelation originated from God rather than the human heart. Whether or not Victorian Christians were right to view the world in the way they did, it is important for those of us who wish to learn about the period to try and sympathize with their perspective, regardless of what we think personally about such beliefs. Victorian Christians typically saw the religious education they provided as an outworking of Jesus’s call in the Sermon of the Mount for his people to be ‘the light of the world’. The implications of these words were understood variously, and questions about the source and nature of revelation were often the subject of vociferous debates. But for the most part the religious education envisioned by the Victorians involved distinctive theological beliefs about God that differ from the theologically lite vision of religion and education presented by Matthew Arnold, Jane Eyre, and a significant cohort within literary scholarship.

Select Bibliography Bebbington, David, and Timothy Larsen (eds), Modern Christianity and Cultural Aspirations (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003). Birch, Dinah, Our Victorian Education (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008). Brantlinger, Patrick, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-​Century British Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 56 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 67.

57 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 419. 58 

George Eliot translated Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841) into English in 1854.

398    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Chadwick, Owen, The Victorian Church, 2 vols. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1970). Ellison, Robert H., The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken and Written Sermons in Nineteenth-​Century Britain (Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1998). Fyfe, Aileen, Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Knight, Mark, and Emma Mason, Nineteenth-​Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Melnyk, Julie, Victorian Religion: Faith and Life in Britain (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008). Montague, C. J., Sixty Years in Waifdom; Or, the Ragged School Movement in English History (London: Charles Murray, 1904). Newman, John Henry, The Idea of a University (1873; repr. New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1996).

Science and the Shaping of Knowledge

Chapter 21

Beyond T wo C u lt u re s Science, Literature, and Disciplinary Boundaries Alice Jenkins

Over the past thirty years historicist literature and science studies has become a central pillar of Victorian studies, existing both as a distinct and separately constituted body of scholarship, and as a set of attitudes and methodological gestures which have become so mainstream as to be used even in Victorianist scholarship which is not directly concerned with scientific culture. There is widespread acceptance and adoption of what I take to be the field’s key, though not original, claims: that texts whose subject matter is literary were written and read within a cycle of cultural production that also included texts whose subject matter is not literary; that this cycle of production (which is made up of active forms of reception such as allusion and borrowing as well as writing, publishing, and reviewing) included textual, epistemological, and social activities concerned with scientific knowledge and practice; that the cycle left its marks on the texts produced within it; and to a growing extent, that it is that cycle of production, rather than the texts, which is the object of investigation. In this essay I want to discuss some of the methodological challenges which face literature and science studies as it deals with a changing research landscape. In particular I want to explore two fundamental problems in the explanatory procedures of literature and science studies: problems of analogy and causation. The study of literature and science, particularly in the historicist modes which are commonly used in Victorian studies, is based on a false binary: this widely acknowledged characteristic has created methodological problems, and at the same time, been a source of interpretative fertility. The false binary is in the title of the field, literature and science, which has always been an imprecise and even misleading description, and is now, arguably, something of a relic. As N. Katherine Hayles noted nearly a quarter of a century ago, the ‘obvious constructedness’ of the field ‘is both a curse and a blessing’.1

1 

N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Literature and Science’, in Martin Coyle et al. (eds), Encyclopaedia of Literature and Criticism (Routledge, 1990), 1068–​1081, at 1068.

402    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Soon after the emergence of the field in its modern form, Gillian Beer warned that the ways in which we name our topic affect the approaches we take: Literature and science: science and literature: what is the force of the connective? It polarises the two domains; it yokes them together in a privileged pair, separated from other cultural expressions. It also sorts them hierarchically according to which is mentioned first, so that they become prime term and concessive term: science and literature; literature and science. One is given the originating role, the other that of dependent, providing ‘context’ or ‘background’.2

Perhaps to avoid this problem of unintended privileging, a small number of scholars have used the abbreviation ‘L&S’ or simply ‘LS’ rather than ‘literature and science studies’.3 These abbreviations have not gained much ground; the distinct nouns tend to be preferred, and avoiding the resulting original/​dependent binary about which Beer warns has become one of the widely shared principles of work in this field. Like the New Historicism with which it has a certain amount in common, researchers in literature and science studies usually try not to frame their materials in oscillating binary patterns of foreground and background, text and context, preferring to seek, as Beer wrote in a later essay, ‘interchange rather than origins and transformation rather than translation’.4 This rejection of the text–​context model reflects a principle which is now almost universally agreed in this field: that the two disciplines should be treated even-​handedly, so that science is not seen as invested with greater authority or more direct access to reality than literature.5 One of the consequences of the field’s characteristic refusal to see scientific texts as background for literary ones, or vice versa, has been to erode the boundaries of ‘literature’ and ‘science’ as distinct categories. Of course it is a crucial first step in using historicist approaches to avoid what one critic describes as ‘the imposition of fixed meaning across time and across cultures to the fluid categories of “literature” and “science”.6 The use of ‘actors’ categories’—​i.e. using terms in the senses in which they would have been used and understood by the authors and readers of our primary sources—​is one 2 

Gillian Beer, ‘Discourses of the Island’, in Frederick Amrine and Robert S. Cohen (eds), Literature and Science as Modes of Expression (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 1–​28, at 1. 3  For example, Pierpaolo Antonello and Simon A. Gilson, ‘Introduction’, in Antonello and Gilson (eds), Science and Literature in Italian Culture from Dante to Calvino: A Festschrift for Patrick Boyde (Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, 2004), 1; Pamela Gossin, ‘Preface’, in Gossin (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Literature and Science (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2002), [n.p.]. 4  Gillian Beer, ‘Translation or Transformation? The Relations of Literature and Science’, in Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 173–​195, at 173. 5  Susan Squier is one of several critics who sees this preference for balance as a fairly recent development in the field, compared with early work which saw one discipline (typically though not invariably science) as stable and authoritative, and the other as responding to it: Susan Merrill Squier, Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 34. 6  Bernhard Kuhn, Autobiography and Natural Science in the Age of Romanticism: Rousseau, Goethe, Thoreau (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 17.

Science, Literature, and Disciplinary Boundaries    403 technique that is often employed to help with these problems of the disappearance of boundaries around ‘literature’ and ‘science’.7 But literature and science scholars are often wary of ascribing a determined set of meanings to either ‘literature’ or ‘science’ even in a given historical and local context. In an important article of 2008, the historian of science Peter Galison picked out ten ‘problem areas’ in history and philosophy of science where ‘only an intense collaboration of effort can help us move forward’.8 He meant, primarily, collaboration between the two disciplines of history and philosophy of science. In literature and science studies we do not feel obliged to attempt a reconciliation between two disciplines; on the one hand, we come primarily from a single discipline, but on the other, we pride ourselves on talking to, with, and about numerous disciplines. Galison’s article is germane to considering the future of literature and science studies because one of the key questions for the field is that of our relationship with history of science. The first of Galison’s ten problems is the one I want to mention here. ‘What is context?’ For historians of science, he writes, context is an ‘elusive explanatory structure always invoked, never explained’.9 He compares it engagingly to the warm bathwater in which floats a piece of soap, the object of study. He does not say, but we all know, that what happens to soap in bathwater is that first it gets lost, and then it melts. In literature and science studies, a large part of our work is bringing texts which might seem ‘cultural context’ to other fields into literary critical attention. Instead of the soap melting into the bathwater, the water has turned itself into soap. There is a growing tendency in the field to push aside the question of how to distinguish literature from science, instead making a third element the centre of the argument, and tracing the ways in which literary and scientific writing contributed to, or drew upon, this third element. For example, Laura Otis used imperial discourse as the central element in her study of nineteenth-​century biology and literature, arguing that her chosen writers ‘defy classification as “literary” or “scientific” ’, but that the ‘imperialistic culture’ in which they wrote ‘shapes both biology and literature by shaping the language through which they express themselves’.10 Other critics select even larger and less 7 

Special attention to actors’ categories, which ‘has long constituted the prevalent methodology’ in history of science (Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman, ‘Introduction’, in Dawson and Lightman (eds), Victorian Scientific Naturalism: Community, Identity, Continuity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 1–​26, at 2), is often traced back to the 1960s and 1970s by Quentin Skinner, John M. Dunn, Barry Barnes, Steven Shapin, and others. For some more recent critiques of the use of actors’ categories, see Nick Jardine, ‘Uses and Abuses of Anachronism in History of Science’, History of Science, 38 (2000), 251–​270; Nick Tosh, ‘Anachronism and Retrospective Explanation: In Defence of a Present-​Centred History of Science’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 34 (2003), 647–​659; Harry Collins, ‘Actors’ and Analysts’ Categories in the Social History of Science’, in Peter Meusberger, Peter Welker, and Michael Wunder (eds), Clashes of Knowledge: Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in Science and Religion (New York: Springer, 2008), 101–​110. 8  Peter Galison, ‘Ten Problems in History and Philosophy of Science’, Isis, 99 (2008), 111–​124. 9  Galison, ‘Ten Problems in History’, 112. 10  Laura Otis, Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-​Century Literature, Science, and Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 3.

404    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture defined third elements than ‘imperialistic culture’: Juliet Cummins and David Burchell, for instance, describe some recent work in early modern literature and science studies as ‘not primarily concerned with either literature or science understood as discrete enterprises, but rather with the way that each participates in general developments in early modern thought and culture’.11 Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne go so far as to say that ‘literature and science are best explored through their interventions in broader cultural themes and events’.12 Earlier methodological writings in the field also stressed that literature and science ‘can fruitfully be studied as parts of the same cultural field’, as George Levine put it in his early and influential essay collection—​but formulations such as those of Willis and Wynne figure literature and science as acting on that larger culture, rather than as arising rather passively out of it.13 The problems of analogy and of causation which I mentioned earlier are products of this commitment. In order to explain them, I will outline the models which have underpinned the extraordinary success of literature and science studies to date: that is, the ‘one culture’ and the ‘two-​way traffic’ models.

Common Context, One Culture, Two-​Way Traffic This essay’s title acknowledges the importance of C.  P. Snow’s 1959 essay, ‘The Two Cultures’ to the development of literature and science studies. I want to highlight the familiar oddness of the way in which literature and science scholarship typically announces its methodology. Essentially we do it by invoking what is by now a very well-​ worn account of our own lineage: Arnold, Huxley, C. P. Snow, F. R. Leavis, the ‘Two Cultures’, the one culture, two-​way traffic, Gillian Beer, Sally Shuttleworth, George Levine, criticism of the one culture, Helen Small. This lineage is rather strange, not least because it is missing two generations from about 1900 to about 1960. Someone would be doing the field a service by making more readily available some of the early and indeed mid-​twentieth-​century studies that have some claim to representation in this family tree—​Stevenson, Richards, Schlossberg, B. Ifor Evans, Huxley, Medawar, and others. The lineage is also strange because though the names of those people still living are hallowed, the names of the models are really only there to be repudiated. It seems

11 

Juliet Cummins and David Burchell, ‘Ways of Knowing: Conversations between Science, Literature, and Rhetoric’, in Cummins and Burchell (eds), Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 1–​14, at 6; my italics. 12  Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne, ‘Introduction’, in Willis and Wynne (eds), Victorian Literary Mesmerism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 1–​16, at 6; my italics. 13  George Levine, ‘Introduction’, in Levine (ed.), One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 4.

Science, Literature, and Disciplinary Boundaries    405 to be more important to keep on repudiating those old models than to assemble some new ones. The view that science and literature have little in common, or, more strongly, are antagonistic, is of course far older than Snow’s essay; and Snow’s complaint is against something more like ‘liberal arts’ than ‘literature’ itself. But the root of the modern academic study of the relationship between literature and science has sometimes been suggested to lie in Snow’s essay and the responses to it, most notably that of F. R. Leavis. An account of the Snow–​Leavis debate opens Elinor Shaffer’s introduction to her collection The Third Culture: Literature and Science, and more recently, Anne-​Julia Zwierlein’s introduction to her collection on biology and literature acknowledges that ‘Snow’s intervention, whatever its intrinsic merits, paradoxically triggered a wealth of “Science and Literature” writing’.14 Despite George Levine’s caution that the terms of Snow’s argument about disciplinary divisions were ‘not serious’, some literature and science scholars have attempted to rehabilitate them.15 Anthony Purdy, for instance, argues that Snow’s lecture helpfully ‘obliges us to look at the messiness and ‘impurity’ of many interdisciplinary conversations’.16 Others treat the idea of two cultures as a contrasting ‘backdrop’ for an investigation of a recent convergence between science and literature stemming from shared interest in and reliance on digital technology.17 But on the whole, Snow’s essay is now, and to some extent has always been, more important to literature and science studies as a ritual object than for its detailed analysis or historical insight; frequently cited in the introductions of publications in this field, ‘The Two Cultures’ often serves as a synecdoche for a larger and perhaps more simplistic description of science’s relations with literary culture against which the critic situates his/​her own practice.18 In response to Snow’s description of a bifurcation in the post-​war intellectual world, many critics have identified in nineteenth-​century writing a more unified literary and scientific culture, or at least a shared culture in which writers and readers of literary and scientific work were familiar with and interested in one another’s work. It is partly because the nineteenth century has been thought to offer this shared culture that studies of Victorian topics have become dominant in literature and science studies. Two key models for literature and science studies have arisen from this view of the nineteenth 14 Shaffer, The Third Culture: Literature and Science (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998), 1–​14, at 1–​2; Zwierlein, ‘Unmapped Countries: Biology, Literature and Culture in the Nineteenth Century’, in Zwierlein (ed.), Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth-​Century Literature and Culture (London: Anthem, 2005), 1–​12, at 5. 15  Levine, ‘One Culture: Science and Literature’, in Levine (ed.), One Culture, 3–​32, at 3. 16  Purdy, ‘Introduction’, in Donald Bruce and Anthony Purdy (eds), Literature and Science (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 5–​24, at 14. 17  Jay Clayton, ‘Convergence of the Two Cultures: A Geek’s Guide to Contemporary Literature’, American Literature, 74 (2002), 807–​831, at 808; see also Clayton, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 190–​213. 18  For an excellent account of more recent theoretical developments on the ‘Two Cultures’ argument in literature and science studies, see Elizabeth Leane, Reading Popular Physics: Disciplinary Skirmishes and Textual Strategies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 61–​80.

406    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture century:  these are the ‘common context’ and the ‘one culture’ models, and in practice they are very closely intertwined. Literature and science studies research which uses these models has challenged the historical foundation of Snowesque accounts of unbridgeable gaps between the humanities and the sciences, pointing out that however far apart they may be in twentieth-​or twenty-​first-​century culture, nineteenth-​century disciplinary formations were much closer than Snow’s model allows. The ‘common context’ or ‘one culture’ models offer a picture of nineteenth-​century writers and readers which is now undergoing substantial revision, but which has done great service in allowing literature and science to come to its present prominence in Victorian studies. The origins of these models predate the emergence of literature and science studies in its modern form in the mid-​1980s. The source which has been most acknowledged and discussed is the historian Robert M. Young’s work in the late 1960s, in which he described a ‘common intellectual context’ holding together Victorian scientific, religious, and other kinds of writing. Young found the primary locus of this common context or ‘rich interdisciplinary culture’ in Victorian periodicals, above all the heavyweight intellectual reviews.19 He argued that the common context lasted only about a generation; from the 1870s on, it fragmented under pressure from emerging disciplinary specialization, the diffusion of the readership into a great number of smaller-​circulation periodicals, and the dismantling of the hegemony of natural theology. Though the hypothesis of a common context has been substantially challenged in recent years, it did make a major contribution to the establishment of an enabling methodological framework for the emerging field of literature and science studies.20 Victorianists quickly adopted the idea of periodicals as a key site for the interactions of the two kinds of literature and science, arguing that in periodicals, disciplinary boundaries were all but non-​existent. Reviews of scientific texts and articles about scientific events and investigators were printed alongside literary and cultural items. Periodical readers were able to move freely between literature and science, creating connections for themselves, and becoming accustomed to carrying those connections over into their other reading. Laura Otis gives a classic version of this ‘juxtaposition’ argument when she writes that ‘in nineteenth-​century periodicals, magazines, and newspapers, articles on scientific issues were set side by side with fiction, poetry, and literary criticism’.21 A number of extremely valuable studies have demonstrated the interweaving of scientific, literary, and commercial interests in Victorian periodicals of many types.22 19 

The essays are collected in Robert M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Quotation from Young, ‘Natural Theology, Victorian Periodicals, and the Fragmentation of a Common Context’, in Darwin’s Metaphor, 126–​163, at 127. 20  For recent challenges, see Gowan Dawson, Darwin, Literature, and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 218–​221; Anne de Witt, Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 2–​6. 21  Laura Otis, ‘Introduction’, in Otis (ed.), Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. xvii–​xxviii, at p. xxvii. 22  For example, see the essays in Geoffrey Cantor et al., Science and the Nineteenth-​Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Geoffrey Cantor

Science, Literature, and Disciplinary Boundaries    407 Highlighting such interweavings, the ‘one culture’ model made it possible to investigate the ways in which literary and scientific texts were produced, consumed, and distributed within a single continuum rather than from within two fortresses separated by a barely passable gulf. The reader of periodicals became a crucial figure for Victorianist literature and science studies, to offset—​to some degree—​the critical prominence of the writer of novels. Another important figure in the ‘one culture’ model, though one given much less weight than the reader of periodicals or writer of novels, was the practitioner of science. Beer’s Darwin’s Plots, of course, centred around Darwin as a reader as well as a writer, and even before 1983, other studies had emphasized the extent to which nineteenth-​ century scientific investigators were involved in and affected by the wider cultural activities of their time. The historians of science Steven Shapin and Arnold Thackray, for example, argued that the British tradition of scientific amateurism and reluctance to professionalize science meant that ‘British men of science were more involved with general culture than their counterparts in countries like France and Prussia’.23 This involvement was not always seen as an advantage: in an influential article in 1981, S. S. Schweber described Victorian scientific intellectuals’ determination to retain broad cultural interests as partly responsible for retarding professionalization and hence delaying scientific progress in Britain.24 Evaluating the impact of scientific professionalization on the ‘one culture’ has been an important element in literature and science studies; one of its effects was to give the nineteenth century special importance in the field as the last era in which science’s language and practices were accessible to general literary readers, its practitioners participating in wider culture. Professionalization has often been taken as having had an enormous and usually damaging impact on a shared literary and scientific culture; in a widely cited essay of 1990, for example, Gillian Beer argued that professionalization fundamentally changed the relationship of members of the in-​group (professional scientists) and out-​groups (amateurs and general readers) with the shared language which they all had in common.25 Other research has tended to see the professionalization of science as inimical to the hypothesized ‘general culture’.

and Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-​Century Periodicals (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004); Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), esp. ch. 6; Susan David Bernstein, ‘Periodical Partners: A Context for Teaching Victorian Literature and Science’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 39 (2006), 383–​397; James Mussell, ‘Cohering Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century: Form, Genre and Periodical Studies’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 42 (2009), 93–​103; Paul White, ‘Cross-​ Cultural Encounters: The Co-​Production of Science and Literature in Mid-​Victorian Periodicals’, in Roger Luckhurst and Josephine McDonagh (eds), Transactions and Encounters: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 75–​95. 23  Steven Shapin and Arnold Thackray, ‘Prosopography as a Research Tool in History of Science: The British Scientific Community 1700–​1900’, History of Science, 12 (1974), 1–​28, at 4. 24  S. S. Schweber, ‘Scientists as Intellectuals: The Early Victorians’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 360 (1981), 1–​37. 25  Gillian Beer, ‘Parable, Professionalisation and Literary Allusion in Victorian Science Writing’, in Beer, Open Fields, 196–​216.

408    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture The eminent historian of science David Knight gave an example of this tendency in an essay of 1990 in which he argued that ‘the one culture of western Europe’ really did exist, in which ‘some men of science and some writers and painters found that they had things to learn from one another’, but located this one culture in the Romantic rather than the Victorian period because in the early nineteenth century, ‘understanding nature was not something quite separate from other concerns, and was still open to those without formal training’. He sums up this happy attitude to the time before professionalization when he writes: ‘In the Romantic period, natural science could still be fun.’26 ‘Fun’ is perhaps a startling word for the quality that interaction with wider culture gives science, but it certainly supports the criticism recently made by Gowan Dawson that ‘there has been an implicit assumption that the interconnection of [literature and science] in the nineteenth century was almost always constructive and beneficial for all concerned’.27 However, recent changes in the dominant narrative in history of science mean that scientific professionalization is not now usually considered to have been so broad or intentional as was previously thought. Instead, as Iwan Rhys Morus puts it, professionalization ‘is now seen as the contested outcome of local dogfights over intellectual and institutional authority in particular contexts rather than as the self-​evident goal of reformist men of science’.28 Research based on this newer understanding of professionalization may substantially affect the ways in which we picture the Victorian period in literature and science studies. If the impact of professionalization affected science and its practitioners, writers, and readers in uneven and unpredictable ways, does this mean that the ‘general culture’ or ‘one culture’ in which literary readers could directly access scientific writing survived longer, albeit perhaps split into smaller pools, than some previous accounts suggested? Alternatively, does the ‘one culture’ model depend on its opposition to an inaccessible scientific culture based on insulated professionalization and specialisms which did not really exist in the nineteenth century? If so, then the collapse of this model of Victorian scientific professionalization may also mean the collapse of the ‘one culture’ model. But the ‘one culture’, unlike Young’s more specific ‘common context’, was never really intended in literature and science studies to be understood as a historical reality. As George Levine wrote in 1987, the phrase ‘promises a unity we will not find’, because ‘the “one culture” is not a unified science and literature’. Instead, he proposed the project of considering ‘ways in which literature and science might indeed be embraced in the same 26  David Knight, ‘Romanticism and the Sciences’, in Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (eds), Romanticism and the Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 13–​24, at 22. 27 Dawson, Darwin, Literature, and Victorian Respectability, 218. 28  Iwan Rhys Morus, ‘(Stop) Talking about Victorian Science’, Annals of Science, 64 (2007), 93–​100, at 94. For a critique of ‘the established narrative of professionalization’, see Jim Endersby, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), esp. 1–​30, at 5; more recently, see, for example, Theodore M. Porter, ‘The Fate of Scientific Naturalism: From Public Sphere to Professional Exclusivity’, in Dawson and Lightman (eds), Victorian Scientific Naturalism, 265–​287.

Science, Literature, and Disciplinary Boundaries    409 discourse, ways in which they have been so embraced’. 29 In this account, the ‘one culture’ is more properly ‘one language’ in which tensions and affiliations between literary and scientific expressions and ideas are created as different disciplinary groups use similar words, phrases, and metaphors for different purposes. Discourse is also the fundamental element in Beer’s classic account of the literary methodology she was pursuing in the 1990s: ‘Scientific and literary discourses overlap, but unstably’, so literature and science studies analyses ‘the transformations that occur when ideas change creative context and encounter fresh readers’.30 Though the ‘one culture’ has often been understood as more or less synonymous with a shared language, there is really a very considerable difference between the two. To share a language with another group, or to use a discourse that overlaps with theirs, implies a degree of shared or overlapping knowledge and beliefs; but it does not imply the smooth and easy access to one another which the ‘one culture’ model in its most optimistic forms suggested. The success of these models has had a significant effect on the kinds of scientific writing which have been most explored in the field. During the decades in which the emerging field of literature and science studies was substantially underpinned by the ‘common context’ and ‘one culture’ models, the field’s major interests were in the biological and earth sciences, and above all in evolutionary science. Terms drawn from these sciences became a key part of the methodological expression of literature and science studies, as scholars and critics using these models were drawn to images such as ‘cross-​fertilization’ to denote the almost organic link between the various products of the same culture. The ‘one culture’ model was and remains well adapted to study of the Victorian life and earth sciences, partly because these sciences continued to be written largely in verbal rather than mathematical language throughout the nineteenth century, and partly because their central interest in development over time is clearly analogous to the central interests of literary narrative. Thus, for example, Virginia Zimmerman is working very much in the ‘one culture’ tradition when she writes in her book on geology and archaeology that ‘the disjunction that makes the conjunction [literature and science] so appealing is itself a product of the twentieth century and obscures the fact that disciplinary boundaries are a recent invention. Science and literature were not distinct from one another in the nineteenth century.’31 In contrast, sciences which moved earlier to a reliance on mathematical expression, and sciences which are less historical or narrative—​especially those such as physics and chemistry which investigate phenomena whose relationship with time is quite different—​have been less well served by the ‘one culture’ model, not least simply in terms of the number of studies devoted to them. I have spent some time discussing the ‘one culture’ model (if it is a model, and not a sort of imagined utopia) because of its importance in allowing the field of literature and science to develop to its present prominence in Victorian studies, and because it continues to play a significant role in the field’s fundamental practices. This role is sometimes 29 

Levine, ‘Introduction’, 3, 4, 3. Beer, ‘Translation or Transformation?’, 173–​195, at 173. 31  Virginia Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 6. 30 

410    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture implicit, and here the ‘one culture’ model is almost always supported by the critic using it; it is often explicit, however, and in recent years, the model has been especially helpful in a reimagined form, this time as a methodological monolith casting an immense shadow over the field, deviation from which scholars use to mark their own work’s originality. A sort of canon of critique of the ‘one culture’ model has developed, often centring on work by Helen Small.32 As an object of hostile critique, the ‘one culture’ model is becoming almost as essential as Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’ thesis was ten years ago. The other major model which supported the growth of literature and science studies remains powerfully operative in the field. George Levine gave a version of this model: ‘to get to the heart of the culture one can travel the road of science, the road of literature, or—​better—​both’.33 The more widely used version, which emphasizes that literature and science interact directly, is Gillian Beer’s ‘two-​way traffic’ model; less homogenizing than the ‘common context’ or ‘one culture’, this model nonetheless emphasizes the equal value of literature and science to one another, deprivileging scientific authority in one sense, but at the same time emphasizing the role of creativity, imagination, and play in scientific writing.34 It was Aldous Huxley who first used this metaphor for the relations of literature and science: ‘between the Two Cultures the traffic of learning and understanding must flow in both directions’.35 The ‘must’ in Huxley’s formulation suggests that the two-​way flow is a kind of law, both in the sense of a social and a natural law: that is, an imperative which culture is obliged to fulfil, and an inescapable fact about the way things are. This dual sense of a law of two-​way traffic is firmly embedded in literature and science studies in the form of a belief that words and ideas necessarily move from literature to science as well as science to literature (natural law); further, that it is part of the work of our field to find evidence for this dual movement (social law). This latter self-​imposed requirement has become a kind of axiom in literature and science studies, one that finds acute form in the field’s careful and sometimes painful commitment to searching out what George Rousseau, in a closely related context, has called ‘arrows of reciprocity’: evidence of influence passing in both directions between the two disciplines.36 While recent criticism has begun to reconsider the tendency to believe that the one culture, if it existed, was, in Gowan Dawson’s words, ‘almost always constructive and beneficial for all concerned’, and instead to explore the disadvantages and losses associated with it, the desirability of ‘two-​way traffic’ between literature and science is all but unquestioned, and the imperative towards finding evidence of such a state virtually unchallenged.37 This is not to say that the ‘two-​way traffic’ model is blandly monolithic 32  Helen Small, ‘ “In the Guise of Science”: Literature and the Rhetoric of Nineteenth Century English Psychiatry’, History of the Human Sciences, 7 (1994), 27–​55. 33  Levine, ‘One Culture: Science and Literature’, 25. 34  Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-​ Century Fiction (3rd edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 5. 35  Aldous Huxley, Literature and Science (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963), 62. 36  G. S. Rousseau, ‘Literature and Medicine: The State of the Field’, Isis, 72 (1981), 406–​424, at 424. 37  An interesting and atypically quantitative response to this imperative is the ‘What Scientist Read’ project run by Sarah Dillon and Christine Knight: http://​www.whatscientistsread.com

Science, Literature, and Disciplinary Boundaries    411 or that it does not recognize differences. In an essay of 2007, for example, George Levine reminded Victorianists that ‘If there is two-​way traffic between science and literature—​ and of course I believe that there is—​there must be two distinctive channels. Science is not literature.’38 Levine allows for variety within the traffic, but his ‘of course I believe’ is a recognition of the security of the larger model within literature and science studies. The value that continues to be invested in two-​way-​ness is illustrated in the recent debate about whether the model of ‘consilience’ advanced by the highly controversial school of so-​called evolutionary criticism or Literary Darwinism does or does not expect ideas to flow from the humanities towards the sciences as well as vice versa. Both sides in this debate have claimed that their position is the really two-​way one, reflecting the fact that bidirectional flow is almost always seen as more prestigious and more defensible than unidirectionality.39

Analogy and Causation Analogy is perhaps the central gesture of literature and science studies. It underpins our methodological proceeding and is often a key part of our form of argument. It is also often an important part of our primary sources; this may be particularly true of Victorianist literature and science studies, because analogy was at the heart of some of the period’s most important scientific structures, including natural theology and the idea of the unity of nature, and was widely used in both research and popularizations.40 38 

George Levine, ‘Science and Victorian Literature: A Personal Retrospective’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 12 (2007), 86–​96, at 95. 39  See, for example, Gowan Dawson’s critique of Literary Darwinism’s approach as ‘less the vibrant two-​way street envisaged by Beer than a decidedly one-​way street which, in my opinion, represents a perilous cul-​de-​sac for literature and science studies’ (Dawson, ‘Literature and Science under the Microscope’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 11 (2006), 301–​315, at 308). Jonathan Kramnick has recently argued that in Literary Darwinism, ‘the idea is not of a two-​way exchange on points of shared interest’, but rather, ‘the kind of claim you can make about natural selection puts limits on what you can say about psychology and what you can say about psychology limits what you can do with literature’ (‘Literary Studies and Science: A Reply to My Critics’, Critical Inquiry, 38 (2012), 431–​460, at 434). In response to similar accusations, a group of leading Literary Darwinists has staked their own claim to the two-​way street: ‘we argue that interdisciplinary work in the human sciences and in the humanities can and should be a two-​way street, with both disciplines making real contributions to the other’ (Joseph Carroll et al., Graphing Jane Austen: The Evolutionary Basis of Literary Meaning (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 159). 40  Other than Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell is perhaps the Victorian scientist whose use of analogy has been most studied. See, for example, Bruce Clarke, Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2001), esp. 93–​96; Barri Gold, Thermopoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010), esp. 113–​50; Kevin Lambert, ‘The Uses of Analogy: James Clerk Maxwell’s “On Faraday’s Lines of Force” and Early Victorian Analogical Argument’, British Journal for the History of Science, 44 (2011), 61–​88; Daniel Brown, The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 59–​88.

412    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture There are, however, methodological difficulties in using analogy. Critics in literature and science studies have to be alert to the warning George Levine gave in Darwin and the Novelists—​‘it is important for a study like this, which depends a great deal on analogy and metaphor for its critical method, to resist […] metaphorical reductionism’.41 Gowan Dawson’s recent essay on serial publication of Victorian fiction and the inductive methods of early palaeontology is a fascinating example of an investigation of analogies, anchoring the apparently far-​fetched similarity between reading a novel and recreating a prehistoric animal’s skeleton in convincing and scrupulously historicist textual readings.42 Dawson’s article points to the fact that we need to know more about Victorian use and understanding of analogy in order to develop it as a more secure part of our own critical practice. I suggest that it is perhaps even more important to use our tendency towards micro-​history to do some very local work on individual readers and their responses to moments of analogy. To have a better understanding of the limitations of historical evidence in constructing these micro-​histories should alert us to the risks of obscurity and excess in our own analogical practices. In a wonderful passage in Darwin’s Plots, Gillian Beer teases out differences between analogies, allegories, metaphors, and homologies. Though Beer is writing about Darwin’s practice, the passage has wider relevance to methods of observation and selection in other historicist literature and science research: Whereas in allegory the one-​to-​one correspondence of object and meaning is sustained, in analogy the pleasure and power of the form is felt in part because it is precarious. We experience a sense of trepidation as we follow the analogy through its various stages lest we are arriving at the point where the parallels dispart.43

Beer sees analogy as a kind of testing process for observed similarities. As a process, analogy can have any one of three outcomes, two definite and one indefinite: either, on investigation, the perceived similarity breaks down altogether; or it holds together perfectly and is recognized as a homology; or it continues to exist in its precarious state, leaning towards dissolution when considered from one angle, and towards homology when considered from another. Of these three outcomes, published work in literature and science studies rarely discusses two: literary critics are not much given to seeking or identifying homologies, and if an observed similarity between two texts breaks down altogether on examination, the research is not usually continued to publication. Thus, the stories of either of the definite outcomes of the process of analogy are seldom told. A strong degree of uncertainty and provisionality is probably an appropriate condition of textual interpretation, but it would be very useful to learn more about the times when

41 

George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 12. 42  Gowan Dawson, ‘Literary Megatheriums and Loose Baggy Monsters: Palaeontology and the Victorian Novel’, Victorian Studies, 53 (2011), 203–​230. 43 Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 74.

Science, Literature, and Disciplinary Boundaries    413 similarities fail; to investigate the places where literature has found that it would not or could not borrow from science, and where science has tried to prevent or reject literary incursions. One of the challenges our field faces at present is coping with diffusion: is there any textual criticism that can not be undertaken as literature and science research? The consequence of choosing not to publish much about the two definite outcomes of the analogy process, sticking instead with the indefinite, ambiguous, multivalent outcome, is that literature and science studies sometimes fails to think of analogizing as a process at all, instead viewing it as an outcome in itself. The problem here is that when we see an analogy as providing evidence of a meaningful relationship between two texts, we have comparatively limited means of accounting for that relationship. This is what I mean by ‘causation’ in this context. Finding or making an analogy might prompt us to look for a source of the similarity between two texts in a direct or indirect influence of the one on the other, or a third text or group of texts which is a source of influence on them both. This approach, which has been very successful in many works of literature and science studies, does have disadvantages, one of which is to promote a tendency to focus on sources which are roughly contemporary with one another, losing sight of the jagged and uneven chronologies of influence which can bring together texts from widely separated historical periods. However, mapping direct or indirect influence of one text on another is not always possible, and indeed is not always a satisfactory approach. Literature and science studies often has recourse to less clear-​cut explanations for textual analogies. Referring the connection to the zeitgeist won’t do (though zeitgeist is, for some of the Victorian period, an actors’ category), and with a fairly widespread shift away from the ‘one culture’, we have an opportunity now to investigate other historicist means of distinguishing between analogies in our own criticism that are useful and productive, and those which are temporary or contingent. It is not enough to say that we need to learn to be better historians, to become more determined in seeking, adept at using, and scrupulous in judging evidence about connections between texts. While we do need to do these things, we also need to go back a step in the process and develop better understandings of analogies and similarities in our primary texts and the cultural field surrounding them. I want to conclude with two possible analogies for the field of literature and science studies: they are useful, I hope, because they may help us towards a clearer sense of what is distinctive and characteristic of the field. Suppose we designed an experiment to explore the historicist assumptions of literature and science studies by running a parallel investigation into two other kinds of nineteenth-​century writing. The first is mathematics. An analogy between literature and science, and literature and mathematics, is tricky: mathematics has posed such a challenge to the ‘one culture’ and ‘two-​way traffic’ models that they have all but ignored it.44 Where mathematics is discussed in literature 44 

Over the last twenty years or so, a modest corpus of philosophical and literary theoretical criticism, which does not use the ‘one culture’ or ‘two-​way traffic’ models, has developed dealing with intersections of literature and mathematics. Key texts include Alain Badiou’s Number and Numbers, trans. Robin Mackay (New York: Polity, 2008); Brian Rotman’s Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987) and Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining,

414    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture and science studies, it is often as a hindrance. Mathematization of science is the classic enemy of the ‘one culture’ model, a roadblock interrupting the two-​way traffic. Gillian Beer has argued that ‘the mathematicization of scientific knowledge’ over the past two hundred years has expedited communication between scientists to such a degree that non-​scientists have been obliged to fall back, and to fall out of scientific conversation, which in turn becomes mystified and unaccountable.45 For Victorianists in particular, an analogy between literature and science and literature and mathematics challenges some of our methodological habits, particularly the ways in which we have adapted and tweaked the ‘common context’ model. Including mathematics in Victorianist literature and science studies would mean rethinking the way in which we use periodicals, for instance, as the ‘juxtaposition’ argument cannot be made of mathematical articles and reports in quite the same way as it has been made of scientific ones; it would also mean adjusting some of our assumptions about Victorian general readers, and it would require us to refine what we mean by ‘scientific language’. The second possible analogy I propose is with the study of literature and Victorian business. Like science, business was one of the Victorian activities that many contemporaries felt was especially up to date, of their own time and making, and that became a rival to traditional forms of cultural authority. There are other similarities with science, broadly conceived: over the course of the century, for example, business grew into a specialism with journals, its own educational institutions, technology, and languages; and its doings were discussed in periodicals, fiction, and poetry. So far, business seems to fit well with existing models in literature and science studies; and it would probably also fit the imperative to find patterns of ‘two-​way’ transmission between literature and business. The upsurge of recent critical interest in Victorian literature and finance gives an indication of the work that can be done on literature and business, from investigations of philosophies of business down to quotidian practice. What is lacking to complete an analogy with literature and science studies? One answer might be truth claims: it might be considered that it is crucially important to literature and science studies that the science it examines claims to tell truths about nature. We could counter this point by reminding ourselves that in our field we tend to view science less as a series of claims than a series of practices, among which textual production is only one; or that there is no law requiring that it be the non-​literature part of interdisciplinary literary studies that

Counting (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000); Barbara Herrenstein Smith and Arkady Plotnitsky (eds), Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); and Apostolos Doxiadis and Barry Mazur (eds), Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), as well as a special issue of Configurations on mathematics and the imagination, edited by Arielle Saiber and Henry S. Turner: Configurations, 17 (2009). There is rather less historicist work, but Mary Poovey’s Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–​1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) and A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) are very notable examples. 45  Gillian Beer, ‘Square Rounds and Other Awkward Fits: Chemistry as Theatre’, in Beer, Open Fields, 321–​332, at 321–​322.

Science, Literature, and Disciplinary Boundaries    415 provides the truth claims; literature makes enough of these to keep any interdisciplinary combination well fuelled. Comparison between our field and the interdisciplinary study of literature and business poses a question for anyone thinking about the underpinnings of our work. Was there something unique in the nineteenth century about literature and science as a combination, and if so, what was it? If not, how do we justify the continued expenditure of effort on developing this area rather than on initiating others? At a higher level of abstraction, the problem of diffusion reappears: how do we draw the bounds of literature and science studies; is there any kind of writing in the nineteenth century that is not potential material for us? Like all privileged positions, the one in which literature and science studies finds itself in Victorianist scholarship has its drawbacks. Are these so severe as to jeopardize the future of the field? We will need either to defend our position by growing in confidence and sophistication, or else to learn to see our field not as a territory in itself but as a developmental stage in the growth of another enterprise, yet to emerge from the matrix of interdisciplinary research.

Select Bibliography Beer, Gillian, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-​ Century Fiction (1983; 3rd edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Beer, Gillian, Open Fields:  Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1996). Cantor, Geoffrey, and Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Science Serialized:  Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-​Century Periodicals (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004). Dawson, Gowan, Darwin, Literature, and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2010). Dawson, Gowan, ‘Literature and Science under the Microscope’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 11 (2006), 301–​315. de Witt, Anne, Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Levine, George (ed.), One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). Levine, George, ‘Science and Victorian Literature:  A  Personal Retrospective’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 12 (2007), 86–​96. Lightman, Bernard, Victorian Popularizers of Science:  Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Young, Robert M., Darwin’s Metaphor:  Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Chapter 22

Science and Pe ri odi c a l s Animal Instinct and Whispering Machines Sally Shuttleworth

In a letter published in Nature (13 February 1873) on the subject of fears which are inherited, Charles Darwin referred the reader to ‘an admirable article’ on the subject by Mr Spalding, ‘recently published in Macmillan’s Magazine’.1 The reference is at first glance rather startling, since Macmillan’s was not a scientific journal, but a family magazine, with a literary orientation. Yet, Douglas Spalding had chosen to publish the results of his innovative experiments on animals in this vehicle; furthermore, Darwin had both read it and responded immediately. The Victorian textual economy appears to mirror Darwin’s natural economy, in which things, seemingly ‘most remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations’.2 To explore the role of science in the Victorian periodical is to uncover an intricate network of connections, a web of relations spun between leading scientists and family magazines, or novelists and popular science writing. This was an era when more strictly professional science journals were emerging, but there were still no hard and fast distinctions or barriers. You could find major scientific figures writing in a range of periodicals, not just the ‘highbrow’ titles, and often on a dizzying array of topics, well beyond their acknowledged areas of expertise. Thus the physician Henry Maudsley wrote on Hamlet, and John Herschel, the astronomer, on Dante’s Inferno, whilst the physician Henry Holland published articles on shooting stars and the physical geography of the sea.3 Within the pages of the general periodical, science-​based articles might sit side by side with the latest novel, political commentary, or household advice. Nor was the science content of periodicals confined 1 

Charles Darwin, ‘Letters to the Editor: Inherited Instinct’, Nature (13 February 1873), 281–​282. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 61. 3  Henry Maudsley, ‘Hamlet’, Westminster Review, 27 (January 1865); John F. W. Herschel, ‘L’Inferno of Dante, Canto 1’, Cornhill Magazine, 18 (July 1868), 38–​42; Henry Holland, ‘Physical Geography of the Sea’, Edinburgh Review, 105 (April 1857), 360–​390, and ‘Meteors, Aerolites, Shooting Stars’, Quarterly Review, 92 (December 1852), 77–​106. Herschel also contributed ‘Notes on science’, a review of recent work, to the Cornhill Magazine, under G. H. Lewes’s editorship, between January 1862 and March 1863. 2 

Science and Periodicals    417 to explicit articles. As the Science in the Nineteenth-​Century Periodical Project (SciPer) showed, references to science could occur almost anywhere in a periodical’s content, from serialized fiction to comic sketches.4 By adopting a policy of inclusive reading, and thus moving beyond the realm of evident connections signalled in article titles, SciPer was able to trace the subtle and complex ways in which science entered into the general culture of the period, and the processes of interaction between literature and science. We are now at a very exciting point in periodical research. In the 1960s, the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals made it possible for the first time to identify the contributors to major titles, and the Index (now available online), with its clear listing of articles in each volume, became the chief guide and bible for researchers in the field. Yet, inevitably, it skewed research: there are an estimated 125,000 periodical titles published in the Victorian period, and the mammoth enterprise of the Wellesley was only able to encompass forty-​five.5 Those titles left in the cold, as it were, tended to be bypassed by researchers. With the advent of periodical digitization, and the possibilities of online searching, a new world is opening up. Searches reveal that well-​known authors wrote for a wider range of periodicals than had previously been identified, while interesting authors, or journals, that have never received any critical attention come into view, reinforcing, in almost overwhelming detail, our previous abstract understanding that the Wellesley titles represented only the tip of the iceberg. In the coming decades we will gain a more profound, and nuanced, understanding of the ways in which science entered into Victorian literary culture, as researchers place all these new findings in a broader context.6 There are of course dangers: searches can throw up a myriad of interesting references, but snippets or quotations, divorced from their immediate periodical context and understanding of their significance within that particular title, will be of limited scholarly value. The challenge will be to marry the depth of historical research 4  The project produced a database which tracks the presence of science within given years of a range of different forms of periodicals, targeted at a variety of audiences, from the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine to Punch and the Boy’s Own Paper. See www.sciper.org The project also produced three books: Geoffrey Cantor et al., Science in the Nineteenth-​Century Periodical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-​Century Periodicals (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004); and Louise Henson et al. (eds), Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-​Century Media (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 5  Walter E. Houghton et al. (eds), The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–​1900, 5 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966–​89), now available from Pro Quest as an online resource). For an extraordinary guide to around half of those 125,000 periodicals, see John S. North, The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–​1900, 50 vols. (Waterloo, Ont.: North Waterloo Academic Press, 1994–​), now available online. 6  For an excellent account of popular science writing, see Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007). See also Bernard Lightman and Aileen Fyfe (eds), Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-​Century Sites and Experiences (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007); James Mussell, Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-​Century Periodical Press (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Two outstanding works on particular areas are Alvar Ellegård, Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859–​1872 (2nd edn., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); and James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’ (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000).

418    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture represented by the Wellesley, and current scholarship in the history of the book, with the exciting possibilities opened up by an increasing range of digitized periodical titles. For the majority of the Victorian reading public, the main way they encountered science was not through books, but periodicals; and periodicals, in their turn, helped nurture the careers of budding ‘scientists’. For those who were not ‘gentlemen of science’, the periodical press offered both a welcome source of income and a public platform, enabling them to make a name for themselves.7 T. H. Huxley, for example, at the beginning of his career, undertook science reviewing at the radical Westminster Review, then under the unofficial editorship of Marian Evans (the future George Eliot). Relations were to become rather strained, however, when he attacked a book on Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences by fellow contributor, G. H. Lewes, as a work by a mere bookman, who lacked practical experience of science.8 Although Lewes (who was soon to become Eliot’s partner), was devastated, the effect was an altogether positive one, leading him to devote himself to physiological studies for a time. Eliot assisted in the practical work which was to lead to the series of articles in Blackwood’s, and subsequent book, Sea-​Side Studies (1858). His important entry into human physiology and psychology, The Physiology of Common Life (1859–​60), was also first published, in part, in article form in Blackwood’s, while Studies in Animal Life (1862) first appeared in the opening issues of the Cornhill.9 These works have a dual layer of inter-​textuality: written to stand alongside the varied content of these periodicals, they also have a strong inter-​textual relation with Eliot’s novels, as both writers gradually developed their ideas through mutual reading and discussion.10 Although Lewes was somewhat unusual in moving from a position of actor and novelist to respected scientist, such shifts were by no means uncommon. Slightly later in the century, James Sully started his career writing on general and philosophical subjects in the periodical press in the early 1870s.11 Whilst maintaining his broad focus, he developed his work in the domain of psychology, and after twenty years of writing in the periodical press (and poorly-​paid part-​time teaching), was rewarded by election to the Grote Chair of Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London in 1892.

7  See Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: The Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). 8  T. H. Huxley, Westminster Review, ns 5 (1854), 254–​256. 9  Cornhill Magazine was launched in 1860 under the editorship of Thackeray. When Thackeray stepped down in 1862, Lewes was one of a committee of three who edited it for the next two years. 10  See, for example, ‘Recollections of Ilfracombe’ and ‘Recollections of the Scilly Isles and Jersey’, in The Journals of George Eliot, ed. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1998), 259–​282. Lewes’s description of the impact of the mill wheel on the subconscious mind in The Physiology of Common Life was written whilst Eliot was working on The Mill on the Floss. See Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–​1890 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 87–​88. 11  His first book, Sensation and Intuition (1874) was drawn from his early periodical essays. In 1871 he became John Morley’s assistant at the Fortnightly; and a few years later became part of Leslie Stephen’s stable of writers at the Cornhill.

Science and Periodicals    419 The growth of universities in the later decades of the century brought new possibilities of professional careers, which would lead, for the next generation, to a diminution of the numbers of scientific figures who contributed to general periodical culture. With scientists like Huxley, John Tyndall, W. K. Clifford, and Francis Galton writing for the general press, and major literary figures such as Thackeray, John Morley, and Leslie Stephen at the editorial helm, the last four decades of the nineteenth century represented a high point for generalist periodical publishing, and for the integration of literary and scientific culture.12 Figures like Grant Allen, novelist and popular science writer, moved with ease across disciplinary boundaries, whilst an army of now largely forgotten science writers, from James Hinton to Francis Anstie, David Ansted, and Richard Proctor, supplied regular science columns or articles. Women too participated in science writing, from Margaret Gatty on natural history to Agnes Clerke on astronomy.13 Given the diversity and scale of science writing, and scientific forms of content, in the Victorian periodical press, it will not be possible in this essay to do more than offer an analysis of a few representative samples. Starting with a case study of an individual article, I will explore the role of science in a couple of ‘heavyweight’ periodicals, followed by more ‘middlebrow’ titles, before concluding with a study of an individual volume of Macmillan’s Magazine.

‘Instinct’ and Douglas Spalding: A Case Study The ‘admirable article’ singled out by Darwin in Macmillan’s Magazine offers a fascinating example both of the cultural and scientific life of an article, and of a science writer. When ‘Instinct: With Original Observations on Young Animals’ was published in Macmillan’s (February 1873), its author, Douglas A. Spalding, was virtually unknown. He had given a paper at the British Association for the Advancement of Science the previous year, which had been published anonymously in short form in Nature, but this was his first major publication. ‘Instinct’ described various experiments Spalding had undertaken with ducklings and chicks. Although a 12  John Morley edited the Fortnightly from 1867 to 1882; he also edited the daily Pall Mall Gazette between 1880 and 1882, and Macmillan’s between 1883 and 1885 (even though he had entered Parliament in 1883). Leslie Stephen edited the Cornhill from 1871 until 1882, when he embarked on the ambitious project of the Dictionary of National Biography. 13  All of these writers (with the exception of James Hinton) have entries in the invaluable Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds), Dictionary of Nineteenth-​Century Journalism (London: British Library, 2009) (which also includes the most extensive bibliography of secondary sources in the field). Hinton was a surgeon who contributed, amongst other offerings, thirteen articles on physiology and other scientific areas in the first volumes of the Cornhill (1860–​3). Lightman looks in depth at Proctor, Agnes Clerke, and Grant Allen in Victorian Popularizers. Even this major work has only been able to cover a small but representative selection of science writers of the period.

420    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture follower of Herbert Spencer, Spalding felt that Spencer had not demonstrated his ideas of inherited acquisition, and was set to remedy that omission. Most educated men, Spalding remarks, had ‘not yet escaped from the habit of regarding mind as independent of bodily organization’.14 In order to show that instinct was inherited, and not acquired from early experience, Spalding designed a series of remarkable experiments: ‘Taking eggs just when the little prisoners had begun to break their way out, I removed a piece of the shell, and before they had opened their eyes drew over their heads little hoods.’15 He kept the chicks in blindness for one to three days, and when he released them, noted that they could invariably peck at insects straightaway. Other experiments included taping over their ears for a few days, and then noting that they were instantly able to respond to a mother’s call. He also notes the chicks’ tendency to follow him around, their instinctive fear of a sparrowhawk, and their tendency to lose instincts if they were not allowed to exercise them within the first ten days. The acclaim that this article received led to Spalding, then a private tutor, being given a reviewing slot for science books in The Examiner, but also gaining the prestigious role of primary reviewer of works on psychology for Nature, from 1873 until his early death in 1877. In Nature’s pages, he contributed critical, and sometimes scathing, reviews of major figures such as Bain, Ribot, Maudsley, Lewes, and Sully; even his hero, Herbert Spencer, came in for criticism.16 These reviews, and a few articles he himself contributed, became the main vehicle for the development of his own arguments that ‘animals and men are conscious automata’.17 From a review in a popular family magazine, he moved into a position of significant scientific authority, with Darwin, Spencer, Lewes, George Romanes, Lloyd Morgan, and William James drawing on and responding to his work. He appears to have dropped from sight after the 1890s, only to be ‘rediscovered’ in the 1950s by J. B. S. Haldane who reprinted his Macmillan’s article in the British Journal of Animal Behaviour (1954), and hailed him as one of the fathers of ethology.18 Spalding was deemed to have anticipated Konrad Lorenz in discovering the phenomenon now

14 

Douglas A. Spalding, ‘Instinct: With Original Observations on Young Animals’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 27 (February 1873), 282–​293, at 290. 15 ‘Instinct’, 283. 16 See Nature, 7 (20 February 1873), 298–​300 for his review of Spencer’s Principles of Psychology. See also the reviews of Alexander Bain’s Mind and Body (8 January 1874), 178–​179; Sully’s Sensation and Intuition (19 November 1874), 44–​45; Maudsley’s Physiology of Mind (19 October 1876), 541–​543; and Lewes’s Physical Basis of Mind (2 August 1877), 261–​263. 17  [Anon.], ‘Obituary: Douglas A. Spalding’, Nature (8 November 1877), 36. The obituary in Mind was less positive, suggesting that in his conclusion that ‘animals and men are conscious automata’ he ‘became a warning example of a certain tendency to premature and hasty speculation’; ‘News’, Mind, 3 (January 1878), 153–​154. Given Spalding’s aggressive reviewing style, particularly of more philosophical psychological works, one can see an element of disciplinary protectionism in this response. When Huxley published his article ‘On the hypothesis that animals are automata, and its history’ in the Fortnightly (November 1874), Spalding took this as a vindication of his own work. See his response to A. R. Wallace in Nature (29 October 1874), 520. 18  J. B. S. Haldane, ‘Introducing Douglas Spalding’, British Journal of Animal Behaviour, 2 (1954), 1.

Science and Periodicals    421 known as imprinting.19 Spalding has subsequently been recognized as ‘the first experimental behaviorist’.20 All this is fairly remarkable, but it is even more so when Spalding’s personal history is considered, since his life seems to embody a combination of Samuel Smiles’s self-​ help and the dramatic excesses of sensation fiction—​an intriguing instantiation of the union of literature and science. Born into poverty in 1841, Spalding first made his living as a slater, before he was granted leave to study for free at the University of Aberdeen, through the intervention of the eminent mental philosopher Alexander Bain. After a year’s study he moved to London, supporting himself by teaching, and he also trained for the Bar. He had contracted tuberculosis, and whilst travelling on the Continent for his health encountered J. S. Mill, who was to open the doors for him to a new life, most notably through an introduction to Lord Amberley. A dinner held by Lord Amberley, in which the guests included J. S. Mill, Alexander Bain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Tyndall, Robert Browning, and Douglas Spalding, suggests the intimate interaction between literary and scientific circles at the time.21 Spalding was persuaded to move in with the Amberleys as tutor for their oldest son, although his primary duties seem to have been pursuing his behavioural experiments, which he did with the help of Lady Amberley. An article in Nature (August 1873), ‘Flight Not an Acquisition’, records how he had shut fledgling swallows in boxes, and reproduces Lady Amberley’s notes on how, when released, they were instinctively able to fly.22 Lady Amberley, or Katherine Russell, was an intriguing figure in her own right; close friends with J. S. Mill and his stepdaughter Helen Taylor, she actively campaigned for women’s rights, and had published ‘The Claims of Women’ in the Fortnightly Review (1871). In this article she argued against male theories of the ‘unsexing’ of women and for higher education, suffrage, property rights, and the opening of all jobs to women on the grounds that ‘natural selection’ would operate, ‘and what they are fitted for they will perform’.23 Drama erupted in the lives of Spalding and the Amberleys when Spalding declared his love for Kate, and Lord Amberley, not wishing to go against his radical principles, gave his consent to their relationship. Their son, Bertrand Russell, gives the following account of the affair: Apparently on grounds of pure theory, my father and mother decided that although he [Spalding] ought to remain childless on account of his tuberculosis, 19  For the complex politics around Haldane’s championing of Spalding, in his battles with Lorenz, see P. E. Griffiths, ‘Instinct in the ’50s: The British Reception of Konrad Lorenz’s Theory of Instinctive Behavior’, Biology and Philosophy, 19 (2004), 609–​631. 20  P. H. Gray, ‘Douglas Alexander Spalding: The First Experimental Behaviorist’, Journal of General Psychology, 67 (1962), 299–​307. See also P. H. Gray, ‘Spalding and His Influence on Research in Developmental Behaviour’, Journal of the Behavioral Sciences, 3 (1967), 168–​179, and ‘Prerequisite to an Analysis of Behaviorism: The Conscious Automaton Theory from Spalding to William James’, Journal of the Behavioral Sciences, 4 (1968), 365–​376. 21  Gray, ‘Douglas Alexander Spalding’, 304. 22  Douglas Spalding, ‘Flight Not an Acquisition’, Nature (August 1873), 289. 23  K. Amberley, ‘The Claims of Women’, Fortnightly Review, 9 (January 1871), 95–​110, at 109.

422    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture it was unfair to expect him to remain celibate. My mother therefore, allowed him to live with her, although I know of no evidence that she derived any pleasure from doing so.24

The arrangement was not to be long lasting. Kate was to die of diphtheria shortly after in June 1874, and Lord Amberley also died the following year. In a final dramatic twist, Lord Amberley left his two sons to the guardianship of Spalding and a fellow agnostic, T. J. Sanderson. A high-​profile court case followed: Lord Amberley’s father, Lord John Russell, the ex-​prime minister, challenged the will and won custody of the children, Frank and Bertrand. Spalding himself fled to the south of France where he was to die in 1877. The case is worth dwelling on in some detail since it brings into startling conjunction so many elements in Victorian culture, not least the intersection of science with intellectual, bohemian, and aristocratic circles. Through the intellectual patronage of two philosophers, Alexander Bain and J. S. Mill, a working-​class young man is able to publish an article in a family magazine, which catches the attention of Darwin, leads him into a sexual liaison with a viscountess, a legal confrontation with an ex-​ prime minister, and temporary guardianship of a child who was to become England’s greatest twentieth-​century philosopher. The article also led to considerable scientific fame, and more recent acknowledgement of his role as ‘father’ of ethology or animal behaviourism. For general readers of Macmillan’s, Spalding’s article did not stand out as anything unusual. Thus in its round-​up of the ‘Magazines for February’, the Birmingham Post notes that In Macmillan, Mr Spalding chats very pleasantly on instinct in young animals. He enumerates a number of theories, and gives some curious illustrations of what is called instinct in animals, but what we may as well call reason. The paper, ‘Thoughts on Government’ deals, this month, with ‘The Intercommunication of Public Departments;’ an intricate dry subject, treated in an interesting way. ‘Passages in the Life of a Bachelor’ is pleasant reading, and betrays a practised hand.25

The report gives an excellent sense of the ways in which the eclectic contents of a magazine were consumed: little distinction was made between the forms of writing, and the science could be fully appreciated (if not fully understood).

24  Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1967), i. 17, cited in Ann P. Robson, ‘Russell, Katharine Louisa, Viscountess Amberley (1842–​1874)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://​ezproxy.ouls.ox.ac.uk:2117/​view/​article/​41338 [last accessed 25 September 2012]. 25  [Anon.], ‘The Magazines for February’, Birmingham Daily Post, 4 February 1873.

Science and Periodicals    423

The Fortnightly Review and the Nineteenth Century The form and content of science coverage varied tremendously with each periodical as editors tried to tailor materials for their targeted readerships. The Fortnightly Review in its early volumes under G. H. Lewes’s editorship (May 1865–​December 1866), for example, had an extraordinary line-​up of material and contributors, with the first volume featuring Lewes on the heart and brain, Eliot’s now classic essay ‘On the Influence of Rationalism’, Herschel ‘On Atoms’ and ‘On the Origin of Force’, Herbert Spencer on ‘Mill v Hamilton’, and T. H. Huxley ‘On the Methods and Results of Ethnology’.26 Subsequent issues saw John Tyndall on ‘The Constitution of the Universe’, and ‘Radiant Heat’, Alexander Bain on ‘The Feelings and the Will, Viewed Physiologically’, Arthur Arnold on sanitary reform, George Bevan on the perils of underground mining, and Huxley ‘On the Advisability of Improving Natural Knowledge’. The Fortnightly was liberal in orientation, pledging itself to becoming ‘an organ for the unbiased expression of many and various minds on topics of general interest in Politics, Literature, Philosophy, Science and Art’.27 Unusually, it was started by committee, with Anthony Trollope and the publisher Frederick Chapman overseeing the launch, and Huxley, Walter Bagehot, Eliot, and Lewes amongst those involved in its creation. For the first time in periodical publishing, it adopted a policy of signed articles, introducing a new era in journalism as other periodicals followed suit. Scientists writing in the Fortnightly were now openly identified, increasing prestige and public profile. Although Lewes was to step down as editor in December 1866, his successor, John Morley, continued his policy of having excellent science coverage. Under Lewes, the new science of anthropology was given significant exposure. In 1865 E. B. Tylor and John McLennan had published their first works, Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilisation and Primitive Marriage respectively. Lewes brought both writers into the fold, with McLennan contributing ‘Kinship in Ancient Greece’ (15 April–​1 May 1866), and Tylor ‘On the Origin of Language’ (15 April 1866), and even more significantly, ‘The Religion of Savages’ (15 August 1866) in which he outlined for the first time his theories of animism. McLennan offered a series on ‘The Worship of Animals and Plants’, in 1869–​70, to which Herbert Spencer responded with ‘Origins of Animal Worship’ (May 1870). These articles were to be foundational elements in the discipline (and were to be influential for Freud when he was forming his own theories in Totem and

26 

Although first published in 1939, E. M. Everett, The Party of Humanity: the Fortnightly Review and Its Contributors, 1865–​1874 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939) remains a very helpful guide to the Fortnightly. 27  Introduction to the Fortnightly Review, in Houghton et al. (eds), Wellesley Index, vol. ii. Although the Fortnightly retained its name, it became a monthly in November 1866.

424    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Taboo).28 In later years other science writers were to join, including the folklorist Andrew Lang, with ‘Mythology and Fairy Tales’ (May 1873), and the novelist and extraordinarily prolific science writer Grant Allen, who contributed a range of offerings in anthropology and other areas, including ‘Who Was Primitive Man?’ (September 1882). Such scientific offerings were interwoven with outstanding literary contributions, as might be expected in a periodical overseen initially by Trollope. The first issue inaugurated the serialization of his novel The Belton Estate (May 1865–​January 1866), with The Eustace Diamonds (July 1871–​February 1873) and Lady Anna (April 1873–​April 1874) to follow, while Meredith proved himself the most faithful of authors, publishing Vittoria (January 1866–​December 1866), Beauchamp’s Career (August 1874–​December 1875), The Tragic Comedians (October 1880–​February 1881), Diana of the Crossways (June 1884–​ December 1884), and One of Our Conquerors (Oct 1890–​May 1891) in a period spanning almost twenty years. The Fortnightly was a keen supporter of Swinburne and Pater, publishing their work from early on, while Edmund Gosse introduced English audiences to ‘Ibsen, the Norwegian satirist’ as early as January 1873. J. A. Symonds, Olive Schreiner, and Oscar Wilde also published in the Fortnightly’s pages. Huxley and Tyndall remained stalwarts, publishing their last articles in the early 1890s. One can track a gradual ‘changing of the guard’, however, as figures such as Lewes and Bain are replaced by younger, rising stars—​the psychologist James Sully, the mathematician W. K. Clifford, or Francis Galton. Inevitably, the relationship between science and religion remained a key component of debates, but taken in a new direction by Galton, who turned his fascination with statistical calculation to a highly contentious area in ‘Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer’ (August 1872). ‘The Ethics of Religion’ (July 1877) by the fiercely atheistic Clifford (which followed on from his ‘The Ethics of Belief ’ in the Contemporary Review (January 1877)), further stirred controversy, with Clifford’s insistence that it was wrong to believe in anything with insufficient evidence. Although Galton is remembered primarily for his work on eugenics, one can trace in the pages of the Fortnightly the development of his fertile, restless intelligence, as he plotted, for example, the hereditary factors involved in creating men of science (March 1873), the use of photography to create a chronicle of personal and family development (January 1882), how we construct mental imagery (September 1883), and the ways in which we can measure character (August 1884). In this latter piece, he draws upon Tennyson to show how the reflex signs of emotion can be tracked. The play of emotion, customarily seen as the domain of the novel and poetry, here provides the foundations for science. Galton concludes, ‘It is the statistics of each man’s conduct in small every-​ day affairs, that will probably be found to give the simplest and most precise measure of his character.’29 The Fortnightly also gave him a platform to argue for the founding 28 

See Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo and Other Works, 1913–​1914, vol. xiii of the Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, gen. ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 3, 75, 79, 107–​110. 29  Francis Galton, ‘Measurement of Character’, Fortnightly Review, 36 (August 1884), 179–​185, at 183, 185.

Science and Periodicals    425 of an anthropometric laboratory (March 1882). He was to establish this laboratory at the International Health Exhibition in 1884, subjecting at least 10,000 subjects to a battery of measurements.30 Galton also instituted a regime of tests and measurements at numerous schools, ushering in a new statistical approach to human development, and thereby establishing the foundations for our current epistemic belief that all aspects of human life can be measured and quantified. The Fortnightly coverage is interesting for what it leaves out, as well as what it includes. Technological advances receive little attention, compared to the ‘higher’ issues of the relations of mind and matter. Tyndall, for example, contributes ‘The electric light’ in February 1879, but there is far less attention to this major transformative development than one might expect until the 1890s, and even then it is not major figures in the field who are writing.31 Medicine receives some coverage, although more limited in scope than that for the evolutionary sciences and psychology. Henry Maudsley contributes ‘Heredity in Health and Disease’ (May 1884), which in its discussions of family ‘stock’ and the emergence of child suicide, looked forward to Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895).32 He also contributed the now infamous ‘Sex in Mind and in Education’ (April 1874), in which he argued that there was indeed sex in mind as well as in body, and women were ill-​fitted for either masculine forms of education, or careers: ‘When Nature spends in one direction, she must economise in another direction.’ The ‘excessive mental drain’ of education would be at the expense of the development of the reproductive organs.33 To the Fortnightly’s credit, it gives space in the following issue for Elizabeth Garrett Anderson’s forthright reply, in which she challenges both Maudsley’s evidence and conclusions, suggesting that young women can indeed become ‘languid and feeble’ and even hysterical, yet not from education, but rather ‘the depressing influence of dulness’.34 Interestingly, she takes Maudsley’s source, a work by American physician Edward Clarke, and uses the evidence against him, drawing on Clarke’s arguments, for example, that girls’ diets might be to blame for any health problems: ‘We live in a zone of perpetual pie and doughnut.’35 The observation sounds an eerily modern note, reminding us that a preoccupation with diets, and healthy eating, is not a twentieth-​or twenty-​first-​century invention. Although the Fortnightly’s science content was overwhelmingly from male pens, the review did publish contributions from an unusually high number of women. Thus

30 

Francis Galton, Memoirs of My Life (London: Methuen, 1909), ch. 17, ‘Anthropometric Laboratories’. For a discussion of the 1890s coverage, see Graeme Gooday, ‘Profit and Prophecy: Electricity in the Late-​Victorian Periodical’, in Cantor et al. (eds), Science in the Nineteenth-​Century Periodical, 238–​254. 32  For a discussion of this topic, see Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science and Medicine, 1840–​1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), ch. 18. Hardy made frequent notes from the science content of the Fortnightly: see The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. L. Björk, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1985). 33  H. Maudsley, ‘Sex in Mind and in Education’, Fortnightly Review, 15 (April 1874), 466–​483, at 467. 34  Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, ‘Sex in Mind and Education: A Reply’, Fortnightly Review, 15 (May 1874), 582–​594, at 590. 35  Anderson, ‘Sex in Mind and Education: A Reply’, 592. 31 

426    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Millicent Garrett Fawcett had written in support of ‘The Medical and General Education of Women’ in an early issue (November 1868), and Sophie Jex-​Blake had followed this with ‘The Practice of Medicine by Women’ (March 1875). The Maudsley article notwithstanding, the Fortnightly was generally in the forefront of campaigning for female education and suffrage. Other leading female contributors included Frances Power Cobbe, both on the campaign against vivisection which she spearheaded (January 1882), and a range of other areas, from ‘What Is Progress?’ (March 1867), to ‘The Education of the Emotions’ (February 1888). Eliot’s close friend and admirer, Edith Simcox, also wrote for the journal, contributing ‘Custom and Sex’ and ‘Cause and Design’ (March and December 1872). The Fortnightly moved with the times, inaugurating the 1890s with ‘The Morality of Marriage’ (March 1890), a polemic against marriage by the ‘New Woman’ writer Mona Caird. The Fortnightly was rivalled in its engagement with science by the Contemporary Review, set up in partial emulation in 1866, and also the Nineteenth Century, established by the leading editor of the Contemporary, James Knowles, in 1877, when that journal ceased to support his policy of ‘open platform’ debate (with the controversy which had surrounded the publication of Clifford’s ‘The Ethics of Belief ’ as one of the precipitating causes of his move). Knowles, who was the founder of ‘the Metaphysical Society’ (1869–​80) which brought together eminent figures in cultural, political, and scientific life to debate issues of science and philosophy, proved a formidable editor.36 At the Contemporary, he shared many of the major scientific contributors with the Fortnightly, taking them with him when he founded the Nineteenth Century, which became Huxley’s favoured outlet. The first issue of the Nineteenth Century featured a round-​up of ‘Recent Science’, written by Knowles, with advice from Huxley, which covered in considerable technical detail developments in chemistry, physics, astronomy, geology, and the biological sciences. Amidst the achievements of male scientists, one finds an account of the experiments of Fräulein Marie von Chauvin on the axolotl, the fascinating creature which possesses both gills and lungs, but also adult sexual organs, raising questions as to the relationship between the two forms. Her achievements in ‘triumphantly evolv[ing]’ ‘Amblystoma out of more than one axolotl’ are set in explicit contrast with the failed, clumsily violent, means of her male predecessors: ‘This she accomplished, not by any such violent measures as excision of the gills, but by gradually accustoming the animal to life on land, and by paying the greatest attention, through the whole process, to its health and diet.’37 Marie von Chauvin is barely remembered now, and is usually mentioned—​if at all—​as an assistant of August Weismann, but by returning to the records of the age we find not only that her achievements were acclaimed but also that her success is subtly aligned 36 

For a study of the society, see Alan Willard Brown, The Metaphysical Society: Victorian Minds in Crisis, 1869–​1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947). James Knowles edited the Contemporary Review from April 1870 to January 1877, and the Nineteenth Century from its beginnings in March 1877 until his death in 1908. In 1901 he renamed it the Nineteenth Century and After. 37  ‘Recent Science’, Nineteenth Century, 1 (March 1877), 174.

Science and Periodicals    427 with her femininity and domestic skills: it is her gentleness, and attention to food and welfare, which has led to her ‘triumphant’ success. The Nineteenth Century offers a wonderful tour through the scientific preoccupations of the age; some surprising, others to be expected, but often introducing concepts which were novel at the time. As in the Fortnightly, many of the contributions were major scientific publications in their own right, such as George Romanes’s ‘The Darwinian Theory of Instinct’ in September 1884, which contained unpublished material from Darwin’s own notebooks. The journal attempted throughout to be even-​handed in its coverage:  the January 1878 volume contained both Tyndall’s essay on ‘Spontaneous Generation’ and Ruskin’s ‘Oxford Lecture’ which was an impassioned attack on the pretensions of science. Arnold’s more measured ‘Literature and Science’, a response to Huxley’s 1880 address to Josiah Mason College, Birmingham on ‘Science and Culture’, was published in August 1882.38 In discussion of the ‘two cultures’ debate, Arnold has often been depicted rather unsympathetically as attempting to cling on to the Classics, as the only real base for education. Looked at in the light of our current ‘crisis of the humanities’, however, his article takes on new resonances: he is writing in concern at what he sees as ‘the present movement for ousting letters from their old predominance and transferring the predominance in education to natural sciences’. It is not an attack on science education per se, but on a perceived move to separate science from a humanist base, so that the consequences for human conduct, and what he terms the ‘instinct for beauty’, are not considered. In part it is a plea for the history of science; his definition of literature encompasses the works of ‘Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Darwin’.39 He argues for a thorough engagement with the discoveries of modern science, but that, additionally, these discoveries are themselves placed in the context established by man’s history, and aspirations. Although Arnold’s target is Huxley, both of them are writing in the pages of the same journal which, in bringing together science and cultural content within its pages, is enacting the vision of education articulated by Arnold. Further engagement with the ‘two cultures’ can be found in Swinburne’s wonderful satirical piece, ‘Dethroning Tennyson:  A  contribution to the Tennyson–​Darwin Controversy’ (January 1888). Taking off from renewed attempts to suggest that Shakespeare was not the author of the plays attributed to him, Swinburne shows, through a careful study of verbal similarities and other clues, that Darwin was actually the author of Tennyson’s verse. The article is artfully playful, but draws its strength precisely from the latent possibilities suggested by Tennyson’s engagement with proto-​evolutionary theories in his ‘celebrated lines’, ‘so careful of the type, so careless of the single life’.40

38 

Matthew Arnold, ‘Literature and Science’, Nineteenth Century, 12 (August 1882), 216–​230. The article was a publication of his ‘Rede lecture’ delivered to the University of Cambridge. T. H. Huxley’s ‘Science and Culture’ address of 1880 was published in his Collected Essays, 9 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1893–​94), iii. 134–​159. 39  Arnold, ‘Literature and Science’, 221. 40  Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘Dethroning Tennyson: A Contribution to the Tennyson–​Darwin Controversy’, Nineteenth Century, 23 (January 1888), 127–​129, at 129.

428    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture As with the Fortnightly, the Contemporary engages less with technological developments than with the biological and psychological sciences. Through a concerted campaign of articles in the early 1880s against the proposed Channel Tunnel, however, it was credited with crushing the proposed British–​French project, raising interesting questions for counterfactual history as to what would have happened if the project had gone ahead in the 1880s.41 Would it have created greater economic and cultural union, and thus forestalled the two world wars, or, as its opponents feared, created greater bellicosity, and the need for larger standing armies? One engineering invention the journal did support was that of ‘whispering machines’ (March 1885). Offering an interesting perspective on current proposals for ‘knowledge transfer’ and technology development, the article celebrates the fact that ‘invention’ is now ‘organised and working under the auspices of science, with the sanction of public sentiment and the bonuses of Government’. The author notes that projects of ‘submarine and aerial navigation are receiving support and encouragement from powerful governments’ and argues that the development of whispering, or reading machines, and ‘machine libraries’ should receive equal support.42 Based on the development of the phonograph, the proposal, which involved a machine placed in a hat with the ‘sounds conveyed to the ears by wires’, would enable all books to be recorded and listened to aurally, thus defeating the increasing problems of myopia which were correlated with the rise in educational levels, and also the sedentary form of life of the student. No longer would people have to risk their sight trying to read in ‘dimly-​lighted underground carriages’. In a wonderfully idealistic vision of what would be possible, the author suggests the machine ‘would accompany men to the office, to the factory, to the bench, to the field, to the ditch, down into the mines, whispering into their ears greater thoughts and imaginations, strengthening, ennobling, and refining the mind’.43 As with the Channel Tunnel, the technological achievement of this Victorian project has taken a century, but its current incarnation in the form of an iPod and its general mode of use, would have severely disappointed the author, with his Arnoldian vision of the power of culture, when supported by scientific technology. His belief that the ready availability of books in other languages would lead rapidly to a tumbling down of national barriers and a new era of cultural understanding would also meet with decided frustration.

The Review of Reviews The nineteenth-​century periodical reveals the Victorians at their fertile, imaginative, and determined best, using the inclusive format of the journals to question, challenge, and 41  See, for example, the articles in the issues of February and March 1882. Introduction to The Nineteenth Century, in Houghton et al. (eds), Wellesley Index, ii. 673. 42  R. Balmer, ‘Whispering Machines’, Nineteenth Century, 17 (March 1885), 496–​499, at 496. 43  Balmer, ‘Whispering Machines’, 497.

Science and Periodicals    429 think beyond their own culture. One of the most ambitious undertakings was W. T. Stead’s Review of Reviews, established in 1890, which aimed, as its title suggests, to offer a review of all other reviews, from specialist scientific journals to more popular magazines, and to cover not only UK culture, but also that of the world. The first volume, for example, carried reports of material from American, French, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgian, Italian, and Dutch periodicals. Although its actual content could never match its ambition, it offers one of the best introductions to science within 1890s culture.44 Stead’s own predilections, including his interests in spiritualism, inevitably influence the choice of material, but even here he was not drastically out of line; the Nineteenth Century, for example, had carried various investigative articles on the topic, including ‘Thought Reading’ by W. F. Barrett, Edmund Gurney, and Frederic Myers (June 1882). Stead’s more extreme interests he confined to his other publication, Borderland (1893–​7), and to Christmas and New Year supplements to the Review of Reviews which featured ghost stories. The supplement to volume 5, for example, had a frontispiece with the noted astronomer, novelist, and spiritualist Camille Flammarion, standing at a huge telescope with the caption: ‘The Psychical World, like the World of Astronomy, opens infinite avenues before us. Study, study without ceasing! Let no system stand in the way! Let us seek truth freely’.45 For Stead, as for the noted philosophers and physicists who joined the Society for Psychical Research (founded in 1882 with the Cambridge Professor of Moral Philosophy, Henry Sidgwick, as its president), the area of mind or spirit, like that of the physical universe, was one more domain to explore and to subject to scientific research, tracing its hidden inner workings.46 Fact and fiction frequently seemed to meld into one, as in the reporting of Alfred Binet’s account of double personalities in the Revue des Deux Mondes, which was entitled ‘Jekyll and Hyde in Science: Have we more souls than one?’ Binet’s article, which in many ways was anticipated by Frederic Myers’s account of ‘Multiplex Personalities’ in Nineteenth Century (November 1886), suggested that ‘Several moral personalities, each having consciousness of itself, may rise side by side without mixing in the same organism’.47 New scientific findings are interpreted here through the prism of recent fiction, suggesting how closely intertwined the two realms were in popular consciousness at the time.48 44  See Gowan Dawson, ‘New Journalism: The Review of Reviews’, in Cantor et al., Science in the Nineteenth-​Century Periodical, 172–​198. See also the database entries in the SciPer Index, www.sciper.org 45  ‘More Ghost Stories: A Sequel to Real Ghost Stories’, Being a New Year’s extra number of the Review of Reviews, collated and edited by W. T. Stead (1892) (commonly bound in with volume 5). 46  For a discussion of the intersection of science and spiritualism see Richard Noakes, ‘“The Bridge which is between Physical and Psychical Research”: William Fletcher Barrett, Sensitive Flames and Spiritualism’, History of Science, 42 (2004), 419–​464, and ‘The Sciences of Spiritualism in Victorian Britain: Possibilities and Problems’, in Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Wilburn (eds), Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-​Century Spiritualism and the Occult (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 25–​54. 47  ‘Jekyll and Hyde in Science: Have We More Souls than One?’, Review of Reviews, 3 (January–​June 1891), 245; Frederic Myers, ‘Multiplex Personality’, Nineteenth Century, 20 (November 1886), 648–​656. 48  For a discussion of the possible psychological sources for The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which was published in the same year as ‘Multiplex Personality’, see Julia Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 96.

430    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture

The Argosy and Temple Bar In its aspirations, the Review of Reviews belonged with the more ‘heavyweight’ journals, such as the Fortnightly, the Contemporary, and the Nineteenth Century (although it roused the ire of those publications by offering ‘easy’ access to their content).49 I would now like to turn to consider science content in more middlebrow, fiction-​oriented magazines, The Argosy (1865–​1901) and Temple Bar (1860–​1906). Both were so-​called ‘shilling’ monthlies, set up in the wake of the great success of Macmillan’s (1859) and the Cornhill (1860). The Argosy, a magazine of tales, travels, essays and poems was established by the publisher Alexander Strahan, but after a strong start, with the serialization of Charles Reade’s study of the pathologies of male jealousy, Griffith Gaunt, it started to decline and was taken over by Ellen (Mrs Henry) Wood in 1867, who made it a vehicle for her own fiction. In the early volumes there is a clear attempt to introduce science, but only as it might be thought to engage a novel-​reading audience. Thus the first volume carried Matthew Browne’s ‘Apology for the Nerves’ which is a defence of ‘nerves’ as a sign of capacity and sensitivity, rather than of derangement. The poet and essayist Alexander Smith contributes an article ‘On Dreams and Dreaming’, which is semi-​ humorously written; ‘few men’, he observes, ‘have extracted such terrors from a pork chop as Fuselli’.50 It addresses contemporary debates on dreaming, however, coming down firmly on the side of dreaming as the product of desires, and memories, when uncontrolled by the conscious will.51 He suggests that ‘out of the chaos of dreams a man may now and then extract a curious self-​knowledge’. Examining a dream is like ‘looking into the interior of a watch; you see the processes at work by which results are obtained. A man thus becomes his own eavesdropper, he plays the spy upon himself ’ (393). The images and language are both evocative and insightful, moving beyond materialist explanations to one that anticipates the interpretive strategies to be adopted by Freud. Memories, he suggests, are not destroyed, but like photographic negatives are laid aside, for possible future use. In another formulation he observes, ‘There is a “Lost Office” in the memory, where all the waifs and strays of experience are taken care of ’ (391). He explores how literary reading can heighten the seeming creativity of a dream, by blending with fears, so that even a schoolboy can, in his dreams, take on the creative powers of a John Bunyan. It is an extraordinarily suggestive analysis of how our forms of reading can help to shape the unconscious processes of the mind. Smith sets himself firmly against any forms of supernatural interpretation of dreaming, observing that it ‘is not in the least a matter for wonder’, that dreams, ‘working continually in the stuff of daily 49 

Dawson, ‘New Journalism’, 175–​189. Alexander Smith, ‘On Dreams and Dreaming’, The Argosy, 1 (April 1866), 390–​394, at 390. Further page references will be given in the text. 51  There are strong similarities with G. H. Lewes’s account of dreaming in The Physiology of Common Life (1859–​60) which had been part serialized in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1858, but Smith places greater emphasis on the possibilities of self-​understanding to be gleaned from dreams. 50 

Science and Periodicals    431 hope and fear, giving palpable shape and image to desire and dread, should sometimes be found to forestal the future fact’ (394). In daylight hours, only those dreams which appear to have a prophetic role will be recalled; the rest will be quickly forgotten. As a companion piece to nerves, and dreams, John McLennan contributed an article on ‘Bride Catching’ to the second volume, thus completing the triumvirate of areas which preoccupied the sensation fiction writers of the 1860s. Unlike the anthropological articles in the Fortnightly, which were frequently the first publication of major research, this is a piece written explicitly for a popular audience, and drawing on his Primitive Marriage published the previous year. McLennan opens with an invitation to the reader, ‘to inspect my show of marriage knick-​knacks. It embraces oddities from all the ends of the earth’.52 He archly adopts the patter of a travelling showman, downgrading his findings to household ‘knick-​knacks’ while nonetheless offering, in the numerous examples of the rituals of ‘bride capture’ from across the world, a compelling study in anthropology, which links practices of marriage in ‘primitive’ tribes to those still evident amidst the ‘higher races of men’. The conclusion offers the pious suggestion that, while humbly viewing our origins, we can nonetheless look hopefully to the future ‘as holding in store for our species forms of life purer and higher than the present, by as much as the present are purer and higher than the past’.53 Readers of sensation fiction, however, were well used to the moral homilies of the narrator, as in Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (serialized in the New Monthly Magazine, January 1860–​August 1861), which were at odds with the real energies of a narrative that suggested a more subversive message. Trained up in the barbarities of marriage practices addressed in such fiction, they would need little urging to read beyond such consoling flummery, and to link McLennan’s primitive marriage practices to those of Victorian England. Darwin, in concluding Origin of Species, sought to make his findings more palatable by extolling the ‘grandeur’ of ‘this view of life’ by which ‘all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection’.54 He was not convincing. McLennan adopts a similar rhetorical ploy, packaging his material in the conventional structures deemed necessary for ‘light’ reading in a family journal, whilst taking his readers on a journey into the darker heart of contemporary life, where ‘primitive’ structures still flourished. Sensation fiction is at heart an anthropological enterprise. Under the editorship of Ellen Wood, the magazine carried less overt science content, although there were occasional articles on themes such as dreaming.55 For alert readers, however, the content was there in the fiction itself, whether in anthropological investigations of primitive desires and practices, or engagements with medical theories of nervous disorders and insanity.56 52 

John McLennan, ‘Bride-​Catching’, The Argosy, 2 (June 1866), 31–​42, at 31. McLennan, ‘Bride-​Catching’, 42. 54 Darwin, The Origin of Species, 395. 55  See, for example, Joseph Hatton, ‘On Some Notable Dreams’ (May 1868), 462–​466. 56  See Andrew Mangham, Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-​Century Psychology (London: Routledge, 1988); and Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Preaching to the Nerves”: Psychological Disorder in Sensation Fiction’, 53 

432    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Temple Bar, edited initially by Augustus Sala and Edmund Yates, addressed questions of insanity in its very first issue, with an article on ‘Criminal Lunatics’ which was both supportive of the genuine ‘criminal lunatic’ and highly critical of court procedures that sought to distinguish the sane from the insane.57 The journal itself adopted a wider remit than The Argosy. While still placing fiction at its heart (it serialized Braddon’s Aurora Floyd, January 1862–​January 1863), it also offered more explicit scientific content, particularly in the contributions of the geologist David Ansted. First published in the year following Darwin’s Origin, but with an avowed editorial policy of avoiding politics, Temple Bar offers an interesting insight into the ways in which a middle-​to low-​brow journal approached such potentially explosive material.58 Ansted was a geologist and mining engineer, and had been professor of geology at Kings College London, 1840–​53 (a post that had previously been held by the eminent geologist Charles Lyell). He contributed many articles in the opening numbers, from ‘What Our Coals Cost Us’ (March 1861), which moves in from a domestic frame to explore the potential depletion of coal reserves, through to a discussion of ‘Giants and Dwarves’ (March 1861), the formation of clouds (May 1861) and of chalk (July 1861), and ‘The Pre-​Adamite World’ (October 1861).59 He does not address Darwinian theory directly, but crabwise, building up gradually in ‘Giants and Dwarves’ with descriptive accounts of extinction, and the development of new forms in the animal and human kingdom, before finally addressing possible explanations. Here he suggests, mildly, that external circumstances might produce variations, as argued by Darwin, or the Creator might intervene with sudden acts of creation. It is clear where his sympathies lie, particularly in his final rhetorical question, where he laments the forms of personal attack expressed in the debates: Why, then, should an endeavour to trace the method, to discover the wonderful mechanism of that mysterious contrivance which governs the phenomena of life, and the constant adaptation of species to changing circumstances, be made the subject of personal attack, because the particular law that seems to be suggested by observation does not quite agree with our preconceived notions of what it ought to be?

While never openly asserting his own allegiances, his use of Darwinian language to defend the cause of open enquiry is designed to engineer readers’ support for the wider Darwinian framework. His subsequent pieces on ‘Chalk’ and ‘The Pre-​Adamite World’

in Marina Benjamin (ed.), A Question of Identity: Women, Science and Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 192–​222. 57  Charles Thomas Browne, ‘Criminal Lunatics’, Temple Bar, 1 (December 1860), 135–​43. Browne was both a barrister and journalist. 58  For a detailed study of Darwin’s reception across the range of periodicals, see Ellegård, Darwin and the General Reader. 59  The article on ‘Chalk’ is probably a model for T. H. Huxley’s famous piece in Macmillan’s ‘On a Piece of Chalk’ (September 1868). In the pressured world of Victorian journalism, there was frequent borrowing and recycling, as writers, who were usually juggling numerous forms of other commitments, struggled to find new areas or angles to meet their deadlines.

Science and Periodicals    433 adopt similar strategies, sheering away from explicit consideration of Darwinian theory, but building arguments which tacitly demand assent to various evolutionary principles. Perhaps the best engagement with Darwinian principles in these early volumes of Temple Bar comes in an anonymous, comic article, ‘With Mr Gorilla’s Compliments’ (November 1861), written as if by a gorilla, which challenges the claims of Du Chaillu, who was exhibiting stuffed gorillas around England that year. While the ‘gorilla’ targets the charlatanry of Du Chaillu, and aims to set the record straight about gorilla behaviour, he takes for granted an acceptance by his readers of a shared ancestry with the ape family. Although comic in mode, his discourse is scientifically informed, cutting through many of the myths which had started to accrue around the figure of the gorilla (while delicately reframing those associated with the gorilla’s assumed sexual rapacity).60 As the foregoing suggests, the engagement with science in the Victorian periodical press took multiple forms. One of the best guides to the scientific issues of the moment is to be found in Punch which took satirical delight in unpacking the comic potential of the latest discoveries or grandiose scientific claims.61 While some periodicals had columns dedicated to reviewing developments in science, more commonly science formed part of the mix of general content, which was itself targeted to specific audiences. Content was carefully tailored for journals oriented to particular religious networks, or political constituencies, while the growing number of magazines for women, and for children, all called for new forms of science writing. Frequently these audiences would overlap, as in the Religious Tract Society’s publications The Boy’s Own Paper (1879) and The Girl’s Own Paper (1880), or Aunt Judy’s Magazine (1866–​85), edited initially by the naturalist Margaret Gatty (and subsequently by her daughters, Juliana Ewing and Horatia Eden), which offered a mixture of fiction and natural history for children, within a liberal, but religious, frame.62 In its diversity, the periodical press created space for numerous female science writers to make their mark.63 Female novelists also moved into editorial roles, with Mary Braddon presiding over Belgravia (from 1867 to 1876), and Ellen Wood over The Argosy from 1867 to 1887, while Charlotte Yonge edited the religious children’s magazine, the Monthly Packet, for an astonishing forty-​three years, from 1851 to 1894. For researchers exploring the intersection of literary and scientific culture, periodicals run by novelist-​editors, such as Braddon and Wood, or Thackeray, Trollope, and Dickens, offer a peculiarly rich field of study, with the editor selecting and commissioning articles 60  For a discussion of some of these popular myths, see Janet Browne, ‘Constructing Darwinism in Popular Culture’, in Anne-​Julia Zwierlein (ed.), Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth-​ Century Literature and Culture (London; Anthem Press, 2005), 55–​70; and Gowan Dawson, Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), ch. 2. 61  See Richard Noakes, ‘Punch and Comic Journalism in Mid-​Victorian Britain’, in Cantor et al., Science in the Nineteenth-​Century Periodical, 91–​122; and Suzanne Le-​May Sheffield, ‘The “Empty-​ Headed Beauty” and the “Sweet Girl Graduate”: Women’s Science Education in Punch, 1860–​1890’, in Henson et al. Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-​Century Media, 15–​28. 62  For a discussion of the role of female naturalists in nineteenth-​century publishing, see Barbara Gates, Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 63  See Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science, particularly c ­ hapters 3 and 8.

434    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture which would stand side by side with their own fiction.64 This was particularly true for Dickens, who, with the medically trained Henry Morley at his side, commissioned an extraordinary range of science-​related articles during his time at the helm of Household Words (1850–​9) and All the Year Round (1859–​70), which stand in very interesting inter-​ textual relations to his own fictional productions during the period.65 To give some sense of the vibrancy and range of scientific coverage in the periodical press, I conclude with a brief overview of one volume of Macmillan’s Magazine, which ran from November 1870 to April 1871, and included the final part of Trollope’s ‘Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite’. At this point, Macmillan’s (then under the editorship of George Grove) was much preoccupied with the Franco-​Prussian War, and volume 23 opens with an article on ‘The Navy’. Its opening lament captures the drama and immediacy of history, which can only be communicated in newspapers or periodicals. ‘It is no longer possible’, the writer exclaims, ‘to take up one’s pen to write upon “The Navy” without pain and humiliation.’ A brand new man of war had simply keeled over, with the loss of 500 lives, due to a miscalculation of the laws of physics. Other content includes Sir James Paget, surgeon extraordinary to Queen Victoria, on attending a bullfight, which leads on to a whole discussion of field sports, and the controversy raging across the periodical press between Anthony Trollope and Edward Freeman, as to whether it could be right to inflict pain on animals.66 A sense of contemporary relevance and of strong continuity between the nineteenth century and our postmodern age is further sustained by a letter from Charles Kingsley, defending the countryside against encroachment. He harangues the government: Will they prevent a penny-​wise and pound-​foolish policy, which is now at work, from destroying these spaces by selling off all that is saleable to villa-​projectors, and planting the rest with worthless fir-​trees enclosed with impassable wire and iron-​ bound fences making the country hideous?

All is not as it seems, however; Kingsley cannot be claimed as a direct forerunner of contemporary countryside campaigners, since the letter then demands that the countryside is left free, not for people to enjoy, or the preservation of habitats, but for the exercise of 64 

Anthony Trollope was on the founding board of the Fortnightly and also established and edited his own periodical, St Paul’s Magazine, from 1867 to 1870. Phineas Finn was serialized in the opening numbers. William Thackeray had been a prolific contributor to Punch as well as the first editor of the Cornhill (January 1860–​May 1862). 65  For digitized versions of the original journals, see the excellent ‘Dickens Journals Online’, www. djo.org.uk led by John Drew. For guides to the contents of the journals, see Anne Lohrli (ed.), Household Words: A Weekly Journal Conducted by Charles Dickens: Table of Contents, List of Contributors and Their Contributions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973); and Ella Ann Oppenlander, Dickens’ ‘All the Year Round’: Descriptive Index and Contributor List (Troy, NY: Whitston, 1984). 66  The controversy began with the publication by Edward A. Freeman of ‘The Morality of Field Sports’ in the Fortnightly (October 1869) to which Trollope responded with a defence of hunting in the December issue, ‘Mr Freeman and the Morality of Hunting’. The controversy spread across the periodical press and continued into 1872.

Science and Periodicals    435 troops, and a ‘national training ground for the army’.67 (Ironically, the desired setting aside of great swathes of English countryside for use by the army has in fact been an inadvertent agent in the preservation of biodiversity in recent decades.) More explicit scientific content is contributed by Francis Galton, in his wonderfully titled ‘Gregariousness in Cattle and in Men’, which anticipates discussions of the herd instinct, normally dated only from an article by Wilfrid Trotter in 1908.68 Galton vividly depicts the ‘passionate terror’ of oxen at separation, suggesting that the gregarious instincts which are necessary for cattle become a ‘hereditary taint’ for men, turning us into ‘a mob of slaves, clinging together, incapable of self-​government and begging to be led’.69 Biological principles are swiftly subsumed under the Victorian social and political ideologies of self-​determination and control, making evident, to the historically trained eye, the ideological premises of such forms of assertion which are often occluded in the sociobiology of our own day. Loss of self-​control also features in very different guise, in ‘Louise Lateau, a Biological Study’, an account by physician George Day of a contemporary Belgian girl who, every Friday, produced stigmata, and fell into ecstatic fits.70 Her case was viewed as a challenge to the interpretative authority of both medicine and the Church, and she was subjected to a whole barrage of tests, led by Professor Lefebvre from Louvain, a physician who had also worked in a lunatic asylum, and an army of medics and clerics, all determined to prove that the signs were either frauds, or of physiological origin. The whole episode offers a perfect symbolic instance of the female mind and body being subjected to masculine science. She was pricked with needles and knives, treated with electromagnetism, and her skin tested with caustic. Although she was bound up in a very elaborate manner, her blood still continued to flow, before an array of over 100 witnesses. The article is written in great clinical detail, with the author concluding finally that she must be suffering from some very rare disease; he refuses to allow the possibility that her state could elude classification. To set against the passivity of Louise Lateau, however, women are given a strong voice in this issue of Macmillan’s, most notably in two articles by Frances Power Cobbe on ‘Unconscious Cerebration’ and ‘Dreams as Illustrations of Unconscious Cerebration’.71 67 

‘Letter from Canon Kingsley’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 23 (November 1870), 71–​72. Wilfrid Trotter, ‘Herd Instinct and Its Bearing on the Psychology of Civilised Man’, Sociological Review, 1, no. 3 (1908), 227–​248. 69  Francis Galton, ‘Gregariousness in Cattle and in Men’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 23 (February 1871), 354–​357, at 354, 357. 70  George E. Day, ‘Louise Lateau, a Biological Study’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 23 (April 1871), 488–​498. The case was a very recent one, only commencing in 1868, with Dr Lefebvre’s report published in 1870. It would continue to attract medical attention until 1883. See Sophie Lachapelle, ‘Between Miracle and Sickness: Louise Lateau and the Experience of Stigmata and Ecstasy’, Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science and Technology, 12, no. 1 (2004), 77–​105. 71  The volume also contained an article by Millicent Garrett Fawcett on proportional representation, and Eliza Lynn Linton’s decidedly unfeminist attack on ‘The modern revolt’ of women. The preceding and following volumes published George Eliot’s lengthy poems, ‘The Legend of Jubal’ (May 1870), 1–​18, and ‘Armgart’ (July 1871), 161–​187, which, extraordinarily, are not listed in the Wellesley Index due to their policy of not listing poems. 68 

436    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture The articles, which were cited approvingly by W. B. Carpenter in his two Contemporary Review articles, ‘The Physiology of the Will’ (May 1871), and ‘On Mind and Will in Nature’ (October 1872) (and subsequently in The Principles of Mental Physiology, 1874), address, from a very different angle to that of Galton or other contributors, the issue of self-​control which so preoccupied the Victorians. Cobbe offers convincing, frequently amusing, accounts of the ways in which our unconscious minds operate, often leading to what Freud was to term the psychopathology of everyday life. In dreams, and involuntary social gaffes, the mind functions outside any conscious control. In her second article, she draws on a large postbag of accounts of dreams from readers, giving a strong sense of the community of exchange established with the reading public. The dreams are full of violence; ‘the woman who never yet voluntarily hurt a fly, chops a baby into mincemeat’.72 While Alexander Smith had argued that dreams enable a man to become ‘a spy upon himself ’, Cobbe adopts the opposite explanatory strategy. Faced with evidence of such violent disjunctions between the conscious mind and its unconscious processes, she insists it is proof that we are all exempt from moral responsibility for our dreams, and that our selfhood is governed by an inner unifying principle which cannot be reduced to the material workings of the brain. Our ‘dreaming brain-​self ’, she pronounces, is not our ‘true self ’.73 In their multiplicity and diversity, periodicals offer a wonderful guide to the Victorian age, and to the ways in which science entered into the general culture of the time. As the case studies suggest, the engagement with science operated on many levels, and in multiple areas. Although evolutionary theory was obviously a significant presence, it formed only one part of a complex picture. In the literary-​oriented periodicals, for example, we find particular emphasis placed on the ways in which scientific thinking appeared to intersect with the interests of fiction and poetry, whether in theories of selfhood or personal responsibility, or the relations between science and religion. There was also, more generally, a fascination with new inventions, and the possibilities opened up by new technologies, such as the ingenious suggestion for a ‘whispering machine’, which was clearly an idea before its time. Periodicals offer an intricate picture of a society grappling with rapid social and cultural change, charged with the immediacy which comes from their serial and time-​ bound nature. In their integration of cutting-​edge science with the latest fiction or social commentary they established a model we could do well to emulate. Such integration was not without challenge, however. Like us, the Victorians underwent a crisis of confidence with reference to education. J. S. Mill, in his Rector’s address to the University of St Andrews in 1867, came down heavily on the side of an integrated curriculum: Can anything deserve the name of a good education which does not include literature and science too? If there were no more to be said than that scientific education 72  Frances Power Cobbe, ‘Dreams as Illustrations of Unconscious Cerebration’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 23 (April 1871), 512–​523, at 522. 73 ‘Dreams’, 523.

Science and Periodicals    437 teaches us to think, and literary education to express our thoughts, do we not require both? and is not any one a poor, maimed, lopsided fragment of humanity who is deficient in either?74

There is indeed much more to be said, but Mill’s vision of an essential partnership between science and the humanities is as relevant today as it was for the Victorian age.

Acknowledgements This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/L007010/1].

Select Bibliography Brake, Laurel, and Marysa Demoor (eds), Dictionary of Nineteenth-​ Century Journalism (London: British Library, 2009). Cantor, Geoffrey, et al., Science in the Nineteenth-​Century Periodical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Cantor, Geoffrey, and Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-​Century Periodicals (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004). Ellegård, Alvar, Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859–​ 1872 (2nd edn., Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1990). Henson, Louise, et  al. (eds), Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-​ Century Media (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). Houghton, Walter E., et al. (eds), The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–​1900, 5 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966–​89). Lightman, Bernard, Victorian Popularizers of Science:  Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007). Lightman, Bernard, and Aileen Fyfe (eds), Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-​Century Sites and Experiences (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007). Mussell, James, Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-​Century Periodical Press (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Secord, James, Victorian Sensation:  The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’ (Chicago:  Chicago University Press, 2000).

