The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature 9781138579866, 9780429507724

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

Citation preview

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

ii

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

v

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

vi

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

vii

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

viii

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

ix

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

x

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.

xii

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

Dennis Denisoff

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

Dennis Denisoff

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

Alison Chapman

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.

12

Poetry

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

13

Alison Chapman

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

Poetry

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

Alison Chapman

“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

Poetry

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

Alison Chapman

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

Poetry

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

Alison Chapman

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.

20

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.

21

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

The Novel

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

Elsie B. Michie

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

The Novel

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

Elsie B. Michie

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

The Novel

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

Elsie B. Michie

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

The Novel

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

Elsie B. Michie

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

The Novel

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.

31

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.

32

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.

33

Susan David Bernstein

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

Short Forms

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

Susan David Bernstein

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

Short Forms

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

Susan David Bernstein

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

38

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

Susan David Bernstein

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

Short Forms

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

Susan David Bernstein

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.

43

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.

44

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

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman

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

Drama and Performance

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

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman

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

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman

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

Drama and Performance

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

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman

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

Drama and Performance

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

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman

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

Drama and Performance

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

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman

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.

56

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.

57

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

Children’s Literature

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

Jessica Straley

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

Children’s Literature

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

Jessica Straley

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

Children’s Literature

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

Jessica Straley

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

Children’s Literature

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

Jessica Straley

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.

66

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.

67

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.

68

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

Trev Lynn Broughton

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

Life-Writing

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

Trev Lynn Broughton

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

Life-Writing

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

Trev Lynn Broughton

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

Life-Writing

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

Trev Lynn Broughton

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

Life-Writing

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

Trev Lynn Broughton

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

Life-Writing

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

79

Trev Lynn Broughton

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.

80

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.

81

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.

82

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

Roger Luckhurst

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

Gothic, Horror, and the Weird

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

Roger Luckhurst

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

Gothic, Horror, and the Weird

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

Roger Luckhurst

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

Gothic, Horror, and the Weird

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

Roger Luckhurst

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

Gothic, Horror, and the Weird

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

Roger Luckhurst

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.

92

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.

93

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.

94

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.

95

Pamela K. Gilbert

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

Sensation Scholarship

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

Pamela K. Gilbert

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

Sensation Scholarship

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

Pamela K. Gilbert

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

Sensation Scholarship

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

Pamela K. Gilbert

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

Sensation Scholarship

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.

103

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.

104

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.

105

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

Decadence and Aestheticism

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

Stefano Evangelista

(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

Decadence and Aestheticism

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

Stefano Evangelista

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

Decadence and Aestheticism

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

Stefano Evangelista

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

Decadence and Aestheticism

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

Stefano Evangelista

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.

114

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.

115

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

Andrew M. Stauffer

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

Book History

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

Andrew M. Stauffer

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

Book History

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

Andrew M. Stauffer

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

Book History

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

Andrew M. Stauffer

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.

126

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.

127

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.

128

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

Karen Bourrier

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

Victorian Digital Humanities

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

Karen Bourrier

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

Victorian Digital Humanities

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

Karen Bourrier

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

Victorian Digital Humanities

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

Karen Bourrier

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

Victorian Digital Humanities

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.

137

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.

138

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.

139

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

Periodical Studies

“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

Linda K. Hughes

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

Periodical Studies

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

Linda K. Hughes

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

Periodical Studies

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

Linda K. Hughes

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

Periodical Studies

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

Linda K. Hughes

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.

148

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.

149

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.

150

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

Deborah Lutz

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

Material Culture

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

Deborah Lutz

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

Material Culture

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

Deborah Lutz

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

Material Culture

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

Deborah Lutz

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.

158

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.

159

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

Popular Fiction and Culture

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

Nicholas Daly

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

Popular Fiction and Culture

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

Nicholas Daly

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

Popular Fiction and Culture

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

Nicholas Daly

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

Popular Fiction and Culture

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

Nicholas Daly

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.

168

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.

169

Nicholas Daly “Substitute for Rags in Making Paper.” Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 25 February 1866, p. 8. Summerscale, Kate. The Wicked Boy: An Infamous Murder in Victorian London. Bloomsbury, 2016. Trollope, Anthony. “The Spotted Dog.” Mary Gresley and An Editor’s Tales. Chapman and Hall, 1873, pp. 227–320. Tschen, John Kuo Wei. “The Yellow Claw: The Optical Unconscious in Anglo-American Political Culture.” The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture: U.S. Popular Print Culture, 1860–1920, edited by Christine Bold, Oxford UP, 2012, pp. 477–99. Vlock, Deborah. Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre. Cambridge UP, 1999.

170

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

Ian Haywood

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

Radical Print Culture

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

Ian Haywood

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

Radical Print Culture

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.

175

Ian Haywood

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

Radical Print Culture

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

Ian Haywood

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

Radical Print Culture

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.

179

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.

180

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.

181

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

Visual Culture

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

Kate Flint

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

Visual Culture

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

Kate Flint

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

Visual Culture

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

Kate Flint

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

Visual Culture

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

Kate Flint

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

Visual Culture

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

Kate Flint

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.

192

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.

193

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.

194

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

Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan

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

Victorianists and Their Reading

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

Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan

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

Victorianists and Their Reading

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

Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan

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.

202

Victorianists and Their Reading

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.

203

Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan Elaine Freedgood, and Cannon Schmitt, editors. “Denotatively, Technically, Literally” special issue of Representations Leah Price. “Reading and Literary Criticism.”

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.

204

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.

205

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

206

Aesthetic Formalism

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

Rae Greiner

(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

Aesthetic Formalism

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

Rae Greiner

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

Aesthetic Formalism

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

Rae Greiner

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

Aesthetic Formalism

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

Rae Greiner

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

Aesthetic Formalism

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.

215

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.

216

19 NARRATIVE THEORY Elaine Auyoung

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

Elaine Auyoung

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

Narrative Theory

“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

Elaine Auyoung

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

Narrative Theory

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

Elaine Auyoung

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

222

Narrative Theory

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

Elaine Auyoung

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.

224

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.

225

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

The Ethical Turn

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

Rebecca N. Mitchell

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

The Ethical Turn

(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

Rebecca N. Mitchell

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

The Ethical Turn

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

Rebecca N. Mitchell

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

The Ethical Turn

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

Rebecca N. Mitchell

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

The Ethical Turn

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.

235

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.

236

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

Supritha Rajan

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 critique capitalist ideology and betray their passive implication in the structures of capital. Klaver’s work is also an instance of a critic extending the archive of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury political economy beyond “classical” political economists like Adam Smith, Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx to include later figures associated with “neoclassical” economics like William Stanley Jevons and Alfred Marshall. Gagnier’s The Insatiability of Human Wants is notable for underscoring the shift from classical political economy, with its emphasis on labor and production costs as the variables that determine price (i.e., value), to the so-called marginalist revolution in the 1870s. The marginalist revolution, which concurrently developed in Britain and the 238

The Future of Economic Criticisms Past

Continent through economists such as Jevons, Karl Menger, and Léon Walras, signaled the rise of neoclassical economics and its focus on subjective preference, scarcity, and demand as the factors regulating price (3–5). Gagnier examines the “coeval” rise of “Economic Man and Aesthetic Man” and the mutually constitutive dynamic between aesthetic and economic conceptions of taste (2, 10–16) [on aestheticism, see Evangelista’s article]. Victorian writers like Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, she claims, however, articulate “a deeper account of value” that provides “a solution to anomie, anarchy, and class conflict” (13, 107). Gagnier’s reference to the conservative tradition of Arnoldian culture is understandable since Anrold argues in Culture and Anarchy (1867–69) that there is a “value” other than capitalist machinery and monetary gain (58, 109). While culture in Arnold is a near synonym for value, the concept of culture also identifies a crucial interpretive framework for new historicist critics who conceive culture as a text whose traces are open to historical recovery and (re)interpretation (Gallagher and Greenblatt 13–16) [on new historicism, see Gallagher’s chapter]. This approach enabled critics like Christopher Herbert to build on an Arnoldian/poststructuralist definition of culture as text in order to consider how a variety of discourses engaged in analyses of value (2–3). Hence, while previous critics had trained their attention on how the problem of value surfaces in political economy, moral philosophy, and aesthetics, Herbert employs culture (as both concept and method) to track the relations between economics, literature, and other nascent fields where culture was emerging as an analytic category, such as ethnography/anthropology, evolutionary biology, and sociology [on anthropology, see Psomiades’s chapter]. Much like Herbert’s Culture and Anomie, Philip Connell’s Romanticism, Economics, and the Question of “Culture” assesses the deep impact that political economy had on conceptions of culture despite an enduring belief that literature references a “sensibility” inimical to economics (Connell 7). Connell’s argument signals a wider scholarly interest in unveiling the sympathies between political economy and literature that have been overlooked. My own book, A Tale of Two Capitalisms, and Catherine Gallagher’s The Body Economic, build on the work of Herbert, Connell, and others to trace the common ground between nineteenth-century literature, political economy, and sociology/anthropology. While I focus on notions of the sacred and how the categories of the economic, religious, and aesthetic came to designate distinct modes of inquiry and systems of valuation, Gallagher examines how both Victorian political economists and writers articulated value either through vitalist conceptions of nature or theories of bodily pleasure and pain (Body 3, 34). Gallagher traces two “plots,” which she terms “somaeconomics” and “bioeconomics,” running through economic and literary writings from Ruskin and Malthus to Dickens and Jeremy Bentham: the somaeconomic plot conceives an individual’s “economic behavior in terms of the emotional and sensual feelings” while the bioeconomic plot focuses on “the interconnections among populations, the food supply, modes of production and exchange” (3, 35–36). Although economic criticism thrives on the diffuse boundaries between literature and socialscientific inquiry, the question of how to theorize the generic relationship between literary and economic texts persists. As a consequence, scholars not only underscore overlapping intellectual histories, but also a formal resonance in which the techniques of narrative play a strategic role in representing human sociality. We see this attention to the theoretical braiding of otherwise distinct discourses in, for instance, Gallagher’s language of plots, my and Klaver’s use of narrative, and Eleanor Courtemanche’s attention to omniscience and point of view in Adam Smith and realist novels.

