1,418 155 4MB
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Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title
Copyright
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Our Victorian Companions
PART I Genres and Movements
1 Poetry
2 The Novel
3 Short Forms: Serialization and Short Fiction
4 Drama and Performance
5 Children’s Literature
6 Life-Writing
7 Gothic, Horror, and the Weird: Shifting Paradigms
8 Sensation Scholarship
9 Decadence and Aestheticism
PART II Media Histories
10 Book History
11 Victorian Digital Humanities
12 Periodical Studies
13 Material Culture
14 Popular Fiction and Culture
15 Radical Print Culture: From Chartism to Socialism
16 Visual Culture
PART III Victorian Discourses
17 Victorianists and Their Reading
18 Aesthetic Formalism
19 Narrative Theory
20 The Ethical Turn
21 The Future of Economic Criticisms Past
22 History/Historicism
23 Liberalism and Citizenship
PART IV Formulations of Identity
24 Feminism and the Canon
25 Gender and Sexuality
26 New Woman Writing
27 Disability Studies
28 The Concept of Class in Victorian Studies
29 Race: Tracing the Contours of a Long Nineteenth Century
30 The Emergence of Animal Studies
PART V Science and Spirit
31 Technology and Literature
32 Brain Science
33 British Psychology in the Nineteenth Century
34 Anthropology and Classical Evolutionism
35 Geology and Paleontology
36 New Religions and Esotericism
37 Studies of Christianity and Judaism
PART VI Spatiality and Environment
38 Domesticity
39 Regionalism and Provincialism: Where Is the Local?
40 Postcolonial
41 Travel Writing
42 Settler Colonialism
43 Victorians in the Anthropocene
44 Why Victorian Ecocriticism Matters
45 Industry
Notes on Contributors
Index
THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO VICTORIAN LITERATURE
The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature offers 45 chapters by leading international scholars working with the most dynamic and influential political, cultural, and theoretical issues addressing Victorian literature today. Scholars and students will find this collection both useful and inspiring. Rigorously engaged with current scholarship that is both historically sensitive and theoretically informed, the Routledge Companion places the genres of the novel, poetry, and drama and issues of gender, social class, and race in conversation with subjects like ecology, colonialism, the Gothic, digital humanities, sexualities, disability, material culture, and animal studies. This guide is aimed at scholars who want to know the most significant critical approaches in Victorian studies, often written by the very scholars who helped found those fields. It addresses major theoretical movements such as narrative theory, formalism, historicism, and economic theory, as well as Victorian models of subjects such as anthropology, cognitive science, and religion. With its lists of key works, rich cross-referencing, extensive bibliographies, and explications of scholarly trajectories, the book is a crucial resource for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, while offering invaluable support to more seasoned scholars. Dennis Denisoff is McFarlin Endowed Chair of English at the University of Tulsa. He is the author of, among other works, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody and Sexual Visuality from Literature to Film. He is the editor of Arthur Machen: Decadent and Occult Works and a special issue of Victorian Review on “Natural Environments,” founding coeditor of The Yellow Nineties Online, and coeditor of Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence. He has recently published on sexuality, the occult, eco-spirituality, decadence, and the environmental humanities. He is currently editing a special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture on decadence and completing a monograph on decadent ecology and the new paganism (1860–1920). Talia Schaffer is Professor of English at Queens College and The Graduate Center at City University of New York. She is the author of Romance’s Rival, Novel Craft, and The Forgotten Female Aesthetes. She has edited Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, a scholarly edition of Lucas Malet’s 1901 novel, The History of Sir Richard Calmady, and coedited Women and British Aestheticism as well as a special issue of Victorian Review, “Extending Families.” Schaffer has published widely on Victorian familial and marital norms, feminist scholarship, disability studies, ethical readings, women writers, material culture, and popular fiction. She is completing a monograph on the feminist theory of “ethics of care” as a new way of thinking about social collectivity in Victorian fiction.
ROUTLEDGE COMPANIONS TO LITERATURE SERIES
Also Available in This Series THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND HUMAN RIGHTS Also available in paperback Edited by Sophia A. McClennen and Alexandra Schultheis Moore THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE Edited by Deborah L. Madsen THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO TRAVEL WRITING Also available in paperback Edited by Carl Thompson THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND RELIGION Also available in paperback Edited by Mark Knight THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO INTER-AMERICAN STUDIES Edited by Wilfried Raussert THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO THE ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES Edited by Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen and Michelle Niemann THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Edited by John Stephens, with Celia Abicalil Belmiro, Alice Curry, Li Lifang and Yasmine S. Motawy THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO PICTUREBOOKS Edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO WORLD LITERATURE AND WORLD HISTORY Edited by May Hawas THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO PAKISTANI ANGLOPHONE WRITING Edited by Aroosa Kanwal and Saiyma Aslam THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND ECONOMICS Edited by Matt Seybold and Michelle Chihara THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY LITERATURE Edited by Daniel O’Gorman and Robert Eaglestone THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES Edited by Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung and Takayuki Tatsumi THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO VICTORIAN LITERATURE Edited by Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer For more information on this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/literature/series/RC4444
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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO VICTORIAN LITERATURE
Edited by Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer
First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-57986-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-50772-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments
ix x
Introduction: Our Victorian Companions Dennis Denisoff
1
PART I
Genres and Movements
9
1 Poetry Alison Chapman
11
2 The Novel Elsie B. Michie
22
3 Short Forms: Serialization and Short Fiction Susan David Bernstein
33
4 Drama and Performance Sharon Aronofsky Weltman
45
5 Children’s Literature Jessica Straley
58
6 Life-Writing Trev Lynn Broughton
69
7 Gothic, Horror, and the Weird: Shifting Paradigms Roger Luckhurst
83
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Contents
8 Sensation Scholarship Pamela K. Gilbert
95
9 Decadence and Aestheticism Stefano Evangelista
106
PART II
Media Histories
117
10 Book History Andrew M. Stauffer
119
11 Victorian Digital Humanities Karen Bourrier
129
12 Periodical Studies Linda K. Hughes
140
13 Material Culture Deborah Lutz
151
14 Popular Fiction and Culture Nicholas Daly
160
15 Radical Print Culture: From Chartism to Socialism Ian Haywood
171
16 Visual Culture Kate Flint
182
PART III
Victorian Discourses
195
17 Victorianists and Their Reading Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan
197
18 Aesthetic Formalism Rae Greiner
206
19 Narrative Theory Elaine Auyoung
217
20 The Ethical Turn Rebecca N. Mitchell
226
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Contents
21 The Future of Economic Criticisms Past Supritha Rajan
237
22 History/Historicism Catherine Gallagher
248
23 Liberalism and Citizenship Helen Small
260
PART IV
Formulations of Identity
271
24 Feminism and the Canon Talia Schaffer
273
25 Gender and Sexuality Duc Dau
284
26 New Woman Writing Molly Youngkin
296
27 Disability Studies Martha Stoddard Holmes
307
28 The Concept of Class in Victorian Studies Carolyn Betensky
319
29 Race: Tracing the Contours of a Long Nineteenth Century Irene Tucker
330
30 The Emergence of Animal Studies Martin Danahay and Deborah Denenholz Morse
342
PART V
Science and Spirit
355
31 Technology and Literature Richard Menke
357
32 Brain Science Anne Stiles
368
33 British Psychology in the Nineteenth Century Suzanne Keen
377
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Contents
34 Anthropology and Classical Evolutionism Kathy Alexis Psomiades
389
35 Geology and Paleontology Ralph O’Connor
401
36 New Religions and Esotericism Christine Ferguson
414
37 Studies of Christianity and Judaism Mark Knight
426
PART VI
Spatiality and Environment
437
38 Domesticity Melissa Valiska Gregory
439
39 Regionalism and Provincialism: Where Is the Local? Mary Ellis Gibson
449
40 Postcolonial Sukanya Banerjee
462
41 Travel Writing Andrea Kaston Tange
473
42 Settler Colonialism Tamara S. Wagner
485
43 Victorians in the Anthropocene Jesse Oak Taylor
496
44 Why Victorian Ecocriticism Matters Lynn Voskuil
506
45 Industry Siobhan Carroll
517
Notes on Contributors Index
527 536
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ILLUSTRATIONS
Ch. 3, Tab. 1 Short Fiction and Serial Fiction by Elizabeth Gaskell Ch. 4, Tab. 1 Number of Publications Listed in the MLA Bibliography in Each Genre from 1920 to 2018 Ch. 4, Fig. 1 Visualization of Number of Publications Listed by MLA in Each Genre from 1920 to 2018 Ch. 4, Fig. 2 Percentages of Total Publications for Each Genre Listed by MLA from 1920 to 2018 Ch. 16, Fig. 1 Photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron, “Death of Elaine” (sitters Charles Hay Cameron, William Warder, Mrs. Hardinge, unknown man, unknown woman), albumen print, 1875 Ch. 30, Fig. 1 Citations of Animal Studies from 1930 to 2019 Ch. 43, Fig. 1 Henry De la Beche, “Awful Changes.” Buckland, Francis T., Curiosities of Natural History. 2nd ed. Richard Bentley, 1858, frontispiece
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38 49 50 51
189 343 499
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Dennis Denisoff When I began work on this project, I could not have realized the amount that I would learn. Without knowing it, I had signed up for a mega-course on multiple approaches to Victorian studies, as well as copy editing 2.0, MLA 8, and the art of (other people’s) clean, spare language. But the most valuable learning experience of the process was given to me by Talia. We’ve been close ever since grad school, but it was during the past two years that our collegiality became a dear friendship. I will be forever grateful that she agreed to coedit the Companion with me; she has been the most rigorous, unflagging partner I could hope for, and the most astute editor—flexible on some decisions and wisely holding her ground on others. Never once did she slow down the pace of production or delay getting some task done, and indeed—if I was being held up with teaching, marking, or writing the introduction— she would surge forward with the next stage in the process. I thank Talia for her editorial acumen and her brilliant mind, but most of all, I thank her for her friendship. In my Introduction to this Companion, I offer an extended statement of appreciation to all of our generous, engaged contributors and to all the Victorianist scholars who have done major, foundational work in the field for the past many decades, as well as to the students and other scholars who have found their way into this project by sharing ideas and engaging in discussions both verbally and in writing. I would also like to thank friends and family. Morgan Holmes has been the sounding board for most of the ideas that have gone into framing this project. In the final stages, he has kept me sane by showing up with coffee and a biscuit, dealing with the cats, or dragging me out of the house for some important, invented reason. Lovette Denisoff I thank for keeping me grounded when I found myself rather overwhelmed with deadlines, and Mabel Denisoff and the rest of the family for distracting me every once in a while with gardening updates and other important aspects of our lives. And thanks to the rest of my family and friends, and to those of my colleagues at the University of Tulsa and Middleborough College who have helped me think through parts of the project or just let me process out loud. Finally, an especially deep thank you to all the graduate students who, during this process, have keenly engaged with me in Victorian studies. There ain’t no short story obscure enough . . .
Talia Schaffer In the fall of 2017, Dennis Denisoff contacted me to ask if I would be willing to coedit a Routledge collection on Victorian literature with him. I was, frankly, skeptical. This collection
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Acknowledgments
seemed like a huge managerial job, involving more than 40 contributors writing more than 400 pages. Both of us had done a lot of editing already, I reminded Dennis, and I didn’t really want to take on the hassles again. “Can you convince me?” I asked. Dennis responded that this project “allows us, perhaps for the first time in both our cases, to produce a collection that reflects our understanding and values with regard to Victorian scholarship. Chapters on trans studies, animal studies, disability studies, eco-studies, craft studies, underrepresented literary genres, YA literature, etc. etc.—it’s quite exciting to think about.” Stressing that we were both at a point in our careers when we knew a wide range of “established and new scholars, all of whom are our colleagues and friends,” Dennis concluded, “I have this personal feeling for the project as a warm reminder that I’ll look back to after retirement.” This was a tempting point. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was indeed a thrilling opportunity to define the field in ways that both reflected and amplified the fields we thought were most important. Moreover, as Dennis and I continued to discuss the project, we began to realize that, although there are already many excellent companions and handbooks, most are pitched to students, not to scholars. We all have times where we need a quick overview of a field for a new article or project, a dissertation, or a seminar paper. I recalled my problems when, in the middle of writing a book on handicraft, I realized I needed to learn about missionaries in the Pacific and when I had to get a crash course in Victorian anthropology while drafting a book on the marriage plot. In both cases, it was difficult to find criticism at the right level. The introductions to Victorian culture are too basic, but the articles in the MLA bibliography are too specialized. So in this Routledge volume I saw an opportunity to help produce the resource that I myself have frequently needed. At the same time, I saw a chance to take a snapshot of the field at a particularly exciting moment, when new areas are springing up. So now, two years later, my first acknowledgments are to Dennis, for thinking up this project and convincing me to do it. Dennis has been a dream coeditor, answering contributors’ emails before I could even read them, dealing with virtually all the formatting work, communicating with the press, and tracking contributors’ progress. And he did it attentively, promptly, imaginatively, and thoroughly. May everyone reading this have a collaborator who takes as much work off their shoulders as Dennis took off mine. Dennis’s and my careers have taken us in different directions, and these divergent interests proved very useful for coediting. What we shared, however, was a core editorial philosophy of trying to help scholars we admired express their ideas as well as possible, rather than setting out to catch and correct what we might see as errors. What you see in this volume is the result of constructive, cooperative, and mutually admiring work—not only between the two editors but also between the editors and the contributors. Thus my second acknowledgments must go to our contributors, who allayed my anxieties in the most splendid way possible. I know from my own experience how unpleasant it can feel to be edited, when an outsider is rooting around in your private thoughts and rearranging your self-expressions. So I never failed to be abashed by the generosity with which our contributors received our editing suggestions and the gratitude they expressed for our ideas. My second acknowledgments go to everyone whose names you see in the table of contents—our contributors and friends, who turned what could have been a grueling cat-herding activity into a delightful meeting of minds. Third, I must thank Princeton University’s Center for Human Values, which allowed me a year without teaching and gave me access to bountiful resources in 2018–2019, making it possible to help build this collection. A matter of particular gratitude is their lending me a loaner computer when my own computer died between Christmas 2018 and February of 2019, just as all the essays were coming in. Without that loaner, I could have done nothing; it literally made all the difference, and it symbolizes the generosity of the people at UCHV, from which I have benefited so much. Thanks, finally, to George Musser and Eliana Musser, who put up with my being hunched over the computer and taking over the dining room with printouts even while I was supposed to be on leave, xi
Acknowledgments
and to all the friends and family members who supported and cheered me on. There are too many to mention, but I want to particularly note the Schaffers, the Mussers, and Glen Ridge friends, including Nicole Cooley, Ellen Blankfein, LoriJeane Moody, and Jane Marcus. Everyone else at Glen Ridge, Princeton, Queens College, and The Graduate Center: you know who you are, and I thank you for letting me complain about my commute over soy cappuccinos all year long.
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INTRODUCTION Our Victorian Companions Dennis Denisoff
The hefty, physical manuscript of The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature is sprawled next to me, seemingly contented with itself, one side pushed up against the warmth of the printer, and taking a much deserved rest. Vic, as I’ve come to call the beast, has been my and Talia’s companion for over a year now, and we have yet to tame it; no doubt we never could. Indeed, from its earliest conception, we ourselves imagined the project as an animated intermingling of approaches to Victorian studies. There is something appropriately stimulating, even inspiring, about having it in this current, slightly frazzled state; it lets off, it seems, some of the energy of the hundreds of minds that have been a part of its formulation—the minds of those who contributed chapters and those before us who have contributed the ideas that have coalesced in each of the chapters. So it is not just the single, somewhat ungainly, domestic companion hunched up at the edge of my desk then but, bringing to mind Michel Foucault’s zoo heterotopia, a rich heterotopia of creatures: dozens of chapters, thousands of ideas, corralled into a single book that reflects our field at the moment, but that is still, in the end, disruptive, contradictory, and playfully refashioning the field as well. In this introduction, I take the opportunity to consider the ways in which external and internal forces are shaping the notion and subjects of Victorian studies (and the Victorian) and the way we as a community work with these influences. Having established this context, I then turn to address the spirit and intentions of the Companion and follow with an explanation of how the chapter topics and overall design arose as a reflection of this collective scholarly identity.
1. Academia, Community, and Victorian Studies Among the most complex elements in editing the Companion is the expansiveness and complexity of the concept of “the Victorian.” The Victorians themselves referred to each other as Victorians within a few years of the start of the queen’s reign, but the meaning of this term changed radically throughout the century. By the early twentieth century, it characterized a population that, compared to the envisioned spirit of current Western society, was rather stuffy, repressed, moralistic, and driven by classist, gendered, and otherwise limiting conventions. “There was always something rootedly Victorian about Di,” says the narrator of Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson’s Secret History, Revealed by Lady Peggy O’Malley (1915), “such as being convinced that Park Lane was the Mount Olympus of London, and that you couldn’t be properly married except at St. George’s” (180). “Hurry, Barbara,” a character in Muriel Spark’s The Mandelbaum Gate (1965) encourages, “In an emergency one can’t be Victorian about things, you know” (141), and the Modernists—especially 1
Dennis Denisoff
in literature and art—loved their emergencies. Victorianists—as scholars—became a critical force by 1956, when the Victorian Studies journal was founded. They emerged in general discourse a little later, if a 1974 article in the Times (vol. 33/34) offers any measure: “I amused myself by guessing which fellow-passengers were members of the Victorian Society. The man opposite . . . did not quite fit my vision of a Victorianist” (qtd. in OED). One imagines that, like this traveler, many assumed Victorianists looked like the embodiment of the cliché of the Victorian—priggish, imperialist, and privileged. Over the years, many scholars have marked the political assumptions inherent to the term “Victorian” itself, and some have proposed avoiding it, primarily for its ethnocentrism (see Flint; Marcus). As the Times traveler implies, in noting that his vision doesn’t fit the reality, any catch-all term— including my own playful reference to the Modernists above—risks becoming misleading when it rigidifies into flat caricature. In her chapter “Postcoloniality” in this collection, Sukanya Banerjee, however, encourages retaining the term “Victorian” as capturing a “transimperial system of which British Victorians, whom we conventionally study, constitute only a part” (633). Meanwhile, in her contribution “History/Historicism,” Catherine Gallagher notes that, in the last half of the twentieth century, Victorianists themselves have “repeatedly interrogated, revised, and reassembled their main terms—Victorian, literature, history, Great Britain, and nineteenth century—but the assumption that they belonged in some sort of relation to each other persisted. Victorianists were, after all, used to ignoring anti-historical aesthetic proclamations, in which they detected attacks on the literature and the period they studied” (350). The term “Victorian” now serves as a reminder of the historical and political privileges and materiality inherent to what are recognized as the key characteristics of Queen Victoria’s reign and thus more broadly encourages the sustained awareness of the potential limitations and oversights of our methodologies and ourselves as scholars. The contributors to the Companion likewise explore these main terms that Gallagher mentions, along with many other concepts and concerns, building on past scholars’ crucial insights while generating new ones—including ones that we as the editors could not have foreseen. Such a community of intellectuals exists not only in the Companion, however, but also in the collection of influences that coheres into any of our individual identities—for a scholar is a confluence of concepts, notions, beliefs, and assumptions, many if not most of which come from other scholars. Since the formation of Victorian studies as an institution, the notion of the independent scholar with personal intention and agency has persevered, even as we have seen increasing advocacy for academic teamwork, collaboration, mentoring, and other methods of networking and building systems of mutual care and support. The work of any field is never completed—it continues beyond the contributions of any one individual, just as the work of various fields are always contributing to each other. Relationality thus characterizes both our community and our methodologies. It also feeds into the emotions experienced in putting this Companion together, feelings that are as vital as the appreciation and respect that we have for its contributors. Talia and I, we could become a little chatty in our feedback and suggestions. There are over a dozen occasions when our Track Change comment began with, “Ignore this if you like . . .” or “Just chatting, but made me think of . . .” Perhaps this comes from our own intellectual curiosity and the pleasure of scholarly engagement; we are like the character in Charles Norris Williamson’s Where the Path Breaks (1918) who observes: “You will think I am very old-fashioned and early Victorian about my postscripts. . . . This one is just a thought put into my head by some of the last things you said” (188). Or perhaps it comes simply from being a Victorianist; like many Victorians, we are more than comfortable with extrapolation and digression because we have long recognized that new knowledge arises through these types of connectivity and diversification. Coediting this collection has also made me appreciate even more richly just how integrated have been my own ventures into fields such as gender/sexuality studies, decadence, visuality studies, paganism and occulture, and the environmental humanities. Each of my intellectual inquiries has been preceded by, drawn in by, a recalibrating cultural circuitry—a network of texts and creators who have 2
Introduction
asked questions and offered answers that allowed me to ask and offer a few of my own. We are each other’s companions, we are inseparable, even as we maintain the paradigms of individuality and institutional order that are the operating systems of our creative industry. Meanwhile, as so many of us are painfully aware, our communities are currently facing challenges from this very industry, and these too are impacting notions of the Victorian and identities of the Victorianist. Siobhan Carroll, in her piece “Industry,” notes “the role that universities are often ascribed in educating the workers of tomorrow—a discourse that, however we might wish to resist it, shapes our students’ and local governments’ views of our classrooms,” poignantly recognizing that “scholarship on Victorian industry cannot help but be shaped by our own experiences as laborers in a system of higher education mourning its own lost golden age of expansion” (698). Moreover, the academic system continues to privilege certain types of individuals over others, creating discrepancies that are, at this moment, perhaps most apparent in the wage differences between student and adjunct instructors, on one hand, and tenuretrack faculty, on the other, and between colleagues in the humanities and those in some other fields. These sorts of structural biases have Victorian precedents as well. In her 1894 Women in the Education System in England and Scotland, Emily Davies—looking back at her decades of working on the subject—noted the double-speak behind which administrators hid their biases against female students. Describing one moment in this history, when the University of London’s charter was in the process of review, Davies quotes Newson Garrett’s arguments for conferring educational equality to women at the university: “[T]he technical legal objection, which appears to be the only obstacle to the admission of women, may be removed by the insertion of a clause [in the updated Charter] expressly providing for the extension to women of the privileges of the University” (6–7). The Senate defeated the proposal (just); the argument offered by William B. Carpenter was that “it is not desirable that the constitution of this University should be modified for the sake of affording such opportunity” (7), which is no argument at all. In short, the actual question of equality remained unaddressed, overridden, and seemingly depoliticized by a question of procedure. Advocating for greater access for women, Davies concludes, “Perhaps the explanation may be that, when both parties are seeking the best, what is best for the human being is found to be also the best for both sexes” (42). Albeit perhaps less explicitly, such biases persist today, particularly against nontraditional students, students of color, and low-income students. Moreover, these biases have more than only an administrative and demographic impact. Such exclusionism and privilege also influence what we recognize as the important subjects of our discipline, what Davies implies are our very ethics and humanity. Our understanding of Victorian politics, experience, and zeitgeist is inevitably selective, mediated through our own current “realities.” And yet, as Davies’s work reminds us, social institutions often maintain a vital force longer than do individual humans; they can live as highly influential agents for centuries. Our perspectives and understandings are thus contemporary, but they are also products of a still active institutional system to which we also now look back. Rather than approaching history as something like a set of records and inert material artifacts, we are repeatedly reminded to recognize it as still vibrantly engaged in, among other places, the academic industry in which Victorian studies has continually morphed but persevered. How does this sense of past structures as pulsing forces within our academic identity alter our awareness of individual and collective agency? Or of systemic change? If we avoid recognizing our integration within the current profit-driven networks of university bureaucracy, administration, and communication, we cannot accurately identify our scholarly selves. Our scholarship, including Vic, is part of an affective, institutionalized, multimedia collective of identities—a convergence of forces that have in some ways proven increasingly in conflict with each other and in other ways have enhanced our awareness of the strengths of scholarly collaboration and mutual support. The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature has come into being during a time when the state of humanities education worldwide is experiencing an intensification of threats from more than one direction. Programs, colleges, and universities are shutting down, administrative priorities are 3
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increasingly shifting from knowledge to profit, and students and instructors are finding themselves more often treated as cogs of an industry rather than companions in a community that nurtures creativity, diversity, humanity, and intellectual adventure. At the same time, administrators are giving programs that are seen as ensuring jobs for students (or “clients”) priority over those that are not seen in this way, with this misconception fostering a mind-set that then reinforces the very profit-based logic of the institution’s own design plans. Driven by a sense of mutual respect and responsibility, we academics have continued—in many cases more richly than in the past—to assist each other, mentor students, and conduct unrecognized, unpaid labor. And we continue to thank each other, to demonstrate our commitment to each other, and, like Davies, to address issues of oppression, marginalization, and inhumanity within our discipline and within our scholarship. In “The Emergence of Animal Studies,” Martin Danahay and Deborah Denenholz Morse declare, in response to a suggestion that now is not the time to use Victorian studies to address the sociopolitical imbrications of animal abuse and rights, “[T]he burgeoning literature in the field of animal studies resists this judgment, indicating that scholars in all fields—very much including Victorian studies—think that the time is right now, as we confront the depredations of the Anthropocene” (472). The idea that some methodologies and areas of study have their day in the sun and then disappear, replaced by the dawn of others, is based on an inaccurate understanding of both our subjects (including the subject of Victorian studies in general) and our methods of engagement as fixed, distinct, and decided by particular, established participants. Disciplines and subdisciplines are not simply disappearing, but changing, meshing, separating, multiplying, dispersing—and often radically. As the following chapters’ explorations of the changing scholarship in various fields demonstrate, in roughly the last 30 years scholars have become increasingly aware of the importance of explicitly considering and engaging issues of diversity, inclusivity, and mutual support, rather than to assume that fields rise and fall by their innate qualities. In light of all of these current challenges and new areas of scholarly pursuit, Talia and I offer our sincere thanks to the dozens of academics from around the world and from a spectrum of institutions who have given their time and creative, intellectual energy to the production of a Companion that can now be shared with students, colleagues, and others interested in Victorian studies.
2. Shifting Subjects and Current Interests At the start of my introduction, I noted that the term “Victorian” maintained a crucial fluidity both early in its etymology and after 1900, when it was more often formulated as a time period circumscribed by the dates of Queen Victoria’s reign, or the dates of the First Reform Act of 1832 and the queen’s death in 1900. Despite these convenient temporal demarcations, there are other workable notions of the Victorian that exist in different and sometimes conflicting time frames, spatialities, and realities. Rae Greiner’s approach in this collection in “Aesthetic Formalism” and Irene Tucker’s in “Race: Tracing the Contours of a Long Nineteenth Century” could only have engaged with their topics by grounding the discussion in positions articulated in the eighteenth century. Stefano Evangelista’s piece “Decadence and Aestheticism” would offer a highly inaccurate portrait of the field if he did not recognize its crucial impact on twentieth-century aesthetics, politics, and globalism. Meanwhile, as Jesse Oak Taylor’s “Victorians in the Anthropocene” and Ralph O’Connor’s “Geology and Paleontology” demonstrate, there is human time and then there is deep time, and then there are Victorians’ changing notions of both. Space and distance likewise took on as many variations then as they do now, as a number of chapters, including Mary Ellis Gibson’s “Regionalism and Provincialism: Where is the Local?” and Andrea Kaston Tange’s “Travel Writing,” effectively explore. These various engagements also make it apparent that the study of the Victorian requires sensitivity to the nostalgia on which Victorians and Victorianists have at times built their ontological systems of understanding. In addition to a historical collection of information and texts, the Victorian is also 4
Introduction
a range of conceptual models that include, for example, Thomas Hardy’s invented Wessex, William Turner’s Atlantic, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Florence. After all, as Oscar Wilde put it, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing” (303). In other words, the concept of the Victorian, the following chapters demonstrate, is not fixed as either British or a segment of historical time, in part because it melds history with forms of nostalgia and utopianism, with works often encouraging a notion of evolution, improvement, or hope for a future in some sort of elsewhere. As such, it is also a system of global exchange, driven by Victorians’ turns to other nations, ethnicities, and cultures for confirmation of their own identities and worth. Another key characteristic of current scholarship is the drive to explore the Victorian through the eyes of the marginalized and disenfranchised, particularly as those positions speak to our identities as students and scholars. In “Disability Studies,” Martha Stoddard Holmes recalls the mid-1990s, a not-so-distant past, when “I did not have a name for the research I was doing, which weakened my performance of the academic version of the elevator speech (‘my current project is . . .’)” (426). As Holmes notes of her own experience, one’s personal topic of interest may someday expand into a subfield. Molly Youngkin, for example, in “New Woman Writing,” calls for reading “from a ‘trans’ perspective—by which I mean across gender, but also across genre and technology” (412). The methodology of working from what have been marginalized perspectives alters the ways we read Victorianist ideas in general, changing again the very notions of the Victorian and the Victorianist. This Companion’s exploration of the state of Victorian studies today is inevitably part of this development. In putting it together, we selected a range of preliminary subjects but were prepared for these to change through discussions of our vision with colleagues, as indeed has happened. Some topics, such as the environmental humanities and the realist novel, receive considerable attention from our contributors, while others, such as the short story and psychology, receive less focus than we had originally expected. Although not an especially new field, the environmental humanities has seen a notable increase in attention among Victorianists over the past ten years, due in part to the precipitous condition of the planet’s own ecological condition and recognition of humans as a scourge of this planetary network. As Lynn Voskuil notes in “Why Victorian Ecocriticism Matters,” the field addresses “the role of empire in prompting both ecological innovation and environmental degradation; the acceleration of anthropogenic climate change during the nineteenth century; the emergence of global perspectives to grasp the planetary scale of the ecological legacy we inherited from our Victorian forebears, and the challenges we continue to share with them” (684–5). The Victorians contributed much to the environmental humanities—not only to the current environmental condition but also to our understanding of and methodological approaches to it. As some of our contributors point out, a number of recent scholars have found in the realist novel not just examples affirming their eco- or other sociopolitical claims but also generic framing devices that Victorians themselves used to understand their ecological contexts. These literary works offer a macro-conceptual structure of time and space all conveniently rendered, in most cases, on a British, white, middle-class scale. But it is important to note that, just as ecologies operate on a different time scale than individuals, not all humans operate or have the opportunity to operate with the same sense of time, due to factors such as personal expectations, spiritual beliefs, opportunities, family and community histories, disability, and health. Robert Louis Stevenson, highly sensitive since childhood due to his weak constitution, wrote as if his very life depended on it. Depicting—in his travelogue An Inland Voyage (1878)—his experience canoeing down the swollen river Oise, the 26-year-old eco-aesthete captures the joy of living with an intensified sense of precious time: [T]he blood shook off its lethargy, and trotted through all the highways and byways of the veins and arteries, and in and out of the heart, as if circulation were but a holiday journey. . . . If this lively and beautiful river were, indeed, a thing of death’s contrivance, the old ashen 5
Dennis Denisoff
rogue had famously outwitted himself with us. I was living three to the minute. I was scoring points against him every stroke of my paddle, every turn of the stream. (87–8) In contrast to the often relaxed pacing of many realist works, some genres in prose fiction, drama, poetry, and creative nonfiction—such as the Gothic, melodrama, sensation fiction, and weird fiction— are erratic in their timing, often forcefully demanding a hyper-emotional, even libidinal reaction from the reader akin to that which Stevenson celebrates with the stroke of his paddle. Roger Luckhurst points out in “Gothic, Horror, and the Weird: Shifting Paradigms,” that recent scholarship on these subjects has weirded realism itself, with scholars working in fields such as actor-network theory, thing theory, and object-oriented ontology having put forward notions of capitalist realism, speculative realism, and, yes, weird realism. Meanwhile, Christine Ferguson’s “New Religions and Esotericism” and Mark Knight’s “Studies of Christianity and Judaism” both note that scholars in these fields speak to different sets of trans-temporal and trans-spatial realities, with recent approaches engaging the issue through topics such as feminist historiography, the history and philosophy of science, notions of alternative realities, and the language of exile. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan address the way that Amy Cruse, in her 1935 Victorians and Their Reading turned to novels as sociological texts revealing the huge variety of types of work being consumed by Victorians, and the fact that the novel itself was often read in short sections akin to serial short stories: “Cruse’s recentering of nineteenth-century literary history as the history of books that are popular rather than great, and readers who are ordinary rather than literary luminaries, also speaks across a century to current critics whose contemporary distant and computational reading projects likewise aim to revolutionize—or at least shake up—literary-critical reading method” (282). This leads one to ask whether some Victorianists, in conducting their research, may turn to novels for examples regardless of the actual topic of their scholarship, being driven more by the habits of our collective scholarly practice than by those of the Victorians themselves. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman suggests this possibility in her chapter “Drama and Performance,” where she notes the relative paucity of scholarship on her subject despite the ubiquity of drama in Victorian culture, while also pointing out the integrated media supporting and blending diverse genres: “Stage adaptations of novels routinely recreated several of the primary texts’ illustrations using a widespread theatrical effect requiring the actors to suspend all movement, creating a tableau or ‘picture,’ as most playscripts describe it, that exactly replicated the familiar visual image” (80). The multimedia realities of Victorian texts expand their possibilities even into the real world. George Du Maurier’s novel Trilby (1895), to note but one example, grew out of key themes in his earlier Punch cartoons and first appeared as a serial in Harper’s Monthly (1894), then in the United States (and outside British copyright regulations) as Paul Potter’s hugely successful play (1895), six months before it was published as a novel (1895). It then led an extended life through diverse media, eventually even spawning a hat (the Trilby) and the name of a town in Florida. In “Popular Fiction and Culture,” Nick Daly helpfully observes that, while the novel was perhaps more popular among the middle class than the general populace, the very concept of the popular “might be more accurately seen as an arena of struggle” and readers as making “their own meanings out of the cultural goods that come their way” (237). Meanwhile, Susan David Bernstein points out, in “Short Forms: Serialization and Short Fiction,” that many novelists, including all of the most canonical, published short-form fiction as well, taking advantage of the booming industry in periodicals. One of the surprises for us in editing this collection is the many scholars with a robust interest in and adept skills at analyzing periodical publication. In her chapter “Poetry,” Alison Chapman observes that “works by prominent as well as little known and unknown poets were mass circulated in serial print culture, including newspapers, magazines, and periodicals that represented the main poetry publishers and distributors in the era” (31). In short, scholars must recognize that the subject of 6
Introduction
Victorian poetry was supported and also formed by a rapidly developing medium that was itself being manipulated by other forces such as consumer culture, printing methods, and changing readership. The short story, meanwhile, was for much of the century a form of fiction that, unlike poetry, did not have an Arnoldian cultural authority. It is curious, regardless, that the genre’s form appears at the moment to be flying under the radar in Victorian studies, especially since Victorians often read short stories, many current scholars use short-form fiction in their scholarship, and the genre came to maturity during the nineteenth century; it was in fact during this time that it went from the Newgate Calendar stories and tall tales, through the ubiquitous ghost stories, penny blood ventures, popular romances, tracts, and newspaper articles on actual crimes, and on to New Woman short fiction, decadent prose poetry, and modernist realism and impressionism. Many of these later works replaced plot-driven narratives with a keen attention to conflicted or rebellious psychological states. In this sense, the short story generically captures in its brevity and its tendency to partial or elided narrative something of the later Victorians’ own investments in such new sciences as criminology, psychology, and neurology. These new sciences required a different framing on our part as editors. Specifically, we found a shift in the subject of psychology. There appears a clear disinvestment in Freudian or Lacanian approaches to works from the period, while the subject is increasingly addressed through other channels. As Suzanne Keen is quick to point out, in her chapter “British Psychology in the Nineteenth Century,” it “was not really about Sigmund Freud” (516), and this collection indeed includes a number of chapters that engage with sciences of the brain and the mind. Keen’s piece and Anne Stiles’s “Brain Science” confirm the energy of the field as a part of the medical humanities, while others make use of the Victorian invention of psychology in discussions of degeneracy, the medicalization of emotions, aesthetic models such as Symbolism and Vernon Lee’s psychological aesthetics, and so on. It is less a case of psychology being nowhere and more a case of its having spread through a diversity of fields. A similar dispersion across the chapters can be found in feminist studies, postcolonial studies, and the digital humanities, although we also have chapters by Talia Schaffer, Sukanya Banerjee, and Karen Bourrier, respectively, on each. However, to be clear, the dispersal of these fields differs. While feminism has shifted its emphasis from authorial recuperation to the study of intersectional identities, postcolonial studies—based on the chapters in the Companion—has enhanced a range of methodologies and subjects, often by problematizing the notion of perspective. Meanwhile digital humanities is mentioned in chapters as offering students and other scholars possibilities for more texts, data, and contexts, and therefore also new, often still unrealized methodologies.
3. The Companion’s Design And so Vic, this shaggy creature, now rests blithely here, satiated with scholarship and waiting for the copy editor to comb through its pages, trim excess fuzziness, and remove any hairballs of awkward wording. Just now, the messiest bits are its nose and tail—this introduction, that is, and the index. The rascal’s scruffiness is understandable, since the two driving questions behind the larger vision for this project are capacious: What does Victorian studies engage with today, and how is it doing so? The challenge has never been that there aren’t any answers but that there are so many. As editors, we are excited to capture something of this moment in the academic field and to note key methodologies and discourses through which scholars are currently mediating their ideas. Of course, all of them are always in play, a tangle of multiple influences and interconnections. In making our preliminary choices of chapter topics, we asked which fields have continued to be a driving force in Victorian studies, which have morphed into some other or (more often) multiple others, and which are engaging with key factors in our society at this time. We asked our authors not to write encyclopedic summaries of their subject but instead to use their own voices and styles to consider what somebody new to a field should know about the history of scholarship on the particular subject. The contributors engage with current discussions in the field 7
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while also making some bold speculations on where it may be going. The chapters’ polyphonic formulations invite readers to participate in the debates and developments animating scholarship today but also to engage imaginatively with the Victorians themselves. After all, as various contributions here attest, nineteenth-century authors demonstrated an exploratory zeal that reached backward and forward in time, outward and inward in space—as well as beyond these two dimensions. So often these ventures were driven by Victorians’ keen interest in understanding themselves. Likewise, the Companion, in addition to addressing nineteenth-century values and concerns, is a collection of twenty-firstcentury issues, critically positioning Victorian studies within the current social and political climate. Each contribution focuses on a different area of Victorianist study that is currently receiving significant critical attention. Some chapters on newer subjects cover perhaps 20 years of scholarship, while others address subjects that have developed for many decades. We have arranged the chapters into six parts that can each easily be envisioned as the core of a course or the theme of an independent study: “Genres and Movements,” “Media Histories,” “Victorian Discourses,” “Formulations of Identity,” “Science and Spirit,” and “Spatiality and Environment.” The dozens of chapters are also entangled through other connections, as our cross-references indicate. In addition, at the end of each chapter, its author(s) offer a short list of key critical works addressing their subject, our guiding query for these being: “What works would you recommend to a person interested in your topic—say, a graduate student just starting out? What should such a scholar read first to get a sense of the field as it has developed in recent decades?” A companion to Victorian literature, Vic is also a companion to its readers, with the network of ideas captured and interconnected here inviting original thoughts and understandings but also, heeding Wilde’s encouragement, fresh entanglements. As he observes on Utopia, “[W]hen Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail” (303–4). In taking in the intellectual energy that the Companion offers, may each reader envision a better country. And may current and future students and other scholars find these chapters an inspiring bunch of comrades, generating new intellectual offspring who shake out their tangled fur, leap off the desk, and scamper off into fresh fields of Victorianist study.
Works Cited Davis, Emily. Women in the Universities of England and Scotland. MacMillan and Bowes, 1896. de Créspigny, Charles. Where the Path Breaks. The Century, 1916. Flint, Kate. “Why ‘Victorian’? A Response.” Victorian Studies, vol. 47, no. 2, Winter 2005, pp. 231–9. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. 1966. Vintage, 1994. Marcus, Sharon. “Same Difference? Transnationalism, Comparative Literature, and Victorian Studies.” Victorian Studies, vol. 45, no. 4, 2003, pp. 677–86. Spark, Muriel. The Mandelbaum Gate. 1965. Fawcett World Library, 1967. Stevenson, Robert Louis. An Inland Voyage. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910. Wilde, Oscar. “The Soul of Man under Socialism.” Fortnightly Review, vol. 55 (old series), February 1891, pp. 292–319. Williamson, Charles Norris, and Alice Muriel Williamson. Secret History, Revealed by Lady Peggy O’Malley. Doubleday, Page, & Co., 1915.
8
PART I
Genres and Movements
1 POETRY Alison Chapman
In February 1832, the second issue of a new magazine, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, published its first poem: the Scottish “farm servant” William Park’s “Ode to Poverty.” The headnote introduces Park’s piece as a marvel, exemplifying “the triumphs of inborn genius.” In the poem, Park acknowledges his poetic marginalization but also his successful legacy as an unknown “hireling bard” whose name nonetheless is “blazoned bright in realms on high,/Enroll’d in records in the sky.” And yet the poem also admits that, for all its spiritual rewards, poetry cannot capture poverty’s misery: “Even poesy would weave in vain/The laurel wreath for penury’s child.” Park’s poem makes bare the tension between expected literary codes and improper sentiment, within a tightly conventional stanzaic scheme (iambic tetrameter sestets rhyming ababcc). This obscure poem began a long tradition of prominently published poetry in one of the century’s most highly circulating weekly magazines, with over 2,500 poems featured from 1832 to 1883 (Chapman, Digital) and a peak circulation of 90,000 copies in 1840 (O’Connor). The poem also signals a long tradition of the interesting and sometimes fraught relationship between poetic form and content, a relationship that distinguishes the development of Victorian poetry as poets reached for reworked, hybrid, and innovative genres to represent and also escape from the century’s modernity. Park’s poem, for example, entitles itself an “ode,” a genre with a long history that originated as lyrics on public occasions, often with a complex stanzaic scheme and argument. The romantic ode became more interiorized as a lyric expression that often addressed the status of poetry and the poet, and which retained a complex stanzaic scheme (such as Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”). Parks’s working-class ode, however, is addressed to poverty within a simple repetitive stanzaic scheme. The poem’s claim to literary posterity is powerfully based on restraint, adversity, and even silence. The year of Park’s poem, 1832, is often taken by literary historians as the beginning of Victorian poetry. Although the accession of Queen Victoria occurred in 1837, scholars generally date the reforming energy of Victorian poetry back to the 1832 Reform Act, which enfranchised male middle-class voters and created new parliamentary constituencies that represented burgeoning industrial cities (Bristow). Chambers’s was indeed established in response to public agitation, leading up to the Reform Act, to educate and acculturate a working-class readership in preparation for the franchise; its opening editorial statement underlines the weekly’s power as “an engine endowed with the most tremendous possibilities” (Chambers 1). Poetry was no less than the fuel for this engine of progress, and in its first years Chambers’s published both working-class poems (especially by Scottish poets such as James Beattie and Dugald Moore) and established poets like Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Walter Scott, and William Wordsworth. Like other popular serial print, the periodical sought 11
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to establish its own readership based on the editors’ sense of the proper poetry canon. Poetry, then, had the power to create and sustain lucrative consumers for the new serial print media and to create and shape a class consciousness as well [on periodical culture, see Hughes’s chapter]. Poetry represented acculturation, community, and aspiration across the wide variety of Victorian print; in fact, the poetry in Chambers’s for 1832 represented the start of an explosion of diverse print cultures for poetry. This year was also the publication date of a volume of poems by a poet who came to define the era as its eventual laureate, Alfred Tennyson. Poems was actually date-stamped 1833, but it was issued in December 1832. Matthew Rowlinson even identifies one of the most well-known poems from that volume and of the era, “The Lady of Shalott,” as a response to the 1832 Reform Act. First, as Rowlinson argues, the poem figures the silencing of an aristocratic female weaver’s song as the end of traditional values and the start of a printed, as opposed to active, lyric voice. The poem, after all, ends with the lady’s swan song, as she chants her “carol” (l. 145) as she dies on a boat whose prow ironically inscribes her name (ll. 161–2). Second, the poem represents a shift in poetics whereby the lyric voice of the Lady is overheard yet irrecoverable, marking a change from early Romantic mediated yet still legible lyric voice (64–5). Not only do the reapers hear her song and ascribe it to the supernatural “‘fairy/Lady of Shalott’” (ll. 35–6), but the aristocratic Camelot audience for her dramatic death is mystified by her final song and her very identity (“Who is this? And what is here?” [l. 163]). Lancelot’s final appraisal about her “lovely face” (l. 169), after he “mused a little space” (l. 168), is crushingly facetious. One of the most influential critical models, Isobel Armstrong’s concept of the “double poem”, similarly posits a radical uncertainty within Victorian poetry, whereby the poem’s claim to expressive truth is layered with skepticism, an epistemological uncertainty that decenters poetic form and politicizes poetic language so that, in a dramatization of lyric, the poem’s “expressive utterance . . . becomes the opposite of itself, not only the subject’s utterance but also the object of analysis and critique” (12). And, in this critical paradigm, the Lady of Shalott’s very expressive lyric song is mediated and ultimately undermined by the ballad narrative that frames and contains it. In other words, Victorian poetry uneasily mediates and questions its own claims to truth, a reading that works powerfully for canonical poets such as Tennyson (from a conservative tradition) and Robert Browning (from a radical democratic tradition), as well as women poets who struggle with a claim to subjectivity. It is less certain, however, how well the model works for the majority of poetry outside the conventional canon. For example, rather than a simultaneously expressive and skeptical double poem, “Ode to Poverty” lays its representational limits bare while extolling the conventional Christian manliness of poverty. Any skeptical doubleness is mediated by the poem’s print ecology, a weekly meant to raise the working class but which seems to have had mostly a middle-class readership. The double poem in this instance, then, hinges on the poem within its print context, represented as an authentic rural voice and yet also depoliticized as an antiquarian wonder. The “digital turn” is making visible both the materiality and scale of Victorian poetry, while complicating conventional literary histories. The vast majority of poems read by Victorians remain critically undiscovered, and are, by virtue of their very profusion, doubtless individually undiscoverable. A British Library catalog search for book titles in English with the word “poems” alone returns 1,952 items. And, to give a flavor of the genre’s biblio-diversity, alongside the Chambers’s and Tennyson’s Poems I place the 1832 Keepsake, a lavish and successful literary annual that foregrounded its aristocratic connections. In 1832, for example, the annual published 28 poems: alongside poems by Landon, William Jerdan, and Agnes Strickland, 19 are signed by poets with an aristocratic title. The year 1832 thus represents Victorian poetry’s profusion and heterogeneousness. This chapter explores emerging trends in Victorian studies by emphasizing poetry’s abundance, approaching poems through their vibrant materiality and multimedia print ecologies, and uncovering the potential for a “bigger Victorianism”—one that expands and decolonizes the canon—through poetry’s mediations, locations, and disruptions.
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1. The Culture of Victorian Poetry Critics have traditionally presented Victorian poetry as displaced by the rise of fiction, a print-market development that caused a shift in poetics intended to address the poets’ perceived absence of readers. Lee Erickson argues that the rise of the dramatic monologue, a hybrid form of narrative and lyric whereby the addressee is silent, originates with anxieties about the collapse of poetry book readership in the 1820s. Yet Victorians encountered poetry everywhere. Books of poetry by single authors were viewed in the nineteenth century as culturally valuable and prestigious, and they dominated reviews of poetry (which quoted poems extensively). The highest circulating poems are typically defined by literary historians through volume sales (Altick 386–7), especially poetry books by single authors— such as John Keble’s The Christian Year (1827), Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850)—and anthologies such as Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (1861). Poet’s careers were shaped by breakout volumes, which were not always their first books; such works include Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Poems (1844), Robert Browning’s Men and Women (1855), Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems (1870), and Alice Meynell’s Preludes (1875). Some poetry volumes garnered no or minimal attention at all on their publication, including the Brontë sisters’ 1846 Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Meanwhile, other important volumes were published in very small print runs, especially at the century’s end; for example, Mary Elizabeth Coleridge’s 1896 Fancy’s Following, published by the Daniel Press, had a print run of 450 copies (Vilain et al. 28). Other prominent poets had important works published posthumously, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins’s 1918 Poems. The poetry canon has generally been defined by this bounty of volumes. But books were only a part of the publication and dissemination of poetry. Works by prominent as well as little known and unknown poets were mass circulated in serial print culture, including newspapers, magazines, and periodicals that represented the main poetry publishers and distributors in the era (Hobbs). A single comparison will make the importance of periodical poetry evident: whereas Tennyson’s 1864 Enoch Arden sold 60,000 copies in its first edition and 40,000 “in a few weeks” (Altick 387), an extraordinary number for a poetry book, his poem published five years earlier in the newly launched magazine Once a Week, “The Grandmother’s Apology,” reached far in excess of 570,000 readers (Waterloo Directory). Many prominent Victorian poets published in ephemeral print to cultivate readership and income but also complained about writing “potboilers.” Most of the poets who published in periodicals did not become best-selling authors of poetry books and remain either little known or entirely obscure (partly because of the widespread practice of unsigned and pseudonymous poems), but their contributions nevertheless shaped the poetry culture of the time. Victorian periodicals published poetry for a number of reasons, including acculturation, prestige, advertisement for forthcoming books, the shaping of a periodical’s politics and aesthetics, conveying news in a different discourse (Houston), and forging an affective and contemplative space for reading (Ehnes); they also did so for the education of readers, including incitement to action, as with poetry published in Chartist newspapers like the Northern Star and Chartist Circular (Sanders) [on Chartist publications, see Haywood’s chapter]. The quantity of poetry in periodicals is staggering, especially for long-running titles like Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (over 3,400 poems from 1819 to 1901), All the Year Round (over 1,000 poems from 1859 to 1895), and Good Words (over 1,200 poems from 1860 to 1899) (Chapman, Digital). Pieces circulating and recirculating in popular and highbrow serial print helped make poems ubiquitous for the reading public but offered an astonishingly wide variety of items that often fall outside the typically anthologized modern canon (such as translations into English, verse dramas, serial poems, Anglophone colonial poetry, and dialect poetry). Recent research approaches the richness and diversity of Victorian poetry’s material forms as a poetry culture: both a print ecology of poems that offers a reader-centric and historically nuanced approach, and a more networked sense of poetry within and beyond Anglo-centrism that embraces colonial and global poetry in English (e.g., Gibson, Rudy). The print ecology is usually understood in
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terms of poetry volumes, anthologies, and serial print, but poetry also widely circulated in other print forms such as advertisements, greeting cards, almanacs, hymnals, broadsides, chapbooks, and travel guides. Some poets took ready advantage of multiple formats for poetry. Tennyson, for example, first published “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in The Examiner (December 9, 1854) as a response to the news from the Crimean War, and it was widely reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic. It was subsequently revised and published in his 1855 Maud and Other Poems, and then 1,000 copies were privately printed as a broadside in August 1855 to send to the soldiers in the Crimea. Later, in 1890, Tennyson recorded this poem on an Edison wax cylinder. It is important to note, however, that poets did not have control over the widespread practice of reprinting poems. For example, a stanza from In Memoriam was illustrated in the New Girl magazine Atalanta for its 1889 Christmas issue as a tippedin plate, a short extract conferring added seasonal and cultural value to ephemeral print, as Tennyson’s long narrative poem is translated into a separate lyric fragment. Unauthorized reprinting in Britain and America meant that British poets could not control their poetry’s transatlantic print dissemination, except with a prior American publisher’s copyright deal. Poetry mattered in Victorian print, and print needed poetry: indeed, poetry was everywhere in Victorian culture. But the quantity of poetry in this period of rapidly expanding and industrial print, especially cheap print, incited debate about quality. Perhaps the most famous commentary on the subject was Margaret Oliphant’s 1858 essay “The Byways of Literature: Reading for the Million.” Oliphant praised the literary value of poetry above verse and poets above versifiers. Responding to the poetry of Anglo-Indian writer Theodosia Garrow (later Trollope), Elizabeth Barrett writes to Robert Browning that “the word ‘poetry’ has a clear meaning to me, & all the fluency & facility & quick ear-catching of a tune which one can find in the world, do not answer to it—no” (Browning and Browning 11.182–3). Garrow, in fact, became a successful periodical poet and journalist, although she never published a poetry volume. These anxieties about the “literary” shadowed twentieth-century Victorian poetry criticism and the recovery of female poets. The current “digital turn” now offers the discovery of an even wider canon that will test critical axioms, while scholars work to machine-read poems quantitatively. The potential of this critical moment is to produce a bigger Victorian poetry within and beyond conventional biases.
2. The Media of Victorian Poetry As we have seen, the flourishing biblio-diversity of Victorian poetry relied on a multimedia print culture. A closer look at the material and visual components of this print culture will show us how different media afforded different reading experiences. With the collapse of the poetry volume market in the 1820s, the literary annual emerged as a leading publisher that appealed to the visual and graphic tastes of readers, while poetry responded by offering “a pictorial aesthetic” (Erickson 346) and a multimedia format [on book history, see Stauffer’s chapter]. Literary annuals, beginning with the Forget-Me-Not in 1823, frequently required poets to write on commission for specific pictures, which were then engraved and reproduced alongside the poem in full pages, sharing space with other miscellaneous prose contributions. The Keepsake offered a tactile and visual excess for the reader, covered in red watered silk (apparently from women’s dress fabric) and decorated in gold on the cover and page edges. The effect was startlingly lavish. The closed Keepsake was displayed as a luxuriant item, date-stamped to mark it as a memorial to be treasured and yet shadowed by ephemerality. Meanwhile, the open Keepsake framed each page with gold from the edging. Poetry, especially illustrated poetry, added prestige and appealing multimedia visual aesthetics. But annual poetry also displayed its indebtedness to material print culture, prized for originality and display yet secondary to the illustrations. The inaugural 1828 Keepsake poem, William Harrison Ainsworth’s “To—,” figures poetry as a metaphor for the annual’s multivocal, textual, and visual dedication to “beauty’s sovereignty” (iii). The poem is a material object because of “the graver’s art” (a reference to the expensive steel-engraved 14
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illustrations) but it is also ethereal as “KEEPSAKES of the soul, to guard thine eyes from tears” (iii, iv). The multimedia annual format was repeated for poems throughout the century in popular gift books and anthologies (as well as commonplace books), even when the fashion waned, associating poetry not only with the social network implied by gift exchange but also with the genre’s insistent embeddedness in materiality. In 1870, for example, when the older men in the Dutt family of Calcutta poets produced a collective book in London, The Dutt Family Album, the “elaborate” format overtly recalled earlier literary annuals, although the poems offered a more modest poetics that, as Gibson remarks, underscored their uncomfortable claim to British affiliation (185). By the mid-nineteenth century, books of poetry by original poets began to be illustrated as well, a trend inaugurated by Christina Rossetti’s first poetry volume, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), which featured two woodcut illustrations by her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who also designed the cover. The Pre-Raphaelite poets and artists were at the forefront of mid-Victorian book design and illustration, taking advantage of wood engraving to develop an illustrative aesthetic that influenced Victorian poetry until the end of the century, based on a more collaborative verbal-visual relationship than the annuals. Goblin Market, the first poetry volume associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, took advantage of the new technology of wood engraving (Kooistra, Christina Rossetti). The material volume offers itself as a carefully stylized work, from the very color of the cover to the page layout and typography. The two illustrations, termed “designs” in a title page, are completely separate from the poetry itself within the volume, placed as a frontispiece and illustrated title page, and yet directly engage with key moments in the title poem by incorporating quotations from “Goblin Market” within the design. Dante Gabriel Rossetti termed his illustrative style “allegorizing on one’s own hook”: the visual designs are both metaphorically separate and yet directly connected with the poetry that it reinterprets. Such an interplay of word and image is also evident in Edward Moxon’s 1857 edition of Tennyson’s poetry, featuring an astonishing 54 wood-engraved illustrations by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other Pre-Raphaelite artists. This volume epitomizes the multimedia print ecology of poetry, in which poems are dependent on and interact with their visual impact and material tactility, and in which the material book is offered as a work of art, but one that is accessible to middle-class readers. The edition features a rich red cloth cover with decorative gold design, and an ornate decorative design at the center, signifying the rarity and value of the poems inside; and yet this book was priced for and appealed to the popular market (Kooistra, “The Moxon Tennyson”). This edition presents a startling contrast with the much more luxurious and expensive red Keepsake annuals. Keepsake published its final volume in 1857, the annual having become an outdated form associated with an earlier era when poetry was subservient to pictures. Another landmark poetry volume dated 1857 is Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse novel Aurora Leigh, in which the eponymous character complains about the burden of publishing for the commercial but lucrative marketplace to fund the writing of her poetry book (3.295–325). Barrett Browning’s volume, which has the reputation of having transformed women’s writing into a more public politicized form, presents a striking difference with the 1857 Keepsake and the Moxon Tennyson, with its sober green cloth cover and restrained decorative gold edging. However, the fact that Barrett Browning contributed the poem “Amy’s Cruelty” to this Keepsake volume demonstrates her active participation in both the multimedia print environment of poetry and the complexities of poetry’s print culture. The Moxon Tennyson volume was designed to exploit the latest technologies, and at the same time the aesthetics and poetics of the book embody Tennyson’s and the Pre-Raphaelites’ attraction to the medieval past. Along with its appealing visual and tactile cover, the generous number of illustrations share space with poems to stress the verbal-visual interplay of the mis en page. The images provide a pause to the poem reading, emphasizing the lyric modality of the poems by encouraging a sense of their appeal to interiority. Simultaneously, however, the images represent an aspect of the plot of the poetry, emphasizing the narrative modality of the poems in this edition. Millais’s illustration to 15
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“Mariana,” for example, dominates over half of the page, with the poem’s title and first stanza placed beneath, privileging the visual depiction of Mariana folded over in despair by a window ledge with her hands in front of her hidden face. This woodcut engraving from Millais’s design depicts the abject interiority of Mariana in the figure of her body as the dark center of the image (where the woodcut technique of crosshatching is closest and darkest), with light entering from the leaded panes symbolizing entrapment. The illustration depicts a collation of narrative moments: Mariana is by her casement, but also Mariana’s repeated refrain of lyric interiority (“I would that I were dead”) makes visible the paradoxical forward narrative of isolation in the poem, whereby each stanza depicts aspects of her days hopelessly waiting within the grange. Millais’s image startlingly visualizes this movement in stasis, an effect that prefaces and frames Tennyson’s poem in this volume as offering access to Mariana’s interior thoughts and the exterior scene. It recasts her quoted refrain “I would that I were dead” as less an active vocalization than an interior monologue, a printed voice in Eric Griffiths’s terms but also a visualized voice. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra terms the 1857 Moxon Tennyson a “textual event” that was crucial in the development of accessible fine-art print culture and a newly visual reading culture. It was also a multisensory event. The images repeatedly remediate the visuality, aurality, tactility, and orality of Tennyson’s poetics within a frame that figures the tension between movement and stasis, modernity and the past. William Holman Hunt’s illustrations to “Ballad of Oriana,” for example, that begin and conclude the poem, shift the focus from the poem’s knightly narrator—who tells of his heartbreak after his lover, Oriana, was killed by an enemy’s stray arrow—to Oriana herself. The poem’s insistent balladic orality—with its reiterated open vowel sounds (particularly the one-word refrain “Oriana”), repeated single rhyme types, and one stanza that features feminine rhymes—feminizes the poem and yet never offers access to Oriana’s interiority. The illustrations, while depicting both lovers, place Oriana in front. The first shows her protectively embracing the knight before battle, with her white dress and outspread arm dominating the visual plane. The second, after the poem’s conclusion, places the lifeless body of Oriana in front of the grieving knight as he kisses and partially embraces her. Except for the arrow that pierces her sides and a glimpse of her dark hair, Oriana’s prostrate corpse looks like it might be in fact her funerary monument resting on her tomb, with her hands improbably clasped upwards together in prayer. The loss of the woman is voiced throughout the poem by her lover’s plaintive and repetitive sorrow. The illustrations translate that sound into the image of Oriana, the agent of the illustrated poem even though she never speaks or acts except to watch the battle and then die by an arrow meant for the knight. Hunt’s designs ironically make visual and prominent Oriana’s inaccessibility, as well as her looming presence even in death, as much as the plaintive voice of her lover repeatedly calls her name and yet is restlessly haunted by her death. The doubled visualization and absence of the poetic voice is evident in the last design, Stanfield’s illustration for “Break, break, break” (372), which depicts two small figures by a wrecked ship beneath a towering cliff in a sea storm. The breaking of the waves on the shore, which in the poem figures the speaker’s sense of despair, grief, and desolation, in the design is visually remediated by a storm and a wrecked ship, adding a narrative not obvious in the poem and reframing the broken voice of the lyric, where the speaker cannot utter his thoughts, into a dramatic narrative illustration. Broken voice has become visual and narrative. Consistent pairing of poetry with illustration, with more inter-artistic integration than the annuals’ pictorial dominance, flourished in mid-century magazines, particularly in Once a Week (1859–89), which set an innovative graphic and poetic standard for popular poetry [on visual culture, see Flint’s chapter]. In its first six months, from July to December 1859, Once a Week published 54 poems and illustrated 45 of them, participating in what Linda K. Hughes terms the “visual effects” of the weekly, pairing “original poems and original woodcut engravings, offering double novelties to the magazine’s purchasers” (48). Poetry in the magazine participated in the modern graphic visual culture while also sometimes signifying a medieval Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, exemplified by the ornate cover. The 16
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magazine’s inaugural poem, Shirley Brooks’s “Once a Week,” illustrated with three designs by John Leech, places poetry prominently within the new multimedia weekly reading event, and (as with the inaugural Keepsake poem), poetry figures its own importance. Brooks’s poem begins with “Adsumus,” Latin for “here we are,” expressing the arrival of poetry and print innovations, as well as the recurring collective reading moment embodied by the weekly serial. The illustrations are placed separately in the graphic layout (the larger illustration in the second page crosses two text columns) and also embedded in the space of a stanza (the smaller first and last illustrations are set within one column). The poem’s title combines a rustic hand-drawn typeface, resembling carved wood with ornate new shoots and, because the poem shares the new magazine’s title, it implies that poetry is embedded in the magazine’s modernity and yet also separate from the magazine: a meta-commentary on poetry’s place in the multimedia print culture. As the poem comments, poetry should “be like the time” although this poem is “lightest lines of rhyme” that expresses “Our notion of the work we’ve undertaken” (1). The unremarkably conventional stanzaic format of the poem, octaves consisting of two quatrains with alternate rhyme, offers a “lesson of this page of ours,” “the morals of our ONCE A WEEK” (2). The poetry in Once a Week illustrates how poems are part of modernity yet set also against it, as Brooks’s poem instructs the readers to mark their week with the magazine and yet also cheat time through immersion as the world is “sometimes bid to keep its distance” (2). Later in the century, poetry’s place in modern culture shifted with the evolution in aestheticism inspired by William Morris’s Kelmscott Press and the “slow print” movement, whereby poetry became more closely integrated into the materiality of book arts. Poetry even became a component of the graphic aesthetic, for example in carefully designed poetry pages of The Century Guild Hobby Horse (1884–94), Pageant (1896–97), and The Yellow Book (1894–97), and in the wide margins and typographical archaism (like Fell types) that dominated letterpress poetry books by private presses such as the Daniel Press (most active from the mid-1870s, published poetry books by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, Robert Bridges, and Laurence Binyon). The late-century poetry culture included a surge in cheap popular print after the 1870 Education Act, which increased literacy rates and an appetite for poetry reading that resulted in affordable publisher series of canonical poetry and anthologies for working and lower-middle classes (readers enfranchised by the 1867 Reform Act). At the same, with the increase of poetry on the market, critics began to define the era’s poetry as specifically “Victorian,” most prominently beginning with Edmund Clarence Stedman’s 1875 Victorian Poets. Victorian poetry was invented as a historical term at the point of print culture saturation.
3. Locations and Dislocations While poetry was everywhere in Victorian culture, many poems registered a profound unease with their sense of place, registering their sense of relatedness to the world through dislocation and homelessness. In this era of major geopolitical and territorial change, when the map of Europe was frequently redrawn and the British Empire was in repeated crisis, many British poets wrote about displacement. Although the culture of poetry was buoyant, it still left many uneasy regarding readership, literary quality, and the permanence of poetry, and often poems figure poetry itself in terms of a discomfort with home and place. Poems about home and place are in fact commonly about homelessness and displacement, as if this era of massive territorial expansion outwards left a radical conceptual uncertainty about rootedness, belonging, and the very ground of expressive poetry. Felicia Hemans’s “The Homes of England,” for example, published in the conservative Blackwood’s Magazine for April 1827 and later in her 1832 Records of Woman, seems to offer a homage to the safety and sanctity of English domestic life, culminating in a celebration of “The free, fair Homes of England!” The poem was widely circulated in the nineteenth century as exemplary of the feminine domestic affections seen conventionally as appropriate for women’s poetry [on domesticity, see Gregory’s chapter]. But the poem is not so sure of its claims, especially in its ironic placement within Records of Women in which, as 17
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Paula R. Feldman points out, it is preceded by a series of elegiac poems about women (187). Although, in the first stanza, the initial rhyme word “England” pairs confidently with “stand” (89), “England” has no rhyme in the remaining four stanzas, and each of the stanzas have another rhyme that is not paired in the first four lines, while the final four lines of each stanza rhyme as a typical quatrain, suggesting repeated unease followed by a series of conventional rhymes. Finally, in the last stanza, “The fair, free Homes of England” introduces a blessing that also seems like a plea: “May hearts of native proof be rear’d/To guard each hallow’d wall!” (90). If children must be taught to guard the sacred walls of their domestic space, the safety and sanctity of the home cannot be assured, and while the second part of each stanza confidently attests to the home’s status as haven in words and in rhyme, the discomfort of each stanza’s start remains unresolved. Hemans’s iconic poem about the stability and safety of the English home evinces an anxiety that the repeated assertion of conventional patriotism does not fully assuage. In fact, the theme of home and unhomeliness is overwhelmingly evident in Anglophone poetry of emigration and empire, British women’s affective poetry of domesticity and nationhood, and Scottish working-class newspaper poetry, as scholars such as Kirstie Blair, Elleke Boehmer, Alison Chapman, Mary Ellis Gibson, and Jason Rudy have recently explored. Poems about home as a discomforting location dominate women’s poetry, despite conventional associations of women with the assumedly private domestic sphere. In Eliza Cook’s “The Old ArmChair” (1838), the speaker’s grief for her dead mother is recalled and comforted by, but wholly contingent on, sitting in her mother’s familiar mundane chair. Christina Rossetti’s “L.E.L.” imagines her precursor Landon offering a false public face in the social space of “Downstairs,” while “in my solitary room above/I turn my face in silence to the wall;/My heart is breaking for a little love” (Rossetti, Poems 1: 153–4). The speaker in Adelaide Anne Procter’s “Home and Rest” never actually makes it home through the storm, although the poem begins by assuring her child they’ll be home and safe by nightfall; instead, “the waves have made/A cradle for thee.” Intriguingly, the poem is placed in All the Year Round before the prose article “Fetishes at Home.” Mary Coleridge’s “The Other Side of the Mirror” imagines her terrible other ghostly self through a vision in a mirror presumably in her bedroom. Home as a location figures anxiety as much as comfort; familiar locations mediate larger ideological social and political dislocations. Perhaps the comforts and anxieties of home are evident most strikingly in Barrett Browning’s poem about the popular political demonstrations in favor of Italian Unification that she viewed from her Florentine home, Casa Guidi Windows (1851), a domestic location and also an intellectual center of expatriate Florence that provides the major structuring trope for this audacious narrative poem (Chapman, Networking, ch. 4). The locations of Victorian poetry are often restless and transient. Robert Browning’s ironic “Home Thoughts, from Abroad” implies that the speaker’s pastoral English homeland is recalled, and deeply longed for, only because inaccessible to the exiled narrator. Another poem about restlessness, Tennyson’s “Ulysses” (1842), is a dramatic monologue spoken by the eponymous classical hero who, freshly returned home to Ithaca from his epic adventures, feels an urgent need to leave again: “I cannot rest from travel” (Ricks 141). This poem is often taken as synonymous for the Victorian impulse toward progress and territorial expansion (encapsulated in its final line, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”). It betrays a fundamental uneasy dislocation, as if the quest will never end, and the “newer world” which Ulysses craves is a heroism that comes with the price of restless wandering. Other poems explore the tension between home and elsewhere as a powerful symbol for uncertainty, often encapsulated in poems about real or imaginary places. This occurs, for example, in the turn to romantic consolation after epistemological despair in Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867). The dramatic monologue is set on the south coast of Britain and renders uncertain the “Glimmering and vast” famous white cliffs, as the speaker looks out from his window. Arnold’s final stanza reaches for domestic certainty in the face of philosophical and religious crisis: “Ah, love, let us be true/To one another!” (ll. 29–30). But the remaining lines turn again so swiftly to the existential darkness closing in that the romantic exclamation seems unconvincing and even ironically futile. 18
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Later poets embrace dislocation and an uncertain sense of place as an aesthetic, such as Amy Levy’s “Ballade of an Omnibus” (1889), in which the new metropolitan opportunities for women, afforded by London’s public transport networks, are celebrated as a poetic liberation; “A wandering minstrel, poor and free,” the speaker rides the streets on the top of an omnibus from where she sees the “city pageant” unfolding in front of her. However, the refrain, “An omnibus suffices me,” puts pressure on “suffices” as adequacy that seems possibly ironic by the end of the poem. Other poets transform the locations and dislocations of place into a theological poetics. For example, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems about specific places such as “Binsey Poplars” (1879) and “Inversnaid” (1881) are a call to preserve the beauty of nature against the destruction of an industrial age. “Binsey Poplars” laments the felling of his favorite aspen trees in Oxford, comparing the destruction to the catastrophic pricking out of an eye with a pin. It ends with incantatory lines that mourn and lyrically restore the sweetness and beauty of the “rural scene.” For Hopkins, as a Jesuit priest deeply influenced by High Anglican typological poetics, the destruction of his beloved locations is akin to a terrible sacrilege, as be believed in the divine quiddity of all nature. “Inversnaid” describes the spectacular waterfall at the east coast of Loch Lomond, in Scotland, in order to call for the wild locations to be left alone: “Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.” As with Levy’s “suffices,” Hopkins’s “yet” suggests an uncertainty within the performative statement. In Thomas Hardy’s desolate New Year (and new century) ballad, “The Darkling Thrush,” the speaker identifies with the “fervourless” anti-pastoral landscape he’s posed within, struggling to comprehend the joyful singing of a bedraggled thrush while “all mankind that haunted nigh/Had sought their household fires.” The poem was first published in the Christmas 1900 issue of The Graphic, titled “By the Century’s Deathbed,” and renders the poem a play less on the ironic romantic lyrical bird and more on the haunting symbolism of the landscape, where the pastoral desolation represents the death of time and of song as well as the speaker. The Graphic concludes the poem with a reproduction of Hardy’s signature, lending ironic authenticity to a poem in which a sense of place and the lyric voice are so radically disjointed. In this poem, facing the end of a century and implicitly the end of an era (and published less than a month before Queen Victoria’s death), the uncertain place of poetry is made visible in a desolate landscape where “The tangled bine-stems scored the sky/Like strings from broken lyres.” Poetry itself, as a broken lyre, slashes the sky as well as renders it musically dissonant, playing on the pun of “score” and poetry as song. And yet, despite the fact that joy is not legible in the landscape (“So little cause for carollings/ . . ./Was written on terrestrial things”), the “happy good-night air” of the thrush “could” lead the speaker to think “Some Blessed Hope” is signified by the song, but if so “he knew/And I was unaware.” Here poetry’s multimedia effects figure the visual and the aural as epistemological disjunctions; what the speaker sees and what he hears are impossible to reconcile in this location. This poem is particularly dissonant when placed in its original magazine context, adjacent to articles and illustrations on Christmas festivities. However, on the same page of the poem is a summary of the century’s history. The article includes a section on the rise in Europe of “Anglophobia,” an account of the peaceful move to democracy since the 1832 Reform Act, a claim about the erasure of social-class barriers, and praise of the positive sociopolitical power of the press. The place of Hardy’s poem in this weekly’s print ecology takes its lament for the century’s death in an anti-pastoral English landscape and places it in sharp juxtaposition with this account of progress. It gives more credence to the “Blessed Hope” of the thrush’s “joy illimited” carol at the expense of the speaker’s limited perceptions. In the vibrant biblio-diversity of the Victorian era, where poetry was plentiful and pervasive, poems energetically questioned their place in print culture and society, asserting, probing, and mediating the limits and legibility of the poetic voice even as the readership for the genre flourished. In our own digital era, where a vast quantity of works is newly discoverable, the boundaries of Victorian poetry offer an apparently “illimited” but uncharted map of the material history of poetry. Promising new directions in Victorian poetry studies include a return to canon revision that dominated and 19
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energized the field at the end of the last century (especially with the recovery of women poets; see Leighton); for example, British regional and four nations poetry, colonial poetry that frames Victorian poets in terms of an Anglophone global tradition in the nineteenth century, and poetry in a fuller and wider sense of print culture and the archive [on canon revision, see Schaffer’s chapter; on regional poetry, see Gibson’s chapter]. Although some scholars have recently challenged what they view as an a-theoretical positivist historicism, in favor of a version of presentism (exemplified by the V21 Collective), methodologies based on historicist models of poetics and poetry still dominate the field (for prominent examples, see Prins, Tucker). Also, interdisciplinary approaches to Victorian poetry continue to emerge as important new avenues for innovative readings on, for example, poetry and science and poetry and the body. Meanwhile, recent and ongoing digital projects offer accessible editions that allow for complex searches of poetry, poetics, and poets as well as multimedia contexts for poetry (Christina Rossetti in Music, Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry, The Yellow Nineties Online, and the COVE poetry editions, as well as the poetry projects federated in NINES: Nineteenth-Century Scholarship Online) [on the digital humanities, see Bourrier’s chapter]. All these opportunities offer exciting ways of finding and thinking about Victorian poetry in the twenty-first century, ensuring that poetry not only remains a dynamic part of Victorian literary studies but is understood as integral to Victorian culture. As the eponymous poet-heroine of one of the most audacious poems of the period, Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1857) declares of her own ideal poetry, “this is living art” (V.221).
Key Critical Works Isobel Armstrong. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics. Joseph Bristow, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison, editors. A Companion to Victorian Poetry. Mary Ellis Gibson. Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore. Eric Griffiths. The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry. Angela Leighton. Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart. Yopie Prins. Victorian Sappho. Herbert F. Tucker. “Tactical Formalism: A Response to Caroline Levine.”
Works Cited Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900. 1957. Ohio State UP, 1998. Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics. Routledge, 1993. Blair, Kirstie. Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press, Community. Oxford UP, 2019. Boehmer, Elle. Indian Arrivals, 1870–1915: Networks of British Empire. Oxford UP, 2015. Bristow, Joseph. “Reforming Victorian Poetry: Poetics After 1832.” The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry. Cambridge UP, 2000, pp. 1–24. Brooks, Shirley. “Once a Week.” Once a Week, vol. 1, no. 1, July 1859, pp. 1–2. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Aurora Leigh. Edited by Margaret Reynolds, W. W. Norton, 1996. ———. “Amy’s Cruelty.” The Keepsake, edited by Marguerite Power, David Bogue, 1857, pp. 75–6. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, and Robert Browning. The Brownings’ Correspondence. Edited by Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson, Wedgestone, 1984. Chambers, William. “The Editor’s Address to His Readers.” Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, vol. 4, February 1832, pp. 1–2. Chapman, Alison, ed. Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry. https://dvpp.uvic.ca Chapman, Alison. Networking the Nation: British and American Women’s Poetry and Italy, 1840–1870. Oxford UP, 2015. The Dutt Family Album. Longmans, Green, 1870. Ehnes, Caley. “Religion, Readership and the Periodical Press: The Place of Poetry in Good Words.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 45, no. 4, Winter 2011, pp. 466–87. Erickson, Lee. “The Market.” A Companion to Victorian Poetry, edited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison, Blackwell, 2002, pp. 345–60.
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Poetry Gibson, Mary Ellis. Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore. Ohio State UP, 2011. Griffiths, Eric. The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry. Oxford UP, 1989. Hardy, Thomas. “By the Century’s Deathbed.” The Graphic, 29 December 1900, p. 956. Hemans, Felicia. Records of Woman With Other Poems. Edited by Paula R. Feldman, UP of Kentucky, 1999. Hobbs, Andrew. “Five Million Poems, or the Local Press as Poetry Publisher.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 45, no. 4, Winter 2012, pp. 488–92. Houston, Natalie M. “Newspaper Poems: Material Texts in the Public Sphere.” Victorian Studies, vol. 50, no. 2, 2008, pp. 233–42. Hughes, Linda K. “Inventing Poetry and Pictorialism in Once a Week: A Magazine of Visual Effects.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 48, no. 1, Spring 2010, pp. 41–72. The Keepsake. Edited by Frederic Mansel Reynolds, Longmans, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1832. Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History. Ohio State UP, 2002. ———. “The Moxon Tennyson as Textual Event: 1857, Wood Engraving, and Visual Culture.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, edited by Dino Franco Felluga. www.branchcollective.org. Leighton, Angela. Victorian Women Poets: Writing against the Heart. Virginia UP, 1992. NINES: Nineteenth-Century Scholarship Online. www.nines.org/. O’Connor, E. Foley. “Chambers’s (Edinburgh) Journal, 1832–1956.” Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, edited by Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, Academia Press and the British Library, 2009, p. 106. Oliphant, Margaret. “The Byways of Literature: Reading for the Million.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, August 1858, pp. 200–16. Park, William. “Ode to Poverty.” Chambers’s Edinburgh Magazine, 11 February 1832, p. 15. Prins, Yopie. Victorian Sappho. Princeton UP, 1999. Procter, Adelaide Anne. “Home and Rest.” All the Year Round, 24 April 1858, p. 445. Rossetti, Christina. The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti. Edited by R. W. Crump, 3 vols., Louisiana State UP, 1979–1990. ———. Goblin Market and Other Poems. Palgrave Macmillan, 1862. ———. The Letters of Christina Rossetti. Edited by Antony H. Harrison, vol. 1, UP of Virginia, 1997. Rowlinson, Matthew. “Lyric.” A Companion to Victorian Poetry, edited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison, Blackwell, 2002, pp. 59–79. Rudy, Jason R. Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies. Johns Hopkins UP, 2017. Sanders, Michael. The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History. Cambridge UP, 2009. Stedman, Edmund Clarence. Victorian Poets. Chatto and Windus, 1875. Tennyson, Alfred. “The Grandmother’s Apology.” Once a Week, 16 July 1859, pp. 41–3. ———. “In Memoriam [Fragment].” Atalanta, December 1889, p. 154. ———. Poems. 1857, New ed., The Scholar, 1976. ———. Tennyson: A Selected Edition. Edited by Christopher Ricks, Pearson, 2007. Tucker, Herbert F. “Tactical Formalism: A Response to Caroline Levine.” Victorian Studies, vol. 49, no. 1, Autumn 2006, pp. 85–93. Vilain, Jean-François, Thomas Bird Mosher, and Philip R. Bishop. Thomas Mosher and the Art of the Book. F.A. Davis, 1992. The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals: 1800–1900. www.victorianperiodicals.com/series3/ index.asp.
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2 THE NOVEL Elsie B. Michie
Building on Catherine Gallagher’s The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, this chapter argues for the Reform reformation of English fiction, locating the impetus for the rise of the Victorian novel in the period of the First Reform Act. It brings together categories of social-problem fiction that have typically been addressed separately: antislavery fiction, industrial fiction, and Poor Law fiction. Reading these historically specific novels in tandem with mid-nineteenth-century canonical novels, I demonstrate that both forms of fiction encode the conflicting feelings of the period when literature “first encountered the general realization among European writers and intellectuals that democracy was inevitable” (During 13) [on radical print culture, see Haywood’s chapter; on class, see Betensky’s chapter]. That recognition was solidified in Britain with the passage of the First Reform Act in 1832 and the legislation enacted shortly before and after that event. The Sacramental Test Act of 1828, the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829, the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, and the Factory Act of 1833 all brought about the inclusion of groups previously conceived as excluded either from the seats of power—Dissenters and Catholics—or from full human citizenship—the enslaved and factory laborers. The British novel recalibrated itself in the wake of these acts, understanding that such dramatic social changes necessitated changes in the practice of fiction. Novelists of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s engaged in an “‘experimental extension of normality,’ . . . the provisional attribution of humanness to persons in whom humanness has previously been denied—children, the old, the poor, the insane, the enslaved” (Claybaugh 163). Recognizing the rich diversity of topics in Victorian fiction as well as in critical approaches to it, I choose in this chapter to focus on a central through line in the evolution of the novel’s form and content: the democratic undercurrent of British thinking from the 1830s to the 1860s. To uncover the fictional traces of that thinking, I turn to a pivotal but overlooked figure, the novelist and travel writer Frances Trollope, whose work explicitly addressed the First Reform Act. Juxtaposing Trollope’s fiction with that of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, I argue that some of the most famous and popular novels of the Victorian period—Oliver Twist (1837–39), Jane Eyre (1847), and Adam Bede (1859)—engaged actively in working for democracy by creating sympathy for what Isobel Armstrong calls “the deficit subject, the subject that falls outside accounts of the fully human, consigned to bare life” (7).
1. Fiction and History Gallagher’s Industrial Reformation appeared in 1985, in a period when novel criticism in America turned strongly toward history. Patrick Brantlinger’s The Spirit of Reform came out in 1977, Joseph 22
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Kestner’s Protest and Reform in 1985, and Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction in 1991. All these critical works address what a nineteenth-century reviewer of Trollope calls “illustrative novels” (“New Fiction” 17), fictions that highlight a particular social issue, like child factory labor. Twenty-first century critics have continued to search for the most accurate term to name the genre. Amanda Claybaugh calls them novels of purpose (taking that phrase from the nineteenth-century critic David Masson); Barbara Leckie recasts them as “social protest novels” (88). The most common term for them, social-problem novels, was developed early in the twentieth century. Louis Cazamian’s Le Roman social en Angleterre: 1830–50 (1903) was “the first work of literary history to identify the social-problem novel (or to use Cazamian’s terms, the ‘social novel with a purpose’ or ‘roman-à-thèse)” (Guy 41). Arnold Kettle specifically used the term social-problem novels in the late 1950s, as part of the British Marxist turn toward history, which included the criticism of Raymond Williams and later of co-authors David Howard, John Lucas, and John Goode. These Marxist readings of the novel were paralleled by what Josephine Guy calls “contextualist” historical treatments, which include the work of John Holloway, Sheila Smith, and Kathleen Tillotson, and more recently Chris Vanden Bossche. However, as the title of Tillotson’s Novels of the Eighteen-Forties suggests, these readings tended to privilege works from that decade rather than looking back, as I do here, to the 1830s as marking the British novel’s turn toward contemporary history. Shortly before Gallagher published The Industrial Reformation of English there was also an alternative American Marxist turn to history inaugurated by Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (1981). For Jameson, “the convenient working distinction between cultural texts that are social and political and those that are not becomes . . . a symptom and a reinforcement of the reification and privatization of contemporary life” (20). Instead of analyzing works like the socialproblem novel that are self-consciously political, Jameson demonstrates in both The Political Unconscious and The Antinomies of Realism that a wide range of seemingly apolitical texts, including both the British and the continental European novel, do in fact address the political concerns of their period. For Jameson those issues manifest themselves in the text’s unconscious and need to be uncovered by critical analysis, which Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus identify as “symptomatic” reading (1) [on the history of reading practices, see Buurma and Heffernan’s chapter]. I follow Jameson by refusing to reify the distinction between texts that are political and those that are apolitical. But unlike Jameson, I continue to pay attention to the category of the social-problem novel. Bringing the explicitly political novel together with the apparently apolitical novel, I argue that the two do similar rather than different kinds of work and that this work is more conscious than Jameson’s argument suggests. My critical approach extends the developments that have taken place in Victorian novel theory over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These developments have involved both expanding the kinds and genres of works deemed worthy of critical examination and complicating our understanding of the nineteenth-century novel’s primary focus on the interiority of the main character. Published in 1948, F.R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition established a canon of practitioners of what Mark McGurl calls “novel art”—Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad. That canon was quickly expanded to include less obviously artful novelists such as the Brontës, Dickens, W.M. Thackeray, Thomas Hardy, and, less centrally Anthony Trollope and George Meredith. In the 1970s Elaine Showalter and Ellen Moers introduced a series of less well-known women writers to this group. At the same time, Victorian critics began to explore fictional genres excluded from the canon: social-problem novels, the gothic (Moers, Kiely), sensation fiction (Hughes, Cvetkovich), and New Woman fiction (Cunningham, Helsinger, and Sheets) and to think more about the physical form of the novel, with attention paid to serial publication and the importance of periodicals as well as books [on sensation fiction, see Gilbert’s chapter; on New Women, see Youngkin’s chapter]. Scholars also raised challenges to Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957), which established the nineteenth-century novel as centrally concerned with the psychological development of the main character. But the nature and position of that main character have increasingly been reconceived. Nancy Armstrong argued that the bourgeois subject at the center 23
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of the novel is implicitly feminine, Alex Woloch that minor characters function as the proletariat of the novel, and Talia Schaffer that the nineteenth-century novel is focused less on individuals than on the bonds between them and the groups individuals form. Following up on these trends, I attend to a writer, Frances Trollope, who has been largely overlooked even by critics who explore overlooked genres like the social-problem novel. Her novels allow us to see how the protagonists of some of the most famous novels in the Victorian period stand for the deficit and excluded subjects whose rights were not fully protected by the legislation passed in the wake of the First Reform Act.
2. The British Novel and Democracy Victorians understood that a prime goal of the mid-nineteenth-century novel was to engender more inclusive social sympathy as Britain entered the democratic era, the period Gallagher identifies with the decades between the Reform Act of 1832 and that of 1867. In his 1852 “The Relation Between Employers and Employed,” W.R. Greg looked back to the 1830s and 1840s and declared that Oliver Twist and Mary Barton (1848) heralded the emergence of “a new class of novels,” which “harmonise . . . with the taste and temper of the times” because they “mark the growth of an earnest spirit of universal sympathy which was never so aroused as now” (257). As a reviewer of Eliot later explained, the era of the mid-1800s “differs from its predecessors in its gradual reclaiming large tracks of existence from the obscurity of an utter removal from all that interests the fancy,” a reclamation that depended on an author whose “sympathies expand” so as “to awake similar sympathies in others” (Mozley 440). This expansion of novelistic sympathy was necessary because of the uneven progress of democracy in Britain. Greg quotes from Alexis de Tocqueville on America and then argues that “the habits and notions of democracy have not yet . . . completely pervaded our minds, and penetrated all our social relations” (274); “[w]e are in a transition state, in which men’s minds fluctuate between the aristocratic notion of subjection, and the democratic notion of free, optional, limited, and purchased obedience” (275). Such comments make clear Victorian critics’ awareness of what Isobel Armstrong calls “[a] persistent and purposive democratic imagination,” which, as we will see, “belongs to the world of the novel, and . . . is all the more intense because the novel is writing about something that has not yet happened” (55). To uncover that democratic imagination in mid-century British fiction, I turn to Frances Trollope, who was in some sense uniquely positioned to be the literary voice for Britain’s ambivalent responses to passage of the First Reform Act. A perfect exemplar of the Anglo-American literary reform movement that Claybaugh traces in The Novel of Purpose, Trollope returned to Britain in 1831 after more than two years in the United States and became an international sensation after the publication of her first book, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), which excoriated American democracy and was deliberately released as the British parliament was debating the First Reform Act. In his autobiography, Anthony Trollope insisted that his mother “became a strong Tory, and thought that archduchesses were sweet” (22). This pejorative image resonated with Trollope’s avowed intention, in the preface that her publishers asked her to add to Domestic Manners of the Americans, to show the “jarring tumult and universal degradation which invariably follow the wild scheme of placing all the power of the state in the hands of the populace” (3). Modern critics have tended to dismiss her work as conservative and prejudiced. Even critics of the social-problem novel typically give only a brief nod to her writings. Claybaugh never mentions Trollope’s antislavery novel in her discussion of transatlantic abolition, Gallagher grants her industrial novel a page, and Josephine McDonagh does the same with her infanticide novel. Those who grant her more space still characterize Trollope’s perspective as limited; in Bodenheimer’s words she is a “female paternalist” (21). Such dismissals ignore two things: first, that “the democratic idea itself often becomes vivid, imagined into the realm of experience, through the work of its victims, critics, and enemies” (During 11), and second, that Trollope became in fact, that politically mixed figure, a Tory Radical. 24
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Like Richard Oastler, famous for his speech on the Yorkshire Slavery, and the Reverend Joseph Raynor Stephens, the radical preacher on infanticide (both of whom Trollope met when preparing to write her social-problem novels), Trollope criticized the limitations of the legislation that was passed in the wake of the First Reform Act. Arising out of her experience of slavery in America, her first social-problem novel, The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, or Scenes on the Mississippi appeared in 1836, just as protests were mounting against the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act. A year after the World Anti-Slavery Convention was held in London in 1840, Lydia Maria Child reprinted Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw in serial form in The National Anti-Slavery Standard. Trollope’s second socialproblem novel, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, or the Factory, advocated for the Ten Hours Bill, protesting against the limitations of the 1833 Factory Act. First published in 12 monthly parts between March 1839 and February 1840, that novel was closely tied to contemporaneous historical events; it ends representing working-class men about to present a Chartist petition to Parliament, as actually happened in 1839. Her last social-problem novel, originally titled Jessie Phillips; A Tale of the New Poor Law (a subtitle later revised to A Tale of the Present Day), protested the 1834 Bill for Amending the Poor Laws and paid particular attention to the Bastardy Clause, which freed the fathers of illegitimate children from financial responsibility for their offspring. Jessie Phillips appeared in 12 monthly parts between December 1842 and November 1843, one year before Parliament passed the Poor Law Amendment Bill of 1844, which partially reversed the Bastardy Clause. Such topical emphases led Trollope to be dismissed for her “disposition to sacrifice future fame to present popularity, by taking advantage of attractive temporary circumstances, and so working them as to produce their greatest effect at the time of production. Mrs. Trollope does this openly and palpably; the titles of her lucubrations announce her intention—The Factory Boy, &c.” (“New Fiction” 17). Yet by engaging so directly with immediate social problems, Trollope’s novels mark a significant step in the evolution of the nineteenth-century British novel. Publishing her first book in 1832, the year of Walter Scott’s death, Trollope stood at the juncture between the Romantic and the Victorian novel, between what George Levine calls “Pre-Victorian Realism” (which includes Jane Austen and Scott) and “Mid-Victorian Realism” (which includes Thackeray and Anthony Trollope). This was the period in which, as Georg Lukács argues in both The Historical Novel and Studies in European Realism, fiction moved away from novels like Scott’s, which referenced distant history, and began to train its attention on contemporary social conditions. Lukács identified that transition with Honoré de Balzac, who was Frances Trollope’s contemporary. (She discusses his 1831 novel Le Peau de Chagrin in her travel book Paris and the Parisians in 1835.) Like Balzac, Trollope wrote “not historical novels, but contemporary novels which are profoundly historical,” and which frame their situation “as social reality rather than historical event” (Jameson, Antinomies 264, 274). Though her novels have not remained in the canon, they capture what Raymond Williams famously called “the structure of feelings” of the era in which Britons became uneasily aware that their nation would inexorably become more democratic (Marxism 132). According to Greg, “[m]an had to be emancipated from a dwarfing and paralyzing thralldom, and given back into his own possession. His limbs had to be unfettered, and his energies to be electrified by the healthy and bracing atmosphere of freedom. Liberty of action had to be won from the tyrant” (255). Trollope’s social-problem novels crystallized the social and emotional dynamic Greg describes in fictional form; they argued for liberty by dramatizing conflicts between tyrannous oppressors (slave overseers, factory owners, enforcers of the New Poor Law), their victims (the enslaved, child laborers, the poor, seduced women), and those who resist oppression and press for emancipation (abolitionists and reformers). Contemporary critics dismissed Trollope’s plots as both being exaggerated and containing material more appropriate for “the grave and calm pages of the advocate or historian” than “the fairyland of fiction” (qtd. in Heineman 144). In the words of a later reviewer, “‘Michael Armstrong’ trenches upon the debatable ground of art. The province of fiction has its limits” (“Mrs. Trollope” 553). Yet the debatable ground of Trollope’s novels, with their curious mixture 25
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of history and fiction, provided fertile soil for the Victorian novelists who followed her. Her explicit engagement with “social problems” like slavery, industrial working conditions, and the bastardy clause reveals how far some of the most famous Victorian novels of interiority depend on images from political discourse. Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and Eliot were all aware of Trollope, about whom The New Monthly Magazine wrote in 1839 that “no other author of the present day has been at once so much read, so much admired, so much abused” (417). She was Dickens’s chief rival in the 1830s (NevilleSington 276). Brontë was thinking about Trollope’s novels when she began her own industrial novel Shirley (Letters, vol. 2, 223). Eliot stayed with Trollope when she was in Florence doing research for Romola. Material from Trollope’s social-problem novels is central to some of the most popular and enduring fictions of the Victorian era: Oliver Twist is indebted to Trollope’s antislavery novel, Jane Eyre to her anti-child labor novel, and Adam Bede to her anti-New Poor Law/Bastardy Clause novel. When these three canonical novels are linked as sequential reworkings of Trollope’s social-problem fiction at ten-year intervals, readers can see how Dickens’s, Brontë’s, and Eliot’s novels record the evolving British response to democracy over the decades of the 1830s, the 1840s, and the 1850s.