74 

J. S. Mill, Inaugural Address, Delivered to the University of St Andrews (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1867), 12.

Chapter 23

Victorian Nat u ra l Scie nce and th e Se ash ore Amy M. King

Introduction On 10 September 1859, just two months before the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, Charles Dickens wrote ‘A Gamekeeper’s Natural History’ in All the Year Round. Appearing alongside an instalment of A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens’s playful satire of the scientist—​a ‘Professor Mole’—​depends upon the contrast he draws with a gamekeeper, ‘our tough friend Targett, who cannot write (who in fact, I caught the other day tearing up a volume of Cuvier to make wadding of the cover)’.1 In Dickens’s essay, professional scientific knowledge comes across unfavourably when contrasted with vernacular knowledge of the natural world: ‘here down in Wiltshire, we have Targett, who knows more about English natural history than all the F.Z.S.’s and presidents of societies in the world’. For Charles Dickens, the author who perhaps comes closest to being a metonym for Victorian literary culture, truth about nature can only be achieved by ‘observing living things, and studying their ways’ (476). The ‘two cities’ of Dickens’s novel might be construed as a metaphor for the kind of oppositional logic we too often bring to what we think of as the separate states of ‘science’ and ‘literature’ in the Victorian period. Our contemporary back-​formation of the separate spheres of science and literature in the Victorian period bears scarce resemblance to the discourses and practices themselves. Victorian literary culture was in fact heterogeneous and inclusive of the scientific. C. P.  Snow in The Two Cultures (1993) understood the late Victorian moment as one that began the cultural divide between ‘science’ and ‘literature’, but his sense of the divide between those two discourses is a now-​discarded historical idea, one that provides an errant back-​formation to Victorian 1 

Charles Dickens, ‘A Gamekeeper’s Natural History’, All the Year Round (17 September 1859), 473–​476. Further page references will be given in the text.

Victorian Natural Science and the Seashore    439 literary culture.2 More recent cultural histories have laid claim to the now accepted idea that Victorian scientific culture cannot be separated from Victorian literary culture, and that the two are in fact mutually constitutive. Victorian science was not a separate discipline outside the parameters of political, religious, and social struggles, but a discourse that was embedded within a broader notion of culture and society. Historians of science over the past forty years have come to see the sciences in the Victorian period not as something independent and distinct from culture and social life, but as integral to other social concerns and part of culture itself. Science thus enters the realm of literary culture, broadly defined, with its ecumenical interest in discourses of many kinds (of which only some were self-​consciously aesthetic in their textual effects). This is particularly important to the Victorian period because it was during the nineteenth century that the sorts of knowledge that we recognize as the sciences formed as disciplines and acquired their great cultural authority. The implications of that cultural shift can be charted through a literary analysis of a variety of discourses, including so-​ called scientific and literary texts. What such an analysis needs to keep in mind is that the natural sciences developed in contexts shaped by a broader history that includes the most sweeping social and cultural changes of the century. Literary scholars need to rethink how we understand the traffic between ‘literature’ and ‘science’. The dynamic between science and literature is complex and varied; there might not simply be permeability between the two discourses but rather an arena that is not habitually recognized, in particular, as scientific. Scholars need increasingly to generate questions about ‘science’ and ‘literature’ other than the perennial one of influence in both directions. The realization that science is not something that is ‘done’ and then transmitted to the arena of culture (the, in some circles, defunct ‘diffusionist’ model) should empower Victorian scholars to work on the robust archive of Victorian popular science. Bernard Lightman, who suggests that ‘we should be suspicious of any model that, in granting to scientists the sole possession of genuine scientific knowledge, serves to support their epistemic authority’, extends our understanding of Victorian scientific culture beyond that of the groups known as the ‘scientific naturalists’ and the ‘gentlemen of science’.3 The rhetorical process of establishing science’s separateness was in formation in the mid-​Victorian moment by a small but culturally influential group known as the ‘scientific naturalists’, a new group at mid-​century that sought to displace the ‘gentlemen of science’ who believed that knowledge of nature had to be understood within a religious framework. The scientific naturalists’ battle for cultural authority over the reigning gentlemen of science employed a rhetoric of professional separateness from other cultural concerns that belies the very cultural context from which the political struggle emerged. Figures such as T. H. Huxley, who gave the name to this new professionalized science,

2 

C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 189. 3 

440    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture led the charge to change the scientific establishment, making it more professionalized and less class-​bound, as well as less tied to religious narratives.4 The primary way to understand the importance of Victorian natural sciences is to see their imbrication more generally in Victorian culture and literature. The social changes in Western society that occurred in the nineteenth century as a result of the forces of urbanization, industrialization, and increased secularization interacted with Victorian science. The intellectual dimensions to science, as important as they are, are no longer understood as separate from the larger culture within the field of the history of science; this marks a shift from intellectual history to contextualism.5 For the uninitiated, ‘Victorian literary culture’ might imply Dickens rather than Darwin; the figures of poetry, non-​fiction prose, and the novel in the Victorian moment would, to many readers’ minds, fill out what we mean by literary culture. To understand Charles Darwin—​and the natural sciences more generally—​as part of Victorian literary culture is to recognize that the Victorians were fascinated by the worlds that the natural sciences opened to them, and were avid readers of those worlds in narrative forms (through periodicals as well as monographs) as well as in the public visual arenas (the museum, zoo, aquarium, and botanical garden). The early Victorian moment was one, as Alison Winter has described it, ‘characterized by a heady optimism about the powers and achievements of scientific inquiry’.6 Historians have traditionally referred to the mid-​to late Victorian period (1850–​90) as the age of the ‘cult of science’, in part because in the second half of the century the legitimacy of ideas more generally had to be determined increasingly by using the scientific method. Moreover, the Victorians were not only avid consumers of the new information coming from the natural sciences, but wrote themselves into the natural sciences in their amateur naturalizing and pursuit of such fads as fern collecting, seashore observation, and private aquaria building.7 Some of these pursuits were a direct result of the middle class’s increased leisure time and material conditions that facilitated amateur scientific inquiry; for instance, innovations in train transportation made daytrips outside the urban environment simpler. Amateur naturalizing cut across class lines in Victorian England; as Anne Secord has shown, working-​class naturalists, including botanists and etymologists, contributed to a growing body of local knowledge about England’s natural world.8 Victorians read natural history in both monograph and periodical form, 4  T. H. Huxley was the first to apply the moniker ‘scientific naturalists’. He did so in the prologue to his Essays on Some Controverted Questions (London: Macmillan, 1892). 5  The trajectory of that change from intellectual history to today’s more common embrace of contextualism as the more dominant way of studying Victorian science as an essential part of society and culture is a complicated one, but one deftly charted by Bernard Lightman in his ‘Introduction’ to Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 6  Alison Winter, ‘The Construction of Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in the Early Victorian Life Sciences’, in Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context, 25–​50. 7  See David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (1976; 2nd edn., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 8  See Anne Secord, ‘Science in the Pub: Artisan Botanists in Early Nineteenth Century Lancashire’, History of Science, 32 (1994), 269–​315. Working-​class naturalists were not something that went unrecorded in the world of the novel: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848)

Victorian Natural Science and the Seashore    441 the print culture aspect of natural history being part of a broader popularization of science in culture that included natural history lectures for the middle class and those sponsored by working men’s institutes. The discourse of natural history permeates, and was at the centre of, popular Victorian literary culture, but in many ways it has been understudied—​in no small part because it was not at the cutting edge of Victorian science. The work of understanding Victorian science not only in light of Victorian literature but as prose or literature owes much to the groundbreaking work of Gillian Beer, George Levine, and Sally Shuttleworth.9 George Levine emphasizes the connections between the realist novels and the scientific naturalists; he calls the realist novel ‘the cultural twin to the project of Victorian science’.10 Gillian Beer’s seminal study of Darwin, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy emphasized the patterns and complexity of later Victorian fiction—​ to use Eliot’s metaphor in Middlemarch (1871–​2), the ‘web’ of complex relationships and patterns of inheritance suggests a connection between new scientific understandings of nature and literary fiction. In light of the period’s so-​called worship of science, it is not surprising that scientific themes were incorporated into Victorian literature. The emphasis on Darwin within literary studies has perhaps been somewhat distorting, however, in that it can imply that Darwin’s ideas were the most relevant scientific ones that ‘influenced’ the literary culture.11 This has had the tendency to falsely divide the century in half around the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, which implies a historical narrative that is neither particularly helpful nor true.12 The field increasingly seeks to disturb the centrality of Darwin and to resist the kind of catastrophist history of ideas that the heavy pressure on 1859 has produced. Studies such as James Secord’s Victorian Sensation (2001) tell a different kind of history about Victorian literary culture by focusing not on Dickens, but rather on a text that was enormously makes one of its characters, Job Leigh, a working-​class etymologist, and the novel opens with a reference to the passion for the natural sciences found among various working men. 9  Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-​ Century Fiction (1983; 3rd edn., Cambridge University Press, 2009); George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-​Century Science: The Make-​Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 10 Levine, Darwin and the Novelists, 7. 11  The journal 19: Interdisciplinary Narratives in the Long Nineteenth Century recently dedicated an issue, entitled ‘Science, Literature, and the Darwin Legacy’, to the subject of the effect of Darwin on the study of science and literature. Excellent recent monographs and anthologies on Darwin’s work in relation to larger cultural historical issues include: Gowan Dawson, Darwin, Literature, and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Cannon Schmitt, Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages, and South America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Jonathan Smith, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Stephen Alter, Colonies, Cults, and Evolution: Literature, Science, and Culture in Nineteenth-​ Century Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context. 12  The original title of Origin of Species as published on 24 November 1859 was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It was changed to The Origin of Species for the 6th edition in 1872.

442    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture infamous and influential in its own cultural moment: Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844).13 In interrogating the tendency within the history of ideas to tell the stories primarily of the most eminent producers of cultural knowledge, we can begin to see how figures such as those I invoked at this essay’s opening—​Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens—​ mistakenly stand in for the twin poles of the literary and the scientific in the Victorian period. Darwin and Dickens to the uninitiated can stand in for ‘the Victorian’ in a way that belies the much more heterogeneous literary culture of the Victorians. The pairing of Darwin and Dickens is especially instructive about Victorian science as literature when we think about the ways in which the putatively literary figure and the putatively scientific figure each reflect on the other. Charles Darwin, who famously admits to feeling nauseous and bored when he tries to reread Shakespeare later in his life, enjoyed novels throughout his life, read poetry (especially the Romantics) into his thirties, and thought so highly of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674) that he included it in the small library he was allowed on board HMS Beagle.14 His Journals and Remarks, commonly known now as The Voyage of the Beagle, chronicle the five years of travel aboard HMS Beagle and on land explorations to such places as the Galapagos Islands, Tierra del Fuego, and Tahiti. Published in 1839, they are exemplary texts in terms of demonstrating the hybrid nature of literary culture and the extent to which narrative and scientific inquiry went hand in hand in the nineteenth century. For Dickens, truthful representation of the world depends upon a thorough empirical vision, one that is beholden, as he writes in ‘A Gamekeeper’s Natural History’, to living things rather than ‘stuffed animals’ and ‘bleached skeletons’. The task of the natural historian is like that of the artist: ‘No one can paint a thing which is not before him as he paints; that no man can describe a place but on the spot; that no one can write on animals till he has chased, and shot, and petted, and watched them’ (474). Naturalists and artists, in other words, depend upon direct observation. In ‘A Gamekeeper’s Natural History’ Dickens clearly idealizes the tradition of the naturalist-​observer as opposed to the professional scientist by invoking three of the most famous naturalists of the period. He does so in order to contrast the ‘timid, twittering’ professional scientist with the manly ‘open air natural history’ of the great collector-​observers of the period: the French-​American ornithologist and artist John James Audubon (1785–​1851), the British parson-​naturalist Gilbert White (1720–​93), and the British ornithologist John Gould (1804–​81). It is an opposition that is baldly painted here in the service of humour, but which is nevertheless important, and one that contextualist historians of science now emphasize. That is, Victorian natural science included not only the realm of what we 13 

James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Secord’s work exhaustively contextualizes Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a text published anonymously with massive sales, and which was generally criticized for its propagation of theories of transmutation of species. 14  See George Levine, ‘Darwin and Pain: Why Science Made Shakespeare Nauseating’, Raritan, 15, no. 2 (Fall 1995), 97–​144.

Victorian Natural Science and the Seashore    443 might call ‘high science’—​the theorists, paper writers, and accumulators of collections, those bespeckled professors of Dickens—​but also other spheres of scientific production, including naturalists, artists, and labourers in the field, both women and men, who collected specimens and observed the natural world in all its particularities. The shift from gentlemen and clerical naturalists to professional ‘scientists’, and the formation of disciplinary divisions between sciences that had formerly been included under the rubric ‘natural history’, is a nineteenth-​century product. These institutional changes saw growing interaction between scientific inquiry, government, and industry, as well as the eventual formalization of science education. The Victorian age also witnessed fundamental, but gradual, transformations of beliefs about nature and the place of human beings in the universe. At the beginning of the century, the fixity of species, rather than their evolution, was assumed; the evolution of the earth and of species was generally considered absurd and beyond the bounds of learned assumptions and discussion. And yet the beginning of the century witnessed profound technological, intellectual, social, economic, and even evidence of geological change—​all changes that challenged a vision of the world that we might call Genesis-​inspired: that the earth and its denizens had been created by God and existed in a steady and hierarchical state of stasis. Darwin’s great idea of natural selection was introduced amidst a complex landscape in which the idea of change itself was increasingly understood as possible. The seismic shift in how people saw the world as capable of and under the continuing influence of change was not the result of one text, but rather was the product of intertwined cultural processes that were social, economic, and religious. Religion played an especially important part in the unfolding story of the natural sciences in the nineteenth century. In considering the role of religious feeling and belief in Victorian science, the idea that Darwin’s ideas automatically and overwhelmingly created a modern world of disbelief is no longer a tenable narrative of the Victorian period for most historians of science and religion. The crux of the question for many individuals was where the agency for change resided: was it with a divine intelligence/​creator, God, or did nature work on its own, following its own rules and internal properties? Some believed in a complex mixture of the two possibilities, while many continued to believe that the natural world testified to a divine creator. For many nineteenth-​century naturalists and their audiences, observing nature and describing it was a reverential practice, and supportive of (though not a definitive proof of) the generally held belief that nature was God’s creation. At least up to the mid-​nineteenth century, there continued to be a broader, if fuzzier, vernacular consensus about nature as divinely created—​not proof, as natural theology would have claimed, but a belief that the wonders of nature generally suggested a divine origin.15 For many the study of nature was thus a kind of devotional exercise, rather than a definitive means to prove the existence of God. This is perhaps the key to understanding the popularity of natural science in the Victorian period; readers 15  For the richest account of this argument, see the Gifford lectures of Brooke and Cantor. John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clarke, 1996).

444    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture of natural history looked to studies of nature to reflect and perhaps affirm their hopes for the truth of the Christian narrative. As we will see, a broadened notion of natural science, one that includes the genre of natural history, will open new ways of thinking about Victorian science as literature.

Charles Darwin: On the Origin of Species and Victorian Literary Culture To narrate the century as having changed when On the Origin of Species was published—​ famously on 24 November 1859—​is to misunderstand the longer story of how evolutionary theory gradually came to be accepted in the nineteenth century by naturalists contemporary to Darwin. The contemporary context into which Darwin’s ideas came into being helps us better understand the success of his idea as well as the nature of On the Origin of Species’s central idea, which is natural selection. The argument that Darwin made entered into a context that had already considered various permutations of evolutionary theory—​theories that, for the most part, had been violently rejected in England, which was something that Darwin was conscious of as he wrote his long-​deferred central work. Darwin’s central concept—​now seemingly so obvious because of having permeated our culture so deeply—​was a theory that at its outset swam in a pool of competing and, to many, compelling ideas. It was a revolutionary idea, but, as Janet Browne, Darwin’s biographer, notes, what we now think of as the ‘Darwinian revolution’ is a retrospective assessment. Browne emphasizes the process of the transmission of texts, arguing that there was not an immediate agreement by science about natural selection’s validity.16 Darwin’s theories in On the Origin of Species produced a variety of reactions; to some they were odious, to others exciting, and to still others—​T. H. Huxley (1825–​95) reputedly among them—​they produced a retrospective sense that the ideas seemed so patently true and obvious that they themselves should have thought of them. Among Darwin’s most tenacious and articulate expositors and defenders, Huxley—​ who referred to himself as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’—​was independently an eminent biologist and the leader of a group that celebrated and forwarded evolutionary theory. Others responded differently. Adam Sedgwick (1785–​1873), known as the founder of modern geology, was an early teacher of Darwin, and later an outspoken critic of Darwin’s ideas. A  geologist of serious repute—​he proposed the Devonian and the Cambrian periods for the geological timescale—​Sedgwick wrote to Darwin in strong terms: ‘I have read your book with more pain than pleasure […] you have deserted—​after a start in the tram-​road of all solid physical truth—​the true method 16 

See Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: A Biography, i. Voyaging (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (New York: Knopf, 2002).

Victorian Natural Science and the Seashore    445 of induction.’17 Sedgwick’s invocation of pain, sorrow, laughter, grief, abandonment, and hatred as responses to Darwin’s book is suggestive of how language and emotions contributed to the debate. Sedgwick’s analytical objection—​that Darwin’s theory does not follow the inductive method—​pairs with his subjective responses. Played out in the journal The Spectator, Sedgwick’s letter—​no less than Darwin’s book—​is part of a public conversation about the gradual (by no means instantaneous) ascendancy of evolutionary thought. Darwin clearly knew that his ideas would invite controversy if not ridicule. His own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, wrote The Temple of Nature in 1803, which was a poem expressing that species change over time, and for this he was thought of as not only irreligious but also ridiculous. The proposal that species change over time was then known as ‘Transmutation’; although this may not seem a radical thought, it threatened the natural theological world-​view that underpinned the understanding of nature. Nature was understood to be unchanging, perfect, divinely created, and joyous; the idea of transmutation threatened the notion of an omniscient and beneficent creator, and indeed set in motion the idea that there might not be a creator at all. Darwin knew how his grandfather’s ideas had been received, and, like anyone else living in his moment, also knew how other theories of evolution had fared. The French naturalist Jean-​Baptiste Lamarck wrote Philosophie zoologique in 1809, showing that new species emerge as they engage with the world during their lifetime; as a result species change and then pass on these changes to their offspring. In Britain, this was roundly condemned on both scientific and religious grounds, including by the geologist Charles Lyell in Principles of Geology (1830–​3). Darwin would have been familiar with Lyell’s refutation of Lamarck because he had brought aboard and read Principles of Geology when he was a naturalist on HMS Beagle; moreover, his letters demonstrate that he not only read Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation but was also deeply interested in its reception by the British public. Scholars of Darwin have suggested that the delay in publishing Origin of Species was due in no small part to Darwin’s hesitancy to enter into the fray of controversy that these earlier articulations of transmutation had caused. Darwin did not publish Origin of Species until 1859, and then, famously, only because he learned that if he didn’t do so he would be trumped by a young naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, who had also come up with the beginnings of the idea of natural selection. (Wallace published ‘On the Law which has regulated the Introduction of new Species’ (1855) and sent Darwin a manuscript copy in 1858 of an article he intended to published entitled ‘On the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type’, which essentially outlined a theory of natural selection.) It was an example of a younger scientist almost forcing the elder’s hand, and Darwin was almost trumped.18 Indeed, even though it is Darwin who 17  Adam Sedgwick, letter to Charles Darwin, published in The Spectator (1860), as cited in David L. Hull, Darwin and His Critics: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 155–​170. 18  See Adrian Desmond and John Moore, Darwin (London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991).

446    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is credited with the idea of evolution, when the theory was first introduced to the scientific community, both men were given space to present precis of their ideas at a meeting of the Linnean Society in London in July 1858. When Darwin did finally publish the Origin of Species, he was very politic in how he presented the work to the larger scientific community, having complimentary copies sent to influential people and arranging for friends such as T. H. Huxley to review the book. It was an extraordinary idea, but it was an idea whose way had been prepared by earlier articulations of transmutationist theories and a text that was shepherded through the reception process by a careful Darwin. The idea of natural selection was articulated with rhetorical care but also extreme simplicity. As Darwin writes in the Origin, ‘this preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection’.19 The preservation to which he refers is the advantage gained by a trait that is passed on by a successful individual organism—​that is, one that has been able to survive and reproduce. Darwin was looking to answer the largest of questions about the natural world: how did all the species of plants and animals on earth come to exist? Darwin’s answer was to build a case for variation among individual organisms of a species, and then to argue for descent, with modification. His idea of the natural world acknowledged the limited supply of the world’s resources, and the reality of excess and death—​concepts that natural theology had not recognized. Tennyson’s In Memoriam notes of the natural world, ‘that of fifty seeds | She often brings but one to bear’, which leads him to ask one of the century’s most serious questions: ‘Are God and Nature then at strife, | That Nature lends such evil dreams? | So careful of the type she seems, | So careless of the single life.’20 Darwin’s idea of natural selection articulated a dynamic natural world, which did nothing less than upend our scientific understanding of living things. What was perhaps most disturbing about Darwin’s findings was the idea that the natural world was not only always changing but was also a scene of unending conflict. Whether Darwin, as some critics suggest, got this sense of the natural world from his reading of Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), or whether he simply observed it in nature, is a point of debate. What is clear is that Darwin understood the central role of conflict within the natural world, which was a departure from the natural theologies and even the transmutationist ideas that had come before it. Darwin did not triumph in this articulation of the harshness of the natural world, preferring to linger as often on its beauty and intricacy as he does on the struggle for existence. Indeed, the famous harsh phrase ‘the survival of the fittest’ was coined not by Darwin but by Herbert Spencer in his Principles of Biology (1864). In that text Spencer borrows the mechanism of natural selection in order to make connections between his economic theories and the biological ones articulated by Darwin: ‘This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. 19  Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Charles Darin: A Variorum Text, ed. Morse Peckham (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959). 20  Lord Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam, A.H.H., sect. 55, ed. Erik Gray (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).

Victorian Natural Science and the Seashore    447 Darwin has called “natural selection”, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life’.21 Darwin, in the fifth edition of Origin of Species in 1869, did appropriate Spencer’s phrase alongside his discussion of natural selection, but without the eugenic connotations that Spencer implied or with which the phrase later became associated.22 How influential was the Origin within Victorian literary culture? Influence is perhaps less calculable than publishing numbers, which tell a somewhat confusing story. As James Secord demonstrates, the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) sold far more copies when it was first published than the Origin. The Origin went through six editions, but what is important to emphasize is less the sales of the books than the dissemination of Darwin’s ideas. The dissemination and often distortion of Darwin’s ideas into the broader culture and in multiple discursive forms, and the extraordinary fascination with Darwin’s ideas, are what make the study of Darwin central to the study of Victorian literary culture. How our conception of nature, both scientific and popular, inevitably changed under the weight of the ideas articulated by Darwin began in 1859, and continues today—​as Stephen Jay Gould wrote, ‘I rather suspect that we’ll have Charles Darwin to kick around for some time.’23

The Gentlemen of Science and the Scientific Naturalists The broad cultural forces at work in mid-​century Britain around the subject of science have sometimes been reduced in error to a single showdown between Darwin’s bulldog, T. H. Huxley, and Archbishop Samuel Wilberforce. The so-​called ‘debate’ took place at Oxford in June 1860, specifically at the meeting for the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at which the two men are said to have rhetorically squared off, with Huxley famously routing the skilful Wilberforce in a match understood as one of ‘science’ versus ‘religion’. This ‘iconic story in the history of evolution and, indeed, in the history of the conflict between science and religion, second only to Galileo’s troubles with the Vatican’, as Jonathan Smith calls it, is more of a convenient narrative based on a later back-​formation than it is based on historical fact.24 That this has become the 21 

Herbert Spencer, Principles of Biology (London and Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1864), i. 444. An excellent and short discussion of Darwin’s understanding of ‘fitness’ is Stephen Jay Gould’s classic essay ‘Darwin’s Untimely Burial’: ‘Darwin’s independent criterion of fitness is, indeed, “improved design,” but not “improved” in the cosmic sense that contemporary Britain favoured. To Darwin, improved meant only “better designed for immediate, local environment.”’ Gould, ‘Darwin’s Untimely Burial’, Natural History, 85 (October 1976), 30. 23  Gould, ‘Darwin’s Untimely Burial’, 30. 24  For an excellent account of this iconic, but misguided, story, see Jonathan Smith’s excellent article in the Branch Collective. ‘The Huxley–​Wilberforce “Debate” on Evolution, 30 June 1860’, http://​www. branchcollective.org/​?ps_​articles=jonathan-​smith-​the-​huxley-​wilberforce-​debate-​on-​evolution-​30-​ june-​1860 [last accessed 15 June 2014]. 22 

448    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture story most often told in accounts about science and religion in the period is telling, for it suggests the extent to which we need to posit it as a conflict, and our (perhaps understandable) desire to reduce the broad cultural digestion of evolutionary theory to a single event. In looking at groups and texts that were not part of the scientific elite, the way we demarcate what natural science was in the first two-​thirds of the century shifts. The Oxbridge-​educated ‘gentlemen of science’ and the scientific naturalists were scientific elites, but science evolved outside of those elite sites as well. In particular, empiricist work by naturalists continued to be performed by amateurs and popularizers, as well as the so-​called gentlemen of science, each of which had natural theological justification. These kind of texts contribute to what Bernard Lightman characterizes as a ‘revised map’ of nineteenth-​century science, one that includes a broader notion of scientific community beyond authorized science. Lightman has urged scholars to think about popularizations of science as sites of knowledge in their own right; he also makes the added claims that popularizers ‘may very well have been more important than the professionals in shaping the public image of science’, and that these alternate voices offer ‘different ways of speaking about nature’ that include experimentation with narrative form.25 Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumphrey have also urged scholars to move away from the idealist and textual products of authorized science and to be more open to a greater plurality of signifiers of scientific activity, such as museums, world fairs, photography, and natural history. They additionally demonstrate the need to recognize the ‘greater plurality of sites for the making and reproduction of scientific knowledge,’ which is an argument for, among other things, a broader sense of what constituted Victorian natural science.26 By including science practised in less elite sites than that suggested by the often-​cited opposition between Huxley and Wilberforce, we can include in our discussion of Victorian literary cultures the genre of popular natural histories—​a good portion of which were written by women.27 The final section of this essay on seashore natural history models a broader sense of Victorian natural science literary culture. The more elite sites of science in early nineteenth-​century Britain were dominated by the aforementioned ‘gentlemen of science’, a group of primarily aristocratic men who were educated at Oxbridge and who identified as Anglicans.28 By the middle of the century the dominance of these Oxbridge elites was being directly attacked by a group of 25  Bernard Lightman, ‘The Voices of Nature”: Popularizing Victorian Science’ in Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context, 191. 26  Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumphrey, ‘Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture’, History of Science, 32 (1994), 237–​267, at 274. 27  Lightman’s work deals with popular science, and half of the figures he treats are neglected women naturalists involved with the making of science for general audiences. Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science, 13. 28  See Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); and Martin Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge Among Gentlemanly Specialists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

Victorian Natural Science and the Seashore    449 relative outsiders (both in terms of class and education) known as the scientific naturalists who saw themselves as upstarts and professionalizers of the discipline of science. Huxley and John Tyndall were two of these middle-​class professionalizers whose work and public personas directly challenged the dominance of the gentlemen of science. The writings and speeches of these ‘gentlemen of science’ constructed for the larger society a vision of the social order that was based on natural theology. Some of its most famous figures are the astronomer John Herschel, the geologists William Buckland and Adam Sedgwick, the astronomer Richard Owen, and William Whewell (whose achievements as a scientist, theologian, philosopher, historian of science, and priest earn him the designation of polymath). According to the work of Frank Turner and others, this hold by the gentlemen of science on the world of science continued until the mid-​century when the scientific naturalists challenged them on a number of different levels.29 What was at stake in this clash? Not least who would lead the British world of science and who would, in effect, have the cultural authority to speak on behalf of science. The conflict between the natural theological world-​view and evolutionary modes of thought was ongoing, and rarely as clear as we might like to believe. What is clear is the importance of these ideas, for evolutionary modes of thought were inextricably linked to culture as well as science, with evolutionary paradigms providing a model for changing understanding about the social order. If the natural order of things provided a model for change and evolution, rather than a natural order dictated by God, then why couldn’t society and class be construed as not fixed and permanent but rather subject to evolution and change? The scientific naturalists were made up of those who became known as members of the ‘X-​Club’, and the other scientists who, though not formally members, shared their aims. The X-​Club, a group founded in 1864, was a private and informal dinner society of nine men that met to exchange ideas—​not only about science, but also about politics and literature. As Joseph Hooker wrote, the purpose of the group was ‘devotion to science, pure and free, untrammeled by religious dogma’.30 Middle-​class professionals—​the scientific naturalists—​overtly challenged the social and intellectual hegemony of the gentlemen of science. In particular, they focused on theorizing and performing empirical science, especially evolutionary science; they were ‘naturalistic’ because their explanations allowed for nothing that was not empirically verifiable or observable in nature. X-​Club members included the aforementioned Huxley (biology) and Tyndall (physics), Herbert Spencer (philosopher of evolution), John Lubbock (anthropology), Edward Frankland (chemistry), Willaim Spotiswoode and Thomas Hirst (mathematics), Joseph Hooker (botany), and George Busk (paleontology and zoology). The second group of scientists were not members but became associated with the scientific naturalists, including Charles Darwin, William Clifford 29  Frank Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 30  Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter 4807, Hooker, J. D. to Darwin, C. R. (7–​8 April 1865), http://​www.darwinproject.ac.uk/​entry-​4807 [last accessed 12 August 2014].

450    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture (mathematics), Francis Galton (eugenics), Henry Maudsley (medicine), and Karl Pearson (statistics). Other figures that were instrumental in the dissemination of the ideas of the scientific naturalists include G. H. Lewes, Leslie Stephen, Grant Allen, and Edward Clodd. The new scientific naturalists sought to wrest control of the discipline from the entrenched scientific leadership, and one way they did this was to make strong distinctions between amateurs and professionals. This was a contest for cultural authority, but it was also a contest of ideas: the scientific naturalists’ vision for British science and culture was decidedly more secular and middle class, a vision that embraced the idea of an independent mode of empirical inquiry that was divorced from religion. In so doing, the scientific naturalists—​both in their public advocacy and in the work itself—​argued for a split between theological and scientific explanations of the natural world. However, the irony is that in making inroads on the entrenched powers within the university system, the scientific naturalists made increasingly marginal many of the amateur (sometimes working-​class, often women) inquirers into nature who had contributed to the broad scientific enterprise in the first half of the century, when interest in the natural world was general in Victorian culture. Nevertheless, despite the drumbeat of professionalization, many Victorians continued to take up the banner of scientific observation, whether that meant exploring a tide-​pool, searching for ferns, or examining a sea-​slug under a microscope.

New Directions in Victorian Literary Cultures of Science: The Seashore Natural History Bernard Lightman contends that ‘popular culture can actively produce its own indigenous science’.31 What does the indigenous science produced by popular culture of the Victorian period look like? Here I will focus on seashore natural histories, a genre that was particularly popular and which, like most natural history genres, was performed by and written about by a wide variety of inquirers. Many of the seashore natural histories were infused with religious feeling, including orthodox naturalists such as Philip Henry Gosse and heterodox thinkers such as George Henry Lewes. That these scientific texts merit literary analysis is in no small part due to the form in which they were written: they are not taxonomic lists, nor dry litanies, but often narratives in which deep description is embedded within a broader narrative. Moreover, they reflect a natural theological sensibility that treads heavily in the mode of wonder, which is as much the realm of the literary as the empirical world.

31 

Lightman, ‘The “Voices of Nature’, 189.

Victorian Natural Science and the Seashore    451 Many of these natural histories were concerned with British nature, rather than the nature found beyond British shores. Many of these natural histories focused on common objects to be found in tide-​pool, field, or ditch—​the rare object, although occasionally engaged, was generally not the focus of natural histories centred in English locales (unlike the macro-​natural histories of naturalists abroad). British natural history from the first half of the century was not all about the Galapagos tortoise or other such previously unknown species, but focused also on Britain’s own tide-​pools, hedges, and fields, claiming that these quotidian and familiar places contained more than enough of interest if one looked closely enough. The difference in subject matter and scale between what Alan Bewell calls ‘colonial natural history’32 and natural histories done within the shores of Britain—​what I term native natural history—​is brought out in this teasing letter from Charles Darwin to his friend and cousin William Darwin Fox, written just after he leaves on his Beagle voyage: when you are picking insects off a hawthorn hedge on a fine May day (wretchedly cold I have no doubt) think of me collecting amongst pineapples & orange trees; whilst staining your fingers with dirty blackberries, think & be envious of ripe oranges.—​This is a proper piece of Bravado, for I would walk through many a mile of sleet, snow or rain to shake you by the hand, My dear old Fox. God Bless you.33

Fox’s reply seems to affirm cheerfully, if self-​mockingly, the difference evident in their naturalist endeavours: I have been more or less invalided […] and have amused myself in sauntering about the fields on horseback studying the small summer birds of passage, their nidification &c, and when thus employed the thoughts of you and your occupation most forcibly & frequently struck me. I pottering in a Hedge Rows to watch the proceedings of a Whitethroat & you surrounded by the Noble Trees of a S. American Forest with every luxury of vegetation & life around you—​34

The opposition that Fox and Darwin draw is obviously somewhat fatuous, and surely tongue in cheek; Darwin paid extraordinary close attention to local ecologies when he was employed as a naturalist on the Beagle voyage—​think of his work on finches on the Galapagos Islands —​not unlike the way that Fox is describing his study of migrating birds near his parish home. But Fox’s general point that Darwin was engaged in a much larger and exotic naturalist project than his own parish-​based naturalizing is not

32  Alan Bewell, ‘Romanticism and Colonial Natural History’, Studies in Romanticism, 43 (Spring 2004), 5–​34. 33  Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter 168, Darwin, C. R. to Fox, W. D. (May [1832]), http://​www. darwinproject.ac.uk/​entry-​168 [last accessed 12 August 2014]. 34  Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter 175, Fox, W. D. to Darwin, C. R. (30 June 1832), http://​www. darwinproject.ac.uk/​entry-​175 [last accessed 12 August 2014].

452    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture without some truth. The humour is based on the caricatures the two knowingly drawn upon—​Darwin the intrepid naturalist explorer in the spirit of Joseph Banks, Fox the pokey parson-​naturalist in the tradition of Gilbert White. The fact is that natural history was performed in many sites, and even Darwin’s own biography suggests the rich possibilities open to nineteenth-​century inquirers into nature. Much of Darwin’s great work was done at home in his study and garden, and in a spirit very much in accord with a love for quotidian nature. In unpacking the broader body of work of natural history from the period we get a richer and broader sense of what constituted science, as well as a more complicated sense of the persistence of religiosity in much nineteenth-​century natural science. Although Darwin’s ideas reverberated throughout much of the nineteenth century, the study of the natural world through a natural theological lens continued at least until the 1870s.35 This may seem surprising, for we have been long accustomed to the descriptions of the Victorian period as one in which religious belief entered a steady period of decline. According to this entrenched narrative, these nineteenth-​century secularizing forces—​first and foremost those scientific discoveries such as the geological age of the earth and Darwin’s thoughts on the origin of species—​are said to have dealt mainstream Christian belief in England a body blow, and religious faith began to wither away. This is known as the ‘secularization thesis’, and it has been increasingly questioned by philosophers and historians of religion for the way that it understands and narrates religious belief.36 In fact, Victorian culture is now recognized as a culture that was persistently religious (and specifically Christian) through much of the century.37 In literary studies the ‘decline of faith’ narrative has had long purchase, especially in the way in which we unwisely have let a few individual (if famous) authors speak generally for their cultural moment. For instance, Matthew Arnold’s famous lyric of disbelief, ‘Dover Beach’ (1867), has been made representative of the effect of Darwin’s ideas on religious faith: The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

35  John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, in their expanded Gifford lectures in Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion, show how natural theology persists in altered form until at least the middle of the nineteenth century. Lightman in Victorian Popularizers of Science sees evidence of the theology of nature up to the 1870s. 36  See especially Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). 37  See Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–​2000 (London: Routledge, 2001). Brown argues that secularization has not been a gradual process that began with the Industrial Revolution, but rather one that was much more abrupt and occurred in the mid-​ twentieth century.

Victorian Natural Science and the Seashore    453 Retreating, to the breath Of the night-​wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.38

But if we look at other texts about the beach or seashore from the exact same time period, we get a different sense of the role of religion in Victorian culture, and, more specifically, popular scientific inquiry. ‘Dover Beach’, published in 1867, was composed in 1851; as we will see, the 1850s was a time when narratives of seashore natural history were particularly popular among the Victorians. J. G. Wood’s Common Objects of the Seashore (1857), Anne Pratt’s Chapters on the Common Things of the Sea-​Side (1850), and W. H. Harvey’s The Sea-​Side Book; Being an Introduction to the Natural History of the British Coasts (1849) are but three examples of exceptionally popular texts about the seashore—​ and though they do not have the poetic force of Arnold’s gorgeous lyric, in them we see an alternative Victorian conception of nature and religion. In this subgenre of natural history the seashore become an object of scientific observation as well as one for religious contemplation. Combined in these narratives is a language that is both scientific and reverent. Faith, far from becoming ‘long withdrawing roar/​retreating’, is central to most seashore natural histories, which were both empiricist observational projects and testimonies to the divine. In other words, natural history continued to be informed by the natural theological idea that to observe the natural world, especially its most humble details, is to see the fact of God inscribed. This was not a Paleyan natural theology, which argued that demonstrative proof of God’s existence could be achieved by studying nature, but rather what John Brooke calls a ‘theology of nature’.39 This, what Jonathan Topham more recently has referred to as a ‘discourse of design’, reflects an understanding of nature not as rigidly demonstrative of God’s existence but rather as suggestive of what the viewer already knew to be true from Revelation.40 This broad vernacular consensus of nature as divinely created persisted until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Nature was generally no longer considered proof, as natural theology would have claimed, of God, but the wonder of nature continued to suggest or even express a divine origin: a state in which, as Aileen Fyfe describes it, ‘close links between religion and the investigation of nature remained almost universal in Britain until the middle of the nineteenth century, and for some individuals, for even longer’.41 In light of this shift, we might understand these natural

38 

Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’, ll. 21–​8, in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, 1840–​1867 (London: Oxford University Press, 1909), 401. 39  John Brooke, ‘Natural Theology in Britain from Boyle to Paley’, in John Brooke, R. Hooykaas, and Clive Lawless (eds), New Interactions between Theology and Natural Science (Milton Keynes: Open University Press), 8–​54. 40  Jonathan Topham, ‘Science, Natural Theology, and the Practice of Christian Piety in Early Nineteenth-​ Century Religious Magazines’, in Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-​Century Periodicals (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 37–​66. 41  Aileen Fyfe, Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

454    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture histories as a practice of reverence rather than a means to achieving a philosophical proof of God’s existence. Why the seashore? Some seashore natural history texts had ambitions to be pedagogically illuminating about the nature they describe, while others tended towards a kind of descriptive lyricism. And yet if the reader of mid-​century seashore natural history expects mostly taxonomic lists she will be disappointed, for many of the popular seashore books, even if written with the goal to educate, understand that they must first amuse. That the seashore captured the imaginations of Victorians of the 1850s has been well established.42 Seaside holidays in the early nineteenth century began as health cures, with sea water for bathing and drinking being the primary attraction; in the first decades of the nineteenth century Lyme Regis became a tourist attraction because of the fossils in its cliffs, including those of the newly discovered ichthyosaur skeleton by the working-​class fossil hunter Mary Anning. By the 1850s what I refer to earlier as ‘native natural history’ was often represented by an unusually specific version of itself: the seashore study.43 For the increasing numbers of middle-​class visitors travelling on holiday to Devonshire, natural history was a rational recreation, one which was understood to be both morally and intellectually uplifting. This did not disappear with either the increasing awareness of the developmental hypothesis in the 1850s or the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859; in fact, the popularity of Gosse’s books about seashore naturalizing actually increased in the mid-​Victorian moment, with his best-​selling book The Romance of Natural History (1860) going through numerous editions. One subgenre of the kind of natural history discussed in this chapter is about seaweeds, and the other is self-​declaredly about ‘common objects’ of the seashore, but they are both part of the larger genre of seaside studies, a term which George Henry Lewes cunningly appropriates for his own work Sea-​Side Studies (1858).44 ‘Seaside’ or ‘seashore’ natural history became a phenomenon in the 1840s and 1850s, owing in no small part, social historians have argued, to the contemporaneous development of the railway and the increase in leisure time. This resulted in large increases in seaside visits by a broad demographic of the British public. Seashore natural history was performed with an especial authority and depth by Philip Henry Gosse, the author of numerous works of popular as well as professional books on the subject. In his own historical moment, Gosse—​whose reputation was skewed in no small measure by his son Edmund Gosse’s appraisal in Father and Son (1907)—​was a well-​known and respected naturalist, as well as the popularizer of the saltwater aquarium. He is most known for his seaside trilogy: A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast (1853), The Aquarium (1854), and Tenby: A Sea-​Side Holiday (1856). 42  See, Allen, The Naturalist In Britain; Lynn Merrill, The Romance of Victorian Natural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Barbara T. Gates, Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Lynn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, 1820–​1870 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980). 43  See Jonathan Smith, ‘Darwin’s Barnacles’, in his excellent Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture, 44–​91. Smith reads Darwin’s monograph on barnacles in the context of the broader popular interest in seaside natural history during the 1850s, paying particular attention to Gosse’s seaside studies. 44  The full title was Sea-​Side Studies at Ilfracombe, Tenby, Scilly Isles & Jersey (London: Blackwoods, 1858).

Victorian Natural Science and the Seashore    455 The seashore study genre, in various ways, seems to combine a language of wonder and reverence with the common natural objects of the shoreline, describing these quotidian subjects in their restricted locale and in so doing creating expansive, dilating narratives. In Gosse’s seashore natural historiesthe observation of ever more detailed and commonplace natural objects is an essential element of both his naturalist and theological projects. For example, he describes a particular pool inside the caverns of St Catherine’s: All round the margins and smooth sides of the pool, under water, grow numerous and fine specimens of the Stag’s horn Sponge-​polype (Alcyonidim hirsutum). These are so characteristic of the pool (scarcely another object of any kind being found there, no seaweeds, nor even a zoophyte, or scarcely one), and so remarkable, as at once to claim attention.45

No particularly rare seashore creature or plant is discovered—​indeed, they all seem quite common—​and yet the narrative gives just as much energy to the representation of these wonders. In fact, the text goes on to amass detail for detail’s sake, a process that feels textually not futile or self-​indulgent, but reverent in a theological sense, as well as procedurally rigorous in a scientific sense. Just as the prestige of the detail in natural history comes from believing that every manifestation of life, however humble, demands not only attention but reverence (for the fact that it was created by God), the prestige of the detail in literary realism comes from an ethical impetus to capture the truth of the everyday and commonplace. The twinned reverence for minute details and the commonplace suggests a possible textual network between the period’s natural history and British realism. Many of the seashore natural histories of the 1850s are infused with religiosity; Pratt in Chapters on the Common Things of the Sea-​Side rather matter-​of-​factly says ‘we speak of the uses of sea-​weeds, and the God who has give to man, the sea and all that therein is’, and refers to grasses ‘which seem, in an especial manner, to have been given by the great Creator to our shores for the purpose of holding them down’.46 Empirical observations dilate endlessly on (what they understood to be) the wonder of God’s creation. Chapter after chapter of sometimes breathless empirical observation of these wonders are yoked to Christian rhetoric. A particularly vivid example of this rhetoric can be taken from Charles Kingsley’s Glaucus: The Wonders of the Shore (1855), an encomium if ever there was one to seashore natural history and its Christian purpose: This great and yet most blessed paradox of the Changeless God […] is revealed no less by nature than by Scripture [… .] Why speak of the God of nature and the God of grace as two antithetical terms? [… . I]f (as we all confess) the universe bears the impress of His signet, we have no right, in the present infantile state of science, to put arbitrary limits of our own to the revelation which he may have thought good to make of Himself in nature.47 45 

Philip Henry Gosse, Tenby: A Sea-​Side Holiday (London: John Van Voorst, 1856), 25. Anne Pratt, Chapters on the Common Things of the Sea-​Side (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1850), 92, 31. 47  Charles Kingsley, Glaucus: The Wonders of the Shore (London: MacMillan and Co., 1855), 87. 46 

456    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Kingsley suggests that scientists who are also Christians are so aware of the pitfalls of natural theological argument that they treat revelation (the ‘God of grace’) and induction (the ‘God of nature’) as antithetical. The ‘Changeless God’, Kingsley argues, ‘is revealed no less by nature than by Scripture’: these are strong words in favour of the theological importance of natural histories. The genre of seashore natural histories is varied, with some more suited to a broader audience and others that work to establish their authority in the subject matter. As a whole, the genre movingly and convincingly seeks to depict a natural world, which it hopes will in turn induce reverence in the reader and viewer of nature. Although some of these texts are manuals, many of them are considerably more literary—​their mimetic style makes for compelling armchair reading, narrative substitutes for the actual experience of naturalizing. That is, they are convincing fictions, fully drawn through the realist habits of detailed description, and often rendered in a first-​person narrative or an older epistolary format. The reader is situated with the observing narrator; just as the reader descends with the narrator into Paris at the start of Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, or as the reader enters Hayslope in Eliot’s Adam Bede alongside the traveller on horseback, one could be in the carriage with Gosse when he describes his first afternoon in A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast: It was on the first afternoon, that is to say, on the 30th of January, 1852, that I set forth to see what promise the shore might afford. A zigzag road, such as a carriage can traverse, leads down the steep from Babbicombe to the beach below. The beautiful coast stretches away before us.48

Gosse dramatizes himself in the narrative, so no distinction is necessary between author and implied author, but his guiding personality is understood to be authentic rather than fictional. Although one might expect this to be the key difference between a literary realist such as Eliot and a natural historian such as Gosse, there is surprising little difference in this respect in the two kinds of narratorial voices. That Gosse and other naturalists like him draw attention to their goal of inducing reverence with occasional meta-​references to this effect does not actively undermine the reality effect any more than the occasional direct addresses to the reader made by George Eliot. One of the most striking features about the subgenre of seashore natural histories is the valorization of commonness or the quotidian in what is being observed and narrated. Surely one might have instead expected celebratory narratives of the rare or exceptional. Instead what we find within seashore natural histories is evidence of some of the larger ideas about religion and science in the mid-​Victorian context. Their thematic preoccupation with the quotidian common object speaks to a Creator who cares about common (and often small) natural objects, and not just rare (or large) parts of nature. The quotidian subject matter robustly demonstrates the persistent theology of 48 

Philip Henry Gosse, A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast (London: John Van Voorst, 1853), 5.

Victorian Natural Science and the Seashore    457 nature in the early Victorian moment. Sophisticated and indeed often aesthetically beautiful literary practices in their own right, seashore natural histories formed a part of a complex Victorian network of the putatively scientific and putatively literary, both of which demand to be read not simply as influences on each other but as part of a complex inter-​textual network of the theological, scientific, and literary.

Select Bibliography Allen, David Elliston, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (1976; 2nd edn., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Beer, Gillian, Darwin’s Plots:  Evolutionary Narrative in Charles Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-​Century Fiction (1983; 3rd edn., Cambridge University Press, 2009). Brooke, John, and Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstructing Nature:  The Engagement of Science and Religion (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clarke, 1996). Cooter, Roger, and Stephen Pumphrey, ‘Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture’, History of Science, 32 (1994), 237–​267. Dawson, Gowan, Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2007). Lightman, Bernard, Victorian Popularizers of Science:  Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Lightman, Bernard (ed.), Victorian Science in Context (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1997). Morrell, Jack, and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). Secord, James, Victorian Sensation:  The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Smith, Jonathan, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Chapter 24

‘You’ve Got  Ma i l ’  Technologies of Communication in Victorian Literature Elizabeth Meadows and Jay Clayton

The letter box was the first visible and public sign of the age of modern communications.1

The letter box and its close relation the pillar box are rather low-​tech harbingers of our modern era of communications, which is now characterized by the promise of instantaneous transmission of information to any corner of the globe. Yet these unassuming structures were but the limbs and outward flourishes of a sophisticated communications network undergirded by the technological and industrial transformations that marked the Victorian period. Sir Rowland Hill’s Uniform Penny Post revolutionized the postal system upon its introduction in 1840, and Hill’s reformed system of postage depended upon a series of innovations both procedural and technological. The rapid and reliable collection, sorting, and delivery of the mail within and between the cities and countryside of nineteenth-​century Britain were facilitated by complex interactions of railways, telegraphs, and rationalized postal procedures. Anthony Trollope, novelist and postal worker, played a major part in extending the reach of this Victorian communications network: in the course of his work for the Post Office, he suggested the adoption of the pillar box—​the free-​standing receptacle for the collection of letters that became nearly ubiquitous in the urban landscape.2 While the letter box attached to a private residence indicated that its inhabitants were connected to the world through the mail, the pillar box provided a multitude of anonymous entry points where mobile users could access 1 

Anthony Michael Benn, ‘Preface’, in Jean Young Farrugia, The Letter Box: A History of Post Office Pillar and Wall Boxes (London: Centaur Press, 1969), pp. xiii–​xiv, at p. xiii. 2  Sir Rowland Hill, W. I. Charlton, and Charles Reeve all made similar proposals for free-​standing letter boxes, yet Trollope’s was apparently the one the General Post Office finally acted on. Farrugia, Letter Box, 120–​2.

Technologies of Communication in Victorian Literature    459 the postal network that blanketed the country. Although the pillar box provided access to a technologically advanced communications network, its immobility and simplicity effaced its technological nature. Similarly, Trollope’s Barsetshire novels attest to the efficiency and scope of the extended networks he helped create, even as they elide the presence of technological innovations through their lack of overtly mechanical themes and images. Until recently, Trollope generally flew below the radar in assessments of technology and its impact on Victorian literary culture, perhaps because many of his novels ignore the cotton mills, coal smoke, and industrial upheaval that are the focus of Condition-​ of-​England novels by Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, and Elizabeth Gaskell.3 But the growth of critical interest in the British postal system in tandem with the railway system as modern communications networks has brought to the fore Trollope’s importance in the nineteenth-​century communications revolution. Networks for transportation and financial speculation play major roles in Trollope’s later novels such as The Prime Minister (1875–​6), in which the anti-​hero Ferdinand Lopez is violently obliterated by a train at Tenways Junction, and The Way We Live Now (1874–​5), which uses the railway boom to depict the rise of dangerous stock market speculation. In contrast, the Barsetshire novels seem to inhabit an imaginary landscape unmarked by technology. But even there, crucial plot elements often turn upon the railways, postal services, and the telegraph. For example, The Small House at Allington (1862–​4) features a railway journey that is memorable not because of any unsettling experience or event but because the trip opens out a space for unconscious reflection. The everyday nature of the communication and transportation technology depicted in The Small House at Allington reveals that such innovations can foster moments of deep interiority and generate narrative structures that link characters and novels to each other in complex webs mimicking Victorian Britain’s network of rails, wires, and postal routes. Trollope’s novel challenges the long-​standing assumption that industrial technologies necessarily threaten individuality, interiority, and complex aesthetic representation. And he is not alone in dramatizing the positive side of Victorian technology. Writers as diverse as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon looked beyond the dehumanizing aspects of technology to register productive modes of experience that were enabled by modern communication and transportation. In recent years there has been increasing critical interest in considering ways in which Victorian technology was perceived as generative rather than merely dehumanizing. A strong motivating force behind this shift in critical perspective has been an understanding of machines and communication technologies as nodes in larger networks of

3  The subgenre of the Condition-​of-​England novel, also known as the industrial novel or the social-​problem novel, rose to prominence in the mid-​to-​late 1840s with the publication of Disraeli’s Sybil; or, The Two Nations (1845) and Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848); later examples of the genre include Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), Gaskell’s North and South (1855), and George Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical (1866). Although these novels deal with the disruptive effects of industrialization, they all tend to avoid portraying the details of mechanized industrial labour.

460    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture human relationships. The human–​machine ensemble is increasingly being recognized as a powerful generative trope for the Victorians, a metaphor that both figures and enables new forms of consciousness. In this chapter we trace this new approach to technology through the work of a number of recent critics, then turn to Trollope to demonstrate how Victorian novelists sometimes viewed human–​machine interactions as productive of individual independence, psychic depth, and literary value.

A Generative Technological Imaginary In The Lives of Machines, Tamara Ketabgian labels the oppositional understanding of the relationship between humans and machines ‘technophobic’, and she maintains that the view of machinery promulgated by Victorian sages like Carlyle and Ruskin and social theorists like Arnold and Marx has dominated scholarship on machinery and industrialization in Victorian literature and culture, ‘serv[ing] as a stick with which to beat industrial fictions as a whole’.4 This critical view of technology has even greater scope than Ketabgian allows; as we will see, its startling flexibility is demonstrated by its application to both Trollope’s character-​driven realism and its generic opposite, the incident-​ driven plot of sensation, not to mention the social problem novels that dealt specifically with industrial technologies and their impact on social and affective forms. Ketabgian participates in a growing counter-​tradition that challenges the ‘anti-​ industrial story [that] has thrived under the auspices of Leavis, Williams, and later Marxist and New Historicist accounts of culture’.5 In recent years Lisa Gitelman (1999), Laura Otis (2001), Jay Clayton (2003), Nicholas Daly (2004), Richard Menke (2008), Jill Galvan (2010), Mark Goble (2010), Jonathan H. Grossman (2012), and Alison Byerly (2013) have mapped a generative technological imaginary pervading Victorian literature, providing authors with powerful tropes of psychological depth and interiority that anticipate postmodern understandings of intersubjectivity. Ironically, we can trace the emergence of this positive technological imaginary in critical approaches to the ‘mechanical’ genre of the sensation novel, which itself was inextricably associated with the shocks of modernity and technological change. In Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–​2000, Daly argues that the sensation novel trains its readers, using plot devices related to the railway and the ‘telegraph and the cheap postal system, the principal elements of the communications revolution that accompanied the railways’, to generate a repeated rhythm of suspense and shock that ‘synchronizes its readers with industrial modernity’.6 Thus the mechanical genre of the sensation novel interacts with 4 

Tamara Ketabgian, The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 7–​8. 5 Ketabgian, Lives of Machines, 8. 6  Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–​2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 47, 37.

Technologies of Communication in Victorian Literature    461 the human organism’s sensory apparatus, creating the potential not only for the human worker’s degeneration into ‘appendages’ of ‘mechanism’ that Marx decries in Capital (1867), but also for modern subjects transformed through a host of novel sensations and perceptions engendered by modernity.7 Daly’s reading of the cultural function of sensation novels has roots in the nineteenth century. While the Victorian critique of technology, especially industrial technology, relied on the opposition between the human and the mechanical, the fertile possibilities of the intersection of humans and the technologies of communication and transportation that extend their reach also occupied the nineteenth-​century cultural imagination. In the same year as The Small House was published, Charles Baudelaire imagined how living in a modern city reshaped and altered human perception and desires. In ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863), he praised the aesthetic perception created by the demands of living in rationalized, industrialized, post-​Haussmann Paris, calling for artists with the flâneur’s sensitivity to ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent’ elements of modernity.8 But according to Georg Simmel’s highly influential essay, ‘The Metropolis and Modern Life’ (1903), the ‘stimuli’ of the city are so overwhelming in their multiplicity and variety, that in order to deal with them the urban dweller ‘develops an organ protecting him against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his external environment which would uproot him’.9 Although this contradicts Baudelaire’s claims about the enhanced sensitivity of the modern city dweller, Simmel further argues that to preserve identity from the ‘atrophy of individual culture’ attendant on functioning as a ‘cog in an enormous organization’, the subject cultivates a ‘uniqueness and particularization’ and ‘exaggerates this personal element in order to remain audible even to himself ’.10 Incorporating Marx’s critique of the mechanization of modern life, Simmel posits that such mechanization paradoxically generates—​ indeed necessitates—​a form of metropolitan monstrosity, in which the hypertrophy of individual traits serves to demonstrate or perform (to oneself as much as others) an individuality that transcends one’s role in the machine. To preserve one’s ‘most personal core’, one must distil it into a few traits that one mobilizes publicly as an identity. The city, transected by modern transportation and communication networks, becomes the site of the conflict between a principle of general humanity and one of individual ‘uniqueness and irreplaceability’, and Simmel claims that ‘It is the function of the metropolis to provide the arena for this struggle and its reconciliation’—​a reconciliation at whose shape Simmel does not even hint.11 The critical consensus that the conflict between these two principles is the central problematic of Victorian realist 7 

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 1867, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 548. 8  Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863), in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1965), 1–​40, at 13. 9  Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in Simmel on Culture, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London; Sage, 1997), 174–​85, at 176. 10  Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, 184. 11  Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, 185.

462    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture fiction might suggest that, while the city provides the site for the struggle, the Victorian novel is the locus of its reconciliation.12 Critical perspectives on the transformations of perception attendant on industrial modernity and technology oscillate between positive and negative poles. In Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary’s analysis of the disciplinary functions of emerging technologies of spectatorship, we see the ‘technophobic’ bent of critical analyses of the intersection of bodies and machines, while his following book, Suspensions of Perception, complicates this position by demonstrating that industrialized modes of consciousness can transcend their mechanical origins and transform into reverie and daydream.13 To some degree, the disjunction between positive and negative perspectives maps onto different types of technologies. While the steam engine that powered industrial production and transportation—​ the factory loom and the railway—​is portrayed as threatening the autonomy, interiority, and occasionally the bodily integrity of the individual, new technologies of communication instead enhance the reach of—​or at least transform—​individual consciousness. Friedrich Kittler’s insights into how new technologies of communication create ‘discourse networks’ that shape the representation and consciousness of the subject have become axiomatic for writers like Lisa Gitelman, who writes of the phonograph, gramophone, and the typewriter that ‘new inscriptions signal new subjectivities’.14 What media studies have brought to critical understandings of the relationship between human and machine is a crucial shift from thinking of people in industrialized modernity as cogs in a machine to nodes in a network. Ketabgian’s study of the machine as trope in Victorian literature is distinctive in that she convincingly demonstrates that forms of technology not usually associated with the communications ensemble can also ‘signal new subjectivities’.15 Through readings of non-​fiction about the factory and its machines and novels by Dickens, Gaskell, and Eliot, Ketabgian demonstrates that the industrial union of humans and machines worked to endow machines with emotion and humans with mechanistic qualities of emotion. Thus the common opposition between the mechanical and the human dissolves in Victorian discourses about the machine and the humans who operate them. In the technological imaginary Ketabgian charts, the machine becomes not antithetical to but a figure for psychological depth, while the energies that drive the machine become an intersubjective force ‘anticipating the non-​subjective nature of postmodern affect’.16 12  See Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); George Levine, Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Carolyn Williams, ‘Moving Pictures: George Eliot and Melodrama’, in Lauren Berlant (ed.), Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 105–​44; Rebecca N. Mitchell, Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011). 13  Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990); Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). 14  Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 11. Although Gitelman focuses on the impact of these new media in America, her insights also apply to the network of new communications technologies in Victorian Britain. 15 Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines, 11. 16 Ketabgian, Lives of Machines, 142.

Technologies of Communication in Victorian Literature    463

Trollope’s ‘Postal Network’ and Literary Realism Both Trollope’s postal career and his literary work focus on creating connections among people and places to facilitate interchanges of affect and information. He started working for the Post Office in 1834 and seemed poorly qualified for advancement until appointed to a post in Ireland in 1841. Once there, he became a reliable and skilful civil servant, got married, and began to write novels. The turning point in his literary career followed in 1851, when Trollope took on what he describes in his Autobiography (1883) as ‘a special job of official work’ that entailed exploring ‘every nook’ of the south-​western counties of England and Wales with the ‘object [… of creating] a postal net-​work which should catch all recipients of letters’; The Warden (1855), conceived and written while Trollope worked to ‘create [this] postal net-​work’, became Trollope’s first literary success.17 In order to realize his ‘ambition […] to cover the country with rural Letter Carriers’, Trollope needed to investigate the countryside ‘with a minuteness which few have enjoyed’, and he did so by exploring on horseback, leaving roads and crossing fields to find remote addresses and chart their distances from a postal hub (Autobiography, 61). While the image of trotting from one farm to another along hedgerows and across fields partakes of the pastoral, it was part of a survey designed to provide the population of the counties least associated with industrialization and mechanization with access to a highly rationalized and technologically advanced system that united new communications technologies to a steam-​driven transportation network. Trollope’s completion of his postal survey, coinciding with his successful proposal of the pillar box, led to a promotion that entailed many hours of travelling by train. In order to maintain his novel-​writing schedule, Trollope devised what he called a ‘tablet’ that would allow him to write while riding the rails. Barchester Towers (1857), Trollope tells us, was the product of this intersection of his literary and civil service work: My time was greatly occupied in travelling [… .] But if I intended to make a profitable business out of my writing, and at the same time do my best for the Post Office, I must turn these hours to more account [… .] I made for myself therefore a tablet and found after a few days’ exercise that I could write as quickly in a railway carriage as I could at my desk [… .] In this way was composed the greater part of Barchester Towers and of the novel which succeeded it, and much also of the others subsequent to them. (Autobiography, 69–​70)

Like the ubiquitous iPads and laptops of the twenty-​first century, Trollope’s writing tablet enabled him to optimize his time, converting into productive time for the ‘profitable 17 

Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (London: Penguin, 1996), 60–​1. Further references are to this edition and will appear in the text.

464    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture business’ of authorship the enforced passivity that led John Ruskin to compare train travel to being sent ‘like a parcel’.18 Trollope’s rural survey was one result of the larger system of postal reforms initiated by Sir Rowland Hill with his 1837 pamphlet Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability. Before Hill’s reforms, the recipient rather than the sender of a letter paid for its delivery according to an arcane pricing structure in which postage varied by the distance the letter had travelled (rather than the distance between the origin and destination) and the number of sheets of paper included (rather than the weight of the letter). Understandably enough, relatively few people used this expensive and inconvenient system. Those who did use it frequently gamed the system by encoding messages in the address, so that the recipient could garner the message from the outside of the letter and then refuse delivery (and payment). Hill’s Uniform Penny Post, introduced in 1840, revolutionized the mail by rationalizing the pricing structure so that all letters up to a half-​ounce in weight could be sent prepaid for a penny, standardizing addresses, and instituting procedures for handling letters efficiently. The cheap cost of transporting letters from one end of the country to another that made Hill’s Penny Post possible was a result of the increasing efficiency that the railway brought to transport networks and that the electric telegraph brought to the railways.19 At one end, the national Penny Post was linked to the steam engine—​the machine essential to the transformation of industrial production in the early Victorian period—​but also to the electric telegraph, the new technology of communication that would eventually disarticulate communication from transportation. At the other end, the postal service still required the old-​fashioned horse-​or foot-​post from the local post office to each address, whether rural or urban. Hill’s Uniform Penny Post melded low and high technology in creating the ‘postal network that would catch all recipients of letters’. A nexus where industrial technology, communications media, and the old-​fashioned face-​to-​face interaction overlap, the Victorian Penny Post has drawn a great deal of attention since its inception. In the first issue of Household Words, Dickens published a paean to the post, ‘Valentine’s Day at the Post Office’, which tracks the progress of three differently coloured envelopes through the sorting and dispatching system of one of London’s central post offices.20 More recently, critics have explored the ways in which the postal network resembles or anticipates our own communications and information networks. Clayton offers Dickens’s article on the post as an example of the ‘often hidden connections 18 

John Ruskin, Modern Painters (1843–​60), 5 vols. (London: George Allen, 1897), iii. 311. It would be a mistake to assume that either transport or communication networks were primitive before the advent of the railways or the Penny Post. There were numerous mail deliveries every day in London; today’s snail mail pales in comparison. As for transport networks, Richard Grossman argues that the stagecoach constituted a system of rapid public transportation that pre-​dated and facilitated the emergence of the web of railways in the 1840s. The technological improvements in communications networks put science and innovation in the service of an already-​existing networked cultural imaginary. 20  Charles Dickens, ‘Valentine’s Day at the Post-​Office’, in Charles Dickens’ Uncollected Writings from ‘Household Words’ 1850–​1859, ed. Harry Stone, 2 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), i. 69–​84. 19 

Technologies of Communication in Victorian Literature    465 between the nineteenth-​century and today’, noting that Dickens ‘marvels’ at the scope and efficiency of the system in terms that enable us to read the ‘postal network’ of Trollope’s ambitions as ‘cyberspace, nineteenth-​century style’, sorting and directing a never-​ending flow of written communication into discrete units of information.21 Although Clayton explicitly disavows the linear and ‘causal relation of organic growth that structures most history’, Catherine J. Golden is less hesitant to see direct connections between the huge success of the Penny Post and ‘our current love affair with innovative information technology’.22 Kate Thomas also invokes the hyperconnectivity of today’s computer-​mediated communications, arguing that, through its creation of ‘virtual associations’, the postal network ‘construes all subjects as thoroughly intermediated and transactional, and thus potentially queer [… . T]ogether the post and queer subjectivity forgo identity for interaction’.23 In Telegraphic Realism, Menke argues that new media for the transmission of written communication, including the electric telegraph and wireless telegraphy as well as the Penny Post, not only become thematically important in Victorian fiction, but also fostered an understanding of ‘nineteenth-​century realism as part of a world of new media and industrialized information’. As Menke notes, Hill’s postal reforms were an example of ‘the modernization of processing and control that would turn the industrial era into a nascent information age’—​in our time no longer nascent, but full-​blown. 24 The railway’s part in the transformation from an industrial to an information age may seem less obvious, but the railways and the Penny Post worked symbiotically and similarly. Golden quotes the novelist and sporting writer R. S. Surtees declaring that, without the railways, the new Penny Post would have been almost impossible, as well as pointing out that ‘Post Office contracts speeded the growth of the railway’.25 In Are We There Yet?, Byerly sums up the railway’s impact by declaring, ‘The railway was in many ways the Internet of its era.’26 Furthermore, the railways were the earliest adopters of the newest technological innovation in communication—​the telegraph that enabled near-​ instantaneous communication along the tracks, which allowed multiple trains to share tracks without collision as well as ensuring greater punctuality. In his influential analysis of the railway’s effect on nineteenth-​century culture, The Railway Journey, Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes the railway’s union of multiple technologies—​the steel rails, the steam engine, the special wheels on the carriages—​as a ‘machine ensemble’.27 We might 21 

Jay Clayton, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5, 4. 22 Clayton, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace, 29; Catherine J. Golden, Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 39. 23  Kate Thomas, Postal Pleasures: Sex, Scandal, and Victorian Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 38. 24  Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 9, 38. 25 Golden, Posting It, 25, 156. 26  Alison Byerly, Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 143. 27  Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 24.

466    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture adapt this terminology to describe the railway, Penny Post, and electric telegraph as a communications ensemble, one that preoccupied Trollope in both his civil service and literary careers. Clayton, Menke, Golden, Byerly, and Thomas all invoke the network and its modern-​day avatar, the Internet, in their analyses of the Victorian communications ensemble. In doing so, these critics return to a metaphor that dominated Victorian discourses around electricity, neurology, and literary realism, as Otis demonstrates in Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century. Otis draws on Friedrich Kittler’s concept of ‘discourse networks’, systems that ‘affected not just the way people wrote and communicated but the way they perceived their own minds and bodies’, to argue that the paired discourses of telegraphy and neurology ‘altered people’s sense of identity’ from a ‘bounded, delimited individual’ to a ‘part of a network […] defined by one’s connections to others’.28 Byerly describes this tension between these two conceptions of the self as a ‘tension between the competing claims of subjectivity and objectivity that is in many ways the fundamental subject of Victorian realist fiction’.29 Menke points out the resemblance between the newly rationalized procedures and ambitious reach of the post and the nineteenth century’s dominant literary form, the novel: ‘Transparency, inclusiveness, regularity, and a certain pragmatism, all bound up with ideas about the power of private communication to express and strengthen the structure of social relations: a similar set of loose and possibly contradictory principles stands behind postal reform and literary realism.’30 Anthony Trollope’s postal tour of England’s south-​western counties and George Eliot’s famous focus on ‘this particular web’ in Middlemarch (1871–​2) are equally engaged in the social networking project that is the fantasy of Victorian realist fiction.31

Networked Novels While George Eliot explicitly thematizes the connections constituting the ‘particular web’ of her novel by calling attention to how the unforeseeable consequences of a letter carelessly discarded and retrieved ripple through all of Middlemarch, Trollope instead networks his Barsetshire novels through a series of narrative effects that draw on the barely noticed presence of technology. In The Small House at Allington, for example, Lily Dale’s abortive romance with Adolphus Crosbie is both fostered and foiled by the ease of movement and communication created by the network of railways and postal services linking Barsetshire and Allington with London—​a fictional version of the ‘postal 28 

Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 13, 10. 29 Byerly, Are We There Yet?, 6. 30 Menke, Telegraphic Realism, 41. 31  George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 132.

Technologies of Communication in Victorian Literature    467 network’ that Trollope himself helped to create in the real world. In Trollope’s novels, technologies of transportation and communication that reconfigured nineteenth-​ century individuals’ experiences of duration and distance similarly transform the Victorian literary landscape, yet the presence of these technologies is effaced as such and becomes apparent instead through narrative devices that link novels and characters to each other in unexpected ways. Trollope uses a narrative structure based on the reading and writing of letters to create virtual encounters between his characters. Trollope’s facility with letters as plot devices, means of characterization, opportunities for commentary, and potentially disruptive narratives has been noted by a number of critics, and in his analysis of Trollope’s ‘postal fiction’ The Three Clerks (1857) Menke offers a good summary of Trollope’s technique:  ‘Letters offer a potential convergence point between characters, narrator, and audience, as all focus upon the same text. Separating and recombining these perspectives, Trollope’s letters reconcile realism’s drives to explicate particular characters in detail and to place them within larger frameworks of narrative structure and moral judgment—​even as they reassert the ties between fiction and daily discourse.’32 Yet in The Small House Trollope achieves the same effect without using a letter at all. After arriving at Courcy Castle, Crosbie delays writing to Lily for a day, despite his promise to write to her his first night there. The next morning, he lies in bed ‘teaching himself to think that this engagement of his was a misfortune. Poor Lily! Her last words to him had conveyed an assurance that she would never distrust him.’ Trollope’s use of free indirect discourse here offers a momentary insight into Crosbie’s mind that instantaneously transports us into Lily’s mind in the very next sentence: ‘And she also, as she lay wakeful in her bed on this the first morning of his absence, thought much of their mutual vows. How true she would be to them!’33 Shifting from focalizing through Crosbie to Lily in the space of a period, Trollope enables readers to apprehend these characters’ thoughts and emotions impinging on each other in what resembles a narrative virtual reality. As Menke points out with regard to the famous telepathic communication between Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester, the simultaneity of thought portrayed here takes for granted the standardization of time necessitated by the spread of the railway, but also resembles the near-​instantaneous communication of the telegraph.34 Trollope deploys a literary device that sprung out of the communications ensemble, yet he does so without ever mentioning these technologies, effacing their presence and preserving their effects. Trollope portrays the virtual transaction between Lily and her fiancé as instantaneous, but the exchange of letters between Allington and Courcy Castle—​located in adjacent counties—​is almost as startlingly swift. When Crosbie does finally write his letter to her, it appears the next morning, less than twenty-​four hours after Crosbie ‘deposited his letter in the Courcy Castle letter-​box’ (Allington, 197). The efficiency of the rural mail is by 32 Menke, Telegraphic Realism, 56, 59–​60.

33  Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington (London: Penguin, 2005), 191. Further references are to this edition and will appear in the text. 34 Menke, Telegraphic Realism, 82–​3.

468    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture this point so taken for granted that it warrants no comment when the letter is delivered. Although Trollope is one of the few Victorian authors who even notices the startling speed and efficiency of the mail, in this case the rapid delivery of the letter is eclipsed by Lily’s anxiety about the day of delay between Crosbie’s departure and the arrival of his letter. Lily ‘was not quite aware what might be the course of post between Courcy and Allington, and had not, therefore, felt very grievously disappointed when the letter did not come on the very first day. She had, however, in the course of the morning walked down to the post-​office, in order that she might be sure that it was not remaining there’ (Allington, 217). Despite her ignorance, Lily’s expectation that the letter may well already have arrived at the Allington post office and the postmistress’s insulted response to Lily’s questions attest equally to the unnoticed efficiency of the technologies and procedures of the ‘course of post’ that Trollope helped create. Although Trollope takes no notice of how the railway facilitates the ‘course of post’ among rural locations, the railway nonetheless has momentous impact on the plot of The Small House. In the chapter chronicling Crosbie’s journey from Allington, the scene of his romance with and engagement to Lily, to Courcy Castle, where he will betray Lily by proposing to Lady Alexandrina De Courcy, Trollope takes care to tell the reader that ‘Crosbie’s way […] lay, by railway, to Barchester, the cathedral city lying in the next county, from where he purposed to have himself conveyed over to Courcy’ (Allington, 168). Eager to cut short his farewells to Lily, Crosbie takes an earlier train than necessary, and ‘[finds] himself in Barchester at eleven o’clock with nothing on his hands to do’ (Allington, 168). To kill the time till he can find his other (unnamed) conveyance to Courcy, Crosbie steps into the cathedral and there encounters Septimus Harding, the quondam warden of Hiram’s hospital and the honourably self-​effacing hero of The Warden. As A. O. J. Cockshut remarks, this seemingly unimportant ‘interlude’ is the turning point of Crosbie’s story: this idea of the undramatic crisis, of a void at the centre of things, is much more for Trollope than a technical device [… .] In this sunny, quiet interlude when he is thinking of other things, the most important decision of Crosbie’s life is being taken for him by his unconscious mind, and will only emerge into daylight some days later. So the crisis for which the stage was set occurs after all, though hidden at the time from the protagonist and the reader; all of them are the victims of a kind of double bluff.35

While the nostalgic flavour of this ‘sunny, quiet interlude’ is in part the result of the reappearance of the gentle, shambling Harding, it is equally the effect of a narrative replication of the railway’s restructuring of time. The narrative seems to pause here, just as Crosbie is perforce arrested in his progress to Courcy by the vagaries of the railway schedule, exemplifying how the inflexible schedules of the railway imposed upon its passengers a new temporality that alternated between first rushing and then waiting for the train. In his masterly survey of the railway’s impact on the perception of time 35 

A. O. J. Cockshut, Anthony Trollope: A Critical Study (London: Collins, 1955), 152–​3.

Technologies of Communication in Victorian Literature    469 and space in the nineteenth century, Schivelbusch chronicles how the railway enforced a standardized time on Great Britain, gradually eliminating differing local times, yet this newly standardized and objective measure of time paradoxically created for passengers a subjective experience of time as alternately foreshortened and prolonged.36 Crosbie rushes away from Lily only to be held up in Barsetshire, and this narrative and temporal delay brings about his choice. Much as the workings of Crosbie’s ‘unconscious mind’ are effaced in this interlude, so are the technological underpinnings that here regulate narrative through the railway’s industrialized systole and diastole. Yet there is no direct causal link between Crosbie’s meeting with Harding and his gradual decision to desert Lily for Lady Alexandrina. Instead, gaps in the railway timetable merely open out a narrative space in which his as-​yet unrecognized choice shapes itself, to be revealed later so that this juncture can only be understood retroactively, linking a later present to this past and unheeded pause. This temporal interlude also serves to link past and present across novels: Mr Harding is a relic of the past novels The Warden and Barchester Towers, and his casually mentioned granddaughter Griselda provides a link back to Framley Parsonage (1860–​1) and forward to The Last Chronicle of Barset (1866–​7) and Can You Forgive Her? (1864–​5), the first novel in Trollope’s famous Palliser series. Crosbie’s chance meeting thereby exemplifies the networked structures that define Trollope’s Barsetshire novels as a series. Much as the pillar box functions as a node in the network of the Penny Post, enabling communication of thoughts embodied in letters, the railway here produces a narrative node around which characters from multiple novels cluster to enable connections that cannot be described as causal, but rather as aleatory. Crosbie’s wait for his connection to Courcy creates a narrative junction with a previous novel that reroutes his engagement to Lily into marriage with Lady Alexandrina. What Julian Thompson calls Trollope’s ‘long-​distance art’ takes shape through serendipitous yet crucial moments like this, scattered throughout the Barsetshire and Palliser novels.37

Mechanical Novels While the quiet interlude between Harding and Crosbie seems uneventful, Trollope also uses the railway to bring about an encounter that parodies cultural anxieties about industrialized forms of sensation and their relationship to literature. As we will see, these anxieties serve to illuminate an important Victorian critique of technology. After Crosbie’s jilting of Lily becomes public knowledge, Crosbie coincidentally travels up to London in the same carriage as Johnny Eames, Lily’s would-​be suitor and childhood friend. Although Crosbie barely acknowledges Eames’s presence, throughout the train ride Eames is so enraged by Crosbie’s treatment of Lily that ‘Twice and thrice he had

36 Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 118. 37 

Julian Thompson, ‘Introduction’, in Trollope, The Small House at Allington, pp. ix–​xxxii, at p. xviii.

470    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture almost flown at Crosbie’s throat in the carriage’ (Allington, 370). Eames’s seething rage, visible in his ‘face […] covered with perspiration’ and ‘limbs […] hardly […] under his own command’, provides comic commentary on a series of Victorian anxieties about the exhausting effects of the ‘continuous vibration’ passengers and railway workers experienced. Schivelbusch summarizes an 1862 article from The Lancet voicing medical concerns regarding physical exhaustion induced by agitations qualitatively different from the swaying and jolting attendant on non-​mechanized modes of transport: The muscles grew tired, and so did the individual sense organs. The rapidity with which the train’s speed caused optical impressions to change taxed the eyes to a much greater degree than did pre-​industrial travel, and the sense of hearing had to cope with a deafening noise throughout the trip. Thus the traveler’s entire organism was subjected to a degree of wear and tear that did not exist in pre-​industrial travel, as well as the purely psychological stresses which were repeatedly emphasized by contemporary authors.38

Johnny’s physical distress references the ‘wear and tear’ and ‘psychological stresses’ endemic to the railway journey, even as it displaces the cause of that agitation from the railway itself to the comically sensational encounter with the dastardly Crosbie. Even as travellers passively exhausted themselves, they ran the risk of dangerously stimulating encounters in the closed environment of the railway compartment. A public space that afforded privacy to its occupants, the railway compartment could promote communication between classes and individuals better kept apart because its design necessitated ‘traveling in close contiguity with random strangers from a range of social classes’.39 The meeting between Eames and Crosbie transposes fears of cross-​ class encounters’ potential for criminal or licentious contact into farce, when Eames, unable to control his rage any longer, finally attacks Crosbie on the railway platform at their common destination in London: ‘ “You confounded scoundrel!” he screamed out. “You confounded scoundrel!” and seized him by the throat, throwing himself upon him, and almost devouring him by the fury of his eyes’ (Allington, 371). But travellers not participating in such sensational confrontations still ran the risk of equally dangerous stimulants in the form of novels specifically marketed for passengers, as Trollope takes care to remind his readers when Crosbie and Eames, locked in combat, ‘fall back upon Mr Smith’s book-​stall […] into the yellow shilling-​novel depot’ (Allington, 371). The ‘yellow shilling-​novels’ soliciting readers from bookstalls on railway platforms were the publishing succès de scandale of the 1860s—​the sensation novel, whose power to evoke physical responses in its readers mirrored and amplified the shocks and vibrations created by railway travel. Trollope’s reference to the novels that dominated the railway bookstalls pokes gentle fun at Victorian anxieties linking the effects of railway travel to dangerously sensational 38 Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 118. 39 Byerly, Are We There Yet?, 174.

Technologies of Communication in Victorian Literature    471 reading matter, but in his Autobiography he is more concerned to differentiate his novels from the ‘yellow-​backed’ books his two heroes tumble into. He writes, ‘Among English novels of the present day, and among English novelists, a great division is made. There are sensation novels, and anti-​sensational; sensational novelists, and anti-​sensational [… .] The novelists who are considered to be anti-​sensational are generally called realistic. I am realistic’ (Autobiography, 146). Despite this distinction between Trollope’s character-​driven realism and the plot-​driven sensationalism of novels by Collins or Braddon, Trollope’s novels and the ‘yellow shilling-​novels’ earned the same critical reproach. The Saturday Review deemed Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–​60), the exemplar of the sensation genre, the product of a ‘Mechanical talent’, and Dean Henry Mansel excoriated a group of sensation novels by likening them to mass-​produced and shoddy cotton cloth.40 In remarkably similar terms, the Saturday Review also condemned Trollope’s work as mechanical: ‘Of course, if Mr. Trollope only looks upon his art as manufacture, there can be no reason why he should not take as just a pride in turning so many novels out of his brain in the twelvemonth as a machine-​maker takes in turning so many locomotives or looms out of his shed. […] Unfortunately [… h]e loses all freshness and interest and vivacity, and grows at each repetition heavier and more mechanical.’41 Critical condemnation of Trollope’s talent for ‘manufacturing’ novels was only amplified after the posthumous publication of his Autobiography. When he died, Trollope had written almost fifty novels, not to mention eight non-​fiction works, five short-​story collections, and assorted articles in newspapers and journals—​an unusual output even for an era famous for its long novels.42 In his Autobiography, Trollope offers readers the secret of his startling productivity: When I have commenced a new book, I have always prepared a diary, divided into weeks, and carried it on for the period which I have allowed myself for the completion of the work. In this I have entered, day by day, the number of pages I have written [… .] According to the circumstances of the time,—​whether my other business might be then heavy or light, or whether the book I was writing was or was not wanted with speed,—​I have allotted myself so many pages a week. The average number has been about forty. It has been placed as low as twenty and has risen to 112. And as page is an ambiguous term, my page has been made to contain 250 words; and as words, if not watched, will have a tendency to straggle, I have had every word counted as I went. In the bargains I have made with publishers I have,—​not of course with their knowledge, but in my own mind,—​undertaken always to supply them with so many words, and I have never put a book out of hand short of the number by a single word. (Autobiography, 80)

40  Unsigned review of The Woman in White, Saturday Review, 10, no. 252 (August 1860), 249; Dean Henry Mansel, ‘Sensation Novels’, Quarterly Review, 113 (1863), 481–​514. 41  Quoted in David Skilton, Trollope and His Contemporaries: A Study in the Theory and Conventions of Mid-​Victorian Fiction (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1972), 56. 42  Mark Turner, ‘Trollope’s Literary Life and Times’, in Carolyn Dever and Lisa Niles (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 6.

472    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Trollope’s portrayal of his literary labour transforms writing into a form of industrial production. Even though he later explicitly compares his work to the artisanal craft of a ‘shoemaker’ or ‘tallow-​chandler’, Trollope’s calculations of the number of words per page and the number of words that constitutes a novel, like his careful accounting of productivity, demonstrate a rationalized approach to literary labour that mimics the principle of standardization underlying the efficiency and productivity of the industrialized factory system. As Walter Kendrick points out in The Novel-​Machine, Trollope’s system for writing enabled him to ‘operate with the predictable regularity of a machine’.43 The assessment of Trollope’s novels as ‘mechanical’ draws on a critique of technology and its effects on social and cultural forms that dominated the Victorian period. In 1829, before both the opening of the first railway line and Victoria’s accession to the throne, Thomas Carlyle published ‘Signs of the Times’, a ringing denunciation of the machine’s impact on human subjectivity, intellectual inquiry, literature, political structures, and social relationships that nonetheless celebrates the productive power harnessed by the steam engine in multiple industrial applications. Carlyle proleptically sums up the Victorian era, which is still identified with the rise of the machine in the realms of production, transportation, and communications, as ‘the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word’. He goes on to list the various manifestations of the machine that mark the spread of industrial technologies: On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster. The sailor furls his sail, and lays down his oar, and bids a strong, unwearied servant, on vaporous wings, bear him through the waters. Men have crossed oceans by steam [… .] There is no end to machinery. Even the horse is stripped of his harness, and finds a fleet fire-​horse yoked in his stead [… .] For all earthly, and for some unearthly purposes, we have machines and mechanic furtherances.

Carlyle praises the results of actual machines, marvelling at the ‘wonderful accessions’ to the ‘physical power of mankind’ and exclaiming at ‘how much better fed, clothed, lodged, and, in all outward respects, accommodated, men now are’ as a result. Turning from concrete examples of machinery like the steam engine, Carlyle declares that ‘Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also’, and this, for Carlyle, is the problem.44 Within the ‘internal and spiritual realm’, the machine becomes a destructive force rather than a productive tool, debasing the science, literature, and ‘Moral condition’ of the time because it ‘regulates […] our modes of thought and feeling’.45 In Carlyle’s essay, the opposite of ‘Mechanism’ is a ‘science of Dynamics’ composed of ‘the primary, unmodified forces and energies of man, the 43  Walter M. Kendrick, The Novel-​Machine: The Theory and Fiction of Anthony Trollope (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 33. 44  Thomas Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’, Edinburgh Review, 49 (June 1829), 439–​59, at 442. 45  Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’, 444, 456.

Technologies of Communication in Victorian Literature    473 mysterious springs of Love, and Fear, and Wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry, Religion’.46 Carlyle’s rhetoric establishes the long-​standing opposition between all things mechanical and the ‘mysterious springs’ of human thought and emotion that has dominated assessments of technology in Victorian literature and culture. Carlyle’s ambivalence about the machine leads him to separate its spiritual from its material effects, enabling the machine to function as a symbol for mechanistic modes of thinking and being associated with processes of industrial production and circulation. Both Karl Marx and John Ruskin deploy this symbolic resonance to explain how the presence of machinery creates mechanical ‘modes of thought and feeling’ that threaten psychic depth and debase art and literature. In his analysis of industrial capitalism, Marx describes machinery’s effects on the workers who operate the power looms and spinning mules of the Northern cotton industry, contrasting factory labour with older forms of production: In handicrafts and manufacture, the worker makes use of a tool. In the factory the machine makes use of him [… . I]t is the movements of the machine he must follow. In manufacture, the workers are part of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated as its living appendages.47

In addition to calling attention to the physical dangers of being mangled in a mill or slowly smothered by airborne cotton fibres, as Elizabeth Gaskell does in Mary Barton (1848), Marx suggests that mechanized labour turns men into machines. Workers become parts of the larger machine of the factory, which is itself but a cog in an all-​ encompassing system of commodity production and exchange. In ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (1853), Ruskin argues that mechanized labour has created a taste for uniformity and order that has debased aesthetic standards to such a degree that any aesthetic production that truly expresses the individual is judged wanting, since it lacks the regularity of objects mass-​produced by machinery. This condemnation of the dehumanizing power of machinery is, according to Herbert Sussman, typical of Victorian responses to the machine that acknowledge the machine’s necessity to the Victorian dream of progress, yet condemn the machine as the sign for industrial modernization’s effects on social organization and human feeling.48 The ‘technophobic’ assessment of the effects of technology on aesthetic representation, affective response, and social engagement is not limited to industrial novels, sensation fiction, or novels at all. For Victorian critics and poets alike, metrical poetry possessed the power to induce physical response in its readers, creating emotional and physiological responses that seemed to override the power of individual will while

46 

Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’, 448–​9.

47 Marx, Capital (1867), 548. 48 

Herbert Sussman, Victorians and the Machine: The Literary Response to Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 7.

474    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture erasing the boundaries between subjects. As Kirstie Blair shows in Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart, poetry that was too affecting in its emotional import or powerful in its rhythmic pulsations was perceived as damaging to the heart in its dual function as the locus of emotion and the engine driving the body’s circulatory system.49 We can see such fears about the mechanical power of poetry to propagate physical response in Victorian responses to the Spasmodics, a group of mid-​century poets including Sidney Dobell and Alexander Smith, whose verse manipulated rhythm and metre to create bodily effects in its readers. Although Alfred Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning cannot be considered Spasmodic poets, some of their works, notably Tennyson’s Maud (1855) and Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), were grouped with the productions of Dobell and Smith by their contemporaries. Initial approval of and interest in this movement seen as ‘vital to poetic developments’ in the 1840s and 1850s rapidly changed into ‘a less congenial appraisal […] characterized by vicious attacks and condescending accusations’.50 Similarly, in the ‘Fleshly School’ controversy, Robert Buchanan attacked Pre-​Raphaelite Poets—​particularly Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne—​for producing poetry characterized by easily imitated rhythmic effects that contaminated the work of other poets: ‘What merits they have lie with their faults on the surface, and can be caught by any young gentleman as easily as the measles, only they are rather more difficult to get rid of.’51 Such fears of the embodied power of poetic form reflect Marx’s apprehension that factory labour turned men into ‘living appendages’ of a ‘lifeless mechanism’. Yet the critical pendulum has swung with regard to the physiological poetics of the Victorian period much as it has with regard to the literary potentialities of machines, technology, and communication in Victorian novels. In Electric Meters, Jason R. Rudy calls attention to how the embodied poetics of the period are figured through the electrically transmitted impulses of the telegraph, so that poetry becomes a circuit for the transmission of affect.52 Victorian metrical poetry, with its potentially dangerous physical effects, was perhaps the form of literature that most ably turned the human body into a machine for reproducing its rhythms, yet, like Trollope’s pillar box, effaced its own status as a technology. In Beautiful Circuits, Mark Goble argues that ‘modernist aesthetics […] gratify and indulge their mediums and materialities of communication’ and ‘make use of the expanded field of aesthetic possibility associated with modern media’.53 The generative technological imaginary evident in Victorian poetry and novels alike suggests that these forms were themselves the most literary of the technologies 49 

Kirstie Blair, Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Charles LaPorte and Jason R. Rudy, ‘Editorial Introduction: Spasmodic Poetry and Poetics’, Victorian Poetry, 42 (2004), 412–​28, at 423, 421. 51  Robert Buchanan, ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti’, Contemporary Review, 18 (1871), 347, www.rossettiarchive.org [last accessed 18 October 2012]. 52  Jason R. Rudy, Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (Athens, O.: Ohio University Press, 2009). 53  Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 7–​8, 16–​17. 50 

Technologies of Communication in Victorian Literature    475 that offered such expanded possibilities in a world newly saturated with the potential for communication.

Select Bibliography Byerly, Alison, Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013). Clayton, Jay, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace:  The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Daly, Nicholas, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–​2000 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2004). Gitelman, Lisa, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). Goble, Mark, Beautiful Circuits:  Modernism and the Mediated Life (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2010). Grossman, Jonathan H., Charles Dickens’s Networks:  Public Transport and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Ketabgian, Tamara, The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). Menke, Richard, Telegraphic Realism:  Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008). Otis, Laura, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986).

Pa rt  I I I

WAYS OF C OM M U N IC AT I N G : P R I N T A N D OT H E R C U LT U R E S

Material and Mass Culture

Chapter 25

T he New Cult u ra l Marketpl ac e Victorian Publishing and Reading Practices Robert L. Patten

The British Empire ran on print. Legislation for home and abroad was printed from the time of its initiation in the records of parliamentary debates to the final details of administration sent out to the counties and colonies. The military depended on print for everything from ordering and shipping supplies to recruiting, commissioning, organizing, directing, and policing the troops. Industry spewed out millions of pages imprinted with instructions about the workplace, order forms and receipts, brochures and advertisements. Families, often separated because of distant work opportunities, flooded the post with letters. Schools that taught the basics of literacy necessary to survive in a print world needed textbooks. Periodicals attracted every kind of reader and interest. Religion relied on books and the Book. The public subscribed for books from a circulating library or bought books in shops. They consumed scientific treatises, illustrated encyclopedias, and reference works, carried home railway timetables, perused adverts for remarkable medical cures and long-​wearing fabrics, attempted to follow the precepts of conduct books, and spent shillings on special issues of publications commemorating national events such as the opening of the Crystal Palace or the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. And the British exported their language, traditions, and culture overseas, to North America, Asia, British protectorates and colonies in Africa and the Pacific, as well as many non-​anglophone locales that nonetheless avidly consumed information and stories about the United Kingdom. Print was at least as important to ‘rule, Britannia’ as its military and merchant fleets, its factories, and the queen’s subjects serving the empire at home and abroad. The book historian Simon Eliot discerns two phases in nineteenth-​century print culture. First, there was a revolution in distribution from 1830 to 1855, when inventions for making paper, mechanizing printing and binding, and transporting goods faster and more cheaply, made it much easier and more profitable to get print products

482    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture into retail circulation. Then, after a plateau of rather steady-​state production from the late 1850s to the early 1870s, a second revolution from 1875 until the First World War was fuelled by mass production technologies—​rotary printing, hot metal typecasting, lithography and photography, and the advent of electricity both in businesses and homes.1 In order for that print culture to flourish, people needed to learn to read, and needed products to read. This essay will begin with the infrastructures of Victorian print culture, then take up the uses to which print was put, segue to the variety of print products sold, move to a brief consideration of those who composed the letterpress, and conclude with sketches of British subjects reading.

Infrastructure The narrative of print infrastructure is grounded on growth, innovation, declining costs, and increasing sales, all supported by distributive financing that enabled print producers to expand without taking disastrous risks. The banking crisis of 1826 that felled printing and publishing houses and saddled Sir Walter Scott with crushing debts caused the industry to seek better kinds of funding. It was common until mid-​century for publishers to buy copyrights with bills cashable at future dates; thus they obtained the product immediately and could sell some of it at least before all of the purchase cost had to be met. Other stratagems included combining with fellow publishers, using a flourishing trade in collateral items to further develop a print business (as Smith, Elder did), and discovering larger markets for cheaper products such as reprints of out-​of-​copyright classics or American popular works, or new products such as instalment fiction or inexpensive periodicals packed with useful and entertaining information. Although cheaper publications earned less per unit, revenues swelled from the resulting huge increase in total sales. This volume encouraged publishers to print bigger editions and printers to invest in larger, faster machines for managing paper, printing, and binding. Growth fed every facet of the industry—​unevenly, of course, as some firms prospered under better management, cannier choices of material, or more convenient locations for shipping product. In the course of the nineteenth century London took business away from the provinces, Scotland, and Ireland, though there remained work for local printers who supplied necessary forms, cards, adverts, legal notices, pamphlets, and local and regional periodicals. But consolidation within London yielded savings from the concentration of suppliers, distributors, transportation, warehouses, and multiplying markets.

1 

Simon Eliot, Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing 1800–​1919 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1994), 106–​7.

Victorian Publishing and Reading Practices    483

Paper The price of printing paper declined through the century, especially after 1866; in the next thirty years paper costs dropped by nearly two-​thirds. A portion of that reduction came as a result of government policy. In 1814, in order to suppress radical publications, Parliament imposed a newspaper tax of fourpence per copy. Members of the working class, who could not afford a newspaper that could cost sevenpence or more per day, might club together to rent one for an hour and read it serially, passing the pages around. Radicals issued unstamped papers that gained large circulations and intermittent prosecution. Gradually arguments in favour of a free press (and potentially much wider paid circulation) caused successive ministries to reduce these ‘knowledge taxes’. There were cuts to newspaper and advertisement duties in the 1830s, when the pamphlet duty was also repealed. And in a further wave of reductions in the 1850s, Parliament eliminated paper, advertising, and newspaper duties. Consequently the price of paper for books dropped a bit, rose again into the middle 1860s, and then began its long fall.2 The cost of manufacturing paper also declined, in part as a result of an invention, the Fourdrinier machine, that allowed big rolls of paper to be manufactured and shipped to large commercial users with rotary, rather than sheet-​fed, presses. At the start of the century paper mills used cotton, linen, and hemp rags. After 1844 wood pulping developed sufficiently to overtake the rag market, though such paper, because acids were used in breaking down the fibres, was more brittle and less lasting than that made from cloths. And as the size of presses increased, so did the size of paper. By the end of the century impositions of sixty-​four or ninety-​six pages were common.

Print Numerous inventions for every aspect of mechanical printing collaborated to increase geometrically the speed of print production. Augustus Applegarth devised vertical machines that printed simultaneously on both sides, thought to be the way for Britain to print millions of banknotes, but that experiment at the beginning of the century failed. However, he was hired on as adviser to The Times, and by 1846 his ‘four-​feeder’ machines enabled the newspaper to issue 28,000 copies daily. A half-​century later steam-​powered presses with continuous feed could meet the demand for as many as 1 million newspapers daily; and several different proprietors owned publishing houses that occasionally attained that circulation in London alone. While materials and machining declined as expenses of manufacturing printed products, the price of labour increased from under 40 per cent of the total production costs for a book in 1836 to about 55 per cent in 1896. Compositors got a little over twopence 2  Alexis Weedon, Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market, 1836–​ 1916 (Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate, 2003), ch. 3, ‘Trends in Book Production Costs’, 59–​88, esp. 66–​7 for paper.

484    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture per copy in the former year, rising to elevenpence in 1886 before falling back to under eightpence a decade later.3 Still, these wage increases probably exceeded the inflation experienced by working families, giving them more disposable income, some fraction of which might be spent on print goods, thus driving the market upward.

Distribution ‘The wagon, the canal barge, the merchant vessel, the post office, and the railroad may have influenced the history of literature more than one would suspect.’4 Robert Darnton’s often-​quoted remark applies even more generally than he claims: these modes of distribution applied to all printed products. It does no good to manufacture a commodity if you can’t transport it to shops. Markets grew throughout the nineteenth century, centralizing in some cases, spreading out in others. Customers sought a wider range of materials, they wanted faster and cheaper products (especially morning newspapers), and they wanted them on demand. The wagon and the canal barge, eighteenth-​century modes of conveyance, were slow; river traffic moved at the rate of two and a half miles per hour, the speed of the horse towing the boat. Newer means of distribution, including trains and steamboats, met the accelerating requirements of publishers, wholesalers, and retailers for more timely delivery of larger bulk orders. Many British-​printed texts were shipped overseas to North America and the colonies. One major book and print dealer, S. W. Fores, sent two of his sons to Australia in the 1840s to develop that side of trade. Publishing firms developed special series for colonial markets, some of which were quite successful. And there was steady, indeed rising, demand for popular Victorian authors:  according to legend, fans waited at the New York dock when in 1842 the ship arrived carrying copies of the conclusion of The Old Curiosity Shop. They shouted to the sailors, ‘Is Little Nell still alive?’5 Most important were the improvements in overland carriage. These centred on two interlocking factors:  transport and costs. Until the 1840s horse-​drawn coaches were still a mode for distributing cheap but heavy products such as printed matter. As roads improved, so did the speed of vehicles over major thoroughfares. Local routes remained rougher, but they were not served by the competition. The primary change in speed of delivery came with steam engines and rails. When daily newspapers became a regular feature of middle-​class life, publishers and wholesalers such as W. H. Smith loaded tons of newsprint onto special coaches departing from London as early as 5.15 a.m.; by the

3 Weedon, Victorian Publishing, 87. 4 

Robert Darnton, ‘What Is the History of Books?’, reprinted many times, including in David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (eds), The Book History Reader, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2006), 9–​26, at 19. 5  Paul Schlicke (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens (1999; anniversary edn., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 436.