2. Money, Finance, and Fiction Much of the economic discourse in Britain from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century focuses on what Marx called “the riddle” of money (105). In the eighteenth century, money (and often wealth itself) was principally identified with the mining, accumulation, circulation, and minting of metals 239

Supritha Rajan

such as gold and silver. Yet as James Thompson’s Models of Value details, this mercantilist conception of wealth as precious metals underwent a notable shift in the eighteenth century. The rise of paper money and credit, the increasing use of money as a form of capital and not simply as a neutral medium of exchange or hoard, the coinage controversies that exposed the unstable relationship between the weight of coins and the monetary value that they represented, an awareness that gold and silver were themselves commodities whose available stock and market prices shift—all these developments dematerialized the concept of money and rendered it an abstract, symbolic representation of wealth (Thompson 41–83). Thus the eighteenth-century discourse of money inaugurated “a semiological crisis over the concept of value”: it was unclear whether value inhered in the signifier (metallic money), the referent (e.g., aggregate produce or saleable commodities), or something generated through the act of exchange and thus lacking a stable referential ground (17). It was precisely money’s volatility and its unstable measure for a commodity’s exchange value that led political economists like Ricardo to theorize labor as an alternate standard by which to measure value (Rajan 71–84; Marx 106–16). Money, however, poses a specific relationship to the problem of value not found in theorizations of labor. As Marx states, money (gold-form) constitutes a commodity that communities single out as a conventional standard, or “universal equivalent,” to express the relative value of all other commodities and mediate their repeated circulation through exchange (79–80; 123–30). The translation of all commodities into monetary value is, according to Marx, what leads eighteenth-century political economists to think that gold and silver have an “imaginary” value and act as “symbols” or “arbitrary fictions” (103). While Marx critiques the symbolic approach to money for obscuring the material conditions and social relations that produce value, it is precisely the semiotic approach that drove poststructuralist economic criticism. Critics analyzed money and literature as semiotic systems, and outlined the conventions of belief and fictionality that governed the world of novels, finance, and credit. Drawing on Saussure’s theory of language as a relational system of signs and A.R.J. Turgot’s comparison of money and speech to languages, Marc Shell’s The Economy of Literature theorizes economics and literature as semiological systems that translate something abstract into a concretized representation or sign: ideas translated into speech/writing or value translated into money (4). JeanJoseph Goux’s Symbolic Economies, which analyzes money as a symbolic system, further elaborates the “homology” between economics and literature (3–4). Synthesizing poststructuralism and Marxism with a psychoanalytic framework, Goux observes that what is common to semiotics, economics, and psychoanalysis is that all three “could be conceived in terms of the phenomenon of exchange” since they operate according to the logic of “substitution and its correlative, value” (2). Shell’s and Goux’s focus on textual economies was supplemented during the 1990s with Foucauldian discourse analysis, new historicism, and cultural studies, which turned scholars’ attention to issues like class, authorship, and the literary/economic marketplace, as Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen discuss in their groundbreaking edited collection, The New Economic Criticism (35–40). Yet the semiotic approach survives in the newest economic criticism and buttresses historicist claims, as Poovey’s Genres of the Credit Economy makes clear. If economics and literature mediated value, it is because both address “the problematic of representation” that emerged after the Bank of England suspended its guarantee to return the paper money it issued for gold (1797–1821)—an event that highlighted the disjunctive relationship between sign and referent, between paper money and the gold that it was meant to reference (Genres 5–6 passim). Economic and financial writing, money, and literature not only demonstrated this problem, but also alleviated it by containing “the slippage between sign and referent” that inhered in the concept of value and encouraging belief in the credit system (7, 71, 89–94). The credit system, as Poovey phrases it, falls under the broader category of finance and includes not only matters of currency, monetary policy, and credit, but also domestic and foreign banking, national debt, legal stipulations for incorporation, the stock market and securities trade, insurance, and taxation (O’Gorman 4). During the nineteenth century, increased dependence on paper money and 240

The Future of Economic Criticisms Past

borrowing through the national debt meant that structures of credit and debt (in the forms of paper money, bills of exchange, IOUs, promissory notes, accommodation bills, and checks) were becoming the primary motor of exchange (Poovey Financial 8–9). The numerous legislative acts that expanded institutions of credit and banking beyond the Bank of England (e.g., joint-stock banks), the broadening of the securities market, loosened strictures on the incorporation of joint-stock companies, and a thriving bill-broking market among London discounting houses aggravated an already lax system of finance and credit and added to the general climate of distrust and fraud characterizing the booms, bubbles, and panics of the 1850s and 1860s (Poovey Making 155–60; Financial 12–17). These imprudent practices strengthened the impression that speculative credit and the securities trade relied on fictions that referred back to no concrete assets or monetary wealth. According to Patrick Brantlinger, Victorian novels capitalized on such fictionality (7, 45). Like literary fiction, money, credit, and debt are all shown to be types of writing that rely on collective belief in their representations for existence (24). In the wake of the 2008 stock market crash and comparisons between Bernie Madoff and Trollope’s Augustus Melmotte, the Victorian period’s interest in the fictionality of finance seems prescient. Anna Kornbluh claims that the fictionality of money and capital was something that writers recognized in the Victorian era, when the term “fictitious capital” peppered the period’s financial journalism and signaled the era’s comprehension “that capital is not real” (3). In a similar vein, Tamara Wagner builds on the conflation of “paper money” with “paper fictions” in both the Victorian period and poststructuralist criticism in order to show how the speculative boom of the 1850s and 1860s influenced the development of various novelistic subgenres (e.g., the sensation and silver-fork novel) (5–6, 10–12). The pride of place that novels occupy in these arguments largely stems from traditional theories regarding the parallel rise of the novel and capitalism (see Ian Watt). As Gallagher argues, a critical component to the novel’s rise was the notion of fictionality, which the realist novel self-consciously deployed and educated its readers to appreciate (Nobody’s Story xv-xvii). Hence, the fictionality that underwrites novels, money, and credit is endemic to the history of the novel as genre and not merely the by-product of deconstructive analysis. Fictionality points to another commonality between finance and novels: belief. The role that belief plays in economic life is unsurprising given political economy’s long-standing reliance on somatic/psychic states for its arguments on utility, consumer preference, and demand. Both Gagnier and Kornbluh underscore the disciplinary interactions between nineteenth-century psychology and political economy. While Kornbluh examines how economics and psychology elaborated a “psychic economy” that posited subjective desire and interiority as the stable foundation of capitalist finance (3, 9), Gagnier contrasts literature’s psychological depth to the flattening of desire into a pleasure/pain calculus in late nineteenth-century economics (53). This emphasis on pleasure had, of course, already surfaced among Utilitarians like Bentham, whose theorization of a self-interested subject maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain also helped galvanize political reform by drawing on notions of aggregate welfare and Smithian principles of sympathy (Blake 44–47). Yet economic critics’ focus on fictionality, belief, self-interest, and sympathy has limited the range of analyses that literary critics pursue. Because the psychology of affects such as confidence, apprehension, trust, mania, or panic typically surface in relation to financial speculations and crises that resemble gambling and fraud, critics have tended to read them as yet another (ideological) fiction that inspires false beliefs or misguided emotional investments.1 The recent boom in affect studies presents an opportunity to reconsider the various “structures of feeling” that, according to Raymond Williams, art represents in response to socioeconomic pressures (132–33). Alexander Dick, Gail Turley Houston, Aeron Hunt, and Jaffe all explore the fuzzy role of emotions in nineteenth-century political economy. Though centering on the Romantic era, Dick demonstrates that confidence and embarrassment, in their economic and affective senses, facilitated “networks of social relations like credit” and thus register the role that affects play in addressing social cohesion and typical economic problems like the gold standard (18–20). Similarly, Jaffe synthesizes 241