3. Novels of the 1830s and Abolition When Trollope and Dickens wrote their first social-problem novels, Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw and Oliver Twist, both were reacting to the intensification of Abolitionist protest characteristic of the 1830s. The Abolition of Slavery Act of 1833 had only freed slaves under the age of 6; those over that age were compelled to become apprentices and continued to labor under conditions of flogging and brutality that amounted to virtual slavery. Those conditions persisted until 1838 when the colonies voluntarily revoked forced apprenticeship. Beginning to appear in serialized form in 1837, the year after Trollope’s Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw had gone through three editions, Oliver Twist opens with a fictional portrait of the apparently freed and forcibly apprenticed child. The story starts as its hero reaches an age when he is put up for sale—bills are posted advertising him—and threatened with apprenticeship to a master whose “countenance was,” like those of planters in abolitionist fiction, “a regular stamped receipt for cruelty” (34). As Lucy Sheehan has shown, the illustration to the scene in which Oliver pleads not to be apprenticed to the brutal chimneysweep replicates the iconography of the famous abolitionist icon, created by Wedgewood, in which a kneeling slave in chains asks, “Am I not a man and a brother?” The story that follows this brutal opening is structured along the lines of the American slave narrative, which Julia SunJoo Lee has argued makes its way into the British novel through “the fugitive plot” (9). Throughout Dickens’s novel, Oliver is forced to run away, only to be recaptured and threatened with brutal punishment. As Nancy observes when he is brought back to Fagin’s after his brief idyll at Mr. Brownlow’s, if he runs away again, Bill Sikes’s dog Bull’s-Eye will “tear the boy to pieces” (114). Images of slaves pursued by dogs as if they were hunted animals were key to abolitionist narratives. In Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, the brutal plantation overseer looks at the enslaved woman he is about to flog “without moving, as a dog may be seen to watch a wounded hare, certain, let it struggle as it may, that escape is impossible” (85). Moreover the license that allowed slave owners to punish slaves how and when they wished inevitably carried over to other venues; “[t]he appetite for this species of chartered vengeance very naturally increased by what it fed on, and very many petty planters . . . felt as much gratification in getting the scent of a missionary, or tracking a Christian traveler, as a bloodhound shows when he comes upon the trace of his prey” (104). The language of being hunted, which pervades Trollope’s novel, is central to Oliver Twist as well, beginning with the scene in which the child is chased through the streets of London after wrongly being assumed to be a thief. Dickens’s novel stops for the narrator to comment that There is a passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast. One wretched breathless child, panting with exhaustion; terror in his looks; agony in his eye; large drops 26
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of perspiration streaming down his face; strains every nerve to make head upon his pursuers; and as they follow on his track, and gain upon him ever instant, they hail his decreasing strength with still louder shouts and whoop and scream with joy. “Stop thief!” Ay stop him for God’s sake, were it only in mercy! (74) Dickens almost invariably juxtaposes passages like this, which are clearly designed to elicit sympathy for a child seen as a human being rather than an animal, with the unfeeling responses of characters linked to the West Indies and the British slave trade. On first meeting Oliver at Brownlow’s, for example, Grimwig insists, “Bad people have fevers sometimes; haven’t they, eh? I knew a man who was hung in Jamaica for murdering his master. He had had a fever six times; he wasn’t recommended to mercy on that account.” (101). These allusions to planter society are concentrated in the novel’s villain, Monks, who is a perfect instance of “the fictional topos of the ‘West Indian,’ a figure of uncertain origins and dubiously acquired wealth, burdened by a sinful hidden past to be expiated only by suffering and repentance, death or expulsion to the margins of civilized society” (Gray 42). When Mr. Brownlow insistently tells Monks “You have a brother, . . . a brother,” the novel returns the reader to the famous “Am I not a man and a brother?” motto. When Monks replies, “I have no brother. . . . Why do you talk to me of brothers?” (326), his response demonstrates that the slave owner never can and never will see the enslaved as human and equals. That response is deliberately contrasted to that of Mr. Brownlow and the Maylies, who willingly accept Oliver into their homes. Taking as its protagonist an illegitimate child raised in poverty and the workhouse, a runaway apprentice, and an accused thief, Oliver Twist provides a resounding yes to the question Tricia Lootens asks in The Political Poetess, “Are the enslaved or, in mid-century British terms, the formerly enslaved, part of one’s family?” (48). It makes its argument for democracy by using the model of an antislavery narrative to track the process by which a deficit subject is welcomed into the human community.
4. Novels of the 1840s and the Factory Question By the time Charlotte Brontë looked back to Trollope’s novels in 1847, the main subject of political concern, and of the social-problem novel itself, had become the factory question, or, in Greg’s words, the relation between employers and employed. This was the moment of the emergence of what Gallagher and others call industrial fiction: Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), and Gaskell’s North and South (1855). But the Brontë novel that most visibly shows the impact of Frances Trollope’s Michael Armstrong is not Shirley but Jane Eyre. The vivid opening scenes of that novel take their emotional tenor from Michael Armstrong, which begins with the mill-owner Sir Matthew Dowling taking a child laborer from his factory into his home in order to prove that he is not a brutal tyrant. This scenario, like the Reeds’ adoption of Jane Eyre, allows the novelist to dramatize the moment in which the child is seen as half-human, half-animal, but refuses to occupy that categorization. In Trollope’s novel, the villainous mill-owner admits of the child laborer that the “look he has got with his eyes . . . makes one always feel so uncomfortable” (139). Similarly in Jane Eyre, “the look [Jane] had in her eyes” (23) makes Mrs. Reed feel, “as if an animal that I had struck or pushed had looked up to me with human eyes” (238–9). Jane Eyre evokes the resistance to oppression and tyranny that Dickens never depicts in Oliver Twist and that Greg associates with the transition to democracy, when Jane calls John Reed “’wicked and cruel’” (23), and explains that he “bullied and punished me; not two or three times in the week, nor once or twice in a day, but continually: every nerve I had feared him, and every morsel of flesh on my bones shrank when he came near” (22). This passage captures the feel of Trollope’s mill-owner: “A wicked and cruel man” (225) who loves to “laugh and make sport of the tears of little children” (226) and insures his laborers’ compliance 27
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by having his overseer beat them regularly. Jane stresses her “physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed” (20), recounts how she became “habitually obedient” (23) after being told she must achieve “a condition of perfect submission and stillness” (30), and describes her life as one “of ceaseless reprimand and thankless fagging” (32). Here she makes the points that Trollope also makes about child factory workers whose punishment forces them to accept the brutal conditions under which they labor. When in Michael Armstrong the cotton heiress Mary Brotherton asks the reforming minister, the Reverend Mr. Bell, why, if conditions are so atrocious, workers submit to them, he explains, “They must either do what the masters would have them, OR STARVE” (143–4). Using rhetoric like that of Richard Oastler in his letter on “Yorkshire Slavery,” Bell insists that this lack of choice makes the workers like slaves. When Mary Brotherton exclaims, “But the negro slave, Mr. Bell, has no choice left him—he is the property of his master,” Bell replies, “Neither has the factory child a choice, Miss Brotherton. He too is a property” (235). Though these discussions feel far from Jane Eyre, in fact the conversations between Jane and Rochester center on choice and employment, as when she tells him that “nothing free-born would submit to [bad treatment] even for a salary” and he replies, “Humbug! Most things free-born will submit to anything for a salary” (140). Brontë’s novel echoes Trollope’s references to starvation when, at the climax of the courtship narrative, Jane refuses to be treated as property and sent to Ireland, telling Rochester, Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton?—a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!—I have as much soul as you,— and full as much heart! (252) This passage approaches the rhetorical terrain of Trollope’s novel, which describes “the secret arcana of that hideous mystery by which the delicate forms of young children are made to mix and mingle with the machinery, from whence flows the manufacturer’s wealth” (98). Trollope is here using the language and imagery of the nonfictional sources that Janice Carlisle, W.H. Chaloner, and others have argued were key to the creation of Michael Armstrong. An 1832 article from British Labourer’s Protector, for example, argued, The children of the poor, it is evident, are the sinews of all states; but let us not forget that they are intellectual sinews; it is not enough, therefore, that they be well governed; . . . it is required for the happiness and future improvement of mankind, that they be qualified to think, to judge, to reason. . . . The Factory System (emphatically so called) precludes these results being accomplished; it reduces the child of the poor man to the rank of an animal machine, to the condition of a breathing automaton. (qtd. in Gallagher 25) But in Jane Eyre, at the very moment when the heroine exercises what Joseph Slaughter calls (quoting Jean-François Lyotard) “perhaps the most fundamental human right,” the “democratic ‘capacity to speak to others’” (153–4), the novel introduces in Bertha Mason a character confined irredeemably to the category of the deficit subject. When Rochester describes Bertha as “a mad, bad, embruted partner” (289), arguing that it is difficult to tell “what it was, whether beast or human being” (289), with a “cast of mind common, low, narrow, and singularly incapable of being led to anything higher, expanded to anything larger” (302), he is echoing the logic of the mill-owner in Michael Armstrong, who justifies his brutal punishment of factory laborers by arguing that, “Brutes and beasts they are, and like brutes and beasts they should be treated” (166). But as Gayatri Spivak explains, 28
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Bertha Mason is also “a figure produced by the axiomatics of imperialism. Through Bertha Mason, the white Jamaican Creole, Brontë renders the human/animal frontier as acceptably indeterminate” (247). This indeterminacy weakens Bertha’s “entitlement under the spirit if not the letter of the law” (249). Bertha Mason marks the limits of how far the mid-Victorian novel could go in its expansion of democratic sympathy; it can imagine workers and slaves as subjects that could be included within civil society. But the native subjects of the British Empire continued to be represented as so degraded they cannot be conceived to be human. Ironically the Victorian novelist was herself aware of the limitations of her sympathy; as Brontë commented of her portrait of Bertha that “[i]t is true that profound pity ought to be the only sentiment elicited by the view of such degradation, and equally true is it that I have not sufficiently dwelt on that feeling” (Letters 2, 3).
5. Novels of the 1850s, the Bastardy Clause and Infanticide By the time that George Eliot was looking back to Trollope’s novels in 1859 when she published Adam Bede, she was thinking about them less in terms of specific contemporary issues than of the long sweep of historical change which began with the First Reform Act, which she was to write about in both Felix Holt (1866) and Middlemarch (1871). In making the story of Hetty Sorrel’s seduction, abandonment, and trial for infanticide the center of her novel, Eliot was also looking to a literary history that stretched back to William Wordsworth’s “The Thorn” (1789) and Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818), a history that, as Jay Clayton has argued, can be extended up to Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). But in inserting Adam Bede into that tradition Eliot also drew on material from Trollope’s anti-bastardy clause novel Jessie Phillips, or a Tale of the Present Day, which tells the story of a beautiful seamstress who is seduced and abandoned by the village squire and must go into the workhouse. Adam Bede follows Trollope’s novel most obviously in its climactic scenes, when a visibly pregnant Hetty leaves Hayslope, contemplates suicide, gives birth, and is tried for infanticide. That sequence of events follows the pattern of Trollope’s novel point for point, much more closely than the story of Mary Voce, which Eliot identified as the historical source of her narrative about infanticide. “The child-murder came to” Eliot, as Josephine McDonagh explains, “not just through her aunt’s recollection but also through other sources, many of them literary” (“Child-Murder Narratives” 229). In discussing the confession at the end of Adam Bede, Sally Mitchell insists that “we cannot help remembering the similar culminating scene in Frances Trollope’s Jessie Phillips” (67). And, in Jessie Phillips as in Adam Bede, the seduced woman is presented as a sacrificial victim. Jessie is a woman “[t]oo weak, too erring, to be remembered with respect, yet not so bad but that some may feel it a thing to wonder at that she . . . should seem so decidedly to be selected . . . as a sacrifice for all the sins of all their sex” (407). In Adam Bede Hetty’s elimination “represents a kind of sacrificial dream of renewal” (Gould 264). Toward the end of Adam Bede, Bartle Massey tries to comfort Adam by telling him that “there may good come out of this that we don’t see.” Adam responds that “[t]hat doesn’t alter th’ evil; her ruin can’t be undone. I hate that talk o’ people, as if there was a way o’ making amends for everything” (459). Yet this is the way the Victorian novel works; it creates the wider sympathy that Greg praises by excluding and sacrificing a character. Eliot’s use of Hetty in Adam Bede allows us to look back and see that Brontë makes a similar use of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre and Dickens of the prostitute Nancy in Oliver Twist. All of these characters must be killed in order that the social order can elsewhere include those previously deemed outsiders or deficit subjects. But the big jump that Eliot makes in Adam Bede by way of her use of Trollope is to represent the sacrificed character as possessing a full subjectivity. Creating through Hetty, as Trollope also does through Jessie Phillips, a romance in which the working-class woman feels the attractions of an upper-class suitor that make her dream and desire, Eliot makes the sacrificial working-class figure a major character who has a full inner life, rather than a minor character. As Raymond Williams notes, Hetty is a desiring subject until the novel’s end (Country 173). She is, in Gillian Beer’s words, “the source of imaginative energy” in the novel; “her hedonistic 29
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presence, so much at odds with George Eliot’s ideals, is yet the most strong imaginatively to the novelist” (George Eliot 67, 71). In Jessie and Hetty, Trollope and Eliot look forward to the end of the century, evoking through their sacrificial heroines what Hardy identifies in Tess of the d’Urbervilles as that most democratic and universal of feelings, the “‘appetite for joy,’ which pervades all creation; that tremendous force which sways humanity to its purpose, as the tide sways the helpless weed, [which] was not to be controlled by vague lucubrations over the social rubric” (149). Ironically, but aptly, nineteenth-century readers experienced Adam Bede as fulfilling the ideal of widespread sympathy that Greg identified as promised by the Victorian novel’s engagement with democracy [on ethical engagement, see Mitchell’s chapter]. In reviewing Eliot’s novel, Ann Mozley argues that there is “a grave class of minds who cannot give their sympathy but through their experience: to such the efforts of imagination, and the description of scenes and modes of life of which they have no personal knowledge, will tell nothing” (433). This sentence identifies the problem fictions confront as they attempt to elicit more democratic sympathy than readers have previously felt. How does the author write about experiences other than her own? How does she open readers’ hearts to the experiences of those they perceive as other than themselves? As Charlotte Brontë confessed when she explained why she could not write a novel like Michael Armstrong, “I must limit my sympathies”: “not one feeling on any subject—public or private, will I ever affect that I do not really experience” (Letters, Vol. 2, 223). But Adam Bede changed all that, as Mozley goes on to explain; it is “a story which we believe has found its way into hands indifferent to all previous fiction, to readers who welcome it as the voice of their own experience in a sense no other book has ever been” (434). Creating a novel that was “remarkable” for its “steady protest against exclusiveness, a characteristic of our time, as prevalent in our literature as in society” (Mozley 434), Eliot fulfilled the artistic and political promise that she identified in “The Natural History of German Life” (1856) when she argued that “[t]he greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. . . . When Scott takes us into Luckie Mucklebackit’s cottage . . . more is done . . . towards obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness, than by hundreds of sermons and philosophical dissertations” (270–1). Yet Eliot’s novel only fulfills the democratic ideal of expansive social inclusion through the sacrifice and exorcism of one character, Hetty Sorrell, on whose suffering the whole edifice is built. Mid-Victorian novels’ competing impulses both to include and exclude marginalized figures characterized as deficit subjects record contradictory British feelings about the process of democratization, a contradictoriness Britons could only fully realize when the country was well beyond the period of the First and even the Second Reform Act. Thinking in 1893 about the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, novelist and critic Margaret Oliphant wrote that It is amazing when we look back to see how strangely different from the present was the state of the country and the public questions that occupied it. . . . The very conditions under which our present life is founded did not exist. . . . There were no factory laws or regulation of labour. . . . It is very difficult for us, amid the broader lines of our present living, to realize that condition of affairs in which all the network of bonds and restrictions caught the feet at every turn. (164) If it was difficult for Oliphant to imagine the tensions and restrictions of those decades, imagine how much more difficult it is for us, as twenty-first-century critics, to capture the feelings of the era in which Britons experienced democracy as inevitable. Victorian social-problem novels allow us to make that trip backward in time and to rethink our image of the Victorian canon. Those historically specific novels record the ambivalent feelings that brought both critics and advocates of democracy together; they register the complex combination of liberalism and illiberalism that characterized the era of reform. The narrative templates developed in the wake of the First Reform Act enable us to 30
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reconceive the evolution of the Victorian novel, to understand that novelists of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s addressed the complexities of Britain’s gradual transition to an increasingly democratic state through stories that invited nineteenth-century readers to imagine a broader and broader sense of social inclusion even as they were constantly reminded of, and perhaps reassured by, the exclusions that made such inclusiveness possible.
Key Critical Works Isobel Armstrong. Novel Politics: Democratic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Nancy Armstrong. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Amanda Claybaugh. The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World. Catherine Gallagher. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative 1832–1867. Fredric Jameson. The Antinomies of Realism. ———. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act. George Levine. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterly. Georg Lukács. The Historical Novel. Ian Watt. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Alex Woloch. The One vs the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel.
Works Cited Allott, Miriam. The Brontës: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, 1974. Armstrong, Isobel. Novel Politics: Democratic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Oxford UP, 2017. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford UP, 1987. Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge UP, 2000. ———. George Eliot. Harvester, 1986. Best, Stephen and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations, vol. 108, no. 1, Fall 2009, pp. 1–21. Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction. Cornell UP, 1991. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Edited by Beth Newman, St Martin’s, 1996. ———. The Letters of Charlotte Brontë: With a Selection of Letters by Family and Friends, 3 vols. Oxford UP, 1995–2004. Carlisle, Janice. “Introduction.” Factory Lives: Four Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiographies. Edited by James R. Simmons, Jr., Broadview, 2007, pp. 11–76. Cazamian, Louis. The Social Novel in England, 1830–1850: Dickens, Disraeli, Mrs. Gaskell, Kinsgley. Translated by Martin Fido, Routledge and Kehan Paul, 1973. Chaloner, W. H. “Mrs. Trollope and the Early Factory System.” Victorian Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 1960, pp. 159–66. Claybaugh, Amanda. The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World. Cornell UP, 2006. Clayton, Jay. “The Alphabet of Suffering: Effie Deans, Tess Durbeyfield, Martha Ray, and Hetty Sorrell.” Influence and Intertextuality, edited by Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, Wisconsin UP, 1991, pp. 37–61. Cunliffe, Marcus. Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery: The Anglo-American Context 1830–1860. U of Georgia P, 1979. Cvetkovich, Ann. Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism. Rutgers UP, 1992. Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. Edited by Fred Kaplan, Norton, 1993. During, Simon. Against Democracy: Literary Experience in the Era of Emancipations. Fordham, 2012. Eliot, George. Adam Bede. Edited by Valentine Cunningham, Oxford UP, 1996. ———. “The Natural History of German Life.” Essays of George Eliot, edited by Thomas Pinney, Columbia UP, 1963, pp. 266–99. Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867. Chicago U Press, 1985. Gould, Rosemary. “The History of an Unnatural Act: Infanticide and ‘Adam Bede’.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 25, no. 2, 1997, pp. 263–77. Gray, Robert. The Factory Question and Industrial England, 1830–1860. Cambridge UP, 1996. Greg, William R. “The Relation between Employers and Employed.” Essays on Political and Social Science, vol. 2. Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1853, pp. 252–302. Guy, Josephine M. The Victorian Social Problem Novel: The Market, the Individual and Communal Life. Palgrave Macmillan, 1996.
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Elsie B. Michie Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Edited by Scott Elledge, W. W. Norton, 1991. Heineman, Helen. Mrs. Trollope: The Triumphant Feminine in the Nineteenth Century. Ohio State UP, 1979. Helsinger, Elizabeth, Robin Lauterbach Sheets, and William Veeder. The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America. 1837–1883, 3 vols. Garland, 1985. Howard, David, John Lucas, and John Goode. Tradition and Tolerance in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Routledge, 1966. Hughes, Winifred. The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860c. Princeton UP, 1980. Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. Verso, 2018. ———. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell UP, 1982. Kestner, Joseph. Protest and Reform: British Social Narrative by Women, 1827–1867. U of Wisconsin P, 1985. Kettle, Arnold. “The Early Victorian Social Problem Novel.” Dickens to Hardy: The Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 6, edited by Boris Ford, Harmondsworth, 1958, pp. 169–87. Kiley, Robert. The Romantic Novel in England. Harvard UP, 1972. Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. NYU P, 1963. Leckie, Barbara. “What Is the Social Problem Novel?” Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Victorian Literature, edited by Lawrence W. Mazzeno, Rowan and Littlefield, 2014, pp. 87–109. Lee, Julia Sun-Joo. The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel. Oxford UP, 2010. Levine, George. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterly. Chicago UP, 1991. “The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy.” The Athenaeum, vol. 615, August 1839, pp. 587–90. Lootens, Tricia. The Political Poetess: Victorian Femininity, Race, and the Legacy of Separate Spheres. Princeton UP, 2016. Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. U of Nebraska P, 1983. Masson, David. British Novelists and Their Styles, Being a Critical Sketch of the History of British Prose Fiction. Gould and Lincoln, 1859. McDonagh, Josephine. Child Murder and British Culture 1720–1900. Cambridge UP, 2003. ———. “Child-Murder Narratives in George Eliot’s Adam Bede: Embedded Histories and Fictional Representation.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 56, no. 2, September 2001, pp. 228–59. McGurl, Mark. The Novel Art: Elevation of American Fiction after Henry James. Princeton UP, 2009. “Memoir of Mrs. Trollope.” The New Monthly Magazine, vol. 55, no. 229, March 1839, pp. 416–17. Mitchell, Sally. The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class, and Women’s Reading 1835–1880. Bowling Green U Popular P, 1981. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. Oxford UP, 1985. Morley, John. The Life of William Ewart Gladstone. Palgrave Macmillan, 1932. Mozley, Anne. “Adam Bede and Recent Novels.” Bentley’s Quarterly Review, vol. 1, July 1859, pp. 433–56. “Mrs. Trollope.” The Eclectic Magazine: Foreign Literature, vol. 27, December 1852, pp. 550–6. Neville-Sington, Pamela. Fanny Trollope: The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman. Viking, 1997. “The New Fiction of Boz and Mrs. Trollope.” The Spectator, vol. 758, 7 January 1843, pp. 16–18. Oliphant, Margaret. Thomas Chalmers: Preacher, Philosopher and Statesman. Methuen, 1893. Schaffer, Talia. Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction. Oxford UP, 2016. Sheehan, Lucy. “Legal Unions: Slavery and Marriage in Victorian Law and Literature.” Unpublished manuscript. Slaughter, Joseph. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. Fordham UP, 2007. Smith, Sheila. The Other Nation: The Poor in English Novels of the 1840s and 1850s. Oxford UP, 1980. Spivak, Gayatri. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry, Autumn 1985, pp. 243–61. Tillotson, Kathleen. Novels of the Eighteen-Forties. Oxford UP, 1954. Trollope, Anthony. An Autobiography. Edited by Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page, Oxford UP, 1992. Trollope, Frances. Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832). Edited by Elsie B. Michie, Oxford UP, 2014. ———. Jessie Phillips: A Tale of the Present Day (1843): The Social Problem Novels of Frances Trollope, vol. 4. Edited Brenda Ayres, Pickering & Chatto, 2009. ———. The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw; or Scenes on the Mississippi (1843): The Social Problem Novels of Frances Trollope, vol. 1. Edited by Brenda Ayres, Pickering & Chatto, 2009. ———. The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy (1840): The Social Problem Novels of Frances Trollope, vol. 3. Edited by Brenda Ayres, Pickering & Chatto, 2009. Vanden Bossche, Chris. Reform Acts: Chartism, Social Agency and the Victorian Novel, 1832–67. Johns Hopkins UP, 2014. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. U California P, 1967. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford UP, 1973. ———. Marxism and Literature. Oxford UP, 1977. Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton UP, 2003.
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3 SHORT FORMS Serialization and Short Fiction Susan David Bernstein
In November 1851, Charles Dickens addressed Elizabeth Gaskell in a letter seeking her contributions to his weekly periodical Household Words (1850–59). “My Dear Scheherazade,” he wrote, “your powers of narrative can never be exhausted in a single night, but must be good for at least a thousand nights and one.” Besides the evident praise for Gaskell’s capacity to weave tales, Dickens also alludes to one of the most popular and abiding story cycles, the Arabian Nights. This compilation of Middle Eastern and Asian folktales, first composed in Arabic and then translated into English in the eighteenth century, captures the captivating narrative power of short-form serials, stand-alone episodes that are told or issued one at a time and linked into a chain of storytelling. Of course, in the Arabian Nights, the perpetuation of ongoing narratives is of mortal importance. To escape beheading, Scheherazade relies on the key components of short-form fiction: repetition, suspense, and pauses (see Bernstein and Chavez). In fact, the Arabian Nights, initially serialized into 445 installments in George Parker’s early eighteenth-century newspapers, continued to appeal to Victorian readers, while allusions to this story cycle abound in many Victorian serial novels. Not unlike today, many Victorian novelists published short-form fiction in periodicals. With the explosion of magazines in the 1860s, due to cheaper paper production, the repeal of taxes on advertisements and on paper, and an increasing demand as a result of rising literacy rates, the serial became the main staple of these publications. Although not all serials were novels and not all fiction were serials, both serials and stand-alone stories are short forms. While scholars have tended to treat the Victorian short story and serial novels separately, it is worth considering how both take up short formats in different ways; as Dennis Denisoff notes in his introduction to Victorian short stories, long serial novels “were themselves broken down into sections of short fiction” (16). All the key novelists of the Victorian era, including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Anthony Trollope, published fiction in short formats. Novelists such as Mary E. Braddon, Dickens, and Trollope served as editors of periodicals that operated as publication vehicles for their own fiction. William Makepeace Thackeray, the initial novel-editor of The Cornhill (1860–1975) in 1860, compared himself to “a Conductor of a Concert in which I trust many skilful performers will take part,” and this term “conductor” quickly became synonymous with novelist-editors of the era (Delafield 58). Dickens edited Household Words and All the Year Round (1859–95); Trollope edited St. Paul’s Magazine (1867–74), and Braddon—the “queen of the circulating library” (Unsigned) with her popular serials, including Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)—edited Belgravia (1866–99). Short formats were a way to get one’s fiction into print quickly, and editors often solicited stories from popular novelists to boost the sales of their periodicals.
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The short forms of fiction published in the Victorian era include part-issue novels appearing in numbered installments, like Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53) and Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72). Novels through the decades included, among thousands, Dickens’s Hard Times (in Household Words, 1854), Eliot’s Romola (in The Cornhill, 1862–63), Margaret Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks (in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1865–66), Hardy’s The Return of the Native (in Belgravia 1878), Trollope’s The Duke’s Children (in All the Year Round, 1879–80), Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (in Macmillan’s Magazine, 1880–81), William Morris’s News from Nowhere (in Commonweal 1890), and H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (in The New Review, 1895), all serialized in parts circulated in a magazine surrounded by other short forms. Rather than novels, some fiction appeared as a cycle of stories, like Arabian Nights, linked through a theme or place and initially serialized in periodicals, and later collected under a title such as Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836–37), Gaskell’s Cranford (Household Words, 1851–53), and Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life (Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1857). As for short fiction, there were many stories appearing in annuals, including the Christmas numbers Dickens issued. These short fictional pieces often clustered around a theme, as in “A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire” (Household Words, December 18, 1852), a collection of 12 tales, many focusing on children, poverty, and disabilities such as Dickens’s “The Child’s Story” and Harriet Martineau’s “The Deaf Playmate’s Story.” Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story” appeared as well in this issue. During other months of the year, periodicals routinely rounded out the contents with single stories, sometimes from well-known writers, such as Eliot’s “Brother Jacob” (Cornhill, July 1864). As the century drew to a close, long serialized novels became less popular than story cycles such as Amy Levy’s “The Diary of a Plain Girl” (London Society, 1883–86) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories that appeared in the Strand 1891–1927). Indeed, most fiction writers from the era published in short forms and in periodicals not only for income but also because the form had gained cultural familiarity and could now even be recognized as a notable subgenre of its own. Approaching Victorian fiction as short forms allows us to escape the isolated realm of the volume form contained whole within its own covers and to explore parts dispersed across space within a magazine issue or across time through weekly or monthly issues. The first section of this chapter offers an overview of Victorian seriality with attention to the form of the novel issued in installments, while the second section turns to the Victorian short story. The third section enhances these discussion by engaging with Elizabeth Gaskell’s multiple and varied short forms, whether installments of her serialized novels, linked short sketches of her fictional Amazon community of Cranford, or the range of short fiction she published in magazines and in collected volumes. Each of these formats offers a different structural opportunity for Gaskell’s explorations of class unrest, the condition of women, especially working poor women, unmarried mothers, and abused wives, and the effects of colonialism.
1. The Short Forms of Victorian Seriality The many variations on serialization—serial, series, seriality—carry different meanings in the context of Victorian publications. As Mark Turner observes, The terms “serial” and “serialization” suggest a range of complex genres, forms, and economic processes. Most basically, a “serial” is any publication that is published by design at regular intervals, of whatever periodicity, but research into serials takes many forms, with attention to specific literary forms/genres (serial fiction or poetry, monthly miscellanies, children’s magazines, etc.), material objects/commodities (a part-issue or number of a magazine, say), readerly experiences (in relation to gender and class, or familial reading, perhaps), and particular economic models for the publishing industry, authors and readers alike. (17) 34
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Turner’s four categories—literary forms, material publication formats, how readers consumed serials, and the economics of the print industry—capture scholarship on Victorian serialization. Until Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund published The Victorian Serial in 1991, scholars tended to privilege the later volume versions of Victorian novels over the original serial publication form. Literary critics had previously treated the serial form as incomplete and fragmentary, a cheapening of the novel as a formulaic series of cliffhanger scenes driven by commercial rather than aesthetic interests, but Hughes and Lund make a strong case for the serial as a prevalent form in which writers wrote and readers consumed Victorian novels. They define the serial novel as “a continuing story over an extended time with enforced interruptions” (1), linking the rhythms of publishing formats across weeks or months to nineteenth-century temporality. These rhythms are both accelerated through technologies of communication, such as the telegraph, and travel, such as the railway, and elongated through theories of the earth’s evolutionary history (5). The serial form expands the time of reading through installments issued over months or years and condenses reading time through the short portions of fiction delivered in regular intervals. While Hughes and Lund made a case for the value of studying the serial form beyond marketplace interests, Bill Bell noted the commercial incentive that made this format especially appealing. Bell provides a Marxist analysis of serialization as he unfolds the marketplace constraints and opportunities that gave rise to the Victorian serial as “a low capital, high yield commodity” in the 1830s (125) [on periodical studies, see Hughes’s chapter]. The diverse newspaper and magazine venues for serials opened up fiction to a wider audience across classes and levels of education (see Law). This was particularly true of the sensation novels of the 1860s, all printed first as installments in magazines as diverse as Sixpenny Magazine, where Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret appeared across 12 months in 1862, to the more upscale one-shilling The Cornhill, where Wilkie Collins’s Armadale was serialized (1864–66) [on sensation, see Gilbert’s chapter]. Some critics found this democratizing impulse through print forms troubling because, as W. F. Rae complained, “the literature of the Kitchen [becomes] the favourite reading of the Drawing room” (92–3). Nevertheless, as Laurel Brake observes, the serial novel offered an economic advantage by recycling the novel in both serial parts and volume wholes (88–9). The most celebrated novelists of the serial form come from the mid-Victorian era, and include Braddon, Collins, Dickens, and Trollope. It was a publication format that accommodated the triple-decker long novels of the era, although the serial form, unlike the triple-decker, actually continued into the twentieth century. Henry James’s penultimate novel The Ambassadors initially appeared in 12 monthly parts in North American Review (1903), while modernist writers also occasionally published in this format, including James Joyce with Ulysses (in The Little Review, 1918–20) [on the novel, see Michie’s chapter]. Other scholars have pointed to the short format of serial fiction issued in magazines as a way of conceptualizing reading. For instance, Julia McCord. Chavez theorizes a “productive wandering” in which readers locate a particular novel’s serial installment among a variety of other items in the contents of an issue, including poetry, articles on historical subjects or scientific topics, and other ongoing serial novels. Rather than taking in a fictive world in isolation, Chavez shows, the periodical format in which serial novels appeared prompted readers to make connections beyond a single imaginary world and go back and forth across different kinds of writing, including advertisements which, in Dickens’s part-issue numbers, echoed commodities and characters within the chapters themselves (see Steinlight). Sean O’Sullivan focuses on how the enforced breaks or pauses of the serial—rather than the promise of connecting within a magazine or across many issues of a serial novel run—encouraged readers to question the satisfaction promised by narrative closure and, instead, to value dissatisfaction through the necessarily fragmentary forms of the serial story, whether a part-issue novel like Middlemarch or a novel serialized in a magazine like Great Expectations in All the Year Round (1860–61). Asks O’Sullivan: “Does the need for satisfaction not run counter to the fragment, to the partial, to the incomplete that are defining elements of serial art?” Noting that the loss of containment—“byways of potential plot and character investigation”—is especially the case with serials due to “alternating 35
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rhythms of appearance and disappearance, or the fluctuation between presence and gap,” O’Sullivan claims that “dissatisfaction is the natural consequence of serials, and we need to embrace it” [on reading, see Buurma and Heffernan’s chapter]. In addition to recent scholarship on Victorian serials, the internet has increasingly provided resources to facilitate researching serial fiction. There are many databases, such as British Periodicals, 1680–1930; The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900; and the Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900, which make possible searches for serial fiction by author or by publication and date, although these are available through subscription only. On a more limited scale but with open access is Troy J. Bassett’s At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837–1901, which includes a section on “Serials” devoted to periodicals that issued serial fiction and short stories. Many scholars have launched open access websites to facilitate reading serially like the Victorians did. Robyn Warhol’s Reading Like a Victorian offers serial novels in “stacks” organized by years so that contemporary readers can easily locate a cluster of novels that overlapped in serial short forms such as Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? (part-issue numbers from January 1864 to August 1865) and Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (also part-issue numbers from May 1864 to November 1865). Warhol’s stacks facilitate what she calls “synchronic serial reading” as “an intervention in the twenty-firstcentury criticism of nineteenth-century literature” (875). My own Serial Readers blog invited readers to comment weekly on each installment of over a dozen novels, including ones by Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell, James, and Oliphant. Such efforts to capture the experiential rhythms of reading by serial formats rather than the immersive reading in a condensed period invites theories of reading short forms, both serial novels and short stories, in time and space [on the digital humanities, see Bourrier’s chapter].
2. The Short and Unitary History of the Victorian Short Story In his contribution to The Cambridge Companion to the English Short Story (2016), John Plotz contends that the Victorian short story is indeed a minor character in the literary history of the age that focuses primarily on the novel. Plotz’s overview organizes his account chronologically, from the urban sketches by Dickens’s Boz in the 1830s, to the abundance of interpolated tales within the “loose baggy Victorian novel” as a voracious “engulfer” of short narratives (92), and finally to the end of the century where “outward and inward pressures” (96), both print market demands and psychological explorations, led to more stand-alone short fictions such as Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. While the engulfment theory allows for embedded stories within larger, ongoing narratives, Plotz never considers the serial installment as an additional kind of episodic short story. Sometimes readers took in a single part-issue, say, of Bleak House, and then took up another one months later, seemingly undaunted by any missing elements of the larger story, a practice consistent with what Peter Stallybrass calls “discontinuous reading” (47). Rather than the term “short story,” which Edgar Allan Poe defined as combining features of unity, concision, and immediate effect (quoted by Plotz 87), we might consider the variety of short forms in which fiction appeared in print and the smaller chunks of writing readers consumed. Instead of locating the Victorian short story as a by-product excreted by that notorious engulfer, the loose baggy monster novel, we might examine the print forms, the units and divisions, with gaps and pauses and disappearances, in which narratives circulated for Victorian readers. Although short stories would often later appear in collected volumes, many were initially published in serial installments, a mini-version of the 20-part-issue numbers of many Dickens novels. As Denisoff remarks in his overview of the form, “The short story is most often defined in contrast to the novel” (17) and often treated separately by scholars. Offering an explanation for why short fiction became more popular in the final decade of the nineteenth century, Denisoff argues that earlier Victorians believed that short fiction required a coherent narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, a form that seems compatible with the serial novel and with realism. But by the 1890s, a proto-modernist approach to fiction, fueled by the Aesthetic Movement, favored psychological stories 36
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rather than organized plots, a quality that was more conducive to the shorter stand-alone stories that filled such magazines as The Yellow Book (1894–97) and The Savoy (1896). Even The Woman’s World (1888–90), edited by Oscar Wilde, carried impressionistic, very brief fiction like Amy Levy’s “The Recent Telepathic Occurrence at the British Museum,” a two-page story that appeared in the first issue of the magazine. Most scholarship on Victorian short fiction revolves around a specific writer, focuses on subgenres like ghost stories or topics like gender or colonialism and race, or uses a Victorian novel as the privileged reference point. For instance, Sophie Gilmartin’s “The Victorian Potboiler: Novelists Writing Short Stories” takes the novel form as its starting point. Amanpal Garcha’s From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction treats short forms as sometimes “discursive plotlessness” or “philosophical meditation” (225), subsidiary to the novels as the more valued achievements of Dickens, Eliot, and Gaskell. Eliot’s first serialized and linking tales, Scenes of Clerical Life, for example, are for Garcha merely “transitional fiction” (225) en route to her novels. But what if we viewed all Victorian fiction as short forms, sometimes woven together through installments or chapters into lengthy novels? Gaskell’s fiction provides an ideal field for exploring this variety of formats. As evidence of the narrative energy she discovered through these short forms, Gaskell successfully traversed length-defined genres and subgenres from her single-, double-, and triple-unit short stories to her last full-length novel Wives and Daughters, serialized in monthly parts (The Cornhill, August 1864–January 1866).
3. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Short Forms I have been suggesting that over the last decades Victorianists, including me, have taken up the question of the serial novel while paying less attention to short stories. There are many ways one might approach these short forms, including developing an inventory of writers and producing a digital study of all the short fiction and serial novels in a given period, cross-referenced for place and form of initial and subsequent publications. With such an inventory in mind, I wish to turn to Elizabeth Gaskell’s short-form publications. Gaskell is an intriguing test case because she wrote many short stories throughout her career, most appearing either in installments or as single items in periodical publications. Yet she is chiefly studied for her novels, primarily her Condition of England fiction Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1854–55), the latter serialized in weekly parts in Household Words. After the commercial and critical success of Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton, Dickens solicited her contributions for his new weekly Household Words; here she published short fiction, a sequence of short stories about a women’s community (1851–1853) later collected in one volume as Cranford (1853), and her novel North and South (1854–55). Although readers tend to think of Cranford as one book at least akin to a novel, the stories were initially issued as nine separate episodes with “at Cranford” in most of the titles, and without a predictable calendar appearance in weekly or monthly portions. Scholars have asserted that Gaskell herself was not especially invested in the serial form of her novels and found the length requirements a constraint. We know that Dickens took her unbroken manuscript of North and South and inserted chapter divisions to meet the installment requirements for Household Words (see both Collin and Harman). However, Maria Damkjær has recently concluded that, although Gaskell wrote North and South initially without shorter divisions, she did later indicate chapter and serial sections, but these parts were not guided by the suspenseful events that shaped Dickens’s and other serial fiction keyed to the calendar of periodical print production. Instead, Gaskell structured the short forms in this serial novel, argues Damkjær, by “a quiet, interruptible, recuperative meantime” (88) that accentuates “the everydayness of the story, the periods of calm between events” (102). To consider Gaskell’s different concept of time in relation to the variety of short-format fiction she wrote and published opens up new avenues of research. As Shirley Foster has noted, Gaskell published over 40 “short pieces, including stories, essays, autobiographical reminiscences, and travelogues” (108) as well as four novellas and seven novels. 37
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Nevertheless, only a handful of short stories tend to draw attention, possibly because, until recent internet access, only those reprinted in collections were readily available, but also possibly because of their “generic indeterminacy” (110), including what Foster extols as one of Gaskell’s most salient innovations, “the constant slippage between real and invented, present and past, effected by the juxtapositions of historically authenticated detail and imaginative reconstruction” (115). Assembling a chart of Gaskell’s fiction of varying published lengths shows some interesting patterns (see Table 3.1, with my appreciation to Jessica Monaco for her research assistance for this chapter, including the information supplied in this table). Twenty-three one-unit magazine publications include three essays; 20 short stories that span her career from her first story, “The Sexton’s Hero,” published under the name “Cotton Mather Mills, Esq.” in Howitt’s Journal in 1847 to “Six Weeks at Heppenheim” in Cornhill Magazine in 1862; and a Gothic tale, “How the First Floor Went to Crowley Castle,” in the 1863 Christmas number for All the Year Round. Five of Gaskell’s short stories appeared in Christmastime special issues edited by Dickens. The Christmas tale, frequently as Gothic ghost stories, is a Victorian subgenre worthy of study (see both Glancy and Thomas).
Table 3.1 Short Fiction and Serial Fiction by Elizabeth Gaskell Title
Periodical & Date
One-unit stories “The Sexton’s Hero”
Howitt’s Journal Sept. 4, 1847
“Christmas Storms and Sunshine”
Howitt’s Journal Jan. 1, 1848
“The Last Generation in England”
Sartain’s Union July 1849
“The Heart of John Middleton”
Household Words Dec. 28, 1850
“Disappearances”
Household Words June 7, 1851
“The Schah’s English Gardener”
Household Words June 19, 1852
“The Old Nurse’s Story”
Household Words Christmas Dec. 1852
“Cumberland Sheep-Shearers”
Household Words Jan. 22, 1853
“Traits and Stories of the Huguenots”
Household Words Dec. 10, 1853
“The Squire’s Story”
Household Words Christmas Dec. 1853
“Company Manners”
Household Words May 20, 1854
“An Accursed Race”
Household Words Aug. 25, 1855
“The Doom of the Griffiths”
Harper’s Magazine Jan. 1858
“An Incident at Niagara Falls”
Harper’s Magazine June 1858
“The Manchester Marriage”
Household Words Christmas Dec. 1858
“The Crooked Branch”
All the Year Round Christmas Dec. 1869
“Curious, If True”
Cornhill Magazine Feb. 1860
“Martha Preston”
Sartain’s Union Feb. 1860
“Six Weeks at Heppenheim”
Cornhill Magazine May 1862
“How the First Floor Went to Crowley Castle”
All the Year Round Christmas Dec. 1863
Two-unit stories “The Well of Pen-Morfa”
Household Words Nov. 16, 23, 1850
“Morton Hall”
Household Words Nov. 19, 26, 1853
“My French Master”
Household Words Dec. 17, 24, 1853
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Short Forms
Title
Periodical & Date
Three-unit stories “Life in Manchester” (later revised as “Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras”)
Howitt’s Journal June 5, 12, 19, 1847
“Lizzie Leigh”
Household Words Mar. 30, Apr. 6, 13, 1850
“Mr. Harrison’s Confessions”
The Ladies’ Companion Feb.–April 1851
“Half a Life-Time Ago” (a revision of “Martha Preston”)
Household Words Oct. 6, 13, 20, 1855
“The Poor Clare”
Household Words Dec. 13, 20, 27, 1856
“Lois the Witch”
All the Year Round Oct. 8, 15, 22, 1859
“The Grey Woman”
All the Year Round Jan. 5, 12, 19, 1861
“French Life”
Fraser’s Magazine April–June 1864
Four-unit stories “Bessy’s Troubles at Home”
The Sunday School Penny Magazine Jan.–April 1852
“Cousin Phillis”
The Cornhill Magazine Nov. 1863–Feb. 1864
Five-unit story “Hand and Heart”
The Sunday School Penny Magazine July–Nov. 1849
Nine-unit stories Cranford
Household Words Dec. 1851–May 1853
“A Dark Night’s Work”
All the Year Round Jan.–March 1863
Serialized novels North and South
Household Words Sept. 1854–Jan. 1855 (22 units)
My Lady Ludlow
Household Words June–Sept.1858 (14 units)
Wives and Daughters
The Cornhill Magazine Aug. 1864–Jan. 1866 (18 units)
Using O’Sullivan’s argument regarding the way in which the serial form cultivates dissatisfaction and suspension rather than tidy closure and containment, I explore a range of short publications by Gaskell. “Disappearances” (1851), an early story and only the second to appear in Household Words, offers a set piece for reading her short forms, as Gaskell relays seven stories of people inexplicably vanishing and only sometimes reappearing. In this series of tales, Gaskell has her narrator erase the temporal gaps between the publication of the stories in different issues; as the narrator tells us, she is reading back numbers of Household Words and selecting articles related to the Metropolitan Police “not as the generality of readers have done, as they appeared week by week, or with pauses between, but consecutively” (1). From here, the narrator uses a “train of reverie and recollection” to draw forth personal accounts of disappearances, narratives of “pursuit and evasion” which have “haunted my imagination longer than any tale of wonder” (3). Two are wedding-day disappearances, one in which the jilted bride anticipates Dickens’s Miss Haversham by a decade; as the narrator observes, “Her whole faculties, her whole mental powers became absorbed in that weary watching” (6). Rather than sleuthing as the police detectives do, the narrator prefers the unsolved, the unaccounted for, the dissatisfactions that come with unresolved endings. And so the story ironically concludes that, thanks to “the days of the Detective Police: if I am murdered or commit bigamy, at any rate my friends will have the comfort of knowing all about it” (10). Elements of the discontinuities of interruptions and suspended closures are evident in Gaskell’s short forms, which often focus on disappearing women or the effects of disappearances on women. The longer serials allow more details in the story of 39
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disappearance, and occasionally the missing person reappears, but the marrow of the short form is always the disappearance itself. Other more recent directions in the study of the short forms of serial installments finds theoretical heft not in resolution but in suspended closure through the patterns of pauses. In “Seriality,” one contribution to Victorian Literature and Culture’s “Keywords” issue, Lauren Goodlad claims that “[t]o a greater extent than any short-form medium, serialized narratives create a real-life experience of inhabiting uncertain worlds whose storylines thwart our longings for knowledge and plenitude” (869). My “Seriality” article, also in the “Keywords” volume, approaches serial short forms through the psychoanalytic concept of transference: “The novel issued in parts, with installments punctuated by regular pauses, encourages the back-and-forthness of transference and countertransference, just as these regular gaps and returns also shape our own affective oscillations between fiction and world” (866). These two considerations of seriality dovetail with O’Sullivan’s argument about the significance of dissatisfaction through the uncertainty of repeated provisional endings and beginnings that the serial form reinforces. This serial choreography of disappearance and reappearance is evident in Gaskell’s short forms. Of the eight stories issued originally in three installments, much of the attention that has been given to Gaskell’s three-part short forms has gone to “Lois the Witch,” which was published in weekly issues of All the Year Round in October 1859 (the first year of the periodical’s run) and then reissued in Right at Last and Other Tales (1860). The interest in the piece is due in large part to its focus on colonial New England and both English and Native characters. I wish to turn instead to the very first of the threepart stories Gaskell published, “Life in Manchester,” which appeared in Howitt’s Journal in weekly segments in June 1847. A few years later Gaskell reworked the story with a title “Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras” and reprinted it in two of her short-form collections: Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales (1855) and The Grey Woman and Other Tales (1865). The original story is noteworthy for the attribution to “Cotton Mather Mills, Esq.,” a pen name alluding to the Puritan New England preacher, one that Gaskell also used with two other stories appearing in Howitt’s: “The Sexton’s Hero” and “Christmas Storms and Sunshine.” The retitled version of the three-part short form echoes the three divisions of the story, each one aligned with a calendrical, seasonal unit: Valentine’s Day (February, early spring), Whitsuntide (June, early summer), and Michelmas (September, early fall). The story portrays Libbie’s observations of the short span of the life of her neighbor Frank Hall, a disabled child. A different kind of disappearance, this story grapples with death, especially child death. “Could it be that he was dead!” wonders Frank’s mother Margaret Hall, “If he were really dead, how could she be still alive?” (185). The final Michelmas section begins with Frank’s funeral and ends with Margaret and Libbie living together, two spinsters caring for each other. The narrator poses a question to the reader in the last paragraph: “Do you ever read the moral, concluding sentence of a story? I never do, but I once (in the year 1811, I think) heard of a deaf old lady, living by herself, who did, and she may have left some descendants with the same amiable peculiarity” (193). This unresolved ending, which even questions whether stories could or should resolve into a moral, still suggests the possibility that Libbie Marsh is such a “descendant” from the unnamed “deaf old lady” who “had a purpose in life” (193). The entwined disappearances of a death within the story and a life beyond the story accentuate the power of inconclusion as an ingredient of the short-form structure, as O’Sullivan attributes to the serial form itself. I offer one more example of a Gaskell short tale that spotlights disappearance as the story itself reappears at weekly intervals. In “Lizzie Leigh,” published in Household Words across three consecutive weeks in 1850, the first episode (chapter one) begins with a mortal disappearance, the death of James Leigh, who tells his wife minutes before dying, “I forgive her, Anne!” (1). The “her” in this pronouncement emerges as the supposedly dead Lizzie, who reappears as the daughter whom the father judged as being as good as dead since she had given birth to a child out of wedlock. Mrs. Leigh—now released from her husband’s prohibition against going to Manchester to find Lizzie—spends the rest 40
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of the story searching for her missing daughter. The second installment picks up on the suspenseful search for Lizzie and her child, with the tension between Mrs. Leigh’s stalwart determination to find her lost daughter and her son Will’s wish to avoid the family “shame” that Lizzie’s discovery would occasion. Coincidence ultimately undoes the various disappearances. Will’s romantic interest, Susan, cares for a young child called Nanny (also named Anne after the child’s grandmother), who turns out to be Lizzie’s daughter. In the third and last installment of two chapters, Lizzie herself finally appears at the start of the fourth chapter but only after Nanny has died. Lizzie’s disappearance, reappearance, and transformation through the experience of suffering highlights a description of her, partway through the final installment, as “not the former Lizzie, bright, gay, buoyant, and undimmed. This Lizzie was old before her time; her beauty was done; deep lines of care, and alas! of want (or thus the mother imagined) were printed on her cheek, so round, so far, and smooth, when last she gladdened her mother’s eyes” (27). The story closes around this reunion of the mother Mrs. Leigh and her child, juxtaposed against the latter’s visit, in the final sentence of the story, to the grave of her own dead infant, while Will and Susan’s child, Nanny—named after Lizzie’s dead daughter—plays nearby. The entire tale is a choreography of loss and gain, plot disappearances and appearances, formulated in each of the three parts. As in these examples, the single- and triple-part short forms of Gaskell’s stories are the most frequent divisions. The table of Gaskell’s short forms (Table 3.1) indicates that there are a few novellas as well, including the four-part “Cousin Phillis” (issued in The Cornhill, 1863–64) and the nine-unit “A Dark Night’s Work” (All the Year Round, 1863). “Cousin Phillis” organizes its plot around geographic dislocation as Phillis, loved from a distance by her cousin Paul Manning, who narrates the story, loses her own romantic love, Edward Holdsworth, when he moves for work from Lancashire to Canada and marries a French-Canadian woman. “A Dark Night’s Work” draws on Gaskell’s initial “Disappearance” theme that borrows from criminal investigations, this time involving the secret burial in the home garden of a man Elinor Wilkins’s father has killed in a fit of rage. Also nine installments, the story offers a sinister view of pastoral life in contrast to the humorous “Cranford” tales, also set in a country village. Unlike the Cranford segments, these were composed closely together and issued in sequential weekly installments from January to March 1863. There are many more ways in which Gaskell’s short forms might be parsed, including the “meantime” which Damkjær claims accentuates the lull in action as a marker of serial installments, a different way of understanding the pauses and gaps O’Sullivan theorizes. Although I have focused on stand-alone stories or installments of serial novels, in terms of these briefer publishing formats, Gaskell’s range of topics leads to other ways to examine short forms, avenues to many authors. “Lois the Witch” has drawn scholarly attention in relation to colonialism and empire. In The Transatlantic Indian, 1776–1930, Kate Flint describes the story as “a tale that dramatizes issues of power and agency . . . in relation to both race and gender” (177), where Gaskell is “explicitly seeking to diminish the difference between Indian and English” (179). Other writers investigate what Barbara Korte explores as the “British imperial project,” which she traces through the short stories of Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad and then follows this theme into more recent short fiction of migrant fiction in contemporary British literature. Korte concludes that “the short story frequently registers hybridity, cosmopolitanism, and even post-ethnicity” (52). The legacy of these recent stories date from the Victorian era when the short story frequently traveled through plot and publication to colonial spaces. Mary Beaumont’s “The Revenge of Her Race” (1879?), set in colonial New Zealand, tells of a dying Maori woman, married to an Englishman, who directs her English nurse to make her children “English like you” and exclaims, “They must be all English, not Maori!” (278) [on settler colonialism, see Wagner’s chapter; on postcolonialism, see Banerjee’s]. In many late-century New Women stories, geographical displacements to colonial spaces become more numerous. Netta Syrett’s “Thy Heart’s Desire” (July 1894) is set in colonial India, and Victoria Cross’s “Theodora: A Fragment” (January 1895) is about a woman who cross-dresses in order to travel 41
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in “the East” with her male companion. Both of these stories were published in The Yellow Book, a magazine of the Aesthetic Movement, and yet no one has traced these currents back to short forms like Gaskell’s story or ahead to Sara Jeannette Duncan’s The Imperialist (1904), about gender and race in the Canadian settler colonies of Britain, a novel serialized and circulated in installments across the British Empire, including the London journal The Queen, The Australasian, and the Toronto News (see Dean) [on the New Woman, see Youngkin’s chapter]. Subjects of gender, especially motherhood, sexuality, and women’s work are prominent in New Women short fiction. S. Brooke Cameron investigates George Egerton’s linked stories in Keynotes about female desire in relation to food in an analysis that stems from the sequence of the stories underscoring “the female protagonist’s struggle against appetitive repression implicit in the domestic plot” (325). Another approach to the wider canvas given to women in Victorian short forms could include C.L. Pirkis’s stories (1893–94) issued in Ludgate Monthly (1891–1901) about woman detective Loveday Brooke (see Miller). These episodic, short-form adventures take Gaskell’s “Disappearances” into fin de siècle London detective stories. And as Foster demonstrates, organizing Gaskell’s short fiction around topics like the Gothic tale and ghost story offers another route into questions of gender and women writers. Nick Freeman’s “Sensational Ghosts, Ghostly Sensations” claims a compatibility between ghost stories and sensation novels, serialized into installments, for mid-Victorian women writers Rhoda Broughton, Amelia Edwards, and Ellen Price Wood, where “sensational supernatural tales” (198) gave these authors speculative forms to imagine women’s lives. Thinking about short forms, parts rather than wholes, of literary production prompts us to investigate alternative accounts of fiction about class relations and labor, printed and circulated and read toward the turn of the century. William Morris’s utopian tales, A Dream of John Bull (1886–87) and News from Nowhere (1890), each first appeared in serial installments in the Socialist League journal The Commonweal. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller analyzes how Morris utilized forms of industrial capitalism, like the serial, to envision a socialist community of collaboration and shared resources in his critique of the ruthless competition and inequalities capitalism fosters (62). I mention Miller’s reading because she addresses the short format of the serial in the wider context of the magazine issues surrounding each installment as part and parcel of Morris’s treatment of labor and class. Again, Gaskell’s short forms furnish various starting points for research on these different strands [on class, see Betensky’s chapter].
4. The Future of Victorian Short Forms Whereas most scholarship on Victorian short fiction and serial novels foreground themes or subject matter, I am calling for attention to formations, to investigating the power of parts rather than wholes. Digital tools and online platforms have opened up new research methods and questions regarding Victorian short forms, especially serial fiction installments. In “Reading Numbers by Numbers,” Catherine DeRose and I use text-tagging and visualization software to discover what we call “the signal of seriality” by comparing Eliot’s serialized fiction as distinct from her non-serialized novels and by taking Dickens’s eight novels first published as monthly part-issue numbers and contrasting them with his five novels published in weekly installments. Our discoveries turned up surprises for future research; for example, we learned that Dickens’s weekly serials emphasized elements of place over character, whereas the monthly serials like David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend, emphasized character or personhood attributes. We had assumed the opposite given the need to remind readers about the narrative context after a temporal reading gap of a month in contrast to one week. Just as the installment plan fit Victorian readers, today, short-format texts fit into the rhythms of our daily life: texting on phones, scrolling on screens, swiping on e-books, listening to podcasts as we move around. We can take such everyday experiences of reading discontinuous short forms and turn back to their Victorian ancestors of serial parts and short stories, a robust archive for continuing to research the interplay of narrative and print form disappearances along with the wider theoretical 42
Short Forms
implications of reading in parts, not wholes. O’Sullivan theorizes how reading in parts instead of wholes encourages us to appreciate the importance of narrative discontent rather than the pleasure of outcomes when we privilege the entire over the segment. We can emphasize reading, researching, and teaching Victorian novels as assemblages of short forms: installments, part issues, even chapters. Attending to different short forms—such as stand-alone short stories, serial segments, sonnets, essay series, reviews—can help us analyze where and how short forms appear and what they can do. Studying Victorian periodicals, where Gaskell’s short stories and serial novels appeared, affords an abundance of part forms. The Research Society for the Study of Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) holds an annual conference and publishes research in Victorian Periodical Review, both superb places for encountering current investigations into Victorian short forms. Access to Victorian periodicals has improved vastly in recent decades through online databases such as ProQuest’s British Periodicals, which includes over 500 journals from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a motherlode for researchers of these short forms. Although scholars have tended to organize and research short forms through themes and topics, categories, and writers, why not read excerpts rather than fetishize wholeness? I once taught a course on nineteenth-century literature, science, and culture. Co-teaching with a historian of science, I convinced her to include on our syllabus the entire unexpurgated edition of On the Origin of Species, something she had excerpted for years in her course on the Darwinian revolution. At the time, I thought the only way to understand this book as a superbly crafted whole was to read the whole, every one of those chapters and every passage with endless examples from Darwin’s observations of the natural world. I’ve since changed my mind. To quote Darwin, “There is grandeur in this view” of literature, but there is also value in savoring smaller sections even apart from the fullness of the long sweep of an entire multiplot narrative. I propose even studying excerpts and abridged editions of long Victorian novels, to evaluate the experience of reading and the design of writing short formats, even if one form—the serial installment or a chapter—is part of a larger text. In short, I am calling for a theory and practice of Victorian short forms.
Key Critical Works Susan David Bernstein. “Seriality.” Susan David Bernstein, and Julia McCord Chavez. “Serialization and Victorian Literature.” Dennis Denisoff. “Introduction.” Amanpal Garcha. From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction. Lauren M. E. Goodlad. “Seriality.” Linda K. Hughes, and Michael Lund. The Victorian Serial. Graham Law. Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press. Sean O’Sullivan. “Serials and Satisfaction.” John Plotz. “Victorian Short Stories.” Robyn Warhol. “Seriality.”
Works Cited Bassett, Troy J. “At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837–1901.” www.victorianresearch.org/atcl/view_periodicals.php. Beaumont, Mary. “The Revenge of Her Race.” The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Fiction, edited by Dennis Denisoff, Broadview, 2004, pp. 277–84. Bell, Bill. “Fiction in the Marketplace: Toward a Study of the Victorian Serial.” Serials and Their Readers, 1620– 1914, edited by Robin Myers and Michael Harris, Oak Knoll, 1993, pp. 125–44. Bernstein, Susan David. “Seriality.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, nos. 3–4, Fall/Winter 2018, pp. 865–8. ———. “Serial Readers.” 2008–2014. http://serialreaders-dickens.blogspot.com/2008/05/. Bernstein, Susan David, and Catherine DeRose. “Reading Numbers by Numbers: Digital Studies and the Victorian Serial Novel.” Victorian Review, vol. 38, no. 2, Fall 2012, pp. 43–68.
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Susan David Bernstein Bernstein, Susan David, and Julia McCord Chavez. “Serialization and Victorian Literature.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 10 October 2017. 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-978019020 1098-e-254. Brake, Laurel. Print in Transition, 1850–1910: Studies in Media and Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Cameron, S. Brooke. “George Egerton’s Keynotes: Food and Feminism at the Fin De Siècle.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, no. 2, 2018, pp. 309–30. Chavez, Julia McCord. “The Gothic Heart of Victorian Serial Fiction.” Studies in English Literature, vol. 50, no. 4, Autumn 2010, pp. 791–810. Collin, Dorothy W. “The Composition of Mrs. Gaskell’s North and South.” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, vol. 54, no. 1, Autumn 1971, pp. 67–93. Corte, Barbara. “The Short Story and the Anxieties of Empire.” The Cambridge Companion to the English Short Story, edited by Ann-Marie Einhaus, Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 42–55. Damkjær, Maria. “Division into Parts: Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and the Serial Installment.” Time, Domesticity, and Print Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Dean, Misao, “Introduction.” The Imperialist by Sara Jeanette Duncan, edited by Misao Dean, Broadview, 2005, pp. 9–31. Delafield, Catherine. Serialization and the Novel in Mid-Victorian Magazines. New York: Routledge, 2016. Denisoff, Dennis. “Introduction.” The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Fiction, edited by Dennis Denisoff, Broadview, 2004, pp. 11–27. Dickens, Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens to Elizabeth Gaskell. Edited by Mitsuharu Matsuoka, 25 November 1851. www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/CD-Letters-EG.html. Flint, Kate. The Transatlantic Indian, 1776–1930. Princeton UP, 2008. Foster, Shirley. “Elizabeth Gaskell’s Shorter Pieces.” The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell, edited by Jill Matus, Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 108–30. Freeman, Nick. “Sensational Ghosts, Ghostly Sensations.” Women’s Writing, vol. 20, no. 2, March 2013, pp. 186–201. Garcha, Amanpal. From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction. Cambridge UP, 2009. Gaskell, Elizabeth. “Disappearances.” Gothic Tales, edited by Laura Kranzler, Penguin, 2000, pp. 1–10. ———. “Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras.” A Dark Night’s Work and Other Stories, edited by Suzanne Lewis, Oxford UP, 1992, pp. 167–93. ———. “Lizzie Leigh.” Cousin Phillis and Other Tales, edited by Angus Easson, Oxford UP, 1987, pp. 1–32. Glancy, Ruth F. Dickens’s Christmas Books, Christmas Stories, and Other Short Fiction: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1985. Goodlad, Lauren M. E. “Seriality.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, nos. 3–4, Fall/Winter 2018, pp. 869–72. Harman, Barbara Leah. “In Promiscuous Company: Female Public Appearance in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South.” Victorian Studies, vol. 31, 1988, pp. 351–74. Hughes, Linda K., and Michael Lund. The Victorian Serial. UP of Virginia, 1991. Law, Graham. Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press. Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture. Stanford UP, 2013. ———. “Trouble with She-Dicks: Private Eyes and Public Women in The Adventures of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 33, no. 1, 2005, pp. 47–65. O’Sullivan, Sean. “Serials and Satisfaction.” RaVoN, vol. 63, April 2013. www.erudit.org/en/journals/ ravon/2013-n63-ravon01450/1025614ar/. Plotz, John. “Victorian Short Stories.” The Cambridge Companion to the English Short Story, edited by Ann-Marie Einhaus, Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 87–100. Rae, W. F. “Sensation Novelists: Miss Braddon.” North British Review, vol. 4, September 1865, pp. 92–105. Stallybrass, Peter. “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible.” Books and Readers in Early Modern England, edited by Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer, U of Pennsylvania P, 2002, pp. 42–79. Steinlight, Emily. “Anti-Bleak House: Advertising and the Victorian Novel.” Narrative, vol. 14, no. 2, May 2006, pp. 132–62. Thomas, Deborah A. “Contributors to the Christmas Numbers of Household Words and All the World Round, 1850–67.” Dickensian, part 1, vol. 69, 1973, pp. 163–72; part 2, vol. 70, 1974, pp. 21–9. Turner, Mark. “The Unruliness of Serials in the Nineteenth Century (and the Digital Age).” Serialization in Popular Culture, edited by Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg, Routledge, 2014, pp. 11–32. Warhol, Robyn. “Seriality.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, nos. 3–4, Fall/Winter 2018, pp. 873–6. ———. “Victorian Serial Novels: Reading Like a Victorian.” https://victorianserialnovels.org/. Unsigned. Advertisement. “Cheap Uniform Edition of Miss Braddon’s Novels.” The Athenaeum, vol. 2835, 25 February 1882, p. 267.
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4 DRAMA AND PERFORMANCE1 Sharon Aronofsky Weltman
When the editors of this volume asked me to write on the burgeoning field of Victorian drama and performance, I was happy that they used both “drama” and “performance” in their request. The conjunction of these two terms matters because it indicates awareness of a play as literary text and as theatrical event, as both genre and medium. The title “Drama and Performance” establishes this chapter from the get-go as bridging what is sometimes felt as a methodological and intellectual divide. Of course, this is a false dichotomy. Whether they come from departments of English, Theatre, or Performance Studies, whether they publish in literary, theatrical, or cultural studies journals, many scholars in practice attend to the play itself, to its production history, and to the many connections that performance has to every other aspect of Victorian life. In this chapter, I first outline the practical ramifications of the intellectual and disciplinary tension between drama and performance. I then show how Victorian theater utterly pervaded the culture. Drama and performance are bound not only to literature but also to visual art, print culture, and every current social issue. However, despite its vitality, its historical consequence, and its growing fascination for many scholars, Victorian drama has almost always been and remains the least examined genre of Victorian literature. Literary critics have tended to veer away from drama relative to other Victorian genres just as theater historians have often passed over what Michael Booth bemoaned as the “arid wasteland of indifference and contempt” from critics of plays written between 1800 and 1890 (“Prefaces” 1); he rightly blames such unwarranted scorn on the unchallenged influence of prior judgments that devalue the fundamental aesthetics of Victorian dramatic art. Instead, I explain the development and trajectory of Victorian drama/performance historiography and literary study, paying attention to what areas of research in drama, theater, and performance now excite the most attention and what seems most likely to elicit interest in the future. I conclude with a call to celebrate the liveness of drama as a performed art, even when our object of study is removed in time.
1. Drama in Performance Part of what is at stake here is the contest between two complementary but sometimes opposed modes of consuming plays. When reading, we absorb them in solitary pleasure, imagining characters interacting as we would with a novel, lingering over startling images and witty wordplay as we would with a poem. When watching dynamically along with the rest of the audience, we hear the give and take of laughter and audible gasps. We share in the actors’ power of performance as they embody the characters, perhaps literal spitting distance from us. We collectively lose ourselves to 45
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the sensation and spectacle of the mise-en-scène in real time. Plays exist to be performed; even socalled closet dramas construct a presumed audience in their very form, and indeed some have been mounted onstage and many have been read aloud at home and in classrooms. The lyrics of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas often appear in British literature anthologies (the Norton eighth edition includes a passage from Iolanthe, for example), and, yes, W.S. Gilbert’s words merit consideration from a strictly literary point of view. Yet even though the words can stand on their own, much of the artistic content of the song is lost without hearing its music, watching its performers, and experiencing it within the dramatic context of the show. The cast and crew also consume the play by fashioning not just an interpretation of the verbal text but also a realization of their own artistic vision. Their effort is, furthermore, labor, as Tracy Davis points out (Actresses as Working Women xi); actors are not just performing their parts, they are performing their jobs, as are stagehands, supernumeraries, ticket takers, playbill printers, musicians, dancers, and miners of the lime that goes into making limelight (Shepherd-Barr). While “drama” refers to both a literary and performance genre that we appreciate greatly on page or stage, “performance” encompasses a wide array of other theatrical displays, including nonverbal arts, even—though this goes beyond the parameters of this chapter—everyday performances of identity that are the bread and butter of performance theory. In the restricted sense of theatrical genres, the term “performance” covers the embodied presentation of widely produced canonical comedies like Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) as well as intimate or experimental dramas with little public exposure, like Michael Field’s A Question of Memory (1893), plus a multitude of Victorian popular entertainments: circus, ballet, minstrelsy, Christmas pantomime, opera, charades, home theatricals, tableaux vivants, platform lectures, Punch and Judy puppet shows, Wild West shows, magic-lantern shows, and public recitations [on popular culture, see Daly’s chapter]. The Victorians voraciously attended and participated in all of them. With the extra-theatrical spectacles of public exhibitions such as dioramas, cycloramas (which used sound), and Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition, we encounter audiences even larger than either the theater-going or the novel-reading public (Altick 4). In New Readings in Theatre History (2003), Jacky Bratton urges examination of a broader theatrical culture than provided by more traditional theater historiography, which long focused narrowly on contextualizing dramatic literature or chronicling teleologically the rise of dramatic realism. This evolutionary paradigm understands Victorian theater history as a process of development through the mid-century introduction of three-dimensional sets and genuine props, the improvement to lighting and other stage technologies, the development of more restrained acting styles, the introduction of the fourth wall, the advancing respectability of actors (manifest in the knighting of Henry Irving in 1875), and culminating in the works of Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw. Such a view posits Victorian theater as a journey through the unfortunate excesses earlier in the century to a happy ending in dramatic modernism. Instead, Bratton suggests we seek to understand what Victorian audiences valued in what they saw (14), including popular genres like circuses, melodrama, and pantomime along with highbrow tragedy, opera, and drawing-room comedy, without simply inverting the high/ low binary or reading these artworks as merely stepping stones to or digressions from the ultimate prize of what twentieth-century aesthetics approved (10).
2. Theater in Victorian Culture The enormously plentiful performance options available to the Victorians were inextricable from the social and aesthetic fabric, including visual culture [on visual culture, see Flint’s chapter]. Popular plays grew out of famous paintings, like Douglass Jerrold’s The Rent Day (1832), inspired by David Wilkie’s paintings Rent Day (1807) and Distraining for Rent (1815). Dion Boucicault drew inspiration for The Colleen Bawn (1860) and other plays from steel engravings of W.H. Bartlett’s art published in the 1842 The Scenery and Antiquities of Ireland (Smyth 348). Stage adaptations of novels routinely recreated 46
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several of the primary texts’ illustrations using a widespread theatrical effect requiring the actors to suspend all movement, creating a tableau or “picture,” as most playscripts describe it, that exactly replicated the familiar visual image. As Martin Meisel explains, this phenomenon of “realization” was so satisfying and so routine that artists drew illustrations in anticipation of their being reconstructed in stage tableaux (247–65). Celebrity photographs of actors were all the rage, but the connections between theater and photography are far more complex. Photography studios mimicked play sets, while plays—most famously Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859)—incorporated photography as crucial plot elements so that, as Daniel Novak concludes, “plays about photography offered an opportunity for Victorian playwrights, actors, and audiences . . . to rethink the relationships between the live event and the recorded image, ephemeral experience and the historical, textual, and visual archive” (58). Besides star-studded collectible photographs and cartes de visites, theatrical images circulated beyond the stage by appearing on souvenir sheets and illustrations in playbills, newspapers, and books. Toy theaters provided three-dimensional replicas of real theaters. People purchased kits used by adults as well as children that included abbreviated versions of popular plays along with facsimile scenery to slide into grooves (like those on real stages that accommodated sliding flats) and paper puppet characters in the appropriate costumes. Skelt’s, Pollock’s, and other companies held voluminous catalogs of popular play packets selling for a “penny plain and twopence coloured,” as Robert Louis Stevenson rapturously described them in Memories and Portraits (213), recounting the joy of hand-coloring them himself. Pictorial renditions of dramatic scenes or actors in costume range from fine art to folk art: massive oil portraits like John Singer Sargent’s famous 1889 rendering of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth and tiny prints of stage luminaries with their costumes decorated by fans with color, fabrics, and tinsel to hang in the home parlor. Sargent’s portrait now resides in the Tate as a lavishly displayed public artistic treasure while the tinseled prints generally can be found either tucked away into dark archival boxes or displayed—proudly, but quite out of general view—in a specialty gallery like the Garrick Club in London, awaiting study. Victorian performance also linked symbiotically to print culture through advertisements, reviews, puff pieces, and celebrity interviews that supported periodicals while keeping audiences coming to the theater [on periodicals, see Hughes’s chapter]. Most prominent in this relationship between print and drama are the many publication formats of plays, including both solid middle-class literary productions and inexpensive acting editions (which also included an illustration, often the only visual remnant of a specific opening night performance). Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Richelieu is an excellent example, as it appears repeatedly in both formats: on one hand, it was published in a substantial 1839 volume published by Saunders and Otley, in which the author included multiple explanatory footnotes and appended three long historical odes, and on the other hand, it appeared in a flimsy paperback, the 1873 Dicks’ Standard Plays acting edition (No. 317), including costume descriptions and the cast list for the premiere. Moreover, theater supplied many plots, characters, and settings for poems and novels; for instance, the blockbuster star vehicle for Kate Bateman, Augustin Daly’s Leah, the Forsaken (1863), was novelized as Leah, The Jewish Maiden in 1864 with cover art that appears to be copied directly from Bateman’s well-publicized shows (Hess 69, 73). Several famous novelists acted onstage: Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins are among the best-known amateur examples, but also Mary Elizabeth Braddon acted professionally before becoming the best-selling author of sensation fiction. Even dramatic structures contributed to the novel. Dickens—all by himself—supplies endless examples of theater’s influence on the novel. Oliver Twist, the narrator tells us, is organized like “all good, murderous melodramas” with “the tragic and comic scenes in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well cured bacon” (117). Nicholas Nickleby depends on the theatrical Crummles family for plot development as well as comic relief. And what would the London of Great Expectations be without Wopsle’s Hamlet? But most any other Victorian author would also serve to illustrate this point; think of Alcharisi in Daniel Deronda, Vashti in Villette, and virtually every aspect of Vanity Fair. 47
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But even more obvious in interconnection between theater and fiction is the novel-to-stage conduit. Because there were no copyright protections addressing theatrical adaptation for authors of fiction, Victorian popular novels inevitably and often instantaneously appeared in adaptation on Victorian stages, often long before their serial sources completed their first run. One famous example is again Oliver Twist (1837–39), adapted at least five times before the last episode appeared in Bentley’s Miscellany, after which more than 200 new versions appeared onstage in England or America by the turn of the twentieth century (Bolton 104–5). Another is The String of Pearls (1846–47), better known as Sweeney Todd. It was melodramatized at the Britannia on March 1, 1847, four weeks before the novel’s final installment came out in The People’s Periodical and Family Library on March 29. The fact that the dramatist George Dibdin Pitt was often erroneously credited with penning the anonymously published novel shows how at times the staged version could not only contribute to the source’s success but even overwhelm the original; later rewritings for page, stage, and screen incorporated elements from the play (Weltman “Introduction” 8–10). Examining the fiction-drama nexus teaches us much about how the Victorians interpreted both. Performances that routinely reached the semiliterate spread a source text’s popularity far beyond the reading public, an essential element in expanding and intensifying the popularity and wide dissemination of novels in Victorian popular culture. With playhouses plentiful in both working-class and wealthy London neighborhoods and a transportation system promoting attendance all over the city, people from most social strata loyally attended all sorts of theater, often seeing the same show repeatedly [on class, see Betensky’s chapter; on radical print culture, see Haywood’s chapter]. George Augustus Sala proclaimed that he and fellow journalists went a minimum of three times a week to the Adelphi during the 1863–64 run of Leah, the Forsaken for the tears and thrills the melodrama provided (Hess 344). Even high-culture critic John Ruskin saw the same Hengler’s Circus pantomime production of Cinderella five times in one week, using it to illustrate a point about poverty and public indifference to childhood privation in the March 1874 installment of Fors Clavigera (Weltman “Arcadias of Pantomime” 41–3). Jane Moody offers Queen Victoria as the best summation of “the heterogeneous character of Victorian performance,” listing the monarch’s entertainment choices “from an equestrian production of St George and the Dragon at Astley’s Amphitheatre to the antiquarian splendours of Shakespeare as mounted by Charles Kean, from Boucicault’s melodrama, The Colleen Bawn, to a private performance at Sandringham starring Henry Irving and Ellen Terry” (113), where the great duo enacted the eclectic choices of Leopold Lewis’s 1871 melodrama The Bells and the trial scene from The Merchant of Venice (Stoker 375). We simply cannot understand Victorian culture or its literature if we ignore the attractiveness, ubiquity, variety, centrality, and influence of theater, including popular performance. So important is the “performative character of Victorian culture” (Moody 112) that Tracy Davis and Peter Holland title their volume of essays on nineteenth-century theater The Performing Century.
3. Drama in the Victorian Critical Landscape The expanding field of Victorian drama and performance bustles with new work and ideas, but in Victorian studies more generally, fiction reigns supreme, as it has done for a long time. Linda Shires points out in a 1999 essay that, when she interviewed job candidates for a Victorianist position, she “discovered the odds at about 9 to 1 for fiction” applicants over everything else; she concludes that “we are overtraining parochial readers of fiction” and witnessing the “marginalization of poetry, drama, and non-fictional prose” (482–3). Fiction still dominates, as we can see from the outsized representation of the novel at any all-purpose Victorian studies conference, the title page of any nonspecial issue of a general Victorian studies journal, and from the 8 to 1 fiction to drama ratio apparent in a limited investigation I conducted into the numbers of literary-critical works posted in the MLA International Bibliography for all Victorianist publications between 2010 and 2018, a ratio similar to the one Shires observed among emerging scholars between fiction and everything else 20 years ago. 48
Drama and Performance Table 4.1 Number of Publications Listed in the MLA Bibliography in Each Genre from 1920 to 2018 Decade of MLA International Bibliography Search (conducted January 18, 2019)
Drama or theater or performance and Victorian
Nonfiction or essay or journalism and Victorian
Poetry or poem or verse and Victorian
Novel or fiction and Victorian
1920–1929
0
2
2
3
1930–1939
2
1
6
13
1940–1949
5
3
3
24
1950–1959
7
11
17
36
1960–1969
20
45
291
84
1970–1979
71
121
489
377
1980–1989
63
266
718
781
1990–1999
110
286
763
1310
2000–2009
312
458
1048
2424
2010–2018
409
726
1106
3362
This asymmetrical survey result came out of a much broader MLA search: I queried four major literary categories—drama, nonfiction, poetry, and fiction—over a period of the past 99 years, January 1920 to December 2018, searching decade by decade for ten decades, with the final time slot necessarily shy one year of a complete ten-year span (see Table 4.1). To capture as many Victorianist critical articles, books, and dissertations as possible in each category, I used the following Boolean search terms: 1) Victorian AND (drama or theater or performance); 2) Victorian AND (nonfiction or essay or journalism); 3) Victorian AND (poetry or poem or verse), and 4) Victorian AND (novel or fiction). Please note that the items in parentheses must be entered on the same line, separated by the word or for the Boolean search to work correctly. Interpreting this data set needs a couple of caveats that render any conclusions fuzzy at best. Some critical or historical works, such as a single study that discusses Bulwer-Lytton’s works in several genres, might show up in multiple generic categories, even if that individual study were more about one genre than another. In addition, not all relevant publishers and journals report to the MLA. An article on Ruskin might appear in an art or architecture history database instead, so that, for example, a recent essay on him in the Journal of Architectural Education appears in the Art and Architecture Complete database but not in the MLA International Bibliography. This small, informal MLA Bibliography investigation is an illustrative exercise, not an exhaustive or conclusive survey. And it is very suggestive. One obvious take-away is that scholarly publication venues (including peer-reviewed online journals) have expanded very significantly over the past century for all fields. This chimes with what historians of academic journals have already told us: the number of scholarly journals in English and American literature more than doubled between 1960 and 1975 (Townsend 36). Also, in the 1960s and 1970s, Victorian poetry ruled. A surprise is that the quantity of publications for drama declined by nearly 12% between the 1970s and the 1980s, while poetry grew by almost 38%, fiction by 70%, and nonfiction more than doubled during that same period. Perhaps the most startling revelation is that while other genres (despite some leaps and plateaus) have increased in volume along relatively steady trajectories, the field of Victorian fiction studies— ever since outstripping poetry in the 1980s as the most studied genre—has taken off explosively, quadrupling in output. Since the 2000s, the number of fiction entries has been larger than all the others combined. 49
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3500
3000
2500
2000
1500
1000
500
0 1920-1929 1930-1939 1940-1949 1950-1959 1960-1969 1970-1979 1980-1989 1990-1999 2000-2009 2010-2018
Drama or theater or performance and Victorian
Nonfiction or essay or journalism and Victorian
Poetry or poem or verse and Victorian
Novel or fiction and Victorian
Figure 4.1 Visualization of Number of Publications Listed by MLA in Each Genre from 1920 to 2018
The graph in Figure 4.1 starkly presents how completely fiction now leads the critical field of Victorian studies and how persistently drama/theater/performance remains the least studied area, despite the richness of the archive and its significance to Victorian culture. But it also shows the field of Victorian theater as vigorous and escalating. At times its rate of increase surpasses all the others, nearly tripling publications between the 1990s and the 2000s. In recent decades, it has grown at a faster pace than poetry. Rather than raw numbers (as we have seen in Table 4.1 and Figure 4.1), when considered in terms of percentages of all publications during each decade, fiction fluctuates inversely to poetry; the two genres trade places in taking precedence. As Figure 4.2 shows, in the 1940s, fiction peaked at 68.6%, while poetry plummeted to only 8.6% of all MLA-posted publications. In the 1960s, poetry prevailed at 66.1%, while fiction sank to 19.1%. In the 2010s, fiction’s climb has surged to 60%—within six percentage points of retaking poetry’s former apex and not far from its own all-time high—while poetry’s steady slide has brought it down to 19.7%, almost matching fiction’s lowest point. Although we must remember that the recorded volume for the earlier decades is too small for confidence in drawing strong conclusions and that we do not have complete data for the 2010s, we see that Figure 4.2 depicts oddly shifting counterweights as though fiction and poetry were funicular cars that can never summit the mountaintop together but can only meet halfway up or down the hill. While poetry and fiction keep switching which gets the lion’s share of publication, drama has generally remained in fourth place, plodding along its subterranean path, except for the 1940s, when poetry was at its nadir; surprisingly drama rose above both poetry and nonfiction to its all-time high of 14.3% of the total publications listed on the MLA International Bibliography. Even while keeping in mind the 50
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80.0%
70.0%
68.6% 66.1% 60.0%
60.0%
50.0% 42.9% 40.0%
30.0%
28.6%
20.0% 14.3%
19.7%
19.1%
15.5%
13.0% 10.0% 4.5%
7.3%
8.6%
0.0% 1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
Drama or theater or performance and Victorian Poetry or poem or verse and Victorian
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010-18
Nonfiction or essay or journalism and Victorian Novel or fiction and Victorian
Figure 4.2 Percentages of Total Publications for Each Genre Listed by MLA from 1920 to 2018
tentativeness of such an informal study, we see that Victorian drama chronically receives less scholarly attention than the other genres. The pedagogical imbalance is even more blatant than the publication disparity. Major anthologies covering the Victorian period typically include one representative play, or two at most. The Longman fourth edition offers just Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Both the eighth and ninth editions of the Norton contain the Wilde plus Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1902). The Broadview manages to add a third, Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859), but only by relegating the Shaw selection—Widowers’ Houses (1892)—to the online supplement. So disproportionate is this paltry representation of Victorian drama to the vast quantities of theater the Victorians themselves devoured and admired that Julianne Smith names Victorian drama the “forgotten” genre (167). She argues for its importance and utility in the contemporary college English classroom, challenging students to enter the digital archives to recover overlooked Victorian playwrights, including women. Drama and performance offer broad opportunities for recovery work, perhaps more right now than fiction does [on recovery work, see Schaffer’s chapter]. For scholars seeking neglected areas to work on, nothing is more promising than drama.
4. Historical Origins of Critical Neglect Victorian drama suffers from scholarly inattention in part due to the long-held perception that British theatre underwent a sharp decline after Richard Sheridan’s comedies of the 1770s, not to be revived again until Shaw and Wilde close to the end of the nineteenth century. Many times, I have heard excellent conference papers in which scholars jarringly (to me, anyway) apologize for the poor quality of the Victorian plays they go on to analyze for the next quarter-hour, justifying their scrutiny on other than aesthetic grounds. Such trash-talking lectures are often enormously fun, treating the audiences to some of the most egregiously awful bits of the plays discussed. I do it myself. But in using this 51
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rhetorical ploy, Victorianists are, perhaps inadvertently, echoing without scrutinizing Victorian critical responses to their own theatrical culture. Even as they flocked to the theater, Victorians lamented what they regarded as the diminished quality of drama, as it seemed more and more to accommodate the vulgar tastes of ever larger and more varied urban populations (Booth Theatre in the Victorian Age 6). Expanding rail service throughout the century brought middle-class suburbanites into town just for an evening of fun, further impacting the diverse composition of audiences. Every London neighborhood seemed to have its own playhouse, and house dramatists from the East End to the West to the southside of the Thames were busily writing for specific theaters to keep the masses entertained. In addition to wanting to please their multiclass audiences, they generated a new play every other week, usually with one in performance while the next was in rehearsal. George Dibdin Pitt’s Tallyho, the Modern Mephistopheles (1845) “was thought of, written, rehearsed, and produced on the stage with success, in four days,” according the Theatrical Journal; but despite the dig at such expeditious output, the reviewer liked it anyway, remarking that “Some of the scenes are of the highest comic description” (“The Drama” 291). The assumption that in general the aesthetic value of dramatic presentations rushed onto the stage under such harried conditions for an uneducated populace must necessarily suffer is not entirely unwarranted. Yet despite some trite dialogue and shortcuts in characterization and plot that speed production in the way we now readily accept in television writing, these plays were often not only enormously popular but also full of smarts, invention, pathos, comedy, social commentary, careful planning, and—yes—good writing. Many Victorian plays are worth examining for themselves as well as for understanding what drew audiences, how theater intersected with other cultural productions, and how they satisfied Victorian artistic standards. It’s important to explore Victorian theatrical aesthetics without succumbing to their own self-flagellation on sometimes classist grounds, just as it’s important to recognize that for decades Victorianists have comfortably studied other popular genres without focusing on the slippery and subjective question of quality. Tallyho appeared at the Britannia in Hoxton, in London’s East End, in a working-class neighborhood, where Dibdin Pitt was the in-house playwright. But tragedies and comedies produced at the most prestigious theaters—London’s patent playhouses of Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket—also generated despairing remarks from contemporary critics who, instead of complaining about degraded tastes, decried a tendency to imitate elite older forms instead of embracing contemporary problems and language. Of course, this is the very approach taken by many melodramas (the century’s most popular genre), which often dealt with topical issues such as abolition, temperance, war, class, unfair eviction, domestic abuse, and the plight of the ex-con. In an age of bardolatry, playwrights who aspired to literary greatness competed not only with one another but also with William Shakespeare, who was enjoyed, revered, and performed continually and visibly throughout the century in all kinds and classes of theater (Foulkes 1). This was emphatically the case even before 1843, when the patent houses held a monopoly on purely spoken drama, so that Astley’s Circus got around the prohibition by playing Shakespeare on horseback, with Richard III proving the best suited selection. After 1843, once it was legal to perform Shakespeare at minor (often working-class) theaters without adding music or gimmicks, his popularity there boomed. For example, the Britannia (known as The People’s Theatre) in London’s East End mounted 21 productions of Macbeth, 22 of Richard III, 24 of Hamlet, and 27 productions of Othello between 1850 and 1879, including performances by the great African American tragedian Ira Aldridge (Norwood 30–5). The problem for new tragedies, according to the Victorian critic and thinker George Henry Lewes, was that authors stuck to rank imitation of Elizabethan plays rather than deploying a new “nineteenth century drama . . . that will appeal to a wider audience than . . . a few critics” (104). Those writing tragedies often continued the five-act verse format that had ossified centuries before. As Booth explains, “The Victorian theatre witnessed the death of English classical tragedy . . . largely because its authors looked back to a former age and were cut off from the mainsprings of modern English life and thought” (English Nineteenth-Century Plays 21). For those interested in a richer understanding of how Shakespeare was viewed in the 52
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nineteenth century, see the two-volume collection Victorian Shakespeare, edited by Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole; Richard Schoch’s Not Shakespeare: Bardolatry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century; and Sophie Duncan’s Shakespeare’s Women and the Fin de Siècle. While curmudgeonly Victorian critics generally decried the elite drama as hopelessly outmoded and the popular theater as pure vulgarity written by hacks, modernist critics—whose opinions we have largely inherited—judged Victorian drama before the 1890s as even worse, in what Bratton sees as the ultimate fruition of earlier critics’ elitist discomfort or disdain (12–13). As with fiction and poetry, they valued realism or experimentation over the sentiment, spectacle, accessibility, and sensation that made up so much of the entertainments presented to their parents and grandparents. Twentieth-century aesthetic criteria, when imposed on the nineteenth century, have worsened the already poor literary estimation of Romantic and Victorian drama [on critical history, see Buurma’s and Heffernan’s chapter]. Yet “people must be amuthed,” as Mr. Sleary says in Hard Times (45). Despite the Victorians’ own anxieties about the quality of their theatre in relation to the Renaissance (Newey, “Victorian Theatre” 660), they lived in a performance-rich world and kept going in droves to hippodramas, tragedies, burlesques, pantomimes, operas, farces, puppet shows, and especially to melodramas. Contemporary critical inquiry into Victorian drama and performance endeavors to proceed without modernist prejudice, setting aside the teleological notion that later tastes must be superior to nineteenth-century palates. Instead, popularity itself is a metric worth exploring because of the insights it gives us into Victorian fantasies, fears, and fun.
5. Melodrama Revived Though the word “melodramatic” has become synonymous in the vernacular with overacting, the genre has sticking power. Not only is it alive and well in current entertainment (via soap operas and films, for example) but also in Victorian scholarship, where it is a growth industry. Booth pioneered this resurgence of interest with his influential 1965 English Melodrama, triggering what Moody has called “perhaps the most important development in the historiography of the nineteenth-century theatre” (120). Suddenly scholars were investigating how melodrama originated in the eighteenth century and morphed transnationally according to changing laws that regulated its performance differently across Europe (McWilliam 56); for example, statutes restricted melodrama or “boulevard” theater to specific venues on Paris’s Boulevard du Temple, nicknamed the Boulevard du Crime for the bloody plots enacted there. Victorian melodrama comprises many subgenres, including domestic, oriental, and nautical melodramas; critics examine the cultural work each does, as in Carolyn Williams’s study of Gilbert and Sullivan’s spoofs of nautical melodramas (G&S 76). Researchers detail how the Victorians remediated the tired genre of tragedy through melodrama (Newey, “Victorian Theatre” 667), finding it more flexible and alert to changing tastes and current events; the genre is “responsive to immediate social circumstances and concerns” (Mayer, “Encountering Melodrama” 146). Examples are Tom Taylor’s The Bottle (1847), portraying the destructive force of alcoholism on family life, and his The Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863), depicting the desperate struggles of a man wrongly convicted. The very speed in which so many melodramas were conceived, rehearsed, and produced onstage, even though deplored by critics, promoted the melodramatists’ ability to reflect, process, and record pressing social concerns. A constitutive element of melodrama—originally known as melody-drama—is music, both through musical underscoring and songs interspersed throughout the play. Michael Pisani teaches us how melodrama’s music works to manipulate emotion, create suspense, and convey dramatic information (168–206). A related component is the sensation scene, like the unconscious man tied to a log inexorably approaching a buzz saw blade rescued at the last possible second by his girlfriend in Arthur Joseph’s Blue Jeans (1890). Dion Boucicault’s sensation melodramas succeeded wildly on both sides of the Atlantic, employing shipwrecks, earthquakes, boat races, train crashes, burning tenements, horse 53
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races with real horses, and a heroine freed from beneath the wheels of a London Underground train in After Dark, or a Drama of London Life (1868). This latter trope was so popular that it appeared in five different plays in London simultaneously in October of 1868 (Daly 47), surely signifying cultural anxieties about rapid transit. The Melodrama Research Consortium (founded by Matthew Buckley) hopes to establish online resources such as the Melodrama Database Project to make such plays more readily accessible. The melodramatic mode in fiction has generated landmark books such as Peter Brooks’s The Melodramatic Imagination in 1976 and Elaine Hadley’s Melodramatic Tactics in 1995, each kickstarting decades of work connecting melodrama to the novel and other media. Williams’s Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama (2018) brings this steady stream of inquiry up to date. The movement to think about how melodrama functions in the novel runs in concert with a shift to recognize the role of theater and performance in fiction more broadly. Further rethinking the relationship of performance to Victorian culture by extrapolating from theater to theatricality in the novel are Joseph Litvak’s Caught in the Act (1992), Lynn Voskuil’s Acting Naturally (2005), David Kurnick’s Empty Houses (2012), and Neil Hultgren’s Melodramatic Imperial Writing (2014).
6. Current Research Trends What, besides the fruitful fascination with popular forms such as pantomime, music hall, and melodrama, are among the main currents of Victorian drama and performance research now? Themes run parallel to other literary and cultural scholarship that readers will recognize in the following quick snapshots of recent work. Performed identity remains a hot topic. In Racism on the Victorian Stage (2007), Hazel Waters excavates the development and dissemination of stereotypes through popular culture as well as the surprising challenges to racism presented by Victorian performances. Excellent studies of Victorian minstrel shows—hugely popular, with a variety of repercussions lasting throughout the century and well beyond—include Sarah Meer’s Uncle Tom Mania (2005) and Michael Pickering’s Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain (2008). Both Edward Ziter, in The Orient on the Victorian Stage (2003) and Marty Gould, in Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter (2011), consider the theater’s construction of Britain’s identity in relation to their own and others’ empires. Class should have its own state-of-thefield essay because it is almost impossible to discuss theater in the Victorian period without considering socioeconomic factors affecting any play’s creation, production, and reception; but among the most influential studies are Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow’s Reflecting the Audience (2001) and Tracy Davis’s The Economics of the British Stage 1800–1914 (2007). An upswing in studies of women and the Victorian stage began with important studies such as Kerry Powell’s Women and Victorian Theatre (1997) and Gail Marshall’s Actresses on the Victorian Stage (2006). Exciting new work is appearing on the generic overlap of novels and plays on the cultural understanding of the actress (Miller 1), actresses’ autobiographies (Wiet, 233), and women’s nonfiction narratives of theatrical spectatorship (Eriks-Cline 161). Heidi Holder takes an intersectional look at women playwrights like Melinda Young, the prolific house dramatist for the Effingham in the East End (175); the first Anglo-Jewish woman dramatist, Elizabeth Polack, also wrote for working-class theaters on the East End (Weltman “Women Playwrights” 269–71). Perhaps most influentially, Kate Newey’s Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain (2005) identifies hundreds of rarely or never studied nineteenth-century women playwrights. Despite Newey’s continued groundbreaking work and the many scholars following her, the rich cache of Victorian women dramatists remains largely untouched. Also sparking excitement are three growth areas across many disciplines: ecocriticism, adaptation, and digital humanities [on ecocriticism, see Voskuil’s chapter; on digital humanities, see Bourrier’s chapter]. Baz Kershaw’s Theatre Ecology (2007) inaugurated interest in theatrical environmentalism. 54
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Devin Griffiths looks at Victorian melodrama as a central genre of the Anthropocene, so fueled by petroleum that he denominates it “petrodrama” (611) [on the Anthropocene, see Taylor’s chapter]. Adaptation studies have mushroomed across disciplines in the past decade. Victorian theater was already fecund ground for adaptations, as we have seen with Dickens; current transmediations and appropriations of Victorian fiction and drama, such as Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2014), help us to understand their source texts in new ways (Meer “Melodrama and Race” 202–3). The digitization of plays, including even the massive Lord Chamberlain’s Plays collection of manuscripts at the British Library, has made the immense archive of Victorian dramatic literature accessible worldwide. However, this online collection is awkward to use and available only through expensive databases. The need for high-quality scholarly digital editions of Victorian plays is urgent. A fine example is The University of South Florida’s online Dion Boucicault Collection, which includes transcripts of plays, scans of promptbooks, and interpretive material. Equally dynamic are the arenas of practice-led research, Victorian theater’s impact on early film, the always vital Wilde, and of course Shaw, with his own specialty journals and conferences. An exciting avenue is production-as-research, the technique of mounting a staged reading or full performance that recovers a forgotten or rarely produced Victorian play. An example is Lizzie Leigh!, produced by members of the Nineteenth Century Theatre Caucus (19CTC) at the North American Victorian Studies Association conference in 2018 (Recchio n.p.). Another instance is Dickens’s 1837 burletta, Is She His Wife?, staged in 2015 at King’s College London and the Charles Dickens Museum, using “historically informed rehearsal methods to interrogate Dickens’s use of these theatrical conventions,” and investigating how performance changes the way we read text (Robinson et al. 164). David Mayer has for decades worked tirelessly to showcase the importance of early film as its own kind of archive of Victorian theatrical practice, documenting the permeability of the two media with shared actors, directors, writers, plays, and staging techniques. The journal Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film often publishes in this area, as on every other topic discussed here. Finally, Wilde and Shaw remain the touchstones of Victorian drama and performance; thrilling new work keeps percolating in their everrelevant oeuvres, so abundant that they need not be called out here.