Victorian Publishing and Reading Practices    485 end of the century such exigent deadlines meant that much of the paper was printed before midnight, leaving only the cover sheets to be imprinted with the latest stories.6 Trains also carried the post, which increased hugely when the Postmaster General, Rowland Hill, introduced prepaid Penny Post. The impulse to stay in written contact with far-​flung family members impelled younger members of the household, if not elderly ones, to learn to write and read handwriting and type. Hill increased this propulsion to literacy by proposing in 1848 a book post, making the shipping of printed materials cheaper than their weight would otherwise cost. In 1863 special rates were assigned for trade, sample, and pattern books, and in that year over 300 million such parcels were mailed.7 To oversee such complicated distribution networks and timetables, wholesalers became an important intermediary between publishers and retailers. On ‘magazine day’, the last business day of the month, one wholesaler, Simpkin Marshall, might put as many as 800 packages of print product onto trains for overnight delivery. The train between Edinburgh and Glasgow added sorting carriages in which staff bundled newspapers and other materials together and tossed the parcels off at intermediate stations while the train whizzed past without stopping: it was crucial to effect the first postal delivery of the day by breakfast. Within conurbations, retail trade took place in six locations. Railway bookstalls became organized and gradually national in scope once W. H. Smith entered the business in November 1848 with a contract for all stops on the London and North Western Railway. In fits and starts Smith’s beginning led to national circulation, warehouses first centrally located in London and later distributed across Britain’s geographic regions, and shops that sold other products as well as newspapers, magazines, and books. It is said that railway reading disseminated that model of occupying leisure time throughout the empire. Circulating libraries in major cities, which had once been meeting places of a select company of residents and visitors (as in Jane Austen), became another kind of warehouse. The Leviathan of that trade was Charles Edward Mudie, whose shop on Oxford Street shipped out a volume at a time to subscribers who paid one guinea a year or more for the privilege of borrowing more than one volume at a time. Often Mudie, or wholesalers, would take virtually the entire first printing of a new title. If demand was great enough, another edition might be run off for more dispersed rental and retail outlets.8 Unlike Mudie’s, whose customers were largely off-​site, other kinds of libraries served as hubs of public reading: there were religious societies; working men’s reading rooms; increasing numbers of ladies’ clubs; Mechanics’ Institutes; newsrooms; lyceums and athenaeums; religious, civic, professional, and commercial libraries; the six depositary 6 

Stephen Colclough, ‘Distribution’, in David McKitterick (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vi. 1830–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 238–​80, at 266–​9. 7  Colclough, ‘Distribution’, 241–​2. 8  Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970).

486    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture libraries that by law (until the late twentieth century, when the number was reduced to one) theoretically held copies of every copyrighted book; libraries at universities, colleges, medical and law schools; church archives and collections; and private libraries occasionally open to scholars and other readers. The Public Libraries Act of 1850 authorized municipalities of over 100,000 to tax residents for the construction and maintenance of local public libraries (but not to buy books), an effort that received important support from the industrialist Andrew Carnegie late in the century. By the end of the First World War there were 660 Carnegie Libraries in Britain and Scotland, many with open stacks that encouraged patrons to browse and discover learning on their own. Rarely did bookshops sell only new books. The margin was too slight, the customer base too unpredictable, for printed sheets to be the sole commodity. Stationers sold all things related to writing and mailing (and later, typing) as well as an array of books, periodicals, pens and inks, papers, and sometimes art supplies. Second-​hand and rare booksellers were of course exceptions to this retail mode. W. H. Smith’s eventually incorporated hardbacks and paperbacks, magazines, tobacco, spangled theatrical images, travel and shopping guides, cards, and souvenirs in their shops. But shoppers didn’t need to pass through a doorway in order to encounter printed goods. On any busy urban street one might see hawkers selling from temporary stalls, or ballad sellers displaying sheet music on a portable easel and even singing for a customer—​Silas Wegg in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend is a disreputable example. In London and other metropolitan precincts there were self-​defined ‘wandering paper-​ workers’ who, out of their pockets and bags, distributed pornography, odd numbers of periodicals, almanacs, memorandum books, and images of London. Some traded openly in the streets, others more discreetly in alleyways and no thoroughfares. In more rural areas chapmen would travel round with a pack full of items specially winnowed for domestic consumption.

Finance There was money to be earned in the print trade. Charles Knight, who catered to the working literate, left nearly £3,000 at his death in 1873, plus an invaluable legacy of championing instructive and attractive reading material for labourers. Richard Bentley was a notable publisher of novels, solid periodicals, and foreign—​especially American and French—​writers. In his heyday of the 1830s and early 1840s he was a powerful force to contend with; thereafter he experienced severe personal and business reverses, but the firm stabilized before his death and in 1871, having ceded direction of the company to his son George, his estate was worth £9,000. A notably upmarket and highly respectable firm, Murray, prospered under its family heads: John Murray II, who died in 1843, left £33,000; his successor, John Murray III, dying in 1892, more than doubled that sum (£76,000)—​and inflation accounted for only a small portion of the increase. The Blackwood family, while comfortably off, left much smaller estates, as the business was owned by several shareholders. When Alexander Blackwood died in 1845, the firm

Victorian Publishing and Reading Practices    487 had a capital value of over £7,000. Thirty-​four years later, when John Blackwood died in 1879, the firm’s capital was appraised at £80,000.9 But by the First World War the declining fortunes of the firm showed up in the balance sheet. On the other hand, George Smith, with earnings from the colonial goods trade as well as publishing, amassed a great fortune: £932,000 when he died in 1901. William Clowes led one of the biggest printing houses. He won the contract for producing all the official catalogues for the Great Exhibition of 1851 and for printing the General Catalogue of the British Museum, a project that took nineteen years to complete. His heirs inherited £47,000 in 1883.10 During the mid-​Victorian period many companies expanded, opening offices in other cities, enlarging their range of titles and subjects, starting up periodicals, and trying to benefit from the boom in educational publishing consequent on the passage of Forster’s Education Act in 1870. In the eighteenth century Longman, founded in 1724, grew by buying up stock and copyrights of other publishers, and bringing in partners who might own shares in the divided copyright of large-​scale moneymakers such as encyclopedias. A century later the firm was known by the names of its partners, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green. After Thomas Longman died in 1842, his two sons prospered, issuing Thomas Babington Macaulay’s successful Lays of Ancient Rome and his History of England. In 1863 they acquired the firm of J. W. Parker, the publisher of authors such as John Stuart Mill and John Anthony Froude and the notable periodical Fraser’s Magazine. In 1890 Longman incorporated all the rights and stock of a rival firm, Rivington, with an even older pedigree dating back into the seventeenth century. But despite these sizeable additions, from 1865 the firm was known by shortened forms of the principal partners’ names, condensing to Longmans (1959), then Longman (1969).11 While the acquisitions brought to the house varied copyrights, authors, and outlets, consolidation of the imprint helped to identify all the products by a brand name. After many nations, but not the US, signed the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works in 1886, and the US adopted some of the bi-​national copyright provisions of the convention in the Chace Act of 1891, many foreign publishers entered the British market, setting up offices in London, promoting their national authors who competed with Britons for the public’s shillings, and arranging reciprocal agreements in their countries for British authors. Being businesslike became a byword for publishers and retailers: accounting became stricter, unprofitable enterprises were sold off or shut down, multiple offices got consolidated, some firms converted into limited liability companies which could sell shares to raise capital, and international trade expanded. The university presses of Oxford and Cambridge established agents or branches throughout the empire. At the same time, amalgamations yielded businesses

9  David Finkelstein, The House of Blackwood: Author–​Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 2–​5. 10  Excepting the Blackwoods, the values of estates are taken from Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entries. 11  Asa Briggs, A History of Longmans and Their Books 1724–​1990: Longevity in Publishing (London: British Library; New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2008), esp. appendix 2, 547.

488    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture with many products: for instance, book, magazine, newspaper, advertising, stationery, and overseas departments. Some of these multitasking enterprises fared better than others. And in balance, sometimes in tension, with consolidation and competition, publishers also sought ways to cooperate and collaborate, to fix trading practices and prices, to standardize policies about things such as returns, to respond to pressures from labour for reducing working hours, and to manufacture cheaper products, especially one-​volume novels that rapidly eclipsed the old three-​volume format. Prices declined to seven, then six and five shillings for reprints of three-​deckers and for new works, shorter in length, that better accommodated the scanty leisure hours of an increasingly bi-​gendered commuter workforce.12 By the end of the century virtually the whole population of Great Britain was literate, and reading was as much a part of life as eating, if not drinking.

Usages Governmental There had been publishers to the Crown for centuries. But in the nineteenth century two firms dominated. Hansard’s, long-​time publisher of the transactions of Parliament, in 1835 received from the Commons responsibility for selling all parliamentary papers to the public at the lowest possible price, often a price that was less than the actual cost of producing, printing, and distributing the materials.13 The other firm, Eyre and Spottiswoode, gained a virtual monopoly on the printing of blue books, royal commission reports, and all the other printed papers generated by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, the War Office, the Treasury, the Public Records Commissioners, the Patent Office, and other entities. If ‘knowledge is power’, a religious motto deriving from Francis Bacon and adapted to the secular ideologies of the nineteenth century, knowledge needed to be produced, circulated, and consumed. It became critical, for instance, to make patent grants publicly known, so that new inventions could be realized and commercialized. Maps were another form of knowledge constantly in need of updating. The Ordnance Survey took off during the 1830s and 1840s; by 1901 its famous one-​inch survey of the United Kingdom was complete. Knowledge also needed to be organized. At the opening of Victoria’s reign there was no comprehensive inventory of state papers, library and archival resources, public or private collections, or industry and business directories. These were produced quickly by various organizations, governmental and private. The Calendar of State Papers was 12  Simon Eliot and Richard Freebury, ‘A Year of Publishing: 1891’, in McKitterick (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vi. 674–​703. 13  David McKitterick, ‘Organising Knowledge in Print’, in McKitterick (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vi. 531–​66, at 535.

Victorian Publishing and Reading Practices    489 commissioned by Parliament in 1855. The first volume, commencing at the end of the reign of Henry VIII, appeared the next year, and within a quarter-​century one hundred volumes had been issued.14 Since many of the government publications had no defined sales targets, some were underprinted, others hugely overprinted, and many had to be scrapped as information was updated and revised. Finally so much excess accumulated that it was necessary to legislate a programme for the disposal of waste printed products, one that by the end of the century, using prison labour, was turning a profit in its own right. Paper money replaced some coinage and also proved much more convenient than bills of exchange executed by private parties on their personal banks. It had the further virtue of being immediately exchanged for purchases, rather than becoming cashable months later. This development speeded up revenue flow and was of particular assistance to businesses such as bookselling that required a large initial outlay for stock but long delays in obtaining receipts. Although the Bank of England was legally the only institution permitted to issue notes in Britain and Wales, three private banks in Scotland, and four in Northern Ireland, retain that privilege in the twenty-​ first century. And as the civil service multiplied and became more professional, it generated huge numbers of forms, from job applications to regulations and licensing schedules and all that mountain of paperwork still with us today. While the ‘British Empire ran on print’, it also choked on paper bound with government red tape.

Commercial Business, like government, ran on paper. Every parcel needed a wrapper; every office kept accounts; retail establishments depended on inventories and receipts; people needed stationery and cartes de visite (photographic calling cards); and there were many occasions requiring printed messages—​weddings, funerals, Christmas, and birthdays, for instance. The John Johnson Collection of printed ephemera in the Bodleian Library at Oxford is the richest collection of these everyday papers, demonstrating the variety of designs and type fonts deployed for various kinds of print displays. Surfaces for drawing, writing, and printing were a hugely diverse commodity, ranging from parchment to brown cardboard to newsprint; household tissues; glossy stock for reproducing metal, lithographic, and photographic images; pads of paper derived from wood pulp scored with lines for schoolrooms; archival sheets for drawing, watercolours, and certificates; blueprints; playing cards; toy theatres; and paper dolls. These inventories can seem overwhelming and repetitive: but that’s part of the point. The age of information was an age of paper and print; those products were as ubiquitous and commercially lucrative for the Victorians as electronic media are today.

14 

McKitterick, ‘Organising Knowledge in Print’, 555.

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Educational Nineteenth-​ century populations needed to learn to read. Through mid-​ century, degrees and kinds of literacy were often distributed among the generations living together:  elders may have been accustomed to oral traditions, including memorization, recital, and singing, while younger ones, educated in denominational or secular academies, mastered reading and writing. They might be the ones to read aloud to their grandparents and parents, or to their younger siblings. By the 1870s some degree of education and literacy was expected of the queen’s subjects, so a massive bureaucracy of state-​supported schools, libraries, teachers, and assessors grew up. That bureaucracy also depended on print: maths and science texts, literature readers, geographies, examination papers, inspectors’ reports, plus the accessory budget, inventory, attendance, and order forms, as well as the other paper paraphernalia not even now replaced by a fully electronic system. Britain not only educated its own, but also its colonials. The export of materials either the same as the home product or allegedly designed for the needs of the colonies was a lucrative business for all those in the communications circuit, including the shipping companies that warehoused and transported masses of books and bibles. Matthew Arnold summarized the education market a decade before national elementary education became law, ‘There is no sale for a book like a school sale’.15 As for the impact of a systematized curriculum of instruction for children and adults alike, the assigned reading—​often written by those with personal relations to the committees choosing the texts—​made students of all ages anxious. For instance, the editor of a standard edition of Shakespeare’s plays, A. C. Bradley, might be considered by examiners to have the final say on the correct interpretation of a work. Punch versified the situation: Last night I dreamt that Shakespeare’s ghost Sat for a Civil Service post, And on the paper for that year There were some questions on King Lear, Which Shakespeare answered rather badly Because he hadn’t studied Bradley.16

(Or perhaps, as some claim, because the true Shakespeare was the Earl of Oxford.)

15  Matthew Arnold, Letters, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996–​2001), i. 500. 16  I reprint this doggerel from Christopher Stray and Gillian Sutherland, ‘Mass Markets: Education’, in McKitterick (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vi. 359–​81, at 370. They got it from G. Boas’s 1926 book, Lays of Learning, but speculate that it may come from one of Boas’s columns in Punch.

Victorian Publishing and Reading Practices    491

Personal David Vincent has demonstrated that the Penny Post in Britain, and its counterpart in other European countries, did not just keep dispersed families in touch. As important, it promoted literacy.17 Anthony Trollope, himself a long-​time employee of the Post Office, may have been the mid-​Victorian writer most conscious of the role letters played in family life; he shows in novel after novel how the post was received, read, discussed, put aside, reread, answered, expected with anxiety or dismay or joy, and on all accounts talked over and about. As deliveries within consolidated urban areas were made several times a day, the post was analogous to today’s social media. Messages could be sent, received, answered, all in a few hours. Middle-​class ladies often had rooms set aside to handle correspondence, and their male counterparts had studies in which to sort out those communications about the family’s finances and legal matters that were transmitted through the mails. Persons of some standing and history might store important documents in a safe or muniments room: deeds, wills, and genealogies were crucial to establishing the family’s rights. Amateur historians and scientists collected specimens and papers relating to their specialties, often drawing exceptionally detailed representations of their objects of study. Some women were formidably learned, at least as well educated as their male counterparts: the libraries and correspondence of George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for instance, exemplify their capacious and erudite knowledge. And in the parish records were recorded all the births, marriages, and deaths that confirmed the family line, or in Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White (1860) and Man and Wife (1870), disconfirmed it. Proofs of legitimacy and heirship were, for the Victorian era, as much a matter of paper and ink as of sperm and egg.

Products What tools taught the skills of writing and decoding print and whetted the appetite for reading? For centuries hornbooks with the letters of the alphabet, accompanied by images of apple, bull, cat, etc., and frequently the Lord’s Prayer, were passed around the homes of the working poor. Religious tracts and other circulars and pamphlets, distributed by volunteers or provided by tinsmiths and itinerant tradesmen, might be acquired, memorized, even nailed onto the walls as decorations. Printers of inexpensive books used the same woodcuts or copper engravings to illustrate all manner of text; sometimes image and words were connected, sometimes the image was merely decorative or used to fill up otherwise blank space. But with the exception of the poorest country hovels

17 

David Vincent, The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).

492    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture and isolated locations, there would be letters, shapes, and words in the neighbourhood, and in urban areas the print environment could be dense and variegated.18 Lessons were taught in many places by many different methods. Some instructors were nearly as ignorant as their pupils—​dame schools in particular were sometimes little more than baby-​minding facilities. Older children taught younger ones, listened to drills, tried to help their classmates with calculations; teenagers were often recruited as pupil teachers, a stepping stone to full certification. Schools founded to educate males of the governing class had existed for centuries; under reform in the early nineteenth century by Thomas Arnold at Rugby and then at other institutions, the balance between a certain aristocratic socialization—​learning dissipation and bullying—​and the acquisition of elitist knowledge—​Greek and Latin and some English history, was righted. Mens sana in corpore sano encouraged self-​and group-​discipline in games and intermural sports contests. Women were generally educated at home; only in the last quarter of the century were institutional foundations for teaching young ladies created in significant numbers. At first the curriculum followed male establishments, even using the same texts. When more middle-​class schools were started, practical lessons in domestic skills and bringing up children came on offer. For all these levels of education, suitable print matter was abundantly, and in some cases cheaply, provided. Poverty in Ireland was so pervasive that from 1831 the Board of School Commissioners was authorized to subsidize prescribed books. At mid-​century commercial publishers John Murray and Longmans complained about being undercut, so the special Irish subsidy was repealed, and in time other means of making inexpensive materials available were instituted for the whole of the British Isles. The free market took notice of new ranges of customers. From the ha’pennies in the trousers of boys to the guineas flourished by Oxbridge grandees, there was print for every taste, from ghost stories to instruction manuals. Serious histories, philosophy, scientific and mechanical treatises, travel and art books, plentiful advice about gardening and botany, and seasonal offerings of richly decorated anthologies of fine writing—​all these and much more were available to the burgeoning middle class with its nascent consumer ethos.

Formats That these materials were available has as much to do with innovative design and marketing as with the decrease in the cost, and increase in the productivity, of print manufacture. Until the late eighteenth century, most books were expensive. After 1774, when the presumption of perpetual copyright was quashed and the limited terms of a substantial portion of Britain’s written legacy expired, publishers regrouped through several 18  Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford (London: Penguin Books, 2000). Originally three books published between 1939 and 1943, Thompson’s autobiographical reminiscences give an account of growing up in rural Oxfordshire where books, even at the end of the nineteenth century, were scarce.

Victorian Publishing and Reading Practices    493 interrelated expedients. Some entrepreneurs set up ‘libraries’ reprinting the standard works of poetry and prose in uniform editions, selected and sold as the foundation of a cultivated household. These products steeply reduced the cost of literary and other materials. Though increasingly impoverished, even Dickens’s parents had a small library of eighteenth-​century novels that young Charles read avidly at night before he had to pawn them. Other publishers looked out for new works that might attract the public’s coin. Byron was a good example, though his publisher John Murray refused to apply for copyright of the first volume of Don Juan because he believed it to be immoral. Thus the poem circulated much more widely through inexpensive editions from inferior presses than it otherwise would have done.19 Booksellers and presses trying to enter the market would team up to issue works that required little capital or commitment: a weekly magazine of some sort, for instance. Large projects such as dictionaries, atlases, and encyclopedias could be printed and sold piecemeal, in fascicles as they were printed. School texts could yield a steady profit for decades. Oxford University Press owed its mid-​century prosperity to Charles Wordsworth’s Greek grammar and Liddell and Scott’s Greek–​English Lexicon.20 Fiction came out in a format standardized by Sir Walter Scott: three uniform volumes costing one and a half guineas, or thirty-​one shillings and sixpence. This packaging and pricing survived until the 1890s, although some titles were made up of very slender volumes, being in toto as short as 90,000 words, and other bulked up to 300,000 or 400,000 words. But through being brought out in other formats the price of novels fell steadily through the century: reprints at a few shillings, or individual weekly or monthly parts for pennies or one shilling, or as instalments in magazines that might cost half a crown in the 1830s and were down to a shilling by the 1860s and sixpence by the 1890s. Similar price and format reductions prevailed in other fields. Customers could buy monthly parts of compendia about plants, art treasures, or chemistry; the pious could find tracts and sermons aplenty for a shilling or less. The SPCK—​Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, an Anglican mission founded in 1698—​and the SDUK—​Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, a secular body founded in 1826—​specialized in producing and distributing very inexpensive materials to the poor, unschooled, and those who were self-​taught. Among the most influential of the SDUK offerings were the biweekly issues of the Library of Useful Knowledge, mainly about scientific discoveries. These did not, however, penetrate deeply into the working class, by far the largest population and the one most in need of serious scientific resources. If mid-​century presses were all about generating mass markets for simple, widely appealing publications, at the end of the century publishers explored two alternatives. On the one hand, national dailies seduced every kind of reader with short articles, contests, puzzles, gossip, and scandal. At the turn of the century the 19  William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 20  Stray and Sutherland, ‘Mass Markets: Education’, in McKitterick (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vi. 363–​4.

494    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture downmarket Daily Mail attained a circulation of 500,000. George Newnes’s Tit-​ Bits, composed largely of extracts from other sources, reached 600,000, and a prize contest in Pearson’s Weekly shot sales up to 1,250,000.21 Syndicates bought up sensation novels by Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon and sold them to provincial newspapers in Britain and around the world either already set in type, or shipped in stereotype (papier mâché moulds for type), to be run as inserts surrounded by the outer pages of local news.22 The readership for these stories was immense. On the other hand, publishers might identify a niche market: children’s magazines, stories for young women and homemakers, publications for hobbyists of all sorts, or materials that catered to advanced tastes, such as the Yellow Book with its ‘decadent’ poems by William Butler Yeats and sinuous images by Aubrey Beardsley. If the mantra of serious book people was to be ‘businesslike’, the avant-​garde declared that they generated literary capital. Magazines that paid little and late, and often went out of business, were proof that art rather than commerce was their métier. Genres spurred markets. The detective novel grew out of lurid accounts of domestic violence and high street crime imaged in prints and broadsides for centuries. By the 1890s Conan Doyle and his imitators held their readers entranced. Dramatizations of popular stories allowed amateurs to stage productions in their own spaces, an activity that seems to do more harm in novels (Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), Collins’s No Name (1862)) than in homes. The John Dicks Press issued over 1,000 plays that could be performed free of any licensing or copyright charges; most scripts had stage directions, illustrations, and other aids to director and cast; and the cost of each copy was just a penny. Another set of genres comprised books on science, technology, mathematics, medicine, and law. Many of these were issued for professionals in the field and were priced accordingly. Some came out for autodidacts. And some crossed fiscal, religious, and educational frontiers. Foremost among that small group were Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). Vestiges, published anonymously, tried to bring scientific discoveries and theology into some kind of broad accord. At first it garnered interest and approbation: Prince Albert read it out loud to Queen Victoria. But soon clergymen denounced its unorthodoxy and scientists pointed out how amateurish it was.23 Nonetheless, it remained an international bestseller for generations: on its fortieth anniversary the Chambers brothers, notable publishers in Edinburgh and London, produced a twelfth edition with Robert Chambers identified as author. 21 

Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–​ 1900 (1957; 2nd edn., Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 395–​6. 22  Graham Law, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). 23  James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

Victorian Publishing and Reading Practices    495 While Chambers’s book ‘prepared the way’ for evolutionary theory, Darwin’s book not only established a carefully constructed ground for such thinking but also provoked opponents into vigorous assaults and supplied novelists with a new paradigm of ‘progress’ or regression on which to model their plots and world view.24 While many scientists and laypeople eventually consented to a notion of species branching over time, ‘there was’, James A. Secord reminds us, ‘consensus neither about the meaning of evolution nor of the truth of natural selection’. But ‘Darwinism’ became a topic of public discussion, about which, within the pages of many kinds of periodicals, science and journalism could meet and exchange views.25 Despite these examples, our knowledge about the scientific press in the Victorian era remains spotty. As Secord observes, ‘the dominant theme’ of STM (science, technology, mathematics) studies ‘has been the emergence of the social role of the specialist practitioner’.26 This narrative, Secord argues, ignores at its peril the forms in which scientific knowledge was communicated, in everything from double elephant folios to tiny tomes for children. As the qualifications, standards, and organs of communication for the sciences and technology grew more elitist during the century, publishers reached out to mass audiences to inform the working classes about the systematization, objectivity, utility, and progress of those disciplines. And, of course, there were also plenty of outlets for naysayers to denounce new findings and procedures as heretical rubbish.

Writers Copyright To a considerable extent, authors are a product of legislation. Until the eighteenth century, presses issued products that frequently had no author: government reports, anonymous political and religious propaganda, and tables of tides are instances of this kind of publication. Where an author was known, he was often dead: the great Greek, Roman, and medieval masters gave the authority of their names to their own (or sometimes spurious) works, but none of them participated in any way in the publication of their corpus. Authors were first taken into account in 1710. Legislation signed in that year by Queen Anne specified a limited term during which someone who owned a copy-​text had the right to print it. But because previously owners thought they had bought the right to copy for ever, it took another sixty years for copyright disputes to be settled in 24  Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-​Century Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983); George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). 25 Secord, Victorian Sensation, 514. 26  Secord, ‘Science, Technology and Mathematics’, in McKitterick (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vi. 443–​74, at 443.

496    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture favour of two concepts: creators or assigns of unpublished materials retained control of those materials until they went into print, and then any printed material had a term limit of copyright, extended in 1814 from fourteen to twenty-​eight years or the life of the author, whichever was longer. Up to the commencement of Victoria’s reign, holders of the right to copy were usually printers and publishers, members of the Stationers’ Company. But with the Lords’ decision in 1774 that copyright terms were finite, publishers began the scramble not only to produce editions of heritage works, but also to find new manuscripts, publishing subjects, formats, modes of publicity and distribution, and sources of income. Writers began to share in the sometimes significant profits from their works. Usually, authors sold a manuscript to a printer or publisher for an outright payment. Some entered into agreements for a kind of leasing: the publisher got the right to print a certain number of editions and number of copies in those editions for a specified period, and then whatever the author’s original share in the copyright might have been reverted back. A third option was for the author to pay for all the costs of publication and sales and pocket the balance. Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning issued their first poems this way, with relatives paying for publication—​more perhaps a mode of subsidizing authorial effort than outright vanity press issue. A fourth option was a royalty system—​some specified percentage of the book’s net earnings. This could be advantageous when a large sale was expected, and was agreeable to publishers who needn’t pay a large initial sum for the transfer of copyright. But publishers’ accounts were indecipherable and unreliable. Those ‘business’ methods advocated in the 1890s included learning how to maintain accurate ledgers. Sounds simple: but how does one figure what percentage of the cost of new machinery should be allocated to any particular copyright? Or what fraction of an advert for multiple publications should be borne by each item mentioned? Authors, until late in the century, were wary of royalties, not only because somehow they rarely materialized, but also because no income was forthcoming until the work had been written, published, and sold for some time. A fifth system, deriving as we have seen from methods of manufacturing and selling large projects such as encyclopedias and dictionaries, was to issue works piecemeal; the author might be paid per instalment delivered to the printer, and also perhaps share in the profits later should the venture succeed. There weren’t a lot of self-​proclaimed ‘authors’ when Victoria assumed the throne. The 1841 census numbered 626 authors, and this number includes newspaper editors, proprietors, and reporters, though not the clerics whose sermons constituted a large portion of the religious books that had the biggest share of the print market then. Many of these ‘authors’ wrote little (editors, proprietors), and many of the rest had second, or primary, jobs in the professions or the civil service. By 1861 the census category had narrowed to ‘author, editor, writer’, while the number nearly trebled, to 1,673. As the newspaper press expanded in every dimension, ‘authors, editors, journalists, publicists’ numbered 6,111 by 1881 and 13,786 in 1911. At no point in these decennial accountings is ‘author’ a single category; it is only one dimension of an occupational group associated

Victorian Publishing and Reading Practices    497 with writing.27 And the rewards varied tremendously: many writers died broke, some left substantial estates derived from their earnings, a few gained celebrity, and most subsisted on a few hundred pounds a year. Insofar as the category of ‘author’ was distinctive, those writers had some legal protections that differed from some of their compatriots in the print world. Illustrators, for instance, owned no part of their image once it was turned into the commissioning publisher, so plates could be reprinted as long as they held out without any further payment to the artist. Rights over reproductions of the image of a painting were by the end of the century divided from rights to permit such reproduction, the former belonging to the artist, the latter to the owner, unless otherwise specified. More ambiguous was the status of those who adapted others’ work, such as playwrights turning novels into stage productions and anthologizers collecting and reprinting selections from popular publications. Even playwrights composing new pieces were quite poorly served in the first half of the century. They got proceeds from a few performances, plus perhaps a nominal sum for the copyright of the play text, and then nothing. Douglas Jerrold received £60 for Black Ey’d Susan (1829), which ran for thousands of performances over the rest of the century (and, not incidentally, inspired Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (1888–​91, unfinished at his death; published 1924)), but Jerrold never saw another penny from any production.28 Given this situation and the decline of legitimate theatres in the 1830s and 1840s, many playwrights, successful as authors though not as earners, turned to other occupations. Those who struggled to remain connected to the stage translated French dramas or folk tales. The hack dramatist W. T. Moncrieff adapted at least 200 works, gamely continuing as he went blind; he died in an almshouse. However, as theatre owners and managers tried to resuscitate their property in the 1860s, they came to more favourable arrangements with writers who could supply sure-​fire hits. Dion Boucicault extracted a profit-​sharing agreement from Benjamin Webster, manager of the Adelphi Theatre, in 1860, and thereby earned £10,000 the first year from The Colleen Bawn.29 Samuel French founded his theatrical publishing company in the US in 1830, teamed up with a counterpart, the British publisher Thomas Hailes Lacy, in the 1850s, moved to London in 1872, and bought out his partner in 1873, printing huge numbers of scripts for private performance without fee as we have seen John Dicks do. Lacy’s Acting Edition of Plays (1848–​73) ran to ninety-​nine volumes containing 1,485 individual titles. When public performance rights became an adjunct of the business, theatrical publishers frequently served as intermediary for those fees, which eventually trickled down to the playwright.

27  Patrick Leary and Andrew Nash, ‘Authorship’, in McKitterick (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vi. 172–​213. 28  Michael Slater, Douglas Jerrold, 1803-​1857 (London: Duckworth, 2002), 70–​3. 29  Leary and Nash, ‘Authorship’, 188.

498    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture

Literature There is no question that Victorian literature was one of the glories of the age, and that authors of many kinds were celebrities. Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Oscar Wilde were some of those who gave reading and lecture tours in Britain and North America for profit. But all sorts of writers sold their books and their fame, including popular preachers, politicians, historians, compilers of conduct and cookery books and of anthologies, scientists, and producers of widely adopted textbooks and editions. A rapidly growing subset of writers were journalists such as William Howard Russell, the first modern war correspondent who covered the Crimean War for The Times (1853–​6), and W. T. Stead, an investigative reporter whose exposé of prostitution, The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon (1885), earned him immense notoriety and a three-​month prison sentence because, to prove the existence of the trade, he bought a 13-​year-​old girl without obtaining her father’s permission. (Stead made sure that the daughter was in no way harmed or frightened by this transaction.) However, the marketplace wasn’t always a good judge of an author’s contribution to society. Some books take a long time to establish their quality and usefulness. And many conscientious scribblers work hard all their lives without saving enough for their old age. Attempts to supplement market rewards were made throughout the century. Some were forms of grants or annuities, supplied by state or private institutions. Others were efforts to legislate more favourable terms for writers. It took six years to pass a version of a Bill, first introduced in 1837 by the playwright and MP Thomas Noon Talfourd, that extended literary copyrights to forty-​two years or seven years beyond the author’s death, whichever was longer. Thomas Babington Macaulay took various stands against the legislation, arguing persuasively in 1841 that it gave a monopoly to writers, depriving the public of inexpensive access, and then in 1842 that the proposal to extend copyright for twenty-​five years post mortem was too short and allotted too great a role to chance. However, this time the Bill, much more modest in its provisions than Talfourd’s original one and now supported even by some publishers and printers as well as by William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle, passed and received the royal assent.30 During the second half of the century there were two routes leading to better deals for authors. One, legislative and diplomatic, was the creation of bi-​national, and later international, copyright agreements that facilitated trade across national frontiers and curtailed the manufacture and sale of foreign reprints outside the boundaries of national copyright. Many countries signed the 1886 Berne Convention, but not the United States, with which British authors had most to gain from copyright protection. Some alleviation of the imbalance was provided with the passage by the US Congress in 1891 of the Chace Act, though it still contained protectionist clauses for American printers. It took

30 

Catherine Seville, ‘Copyright’, in McKitterick (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vi. 214–​27.

Victorian Publishing and Reading Practices    499 until 1911 for Britain to consolidate and codify the multitude of separate documents, laws, and practices that had grown up at various places in the empire. The other route was private. The Society of Authors was founded in 1883 under the leadership of the novelist Walter Besant. Its three objectives were the definition and defence of literary property, amendment of the copyright laws, and promotion of international agreements. It lobbied, at times successfully, for all three initiatives, but it also provided invaluable advice, in print and in person, to authors unsure about everything from the clauses in their contracts to the rights they might reserve regarding reprints, adaptations, foreign translations, and other versions of their works. It advocated a royalty system of payments and contributed to a broadening sense of authors as professionals. Simultaneously, writers began on an informal, and then more contractual, basis to advise publishers—​John Forster, Geraldine Jewsbury, George Meredith, and Margaret Oliphant all served for many years as publishers’ readers. Another set of intermediaries—​author’s agents—​negotiated contracts, foreign sales, syndications, dramatic rights, publicity and book tours, and the minutiae incidental to a popular writer’s career. Trade journals printed advertisements for handbooks and editorial services, including the newly formed typing bureaus for manuscript conversions.

Writers in general There is probably no generalization that would apply to all writers and to all periods of the Victorian age. Except that one, and a corollary, that the careers of authors were very diverse. Some poets were much more popular than almost any poet is today: Tennyson, who received a baronetcy from Queen Victoria, his neighbour on the Isle of Wight, commanded $1,000 from an American publisher just for one short lyric. Certain histories and scientific treatises found wide readership. Celebrities could always sell: Queen Victoria used her diary as the basis for two books about her life in the Highlands, published in 1868 and 1884. These contributed to a century-​long romanticization of Scotland impelled by Scott, the painter Edwin Landseer, and such enthusiastic descriptions as the queen’s word-​picture of the rock-​bound source of the Dee: a scene featuring ‘such magnificent wild rocks, precipices, and corries, most splendid. It had a sublime and solemn effect; so solitary, so wild, so severe, no one but ourselves and our little party there’.31 Between the highs and the lows was a broad middle-​band of more-​or-​less full-​time, more-​or-​less professional, writers who might be formally or informally connected to a periodical, might develop a speciality in a particular subject and earn money by assessing and reviewing books in that area, might fashion works for schools or institutions training particular workforces, might pen humorous stories or lyrics (Jerome K. Jerome, William Schwenck Gilbert), or, like George Grossmith, might write journalism and sketches, produce, sing, and dance in entertainments and light opera, as Grossmith did

31 Victoria, Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands (privately printed, 1865), 86.

500    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture in ten of the Gilbert and Sullivan Savoy hits, and collaborate with his comedian and illustrator brother Weedon on one of the funniest and most popular stories of the century, The Diary of a Nobody, first serialized in Punch in 1888–​9, and then expanded into a book in 1892. The 1890s saw several new directions for literature. New Women fiction roused controversy and discovered a devoted readership. The Irish invaded: Oscar Wilde writing plays, poems, novels, and lectures, George Bernard Shaw inditing the most perceptive theatre and opera reviews while penning a series of successful West End comedies. Fiction dealt with tougher subjects frankly, although Thomas Hardy could not publish his original version of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and after 1900 turned instead to poetry. Fantasy and aestheticism supplanted mid-​century morality; the oppression of women became a popular subject of protest in fiction and theatre; French naturalism crossed the Channel; and ‘decadence’ (referring to eroticized atheism: Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti) and sexualized theatre (such as Wilde’s Salome written for Sarah Bernhardt (1893)) gained wide followings among the ‘moderns’ and fierce resistance from conservative writers and thinkers. Spiritualism inspired Yeats (another Irishman), Shaw championed Ibsen (1891) and Wagner (The Perfect Wagnerite written in 1883, printed in 1898). The philology and philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche entered British consciousness. The kind of writing consumed by the public also shifted, generating demand for new kinds of authors and genres. From 1814 to 1846 books about religion were the largest single category of titles; geography, travel, history, and biography (a compound booksellers’ category) came second; fiction and juvenile literature third; education fourth.32 By the 1870s these proportions had shifted. The number of books printed had also hugely increased. So it was possible for the same number of books on a subject to be issued as a half-​century earlier, but for the proportion of the market represented by that number to fall considerably, as was the case with the category of religion. Fiction and juvenile literature bumped religion out of first place, and education, with 11 per cent of the titles published in the 1870s, was charging up on geography et al.33 By the 1890s newspapers and other quickly produced, mass-​market paper products—​racing sheets, puzzle books, and so forth—​consumed a lot of readers’ time and churned enormous profits for a few print industrialists. A particularly lucrative and diversified market opened up in the 1840s, and by 1900 was a major publishing and selling season: Christmas. In earlier times the book trade expected two seasons: spring, peaking in March, and pre-​summer holidays, peaking in May and June. A Christmas Carol and the first Christmas card both came out in 1843; publishing was not the same thereafter. All kinds of paper products spewed forth from October to December for holiday shoppers. Also Christmas itself became redefined, not as twelve days that included celebrating the birth of the New Year on 31 December and the gifts of the Magi on Twelfth Night, but instead as the three days of Christmas 32 Eliot, Some Patterns and Trends, 44–​5. 33 Eliot, Some Patterns and Trends, 46–​7.

Victorian Publishing and Reading Practices    501 Eve, Christmas day, and Boxing Day. Many of the gift books were lavishly illustrated in colour. Technologies for reproducing images vastly improved over the century and the bright, beautiful, and imaginative prints and photographs gracing these attractive offerings stimulated buyers and readers. By the 1870s December publications accounted for as much as 35 per cent of annual print production.34 Greeting cards flourished, and expanded into other seasons as well, such as Valentine’s Day.

Readers The reading public multiplied over the century and consumed every imaginable variety of print product. But two cohorts of readers in particular were identified and newly catered to: the self-​educated working class, and women. ‘The common people of England read their English authors!’ exclaimed the self-​educated German Carl Moritz, who paid a visit to England in 1782.35 That remained true of many labourers throughout the nineteenth century. These autodidacts struggled to acquire even the rudimentary means for reading—​a warm, well-​lighted nook, spectacles, and quiet time. But they did acquire an education from books. Good books. They read science and history and philosophy. Novels taught many that hitherto unrecorded lives might have their own dignity and worth. The canon included thrillers, romance, and salacious scandal, but in general working-​class reading rooms and libraries stocked conservative texts reproduced in cheap editions long after they first appeared in finer formats at higher prices. The poor lagged a generation behind the rich; even their raggedy schoolbooks never cited living authors still in copyright. And thus popular radicalism and religious fundamentalism could coexist, even reinforce one another. There was, Jonathan Rose points out, ‘persistent working-​class resistance to Darwin’.36 Women found ways to educate themselves even if they had restricted access to schooling or libraries. They formed book clubs and mutual improvement societies. A  surprising proportion of their parents took an interest in their schooling, and girls liked schools better than boys, at least according to a University of Essex survey in the late 1960s that recorded oral interviews with a range of students educated between the 1870s and 1908.37 While most interviewees learned through experience that their basic education was inadequate, they remembered those years as pleasant. By the 1880s there were opportunities for women to pursue higher levels of both vocational and liberal studies. Some well-​educated women proselytized in meetings and magazines for their sisters’ advancement in learning. While domestic skills were still in great demand, by 1900 other employment opportunities opened up, notably in retail stores and secretarial and 34 Eliot, Some Patterns and Trends, 34–​5.

35  Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 187. 36 Rose, The Intellectual Life, 119. 37 Rose, The Intellectual Life, 146–​86.

502    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture typing pools. Some women became famous as authors, teachers, labour leaders, scholars and scientists, and propagandists. In sum, there were many more job options for females outside the home or factory than had existed in the previous century. Women’s relations to print culture, however, cannot be generalized any more than men’s.38 They had varied responses to the materials available to them, sometimes reacting to approved works with shock or terror while finding censored reading liberating, and frequently discovering after marriage printed matter ranging from advice about household economy to treatises regarding medical conditions, politics, and personal relationships that they would never have been allowed to read as single ladies. Many Victorian women acquired an education equal to their male peers as a result of their work at home, in factories, in shops, as teachers in schools, and in offices that transacted business of all sorts. By 1900 the ability to decode printed materials was commonplace.39 It was probably helpful to British print culture that Protestantism encouraged literacy: the Bible was read, memorized, and discussed in private, in public, in schools, in assemblies and committees, in periodicals, in novels, and in Parliament. Such reading could be ‘extensive’, that is, ranging across the scriptures and commentary, or ‘intensive’, that is, studying and meditating on passages or, for those trained in the appropriate languages, the translations of those passages. Most children were taught the syllabic method of acquiring reading: letters first, then simple syllables, then more complex multisyllabic combinations, a system of steps that could be mastered and then taught by more advanced students to their juniors. But there was much informal education in decoding as well, and eager learners found ways of exercising their curiosity and mastering whatever printed matter came to hand. Any kind of conversation, court procedure, lecture or sermon, pub discussion or political rant, dramatic performance, or gossip at fairs and markets could add to the fund of language, grammar, and usages circulating in the society.40 And while especially through the influence of state schools after 1870 local languages (Cornish, Welsh) and idiolects declined, Britons spoke and wrote quite differently in different regions. Dickens is not unique in paying attention to these varieties of linguistic usage. But the take-​up of his cockney expressions or rhetorical circumlocutions as practised by such characters as Sam and Tony Weller, Mrs Nickleby, and Sairey Gamp, indicates that readers could understand and enjoy different modes of verbal expression. Reading aloud, and thus hearing rather than conning words, remained for the working class a primary mode of instruction and the basic mode of understanding; reading aloud in the home became a practice not only of the middle and upper classes but also of the labouring poor around mid-​century; and silent reading arrived much earlier in higher economic 38 

Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–​1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Stephen Colclough and David Vincent, ‘Reading’, in McKitterick (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vi. 281–​323. 40 The Contemporary Review specialized in publishing ‘conversations’ among a group of fictional or real people about such matters as war, aesthetics, music, art, and literature. 39 

Victorian Publishing and Reading Practices    503 brackets than lower ones. But whether communication was effected by visual imagery, sounded syllables, dialogue, speeches, public readings, or by individuals themselves subvocalizing words and painstakingly solving the mysteries of print, literacy characterized the Victorian population and was nearly universal by 1900. One dimension of that cultural literacy was the homemade album, composed of extracts copied or clipped out, accompanied by printed or handmade images, annotations, and other enhancements. In one way these ‘scrapbooks’ functioned as popular caricatures and cartoons had during the Napoleonic Wars: they provided sociable entertainment for evening parties. Music sheets were also great resources. In any company there might be someone who could sing or play an instrument, reading music or lyrics while the audience listened and perhaps looked over the florid pictures that decorated popular music sheet covers. Families might write and read their own stories, or decorate a favourite book with all kinds of association items. So print culture was never just a prompt for passive reception. It was an interactive, pervasive, compelling environment that touched virtually every person and activity of the age. In closing, one might cite four phenomena that, while not in any way encompassing the ubiquity of print culture, characterized the Victorian experience: (1) the synchronization and acceleration of time, (2) the shrinking of space, (3) the encouragement of curiosity, and (4) the consciousness of interdependence. First, everything speeded up: movement, cogitation, transactions, production, consumption. The beginning of the century knew time in various ways: through the sun, moon, stars, and tides; through the rhythms of the barn and farmyard; through cooking and baking and preserving; through religious seasons and services and bells; and by means of timepieces, as in the expression ‘six of the clock’. By the end of that century clocks had replaced most of the other chronological measures; ‘o’clock’ as indicated on a dial timed all events, from the arrival of a train to the hour of supper. George Elgar Hicks’s 1860 crowd-​pleaser, The General Post Office—​ One Minute to Six, though condemned by critics for its vulgar depiction of commonplace activity, supplies an unforgettable impression of how critical minutes mattered: in this case, catching the 6.00 p.m. train with newspapers and parcels and mail—​the last post of the day. And that time was standardized around the globe, with ground zero established by an international conference in 1884 as the longitudinal line passing through the Greenwich Observatory on the South Bank of the Thames. The French refused for several decades to acknowledge this prime meridian, preferring their own Paris meridian. Greenwich grounded spatial as well as temporal relations. And as transport speeded up, space seemed to shrink. Whereas a nearby town might be two hours away by horse, it could be reached in twenty minutes by train. A transatlantic trip that might be taken once in a lifetime became a regular crossing scheduled and concluded so reliably that contracts were made for delivery of printed materials so they could be issued on the same day in North America and Britain. Lives were enriched, organized, disciplined, and judged by time and space and how the living made use of them. It was, in fact, sometimes difficult to argue that any time or space should be set aside not for ‘use’, but for enjoyment, reflection, reading, or contemplating nature.

504    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Curiosity is a third prominent feature in the general culture of the time. It was clearly a driver of the innumerable publications devoted to every conceivable subject. Curiosity overcame disadvantages. Many a worker used their reading to widen their perspectives and improve their skills as well as their machines and tools. Amateur scientists collected, inspected, represented, and narrated their findings, building idiosyncratic, collective, or professional resources as their inclination and research led them. Rock strata told the story of earth’s history; beetles and birds diagnosed past and present environments and life struggles; the wealthy competed to import the rarest botanical specimens and raise them in their conservatories. Robert Louis Stevenson versified his ‘Happy Thought’ (1885) in a two-​line poem: ‘The world is so full of a number of things, | I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.’41 The wondrous variety called out to curiosities everywhere; the records of investigating that world inspired further generations of writers and readers. Finally, the nineteenth century developed the notion that things were related in complex and co-​dependent variables. One could set a course for life and try to follow it, but every step was governed not only by will but also by circumstances. The metropole could plan elaborately for governing the colonies, but they pushed back, individually, collectively, through climate and ecology, disease and sanitation practices, religions and customs, rebellion and war. Calculus, the mathematics of infinitesimals, limits, and change, became crucial to such essential studies as biology, astronomy, and engineering. A characteristic thoughtful sentence expressing the perpetual interaction of competing forces might have independent and dependent clauses, lists and examples, generalizations and retractions, all contained within the same syntax. Each moving part needed to be registered in order to comprehend the motions and energy of the whole and to raise awareness that any proposition or course of action threaded its way through a multitude of competing determinants. Dickens, pre-​eminent shaper of Victorian print culture, shows us this in the symphonic opening paragraph of his mid-​century epic, Bleak House: London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-​pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-​grown snow-​flakes—​gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-​temper, and losing their foot-​hold at street-​corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the

41 

Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses, illustrated by Charles Robinson (1885; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: John Lane, 1895), 44.

Victorian Publishing and Reading Practices    505 crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.42

Here, in less than two hundred words, the printed text assimilates all time, beginning with antediluvian dust storms that once whirled through a glacial period to produce the ancient mud once again in 1851 building up new deposits on London streets,43 and prehistoric eras when a species of ‘greedy crocodile’ resembling an elephantine lizard roamed the world. A Megalosaurus (Greek megalo ‘big’ + sauros ‘lizard’) died and sank into that mud. Its bones were unearthed and a whole body reconstructed in 1851 by the geologist William Buckland (1784–​1856) and the anatomist Richard Owen (1804–​92). That image contributed to the heated debate about evolution. The medieval period is represented by the era when Lincoln’s Inn was founded—​it may be named after Henry de Lacy, earl of Lincoln, who died in 1311, and its earliest official record dates from 1422. Lincoln’s Inn Old Hall was built in the fifteenth century and Michaelmas term defines a court and university session following the feast day of St Michael, 29 September, deriving from medieval calendars. A few lines further along in this introduction the Lord Chancellor, ‘with a foggy glory round his head’, presides over a court that is ‘the most pestilent of hoary sinners’, seemingly an embodiment of Genesis and the root of all disease, while the soot intimates the end of the world, as projected in the nebular hypothesis of Pierre-​Simon Laplace (1749–​1827) that the sun would eventually burn out. We have the canine, equine, and human descendants of elephantine forebears and mud compounding as in geological strata and banking. And if any passage or way forward is attempted, it is confounded by the slipping and sliding, the jostling and sticking, and the general infection, that characterizes the interaction of past and present, human and non-​human, earthly and universal components of the century’s most paradigmatic city, London. The place may be named in a one-​word sentence, a syntax without subject, verb, or predicate. But to unpack that sentence requires aeons and clauses innumerable, stretching from the beginning of time, light, and the Word to the death of the sun, mimicked in the unending documents of the interminable law case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce. This is the sort of vision Victorian print culture was capable of generating, understanding, pursuing, imaging, and writing.

Select Bibliography Altick, Richard D., The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–​1900 (1957; 2nd edn., Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998). Beer, Gillian, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-​ Century Fiction (1983; 3rd edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

42  Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. George Ford and Sylvère Monod, Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 195. 43  Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (London: Vintage, 2001).

506    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Brake, Laurel, Subjugated Knowledges:  Journalism, Gender, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1994). Flint, Kate, The Woman Reader, 1837–​1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Fyfe, Aileen, and B. Lightman (eds), Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-​Century Sites and Experiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Gagnier, Regenia, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986). Hughes, Linda K., The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Jordan, John O., and Robert L. Patten (eds), Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-​Century British Publishing and Reading Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Leary, Patrick, The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-​Victorian London (London: British Library, 2010). McKitterick, David (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vi. 1830–​ 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Maxwell, Richard (ed.), The Victorian Illustrated Book (Charlottesville:  University Press of Virginia, 2002). Pettitt, Clare, Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Rose, Jonathan, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Secord, James A., Victorian Sensation:  The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Seville, Catherine, Literary Copyright Reform in Early Victorian England: The Framing of the 1842 Copyright Act (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Sutherland, John, Victorian Fiction:  Writers, Publishers, Readers (1995; 2nd edn., Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Tucker, Herbert F. (ed.), A Companion to Victorian Literature & Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). Vincent, David, The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). Weedon, Alexis, Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market, 1836–​1916 (Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate, 2003).

Chapter 26

L iteratu re a nd t h e Ex pansion of t h e  Pre s s Joanne Shattock

The publication on 30 March 1850 of Household Words, a new twopenny weekly miscellany ‘of Entertainment and Instruction’, was an event that reverberated throughout the literary world and beyond. The launch of the weekly had been the talk of London for some time; the consequences were to be far-​reaching. Its unprecedented success, not only in terms of sales and readers but the way in which it established itself on the literary landscape, offers a starting point for exploring the close connections between literature and the periodical press from the mid-​nineteenth century onwards. In 1850, the publication of yet another periodical was scarcely a novelty. Technological advances in manufacturing, improved communications—​notably the railways and the Penny Post—​the growth in literacy among the artisan and lower middle classes, and an increase in the disposable income of the middle classes converged to make the 1850s a propitious time for publishers, particularly publishers of fiction but also of periodicals. The self-​styled ‘Conductor’ of the new weekly, Charles Dickens, on the other hand, had a celebrity status unequalled in the world of magazine publishing. Dickens had been contemplating a new periodical for some time, writing to his friend John Forster the previous September that the idea was ‘at last gradually growing into form’.1 Approaches were made to likely contributors, followed by a series of advertisements for the miscellany. In a well-​judged and carefully constructed ‘Preliminary Word’ published in the first number Dickens alluded gracefully to ‘some tillers of the field into which we now come […] whose company it is an honour to join’.2 That company included the proprietors of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (1832–​1956), a long-​lived and 1 

The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson, 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–​2002), v. 1847–​1849, ed. Graham Storey and K. J. Fielding (1981), 613. 2  ‘A Preliminary Word’, in The Amusements of the People and Other Papers 1834–​1851, Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism, ed. Michael Slater with John Drew, ii (London: J. M. Dent, 1996), 178.

508    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture successful miscellany that like Household Words also contained some fiction and according to John Sutherland was ‘the direct inspiration’ for the new weekly.3 Other competitors included the London Journal, and Weekly Record of Literature, Science and Art (1845–​1928) and its main rival, The Family Herald or Useful Information and Amusement for the Million (1842–​1940), both weekly publications that serialized fiction, and in the case of the London Journal, commanded a circulation of some 500,000. Others in the same price range of one to two pence, a figure directed at lower-​middle-​class readers, included Howitt’s Journal (1847–​8), formerly the People’s Journal, a magazine of ‘popular progress’ edited by the husband-​and-​wife team of William and Mary Howitt, that published fiction by Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, and Eliza Meteyard, together with contributions by Samuel Smiles. Sharpe’s London Magazine (1845–​70), another competitor, similarly promised ‘Entertainment and Instruction for General Reading’. It was edited by the novelist Frank Smedley and later by Anna Maria Hall, both of whom were contributors. A recent venture by the popular poet Eliza Cook, Eliza Cook’s Journal (1849–​54), published work by Julia Kavanagh, Eliza Meteyard, Samuel Smiles, and Cook herself. One ‘tiller in the field’ whose company Dickens decidedly did not relish was his fellow novelist and proprietor G. W. M. Reynolds, whose successful Reynolds’s Miscellany ‘of romance, general literature and science’ (1846–​69) contained ‘villainous’ (Dickens’s word) sensational fiction that he deliberately set out to counteract by the contents of his new weekly.4 Another was the equally successful Edward Lloyd, proprietor of Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (1842–​1931) the contents of which were also sensational. Partly owing to the success of Lloyd and Reynolds, and due also to the mediocre quality of much of the fiction in the London Journal and the Family Herald, the weekly penny magazine containing fiction was regarded as a decidedly tainted form in 1850. A clear division remained between cheap literature directed to the new, mass reading public and literature aimed at a more traditional, educated readership, now expanded to include a new constituency, the middle-​class family. One of the major achievements of Household Words and its successor All the Year Round (1859–​95) was to make the fiction-​bearing weekly magazine respectable, and to attract both a mass popular readership and an educated middle-​class one. In so doing, Dickens’s two weeklies were to pave the way for the next important development in fiction publishing, the ‘shilling monthlies’ of the 1860s. In his ‘Preliminary Word’ Dickens expressed an ‘ambition […] to be admitted into many homes with affection and confidence; to be regarded as a friend by children and old people […] and to be associated with the harmless laughter and the gentle tears of many hearths’.5 The initial target audience, indicated by its price of twopence, were newly literate consumers, wage earners resident mainly in towns and cities, 3 

John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, 2nd edn. (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2009), 111. 4  Pilgrim Edition of Letters of Dickens, vi. 1850–​1852, ed. Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, and Nina Burgis (1988), 83. 5  ‘A Preliminary Word’, 178.

Literature and the Expansion of the Press    509 whose tastes, particularly in fiction, it was argued, were still to be formed. This was the ‘Unknown Public’ referred to by Wilkie Collins in his 1858 Household Words article of the same title, ‘a public to be counted by millions, the unfathomable, the universal public of the penny-​novel Journals’, as he described them, who needed to be taught ‘the difference between a good book and a bad’.6 Margaret Oliphant, in her article ‘The Byways of Literature:  Reading for the Million’, in Blackwood’s Magazine for the same month (August 1858), made a similar point. She surveyed six penny publications, including the Family Herald, the London Journal, Cassell’s Illustrated Paper, Reynolds’s Miscellany, and two others, commenting on their enormous circulation, and on the seemingly insatiable appetite for stories among the nation’s new readers. Like Collins she acknowledged that the increase in literacy was a potential for good, but lamented the indiscriminate reading of the new reading public, the poor quality of the magazines directed to them, and the difficulty of changing their reading tastes and habits.7 Dickens’s appeal for admission to the homes and hearths of the nation’s readers was directed to this large section of the reading public, but he also had his sights on an increasingly affluent and growing middle-​class family readership, one that contained a large proportion of women. That middle-​class public, he was also aware, now had the potential to become a fiction-​buying one. With the latter in mind, Household Words adopted one important feature of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. Like the earlier paper, it was marketed in weekly issues of twenty-​four double-​column pages selling for twopence (Chambers’s contained sixteen pages and sold for one-​and-​a-​half pence) and in ninepenny monthly numbers with wrappers, as well as more substantial bound biannual volumes. The last two formats were aimed at middle-​class purchasers and readers. Lorna Huett, in an illuminating article ‘Among the Unknown Public: Household Words, All the Year Round, and the Mass-​Market Weekly Periodical in the Mid-​Nineteenth Century’,8 shows how in the format of his periodical Dickens carefully hedged his bets, deliberately choosing the cheaper paper, the dense typeface, and crowded double-​ column page layout of the cheap weeklies, but also the smaller crown octavo size of the more expensive periodicals—​the monthly magazines and quarterly reviews aimed at the middle and upper classes. By means of the physical appearance of the miscellany and by a combination of new fiction and imaginative non-​fiction, Dickens attracted the new readerships of the lower-​middle and artisan classes and the middle-​class family. Just as he was aware of the need for the careful positioning of his new journal in terms of readers, Dickens was equally conscious of the importance of his choice of contributors. Here too his timing was propitious. The literary marketplace, as the writer G. H. Lewes had recently observed, had become professionalized. In an article for Fraser’s 6 

[Wilkie Collins], ‘The Unknown Public’, Household Words, 18 (21 August 1858), 217–​22, at 222. Margaret Oliphant, ‘The Byways of Literature: Reading for the Million’, in Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant, ed. Joanne Shattock and Elisabeth Jay, 25 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011–​), i. Literary Criticism, 1854–​1869, ed. Joanne Shattock (2011), 179–​202. 8  Lorna Huett, ‘Among the Unknown Public: Household Words, All the Year Round, and the Mass-​ Market Weekly Periodical in the Mid-​Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 38, no. 1 (Spring 2005), 61–​82. 7 

510    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Magazine three years earlier Lewes commented that ‘Literature has become a profession [… .] It is a means of subsistence, almost as certain as the bar or the church’. ‘The real cause’, he went on, was ‘the excellence and abundance of periodical literature’.9 Never before had writers relied so extensively on the periodical press to support themselves, and never before had this been regarded as a respectable career path. The press was now an essential element in a writing life, much more so than it had been in the Romantic era. It may have been an exaggeration to claim that the literary profession was equivalent to the law, the Church, or the universities in terms of status or security, but like those professions it operated on a series of interlocking networks, of writers, publishers, and proprietors. Like many of the senior professions, it was also metropolitan in its focus. In tacit acknowledgement of this fact, publishing houses outside London established premises in the capital in the 1840s and 1850s, among them the Edinburgh publisher William Blackwood and Sons, publishers of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, who opened an office in Pall Mall in 1840. W. and R. Chambers, proprietors of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal followed suit in 1842. In the early 1850s the Cambridge firm of Daniel and Alexander Macmillan opened a London office in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, and the firm’s business gradually shifted from Cambridge to London. Publishers became important centres of literary networks or ‘nodes’, in the terminology of modern network theory; their offices, like London gentlemen’s clubs and the coffee houses of an earlier era, were where contacts were made, contracts initiated, and literary gossip circulated. The wheels of literary London in the 1850s and 1860s were oiled by dinners and evening parties, many of them hosted by publishers. Patrick Leary’s The Punch Brotherhood10 presents a compelling portrait of the weekly meetings of the staff of the comic miscellany Punch in the 1850s and 1860s, which were conducted over dinner at Bradbury and Evans’s offices on Bouverie Street, off the Strand. Contributors arrived from the theatre, the law courts, gentlemen’s clubs, and the offices of London newspapers to thrash out the subject for the weekly cartoon or ‘cut’. Each brought news and gossip which were offered for circulation over dinner, and each in turn took away items of news for recirculation in their respective milieus. Salacious gossip and, as Leary demonstrates, the fomentation of at least one serious literary quarrel, between Dickens and Thackeray, were two outcomes of these working dinners, but there were undoubtedly more positive consequences of this gathering of professional writers, illustrators, politicians, and journalists. The radical publisher John Chapman, who became the proprietor of the quarterly Westminster Review in 1851, regularly held evening parties at his residence 142 Strand. Serjeant Cox, proprietor of The Critic, a fortnightly literary review, held receptions and dinners at his home on Russell Square. The Macmillan brothers, who launched Macmillan’s Magazine at the end of 1859, held suppers at their Henrietta Street premises, the so-​called ‘tobacco parliaments’, a more sober version of the weekly Punch dinners at 9  [G. H. Lewes], ‘The Condition of Authors in England, Germany and France’, Fraser’s Magazine, 35 (March 1847), 285–​95, at 287. 10  Patrick Leary, The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-​Victorian London (London: British Library, 2010).

Literature and the Expansion of the Press    511 Bradbury and Evans’s. George Smith, of the publishers Smith Elder, who founded the monthly Cornhill Magazine in 1860, held monthly dinners at his home on Gloucester Square, and after 1863, more informal ‘at homes’ on Friday evenings at his new house in Hampstead. The letters and memoirs of the 1850s and 1860s record these and similar gatherings, yet more evidence of the way in which the press had become an essential element in a Victorian writing life. Daniel Maclise’s well-​known illustration of ‘The Fraserians’ which accompanied an article of that title in the January 1835 number of Fraser’s Magazine depicted some twenty-​seven of the magazine’s contributors, including a few fictitious ones, all of whom were to varying degrees celebrities. They present a portrait of the convivial and decidedly masculine magazine culture of the 1830s. Their mid-​Victorian counterparts were for the most part more sober and professional, and included an increasing number of women. Networks of women writers were likely to emanate from within a domestic setting, as that centred around William and Mary Howitt, the proprietors of Howitt’s Journal, who were well known for their patronage of younger writers, women in particular. The Howitts’ various homes in and around London—​they moved from Clapton, in east London, to Regent’s Park and eventually to Highgate, were centres of literary activity. Mary Howitt actively recruited contributors for her protégé Eliza Cook’s new journal, and for Sartain’s Union Magazine, a Philadelphia-​based illustrated monthly. Anna Maria and Samuel Carter Hall were another well-​connected couple, whose afternoon parties at their cottage ‘The Rosery’, in Old Brompton, and later at their country home near Addlestone in Surrey, were attended by many aspiring novelists and journalists. Anna Maria Hall was also active in recruiting writers for Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, for Sharpe’s London Magazine during her editorship, and later for St James’s Magazine, which she edited from 1861 to 1868. In her analysis of the contributors to Household Words, Anne Lorhli divided the 390 known contributors into several groups. The first was the inner core of staff: the subeditor W. H. Wills, R. H. Horne, Henry Morley—​who wrote the largest number of articles of all (300)—​and Wilkie Collins. After that there were some thirty-​five regulars, not all of whom remained for the nine years of the magazine’s run. But the majority of contributors to Household Words were drawn from the same pool of talent relied upon by the editors of Chambers’s Journal, Howitt’s Journal, Sharpe’s London Magazine, Eliza Cook’s Journal, Bentley’s Miscellany, Ainsworth’s Magazine, and many others. Dickens made a number of overtures to individual writers, and his choices were astute. Elizabeth Gaskell was known to him through Forster and through Chapman & Hall, who had published her first novel Mary Barton (1848). She had been introduced to Chapman & Hall by William Howitt. The Howitts, whom Dickens knew from their Journal, were also invited to write for Household Words. They were both flattered and grateful, although in the end they did not write much for the weekly. Harriet Martineau was in 1850 an established figure on the literary scene and, like Gaskell, was an inspired choice. Gaskell proved to be surprisingly adept in responding to the challenge of writing for the miscellany, although she had difficulty in adapting to the demands of weekly serialization. Others like Geraldine Jewsbury, Eliza Lynn (later Linton), and Dinah

512    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Mulock (later Craik), wrote occasionally, all three sound choices. Dickens also invited Tom Taylor and Douglas Jerrold, both of whom refused. Why then was Household Words so spectacularly successful in comparison with the other journals, many of whom relied on the same contributors? One of the reasons usually given was the quality of the original fiction—​novels and stories by Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Eliza Lynn Linton, Harriet Parr, and James Payn, all of whom were, or would become, significant writers. Dickens himself wrote for Household Words, serializing Hard Times in 1854, which was followed by Gaskell’s North and South. By contrast, as has been noted, much of the fiction in competing magazines like the London Journal and the Family Herald was anonymous or by little-​known writers, and some of it was reprinted from earlier periods. In her book Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words:  The Social Life of Goods,11 Catherine Waters highlights another factor in the success of Household Words, the innovative nature of its non-​fiction. Waters provides a compelling tour or excursion through these articles—​many of them by Household Words regulars like G. A. Sala, Henry Morley, and Harriet Martineau, some written or co-​written by Dickens himself, demonstrating their imaginative take on their subjects, and the virtuoso performances of the writers. Waters’s assessment of the non-​fiction is that it was aimed specifically at a middle-​class readership. The ‘commodity culture’ it interrogated was one with which the middle classes of the 1850s were familiar—​and in so doing it solidified the miscellany’s middle-​class reader base. The third and perhaps the most significant reason for the success of Household Words was Dickens himself. He was a celebrity editor of a kind that had not been seen before. None of the other eponymous journals had a ‘Conductor’ with such pulling power, neither Douglas Jerrold, proprietor of Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine (1845–​8) and Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper (1846–​51), nor the Howitts, or Eliza Cook. Writers wanted to be published in Dickens’s journal, and then to republish their essays, stories, and articles as having been ‘first published in Household Words’, such was the draw of the miscellany and the impact of its brand. The Household Words office received, according to report, ‘whole sacks’ of material, much of which was rejected, all of which had to be read and sifted.12 Reading accounts of the effort Dickens put into his journal—​rewriting or altering many of the articles submitted, keeping a hold on the proceedings, including the finances—​while also writing David Copperfield (1849–​50), Bleak House (1852–​3), and Little Dorrit (1855–​7), and undertaking public readings and amateur theatricals, one can only marvel at his energy. In her book Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture:  Sensational Strategies,13 Beth Palmer argues that it was Dickens as the ‘Conductor’ of his two journals 11 

Catherine Waters, Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 12 Waters, Commodity Culture, 4. 13  Beth Palmer, Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Literature and the Expansion of the Press    513 who was regarded as a role model by the novelists Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Florence Marryat, when they took charge of Belgravia, Argosy, and London Society—​all three fiction-​bearing monthlies founded in the 1860s. Such was his prestige as the celebrity novelist-​cum-​editor, she suggests, that these women novelist-​editors looked back to him, rather than to the more recent successes of George Smith’s Cornhill Magazine (1860–​1975) under Thackeray or to Macmillan’s Magazine (1859–​1907). They sought to emulate Dickens’s ‘performance’ as editor and the control he exerted over the form, content, and the style of Household Words and All the Year Round. Palmer also suggests that Samuel Beeton’s emphasis on ‘the editress’, in other words Mrs Beeton, in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (1852–​79) from 1854 onwards, was another attempt to replicate Dickens’s all-​embracing ‘conducting’ of Household Words. All the Year Round, which succeeded Household Words in 1859 after Dickens had quarrelled with his publishers Bradbury and Evans, included even more serialized fiction. Each issue featured a serial on its front page, signed by the author, with Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities leading off the first number on 30 April 1859. At the end of its final instalment (26 November 1859), Dickens confirmed his determination to make fiction paramount in the weekly: We propose always reserving the first place in these pages for a continuous work of original fiction [… .] And it is our hope and aim, while we work hard at every other department of our journal, to produce, in this one, some sustained works of imagination that may become part of English Literature.14

As Palmer notes, the declaration was inserted between the final lines of Dickens’s historical novel, and the opening of the first number of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–​60), as if to emphasize the quality of the novels that were to be serialized. Dickens’s Great Expectations was serialized between 1 December 1860 and 3 August 1861. Other novelists whose fiction was serialized in All the Year Round included Bulwer Lytton, Frances Trollope, Charles Reade, Edmund Yates, and G. A. Sala, as well as Gaskell and Collins, the last two carrying over their commitment to the new weekly. The end of the 1850s marked a watershed in fiction publishing. Part publication, the format by which novels were issued in twenty equal monthly parts selling for a shilling, had been revitalized in the 1830s by Dickens’s publisher Chapman and Hall. Both Dickens and Thackeray published the majority of their novels in parts. This practice, and the serialization of novels and shorter fiction in monthly magazines like Blackwood’s, Fraser’s, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany, and Henry Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine, had gradually mounted a challenge to the practice of publishing novels in three volumes selling for a guinea and a half, or thirty-​one shillings and sixpence, the format demanded by the powerful circulating libraries, and one that had dominated fiction publishing since the days of Scott. By the late 1850s part publication was on the wane. New technologies for paper making and book production had 14 

Quoted in Palmer, Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture, 21.

514    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture lowered costs, enabling publishers to offer a further challenge to the stranglehold of the circulating libraries by issuing cheap, one-​volume editions of novels selling for six shillings, as opposed to the twenty shillings required for a novel published in monthly parts. Simultaneously, enterprising publishers like Alexander Macmillan and George Smith capitalized on the opportunities offered by lower production costs and new technologies for mass-​produced illustrations to launch new-​style monthly magazines containing original fiction by major novelists, accompanied by lavish illustrations commissioned from prominent artists. The new magazines sold for the unheard-​of price of a shilling, in contrast to the older magazines’ price of between two shillings and three shillings sixpence. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine had lowered its price to a shilling in 1834, making it technically the first of the shilling monthlies, but its popularity faded after its editor, Christian Isobel Johnstone, retired in 1846. Macmillan’s Magazine and the Cornhill were launched within months of one another, in November 1859 and January 1860. George Smith, observing Dickens’s success as editor-​proprietor, and with a reputation for generous payments to his authors, enlisted Thackeray as editor of his new monthly at a salary of £1,000 per annum. The first number of the Cornhill sold an unprecedented 110,000 copies, such was the excitement generated by the new magazine. Sales fell to 80,000 after the first number, stabilizing at that level for two years, after which there was a further drop. Thackeray contracted Trollope to serialize Framley Parsonage in 1861 and The Small House at Allington in 1862, Smith offering £1,000 and £3,200 respectively for them. Three of Thackeray’s own novels were serialized in the magazine: Lovel the Widower (1860), The Adventures of Philip (1861–​2), and Denis Duval (1864). Wilkie Collins was paid £5,000 for Armadale, serialized from November 1864 to June 1866. Among novelists there was a sense that the new monthlies were more prestigious than the weeklies, more lucrative, and more convenient, offering more space per instalment and more time between issues. The Cornhill had single-​column pages, resembling a book rather than a periodical, and had the added attraction of illustrations. Elizabeth Gaskell clearly thought the new monthly more desirable as she agonized over whether her stories were of an appropriate standard for the Cornhill or whether she was destined to send them to Dickens. ‘It is not good enough for the C. M.—​I am the best judge of that, please,—​but it might be good enough for H. W.’, she wrote to Smith at the end of 1859.15 The story in question, ‘A Dark Night’s Work’, was eventually published in All the Year Round in five instalments from 24 January to 21 February 1863. Her personal relations with the respective proprietors was a factor in her dilemma; those with Dickens never resumed the cordiality of the early 1850s after they fell out over her difficulties in writing to time and within the allotted space when North and South was serialized in Household Words in 1854–​5. Such were the conditions of the market, however, that publishers knew the worth of their respective authors. George Smith’s personal dealings with Gaskell were extremely friendly, as they exchanged gossipy letters, and arranged visits between their two families. But as John Sutherland has shown, Smith paid her at a far lower rate than Trollope, 15 

The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (1966; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 595.

Literature and the Expansion of the Press    515 Wilkie Collins, and his other authors. More significantly he paid her at less than a twentieth of what he was to offer her most eminent female contemporary.16 The launch of the Cornhill and Macmillan’s was accompanied by a buzz of publicity, largely because of the eminent writers and illustrators associated with the new magazines. Meanwhile Blackwood’s Magazine, now in its fifth decade, also adapted to the times. John Blackwood, the most talented of William Blackwood’s sons, had succeeded to the editorship of the magazine in 1845, and became head of the firm in 1852. Like his father, he regarded the house magazine as an opportunity to showcase the firm’s authors, the serialization of novels providing an opportunity to attract additional readers before their publication in two or three volumes. Bulwer Lytton, Samuel Warren, and Margaret Oliphant were three of Blackwood’s stalwarts in the 1850s. Trollope, Lever, Charles Reade, and others would later be added to the list. The introduction of the unknown and initially anonymous Marian Evans was made by her partner G. H. Lewes, who was a valued contributor to the magazine. The modest success of the two-​volume Scenes of Clerical Life early in 1858, following its serialization, led Blackwood to encourage his new author. Marian Evans found serialization irksome. Nevertheless she began her first full-​length novel Adam Bede (1859) in the expectation that it too would be serialized.17 John Blackwood was shown the first thirteen chapters in March 1859. Sensitive to the preference of his new author, and possibly concerned that the developing relationship between the dairymaid Hetty Sorrel and Arthur Donnithorne, the squire’s grandson might not be suitable for readers of the magazine, he conceded that the new novel could be published in the three-​volume format. The financial as well as popular success of Adam Bede, in terms of successive reprintings or ‘editions’ of the three volumes, justified his decision. Eliot then pleaded that her next novel, The Mill on the Floss (1860) should also be published in three volumes, arguing that its serialization would ‘sweep away perhaps 20,000—​nay, 40,000—​readers’ of the more expensive library edition.18 This was precisely the opposite argument put forward by the publisher, who regarded serialization as an opportunity to create new readers, rather than to discourage traditional library readers, whose demands determined the number of copies bought by the circulating libraries. A more honest reason was Eliot’s dislike of beginning publication before she had finished her novel. ‘[M]‌y stories grow in me like plants, and this is only in the leaf-​ bud,’ she wrote to Blackwood in August 1859. ‘I have faith that the flower will come. Not enough faith, though, to make me like the idea of beginning to print till the flower is fairly out—​till I know the end as well as the beginning.’19 Blackwood eventually offered

16 

See John Sutherland, ‘Cornhill’s Sales and Payments: the First Decade’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 19, no. 3 (Fall 1986), 106–​8. 17  ‘End of Part I’ is marked on the manuscript of the novel following the fourth chapter. See Adam Bede, ed. Carol Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. xxvi. 18  The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–​78), iii. 151. 19  Eliot Letters, iii. 133.

516    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture her £2,000 for the novel, to be published in three volumes, the copyright to be retained by her. George Smith, meanwhile, was in search of a ‘star’ author to boost the sales of the Cornhill, after the first rush of 1860–​1. Thackeray’s The Adventures of Philip (January 1861–​August 1862)  was not proving as attractive to readers as Lovel the Widower (January–​June 1860) and Trollope’s Framley Parsonage (January 1860–​April 1861). Early in 1862 he made Eliot a ‘magnificent offer’ of £10,000 for the novel on which she was currently working, to be published in twelve instalments in the magazine, with illustrations by Frederic Leighton. Only Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend and Disraeli’s Endymion were to match the sum offered by Smith. The price eventually agreed was £7,000, following Eliot’s negotiation for the reversion of her copyright after six years. The experience was not a happy one. She struggled with the demands of writing monthly parts, the number of which eventually extended to fourteen rather than the twelve agreed. The research for the novel had also exhausted her. ‘I began it a young woman,—​I finished it an old one’, she later reflected.20 Romola (1862–​3) was not the success which Smith had hoped for, and it made little impact on the sales of the Cornhill. He rejected Eliot’s offer of her next novel, Felix Holt, and she returned to the magnanimous Blackwood, who published it in three volumes in 1866. Unlike Marian Evans, Margaret Oliphant, Blackwood’s other major woman novelist, found no difficulty in adapting to the discipline of monthly serialization. By contrast, she positively enjoyed it. She had begun her contributions to the magazine with her short novel Katie Stewart, which was serialized from July to November 1852. In May 1861 she began a series of stories and full-​length novels which became the ‘Chronicles of Carlingford’, a series that would prove to be her most enduring achievement in fiction. George Eliot’s absence from the Blackwood stable proved an opportunity for Oliphant, whose Salem Chapel began its serialization in February 1862, just as Smith entered into negotiation with Eliot and Lewes for Romola. It was followed by The Perpetual Curate in June 1863. A close rapport developed between Oliphant and John Blackwood, as he carefully read and commented on individual instalments of the Curate and at one point intervened in the development of the plot. ‘I will do the very best I can to content you, but you make me nervous when you talk about the first rank of novelists, etc.: nobody in the world cares whether I am in the first or sixth’, she wrote to him, with genuine modesty.21 In the spring of 1866, while on a visit to London, and with his senior novelist back in the fold, Blackwood enthusiastically pronounced Oliphant and Eliot ‘the two cleverest women in the world’.22 The two novelists, whose writing lives and reputations would ultimately be viewed very differently, were in the 1860s both typical professional women of letters, whose 20 

J. W. Cross, George Eliot’s Life, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1885), ii. 352. Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant, vi. Autobiography and Letters of Mrs Margaret Oliphant, ed. Linda S. Peterson (2012), 137. 22  Letter of 26 May 1866. Quoted by David Finkelstein, The House of Blackwood: Author–​Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 32. 21 

Literature and the Expansion of the Press    517 careers had been forged by writing for the periodical press. Marian Evans had begun her career in 1851 by acting as the unpaid subeditor of the Westminster Review under the proprietorship of John Chapman and had earned a modest income by reviewing both for it and for the Leader, a weekly review co-​founded by her partner G. H. Lewes in 1850. Oliphant began her connection with Blackwood by writing fiction, as has been noted, and in 1854 petitioned him for regular work as a reviewer, to supplement her income after the births of two children. A survey of their reviewing in the years 1855–​7 reveals that they read and reviewed many of the same books—​novels, poetry, history, biography, books of travel—​each working at a prodigious rate, their reviewing fuelling their creativity and directly or indirectly influencing their writing of fiction.23 The success of the Scenes of Clerical Life determined George Eliot to abandon reviewing and to concentrate on writing fiction, but she was to return to reviewing sporadically when Lewes’s career required her cooperation. Although in the 1850s her annual income exceeded that of Marian Evans, Oliphant never achieved George Eliot’s level of financial success. At points in her career, the steady income from reviewing was to compensate for the variable success of her novels, now published by a number of houses in addition to Blackwood. Blackwood’s Magazine continued to serialize fiction by the firm’s authors, but it never attained the popular success of the Cornhill and Macmillan’s Magazine, with their strategically reduced price and deliberate courting of popular novelists. Their success led other publishers, who had not at that point entered the periodical market, to establish house magazines with a similar purpose. Several followed the precedent established by Thackeray’s brief but celebrated editorship of the Cornhill from January 1860 to May 1862 and Dickens’s proprietorship of his two weeklies, by appointing a novelist as editor, thus developing an ancillary career for a chosen few. As has been noted, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Florence Marryat were three popular novelists who became magazine editors in the 1860s. Belgravia (1867–​99), published by Braddon’s partner John Maxwell, was later sold to Chatto and Windus in 1876. Argosy (1865–​1907), initially published by Alexander Strahan, was modelled on the Cornhill. It was sold to Ellen Wood in 1867, and then to Bentley and Son in 1871. Both Braddon and Wood unashamedly used their magazines as vehicles for their own fiction. London Society (1862–​98) was initially less successful than Belgravia and Argosy but sales picked up when it was purchased by Bentley in 1870, and Florence Marryat took over as editor in 1872. Temple Bar (1860–​1906) was another of John Maxwell’s publications, and was also modelled on the Cornhill. Its first editor, the novelist and journalist G. A. Sala, had been given his first significant career break when Dickens engaged him for Household Words. The firms of Tinsley, Longman, and John Murray followed suit in establishing house magazines that included serial fiction. Tinsley’s Magazine (1867–​92) ‘conducted’ by Edmund Yates published work by Thomas Hardy, Sheridan Le Fanu, Sala, and Ellen Wood. Longman’s Magazine (1882–​1905), established a decade and a half later, aimed to attract a new 23 

See Joanne Shattock, ‘Models of Authorship: Margaret Oliphant and George Eliot’, George Eliot Review, 43 (2012), 18–​30.

518    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture generation of readers who had benefited from the 1870 Education Act. R. L. Stevenson, Kipling, Margaret Oliphant, and Grant Allen serialized short fiction and full-​length novels in the magazine. The firm of John Murray launched Murray’s Magazine in 1887. Relatively short-​lived in comparison with other shilling monthlies, it contained fiction by Emily Lawless, Hardy, Mary Kingsley writing under the pseudonym ‘Lucas Malet’, and Vernon Lee. In the 1890s there were further developments in magazine publishing that reflected equivalent developments in newspaper production in the 1880s, in particular the phenomenon known as the ‘New Journalism’. The use of banner headlines, personal interviews, illustrations, and copious advertisements was copied by other sections of the press. The entrepreneurial publisher George Newnes founded the Strand Magazine in 1891, a sixpenny illustrated monthly that specialized in short stories, and adopted some of the features of illustrated American magazines like Harper’s and Scribner’s. Its initial circulation was 300,000, rising to 500,000 with American sales. The stories of Arthur Conan Doyle inaugurated the Strand’s fiction which later included works by Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, and, in the twentieth century, Aldous Huxley and Graham Greene. It might have seemed an enormous leap from the launch of Household Words in 1850 to the inauguration of the Strand Magazine and its American counterparts in the 1890s, but there had been a gradual evolution. The fiction reading public looked to the magazines for new fiction by mainstream writers, just as Dickens and his colleagues had taught them to do in 1850.

Poetry and the Press The novel was not the only literary genre whose fortunes had become bound up with the periodical press in the Victorian period. Poets too gradually saw the possibility of acquiring new readers through periodical publication, although the leap of faith required was a large one. Tennyson’s friend and mentor Arthur Hallam encouraged a reluctant Tennyson to publish some of his earliest poems in the annuals, the lavishly produced gift books that flourished in the 1830s and 1840s, despite the poet’s reluctance to engage with what he regarded as a blatantly commercial and ‘popular’ mode of publication. As Kathryn Ledbetter has shown in her study, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals: Commodities in Context,24 by the end of his career Tennyson had published a total of sixty-​two poems in thirty-​two periodicals. He became, as she rightly argues, the first ‘media poet’.25 Hallam’s suggestion that the annuals, and also the Englishman’s Magazine, published by Edward Moxon, Tennyson’s publisher, would introduce the poet to readers who 24  Kathryn Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals: Commodities in Context (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 25 Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals, 2.

Literature and the Expansion of the Press    519 could not afford to purchase a volume of poems, was astute. The annuals attracted a large number of women readers who were, it was argued, less familiar with contemporary poetry than their male equivalents and constituted a potential new reading public for poetry. The poet remained uneasy about The Gem, Friendship’s Offering, The Keepsake, and other annuals, but nevertheless sent early versions of ‘Tears Idle Tears’, ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘St. Agnes Eve’ as well as early drafts of portions of ‘The Palace of Art’ and ‘The Lotos Eaters’ to the gift books. The financial rewards of publishing in the annuals were an obvious factor in overcoming his scruples. Thackeray, who in 1832 was an aspiring writer, viewed Tennyson’s exposure in the annuals with envy. Writing in his diary in June 1832 he pronounced him a ‘clever fellow […] & makes money by magazine writing, in wh. I shd. Much desire to follow his example’.26 After he was appointed Poet Laureate in 1850 the press, and in particular The Times and The Examiner, became the recognized outlets for Tennyson’s official poetry, written in response to national events and occasions. The poems were often published without his permission, and reproduced in the popular press. ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, his famous evocation of an episode in the Crimean War, first appeared in The Examiner for 9 December 1854. As Ledbetter points out, much of what Tennyson knew about the infamous military disaster was gleaned from his reading of W. H. Russell’s reports in The Times and reports in other papers. In this respect, she argues, the poem became ‘an artistic outgrowth of a media blitz’.27 Throughout his career Tennyson published a number of political poems on issues about which he felt strongly, some of them written under pseudonyms. These too were published in newspapers and periodicals, including the Morning Chronicle, The Examiner, Fraser’s Magazine, and the Nineteenth Century.28 Whereas he consigned his official poetry as well as his political poems to the newspaper and periodical press as a matter of course, Tennyson continued to be uneasy about publishing his mainstream work in periodicals, retaining his old prejudices about their status. When news of Thackeray’s appointment as editor of the Cornhill reached him, Tennyson wrote to him: ‘I am sorry you have engaged for any quantity of money to let your brains be sucked periodically by Smith, Elder and Co.: not that I don’t like Smith […] but that so great an artist as you are should go to work after this fashion’.29 The irony of this remark could not have been lost on Thackeray when shortly afterwards Tennyson agreed to contribute to both Macmillan’s Magazine and the Cornhill, the latter as a direct result of a flattering letter from the editor. ‘Sea Dreams: An Idyll’ was published in the third number of Macmillan’s (January 1860), to coincide with the first number of the Cornhill. For this Alexander Macmillan paid him £250. ‘Tithonus’ was carefully scheduled for the second number of the Cornhill, following immediately after the instalment of Trollope’s Framley Parsonage, in order to keep up the sales of the triumphant first 26 

Quoted by Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals, 46.

27 Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals, 125.

28  See Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals, ch. 3, ‘War Scares and Patriot-​Soldiers: Political Poetry’, 101–​42. 29  Quoted by Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals, 46.

520    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture number. Tennyson’s only response was to grumble that his poem had been positioned ‘queerly enough at the tail of a flashy modern novel’.30 Like the novelists who accepted invitations to serialize fiction in the new monthlies, the sums offered by editors plus the new readerships opened up by the magazines overcame any scruples about commercial modes of publication. Tennyson continued to publish poems in periodicals to the end of his career. His friend James Knowles persuaded him to contribute to the two periodicals he founded, the Contemporary Review, established in 1866, and the Nineteenth Century in 1877. The popular monthly Good Words, established by Alexander Strahan in 1860, with a circulation of between 80,000 and 130,000 in the 1860s and 1870s, became another outlet. He continued to publish in Macmillan’s Magazine into the 1870s, the connection reinforced when Macmillan became his publishers. In addition to the new readers he acquired through periodical publication in Britain, Tennyson’s American readers were legion. American magazines and annuals took advantage of the absence of international copyright, and freely reproduced his poems. As Ledbetter notes, although Tennyson resented his inability to control or to capitalize on his American publications, he had far more readers in America than in Britain. He became, in her words, ‘an American icon’, a legendary figure whose reputation in that country outreached his reputation in Britain.31

Conclusion The centrality of the diverse and expanding periodical and newspaper press in the writing lives of the novelists and poets discussed in this chapter was replicated to a greater or lesser degree in the professional careers of most Victorian men and women of letters. In Patrick Leary’s view, literary life experienced a ‘fault line’ in the mid-​1840s, as perceptions of it moved from the Romantic view of the artist working in isolation, regardless of the practicalities of the marketplace, to the concept of the mid-​Victorian author-​ businessman, negotiating contracts, entering into agreements with editors and publishers, and operating in a mixed economy of periodical and book publication.32 Linda Peterson presents a similar portrait of the nineteenth-​century ‘woman of letters’, equally professional and independent, balancing publication in annuals, weeklies, monthlies, and dailies with the traditional volume formats. As the critic and literary historian George Saintsbury concluded in 1896, there was perhaps ‘no single feature of the English literary history of the nineteenth century, not even the enormous popularization and multiplication of the novel, which is so distinctive and characteristic as the development 30 

Quoted by Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals, 61.

31 Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals, 169. See ch. 5 ‘Transatlantic Connections’, 169–​201. 32 

Patrick Leary, ‘Fraser’s Magazine and the Literary Life, 1830–​1847’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 27, no. 2 (Summer 1994), 105–​26, at 106.

Literature and the Expansion of the Press    521 in it of periodical literature’.33 Without the process of collecting and republishing the works of fiction and non-​fiction that had originally been published serially, he reflected, ‘more than half the most valuable books of the age […] would never have appeared as books at all’.34

Select Bibliography Brake, Laurel, and Marysa Demoor (eds), Dictionary of Nineteenth-​Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (Ghent and London : Academia Press and British Library, 2009). Dickens, Charles, The Amusements of the People and Other Papers 1834–​1851, Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens Journalism, ed. Michael Slater, ii (London: J. M. Dent, 1996). Huett, Lorna, ‘Among the Unknown Public: Household Words, All the Year Round, and the Mass-​Market Weekly Periodical in the Mid-​Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 38, no. 1 (Spring 2005), 61–​82. Leary, Patrick, The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-​Victorian London (London: British Library, 2010). Ledbetter, Kathryn, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals:  Commodities in Context (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Lohrli, Anne, ‘Household Words: A Weekly Journal 1850–​1859 Conducted By Charles Dickens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973). Palmer, Beth, Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Peterson, Linda H, Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Shattock, Joanne, ‘Models of Authorship: Margaret Oliphant and George Eliot’, George Eliot Review, 43 (2012), 18–​30. Waters, Catherine, Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).

33 

George Saintsbury, History of Nineteenth Century Literature (London: Macmillan, 1896), 166.

34 Saintsbury, History of Nineteenth Century Literature, 166.

Chapter 27

M aterialit y i n T h e ory What to Make of Victorian Things John Plotz

‘Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.’ Emerson in 1847 was describing an America paralyzed by slavery, in bond to its bonded labour.1 Still, his words could almost describe our current state of academic affairs; ‘thing theory’ has established almost as secure a niche among humanists and social scientists as ‘object biographies’ (of chairs, paperclips, sofas) have carved out in popular writing. Victorian studies has been one place where that surge crested vigorously. Ever since Asa Briggs and Dorothy Van Ghent, Victorian things—​parlour furnishings, chintzes, aquaria—​have seemed crucial clues in exploring bourgeois sociability (a legacy still strong in the current day; e.g. Logan, Dolin, Benedict2). Critics have taken such daily impedimenta as marking the limits of realist representation (cf. Barthes on Flaubert’s barometer3) or as revealing the deanimation of people in the face of their dancing commodities (isn’t the Marx of Capital something of a thing theorist?) as well as potent markers of the not-​quite-​invisible presence of the colonial periphery in the not-​quite-​sacrosanct metropole (Daly, Freedgood4). And recently Deborah Cohen and Amanda Vickery have offered rival but in many ways complementary readings of how doctrines of moral improvement (Cohen5) and control of 1 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Ode (Inscribed to W. H. Channing)’ 73, ll 48–​49 in Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson: New and Revised Edition (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin 1886). 2  Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Tim Dolin, ‘Cranford and the Victorian Collection’, Victorian Studies, 36, no. 2 (993), 179–​206; Barbara Benedict, ‘The Trouble with Things: Objects and the Commodification of Sociability’, in Claudia Johnson and Clara Tuite (eds), A Companion to Jane Austen (Chichester: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009), 343–​354. 3  Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’ (1968), in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984), 141–​148. 4  Suzanne Daly, The Empire Inside: Indian Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011); Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 5  Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

What to Make of Victorian Things    523 public political discourse (Vickery6) were profoundly shaped by the material realities of the well-​accoutred middle-​class living space of nineteenth-​century Britain. Claims for Victorian priority in this kind of thing-​study are not groundless. Perhaps the eighteenth century owns satire and character (cf. Lynch7), and to modernism belong anomie, image, and the evanescent stream of consciousness. Judged in those terms, nineteenth-​century literature (especially of the variety long ago dubbed ‘formal realism’ by Ian Watt8) is noticeably devoted to trying to catalogue, classify, and otherwise make sense of the obtrusive, insistent ‘stuffiness’ that was a by-​product (if not the wished-​for consummation) of a worldwide capitalist network with London as both its fiscal and political centre. In Portable Property, I tried to make the case that in the complicated mess wrought by the ideological and conceptual tensions between the demands of Empire and ferociously successful capitalism in Victorian Britain, the ‘thinginess’ that haunted realist fiction was linked to the novel’s own status as an exemplary portable property. Themselves sentimentalized items, endowed with both fiscal and transcendent value, Victorian novels took on the project of making sense of resonant but potentially marketable objects as they moved through an empire that required its most important objects at once to be readily exchangeable and violently to disavow just such alterability. In the English novel between 1830 and 1870, objects represented as problematically endowed with sentimental and fiscal value simultaneously become absolute crux-​points. Every age, however, has its own set of objects pricked out for special attention: medieval relics, classical Roman lares and penates, and our own inescapable electronic ‘iProstheses’ have all served as temporary cynosures. So in order to argue that things—​in theory or in practice—​are a distinctively significant problem for nineteenth-​century Britons, a retrospective designation of the era as thing-​obsessed is not enough. Instead, we need to explore how (Greater) Britons themselves understood the tangible and intangible life of the objects that filled or overfilled their private and public realms. Where are such object-​centric approaches to be found? One enduring ‘thing theory’ from the latter nineteenth century begins with the notion that when we try to make sense of any object in the shared social world its empirically measurable properties tell only half the story. The account of significance-​laden commodities offered in Marx’s 1867 Capital is at once the era’s most straightforward (because preceding from a theory of stored labour-​value it derives from liberal economics) and most subtle (because pursuing those liberal precepts to the limit of their implications). A commodity […] not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than ‘table-​turning’ ever was […]. A commodity 6  Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 7  Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1998). 8  Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), 34.

524    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is therefore a mysterious thing, simply […] because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses.9

When is a table not a table? When it is the product of invisible human work, the essence of the social relation between its oblivious buyer and never-​glimpsed maker. Because Marx refuses to take the commodity’s material instantiation as a complete account of its reality, he devises a theory (not just a history or a story) of the commodity-​as-​thing. You might think of him as trying to explain to residents of E. Abbot’s Flatland (1884) that what happens to manifest itself within their two-​dimensional world as nothing more than a circle is actually a sphere. One virtue of Marx’s account of the ‘metaphysical niceties’ of commodities is that it helps to reveal how many other writers are also puzzling over the amount of energy contained (stored, bottled up, confined) within things. Charles Dickens, for example, approaches the problem of representing human beings stripped of their agency and their capacity to feel, via the obtrusive even mawkish animation of their appurtenances, a kind of sublimely excessive pathetic fallacy in which will-​ful furniture signals the will-​less state of those who perch upon it. In Great Expectations (1860–​1) for example, Pip spends a night in an inn, closeted with a monstrous bed that is busy putting one of his arbitrary legs into the fireplace, and another into the doorway, and squeezing the wretched little washing-​stand in quite a Divinely Righteous manner.10 Such objects, in Dickens’s universe, take up so much space that humans find themselves flattened or objectified in order to make way. Hence a not-​quite-​uncanny convergence: Van Ghent’s diagnosis of Dickens is germane to Marx’s account of dancing tables as well: the animation of inanimate objects suggests both quaint gaiety of a forbidden life and an aggressiveness that has gotten out of control—​an aggressiveness that they have borrowed from the human economy and an irresponsibility native to but glossed and disguised by that economy.11

The role that things, commodities, and ‘reification’ played in the writing of Marx and Dickens, or in the thinking or daily practice of nineteenth-​century Britons, does serve as a reasonable basis for a Victorianist claim to some kind of intellectual priority when it comes to thing theory. However, there is currently a shortage of helpful paradigms for explaining the distinctiveness of how Victorian thinkers make sense of ‘stuff ’ or ‘things’ or ‘objects’ or even ‘commodities’. The study of Victorian things has to move beyond Roland Barthes’s memorable account of the object as signifying the aggregation of 9  Karl Marx, Capital: An Abridged Edition, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 42. 10  Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (New York: Norton, 1999), 273. 11  Dorothy Van Ghent, English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Rinehart, 1953), 129.