Supritha Rajan

the work of Silvan Tompkins and Sarah Ahmed with Franco Moretti’s practice of distant reading to identify how various abstractions such as the stock market graph or normative ideals of happiness and the average man functioned as “representations of collective emotion” that shaped the interiority of subjects (2–4, 42–66). Turning her attention to the relationship between Gothic fiction and politicaleconomic discourse, Houston traces how both “banked on panic” and depicted crises in banking through supernatural tropes (1–6, 27) [on Gothic fiction, see Luckhurst’s chapter]. While panic is an emotion that is difficult to miss in economics and Gothic fiction, Hunt’s argument on the performative dimensions of character displays the benefits of attending to those subtle affects that lubricate economic relations and interpersonal bonds of trust (2–8). In her analysis of business biographies, for example, Hunt clarifies how Victorian writers like Samuel Smiles rearticulated Weberian “charisma” to promote the ideal of the magnetic businessman—an ideal Trollope parodies in The Way We Live Now (1875) with Melmotte (88–104). As these examples show, beliefs and affective states need not solely be read as ideological fictions. The benefits of a less ideological approach applies to feminist scholarship as well. In the late 1980s and 1990s, critics such as Poovey and Nancy Armstrong demonstrated how gender operated as an economic category by separating the male, commercial realm of self-interested competition from the feminine, domestic realm (Poovey Uneven 10; Armstrong 47–48). Much like gold, women in these arguments function as a sign of intrinsic value through their association with love and marriage (Thompson 18–22). Focus on woman’s symbolic value, however, overemphasized the ideology of separate spheres and neglected women’s actual financial practices (see George Robb) [on domesticity, see Gregory’s chapter; on feminism, see Schaffer’s chapter]. This critical neglect extends to the literary canon. Nancy Henry argues that Charlotte Riddell was popular in her time as a novelist of London finance but has been ignored by literary critics because her realism documents day-to-day Victorian business practices rather than sensationalizing economic frauds and proffering those critiques of capitalism that we now associate with canonical realist fiction (195–97; 205). Such claims raise the possibility that the conflation of finance and fictionality, which so many critics highlight, relies on a narrow construal of the nineteenth-century novel.

4. Global Economics The Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 celebrated Britain’s technological and economic prowess and marked its preeminent position in a global capitalist economy—one grounded, as Paul Young observes, on the practices of free trade imperialism (10) [on postcolonialism, see Banerjee’s chapter]. Bernard Semmel notes that free trade imperialism captured an essential principle of British political economy and policy (4–5). Britain’s economic dominance on the world stage relied on its strategic expansion of colonial holdings and the development of colonies into economic assets that either produced materials for British manufacturing or consumed British exports (Gallagher and Robinson 4–6, 10–13). This dynamic is nowhere more apparent than in Britain’s relationship to India. As Elaine Freedgood’s and Suzanne Daly’s discussion of nineteenth-century cotton production makes clear, the technological improvements that facilitated Britain’s dominance in textiles was buoyed by protectionist policies dating back to the eighteenth century that prohibited the importation of finely produced Indian textiles and instead reduced India to producing raw cotton, creating an imbalance in trade that India could only offset by exporting grains that increased its susceptibility to famines (Freedgood 65–68; Daly 36–39). The imperial context of nineteenth-century capitalism has led critics like Ayşe Çelikkol to trace twentieth-century globalization back to Victorian debates on free trade and the growth of economic/ political alliances beyond the nation-state (9). Yet I want to close this chapter by suggesting that we might explore other iterations of the global by examining the transnational development of political economy as a discipline and resisting the “insular” mind-set that, according to Walter Bagehot, 242

The Future of Economic Criticisms Past

plagued British political economy (3). Literary critics might pay more attention to nineteenth-century Continental economists (e.g., Austrian and German schools) and to those writing on economics in former colonial holdings (e.g., North America and India). I reference nineteenth-century Austrian and German economics because they represent two methodological schools of thought that pursued, respectively, deductive and inductive methods. The deductive method of the Austrian school, typically identified with Karl Menger, presented an abstract theory of the economic laws that govern general phenomena, whereas the inductive approach, associated with Gustav Schmoller and the German historical school of Wilhelm Roscher, emphasized an empirical approach that collected historical particulars and inferred generalities from them (Louzek 443–51; Böhm-Bawerk). It was this methodological debate between Menger and Schmoller, which pitted theoretical abstraction against historical description, that Eugen Von Böhm-Bawerk classified as the central methodenstreit, or method-war, of economic theory (Louzek 440). This methodological controversy poses relevance for discussions of method in literary studies in ways that scholars may not be fully aware. As an example, we might turn to recent literary debates on the limits of historicist scholarship and the practices of “suspicious” reading attributed to ideology critique (see Best and Marcus; Felski; Love). In a recent article in Victorian Studies, Lauren Goodlad and Andrew Sartori observe that scholars critical of the latter reading practices often embrace the sociology of Bruno Latour and social-scientific practices of description as an alternative approach to the relations between texts, agency, and the social. Goodlad and Sartori contend that Latour’s work is largely a methodological reaction against the abstractions of Pierre Bourdieu’s Marxist-laden sociology and that, as a consequence, literary critics who assimilate Latour’s methods are unwittingly “caught up in a Methodenstreit, the origins of which are in the social sciences” (597). While Goodlad and Sartori give a recent date to this methodological quarrel, those familiar with the writings of Herbert Spencer, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber will recognize that the very thinkers credited with founding the discipline of sociology (e.g., Dukheim, Weber) were knowledgeable about a much earlier methodenstreit between Menger and Schmoller regarding the relationship between theoretical abstraction and historical description; it is this methodological quarrel that they address in their arguments on proper sociological method and that reverberates in the dispute between Bourdieu and Latour.2 In this context, expanding knowledge of economic thought beyond Britain allows us to consider a hitherto unexamined territory—that literature and political economy may share not just disciplinary genealogies but also persistent problems in methodology. We gain other insights if we situate British political economy outside continental Europe. Scholars of transatlantic studies like Amanda Claybaugh have already shown how Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34) participated in the “Anglo-American public sphere” (2–6). Yet Martineau is not the sole example of transatlantic connections. John Maynard Keynes remarks that Marshall would revise his theories continuously as economic facts changed over time in both Britain and America (143, 170–73). We might ask how Marshall’s travels in the United States and conversations with American economists shaped his views on protectionist policies, supply/demand, and the international competition in the cotton trade (Marshall and Marshall 164, 182; Keynes 143–44). Paying attention to these transnational dynamics clarifies central tenets of political economy like rent, wages, and price. Turning her attention to nineteenth-century India, Sukanya Banerjee notes that Dadabhai Naoroji’s “drain theory” of economics in Poverty and Un-British Rule (1876; 1901) provided a calculation of India’s national income and showed that the payment of revenues, high interest rates on debt, unequal trade, and salaries to British officials were leaving behind “an emaciated body politic” (Banerjee 41–51). Like Naoroji, R.C. Dutt’s Economic History of British India (1901) and his various essays on famine and currency contend that Indian poverty and famine—contrary to Malthusian and Ricardian theories of rent—did not occur due to an improvident peasantry, increases in population and tilling of less fertile lands, or lack of rains; rather, the causes were the exorbitant land tax, individualized models of tenancy, and a system of bimetallism that required India, which relied on 243

Supritha Rajan

a depreciated silver currency, to pay its debts to the Crown in gold at a permanent rate that lowered the rupee’s value even as wages remained stationary and food prices rose.3 Naoroji’s and Dutt’s historical approach versus Ricardo’s deductive method yield contrasting perspectives on monetary policy, theories of falling wages or rising prices, and land rents that shape their understanding of the global, uneven rhythms of famine. Locating political economy within a global context reorients our understanding of Victorian literature as well. If we continue with the issue of famine, we might ask how the problem of falling wages, rising prices, and hunger portrayed in Gaskell’s North and South (1854–55) can be interpreted in light of scholarship on the novel’s transatlantic connections to slavery, American cotton plantations, and the Crimean war (1854–56). At the very moment that Britain fought to deny Russians access to the east through the Caucuses and protect its economic and military stronghold in India (Darwin 29–35), Manchester manufacturers were trying to solve their overdependence on the American cotton supply by developing India as an alternative source of cotton production (Harnetty 36–37, 43–44). In this context, North and South’s references to the Crimean War presents the Condition-of-England question as “entwine[d] with the Eastern question” because they together articulate the transnational network of the cotton trade as it linked the British manufacturers to both the American cotton supply and India’s position as the consumer of British textiles (Markovits 91). In so doing, the novel’s portrayal of workers who “clem to death” points to the interconnected economic contexts of famine during the nineteenth century as they unfolded in India, Ireland, and Lancashire (Gaskell 154). The Irish (1845–52) and Indian famines were largely the result of economic and political constraints that helped Britain profit from inequitable policies in trade (Bigelow 112–14; Davis 25–59). By contrast, the “cotton famine” that plagued Lancashire, first in 1846 and then later during the American civil war, arose from dependence on American cotton, which caused a price war between American suppliers and Manchester manufacturers, who refused to pay America’s high prices, halted cotton orders, and laid off large numbers of workers (Harnetty 36; Lee 100). The transnational economics of famine reconfigures our understanding of conflicts central to North and South. While the novel gestures at the dynamics of international trade and the global network of famine, it also resists the legal, governmental, and economic interventions that would alleviate the unequal distribution of wealth, both domestically and abroad. In his groundbreaking theory of entitlements, Amartya Sen establishes that starvation and famines occur where there is abundance and no excess population; hence, the question is not “what exists” but “who can command what” within an existing class structure and the legal means individuals possess in an exchange-based society to “command food” (3–4, 7–8, 45, emphasis original). Gaskell’s novel, however, rejects strikes as a legal method of resistance that would allow workers to exert command over the redistribution of money/ goods and instead favors a cooperative sympathy between masters and men. Moreover, although the novel provides ample details of how Thornton’s poor financial investments contribute to class-based inequalities, Margaret and Mr. Hale’s responses to Nicholas and Bessy Higgins’s questions on the falling wage-rate and rising food prices parrot Ricardian orthodoxy as wages are said to “find their own level” (Gaskell 226). The novel’s response to the problem of wages/prices recapitulates a tension that runs through political-economic thought. In A Tale of Two Capitalisms, I argued that the unequal distribution of wealth among individuals, classes, and nation-states complicates the abstract ideal of the economy at equilibrium as a global system of reciprocal exchange. Ricardo, for example, presents the economic laws that balance wages and prices as operating within a self-regulating system, wherein the natural price of labor (i.e., the necessaries for subsistence that labor can purchase) and the market price (the money paid for labor) adjust to one another at equilibrium (65–66)—a global effect contingent on international free trade. Yet Ricardo observes that falling wages and rising prices are often corrected through poverty/death, which reestablishes equilibrium between population (demand) and goods (supply), thus suggesting that the just distribution of goods/money at equilibrium is predicated on 244