7. Conclusion Joining drama to performance means examining the whole artistic enterprise of text and action. It means observing if, when, where, and by whom a play was performed, the socioeconomic class of the audiences it served, and what sort of sets and costumes the production could afford. Noting the sex of the actors performing male and female roles affects interpretation, since cross-gender performance was common in the Victorian period; the sex of the performer (a known characteristic evident onstage, on the playbill, or through fans’ prior knowledge) shaped how audiences read the character portrayed. Understanding Victorian theatre means attention to stagecraft, lighting, scenery, sets, direction, acting, publicity, financing, labor, management, specific theaters and their audiences—all elements that might seem extra-literary but that are inextricably bound up in the art form for which the word on the page is only one factor. The play is only half the thing; even when they abundantly reward close reading to be enjoyed and taught strictly as literature, Victorian plays are still in a sense, ultimately, a roadmap for theatrical experience. A script is no more an accurate representative of what happens in performance than reading the musical score and libretto would approximate hearing Jenny Lind sing the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor (1835). As we study Victorian drama and performance, we should see new performances, engage in or support practice-led research, and read plays aloud with students. Crucial to considering the field of Victorian drama and performance is recognizing its multiplicity in subject and methodology. Indeed, even more basic is appreciating theater as central to Victorian culture. Theater comprises the intersection of embodiment with language, aesthetics, economics, gender, race, disability, sexuality, transit, entertainment, markets, popularity, politics, and material culture. 55
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Tremendous untapped research opportunities in archives of unread plays and unexamined ephemera beckon. Acknowledging that drama and performance were wholly integral to Victorian life and that understanding them changes the way we understand the culture, let’s incorporate the forgotten genre fully into Victorian studies.
Note 1 My thanks go to Ethan Gilberti for his research assistance and to Daniel Novak for perennial reading and rereading.
Key Critical Works Michael Booth. English Melodrama. Jacky Bratton. New Readings in Theatre History. Peter Brooks. The Melodramatic Imagination. Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow. Reflecting the Audience. Tracy Davis. Actresses as Working Women. Elaine Hadley. Melodramatic Tactics. Martin Meisel. Realizations. Katherine Newey. Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain. Kerry Powell. Women and Victorian Theatre. Carolyn Williams. Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama.
Works Cited Altick, Richard. The Shows of London. Harvard UP, 1978. Bolton, H. Philip. Dickens Dramatized. G. K. Hall, 1987. Booth, Michael. English Nineteenth-Century Plays, vol. 1. Oxford UP, 1969. ———. Prefaces to English Nineteenth Century Theatre. Manchester UP, 1980. ———. Theatre in the Victorian Age. Cambridge UP, 1991. Bratton, Jacky. New Readings in Theatre History. Cambridge UP, 2003. Daly, Nicholas. “‘Blood on the Tracks’: Sensation Drama, the Railway, and the Dark Face of Modernity.” Victorian Studies, vol. 42, no. 1, 1998–99, pp. 47–76. Davis, Jim, and Victor Emeljanow. Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880. U of Iowa P, 2001. Davis, Tracy. Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 1991. ———. The Economics of the British Stage 1800–1914. Cambridge UP, 2007. Davis, Tracy, and Peter Holland. The Performing Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre’s History. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. Edited by Kate Flint, Penguin, 2003. ———. Oliver Twist. Edited by Fred Kaplan, W. W. Norton, 1993. “The Drama.” Theatrical Journal and Stranger’s Guide, vol. 6, no. 300, 13 September 1845, pp. 290–2. Duncan, Sophie. Shakespeare’s Women and the Fin de Siècle. Oxford UP, 2017. Eriks-Cline, Lauren. “‘Mere Lookers-On at Life’: Point of View and Spectator Narrative.” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, vol. 44, no. 2, 2017, pp. 154–72. Foulkes, Richard. Performing Shakespeare in the Age of Empire. Cambridge UP, 2006. Griffiths, Devin. “Petrodrama: Melodrama and Energetic Modernity.” Victorian Studies, vol. 60, no. 4, 2018, pp. 611–38. Hess, Jonathan. Deborah and Her Sisters: How One Nineteenth-Century Melodrama and Host of Celebrated Actresses Put Judaism on the World Stage. U of Pennsylvania P, 2018. Holder, Heidi. “‘Lady Playwrights’ and the ‘Wild Tribes of the East’: Female Dramatists in the East End Theaters.” Women and Playwriting in Nineteenth-Century Britain, edited by Tracy C. Davis and Ellen Donkin, Cambridge UP, 1999. Hultgren, Neil. Melodramatic Imperial Writing: From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes. Ohio State UP, 2014. Kershaw, Baz. Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events. Cambridge UP, 2007. Kurnick, David. Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel. Princeton UP. 2012. Lewes, George Henry. Dramatic Essays. Walter Scott, 1896.
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Drama and Performance Litvak, Joseph. Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel. U of California P, 1992. Marshall, Gail, and Adrian Poole. Victorian Shakespeare, 2 vols. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Mayer, David. “Encountering Melodrama.” 2004. The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, edited by Kerry Powell, Cambridge UP, 2006. ———. Harlequin in his Element: The English Pantomime 1806–36. Harvard UP, 1969. McWilliam, Rohan. “Melodrama.” A Companion to Sensation Fiction, edited by Pamela K. Gilbert, WileyBlackwell, 2011. Meer, Sarah. “Melodrama and Race.” The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama, edited by Carolyn Williams, Cambridge UP, 2018. ———. Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, & Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s. U of Georgia P, 2005. Meisel, Martin. Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England. Princeton UP, 1983. Miller, Renata Kobetts. The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage. Edinburgh UP, 2018. Moody, Jane. “The State of the Abyss: Nineteenth Century Performance and Theatre Historiography in 1999.” Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. 5, no. 1, 2000, pp. 112–28. Newey, Katherine. “Victorian Theatre: Research Problems and Progress.” Oxford Handbook on Victorian Literary Culture, edited by Juliet John, Oxford UP, 2016. Norwood, Janice. “The Bard Returns to Shoreditch: Shakespearean Productions at the Britannia Theatre.” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, vol. 35, no. 2, 2008, pp. 29–47. Novak, Daniel A. “Caught in the Act: Photography on the Victorian Stage.” Victorian Studies, vol. 59, no. 1, 2017, pp. 35–64. Pickering, Michael. Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain. Ashgate, 2008. Pisani, Michael. Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth-Century London and New York. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2014. Recchio, Thomas. “Embodied Scholarship: A Performance History of William Richard Waldron’s Lizzie Leigh; or, the Murder Near the Old Mill (1863).” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, June 2019, doi:10.1177/ 1748372719853234. Robinson, Joanna, Oskar Cox Jensen, and Emma Whipday. “Is He a Dramatist? Or, Something Singular! Staging Dickensian Drama as Practice Led Research.” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, vol. 43, no. 2, 2016, pp. 160–82. Schoch, Richard. Not Shakespeare: Bardolatry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge UP, 2002. Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten. “Behind the Limelight: Theatre’s Working Environment.” Conference Paper. Theatrical Ecologies and Environments in the Nineteenth Century. U of Warwick, 1 July 2017. Shires, Linda. “Victorian Studies and Cultural Studies: Interdisciplinarity, the Market, and a Call for Critical Realism.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 27, no. 2, 1999, pp. 481–6. Smith, Julianne. “Teaching the ‘Forgotten’ Genre: Victorian Drama.” Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century: A Guide to Pedagogy, edited by Jen Cadwallader and Laurence W. Mazzeno. Springer, 2017. Smyth, Patricia. “The Popular Picturesque: Landscape in Boucicault’s Irish Plays.” New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 4, 2016, pp. 347–62. Stephens, John Russell. The Profession of the Playwright: British Theatre 1800–1900. Cambridge UP, 1992. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Memories and Portraits. Scribner’s and Sons, 1902. Stoker, Bram. Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving. London: W. Heinemann, 1906. Townsend, Robert B. “History and the Future of Scholarly Publishing.” Perspectives, October 2003, pp. 32–41. Voskuil, Lynn. Acting Naturally:Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity. U of Virginia P, 2004. Weltman, Sharon Aronofsky. “‘Arcadias of Pantomime’: Ruskin, Theater, and The Illustrated London News.” Victorian Pantomime: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Jim Davis, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ———. “Introduction: George Dibdin Pitt’s 1847 Sweeney Todd.” Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film, vol. 38, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–22. ———. “Melodrama, Purimspiel, and Jewish Emancipation.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 47, no. 2, 2019, pp. 305–45. ———. “Women Playwrights and the London Stage.” The History of British Women’s Writing, 1830–1880, edited by Lucy Hartley, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Wiet, Victoria. “The Actress in Nature: Environments of Artistic Development in Victorian Fiction and Memoir.” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, vol. 45, no. 2, 2018, pp. 232–53. Williams, Carolyn, editor. Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama. Cambridge UP, 2018. ———. Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody. Columbia UP, 2010.
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5 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Jessica Straley
Children’s literature became an object of serious scholarly study only once it was deemed impossible. Jacqueline Rose’s groundbreaking The Case of Peter Pan: or, the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984) famously claims, “Children’s fiction is impossible” because it relies on “the impossible relation between adult and child. Children’s fiction is clearly about that relation, but it has the remarkable characteristic of being about something which it hardly ever talks of ” (1). Rose’s argument unravels any consensus that children’s literature is for children and insists instead that the texts circulating under this guise communicate an adult fantasy of childhood innocence. This critical reorientation from child to adult was essential in making the now ironically named “Children’s Literature” a scholarly field. While texts like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Treasure Island (1883), and Peter Pan (1904) were thought to be for and about children, they occupied a lower rung of literariness; institutionally sanctioned study of them belonged to colleges of education rather than to departments of English. But as exhibitions of adult desire masquerading as appeals to children, they open themselves up to psychoanalytic and poststructuralist critique. Rose and the scholars who follow her example reveal the rich complexity and copious contradictions inherent in our very adult construction of “childhood.” Since Rose’s study, scholars have challenged this evacuation of the child (real or implied), but the category “children’s literature” still retains an aura of impossibility. In contrast to other terms used for literary taxonomy—such as “the novel” or “sensation fiction,” elsewhere in this collection— “children’s literature” does not name a distinct genre with shared corpus of conventions [on the novel, see Michie’s chapter; on sensation fiction, see Gilbert’s chapter]. Distinct from “postcolonial” or “ecostudies,” “children’s literature” does not signal a set of theoretical practices. Uniquely, children’s literature designates its audience—and maybe not even that. Children do not author, publish, or purchase the principal texts and may constitute only a portion of the readers. Moreover, the term “children” does not signify any coherent demographic but masks divisions of gender, race, class, and historical context. Dissatisfied with this categorical fuzziness, Perry Nodelman’s The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature (2008) seeks narrative commonalities, among them central child characters and the tension between home and away. In response, Marah Gubar, in “On Not Defining Children’s Literature” (2011), resists this impulse; “insisting that children’s literature is a genre characterized by recurrent traits,” she writes, “is damaging to the field, obscuring rather than advancing our knowledge of this richly heterogeneous group of texts” (210). After all, we can recognize children’s literature even when we cannot define it. The works of Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, and J.M. Barrie are canonized as the core of the “Golden Age”—the period from 1860 to 1920 when children’s authors relaxed the didacticism and moralism 58
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of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and reveled in imagination, pleasure, and play. The profusion of Victorian and Edwardian children’s books provides critics an abundance of genres with which to work: fairy tales (George MacDonald, Juliana Horatia Ewing, Oscar Wilde), animal stories (Anna Sewell, Rudyard Kipling, Beatrix Potter), poetry (Christina Rossetti, Stevenson, Walter de la Mare), moral and religious literature (Mary Martha Sherwood, Margaret Gatty, Hesba Stretton), tales of science and magic (Charles Kingsley, Arabella Buckley, Lucy Rider Meyer), and nonsense (Edward Lear, Carroll, Hilaire Belloc). In addition, adventure fiction (R.M. Ballantyne, G.A. Henty, H. Rider Haggard), school stories (Thomas Hughes, Frederick Farrar, L.T. Meade), and domestic fiction (Mary Louisa Molesworth, Charlotte M. Yonge, E. Nesbit) for an older juvenile market allow scholars to revisit the origins of “young adult” fiction. Technological improvements in printing showcased the artwork of talented Victorian illustrators for children, including Walter Crane, Kate Greenaway, Arthur Rackham, and Jessie Willcox Smith. Periodicals, such as The Children’s Friend (1824–1930), Aunt Judy’s Magazine (1866–1885), Little Folks (1871–1933), The Boy’s Own Paper (1879–1967), and The Girl’s Own Paper (1880–1956), likewise flourished. Though primary material has always been abundant, Rose’s claim that children’s literature is about the relation between child and adult offered a welcome definition that bounded the category and elevated it for academic consideration. Much subsequent scholarship has focused on texts that thematize the shifting, vexed, and at least partially illusory relation between empowered agent and vulnerable object. This approach has been especially fruitful for Victorianists exploring a historical era in which our modern conceptions of childhood and adolescence were invented and in which development from youth to maturity was reorganized according to new pedagogical, medical, economic, anthropological, and biological principles. While attention to the adult/child relation has produced fine work—indeed granting integrity to our coordinated work as a field—the latest scholars are productively resisting its limitations. Surely, they argue, not all children’s literature pursues this relation solely or most importantly. They ask, instead, what other concerns might be revealed if we look elsewhere, what canonical elasticity might be afforded by including texts without this focus, and what new critical questions might be asked about young people, their literary culture, and their reading practices.
1. Escaping Innocence Before Rose, the Victorian embrace of childhood innocence was largely assumed. Psychoanalytic critic Bruno Bettelheim was first to suggest, in The Uses of Enchantment (1975), that children are not so innocent, nor do they identify with “good” characters. In contrast to sentimental portraits of virtuous heroes, fairy tales present children with oral fixations, boys who lie to their superiors, and girls who hate their mothers. This catalog of disobedience, Bettelheim writes, allows child readers to work out their unwholesome ids within the safety of stories. Fairy tales featured prominently in the critical turns of the twentieth century: Bettelheim’s psychoanalytic study, Vladimir Propp’s codification of Russian Formalism, and Jack Zipes’s elaboration of Marxist theory. Zipes’s Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (1983) challenges assumptions of innocence but, in contrast to Bettelheim, rejects that the tales are “universal, ageless, therapeutic, miraculous, and beautiful”; he understands “the fairy-tale discourse as [a] dynamic part of the historical civilizing process” (1, 11). This attention to history has led to vital scholarship on the tales’ oral tellers (Marina Warner), their transition to text (Maria Tatar), and their publication (Caroline Sumpter). The tradition was transformed in the nineteenth century, absorbing and altering scientific theories (as shown by Melanie Keene and Laurence TalairachVielmas), and reinvented by authors like MacDonald (see Roderick McGillis and John Pennington’s volume) and Wilde (see Joseph Bristow’s edited collection). Taking up the nebulous, multi-genre category of children’s literature, Rose breaks with Bettelheim’s use of psychoanalysis: “We have been reading the wrong Freud to children,” she writes (12). Whereas Bettelheim claims that fairy tales get children’s psychology right, Rose denies any “pure 59
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point of origin lurking behind the text which we, as adults and critics, can trace” (19). Literary criticism, she argues, seeks origins (referents, meanings) that precede textual depiction; indebted to the philosophies of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, children’s literature positions the child as that origin. According to Rose, there is no innocent origin that precedes our imbrication in language, culture, sexuality, and the state; reading childhood as a fantasy about intelligibility (not intelligibility itself) is the right Freud. The phantasmal child informs James Kincaid’s Child-Loving (1992). For Kincaid, our cultural preoccupation with this collective myth of childhood innocence veils its distasteful inversion: an obsession with the erotic child. His analysis places nineteenth-century children’s literature into conversation with twentieth-century tabloid journalism and pedophilia trials, importantly implicating modern scholars in a cultural continuum of “child-loving.” For Rose and Kincaid, the child is a fantasy mutually constructed by both the Victorian author and the modern critic. This rejection of any essentialist and transhistorical childhood allowed literary scholars to interrogate childhood as a signifier of shifting cultural values and political ideologies. In Centuries of Childhood (1960), French historian Philippe Ariès had already shown that modern concepts of childhood bear little relation to their medieval antecedents, and the children’s literature criticism following the seminal works by Zipes, Rose, and Kincaid recognizes childhood as variably constructed. Karín LesnikOberstein, introducing the collection Children in Culture (1998), sums up this poststructural stance: “Childhood is, as an identity, a mediator and repository of ideas in Western culture about consciousness and experience, morality and values, property and privacy, but, perhaps most importantly, it has been assigned a crucial relationship to language itself ” (6). No longer conceived as an origin before culture, childhood is culture’s “repository.” Recognizing the cultural and historical contexts in which children’s texts circulate, Beverly Lyon Clark’s Kiddie Lit (2003) analyzes the category of children’s literature itself, the low cultural status it has been historically afforded, and its belated reception into the academy. Not every early pioneer of children’s literature criticism abandoned the notion that some books are written, at least partially, for young people. Without disclaiming the appeal made by children’s literature to adults, U.C. Knoepflmacher’s “The Balancing of Child and Adult: An Approach to Victorian Fantasies for Children” (1983) argues that children’s books meld “the wishful, magical thinking of the child” with “the adult’s self-awareness” in order to engage both audiences simultaneously (499). For Knoepflmacher, this “double readership” complicates the singular ideal reader in the reader-response criticism of Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser; the simple charms that the text provides for the child are as important as the moments that invite the adult’s critical perspective (501). Though reader-response criticism lost its hold in literary study, the association that the category “children’s literature” implies between text and audience makes readership harder to ignore. Knoepflmacher’s Ventures into Childland (1998) returns to this “dual audience” in order to explore the differences between how male and female authors established, policed, and dissolved the boundaries between child and adult (xiii). In Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (2009), Gubar reframes Knoepflmacher’s dual address into a corrective of Rose’s denial of child agency. She rejects Rose’s assertion that children’s literature “hardly ever talks” of the relation between child and adult, rendering the child passive in its silent assertion of power. Rather, according to Gubar, Victorian children’s literature talks about this relation compulsively—laying bare the politics of its production and, in so doing, offering possibilities for child agency. In the place of the passive child, Gubar gives us child “collaborators”: characters who reject the cultural narratives and subject positions assigned to them and who find spaces (however slight or sizable) to rewrite their stories. Around this figure, Gubar forms an altered, but still comfortably loose, definition of children’s literature: “a genre that celebrates the canny resourcefulness of child characters without claiming that they enjoy unlimited power and autonomy” (5). The Victorian era is rife for her analysis because, according to her fine-toothed historical contextualization, the Golden Age is bounded by early nineteenth-century experiments with child narrators (invoking questions of agency and voice) and the turn-of-the-century employment of 60
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child actors (generating power negotiations and collaborations among unequal parties). In between, Victorian children’s literature offered savvy child heroes who refuse to leave storytelling to the adults. Looking beyond fictionalized adult/child collaboration, scholars are recovering archival evidence of intergenerational co-production. In Between Generations (2017), for example, Victoria Ford Smith reconstructs the working relationship between Robert Louis Stevenson and his teenaged stepson Lloyd Osborne that produced Treasure Island. Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s “Castaways: The Swiss Family Robinson, Child Bookmakers, and the Possibilities of Literary Flotsam” (2011) presents the efforts of a Boston family to rewrite, to illustrate, and to self-publish their own adaptations of Johann David Wyss’s 1812 German classic. Such co-productions underscore children’s exercise of their own agency in response to adult-authored texts. Ingeniously using Wyss’s trope of the shipwrecked family, Sánchez-Eppler writes, “I treat children as participants in cultural formation, creatively deploying flotsam salvaged from the adult world” (451). Defining childhood itself as this cultural recycling and repurposing, she reiterates Gubar’s sense that children’s literature encourages the “canny resourcefulness” by which children, unable to invent their own worlds from scratch, learn to refashion even the most retrograde and inhospitable cultural artifacts that they receive. Significant in Sánchez-Eppler’s study is an awareness of distinctly childlike reading practices. If children’s literature insists on naming its readers, then we should consider the unique ways that texts invite young people to enact their roles as readers. Though few youths have the resources to selfpublish revamped versions of their favorite books that Sánchez-Eppler’s Bostonians enjoyed, others rewrite texts in more ephemeral—but still childlike and juvenile—ways. In Nesbit’s The Wouldbegoods (1901), the siblings pilfer their uncle’s taxidermy specimens to recreate scenes from Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894). Likewise, in Stalky & Co. (1899), Kipling’s irreverent adolescents laugh themselves silly imitating episodes from Farrar’s schoolboy tragedy Eric; or Little by Little (1858). Such deployment of salvaged flotsam need not appear within the text; reading aloud, a practice inherent to children’s literature, demands performance and improvisation. For small children, parents’ reading invites repetition, interruption, and digression. For teenaged working-class readers unable to purchase costly books, penny dreadfuls offered the most literate among them the opportunity to perform stories for their fellows’ amusement [on popular culture, see Daly’s chapter]. Children’s and juvenile literature, then, may be more useful as categories that gesture not so much at who reads but rather at how to read: or, rather, reading as acting out, reworking, rewriting. Focused on American literature, Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence (2011) is instructive for Victorianists. Following Kincaid’s suspicion of innocence, Bernstein levels a withering critique of American culture’s fetishization of innocence as “raced white” and “characterized by the ability to retain racial meanings but hide them under claims of holy obliviousness” (8). Equating innocence with whiteness (but never openly admitting as such) allows not only the perpetuation of violence against non-white bodies but also, more perniciously, the denial that such violence is happening. Neatly bringing together Rose’s innocence paradigm and Gubar’s focus on collaboration, Bernstein contrasts this adult fantasy of childhood innocence with the material opportunities granted to the child reader to usurp the text. She reveals this tension by vitally expanding our concept of the literary. Bernstein urges us to see Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) not as a singular novel authored by Harriet Beecher Stowe, but as a “repertoire” variously constituted by “books and illustrations, handkerchiefs and dolls, playscripts and stage props, photographs and statues” that capitalized on the popularity of Stowe’s characters (14). Examining this repertoire allows Bernstein to explore how texts and objects suggest both licensed and illicit ways to use them, simultaneously circumscribing and ceding agency to users [on material culture, see Lutz’s chapter]. The literary circulates through culture in many forms besides the textual. Once eighteenth-century publisher John Newbery began selling children’s books bundled with balls and pincushions, children’s literature became inextricable from cross-marketing and diverse media. In the next century, tea sets, toy soldiers, and baby dolls invited Victorian children to extrapolate their reading onto their physical worlds. Children’s fashion, for instance, like the lace collars and velvet hats worn by Frances Hodgson 61
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Burnett’s protagonist in Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), and paper costumes, such as those modeled on the outfits in Greenaway’s illustrations, encouraged young people to perform an adult fantasy of childhood, but also to improvise with their own invented versions. Children’s parlor games and home science sets extended literary and textual engagements (as discussed by Megan Norcia and Virginia Zimmerman). A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) famously offers a template, not only in its stories but also in the sale of cuddly bears that it promotes, for the child’s reworking of literary and material culture through play. Though “play” is an overused and frequently under-defined concept in children’s literature criticism, I am specifically referring to the possibilities within texts and corollary material objects that invite readers to act out characters and plots and thus to revise received literary culture into their own imagined worlds. Recovering how children revised Wonderland during tea parties—or determining whether or not they did—taxes the skills of the most seasoned archivist and risks making erroneous claims about real children. The rise of the child consumer during the Victorian era is the subject of Dennis Denisoff ’s collection The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture (2008). Christopher Parkes’s Children’s Literature and Capitalism (2012) shows how, through popular biographies of inventors, juvenile readers were encouraged to become entrepreneurs. But Parkes and Denisoff ’s contributors steer clear of resting their analyses on textual reception by real children. Bernstein helpfully lets us off the hook when she claims, “The goal is not to determine what any individual did with an artifact but rather to understand how a nonagential artifact, in its historical context, prompted or invited—scripted— actions of humans who were agential and not infrequently resistant” (8). Though such objects contain within them implicit or explicit instructions, their potential uses expand beyond this prescription. The critic’s role, then, is not to chase down how any particular child actually played with an object—or imaginatively revised a text—but rather to examine the possibilities for transgressive and generative play that exist alongside more sanctioned scripts. Even if the script reads “innocence,” opportunities for agency abound.
2. Rewriting the Body The scholarly focus on the adult/child relation has also tended to look past another relation at the heart of children’s literature: between children and their bodies. Readers instantly recognize that Peter Rabbit’s insatiable appetite and Colin Craven’s fear of hereditary disability signal a prevalent interest in bodily functions and limitations. For young pre-readers, poetry is carried by the parent’s voice; for new readers, open-ended stories invite embodied performance; and for juveniles, reading aloud enables text to pass through the body. In its zeal to bare the fantasy of innocence, however, much scholarship either bypassed this corporeality or sublimated it in a haze of poststructuralism. Maria Nikolajeva, in “Recent Trends in Children’s Literature Research” (2016), celebrates a shift in literary criticism that is now reorienting the field: “Until relatively recently, children’s literature research was predominantly inspired by cultural theory, viewing the child and childhood as a social construction rather than a material body existing in a material world” (133). This “material turn,” she argues, can unite both the literature scholars and specialists in the field of education who share an investment in children’s literature. One such turn to the child’s body is informed by cognitive science [on psychology, see Keen’s chapter; on brain science, see Stiles’s chapter]. In “The Meaning of Children’s Poetry” (2013), Karen Coats seeks an analytical method specific to children’s poetry; she argues that children’s poetry uniquely “connect[s] the body to language in a material and sensual, rather than linguistically or conceptually meaningful, way” (133). The “lilting, rhythmical speech” of children’s poetry, she writes, “replicates the shushing sounds of the womb,” thus “preserv[ing] the body in language, while its metaphors,” which are “rooted in sensual experience, help us understand who we are as subjects and objects in a world of signs” (136, 134). Debbie Pullinger uses the term “embodied prosody” to account for the dynamics of voice and touch in nursery rhymes like “This Little Piggy,” when the parent’s fingers 62
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trippingly enact the pig’s “wee wee wee—all the way home!” and up the child’s leg. Embodiment especially interests Nikolajeva, who contends in Reading for Learning (2014) that “our engagement with fiction . . . is firmly anchored in the body” (10). Her reading of The Secret Garden (1911) focuses on how Burnett’s narration connects Mary’s emotions “to body movement, vision, tactile and olfactory perception,” which actual child readers can easily recognize because the “basic emotions are hard-wired in our brains” and first felt corporeally (134, 133). Assertions of a causal connection between literary language and neural activity demonstrate just how far scholars have come from Rose. Literary critics like Lesnik-Oberstein say this is too far (“Cognitivism”). She argues that cognitive science indulges precisely the delusion that Rose exposed 35 years ago: that the real child comes before language and therefore literature can render that child accurately and reach her effectively. The impossibility of audience rears its head again for children’s literature scholars, along with the persistent question: do we analyze how literary texts represent and affect real children or do we interrogate the fantasy of childhood presented to us in texts written by (and maybe for) adults? Is it possible to bridge the two approaches? Nikolajeva importantly praises the “material turn” not merely for its engagement with cognitive science (her chosen methodology) but also for its promise to unite children’s literature scholarship with other burgeoning critical discourses—such as queer theory, disability studies, animal studies, post-humanism, and ecocriticism—that have operated at its margins but have yet to form its theoretical center. These new critical interventions are worth a closer look. Despite the influence of poststructuralism, Victorianist scholars never wholly lost sight of children’s bodies, in part because the Victorians kept them under such careful scrutiny. Imperially inflected adventure fiction, for instance, pits healthy, heroic British bodies against stealthy, hedonistic bodies of the native other. Postcolonialist children’s literature critics, like M. Daphne Kutzer and Kathryn Castle, point out these racialized and gendered constructs that, according to more recent scholarship, seek to train the real bodies of juvenile readers [on postcolonial readings, see Banerjee’s chapter; on race, see Tucker’s chapter]. Troy Boone’s Youth of Darkest England (2005) examines the ideological formation of the adolescent working-class body as “mechanized physicality” to be inducted into imperial service as well as reports of boys who dropped out of the Boy Scouts in explicit resistance to this civilizing program (1). In Soon Come Home to this Island (2008), Karen Sands-O’Connor examines both the ambivalent representations of slave bodies in children’s literature of the West Indies and the efficacy of abolitionist literature on young white readers. Imperialist literature for children promises to remain a fruitful resource as scholars expand the literary corpus outside the British Isles to Africa, India, and China, as engaged by Mawuena Kossi Logan, Supriya Goswami, and Shih-Wen Chen, respectively. Gender in the Victorian period was inseparable from empire, specifically the professed division between home and away at the heart of the imperial project. Bristow’s Empire Boys (1991) argues that colonial fantasies supply their readers with models of militant masculinity; Claudia Nelson’s Boys Will Be Girls (1991) contends that this imperial model of manliness replaced the more feminized manhood of early nineteenth-century evangelical fiction. Subsequent interest in the Victorian construction of gender looks to adventure fiction (Bradley Deane), legends of feral boys (Kenneth Kidd, Making American Boys), tales of orphan girls (Joe Sutliff Sanders), and children’s periodicals (Kelly Boyd and Kristine Moruzi). Because boyhood and girlhood are central to coming-of-age stories, this scholarship largely focuses on texts for a juvenile audience and, commonly, for both adolescent and adult readers. As a consequence, in explorations of gender and race, children’s literature has been able to join and to inform broader critical conversations about fiction in the Victorian period; these studies are instructive for thinking through whether we wish to preserve or, alternatively, to puncture the taxonomic boundaries around children’s and juvenile literature. Though queer theory grapples with representations of childhood, Victorian children’s literature remains a largely untapped resource [on queer readings, see Dau’s chapter]. In their introduction to Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (2004), Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley argue, “The very 63
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effort to flatten the narrative of the child into a story of innocence has some queer effects” (xiv), but their collection bypasses texts for children. Tison Pugh’s Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature (2011) elaborates: “This conflicted gesture—of purging sexuality from a text to preserve children’s innocence while nonetheless depicting some form of heterosexuality as childhood’s desired end—reveals the queer foundations of children’s literature” (2). In “Queer Theory’s Child and Children’s Literature Studies” (2011), Kidd notes, with justified surprise, the scholarly division between his two titular subjects and calls for a criticism that can “theorize (not just interpret) children’s literature and children’s literature studies” (186). He asks us not only to look for queer characters or to consider how the innocence paradigm produces queerness, but rather to conceive of children’s literature criticism itself as a queering endeavor—one constructed (like straight and gay childhoods) retrospectively from the belated standpoint of the adult, the end product of sexual maturity or textual sagacity. Like the recent iterations of postcolonialism, gender studies, and queer theory, disability studies asks us to reconsider bodies [on disability studies, see Stoddard Holmes’s chapter]. In Take Up Thy Bed and Walk (2001), Lois Keith highlights the many disabled characters in Victorian children’s literature. Disability studies today invites us to stop thinking about disability as a quality that inheres in specific bodies and to conceptualize it instead as a relation between bodies and space, particularly analyzing how built environments enable some bodies to move around more easily than others. Several Victorianist scholars not aligned with disability studies are doing just this. Elizabeth Gargano’s Reading Victorian Schoolrooms (2008), for instance, attends to “the connections among pedagogy, architecture, and psychology” in how Victorians partitioned pupils’ physical and mental spaces (13). Gubar’s and Liz Farr’s studies of child actors and the Victorian theatre likewise examine the liberties and limitations of young bodies onstage (Gubar, “Drama of Precocity”). Attentive to both disability scholarship and to the intersections among bodies, objects, class, gender, and space in the Victorian context, Alexandra Valint’s reading of Burnett’s The Secret Garden in the context of wheelchair use and technology nicely bridges constructionist and materialist approaches. Increasingly interdisciplinary approaches in children’s literature scholarship are revealing how nineteenth-century science conceptualized childhood and conscripted children’s bodies. In The Mind of the Child (2010), historian Sally Shuttleworth shows how developments in psychology, pediatrics, and evolutionary theory altered Victorians’ understandings of both the mental and physical identity of childhood. Her literary examples are confined to books for adults, but her discussions of the child study movement, medical experiments on babies, and baby shows (modeled on dog and cat shows) are valuable to children’s literature scholars. To this catalog, Katharina Boehm’s Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood (2013) adds the use of children in mesmeric performances as a context to reconsider the passive innocence of the eponymous hero of Oliver Twist (1839). My book Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children’s Literature (2016) demonstrates how Victorian children’s authors responded to recapitulation theory—the hypothesis that children repeat the species’ evolution and are, thus, not yet fully human. I argue that the transference of this developmental theory from physical biology to elementary pedagogy and children’s literature fundamentally altered Victorian conceptions of the child reader. Equations between children and animals lay fertile ground for animal studies [on animal studies, see Danahay and Morse’s chapter]. Margaret Blount’s early study, Animal Land (1975), offers an unparalleled survey of nonhuman characters in children’s literature. In Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914 (2006), Tess Cosslett takes up the moral, aesthetic, and evolutionary stakes in giving voice to animals. Recent monographs like Amy Ratelle’s Animality and Children’s Literature and Film (2015) and Anna Feuerstein’s and Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo’s Childhood and Pethood in Literature and Culture (2017) consider how, as Ratelle says, “the civilizing process that children go through has been mediated by the animal body” (10). These studies skew to the twentieth century, but the ubiquity of domestic pets in nineteenth-century households and the concurrent protection discourse 64
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that mutually constructed animal and child in the Victorian period (as Monica Flegel lucidly shows) invite further consideration. Zoe Jaques’s Children’s Literature and the Posthuman (2015) focuses on how children’s texts, some of them Victorian, challenge the primacy of the human by breaking down, transforming, and reconstituting both organic and machinate bodies. At the vanguard of ecocritical explorations of the child’s relation to the nonhuman world, Sidney Dobrin’s and Kidd’s collection Wild Things (2004) explores “the interplay of children’s texts—literary, multimedia, cultural—and children’s environmental experience,” with chapters dedicated to the botanical and zoological imaginary of Victorian and Edwardian texts (1) [on botanical issues, see Voskuil’s chapter]. Richard Fulton’s and Peter Hoffenberg’s volume, Oceania and the Victorian Imagination (2013), contains a compelling section on children’s literature that recasts the wild colonial spaces of juvenile adventure fiction in terms of devastation and sustainability. Ecocriticism rejects any assumption of inert nature and urges us to see dynamic interplays of contrasting organic agencies; children’s literature scholarship has likewise escaped the shadow of the passive child to elucidate instead the willing collaborator. The Romantic association between the child and nature, then, could be productively revived to explore encounters among actors with varying mobilities, modalities, and accesses to power and resources. Through an ecocritical lens, the spaces invented and transformed in the Victorian period—parks, playgrounds, zoos, exhibitions, schools, homes, factories, and even prisons—could find new critical purchase as contact zones where bodies and minds of divergent capabilities meet.
3. Adjusting the Boundaries An overview of Victorian children’s literature scholarship encompasses every theoretical approach: psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, formalism, Marxism, reader-response theory, gender studies, postcolonialism, cognitive science, disability studies, Darwinism, animal studies, post-humanism, and ecocriticism. Children’s and juvenile literatures do not occupy a protected corner of cultural discourse but rather absorb, reflect, react, and contribute to the same conversations about human identity, history, art, and language that energize all literary works. Current and future scholars of Victorian children’s literature have an array of primary texts, archival resources, and theoretical approaches to inform their research. But we also confront questions: to what extent do we dissolve the boundaries around children’s literature? Should works by Carroll, Kipling, Nesbit, and others be placed alongside and without distinction from literature for adults? Or do we preserve distinctness to what we call children’s literature? If we say yes to the latter, we are challenged to devise parameters elastic enough to embrace the diversity of texts and to include the toys and clothing, and so on, that contribute to children’s culture and through which readers extend their literary engagements. I have advocated for a consideration not of what children’s literature is but rather of what children’s literature does—of the peculiar invitations that children’s literature makes to its readers to recite, to perform, to improvise, to elaborate, and potentially to undo. This approach asserts a relationship between reading and playing that attends to the intersections among texts, bodies, objects, and spaces that animate and complicate our literary experiences. It conceives of “the child” as both a cultural construct and a material body and reminds us of the distinctions of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and ability that the uniform category of “child” has historically obscured. We do well to heed Rose’s warning against thinking that children’s literature gets the child right, but it need not follow that children’s books occupy a separate theoretical sphere from considerations of child readers and childlike reading practices. As we learn more about the multiplicity of nineteenth-century childhoods, the bodies that comprised them, the spaces they occupied, and the texts that circulated among them, whatever we call and however we conceive Victorian children’s literature will continue to expand and to evolve. Children’s and juvenile literature promises to evoke future discussions about embodiment, performance, and adaptation not only because these stories, poems, plays, and illustrations construct the 65
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relation between the reader and the text differently than do texts ostensibly for adults but because they undeniably do it first. Nursery rhymes form our primary engagement with sounds, picture books with images, adventure fiction with otherness, and oral recitation with play. Victorian children’s and juvenile literature invites readers to absorb these narrative elements into their bodies and then to manipulate those bodies to rewrite them on their own. Our efforts to discover how these texts do this will gain vigor from engagements with queer theory, gender theory, postcolonialism, disability studies, animal studies, and ecocriticism. And true to its form and its history, Victorian children’s and juvenile literature will productively rewrite these critical discourses in the process.
Key Critical Works Robin Bernstein. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. Troy Boone. Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire. Karen Coats. “The Meaning of Children’s Poetry: A Cognitive Approach.” Marah Gubar. Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Kenneth Kidd. “Queer Theory’s Child and Children’s Literature Studies.” James Kincaid. Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture. U. C. Knoepflmacher. “The Balancing of Child and Adult: An Approach to Victorian Fantasies for Children.” Claudia Nelson. Boys Will Be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children’s Fiction, 1857–1917. Perry Nodelman. The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature. Jacqueline Rose. The Case of Peter Pan; or, the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. Jessica Straley. Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children’s Literature. Jack Zipes. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization.
Works Cited Ariès, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. 1960. Translated by Robert Baldick, Vintage, 1962. Ballantyne, R. M. The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Island. 1858. Puffin, 1994. Barrie, J. M. “Peter Pan.” 1904. Peter Pan and Other Plays. Oxford UP, 2008. Belloc, Hilaire. Bad Child’s Book of Beasts together with More Beasts for Worse Children. 1896 and 1897. Duckworth, 1966. Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York UP, 2011. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. 1975. Vintage Books, 1989. Blount, Margaret. Animal Land: The Creatures of Children’s Fiction. W. Morrow, 1975. Boehm, Katharina. Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood: Popular Medicine, Child Health and Victorian Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Boone, Troy. Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire. Routledge, 2005. Boyd, Kelly. Manliness and the Boys’ Story Paper in Britain: A Cultural History, 1855–1940. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Bristow, Joseph. Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World. 1991. Routledge, 2016. ———, editor. Oscar Wilde and the Cultures of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Bruhm, Steven, and Natasha Hurley, editors. Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. U of Minnesota P, 2004. Buckley, Arabella. The Fairy-Land of Science. 1879. D. Appleton, 1892. Burnett, Frances Hodgson. Little Lord Fauntleroy. 1886. Puffin, 2011. ———. The Secret Garden. 1911. Aladdin, 1999. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. 1865 and 1872. 1865. Penguin, 2003. Castle, Kathryn. Britannia’s Children: Reading Colonialism through Children’s Books and Magazines. Manchester UP, 1996. Chen, Shih-Wen. Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851–1911. 2013. Routledge, 2016. Clark, Beverly Lyon. Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America. The Johns Hopkins UP, 2003. Coats, Karen. “The Meaning of Children’s Poetry: A Cognitive Approach.” International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 6, no. 2, 2013, pp. 127–42. Cosslett, Tess. Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914. Ashgate, 2006. Crane, Walter, illus. Baby’s Own Aesop. 1887. Pook, 2016. Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914. Cambridge UP, 2014.
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Children’s Literature de la Mare, Walter. Peacock Pie: a book of rhymes. 1913. Constable, 1924. Denisoff, Dennis, editor. The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture. Ashgate, 2008. Dinter, Sandra, and Raif Schneider, editors. Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Childhood in Contemporary Britain: Literature, Media and Society. Routledge, 2018. Dobrin, Sidney I., and Kenneth B. Kidd., editors. Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism. Wayne State UP, 2004. Ewing, Juliana Horatia. The Brownies and Other Stories. 1871. J. M. Dent & Sons, 1954. Farr, Liz. “Paper Dreams and Romantic Projections: The Nineteenth-Century Toy Theater, Boyhood and Aesthetic Play.” The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture, edited by Dennis Denisoff, Routledge, 2008, pp. 43-61. Farrar, Frederic W. Eric; or, Little by Little. 1858. S. W. Partridge, 1920. Feuerstein, Anna, and Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo, editors. Childhood and Pethood in Literature and Culture: New Perspectives on Childhood Studies and Animal Studies. Routledge, 2017. Flegel, Monica. Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-Century England: Literature, Representation, and the NSPCC. Ashgate, 2009. ———. Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture: Animality, Queer Relations, and the Victorian Family. Routledge, 2015. Fulton, Richard, and Peter H. Hoffenberg, editors. Oceania and the Victorian Imagination: Where All Things Are Possible. 2013. Routledge, 2016. Gargano, Elizabeth. Reading Victorian Schoolrooms: Childhood and Education in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Routledge, 2008. Gatty, Margaret. Parables from Nature. 1855–1871. George Bell and Sons, 1885. Goswami, Supriya. Colonial India in Children’s Literature. Routledge, 2012. Greenaway, Kate. Under the Window. 1879. Octopus, 1985. Gubar, Marah. Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Oxford UP, 2009. ———. “The Drama of Precocity: Child Performers on the Victorian Stage.” The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture, edited by Dennis Denisoff, Routledge, 2008, pp. 63-78. ———. “On Not Defining Children’s Literature.” PMLA, vol. 126, no. 1, 2011, pp. 209–16. Haggard, H. Rider. King Solomon’s Mines. 1885. Penguin, 2008. Henty, G. A. With Clive in India; or, the Beginnings of an Empire. 1884. A. L. Burt, 1900. Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown’s Schooldays. 1857. Oxford, 2008. Jaques, Zoe. Children’s Literature and the Posthuman: Animal, Environment, Cyborg. Routledge, 2015. Keene, Melanie. Science in Wonderland: The Scientific Fairy Tales of Victorian Britain. Oxford UP, 2015. Keith, Lois. Take Up Thy Bed and Walk: Death, Disability, and Cure in Classic Fiction for Girls. Routledge, 2001. Kidd, Kenneth B. Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale. U of Minnesota P, 2005. ———. “Queer Theory’s Child and Children’s Literature Studies.” PMLA, vol. 126, no. 1, 2011, pp. 182–8. Kincaid, James. Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture. Routledge, 1992. Kingsley, Charles. The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby. 1863. Macmillan, 1890. Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Books. 1894 and 1895. Oxford UP, 1998. ———. Stalky & Co. 1899. Oxford UP, 2009. Knoepflmacher, U. C. “The Balancing of Child and Adult: An Approach to Victorian Fantasies for Children.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 37, no. 4, March 1983, pp. 497–530. ———. Ventures into Childland:Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity. U of Chicago P, 1998. Kutzer, M. Daphne. Empire’s Children: Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children’s Books. 2000. Routledge, 2002. Lear, Edward. A Book of Nonsense. 1846. Everyman’s Library, 1992. Lesnik-Oberstein, Karín. “Children’s Literature, Cognitivism and Neuroscience.” Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Childhood in Contemporary Britain: Literature, Media and Society, edited by Sandra Dinter and Raif Schneider, Routledge, 2018, pp. 67–84. ——— editor. Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood. Macmillan and St. Martin’s, 1998. Logan, Mawuena Kossi. Narrating Africa: George Henty and the Fiction of Empire. Routledge, 1999. MacDonald, George. The Complete Fairy Tales of George MacDonald. 1961. Schocken Books, 1977. Meade, L. T. A World of Girls: The Story of a School. 1886. Hurst, 1909. Meyer, Lucy Rider. Real Fairy Folks, or, the Fairy Land of Chemistry: Explorations in the World of Atoms. D. Lothrop, 1887. Mickenberg, Julia L., and Lynne Vallone, editors. The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature. Oxford UP, 2011. Milne, A. A. Winnie-the-Pooh. 1926. Dutton Books for Young Readers, 1988. Molesworth, Mary Louisa. The Cuckoo Clock. 1877. Saalfeld, 1927. Moruzi, Kristine. Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850–1915. 2012. Routledge, 2016.
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Jessica Straley Nelson, Claudia. Boys Will Be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children’s Fiction, 1857–1917. Rutgers UP, 1991. Nesbit, E. The Wouldbegoods. 1901. Puffin, 1996. Nikolajeva, Maria. Reading for Learning: Cognitive Approaches to Children’s Literature. John Benjamins, 2014. ———. “Recent Trends in Children’s Literature Research: Return to the Body.” International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 9, no. 2, 2016, pp. 132–45. Nodelman, Perry. The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature. The Johns Hopkins UP, 2008. Norcia, Megan A. “Playing Empire: Children’s Parlor Games, Home Theatricals, and Improvisational Play.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 4, Winter 2004, pp. 294–314. Parkes, Christopher. Children’s Literature and Capitalism: Fictions of Social Mobility in Britain, 1850–1914. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Pennington, John, and Roderick McGillis, editors. Behind the Back of the North Wind: Critical Essays on George MacDonald’s Classic Children’s Book. Winged Lion, 2011. Potter, Beatrix. The Tale of Peter Rabbit. 1902. Frederick Warne, 2002. Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. 1928. Translated by Laurence Scott, U of Texas P, 1968. Pugh, Tison. Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature. Routledge, 2011. Pullinger, Debbie. “Nursery Rhymes: Poetry, Language, and the Body.” The Aesthetics of Children’s Poetry: A Study of Children’s Verse in English, edited by Katherine Wakely-Mulroney and Louise Joy, Routledge, 2018, pp. 144–61. Rackham, Arthur, illus. The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. 1900. Canterbury Classics, 2017. Ratelle, Amy. Animality and Children’s Literature and Film. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan; or, the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. U of Pennsylvania P, 1984. Rossetti, Christina. Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book. 1872. Dover, 1968. Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. “Castaways: The Swiss Family Robinson, Child Bookmakers, and the Possibilities of Literary Flotsam.” The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, edited by Julia L. Mickenberg and Lynne Vallone, Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 433–54. Sanders, Joe Sutliff. Disciplining Girls: Understanding the Origins of the Classic Orphan Girl Story. The Johns Hopkins UP, 2011. Sands-O’Connor, Karen. Soon Come Home to This Island: West Indians in British Children’s Literature. Routledge, 2008. Sewell, Anna. Black Beauty. 1877. Broadview, 2015. Sherwood, Mary Martha. The History of the Fairchild Family; or, the Child’s Manual. 1818–1847. T. Hatchard, 1853. Shuttleworth, Sally. The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840–1900. Oxford UP, 2010. Smith, Jessie Willcox, illus. The Jessie Willcox Smith Mother Goose. 1914. Pelican, 1991. Smith, Victoria Ford. Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. UP of Mississippi, 2017. Stevenson, Robert Louis. A Child’s Garden of Verses. 1885. Simon & Schuster, 1999. ———. Treasure Island. 1883. Penguin, 1999. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1852. Norton, 2017. Straley, Jessica. Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children’s Literature. Cambridge UP, 2016. Stretton, Hesba. Jessica’s First Prayer. 1866. Horse’s Mouth, 2018. Sumpter, Caroline. The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence. Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Tatar, Maria. Off With Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood. Princeton UP, 1992. Valint, Alexandra. “‘Wheel Me Over There!’: Disability and Colin’s Wheelchair in The Secret Garden.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 3, Fall 2016, pp. 263–80. Wakely-Mulroney, Katherine, and Louise Joy, editors. The Aesthetics of Children’s Poetry: A Study of Children’s Verse in English. Routledge, 2018. Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1994. Wilde, Oscar. The Happy Prince and Other Tales. 1888. The Happy Prince and Other Stories. Puffin, 2009. Wyss, Johann David. The Swiss Family Robinson. 1812. Penguin, 2007. Yonge, Charlotte Mary. The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations. 1856. Beautiful Feet Books, 2004. Zimmerman, Virginia. “Natural History on Blocks, in Bodies, and on the Hearth: Juvenile Science Literature and Games.” Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology, vol. 19, no. 3, 2011, pp. 407–30. Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. 1983. Routledge, 1991.
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6 LIFE-WRITING Trev Lynn Broughton
Victorian life-writings do a great deal more than narrate lives or describe selves. Life-writers intervened in and helped to shape contemporaneous debates about the meaning and constitution of selfhood; they posed questions about the nature of individualism and individuality; they explored the cultural uses of publicity, privacy, intimacy, and sociability; they investigated the production and commodification of identity; they sometimes even experimented with ideas of an embodied self. Focusing mainly on autobiographical rather than biographical writing, and offering Harriet Martineau’s practice as a case study, this chapter first outlines early scholarly approaches to the genre before identifying some recent critical currents. When life-writing studies began to emerge as an academic subfield in the 1980s, scholars often identified variations of Christian testimony as the dominant “figure” of autobiography in the nineteenth century. According to this view, an evolving lineage from Augustine via Bunyan led to a late literary flowering of spiritual and post-spiritual conversion narrative, heralded by Thomas Carlyle’s cryptic Sartor Resartus (1833–34), taking in John Henry Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864) and John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography (1873), and succumbing to the icy blast of secular modernity around the time of Edmund Gosse’s post-Darwinian masterpiece Father and Son (1907). The trope of conversion affords readers a useful way of imagining the healing of the irreducibly split “I” of autobiography: of suturing the past, written self to a self writing in the present. But it applies at best to only a narrow range of texts in what, as we shall see, was an active and heterogeneous field [on Christianity, see Knight’s chapter]. The impression that Victorian autobiography was somehow the last gasp of an obsolescent form has been compounded by the fact that it was—and is—frequently dismissed either as the timid successor to Romanticism’s energetic idioms of self-creation and intimate self-disclosure, or as the dull, exhausted foil to modernism’s edgy experimentation. Framed this way, nineteenth-century narratives were noteworthy only insofar as they dramatized some form of violent Promethean or Oedipal struggle. Duncan Wu’s recent account of Romantic-era autobiography, for instance, insists that “[t]here was more conscious manipulation of the genre during this period than in the remainder of the nineteenth century, when authors would compose autobiographies that seem pious and disembowelled by comparison.” Wu attributes this alleged lull to a Victorian “culture intolerant of emotional intensity” in which “intimate correspondence had become unacceptable when formally published.” Hence, according to Wu’s account, Victorian life-writing was dominated, not by the conversion narrative, but by the narrowly moralizing tale of self-help: “a story of honourable struggle, an apology of which the virtues were modesty, discretion, and reticence” (187–9). One can see in this verdict traces 69
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of familiar stereotypes of Victorianism: worldliness and respectability; inhibition camouflaged by prolixity, bourgeois and masculinist versions of success paraded as universally valued and attainable. The corollary of course is a stereotype of Victorian readers as undiscriminating, long-suffering and easily pleased. Only recently have scholars begun to take seriously the kinds of life-writings—first and third person—hugely popular at the time, but until recently dismissed as trite or formulaic. Alison Booth’s work on collections of famous women’s Lives, Juliette Atkinson’s reconsideration of Victorian biography, Regenia Gagnier’s studies of public school memoirs and working-class Lives, and Donna Loftus’s reading of nineteenth-century middle-class men’s autobiographies are all valuable contributions to this work of reappraisal. Despite all this, even now it is common to find Victorian life-writing represented by autobiography, autobiography by spiritual narrative, and spiritual narrative mainly by Carlyle, Mill, Newman, and Gosse (see Gibson and Larsen; Epstein). This exiguous canon coincided, unsurprisingly, with the narrow selection of Victorian life-writing taught in colleges and universities, bulked out by texts that were only arguably life-writing: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50), William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1850), Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850). If Victorian biography had a look-in, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) did service. Sean Grass has confirmed what many scholars of Victorian life-writing have suspected: that, with a few important exceptions (see Swindells; Gagnier; Amigoni; Marcus), a tiny selection of life-writing texts has for decades soaked up most of the literary-critical attention (“Imminent”). Until recently, truth to tell, little else was available outside academic libraries. There were a few significant outliers. Among the most important were Leicester University Press’s terrific (but hardback) editions: The Life of Thomas Cooper (1872) detailing the Chartist poet’s plunges into and out of religious and political creeds; the poignant but fragmentary Autobiography and Letters of Margaret Oliphant, prolific novelist and journalist (1899); and William Hale White’s delightful (but fictionalized) de-conversion tale Autobiography and Deliverance of Mark Rutherford (1881,1885) could be picked up here and there, while Oxford University Press loyally reissued Anthony Trollope’s splendidly unspiritual An Autobiography (1883) from time to time. The remarkable archive of working-class autobiographies assembled by John Burnett, David Vincent, and David Mayall at Brunel University could be glimpsed in Burnett’s anthologies Useful Toil and Destiny Obscure, and supplemented by Liz Stanley’s groundbreaking but almost immediately out-of-print selection of the Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant (1984). The same year saw a bold edition, by Ziggi Alexander and Audrey Dewjee, of The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, still almost the only text by a Victorian woman of color widely available in print. In this climate, Virago’s 1983 edition of Harriet Martineau’s posthumous Autobiography (1877), edited by Gaby Weiner in two fat paperback volumes, was as striking as it was commercially reckless (see Sanders, “Bicentenary”). As an eminent writer with a tale of spiritual (re-)awakening to tell— from Unitarianism to Comtean positivism and mesmerism—Martineau had some of the qualifications for canonization. In other ways, however, as a middle-class woman grappling with paid work, a disappointing rather than an Oedipally antagonizing family, a bodily life that claimed its place in her narrative of belief, and a capacious sense of relevance, she seemed an unlikely candidate. Indeed for a while the Autobiography was caught up in the closed circuit of recognition and valuation I have sketched: a circuit with particular dangers for a woman writer. One trap was the issue of expertise. Early in the theorization of autobiography, critics began to ask how far nineteenth-century autobiographical practice was tied not to the subject’s story of personal suffering and rebirth (however fully secularized) but to the writer’s wherewithal to interpret that change along intelligible lines (Henderson). This competence involved a sophisticated knowledge of and skill in deploying the tools of biblical exegesis and hermeneutics, even—perhaps especially—when the narrative involved conversion out of orthodox Christianity. 70
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An early exponent of this view was the late Linda Peterson, who, in her pioneering Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation, found that most women were excluded from the tradition because they lacked both the authority and the formal education to engage with theories and methods of interpretation and the confidence to speak the language of biblical types with confidence (27–8, 130). In this context Martineau, who cut her professional teeth writing on religious subjects for the Monthly Repository, appears to be anomalous, in that she writes within a (supposedly) dominant idiom rather than within one of the other autobiographical modes more accessible to women: the diary, the family memoir, the autobiographical novel (124). As Peterson put it, The most unusual thing about the Autobiography . . ., was that Harriet Martineau had written it at all. For during the nineteenth century few women wrote and published their autobiographies, and virtually no women wrote within the main tradition of the spiritual autobiography or, like Martineau, attempted one of the secular variants so common for male writers. (120) The critical pitfall was obvious: Martineau’s text was only legible as autobiography insofar as it was different from “women’s” life-writing and more like highly educated “men’s.” Having painted Martineau into this corner, however, Peterson spent a significant portion of her subsequent career finding new ways of revaluing, contextualizing, and understanding neglected life-writings, including those written by women, without assuming that gender, any more than scriptural competence, was the sole determining factor in the shaping of autobiographical forms. She explored the role of diverse religious, regional, political, and social allegiances, as well as the shaping power of editorial and critical practices, in the formation of multiple “women’s autobiographical traditions” (Traditions 2 and passim). This chapter honors Peterson’s project by resituating Martineau’s Autobiography within wider debates about the practices and politics of self-representation. I ask, what if, instead of treating it as a token woman’s text in a dominantly male canon, we took our bearings from Martineau’s Autobiography and worked outward to questions of value, purpose, and significance?
1. Citizen Selves By far the most common motive offered by Victorian life-writers for their endeavors—and this is just as true of autobiographers as of biographers—is that they are prompted by a sense of duty to others. In the case of autobiographers, this stance is cut across by another imperative: the need to avoid egotism. Autobiographers, therefore, face an ethical crux which they must actively address if not resolve [on ethics, see Mitchell’s chapter]. By the time she came to write the Autobiography Martineau had for decades supported herself by her pen in the wake of her cloth-manufacturer father’s bankruptcy. As, by turns, writer on theology, popularizer of political economy, travel writer, abolitionist, novelist, translator, advocate of mesmerism, magazine and newspaper journalist, obituarist, advisor of the invalid and the deaf, and social commentator, Martineau was adept at using her own experiences, including her sense of ordinariness and of extraordinariness, as cultural capital. Nevertheless, Martineau prefaces the Autobiography with a stringent rationale for writing this text and suppressing personal correspondence—effacing the “Letters” that were the staple filling of the popular nineteenth-century “Life and Letters” format. Like many Victorian autobiographers she uses her introduction to conceptualize the project within manifold frames—moral, ethical, psychological, professional, legal, temporal, narratological, and spatial—angled at various imagined interlocutors. Having enjoyed and profited from reading about the lives of others, and possessing a “strong consciousness and a clear memory in regard to [her] early feelings,” she has, she says, from youth upwards, considered the writing of an autobiography to be one of the duties of life: a duty then reinforced by 71
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having had a “somewhat remarkable life” (I:1). She recounts the decadal sequence of occasions (before she was 30, ten years later, and now in her fifties) on which she has attempted to fulfill this duty, an obligation secondary only to the exigencies of her “political work.”1 Encouraged by her “intimate friends,” and spurred into action by the opinion of two “able” London physicians that she has a mortal disease of uncertain duration, she returns home, settles her affairs with her Executor, and sets to work (I:1–2). Her program of self-preparation extends to “rewrit[ing] the early portion” penned during her previous attempts, so as to achieve a consistent point of view and spirit, and, after writing the first two “Periods” of her Life, to breaking off to explain her position on private correspondence. Though an imperative of conscience, life-writing is still labor, and still subject to an elaborate disciplinary regime involving a range of partners (doctors, legal representatives, close friends, private correspondents, an imagined posthumous reader, and posterity), all of whom have an ongoing stake in the project. Questions of the relationship between public and private are routinely triangulated by third-party witnesses—readers, survivors, the law—who are invited to scrutinize and sanction the decisions enacted by the text. As well as a final casting of accounts and as testimony to her beliefs, then, the Autobiography is understood, and presented, as a social—almost an institutional, but certainly an interpersonal—event. Martineau’s prohibition of the publication of her personal correspondence is carefully reasoned. Her point is that “epistolary intercourse” is written speech, and should be carried on with the freedom and confidence of “two friends, with their feet on the fender, on winter nights.” “How,” she asks, “could human beings ever open their heart and minds to each other, if there were no privacy guaranteed by principles and feelings of honour?” (I:4). The withholding or publishing of correspondence is, for Martineau, essentially a political matter. The problem is not that personal secrets may be betrayed or weaknesses revealed: after all, she has cultivated a “naturally open and communicative disposition,” has made her opinions and feelings “remarkably open to the world,” and has nothing to hide. And it is not just a matter of violating the coziness of the fireside or putting one’s executors in an awkward position. Rather, she argues, the publication of personal correspondence acts in the same way that “the spy system under a despotism” acts on speech: it has a chilling effect on all human intercourse (I:5). Though she stresses the idea of privacy, for Martineau personal correspondence is continuous with a kind of Habermasian “public sphere”: it has a vitally important civic function, guaranteeing the free flow of ideas and debate, and constitutive of, rather than subordinate to, public life (see Ryall cited in Frawley 411). Her advocacy of privacy is thus entirely compatible with a sense of herself as a public figure. As she noted in a preface to her Biographical Sketches in 1870, “To me it appears that persons of social prominence enough to be subjects of published Biography, have given themselves to society for better for worse,—not their deeds only, but themselves” (vi). Eminence—or “prominence” as Martineau more neutrally terms it—is a kind of marriage contract with the public, of which truthful Life-writing is a key clause. Because of this, life-writing has a vital social role, and not one reducible, to borrow Lauren Berlant’s term, to an “institution of intimacy” (281). Hence, she argues, it must be safeguarded and monitored. Martineau’s deliberations rehearse the conventions of life-writing as a speech act: an attempt to formalize the relationship between intimacy, sociality, and publicity at a time when the confidential talk of well-known people routinely became fodder for published reminiscences, or the basis of “a newspaper article the next day” (I:5). She encourages us to see her text, and autobiography more generally, as an active theorizing of and intervention in the social world rather than a passive impression of it. Martineau’s understanding of life-writing as social—as a mode of civic agency—though more rigorous than most, can be glimpsed in many nineteenth-century texts. When Samuel Smiles writes of laboring-class geologist Hugh Miller’s My Schools and Schoolmasters (1854) “it is more than an ordinary book,—it might almost be called an institution” (84), or when John Stuart Mill insists that his Autobiography is in part an “acknowledgment of the debts which my intellectual and moral development owes to other persons” (2), or even when author Percy Fitzgerald intersperses his experiences 72
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of a “Literary Life” with hints on the “Art of Enjoying Trifles” (1882, I:Preface n.p.), they are doing something akin. They are interrogating what Pauline Polkey called the “representational agency” of autobiography: reaching beyond what it narrates to what Gagnier calls the “pragmatics” of autobiography (4).
2. Embodied Selves But let us turn to some memories of a serious, unprepossessing teenaged girlhood spent in a wellto-do household of Norwich Unitarians: in the kind of respectable, middle-class family Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall wrote about so memorably in their classic Family Fortunes. The scene is dated 1816: We had lessons in Latin and French, and I in music, from masters; and we read aloud in family a good deal of history, biography, and critical literature. The immense quantity of needlework and music-copying that I did remains a marvel to me; and so does the extraordinary bodily indolence. . . . My health was bad, however, and my mind ill at ease. It was a depressed and wrangling life; and I have no doubt I was as disagreeable as possible. The great calamity of my deafness was now opening upon me; and that would have been quite enough for youthful fortitude, without constant indigestion, languor and muscular weakness which made life a burden to me. My religion was a partial comfort to me; and books and music were a great resource; but they left a large margin over for wretchedness. (I:70) With the exception of the Latin, this could be a description of any conventional middle-class girl’s education: some reading aloud, a sprinkling of this or that accomplishment, a lot of laborious sewing, and too little exercise, urgency, or point. We might note that life-writing—in this case biography—is part of this family’s standard cultural diet (and not, say, poetry or fiction), and that it is bracketed with “history and critical literature” as serious family fare. This phase of Harriet’s experience is related with all the emotional intensity and investment of spiritual autobiography, though with a more nuanced emotional vocabulary. The self-involvement of the girl and the exasperation of the adult narrator are both ventilated; the tone oscillates—midsentence, sometimes virtually mid-word—between sympathy and antagonism; the perspective of the later self drifts apart from that of the younger (“a marvel to me . . . extraordinary . . . no doubt”) only to reconverge on that final word “wretchedness.” Narratologically and stylistically a great deal is happening. Martineau’s depiction of her youth—especially in scenes of “wrangling” with her mother and sister—points to a more porous boundary than we generally expect between the narrative conventions of nonfictional autobiography and the first-person novels Heidi L. Pennington discusses. Martineau’s vivid reconstruction of her awkward teenage years has much in common with a novel like Jane Eyre, which plays on the incredulity of the reader by recounting past experiences, conversations, and feelings via apparently superhuman feats of memory (Pennington 19–26). We are accustomed to thinking of fictional autobiography as an offshoot of the “referential” kind: perhaps, as Pennington suggests, they are more like siblings. As this passage reminds us, Martineau’s Autobiography gives the lie to any assumption that all Victorian life-writers consistently disavowed, repressed, or ignored the body. As readers of Victorian Lives know, the body features in many accounts, most often in narratives of discreet childbed, long-suffering invalidism or a well-wrought death. Martineau describes childhood as a world of “pure sensation.” Her earliest memories involve a plethora of moral and psychological terrors, but also diarrheas caused by fear and malnutrition, a lump in the throat, self-harm to fend off panic, ear-ache, as well as vividly tactile recollections of unfamiliar sheets, the bark of trees, and the monstrous pleasure of velvet. Martineau’s account of her childhood insists on its author’s ability to remember herself from the inside, as 73
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a painfully embodied subjectivity at odds with the world (a “wretch” is a banished person), even as she observes these impressions and sensations from a distant vantage point. Martineau scholars today differ widely in the emphasis they put on the Autobiography’s depiction of illness and well-being; on deafness as disability and deafness as privilege; on bodily experience versus medical authority; and on its critique of officially sanctioned science versus Martineau’s preferred mesmerism. Anka Ryall identifies Martineau as a key figure in nineteenth-century turf wars between versions of expertise and professionalism (35). George Levine reads the Autobiography as a gendered experiment in scientific epistemology, and one can see in the passage above the tension between a catastrophic narrative (her deafness as a “calamity” she must transcend) and a gradualist one of weakness and ignorance amended (85–103, 126–47).2 Rachel Ablow sees Martineau’s writing about her body as a philosophical enquiry into the use of pain as a point of connection between the individual and the social: Martineau “consistently resists any disaggregation of the physical and the mental” and, “the closer [she] comes to what looks like a description of simple experience, the more seriously we need to consider its philosophical or theoretical implications” (678–9). Maria Frawley maintains that sickness is not just a theme of the book. Rather it is “the lens through which readers of Martineau’s autobiography are asked to comprehend her life story”: its originating cause, its characteristic phases and affects, its culmination (434). Martineau was unusual in aiming explicitly to demystify (or “desacralize”) her experiences of bodily suffering: the gradual loss of her hearing in adolescence, the severe gynecological problems she suffered in her 30s and 50s, and the infirmities she ascribed to chronic heart disease (“Letter” 175, 174). But as Frawley notes, in many ways the treatment of embodiment in the Autobiography is continuous with a back-catalog of works in which she placed her own experiences of invalidism in the service of the public, often exposing what she regarded as the mistakes made in her own diagnosis and treatment (see Letters, Life) [on disability, see Stoddard Holmes’s chapter]. Far from a sequestered, private matter, Martineau’s body was debated in the public sphere. In 1845, in the thick of the controversy over her use of mesmerism to cure her ailments, she had countenanced the publication by her brother-in-law physician of his medical report on her case, incompletely anonymized as “Medical Report of the case of Miss H—M—.” Claiming, rather bizarrely, that “scarcely anyone was ignorant” of the general character of her disease, and contradicting her claims for mesmeric cure, T.M. Greenhow enumerated Martineau’s symptoms in mindboggling detail: the disorders of her uterus, her menstrual discharges, her bowel and urinary complaints, her flatulence (“Medical” vi). Hence, when composing the Autobiography in 1855, she kept back from the public her knowledge that she still had a large internal tumor, partly to thwart those physicians who had contradicted her claims for the curative powers of mesmerism.3 Even the third-person obituary of herself she prepared for the Daily News inveighed against the medical profession for its misunderstanding of her case, so that her physicians—in the guise of reviewers of her Autobiography—had once again to defend themselves in the medical press against a diagnosis they had never uttered (heart disease), and to refute a cure they could not countenance (mesmerism) for a disease (ovarian dermoid cyst) whose symptoms and prognosis, they argued, a lay woman could not be expected to understand (Martineau, Memoir; Anon. “The Late”). In this light, the Autobiography can be seen as akin to adjacent modes of self-inscription by Martineau herself (case history, for instance, or advice manual for the sick) and in explicit contention with “hetero”-biographies: reviews and refutations by physicians, or by orthodox believers of various persuasions (Greenhow “Termination” 449–50). No doubt the unusually corporeal emphasis Martineau brought to her writing triggered unusually outspoken and disparate responses. But thinking of the Autobiography as part of a conversation on which she embarked may have lessons for our reading of Victorian Lives more broadly. We are accustomed to recognizing the dialogical relationship between, say, John Henry Newman’s Apologia and Charles Kingsley’s attacks on his veracity, and to thinking of these as competing versions of what Roy Pascal long ago called “design and truth”: the interrelation between the textual patterning of experience and the kind of claims being advanced. Careful attention 74
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to autobiography’s mobilization of a range of explanatory tools—in Martineau’s case, at a minimum, scientific, professional, religious, philosophical, political—not only reveals highly complex designs but also, in this case, its embeddedness in a taut network of truth-claiming genres. As Martha Stoddard Holmes puts it, in Martineau’s Autobiography “what complicates self-representation—especially in terms of representing her disabilities—is her critical awareness of the nuances and consequences of any discourse that enfolds or abuts her writing” (157). Today life-writing is understood as valent with a range of discourses of embodiment: forensic science, case history, narrative as therapy and therapy as narrative, identity-political manifesto, self-advocacy, and so on (Smith and Watson, Couser). Martineau’s life-writing practice indicates that in the mid-nineteenth century such valencies were not only evident, but available for self-construction and cultural critique.
3. Life-Writing as Commodity Clearly the familiar myth of Martineau’s Autobiography—that she wrote it in an impetuous rush with death in her sights, and according to purely moral or metaphysical considerations—is wrong. As we have seen, this narrative elides 20 years of attempts to fulfill a duty conceived “from youth upwards.” The myth ignores the elaborate circumspection of the final product, not to mention the text’s 22 preposthumous years of unamended stasis (Martineau died in 1876). It also overlooks her sense of her own brand. Though famously and fiercely independent of patronage or party, and claiming to cherish “literary labour more for its own sake, and less for its rewards” (I:102), as a professional author Martineau was aware from an early age of the value of her work in the commercial marketplace and willing to use her selling power to get her views heard (II:2–7). This was equally true of her Autobiography. By the time she wrote the final version she had had more than 20 years’ experience of the market value of her own and others’ lives. Her earliest foray into autobiography, a slight sketch penned in 1833, was written at the request of M.B. Maurice by way of preface to his French translation of her celebrated Illustrations of Political Economy (1833–34). In it she acknowledged that “la curiosité qu’excitent . . . les auteurs d’ouvrages populaire” was “innocente et naturelle.” Almost before the ink was dry it was reprinted in the Review Mensuelle de L’Economie Politique. Before the year was out, the piece was retranslated into English to satisfy the curiosity of British readers of the monthly and weekly press. Having experienced the age of “literary lionism” into which she found herself plunged in the early 1830s, she was from then on confident that anything she wrote, perhaps especially about herself, would have wide and unpredictable circulation, some of it beyond her editorial or financial control. Even when living as a secluded invalid in Tyneside and then Ambleside, from the 1840s until her death, she remained attuned to the market value of life-writing. In 1868, the republication of her biographical sketches for the Daily News in book form helped her out of a financial crisis caused by the suspension of dividends to shareholders by the Brighton Railway (Miller 198). The will she wrote when she settled her affairs in 1855 made provision for £200 to Maria Chapman to produce a conclusion to the Autobiography should Martineau die before it was completed, “over and above a fourth share of the profits on the sale of the whole work after the first edition” (see Chapman). Her Autobiography came under a similar hard-headed disposition as the legacy of her skull, and if convenient her brain, to her friend the mesmerist Henry George Atkinson (Miller 174).4 Writing to publisher John Chapman on September 16, 1855, she outlined the arrangements she had made with her executors about the proofs and the key to “unnamed personages” in the text, before affirming her belief that “the book will have, in the long run, an immense circulation, in spite of the religious world” (Sanders ed., Letters 131–2). This is not a frame within which we are accustomed to read a Victorian autobiography—especially one addressed to the reader d’outre tombe. Yet Michael Mascuch has argued that in the late eighteenth century, recognition of the kind of personal property represented by the story of one’s own self combined with the commodification of that story as printed autobiography, was a key step in the evolution of modern “ordinary” individualism. Mascuch identifies the Memoirs of the First Forty-Five Years 75
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of the Life of James Lackington (1791) as exemplary of this process. Lackington (1746–1815), having started life as a cobbler, made a fortune selling books cheaply. He realized from his familiarity with both the marketplace and the emergent culture of celebrity that a printed life “helped establish for its subject a public ethos from which a host of other personal advantages might accrue” (5). In these days of pulp memoir such a claim seems barely controversial, but in locating Lackington at the culmination of eighteenth-century developments, rather than as inaugurating nineteenth-century trends, Mascuch left the relevance of these claims for nineteenth-century life-writing to be investigated. Until recently, scholarly recognition of the significance of the marketplace for Victorian lifewriting, including autobiography, has been limited to the more egregious instances of celebrity biography (see, for instance, Broughton, Hamilton) or to the popularity of “Useful Lives” of the kind written by Smiles. In his recent volume Life on the Exchange, however, Sean Grass, argues that “Victorian autobiographies were economic as well as discursive transactions, and . . . belonged—like The Pickwick Papers, gift books, illustrated newspapers, and sensation novels—to the wondrous complexity of the Victorian literary market” (5). Unlike most studies of life-writing, Grass bases his observations on book and publishing history, as well as textual data, finding that in the period “autobiographies became popular and profitable things for the first time, designed for industrial production and a mass market rather than for private reading by family and friends or the spiritual edification of religious believers. They became commodities, reifications of the self-alienation that Karl Marx was simultaneously identifying as endemic to the capitalist age” (6). Grass takes up the story where Mascuch left off, asking what happens when the conceptual boundary between property and identity is attenuated, and probing the consequences of the commodification of Lives, including its effects on “the legal, economic and discursive practices associated with identity” as well as on the “narrative representation and ontological status of subjectivity” (6). Both critics encourage us to think about autobiography as a forum within which subjects not only created themselves as individuals but also participated in and pushed back against the commodification of identity.
4. Periodical Selves: Life-Writing, Journalism and Print Culture As we have seen, Harriet Martineau mounted a sturdy defense of her auto/biographical autonomy. Stringent proscriptions and preclusions limited access to more unbuttoned or congenial versions of her persona and strove to set the terms of her posthumous reputation. She was successful to the extent that volume 36 of the Dictionary of National Biography relied on her own account for its summation of her life, while subsequent biographers such as Florence Fenwick Miller found themselves defending Martineau against her own autobiography.5 This is not the whole story however. As the rapid transmutation of Martineau’s “Letter to M.B. Maurice” suggests, nineteenth-century life-writings often survived and adapted in a rapidly changing print ecosystem. Stephen Colclough has pointed out that by mid-century, extracts from an eclectic range of contemporary memoirs were reaching at least half the population of Britain through mass-market weeklies for working- and lower middle-class audiences. It was not unusual for life-writings to circulate in several different guises to distinct readerships. They appeared as a whole or in part; anonymously or signed; at home or overseas; at once or serially. Periodicals offered life-writings, in both the first and third person, sometimes as entertainment, sometimes as instruction, sometimes as a form of coded political commentary, and sometimes in the explicit service of a narrow reforming agenda. While in Martineau’s oeuvre multiple recycling was indexed to personal celebrity, this was not always the case. Hence Charles Manby Smith’s anonymous The Working-Man’s Way in the World, the autobiography of a journeyman printer, was first published serially by Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine between March 1851 and May 1852, and was abridged and reframed as the it-narrative “Story of a Blue Book” for Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal in April 1853 before being issued in book form in 1854 on both sides of the Atlantic. Exemplary biography of the Self-Help type was a staple of the popular magazines (239), contributing a personalist idiom to the broader culture 76
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of self-improvement, whether financial, educational, or even spiritual (Denisoff). Colclough extends this observation to autobiography, arguing that the cheap periodical press constituted a “unique site in the construction of autobiographical discourse and meaning.” Periodicals occasionally commissioned, but more frequently reviewed, extracted, and abridged existing memoirs so as to offer models of selfreliance, industry, and endurance (241; on biography as editing, see Regis). As Colclough notes, and as the Manby Smith example confirms, such retellings often involved “creative rewriting” on the part of the editor, a phenomenon that has been overlooked in accounts of the genre (238) [on serialization, see Bernstein’s chapter; on periodicals, see Hughes’s; and on popular fiction, see Daly’s]. Most of those mainstream periodicals were past their heyday by the time Martineau’s Autobiography was published, but the family-oriented Leisure Hour found room for some gossipy morsels. Her withering comments on the anniversary celebration of the British Association made their way into its pages (“the obtrusions of coxcombs, the conceit of third-rate men, . . . the disagreeable footing of the ladies”) as did her firsthand account of Queen Victoria’s coronation. The passages chosen by Leisure Hour have in common Martineau’s characteristic pose as grudging eyewitness, an element of social comedy, and a dash of wry opinion forcibly expressed. While one doubts whether Martineau would have wished to be remembered by the large Leisure Hour audience as an observer of pompous official junkets, her republicanism and feminism remain audible in these anecdotes. The question of whose opinion this is seems a secondary matter to the journal: attribution to the Autobiography appears only at the end of the snippet, almost as an afterthought. In Leisure Hour, then, Martineau’s autobiographical impressions are reframed as a kind of special correspondence from the past, to be picked up alongside Letters to the Editor and other miscellaneous opinions. The burgeoning of periodical studies thus poses unforeseen challenges to the student of Victorian life-writing. It has long been recognized that the period was, as Dallas Liddle puts it, “dazzlingly multigeneric,” that magazines and newspapers were the most influential and pervasive sources of cultural authority at the time, and that most professional authors wrote extensively, if not exclusively, for periodicals. But the implications of these factors for apparently “monographic” genres, practices, and careers are under-researched (1–11, 8).6 What difference does nineteenth-century autobiography’s mutation between signed and unsigned media make to what Philippe Lejeune calls “the autobiographical pact:” the contract of agreement between authorial signatory and reader that the written self and the named author share an identity? Liddle recontextualizes Martineau’s Autobiography within her mid-1850s immersion in leaderwriting for the Daily News. He argues convincingly that the Autobiography’s account of her genesis and career is as consistently intelligible as a meditation on the ideals and practices of newspaper journalism as it is the Bildung of a feminist, a sociologist, an atheist, and a woman of letters [on feminism, see Schaffer’s chapter]. The Autobiography’s narratorial emphasis on disinterestedness, independence, one-draft composition, and non-revision, and its faith in openness and the verdict of the public, are characteristics of Martineau’s late-life “journalistic creed,” though superimposing these values onto her early career involves distortion. Liddle is less interested in pursuing the implications of all this for the Autobiography as life-writing than for Martineau’s career as a strategic adopter and virtuoso theorist of a succession of influential periodical genres. But his central insight—that the Autobiography should be seen as a field of competing genres (review essay, journalism, memoir), and hence of “contending and competing worldviews”—is a compelling one (46–72, 9). As an example of what I mean by competing genres, the Autobiography recounts Martineau’s 1830s experience of metropolitan literary celebrity three times. She dates her decisive “release from pecuniary care” to her receiving the news of the sudden success of her Illustrations of Political Economy on February 10, 1832. She then narrates the following seven “dreamy” years as a period of “diversified experience,” work, and enjoyment, tempered by the embarrassments of finding herself “the fashion” (I:184, 178, 189). She chooses, however, sharply to, distinguish her account of the serious aspects of her career as an author—her working routines, her research methods, her tussles with critics, her 77
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ethos—from what she describes as the repugnant details of her reception by London society. She manages to divide her professional work from “this sort of play” (1:186) by deferring her account of her social life until the end of the summary of her work, and by repeatedly changing both the angle of retrospection on and the generic framing of her life as a literary celebrity. Before narrating her fashionable social life from the perspective of 1855, she explicitly interpolates an extended piece first published 16 years earlier: “Literary Lionism,” a review essay written for the London and Westminster Review (April 1839).7 She reasons that she will thus “be spared the disgusting task of detailing old absurdities and dwelling on old flatteries, which had myself for their subject” (1:186). Indeed the discursive register of this account of her fame is as impersonal and generalized as an account of faddish behavior can be without losing its topicality. Both the first person (a gender neutral “we”) and the objects of attention—the authors and their morally pestiferous hosts—are dealt with as types: the eminent divine, the lady poet, the refugee, the “party of languid fine people” (I:279), and so on. The angle of vision is provided by an imaginary “resuscitated gentleman of the fifteenth century” (1:77), anthropologically positioned to decode the whole affair. In other words, Martineau’s own experience of having her head turned, of being almost spoiled by homage, is purged of individuality, personality, and cringeworthiness. This element of her experience, she insists, is significant only for its result on her convictions and feelings, not for the comedy or gossip it might afford (1:187). It is presented as a series not of comic vignettes but stern moral lessons in the manner of Carlyle. She then leaves behind the essay and the essay vantage point for a long, personal, and frequently disparaging account of the celebrities she encountered at the time: “Whately, with his odd, overbearing manners, and his unequal conversation, . . . singularly over-rated” (1:339), “Jeffrey . . . flirting with clever women” (1:350), and so on. Vanity is ascribed mainly to men, and women get off relatively lightly. The complex narrative structure of the London adventure has obvious gendered advantages: it allows Martineau to recount an episode that shaped her professional outlook and built up her cultural capital, without having to yield to the overdetermined trope of “being looked at” necessarily implied by a woman’s experience of literary notoriety. As a corollary, it enables her to foreground the issues of voice, address, speech, and hearing that continued to interest her as both a public intellectual and a woman with hearing loss in a salon society. From a literary-critical point of view, it poses many questions, not least of which is which of these first persons counts as an autobiographical self? Which version of the London years—heroic self-help narrative of principles developed and work efficiently accomplished, recycled review, and namedropping reminiscence—counts as autobiographical? Richard Salmon notes that the original London and Westminster essay formed part of Martineau’s participation in the early Victorian campaign for copyright reform and argues that her choice to include the piece in a work destined for posthumous publication marked the “depth of [her] personal feeling” about the importance of enduring achievement as against the temporary appeal of the fashionable author. The implication is that the recycling of old material signals continuity of outlook, feeling, and thought between past and present writing selves, and hence a sense of achieved identity in the present. However, such explicit interpolations, with their counter-narrative or even backward pull, and their discontinuities of location, moment, and sometimes tense, fundamentally challenge the supposed aesthetic unity of autobiographical narrative and retrospective. Reading Victorian life-writing in light of periodical studies thus requires us to challenge our assumptions about written selves: about the autobiographical pact, the nature of the “personal” as distinct from an “impersonal” voice, the binary splitting of the “I,” and the supposedly mutually exclusive relationship between life-writing and fiction (Lejeune, De Man, Mackenzie, Pennington). My immediate point is that in Martineau’s text all three versions are assumed to be perfectly intelligible as life-writing, with no apology tendered for repetition, for spiraling chronology, for the recycling of old copy, or for a perspective that shifts into and out of various degrees of personality and impersonality. The title Autobiography subsumes all three. 78
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Martineau recognized that making writing pay more than once (if only to one’s posthumous literary estate) was fundamental to the economics of authorship. As for many Victorian memoirists, journalism and life-writing were not two ends of a spectrum of cultural value and hence durability but overlapping practices that were separable or miscible depending on context and audience. Professional authors routinely exploited their back-catalog and recycled their reminiscences as a matter of course: a tendency that should caution us against seeing autobiography as a privileged space of personal revelation. The more insecure an autobiographer’s professional status, the less likely they were to offer personal experience to the public on a once-and-for-all basis. Working-class activists, for instance, often supplemented their income with journalism; hence they knew how to spread the risk of and multiply the possible returns on publication by testing the market for their recollections in hospitable magazines. The 1913 autobiography of Frederick Rogers, social activist and artisan vellum binder, consists almost entirely of articles already printed in the Anglo-Catholic Treasury, while the articles themselves frequently contain long extracts from earlier essays. To what extent, then, were traces of recycling embedded in life-writing generally—even in the texts now regarded as the canon of Victorian life-writing? Were they camouflaged, or legible as such? And if the latter, with what consequences? When we read Mary Russell Mitford’s Recollections of a Literary Life, or Books, Places and People (1852) or Newman’s Apologia (1864), W.E. Adams’s Memoirs of a Social Atom (1903), or Ruskin’s Praeterita and Delicta (1908), how far are we conscious of what each author admits: that the first was a repackaging of earlier sketches and letters, the second a collection of pamphlets, the third mainly an assemblage of articles for the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle written in, of all places, Madeira, and the fourth a series on monthly numbers published over several years, in turn originating as journal entries? The answers have implications for our understanding not just of professional authorship but of what readers expected of life-writing; how achievement was calibrated; what significance was vested in individual personality and name; what role recognition and familiarity played in readers’ responses to purportedly new works; and how writers and readers reconciled the pleasures of the ephemeral with claims for permanent worth. An interest in literary sociability and textual communities, as well as challenges to the myths of the isolate author, the solitary reader, and the self as autonomous individual, has led to a turn or detour in life-writing studies away from the interrogation of singular texts, lives, and identities and toward the analysis of collected, relational, and collaborative productions. As Daisy Hay puts it, such attention to groups, networks, and relationships can be an “act of resistance towards posthumous and anachronistic constructions of significance” (cited in James and North 2). While nineteenth-century biography has long been recognized (and criticized) as a miscellany of letters, reminiscences, diary entries, tailors’ bills, and obituaries, and hence as the production of many hands, my claim in this chapter is that autobiographies—even a canonical one such as Martineau’s— were characterized not just by competing genres but by heterogeneous modes of production, and therefore incongruent understandings of the narrating “I.” It was often a commodity, always intertextual, and was frequently either born serial or eventually serialized (Warhol). Frequently a vector for individualism and a repository for moral and spiritual self-analysis, Victorian life-writing was also a dynamic, responsive form that required many of the nimble, versatile, and patient ways of reading we associate with serial novels. With thanks to John Bowen and the volume editors for their careful reading.
Notes 1 A letter to W. J. Fox of the Monthly Repository of 21 January 1843 underlines the longevity, exhaustiveness and pragmatism of her autobiographical project, as well as her sense of the ‘implicatedness’ of different audiences: “I have taken measures to prevent my private letters being ever printed: but I shall leave otherwise the fullest possible revelation of myself. I can do it, I find, without much implicating my family; but still, I wish to keep
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2 3 4
5 6
7
my mind clear from all family influences . . . I feel it to be as clear a duty as any that ever lay before me. My faults & weaknesses themselves all go to enable me to do this well” (Sanders ed. Letters 69). As a Comtean positivist Martineau came to see ill-health as disobedience to the laws of nature (Autobiography I:55). See Letter to John Chapman of 16 Sept 1855 (Sanders ed. Letters 130). Despite all Martineau’s efforts to have the last word on her body, her brain never made it to Dr Atkinson, and after a widely discussed postmortem, her large dermoid cyst was exhibited and discussed at the 27 April 1877 meeting of the Clinical Society of London, and duly described in detail in the British Medical Journal. That the pretext for these continued discussions was the wide circulation of the Autobiography is equivocal testimony to its power (“Remarks” 543). Miller castigates it as “hard and censorious” (175), vain and aggressive, and neglects Martineau’s finer and softer side. Because journalism is often construed as apprenticeship rather than a professional craft itself, and because, even when a periodical provenance for “literary” work is identifiable, the generic specificities of periodical writing—journalism, reviewing, leader-writing, even serial fiction—invite more attention. The interpolated version was signed rather than initialed as in the earlier version, given an ad hoc title, and stripped of the few long quotations from the ‘reviewed’ words that provided its original pretext. See Martineau “Review.” On Martineau as a journalist, see Easley.
Key Critical Works David Amigoni, editor. Life Writing and Victorian Culture. Juliette Atkinson. Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth-Century ‘Hidden’ Lives. Alison Booth. How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present. Regenia Gagnier. Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920. Martha Stoddard Holmes. “Melodramas of the Self: Auto/Biographies of Victorians with Physical Disabilities.” George Landow, editor. Approaches to Victorian Autobiography. Philippe Lejeune. “The Autobiographical Pact.” Laura Marcus. Auto/biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice. Heidi L. Pennington. Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography. Linda H. Peterson. Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing. ———. Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation. Adam Smyth, editor. A History of English Autobiography.
Works Cited Ablow, Rachel. “Harriet Martineau and the Impersonality of Pain.” Victorian Studies, vol. 56, no. 4, 2014, pp. 675–97. Adams, W. E. Memoirs of a Social Atom, 2 vols. Hutchinson, 1903. Alexander, Ziggi, and Audrey Dewjee, editors. The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands. Falling Wall, 1984. Amigoni, David, editor. Life Writing and Victorian Culture. Taylor and Francis, 2006. Anon. “The Late Harriet Martineau.” The British Medical Journal, vol. 2, no. 809, 1876, pp. 20–1. Atkinson, Juliette. Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth-Century ‘Hidden’ Lives. Oxford UP, 2010. Bennett, Scott. “The Editorial Character and Readership of the Penny Magazine.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 17, no. 4, Winter 1984, pp. 127–41. Berlant, Lauren. “Intimacy: A Special Issue.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 2, Winter 1998, pp. 281–8. Booth, Alison. How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present. U of Chicago P, 2004. Broughton, Trev Lynn. Men of Letters, Writing Lives: Masculinity and Literary Auto/Biography in the Late-Victorian Period. Routledge, 1999. Burnett, John. “Archive of Working-Class Autobiographies.” www.brunel.ac.uk/life/library/Special-Collections/ Burnett-Archive-of-Working-Class-Autobiographies. ———. Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s. Penguin, 1984. ———. Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s. Penguin, 1977.
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Life-Writing Chapman, Maria Weston. Memorials of Harriet Martineau, edited by Deborah Logan, Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. Coghill, Mrs Harry, editor. The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs M. O. W. Oliphant, introduced by Q. D. Leavis, Leicester UP, 1973. Colclough, Stephen. “Victorian Print Culture: Periodicals and Serial Lives, 1830–1860.” A History of English Autobiography, edited by Adam Smyth, Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 237–51. Cooper, Thomas. The Life of Thomas Cooper, edited by John Saville, Leicester UP, 1971. Couser, G. Thomas. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability and Life Writing. U Wisconsin P, 1997. Cullwick, Hannah. Diaries of Hannah Cullwick,Victorian Maidservant, edited and introduced by Liz Stanley, Virago, 1984. Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. Routledge, 1987. De Man, Paul. “Autobiography as Defacement.” MLN, vol. 94, no. 5, 1979, pp. 919–30. Denisoff, Dennis. “The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 1888–1901.” BRANCH. www.branchcollective. org/?ps_articles=dennis-denisoff-the-hermetic-order-of-the-golden-dawn-1888-1901. Dibattista, Maria, and Emily O. Wittman, editors. The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography. Cambridge UP, 2014. Easley, Alexis. First Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830-1870. Ashgate, 2004. Epstein, Deborah. “Victorian Autobiography: Sons and Fathers.” The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography, edited by Maria Dibattista and Emily O. Wittman, Cambridge UP, 2014, pp. 87–101. Fitzgerald, Percy. Recreations of a Literary Man, or, Does Writing Pay?, 2 vols. Chatto and Windus, 1882. Frawley, Maria. “Harriet Martineau, Health, and Journalism.” Women’s Writing, vol. 9, no. 3, 2002, pp. 433–44. Gagnier, Regenia. Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920. Oxford UP, 1991. Gibson, Richard Hughes, and Timothy Larsen. “Nineteenth-Century Spiritual Autobiography: Carlyle, Newman, Mill.” A History of English Autobiography, edited by Adam Smyth, Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 192–206. Grass, Sean. “Imminent Victorians: Life-Writing and the Literary Market.” Unpublished paper, North American Victorian Studies Association Conference, Banff, AB, November 2017. ———. Life on the Exchange. Cambridge UP, 2019. Greenhow, T. M. Medical Report of the Case of Miss H—M—. Samuel Highley, 1845. ———. “Termination of the Case of Miss Harriet Martineau.” British Medical Journal, vol. 1, no. 850, 1877, pp. 449–50. Hamilton, Ian. Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography. Faber, 1994. Henderson, Heather. The Victorian Self: Autobiography and Biblical Narrative. Cornell UP, 1989. Holmes, Martha Stoddard. “Melodramas of the Self: Auto/Biographies of Victorians with Physical Disabilities.” Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture, U of Michigan P, 2010, pp. 133–90. James, Felicity, and Julian North. “Introduction.” Writing Lives together: Romantic and Victorian Auto/Biography, edited by Felicity James and Julian North, Routledge, 2018. Lejeune, Philippe. “The Autobiographical Pact.” Translated by Katherine Leary. The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader, edited by Rita Anne Chansky and Emily Hipchen, Routledge, 2016, pp. 34–48. Levine, George. Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England. U of Chicago P, 2010. Liddle, Dallas. The Dynamics of Literary Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain. U of Virginia P, 2009. Loftus, Donna, “Self-Made Men and the Civic: Time, Space and Narrative in Late Nineteenth-Century Autobiography.” Controlling Time and Shaping the Self: Developments in Autobiographical Writing since the Sixteenth Century, edited by Arianne Baggerman, Rudolph Dekker, and Michael Mascuch, Brill, 2011, pp. 303–30. Mackenzie, Hazel. “‘Allow Me to Introduce Myself: First Negatively’: Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray and First Person Journalism in the 1860s Family Magazine.” PhD Thesis, U York, 2010. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/1490/1/Hazel_Mackenzie_-Thesis.pdf. Marcus, Laura. Auto/biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice. Manchester UP, 1994. Martineau, Harriet. “An Autobiographic Memoir.” Daily News, 29 June 1876, p. 2. ———. Excerpt in “Varieties.” Leisure Hour, vol. 1336, no. 4, August 1877, pp. 496–6. ———. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography. 1877. Edited by Gaby Weiner, 2 vols., Virago, 1983. ———. Letters on Mesmerism. Harper, 1845. ———. “Letter to the Deaf.” Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, n.s., vol. 1, April 1834, pp. 174–9. ———. Life in the Sickroom: Essays by an Invalid. Edward Moxon, 1844. ———. “Miss Harriet Martineau to M. B. Maurice.” Athenaeum, vol. 306, no. 7, September 1833, pp. 604–5. ———. “Miss Harriet Martineau à M. B. Maurice.” Revue mensuelle d’économie politique, vol. 3, 1833, pp. 71–5. ———. “Preface to Second Edition.” Biographical Sketches, 3rd ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 1870.
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Trev Lynn Broughton ———. “Queen Victoria’s Coronation.” Leisure Hour, vol. 1343, 22 September 1877, pp. 606–7. ———. “Review of ‘Heads of the People’.” London and Westminster Review, vol. 2, no. 21, April 1839, pp. 261–81. Mascuch, Michael. Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791. Polity, 1997. Mill, John Stuart. Autobiography. Longman, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1873. Miller, Florence Fenwick. Harriet Martineau. W. H. Allen, 1884. Mitford, Mary Russell. Recollections of a Literary Life, or Books, Places and People, 3 vols. Bentley, 1852. Newman, John Henry. Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1864. Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. Harvard UP, 1960. Pennington, Heidi L. Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography. U Missouri P, 2018. Peterson, Linda H. Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing. UP of Virginia, 1999. ———. Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation. Yale UP, 1986. Polkey, Pauline. “Reading History through Autobiography: Politically Active Women of Late NineteenthCentury Britain and Their Personal Narratives.” Women’s History Review, vol. 9, no. 3, 2000, pp. 483–500. Regis, Amber K. “Un/Making the Victorians: Literary Biography, 1880–1930.” A Companion to Literary Biography, edited by Richard Bradford, Wiley, 2018, pp. 63–86. Rogers, Frederick. Labour, Life and Literature. Edited by David Rubinstein, Harvester, 1973. Ruskin, John. Praeterita. Edited by Francis O’Gorman, Oxford World’s Classics, 2012. Ryall, Anka. “Medical Body and Lived Experience: The Case of Harriet Martineau.” Mosaic, vol. 33, no. 4, December 2000, pp. 35–53. Salmon, Richard. The Formation of the Literary Profession. Cambridge UP, 2013. Smiles, Samuel. “Harriet Martineau in the Bicentenary Year.” Women’s Writing, vol. 9, no. 3, 2002, pp. 331–6. ———, editor. Harriet Martineau: Selected Letters. Clarendon, 1990. . Brief Biographies. Ticknor and Fields, 1861. Smith, Charles Manby. The Working-Man’s Way in the World, Being the Autobiography of a Journeyman Printer. Redfield, 1854. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography. U Minnesota P, 1996. Swindells, Julia. Victorian Writing and Working Women: The Other Side of Silence. U of Minnesota P, 1985. Warhol, Robyn. “Seriality.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, nos. 3–4, 2018, pp. 873–6. Wells, T. Spencer. “Remarks on the Case of Miss Martineau.” The British Medical Journal, vol. 1, no. 853, 1877, pp. 543–3. White, William Hale. The Autobiography and Deliverance of Mark Rutherford, edited by Basil Willey, Leicester UP, 1969. Wu, Duncan. “Romantic Life-Writing.” A History of English Autobiography, edited by Adam Smyth, Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 179–91.