What to Make of Victorian Things    525 significantly insignificant objects that must clutter up a world, that ‘touch of the real’ that matters only because their very unsayableness is what proves the ‘reality’ of realist fiction. Some fine recent work—​e.g. Isobel Armstrong on the lens and Leah Price on the printed book12—​raises an intriguing possibility. To make sense of Victorian materiality and Victorian conceptions of materiality, we might begin by making sense of Victorian books as the medium upon which representation occurs as well as a potential subject of such representation. In order properly to assess works we know well as texts, we also need to consider them as artefacts, as material residue from another age. But how? A look at the study of objects and their makers in the humanities and social sciences more generally suggests some of the ways in which Victorian studies could benefit from the more nuanced and theoretically supple turns in material and materialist history recently. In addition, fine recent work by (among others) Armstrong and Price, by borrowing explicitly from the fields of history of science and book history, has uncovered promising ways of simultaneously appraising an object’s material and ideational aspects (its mass and its meaning). A genealogy of the pitfalls and the promises of Victorian ‘thing theory’ might usefully begin with the transformation wrought in theorizing things (and materiality generally) by the publication of Arjun Appadurai’s edited collection The Social Life of Things,13 now a quarter-​century old. That collection made it seem crucial for scholars to start noticing the different material valences of the objects that they had too blithely assumed were simply interchangeable according to their fiscal (or culturally fixed) value. Behind Appadurai’s intervention, though, looms a rich tradition of anthropological work mostly stemming from or quarrelling with Marcel Mauss’s seminal The Gift.14 Such scholarship includes Malinowski’s influential work on kula in Pacific Island cultures, but also more recent work by Nancy Munn, Maurice Godelier, Nicholas Thomas, Marilyn Strathern, and Annette Weiner on ‘inalienable possessions’.15 This strain of anthropological work, with some exceptions, hears the ‘object’ saying nothing that the ambient culture has not instilled: its stress ultimately falls, you might say, on social life, rather than on things endowed with a distinctive materiality that itself 12 

Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830–​1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 13  Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 14  Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, foreword by Mary Douglas (1924; London: Routledge, 2002). 15  Nancy Munn, ‘Spatiotemporal Transformations of Gawa Canoes’, Journal de la Société des océanistes, 33 (1977), 39–​52; Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, trans. Nora Scott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Marilyn Strathern, Property, Substance and Effect: Enthropological Essays on Persons and Things (New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press, 1999); Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-​ While-​Giving (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992). Cf. also Jacques Derrida, Given Time, i. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

526    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture has the potential to shape, alter, or otherwise historicize what is presumed to be a given culture’s underlying structural logic. From Mauss to Strathern and beyond (e.g. Menely, Miller), the aim is to unpack what ‘a culture’ (the role of individuals within that culture always being a tricky question) understands the (definitive) meaning of particular objects to be.16 Such approaches are not well positioned to reflect on failures of meaning, or on the slippages that occur between the intended meaning and the actually embodied substance of Balinese fighting cocks.17 The anthropological approach to the study of things runs the risk of being an anthropocentric one, with all the virtues (there are many) and attendant vices of that bias—​chiefly defined by an inability to see beyond the hypostatized social totality that anthropocentric thinking produces. Such anthropological anthropocentrism has its mirror image in the new field of ‘object-​oriented philosophy’, which is concerned to analyse or make sense of the world understood as extra-​or pre-​or even in-​human. This work eschews the Kantian insistence that the world’s nature, in all its variegated materiality, can be known to humans only phenomenologically, by the evidence of our reason and our sense: ultimately, such ‘posthuman’ work is not so far from satirical/​philosophical proposition at the heart of Woolf ’s 1927 To the Lighthouse (‘Think of a kitchen table […] when you’re not there’18). For the ‘speculative realist’ philosopher Graham Harman, for example, ‘the real has an inner struggle of its own quite apart from the human encounter with it’.19 Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010) similarly explores the unparsable materiality of the universe, which persists in having a meaning while nonetheless resisting the paraphrase and sense-​making that is the usual Kantian procedure for arriving at successful comprehension of the world. This interest in matter’s ‘recalcitrance’ also bears an interesting relationship to the rise in ‘animal studies’ which seeks—​more after Derrida than Peter Singer—​a non-​subject-​centred way of approaching the animal, understood as a larger, encompassing category that subsumes the human within it, rather than standing outside as the human’s antithesis. (Literary scholars may be familiar with Miguel Tamen’s response, or Walter Benn Michaels’s excoriation of the implicit anti-​intentionalism of such work. De la Cadena is a recent anthropological approach to the same issues, and interesting forebears also include eccentric works like Christopher Stone’s Should Trees Have Standing? (1972)20). Such ‘object-​centred’ approaches, however, are less productive when applied to the literary realm than is the anthropological bias towards rendering all study of objects 16 

Anne Meneley, ‘Oleo-​signs and Quali-​signs: The Qualities of Olive Oil’, Ethnos, 73, no. 3 (2008), 303–​26; Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). 17  Clifford Geertz, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’, Daedalus, 101, no. 1 (Winter, 1972), 1–​37. 18  Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927), 16. 19  Graham Harman, ‘The Well-​Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-​Oriented Literary Criticism’, New Literary History, 43 (2012), 183–​203, p. 193. 20  Miguel Tamen, Friends of Interpretable Objects (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

What to Make of Victorian Things    527 the study of their social life. The quarrels among object-​oriented philosophers about the nuances of recalcitrance are medievally hermetic: angels on the head of a pin could at least be conceptualized if not counted, but how can recalcitrant matter lend itself to a discussion that would, by definition, reduce, appropriate, or misdescribe such matter by bringing it within syntax? Small wonder that there is little sign of aesthetic theory and critical practice heading in this direction. The barriers to entry when coming from our text-​based methodology are simply too high. Bill Brown—​author of a Heideggerian book of ‘thing theory’ that from a Kantian perspective very strongly downplays human ratiocination’s power to settle how and what things mean—​comes in for damningly faint praise from Harman when he tries to make literary criticism object-​centred.21 Brown, Harman grudgingly concedes, ‘allows for some recalcitrance in material things, however human-​centered the notion of recalcitrance always remains’.22 Literary critics ultimately have less to gain from this resolutely anti-​anthropocentric approach than they do from its (admittedly imperfect) anthropological counterparts. Given that literary studies allows no way out to a recalcitrant universe without signs (since the elementary atomic structure of literary study is precisely a signifying system, a language), the only way towards ‘vibrant matter’ or ‘recalcitrance’ lies via the rabbit hole of DeManian deconstruction. How salient, however, should that face-​off between anthropological and object-​ oriented approaches be to literary scholarship? Are we stuck, forced to choose between two approaches, one anthropological (the object as concretized social codes) and the other philosophical (vibrant and recalcitrant matter twisting free of any human efforts to pin it to mere signification)? If so, Elaine Freedgood’s influential The Ideas in Things and, more recently, Suzanne Daly’s Empire Inside in different ways both give a glimpse of what literary approaches to things and objects would look like. Both make the case that we can make sense of what is depicted only fleetingly within the text, in part by attending to a dense and significant cultural history behind objects that may emerge into the light of novelistic day only very briefly. Daly’s focus on the importance not of ‘things’ but of commodities—​that is, fungible objects circulating within an exchange system—​allows the reader to reflect on what exactly makes a particular object ‘auratic’ at a given moment—​or simply merchandisable. Daly’s work on Kashmiri shawls and on Indian cotton unpacks the double life of certain commodities. Once imported to Britain, after all, these objects began (like many of the foreign imports in Cranford (1851)—​a novel that is an important touchstone for Daly’s account) to accrue domestic associations. Daly’s object—​accomplished by way of deep detours into a history of these objects that is not readily known to present-​day readers—​is to bring to life what a novel does not set out to show. There is a great deal to learn from the stories that Daly sets out to tell, of Mysorean inheritance battles and the repurposing of both shawls and Indian cottons 21  Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 22  Harman, ‘The Well-​Wrought Broken Hammer’, 193.

528    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture as (deracinatable) import goods inside the British (and especially the English) domestic market. In addition, though, there is a side of Daly’s attempt to reveal the imperial objects that float to the top of her readings of domestic novels that follows the same logic as Nancy Armstrong and D. A. Miller did back in the 1980s, when both published books that discerned deep ideologically conditioning structures concealed beneath seemingly benign and placid domestic narratives. This hermeneutics of suspicion is exemplified in Daly’s argument that ‘the novels’ gestures at the historicity of British India, however oblique, allow us to undo their hypostatizing of Indian commodities as timeless embodiments of cultural difference recuperated as British status symbols’.23 Readers who try to understand the rule that ‘white muslin’ plays in terms of the formal logic of the novels in question are by Daly’s account deceived by the hypostatizations of Victorian novelists; we ought to know better, ought to read more deeply back into the colonial substrate. Daly’s work—​committed to bringing to a fuller light objects that by previous readings form only a passing or nugatory element within a novel’s structure—​is deeply indebted to the tradition of the Jamesonian logic of ‘the political unconscious’ whereby (in Jameson’s famous reading of Conrad’s Lord Jim (1899–​1900)) the thrum of the Patna’s motors below decks is the ‘anagogical’ reminder that History, whether glimpsed or not, whether explicitly present in the text or not, lies under the feet of common everyday life. Auerbach’s memorable distinction between ‘analysing’ and ‘interpreting’ applies here: by Daly’s account the material substance of the Victorian cultural realm must simply be uncovered here to be subject to definitive analysis. To those committed above all to excavating ‘ideas in things’, a literary text requires definitive decoding, not interpretation. Daly is an instance of one sort of turn away from the study of the enabling constraints of formal and generic requirements and away from the notion of ambiguous and variably decodable patterns of meaning that interpretation aims to track down. (Another way to banish interpretation, at least in theory, is the ‘surface reading’ of Best and Marcus.24) There has been a rising impulse to look past realism as a formal mode (forget that barometer!) to parse the real objects (e.g. muslin curtains or imported tobacco) that are plainly named on the ‘surface’ of the text. The supposition seems to be that—​ much like the philosophers in Jonathan Swift’s ‘Academy of Delgado’—​novelists are lugging around bags filled of objects (tea, shawls, muslins) that they drop onto the printed page at will. Such work sometimes moves towards a notional absolute historicity (what a given thing’s appearance in a novel must have meant, in an era defined by certain kinds of commodity flow) that trumps variations in authorial intent and in reception, and underestimates the enabling constraints of a particular genre’s protocols. (Franco Moretti’s typing of London novels based on the neighbourhoods in which they primarily take place is an interestingly analogous sort of project.25) 23 Daly, The Empire Inside, 11.

24  Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations, 108 (Fall 2009), 1–​21. 25  Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel: 1800–​1900 (London and New York: Verso, 1998).

What to Make of Victorian Things    529 This looks like a real conundrum: object-​oriented thing theory tends towards recalcitrance and the Delgado-​like flourishing of ineffable objects, and the anthropocentric impulse from anthropology risks turning ‘things’ into nothing more than invariable bearers of a socially determinate and uniform meaning, and no obvious ‘third way’ looms between the two. Fortunately the past decade has also seen the development of some valuable new approaches to the materiality in the aesthetic realm, leading towards a new field that might be dubbed ‘materiality theory’. Such work comes, for instance, from scholars in such related disciplines as book history and media studies (Matthew Kirschenbaum, Lisa Gitelman), where questions of materiality have always been foregrounded, in ways both empirical and theoretical.26 Before surveying the last decade’s most important steps forward, though, it may be helpful to ask exactly what value the notion of studying ‘things’ adds to a textually centred Victorian studies, given the pitfalls built into both anthropological and object-​ oriented approaches? Ordinary language can provide some useful guidance here. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s original subtitle for her 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (‘The Man who was a Thing’) is meant to shock readers far more than Uncle Tom’s merely being an object might (a person can be, after all, the ‘object of admiration’ or ‘object of my affection’). And Phil Harris’s chart-​topping 1950 song about an unnameable horror that is indicated only by an ominous drumming (e.g., ‘Get out of there with that—​[RAT-​TAT-​ TAT]—​and don’t come back no more’) was called ‘The Thing Song’ for good reason. Lexically, ‘thing’ sums up imponderable and slightly creepy what-​is-​it-​ness. It’s the term of choice for extreme cases when nouns otherwise fail us: the thingamagummy and the thingamabob. Thing theory may be at its best when it focuses on this sense of failure, or partial failure, to name or to classify. Geoffrey Batchen’s work on Victorian memorial photography suggests one historically germane way to theorize objects that are troubling because perched on the boundary between sign and substance.27 Batchen studies Victorian photographs that were stored along with hair of the depicted person: sometimes woven as jewellery, sometimes simply attached, in one case draped to form a blonde wig over the photographed face of a departed soldier. Such photos appeared to contemporary viewers, Batchen contends, something more than simple symbolic objects, more than pieces of the material world that come to us already marked up as signifiers, with a definite human meaning attached to them by way of representation. Batchen quotes an advertising jingle that perfectly elucidates the boundary status of these photographs: ‘secure the shadow ere the substance fade | let nature copy that which nature made’. Like hair, the photograph is in some sense consubstantial with the person

26  Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008); Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006). 27  Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Ere the Substance Fade: Photography and Hair Jewelry’, in Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (eds), Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images (London: Routledge, 2004), 32–​47.

530    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture depicted—​this ‘shadow’ is made by nature, in direct contact with the now-​absent person. Yet it is this very consubstantiality that makes it into not an object but rather a thing, since it is at once the essence of a person and yet at the same time utterly material, devoid of all the spiritual qualities that an actual person would have. The photograph, because it is the direct record of a bygone human life, thus becomes more than an object—​because it is partially human—​and yet also less, because what is human in it recedes so dramatically from the possibility of interaction. It is when such objects give up their objecthood, when representations seem to lose their power to represent, that there is glimpsed, beneath, a kind of bedrock assurance associated with the enduring indexical trace—​the substantial sign, comprised of the very particles that left the depicted object to mark the surface of the photograph. Within literary studies, Isobel Armstrong’s 2008 Victorian Glassworlds is the most fully articulated example of a new kind of materiality studies, one that investigates boundaries or crux points where new ideas about the limits of materiality are coming into being. Armstrong reveals the oft-​overlooked developments that made that triumph of sheet glass profoundly transformative of worldwide attitudes about both the philosophical and the industrial/​political ramifications of glass. It demonstrates how lenses, mirrors, and omnipresent windows could reshape both lived environment and scientific practice. Victorians, by Armstrong’s account, saw glass as simultaneously medium and barrier, an industrial product that ‘makes evident its materiality as a brittle film’ between viewer and world,28 that also allowed that world to come through or bounce off it, in a dizzying range of magnifications, refractions, and reflections that forced viewers to contemplate objects both in their original and in their glassed manifestations. Armstrong locates ‘glass culture […] at the centre of the debates of what I have called Victorian Modernism—​labour, political radicalism, the “free” human subject, spectacle in an industrial society, the politics of evolution in astronomy and under the microscope’.29 Armstrong’s account of debates on magnification undergird her larger claim about the immense cultural impact of the close-​up, with its power to place an object in ‘atopic space, preternaturally distinct, but freed from relational coordinates’.30 Detailed observations about little-​known texts on microscopy lead Armstrong on to her central argument: that nineteenth-​century conceptions of glass stressed its mediating rather than its transparent capacity. She demonstrates that theories about vision, mediation, and reflection flourished within a specific material context in which the newest innovations in different kinds of glass production shifted the terms through which philosophers, artists, and everyday visitors to the Crystal Palace understood their own place in the world. Armstrong’s work may also be a promising bellwether in its explicit exploration of our field’s link to a set of scholars who have been ‘secret sharers’ of our major intellectual preoccupations for a couple of decades now: historians (and philosophers) of science. Historians of science are of immediate interest because they generally approach the 28 Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 115.

29 Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 362. 30 Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 317.

What to Make of Victorian Things    531 notion of ‘thing theory’ not via the Maussian gift but rather the humble object of investigation. Whether focusing on ‘working objects’ or on ‘epistemic things’, such historians have helped clarify what exactly scholars are studying (its phenomenology, its objective reality, its linguistic or material form?) when they turn their eyes upon discrete pieces of the non-​human world. Thought-​provoking, recent interdisciplinary work in this vein by Helmut Müller-​Sievers and by John Bender and Michael Marrinan31 suggests that much remains to be clarified about the exact nature of the approaches that connect, without quite uniting, the social scientist and the humanist. The Cylinder (2012) is Helmut Müller-​Sievers’s account of nineteenth-​century notions of constrained force, and the central role that the cylinder has to play in embodying such force and (though here his case is less clear) modelling it for larger cultural uptake. Müller-​Sievers surveys ways that ‘motion in mechanisms and machines’32 emerged as a distinct field of study (and perhaps more importantly, empirical experimentation for economic gain) in the early Industrial Revolution. At its best, Müller-​Sievers’s book is an intriguing example of how a scientific history of ‘epistemic things’ can help scholars uncover not just the metaphors but the central organizational principles by which thinkers and writers made sense of the world around them. Like Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison in their pathbreaking Objectivity (as well as various contributors to Daston’s various edited books, among them Things that Talk, Biographies of Scientific Objects, and Histories of Scientific Observation),33 Müller-​ Sievers is persuasive when tracking the local changes that new scientific and technological developments (here, in kinematics) produce—​and in documenting ways that cylindrical thinking percolates into the more general flow of European (largely English and German, and to a certain extent French) culture, especially aesthetics (and within aesthetics, especially narrative). Starting with what he describes as ‘the empathetic admission that there may be a potential for grace in the products of mechanical engineering’, he proposes ‘the integration of nineteenth-​century narratives into the discussion of Kinematics’.34 Essentially, he proposes that influential narratives of the day—​unlike their antecedents and successors—​wove a close relationship between a new logic of mechanical motion and the logic that explained human motion and interaction (this is ground also explored in Tamara Ketabgian’s recent The Lives of Machines35).

31  Helmut Müller-​Sievers, The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012); John Bender and Michael Marrinan, The Culture of Diagram (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010). 32  Müller-​Sievers, The Cylinder, 20. 33  Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007); Lorraine Daston, Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York and Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books, distributed by MIT Press Books, 2004); Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (eds), Histories of Scientific Observation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 34  Müller-​Sievers, The Cylinder, 18. 35  Tamara Ketabgian, The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011).

532    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Unfortunately, Müller-​Sievers overreaches in various ways when he tries to prove the centrality of cylindrical energy and kinematics to the era’s aesthetic discourse. His reductive claim that the cylindricality of the printing press itself somehow directly shapes the seriality and the realism of the nineteenth-​century novel recurs in various forms in The Cylinder (e.g. ‘without the rotation of the presses there would be no serialized narrative, including all the formal consequences this entails for the conception, distribution and consumption of realist stories. It is obvious that this is a stronger relationship than that provided by the poetic concept of mimesis or by its rhetorical cognate, metaphor’36). Müller-​Sievers short-​circuits the elaborate network (which Armstrong’s account of new nineteenth-​century ways of thinking about refraction and magnification is careful to elucidate) through which any idea must move before it takes shape in any recoverable artefact that is amenable to study. Two distinct iterations of a phenomenon like ‘kinematics’ in a culture may lie as close to one another as the physical printed page and the words that appear on that page, and yet still be linked only indirectly—​both the common products of an impulse that is differently incarnate in different cultural frames that coexist within a single society: I think of that image in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) of two separate wheels of a watch, which may lie millimetres away yet be only distantly connected through a series of cunningly wrought joints. Leah Price’s recent caution about readings of Victorian novels that proceed by ‘thematic materialism’ is apposite here: she warns of ‘typological interpretation that reduces the text to an allegory of its own manufacture [… in which] a history of the material conditions of production and consumption can either redundantly corroborate some formal or thematic explication of the texts itself, or irrelevantly contradict it’.37 Another striking attempt to profit from the interests that are shared by history of science and literary studies comes in The Culture of Diagram. There, John Bender and Michael Marrinan deftly explore the shifting material practices and concomitant intellectual paradigms of Enlightenment and post-​Enlightenment printed culture. They propose that the late eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century European novel participated in a ‘culture of diagram’, predicated on the epistemological indispensability of establishing multiple viewpoints upon any object of knowledge. This ‘culture of the diagram […] embraces both scientific and aesthetic orientations, notably with shifts in scale, perspective and imaginary points of view that follow from recasting innate and idealized knowledge in terms of the materiality and limits of human perception’.38 In the scientific realm the crucial technique for this may be the technical diagram, but in the aesthetic realm from the early nineteenth century onwards, free indirect discourse and related formal techniques for presenting subjective standpoints in putatively objective discourse make the novel a crucial site of diagrammatic thinking. Brewer and Marrinan want to locate nineteenth-​century novels as part of a project—​ as much epistemological as aesthetic—​to make sense of a world where ‘limits of human 36 

Müller-​Sievers, The Cylinder, 131.

38 

Bender and Marrinan, The Culture of Diagram, 81.

37 Price, How to Do Things, 130.

What to Make of Victorian Things    533 perception’ can come to be modelled by way of a series of experiments that measure what can be captured and conveyed on white pages intermittently blackened by print. Unfortunately, Bender and Marrinan run the risk of overstating the connection between paradigms borrowed from history of science and those that make sense of literary texts. The leaps they make are in many ways reminiscent of the ways that Müller-​Sievers short-​ circuits the link between the material nature of printing presses and the representational response to that and other sorts of industrial materiality that is recorded, word by word and chapter by chapter, in the novels that roll off those presses. They are too quick to presume that ‘working objects’ or ‘epistemic things’ can provide a paradigm shift that cancels out the need for the sorts of textualism that can explicate how objects (books as much as kitchen implements) were thought, experienced, and accounted for in the era’s explicitly representational forms. Missing is the necessary struggle to reconcile the problems of shared physicality of the printed book with the different cultural forms (fictional and factual genres, for instance) that grapple with that shared material substrate in distinct ways. Fortunately, literary scholars have a fraternal (though by no means identical) twin to turn to in this hour of need: book historians. The shared intellectual space between the two disciplines has shifted in nature as well as extent over the years, but the recent resurgence in media studies has increased the overlap with textual studies, as has important recent work (e.g. Blair, Kafka, Soll) that explores how practices like note-​taking, record-​ keeping, and book-​publishing have shaped and been shaped by evolving intellectual norms for defining textuality, fictionality, and aesthetic value.39 The most stimulating recent boundary crosser has been Leah Price’s stimulating work on the many uses to which books were put in the Victorian era—​and the many shifting ways in which their mixed material and ideational nature was understood. One great virtue of Price’s recent How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain is that it attempts not only to document and explain the historical shifts that occur within the nineteenth century, but also to bring its analysis forward to explain why what we see of the past in the early twenty-​ first century may differ so greatly from what scholars perceived only a decade or so back. Price is sceptical of ‘oxymoronic subfields like “thing theory” [… in which] scholars change from the freest of associators into the most slavish of idiot savants’.40 ‘The dethronement of reading requires an assault upon metaphor’, she proposes, with one result being the worst kind of aesthetic deafness that settles over a scholarly community that formerly prided itself on identifying and responding to nuances of aesthetic value, in part by capturing and reporting on aesthetic pleasure.41 Price’s sardonic acuity about the extremes to which surface reading can bring book historians does not prevent her

39  Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012); Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-​Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). 40 Price, How to Do Things, 22. 41 Price, How to Do Things, 23.

534    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture from indicting those Platonist close readers who still suppose that criticism can proceed without reference to the material object itself. On the one hand, Price ruefully suggests that book historians are the rightful heirs (and hence perhaps the likeliest explicators) of the realist novel: ‘both are detail-​oriented, business-​minded and petty […] inclined to privilege the mundane over the ideal, the local over the transcendent’. But there is an equally tart corollary: ‘Twenty-​first century literary critics look more like heirs to the sermon […]. From Protestant theology, secular explicators have learned to prize spirit over matter’.42 The plague that Price casts on both houses—​ the book historians irredeemably surface-​oriented, the literary critics trapped in sermonizing mode—​should not obscure Price’s new way out of the oxymorons and dead-​end aporias of thing theory. She reminds us of the structural logic that splits fields and their paradigmatic assumptions from one another; her acute anatomy of these structural splits enables her to look at divisions as features of the intellectual field that can be acknowledged and worked within, rather than heroically overcome. Her account of the relationship between nineteenth-​century ‘it-​narratives’ (e.g. The History of a Religious Tract Supposed to be Related by Itself, 1806) and the Bildungsroman shows what a long-​standing intellectual divide has always existed between scholarship that focused on making sense of author’s and reader’s ideas and experiences and scholarship that has striven to arrive at objective truths about the production and dissemination of books. Between those who study ‘a human subject’s formation through a series of texts’ and those striving to document ‘transmission of textual content’43 there will arise inevitable discrepancies, since the object of investigation as well as the methods employed must perforce differ sharply. Price’s account of this rift within book and reception history points to a plausible genealogy for ‘thing theory’ as it is currently, uneasily, formulated. Rather than being a newfangled detour into the oxymoronic, thing theory is the heir to a deep history of divided models for interpreting the sites at which knowledge is transmitted. The rift she describes is one that not just the ‘history of books and reading’ but any history of ‘objects and interpreters’ would have to contain. If so, then there seems to be a renewed need not so much for thing theory as for a theory of thing theory—​an explanation, that is, of the deeper intellectual currents within which the stories about Indian diamonds, calico, Victorian lenses, and even ‘the cylinder’ can be seen to flow. That theory would delve into a longer history that includes not just the rise of descriptive bibliography and the fascination with ‘association copies’, but also Bruno Latour’s notion that in order for Enlightenment-​era science to take hold it had first and foremost to ‘invent objects which have the property of being mobile but also immutable, presentable, readable and combinable with one another’.44 42 Price, How to Do Things, 28.

43 Price, How to Do Things, 130. 44 

Bruno Latour, ‘Drawing Things Together’, in Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (eds), Representation in Scientific Practice (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 19–​68, p. 26.

What to Make of Victorian Things    535 Price’s point is that we still need to find a ‘history of books and reading’ that acknowledges the difficulties involved in coming up with any one intellectual approach that could rest comfortably and continuously at the juncture point where books and reading converge. Ultimately, a revamped thing theory might shed more light on the tangled and troubled ‘contact zone’ between material objects and the human subjects who are thrown into relationship with both the material world and one another by their interactions with those objects. One promising way forward may be to hypothesize that any thing theory ought to highlight approaches to any historical period’s margins—​of language, of cognition, of material substance. ‘Things’ do not lie beyond the bounds of reason, but at times they may seem to. That seeming is significant: these are limit cases at which our ordinary categories for classifying signs and substances, meaning and materiality, appear to break down. It is accordingly worth seeking out not so much a theory about the cultural significance of the movement of objects within the realm of symbolic circulation, as the limit cases of different epochs and locations, the examples that push and pull at the problem of where an object’s ‘meaning’ ends and its ‘materiality’ begins. Such a thing theory could then be understood as remaining not so much inter-​disciplinary (that suggests a boundary at which two different idea systems may meet) as extra-​disciplinary. It might consist of noting the places where any mode of acquiring or producing knowledge about the world runs into hard nuts, troubling exceptions, or blurry borders—​of anatomizing places where the strict rules for classifying and comprehending phenomena seem suddenly no longer to apply. Victorianist antecedents to this turn towards the study of liminal or transitional states might include critics like Isobel Armstrong (on Gerard Manley Hopkins) and Jerome McGann (on William Morris), both of whom parse the ways late Victorian writers came to understand not just the printed page but even language itself as simultaneously corporeal and semiotic.45 In the spirit of such analysis, I want to conclude by asking how the interpretation of another Victorian writer changes if we take seriously his own recursive exploration of what it means to think of his poetry as at once a material object and a set of abstract, ethereal signs. In ‘The Dead’ (1914), James Joyce sums up Robert Browning’s poetry as ‘thought-​tormented music’.46 That odd duality captures Browning’s commitment both to the palpable ‘thinginess’ of a work of art (its musicality) and to its detachability from that ‘mere’ materiality (hence its thought-​tormented quality). One way to understand the ‘thought-​tormented’ quality of Browning’s not-​quite musical poetry (especially in his 1855 Men and Women) is as a special kind of Victorian thing theory: a thing theory that explores what it means for the poem to create for its readers a half-​material experience of moving into a ‘virtual’ world. Building on work by Gilles Deleuze and Pierre Levy that focuses on the distinction between ‘virtual’ and 45  Isobel Armstrong, Language as Living Form in Nineteenth-​Century Poetry (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester; Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1982); Jerome McGann, ‘“A Thing to Mind”: The Materialist Aesthetic of William Morris’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 55, no. 1 (Winter 1992), 55–​74. 46  James Joyce, Dubliners, with intro. and notes by Terence Brown (London: Penguin, 1992), 192.

536    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture ‘actual’ experience, Michael McKeon has made the case that the aesthetic imagination itself ought to be thought of as ‘a modern social imaginary’; by this he means that we should think of artworks as occupying a virtual (i.e. real, yet not material and actual) realm of ‘normatively impersonal relations between “strangers” who have no actual experience of one another’.47 In Browning we find one striking instantiation of this idea, in the notion of the poem itself as a quasi-​tangible, quasi-​abstract aesthetic experience. He neither aspires to nor attains the Romantic lyric immediacy of the sort Mill praised as overheard. He is not, as early critics charged, aiming for a directness of experience that eludes him. With all of poetry’s formal props and aids put on display rather than hidden away for elegance’s sake, many of the poems in Men and Women stage a version of just this balancing act: between poem as object and poem as idea in the reader’s mind. The result is that these poems come to exist as virtual things, in whose incompleteness and evanescence lies their strongest claim to work on the reader’s thought and feeling. Isobel Armstrong’s influential reading of Browning’s poetry as torn between cerebral and libidinal attachments tells part of the story, but it is also crucial that many of the poems in Men and Women explore in great detail what such material/​conceptual doubleness looks, feels, and sounds like. The tussle that is staged, and made corporeal in his poetry is often staged as the tension between considering the words of others, and feeling them enter one’s body uninvited and unexpellable. Browning presumes that audiences respond both to his poetry’s music and to its thought. Hence an adequate account of his poetry means we should think about the way that even the most affecting of these poems work by simultaneously engaging the reader sensuously and cognitively—​as things and as ideas. One way to understand how this irresolvable tension between material and conceptual structures Browning’s ‘double poems’ is to turn to the poem that most perfectly epitomizes ‘thought-​tormented music’: ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’ (1855). This poem about a musician is written as if it were itself a piece of music. Browning presents the poem as attentive both to connection—​between a dead composer and his audience(s)—​and to material separation. Although Browning himself likely wrote the poem in Venice, the poem’s narrator reaches out to a distant Galuppi from modern England: ‘I was never out of England—​it’s as if I saw it all.’ This ‘separateness with communication’ (the phrase Eliot uses to describe Daniel Deronda’s ideal Zionism) structures the poem in ways that resonate outwards throughout Browning’s poetry. The poem is designed both to send the reader back into this world (the world of the musician himself struggling to move back into the world of the piece of music) and to acknowledge a gap. The reader’s body is meant to register the thrum of the music just as the speaker’s does: ‘In you come with your cold music till I creep thro’ every nerve.’48 In fact, the overlap between imagined musicality and the verbal fabric of the poem itself is made explicit: the musical rhythm described in the poem is also meant to take (imperfect) hold of the reader in the very words that describe that rhythm. 47 

Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005), 106–​107. 48  Robert Browning, ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’, 42, xi 3 in Browning, Men and Women (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1856).

What to Make of Victorian Things    537 What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh, Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions—​‘Must we die?’ These commiserating sevenths—​‘Life might last! We can but try!’ (vii 1-​3)

Yet even at such moments of aural harmony, the semantics of the sentence generate uneasiness. The ventriloquized resolution ‘We can but try!’ is assigned to some particular imagined speaker, in the unmarked unspecified we of ‘Must we die?’ Browning aims at producing an indeterminate sort of solidarity between reader, speaker, and the imagined originator of the musical idea. Suspensions and solutions both are tentative and partial at best, which is precisely what allows them to reach out to implicate the reader as well. In the poem’s quasi-​intangibility, its materiality lies. Ultimately, Browning’s is an experiment in virtual world-​making that is designed to remind the reader that a poem is not quite the kind of solid thing that a reader hopes it will be. The poem can neither satisfactorily impersonate an object, nor can its words be granted sufficient musicality to make the question of tangibility seem temporarily irrelevant. The point of poetry’s virtuality, then, is precisely to suggest that all such intangible experiences bring readers to inconceivable heights, but only by forfeiting the durability across time that might keep them there for good. If Geoffrey Batchen describes Victorian photographs brought back to life by strategically placed hair, the thought of such hair concludes Browning’s poem by ejecting the speaker into a disenchanted world: Dear dead women, with such hair, too—​what’s become of all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old. (xv, 2–​3)

There’s no hair to hang the tale on. Like the wrenching perspective shift that leaves everything ‘cold’ at the end of Keats’s 1819 ‘Eve of St Agnes’ (‘And they are gone: ay, ages long ago | These lovers fled away into the storm’, ll. 370–​1), Browning’s ending suggests that poems impersonate the palpable presence a thing ought to provide—​but ultimately insidiously undermine just such solidity. In ways that invite a deeper comparison to the questions raised by Dickens’s obtrusive bed and Marx’s dancing table, Browning’s tormented lyric commends itself to its readers’ attention not by making a straightforward and palpable claim, but by deferring certainty, foreclosing succinct definition, and inviting interpretation.

Acknowledgements In preparing this chapter, I have drawn some ideas and formulations from previously published work: Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); ‘Can the Sofa Speak? A Look at Thing Theory’, Criticism, 47, no. 1 (Winter, 2005), 109–​118; ‘Two Flowers: George Eliot’s Diagrams and the Modern

538    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Novel’, in Amanda Anderson and Harry Shaw (eds), Blackwell Companion to George Eliot (Malden, Mass.:  Blackwell, 2013), 76–​90; Review of Suzanne Daly, The Empire Inside: Indian Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels, Nineteenth Century Contexts, 34, no. 1 (February 2012), 70–​73; Review of Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, Victorian Studies, 51, no.  2 (2009), 365–​367; Review of Helmut Müller-​Sievers, The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century, Modern Language Quarterly, 74, no. 4 (2013), 549–​553. I am grateful to the following colleagues for conversation and counsel:  Elizabeth Ferry, Richard Parmentier, Mary Wilson Carpenter, Deb Gettelman, Michele Martinez, Maia Macaleavey, Anna Henchman, Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Karen Bouvier, and Ivan Kreilkamp.

Select Bibliography Armstrong, Isobel, Victorian Glassworlds:  Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830–​1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Bender, John, and Richard Marrinan, The Culture of Diagram (Stanford, Calif.:  Stanford University Press, 2010). Blair, Ann, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Cohen, Deborah, Household Gods:  The British and Their Possessions (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2006). Freedgood, Elaine, The Ideas in Things:  Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Gitelman, Lisa, Always Already New:  Media, History and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006). Kirschenbaum, Matthew, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008). McGann, Jerome, ‘“A Thing to Mind”: The Materialist Aesthetic of William Morris’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 55, no. 1 (Winter, 1992), 55–​74. Müller-​Sievers, Helmut, The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012). Price, Leah, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). Weiner, Annette, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-​While-​Giving (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).

Chapter 28

Celebrit y C u lt u re John Plunkett

In 1883, Matthew Arnold was on an American lecture tour when he received a letter from the great showman P. T. Barnum: ‘You, sir, are a celebrity. I am a notoriety. We ought to be acquainted.’1 Alas, this proposed meeting never took place. Nonetheless, Barnum’s desire to take advantage of any opportunity to puff his own distinction—and his belief that this was best achieved by associating with another famous person—typifies the potent aura of celebrity in modern culture. The Victorian period saw the charisma and mystique of ‘celebrity’ become an established part of cultural life, percolating into many social and professional arenas. In Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), when a young boy appears before the famed Sergeant Cuff, the narrator remarks that ‘In our modern system of civilisation, celebrity (no matter of what kind) is the lever that will move anything.’2 Sergeant Cuff ’s reluctant witness is soon talking. Authors of the period were variously subjects and objects, pioneers, accomplices and victims, of a celebrity culture that was equally evident in theatre, music, painting, fashion, and the sporting world. This essay demonstrates the important role played by celebrity in Victorian literary life; it maps its principal characteristics, influences, and practices, and focuses on those writers who were most active in harnessing its power or subjected to its demands. Celebrity culture was certainly not invented by the Victorians; indeed, what characterizes celebrity is an open-​ended and heuristic question. Few could claim to be more embedded in popular culture than Barnum, and his distinction between celebrity and notoriety suggests the nuanced vocabulary that was evolving to describe its different types, which still overlapped with historical cognates like fame, renown, reputation, and genius. Celebrity could be regarded as a modern version of fame; however, the dynamics driving its development make it a much more complex and innovative phenomenon. It marked the democratization of the public sphere but, at the same time, its advent was infused by a commercial dynamic, making it more liable to fabrication and an inherent transience. Recent scholarship has

1 

2 

Herbert W. Paul, Men and Letters (London: John Lane, 1901), 37. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, ed. John Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 435.

540    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture convincingly argued that numerous factors coalesced between 1780 and 1830 to form the recognizable dynamics of modern celebrity, prominent amongst them being the spread of print and visual media, urbanization and the creation of large, popular audiences, and the spread of commodity culture.3 As Tom Mole has neatly encapsulated it, the key impact of these changes was that ‘Celebrity was no longer something you had; it was now something you were.’4 Mole argues that celebrity is best understood as ‘a cultural apparatus consisting of three elements: an individual, an industry and an audience’. Modern celebrity is a product of these three elements working ‘together to render an individual personally fascinating’.5 Lord Byron’s unprecedented fame and notoriety following the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) typifies this new celebrity culture at work. Following Byron, there were good reasons why writers continued to be at the forefront of celebrity culture as its development intensified. Potential audiences, thanks to population growth, rising living standards, and improved literacy levels, increased exponentially in size and geographical distribution. The industrial and commercial development of publishing provided a host of new ways for writers to interact with this ever-​increasing number of readers, overcoming, or perhaps disavowing, the commodification of print media in order to make a genuine psychological and affective connection with readers as individuals rather than as an anonymous mass. Writers were equally important in formulating the evolving discourse about celebrity; thus, in a notable 1817 essay, ‘On the Different Sorts of Fame’, William Hazlitt, like Barnum many years later, sought to elaborate on the new taxonomies of fame, distinguishing between that justly bestowed by posterity and the instant gratification created by the most recent issue of the Edinburgh Review or Quarterly Review. At the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign, the emergent nature of literary celebrity provoked much anxious debate due to the new phenomenon of ‘lionism’. Labelled after gazing at the lions in the Tower of London, lionism was the practice of having authors at salons and evening parties to be exhibited and shown off. Harriet Martineau’s description of such occasions suggests that the ‘lion’ was more often hunted than hunter: He is the ‘interesting creature’ round whom young ladies flutter, with bashful praises of his ‘divine poem’, and urgent requests for ‘one line’ for each of their albums. He is the delightful ‘soul’ who is always losing his gloves, or rather one glove at a time, and who does not need to be told that each of his lost kids is locked up in lavender, cherished like a gem for a few weeks or months, till a rival bring out a still diviner poem.6 3 

Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Tom Mole (ed.), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–​1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See also Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion, 2001); Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (1986; New York: Vintage, 1997); Alexis Easley, Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850–​1914 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011). 4 Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, p. xii. 5 Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, 1. 6  H.M. [Harriet Martineau], ‘Literary Lionism’, London and Westminster Review, 32 (1839), 261–​81, at 261.

Celebrity Culture   541 Lionism was alluring because of its promise of an unmediated and intimate personal exchange, even though the social event was usually arranged solely for the host to be able to exhibit the ‘lion’. This contrived sociability created a voyeurism that turned the author into a fetishized, sexual object. As important as being able to converse with the ‘lion’ was the ability to gaze upon him or to gather one of his accessories as a fetishistic trophy. Despite such magnetism, Martineau makes it clear that the celebrity of the ‘lion’ was doomed to transience: his charismatic appeal lasted only as long the adoring audience continued to invest him with a fashionable status. Martineau’s evocation is typical in picturing a masculine ‘lion’ surrounded by female admirers, yet her portrayal derives from her own subjection to lionism following her move to London in 1832 and the success of her Illustrations of Political Economy. She found the experience disconcerting and alienating, and warned against its effects. A recurring critique of literary celebrity during this period was that it risked becoming a bar to the realization of talent and craft rather than a natural recognition of it. Martineau was certainly not the only one to warn against the dangers of lionism. In Heroes and Hero-​Worship (1841), Carlyle asserted that ‘Lion-​hunters were the ruin and death of Burns’, gathering round his farm and hindering his industry till ‘no place was remote enough from them’, while in G. H. Lewes’s Ranthorpe (1847), his eponymous author-​ hero has to overcome its superficial seductions.7 Martineau saw lionism as a ‘sign of the times’: the modernity of its principal causes and characteristics exemplified a new type of fame. She regarded it as a ‘media’ phenomenon, a product of the ever-​increasing dissemination of books and journals that, in its turn, changed the relationship between authors and readers. Literary ‘lionism’ was created by the new popular readership: it was driven by ‘fans’. While Martineau acknowledged that their admiration was the same feeling of homage to writers that went as far back as Petrarch, ‘its form and prevalence are determined by the fact, that literature has reached a larger class, and interested a different order of people from any who formerly shared its advantages’.8 Lionism drew on practices that were traditionally part of the elite sphere of culture—​salons, coteries, and face-​to-​face sociability—​that had been reinvented through the industrialization of publishing and the concomitant creation of a large readership. Richard Salmon argues that lionism emerged out of a ‘culture of visual spectacle and sociable encounter cognate with institutions of the eighteenth-​century public sphere’ but fed off the expansion of print culture and anticipated modern mass-​ media publicity.9 What Martineau most disliked about lionism was not the attention in itself, but that it took place ‘when the eminent person becomes a guest in a private house’. Martineau had no issues with audiences waiting to get a personal glimpse of scientific luminaries 7 

Thomas Carlyle, ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’, in Heroes and Hero Worship (1841; London: Macmillan, 1897), 206–​61, at 229. 8  H.M. [Harriet Martineau], ‘Literary Lionism’, 264. 9  Richard Salmon, ‘The Physiognomy of the Lion: Encountering Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century’, in Mole (ed.), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 60–​78, at 60.

542    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture such as William Whewell, Charles Babbage, or John Herschel after one of their public lectures; however, for her, lionism became sordid when an ostensibly ‘private’ event was used for display, corrupting not only the sociability so important to intellectual life but also the authenticity of the domestic sphere. Unlike answering letters from admirers in a secluded study, lionism forced the author to be complicit in, and feel more intimately, their own objectification. The ideology of separate spheres contributed to an inherent tension in the creation of the mystique of celebrity. Lionism seemed to accentuate the boundary between public and private; indeed, in what would become a wholly familiar narrative to twenty-​first-​century audiences, Martineau warned that writers seduced by the adulation of lionism risked losing touch with the everyday life on which their creative practice depended. Yet, the greater the fetishized public allure of writers, the greater the frisson, and need, for lionism to exploit the private sphere as the locus of interiority. Lionism simultaneously fed off, and undermined, the division between public and private. Martineau was right that there was a new swathe of readers asserting their commercial and aesthetic power in the 1830s. The history of modern celebrity is a function of the growth of the popular media, and, for most of the nineteenth century, this was achieved through the spread of print and visual culture. It is thus perhaps a misnomer to talk about an exclusively ‘literary’ celebrity for, while writers did become famous for their words, their renown was, in part, a product of those words being published in the books, journals, periodicals, and newspapers that were the mainstream ‘media’ of the day. The 1830s and 1840s saw a number of factors working in tandem to produce novelists who were not only popular but ‘celebrities’, operating on a far larger scale than the upper-​class coteries of lionism. The most notable of these was a significant expansion in the publishing industry, together with the emergence of arguably the first genuinely mass reading public, largely made up of the new urban working and middle classes. This growth was tied in to the advent of a cheap periodical press, which, in its turn, was key to the establishment of the practice of serial publication and serial reading. In an 1842 article, J. Malcolm Rhymer remarked on the vastly increased income and status now enjoyed by those novelists that were able to gauge popular taste: ‘The star system, borrowed from the theatrical world, prevailed in full force. Every needy gentleman and dowager in difficulties commenced novelist.’10 Rhymer is best known for his penny-​part novels, which include Varney the Vampyre (c.1844) and The String of Pearls: A Romance (1846–​7); his borrowing from the language of the stage, where theatrical ‘stars’ were more established, highlights the novelty of the status now being enjoyed by popular writers (the Oxford English Dictionary records the first such use of ‘star’ to the death of David Garrick in 1779). Who though were the literary ‘stars’ Rhymer describes? While Dickens might come to mind as the obvious candidate, leading the way was a raft of ‘celebrity’ writers created by the extraordinary growth of the serial fiction disseminated through cheap periodicals. The 1840s saw the establishment of a number of 10 

The Editor [J. Malcolm Rhymer], ‘Popular Writing’, Queen’s Magazine: A Monthly Miscellany of Literary and Arts, 1 (1842), 99–​103, at 101.

Celebrity Culture   543 large-​circulation penny periodicals whose serial fiction was their principal appeal, the most notable being the London Journal (1845–​1928), Family Herald (1842–​1940), Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper (1853–​67), and Reynolds’s Miscellany (1846–​69). Andrew King has noted that by the mid-​1850s, these four penny-​periodicals were selling 2 million copies a week between them; in contrast, Dickens’s twopenny Household Words was managing only 38,000 copies.11 The serial fiction these journals disseminated imbued many of their authors with celebrity; like Rhymer, though, most have since been largely forgotten. Authors who became ‘stars’ were invariably part of the most commercial, sales-​driven zone of publishing: their very celebrity signified their exclusion from the ‘literary’. The fissure between high-​status literary distinction and commercial celebrity was inherent to the growth of the literary marketplace and remained a running fault line. Probably the best example of the double-​edged celebrity of popular authors is J. F. Smith, a truly best-​selling author of the 1840s and 1850s. His serial fiction in the London Journal was selling 500,000 copies a week in 1851–​2. In 1858, Margaret Oliphant, in a long unsigned article for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine surveying popular reading tastes, singled out Smith as an example of the celebrity enjoyed by popular authors who were unknown to the literary elite: Let us not delude ourselves with the idea that literature is fully represented by that small central body of its forces of whom everybody knows every individual name […] in the underground, quite out of sight and ken of the heroes, spreads thickly and darkly an undiscriminated multitude—​undiscriminated by the critics, by the authorities, by the general vision, but widely visible to individual eyes, to admiring coteries, and multitudinous lower classes, who buy, and read, and praise, and encourage, and, under the veil of their own obscurity, bestow a certain singular low-​ lying Jack-​o’-​lantern celebrity, which nobody out of these regions is aware of, and which is the oddest travestie and paraphrase of fame.12

The growth of the literary marketplace went hand in hand with the creation of numerous distinct literary fields, each with their own conventions, authors, and readers. Different reading communities, whether grouped together by class, gender, trade, age, or region, had their own literary celebrities. Another influential article written by a middlebrow novelist, published almost simultaneously in August 1858 in Household Words, and similarly concerned with analysing popular reading tastes, is Wilkie Collins’s ‘The Unknown Public’. In this piece, Collins adopts an earnest quasi-​sociological method, akin to that of his friend Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor (1851), and sets out to interview those who make 11 

Andrew King, ‘ “Literature of the Kitchen”: Cheap Serial Fiction of the 1840s and 1850s’, in Pamela K. Gilbert (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Sensation Fiction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), 38–​53, at 41. 12  [Margaret Oliphant], ‘The Byways of Literature: Reading for the Million’, in Andrew King and John Plunkett (eds), Victorian Print Media: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 196–​206, at 199.

544    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture up a previously ‘unknown public’ of 3 million readers. Collins’s article drips with condescension towards the tastes of the ‘unknown public’; he nonetheless illuminates the way its reading practices could help turn authors and characters into celebrities through encouraging a personalized relationship between readers, novelists, and editors, even as the publishing industry was increasingly organized on an industrial basis. The most in-​depth aspect of Collins’s article pokes fun at the ‘Answers to Correspondents’, mocking the inane, intimate, and ignorant questions asked by readers, all of which were seriously answered by the editor: ‘Now he is father, now a mother, now schoolmaster, now a confessor, now a doctor, now a lawyer, now a young lady’s confidante, now a young gentleman’s bosom friend, now a lecturer on morals, and—​now an authority in cookery.’13 Popular journals encouraged an interactive and intimate relationship with their readers, which needs to be seen as one of the preconditions for a celebrity culture in so far as it inspired readers’ emotional and psychological engagement. Recent scholars have similarly emphasized the way that serial publication—​through its sustained regularity—​made writers and their work part of their readers’ everyday, affective lives. Readers literally lived with the novels, whose serial rhythms connected with their own: fiction and everyday life converged. Moreover, as Mark Turner has noted of serial fiction, the impact of ‘readers interacting with media at roughly the same time’ was to create ‘a kind of simultaneity [which] becomes increasingly significant in a collective media culture, and can lead to a form of social bonding with a community of readers all engaged in the same activity’.14 The simultaneity of the reading public’s collective engagement is one of the mechanisms that fosters celebrity, but also raises the question of whether literary celebrity was as much imbued in texts as individuals. So many frontispieces of Victorian novels, even by well-​known figures, state not a name but ‘By the author of […]’, advertising it to readers primarily through their experience of a previous text rather than marketing it through a commodified authorial signature. Equally, individual characters had great renown: Jack Sheppard, Punch, the Artful Dodger, Scrooge, and, later, Trilby, Sherlock Holmes, and Ally Sloper, were amongst those who enjoyed a rich cultural life of their own. The link between literary celebrity and popular reading practices is neatly encapsulated by Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife, first serialized in Temple Bar in 1864. Through the character of the sensation novelist Sigismund Smith—​a celebrity of penny serial fiction who may well have been based on J. F. Smith—​Braddon pokes fun at the naivety with which his readers built up a fabricated authorial personality. Smith is believed to resemble the Byronic heroes of his fiction. His readers’ psychological intimacy and over-​investment in him fashions him as a celebrity (their celebrity) far removed from the mundane labour attendant upon being a professional writer: 13 

[Wilkie Collins], ‘The Unknown Public’, in King and Plunkett (eds), Victorian Print Media: A Reader, 207–​16, at 212. 14  Mark Turner, ‘ “Telling of My Weekly Doings”: The Material Culture of the Victorian Novel’, in Francis O’Gorman (ed.), A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 113–​33, at 124.

Celebrity Culture   545 People who were impressed by his fictions, and were curious to see him, generally left him with a strong sense of disappointment, if not indignation. They had their own idea of what the author of the Smuggler’s Bride and Lilia the Deserted ought to be, and Mr Smith did not at all come up to the popular standard; so the enthusiastic admirers of his romances were apt to complain of him as an impostor when they beheld him in private life. Was this meek young man the Byronic hero they had pictured? Was this the author of Colonel Montefiasco, or the Brand upon the Shoulder-​blade? They had imagined a splendid creature, half magician, half brigand, with a pale face and fierce black eyes, a tumbled mass of raven hair, a bare white throat, a long black-​velvet dressing gown, and thin tapering hands with queer agate and onyx rings coiling up the flexible fingers.15

Braddon was no stranger to cheap serial publication and sympathetically depicts the demands placed upon authors by the desires readers invested in them (although a more sceptical interpretation of this episode might be that it conveniently pushes responsibility for celebrity onto readers and thereby downplays her agency in creating her own sensational reputation). For Braddon, following on from Collins and other critics, the fashioning of literary celebrity is an extension of the open-​ended, interactive, and immediate nature of serial reading.

Dickens and the Gendering of Celebrity Charles Dickens was probably the author who took maximum advantage of the opportunities for achieving celebrity that were offered by the growth of the publishing industry. As is well known, Dickens’s popularity was aided by his use of serial publication and the general publishing expansion of the 1830s and 1840s. The blaze of early success he enjoyed typifies the degree to which celebrity was now a trans-​media and transatlantic phenomenon. There were numerous pirated adaptions of his work for the stage; the East End Royal Pavilion Theatre’s burletta of Oliver Twist was first performed on 21 May 1838, even though the serialization would not be completed until April 1839. There were also unauthorized spin-​off versions of his early novels that exploited the ‘Boz’ brand; imitative titles included Pickwick Abroad: Or, The Tour in France (1839), The Penny Pickwick (1837–​9), The Life and Adventures of Oliver Twiss (1838–​9), and Nickelas Nicklebery (1840). Without an international copyright agreement, cheap unauthorized reprints of Dickens’s novels published in America also helped to give him an international popularity that is testimony to the scale of celebrity writers could now achieve. Following the 15 

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, ed. Lyn Pykett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 13.

546    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture success of his early novels, Dickens left for the United States early in January 1842; writing from Boston on 28 January 1842, he marvelled at the attention he was receiving: How can I give you the faintest notion of my reception here; of the crowds that pour in and out the whole day; of the people that line the streets when I go out; of the cheering when I went to theatre; of the copies of verses, letters of congratulation, welcomes of all kinds, balls, dinners, assemblies without end?16

It was not long, however, before the novelty of such attention wore off. Less than a month later he was complaining, ‘I can do nothing that I want to do, go nowhere where I want to go, and see nothing that I want to see [… .] I get out at a station, and can’t drink a glass of water without having a hundred people looking down my throat when I open my mouth to swallow.’17 The geographical and social range of Dickens’s appeal was not only a precondition of his celebrity but also central to the narrative of his renown. Dickens’s career and reputation arguably helped to redefine celebrity, making it more aligned with universal readership. In contrast to the literary elite’s ignorance of writers like J. F. Smith and Rhymer, Juliet John has detailed how an integral part of Dickens’s reputation was the frequent assertion of the unrivalled nature of his cross-​class appeal.18 One review from 1839 declared: Not alone are his delightful works confined to the young and old, the grave and gay, the witty, the intellectual, the moralist, and the thoughtless of both sexes in the reading circles, from the peer and the judge to the merchant’s clerk; but even the common people, both in town and country, are equally intense in their admiration.19

Such assertions were frequent and performative:  they aided Dickens’s celebrity by making his readership feel part of a large imagined community. All the variations and adaptations of Dickens’s works, however, only go partway in explaining his place in the cultural imagination: it was his innovative approach to personally engaging his readers that did so much to create him as a larger-​than-​life figure. As Juliet John elaborates, ‘there is so often a blurring of the idea of Dickens himself with the reality of his works. The idea of Dickens was integral to the popularity of his writings.’20 Dickens’s career is characterized by the familiarity and intimacy he encouraged with his reading public. Echoing Collins’s description of the role of the popular journal editor, Dickens’s opening address in Household Words in 1850 declared that he wanted his

16 

Charles Dickens to John Forster, repr. in Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens: The Critical Heritage (1986; London: Taylor and Francis, 2005), 115. 17  Charles Dickens to John Forster, 24 February 1842, The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson, 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–​2002), iii. 1842–​1843 (1974), 87. 18  Juliet John, Dickens and Mass Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 5–​10. 19  ‘Review of Books’, National Magazine and Monthly Critic, 1 (December 1837), 445. 20 John, Dickens and Mass Culture, 15.

Celebrity Culture   547 journal ‘to be numbered among the Household thoughts, of our readers’ and to be ‘the comrade and friend of many thousands of people, of both sexes, and of all ages and conditions, on whose faces we may never look’.21 This rhetorical performance of friendship and immediacy was embodied through his journal on a week-​by-​week basis. Lest readers be in any doubt that it was a journal pervaded and animated by the spirit of Dickens (despite the fact that there were a number of contributors), the front page of every issue had ‘Conducted by Charles Dickens’ as part of its masthead while ‘Charles Dickens’ was a running header. In what may well be the first official ‘press’ statement by an author, Dickens used Household Words to announce his separation from his wife, Catherine, and scotch rumours about his unfaithfulness; his very public statement declared, without a hint of irony, that his troubles were of a ‘sacredly private character’.22 Dickens’s belief in his affective connection with his readers may not have been exceptional, but what made him a unique celebrity amongst authors was the length to which he went to embody this connection. Seeking to go beyond the pages of Household Words and his novels, Dickens embarked on a series of public readings; his countless readers could see and hear him reading their favourite scenes. The public lecture was a staple of Victorian cultural life: in most towns and cities, several were given nightly at Mechanics’ Institutes, town halls, churches, athenaeums, schools, or outdoor political platforms. Some professional lecturers and popular scientists achieved considerable celebrity; for many writers, lectures provided an opportunity to engage with their actual public. Dickens was certainly not alone in his ventures. For example, prior to Dickens’s first charity readings, which took place at Birmingham Town Hall in December 1853, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered sixty-​four addresses as part of a British lecture tour between November 1847 and February 1848. Dickens’s first series of public readings for profit began on 29 April 1858 at St Martin’s Hall, London; these were followed by an extended provincial tour. Many more readings took place during the 1860s; he also made a hugely successful four-​and-​a-​half-​month American tour from December 1867 to April 1868, during which time he visited the White House as the guest of President Andrew Johnson. Dickens’s public readings were certainly lucrative; from twenty-​five readings in the provinces in August 1858 he made over 1,000 guineas. His tours were also characterized by arrangements regarding the commercial value of his name and face that are now normal for any modern celebrity worthy of the label; for example, before heading to America, Dickens signed an agreement with the photographic studio J. Gurney and Son to have exclusive rights to photograph him during the tour. Images of him reached saturation levels; the Boston Tribune declared that ‘At every turn in the illustrated newspapers, in the hotel office, and in all the shop windows, the new portrait of Mr. Dickens is to be seen’.23

21 

Charles Dickens, ‘A Preliminary Word’, Household Words, 1 (30 March 1850), 1–​2, at 1. Charles Dickens, ‘Personal’, Household Words (12 June 1858), 601. 23  Cited in Malcolm Andrews, Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 157. 22 

548    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Not all were enamoured of the innovation of Dickens’s public readings. John Forster cautioned beforehand that this reading for profit was demeaning, turning Dickens into a popular exhibition and casting doubt upon his ‘respect for his calling as a writer, a question also of respect for himself as a gentleman’.24 In response to the concern that such active exploitation of himself turned him into a celebrity and thereby risked his social and literary status, Dickens wrote to Forster that his project needed to be understood ‘with a view to its effect on that peculiar relation (personally affectionate, and like no other man’s) which subsists between me and the public’.25 Margaret Oliphant was another writer who questioned whether his public readings were an appropriate way of creating a personal relationship with readers, even if they were an attempt to counterbalance the anonymized scale of the ever-​burgeoning reading public: though it is becoming common, it is not the most dignified meeting this between the story-​teller and his auditory. The relations between them are changed for the time, and not agreeably changed. Somehow it seems a sin against good taste and the reticence of genius, that the writer, with his own voice, should bring out those ‘points’ already singled out for popular approbation, which are sure to ‘bring down the house’.26

Dickens’s readings were not trying out new material in order to gauge popular taste as Oliphant would have preferred; rather, by reading those scenes that were guaranteed to garner success, he was taking advantage of the public’s ‘perfectly unelevated curiosity’. Like Martineau, Oliphant feared that literary celebrity risked becoming an exercise in flattery to the long-​term detriment of creativity. Oliphant’s distaste may well have been influenced by the fact that the same opportunities were not open to her as a woman writer. Dickens’s enthused involvement in public life—​not only readings but dinners, speeches, and high-​profile social projects like the Urania Cottage for fallen women—​contrasts with the more ambivalent and complex celebrity of the most prominent women writers. In the 1820s and 1830s, Laetitia Landon and Felicia Hemans had enjoyed considerable celebrity but their renown was as ‘poetesses’ famed for their ‘feminine’, sentimental verse. Hemans’s ‘Woman and Fame’, first published in The Amulet in 1829, is suggestive of the doubleness around their public position. Hemans’s poem figures Fame as alluring, enlivening, and vital, yet ultimately hollow, to be rejected in favour of domesticity and the nurturing pleasures of the hearth: Thou hast a voice, whose thrilling tone Can bid each life-​pulse beat, As when a trumpet’s note hath blown, 24 

John Forster, Life of Charles Dickens, 3 vols. (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1875), iii. 180. Cited in Malcolm Andrews, Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 10. 26  [Oliphant], ‘The Byways of Literature: Reading for the Million’, 200. 25 

Celebrity Culture   549 Calling the brave to meet: But mine, let mine a woman’s breast, By words of home-​born love be bless’d. A hollow sound is in thy song, A mockery in thine eye, To the sick heart that doth but long For aid, for sympathy For kindly looks to cheer it on, For tender accents that are gone.27

Susan Wolfson has argued that this is a ‘poem at war with its lesson’, where the imagery and argument run counter to each other.28 The artistic rewards of Fame are ‘life-​giving’, yet work against female happiness. The levels of contradiction are multiplied by the fact that, when published, Hemans was probably the famous poetess of the day, and literary annuals and giftbooks like The Amulet were notorious as luxury commodities, paying authors handsomely for the value of their names even if their verses did not always stand up to much critical scrutiny. The publication context exemplifies the benefits of Hemans’s celebrity status even as the poem itself ostensibly rejects Fame. The subsequent growth of publishing did provide opportunities for more women to undertake writing as a profession; nonetheless, the ideology of separate spheres made their celebrity more problematic. This was a period when the public performativity of women—​and more particularly actresses—​still risked associating them with prostitutes. An example from the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign illustrates the layers of difficulty faced by women writers. Famously, in 1836, the 20-​year-​old Charlotte Brontë wrote to Robert Southey, then Poet Laureate, stating her desire to be a poet and asking his opinion of her poetry. Southey replied, praising her talent, but told her that ‘Literature cannot be the occupation of a woman’s life: & it ought not to be’ and that her future womanly duties that would crowd out her space for writing: ‘To those duties you have not yet been called, & when you are you will be less eager for celebrity.’29 Southey’s stricture has added force by accusing Charlotte of desiring celebrity in itself. For her part, Charlotte kept his letter for the rest of her life, replying to Southey that if she ever wished herself to appear in print, ‘I’ll look at Southey’s letter, and suppress it. It is an honour enough to me that I have written to him, and received an answer.’30 There is an odd doubleness to this episode, though, which reveals some of the contradictions of a nascent celebrity culture: Charlotte asserts her determination to follow Southey’s advice 27  Felicia Hemans, ‘Woman and Fame’, in Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials, ed. Susan Wolfson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 441–​2, at 441. 28  Susan Wolfson, ‘Introduction’, in Felicia Hemans, ed. Wolfson, pp. xiii–​xxx, at xxv. 29  Repr. in Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1857), i. 152. 30 Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, i. 152.

550    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture against the dangers of renown (albeit not against publishing), yet she holds onto her youthful celebrity souvenir, perhaps not simply as a warning but as a hopeful sign that someone of Southey’s standing regarded her efforts as worthy enough to reply to. The very act of answering back worked against the grain of his advice. The pseudonyms adopted by some women writers, most famously by the Brontë sisters and Marian Evans Lewes (better known as ‘George Eliot’) are further examples of the ambivalence around the public status of literary women. As Charlotte Brontë tellingly put it in 1850, ‘Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell’, while Eliot similarly used her pseudonym to keep her readers at a distance.31 Moreover, it was not only that women writers had to negotiate a minefield created by the ideology of gendered spheres and sexual double-​standards (it is telling to compare Dickens’s announcement of his marital separation with the difficulties faced by Eliot due to her unmarried relationship with George Henry Lewes); the celebrity that women writers did achieve continued to be shaped by the feminine ideal. The mythology of solitude and natural isolation created around the life of the Brontë sisters at Haworth parsonage, for example, is very different from Dickens’s celebrity. Their renown was a kind of anti-​celebrity. In part, this mythology was fostered by the Brontës themselves, with Charlotte’s preface to Emily’s Wuthering Heights in 1850 stressing her sister’s lack of sociability: ‘circumstances favoured and fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to go to church or take a walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home’.32 When it came to Charlotte’s own biography by Elizabeth Gaskell, her friend and fellow writer was similarly keen to stress Charlotte’s seclusion at Haworth and her role as a devoted daughter and loyal sister. John Cross’s sanitized biography of George Eliot, published after her death in 1885, similarly sought to foreground her serious and elevated intellectualism in order to distinguish her from any taint of celebrity or personal scandal.33 There were women writers who gave public lectures or who used their celebrity to espouse political causes; tellingly, though, the presence on public platforms risked compromising their femininity. In the immediate aftermath of the success of Illustrations of Political Economy, Harriet Martineau toured America from 1834 to 1836; however, she was attacked for attending abolitionist meetings and speaking out in support of the anti-​slavery cause. One American writer railed against this ‘unwomanly act of hers,—​the delivery of a speech at an abolition meeting’;34 Oliphant paid her the dubious

31  ‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell’, in Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. Ian Jack with introd. and additional notes by Helen Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 302. On Eliot, see Kyriaki Hadjifxendi, ‘ “George Eliot”, the Literary Market-​Place and Sympathy’, in Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Polina Mackay (eds), Authorship in Context (Basingstoke; Palgrave, 2007), 32–​55. 32  Currer Bell [Charlotte Brontë], ‘Editor’s Preface to the New Edition of Wuthering Heights’, in Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski (eds), What is a Woman to Do? A Reader on Women, Work and Art (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), 127–​32, at 129. 33  See Sarah Wah, ‘ “The Most Churlish of Celebrities”: George Eliot, John Cross and the Question of High Status’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 15, no. 3 (December 2010), 370–​87. 34  Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography and Memorials of Harriet Martineau, ed. Maria Weston Chapman, 2 vols. (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1877), ii. 291.

Celebrity Culture   551 compliment of declaring that ‘as a born lecturer and politician she was less distinctively affected by her sex than perhaps any other, male or female, of her generation’.35 One writer who managed to avoid such pitfalls, but who silenced herself in the process, was Harriet Beecher Stowe. When she toured Britain in 1853 after the extraordinary success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), large crowds turned out in her honour; a predominantly female audience of over 2,000 people filled Glasgow City Hall in April 1853. Yet exhaustion and a fear of public speaking meant that her husband and brother largely spoke for her at all her public engagements.36 In marked contrast to Dickens, Stowe’s role was largely limited to silently acknowledging her popular appreciation. It would not be until the advent of the New Woman that campaigning women writers became common on public platforms. Like their male counterparts, the renown of these writers could lead to transatlantic lecture tours; Charlotte Perkins Gilman undertook an extensive lecture tour of Britain in 1899, while, travelling in the other direction, Sarah Grand undertook an American lecture tour in 1901.

New Journalism, Photography, and Late Victorian Celebrity The 1860s saw the advent of a new visual media that would do much to further the creation of a celebrity culture. The medium was, of course, photography, which burst into popular culture through the format of the carte de visite, a small photograph around 54 mm × 89 mm, pasted onto a piece of card. It was an ideal format for collecting and exchanging the photographs of family, friends, and celebrities. A rage for portrait cartes de visite began around 1860, when the photographs of favourite preachers, actors, singers, writers, and sportsmen, as well as Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, became available and affordable. They helped to realize the desire for a personalized familiarity with public figures: Now that every bookseller’s window is converted into a portrait gallery, and the public demands some knowledge of the personnel, as well as of the deeds and speeches of men of eminence and notoriety, the carte de visite has become such a great institution that it is worthy of some special notice. These handy little records of old familiar faces stand in the same relation to the grand portraits that grace the National Gallery and the drawing-​room that small change does to gold or paper money. They are the democracy of portraiture.37

35 

Margaret Oliphant, ‘Harriet Martineau’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 121 (1877), 472–​96, at 479. 36  ‘Mrs Beecher Stowe at Glasgow’, Bristol Mercury, 23 April 1853, 6. 37  Andrew Wynter, ‘Cartes de Visite’, in Curiosities of Toil and Other Papers (London: Chapman and Hall, 1870), 111–​34, at 112.

552    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Compared to existing graphic media, the realism of photography held out the promise of a more authentic, intimate experience of the celebrity so depicted. Cartes de visite were literally touchy-​feely artefacts—​not to be framed and looked at with deferential awe or revered from a distance but catalogued and collected, gossiped and commented upon. Unlike the rarefied pantheon of the National Portrait Gallery, photography offered a more democratic yet ephemeral celebrity; all that mattered was whether any individual carte de visite would sell. Boxers, singers, and local notables rubbed shoulders with politicians and royalty in stationers’ shop windows. Events, such as a successful play or opera, created ‘rages’ for photographs of particular individuals, with demand rising as quickly as it would subsequently fall. Literary figures, though, were said to have ‘a constant sale’ such that ‘Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope are bought for every album’.38 Following a revised Copyright Bill, which came into effect on 29 July 1862 and which extended legal coverage to photography, the first photographs officially registered for protection were two portraits of Tennyson. Photography soon became part of the repertoire by which authors circulated their image. A satirical poem in Fun from 1862 mocked a young author’s pretensions to celebrity upon finding that his carte de visite was ‘out’: Fame sings our praises wide and far The carte’s her new triumphal car; If this is renown, what men of sense Would object to be sold for eighteen-​pence?    For eighteen pence, for eighteen-​pence You can purchase my carte for eighteen-​pence Apollo, patron of the pen, Helps Fame to photograph great men I will purchase renown—​confound the expense—​ I will buy my own carte for eighteen-​pence,—​    For eighteen-​pence, yes, eighteen-​pence Will somebody loan me eighteen-​pence.—​39

The author’s elation at seeing his carte de visite on sale alters swiftly to desperation: he ends up seeking a loan so that someone, anyone, would purchase one. Fun lampoons the superficial ease by which authors could feel themselves to be celebrities. Long after the rage for cartes de visite had passed, though, different manifestations of photography remained an important tool in the creation of literary celebrity. The London Stereoscopic Company provided three-​dimensional views of Shakespeare’s house and Anne Hathaway’s cottage as well as topographical views inspired by novels such as of 38  Andrew Wynter, ‘Photographic Portraiture’, Subtle Brains and Lissom Fingers (London: Robert Hardwick, 1869), 297–​317, at 306–​7. 39  ‘Lines by a Young Author, on Hearing that his Carte De Visite is “Out” ’, Fun, 19 July 1862, 177.

Celebrity Culture   553 Kenilworth Castle.40 Later in the 1890s and 1900s, the advent of photographic magic lantern slides fostered an industry making large numbers of series available for professional and domestic exhibition. There were many slide sets of literary adaptations, with numerous others retelling the lives of authors and their homes. Sets available from one supplier, Newton and Co., included ‘An Evening with Charles Dickens’, ‘Life of Tennyson’, ‘Shakespeare Country’, ‘Sir Walter Scott’, and ‘Wordsworth’; another firm sold dissolving views of Dickens at Gad’s Hill, with the scene changing from a scene of his empty study to the famous author suddenly appearing seated at his desk.41 Photography, employed for portraits and lantern slides and reproduced in illustrated periodicals, was just one of a number of developments that created a more forceful and pervasive celebrity culture in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Many of these features came together under the banner of New Journalism, which promoted a more intimate and personalized public discourse. Popular interest in public figures qua individuals was given form through the emergence of the interview as a media format; the slow breakdown of the convention of anonymous authorship in the high end of the periodical press (a shift started by Macmillan’s Magazine and Fortnightly Review, launched in 1859 and 1865 respectively); and the increasing use of illustration. T. P. O’Connor declared that the key difference between the New Journalism and its predecessors was ‘the more personal tone of the more modern methods’.42 Gone were the days when any reference to the ‘personal appearance, the habits, the clothes, or the home and social life of any person, would have been resented as an impertinence and almost as an indecency’.43 O’Connor argued that the desire for personal details of public figures was ‘healthy, rational, and should be yielded to’. Gossipy human-​interest reportage, regarding details of dress, appearance, and who had had dinner with whom, was regarded as no longer off-​limits. At the same time as New Journalism created increasingly ‘personalized’ public figures, it promoted the journalist as an important public personality, extending some of the celebrity achieved by poets and novelists to a broader range of writers (journalists had traditionally enjoyed much lower status than literary figures). As Richard Salmon has observed, the advent of New Journalism encouraged an intimate ‘personalization’ of both the subject and object of journalism.44 W. T. Stead’s influential essay, ‘The Future of Journalism’ (1886), famously declared that ‘everything depends upon the

40  Catalogue of the Binocular Pictures of the London Stereoscopic Company, bound at the end of David Brewster, The Stereoscope: Its History, Theory and Construction, With its Application to the Fine and Useful Arts (London: John Murray, 1856), 14. 41 See Catalogue of Lantern Slides for Educational and Scientific Purposes … (London: Newton, c.1912); Illustrated Catalogue of Magic, Optical and Dissolving View Lanterns, Limelight Apparatus &c. (London: Duckworth, 1902). 42  T. P. O’Connor, ‘The New Journalism’, New Review, 1 (1889), 423–​34, at 423. 43  O’Connor, ‘The New Journalism’, 423. 44  Richard Salmon, ‘ “A Simulacrum of Power”: Intimacy and Abstraction in the Rhetoric of the New Journalism’, in Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, and David Finkelstein (eds), Nineteenth-​Century Media and the Construction of Identities (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 27–​39, at 28.

554    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture individual—​the person. Impersonal journalism is effete. To influence men you must be a man, not a mock-​uttering oracle.’45 Salmon points out, however, that at the precisely same time as the New Journalism argued for a more personalized discourse, the newspaper and publishing industry was becoming much more large-​scale, impersonal, and corporate. It was its increasing scale and penetration into daily life that really underpinned the fostering of a celebrity-​driven popular culture. A notable example of the way New Journalism fostered celebrity is when, in 1878, the weekly newspaper The World, edited by Edmund Yates, introduced a regular feature of ‘Celebrities at Home’. Describing individuals in their domestic interiors, the series sought to capture an intimate portrait without any of the trappings of public life. The format implicitly takes for granted the fabricated and artificial nature of celebrity. The first series included Ouida, Braddon, and Tennyson along with the Prince of Wales, Gladstone, Henry Irving, Charles Mathews, and John Bright. The treatment of Wilkie Collins in the third series is typical of its tying together the authenticity of character with the domestic interior: A short man, with stooping shoulders and tiny hands and feet, with bright pleasant face looking out of a forest of light-​gray, almost white, hair, greets us as we enter the bier double drawing-​room in Gloucester-​place. This apartment is admirably adapted to the peripatetic style of composition now in increasing vogue, and to authors who can only think on their feet it would be invaluable. Mr. Wilkie Collins is not of this class, and when at work sits at a massive writing-​table furnished with a small desk of the same design as that used by Charles Dickens. On the left is a japanned tin box containing what Mr. Collins calls his stock-​in-​trade—​plots and schemes for stories and dramas. For a plot he is never at a loss, his great difficulty being in working it out to his satisfaction, and in imparting the necessary literary finish to his composition. Hence he is a rapid inventor and a slow producer, constantly revising his work until he has reached something approaching his ideal of a simple natural style.46

Most of the article is taken up with describing Collins’s study, using it as a kind of synecdoche for the act of literary creation. The design of the desk indicates his friendship with Dickens; the secrets of the japanned box stand for his renowned plot twists. At one level, the descriptions seem remarkably anodyne, revealing little of the inner life of the celebrity; yet this elaborate reading out from the materiality of studies and drawing rooms is another exploitation of the interiority associated with the domestic sphere. The ‘Celebrities at Home’ series forms part of a broader psychological conjunction between topography and literary celebrity that made the homes (and indeed graves) of writers into tourist destinations. This phenomenon was not wholly new; Sir Walter Scott’s Abbotsford opened to the public as early as 1833, while Wordsworth’s Rydal Mount received a regular stream of tourists. In 1847, Shakespeare’s birthplace 45 

W. T. Stead, ‘The Future of Journalism’, Contemporary Review, 50 (1886), 663–​79, at 663. Edmund Yates, ‘Wilkie Collins’, in Celebrities at Home: Reprinted from ‘The World’, 3rd ser. (London: Office of ‘The World’, 1879), 145–​56, at 146. 46 

Celebrity Culture   555 in Stratford-​upon-​Avon was purchased for the nation by the Shakespeare Birthplace Committee; the subsequent extensive restoration and preservation of the house in Henley Street turned it into a pilgrimage destination for thousands of tourists, a vital element in the Victorian canonization of Shakespeare.47 There were also related guidebooks such as William Howitt’s Homes and Haunts of Eminent British Poets (1847), which had reached a fifth edition by 1863. As Nicola Watson has commented, ‘Readers were seized en masse by a newly powerful desire to visit the graves, the birthplaces, and the carefully preserved homes of dead poets and men and women of letters; to contemplate the sites that writers had previously visited and written in or about; and eventually to traverse whole imaginary literary territories, such as “Dickens territory” or “Hardy territory”.’48 By the end of the century the growth of literary celebrity and tourism had become increasingly entwined and institutionally supported: Dove Cottage was acquired by the Wordsworth Society in 1890, while the Brontë Parsonage Museum and Thomas and Jane Carlyle’s London home both opened in 1895 (the former aided by the formation of the Brontë Society in 1893). Variations of the ‘Celebrities at Home’ format were commonplace in the late Victorian periodical press. The Strand Magazine, for example, ran its ‘Portraits of Celebrities at Different Times of Their Lives’ from 1891 to 1895; it also had its ‘Illustrated Interviews’ and articles such as ‘The Signatures of Charles Dickens’ and ‘The Handwriting of John Ruskin’.49 Salmon argues that the profusion of such articles represents the difficulty in creating a sense of personal intimacy and immediacy in a culture of publicity: signatures, interviews, views of homes, and photography all try to offer an immediacy and realism that is key to celebrity culture, to overcoming its commodified, impersonal dynamic.50 As celebrity became an increasingly prominent feature of both literary life and popular culture, authors continued to debate its worth and nature. Reworking the fears of earlier decades, the impact of New Journalism—​and the corresponding rise of celebrity culture—​was attacked in George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) as the prime example of the base commercialism corrupting the literary world. Gissing’s portrayal of the literary marketplace is dyspeptic and jaundiced: commerce and art, celebrity and talent, are antithetical to each other. Celebrity is hollow and insincere, and the desire for it acts as a prophylactic to genuine literary distinction. Moreover, it functions as both a prerequisite and a proxy for commercial success rather than as a justifiable by-​ product of artistic quality or even popularity. Nowhere is this more evident than in the career plans of the central character, Jasper Milvain, the self-​declared ‘literary man of

47 

See Julia Thomas, Shakespeare’s Shrine: The Bard’s Birthplace and the Invention of Stratford-​upon-​ Avon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 48  Nicola Watson, ‘Introduction’, Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-​Century Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 3. 49  ‘The Signatures of Charles Dickens (with Portraits)’, Strand Magazine, 7 (January–​June 1894), 80–​9; J. Holt Schooling, ‘The Handwriting of John Ruskin’, Strand Magazine, 10 (July–​December 1895), 669–​80. 50  Richard Salmon, ‘Signs of Intimacy: The Literary Celebrity in the “Age of Interviewing” ’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 25 (1997), 159–​77, at 168.

556    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture 1882’.51 Milvain is ambitious, unprincipled, and calculating, ever ready to adapt his writing to the latest demands of the market; his entrepreneurial brio contrasts with Edwin Reardon, a struggling novelist who fails to adapt his creative vision to the practical and commercial demands of the three-​volume novel. Reardon’s idealism is the antithesis of Milvain’s grand plan for literary success, which is to first become one of the ‘literary reputabilities’.52 This is to be achieved by extensive networking: Milvain’s scheme is founded on the belief that celebrity is a necessary precursor to fame. Becoming famous for being famous has to come first, and he initially plans to marry Marian Yule and use her money to help him manufacture his reputation, claiming that unknown authors with talent, like Reardon, will achieve neither distinction nor celebrity: ‘Suppose poor Reardon’s novels had been published in the full light of reputation instead of in the struggling dawn which was never to become day, wouldn’t they have been magnified by every critic? You have to become famous before you can secure the attention which would give fame.’ He delivered this apothegm with emphasis, and repeated it in another form. ‘You have to obtain reputation before you can get a fair hearing for that which would justify your repute.’53

For Gissing, celebrity is now not a sincere mark of popular affection but is artificially manufactured by a self-​serving literary elite concerned more with settling personal scores and promoting individuals who might, in their turn, be able to provide them with future patronage. Later in the novel Milvain attempts to promote Biffen’s novel by writing two pseudonymous reviews for two different periodicals, claiming that if he could only do five or six he could ensure its distinction from the flood of popular literature being produced. Celebrity is to be achieved by behind-​the-​scenes manipulation. As it is, Biffen’s novel is a critical failure and he subsequently commits suicide. Milvain is also responsible for honouring the editor and critic Clement Fadge with a place in the weekly ‘Celebrity’ feature of The West End: A coloured portrait of this illustrious man challenged the admiration of all who had literary tastes, and two columns of panegyric recorded his career for the encouragement of aspiring youth. This article, of course unsigned, came from the pen of Jasper Milvain.54

Fadge gave Milvain his first break as a writer and the favour is now being returned. In an uncoincidental coincidence, Fadge’s veneration is published on the same day that Alfred Yule’s encroaching blindness and physical decline forces his family to leave London. 51 

George Gissing, New Grub Street, ed. John Goode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 8.

52 Gissing, New Grub Street, 384. 53 Gissing, New Grub Street, 385.

54 Gissing, New Grub Street, 506.

Celebrity Culture   557 Yule and Fadge are long-​confirmed critical foes; their contrasting fortunes form an inverse morality tale where puffery and patronage are the pathways to achieve literary success, which is itself now measured through recognition as a ‘Celebrity’. In New Grub Street, the career of Marian Yule exemplifies the difficulties for a new writer making her way in the world. Marian begins by aiding her father’s researches; as his illness increases, she takes upon herself the writing of articles that are published under his established name. One cost of the prominence of celebrity authors was to encourage a profession increasingly divided between a few ‘star’ names and an undifferentiated ‘mass’ of hack writers. New writers hoping to achieve a breakthrough could find themselves having to work up journal articles for better-​known authors who were able to get commissions on the basis of their names. When Charlotte O’Conor Eccles (who would go on to be a successful professional writer working for various newspapers and journals) moved to London in the late 1880s to begin her career, she initially found herself employed by a ‘Mr Dash’, a man who described himself as a ‘literary sweater’, churning out innumerable articles for magazines and newspapers, most of which were written by young women like herself. Dash explained that his work often included finishing off pieces by those whose name had enough celebrity to guarantee sales: ‘I often,’ he said, ‘get a few notes on a subject from some well-​known writer, headings, you know, a mere outline: these I have amplified by some of the ladies who write for me, and it is published under the better known name.’ He showed me a rather long essay, as he spoke, purporting to be by a popular woman traveller, and told me that all she had written would just fill half a sheet of note-​paper.55

The darker side of literary celebrity was not simply the pressures or public intrusion but a market logic that worked to set a few individual writers apart while condemning others, particularly women, to obscurity and relative penury. In New Grub Street, literary celebrity corrupts readers as well as writers. Gissing foregrounds the sexualized nature of the relationship between writer and admirer through the marriage of Edwin and Amy; her attraction to him is primarily because of the celebrity she initially believed he would achieve. She values fame not for his sake but for how it would reflect distinction upon her: Already she had allowed her husband to understand that one of her strongest motives in marrying him was the belief that he would achieve distinction. At the time she doubtless thought of his coming fame only—​or principally—​as it concerned their relations to each other; her pride in him was to be one phase of her love. Now she was well aware that no degree of distinction in her husband would be of much value to her unless she had the pleasure of witnessing its effect upon others; she must shine with reflected light before an admiring assembly.56 55  [Charlotte O’Conor Eccles], ‘The Experiences of a Woman Journalist’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 153 (June 1893), 831–​44, at 836. 56 Gissing, New Grub Street, 133.

558    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Amy’s attraction to Reardon dissipates in proportion to her realization that he will never achieve renown. Following her separation from Reardon and his subsequent death, Amy moves on and ultimately marries Milvain, basking in his success as an established literary figure. By no means all late Victorian writers had such a resolutely jaundiced attitude towards celebrity culture. Oscar Wilde famously promoted Aestheticism (and himself) by conflating life and art: he eagerly turned himself into an aesthetic object, and a much-​caricatured icon, through his clothing and appearance. His self-​promotion was wholly complicit with the dynamics of celebrity culture. Conversely though, his ludic meditations on the performance of selfhood suggest a much more critical, reflexive engagement, perhaps even turning celebrity into art. His concern over the theatricality and spectacle of authorship links him to Dickens, Braddon, Gissing, Martineau, and Oliphant. A fitting end point of nineteenth-​century celebrity culture—​the culmination of its contradictions, opportunities and fleetingness, its demands, rewards and abuses—​ is the date of 30 November 1900, when Wilde, exiled, disgraced, and penniless, died in Paris. Wilde rode the wave of the best and worst that celebrity had to offer, his rise and fall prefiguring, perhaps establishing, the narrative arc of so many subsequent celebrities. Ultimately, Wilde descended from celebrity to notoriety with his trial, its sensational reportage, and his subsequent imprisonment. The impact of Victorian celebrity culture upon authors was always double-​edged: for those authors who were able to take advantage of the possibilities of popular media, their public distinction and approval could be genuinely augmented. Yet, the same practices were equally liable to fashion a commodified personality that could be exploited for its scandal, sensation, or adulation.

Select Bibliography Braudy, Leo, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (1986; New York: Vintage, 1997). Easley, Alexis, Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850–​ 1914 (Newark:  University of Delaware Press, 2011). Inglis, Fred, A Short History of Celebrity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). John, Juliet, Dickens and Mass Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). King, Andrew, and John Plunkett (eds), Victorian Print Media:  A  Reader (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2005). McDayter, Ghislaine, Byromania and The Birth of Celebrity Culture (Albany, NY:  SUNY Press, 2009). Mole, Tom, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Mole, Tom (ed.), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–​1850 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009). Rojek, Chris, Celebrity (London: Reaktion, 2001). Salmon, Richard, The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Aesthetics and Visual Culture

Chapter 29

Victorian Ae st h et i c s Jonah Siegel

‘Aesthetic’ Discussions of beauty in the twentieth century inevitably took place in the penumbra cast by two dominant intellectual conventions, both ultimately derived from the debates of an earlier era: on the one hand, the modernist claim for autonomy as the fundamental value (if not the inevitable tendency) of the history of art, and on the other, the complimentary sense that to discuss beauty or its more rarefied cousin, the aesthetic, is to engage in an apolitical, and therefore morally suspect, project. This chapter will be interested in demonstrating the ways these attitudes are anticipated in earlier periods. But it is worth identifying from the outset the pressure on the historical and conceptual study of the aesthetic traceable to the dominance of these two strands in twentieth-century thought, the unstable situation in which beauty had to be entirely, and by necessity, autonomous—but could or should not be so. Theodor Adorno offers one of the strongest and most sophisticated expressions of an influential line of thought about the aesthetic prevalent in the second half of the last century. The claim that there is nothing self-​evident about art anymore is just one element in his particularly rigorous and erudite version of the political challenge to autonomy as a value, as well as to the category of autonomy itself (after all, how free is a thing that needs to change from one moment to the next?).1 It is a battle that was also joined by theorists such as Peter Bürger and Pierre Bourdieu, each of whom made deeply influential arguments for the historical nature of the claim of disinterestedness itself, while offering analyses intended to demonstrate some of the interests hidden in plain sight in the aesthetic as a category or in particular aesthetic objects. Critics wishing to return to beauty as a category and to engage with the problem of the aesthetic, or of form itself, 1  ‘It is self-​evident that nothing concerning art is self-​evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.’ Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970), trans. Robert Hullot-​Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1.

562    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture had to make their way past the rugged obstacles set by authors such as these and their followers.2 Hence the boldness of work such as Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty, and Being Just or Isobel Armstrong’s The Radical Aesthetic—​and even of Jacques Rancière’s project in Aisthesis and elsewhere—​efforts to reclaim the political and ethical force of a concern that for much of the twentieth century was felt almost by definition to be either divorced from politics and ethics or in an unhappy partnership with the worst versions of both.3 But that is in the future of our period. Let us begin with that definition at its outset. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) identifies aesthesis as ‘rare before the 19th cent.’ And indeed, even aesthetic, its more popular adjectival form, is one of those keywords that had no life of note prior to the eighteenth century but which nineteenth-​century culture found it could not do without. The term sounds technical, and in a way it is: it is an announcement that something requiring conceptualization or abstraction is being advanced, even though the tendency of that abstraction may be—​as it is in this case—​to bring us back to our senses. Like every concept of interest, aesthetics has been of particular influence insofar as it has been a subject of debate, and even confusion. The word has perception at its core, and certainly the British were aware when they used this still novel term of its source in the ancient Greek word meaning ‘sense perception, sensation, perception’. From the beginning, the margins of the term were so ill defined, however, that they quickly reached important points of contradiction, particularly as the word came to take on a number of new and more specialized meanings—​which it soon did—​while never fully shedding its first sense. The 1875 Encyclopedia Britannica, also cited in the OED entry, correctly notes that Immanuel Kant, ‘under the title Transcendental Æsthetic, treats of the a priori principles of all sensuous knowledge’. But the philosopher’s rigourous commitment to both modifiers, to the a priori and the sensuous, is unusual.4

2 

Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-​Garde (1974), trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). See also two works by Pierre Bourdieu: Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); and The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1992), trans. Susan Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). A dense political attempt to trace the history of the field is to be found in Terry Eagleton’s Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990). A sophisticated recent reflection on the topic is Jonathan Loesberg, A Return to Aesthetics: Autonomy, Indifference, and Postmodernism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005). For a sense of the emergence of autonomy in Victorian art writing, see Rachel Teukolsky, The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). See also Andrew Goldstone’s Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 3  Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (2000), trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury, 2004); The Future of the Image (2003), trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007); and Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (2011), trans. Paul Zakir (London: Verso, 2013). The list of critics engaging with the problem of beauty or form in recent years would be long. Angela Leighton’s On Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) is an important study focusing on the Victorian period in particular. See also Caroline Levine’s ‘Strategic Formalism’, Victorian Studies 48, no. 4 (2006), 625–​657; and the responses by Carolyn Dever and Herbert Tucker in Victorian Studies, 49, no. 1 (2006), 85–​105. 4  Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v. ‘aesthetics’; my emphasis.

Victorian Aesthetics   563 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Kant’s principal influence, and the figure generally seen as the founder of the field, described aesthetics as the ‘science of sensitive cognition’ in his Metaphysica (1739), but before the century was out, he himself had glossed the term as ‘the science of the beautiful’, thereby writing the key conceptual uncertainty about the topic right into its founding document.5 After all, perception may be of any sort of object, while beauty is one particular quality, and generally ascribed to a limited set of objects. The Metaphysica was only translated into English in 2013. For centuries Baumgarten’s texts remained in Latin, and in that powerful realm of the not fully considered. Ultimately, and this gets to the heart of the history of the term, the original meaning of aesthetic has become obsolete (OED: ‘Of or relating to perception by the senses; received by the senses. Obs’), while the focus largely (and confusedly) on beauty has come to dominate (OED: ‘Of or relating to the perception, appreciation, or criticism of that which is beautiful). Little wonder, then, that as a term and as a historical phenomenon aesthetics has been characterized by productive instability (‘of that which is beautiful’ versus ‘of all sensuous knowledge’), which is vividly manifested in key texts of the Victorian period. The development of aesthetics in the eighteenth century helped begin a conversation about beauty that has never been fully resolved, because from the outset it aimed to do something quite difficult: to identify faculties or qualities that make the experience of the world through our senses valid evidence of beauty without abandoning other kinds of claims for the validation of beauty—​notably ethical or religious—​that have often mistrusted those very senses. And then, a great deal of the cultural force of the concept is traceable to associations and values that have been understood at various times but not consistently to be important or even necessary to its existence, including such heterogeneous or contradictory phenomena as autonomy, ideal nature, artifice, or even reality itself. Kant, who used the fourth edition of the Metaphysica as a text when he taught, relayed the term to later generations, along with a general sense that his predecessor had got 5 

Baumgarten’s apparently simple definition—​‘The science of knowing and presenting with regard to the senses is AESTHETICS’—​is complicated not only by the immediate introduction of an elaborate parenthetical gloss which the philosopher expanded over the editions of the work, ‘(the logic of the inferior cognitive faculty, the philosophy of graces and muses, inferior gnoseology, the art of thinking beautifully, the art of the analogue of reason)’, but also by a footnote in German redefining the term in a surprisingly straightforward way as ‘die Wissenschaft des Schönen’ (the science of the beautiful). Alexander Baumgarten, Metaphysics: A Critical Translation with Kant’s Elucidations, Selected Notes, and Related Materials, trans. and ed. Courtney D. Fugate and John Hymers (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), § 533. Baumgarten introduced German footnotes for key terms starting with the 4th edition. (I am grateful to John Hymers for his clarification of the history of the textual changes in an email exchange.) See also Baumgarten, Aesthetica (1750), § 1. For useful context, see Frederick C. Beiser, Diotima’s Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing (Oxford University Press, 2009), 118–​152. See also two books by Paul Guyer: Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 17–​28; and Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3–​128.

564    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture things wrong because his emphasis on the sensuous left out the kinds of a priori determinants that were central to concerns of a more stringent philosophy. Students of Kant’s seminal Critique of Judgment (1790) learned that something more than the stimulation of the senses was required for a judgement of beauty to take place, that a formal suggestion of purpose without an actual purpose (Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck) would be the sign that we are face to face with beauty. Kant’s rigour left as unbeautiful a vast realm of the lovely things that call to us from the world—​the face across a room that draws us into conversation; the smell of a baking dish we fully intend to eat; even the music that makes us dance. All phenomena with a purpose or that generate or arise from a human interest are not beautiful in Kant’s use of the term.6 The question of form did not arrive directly in Victorian Britain from Baumgarten, nor even in most cases via Kant, whose reputation in the Anglo-​Saxon world has never been fixed, and certainly was not in the nineteenth century. Indeed, as Kant’s analysis of the aesthetic cannot take history into account, and is not principally concerned with art but rather with the experience of beauty in the world, there was a limit to how broadly applicable his claims could be. Arguably, formulations shaped by Friedrich Schiller and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel were more influential on British culture because of the ways they expanded the reach of what in Kant is an important but rigorously constrained topic. For all three authors, however, it bears saying that influence in the English speaking world is often indirect, unstated, or even manifested as a kind of resistance.7

Autonomy or the Senses? In The Critique of Judgment, Kant aims to understand the experience of beauty as more than an accident of the senses, or as different from the recognition or anticipation of their satisfaction. In the course of his argument, as throughout his transcendental system, he identifies a split between the senses and reason, and it is at this gap that Schiller locates the special power of art. In his influential works of the 1790s, The Aesthetic Education of Man (1794) and On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (1795–​6), Schiller presents art itself as the element that mends the division between the realms of reason and of the sensuous, thereby reconciling man to the world. In The Aesthetic Education, Schiller famously introduced the concept of play, his term for the reconciliation within 6  On the necessity of disinterest, see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 44–​53; on purposiveness without a purpose, see 64–​84. The literature on Kant is of course vast, and outside the scope of this chapter, but Guyer’s texts are extremely useful on the topic of taste in the philosopher. 7  Recent work on the complex reception of these authors includes Giuseppe Micheli, The Early Reception of Kant’s Thought in England (London: Routledge/​Thoemmes, 1999); Kirk Willis, “The Introduction and Critical Reception of Hegelian Thought in Britain 1830–​1900,” Victorian Studies 32 (1988): 1, 85–​111; and Lesley Sharpe, Schiller’s Aesthetic Essays: Two Centuries of Criticism (Columbia, SC: 1995).

Victorian Aesthetics   565 the aesthetic of the limits of experience with the boundless drives of form. A notoriously slippery concept built on a few hints from Kant, play is what occurs when the sense impulse, which ‘requires variation, requires time to have a content’, is reconciled with the form impulse, which ‘requires the extinction of time, and no variation’. A great deal of weight is naturally placed on a process that ‘would aim at the extinction of time in time and the reconciliation of becoming with absolute being, of variation with identity’.8 Given the absolutes he is attempting to harmonize, the significance of the phenomenon, which we may understand as the full experience of disinterested beauty, becomes evident: ‘In every condition of humanity it is precisely play and play alone that makes man complete and displays at once his twofold nature.’ But the boon Schiller describes is hardly of ready access: ‘in actual life we should also seek in vain for the Beauty of which we are now speaking’ (79). While terms and arguments first developed in The Aesthetic Education are unavoidable throughout the nineteenth century and after, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry was possibly an even more pervasive influence. Adding a new conceptual rigour to formulations anticipated in a number of Enlightenment predecessors, Schiller developed a historicization of style, in which an essentially reductive system opens up into sophisticated claims about both period and form. The approach has been emulated ever since, if seldom with sophistication of the dialectical process Schiller describes. The valorization of the naïve as the privileged site of unselfconscious original creativity, appears to leave the sentimental, the self-​reflective modern form of literature, as the weaker of the pair. But in the course of the argument it emerges that the unavoidable failure of the later mode is the very thing that fuels the forward motion of culture. This dynamic, historicizing view of the place of the aesthetic is subsequently given its richest development by Hegel, in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and in his lectures on aesthetics (1818–​35, compiled 1839). Aesthetics became more than theoretical when the experience of beauty was seen to present the opportunity of a fundamental return, of giving us back to the world we already have but fear we have lost. In that sense, the aesthetic is a project of knowing the world, and it touches on a number of questions that would have scientific and religious implications in the Victorian period for authors ranging from Ruskin to Hopkins. It bears saying that a powerful native tradition of aesthetic thought, including authors such as Shaftesbury, Addison, Smith, and Burke, which itself contributed to German idealist formulations, was bound to be a direct and indirect influence on British thinkers.9 In one of those peculiar turns that are familiar to any student of the 8 

Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Richard Snell (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), 74; emphasis in the original. Further references to this edition will be given in the text. 9 Guyer’s Values of Beauty is particularly interesting on the important and still understudied British backgrounds to influential German formulations. See also Timothy M. Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1–​134. For a thorough and sophisticated account of the developments in culture and society driving the emergence of the aesthetic as a category in eighteenth-​century Britain, see Michael McKeon’s Secret History of Domesticity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), esp. 337–​87.

566    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture vicissitudes of culture, however, the tendency in the nineteenth century was to identify self-​conscious reflection on beauty not with the native, but with the German tradition. Indeed, throughout the Victorian period the suspicion of a foreign taint would be used to suggest the immoral quality of an excessive or just misaddressed preoccupation with beauty. Though theoretic—​the term Ruskin offered in 1856 as an alternative safe from the sensuous confusions written into aesthetic—​did not take, the critic’s presentation of this other faculty indicates the promise and dangers of a growing preoccupation with beauty as a value: the Theoretic faculty, is concerned with the moral perception and appreciation of ideas of beauty. And the error respecting it is, the considering and calling it Aesthetic, degrading it to a mere operation of sense, or perhaps worse, of custom; so that the arts which appeal to it sink into a mere amusement, ministers to morbid sensibilities, ticklers and fanners of the soul’s sleep.10

When the aesthetic—​understood as the area of human endeavour, reflection, or experience concerned with the encounter with beauty in the world, say with a bank of flowers or the song of a bird—​met up with a related but not entirely homologous fascination with created beauty, with art, new complications were bound to emerge. And so, the beauty that is the truth that is all we need to know on this earth is represented in Keats by a vase, a made object. The question of what is beautiful and why comes necessarily to be entwined with what might easily have been understood as quite a distinct matter: the nature of the maker of beauty in the world. It is the new power ascribed to beauty—​ to validate our experience of the world, as opposed to tickling and fanning the soul’s sleep—​that allows the figure of the creative genius to come to the fore. For the first time in the history of culture, the simple recognition of what is in the world has become a mark of uncommon achievement, hence Ruskin’s moving formulation in Modern Painters III (1856), which identifies the artist not as a skilled maker, but rather as a sublimely gifted perceiver: the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion,—​all in one. (Works, v. 34; emphasis in the original)

Ruskin participates in a late Romantic tradition that includes Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson in his celebration of perception as the fundamental quality for the artist. But we might also include Robert Browning in the list, as ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’(1855) is the story of the coming into being of the kind of individual who will see the way required

10  John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (Library Edition; London: George Allen, 1903–​12), iv: Modern Painters, II (1846; 1903), 35–​6. Further references to the Works are given in the text by volume and page number.

Victorian Aesthetics   567 in order to recognize and represent beauty. The painter’s childhood suffering, like that of Turner evoked by Ruskin in ‘The Two Boyhoods’ chapter of Modern Painters V (1860), is precisely what makes him into such a sensitive register of the beauty of the world (Works, viii. 374–​388). The poem also provides a characteristic explanation of the process whereby the sensibility of the artist becomes a register on which the world’s beauty is inscribed and thence represented back for the world to witness. ‘For, don’t you mark?’, Lippo Lippi asks his auditor, we’re made so that we love First when we see them painted, things we have passed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see; And so they are better, painted—​better to us, Which is the same thing. Art was given for that; God uses us to help each other so, Lending our minds out.11

This is a vision of the artistic project that wants to see it as naturally social (we see the things the artist sees, as Lippo Lippi puts it: ‘Art was given for that’). It is in that sense a response to a counter-​tendency in post-​Romantic concepts of creativity, the idea that all art is at its heart the deeply personal expression of individual passion, a notion so important that it leads John Stuart Mill in 1833 to make a claim whose perversity has often been lost sight of, precisely because it has proved so useful for later attempts to negotiate the relationship between personal expression and public statement: The peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind. Eloquence is feeling pouring itself out to other minds, courting their sympathy, or endeavoring to influence their belief, or move them to passion or to action.12

Nearly a century later, Yeats is still working with this influential distinction when he writes that ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’.13 In this line of thought the identification of something as an aesthetic object depends on imagining that thing to be essentially personal. Although the measure of its effectiveness is ultimately its social reach, any attempt to acknowledge the need

11  ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, in The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, v. Men and Women, ed. Ian Jack and Robert Inglesfield (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 35–​53, p. 49, ll. 300–​6). Further references to this edition are given in the text, by page and line number. 12  John Stuart Mill, ‘What is Poetry?’, Monthly Repository, ns 7 (1833), 60–​70. 13  W. B. Yeats, ‘Anima Hominis’, in Per Amica Silentiae Lunae (1917), in Yeats, Later Essays, ed. William H. O’Donnell (New York and London: Scribner’s, 1994), 4–​16, p. 8.