The Future of Economic Criticisms Past

cycles of famine and poverty that result from the unequal operation of free trade policies within and outside England (Ricardo 66, 68–69; Rajan 143–44). These inconsistencies in Ricardian economics clarify Margaret’s conflicted position in the novel. On the one hand, Margaret calls for the just distribution of wealth between the manufacturing and working classes; on the other hand, this call takes as a given that periodic depressions in income will visit the poor. Margaret’s acquiescence to the local rhythms of famine and poverty is part and parcel of their global operation—a precondition for Britain’s accumulation of wealth through free trade and its evolving class structure. As Markovits notes, Margaret’s appearance at the novel’s opening draped in Indian shawls renders her an immediate symbol of British imperial power in trade (104), a symbolic position that she consolidates through her marriage to Thornton and their union of gentry and northern manufacturing interests. The novel’s transnational, metonymic troping of slavery and famine thus exists in tension with an imperial agenda in which British economic dominance establishes itself through the underdevelopment of the British laboring classes and the global south.4 For all its references to the international context of the textile trade and famine, North and South ultimately presents famine to be an inevitable casualty of capitalism that can be assuaged through paternalistic, face-to-face relations or momentarily corrected through the self-regulating laws of supply and demand, but never altogether eradicated. The foregoing analysis of North and South incorporates a variety of methods outlined in this essay. I have read North and South to show how its embedded historical references to shawls, the slave trade, the Crimean War, as well as its obvious engagement with industrialism, can be placed in relation to the economics of famine, class, and imperialism. This technique widens the economic archive to include Indian economists alongside British ones in order to highlight their divergent theories of famine. In delineating the economics of famine, I approached economic principles on their own terms rather than focusing on their rhetorical features, though I nevertheless assumed, as an enabling premise, that economic and literary texts during the nineteenth century constitute porous discursive formations. The conflicting theories of famine presented by Ricardo’s deductive approach and Dutt’s historical approach articulate an instance of the later methodological controversy between Menger and Schmoller that, I have claimed, shaped subsequent arguments on sociological method. Such consonances invite us to interrogate method as one of many threads running through the interdisciplinary cross-histories of economics and literature. All these critical maneuverings are a by-product, however, of the dynamic relationship between method and archive to which the introduction alluded. I would not have addressed Indian economists on famine if historicist scholarship on Gaskell had not challenged me to rethink the international circuits of trade. But my point is not that the future of economic criticism’s past lies in the global. If this chapter shows one thing, it is the continuum of past and present methods. There is no such thing as old or new economic criticism: there is only the constellation of methods and archives that move— like value, money, or commodities—in an ever-shifting set of relations.

Notes 1 See Jeffrey Franklin (34–79); Audrey Jaffe (49–54); Kornbluh (9–10, 156–57); and Poovey (Financial 12–18; Genres 251–52). 2 See, for example, Weber’s essay “Roscher and Knies.” For the relevance of the methodenstreit to Durkheim, see Robert Jones 190–94. 3 See Dutt (Economic History vi-xi, 116–34; Open Letters 1–6, 72–74, 92); and Poovey (Financial 112–14). 4 On the metonymic relations between Atlantic slavery and Victorian literature, see Julia Sun-Joo Lee 21.

Key Critical Works Patrick Brantlinger. Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994. Regenia Gagnier. The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society.

245

Supritha Rajan Catherine Gallagher. The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel. Jean-Joseph Goux. Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud. Mary Poovey, editor. The Financial System in Nineteenth-Century Britain. ———. Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain. ———. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Supritha Rajan. A Tale of Two Capitalisms: Sacred Economics in Nineteenth-Century Britain. James Thompson. Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel. Martha Woodmansee, and Mark Osteen, editors. The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics.

Works Cited Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford UP, 1987. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings. Edited by Stefan Collini, Cambridge UP, 1993. Bagehot, Walter. Economic Studies. Edited by Richard Holt Hutton, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1880. Banerjee, Sukanya. Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire. Duke UP, 2010. Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations, vol. 108, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1–21. Bigelow, Gordon. Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland. Cambridge UP, 2003. Blake, Kathleen. Pleasures of Benthamism:Victorian Literature, Utility, Political Economy. Oxford UP, 2009. Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen von, and Henrietta Leonard. “The Historical vs. the Deductive Method in Political Economy.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 1, October 1890, pp. 244–71. Brantlinger, Patrick. Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994. Cornell UP, 1996. Çelikkol, Ayşe. Romances of Free Trade: British Literature, Laissez-Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century. Oxford UP, 2011. Claybaugh, Amanda. Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World. Cornell UP, 2007. Connell, Philip. Romanticism, Economics, and the Question of ‘Culture’. Oxford UP, 2001. Courtemanche, Eleanor. The ‘Invisible Hand’ and British Fiction, 1818–1860: Adam Smith, Political Economy, and the Genre of Realism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Daly, Suzanne. The Empire Inside: Indian Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels. U of Michigan P, 2011. Darwin, John. The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970. Cambridge UP, 2009. Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. Verso, 2001. Dick, Alexander. Romanticism and the Gold Standard: Money, Literature, and Economic Debate in Britain 1790–1830. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. 1846–48. Edited by Peter Fairclough, Penguin, 1970. Dutt, Romesh Chunder. The Economic History of India Under Early British Rule. Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1956. ———. Open Letters to Lord Curzon & Speeches and Papers. Gian, 1986. Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. U of Chicago P, 2015. Franklin, J. Jeffrey. Serious Play: The Cultural Form of the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel. U of Pennsylvania P, 1999. Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Gagnier, Regenia. The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society. U of Chicago P, 2000. Gallagher, John and Ronald Robinson. “The Imperialism of Free Trade.” The Economic History Review, vol. 6, no. 1, 1953, pp. 1–15. Gallagher, Catherine. The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel. Princeton UP, 2006. ———. Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820. U of California P, 1994. Gallagher, Catherine and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism. U of Chicago P, 2000. Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South. Edited by Patricia Ingham, Penguin, 1995. Goodlad, Lauren, and Andrew Sartori. “The Ends of History: Introduction.” Victorian Studies, vol. 55, no. 4, 2013, pp. 591–614. Goux, Jean-Joseph. Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud. Translated by Jennifer Curtiss Gage, Cornell UP, 1990. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. U of Chicago P, 1993. Harnetty, Peter. Imperialism and Free Trade: Lancashire and India in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. U of British Columbia P, 1972.