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7 GOTHIC, HORROR, AND THE WEIRD Shifting Paradigms Roger Luckhurst
In 1979, a late chapter in David Punter’s landmark two-volume study, The Literature of Terror, made the case for adding an “often ignored” and “underrated” novel to the study of the late Victorian Gothic revival. It was by an amateur, minor Irish writer, a Dublin acquaintance of Oscar Wilde called Bram Stoker, and the book was named Dracula (256). It had been dismissed as a “lurid and creepy” potboiler in Stoker’s obituary in 1912 in the London Times, which was assured that long after this shocker had disappeared Stoker would mainly be remembered for the biography of his boss at the Lyceum Theater, the actor Sir Henry Irving. Twenty years later, Dracula was sent to the hell of endless B-movie recycling, the lowest circle of mass cultural damnation. Yet Punter tentatively suggested that Dracula might offer to literary critics “a powerful record of social pressures and anxieties” of England in the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897 (256). Forty years on, a vast critical industry has grown up around Dracula, declared to be “the single most important text in the history of horror” in a recent Oxford University Press history (Darryl Jones 39). Punter’s generation of critics, coinciding with a massive 1970s boom in paperback and film horror, recovered and reshaped a genre we now call Gothic Romance. Previously, critics referred to a fevered strand of “horror-romanticism,” as Eino Railo termed it in his 1927 study, The Haunted Castle (7). In The Romantic Agony (1933), Mario Praz occasionally dipped into extremities of the Gothic, but the noble art of Romanticism was best defined against the vast numbers of so-called “terror novels” that followed in the wake of Horace Walpole’s fake manuscript, The Castle of Otranto (1764). Walpole’s fever dream was an outlier and oddity of a text until the craze for Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic romances took off in England in the politically anxious 1790s, an era haunted by the French Revolution and the guillotine justice of The Terror. Literary critics might read Jane Austen’s satire of this “horrid” novel genre, Northanger Abbey (first offered for publication in 1803, but not published until 1817), but they rarely read the original sources she mocked, novels such as Peter Teuthold’s The Necromancer (1794) or Carl Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries (1796). Only in the 1970s did dissident critics, particularly feminist scholars seeking the traces of what Ellen Moers called the Female Gothic, begin to turn their critical attention to the Gothic. If horror has become culturally and academically mainstream since the 1970s wave, it is also important to track the shifting meanings of the word across the years. We tend informally to elide terms like “Gothic” and “horror,” or mix up the affective language of terror, horror, the uncanny, fear, dread, the weird, and the eerie as if they were equivalents. While it is possibly worse to insist on pedantic distinctions, the history of horror, and particularly its transformation in recent critical theories, is helpful to unpack precisely. It explains why the mode of horror has become such a vital 83
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theoretical conjuncture not just for genre critics, but also for philosophers exploring the limits of the unthought, and for ecocritics contemplating the origins of the dark ecologies of the Anthropocene.
1. Aesthetic Value: Terror vs. Horror Nearly every study of the first era of the Gothic Romance is compelled to cite Ann Radcliffe’s slightly shaky conceptual opposition of terror versus horror. Radcliffe’s greatest success, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), was actually a relatively conservative novel of sensibility, in which the heroine finally absorbs her father’s injunctions regarding proportionate moral and affective action and, after many menaces to her virtue in the twisting labyrinths of Udolpho, finds her way to modest Protestant retirement in married life. The key pedagogical device is the explained supernatural, where the disproportionate reactions of fancy and imagination are eventually neutralized by patient naturalistic explanation. Superstition and credulity are craven continental and Popish traits; the book eventually masters them with calm, English, middle-class skepticism. Yet Radcliffe’s instructional use of fancy’s horrors could not control their disordered and licentious indulgence in the literary marketplace, and Udolpho quickly produced its nightmare other, Matthew Lewis’s daring and transgressive phantasmagoria, The Monk, the scandalous success of 1796. Coleridge—one of its many detractors—denounced Lewis’s impious and pernicious indulgence of “the horrible and the preternatural” in the strongest moral, religious, and aesthetic terms, but Lewis had let a libidinous genie out of the bottle (185). To divide her own project from this scandalous text, Radcliffe wrote an essay distinguishing her use of terror from Lewis’s use of horror (the essay was only published posthumously in 1826, as Radcliffe’s main defense against Lewis and his imitators was to abandon publishing novels completely after 1796). Radcliffe states: “Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a higher degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them” (168). Terror is aligned with the outward, expansive movement of the sublime, in which, according to English theorist Edmund Burke, “terrible objects”—wild mountains, violent weather, lightning, darkness, obscurity, shocks, and menaces—produce the most intense emotions in art, a quixotic mix of pleasure and pain (39). The philosopher Immanuel Kant would later add that the vast, colossal, monstrous sublime generated an added cognitive boost as the mind sought to grasp this vast, unrepresentable thing. In its reach to master terror, this was the highest form of cognition. Horror, in contrast, is contractive, reducing response back to the physiological reactions of the body. It is a response of the crawling skin or the convulsed gut, not of the brain. In this, horror returned to its etymological roots. The Latin horrere means to bristle or stand on end; it produces the word horripilation—goose-bumps, the involuntary shudder, the hackles raised, all purely bodily reactions. Kant was very clear that the feeling of disgust could produce no aesthetic response because it short-circuited any mental reflection, replacing proper aesthetic reaction with the lower autonomic reactions of the body (see Miller). Implicitly, there is also a theological divide at work. There are holy terrors, but horror is rooted thoroughly in the secular body. Erasmus Darwin’s sly reflections on biological transformism in his poem The Loves of the Plants (1789) were turned into a theory of purely natural selection, with no divine intervention required, by his grandson Charles Darwin in the Origin of Species (1859). The first Gothic romances were written by timid Protestants who feared reversion to the tyranny and superstition of Catholic priestcraft. Horror came from what was coiled inside the body—what we might inherit from the biological past, what might erupt from within. The secularization of the West since the eighteenth century—what Max Weber called “the disenchantment of the world” in 1919—ought to favor a drift from terror to horror. Science was supposed to replace magic or theology with materialist thinking. Yet Weber’s secularization thesis, for so long an influential account of the progress of modernity, has been strongly contested by Alex Owen and Charles Taylor, among others. After their critiques, we might better consider modernity as a dialectic of the dis-enchantment 84
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and re-enchantment of the world. The modern world creates its own magical effects: monsters generated by the very taxonomies of biology, or specters shadowing the new Victorian technologies of telegraphs (in the 1840s), telephones (in the 1870s), or X-rays (in the 1890s). The dead started to travel down the wires, and ghosts flare in the spectrum visible only to cameras or wave detectors in laboratories. To the frustration of many materialists, this has meant we have maintained an enduring interest in the supernatural and the lowly Gothic mode as a means of negotiating the very novelty of modernity. And our terrors have remained quite robustly holy, as horror films from The Exorcist (1973) to The Nun (2018) attest. We remain scared sacred [on new religions, see Ferguson’s chapter; on Christianity, see Knight’s; and on technology, see Menke’s]. Although many writers, including Radcliffe herself, confusingly used “terror” and “horror” interchangeably, this conceptual opposition implicitly operated to create a hierarchy of taste within the Gothic itself. What is given aesthetic approval is the mental stretch of terror—the suggestive, the intangible, or the elusive. The “best” contributions are the psychological terrors of Henry James, say, where the ghostly hovers between the literal and the metaphorical and remains radically undecidable—as in “The Turn of the Screw” (1898) or “The Jolly Corner”(1908). James’s ghosts flicker in and out of existence in the byways of his tortured syntax. The donnish primness of M.R. James loathed the new explicitness of writing from American pulp magazines in the early twentieth century, calling it “merely nauseating,” and commanded: “Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it” (414). There is a line of aesthetic condemnation of the lowly pleasures of mere physiological horror that stretches from Lewis’s The Monk, via the genre noir of French terror fiction in the 1820s, to Edgar Allan Poe’s tasteless obsession with bodily ruination in the 1830s and 1840s, and toward the revulsion actively sought by those fin de siècle upstarts, Arthur Machen and H.G. Wells. Machen obsessively staged the dissolution of the body in his early fiction: in “The Novel of the White Powder,” for instance, the indulgences of a young man reduces him to “a pool of horrible liquor” that drips through the ceiling onto his pious sister below (122). His stories collected such opprobrium that he even published a selection of his worst reviews, Precious Balms (1923). Wells was warned he had thrown away his early promise with the vivisectionist nightmare of spliced horrors and moral degeneracy in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). Meanwhile, the popular romance writer Henry Rider Haggard was denounced by the Church Quarterly Review in 1888 as the ringleader of “The Cult of the Horrible” for his bloodthirsty adventures and grammatically offensive, unclassical prose. Haggard railed against a literary establishment that excluded him from the very moment of his first commercial success with King Solomon’s Mines (1885). Writers of popular pulp fiction explicitly embraced the anti-aesthetics of physiological revulsion. Edwardian writer William Hope Hodgson specialized in trying to sustain the sensation of the “creep” (24), the physical effects of the horrific atmosphere of malignant hauntings in his stories in Carnacki, The Ghost Finder from 1913. Elsewhere, Hodgson specialized in stories of men-becoming-fungus, or, for a bit of variation, fungus-becoming-men. The stable of writers for Weird Tales, founded in 1923, which famously included American author H.P. Lovecraft, reveled in ooze, bodily decay, and dissolution. Lovecraft was a militant atheist, who overthrew the religious trappings of the Gothic for what he called the “cosmic indifferentism” of a callous and cold universe. The whole subgenre was known as the “shudder pulps” by the 1930s, emphasizing its lowly physiological ambitions. The editorial of the first issue of Terror Tales in 1934 justified its existence in these terms: “[T]oday, in a generation protected and coddled by the artificial safeguards of civilization, the average citizen finds scant play for those tonic bodily reflexes which are so largely caused by primitive fear. Thrills, we believe, fill an important and necessary function in any normal, healthy human life” (cited by Robert K. Jones 19). It was about the same time that the rush of “weird menace” films began to emerge from Universal Studios and its rivals in Hollywood, after the success of Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931). British film censors developed the category “H for Horrific,” thus marshaling a dispersed set of films into a new genre: the horror film (see Peirse). Some of these adaptations of Victorian classics, before the 85
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systematic imposition of censorship on Hollywood through the Hays Code in 1934, were incendiary. Wells’s Doctor Moreau, adapted as The Island of Lost Souls (1932), remained banned in Britain until the late 1960s, so disturbing were the implications of its sexual perversion, racial intermixing, and a plot trajectory that seemed to imply the revolutionary overthrow of colonial masters.
2. The Gothic and Cultural Value Any such hierarchy of aesthetic value and taste can be subject to odd inversions. This has been particularly the case since the horror revival of the 1970s. The horror novelist and film critic Kim Newman, who documents this era, talks about the “trash vitality” or subcultural energy of the genre (49), and fan cultures lovingly embrace mainstream opprobrium and moral outrages committed on the aesthetics of the beautiful. The testing of the limits of taste is given intrinsic subversive value in horror (despite its frequently conservative content). In this subcultural regime, the threshold year of 1968 is much more about George Romero’s low-budget, independent, and unrated film about undead cannibal ghouls in Pittsburgh, Night of the Living Dead, than the mainstreaming of horror in Hollywood studio productions such as Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. Ten years later, this inverted regime of taste would always choose Sam Raimi’s frenetic, gross-out, and briefly banned “video nasty” The Evil Dead (1983) over the perfect glacial symmetry of Stanley Kubrick’s studio-bound The Shining (1980) [on popular fiction and culture, see Daly’s chapter; on aesthetic formalism, see Greiner’s]. A different economy of value attends the connoisseurs who navigate away from both high cultural opprobrium and the low cultural carnivalesque. Operative here is what James Machin calls “the virtues of obscurity,” a pursuit of lost or vanished writers of a kind of outré fiction that has pushed them out of both popular and literary canons. The exemplary figure used to be Lovecraft, a paradoxical pulp Decadent who published in amateur or pulp magazines. His stories were only collected and published posthumously by friends through their own publishing venture, Arkham House, since no established press was remotely interested in such awkward, mannered stories. Since the republication of his work in paperback in the 1960s, which has engendered a hugely influential cultural strand of horror across literature, film, TV, comics, and games, Lovecraft has lost the imprimatur of obscurity. That mantle arguably then passed to Arthur Machen, a “lost” writer of the 1890s, re-found and celebrated as a cult author in America in the 1920s, even while he was still alive (he died in 1946). His prose style perfectly fits Arthur Symons’s 1893 definition of “The Decadent Movement in Literature” as marked by “an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity” (105), and his authorial persona is often elided with the tortured protagonist of his novel about writer’s block, The Hill of Dreams (written 1897, published 1907). Now that Machen features as a Penguin and Oxford World’s Classic and has an authoritative scholarly MHRA selection edited by Dennis Denisoff, Machen seems to have developed a paradoxical role as a major “minor” writer, a marginal figure who has an odd “ubiquitous peripherality” (Machin, 1067). Connoisseurs have since pursued and attempted to revive other vanishingly rare Victorian and Edwardian authors, such as Count Stenbock, the perverse Decadent who managed to publish Studies in Death before his addictions killed him in April 1895 at exactly the moment Oscar Wilde went on trial. A long-rumored edition of his work, including manuscripts long held aloof from public circulation in a private collection, finally appeared in 2018 from the Strange Attractor Press [on decadence, see Evangelista’s chapter]. Indeed, this culture of rarefied horror feeds a whole network of small presses producing lavish, limited edition runs of obscure authors for discerning collectors. Tartarus, a small independent English press, has been responsible for reestablishing Machen’s reputation through its limited runs of self-consciously retro designed editions. They have since reissued the unnerving postwar writer of “strange stories,” Robert Aickman (who has also now made it to major press reissues), the ghost 86
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stories of the Edwardian Oliver Onions, and the weird decadent tales of M.P. Shiel from the 1890s. There have been similar small presses in America: Ash-Tree, Night Shade Books, Centipede. The larger Valancourt imprint makes a virtue of lower digital printing and production costs to reissue hundreds of once “lost” Victorian Gothic and horror writers, all the way from a complete run of the 1790s “Northanger” terror novels mocked by Jane Austen to the revival of once astoundingly successful mid-Victorian serials, such as George Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London (1845), to the jobbing writers of “horror” fiction in the late-Victorian revival, such as Richard Marsh and Bertram Mitford. Small-scale, artisanal book production, and the generation of value through the scarce commodity of the “book beautiful,” is a deliberate echo of Decadent anti-market tactics of the 1890s and is clearly a dialectical response to the digitized ubiquity and immediate access on the internet.
3. Enter the Weird For a long time, readers could use the convenient terror/horror dyad to position a higher Gothic sensibility against the lowly shocks sought by mass cultural horror. But recent critical reflections have considerably complicated this picture. In 2003, the British writers M. John Harrison and China Miéville, authors of generically slippery fiction (never quite science fiction or horror or fantasy), briefly championed a conjuncture they called The New Weird. Typically, Harrison posed this as a set of questions rather than a positive object: “Who does it? What is it? Is it even anything?” (317). Miéville, a communist activist as well as a writer, wrote a manifesto declaring the New Weird to be a potentially revolutionary literature, “post-Seattle fiction”—referring to the early anti-globalization protests at the World Trade Organization meeting in 1999 (3). Anti-realist fiction could unravel the fantastical nature of what Mark Fisher, another radical champion of this mode, called Capitalist Realism. This was a provocative attempt to appropriate the form but distance the new fiction from the old weird of H.P. Lovecraft, with its notoriously nativist, conservative politics. It was, Miéville argued, “both a renunciation and a return” (3), where tentacular alterities were introjected or embraced rather than phobically expelled. Both Harrison and Miéville hastily moved away from the New Weird, fearing the term would ossify. Yet it had already traveled to America, and an anthology, The New Weird, appeared in 2008. The same anthologists, Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, then retroactively invented a tradition of writers for this mode in their huge tome, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, in 2011. This steered away from the pulp origins of Lovecraft and Weird Tales, and instead claimed roots in cosmopolitan Modernism, in figures as diverse as Franz Kafka, Gustav Meyrink, Jorge Luis Borges, and Stefan Grabinski. The VanderMeers did not go much further back, but those more attuned to nineteenthcentury fiction have traced a line through Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s occult novels Zanoni (1842) and A Strange Story (1845) down to Charlotte Riddell’s Weird Stories (1882) to Rudyard Kipling’s queasy super/natural Indian tales in collections such as Life’s Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own People (1891). In America the line from Poe to Ambrose Bierce, now belatedly declared one of the masters of the weird tale, is also well established. What is striking about the interstitial category of the weird is this insistent act of self-invention, each history creating its own tradition. Lovecraft’s long survey essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature, defined the weird tale as needing to contain “a certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces” (15), but then openly recruited a line of writers to his retrospective tradition, often simply ignoring “the author’s intent” (16). Lovecraft’s four “masters” of the weird—M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and Lord Dunsany—in no way shared his philosophy, even as he appropriated their work. Precisely because the weird is interstitial, canon formation remains volatile, shifting, an act of strong curation rather than objective recovery. This means that aside from the Modernist or Edwardian weird, or the contemporary New Weird, there is also a Victorian weird waiting to be retroactively composed, which could recruit from as far and 87
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wide as William Wordsworth, Lord Tennyson, George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Emma Hardinge Britten, or Marie Corelli.
4. From the Philosophy of Horror to the Horror of Philosophy For decades, critical thinking about the Gothic tended to be rooted (and often routinized) through the matrix of psychoanalysis: monsters of the id, the haunted house as psychic topography, a genre of desublimation. Sigmund Freud had theorized “the uncanny” (the unfamiliar or unhomely that erupts into the home) through his reading of E.T.A. Hoffman’s tale, “The Sandman” (1816). Freud interpreted the ghosts that appear in Wilhelm Jensen’s strange novel Gradiva (1902) and also talked about pressing copies of H. Rider Haggard’s romances on his long-suffering patients, as he considered them primal masterpieces. The early British convert to Freudianism, Ernest Jones, wrote On the Nightmare (1910), which included a chapter analyzing the folkloric figure of the vampire, although Jones never dipped so low as to mention Stoker’s Dracula [on psychoanalysis, see Keen’s chapter]. In France, the maverick psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan wrote at length about Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” (1844), and Lacan’s conception of the Real—that realm outside of the structuration of the Symbolic Order in which all human meaning subsists—has made “cosmic” horror a rich resource for the Lacanian Marxist Slavoj Zizek and his followers. Some terrifying “blot” on sign systems threatens meaning—like the monstrous white whale of Moby Dick (1851), or the creatures that populate the upper stratosphere in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Horror of the Heights” (1913). Victorian men of science “see” what they should not, lurking behind conventional reality, as in the enhancement of vision in H.G. Wells’s “The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes” or The Time Machine (both 1895) or Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla” (1887). Julia Kristeva, another French Freudian, influentially reflected in The Powers of Horror on how the subject is constituted in the process of expelling the abject. The shifting cultural boundaries of disgust at the unclean, the impure, and the abject again made horror fiction a privileged locus in this paradigm. Although uninterested in historical specificity, Kristeva’s abjection can allow precise readings of nineteenth-century forms of abjection and taboo, often intensely focused on matters of sex and race. The secret sexual liaison or the taint of foreign blood, belatedly discovered, motors a thousand Victorian melodramas and Gothic horrors. Another French theorist whose work was constantly indebted to Freud was Jacques Derrida. In his late lectures, Specters of Marx, Derrida reworked ontology as “hauntology,” proposing that to be is to be haunted by the temporally disjunct absent-presence of ghostly (un)dead. The paradigm of “spectrality” has been exhaustively subsumed into Gothic criticism, most obviously in readings of the Golden Age of the ghost story, identified by Julia Briggs, Andrew Smith, and others as running from the late-Victorian period into the 1920s. “Hauntology” has now been so extensively reworked for contemporary horror that it often barely has any connection with Derrida’s original text (see, for instance, Prince). In the 1990s, the emergence of queer theory turned overtly to horror because it was a tradition of writing for sexual dissidents that focused on the material threats to vulnerable material selves. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick tracked a logic of “homosexual panic” in the persistent Gothic theme of the persecution of men by their doubles, from James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) to Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903). J. Halberstam’s Skin Shows—with its analysis of works by Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Stoker, and Wilde—was rooted more thoroughly in the biopolitical body, arguing that horror fiction is a “technology of monstrosity” that “produce the monster as a remarkably mobile, permeable and infinitely interpretable body” (21–2). The epistemological frenzy generated by queer theory was redoubled by the horror genre: “[M]ultiple interpretations are embedded in the text and part of the experience of horror comes from the realization that meaning itself runs riot” (2). Despite the interrogation of the limits of the Freudian “hermeneutics of suspicion” voiced by Halberstam, 88
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queer theory tended to multiply and intensify that very hermeneutics. If it suspected there was no final hidden truth to uncloset, the surface of the text was animated by apparently inexhaustible, intersecting lines of conflictual meanings [on sexuality, see Dau’s chapter]. A stark change in approaches emerged with the shift from the Gothic to the weird in the early twenty-first century. Horror was not necessarily interpretable at all, but was horrific precisely because it dramatized the very limits of thought itself. The philosopher Eugene Thacker argued in After Life that, in Lovecraft’s fiction, the weird is not the discovery of an aberration, which would place us in the context of law, norm, and the monster. Rather, the weird is the discovery of an inhuman limit to thought, that is nevertheless foundational for thought. (23) Thacker then produced a three-volume study that refused to provide a “philosophy of horror” (as Noel Carroll had once done), but offered instead a “horror of philosophy”—an investigation of how horror fiction and film might articulate the limits of post-Kantian thought. In the first volume, Thacker proposed that horror was “not dealing with human fear in a human world (the worldfor-us), but that horror be understood as being about the limits of the human as it confronts a world that is not just a world, not just the Earth, but also a Planet (the world-without-us)” (8). Horror is “a non-philosophical attempt to think about the world-without-us philosophically” (9). This position privileges the cosmic horror of Lovecraft, who is elevated to a full-scale philosopher, an exact contemporary of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. Indeed, Lovecraft is proffered as a much more urgent and relevant thinker. After two volumes reading the philosophical tradition hard against the grain (raiding medieval demonology, among other things), Thacker’s third volume reads horror fiction from Poe’s “The Black Cat” (1843) and “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842) to Blackwood’s ‘The Willows” (1907). This third volume also parsed the categories of the Gothic and the weird. Thacker’s exercise is a deadpan provocation to both philosophy and literary criticism, and the hermeneutics that they share. It could be called, after the work of Franҫois Laruelle, “non-philosophy,” that is, philosophy conducted outside what Laruelle considers the “pretension” of conventional philosophical institutions and argumentation (28). This stance is similar to a group of philosophers on the margins who were briefly gathered under the name of “Speculative Realism” in about 2007. This group included Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, and others (the best outline of the group’s interlinked interventions is The Universe of Things by Steven Shaviro). These nonphilosophers sought to abandon the anthropocentric subjectivism of all Western philosophy after Kant, arguing that the object world always exceeded the subject, that much of the world exists in what Meillassoux called in After Finitude “the great outdoors, the absolute outside . . . which was not relative to us . . . existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking of it or not” (7). In this they claimed to formulate a new kind of realism, unencumbered by Enlightenment idealism. This stance is termed “non-correlationism”: a refusal to assume that the subject and object worlds align, or that the subject must always master and subsume the object world. As in the turn to the material object in recent thing theory, things stubbornly persist outside any attempts to contain them inside the subjectobject division of the world. Things do not necessarily “disclose” themselves to human attention or interpretation (see Bill Brown) [on material culture, see Lutz’s chapter]. In this theory, Lovecraft’s take on horror is elevated above Husserl’s belief in the priority of human interpretations, since “cosmic dread” dramatizes the very limit of anthropocentric thought. Horror fiction like this becomes very important because it reveals the limits of philosophy in a way inaccessible to conventional philosophical argument. Graham Harman even wrote an entire book called Weird Realism, which was a series of close commentaries on Lovecraft’s key stories—although these readings deliberately refuse the standard logic of critical exposition and inhabit rather than “decode” 89
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the fiction. It was Mark Fisher’s innovative critical approach to Lovecraft that inaugurated this trend, and his useful discrimination of categories of the “weird” and the “eerie” were in his case backed up by more attentive close readings of M.R. James and the 1970s revival. Much of this interest remains theory-driven, rather than cultural-historical, and these thinkers have little to say about the Victorian period as such. It can be an immensely generative framework, however. An allied approach, with a more literary focus, comes from genre critic John Clute, whose theory of horror fiction in his long essay The Darkening Garden, suggests that the moment of revelation of a radical “outside” to perceived reality be termed “Vastation”. This is the pivotal moment in horror when there is a sudden access of vision that reveals the true world behind the veil. Clute derives the term Vastation from the writings of the eighteenth-century occultist and visionary Emmanuel Swedenborg, who was an important influence on American Transcendentalist thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry James Sr., and fed into the horror fiction of Blackwood and others. Lovecraft’s fiction is a typical focus for Vastation—a shattering revelation of the malign, oppressive forces of the Outside—but John Clute also lists Mary Shelley’s Last Man (1826) and Sheridan Le Fanu’s famous tale, “Green Tea” (1869), as instances of Vastation. Mark Blacklock has also used Clute’s frame to explore Stoker’s Dracula. The name for this new horror of philosophy, “Speculative Realism,” has morphed under Harman’s tireless promotion into the school of “object-oriented ontology,” or “OOO” (a term first used in 2010). As the name implies, OOO continues the task of dethroning the subject, and arguing for a “flat ontology” that treats all things (insects, stones, weather systems, factories, frogs, humans, or sneakers) the same way, in order to “depart from the dreary anthropocentrism of modern philosophy,” as Harman puts it (Object-Oriented Ontology 88). This borrows a lot from Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, which also takes aim at an Enlightenment project that has placed man over animal, subject over object, and culture over nature, with (Latour argues) disastrous effects. Latour’s work is grounded in historical research, institutional critique, careful case studies, and fieldwork with scientists, so it accrues considerably more gravitas than OOO. Latour has written productively about the imbrication of science and culture, for instance using the patchworked construction of the monster in Frankenstein as the dominating device in his study of technology, Aramis. After Latour, and after the rise of OOO, the strategic use of horror and weird fiction has become a routine part of undoing philosophy-as-usual.
5. Horror and the Anthropocene Our growing concern at the fragile ecology of human existence on the planet has increasingly favored Gothic, horror, and weird modes, as well as reviving an interest in the literature of the first Gothic wave in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Apocalyptic fiction steadily leeches into the groundwater of mainstream culture. Ecocriticism might have started with high Wordsworthian Romanticism, but it has come to recognize that horror can powerfully figure the kinds of global changes that the domestic scales of realist fiction cannot see. Horror fiction might just well be the privileged genre of the “Anthropocene” [on the Anthropocene and ecocriticism, see Taylor’s and Voskuil’s chapters, respectively]. Bruno Latour argues that global warming is indicative of a crisis in the Enlightenment view of nature as a resource to be dominated and used up (the unexamined assumption of much nineteenthcentury thought, from communists like Karl Marx to imperialists arguing for the occupation of otherwise “wasted” land). Instead of humans dominating the object world, global warming reveals a world of “risky attachments, tangled objects”: “they have no clear boundaries, no well-defined essences, no sharp separation between their own hard kernel and their environment. It is because of this feature that they take on the aspect of tangled beings, forming rhizomes and networks” (Politics of Nature 22, 24). Of course, breached and torn boundaries are the red meat of the Gothic mode, which often panics at the prospect of such hybrid fusions. 90
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The “Anthropocene” is Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer’s term for the stance that the planet’s “natural” systems had been so altered by human action that a new geological epoch had been inaugurated, one in which the culture/nature divide had collapsed. The trace of human-generated change in many planetary systems was apparent in ice cores that recorded traces of the beginning of the carbon-burning Industrial Revolution from the 1780s and the steady increase of ozone, nitrous oxide, methane, and sulfur dioxide, along with carbon dioxide (the “greenhouse gases”) in the oceans and atmosphere, coincident with industrial development. The existence and extent of the Anthropocene circulates as a matter of dispute—it is designed to generate debate, not end it. What is certain is that the “progress” so intrinsic to the nineteenth-century’s conception of itself remains central to the new contentious geostories we have started to tell about modernity [on industry, see Carroll’s chapter]. Horror fictions articulate visions of the Anthropocene that the domestic scales of realist fiction cannot capture, or can only capture as absence. More than anything, the Anthropocene demands a derangement of scale in aesthetic representation (Clark). In Morton’s work, horror is never far away: he talks about the “hyperobject” of interlinked ecosystems as “more than a little demonic” and “hauntingly weird” (29, 30). The opening of his first Dark Ecology lecture starts with a reading of the horrifying mechanization of rural labor in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) but then twists into a reflection on the meaning of the term “weird.” At the end of that section, he asserts: “The Anthropocene binds together human history and geological time in a strange loop, weirdly weird” (8). Spooked and spectral landscapes were also a concern of Mark Fisher’s interest in horror fiction and film that evoked the radical outside, in weird and eerie modes: Like the weird, the eerie is also fundamentally to do with the outside . . . A sense of the eerie seldom clings to enclosed and inhabited domestic spaces; we find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human. What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance? What kind of entity was involved? What kind of thing was it that emitted such an eerie cry? . . . The eerie is fundamentally tied up with questions of agency. What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all? (Weird and Eerie 11). Fisher’s rendition of “hauntology” was part of a wider revival of interest in the subgenre of “folk horror,” associated with films like The Wicker Man (1973), where British folk traditions curdle into a vicious vengeance on the presumptions of modernity (see Scovell). In this revival, M.R. James’s stories or the menacing landscapes of Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, and the rural folklore collections of Sabine Baring-Gould, become exemplary of what Robert MacFarlane identifies as “the eeriness of the English countryside,” a deep history of violent enclosure that has been covered over but which menacingly returns, seeping up through the poisoned ground. Thinking the Anthropocene is not just a contemporary frame but requires a fundamental rethinking of space, time, and causation. “Climate change,” as Andreas Malm warns, “is a messy mix-up of time scales” (8). If James Watt’s invention of the steam engine in 1784 is the inauguration of the fossil-fuel economy, with the Industrial Revolution driven first by coal and then by oil, then this places the nineteenth century at the heart of this narrative. Even if some geoscientists argue that the atomic bomb in 1945 is a more significant inaugural moment, this still makes the nineteenth century “an intermediate space, in which to trace the Anthropocene’s emergence.” The Victorians were placed “in media res, from the midst of still-unfolding, slow-motion catastrophe” (Jesse Oak Taylor, 574–5). Factory production, urban concentration, the massification of the working class, geopolitical diplomacy, imperial annexation for raw materials and strategic need for naval coaling stations—all of these are imbricated in the hyperobject of the fossil economy which only looms into vision with the shift of perspective generated by thinking the Anthropocene. The giant specter of oncoming climate change appears in literature in the slave plantations undergirding Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) and the estates 91
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of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1848), which produce the profits on which the English country house economy in Britain thrives through the catastrophe of intensive farming. The Anthropocene is there in the foggy climacterics of the imperial metropolis in Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) and John Ruskin’s Storm Clouds of the Nineteenth Century (1884). It rears up in the rural melancholia of Rider Haggard’s writing on the decline of English farming in the 1890s and in the far-flung networks of grubby imperial profiteering of Conrad’s Nostromo (1904). The hyperobject of the Anthropocene tangles together diverse and formerly very separate texts and issues. Such Victorian fictions trace, Allen MacDuffie suggests, the “first stirrings” of the Anthropocene (11). If ecocriticism has largely focused on the canonical Romantics and post-Romantics, weird fiction and horror can also be rich resources, whether it is the eerie menace of the wild forests of Blackwood’s classic stories such as “The Wendigo” or “The Willows,” the weird calm of Richard Jefferies’s post-apocalyptic After London, or the global catastrophes envisioned by M.P. Shiel in The Purple Cloud or Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poisoned Cloud. Something that was once hazy or difficult to grasp, the unthought of the nineteenth century, suddenly comes into focus, like Kurtz’s compound on the Congo River does for Marlow when he adjusts the focus of his binoculars: I made a brusque movement, and one of the remaining posts of that vanished fence leaped up in the field of my glass. . . . These round knobs were not ornamental but symbolic; they were expressive and puzzling, striking and disturbing—food for thought and also for the vultures if there had been any looking down from the sky. . . . They would have been even more impressive, those heads on the stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house. Only one, the first I had made out, was facing my way. (86) Conrad’s classic tactic in The Heart of Darkness (1899) of delayed decoding, revealing those severed trophy heads in a late, subordinate clause of a long, descriptive passage, is much like the belatedness of our ecological experience. The Anthropocene rears up into visibility only when, it would seem, it is too late. Kurtz’s cry of “the horror” insists again on the renewed relevance and urgency of thinking through the Gothic and its cognates in the Victorian period.
Key Critical Works Mark Fisher. The Weird and the Eerie. J. Halberstam. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Darryl Jones. Sleeping with the Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror. James Machin. Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939. David Punter. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present. Xavier Aldana Reyes, editor. Horror: A Literary History. Andrew Smith, and William Hughes, editors. Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Eugene Thacker. In the Dust of This Planet (Horror of Philosophy,Vol. I).
Works Cited Blacklock, Mark. “Dracula and the New Horror Theory.” The Cambridge Companion to Dracula, edited by R. Luckhurst, Cambridge UP, 2017, pp. 136–48. Briggs, Julia. Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story. Faber, 1977. Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1–22. Brown, Nathan. “The Nadir of OOO.” Parrhesia, vol. 17, 2013, pp. 62–71. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. Edited by James T. Boulton, Routledge, 2008. Carroll, Noel. The Philosophy of Horror; or, Paradoxes of the Heart. Routledge, 1990.
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Gothic, Horror, and the Weird Clark, Timothy. “Derangements of Scale.” Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, vol. 1, 2012. https:// quod.lib.umich.edu. Clute, John. The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror. Payseur and Schmidt, 2006. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Review of The Monk.” 1797. Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820, edited by E. J. Clery and Robert Miles, Manchester UP, 2000. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Penguin, 1983. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero, 2009. ———. The Weird and the Eerie. Repeater, 2016. Halberstam, J. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke UP, 1996. Harman, Graham. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Pelican, 2018. ———. Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. Zero, 2012. Harrison, M. John. “New Weird Discussions: The Creation of a Term.” The New Weird, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer, Tachyon, 2008. Hodgson, William Hope. Carnacki, the Ghost Finder. 1913. Sphere, 1974. James, M. R. “Some Remarks on Ghost Stories.” Collected Ghost Stories, edited by Darryl Jones, Oxford World’s Classics, 2011, pp. 410–16. Jones, Darryl. Sleeping with the Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror. Oxford UP, 2018. Jones, Robert Kenneth. The Shudder Pulps: A History of the Weird Menace Magazines of the 1930s. Fax Collector’s Editions, 1975. Landy, Joshua, and Michael Saler. The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational World. Stanford UP, 2009. Laruelle, Franҫois. Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy. Translated by Drew. S. Burk and A. P. Smith, Univocal, 2012. Latour, Bruno. “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.” New Literary History, vol. 45, 2014, pp. 1–18. ———. Aramis, or the Love of Technology. Harvard UP, 1996. ———. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Harvard UP, 2004. Lovecraft, H. P. Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by E. F. Bleiler, Dover, 1973. MacDuffie, Allen. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2014. Macfarlane, Robert. “The Eeriness of the English Countryside.” Guardian, 10 April 2015. www.guardian.com. Machen, Arthur. Arthur Machen: Decadent and Occult Works. Edited by Dennis Denisoff, MHRA, 2018. ———. The Three Impostors. Edited by David Trotter, Dent, 1995. Machin, James. “Weird Fiction and the Virtues of Obscurity: Machen, Stenbock, and the Weird Connoisseurs.” Textual Practice, vol. 31, no. 6, 2017, pp. 1063–81. ———. Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso, 2016. Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Translated by R. Brassier, Continuum, 2008. Miéville, China. “Long Live the New Weird.” The Third Alternative, vol. 35, 2003, p. 3. Miller, Ian William. The Anatomy of Disgust. Harvard UP, 1997. Moers, Ellen. “The Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother.” New York Review of Books, vol. 21, March 1974. www. nyrb.com. Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Coexistence. Columbia UP, 2016. ———. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. U of Minnesota P, 2013. Newman, Kim. Nightmare Movies: Horror on the Screen since the 1960s. Bloomsbury, 2011. Owen, Alex. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. U of Chicago P, 2007. Peirse, Alison. After Dracula: The 1930s Horror Film. I. B. Tauris, 2013. Prince, Stephen. A Year in the Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields. A Year in the Country, 2018. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present, 2 vols. 1979. Longmans, 1996. Radcliffe, Ann. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” 1826. Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820, edited by E. J. Clery and Robert Miles, Manchester UP, 2000, pp. 163–72. Railo, Eino. The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism. Routledge, 1927. Scott, Heidi. Chaos and Cosmos: Literary Roots of Modern Ecology in the British Nineteenth Century. Pennsylvania State UP, 2014. Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Auteur, 2017. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia UP, 1985. Shaviro, Steven. The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism. U of Minnesota P, 2014. Smith, Andrew. The Ghost Story 1840–1920: A Cultural History. Manchester UP, 2010.
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Roger Luckhurst Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes. The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh UP, 2012. Symons, Arthur. “The Decadent Movement in Literature.” 1893. The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c. 1880–1900, edited by Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst. Oxford UP, 2000, pp. 104–11. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Harvard UP, 2007. Taylor, Jesse Oak. “Anthropocene.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, nos. 3–4, 2018, pp. 573–7. Thacker, Eugene. After Life. U of Chicago P, 2010. ———. Horror of Philosophy, 3 vols., Zero, 2011 and 2015. Townshend, Dale. “Gothic and the Cultural Sources of Horror, 1740–1820.” Horror: A Literary History, edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes, British Library, 2016, pp. 19–51. VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer, editors. The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, Tor, 2012. Wolfendale, Peter. Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes. Urbanomic, 2018.
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8 SENSATION SCHOLARSHIP Pamela K. Gilbert
In 1863, Henry Longueville Mansel, religious leader and Oxford professor, warned that “sensation novels must be recognized as a great fact in the literature of the day, and a fact whose significance is by no means of an agreeable kind” (267). Today, we tend to find sensation more agreeable than did Professor Mansel, but what now is the status of this “fact” and the scholarship around it? Sensation fiction was defined as a literary genre by 1860s critics in Britain, and the term, applied rather loosely to many works which were then enormously popular, has stuck. The first and best-known sensation novels were Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861) was also often included in the category. In the pages that follow, I will detail the original critical response and definition of the genre, and then offer a discussion of the development of the scholarship on this topic from its inception in the 1970s to the present, followed by an exploration of the continuing usefulness of “sensation” as a term.
1. Original Reception “Sensation” was a term popularized by critics; the genre’s authors were simply trying to write successful fiction. A careful examination of sensation novels as a group reveals as many similarities as differences, though certain traits have been found to be common: a fast-paced plot, with plenty of turns, surprising secrets, and transgressive women. These stories emerged out of existing forms and modes, including sentimental fiction, melodrama, the Gothic, and domestic realism. The plots of these novels often involve scandalous activities, including adultery, bigamy, fraud, misdirected or stolen legacies, concealed madness, and even murder. They are generally set in the Victorian present, in the homes of respectable middle class and gentry. The overwhelming popularity of these fictions and their appeal to a broad audience, especially of women and lower-class readers, called forth denunciation from critics and religious leaders concerned that they fed a craving for thrills that bypassed judgment and appealed directly “to the nerves” (Mansel 357). The term was disproportionately applied to works authored by women. Attacks on the genre were published in the relatively liberal Quarterly Review, authored by the religious authority Henry Mansel (1863) and in the conservative Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine by the author Margaret Oliphant (1862 and 1867), among others. These described the books as morally “nasty,” potentially addictive, over-stimulating to the nervous system and improbable in plot and character. Moreover, they saw sensation fiction as an invasion of middle-class reading by forms and themes taken from lower-class periodical fiction.
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Although any of the themes that supposedly defined sensation could be found in other novels published earlier, critics were reacting to some real historical forces. Gradual reductions in taxes on periodicals (to one penny in 1836 and then nothing at all in 1855), combined with relatively high prices on bound books, ensured that most readers first encountered fiction in periodical form. Prices on bound books did reduce dramatically over the period, but not enough to make buying new novels—as opposed to borrowing them from a circulating library—affordable for the general public. But in the second half of the century, improvements in press machinery, the availability of cheaper paper, and innovations in illustration technology contributed to rapid changes in pricing models. Single-volume novels appeared in paperback in the 1860s, and suddenly it was possible to buy a novel for sixpence (Routledge’s series of sixpenny novels was launched in 1867. Publishers began to make older, well-respected novels available as reprints, but also launched an array of new material aimed at the lower-middle and working classes. It is hard to translate nineteenth-century costs meaningfully, but some details may be helpful. In 1861, Isabella Beeton suggests an annual minimum salary of nine pounds per year, that is, about 41.5 pence per week, for a maid-of-all-work, plus lodging (8), thus sixpence was within the range of even relatively poor working people (Beeton). In 1859, Charles Dickens left the editorship of Household Words, a monthly periodical, after a conflict with his publishers, and launched All the Year Round, a weekly. Dickens’s entry into the weekly market did much to make weekly fiction publication respectable for middle-class audiences. He published both A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations in this format between 1859 and 1861, and Collins’s Woman in White ran side by side with Tale. Oliphant lamented in 1862 that sensation novels result from “the violent stimulant of serial publication—of weekly publication, with its necessity for frequent and rapid recurrence of piquant situation and startling incident. . . . What Mr. Wilkie Collins has done with delicate care and laborious reticence, his followers will attempt without any such discretion” (“Sensation,” 568). An emerging mass market required mass production; Mansel sniffs, “A commercial atmosphere floats around works of this class, redolent of the manufactory and the shop. . . . There is something unspeakably disgusting in . . . this vulturelike instinct which smells out the newest mass of social corruption, and hurries to devour the loathsome dainty. . . . Penny publications are the original germ, the primitive monad, to which all the varieties of sensation literature may be referred” (495–6). Oliphant returned to the attack in 1867, again in Blackwoods, where she lambasted the sexual frankness of women writers of the period, and witheringly declared that “The novels which crowd our libraries are, for a great part, not literature at all” (“Novels,” 263). Although women authors had long been a feature of the landscape, during this period independent women inspired more anxiety than ever before. Women were agitating for more rights than they had long had. Many middle-class women were forced to support themselves, as emigration depleted the adult male population—or so W.R. Greg would argue in 1869 in his evocatively titled “Why are Women Redundant?” Wars in the 1850s, especially in the Crimea, had taken a toll on the male population as well. But equally important, industrialization had in the earlier part of the century provided new economic power and freedom to working women; as they moved into the classes immediately above them, they became part of a transformation in thinking about women’s roles as consumers. What was called the “Woman Question” continued to be a concern throughout the century, and the institution of marriage, always a contentious topic, became subject to particular scrutiny in the 1860s as laws began to change and the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 made divorce more available. Women were important both as producers of novels and as consumers; middle-class women had leisure, literacy, and, increasingly, mobility and purchasing authority. Often, for example, they were the ones to go to Mudie’s circulating library (which expanded its location and reach dramatically in the 1850s and 1860s) and pick out reading for the household. Spirited defenses were not wanting, often mounted by the “sensation” authors themselves, but for at least a decade, authors so labeled were tarnished as unserious, possibly immoral—and eminently saleable. In 1867, author and critic George Augustus Sala published in Belgravia (under the editorship 96
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of Braddon) a response to Oliphant’s ad feminam attack on the characters and morality of Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, and Ouida (Mary Louise Ramé, also known as de la Ramée). He pointed out that sensation was nothing new: “Jane Eyre [sic] was to all intents and purposes a ‘sensational’ novel” with its bigamy, its violent madwoman, and its “impulsive little governess [who] sits on a blind gentleman’s knee, and pulls his beautiful dark hair about” (52). Further, “Adam Bede [sic] too is clearly ‘sensational’,” as are Braddon’s novels, but they are, he argues, also realistic: characters “walk, and talk, and act . . . like dwellers in the actual, breathing world in which we live” (52). This roughly shows the contours of the debate—sensation was something new and detestable, to be defined against “good” fiction, or it was nothing new and different, but had been defined as such by an excess of prudery. It was unrealistic and exaggerated, or it was more realistic than what had preceded it—and that might itself be good or bad, depending on the critical point of view. By the end of the 1860s, the term “sensation” itself lost its force as a way to define a distinct genre. At this point, the term was sufficiently diffuse that it was often applied to anything that seemed transgressive or “new,” from sentimental tales to Gothic to aestheticism. Trollope summed up the situation in 1870, shortly before the term fell out of common use in criticism, sounding somewhat bemused by the distinction: There has arisen of late years a popular idea as to the division of novels into two classes which is, I think, a mistaken idea. We hear of the sensational school [and . . .] the realistic, or life-like school. . . . I think that if a novel fail in either particular it is, so far, a failure in Art. (124)
2. History of Scholarship, 1970s to the Present The first sensation novels continued to be read and staged and made into films well into the twentieth century. Under the canonical policing of the modernist critics, however, they also continued to be categorized as unserious—merely “popular.” They gradually dropped out of view, as Victorian novels were increasingly relegated to the academic domain and reduced to a small canon. In the 1970s, however, a process of recovery began, which took on increasing urgency under feminist research and emerging questions around class. The scholarship on these works gained velocity in the 1980s during the canon wars—as researchers built on the bibliographies of the 1970s—and then flourished in the 1990s as feminist scholarship turned from simple recovery and defense to more complex readings. Feminist recovery work, then, was the most important to the early criticism of the genre. Elaine Showalter’s foundational A Literature of Their Own (1977) laid the groundwork, identifying many genres and authors who had been lost to scholarship, though her focus was explicitly on finding a feminist tradition of authorship, under which some sensation authors fare poorly. She is, however, the first to trace a subversive reading of the beleaguered and murderous Lady Audley as “sane, and moreover, representative” (167). The 1980s saw some important studies of sensation as a genre that wrestled with what exactly was so frightening to its critics. Winifred Hughes’s important The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (1980) took a major step forward, treating the genre as worth serious attention in its own right, examining its combination of “romance and realism” as an innovative and important treatment of social issues [on feminism, see Schaffer’s chapter]. Class and the delineation of genre were also foundational themes of this work. Following in the tradition of Richard Altick’s The Common Reader (1957), serious studies of readership and class converged in the 1980s with feminist studies that took women’s reading seriously. Sally Mitchell’s The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class, and Woman’s Reading (1981) took up sensation as part of women’s “light reading” in terms of the affective work such reading might do. Two essays became particularly important in framing the definition of sensation as a genre. Patrick Brantlinger’s 1982 essay, “What is ‘Sensational’ about the Sensation Novel” and Jonathan Loesberg’s 1986 “The Ideology of Narrative 97
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Form in Sensation Fiction” consider the class anxieties so central to the genre (and indeed, the period) specifically in terms of the genre’s formal properties. In the latter part of the decade, more booklength studies take up sensation’s intersection with broader themes. Altick’s Deadly Encounters (1986) and Thomas Boyle’s Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead (1989), for example, focus on the crossover between crime news and sensation, while Anthea Trodd’s 1989 study of Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel explores the relation of law and domesticity as a key theme in the genre, which continues to be significant in scholarship today [on class, see Betensky’s chapter]. Collins, as a male author who had already been established in crime and detective fiction scholarship, has always had a slightly eccentric relationship to sensation studies—he often stands alone or apart from his contemporaries—but some studies began in this decade to address him as a sensation writer specifically. D.A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (1988), which sets up a Foucauldian emphasis on discipline and surveillance in the nineteenth-century novel, and Collins in particular did much to “mainstream” the study of Collins beyond the purview of crime fiction scholarship. Also important in 1988 is Jenny Bourne Taylor’s In the Secret Theatre of Home, a detailed treatment of nineteenth-century psychology in Collins, which has continued to be relevant to later studies of nineteenth-century literature generally. Tamar Heller’s study on Collins and the Gothic in Dead Secrets (1992) and Nicholas Rance’s placement of Collins in the sensation (rather than crime-story) tradition in his wide-ranging Wilkie Collins and Other Sensation Novelists: Walking the Moral Hospital (1991) continued the critical revival of that author. In the mid-1990s, a flurry of books appeared addressing the sensation novel per se that were typically concerned with defining the genre and understanding its reception. Building on work on gendered reading and writing by Showalter, Mitchell, and Shuttleworth, these scholars also took up the genre questions posed by Brantlinger and Loesberg. Lyn Pykett’s The Improper Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (1992) paired sensation and the New Woman genres, genres poised a few decades apart that garnered similarly appalled responses from reviewers—and enthusiasm from readers. Likewise, Kate Flint’s magisterial study of The Woman Reader (1993) offers detailed sections on these two genres as well. Chapters on sensation novelists, mostly Collins and Braddon, began to appear more commonly in books on broad topics, especially on the body, psychology, and medicine. Feminist studies of the body found a rich trove in the fiction of the period generally, and especially sensation with its explicit emphasis on physicality, both of characters and readers. Ann Cvetkovich offered a detailed reading of sensation fiction and affect in Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture and Victorian Sensationalism (1992), extending the work of Mitchell in thinking through the transgressive potential of reader affect and popular genre. My own Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (1997) falls into this category and continues the work of both historicizing and theorizing Victorians’ understanding of the genre in terms of concerns about readers’ bodies, while also pushing against genre as an inadequate way to group very disparate popular women writers and novels. Continuing the discussion of gender and class, The Private Rod: Marital Violence, Sensation, and the Law in Victorian Britain (2000) by Marlene Tromp argues that sensation novels brought to light gendered violence in the middle-class home that was neglected in legal discourse and realist fiction, which tended to locate such violence in the working classes. She shows that sensation fiction such as The Woman In White and Aurora Floyd exposed the naturalization of such violence and suggests that distinctions between sensationalism and realism collapse around “the central metaphor of marital violence” (3). The aughts saw a dramatic expansion of the field in terms of an uptick in publications on sensation novelists and novels, an increase in authors studied, and an increase in the diversity of approaches, which moved more decisively past genre definition and reception. The first collection on Braddon appeared in 2000 (Tromp, Gilbert, Haynie) and attempted to get beyond criticism’s blindness to any of Braddon’s novels other than Lady Audley’s Secret and indeed to any designation other than sensation for her large and varied corpus. Newly digitized resources helped feed the growth of what had earlier 98
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been a relatively small though important field of publishing history and periodical studies (of which more later). Deborah Wynne (2001) and Jennifer Phegley (2004) examined magazine publication and sensation through the lens of gender and domesticity. Work on the history of illustration, such as that by Angela Leighton and Lisa Surridge (2008), has revolutionized the way we think about reception. Several other studies have also taken up the relation of sensation fiction to journalism, not simply as a source of content but as a formal issue. See especially Barbara Leckie on adultery, newspapers, and fiction (1999), who also treats the law, and Matthew Rubery, on newspapers (2009). This profusion of new work prompted surveys, companions, and collections to chart this increasingly vibrant and diverse field that began to appear in the following decade. Lyn Pykett updated and expanded her 2004 The Nineteenth Century Sensation Novel in 2011. The Blackwell Companion to Sensation Fiction (Gilbert 2011) offers 49 essays by 51 authors emphasizing the placement of sensation fiction in a continuing tradition of popular fiction genre and publishing before and after, from Newgate to New Woman and Neo-Victorian fiction, as well as performance and poetry. It also offers a range of individual-author chapters well beyond those most well known and topics in scholarship from gender and empire to science, visuality, and disability. Andrew Mangham’s 2013 Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction offers a further 15 thematically organized essays on various aspects of this literature, from its links to science, medicine, and spiritualism, to its relation to Gothic, publishing history, and illustration. As Anne-Marie Beller says in her review essay of 2017, “[A] key impetus of recent scholarship on the sensation novel has been a return to a second phase of recovery. For a long time, critical work in this area maintained a rather narrow focus on the triumvirate of Collins, Braddon, and Wood, and on a handful of best-selling novels from the early 1860s” (3). For a more comprehensive bibliography on this wider range of writers, I would suggest Andrew Radford’s Victorian Sensation Fiction: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (2008), Matthew Rubery’s Oxford Bibliography entry, good up through 2010, and then Anne-Marie Beller’s “The Fashions of the Current Season,” which takes the reader to 2017. For a more evaluative survey of research on sensation and crime fiction, also see Mark Knight (2009).
3. Major Current Themes As the preceding section makes evident, the material on sensation is rich—and a little overwhelming. So I will just point here to four promising recent areas of scholarly development. Nicholas Daly’s Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000 (2004) explores the centrality of modernity to sensation in a chapter on the relations of Victorian technologies such as railways to the sensing body. Discussing both Braddon and Collins, Daly traces the synchronization of the body with the rhythms of rail travel and the nervous suspense of the body newly sensitive to time [on technology, see Menke’s chapter]. Race and empire is a second area of perennial and now growing interest. Brantlinger (2011) points to the importance of race and empire in Collins’s many novels that include foreign, mixed-race characters, and the sensational characteristics of many “Indian Mutiny” novels of the 1860s. Lillian Nayder (2011) also provides an excellent survey of work on empire and sensation, along with a reading of Felicia Skene’s “Hidden Depths” that connects the period and genre’s focus on marriage laws to the imperial context. She compares it to several other novels, including Collins’s The Moonstone to show the authors’ critique of the narrative of the benevolent Briton in India. Transatlanticism and internationalism is emerging as a focus in Victorian studies generally, and sensation studies, specifically, is beginning to turn to this topic. One fine example is Jennifer Phegley and colleagues’ collection (Transatlantic Sensations 2012), which also showcases significant discussion of slavery and race in several essays, including Phegley’s own, on transatlantic publishing rights and representations of race in Braddon’s The Octoroon, a novel in which a British girl discovers both her mixed racial heritage and the viciousness of the “peculiar institution” upon traveling to the United States [on race, see Tucker’s chapter; on postcoloniality, see Banerjee’s; and on settler colonialism, see Wagner’s]. Finally, theater and 99
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performance are becoming more important to the study of Victorian culture generally, and sensation provides a particularly rich context for exploration of theater and performance. Lynn Voskuil’s Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity (2004) understands sensation as a form of melodrama, deeply implicated in the earlier political history of that form. But, she suggests, sensation theater marked a major shift away from the politicized sympathy with characters that marked earlier melodrama. In the 1860s and onward, spectators were aware of theater as both an experience of physical immediacy and artfulness implicated in the emergence of consumer culture; sensation theater “used verisimilitude to evoke awe and wonder in spectators who had become invested in . . . commodities’ special faculties. This enigmatic doubleness,” or simultaneous emphasis on authenticity and “heightened spectacle” demanded and created a sophisticated audience whose sensibilities were at home in consumer culture (Voskuil 76). Heidi Holder (2011) chronicles the formation of sensation theater and compares theatrical adaptations of sensation fiction to show some of the challenges posed by the temporality of drama versus fiction. She also shows the impact of photography and resultant demands for pictorial scenes and reciprocal demands for visual and pantomime-based drama emerging from unlicensed theaters [on drama and performance, see Weltman’s chapter]. All four of these themes are important in the study of Victorian literature generally. As Beller notes, in recent book-length studies, “[T]he discussion of sensation fiction is increasingly taking place alongside . . . more established canonical texts and authors” (470). That said, the body of scholarship on sensation fiction per se from the last two decades does continue an early preoccupation with generic and formal concerns, including and especially the genre’s relations to realism. Realism has been from the beginning an important defining element of studies on sensation, in part because sensation was at first persistently defined by scholars in comparison—or even in opposition—to realism, which we now think of as the dominant mode of the period, at least within the canonical body of novels. For a long time, the mid-nineteenth century was supposed to be the great age of the realist novel, defined, as George Levine noted, by the “middling condition”—that is, against the romances that preceded it of high life and exotic settings, often historically distanced. The sensation novel’s novelty—its reliance on crime and on frequent plot twists or cliffhangers related to the rhythm of weekly publication—seemed new to critics at the time. To twentiethcentury scholars that newness was reflexively defined against the critical commonplace that realism dominated the period; ergo, sensation was a departure from realism. But realism, as we imagine it, never dominated the period in any way that set it apart from these novels. Indeed, realism itself is something quite different for us than it was for Victorians, who only began to use the term at mid-century and were not at all sure that they liked it. Unlike sensation, which was a term defined and well used in the 1860s, realism as a defining factor of the mid-nineteenth century appears most clearly in the rearview mirror (with the exception of Eliot, who always knew exactly what she was up to). I would argue that realism—as a mode, not a genre—is itself increasingly marked by attention to the body at mid-century and to a materialist psychology of sensation, and that sensation fiction is exemplary of this general process. Tales generally thought of as domestic realism have this characteristic, the Gothic may sometimes have it, sensation has it in generous proportions. Dickens has it, which is why he is often tagged as a realist even though, of all the authors of the period, his work has the most obviously exceptional characters and events; as he famously phrased it, defending his use of spontaneous combustion in Bleak House, he emphasizes the “romantic side of familiar things” (“Preface, 1853,” p. 6). On the other hand, many of the elements we think of as sensational have been shown to be much more widespread than we may have realized. As Maia McAleavey’s The Bigamy Plot (2015) shows us, for example, bigamy was such a common theme that we should probably no longer think of it as a defining characteristic of sensation as a separate genre. (She lists 200 novels using this theme.) Boyle noted in 1989 that most of what went into sensation fiction was ripped from the headlines—was, indeed, the real, if not the typical. And of course, we know that “realism,” to the extent that we can categorize it at all, depends on a reality effect that 100
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precisely appeals to our sense of the normative rather than the normal—that is, the violence and fraud that form a mainstay of “sensation” may be normal in the sense that violence and frauds happen frequently, but not normative, because we want those events to be exceptional, marginal. We now generally see sensation as a subset of realism itself [on the Gothic, horror, and the weird, see Luckhurst’s chapter]. As the expansion of temporal and genre categories under the nominal heading of “sensation” proceeds, then, even as we question the boundaries of the category, we should perhaps rethink our terms. “Sensation” was, as I mentioned earlier, a term applied by critics to certain texts in a certain period, and I think there are good historical reasons to continue to teach the history that shaped their exclusion from the canon and rediscovery. However, perhaps inevitably, the word becomes a portmanteau that reifies the notion that there really is something intrinsically different about these texts, and, as a marketable term, it has been expanded to cover many forms of fiction which might benefit from being detached from that particular designation. Marlene Tromp in her recent definition of sensation as a Victorian “Keyword” remarks that, despite our understanding that genre traits are indefinite, “[W]e tend to reassert them where sensation fiction is concerned” (858). Though, as she notes, the field may now be regarded as mature: Even the most important work in the field on sensation has often reinforced the binary between sensation and realism[, . . .] treating sensation fiction as an excessive hyper-genre of the “not real”—a bit of flash and dazzle that emerged (or could be consciously deployed) in relation to or in realist fiction for effect. This seems striking given the fact that we have learned to explore real cultural phenomena like marital violence, the body, property law, and science in new ways from sensation fiction. (859) She notes that the designation of something as “sensational”—and so not “realistic”—continues to marginalize crimes and violence which disproportionately affect women by suggesting that they are hysterical, overly dramatic, or at least wildly unusual. Tromp points as well to a double difficulty: the initial (hostile) Victorian designation of this body of literature has become, through critical history, the label by which we know these works, by which we look them up in a journal issue devoted to “Keywords,” or a Companion to Sensation Fiction—or market or buy such a companion. So Tromp denounces the term in an essay titled “Sensation Fiction,” and I take this question up here in this Companion essay, “Sensation scholarship.” We do so despite the fact that the history of criticism has since the early days been canny about the genre designation’s status as extrinsic to the texts. Even more problematically, the term “sensation” has been extended through a whole field of popular literature that was not considered sensational in its own time, because of the marketing force of the term in scholarship today.
4. Whither “Sensation” Now? There is a real argument to be made for simply absorbing these fictions into the general body of Victorian literature. Perhaps a good way to think about our changing use of the term “sensation” is to ask ourselves whether we are treating this literature on a par with the other work we are teaching and writing about. Are we historicizing reception and publishing with all of our texts? Then it is useful to situate these texts as “sensational.” But otherwise, perhaps not. Reception may be the new “biographical” reading—if we aren’t teaching male-authored texts, or canonical monuments such as Eliot’s that way, we ought not teach Braddon’s that way. But then, depending on the context of our teaching and scholarship, there may well be a point to teaching the history of reception that distinguished texts as something new and dangerous, or teaching the history of genre as a set of combined 101
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intrinsic and extrinsic elements that were completely legible to readers at the time and now are not, or not in the same way. Recovery has always been tightly coupled with publishing history, where “sensation” has now become a convenient, if historically inaccurate, marketing term for work on a full range of popular literature. Digitization has made nineteenth-century periodicals increasingly accessible. Perhaps one of the most significant recent turns in the study of “sensation” literature is the move to center the history of publishing and reading, especially within periodical studies. Beth Palmer in 2011, for example, reads Braddon, Wood, and Florence Marryat in terms of their performance of gender and genre through both their fiction and editing: they ran Belgravia, Argosy, and London Society, respectively. Issues surrounding marketing and classed reception are central to this work. Andrew King offers an exemplary study of the differences in reception of Ouida’s A Dog of Flanders depending on its publishing venue and packaging, as well as the international context of its varying receptions over time (2011). As we move away from the early view of what can be read under the rubric of “sensation,” questions also arise around popular fiction that exceeds the temporal, generic, and class investments of the 1860s novels. Graham Law, in Periodizing Fiction (2000), offers invaluable archival work on popular fiction published in serial installments in syndicated newspapers across Britain. Law shows that fiction syndication in provincial newspapers for the (often lower) middling classes in the 1870s and 1880s has been largely overlooked. He maps whose novels appeared where, what form these novels took and why, focusing principally on Braddon, Collins, and the less well-known David Pae. The provinces were not simply dependent on London, he shows, but were a substantial market that created their own impact on larger circulation. In 2011, he took up the syndication of Charlotte M. Brame and Mary Cecil Hay in an essay which contextualized these competing authors in terms of genre, publication venue, and market considerations (“Sensational Variations”). His foundational bibliography of and introduction to the relatively unknown syndicated periodical fiction writer Charlotte Brame (2012) is a superb gesture toward a large and unacknowledged body of work often originally read by the servant and shop-keeping classes, although not only by them. As he also notes, many of these works had a transatlantic career that looks quite different from the UK contexts: Brame, under the name “Bertha M. Clay,” was widely read as a more middle-class author in the United States. Much of her vast oeuvre was produced for a readership of the lower middle, servant, and upper-working classes, in syndicated periodicals such as Bow Bells and Family Reader, and even more is attributed to her than she actually wrote, since her names were so saleable as brands. Law’s meticulous work is historical in nature; he is less interested in literary questions of interpretation, and yet his work in genre contributes well to work on sensation and popular fiction, which has always overlapped with publishing history. It gestures, as well, to a vast body of work beyond that published by Tillotson’s which has yet to be addressed. Likewise, this scholarship should move back to take in earlier popular literature, including the work done on penny dreadfuls, a field which is imbricated in theater history. This topic goes well beyond what I can discuss here, but to the extent that sensation fiction as a research topic was a way into the study of classed as well as gendered reading, we find ourselves, still, at the beginning of the journey [on serialization, see Bernstein’s chapter; on regionalism and provincialism, see Gibson’s; and on popular fiction, see Daly’s]. Perhaps most significantly, then, what began as research on sensation has now more dramatically bifurcated, between a mainstreaming of middle-class sensation texts into general literary study, on one hand, and work grounded in publishing and reception history, on the other. Under the latter heading falls a much wider variety of texts than are currently typically discussed in literature classes. For example, the affective potential of sensation—often directed at women—was both targeted as corrupt and dismissed as frivolous. This is also true of “sentimental” fiction, which has received much less sustained attention in its British incarnation than in the United States—perhaps because so much of it was consumed there in the latter half of the period by women below the middle classes. 102
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Ellen Wood has received crossover attention from her early incarnation as a “sensation” writer, and scholars have now moved beyond East Lynne to her other, sentimental and temperance, work. But much sentimental fiction was published in periodicals, especially in the second half of the century, rather than in three-volume form, and so was less likely to be read by scholars in the 1970s through 1990s, when access to these materials, especially beyond the UK, was difficult. Brame is such an author. As mentioned earlier, scholars such as Graham Law have begun work on this material, but the general neglect of this literature strikes me as in part an aesthetic issue—we find these works less accessible, as the affects they depend upon are more temporally specific than the suspense and mystery that elevated sensation to broader attention. It is unlikely that they will be taught or researched as texts without being contextualized within publishing history. And yet we reinforce a classed canon and a partial view of the development of literature if we do not attend to this history. Moreover, we miss the broader, more decentralized context of transnational—and imperial—production. For example, in 2014, Sukanya Banerjee discussed Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s first Indian novel in English, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864), which was serialized in the weekly Indian Field, showing how the novel’s thematization of changing expectations around marriage was responsive to the British sensation craze. In other words, the most important thing the study of sensation may have done is to open up scholarship to something beyond the way Victorians and then Victorianists narrowly defined that genre and beyond the bound book as the dominant form. We have done the work of contextualizing the gendered reception of these works and of revaluing these texts as significant in their own right. The other aspect of reading beyond the canon—that is, a fuller understanding of class and of global networks of writing, reading, and publishing—however, is still nascent. Now that we have greater digital access to this material, we can finally go beyond these middle-class, three-volume novelists to the broader history of publishing, of periodical fiction, its writers, and their readers.
Key Critical Works Patrick Brantlinger. “What Is ‘Sensational’ about the ‘Sensation Novel’?” Ann Cvetkovich. Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism. Kate Flint. The Woman Reader, 1837–1914. Pamela K. Gilbert, editor. The Blackwell Companion to Sensation Fiction. Jonathan Loesberg. “The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction.” Andrew Mangham, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction. Sally Mitchell. The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class, and Woman’s Reading. Lyn Pykett. The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. ———. The Nineteenth Century Sensation Novel. Elaine Showalter. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing.
Works Cited Allan, Janice M., editor. “Other Sensations.” Critical Survey, vol. 23, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–7. Altick, Richard. Deadly Encounters: Two Victorian Sensations. U of Pennsylvania P, 1986. ———. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900. U of Chicago P, 1957. Banerjee, Sukanya. “Troubling Conjugal Loyalties: The First Indian Novel in English and the Transimperial Framework of Sensation.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 42, no. 3, 2014, pp. 475–89. Beeton, Isabella. Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1861. Beller, Anne-Marie. “‘The Fashions of the Current Season’: Recent Critical Work on Victorian Sensation Fiction.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 45, no. 2, June 2017, pp. 461–73. ———. Mary Elizabeth Braddon: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction. McFarland, 2012. Booth, Michael. Victorian Spectacular Theatre, 1850–1910. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Boyle, Thomas. Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism. Viking, 1989. Brantlinger, Patrick. “Class and Race in Sensation Fiction.” The Blackwell Companion to Sensation Fiction, edited by Pamela K. Gilbert, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp. 430–41.
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Pamela K. Gilbert ———. “What Is ‘Sensational’ about the ‘Sensation Novel’?” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 37, no. 1, 1982, pp. 1–28. Cox, Jessica. “From Page to Screen: Transforming M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret.” Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 2005, pp. 23–31. Cvetkovich, Ann. Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism. Rutgers UP, 1992. Daly, Nicholas. Literature, Technology and Modernity, 1860–2000. Cambridge UP, 2004. Dickens, Charles. “Preface, 1853.” Bleak House, edited by Stephen Gill, Oxford UP, 1996, pp. 5–6. Fantina, Richard. Victorian Sensational Fiction: The Daring Work of Charles Reade. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Flint, Kate. The Woman Reader, 1837–1914. Clarendon, 1993. Gabriele, Alberto. Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: Belgravia and Sensation. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Gilbert, Pamela K., editor. The Blackwell Companion to Sensation Fiction. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. ———. Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels: Reading, Contagion, and Transgression. Cambridge UP, 1997. Greg, W. R. Why Are Women Redundant? N. Trübner and Co, 60 Paternoster Row, 1869. Heller, Tamar. Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic. Yale UP, 1992. Holder, Heidi. “Sensation Theater.” The Blackwell Companion to Sensation Fiction, edited by Pamela K. Gilbert, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp. 67–80. Hughes, Winifred. The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s. Princeton UP, 1980. Jones, Anna Maria. Problem Novels:Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self. Ohio State UP, 2007. Jordan, Jane, and Andrew King, editors. Ouida and Victorian Popular Culture. Ashgate, 2013. King, Andrew. “Impure Researches, or Literature, Marketing and Aesthesis: The Case of Ouida’s ‘Dog of Flanders’ (1871-Today).” English Literature. Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2016, pp. 359–82. ———. “The Sympathetic Individualist: Ouida’s Late Work and Politics.” Victorian Literature and Culture. Cambridge UP, 2011, pp. 563–79. King, Andrew, Alexis Easley, and John Morton, editors. Researching the Nineteenth-Century Press: Case Studies. Routledge, 2017. Knight, Mark. “Figuring Out the Fascination: Recent Trends in Criticism on Victorian Sensation and Crime Fiction.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 37, no. 1, 2009, pp. 323–33. Law, Graham. Charlotte M. Brame (1836–1884): Towards a Primary Bibliography, edited by Graham Law, Greg Drozdz, and Debby McNally. Victorian Fiction Research Guides #36, May 2012. http://victorianfictionresearchguides.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/36-Charlotte-May-Brame.pdf. ———. “Sensational Variations on the Domestic Romance: Charlotte M. Brame and Mary Cecil Hay in the Family Herald.” The Blackwell Companion to Sensation Fiction, edited by Pamela K. Gilbert, Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2011, pp. 332–48. ———. Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press. Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Leckie, Barbara. Culture and Adultery: The Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law, 1857–1914. U of Pennsylvania P, 1999. Leighton, Mary Elizabeth, and Lisa Surridge. “The Plot Thickens: Toward a Narratological Analysis of Illustrated Serial Fiction in the 1860s.” Victorian Studies, vol. 51, no. 1, 2008, pp. 65–101. Levine, George. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley. U of Chicago P, 1981. Loesberg, Jonathan. “The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction.” Representations, vol. 13, 1986, pp. 115–38. Mangham, Andrew, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction. Cambridge UP, 2013. ———. Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine, and Victorian Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Mansel, Henry. “Sensation Novels.” Quarterly Review, vol. 113, April 1863, pp. 481–514. Martin, Susan K., and Kylie Mirmohamadi, editors. Sensational Melbourne: Reading, Sensation Fiction and Lady Audley’s Secret in the Victorian Metropolis. Australian Scholarly, 2011. Maunder, Andrew, editor. Varieties of Women’s Sensation Fiction, 1855–1890, 6 vols. Pickering and Chatto, 2004. McAleavey, Maia. The Bigamy Plot: Sensation and Convention in the Victorian Novel. Cambridge UP, 2015. Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. U of California P, 1989. Mitchell, Sally. The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class, and Woman’s Reading. Bowling Green U Popular P, 1981. Nayder, Lillian. “The Empire and Sensation.” The Blackwell Companion to Sensation Fiction, edited by Pamela K. Gilbert, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp. 442–544. Oliphant, Margaret. “Novels.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 102, 1867, pp. 257–80. ———. “Sensation Novels.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 91, 1862, pp. 564–80. Palmer, Beth. Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies. Oxford UP, 2011.
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Sensation Scholarship Phegley, Jennifer. Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation. Ohio State UP, 2004. ———. “Slavery, Sensation, and Transatlantic Publishing Rights in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Octoroon.” Transatlantic Sensations, edited by Jennifer Phegley, John Cyril Barton, Kristin N. Huston, and David S. Reynolds, Ashgate, 2012, pp. 153–68. Phegley, Jennifer, John Cyril Barton, Kristin N. Huston, and David S. Reynolds, editors. Transatlantic Sensations. Ashgate, 2012. Pykett, Lyn. The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. Routledge, 1992. ———. The Nineteenth Century Sensation Novel. Northcote, 2011. Radford, Andrew. Victorian Sensation Fiction: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Rance, Nicholas. Wilkie Collins and Other Sensation Novelists: Walking the Moral Hospital. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1991. Reitz, Caroline. Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Adventure. Ohio State UP, 2004. Roberts, W. “Life on a Guinea a Week.” The Nineteenth Century, vol. 23, 1861, pp. 464–7. Rubery, Matthew. The Novelty of Newspapers:Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News. Oxford UP, 2009. ———. “Sensation.” Victorian Literature Oxford Bibliography. https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/obo/97801997995580062. Ruskin, John. “Fiction Fair and Foul.” The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 34, edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, London: George Allen; New York: Longman’s, Green, 1908, pp. 264–399. Sala, George Augustus. “The Cant of Modern Criticism.” Belgravia, vol. 4, 1867, pp. 44–55. Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Virago, 1977. Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence. Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels. Ashgate, 2007. Taylor, Jennie Bourne. In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology. Routledge, 1988. Tomaiuolo, Saverio. In Lady Audley’s Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres. Edinburgh UP, 2010. Trodd, Anthea. Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, 1989. Trollope, Anthony. “On English Prose Fiction as a Rational Amusement.” 1870. Four Lectures by Trollope, edited by M. L. Parrish, Constable, 1938. Tromp, Marlene. The Private Rod: Marital Violence, Sensation, and the Law in Victorian Britain. U of Virginia P, 2000. ———. “Sensation Fiction.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, nos. 3 and 4, 2018, pp. 858–61. Tromp, Marlene, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Aeron Haynie, editors. Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context. SUNY P, 2000. Voskuil, Lynn M. Acting Naturally:Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity. U of Virginia P, 2004. Wynne, Deborah. The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
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9 DECADENCE AND AESTHETICISM Stefano Evangelista
Decadence and aestheticism have always stood in an uneasy relation to Victorian studies. Defined by their attacks on the nineteenth-century cult of progress and materialism, their interest in pleasure, desire, and subversive individualism, and their cosmopolitan outlook, these movements seem rather to herald the dissolution of the Victorian worldview. From the perspective of literary form, too, authors close to decadence and aestheticism departed from the genres that we now associate most closely with Victorian literature: they abandoned realism and the three-volume novel in favor of the supernatural and the Gothic, experimented widely with the short story and the essay, and indeed they often mixed genres and registers in order to create new hybrids. Yet while the historical peak of these movements occurred in the 1890s, the subtle provocations of aesthetic writing and the germs of a decadent taste were already present in the public domain as early as the 1860s, with the appearance of the first published works of A.C. Swinburne and Walter Pater. Just as those writings generated productive controversies over aesthetics, religion, the ethics of art appreciation, and sexual morality in the nineteenth century, the study of decadence and aestheticism today should invite us to question and revise our critical approaches to the literature of the Victorian period. For most of the twentieth century, decadence and aestheticism were viewed as eccentric to the Victorian canon, and were attacked as chaotic and sensationalist, or as artistic dead ends. At most, critics saw them as anticipating themes and concerns that would be coherently developed by the modernists. However, the connection with modernism was, historically, a disabling one. Because of their very proximity, aesthetes and decadents became the objects of some of the worst of the modernists’ anti-Victorian vitriol. T.S. Eliot’s well-known pronouncements about Swinburne’s “hallucination of meaning” (or, for that matter, W.B. Yeats’s myth of the “tragic generation”) may seem transparently exaggerated to us, but they were extremely effective at marginalizing a whole group of Victorian writers. In The Romantic Agony (1930, translated into English in 1951), the Italian critic Mario Praz put forward a pioneering interpretation of the close relationship between canonically strong romanticism and decadence, but he remained a lone advocate in the middle of an otherwise hostile reception. And even in Praz, the unrelenting focus on perversion was at best a double-edged sword at a time before postmodern criticism positively embraced the value of dissidence as a category capable of offering privileged insights into cultural history. It was only in the last decades of the twentieth century that critics started to undertake a systematic and positive revision of aesthetic and decadent writing, highlighting its unique and progressive contributions to literature and culture. It is important to point out that decadence and aestheticism are two distinct phenomena, with different characteristics and emphases. Critics have long debated their shared traits and points of 106
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difference, as well as areas of overlap with related movements such as Symbolism, impressionism, and New Woman writing (Ruth Temple’s 1974 article remains a useful source on this). The purpose of this chapter, however, is not to come to a precise definition of these movements or provide a comprehensive overview of their critical reception. Rather, in what follows I examine three approaches that have sparked particularly productive debates over the past few decades: gender and sexuality, modernist form, and literary cosmopolitanism.
1. Queer Beginnings Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) was the book that introduced the English public to the doctrine of art for art’s sake. In its controversial “Conclusion” in particular, Pater argued that moral concerns should not stand in the way of art and that, as a consequence, art and beauty could and should take the individual beyond the narrow moral horizon of bourgeois society. At the center of the book stands Pater’s iconic description of the Mona Lisa as a vampire who “has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave” (99). Pater’s ekphrasis of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece is at once a perfect example of the jeweled impressionistic style of aesthetic prose and an evocative homage to the destructive sexuality of the femme fatale, which became a trope of decadent literature. However, in the essay on Leonardo, as throughout The Renaissance, the representation of perverse heterosexuality occurs within a broader spectrum of sexual diversity analyzed by Pater, in which homosexual desire plays a particularly prominent role. Several of the Renaissance male artists examined by Pater, including Leonardo, were known to have been attracted to other men, but this aspect of their life was normally disregarded or politely ignored by critics. Pater was among the first systematically to excavate the role of homosexual desire in the history of art and, most importantly, to construct it as a marker of distinction. In The Renaissance, queerness is both an attitude to experience that enabled individuals to make outstanding original contributions to the culture of their times in the fields of art, literature, and scholarship, and a style of radical interpretation that, as Pater practically demonstrated in the book, was still very much available to critics in the present. The queer subject, it followed, was not an abject member of society, as Victorian law and customs would have it, but a key agent in its cultural production [on aesthetics, see Greiner’s chapter; on queer sexuality, see Dau’s]. It is easy to see how, in The Renaissance, Pater anticipated some of the insights of modern queer studies. It is therefore unsurprising that some of the most influential work on aestheticism and decadence should have come from the perspective of queer criticism. From the 1990s onwards, the study of aestheticism and decadence and queer studies have stood in a mutually reinforcing relationship: just as literary critics of these movements have drawn on the insights of queer theorists, queer theory has benefited from the knowledge of the complexities of gay history, and the modes of its cultural inscription, generated within literary criticism. Exemplary in this sense is Richard Dellamora’s Masculine Desire (1990), which brought to light the pervasive presence of homosexual desire as a thematic concern among aesthetic writers well beyond Oscar Wilde, who was already gaining ground as a major author and whose contribution to the history of sexuality was, as a result, examined extensively. Dellamora identified a canon of queer male writers that crystalized around aestheticism (his preferred focus, rather than decadence): Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pater, Swinburne, John Addington Symonds, Alfred Tennyson, and Wilde, as well as the artist Simeon Solomon. These would be very influential for later critics. He also established aestheticism as a field of revisionary masculinity, where male subjects were free to inhabit new identities and desires that questioned the orthodoxies of the Victorian period. Masculine Desire showed the need to pay attention to anxious and indirect strategies of selfrepresentation of Victorian homosexuality, which of course came under increased strain with the introduction of the Labouchère Amendment in 1885. A detailed exploration of the impact of antihomosexual legislation on the literature of the turn of the century is put forward in Effeminate England 107
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(1995) by Joseph Bristow, who would go on to produce some of the most influential queer readings of aesthetic and decadent authors, especially Wilde. In the years around the symbolic watershed of 1885, the study of the past and the creation of elaborate literary forms were both ideal ways of writing about homosexuality—a topic that was increasingly interesting to people just as it remained impossible to broach openly in literature. One century later, the 1990s were the decade that marked the peak of deconstruction, when critics became particularly aware of the cultural importance of the hidden and unsaid: finding the ways in which homosexuality was articulated in a culture that censored and actively policed it was therefore a challenge that several critics embraced, sometimes with important results. Building on Dellamora’s insight that homosexual desire was often displaced onto the past, Linda Dowling’s Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (1994) argued that, in the works of Pater, Symonds, and Wilde, references to ancient Greece functioned as a code that made queerness legible and attractive to like-minded readers. Dowling showed that a Victorian classical education empowered writers with the tools to bring homosexuality in line with Victorian liberal values, “no longer a sin or crime or disastrous civic debility but a social identity functioning within a fund of shared human potentialities, now recognized as shared, out of which the renewal or, as Pater would say, the renaissance of Victorian life might actually begin to rise” (31). Dowling made a strong case for the importance of these writers in setting the terms on which the twentieth-century struggle for the moral legitimacy of homosexuality would be conducted, even though her focus on Oxford was geographically and socially narrow and, in this book, she shied away from a systematic examination of the categories of aestheticism and decadence. A broader spatial and temporal perspective and an explicit focus on aestheticism are present in Dennis Denisoff ’s Aestheticism and Sexual Parody (2001), which also dealt with the discursive formation of queer desires and queer print networks. An important achievement of Denisoff ’s book was that it took aestheticism out of the ivory tower: here the aesthetes’ contribution to the history of sexuality appeared much more public, as it took shape in a variety of media that include caricature and popular theatre. Denisoff played on the semantic complexity of parody as a discourse of representation that simultaneously criticizes and affirms its object by lending it public legitimacy, and is therefore an ideal ground for the literary inscription of Victorian homosexuality, with its complex semantic codes. A similar focus on the semantics of desire is behind Ellis Hanson’s Decadence and Catholicism (1998). Hanson started from the historical premise that several male Decadent writers were Catholic converts: the circumstances of Wilde’s disputed deathbed conversion are well known, but the list includes John Gray, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Marc-André Raffalovich, and Frederick Rolfe (alias Baron Corvo), among others. Hanson argued that the Catholic faith provided a fraught but attractive language to express homosexual identities that were bound up with the anti-bourgeois and anti-materialist critique that characterizes decadent literature. Pater was supremely important to Hanson, not only as a key historical figure but also as a critical model: his elegant use of aesthetic prose in this book took the queer tradition of Paterian intertextuality right up to the late twentieth century, showing its undiminished vitality [on Christianity, see Knight’s chapter]. All these works reflect the major influence that Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality had on literary scholars at this point. Foucault showed that the nineteenth century was a key period in the formation of the modern idea of sexuality. In particular, he identified the late nineteenth century as marking the birth of homosexuality as a distinctive sexual identity, with its own social networks and codes of representation. Enabled by Foucault, literary critics now turned to examine how male homoeroticism—a category that entered the critical debate at this point—played itself out in literary texts. No doubt the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s was also a factor in encouraging scholars to reassess accusations of degeneration and sexual immorality, and to find historical precedents for the late twentieth-century struggle against homophobia. Unlike what happened with other areas of Victorian literature, in the study of aestheticism and decadence the development of key feminist approaches chronologically followed queer criticism and 108
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was implicitly or explicitly influenced by them. A crucial work was Elaine Showalter’s Sexual Anarchy (1991), which showed that the turn of the century saw a “redefinition of gender” that simultaneously affected perceptions of femininity and masculinity (8). Showalter revealed that there was a hidden but powerful link between the artful writing typified by Pater and Wilde and the literature of the New Woman movement, discontinuous though this body of writings is in terms of literary form. Later in the 1990s, in Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (1997), Kathy Alexis Psomiades partly built on the earlier wave of queer criticism in order to unearth the complex modes of desire that attached themselves to the female body. Around the turn of the millennium, Psomiades and Talia Schaffer changed dominant perceptions in order to recognize women as active agents in the production of aestheticism with their coedited Women and British Aestheticism (1999); while Schaffer’s The Forgotten Female Aesthetes (2000) put the spotlight on genres that were otherwise seldom associated with aestheticism, such as popular romance, and showed the leading role played by women in the establishment and consolidation of the movement. For instance, Schaffer persuasively showed that Wilde modeled his well-known epigrammatic style on the then extremely successful novelist Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée), whose work fell out of fashion in the twentieth century and whose pervasive influence on late-Victorian literature has therefore become difficult for us to see [on feminism, see Schaffer’s chapter]. From the early 2000s, the focus thus shifted to previously marginalized women authors, who now started to reemerge into the canon, replicating the process undergone by their male peers roughly 20 years earlier. Olive Custance, Lucas Malet, Alice Meynell, Ouida, and A. Mary F. Robinson among others became the subjects of an increasing number of articles and book chapters. Perhaps the most notable success story of this important period was Vernon Lee, who first attracted attention as anomalous due to her cosmopolitan identity and her efforts to fuse aesthetics and experimental psychology. Lee’s alleged eccentricities, however, would in time come to be taken seriously, as is testified by the prominent place that Benjamin Morgan has recently given to her in his study of Victorian science and affect, The Outward Mind (2017). Lee’s renaissance started with the publication of Christa Zorn’s biography in 2003 and was consolidated in 2006 by Catherine Maxwell’s and Patricia Pulham’s collection of essays, Vernon Lee, which recuperated Lee by situating her work in relation to aestheticism and decadence. Students approaching these movements nowadays no longer regard Lee as a minor author but rather as a major and influential voice. Michael Field (the poetic partnership of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) has followed a similar trajectory, from quirky appendix to literary histories to towering presence in twenty-first-century discussions of the fin de siècle. Here again, the ongoing redefinition of the categories of aestheticism and decadence has provided invaluable keys to learn how to reread these authors and make them relevant to literary studies today, such as in Yopie Prins’s Victorian Sappho (1999), where there is a pioneering chapter devoted to Michael Field, and Marion Thain’s monograph “Michael Field” (2007). At the same time, the rediscovery of women authors—whose works are still too patchily available in reliable critical editions—has helped critics to radically redraw the canon of aestheticism and decadence, which now looks profoundly different from that envisaged by T.S. Eliot, Praz, or the early literary historian of the 1890s, Holbrook Jackson. Queer and feminist agendas have thus been a driving motor behind the rise of aestheticism and decadence within Victorian studies. It is no coincidence that interest in same-sex intimacies has also fueled scholarship on Lee and Michael Field. The work of Bristow, Denisoff, and Maxwell, among others, as well as my own British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece (2009), has tried to find ways of relating queer and feminist perspectives, and to unearth historical links between male and female queer identities. Thanks to the efforts made by queer and feminist critics from the 1990s to the present, queerness is nowadays no longer a marginal interest in the study of aestheticism and decadence. The challenge is to keep queerness visible and central without assimilating its countercultural energy to the point that it loses its political value. 109
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2. Modernist Forms We have seen that aestheticism and decadence were devalued by the modernists, who cast a long shadow over their critical reception in the twentieth century. Some authors, like Vernon Lee, Lucas Malet, and Arthur Symons, lived well into the modernist era and saw their work get more and more out of fashion, become more and more unpalatable to readers and publishers. Another long-lived author was George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne), who entered the canon of 1890s decadence with her collection of short stories Keynotes (1893), which combined formal experimentation and a shockingly frank treatment of female sexuality. In the essay “A Keynote to Keynotes” (1932), looking back to her early work from the vantage point of the 1930s, Egerton encapsulated the problematic temporal relation of decadence vis-à-vis modernism: “I came too soon” (58). In particular, after reading Freud, Egerton felt that her depiction of the cultural repression of female sexual desire broke new ground at a moment when society was not yet ready for it. At the same time, now that Freudian psychoanalysis was the norm, she felt that her work was equally out of place and different from the advanced literature of the day. In her assessment of the displaced modernity of Keynotes, Egerton grappled with the problem of how to link and simultaneously disentangle aestheticism and decadence from modernism—something to which later critics of Victorian literature would also turn. Modernism occupied a solidly canonical position within the academy from its experimental first starts right through the twentieth century. The modernists claimed to have made a clean break with tradition, especially with Victorian literature. But later scholars naturally questioned this claim and, when they started systematically to excavate the genealogy of modernist authors, they found the traces of aestheticism and decadence right underneath the surface. Perry Meisel’s The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater (1980), The Myth of the Modern (1987), and F.C. McGrath’s The Sensible Spirit: Walter Pater and the Modernist Paradigm (1986) triggered a first wave of interrogations of the modernists’ debts to their late-Victorian precursors. It is symptomatic of the low status then enjoyed by aestheticism and decadence that these scholars usually refrained from referring to these movements, preferring instead to pay attention to the influence of isolated authors—Pater, again, was understandably a favorite. Yet these works opened the way to dismantling the critical orthodoxy that saw modernism as clever, tasteful, and progressive, while dismissing aestheticism and decadence as purple and somehow easy to decipher. The challenge now was to learn how to appreciate the “modernism” of aestheticism and decadence without tying it to the high modernism of the twentieth century, to which it would almost inevitably stand, retrospectively, in a relationship of failure, like Egerton’s “I came too soon.” Very important in this sense was the work of critics who set out to define the characteristics of aesthetic and decadent literary form, such as Catherine Maxwell’s Second Sight (2008). One of the outstanding achievements of Maxwell’s extensive exploration of Victorian literature is her codification of aesthetic prose as a literary genre in its own right. Meanwhile, Ana Parejo Vadillo in Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism (2005) and Thain in the aforementioned “Michael Field” showed that aestheticism also had its own distinctive poetic tradition, which strove to articulate the perception of modernity by means of original poetic styles—an insight that is reinforced by the essays in Joseph Bristow’s The Fin de Siècle Poem (2005), where the emphasis is also on the occluded presence of women writers. In the introduction to that volume, Bristow highlighted the dangers of identifying the fin de siècle as a period of transition: [T]he poetry that historians have classified under this rubric [fin de siècle] tends to be valued not so much for its artistic eminence or technical prowess as for the liminal position in which it bears witness to the attenuation of what had been one monumental age (the Victorian) and the consequent need for cultural revitalization by another (modernism). (1) 110
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Bristow urged critics, instead, to understand the apparent “pretentions and perversions” of aestheticism and decadence as signs of a “well-considered interest in devising fresh poetic models that could engage with the modern before further shifts in poetics became identifiably modernist” (39) [on Victorian poetry, see Chapman’s chapter]. Decadence presented a more difficult challenge than aestheticism, as the very concept of decadence (from the Latin for “to fall from”) implies not only derivation but a movement backward rather than an engagement with the present and the idea of modernity. Linda Dowling in Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (1984), John Reed in Decadent Style (1985), and the essays in the collection Perennial Decay (1999), edited by Matthew Potolsky, and colleagues, argued for the importance of divorcing decadence from the pejorative meanings and connotations that had been attached to it since Max Nordau’s extremely successful, sensationalist attack in Degeneration (1892, English translation 1895). In these accounts, although the modernists are hardly mentioned as points of comparison, decadence emerged as finding forms and styles capable of responding to the intellectual crises of modernity. More recently, the collection Decadent Poetics (2013), edited by Jason David Hall and Alex Murray, has argued for a historically and politically informed attention to form as the best way to come to a revised understanding of decadence, which at the same time enables us to expand its canon and range of thematic concerns. However, for all their shared emphasis on the need to move away from pejorative readings, scholars disagree on whether the rhetoric of decline is a hindrance to a proper understanding of decadence or, as Hall and Murray put it, an important feature by means of which the decadent literary text performs “the deconstruction of meaning and value” (1). The systematic investigation into the legacy of decadence in the twentieth century started with David Weir’s Decadence and the Making of Modernism (1995), which went beyond the English canon to show how Anglophone modernists were indebted not only to Pater, but also to French authors such as Gustave Flaubert and Huysmans in their style. James Joyce could now be read in the context of a long history of decadence that extended right into the twentieth century. Vincent Sherry in Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence (2015) and Kristin Mahoney in Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence (2015) have traced the same genealogy. Sherry’s focus was on recovering the persistence of the classic decadent imagery of decay and loss in canonical modernists such as Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, and Rebecca West. Mahoney coined the original category of “post-Victorian decadence” to encapsulate the complex temporality to which Egerton alluded in “A Keynote to Keynotes,” recasting her assessment in positive terms. Mahoney persuasively showed that the relations between decadence and modernism might not best be framed in terms of influence or prefiguring, but by finding an alternative canon of early twentieth-century authors who were themselves skeptical of the myth of the modern promulgated by Eliot and Pound. Mahoney thus demonstrated that authors like Egerton and Lee still participated in the making of the radical modernity of the early twentieth century by holding on to their decadent formation, where they found vital tools of cultural critique that they redeployed in their writings on pacifism and sexual identity.