568    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture to make the reach risks taking poetry out of the realm of poetry altogether, into that of mere eloquence or rhetoric. The religious account of the role of the aesthetic suggested by Browning’s Lippo Lippi (‘God uses us’) was one way to fill in with content what could otherwise appear to be far too abstract a structure. But the emphasis varied widely. Thus, Gerard Manley Hopkins (student of Walter Pater that he was) can write verse insisting on the identity of his vocations as priest and poet precisely because of the ways in which the poet brings into view a world that is not simply evidence, but manifestation of the divine. Another extreme came to the fore later in the century: instead of the artist as priest, relaying to others the benediction inherent in a world well perceived, the movement known as Aestheticism—​ itself also drawing on Pater—​presented a vision of the artist as maker of the world. Art, in this view, does not return us to a world we have lost, so much as it creates a better one. Hence Oscar Wilde’s characteristic claim in his 1891 ‘Decay of Lying’ (note his outrageous use of ‘fact’) that ‘In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people’.14 Although Wilde’s paradoxes are typically associated with a fin dè sièclè sensibility fascinated by the ways in which the love of beauty combines with a celebration of artifice to absorb energies generally understood to be destined for life, it would be wrong to treat the phenomenon simply as a late reaction to a beauty-​obsessed era. As early as 1833, we find Tennyson writing his cautionary allegory about the moral failure entailed in the attempt to live purely in a realm of beauty and culture. ‘The Palace of Art’ is, as the author explains, ‘a sort of allegory’ of A sinful soul possess’d of many gifts, […] That did love Beauty only, (Beauty seen In all varieties of mould and mind) And Knowledge for its beauty; or if Good, Good only for its beauty, seeing not That Beauty, Good, and Knowledge, are three sisters That doat upon each other, friends to man, Living together under the same roof, And never can be sunder’d without tears.15

While the connection between Beauty and the Good is a theme of long standing, the inclusion of Knowledge in the trio of sisters may be taken as characteristic of a period widely committed to the idea that a clearer view of the world would result in better art, or even—​as Lippo Lippi will suggest—​that the aesthetic has an epistemic value. Still, for all the celebration of improved perception, the turn to realism that characterized the nineteenth century presented an important challenge to nineteenth-​century aesthetic 14 

Oscar Wilde, ‘Decay of Lying’, in Complete Works (London: Collins, 2003), 927. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘To —​—​: With the Following Poem,’ in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (2nd edn.), 3 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), i. 435–​6, ll. 1–​13. 15 

Victorian Aesthetics   569 thought. Influential formulations inherited from the eighteenth century had tended to emphasize formal values moving towards generalization. But the ideal forms that were such a central tenet of neoclassical aesthetics came to appear fundamentally impoverished in the nineteenth century, which saw a broad turn to the real in its most contingent manifestations, both in painting and poetry, and eventually, and most powerfully, in narrative fiction.16

The Nature of Modernity The aesthetic appeal of realism (as opposed to its moral or political work) is still a difficult question in criticism, so there is little wonder that, with a few important exceptions, it was not typically addressed in its own day. More common was a tendency that can appear to be in contradiction to the achievement of the novelists: the sense that there was something ingloriously prosaic about contemporary life, that the representation of modernity was precisely what would not yield great art. The aesthetic failure of modern life, an idea also given force by various kinds of movements of historical revivalism, ranging from neoclassicism to the Gothic Revival, is addressed directly in the ars poetica that is book V of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1857): ‘Ay, but every age,’ notes Aurora, ‘Appears to souls who live in’t (ask Carlyle) | Most unheroic’.17 Aurora Leigh’s wide-​ranging aspiration to make the current time worthy of being itself historical—​that is, of mattering to later eras—​is an open challenge to the period-​hyperopia that cannot see the merits of its own days. Aurora represents the aspiration to move away from nostalgic disdain of the present, towards a passionate interest in the moment. To ‘catch | Upon the burning lava of a song | The full-​veined, heaving, double-​breasted Age’ (v. 214–​216) is to be able to make a claim on the future of the sort the past has made on modernity. George Eliot stands out for her typically self-​reflexive, informed, and bold claims for the value of realist representation. But it is striking how much her oft-​cited polemic on the topic in Adam Bede (1859) stakes its claim on the evocation of a kind of sympathy that routes the new aesthetic through an ultimately Wordsworthian ethical claim that, as she knows, will always be at an angle to claims for formal beauty: All honor and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children—​in our gardens and in our houses; but let us love 16 

See Hugh Honor, Neoclassicism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 101–​105. Walter Jackson Bate’s study From Classic to Romantic (New York: Harper and Row, 1946), 59–​92, is also still useful. The vast literature on realism is outside the scope of this piece, but we may cite in this context Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 17  Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, ed. Kerry McSweeney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), v. 155–​157. Further references to book and line will be given in the text.

570    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture that other beauty, too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy.18

The moving vision of realism Eliot lays out in her long digression on the topic is probably the clearest demonstration of the conceptual challenge presented by key developments in mid-​century Victorian culture: does the insistence on the moral value of representing imperfect nature amount to a newly energized aesthetic project, or is it an ethical refutation of formal concerns? Put another way, is sympathy, which Eliot describes as ‘delicious’ (163) in this excursus, a manifestation of disinterestedness, or the highest form of interest? Eliot’s impassioned evocation of the achievement of Dutch painting allows her to reach for a middle ground: a beautiful depiction of the fall of light will borrow something of the moral charge accruing to the object on which that light falls when that object is a poor Dutch woman at a simple meal or at work. For all its conceptual irresolution, the achievements of realism and the moral drives with which it was associated were undeniable in the period. And both the formal achievement and the broadening out of the claims for ethical responsibility came to be part of the characteristically Victorian aesthetic.

The Moral Life of the Consumer His ever more urgent belief that art involved the entirety of the values and culture that shaped a society meant that all of Ruskin’s work from the middle of the century on would be addressed to the nexus of desire, consumption, and manufacturing that we call economic. This tendency in his work leads directly to the Arts and Crafts movement associated in particular with William Morris. Thus, in the famous chapter on the ‘Nature of Gothic’ in the second volume of Stones of Venice of 1853 (which Morris reprinted as a free-​standing volume at the Kelmscott Press in 1892), Ruskin not only addresses himself to the creative force of the craftsman slighted in earlier aesthetic formulations, he works hard to identify the proper relationship to nature in which great art is producible. The element that is particularly modern about this line of Victorian thought is its insistence on the responsibility of the consumer in shaping the form of art and its moral effects. The beauty of the art object—​say a capital carved by a medieval craftsman—​arises from (and is therefore evidence of) the freedom of the mind at work. The loss of joy in creation characteristic of modernity is directly linked to a failure in the desires of the public; it is the practical manifestation of values on which they have never reflected. Ruskin’s treatment of the topic is built on a dramatic sudden address to the reader:

18 

George Eliot, Adam Bede (London: Blackwood, 1859), 164. Further references to this edition will be given in the text. See also Yeazell, Art of the Everyday, 91–​124.

Victorian Aesthetics   571 And now, reader, look round this English room of yours, about which you have been proud so often, because the work of it was so good and strong, and the ornaments of it so finished. Examine again all those accurate mouldings, and perfect polishings, and unerring adjustments of the seasoned wood and tempered steel. Many a time you have exulted over them, and thought how great England was, because her slightest work was done so thoroughly. Alas! if read rightly, these perfectnesses are signs of a slavery in our England a thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of the scourged African, or helot Greek. (Works, x. 193)

The consumer’s desire for perfection is an enslaving desire on. Taste, rightly trained, will recognize that the thing to be valued is not polished execution, which is an indication of the limits of what is being attempted, but those imperfections that indicate the presence of fallible human life. The perpetual change Ruskin finds in Gothic design and execution, he traces to the workman set free to imagine. In modernity, the power to determine the degree of freedom of the worker resides in the desires of the consumer, which are precisely what need to be trained. ‘If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it,’ Morris would declare in a lecture in 1871, in a phrase the political tendencies of which have frequently been lost sight of: ‘Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.’19 This is a prescription for better interior decoration, certainly, but its ultimate motivation is the ambition to make the taste of the public a support for the spiritual life of the craftsman, rather than its opposite.

Historicism, the Body, and Aesthetic Criticism At first sight, Walter Pater appears to offer an important counter-​argument to the line of criticism that would see the aesthetic as a route back to the world. ‘[I]‌n aesthetic criticism,’ he writes, ‘the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly.’ 20 And yet, the critic’s invitation to self-​reflection, while powerful in its celebration of the self, is weak in its acknowledgement of the limitations of that self ’s relationship to the world, in part because of the deeply physical sense of the world that drives Pater’s thought. That a profound scepticism underlies Pater’s project will be clear to any reader of the famous Conclusion to the Renaissance (1873), but the place of the aesthetic in that doubt 19  William Morris, ‘The Beauty of Life’ (first published as ‘Labour and Pleasure’ in 1880), in Hopes and Fears for Art (1882), repr. in Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966), 51–​80, p. 76; emphasis in the original. 20  Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), p. xix. Further references to this edition will be given in the text.

572    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is already evident in the Preface. ‘[H]e who experiences these impressions strongly,’ he writes about the phenomena he has identified as the primary data of the aesthetic critic, and drives directly at the discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or experience—​metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysical questions elsewhere. He may pass them all by as being, answerable or not, of no interest to him. (Renaissance, 1981, p. xx)

The historicism characteristic of the era returns in Pater, given new force by what is probably the richest response to German idealist philosophy of any British critic of the period, in particular to a line of thought running from the great art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann to Hegel. 21 But in Pater the physicality always immanent in the work of his predecessors comes to the fore, and itself enters history. Pater tracks the place of the body in various historical dispensations, alive always to the complexity and contradiction of any period: classical asceticism and Epicureanism both interest him, the abnegations of the medieval period as well as its passions. And it is his emphasis on the individual body, itself a modern characteristic for Pater (following Hegel), that takes his historicism to different places than those aimed at by Hegel or Schiller while absolutely challenging the disinterested model of aesthetic experience in Kant. ‘What is this [. . .] to me?’ (xix–xx) is not an aesthetic question in Kant, but neither is the quickened sense of life, which is the effect of the experience of beauty for Pater, the goal of the philosopher. The year 1867 saw the publication in the Westminster Review of Pater’s seminal treatment of Winckelmann, the longing Austrian schoolmaster who became the founder of art history and the champion of a vision of classical antiquity as the location for unimpeachable classical perfection characterized by ‘Noble simplicity and still grandeur’ (‘Edle Einfalt und stille Grosse’).22 Winckelmann’s desires, and the influence of his thought on Hegel, become opportunities for the critic to take on a favourite theme, the limitations of perfection in modernity. What makes art modern for Pater is a characteristic sense of the vulnerability of the beauty it manifests, something quite distinct from what Winckelmann found in classical antiquity.23 Pater continues his rich treatment of beauty in history in his very next publication, the essay on the poetry of William Morris, in which the movement from the medievalizing

21  See Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univesity Press, 1990). 22  See Winckelmann, ‘On the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks’, trans. Henry Fuseli, in Winckelmann: Writings on Art, ed. David Irwin (New York: Phaidon, 1972), 72. Fuseli renders the phrase ‘Noble simplicity and sedate grandeur’, but I have opted for the more common rendering of stille. 23  Walter Pater, ‘Winckelmann’, Westminster Review, 87 (1867), 36–​50, p. 49. The article was reprinted in The Renaissance (1873), with some small changes. Further references will be to the Hill edition, and made in the text.

Victorian Aesthetics   573 Defence of Guenevere and other Poems (1858) to the classicizing Death of Jason (1867) allows the critic ample opportunity to reflect both on the historically contingent nature of beauty and on the complex nature of cultural revivals within historicism. Still, the title poem of Morris’s first collection, as much a performance of the effectiveness of beauty as a defence of the adulterous queen in its title, sounds the keynote of the piece. Confronted by proofs and testimonies about her illicit relationship with Lancelot, the only counter-​argument the Queen offers is an extraordinary insistence on the experience of her own beauty: will you dare When you have looked a little on my brow, To say this thing is vile? or will you care For any plausible lies of cunning woof, When you can see my face with no lie there For ever? am I not a gracious proof?—​24

Morris’s poem revolves in fascination around a woman performing her own desirability, and her own recognition of that desirability. In the Queen’s nostalgic and proud confession of her passion an emotional quality emerges that has moved beyond the classical, in ways at once formal and thematic: ‘The poem which gives its name to the volume,’ Pater writes, ‘is a thing tormented and awry with passion, like the body of Guenevere defending herself from the charge of adultery, and the accent falls in strange, unwonted places with the effect of a great cry.’25 The break with perfection, in Pater, as in Ruskin, is a key part of the value of the Middle Ages, one which opens up the possibilities for appreciating a beauty that moves beyond classical flawlessness and towards something more alive and vivifying, something modern. What Pater responds to in Morris’s medievalizing is not the beautiful imperfection inherent in the work of the craftsman, however, but the moral imperfection of the Queen, and the psychological fascination it provokes. The experience of beauty in Pater is accompanied by a bracing sense of risk. While it may offer some compensation for the brevity and uncertainty of life, it leaves little room for a deluded sense of permanence, and no time at all for generalities. By the close of the review, which he would later re-use for the notorious conclusion of the Renaissance, the love of art becomes the highest form of compensation for the transient nature of all other experiences, hence Pater’s location of its claim within an emotional context owing everything to human affective relations; art comes to one like a generous knowing lover offering sensations all the more to be prized for the anticipation of their brevity: High passions give one this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, political or religious enthusiasm, or the ‘enthusiasm of humanity.’ Only, be sure it 24  William Morris, ‘The Defence of Guenevere’, in The Defence of Guenevere and other Poems (London, 1858), 14. 25  Walter Pater, ‘Poems by William Morris’, Westminster Review, ns 34 (1868), 300–​312, p. 301. Further references will be given in the text.

574    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is passion, that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake. (‘Poems’, 312)

By the second half of the nineteenth century, then, the vivifying quality of the arts that had been suggested in Schiller had ramified in extraordinary ways. Ruskin and Morris stand at the head of a movement calling for the full realization of the living individual through the experience of creative work, for the free play of imagination to be licensed and supported instead of dulled by the demands of the public. Pater’s invitation to live is of necessity a more self-​involved one, but not for that reason less poignant.

Modernity, Politics, and the Play of Mind The critical work of Matthew Arnold has sometimes been taken to represent a fundamental antithesis to Pater’s relativism, most notably by Pater himself, who, in the Preface to the Renaissance, notoriously rings the changes on the earlier writer’s critical project of seeing the object ‘as in itself it really is’. The force of the aspiration for Arnold lies in the possibilities of an escape from the limitations of the self that such a clarified perception might bring in its wake, along with an attendant access to the experiences of others (all of us seeing—​or trying to—​the thing as in itself it really is). Such an escape is entirely impossible for Pater, so he routes the process of seeing things as they really are back to the practice of reflecting on the self.26 Still, even without Pater’s sceptical challenge, it is worth noting that Arnold’s desire to use the aesthetic as a means of social improvement is more remarkable for the ways that aspiration fails in his own poetry than for the ways it may be said to work out. Arnold’s renunciation of ‘Empedocles on Etna’ (1852) is a key moment in his poetic practice and theorization; the poet-​critic’s refusal to republish this ambitious work is the sacrifice that mobilizes his arguments in the important Preface to Poems of 1853, a text that offers a formal, ethical, and historical description of failures meant to be understood as more than personal. The ethical problem Arnold identifies in his poem is the absence of the significant moral action he considers necessary for any work of art. And, certainly, by this standard a poem limning the uncertainty and ultimate suicide of a Greek philosopher is likely to

26  The critical aspiration, ‘to see the object in itself as it really is’, is first proposed in Arnold’s ‘On Translating Homer’ (1862), and returns in ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (1864). See Pater, The Renaissance, p. xix; and also Hill’s useful notes, pp. 296–​297.

Victorian Aesthetics   575 be found wanting. The insight would be of limited application, however, if it were not for Arnold’s aim to present the failings of the poem as symptomatic of his era. The creative weakness the work reveals is a condition Arnold shares with some of the greats of his period; the inadequacy of ‘Empedocles on Etna’ is characteristic of the modern inability to create great wholes. The source of the problem, which Arnold traces at least as far back as Keats, are ultimately historical: the modern era has become so full of potential models that it does not allow the possibility of an informed and committed choice of form. Lovely fragments are the results of poets attempting to come to grips with the wealth of possibilities that is the inheritance of modernity. The historical claim underpinning the necessary aesthetic failure of the era is laid out forcefully in ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (1864), in which Arnold argues that Romanticism was doomed to produce work that would not last because the poetry of that period, swept up in the political enthusiasm of the French Revolution, emerged prematurely, in the sense that it had been produced in a time not adequately prepared through the prior consolidation of knowledge required to produce great work. ‘[T]‌he burst of creative activity in our literature, through the first quarter of this century,’ he argues ‘had about it in fact something premature; and […] from this cause its productions are doomed, most of them, in spite of the sanguine hopes which accompanied and do still accompany them, to prove hardly more lasting than the productions of far less splendid epochs.’27 Ultimately, in this argument, it is criticism that will create the conditions for a new era of poetic invention. Arnold himself worked to establish the idea of the autonomous role of criticism to which Wilde would address himself with such relish in texts such as ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891). But the earlier critic had social aims in mind when arguing for the value of autonomy, as is evident from his returns to play, Schiller’s term for the process by which the aesthetic reconciles two incommensurate things: the limits of experience and the boundless drives of form. Writing eighty years after Schiller, Arnold translates the philosopher’s play into a vision of disinterestedness that is mundane nearly to the point of unrecognizability. That Arnold’s play of mind inherits the world only at the cost of losing the soul of Schiller’s concept, is evident from the remarkably concrete context in which the term becomes useful to him. A complaint about the political tendencies of critical journalism in one’s own day is a long way from the reconciliation of being in time: Our organs of criticism are organs of men and parties having practical ends to serve, and with them those practical ends are the first thing and the play of mind the second; so much play of mind as is compatible with the prosecution of those practical ends is all that is wanted. […]Every fraction has, as such, its organ of criticism, but the notion of combining all fractions in the common pleasure of a free disinterested play of mind meets with no favor.28

27  Matthew Arnold, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (1864), in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. Robert H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), iii. 262. 28  Arnold, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, 270.

576    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Instead of the aesthetic as a salve for the wound inevitably to be found at the division between nature and reason that characterizes the human condition described in Schiller, Arnold offers criticism as a cure for the factionalism of nineteenth-​century politics. This is evidently a loss of sophistication even as it is a widening out of the applicability of Schiller’s notoriously vague category. But it bears saying that Arnold’s strategy also opens up to a question for which there is little room in the philosopher’s system, the relation of distinct kinds of socially determined selves to the aesthetic. The most striking gap that concerned the nineteenth century was not, after all, the one identified in transcendental philosophy, the one that occurs whenever the mind attempts to come to grips with a world that it needs, and of which it forms a part, but with which it finds itself not fully commensurate. For most of the period, the space between classes of people seemed a far more pressing worry. Still, the aesthetic could also be drafted into service in the attempt to repair this social break. Thus, when parliament took up, barely a month after the first Reform Bill was passed in 1832, a bill to fund the construction of a building to house the National Gallery (to replace the private home that had been pressed into that service at its founding in 1824), among the arguments advanced was that the institution would serve as a place where distinct classes, riven by economic differences and irreconcilable political aspirations, might find a new kind of harmony. This is precisely the point Robert Peel makes in support of the expense, and risk, of locating the gallery in central London: He therefore trusted that the erection of the edifice would not only contribute to the cultivation of the arts, but also to the cementing of those bonds of union between the richer and the poorer orders of the State, which no man was more anxious to see joined in mutual intercourse and good understanding than he was.29

The achievement of class harmony through the shared practice of disinterested aesthetic contemplation was not the sole basis for government support of art institutions, of course. A more practical and directly interested claim was made throughout the century based on the widely perceived shortcomings in taste inhibiting the development of trade in British goods. In spite of the clear lead the British nation had when it came to technologies of manufacture, it was said, the design of its merchandise suffered in comparison to that of Continental competitors. Design schools and museums were places where the artisan could imbibe principles that would add grace to the power of British industry, and thereby make its dominance absolute. The argument, which drove the founding of Government Schools of Design starting in 1837, took on particular force after the triumph of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Indeed, one of the principal projects that emerged as a result of that epochal event was the opening of the South Kensington Museum in 1857 (now the V&A), which had design in its purview. As the Parliamentary Commissioners wrote in an important report of 1849,

29 

Robert Peel, Parl. Debs. (series 3), vol. 14, cols. 643–​648 (23 July 1832).

Victorian Aesthetics   577 as soon as the public obtains plain manufactures cheap, it seems to desire, almost by a law of nature, to have them decorated, and thus creates an employment for that labour which otherwise would appear for the time to be superfluous. Again, in proportion as the design is excellent, so is a taste generated on the part of the public, which becomes inevitably a necessity, and multiplies advantages to all parties.30

Desire and Autonomy As these brief instances from its history will have illustrated, the place of the aesthetic in Victorian culture can appear at once central and unfixed. Like any powerful idea, it was liable to a number of emphases as it was taken up for practical application in literature or in life. Nevertheless, while the longevity of the concept was in part due to its motility, it is also evident that there were specific and important roles it consistently filled. Given the speed of social change attributable to technology, the growing disparity in wealth in the nation, and the expanding power of a middle class able to feel and identify that disparity, it is more than simply reductive to suggest that if it had not inherited the aesthetic realm, the nineteenth century might well have needed to invent something like it—​a space in which to locate the hope for a higher reconciliation, for things that were disinterested in the sense of being unconstrained by a world ever more bent on getting and spending. In an era in which every development in technology or political organization seemed to open up another schism, the aesthetic emerged as an opportunity to provisionally overcome otherwise unbridgeable distances. As we have seen, however, the solution of the aesthetic tended not to close off debate so much as to open it up. The forms of beauty, never, disinterested for Pater and those who followed him, become in their works opportunities to address concerns that are often worldly and not infrequently disturbing. The intricate play of desire and influence shaping the relationship between artist and art object—​not to say between model and viewer—​in Wilde’s Dorian Gray (1890) makes impossible for that novel the idea of disinterested creativity. And then, the decay of the painting at the heart of the book throws the work of art back into the stream of time from which Schiller would have pulled it. It would be inaccurate and reductive to say that at the end of the century we find a widening conceptual resistance to the claims of disinterested appreciation that are central to post-​Kantian aesthetic thought. On the one hand, these come to be adapted, revised, or distorted in order to create a realm of pure artifice, as in Dorian Gray, or in Wilde’s giddy comedies, notably The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). On the other hand, the

30  Report from the Select Committee on the School of Design; together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence (House of Commons, London, 1849). See also another important government text on these topics, Report, Proceedings and Minutes of Evidence of the Select Committee on Arts and Their Connexion with Manufactures (House of Commons, London, 1836).

578    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture theoretical separation of the aesthetic from the practical made room for the exploration of realms of transgressive desire, for the representation of pleasures that were indeed interested in their satisfaction, though they might not be routed towards licit objects of desire the way, for example, that heterosexual passion may be said to achieve its ends in the social bond of marriage or the biological goal of reproduction. In the hypertrophied decadence of Victoria Cross’s short story ‘Theodora’ in The Yellow Book (1895), we find the narrator reflecting on what we might call his natural desire to possess the androgynous object of his passion as a peculiar sort of moral failure: As we admit of works of pure genius that they cannot claim utility, or motive, or purpose, but simply that they exist as joy-​giving and beautiful objects of delight, so must we have done with utility, motive, purpose, and the aims of Nature, before we can reach the most absolute degree of positive pleasure.31

As is the case for many of the authors we associate with fin-​de-​siècle decadence, Cross’s treatment of transgression is flavoured with more than a little arch humour. Nevertheless her narrator does give expression to an important line of nineteenth-​century thought with sources in Swinburne, and ultimately Gautier and Baudelaire, that found in the model of aesthetic theory a pattern for the violation of normative desire. While adding an affective charge to the question of interest (and disinterest) raised as far back as the eighteenth century, the aesthetic comes to offer same-​sex and other forms of non-​normative sexuality an important language for longings that might otherwise have been only unspeakable.32 I have tried to suggest some of the reasons it is imperative to recognize the aesthetic aspirations of the Victorians, but also why we should not be surprised or disappointed when we do not find the living problem of Victorian aesthetics to resolve into any one thing. Recent attempts to ally the beautiful and the political by means of attention to form or the aesthetic, some of which recruit Schiller to their projects, or Kant himself, are notable instances of a return to a field that has never been more significant than when it was not fully coherent.33 These efforts may meet no more success than mere formalism when confronting the nineteenth century, but in the rhythm created when the desire to keep pulling art into a space outside that belonging to our day-​to-​day needs meets the inevitable tendency for art to sink back into the realm from which we have

31  Victoria Cross, ‘Theodora, A Fragment’, The Yellow Book, 4 (1895), 156–​188, p. 173–​177). The story is reprinted in Elaine Showalter, Daughters of Decadence (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 6–​37. 32  For a sense of the interplay of the erotic life and aesthetic ideas in the period, see Richard Dellamora (ed.), Victorian Sexual Dissidence (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999). See also Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 33  Jacques Rancière is particularly clear on his debt to Schiller. See especially, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (2004; Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 30–​36.

Victorian Aesthetics   579 plucked it, we may find more than failure. We may begin to recognize the form of our inherited Victorian aesthetics.

Select Bibliography Adorno, Theodor, Aesthetic Theory (1970), trans. Robert Hullot-​ Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Armstrong, Isobel, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). Bourdieu, Pierre, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1992), trans. Susan Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). Eagleton, Terry, Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990). Leighton, Angela, On Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Loesberg, Jonathan, A Return to Aesthetics:  Autonomy, Indifference, and Postmodernism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005). Rancière, Jacques, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (2004; Cambridge: Polity, 2009) Rancière, Jacques, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (2011), trans. Paul Zakir (London: Verso, 2013). Scarry, Elaine, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Chapter 30

Emoti ons Carolyn Burdett

Where to start, and where stop, in considering the topic of emotion in Victorian literature and culture? It often seems that to write or read the period’s literature is also necessarily to feel emotion. George Henry Lewes reports George Eliot ‘getting her eyes redder and swollener every morning’ as she completed the final chapters of The Mill on the Floss in 1859. Charles Dickens, playing Bill Sikes and Nancy from Oliver Twist (1837–​9) in his famous public readings and describing himself as both murderer and ‘at present nightly murdered’, resisted the pleading of friends and family that the sensation and emotion of the experience would prove too gruelling, too much for both body and mind. Lewes, recounting Eliot’s daily weeping to her publisher, John Blackwood, knew as well as ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’, Dickens himself, the value of those tears: ‘the more she cries, and the readers cry, the better say I’.1 Literature makes us feel, and in its engagement with emotion of all sorts, it taps the wellsprings of pleasure and pain, kinship and antipathy. The emotions evoked by literature, many Victorians believed, could spur moral reflection and ethical action. They also helped to make books commercially successful. For the Victorians emotion was central to literature as it was to life, helping to define the qualities associated with national and family affections and colouring the religious experience of fear-​filled sinners as much as those with good Christian hearts. Emotions distinguished pathology from what was deemed normal; they erupted, in melodramatic fashion, to present suffering and to stage protest in radical political campaigns; and they were at the heart of the vast and diverse archive of lives lived in the Victorian period. Although apparently obvious, common, and shared, emotions nevertheless come freighted with problems of nomenclature. In use as a term since the sixteenth century, ‘emotion’ originally denoted disturbance, perturbation, convulsion, or movement, including public commotions and civil unrest or migrations of people. In relation to

1  The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols. (1978; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–​5), iii. 269; Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London: Vintage, 1999), 1090, 1096. ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’ was coined by Anthony Trollope, in a satirical portrait in The Warden (1855).

Emotions   581 individuals, it first signalled an agitated or excited physical or mental state before extending to include strong feelings such as pleasure, fear, or grief. It was only in the nineteenth century, however, that the word ‘emotion’ began to be used in a recognizably modern manner. By the mid-​century, the models of mind inherited from eighteenth-​ century philosophy and psychology were brought into conjunction with new physiological perspectives by the Scottish psychologist Alexander Bain, in his influential The Senses and the Intellect (1855) and The Emotions and the Will (1859). Bain explained that he used the term ‘emotion’ to ‘comprehend all that is understood by feelings, states of feeling, pleasures, pains, passions, sentiments, affections’.2 Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Psychology, which appeared around the same time in 1855, was revised and expanded to incorporate a thoroughgoing evolutionary model of the human mind and associated states of feeling at the beginning of the 1870s. In 1872, Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals tackled the topic, making emotion integral to the wider story of evolutionary survival and species development and underscoring the fact—​a fact highly unpalatable for some—​that emotions are common to creaturely life, the beast’s attacking teeth linked by threads of adaptation, use, and habit to the cultivated man’s condescending sneer. So, while day-​to-​day Victorians loved and suffered, felt joy or grief or rage, valued family and social affections, or enjoyed the sentiments evoked in novels, poems, and pictures, the bodily and mental processes associated with such various and diverse states and feelings were being hypothesized about and investigated in new ways. The historian Thomas Dixon has argued that the nineteenth century created emotion as a secular and psychological category.3 It proved a flexible and capacious concept, able to incorporate into itself the varied and differentiated range of terms that had previously described states of feeling, sentiments, appetites, passions, and affections. Its use as an umbrella category helped order and organize systematic enquiry about minds and bodies as part of the new discipline of psychology as the latter in turn sought to distinguish its objects, theories, and practice from philosophy, theology, and literature. Terms that had hitherto carried theological associations, such as passions or appetites, were either replaced or repositioned in relation to this newly-​defined psychological term ‘emotion’, and in turn were recast and differently configured. The first section of this chapter looks at the Victorian debate about sentimentalism in which the moral value of emotion was widely discussed. The value of what was called sentiment was established in the philosophy and literature of the eighteenth century but underwent, in the nineteenth, significant metamorphosis, as sentiment was defended, condemned, and redefined. Sentimental literary and artistic representations were characteristically seen either as an invaluable moral lever, provoking through the resemblance between character and real person a sympathy that results in social action; or 2  Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the Will (London: J. W. Parker, 1859), 3. In the 1865 second edition, Bain changed ‘emotion’ to ‘feeling’ in this opening chapter. 3  Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

582    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture else a means by which some members of the human community inoculate themselves against the suffering of their fellows as they shed easy tears for fictional characters and, in the process, confirm their own capacity to feel. Narrative itself, in this view, is dangerous. It is seductively able to create and manipulate emotions that, as a result, are suspect and deemed ‘sham’ and unearned. Although criticism of sentimentality can be found throughout the period, a more sustained condemnation gathered force from around the 1860s. By the century’s end, literary scenes once revered and loved for their emotional impact were as likely to be ridiculed for a sentimentalism seen as equally moralistic and ruinous of aesthetic value. The only tears shed for the death of Little Nell were hitherto to be those of laughter, according to Oscar Wilde’s famous quip.4 Scientific and psychological theories of emotion played a part in this revaluing of sentimental culture, although not in direct ways. Indeed, in many respects, new psychological accounts continued to affirm the importance of the ‘tender emotions’, as I discuss in the chapter’s second section. However, new scientific models for understanding the relation between mind and body—​especially those focused on the role of human will—​were brought into sharp focus with debate about political and cultural enfranchisement in the period. This latter was seen to empower groups construed as controlled by rather than controlling their emotional selves. Women were most readily defined in terms of excessive emotion (both positively and negatively), while working-​class people were also frequently associated with strong and inadequately controlled feelings. Anxieties about these groups went hand in hand with distaste for mass-​produced culture. Associated with the ‘heated’ emotion deplored by critics of sentimentalism, popular culture was condemned as aesthetically puerile and liable to encourage artificial feelings. Such fears were compounded in the theorization of group psychology that began towards the end of the century, focused on the dangerous emotional qualities of the urban crowd. Mass culture could, at worst, foster frightening contagions of feeling and provoke volatile group behaviour. Notions of aesthetic value were widely debated during the final third of the century when they became a testing ground for notions of human distinctiveness and hierarchy. Indeed, as forms of mass and popular culture diversified, creating new opportunities for distinctively modern cultural consumers, the capacity for certain kinds of emotional aesthetic response became one important means of demonstrating evolved and civilized selfhood. For some, the emotions associated with beauty offered a holding space capable of withstanding the bleak and chill winds of a scientific naturalism which appeared by its mechanism, determinism, and materialism to demote humanity. Responsiveness to beauty helped to confirm human distinctiveness and value as well as hierarchies of taste and sensitivity. However, competing accounts propounded ideas about a ‘physiological aesthetics’. Here, aesthetic emotion is one more facet of evolution, understandable as a by-​product of a biological existence in which emotion is a necessary element of species health. In the chapter’s third section I consider how, from around the 1870s, 4 

Wilde reputedly commented that ‘one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing’, in Ada Leverson, Letters to the Sphinx from Oscar Wilde (London: Duckworth, 1930).

Emotions   583 attempts were made to account scientifically and naturalistically for the experience of aesthetic feeling and its relationship to ‘civilized’ value. Scientific and cultural debates circulated energetically in the periodical press and elsewhere, contesting and repositioning emotion and its value in relation to art and literature. Finally, the essay’s closing section briefly considers the twenty-​first century’s burgeoning interest in emotion within the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences and asks if there are common threads between Victorian debates about emotions and contemporary ones. Might the Victorians shed light on our current fascination with emotional brains, empathy, smart emotions, and affect theory?

Sentiment and Sentimentalism An article in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal of 1836 claims that of all the ‘fine old-​ fashioned feelings’ that graced eighteenth-​century life, none had fallen so quickly out of favour as sentiment. To be sentimental now, the piece suggests, is to risk derision or being deemed a bore. To illustrate the point, the contributor recounts the outrage of Sam, a London omnibus driver, that Bob, his fellow driver, who died suddenly the previous night, had been immediately replaced. The driver’s perplexed astonishment at Bob’s substitutability—​and thus inevitably his own too—​creates the irony and thus the joke of the article: the working-​class man, aghast at how his human uniqueness means nothing whatsoever to a master concerned only with the abstract categories of labour and the commercial imperatives of his transport business is sentimental, even though the omnibus master certainly is not.5 Tiny and ephemeral though this incident is, it pinpoints important features of the debates about sentiment and sentimentalism which took place in the nineteenth century. The writer evokes the legacy derived from the eighteenth century’s culture of sensibility and moral sentiment philosophies. The latter identified a natural capacity for benevolent and sociable impulses, seeing these as constitutive of moral experience. It provided models of moral conduct for the Victorians, and important ballast against what many perceived as the bleak vision of humans offered by utilitarianism.6 In this positive guise, sentiment sensitizes us to others’ suffering and arouses compassionate feelings—​a task for which literature was especially fitted. The omnibus driver’s tale is also a reminder that class is central to notions of sentiment: the joke is underscored by the initial description of sentimentalism as an ‘ornament’ of life, its morality inherent in manifestations of aesthetic quality. The sighs and tears of the fine-​fibred and sensitive upper classes and especially of women—​the groups associated with sentiment and its value in the eighteenth century—​contrast with the omnibus driver’s uneducated 5 

[Anon.], ‘The Sentimentalist on an Omnibus’, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 223 (7 May 1836), 117. Fred Kaplan, Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). 6 

584    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture diction. The urban working-​class man’s tones and the modernity of the city and its transport are presented as if inevitably at odds with sentiment: the ‘tooting’ and calling of ‘Time’ destroy any possibility of pathos: ‘ “poor Bob is dead [… .] Why, didn’t ye know Bob, that gemman vot drove the other ’buss? [Going down, sir? Charing Cross—​ Elephant and Castle, sir]” ’.7 Although outside the scope of this essay, Sam’s story could readily be imagined beyond the newspaper’s page in order to reveal an alternative class tradition of sentiment. This latter includes, for example, the melodramatic depiction of the effects of poverty accompanying resistance to the Poor Law of 1834, or the celebration of the lower-​class man of feeling exemplified in Wordsworth’s poetry.8 Sentiment was deployed in diverse ways and with varying class-​related ends. The term ‘sentimental’ is thus already ripe for irony in 1836 when this piece appeared. In Keywords (1983), Raymond Williams notes the initial voguish use of the term ‘sentimental’ in the eighteenth century as marking a new self-​consciousness about the importance of feelings.9 This emerged alongside the conspicuous cultural consumption of a literature of sentiment. For Victorian writers such as Thomas Carlyle, it is precisely this self-​consciousness that taints sentimentality as a sign of self-​absorption and indulgence, and Carlyle was an important early critic. Trying to date the fortunes of sentimentalism across the entire Victorian period, Philip Collins argues for a critical consensus during the 1830s and 1840s whereby sentimental scenes in literature were highly valued. This consensus begins to ‘show cracks’ in the later 1850s and a ‘substantial fissure’ by the 1870s. Collins relates these shifts to class and education: the intelligentsia lead the attack on ‘excessive’ emotion, while its defenders were identified as the ‘critically unsophisticated’.10 As the omnibus example suggests, there was probably not quite the consensus that Collins suggests in the 1830s and 1840s, but it is certainly the case that condemnation of sentimentalism markedly intensified by the 1860s, and was associated with attacks on popular culture and the inadequate intellectual control of its consumers. ‘The connexion between moral and intellectual weakness is considerable’, insists one contributor to the Saturday Review in 1860, declaring ‘Few things are more thoroughly an index of a cultivated mind than the way in which it is able to master itself in the presence of fictitious sentiment’.11 Sentiment was, though, a highly important mode through which argument about the moral value of fiction and art took place across the century and was at the heart of opposing views of selfhood and community. R. H. Horne, writing on Dickens in A New Spirit of the Age (1844), represents one strand of argument about its substantial 7 

[Anon.], ‘Sentimentalist’, 117. Sally Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Michael Bell, Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 92–​117. 9  Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1983), 281–​2. 10  Philip Collins, From Manly Tear to Stiff Upper Lip: The Victorians and Pathos (Wellington, NZ: Victoria University Press, 1974), 16. For more recent discussion, see Carolyn Burdett (ed.), ‘Sentimentalities’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 16, no. 2 (2011). 11  [Anon.], ‘Sentimental Writing’, Saturday Review, 10, no. 252 (25 August 1860), 235–​6, at 235. 8 

Emotions   585 personal and social good. Referring judgement of Dickens’s novels to the democracy of readers, he claims that ‘the heart-​felt tears of tens of thousands of readers’ are the ‘test of natural pathos’ and sign of Dickens’s unsurpassed talent. The ‘unadulterated pathos’ of Little Nell’s death in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–​1) functions by analogy with real suffering to purifying effect. Horne challenges readers ‘of the scrupulous taste’ who condemn Dickens as a ‘low’ writer in phrases that evoke Christian precepts: ‘find out how low it is’ and ‘rise up from the contemplation chastened, purified—​wiser because sorrow-​softened and better men through the enlargement of sympathies’.12 This internal, quasi-​religious process instigates external action. The Countess of Blessington, writing to Dickens’s friend John Forster concerning The Chimes (1844), is cited by Sally Ledger: ‘this book will melt hearts and open purse strings’.13 The refined tears of the eighteenth-​century man (and woman) of feeling were, by the mid-​nineteenth century, meant to do down-​and-​dirty work amidst the poverty and want of industrialized Britain. The psychologist Alexander Bain’s extensive discussion of ‘tender emotion’ in Emotions and the Will confirmed this view. Tender feelings for others are ‘one great foundation of natural goodness, and of the social duties and virtues. Through it we derive a real satisfaction in acting for others; which secures the spontaneous discharge of many of our social obligations’.14 For some Victorians, and especially those critical of capitalist economic organization, emotion was both source and conduit for ameliorative social action within a laissez-​faire structure. As Ledger notes, however, the purse opened on a charitable impulse sparked by emotional scenes in Dickens’s novels and stories was also the purse that consolidated his reputation and financial standing as one of the period’s most popular writers. The Countess of Blessington’s confidence that sentiment-​inducing literary scenes would fuel action to tackle grotesque social ills was matched by suspicion that sentimentalism was a mode of money-​grubbing associated with mass culture. Cheap images and mass production encouraged and pandered to cheap sentiments. Such sentiments were viewed as both products and symptoms of modern cultural enfranchisement and its commercial accompaniments.15 For detractors, far from conscience-​creating outward-​oriented action, emotional expenditure on fictional people threatened to inoculate readers against the more obdurate facts of real suffering. Writing in 1867, a Saturday Review critic deemed his own present moment uniquely (and worryingly) sentimental. Though noisy commentators lamented living in an 12 

R. H. Horne (ed.), A New Spirit of the Age, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1844), i. 8, 13, 19. 13  Sally Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 124–​5. 14 Bain, Emotions and the Will, 117. 15 Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination, 124–​5. See also Nicola Bown, ‘Introduction: Crying over Little Nell’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 4 (2007) and, in relation to pictorial art, Sonia Solicari, ‘Selling Sentiment: The Commodification of Emotion in Victorian Visual Culture’ in the same issue http://​www.19.bbk.ac.uk/​index.php/​19/​issue/​view/​67 [last accessed 11 October 2013].

586    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture ‘unpoetical’ age, ‘a hard, screaming, iron, red-​brick, go-​ahead sort of generation’, Britain was in truth ‘flooded with a perfect inundation of sentimentality far above anything known or seen before’.16 Lurking behind such accusation in the decade was anxiety about political unrest and democratic change, which had reference points in European conflicts and nationalist movements, the American Civil War, the Jamaican uprising, and, especially, the debates leading up to the Second Reform Bill of 1867. James Fitzjames Stephen’s 1864 ‘Sentimentalism’, published in the Cornhill, attacked both the popular sensation fiction of the 1860s and the prospect of a widened franchise. ‘Sentimentalism’ is defined by him as misuse of ‘natural’ and morally valuable tender emotions. Experiencing the latter is pleasurable but when indulged—​as it inevitably is when reading fiction—​this pleasure is enjoyed for its own sake rather than as a signal to attend to some external provoking object or event. The utilitarian ethics Stephen otherwise endorses are eroded by sentimentalism because individuals are in thrall to solipsistic pleasures and are consequently unable to take the wider view that calculates a greater good. The regulative effects that stem from the exercise of reason are essential: only reason can ensure right judgement in the place of potentially antisocial individual feeling.17 The counter to dangerous sentimentalism for Stephen is manifested at its best in ‘our national manner’, as exemplified by the ideal of military masculinity. Ardent and brave, this latter is exemplified by the man who is internally schooled against indulgent feeling—​who will fight fearlessly for his friends but, having seen them hanged at 8 a.m., will breakfast at 9 with perfect composure. So, while art and literature do and must ‘artificially’ provoke emotion—​therein lies their pleasure as modes of amusement—​their danger lies in immoderation on behalf of both consumers and producers. For Stephen, the sheer size and scope of the triple-​decker novel makes it suspect, inevitably more prone to emotional manipulations than, say, a short song. Especially injurious is the modern novel’s tendency to stray into areas requiring particularly robust reasoning such as criminality and law. This favourite focus of sensation fiction is why, for Stephen, this type of novel has ‘the trail of the serpent […] all over it’. Increasing literacy and the prospect of widening democratic representation for Stephen threaten alarmingly to increase the sway of sentimentalism’s ‘great standing temptation’ to found political and social decisions on the dangerously false foundations of feeling.18 Women are repeatedly identified as most vulnerable on this score. Because they are ‘naturally’ dominated by feeling, they are bound to vote according to ‘the impulse of sentiment’, a contributor to Tinsley’s Magazine in 1870 insists. For him, the ‘absurd’ and emotive arguments deployed by women against the Contagious Diseases Act provide evidence enough of the catastrophic result.19 16 

Anon., ‘Sentimentalism’, Critic, 6 (December 1847), 370; ‘Nineteenth Century Sentiment’, Saturday Review, 24 (2 November 1867), 561–​6, at 561. 17  James Fitzjames Stephen, ‘Sentimentalism’, Cornhill Magazine, 10, no. 55 (July 1864), 65–​75. 18  Stephen, ‘Sentimentalism’, 74, 72, 75. 19  ‘On Sentiment’, Tinsley’s Magazine, 6 (July 1870), 707–​11, at 710–​11.

Emotions   587 Emotions are, as their original etymology suggests, about movement and being moved. For Dickens, and many other Victorians, this meant above all being moved to pity and sympathy and thence to ameliorative social effort; whereas for a critic of sentimentalism such as Stephen, emotional movements must be subject to the restraining element of ‘religious, moral and social checks’—​‘reason, habits, laws’.20 These distinctively Victorian debates that focused on cultural objects like the long novel or narrative painting as well as social debates about the implications of increased literacy and the extension of political franchise drew from and refashioned much older ones. They derived originally from the Stoics and from Christian tradition. While the Stoics saw passions as diseases of the soul in need of the calming application of reason, Augustine sought to distinguish between troubling perturbations of mind and soul and those affections that grant people their humanity: love and compassion primarily.21 These powerful ontological and ethical threads were woven into debate about the value of feeling. They also played a part in the debates about the nature of bodies and minds that dominated psychological discussion during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Emotions began to be conceived as functions of physiological and biological laws but key elements of older formulations remained powerful.

Materialist Emotion In his ‘C Notebook’ on the transmutation of species, made between February and July 1838, Charles Darwin instructed himself to read Sir Charles Bell on emotional expression, noting:  ‘if a man grinning is to expose his canine teeth […] no doubt a habit gained by formerly being a baboon with great canine teeth.—​Blend this argument with his having canine teeth at all.—​This way of viewing the subject important.’22 It certainly was important, as Darwin laid the patiently detailed foundations of what eventually appeared in 1859 as the theory of evolution by adaptation and his related ideas about emotional expressions as signs of the common origins of humans and beasts. In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), Darwin wrote of an old blind pelican, fat and clearly well fed by other pelicans; blind Indian crows being fed by companions; a dog pausing to lick affectionately a sick cat in its basket; and a small monkey confronting a feared and fierce baboon that had attacked its keeper. This ‘sympathetic conduct’ amongst animals is a manifestation of social instincts that humans, as social

20 

Stephen, ‘Sentimentalism’, 70. Thomas Dixon, ‘ “Emotion”: The History of a Keyword in Crisis’, Emotion Review, 4, no. 4 (2012), 1–​7. 22  Darwin’s Notebooks on Transmutation of Species, Part II, Second Notebook (C), Feb.–​July 1838, ed. Gavin de Beer, from Darwin Online http://​darwin-​online.org.uk/​content/​frameset?keywords=to%20 barking%20other%20tell%20animals&pageseq=37&itemID=F1574b&viewtype=text, 111 [last accessed 11 October 2013]. 21 

588    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture creatures themselves, have ‘subsequently rendered […] more tender and more widely diffused’, Darwin reasoned.23 This notion of sympathy, the favoured Victorian method for feeling about others, was more typically seen as special to humans. Even Darwin deemed it the ‘noblest part of our nature’ and associated it with increased civilization. ‘[H]‌abit, example, instruction, and reflection’ all contribute to its development and—​in this matter—​even (Lamarckian) use-​inheritance plays a part, making it ‘not improbable that after long practice virtuous tendencies may be inherited’.24 But writing about emotional expressions in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin made little concession to human nobility. Emotional expressions are evolutionary legacies, residual signs of a common heritage, with origins in distinctly non-​human activities. In her ‘Daniel Deronda Notebooks’, George Eliot summarized the three bluntly materialist principles by which Darwin accounts for the rich repertoire of human emotional expressivity—​‘Serviceable associated habits’; ‘Antithesis’; ‘Actions due to the constitution of the Nervous system’.25 Darwin’s own notebooks show him enjoying his risqué iconoclasm, fascinated that the most refined and delicate of ‘civilized’ emotional gestures by his account have their origins in competitive, destructive, or sexual behaviour. The superior man, despising another and saying nothing of his feeling, secretly feels pleased with himself and his gait unconsciously stiffens ‘like that of a turkey’; of blushing, Darwin wonders: ‘does the thought drive blood to the surface exposed […]—​upper bosom in women, like erection’; while men’s attraction to women’s breasts is likened to stallions licking mares’ udders, and kissing is associated with the saliva flow in sexually aroused animals.26 Emotional expressions in Darwin’s account are residual, habitual, and unconscious remnants of instinctual behaviour that, in the evolutionary past, conferred advantage. Even here, however, the notions of emotional artifice and authenticity that occur throughout debates about sentimentalism resurface. Representing emotion meant exploiting oppositions between art and science, popular and specialist knowledge, and commercial and aesthetic value. Seeking illustration for emotional expressions took Darwin to the work of the French neurologist Guillaume-​Benjamin Duchenne, who famously experimented with galvanic stimulation to simulate expressive facial movements. Reproducing Duchenne’s experimental images, Darwin was alert to their visual effects, carefully instructing that the engraved illustrations be altered in various ways—​emphasizing wrinkles on the neck and forehead, for instance, and omitting the galvanic instruments and the hands of the operator. As a result, the emotional spectacle 23 

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (2nd edn. 1879; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), 126, 159. 24 Darwin, Descent, 682. 25  George Eliot, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda Notebooks, ed. Jane Irwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 242. 26  Stéphanie Dupouy, ‘The Naturalist and the Nuances: Sentimentalism, Moral Values, and Emotional Expression in Darwin and the Anatomists’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 47, no. 4 (2011), 335–​58, at 347–​8.

Emotions   589 in Darwin’s text removes the original context, producing naturalized images stripped of their disturbing experimental paraphernalia. His use of the work of the art photographer Oscar Rejlander, who ran a commercial portrait studio, and provided a substantial number of the images for Expression, also raises questions of representation. Rejlander was known for his photographic manipulations and at least one of his ‘baby’ images for Darwin’s book, ostensibly depicting spontaneous infant distress, was in fact a drawing, carefully treated to resemble an original photograph.27 The critic Jonathan Smith highlights how Rejlander’s images borrowed from the visual spectacle of Victorian theatre which was dominated in the 1860s and 1870s by adaptations of sensation fiction. These drew on still-​powerful melodramatic conventions, and, in turn, manuals instructed actors on the preferred way for the face and body to convey appropriate emotions.28 Such conventions thus helped determine correct expression, in the process knotting together notions of emotional authenticity and aesthetic rules. The question of aesthetics was also prominent in one of the most provocative and influential contributions to the materialist debate about emotion, William James’s ‘What is an Emotion?’, published in 1884 in Mind. James’s answer became known as the ‘James–​Lange hypothesis’, named after James and the physiologist Carl Lange who independently developed similar ideas. Both men sought to overturn the common sequence in which the bodily changes associated with emotional states—​hair rising on the back of the neck, limbs trembling, heart racing, and so on—​are seen as reactions to those states (fear, in this instance). On the contrary, James insisted, the sequence works the other way round: the body responds to environmental stimuli and the feeling that results is a consequence of such changes, not their cause (we fear because we tremble, not tremble because we fear). Though initially stating that his model was confined to what he deems the ‘standard emotions’ (supposedly unalloyed states such as joy or fear), and exempting the more complex and cognitive states associated with morality and aesthetic responsiveness, James ends up arguing that all emotions, even the most complex and ‘civilized’, depend upon corporeal change. The visceral body itself becomes an aesthetic instrument in James’s account, a ‘sounding-​board’ responsive to the minutest reverberations. However intellectual the supposedly ‘higher’ forms of aesthetic contemplation are claimed to be, if the ‘bodily sounding-​board’ is not at work the result is ‘dryness’ and ‘paleness’. Aesthetic pleasure that is emotionless is, in truth, largely forfeited. James aimed to restore to psychological researches fixated on cognitive and volitional performance ‘the aesthetic sphere of the mind, its longings, its pleasures and pains, and its emotions’.29 This meant bringing back the body (the mind is the body in this respect), and by associating the highest aesthetic pleasures with it, James

27  Phillip Prodger, ‘Photography and The Expression of the Emotions’, 408; Appendix III, Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, ed. Paul Ekman (London: HarperCollins, 1998), 399–​410, at 405. 28  Jonathan Smith, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 29  William James, ‘What Is an Emotion?’, Mind, 9, no. 34 (1884), 188–​205, at 201–​2, 188.

590    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture destabilized the customary opposition between (higher) intellectual/​cognitive function and (lower) emotionality. For many Victorians, however, this physiological economy was reductive and tantamount to a moral catastrophe as emotions were associated with bodies, allied with creatures, and divested of God-​endowed moral qualities. The physician Henry Maudsley, writing in 1870, was bullish about their materialism, insisting that emotions were not some ‘intangible entity or incorporeal essence which science inherited from theology’ but organic processes, little different in kind to those ‘lower nerve centres’ organizing physical existence.30 Such ideas were dismaying, and not only for religious traditionalists. Frances Power Cobbe, the campaigner for women’s rights and anti-​vivisectionist, had rejected the evangelical Christianity of her father in favour of a form of Kantian-​ inflected deism. Interested and informed in scientific and philosophical debate, she nevertheless believed agnosticism was inevitably enslaved to materialism. One of its pernicious results was the notion of ‘Inherited Conscience’. The transcendent, God-​ given faculty of recognizing good from evil was as a result ‘degraded […] to a mere inherited prejudice’.31

(Aesthetic) Emotion: Beauty and Good; Bodies and Minds Renowned for her practicality, Cobbe tried to tackle the ethical implications of these new ideas about emotion by revisiting the question of emotional education. ‘The Education of the Emotions’, written for the Fortnightly Review in 1888, sidesteps contentious questions of what emotions are and instead focuses on the fact that they can be transmitted. In doing so, Cobbe implicitly invokes a tradition consolidated in the eighteenth century by David Hume which views emotions as impersonal and contagious. The passions, Hume declared, ‘are so contagious, that they pass with the greatest facility from one person to another, and produce correspondent movements in all human breasts’.32 Because emotions can be acquired ‘second hand’, by contagion, ‘practical systems of education’ must function to foster in young people right modes of feeling, Cobbe contends. Rehearsing a diverse range of educative examples designed to control fear, enhance courage, communicate veneration or enthusiasm, Cobbe challenges parents, teachers, and the state to enact emotional value—​which, for her, is inseparable 30 

Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind: An Enquiry into Their Connection and Mutual Influence, Specially in Reference to Mental Disorders, being the Gulstonian Lectures for 1870 (London: Macmillan, 1870), quoted by Jane Wood, Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 133. 31  Frances Power Cobbe, ‘Agnostic Morality’, Contemporary Review, 43 (1883), 783–​94, at 786. 32  Quoted by Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 1.

Emotions   591 from moral value. She insists: ‘We must give the feeling we desire. We cannot possibly impose it.’ Her implicit opponent is the socialist or liberal ‘preachers of Altruism’ who fail to understand that although emotions can be caught they cannot be commanded or taught. As a corollary, ‘it is better to be good than to do good’: living example, not theory, creed, or political doctrine, is the only sure educator in the field of emotions.33 Written in 1888, Cobbe’s essay implies a set of values, and accompanying moral behaviour, that were being subjected to sustained and powerful cultural and political challenge. Socialists attacked revered notions of the individual and New Woman writers condemned existing marriage and family structures as damaging for women and the wider society. Meanwhile, the creative and dissident energies of aestheticism and decadence helped to polarize reactions to Victorian progress and the state of modern life. Art and beauty were variously configured as bulwarks against or manifestations of fin-​de-​siècle exhaustion, dissatisfaction, and ennui, while a term adopted from scientific debate, degeneration, became a popular way to condemn artists and writers as various as Oscar Wilde, Henrik Ibsen, the Impressionists, and Émile Zola. The values of art and literature, and their contribution to the moral tone of the nation, were fiercely contested. Among the most visible of these contests were the much-​parodied and attacked doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake’, the theatrical dandyism of Wilde and his followers, the risqué contents of The Yellow Book with its distinctive Aubrey Beardsley illustrations, and the literature associated with Zola and his school. Emotional responses to art and literature guided by identificatory sympathy or prompting moral self-​scrutiny were ousted in favour of the individual’s experience of the ecstasy of intense aesthetic pleasure or else the impersonal and ‘scientific’ scrutiny of often sordid types of human experience (as exemplified, respectively, in ‘art for art’s sake’ aestheticism and Zolaesque naturalism). Less visible, but no less intensely debated, were scientific, psychological, and philosophical arguments about emotions, aesthetics, and ethical value. The scientific popularizer and novelist Grant Allen published Physiological Aesthetics in 1877. Dedicated to Herbert Spencer, it developed Spencer’s theory (in Principles of Psychology (1872)) that aesthetic pleasure is a form of play, distinct in most instances from life-​preserving functions but nevertheless important for an organism that is self-​regulating in its circulation of energy. Play helps to manage such energy, providing for relief, repose, and a recharging of the physiological system according to the imperatives of pleasure and pain. The aesthetically beautiful is thus, in Allen’s definition, ‘that which affords the Maximum of Stimulation with the Minimum of Fatigue or Waste’. Stating that his book would demonstrate ‘the purely physical origin of the sense of beauty, and its relation to our nervous organisation’, Allen meant to be provocative. He wished to dismiss as unscientific and outmoded those accounts—​most notably John Ruskin’s—​that made emotional response to beauty evidence of moral teleology, and to ratify instead a purely hedonic physiological economy. Although Allen occasionally voices an aspiration to move from sensual, individual pleasures to ‘the nobler sentiments of an all-​embracing humanitarianism’, it is 33 

Frances Power Cobbe, ‘The Education of the Emotions’, Fortnightly Review, 43 (February 1888), 223–​36, at 223, 226, 236.

592    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture the former that dominate his book.34 The evolutionary tug in his argument leads seamlessly to distinguishing stages of aesthetic development: ‘good taste’ is a ‘natural’ marker of progress, of ‘progressing fineness and discrimination in the nerves, educated attention, high and noble emotional constitution, and increasing intellectual faculties’.35 In this respect, he was in tune with wider responses to expanding cultural markets. At the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, judgements about aesthetics increasingly served to mark hierarchical distinctions between high and low, elite and mass culture. Not all commentators were as sanguine as Allen about the ethical implications of his evolutionary stance, or as committed to a critique of what he deemed distorting moral asceticism, however. The psychologist James Sully, for instance, reviewing Physiological Aesthetics for the journal Mind, rebukes Allen for insufficient attention to what Alexander Bain had argued constituted the distinguishing feature of aesthetic emotion, namely its ‘shareability’. According to Bain, ‘monopolist interest’ dominates much of sensory and physiological life, as organisms compete for advantage in the struggle for life. However, beautiful sights and sounds especially are ‘capable of being enjoyed alike by a numerous multitude’.36 A glorious feast pleasures only the individuals attending it whereas a feast represented by a skilful painter may please many hundreds or thousands of viewers.37 Sully concludes that ‘Prof. Bain is nearer the truth than Mr Allen in making the shareability of a pleasure a leading essential in its aesthetic quality’.38 For Sully, a psychological understanding of aesthetic emotion could rescue beauty from the sensual and hedonistic consumption implied by Allen’s thesis, and reground scientifically an ethical dimension of the experience of beauty in notions of communality: ‘the beautiful expresses the instinctive tendency of the emotional mind to be in harmony with other minds’, as he elsewhere expresses this conviction.39 However, the reliance of his argument on an unanalysed and merely asserted ‘instinctive tendency’ is indicative of how scientific and psychological interpretation of aesthetic emotion during the final three decades of the century was often tentative and rather underwhelming. Sully, the most prominent commentator on the topic, severely restricted the claims that could be made about art and beauty using a psychological approach. Writing for Mind in 1876 on ‘Art and Psychology’, what is striking is just how little Sully is prepared to assert can be explained of the former by the latter—​other than how complex are the ‘many diversities of human emotion’ where aesthetic response plays a part. A ‘just aesthetic science’ may need to acknowledge and allow for ‘an indeterminate unknown in aesthetic delight’, he concludes.40 Some mysterious emotion still 34 

Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics (London: King, 1877), 39, 2, 216. Allen, quoted and discussed in Regenia Gagnier, The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 136–​9, at 137. 36 Bain, Emotions and the Will, 211. 37  The philosopher Immanuel Kant established the importance of ‘disinterest’ in relation to aesthetics. 38  James Sully, ‘Review of Physiological Aesthetics’, Mind, 2, no. 7 (July 1877), 387–​92, at 391. 39  James Sully, ‘The Aesthetics of Human Character’, Fortnightly Review, ns 52 (April 1871), 505–​20, at 505. 40  James Sully, ‘Art and Psychology’, Mind, 1, no. 4 (October 1876), 467–​78, at 477, 470. 35 

Emotions   593 holds sway it seems, resistant to scientific scrutiny. Sully and other psychologists, themselves drawing examples from contemporary developments in art and literature, in turn provided interlocutory material for writers like Walter Pater, who knew Sully’s work and echoed its vocabulary in the Preface and Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873).41 It was one of Pater’s admirers, however, who in the 1890s used psychological theorizing about emotion in a far bolder attempt to understand scientifically the experience of beauty. Vernon Lee became convinced that aesthetics ‘could be dealt with as a part of the science of Mind and Mind’s relation with Body’, and thus be freed from cumbersome Victorian moral categories. Far from the ‘modestly conceived science’ of aesthetics Sully believed psychological insight could support, Lee ambitiously believed her theory of aesthetics offered ‘one of the keys to the Universe’.42 In the late 1880s she had fallen in love with a Scottish artist called Clementina (or Kit) Anstruther-​ Thomson and had been struck by Kit’s seeming bodily sensitivity when looking at beautiful objects. Kit could detect changes in her breathing, her muscle tension, and her balance, and the women began to wonder how such physiological changes affected mental and emotional moods. It was the James–​Lange hypothesis associated with William James’s theory that emotional states result from bodily changes that helped Lee out. Borrowing James’s formula, she argued that an object’s form—​its lines, angles, planes, and mass—​precipitates physiological responses in the viewer (in eyes, muscles, heart, and lungs) that, in turn, affect their mental and emotional states. These physiologically produced emotions are ascribed to the object and experienced as if they belong to it. Lee described this as a process of ‘feeling into’ an object. Pleasurable feelings—​ones that harmonize and vitalize—​are the experience of beauty: the mysteries of aesthetic feeling were indeed located in the body’s response to form. A beautiful object is remade in the act of appreciating it, Lee insists, and it ‘lives’ because something of human life is projected into it. For Lee, this theory of aesthetic emotion showed why art and beauty were crucial components of living well—​beauty really does facilitate life as it prompts a circulation of energy and emotion between viewer and object.43 It allowed her to rewrite the formula of aestheticism, while avoiding the traditional moralism that habitually accompanied its critique: ‘Art not for art’s sake, but art for the sake of life—​art as one of the harmonious functions of existence’, as she put it in an 1895 ‘Valedictory’ dedicated to Walter Pater.44

41  I. C. Small, ‘The Vocabulary of Pater’s Criticism and the Psychology of Aesthetics’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 18, no. 1 (1978), 81–​7. 42  Vernon Lee, ‘Introduction’, in C. Anstruther-​Thomson, Art and Man: Essays and Fragments (London: Bodley Head, 1924), 3–​112, at 46, 57. Sully quote is from ‘Art and Psychology’, 469. 43  Carolyn Burdett, ‘ “The Subjective Inside Us Can Turn into the Objective Outside”: Vernon Lee’s Psychological Aesthetics’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 12 (2011). http://​ www.19.bbk.ac.uk/​index.php/​19/​issue/​view/​80 [last accessed 11 October 2013]. 44  Vernon Lee, Renaissance Fancies and Studies: Being a Sequel to Euphorion (London: Smith, Elder, 1895), 259.

594    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Like Sully, Lee aimed to reattach the beautiful and the good by scientifically respectable means. She believed she had uncovered a modern, experimentally verifiable, and ultimately robust case for the life-​enhancing qualities of art—​one that made an equally powerful argument against both poverty and mass cultural consumption, neither of which permitted the time and attention to art demanded by ‘giving oneself’ to beautiful things.45 In the main, though, Lee’s ideas were either dismissed or ignored, including their progressive aspirations. Other overtly political configurations of the value of responses to art, meanwhile—​such as William Morris’s belief in the creative and pleasurable fulfilment of labour—​battled against alternative models deeply suspicious of emotion. For the Fabian socialists, and especially figures like the Webbs, aesthetic commitments and emotion were each moribund as routes to social transformation. Trade unionism and effective municipal administration were instead the means to achieve a rational remodelling of society by the state. The scientific and Marxist-​oriented Social Democratic Federation similarly showed a ‘strange disregard of the religious, moral and aesthetic sentiments of the people’, according to the Scottish socialist John Bruce Glasier.46 For Regenia Gagnier, Morris’s sagas and tales were themselves a form of emotional education—​enacting forgiveness, making peace with rivals, extirpating anger.47 In the wider literary culture, however, much of the most durable fiction of the period dwelt on darker feelings. In texts like The Time Machine (1895), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Dracula (1897), taboo fears and desires circulated, encrypted in the new prose forms of late Victorian Gothic.48 By the century’s end, the spectre of unregulated and contagious emotion lurked in new psychological theories of the crowd. No longer bound by traditional associations with class, nation, or ‘the people’, crowd psychology emphasized an impersonal modern mass dominated by what Gustav Le Bon deemed ‘its unconscious life’. In Le Bon’s 1896 study The Crowd, emotions are archaic and potentially anarchic and rationality and civilization, as a result, rendered frail. Conscious acts are ‘the outcome of an unconscious substratum’: performed for reasons that cannot be avowed or even known, the ‘greater part of our daily actions are the result of hidden motives’.49 Created by the Victorians as a protean psychological category, emotion was also a wild card, evolutionarily soldered to what was hoped to be the best, but often feared to be the worst, of human striving, living, and surviving.

45 

Vernon Lee, Laurus Nobilis: Chapters on Art and Life (London: John Lane, 1909). Quoted in William Greenslade, ‘Socialism and Radicalism’, in Gail Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 73–​89, at 84. 47  Regenia Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 153, 156. 48  For a survey, see Nicholas Ruddick, ‘The Fantastic Fiction of the Fin de Siècle’, in Marshall (ed.), Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, 189–​206. 49  Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Macmillan, 1896), 7–​8. 46 

Emotions   595

Emotion, Affect, and Empathy in the Twenty-​First Century The Victorians struggled both with dualist models of mind and body that divide reason and emotion and with monist models that sought to understand everything as matter, doing away in the process with the soul. In our own century, both models are still active and contested. Emotion has been the special focus of recent attacks on dualism, many of them driven by the argument that emotion is in fact a form of thought. Emotions are conceived as not opposed to reason, requiring control by it, but rather as modes of appraisal, judgement-​ making responses that are types of cognition. ‘Emotional intelligence’ and the ‘emotional brain’ have become, as a result, popular notions. ‘Smart emotions’ are acknowledged to orientate decision-​making, and are associated with specific (often evolutionarily older) parts of the brain, firing into action prior to more obviously rational or cognitive judgements.50 Such popular science has been taken into new directions by philosophers and cultural practitioners associated with ‘affect theory’ who conceive affect as a quality that is non-​signifying and pre-​personal, the body’s way of preparing for actions prior to any type of signification or cognition. The most challenging versions of affect theory seek to separate affect from emotion, stripping the former of meaning, intention, or symbolization.51 The role of literature and art in fostering emotional and ethical response also remains both disputed and important. For the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, the realist novel is a key means of making global citizens able to extend compassion to unknown others.52 Empathy has become an indispensable term for understanding identificatory responses to others and, as a result, a vital component of our modern emotional lexicon. Signalling the ability to ‘feel with’ another person, empathy has been the focus of burgeoning brain research. Recent work that aims to determine its neurophysiological processes has been driven by enquiry into a special class of neurons that are activated both when an individual performs a certain kind of action and when an individual observes another performing the same action. These ‘mirror neurons’ have been dubbed ‘empathy neurons’ and seen as a key to understanding human evolutionary success.53 50  Key texts of the now vast literature include Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (1994; London: Vintage, 2006) and The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt, 1999); Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (1996; London: Phoenix, 1999); Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ (1995; London: Bloomsbury, 1996); Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 51  For detailed discussion and critique of affect theory, see Ruth Leys, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, Critical Inquiry, 37, no. 3 (spring 2011), 434–​72. 52  Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defence of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). 53  ‘V. S. Ramachandran: The Neurons that Shaped Civilization’, a TED TALK at http://​www.ted.com/​ talks/​vs_​ramachandran_​the_​neurons_​that_​shaped_​civilization.html [last accessed 11 October 2013].

596    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Empathy is now more regularly and popularly used than sympathy—​ but the Victorians, who so valued the latter, had no such term. Coined in 1909, empathy did not at first refer to how one feels about another person. It was introduced into a British context as an aesthetic term by Vernon Lee, to describe what she called the process of ‘feeling into’ an object which was supposed to be the crux of aesthetic feeling. Although after the turn of the century, influenced by German psychological debates, Lee increasingly saw the process she described as psychological rather than physiological, she also hazarded that ‘future neurologists will very probably discover the portions of our brains and nervous systems’ on which such mental phenomena are dependent.54 By the twenty-​first century, developments in technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) now produce knowledge of the brain undreamt of by the Victorians. For sceptics, though, mirror neurons prove nothing beyond a neural disposition to imitate. The excitement about them demonstrates how readily we still grasp for reductive explanations of complex historically, culturally, and environmentally situated behaviour, in which biology gets extracted from its workings within environments. It is easy to be amused by the excitement with which some Victorians viewed their own brain research. Conducted on the humble frog, materialist methods seemed on the cusp of revealing the most arcane mysteries of mind and motive. Twenty-​first-​century methods have developed considerably but the seductive appeal of materialist reductionism seems undiminished and its resultant problems still legion. Equally important, especially when surveying the veritable explosion of interest in and research on emotions over the last three decades is the continuing, indeed increasingly urgent, need to challenge our divided disciplinary cultures. Again, Vernon Lee’s idiosyncratic and largely ignored aesthetic and psychological ideas serve as an example. Her persistent, dogged pursuit of ideas that unsettled and reshaped not only others’ ideas, but her own too, is testimony to the relative freedom with which Victorians transplanted knowledge between sciences and humanities. It is a reminder of how important similar freedom is today.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Lawrence Normand and to the volume editor for comments on drafts of this essay.

Select Bibliography Allen, Grant, Physiological Aesthetics (London: King, 1877). Bown, Nicola, ‘Introduction: Crying over Little Nell’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 4 (2007) http://​www.19.bbk.ac.uk/​index.php/​19/​issue/​view/​67 54 

Quoted in Carolyn Burdett, ‘Is Empathy the End of Sentimentality?’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 16, no. 2 (2011), 259–​74, at 273.

Emotions   597 Burdett, Carolyn, ‘ “The Subjective Inside Us Can Turn into the Objective Outside”: Vernon Lee’s Psychological Aesthetics’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 12 (2011) http://​www.19.bbk.ac.uk/​index.php/​19/​issue/​view/​80 Burdett, Carolyn (ed.), ‘Sentimentalities’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 16, no. 2 (2011). James, William, ‘What Is an Emotion?’, Mind, 9, no. 34 (1884), 188–​205. Cobbe, Frances Power, ‘The Education of the Emotions’, Fortnightly Review, 43 (February 1888), 223–​36. Dixon, Thomas, ‘ “Emotion”: The History of a Keyword in Crisis’, Emotion Review, 4, no. 4 (2012), 1–​7. Dixon, Thomas, From Passions to Emotions:  The Creation of a Secular Scientific Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Stephen, James Fitzjames, ‘Sentimentalism’, Cornhill Magazine, 10, no. 55 (July 1864), 65–​75. Sully, James, ‘Art and Psychology’, Mind, 1, no. 4 (October 1876), 467–​78.

Chapter 31

Ae stheticism a nd t h e P olitics of Pl e asu re Ruth Livesey

In the final pages of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) the corrupt murderer, Dorian, stands in front of the portrait that has mysteriously taken the burden of age from him. Every mark of time and sin is visible on its painterly surface, unlike Dorian’s ‘rose-​white’ skin. This loathsome ‘mirror of his soul’ seems to taunt him with the evidence of deeds he cannot escape in private, whatever his public self might suggest. But there is one reason, above all, why Dorian decides to pick up a knife to destroy the picture; it no longer gives him what an aesthete always seeks: pleasure. The narrator shares Dorian’s musing: ‘Once it had given him pleasure to witness it changing and growing old. Of late he had felt no such pleasure […]. Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. It had been like conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience.’1 Raising the knife, Dorian attempts to do away with conscience in pursuit of pleasure; the result is, of course, suicide and ugliness as Dorian is found a hideous wrinkled corpse at the end, stabbed in the heart. The strange death of Dorian Gray is an appropriately violent emblem of Aestheticism in the context of Victorian literature. For many conservative commentators Aestheticism stood for the end of decency, morality, and virtue, a descent into decadence which, as the wonderfully sensationalist writer Max Nordau put it, was evidence of the ‘Dusk of Nations’ as the West slipped into degeneration and eventual self-​extinction.2 This may seem an extreme reaction to a movement interested in ‘art for art’s sake’ and the gospel of beauty, a movement that claimed to step away from the grubby real world into something more beautiful and strange. Wilde’s assertion that ‘Aesthetics are higher than 1 

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 7 vols. to date (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), iii. The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow, 356. 2  Max Nordau, Degeneration (1891), repr. in Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (eds), The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 13–​17.

Aestheticism and the Politics of Pleasure    599 ethics’, however, is a pithy version of the sort of challenge writers associated with the Aesthetic movement made to some fundamental social beliefs in the later nineteenth century.3 Wilde’s playful phrase from ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891) places the evaluation of beauty above that of right or wrong, encapsulating more than two decades of Aestheticism’s resistance to much mainstream Victorian culture. In this chapter I want to dig a little deeper into British Aestheticism and its politics of pleasure and beauty. The death of Dorian changes meanings in this shifting light. Dorian’s death appears at first to be an indictment of hedonism, warning what the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake can lead to. But a wealth of criticism invites us to pause over this and wonder if Lord Henry’s insistence in the novel that ‘“Pleasure is nature’s test, her sign of approval”’ is really contradicted by the text’s final act. The phrase, after all, is one Wilde repeats in his own voice in his essay ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ (1891).4 Dorian Gray, like much of the poetry and prose associated with Aestheticism in Britain, can be read as a serious play on the limitations of nineteenth-​century ethics and political economy and an exploration of the alternatives offered by aesthetics: the gospel of beauty preaches against the shortcomings of conventional morality in Victorian society. Aestheticism holds up the integrity and perfection of the work of art as the impossible ideal towards which humanity should aspire. Aestheticism is a slippery category to define, but it is perhaps best captured as a belief that taste and the pursuit of beauty should be chief principles in not only art, but also life. Although it only became a recognizable literary movement in Britain from the 1860s, its early development is often traced back to the French novelist Théophile Gautier’s 1836 Preface to his work Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835–​6) in which he advanced the claims of ‘l’art pour l’art’. Gautier was but one of an increasing number of writers and artists over the century who argued that art should be evaluated with reference to its own criteria rather than in terms of its social or moral utility: pleasure in beauty should be complete in itself, rather than a means to an end. Writing of the British art world of 1868, the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, for instance, decided that the paintings of James McNeil Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti shared ‘one supreme quality of spirit and of work […], the love of beauty for beauty’s sake, the faith and trust in it as a god indeed’: Rien n’est vrai que le beau (Nothing is true except beauty). This, Swinburne argued, should be the ‘beginning and ending’ of an artist’s belief. ‘Beauty may be strange, quaint, terrible, may play with pain as with pleasure, handle a horror until it is a delight,’ but ‘No good art is unbeautiful’.5 Swinburne’s suggestion that aesthetes worship a pagan god of beauty was calculated to shock the conscientious tendencies evident in much British culture at the time. It is also an indication, however, of the influence of classical Hellenistic 3 

Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, iv. Criticism, ed. Josephine Guy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 123–​206, p. 204. 4 Wilde, Dorian Gray, 235. 5  A. C. Swinburne, ‘Some Pictures of 1868’, in Essays and Studies (London: Chatto and Windus, 1875), 379.

600    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture philosophy on Aestheticism. Later nineteenth-​century painters, poets, and designers within the Aesthetic movement emphasized the appreciation of the perfect truth of visible beauty in ancient Greek culture and contrasted it with the Christian interest in invisible virtue.6 The resulting emphasis within Aestheticism upon what could be seen and felt through the experience of pleasure and beauty—​in life, as well as art—​ made it discomfiting to many literary commentators in later nineteenth-​century Britain.

Taste and Pleasure For writers and artists associated with Aestheticism the judgement of a work of art was a matter of taste; criticism, a process of conveying the impression the work of art made on the self. Swinburne rhapsodized about the impression Victor Hugo’s L’Homme qui rit made on him: ‘the impression of [Hugo’s] mind; physical as it touched the nerves with a more vivid passion of pleasure than music or wine; spiritual as it exalted the spirit with the senses and above them to the very summit of vision and delight’.7 The work of art—​ of whatever form—​was to be appreciated as multi-​sensory pleasure; the ever-​changing self touched by the encounter with eternal beauty of art. The basis of aesthetic critical evaluation, Walter Pater argued in his influential work Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), was formed by several seemingly straightforward questions: ‘What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure?’8 By explicitly placing the self at the centre of such judgements, Pater became the figurehead for a radical reshaping of literary culture in the late nineteenth century. For Wilde, the Renaissance was his ‘golden book’ and Pater’s work influenced later writers reflecting on the psychology of art from Vernon Lee to Virginia Woolf.9 The emphasis on the individual licensed constellations of personal appreciations of beauty in all sorts of forms, rather than an authoritative single standard. Above all, however, Aestheticism after Pater set the pursuit of pleasures, as opposed to objective merit or virtue, at the heart of artistic endeavour: literature and criticism included. Rather than asking if an object, a person, or an act, is good or bad, right or wrong, Aestheticism required 6 

See David DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970); Carolyn Williams, Transfigured Worlds: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009). 7 Swinburne, Essays and Studies, 3. 8  Walter Pater, The Renaissance, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), xxix. 9  Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 47. For examples of Pater’s influence, see Perry Meisel, The Absent Father: Walter Pater and Virginia Woolf (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980); Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (eds), Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006).

Aestheticism and the Politics of Pleasure    601 individuals to reflect on whether it might give them pleasure, and if so, to discriminate what sort pleasure it was. The most controversial part of Pater’s argument in the Renaissance appeared in its Conclusion, which the author suppressed in the 1877 reprinting of his work, fearing, as he put it, that it might mislead some of the young men into whose hands it fell.10 The Conclusion was itself a reproduction of the closing few pages of a review Pater published in 1868 of three volumes of William Morris’s poetry that praised the work’s ‘pagan spirit’, which preserved purity, despite the violence of its subject matter, through ‘perfect taste’ and ‘clarity and chasteness’ of style.11 Pater imagined, however, that readers might get impatient with Morris’s myths and medievalism. These were dreamlike poems that reworked and sublimated existing legends and tales into something ‘still fainter and more spectral […] a finer ideal, extracted from what in relation to any actual world is already an ideal’. The secret to enjoying these works was ‘that incurable thirst for the sense of escape, which no actual form of life satisfies, no poetry even, if it be merely simple and spontaneous’ (300–​1). The reader of the rationalist Westminster Review, Pater decided, was likely to see such escapism as pointless: you say […] ‘what but a passing smile can [the modern world] have for a kind of poetry which, assuming artistic beauty of form to be an end in itself, passes by those truths and the living interests which are connected with them, to spend a thousand cares in telling once more these pagan fables as if it had but to choose between a more and a less beautiful shadow?’ (309)

But in the final few pages that were to reappear in the Renaissance, Pater describes a modern world that absolutely requires this sort of escape into art. To exist in the present, in Pater’s view, is to experience isolation and fragmentation in a world moving at speed but ‘each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world’. The separateness of art for art’s sake from the ‘truths’ of the everyday world made it a vital means to survive the rapid flux of modernity. Pleasure in beauty could allow the individual to live intensely in the moment, holding still in the flow of time. In what were to become the most notorious lines of the Renaissance, Pater urged his readers to seek ‘Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself ’ as the end; to ‘grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment’: ‘To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.’12 Pater blurs the boundary between art and life in the pursuit of beauty. If life really were to be lived like a work of art, if our judgement of people and behaviour rested on 10  On the textual history of Renaissance see William Shuter, ‘Pater’s Reshuffled Text’, Nineteenth-​ Century Literature, 43 (1989), 500–​525. 11  [Walter Pater], ‘The Poems of Mr William Morris: The Defence of Guenevere (1858), The Life and Death of Jason (1867) and The Earthly Paradise (1868)’, Westminster Review, ns 34 (October 1868), 300–​ 312, p. 310. Further page references to this edition will be given in the text. 12 Pater, Renaissance, 152.

602    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture grasping pleasure and appreciating beauty, rather than preconceptions of vice and virtue or contingent moral norms, what would be the result? One could be a success in life—​in Aestheticism’s terms—​by burning with pleasure for the touch of a friend’s hand, a suggestion dangerously at odds with normative ideals of Victorian masculinity. It is a small step from this to see how powerful Aestheticism was in giving licence to lives and loves outside the norms of Victorian moral codes, especially in terms of same-​sex desire. For all the apparent unworldliness of aesthetic poetry and art in its retreat from the everyday life of Victorian Britain, that retreat was in itself controversial and political; a critique of the status quo. There is a fair degree of consensus that Pater’s decision to remove the Conclusion from the 1877 edition of the Renaissance reflected his anxiety after some warmly loving letters between himself and an Oxford undergraduate had been passed to the Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett, in 1874.13 But despite tragically abundant evidence of the social disgrace that followed the public exposure of homosexuality in the 1870s and 1880s, Marius the Epicurean (1885)—​the novel Pater claimed to have written as a corrective to what he felt was misleading in the Renaissance—​places love between men at the centre of its narrative of pleasure and the self. It was perhaps not so much the exposure of same-​sex passion in the Renaissance that Pater believed might be a risk to young male readers, but rather, reading Marius suggests, a misunderstanding of the pursuit of pleasure. Marius is an aesthetic Bildungsroman of a young man’s coming of age in Antonine Rome.14 The young Marius (in many senses an historical avatar for Pater himself) devotes himself to crafting elaborate prose and pursuing beauty. In response, some of Marius’ acquaintances label this ‘severe and laborious youth’ a hedonist.15 Pater criticizes the lumping together of very different experiences in such a description, from drink to religious enthusiasm, to scholarly curiosity: Really, to the phase of reflection through which Marius was then passing, the charge of ‘hedonism’, whatever its true weight may be, was not properly applicable at all. Not pleasure, but fullness of life, and ‘insight’ as conducing to that fullness—​energy, 13 

On Pater and the scandal, see Billie Andrew Inman, ‘Estrangement and Connection: Walter Pater, Benjamin Jowett, and William M. Hardinge’, in Laurel Brake and Ian Small (eds), Pater in the 1990s (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 1991), 1–​20. On Hellenism and homoeroticism, see Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Stefano Evangelista, ‘Victorian Platonists: Platonic Dons, Adolescent Bodies: Benjamin Jowett, John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater’, in George Rousseau (ed.), Children and Sexuality from the Greeks to the Great War (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2007), 206–​230. For a counterpoint, see William Shuter, ‘The “Outing” of Walter Pater’, Nineteenth-​Century Literature, 48 (1994), 480–​506. 14  On forms and feelings in Marius, see Stephen Arata, ‘The Impersonal Intimacy of Marius the Epicurean’, in Rachel Ablow (ed.), The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 131–​156; David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 59–​82. 15  Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (London: J. M. Dent, 1934), 86. Further page references to this edition will be given in the text.

Aestheticism and the Politics of Pleasure    603 variety, and choice of experience, including noble pain and sorrow even, loves such as those in the exquisite old story of Apuleius, sincere and strenuous forms of the moral life, such as Seneca and Epictetus—​whatever form of human life, in short might be heroic, impassioned, ideal: from these the ‘new Cyrenaicism’ of Marius took its criterion of values. (87)

The luminous journey of Marius’ ‘sensations and ideas’ as he moves, by means of passionate friendships, through this phase of ‘new Cyrenaicism’ towards Epicureanism and primitive Christianity, attempts to recapture an ethical understanding of the pursuit of pleasure. The pleasures of the self that Pater brings to the fore in Marius are those that tend to virtue and tranquillity of mind; care for the self, but also tenderness to others. Marius, however, has to experience the full play of pleasure, from the low pursuits of his first love, Flavian, to the resigned self-​sacrifice of the Christian martyrs, in order to reach his final state of peaceful detachment and self-​government. Pater’s novel insists in the very density of its surface and style that to find pleasure in life is a process of struggle and discrimination that tends to a better self: the implied reader is set to work on this journey in the act of reading itself.16 Like Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Marius tries to teach life what may be learned from the world of aesthetic experience. In the case of both novels, setting the central questions of Aestheticism in narrative form allows the reader to see the pursuit of pleasure as a process through which the self can develop. Wilde’s Dorian Gray dramatizes the separation of the self that occurs when life is lived as a series of discrete intense moments: Dorian’s body is split from his soul; that secret split in turn separates him further still, keeping him apart from even his closest friends. Pater’s novel also warns against separation of the self, correcting the impression that aesthetes were covert egotists, indulging in purely selfish pleasures. The narrative of Marius is that of the pleasure that comes through the continual encounter with what is strange and new, moving beyond the self through loving others and offering houseroom to their thoughts and ideas. Both novels search after the impossible perfection of a human life lived as and through the fullness and integrity of beauty. As Josephine Guy suggests, the aesthetes provide one of the earliest examples of an avant-​garde artistic movement in Britain and it is easy to project hedonism, in its now common sense, backwards onto this as the expected ‘lifestyle’ accompaniment to any movement seeking to appal its elders with the shock of the new.17 From the Pre-​ Raphaelite Brotherhood overdosing on laudanum and ‘stunners’ (luscious artist’s models) to the self-​loathing ennui of Arthur Symons’s decadent London Nights (1895) in the music halls, the painters and poets associated with Aestheticism give good material to those after the nineteenth-​century equivalent of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. But the

16  For more on this, see Andrew Miller, The Burdens of Perfection: Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-​ Century British Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 5–​20. 17  Josephine Guy, The British Avant Garde: The Theory and Politics of Tradition (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1991).

604    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture classical scholar Pater was a man of such careful privacy and unremarkableness in social life that at his death Wilde rather meanly wondered if he had ever actually been alive.18 For Pater the Hellenistic philosophy of the pursuit of pleasure was the thing in itself, not the habits and pleasures commonly associated with it. It was this, perhaps, that apparently made Pater wish, allegedly, that people would not use the term hedonism in relation to him because ‘it gives such a wrong impression to those who do not know Greek’.19 In the next two sections of this chapter I  examine how the value of pleasure in Aestheticism resisted two important aspects of literary—​and political—​culture in nineteenth-​ century Britain. First, Pater’s theory of ‘aesthetic criticism’ subverted Matthew Arnold’s argument for the social mission of the critic in ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (1865) and Culture and Anarchy (1869). The emphasis on individual taste in Aestheticism countered a growing sense that literature and criticism were means to ensure national excellence and consensus in a democratic era. Second, the exploration of the variety of pleasure by aesthetes recaptured hedonism from the school of philosophy that is often associated with a narrowing of all that is sensual and imaginative: Utilitarianism. One vital feature of Aestheticism was its rejection of the idea that art, and pleasure in beauty more generally, should be useful, rather than an end in itself. This yoking of pleasure with uselessness and sterility has important connections to the movement’s sexual politics; it also, however, subverted the Utilitarian political economy that had dominated theories of hedonism in Britain during the nineteenth century.

Aestheticism and Democracy: The Individual and the Mass In his review of William Morris’s poetry in 1868, Pater reflected on the desolation and ‘bitterness of life’. The image of existence in modernity was of one ‘washed out beyond the bar in a sea at ebb, losing even his personality, as the elements of which he is composed pass into new combinations. Struggling, as he must, to save himself, it is himself that he loses at every moment.’20 In the previous year Matthew Arnold published ‘Dover Beach’ (1867) which also meditates on the isolation and uncertainties of the self in an era in which the ‘sea of faith’ is in retreat. Arnold’s fragile poetic resolution is to reach out to 18 Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 50. The source of the comment is Max Beerbohm: a wonderfully unreliable

narrator. 19  ‘I wish they wouldn’t call me “a hedonist”; it produces such a bad effect on the minds of people who don’t know Greek’—Edmund Gosse, ‘Walter Pater’, in Critical Kit-​Kats (New York: Dodd and Mead, 1903), 258. 20  [Pater], ‘Poems of Mr William Morris’, 311. These lines were not included in the later reprinting of this article as the Conclusion to Renaissance. The original is thus a much more melancholy reflection on the ‘strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves’.

Aestheticism and the Politics of Pleasure    605 the truth and virtue of love and companionship in order to hold fast against the ‘ignorant armies’ of the age: his speaker remains standing on the shore. Pater’s modern self, by contrast, has already been swept across the bar and out to sea, alone. This doubled reflection of the self on the shore of modernity mirrors the differing responses of Arnold and Pater to the social changes of their era.21 In the later 1860s, when both men were formulating their critical writings about art and literature, the mass extension of voting rights for men in the 1867 Reform Act pushed Britain towards democracy. For the first time in Britain the rule of numbers, rather than—​in the etymological meaning of aristocracy—​the rule of the best, came close to being reality (for male voters, at least). Arnold’s writings about democracy and its likely effect on culture are fearful about the future of a nation ruled exclusively, as he thought it would be, by the ‘Philistines’ of the English middle class and their ‘narrow, harsh, unintelligent, and unattractive spirit and culture’. The middle classes might rule England only ‘for a season, but they will certainly Americanise it. They will rule it by their energy, but they will deteriorate it by their low ideals and want of culture.’22 Arnold worried that new middle-​class leaders would fail to win the spirits of the ‘more liberal’ working-​class mass below them, leaving ‘society […] in danger of falling into anarchy’.23 Arnold’s solution to this prospect of a divided nation was to think of culture and criticism as its antidote. Rather than mass education and mass rule tending downwards to the lowest common denominator, Arnold argued that the critic had an important role in the future of the nation: to select, preserve and communicate ‘the best that has been thought and known in the world’.24 High and serious thinking in literature and art offered an alternative means of selection and discrimination in a new world in which any man could choose his political leader, swayed by all sorts of misinformation: judgements of taste, that is, became a means to excellence in the era of the mass. The function of criticism, ‘high reason and a fine culture’, was to sustain the quality of a democratic nation.25 Above all, the critic could remain distant from the battling interest groups of party politics and religion and provide a living example to all of impartial judgement, seeing each object ‘as in itself it really is’.26 In the introduction to the Renaissance, Pater quoted Arnold’s vision of the mission of criticism only to stand it on its head. If Arnold’s critic was on the shore, striving for

21 

For a brilliant reading of these differences in terms of sexual politics, see James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 183–​239. 22  Matthew Arnold, ‘Democracy’, from Popular Education in France (1861), in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, 11 vols., ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–​77), ii. 16, 26. 23  Arnold, ‘Democracy’, 26. 24  Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869), in Complete Prose, v. 113. 25  Arnold, ‘Democracy’, 24; ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, in Complete Prose, iii. 283, 275, 279. 26  Arnold, ‘Function of Criticism’, 258.

606    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture objective detachment and fighting against the indifferent sea, Pater’s aesthetic critic was one who could live in the cross-​currents of subjectivity: ‘To see the object as in itself it really,’ has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever; and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly.27

Arnold’s quest for perfection in the era of democracy called for the careful treasuring of knowledge to give a sense of national unity around the truth of things; Pater’s aesthetic critic merely required a certain kind of temperament responsive to beauty as he or she was borne alone along the stream of life. There is a clear potential for anarchic freedom in Pater’s Aestheticism, as Josephine Guy points out in her essay in this volume. But despite the apparent individualism of Pater’s theory, Aestheticism was given social force by writers, poets, and painters who were intensely fraternal and communal in ethos, from the Pre-​Raphaelite Brotherhood, to the pairing of aunt and niece which made up the poet ‘Michael Field’, to the artistic colonies of London’s Bedford Park and beyond.28 What made Pater’s work such a rallying point for younger artists and writers was not so much its insistence that appreciation of beauty was individual, but rather its melancholy acceptance of that solitary individual as the centre of all experience in modernity. Pater provided a means to acknowledge that isolation was a shared experience—​and to find something beautiful in that experience against the grain. In the central place given to temperament in the works of Pater and his followers, Aestheticism sets up a paradoxical relationship between itself and democracy. Aestheticism often represented itself in terms that later became commonplace in literary histories of the period. In the era of mass literacy and democracy, such a narrative runs, the figuring of aesthetic sensibility as something rarefied and confined to special sensitive temperaments sets these sensitive souls off as a coterie in the world of mass culture.29 When everyone on the street corner can read, and every plutocrat buy up Old Masters, aesthetic refinement creates a new sort of aristocracy—​one of taste. But at the same time that Aestheticism might be seen to be an exclusive movement as a result, the

27 Pater, Renaissance, p. xxix. 28 

On communalism and Aestheticism, see Diana Maltz, British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes: Beauty for the People (New York: Palgrave, 2005); Maltz, ‘Ardent Service: Female Erotics and New Life Ethics in Gertrude Dix’s The Image Breakers’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 17, no. 2 (2012), 147–​163. See also Marion Thain, ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Anna Vaninskaya, William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880–​1914 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). 29  Holbrook Jackson and Alfred Orage were invoking this narrative as early as 1914. See Orage’s review of Jackson’s The Eighteen-​Nineties in ‘Reader and Writers’, New Age, 14 (16 April 1914), 754–​755. A version of this literary history is in John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–​1940 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992).

Aestheticism and the Politics of Pleasure    607 emphasis on feeling, taste, and pleasure gave space within the movement for those more often marginalized in critical discourse. Arnold’s emphasis on objectivity growing from a thorough knowledge of ‘the best that has been thought and known in the world’ was, for example, a difficult doctrine of perfection for middle-​class women or those from a less privileged educational background to aspire to. If Arnold thought that mass democracy needed to strive towards perfect culture for all through reformed education, Pater accepted that even those in the here and now could be gifted with sensibility to beauty against all odds. It was not, he argued, ‘a correct abstract definition of beauty’ that a critic required, but rather ‘a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects’.30 The very range of objects that could be seen as beautiful in aesthetic discourse did much to lend authority to women artists and writers. In 1882, an article in the Burlington Magazine defended Aestheticism against a welter of current satire—​from George Du Maurier’s caricatures of Maudle and Postlethwaite in Punch, to burlesques like The Colonel (1881) and Patience (1881) on the stage. The author worried (quite presciently) that in generations to come, it would be these materials that would be widely reproduced and readers would wonder ‘how people could be so ridiculous, utterly ignoring the fact that the cultured taste which appears in their homes, from a kitchen utensil to a carpet and wall-​paper and a lady’s dress […] were the work of these so-​called ridiculous people’.31 Aestheticism brought artistic taste into the feminized domestic sphere and enabled a revaluation of the crafts already practised by women as arts.32 For all the evidence there is of the confining idealization of women within Pre-​Raphaelite art, recent scholarship has helped us to understand how the wider Aesthetic movement gave space in which women could also be valued as producers of art.33 In addition to the important part played by women poets, embroidery, dress design, interior design, book illustration, and book binding were but a few of the art forms that the wider Aesthetic movement fostered. A radical ideal of Aestheticism was that the whole of life could be made a pleasure by the presence of beauty at every moment, in every day, however humdrum and homely.

30 Pater, Renaissance, xxx. 31 

‘A Plea for Aestheticism’, Burlington: A High Class Monthly Magazine, 2 (July 1882) cited by Walter Hamilton, The Aesthetic Movement in England (2nd edn., London: Reeves and Turner, 1882), 125; the Burlington published articles by Lady Jane Wilde on the laws of dress and other subjects and poems by Wilde himself. 32  For this process of feminization as colonization of aspects of femininity alongside the denigration of actual womanhood in dandyism, see Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 105; Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism, 19. 33  J. B. Bullen, The Pre-​Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Pre-​Raphaelite Poetry, Painting and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Kathy Psomiades, Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997); Talia Shaffer and Kathy Psomiades (eds), Women and British Aestheticism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999); Talia Shaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late Victorian England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000).

608    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture The Burlington suggested that Aestheticism had in some sense democratized the arts in terms of class as well as gender in extending beauty to the home. The valuation of objects by beauty rather than cost was ‘rapidly spreading through all classes of society’: good taste is no longer an expensive luxury to indulge in—​the commonest articles of domestic use are now fashioned in accordance with its laws, and the poorest may have within their homes, at the cost of a few pence, cups and saucers and jugs and teapots, more artistic in form and design than were to be found twenty years ago in any homes but those of the cultured rich.34

This emphasis on decorative arts is a useful corrective to conclusions drawn too easily from analysing aesthetic prose style. For while the artists and makers influenced by William Morris and John Ruskin gravitated towards a craft-​based clarity and simplicity, the poetry and prose of Aestheticism tended to be associated with obscurity, self-​ conscious style, and what Pater termed euphuism: if Morris’s work sought to make beauty part of the life of all, there is a tendency to assume, as I have done elsewhere, that the aesthetic style associated with Pater, Wilde, and others, wanted to be legible only to a select few.35 In his essay on style from 1888, Pater certainly made a case for crafting prose into fine art rather than simply reflecting truth. Like all art, Pater argued, prose was the ‘representation of […] fact as connected with the soul, of a specific personality, its preferences, its volition, its power’.36 It was not just imitative, but shaped to give pleasure to the writer. For the lover of words, the inherited riches of language were to be scraped and crafted like a block of marble, elaborate here, simple and direct there, to release the idea into perfection. Aesthetic prose presented the reader with ‘a challenge for minute consideration; the attention of the writer, in every minutest detail, being a pledge that it is worth the reader’s while to be attentive too, that the writer is dealing scrupulously with his instrument, and therefore, indirectly with the reader himself also’.37 Contrary to the common representation of aesthetic prose as florid and self-​indulgent, Pater argued that to ‘really strenuous minds there is a pleasurable stimulus in the challenge for a continuous effort on their part, to be rewarded by securer and more intimate grasp of the author’s sense. Self-​restraint, a skilful economy of means, ascêsis, that too has a beauty of its own.’38 Such a quest for perfection, such informed patience, such pleasure in difficulty might seem to restrict the readership of aesthetic writing to an educated male elite. It certainly was also the basis on which later critics, like Alfred Orage of the radical modernist journal the New Age, for instance, suggested that the writings of Pater and Wilde

34 

‘A Plea for Aestheticism’, in Hamilton, The Aesthetic Movement, 126–​127. On euphuism and aesthetic style, see Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 104–​174. Ruth Livesey, Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–​1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 18–​43. 36  Walter Pater, Appreciations: with an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan, 1889), 7. 37 Pater, Appreciations, 10. 38 Pater, Appreciations, 14. 35 

Aestheticism and the Politics of Pleasure    609 were pathologically decadent because they elevated part over whole and rated style over content.39 Yet the strong sense in aesthetic critical writing that new texts were just the reworking of old forms through a fresh personality opened up space for more inclusive dialogue. Wilde’s writings, for instance, interpolate and paraphrase other texts, often without attribution in the earlier lectures, or, more frequently in the later critical essays published as Intentions (1891), as a dense patchwork of references Lawrence Danson has described as ‘literary bricolage’.40 Wilde’s critical prose not only offers such space to others’ voices and arguments (whether attributed or otherwise), but also weaves them together in such a manner that no one voice is wholly silenced. From his early wholesale reproduction of Pater’s Conclusion, alongside bits of Swinburne, Morris, and Ruskin in his 1882 American lecture ‘The English Renaissance in Art’, Wilde’s conflation of varied aesthetic views is a critical tendency in his works: a radical openness to the resources of pleasure and beauty wherever they might be found. A good case in point is Wilde’s ‘The Critic as Artist’ which reworked Arnold’s ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ even in its original title—​‘The True Function and Value of Criticism’—​when it appeared in the periodical the Nineteenth Century in 1890. In Wilde’s critical dialogue, Ernest concludes that the function of aesthetic criticism is ‘to see the object as in itself it really is not’ after hearing Gilbert’s defence of criticism as an art form in its own right.41 But despite such direct subversion, Arnold’s argument remains alive in the dialogic nature of the essay, just, perhaps, as Lord Henry’s arguments for the virtues of hedonism outlive the death of Dorian Gray. This formal inclusiveness, this sense of continual dialogue with textual precursors, implicit or explicit, more subtly insinuated in Pater’s own works, has implications for the politics of Aestheticism. It is of its very nature hospitable to the voices of others and evokes the Socratic forms of Athenian democracy. Aestheticism’s inclusive idea of beauty, defined by individual appreciation, made it a force that united many pursuing a radical change in society. Cultural critics who followed Arnold might want to avoid anarchy by carefully spreading culture to the unfortunate; but aesthetic critics inspired by Pater—​and Ruskin—​were more likely to yearn for a revolution to liberate all into a world of beauty.