246

The Future of Economic Criticisms Past Henry, Nancy. “Charlotte Riddell: Novelist of ‘the City’.” Economic Women: Essays on Desire and Dispossession in Nineteenth-Century British Culture, edited by Lana L. Dalley and Jill Rappoport, Ohio State UP, 2013, pp. 193–205. Herbert, Christopher. Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century. U of Chicago P, 1991. Houston, Gail Turley. From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction. Cambridge UP, 2005. Hunt, Aeron. Personal Business: Character and Commerce in Victorian Literature and Culture. U of Virginia P, 2014. Jaffe, Audrey. TheAffectiveLife of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph. The Ohio State UP, 2010. Jones, Robert Alun. The Development of Durkheim’s Social Realism. Cambridge UP, 2004. Keynes, John Maynard. Essays in Biography. Horizon, 1951. Klaver, Claudia. A/Moral Economics: Classical Political Economy and Cultural Authority in Nineteenth-Century England. The Ohio State UP, 2003. Kornbluh, Anna. Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form. Fordham UP, 2014. Lee, Julia Sun-Joo. The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel. Oxford UP, 2010. Louzek, Marek. “The Battle of Methods in Economics: The Classical Methodenstreit—Menger vs. Schmoller.” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, vol. 70, no. 2, April 2011, pp. 439–63. Love, Heather. “Close But Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn.” New Literary History, vol. 41, no. 2, Spring 2010, pp. 371–91. Markovits, Stefanie. The Crimean War in the British Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2009. Marshall, Alfred, and Mary Paley Marshall. The Economics of Industry. Palgrave Macmillan, 1879. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Edited by Frederick Engels, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, Charles H. Kerr, 1906. McCloskey, Deirdre N. The Rhetoric of Economics. U of Wisconsin P, 1998. Mirowski, Philip. More Heat Than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics. Cambridge UP, 1989. O’Gorman, Francis, editor. Victorian Literature and Finance. Oxford UP, 2007. Poovey, Mary, editor. The Financial System in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Oxford UP, 2003. ———. Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain. U of Chicago P, 2008. ———. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. U of Chicago P, 1998. ———. Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864. U of Chicago P, 1995. ———. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. U of Chicago P, 1988. Rajan, Supritha. A Tale of Two Capitalisms: Sacred Economics in Nineteenth-Century Britain. U of Michigan P, 2015. Ricardo, David. Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. Prometheus Books, 1996. Robb, George. “Ladies of the Ticker: Women, Investment, and Fraud in England and America, 1850–1930.” Victorian Investments: New Perspectives on Finance and Culture, edited by Nancy Henry and Cannon Schmitt, Indiana UP, 2009, pp. 120–40. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Jerome McGann, Yale UP, 2003. Schabas, Margaret. The Natural Origins of Economics. U of Chicago P, 2005. Schumpeter, Joseph Alois. History of Economic Analysis. Edited by Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter, Oxford UP, 1954. Semmel, Bernard. The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism: Classical Political Economy, the Empire of Free Trade, and Imperialism, 1750–1850. Cambridge UP, 1970. Sen, Amartya. Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Clarendon, 1981. Shell, Marc. The Economy of Literature. Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. Thompson, James. Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel. Duke UP, 1996. Wagner, Tamara S. Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Plotting Money and the Novel Genre, 1815–1901. The Ohio State UP, 2010. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: U of California P, 1962. Weber, Max. “Roscher and Knies.” Max Weber: Collected Methodological Writings, edited by Hans Henrik Bruun and Sam Whimster, translated by Hans Henrik Bruun, New York: Routledge, 2012, pp. 3–94. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford UP, 1977. Woodmansee, Martha, and Mark Osteen, editors. The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics. Routledge, 1999. Young, Paul. Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

247

22 HISTORY/HISTORICISM Catherine Gallagher

It’s well known that in the middle of the twentieth century the academic study of literature took a turn toward formal and stylistic analysis and, like their colleagues in other fields, specialists in Victorian literature became adept practitioners of close reading. However, Victorianists were less likely to follow doctrinaire New Critical injunctions against examining the author’s intentions, the reader’s responses, or any other aspect of the social or cultural history surrounding the work. The dogma of the autonomy of the literary objects failed to penetrate deeply into the field, and, paradoxically, close reading increased the number of ways in which scholars of Victorian literature connected it to the history of Great Britain in the nineteenth century. Throughout the last half of the twentieth century, they 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. The aesthetic modernists in the early twentieth century, forerunners of the New Critics, were acutely aware of the entanglement between the art of the previous century and its historicist predilections, both of which they denigrated. The modernists were right to see Victorians as the authors of a heightened historical consciousness, which held that a proper understanding of any phenomenon, including their own era, required placing it in a historical perspective, context, or larger narrative. When modernists rebelled against their parents and grandparents they tended to simplify that message and were especially loud in their hostility to a pair of opposite historicist tendencies: revivalist nostalgia (as embodied in the Gothic revival) and optimistic progressivism (as practiced in “Whig History”). By mid-century, though, scholars of the nineteenth century were taking a more capacious and appreciative view of Victorians in general and their historical consciousness in particular. Thus, by the time the New Critics once again raised the banner of literature’s unconditioned independence from its cultural contexts and warned against turning English into a branch of the History Department, many Victorianists were primed to disregard them. And yet, although they often assumed they would be thinking about literature historically, as the field developed in the late twentieth century, numerous competing models of how to do so arose. This chapter describes how and why the field’s interdisciplinary historicist tendencies changed over time, and how, in turn, they helped change the field.

1. Founding Victorian Studies (Late 1940s and 1950s) The late 1940s through the 1950s were a time when two tendencies coexisted in nineteenth-century criticism: New Criticism and practical criticism (depending on your side of the Atlantic) became the 248

History/Historicism

default critical practices, while the foundation of a much broader field of interdisciplinary Victorian studies was being laid in ambitious and synthetic reappraisals of the period’s literature and history. Reevaluation was long overdue, and numerous literary critics and historians undertook the task with a conscious sense of relief that they had finally arrived at a time when, as a reviewer of John Holloway’s The Victorian Sage (1953) remarked, “[T]he Victorian idiom neither dominates nor repels” (193). At last, a neutral historical perspective on the mid and late nineteenth century would be possible, from which its dynamic currents and the relations between its parts might be visible. A current misapprehension about this interdisciplinary turn is that it somehow established the category of “Victorian” as a natural unit of historical time, thereby assuming a national and cultural cohesiveness among its various phenomena that remained unquestioned. But if we look at the books that initiated the field, we can see that they took very little for granted and were especially eager to question the term “Victorian”. A sample of them— Graham Hough’s The Last Romantics (1949); Jerome Buckley’s The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture (1951); John Holloway’s The Victorian Sage (1953); Asa Briggs’ Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes, 1851–1867 (1955) and The Making of Modern England: The Age of Improvement (1958); and G. Kitson Clark’s The Making of Victorian England (1960)—reveals that naturalizing the idea of “Victorian” was the last thing on their minds [on Victorian studies, see Denisoff ’s introduction]. Both critic Hough and historian Briggs stressed the international connections and the continuities with the late eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries, while historian Kitson Clark began by emphasizing the necessary artificiality of the term “Victorian.” In the first half of the twentieth century, Kitson Clark wrote, Men criticized and sneered at what they called “Victorianism,” or they hotly defended it, or, in due course, they expressed nostalgic regret for it, and it must be presumed that they all thought that they knew what they were talking about. (29) But, of course, they didn’t; so he spent several paragraphs detailing the sprawling national, international, chronological, and cultural indeterminacy of the term, concluding with the caveat, “If, however, we remember these things and define what we are discussing there was probably something we can talk about” (31). Kitson Clark is making a common mid-twentieth-century assertion here: that his is the first generation to be able to write the history of the last 70 years of the nineteenth century; most things previously written on the period were mere polemics.1 Moreover, far from consolidating a closed field, his generation of historians was intent on breaking up the taken-for-granted unity of a “Victorian” time and place, and would attempt to put the pieces back together again only insofar as their evidence would allow. Their aim was not a new consensus but rather increased awareness of the vast multifariousness of the phenomena, their internal contradictions, and the opportunities and problems of working among their innumerable records. Since the emphasis was on the multiplicity of historically significant topics yet to be studied, the history books brimmed with suggestions about new lines of inquiry, several of which seemed to invite the participation of literary scholars. For example, when Asa Briggs discusses class antagonism in the 1840s, he not only quotes Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Kingsley but also identifies a special historical task for the literary historian. “Literature,” he claims, “is much more revealing than economic data for the understanding of the attitudes of contemporaries to the social gulfs” (298). The novelists’ descriptions were not naïvely taken for accurate representations of conditions; rather, their historical significance lay in the revelation of the writers’ “attitudes.” “Attitude” was a word often used by that founding generation to expand the reach of what had previously been the history of ideas: to the paraphrasable content of a particular debate was added its emotional intensity and its moral tones, which were said to be detectable in the writing styles 249

Catherine Gallagher

as much as the expressed opinions. Kitson Clark also turned to literature when taking the emotional temperatures, and hence the strengths of motivations, underlying historical changes. Dickens’s attack on patronage in Little Dorrit’s “bitter and brilliant chapter on the Circumlocution Office and the great family of the Tite Barnacles,” Kitson Clark explains, was no doubt an exaggeration, but it was also a significant historical fact in itself, indicating the process by which “opinion . . . progressively hardened against the whole system of [aristocratic] patronage, fortified . . . by an increasing number of articulate people who had no hope of participating in its benefits” (219–20). Walter Houghton’s Victorian Frame of Mind is the most obvious example of this mid-century trend toward an interdisciplinary history of intellectual affect, and it helps us to see how that project anticipated later movements toward the histories of subjectivity. The book is organized into three broad categories—“Emotional Attitudes,” “Intellectual Attitudes,” and “Moral Attitudes”—and premised on the idea that to know any historical situation one must analyze the framework of “expression” used by its most persuasive contemporary witnesses. Houghton stresses not only the need to study “literature” in the interests of history but also the importance of keeping the definition of that word open in order to view the full range of “what the mind sees and feels”: “literature in the broad sense that includes letters and diaries, history, sermons, and social criticism, as well as poetry and fiction” (xv). The book is partly a history of ideas, but it envelops them in an exploration of the contradictory frameworks through which representative intellectuals viewed the modern world they were making. Houghton organizes their collective “attitudes” into a series of oppositions, an organizing principle he takes from the Victorians themselves, but stresses his subjects’ modes of experiencing and articulating the tension. History in this book appears not as some external “condition” of life but is instead the organizing principle that makes subjective experience possible. Although both the critics and the historians in those decades saw the study of literature as a means of capturing historical feelings that would otherwise remain hidden, there was nevertheless a disciplinary distinction: the general historians used the literature as a specialized lens that could bring subjective Victorian attitudes into focus, while the literary scholars paid attention to the shape of the lens itself. Briggs and Kitson Clark tossed in out-of-context quotations from all sorts of literary works, whereas Houghton studied the patterns that organized and integrated the perspectives of writers and their audiences. An even better example of a literary critic working in the postwar historical mode is John Holloway, whose book The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (1953) not only isolated the creation of a distinctive Victorian prose genre, “Sage writing,” but also extensively analyzed how each of his six chosen writers created visionary “experience for the reader” (11). Holloway’s rhetorical analyses and methods of close reading illustrate the reciprocity of historical and rhetorical literary analysis at mid-century: studying the creation of a genre deepens our insights simultaneously into a period’s self-consciousness and its formal and stylistic development.