3. The Cosmopolitan Turn A crucial difference between decadence and aestheticism is in their national affiliation. In the Englishspeaking world, decadence has always been regarded as a foreign import. In his important manifesto of 1893, “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” Arthur Symons introduced decadence as the “latest movement in European literature” (169), suggesting its cosmopolitan character and transnational outlook. Almost all of Symons’s examples were French writers: Joris-Karl Huysmans, the Goncourt brothers, Maurice Maeterlinck (a Francophone Belgian writer), Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Verlaine. This was hardly surprising given that, when Symons published his article in the American journal Harper’s Magazine, French decadence had already been codified as a literary movement, with its own little magazine, Le Décadent, founded in 1889 by Anatole Baju. Despite the efforts of Symons 111
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and other English mediators, modern decadence was never fully naturalized within English literary culture. It always retained a visible trace of its French heritage, just as the English decadents were all more or less openly Francophile. Aestheticism, by contrast, has traditionally been seen as native to English-speaking countries. As a critical category, it is almost exclusively used within English literary studies: to speak of a French or Russian aestheticism is as awkward as postulating the existence of a Victorian France or Victorian Russia. It is telling that, in his 1882 American lecture “The English Renaissance of Art,” Wilde presented what had come to be known as the aesthetic movement as “the great English Renaissance of art in this century,” adding, “I call it our English Renaissance because it is indeed a sort of new birth of the spirit of man, like the great Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century” (243). What is striking in this quotation is the uncharacteristic note of patriotism introduced by the pronoun “our,” as though the Irish Wilde wanted to suggest that aestheticism should be a source of national pride for the British. And yet, in that same lecture, Wilde proceeded to show that aestheticism drew heavily on the writings of foreign authors, including Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, J.W. Goethe, and even the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini. Far from encouraging patriotic feeling, Wilde wanted to show that aestheticism regarded the arts as the universal property of humankind. He therefore warned against the use of art as an instrument of political propaganda that set one nation against the other, reminding his American audience that the “political independence of a nation must not be confused with any intellectual isolation” (267). His point was that aestheticism, by placing literature and the arts above national loyalty, helped to curb nationalist tendencies, promoting a cosmopolitan orientation that aids peaceful relations between countries. In “The English Renaissance of Art,” Wilde thus gave voice to a cosmopolitan ambition aestheticism had in fact embodied from the outset: Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866) brought the transgressive spirit of Baudelaire to English readers and Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance, from which Wilde quoted liberally in his American lecture, took Italian, French, and German artists and scholars as capable of bringing into modern English culture a love of artistic freedom that it painfully lacked. This interest in bringing about a cosmopolitan turn in English literature is therefore also something that decadence and aestheticism had in common. And this cosmopolitanism, with its questioning of identities, aesthetic orthodoxies, and forms of ethical attachment, must be understood in its full political import, as a critique of nineteenth-century cultural nationalism. Should literature cement a sense of national identity or provide a platform to transcend the social and emotional ties of the nation? What is the relationship between the local and the global in literature? Can literature ever be produced outside the frame of a national culture? These are some of the fundamental questions with which aestheticism and decadence confronted their first readers—questions that have not lost their urgency in the twenty-first century. For a long time, literary critics were all too ready to take the apolitical claims of art for art’s sake at face value, or even to stigmatize aestheticism and decadence as politically regressive. Particularly influential in this regard was the Marxist critique developed after the Second World War by Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School, who suggested that there was a continuum between the obsessive formalism of the cultural vanguards of fin de siècle and the aestheticization of politics operated by right-wing totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century. In fact, though, as we have already seen with reference to gender, aestheticism and decadence did make long-lasting interventions into Victorian politics. The Wilde trials, for instance, where both aestheticism and decadence became compounded and confused with homosexuality, were instrumental in galvanizing the struggle for homosexual emancipation in the twentieth century. Within Victorian studies, sustained critical examination of the politics of aestheticism started with Regenia Gagnier’s early work on Wilde. In Idylls of the Marketplace (1986), Gagnier read Wilde’s writings and his strategies of self-presentation as “an engaged protest against Victorian utility, rationality, scientific factuality, and technological progress” (3), and showed how to understand his dandyism in relation to capitalist consumer culture. The same impulse to resituate aestheticism within the 112
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Victorian social and political spheres, with an emphasis on the interface between artistic taste and market economy, was behind Jonathan Freedman’s Professions of Taste (1990) and Linda Dowling’s The Vulgarization of Art (1996). These critics all focused on canonical writers: Henry James, William Morris, Pater, John Ruskin, Wilde. For them it was important to show that key figures linked to the aesthetic movement were concerned with social questions. A later generation of critics shifted the focus onto institutions and networks. Diana Maltz in British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes (2006) and Ruth Livesey in Socialism, Sex and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain (2007) explored how aesthetes, in Maltz’s words, engaged in “a constellation of social activities” (19) that brought literature into dialogue with, among other things, sexology, organized and revolutionary politics, philanthropic movements, and the educational and museum sector. By so doing these critics also expanded the canon of aestheticism to include writers such as Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, Isabella Ford, George Gissing, Arthur Morrison, and Olive Schreiner. Like the Frankfurt School, all these critics started from the left, but they revised the rigid position of the Frankfurt School by teasing out links between art for art’s sake and various forms of social engagement. In recent years, global politics and international relations have come prominently to the fore, mostly with a specific focus on decadence which, as we have seen, openly flaunted its transnational connections from its very onset on the British scene. As Gagnier has suggested in Individualism, Decadence and Globalization (2010), the complex debate on individualism that developed within and around decadent literature anticipates a set of opportunities and anxieties that we now associate with globalization. While Gagnier encouraged us to frame decadent cosmopolitanism by looking forward to social theories formulated in the following century, Matthew Potolsky in The Decadent Republic of Letters (2013) related it back to the Enlightenment ideal of the Republic of Letters which, he argued, provided a model for its practices of transnational textual networking. Gagnier and Potolsky have opened ways of rethinking the extreme and sometimes disruptive individualism of decadent literature in positive terms, as heralding progressive discourses of internationalism. Of course, in Victorian studies, theories and practices of cosmopolitanism must come up against the inescapable reality of the British Empire, which in the late nineteenth century reached its largest territorial expansion. Within the Empire, the new cross-cultural sensibility generated by aestheticism was capable of creating bonds of solidarity between the metropolitan and colonial spheres, as Leela Gandhi has shown in Affective Communities (2006). These bonds had a long-lasting influence. As Robert Stilling has argued in Beginning at the End (2018), the strategies of intellectual and social resistance promoted by aestheticism and decadence would later inspire twentieth- and twenty-first century writers, including Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Derek Walcott, who redeployed them as instruments of postcolonial critique. Stilling argues that the postcolonial space creates a productive new reading of the chronology of decadence: “[T]he postcolonial nation begins in a state of artistic decadence, a decadence not simply imported from the West but composed of those backward-looking elements of indigenous traditions exaggerated by the colonizers” (63). In this context decadence, which had been associated with loss and regression in metropolitan Europe, becomes instead charged with hope, regeneration, activism, and even a progressive form of anti-imperialist nationalism [on postcolonialism, see Banerjee’s chapter]. The dialogue with postcolonial criticism exemplified by Gandhi and Stilling has been very productive. It has unearthed anti-imperial and anti-colonial dimensions of a canon that had for many been synonymous with a detached and even self-referential formalism. It has provided us with a framework to redress overt orientalist tropes that, drawing on Edward Said, critics tended to condemn as a means of cultural imperialism. It has also tested classic theories of cosmopolitanism, formulated within the European philosophical tradition, by taking them beyond the geographical boundaries of Europe, putting pressure on their claims to universalism. This opening toward other geographical spaces, literatures, and traditions reflects one of the major disciplinary challenges that Victorian scholars face in the twenty-first century. Important interventions 113
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by, among others, Tanya Agathocleous (Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century, 2011), Amanda Anderson (The Powers of Distance, 2001), Lauren Goodlad (The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic, 2015), and Caroline Levine (“From Nation to Network,” 2013) have opened up new dimensions of Victorian cosmopolitanism, paving the way for a sustained critical reexamination of concepts of nationhood and national identity. As we have seen, aesthetic and decadent authors were at the vanguard of creating transcultural literary exchanges and alliances that placed Britain in a complex global economy of cultural exchanges and migrations. Like their ambiguous straddling of Victorian and modernist aesthetics, the geographical positioning of aestheticism and decadence between domestic and foreign cultures should be seen as a source of richness. The fight against “intellectual isolation” (267), as Wilde put it, was one of their most powerful interventions within Victorian literary culture. In the early twenty-first century, as Britain, the United States, and many other nations are swept by a resurgent impulse toward isolation and cultural nationalism, it is once again the most important contribution that decadence and aestheticism can make to Victorian studies today.
Key Critical Works Dennis Denisoff. Aestheticism and Sexual Parody, 1840–1940. Linda Dowling. Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Regenia Gagnier. Idylls of the Marketplace. Leela Gandhi. Affective Communities. Ruth Livesey. Socialism, Sex and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914. Kristin Mahoney. Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence. Ana Parejo Vadillo. Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism. Matthew Potolsky. The Decadent Republic of Letters. Talia Schaffer. The Forgotten Female Aesthetes. Elaine Showalter. Sexual Anarchy.
Works Cited Agathocleous, Tanya. Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century:Visible City, Invisible World. Cambridge UP, 2011. Anderson, Amanda. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton UP, 2001. Bristow, Joseph. Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885. Open UP, 1995. ———, editor. The Fin de Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s. Ohio State UP, 2005. Dellamora, Richard. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism. Duke UP, 1990. Denisoff, Dennis. Aestheticism and Sexual Parody, 1840–1940. Cambridge UP, 2001. Dowling, Linda. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Cornell UP, 1994. ———. Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Princeton UP, 1984. ———. The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy. UP of Virginia, 1996. Egerton, George. “A Keynote to Keynotes.” John Gawsworthy, Ten Contemporaries. Ernest Benn, 1932, pp. 57–60. Evangelista, Stefano. British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Freedman, Jonathan. Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture. Stanford UP, 1990. Gagnier, Regenia. Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public. Stanford UP, 1986. ———. Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anti-Colonial Thought, Fin de Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Duke UP, 2006. Goodlad, Lauren. The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience. Oxford UP, 2015. Hanson, Ellis. Decadence and Catholicism. Harvard UP, 1998. Jackson, Holbrook. The 1890s: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century. Grant Richards, 1913. Levine, Caroline. “From Nation to Network.” Victorian Studies, vol. 55, no. 4, 2013, pp. 647–66. Livesey, Ruth. Socialism, Sex and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914. Oxford UP, 2007.
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Decadence and Aestheticism Mahoney, Kristin. Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence. Cambridge UP, 2015. Maltz, Diana. British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes: Beauty for the People. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Maxwell, Catherine. The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne: Bearing Blindness. Manchester UP, 2001. ———. Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature. Manchester UP, 2008. Maxwell, Catherine, and Patricia Pulham, editors. Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. McGrath, F. C. The Sensible Spirit: Walter Pater and the Modernist Paradigm. UP of Florida, 1986. Meisel, Perry. The Absent Father:Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater. Yale UP, 1980. ———. The Myth of the Modern: A Study in British Literature and Criticism after 1850. Yale UP, 1987. Morgan, Benjamin. The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature. U of Chicago P, 2017. Parejo Vadillo, Ana. Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Edited by Donald L. Hill, U of California P, 1980. Potolsky, Matthew. The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley. U of Pennsylvania P, 2013. Potolsky, Matthew, Liz Constable, and Dennis Denisoff, editors. Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence. U of Pennsylvania P, 1999. Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony. Translated by A. H. G. Davidson, Oxford UP, 1951. Prins, Yopie. Victorian Sappho. Princeton UP, 1999. Psomiades, Kathy Alexis. Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism. Stanford UP, 1997. Psomiades, Kathy Alexis, and Talia Schaffer, editors. Women and British Aestheticism. UP of Virginia, 1999. Reed, John R. Decadent Style. Ohio State UP, 1985. Schaffer, Talia. The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England. UP of Virginia, 2000. Sherry, Vincent. Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence. Cambridge UP, 2015. Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. Bloomsbury, 1991. Stilling, Robert. Beginning at the End: Decadence, Modernism and Postcolonial Theory. Harvard UP, 2018. Symons, Arthur. “The Decadent Movement in Literature.” 1893. The Symbolist Movement in Literature, edited by Matthew Creasy, Carcanet, 2014, pp. 169–83. Temple, Ruth Z. “Truth in Labelling: Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, Decadence, Fin de Siècle.” English Literature in Transition (1880–1920), vol. 17, 1974, pp. 201–22. Thain, Marion. ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge UP, 2007. Weir, David. Decadence and the Making of Modernism. U of Massachusetts P, 1995. Wilde, Oscar. “The English Renaissance of Art.” The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, 15 vols., vol. 14, edited by Robert Ross, Routledge and Thoemmes, 1993, pp. 243–77. Zorn, Christa. Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History and the Victorian Female Intellectual. Ohio State UP, 2003.
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PART II
Media Histories
10 BOOK HISTORY Andrew M. Stauffer
A novel by Charles Dickens as issued in its original monthly parts, with advertisements; a series of illustrated editions of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market; a pop-up book of the Great Exhibition of 1851; a weekly literary periodical printed in British India: if you find yourself fascinated by things like this—by Victorian books, periodicals, manuscripts, engravings, and ephemera—and interested in the details of their production and use, you’re not alone. Book history is one of the most vibrant and active fields within Victorian studies, aimed at describing and interpreting such documents and analyzing the networks of producers and readers that constituted the nineteenth-century media landscape. Book historians also work in areas such as copyright law, industrialization, education, economics, and technology, but the grounding of the field is in the material archive the Victorians left behind. Of a nineteenth-century print or manuscript document, book historians ask, where did it come from? How and why was it made in this way? And what do its specific features reveal about its cultural meanings and the hands of its makers? In addition to these questions about production, they also ask about that document’s circulation and reception: who read it, and how? What made them want to read it, and how did it affect them? Asking such questions may involve bracketing the document’s semantic content for a time, but will eventually lead to a braiding of that content with the material forms of its existence, a reading of the prose, poetry, or image in relationship to the format and physical characteristics of the vehicle upon which it depends, including the history of its production and use. Finally, the book historian will place that document within the larger social, economic, and cultural trends that sustained it, drawing conclusions about the production, distribution, and use of books in Victorian Britain. If that’s what you want to do, you’re in the right place. And your timing is good as well: in recent decades, digital technologies have vastly expanded the field, making scanned images of original documents visible, accessible, and shareable [on digital technologies, see Bourrier’s chapter]. Indeed, nineteenth-century content has been key to the digital humanities from its beginnings. And a significant portion of the Victorian print record can be found freely available online—not just its words but its look, layout, and bibliographic details. Such digital gateways have led many students and scholars into the archive: the library collections of Victorian-era paper, ink, cloth, and leather. From those collections, they have brought back a newly widened range of material, beyond the traditional canon of authors and genres. It’s an exciting time to engage the multiplicity of what we call by way of shorthand “the Victorian book.” Indeed, one key predicate of Victorian book history is the astounding plenitude of printed material produced in that era. Much of this was due to the industrialization of the various processes that went into the production and dissemination of print, processes that fed and were demanded by the rise of 119
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general literacy throughout the century [on print culture, see Haywood’s chapter; on periodicals, see Hughes’s chapter]. As was observed by a commentator in 1907, “Every one knows how to read, and books and newspapers have come to be within the reach of the poorest” (Spicer 1). Access to print became cheaper: it became increasingly easy to manufacture and circulate printed material as the century moved forward. One historian observes: “[A]ll of printing technology changed dramatically in the first four decades of the nineteenth century, following three and a half centuries of no significant changes” (Kilgour 98). Another singles out “the decades of the 1860s and 1880s” as “a true dividing line in the history of paper-making,” when grass and wood pulp were introduced: “[A]fter eighteen centuries of existence as a manufacture based on rags and nearly four hundred years of existence in Britain, it found a major new raw material” (Coleman, 344). The steam-driven press, the papermaking machine, mechanical type-founding and typesetting processes, cloth bindings, steel engraving, lithography, and other innovations all took hold in Britain (and America) during the nineteenth century, the result being a richly textured and wide-ranging culture of print in the hands of unprecedentedly large numbers of readers [on industrial processes, see Carroll’s chapter; on technologies, see Menke’s chapter]. For books and reading on both sides of the Atlantic, before any competition from televisual media or even radio, it truly was the best of times.
1. Orientation and Starting Points So where to begin? As its name “book history” suggests, the field requires some general knowledge acquisition regarding the historical developments that shaped nineteenth-century cultures of the book. Book history assumes that you cannot interpret a text or material document in isolation but rather only as part of various networks of practices (e.g., technological, economic, social) that existed in particular times and places. To grasp these networks, one great place to start is with The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 1830–1913, edited by David McKitterick (2009). Some of the best scholars in the field have contributed essays, including McKitterick’s magisterial introduction, and the volume covers a wide range of topics, from serials and children’s books to copyright and readerships. Given Britain’s imperial reach during this era, the book also emphasizes book production and distribution in a global frame of reference, particularly in a chapter called “A Place in the World.” For the specifically Scottish context, the best recent work can be found in the Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland: Ambition and Industry, 1800–1880, edited by Bill Bell (2007). Those interested in the American developments during the heart of this same period can turn to A History of the Book in America. Volume 3. The Industrial Book 1840–1880, edited by Scott E. Casper and colleagues (2007), which includes among other things an excellent overview of “Manufacturing and Book Production” by Michael Winship and important essays on the “Sites of Reading” and “Cultures of Print” in nineteenth-century America. All of these collective histories can be used as resource hubs, each essay within them pointing outward in many different directions, some pursued by leading scholars in the excellent collection of essays, Bookish Histories: Books, Literature and Commercial Modernity 1700–1850, edited by Ina Ferris and Paul Keen (2007). But before moving in some of those directions, we need to acknowledge the parent field of book history, which is bibliography. Fredson Bowers, this field’s modern pioneer, identified four different types of bibliography, all of which have a bearing upon book history: enumerative, descriptive, analytical, and textual (“Four Faces”). Enumerative bibliography is focused on census-taking: the establishing of comprehensive lists of relevant editions, which may form the foundation of a research project. No book exists in isolation, and the enumerative bibliographer is set on identifying the other editions and/or copies that constitute its larger system of connections. Descriptive bibliography governs the examination and description of individual books according to specific terms and formulae, while analytical bibliography makes use of such descriptions to investigate the history of a book’s production; both have a forensic element to them. Finally, textual bibliography uses the insights of the other 120
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branches to make judgments regarding a text’s history in the service of scholarly editing (determining, for example, the more correct version of a given line or passage). Taken as a whole, bibliography is the “hard core” of book history, the underlying approach to the specific significant details of the documentary record. In fact, some would argue that book history cannot be done properly without the attention to detail enjoined by bibliography. David Vander Meulen’s “How to Read Book History” (2004) is important on this score. Scholars of book history very often adopt bibliographic methods as part of their intellectual toolkit, moving from the local details of a printed page to the larger sweep of media in culture. The interested scholar new to the field can begin with Phillip Gaskell’s A New Introduction to Bibliography (1995), D.C. Greetham’s Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (1994; rev. 2013), G. Thomas Tanselle’s work as collected in Essays in Bibliographical History (2013), and D.F. McKenzie’s Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (1999). Especially for those with Victorian interests, to this list should be added Jerome McGann’s A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983) and The Textual Condition (1991), as both address bibliographic issues characteristic of the nineteenth century and their consequences for theories of the text. McGann has long been one of the most influential scholars in the field of nineteenth-century book history. His early collection of essays, The Beauty of Inflections (1985) brought book history into conversation with historicist and poststructuralist literary theory, and used a series of nineteenth-century case studies to demonstrate the centrality of bibliographic and textual studies to literary history and critical method. Start with the chapters called “The Monks and the Giants” and “The Book of Byron and the Book of a World”: they have converted more than a few. You might then jump to McGann’s Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (1993), on the significant textual details of the work of William Morris, W.B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson, and others. Finally, you could take up Radiant Textuality: Literary Studies after the World Wide Web (2001), in which McGann continues his work in editorial and textual theory based on his foundational work in the digital humanities, including the Dante Gabriel Rossetti Archive (http://rossettiarchive.org)—one of the first large-scale scholarly editions created in a digital environment. In his extensive body of work, McGann consistently braids bibliographic, book-historical, literary-critical, and theoretical strands together, providing examples that have set the standard for the new book history.
2. Other Directions Beyond these beginnings lie many possibilities. One might get interested in Victorian publishing history and look at some classics in that area, such as John Sutherland’s Victorian Novelists and Publishers (1976), Allan C. Dooley’s Author and Printer in Victorian England (1992), and Peter Shillingsburg’s Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and W.M. Thackeray (1992). All of these focus on the literary, and often textual, consequences of developments in the publishing industry in Victorian Britain, and all proceed by way of case studies in author-publisher interaction. For a more comprehensive view of the changing markets for literature during this period and how those markets influenced what was written, Lee Erickson’s The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (1996) remains valuable, although it exaggerates the decline of poetry’s popularity during the period. If your interests tilt away from the specifically literary and more toward the larger sweep of publishing history, and particularly the economics of its transformation through the century, you will want to consult two recent overviews of the book trade: Alexis Weedon’s Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market, 1836–1916 (2003) and James Raven’s impressive and far-ranging study, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–1850 (2007). Finally, two touchstone books amount to required reading for those interested in nineteenth-century book history as inflected by changes in publication practices and copyright regimes, even though each is adjacent to Victorian studies proper. Meredith McGill’s American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1843–1853 (2003) has had a wide influence, directing attention to the transnational economies 121
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of information that led to piracies and copying as forming a major part of literary publishing in the nineteenth century. William St. Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004) analyzes the publishing markets of the early part of the century, using quantitative methods to demonstrate crucial time-lags in circulation: he shows that Romantic-era publishers were mostly reprinting works from earlier periods, since those were more readily profitable than new works. Both McGill and St. Clair have reminded us that publishing means much more than bringing out first editions, and their work has prompted scholars to construct more capacious models of nineteenth-century print circulation. Another aspect of the publishing process, Victorian illustration, continues to draw substantial scholarly interest. Technologies of image reproduction evolved throughout the century: engraving on wood, copper, and steel, lithography, photography, and other visual reproductive techniques changed the possibilities for Victorian media [on visual culture, see Flint’s chapter]. The images by Boz (George Cruikshank) and Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne) that accompanied Dickens’s novels, the Pre-Raphaelite illustrations of poems by Tennyson and others, and the Kelmscott Press books designed by William Morris are all well-known examples of this massively influential aspect of the Victorian book, which extended across all ranges of print, from deluxe editions to cheap broadsides and handbills. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra’s Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing (2011) gives valuable detail on the interaction of poetry and image in Victorian print, and should lead the interested scholar to her other important work, including Christina Rossetti and Illustration: a Publishing History (2002) and her overview essay (“Poetry and Illustration”) on Victorian poetry and illustration (2002). Another starting point could be The Victorian Illustrated Book (2002), which presents essays by various hands on the culture of nineteenth-century text and image, as does the more recent Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855–1875 (2012) which opens with an essay on “Defining Illustrations Studies” by coeditor Paul Goldsmith. From there, many paths beckon, as various as the kinds of images circulating in the Victorian era, taking us beyond book history as such into the study of art and media. At the same time, magazines and newspapers multiplied and spread during this period, impelled in part by new graphical possibilities. This area of scholarship is massive and frequently atomized into localized studies of particular periodicals, and so can be hard to navigate. The best recent guide to the landscape, and a companion to the one you are reading now, is The Routledge Handbook to NineteenthCentury British Periodicals and Newspapers (2016), containing 29 essays that provide a combination of case studies and surveys of current research. Reflecting on the implications and possibilities for studying periodicals online, James Mussell’s The Nineteenth Century Press in the Digital Age (2012) is a thoughtful engagement with the methods of the field as such, usefully placed in conversation with an earlier field-defining study by Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial (1991). Another good way into this territory would be via current and back issues of the Victorian Periodicals Review, the scholarly journal of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. There the book historian will find more than occasional items of interest, given the emphasis that most of the articles place on the making and circulating of serial formats. In fact, periodical studies as a subfield overlaps extensively with book history, especially insofar as it emphasizes the meaningful details of Victorian publishing. As Mussell’s book reminds us, the digitization of so many nineteenth-century serials has made this a thrilling time to be doing such work. Katherine Bode’s A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (2018) provides a wonderful example of how digital newspapers can be mined to transform our understanding of the literary landscape. For similar important research in this vein, see Ryan Cordell’s Viral Texts project as well as the work of Paul Fyfe, mentioned later. Like periodical studies, book history tends to emphasize the methods and motives of publishing, but this quickly shades into questions of market and reception—in short, the history of reading. A large subfield of scholarly work in nineteenth-century studies places emphasis on the receiving end of the print-culture circuit. Valuable and oft-cited general works in the history of reading include Richard Altick’s The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (1957), Kate Flint’s The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (1995), David Vincent’s Literacy and Popular Culture: 122
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England 1750–1914 (1993), and Patrick Brantlinger’s The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (1998). All of these books deal with reading as a social phenomenon and with the consequences of expanding readerships in the Victorian era: the hopes, anxieties, and contested empowerment associated with Britain’s rise to near-universal literacy during the century. Along similar lines, those interested in childhood studies, and in the emergence of children’s books, should consult M.O. Grenby’s The Child Reader, 1700–1840 (2011) and, in the American context, Patricia Crain’s marvelous Reading Children: Literary, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America (2016) [on children’s literature, see Straley’s chapter]. Still on the American side, Michael Cohen’s valuable The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America (2015) analyzes the complexities of print circulation along vectors of race, class, and region, with a particular focus on the cultural valences of poetry. Finally, two crucial books on the pre-Victorian decades of the century are Jon Klancher’s The Making of English Reading Audiences 1790–1832 (1987) and Andrew Piper’s Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (2009). Both emphasize how the flourishing of print changed the ways authors imagined their task and addressed their audiences, thus producing a zeitgeist we call Romanticism. Taken together, all of these cultural histories demonstrate how nineteenth-century literature was shaped by the increasingly common and increasingly diverse experience of reading in the English-speaking world. Some book historians are interested in a looser definition of “reading” as such, examining the ways that people involved themselves with books in different ways. As a shorthand phrase for such involvement, one might take the title of a recent collection of essays on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reading practices: Interacting with Print (2017). Keyed to particular aspects of the book, its authors analyze multiple examples of practices such “Marking,” “Thickening,” and “Binding,” while also offering overviews of technological and material changes to book production that enabled new kinds of bibliographic interaction, of “Reading in the Era of Print Saturation” (as the subtitle has it). Tom Mole’s What the Victorians Made of Romanticism (2017) demonstrates the ways that nineteenth-century media shaped reception and thus the literary legacies we have inherited. Furthermore, Victorian authors were well aware of the multiplicity of uses to which their productions might be put, and Leah Price’s How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (2012) provides a lively, brilliant tour of literary representations of non-reading, of what she calls “reader-unresponse” and the material and social object-hood of printed matter. To this should be added two influential works of book history that deal in part with the nineteenth-century rise of the “document” as bureaucratic paperwork, and on the mediated individual in modern information culture: Lisa Gitelman’s Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (2014) and Ben Kafka’s The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (2012). Both of these theoretically sophisticated and highly readable studies center on paperwork as documentary agent, as something that you do rather than read, and the consequences for modern institutional and informational regimes. Along similar lines, other scholars examine the active modifications that nineteenth-century readers made to their books. Heather Jackson’s two foundational studies, Marginalia (2002) and Romantic Readers (2005), examine and classify the many types of verbal and nonverbal marks that readers wrote in margins and on endpapers. In revealing such richly varied practices of interactivity, Jackson argues for an aggregated, particularized evidentiary base for histories of reading. Lindsey Eckert does the same in her article, “Reading Lyric’s Form: The Written Hand in Albums and Literary Annuals” (2018), in which she traces the development of the nineteenth-century lyric to inscriptive practices in personal albums. My own recent essay, “An Image in Lava: Annotation, Sentiment, and the Traces of Nineteenth-Century Reading” (2019) examines marginalia in personal copies of Felicia Hemans’s poetry to analyze how it mattered to nineteenth-century readers. Book modification also took the form of creative destruction and remixing, as is examined in two essays on scrapbooking, Ellen Gruber Garvey’s “Scissoring and Scrapbooks: Nineteenth-Century Reading, Remaking, and Recirculating” (2003) and Deidre Lynch’s “Paper Slips: Album, Archiving, Accident” (2018), the latter a part of Lynch’s larger project on Victorian scrapbook culture. Deborah Lutz works in a similar vein in her 123
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research represented by “Emily Brontë’s Paper Work” (2018), in which Lutz studies the cutting, tearing, and doodling that were a fundamental part of Brontë’s compositional practice. All of these studies offer new evidence of how authors and readers participated in communities of print consumption and creation and thus widen our understanding of the nature of the Victorian book and the reading of it. Recently the field has seen a renewed scholarly interest in the underlying materiality of printed objects, due in part to our increasing recognition that rag-based paper involve a complex mode of memorialization [on material books, see Lutz’s chapter]. On the American side, Josh Calhoun’s evocative essay, “The World Made Flax: Cheap Bibles, Textual Corruption, and the Poetics of Paper” (2011), reveals the “materials of memory” involved in the making of paper (flax and linen rags) and their prompting of larger concerns about durability and the ecology of information. Similarly, in his essay “Vibrant Material Textuality: New Materialism, Book History, and the Archive in Paper” (2018), Jonathan Senchyne is interested in the rag-based prehistory of paper, in paper’s constitution as itself an archive of recycled material, an object and repository of memory. Maria Zytaruk’s recent work engages with nineteenth-century material in a similar vein, in two essays that meditate on hybrid material documents. In “Caught in the Archive: Unruly Objects at the Foundling Hospital” (2018), Zytaruk considers the poignant persistence, among the paperwork, of scraps of clothing, ribbons, and other small objects left with infants who were given to the London Foundling Hospital. In “Preserved in Print: Victorian Books with Mounted Natural History Specimens” (2018), she considers the “almost startling materiality” of published botanical collections that contained actual samples as illustrations. Resolutely anchored in physical documents and objects, these recent studies are all interested in the signifying power of the material archive. Another welcome trend in Victorian book history is a fresh attention to the publication and reception of print in a global frame, and as shaped by race and empire. An early example is the first half of Priya Joshi’s In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (2002), which explicates the circulation and consumption of British literary fiction in the Victorian imperial context [on postcolonialism, see Banerjee’s chapter]. Working in publishers’ archives and library records, Joshi illuminates the appropriations and exchanges that characterized the colonial market for fiction. More on the Indian context can be found in Anindita Ghosh’s “An Uncertain ‘Coming of the Book’: Early Print Cultures in Colonial India” (2003), which gives a rich history of the development of local print cultures in the nineteenth century. In a related vein, Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire (2014) contains essays, such as “Jane Eyre at Home and Abroad” by Charlotte McDonald and “Macaulay’s History of England: A Book that Shaped Nation and Empire” by Catherine Hall, that discuss the twoway influences visible in patterns of colonial circulation, reading, and appropriation. Ross Forman’s China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (2016) also has fascinating things to say in this regard. Daniel Hack’s Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (2016) reveals such influences in a transatlantic context, showing how African American print culture made use of Victorian literature by reframing, reprinting, and reimagining it. The empire not only writes back, it publishes back as well. Studies like these suggest the possibilities for future work in alternative archives. As a signal example, perhaps at the edge of book history proper, is Anna Brickhouse’s The Unsettlement of America (2014) which presents a history of cultural transmission and translation based on deep research in the Spanish colonial archive, using records that span the IberianAnglo world. Much more work of this kind remains to be done: Victorian scholars operating within a global context to interpret the documents of the past according to their own histories of their making, circulation, and use.
3. Digital Transformations By the late 1990s, the digital humanities had introduced major changes to ways book historians engage with their materials. Early work centered on the creation of online scholarly editions, many of 124
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them representing nineteenth-century texts and images. Seminal projects include the Blake Archive, the Rossetti Archive, the Whitman Archive, the Poetess Archive, and Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles; for an overview of this period, see Amy Earhart’s 2015 book, Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies. Many first-generation digital humanists took as their aim the online representation of books, documents, and artwork, leveraging the newly emergent graphical web browser and associated technologies such as the scanner. This meant that scholars and students were paying attention to books in ways that were productively unfamiliar and highly detailed, as they developed methods of description, markup, and imaging that could represent complex documents and textual networks. What does it mean to “digitize” a book or “put a book online”? How can we use these powerful tools to reconceive bibliographic and editorial method? And what will it mean for the critical enterprise to have such ready, shareable access to “original” documents? All of these questions were fundamental to the digital humanities as they intersected with the work of book historians in English departments. And because Victorian books were typically out of copyright, and sometimes less rare and thus less protected by the strictures of special collections departments, those books attracted early experimentation and online publication. A good starting point is still NINES (Networked Interface for Nineteenth-century Electronic Studies), which, since 2005, has provided a portal onto a federation of digital resources in the field (British and American). You can get a (nowdated) overview of this work in my essay, “Digital Scholarly Resources for the Study of Victorian Literature and Culture” (2011). The upshot is that the digital humanities, even as it has morphed and forked into myriad possibilities and projects, retains Victorian book history as a basic part of its DNA. The two fields share a substantial amount of theoretical and practical territory, meaning students of one may well find themselves gravitating toward the other. At the same time, commercial and library-based digitization projects resulted in the wide-scale scanning of Victorian material, the largest and most obvious of these being the Google Books Project. For about a decade starting in the early 2000s, Google scanned over 25 million books from academic library shelves. Because they did not scan older material from rare book rooms, and because most post-1923 books are still in copyright in the United States, a large portion of their full-view books and periodicals date from the Victorian era. Images of many millions of nineteenth-century book pages were suddenly available online, bringing textual, visual, and bibliographic details into the view of even the casual seeker of Victorian content. At the same time, commercial resource providers such as ProQuest, EBSCO, Gale/Cengage, Intelex, Readex/Newsbank, and Adam Matthew Digital all were developing vast searchable archives of nineteenth-century documents, making them visible as pages and searchable as text (to libraries that can afford them). All of these resources continue to have farreaching effects on the field of Victorian studies as a whole, and they are of particular interest and concern to the book historian. On one hand, such ready availability of facsimile pages has energized book history in many ways: by increasing familiarity with Victorian print, by lowering the bar for teaching from originals, by enabling detailed presentations of visual evidence, and by allowing for extensive searches for relevant information such as publishers’ names. On the other hand, these mass-produced digital databases are of uneven quality, and they are unevenly available to researchers. Further, their apparent detail may discourage research among the original books—the “I’ve already seen it online” logic. The print record itself is much more nuanced and multiform than flat scans done at speed and often without scholarly oversight. For example, the scanning and the associated bibliographic data in Google Books are infamous for their unreliability (see Nunberg), as are many commercial scans of nineteenth-century periodicals, as Paul Fyfe shows in his work on image analytics. Further, the use of optical character recognition (OCR) to convert scanned images into text results in numerous errors, and the majority of DH projects do not make the visual elements of text computer-searchable. So the book historian has to advocate for a hybrid approach to Victorian studies, a use of digital surrogates and databases for their particular affordances in support of an engagement with the material archive as the sine qua non of rigorous scholarship in the field. Good examples of such projects include Alison 125
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Booth’s Collective Biographies of Women, Katherine Bode’s Australian Newspaper Fiction Database, and, in an adjacent historical and geographical area, The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, currently under the direction of Simon Burrows. More than most areas of Victorian studies, book history relies on empirical method and the pursuit of data. The field depends upon the detailed explication of material evidence, its description offered in support of larger analyses of culture and media. For the literary scholar, such historicism becomes most productive when informed by close reading and theoretical interpretation of the texts under investigation—when the question shifts from “what happened?” to “what does it mean?”: how does bibliographic and textual history determine the makeup, contours, and signification of a literary work? Let me conclude with an example. In 1864, Reverend Charles Dodgson created an illustrated pen-and-ink manuscript book (now online thanks to the British Library) called “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground,” a present for young Alice Liddell. The story would later be expanded and published as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). On the final page of the manuscript book, Dodgson drew a picture of Liddell, an attempt at a likeness of the real Alice rather than the more generically-drawn heroine of earlier pages. But he wasn’t happy with the sketch, and so instead pasted a small photograph of Alice overtop of it. Already we are through the looking-glass, as the fictional Alice and her real-life model come to share the overlapping representational space of the page. The situation is deepened by the closing paragraphs of the story, which tell of Alice’s sister’s dream of “another little Alice,” a dream-Alice whom she imagines growing up and one day telling to “other little children” this story “of little Alice of long ago.” As happens throughout the story, identity becomes vertiginous here: the text oscillates in near-delirium among Alice Liddell, Alice the heroine of the book, “another little Alice” as dreamed, and the grown-up dream-Alice telling this story to (one now guesses) yet another Alice. The manuscript book, now in the British Library, captures this thematic precisely with its alternating images of Alice on that last page. Dodgson even had to recopy a bit of the last sentence, because the photograph was slightly too large—so that, if you look underneath the photo, the final phrase reads, “happy summer days. days”: more doubling, and more of this sense of the elongation of childhood through its repeated days and stories. Curiouser and curiouser, the heroine might say; and down the rabbit-hole we go. Are we doing Victorian book history yet? I would say yes: welcome to the wonderland.
Key Critical Works Richard Daniel Altick. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900. Katherine Bode. A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History. Ina Ferris, and Paul Keen. Bookish Histories: Books, Literature and Commercial Modernity 1700–1850. Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton, editors. The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers. Jerome McGann. The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory. Meredith McGill. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1843–1853. David McKitterick, editor. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 1830–1913. James Mussell. The Nineteenth Century Press in the Digital Age. Leah Price. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. James Raven. The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–1850.
Works Cited Altick, Richard Daniel. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900. U of Chicago P, 1957. Bell, Bill, editor. Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland: Ambition and Industry, 1800–1880. Edinburgh UP, 2007. Bode, Katherine. Australian Newspaper Fiction Database. http://cdhrdatasys.anu.edu.au/tobecontinued/. ———. A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History. U of Michigan P, 2018.
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Book History Booth, Alison. Collective Biographies of Women. http://cbw.iath.virginia.edu. Bowers, Fredson. “The Four Faces of Bibliography.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, vol. 10, no. 1, 1971, pp. 33–45. Brantlinger, Patrick M. The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Indiana UP, 1998. Brickhouse, Anna. The Unsettlement of America: Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis de Velasco. Oxford UP, 2014. Burrows, Simon, Mark Curran, et al. The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe: Mapping the Trade of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel, 1769–1794. http://fbtee.uws.edu.au/main/. Burton, Antoinette, and Isabel Hofmeyr, editors. Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons. Duke UP, 2014. Calhoun, Joshua. “The World Made Flax: Cheap Bibles, Textual Corruption, and the Poetics of Paper.” PMLA, vol. 126, no. 2, 2011, pp. 237–44. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. Illustrated holograph manuscript. British Library. www.bl.uk/ collection-items/alices-adventures-under-ground-the-original-manuscript-version-of-alices-adventures-inwonderland#. Casper, Scott, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, Michael Winship, and David D. Hall, editors. A History of the Book in America,Volume 3: The Industrial Book 1840–1880. U of North Carolina P, 2007. Cohen, Michael. The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America. U of Pennsylvania P, 2015. Coleman, D. C. The British Paper Industry, 1495–1860: A Study in Industrial Growth. Clarendon, 1958. Cordell, Ryan. The Viral Texts Project: Mapping Networks of Reprinting in 19th-Century Newspapers. http://viraltexts.org. Crain, Patricia. Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America. U of Pennsylvania P, 2016. Dooley, Allan C. Author and Printer in Victorian England. U of Virginia P, 1992. Earhart, Amy. Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies. U of Michigan P, 2015. Eckert, Lindsey. “Reading Lyric’s Form: The Written Hand in Albums and Literary Annuals.” ELH, vol. 85, no. 4, Winter 2018, pp. 973–97. Erickson, Lee. The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Ferris, Ina, and Paul Keen, editors. Bookish Histories: Books, Literature and Commercial Modernity 1700–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Flint, Kate. The Woman Reader, 1837–1914. Clarendon, 1995. Forman, Ross. China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined. Cambridge UP, 2003. Fyfe, Paul, and Quian Ge. “Image Analytics and the Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Newspaper.” Cultural Analytics, 25 October 2018. 10.31235/osf.io/hwcpq. Garvey, Ellen Gruber. “Scissoring and Scrapbooks: Nineteenth-Century Reading, Remaking and Recirculating.” New Media, edited by Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey Pingree, MIT P, 2003, pp. 207–27. Gaskell, Phillip. A New Introduction to Bibliography. Oak Knoll, 1995. Ghosh, Anindita. “An Uncertain ‘Coming of the Book’: Early Print Cultures in Colonial India.” Book History, vol. 6, 2003, pp. 23–55. Gitelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Duke UP, 2014. Goodman, Paul, and Simon Cooke. Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855–1875: Spoils of the Lumber Room. Routledge, 2012. Greetham, D. C. Textual Scholarship: An Introduction. Routledge, 2013. Grenby, M. O. The Child Reader, 1700–1840. Cambridge UP, 2011. Hack, Daniel. Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature. Princeton UP, 2016. Hughes, Linda K., and Michael Lund. The Victorian Serial. U of Virginia P, 1991. Jackson, H. J. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. Yale UP, 2002. ———. Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia. Yale UP, 2005. Joshi, Priya. In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India. Columbia UP, 2002. Kafka, Ben. The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork. MIT P, 2012. Kilgour, Frederick G. The Evolution of the Book. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. King, Andrew, Alexis Easley, and John Morton, editors. The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers. Routledge, 2016. Klancher, Jon. The Making of English Reading Audiences 1790–1832. U of Wisconsin P, 1987. Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History. Ohio State UP, 2002. ———. “Poetry and Illustration.” A Companion to Victorian Poetry, edited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison, Blackwell, 2002, pp. 392–418.
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Andrew M. Stauffer ———. Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855–1875. Ohio State UP, 2011. Lutz, Deborah. “Emily Brontë’s Paper Work.” Victorian Review, vol. 42, no. 2, Fall 2016, pp. 291–305. Lynch, Deidre. “Paper Slips: Album, Archiving, Accident.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 57, no. 1, Spring 2018, pp. 87–119. Maxwell, Richard, editor. The Victorian Illustrated Book. U of Virginia P, 2002. McGann, Jerome. The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory. Clarendon, 1985. ———. Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism. Princeton UP, 1993. ———. A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. U of Chicago P, 1983. ———. Radiant Textuality: Literature Since the World Wide Web. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. ———. The Textual Condition. Princeton UP, 1991. McGill, Meredith. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1843–1853. U of Pennsylvania P, 2003. McKenzie, D. F. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. McKitterick, David, editor. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 1830–1913. Cambridge UP, 2009. Mole, Tom. What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History. Princeton UP, 2017. Multigraph Collective. Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation. U of Chicago P, 2018. Mussell, James. The Nineteenth Century Press in the Digital Age. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Nunberg, Geoffrey. “Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 31 August 2009. www.chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245. Piper, Andrew. Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age. U of Chicago P, 2013. Price, Leah. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2013. Raven, James. The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–1850. Yale UP, 2007. Sencheyne, Jonathan. “Vibrant Material Textuality: New Materialism, Book History, and the Archive in Paper.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 57, no. 1, Spring 2018, pp. 67–85. Shillingsburg, Peter. Pegasus in Harness:Victorian Publishing and W.M. Thackeray. U of Virginia P, 1992. Spicer, A. Dykes. The Paper Trade: A Descriptive and Historical Survey of the Paper Trade from the Commencement of the Nineteenth Century. Methuen, 1907. Stauffer, Andrew. “Digital Scholarly Resources for the Study of Victorian Literature and Culture.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 39, no. 1, March 2011, pp. 293–303. ———. “An Image in Lava: Annotation, Sentiment, and the Traces of Nineteenth-Century Reading.” PMLA, vol. 134, no. 1, January 2019 (forthcoming). St. Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge UP, 2004. Sutherland, John. Victorian Novelists and Publishers. U of Chicago P, 1976. Tanselle, G. Thomas. Essays in Bibliographical History. Bibliographical Society, 2013. Vander Meulen, David. “How to Read Book History.” Studies in Bibliography, vol. 54, 2003–04, pp. 171–93. Vincent, David. Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914. Cambridge UP, 1993. Weedon, Alexis. Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market, 1836–1916. Ashgate, 2003. Zytaruk, Maria. “Caught in the Archive: Unruly Objects at the Foundling Hospital.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 57, no. 1, Spring 2018, pp. 39–66. ———. “Preserved in Print: Victorian Books with Mounted Natural History Specimens.” Victorian Studies, vol. 60, no. 2, Winter 2018, pp. 185–200.
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11 VICTORIAN DIGITAL HUMANITIES Karen Bourrier
For the Victorians, disability and the progress of technology were intimately intertwined. Although we might see disability as marginal to histories of technology, examples from the nineteenth century teach us that new technologies were often first developed as aids to the disabled, only afterwards finding broader use among the general population. The first typewriter proven to work, for example, was built by Pellegrino Turri in 1808 to help his blind friend write independently (Lazar et al. 23). And as Matthew Rubery has shown, following nineteenth-century innovations in recorded sound, the first audiobooks were developed in the US by the Library of Congress and in the UK by the Royal National Institute of Blind People, in order to give the blind access to literature (109, 129). The exchange also worked in reverse, with technologies for the able-bodied being adapted by the disabled. At the fin de siècle, once rubber-spoked wheels were developed for bicycles; they were quickly put to use on wheelchairs, which had to this point relied on wooden wheels that were difficult to maneuver (Kamenetz, 209–10). As these examples remind us, disability has long been integral to the development and deployment of new technologies. The tire, the typewriter, and the talking book show us how disability can prompt new ways of thinking about mobility, accessibility, and the creation and transmission of knowledge. In Victorian studies, we too are at a moment when the digital era is pressing us to think about the ways in which we can use technology not only to disseminate our work but also to inform its creation. The term “accessibility” has been theorized in both disability studies and the digital humanities, in particular through theories of universal design. Forty years ago, universal design started as a theory of architecture that sought to create buildings that would be inherently accessible to everyone, able-bodied and disabled (Stenfield and Maisel 27–9). One of the main insights of universal design is that when we make architecture more accessible, rather than being an expensive solution that benefits only a handful of needy people, it benefits everyone. This is also true about the development of digital resources, a point that has been made by George Williams, who argues for the importance of keeping the largest potential pool of users in mind when designing resources for the web. As Williams notes, “[T]he digital humanities community will also benefit significantly as it rethinks its assumptions about how digital devices could and should work with and for people” (210). Universal design builds on the main tenet of contemporary disability studies, which is that disability, like race and gender, is a social construct [on disability, see Stoddard Holmes’s chapter]. The traditional view of disability follows the medical model; in this model a physical impairment, such as a mobility issue, is seen as a personal tragedy in need of a cure. Disability studies adopts a social model, in which a lack of accessibility in the environment—such as a lack of curb cuts or elevators—is the real problem, rather than the person with a disability. The kinds of impairments that count as 129
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disabilities also depend on the social meaning attached to them; as Lennard Davis points out, while glasses and hearing aids are both indicative of the need to amplify a sense, in our current culture, a hearing aid signifies a disability while glasses do not (4). Digital technology, and the digital humanities, are bringing greater clarity to this point. The activist and artist Sara Hendren argues that all technology is assistive technology, not just those forms of technology aimed at people with disabilities (par. 13). Henderson’s observation highlights our dependence on both devices and each other. As Patrick Leary points out in his seminal article on “Googling the Victorians,” whether we consider ourselves digital humanists or not, our research as Victorianists has been transformed by the web (72). Indeed, our research is now arguably dependent on the internet, which, like all technologies, can be seen as a form of assistive technology. From a disability studies perspective, dependence is not necessarily a bad thing; rather it serves to underscore the fact that we all experience physical and mental forms of vulnerability, and we share a collective need to work together. Indeed, universal design and assistive technology are intertwined with concepts about interdependence, collaboration, and care. Following work by Martha Stoddard Holmes and Talia Schaffer in Victorian disability studies, then, we might consider the Victorian digital humanities through a feminist ethic of care, as summarized by Schaffer (166–70). As Bethany Nowviskie writes, following such an ethic in the digital humanities might reorient practitioners toward an appreciation of “context, interdependence and vulnerability” (“On Capacity and Care” par. 25). Disability studies emphasizes our interdependence on each other, as we will all be vulnerable and in need of care at various points in our life cycle, from infancy to old age (Stoddard Holmes 29). Because work in the digital humanities is typically collaborative, I would like to suggest that the digital humanities too, can highlight the interdependence of the people involved in any given project—including but not limited to scholars, students, information technology specialists, librarians, and the public—as well as the interdependence of people and technology. It is particularly important that those of us who hire graduate and undergraduate students to work on digital humanities projects keep this principle of care in mind, ensuring that the work is beneficial for all. As we remediate and reinterpret Victorian archives using digital tools, we can also see the digital humanities as a form of care for our cultural heritage and our colleagues in Victorian studies, present and future. Rather than offering a survey and critique of major or exemplary projects in the Victorian digital humanities, or an analysis of the uses of digital evidence in Victorian studies, as others have done (see Chapman; Stauffer; Walsh; Wisnicki), in this chapter I offer an analysis of the themes of accessibility, interdependence, and care in two small-scale projects: Heidi Kaufman’s The Lyon Archive and Alison Hedley’s personography for the well-established project, the Yellow Nineties Online. I also draw on my own experience as principal investigator for Nineteenth-Century Disability: Cultures and Contexts, an online reader of texts and artifacts about disability in the nineteenth century, and Digital Dinah Craik, an ongoing project to digitize the letters of the popular Victorian novelist.1 I explore these projects with particular attention to what is possible at different career stages and with different levels of access to funding and technological support. I demonstrate that, while significant grants and technological knowledge were once necessary to launch a digital humanities project, as we move forward, tools and platforms have developed with a wide audience in mind and with a low barrier-to-entry both in terms of funding and technological knowledge necessary to use them. Within this environment, I argue that our work in the digital humanities must also make our research in Victorian studies accessible to a broader audience, as both consumers and co-creators of knowledge. Finally, I argue that acknowledging our interdependence on each other and technology can help us to see our work in the Victorian digital humanities as a form of care, both for each other and our objects of study. The first major projects in the Victorian digital humanities typically required significant funding, often from national funding bodies, and the backing of well-known scholars to get off the ground. We might think of The Rossetti Archive, helmed by Jerome McGann, or The Walt Whitman Archive, edited by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, as examples of this genre. In the first wave of the digital humanities, as Marjorie Stone and Keith Lawson point out, many projects focusing on women’s 130
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writing considered women collectively, a move that may have been necessary to gain funding (112). As examples in this genre, we might think of The Indiana Women Writer’s Project, the Northeastern University Women Writers Project (previously at Brown University), and the Orlando Project at the University of Alberta, which were begun in the late 1980s and mid-1990s (see Beshero-Bondar and Rainsanen 739–41). While the first major digital humanities projects on nineteenth-century literature may have required the imprimatur of well-known authors and scholars as well as significant funding, more than 20 years later we are now at a moment where the tools to develop a smaller-scale digital humanities project have become accessible to scholars at all levels, without requiring a significant grant to get started. Rather than focusing exclusively on single projects, national funding bodies like Mellon and the National Endowment for the Humanities in the US, the Social Science and Research Council of Canada, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK are now funding the tools that will help many people work in the digital humanities. For example, it is no longer necessary for a scholar to find the funding and expertise to build a database from the ground up. Those wishing to curate a digital exhibit can use Omeka, a free, open-source web-publishing platform for publishing digital collections and creating media-rich online exhibits. Unlike a content management system like WordPress, which is for-profit, Omeka is a not-for-profit platform which has been developed specifically for academia, libraries and cultural resources, and museums.2 Many scholars of Victorian studies may be put off from tackling a digital humanities project because of anxiety around the issue of how much knowledge of coding will be necessary to launch such a project. There is some knowledge necessary to work with a content management system like Omeka; students and scholars working with this tool need to learn about the Dublin Core Standards for metadata, and if they want Omeka to behave slightly differently than it does out of the box, they need to be willing to tinker with the back end. This may sound intimidating, but we need not work alone. The developers at Omeka are caretakers of those who work with the system; in my experience they are more than willing to help those learning to use the content management system through their forums, and many institutions will now have librarians who are familiar with Omeka and able to work with students and faculty. For those wishing to edit Victorian texts, from letters to periodicals, the scholarly standard for electronic editing is the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Working with TEI can be a little more intensive than working with a content management system like Omeka, but it also allows for a more granular tagging of texts. Once again, collaboration and learning from each other is key. After a three-to-five-day workshop at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria, British Columbia, or through the Women Writers Project, most scholars will be confident in producing TEI-compliant texts. For many years, a problem with the TEI was that scholars could produce encoded texts, but many did not have the technical expertise or design skills to transform them for web publication immediately. However, thanks to the TAPAS Project (the TEI Archiving and Publishing Service), also funded by Mellon and the NEH, TEI texts can now immediately be published online. For a small-scale project like Digital Dinah Craik, this means that we can share letters as we finish encoding them rather than waiting for the far-off day in the future when all 1,000 letters are completed and we are ready to build a more permanent site. Omeka and TAPAS are just two digital humanities tools that have become more accessible to scholars in the last five years or so, and we have every reason to expect that the tools that will allow scholars to create Victorian digital humanities projects will become even more accessible in the future. By taking two small-scale digital humanities projects—The Lyon Archive and the Yellow Nineties Personography Online—as case studies, we can examine how increased accessibility is shaping current work in the Victorian digital humanities.
1. The Lyon Archive The Lyon Archive, directed by Heidi Kaufman at the University of Oregon, gives us an opportunity to reflect on the theme of accessibility, as the digital archive makes content available not only for 131
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consumption but also for the active engagement of users. The Lyon Archive, which uses Omeka Classic, digitizes the diaries of A.S. Lyon while he lived in the East End of London, as well as the poetry of his older sister, Emma Lyon. Abraham and Emma Lyon were the children of the well-known Hebrew Literature instructor, Solomon Lyon, who taught at Oxford and Cambridge after fleeing racial and religious persecution in late eighteenth-century Bohemia. A S. Lyon’s diaries, in particular, which were not held in the archive of a library or museum but preserved through generations of his family (they are now held by the great-great-great-granddaughter of Solomon Lyon, Annabel Foster-Davis), are only accessible to the public in their digital incarnation. Kaufman happened upon the diaries when she met Diane Lyon Wead on a historic preservation trip to Jamaica; she was fascinated to learn about these diaries, since her current program of research is in nineteenth-century East End literary culture and archival studies. Kaufman argues that the diaries offer a counter-narrative about the East End of London insofar as they “tell us something about how A.S. Lyon—a writer, theatre-goer, and reader—viewed his East End community during a period when it was more commonly associated with prostitution and crime” (“Preservation Acts”). Kaufman has also used The Lyon Archive to promote a counter-narrative about what the digital archive can do. The project records not only her perspective as editor and principal investigator but also the perspectives of Lyon’s descendants, as well as students at the University of Oregon. Kaufman notes that archival theory frequently addresses “the limits of the archive’s ability to save or recover evidence or historic voices” moving past the “romance of recovery” in which we imagine as scholars that we will find the “truth” in a hidden cache of letters or a lost novel. In the design of The Lyon Archive, Kaufman responds to a prompt from digital humanities scholar Bethany Nowviskie asking us to move past the digital archive as “memorializing, conservative, limited,” to something to be “received by audiences as lenses for retrospect, rather than as stages to be leapt upon by performers, by co-creators” (“Speculative Collections” par. 5). To that end, Kaufman includes in the archive exhibits built by students as well as podcast interviews with Lyon’s descendants in order to create a virtual space where multiple perspectives can emerge and mingle, and through that process create knowledge about Lyon and his cultural and spatial contexts. She is not interested in creating a master narrative about the family but instead actively promotes the digital archive as “a space for dissent and debate” where “speculative, imaginative encounters that illuminate or engage with archival silences” can take place (Kaufman, “Preservation Acts”). As an example, one of her students, Mai-Ling Maas, studied references to the “blue devils”—Lyon’s phrase for feeling low—in A.S. Lyon’s East End diary kept from 1826 to 1839, which often occur near mentions of his financial difficulties. Maas concludes that “Lyon’s depression and anxiety seem to hold a large role in how he lives his life and the changing style of writing we see in the latter half of the diary” (par. 2). Lyon’s descendant, Diane Lyon Wead, did not see the blue devils as evidence of depression, arguing in a podcast interview with Kaufman that Maas had mischaracterized her ancestor as “wallowing in self-pity” (quoted in Kaufman, “Preservation Acts”). As editor of the archive, Kaufman does not try to come to a final truth about what the blue devils meant to A.S. Lyon; rather, she allows both perspectives to coexist in the digital archive. Kaufman argues that “as a methodology digital invention—rather than recovery—may then be a far more productive way to address silences and foreclosures in the Victorian archive” (“Preservation Acts”). Victorianists have also challenged the role of the archive in print form—we might think of the way in which Helena Michie and Robyn Warhol’s biography of George Scharf, Love Among the Archives, queries our affective investments in the archive by allowing multiple interpretations of the same author to coexist in one book. One key difference with a digital humanities project is that interpretations can be added to the same website after the initial moment of publication. Digital humanities projects can be democratizing, inviting this kind of reinterpretation, since affordances like commenting can be made widely available to visitors to the site. We can also see Kaufman’s involvement of her students and Lyon’s descendants in the archive, something that would be more difficult in print, as an exemplary form of collaboration and care taking. 132
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Kaufman created The Lyon Archive after she had received tenure at the University of Oregon, as part of a long-standing program of research on spatial narratives of the nineteenth-century East End of London. It is safe to say, I think, that the diaries of a little-known Jewish man from London’s East End would have been unlikely to attract major funding from a national body in the first wave of digital humanities projects focusing on nineteenth-century culture. Drawing on her expertise in Victorian literature and culture as well as archival studies, and using a free open-source platform like Omeka, Kaufman has been able to create a different kind of digital humanities project, one that makes the archive accessible to others as co-creators and caretakers of knowledge.
2. The Yellow Nineties Personography In my next example, I would like to turn to Alison Hedley’s Yellow Nineties Personography, which provides an exemplary instance of how an established, larger-scale project can involve new researchers in a way that benefits both the emerging scholar and the project itself. Some background on the Yellow Nineties Online, the larger project of which the Yellow Nineties Personography forms a part, may be helpful here. Dennis Denisoff and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra began working on the Yellow Nineties Online in 2005. At that time they were both tenured Victorianists at Ryerson University in Toronto, which gave them the career security to take on a new kind of work and the ability to apply for support from Canada’s national funding body, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). (The project has since gained funding every year, mainly from SSHRC, as well as a permanent home in the university archives.) The Yellow Nineties Online makes searchable facsimiles of avantgarde aesthetic periodicals, including The Yellow Book, The Pagan Review, The Evergreen, and The Pageant, freely available online. These avant-garde periodicals are also contextualized with introductions by leading scholars in the field and biographies of the journal’s contributors to the journals—including not only authors and artists, but editors, publishers, designers, and other often unacknowledged contributors [on aestheticism, see Evangelista’s chapter; on periodical studies, see Hughes’s]. The periodicals in the Yellow Nineties Online are tagged according to the guidelines of the TEI. As Martha Nell Smith reminds us, encoding, like editing, is always an act of interpretation (par. 21), and the first round of tagging in the Yellow Nineties Online focused on the magazine’s aesthetic qualities. For example, the project scrupulously encodes headers, footers, and catchwords using the TEI element “forme work”; the project also encodes features of the physical text such as onionskin pages and lineengravings (Knetchel pars. 9–11). As Ruth Knetchel, research collaborator on the project, notes, elements like onionskin pages are important “visually and historically” but may make less sense online. However, the TEI is flexible enough to allow researchers to tag an aesthetic and functional element like an onionskin page on the back end while choosing not to display an empty page online (Knetchel par. 9). This encoding decision preserves a record of the physical text, which may deteriorate over time, while not sacrificing functionality online. All of these encoding choices gesture toward an interpretation of The Yellow Book as an aesthetic object [on book history, see Stauffer’s chapter]. Every digital humanities project makes a different set of interpretive choices in its encoding. For example, in Digital Dinah Craik, we focus on tagging the people, places, and books mentioned in Craik’s letters rather than, for example, the size or color of the paper on which Craik wrote her letters. This reflects our theory of the letters as social documents, in which the people mentioned in the letters are more important than their aesthetics. It is impossible to tag everything, and every project will make decisions about encoding that reflect their theory of the text. While the first phase of the Yellow Nineties Online did include a growing number of brief biographies by experts on particular individuals, it did not yet include extensive biographical detail about the contributors to the magazines. A personography is a structured way of representing individuals that encodes each person in the set according to categories like birth and death date, gender, nationality, and occupation. As work on the Yellow Nineties Online progressed, the principal investigators 133
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saw the development of a personography as the next step in analyzing the networks of people who produced avant-garde periodicals at the fin de siècle. An additional round of funding from SSHRC, in part earmarked for this project, was necessary to begin this work. Alison Hedley, then a PhD candidate, helmed this new addition to the well-established project beginning in 2013, eight years after its inception (“Crossing the Stile” par. 1). The Yellow Nineties personography project is a biographical database of 351 people that documents the contributors to The Yellow Book, The Pagan Review, The Savoy, and The Evergreen. It seeks “to better understand the individual authors, editors, artists, illustrators, and engravers who contributed to the little magazines and to illuminate the intricate social and artistic networks that were so essential to their production” (Hedley “Bodies of Information”). Short, collective biographies are not new in the digital era; we might think of that great Victorian project, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. But, as projects like Alison Booth’s Collective Biographies of Women and The Orlando Project show, pursuing this research as a digital humanities project allows for new kinds of research, from quantitative analysis to network graphing. As Victorianists trained in theories of gender, sexuality, nationality, and disability that emphasize the fluidity of these categories will quickly recognize, attempting to encode a person’s sexuality as falling within one box or another quickly raises theoretical difficulties [on sexuality, see Dau’s chapter]. This is compounded by the problem of remaining true to the categories that the Victorians themselves would have used to describe their occupations and relationships. As Hedley points out, if Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts were to be entered in the Census of England and Wales, the nature of their relationship to one another as life partners would go unrecorded, even though they lived together from 1886 onward for forty years. Presumably, in the census, one of them would be documented as head of the family of the house, but the other’s true relationship to the family head could not be fully described through the available categories of the census form: wife, child, other relative, visitor, boarder, or servant. (“Bodies of Information”) Hedley’s personography team strives for a middle ground in the question of whether to “reinscribe or refuse late-Victorian assumptions about personhood.” As she describes the team’s practices: “[W]e look to the nineteenth century for the organizing principles of our data model, but we’re also always thinking critically about the Victorian cultural assumptions that influence our practices for gathering and analyzing data.” Looking to the nineteenth century might mean using the terms that were used on the 1881 census when describing the occupations of Victorians involved in the production of aesthetic periodicals at the fin de siècle, but moving beyond the census terms to describe relationships, and adding in additional terms like “extralegal spouse of ” to describe “relationships identified by the persons involved as marriages even though they weren’t legal unions” (for example, the two female poets and lovers who went by the single name Michael Field), and “Intimate of ” “to describe sexual and/or emotionally intimate and/or romantic relationships that were not described as marriages” (“Bodies of Information”). Hedley’s engagement with these theoretical questions eventually led her to move from a TEI personography (the form of markup used for the Yellow Nineties Online) to linked open data, a method of structuring and publishing data on the web that allows for machine-readable connections to be made across different sources of information (“Crossing the Stile” par. 7). To put it another way, in an ideal world, if all projects were structured using linked open data, all the information on the web—on Dinah Craik, for example, or Westminster Abbey—would be instantly accessible.3 Linked open data is an inherently collaborative technology that cares for our cultural heritage by aggregating it. The personography project of the Yellow Nineties Online is exemplary not only as a research project in the Victorian digital humanities but also for what it can teach us about academic collaboration, care, and mentorship, and the ways in which we can make our work accessible to the widest possible 134
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audience. The personography works as both an offshoot of a large-scale project founded by two established scholars, and as a relatively small-scale digital humanities project with its own theoretical questions. Early in her career as a graduate student, then, the Personography offered Hedley the opportunity to develop a rich set of theoretical questions within the context of a well-established project. When the project transitioned from the TEI to a linked open data model, it created an opportunity for Hedley to consult with librarians at her home institution and join a burgeoning conversation about humanities practices for linked open data that is gaining prominence in academia and the GLAM (Galleries, Archives, Libraries and Museums) sector. It also offered Hedley the opportunity to copresent and co-publish with her supervisor, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra. At most institutions, we are not yet at a point where completing a digital humanities project counts as a sufficient qualification for the PhD. Hedley worked on the Y90s Personography alongside a dissertation project on popular illustrated magazines, new media, and popular culture from 1885 to 1918. Although it may seem like a massive undertaking for a PhD candidate to take on both a digital humanities project and a dissertation, Hedley notes that working on this project offered her strong mentorship as well as financial support, and that working chiefly as a research assistant at the Ryerson Centre for the Digital Humanities, rather than as a teaching assistant, helped her to complete her degree in a timely manner (Email to the author). Although there certainly is the potential that professors could take advantage of graduate student labor, looking at the Yellow Nineties Personography, and digital humanities projects like it, could provide us with a new model of working together in Victorian studies [on the current academic climate, see Denisoff ’s introduction]. Participation in the Victorian digital humanities offers emerging scholars significant opportunities for research and publication, often long before the moment in their careers when they would be ready to publish a traditional critical journal article. Digital humanities projects often require short biographies and personographies, editorial work, transcription, and short analyses of items in an archive. All of these scholarly activities can be anatomized and credited as lines on a scholar’s CV. Paul Fyfe is a leading figure in both Victorian studies and the digital humanities; significantly, the first publication on his CV is an edition of William Michael Rossetti’s “Mrs. Holmes Grey” in The Rossetti Archive (Fyfe “People”). Even when a contribution is too small to merit a line on a CV, the digital humanities tend to make labor visible that might otherwise go uncredited. For example, the protocols of the TEI mean that credit is given where credit is due, even for small things that would not traditionally make it onto a CV. Every footnote has a responsibility statement, giving credit to the person who did the research. The header of a TEI document also makes it clear who exactly did the transcription and encoding of every text, and who checked it, labor that—as Kathryn Tomasek pointed out to me—on larger-scale projects is typically done by student research assistants and can often be obscured in print editions.
3. Challenges I could be criticized for offering a utopian vision of Victorian digital humanities in this chapter, one that is accessible to students and emerging scholars with little to no funding, offers wonderful opportunities for training, mentorship, and collaboration, and engages the general public in our research as both consumers and producers of knowledge. I do think that the digital humanities has the potential to do all of these things, making our research more accessible than ever before. But, like any program of research, there are challenges along the way. Combined with a job market that is difficult, to say the least, one of the biggest challenges for emerging and even established Victorian digital humanities scholars may be imposter phenomenon (as Adrian Wisnicki observes in “Journey into Digital Humanities”). Natalie Houston points out that the highly hierarchical structure of the academy, constant evaluation, and the fact that many humanities scholars work alone can all exacerbate imposter phenomenon (75–6). I would add that—for those of us originally trained in a historical field like Victorian studies, which tends to emphasize the work of the individual scholar, produced through long 135
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lonely hours in the archive and eventually disseminated as a solo-authored article or monograph—it can feel disorienting to enter a new field where collaboration and an openness about what you don’t know are necessary. Imposter phenomenon in the Victorian digital humanities may also have a gendered as well as a racial component. As Miriam Posner reminds us, “[P]rogramming knowledge is not a neutral thing”; white middle-class men are most likely to have access to knowledge and training in coding. I have trained more than one (female) undergraduate research assistant in the digital humanities who protests that she is “not good with computers” and is intimidated by the thought of learning TEIcompliant XML. I can empathize, as I have experienced far more anxiety about my own work in the digital humanities than I have about my work in Victorian studies. But, as Kate Singer argues, the skills of close reading that we teach in the English major are actually highly applicable to the work of meticulously tagging a text for rhyme scheme or literary allusions. Every research assistant that I have worked with on my current digital humanities project, Digital Dinah Craik, ends by saying that it is the nineteenth-century handwriting that is more difficult than the TEI. And two research assistants, neither of whom considered themselves technically adept before starting on Digital Dinah Craik, have gone on to parlay their degrees in English alongside some experience on a digital-humanities project into successful jobs as digitization assistants in Libraries and Cultural Resources at the University of Calgary. The meticulous attention to detail and critical thinking developed on a TEI project singled both students out as potential hires for Libraries and Cultural Resources. Both students reported to me that their experience working with the TEI gave them the confidence that they could learn new digital skills, while their degrees in English gave them a critical framework for thinking about digitization projects. Another charge that could be reasonably laid against the Victorian digital humanities is that we are building silos, or self-contained banks of knowledge rather than collaborating to the extent that we could be. For example, in Digital Dinah Craik, we have a personography of more than 900 historical people mentioned in Craik’s letters (and this does not include the fictional characters or pets, which we also encode), as well as an extensive bibliography. Right now, we are researching people like Lady Byron, whom Craik had lunch with in March 1860 (Letter to Ben Mulock), and periodicals like La Belle Assemblée (1806 to 1847) on our own. Despite the generational gap between Dinah Craik (1826 to 1887) and Mary Russell Mitford (1787 to 1855), we know that Elisa Beshero-Bondar and the editors at Digital Mitford are researching many of the same people and publications for their project and that we would benefit from sharing knowledge in a more systematized manner, perhaps using a technology like linked open data, which we are not yet doing. The dangers of imposter phenomenon and silo-building serve to underscore the importance of prioritizing accessibility in the digital humanities as well as the importance of collaboration and care as we work together on digital humanities projects. This care taking may take the sociable form of sharing information and collaborating with scholars in other fields and our own, or it may take more technical forms, such as linked open data. As we move forward in the Victorian digital humanities, we can imagine projects and methodologies that will allow us to see our objects of study anew, as well as enrich other fields of study, from computer science to geography. The Illustrated Newspaper Analytics Project, directed by Paul Fyfe, is developing image-processing techniques that will allow large-scale analysis of neglected images in The Graphic, The Illustrated Police News, and the Penny Illustrated Paper (“Nineteenth-Century Newspaper Analytics”). Natalie Houston’s “The Visual Page as Interface” provides a computational analysis of graphical meaning of digitized page images, which should enable us to answer questions such as whether the amount of white space in a poet’s published work corresponded to his or her literary prestige (“Computational Analysis”). Adrian Wisnicki and Megan Ward have used spectral imaging to uncover layers of meaning in the explorer David Livingstone’s field diaries (Wisnicki and Ward). These types of projects move knowledge in both Victorian studies and computer science forward. Similarly, the spatial humanities and the digital humanities have already 136
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combined to produce several mapping projects of interest to those in Victorian studies, including two from the Stanford Literary Lab, Mapping Emotions in Victorian London and Authorial London. This kind of work will require collaboration with computer scientists, geographers, and specialists in Libraries and Cultural Resources, as well as other Victorianists, from students to full professors. It will require an openness to what we do not know, as well as an awareness of how what we do know as Victorianists can inform the question of what digital tool to use or what encoding decision to make. Scholars of disability studies and the digital humanities have pointed out that, when we consider the widest possible audience for our work, it expands the possibilities for everyone, not just people with disabilities. When HTML or even a Microsoft Word document is well-formatted, using the proper tags to identify, for example, titles and subheadings, it can be translated directly into well-formatted Braille, or read with ease by a screen reader (Williams 208). When audio elements of a website are transcribed, not only is it easier for deaf people as well as hearing people to follow the content but the site is indexed more fully for search engines (209). The digital humanities, with its prioritization of crediting once invisible labor and involving many collaborators on a single project, can offer a model of scholarship that highlights our interdependence. This may also lead us to see our work in the Victorian digital humanities as a form of care taking, both for our cultural heritage—as nineteenth-century books and periodicals are often printed on brittle, fragile paper that is continually deteriorating—and for each other, as we work together to produce new archives and new knowledge.
Notes 1 Other projects that seek to digitize Victorian women’s correspondence include The Letters of Charlotte Mary Yonge and The Olive Schreiner Letters Online. 2 Omeka is a project of the Corporation for Digital Scholarship, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, and George Mason University, with funding from multiple sources including Mellon, Getty, and the NEH. 3 As I write, linked open data, which would allow projects to automatically share structured information about their research, is gaining traction in the digital humanities. In Victorian studies, Susan Brown and Constance Crompton are among the scholars who have been promoting the adoption of linked open data. Crompton and her collaborator Michelle Schwartz are at work on a tool to “convert and connect” data sets. Crompton argues that linked open data should be essential to digital humanities projects rather than a “nice to have” extra that happens after the encoding.
Key Critical Works Alison Chapman. “Digital Studies.” Matthew K. Gold, editor. Debates in the Digital Humanities. Matthew K. Gold, and Lauren F. Klein, editors. Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. Patrick Leary. “Googling the Victorians.” Jerome McGann. Radiant Textuality. Bethany Nowviskie. “On Capacity and Care.” Adrian S. Wisnicki. “Digital Victorian Studies Today.”
Works Cited Beshero-Bondar, Elisa. “Digital Mitford: The Mary Russell Mitford Archive.” 2013–2018. http://digitalmitford. org/. Accessed 13 October 2018. Beshero-Bondar, Elisa, and Elizabeth Raisanen. “Recovering from Collective Memory Loss: The Digital Mitford’s Feminist Project.” Women’s History Review, vol. 26, no. 5, 2017, pp. 738–50. Booth, Alison. The Collective Biographies of Women. U of Virginia and NINES, 2007–2018. http://womensbios.lib. virginia.edu/. Accessed 29 October 2018. Bourrier, Karen. Digital Dinah Craik. U of Calgary, 2015–2018. http://tapasproject.org/node/443. Accessed 29 October 2018.
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Karen Bourrier ———. Nineteenth-Century Disability: Cultures & Contexts. U of Calgary and NINES, 2012–2015. Web. www. nineteenthcenturydisability.org/. Accessed 1 December 2019. Brown, Susan, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy. Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present. U of Alberta and Cambridge UP, 1995–2018. http://orlando.cambridge.org/. Accessed 29 October 2018. Chapman, Alison. “Digital Studies.” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, edited by Dino Franco Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Linda K. Hughes, Blackwell, 2015, pp. 434–43. ———. Victorian Poetry Network. U of Victoria, 2010–2018. http://web.uvic.ca/~vicpoet/. Accessed 29 October 2018. Courtney, Angela, and Michelle Dalmou. Victorian Women Writers Project. Indiana U, 1995–2017. http://webapp1. dlib.indiana.edu/vwwp/welcome.do. Accessed 29 October 2018. Craik, Dinah. “Letter from Dinah Craik to Ben Mulock, 17 Mach to 7 April 1860.” Mulock Family Papers, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. http://tapasproject.org/digitaldinahcraik/files/letter-dinahcraik-ben-mulock-17-march-7-april-1860. Accessed 13 October 2018. Crompton, Constance, and Michelle Schwartz. “More Than ‘Nice to Have’: TEI-to-Linked Data Conversion.” DH2018, Mexico City, Mexico, Conference Presentation. https://dh2018.adho.org/more-than-nice-tohave-tei-to-linked-data-conversion/. Accessed 29 October 2018. Davis, Lennard. “Introduction.” Beginning with Disability: A Primer. Routledge, 2017. Denisoff, Dennis, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, editors. The Yellow Nineties Online. Ryerson U and NINES, 2012. http://1890s.ca/. Accessed 29 October 2018. Evans, Martin. Authorial London: The City in the Lives and Works of Its Writers. Stanford U, 2011. https://authorial. stanford.edu. Accessed 13 October 2018. Flanders, Julia. The Women Writers Project. Northeastern UP, 1996–2018. www.wwp.northeastern.edu/. Accessed 29 October 2018. Fyfe, Paul. “Mrs. Holmes Grey.” The Rossetti Archive, edited by Jerome McGann, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, U of Virginia. www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/wmrossetti014.raw.html. Accessed 13 October 2018. ———. “People-Department of English-Paul Fyfe.” NC State U, 2018. https://english.chass.ncsu.edu/faculty_ staff/pcfyfe. Accessed 13 October 2018. Hedley, Alison. “Bodies of Information: Remediating Historical Persons in the Yellow Nineties Personography.” Conference Presentation. Research Society for Victorian Periodicals/Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada Conference, July 2018, U of Victoria, Victoria, Canada. ———. “From TEI to Linked Open Data: Crossing the Stile.” The Yellow Nineties Online, edited by Dennis Denisoff and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Ryerson U, 2017. http://1890s.ca/PDFs/Crossing%20the%20Stile. pdf . Accessed 13 October 2018. ———. “Re: Y90s Personography Project.” Received by Karen Bourrier, 16 August 2018. Hendren, Sara. “All Technology Is Assistive: Six Design Rules on ‘Disability’.” Wired, 15 October 2014. www. wired.com/2014/10/all-technology-is-assistive/. Accessed 27 November 2018. Houston, Natalie. “Imposter Phenomenon.” How to Build an Academic Life in the Humanities: Meditations on the Academic Work-Life Balance, edited by Greg Colon-Semenza and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 73–81. ———. “Visualizing the Cultural Field of Victorian Poetry.” Virtual Victorians: Networks, Connections, Technologies, edited by Veronica Alfano and Andrew Stauffer, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 121–41. Kamenetz, Herman L. “A Brief History of the Wheelchair.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 24, no. 2, April 1969, pp. 205–10. Kaufman, Heidi. “The Lyon Archive.” The Lyon Archive, 2018. http://lyon.eastendarchives.net/. ———. “Preservation Acts in the Digital Victorian Archive.” Conference Presentation. North American Victorian Studies Association Conference, November 2017, Banff Centre, Banff, Canada. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “What Is the Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” Debates in the Digital Humanities. U of Minnesota P, 2012. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/38. Accessed 29 October 2012. Knetchel, Ruth. “Digital Estrangement, or Anxieties of the Virtually Visual: XSLT Transformations and The 1890s Online.” The Yellow Nineties Online, edited by Dennis Denisoff and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Ryerson U, 2011. www.1890s.ca/HTML/Digital_Estrangement.html. Lazar, Jonathan, et al. Ensuring Digital Accessibility Through Process and Policy. Morgan Kaufmann, 2015. Leary, Patrick. “Googling the Victorians.” Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. 10, no. 1, 2005, pp. 72–86.
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Victorian Digital Humanities Maas, Mai-Ling. “A Lyon’s Share of Sickness: One Man’s Battle against the Blue Devils.” The Lyon Archive, edited by Heidi Kaufman. http://lyon.eastendarchives.net/exhibits/show/a-lyon-share-of-sickness. Accessed 13 October 2018. McGann, Jerome. The Rossetti Archive. U of Virginia and NINES, 2000–2007. www.rossettiarchive.org/. Accessed 13 October 2018. Michie, Helena, and Robyn Warhol. Love Among the Archives: Writing the Lives of George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor. Edinburgh UP, 2015. Mitchell, Charlotte, Ellen Jordan, and Helen Schinske, editors. The Letters of Charlotte Mary Yonge. University College London, 2007–2012. https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/yonge/. Accessed 1 December 2018. Nowviskie, Bethany. “On Capacity and Care.” Bethany Nowviskie, 4 October 2015. http://nowviskie.org/2015/ on-capacity-and-care/. Accessed 1 December 2018. ———. “Speculative Collections.” Bethany Nowviskie, 27 October 2016. http://nowviskie.org/2016/speculativecollections/. Accessed 13 October 2018. “Omeka.” Omeka.org. George Mason U, 2018. https://omeka.org. Posner, Miriam. “Think Make Talk Do: Power and the Digital Humanities.” Journal of Digital Humanities, June 2012. http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-2/think-talk-make-do-power-and-the-digital-humanitiesby-miriam-posner/. Accessed 13 October 2018. Pullin, Graham. Design Meets Disability. MIT P, 2009. Rubery, Matthew. The Untold Story of the Talking Book. Harvard UP, 2016. Schaffer, Talia. Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction. Oxford UP, 2016. Singer, Kate. “Digital Close Reading: TEI for Teaching Poetic Vocabularies.” The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 15 May 2013. https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/digital-close-reading-tei-for-teaching-poeticvocabularies/. Accessed 13 October 2018. Smith, Martha Nell. “Electronic Scholarly Editing.” A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, Blackwell, 2004. www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/. Accessed 29 October 2018. Stanley, Liz, editor. The Olive Schreiner Letters Online. U of Edinburgh, 2012. www.oliveschreiner.org/. Accessed 1 December 2018. Stauffer, Andrew. “The Nineteenth-Century Archive in the Digital Age.” European Romantic Review, vol. 23, no. 3, 2012, pp. 335–41. Steinfeld, Edward, and Jordana Maisel. Universal Design: Creating Inclusive Environments. John Wiley & Sons, 2012. Stoddard Holmes, Martha. “Victorian Fictions of Interdependency: Gaskell, Craik, and Yonge.” Journal of Literary Disability, vol. 1, no. 2, 2007, pp. 29–41. Stone, Marjorie, and Keith Lawson. “‘One Hot Electric Breath’: EBB’s Technology Debate with Tennyson, Systemic Digital Lags in Nineteenth-Century Literary Scholarship, and the EBB Archive.” Victorian Review, vol. 38, no. 2, 2012, pp. 101–25. Tapas Project. “Home: TAPAS Project.” TapasProject.org. Northeastern UP, 2016. http://tapasproject.org. TEI Consortium. “TEI: Text Encoding Initiative.” TEI-C.org. U of Virginia. www.tei-c.org. Accessed 13 October 2018. Walsh, John A. The Algernon Charles Swinburne Project. Indiana U and NINES, 1997–2012. Web. 5 January 2015. http://swinburnearchive.indiana.edu/swinburne/. ———. “Multimedia and Multitasking: A Survey of Digital Resources for Nineteenth-Century Literary Studies.” A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, edited by Ray Siemens and Susan Schriebman, Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2007, pp. 121–38. Williams, George H. “Disability, Universal Design and the Digital.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, U of Minnesota P, 2012, pp. 202–12. Wisnicki, Adrian S. “Digital Victorian Studies Today.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 44, no. 4, 2016, pp. 975–92. ———. “Journey into Digital Humanities: One Victorianist’s Tale.” Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. 28, no. 2, 2013, pp. 280–6. Wisnicki, Adrian S., and Megan Ward. “The Theory Behind Livingstone Online.” Livingstone Online, directed by Adrian S. Wisnicki and Megan Ward, U of Maryland Libraries, 2016. www.livingstoneonline.org/about-thissite/the-theory-behind-livingstone-online. Accessed 13 October 2018.
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12 PERIODICAL STUDIES Linda K. Hughes
The sheer prodigiousness of Victorian periodicals in the first mass (print) media age is breathtaking. As George Saintsbury contended in 1896, “Perhaps there is no single feature of the English literary history of the nineteenth century, not even the enormous popularisation and multiplication of the novel, which is so distinctive and characteristic as the development in it of periodical literature” (166). The first two series of John North’s indispensable reference work, The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900, documents around 75,000 periodical titles. Combined with North’s directory of Irish periodicals for the same period, and those in Wales and Scotland, the known periodical titles of the nineteenth century numbers well over 100,000 (King et al. 1). To multiply this figure by the pages per individual issue of a periodical over its entire run, whether a few issues or more than a hundred volumes, summons up a vast archive of printed paper that in “its very ubiquity threatened its signifying power” (Stauffer). This archive now enjoys a thriving afterlife in our digital era. How might we conceptualize this massive welter of titles, articles, contributors, editors, political orientations, target audiences, price points, adverts, illustrations, and literary genres (fiction, poetry, reviews, essays, jokes, manifestos) that proffer material relevant to every topic included in this companion? One research principle advocated by distinguished periodical scholars is recognizing that every feature of a Victorian periodical is always mediated—by persons, institutions, market forces, material production, transportation, news cycles, geography, and class. In what follows I survey three major phases of periodical studies and each phase’s principal scholars before highlighting some contemporary research sources and methods.
1. Beginnings It is easier to date the inception of periodical scholarship than other sectors of Victorian studies: 1958. Before then, periodicals evidently lacked visibility to twentieth-century scholars, perhaps because so many nineteenth-century titles were still being published (e.g., Spectator, 1828–present; Punch, 1841– 2002; Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1817–1980; Cornhill Magazine, 1860–1975). In 1958 Walter E. Houghton announced his intent to compile an index of Victorian periodicals that would identify authors of anonymously published work, and he invited others to collaborate with him (VanArsdel, “Early” 419). Houghton’s impetus reflected author-centered literary scholarship and the flourishing subfield of Victorian prose at the time. Houghton’s invitation culminated in the magnificent fivevolume reference work, The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals (Houghton et al.), still a definitive resource for identifying unsigned contributions excepting poetry, which the editors omitted (Hughes, 140
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“What”)—though that omission is now being remedied by the open access Periodical Poetry and Curran Indexes. Volume 1 (1966) coincided with the first awards granted by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in the US, and NEH subsequently funded the Wellesley project from 1967 to 1983 (Wyland). The index has now been digitized, yet the print version still has utility since it more readily enables researchers to visualize at a glance the ordering of articles (again excluding poetry) in a given issue. Editors usually placed their most important articles first in a periodical issue. Thus the print Wellesley is a technology for learning about individual editorial attitudes about what counted in relation to their readerships and political orientations; additionally, the print format enables researchers to scan as many as five months’ issue contents on a single page, a kind of thumbnail sketch of shifting topical interests and news cycles. Prior to the Wellesley, Richard Altick had provided a deeply informative social history of nineteenthcentury mass print culture. Publication of the Wellesley then instigated new research guides and analysis. J. Don Vann and Rosemary VanArsdel’s first research guide covered finding aids and multiple bibliographies of histories of the press, individual periodical titles, and the impact of stamp duties or their mid-century abolition, after which the periodical market exploded. Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff ’s edited collection (1982) featured three sections: “The Critic as Journalist” raised issues of status and classification in aligning prominent men of letters with journalists; “Management and Money” detailed the economics and policy decisions of editors and publishers; and “New Readerships” addressed the diversity of reading audiences from activist reformers to artisanal workers and servants. If the Wellesley, in partnership with the founding of Victorian Periodicals Newsletter (later Review) in January 1968 and Research Society of Victorian Periodicals in December of the same year, jumpstarted new scholarship, it also consolidated a literary approach to periodicals and a tacit canon of the 45 periodicals it indexed. These were almost exclusively middle-class monthlies or quarterlies. Author-focused scholarship on middle-class periodicals continues to appear today; for example, a 2017 special issue of Romanticism: The Journal of Romantic Culture and Criticism was devoted to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Journal and included articles on authors James Hogg, Walter Scott, William Blake, and Lord Byron (Morrison). Reputation and reception studies of nineteenth-century authors often still rely on book reviews in periodicals but should be used with caution, since periodicals’ accessibility, class registers, and politics can skew results.
2. Theory In 1989 historian Christopher Kent sounded a key theoretical insight still in force today, the danger of treating Victorian periodicals as “documentary background” or a “‘mirror’ to . . . Victorian reality” rather than recognizing “that Victorian Britain was a construct in the making of which periodicals played an essential part” (12). The impact of historian Hayden White’s The Content of the Form (1987), which brought narrative theory and poststructuralist philosophy to bear on scholarly (and popular) narrative history, informs Kent’s observation; both historians help demarcate the role of theory in humanities scholarship as of the 1980s. The irreducible materiality of periodical texts resisted strict deconstructionist readings, but new poststructuralist and gender theories enabled periodical scholars to ask new questions. This theoretical turn was immediately visible in the 1989 special theory issue of Victorian Periodicals Review edited by Laurel Brake and Anne Humpherys, whose introduction identified “referentiality as a problem” rather than unquestioned function of periodical discourse (94). “Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre” by Margaret Beetham applied genre and gender theory to a key theoretical question: “What is a periodical? How can we define and delimit it?” (20). Posing multiple possible answers (aggregated articles, a title’s entire run, a commodity), Beetham identified “the most important quality” of the periodical as “the way the periodical engages with its readers across time” (26; see also Turner, “Telling,” Beetham 2015). She then linked 141
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this fundamental feature to the periodical as both “open” and “closed” form (feminine/masculine terms adapted from feminist theory) depending on whether the issue, volume, or ongoing seriality was referenced. Underscoring the intersection of immaterial time with relentless materiality, Beetham clarified why the periodical is so recognizable, yet so resistant to definition. Yet neither did Beetham ignore the Victorian drive toward meaning-making in its periodicals’ textuality, even if, she noted, editors, proprietors, and journalists had more power to define “reality” than others. Laurel Brake’s Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender & Literature in the Nineteenth Century (1994) exposed the constructedness of literary histories founded on book publication and books’ privileged bibliographical status relative to serials. Matthew Arnold’s and Walter Pater’s essays were journalism before becoming elevated as books of criticism after their articles were gathered into Essays in Criticism (1888) and Appreciations (1889), respectively. Brake additionally pioneered discussion of gay discourse in periodicals, both in Pater’s Westminster Review essay (1867) on Johann Winckelmann— who celebrated sensuous male nudes in classical sculpture—and fin de siècle little magazines such as Charles Kains-Jackson’s The Artist and Journal of Home Culture (1888–94) that more overtly opened textual spaces to gay writers and readers. Brake also identified gendering in periodical features: when the Academy (founded 1869 by and for university men) began to include fiction reviews, it signaled the financial benefit of attracting “‘unlearned’” women readers who read popular fiction more than Greek (45). Finally, she interwove theoretical perspectives with empirical study in structural analysis of unsigned versus signed contributions. Anonymity served the early quarterly reviews (e.g., the Whig Edinburgh Review founded 1802 and Tory Quarterly Review founded 1809) by consolidating authority in the journal’s corporate editorial voice rather than the prestige of individual contributors. Anonymity also served journalists by providing cover when they advanced an unpopular position or wanted to veil hack writing for money. Anonymity could be abused, however, by “puffing,” writing favorable reviews of one’s friends or even one’s own work. Signature, in contrast, became increasingly common after 1859, when Macmillan’s Magazine adopted it as its house style, and the rise of celebrity journalism after 1870 made signature more imperative still.
3. Digitization Bibliographical, theoretical, historical, and author-centered research continues into the present; but a new phase of periodical studies opened in the twenty-first century with digitization. The commercial vendor ProQuest launched its first digitized database of historical newspapers with the New York Times in 2001 (ProQuest). Since then ProQuest, Gale, and other for-profit companies have digitized an extraordinary wealth of historical periodicals from “Nineteenth-Century UK Periodicals” (Gale) to “Caribbean Newspapers, 1718–1876” (Readex) in fully searchable, full-text databases. All these, however, are behind paywalls that may be inaccessible to underfunded libraries or independent scholars, a reminder of funding’s role in generating what we can undertake in research. Alternatively, public funding has sponsored open access scholarly digital projects such as Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ed. Brake et al.), which includes full-text facsimiles and searchability of six periodicals, including the important Chartist newspaper The Northern Star (1838–52). Numerous additional periodicals are available through Google Books or the non-profit Hathi Trust—though in these instances searchability is often limited. The advent of large-scale digitization has meant that researchers need not rely on expensive travel to the British Newspaper Library or a university library’s microfilm collection (though this medium remains important for periodicals not yet digitized). Suddenly, rather than relying solely on the Wellesley Index as a finding aid or painstakingly browsing successive pages on microfilm or in hard copy, researchers can access millions of pages of periodical content at any time so long as they enjoy the privileges of internet access or entrée to a library able to afford expensive commercial databases. If, for example, I want to find out about the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889 (which involved a male brothel and rumored royal patron), an event that shaped reception of Oscar 142
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Wilde’s first, periodical version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, I can search multiple newspapers and periodicals in seconds. But all researchers are well advised to heed Patrick Leary in “Googling the Victorians” (2005). While noting the immense capacities of online searches, he reminds researchers of what remains offline, of limited hits due to errors in Optical Character Recognition, and of difficulties in searching for context rather than key terms [on digital humanities, see Bourrier’s chapter]. Still, are remediated periodicals the same as Victorian periodicals, and if a search term returns an overwhelming number of hits, what exactly do they amount to? These questions, at once pragmatic, historical, and theoretical, have inspired new scholarly approaches. James Mussell, who as a postgraduate fellow worked on the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition, theorizes the implications of both print and digital periodicals in The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age (2012). His book underscores that, like a nineteenth-century print periodical, a digitized periodical is also an edition, its formats likewise shaping what is visible and knowable. For example, digital platforms that display periodical pages and articles as PDFs render all of them approximately the same size on the computer screen. Yet variant size was an important factor in a periodical’s print identity; if approximating newspaper size, it was more vulnerable to being discarded, in contrast to issues sized to encourage binding into a volume and placed on library shelves. Nor can the quality of a journal’s paper stock, whether cheap (Huett) or glossy, be displayed digitally, though these were significant class markers (Mussell 13). If digitization has transformed nineteenth-century periodicals’ accessibility to current researchers, it has also entailed a loss of information specific to print. Even libraries’ bound periodicals, however, transformed loose print issues into “archival” editions that eliminated paper covers and advertisements, additional rich sources of information, though bindings likewise enhanced accessibility through preservation (Mussell 33–4). If, as Brake argues, remediation was as central to nineteenth-century as to twenty-first century digitized Victorian periodicals (Brake, “Markets” 245–6), Mussell’s key conclusion is that, to understand adequately the nineteenth-century press today, scholars must study the modes of production of digital platforms, including metadata and display formats, as well as print production (1, 21). Paul Fyfe historicizes digitization by documenting the large-scale microfilming of fragile periodicals dating from 1950 that made twenty-first-century digitization possible, adding an ethical dimension to his study in the process. Twentieth-century microfilming required extensive human labor invisible to microfilm users, and rescanning to remove OCR errors that enabled commercial vendors to sell digital editions to libraries at a profit likewise required low-paid human labor, much of it in global sites removed from first-world affordances. Fyfe intervenes in the invisibility of embodied human labor on researchers’ illuminated computer screens by including historical photographs of twentieth-century female microfilming labor and alluding to twenty-first-century scanning by people of color. Fyfe, understandably, can provide no statistics on numbers of females or people of color involved in scanning, nor their pay scales juxtaposed to commercial sales and profits. Still, his photographs pose a telling contrast to the image on ProQuest’s “History and Milestones” page, which shows scanning carried out by white men. Welcoming new possibilities for big data analysis through digitization, then, Fyfe, like Leary and Mussell, offers yet another reason to contemplate what is not immediately visible on an electronically displayed periodical page. Katherine Bode issues a third caveat about periodical research adopting big data analysis, advising that a data set’s unconsidered parameters might construct fallacious literary history. Literary histories of serial fiction published in nineteenth-century Australia often assume that the stories were written by British authors (see also Law 241–3). When, however, Bode performed a network analysis of recently digitized Australian provincial newspapers, rather than relying on databases of major metropolitan papers in Sydney and Melbourne, a different story emerged—namely, widespread serial novels by Australian authors. Bode’s findings parallel those of Hobbs’s research on provincial weekly newspapers in Great Britain; these, Hobbs argues, actually comprised “the majority of English periodicals and newspapers” published from the 1830s to 1890s (221). Law’s study of serial fiction parallels Hobbs’s and Bode’s research regarding the prolific provincial serial novelist David Pae, who authored some 143
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fifty novels in provincial newspapers but republished fewer than one quarter of them as books and so remains occluded in bibliographies and databases (47–8). A different challenge is posed by periodical illustrations. It is easy enough to click on the “illustration” or “cartoon” option in ProQuest databases and see what results. But searching for, say, images of persons of color in India 1857–1876 is another matter, especially if there is no verbal label attached to the images. Strides are being made toward the search functionality of illustrations and decorative elements, however, as in the open access database The Yellow Nineties Online (Denisoff and Kooistra) [on serialization, see Bernstein’s chapter; on visual culture, see Flint’s].
4. Research Opportunities and Methods Large-scale digital critique requires in-depth knowledge of prior scholarship and technical prowess. Theorizing periodicals demands fine-grained knowledge of a vast array of print and digital periodical formats, titles, temporalities, journalists, and more in addition to command of theoretical and philosophical frameworks. But even a newcomer to periodical studies can make discoveries in and about periodicals. As noted earlier, periodicals contained material relevant to virtually every chapter in this companion, even “Book History and the Archive,” and virtually every author. For as Brake demonstrates in Print in Transition, nineteenth-century periodicals and books were interactive and mutually constitutive. Books generated occasions for book reviews and serials became books; moreover books could also be published serially, as in Macmillan’s English Men of Letters Series. In addition to the full gamut of literary genres in periodicals, science writing was also richly represented, from George Henry Lewes’s accessible Studies in Animal Life in the Cornhill (1860) to the more technical Fortnightly Review article “G.J. Romanes vs. Darwin,” in which Alfred Wallace, co-discoverer of the theory of evolution, analyzed Romanes’s critique of Darwin’s theory and critiqued Romanes’s argument in turn (1886). Sally Shuttleworth, Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, and Jamie McLaughlin have developed Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical, an important research tool for analyzing such interactions within the field. Travel writing, which was inseparable from imperialism, tourism, transportation, ethnography, and environmental impacts, also abounded in Victorian periodicals. Since it is impossible to discuss all topics in this handbook in relation to periodicals, I detail only those sources and studies relevant to the scholarly paradigm of intersectionality. Periodicals are an excellent resource for exploring Victorian intersectionality, both because new technologies (the steam-roller press, for example) and removal of newspaper taxes combined with increasing literacy radically expanded periodical titles, and also because this rapid growth meant that periodicals could target specific as well as mass audiences. The tendency of nineteenth-century print, like Darwinian species, to proliferate to fill manifold niches in the environment meant that periodicals and their audiences might support, diverge from, or resist dominant institutions and opinions along the lines of gender, class, and race [on book history, see Stauffer’s chapter; on paleontology, see O’Connor’s; on evolutionism, see Psomiades’s; and on travel writing, see Tange’s].