Aestheticism, Utilitarianism, and the Pursuit of Pleasure By the later nineteenth century the legislative structures of Britain had been fundamentally reshaped by the Utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham and his 39 

‘R.H.C.’ [Alfred Orage], ‘Readers and Writers’, New Age, 13 (12 June 1913), 177. Orage, here as elsewhere, reflects Nietzsche’s view of decadence. 40  Lawrence Danson, Wilde’s Intentions: The Artist in His Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 129. 41  Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, 159.

610    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture followers, the philosophic radicals. For Bentham self-​interested pleasure seeking was the central ‘spring of action’ in man and rational government needed to organize society on that understanding, not abstract ideals of rights and duties. Bentham’s idea that pleasure could be worked out using ‘felicific calculus’ and his notorious assertion that ‘push-​pin is of equal value to the arts […] of music and poetry’ seem a world away from the interest in sensations of pleasure in Aestheticist writing.42 As Kathleen Blake has recently pointed out, however, scholarship in Victorian studies has tended to underestimate the place of pleasure in Benthamism, replicating the joyless version of Utilitarianism that features in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854).43 Much of the contemporary bite of the reclamation of hedonism by aesthetes came from snatching it away from its primary association in the 1860s with Utilitarian thinkers and political economists. In his seminal work Utilitarianism (1861), Bentham’s early disciple John Stuart Mill railed that the ‘common herd’ perpetually fell into the shallow mistake of using ‘utility’ to mean ‘the rejection, or the neglect, of pleasure in some of its forms; of beauty, or ornament, or of amusement’.44 Those who know anything, however, know that ‘every writer, from Epicurus to Bentham, who maintained the theory of utility, meant by it, not something to be contradistinguished from pleasure, but pleasure itself, together with exemption from pain; and instead of opposing the useful to the agreeable or ornamental have always declared that the useful means these, among other things’.45 As the nineteenth century progressed, the idea that behaviour could be predicted on the basis that human agents seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain did much to inform both the development of economic theory and broader culture.46 Within political and economic theories, however, as we can see even in Mill’s more temperate theorization, the pleasures of art and beauty take their place among other use values; valuable because humans desire them and seek to possess them. The idea that human beings seek pleasure—​or avoid pain—​unites the seemingly opposite political poles of Utilitarianism and Aestheticism in later nineteenth-​century Britain. Yet the two schools of thought diverge abruptly at the originary moment of sensation. The philosophy of Bentham (though to a much lesser extent, that of Mill) equated all sorts of pleasures as interchangeable. As Philip Mitsis argues, in the British empiricist tradition of Utilitarian thought, pleasure was a set of sensations that could be separated from its causes, analysed, ranked on a uniform scale, and then maximized by a 42 

Jeremy Bentham, The Rationale of Reward (London: Robert Heward, 1830), 206; this is more famously misquoted by J. S. Mill as ‘pushpin is as good as poetry’. 43  Kathleen Blake, The Pleasures of Benthamism: Victorian Literature, Utility, Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 44  John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Considerations of Representative Government (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), 6. 45 Mill, Utilitarianism, 6. 46  See Regenia Gagnier, The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 54–​60. Gagnier suggests the theory of marginal utility developed by Stanley Jevons, like Aestheticism, placed new stress on consumption towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Aestheticism and the Politics of Pleasure    611 conscious, introspective mind.47 Aestheticism, however, paused at the moment of pleasure; it made pleasure itself and the process of tasting its individuation the substance of existence and an end itself. In this refusal to separate conscious mind over and above the play of feelings, aesthetes like Pater gave new life to the classical hedonistic philosophies of Epicurus in the teeth of the British empiricist tradition. The radical literary politics of this distinction is apparent in the contrast between what the Utilitarian Mill writes about the pleasures of poetry and the poetics of the Pre-​Raphaelites. In Mill’s Autobiography (1873) he recounts how reading Wordsworth helped him out of a prolonged depression caused, he implies, by his Utilitarian education. His new-​ found passion for poetry—​and his belief that it gave him a fresh ability to feel—​led him to fall out with an old friend, J.A. Roebuck. Although possessed of ‘quick and strong sensibilities’, Roebuck, ‘like most Englishmen who have feelings, […] found his feelings stand very much in his way’ and ‘wished that his feelings should be deadened rather than quickened’. Mill worked hard to convince his friend ‘that the imaginative emotion which an idea, when vividly conceived, excites in us, is not an illusion but a fact, as real as any of the other qualities of objects; and […] quite consistent with the most accurate knowledge and most perfect practical recognition of all its physical and intellectual laws and relations’.48 Feeling the beauty of a sunset, Mill argued, was no hindrance to understanding the science of cloud vapour and acting on that knowledge, whilst it could be of real value in ‘the formation of character’. Poetry and art for Mill, despite his attentive reworking of Utilitarianism, are still means to an end: beauty is subservient to science. The peculiar quality of thought in poetry, he argues here and elsewhere, enables the reader to develop character through the exercise of the imagination and the extension of sympathy, complementing the core of the rational, decisive self. Mill’s writing on poetry is governed by the sense that such art is necessary because ‘feeling’ and ‘thought’—​body and mind—​are distinct and the dominant thinking mind can be refreshed by accessing feelings of pleasure. The disturbing nature of aesthetic writing lies in its resistance to a hierarchical division between mind and body and its claims for beauty and truth in embodied sensation itself. What scandalized conservative critics like Robert Buchanan about the aesthetic poetry of Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti was its refusal to elevate the mind and extend sympathetic thought, dwelling intensively on a singular moment of fleshly experience.49 Rossetti’s sonnet ‘Nuptial Sleep’ (1870), from his House of Life sequence, for instance, gives a moist permanence and immediacy to post-​coital separation: At length their long kiss severed, with sweet smart: […] Their bosoms sundered, with the opening start 47 

Phillip Mitsis, Epicurus’s Ethical Theory: The Pleasures of Invulnerability (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 13; 20. 48  John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (1873), in Collected Works, 33 vols., ed. John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–​91), i. 155–​157. See also Mill’s essays ‘Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties’ in that volume and on Bentham and Coleridge in vol. x of the Works. 49  The most famous of these attacks remains [Robert Buchanan] ‘Thomas Maitland’, ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr D. G. Rossetti’, Contemporary Review, 18 (1871), 334–​350.

612    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Of married flowers to either side outspread From the knit stem; yet still their mouths, burnt red, Fawned on each other where they lay apart.50

This sort of poetry is radical in part because it refuses to distinguish between ‘feeling’ and ‘thought’. Rossetti’s experiments with the sonnet form in the House of Life (1870; 1881) return again and again to the desire for an art form to crystallize a moment of pleasure as a thing of permanence: to make art a place where time, duration, and the forward march of the mind stop; and feeling is an end in itself. When Wilde announces in his preface to Dorian Gray that ‘All art is quite useless’, he thus—​in his usual manner—​turns two decades of Aestheticism’s resistance to Utilitarian political economy into a brilliantly polished epigram. Stating the uselessness of art not only refutes the idea that art should teach moral lessons but also undermines the Utilitarian idea that such pleasures were a means to an end, a moment the thinking mind passes through to get somewhere else. If we return briefly to the Conclusion to the Renaissance, Pater’s rejection of pleasure as consequential (a means to an end) there is clear in the notorious line, ‘Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end’.51 To assert the uselessness of art is to affirm its unique status as an experience in and of itself. The Aestheticist celebration of the uselessness of art mirrors contemporary arguments for the intensity of same-​sex desire: unlike normative heterosexual sex, homosexual practices were not a means to the ‘fruit’ of reproduction but an end of pleasure in itself. If there was one particular aspect of his Conclusion that Pater tried to rework in detail in Marius, it was this sense of the overall goal—​or telos—​of a life understood as the pursuit of pleasure. As Marius passes through the ‘New Cyrenaicism’, Pater’s narrator worries it risks making ‘a kind of idolatory of mere life’ and its natural gifts (89). Classical Cyrenaicism, as Philip Mitsis points out, and Pater certainly knew, argues that ‘we will gain more pleasure by viewing ourselves as discrete, momentary selves enjoying momentary episodes of pleasure’.52 In his Conclusion to the Renaissance Pater seemed to endorse such a vision of a fragmented self: ‘How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?’53 But by the time he published Marius, this idea of a self that only existed as episodes of intense feeling—​and that therefore could not be held to account—​had been subject to extensive satire as a convenient cover for social and sexual predation. Henry James’s fiction of the 1880s, for example, skewers the avarice and moral manipulation of self-​declared aesthetes.54 In The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Gilbert 50  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems (London: F. S. Ellis, 1870) via www.rossettiarchive.org/​docs/​1-​ 1870.1stedn.rad.html#A.R.31 [last accessed 15 September 2014]. 51 Pater, Renaissance, 152. 52 Mitsis, Epicurus’s Ethical Theory, 56. 53 Pater, Renaissance, 152. 54  On James’s complex relations to British Aestheticism, see Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990); and Michèle Mendelssohn, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).

Aestheticism and the Politics of Pleasure    613 Osmond’s apparent disinterest in common materialism in pursuit of moments of beauty prevents Isabel Archer from seeing that she is prey to a common fortune hunter and provides for Osmond’s monstrous self-​justification. Vernon Lee—​herself an aesthetic essayist much influenced by Pater—​also spiked the utter lack of social conscience in the poet/​painter anti-​hero of her 1884 novel Miss Brown. The discovery of incest in the woefully neglected hovels on his family estate merely inspires Walter Hamlin to write a new poem, whilst he ‘rescues’ and educates the beautiful Anne Brown in the expectation of her serving purely as his living canvas. The hedonism of Aestheticism had gained a dingy reputation by the 1880s, even amongst those strongly interested in the movement itself. As Pater seeks to remind readers of Marius, though, Epicurean philosophy differed from the ‘New Cyrenaic’ phase that Marius passes through. Epicurus laid much more holistic stress on the long-​term goal of life as happiness, or eudaimonia. All pleasures should be carefully tasted and balanced with this in mind. As Mitsis concludes, ‘Epicurus […] thinks that we will gain more pleasure by regarding ourselves as self-​ sufficient sages rationally planning for our future’ so ‘he can claim to be offering a more plausible conception of personal identity’ than Cyrenaic thought:  ‘one that requires more than a series of discrete, unrelated, episodic “selves”’.55 The ultimate goal for Epicurus is a state of bodily health and tranquillity of mind (ataraxia) in which the self is free from pain, complete, invulnerable, self-​sufficient. Pleasure, equally for Epicurus, is inseparable from virtue: ‘for the virtues have grown to be a part of living pleasantly, and living pleasantly is inseparable from them’.56 Wilde’s essay ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ (1891) explores this Epicurean philosophy of pleasure and the good life in order to undercut nineteenth-​century debate that contrasted Utilitarian political economy based on individualism with a communal socialist alternative.57 Wilde’s concepts of pleasure and art in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ are unambiguously Epicurean and individual in the teeth of contemporary associations of socialism with collective labour. For what man has sought for is, indeed, neither pain nor pleasure, but simply Life. Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly. When he can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilised, more himself. Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment. The new Individualism, for whose service Socialism, whether it wills it or not, is working, will be perfect harmony. […] It will be complete, and through it each man will attain to his perfection. The new Individualism is the new Hellenism.58

55 Mitsis, Epicurus’s Ethical Theory, 56. 56 

Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 239. Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Market Place: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986), 28–​29; Livesey, Socialism, 36–​40. 58  Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, in Complete Works, iv. 267–​268. 57 

614    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture As the end of poverty and ugliness, socialism offered an Epicurean answer to the quest for happiness. According to Wilde, only a socialist state could establish a secure economic basis in which the individual could be perfectly invulnerable and self-​sufficient, generating new art forms in a state of perfect bodily and mental tranquility. Wilde’s paradoxical version of socialism as intense individualism reflects an Epicurean understanding of happiness in which the good life is achieved through almost entirely inward states of being.

The Ethics of Aestheticism Like Pater, who believed he had mitigated the moral dangers of the Renaissance by exploring the pursuit of pleasure in Marius the Epicurean, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray refines on the ethics of his critical works. Dorian Gray explores the risks of transposing art and life, of applying aesthetic judgements to people and conflating beauty with virtue. Steeped in the atmosphere of Lord Henry’s aesthetic doctrines, Dorian gives away his soul on a whim to attain the perfect stasis and beauty of art, only to realize the ‘terrible reality of the soul’ at the novel’s conclusion.59 Since the moment of its publication the reception of Dorian Gray has veered between those who read it as an overt celebration of hedonism, a declaration of desire between men, a symbol of the dawn of decadence; and others who perceive its anti-​hero’s grisly end as a clear moral overriding all that goes before it. In a straightforwardly moral reading of the narrative, Dorian’s death confirms that no sin goes unpunished; mankind will never be able to escape the laws of time and consequence to live in the perfect freedom and stasis of art; and equating the appearance of beauty with virtue is positively dangerous. At the time of the publication of the first version in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1890, Wilde was glad to acknowledge such interpretations of the narrative in the face of some overwhelmingly vituperative notices in the press. In a letter Joseph Bristow has only recently brought to wider critical attention, Wilde thanked a correspondent for his ‘artistic and ethical appreciation’ of the story: ‘it has been very wrongly and stupidly assailed by the prurient, but I am overwhelmed by letters from people assuring me of the pleasure they have felt in reading a book that has beauty for its aim, and ethics for its subject matter’.60 In the Preface added to the extended 1891 edition of Dorian Gray, Wilde, however, seems to subvert his happy embrace of the ethics of his narrative. He not only adds his famous assertion of the uselessness of art, as we have seen, but also that ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written, that is all […]. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.’ But the Faustian element of the narrative—​Dorian’s almost 59 

Dorian Gray, 349. Letter to Sir George Scott Douglas, August 1890 (Karpelas Manuscript Library), cited by Bristow, ‘Introduction’, in Complete Works, vol. iii, p. li. 60 

Aestheticism and the Politics of Pleasure    615 accidental trading of his soul for a form of immortality—​is also brought to the surface in the later version. Wilde inserts Dorian’s willingness to ‘give [his] soul’ in exchange for the timelessness of the painting in addition to the extensive discussion between Lord Henry, Dorian, and Basil Hallward in ­chapter 6 about the relations between pleasure, happiness, and the good, and devises a further exchange between Dorian and Lord Henry about the loss of the soul in the penultimate chapter.61 The result of these revisions is a fresh emphasis on the failure of Dorian to ever really achieve aesthetic status, whatever Lord Henry might believe about him. Dorian, unlike a work of art, is divisible and fractured and cannot be experienced as a whole; he can never achieve Lord Henry’s definition of good: to be in harmony with oneself.62 Reviewing Pater’s Appreciations in 1890, Wilde concluded that the work demonstrated that ‘behind the perfection of a man’s style must lie the passion of a man’s soul’: body and soul; style and content; surface and depth strive for unity in this analysis.63 Dorian Gray thus does not turn away from Aestheticism; it rather gives narrative form to the critical argument that ‘Aesthetics are higher than ethics’ by suggesting that the pursuit of pleasure, correctly understood, must lead to the avoidance of sin.64 Like Dorian’s portrait, the novel is an aesthetic object that records the inevitable ugliness of vice as it draws the self away from harmony and self-​government. It plays out the risks consequent on cultivating desires that cannot be satisfied, unsettling the Epicurean aspiration to self-​ sufficiency, tranquillity, and detachment from the mass of human passions. Dorian cannot live a truly free and aesthetic life in the pursuit of pleasure because he is a fractured self, forever attached to the ugliness of his portrait. When Pater criticized the novel for its failure to reflect ‘true Epicureanism [which] aims at a complete though harmonious development of man’s entire organism’, including the moral sense, he got close to the heart of the matter but rather missed the point.65 Aesthetics are higher than ethics precisely because its truths are visible ones; and the true work of art, unlike Dorian’s failed translation, is a moment of perfect wholeness and completion.

Select Bibliography Dellamora, Richard, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Dowling, Linda, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1996). Dowling, Linda, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). Evangelista, Stefano, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009).

61 

See Bristow’s comments on these changes in Complete Works, iii, pp. liii–​liv. Complete Works, iii, 235. 63  Oscar Wilde, ‘Mr Pater’s Last Volume’, Speaker, 1 (22 March 1890), 319–​320. 64  Wilde, ‘Critic as Artist’, 204. 65  Walter Pater, ‘A Novel by Mr Oscar Wilde’, Bookman, 1 (November 1891), 59–​61. 62 

616    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Freedman, Jonathan, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990). Mendelssohn, Michèle, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). Psomiades, Kathy, Beauty’s Body:  Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997). Shaffer, Talia, and Kathy Psomiades (eds), Women and British Aestheticism (Charlottesville:  University Press of Virginia, 1999). Weir, David, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).

Chapter 32

Illu strations a nd t h e Victorian  Nov e l Julia Thomas

In the Margins Of Sensation Literature we hear talk enough; but we are beginning to be overwhelmed also with what may be called a Sensuous Literature,—​a literature in which the eye is appealed to at every step in aid of the intelligence or the fancy, in which woodcut and engraving assist or dominate the text.1

It is easy to see why this reviewer felt so ‘overwhelmed’. Writing in 1863, he was in the midst of a golden age of illustration, a period characterized by the rise of wood engraving, which enabled word and image to be printed together on the same page and generated a mass proliferation of illustrative images. Even the use of the word ‘illustration’ to mean a pictorial representation of a text dates from the early nineteenth century.2 This reviewer is not alone in expressing the powerful appeal of illustrations for the Victorian public. George du Maurier, who was himself both an illustrator and a novelist, describes an almost psychological desire for books to be illustrated in this period, a ‘felt want’, as he calls it.3 This desire manifested itself in a variety of ways, illustrations crossing generic boundaries and appearing in books for adults and children, in magazines and newspapers, to advertise products from crinolines to false teeth, to adorn poetry, novels, and short stories, and to report the events of the day. The Victorian world was one monumental and marvellous illustrated book. 1 

‘Illustrated Literature’, Reader (12 December 1863), 687. One of the earliest uses of this sense of the term appears in an 1817 advertisement for Richard Westall’s illustrations to the Works of Walter Scott. See the Oxford English Dictionary. 3  George du Maurier, ‘The Illustrating of Books: From the Serious Artist’s Point of View—​I’, Magazine of Art (January 1890), 349. 2 

618    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture To us, however, this book is often a closed one. Any teacher or student who has tried, and failed, to find modern editions of nineteenth-​century novels with their illustrations will be all too aware of how these images, apart from a few notable exceptions, have been hidden from view. The relative invisibility of Victorian illustration extends beyond its existence as a material artefact to its position as an object of critical study. One of the only theorists to mention illustration is Gérard Genette, who defines it as a ‘paratext’ (seuil in the original French), part of the supplementary material that surrounds a work and that also includes prefaces, titles, and dedications.4 Genette’s account fails to account for the complexities of the dialogue between word and image in illustration, relegating it to a position of exteriority and subordination; like other paratexts, illustration is ‘dedicated to the service’ of the text.5 Genette himself is acutely aware of this inadequacy and seems to struggle with illustration and its semiotic possibilities. In his otherwise exhaustive account, he lists illustration with examples of paratexts, but fails to analyse it in its own right. Illustration, he concludes, is an ‘immense continent’, and to ‘examine this subject in its full scope, one would need not only the historical information I don’t have but also a technical and iconological skill [… .] I will never have’. ‘That study’, he writes, ‘exceeds the means of a plain “literary person”.’6 The interdisciplinarity of illustration, its gesturing beyond the expertise of the ‘plain “literary person”’, means that it has fallen by the wayside in both literary criticism and art history, which have tended, at best, to treat these pictures alongside other types of visual images with little regard for their specificity, or, at worst, to ignore them altogether. One of the reasons for this sidelining of illustration is that it is difficult to shake off the assumption that the pictures are subservient to an autonomous and privileged text, which is still largely dominated by the ghostly presence of its author. This is despite the fact that the Victorian illustrated novel actively undermines this notion precisely because it is the product of multiple ‘creators’: the writer, the artist, the engraver or etcher, and the publisher, who was often responsible for commissioning the images. Far from the text being the primary partner, a variety of publishing practices in the period saw illustrations appearing at different stages in the genesis of novels. In some novels (including many by Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope) illustrations appeared from the outset, so that the text was always read alongside its pictures. In other instances, however, it was the pictures that came first. It was fairly common, especially in albums and annuals, for writers to be asked to devise the words to accompany images. The Pickwick Papers (1836–​7) originated as sketches by the artist, Robert Seymour, which Dickens was commissioned to ‘illustrate’ with his text. Later in the century, the illustrations for W. H. Ainsworth’s novel, Boscobel or, The Royal Oak (1872) came before and inspired the novel.7 The activity of writing to pictures was also encouraged by publishing companies, which bought up 4  Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (1987; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 5 Genette, Paratexts, 12. 6 Genette, Paratexts, 406. 7  See Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image 1830–​1870 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 281.

Illustrations and the Victorian Novel    619 woodblocks and electrotypes for reuse in different contexts and, in turn, sold them on to other printers. Even when the text did come first, publishers testing the waters before commissioning illustrations, the pictures in subsequent editions could have a significant impact on the novel. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–​2), which was originally published in America without illustrations, was issued from the very beginning in Britain with pictures that determined how the text and its racial politics were read.8 As the example of Uncle Tom’s Cabin suggests, even if illustrations were not initially present, once they were included, they dramatically changed the meanings of the novel. The preface to the illustrated edition of Florence Montgomery’s novel Misunderstood (1874; illustrated by George du Maurier), which had first appeared without illustrations in 1869, draws attention to the addition of the pictures: ‘the Illustrations’, the author writes, ‘may serve to heighten any interest that her little heroes may have inspired, just as we take pleasure in seeing pictures of people and places we have often heard of, but are not likely ever to see’.9 Montgomery’s remark implies that the illustrated edition will be purchased by people who have read the text and are familiar with the story and characters, the images allowing readers to ‘see’ the people and places they have already read about. Illustration, then, functions as a commercial device for selling the book twice in the same market. It is the apparent pre-​eminence of the text, however, that reveals the different mechanisms involved in an illustrated book: the reading experience is now a visual as well as a verbal one in which the pictures enhance the appeal of the novel. It is perhaps the very complexities of Victorian illustration both as a publishing practice and as a mode of signification that have led to its marginalization. It is telling, for instance, that there is no standard bibliographic formula for describing an illustration, a lack of uniformity evident in the inconsistent ways in which illustrations are referenced in scholarly works, with details like the names of the artist, engraver, or etcher, the dimensions of the image, or the means by which the picture is reproduced, frequently left out. This issue is not insignificant; neither is it simply a matter of how an illustration is described. Rather, it has implications for how an illustration is defined, what it is, or what it is assumed to be. It matters that the materiality of the picture in the form of its size, mode of reproduction, even artist, can be so easily dismissed; it also matters that an illustration can be subsumed or defined by the textual work in which it appears, its own identity erased in the process. These discrepancies hint at the ambiguities and problems surrounding the status of illustration and its relation to the words it accompanies. Is illustration primarily visual, textual, or a curious hybrid? Is it integral to the text, or can it stand on its own? And what of the text itself: can it be read without its illustrations? All of these questions come down to a seemingly basic, yet fundamental, one: how do illustrations generate meanings?

8  See Julia Thomas, Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image (Athens, O.: Ohio University Press, 2004), 21–​51. 9  Florence Montgomery, Misunderstood (1869; London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1874), preface to illustrated edition.

620    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture

Illustration Studies Although Victorian illustrations have been marginalized, there has been some critical work, much of it undertaken on the fringes of academic disciplines, that has been invaluable in providing a platform for a study of the genre. This work has tended to adopt one or a combination of three analytical approaches: the first explores the development of the technical processes involved in illustration, particularly the dominance of wood engraving in the middle of the century;10 the second focuses on the parties involved in illustration (authors, artists, engravers, publishers) and the relationships between them;11 and the third approach situates the work within the context of artistic schools, traditions, or movements.12 These three ways of discussing Victorian illustration bring with them certain assumptions about how this mode of representation signifies: those that focus on reproductive techniques are concerned primarily with the materiality of the illustrated book and its place in print culture; those that look at the relationship between authors and artists explore the creative processes involved in producing the images and texts; and those that examine the illustrator as artist tend to draw on biography and/​or the disciplinary procedures and definitions of art history. What is often missing from these approaches, though, is the question of how an illustration makes its meanings in relation to the text. More specifically, illustration has rarely been identified as a form of meaning production that is generated not so much by the author, artist or technique, but in the very act of reading. This analysis of how illustration makes its meanings was advocated by the Victorians themselves. As a young man, Edward Burne-​Jones was so inspired by Richard Doyle’s illustrations to Thackeray’s novel The Newcomes (1853–​5) that he made a plea for the proper study of these images: ‘Engravings have of late become a very essential feature in book-​making, so that their very frequency alone, as testifying the direction of public taste, requires that this long silence and oblivion of their merits should be broken, and they should be forthwith acknowledged as a subject of criticism.’13 For Burne-​Jones, these illustrations should not be overlooked or taken for granted but closely studied, and this activity took on some urgency as illustrations, which could now be reproduced relatively cheaply and in bulk, moved beyond the elite collector to penetrate working-​and middle-​class homes. Burne-​ Jones argued that there was a responsibility on the part of the artist to produce ‘truthful’ illustrations that had an instructive purpose, but the onus was also on viewers to ‘learn to read a picture as we would a poem’, to examine them carefully and critically.14 10 

See, for example, John Buchanan-​Brown, Early Victorian Illustrated Books: Britain, France and Germany, 1820–​1860 (London: British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2005); Geoffrey Wakeman, Victorian Book Illustration: The Technical Revolution (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1973). 11  See, for example, N. John Hall, Trollope and His Illustrators (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1980); Michael Steig, Dickens and Phiz (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978). 12  See, for example, Susan P. Casteras (ed.), Pocket Cathedrals: Pre-​Raphaelite Book Illustration (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1991); Paul Goldman, Victorian Illustration: The Pre-​Raphaelites, the Idyllic School and the High Victorians (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996). 13  Edward Burne-​Jones, ‘Essay on The Newcomes’, Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (January 1856), 59. 14  Burne-​Jones, ‘Essay on The Newcomes’, 59.

Illustrations and the Victorian Novel    621 It is this recognition of illustration as a ‘subject of criticism’ that can be seen in a number of discussions of the genre that have emerged in recent years.15 Such work, I suggest, can be regarded as the seeds of an emergent illustration studies, although this is far from an organized or established collective. What draws these approaches together is an awareness of the validity of illustration as a distinct object of study that requires specific vocabularies, methodologies, and ways of critical thinking. The emphasis of illustration studies is on the complex ways in which illustration signifies and its importance as a cultural and aesthetic practice that influences the process of reading and interpretation. Illustration studies has a crucial role to play in discussions of the history of the book and accounts of the dialectic between word and image. While it is open to a range of different historical, critical, and disciplinary perspectives, its recent evolution from within Victorian studies is indicative not only of the ubiquity of such images at this particular moment, but also the relevance of illustrations for an understanding of nineteenth-​century culture more generally. In what follows, I shall examine how issues central to what I have termed illustration studies manifest themselves in the Victorian illustrated novel.

The Meanings of Illustration The reader of the illustrated novel alternates between words and pictures, reading and viewing, in a way that complicates the linearity of the text. Some Victorian illustrations were positioned before the text, so that the reader encountered the image before reading a word. Such was the case in the serialized novels that appeared in periodicals and magazines like Once a Week and the Cornhill, where the picture was often placed at the head of the instalment. In book form, frontispieces and illustrated title pages also put the pictures first. Many of Dickens’s novels were published in monthly parts in which two etched plates were included after an advertising section and before the text. When the actor William Macready received one of the final instalments of the Old Curiosity Shop (1840–​1), which appeared in the serial Master Humphrey’s Clock, it was the illustration by George Cattermole that first caught his eye: ‘Found at home […] an onward number of Master Humphrey’s Clock. I saw one print in it of the dear dead child that gave a dead chill through my blood. I dread to read it, but must get it over.’16 15 

See, for example, the work on illustration by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, including The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin-​de-​Siècle Illustrated Books (Aldershot: Scolar, 1995) and Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture 1855–​1875 (Athens, O.: Ohio University Press, 2011); Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge, ‘The Plot Thickens: Toward a Narratological Analysis of Illustrated Serial Fiction in the 1860s’, Victorian Studies, 51, no. 1 (Autumn 2008), 65–​101; Stuart Sillars, The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709–​1875 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); David Skilton, ‘The Relation Between Illustration and Text in the Victorian Novel: A New Perspective’, in Karl Josef Höltgen, Peter M. Daly, and Wolfgang Lottes (eds), Word and Visual Imagination: Studies in the Interaction of English Literature and the Visual Arts (Erlangen: Universitatsbibliothek Erlangen-​Nürnberg, 1988), 303–​25. 16  The Journal of William Charles Macready 1832–​1851, ed. J. C. Trewin (London: Longmans, 1967), 169.

622    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture As Macready’s comment implies, these illustrations act like film trailers or spoilers by showing what is to come in the story and, in so doing, reverse the apparent temporal sequence of the novel, placing pictures, which the artist has here produced in response to the words, prior to the text. It is this notion of a pictorial before-​ness that is suggested in George Eliot’s remark to Frederic Leighton, the illustrator of Romola (1862–​3), that illustrations ‘form a sort of overture to the text’.17 As an ‘overture’, illustrations introduce the text, but they can also influence how the subsequent words are read, or even if they are read at all. One nineteenth-​century critic noted how three out of four people, on taking up a book for the first time, would look to see if there were any illustrations before reading a page and would lay it aside in disappointment if there were not.18 Such remarks testify to the prevalence of illustration, but they also expose the specific type of reading that it generates: one in which the images are prioritized, looked at and ‘read’ before the text. Even if illustrations did not physically come before the words, readers often privileged them by looking for and at the pictures first, a practice that was facilitated in books because the images were printed on thicker paper, making them easier to locate. The viewing of an illustration does not end with this initial, and often prior, glance, however. Rather, the reader of the illustrated novel moves back and forth between text and image, each informing how the other is interpreted. Although only certain aspects of the text are actually illustrated, therefore, the presence of the images shapes and colours the work as a whole. Alluding to his childhood reading of Dickens’s novels, du Maurier describes the etchings ‘printed on those ever-​welcome pages of thick yellow paper, which one used to study with such passionate interest before reading the story, and after, and between’.19 As well as illustrations being viewed ‘before’ and ‘between’ the text, du Maurier states that the pictures have an afterlife that lingers even when the words are gone:  ‘they may continue to haunt the memory when the letterpress they illustrate is forgotten’, he writes, even when that ‘letterpress’ is composed by the likes of Dickens: ‘One may have forgotten much that Mr Pecksniff has thought, or said, or done in this world; but what he looked like, never!’20 It is not just the way illustrations are read or their position relative to the text that disrupts the novel’s linear progression, however. Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge have examined the subject matter and content of illustrations in order to explore the ways in which they can be proleptic, anticipating what is to come, and analeptic, pointing back in or recalled by the narrative.21 This has particular effects in the serial fiction that Leighton and Surridge discuss, but it can also be seen in illustrations that appeared in book form. A picture in Misunderstood, for example, shows the figure of Miles, a young boy still in his petticoats, looking up at his older brother, Humphrey, who holds a couple of ears of corn in his hand. The caption reads ominously, ‘ “They will never ripen now,” repeated little Miles, sorrowfully’ (Figure 32.1). 17 

George Eliot to Frederic Leighton (10 September 1862), in The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), iv. 1862–​1868, 55. 18  ‘Book-​Prints’, Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts (30 August 1862), 135. 19  Du Maurier, ‘The Illustrating of Books’, 350. 20 Du Maurier, ‘The Illustrating of Books’, 350. 21  See Leighton and Surridge, ‘The Plot Thickens’.

Illustrations and the Victorian Novel    623

Figure 32.1  George du Maurier, ‘“They will never ripen now,” repeated little Miles, sorrowfully’, 109 mm x 107 mm, wood engraving by Joseph Swain. Illustration for Florence Montgomery, Misunderstood (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1874), facing p. 37.

The reader is led to believe that it is the fragile Miles who will ‘never ripen’. It is only at the end of the novel that we realize the true significance of the picture when it is Humphrey who lies dying. At this tragic moment, the reader is encouraged to recall this illustration when the boys’ father remembers the scene: ‘He seemed to see and hear it all with startling distinctness. Wherever he looked, he saw Humphrey sitting on the top of

624    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture the gate, with the ears of corn in his destroying hand, and Miles looking up sorrowfully at him.’22 This picture, then, is both an illustration of the original event and of the father’s later reminiscences. For those readers of the illustrated edition already familiar with the story, viewing this picture with the knowledge of Humphrey’s death gives it a particular significance and poignancy. In Misunderstood the reader recalls the illustration as the father remembers the event. In one of the images in Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm (1861–​2), illustrated by John Everett Millais, there is an added layer of complexity because the picture shows an incident that has occurred previously in the novel (although it was not illustrated at this point) and is now being recounted by one of the characters (Figure 32.2). The motivation for this illustration, which has the enigmatic caption ‘Never is a very long word’, is a conversation between Peregrine Orme and Lady Staveley about what Madeline, Lady Staveley’s daughter, has said to her mother about Peregrine’s offer of marriage. Lady Staveley reports the conversation she has had with her daughter and it is this earlier conversation that is illustrated rather than the actual conversation that is taking place between Peregrine Orme and Lady Staveley. This illustration is analeptic in that it alludes to an event that happened earlier, but it is also a depiction of the episode as it is remembered by one of the characters. The idea of (faulty) memory is built into the image itself, Millais getting the finer details of this incident, as it is previously described, wrong: Trollope has Lady Staveley sitting on a sofa near her daughter and then making room for her so that they can they sit together, while the picture shows the figures sitting on two chairs. This inconsistency might have arisen simply because Millais did not reread Trollope’s earlier textual description, or perhaps he favoured the angular positioning that the two chairs allowed, but it suggests, even if unintentionally, a character’s memory of an event rather than the event itself. While illustrations can point backwards or forwards in the text, the text itself can refer to the illustrations. At an extraordinary moment in Orley Farm the reader is instructed by the narrator to look back at one of the illustrations: In an early part of this story I have endeavoured to describe how this woman [Lady Mason] sat alone, with deep sorrow in her heart and deep thought on her mind, when she first learned what terrible things were coming on her. The idea, however, which the reader will have conceived of her as she sat there will have come to him from the skill of the artist, and not from the words of the writer. If that drawing is now near him, let him go back to it.23

Such comments actively encourage the reader to move between picture and text in a way that is indicative of the illustrated novel as a whole. As Trollope acknowledges, an illustration is even capable of supplanting the text, the reader’s perception of the episode coming more from ‘the skill of the artist’ than ‘from the words of the writer’. It

22 Montgomery, Misunderstood, 180–​1. 23 

Anthony Trollope, Orley Farm (1861–​2), ed. David Skilton, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), ii. 230.

Illustrations and the Victorian Novel    625

Figure 32.2  John Everett Millais, ‘Never is a very long word’, 169 mm x 106 mm, wood engraving by the Dalziels. Illustration for Anthony Trollope, Orley Farm (London: Chapman and Hall, 1862), vol. II, facing p. 77.

seems particularly ironic that this testament to the power of illustrations is today situated in editions of Orley Farm that do not reproduce Millais’s accompanying images.24 The self-​referentiality of Orley Farm, although explicit, is far from unique. Illustrated novels of this period frequently draw attention to their own visual components.

24 

This includes the Oxford World’s Classics edition, which I have quoted from in the text.

626    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Thackeray mentions his illustrations in Pendennis (1848–​50), commenting ironically on the gap between the text and images in the representation of the hero: ‘I see that the artist who is to illustrate this book, and who makes sad work of the likeness, will never be able to take my friend off.’25 Illustrations, it seems, influenced not only how novels were read, but also how they were written, particularly in a period in which their composition in serial form meant that the author might be as struck by an illustration as the reader. This possibility is suggested by the novelist Charles Lever, who wrote to his publisher while the monthly parts of Confessions of Harry Lorrequer (1838–​9), illustrated by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz), were being published: ‘H. K. Brown [sic] has not yet written to me, and I regret it the more, because if I knew the scenes he selected, I might have benefited by his ideas and rendered them more graphic, as an author corrects his play by seeing a dress rehearsal.’26 Lever indicates that texts might be (re)written as a direct result of the illustrations, a practice facilitated by serial publication. Certainly, in the case of Orley Farm, it is the impact of the illustration on the author that leads to Trollope’s intervention in the text. This is confirmed in Trollope’s autobiography, where he remarks that because some of his characters appeared from book to book, his own early ideas were ‘impressed indelibly on [his] memory’ by Millais’s images.27 There is another sense in which illustration can influence the content of the novel: by privileging certain moments which are ‘read’ twice over in the form of the words and the image, or, equally, by repressing parts of the narrative. In giving more or less weight to a textual episode than it might otherwise have, illustration changes how the novel is read, and it can also modify the story itself by emphasizing a trajectory that is defined by the pictured rather than the written episodes. This comes to the fore in a novel like Oliver Twist (1837–​9), which seems to take its shape according to key visual incidents like Oliver asking for more or Fagin in the condemned cell. Numerous critics have pointed to the repeated gestures and patterns used by the illustrator, George Cruikshank, which tie the images together and construct an independent pictorial sequence.28 This was recognized by the Victorian critic Robert Shelton Mackenzie, who observed that Cruikshank’s illustrations form a series, ‘in which, without a single line of letter-​press, the story [is] strikingly and clearly told’.29 Mackenzie was also responsible for publicizing Cruikshank’s claim that he, in fact, was the ‘author’ of Oliver Twist, Dickens having seen some of Cruikshank’s images and written up the story in response to them.30 Whatever the truth of this claim (and it has been fiercely contested either 25 

William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy, i (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1849), 22. 26  Charles Lever, quoted in Steig, Dickens and Phiz, 21. 27  Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (1882), ed. David Skilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), 99. 28  See, for example, Anthony Burton, ‘Cruikshank as an Illustrator of Fiction’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 35 (1974), 122–​7. 29  Quoted in Burton, ‘Cruikshank as an Illustrator of Fiction’, 124 n. 30  R. Shelton Mackenzie, Life of Charles Dickens (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson and Brothers, 1870), 164–​5.

Illustrations and the Victorian Novel    627 way), it demonstrates the sheer power of illustrations in shaping texts. Even in cases where the original pictures have been largely forgotten, they continue to influence how Victorian novels are interpreted and visualized. One might point, for instance, to television and film representations of Sherlock Holmes, the dashing hero with his deerstalker cap and cape, whose appearance has its origins in the illustrations designed by Sidney Paget to accompany Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories in the Strand magazine. With its influence on the reading process and the words themselves, it is easy to see why many Victorian novelists were suspicious of illustration and even attempted to control it. Dickens chose the part of the text to be illustrated and sent it with detailed instructions to the artists, whose proofs he would comment on and revise. Such constraints were criticized by Luke Fildes, who was commissioned to illustrate The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). Fildes complained that Dickens always chose the most descriptive part of the text for illustration—​those parts, in other words, that provided the least amount of interpretative freedom for the illustrator.31 Other novelists were not so successful in their attempts to manage the illustrations. Ellen (Mrs Henry) Wood wrote a letter to the Dalziel brothers, one of the principal engraving companies of the day, which gives a fascinating insight into Victorian publishing practices concerning illustration. The letter is written in response to one sent by the Dalziels in which they ask if Wood has any preferences for the illustrations to the book edition of The Channings (1862). Wood responds by revealing that the novel is set in Worcester and states that she would like to include pictures of the actual cathedral and cloisters rather than imaginary ones. The exchange of letters demonstrates the involvement of engravers in the illustrative process, that, far from mere copyists of the artist’s designs, they could act as the intermediaries between authors and artists. It also suggests the seriousness with which writers treated the illustration of their works. Wood informs the Dalziels that she has written to Worcester asking for some small drawings and engravings and has considered employing the services of a local photographer. Her anxiety about getting the pictures right stems from an unfortunate experience with the illustration of East Lynne (1861), which she recounts in her letter: I was not pleased with the illustrations to ‘East Lynne’ for this reason: I had made it a special request to Mr Bentley that the frontispiece should be taken from a certain scene, the chief scene in the book; and I gave a choice in writing of three other scenes for the vignette. I was naturally vexed to find that these wishes had not been in the least attended to: surely no one has a right but myself to fix on the illustrations for my own book. Of all the scenes throughout the book, I would have preferred that the one, standing now as the frontispiece should be passed over and not be depicted. When I saw the book come out with it, I was indescribably vexed, and would have paid a good deal to suppress it. I will never again allow a book of mine to be illustrated without my knowledge of what is going to appear.

31 

L. V. Fildes, Luke Fildes, R.A.: A Victorian Painter (London: Michael Joseph, 1968), 15.

628    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Neither do I think the illustrations done well. The young lady is as tall as the bed—​ and the vignette is not done well to my taste.32

Wood’s anger at Richard Bentley’s disregard for her opinions marks an attempt to assert authorial control in a situation where the illustration of the text threatens to undermine it. This threat arises not just in the publisher’s poor communication or in the aesthetic weakness of the image but, more specifically, in the effect illustration has on the novel and the way it is read. Wood is all too aware of this dangerous illustrative potential, especially as the picture in question (which depicts two creditors turning up to ‘arrest’ the corpse of Lady Isabel’s father) is the frontispiece to the novel, the image that encapsulates the text, points forward in the narrative, and incites the viewer to read on. Her awareness of the different mode of reading that illustration generates is evident in the comment that ‘Of all the scenes throughout the book, I would have preferred that the one, standing now as the frontispiece should be passed over’. The implication is that illustrations encourage the reader to focus on and pause at the episode represented rather than ‘pass over’ it. In this way, illustration can manipulate the pace and emphasis of a novel, a manipulation that, in Wood’s opinion, should be carefully controlled by the author. Like Ellen Wood, Trollope also asserts the authority of the writer over the illustrations. In his autobiography, he registers his approval for Millais in the following terms: Writers of novels know well,—​and so ought readers of novels to have learned,—​that there are two modes of illustrating, either of which may be adopted equally by a bad and by a good artist. To which class Mr Millais belongs I need not say; but, as a good artist, it was open to him simply to make a pretty picture, or to study the work of the author from whose writing he was bound to take his subject. I have too often found that the former alternative has been thought to be the better as it certainly is the easier method. An artist will frequently dislike to subordinate his ideas to those of an author, and will sometimes be too idle to find out what those ideas are. But this artist was neither proud nor idle. In every figure that he drew it was his object to promote the views of the writer whose work he had undertaken to illustrate, and he never spared himself any pains in studying that work so as to enable himself to do so.33

For Trollope, the ‘views’ of the author are paramount and illustrations should be judged according to the extent to which they faithfully depict these views. There is no doubt here that what an author wants can be easily translated into the text; the meaning of the writer and the text are regarded as one and the same. It is this seemingly secure assumption that illustration problematizes, however. This was brought to the fore in a series of articles on book illustration by the artist and writer P. G. Hamerton, which were published in Portfolio in 1888. The articles were presented in the form of a dispute, or paragone, between a poet, critic, artist, and scientist, which 32  Ellen Wood to the Dalziel Brothers (16 September 1862). Letter in the collection of the Morgan Library and Museum, New York. 33 Trollope, An Autobiography, 98–​9.

Illustrations and the Victorian Novel    629 allowed Hamerton to express different views and opinions about illustration: his own, he admitted, could be found in the words of the critic, while the scientist expresses the typical attitudes of scientific men, the artist is opposed to these scientific views, and the poet ‘has that want of sympathy with the graphic arts which so often accompanies a purely literary culture’.34 It is the scientist who questions the transparency of authorial intention in the illustrated text. Following a damning indictment of illustration from the poet, who argues that illustrations have no value or ‘utility’ because they are not the author’s conceptions, the scientist responds: I cannot agree with you, because, in any case, the reader’s conceptions are no more those of the author than the illustrator’s. It is quite a mistake to suppose that when you read ‘The Newcomes’, you see in your mind’s eye exactly the Colonel Newcome that Thackeray saw. Doyle’s conception of the Colonel is not Thackeray’s either.35

This remarkable statement, which anticipates post-​ structuralist debates about authorship, suggests that the writer’s intentions are not directly transmitted to the text and then simply absorbed by the reader and the artist. Rather, the illustrated novel is constituted by multiple and diverse readings that it exposes and puts on show but which do not necessarily coincide. Such a subversive possibility was sidestepped in the majority of Victorian reviews of illustration, which focused on the ‘match’ between word and image, evaluating the pictures according to their ability to embody or mirror the text. Unsurprisingly, many illustrations were deemed to fail in this objective, some more miserably than others. One reviewer points to a recent illustration of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) where the artist illustrates the first line of the epitaph at the end, ‘Here rests his head upon the lap of earth’, with the figure of a gentleman dressed in black and lying on the ground with a sod of turf for his pillow.36 In order to avoid such ludicrous situations, the reviewer argues that illustrations should move beyond the notion of matching or mirroring the words to show an engagement with them, allowing the illustrator the same imaginative freedom as the writer. Even in those pictures that seem relatively ‘faithful’ to the words, it is the differences between them that come to the fore. While Dickens sought to keep a tight control over the illustrations in his novels, they often made their meanings in diverse ways and told the story from a radically different perspective to the text. In the case of a first-​person narrative like David Copperfield (1849–​50), for example, it is only in the images that we see the protagonist from the outside. These differences between word and image do not simply equate to the difference between author and artist. Even in novels where the writer and illustrator is one person, the pictures and words do not signify in the same 34  P. G. Hamerton, ‘Book Illustration: Conversation I. The Rivalry Between Art and Literature’, Portfolio, 19 (January 1888), 17. 35  P. G. Hamerton, ‘Book Illustration: Conversation II. Utility’, Portfolio, 19 (January 1888), 51. 36  ‘Illustrated Books’, Quarterly Review, 74, no. 147 (June 1844), 196.

630    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture way or generate the same meanings. Thackeray illustrated several of his own novels (Vanity Fair (1847–​8), Pendennis (1848–​50), The Virginians (1857–​9) ), as well as producing the pictorial capitals and four of the full-​page plates for Philip (1861–​2), and all but the initial vignette for Lovel the Widower (1860). It might be assumed that the illustrations here work in harmony with the text because they are created by the same individual.37 However, Joan Stevens has drawn attention to the ways in which Thackeray’s pictorial initials can function metaphorically, commenting on rather than reflecting the action.38 One of the most dramatic examples of an illustration that adds to rather than simply mirrors the text occurs towards the end of Vanity Fair (1847–​8) when Dobbin meets Jos to try and persuade him to escape from the evil clutches of Becky Sharp. The illustration depicts the interview between Jos and Dobbin, but also includes another figure hiding behind a curtain on the right-​hand side of the image: Becky herself, who is bent on evil intent and clutches something suspicious in her hand that looks like a phial of poison. The illustration suggests that Becky goes on to murder Jos, the text reporting his death in strange circumstances a few months after the scene represented in the picture. As this example demonstrates, illustration generates its meanings in conjunction with the words, but the relationship between them is not one of equivalence. Illustration can add to the text, or oppose and contradict it. In some cases, it is not even clear exactly what part of the text is being shown. Illustrations might include information taken from several pages rather than depicting a single, identifiable moment, as the inadequacy of the caption often exposes. At times, there is little connection to the text at all. Charles Reade commented that the size and shape of the vertical woodblock resulted in a proliferation of ‘amusing duet[s]‌’ in which ‘A ponderously tall gentleman is seen talking to a ponderously tall lady in a room furnished with the section of a tea-​table’.39 (It is such a vertical woodblock that forms the frontispiece for East Lynne and leads Wood to observe that the heroine is almost as tall as the bed.) Such ‘duets’ are so stylized and prolific that they bear only a passing relation to the accompanying words: we have to read the text to learn what the pictured figures are talking about, argues Reade: ‘the writer must illustrate the sketch that is paid for to illustrate the writer’.40 Trollope might have considered Millais’s illustrations faithful to his text, but the artist frequently resorted to the duets that Reade describes, some showing scenes that do not occur in the novel. They do, however, serve to set up an imaginative world, giving a physical reality to the characters that is not always present in the words, like ‘Sir Peregrine and his Heir’, an 37  See, for example, Victor R. Kennedy, who asserts that ‘When the author is also the illustrator […] what is otherwise at best a symbiotic relationship may give way to a unified vision’. Victor R. Kennedy, ‘Pictures as Metaphors in Thackeray’s Illustrated Novels’, Metaphor and Symbol, 9, no. 2 (1994), 136. Michael Steig argues that Thackeray’s ‘artistic intention may be thought of as unified even though he works in two media’. Steig, Dickens and Phiz, 3. 38  Joan Stevens, ‘Thackeray’s Pictorial Capitals’, Costerus, 2 (1974), 113–​40. 39  Charles Reade, quoted in Simon Nowell-​Smith, The House of Cassell 1848–​1958 (London: Cassell, 1958), 94. 40  Reade, quoted in Smith, The House of Cassell, 94.

Illustrations and the Victorian Novel    631 illustration at the beginning of Orley Farm, which highlights the relationship between the two depicted figures. Victorian illustrations are, in fact, adept at showing the external realities of the novel, the rooms furnished with sections of tea-​tables, as Reade puts it. An illustrated novel like James Payn’s A Confidential Agent (1880; illustrated by Arthur Hopkins) is typical in its depiction of middle-​class interiors with furniture, ornaments, and pictures, none of which are detailed in the text. There is even, quite unusually for the time, a picture of a suburban middle-​class garden. Although such pictorial details are textually absent, they play an important part in setting the scene. Whereas the words might describe an incident that takes place in a drawing room, it is the image that shows what this drawing room looks like. In its inclusion of such information, Victorian illustrated novels, many of which are set in the contemporary world, provide a unique insight into everyday life and values.41 This historical significance was recognized in Hamerton’s staged dispute about book illustration in which the artist defends the genre because of its accurate rendition of costume and surroundings: ‘An author cannot be constantly describing costume,’ he comments; ‘if he did his books would read like the newspaper accounts of levees and drawing-​rooms; but a draughtsman can be continually describing dress, furniture, architecture—​in short, everything that is visible.’42 And illustrators did describe everything that was visible. It is in these seemingly incidental details that we find depictions of nineteenth-​century fashion, public and private spaces, people’s postures and behaviour, how they dine, sit, stand, sleep, and lounge about. Illustrators went to extraordinary lengths to get this information right, to the extent of treating illustrations as seriously as paintings, employing models and making detailed studies of contemporary and historic clothes.43 Some Victorian reviewers were not as generous as Hamerton’s artist and criticized this excess of detail in illustrations, pointing out that it was absurd to design an elaborate piece of furniture for an image meant to show a lover’s devotion or to make a carefully rendered picture of Hyde Park for the sake of a pun: ‘Half the common accessories to subject-​pictures are worthless.’44 Worthless they might have seemed, but it is in these additional details in the illustrations that we see Victorian life pictured in a way that is often strikingly different from other visual representations in the period. While illustrations draw on the contemporary world to make their meanings, they also draw on other images. This ‘interpictoriality’, as I have called it, situates Victorian illustration as a product of the moment in which it was produced and viewed and suggests the ways in which the pictures form part of and intersect with a specifically visual

41 

David Skilton discusses the significance of illustration for an understanding of Victorian culture in ‘The Centrality of Literary Illustration in Victorian Visual Culture: The example of Millais and Trollope from 1860 to 1864’, Journal of Illustration Studies (December 2007), http://​www.jois.cf.ac.uk/​articles. php?article=30 [last accessed 25 April 2012]. 42  Hamerton, ‘Book Illustration: Conversation II’, 51–​2. 43  See du Maurier, ‘The Illustrating of Books’, 351. 44  Henry Blackburn, ‘Black and White’, Athenaeum (12 October 1872), 473.

632    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture tradition.45 In David Copperfield, for example, Phiz’s illustration of Martha’s discovery by the river’s edge, ‘The River’ (August 1850), shimmers with the remembrance of other contemporary images that represent the fallen woman and her watery grave. More generally, the caricature style of illustration associated with Phiz, Cruikshank, and Thackeray is indebted to the narrative images of William Hogarth. Such interpictorial references can be seen across the work of different artists, regardless of the texts they are illustrating. As well as the iconographic motif of the ‘duet’ identified by Reade, Millais’s solitary female figure sat in contemplation, which had been so admired by Trollope, was another familiar iconographic pose in illustration of the 1860s. Millais himself used this situation no less than six times in 1862, four times in Orley Farm and again in illustrations for Harriet Martineau’s The Anglers of the Dove and Dinah Maria Mulock’s Mistress and Maid. Illustrations, then, do not correspond with the words in any simple way. Rather, illustration is a process of interpretative engagement between texts, images, and readers that takes place at a specific cultural moment. It is this process that is the defining feature of the Victorian illustrated novel, whether these illustrations are part of the caricature tradition that dominated the beginning of the period or the more ‘modern’ images associated with a greater realism that became established in the middle of the century. Interpretation is built into the very fabric of the genre, its internal mechanisms and structures: where the words come first, the construction of illustration in response to them situates the image as an interpretation of the text; in cases where the pictures appear before the text, the text is rendered an interpretation or reading of the image; while the reader interprets both picture and text and the relationship between them. In the illustrated novel, the act of interpretation does not mark the culmination of the reading process but feeds directly into the production of meanings, the reader reading in the light of these other interpretations. To put it simply, seeing how an illustration ‘interprets’ the text affects the reader’s interpretation of the text and the illustration. If illustrated texts undermine any simple idea of authorial control, they simultaneously emphasize the role of the reader, who, far from a passive recipient, is directly implicated in the generation of meanings. Take an example that is far removed from the sophistication and elegance of Millais’s illustrations for Trollope: the (spectacularly bad) pictures that appeared in the illustrated book edition of Jane Sexey’s A Slip in the Fens (1873). This novel was originally published unillustrated in Macmillan’s Magazine in four instalments between December 1872 and March 1873, but it was the introduction of the images, drawn by Sexey herself, that helped secure the astonishing success of the novel. The story, set in the desolation of the Fen Country in the marshy region of eastern England, was compared in the reviews to a Dutch genre painting, so detailed was its account of cottage life.46 The illustrations also attempt to capture this environment and 45  ‘Interpictoriality’ is the term I use to describe this phenomenon in Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image. See, for example, p. 28. 46  H. F., ‘A Slip in the Fens’, Examiner (21 June 1873), 646. ‘A Slip in the Fens’, Saturday Review (19 July 1873), 88.

Illustrations and the Victorian Novel    633 consist primarily of images of the landscape with crudely drawn figures. The last picture in the book, for all its apparent tranquillity, represents the novel’s dramatic climax when the country maid, Elsie, and her well-​to-​do Cambridge undergraduate lover, Claude Lillingstone, are discovered during a night-​time assignation, prompting Claude’s father to send him away from the Fens (he later goes on to make a respectable marriage). They are seen by a boy, who thinks that they are ghosts from a local legend and lets out a scream that wakes up the household. The caption of the illustration, ‘He little knows how he’s frightened us’, is uttered by Elsie (Figure 32.3). The illustration emphasizes the significance of the textual episode and this is intensified in the fact that the novel keeps returning to the critical moment when Elsie and Claude are seen: Claude’s father hears the scream and reaches his window just in time to see the moonlight fall upon his son and Elsie; he goes on to report the story of how the boy was startled by the two figures; and the incident is recounted again a few pages later by another character, who tells a friend how a boy passing through the farm saw a man and woman standing by the dairy door. These textual repetitions of the same event position the illustration as the visual epicentre, the focal point from which the multiple textual accounts emanate. The presence of the illustration encourages the reader to look back and remember the scene each time it is mentioned in the novel, like the picture of the unfortunate Humphrey in Misunderstood. This picture does something else, too: it directly addresses the reader as a viewer, positioning him or her not in the place of the lovers but of the frightened boy who sees them. Elsie and Claude stare directly back at us. In this way, the picture implicates the reader/​viewer in the discovery and its consequence: the enforced end of the love affair. Through the mechanisms of this illustration, the viewer is led to assume a certain responsibility for what happens next, an effect that is even a little discomfiting. It was the position of the reader and the impact of illustration on the reading experience that was stressed in Victorian accounts. ‘Discomfort’ is actually the word used by one reviewer of illustrated fiction, who suggests that problems arise when readers encounter the text before seeing the illustrations and have already moulded their ideas of what things look like. In such instances, the critic argues, it is rare that the pictures are seen ‘without disturbance and discomfort’.47 The problem for this critic is that, although the illustrations interpret the text, the reader is unlikely to have interpreted it in the same way. Edward Burne-​Jones identifies a similar response, referring to the ‘disappointment’ that the reader of the illustrated novel experiences when his or her mental pictures do not match those of the artist: ‘our disappointment may be accidental, arising from our preconceived mental pictures not being coincident with the artist’s arrangement; and here satisfaction, or the contrary, will be proportionate to the reader’s power of realizing the scenes pictorially as he reads on’.48 For some Victorian critics, this is reason enough for dispensing with illustrations, at least in the case of ‘imaginative

47 

48 

‘Illustrated Literature’, Reader, 688. Burne-​Jones, ‘Essay on The Newcomes’, 61.

634    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture

Figure 32.3  Jane Sexey, ‘He little knows how he’s frightened us’, 109 mm x 76 mm, wood engraver not identified. Illustration for Jane Sexey, A Slip in the Fens (London: Macmillan and Co., 1873), facing p. 181.

literature’: ‘unrestricted by accompanying illustrations’, one critic writes, this literature will allow us to think in different directions and ‘exercise [our] faculties to the utmost’.49 The argument here, and it is one that is commonly expressed in the period, is that illustration can actually curb the imagination or the reader’s interpretative capacity

49 

‘Illustrated Literature’, Reader, 688.

Illustrations and the Victorian Novel    635 because it provides images rather than encouraging the reader to construct his or her own mental pictures. Illustration is regarded as a hindrance, a distraction; it promotes a lazy reader. George du Maurier maintained that this depended on the particular reader and his or her capacity for imaginative thought. According to du Maurier, there were two types of reader: one who sees everything in his mind’s eye and to whom illustration is a ‘hindrance’; in this case, another conception of the text ‘would interfere with his own’.50 The majority of readers, however, do not have this talent: for them, to have the concrete form of the illustration is ‘an enhancement of their pleasure’.51 ‘Pleasure’, ‘disappointment’, ‘discomfort’, or—​to go back to the quote with which we began—​‘Sensuous’. Victorian illustration is constantly described in terms that hover precariously between pain and pleasure and that evoke an emotional and physical (even a sexual) experience of reading/​viewing. It is no coincidence that John Ruskin remarked that illustration led to a ‘feverish thirst for excitement’.52 This emotive language might provide the key to understanding the Victorian illustrated novel and the issues at stake in an emerging illustration studies. Illustration is characterized by the gap between word and image, the inevitable differences between the two forms, even when they seem to coincide. But there is another gap that is endemic to the illustrated novel: the gap between the illustrations and the mental pictures produced in the reading process, the images constructed ‘with the mind’s eye’. In a way, reading the Victorian novel always involves illustrating the text, picturing its scenes and characters, whether actual images are present or not. This gap can be lessened in cases where the pictures are available from the start and influence the reader’s interpretation, but it can widen into an abyss when the mental and material pictures fail to coincide, resulting in those more ambivalent feelings of ‘discomfort’. It is this relationship of difference, of the fissure between multiple interpretations, that motivates desire, the ‘felt want’ that du Maurier identifies or the ‘feverish thirst for excitement’ described by Ruskin, resulting in the urge to read more illustrated texts, to see if the pictures match or deviate from our own conceptions. This reading might bring with it the risk of disappointment, but, as the Victorians were well aware, it also constituted the peculiar pleasure of the illustrated novel.

Select Bibliography Goldman, Paul, Victorian Illustration:  The Pre-​Raphaelites, the Idyllic School and the High Victorians (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996). Hall, N. John, Trollope and His Illustrators (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1980). Harvey, John, Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators (New  York:  New  York University Press, 1971). 50 

Du Maurier, ‘The Illustrating of Books’, 349. Du Maurier, ‘The Illustrating of Books’, 349–​50. 52  John Ruskin, The Cestus of Aglaia, in The Works of John Ruskin ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London and New York: George Allen; Longmans, Green and Co., 1903–​12), xix. 140. 51 

636    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Leighton, Mary Elizabeth, and Lisa Surridge, ‘The Plot Thickens:  Toward a Narratological Analysis of Illustrated Serial Fiction in the 1860s’, Victorian Studies, 51, no. 1 (Autumn 2008), 65–​101. Mitchell, Rosemary, Picturing the Past:  English History in Text and Image 1830–​ 1870 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000). Muir, Percy, Victorian Illustrated Books (London: B. T. Batsford, 1971). Skilton, David, ‘The Relation Between Illustration and Text in the Victorian Novel: A New Perspective’, in Karl Josef Hőltgen, Peter M. Daly, and Wolfgang Lottes (eds), Word and Visual Imagination: Studies in the Interaction of English Literature and the Visual Arts (Erlang en: Universitatsbibliothek Erlangen-​Nürnberg, 1988), 303–​25. Thomas, Julia, Pictorial Victorians:  The Inscription of Values in Word and Image (Athens, O.: Ohio University Press, 2004).

Chapter 33

Art and the L i t e ra ry Hilary Fraser

I  The painting that took the Victorian art world by storm at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1855 was by a then little-​known artist, Frederic Leighton, later to become an academician himself and eventually president of that venerable institution. The subject of Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna is Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence (Fig. 33.1) is taken from Giorgio Vasari’s account of the birth of Renaissance art in the first of his Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, which had recently been translated into English for the first time. Vasari describes how Cimabue’s contemporaries recognized that his panel painting of the Madonna, executed for the church of Santa Maria Novella, represented a startlingly new level of achievement in art, and recounts the story of how they ‘considered this work so marvellous, that they carried it to the church from Cimabue’s house in a stately procession with great rejoicing and blowing of trumpets, while Cimabue himself was highly rewarded and honoured’.1 Leighton’s painting of this scene depicts the celebrated thirteenth-​century artist, crowned with laurels, processing before his painting, alongside him the boy who was to become even more highly celebrated in the annals of art history, his pupil Giotto, and following them a line of other early Renaissance artists. The linear frieze-​like composition irresistibly suggests the Vasarian idea of the progress of art, running right up to the present-​day artist, and metapictorially invites the viewer to draw comparisons between the acclaimed Florentine picture and the modern painting that represented its enthusiastic reception to the art-​going public of 1855. ‘Everyone talks of [it],’ wrote Dante Gabriel Rossetti to his friend William Allingham, and they did so in ways that recapitulated the hype 1  Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. A. B. Hinds, 4 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1927), i. 25. The painting was in 1790 reattributed to Duccio di Buoninsegna. It now hangs in the Uffizi, alongside Cimabue’s Santa Trinità Madonna, which is indeed regarded as pioneering a more naturalistic painterly style. Vasari appears to have conflated the two works.

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Figure 33.1  Frederic Leighton, Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna is Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence, 1853–​55, National Gallery, on loan from the Queen’s Collection. Royal Collection Trust/​© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013.

that, according to Vasari, circulated around Cimabue’s work.2 The reviewer in the Art Journal, picking up his cue from Leighton’s Vasarian subject, singles out his painting as the ‘one picture in the collection that will mark this year […] as an epoch in British Art’, and sees it as ‘prophetic of a future’, not only for the young artist who produced it, but for the art of the nation.3 In a departure from his source, Leighton depicts Charles of Anjou, King of Naples, on horseback to the extreme right of the composition, a reminder of the importance of royal patronage behind the glittering achievements of Renaissance art. Perhaps it was this detail that prompted Queen Victoria, on the advice of the discerning Prince Albert, to purchase Leighton’s painting on the first day of the exhibition. It now hangs above the main entrance of the National Gallery, a paean to the idea of the artist, to a particular view of the history of art, and to art as a public good to be nationally celebrated and supported. I have chosen this painting as a way into my subject because it seems exemplary of the complex interfiliation of art and the literary in Victorian England. Leighton was fond of painting literary subjects early in his career, and before his duecento show-​stopper he had produced a number of pictures inspired by Dante, Boccaccio, and Shakespeare. He would become the natural choice for George Eliot seeking an illustrator for her historical novel Romola (1862–​3), which itself conjures and memorializes the triumphant convergence of the arts in Renaissance Florence. But never before had the literary and the visual, the labours and pleasures of reading, writing, painting, and looking, been so integrated or so integral to the aesthetic project. In the lower right foreground of the canvas, 2  D. G. Rossetti, The Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. O. Doughty and J. R. Wahl, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–​7), i. 252. 3  ‘The Royal Academy: The Eighty-​seventh Exhibition, 1855’, Art Journal, 17 (1855), 169–​84, at 169–​70.

Art and the Literary    639 the figure of Dante looks onto the festivities. In the Purgatorio, Cimabue and Giotto are described as the first reformers of painting following the Dark Ages. Furthermore, Dante’s lines, ‘In painting Cimabue thought to hold the field and now Giotto has the cry, so that the other’s fame is dim,’ had been quoted by Vasari, to reinforce his own narrative of the progress of art.4 Leighton deploys the figure of the poet, leaning against the frame and looking in on the scene of art as if it were in some sense his own creation, to buttress, both literally (compositionally) and metaphorically, the Victorian painter’s reiteration of that paradigmatic narrative for his own times. The picture is at the very interface of art and the literary. Not only does it portray artists and painting and the unmistakable figure of the great Italian poet, but its meaning, the story it tells, derives from an enduringly influential literary work that is at once a history of art and a collective biography of Renaissance artists. Furthermore, the way Leighton’s painting was written about by art critics and reviewers, at a time when a new genre of art literature was emerging as part of an explosion of both popular and professional interest in the visual arts, can be said to have shaped how it was read in the mid-​nineteenth century, in the context of the politics of Pre-​Raphaelitism, Continentalism, and the Academy, and contemporary debates about realism and historical representation in the literary and visual arts. It is, then, a painting that profoundly engages with literature on many levels, and which exploits, embellishes, and translates into a new medium the latent visuality of the written word. Visuality is a key term in our contemporary critical and cultural lexicon, and indeed it has been the conceptual focus of some of the most exciting and innovative work in Victorian studies in recent years.5 Yet the word was coined, not by a postmodern theorist of visual culture, but by Thomas Carlyle writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, and he invented it in order to describe a work of poetry—​again it is Dante’s Divine Comedy, ‘every compartment’ of which is, he says, ‘worked-​out, with intense earnestness, into truth, into clear visuality’.6 Given that this foundational connection between visuality and literature was made in 1841, it should come as no surprise that a number of modern visual theorists look back to the nineteenth century as the scene of a decisive shift in the conceptualization, framing, and writing of visual experience, and equally that the Victorian period was an era of extraordinarily fertile interchange between the literary and visual arts.7 The critical moment now and the cultural moment 4 

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, ed. John D. Sinclair, 2nd edn., 3 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), ii. 147: Purgatorio, xi. 94–​6; Vasari, Lives, ii. 43. 5  See, for example, Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan (eds), Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Julia Thomas, Pictorial Victorians: The Inscriptions of Value in Word and Image (Athens, O.: Ohio University Press, 2004). 6  Thomas Carlyle, The Norman and Charlotte Strouse Edition of the Writings of Thomas Carlyle: On Heroes, Hero-​Worship and the Heroic in History, notes and introduction by Michael K. Goldberg, text established by Michael K. Goldberg, Joel J. Brattin, and Mark Engel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 79. 7  See, for example, Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988); Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991); Luisa Calè and Patrizia Di

640    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture then seem to speak to each other with particular sympathy and resonance, the visual turn (or what W. J. T. Mitchell refers to as a ‘pictorial turn’8) in contemporary culture and theory responding to that integration of images and words, the realm of the visual and the realm of language, which took place in peculiarly intense ways in Victorian culture. Rather than looking back to the classical formulations of Aristotle, Horace, and others, like eighteenth-​century theorists of the ‘sister arts’,9 nineteenth-​century writers and artists, technologies and media, inaugurate reciprocities between the literary and the visual that we associate with modernity, and that gesture forwards to the cultural preoccupations, the hybrid graphic textual genres, and the hypermedia technologies of our own post-​digital times. Images have been incorporated into books and words into pictures throughout history, of course, and new and more dynamic ways of thinking about intermedial negotiation between art and the written word had already begun to refresh and supplant the somewhat tired tradition of ut pictura poesis decades before Carlyle invented his neologism. Eighteenth-​and early nineteenth-​century cultural practices in the public sphere of art, including the emergence of a new exhibition culture, and commercial collaborations in the book and print trades that developed and exploited the market for illustrated and extra-​illustrated books, enacted and encouraged new models of exchange between the arts. Mitchell observes that ‘the belief in the translatability of literature into painting is everywhere evident in the eighteenth century’, citing not only ‘individual designs illustrating literary texts, but […] entire galleries dedicated to the pictorial translation of poets’.10 Critics were already alert to the pictorial qualities of poetry and how often it lends itself to illustration. Anticipating Carlyle, Coleridge celebrated in his tenth London lecture of 1818 the ‘picturesqueness’ of Dante’s poetry, and noted that ‘Michel Angelo is said to have made a design for every page of the Divina Commedia’.11 Romantic practitioners, both writers and painters, explored complex forms of intermedial poetic and visual expression in their work. Blake’s ‘composite art’ depended on a method of printing that unifies poetry and painting produced in the same medium,12 while Turner not only gave many of his oil paintings and watercolours literary titles and poetic epigraphs, some of which he composed himself, but also, as professor of perspective at the Bello (eds), Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-​Century Literary and Visual Cultures (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 8  See W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘The Pictorial Turn’, Artforum (March 1992), and Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 9  See Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 10  W. J. T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); for a detailed study of one such gallery, see Luisa Calè, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: ‘Turning Readers into Spectators’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). 11  The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge, 4 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1936), i. 161. 12  See Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art; and previously Northrop Frye, ‘Poetry and Design in William Blake’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 10 (September 1951), 35–​42; Jean Hagstrum, William Blake, Poet and Painter: An Introduction to the Illuminated Verse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).

Art and the Literary    641 Royal Academy, delivered numerous lectures between 1811 and 1823 that considered the relation of the literary and visual arts.13 Ruskin indeed may well have encountered these lectures in the mid-​1850s when he was preparing the Turner Bequest for the British Museum, but he had already understood the interconnectedness of poetry and painting for Turner from his close scrutiny of his art, and he was consciously following the older artist’s lead when he declared in Modern Painters that he uses ‘the words painter and poet quite indifferently’.14 The Victorians were by no means the first, then, to be interested in the interconnections between art and literature, and they benefited from a Romantic legacy of aesthetic experimentation and cultural practice that informed their own perspectives on the relationship between the visual and the literary. However, never before had the interplay between the literary and the visual arts been so pronounced or so profound. The key cultural movements of the nineteenth century—​Pre-​Raphaelitism, Realism, Impressionism, Symbolism, Aestheticism—​ are all associated equally with literature and art. The creative dialogue between practices of writing, reading, and viewing in the period is evident from the proliferation of new or greatly enhanced intermedial forms: illustrated gift books, annuals, and magazines; narrative and genre paintings taking literary characters and scenes as their subject; pictures with accompanying texts—​poetry or commentary—​sometimes embedded in the frame itself; writing that is self-​consciously and knowingly informed by the visual, and vice versa, particularly in the genres of landscape and pastoral; the portrait as an experimental literary form; fiction with artistic subjects and artist characters, or with an art object at the centre of the plot; ekphrastic poetry; and, perhaps most notably of all, the emergence of the new discipline of art history, the new profession of art critic, and the new genre of art literature, a form of writing about the visual arts that, in the words of Oscar Wilde, treats ‘the work of art simply as a starting-​point for a new creation’.15 What were the historical conditions for this extraordinary syncopation of word and image, writing and seeing? How do we understand the contexts within which such visual/​textual hybrids and doublings were produced and consumed, and in what ways were they constitutive of modernity? At the most fundamental material level, the Industrial Revolution had developed new and ever-​evolving mechanical processes for the making and reproduction of words and images. The technologies of printing, engraving, and book illustration were transformed in the course of the nineteenth century, and this had a huge impact on the production, the cost, the appearance, and the distribution of illustrated texts of all forms. For example, the period saw great changes in the techniques, quality, and cost of graphic reproduction. The revival of

13  See Jerrold Ziff, ‘J. M. W. Turner on Poetry and Painting,’ Studies in Romanticism, 3, no. 4 (Summer 1964), 193–​215. 14  The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903–​12), v. 221. 15  Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 366.

642    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture wood engraving in the 1820s and 1830s enabled a profusion of cheap illustrated publications, and was particularly favourable to the development of the early Victorian radical graphic press and illustrated miscellanies, whilst photography played an increasingly important role in the expansion of illustrated periodical publication in the 1880s and 1890s. The production of such hybrid material objects in both popular and high culture encouraged textual ways of seeing and visual ways of reading. Added to this the coming of the railway transformed distribution networks, and produced a new kind of reader and observer on the move.16 Picturesque tourism was reinvigorated by the new ‘portable medium’ of watercolour when new commercially manufactured paints were packaged in metal paint boxes for use in the field,17 by the vogue for both illustrated and extra-​illustrated art novels, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860) and George Eliot’s Romola (1862–​3), and by travel guides, like the Tauschnitz volumes that included blank pages to enable reader-​travellers to incorporate their own illustrative material to enhance the written text. And reorienting sight/​ seeing itself, a proliferation of new optical technologies and gadgetry, which in the course of the long nineteenth century took the viewer from the camera obscura and Claude glass through dioramas, stereographs, and photography to the moving image and early film, continually refreshed and reshaped visual experience, recalibrating what Jonathan Crary calls the ‘techniques of the observer’ to produce a new kind of spectatorship that was realized and articulated in both the literary and visual cultures of modernity.18 Gilles Deleuze reminds us that ‘a society is defined by its amalgamations, not by its tools’, and so the importance of such technical innovations lies in what he terms ‘the interminglings they make possible or that make them possible’.19 It was the amalgamations between new technologies and other social, economic, and cultural forces—​ improvements in education and literacy, for example, and the opening up of public access to the arts; changes in the legal regulation and taxation of the media—​that made

16  See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986); Ana Parejo Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); M. Freeman and M. Beaumont (eds), Railway and Modernity: Time, Space and the Machine Ensemble (Berne: Peter Lang, 2007). 17  Rachel Teukolsky, The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 33. 18  See, in addition to Crary, Techniques of the Observer, Helen Groth, Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Laurent Mannoni, Werner Nekes, and Marina Warner, Eyes, Lies and Illusions: The Art of Deception (London: Hayward Gallery, 2004); John Plunkett and J. Lyons (eds), Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007); Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film, c.1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Lindsay Smith, Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris and the Pre-​Raphaelites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 19  Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 90.

Art and the Literary    643 possible the interminglings of art and the literary in the newly democratized culture of the modern mass media, and in turn it was the increasingly sophisticated interplay of word and image that enabled new models of aesthetic reception and consumption to flourish. In the case of both the production and consumption of literary art and painterly writing, as the arts beheld each other afresh amidst the dynamically transformative contexts of a vastly expanding periodical press and multiple new museum and gallery initiatives, artists and writers everywhere engaged in imaginative acts of translation from one medium to another. In his essay ‘The Task of the Translator’, Walter Benjamin describes the activity of translation as ‘transparent’:  ‘it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully’.20 Victorian writers and artists, practitioners and critics, stimulated by the innovative possibilities of the new media and exhibition cultures of their day, experimented with new forms of language to redefine the very concept of originality and play instead with ideas of reflection, mediation, framing, and doubling.

II  Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the quintessential Victorian literary painter, and it is in his work that such intermedial experimentation can be seen in the most developed and diverse forms. He was, of course, literally a translator of the early Italian poets, and most notably of Dante, into English, but his translational interests extended well beyond the linguistic sphere. From his earliest work until the end of his career he explored the intriguing possibilities of contrapuntal verbal and visual representation, producing countless pictorial interpretations of textual scenes, and literary renditions or interpretations of paintings.21 The year before Leighton began work on Cimabue’s Madonna, he himself had worked on a study for an oil painting that was never completed celebrating the relationships between Cimabue, Giotto, and his own namesake Dante. Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante (1852) (Fig. 33.2) recreates the imagined scene of the painting of the fresco that had recently been discovered in the Bargello Chapel in Florence, commemorating anew the connection between the great artist and the great poet, and in the process, as Leighton was to do contemporaneously, placing himself by implication in that distinguished line of descent. Cimabue, Giotto’s Master, is shown standing behind his pupil, and the lines from Dante’s Purgatorio referring to them are written below. This was an early and defining example of Rossetti’s 20 

Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 70–​82, at 79. 21 See The Rossetti Archive (www.rossettiarchive.org), maintained at the University of Virginia under the editorship of Jerome McGann; and Elizabeth Helsinger, Poetry and the Pre-​Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

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Figure 33.2  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Study for ‘Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante’, 1852 © Tate, London 2013.

self-​mythologization as painter-​poet, but it was not the first to express his literary/​ visual aesthetic. In 1848 (the year that the Pre-​Raphaelite Brotherhood, entering into the revolutionary spirit of the times, declared its artistic manifesto), whilst working on his painting The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, Rossetti wrote the first of two accompanying sonnets that would eventually be transcribed onto gold-​leaf paper and attached to the frame of the picture when it was exhibited at the Hyde Park Corner Free Exhibition in

Art and the Literary    645 the following March.22 From its first showing, then, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, the first painting to bear the initials PRB, was a composite work, comprising a triptych of textual and pictorial companion pieces; discrete material objects to be sure, but whose total effect depends upon a triangulated play of aesthetic experience and meaning. Such profound interaction between word and image was foundational to Rossetti’s poetics and has come to be seen as the hallmark of his work. His ‘double art’ took many different forms. Typically, he wrote poems, often sonnets, that respond to pictures, glossing them, elaborating upon their meanings, turning viewers into readers, and readers into spectators.23 Often the paintings are his own, as in the case of The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, and sometimes there are several pictorial and poetic reworkings of the subject, as with Proserpine, of which there are at least eight painterly versions and for which he wrote an Italian sonnet that, in a further translation, he then rendered in English. Elsewhere he writes poetic responses to paintings by others, as in the initial series of Sonnets for Pictures, which was first published as a group of six poems in the Pre-​Raphaelite journal The Germ in 1850, and which comprise his ekphrastic translations of paintings by Hans Memling, Ingres, Giorgione, and Andrea Mantegna.24 An example is his sonnet ‘For An Allegorical Dance of Women by Andrea Mantegna (In the Louvre)’: Scarcely, I think; yet it indeed may be The meaning reached him, when this music rang Clear through his frame, a sweet possessive pang, And he beheld these rocks and that ridged sea. But I believe that, leaning tow’rds them, he Just felt their hair carried across his face As each girl passed him; nor gave ear to trace How many feet; nor bent assuredly His eyes from the blind fixedness of thought To know the dancers. It is bitter glad Even unto tears. Its meaning filleth it, A secret of the wells of Life: to wit:—​ The heart’s each pulse shall keep the sense it had With all, though the mind’s labour run to nought.25 22  The Rossetti Archive notes that, according to Alastair Grieve, on the original frame Rossetti had inscribed his sonnet explaining the symbolism, while a second sonnet was printed in the catalogue of the Free Exhibition. Both sonnets are inscribed at the bottom of the present frame (The Pre-​Raphaelites (London: Tate Gallery, 1984), 65). Virginia Surtees, however, says that the two sonnets were printed on a slip of gold-​covered paper and fixed to the frame of the picture. They are now on the back (The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1828–​1882, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), i. 11). 23  The Blessed Damozel, where the poem was the prior work, is a notable exception. 24  He subsequently added to the Sonnets for Pictures with poems on paintings by Leonardo, Botticelli, Burne-​Jones, Theodore von Holst, and others. 25  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jerome McGann (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 184.

646    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture In this enigmatically beautiful response to Mantegna’s Allegorical Dance, Rossetti reaches towards and reproduces in poetic form the fundamental paradox of allegory: its gesturing towards a meaning that demands articulation yet is fundamentally untranslatable. The ‘frame’ of which he writes encompasses at once the frame of the painting and the artist’s own bodily frame, and furthermore suggests the poem itself, which provides an interpretative frame for the picture, and the responsive frame of its embodied author, the poet’s own physiological possession by the unheard music, his own sensorium responding empathetically to the scene envisioned by the painter: the touch of the girls’ hair on his face; his eyes, seeing and welling with tears; the beating of his own pulse in rhyme with the rhythm of his own music, recapitulating the music that ‘rang | Clear through’ the artist’s frame. ‘[T]‌hough the mind’s labour run[neth] to nought’, in the poem as in the painting, ‘Its meaning filleth it’. In this way Rossetti’s sonnet translates into words not the literal meaning of the allegory, but the sense of the profoundly untranslatable experience of the work of art, giving us that experience in a different form. Both the conceptual and the material frame appealed to Rossetti’s creative imagination. In the case of his own ‘double’ works, he often designed the frames of his paintings to contain the companion poem, as, for example, in the version of The Blessed Damozel (1875–​8) in the Fogg Art Museum, which includes an inscription of four stanzas of the poem on which the painting is based. Interestingly, despite the sonnet-​like proportions of the painting’s composition and frame, with its distinctive turns and its coda-​like predella, the companion poem is not in this instance a sonnet, yet this is the poetic form that is uncannily, and aptly (given the theme of the emparadised lover), invoked. The painting is, as it were, given a literary shape. Elsewhere Rossetti frames, illustrates, and illuminates his own and others’ literary work with his signature visual realization of the words on the page, whether in his designs for Edward Moxon’s illustrated edition of Tennyson’s Poems (1857), as in his illustration of the final lines of ‘The Lady of Shalott’, where Lancelot peers at the dead Lady and says ‘She has a lovely face; | God in his mercy lend her grace, | The Lady of Shalott’; his designs for the title page and frontispiece for Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1861–​2); or his own more integrated ‘Introductory Sonnet’ to The House of Life (1881), which recalls Blake’s illuminated texts. What is striking about his work, and indeed exemplary not only of Pre-​R aphaelitism but also of Victorian literary and visual culture more broadly, is the extent to which, in both the creation and the consumption of the arts, the textual and the visual are mutually constitutive. In the case of Tennyson’s poetry, for example, the source for so many Pre-​R aphaelite pictures, visuality is often crucial to its themes and effects. The Lady of Shalott, weaving her art under a curse that forbids her to look directly at the world, which she views only in her mirror, breaks out of her life of shadows and reflections to become the object of Lancelot’s curious gaze in Rossetti’s image, and in fact to become a source of visual pleasure for a wider Victorian audience through the many painterly images of her that have become iconic of the Victorian visual imagination. Techniques of looking are shaped by reading, and literary interpretation is inflected by spectatorship, and

Art and the Literary    647 this is nowhere more evident than in the art literature that was such a special feature of the period.

III  In the middle of the nineteenth century, opportunities for the public to view the fine arts in Britain, as well as in Continental Europe, expanded on an unprecedented scale. The National Gallery more than doubled the size of its collection between 1843 and 1855, and initiatives such as the contest for the decoration of the new Palace of Westminster in 1843 provided a catalyst for major exhibitions of public art. The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 meant that even works in private collections were made available to the public gaze and reached mass audiences. Britain became a nation of spectators and critics, as exhibition attendance figures and the number of visual and textual depictions of the new museum culture attest. Furthermore, fine art images made their way into shop windows and into the home, not only in the fashionable streets of London or via educated networks such as the Arundel Society, but in provincial towns and in the pages of the penny press. Now that, as the art historian Anna Jameson observed in 1843, ‘the Penny Magazine [could] place a little print after Mantegna at once before the eyes of fifty thousand readers’, the fine arts were made democratically available to an entirely new viewing public.26 Looking at art, writing about it, reading about it was not the reserve of an aesthetic elite but right at the centre of Victorian cultural life, and this is everywhere reflected in its literature, from the popular to the abstruse. Novels often turn centrally on art and artist characters, both fictional (for example Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Dinah Craik’s Olive (1850), and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)) and historical (as in George Eliot’s Romola (1862–​3) and Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s Miss Angel and Fulham Lawn (1876)). How people respond to art can be a crucial marker of character. Jane Eyre is a seeing subject, an artist, and a lover of art. She is introduced to the reader as a girl who consoles herself for the fact that ‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day’ by immersing herself in a book, ‘taking care that it should be one stored with pictures’, and displaying less interest in the letterpress than the images.27 Jane’s drawings have considerable symbolic power, and Rochester’s engagement with them is a crucial feature of their courtship. In both fiction and poetry, the art gallery is a scene of aesthetic and amorous encounter. Who can forget Lucy Snowe’s

26  Anna Jameson, ‘Andrea Mantegna’, Penny Magazine, 12 (1843), 436. Reprinted in Memoirs of Early Italian Painters and of the Progress of Painting in Italy, 2nd edn. (London: John Murray, 1868), 108–​27, at 121. 27  Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1848), ed. Richard J. Dunn (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1971), 5. See Antonia Losano, The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008).

648    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture assessment of the paintings of Cleopatra and ‘La Vie d’une Femme’ under the watchful eye of M. Paul in Villette (1853); or the narrator’s description of Dorothea Brooke on her wedding journey to Rome in Middlemarch (1871–​2), and Will Ladislaw’s first glimpse of her among the statuary? More forgettable, though popular among the Victorians, are sentimental verses such as Frederick Locker-​Lampson’s poem of 1868, ‘On “A Portrait of A Lady.” Vide Royal Academy Catalogue. By the Painter’, in which the speaker stands voyeuristically aloof from the crowd of visitors to the Royal Academy exhibition before the portrait of the beautiful woman with the rose in her hair he has painted, savouring the private memory of the plucking of that rose: I gather’d it wet for my own sweet pet As we whisper’d and walk’d apart; She gave me that rose, it is fragrant yet And its home is near my heart.28

More to the taste of modern readers are the mid-​century ‘painter poems’ of Robert Browning and the fin-​de-​siècle ekphrastic lyrics of Michael Field. In ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ and ‘Andrew del Sarto’ (1855) Browning draws upon his knowledge of the historical artists’ paintings and contemporary anecdotal Lives such as Vasari’s to conjure their personalities, whilst in dramatic monologues, such as ‘The Bishop Orders his Tomb’ (1845), ‘My Last Duchess’ (1842), and ‘Pictor Ignotus’ (1845), the poet evokes the spirit of the Renaissance through the imaginative creation of fictional artworks and their artists, subjects, and owners. Later in the century, his friends Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote under the signature Michael Field, published an ornamental limited edition of a volume of poetry with the title Sight and Song (1892) based on their response to a series of paintings by artists such as Watteau, Correggio, Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Tintoretto, and Giorgione in British and Continental public galleries. The aim of their collection of ekphrastic poems was, as they explained in the Preface, ‘to translate into verse what the lines and colours of certain chosen pictures sing in themselves’.29 The new exposure to the fine arts, both at home and, in a new age of popular tourism, abroad, led then to an outpouring of words on the subject of art, ranging from poetry and fiction to formal academic treatises and monographs on artists; from articles, reviews, and impressionistic essays for the periodical press to museum catalogues and popular guidebooks. Alongside the art journalism, and the high cultural forms of the critical essay and scholarly history, other forms of art writing operated upon and produced the Victorians’ experience of art. As Jonah Siegel points out, the Victorian museum-​going experience was highly ‘scripted’, the spectator’s view of the artwork mediated even more insistently than the modern blockbuster exhibition visitor’s by an array of captions, commentaries, guidebooks; what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as an 28 

Frederick Locker-​Lampson, London Lyrics, ed. Austin Dobson (London: Macmillan, 1908), 131–​3. Michael Field [Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper], Sight and Song (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1892), p. v. 29 

Art and the Literary    649 ‘artistic language’, the elaboration of ‘an autonomous definition of properly artistic value irreducible to the strictly economic value and also a way of speaking about painting itself, of pictorial techniques, using appropriate words […] which enable one to speak of pictorial art’.30 Victorian critics set out unabashedly to ‘read’ the visual arts. Anna Jameson, for example, reflecting on the transactional nature of the verbal and the visual in the interpretation of art, declares: ‘We should be able to read a picture as we read a book.’ She adds, ‘A gallery of pictures may be compared with a well-​furnished library; and I have sometimes thought that it would be a good thing if we could arrange a collection of pictures as we arrange a collection of books.’ Jameson hopes in her writing about art, to stimulate ‘comparative and discriminating reflections’ and thereby ‘enlarge [the] sphere of rational pleasure in the contemplation of works of art’.31 Much early Victorian writing about art had this kind of overtly educational function in what has been described as a ‘preprofessional age, before art history had acquired disciplinary identity or an institutional structure, before Roger Fry created the modern specialized art critic’.32 The ability to read and to talk about art was a skill, and a crucial item of cultural capital, to be acquired by both the self-​improving populace and the aspiring bourgeoisie, and this gave rise to a whole new class of writers who, with varying degrees of knowledge and experience, dedicated themselves to teaching the art of appreciation. Chief among these was John Ruskin, who launched his brilliantly eclectic and highly subjective and rhetorical work, Modern Painters, in 1843 under the signature ‘A Graduate of Oxford’. His writing was to have a signally important influence on Victorian art and taste, assisting in the reinstatement of Turner’s reputation, inspiring and championing, as well as critiquing, the Pre-​Raphaelites, promoting early Italian art and the Victorian Gothic Revival, and challenging everything from civic architectural programmes to individual artists, such as Whistler, who offended against his strictures. Overarchingly, his strenuously argued view that works of art represent the moral health of the artist, the nation, and the period that produced them, and that as a consequence our aesthetic responses are crucially related to moral and social judgements, was to exercise peculiar cultural authority in Victorian England, and indeed is an influence that can still be felt in our own times. Ruskin developed his complex visual aesthetic over many years—​Modern Painters itself took seventeen years and five volumes to complete—​and his oeuvre encompassed a wide range of diverse and sometimes contradictory critical positions, yet at the heart of his method a desire to render into words what he imagined the artist actually felt when he made the picture, and intended to inspire in the imagination of the viewer through 30 

Jonah Siegel, Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-​Century Culture of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. xxvi; Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic’, in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 260. Both are cited by Teukolsky in her fine discussion of ‘Cultures of Word and Image’, in The Literate Eye, 16–​20. 31 Jameson, Memoirs of Early Italian Painters, pp. xi, xii, xvii, xix. 32  Laurie Kane Lew, ‘Cultural Anxiety in Anna Jameson’s Art Criticism’, Studies in English Literature, 36 (1996), 829–​56, at 838–​9.

650    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture the use of colour, line, light, and composition, remained constant. His object is very often not so much to describe the picture and the painterly techniques deployed by the artist, as to create in written language its effect upon himself as viewer, and in so doing to try to recover how it was conceived, to bring to life the artist’s vision by recapitulating in words his aesthetic, physiological, and emotional engagement with his subject. One of the most famous set pieces in Modern Painters, volume i is Ruskin’s celebration of Turner’s painting Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhon Coming On (1840), which had been exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1840, paired, incidentally, with an extract from the artist’s unfinished and unpublished poem ‘Fallacies of Hope’ (1812).33 The picture had not been well received by reviewers and was initially unsold (until Ruskin père purchased it for his son in 1844). Ruskin’s word-​painting brilliantly recuperates Turner’s pictorial interpretation of the English slave trade, an aesthetically audacious, morally and emotionally harrowing portrayal, specifically, of the practice of throwing dead or dying slaves overboard to claim insurance money: It is a sunset on the Atlantic after prolonged storm; but the storm is partially lulled, and the torn and streaming rain-​clouds are moving in scarlet lines to lose themselves in the hollow of the night. The whole surface of sea included in the picture is divided into two ridges of enormous swell, not high, nor local, but a low, broad heaving of the whole ocean, like the lifting of its bosom by deep-​drawn breath after the torture of the storm. Between these two ridges, the fire of the sunset falls along the trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, the intense and lurid splendor which burns like gold and bathes like blood. Along this fiery path and valley, the tossing waves by which the swell of the sea is restlessly divided, lift themselves in dark, indefinite, fantastic forms, each casting a faint and ghastly shadow behind it along the illumined foam. They do not rise everywhere, but three or four together in wild groups, fitfully and furiously, as the under strength of the swell compels or permits them; leaving between them treacherous spaces of level and whirling water, now lighted with green and lamp-​like fire, now flashing back the gold of the declining sun, now fearfully dyed from above with the indistinguishable images of the burning clouds, which fall upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet, and give to the reckless waves the added motion of their own fiery flying. Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of the night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty* ship as it labors amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its

33 

Aloft all hands, strike the top-​masts and belay; Yon angry setting sun and fierce-​edged clouds Declare the Typhon’s coming. Before it sweeps your decks, throw overboard The dead and dying—​ne’er heed their chains Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope! Where is thy market now? (The Exhibition of the Royal Academy 1838 (London: Royal Academy, 1838), 14)

Art and the Literary    651 flaming flood with the sunlight,—​and cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea. * She is a slaver, throwing her slaves overboard. The near sea is encumbered with corpses.34

Ruskin’s seeming relegation of the subject of the drowning slaves to a footnote has been the subject of much critical discussion, but focusing on this seems to miss the point. Ruskin’s rhetorical elaboration of the ways in which Turner exploits the aesthetic properties of colour symbolism, composition, and metaphor to create a visual meditation on the inheritance of slavery and its atrocities constitutes an aesthetic exposition of the ‘guilty’ ship’s vile freight through an intensely metaphorical reading of the turbulent seascape as the scene of horrific rape and murder. As Marcus Wood argues, in Ruskin’s prose that subject ‘is embodied in a sky made of blood and a sea convulsed with pain’; the storm that is so naturalistically depicted and described ‘is also a metaphor for physical torture’; the violent whipping of the tempestuous sky and the surging of the sea invoke at once the destructive power of the elements (the agents, seemingly, of divine retribution) and the tortured bodies of the slaves in their desperate and doomed struggle; in this way, the painting can be seen as ‘an act of artistic salvage’.35 For the climax of his reading, where he describes how ‘that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror […] incarnadines the multitudinous sea’, Ruskin brings to the painting a wonderfully suggestive allusion to Macbeth’s words: ‘Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood | Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather | The multitudinous seas incarnadine, | Making the green one red’, deftly evoking a whole bloodstained history and cosmology of human greed, violence, and guilt.36 If Ruskin’s work demonstrates the myriad ways in which literary techniques and references can be brought to bear upon art, his contemporary, the aesthetic critic Walter Pater transfers the painterly ideas and methods of Impressionism to his writing. ‘What is this song or picture, the engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me?’ is the question he poses in his controversial Preface to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). ‘What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence?’37 These leading questions sound a very different note from Ruskin’s, as Pater’s contemporaries immediately recognized, and they radically reconceptualize the dynamics of the encounter with art and the value and purpose of writing about it. Under Aestheticism, which Pater may be said to have inaugurated in England with his profoundly unsettling valorization of pleasure and the sensorium, art was no longer viewed 34 Ruskin, Works, iii. 571. Of the many critical discussion of this passage, Marcus Wood’s, in Blind

Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780–​1865 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 56–​68, is outstanding. 35 Wood, Blind Memory, 62–​3. 36 Shakespeare, Macbeth, II. ii. 57–​60. 37  Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan Library Edition, 1910), viii.

652    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture as serving a didactic, moral, or utilitarian purpose (this is not Jameson’s ‘rational pleasure’), but was to be experienced intensely, using all the senses, for its own sake, ‘l’art pour l’art’. For Pater, both aesthetic criticism and aesthetic practice take place, crucially, across the arts.38 For example, he invented a new genre which he termed the ‘Imaginary Portrait’ which obviously draws on visual models. He published around a dozen such portraits, which are typically psychological studies of fictional characters at key historical moments of cultural change who embody some aspect of the zeitgeist, often overlaid by an element of self-​portraiture, in line with his overriding emphasis on the question ‘What is this […] engaging personality […] to me?’ As well as creating imaginary portraits, he responds imaginatively to the subtle undercurrents of actual portrait paintings and sculptures, recreating in his haunting prose his encounters with the engaging historical personality or personification they represent to the modern viewer. His celebrated reverie on Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is the most famous example of this kind of ekphrastic writing: The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all ‘the ends of the world are come,’ and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.39

Pater’s brooding meditations on Renaissance artworks quickly came to be regarded as key texts of the Aesthetic movement. Yet Pater’s transformation of visual experience into 38  See Elicia Clements and Lesley Higgins (eds), Victorian Aesthetic Conditions: Pater across the Arts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 39  Pater, The Renaissance, 124–126.