2. The Left Turn (1960s and 1970s) There was one scholar of nineteenth-century literature in the 1950s, however, who fundamentally challenged the division of labor between historians and critics: Raymond Williams. His 1958 book Culture and Society, 1780–1950 became so important to the future of Victorian studies, indeed to literary studies generally, that it makes sense to examine it here as the beginning of a new stage. He was, to be sure, indebted to the earlier assumption that literature, broadly defined, gave access to peoples’ combined thoughts and feelings about the history they experienced. But he also reflected on that assumption and set out to explain how certain responses to historical change were differentiated and categorized as “culture,” which became something separate and apart from the changes themselves. “Culture” had, of course, been a keyword in the development of nineteenth-century historicist thought, and Matthew Arnold—in his collection of essays Culture and Anarchy (1869)—had given it a different emphasis, so it was by no means a new historical topic. Williams’s innovation was to make 250

History/Historicism

the history of such earlier conceptualizations, along with the historical functions they performed, the object of his study. Thus, he was not simply doing more cultural history but was instead reflecting on the process by which culture came to be seen as a privileged historical site: The organizing principle of this book is the discovery that the idea of culture, and the word itself in its general modern uses, came into English thinking in the period which we commonly describe as that of the Industrial Revolution. The book is an attempt to show how and why this happened, and to follow this idea through to our own day. It thus becomes an account and an interpretation of our responses in thought and feeling to the changes in English society since the late eighteenth century. (Williams, Culture and Society, ix) The first sentence in this no-frills paragraph seems to announce an interesting but not earthshaking etymological discovery, and yet by the third sentence we are promised that tracing the history of the idea of culture will yield “an account and an interpretation” of no less than a century-and-a-half ’s worth of collective responses (“in thought and feeling”) to national social changes. Moreover, as these “responses in thought and feeling to the changes in English society” make themselves a separate realm under the name “culture,” the process itself continues to change, eluding any stable definition. Indeed, he acknowledges that at the very moment of writing, its meaning is disputed, and his book is an attempt to accelerate yet another of its transformations. Williams’s Culture and Society, it is often said, started the academic field of Cultural Studies, which flourished in most English-speaking countries in the late 1970s and 1980s, itself becoming an object of dispute during the “culture wars” in the US in the 1990s. Our concern here, though, is with the book’s impact on Victorian studies, which was also far-reaching. To begin with, it introduced the Western Marxist tendency into the British critical tradition, thereby turning away from economic determinism while nevertheless retaining a Marxist account of the main forces driving the nineteenth-century critique of capitalist society. Like Eric Hobsbawm in The Age of Revolution, 1798– 1848 (1962), Williams pairs the Industrial Revolution with the French Revolution as the two great transformative changes: “the means of change are different, but the change is comparable in kind”; each produces “a new society” (xii). In the years after WWII, when British governments (both Labour and Conservative) were nationalizing industries and building a new welfare state, left-wing intellectuals were interested in retrieving a British tradition of thought that was critical of industrial capitalism, and Culture and Society succeeded brilliantly in that task because it was willing to include many politically and socially conservative thinkers in the tradition along with the usual radicals. The creation of the idea of culture, as supplement and antidote to a modernizing society, Williams shows, was deeper and broader than ideology. The book thus provided a model of left-leaning criticism without a narrow political bias or hints of Moscow-influenced orthodoxy. It had intellectual integrity, sophisticated reading techniques, and a general tone of scholarly urbanity that commanded respect, and it therefore gave respectability to a new kind of Marxist critique. Many other books with these qualities appeared in the 1960s, making nineteenth-century Britain a topic of intense interest and debate among historians and literary critics alike. Some of those debates were continuations of controversies started by the Victorians themselves. For example, the long argument between the historians Eric Hobsbawm and Max Hartwell over the standard of living during the British Industrial Revolution in many ways continued the Victorian’s Condition-of-England debate, updating it with hindsight and statistical evidence unavailable to contemporaries. E.P. Thompson’s 1963 The Making of the English Working Class steered the discussion about industrialization in a more culturalist direction, concentrating on the growth of a distinct class consciousness resulting from decades of common experiences of dislocation and exploitation matched by numerous workers’ 251

Catherine Gallagher

organizations. Thompson’s way of historicizing “class” echoed Williams’s with “culture”: by no means an eternal category of human division, “it is an historical phenomenon. I do not see class as a ‘structure’, or even a ‘category’, but as something which in fact happens . . . in human relationships” (9). Victorian history was thus exciting not only because it studied the first industrial national formation at a time when rapid industrialization was taking place in numerous parts of the world but also because it had practitioners eager to analyze modernization in experiential terms. They were bringing into view things that had once seemed outside of history’s perspective, either because, like “culture” and “class,” they were thought to be permanent categories, or because, like the “raw experience” and “consciousness” of individuals (Thompson 9), they were previously thought to be too idiosyncratic and ephemeral [on class, see Betensky’s chapter; on industry, see Carroll’s]. The initiatives and revisions in the British Marxist perspective also had points of convergence with European “Marxist Humanist” and “Western Marxist” lines of thought, which brought a range of twentieth-century European theorists, especially theorists of the novel, to the attention of Victorianists. Translations of the works of Theodor Adorno, Mikhail Bakhtin, Lucien Goldmann, Antonio Gramsci, and George Lukács raised important questions regarding the mediating processes through which a collective social consciousness could be said to manifest itself in a literary work. Moreover, their criticism was especially resonant for Victorianists because it often concerned nineteenth-century realist novels, which were said to be the most comprehensive expression of modernizing bourgeois consciousness [on the novel, see Michie’s chapter]. In discussing both individual authors and whole genres, Victorianists started weighing the relative factors of individual genius, gender, education, religious and political views, professional situations, constraints of form and medium, literary markets, and so on. It increasingly seemed naïve to talk of literature reflecting an abstraction like “society,” or to regard works of art as transparent responses to social change. Although few followed a single theoretical path, historicist critics became more precise about the exact historical conditions under which the texts were produced and consumed. Moreover, debates raised awareness of the many methods for making connections between the specifically literary features and other aspects of history. Those methods ranged from Lucien Goldmann’s concentration on the mediation of world views, which linked social forms with formal literary homologues, to Pierre Macherey’s search for the text’s “silences,” which must be filled in by the reader. Another consequence of the quest for greater precision in the historical placement of works was an attempt at mapping a more inclusive topography of the overall Victorian literary terrain, which required exploring whole categories of works that had not been written for a well-educated audience or had otherwise seemed too minor to be mentioned by previous literary historians. For example, works written either for or by the working classes were examined, most notably by Louis James in Fiction for the Working Man (1963), Martha Vicinus in The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British Working-Class Literature (1974), and John Burnett in Annals of Labour: Autobiographies of British Working-Class People, 1820–1920 (1974). The compilations of working-class autobiographies and memoirs were in turn mined for further details about how working people acquired literacy and how they used it. In the early 1970s, Historian Thomas Laqueur’s Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools & Working Class Culture, 1780–1850 (1974), for example, had demonstrated that working-class communities themselves, rather than the Church or middle-class outsiders, controlled their schools and made them vibrant centers of their cultural life. Research soon followed into the records of other working-class educational associations and reading groups, organized by Chartists, trade unionists, and Dissenting chapels. In the 1960s and 1970s, the recovery of working-class reading and writing seemed less a mere empirical exercise in literary history than a heroic attempt to revive and honor undervalued people and their way of life [on radical print culture, including Chartism, see Haywood’s chapter]. Perhaps the largest rescue operation of these decades, though, was conducted by feminist scholars on Victorian women writers. It might now seem as though women’s history in general should have been continuous with the movement toward social specificity and inclusion in historical studies, but 252