5. Gender Gender was a major force in periodical authorship, markets, and discourse. Given my earlier attention to scholarship relevant to men, I turn here to expanded opportunities for women writers created by proliferating periodical titles (Onslow, Peterson 13–60). Women’s entrée was facilitated by a convention that helped jumpstart periodical studies in the first place: anonymity. This meant that a periodical, to state the matter baldly, need not stake its prestige or authority on the visible presence of women writers. Women could even became adjudicators of editorial opinion: Harriet Martineau was a leader writer for the Daily News, 1852–66 (Onslow 230), and Frances Power Cobbe published second leaders in the Echo, 1868–75 (Mitchell 186–90). But they published anonymously. Anonymity also widened publishing opportunities by enabling women writers to shift from periodical to periodical, taking the color of editorial politics 144
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or adapting their emphasis to their host publication without necessarily surrendering their convictions and interests. Today it is sometimes still possible to track little-known women through their anonymous or obscure periodical publications, as Marianne Van Remoortel demonstrates with Matilda Pullen, contributor of needlework patterns [on gender, see Dau’s chapter; on feminism, see Schaffer’s]. Contrarily, women could retroactively confer signature on their anonymous publications if they gathered their work into signed books. Alexis Easley provides an example in Eliza Lynn Linton, the prolific anti-feminist journalist whose attack on “fast” young women in “The Girl of the Period” (Saturday Review, 1868) appeared anonymously. Linton’s authorship was not established until 1883, when Linton adapted the title of her famous article for her book of selected essays (Easley “Gender,” 48; see also Easley First). Retroactive or oblique signature was also practiced by women poets and novelists, who might use the minimal signature of initials—which actually became a famous signature for poet L.E.L. (Letitia Landon)—and afterward supply the full name on a book’s title page. Even periodical editors adopted a kind of reverse practice; once a novel had been well received, the customary signature for serial fiction in the Cornhill and other middle-class magazines was, “by the author of . . .” with the relevant title filled in. Though periodicals were unquestionably dominated by male editors and proprietors, some women novelists followed the precedents of Dickens, William Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope (the last two editors, respectively, of Cornhill and St. Paul’s), and acquired editorships on the strength of their fame, such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, who edited Belgravia from 1866–71 (Phegley 110–72; see also Palmer). In one famous case the reverse order of attainment held: Marian Evans first acted as unofficial editor of the Westminster Review, and then turned to fiction as George Eliot (Dillane). Women writereditors of children’s periodicals seem less uncommon, among them Charlotte Yonge, Margaret Gatty, and L.T. Meade (Onslow, Morruzi). A mainstay of Victorian markets and readerships was women’s magazines, still a notable market niche today. The construction of women in and by women’s magazines and the magazines’ commodification are addressed by Beetham (Magazine) and Ledbetter, with Ledbetter additionally excavating poetry’s role in this media form. Questions about readerships of such magazines (how thoroughly were they read? what did readers take away? did men as well as women look at them?) remain relevant but have been only partially answered. Correspondents’ printed letters to editors and editors’ answers to queries (which usually gave only answers, not the prompting questions) provide some indication of readers but are always problematic, since editors might be using letters for promotional purposes (Taunton) or, as has been speculated regarding the notorious 1860s corset controversy over tight lacing in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (Beetham, Magazine 82–5), even making them up to titillate readers with lurid stories of sadistic bondage. Yet another periodical research question concerns the gendering of discourse in individual periodicals or at large. Female consumers were not expected to read sporting magazines but were probably hovering; contrariwise many editors of women’s magazines were men. Mark Turner suggests that the nonfiction articles in Cornhill Magazine, which eventually included the earliest installments of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, targeted men, in contrast to fiction and other literary features (Trollope 7–47). Late-century feminist periodicals such as Women’s Penny Paper and Woman’s Signal focused on women but were by no means conventionally feminine in tone. Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green, and Judith Johnston conclude that periodicals unquestionably gendered their readers explicitly or by implication, but that no single generality about gender and periodicals is possible: “the press was as much a reflection and reinstatement of existing ideology as a source of resistance” (200).
6. Periodicals and the Working Class Though the politics of periodicals indexed by the Wellesley varied widely, they were overwhelmingly addressed to middle-class audiences and have, for reasons addressed above, received the greatest 145
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attention within Victorian studies. Journals like Queen and, presumably, Court and Society Review (in which Wilde serialized “The Canterville Ghost” in two parts) were aimed at the upper class—and no doubt found readers among the socially aspirant or voyeuristic. Until the development of class consciousness and the socialist movement late in the nineteenth century (Mutch 2005, 2008) it is difficult to speak of specifically working-class journals; rather, “radical” and “cheap press” have been more pertinent terms, as in Ian Haywood’s 2004 monograph. Though much of the cheap press, from the founding of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal in 1832 (Ulin), was devoted to what Brian Maidment terms “popular progress” through moral and mental uplift rather than calls to action, these periodicals nonetheless reached workers. Mutch surveys all literary genres published in socialist periodicals, from serial fiction and poetry to children’s columns, articles, and adverts (English); more recently her scholarship has emphasized socialist fiction (“Intemperate”), while Haywood emphasizes features meant to incite activism and social awareness. Since 2008 innovative scholarship on working-class poetry has gathered momentum, beginning with Florence S. Boos’s anthology of women’s working-class poetry and Mike Sanders’s The Poetry of Chartism, and extended more recently by Kirstie Blair’s study of Scottish working-class newspaper poetry and reader-editor exchanges. The NCSE digitized The Northern Star, the Chartist weekly newspaper essential to Sanders’s study, but this is an exception: a special challenge for research on working-class newspaper poetry is the sequestering of relevant newspapers in local archives outside metropolitan sites. Late-century socialist newspapers published in London, like To-Day and William Morris’s Commonweal, have fared better and now can be searched online. These are but two of the periodicals (some not yet digitized) examined by Elizabeth C. Miller in Slow Print, which theorizes late-century radical press production and political tactics as a deliberate intervention in commodity capitalism. [on print culture and Chartism, see Haywood’s chapter].
7. Race: Internal Others, Abolition, and Empire Racial discourse in Victorian periodicals originated both internally and among reformers and imperialists who looked outward. Blood more than skin color or religion was the prime signifier at home: both Celts and Jews were routinely differentiated from Anglo-Saxons who comprised “we English” (Arnold 46). Matthew Arnold’s 1866 Cornhill essays on Celtic literature associated Celts with high imaginative and emotional qualities, a trait that many continued to evoke as late as the Celtic Revival of the 1890s and beyond. The Irish, with whom Wilde and W.B. Yeats deliberately affiliated themselves, generally were linked in England to poverty and dirt whether in Ireland or in Seven Dials, where so many impoverished workers settled (“Seven”); and they were also caricatured in cartoons as apes or black persons (Curtis; Mendelssohn 4). Jews, often termed “Oriental” and sometimes, as Susan David Bernstein reminds us, also as black, were likewise seen as a race apart and stereotyped as such (see Smith). But Irish and Jewish Britons were not merely catalogued and objectified in print; Irish and Jewish periodicals and journalists articulated identities and interests on Irish and Jewish terms. Dublin University Magazine was published in Ireland and edited by Irish journalists, including the prominent journalist-novelist Charles Lever, but it also had a strong English presence and is indexed by the Wellesley (Tilley 213–19). The Jewish Chronicle, still appearing today, was founded in 1841 and attracted contributions from poet-novelist Amy Levy on women’s rights, Jewish women and children, the ghetto in Florence, and Jewish humor (Levy). In 1889, the same year that Levy committed suicide, Israel Zangwill, a prominent fin de siècle journalist and novelist still famous for coining the phrase “melting pot” (Rochelson), published “English Judaism” in the Jewish Quarterly Review, which emphasized diversity within the British Jewish community [on race, see Tucker’s chapter; on Judaism, see Knight’s]. Race was also inseparable from articles on abolition and abolitionist periodicals, including The Anti-Slavery Reporter, which ran from 1825 to 1833, when Parliament abolished slavery in British dominions. The following decade, Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Barrett Browning published 146
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abolitionist poems and prose in the Liberty Bell, a US annual to which Frederick Douglass also contributed (Stone). In contrast, Thomas Carlyle unleashed virulent racism in “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” in Fraser’s Magazine. Carlyle’s position was not allowed to stand alone, however; his essay provoked a riposte from John Stuart Mill in the next issue. The British and Foreign AntiSlavery Reporter (1840–1931) succeeded the earlier Reporter; it too was based in London but lasted much longer than its forebear under the sponsorship of the eponymous society formed in 1839. The Society’s constitution (reprinted in the journal’s first issue) included this principle: To circulate, both at home and abroad, accurate information on the enormities of the Slavetrade and Slavery[;. . .] to diffuse authentic intelligence respecting the results of emancipation in Hayti, the British Colonies, and elsewhere; to open a correspondence with Abolitionists in America, France, and other countries. (“Constitution”) While Douglass and William Wells Brown did not contribute essays to British journals, they did lecture throughout Britain during their visits in the 1840s and 1850s, and their speeches were regularly reported (see “Anti-Slavery”). Another research area revolving around race was of course the empire. Ethnographic, political, and travel writings on sites from China and Africa to India and the Caribbean abound in Victorian periodicals and newspapers, as well as fiction and poetry inspired by the Indian rebellion of 1857 or imperial war in the Sudan (Dickens, “Perils,” Kipling). But again, the discourse was not unidirectional (Codell). Indians Samuel Satthianadhan and Sarojini Naidu, who resided in England in the 1880s and 1890s (though not permanently), published, respectively, in the Cambridge Review and the Savoy; English language journals in India, a number of them now digitized in the World Newspaper Archive, offer further opportunities for research (Joshi, Gibson) [on Life-writing, see Broughton’s chapter; on settler colonialism, see Wagner’s].
8. Search and Research Techniques The massive scope of Victorian periodicals is both their challenge and their opportunity; if abundance of material can overwhelm, the opportunities for original research seem almost infinite. Periodicals can be approached using the methods of media studies; visual analysis; journalism (Shattock); publishing history; political, social, and/or literary history; and big data. Though researchers will perforce tailor their methods to their topics, first they must craft a research question, one narrowly enough defined to suggest the scale of needed research, potentially fruitful periodical types, and probable methods. Possible approaches, to name a few, could include the study of a specific periodical and its changes over time (whether in content, editorial staff, audience, format, or commercial viability); a specific journalist or writer innovating a periodical subgenre, a method of reporting (e.g., war reports from the field), or establishing a reputation; an important topic or issue that can be tracked through kindred or competing periodicals in terms of politics, readerships, genres, or professional identities within a given time frame; reception studies of literary and nonliterary discourses; and ideological analyses. Theoretical questions demand the largest scope of investigative material (since theorizing from a sample of one is never a good idea). Numbers of database hits in given periodicals can indicate which periodicals to probe in depth on any particular subject, but so can prior scholarship. However, searching only those periodicals already well traveled or most abundant in hits might lead to the researcher’s missing other important perspectives in titles less available to database searches, or in material features that demand examination of paper copies in archives. As in all English studies research, seeking only what one expects to find can undermine quality, and it is better to practice openness to unexpected findings that might lead in entirely new directions and offer the richest outcomes. 147
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Thus, recursiveness in periodical research can be an especially helpful technique. On one hand this means formulating a research question, gathering initial information, and then reformulating the research question in keeping with what emerges. Moving back and forth between primary and secondary materials, stopping to check on historical, biographical, and cultural backgrounds or references, is also useful at the early stages of research. Knowing the political orientation of periodicals furnishing information is always essential; in addition to the Waterloo Directory, the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in digital or print form (Brake and Demoor) offers capsule profiles of all the journalists and periodicals it includes (plus entries on broader topics). Finally, it is helpful to think about what is not on the page, whether it be from differing opinion elsewhere or important simultaneous historical or publishing contexts (seasons, wars, deaths of celebrities, vogues inspired by literary newcomers, etc.) (Hughes, “Sideways”). From the beginning, Victorian periodicals were sites of conflict and consensus within news cycles and between competing titles. Periodicals were the first publication venue for everything from Tennyson’s “Tithonus” or Christina Rossetti’s “Up-hill” to John Ruskin’s earliest parts of Unto this Last, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, Isabella Beeton’s Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, and novels by Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, or Braddon—not to mention countless unnamed anonymous book reviewers and aspirants, sometimes impoverished contributors possessed of little more than literacy who sought to earn a pittance and were driven by relentless need to write. The contiguous publication of different kinds of texts in quarterly, monthly, weekly, biweekly, or daily issues further interleaved letterpress with visual illustration and commercial adverts, all together forming an interwoven web of periodical discourse that affected national and gendered identities, reputations, and the endlessly variegated construction of Victorian reality by writers and readers of (or listeners to) periodical reports of their world.
Key Critical Works Laurel Brake. Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender & Literature in the Nineteenth Century. Laurel Brake, and Marysa Demoor, editors. Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism. Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden, editors. Investigating Victorian Journalism. Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton, editors. The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth Century British Periodicals and Newspapers. Graham Law. Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press. Patrick Leary. “Googling the Victorians.” James Mussell. The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age. Barbara Onslow. Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Joanne Shattock, editor. Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Joanne Shattock, and Michael Wolff, editors. The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings.
Works Cited Altick, Richard. The English Common Reader. U of Chicago P, 1957. “Anti-Slavery Meeting.” Manchester Times and Examiner, 5 August 1854, pp. 10–11. Arnold, Matthew. “Anarchy and Authority.” Cornhill Magazine, vol. 17, January 1868, p. 46. Beetham, Margaret. A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914. Routledge, 1996. ———. “Time: Periodicals and the Time of the Now.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 48, no. 3, Fall 2015, pp. 323–42. ———. “Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre.” Investigating Victorian Journalism, edited by Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden. St. Martin’s, 1990, pp. 19–32. Bernstein, Susan David. “The Jewish Question in Victorian Culture.” 1889. Reuben Sachs, by Amy Levy, Broadview, 2006, pp. 215–33. Blair, Kirstie. “‘Let the Nightingales Alone’: Correspondence Columns, the Scottish Press, and the Making of the Working-Class Poet.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 47, no. 2, Summer 2014, pp. 188–207.
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Periodical Studies Bode, Katherine. “Fictional Systems: Mass-Digitization, Network Analysis, and Nineteenth-Century Australian Newspapers.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 50, no. 1, Spring 2017, pp. 100–38. Boos, Florence S., editor. Working-Class Women Poets in Victorian Britain: An Anthology. Broadview, 2008. Brake, Laurel. “Markets, Genres, Iterations.” The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, edited by Andrew King, et al., Routledge, 2016, pp. 237–48. ———. Print in Transition, 1850–1910: Studies in Media and Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. ———. Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender & Literature in the Nineteenth Century. New York UP, 1994. Brake, Laurel, and Anne Humpherys. “Critical Theory and Periodical Research.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 22, no. 3, Fall 1989, pp. 94–5. ———, editors. “Theory.” Special Issue, Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 22, no. 3, Fall 1989, pp. 94–132. Carlyle, Thomas. “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.” Fraser’s Magazine, vol. 40, December 1849, pp. 670–9. Codell, Julie, editor. Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2003. “Constitution and Objects of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.” British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, vol. 1, no. 1, January 1840, p. 1. Curtis, L. Perry. Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature. Smithsonian Institution P, 1971. Denisoff, Dennis, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, editors. The Yellow Nineties Online. Ryerson U. www.1890s.ca. Dickens, Charles, and Wilkie Collins. “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners.” Household Words, Extra Christmas Number, 7 December 1857, pp. 1–36. Dillane, Fionnuala. Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press. Cambridge UP, 2013. Easley, Alexis. First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830–70. Ashgate, 2004. ———. “Gender, Authorship, and the Periodical Press.” The History of British Women’s Writing, 1830–1880, edited by Lucy Hartley, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 39–55. Fraser, Hilary, Stephanie Green, and Judith Johnston. Gender and the Victorian Periodical. Cambridge UP, 2003. Fyfe, Paul. “An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers.” Victorian Periodicals Research, vol. 49, no. 4, Winter 2016, pp. 546–77. Gibson, Mary Ellis. Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore. Ohio State UP, 2011. Haywood, Ian. The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics, and the People, 1790–1860. Cambridge UP, 2004. “History and Milestones.” ProQuest. www.proquest.com/about/history-milestones/. Hobbs, Andrew. “Provincial Periodicals.” The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, edited by Andrew King, et al., Routledge, 2016, pp. 221–33. Houghton, Walter E., et al., editors. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900. U of Toronto P, 1966. 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, vol. 38, no. 1, Spring 2005, pp. 61–82. Hughes, Linda K. “SIDEWAYS! Navigating the Material(ity) of Print Culture.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 47, no. 1, Spring 2014, pp. 1–30. ———. “What the Wellesley Index Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 40, no. 2, Summer 2007, pp. 91–125. Joshi, Priti. “Audience Participation: Advertisements, Readers, and Anglo-Indian Newspapers.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 49, no. 2, Summer 2016, pp. 249–77. Kent, Christopher. “Victorian Periodicals and the Constructing of Victorian Reality.” Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research, vol. 2, edited by J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel, MLA, 1989, pp. 1–12. King, Andrew, Alexis Easley, and John Morton, editors. The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers. Routledge, 2016. Kipling, Rudyard. “Fuzzy-Wuzzy.” Scots Observer, 8 March 1890, pp. 437–8. Law, Graham. Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press. Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Leary, Patrick. “Googling the Victorians.” Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. 10, no. 1, 2005, pp. 72–86. Ledbetter, Kathryn. British Victorian Women’s Periodicals: Beauty, Civilization, and Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Levy, Amy. The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy, 1861–1889, edited by Melvyn New, UP of Florida, 1993. ———. “Jewish Women and ‘Women’s Rights’.” The Jewish Chronicle, 7 and 28 February 1879, pp. 5 and 5. Maidment, Brian E. “Magazines of Popular Progress & the Artisans.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 17, no. 3, Fall 1984, pp. 83–94. Mendelssohn, Michèle. Making Oscar Wilde. Oxford UP, 2018. Mill, John Stuart. “The Negro Question.” Fraser’s Magazine, vol. 41, January 1850, pp. 25–31. Miller, Elizabeth C. Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture. Stanford UP, 2013. Mitchell, Sally. Frances Power Cobbe:Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer. U of Virginia P, 2004.
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Linda K. Hughes Morrison, Robert, editor. “Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1817–2017.” Special Issue, Romanticism, vol. 23, no. 3, October 2017, pp. 205–81. Moruzi, Kristine. Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850–1915. Ashgate, 2012. Mussell, James. The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Mutch, Deborah. English Socialist Periodicals, 1880–1900: A Reference Source. Ashgate, 2005. ———. “Intemperate Narratives: Tory Tipplers, Liberal Abstainers, and Victorian British Socialist Fiction.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 36, 2008, pp. 472–87. Naidu, Sarojini Chattopadhay. “Eastern Dancers,” Savoy, 5 September 1896, p. 84. North, John. The Waterloo Directory of Irish Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900. North Waterloo AP, 1986. ———. The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900, 1st series, 10 vols. North Waterloo AP, 1994. ———. The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900, 2nd series, 20 vols., North Waterloo AP, 2003. ———. The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900, 3rd series, 30 vols., North Waterloo AP, 2013. Onslow, Barbara. Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Palmer, Beth. Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies. Oxford UP, 2011. Peterson, Linda H. Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market. Princeton UP, 2009. Phegley, Jennifer. Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation. Ohio State UP, 2004. Rochelson, Meri-Jane. A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill. Wayne State UP, 2010. Saintsbury, George. A History of Nineteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 1896. Sanders, Mike. The Poetry of Chartism. Cambridge UP, 2009. Satthianadhan, Samuel. “India in 1880.” Cambridge Review, 23 February 1881, pp. 188–90. “The Seven Dials.” The Graphic, 26 October 1872, p. 393. Shattock, Joanne, editor. Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge UP, 2017. Shattock, Joanne, and Michael Wolff, editors. The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings. Leicester UP and U of Toronto P, 1982. Shuttleworth, Sally, Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, and Jamie McLaughlin. Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical. www.sciper.org/. Smith, Goldwin. “Can Jews Be Patriots?” The Nineteenth Century, May 1878, pp. 875–87. Stauffer, Andrew M. “Ruins of Paper: Dickens and the Necropolitan Library.” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, vol. 47, August 2007, Érudit. www.id.erudit.org/iderudit/016700ar. Stone, Marjorie. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Garrisonians: ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’, the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, and Abolitionist Discourse in the Liberty Bell.” Victorian Women Poets, edited by Alison Chapman, D. S. Brewer, 2003, pp. 33–55. Taunton, Matthew. “Letters/Correspondence.” Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, edited by Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, Academia Press and the British Library, 2009, pp. 358–60. Tilley, Elizabeth. “Periodicals in England.” The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, edited by Andrew King, et al., Routledge, 2016, pp. 208–20. Turner, Mark. “‘Telling of My Weekly Doings’: The Material Culture of the Victorian Novel.” A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel, edited by Francis O’Gorman, Blackwell, 2005, pp. 113–33. ———. Trollope and the Magazines: Gendered Issues in Mid-Victorian Britain. St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000. Ulin, Don. “Working-Class Periodicals.” Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, edited by Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, Academia Press and the British Library, 2009, p. 689. VanArsdel, Rosemary T. “Early Victorian Periodicals Research.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 50, no. 2, Summer 2017, pp. 418–23. Vann, J. Don, and Rosemary T. VanArsdel, editors. Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research, 2 vols., MLA, 1978–1989. Van Remoortel, Marianne. Women, Work and the Victorian Periodical: Living by the Press. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Wallace, Alfred R. “G. J. Romanes vs. Darwin.” Fortnightly Review, vol. 46, September 1886, pp. 300–16. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. Wyland,Russell M. “Public Funding and the‘Untamed Wilderness’of Victorian Studies.”Romanticism andVictorianism on the Net, vol. 55, August 2009, Érudit. www.erudit.org/en/journals/ravon/2009-n55-ravon3697/039554ar/. Zangwill, Israel. “English Judaism: A Criticism and a Classification.” Jewish Quarterly Review, July 1889, pp. 376–407.
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13 MATERIAL CULTURE Deborah Lutz
The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings. —Robert Louis Stevenson
The typical Victorian novel, with its length, breadth, and commitment to representing a detailed world, teems with stray stuff—some of it significant and much of it miscellaneous clutter. Often the reader senses a tactile dimension, as if one could step into these stories and finger the cashmere shawls, gold-handled riding whips, and beribboned and feathered bonnets. Charles Dickens’s novels are especially rich in this way, as are Charlotte Brontë’s, George Eliot’s, and many others. How do we read this tangible plenitude? This question has been taken up by many over the last 30 years or more, with the Americanist Bill Brown an early theorist and proponent. Victorianists have picked up the mantle and read fictional matter using ideas developed from Freud, Marx, gender studies, book history, and other lines of thought. For instance, Elaine Freedgood considers seemingly inconsequential things in fiction through, in part, the history of their production. Talia Schaffer’s approach to crafts is similar, although her project, feminist in nature, pulls from and contributes to gender studies. Theories about souvenirs, collecting, and museums have been central to the work of Claire Pettitt and Susan Stewart, and Leah Price has recently turned to book history and its intersection with thing theory. The latter, as a subset of the larger material culture project, was defined initially by Brown: “[W]e begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily” (4). This chapter traces these theories, largely through attention to specific artifacts, such as Catherine’s bed in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). In their different ways, all of these theorists take up the project Karl Marx suggested in declaring that “[T]o discover the various uses of things is the work of history” (303). Yet, at the same time, what they most care about is how objects, usually personal possessions, relate to the human subject: how she used, made, or loved them and, ultimately, how they come to represent her.
1. Furnishings Take, for example, two domestic interiors in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), which she uses to explore the intricacies of social class and urban change. The Thorntons represent a rising group of 151
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Manchester industrialists; they work hard and think a good deal about amassing money and power, but have little education or cultural capital. Their drawing room seemed as though no one had been in it since the day when the furniture was bagged up with as much care as if the house was to be overwhelmed by lava, and discovered a thousand years hence. . . . Great alabaster groups occupied every flat surface, safe from dust under their glass shades. In the middle of the room . . . was a large circular table, with smartly-bound books arranged at regular intervals round the circumference of its polished surface. . . . Everything reflected light, nothing absorbed it. The whole room had a painfully spotted, spangled, speckled look about it[, . . . an] icy, snowy discomfort. . . . There was evidence of care and labour, but not care and labour to procure ease, to help on habits of tranquil home employment; solely to ornament, and then to preserve ornament from dirt or destruction. (103) Meanwhile, compared with the cold artifice of the Thornton’s painfully shored-up gentility, the home of the Helstones, an intellectual family from the south of England with links to sophisticated London society, has a careless grace and organic beauty: Here were no mirrors, not even a scrap of glass to reflect the light, and answer the same purpose as water in a landscape; no gilding; a warm, sober breadth of colouring, well relieved by . . . chintz-curtains and chair covers. An open davenport stood in the window opposite the door; in the other there was a stand, with a tall white china vase, from which drooped wreaths of English ivy, pale-green birch, and copper-coloured beech-leaves. Pretty baskets of work stood about in different places: and books, not cared for on account of their binding solely, lay on one table, as if recently put down. (73) Gaskell’s descriptions of these rooms let the furniture, fixtures, and books speak, communicating even to the novice reader information about the inhabitants of these spaces, making the furnishings extensions of their characters. In Freedgood’s study of the blue-and-white-checked curtains in Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), she traces a partial history of the fabric and the laborers who made it. She explains her method as “taking a novelistic thing materially or literally and then following it beyond the covers of the text through a mode of research that proceeds according to the many dictates of a strong form of metonymic reading” (Ideas in Things 12). Such objects, which she calls “non-symbolic,” feel weighty in their non-transparent bluntness; they don’t stand in for something else but, rather, their meaning comes in their contiguity with a cultural history [on class, see Betensky’s chapter]. On the face of it, however, Gaskell’s catalogs of living spaces most clearly reference the work of women—those likely to people these drawing rooms and parlors and decide on their ornamentation.1 The “pretty baskets of work” in the second quotation refer to needlework, an activity often occupying women’s hands. Schaffer explores how makers of domestic handicrafts could be “fiercely nostalgic” (10) but also embrace “the mass-produced commodity” (8), underscoring how reading objects opens up women’s history. As Naomi Schor argues, normally insignificant details of daily life—rugs, antimacassars, footstools—are generally gendered feminine, especially “the everyday, whose ‘prosiness’ is rooted in the domestic sphere of social life presided over by women” (4). In an oft-recurring scene, women do needlework while listening or talking to others, especially men. In fact, the activity is so commonly depicted in Victorian fiction it has become almost invisible, even to careful readers. Many do not notice that in Wuthering Heights, the servant Nelly Dean tells Lockwood of the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange—the core of Catherine and Heathcliff ’s story—while stitching, her “basket of [needle]work” (28) next to her. When the plain governess Jane must join the 152
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brilliant company in the Thornfield parlor, in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), she hides behind her handcraft, concentrating her “attention on those netting-needles, on the meshes of the purse I am forming,” training her vision to narrow to the “silver beads and silk threads that lie in my lap” (157). Men often declare their love, or show it, with women reacting through the sewing in their hands or laps. When Paul Montague tells of his love to Henrietta Carbury, in Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), “she had been working some morsel of lace . . . had endeavoured to ply her needle, very idly, while he was speaking to her, but now she allowed her hands to fall into her lap” (506). Shirley Keeldar’s lover sits so close to her he is “near enough to count the stitches of her work, and to discern the eye of her needle” (525), in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849). The tools of needlework often have an intimacy with the woman’s body, Mary Beaudry remarks, helping to describe, encompass, and explain it. Sometimes personalized and passed down to daughters or female friends, these implements could also become memorials of the dead. For instance, the Brontë daughters kept the wooden knitting-sheaths with MB scratched on them that belonged to Maria Branwell, their mother, who died when they were girls. They are now at the Brontë Parsonage Museum (H201.1 and H201.2).2 The notion that prosaic but useful equipment accretes meaning through time and memory informs Clare Pettitt’s discussion of servants’ sewing kits, in particular Peggotty’s needlework box in Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850). Pettitt makes a case for problematizing the “boundary between person and thing” (para 27), thus complicating the separation of subject and object, giving matter a heavy symbolism and moving away from Freedgood’s non-symbolic thing [on domesticity, see Gregory’s chapter; on feminism, see Schaffer’s]. Dickens with his character Peggotty, a servant at work, points to the rhythms of the daily lives of marginalized groups that material cultural studies have sought to recover. Victorianists, especially those in the popular subfield of neo-historicism, have shared this interest with historians and archaeologists, importing and expanding on many of their methods.3 The anthropologists Alastair Owens and Nigel Jefferies, for instance, discovered household items dating from the mid-1800s in sealed privies in the Limehouse area of London, a poor, maritime community that Dickens brings to life in Our Mutual Friend (1865). They read these leftovers, such as china teapots, ornamental glass rolling pins, and scrubbing brushes, as markers of domestic labor and of the objects’ micro-mobility, how they would have “been moved over short distances hundreds if not thousands of times, from cupboard to cooking range, or water pump to table and so on,” thus highlighting “the routines and chores that were central to the experience of poorer women.”4 This type of women’s work becomes “palpable within the archaeological record if not always in other historical sources” (819).5 Peggotty’s workbox, Nelly Dean’s basket of work, and the numerous mourning dresses that Gaskell’s Mary Barton, who is often “worn out by stitching and sewing” (139), toils over late into the night highlight just such routines. The clothing being made with all of this sewing work plays a key role in Victorian fiction, which features long and lush descriptions of it, thus bringing the body—usually women’s—into the object realm and merging fashion history and thing theory. Ariel Beaujot investigates the glove as an example of class and gender being “performed on a day-to-day basis” (168) through the body and its adornment. Kid gloves hid labor and “masculine-looking” hands, and through them the “middleclass body [was] ‘made-real’” (168). The ordinary rhythms of the hours are again privileged here, with the buying, putting on, and taking off of these thin coverings.6
2. Souvenirs and Collections Returning to Peggotty’s workbox, we notice that it appears to be a souvenir, with St. Paul’s cathedral painted on the lid (although, as Pettitt points out, Peggotty has not yet been to the cathedral). Souvenirs were especially popular in the Victorian period, the Queen and her husband leading the way with their pebbles from the seashore in Scotland, teeth from the deer Albert hunted, and locks of hair cut on special occasions from family and friends. Such belongings have a special kind of life as 153
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possessions, evoking travel, memory, and experience situated locally. Some of these keepsakes came with text such as “A present from Tunbridge Wells” or “A souvenir of Scarborough,” tethering them to place, much as a photograph refers to a moment always in the past.7 At the Great Exhibition of 1851, commemorative gear could be purchased, generally featuring views of the Crystal Palace: teacups, teaspoons, inkstands, fans, papier-mâché desk folders, medals, stereoscopic daguerreotypes, games, paper peepshows, pot lids, and more, demonstrating the impact of souvenirs not just on intimate, personal emotions but also national affect.8 Susan Stewart sees the souvenir as exemplary of the “capacity of objects to serve as traces of authentic experience” (135). Viewed somewhat differently, physical markers like these are, John Plotz remarks, “at once products of a cash market and, potentially, the rare fruits of a highly sentimentalized realm of value both domestic and spiritual, a realm defined by being anything but marketable” (2). Some of the earliest souvenirs, or “portable property,” in Plotz’s terms, came from religious pilgrimages—scallop-shaped medals to prove that one had been to the Saint James shrine in Santiago de Compostela, pebbles picked up from the Holy Sepulcher, or compacted earth carried away from the Walsingham shrine to the Virgin Mary.9 Large gatherings of such artifacts and other types of evocative memorabilia increasingly went on public display in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as with the Great Exhibition, which became the nucleus of the Victoria and Albert Museum (first called the South Kensington Museum). In her remarks on collecting, Judith Pascoe investigates this “time when the notion that objects are imbued with a lasting sediment of their owners” (3) became newly visible. Collecting personal bric-a-brac that had little outward value became fashionable—shells, pressed plants, locks of hair—a means of identifying the self closely with the possession, the collection (see also Pearce, Tobin). Such collecting reaches a kind of pinnacle of meaning in fin de siècle works of decadence, such as in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), with life turning into an art form through surrounding oneself with things of beauty. Dorian spends years amassing collections of musical instruments, book bindings, jewels, tapestries, ecclesiastical vestments, and more to mold his identity as a connoisseur of experience, expressed through possessing. Indeed, they come to shore up who he is, threatened always by mortality and the exposure of his “sins,” represented by the painting that makes visible his corrupt soul. “For these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne” (152). Walter Benjamin wrote in 1931 that such beloved stuff gathered together so carefully does not “come alive in him [the collector]; it is he who lives in them” (67). Dorian describes living inside his collections, in turning into what they make of him. This is especially true with the painting, which bodies forth his true life, and he dies by its hand. Wilde is attuned to the “aura” of the valuables Dorian brings home, as Benjamin defines it in relation to works of art: a “presence in time and space[, a] unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (220). Wilde devotes many pages to the intricate histories—the auras—of particular objects, such as the “state bed of Sobieski, King of Poland . . . made of Smyrna gold brocade embroidered in turquoises with verses from the Koran. Its supports were of silver gilt, beautifully chased, and profusely set with enameled and jeweled medallions. It had been taken from the Turkish camp before Vienna, and the standard of Mohammed had stood beneath the tremulous gilt of its canopy” (180). The aura of this bed comes from its “testimony to the history which it has experienced” (Benjamin 221). In other words, life’s trappings seem to witness what happens to their human owners, soak it up and, perhaps, retell it later [on decadence and aestheticism, see Evangelista’s chapter].
3. Speaking Objects The Gothic qualities of the painting in Wilde’s novella, its ability to have at least as much life as Dorian, appear in material goods in other Gothic-tinged tales. For instance, a piece of furniture that “comes alive” for a different reason is Catherine Earnshaw’s bed in Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë, 154
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like Gaskell, compares two families through the contents of their houses—the primitive Earnshaws at the Heights, with dead rabbits decorating a chair and angry dogs growling around the entranceway, and the Lintons at Thrushcross Grange, with their crimson carpets and glittering chandeliers. Yet Brontë’s Gothic Romanticism gives furniture in her novel a more ethereal feel than in Gaskell’s social problems tale. Catherine’s strange bed, for example, appearing numerous times throughout the story, works as a symbol, but a complex one: it is a conduit, a liminal, and a dream-like shape changer. “A large oak case, with squares cut out near the top, resembling coach windows,” the bed is also “a singular sort of old-fashioned couch . . . that formed a little closet, and the ledge of a window, which it enclosed, served as a table” (50). After her death, her presence permeates the space: she has carved her name into the window ledge, written it inside her books piled there, and scrawled her diary in their margins. Brown’s question comes to mind here: “Why . . . does death have the capacity both to turn people into things and to bring inanimate objects to life?” (7). When sleeping in the bed, the stranger Lockwood dreams of the ghost of Catherine as a child trying to return to this space. It is no wonder that she might linger here, since the bed functioned as a secret hideout for Heathcliff and Cathy when young, for her to weep for him when he leaves, and as the place she wants to be when she is dying at the Grange. Heathcliff believes he communicates with the dead Catherine in this portal, and he dies here, making it coffin-like, but also bringing it an added vitality (see Lutz, Relics) [on the Gothic, horror, and the weird, see Luckhurst’s chapter]. Catherine’s bed has a hybridity, managing also to be a library, a room within a room, and a magical box, leaving it open to be read using different forms of material culture theory. For example, the piece of furniture is not exactly the same type of object that fits into Brown’s thing theory, as described above. Plotz makes a related argument when he points to property that troubles “intersections between clear categories.” “‘Things,’ then, are limit cases at which our ordinary categories for classifying signs and substances, meaning and materiality, appear to break down” (25). Yet Catherine’s bed doesn’t exactly “break down,” or stop working; it can still be slept in (Lockwood does it, albeit fitfully, in the beginning of the novel), and its quality as a place for dreams and reverie lends it its power. In other words, it still works, yet in some ways it also stalls, is arrested, and maybe even gets filthy. The bed is “consumed” as Brown puts it, but it also fits into the category of what Annette Weiner calls “inalienable possessions”: objects transcendent, kept out of circulation, and “imbued with the intrinsic and ineffable identities of their owners” (6–7). Indeed, the bed gains a kind of animacy through its ghost. Spiritualists, Aviva Briefel explains, spoke of haunted furniture as “possessing the agency to define its owners in moral and aesthetic terms” (212). Read differently, it might be a fetish, or matter with a special kind of aliveness (see Logan). The Victorian Herbert Spencer wrote of fetishism as “the primitive belief that each person’s nature inheres not only in all parts of his body, but in his dress and the things he has used” (336), a way of thinking continued into his age and beyond, of course, with Freud’s work on fetishism. The bed, like the King of Poland’s, holds a Benjaminian aura, being a sort of local, authentic witness to human experience. Still, the bed does not actually speak to us, at least not in the way that things do in “it narratives”— stories, popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that center on an object, usually inanimate, telling its life history from its own point of view. Often personal possessions, they think and feel, expressing a vigor sometimes missing in human characters. In Charlotte Maria Tucker’s 1858 tale called The Story of a Needle, for instance, said needle shares his experience with the reader and has a conversation in a workbox with scissors and a thimble. Mrs. Pin in Emma Stirling’s The History of a Pin (1861) explains how she was manufactured, and we can also read about The Adventures of a Pincushion (1846) and The Memoirs of an Umbrella (1845). A sort of displacement occurs in these stories, stemming possibly from the discomfort of the humans—who made, bought, and used these tools—fearing they themselves might become thing-like or machine-like. If needlework gear works as extensions of women’s bodies, might the working women themselves be conceived by many men and upper-class women as less than human, and more as domestic automatons? Or, contrarily, perhaps if pins and 155
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needles could stir to life and talk of the pleasantness of being employed, then maybe people could also remain animated agents? Freedgood argues that implements like these “hold much in common with the dispossessed—with slaves, many women and children, most of the working classes, the colonized, and other oppressed or marginalized people . . . who cannot make themselves heard inside the world of their stories” (“What Objects Know” 84). This holds true, to some extent, with Catherine’s bed, in that her marginalization as a woman is written there, in figurative terms with her haunting it as a girl ghost (in Lockwood’s nightmare), and, more literally, with her graffiti and her diary penned in the margins of her books.
4. Books as Stuff In one special sort of “it narrative,” books speak up for themselves, as physical material rather than windows through which we enter the world of the printed text inside. The History of a Book (1873), one of many of these tales explored by Leah Price, closes when its narrator is put up for sale, before “he” is ever read. Heroes in these tales complain about being coverless, soiled, dog’s-eared. . . . The great gap you see in one of my pages was occasioned by the scissors of a young lady, who clipped out a beautiful poem, by Mrs. Neal, for her scrapbook. . . . One careful housewife, to complete my degradation, after she read my contents, used me as a duster. (“The Life and Adventures” 426) Price focuses on the “non-reading” of books, of their being dreamt over, thrown at someone, hid behind to avoid family, ripped up for toilet paper, food wrappings, and shelf or trunk linings. Utilized in other ways than reading, books thus fit into Brown’s idea that things become fully present to us when their original intended use breaks down, and they become obdurate, weighty. In the first Gaskell quotation above, books are more or less equivalent to “alabaster groups” and the “open davenport.” The Thorntons’ “smartly-bound books arranged at regular intervals” display decorative ornaments that are not meant to be opened and perused. The Helstones’ books are, on the other hand, “not cared for on account of their binding solely,” looking “as if recently put down.” Catherine’s library of sermons and other religious texts stored in her bed fits perfectly with Price’s discussion. The volumes seem never to have been read, but rather “scarcely one chapter” had escaped Catherine’s “regular diary, scrawled in an unformed, childish hand,” filling “every morsel of blank that the printer had left” (51). Catherine’s rebellious scribbles replace the published text, since the reader is never given it (except for the title of one sermon, which becomes a dream), making the paratext the main (only) text. Like mortal bodies, the volumes speak of their years by being mildewed, “dreadfully musty” things stacked in a corner, and Lockwood burns one with a candle, perfuming the bed “with an odour of roasted calf-skin,” as if they were animal meat being cooked to eat. This skin evokes Catherine’s skin, which bleeds, in Lockwood’s dream, and the books with her handwriting stand in for her body. This kind of closeness of the body and the book in the nineteenth century is explored by Price, who explains that “before the invention of the paper bag . . . old paper was inextricably linked to food: to the kitchen and the privy, to the market and the body” (“Getting the Reading” 154) [on book history, see Stauffer’s chapter]. Another means of thinking about books as material objects is to focus on them as lovely tangibles to be collected, admired, and handled, as Dorian Gray does. He swoons over “books bound in tawny satins or fair blue silks, and wrought with fleurs de lys, birds, and images” (180), and describes another book as “Gautier’s “Émaux et Camées,” Charpentier’s Japanese paper edition, with the Jacquemart etching. The binding was of citron-green leather, with a design of gilt trellis-work and dotted pomegranates” (210). While he does read the central “poisonous book” given to him by Lord Henry and is accordingly “corrupted” by it, its mere physical presence carries talismanic qualities: “the heavy 156
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odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain” (163). Dorian “procured from Paris no less than nine large-paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in different colours, so that they might suit his various moods (165). Wilde was following here an Aesthetic preoccupation with the book as a work of art—its binding, paper ingredients and quality, type, and illustrations worthy to be labored over. For example, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and others founded the Kelmscott Press to create gorgeous unique objects. Burne-Jones called the Kelmscott Chaucer a “pocket cathedral” (qtd in Robinson and Wildman 96). While he was probably referring to the tome’s intricate majesty, he also evokes a book as a space to be walked into, with more spaces to be found inside. Dorian’s “poisonous book,” while based on an actual book (probably J.K. Huysmans’s Á Rebours), is also a version of The Picture of Dorian Gray. In a similar way, Catherine’s diary is a “microcosm of the novel” (Berg 39) or a representation of the story within the story (with Catherine working as Brontë’s authorial surrogate and Dorian as the reader’s surrogate). This recursive function of the material object in the novel is somewhat different from Freedgood’s theory of metonymy. Rather than meaning through association, here we find representational removes—representations within representations, with a core “thing itself ” at the center. Catherine’s manuscript diary (and Dorian’s “poisonous book,” in a different way), stands as the “thing itself,” or the story in its most authentic form. The other stories build out from this one, or it is embedded in them, with the novel we read at a far remove from this core text. The embedded manuscript, albeit fictional, is something like the (real) dirt, mentioned earlier, picked up from the shrine by pilgrims, what Stewart calls a “material sample” (136), a part of the thing itself. To conclude, we can see how each of the objects and their readings described in this chapter—from Freedgood’s use of curtains, through Schaffer’s understanding of handicraft and Pettitt’s theories about souvenirs, to Brown’s and Plotz’s ideas about breakdown and Price’s about the thingliness of books— deal primarily with a subject’s relationship to objects. A more philosophical approach to materiality might open a new avenue of inquiry for Victorianists who do material culture work. Brown gestures toward object-oriented ontology when he makes the case that “granting the physical world its alterity is the very basis for accepting otherness as such” (18). Object-oriented ontology grew in part out of Immanuel Kant’s arguments about our inability to know the “thing-in-itself,” because we encounter it with our human conceptions of time and space, thus altering it. Martin Heidegger, in an extension of Kant’s ideas, felt that the object (“das Ding,” as he calls it), such as a jug, worked as a place where the central elements of sky, earth, mortals, and the divine met. This was true, however, only when we could meet the object in an authentic way, which Heidegger saw as increasingly difficult with the noise and hurry of our world. Influenced by Heidegger and Kant, contemporary philosophers like Graham Harman attempt to understanding objects as autonomous from us in various ways, from our perception, from direct access. Invested in moving away from our human-centered hubris, this philosophy privileges the object’s relationship with other objects. Going even further, Harman wants “all human and nonhuman entities [to] have equal status” (46), and he believes that the “real object lies deeper than” (123) any relations with people or other objects. Thus might things hold their own secret lives, having nothing to do with us at all. As we have seen, however, the material culture work of Victorianists do not grant this. They remain steadily human-centered, especially when neo-Marxist and feminist—individualist and tied to cultural history. When we encounter possessions such as Esther Summerson’s monogrammed handkerchief in Bleak House (1853), it is hard to imagine how such a reading would look. Treasured by the brickmakers’ wives when Esther uses it to cover a dead baby, the handkerchief is carried off by her mother Lady Dedlock, and then becomes an important clue for Inspector Bucket who, when he is searching for her, uses it as a kind of talisman. “If, as he folds the handkerchief and carefully puts it up, it were able, with an enchanted power, to bring before him the place where she found it, and the night landscape near the cottage where it covered the little child, would he descry her there?” (864). To end with this question is to wonder what sort of magic, or authentic stance, objects might have in future readings of stories from the Victorian era. 157
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Notes 1 For cultural histories of the Victorian parlor, see Thad Logan and Cohen. 2 See also Parker; Lutz, The Brontë Cabinet; Quirk; and Rappoport. 3 Historians, early adopters of the material culture method, were influenced by, in part, archeology’s use of objects to understand cultures. The popularity of neo-historicism in the study of Victorian literature brought material culture methods to the fore (see Briggs 16). 4 Early nineteenth-century pauper inventories list contents of particular households, giving us a sense of how historical individuals similar to Gaskell’s Bartons would have lived (see King). 5 Owens and Jefferies explore the communal properties of some of these objects, moving against the tendency of many readings to focus on objects as expressing the individuality of owners. 6 For more on Victorian clothing and jewelry, see Pointon and Worth. 7 For the photograph as a material object, see Barthes and Batchen. 8 The Victoria and Albert Museum has examples of all of these commemorative objects (and more) in its collection. 9 The British Museum has a collection of these mostly medieval pilgrims’ tokens.
Key Critical Works Bill Brown. “Thing Theory.” Elaine Freedgood. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Deborah Lutz. Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture. Judith Pascoe. The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors. John Plotz. Portable Property:Victorian Culture on the Move. Leah Price. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Talia Schaffer. Novel Craft:Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Susan Stewart. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Annette Weiner. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving.
Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, 1981. Batchen, Geoffrey. Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance. Princeton Architectural P, 2004. Beaudry, Mary C. Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing. Yale UP, 2006. Beaujot, Ariel. “‘The Beauty of her Hands’: The Glove and the Making of the Middle-Class Body.” Material Women, 1750–1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices, edited by Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowles Tobin, Ashgate, 2009. pp. 167–83. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt and Translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken, 1968. Berg, Maggie. Wuthering Heights: The Writing in the Margin. Twayne, 1996. Briefel, Aviva. “‘Freaks of Furniture’: The Useless Energy of Haunted Things.” Victorian Studies, vol. 59, no. 2, 2017, pp. 209–34. Briggs, Asa. Victorian Things. B.T. Batsford, 1988. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Norton, 2017. ———. Shirley. 1849. Oxford UP, 2008. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847. Broadview, 2000. Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, 2001, pp. 1–22. Carey, Annie. History of a Book. Cassell, Petter, Galpin, 1873. Cohen, Deborah. Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions. Yale UP, 2006. Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1853. Penguin, 1996. Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. U of Chicago P, 2006. ———. “What Objects Know: Circulation, Omniscience and the Comedy of Dispossession in Victorian ItNarratives.” Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2010, pp. 33–100. Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton. 1848. Norton, 2008. ———. North and South. 1855. Norton, 2005. Harman, Graham. The Quadruple Object. Zero, 2011. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter, Harper and Row, 1971.
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Material Culture King, Peter. “Pauper Inventories and the Material Lives of the Poor in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.” Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840, edited by Tim Hitchcock, Peter King, and Pamela Sharpe, St. Martin’s P, 1997, pp. 155–91. “The Life and Adventures of a Number of Godey’s Lady’s Book.” Godey’s Magazine, November 1855, pp. 425–7. Logan, Peter. Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives. SUNY P, 2009. Logan, Thad. The Victorian Parlour. Cambridge UP, 2001. Lutz, Deborah. The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects. Norton, 2015. ———. Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture. Cambridge UP, 2015. Marx, Karl. Marx-Engels Reader. Edited by Robert Tucker, Norton, 1978. Owens, Alastair, and Nigel Jeffries. “People and Things on the Move: Domestic Material Culture, Poverty and Mobility in Victorian London.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology, vol. 20, no. 4, 2016, pp. 804–27. Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. Women’s, 1984. Pascoe, Judith. The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors. Cornell UP, 2006. Pearce, Susan. On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition. Routledge, 1995. Pettitt, Clare. “Peggotty’s Work-Box: Victorian Souvenirs and Material Memory.” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, vol. 53, 2009. Plotz, John. Portable Property:Victorian Culture on the Move. Princeton UP, 2009. Pointon, Marcia. Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellery. Yale UP, 2009. Price, Leah. “Getting the Reading Out of It: Paper Recycling in Mayhew’s London.” Bookish Histories: Books, Literature and Commercial Modernity, 1700–1900, edited by Ina Ferris and Paul Keen, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 148–66. ———. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton UP, 2012. Quirk, Mark. “Stitching Professionalism: Female-Run Embroidery Agencies and the Provision of Artistic Work for Women, 1870–1900.” Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. 21, no. 2, 2016, pp. 184–204. Rappoport, Jill. Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture. Oxford UP, 2011. Robinson, Duncan, and Stephen Wildman. Morris and Company in Cambridge. Fitzwilliam Museum Catalogue, 1980. Schaffer, Talia. Novel Craft:Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Oxford UP, 2011. Schor, Naomi. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. Methuen, 1987. Spencer, Herbert. Principles of Sociology. Appleton, 1898. Stevenson, Robert Louis. “Happy Thought.” A Child’s Garden of Verses. Charles Scribner, 1905. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Duke UP, 2001. Tobin, Beth Fowkes. “The Duchess’s Shells: Natural History Collecting, Gender, and Scientific Practice.” Material Women, 1750–1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices, edited by Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowles Tobin, Ashgate, 2009, pp. 247–63. Weiner, Annette. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. U of California P, 1992. Wilde, Oscar. The Major Works. Edited by Isobel Murray, Oxford UP, 1989. Worth, Rachel. Clothing and Landscape in Victorian England: Working-Class Dress and Rural Life. Tauris, 2018.
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14 POPULAR FICTION AND CULTURE Nicholas Daly
In July of 1895 Robert Coombes (aged 13) stabbed his mother, Elizabeth, to death. His father was away at sea, so Robert and his brother Nathaniel then went on something of a spree: they went to see W.G. Grace play cricket at Lord’s and spent money freely on jam tarts, sausage rolls, the theater, and hansom cabs. Robert was soon apprehended, and at his trial he was found guilty but insane; Nathaniel was a witness for the prosecution (Freeman 156–7; Summerscale). For some newspapers, such as the Illustrated Police News, the story provided a source of lurid copy: “Boys Murder Their Mother: Revolting Crime at Plaistow—Shocking Details.” But even the weightier papers, such as the Times, were drawn to the Plaistow Murder, not least because it was revealed that Robert was in the habit of reading “novelettes and ‘penny dreadfuls’.” He had read a tale called The Last Shot before killing his mother, and the boys owned a small library of similar fare, which reportedly included The Witch of Fermoyle, The Bogus Brokers, A Fortune for £5, Under a Floating Island, The Crimson Cloak, Cockney Joe, and Buffalo Bill (“Plaistow Tragedy,” “Plaistow Murder”). By September, The St. James’s Gazette was calling it the “Penny Dreadful Murder,” and suggesting that young Robert had “steeped his mind in the crude melodrama of violence till he was spurred to realistic imitation”; other newspapers weighed in with similar views. While jeremiads about the dangers posed by popular literature recurred across the nineteenth century, they had become increasingly shrill in this period (Springhall 72–97). Recent pseudoscientific ideas about nerves and heredity were grist for the mill of those who wanted to link juvenile behavior and juvenile reading habits, and newspaper accounts suggested that sensational reading could lead to anything from petty crime to attempted train-wrecking to suicide (Editorial, Morning Post). So relentless was this demonization that there was a reaction against it on the part of a number of writers, including W.T. Stead, Walter Besant, and James Payn, who suggested that it was better that working class youths read penny dreadfuls than nothing at all. Nonetheless, Stead later set up his own “Masterpiece Library” series of condensed classics to offer impressionable readers a supposedly more wholesome alternative. Looking back, some of those who had grown up on the penny dreadful took a similar view, one of them noting that “none of us in after life adopted highway robbery as a profession,” though many developed a love of reading (qtd. in Rose 367–8). But what were these dreadful books? They are not the ones that we (and I include myself here) usually read, research, and teach. Although sensational, they are not “sensation novels”; nor are they the “Newgate novels” of the 1840s, with their depictions of infamous crimes and court trials involving the infamous Newgate prison, or “shilling shockers” of the 1880s like Hugh Conway’s Called Back, or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. They belong instead to that submerged 160
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literary world that some 37 years earlier Wilkie Collins associated with the “Unknown Public” and Margaret Oliphant considered as “Reading for the Million.” This was the penny fiction that was affordable by working-class adults and, among the more prosperous, by their children. In the 1890s it generally came in paperback novelettes of 32 pages, with a two-column format, closely resembling the American dime novel of the same period, as we can see from the Coombes’s collection, the titles of which were slightly garbled by the newspapers. The Bogus Brokers is in fact Captain Howard Holmes’s The Bogus Broker’s Right Bower, featuring Sleek Sid, the Sure-Snap Detective, which was published in Beadle’s New York Dime Library in 1894. Cockney Bob is an English reprint of William G. Patten’s Fire-Eye, the Thugs’ Terror; or, Cockney Bob’s Big Bluff, another Beadle title from 1894, and of course there were dozens of dime novels about Buffalo Bill by “Ned Buntline” and others (Nickels and Dimes). The newspapers called the Coombes’s reading matter “penny dreadfuls,” a term that had become popular in the 1860s and 1870s to describe cheap sensational novels, though it is also used in that period to describe cheap newspapers and magazines. In Anthony Trollope’s short story of 1870, “The Spotted Dog,” for instance, Julius Mackenzie is “employed on the staff of two or three of the ‘Penny Dreadfuls’,” for which he produces “blood and nastiness” (231). It is sometimes suggested that “penny blood” is the earlier term for this type of fiction, or that “blood” is a trade term and the other more a pejorative used by the middle-class press. This may be so, but in contemporary newspapers the two terms appear at roughly the same time, and from the 1860s on “penny dreadful” and “penny blood” or “penny blood and thunder” are used interchangeably. “Penny dreadful” is the more common term up to the end of the century, and enjoys a particular vogue in the 1880s and 1890s, when debates on the effects of sensational literature on young working-class readers were at their peak. As our knowledge of middle-class Victorian culture has widened and deepened, we have somewhat lost sight of these texts, which for many working-class people were the only forms of fiction that they read. In this chapter, then, I want to offer a pocket history of this significant but understudied form of popular literature and to suggest some of the ways that it overlaps with the dominant literary culture of the period.
1. Defining the Popular Before focusing on popular forms like the penny dreadful, we might first consider what the term “popular” actually means. Should we think of the popular as the culture of “the people” or as a purely commercial field? Is it likely to yield us some access to the hopes and fears of ordinary people, or are we only going to find in it the repetitive and stultifying formulas of a cynical “culture industry” [Kulturindustrie], to use Theodor Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s term from The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)? From the perspective of cultural studies, the popular might be more accurately seen as an arena of struggle. David Glover offers a short introduction to various uses of the term. One way of thinking about the concept is to assume that readers are not passive consumers and make their own meanings out of the cultural goods that come their way, rather as Marx suggests people “make their own history” but “do not make it as they please (“The Eighteenth Brumaire”). By some definitions, of course, the novel itself is an inherently popular form. Jacques Rancière argues along these lines, suggesting that its focus on the ordinary served to disrupt a hierarchical regime of representation in which form and content were aligned, tragedy was for the great and good, workers could only be seen through the lens of comedy, and so on (32). However, at a more granular historical level we can see that the nineteenth-century novel as we usually study it was popular among the middle classes rather than among the populace more generally. Certainly it was often seen as a form of light entertainment rather than as great literature, despite the efforts of David Masson in the 1850s, and later Henry James (Farina). But in the first half of the century at least, it was largely popular among the class that produced it; that is to say, it was almost exclusively written by and aimed at the middle classes, those who employed servants, rather than the 161
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servants themselves. The reading of the “unknown public” that concerns us here certainly intersected with middle-class tastes, but it also constituted a semi-autonomous market. Literary scholarship’s dealings with such material have been fairly limited, and interest in it has been greatly outstripped by our fascination with the middle-class popular: for example, the sensation novels of the 1860s, the Gothic revival of the fin de siècle, and, above all, perhaps, the work of Charles Dickens. Louis James may have felt that he was scotching the myth that Dickens was read by all classes in his landmark work of 1963, Fiction for the Working Man, but he was too optimistic [on class, see Betensky’s chapter]. This is not to say, of course, that working-class readers lived entirely in a separate literary world. As Jonathan Rose has shown, the evidence of autobiographies suggests that the reading lives of individual workers were often complex and sustained by a variety of sources. Like their middle-class peers, manual workers depended on commercial libraries for much of their reading matter. These libraries rented out books at a penny a volume, and Louis James points out that they were to be found in sometimes surprising venues: coffee houses, but also drapers, barracks, and factories. Together with the Mechanics’ Institutes, which were more likely to stock nonfiction, these offered working-class readers access to at least some of the successful authors of the dominant culture: Edward Bulwer-Lytton, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Samuel Warren (author of Ten Thousand a Year [1839]), for instance, were stocked by the Sheffield Mechanics’ Institute, which was otherwise rather against fiction (James 5). Some readers would also have encountered the novels of working life that were serialized in the Chartist press: Thomas Martin Wheeler’s Sunshine and Shadow (1849–50), for instance, was serialized in Feargus O’Connor’s Northern Star [on Chartism, see Haywood’s chapter]. But the highly colored penny dreadful, written specifically for a working-class readership and published in 8-, 16-, or 32page penny parts, was something else again. On the side of consumption, its existence long before the 1870 Elementary Education Act suggests high levels of working-class literacy. On the production side, its development was underwritten by a trifecta of factors that transformed the publishing landscape more generally: cheaper raw materials, lower taxes, and improved printing technology. Paper became cheaper first through the Whig government’s 1836 reduction of the tax per pound from 3d to 1d, and later through the gradual replacement of rags with esparto grass in manufacture. The most significant technological factor was the use of steam presses, which the Times was already employing by 1817; the arrival of the rotary press in the 1850s was another watershed (see Routledge, as well as the article “Substitute”). These developments helped to ensure the arrival of cheaper newspapers, but they also made fiction for the masses feasible [on technology, see Menke’s chapter]. One of the first to see the possibilities was Edward Lloyd, a laborer’s son from outside Croydon who at the time of his death in 1890 had become the highly respected proprietor of Lloyd’s News and the Daily Chronicle. He was lauded in obituaries as a campaigner against the stamp tax on newspapers, as a pioneer in importing Hoe’s Rotary Press from the United States, and as a resourceful entrepreneur who had bought huge swathes of land in Algeria for the production of his own esparto grass (“Death”). Some 40 years earlier, though, his reputation was rather different. The Daily News, in an article on “Deleterious Literature,” singled him out as a producer of “intoxicating poisons.” In his penny pamphlet serials, [A] succession of sickly but exciting scenes is kept up—theft, seduction, violence, adultery, and murder stalk through their pages as if they were the most common-place and agreeable things in the world. Contact with such a literature is inevitably corruption. (1847) Early Lloyd publications give a variety of addresses—Wych Street in the Strand, Broad Street, Bloomsbury, and Holywell Street, but by this period he was established at 12 Salisbury Square, off Fleet Street. He had first embraced the dreadful with The Calendar of Horrors (1835), the title of which was presumably meant to remind readers of the Newgate Calendar and similar catalogs of crime; these had been 162
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doing good business since the late eighteenth century. Thomas Frost, the radical writer, once tried to sell a novel to Lloyd’s firm, and to him we are indebted for an account of the quality control employed at Salisbury Square when dealing with new authors. He was told: [O]ur publications circulate amongst a class so different in education and social position to the readers of three-volume novels, that we sometimes distrust our own judgment, and place the manuscript in the hands of an illiterate person—a servant or a machine-boy, for instance. If they pronounce favourably upon it, we think it will do. (90) (Frost’s novel did not do.) Lloyd’s other early fare had included such sensational material as Thomas Peckett Prest’s Lives of the Most Notorious Highwaymen Footpads and Murderers (1836–37); Angelina, or The Mystery of St. Mark’s Abbey: A Tale of Other Days (1841); The Maniac Father, or The Victim of Seduction, A Romance of Deep Interest (1842); and James Malcolm Rymer’s The White Slave, A Romance for the Nineteenth Century (1844). If we read these novels now, we are struck by the somewhat florid language and by the relentless series of melodramatic plot incidents, but the latter trait, as Janice Carlisle has suggested, may have been very much the point of these novels for their original readers: it made them attractive for those who could only snatch five or ten minutes at a time to read. In this light the complex and even contradictory plots of such novels as infamous as Rymer’s Varney the Vampire make more sense: you could dip in anywhere and find vivid and emotionally powerful incidents; continuity was a secondary consideration. But it would be a mistake to regard this as empty sensationalism; its scope for narrative heterogeneity also made the penny dreadful a potential vessel for political asides. Ian Haywood points out that in 1848 G.W.M. Reynolds interrupted the second series of The Mysteries of London (1847–48) to editorialize about the French revolution then taking place, and to make pointed comparisons between his aristocratic villains and their French equivalents; for him, at least, Chartism and popular fiction could march side by side (177–9). These, then, were not the novels that the prosperous middle class were borrowing from their subscription library, and that we tend to study as representative Victorian fiction. Cheaply printed in double columns, and bound in penny parts, they even looked and felt very different. And yet there was some overlap. Looking back at the moral panics around the “Salisbury Square school” (92), Frost shrewdly assessed that, whatever their lurid titles, the subject matter and morals of such penny-part novels were not so very different from those of the three-deckers borrowed from Mudie’s at a shilling a volume, since “the literary tastes of Belgravia and Bethnal Green were . . . very similar” (92). If Lloyd’s hack writers churned out tales of crime, did not Edward Bulwer (later Lord Lytton) and William Harrison Ainsworth produce similar fare for the middle-class reader with their tales of highwaymen in Paul Clifford and Rookwood (93)? (As today’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest should remind us, the florid prose of Salisbury Square also had its equivalents in three-decker fiction.) Likewise the models for Salisbury Square’s Gothic mysteries were the middle-class entertainments of an earlier generation. Indeed it is worth bearing in mind that the greatest moral panic around popular fiction in this period was focused on Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839–40), the crime novel that Franҫois Courvoisier had supposedly been reading before he murdered his employer, Lord William Russell, in May 1840. Reviewers were already condemning the “Newgate School” (i.e., Ainsworth, Bulwer, sometimes Dickens) for their representation of crime, and the Russell case gave them fresh ammunition. But Ainsworth’s novel had been aimed at the middle classes: it appeared first in serial form in Bentley’s Miscellany, a magazine that was priced at two shillings and sixpence, placing it well beyond the reach of most working-class purchasers. One of the most striking examples of such parallel class taste is the series of illustrated Dickens pastiches produced by Lloyd’s stable, including The Post-humourous Notes of the Pickwickian Club (1838–42), by one “Bos,” Memoirs of Nickelas Nicklebery (1838), Posthumous 163
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Papers of the Cadgers’ Club (1838), and The Life and Adventures of Oliver Twiss (1838–39). The latter, for instance, by Thomas Peckett Prest, was published in 80 weekly penny parts, a cheaper mode than the monthly numbers favored by Dickens [on the Gothic, horror, and the weird, see Luckhurst’s chapter].
2. Popular Fiction After mid-Century As Lloyd came to focus more and more on his lucrative newspaper business, by the mid-1850s the torch of cheap fiction had been passed to others. For instance, if we track the work of two of his most prolific authors, Thomas Peckett Prest and James Malcolm Rymer, we see that their novels continued to appear, but from a series of other publishing houses: Henry Lea in the 1850s; John Dicks and Francis A. Brady in the 1860s and 1870s; and E.H. Bennett toward the end of the century. The reading materials of the Coombes brothers, Nathaniel and the murderous Robert, came from, inter alia, the Fairlee Press, which also published such stirring 32-pagers of criminal life as W. Prideaux Naish’s In the Shadow of the Scaffold (1892) and the anonymous Bequeathed from the Gallows (1892). From the 1860s onward, the publishers of penny dreadfuls were aiming more at readers like them rather than adults; for instance, one of the newer players, the Newsagents’ Publishing Company (NPC), churned out tales of the Wild Boys of London, and of Boy Detectives (Springhall 52–4; James and Smith xii). Part-published novels were not the only form in which readers could get their fix of light reading. Some of the same shifts in technology, raw materials, and tax regimes that underwrote the rise of Lloyd’s publishing empire also made possible the mid-century appearance of the “yellowbacks,” cheap one-volume reprints of successful novels, marketed with chromolithographic pictorial covers, often of eye-catching scenes (for an extensive range of examples, see Grossman). Priced at a shilling or more and often available at railway bookstalls, these were more likely to have been bought by the traveling middle-class public than by working-class readers. But cheaper, paperbound editions began to appear in similar series. The weakness of international copyright law often meant that foreign authors were among the first to be republished cheaply: Routledge’s early paperbacks include novels by James Fenimore Cooper; Ward Lock was publishing Jules Verne in pictorial card covers by the 1870s. Dicks’s English Novels from the 1860s on featured cheap paperback reprints of novels by Ainsworth, Dickens, Lytton, and Reynolds, among others. The series was based on novels that were out of copyright or, in some cases, to which John Dicks had acquired the rights for his magazine, Bow Bells (Humpherys; Neuburg 174–7). Thus Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby begin to appear in the series in the 1880s, when they emerged from copyright. Priced at 6d per volume, this series was probably still too dear for many working-class readers. But it pointed the way, and such one-volume reprint series began to reshape the market. Like their more affluent peers, working-class readers could also access serialized magazine fiction, though in cheaply printed halfpenny and penny periodicals rather than those retailing at a shilling. (Dickens’s Household Words and its successor, All the Year Round, were somewhere between those markets, priced at tuppence per weekly issue, but also available as a 9d monthly.) As Linda K. Hughes demonstrates in her contribution on periodicals in this companion, we now know a good deal more than we used to about this segment of the market. Significant journals of this kind included the highly successful London Journal; priced at a penny, this ran for almost 40 years (King). Another case in point is John Maxwell’s Halfpenny Journal, with its encouraging subtitle, A Weekly Magazine For All Who Can Read. Maxwell, an Irishman who had also worked in insurance and as an advertising agent, had earlier tried a cheap weekly, the Welcome Guest (1858–61), which he had acquired from Henry Vizetelly; The Halfpenny Journal did slightly better, surviving from 1861 to 1865. It is a magazine that is now remembered chiefly because one of its anonymous contributors was Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the minor actress turned sensation novelist, who was later dubbed the “queen of the circulating libraries” in the press. In the 1860s she wrote such novels as The Black Band, The White Phantom, and The Octoroon, or The Lily of Louisiana for Maxwell’s cheap weekly, which was edited by her mother, Fanny. 164
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Maxwell became Miss Braddon’s partner, though they were prevented from marrying until the death of his mentally ill wife in 1874 (see Bennett, Carnell). As a pair, they are another reminder that on the side of production the line between the working-class fiction market and the middle-class one was not always very definite. At the same time that Maxwell was publishing his cheap weeklies, he was also trawling for more affluent readers with shilling monthlies such as Temple Bar and The St. James’s Magazine. Lady Audley’s Secret, Braddon’s first great middle-class success, began serialization in one of Maxwell’s cheap weekly magazines, Robin Goodfellow, but after that publication folded it was continued in Maxwell’s somewhat more expensive Sixpenny Magazine, a monthly, presumably out of the reach of many working-class readers, though half the price of the shilling magazines. On the other hand, editors sometimes misjudged the appetite of their mass-market audience for middle-class fiction, as when Mark Lemon tried to force-feed Walter Scott to the readers of the penny London Journal, leading to a sharp drop in circulation (King 112–41). In the last quarter of the century, magazine publishers also began to court younger readers. The Boy’s Own Paper, for instance, was a story-filled penny weekly that was published by the Religious Tract Society from 1879 in an attempt to wean readers from what was perceived to be morally dubious penny material; the Girl’s Own Paper followed the next year. In both cases, of course, as Mike Ashley has noted, these boys and girls were often teenagers and young adults rather than children per se (8).
3. Fiction as Drama We have already touched briefly upon another form of entertainment that mediated between middleclass and working-class worlds: the theater. But a little more needs to be said on the extent to which across the century working-class consumers accessed fiction as drama. When Courvoisier’s reading of Jack Sheppard was adduced as a factor in his murder of Lord Russell, new stage adaptations of the novel were banned, though the novel was not. Presumably this was because, as a play, it had a much wider social reach than it had in print, even if the size of the theater audience was relatively limited (Buckley). Urban youths who could not afford Ainsworth’s novel could see one of the many stage productions, sustaining a veritable Jack Sheppard-mania. “Nix my Dolly Pals, Fake Away”—the “flash” song that J.B. Buckstone borrowed from Ainsworth’s 1834 novel, Rookwood, and added to his adaptation of Jack Sheppard—was to be heard everywhere, and to be purchased as a broadside crime ballad (“In a box of the stone jug I was born/Of a hempen widow the kid forlorn” [“Nix my dolly”]). Likewise, there were multiple stage versions of Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, some of which began to appear before Dickens had even finished the original novel. These included the anonymous Oliver Twist, Founded on the Popular Tale by Boz (St. James’s, March 27, 1838); Edward Stirling’s version (City of London, n.d); C.Z. Barnett’s (Pavilion, May 21, 1838); and George Almar’s “serio-comic burletta,” Oliver Twist! (Surrey Theatre, November 19, 1838). Adaptations of Nickleby included Edward Stirling’s Nicholas Nickleby (Adelphi, November 19, 1838), George Dibdin Pitt’s Nicholas Nickelby or, The Schoolmaster at Home and Abroad (City of London Theatre, November 19, 1838), and W.T. Moncrieff ’s Nicholas Nickleby and Poor Smike, or The Victim of the Yorkshire School (Strand Theatre, May 20, 1839). As Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow have shown, the West End theaters in this period attracted diverse audiences, and the audiences in venues like the Pavilion and the City of London would have been dominated by the working class and lower middle class. If workers were not reading Dickens, then, at least some of them were enjoying his work in other modalities [on drama and performance, see Weltman’s chapter]. Deborah Vlock has attempted to excavate what it was like to read in such a culture, in which narratives moved so amphibiously between page and stage, arguing that Dickens’s readers were influenced not just by these direct theatrical versions but also by a more general sense of conventional stage characters, situations, and effects. However, it is also worth thinking about those members of the audience who encountered the novels only in their stage form. For them the conventional characters, 165
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stock situations, and clichéd effects did not shape their reading of Dickens’s work: they were Dickens’s work. To some extent this must have been perplexing since, as Renata Kobetts Miller has noted, the stage versions often tend to presuppose an audience who already knows the novels, offering “a series of scenes without interstitial connections” (60). In the case of plays that were staged before the original novels were fully serialized, audiences may also have come away with a different sense of the plot: Barnett’s Oliver Twist, for instance, omits the murder of Nancy and the death of Sikes. Even in later adaptations, the original narratives are often liberally changed. In the Royal Strand Theatre’s version of Dombey and Son (c.1850), for example, Carker is foiled at the end by Good Mrs. Brown, and Edith and Mr. Dombey are reconciled. There were also more radical appropriations of Dickens’s work than this, in which iconic characters were lifted from their original novels and presented as the center of the action. John Brougham entertained audiences in New York with his one-act Captain Cuttle (Burton’s Theatre, January 14, 1850). None of the Dombey family appear, allowing the Captain, Toots, the Chicken, Mrs. MacStinger, and other minor characters to have the action to themselves. Dickens is, perhaps, sui generis, and may not always provide a view of ordinary practice. For example, the stage adaptations of the sensation novels of the 1860s tended to follow the plots of the originals fairly closely, and even an audience unfamiliar with the text would have a fair chance of making sense of the onstage action. But of necessity as well as by design these melodramas were also different from their originals, and as Kate Mattacks has argued, they tailored the original narrative for different audiences. In C.H. Hazlewood’s Lady Audley’s Secret (Victoria, May 25, 1863), for instance, written for a working-class theater south of the Thames, the roles of Phoebe and Luke, the maid and her lover, are expanded. Lady Audley is a more violent criminal than in the novel, and we see her hit her returned husband, George Talboys, with an iron spindle before pushing him down a well and exulting in the best melodramatic style: “‘Dead men tell no tales! I am free! I am free! I am free! Ha, ha, ha!’ (raising her arms in triumph, laughing exultingly)” (17). In the novel, Lady Audley is packed off to a Belgian asylum, where (we are led to assume) she dies out of sight while we focus on the happy endings for Robert Audley and others. In Hazlewood’s play, George confronts Lady Audley, who promptly displays her true madness and dies: Aye—aye! (laughs wildly) Mad, mad, that is the word. . . . let the grave, the cold grave, close over Lady Audley and her Secret (falls—dies—Music—tableau of sympathy— George Talboys kneels over her) (33) Here, Lady Audley is not the ambiguous figure she is in Braddon’s novel but simply mad and bad, and more fully comprehensible within the character range of stage melodrama [on sensation scholarship, see Gilbert’s chapter]. Sensation drama was not the only performance medium through which middle-class popular fiction reached working-class audiences. When the theatrical illusion “Pepper’s Ghost” was first exhibited at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in Leicester Square on December 24, 1862, it was in the staging of a much-truncated version of Dickens’s The Haunted Man, and later shows at the same venue gave A Christmas Carol the same high-tech treatment (Daly 198–208, Groth, Carlson). While the Polytechnic was patronized by a mixed but largely well-to-do crowd, one of the first theaters to adopt the new spectral technology was the working-class Brittania in Hoxton, and similar “ghost shows” lingered in music halls and country fairs long after the theaters had wearied of the novelty [on visual culture, see Flint’s chapter]. The music halls were major venues for working-class entertainment more generally and, as Peter Bailey has argued, they present quite a different Victorian culture to that which we infer from canonical novels. The comic songs and the patter of comic lions and lionesses celebrate urban fun and hint at possibilities of sexual pleasure in a way that is rare in middle-class forms. It is out of the irreverent 166
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worldview of the halls that one of the most significant popular fictional characters of the late nineteenth century emerges, the enormously popular comic anti-hero, Ally Sloper. First appearing in the comic magazine Judy in 1867, from 1884 to 1923 he had his own illustrated penny newspaper, Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday (Bailey 47–79, Banville). The picaresque adventures of the bibulous and feckless Ally appealed to working-class readers as well as to a lower middle-class readership of shop assistants, junior clerks, and small tradesmen, part of their charm being the absence of any ethos of inferiority or deference: as Scott Banville notes, “Ally’s adventures openly mock the very idea of self-improvement, and the middle-class hegemony that underwrites self-improvement” (151). Readerly investment in Sloper was encouraged by a variety of gimmicks, including a Sloper’s Club, Sloper-themed prizes, and invitations for readers to submit their own stories. Roger Sabin has demonstrated how this comic anti-hero anticipated the rise of the popular newspaper comic strip but also moved into other entertainment platforms, including Ally Sloper music-hall turns and Christmas pantomimes, Ally Sloper magic-lantern shows, and eventually Ally Sloper short films, from Ally Sloper (1900) to Ally Sloper Goes Yachting (1921). Music-hall spinoffs included Annie Leonie’s “Original Mrs Sloper” and acts that featured Sloper’s daughter, Tootsie, and even the family dog, Snatcher.
4. A Changing Market Ally Sloper’s cross-platform success is an indication that by the end of the century the realm of popular culture had changed in terms of media but also in intensity. What would soon become the first million-selling newspaper, the Daily Mail, appeared in 1896, priced at half a penny, and such masscirculation magazines as Tit-Bits and Answers courted readers with a salmagundi of news, humorous articles, bite-sized fictional excerpts, puzzles, and competitions. Variants of the penny dreadful continued to appear, of course. As we have seen, in the United States Beadle’s dime novel series provided cheap, paperbound fiction to a mass audience (Denning, Kasanjian); they pointed to new directions for popular fiction in Britain, and also provided an additional marketplace for British authors. Adventure tales of the sea and of the frontier predominated in the 1860s. By the 1890s there were also romances and tales of two-fisted detectives battling against sinister underworld organizations; Nick Carter is probably the most famous of these detective heroes and lived on in a variety of other media. Beadle’s own booklets tended to be rather plain-looking, but his rivals realized that dramatic duotone and four-color pictorial covers were an effective marketing tool, a technique that looked forward to later story-papers and pulp magazines. Publishers like Street and Smith also began to use giant trackside billboards to advertise their wares to bored commuters. Much of the fiction in the original dime publications was written to order, though the more expensive Seaside Library series published by George Munro at 20 or 25 cents also contained work by well-known British authors, including Braddon, Hall Caine, Hugh Conway, Marie Corelli, Ouida, and Robert Louis Stevenson. In the 1890s the popular best-selling authors were those who could turn out multiple novels per year, and who could appeal to both the American dime novel market and the cheaper end of the British market. Among this select band were the popular English romance authors Charlotte M. Brame and Charles Garvice, and the Irish writer Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (see, for instance, Bloom; Carr). Brame adopted the pen name Bertha M. Clay, among others, for publication in America, possibly to evade contractual arrangements with English publishers. Charles Garvice was an even more successful transatlantic bestseller, cranking out ten or twelve novels a year under the pseudonym Caroline Hart. Wolfe Hungerford, some of whose American output appears under the name “The Duchess,” was best known as the author of Molly Bawn (1878), but she wrote dozens of similar tales of feisty heroines finding their way in the world, with such self-explanatory titles as A Born Coquette (1890) and A Troublesome Girl (1893). The work of this trio remained popular well into the twentieth century, though in the 1930s their territory would be taken over by the romance series of Mills and Boon in Britain, and later by Harlequin and Silhouette in North America. 167
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By the early years of the twentieth century the market for popular fiction, like that for fiction more generally, had become more complex and decentered (Glover). Non-subscription public libraries had made a considerable impact, often through the donations of philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie (Bloom 67), and the penny dreadfuls were morphing into comics and cheap story-papers along the lines of the American pulps (Ashley). Books and magazines had a new rival in the form of the cinema, but like the theater before it, the mushrooming cinema industry often drew on printed fiction for its plots and scenarios. Thus, while the nascent cinema may have offered an alternative to reading, it helped to boost the popularity of some novels and contributed to the formation of the modern bestseller. But however the field changed, there was at least one constant: long after the Coombes trial was ended, and the penny dreadful had had its day, moral panics around popular reading and viewing continued to flourish. Archival work has brought some of the popular literature discussed in this chapter more clearly into view, and innovative digital projects have helped to make it more easily available than it has been for more than 100 years. This work has not taken place in a vacuum, of course, and it has been sustained and underpinned by, for instance, the investment of feminist scholarship in recovery projects like that of Felicia L. Carr; and by work on race, ethnicity, and popular culture (Tschen). And as our own international popular culture travels with ever-greater speed across platforms, we have become, perhaps, more aware of the materiality of reading practices and of earlier regimes of cross-medium adaptation and remediation (Miller; Grusin). While we have still a good deal to learn about reading for the million, as Mrs. Oliphant termed it, Collins’s Unknown Public no longer seems quite so alien to us.
Key Critical Works Peter Bailey. Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City. Janice Carlisle. “Popular and Mass-Market Fiction.” Michael Denning. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America. Ian Haywood. The Revolution in Popular Literature. Louis James. Fiction for the Working Man. Victor E. Neuburg. Popular Literature: A History and Guide. Jonathan Rose. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. John Springhall. Youth, Popular Culture, and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-Rap. Deborah Vlock. Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre.
Works Cited Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford UP, 2002. Ashley, Mike. The Age of the Storytellers: British Popular Fiction Magazines, 1880–1950. British Library and Oak Knoll, 2006. Bailey, Peter. Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City. Cambridge UP, 2003. Banville, Scott. “Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday: The Geography of Class in Late-Victorian Britain.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 41, no. 2, Summer 2008, pp. 150–73. Bennett, Mark. “Generic Gothic and Unsettling Genre: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the Penny Blood.” Gothic Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, May 2011, pp. 38–54. Bloom, Clive. Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900, 2nd ed. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT P, 1998. Buckley, Matthew. “Sensations of Celebrity: Jack Sheppard and the Mass Audience.” Victorian Studies, vol. 44, no. 3, Spring 2002, pp. 423–63. Carlisle, Janice. “Popular and Mass-Market Fiction.” A Companion to the English Novel, edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke, Wiley Blackwell, 2015, pp. 132–43. Carlson, Marvin. “Charles Dickens and the Invention of the Modern Stage Ghost.” Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity, edited by Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 27–45.
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Popular Fiction and Culture Carnell, Jennifer. The Literary Lives of M.E. Braddon. The Sensation Press, 2000. Carr, Felicia L. American Women’s Dime Novel Project: Dime Novels for Women, 1870–1920. chnm.gmu.edu/ dimenovels/. Accessed 1 July 2018. Collins, Wilkie. “The Unknown Public.” Household Words, vol. 18, no. 439, August 1858, pp. 217–22. Daly, Nicholas. Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s. Cambridge UP, 2009. Davis, Jim, and Victor Emeljanow. Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880. U of Iowa P, 2001. “Death of Mr Edward Lloyd.” Pall Mall Gazette, 9 April 1890, p. 6. “Deleterious Literature.” Daily News, 4 November 1847, p. 7. Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America. Verso, 1987. Editorial. Morning Post, 21 July 1894, p. 4. Farina, Jonathan. “On David Masson’s British Novelists and Their Styles (1859) and the Establishment of Novels as an Object of Academic Study.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, edited by Dino Franco Felluga, May 2012. http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=jonathan-farina-ondavid-massons-british-novelists-and-their-styles-1859-and-the-establishment-of-novels-as-an-objectof-academic-study Freeman, Nicholas. 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain. Edinburgh UP, 2011. Frost, Thomas. Forty Years’ Recollections: Literary and Political. Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1889. Glover, David. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction, edited by David Glover and Scott McCracken, Cambridge UP, 2012, pp. 1–14. Grossman, Jonathan. Yellowback Cover Art. www.flickr.com/photos/yellowbacks/. Groth, Helen. “Reading Victorian Illusions: Dickens’s ‘Haunted Man’ and Dr. Pepper’s ‘Ghost’.” Victorian Studies, vol. 50, no. 1, Autumn 2007, pp. 43–65. Haywood, Ian. The Revolution in Popular Literature. Cambridge UP, 2004. Hazlewood, C. H. Lady Audley’s Secret: A Drama in Two Acts From Miss Braddon’s Popular Novel. Harold Roorbach, 1889. Humpherys, Anne. “John Dicks’ Cheap Reprint Series, 1850s-1890s: Reading Advertisements.” Media and Print Culture Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Victorian Reading Experience, edited by Paul Raphael Rooney and Anna Gasperini, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 93–107. James, Elizabeth, and Helen R. Smith. Penny Dreadfuls and Boys’ Adventures: The Barry Ono Collection of Victorian Popular Literature in the British Library. British Library, 1998. James, Louis. Fiction for the Working Man. Oxford UP, 1963. Kasanjian, David. “The Dime Novel.” The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. 6: The American Novel, 1879–1940, edited by Priscilla Wald and Michael A. Elliott, Oxford UP, 2014. King, Andrew. The London Journal 1845–83: Periodicals, Production, and Gender. Ashgate, 2004. Marx, Karl. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” 1852. Marxists Internet Archive. Accessed 7 September 2018. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ Mattacks, K. “Regulatory Bodies: Dramatic Creativity, Control and the Commodity of Lady Audley’s Secret.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2009, p. 8. Miller, Renata Kobetts. “Nineteenth-Century Theatrical Adaptations of Novels.” The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, edited by Thomas Leitch, Oxford UP, 2017, pp. 53–70. Neuburg, Victor E. Popular Literature: A History and Guide. Penguin, 1977. “Nix My Dolly, Pals Fake Away.” English Ballads. National Library of Scotland. https://digital.nls.uk/englishballads/archive/74893543#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=0&xywh=-3064%2C0%2C8627%2C4808; https://digital.nls.uk/english-ballads/archive/85447909. Accessed 4 August 2018. Nickels and Dimes: From the Collections of Johannsen and LeBlanc. dimenovels.lib.niu.edu/. Accessed 1 August 2018. Oliphant, Margaret. “The Byways of Literature: Reading for the Million.” Blackwoods, vol. 84, August 1858, pp. 201–16. “The Penny Dreadful Again: The Coroner on Bad Books and Children’s Suicides.” The St. James’s Gazette, 14 February 1896, p. 6. “The Penny Dreadful Murder.” St. James’s Gazette, 18 September 1895, p. 3. “The Plaistow Murder.” The Daily News, 18 September 1895, p. 4. “The Plaistow Tragedy.” St. James’s Gazette, 30 July 1895, p. 6. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. 2004. Translated with an Introduction by Gabriel Rockhill. Continuum, 2011. Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Yale UP, 2001. Routledge, Thomas. “Esparto Grass.” Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser, 30 March 1866, p. 2. Sabin, Roger. “Ally Sloper on Stage.” European Comic Art, vol. 2, no. 2, December 2009, pp. 205–25. Springhall, John. Youth, Popular Culture, and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-Rap. Palgrave Macmillan, 1998.
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15 RADICAL PRINT CULTURE From Chartism to Socialism Ian Haywood
When the Chartist poet and activist Thomas Cooper insisted that his movement needed a “literature of our own,” he spoke for generations of radical activists who felt excluded from mainstream culture (“Introductory Lecture” p 199). Cooper’s words express a firm belief in the power of literature to change the world but also acknowledge the challenge of making your voice heard by those who would prefer to ignore you. But if writing by working-class and oppositional Victorian authors has too often been marginalized in literary history, the same cannot be said about the recent surge of interest in nineteenth-century radical print culture. I find it both heartening and noteworthy that so much important scholarship has appeared since I prepared my chapter “The Literature of Chartism” in 2014 (see also Vargo’s “Radicalism”). In order to try to do justice to this work, and to highlight important historical developments across the period, I have taken a chronological approach, focusing on the two moments of most intense radical cultural activity in the nineteenth century, the Chartist movement of the 1830s and 1840s and the socialist renaissance of the 1880s and 1890s. In the former period, I focus on new work which has deepened our understanding of the aesthetic dimensions of Chartist texts and their interaction with the literary mainstream. In the later period, I highlight work on the remarkable proliferation of socialist and utopian periodicals which disseminated radical ideas to the first generation of compulsory-educated working-class readers. I also make a case for the important role of radical visual culture and in particular the caricature and illustration revolution of the 1830s, a foundational change that is echoed and complemented by the socialist artwork of the fin de siècle.
1. Chartism and Early Victorian Print Radicalism It is not an overstatement to claim that Chartist literature has finally come of age. Five book-length studies of Chartist literature have appeared in less than a decade: Margaret A. Loose’s The Chartist Imaginary: Literary Form in Working-Class Political Theory and Practice (2014); Chris Vanden Bossche’s Reform Acts: Chartism, Social Agency, and the Victorian Novel (2014); Rob Breton’s The Oppositional Aesthetics of Chartist Fiction: Reading against the Middle-Class Novel (2016); Simon Rennie’s The Poetry of Ernest Jones: Myth, Song, and the ‘Mighty Mind’ (2016); and Gregory Vargo’s An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel (2018). What this impressive body of criticism has in common, as several of the titles indicate, is a determination to show the formal distinctiveness of Chartist writing as it battled to find a voice and an agency against formidable cultural and political obstacles. Building on previous scholarship by Anne Janowitz and Mike Sanders, and drawing on my reprints of Chartist fiction (reissued in 2016) as well as digital 171
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access to the radical press, recent Chartist criticism presents the aesthetic and ideological aspirations of Chartist texts as a coherent program of what James Epstein calls “radical expression,” a discourse of agitation and inspiration which contested, appropriated, and (perhaps more contentiously) influenced dominant literary culture. Margaret A. Loose is the only critic from this group to range across both fiction and poetry, and though her analysis of the leading Chartist poet Ernest Jones is likely to be overshadowed by Rennie’s book on the author, Loose makes a worthy attempt to reshape and rethink the Chartist canon. She brings together for the first time the three Chartist “epics”—W.J. Linton’s illustrated Bob-Thin, Or the Poorhouse Fugitive (1845), Thomas Cooper’s The Purgatory of Suicides (1847), and Jones’s The New World (1851)—and makes a salient point that Chartist readers were sufficiently sophisticated and able to appreciate the political valences of versification, parody, and literary allusion. The book’s main legacy is likely to be her discussion of women and Chartism, particularly the discussion of Elizabeth La Mont and Mary Hutton, two named female poets. Hutton had the “more enlarged public identity” (160) and although her “acerbic, political” poems (162) were well received by the predominantly patriarchal Chartist intelligentsia, her lyrics also betrayed a vulnerability to the twin forces of capitalism and lack of female rights. Unlike Loose’s wide-ranging approach to Chartist literature, Simon Rennie’s The Poetry of Ernest Jones focuses solely on the leading Chartist “laureate” Ernest Jones. As Janowitz and Miles Taylor have each shown, Jones was an outsider who achieved Chartist fame by self-consciously harnessing the authority of poetry, crafting a poetic persona of dedication and self-sacrifice, and utilizing a range of genres from the lyric to the “song” that would appeal to the maximum number of Chartist readers. For these reasons Jones is an ideal case study for examining the agency of Chartist poetry and the variety of ways in which this “politico-poetic discourse” (Rennie 1) mobilized aesthetic pleasure to engage with “extra-literary contexts” (66), including the vexed and irresolvable dilemma of reform versus revolution. Rennie cautions against over-romanticizing Jones’s own post-Romantic beliefs in the social power of poetry—“the effects of poetry, political or otherwise, on the consciousness of the reader are often residual, or even atemporal” (68)—but at the same time acknowledges that it was precisely the immediacy and morale-building imperative that made this poetry unique: unlike Jones’s hero Shelley, the Chartist poet was immersed in and spoke to a mass movement [on poetry, see Chapman’s chapter]. This representative role was both a blessing and a burden: Jones was not afraid to berate the cowardice of his un-chivalric male readers in his early verse, and when he was jailed for two years in 1848 he milked his sufferings for all they were worth, even claiming that he wrote prison poems in his own blood. Rennie is right to be skeptical about this self-fashioning, but he also shows that the “extra-literary context” of the European revolutions of 1848–51 prompted some of Jones’s most impressive work, most notably The New World: A Democratic Poem, an “epic” review of world history which was rechristened The Revolt of Hindustan after the Indian rebellion of 1857, and a text which has rightly attracted considerable critical attention for its vision of imperial breakdown and colonial rebellion (Gilbert, Vargo Underground). But Rennie also illuminates lesser-known poems such as “The Working Man’s Song” (which insists that “Frank—Briton—Teuton, are one”) and “The Age of Peace,” which debunks the idea of a post-1848 “Pax Britannica” by listing conflict zones across the globe from Ireland to India. This heroic, masculine conclusion to Jones’s poetic career contrasts neatly with Loose’s feminized closure, though it is important to remember that Jones also wrote the remarkable portfolio novel Woman’s Wrongs, also published in his impressive periodical Notes to the People (1850–52). As much as he aspired to Parnassian heights, Jones was first and foremost a radical editor and journalist who operated through the primary, material means of communication between the writer and audience, the Chartist press. Radical print culture was precisely that, a culture of print, and extracting texts from this context always runs the risk of hierarchization and misrepresenting the experience of 172
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the radical reader who absorbed multiple textual genres, texts, and messages from across the pages of each periodical. Rob Breton tries to correct this distortion in his study of Chartist fiction’s “oppositional aesthetics,” a term which refers to the widespread refusal of Chartist writers to give their readers happy endings and progressive character development. Breton sees this negation as the main divergence between Chartist fiction and what Breton calls the “middle-class novel,” and he illustrates the point across a range of subgenres, tropes, and themes: the social-problem narrative, historical romance, temperance, the fallen woman, and the deus ex machina. One of the strengths of Breton’s book is that it ranges well beyond the sparse number of Chartist novels and delves into the hinterland of shorter, more fugitive texts—and significantly, Breton and Vargo have produced an exhaustive online bibliography of Chartist fiction that should now become the standard reference point for future scholars (Breton and Vargo). Far from being an indicator of underdevelopment or callowness, Breton argues that this counter-hegemonic anti-fiction exposed the ideological bias of mainstream fiction, which centered on property plots, inheritance, the absence of labor, “middle-class” morality, and romantic resolutions to social conflicts. To this extent, Chartist fiction was a symbolic statement of the gaping absence of a political cure for the nation’s ills: “only radical political change could constitute resolution” (127). But Breton also adds an important qualifier to this radical pessimism: the pages of Chartist periodicals in which these stories first appeared provided the political direction and purpose to solve these difficulties. The Chartist “imaginary,” like other political movements, was a dialectic of injustice and vision. Critics are understandably drawn to the textual manifestation of the tension between these two discourses, but more attention needs to be given to how they operated within radical print culture more generally. Chartist criticism is often most illuminating when it overlaps with the methodologies of periodical studies, and it is worth a reminder that much middle-class fiction also emerged from periodicals, though it usually progressed into book form, unlike its radical counterpart. Both Chris Vanden Bossche and Gregory Vargo put their knowledge of the Chartist press to good use in their respective studies [on periodical studies, see Hughes’s chapter; on serialization and short fiction, see Bernstein’s]. A highlight of both books is a close reading of Thomas Martin Wheeler’s Sunshine and Shadow (1849–50), Chartism’s most iconic and self-referential novel, which first appeared in short “weekly communions” in the flagship Northern Star (1837–52) in the wake of the political turbulence of 1848. Wheeler’s express aim was to represent the history of Chartism up to that point through the story of his hero Arthur Morton, a working man who undergoes what Engels called “typical” experiences: skilled work, marriage, unemployment, emigration, political activism, and eventual exile to avoid prosecution. This combination of Bildungsroman and documentary is a classic example of radical fiction’s creative revision of established norms, so it is unsurprising that Wheeler’s story merits sustained critical attention. Vanden Bossche looks at the story’s complex links to the Chartist Land Plan, a utopian project aimed at resettling urban slum-dwellers into self-sufficient rural cottages. Although he was a direct beneficiary of this scheme and wrote the novel from one of its cottages, Wheeler refused to grant this boon to his hero and instead sent him into exile to reinforce the point that “the future of Chartism was unclear” (124). Vargo takes a global perspective and focuses on the narrative’s anti-colonialist credentials in the episodes where Morton travels to the Caribbean and America. Vargo shows convincingly how reports on European revolutionary struggles in adjacent columns of the Northern Star bled into the narrative, contextualizing and ironizing the hero’s tribulations. As this discussion demonstrates, the relationship between “late” Chartism and European politics merits further investigation. W.J. Linton, for example, one of the least researched Chartist authors and a staunch internationalist who knew Mazzini, envisioned a “Republic of Europe” in his remarkable periodical English Republic (1851–55); he even drew a map which speaks directly to present anxieties about Europe’s stability. Vargo is also strong on the journalistic and pamphlet origins of the Swiftian Book of Murder, an anonymous, anti-Malthusian satire that acquired cult status around the time of the 173
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first Chartist petition in 1839. Finally, Vargo’s interpretation of Thomas Cooper’s fascinating short stories as a collective working-class Bildungsroman shows convincingly how Chartist writers “used popular literary forms for their own ends and recontextualized familiar genres in an oppositional print culture” (2). These arguments are well made, and there are now clear signs that the “oppositional aesthetics” of Chartist literature are finding favor within more mainstream Victorian critical channels. The best example of this growing consensus is Isobel Armstrong’s provocative Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2016). The trajectory of this revisionist study is intriguing. Armstrong’s controversial argument seems at first to be diametrically opposed to the advocacy of unabashed Chartist devotees. She refutes the commonly accepted view (which both Vanden Bossche and Vargo subscribe to) that the social-problem novel was the locus of the “democratic imagination”: “specifically political programmes and accounts of the franchise and reform in fiction are not where we will find a democratic imagination” (28). In other words, we are looking in the wrong place for radical writing: “the mechanics of the ballot are not where political energy lies” (8). In place of parliamentary politics, Armstrong substitutes illegitimacy, a trope which exposes the oppressions of patriarchal capitalism and delivers “alternative readings of the real” (89) through its use of a “genealogical imperative” (13), in other words disputes about property. She then demonstrates this methodology through close readings of six canonical novels, and if this had been the sum total of the book it would have been a major counterblast to Chartist criticism. However, against the grain of her main argument, Armstrong acknowledges that Chartist fiction posed a direct challenge to the “default conservatism” of the Victorian novel (54). Her discussion of Sunshine and Shadow and George W.M. Reynolds’s Mary Price: Or the Memoirs of a Servant-Maid (1852) focuses on the intrusive narrative voice, “a declamatory and often agonistic voiceover of commentary and explanation” (257), and on the “simplification” of bourgeois realism which, she argues, is stripped down to its basic class functions. She also highlights how the stories challenge the commodification of women (261) with bold depictions of sexual freedom. Armstrong also agrees with Vargo that the direction of literary influence was not all one way, and that the poor relation or upstart may have bestowed cultural capital on the literary parent. Her example is Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), which she claims may have borrowed from Mary Price. Vargo is more forthright: “middle-class authors learned in turn from experimental writing that appeared in the radical press” (2). In some ways this claim is not contentious: as Mikhail Bakhtin argued, the novel has always absorbed the energies, tropes, plots, and character types of popular culture. But in the Victorian period the categories of the popular and the polite became entangled with class politics and suffered a damaging split (Vargo; James). Even though most radicals saw themselves as deeply respectable, mass politics was demonized as wayward, volatile, misguided, and brutish—as in Thomas Carlyle’s essay Chartism (1839). If middle-class novelists did indeed learn from the radical press, this was not an association to be openly declared. One of the purposes of the social-problem novel was to neutralize Chartism by dramatizing the misguidedness, folly, and tragedy of its followers. Nevertheless, Vargo argues that Gaskell’s focus on autodidacticism in Mary Barton (1848) shows a debt to the Chartist promotion of education, and that Charles Dickens’s rendition of transnational politics in A Tale of Two Cities (1859) borrows from Chartist internationalism. As evidence for the latter claim, Vargo cites the fact that Dickens helped Thomas Cooper to get published, though patronage cut both ways, and Cooper also acted as a source for Charles Kingsley’s unflattering portrayal of Chartist print culture in Alton Locke (1850), as Vargo notes (29–30). Dickens is probably the most important test case of the reciprocity thesis, as he was much admired by Chartists for both his comic skills and his social conscience. Vargo’s modest claim for a specifically Chartist influence on Dickens sits alongside more sustained studies of Dickens’s complex relation with the overlapping spheres of popular and radical culture by Sally Ledger, Sambudha Sen, and Mary L. Shannon [on the novel, see Michie’s chapter]. 174
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2. Radicalism, Popular Fiction, and Periodicals Shannon’s prize-winning book, Dickens, Reynolds and Mayhew on Wellington Street, provides a new methodology for exploring radical print culture in the mid-Victorian period. Drawing on the topographical techniques of cultural geography and the social network theories of Bruno Latour, Shannon argues that the physical proximity of the offices of Dickens, Reynolds, and Henry Mayhew in the 1840s and 1850s generated a productive climate of competition and ambition as each figure sought to shape the format and future of popular print culture. The idea that Dickens and Reynolds may have rubbed shoulders daily on their way to and from work is particularly fascinating as there was no love lost between the two men. Dickens was justifiably aggrieved that Reynolds began his career in the 1830s by plagiarizing Pickwick Papers, but by the time he launched his twopenny Household Words (1850–59) in March 1850, Dickens was more concerned about Reynolds’s lethal combination of journalistic popularity and radical celebrity. The penny-issue Reynolds’s Miscellany (1846–69) and Reynolds’s Political Instructor (1849–50) both commanded larger readerships. Moreover, it was known that Reynolds was about to launch his most enduring legacy, Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper (1850–1967), later that year. This prompted Dickens to lay his cards on the table: in the “Preliminary Word” to the first issue of Household Words, he greeted those “tillers of the field . . . whose company it is an honour to join” but attacked “others here—Bastards of the Mountain, draggled fringe on the Red Cap, Panders to the basest passions of the lower natures—whose existence is a national reproach. And these, we should consider it our higher service to reproach” (Dickens, 1: 1–2). This was a vain wish, as two years later Dickens was exasperated by his inability to “displace the prodigious heaps of nonsense, which suffocate their better sense” (Storey, Tillotson, and Burgis, 602), even though Household Words had achieved a respectable circulation of over 30,000 (Drew). Shannon’s astute point is that Dickens conceived of the popular periodical press as a networked community within a specific London location, simultaneously both a real and imagined place which could be celebrated, defended, and contested, and which readers could also inhabit virtually. Mastering a huge field of print, visual, and archival sources, Shannon persuasively and vividly recreates a typical working day in the life of Wellington Street, a congested hub of over 20 editorial offices, including the Examiner, Morning Chronicle, Punch, and Puppet Show. Her argument is that editors and their papers absorbed and remediated the seething energies of urban life that funneled through this central London thoroughfare, though the material and virtual mapping of popular literary culture did not end there; in her final chapter Shannon extends these print networks to the further reaches of the British Empire. Despite the necessarily speculative nature of some of Shannon’s conclusions about what may or may not have happened on Wellington Street, this book makes a compelling case for paying more attention to the creative synergies generated by the physical location of radical publishers and the sense of community, inclusion, and exclusion this produced. The central conflict between Dickens and Reynolds gives the book its narrative frisson and highlights the challenge which radical print culture posed to the hegemony of liberal, respectable Victorian values. I have focused on Reynolds because his place within the Chartist canon is now widely accepted and, unlike most of his radical contemporaries, he was phenomenally popular. A similar point could also be made about Reynolds’s compatriot Edward Lloyd, publisher of the infamous penny bloods and the founder of the liberal-leaning and pro-Chartist Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (1842–1931). It is indicative of the surge of interest in radical Victorian print culture that the first collection of scholarly essays on Lloyd was published in 2019. Edward Lloyd and his World: Popular Fiction, Politics and the Press in Victorian Britain, edited by Sarah Louise Lill and Rohan McWilliam, covers all aspects of Lloyd’s career, from his imitations of Dickens to his success as an entrepreneur of “Salisbury Square” sensational fiction and his triumphal role as a press baron and promoter of a cheap, mass-produced newspaper that sold a million copies a week by the end of the century. This volume will complement Anne Humpherys’s and Louis James’s landmark G.W.M. Reynolds: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics and the Press (2008), and help to put both these remarkable figures firmly on the literary-historical map.