Art and the Literary    653 literary form, his exploration of the art of creative ekphrasis in imaginative prose, for all that it was inflected by French cultural movements such as Impressionism, Decadence, and Symbolism, clearly shares some affinity with Ruskin. Oscar Wilde indeed brackets the two writers together as types of the ‘creative’ impressionistic critic. ‘Who cares’, says Gilbert, in ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891), ‘whether Mr Ruskin’s views on Turner are sound or not? What does it matter?’ That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so fiery-​coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and epithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England’s Gallery [… .] Who, again, cares whether Mr Pater has put into the portrait of Mona Lisa something that Leonardo never dreamed of? The painter may have been merely the slave of an archaic smile, as some have fancied, but whenever I pass into the cool galleries of the Palace of the Louvre, and stand before that strange figure ‘set in its marble chair in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some strange light under sea’, I murmur to myself, ‘She is older than the rocks among which she sits.’40

IV  Wilde conjures an image of walking through the National Gallery and the Louvre intoning Ruskin’s and Pater’s words, and this is of course something we might expect an aesthete to do. Yet what I hope this essay has made clear is that the imbrication of visual and verbal aesthetics, art and the literary, in a unified cultural poetics was a widespread phenomenon for Victorian readers and spectators of many different classes and intellectual backgrounds. The physicist James Clerk Maxwell provides a particularly interesting perspective on the subject that captures the historical moment very precisely. His 1874 verses ‘To the Committee of the Cayley Portrait Fund’ anticipate a commissioned portrait of the English mathematician Arthur Cayley, demonstrating concisely how the ancient Horatian conceit of ut pictura poesis can be enhanced by the new mathematical understandings of space that Cayley and his peers pioneered. Beginning with Euclidean space, contrasting the two-​dimensional space of the portrait’s picture plane with the three-​dimensional figure it represents, the poem invokes recent non-​Euclidean ideas of space as extending to n dimensions (that is, any number of dimensions) to describe the soul of the mathematician: In two dimensions, we the form may trace Of him whose soul, too large for vulgar space, In n dimensions flourished unrestricted.41 40 

Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, 366. Lewis Campbell and William Garnett, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell: With a Selection from His Correspondence and Occasional Writings and a Sketch of His Contributions to Science 41 

654    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Maxwell’s poem itself, of course, adds a new linguistic dimension to the two-​ dimensional plane of the picture space, demonstrating an interpenetration of text and image that seems characteristic, indeed constitutive, of Victorian aesthetic representation at a moment when the experience and conceptualization of time, too, was being radically transformed, not least by the new velocities of moving pictures and time-​based media.42 Likewise, to turn finally to a different text by Wilde, the portrait at the centre of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) presents a device for exploring dimensions of time and space uncontainable within a normal picture frame or conventional narrative. Had it in fact had the material form of a painting, it could not in its nature have transmogrified and changed over time to reveal the ‘true’ nature of its subject. But of course, the portrait does not exist as an actual picture: it merely ‘exists’ in language, as a literary representation of a portrait, and it is only in this hybrid image/​text form that the ‘portrait’ enables its subject, Dorian Gray himself, and the reader/​viewer to participate in the additional dimensions supposed unavailable to the two-​dimensional visual representation: the third dimension, of depth or full physical embodiment; the fourth dimension, whereby we see Gray’s portrait changing over time; and the newly revealed n dimensions, by which we can understand the unfolding of who he is, the true horror of a soul ‘too large for vulgar space’, when it has been allowed to flourish unrestricted. In literature such as this, visuality is carried into the very heart of the text, and textuality right to the heart of the visual image. Rather than the ‘sister arts’ being practised and appreciated as ‘two equitable neighbouring powers’, as Lessing had recommended in the Laocoön in 1766,43 a hundred years later they have become collaborators in a dynamic inter-​artistic exchange. Walter Pater elaborates a contemporary underpinning theory for creative interfiliations of this kind in a discussion of the German concept of Anders-​ streben, which depends upon the idea of a continuum between the arts: although each art has thus its own specific order of impressions, and an untranslatable charm, while a just apprehension of the ultimate differences of the arts is the beginning of aesthetic criticism; yet it is noticeable that, in its special mode of handling its given material, each art may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art, by what German critics term an Anders-​streben—​a partial alienation from its own limitations, through which the arts are able, not indeed to supply the place of each other, but reciprocally to lend each other new forces.44

Modern cultural theorists remain intrigued by the dynamic nature of this exchange, and their formulations continue to suggest how image/​text interactions enable a (London: Macmillan, 1882), 637. I am grateful to Daniel Brown for this reference. See his The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 220. 42  See Nead, The Haunted Gallery; and Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). 43  Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay on the limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. E. C. Beasley, introd. T. Burbidge (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1853), 121. 44 Pater, The Renaissance, 133–​4.

Art and the Literary    655 transcendence of the dimensional limitations of each individual art form. Michel Foucault, for instance, claims that ‘the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation,’ and W. J. T. Mitchell endorses his strategy of ‘holding open the gap between language and image’, a strategy which, he notes, ‘allows the representation to be seen as a dialectical field of forces, rather than a determinate “message” or referential sign’.45 When we approach the subject of art and the literary in Victorian culture, we should, I suggest, be led, as was Pater himself, by the material forms and representational practices of the works of art themselves. For such works demonstrate, more powerfully than theory, how words and images ‘reciprocally […] lend each other new forces’ (in Pater’s words) and n dimensions (in Maxwell’s) by way of an ongoing intermedial dialectic in which we ourselves, as critics, can transhistorically participate.

Select Bibliography Bullen, J. B., The Sun is God: Painting, Literature, and Mythology in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). Calè, Luisa, and Patrizia Di Bello (eds), Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-​Century Literary and Visual Cultures (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Christ, Carol T., and John O. Jordan (eds), Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995). Flint, Kate, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000). Helsinger, Elizabeth K., Poetry and the Pre-​Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Mitchell, W. J.  T., Picture Theory:  Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). The Rossetti Archive, ed. Jerome McGann (University of Virginia) (www.rossettiarchive.org). Siegel, Jonah, Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-​Century Culture of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Smith, Lindsay, Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris and the Pre-​Raphaelites (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Teukolsky, Rachel, The Literate Eye:  Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

45 

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970, 1974), 9; Mitchell, Picture Theory, 64.

Theatrical Culture

Chapter 34

Vi ctorian T h e at re Research Problems and Progress Katherine Newey

In 1883 William Powell Frith exhibited a spectacular painting, A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881. It was spectacular for its size, its reference to the event of the private view, its roll call of fashionable figures identifiable within the painting, and its scathing message about fashion and art. Frith glossed the painting in his autobiography, commenting: Beyond the desire of recording for posterity the aesthetic craze as regards dress, I wished to hit the folly of listening to self-​elected critics in matters of taste, whether in dress or art. I therefore planned a group, consisting of a well-​known apostle of the beautiful, with a herd of eager worshippers surrounding him.1

That apostle was, of course, Oscar Wilde, surrounded by a group of ‘pure aesthetes absorbed in affected study’. This much is well known, as is the grouping of other Victorian celebrities (Frith’s word) not connected with Wilde: by implication, these are worthy colleagues whose taste is neither ‘affected’ nor ‘eccentric’. Mary Braddon is included in this group, as well as Lily Langtry, Henry Irving, and Ellen Terry. These theatre professionals are part of Frith’s broader vision of Victorian celebrity of all kinds: ‘statesmen, poets, judges, philosophers, musicians, painters, actors, and others’.2 The inclusion of theatre professionals in Frith’s fashionable group portrait, offers a different view of the Victorian Establishment, belying the common view that actors were beyond the pale of polite society. So too, does Frith’s critique of Oscar Wilde, possibly the most recognizable theatre professional to most general readers now, and the playwright whose satirical works confirm our own prejudices about the Victorian theatre which Wilde sought to remake. 1  William Powell Frith, My Autobiography and Reminiscences (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1889), 432–​433. 2 Frith, My Autobiography and Reminiscences, 433.

660    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture One hundred and thirty years later, it is salutary to be reminded of the presence of theatre professionals at the centre of Frith’s representation of the fashionable Victorian aesthetic cognoscenti—​theatre professionals appear both amongst those satirized by Frith and those of whom he approved. Salutary, because scholars of the Victorian period regularly forget the drama and the theatre, although they are just as regularly reminded of its significance. Every few years, another essay surveys the state of scholarship on the Victorian theatre, the examination still driven by the omission of studies of the Victorian theatre from the mainstream of Victorian studies, literary studies, or theatre and performance studies.3 We mark progress, but in doing so we also continue to highlight the continuing position of the theatre and drama of the nineteenth century outside mainstream Victorian studies. For contemporary literary and cultural scholars, the Victorian theatre is still positioned uncomfortably between high art and popular culture, between Romantic notions of beauty and artistry, and commercial relationships governed by the cash nexus. This disciplinary positioning is as much a reflection of Victorian anxieties about their theatre, and outright dissatisfaction with their dramatic literature, as it is later scholarly hesitation or even aversion to theatre and drama. For most of the twentieth century, theatre historians conspired (knowingly or not) with their historical subjects to hide the commercial foundation and cash lifeblood of the theatre, while literary historians and critics found the commercial basis of the drama so difficult that they worked to make the theatre itself almost invisible. Yet there are advantages to abjection and liminality. Pierre Bourdieu argues that cultural fields are defined by their boundaries.4 Interesting things can happen at boundaries, and what goes on in the liminal spaces between fields can challenge and shape those fields. In this essay I want to suggest that the study of the Victorian theatre, as a still liminal field, has much to offer scholars of Victorian literature and culture. An understanding of Victorian drama and theatre in the twenty-​first century requires us to set aside the judgements of the twentieth century that Victorian dramatic literature was badly written, and that the Victorian theatre was crude and ridiculous. This view of the Victorian theatre from the twentieth century connects to the more general challenge posed by Andreas Huyssen, who asked ‘why, despite the obvious hetereogeneity of the modernist project, a certain universalizing account of the modern has been able to hold sway for so long in literary and art criticism’.5 Rather than standing for outmoded, exhausted, and even risible ‘bad’ art, the Victorian theatre can offer examples of innovation and modernity. The inventiveness, skill, and resourcefulness of Victorian theatre workers, the new forms developed by playwrights of the period, and the challenges to the boundaries of genre and aesthetic theory offer a challenge to generations of critics and historians who placed the theatre in the margins of Victorian culture. 3  Tracy C. Davis, ‘Riot, Subversion, and Discontent in New Victorian Theatre Scholarship’, Victorian Studies, 37, no. 2 (1994), 307–​316; and Jane Moody, ‘The State of the Abyss: Nineteenth Century Performance and Theatre Historiography in 1999’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 5, no. 1 (2000), 112–​128. 4  The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. and trans. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 42. 5  After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 56.

Victorian Theatre: Research Problems and Progress    661 To recognize the aesthetic innovations of the Victorian theatre and drama, it is necessary to understand its material practices, and the industrial and legal structures within which it operated. In this respect, the Victorian theatre was part of the structural change of social and economic organization in Britain in the nineteenth century. The theatre industry demonstrates the tensions arising from the challenges of nineteenth-​century laissez-​faire capitalism to older systems of custom and protectionism.6 While avoiding a crudely Marxist view that economic forces are the principal drivers of artistic change, understanding the Victoria theatre and drama does require a recognition that changes in the drama and its staging were framed by particular modes of economic organization. In part because of its materiality, its use of embodied labour, its ‘thingness’, theatre was positioned more overtly at the boundary between art and economics than other modes of cultural production, where labour could be overlooked or made invisible, particularly the labour of women. The organization of the theatre in the nineteenth century developed from an oligarchy—​ the patent theatre monopoly—​to a more varied and less stable array of different kinds of entertainment, located in a variety of spaces, and catering to increasingly diverse audiences, with financial models ranging from the actor-​manager leading a repertory company (most famously, Henry Irving at the Lyceum), the perpetual touring of repertory companies (such as the Kendalls’ repeated forays to the USA), to the many brave (or perhaps foolhardy) entrepreneurs who made and lost fortunes throughout the century. Many of the strongest features of the British theatre industry of the twenty-​first century have been inherited from the Victorian theatre, together with its anxieties: in chief, a confusion of opinions about the purpose of theatre which has its effects on public policy and industrial regulation, as well as aesthetic considerations of dramaturgy and representation. Understanding the mixed modes of the Victorian theatre, and its dramatic literatures, necessitates tracing how these new forms were in part produced by a tangle of customary practice and statute law which was never fully reformed until late in the twentieth century, when state censorship was finally removed by the Theatres Act of 1968. The innovation and experimentation to be found in the Victorian theatre—​its adoption of melodrama from the French boulevards to a thoroughly naturalized domestic British form, the evolution of pantomime into the extravaganza, ballet, and its late Victorian form, the new urban form of the music hall, and the uses of spectacle and adaptation—​ were developed partly in response to continuing attempts to legislate for and control public entertainments. Throughout the nineteenth century, the legal status of theatre, and indeed the very question of ‘What is a play?’, involved a series of parliamentary select committees, Acts of Parliament, and several more or less organized public campaigns about the theatre, driven by public press commentary of varying degrees of disinterestedness.7 Since the early modern period, public performance in Britain has been 6 

Tracy C. Davis, Economics of the British Stage, 1800–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 7  Katherine Newey, ‘The 1832 Select Committee’, in David Francis Taylor (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Georgian Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Richard Schoch, ‘Shakespeare and the Music Hall’ and Jacky Bratton, ‘What Is a Play? Drama and the Victorian Circus’, in Tracy C. Davis and Peter Holland (eds), The Performing Century: Nineteenth-​Century Theatre’s History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 236–​249 and 250–​262, respectively.

662    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture a matter of public policy. From the regulation of the monarch’s entertainments in the late sixteenth century by the Master of the Queen’s Household, a post which evolved into the Master of the Revels, through the royal letters patent of Charles II bestowed on Killigrew and Davenant, and thus supressing other theatres, to the establishment of the Lord Chamberlain’s powers in the 1737 Licensing Act, public performance was subject to state control and protection in Britain. Such control was often overtly party political, as in 1737 and 1832, as well as serving as a marker for broader ideological attitudes towards representation, play, and pleasure.8 The complexities of the legal status of public theatres in the nineteenth century were inherited from earlier attempts to regulate and control performances on the public stage, particularly in London. The royal letters patent, presented to theatre managers Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant by the restored Charles II in 1662, gave the monopoly of the spoken drama to these actor-​managers. The Restoration was the restoration of pleasure, but licensed pleasure. Censorship of the spoken word in the theatre formally introduced by the 1737 Licensing Act presents an interesting paradox of the real/​not real, of theatricality versus truth. The power of make-​believe—​or the fear of its power—​drove the 1737 Licensing Act, and is evident throughout the ‘decline of the drama’ debates of the late Georgian and early Victorian periods, and the re-​emergence of this debate over the establishment of a national theatre in the late nineteenth century. The fear of the consequences of play, theatricality, and make-​believe recurred throughout the nineteenth century in various moral panics to do with the theatre, performance, and public behaviour, such as Mrs Ormiston-​Chaunt’s campaign against the Empire, a music hall in Leicester Square.9 In 1837, the British theatre was still regulated by this combination of custom and legislation derived from Charles II’s restoration of the theatres. But regulation was confused and contentious. In London, the lessees and managers of the Theatres Royal (Drury Lane and Covent Garden) claimed monopoly rights to perform the ‘legitimate’ drama; that is, the spoken drama of the English tradition. Yet there was very little consensus about what comprised the legitimate drama, as was clear from the variety of definitions offered to the House of Commons Select Committee on Dramatic Literature in 1832.10 From the Old Price riots in 1809 to this select committee of 1832, by the beginning of the Victorian period, the monopoly rights of the Theatres Royal to the canon of English drama had been under sustained attack from radical modernizers and reformers on the one hand, and commercial entrepreneurial theatre managers on the other. This pressure continued through to the 1843 Theatres Act, when the monopoly was removed, and beyond, as the radical bourgeoisie of literary London (or the ‘literati’ as Catherine Gore referred to the world of 8 

Jonas Barish, The Anti-​Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), is still the most comprehensive study of this phenomenon in British culture and society. 9  Joseph Donohue, Fantasies of Empire: The Empire Theatre of Varieties and the Licensing Controversy of 1894 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005). 10  Newey, ‘The 1832 Select Committee’, 152–​153.

Victorian Theatre: Research Problems and Progress    663 letters in 1850)11 pushed for a new ‘legitimate’ drama drawing on the poetic tragedy of the Elizabethans and the social comedy of the eighteenth century. In public debates on the ‘decline of the drama’ they lambasted the managerial policies of the patent theatres, accusing them of bringing the theatre of spectacle and sensation into the ‘temples of the Drama’. This was because the Theatres Royal were not restricted in offering ‘illegitimate’ performances, while the ‘minor’ theatres operated under the threat of prosecution if they offered ‘legitimate’ performances. Even after the removal of the patent theatres’ monopoly in 1843, the Theatres Royal were thought to be failing: The case of the old ‘legitimate’ Drama seems to be hopeless: Tragedy is turned out of doors at Covent Garden, and not one of the score of metropolitan theatres, licensed by the Lord Chamberlain under the new Act, will give her house-​room.12

Attempts were made throughout the period to nurture new writing which lived up to the label of legitimate. These included Benjamin Webster’s £500 competition for a prize comedy in 1843,13 and William Macready’s productions of modern ‘legitimate’ plays such as Robert Browning’s poetic dramas and the history plays of Thomas Noon Talfourd and Edward Bulwer Lytton. At the end of the century, Henry Irving’s collaboration with Lord Tennyson on The Cup14 and Wilson Barrett’s work with Thomas Hall Caine and Henry Arthur Jones15 together tried to revive the ‘legitimate’ theatre within the economic stringencies and uncertainties of commercial management. From the other side of a class and aesthetic divide, managers of the minor theatres—​ those London theatres such as the Surrey, the Coburg (then the Victoria and now the Old Vic), the Adelphi, the City of London, which were not designated Theatres Royal—​exerted constant pressure on the institutions of regulation by openly staging spoken drama, from Shakespeare through to contemporary melodrama. This is what Jane Moody called the ‘illegitimate’ theatre, a mode of performance which she argues ‘transformed the characters and dramatic subjects […] represented on the British stage’.16 Managers of both the patent and the minor theatres had no difficulties in commissioning the many ‘illegitimate’ plays—​farces, melodramas, burlesques, burlettas—​ that their hungry audiences ate up in the long bills of performance given each night. And what reformers and critics throughout the century overlooked was that audiences 11  Catherine Gore, letter to the Duke of Devonshire (12 December [1850?]), Devonshire MSS, Chatsworth, 2nd ser. 384.16. 12  The Athenaeum (21 October 1843), 946. 13  Ellen Donkin, ‘Mrs. Gore gives Tit for Tat’, in Tracy C. Davis and Ellen Donkin (eds), Nineteenth-​ Century British Women Playwrights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Katherine Newey, Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 28–​29. 14  Jeffrey Richards, Sir Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor and His World (London: Hambledon, 2005), 202–​210. 15  Katherine Newey and Jeffrey Richards, John Ruskin and the Victorian Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 120–​131. 16  Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–​1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 242.

664    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture relished mixed bills, combining the canonical drama with melodrama, dance, farce, and the pleasures of spectacle and sensation. The Victorian theatre was hungry for content, and theatres were supplied with a stream of pieces of great variety in form and performance style. The richness of this archive has its problems:  it is extensive but fluid and almost unboundaried, and the sustained work required to make it productive in conventional ways for scholars has been patchy. Scholars working on the Victorian theatre have few of the resources taken for granted in other areas of cultural and literary history. The literary and archival materials available for the study of the Victorian theatre are like the theatre industry itself: profligate in the range of performance texts, adaptations, and genres, replete with a myriad physical, visual, and textual traces of performance, and demonstrating the theatre’s endless capacity to innovate and adapt, but chaotic and often contradictory. Serious historians of the Victorian theatre have had to invent or adapt research methodologies to explore the richness of the documents of Victorian performance available to us. In this respect, recent developments in the range of digitized archives have had a transformative effect on scholarship in the field. The availability of ‘big data’ online and in relatively easily searchable forms means that we can explore the interconnectedness of previously largely discrete areas of Victorian culture, social, and legal organization. For example, it is now feasible to find reviews of almost any Victorian stage production, even in rare or short-​lived journals and newspapers, and with a reasonable (although not complete) coverage of all the country, not just London. The material traces and ephemera of performance, such as playbills, advertisements, programmes, or print shop cuts are available within the limitations of facsimiles of paper-​ based and two-​dimensional objects. In the near future, three-​dimensional printing may offer us a whole new kind of virtual archive. Online searchable census reports, court reports such as the online Old Bailey records, and police reports offer new possibilities for approaches to the lives and working conditions of theatre professionals. Digital maps and population data are enabling scholars to explore the spatial dynamics of the theatre, within urban contexts, and through national and global networks.17 It is not that any of this material is newly discovered: it has always been available, although not easily accessible for scholars outside London. However, it is now framed differently for twenty-​first-​ century scholars and open to new ways of combining data sets more methodically and imaginatively. The diversity of the archive now being revealed emphasizes that, more than in other eras of performance, Victorian theatre is not accessible simply through its textuality, and that a consideration of dramatic literature is not necessarily the most productive starting point. Critics in the nineteenth century found this non-​literariness problematic, and it remains a difficult issue for literary historians now. In 1999, Jane Moody 17  Jo Robinson et al., ‘Mapping the Moment: A Spatio-​Temporal Interface for Studying Performance Culture, Nottingham, 1857–​1867’, International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, 5, no. 2 (2011), 103–​126; and Julie Holledge, ‘Addressing the Global Phenomenon of A Doll’s House: An Intercultural Intervention’, Ibsen Studies, 8, no. 1 (2008), 13–​28.

Victorian Theatre: Research Problems and Progress    665 referred us to Michael Booth’s 1980 description of the literary record of the Victorian theatre as an ‘abyss’.18 The non-​literariness of the drama of the nineteenth century has often been cited as the chief reason for the Victorian theatre being overlooked in burgeoning English literary studies in the twentieth century. Furthermore, the archive of the Victorian theatre—​its textual documents and the traces of its material practices—​ exists in a largely undifferentiated mass. Archival sources for the Victorian theatre are multiple, various, and scattered. But, notwithstanding the chaos of the archive, if we are searching for evidence of modernity, innovation, and experimentation in the Victorian period, then its theatrical activity is a rich field. The theatre existed in the boundary spaces between high art and popular culture, a space about which Victorians were very anxious. Victorian critics protested at the non-​ literariness of the English drama in successive waves of public debates over ‘the Decline of the Drama’, thus embedding a historiographical narrative of failure, decline, and lack of aesthetic value. On the one hand, the Victorian theatre inherited the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the comedies of Sheridan, and the traditions of great acting of David Garrick, John Philip Kemble, and Sarah Siddons. On the other hand, the theatre industry itself was resolutely commercial, as managers, playwrights, and actors constantly sought new ways to turn a profit by pleasing diverse audiences. This debate rumbled on as an undercurrent throughout the Victorian period. It was fuelled particularly by upwardly mobile writers, critics, and managers whose ambivalent relationship with the commercial basis of the theatre led to a variety of strategies of engagement or disengagement from the industrial and commercial basis of the theatre as an industry.19 Examples abound, such as James Robinson Planché’s removal of the boisterous, physical comedy of the Harlequinade from pantomime to develop the extravaganza form for the middle-​class audiences of the Olympic Theatre. The making of ‘respectable’ theatre in the 1860s led from ‘cup and saucer’ social comedies such as Society (1865) and Caste (1867) by Tom Robertson, produced by Marie Wilton, with their ‘practicable’ doors, windows, and teapots and cups (wonderfully satirized by Oscar Wilde in Gwendolen and Cecily’s afternoon-​tea encounter in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), to Arthur Wing Pinero’s development of a hybrid of sensation melodrama and ‘problem play’ in The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893), or sensation drama mixed with farce in The Magistrate (1885). All of these examples represent writerly and managerial innovations and experiments in genre. Ironically, these playwrights worked closely with popular forms such as melodrama, pantomime, farce, and spectacle, while trying to move them from low cultural ‘illegitimacy’ to literary decorum. In spite of themselves, playwrights ambitious for literary notice still needed to engage deeply with what they felt to be a debased culture, in order to have their plays staged. Opposition between the popular and the literary, represented as the gulf between high and low culture, was marked in the commentaries of Henry Arthur Jones at the end 18 

Moody, ‘The State of the Abyss’, 112. Jacky Bratton, The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London, 1830–​1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 88–​92. 19 

666    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture of the Victorian period. Jones was a playwright and critic, and—​together with William Archer—​a leading public voice in support of a subsidized national theatre. Although he may be chiefly remembered (or forgotten) for his co-​authorship, with Henry Herman, of the hugely successful melodrama, The Silver King (1882),20 in the latter part of his life it was Jones’s public pronouncements on the theatre which attracted attention. In a series of essays, speeches, and books, he consistently attempted to decouple theatre from entertainment and art from commerce. He rewrote the history of English theatre as one solely of aesthetic striving for moral and educational improvement, sabotaged by the curse of the commercial and the popular. In his introduction to the polemical pieces The Renascence of the English Drama, Jones states that he has been fighting for ‘a recognition of the distinction between the art of the drama on the one hand and popular amusement on the other, and of the greater pleasure to be derived from the art of the drama’.21 The problem with contemporary English drama is that It is a hybrid, an unwieldy Siamese Twin, with two bodies, two heads, two minds, two dispositions, all of them, for the present, vitally connected. And one of these two bodies, dramatic art, is lean and pinched and starving, and has to drag about with it, wherever it goes, its fat, puffy, unwholesome, dropsical brother, popular amusement.22

In a later lecture at Harvard, Jones argues that one of the ‘Corner Stones of Modern Drama’ is The severance of the drama from popular entertainment: the recognition of it as a fine art which, though its lower ranges must always compound with mere popular entertainment, and be confused with it, is yet essentially something different from popular entertainment, transcends it, and in its higher ranges is in marked and eternal antagonism to popular entertainment.23

Jones’s imagery is as violent and grotesque as his vision of popular entertainment. Yet, reading against the grain, the vividness of Jones’s description suggests the strength of the power of that ‘dropsical brother’, such that Jones feels the need to muster such strong polemic in opposition to popular entertainment. Henry Arthur Jones presents art and amusement in opposition to each other, in order to maintain the ‘distinction’ between art and entertainment. His boundary riding, however, flew in the face of the realities of the material and dramaturgical practices of the Victorian theatre. One of the defining features of Victorian performance practices—​as 20 See Plays by Henry Arthur Jones, ed. Russell Jackson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 21  Henry Arthur Jones, The Renascence of the English Drama (London: Macmillan, 1895), p. vii. 22 Jones, The Renascence of the English Drama, 11. 23  Henry Arthur Jones, The Foundations of a National Drama (London: Chapman & Hall, [n.d.]), 37–​38.

Victorian Theatre: Research Problems and Progress    667 opposed to Victorian theories of dramaturgy—​was its powerful disregard for boundaries of genre. Indeed, more generally the popular culture of the nineteenth century was a period when generic boundaries were challenged, as were the material limitations of various media. As a vital element of Victorian popular culture, the theatre mixed modes in ways which challenged eighteenth-​century academic prescriptions of aesthetic hierarchies and the separation of genres, and was both a product and productive of a thriving visual culture and visual economy. Such fecundity was in direct conflict with the aesthetic theories developed through more academic aesthetic theories and practices. In Victorian popular culture, there are paintings which want to become actions or scenes, stage tableaux which want to be paintings; speech which was characterized as music or sound; and spectacle which wished to replicate the ‘real thing’ so intensely, yet was not the ‘real thing’ itself. Semioticians have argued that the special quality of performance which distinguishes it from any other art form is its quality of ‘ostension’: the theatre shows, rather than tells.24 While this may seem a statement of the obvious, it can offer a starting point for ways to understand the range of generic methods used in the theatre to represent and communicate. For in showing, there is also seeing and looking: showing needs a spectator. The connection of the Victorian theatre with the visual culture of its period, then, is central to an understanding of both the theatre and Victorian visual culture, to the extent, I would argue, that we need to consider the theatre as part of Victorian visual culture, and performance and theatricality as constitutive of both theatre and visual culture. Victorian theatre participates in remediation, defined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin as the process ‘by which new media fashion prior media forms’.25 Linked to this movement across generic boundaries is the quality of intermediality, as Christopher Balme explains: ‘the medium of theatre fulfils a number of functions, the main one being the purveying of entertainment in different genres and degrees of complexity’.26 And melodrama, as the dominant form in the Victorian theatre, became a vehicle for mediation and remediation in popular culture. The remediation of tragedy through melodrama, fitting it for a new audience, and the intermediality of melodrama through its ekphrastic capacities to present and represent the visual, put melodrama at the centre of Victorian theatrical innovation. The remediative nature of the Victorian theatre, and its fundamental connection with Victorian visual culture, has the potential to offer scholars of Victorian culture a fresh understanding of theories of representation in the period. The theatre’s engagement with ‘the real’ is a case in point. While Victorian writers developed complex theories of realist representation in novel fictions, it may seem as though the theatre retained an infantilized, simplistic approach to representation. Charles Dickens affectionately 24 

Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980), 26. Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 273. 26  Christopher B. Balme, ‘Playbills and the Theatrical Sphere’, in Charlotte Canning and Thomas Postlewait (eds), Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005), 42–​43. 25 

668    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture satirizes the fetish for the real in Mr Crummles’s request to Nicholas Nickleby that he write a scenario to show off the ‘practicable’ pump and ducks the itinerant theatre manager had acquired: the real and the quotidian was also spectacular. Yet, the focus on showing as a way of telling, and the use of mixed codes of representation on the stage, required a theatrically knowledgeable audience, ready to understand generic and conventional representational codes, but also ready to engage and participate in an embodied process of meaning-​making. As Dickens points out in Household Words: Joe Whelks […] is not much of a reader, has no great store of books, […] and no power at all of presenting vividly before his mind’s eye what he reads about. But put Joe in the gallery of the Victoria Theatre; show him doors and windows in the scene and that people can get in and out of it; tell him a story with these aids, and by the help of live men and women dressed up, confiding to him their inmost secrets, in voices audible a mile off, and Joe will unravel a story through all its entanglements and sit there as long after midnight as you have anything left to show him.27

Dickens’s approach here is to patronize ‘Joe Whelks’ as a credulous and simple spectator, able only to see rather than imagine. But implicit in Dickens’s statement is the richness of knowledge to be found in seeing. The importance of narrating by showing and playing in Dickens’s views of the theatre (and throughout his own fictions) makes an important point, in which showing and feeling are brought together to constitute what might be regarded as a specific epistemological position, unique to the heightened theatricality of the Victorian theatre. Dickens’s account of the ‘cheap theatre’ documents the reception of the melodramatic structure of feeling and emotional register outlined by Wylie Sypher, its moral register, theorized by Peter Brooks, and perhaps most succinctly summarized by Eric Bentley, who describes melodrama as the ‘the Naturalism of the dream world’28—​a world both quotidian and heightened. The narrative in melodrama is made clear by a series of events or incidents, ‘telling’ each on its own, which build in a jerky pattern to the final unknotting of the plot. The presentation of melodrama is made through visual and physical action in such a way that ‘Joe Whelks’ can understand, and become powerfully affected. In the old debate about whether we go to see or hear a play, Dickens is firmly in support of seeing a play, and describes a theatrical practice in which ‘telling’ scenes work through such visual and physical effects. In this, Dickens is representative of a number of commentators on the nature of seeing and knowing the Victorian theatre. Michael Booth explores this taste for the visual and the embodied spectacle on stage, citing William Bodham Donne, the Examiner of Plays in the mid-​century: To touch our emotions, we need not the imaginatively true, but the physically real. The visions which our ancestors saw with the mind’s eye, must be embodied for us

27 

28 

‘The Amusements of the People’, Household Words (30 March 1850). Eric Bentley, The Life of the Drama (London: Methuen, 1965), 205 (emphasis in original).

Victorian Theatre: Research Problems and Progress    669 in palpable forms. If a king dies on stage, he must suffer mortality’s last pangs with all the circumstances of a death-​bed; […] we must see the patient writhe anatomically [… . A]ll must be made palpable to sight, no less than to feeling; and this lack of imagination in spectators affects equally both those who enact and those who construct the scene.29

What Donne saw as problematic might now be regarded as one of the significant innovations of the Victorian theatre. Donne’s criticism is of the loss of a literary text and the imaginative spectatorship prompted by the text. In his nostalgia for the vision of his ancestors, Donne is once again invoking the superiority of the literary and the textual over the visceral and the embodied, a valuation which has endured into all but recent views of the Victorian theatre. The palpable embodiment which Donne argues has replaced the ‘mind’s eye’ of the ancients is connected to the commitment to reality to be found later in the work of André Antoine and Konstantin Stanislavsky. This is not to say that Mr Crummles’s real pump, or Tom Robertson’s practicable sets and cups and saucers, are of the same order as the realist investigations of Zola, Balzac, and their theatrical counterparts: each period redefines what it means by ‘the real’, and how it represents that reality. However, a reconsideration of Victorian spectacle in this light might suggest that we consider the differences between mainstream modes of representation, and the experimenters and modernizers at the end of the century, as less of a ‘great divide’ (as Huyssen ironically calls it) than an open and rich set of possibilities. There is more work to be done here, in ridding ourselves of the historiographical framing of the narrative as one of modernist triumph over exhausted and outmoded aesthetic practices. In general, the theatre of the nineteenth century relied greatly on the creation of telling scenes; that is, the creation of arresting and interesting situations, which not only told a story, but had an emotional effect on their audience. To tell is to narrate, but also to express affect. As Edward Mayhew explains in Stage Effect: To theatrical minds the word ‘situation’ suggests some strong point in a play […] where the action is wrought to a climax, where the actors strike attitudes, and form what they call a ‘picture’.30

Such stage pictures played a dual role: they were of interest in themselves as theatrical events quite independent of the immediate action of the plot, as they introduced novelty and sensation into the performance, and, in the case of the realization of familiar paintings, they introduced an extra-​theatrical dimension to the play. They also strategically highlighted important ideas communicated by the play, and required a ‘multiconscious’

29 

‘The Drama, Past and Present’, in Essays on the Drama (London: John W. Parker & Son, 1858), cited in Michael Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, 1850–​1910 (Boston and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 2. 30  Stage Effect: or, The Principles Which Command Dramatic Success in the Theatre (London: C. Mitchell, 1840), 43–​44.

670    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture spectator;31 that is, one who is able to recognize and comprehend the shift in modes and combination of genres, and the extra-​theatrical dimension of the performance. The reference to familiar paintings within the stage performance provided a point of contact between audience and stage which reinforced the active participation of the popular mass audience of the Victorian theatre and reinforced its cultural knowledge. Obviously, the theatre’s three-​dimensionality and its combination of verbal and non-​ verbal elements are features which set it apart from the other arts, and are not confined to the productions of the nineteenth-​century stage, nor to plays derived from pictures. However, it is in the nineteenth century that the theatre is seen as an important site for a synthesis of the arts, with its combination of speech and gesture, visual and oral signals, cerebral and plastic communication. In 1875, actor and speech tutor Henry Neville articulated what had been a guiding principle for dramatists, actors, and managers throughout the nineteenth century: Painting and sculpture embody impressions of simultaneous action and effect only; but acting gives us the succession of events in vivid representation, accompanied with the power of language, and the exquisite changes of feature, rapidity of action, delicate bye-​play, and the power of the eye which has a special poetry of its own that touches our tenderest sensibilities—​all of which are entirely lost in painting and sculpture.32

Such formulations as Neville’s represent a Victorian reworking of the theory of ut pictura poesis, extending the theory to incorporate the ideals of theatrical performance, and refuting the claim that this close relationship between poetry and painting, the verbal and the visual, was on the decline in the nineteenth century.33 This is an important point, and one which focuses on the Victorian inheritance of the Romantic revolt against the eighteenth century. The negation of the principle of ut pictura poesis in the eighteenth century constituted an ideological separation of the word and the image, as, according to W. J. T. Mitchell’s study of iconology, theorists such as Gotthold Lessing and Edmund Burke ‘treat[ed] the image as the sign of the racial, social, and sexual other, an object of both fear and contempt [… and] a site of special power that must either be contained or exploited’.34 Thus the consistent breaking down of generic distinctions on the nineteenth-​century stage was, as Neville’s essay exemplifies, part of the radical reordering of aesthetics and epistemology in the period. The

31  S. L. Bethell, Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition (1944), repr. in Peter Davison, Rolf Meyersohn, and Edward Shils (eds), Literary Taste, Culture and Mass Communication, viii; Theatre and Song (Cambridge: Chadwyck-​Healey, 1978), 25. 32  Henry Neville, The Stage: Its Past and Present in Relation to Fine Art (1875; New York: Garland, The Victorian Muse Series, 1986), 67. 33  Richard Altick, Paintings From Books (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 57. See also Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 34  Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1986), 151.

Victorian Theatre: Research Problems and Progress    671 tendency of this dissolution of generic boundaries and hierarchies was to democratize the arts, a process which can be seen as symptomatic of the general cultural and political transformation of British society in the first half of the nineteenth century. In this respect the theatre, in its chaotic, unprogrammatic way, was at the vanguard of aesthetic experimentation, and rebellion against the fixed boundaries of academic art. It is no coincidence then, that one of the innovations of Victorian theatre was its delight in recreating well-​known paintings on the stage, and participating in generic exchanges with contemporary painting and sculpture. Plays from pictures, and pictures which looked like staged scenes, were part of the ‘telling’ of Victorian theatre: its engagement with plot and narrative, and its affect for mass urban audiences. The adaptation of well-​known paintings into plays demonstrates the appropriation and adaptation of high cultural modes of representation into popular mass entertainment (a process which continues in even more strength today), through remediation. Although earlier than the strictly Victorian period, W. T. Moncrieff ’s melodrama, The Shipwreck of the Medusa; or, The Fatal Raft (1820) demonstrates this process of remediation, and also the ways in which all art was imbricated in cultural and economic exchange.35 Moncrieff ’s play dramatized the subject of Théodore Géricault’s painting, The Raft of the Medusa and both play and painting were based loosely on events of 1816, when the French ship La Méduse, carrying soldiers and settlers to the French colony of Senegal, foundered in shallows and was wrecked. Published accounts of the shipwreck included stories of murderous foul play, panic, near-​mutiny, and—​ most sensational of all—​cannibalism. The factual status of The Shipwreck of the Medusa was emphasized by the theatre management throughout the production.36 Moncrieff ’s play was staged at the Coburg (now the Old Vic) while Géricault’s painting was on public (and lucrative) display in London: despite the high cultural context of the work, it was also part of a network of commercial exchange. In making a play from a painting which visualized a contemporary event, Moncrieff utilized that other staple of the Victorian theatre: use of documentary realism as a way of making a claims for representational truth. Even more so than Crummles’s real pump, the power of the ‘true story’ was potent, as it could assume an authority not given to products of the imagination only. By producing a play about a historical event—​and moreover, an event which also forms the basis of an artwork deemed to be of great significance—​Moncrieff was able to satisfy his audience’s demands for both fact and sensation, while repudiating contemporary cultural and religious sanctions against the popular theatre. In other examples of Victorian ekphrastic representation, the affective structure and powerful narrative of theatrical melodrama circulates between the stage and visual culture. In George Cruikshank’s temperance narrative sequences The Bottle (1847), and 35  William Thomas Moncrieff, The Shipwreck of the Medusa; or, The Fatal Raft (London: Thomas Richardson, n.d.); first performed 19 June 1820, Coburg Theatre. 36  Playbill, Coburg Theatre (19 June 1820), Playbills and Programmes from the London Theatres, 1801–​ 1900 in the Theatre Museum, London (Cambridge: Chadwyck-​Healey, 1983).

672    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture The Drunkard’s Children (1848) and the plays derived from his engravings, we have a powerful demonstration of the breaking of generic boundaries and the remediation of tropes and modes of representation in Victorian popular culture. George Cruikshank’s sequences of temperance glyphographs (a printing process aligned to lithography) are simple narratives, showing the inexorable path of alcohol addiction, and the destitution, delirium, and death into which victims of the bottle descend. The two sequences are reminiscent of Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress (1735) and Marriage A-​la-​Mode (1743–​ 5) sequences (and there were Victorian theatrical versions of at least the former of these sets of paintings), but Cruikshank’s unadorned and graphic record of contemporary domestic life, and his didactic attitude, using both sensational and sentimental events to emphasize his teetotal message, set him apart from Hogarth. Notably, Cruikshank’s pictures are devoid of the picturesque qualities of most popular genre paintings of the period. The images show a generalized family—​the husband, wife, and sundry children—​drawn in a series of schematized poses. The combination of realistic, familiar details and gestures makes the sequences powerfully propagandist, by leaving imaginative space for suggesting that the story is true in its particulars, but also universally applicable. Cruikshank’s images were obvious source texts for adaptation to the nineteenth-​ century stage: they have a strong narrative and dramatic through-​line, recognizable character types, and are essentially melodramatic in the clarity of their delineation of the battle between good and evil. They also offer sufficient sensational and sentimental interest for adaptation for the popular stage. While Moncrieff changed the documented story of the shipwreck of the Méduse, converting Géricault’s doomed image of crisis into the shape of triumphant melodrama, Cruikshank’s engravings seem almost predicated on their realization on the popular stage, the battle between virtue and vice anticipating physicalization. These melodramas all share one feature:  in their self-​ conscious recreations of visual images they exploit the visual, and specifically pictorial, possibilities of the theatre to its fullest. What is also significant in these productions is their playfulness in the use of tableaux with living breathing actors realizing static painterly representations. This type of realism is akin to the performance of a masked actor, where the actor exploits, and the audience comprehends, the double vision of the masked face: the static painted or sculpted representation of the face juxtaposed against the plastic body of the actor. In melodrama a similar compound of strangeness and familiarity is created by the hyperrealism of tableaux, scene painting, and stage technology, which express both an extreme level of theatricality and an opposing but complementary straining after ‘reality’ in the detailed reproduction of the extra-​ theatrical world on the stage. The stage becomes here what Balme has identified as an intermedial space, bringing together multiple modes of representation. Caroline Radcliffe sees this intermediality as foundational to the new form of sensation melodrama as it emerges in the Victorian period, arguing that audiences’ responses to the new medium of sensation drama were formed by the double processes of remediation: hypermediacy (the requirement that the spectator look at and recognize the multiplicity of media) and immediacy (the sensation

Victorian Theatre: Research Problems and Progress    673 of transparency, of looking through the medium to the real).37 The particular and local conditions of production are also folded into sensation melodrama, offering an intertheatrical connection with other pieces in the theatre’s repertoire, and the spectator’s theatrical experience. And theatrical repertoire, as Tracy Davis has recently argued, was not just a body of work from which theatres could draw specific plays for particular moments, but ‘multiple circulating […] discourses of intelligibility that create a means by which audiences are habituated to understand one or more kinds of combinations of performative tropes’.38 Davis’s conceptualization of repertoire as part of the circulation of conventions of representation offers a further particularization of the nature of popular entertainment, but it also might suggest to us broader principles applicable to genres other than the theatre. Theatre audiences could also be readers of novels and visitors to galleries. The actions of remediation through repertoire as a way of accommodating and comprehending the new are more generally applicable: they remind us of the diverse ways in which Victorian cultural production circulated and was consumed. As a significant feature of the Victorian theatre in aesthetic terms, as well as an important industrial practice in the feeding of hungry audiences, adaptation is a central issue for any scholar of the Victorian theatre. As I have shown in my discussion of the ekphrastic practices of the Victorian theatre, Victorian stage adaptation is a complex form of remediation which placed the theatre within the Victorian visual as well as textual economies, with significant consequences for our historiographical narratives of the theatre, and our understanding of the practices of realism throughout the nineteenth century. In seeing the Victorian stage as a space for remediation, we might also draw on reader-​ response theories which start from the assumption that meaning is created and communicated in a two-​way process of exchange and interaction between reader/​spectator and text (be that a picture, a film, a book, a performance).39 In thinking of what a spectator may have brought to the performance—​what Hans-​Robert Jauss usefully articulates as the ‘horizon of expectation’—​the power and variety of the genealogy of the story, and the locus of ideas around it, focuses our attention on that paradoxical but immensely pleasurable mix of the familiar and the new, which is the core of what Bolter and Grusin identify as remediation. David Wilkie put it beautifully in his comment on seeing the tableaux realizations of his paintings The Rent Day and Distraining for the Rent in Douglas Jerrold’s play, The Rent Day (1832), as ‘the surprise of an expected event’.40 Recognizing the streets of London onstage (as we might today on the screen) offers both the thrill of recognition and the dangerous pleasure of strangeness—​what Brecht called Verfremdungseffekt41—​of one medium transferred to another. The circulation of images,

37 

‘Remediation and Immediacy in the Theatre of Sensation’, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, 36, no. 2 (Winter 2009), 38–​52. 38 

‘Nineteenth-​Century Repertoire’, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, 36, no. 2 (Winter 2009), 7. Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (London: Routledge, 1997), ­chapter 2 passim. 40 Meisel, Realizations, 150. 41  Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 91. 39 

674    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture plots, ideas, scenes in adaptation here has the potential to slot straight into the pleasure we derive from play, from make-​believe, which operates to create the real: Stanislavsky’s ‘magic if ’.42 In theatre history, there is no text we can hold in our hands and pretend that in that object, we have the subject and object of our desire to understand, to know, and to debate with the past. So we have to be imaginative in using other sources and a variety of kinds of evidence to enable us to focus on the performance event in ways which allow us to make meaningful statements. The combination of quantitative and qualitative research essential for theatre history reminds us that aesthetic practices and theories are always embedded in material practices and commercial considerations. It can offer a way out of the high/​low culture divisions which, I contend, are still damaging a full understanding of the cultural dynamics of the nineteenth century. If one of our tasks as scholars is critically to investigate perceptions of the nineteenth century generated by the period itself, then theatre history offers us a way of moving beyond a division which is an obstacle to a full and ethical understanding of the period.

Select Bibliography Bratton, Jacky, The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London, 1830–​1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Davis, Jim, and Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–​1880 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001). Davis, Tracy C., Economics of the British Stage, 1800–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Meisel, Martin, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). Moody, Jane, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–​1840 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000). Newey, Katherine, Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Taylor, David Francis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Georgian Theatre (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2014).

42 

Sharon Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus: An Acting Master for the Twenty-​First Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 221.

Chapter 35

Vi ctorian T h e at re Power and the Politics of Gender Kerry Powell

In Victorian theatre the normative gender roles of the time were in some respects strikingly altered. On stage, women broke through limits placed on their ambition and activity in other areas of life, enjoying the benefits of membership in a profession and being enabled, indeed expected, to speak compellingly while men looked on in silence. Although in other spheres it was men who compelled women to ‘suffer and be still’, in the theatre power was exercised along different lines—​not always, of course, but often enough to draw attention to the fact and disturb a politics of gender that in most cases arrogated power to men. In the Alice-​in-​Wonderland world of the stage, women could and did feel the excitation of power, and not just in general but power over men. And men, for their part, frequently experienced something out of the ordinary too—​a commanding attraction, even enthralment, to these exceptional women that was often mixed with fear and dread. Stars like Madge Kendal emphasized the independence that women of the stage gained through making their own money, sometimes (as in her own case) a great deal of it.1 But the pioneering work of Tracy C. Davis on Victorian actresses makes clear that most of them were not prosperous at all, and that acting, for women especially, was a competitive business that often brought in only £1 or £2 a week. Nevertheless, as Mrs Patrick Campbell mentions in describing her own beginnings as a performer, ‘you could get a nice room and board for 18s. a week; and many actresses lived on £1 a week’.2 This was survival rather than a life of ease, and it belied the notion—​popularized in plays like Dion Boucicaut’s Grimaldi; or, The Life of an Actress (produced in 1855)—​that a young woman might be begging on the streets one day and on the next become ‘the new theatrical divinity’ with ‘riches, honours, coronets’ at her feet.3 The reality, as represented 1 

Madge Kendal, Dramatic Opinions (London: Murray, 1890), 47. Mrs Patrick Campbell, My Life and Some Letters (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1922), 60. 3  Dion Boucicault, Grimaldi; or, The Life of an Actress (New York: n.pub., 1856), 29. 2 

676    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture by George Moore in his essay ‘Mummer-​Worship’ (1891), was that actresses were combatants in a ‘battle of the footlights’ in which few would be able to fight their way ‘to the front’.4 This was the reality that American performer Anna Cora Mowatt had in view when she advised the would-​be actress to ‘shun the stage’ unless she were prepared for brutally hard work and ‘disappointment in myriad unlooked-​for shapes’.5 But it was the work itself, not an illusionary dream of sudden fame and wealth, which made a career on stage so attractive to many Victorian women. Although the life of an actress might not be better off or happier than that that of other women, ‘it has one great advantage’, writes Florence Marryat in her novel Facing the Footlights (1883)—​‘it is full of work and change’.6 Besides this independent life of ‘work and change’ that Florence Marryat found ennobling, there was another transfiguring potential of a career in the footlights, at least for a fortunate few women. ‘I don’t care whether I make money or not,’ says the title character in Connie the Actress (1902), a novel by John Strange Winter (the pen name of Henrietta Stannard). ‘I want to sway people. Think of having a great audience hanging on the words that fall from your lips! Think of the power—​’.7 Adelaide Ristori, the Italian actress who captivated audiences in London with her Lady Macbeth, experienced that power and was exhilarated by it. ‘It was delicious to me […] to feel that I could move human souls at my will,’ Ristori writes in her autobiography. ‘This intoxicated me, made me feel as though I were endowed with superhuman powers.’8 The actress-​heroine of Geraldine Jewsbury’s novel The Half Sisters (1848) uses the same metaphor to express the same point: ‘You do not know the sense of power there is in seeing hundreds of men and women congregated together and to know that I can make all that assembled multitude laugh, weep, or experience any emotion I please to excite:—​there is positive intoxication in it.’9 If the actress could be ‘intoxicated’ by her own power, so could the audience. Theatre reviewers of the time took note of the narcotizing effect that an exceptional actress could produce on her spectators. Sarah Bernhardt’s voice in itself was ‘so exquisitely toned and modulated that it realised the fable of the Sirens’, a critic wrote; ‘it acted on the hearer like some soothing, intoxicating Indian drug’.10 The beguiling effect of Bernhardt’s voice could also be experienced as an almost surgical intrusion on the body of the spectator—​‘as if nerve touched nerve’, Arthur Symons writes, ‘or the mere “countour subtil” of the voice were laid tinglingly on one’s spinal cord’.11 Just beneath the surface of that description of Sarah Bernhardt’s acting lies the divided reaction of anxiety and allure that men often felt in the Victorian theatre when under assault—​so they perceived it—​by a powerful and fascinating actress. G. H. Lewes strikes this tone in his account of Rachel, whose acting seemed to him ‘magnificently beautiful’ on one hand but evocative of terror and ‘something not human’ on the other—​above all, 4 

George Moore, ‘Mummer-​Worship’, Impressions and Opinions (New York: Scribner’s, 1891), 176. Anna Cora Mowatt, Autobiography of an Actress (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1854), 426–​427. 6  Florence Marryat, Facing the Footlights, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1883), i. 240. 7  John Strange Winter, Connie the Actress (London: White, 1902), 37. 8  Adelaide Ristori, Studies and Memories: An Autobiography (Boston: Roberts, 1888),16, 40–​41. 9  Gealdine Jewsbury, The Half Sisters, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1848), ii. 82. 10  The Era (17 June 1899), 17. 11  Arthur Symons, Plays, Acting, and Music (New York: Dutton, [1903]), 27. 5 

Victorian Theatre: Power and the Politics of Gender    677 there was little in her acting that could be reconciled with prevailing ideas of womanhood. ‘Rachel was the panther of the stage,’ writes Lewes; ‘with a panther’s terrible beauty and undulating grace she moved and stood, glared and sprang. There always seemed something not human about her […] no womanly caressing softness.’12 Charlotte Cushman’s performance as Lady Macbeth stirred audiences in London in a similarly ambivalent way, inspiring awe and admiration while transporting the audience to the borderlines of gender and even humanity—​‘she was inhuman, incredible, and horribly fascinating’, wrote a contemporary reviewer.13 Cushman’s acting communicated ‘an innate grandeur of authority’ to the prominent American drama critic William Winter, who cautioned readers that ‘you might resent her dominance, and shrink from it, calling it “masculine” [… but] you could not doubt her massive reality nor escape the spell of her imperial power’. Likewise, Eleonora Duse, although a more restrained actress, overwhelmed Max Beerbohm in a way that made him uneasy and seemed incompatible with her femininity. ‘My prevailing impression [of Duse] is of a great egoistic force,’ Beerbohm writes in Around Theatres (1930); ‘in a man I should admire this tremendous egoism very much. In a woman it only makes me uncomfortable.’14 As Beerbohm’s assessment of Duse makes clear, male critics—​and they were always male—​were vulnerable to the powerful effects of an actress even if they disliked her style of acting. A better-​known example is Bernard Shaw’s damning appraisal of Sarah Bernhardt as an actress who ‘not only appeals to your susceptibilities, but positively jogs them’. Her power in performance, writes Shaw, is ‘entirely inhuman’, punctuated with diseased ‘paroxysms’ and inducing in her audience a barbaric enjoyment like that of a public execution, ‘or any other spectacle in which we still take a hideous delight’.15 Shaw’s association of the all-​powerful actress with inhuman savagery, pain, disease, and death was symptomatic of theatre-​going Victorian men, but some of them felt a thrill in the danger more than the threat. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that the poet and critic Arthur Symons worshipped Bernhardt, even though as a spectator he felt in her presence ‘almost a kind of obscure sensation of peril’. Bernhardt was for Symons ‘like a wild beast ravening upon prey’, tearing words with her teeth and spitting them out at the audience. Looking on at such a performance as this, he writes in Plays, Acting, and Music (1903), the spectator’s pulse ‘beat feverishly’ while at the same time the performance ‘mesmerised one, awakening the senses and sending the intelligence to sleep’.16 What repelled Shaw, therefore, was irresistibly appealing to Symons—​the two men simply experienced in different registers their subjection to a powerful woman on stage and the ‘peril’ she represented for them. By no means did the most notable Victorian actresses always or even typically perform in the mode of a Bernhardt or Réjane, the Frenchwoman who, like la divine Sarah, inspired in Arthur Symons ‘an actual physical sensation; the woman took me by the 12 

G. H. Lewes, On Actors and the Art of Acting (New York: Grove, [1957]), 32. Quoted from a review of Charlotte Cushman as Lady Macbeth, repr. in Mary Turner’s Forgotten Leading Ladies of the American Theatre (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990), 64. 14  Max Beerbohm, Around Theatres (New York: Knopf, 1930), 102. 15  Bernard Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties, 3 vols. (London: Constable, 1931), i. 158–​160. 16  Arthur Symons, Plays, Acting, and Music, 27–​30. 13 

678    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture throat’.17 Ellen Terry herself, the most popular English actress of the Victorian period, stirred her audiences with a softer, but pathos-​charged style of acting that placed her on the other side of a rhetorical divide in which performing women were framed as either angels or demons, incarnations of the ideal or ravening beasts. The influential drama critic Clement Scott was one among a throng of worshippers at Ellen Terry’s feet, calling her the greatest actress of the day because of the ‘ideal’ and ‘mystical’ qualities that moved spectators to tears when she performed as Ophelia or any number of other suffering and victimized women.18 As Oscar Wilde says in a poetic tribute to Ellen Terry in one such role, there was ‘power’ in those performances in which she came to the audience through ‘mists of pain, | Like some wan lily overdrenched with rain’.19 One of Wilde’s readers was Ellen Terry herself, who took the point and approved it—​the ‘phrase “wan lily” represented perfectly what I had tried to convey’, she said.20 As a delicate flower, a ‘mystical’ force, or in the words of another devotee a ‘spiritual essence’,21 the power of this actress came from her ability to thrill an audience with an electrifying display of tender emotion. It was a power unlike that of Bernhardt, but as in the case of la divine Sarah it was difficult to reconcile her power with the subjected position that women occupied in Victorian society. That is one reason it made sense for male commentators to regard her—​like Bernhardt, only in a different way—​as residing beyond the boundaries of gender and even of humanity as generally understood. This ‘wan lily’ of an actress, Ellen Terry, was more spirit than woman. Whatever their style of acting, the power displayed by exceptional women in performance was widely believed to disqualify them from succeeding in, or even comprehending, the traditional roles of wife, mother, and homemaker. In a fascinating article entitled ‘Actors’ Marriages’, the theatrical trade publication Stage Directory stated the matter in these striking terms in 1880: ‘How can the actress whose whole life had hitherto been passed upon the stage be expected to understand domestic arrangements, and all those little tricks and plans about household management, which tend to make a home happy? As a rule it is hopeless to look for it.’22 This seemingly irreconcilable opposition between home and theatre, the domestic and life and public performance, was experienced on the pulses of some of the most famous actresses of the Victorian period. So the American star Mary Anderson retired from the stage when she married and never experienced, or so she claimed, any desire to act again—​explaining that ‘I have always thought that no woman can serve two masters: public and domestic life’.23 Elizabeth Robins, whose important career included producing and starring in the first productions of Ibsen in England, made the opposite choice, continuing to act and tour after her marriage and 17 Symons, Plays, Acting, and Music, 128. 18 

Clement Scott, Ellen Terry (New York: Stokes, 1900), 226. Oscar Wilde, ‘Queen Henrietta Maria’, in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (2nd edn., London: Collins, 1966; repr. 1986), 380. 20  Ellen Terry, Story of My Life: Ellen Terry’s Memoirs (Westport, Conn.: Greenwich, 1970), 198. 21  Shaw Desmond, London Nights of Long Ago (London: Duckworth, 1927), 183. 22  ‘Actors’ Marriages’, Stage Directory (1 March 1880), 8. 23  Mary Anderson, A Few More Memories (London: Hutchinson, 1936), 17–​21. 19 

Victorian Theatre: Power and the Politics of Gender    679 against the objections of her husband, George Parks, an actor himself. Parks, driven frantic by the mixed love and dread that Victorian men so often felt in the presence of a powerful actress, insisted that Elizabeth quit the stage—​and when she refused, strapped himself to a stage costume of chain-​mail armour and jumped to his death in the river. This explosive tension between the theatre and domestic life was managed differently by the famed and happily married Kendals—​Madge and W. H.—​who simply extended the boundaries of home to encompass the theatre itself, always acting in the same productions, never playing apart even when more money could be earned that way. One notable casualty of the Victorians’ inability to make room for actresses in their concept of home, family life, and femininity itself was the son of Ellen Terry—​actor, director, and scenic designer Gordon Craig. He writes of his mother as not one but two women, the actress and the mother—​‘two persons in one body’, as he puts it in Ellen Terry and Her Secret Self. Referring to the actress-​self as ‘E.T.’, Craig recollects with some bitterness that E.T. was always getting in the way of my mother [… .] I continue to speak of them as two, because although the same person, they were leagues apart [… .] No woman could possibly have been a better mother, a truer wife, a more faithful, unwavering guardian and guide […] had it not been for E.T.—​that public person who came between us.

Then Craig, who grew up in the theatre and became a famous practitioner himself, begins to generalize from the case of ‘E.T.’ and construe her divided personality as symptomatic of theatrical women as a class: Great actresses and singers as a rule don’t marry with success. Great actresses evidently must be impossible people. Bernhardt, Duse, Rachel, Siddons, Jordan, Sophie Arnould, la Gabriella—​I could add a hundred to this brief count of those who were not possible persons as wives. There is no other explanation for it, and it had best be faced.

The point is that women like ‘E.T.’ were sadly unsuited for the roles of wife and mother; they were previously engaged—​‘married to the stage’, as Craig says. Put another way, the actress was perceived by Craig, and certainly not by Craig alone, as being in perpetual conflict with her own femininity, the result being a torn, incoherent personality that could be agonizing not only for her family, but also for the actress herself. It was a distress his mother had known and experienced all too well, according to Craig, seeing herself as ‘two persons in one body […] unable to be one thing or another […] never entirely one’.24 This disjunction between the actress and her gendered identity as a woman was seen in many cases as symptomatic of actual illness—​a medical crisis brought on by leading an unwomanly life outside the home, a life of public display, 24 

Gordon Craig, Ellen Terry and Her Secret Self (New York: Dutton, 1932), 52, 57, 63, 65–​66.

680    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture feigned emotions, brutally hard work, and personal independence. The sick actress is a familiar character in popular Victorian fiction, some of it written by actresses themselves. In these numerous stories the performing woman may be a victim of ‘brain fever’, like the actress in ‘The Tale of a Peacock’ (1881), written by leading lady Fanny Bernard-​ Beere, or struck down by vague but deadly maladies as in ‘Chances!’ by the famous actress Marie Litton. Like the heroine of the novel The Life and Love of an Actress, ‘By an Actress’ (1888), these women become casualties of a ‘feverish profession that would destroy you’. Indeed, in The Life and Love of an Actress the heroine destroys herself—​on stage, for added emphasis. Hungry for the love of a man and driven to despair by having lived for her art alone, Genevra Romaine raises a dagger and plunges it into her heart when her mad scene reaches its climax. The audience responds with wild applause, not knowing that the madness and suicide of this actress were no pretence—​they were the real thing.25 Ellen Terry’s own experience–​–​‘two persons in one body […] never able to be one thing or another’—​suggests that actresses mimicked in their own lives the cultural representation of performing women as diseased or distressed. Mrs Patrick Campbell, for example, suffering a ‘nervous breakdown’ in 1897, acquiesced in her physician’s judgement that ‘all the acting has done this [… I had] worked too hard, and felt too much’.26 Elizabeth Robins, complaining of both mental and physical ‘illness and exhaustion’, decided that ‘I drove myself too hard’ and left the stage to undergo a ‘rest cure’. It would have been a relief, she writes in her memoir Both Sides of The Curtain (1940), to find that she had contracted ‘some important disease’ to account for the acute distress she had fallen victim to.27 Mary Anderson felt not only that there was an impassable gulf between domestic life and the life of an actress, but also that theatres themselves were unhealthy—​‘sunless, musty’ places in which some ‘malaise’ was likely to take root. Concern for her own health contributed to Anderson’s decision to quit the stage, and she never looked back after trading fame and fortune as an actress for a quiet, conventional domestic life.28 In her own memoir Adelaide Ristori recounts how as an actress she was plagued by ‘an inexplicable melancholy, which weighed on my heart like lead, and filled my mind with dark thoughts’—​a mental crisis brought on, so she believed, by ‘the excessive emotion I experienced in performing my most impassioned parts’. Like Ellen Terry, she was fascinated by ‘mad girls’ and took to visiting insane asylums to observe their ‘lunacy’—​it spoke to her own confessedly disordered mind and provided real-​life models for some of the roles she enacted on stage.29 This self-​identification of actresses with madness, depression, and disease suggests that the social discourse that stigmatized them in precisely these terms had been internalized—​thus executing the disciplinary function that drove the discourse on actresses to start with. 25 

The Life and Love of an Actress, ‘By an Actress’ (New York: Judge, 1888), 63–​65, 261–​263. Mrs Campbell, My Life and Some Letters, 155. 27  Elizabeth Robins, Both Sides of the Curtain (London: Heinemann, 1940), 204. 28 Anderson, A Few More Memories, 27. 29 Ristori, Studies and Memories: An Autobiography, 12. 26 

Victorian Theatre: Power and the Politics of Gender    681 So far, our consideration of women and the politics of gender in Victorian theatre has centred on the actress herself—​naturally, it might be said, since it was in acting and not the broader spectrum of theatre arts that women usually found a place. But at a time when theatre managers ruled the major venues with an iron hand, some actresses dreamed of entering management on their own in order to enjoy more freedom to shape their careers and in some cases realize a high ideal of theatre itself. Most failed to realize that dream, or even act on it, but a few did. Marie Wilton (later Bancroft), weary and bored with playing Cupids in Strand Theatre burlesques, was able to open her own theatre and change the course of her career when she borrowed £1,000 to open the Prince of Wales’s Theatre. Janette Steer became her own manager at the Comedy Theatre simply because, as she explained in an interview, ‘I hate having to play parts I don’t like, and now I can choose what I please’.30 Loftier motives were behind Eleanor Calhoun’s vision of a non-​commercial theatre offering a more ambitious bill of fare than West End houses with their ‘vulgar and common plays’ put on by self-​interested managers. The theatre imagined by Calhoun would aspire to ‘truth’ and aesthetic excellence, not profit, and may have influenced the more organized schemes of her friend Elizabeth Robins for a ‘theatre of the future’, an idea that we will return to presently. These visionary women of the theatre experienced some success in the 1890s when Florence Farr produced as well as starred in a production of Rosmersholm (1891) and Elizabeth Robins found the woman’s role of strength and depth that she had longed for by joining forces with another actress, Marion Lea, to produce Hedda Gabler for the first time in England (1891), casting herself as the title character. Robins and Lea would go on to form what they called their ‘Joint Management’ company, producing A Doll’s House (1891) among other plays and winning notoriety for Robins as ‘the High Priestess of Ibsen’. Meanwhile the actress Lena Ashwell worked on a plan to engage an entire company for the full year, thus making the working lives of both actors and actresses more secure. The scheme was not realized at once, but among the plays Ashwell launched in this way was Diana of Dobson’s (1908) by Cicely Hamilton—​nevertheless her ultimate ambition of founding a ‘national theatre’ went unfulfilled and for the most part unacknowledged. Women were scarcely more successful in the area of playwriting than in executive management of the theatre. But just as a few women became theatre managers and independent producers despite long odds, some others wrote plays that were staged in major theatres, particularly in the later Victorian period when playwrights as a group were increasingly well remunerated. Part of the explanation for women’s under-​ representation in playwriting can be found in a sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, bias against women who wrote or wanted to write drama. Even the leading advocate of Ibsen and the ‘new drama’ in England, William Archer, omitted any mention of women playwrights, although he knew some personally, when he wrote The Old Drama and the New (1923) to construct something like a canon of recent and notable English playwriting. To compound matters, there was no established tradition of women’s playwriting at

30 

‘London’s Lady Managers: A Chat with Miss Janette Steer’, The Era (2 June 1900), 13.

682    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture all comparable with that of women’s fiction writing. ‘Though we can count women novelists by the score,’ observed a critic in All the Year Round in 1894, ‘the number of women dramatists is extremely limited, and can easily be told off on the fingers.’31 In the same year Constance Fletcher achieved some success in London with her ‘New Woman’ play Mrs Lessingham (1894), but William Archer could account for it only by the playwright’s masculine style. Calling Mrs Lessingham ‘strong’ and ‘actable’, Archer declares ‘it would require a very keen critic who should detect a feminine hand in the workmanship’.32 In The Stage of 1871, the pseudonymous author ‘Hawk’s-​Eye’ insists upon masculinity itself as a requirement for writing good plays. Playwrights therefore are men of wide experience in the world, ‘men who, in addition to literary ability, have mixed with all classes, and experienced the ups and downs of life’.33 A man’s experience of life is held up as a prerequisite for becoming a successful playwright by other reviewers of the time too—​he must be not only a man, but ‘a man of action and thought’ and ‘above all, he must directly and publicly impress a crowd of other men’.34 Plays according to this view are written by but also for men, and the best audience is—​as William Archer put it in English Dramatists of To-​Day (1882)—​‘principally masculine of course’.35 The attempt to gender playwriting as masculine was justified by the supposed nature of women, which deprived them of the faculties essential for writing good drama—​‘chiefly because’, as a critic in the Playgoer claimed, ‘most women are devoid of deep and mirthful humour, and on account of their prolixity of diction and tendency to introduce an abundance of small irresponsible details into their writings’.36 Even women of the theatre were known to agree with this widely held view. The actress Fanny Kemble once wrote that ‘the original feminine nature’ mitigates against their succeeding as playwrights, and Pearl Marie Craigie, a playwright herself (writing under a male pseudonym, John Oliver Hobbes), believed that playwriting required a ‘constructive capacity’ and ‘vast co-​ordinative power’ that women were rarely endowed with—​‘how few women dramatists there are, or ever have been, in comparison with men’.37 Notwithstanding these attempts to conceptualize dramatic authorship as beyond the intellectual and linguistic grasp of women, hundreds of plays written by women were staged in London theatres in Victorian times. In rare instances a woman’s play became a hit, as happened with Clo Graves’s delightful but forgotten comedy A Mother of Three (1896), in which the chief character is a woman dressed as a man, masquerading as her own husband. Most women’s plays, however, were not so fortunate; received with hostility or indifference, if produced at all, they were infrequently published in book form (or any other form) and none has broken into the canon of English drama. So for all 31 

‘Women as Dramatists’, All the Year Round (29 September 1894), 299. William Archer, The Theatrical ‘World’ of 1894 (London: Scott, 1895), 97. 33  The Stage of 1871: A Review of Plays and Players, by ‘Hawk’s Eye’ (London: Bickers, 1871), 15. 34  The Stage of 1871, 15. 35  Quoted by Olive Logan, Before the Footlights and Behind the Scenes (Philadelphia: Parmalee, 1870), 391. 36  William Archer, English Dramatists of To-​Day (London: Sampson Low, 1882), 76. 37  Playgoer (August 1889), 1. 32 

Victorian Theatre: Power and the Politics of Gender    683 practical purposes, nearly all plays authored by women in the Victorian period are lost to us today. Sometimes, as in the case of ‘John Oliver Hobbes’, women playwrights sought to compensate for the disadvantage of their gender by taking a male pseudonym. Otherwise, I know of only two notable instances where women competed on equal ground with men as dramatists, both of them open playwriting contests in which the anonymous entries were judged without any identification of the author or author’s gender. In the first instance, a select committee of managers and playwrights in 1844 chose as the best play one submitted by Catherine Gore, Quid Pro Quo: or, The Day of Dupes. In the second case the Playgoers’ Club, sponsoring a competition in 1902 responding to complaints that new playwrights had difficulty getting a hearing, received hundreds of submissions of new and unproduced dramas and awarded first prize to Netta Syrett for The Finding of Nancy. Netta Syrett’s play was produced at the St James’s Theatre as the prize play in the Playgoers’ Club competition, just as Catherine Gore’s winning entry had been staged at the Haymarket more than a half-​century earlier. In performances with all-​star casts and with the identity (and gender) of their authors made known, both plays received hostile reviews from critics and neither survived beyond a few performances. Netta Syrett’s The Finding of Nancy outraged the eminent critic Clement Scott with its story of a heroine who becomes involved with a married man, but other critics, like the reviewer for The Times, found other and strictly gendered reasons to disapprove of it. ‘The play is not only written by a lady,’ The Times complained; ‘it assumes as a matter of course that the great interest for all of us in life, the thing that we want most to hear about it, and that we go to the play to see, is the career of woman [… I]t is a mistake nevertheless.’38 Another of the women whose playwriting exceeded the limits of decorum in the Victorian theatre was Elizabeth Robins herself, better known for her work as an actress, producer of Ibsen, and eventually fiction writer. Alan’s Wife (1892), co-​written with actress Florence Bell, tells the story of an agonized woman who slays her ‘hideous and maimed infant’, considering it an act of courage and kindness.39 Only the avant-​garde Independent Theatre Association was willing to produce the play, and even so for only two performances. Writing such a play herself was one way Robins could secure the kind of role she found so elusive in the theatre of her time, that of a strong woman with emotional depth and power. Even Bernard Shaw was intimidated, dismissing Robins’s character in Alan’s Wife as manic and ‘most horribly common’.40 Undeterred, Robins went on to write another powerful, transgressive woman’s role in the 1890s in The Mirkwater, dealing with breast cancer and a woman’s suicide; the play went unproduced for a century and the exact date of composition is not known. George Alexander showed interest in putting on The Mirkwater at the St James’s Theatre in exchange for total rights to the 38 

The Times (9 May 1902), 8. Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell, Alan’s Wife: A Dramatic Study in Three Scenes (London: Henry, 1893), 47. 40  Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters, 1874–​1897, ed. Dan H. Laurence (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1965), 393–​395. 39 

684    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture play itself, but in the end no one stepped forward and The Mirkwater remained unproduced for more than a century to come.41 The difficulties encountered by Elizabeth Robins as a playwright only added fuel to the fire of her ambition, not only to achieve success in her theatrical career but in doing so to transform the theatre itself. Finding her hopes thwarted in the theatre as it existed, Robins began to envision in the 1890s a ‘Theatre of the Future’ in which women would compete equally with men and the commercial motive itself would be set aside. In collaboration with her friend, the actress Marion Lea, she formed the so-​called ‘Joint Management’ for staging productions of cutting-​edge plays instead of trying to break into the West End venues that had been so inhospitable. Although the Joint Management’s production of the first English-​language production of Hedda Gabler in 1891 was a historic success, with Robins acting brilliantly in the title role, little came of it in terms of realizing the dream of a ‘Theatre of the Future’. As Robins writes in a mix of typed and handwritten notes at the end of her unpublished, undated memoir entitled ‘Whither and How’, the positive response to her Hedda Gabler was positive, but not in the way she had hoped: Offers of engagement under regular managers began to flow in. The first on record I refused to go further with, because I knew to what a blind alley it would lead. All the theatres then were either frankly commercial, or commercial in disguise, & without exception were under the management of men [… .] Men who wrote plays for women had long been seeing that they simply had little or no chance of being acted.

With that, Robins felt a crushing depression and sense of helplessness, ‘for I saw what I  was facing’.42 The success of Hedda Gabler had opened conventional opportunities for her as an actress—​opportunities that she scorned—​but her ‘rational theatre’ of the future was as far away on the horizon as ever. Along the way Robins’s hopes for something like a National Theatre intersected with the progressive views of a few men of the theatre with whom she was closely associated—​ most notably Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, and William Archer. Their support was welcome but limited in its effect, and in the end Robins came to realize—​as expressed years later in her suffrage drama Votes for Women (1907)—​that ‘winning over the men’ was not enough—​that some battles ‘must be fought by women alone’.43 Elizabeth Robins did everything she could as an actress, playwright, and producer to challenge the tyrannical rule of men over women in the theatre, a battle that Bernard Shaw characterized as ‘a struggle between the sexes for dominion over the London stage’.44 Victory, however, was 41 

The Mirkwater was given its first production in 1997 by the Miami University Theatre in Oxford, Ohio. 42  Eliabeth Robins, ‘Whither and How’, unpublished manuscript in the Elizabeth Robins Collection at Fales Library, New York University. The quotation is from notes Robins added at the end of the MS, under the heading ‘Odd Bits’. 43  Elizabeth Robins, Votes for Women: A Dramatic Tract in Three Acts (Chicago: Dramatic Publishing, 1907), 122–​123. 44  Bernard Shaw, preface to The Theatrical ‘World’ of 1894 (London: Scott, 1895), xxix–​xxx.

Victorian Theatre: Power and the Politics of Gender    685 never within her reach, and as theatre moved into the twentieth century, Robins, weary of commercial theatre managers and ‘battering at their doors’,45 had less and less to do with it. It had been different in the 1890s, dreaming up ‘wild projects’ with Marion Lea and other women of the stage to challenge a system in which power was held by a small group of men determined to promote their own interests, economic and personal.46 Her vision of a gender-​neutral Theatre of the Future, ‘a Theatre we can worship’, was not to be, at least not in her own time.47

Select Bibliography Auerbach, Nina, Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). Booth, Michael, Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Davis, Tracy C., Actresses as Working Women:  Their Social Identity in Victoria Culture (London: Routledge, 1991). Gale, Maggie B., West End Women:  Women and the London Stage 1918–​1962 (London:  Routledge, 1997). Marshall, Gail, Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Meisel, Martin, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-​Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). Powell, Kerry, Women and Victorian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Powell, Kerry (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Rowell, George, The Victorian Theatre (2nd edn., Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1978). Stokes, John, Resistible Theatres:  Enterprise and Experiment in the Late Nineteenth Century (London: Paul Elek, 1972).

45  Elizabeth Robins, letter to Millicent Fawcett, 1 November 1906, MS in Fales Library, New York University. 46  Elizabeth Robins, Theatre and Friendship (New York: Putnam’s, 1932), 185. 47  Robins, ‘Whither and How’, ch. 2, p. 9. For a more sustained treatment of Robins and gender issues in Victorian theatre, see my book Women and Victorian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Chapter 36

Mel odrama On a nd Off the Stag e Jim Davis

Since so much has been written about melodrama over the last five decades, there may be a case for arguing that there is nothing more to say for the moment. Among the most influential books of recent years have been Peter Brooks’s The Melodramatic Imagination, focused on French melodrama and its impact on French literature and using a methodology partially based in psychoanalytic theory; Martin Meisel’s Realizations, which links melodrama (and other genres) to the visual arts and the nineteenth-​century novel; Elaine Hadley’s Melodramatic Tactics, which demonstrates how melodrama operates as an extra-​theatrical force within nineteenth-​century culture and politics; and Ben Singer’s study of melodrama and modernity and their impact on early cinema.1 There has also been a considerable amount written about melodrama’s political impact (or lack of it) and debates around the perhaps oversimplified binaries of subversion versus escapism, efficacy versus containment. In this chapter I want to argue for a more pluralistic view of melodrama and also to suggest that there are still many avenues totally or partially unexplored. Traditionally melodrama has been written about as a national phenomenon. Thus Frank Rahill’s early study The World of Melodrama is carefully divided into sections on French, English, and American melodrama, while Michael Booth focuses solely on English melodrama and a number of other studies focus on American or Australian melodrama.2 Yet overall, 1 

Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975); Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-​Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–​1885 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995); Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 2  Frank Rahill, The World of Melodrama (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967); Michael Booth, English Melodrama (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1985).

Melodrama On and Off the Stage    687 with some notable exceptions, there has been a reluctance to focus on melodrama as a transnational phenomenon and to ask what it means, say, when East Lynne (1862) suddenly becomes successful in North America and Australia or Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) is performed in Britain. Boucicault’s melodramas were, of course, performed and even toured by him internationally and, by the end of the nineteenth century, many other actor-​managers were very much alive to the potential attraction of good melodramas as vehicles for international touring. Even in discussions of the origins of melodrama there is a case for further exploration of the interactions between French, English, and German drama and literature during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet, before following through the notion of melodrama as a transnational phenomenon, it is necessary to be a little clearer about what we mean by melodrama. There has been a tendency among scholars to label as melodramas plays that were not labelled as such by their own authors or by the theatres that staged them. Not all of the plays that we would define as melodrama today were so regarded by their contemporaries. Many were labelled as dramas, nautical dramas, dramatic romances, domestic dramas, temperance dramas or plays, but there is no evidence that their authors or contemporary audiences regarded them as melodramas in any strictly generic sense of the word, although many of these plays share melodramatic characteristics. Moreover, in so far as melodrama as a genre is often defined through character stereotypes, moral absolutes, and conventional plot structures, we find that many so-​called melodramas defy such simplistic categorization from John Walker’s The Factory Lad (1832; a domestic drama) to Leopold Lewis’s The Bells (1871; a drama) and Paul Potter’s Trilby (1895; not categorized). Indeed, The Factory Lad raises another problem. Performed for a week at the Surrey Theatre in the 1830s and revived briefly at the Victoria Theatre a few years later, it is both atypical and even insignificant in its impact, but has nevertheless been accorded a lot of arguably disproportionate space in critical discussions of the genre. Much of what we call melodrama is not really melodrama at all and there is a danger that it has merely become an easy device through which to define and limit our responses to the wide, diverse field of nineteenth-​century drama. Equally, the failure by some critics to explain ways in which spectacle and acting style and even the use of music were mandated by the increasing size of theatres from the 1790s onwards can lead to dismissive comments about the drama of the period, even while the impact of these changes on operatic or Shakespearean productions is readily accepted. The rhetorical language and visual appeal of nineteenth-​century drama is not out of place in theatres with audience capacity of 3,000 or more, while a scene such as William’s court martial in Jerrold’s Black-​Ey’d Susan (1829), which takes a minute to read, actually lasted for ten minutes or more in performance, as the original musical score for the play clearly indicates. Nineteenth-​century dramas need to be read carefully by contemporary critics, since the theatres and actors for which they were written, and the musical scores, form the primary footnotes to our understanding of these plays in performance.

688    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture

The Evolution of Melodrama and the Supernatural If, despite these provisos, we loosely define many nineteenth-​century plays as characterized generically by melodramatic features, we still have to confront a further issue. Melodrama evolved and changed throughout the nineteenth century and, as a genre, demonstrates continual slippage and refashioning and not only through the series of subgenres that Booth or Rahill define in their studies. If we take the treatment of the supernatural as an example, we might consider the last act of Trilby (1895) in which we learn that a character named Zouzou has passed a disgusting old man in the street, reminiscent of the now deceased Svengali, carrying a portrait. He is quite shaken, for he thinks he has seen Svengali’s ghost. Shortly afterwards a portrait is delivered to Trilby: unveiled, it turns out to be a portrait of Svengali. Even from the grave, it seems, Svengali maintains his hypnotic power over Trilby—​the mesmerizing power of the eyes in the portrait so overwhelms her that she expires. Whether the power of suggestion is too great or the other-​worldly, quasi-​supernatural implications of the ending bring closure, the play concludes with a moment worthy of an M. R. James short story, one that hopefully sends shivers down the spines of its spectators. Yet, if we take a step backwards from the late 1800s to the late 1700s we might find ourselves confronting another spine-​ shivering moment in M. G. Lewis’s 1797 drama The Castle Spectre, considered by many to be a Gothic harbinger of melodrama. Angela has just confronted Earl Osmond with the poniard with which he killed her mother and caused him to faint. Now she must save her father, but a plaintive voice, with (supernatural) guitar accompaniment, sings to her, informing her that her father is on his way, as folding doors unclose and the oratory is seen illuminated In its centre stands a tall female figure [her deceased mother], her white and flowing garments spotted with blood; her veil is thrown back and discovers a pale and melancholy countenance; her eyes are lifted upwards, her arms extended towards heaven, and a large wound appears upon her bosom.3

Angela sinks to her knees, then, as the spectre vanishes to an organ swell and full chorus of female voices chanting ‘Jubilate’, enhanced by a blaze of light flashing through the oratory and the clang of the doors closing, she falls motionless on the floor. Reactions to the use of ghosts in late eighteenth-​century drama were polarized between those who saw it as blasphemous and those who saw it as inappropriate in a post-​Enlightenment age. Subsequently, the use of the ghost in Lewis’s play spawned not only a debate about the legitimacy of using the supernatural in the drama, but also a whole series of imitations in future plays. As a result spectres of all shapes and 3 

M. G. Lewis, The Castle Spectre (London: John Cumberland, [n.d.]), 55.

Melodrama On and Off the Stage    689 sizes haunt nineteenth-​century British drama, raising the obvious question as to why ghost effects retained their popularity throughout the nineteenth century and the need to move beyond the obvious answer, applicable to The Castle Spectre and much else besides, that the growing demand for spectacle and new developments in stage technology inevitably encouraged this sort of effect. In the light of this one might have expected the Victorians to be more sceptical about ghosts than their predecessors, but the reverse turned out to be the case. Despite scientific and technological progress and the impact of Darwinism, curiosity about, fascination with, as well as investigation of, the supernatural became much more marked, especially on account of the growing interest in spiritualism, mesmerism, and the embedding of the tradition, by Dickens, of the Christmas ghost story, as well as ongoing discussions of ghosts and the supernatural in the journals Dickens edited.4 New technologies enhanced the mechanical sophistication of the means by which the appearance and sudden disappearance of supernatural beings could be effected on the stage from the vampire trap devised for J. R. Planche’s 1820 romantic melodrama The Vampire to the Corsican trap devised for Boucicault’s The Corsican Brothers in 1852 and the first theatrical use of Pepper’s Ghost (dependent on a sheet of plate glass and reflection) in Britannia melodramas in 1863, sensationally superseding the earlier impact of the phantasmagoria displays of the supernatural at the beginning of the century. These all appealed to the visual or ocular senses that are fundamental to an apprehension of the supernatural and which, of course, place theatrical display in a different category from the novel or short story, in which the appearance of ghosts and spectres may be rendered far more ambivalent and uncertain. Once the spectre is made visible, then there is less room for doubt. Thus the ambiguities of Dickens’s Christmas stories are sacrificed in the many stage dramatizations which give the ghosts a concrete form. Ambivalence makes way for spectacle. Within the context of modernity the function of the supernatural in the Victorian theatre is arguably more complex than merely providing an excuse for the presentation of special effects. The ghost in the machine (to use the phrase anachronistically for the moment) becomes more interesting than the mechanized ghost, which might anyway prove unreliable. Indeed, the use of special supernatural effects materialized more in plays where the visions or hallucinations were internal, perhaps most famously in Leopold Lewis’s The Bells in 1871, when Mathias sees a vision of his murder, many years before, of a Polish Jew and later a vision of a court scene in which, through the agency of a mesmerist, he is forced to reveal his long suppressed guilt. The possibility that manifestations of the supernatural might, as it were, be in the mind’s eye or in those dream-​like, hallucinatory moments between sleeping and waking, had long been discussed by the Victorians and even earlier. In effect, they were the result of physiological and psychological processes, manufactured within the mind of the spectator. Now, as in the instance of The Bells or in the uncanny power of Svengali’s portrait to mesmerize 4 

See Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett, and Pamela Thurschwell (eds), The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

690    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture and kill Trilby by some form of autosuggestion, the supernatural is internalized and we are confronted not so much by haunting but self-​haunting. We move into the realm of psychology: it is not mesmerism, but fear of mesmerism, that kills Mathias; it is the hypnotic power of suggestion embodied in Svengali’s portrait, not Svengali’s ghost, that kills Trilby.

Melodrama and Realism As melodrama evolved, its use of the supernatural evolved too, emerging in more credible or psychologically driven manifestations. Increasingly, melodrama reflected everyday life. The oppositional way in which the coming of naturalism and realism is often seen as a late nineteenth-​century antidote to popular drama fails to grasp that the various categories of drama generically defined as melodrama were grounded in the real. This point is astutely made by Julia Swindells, who argues that the fundamental interest of pre-​Victorian drama and melodrama is in this everyday world of ordinary people, not kings and queens, not the nobility (except for their vices), but the lives and perspectives of factory workers, oppressed wives and daughters, cottagers, farmers and farm labourers, domestic servants and other representatives of daily life in Britain.5

While one may argue for a wider social basis or bias in the drama of the Victorian period, the fact is that melodrama, however heightened though spectacle, conventional plotting, and character stereotyping, works because it is rooted in the real, just as David Wilkie’s pictures of everyday life, Augustus Egg’s narrative paintings, or W. P. Frith’s representations of everyday spectacle also appeal because they embody the familiar. Some, like William Bodham Donne, the Examiner of Plays from 1857 to 1874, complained that an obsession with the everyday stifled the imagination,6 a lament articulated more graphically by Percy Fitzgerald writing in 1870, who noted that even in the theatre we are no longer separated from the objects of everyday life, and ‘meet again the engine and train that set us down almost at the door; the interior of hotels, counting-​houses, shops, factories, the steam-​bats, waterfalls, bridges, and even fire-​engines’.7 The real, as Swindells implies, goes deeper than the pictorial representations criticized by Donne and Fitzgerald. A  number of studies have demonstrated that melodrama was often rooted in the everyday experience of its spectators and it was even a

5 

Julia Swindells, Glorious Causes: The Grand Theatre of Political Change, 1789 to 1833 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 174. 6  William Bodham Donne, Essays in the Drama (London: John W. Parker & Son, 1858), 206, quoted in Michael R. Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850–​1910 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 2. 7  Quoted in Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850–​1910, 15.

Melodrama On and Off the Stage    691 modus operandi of Victorian society outside the theatre. This is the persuasive case made by Elaine Hadley in Melodramatic Tactics, arguing for a historicist view of melodrama rather than for an aesthetic or personalized discussion of melodrama as genre. Particularly valuable is her comment on the limitations of Peter Brooks’s influential study, The Melodramatic Imagination: Brooks’s title articulates our fundamental differences, for in his attribution of melodrama to the imagination—​what amounts to a melodrama of consciousness—​he locates melodrama within the psyche of the individual. Thus, the rhetoric of melodrama becomes an aestheticized form of psychological expression and its tropes a series of psychic pressure points that move melodrama out of history and, occasionally, into pathology.8

For Hadley the melodramatic mode erupts throughout nineteenth-​century public life, often as ‘a reactionary rejoinder to social change’.9 Hadley sees this mode as operative verbally and non-​verbally, often theatrically reinforcing traditional values and social formations, to which stage melodrama is a contributing factor. The melodramatic mode, in Hadley’s view, is not discursive, but nevertheless contributed to the shaping of nineteenth-​ century society. Even if, in real life, the villain, embodying ‘all the evils of modernising Victorian capitalism’, won in the end and rewrote nineteenth-​century history from his own perspective, the ‘melodramatic mode’ provides a multiple and more variegated manifestation of the ‘conflict, struggle, unmanaged excess, insistent variety in the historical record’.10 Hadley provides a sophisticated approach to the relationship of melodrama with nineteenth-​century life, one that liberates us from too close an engagement with romantic individualism and psychoanalytic theory as key elements of the genre and its applications. Ben Singer has also argued for a recognition that melodrama is neither anti-​realist nor confined to the superficially external realism evoked by realistic scenery and objects, but that by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the sensation scenes of melodrama, reflecting the cultural and personal discontinuities of modernity, contained a considerable degree of realism, insofar as the events portrayed ‘correlated, even if only loosely, with certain qualities of corporeality, peril, and vulnerability associated with working-​class life’.11 That melodrama is a means of coming to terms with modernity or certainly provides ways of dealing with its complexities takes us in the direction of Jacky Bratton’s broader notion of the ‘ “contending discourses” of melodrama’.12 Melodrama,

8 Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics, 9. 9 Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics, 3.

10 Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics, 225.

11 Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, 53. 12 

Jacky Bratton, ‘The Contending Discourses of Melodrama’, in Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (eds), Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 38–​49; and J. S. Bratton, ‘Introduction’ and ‘British Heroism and the Structure of Melodrama’ in J. S. Bratton, Richard Allen Cave, Breandan Gregory, Heidi J. Holder, and Michael Pickering, Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage, 1790–​1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 1–​17, 18–​61.

692    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture in her view, enabled its spectators to negotiate change in a period of imperialism, industrial growth, and socio-​economic instability, often through the use of contrast, humour, and irony. Again the emphasis here is on melodrama from a cultural materialist and historicist perspective, acknowledging the ambiguities and complexities of its interaction with everyday life and experience. Melodrama’s engagement with the quotidian is prevalent in many of the plays categorized within the genre. Both Tom Taylor’s The Ticket of Leave Man (1863) and Colin Hazlewood’s The Casual Ward (1866) have provoked essays specifically on their relationship to everyday life.13 The latter play, based on James Greenwood’s sensational series of essays ‘A Night in a Workhouse’, published in the Pall Mall Gazette,14 was staged simultaneously at the Marylebone, Britannia, and Whitechapel Pavilion Theatres: the Marylebone production even featured one of the workhouse inmates described in the Greenwood articles, ‘Old Daddy’, among its cast. Punch (17 March 1866) denounced this mania for realism as tasteless, while All the Year Round was equally condemnatory.15 Yet the depiction of the casual ward on stage was praised in many reviews and the humiliating experiences of new inmates, as described by Greenwood, were also incorporated into the script. At a time of chronic unemployment, an increase in sweated and casual labour, growing poverty and economic instability, it is neither surprising that over 100,000 paupers sought relief from parish charities in the metropolitan areas of London in the last week of April 1866 nor that the play should attract audiences in the predominantly working-​class neighbourhoods to the west and the east of London, when it was first staged. Hazlewood is among those dramatists who, however faithful to the conventions of melodrama and the expectation of a happy ending, frequently demonstrate the injustices and inequalities of working-​class life, as, for example, in The Work Girls of London (1864).16 Yet the happy ending of melodrama, with its seeming endorsement of a benevolent providence and emphasis on ‘affect’, is one that, I believe, should be read with a certain degree of irony. The exigencies of plotting should not be allowed to undermine the realism that is often a concomitant aspect of melodrama, however benign its endings. Indeed, many melodramas do not end happily, as we have already seen in the cases of The Bells and Trilby. John Walker’s The Factory Lad and Douglas Jerrold’s Mutiny at the Nore (1830) both end bleakly, as does the perennially popular East Lynne. The problems of distinguishing between melodrama and realism or between melodrama and realist drama, from generic, formalist, or even evolutionary perspectives, are eloquently explored by Tom Postlewait. Although his discussion focuses primarily on American drama and its history according to melodramatic conventions—​‘a primary conflict between good and bad drama, high and low culture, innovative art and 13 

David Mayer, ‘The Ticket-​of-​Leave Man in Context’, Essays in Theatre, 6 (1987), 31–​40; Jim Davis, ‘A Night in the Workhouse, or The Poor Laws as Sensation Drama’, Essays in Theatre, 7 (1989), 111–​26. 14  Reprinted in Peter Keating (ed.), Into Unknown England 1866–​1913: Selections from the Social Explorers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976). 15  All the Year Round (3 March 1866), 187–​8. 16  See Jim Davis, ‘The Gospel of Rags: Melodrama at the Britannia 1863–​1874’, New Theatre Quarterly, 7, no. 28 (1991), 369–​89.

Melodrama On and Off the Stage    693 retrograde tradition, enlightened critique and false consciousness’17—​it can be applied more widely. Postlewait argues for a mutuality and overlapping between the two forms, not an evolution from one to the other, and believes that so-​called realistic drama will often contain elements of the melodramatic just as melodrama will often contain much that is realistic.18 In pursuing rigid genre definitions or looking for an evolutionary history we are, in effect, ignoring the complexity that melodrama offers and its close association with the real. Finally, performance itself is what embodies and makes real the text. Melodramatic acting has often been criticized as rhetorical, pictorial, exaggerated, and untrue to life, but as James Naremore has usefully argued, all acting is rhetorical, even at its cinematically most restrained.19 The large theatres in which nineteenth-​century melodrama was often performed required strong physical and vocal performances that were visible, audible, sensitive to pictorial effect and narrative clarity, and heightened emotionally. Actors in melodrama also performed in precise coordination with a musical score and, in some of the genre’s more sensational scenes, demonstrated considerable athletic prowess. Arguably, despite the derision directed at melodrama by the many burlesques of the form, the actors of melodrama enhanced its realism within the context of the theatrical spaces in which they performed, the expectations of its audiences, and its generic conventions. In some instances, such as Henry Irving’s performance of Mathias in The Bells (1871) a sense of repression, the contrast between the inner and outer self, and, as Gordon Craig reveals in his discussion of Irving’s enactment of the role, the careful use of detail all demonstrate the possibility that melodramatic acting can also be extremely subtle.20 Nineteenth-​century actors made melodrama work and made it credible; only in burlesque did actors parody or exaggerate melodrama to the extent that it seemed patently unreal.

Transnational Melodrama In this section I want to focus on some of the more frequently performed melodramas (albeit often in different versions or adaptations taken from a common source) and the way in which they impacted across the globe as part of the phenomenon of burgeoning cultural exchange transnationally as the century progressed, communicating and enacting multiple versions of the ‘real’. My argument is not that melodrama per se should be disregarded as a product of national cultures, perceptions, identities or as a factor 17 

Tom Postlewait, ‘From Melodrama to Realism: The Suspect History of American Drama’, in Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou (eds), Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), 39–​60, at 49. 18  Postlewait, ‘From Melodrama to Realism’, 54–​6. 19  James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988). 20  Edward Gordon Craig, Henry Irving (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1930), 58–​61.

694    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture that in turn shapes national cultures and identities, for often the reverse is true. Rather I am interested in the exchange transnationally that reshapes meaning but also purveys a common set of beliefs and ideologies to a wide range of global spectators, often resulting in the modification of attitudes and values, but also their entrenchment. While the advocacy of patriotism and imperialism, say, is clearly embedded in a number of British melodramas in the late nineteenth century, I am equally interested in the way in which melodrama operates both as a hegemonic and subterranean force in its transnational manifestations, whether in its focus on spectacle, ethical clarity (what Brooks calls ‘moral legibility’), or oversimplification of individual character traits. A couple of short case studies, both based around dramatizations of well-​known novels, will demonstrate how meaning changes or is enhanced transnationally. H. Phillip Bolton comments: It seems that the vast phenomenon of the dramatizations of famous novels would suggest how the nineteenth century was an era of popular theatrical and letter-​press protest against perceived social injustices in the tyranny of one ethnic group over another, in slavery, in the oppression of women, in the exploitation of children, and in the abuse of the lower social orders.21

One significant source of adaptation was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the significance of which in North America has been discussed by numerous critics such as Jeffrey D. Mason, who sees in George Aiken’s well-​known North American dramatization ‘a fundamental tension between Stowe’s Christian vision and the ideology of mid-​ century melodrama’ and believes it offers a confirmation of ‘the fundamental racism of American society’.22 Nevertheless, the focus, even in the best of American stage adaptations, is somewhat different from that which becomes explicit in a number of English stage versions. Recent monographs on abolitionist politics in literature and popular culture in Victorian England by Audrey A. Fisch, which touches on British reactions to the novel (and stage adaptations), and by Sarah Meer on ‘Uncle Tom mania’ provide useful perspectives on what British dramatizations meant to British audiences.23 The first British ‘Uncle Tom’ adaptation was performed in England at the Adelphi Theatre in 1852, although The Spectator considered that both its form and substance precluded the novel from anything like adequate representation on stage and that it lost its emotional force in performance. Both The Spectator and The Times were also concerned, as conservative journals, about how the more sensational elements of the novel might be treated in adaptations designed for British working-​class audiences and the way in which these 21 

H. Phillip Bolton, Women Writers Dramatized: A Calendar of Performances from Narrative Works Published in English to 1900 (London: Mansell Publishing, 2000),  xx. 22  Jeffrey D. Mason (ed.), Melodrama and the Myth of America (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 125. 23  Audrey A. Fisch, American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Sarah Meer, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery Minstrelsy and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2005).

Melodrama On and Off the Stage    695 might be a catalyst for subverting the ‘mob’ and even arousing it to action, drawing the ‘unwashed’ to theatres such as the Victoria and the Bower in working-​class districts of south London. Built into this, suggests Fisch, was also a view that the use of the novel for such low cultural purposes militated against the higher cultural aspirations of Victorian society.24 For other British audiences and for less conservative members of the public the popularity of Uncle Tom adaptations was enhanced by British support of the abolitionist movement and both the novel and the many dramatizations unleashed a surfeit of what was called Uncle Tom mania, manifested in the manufacture of a wide range of material objects, and (in some of the stage productions) a conflating of Stowe’s representation of plantation life with that represented by contemporary minstrel acts. Sarah Meer suggests that ‘when Uncle Tom’s Cabin transferred to the London stage it became a vehicle for popular British attitudes towards slavery as well as to the United States’.25 Cultural and political differences were very apparent in the British ‘Uncle Tom’ plays. Moreover, the religious element was played down in Britain and was far less obtrusive than in many American versions, whereas the threat of violent action or revolt by the slaves (here almost a surrogate for the downtrodden English lower classes) was much enhanced in English adaptations, which were generally much more uncompromising in their politics. Some British adaptations, suggests Meer, condemned slavery outright and suggested ‘remedies that in the United States would have seemed terrifyingly inflammatory. In England Stowe’s “Christian Slave” threatened to become a revolutionary’.26 English versions also tended to take far more liberties with the plot and narrative of Stowe’s originals, many playing down or eliminating the character of Little Eva and the piety and moral concerns at the heart of Stowe’s novel. In Meer’s opinion, Uncle Tom’s Cabin made a useful case for British self-​congratulation based on a peculiar image of America that was refracted and distorted by the conventions of melodrama.27

It enabled a sense of moral superiority in regard to Britain’s seemingly more enlightened attitude towards slavery and could also be seen as an incentive for revolt and rebellion. In its British dramatizations Uncle Tom’s Cabin took on new meanings and cultural imperatives, the issue of race being subsumed, to some extent, by that of class. But what happened when a well-​known and popular English novel was adapted for American audiences? Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne was first adapted for a New York audience in 1862 and, as H. Phillip Bolton has shown, became one of the most popular nineteenth-​ century melodramas in both the United States and in Britain, dramatized constantly in new versions in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century.28 After

24 Fisch, American Slaves in Victorian England, 11–​12. 25 Meer, Uncle Tom Mania, 133.

26 Meer, Uncle Tom Mania, 134. 27 Meer, Uncle Tom Mania, 141.

28 Bolton, Women Writers Dramatized, 394–​413.

696    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Uncle Tom’s Cabin, East Lynne was almost certainly the most performed melodrama in North America, its popularity, according to Robert Liston, resting in ‘its mixture of high flown morality and emotional titillation’.29 E. Ann Kaplan, in Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama, suggests that its popularity may also be due to its emergence at the juncture where external threats to the family in the melodramatic genre are beginning to be complicated and even subsumed by internal difficulties within the family unit itself.30 Whereas the perennial issue of class is unavoidable within the English context, Kaplan also draws attention to the manifestly different ways dramatizations of East Lynne work in American society.31 She believes there was a great distance between ‘British class and gender relations, and the specificity of the North American historical contexts in which the play was being seen’ and that it was difficult to adapt a mid-​nineteenth-​century British work, ‘dealing with the political discourses specific to Britain, for American audiences in a very different historical and political context’. In her view, An attraction to the historic splendour and the traditions of England is combined with a gleeful distaste for the unequal class structures in Europe that gibe with North America’s self-​professed adherence to a demonstrative, classless ideal.32

As a result, argues Kaplan, it loses the particular British context of class structures and hierarchy and becomes, in North America, more of a family melodrama of the sort that was later played out in American cinema, presenting what Nina Auerbach has called ‘a kaleidoscope of unstable domestic identities’.33 We have already noted the anxiety generated in some quarters around how dramatizations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin might be received in the theatres of east and south London. Even in the case of East Lynne ideological interpretations shifted according to the venue where adaptations were performed. Andrew Maunder has drawn attention to probably the first, if somewhat free, adaptation of the novel performed at the Effingham Theatre in east London under the title Marriage Bells. I have argued elsewhere that we should not conflate West End and East End attitudes to specific melodramas and be open to variegated audience responses. Whereas for middle-​class audiences East Lynne (at least in dramatic form) may have been a moral tale about a runaway wife who commits adultery and is duly punished for her sins, Maunder suggests that in Marriage Bells ‘laissez-​faire capitalism is the real villain, more destructive and cruel than any seducer’. He considers that this was a version with which the working-​class women of the 1860s could identify, because the erring wife becomes a symbolic representative of the poor and dispossessed 29 

Quoted in E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (London: Routledge, 2004), 93. 30 Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation, 96. 31 Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation, 96. 32 Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation, 96. 33  Nina Auerbach, ‘Before the Curtain’, in Kerry Powell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3–​14, at 11.