History/Historicism

in fact women’s history was often controversial on the left, especially in Britain. The feminist historian Sally Alexander recalled being greeted by “a gust of masculine laughter” at a 1969 History Workshop meeting when requesting a session for those interested in “Women’s History” (Alexander, 127). In 1972, the Althusserian Paul Hirst explained the hostility by noting that such topics as the history of sexuality and the family in general were inappropriate objects of Marxist study, which are “specified by its own concepts, the mode of production, the class struggle, the state, ideology, etc.” (29). The aim of feminist work in both social and literary history, though, was to challenge the dividing line between aspects of the past and present that were considered ahistorical because unchanging (like gender hierarchies) and those that were recognized as historically variable. To be sure, feminist scholars recognized the relative stability of women’s condition even as they denied its naturalness by subjecting it to historical analysis. They noted, too, that the slow pace of change in gender and family relations often served as a stabilizing social force in times of rapid transformation, thus uncovering the interactive connection between dynamic elements in a society and seemingly static one. By making the very division between the changeable and the stable an object of historical scrutiny, feminists raised an important metahistorical question: what was it that made certain phenomena historical, and why had private experiences so seldom qualified? Feminist literary critics, of course, looked to women’s writing for insights into the history of such experiences, just as Williams had looked to literature for what he called the “structures of feeling” of the past. Both culturalist Marxism and feminism in the 1960s and 1970s extended history’s reach into the domains of everyday life, gender and sexuality, affective life, and familial relations. Moreover, both also raised important hermeneutic issues, for although they believed literature distinctively registered a period’s “thought and feeling,” they seldom read texts as direct expressions of otherwise forgotten mentalities, let alone coherent ideologies. Their interpretations instead sought submerged, semiconscious structures. As Schaffer points out, critics like Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic often looked for the signs of barely acknowledged anger, where dissonance and incoherence appeared. Similarly, Williams focused on cognitive and affective discrepancies, where hegemonic “articulations” collided with “lived experience” (Politics and Letters, 168). They took historical literary criticism beyond ideology critique, and they imagined embodied historical subjects with complex, personal, and often antagonistic relations to their own times. Thus, some aspects of their work prepared the way for many of the later developments that were grouped under the term “New Historicism,” whereas others became its targets [on feminism, see Schaffer’s chapter].

3. New Historicism and the History of the Subject (1980s and 1990s) In the early 1980s, critics expressed discontent on several fronts with the leftist literary criticism we’ve been surveying. One of the most common complaints, inspired by the theories of Michel Foucault, was that the historical work of the 1960s and 1970s had failed, in the parlance of the day, to historicize “the subject” in all of its various meanings. Although Marxists and feminists had, as we’ve seen, been interested in affective states, class consciousness, and psycho-social responses to change, they also often seemed to assume a natural human inclination toward greater social freedom and personal autonomy even when those goals were sought through collective means. Foucauldians, in contrast, took that model of human striving as itself a product of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century changes in the history of dynamic interactions between “resistance” and “power.” In the works that had the greatest influence in Victorian studies—Archeology of Knowledge, The History of Sexuality, Discipline and Punish—Foucault presented power not as the possession of any particular class or state apparatus but rather as a driving force flowing through us all and animating the whole. Consequently, the anticapitalism that had motivated much of 1960s and 1970s historical thought was sidelined in what came to be called the “New Historicism,” where a different set of inquiries appeared that placed the historical formation of subjects (or “subjectification”) at its center. 253

Catherine Gallagher

To be sure, Foucault was not the only influential theorist of subject-formation in those decades. “The subject” was a central concern for all French poststructuralist writers, and one of the attractions of Foucault’s thought for literary critics was its relevance to current theoretical issues. It took up topics treated by deconstructionists and examined their geneses, thereby giving historical criticism an important point of leverage in theoretical debates. Althusserian Marxists like Terry Eagleton were also trying to historicize subjectivity, viewing it as the product of the state’s ideological apparatuses. But Foucault’s theories allowed critics to replace the rigid Althusserian concept of ideology with the more flexible category of discourse: a congeries of intellectual and practical activities, which lies too deep to be spelled out in arguable principles or articulated in ways that solicited belief. As he described them, discourses sustain our sense of both order and disorder, allowing us to navigate the world; they are built into our physical environments and habits, diets and sexuality, social identities and enmities, shaping our experience and carving out the dimensions of our subjectivity. Moreover, discourses engender and organize the disciplines through which we come to know the world, thus seeming particularly relevant to professional intellectuals. In discourse analysis, we also became new objects of historical scrutiny. Foucault’s discourse analysis never completely replaced ideology critique in Victorian studies, but his unfamiliar approach nevertheless had some far-reaching effects. It produced an intriguing alienation effect, defamiliarizing the Victorians and making a hard separation between the historians’ views of nineteenth-century Britain and those of the Victorians themselves. Unlike Marxist and feminist cultural histories, whose explanations of nineteenth-century change (industrialism, class antagonism, women’s legal and political disabilities) had been recognized at the time, the Foucauldian version of modernization was a new one, and its novelty was part of its attraction. In historian Judith Walkowitz’s 1980 Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State, for example, we can see a blend of the older feminist practice with the newer perspective. The book describes working-class women’s victimization by the Contagious Diseases Acts and their activism in the campaign to repeal those Acts, giving us a chapter in the history of women’s struggles. But Walkowitz also places that history inside a larger discursive context that escaped the Victorians’ self-awareness. The state’s regulation of prostitution, she demonstrates, was connected to a new “science of sexuality,” which “identified sex as a public issue; rigidly differentiated male from female sexuality; focused attention on extramarital sexuality” as a danger, and generally assigned both heterosexuals and putative deviants “an exclusive and distinct sexual identity” (4–5). This new mode of discursive and disciplinary history thus intensified the attempts of feminists to historicize dimensions of human existence previously thought timeless, and yet it went beyond the history of women, the family, and private life to the sexual subjectivities that seem more fundamental. Thomas Laqueur’s 1990 Making Sex went even further in demonstrating that the medical discipline shaped the very nature of the physical phenomena it described: Victorian medicine turned away from centuries of conceptualizing the differences between male and female genitalia on a hierarchical continuum (women’s organs were similar to but lesser than men’s) to regarding them as a complementary binarism (male and female genitalia are equal opposites). The idea that nineteenth-century culture had invented modern sexed bodies and their sexuality as we know it was especially surprising, for, in common parlance, “Victorian” was a synonym for “prudish.” Although some earlier Victorianists had suggested that there was a historically specific repression of sexuality during the nineteenth century, which might have stimulated an unusual interest in it, the scholarship showing that Victorians had redefined sexual difference and promoted the idea of sexuality as the core of people’s identities was altogether novel. Moreover, though such research drastically revised our view of the Victorians, it also connected them to us in a surprising way, for it stressed that making sex an object of disciplinary discourse was the very thing that brought it into public discussion as sexuality, eventually enabling both Freudianism and the anti-repression rhetoric of twentieth-century sexual liberation. These were definitely not our grandparents’ Victorians [on gender and sexuality, see Dau’s chapter]. 254

History/Historicism

I single out the 1980s scholarship on the history of subjectivity, sexuality, and the body not only because it was sensationally innovative but also because it includes so many seminal works by literary critics. In 1985, Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire drew on Foucault’s History of Sexuality to historicize the sex/gender system in the novel and its importance for sexual identity. Inspired by Discipline and Punish, D.A. Miller’s 1989 The Novel and the Police revealed modes of self-surveilling and subject-making by the novel, not just as a theme or method of characterization but as a by-product of novel reading itself. Concentrating on women’s gendering specifically, Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction (1990) made a dramatic break with earlier feminism by asking not only how female subjectivity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was represented but also what processes brought it into discourse as a record of struggle for personal moral agency and self-control. Armstrong argued forcefully that reading such narratives was an important self-disciplining practice. Literary critics, of course, did not need to go far from their usual subject matter to adopt the new focus on the histories of subjectivity, sexuality, and the body. As we’ve already seen, historians had long relied on literary sources to understand Victorians’ intimate, private, affective, and subjective lives, so the Foucauldian emphases seemed like an amplification of an ongoing tendency among historians to address cultural topics more commonly treated in literary studies. New Historical criticism, though, introduced into literary study the idea that there were underlying discourses that could connect widely separated domains of activity. Critics began paying close attention to both formal and thematic echoes from all sorts of unlikely sources—demographic studies, sanitary reports, medical journals, factory legislation—in literary works. As Stephen Greenblatt and I explain in Practicing New Historicism, the discoveries of such conjunctions could produce “almost surrealist wonder at the revelations of an unanticipated aesthetic dimension in objects without pretensions to the aesthetic,” while also drawing attention to “the process by which [canonical literary] works achieve both prominence and a certain partial independence” (pp. 10–11). Moreover, one could make such discursive connections without adopting any model of full cultural coherence or ideological totality, drawing instead on the multiple dimensions of discourses and their mobility across disciplines, genres, and social practices. Many New Historicists were drawn to Foucault’s work, especially Archeology of Knowledge and The Order of Things, by its promise of freedom from fruitless debates about how certain primary social activities (e.g., the economic base) determined secondary and tertiary undertakings (like literature). And yet it must also be said that the Foucauldian turn opened a perspective on literature and the humanities in general that sometimes seemed equally subordinating: they were aligned with the modern disciplinary practices that were said to have displaced the ancien régime’s method of maintaining political order through corporal punishment. Exactly how literature and the academic disciplines fit into this shift was a matter of intense debate, which often had more to do with the alignment between literary and discursive forms than with the intentions of authors. By affiliating certain kinds of literary work (the novel especially) with disciplinary surveillance, though, some Foucauldian critics seemed to suggest that literature as a whole was fatally implicated in the operations of power. That use of Foucault’s ideas, however, required such a sweeping moral and political revaluation of literature in general that it did not become widespread. The debate on these issues is charted in The New Historicism, edited by H. Aram Veeser. But rather than endlessly debate such generalizations, New Historicism in the later 1980s and subsequent decades instead reconsidered the particular histories of individual genres, discourses, disciplines, and media, as well as the array of public and private institutions that supported them, with a continuing emphasis on the history of subjectivity but also with fewer disapproving judgments. Literary critics became more self-conscious about their own disciplinary biases and histories. Foucault’s accent on disciplinarity encouraged them to examine how their professional practices created the texts they studied, thus promoting what had been an increasingly obscure interest in the history of textuality and textual scholarship. Pressing further into the history of the discipline stimulated 255