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One aspect of both Reynolds’s and Lloyd’s oeuvres that distinguished them from the mainstream of Chartist literary culture was their investment in visual imagery. Their readers were offered a range of visual pleasures from very crude woodcuts in the penny bloods to the more elegant and accomplished (though often equally racy and sensational) illustrations in Reynolds’s periodicals and part-issue fiction. As Brian Maidment has noted, even the cheapest of Reynolds’s publications “look relatively sophisticated and even ‘genteel’ to modern eyes, with their double-columned pages held within discreet double rules, and with wood-engraved vignette illustrations, often highly finished and tonally complex” (227). Such “sophisticated” and “tonally complex” images challenge the idea that popular illustrations were a hallmark of downmarket vulgarization, “pandering to the basest passions of the lowest natures,” in Dickens’s harsh terms. Though the purchase price of a penny was aimed primarily at a working-class market, this did not exclude more affluent readers, including genteel women, from enjoying the visual and verbal satisfactions of Reynolds’s and Lloyd’s texts. The cross-class appeal of radical print culture may have been an uncomfortable fact for Dickens, Thackeray, and other establishment authors who Othered what Wilkie Collins branded the “unknown public,” but it is important to remember that radical texts and paratexts functioned at a number of interpretive levels, from immediate impact to deeper analysis. This is especially the case in radical caricature, a genre which has received very little critical attention and which I will discuss by way of concluding this section of the chapter. As Maidment has shown in his pioneering study Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order, 1820–50 (2013), it is a grave error to assume that British caricature ceased to function between the demise of the Georgian “Golden Age” of single prints and the arrival of Punch. Instead of disappearing, graphic satire fragmented and diversified into a variety of serialized and periodicalized formats aimed at an expanding, image-hungry public: prices, quality, design, and reprographic medium were targeted at different social strata. Expensive, metal-engraved intaglio reproduction was replaced by the more durable and cheaper lithography and wood engraving. Maidment traces the evolution of a new, popular iconographic language of social satire which, in the hands of experts like George Cruikshank and Robert Seymour, influenced the style and content of the burgeoning illustrated fiction market. Maidment’s meticulous archaeology has added a great deal to our understanding of popular visual culture in the transitional phase between the Romantic and Victorian periods, but there is another, parallel development that his history explicitly leaves out: the democratization of political caricature. The launch of Figaro in London in 1831 saw the arrival of the penny-issue satirical periodical and a highly influential reinvention of the political cartoon as the front-page woodcut. With weekly sales of around 40,000 copies, Figaro in London quickly established itself as a powerful new cultural tool of political reportage and accountability. Its success, due in no small part to the skills of its artist, the indefatigable Seymour, was followed by a slew of pro-Chartist penny newspapers later in the decade: Penny Satirist (1837–46), Cleave’s Gazette of Variety (1837–44) and Odd Fellow (1839–42) were all illustrated by the prolific but elusive Charles Jameson Grant. Until the arrival of Punch (1841–2002) and the Illustrated London News (1842–1989) in the early 1840s, these radical weeklies dominated the visual representation of politics in Britain. Both the deceptively sophisticated woodcuts and the textual content of the papers implied a reader-viewer of considerable education and political literacy. In order to compete with these titles, the fourpenny middle-class Punch had to deliver a trenchant critique of early Victorian capitalism and borrow many elements of their visual style, particularly the two-paneled diptych of jarring social contrasts and the replacement of speech bubbles with captions. I have explored this remarkable story of counter-hegemonic popular visual culture in The Rise of Victorian Caricature (2020), which includes chapters on the Reform Bill crisis, Chartism, and Queen Victoria [on popular fiction and culture, see Daly’s chapter].
3. Socialist Print Culture at the Fin De Siècle It is somewhat ironic that the socialist renaissance of the late-Victorian period occurred after most of the Chartist demands had been met. The Reform Acts of 1867 and 1885 enfranchised most adult 176
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men and, apart from annual parliaments, the rest of the Chartist political program was implemented: secret ballot, no property qualification, a salary for members of parliament, and equal electoral districts. From the perspective of the Chartist 1840s, this would have been deemed a major victory. Other reforms such as improved sanitation and free elementary education seemed to indicate that the state was finally taking its responsibilities for the welfare and progress of the working classes seriously. But these measures did little to ameliorate the deleterious social effects of the rapid advance of industrial capitalism. The socialist revival was a response to the stubborn persistence of Benjamin Disraeli’s “two nations” of rich and poor. Just as the parliamentary investigations (known colloquially as Blue Books) and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851) had revealed an appalling national landscape of deprivation, disease, and moral decay in the mid-Victorian period, so the next generation of social investigators in 1880s and 1890s unveiled the spectacle of slum housing, homelessness, unemployment, poor health, and rampant prostitution in the heart of the metropolis, a “dark continent” that was likened (through a colonialist gaze) to the “savagery” of supposedly benighted first-nation peoples. In rapid succession, new radical organizations sprung up to confront these problems head-on. The most important of these were the Socialist Democratic Federation, the Socialist League (to which William Morris belonged before he founded the breakaway Communist League), the Fabian Society, and the Independent Labour Party (the precursor of the modern Labour Party). These movements overlapped with many other groups, causes, and factions, some of them utopian, that agitated for a host of progressive causes, including women’s suffrage, decolonization, anti-vivisection, secularism, anarchism, trade unionism, Irish independence, gay rights, and land reform. Like the Chartist movement, all these campaigns generated a prodigious print culture: according to the Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism, around 250 socialist periodicals and newspapers saw the light of day in the last two decades of the century (Hopkin). With the exception of a predictable interest in canonical figures such as Morris, this rich repository of radical print culture has received modest scholarly attention, though seminal critical and anthological work has now begun to appear. At the forefront of this recuperation is Deborah Mutch’s five-volume British Socialist Fiction, 1884– 1914 (2013). As Mutch observes in her General Introduction, there is “an enormous body of work, much of which remains largely undiscovered and un-researched” (1: ix). To show the socialist faith in “the power of print,” (I: ix), Mutch has selected an impressive range of short and longer fiction from a range of weekly periodicals. The most popular of these was Robert Blatchford’s The Clarion (1891– 1935) which sold up to 90,000 copies. Other important titles were Henry Hyndman’s Justice (1884– 1933), the Labour Leader (1894–1987), and Charles Allen Clarke’s Teddy Ashton’s Journal / Northern Weekly (1896–1910), all of which sold in their thousands. These circulation figures may seem modest when compared to popular magazines such as Tit-Bits which sold up to 600,000 weekly copies, but the actual radical readership was almost certainly much higher, as issues were shared and passed around communities. Nor did small circulation spell commercial disaster, since socialist periodicals were often subsidized by their owners or movements. The main preoccupation of the fiction, unsurprisingly, is socioeconomic injustice, but the stories are more than just lightly fictionalized reportage, as they often resort to conventional romance plots to carry the reader. Most of the authors that can be identified are men, though women did begin to contribute in increasing numbers as time wore on. High-profile figures such as Morris, Keir Hardie, and Edward Carpenter are included in Mutch’s volumes, but her main aim is to restore a sense of a literary community in which ordinary members would submit fiction to the periodicals, just as many Chartists proffered poems to the Northern Star. Mutch accepts that this aim is partially scuppered by the very format she is working within: by extracting the stories from their original context, the “multidimensional” aspect of embedded periodical reading is lost (1: xxiv). Mutch argues persuasively that this dislocation can lead to unnecessarily gloomy conclusions. H.J. Bramsbury’s novel A Working Class Tragedy, (1888-89) for example, ends with the hero’s suicide, but this pessimism is contradicted by the campaigning spirit of the periodical in which it appeared. Citing 177
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Raymond Williams’s point in Modern Tragedy (1966) that the classical focus on the fallen individual neglects the continued life of the community, Mutch concludes that “the reader who has invested time and money in the story” only had to turn to the “same page as the final instalment” to find “a list of lectures and meetings where they might help advance the socialist cause and avoid [the hero’s] fate” (1: liii). Mutch makes a compelling case for reinserting radical texts back into their point of origin in order to bring out the complex emotional and ideological consequences of this dialogical reading experience. Morris’s famous News from Nowhere (1890) is a classic case of the benefits of this approach. As Tony Pinkney has shown, the novel appeared in three different forms. It began as a weekly serial in the Socialist League’s Commonweal in 1890, where it was open to being shaped by readers’ responses. In 1891, a revised book version added several scenes of female labor, which suggests that Morris had indeed listened to some of his women readers. Finally, the expensive 1893 Kelmscott Press edition turned the text into an exemplum of the arts-and-crafts culture represented in the story. Pinkney could have added that the role of illustration and visual design was crucial in this transformation. In her capacious study Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (2013), Elizabeth Carolyn Miller reminds us that Commonweal interleaved the story with some of Walter Crane’s stunning “Cartoons for the Cause.” The result of this juxtaposition was a “utopian print space, severed chronologically and spatially from the historical present” (46). News from Nowhere is only the most famous example of what Miller calls “slow print,” a term she coins to describe the resistance of socialist periodicals to the commercialized, mass-produced, apolitical journalism which was fast-becoming the staple diet of the working classes. Miller deals with the irony that the “free” press, one of the most cherished causes of radicalism earlier in the century, had become a powerful cultural tool of industrial-capitalist ideology. For many socialists, it seemed that the image of the world portrayed in the popular press was an unwholesome diet of illusory consumerist freedoms, dubious sensationalism, and superficial knowledge. For radical publishers who wanted a complete break with this dominant ideology, the answer was no longer to try to out-gun the mainstream press but instead to retreat to a position of niche production. This tactic had the advantage of relatively low start-up costs, but the disadvantage of marginalization and ephemerality, and the further risk of perpetuating single-issue causes, what George Orwell would later (and damagingly) stereotype as socialist crankiness. But if the overall impact of these “slow” titles on the progress of socialism is still to be assessed, there is no denying that Miller has tapped into a bewitching array of titles for further study. One of my favorites is the intriguing “free love” journal The Adult (1897–99), deliciously subtitled “A Journal for the free Discussion of Tabooed Topics” (see also Jones). After its publisher was prosecuted for issuing Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds’s Sexual Inversion (1897), a “Free Press Defence Committee” was set up whose members included Walter Crane, George Bernard Shaw, Grant Allen, Edward Carpenter, and the Social Democratic Federation leaders Henry Hyndman and Harry Quelch. As this example highlights, one of the enduring and distinctive features of radical print culture was its resourcefulness and its participation within a dynamic culture of organized struggle and innovation. A closer look at Blatchford’s Clarion will show the benefits of a material culture approach to late-Victorian socialist periodicals. Like Reynolds News, The Clarion equated numbers with influence, and literature was one of its main attractions. Margaret Cole recalled: “There never was a paper like it; it was not in the least the preconceived idea of a socialist journal. It was not solemn; it was not highbrow; it did not deal in theoretical discussion, or inculcate dreary isms. It was full of stories, jokes and verses” (qtd. in Wright 75). Its rival Justice declared that “no-one since William Cobbett had ever had so direct an influence over the minds of working-class readers” as its editor Blatchford (qtd. In Wright 76). The Clarion was the hub of a whole way of life, including walking and cycling clubs, and its famous vans took its non-revolutionary socialist message to every corner of the country (indeed, the van is unceremoniously ejected from Mugsborough in a scene in Robert Tressell’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists [1914]). In addition to promoting Crane’s artwork as an idealized expression of the 178
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triumph of labor, Clarion showcased its own labor through a proliferating and self-generating series of pamphlets and publicity (for Crane’s career, see O’Neill). The British Library has a bound volume containing 49 numbered pamphlets issued between 1893 and 1908. The wrappers are a goldmine of information. Blatchford’s best-selling Merrie England (1893) is a constant reference point, with sales of over 850,000 copies by the early 1900s. Only Reynolds could claim such a following in the midVictorian period: at over 100 times the actual circulation of the periodical, the statistics convey an optimistic sense of the wider socialist community. Advertisements for Blatchford’s other works further enhance this impression, as connections to other radical print communities are displayed on the page. For example, a feminist network is established in three separate ads: a story for the Woman Worker, published by the Utopia Press; a novel called A Bohemian Girl: An Up-To-Date Love Story (1898); and a self-declared “slum” novel Julie (1900) which, as Chris Waters has noted, dramatizes the dilemma of a working-class female singer caught between philanthropic social mobility and class solidarity (102–3). These three titles participate in the New Woman revolution and adumbrate a radically alternative narrative of women’s lives which ranges well beyond the conventional constraints of domesticity and takes female experience into a range of occupational and cultural spheres [on the New Woman, see Youngkin’s chapter]. An additional important point is that the ads also declare a range of prices and formats that indicate the prestige value of literature and a cross-class market. While the pamphlets cost between a penny and threepence, the advertised novels cost from one shilling to 2s 6d in “cloth and gold,” a price well beyond the pockets of most working-class readers. These figures show that the place of the literary text within socialist print culture was dynamic and fluid and that it responded to an overlapping, socially diverse readership. There are encouraging signs that the rich seam of socialist print culture uncovered by Mutch has begun to reshape literary history and critical practice. Michael Rosen’s anthology Worker’s Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables, and Allegories from Great Britain (2018) reprints around 50 children’s stories, most of which as are drawn from Mutch’s volumes. One of my favorites is Charles Allen’s Clarke’s reworking of Little Red Riding Hood which turns the familiar tale into an ecological-Marxist tract: “In those days men had not built ugly factories and forges to kill the flowers and trees, and there were no hideous, dirty towns in any part of the land” (112). This intervention is a reminder of the importance of green issues in socialist thought, something addressed by Rignall, Klaus, and Cunningham. I want to end by reaffirming the fact that radical print culture has much to offer the scholar of Victorian literature. As the work cited in this chapter has shown, radical texts are valuable not only for the ways in which they speak for the oppressed and marginalized in society but also for their critique of the literary mainstream which either ignores or pacifies deep-seated social divisions. The greater availability of radical primary texts in anthologies and digital databases has opened up an exciting area of scholarship that promises to change how we conceive and study the Victorian period. Modifying T.S. Eliot’s famous formulation of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” we can now consider how “Tradition and the Collective Talent” has left a rich legacy of poems, stories, and images for posterity to ponder and learn from.
Key Critical Works Isobel Armstrong. Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Laurel Brake, and Marysa Demoor, editors. Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism. Rob Breton. The Oppositional Aesthetics of Chartist Fiction. Ian Haywood. “The Literature of Chartism.” Margaret A. Loose. The Chartist Imaginary: Literary Form in Working-Class Political Theory and Practice. Brian Maidment. Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order. Rohan McWilliam, and Sarah Lill, editors. Edward Lloyd and his World: Popular Fiction, Politics and the Press in Victorian Britain. Elizabeth Caroline Miller. Slow Print.
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Ian Haywood Mary L. Shannon. Dickens, Reynolds and Mayhew on Wellington Street. Gregory Vargo. An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction.
Works Cited Armstrong, Isobel. Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Oxford UP, 2016. Bakhtin, Mikhail. “From the Pre-History of Novelistic Discourse.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist and Translated by Caryl Emerson, U of Texas P, 1981, pp. 41–83. Brake, Laurel, and Marysa Demoor, editors. Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism. Academia Press and British Library, 2009. Breton, Rob. The Oppositional Aesthetics of Chartist Fiction: Reading against the Middle-Class Novel. Routledge, 2016. Breton, Rob, and Gregory Vargo. “Chartist Fiction.” Chartist Fiction Online. http://chartisfiction.hosting.nyu.edu/. Dickens, Charles. “Preliminary Word.” Household Words: A Weekly Journal, vol. 1, 1850, p. 254. Drew, John. “Household Words’.” Brake and Demoor, pp. 292–3. Epstein, James. Radical Expression: Political Language, Symbol and Ritual in Britain, 1790–1950. Oxford UP, 1997. Gilbert, Pamela K. “History and It Ends in Chartist Epic.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 37, no. 1, 2009, pp. 27–42. Haywood, Ian. “The Literature of Chartism.” The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture, edited by Juliet John, Oxford UP, 2016, pp. 83–102. ———, editor. The Literature of Struggle: An Anthology of Chartist Fiction; Chartist Fiction, Vol. One: ‘The Political Pilgrim’s Progress,’ Thomas Martin Wheeler, ‘Sunshine and Shadow’; Chartist Fiction,Vol. Two: Ernest Jones, ‘Woman’s Wrongs’. Routledge, 2016. ———. The Rise of Victorian Caricature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Hopkin, Deian. “Socialist Newspapers.” Brake and Demoor, p. 583. Humpherys, Anne, and Louis James. G. W. M. Reynolds: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics and the Press. Routledge, 2008. James, Louis. Fiction for the Working Man 1830–1850. 1963. 3rd expanded. Edward Everett Root, 2017. Janowitz, Anne. Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition. Cambridge UP, 1998. Jones, Sarah. “Gender, Reproduction and the Fight for Free Love in the late Nineteenth Century Periodical Press.” Women in Magazines: Research, Representation, Production and Consumption, edited by Rachel Ritchie, Sue Hawkins, Nicola Phillips, and S. Jay Kleinberg. Routledge, 2016, pp. 55–65. Ledger, Sally. Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2007. Loose, Margaret A. The Chartist Imaginary: Literary Form in Working-Class Political Theory and Practice. Ohio State UP, 2014. Maidment, Brian. Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order, 1820–50. Manchester UP, 2013. ———. “The Mysteries of Reading: Text and Illustration in the Fiction of G. W. M. Reynolds.” G. W. M. Reynolds: Nineteenth Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press, edited by Anne Humpherys and Louis James, Ashgate, 2009, pp. 225–46. McWilliam, Rohan, and Sarah Lill, editors. Edward Lloyd and His World: Popular Fiction, Politics and the Press in Victorian Britain. Routledge, 2019. Miller, Elizabeth Caroline. Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture. Stanford UP, 2013. Mutch, Deborah. British Socialist Fiction, 1884–1914, 5 vols. Pickering and Chatto, 2013. O’Neill, Morna. Walter Crane: The Arts and Crafts, Paintings, and Politics 1875–1890. Yale UP, 2010. Pinkney, Tony. “Problems in Utopia from the Thames Valley to the Pacific Edge.” Utopias and Dystopias in the Fiction of H. G. Wells and William Morris: Landscape and Space, edited by Emelyne Godfrey, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 91–105. Rennie, Simon. The Poetry of Ernest Jones: Myth, Song and the ‘Mighty Mind’. Routledge, 2016. Rignall, John, H. Gustav Klaus, and Valentine Cunningham, editors. Ecology and the Literature of the British Left: The Red and the Green. Ashgate, 2012. Rosen, Michael, editor. Worker’s Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables, and Allegories from Great Britain. Princeton UP, 2018. Sanders, Mike. The Poetry of Chartism. Cambridge UP, 2009. Sen, Sambudha. London, Radical Culture, and the Making of the Dickensian Aesthetic. Ohio State UP, 2012. Shannon, Mary L. Dickens, Reynolds and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street. Ashgate, 2015. Storey, Graham, Kathleen Tillotson, and Nina Burgis, editors. The Letters of Charles Dickens, Volume V1: 1850– 1852. Clarendon, 1988. Taylor, Miles. Ernest Jones, Chartism and the Romance of Politics. Oxford UP, 2003.
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Radical Print Culture Vanden Bossche, Chris. Reform Acts: Chartism, Social Agency, and the Victorian Novel. Johns Hopkins UP, 2014. Vargo, Gregory. “Radicalism from Below: Radicalism and Popular Fiction.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 44, no. 2, 2016, pp. 439–53. ———. An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel. Cambridge UP, 2017. Waters, Chris. British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884–1914. Manchester UP, 1990. Wright, Martin. “Robert Blatchford, the Clarion Movement, and the Crucial Years of British Socialism, 1891– 1900.” Edward Carpenter and Late Victorian Radicalism, edited by Tony Brown, Frank Cass, 1990, pp. 74–99.
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16 VISUAL CULTURE Kate Flint
As we read, we form mental images. Being conscious of the visual elements and devices that we find within texts deepens our comprehension of the mental images that we form and the associations that we make. Visual alertness, when reading, can function as a powerful critical tool. Every glance, gaze, stare, bashful downward look; every avoidance of the eye; every act of scrutiny invites our attention. We are invited to examine a tiny detail, which focuses our attention away from the generalized surroundings; we are invited to stretch our sight into the misty distance. Sometimes these careful evocations of scale are deliberately juxtaposed, as when the narrator in Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower (1882)—a novel with a global and celestial reach—calls our attention to the lichen-stains and mildew and pads of moss and shade-loving insects on the base of the substantial column on which Swithin St. Cleeve has his astronomical telescope. We need to notice colors, or their absence; to take on board the effects of grayness, of twilight, of haze; to note the decadent associations of a touch of yellow. It’s important to consider framing devices like the window or door, or the reflections, the side-angles, and the self-regard that a mirror can reveal. We should consider how perspective and motion and unfamiliar points of view are deployed—when we are invited to look down from a balloon, say, or—like Rob the Grinder in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1847)—peer down through a skylight; or fly, with John Ruskin, over Europe’s landscapes at the opening of The Stones of Venice (1851–53). How might a critic make sense of the visuality of visual information in Victorian texts? Traditionally, the vast field of visual culture has often been approached as a collection of objects of study—a heterogenous assemblage, to be sure, but one that above all comprises things that we look at or, on occasion, look through. These objects include history paintings in oil; landscapes in water color; illustrated books of poetry and cartoons in Punch; engravings of battles in the Illustrated London News and pictures of steaming cups of tea on advertisement hoardings; architectural drawings; statues and monuments; panoramas and dioramas; postcards and Valentine cards; tattoos; scrapbooks and illuminated photo albums; diagrams and maps; medical, botanical, and other scientific drawings; phrenological heads and physiognomic composites; waxworks and puppet shows; tableaux and poses plastiques; illustrations of fancy puddings in Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) and engravings of crowded streets and alleys in John Blanchard and Gustave Doré’s London: A Pilgrimage (1869); souvenirs and mementos—of visits to the seaside or Queen Victoria’s Jubilees; Staffordshire figurines and jewelry in the form of insects; the catalog to the 1851 Great Exhibition or the publicity materials announcing Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show [on popular fiction and culture, see Daly’s chapter]. 182
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But I want to emphasize, from the start, how the intersection of visual culture—taken as a whole— with literary culture involves a particular emphasis on how we look, whether that looking be understood as an activity strongly dependent on shared social protocols or (as was increasingly the case toward the end of the nineteenth century) understood as something highly subjective and individualized. We may invoke a whole range of sites of spectatorship, including buildings such as museums and galleries or the temporary structures containing the Great Exhibition and other World’s Fairs; or churches, with stained glass windows and ornamented pavements; or railway stations. All such locations appear in Victorian literary writing, together with entertainments, such as pantomimes, circuses, music halls, and sporting events. Streets have their own visual life, including shop windows, store displays, advertising placards, and posters; Victoria’s Jubilee processions and state funerals. Science took public, visible form through demonstrations at venues such as the British Institution or the display of archaeological finds; or in the Zoological Gardens in Regents Park and the hot houses in Kew Gardens. If all of these places and occasions provided opportunities for looking at different material displays, they also offered the potential to socialize, to encounter an acquaintance after spotting them across a room, and to observe other, unknown individuals; to assess fashions in dress and hats and the latest trimmings and colors (noting the increased range of possibilities after the introduction of aniline dyes in the late 1850s); to identify uniforms or the costumes worn by foreign visitors; to note trends in hairstyles and beards or, toward the end of the century, to debate whether or not women “painted” or not. Class, “respectability,” even sexual preferences (does that man have a green carnation on his lapel?) could be read on the street. In very many cases, the visual assessment practiced by the individual in a drawing room or a market place involved highly similar strategies to those employed when reading a written text. All of this only applies, necessarily, if we are sighted. Considering how visually impaired people navigate visual cues affords an enriched awareness of the work that such cues perform and the means by which we process them—issues which were debated by the Victorians and which continue to be highly pertinent today. This interpretive looking—whether it be turned to paintings displayed at the Royal Academy, an advertisement for a hat, or a page of Henry James—is sustained by an understanding that visual culture does not stand independent of cultural structures and formations as a whole. W.J.T. Mitchell, one of the most influential figures in establishing what we understand today by “visual culture,” wisely and rightly refuses to take the term for granted. It “commits one at the outset,” as he puts it, to a set of hypotheses that need to be tested—for example, that vision is (as we say) a cultural construction, that it is learned and cultivated, not simply given by nature; that therefore it might have a history related in some yet to be determined way to the history of arts, technologies, media, and social practices of display and spectatorship; and finally that it is deeply involved with human societies, with the ethics and politics, aesthetics and epistemology of seeing and being seen (166). Mitchell’s words serve as a highly pertinent reminder that behind all types of display lie systems and processes, both abstract and concrete. In what follows, I explore Victorian innovations in visual culture and have more to say about how changing social formations impacted not just looking itself but also theories of the visual as they developed during the twentieth century. I then consider the implications of what might be said to be “natural,” or at least physiologically grounded, about looking, and show how Victorian aesthetics, in turn, were consistently connected to the body. After examining how text and image work in dialogue with one another, I conclude by looking at instances where Victorian writing deals explicitly with visual materials, as a way of making suggestions about directions in which the interaction between the written and the visual may profitably move in the future.
1. Victorian Visual Technologies Visual culture is impossible to separate from material culture—from the developments in reproductive techniques that the Victorian period witnessed; from the availability of pigments and woods and 183
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metals and hence from global trade routes; from the development of aniline dyes in the late 1850s; from the falling price of paper, and from the business and financial organizations that supported all this. If the nineteenth century’s improved methods of transportation helped to move goods and people around, in turn they created new speeds and modes of viewing. Such an experience is memorably recorded in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “A Trip to Paris and Belgium” (1849), which opens, A constant keeping-past of shaken trees, And a bewildered glitter of loose road; Banks of bright growth, with single blades atop Against white sky; and wires—a constant chain— That seem to draw the clouds along with them. As Rossetti’s lines show, Victorians were self-consciously engaged in using their eyes to apprehend, consume, and understand their surroundings. Indeed, a fascination with the act of seeing runs through the period. It is reflected in the delight Victorians took in optical tools and toys, ranging from microscopes and telescopes to such entertaining devices as stereoscopes, phenakistiscopes, zoetropes, praxinoscopes, and flip books—devices that were precursors, in many ways, of the cinema [on material culture, see Lutz’s chapter; on technology, see Menke’s; and on economics, see Rajan’s]. Auguste and Louis Lumière patented their cinématographe in February 1895: photographic images began to move. This may be seen as the end point of a longer process of invention. Various means of capturing the still image, on prepared paper and metal surfaces; on wet plates, dry plates, and finally on film, had been developed since William Henry Fox Talbot announced his invention of the salted paper process—succeeded by the calotype—early in 1839, very shortly after Louis Daguerre had launched his invention of the daguerreotype. In turn, this desire for fixing an image grew out of such earlier devices as the camera obscura and the camera lucida. By the late nineteenth century, amateur photographers were able to purchase a relatively portable camera such as the Kodak Brownie (“you click the shutter—we do the rest”) and pursue something that had previously been largely the province of scientists, professionals, and leisured or moneyed amateurs. The resulting snapshots increased yet further the large quantities of photographic images already in circulation, whether in the form of studio portraits or cartes de visite; or reproduced, using the half-tone method (patented in Philadelphia in 1881), in newspapers and periodicals (Batchen, Beegan). Probably more than any other medium, photography has been responsible for the democratization of the image in the Victorian period. As Lady Eastlake wrote in 1857, the photograph was found everywhere: it had already become a household word and a household want; is used alike by art and science, by love, business, and justice; is found in the most sumptuous saloon, and in the dingiest attic—in the solitude of the Highland cottage, and in the glare of the London gin-palace—in the pocket of the detective, in the cell of the convict, in the folio of the painter and architect, among the papers and patterns of the millowner and manufacturer, and on the cold brave breast on the battle-field. (443) The study of visual culture over the past 20 or so years has frequently been preoccupied with the widening dissemination of images, with the growth of mass culture and of the ephemeral, and with the relationship of visual materials to the development of industrialized social modernity, including the role of images in establishing typologies of race and criminality (Novak). In this emphasis on the ephemeral, scholarship takes its cue from earlier commentators. One notes Charles Baudelaire’s 1863 figuration of a modern man searching for—and finding—“the ephemeral, the 184
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fugitive, the contingent” on the streets of Paris and in contemporary expression (including dandyism, women’s fashions, and make-up) (19). Later in the century, Georg Simmel discussed in “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903) the “highest degree of nervous energy” that modern metropolitan consumerism instills, fed by market forces that work on “purchasers who never appear in the actual field of vision of the producers themselves” (330; 327). Siegfried Kracauer’s 1927 essay “Die Photographie” (English translation 1993) emphasizes that a photograph is not some transparent window onto the world, but performs varied and complicated work in relation to temporality and memory. Perhaps above all, scholars of visual culture are greatly indebted to Walter Benjamin. In his unfinished Arcades Project (1927–40), he describes and enlarges upon world’s exhibitions, department stores, and commodities. His agglomeration of sites, objects, and topics, accompanied by both commentary and a careful collage of quotations, is exuberantly varied. From iron constructions to self-propelled toys to dioramas in shop windows, he sees material phenomena as phantasmagoric signs of modern society—filtered through both Baudelairian and Marxist thought. Additionally, Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) has had an enormous influence over the discussion of photography, and of the mass consumption of images more broadly.
2. The Psychology of Vision But visual culture encompasses far more than what is looked at, its circulation, its ephemerality, and its relationship to patterns of consumption. Despite a long-standing emphasis on mass culture (and one should note the disdain expressed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno for “the culture industry”), on cultural values presumed to be held in common by particular classes and groups, and on tastes formed by education, social position, and personal experience, it remains true that each individual sees differently in terms of the workings of our actual eyes. In their concern with how we see, today’s scholars of visual culture take up the Victorians’ own sustained interest in the eye’s variations, and with how it is connected to brain and body. These questions were addressed by such experts in the physiology and psychology of seeing as Alexander Bain, George Henry Lewes, James Sully, and at the century’s end, Grant Allen. Moreover, as scientists and essayists acknowledged, the eyes do not operate independently of the other senses, something that is also investigated by poets and novelists as well as physiologists, who take up the topic of blindness (Tilley). Except in cases of physical impairment, eyes send messages to the brain that work together with information and associations provided by sound and touch and smell. Victorian visual culture is inseparable from the operations of the whole sensorium—and this includes the part played by all the senses in establishing associations and engaging the operations of memory. These same Victorian pioneers in the physiology and psychology of vision extended their concern with our apprehension of the visible world to the phenomena of the unseen, including the images that accompany the work of recollection, imagination, or—a closely linked category—that come into “the mind’s eye” when reading. In doing so, they also call into question the reliability of the eye in a different sense from its physiological variability. I discuss this issue at length in The Victorians and the Visual Imagination, as well as in a later chapter on visual culture and Victorian fiction. In these, I call attention to how George Lewes, in an 1860 Blackwood’s article called “Seeing is Believing,” insists on the dangers of confusing vision—in a physiological sense—with inference. He is teaching his readers skepticism about supposedly paranormal manifestations—dinner-tables, complete with wine and fruit, that rise mysteriously into the air, or tongs that leap out of the fireplace. But the fact that we cannot see how these things have happened is by no means evidence for supernatural agency. “It is one thing,” Lewes writes, “to believe what you have seen, and another to believe that you have seen all there was to be seen” (“Seeing,” 381). Lewes is probably relying on his readers to pick up the allusion to John 20:29: “Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen 185
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me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed” (KJV), turning this to a secular and materialist end. Yet in the section titled “The Principle of Vision” in The Principles of Success in Literature (1865), Lewes advanced a more nuanced understanding of the workings of inference: it goes hand in hand, he acknowledges, with the information that one’s previous experience has already lodged in the mind. We may see a colored surface: that involves using the sense of sight. But perception, which he differentiates from the immediate work of the senses, supplies the knowledge that brings together our existing familiarity with roundness, texture, scent and taste: that’s how we know that an apple—whether on a table, on a painted canvas, or in a black and white engraving—is an apple. “Were it not for this mental vision supplying the deficiencies of ocular vision, the coloured surface would be an enigma” (189). For that matter, when we read in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1886–87) of Giles Winterborne pointing out a good crop of “bitter-sweets” to Grace Melbury as they drive away from market, and he nods “towards an orchard where some heaps of apples had been left lying ever since the ingathering,” it is our stored experience of fallen fruit that allows us to see this superfluity in our mind’s eye, expanding the verbal referent into something visible. Yet Grace, of course, doesn’t really see the apples at all; whereas Giles was seeing John-apples and farm-buildings she was beholding a much contrasting scene: a broad lawn in the fashionable suburb of a fast city, the evergreen leaves shining in the evening sun, amid which bounding girls, gracefully clad in artistic arrangements of blue, brown, red, and white, were playing at games, with laughter and chat, in all the pride of life, the notes of piano and harp trembling in the air from the open windows adjoining. . . . Beside this visioned scene the homely farmsteads did not quite hold their own from her present twentyyear point of survey. (42) In turn, it is our stored perceptions that allow us to retrieve, or recreate, scenes from earlier in our own lives—or that allow us, as readers, to create imaginary scenes for ourselves—in order to visualize what Grace beholds [on psychology, see Keen’s chapter, and on brain science, see Stiles’s]. In The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan explores how Victorian scientific studies of mind and emotion both addressed how writers and artists understood beauty—the main focus of his book— and point forward to much more recent concerns in cultural criticism about the relationship between external materialism and the physiological matter of the mind; between reading and empathy, between encountering formal symmetry and the responses of the body. As he explains, This possibility of a physiological, reflexive aesthetics emerged from a natural-theological concern with the ordered relationships between human beings and nature . . . The aspiration toward a science of beauty was often in close dialogue with much broader revisions of nineteenth-century understandings of human emotions, volition, and mental action. A language of the soul was displaced by a language of electrical waves, nervous currents, and adaptations over millennia. (128) Morgan builds his argument not just on scientific writers but also on the work of John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Vernon Lee. Or rather, he shows how their various approaches toward aesthetics are completely imbricated in their scientific interests in physical structures, physics, and physiology. As both Anne Helmreich, in Nature’s Truth: Photography, Painting, and Science in Victorian Britain, and John Holmes, in The Pre-Raphaelites and Science, recently make clear, Pre-Raphaelite painting, sculpture, and poetry “bear witness to one of the most fertile engagements with science by art, and to some of the 186
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richest collaborations between scientists and artists, of the nineteenth century” (Holmes 15). While Ruskin’s own polymathic interests indisputably had considerable influence on the works of the PreRaphaelites and other artists, the broader point is that what scientist and novelist C.P. Snow came, in 1959, to call “the two cultures”—the division between the sciences and the humanities—was nothing like as distinct. So it should not be surprising that Pater, in the opening of Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), described the function of the aesthetic critic as analogous to that of the experimental scientist, striving to distinguish, analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of the impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced. His end is reached when he has disengaged that virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes some natural element, for himself and others. (4) Additionally, as Rachel Teukolsky pointed out in relation to Pater’s fictionalization of aesthetic theory in his historical novel Marius the Epicurean (1885), it was the “chief task of the aesthetic critic . . . to create new orders from old elements, to rearrange, or to re-decorate” (143). This is all dependent, however, on human biology—and thus, by extension, the materiality of the human individual is linked to the materiality of the world. “What is the whole physical life,” Pater asks in The Renaissance, but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But those elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them— the passage of the blood, the waste and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain under every ray of light and sound—processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us: it rusts iron and ripens corn. (118) Yet these natural elements are only physically present in the words on the page through the fibers of the paper on which they are printed, the metallic frames of printing presses, and the solutions of pigments and dyes that are used for printing ink. We may, of course, be persuaded by their visuality, in the sense that font and layout, blank pages and complex capital letters, all play a role in our textual consumption, as do the columns, the page spreads, the borders, the complex arrangements of boxed and overlapping illustrations, and the coexistence of literary text and advertisements on the pages of periodicals and within the wrappers of novels published in part form. But above all—and perhaps to state the obvious—the prose of each of these critics—whether polemical, lyrical, meditative, evocative, or scientific—and the range of their points of reference is testimony to the inseparability of visual culture from the effects and impact of the written word. The written word—or the spoken word: Victorian audiences heard about seeing and interpreting from scientific demonstrations, from magic-lantern shows, and from lectures. [on aestheticism and decadence, see Evangelista’s chapter; on aesthetic formalism, see Greiner’s].
3. The Intermediality of Visual Culture Writing and lecturing about art reached numerous nineteenth-century publics. It appeared in specialist journals, such as the Magazine of Art (1878–1904), Art Journal (1849–1912; formerly the Art Union, 1839–49), and Studio (1893–1964). It was also prominent in the columns of daily newspapers and in 187
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periodicals; the Spectator, Saturday Review, and Athenaeum were assiduous in their coverage of exhibitions of all types. Considerable influence was assumed by individual critics such as Tom Taylor (who wrote for The Times for several decades in the mid-century), D.S. MacColl, Frederick Wedmore, and R.A.M. Stevenson (who all gently led a middle-class public into an understanding of the modern art emanating from France). Hilary Fraser extends our knowledge of women’s contribution to historical criticism in Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century. Certain writers on art, most notably Oscar Wilde and the artist James McNeill Whistler, were vociferous in their opposition to the assumption that paintings should tell stories, and in their condemnation of a picture-going public that wanted an easy moral to take away from art work. But by replacing an emphasis on narrative with lyrical language, the reader’s responsibility becomes not so much one of interpretive decoding—of putting a verbal signified to what they see on the canvas—but of succumbing to mood, atmosphere, affect. These may be conveyed in tone and color, in the choice of subject matter—a misty winter twilight over the Thames, with early-lit lamps glowing through the blue-grey gloom—or in the evocation of such a scene in their imagination. This is an aesthetic approach that tends toward the immersive and the attentive, and that appears to counter the speed and distractions of modern life. Immersion of a quite different kind is figured in Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s 1863 painting The Last Chapter (Birmingham Museum of Art), in which a young woman in a comfortable drawing room kneels on an Oriental rug in front of the fire, borrowing the light from its flames in order to finish the final pages of the novel that compels her attention. The painting’s date would suggest that Martineau is referencing the current craze for sensation fiction, with its gripping, often scandalous plots and, quite probably, the inflammatory power that it was alleged to have on its readers, especially women. Images of readers—women, men, children—offer one type of intersection between written and visual texts, variously depicting absorption, studiousness, boredom, escapism, alertness (Badia and Phegley; Flint, Woman Reader; Stewart). Such images offer a perfect instance of the constellation of factors involved in an approach based on visual studies. Analyzing this painting takes an understanding of contemporary attitudes toward reading (including its presumed effects on nerves and minds). It joins this together with the broader knowledge that allows one to place human subjects and their settings, dress, and furniture—their Chinese porcelain or their embroidered pincushion—in a wide matrix of cultural contexts. These can involve finely calibrated distinctions involving class and gender, indoors and outdoors, race and religion, country and city, provinces and metropolis. Such contextualization includes consulting exhibition reviews; these explain how a painting was represented to a public that might or might not have seen it, and offer further information about how a work was hung, the paintings to which it was compared, and contemporary aesthetic taste and biases. Furthermore, this painting, like any, cannot be taken separately from the conventions of representation that lie behind its composition, which include modes of realism and idealism, and the placement of details that invite cultural or typological decoding. Genre conventions overlap. Martin Meisel, in Realizations, discusses many examples of the collaborative work that took place between storytelling, theater and performance, and visual art in the nineteenth century: “[A]ll three forms,” he writes, “are narrative and pictorial; pictures are given to storytelling and novels unfold through and with pictures. Each form and each work becomes the site of a complex interplay of narrative and picture” (3). Some of his examples involve Royal Academy paintings that took their subject matter from William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Keats, or Alfred Tennyson—and the Academy’s catalogs often had an apposite quotation to drive the point home. Notable poetic/painterly parallels are found in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poems and paintings on identical topics. His poetry and short fiction—like “Hand and Soul” (1850)—raise broader questions about the relationship between artist, intention, audience, and response, recurrently assessing the distance between artwork and beholder. New technologies, historical subject matter, indexicality and imagination are rendered indivisible in the photographic illustrations that Julia Margaret Cameron produced in 1875 for a very limited edition of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Arthurian epic-in-progress, 188
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Figure 16.1 Photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron, “Death of Elaine” (sitters Charles Hay Cameron, William Warder, Mrs. Hardinge, unknown man, unknown woman), albumen print, 1875. Source: Given by Mrs. Ida S. Perrin, 1939 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Idylls of the King (1859–1889) (see Figure 16.1). Ekphrastic writing by fin de siècle women, as Jill Ehnenn has shown, offered an opportunity for them to comment on the gendered dynamics of representation in painting and, by extension, poetry, at a time when “increasing numbers of women writers . . . saw an unprecedented rise in technologies of vision, growing awareness of the consequences of seeing and of the relationship between visibility and invisibility.” Ruth Yeazell’s Picture Titles explores the link between titles and paintings that offers one particular instance of the symbiotic relationship between word and image. Illustrated poetry and gift books, with their ornamental bindings and wood engravings, afford an even more conspicuous interrelation, from the 1857 edition of Alfred Tennyson’s poetry published by Moxon, accompanied by images from such well-known contemporary artists as Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt, to the children’s book illustrations of Arthur Hughes or Kate Greenaway. Such volumes, as Lorraine Janzen Kooistra has shown, 189
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help emphasize both “poetry’s visuality” and “poetry’s materiality in print” during the period (1). At the end of the century, the Century Guild Hobby Horse (1884–94) and The Yellow Book (1894–97, with Aubrey Beardsley as a notable contributor and art editor for a number of issues) stood out for their innovative graphic work. As for fiction, numerous titles were illustrated, in both volume and serial form: consider Dickens’s collaborations with George Cruikshank, with “Phiz” (Hablot Knight Brown), and with Marcus Stone. Millais produced intricately detailed illustrations for Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage (1860–61), Orley Farm (1862), and The Small House at Allington (1862–63). Meanwhile, George du Maurier, once his vision became too poor to continue pursuing a career as a painter, became famous providing cartoons for Punch and line drawings for various novels, including his own.
4. Gender, Visual Art, and Literature Du Maurier, of course, was the author and illustrator of Trilby (1894), in which he borrows from his own experiences as an art student in Bohemian Paris. This is just one of many nineteenth-century novels and short stories that feature painters and photographers, and that use their presence to critique, for example, pretentiousness and attitudinizing—consider Henry Gowan in Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–57), for example, or Andrea Fitch in William Makepeace Thackeray’s unfinished A Shabby Genteel Story (1840–57); or that “perfumed piece of a man” (43), the none-too-subtly named Eustace Ladywell in Hardy’s The Hand of Ethelberta (1876). Kathy Psomiades notes that, in the period, femininity served “to manage the contradiction between artistic autonomy on the one hand and art’s necessary commodification on the other” (33)—something that is applicable to both art’s subject matter and the presentation of male artists, whose representation frequently veers between the overfeminized and the hyper-masculine. A plot that necessitates a character’s temporary but prolonged absence allows writers to invoke different sorts of artistic types and careers. For example, Walter Hartwright, in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859), after working as a drawing master to Laura Fairlie, goes to South America to record a naturalist expedition, and later works as an engraver for the illustrated papers. Frank Jermyn, in Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop (1888)—a novel centering on the experience of a family of sisters running a photography studio in London—travels as a war artist in Southern Africa. Levy sets Frank’s straightforwardness not just as a male counterpart to Gertrude and Lucy, the more efficient, practical, and business-like of the Lorimer sisters, but positions him against the romantically devious, and appallingly arrogant Academy figure of Sidney Darrell. Different, much more dandy-like versions of the society painter are found in the figures of Phoebus in Benjamin Disraeli’s Lothair (1870) and Lord Mellifont in Henry James’s “The Private Life” (1893)— both supposedly based on Frederic Leighton. By contrast to the polarized gender stereotyping that takes place around the male artist, women artists and photographers tend to be treated, especially by women, with a different kind of seriousness: one that emphasizes both their competency and agency, and the difficulties that they face on account of their gender. Antonia Losano has discussed how Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) was written at a moment when the representation of women artists began to transition from accomplished amateurism to professionalism. “Brontë’s novel,” she argues, “is as much a treatise about how and what woman should paint as it is about how men (and possibly critics) should interpret women’s art work” (“Professionalization,” 5). As Dennis Denisoff usefully speculates, “the predominant conviction that men were both naturally and culturally better suited than women to artistic professions led society to configure a woman who attempted to infiltrate the hegemony as a sexually deviant, masculine threat” (18–19)—or, if treated sympathetically, they needed to evoke our sympathies in some other way. The titular heroine of Dinah Mulock Craik’s Olive (1850), has very real talent. She needs to work in order to support her mother, who is going blind, but working in the studio of their landlord, Michael Vanbrugh, suffers the male painter telling her that no woman possesses either the 190
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talent or the dedication to be a major artist. Olive’s success, while discernible, is muted to the extent that one suspects that Craik’s decision to give her what is seen as a physical disability—she has a curvature of the spine—functions as a metaphor for women’s position in the art world. With a number of portrayals of women artists, too, one may speculate that visual production is, on occasion, used as a stand-in for the assumptions and discrimination faced by literary women. Several of Hardy’s artists, especially the sculptor Jocelyn Pierston in The Well-Beloved (1897), take the objectification of women to an extreme, just as the Duke in Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (1842) finds his late wife much more manageable when hanging in painted form on the wall. Meanwhile, women, like Christina Rossetti in “In an Artist’s Studio,” (1856), can be found writing back against such silencing, and thereby reclaiming agency for themselves. Many more examples of fictional artists and paintings may be found in Bo Jeffares’s The Artist in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction, Losano’s The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature, and my own essay “‘Seeing is Believing?’.” Talia Schaffer’s Novel Craft moves away from high art to show how the presence of amateur, domestic handicraft within fiction not only reminds one about a further type of material aesthetics, but served as a vehicle through which to celebrate the authentic, the “natural,” and the importance of decorative objects that were not identical replicas churned out on machines: such craft, too, valorized women’s creativity. Owen Clayton, in Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–1915, explores how early photography, film, and their practitioners are used as subject matter and metaphor, as does my chapter on “Literature and Photography.” In writing about late Victorian fictional photography, I paid particular attention to the “magical photographs” found in tales that play with such features of the medium as a photograph’s slow coming into clarity as it develops, its tendency to fade if not properly “fixed” or if placed in strong light, and the visual accidents caused by double exposures. All of these properties make photographs readily appropriable by the supernatural stories that became so popular by the century’s end. This links them, too, to the “magic picture” tradition—paintings that shape-shift on the wall, and seem to have an agency of their own. The most famous of these is surely the picture of Dorian Gray that gives Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel its name. Kerry Powell located another 30 or 40 examples of the genre. Although the main emphasis of his article falls on how a static canvas can function as an emblem of what lies repressed, or as a corrective to a lack of conscience, such images also indicate a painting’s power to work, emotionally, on a spectator—in much the same way that an earlier portrait functions, in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), to reveal its subject’s true character: No one but a pre-Raphaelite would have painted, hair by hair, those feathery masses of ringlets with every glimmer of gold, and every shadow of pale brown. No one but a preRaphaelite would have so exaggerated every attribute of that delicate face as to give a lurid lightness to the blonde complexion, and a strange, sinister light to the deep blue eyes. No one but a pre-Raphaelite could have given to that pretty pouting mouth the hard and almost wicked look it had in the portrait. (65) The reader is clearly expected to possess the cultural capital necessary to understand the revelatory powers of this fictional painting. Moreover, as Lynda Nead points out, the idea of the enchanted canvas points forward to film: it “must be seen as a founding myth of the new medium,” with its creation of living pictures through the animation of still images (93).
5. Looking Forward All of this material—the paintings and engravings that show scenes from earlier English literature, or the illustrations that accompany contemporary texts; the depiction of women and men as artists; the 191
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ekphrastic relations between image and text—has been the subject of extensive scholarship over the past couple of decades. This criticism unquestionably represents important aspects of literary/visual dialogues, but it also speaks to the limitations of how visual culture is frequently understood in the context of literary scholarship. I wish to conclude by coming full circle and invoking visual culture in a less content-driven sense. In the opening of this chapter, I emphasized the provocations that visual culture offers to how we read. Language supplies the ground on which we build our images of people and of place; it shifts our own imagined vantage point and angles of vision as we are invited to follow the gaze of narrator or character. At the same time, an expanded sense of the realm of the visual allows one to ask different sorts of questions about images, whether the subjects of discussion be canonical, mass-produced, ephemeral, or simply overlooked. Our comprehension of what’s at stake when we analyze a single canvas, or a bill hoarding, or an album full of snapshots is dependent on our recognizing the interconnectedness of many different strands of visual culture—just as it is when we read of a street, a studio, a café, a railway carriage. Visual culture draws from art history and sociology, from literary study and from book history, from cultural history and cultural studies. Furthermore, given the global circulation of images and texts in the Victorian period, it opens up the world, enabling us to make new connections between representations, materials, and consumers. The question of visual culture’s relationship to disciplinarity remains much debated, as it was when Mitchell published “Showing Seeing” in 2002, but his conclusion then, that “it may send us back to the traditional disciplines of the humanities and social sciences with fresh eyes, new questions, and open minds” (179) remains every bit as true today. Writing in 1879, Scottish essayist Peter Bayne distinguished between two types of vision. “The tree, house, or friend seen with the bodily eye is naturally and authoritatively presented to you as an external reality, wholly independent both of you and of your eye; the tree, house, or friend seen with the mind’s eye is seem as an image, and known to be nothing but an image” (121). In identifying this gap between what is seen outside of one’s body, and what appears to one’s individualized subjectivity, he helps us understand why literary studies offers a particularly hospitable home to the consideration of visual culture. For we are well used to discussing the unsaid, and the invisible. We may not always be suspicious readers, but that does not mean that we are necessarily trusting ones who believe the evidence of our eyes. Rather, we can readily acknowledge a variety of visual clues within a text that can give us insight into our own—and Victorian—patterns of conscious and unconscious image making. And it is the interdisciplinarity of visual studies that will give context and depth—both literal and figurative—to this shifting, mutable array of images.
Key Critical Works Walter Benjamin. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Kate Flint. The Victorians and the Visual Imagination. Anne Helmreich. Nature’s Truth: Photography, Painting, and Science in Victorian Britain. John Holmes. The Pre-Raphaelites and Science. W. J. T. Mitchell. “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture.” Benjamin Morgan. The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature. Lynda Nead. The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c. 1900. Rachel Teukolsky. The Literate Eye:Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics.
Works Cited Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” 1944. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford UP, 2002, pp. 94–136.
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Visual Culture Badia, Janet, and Jennifer Phegley. Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present. U of Toronto P, 2005. Batchen, Geoffrey. Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. MIT P, 1997. Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Translated by Jonathan Mayne, Phaidon, 1965. Bayne, Peter. “David Hume and Professor Huxley.” Literary World, vol. 19, 21 February 1879, pp. 120–3. Beegan, Gerry. The Mass Image: A Social History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian London. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Harvard UP, 1999. ———. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Edited and Introduced by Hannah Arendt, Translated by Harry Zohn, Fontana, 1973, pp. 219–53. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley’s Secret. 1862. Oxford UP, 2012. Clayton, Owen. Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–1915. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Denisoff, Dennis. Sexual Visuality from Literature to Film, 1850–1950. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Eastlake, Lady Elizabeth. “Photography.” Quarterly Review, vol. 101, April 1857, pp. 442–68. Ehnenn, Jill R. “On Art Objects and Women’s Words: Ekphrasis in Vernon Lee (1887), Graham R. Tomson (1889), and Michael Field (1892).” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, edited by Dino Franco Felluga. www.branchcollective.org. Flint, Kate. “Literature and Photography.” Late Victorian into Modern, edited by Laura Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn, and Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr, Oxford UP, 2016, pp. 582–96. ———. “‘Seeing Is Believing?’ Visuality and Victorian Fiction.” A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel, edited by Francis O’Gorman, Blackwell, 2005, pp. 25–46. ———. The Victorians and the Visual Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2001. ———. The Woman Reader, 1837–1914. Oxford UP, 1993. Fraser, Hilary. Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge UP, 2014. Hardy, Thomas. The Hand of Ethelberta. 1876. Penguin, 1998. ———. The Woodlanders. Penguin, 1998. Helmreich, Anne. Nature’s Truth: Photography, Painting, and Science in Victorian Britain. Pennsylvania State UP, 2016. Holmes, John. The Pre-Raphaelites and Science. Yale UP, 2018. Jeffares, Bo. The Artist In Nineteenth-Century English Fiction. Colin Smythe, 1979. Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855–1875. Ohio State UP, 2011. Kracauer, Siegfried. “Photography.” The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Translated by Thomas Y. Levin, Harvard UP, 2005, pp. 47–63. Lee, Vernon. Renaissance Fancies and Studies. Smith, Elder & Co., 1896. Lewes, George Henry. “The Principle of Vision.” Chapter II of The Principles of Success in Literature. Fortnightly Review, vol. 1, 1865, pp. 185–96. ———. “Seeing Is Believing.” Blackwoods Magazine, vol. 88, 1860, pp. 381–95. Losano, Antonia. “The Professionalization of the Woman Artist in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 58, no. 2, September 2003, pp. 1–41. ———. The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature. Ohio State UP, 2008. Meisel, Martin. Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England. Princeton UP, 1983. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture.” Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 1, no. 2, 2002, pp. 165–81. Morgan, Benjamin. The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature. U of Chicago P, 2017. Nead, Lynda. The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c. 1900. Yale UP, 2007. Novak, Daniel A. Realism, Photography and Nineteenth Century Fiction. Cambridge UP, 2008. Pater, Walter. Studies in the History of the Renaissance. 1873. Oxford UP World’s Classics, 2010. Patten, Robert L. “Illustrators and Book Illustration.” The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens. Oxford UP, 1999. Powell, Kerry. “Tom, Dick, and Dorian Gray: Magic-Picture Mania in Late Victorian Fiction.” Philological Quarterly, vol. 62, 1983, pp. 147–70. Psomiades, Kathy Alexis. Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism. Stanford UP, 1997. Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914. Stanford UP, 1990. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Letter to William Michael Rossetti, September 21–23, 1849. The Rossetti Archive. www. rossettiarchive.org/docs/dgr.ltr.0554.rad.html. Schaffer, Talia. Novel Craft:Victorian Domestic Handicraft & Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Oxford UP, 2011.
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Kate Flint Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Modern Life.” Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, edited by Donald L. Levine, U of Chicago P, 1972, pp. 324–39. Stewart, Garrett. The Look of Reading. U of Chicago P, 2006. Teukolsky, Rachel. The Literate Eye:Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics. Oxford UP, 2009. Tilley, Heather. Blindness and Writing from Wordsworth to Gissing. Cambridge UP, 2017. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names. Princeton UP, 2015.
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PART III
Victorian Discourses
17 VICTORIANISTS AND THEIR READING Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan
In the early 1930s, Amy Cruse sat down to write about “that side of the history of literature which tells of the readers rather than of the writers of books” (7). In The Victorians and Their Reading (1935), she investigated “what books, good and bad, were actually read by the Victorians in the first fifty years of the Queen’s reign, what they thought of them, and how their reactions influenced the future output” (7). To reconstruct what and how everyday Victorians read, Cruse turned to the usual diaries and letters—and to fictional representations of readers within Victorian realist novels. Cruse not only mined Victorian novels for sociological data, she also borrowed the practices of realist fiction to recreate her lost public. In her opening chapter, she creates a composite image of the ordinary reading public with a fictionalized scene of an upper-middle-class household in 1837. Here, in a “solidly furnished drawing room, under the blaze of an ornate chandelier” sit papa, mama, daughter Caroline, and Caroline’s fiancé, Edward (16). As the women take up their worsted-work and their tatting, Edward is “reading aloud an instructive article on The New Steam Plough, from Chambers’s Journal” (16). Pious mama would have “preferred that Edward should read something from the Christian Observer or from Pollok’s Course of Time, both of which lay on the polished centre table” while Papa—who enjoyed Byron’s Lara (1814) and Don Juan (1819) in his youth and abhors “Methodist ranting” now—waits impatiently with a copy of the Pickwick Papers (1837) on his lap (16, 17). Caroline listens happily as Edward moves on to a poem by Felicia Hemans, “The Adopted Child” (1828). Overlooking this domestic scene of evening reading sits a bookshelf containing beautifully bound but untouched copies of the canonical “Shakespeare and Milton and Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe” (17). Cruse’s composite picture of a Victorian family feels realist in its texture, but the range of reading interests she ascribes to her fictional family strains credulity. In fact, as we turn to the later chapters of the book, we realize that her family’s reading of dissenting fiction and silver-fork novels, useful knowledge and Pickwick, moral and Romantic poetry works as a fairly comprehensive table of contents to the types of reading that will occupy each of her book’s subsequent chapters. Despite the groundbreaking nature of her work, Cruse has not been a very important reference for the surge of recent scholarly work on nineteenth-century reading. The absence of citations in her work, as Patrick Buckridge notes, likely explains why the book never became an important citation reference for others in the field; along with her use of methods borrowed from novels, her submerging of her sources conflicted with the developing sense of a scholarly profession for which practices of scholarly citation were an essential glue (273). Richard Altick’s 1957 English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900, published more than two decades after Cruse’s book, is more commonly cited as a central or founding work in Victorianist studies of reading. 197
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Yet it is precisely because of her distance from traditional scholarly methods that Cruse seems like a congenial figure for today’s Victorianists, and particularly for those who are interested in questions of method. For many of these recent methodologically minded critics, as for Cruse, the nineteenth century has come to seem like a bottomless resource not just for new objects of study, but for new and transformative methods of reading. And Cruse’s recentering of nineteenth-century literary history as the history of books that are popular rather than great, and readers who are ordinary rather than literary luminaries, also speaks across a century to current critics whose contemporary distant and computational reading projects likewise aim to revolutionize—or at least shake up—literary-critical reading method. Distant reading, surface reading, curatorial reading, reparative reading, referential reading, literal reading, affective reading: these apparently very different interventions in literary scholarship’s method in recent decades all have in common, as we see when we look back to Cruse, their attraction to the nineteenth century not just as an object of study, but as an inspiration for method. In what follows we will consider the contexts for these recent method debates before surveying the current methodological scene and considering the role the nineteenth century has played as both specimen and muse in these new forms of literary and cultural interpretation.
1. Shifting Attention Our collective affinity with Cruse may relate to the fact that we seem to be coming out the other side of the professional consolidation and institutional expansion that characterized the decades immediately following her own 1930s moment. Adjunctification and other labor models that offer highly differential rewards for the same forms and amounts of labor have accompanied the dwindling of resources for research-based scholarship in the humanities (and indeed for work in the social and pure natural sciences). Shifts in publishing and scholarly communication have also played a key role. The privatization and platformization of the academic publishing industry has amplified inequality in access to publishing and research opportunities across the academy. Meanwhile institutions’ expanding reliance on bibliometric performance measures of scholarly productivity produced by these same often proprietary systems prompts more and more output in more and more specialist publications. All the while, the inequalities created and perpetuated by peer review are becoming more and more visible (Wellmon and Piper). Scholars continue to read and write and publish even as the jobs that support and reward scholarship are vanishing [on the current state of the academy, see Denisoff ’s introduction]. At the same time, and perhaps partly in response, scholars of literature are shifting their attention at least in part to publications aimed at new and imaginatively wider audiences. Turning away from journals, methods, and arguments that are directed at historical-specialist scholars, and toward those that speak to scholars across an array of fields, promises to turn the same old crowd into a new and larger audience who share a broad interest in literature rather than a field-divided interest in early-modern drama or modernist novels. This impulse to turn away from the very practices of field-specific scholarly writing that enabled the profession to form a coherent identity and create scholarly conversations seems like a resistance to the new conditions of academic labor; it feels like a way scholars might resist the increasing institutional desire to capture scholarly labor in ever more granular detail. At many—probably most—institutions, nonspecialist writing for broad audiences has at best a small place in the tenure file. It circulates instead as a currency with value within the profession but without value for the particular institution, since as of now institutions do not capture nonpeer-reviewed writing in h-index measures (a single number that combines productivity with citation numbers) and annual reviews as they do traditional scholarship. Of course, some scholars legitimately point out that writing for less specialist audiences should be credited as scholarly labor by universities; nevertheless, in the reorientation of audience, as well as the disconnection from traditional peer review and the systems of institutional evaluation which rely upon peer review, public writing remains a form of resistance to the institution. 198
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This shift in attention from field-specific to broader audiences matches the shift away from historical periods that has also begun to reshape majors and course schedules. As Ted Underwood points out, large-scale changes in the general cultural imagination about the centrality of capitalism are exerting pressure on literary studies’ organizing principle of contrasting historical periods (14). His 2013 guess that the discipline may well move away from period-based fields (and thus away from hiring in period-based fields) seems increasingly prescient. University administrators who assume that no alternatives to capitalism exist have also instituted material changes to higher education that have had a major impact. Declining enrollments in English departments mean that, at many institutions, periodbased fields can no longer sustainably structure undergraduate education. While period courses and surveys remain standard, new curricular revisions tend to focus on categories that seem more flexible or more legible to students—types of writing, for example, genres, or broad topics. So whereas in the past a Romanticist and a Victorianist may have felt they belonged to different scholarly worlds, today they find themselves allied in their attempt to keep the Brit Lit II survey on the books. Literary studies has responded to this moment of change by soul-searching. The past decade of literary studies has seen an explosion of critical manifestos, methodological interventions, journal issues focused on modes of reading, and a new wave of disciplinary-historical writing. Starting perhaps with the MLQ special issue on “Reading for Form” in March 2000, this tide has carried numerous essays, collections, and special issues, including the 2009 Representations special issue on “The Way We Read Now” (edited by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus), a 2014 Representations special issue on reading “Denotatively, Technically, Literally” (edited by Elaine Freedgood and Cannon Schmitt), a 2017 PMLA cluster on “Distant Reading” (responding to both Franco Moretti’s book of that title and the collection of methods the title designates), and a 2018–2019 PMLA double special issue on Cultures of Reading (coordinated by Evelyne Ender and Deidre Shauna Lynch), as well as a 2016 cluster in Victorian Studies on “Strategic Presentism” (edited by David Sweeney Coombs and Danielle Coriale). Method debates have also clustered around discussion of computational and quantitative methods, appearing in manifestos, special issues, method-specific journals (such as Cultural Analytics and DHQ) and serial books (such as Debates in the Digital Humanities). These forms of professional soul-searching tend to be forward-looking and ask method to do the work of better suiting us to our circumstances, healing divides, and getting us back on our feet.
2. Back to the Nineteenth Century The nineteenth century has played a starring role in these method debates. Victorianists and Victorian scholarship have incubated methods that transcend their scholarly circles and have captured the wider attention of the discipline in general. As we argued in our essay “Interpretation, 1980 and 1880,” many of the key critical works that have shaped the current methodological landscape had their origins in nineteenth-century scholarship. Witness, for example, how Sharon Marcus’s conception of “just reading” in Between Women, along with Stephen Best’s work on nineteenth-century slavery and the limits of historicist critique, helped them describe the critical trend of what they named “surface reading.” Moretti’s work on literary form in the long nineteenth century led to Distant Reading. And Eve Sedgwick’s courses on Victorian Textures and her essays on nineteenth-century literature in Tendencies gave way to the “reparative reading” of Touching Feeling. Meanwhile, Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network argues for a new formalist approach to the interpretation of social life in a book that has its roots in Victorian literature, and gestures to a broader application of her method in her introduction and final chapter. Elaine Freedgood’s metonymic reading of the “things” of Victorian realism (The Ideas in Things) and Cannon Schmitt’s work on the literal in Victorian fiction (“Tidal Conrad”) find more general expression in the introduction to the Representations special issue “Denotatively, Technically, Literally.” And Jacques Rancière’s theoretical realignment of the politics of aesthetics proceeds from his years of archival work on nineteenth-century workers’ writings. 199
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All of these very different forms of professional soul-searching have widely varying relations to the larger field- and profession-specific scholarly projects in which they are rooted and to which they contribute; their nineteenth-centric orientations are neither determinative of their contributions nor of their reception. It is worth pointing out, as well, that those critics who turn to the nineteenth century as a model for meditating on method do not constitute an exhaustive survey of method study in Victorian studies, nor even of the significant and exciting work on nineteenth-century reading practices that has appeared in recent years. In surveying the centrality of the nineteenth century to current method debates in literary studies broadly, we do not seek to suspiciously uncover and interpret a dependence on Victorian practices hidden from these critics but known to us. Nor, on the other hand, do we mean to celebrate a return to a Victorian moment that these critics imagine as particularly various—a world of pre- or proto-professional readers, a model of more general and less segmented or fragmented public audiences, a more referential world to be known. Rather, we simply want to point out that the consistent orientation of the discipline-level method debates that both emerge out of nineteenth-century studies and take the nineteenth century as an inspiration does seem to capture a significant moment of grappling with our collective professional present and past. When we see the nineteenth century as a source of both new objects of study and new reading methods, we are reckoning with the century’s ambiguous status as both a proto- and preprofessional moment for literary studies. It is true that, as Andrew Miller points out, the nineteenth century may no longer stand as a specially consolidating moment in the arrival of capitalist modernity, as it was for decades assumed to be by the field of Victorian studies; citing the work of the historian James Vernon, he notes that in losing this distinction the field lost some of its coherence (125–6). Yet as the location of our early professional formation and our object of study, the nineteenth century still holds out a double attraction to nineteenth-centuryists. As Jesse Cordes Selbin argues, we are impelled toward nineteenth-century reading practices in part because “excavating a lapsed culture of reading built around the social value of the endeavor stands not only to enrich contemporary research methods, but to help forge neglected links between specialized disciplinary tools and strategies for broader public engagement”; it promises a “means of recovering lost skills and cultivating contemporary strategies” of interpretation (827, 828). In the first decade of this recent methodological foment, it seemed as though we were in for simply another swing of the generational pendulum. During much of the early 2000s, work on method explicitly introduced itself as a turn away from modes of symptomatic or new historicist criticism prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s. New formalism, for example, marked a self-conscious return to form after two decades of what its practitioners saw as 20 years’ worth of criticism that either ignored literary forms or unconsciously depended upon them while claiming otherwise (Levinson) [an aesthetic formalism, see Greiner’s chapter]. “Surface reading,” meanwhile, aimed itself explicitly against symptomatic reading in the vein of Louis Althusser and Frederic Jameson. Likewise, thing theory (introduced by a 2001 special issue of Critical Inquiry) reacted against new historicism’s tendency to read the world as a text or treat the archive as a discourse, searching for its patterns and codes rather than reading for its content. Much of this work seemed like the usual but crucial turning over of the soil so that the same field can be planted anew, a move that disciplines require every so often. These interventions, in other words, seemed designed to incite new interpretations of old classics. One might “surface read” a noncanonical text or an archival document, for example, but the power of such a method seems more valuable on better-trodden ground. A surface reading method makes most sense for opening new ideas instead of piling on top of prior readings of particular passages and aspects of a well-known work. But what seemed at first like a generational shift has ended in a broader self-consciousness about the longer history of literary criticism and its role in shaping our conceptions not just of the nineteenth century and its literature, but of the novel, of realism, and of literariness itself. This broader consciousness of the legacy of literary criticism works in two directions: a new interest in the longer 200
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history of the discipline, on one hand, and an attempt to imagine or affiliate with a nineteenthcentury readership unschooled by its protocols, on the other. This new wave seeks to jettison not only recent forms of contextualist criticism, but an entire century’s worth of work that seems now to have made interpretation synonymous with reading (Price, 231–2). We would also place here Nathan Hensley’s “curatorial reading,” which aims to “retain critical activity while keeping faith with our objects of study—remain paranoid about Victorian history while reading its objects with reparative care” (66). We should also consider recent work that takes supposedly undisciplined reading practices as the inspiration for critical and scholarly work: David Kurnick’s novel reader who lingers with the middles of marriage plots rather than their ends; Nicholas Dames’s nineteenth-century critics and readers who read but do not interpret excerpts from novels; Elizabeth Miller’s slow readers; Gage McWeeney and Emily Steinlight’s collective readers of sociological forms; Elaine Auyoung’s work on how fiction feels real and her attention to those “processes involved in merely comprehending a text” rather than those involved in the more lauded process of developing “an interpretive reading” (2–3). And in her introduction to the 2010 collection The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience & Victorian Literature, Rachel Ablow notes the new interest of scholars of reading not in interpreting reading practices or representations of reading, but in excavating the experience of reading; these scholars seek to discover “what nineteenth-century readers and writers thought they were doing” by asking questions like “How did nineteenth-century readers and writers think about the experience of reading? What did they regard as its pleasures and dangers?” (3–4). These critics, she notes, turn to the nineteenth century with a double vision, “asking how we can reconstruct the alien historical circumstances of Victorian reading and how those distant reading experiences are restaged in attentive acts of reading in the present” (4). Critics today, in other words, have turned back to the Victorian era to query its readers rather than its writers; in this same vein, many contemporary critics consider the nineteenth century as the century of print rather than literature. Mary Poovey, for example, has asked contemporary critics to return to the mid-nineteenth century as a moment before the full development of twentieth-century conventions made a distinction between literary and nonliterary forms of writing. In 2006 Leah Price pointed out that the study of the material form of literature was a small corner of a much wider world of scholarship on print; a decade later, it seems that some scholars of literature have reimagined the entire world of print as an object of study. Price’s later work returns us to a nineteenth-century world of books rather than texts; her Victorians are hardly even readers at all. If it had ever seen the light of day, Ian Watt’s little-known mid-century declaration that “all print is literary” in his unpublished book “Printed Man” would stand as the lost reconciliation of New Critical formalism and print historicism that makes the exact opposite argument as this recent turn away from the specifically literary to the generally printed in Victorian studies (Watt). Others read this wider world of print as it appears in contiguity with published literary work as itself possessing literary form. Simon Reader turns to the notebooks Victorian readers kept to study the aesthetics of their note-taking practices rather than the finished literary works to which those practices contributed, and Anna Gibson’s work on Dickens’s notebooks imagines them not just as sources contributing to Dickens’s published novels, but as documents of literary (and of course also of historical and editorial) interest in their own right [on book history, see Stauffer].
3. Distant Reading’s Nineteenthcentricity Distant reading, too, has gravitated toward the nineteenth century as both privileged object and inspiration for method. There are some quite material reasons the nineteenth century has exerted a gravitational pull on recent quantitative work. Publication radically expanded over the course of the century, offering the kinds of large corpora best suited for distant reading. For most of the century in many contexts, words were printed with machine methods and typographical standards that made 201
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them relatively uniform and thus easier (than in the eighteenth century or earlier) to automatically transform into machine-readable text suitable for computational text analysis. And copyright on the majority of the century’s books has expired in most countries, making corpora built from these texts easy to use and share relative to the twentieth century. The accessibility of the nineteenth century is, of course, relative, given the challenges corpus construction almost always presents; as Mark Algee-Hewitt and his co-authors conclude in Canon/Archive. Large-scale Dynamics in the Literary Field, a study of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, “Clearly, the idea that digitization has made everything available and cheap—let alone “free”—is a myth” (3) [on the digital humanities, see Bourrier’s chapter]. The material conditions that make the century so appealing to distant readers, however, are also a clue to the deep affinity between the century’s informational attitude toward literature and those of recent critics interested in literary texts’ informational forms. Serial installments of novels and the volumes beloved by circulating libraries remind us of the uniform (but somewhat arbitrarily sized) segments into which we chunk corpora. The uniform running titles that are so annoying to distant readers and require removal in most corpus pre-processing nonetheless echo the standardized filenaming conventions of the machine-readable collection of documents in a corpus. And the tabular forms in which we often represent corpus-derived data became central in the nineteenth century (Seltzer). Not merely convenient because of the length of its texts and the size of its archive, the nineteenth century seems hospitable to distant readers because of the informational forms and practices they share. It is worth pointing out, of course, that despite widespread impressions, these kinds of methods are anything but new. While “distant reading” is a neologism, and the rhetoric around the kind of quantitative text analysis that goes by this name often emphasizes its newness, in fact scholars of literature have long used numbers in their work, from bibliometrics as evidence in the history of reading to wordcounts as crucial evidence of materials out of which poets create works; throughout the course of the twentieth century literary scholars have turned to quantitative methods to help them make arguments about literature and culture (Buurma and Heffernan, “Search and Replace”). Despite this long history, however, until recently literary scholars have primarily drawn on statistical descriptions of corpora rather than statistical models of them, and the recent turn to using statistical models to understand literary corpora and literary history has opened new possibilities for literary study. And it is this method, rather than material or informational form, or an interest in literature’s numbers, that may be the strongest attractor of contemporary distant reading to the nineteenth century. The statistical models increasingly central to distant reading have a special affinity with the Victorian period, as the practice of fitting models to collections of individual data points bears more than a passing resemblance to the Victorian novel’s own practices of representing many potential examples by way of individual characters. Of course, the modeling of a textual corpus has more immediate affinities to the larger category of humanistic inquiry into which it falls. As Julia Flanders and Fotis Jannidis point out in their editorial introduction to The Shape of Data in Digital Humanities: Modeling Texts and Text-based Resources, humanities scholarship has a “long and rich tradition of gathering and modeling information as part of humanities research practice” (3), and Mark Algee-Hewitt notes that the practices of abstraction that reduce texts “to the features they have in common” to allow for comparison “across scales” are common to qualitative and quantitative literary scholarship (751). Theorists of the Victorian novel’s fictionality often conceive of the novel as existing in the realm of the probable; the characters, settings, and events in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers (1857) or George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72) are like those of at least some readers’ referential worlds—but they cannot be reliably identified with any actual particular person, place, or thing. Instead, they stand in for an indeterminate number of possible people, places, and things in an indeterminate number of real worlds, against which they are often measured, tested, and compared by everyday readers and scholarly researchers alike.
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In this quality of abstraction, they are akin to the abstraction of a statistical model. It is exactly this quality, we imagine, that made Cruse turn to fiction as such a compelling method for representing the results of her own research on reading. In “All Models Are Wrong,” Richard Jean So explains that scientists use models of data to “think about the social or natural worlds and to represent those worlds in a simplified manner”; they abstract a limited set of quantifiable characteristics out of a natural or social world, look for consistent correlations between characteristics, and ask whether these trends are weak or strong. The way distant readers are thinking about novels also chimes with the ways scholars of reading have been turning back to the Victorian era for new models of attention, audience, and collectivity. As Andrew Piper writes, statistical models offer not just new views of literary history and literary texts but, because they are iterative, sharable, and necessarily never perfectly fitted they “open the door to new kinds of critical sociability” (657). Other critics are also thinking about ways that quantitative work offers new forms of critical sociality in ways that implicitly or explicitly hark back to Victorian modes of reading. Sarah Allison’s concept of “reductive reading,” for example, shows us how quantitative work foregrounds the reductions that are actually a necessary part of making any claims about texts that can be debated and discussed by groups of people. And Allison Booth’s “mid-range reading” emphasizes the slow, collective work that groups of scholars must engage in to prepare the kind of data that could offer us a useful view of a Victorian social network; in her example, mid-range reading responds to the “morphology of female biography” in the nineteenth century in part by analyzing the networks formed by the collocation of types of life narratives in collective biographies of women (621). While neither Allison nor Booth explicitly model their respective forms of quantitatively inflected reading on Victorian ones, both are working with nineteenth-century texts and both are studying the way quantitative work might capture how nineteenth-century social life formed around literature.
4. Turning Back, Reaching Out These method debates range widely, but in their response to our moment of professional and institutional crisis they have at least one thing in common—a tendency to reach beyond our profession, with its perhaps too-familiar methods and audiences, in order to seek new interlocutors and borrow new methods. This searching turns not just to other disciplines (computer science, anthropology, psychology, sociology, statistics), but even toward readers altogether outside academia’s walls; it seeks a reinvigorated set of approaches in the reading practices and affective and aesthetic responses of those extra-disciplinary readers. In part because of the decline of a shared imaginative form of professional labor and career trajectory that has vanished along with tenure-track jobs, and along with the field-specific forms of research and publication that accompanied them, the profession has started to imagine itself instead as a more unified audience, one that shares forms of attention and method. As Ender and Lynch note, “[T]he divisions between amateurs and professionals, common readers and academics . . . no longer seem as firm as they once did” (1077). In reaching beyond the profession to the methods of other publics and other disciplines, and in their more modest reconfiguration of the dimensions of an actual professional audience that knits a specialized field-identified audience back into a general audience of literary scholars, they all reach backward toward the nineteenth century.
Key Critical Works Rachel Ablow, ed. The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature. Richard Altick. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900. Stephen Best, and Sharon Marcus, eds. “The Way We Read Now” special issue of Representations. Amy Cruse. The Victorians and Their Reading. Evelyne Ender, and Deidre Shauna Lynch, eds. “Culture of Reading” special issue of PMLA.
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Works Cited Ablow, Rachel. “Introduction: The Feeling of Reading.” The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature. U of Michigan P, 2010. Algee-Hewitt, Mark. “Distributed Character: Quantitative Models of the English Stage, 1550–1900.” New Literary History, vol. 48, no. 4, 2017, pp. 751–82. Algee-Hewitt, Mark, Sarah Allison, Marissa Gemma, Ryan Heuser, Franco Moretti, and Hannah Walser. Canon/ Archive: Large-Scale Dynamics in the Literary Field. Stanford Literary Lab Pamphlet, 11 January 2016. Allison, Sarah. Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing. Johns Hopkins UP, 2018. Altick, Richard. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900. U of Chicago P, 1957. Auyoung, Elaine. When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind. Oxford UP, 2018. Best, Stephen. None Like Us : Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life. Duke UP, 2018. Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus, editors. “The Way We Read Now.” Special Issue, Representations, vol. 108, no. 1, 2009. Booth, Alison. “Mid-Range Reading: Not a Manifesto.” PMLA, vol. 132, no. 3, May 2017, pp. 620–7. Buckridge, Patrick. “The Fate of an ‘Ambitious School-Marm’: Amy Cruse and the History of Reading.” Book History, vol. 16, 2013, pp. 272–93. Buurma, Rachel Sagner, and Laura Heffernan. “Interpretation, 1980 and 1880.” Victorian Studies, vol. 55, no. 4, Summer 2013, pp. 615–28. ———. “Search and Replace: Josephine Miles and the Origins of Distant Reading.” “The Discipline” blog, Modernism/Modernity Print Plus, 11 April 2018. https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/search-and-replace. Coombs, David Sweeney, and Danielle Coriale, editors. “V21 Forum on Strategic Presentism.” Victorian Studies, vol. 59, no. 1, 2016, pp. 87–126. Cruse, Amy. The Victorians and Their Reading. Houghton Mifflin, 1935. Dames, Nicholas. “On Not Close Reading: The Prolonged Excerpt as Victorian Critical Protocol.” The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature, edited by Rachel Ablow, U of Michigan P, 2010, pp. 11–26. Ender, Evelyne, and Deidre Shauna Lynch. “Introduction: Time for Reading.” PMLA, vol. 133, no. 5, October 2018, pp. 1073–82. Flanders, Julia, and Fotis Jannidis. “Data Modeling in a Digital Humanities Context: An Introduction.” The Shape of Data in Digital Humanities Modeling Texts and Text-Based Resources, edited by Julia Flanders and Fotis Jannidis, Routledge, 2018, pp. 1–23. Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. U of Chicago P, 2006. Freedgood, Elaine, and Cannon Schmitt, editors. “Denotatively, Technically, Literally.” Special Issue, Representations, vol. 25, no. 1, 2014. Gibson, Anna. Digital Dickens Notes Project. dickensnotes.com. Hensley, Nathan. “Curatorial Reading and Endless War.” Victorian Studies Victorian Studies, vol. 56, no. 1, Autumn 2013, pp. 59–83. Klein, Lauren F., and Matthew K. Gold, editors. Debates in the Digital Humanities. U of Minnesota P, 2016. Kurnick, David. “An Erotics of Detachment: Middlemarch and Novel-Reading as Critical Practice.” ELH, vol. 74, no. 3, 2007, pp. 583–608. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton UP, 2015. Marcus, Sharon. Just Reading: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton UP, 2007. McWeeny, Gage. The Comfort of Strangers: Social Life and Literary Form. Oxford UP, 2016. Miller, Andrew H. “Response: Responsibility to the Present.” Victorian Studies, vol. 59, no. 1, 2016, pp. 122–6. Miller, Elizabeth. Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture. Stanford UP, 2013. Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. Verso, 2013. Piper, Andrew. “Think Small: On Literary Modeling.” PMLA, vol. 132, no. 3, pp. 651–8. Poovey, Mary. “Beyond the Current Impasse in Literary Studies.” American Literary History, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 354–77. Price, Leah. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton UP, 2012. ———. “Reader’s Block.” Victorian Studies, vol. 46, no. 2, 2004, pp. 231–42. ———. “Reading and Literary Criticism.” The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature, edited by Kate Flint, Cambridge UP, 2012, pp. 34–55.
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Victorianists and Their Reading Reader, Simon. “Social Notes: Oscar Wilde, Francis Bacon, and the Medium of Aphorism.” Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. 18, no. 4, December 2013, pp. 453–71. Schmitt, Cannon. “Tidal Conrad (Literally).” Victorian Studies, vol. 55, no. 1, Autumn 2012, pp. 8–29. Sedgwick, Eve. Tendencies. Duke UP, 1993. Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke UP, 2003. Selbin, Jesse Cordes. “Reading.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, nos. 3–4, September 2018, pp. 826–31. Seltzer, Beth. “Fictions of Order in the Timetable: Railway Guides, Comic Spoofs, and Lady Audley’s Secret.” Victorian Review, vol. 41, no. 1, 2015, pp. 47–65. Steinlight, Emily. Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life. Cornell UP, 2018. So, Richard Jean. “All Models Are Wrong.” PMLA, vol. 132, no. 3, 2017, pp. 668–73. “Theories and Methodologies: On Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading.” Essay Cluster. PMLA, vol. 132, no. 3, May 2017, pp. 613–89. https://www.mlajournals.org/toc/pmla/132/3 Underwood, Ted. Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies. Stanford UP, 2013. Watt, Ian. “Printed Man.” Ian P. Watt Papers (SC0401), box 22, folder 1, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA. Wellmon, Chad, and Andrew Piper. “Publication, Power, and Patronage: On Inequality and Academic Publishing.” Critical Inquiry Review, July 2017. https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/publication_power_and_ patronage_on_inequality_and_academic_publishing/. Wolfson, Susan J., editor. “Reading for Form.” Special Issue, MLQ, vol. 61, no. 1, 2000.
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18 AESTHETIC FORMALISM Rae Greiner
1. Form and Formalism: A (very) Brief History Protean and contested from the start, the concept of form has always held a number of contradictory meanings. We tend now to think of form as the embodiment of something: the shape it takes, its size and color, physical appearance, or the rules and patterns governing its composition. Yet for Plato, eidos—the Greek term for “form” or “shape”—is immaterial. It is the truest and most perfect property or thing that can be conceived or imagined, as opposed to any individual instance of that thing in the physical world. Platonic forms are ideational, metaphysical. They are also good and without flaw, whereas worldly instantiations of forms are necessarily imperfect. For example, the form of “omelet,” according to this definition, is non-identical to any particular omelet in the world, instead operating as the ideal to which the eggs and cheese in your kitchen can only aspire. For Plato, the form is the more real of the two, despite being comprehensible to us only as an idea, because it does not depend on objectification in the natural world. It doesn’t even require us. Plato’s form is a priori and eternal, existing independently of nature and the human mind. Plato’s student Aristotle would make a different claim: that there is no form without matter. Since nothing can come from nothing, form inheres only in material objects or shapes; this doctrine is called “hylomorphism,” combining the Greek hulê (matter) and morphê (form or shape). The human is a combination of soul (form) and body (matter), and these, for Aristotle, are not separable. From there, centuries of thinkers would debate whether form is existing or abstract (or some combination of the two), historical or transcendental, exclusively an aesthetic category or applicable to a variety of discourses and practices. It is important to recognize, though, that form as originally conceived had no special relationship to art. What, then, is aesthetic formalism? Aesthetics and formalism are related but not interchangeable concepts, with different histories (see Otter). Aesthetics generally refers to thought originating in eighteenth-century Continental philosophy, especially the moral, aesthetic, and social theories of writers such as Edmund Burke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Schiller, and focusing on the sensory, personal, and shareable experiences of art (on the radical shift from Aristotelian to Lockean frameworks in this period, see Macmurran). Formalism is a twentieth-century concept associated with the Russian formalists and the later New Critics, and with the project of identifying features of language that account for its “literariness.” Bridging these two moments is the nineteenth century, during which aesthetic theory gained new vigor as the study of art became increasingly democratized and professionalized, giving rise to an idea of art criticism as a set of scholarly and pedagogical practices in need of greater standardization and precision. This meant, among other things, identifying
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with exactness what made art art in the first place, and how humans ascertain and appreciate it as such. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry for aesthetic formalism, for instance, begins with the statement that “formalism in aesthetics has traditionally been taken to refer to the view in the philosophy of art that the properties in virtue of which an artwork is an artwork—and in virtue of which its value is determined—are formal in the sense of being accessible by direct sensation (typically sight or hearing) alone” (Dowling, original italics). Here, an artwork is recognizable as such by virtue of certain formal properties that must be apprehensible via the senses. The importance of the sensory in what is here called the “traditional” view of aesthetic formalism is in fact one of the most significant legacies of the philosophical debates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While a conception of the aesthetic as involving perception had been around since its inception, the sensory and bodily sensation became central in the Anglophone world only in the eighteenth century, and came utterly to preoccupy nineteenth-century thought on the subject. As Jonah Siegel notes, aesthetic “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” (562). A key inheritance of eighteenth-century aesthetic philosophy concerned the proper sphere of aesthetic experience, a hotly contested topic in Germany and France. Two issues were foremost: first, whether or not the aesthetic domain should be limited to nature, the beautiful, or the sublime—the latter characterized by Burke as confrontation with the “astonishing,” overwhelming forms and forces of the natural world—and, second, the extent to which art should be non-utilitarian or “purposeless.” This last idea was powerfully (if confusingly) articulated by Immanuel Kant who, in the Critique of Judgement (1790), portrays aesthetic experience as disinterested. Kant sought to distinguish mere sensual, felt pleasure from aesthetic experience, which is disinterested in his view because it involves the free play of the imagination and the understanding together. This process is “free” only when neither of the two hold sway: when the understanding does not subsume the imagination into pre-given explanations (thus allowing for “play”), and the senses do not overwhelm the concepts organizing thought (thus allowing for “judgment”). “The beautiful is that which pleases universally, without a concept,” he writes (67, original italics). Kant is considered the founder of aesthetic formalism for his insistence that aesthetic judgment pertains to form—in the sense of shape, arrangement, and so on— rather than sensible content (such as pleasing color). This judgment, he says (in an echo of Plato), must transcend idiosyncratic or personal tastes, achieving disinterestedness by way of a fixation on form. Kant’s ideas did not gain immediate traction in Anglophone aesthetic theory; nor was his influence preeminent in the nineteenth century. Still, his notions of aesthetic judgment as disinterested, and of art as necessarily “useless,” were taken up by subsequent thinkers into a host of related claims with important implications for what it means to study aesthetics generally as well as form in particular. Many Victorian British writers correlated aesthetic enjoyment, pleasure, and embodiment in ways that distinguished their ideas from Kant’s. As Benjamin Morgan has recently argued, for instance, Victorian aesthetic thought eschewed “a philosophical idiom,” and instead “theorized the aesthetic in genres that were unsystematic, vernacular, or literary.” And it did so, he says, “from the perspective of science”: from David Ramsay Hay’s “science of aesthetics” of 1849 to the “somatic” and dispositional aesthetic of William Morris (9, 199). Victorian aesthetics, in this account, sought to garner credibility by adapting scientific principles to what had been heretofore a philosophical domain; thus, in the nineteenth century, “the meaning of the term aesthetics and the question of whether it belonged to philosophy or science remained unresolved” (9, original emphasis). Victorian aesthetic theory “was not primarily pursued in the idiom of philosophy,” Morgan claims, but was situated “at the intersection of multiple discourses and practices,” such as art history, interior design, and evolutionary biology (5). Displacing Kant’s philosophical disinterestedness, scientific objectivity here forms the rational ground of aesthetic judgment. The Victorian turn to emotions, physical substance, and sensuality—what William James called the “bodily sounding-board”—represents an even more explicit rejection of Kantian disinterestedness 207
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(Morgan 8–9). By the end of the century, when a modified version of Kantian formalism took hold in British aesthetic theory, this “scientific” imperative was marshaled in response to what some saw as the oppressive hypermoralism that had for too long dictated British conventions of art. Often seen as a direct rejection of Victorian mandates for a sanitized literary realism—one whose reality had undergone purification, purged of darker desires and urges, the very real human compulsions of sex and violence—the later nineteenth-century turn to form is cast as cleaving aesthetic value from morality in favor of measurable, empirical categories of shape and rhythm, order and balance, and the like. Oscar Wilde’s decadent preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)—in which he states: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all”—is characteristic of a changing attitude toward aesthetic experience that values technical or formal skill over abstract moral commitments. Wilde admires “uselessness”—the “only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely”—but admiration even for technical mastery was not merely thought, but “intensely” felt: “there was no mood of the mind that had not its counterpart in the sensuous life,” he writes. Similarly, in his profoundly influential Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Walter Pater revises Hegelian aesthetic theory but removed the footnotes making this explicit, instead choosing to highlight a highly sensual aesthetics operating by and on the body, “by instinct or touch” (193). Pater’s admiration for the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann has as much to do with personal vitality as it does his writing. If “his science was often at fault,” nevertheless the world “seem[ed] to call out in [him] new senses fitted to deal with it”; likewise, his works are “a life, a living thing, designed for those who are alive” (194) [on aestheticism, see Evangelista’s chapter]. What, then, does it mean to say that a book is well or badly written? If this is not to be a mere matter of opinion, it must be one of rules, of aesthetic standards and reading practices—perhaps also, following Pater, a way of life. Determining these standards became one of the most important legacies of late Victorianism and modernism, the inheritances of which shape our curricula, classroom practices, and scholarship to this day. This was especially true of novel criticism since, unlike poetry (which was considered by Kant and others the highest form of art), the novel was at the time a new, often disparaged, and popular (meaning: low-brow) genre that carried neither poetry’s clout nor its lengthy and illustrious critical history. To grasp the shadowy and fantasmal form of a book, to hold it fast, to turn it over and survey it at leisure—that is the effort of a critic of books, and it is perpetually defeated. Nothing, no power, will keep a book steady and motionless before us, so that we may have time to examine its shape and design. As quickly as we read, it melts and shifts in the memory; even when the last page is turned, a great part of the book, its finer detail, is already vague and doubtful. (1) These are the opening sentences of Percy Lubbock’s 1921 The Craft of Fiction, and they name a problem that had been around at least since Henry James had complained of the attitude that “a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that this was the end of it”: the sense that the novel was so self-evidently itself as to require only the basic skills needed to read it (502). Given such conditions, Lubbock complained, “It is scarcely to be wondered at if criticism is not very precise, not very exact in the use of its terms” (2). Both James and Lubbock lament the absence of a theory of the novel, and it is form that poses the problem. “The form of a novel . . . is something that none of us, perhaps, has ever really contemplated,” Lubbock writes; “It is revealed little by little, page by page,” so that the more we progress, the more the “image escapes and evades us like a cloud” (3). Length is a factor (we spend “hours” with the likes of Clarisssa Harlowe, Lady Dedlock, and Emma Bovary), but so too is the accumulated effect of “liv[ing] with” these fictional creations (4). Few of us could claim, Lubbock asserts, “that in reading a novel we deliberately watch the book itself, rather than the scenes and figures it suggests,” for we are “much more inclined to forget, if we can, that the book is an object 208
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of art, and to treat it as a piece of the life around us” (6). Here the problem has less to do with the form of the novel than with our habits of reading (though it is worth noting that Lubbock has realist novels in mind). Our attention consumed by the men and women of novels—their escapades, sentiments, histories—we treat the book as continuous with real life. In so doing, he contends, we fail to appreciate that the novel has a deliberate form at all: that it is crafted and put together, a thing made. This needed to change.