Melodrama On and Off the Stage    697 rather than a moral exemplum of what happens to women who break with social expectations of correct matrimonial behaviour, raising two fingers to ‘the callous straitjacket of bourgeois propriety and its mechanistic spirit’.34 Yet another response to East Lynne, if somewhat more sardonic, is exemplified in some of the critical reactions to the play in the Australian press. The Melbourne Punch (13 September 1866, p. 83) commented, shortly after the first Melbourne production of the play, During the last few days, the drapers have been doing an unusually brisk trade in ladies’ pocket-​handkerchiefs—​so brisk, indeed, that the price has slightly risen in consequence of the special demand. The reason is said to be that the lachrymose influence of East Lynne, which everybody is going to see at the Theatre Royal, imperatively requires that every lady should take with her to the theatre at least a dozen of these articles. The manager is in excellent spirits, and says this flood (of tears) is the tide in his affairs that is going to lead on to fortune. So happy has it made him that, out of pure sympathy, he has taken to the study of hydraulics.

A later review of a revival of East Lynne in the Melbourne Argus (13 December 1880, p. 6) refers to it as ‘a lugubrious and lachrimoyant [sic] drama which enables the more impressionable of the audience to indulge in the luxury of grief ’. That East Lynne was a tear-​jerker wherever it was played seems a reasonable assumption and a strand that would be interesting to follow up, if space allowed, would be the shared visceral responses that the genre of melodrama quite probably offered its international audiences. When Joseph Jefferson, an American actor who spent several years in Australia playing in melodrama and comedy, appeared in Tom Taylor’s The Ticket of Leave Man in Tasmania, he also provided evidence of how an individual melodrama takes on specific connotations in different parts of the world. The central role played by Jefferson was Bob Brierley, the ticket-​of-​leave man or returned convict back in London from Australia, which he acted for the first time in Hobart: At least one hundred ticket-​of-​leave men were in the pit on the first night of its production. Before the curtain rose, I looked through it at this terrible audience [… .] Men with low foreheads and small, peering, ferret-​looking eyes, some with flat noses, and square, cruel jaws, and sinister expressions—​leering, low, and cunning—​ all wearing a sullen, dogged look, as though they would tear the benches from the pit and gut the theater of its scenery if one of their kind was held up to public scorn upon the stage.35

34 

Andrew Maunder, ‘ “I will not live in poverty and neglect”: East Lynne on the East End Stage’, in Kimberley Harrison and Richard Fantina (eds), Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre (Athens, O.: Ohio University Press, 2006), 174–​87, at 185. 35  Joseph Jefferson, ‘Rip Van Winkle’: The Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson (London: Reinhardt & Evans Ltd., 1949), 199.

698    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture The first act passed without incident, but when I came upon the stage in the second act, revealing the emaciated features of a returned convict, with sunken eyes and a closely shaved head, there was a painful stillness in the house. The whole pit seemed to lean forward and strain their eager eyes upon the scene; and as Bob Brierly revealed to his sweetheart the ‘secrets of the prison house’, there were little murmurs of recognition and shakings of the head, as though they fully recognized the local allusions that they so well remembered [. …] This performance rendered me extremely popular with some of the old ‘lags’ of Hobart Town; and I was often accosted on the street by these worthies and told some touching tale of their early persecutions. In fact they quite looked on me as an old ‘pal’.36

Even allowing for some degree of hyperbole in this account, Jefferson again demonstrates how melodrama takes on specific local meanings or connotations in specific places. Australia furnishes a further example of the ways in which melodrama adapts transnationally. The popularity of Boer War melodrama, much of which was derived from British sources, but adapted to Australian characters and locations, is a case in point. Some plays were rewritten so that the British were saved in the nick of time by Australian reinforcements, although this subgenre soon went into decline on the Australian stage as disillusionment with the war set in among the Australian public.37 Richard Fotheringham’s study of Sport in Australian Drama demonstrates that nearly all the major sporting dramas performed in Australia from 1867 to 1910 had previously been successful in London. Consequently, he writes, ‘sporting drama in Australia was dominated by a relatively small number of overseas plays, which established and developed the genre in directions determined by overseas trends, but which were selected by Australian managers on the basis of their knowledge of Australian conditions’.38 Inevitably, responses in the two countries differed: If the sporting plays were for English society a reactionary fantasy of a lost age of social harmony, they were for most white Australians a dream of a remote utopian ‘home’ where life expectations were very different from those experienced in the colonies.39

Plays like Boucicault’s horse-​racing drama The Flying Scud, for instance, were popular in Australia because Australian audiences could find multiple and perhaps different meanings in them that were not specifically the same as those found by British audiences. 36 Jefferson, ‘Rip Van Winkle’, 200. 37 

See Jim Davis, ‘The Empire Right or Wrong: Boer War Melodrama on the Australian Stage, 1899–​ 1901’, in Hays and Nicolopoulou (eds), Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre, 21–​37. 38  Richard Fotheringham, Sport in Australian Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 97. 39 Fotheringham, Sport in Australian Drama, 119.

Melodrama On and Off the Stage    699 However, and this is a significant point, once we try to read melodrama as a transnational phenomenon: [S]‌porting drams addressed not particular problems of English and American culture, but problems of western industrialism which remained valid across nation boundaries. In particular, the utopian world offered compensation for deeper social insecurities which might be summed up as a perceived lack of stability in modern society and the sense that this sprang from a lack of any correspondence between power and morality.40

Thus Fotheringham’s study shows how melodramas not only take on different cultural meanings in different cultural locations, but may also indicate globally shared ideological concerns. Melodrama is trans-​temporal too and the same play can take on different meanings at different periods and in different guises. Thus George Dibdin Pitt’s Sweeney Todd melodrama, an adaptation of The String of Pearls, first performed at the Britannia Theatre in 1847, has undergone a number of metamorphoses. The original script was never published, although it still exists in manuscript. The 1847 version is located firmly within the Georgian period—​in the early years of George III’s reign—​so that there is already a considerable gap between the historical setting of the play and its first performance. Moreover, a key character in Dibdin Pitt’s play, a liberated black slave called Hector, who is crucial to the plot’s resolution, disappears entirely from the first published version of the play (Dicks’ Standard Plays, 1883), and the satire on religious hypocrisy, partly plagiarized from Isaac Bickerstaffe’s The Hypocrite, is also less prominent than it is in Pitt’s original. Pitt seems to have had radical sympathies41 and his melodrama arguably presents Sweeney as an allegorical demonic figure, killing and devouring his prey just as the city, in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, was equally cannibalistic as it swallowed up its new inhabitants. Yet, by the second half of the twentieth century, through the agency of Christopher Bond’s adaptation at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in 1973 and subsequently of Stephen Sondheim’s music theatre adaptation (1979), Sweeney Todd had ceased to be an allegorical figure and had become a semi-​tragic character, motivated by revenge and more sympathetically delineated. He is presented as a victim of the class system and the temporal location of the play has shifted from the Georgian to the mid-​Victorian period. Just as East Lynne metamorphosed into a play about dysfunctional families so Sweeney Todd has metamorphosed through time from a play featuring an arch unmotivated villain presiding allegorically over the cannibalization of individuals through industrial and urban growth into a play about the victim of an injustice who takes extreme measures to effect his revenge on society.42 40 Fotheringham, Sport in Australian Drama, 157. 41 

Dwayne Brenna, ‘George Dibdin Pitt: Actor and Playwright’, Theatre Notebook, 52, no. 1 (1998), 33–​6. 42  See Jim Davis, ‘The Cannibalisation of Sweeney Todd’, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, 38, no. 1 (Summer 2011), 86–​91. This volume also includes Dibdin Pitt’s original version of the play, edited by Sharon Weltman; see also Robert L. Mack, The Wonderful and Surprising History of Sweeney Todd: The Life and Times of an Urban Legend (London: Continuum, 2007).

700    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture In this chapter I have argued against the dangers of overdefining melodrama as a genre, both insofar as not everything we now think of as nineteenth-​century melodrama was so defined by its authors and because as a genre it is continually evolving and regularly defying the conventions by which we tend to define it. I have also argued for rethinking the progress of melodrama not only in terms of national identities and their formation, but also as a series of journeys in which the plays themselves not only propagated old values but also took on new meanings transnationally. Within the scope of this chapter I have only been able to offer a few limited examples and hint at broader possibilities, but I certainly hope for and look forward to more studies of the genre that recognize and analyse its international reach and the implications of this for understanding shared and distinctive transnational values and ideologies in the nineteenth century. Melodrama is also a way of seeing, both on and off the stage. In everyday life it provides narrative, ideology, allegory through which existence may be explained and even lived. As discussed earlier, it is not the antithesis of realism, more a way of mediating reality. Through spectacle, heightened gesture, the frozen moment captured in tableau, it teaches its spectators how to look at the world around them and even how to behave in that world. And, while it certainly contains ‘texts of muteness’, it is also a highly articulate form, using language and rhetoric to express reality, not always in the language of everyday life, but in ways that communicate the inherent reality of emotion and intention. It teaches us how to speak, how to perform language. Indeed, melodrama is a performance of everyday life, just as everyday life can be a performance of melodrama. As such it provides rather than erases agency. It is empowering, enabling, providing a model of how its spectators might interpret the world around them, but also suggesting how they might perform their roles in that world. In many ways melodrama is the private made public, interiority made visible, a sort of transcendent realism which takes us far beyond the limitations of verisimilitude and surface appearance.

Select Bibliography Booth, Michael R., Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850–​1910 (London:  Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). Bratton, Jacky, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (eds), Melodrama:  Stage, Picture, Screen (London: British Film Institute, 1994). Bratton, J. S., Richard Allen Cave, Breandan Gregory, Heidi J. Holder, and Michael Pickering, Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage, 1790–​1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991). Brooks, Peter, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). Fisch, Audrey A., American Slaves in Victorian England:  Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Fotheringham, Richard, Sport in Australian Drama (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Melodrama On and Off the Stage    701 Hadley, Elaine, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–​ 1885 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995). Hays, Michael, and Anastasia Nikolopoulou (eds), Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996). Kaplan, E. Ann, Motherhood and Representation:  The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (London: Routledge, 2004). Meer, Sarah, Uncle Tom Mania:  Slavery Minstrelsy and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2005). Singer, Ben, Melodrama and Modernity:  Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). Swindells, Julia, Glorious Causes:  The Grand Theatre of Political Change, 1789 to 1833 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Chapter 37

Henry James ’ s  H ou se s Domesticity and Performativity Gail Marshall

She liked a stage full of atmosphere—​things to look at: love seats and painted screens; heavy drapings, oil lamps, someone carrying a samovar; or cobwebs and a broken window [ … . ] There were plenty of things in Henry James.1

Henry James is the consummate novelist of the enclosed space: the drawing room, the carefully landscaped garden, the doorway that frames its entrants so poignantly. Within that space, achieved particularly brilliantly in James’s late novels, we see his psychological dramas tentatively unfold under the scrutiny of their players and their settings, the latter mute commentators on the performances that they both witness and in part produce. As Nicky Gregson and Gillian Rose argue, ‘a notion of performance is indeed crucial for a critical human geography concerned to understand the construction of social identity, social difference, and social power relations, and the way space might articulate all of these’. Furthermore, ‘Space too needs to be thought of as brought into being through performances and as a performative articulation of power’.2 This symbiotic energy is fully realized by James in his novels and plays of domestic lives. ‘Performativity’, as we have come to understand the term in recent theoretical discourse, is, as we will see, nothing new. Its contemporary iteration developed out of the work of the philosopher J. L. Austin and his William James Lectures at Harvard in the 1950s, when he argued that a linguistic act is more than the sum of the words it contains. Rather than words simply recording or reflecting the world around them, they actually perform within that world, and take upon themselves the quality of an action. From this founding premise, readings of the ‘speech act’ were developed that invite us to interrogate

1 

Elizabeth Taylor, The Soul of Kindness (1964; London: Chatto & Windus, 1974), 147, 148. Nicky Gregson and Gillian Rose, ‘Taking Butler Elsewhere: Performativities, Spatialities, and Subjectivities’, Society and Space, 18 (2000), 433–​53, at 433, 434. 2 

Henry James’s Houses   703 the performance of identity in the world, specifically gender identity, and which impinge upon understandings of performance more broadly, whether within a designated theatrical space, or other venues.3 The connectedness of identity, utterance, appearance, gender, and space which contemporary theorists have found so rich an area for exploration, is precisely the arena within which James works. This essay will explore the mode of performance in some of James’s work, examining its conditions, and its bases in the interactions between spaces—​particularly domestic spaces, actors, spectators, and things. James is a highly dramatic writer, whose works are imbued with the tensions of movement, shifting perspectives, the telling use of props, and, above all, an awareness of the affect, politics, efficacy, and the instinctive nature of performance. James shows himself and the late nineteenth century to be perfectly adroit in their apprehension of performativity’s negotiations between performer, spectator, and space; between language heard and understood; and between speech acts and the residual violence that they often cloak. The Victorian period has become casually, reductively, known as an age of hypocrisy; it might with more justice be termed an age of performance, an age of audiences educated to apprehend the complexity of social appearances. James came to term the world of drama ‘the scenic art’, a phrase since adapted for the title of a collection of his theatre criticism, and which usefully highlights the visual elements of the drama. That visual aspect is itself deeply dramatic, as James implicitly realized in his appreciation of the work of another Anglo-​American, his friend, the painter and portraitist John Singer Sargent, many of whose most notable paintings, such as his 1885 portrait Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife, operate within a highly dramatized domestic space. In James’s 1887 appreciation of Singer Sargent, he singles out for particular attention The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, painted in 1882 and exhibited at the Paris Salon in the following year. In it, James found ‘the freshness of youth combined with the artistic experience, really felt and assimilated, of generations’, and ‘the slightly “uncanny” spectacle of a talent which on the very threshold of its career has nothing more to learn’.4 Within the precocity of Singer Sargent’s achievement, James is particularly intrigued, as critics have been since, by the painting’s unconventionality, and its ability to convey suggestions of a deeply rich backstory. He describes the painting thus: The artist has done nothing more felicitous and interesting than this view of a rich, dim, rather generalized French interior (the perspective of a hall with a shining floor, where screens and tall Japanese vases shimmer and loom), which encloses the life and seems to form the happy play-​world of a family of charming children. The treatment is eminently unconventional, and there is none of the usual symmetrical balancing of the figures in the foreground. The place is regarded as a whole; it is a scene, a comprehensive impression; yet none the less do the little figures in their white

3  For an excellent introductory account of performativity, see James Loxley, Performativity (London and New York: Routledge, 2007). 4  Henry James, ‘John S. Sargent’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 75 (October 1887), 683–​92, at 684. Further page references will be given in the text.

704    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture pinafores (when was the pinafore ever painted with that power and made so poetic?) detach themselves, and live with a personal life. Two of the sisters stand hand in hand at the back, in the delightful, the almost equal, company of a pair of immensely tall emblazoned jars, which overtop them, and seem also to partake of the life of the picture; the splendid porcelain and the aprons of the children shine together, and a mirror in the brown depth behind them catches the light. Another little girl presents herself, with abundant tresses and slim legs, her hands behind her, quite to the left; and the youngest, nearest to the spectator, sits on the floor and plays with her doll. The naturalness of the composition, the loveliness of the complete effect, the light, free security of the execution, the sense it gives us as of assimilated secrets and instinct and knowledge playing together [ … is] astonishing. (688)

Singer Sargent has painted a scene which we might recognize and describe anachronistically as deeply Jamesian, where light and the planes of vision, perspective, and colour cohere only to suggest the potential incoherence of the lives within it. This is no conventional studio portrait of a happy family, but rather a staged moment in which narratives rich with complication are briefly suspended by the painter’s brush. Perhaps James was also responding to an effect of the painting described by Bill Brown as ‘depict[ing … ] an equation of humans and things that casts the human figures themselves as decorative objects among the Boit collection’.5 It is James’s receptivity to the creative tensions of the ways in which implications of a richer narrative exist both within and beyond the frame of the portrait that is demonstrated in his own pen paintings, which, unlike Singer Sargent’s art, can of course move their subjects beyond their frozen moment on canvas. One such instance is given on the first page of The Portrait of a Lady (1881) in a scene in which we are introduced to three of its principal actors: Ralph Touchett, his father, and his friend Lord Warburton: The shadows on the lawn were straight and angular; they were the shadows of an old man sitting in a deep wicker-​chair near the low table on which the tea had been served, and of two younger men strolling to and fro, in desultory talk, in front of him. The old man had his cup in his hand; it was an unusually large cup, of a different pattern from the rest of the set and painted in brilliant colours.

The attention to light and shade, to the suggestion of the moving shadows of the men walking as opposed to the angularity of those of the seated invalid, and the focus on the intense impact of the teacup’s brilliance, make this a visually arresting scene, the light conditions of which have already been established by James: ‘Real dusk would not arrive for many hours; but the flood of summer light had begun to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth, dense turf.’6 As we watch, the dramatic possibilities of the scene open out before us, though it will be several more pages before the characters speak. 5 

Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 140. 6  Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 59. Further page references to this edition will be given in the text.

Henry James’s Houses   705 What is most notable here, as is the case in Singer Sargent’s portraits, is the interplay of space and characters, and the artist’s judicious playing on visual details to focus the scene, whether it be the massive Japanese vases of the Boit sisters’ home, which bespeak the girls’ own relative insignificance, or Mr Touchett’s teacup, redolent of ‘the ceremony known as afternoon tea’, of nationality, custom, and comfort. In The Comfort of Things, Daniel Miller writes of lives lived in some measure through objects, but not, as he explains, with the connotations usually accruing to abject materialism: ‘We live today in a world of ever more stuff—​what sometimes seem a deluge of goods and shopping. We tend to assume that this has two results: that we are more superficial, and that we are more materialistic, our relationships to things coming at the expense of our relationships to people.’7 This is arguably precisely what James explores in The Spoils of Poynton (1897), to which we will return, but, as Miller goes on, his research uncovered the opposite finding: ‘that possessions often remain profound and usually the closer our relationships are with objects, the closer our relationships are with people’,8 for what concerns Miller and James is not the fact of possession, the commercial transaction, but how it feels to live with things, to have them embody a life, and in the cases of James and Singer Sargent, to explore the representational potency of things, and specifically the ways in which they, as well as their owners, enact narrative and meaning. In this respect, in the case of The Portrait of a Lady, James may well have been influenced by the drama which he was reviewing in the late 1870s and early 1880s for the Atlantic Monthly, Scribner’s Monthly, and The Nation amongst other publications. In ‘The London Theatres’, which appeared in Scribner’s in January 1881, James gives an account, which ranges from Shakespeare at the Lyceum to Bulwer Lytton at the Haymarket, of the theatrical offerings of the time: it is not generally an encouraging picture. In it, he spends some time considering the successes of Mr and Mrs Bancroft, a popular management team best known for their work in popularizing the comedies of Tom Robertson, described here by James as ‘among the most diminutive experiments ever attempted in the drama’.9 These so-​called ‘cup and saucer’ dramas were based in the realistic representation of drawing rooms on stage, and the mirroring of such domestic comforts in the body of the theatre itself. The plays were highly popular from the mid-​1860s onwards, and formed the bedrock of the Bancrofts’ popularity and success. So successful were they, that in 1880 they moved their company from the Prince of Wales’s theatre to the more august and larger Haymarket. James writes of this move in terms that, despite his rather slighting attitude to the ‘cup and saucer’ drama, also ironically reveal his own fascination with it: We are not sure that this humorous couple have bettered themselves with the public by leaving the diminutive play-​house to which they taught the public the road. The Prince of Wales’s is a little theatre, and the pieces produced there dealt mainly in little things—​presupposing a great many chairs and tables, carpets, curtains, and 7 

Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 1.

8 Miller, The Comfort of Things, 1.

9  Henry James, ‘The London Theatres, 1880’, in The Scenic Art, ed. Allan Wade (London: Hart-​Davis, 1949), 133–​61, at 148. Further page references to this edition will be given in the text.

706    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture knickknacks, and an audience placed close to the stage. They might, for the most part, have been written by a cleverish visitor at a country-​house, and acted in the drawing-​room by his fellow-​inmates. (147–​8)

The deviser of domestic tales is a figure that would enthrall James throughout his career, and surfaces most notably in the framing device of The Turn of the Screw (1898), but his fascination with domestic ‘things’, and the performative aspect of both them and the ‘actors’ who move amongst them, is ever-​present in his writing. James’s analysis of the Bancrofts’ work elides illusion and reality by acknowledging the power of the recognizable domestic thing on stage to suggest both its status as dramatic signifier and its domestic being. Bill Brown is interested in asking ‘why and how we use objects to make meaning, to make or re-​make ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections’.10 James’s fiction and dramatic criticism insist rather on the ineluctable performance of things themselves, almost irrespective of human agency and willing. ‘[C]‌arpets, curtains, and knickknacks’ are far more than stage decoration, rather working actively to conjure recognition, to bring the audience mentally and emotionally as well as physically up close, and to suggest the innately representational, performative activities that link the worlds of the stage and the drawing room. Actors perform, cups and saucers perform, so do their audiences and James’s characters, and so, as we will see, does language, eliding in itself too the onstage/​offstage realities of performing, of appearing both in society and on stage. The Portrait of a Lady announces its concerns with representation in its title, and maintains it through its treatment of the ways in which Isabel Archer will risk aesthetic commodification throughout this novel. Even Ralph Touchett, the most sympathetic of those who love her, sees her advent in terms of something to display. As Michael T. Gilmore notes, Ralph Touchett sees having Isabel for a cousin as ‘like receiving “a Titian, by the post, to hang on my wall—​a Greek bas-​relief to stick over my chimney piece”’.11 Isabel has of course later to resist the more sadistic commodifying instincts of her husband, Gilbert Osmond, and tries throughout to manage his demands of being seen to good effect, most notably in the home. From the moment Ralph and his family first see her, and the term is deliberately chosen, Isabel is framed for their viewing. Seen from the lawns of Gardencourt, she is a distantly perceived person ‘who had just made her appearance in the ample doorway’ (69). This anticipates a moment later in the novel when Isabel appears to Ned Rosier ‘framed in a gilded doorway’, and ‘struck our young man as the picture of a gracious lady’ (418). The movement from ‘ample’ to ‘gilded’ speaks to the dangers of Isabel’s emotional and aesthetic passage through the novel. But these scenes also attest to James’s visual intelligence, to borrow a phrase from Ludmilla Jordanova, his commitment to the performative aesthetics of domesticity, and his acute awareness of his heroines’ own sense of the appropriate realization of their social, performative selves through their management of appearances, both their own and that of their homes.

10 Brown, A Sense of Things, 140.

11  Michael T. Gilmore, ‘The Commodity World of The Portrait of a Lady’, New England Quarterly, 59 (1986), 51–​74, at 56.

Henry James’s Houses   707 In The Spoils of Poynton, Mrs Gereth’s desire to retain her ‘spoils’ is both the longing of the connoisseur and that of the woman whose diligent care has imbued her objects with her own being. In this novella too, we see the novelist’s attention to framing reflected in his character’s aesthetic sense of the home as a setting: On the subject of doors especially Mrs Gereth had the finest views: the thing in the world she most despised was the meanness of the undivided opening. From end to end of Poynton there swung high double leaves. At Ricks the entrances to the rooms were like the holes of rabbit-​hutches.12

Her son’s proposal that Mrs Gereth remove from Poynton to the hutch-​like Ricks does not just impinge upon her sense of self, but threatens to uproot it entirely, so dependent is she upon her things for her identity: as James writes, she had an ‘almost maniacal disposition to thrust in everywhere the question of “things”, to read all behaviour in the light of some fancied relation to them’ (38). The ‘fancied’ comes from the fascinated, but still slightly appalled spectator-​figure of Fleda Vetch, who comes, as do all the novella’s characters, to realize the cost of such an investment in the material. In this sense, the novella plays out one of James’s preoccupations in The Portrait of a Lady, where Isabel too feels the lure, both narrative and aesthetic, for herself and for others, of the things about her. Chronologically, we see Isabel first in the minutely conjured ‘mysterious apartment which lay beyond the library’ of her grandmother’s house in the US. This is a curious space, a kind of theatrical props room, in which Isabel waits her turn to move upon the stage of her European adventure, and which is full of redundant furniture with which Isabel has ‘established relations almost human, certainly dramatic’ (78). It is explicitly conjured as a room in which to wait, a room whose papered-​over windows and carefully bolted door prevent Isabel from seeing or being seen, but in which she is discovered by her aunt, who acts in this instance as an eccentric impresario figure, and made ready for her appearance. But it is also a room in which Isabel is rendered another form of prop or effect, another of the things in the lumber room which await their emergence into meaning through employment and through being seen into meaning by the other characters. For the novel’s purposes, Isabel’s story begins at the moment that a European audience is conjured into being for her, but she needs to learn how to appear before that audience, and specifically how to act naturally for them. After meeting the Osmond family and their circle, Isabel begins her European education by watching the seasoned performers Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle negotiate their occupation of the exquisitely conjured domestic spaces which they inhabit, and in which they most self-​consciously act. Initially, Isabel is their intrigued spectator: Isabel took on this occasion little part in the talk; she scarcely even smiled when the other turned to her invitingly; she sat there as if she had been at the play and had paid even a large sum for her place. [ … ] It had all the rich readiness that would have 12 

Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton, with A London Life and The Chaperon (London: Lehmann, 1947), 55. Further page references to this edition will be given in the text.

708    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture come from rehearsal. Madame Merle appealed to her as if she had been on the stage, but she could ignore any learnt cue without spoiling the scene. (297–​8)

The domestic spaces in which Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle are most at home are themselves compounded of a range of aesthetic artefacts and symbols, props which, along with the recourse to the metaphor of drama, represent to Isabel the limits of the possibilities envisaged for her by her husband and his former lover. Isabel’s encounter with the performative possibilities of her life can be mapped through her relationship with Madame Merle, the woman who attracts most of the novel’s theatrical metaphors, situations, and techniques, and is ultimately most subject to their ephemeral qualities, and to the dangers of performing ‘naturally’. In ­chapter 20 for instance, she thinks in ‘inaudible’ reflections (258) which resemble stage asides. Madame Merle loses her power over Isabel once the latter recognizes the fundamentally oxymoronic nature of her being. Madame Merle was ‘more than ever playing a part [though] it seemed to her that on the whole the wonderful woman had never been so natural’ (596). This was, for the Victorians, the ultimate theatrical illusion, and one that the most successful English actresses perfected.13 Madame Merle has throughout recognized society’s demands as to the representation of her identity as involving an inherently theatrical process: I know a large part of myself is in the clothes I choose to wear. I’ve a great respect for things! One’s self—​for other people—​is one’s expression of one’s self; and one’s house, one’s furniture, one’s garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps—​these things are all expressive. (253)

Madame Merle fits herself out like a theatrical costumier concerned with the highest expectations of synecdochic verisimilitude. Madame Merle is described by Mrs Touchett as ‘one of the most brilliant women in Europe’ (246), a phrase more appropriate in its scope perhaps to the great actresses who were also the most visible women in Europe. Isabel glosses that appreciation of achievement rather differently and more critically: If for Isabel she [Madame Merle] had a fault it was that she was not natural; by which the girl meant, not that she was either affected or pretentious, since from these vulgar vices no woman could have been more exempt, but that her nature had been too much overlaid by custom and her angles too much rubbed away. She had become too flexible, too useful, was too ripe and too final. She was in a word too perfectly the social animal that man and woman are supposed to have been intended to be; and she had rid herself of every remnant of that tonic wildness which we may assume to have belonged even to the most amiable persons in the ages before country-​house life 13  See Lynn M. Voskuil, Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004) for an excellent account of how a fascination with theatricality infiltrates the whole of Victorian culture.

Henry James’s Houses   709 was the fashion. Isabel found it difficult to think of her in any detachment or privacy, she existed only in her relations, direct or indirect, with her fellow mortals. (244)

That is, she perceives that there is no prior or anterior self to Madame Merle: she is her performed self, and hence increasingly an object of terror to Isabel. This analysis elides the heroine of the country house with the actress, both equally dependent on their relations with others for their being, and having none of that inner life, the moral privacy, that Isabel so relishes at this stage in the novel. On stage and in the domestic setting, James suggests, woman is ideally moulded to a purpose that excludes other, ‘wider’ possibilities. Scripted lives deny improvisation, and render privacy unnecessary, distracting. James emphasizes the public nature of her life by only once allowing the reader to see her alone, when Madame Merle briefly reveals another self which the habits of performance and Osmond’s disdain have rendered negligible: ‘her face, which has grown hard and bitter, relaxed to its habit of smoothness’ (571). The occasion is the aftermath of a cruel encounter with Osmond during which they discuss both their relationship and Osmond’s marriage. The limits of Madame Merle’s influence over him become clear in an exchange which is one of the most nakedly emotional in the novel, but which is nonetheless filtered always through reference to other modes of expression: to ‘tragedy’, ‘sentence[s]‌in a copy-​book’ (571) and the image of a coffee cup which is one of ‘the delicate specimens of rare porcelain’ (570) with which Madame Merle’s mantelpiece was covered. Osmond’s attention to things and appearances never leaves him even in this most intense exchange, and he exudes the sadism and control with which he taints all his relationships, remarking ‘dryly’ on the coffee cup that ‘It already has a wee bit of a tiny crack’ (570). On his departure, Madame Merle ‘went, the first thing, and lifted from the mantel-​ shelf the attenuated coffee-​cup in which he had mentioned the existence of a crack; but she looked at it rather abstractedly. “Have I been so vile for nothing?” she vaguely wailed’ (571). That the wail is vague implies moral uncertainty at a moment when Osmond’s cruelty has unavoidably pressed upon her, but also the insecurity of identity that occurs when she is alone, and when her commitment to, and confidence in, her performed self has been shaken. In a highly compacted moment, James rejects for her both the adulation of connoisseurship that she has accepted as the inevitable price of loving Osmond and the carapace of the spectacle. Madame Merle is thus left with the remnants of identification with a cracked coffee cup that stands, in its rarity, delicacy, and display—​this is not, like Mr Touchett’s teacup, an item to use and which can sustain, but to show—​for the limitations and fragilities of Madame Merle’s commitment to performance and to a man who lives as much in the public gaze as do the objects he craves. Isabel’s recognition of Madame Merle’s public performances is part of a process whereby she has to come to terms with the performativity implicit in the world around her, with the importance of ‘things’ in that world, and the necessity of participating in a system she finds inimical, if not overtly damaging. Bill Brown’s ‘thing theory’ sheds interesting light on Isabel’s dilemma, and the conjunction of performativity and this theory itself might make us reflect anew on Brown’s ideas. Eschewing what he describes

710    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture as ‘more familiar fetishizations: the fetishization of the subject, the image, the word’, he concentrates attention rather on ‘the ideological and ideational effects of the material world and of transformations of it [ … on] questions that ask not whether things are but what work they perform—​questions, in fact, not about things themselves but about the subject-​object relation in particular temporal and spatial contexts’.14 These are questions highly pertinent both to James’s characters’ dilemma in a domestic world which privileges things of aesthetic value far above the human, and to Isabel’s maturing perception of the centrality of the theatrical mode, with its dependence on the material and actual as realized in a specific moment. Madame Merle, described by Brown as one of James’s ‘most notorious characters’ because of her apparent belief that ‘character [is] reducible to possessions’,15 epitomizes the risks of exposure within such a world, and specifically of the female dilemma it entails. In her bleakest moments, Isabel appreciates Madame Merle’s self-​protecting strategy, her ability firmly to embrace a thing-​like identity, though, as James is scrupulous in recording, Isabel cannot bring herself to behave in the same way: Madame Merle had suppressed enthusiasm [… .] There were hours when Isabel would have given anything for lessons in this art [… .] She had become more aware than before of the advantage of being like that—​of having made one’s self a firm surface, a sort of corselet of silver. (452)

Isabel recognizes, but rejects, the identity of self and ‘things’, the giving up of the constant mutation of identity for the fixed personation through an object or theatrical stock type such as that Serena Merle adopts: ‘I think I always look the same’, said Madame Merle. ‘You always are the same. You don’t vary. You’re a wonderful woman.’ (288)

Isabel rather maintains a fluidity which means that her performances, though dramatic and often pictorial, can never be inscribed within the more fixed, public terms of the theatrical. At the end of the novel of course, Isabel’s exit from Gardencourt precisely defies a confident closing of the theatrical curtain, as the reader’s mind pursues her imaginatively back to Rome, and thence who knows where. Within James’s later fiction, the conjunction of female performativity and domesticity, domestic relations, was one that he continued to explore. In his final novel, The Golden Bowl (1904), Maggie Verver enjoys ‘the first surprise to which she had ever treated’ her husband initially as ‘a great picture hung on the wall of her daily life’, but subsequently and more sustainedly as ‘a succession of moments that were watchable still; almost in the manner of the different things done during a scene on the stage, some scene so acted as to have left a great impression on the 14 

Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28 (2001), 1–​22, at 7.

15 Brown, A Sense of Things, 140.

Henry James’s Houses   711 tenant of one of the stalls’.16 A few days later, sustained by the momentum of this first impression, Maggie finds herself acting before her father and his wife: She felt herself going; she reminded herself of an actress who has been studying a part and rehearsing it, but who suddenly, on the stage, before the footlights, had begun to improvise, to speak lines not in the text. It was this very sense of the stage and the footlights that kept her up, made her rise higher (322)

In this supremely reflective book, the drawing room becomes a stage for Maggie when her familial expectations and confidences are disturbed by the dramatic elements of the relationship between her husband and her father’s wife, a form of theatrical backstory used by playwrights, such as Pinero in his The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893), to good effect. In this domestic space, James finds the culmination of his intense interest in the drama, and the sublimation of his fascination in his heroines’ performed, imagined selves. The early pages of James’s memoir, A Small Boy and Others (1913), reveal that the theatre had figured as a significant presence in his life from his youngest years growing up in New York City. It shapes much of his social world, as well as the sensory world of the small boy, and, most intriguingly, it is introduced to the reader through the medium of the theatre poster, ‘those founts of romance that gushed from the huge placards of the theatre’.17 The posters were not in themselves visually representational, rather consisting ‘of vast oblong sheets, yellow or white, pasted upon tall wooden screens or into hollow sockets, and acquainting the possible playgoer with every circumstance that might seriously interest him’ (100–​1). However, the effect of these announcements upon James is best represented for him by likening it to an overtly visual aesthetic experience: It engaged my attention, whenever I passed, as the canvas of a great master in a great gallery holds that of the pious tourist, and even though I can’t at this day be sure of its special reference I was with precocious passion ‘at home’ among the theatres—​ thanks to our parents’ fond interest in them. (101)

The theatre poster frames James’s memories—​fifty pages later he is still under its thrall: ‘I turn round again to where I last left myself gaping at the old ricketty bill-​board in Fifth Avenue’ (154)—​and his acknowledgement of theatre’s power. In reminiscing of ‘the Smike of Miss Weston’ and his ‘sharp retention’ of her performance, he asks, ‘who shall deny the immense authority of the theatre, or that the stage is the mightiest of modern engines?’ (116–​17). James also writes movingly of the ageing tragedian Miss Mestayer, who ‘gave form to [James’s boyish] conception of the tragic actress at her highest’ (157). That this precedence is somewhat ironically bestowed in the light of the great actresses 16  Henry James, The Golden Bowl (1904; Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1983), 305. Further page references to this edition will be given in the text. 17  Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (1913; New York: Scribner’s, 1941), 100. Further page references to this edition will be given in the text.

712    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture he had seen since, becomes clear as James’s memories progress, but it is an important memory for tracing the genealogy of the novelist’s subsequent depictions of tragic actresses, be they performers in domestic or theatre houses: there was no one like her in the Boston time for cursing queens and eagle-​beaked mothers; the Shakespeare of the Booths and other such would have been unproducible without her; she had a rusty, rasping, heaving and tossing ‘authority’ of which the bitterness is still in my ears. I am revisited by an outer glimpse of her in that after age when she had come, comparatively speaking, into her own—​the sight of her, accidentally incurred, one tremendously hot summer night, as she slowly moved from her lodgings or wherever, in the high Bowdoin Street region, down to the not distant theatre from which even the temperature had given her no reprieve; and well remember how, the queer light of my young impression playing up again in her path, she struck me as the very image of mere sore histrionic habit and use, a worn and weary, a battered even though almost sordidly smoothed,18 thing of the theatre, very much as an old infinitely-​handled and greasy violoncello of the orchestra might have been. It was but an effect doubtless of the heat that she scarcely seemed clad at all; slippered, shuffling and, though somehow hatted and vaguely veiled or streamered, wrapt in a gauzy sketch of a dressing-​gown, she pointed to my extravagant attention the moral of thankless personal service, of the reverse of the picture, of the cost of ‘amusing the public’ in a case of amusing it, as who should say, every hour. And I had thrilled before her as the Countess in ‘Love’—​such contrasted combinations! But she carried her head very high, as with the habit of crowns and trains and tirades—​had in fact much the air of some deposed and reduced sovereign living on a scant allowance; so that, all invisibly and compassionately, I took off my hat to her. (157–​8)

James’s compassion for the old actress is palpable and is generated by his respect for her former powers, and the very transience of those powers, but also by his apprehension of her as a ‘thing’ of the theatre (the original emphasis is his). We can hear in this judgement an element of James’s own adult distaste for the conditions of the theatre, if not for the entrancing possibilities of the dramatic form.19 But the language of things also, of course, echoes the fate of Madame Merle, Mrs Gereth, Maggie Verver, even Isabel Archer, and the plight of the domestic actress more generally. James’s most sustained treatment of the actress, however, is fictional, and comes in his novel The Tragic Muse (1890), in which he contrasts the arts of acting and portraiture, and in which we meet Miriam Rooth, James’s professional actress-​heroine who appalls her diplomat-​admirer Peter Sherringham by the monstrosity of her lack of privacy:

18 

Cf. Gilbert Osmond’s initial perception of Isabel as ‘smooth to his general need of her as handled ivory to the palm’ in the New York edition of The Portrait of a Lady, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1908), ii. 11. 19  For a discussion of this tension in James’s attitude to the theatre, see Leon Edel, ‘Henry James: The Dramatic Years’ in his edition of The Complete Plays of Henry James (London: Rupert Hart-​Davis, 1949), 19–​69. It is also this tension, and its manifestation in public responses to James’s 1895 play Guy Domville, that provide the inspiration for David Lodge’s Author, Author and Colm Tóibín’s The Master (both 2004).

Henry James’s Houses   713 A woman whose only being was to ‘make believe’, to make believe that she has any and every being that you liked, that would serve a purpose, produce a certain effect, and whose identity resided in the continuity of her personations, so that she had no moral privacy, as [Sherringham] phrased it to himself, but lived in a high wind of exhibition, of figuration—​such a woman was a kind of monster, in whom of necessity there would be nothing to like, because there would be nothing to take hold of.20

In this respect, Rooth displays her genealogical links to Madame Merle and the publicity of her life, and enables James to examine in more detail the professional actress, and to plot alongside her development the story of the would-​be portraitist and one-​time politician Nick Dormer. In the midst of his own dramatic years, James turns to the theatre and to portraiture in order to ‘do something about art’—​art, that is, as a human complication and a social stumbling-​block—​[which] must have been for me early a good deal of a nursed intention, the conflict between art and ‘the world’ striking me betimes as one of the half-​dozen great primary motives. (‘Preface’ to The Tragic Muse, 1)

That conflict is played out in the romances of Miriam Rooth and Nick Dormer, who attract Peter Sherringham and his sister Julia Dormer, but whose relationships with them cannot flourish because of the artists’ devotion to the theatre and portraiture. Nick and Miriam are united by their sense of vocation, by their desire, as the aesthete Gabriel Nash puts it, to ‘recognize [their] particular form, the instrument that each of us—​each of us who carries anything—​carries in his being. Mastering this instrument, learning to play it in perfection—​that’s what I call duty, what I call conduct, what I call success’ (252). This is seen to be inimical to the life of society, as represented by Peter’s diplomatic status, and Julia’s social standing and political ambitions, and both artists are deemed monstrosities and mountebanks, terms which here become almost synonymous. Miriam in particular attracts the wonderingly horrified and fascinated attention of Peter who describes her twice as a Medusa, as having a face of ‘gutta percha’ 126), and as being ‘an embroidery without a canvas’ (138). He perceives her fundamental lack of a fixed identity, of something with which to engage, beyond the footlights. The novel engages with a commonly recognized element of anti-​theatricality in late Victorian society, but James is also clear that the notion of performance goes far beyond the stage. Peter Sherringham too attracts the label of ‘mountebank’ from Miriam (362), for instance, and, as she tells him earlier in London, ‘if you only kept your eyes open nothing could happen to you that wouldn’t be food for observation and grist to your mill, showing you how people looked and moved and spoke, cried and grimaced, writhed and dissimulated, in given situations’ (314). This is not so much because she

20 

Henry James, The Tragic Muse (1890; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 130. Further page references to this edition will be given in the text.

714    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture can learn from observation and then translate those observations into actions on stage, but because the life of society is itself inherently a performance. Whilst overtly eschewing Miriam’s theatricality, James’s characters recognize that they are performing for an audience. Grace Dormer’s embarrassment at Nick’s kissing their mother in public is assuaged when she realizes that ‘they had escaped’ notice (24). Similarly, after a devastating meeting with Nick, Julia Dormer, the character least sympathetic to Miriam and her vocation, shows her ever-​present awareness of her audience: ‘“Explain what?” she asked, still very pale and grave, but in a voice that showed nothing. She was thinking of the servants—​she could think of them even then’ (272). James’s characters are what they perform, what they seem to be; even for his least theatrical figures, performance lies at the root of their identity: it is, to borrow James Loxley’s term, ‘infrastructural’.21 Nina Auerbach has written in Private Theatricals (1990) of the ways in which the Victorians lived through and by theatricality in their everyday lives, despite the inherent suspicion with which they ‘shunned theatricality as the ultimate, deceitful, mobility’.22 What James is doing here, and throughout his oeuvre, is slightly different in that he distinguishes between the professional forms of theatricality and the domestic conditions that produce dramatic or performative behaviour. For James, theatricality is indivisible from its material conditions, damning as he perceived those conditions to be for the practice of art: ‘When I was younger [writing plays] was really a very dear dream with me—​but it has faded away with the mere increase of observation—​observation I mean, of the deadly vulgarity and illiteracy of the world one enters, practically in knocking at a manager’s door’,23 or, more succinctly: ‘I may have been meant for the Drama—​God Knows!—​but I certainly wasn’t meant for the Theatre.’24 Theatricality and the drama are set in fundamental opposition by James in his play-​writing years, but operate with more productive synergy in his subsequent development of the ‘divine principle of the Scenario’.25 This blends dramatic, visual, and narrative elements and is based in the material specificity of geographical and social space. Theatricality then, as made manifest in the professional space of the theatre, becomes a form of drama or performativity rather than its root. It is his analysis of the intimate relationship between space, that space’s things, and performance that James adds to our understanding of Victorian performativity, and which lies at the heart of the complex networks in The Tragic Muse. It is at the heart too of the language in this novel, where James knowingly, teasingly perhaps, plays with the idea of ‘houses.’ We have the theatrical house in which Miriam and her company play, and the house, that is, the audience, to which they play and which can both ‘glow’ domestically with ‘rosy fire’ (423) when Miriam embraces them; the House of Commons

21 

See Loxley, Performativity, 154. Nina Auerbach, Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 4. 23  Quoted in Edel, ‘Henry James: The Dramatic Years’, 44. 24  Quoted in Edel, ‘Henry James: The Dramatic Years’, 53. 25  Quoted in Edel, ‘Henry James: The Dramatic Years’, 62. 22 

Henry James’s Houses   715 (‘your terrible House’ (260) in Miriam’s words) in which Nick ‘has tried to play [his] part so beautifully’ (242); the houses in which Mrs Rooth fears her daughter will no longer be welcome should she take to the stage; the more public ‘first house in England’ (162) that could be Nick’s if he and Julia were to marry; and Mr Carteret, Nick’s would-​be sponsor, who is likened to a house with ‘back windows opening into grounds more private’ (189–​ 90). These spaces determine performance, and the selves of those who occupy them. What is perhaps most notable about the multiple uses of ‘houses’ in The Tragic Muse is how they argue for the ultimate root of performativity in the house, the home, rather than in the public performance space which Auerbach would argue gives shape and form to categories of being in the nineteenth century. In A Small Boy, we may remember how James felt ‘at home’ in the theatre from an early age, but his memoir also recalls the evening when the scenic art in all its dramatic richness and potential dawned on him. His small cousin was protesting about being told to go to bed, and her mother responds: ‘Come now, my dear; don’t make a scene—​I insist on your not making a scene!’ That was all the witchcraft the occasion used, but the note was none the less epoch-​ making. The expression, so vivid, so portentous, was one I had never heard—​it had never been addressed to us at home; and who should say now what a world one mightn’t at once read into it? It seemed freighted to sail so far; it told me so much about life. Life at these intensities clearly became ‘scenes’; but the great thing, the immense illumination, was that we could make them or not as we chose. It was a long time of course before I began to distinguish between those within our compass more particularly as spoiled and those producible on a different basis and which should involve detachment, involve presence of mind; just the qualities in which Marie’s possible output was apparently deficient. It didn’t in the least matter accordingly whether or no a scene was then proceeded to—​and I have lost all count of what immediately happened. The mark had been made for me and the door flung open; the passage, gathering up all the elements of the troubled time, had been itself a scene, quite enough of one, and I had become aware with it of a rich accession of possibilities. (185–​6)

For James, the house, and more specifically the home, is the most potent stage, the root of performativity, of learned behaviour, and of the impulse to interpret and re-​present the behaviour of others.

Bibliography Auerbach, Nina, Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). Brown, Bill, A Sense of Things:  The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble:  Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New  York and London: Routledge, 1990). Loxley, James, Performativity (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007).

716    The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture Miller, Daniel, The Comfort of Things (Cambridge: Polity, 2008). Parker, Andrew, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (eds), Performativity and Performance (New York and London: Routledge, 1995). Petrey, Sandy, Speech Acts and Literary Theory (New York: Routledge, 1990). Schechner, Richard, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002). Voskuil, Lynn M., Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity (Charlottesville:  University of Virginia Press, 2004). Wade, Allan (ed.), The Scenic Art (London: Hart-​Davis, 1949).

Index

The Academy 268 Acts of Parliament: Abolition Act  131 Bank Charter Act  155, 157 Catholic Emancipation Act  336, 356 Chace Act  487, 498 Civil Divorce Acts  167 Contagious Diseases Acts  173, 586 Corrupt Practices Act  68 Criminal Law Act  196 Education Acts  278, 390, 487, 518 Factory Act 83 Infant Custody Acts  167 Irish Land Acts  153, 157, 158 Licensing Act  5, 662 Lord Campbell’s Act  196 Married Women’s Property Act  167 Matrimonial Causes Act  167 Obscene Publications Act  200 Old Age Pensions Act  180 Poor Law Amendment Act  69 Public Libraries Act  486 Reform Acts  27 108, 216–​17, 605 Sunday Trading Act  325 Theatres Act  661–​2 Theatres Regulation Act  5 Universities Tests Act  388 Acton, William: The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs 166, 196 Addison, Joseph  33, 382 The Campaign 33 aesthetics and aestheticism  9–​10, 202–​3, 209, 269, 314, 327, 328, 598–​616, 670, 641, 651, 706 Aesthetic Movement  77, 328, 600, 607, 652 aesthetic turn  89 and liberalism  116–​17, 120

affect and affect theory  10, 88, 212, 226, 332, 344, 350, 583, 595, 692; see also emotions Africa  110–​11, 113, 124, 139–​40, 183, 240–​1, 245–​9, 481 scramble for  112, 245 Ainsworth, W. H.  618 Boscobel or, The Royal Oak 618 Alcott, Louisa May: ‘Behind a Mask’  170 Allen, Grant  75–​6, 80–​1 419, 424, 450, 518, 591–​2 Physiological Aesthetics 591 amateur and amateurism  36 scientific amateurism  407, 440, 448, 450, 504 amateurism and theatre  494 America and Americans  110, 115, 120, 128, 138, 240, 254–​5, 348, 381, 429, 441, 462, 482, 486, 498, 499, 518, 520, 522, 550; see also North America; see also United States American Civil War  586 American drama  676–​8, 686–​7, 692, 694–​7, 699 American magazines  518 American Revolutionary War  37, 279 and slavery  97, 522, 550 The Amulet 548, 549 angel in the house  169, 173, 297 angel of the frontier  297 see also Patmore, Coventry anglo-​saxon and anglo-​saxonism  234, 236, 239, 240, 241, 242, 287, 299 Arendt, Hannah  116 The Argosy  130, 430, 431, 432, 433 Aristotle 640 ‘Law of the Universal’  78

718   Index Arnold, Ethel M.: Platonics 207 Arnold, Matthew  1, 3, 8, 15, 75–​78, 80–​1, 116, 120, 144, 146, 234, 367–​70, 373–​4, 379–​83, 389, 395–​7, 404, 407, 418, 423, 427–​8, 452–​3, 460, 490, 539, 574–​6, 604, 605, 606–​7, 609 American lecture tour  539 Arnoldianism 20 Culture and Anarchy  1, 5, 7, 108, 368, 396, 604–​5 ‘Dover Beach’  604–​5 Essays in Criticism  369, 381–​2 God and the Bible 368 Last Essays on Church and Religion 368 Literature and Dogma  368, 373, 380 Poems 76 St Paul and Protestantism 368 Arnold, Thomas  270, 272–​3, 276, 358–​9, 389, 492 Arts and Crafts movement  91 ascetics and asceticism  216, 353, 359–​61, 364–​5 Ashbee, Henry Spencer  176 Index Librorum Prohibitorum 176 Pisanus Fraxi  176 Atlantic Monthly  705 Atlantic slave trade 110 Athenaeum  71, 268–​9, 663 Austen, Jane  175, 237, 313, 411 Mansfield Park  237, 239, 494 Pride and Prejudice  156, 237, 358 Australia  110, 124, 234, 241–​5, 255–​6, 285–​8, 292, 484, 686–​7, 697–​700 Baden-​Powell, Robert: Scouting for Boys 281 Baedeker, Karl  236 Bagehot, Walter  73, 144, 155, 156, 423 The English Constitution 108 Bakhtin, Mikhail  93 Balfour, Arthur  65 Ballantyne, R. M.  259–​611 The Coral Island 259 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth  217, 338, 369–​70, 392, 474, 491 Aurora Leigh  474, 569; see also Brownings, Robert and Elizabeth Barrie, J. M.  195

Tommy and Grizel 49 Baudelaire, Charles  15, 461 Baudrillard, Jean  153 Beardsley, Aubrey  173, 324, 494 Bedborough, George  198 Adult 198 Bedlam 164 Beerbohm, Max  604, 677 Belgravia  433, 513, 517 Benjamin, Walter  153, 602, 643, 663 ‘The Task of the Translator’  643 Bennett, Arnold  171 Bentham, Jeremy  28–​9, 104, 105, 110, 143–​6, 148, 150, 151, 154, 156, 157, 353, 609–​11 An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation 145 ‘Manual of Political Economy’  146 ‘Table of the Springs of Action’  146 Bernhardt, Sarah  500, 676–​9 Besant, Annie  339 Besant, Walter  171, 499 Bible and biblical  331, 334, 336–​8, 343, 344, 352–​3, 358, 368, 370–​4, 378, 380–​3, 385, 391–​4, 490, 502 Blackwood family  53, 486 Blackwood, Alexander  486 Blackwood, Isabella  45, 53, 56, 60 Blackwood, John  45, 53, 56, 487, 515–​17, 580 Blackwood and Sons  510, 515 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine  36, 48, 272, 430, 510, 543 Blackwood’s Magazine 36, 58–​ 60, 190, 418, 509, 513, 515, 517 Blackwood, William  510, 515 Blake, William  91, 119, 144, 322, 342, 640, 646 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna 342 Bluestockings 162 The Bookman  268–​70, 281 Booth, Catherine  392 Booth, Charles  179, 182, 310 The Aged Poor in England and Wales 179 Inquiry into Life and Labour in London 313 Booth, William  387 Borderland 429 Boswell’s Life of Johnson 35, 47 Boucicault, Dion  675, 687, 689, 698 The Colleen Bawn 497

Index   719 The Corsican Brothers 689 The Flying Scud 698 Boys of the Empire 246 Boys of England 246 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth  46, 432–​3, 459, 471, 494, 513, 517, 647, 657 Aurora Floyd 70, 432 The Doctor's Wife 46 ‘Good Lady Ducayne’ 184–​5, 188  Lady Audley’s Secret  45, 169, 244, 647 British Quarterly Review 276, 395 Brontë, Anne  335 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 165, 647 Brontë, Charlotte  116, 125, 332, 337, 352–​3, 549, 550 Jane Eyre  132–​3, 148, 164–​5, 170, 205, 238–​9, 337, 353, 359, 361, 370–​2, 384, 386, 397, 467, 647 Shirley 152 Villette 170, 648 Brontë, Emily: Wuthering Heights  73, 165, 237, 238, 393 Brontës  165, 175, 335, 550 Brontë sisters  550 Brontë Society  555 Brooke, Emma Frances: A Superfluous Woman 170 Transition 207 brothels 195, 199 Brown, Isaac Baker  163–​4, 166 Brown-​Sequard, Charles Edourard  189 Browning, Robert  119–​20, 238, 335, 357, 421, 496, 535–​7, 663, 269 ‘Andrew del Sarto’  648 ‘The Bishop Orders his Tomb’  648 ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’  357–​8, 566, 568, 648 ‘My Last Duchess’  648 ‘Pictor Ignotus’  648 The Ring and the Book 393 Browning, Robert and Elizabeth  79, 361 Buchanan, Robert  474, 611 ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry'  474 Bulwer Lytton, Edward  513, 515, 663, 705 Bunyan, John  394, 430 The Pilgrim’s Progress 394 Burke, Edmund  110, 252–​7, 565, 670 Burlington Magazine 607

Burne-​Jones, Edward  620, 633 Burns, Robert  83, 88 Butler, Josephine  173 Butler, Judith  174, 214 Butler, Samuel: The Way of All Flesh 352, 385 Byron, George Gordon  83, 87–​8, 493 Caine, Thomas Hall  663 Caird, Mona  171 The Daughters of Danaus 170 The Morality of Marriage 170 Campbell, Mrs Patrick  177, 675, 680 Canada  242–​3, 256, 286–​8 ‘Cannibal Club’  199 Capitalism  6, 106, 117–​18, 124, 126–​131, 133, 136–​8, 182, 187, 263, 276, 473, 523, 661, 691, 696 Carleton, William: The Black Prophet 243 The Emigrants of Ahadarra 243 Carlyle, Jane Welsh  50–​1 Carlyle, Thomas  35, 47–​50, 54, 58, 73, 75, 81, 83, 144, 218, 353, 358, 367–​369, 376, 377–​ 8, 380–​1, 383, 460, 472–​3, 498, 541, 566, 569, 584, 639, 640 Heroes and Hero-​Worship  367, 376–​7, 541 ‘The Nigger Question’  144 ‘sage of Chelsea’  73 Sartor Resartus  35, 48, 150, 154 ‘Signs of the Times’  472, 473 Carlyle, Thomas and Jane  555 Carpenter, Edward  176, 203 Carpenter, W. B.  436 Carroll, Lewis  195, 233 Cassell’s Illustrated Paper 509 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart  89 celebrity  7, 392, 497, 507, 513, 539–​558, 291, 658 Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal  507, 509–​11 Chambers, Robert  494 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation  240, 442, 445, 494–​5 Chameleon 193 Charcot, Jean-​Martin  180 Chartism  83–​102, 106, 319, 321 and fiction  69

720   Index Chartism (cont.) and periodicals  91, 94, 98, 100–​1 and poetry  72, 119 Chesterton, G. K.  310, 335, 342, 396 Cholmondeley, Mary: Pottage 170 Church of England  352, 356, 358, 388, 389 Church of Scotland  52–​4, 57 circulating libraries  46, 481, 485, 513–​15; see also Mudie’s class  71–​4, 83, 85, 89, 94–​5, 97–​100, 195, 199–​ 201, 212, 215–​218, 220, 233, 240, 244, 247–​9, 251–​9, 263–​7, 273–​4, 276, 286, 288–​9, 311, 313–​18, 320, 352, 356–​390, 392, 422, 440–​441, 449, 450, 454, 470, 483–​484, 491–​3, 495, 501–​2, 507–​9, 512, 523, 605, 607–​8, 620, 631, 649, 653, 663, 665, 682, 691–​2, 694–​6, 699 antagonism 75 conflict 69, 240 struggle 87, 93 Cleave’s Gazette of Variety  93–​4 Clough, Arthur Hugh  119, 338 Cobbe, Frances Power  426, 435, 436 ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors’  167–​8 ‘Dreams as Illustrations of Unconscious Cerebration’ 435 ‘Unconscious Cerebration’  435 Cockton, Henry: Valentine Vox, the Ventriloquist 70 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  29, 47, 88, 336, 611, 640 Collins, Wilkie  337, 459, 471, 509, 511–​15, 545–​6, 554 Armadale 131, 514 The Moonstone 539 No Name 494 ‘The Unknown Public’  543–​4 The Woman in White  70, 471, 491, 513 Colonialism  111–​12, 137, 139, 252, 257, 260 Communism 109 Conan Doyle, Arthur  118, 310, 494, 518, 627 Sherlock Holmes  310, 312, 544, 627 Conrad, Joseph  254, 262, 264–​7, 312 Heart of Darkness 247, 312 Lord Jim  254, 260–​7, 528 Conservative Party  104, 111

Contemporary Review  424, 426, 436, 474, 502, 520 Cook, Thomas  236 Cooper, Thomas  83, 85–​6, 89–​91, 101, 119 Cooper’s Journal or Unfettered Thinker 85 ‘ “Merrie England”—​No More!’  96 The Purgatory of Suicides  89–​90, 96 ‘Shakespeare Chartist Association’  101 copyright  47, 482, 486–​7, 492–​9, 501, 516 international copyright  498, 520, 545 revised Copyright Bill  552 Corelli, Marie  342, 377 Cornhill Magazine  416, 418, 511, 513, 516, 517, 519, 621 Cosmopolitanism  2, 129–​30 Courthope, William John  77–​81 History of English Poetry 78 Life in Poetry: Law in Taste 77 Craik, Dinah  511–​12, 647 John Halifax, Gentleman 215 Mistress and Maid 632 Olive  284–​5, 293, 295, 647, 682 see also Mulock, Dinah Crane, Walter  91 crime  94, 109, 298, 315, 494 war crime  32, 34, 39–​40 The Critic 220, 510 Cruikshank, George  626, 632, 671 The Bottle 671 The Drunkard’s Children 672 Cushman, Charlotte  205, 677 Daily Mail 226, 494 Daily Telegraph 196, 200 Dante Alighieri  638–​9, 640, 643 Divine Comedy 639 Purgatorio 639, 643 Darwin, Charles  15, 70, 233–​5, 242, 407, 412, 417–​420, 422, 427, 438, 440–​1, 501, 587–​9 Darwinism  427, 432–​3, 495, 689 Literary Darwinism  411 The Descent of Man 234 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals 581 The Origin of Species  234, 416, 431–​2, 441–​7, 449, 451–​2, 494–​5 The Voyage on the Beagle  234, 442, 451

Index   721 Darwin, Erasmus: The Temple of Nature 445 Daubeny, Ulric: ‘The Sumach’  185–​6 Davenport, Allen: The Life and Literary Pursuits of Allen Davenport  84–​5 Dawson, Catherine  203 Decadence  2, 174, 500, 598, 614, 653 Derrida, Jacques  153, 525, 526 Dickens, Charles  5, 29, 99–​100, 116, 118, 125, 133, 150, 164–​5, 174, 236, 237, 244, 247, 253, 310–​20, 324–​6, 331, 337–​8, 352, 354, 377, 385, 391–​3, 405, 433–​4, 438, 440–​3, 459, 462, 464–​5, 475, 484, 486, 493, 498, 502, 504–​5, 507–​514, 516–​18, 521, 524, 537, 610, 618, 620–​2, 626–​7, 629–​30, 667–​8, 689 All the Year Round  236, 434, 438, 508, 513, 682, 692 American lecture tour  498, 547 American Notes 236 Bleak House  148, 153, 170, 205, 238, 337, 385, 504, 512 A Christmas Carol 500 David Copperfield  243–​4, 337, 385, 512, 629, 632 Dickens Universe  19 Dombey and Son  100, 120, 126–​7, 236, 247 Great Expectations  38, 45, 142, 146, 215, 237–​ 8, 242, 244, 513, 524 Hard Times  7, 150, 459, 512, 610 Household Words  100, 434, 464, 507, 508, 509, 511, 512, 513, 514, 517, 518, 521, 668 Little Dorrit  133, 156, 317, 352, 512 Master Humphrey’s Clock 621 The Mystery of Edwin Drood 627 Old Curiosity Shop 484, 621 Oliver Twist  69, 316, 354, 626 Our Mutual Friend  70, 486, 516 The Pickwick Papers 618 Pictures from Italy 236, 319 Sketches by Boz 310 A Tale of Two Cities 438, 513 The Uncommercial Traveler 236, 318 Dilke, Charles  111 Greater Britain 236 Disraeli, Benjamin  65, 72, 111, 114, 118, 240

Coningsby 72 Endymion 516 Sybil 72, 96, 98 Tancred 72, 240 ‘Young England’ trilogy  72 Dixon, Ella Hepworth: The Story of a Modern Woman 170 Dodgson, Charles  195 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland  233, 280, 675 see also Carroll, Lewis Donaldson, Joseph  36 Recollections of an Eventful Life, chiefly passed in the army 36 Donizetti, Domenico Gaetano Maria: La Fille du Régiment 220 Doubleday, Thomas: Political Pilgrim’s Progress  95–​6 Douglas, Lord Alfred  193 ‘Two Loves’  193–​4 Du Maurier, George  617, 619, 622–​3, 635 Trilby 544 see also Potter, Paul Dunne, Mary Chevalita  194 Durkheim, Émile  266 East India Company  55, 111, 134, 157, 218, 223, 224, 246 Eccles, Charlotte O’Conor  190, 557 ‘How Women Can Easily Make Provision for Their Old Age’  190 The Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore  190–​1 see also Hall, Godfrey eco-​criticism  18 Edgeworth, Maria  35 Castle Rackrent 35 Essays on Professional Education 223 Edinburgh Review  56, 60, 134, 358, 276–​8 education  166, 214, 233 and religion  384–​397 Revised Code or ‘Lowe’s Code’  70 of soldiers  217 women’s 190 Egerton, George  161 ‘Virgin Soil’  161–​2 see also Dunne, Mary Chevalita Eliot, George  17, 19, 29, 47, 70, 116, 119, 121, 125, 150, 206, 253, 331, 337, 378, 418, 423, 426, 456, 459, 462, 466, 491, 515–​7, 550, 569–​ 70, 580, 588, 612, 638

722   Index Eliot, George (cont.) Adam Bede  149, 393, 456, 515, 569 Daniel Deronda  19, 151, 536, 588 Felix Holt  70, 108, 122, 516 ‘On the Influence of Rationalism’  423 The Lifted Veil 29 Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life 19, 29, 125–​6, 168–​9, 235, 237, 358, 441, 466, 648 The Mill on the Floss  148, 150, 208, 360, 515, 580 Romola  119, 516, 622, 638, 642, 647 Scenes of Clerical Life 515, 517 see also Evans, Mary Ann Eliot, T. S.  248, 342 Eliza Cook’s Journal 508, 511 Elliott, Ebenezer: Corn Law Rhymes 135 Ellis, Havelock  176, 197, 199 autobiography 199 Sexual Inversion  197–​8, 200, 202 Studies in the Psychology of Sex  199–​200 and Symonds, John Addington  197 Elmy, Elizabeth Wolstenholme  172 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  120, 421, 522 emotions  9–​10, 28, 30, 559–​596 Empire  27, 233–​249, 368 Engels, Friedrich  84, 120, 124, 316–​17 The Communist Manifesto 109 and Marx  109 English Chartist Circular 85, 87, 94 Englishman’s Magazine 518 eugenics  242, 424, 450 Evans, Mary Ann  360 Evans, Marian  418, 515–​17, 550 Evening Citizen 227 Examiner  71, 420, 519 exhibitions: the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations  112, 130, 236, 245, 487 International Health Exhibition (1884)  425 London International Exhibition (1862)  112 The Family Herald, or Useful Information and Amusement for the Million  508–​9, 512

Fanu, Sheridan Le  517 femininity  170, 174, 176, 178, 188–​9, 205, 294, 298, 300–​1, 351, 427, 550, 677, 679 Feminism  4, 15, 171–​2, 181, 301–​2 Ferrero, Guglielmo  176 The Female Offender 176 Field, Michael  202–​3, 206, 342, 365, 606, 648 Bradley, Katharine  202, 365, 648 Cooper, Edith Emma  365, 648 ‘It was deep April’  206 Sight and Song 648 Fielding, Henry  35, 215 Jonathan Wild 35 Figaro in London 95 fin de siècle  29, 77, 173, 179, 268, 275, 312, 316, 321–​5, 591, 648 and decadence  170, 578 studies 2 Foot, Jesse  35 The Lives of Andrew Robinson Bowes, Esq. and the Countess of Strathmore 35 Memoirs of Casanova 35 Forster, John  487, 499, 507, 511 Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith 47 Forsyth, William: Novels and Novelists of the Eighteenth Century 196 Fortnightly Review  70, 121, 421, 423, 424, 425, 553, 590, 591, 592, 597 Foucault, Michel  4, 16, 115–​16, 119–​20, 143, 153, 162, 180, 312, 351, 353, 655 The History of Sexuality 162, 350 France and French  216, 252, 263, 265, 272, 290, 328, 360, 369, 381, 388, 407, 422, 428–​9, 442, 445, 605, 618, 620, 653, 661, 671, 686–​7, 703 French Revolution  74–​5, 77, 94, 99, 162, 575 Freud, Sigmund  153, 176, 197, 365, 423–​4, 430, 436 Totem and Taboo  423–​4 Friendship’s Offering 519 Frost, Thomas The Secret 98 Froude, James Anthony  256, 257, 375 The Nemesis of Faith 375 Oceana, or England and Her Colonies 236

Index   723 Galt, John  135 Galton, Francis  242, 419, 424–​5, 435, 450 Gaskell, Elizabeth  47, 50, 70–​1, 175, 247, 253, 355, 440, 459, 473, 508, 511, 514, 549, 550Cranford 154, 236, 247, 527 Life of Charlotte Brontë 47, 50 Mary Barton  69, 71, 83–​4, 154, 243, 440, 459, 473, 511 North and South  69, 459, 512, 514 Ruth 355 The Gem 519 gender  16, 50, 88, 94, 152, 161–​177, 188, 233, 252, 284–​309, 341, 543, 703 Germany and German  239, 272, 302, 337, 375, 381, 620 Gilbert and Sullivan  500 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins  165, 551 ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’  165 Gissing, George  116, 319, 320, 321, 365, 555, 556 Demos 244 New Grub Street  321, 555, 556, 557 The Odd Women 181, 365 Gladstone, William  46, 65, 118, 121, 554 Glasgow Record 227 Godwin, William  354 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang  47 Good Words  350, 390, 520 Gordon, General Charles George  245 Gosse, Edmund  46, 424, 454 The Aquarium 454 Father and Son 454 A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast 454, 456 The Romance of Natural History 454 A Short History of Modern English Literature 78 Tenby: A Sea-​Side Holiday 454 gothic  32, 127, 130–​3, 140, 179, 180–​1, 183, 185, 188, 203, 238, 338, 347, 356, 366, 390, 313, 318, 322, 326, 649, 688 Grand, Sarah  181, 551 American lecture tour  551 The Beth Book: Being a Study from the life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius 181, 170

The Heavenly Twins  170, 171, 172, 181 Ideala 170 Green, T. H.  104, 107–​9 Greenwood, James  310, 692 ‘A Night in a Workhouse’  692 Grossmith, George and Weedon: The Diary of a Nobody 500 Gurney, Edmund  429 Habermas, Jurgen  116 Haggard, H. Rider  342, 285, 291–​3, 296–​303, 308–​9 Allan Quatermain 246 Benita: An African Romance  299–​300, 302 The Ghost Kings  299–​300, 302 Jess  291, 297–​8 King Solomon’s Mines  139–​40, 183, 246, 297 She 183, 246 Hall, Godfrey  190 Hallam, Arthur  209, 518 Hardy, Thomas  81, 280–​1, 364, 365, 382, 388, 389, 425, 441, 500, 517, 518, 555 ‘Drummer Hodge’  280–​1 Jude the Obscure  172, 364, 382, 383, 389, 425 Tess of the D’Urbervilles 365, 500 Harkness, Margaret  70 A City Girl 70 Law, John  70 Harney, George Julian  86 Harper’s Magazine 518 Hawthorne, Nathaniel  642 The Marble Faun 642 Hazlewood, Colin  692 The Casual Ward 692 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  104, 107–​8, 564 Heidegger, Martin  333, 342, 344–​6, 349–​50 Hemans, Felicia  203, 237, 548, 549 ‘Woman and Fame’  548–​9 Henty, G. A.  270, 291 Hogarth, William  632, 672 Marriage A-​la-​Mode 672 The Rake’s Progress 672 homosexuality  193–​209, 362, 363, 602, 612

724   Index Hopkins, Gerard Manley  331, 335, 348, 360, 535, 568 ‘Harry Ploughman’  203 Horace 640 Horne, R. H.  511, 584, 585 Orion 136 Hosmer, Harriet  205 Howitt’s Journal 508, 511 Hughes, Thomas  270, 275–​7, 359, 393 Tom Brown at Oxford 359 Tom Brown’s School Days  175, 269–​7 1, 176, 178, 280, 282 Humboldt, Wilhelm von  105 Huxley, Aldous  410, 518 Ibsen, Henrik  424, 500, 591, 664, 678, 681, 683 Ghosts 172 Illustrated London News 91, 242 Imperialism and imperial  110–​14, 233–​249, 251–​8, 270–​1, 275, 278, 280, 284–​7, 289–​92, 297–​9, 301–​3, 337, 403, 677, 692, 694 India and Indian  110–​15, 122, 124, 136, 154, 158, 218–​19, 223–​4, 235–​6, 240, 244–​9, 251, 253–​5, 257, 265–​7, 284–​6, 290, 338, 528 Indian rebellion  91, 111–​13, 245, 359 Individualism  103–​6, 109, 117, 259, 261–​5, 305, 606, 613–​14, 691 Ireland and Irish  110–​11, 113, 237, 240, 243–​4, 246, 248, 255, 257, 265–​7, 270, 277, 287, 335, 463, 482, 489, 492, 500, 521, 676 famine 242, 243 and home rule  103 rebellion 94 Irving, Edward  45–​61, 392 Irving, Henry  554, 659, 661, 663, 693 Italy and Italian  400, 429, 639, 643, 645, 647, 649, 676 Italian Risorgimento  119 Jamaica  105, 113, 238, 249 Jamaican uprising  586 James, Henry  29–​30, 69–​7 1, 73, 118, 202, 322–​ 3, 702–​7 16 The Aspern Papers  48–​9 ‘The Future of the Novel’  71

The Golden Bowl 710, 711 The Portrait of a Lady  612–​13, 704–​7, 712 The Princess Casamassima 322 A Small Boy and Others 711, 715 The Spoils of Poynton 705, 707 The Tragic Muse  65–​9, 712, 713, 714, 715 The Turn of the Screw 170, 706 James, M. R.  688 James, William  365, 383, 420–​1, 589, 593 Jameson, Fredric  153, 528 Jerrold, Douglas  641, 673, 687, 692 Black-​Ey’d Susan 687 Mutiny at the Nore 692 The Rent Day 673 Jevons, William Stanley  144 The Theory of Political Economy 146, 156 Johnson, Samuel  35; see also Boswell’s Life of Johnson Jones, Ernest  85–​87, 89–​91, 100–​1 De Brassier: A Democratic Romance 96, 98 The New World  90–​1 The Revolt of Hindostan 91 The Romance of a People 98 The Maid of Warsaw 91 Woman’s Wrongs  94, 100–​1 Jones, Henry Arthur  663, 665–​6 Jowett, Benjamin  602 Kant, Immanuel  104–​5, 116, 119, 526–​7, 562, 564, 577, 590, 592 Kaye, John William: People of India 240 Keats, John  234, 362, 537, 566, 575 Keble, John  331–​2, 336–​7, 342–​5, 382, 391 The Keepsake 519 Kingsley, Charles  70, 276, 278, 358–​9, 360–​3, 434–​5, 455 Alton Locke  69–​70, 97, 244, 358 Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn 242 Two Years Ago 175 Westward Ho! 241, 358 Kipling, Rudyard  239, 246, 254, 265–​6, 268, 270, 275, 280, 518 Jungle Books 280 Kim  246, 254, 260, 262, 265–​6, 275, 280 Stalky and Company 275, 280 Knox, Robert  240

Index   725 The Races of Men 233 Krafft-​Ebing, Richard von  176 Pyschopathia Sexualis 197 Labouchère, Henry: the Labouchère Amendment  196 Lacan, Jacques  153 Ladies Journal 190 Ladies Pictorial 190 Lamarck, Jean-​Baptiste  445 Philosophie zoologique 445 The Lancet 180, 470 Lanchester, Edith  171 Lang, Andrew  424 Lawrence, George Alfred: Guy Livingstone 226 Laws: Corn Law  134–​5 Corn Law (repeal) 151–​2, 157  Navigation Laws  134–​5 Poor Law  70, 91, 116, 148–​9, 157, 584 Poor Law Commission  179; see also Poor Law Amendment Act Leavis, F. R.  1–​4, 6, 10, 13, 18–​19, 143, 404–​5, 460 Leavis, Q. D.  5 Fiction and the Reading Public 5 Lee, Vernon  203, 518, 593–​4, 596, 600, 613 ‘Lady Tal’  201 Lefebvre, Henri  312, 435 Legitimation League  171 Leighton, Frederic  516, 622, 637–​9, 643 L.E.L. (Letitia Landon)  203, 548 lesbianism and lesbians  194, 197, 199, 202–​8, 362, 364 Lever, Charles  626 Confessions of Harry Lorrequer 626 Levy, Amy  207, 335, 364 A Ballad of Religion and Marriage’  364 ‘To Lallie (Outside the British Museum)’ 207 Lewes, George Henry  47, 416, 418, 420, 423–​4, 450, 454, 509–​10, 515–​17, 550, 581, 676–​7 Ranthorpe 541 Lewis, Leopold  687 The Bells  687, 689, 692–​3 Lewis, M. G.:

The Castle Spectre  688–​9 Liberalism  28, 103–​123, 157, 279, 358 and aestheticism  116–​17, 120 see also neo-​liberalism Liberal Party  103, 106, 112–​3, 157 life writing  35, 45–​61 autobiography  30, 35, 48, 60 biography  35, 45–​61, 500, 517, 620, 639 Christ biography  377–​8, 380 memoir  30, 32, 35–​6, 45–​57, 335, 511 and nationality  59–​61 Linton, E. J.  86, 89–​91, 171, 178, 435, 511–​12 Bob Thin; or the Poorhouse Fugitive 91 English Republic 91 ‘The Girl of the Period’  168 Ireland for the Irish 95 ‘Modern Man-​Haters’  168 ‘The Modern Revolt’  168 The National 91 Lippincott’s Magazine 614 lithography 482, 672 Livingstone, David: Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa 55, 245 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper 508 Locke, John  104–​5, 110 Lofft Junior, Capel  92 Ernest; Or Political Regeneration 92 Lombroso, Cesare  176 The Female Offender 176 London Journal, and Weekly Record of Literature, Science and Art 99, 508–​9, 512 London Magazine  36–​7 London Society 513, 517 London Society for the Extension of University Teaching  65 Longman’s Magazine 517 Lyell, Charles  432, 445 Principles of Geology 445 Macaulay, Thomas Babington  110, 113–​14, 487, 498 MacDonald, George  394, 395 Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood 394 At the Back of the North Wind 394 Dealing with the Fairies 394

726   Index MacDonald, George (cont.) The Princess and the Goblin 394 MacKay, Charles  242 ‘The Emigrants’  242 Mackenzie, Robert Shelton  626 Macmillan, Alexander  510, 514, 519–​20 Macmillan’s Magazine  57, 416, 419–​20, 430, 434–​6, 510, 513–​15, 517, 519–​20, 553, 632 Macmillan publishers  56–​7 Magna Carta  107 Malthus, Robert Thomas  144–​5, 148–​51, 154, 156, 353–​4, 446 Essay on the Principle of Population  148–​9, 353, 446 Marchant, Bessie  291 Marryat, Florence  513, 517, 676 Facing the Footlights 676 Marryat, Frederick  152, 246, 258 Frank Mildmay 259 Masterman Ready 259 Mr. Midshipman Easy 258 Peter Simple 70, 259 Poor Jack 259 Marryat, Thomas  270 Martineau, Harriet  116, 136, 144, 152, 156, 244, 491, 508, 511–​12, 540–​2, 548, 550–​1, 558, 632 The Anglers of the Dove 632 Dawn Island 135, 152 Illustrations of Political Economy 541, 550 ‘The Loom and the Lugger’  135 ‘Sowers, Not Reapers’  135 Marvell, Andrew  88 Marx, Eleanor  171 Marx, Karl  109, 124, 143–​4, 150, 153–​4, 156, 240, 316, 460–​1, 473–​4, 522–​4, 537 Capital  150, 461, 522–​3 The Communist Manifesto 109 and Engels  109 Marxism  15, 275, 460, 594, 661 masculinity and manliness  95, 165, 172, 174–​5, 211–​229, 334, 586, 602 and emotions  212, 218–​20, 228 military masculinity  211–​229, 272, 586 Massey, Gerald  85–​6, 89–​91 Masterman, Charles: The Heart of the Empire  248–​9

Maudsley, Henry  166, 416, 420, 425–​6 Mayhew, Edward: Stage Effect 669 Mayhew, Henry: London Labour and the London Poor 247, 543 Mazzini, Guiseppe  119 Melbourne Punch 697 Melodrama  70, 74, 661–​8, 671–​3, 686–​700 Meredith, George  119, 424, 499 Beauchamp’s Career 70, 424 Diana of the Crossways 424 One of Our Conquerors 424 The Tragic Comedians 424 Vittoria 424 Metchnikoff, Elie  180 Meynell, Alice  191, 325, 342 ‘A Letter from a Girl to Her Own Old Age’ 191 Militarism  211–​229, 279 Mill, James  110, 112, 134, 157, 257 History of British India 158 Mill, J. S.  104–​5, 107, 109–​10, 112–​13, 116, 120, 122, 128, 133, 140, 144, 148, 151–​13, 157, 360–​1, 364, 367–​8, 374–​5, 383, 418, 421–​ 3, 436–​7, 487, 536, 567, 610–​11 Autobiography 611 On Liberty  105, 110, 146, 151 Principles of Political Economy  128, 131, 146 The Subjection of Women 168 Millais, John Everett  62–​6, 628, 630–​2 L’Enfant du Régiment 220 Peace Concluded 226 Millman, H. H.  92 Milnes, Richard Monckton  199 Milton, John  88, 345, 442 Paradise Lost 442 Moncrieff, W. T.: The Shipwreck of the Medusa; or, The Fatal Raft  671–​2 More, Hannah  337, 363, 365, 386–​7, 394, 429, 435, 439, 464, 497, 515 Moretti, Franco  187, 313–​14, 326, 528, Morley, John  65, 67, 69–​70, 72–​3, 80–​1, 110, 418–​19, 423, 434 and the Fortnightly Review 70 Morning Chronicle 519

Index   727 Morris, William  72, 91, 117–​18, 193, 535, 538, 570–​3, 594, 601, 604, 606, 608–​9, 642–​3, 655 ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ 193 A Dream of John Ball 72 News from Nowhere 72 Mudie, Charles Edward  47–​48, 485 Mudie’s Lending Library  47, 485 Mulock, Dinah  511–​12 Murray, John  14, 236, 390, 486, 492–​3, 517–​18 Murray’s Magazine 518 Muscular Christianity  216, 270–​1, 276, 278, 282 Myers, Frederic  429 Naden, Constance Caroline Woodhill  188 ‘The Elixir of Life’  189 ‘The Lady Doctor’  188–​9 ‘Love Versus Learning’  189 A Modern Apostle, the Elixir of Life, the Story of Clarice, and Other Poems 188 Songs and Sonnets of Springtime 188 ‘strange waking vision’  189 Napoleon  40–​1, 268, 293 National Instructor 98 Nature  367, 376, 406–​8, 415–​17, 419–​21, 425, 433, 436–​7, 439, 443, 445–​6 Nazism 242, 333 neo-​liberalism  104 neo-​Victorianism  2, 16–​18, 311 Newbolt, Henry  268–​270, 272, 280–​281 Admirals All 268, 269 The Twymans 268 New Journalism  196, 429, 430, 518, 551, 553, 554, 555; see also periodicals Newman, John Henry  331, 336, 358, 363, 382, 389, 398 Loss and Gain 375 Newnes, George  494, 518 New Woman  2, 170–​1, 178–​191, 193, 289, 291–​ 4, 299, 303, 309, 364–​5, 426, 551, 591, 682 and fiction 170, 172 and sensation fiction  184 New York Herald 190 New York Times 228 New Zealand  234, 245, 255, 286–​8 New Zealand Graphic 190

Nietzsche, Friedrich  117, 500 Nineteenth Century  190, 423, 426–​7, 429–​30, 519–​20, 609 Nordau, Max  76–​78, 81, 173, 327 Degeneration 77 North America  124, 236, 243, 245, 481, 484, 498, 503, 687–​694 Northern Liberator 95 Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser  83–​6, 91, 95–​7, 101 Notes to the People 91, 100 O’Connor, Feargus  83, 95, 98 O’Connor, T. P.  553 Oken, Lorenz  34 Elements of Physiophilosophy 34 Oliphant, Margaret  45–​61, 337, 392, 499, 509, 515–​18, 521, 543, 548, 550, 558 ‘Among the Lochs’  58 The Life of Edward Irving, Minister of the National Scotch Church  45–​61 The Minister’s Wife 58 ‘Religious Memoirs’  58 ‘Scottish National Character’  58 ‘Sermons’ 58 ‘Three Days in the Highlands’  58 Once a Week 621 Orme, Robert: History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan  223–​4 Ottoman Empire  137, 216 Pall Mall Gazette  190, 227, 692 Pater, Walter  13, 76, 81, 109–​10, 122, 146, 238, 360–​3, 424, 568, 571–​4, 577, 593, 600–​9, 611–​15, 651–​5 ‘Diaphaneitè’ 202 Marius the Epicurean 602, 614 Studies in the History of the Renaissance 76, 106–​107, 361, 571–​2, 574, 593, 600–​2, 605, 612, 614, 651 Patmore, Coventry  342, 361 ‘Angel in the House’  169 Payn, James: A Confidential Agent 631 penny dreadfuls  6, 74 Penny Post  458, 464–​6, 469, 485, 507

728   Index People’s Journal 508 periodicals  2, 6, 307, 406–​7, 415–​17, 436–​7, 453, 481, 509, 515, 518–​21, 643 and anonymity  75 circulation 6 comics 6 democratisation of 6 and fine art  648 and log-​rolling  75–​6 and science  416–​437 and theatre reviews  664 war of the unstamped  84 see also New Journalism photography  61, 240, 424, 448, 482, 529, 551–​558, 642 Pinero, Arthur Wing: The Second Mrs Tanqueray 665, 711 Planche, J. R.  689 The Vampire 689 Plato 202, 363 police  201, 303, 322, 664 Popular Science Monthly 180 pornography  194, 199, 200–​1, 486 Postcolonialism  4, 15, 142, 273 Potter, Paul  687 Trilby  687–​8, 690, 692 see also Du Maurier, George Pre-​Raphaelite  474, 603, 606–​7, 611, 620, 639, 641, 643, 644–​6, 649, 655 Professionalism, rise of  68, 263–​4, 266 and criticism  73–​5 and women  166, 169–​72 Prospective Review  71–​2 prostitution and prostitutes  166, 173, 354, 498 Punch  91, 270, 356, 433, 490, 500, 510, 607, 692 Quarterly Review 92 queer theory  15, 49–​51, 174, 202–​3, 208–​9, 275 race  233–​4, 239–​244, 247–​8, 251, 256–​7, 288, 296, 301, 303, 695 racism  113, 183, 239, 694 railways and trains  134, 137, 184, 235–​6, 239, 249, 266, 277, 315, 440, 454, 458–​60, 462–​70, 472, 481, 484–​5, 503, 508, 642, 690

railway bookstalls  470, 485 Reade, Charles  430, 513, 515 Hard Cash 70 It Is Never Too Late to Mend 243 A Terrible Temptation 70 Reagan, Ronald, 104  Reform Bills  6, 576, 586 Ilbert Bill  113 ‘Great’ Reform Bill (1832)  84 Reform Bills (1832, 1867, and 1884)  157 Renan, Ernest  378–​9 Vie de Jésus  378–​80 Review of Reviews  428–​30 Reynolds, George W. M.  86, 93, 97, 99–​101, 247, 508 The Mysteries of London 99, 247 Pickwick Abroad 99, 545 Reynolds’s Miscellany  99, 508, 509 Rhodes, Cecil  290, 303 Rhodesia  139, 303–​8 Ricardo, David  134–​4, 149, 151–​2, 156–​8 Richardson, Samuel  224, 228 Clarissa: Or The History of a Young Lady 221 The History of Sir Charles Grandison 218, 221, 228 Pamela or Virtue Rewarded 221 Ricoeur, Paul  10 hermeneutics of suspicion  10–​11, 347, 386, 528 Ritchie, Anne Thackeray: Miss Angel and Fulham Lawn 647 Robins, Elizabeth  678, 680–​5 ‘Whither and How’  684–​5 Romantics and Romanticism  336, 371–​2, 383, 400, 408, 451, 540–​1, 558, 575 and Germany  104–​5 influence on Chartist poetry  85, 87–​8, 90, 93–​4 Rossetti, Christina  203, 331–​2, 335–​7, 343–​44, 361, 370, 392, 646 Goblin Market  148, 205, 646 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel  206, 474, 500, 599, 611–​12, 637, 643–​4 House of Life  611–​12, 646 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel and Christina  79 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques  35

Index   729 Confessions 35 Rowcroft, Charles: Tales of the Colonies 242 Ruskin, John  116, 144, 163, 238, 337, 357, 427, 460, 464, 473, 565–​7, 570–​1, 573–​4, 591 608–​9, 635, 641, 649–​51, 653 ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’  163 The Stones of Venice 238 Russia and Russian  216, 429 Sade, Marquis de  199 Saintsbury, George  520, 521 A Short History of English Literature 78 Sala, G. A.  512–​13, 517 Salisbury, Lord  65 Sargent, John Singer  703–​5 Sartain’s Union Magazine 511 Saturday Review  270, 278–​80, 287, 296, 359, 471, 632 Schiller, Friedrich  564–​5 Schreiner, Olive  170–​1, 284–​5, 291–​2, 293–​7, 303, 308–​9, 424 Dreams 171 From Man to Man 171 Love in the Wilderness: The Story of an African Farm  170, 172, 291–​7, 303, 305–​9 Woman and Labour 170 Scotland  54, 235, 244 Scott, Sir Walter  34, 37, 43, 237, 359, 482, 493, 499, 513, 525 The Antiquary 34 Heart of Midlothian 235 Waverley  40–​1 Scribner’s Monthly  504, 518, 676, 705, 711 Sedgwick, Adam  444–​5 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky  205 Between Men 174 Epistemology of the Closet 197 Seeley, John  245, 257 The Expansion of England 236 sensation drama  665, 672 sensation fiction  169–​70, 421, 431, 586, 589 Sensationalism  279, 327, 610–​11, 617, 663–​5, 669, 671–​3, 677, 691 Sentimentalism  216, 220, 343, 581, 582–​6, 588

sex and sexuality  161–​177, 193–​209, 334, 344, 351, 353–​7, 362, 364–​5, 578 Sexey, Jane  632, 634 A Slip in the Fens 632 Shakespeare, William  88, 101, 324, 336, 427, 442, 490, 552–​3, 554–​5, 621, 638, 651, 661, 663, 665, 670, 687, 705, 712 Hamlet 417 King Lear 490 Macbeth  651, 676–​7 The Winter’s Tale 324 Sharpe’s London Magazine 508, 511 Shaw, George Bernard  500, 677, 683–​4 Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 165 Shelley, Percy Bysshe  83, 87–​8, 234 Mask of Anarchy 89 ‘Song to the Men of England’  90 Simmel, George: ‘The Metropolis and Modern Life’  461 Smiles, Samuel  47, 244, 421, 508 Smith, Adam  104, 110, 134, 144–​5, 151, 154, 156–​7 The Theory of Moral Sentiments 145 The Wealth of Nations 145 Snow, C. P.  404–​6, 410, 438, 439 Societies: Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 493 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge 493 Society for Psychical Research  429 Society for the Suppression of Vice  196 South Africa  111, 114, 236, 256, 282, 284–​ 5, 287–​90, 292, 295, 296–​300, 302–​4, 308–​9 South America  124, 136–​7, 234 Spalding, Douglas  416, 419, 420–​2 The Spectator  180, 182, 218, 221, 445, 694 ‘Restlessness in Old Age’  182 Spence, William  135 Spencer, Herbert  266, 420, 423, 446–​7, 449, 581, 591 Principles of Biology 446, 447 Spiritualism  335, 429, 500 clairvoyance 29

730   Index sport  5, 311, 359, 434, 492, 539, 551 sports history  274 and warfare  268–​70, 272–​3, 277–​8, 282 Stead, W. T.  293, 429, 498, 553–​4 and ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ 173, 498 and the Pall Mall Gazette 173 Stebbins, Emma  205 Stevenson, Robert L.  258, 260–​1, 268, 270, 275, 322, 404, 429, 504, 518, 703 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 156, 173, 322, 429, 594 Treasure Island  139–​40, 246 Stock, St George H.: Romance of Chastisements 199 Stocqueler, by J. H.: The British Officer: His Positions, Duties, Emoluments and Privileges 222 Stoker, Bram: Dracula  156, 172–​3, 183–​4, 186–​7, 594 Story, Revd Robert Herbert  51–​3, 56–​9 Stowe, Harriet Beecher  529, 551 Uncle Tom’s Cabin  529, 551, 619, 687, 694–​6 Strachey, Lytton  46, 53, 272–​3 Eminent Victorians 46, 272 Strand Magazine  184, 296, 392, 518, 627, 681 Street, G. S.: Autobiography of a Boy 201 Swinburne, Charles Algernon  119, 199, 203, 324, 328, 361–​2, 382, 424, 427, 474, 500, 600, 609, 611 and ‘ready’ readers  74, 78 Symonds, John Addington  197–​8, 424 ‘A Problem in Greek Ethics’  202, 204 Sexual Inversion 197 see also Ellis, Havelock Symons, Arthur  676–​7 ‘Impression’  325–​6 London Nights 603 Tahiti 234, 442 Taylor, Tom: The Ticket of Leave Man 692, 697 Temperance  216, 671–​2, 687 Temple Bar  430, 432–​3, 517 Tennyson, Alfred Lord  234, 246, 335, 338, 342, 351, 355–​6, 360–​1, 269, 273, 424, 427, 446, 646, 663

‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’  225–​6, 519 Idylls of the King  241–​2, 355 ‘The Lady of Shalott’  646 ‘Locksley Hall’  238–​9 Maud 474 ‘In Memoriam’  209, 234, 351, 355–​6, 446 Poems 646 Terry, Ellen  657, 678–​80 Both Sides of The Curtain 680 Thackeray, William Makepeace  28–​43, 212–​ 229, 235, 385–​6, 418–​19, 433–​4, 498, 510, 513–​14, 516–​17, 519, 552, 618, 620, 626, 629–​30, 632, 647 The Adventures of Philip 514, 630 Barry Lyndon  32, 37–​43 The Book of Snobs 244 Denis Duval 514 The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. 31, 33, 40 The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy 626, 630 The Irish Sketchbook 236 Lovel the Widower 514, 630 The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family, edited by Arthur Pendennis Esq.  212–​229, 244, 620, 629, 633 Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo 236 The Paris Sketchbook 236 Snob Papers 30 The Tremendous Adventures of Major Gahagan  31–​3, 38 Vanity Fair  30, 213, 217, 244, 385, 386, 630 The Virginians 630 Thatcher, Margaret  104 theatre  5, 16, 18, 66–​7, 75, 659–​674, 675–​685, 686–​701, 703, 705, 710, 712–​15 theatregoing 74, 80 theatre studies  18 The Times  196, 299, 483, 498, 519, 683, 694 Tinsley’s Magazine 517 Tit-​Bits 494 Tolstoy, Leo: War and Peace 532 Toryism 8 Tories 108, 112

Index   731 transgender studies  197 Trollope, Anthony  29–​30, 111–​12, 116, 118–​9, 121, 137, 213–​14, 236, 255–​6, 337, 351, 393, 423–​4, 433–​4, 618, 620, 624–​6, 628, 630–​32, 635 Autobiography  463, 471, 628 Barchester Towers 463, 469 The Belton Estate 30, 424 Can You Forgive Her? 469 Castle Richmond 243 The Eustace Diamonds 424 Framley Parsonage  256, 469, 514, 516, 519 John Caldigate  255–​6 Lady Anna 424 The Last Chronicle of Barset 469 Miss Makenzie 30 Orley Farm  624–​6, 631–​2 Phineas Finn 121 The Prime Minister  118, 138, 459 The Small House at Allington  459, 461, 466–​9, 514 The Three Clerks 70, 467 The Warden  463, 468–​9, 580 The Way We Live Now  137–​8, 459 Traill, Catherine Parr: Backwoods of Canada 242 Trollope, Frances  116, 513 Jessie Philips 69 Turkish baths  193, 198, 201 Turner, Ethel:  Seven Little Australians 291 Turner, J. W.  640–​1, 649–​51, 653 Tyndall, John  419, 421, 423, 449 Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich: Forschungen uçber das Räthsel der mannmannlichen Liebe (Researches on the Riddle of Male–​Male Love) 197 United States  103, 255, 286, 287, 302, 695 University Magazine and Free Review 198 uprising: Baptist War 31 Indian rebellion  91, 111–​13, 245, 359 Irish rebellion  94 Jamaican uprising  586 Newport uprising  93–​4, 101 Utilitarianism  144, 146, 148, 583, 604, 609–​11

vampires and vampirism  182, 184–​7 Wagner, Richard  393 Walker, John: The Factory Lad 687, 692 War  30–​43 American Indian Wars  31 First Anglo-​Boer War  296, 299 Second Anglo-​Boer War  245, 270–​1, 275, 280–​2, 287–​8, 290, 299 Boer War melodrama  698 Anglo-​Burmese War  31 Battle of Blenheim  33, 40 Battle of Minden  39–​40 Crimean War  212, 216–​17, 220, 223, 225, 269–​7 1, 278, 283, 359, 498, 519 Franco-​Prussian War  279, 434 First Indian War of Independence 270, 277 Java War 31 the Liberal Wars  31 Napoleonic Wars  31, 503 Second Opium War  133 Russo-​Persian War  31 War of the Spanish Succession  31 First World War  103–​4, 213, 226, 228, 268–​ 70, 282, 286, 288, 290, 302 Great War  271, 281–​2, 602 Second World War  249, 282, 312 Ward, Mary Augusta  171, 375 Robert Elsmere 375, 395 see also Ward, Mrs Humphry Ward, Mrs Humphry  375 Ward, T. H.: The English Poets 78 English Prose Selections 78 Warren, Samuel  515 Ten-​Thousand a Year 244 Watkins, John: John Frost 101 Watson, John Forbes: People of India 240 Wells, H.G.  91, 116, 171, 518 The Time Machine 594 West Indies  132–​3, 236 Westminster Review  106, 198, 416, 418, 510, 517, 540, 572–​3, 601 Westphal, Carl Friedrich Otto:

732   Index Westphal, Carl Friedrich Otto (cont.) ‘Die conträre Sexual empfindung’ (‘Contrary Sexual Feeling’) 197  Wheeler, Thomas Martin  86, 334, 351–​2 Sunshine and Shadow: A Tale of the Nineteenth Century  83, 96–​8 Whistler, James McNeil  328, 599, 649 Whitman, Walt  119, 202 Wilde, Oscar  76, 81, 109–​10, 116–​17, 146, 176, 193, 202, 208–​9, 233, 311, 335, 338, 342, 362–​4, 377, 424, 498, 500, 506, 558, 562, 568, 575, 577, 582, 591, 600, 608–​9, 614–​ 15, 641, 653–​4, 665, 678, 684 ‘The Critic as Artist’  599, 609, 653 De Profundis 116, 364 The Importance of Being Earnest 577 The Picture of Dorian Gray  173, 180, 202, 208, 321–​22, 327, 577, 614, 654 Salome 500 ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’  81, 328, 613 trial  196, 198, 202 Williams, Isaac  331, 336 Williams, Raymond  1, 4, 105, 311–​12, 460, 584 The Country and the City 312

Keywords 584 Windsor Magazine 190 Wollstonecraft, Mary  162, 354 Vindication of the Rights of Woman 162 Wood, Ellen  337, 393, 430–​1, 433, 453, 513, 517 The Channings 627 East Lynne  170, 236, 627, 630, 687, 692, 695–​7, 699 see also Wood, Mrs Henry Wood, Mrs Henry  627, 695 Woolf, Virginia  169, 197, 526, 600 To the Lighthouse 526 Wordsworth, William  88, 234, 336, 493, 498, 553–​5, 584, 611 The Prelude 118 The World 554 workhouse system  91, 94, 316, 692 Yates, Edmund  432, 513, 517, 554 Yeats, William Butler  238, 494, 500, 567 ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’  237 Yellow Book  173, 494, 578, 591 Yonge, Charlotte  331, 335, 337–​8, 394, 433 Heartsease 225 The Heir of Redclyffe 225