2. Form and Formalism Today What today goes by the name of formalism arose from complaints like these, themselves a product of a new confidence in the aesthetic quality and seriousness of the novel and the need for a more rigorous accounting of its formal characteristics, techniques, and innovations. Where poetry, painting, drama, and music had centuries-old nomenclature and established theories and rules, fiction did not, prompting writers at the fin de siècle to attempt to identify and describe the mechanics at work in fictional prose narrative: how it created and sustained an immense variety of effects, including the illusion that novels are equivalent to life. At the same time, from the turn of the century onward, discussions of formalism tended to involve the question of history, since some influential early twentieth-century formalists, looking back on what they saw as the nineteenth century’s mistakes, sought early on to exclude from critical consideration such things as historical context or author biography [on historicism, see Gallagher’s chapter]. One legacy of the New Criticism that arose at this time is an understanding of form as the exclusive category of literary analysis. For literary critics working in this vein, formalism involved careful, precise attention to features either peculiar to literary or linguistic forms (such as free indirect discourse) or simply amply and richly available there (like irony). If literature was a special type of writing, unique in kind from other kinds, then specialists in literary interpretation were essential to understanding precisely what made it unique and what distinguished good literature from bad. As “the critic” grew to be dis-identified from the artist, poet, or novelist, becoming the trained, specialist scholar, formalism grew to be indistinguishable from literary criticism. All critics were now formalists, and all criticism formal. If this overview is something of an oversimplification of the dynamic historical processes out of which literary criticism developed (such as the rapid, epochal technological shifts in printing that took place in the nineteenth century), and an oversimplification of formalism, it nevertheless captures something still true about the core issue involved in any discussion of formalism, the extent to which literary writing is different from other kinds—self-consciously odd, even “useless,” rather than practical—and so requires unique skills (and persons) to read and interpret well. In the work of the Russian Formalists (chiefly 1916–30), the study of form becomes more rigorous and exacting, and a vocabulary emerges that attempts to specify precisely how to identify literary techniques and to distinguish literary language from other kinds. In his 1917 “Art, as Device” (or “Art as Technique”), for instance, Viktor Shklovsky claims that literary writing defamiliarizes, doing so in order to revitalize our experiences of the real. Whereas habit and routine dull our sensations, numbing our capacities to feel ourselves alive in and to the world, poetic language estranges, shocking us back into feeling it freshly. It makes “a stone stony,” he says (162). At the same time, for this to happen, the work of art must relinquish any claim to uniqueness. Poetic language makes use of particular techniques in order to enable experiences of the artfulness of the world, but because of this, the thing itself ceases to be important: “what has been made does not matter in art” (162). What matters instead (in what could be a Paterian formulation) is the generation and prolongation of this heightening of sensation and perception. This argument is formalist for a number of reasons, including Shklovsky’s detailing of techniques used to produce these desired effects, such as Leo Tolstoy’s depiction of a horse narrator trying to come to grips with the human concept of property. How better to defamiliarize the ordinary than by portraying it as seen from outside, in an alien, animal, or otherwise not fully human point of 209
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view? It is a point the Victorians understood very well, as demonstrated by works such as Ouida’s Puck (1870), Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) [on animal studies, see Danahay and Morse’s chapter]. The very choice to identify the poetic function as a matter of point of view, as unencumbered or “naïve,” is itself a legacy of the long-nineteenth-century commitment to seeing well. Though the ideal of the inexperienced eye and the ideal of scientific objectivity (discussed above) are not the same, involving very different levels of expertise, both share a pronounced refusal to prejudge what is viewed. John Ruskin, for instance, in The Elements of Drawing (1857), insisted on “the innocence of the eye; that is to say, a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify, as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight” (22). For Pater, the insufficiencies of the eye are coincident with our regrettable propensity to form habits: “for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike” (236–237). It is not just that the human eye cannot comprehend everything there is to see but also that we grow mentally habituated to seeing the world in particular, self-limiting ways. Pater’s call “to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy” is an attempt to cultivate an awareness and pursuit of what he calls “the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves” (236). At the same time, Shklovsky’s contention that the art object “does not matter” newly breaks down any solid boundary between those items that count as art and those that do not. “The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things,” he says (162). Here we can see a version of the claim that the nineteenth century is the beginning of the end of art, in that it is when a theory of art’s autonomy from life develops (“art for art’s sake” is the usual shorthand). This idea later finds its apotheosis in the avant-gardism of twentieth-century forms, such as surrealism, in which the boundary between art and life breaks down (see Bürger) [on visual culture, see Flint]. This shift in aesthetic theory toward deprivileging the literary art object, toward seeing aesthetic form less as a distinctive kind of form than something flexible, mobile, and quotidian, has many important effects in twentieth-century literary criticism. It grants to the novel a newfound significance, because the genre’s representational scope, length, and formal variety make it seem an especially valuable means for portraying a great range of human society. Indeed, as Dorothy J. Hale observes, by 1967 “novel study was prolific enough to have a journal, Novel, devoted exclusively to its study” (2, n. 1). Perhaps unsurprisingly, social life at the same time becomes the most valuable object of literary analysis. Hale’s 1998 Social Formalism opens by noting the persistence of this fact in novel theory from Henry James to Mikhail Bakhtin and all the way through to identity studies. If the twentieth century began with the novel gaining “new prestige as an art form when critics granted it a unique technical complexity,” she says, it ended with critics seeming to turn away from formal analysis to issues of “ideological typicality” and “the question of cultural function”: [C]ritics seem to be left with little interest in or need for what at the beginning of the century was considered by many to be the point of literary analysis generally and the mission of novel theory in particular: the isolation and description of the generic features that not only distinguish one literary object from another but defined the literary as a logical category. Formal and generic descriptions of the novel have increasingly been subsumed by the almost hermetically sealed field of narratology, which, from its structuralist inception, has ardently pursued the increasingly rarified business of nomenclature. (2) Hale points to several interlacing reasons for this shift, one of the most important being the challenge posed by feminism, in the 1980s and 1990s, to a formalism that had understood itself as value 210
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neutral and objective. Citing works such as Robyn Warhol’s Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel (1989), Hale argues that feminist cultural critics did not seem to need the highly technical vocabularies of the narratologists to perform their critiques. But they did continue to make use of “the old-fashioned vocabulary of plot, character, point of view, and exposition” to portray the ideological content of novels as well as of novel theory and its methods (2). In other words, in unpacking the ideological content of these forms, feminist and cultural critics tended to rely on conventional formalist techniques, like close reading, to do the work of critique. Hale goes on to pose skeptical questions that persist in similar formulations to this day. Why assume that the novel can be a “causal force” at all, she asks, one that makes things happen in the world? (10). Why should we consider literary methods to be appropriate for reading nonliterary, cultural phenomena—social forms—like the politics of gender or class? The argument takes aim at field-shaping works of Victorianist literary criticism such as D.A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (1988), whose chapters on Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope build from the premise that “no openly fictional form has ever sought to ‘make a difference’ in the world more than the Victorian novel,” and that, “as much as in [its] characteristic forms . . . as in its themes,” the Victorian novel seeks to engrain the “political regime” of the liberal subject—in effect, to police us (x) [on the novel, see Michie’s chapter, on narrative theory, see Auyoung’s]. Yet why assume, Hale asks, that there is a special or even a useful relationship between the tools of literary formalism and social critique? Currently scholars continue to grapple with these questions. This is a category contest: what can and cannot (or should and should not) be considered form? To what purposes can formalist methods best be put, or should they be used more cautiously, or not at all? But it is also much more than this, for what we mean by form continues to have everything to do with what we do, or believe we do, when we study it. We might see recent reformulations of our reading practices as instructive. Calls for surface, descriptive, literal, or denotative reading (in work by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Cannon Schmitt) pointedly reject an idea of the heroic critic-reader and instead invite ways of reading that do not take literary texts to be mere “symptoms” of the outsized cultural or political forces that produce them. Critics frame these practices as responses to dominant theories of ideology critique and dubious ideas of textual wholeness or originality. These new reading practices share a notion of formalism as, in Schmitt’s words, “refus[ing] to read through the manifest details of a text to some sort of veiled or latent level of significance” (10). Schmitt summarizes the “modest” goals of “just” or surface reading as operating through a “hermeneutics of trust. Just readers trust texts to say what they mean, and trust to the sufficiency of an interpretive endeavor that just reads, that rejects aspirations to finding in a text that which it does not know about itself ” (11). Such reading practices are oriented against the suspicious or paranoid reading associated with Freudian and Marxist models in which meaning inhabits a text’s unconscious, but Schmitt shows parallels with earlier Anglophone formalisms: Cleanth Brooks’s “rejection of forays into ‘psychology and the history of taste’ in favor of ‘a criticism of the work itself ’,” or Shklovsky’s articulation of poetic language as different in kind because involving “the perception of its structure,” with the important conclusion that “poetic language may be felt” (qtd. in Schmitt 10). Recent work going by the name “new formalism” seeks to reconsider another and related formal relationship, that between forms and their contexts, or between literary texts and methods and the sociopolitical realities to which they can sometimes seem irrelevant. Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), for instance, opens this way: “If a literary critic today set out to do a formalist reading of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, she would know just where to begin” (1). Levine proceeds to list a variety of stock literary techniques such a critic might examine, such as free indirect discourse, but her point is that “traditional formal analysis—close reading” is no longer sufficient. Instead, Levine offers an account of form as encompassing “patterns of sociopolitical experience,” everything from standing in lines to racist hierarchies, prisons, the ways we use forks and doorknobs: “all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference” (2–3). 211
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Levine’s objective is to eliminate the distinction between aesthetic forms, like poems, and social forms, like biological clocks: the divide “between the form of the literary text and its content and context dissolves” (2). Against the view that “form explains everything,” Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian propose instead to treat form as a term whose meaning—at times, whose very existence— comes into being through a particular use (650). Explanations are “inquiry relative,” they say, which means that form can be made to do things in a scientific context (say, chemistry) that it is not expected to do or capable of doing in, for instance, psychology (Kramnick and Nersessian 651). Form arises in relation to goals, in explanatory occasions. Thus the concept of form need not hold a single, fixed meaning for the disciplines or persons making it; form is “a notion bound pragmatically to its instances” (661). Forms emerge only in “the shifting context of formalism, only in the practice of critical explanation” (665).
3. Formalism and Victorian Studies Formalist criticism these days is a vital pulse within Victorian studies. Its energies have helped to put to rest two long-standing truisms about the Victorian period and its study. Against a characterization of the period as boorish when it comes to aesthetic theory (especially prevalent outside Victorian studies), scholars in the field have done much to demonstrate the robustness, at times the intoxicating weirdness, of Victorian formalist thinking; it appeared in an unprecedented variety of materials and dramatically reformed such staid genres as the art-historical essay, as Pater’s wildly (and probably intentionally) inaccurate Renaissance had decidedly done. And scholars have also shown that, in distancing itself from the dominant conventions and dicta of the Victorians—variously portrayed as paralyzingly moral, as idealizing and therefore unrealistic and dishonest, as hidebound and unmodern, or as irrational and erratic—twentieth-century criticism dramatically minimized the power and complexity of aesthetic thought in the period. Lytton Strachey’s 1918 Eminent Victorians is perhaps the most sneering take-down of Victorian luminaries, but as Rohan Maitzen points out, identifying the Victorians with a rigid, “rule-oriented, censorious ‘form of reading’” enabled twentieth-century ethical critics as unlike one another as Wayne Booth and Geoffrey Harpham to “explicitly distance themselves” from the “‘hectoring’ voices” of Matthew Arnold’s twentieth-century heirs (152): as she explains, “this focus on prominent individual voices valued according to their supposed correspondence to—or offences against—modern(ist) prejudices has distorted our view of the potential relationship between Victorian critical practices and our own” (154). The remaining pages seek, in contrast, to demonstrate that Victorian aesthetic thinking, and Victorian literature more broadly, continues to influence and matter to cutting-edge approaches to formal analysis [on Victorian studies, see Denisoff ’s introduction]. The field has had an especial need for such endeavors, not only because the Victorians were considered poor practitioners of formalism but also thanks to the perception that Victorian studies was for a time hostile to it. As Jonathan Loesberg put it in 1999, “Victorian studies, in its longstanding resistance to the formalist study of Victorian literature, has to an extent been re-enacting the anxiety of mid-Victorian poets and novelists about being entrapped in a world of art” (537). On this account, Victorian studies at the turn of the twenty-first century was itself quasi-Victorian in its “anti-formalism,” setting its sights on nonliterary objects such as blue books, systems of criminal transport, or male homosocial desire (537). Citing George Levine, Loesberg asks: if one’s ends are historical, cultural, or anthropological, “why finally read literature at all?” (538). Thus, though it was published 20 years earlier, Loesberg’s essay (which is specifically about Victorian studies) is not unlike Kramnick and Nersessian’s (which is not) in asking, with as much skepticism as they do, whether there are good reasons for maintaining a narrower sense of the literary and its methods. Moreover, the question of formalism has had special relevance to Victorian studies because the field is of relatively recent invention. Victorian Studies, the flagship journal in the field, was founded in 1956, and was born of a 212
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historicist and interdisciplinary imperative. And it is relevant, too, for considering how the formalism of the moment is itself a product of historical conditions, just as much as it was in its Victorian incarnations. As Loesberg puts it, “[T]he fact that many Victorian authors were not aware of aesthetic theories does not mean that those theories were not aware of them” (541). Marjorie Levinson’s contention that the new formalism practiced today “is better described as a movement than a theory or method” is a reminder that it may best be understood as an orientation, a manifestation of interest rather than a set of prescriptions or an agreed-upon vocabulary (558). In this sense, it resembles the Victorian more than the twentieth-century moment from which it gets its name. Levinson’s strongest claim is that, with few exceptions, new formalism makes “no efforts to retheorize art, culture, knowledge, value, or even—and this is a surprise—form.” Despite the many synonyms for form used in them, “(e.g., genre, style, reading, literature, significant literature, the aesthetic, coherence, autonomy), none of [the works in question] puts redefinition front and center,” nor do they develop “new critical methods as the driving force behind new formalism” (561). Similarly, Samuel Otter observes: “There is no such thing as ‘new formalism,’ if the term is meant to name a system of thought or a sustained method” (116). Such criticisms are valid, but they also reproduce those leveled against the Victorians for their wild approaches to forms, which were antagonistic toward systematicity for reasons largely historical and pragmatic. Turning to some examples of recent scholarship in which formalist analysis matters to Victorian studies now, we will keep in mind this notion of formalism’s asynchrony and dynamism, its changing shape over time, and its function as an attitude or stance rather than as a consistent set of terms or rules. Consider, for instance, Alex Woloch’s astonishing observation that the most recognized formal feature of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853)—its double narrative—went “unseen” by its original readers. To contemporary scholars the possibility of not noticing this aspect of the novel can only seem absurd. Indeed, Dickens’s formal experimentation in Bleak House is nearly universally regarded as its defining quality: the narrative’s split between first-person and third-, between the perpetual present tense of the omniscient narrator, on one hand, and the past tense narration of the character Esther Summerson—“who strains so hard against, and thus accentuates, the brutally subjective ground of first-personness”—on the other (Woloch). And yet it is just this feature that, in Woloch’s account, went “largely unremarked: by Dickens, by his reviewers, or in nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticism” (original emphasis). Woloch describes this stunning fact as an instance of “radical ‘untimeliness’”: because our eyes and minds have been trained differently, we can identify as meaningful a formal feature that the Victorians eitehr did not or ignored as inconsequential. Such shocks can shake our faith: neither forms nor aesthetic judgments have universal coordinates but are historically contingent. Yet Woloch concludes by suggesting, in a rather Ruskinian formulation, that this “Victorian blindness might be incredibly productive” in that it might free us from the constraints imposed on us by our inherited critical models, shocking us into other ways to see. In so doing, he also tacitly resists any easy sense that a text’s most resonant features are simply there, on the surface, waiting to be beheld. Here it is our particular formalism that has made form visible to us. Similar provocations enlivening Victorian studies today demonstrate the usefulness of formalism not only for analysis of aesthetic objects but also for Victorian methods for inhabiting the world. Rachel Teukolsky’s The Literate Eye (2009), for instance, depicts early Victorian art writing such as Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843) as contributing to developments in aesthetics that twentieth-century modernist criticism would later claim as its own invention. Avoiding “modernist approaches to locate modernist values” (“deep close readings of canonical texts to locate moments of formalism, self-consciousness, or neo-Kantian philosophy”), Teukolsky instead seeks to recover the Victorian roots of a formalist aesthetic that is “separate from an art-historical account of line, color, or facture, or from a literary account of chapter, stanza, or style” (6). Like Morgan, she pursues this alternative history by demonstrating how a surprising array of scientific discourses—from biology and zoology, optics, botany, neurology, and chemistry—impact the realm of Victorian aesthetics. In a different vein, 213
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Elaine Hadley’s Living Liberalism (2010) returns to Hale’s concept of social formalism in characterizing liberalism as preeminently formal rather than political. Mid-nineteenth-century liberalism’s “social formalism emanates from the formalist tendencies that saturate liberal cognition,” she says; “[T]he liberal mind formalizes the social—its diversity, difference, and foreignness” (54). Thus, Matthew Arnold’s conception of “sweetness and light,” in Culture and Anarchy (1869), is an aspect of what he calls “the best self,” a self understood as “an aestheticized formality, a bearing.” Arnold’s best self, we might say, is a form: at once good, aesthetic, and dispositional. And it is modeled on another form, “the formal harmony attributed to culture” (Hadley 57). Yet this is but one way in which form builds on form in Hadley’s historicist account. For this manner of thinking, what she calls Victorian cognitive formalism is fundamentally different from the earlier, Lockean variety. Where Locke presupposed a divinely made world, beautiful and harmonious—form as totality—that exists as such without human perceptual input, Victorian liberalism could no longer depend on any such confident, a priori assertions about either the world’s divine origins or the forms that accompanied its creation. Instead, it “had to rely on the mind’s own formalizing capacities, its own harmony and intelligence, so that a person could live liberalism in an otherwise fragmentary world” (Hadley 55). Some of the most exciting new work in aesthetic formalism involves traditions and authors that are more diverse. For example, William Ghosh (drawing on work by Garrett Stewart) notes that formalism, for obvious reasons, has seemed to be of little value to colonial and postcolonial studies. The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, for instance, explained that “literature and the aesthetic at large have suffered a regrettable abeyance as prime sites for generating theoretical perspectives on the conditions of the postcolonial,” and positioned itself as offering a corrective (qtd. in Ghosh 767). Yet Ghosh does not share this view. He is not a Victorianist, but his analysis of V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) shows the novelist drawing on a range of nineteenth-century influences, from the self-help books of Samuel Smiles to Charlotte Brontë’s bildungsroman, from Dickens to Sir Walter Scott, and emphasizing as well Naipaul’s undergraduate training in Chaucer and Spenser and his “systematic study of the rise of the novel in the nineteenth century” (769). Ghosh’s aim is not merely to demonstrate Naipaul’s familiarity with the British tradition, however. It is to demonstrate the author’s cogent understanding that commonplaces about British literary forms can be radically upended when those forms are taken up by colonial readers in colonial contexts. For instance, having read popular novels by Marie Corelli and Hall Caine, respectively, an English mystic novelist and a novelist of adultery, mesmerism, and crime, Naipaul’s Trinidadian Mr. Biswas despairs of “finding romance in his own dull green land” (qtd. in Ghosh 768). The joke is one of genre, comic and painful at once. The reader is invited to understand what Mr. Biswas does not, that “the generic codes seen to inhere in literary forms are skewed as the forms (the novels themselves) move from place to place. The realism of the bildungsroman comes to look, to the colonial reader, much like ‘romantic’ fantasy”— just as, conversely (and perversely), the island green comes to seem a landscape where romance cannot exist. Naipaul’s “play with the concept of form,” Ghosh remarks, “is never more evident than when he satirizes Mr. Biswas for his inability to tell one form from another” (768). Here another blindness is revealing of something fundamental about how form operates—who can see it (and who can’t), and where, and how. Alongside the example of Bleak House, this work of comparative formalism suggests new avenues for Victorianist studies, new reasons to conclude that “to read . . . is to contend with form” (766) [on settler colonialism, see Wagner]. Such examples suggest powerful exciting future directions for Victorian formalist critique that twists or remakes extant models for new ends. Disability studies scholars, for instance, have drawn attention to the ways in which formal concepts of balance, wholeness, and equilibrium presume a kind of ideal body, figuring form as an inherently spatial, embodied concept and asking what it means to see and to be in differently enabled bodies. Martha Stoddard Holmes’s recasting of melodrama’s emotional highs and lows in terms of psychological or affective disability, and work that historicizes ideals of intellectual normalcy, dysfunction, or precocity (perhaps surprisingly, precocity 214
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was deemed a disability by the Victorians) offer ways of rethinking our evaluative models whereby (to echo Wilde) books—and persons—acquire “good” forms or “bad.” Similarly, queer theory, which has long relied on Victorian literary and cultural resources for its examples and formulations (most notably in the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), continues to draw meaningfully on ideas of (good or bad) form not as the product of nature but as stance. [on disability studies, see Stoddard Holmes’s chapter; on gender and sexuality, see Dau’s]. Finally, we might look to Yopie Prins’s “What is Historical Poetics?,” part of a special issue on the topic, for a riveting account of the importance of genre in nineteenth-century verse culture. Prins shows how “a historical process of thinking through (simultaneously about and in) verse” enabled poets like Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning to call attention to the processes of mediation through which poems might speak to one another and to their readers (18). Poems are “read through the generic conventions that make up the history of reading poetry,” Prins writes (15). But perhaps most revealing is Prins’s argument that the methodological framework of I.A. Richards, a highly influential member of the New Critical school, has prevented us from recognizing such generic transformations by focusing on the mind of one reader, individuated and in the present tense, in whom a poem’s formal properties are internalized, rather than on the ways in which poetic forms are taken up, circulated, rewritten, and parodied by different readers across time. Such an awareness of poems’ mediation and remediation makes “poems possible from the inside out.” Prins thus revises the questions formalist critics are asking today: not “What is historical?” or “What is poetics?” but instead: “‘What was historical poetics?’ at moments in history other than our own?” (37).
Key Critical Works Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Peter Brooks. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Elaine Hadley. Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain. Dorothy Hale. Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present. Yopie Prins. “What is Historical Poetics?” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The Epistemology of the Closet. Harry Shaw. Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot. Viktor Shklovsky. “Art, as Device.” Ian Watt. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Alex Woloch. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Novel.
Works Cited Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations, vol. 108, no. 1, Fall 2009, pp. 1–21. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Harvard UP, 1992. Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avante Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw, U of Minnesota P, 1984. Dowling, Christopher. “Aesthetic Formalism.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. www.iep.utm.edu/aes-form/. Ghosh, William. “The Formalist Genesis of ‘Postcolonial’ Reading: Brathwaite, Bhabha, and A House for Mr. Biswas.” ELH, vol. 84, no. 3, 2017, pp. 765–89. Hadley, Elaine. Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain. U of Chicago P, 2010. Hale, Dorothy. Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present. Stanford UP, 1998. Holmes, Martha Stoddard. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. U of Michigan P, 2009. James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” Longman’s Magazine, 4 1884, pp. 502–21. Hathi Trust Digital Library. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.30000093223778;view=1up;seq=1. Kant, Immanuel. Kant’s Third Critique of Judgement. 1790. Translated by J.H. Bernard. Palgrave Macmillan, 1914. Project Gutenberg Online. www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48433. Kramnick, Jonathan, and Anahid Nersessian. “Form and Explanation.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 43, 2017, pp. 650–69. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton UP, 2015. Levinson, Marjorie. “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA, vol. 122, no. 2, 2007, pp. 558–69.
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Rae Greiner Loesberg, Jonathan. “Cultural Studies, Victorian Studies, and Formalism.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 27, no. 2, 1999, pp. 537–44. Lubbock, Percy. The Craft of Fiction. Jonathan Cape, 1921. Project Gutenberg Online. www.gutenberg.org/ files/18961/18961-h/18961-h.htm. Macmurran, Mary Helen. Mind, Body, Motion, Matter: Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives. U of Toronto P, 2016. Maitzen, Rohan. “‘The Soul of Art’: Understanding Victorian Ethical Criticism.” English Studies in Canada, vol. 31, nos. 2–3, 2005, pp. 151–86. Morgan, Benjamin. The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature. U of Chicago P, 2017. Otter, Samuel. “An Aesthetics in All Things.” Representations, vol. 104, no. 1, 2008, 1pp. 16–25. Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. 1874. 6th edition. Project Gutenberg Online. www.gutenberg.org/files/2398/2398-h/2398-h.htm. Prins, Yopie. “What Is Historical Poetics?” Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 77, no. 1, 2016, pp. 13–40. Ruskin, John. The Elements of Drawing: In Three Letters to Beginners. Wiley and Halsted, 1858. Schmitt, Cannon. “Tidal Conrad (Literally).” Victorian Studies, vol. 55, no. 1, 2012, pp. 7–29. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Epistemology of the Closet. U of California P, 1990. Shaw, Henry. Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot. Cornell UP, 1999. Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art, as Device.” 1917. Translated by Alexandra Berlina. Poetics Today, vol. 36, no. 3, 2015, pp. 151–74. Siegel, Jonah. “Victorian Aesthetics.” The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture, edited by Juliet John, Oxford UP, 2016, pp. 561–79. Teukolsky, Rachel. The Literate Eye:Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics. Oxford UP, 2009. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. U of California P, 1957. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1890. Project Gutenberg Online. www.gutenberg.org/files/174/174h/174-h.htm. ———. The Picture of Dorian Gray, edited by John M.L. Drew, Wordsworth Classics: Ware, U.K., 1992, pp. 3–4, 107. Woloch, Alex. “Bleak House: 19, 20, 21.” boundary 2. October 2016. www.boundary2.org/2016/10/ alex-woloch-bleak-house-19-20-21/ ———. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Novel. Princeton UP, 2003.
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Fabula and syuzhet. Focalization. Heterodiegetic narrator. Proairetic code. Critics who discuss Wuthering Heights (1847) or David Copperfield (1850) in these terms seem to be speaking a different language— the language of narrative theory. One of the unheralded functions of narrative theory (and a not insignificant part of its allure) is to satisfy our discipline’s long-standing need for a specialized vocabulary that, as with terminology in mathematics or chemistry, differentiates the expert from the layperson, the initiate from the outsider. While contemporary narratology continues to serve this function, providing our discipline with an ever-expanding set of often unwieldy neologisms, the narrative theorist’s impulse to break down a literary narrative into its component parts, to describe how narratives work, and to abstract them into shared underlying structures long predates literature departments. In the Poetics, Aristotle defines tragic drama by its ability to elicit a particular affective response (fear and pity). To achieve this effect with maximum success, he asserts, tragedies must adhere to a certain set of rules, which includes focusing on a certain type of protagonist (an ordinary person) and turning on a particular sequence of action (reversal and recognition). What we find modeled here, however, is more than the critical method of identifying and classifying literary structures that we still see in contemporary narrative theory. By presuming that crafting a tragic drama imposes its own constraints on the story that is told (not just any protagonist but an ordinary one and not just any plot but one that leads to a reversal of fortune), Aristotle approaches storytelling as an activity that comes with its own rules and demands. How these rules and demands shape the stories we tell animates the work of modern narrative theorists from the early twentieth century to the present. The story of narrative theory’s emergence and development in the twentieth century, from Russian Formalism to French structuralism to contemporary narratology, has been told many times over, with figures such as Mieke Bal, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Wayne Booth, Seymour Chatman, Dorrit Cohn, Gérard Genette, David Herman, James Phelan, Gerald Prince, Marie-Laure Ryan, and Viktor Shklovsky playing more or less prominent roles depending on who is doing the telling. In the 1920s, Vladimir Propp applied the approach we see in the Poetics much more thoroughly and systematically to the Russian folktale, working out a typology of characters and plot functions, which in turn paved the way for the work of A.J. Greimas, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Tzvetan Todorov in the 1960s. One concept fundamental to the work of many narrative theorists is the distinction between discourse and story, or between fabula and syuzhet for Russian Formalists and between récit and histoire for French structuralists. Whereas story consists of the chronological sequence of events in a plot, discourse is the manner in which those events are presented by the narrative. Recognizing that the contents of a story can be represented in countless ways in turn makes it possible to recognize the range of strategies 217
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by which narratives handle the passage of time (as when Genette distinguishes between summary, scene, stretch, pause, and ellipsis) or the variety of discursive possibilities for representing a character’s thought or speech (as when Cohn draws distinctions between quoted monologue, narrated monologue, and psycho-narration). Such categories reflect another aim of narrative theory or narratology: to develop a systematic approach to analyzing narration that would be tantamount to a science. Much like the New Critics working in mid-twentieth-century America, Russian Formalists and the later French structuralists sought to consider literary texts as freestanding, self-contained systems, with rules that operate independently of context. In this regard, narratology could not seem more at odds with Victorian studies, which by definition is concerned with literature and culture produced during the reign of a particular British monarch, Queen Victoria. And yet some of the criticism that has been most influential in Victorian studies, such as that by Peter Brooks and D.A. Miller, is grounded in and derives its force from key structuralist claims and concepts. The enduring appeal and importance of this work attest to the methodological ambition and analytical power that perspectives from narrative theory afford.
1. Narration’s Inherent Tensions Critics working at the intersection of narrative theory and Victorian literature tend to take one of two approaches that seem unique to their field. The first is to identify some fundamental property of narrative by means of close critical attention to nineteenth-century novels [on the novel, see Michie’s chapter]. While this work is consistent with the spirit of classical narratology, it is distinguished by a tendency to build drama around a specific conflict or tension between discourse and story—between the act of storytelling and the contents of the tale. While critics who take this first approach alert us to the formal demands and constraints that shape Victorian narratives, others take a second approach, which is to examine the relationship between Victorian narratives and their audience, and to make a case for this relationship’s cultural, historical, or ethical significance. We see both approaches—to identify a property fundamental to narrative in general and to theorize the relationship between text and reader—in Brooks’s Reading for the Plot (1984). This work is presented as a corrective to the static structures of classical narratology, which, Brooks argues, fail to capture the dynamic experience of reading and writing. Brooks is concerned with the forwardmoving “force” or “energy” that drives narratives to their end—along with the act of reading and interpreting these narratives. To account for this force, he draws on a psychoanalytic model of erotic desire. For him, the plots of nineteenth-century novels are not just about desire, propelled by the libidinal energy of young male protagonists, but also arouse in their readers a desire for meaning that sustains their progress through the text. The drama of Brooks’s account lies in his recognition that the moment when our desire for meaning is fulfilled is also the moment when the narrative comes to an end. Paradoxically, the drive toward meaning is also a drive toward the death of desire [on desire, see Dau’s chapter]. By calling attention to this tension inherent in narrative desire, Brooks makes a move that also characterizes major claims about the nature of narrative by Miller, Audrey Jaffe, Garrett Stewart, and Alex Woloch. They similarly seek to expose tensions inherent in narration itself. In the work of these critics, we continue to see the narrative theorist’s interest in how what is represented on the page emerges from the struggle between the demands of storytelling as an endeavor in itself and the attempt to present an account of characters and incidents. Brooks’s observation that the arrival at full knowledge marks both the consummation of narrative desire and the death of desire builds on Miller’s more predominantly structural study of narrative closure in Narrative and Its Discontents (1981). Miller argues that the production of narrative is only possible when settlement, closure, and the arrival at a definitive meaning is deferred. To keep going, a narrative must maintain the state of “disequilibrium, suspense, and general insufficiency” that characterizes the “narratable” (ix). The drama or tension inherent in narration is a fundamental asymmetry: 218
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“The narratable is stronger than the closure to which it is opposed” (266). For Miller, the conclusion that a novel provides can never truly resolve the conditions of disequilibrium that first set it into motion. Writing against the long-standing assumption that the endpoint of a narrative possesses a kind of teleological finality, he redefines narrative closure as a mere “denial or expedient repression” of the narratable (267). While, in Narrative and Its Discontents, Miller celebrates the narratable as something that cannot be fully mastered, the anxiety or uneasiness that this book identifies as inherent in the narratable becomes, in his The Novel and the Police (1988), an instrument of social discipline. More recently, Robyn Warhol provides a taxonomy of “unnarratability” in “‘It Is of Little Use for Me to Tell You’: George Eliot’s Narrative Refusals” (2013). She distinguishes between the subnarratable (what need not be told because it is too obvious or boring), the supranarratable (what cannot be told because it is ineffable or inexpressible), the antinarratable (what should not be told because of trauma or taboo), and the paranarratable (what would not [yet] be told because of literary convention). If Narrative and Its Discontents unsettles our assumptions about the tidiness of narrative closure, Audrey Jaffe unsettles our assumptions about omniscient narration in Vanishing Points (1991). She takes up the question of “who is speaking” posed by Roland Barthes in S/Z, arguing that the narrative point of view that we label as “omniscient” is defined by a tension between a specific voice that implies a concrete physical being and the fantasy of being able to transcend the boundaries of an individual identity (and to achieve the unlimited knowledge and mobility that such transcendence affords). Focusing on Charles Dickens, Jaffe demonstrates how first-person narrators like Boz, David Copperfield, and Esther Summerson self-reflexively dramatize the contradictory way in which omniscient narrators are “at once inside and outside character” (16). Esther Summerson’s extreme selfeffacement, for instance, alerts us to just how much the impersonal, disembodied quality associated with omniscient narration is at odds with the embodied specificity that defines fictional characters. By suggesting that what we refer to as omniscient narration is actually poised at the juncture between individuality and impersonality, Jaffe brings out a tension that has all along been inherent in a familiar strategy of narration. The same effort to bring out a tension inherent in narrative representation defines Alex Woloch’s groundbreaking The One vs. the Many (2003). Attention to literary characters has long been divided between structural attempts to reduce characters to their functions within a narrative, as in the work of Propp and Greimas, and the persistent tendency for readers and critics to think about characters mimetically, as if they have implied personhood outside of the narrative. Woloch argues that our sense of a character’s implied personality is inseparable from the space or position they occupy within the narrative as a whole. At the core of this theory is the drama by which a narrative’s minor characters become flattened or distorted as a result of the unequal distribution of a novel’s limited narrative attention. All these critics pursue their argument with varying support from close readings of passages that allegorize the formal tensions they seek to identify. When claiming that desire is the engine of plot, Brooks cites the literal motors and engines that appear in nineteenth-century fiction (61), while Woloch interprets Magwitch’s severed leg iron and file in Dickens’s Great Expectations as emblems of the fragmentation that befalls the type of minor character he represents. Miller interprets a moment of indecision in Jane Austen’s Emma as an allegory of the deferral of closure on which all narration depends, while Jaffe focuses on how Dickens’s first-person narrators dramatize tension between “selfeffacement and self-assertion” inherent in omniscient narration (168). This desire to find coherence between multiple levels of the text and between form and content brings out narrative theory’s continuing debt to New Criticism, which emphasized unity between structure and meaning in a literary work. We find the fullest expression of this debt in Garrett Stewart’s Novel Violence (2009), which is presented as a corrective to narratology’s tendency to discard surface features of texts to bring out the abstract structures and codes underlying them. Stewart proposes instead a method that he terms “narratography,” a micropoetics of prose effects that are lexigraphic, syntactic, syllabic. Drawing on 219
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Roman Jakobson’s notion of linguistic “violence” as a moment of disruption or surprise—a violation of expectation—at the scale of the sentence, Stewart models a form of close attention attuned to “prose’s own tensile energy” (6). He traces, for example, “the squeezing out—and to death—of a single phonetic cluster” in a sentence from The Mill on the Floss (“These words were wrung forth from Maggie’s deepest soul, with an effort like the convulsed clutch of a drowning man”) that bends the narrative toward Maggie’s own tragic fate (161). From Narrative and Its Discontents to Novel Violence, critics working at the intersection of Victorian fiction and narrative theory have shown how the act of narration itself shapes or constrains the content, because storytelling comes with its own rules, demands, and effects. The drama of such criticism centers on a tension or conflict between content and form. For Jaffe, omniscient narration is defined by a conflict between the attempt to present a depersonalized, disembodied voice and the inability of any speaking voice to be free from personal and cultural identity. Woloch reveals that a literary character’s personality is shaped by his or her structural position within the character-system, while Stewart argues that violence at the linguistic scale warps and bends the trajectory of the larger drama. For Miller, narrative content is shaped by the conflict between a novelist’s personal ideological commitments and the demands inherent in the enterprise of narration. Thus George Eliot, who wants to hold out for transcendent possibility, resists the social limitations that make narrative closure and settlement possible. When we recall that the New Critics also sought to identify the tensions, paradoxes, and oppositions inherent in literary works, Miller’s interest in bringing out the drama at the heart of the relationship between form and content—or between discourse and story—again reveals the deeply New Critical method and aesthetic employed by narrative theorists.
2. Metaphors for Text and Reader If a number of critics have elucidated tensions between narrative content and form, others have focused on how narrative form affects its audience and the significance of these effects. Here we can circle back to Peter Brooks’s use of erotic desire as a framework for reading in Reading for the Plot [on reading, see Buurma’s and Heffernan’s chapter]. For Brooks, “the need to tell” is “a primary human drive that seeks to seduce and to subjugate the listener” (61). This account of the relationship between text and reader as one of dominance and submission has served as a seductive image of the text as an entity that compels, trains, and disciplines its readers. While erotic desire and psychoanalytic theory more generally have continued to influence critical approaches to narrative, other critics have introduced new metaphors for thinking about what a narrative is and what it does to readers. Whereas Brooks uses male erotic desire as a metaphor for reading, Caroline Levine enlists the metaphor of the scientific experiment in The Serious Pleasures of Suspense (2003). While the Freudian model of desire is meant to be universal, Levine grounds her approach in a moment when Victorian scientists and philosophers were becoming attuned to the importance of suspending judgment during the pursuit of knowledge. She argues that, by withholding information from their readers, Victorian novels provided a form of “rigorous political and epistemological training” that fostered “energetic skepticism and uncertainty rather than closure and complacency” (2). Levine shifts our attention from the force that drives readers toward the end of a novel when they arrive at full knowledge to the cultural and ethical significance of narrative middles, which heighten readers’ sense of how much they are unable to know [on ethics, see Mitchell’s chapter]. For further approaches to the middle of a narrative, readers can consult Caroline Levine’s and Mario Ortiz-Robles’s (eds.) Narrative Middles (2011). Jesse Rosenthal takes a related approach in Good Form (2016), which focuses on how our interest in a narrative, along with our sense of the “formal satisfaction” a novel provides, is based on our moral intuition. In lieu of Brooks’s erotic model, Rosenthal argues that Victorian narrative strategies—the twists and turns of plot—are designed to provoke readerly reactions that stem from a moral sense of whether a plot outcome is just, fair, or “right” (13). Rosenthal’s claim that narrative 220
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structure is not an arbitrary set of rules or codes but has a profoundly moral dimension returns us to Aristotle’s assertion that tragic dramas are most effective when they focus on plots about unmerited misfortune. To account for an audience’s interest in whether fictional characters are punished or rewarded for their actions, William Flesch’s Comeuppance (2007) draws on evolutionary theories of altruism. The Aristotelian notion that a tragedy can be constructed in a manner that is maximally affecting is also central to Nicholas Dames’s Physiology of the Novel (2007), which recovers Victorian views of the novel as a metaphoric machine designed to produce certain effects on readers’ bodies, whose responses were also seen in mechanical terms. In this way, Dames argues, novel reading was understood as “a training ground for industrialized consciousness” at odds “with our own habitual sense of reading novels as an escape” (7) [on industrialization, see Carroll’s chapter]. Whereas Brooks sees the engines and motors that appear in the novels of Émile Zola as emblems of the erotic force that powers the forward movement of plot, Dames attends to the rhythmic structure of a narrative across time, to the “moment-to-moment affects and processes of reading prolonged narratives” (12). In Still Life, Elisha Cohn dwells on moments of rest or un-plotted moments of “non-reflection, inaction, and absorption” in a narrative (2), which for her expose the Victorian novel’s ambivalence about the relentless drive toward what needs to be “realized, revealed, or accomplished” (29). While many critics have understood both reading and critical practice in terms of the “passion to discover meaning” that Barthes celebrates in his 1975 “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative”, Cohn draws on another text by Barthes, The Neutral, to make a case for the value of a neutral, lyrical mood in which the productivity of reading is temporarily suspended (271). To recognize such moments is to recognize that Victorian novels do not perfectly fit the structures and models used to describe them. Suzanne Keen captures the messiness of these narratives by adopting the spatial metaphor of the house (a metaphor that Henry James made famous in his 1908 preface to The Portrait of a Lady). In Victorian Renovations of the Novel (1998), Keen introduces the concept of the narrative “annex,” a moment when a novel temporarily crosses over into a different generic realm, introducing characters, subject matter, and incidents that fall outside the cultural and literary norms of Victorian fiction but are essential to the progress of the narrative. By framing the Victorian novel as a house divided into distinct, bounded spaces, Keen presents yet another metaphoric way in which to understand what a novel is and what this does to or for readers. When critics describe the novel as a house, a machine, an experiment, or an engine of desire, they adopt a metaphor for thinking about what kind of thing a novel is and about the relationship between fictional narratives and their readers. As a house, the novel has separate spaces for readers to explore; as a machine, novels work on readers’ bodies, which respond mechanically in turn; as a scientific experiment, novels invite readers to generate hypotheses that may or may not be disproved. And, in his account of the relationship between reader and text as one of erotic desire, Brooks gives us a specific relationship of dominance and submission, in which the reader is seduced and reading is defined by an experience of surrender. These models reflect a critical desire to move beyond classical narratology’s representation of the text as a closed system but to retain some kind of abstract framework or model, so that thinking about the novel will proceed in a manner that seems systematic. Many of these accounts also reflect the broader values not just of the nineteenth century but also of the critical moment in which they appeared. We see nineteenth-century values on full display in the Victorian theory of the novel as a machine that trains readers to be members of industrial society, just as we see the influence of psychoanalysis on Brooks’s use of desire to understand narrative as an attempt to seduce and subjugate the reader. Levine’s claim that novels train readers to suspend judgment is compatible with contemporary views about literature’s role in the cultivation of critical thinking, while Cohn’s contention that fiction can provide a respite from self-cultivation comes at a moment when the discipline has turned to affect as an alternative to the single-minded pursuit of meaning. 221
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3. Narrative and Comprehension What if we could explore the intersection between texts and readers without resorting to metaphors for the relationship between them? I propose that psychological research on the reading process can provide literary critics with a conceptual vocabulary for the mental acts involved in reading qua reading, rather than as a figurative form of seduction, a scientific experiment, a mechanical response, or an exploration of the house of fiction [on psychology, see Keen’s chapter]. What’s more, although our discipline was founded on a belief in the causal connection between what literary texts are about and what readers learn from them, a vast body of psychological research on learning, problem solving, and decision making makes it possible to explore how this process might work in practice, allowing us to go beyond the straightforward causal relationship in which literary texts shape the reading subject. Although many scholars remain resistant to cognitive psychology in literary criticism, I would argue that engaging with empirical findings presents an unexpectedly effective way to move beyond narrative theory’s current methodological limitations while also advancing its long-standing aims. Here we might recall that one of the defining aims of classical and contemporary narratology has been to approach the study of narrative as a science. Yet narratologists, in their effort to examine literary texts systematically, have tended to construe narratives as closed systems with a logic and structure of their own, independent of the human beings who create and consume them. Put another way, the desire for a systematic methodology has led narratologists to proceed as if narratives themselves operate systematically as well, which downplays all the ways in which the stories we tell ourselves violate the formal patterns and structures that literary critics seek to impose upon them. Because the psychological study of how readers comprehend and retain narrative information is grounded in the scientific method (a method that aspires to the systematicity that narratologists have also pursued), it presents literary critics with a set of orderly and disciplined procedures for examining the messiness of literary texts and their relation to the human activities of constructing and comprehending narratives. Concepts from the psychology of reading can assist us with thinking about narratives as human artifacts that may not be organized in a perfectly logical and systematic way. In When Fiction Feels Real (2018), I point out that narratives are subject to the biases, limitations, and inclinations of the human mind, which complicates the structuralist assumption that every part of a text is equally (and enormously) significant. Roland Barthes asserts in the 1975 “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” that art “does not acknowledge the existence of noise (in the informational sense of the word). It is a pure system: there are no wasted units, and there can never be any” (245). He models this approach in “The Reality Effect,” which makes a case for the discursive significance of narrative details that seem to resist interpretation. By devoting unlimited time and attention to units of a text that might otherwise be overlooked by readers chiefly concerned with the plot, critics bring out content that the text itself works to obscure. Yet precisely because this specialized reading practice overrides the ordinary ways in which readers approach a text, it obscures the dynamic relationship between the constraints on a reader’s interest, memory, and attention and the ways in which narrative information has been arranged. Just as readers may not devote equally intensive attention to every part of a text, organizational structures within a text also influence a reader’s ability to comprehend, remember, and retrieve narrative content. For instance, studies from the 1970s and 1980s suggest that readers display a much greater ability to retain information when it is structured around a causal relationship than when it was presented as a series of unrelated events. What this opens up for narrative theory is the relationship between narrative structures and how the human mind makes sense of and retains new information. Knowing more about what happens when we read can also alert us to aspects of the reading process that are at odds with the felt experience of reading. Whereas Brooks’s model of a passive reader
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who is seduced by and submits to the text is one of many influential accounts of how readers are under the grip of what they read, research on the reading process reveals that comprehension is far from mindless or passive, even when readers feel as if they have surrendered to the text. Even when readers seem to be passively borne along by a text, a precondition of this self-forgetful experience of “flow” is a sense of being in control of their actions and environment (Csíkszentmihályi). And even when a reader feels immersed in a narrative about a fictional character who is at rest, asleep, or dreaming, the reader’s attention remains fully engaged by cognitive processes that include recognizing words, parsing sentences into propositional content, drawing on background knowledge to make inferences necessary for comprehension, and organizing narrative information into mental representations that can be retrieved and revised. While the belief that reading is a mindless activity has a long history, we can trace our discipline’s assumptions about how literary language works back to structuralist interpretations of select passages from Ferdinand de Saussure’s 1916 Course in General Linguistics. Now that more than a century has passed since that book’s publication, we need to become acquainted with more recent ideas about language. For instance, Barthes repeatedly dismisses the significance of the “referential illusion,” or the notion that the words of a fictional narrative refer to persons, places, and things (“Reality Effect” 148). Yet well-established psychological studies from the 1970s suggest that comprehending a narrative necessarily involves constructing a mental representation of what the text describes, regardless of whether a real referent is present. When the narrator of The Mill on the Floss says, “I have been pressing my elbows on the arms of my chair, and dreaming that I was standing on the bridge in front of Dorlcote Mill” (11), readers may draw on their knowledge of what a chair is and what it means to press one’s elbows on something as part of the comprehension process. Since its nineteenth-century emergence, our discipline has been oriented toward how literary texts enable readers to acquire the knowledge and abilities they lack. I argue, however, that knowing more about the reading process alerts us to just how much literary artists depend on a reader’s existing background knowledge and abilities. This includes not just forms of literary competence and cultural knowledge that literary critics readily recognize, but also areas of expertise that require no specialized training and therefore tend to be taken for granted, such as the social and emotional intelligence readers acquire through everyday lived experience. Cognitive literary critics such as Alan Palmer, Blakey Vermeule, and Lisa Zunshine have already drawn attention to how literary texts engage readers’ capacity to exercise Theory of Mind, or the ability to make inferences about other people’s implicit motives and feelings. Yet there are many more concepts in social psychology and sociolinguistics that are remarkably suggestive for literary critics. For instance, impression formation, which I discuss in When Fiction Feels Real, is the cognitive process of accumulating and integrating available information about a person to construct a mental representation that can be retrieved from memory. Our facility with organizing information about other persons into coherent mental models in turn assists us with comprehending narrative information about characters such as Maggie Tulliver and Philip Wakem. Novel readers frequently speak of “meeting” characters who do not exist because they so readily undertake the social process of forming, retrieving, and revising mental models of fictional beings. From a sociolinguistic perspective, our acute sensitivity to social information also extends to the style or manner in which someone speaks. This attunes us to the social effects produced by the distinctive narrative styles of writers like Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope. Moreover, it introduces a new way to account for Audrey Jaffe’s claim that omniscient narrators emerge from the tension between personality and impersonality. Try as they might to efface their distinctive voices, third-person narrators display social cues to which we readily respond. Psychological perspectives on reading can also expand narrative theory’s fundamental understanding of what readers do with literary texts and what texts do to their readers in turn. In Reading for the Plot, Brooks displays a notably narrow view of what counts as reading, equating it with the “passion 223
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for meaning” that Barthes celebrates (19). If reading is synonymous with the epistemological desire to find things out, it is quite closely related to the quest for interpretive significance that has long characterized the work of many literary critics. What psychological research on reading comprehension reveals, however, is that readers can approach a narrative with a wide range of reading goals; that the pursuit of these goals can be affected by many additional factors, such as varying levels of motivation, interest, background knowledge, skill, and attention; and that all of these factors often have a profound influence on what we get out of a text. Empirical findings even suggest that it can be surprisingly difficult for information in a text to change a reader’s existing beliefs. Once we become open to the possibility that the interpretive meaning readers find in a text is not necessarily synonymous with how that text affects them, the claims we make about what texts do to their readers can acquire greater nuance and sophistication. We can recognize, for example, that not every aspect of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre or its cultural context has equal weight when it comes to comprehension, which in turn enables us to become more precise about the significance of specific historical conditions. At the same time that causal relationships render narrative information in Jane Eyre easier for readers to comprehend and remember, our own causal reasoning is often shaped by cognitive biases. Developing greater awareness of these biases can help us interrogate our own disciplinary practice of inferring causal relationships between textual details and broader cultural conditions, such as between specific passages in Jane Eyre and large-scale historical movements. In the absence of full knowledge, we often resort to basic causal principles that are learned at an early age, readily perceiving causal relationships between phenomena that have temporal and spatial contiguity, such as the books in Brontë’s home and the novels she wrote, and between stimuli that are especially salient to us, such as the literary texts we study and contemporary current events. At the same time that we might consider how literary narratives play with these habitual expectations, we can also examine how interpretive readings are themselves narratives that reflect and reinforce the cognitive biases that shape our causal reasoning. Indeed, it is important to recognize that, as influential as narrative theory has been in Victorian studies, it has been disproportionately shaped by specific claims within the work of a surprisingly small set of theorists and literary artists. Barthes’s view of texts as “pure system” with “no noise” is grounded in the work of Honoré de Balzac, whose relentlessly allegorical understanding of his realist project lends itself to the symptomatic quest for meaning that many critics have celebrated. Similarly, Genette’s emphasis on narrative time and diegetic levels is grounded in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, which foregrounds the operation of memory, the passage of time, and the frequency of reported events. I urge the next generation of narrative theorists to consider the relationships between narrative form and how the human mind makes sense of a text (and of information more generally). By exploring this rich, uncharted territory, we can develop new tools (theoretical, digital, and otherwise) and perspectives on narration grounded in a larger set of primary texts, writers, and genres in Victorian studies and beyond.
Key Critical Works Aristotle. Poetics. Mieke Bal. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Roland Barthes. S/Z. Peter Brooks. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Seymour Chatman. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Nicholas Dames. The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction. Gérard Genette. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Audrey Jaffe. Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience. Suzanne Keen. Narrative Form. D. A. Miller. Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel.
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Narrative Theory Robyn Warhol. Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel. Alex Woloch. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel.
Works Cited Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by Malcolm Heath, Penguin, 1996. Auyoung, Elaine. When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind. Oxford UP, 2018. Barthes, Roland. “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative.” New Literary History, vol. 6, no. 2, Winter 1975, pp. 237–72. ———. The Neutral: Lecture Courses at the Collège de France (1977–1978). Translated by Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier, Columbia UP, 2005. ———. “The Reality Effect.” The Rustle of Language, translated by Richard Howard, U of California P, 1989, pp. 141–48. ———. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller, Hill and Wang, 1974. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Harvard UP, 1984. Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton UP, 1978. Cohn, Elisha. Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel. Oxford UP, 2016. Csíkszentmiháyi, Mihály. Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play. Jossey-Bass, 1975. Dames, Nicholas. The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction. Oxford UP, 2007. Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. Edited by A. S. Byatt. Penguin, 1979. Flesch, William. Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction. Harvard UP, 2009. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Cornell UP, 1983. Jaffe, Audrey. Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience. U of California P, 1991. Keen, Suzanne. Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation. Cambridge UP, 2005. Levine, Caroline. The Serious Pleasures of Suspense:Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt. U of Virginia P, 2003. Levine, Caroline, and Mario Ortiz-Robles, editors. Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Ohio State UP, 2011. Miller, D. A. Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel. Princeton UP, 1981. ———. The Novel and the Police. U of California P, 1988. Rosenthal, Jesse. Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel. Princeton UP, 2016. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Wade Baskin, McGraw-Hill, 1966. Stewart, Garrett. Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction. U of Chicago P, 2009. Warhol, Robyn. “‘It Is of Little Use for Me to Tell You’: George Eliot’s Narrative Refusals.” A Companion to George Eliot, edited by Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw, John Wiley, 2013, pp. 46–61. Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton UP, 2003.
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20 THE ETHICAL TURN Rebecca N. Mitchell
Charles Dickens wanted to help. Inspired by a governmental report on the deplorable state of child labor in England, in March 1843 he wrote to Dr. Southwood Smith—one of the commissioners responsible for the report—that he would publish a “very cheap pamphlet,” called “An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child” (459) to address the problem of child poverty and exploitation. Just one week later, Dickens’s thinking had evolved on the matter and he wrote again to Smith, noting his decision to delay the publication until the end of the year. Dickens promised that, upon reading the eventual publication, Smith would “certainly feel that a Sledge hammer has come down with twenty times the force—twenty thousand times the force” that Dickens could have achieved with his initial pamphlet idea (461). Ultimately, the conduit for that “Sledge hammer” force was not a pamphlet at all, but his novella A Christmas Carol (1843), a fictional “little scheme” to “carry out a notion” of social amelioration (585) that promised exponentially more power than nonfiction writing on the same topic. A decade later, George Eliot bemoaned Dickens’s “frequently false psychology, preternaturally virtuous poor children and artisans, his melodramatic boatmen and courtezans” (54) in her seminal treatise of realism in literature “The Natural History of German Life” (1856); yet she heartily endorsed his larger project, maintaining that fiction could improve its readers and their world. She felt that an author’s most moral intentions could be undermined by inaccurate portrayals, and in order for fiction to have the desired effect, Eliot insisted that its representational choices must be based in accurate, lived experience. Readers could “be taught to feel” for others unlike themselves by encountering flawed, human individuals in fictional narratives (55). The Victorian alignment of fiction and an ethical imperative became so ubiquitous that when popular (and popularly conventional) social-problem novelist Walter Besant lectured a public audience on “The Art of Fiction” in 1884, he informed his listeners that a “conscious moral purpose” is “practically a law of English Fiction” (29). By the 1880s, objections to overt moralizing in literature were becoming more common. Henry James famously rebutted Besant by insisting that a novelist’s “only obligation” is that the work must “be interesting” (507). A more radical articulation of this position arrived in the fin de siècle, exemplified in Oscar Wilde’s rejoinder to the critics of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), who charged the work and its creator with transgressing the ethical norms of Victorian literature and culture. In a series of 23 epigrams intended to serve as a preface to subsequent editions of the novel, Wilde railed against the idea that an artist or his work was beholden to any such values: “No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.” Wilde rejected the notion that a text itself might have an ethical charge: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. 226
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Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” And he placed all responsibility for the perception of immoral or unethical content in a novel on the reader or critic who identifies it: “Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault”; “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors” (480–81) [on aestheticism, see Evangelista’s chapter]. These were provocations, boldly challenging long-held views about the significance of an author’s ethical intentions (e.g., those expressed by Dickens) and the intrinsic moral quality of fiction as determined by its representational choices (e.g., those advocated by Eliot), and positing that fiction should only be judged on its formal qualities as opposed to its perceived moral position. Over the course of the twentieth century, this view would come to hold sway, establishing the critical terrain ripe for what would come to be called the “ethical turn” in literary studies that occurred nearly a century after Wilde’s polemic.
1. Orientation Reflecting in 2001 on trends in ethical criticism, Jil Larson summarized the contrast that defined literary scholarship across the previous century and a half: While traditional ethical criticism was too often essentialist, normative, and blind to the implications of narrative choices and rhetorical relations both within a text (between narrator and narratee, for instance) and outside a text (between readers or listeners and narrators and implied authors), the formalist correctives to this type of literary criticism tended to leave ethics behind altogether. (2) As we have seen, Wilde’s Preface to Dorian Gray was an early salvo in this shift to formalism. In the decades that followed, the “conscious moral purpose” touted by Besant came to be regarded as hopelessly retrograde, a vestige of outmoded notions of hegemonic propriety, and novels such as Besant’s that foregrounded didactic moralizing or the amelioration of social problems fell out of favor. At the same time, nonfiction works including Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1919) delighted in skewering a number of Victorian figures whose fame rested on their ostensible virtue, Florence Nightingale and Cardinal Manning among them, calling into question whether any individual should be considered a moral arbiter to begin with. Strachey’s anti-hagiographical irreverence was a revelation in the practice of biography, but it also aligned chronologically with the rise of Russian formalism. By mid-century, the New Criticism that developed from its Russian antecedent definitively divorced the text from its maker and, to a large degree, divorced moral content and ethical imperatives from considerations of a novel’s quality. Considerations of literary ethics never disappeared completely in part because, by the midtwentieth century, Victorian novels built on ethical motives regained a privileged place in literary studies as a result of a few well-placed interventions by critics, including John Holloway and F. R. Leavis. Holloway unabashedly valued Victorian works on their own (Victorian, masculinist) terms; his Victorian Sage (1951) helped to revive interest in the mid-nineteenth century prose of Arnold, Carlyle, and Ruskin, preferences that would come under fire through the culture wars of the following decades. Leavis’s 1948 The Great Tradition was even more influential than Holloway’s study, and did much to secure the realist novel among the twentieth-century canon, in part by the force of his conviction. His sure-footed declaration that, for example, Henry James is one of only four “great English novelists” (1) can detract attention from his more nuanced description of James’s “moral fineness” which was, Leavis argues, “so far beyond the perception of his critics that they can accuse him of the opposite” (157) [on canonization, see Schaffer’s chapter]. (It is worth recalling that James himself had rejected 227
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the “conscious moral purpose” as a necessary motive of literature.) While adopting the careful close reading pioneered by the formalists, Leavis attended equally to the ethical texture of the works he considered and to the effects that they produced in the reader. His description of Isabel Archer’s rejection of her suitor Warburton in James’s A Portrait of a Lady (1881) is representative: The admirableness of Lord Warburton and the impressiveness of his world, as we are made to feel them, are essential to the significance of Isabel’s negative choice. That her rejection of them doesn’t strike us as the least capricious, but as an act of radically ethical judgement, is a tribute to the reality with which James has invested her. (148) In Leavis’s telling, the ethical basis of Archer’s actions “strike” the reader; the reader is “made to feel” impressed by the characters. These effects arise as a consequence of the author’s ability to invest his characters with “reality.” Like Leavis, later critics would take up the challenge to perceive, and to describe, the means through which novelists’ subtle depictions of psychological complexity achieved this “moral fineness.” Leavis’s work, with its careful attention to readerly experience and the depiction of moral ambivalence, was an early example of the approach that would drive the “ethical turn” in literary studies. A number of smaller critical evolutions facilitated and occurred alongside this eventual turn. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975, trans. 1977) and History of Sexuality (1976, trans. 1978) made it harder to believe that the Victorians held an intrinsically and uniformly high moral ground, built on their history of repression. Foucault’s work, like Strachey’s, challenged the notion that the nineteenth century was morally and sexually pure by examining the socio-legal, political, and bureaucratic structures that regulated Victorian life and its representations. At the same time, other literary-critical interventions considered points of view other than the Western, male, white, imperial, and capitalist. Frederic Jameson (e.g., The Political Unconscious, 1981) explored the ways that the rise of the realist novel contributed to the rise of the capitalist subject; his model laid the foundation for enriching close reading with careful attention to the sociopolitical contexts that led to literary texts [on historicist reading, see Gallagher’s chapter]. Feminist and queer critics were examining the power dynamics that defined the nineteenth-century publishing world and recuperating the work of writers who had been sidelined through the previous century. Postcolonialists performed analogous work, excavating alternate narratives of production and interrogating the power dynamics that shape language and literature [on postcolonial reading, see Banerjee’s chapter]. One could argue convincingly that these are fundamentally ethical projects, concerned with depictions of alterity, access to representation, and the explosion of totalizing perspectives that further alienate the marginalized. Yet as these efforts generally did not take the ethical investment of literary texts as their primary subject, they tend not to be enclosed within the “ethical turn” per se. Despite these eddies, from the late 1970s through the 1980s the dominant literary discourse was that of structuralism and poststructuralism/deconstruction. To adopt Jil Larson’s description, it did seem to “leave ethics behind altogether,” as it disputed the idea that texts instantiated stable meanings, much less fixed ethical values. That position proved ultimately untenable, and a counter-movement was precipitated at least in part by the then-shocking revelation that Paul de Man, one of the leading theorists of the Yale School, had published articles sympathetic to Nazi causes while working as a journalist in occupied Belgium. Against the charge that the work of Jacques Derrida and his interlocutors encouraged an ultimately empty nihilism, philosophers in the early 1990s began to argue for the ethical implications of poststructuralism, noting, for example, the significance of the work of phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas for Derrida’s ideas. Among Levinas’s contributions was an ethics dependent on the recognition of the radical alterity of the other: a uniquely inter-human obligation that arises from what Levinas describes as the “relation with something which for ever remains other” 228
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(165). Despite Levinas’s insistence that objects—texts included—could not function as the subjective other in an encounter with a reader, literary scholars were quick to suggest that literature could function analogically in this role.
2. Reorientation This new willingness to countenance literary ethics created an opening for critics at the helm of the ethical turn, which might be described as a change in focus from the values inherent in the author or the plots and characters depicted in fiction to a focus on the values inherent in the relationship between the reader and the text. Still, the opening pages of Wayne Booth’s 1988 foundational study The Company We Keep demonstrate that he was keenly aware that he was swimming against prevailing currents in literary theory. Before the introduction begins in earnest, readers encounter ten epigraphs by a range of heavy-hitting philosophers (e.g., Jacques Maritain, Jean-Paul Sartre), writers and composers (e.g., George Orwell, T. S. Eliot, Igor Stravinsky), and literary critics (e.g., Roland Barthes, John Gardner) about the ethical nature of art, establishing a polyphonic chorus insisting one way or another that ethical considerations matter. The introduction is subtitled “Ethical Criticism, a Banned Discipline?” and it begins with an anecdote about Booth’s colleague Paul Moses, who in the 1960s objected to Huckleberry Finn on ethical grounds. This “overt, serious, uncompromising act of ethical criticism” was met in the halls of the University of Chicago with outrage: “All of his colleagues were offended: obviously Moses was violating academic norms of objectivity” (3), a view that Booth admits that he shared. Booth seems, in short, to be anticipating readers’ objections to his project, both by marshaling a group of famous, powerful voices to his cause and by acknowledging his own previous suspicion of the kind of work he is writing, before turning to his argument that “an overt ethical appraisal, is one legitimate form of literary criticism” (4). Such preliminaries aside, Booth’s interest was in how exactly a novel produced its ethical effects. Among the more powerful metaphors for literary meaning-making he offered was the one signaled in his title: that of friendship. A reader of a book enters into its company, that of the characters and of the implied author. The metaphor of “people meeting,” he argued, was useful for reviving discussion “about the types of friendship or companionship a book provides as it is read” (188, emphasis in the original). Though once a common trope for book lovers and authors to invoke—the Preface to Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) implores readers to “let this little book be your friend” (23)—Booth notes that use of the figure had waned in the previous decades. But this was not the only model of reader-book relationship that Booth described. Another presents the novel as testing ground for hypothetical behaviors. A well-crafted novel will allow readers to “stretch our own capacities for thinking about how life should be lived” (187). He describes the “unique value of fiction” as “its relatively cost-free offer of trial runs”; “In a month of reading, I can try out more ‘lives’ than I can test in a lifetime” (485). Here, the book’s direct application to ethical acts becomes more apparent, as a positive or negative fictional example can ostensibly guide the reader, who can adopt or avoid the actions or behaviors of characters depending on the outcomes depicted in the novel. Booth was not alone in considering the readerly apperception of novels. J. Hillis Miller, in The Ethics of Reading (1987), offers an account that, from today’s distance, looks not dissimilar to Booth’s: “We read novels to see in a safe area of fiction or imagination what would happen if we lived our lives according to a certain principle of moral choice” (30). Whereas Booth emphasizes the content of the works as a means of facilitating the ethical extension of the reader by encouraging friendship or illustrating a variety of lived experiences, Miller looked to the ethical quality that inheres in the act of reading itself, as an “effective and functional embodiment of some ethical law in action,” and not as a “thematic statement or dramatization of some ethical law.” Miller’s embrace of ethics relied on the tenets of poststructuralism, his textual exemplars including those familiar figures of George Eliot and Henry James, but also ur-deconstructionist Paul de Man. 229
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As some literary theorists were delineating the ethical aspects of fiction and reading practices, moral philosophers were turning to literature as a proving ground for their ideas, extending the ethical extension outside of the halls of the university philosophy department. Foremost among these thinkers is Martha Nussbaum, whose Love’s Knowledge (1990) is the definitive example of moral philosophy grounded in literary analysis. She seems even to have coined the term “turn,” remarking in a footnote that “it is striking that in the last few years literary theorists allied with deconstruction have taken a marked turn toward the ethical” (66, n. 52). In her collection of essays, the earliest of which had been published in 1985 (thus pre-dating Booth’s The Company We Keep), Nussbaum argued that literature, and not traditional philosophy, was able to communicate more clearly the nature of reality and its ethical imperatives: There may be some views of the world and how one should live in it—views, especially, that emphasize the world’s surprising variety, its complexity and mysteriousness, its flawed and imperfect beauty—that cannot be fully and adequately stated in the language of conventional philosophical prose, a style remarkably flat and lacking in wonder—but only in a language and in forms themselves more complex, more allusive, more attentive to particulars. (3) For Nussbaum, the form and style of fiction—“the selection of genre, formal structures, sentences, vocabulary, of the whole manner of addressing the reader’s sense of life” (20)—are central to its ability to represent human life. This nature of fiction is also central to its ability to encourage transformative readerly engagement: “People care for the books they read,” she writes, “and they are changed by what they care for, both during the time of reading and in countless later ways more difficult to discern” (252). Despite her unabashed endorsement of fiction’s ethical potential, Nussbaum is careful to avoid a hectoring tone or static, binary notion of right versus wrong, and in this regard her caution calls to mind the charges against Victorian fiction leveled by early twentieth-century critics. She draws heavily upon nineteenth-century novels for her content, with Dickens’s David Copperfield among her case studies. Unsurprisingly, James too is designated for especial praise, as his nuanced prose and psychologically complex characterization ensure that ethical behavior is not a set of foreclosed options but rather a consequence of multiple intersecting subjectivities. The degree to which Nussbaum’s version of literary ethics endorses ambivalence over certainty is cast into relief when we consider her conclusions alongside Booth’s. He had gone further, suggesting—perhaps wryly, perhaps not—that it would be up to readers to decide “just which of the world’s narratives should now be banned or embraced in the lifetime project of building the character of an ethical reader” (489). This kind of instrumentalist approach has not won favor; rare is the work of literary criticism which prescribes reading. In their assessment of the ethical turn, Todd Davis and Kenneth Womack conclude: “[I]f there is any single defining characteristic in the ethical turn that marks contemporary literary studies, it resides in the fact that few critics wish to return to a dogmatically prescriptive or doctrinaire form of reading” (x). Still, Nussbaum’s relative comfort with complexity within fiction has not excused what some regard as her untroubled acceptance that the novel and its ethical project are necessarily good. In a helpful overview of ethical criticism, Dorothy Hale notes that feminist and postcolonialist critics take issue with the seemingly uncritical buy-in of ethical arguments like those of Nussbaum (whose emphasis on private emotion can be seen as confirming “the liberal subject’s valorization of psychological interiority through its mystification” [898]), but that even in their criticism, they still agree that literature does offer ethical value; it’s just the nature of that value that is different. “For these new ethicists and a wave of others,” Hale argues, “the ethical value of literature lies in the felt encounter with alterity that it brings to its reader” (899), not in teaching the reader how to behave. Hale reconciles these sides by adapting Nussbaum’s example of James, 230
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showing that his work was already participating in the centering of alterity in literary aesthetics. Hale’s “social formalism” seeks to demonstrate that narratology and cultural criticism are not antagonistic methodologies or anathema to ethics, an approach that would be adopted across Victorian studies.
3. Victorianist Angles In Victorian scholarship, these precedents ultimately gave rise to a series of studies which recognized that the ethical concerns that had always been central to Victorian literature could be newly invigorated with formal close reading and by turning to the ways that novelists effected readerly engagement. One group of scholars took up nineteenth-century epistemology as an organizing principle for approaching the study of the novel. After all, the nature of knowledge was a subject debated in the nineteenth century and pivotal in the realist novel, and it promised to shape our understanding of other people in addition to our knowledge of the natural world. Before we can know the other or understand our ethical obligation to them, we must understand the nature of knowledge itself. Amanda Anderson framed epistemological detachment as ethical stance, asking “what it means to cultivate a distanced relation toward one’s self, one’s community, or those objects that one chooses to study or represent” (4), noting all the while that “the issue of moral character” (7) is central to that question. Modulating the degree of distance—of “stance” in relation to the other (10)—is a function of fiction. Anderson describes George Eliot as “interested in exposing the falsehoods that issue from acts of distancing, but she is equally interested in examining the psychological and social attitudes that accompany such detached and objectifying relations to the social world” (10). The same might be said of Anderson. George Levine’s Dying to Know (2002) similarly connects a discussion of dispassionate knowledge with the ethical stakes of objectivity. “I want to foreground the narrative basis of our culture’s large and abstract commitment to knowledge and truth,” he writes in his introduction, “to shift the grounds of discussions of disinterest and objectivity from philosophical haggling to human and ethical concerns” (2). Levine is also attuned to the concern that, by discussing ethics, he is somehow reinscribing the kind of hegemonic order that previous decades of literary scholarship tried so hard to undo. He insists that “nineteenth-century aspirations toward knowledge were not merely, as they have often been ‘exposed’ as being, disguises of egoistic aggressions, reflections of surreptitious ideologies, disreputable programs of power, intimations of personal and culturally deep prejudices” (6). Levine’s notion of aspiration here is important, as there is value in the effort even if the ideal end is not achieved, but noteworthy too is his skepticism of moral policing. The Victorian desire to know is ultimately an ethical act. In his Burdens of Perfection (2008), Andrew Miller, equally aware that moralizing can seem “portentous, pious, humorless,” nevertheless maintains that “what distinguishes nineteenth-century British literature, what sets it apart from other sorts of cultural achievements” is its thoroughgoing devotion to ethics: “The period’s literature was inescapably ethical in orientation: ethical in its form, its motivation, its aims, its tonality, its diction, its very style” (xi). Miller’s interest is in the relationship between reader and text, and in the aspiration to moral perfectibility, whereby “individual transfiguration comes not through obedience to [rules, commandments, laws, guidelines] but through openness to example—through responsive, unpredictable engagements with other people” (3). In the nineteenthcentury novel, readerly “commitment” to the narrator is “cultivated through the formation of a particular second-person perspective on the novel we are reading” (78). By replacing rules with considered knowledge of the other, we see the intersection of knowledge and behavior, and of learning how to be in relation to other individuals. Some scholars have developed this interest into studies of interpersonal relationships, and sympathy and empathy have emerged as central to the ethical turn in Victorian studies. These critics explore the mechanisms through which fiction constructs or instructs its readers about the nature of human 231
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intersubjectivity. Given the persistence of formalist literary criticism, it should not surprise us that many studies of Victorian empathy focus on the diegetic expressions or depictions of empathetic engagement between characters, as opposed to the extradiegetic relationship between reader and text. Audrey Jaffe’s Scenes of Sympathy (2000) does not overtly tackle ethics as a central theme, but her work explores the ways that Victorian novels “render visible otherwise invisible determinations of social identity” (8). She tracks shifts from the earlier decades of the period in which “sympathy generally entails an attenuation of self in a spectator’s disturbing identification with the marginal” (114)—a fellow-feeling born of recognition of difference—to the fin de siècle, when sympathy arises from the recognition of similarity, of a shared “imaginary body” (178). Other waves of scholarship on fellow-feeling emerged in the wake of Jaffe’s study. Rachel Ablow’s The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (2007), for example, takes up the marital relationship to consider the ways that the novel organizes interpersonal subjectivity. Whereas Booth’s model for reader/text relationship was friendship, Ablow’s is the more intimate relationship of marriage. She draws on legal concepts like coverture to explore, as she deftly puts it in her introduction, “the implications of the common Victorian claim that novel reading constitutes a way to achieve the psychic, ethical, and affective benefits also commonly associated with sympathy in married life” (1). A few years later, Rae Greiner’s Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2012) turns more directly to issues of form, considering the mechanisms through which sympathetic extension is enacted in realist fiction, metonymy foremost among them. The vestiges of the Levinasian bend of the early ethical turn can also be traced in empathy studies. In my own Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference (2011), I adopt Levinas’s vocabulary of limitation and aspiration to argue that realist novels and paintings insist on the alterity of the other by depicting failures of assumed knowledge: the problems of treating other individuals as readable, knowable texts. Empathy, I argue, arises not from identification, but from the realization of the other’s unassailable difference. Rachel Hollander’s Narrative Hospitality in Late Victorian Fiction: Novel Ethics (2013) uses Levinasian notions of hospitality—the duty of the self to the other—as a paradigm to explain the ethical imperatives of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction. Most of these works agree that Victorian texts encourage readers to consider the other carefully and sensitively, though they differ in their explanations for the mechanisms of that encouragement. This process is generally assumed to be inherently altruistic, and the actual efficacy of readerly empathetic extension is not commonly plumbed. Suzanne Keen’s Empathy and the Novel (2007), while not solely dedicated to Victorian texts, was nevertheless important for the development of empathy studies and their practical application in the classroom, and one of her interventions is in considering the transfer of empathy outside the covers of a book. Her interest is expressly in the outcomes of readerly empathy: does a reader’s emotional investment in fictional characters result in altruistic behavior in the real world? Dickens’s “Sledge hammer” blow would only be effective if readers converted their outrage, or guilt, or empathy, into action, and—as Keen compellingly demonstrates—that conversion is all too rare. Keen’s work is unique for its real-world focus on the behaviors of actual, as opposed to imagined, readers, learners, and students. It will be clear from this brief survey that scholars of Victorian intersubjectivity have grappled with which words—“sympathy,” “empathy,” “fellow-feeling”—are best suited to the task. As has been extensively documented, the word “empathy” did not enter the English language until the fin de siècle, borrowed from the German einfühlung. The use of “empathy” gained traction in the first decades of the twentieth century, when Vernon Lee theorized the aesthetic and sensorial dimensions of empathic extension. In light of this history, using “empathy” to describe nineteenth-century behaviors can seem like an anachronism. Yet by the mid-eighteenth century, the contours of “sympathy” were the subject of debate, most notably in the works of David Hume—whose Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) explained that a vivid sympathetic imagination could allow for the sharing of sensations between individuals—and Adam Smith—whose Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) argued 232
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instead that sympathetic extension is always mediated by cognition, and that one could never truly experience the lived sensation of someone else [on form, see Greiner’s chapter]. Smith’s view has held sway with most Victorian studies, explored explicitly in Greiner’s and my books, but both Smith and Hume used “sympathy” to describe these varied intersubjective encounters. Given the slipperiness of the terminology, recent scholars are compelled to explain the reasoning for their rhetorical choices, but even in this they have nineteenth-century precedents: in 1823, Thomas De Quincey complained of having to explain that the “proper sense” of the word “sympathy” was “the act of reproducing in our minds the feelings of another” and not “a mere synonyme [sic.] of the word pity” thanks to the “unscholarlike use of the word” (emphasis in the original, 355). It bears repeating that many studies participating in the ethical turn are united by an emphasis on the aspiration toward a state of ethics, rather than its achievement. This stance was anticipated in Smith’s work, which maintained that sharing the identification sensation of another was an impossibility, and it was central to Levinas’s phenomenology, which insisted that the ethical imperative—the duty of the self to the other—existed regardless of the futility of fulfilling it. Even Eliot, that most earnest endorser of the power of sympathetic extension, repeatedly acknowledges the limitation of her own narrative and narratorial reach. There are limitations of scope, as when in Middlemarch the narrator cautions that “if we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence” (194). And there are also limitations of subjective bias, as when in Adam Bede the narrator declares, “I aspire to give no more than a faithful account of men and thing as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed; the reflection faint or confused” (193). Attempts to reconcile the lofty aims of perfection, detachment, or empathy with the reality of their impossibility may produce ambivalence, but that is no indictment of the ethical project.
4. Circumvolutions The studies glossed here attend carefully to form and its potential for cultivating awareness of and sensitivity to alterity, and they therefore demonstrate the variety of ways that Victorian fiction can compel readers to expand their consciousness to include individuals and experiences outside of their own. In the last few decades, literary criticism has extended this consideration to include the relationships between human characters and nonhuman agents in the texts, be they animal or environmental. And so, other “turns” emanate from the ethical: the affective (which overlaps with the ethical and the empathic), the neurological, the ecological, the animal, and the geopolitical among them. Most seek to connect formalist critique with extraliterary disciplinary concerns, nearly all with ethical implications. Lauren Goodlad’s “Cosmopolitanism’s Actually Existing Beyond: Toward a Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic” (2010) proposes “the joining of ethics and geopolitics” with “historical materialism” and “attention to literary form” (399–400). For Kay Young (2010), Mary-Catherine Harrison (2007), and Benjamin Morgan (2017), Victorian developments in the physiological and psychological understandings of the mind provide the relevant context for explaining the way that fiction encourages readers to imagine the consciousness of characters or the aesthetic experience of the text. It is, in Young’s telling, a valuable extension, “mind work that prompts us to better know our own minds” (4). These many turns have produced real-world consequences. The expansion of empathy into everyday training and practice of medicine is one example. Once relegated to the nebulous domain of the (optional) pleasant bedside manner, empathy now features regularly in medical school admissions interviews. Narrative and the novel have become a means of teaching what is currently regarded as a necessary skill for the future doctors: “the effective practice of medicine,” Rita Charon argues, “requires narrative competence, that is, the ability to acknowledge, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others” (1897). We might expect that literary studies will continue to shape the 233
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way individuals understand and care for others by theorizing the way that novels represent those relationships. Indeed, the evolution of the “ethics of care,” and its relevance to disability studies broadly, including works such as Talia Schaffer’s recent Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction, suggest areas for future development. For all of those new areas, medical empathy and the ethics of care concern themselves with the relationship between individuals, and the way that narratives might inform or enhance the ethical relations between them [on medical humanities, see Stoddard Holmes’s chapter]. It is an ethics still grounded in the relationship between the literary text and the reader. I have suggested that this emphasis is characteristic of the modern ethical turn, as distinct from previous critical traditions that have located ethical intention more firmly in the role of the author or in the text itself.
5. Full Circle? In 2004, writing on the “twentieth birthday” of the revival of interest in ethics and literature, Michael Eskin suggested that the “ethical turn” was “more like a noticeable turbulence in the path of modern intellectual history than a (radical) veering off from hitherto accepted intellectual practices” (558). For the Victorians, those accepted intellectual practices included the blending of ethics and literature, with the goal of fiction improving readers morally and inspiring social change through them. Challenges to the text/ethics connection arose throughout the twentieth century, but as Eskin points out, and as I hope that this survey has demonstrated, those critics and philosophers contributing to the ethical turn returned to questions of literary ethics with a new focus on the ways that “the singular encounter between reader and text-as-other, [solicits] a singularly just response on the reader’s part” (560). They do this by describing models of the reader-text relationship (e.g., as friendship, as marriage), by exploring the formal qualities of nineteenth-century literature that enact dynamics analogous to human experience (e.g., ambivalence or multiplicity of perspective, narratorial distance, aspiration and limitation), and by considering the sympathetic or empathetic extension depicted in or encouraged by fiction. Eskin called attention to the long-standing imbrication of ethics and literature in part to caution against overstating the innovative quality of the ethical turn; his goal was “not to derogate from or diminish the achievements of ethical critics,” but to forestall a falsely progressivist assessment of the current state of affairs in the “ethics and literature” debate based on a facile notion of innovation by being mindful . . . of such facts as that philosophy—of which ethics is a branch . . .—and (the study of) literature have been more or less overtly enmeshed since, at the very least, Plato’s reflections on the subject. (558–59) For all of their interest in the workings of ethics in literature, few ethical critics position their own work—as opposed to the imaginative literature they were discussing—as the source of ethics. More recent Victorian scholarship, though, seems to be calling explicitly for a literary criticism that locates the site of ethics not in the author (as Wilde’s critics did), not in the text (as Eliot did), not in the relationship between the text and the reader, and not in the relationship between the reader and the others in her world, or the ways that a text might inform those relationships, but in the criticism itself. For example, in the introduction of a cluster of articles helmed by the V21 Collective in the Autumn 2016 issue of Victorian Studies, David Sweeney Coombs and Danielle Coriale argue that critical presentism (as opposed to historicism) can be intentionally deployed for “achieving strategic ends,” which might include “contesting the fiscal austerity that threatens the survival of Victorian studies” (87) as well as imagining “alternative futures to the mass extinctions that loom just over the horizon of the present” (88). Caroline Levine was no less bold in Forms (2015), declaring that the “primary 234
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goal” of the formalism she elaborated was “radical social change” (18); becoming “formalists,” she argues, will allow us to “begin to intervene in the conflicting formal logics that turn out to organize and disorganize our lives, constantly producing not only painful dispossessions but also surprising opportunities” (23). Like Eskin, I do not wish “to derogate from or diminish the achievements” of such efforts, but I return to his caution against a “falsely progressivist assessment of the current state of affairs . . . based on a facile notion of innovation.” Dickens thought that fiction would be a better way of spurring action than nonfiction, yet even his A Christmas Carol, with its massive audience of countless readers, failed to function as the “Sledge hammer” Dickens intended; to what extent can literary criticism claim to impact the capitalist takeover of higher education or global warming? Perhaps the aspiration is the point. But might we risk of replicating the worst of neoliberal excesses instead of challenging them, undermining our ultimate goals by casting ourselves in flattering roles in a disruption narrative? In the Preface to Dorian Gray, Wilde suggested that “the highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography” (480). If the criticism we produce is a “mode of autobiography,” now might be time to consider what kind of self we are projecting.
Key Critical Works Wayne Booth. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Rae Greiner. Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Audrey Jaffe. Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction. Dorothy Hale. Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present. Suzanne Keen. Empathy and the Novel. J. Hillis Miller. The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin. Rebecca N. Mitchell. Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference. Martha Nussbaum. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature.
Works Cited Ablow, Rachel. The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot. Stanford UP, 2007. Anderson, Amanda. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton UP, 2001. Besant, Walter. The Art of Fiction. Cupples, Upham, 1885. Booth, Wayne. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. U of California P, 1988. Charon, Rita. “Narrative Medicine: A Model for Empathy, Reflection, Profession, and Trust.” JAMA, vol. 286, no. 15, 2001, pp. 1897–1902. Coombs, David Sweeny, and Danielle Coriale. “Introduction: V21 Forum on Strategic Presentism.” Victorian Studies, vol. 59, no. 1, 2017, pp. 87–89. Davis, Todd F., and Kenneth Womack. Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory. UP of Virginia, 2001. De Quincey, Thomas. “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.” London Magazine, October 1823, pp. 353–6. Dickens, Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 3, 1842–1843. Edited by Madeline House and Graham Storey, Clarendon, 1965. Eliot, George. Adam Bede. Edited by Margaret Reynolds, Penguin, 2008. ———. Middlemarch. Edited by Rosemary Ashton, Penguin, 1994. ———. “The Natural History of German Life.” Westminster Review, vol. 66, no. 129, July 1856, pp. 51–79. Eskin, Michael. “Introduction: The Double ‘Turn’ to Ethics and Literature?” Poetics Today, vol. 25, no. 4, Winter 2004, pp. 557–72. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sorrows of Young Werther. Penguin, 1989. Goodlad, Lauren. “Cosmopolitanism’s Actually Existing Beyond: Toward a Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 38, no. 2, 2010, pp. 399–411. Greiner, Rae. Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. Hale, Dorothy. “Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century.” PMLA, vol. 124, no. 3, 2009, pp. 896–905. ———. Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present. Stanford UP, 1998.
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Rebecca N. Mitchell Harrison, Mary-Catherine. “The Paradox of Fiction and the Ethics of Empathy: Reconceiving Dickens’s Realism.” Narrative, vol. 16, no. 3, 2006, pp. 256–77. Hollander, Rachel. Narrative Hospitality in Late Victorian Fiction. Routledge, 2012. Jaffe, Audrey. Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction. Cornell UP, 2000. James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” Henry Longman’s Magazine, vol. 4, September 1882, pp. 502–21. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford UP, 2007. Larson, Jil. Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880–1914. Cambridge UP, 2001. Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition. George Stewart, 1948. Levinas, Emmanuel. “The Other in Proust.” The Levinas Reader, edited by Seán Hand, Blackwell, 1989, pp. 160–65. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton UP, 2015. Levine, George. Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England. U of Chicago P, 2002. ———. Realism, Ethics, and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science. Cambridge UP, 2008. Miller, Andrew H. The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Cornell UP, 2008. Miller, J. Hillis. The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin. Columbia UP, 1987. Mitchell, Rebecca N. Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference. Ohio State UP, 2011. Morgan, Benjamin. The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature. University of Chicago Press, 2017. Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford UP, 1990. ———. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Beacon, 1995. Schaffer, Talia. Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction. Oxford UP, 2016. Wilde, Oscar. “A Preface to ‘Dorian Gray.’” Fortnightly Review, March 1891, pp. 480–81. Young, Kay. Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy. Ohio State UP, 2010.
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21 THE FUTURE OF ECONOMIC CRITICISMS PAST Supritha Rajan
The relationship between economics and literature has provided one of the most robust areas of scholarly inquiry in the past 30 years. Many of the approaches that twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary critics have pursued assume a fundamental connection between literary texts and economic theory, practice, or ideology: Marxism, book history, authorship studies, material culture, feminist analyses of marriage and property, political theories of liberalism, and postcolonial critique. In the Victorian period, this nexus of economics and literature was not an extrinsic framework that critics brought to texts but rather a problematic that Victorian writers across genres continuously foregrounded in their poetry and prose. Hence, although we may articulate claims in terms that a Victorian would likely not have made and employ critical apparatuses that were unavailable to them, our arguments on economics and literature are often informed by questions that Victorian writers themselves, either implicitly or explicitly, pose in their works. When Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Sonnet” (1881) begins with the line “A sonnet is a coin” (127) or when little Paul asks his father in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846–48), “Papa! what’s money? . . . what can it do?” (152), these texts identify the very quandaries explored in economic criticism. From these two examples alone we can unspool a range of critical issues: the semiotic analysis of literature and money, the conflict between aesthetic and monetary value, and the question of how money works as capital, symbol of value, and medium of exchange. To some extent, then, scholars exploring these issues think with and against the grain of the economic criticism that was already practiced by Victorian writers. Drawing on a range of theoretical and historical methods, they aim either to extend lines of inquiry intimated in literary texts or to present counterarguments that unveil a text’s blinkered assumptions and ideological investments. Yet economic criticism as it is practiced in literary studies entails something not found in Victorian literature: a self-conscious relationship to method. Since the 1980s, economic critics have relied on a nuanced historicism, largely displacing their earlier reliance on poststructuralism, Foucauldian disciplinarity, and ideology critique. The scholarship canvassed in this chapter does not simply examine well-known materials through a refurbished critical lens, but \also expands the nineteenth-century archive to include new kinds of economic, literary, and historical evidence that challenges prevailing assumptions and methods.
1. Value and Disciplinarity Aesthetics and economics both emerged from eighteenth-century British and Scottish moral philosophy. John Guillory argues that, prior to this historical moment, there existed neither the distinct 237
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discourses of political economy and aesthetics nor conceptions of use, exchange, or aesthetic value (302–03). Guillory’s examination of the shared disciplinary genealogy between aesthetics and political economy marks a significant methodological approach that has been taken up by Victorian literary critics such as Regenia Gagnier, Catherine Gallagher, Mary Poovey, and me: intellectual histories of the disciplines. Here the theoretical influence is not only Michel Foucault but also historians of science. In Making a Social Body, for example, Poovey synthesizes Lorraine Daston’s concept of “historical epistemology” (how epistemological categories like objectivity or evidence developed) with a Foucauldian and Marxist attention to how various domains of knowledge, such as “the abstraction of the ‘economy,’” were constructed, differentiated, and reified over time (Making 3–7; History 7). Both Poovey’s A History of the Modern Fact and Genres of the Credit Economy provide a genealogy of how political economy rose as a discipline aligned with numerical systems, value-neutrality, and factuality in contradistinction to conjectural history, moral philosophy, and imaginative literature (History xix, 4–7, 215–36). What I want to underscore here as an important development in the work of Poovey and others is their attention to discipline-formation as an epistemological issue, concurrently with interdisciplinarity as a methodological practice. Interdisciplinarity underscores the specificity of each discipline’s methods, analytic frameworks, and genres of writing, even as it isolates moments of disciplinary contiguity or discreteness. In Genres of the Credit Economy, for example, Poovey draws on Guillory’s argument on the separation of economic and aesthetic value in order to claim that, during the eighteenth century, literature, political economy, finance journalism, and money all constituted modes of writing, whose interrelated “function” in Britain was to “mediate value—that is, to help people understand the new credit economy and the market model of value” (1–2). Money, literature, and economic writings also point to the continuities that persisted between fact and fiction, which was disrupted by the generic distinction between imaginative and economic/financial writing during the nineteenth century, when political economy and literature were increasingly segregated (2–5, 287–93). As the example of Poovey makes plain, literary scholars narrating the history of political economy take a different approach than historians of economics (e.g., Joseph Schumpeter) or even less orthodox historians attuned to the importance of rhetoric and metaphor in economic thought (e.g., Deirdre McCloskey, Philip Mirowski, and Margaret Schabas). Literary scholars emphasize, as Claudia Klaver notes in A/Moral Economics, the “uneven development” of economics and its relationship to cognate discourses such as literature, moral philosophy, political theory, and religion (xi, xvi-xvii). Klaver contends that while economists such as David Ricardo sought to uncouple political economy from moral philosophy in order to establish the economic as a separate realm from the moral or religious (xiii, xiv-xv), “the discourse of morality, ethics, and virtue plays a key and troubling role in the discursive and institutional foundation of economic authority in nineteenth-century Britain” (xii). She goes on to argue that economics nevertheless retains affiliation with the discourses that it eschews and that literary figures ought to be included in a history of the disciplines because they critique political economy on the basis of values it disavows (xiv, xvi-xvii, 184–85). Yet critics like Poovey, Klaver, and others working within Foucauldian/Marxist frameworks face a particular bind: on the one hand, literary and economic writings are equivalent as texts, and on the other hand, literary texts occupy a privileged position because they simultaneously cri