Catherine Gallagher

curiosity about the construction of its various specialties, especially its division into nationalities (then sub-nationalities) and periods. The Foucauldian attention to the production of subjectivity through literary activity also increased research into the histories of the concepts of the author and the reader. There was, we might say, a tendency toward disciplinary introspection as critics historicized the profession’s key terms, especially “author,” “text,” “reader,” “literature,” “national” (i.e., “British,” “Scottish,” “Irish”) and even “history.” And yet introspection was by no means isolating, because all of these terms were connected with other disciplines as well. Taking advantage of the extraordinarily abundant British intellectual history produced in those decades, scholars explored the nexus between the histories of literature and literary studies and those of numerous other Victorian phenomena: the massive growth in the learned professions and their increasing power and prestige; the legal changes in intellectual property and censorship; the economics and sociology of publishing, libraries, illustration, periodicals, and international literary markets; the histories of privacy, publicity, and celebrity; of education and university reform; and of the expansion and dissemination of new media.2 The 1980s and 1990s saw a surge of historical studies of the “literature-and” variety—literature and law, literature and medicine, literature and anthropology, literature and economics, literature and religion—many of which grew out of attempts to map the discursive terrain of Victorian disciplines.

4. Victorianism in Extended Space and Time This final section will briefly discuss two crucial twenty-first-century developments that might also be traced to the historicization of key terms in our discipline’s lexicon: in this case, “nation” and “history.” The topic of the connections between the modern idea of literature and the development of modern nations was broached by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; 1991), which began a flood of studies on the topic of the role of nations in forming literary canons and the role of literature (especially novels) in making nations. The fact that Great Britain in the nineteenth century was not a nation but a conglomerate of nations with a vast empire of separate national entities meant that scholars tended to treat this topic through the lens of empire, where it merged with the postcolonial scholarship that had been initiated by Edward Said’s 1977 Orientalism and made especially pertinent to British nineteenth-century literature by Gayatri Spivak’s influential essay, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985). Said’s own Culture and Imperialism (1994) explored the role of canonical nineteenth-century novels in an ongoing process of situating and resituating Great Britain in geopolitical space. Like Spivak’s essay, Said’s book placed the empire not on the edge of British Victorian consciousness but at its center. Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989) focused more on the details of a dynamic literary relation between Britishness and empire, tracing the stages through which the British in India educated Indians in English literature specifically in order to acculturate them without interfering with their religious beliefs. Thus the English literature curriculum first developed as an imperial program before it appeared at home in Britain. Later books like Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (1997) investigated the relation between overseas expansion and literary expressions of minority nationalisms internal to the UK. The literarycritical works in the 1990s appeared alongside massive amounts of historical scholarship on the British Empire, examining every aspect of its spread in the nineteenth century, including the cultures it inseminated in different parts of the globe, as well as the imperial cultures (including the literatures) of the United Kingdom. An important guide to the historiography as it stood at the end of the twentieth century is Volume III of The Oxford History of the British Empire, which contains John M. MacKenzie’s “Empire and Metropolitan Cultures,” an essay stressing the ways in which the global encounters altered the cultural production of Britishness itself. And throughout the first decades of the twentyfirst century, historical scholarship on the literary culture of the British Empire in the nineteenth 256

History/Historicism

century has continued to thrive, greatly expanding the spatial dimension of the term “Victorian” and stressing its global reach [on postcolonialism, see Banerjee’s essay; on global economics, see Rajan’s; and on settler colonialism, see Wagner’s]. In their strenuous attempts to take nothing for granted, the New Historicists of the 1980s and 1990s also attempted to historicize and problematize the writing of history itself. The concept of history, though, is difficult to destabilize by uncovering its historical multiplicity, for one must assume some privileged perspective even to chart the other varying perspectives. Nevertheless, challenged by the critiques of historical practice made by F. R. Ankersmitt, Dominick LaCapra, Hayden White, and Foucault himself, New Historicists attempted to avoid the grands récits of the nineteenth century and developed methods of synchronic analysis, such as writing the histories of single years, juxtaposing moments distant in time, concentrating on ruptures, and excluding accounts of transition. In this century, an additional problematic has arisen that puts even greater pressure on normal literary-historical practices, and its roots lie at the heart of Victorian intellectual life: the connections and distinctions between change over time in the natural world and change in human culture; or as the early Victorians might have put it, between natural history and human history. That the planet had a deep history and humans are one of its products was always recognized to be among the most significant Victorian discoveries, and the history of evolutionary thought in literature as well as in the biological and social sciences was a perennial topic in research and criticism. However, as climate science reveals the massive changes in nature that industrialization has produced, the Victorian ecological imagination, especially its formulation of the interactions between resources and populations, has become an even more prominent object of study. Building on seminal work by Gillian Beer and George Levine, Victorianists have been rediscovering not only the legacies of Victorian conservationists and environmentalists, like John Ruskin, but also the biases (like antiMalthusianism) that blinded them to the full consequences of the carbon-spewing technologies they had invented (MacDuffie). As the general literature-and-environment field has burgeoned in recent decades, the nineteenth-century roots of its discourse have become more apparent, and new interdisciplinary enquiries have established themselves in the field. The methods of ecocriticism both rely on historical scholarship and raise awareness of its limits. As Timothy Clark, the editor of the Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment explains, “Most criticism today is contextual, aiming to situate a text in a cultural or cultural-historical context. . . . Yet culture itself has a context—the biosphere, air, water, plant and animal life.” Consequently, “ecocritical work tends to be . . . metacontextual” and quickly reaches “the limits of the competence of any one intellectual discipline” (4). Clark’s description of ecocriticism is not an argument against historical enquiry, which often goes far beyond mere contextualization. It is, instead, a salutary reminder that the combination of literary criticism and history so typical of Victorian studies frequently serves as a prelude to even more extensive interdisciplinarity [on industry, see Carroll’s chapter; on ecocriticism, see Voskuil’s].

Notes 1 The one exception to this rule, which is relied on as an impartial authority by all of the postwar historians, is Elie Halevy’s A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century. Several historians of Kitson Clark’s generation note that Halevy’s foreignness freed him from the controversies that ensnared earlier British historians. 2 For a sampling of the intellectual history of the period, see the two collections of essays edited by Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young: Economy, Polity, and Society: British Intellectual History 1750–1950 and History, Religion, and Culture, British Intellectual History 1750–1950.

Key Critical Works Gillian Beer. Darwin’s Plots, 1983. G. Kitson Clark. The Making of Victorian England, 1962.

257

Catherine Gallagher Walter E. Houghton. The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830–1870, 1957. Thomas Laqueur. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, 1990. George Levine. Dying to Know, 2002. Allen MacDuffie. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination, 2014. D. A. Miller. The Novel and the Police, 1989. Eve Sedgwick. Between Men, 1985. E. P. Thompson. The Making of the English Working Class, 1963. Gauri Viswanathan. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, 1998. Raymond Williams. Culture and Society, 1780–1950, 1958.

Works Cited Alexander, Sally. “Women, Class and Sexual Differences in the 1830s and 1840s: Some Reflections on the Writing of a Feminist History.” History Workshop, no. 17, pp. 125–49. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction. Oxford UP, 1990. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. Smith, Elder & Co., 1869. Burnett, John, editor. Annals of Labour: Autobiographies of British Working-Class People, 1820–1920. Indiana UP, 1974. Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge UP, 1983. ———. Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter. Oxford UP, 1999. Briggs, Asa. The Making of Modern England: The Age of Improvement, 1783–1867. Harper & Row, 1959. Clark, Timothy. “Introduction: The Challenge.” Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge UP, 2011, pp. 1–14. Collini, Stefan, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young, editors. Economy, Polity, and Society: British Intellectual History 1750–1950. Cambridge UP, 2000. ———. History, Religion, and Culture, British Intellectual History 1750–1950. Cambridge UP, 2000. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith, Pantheon, 1972. ———. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage, 1974. ———. The History of Sexuality:Volume I: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley, Pantheon, 1978. ———. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Random House, 1970. Gallagher, Catherine, and Greenblatt, Stephen. Practicing New Historicism. U of Chicago P, 2000. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale UP, 1979. Halevy, Elie. A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century. Translated by E. I. Watkin and D. A. Barker, 6 vols, T. Fisher Unwin, 1924–51. Hirst, Paul Q. “Marx and Engels on Law, Crime and Morality.” Economy and Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 1972, pp. 28–56. Hobsbawm, E. J. The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848. Mentor, 1962. Holloway, John. The Victorian Sage. Norton, 1965. Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830–1870. Yale UP, 1957. James, Louis. Fiction for the Working Man. Root, 1963. Kitson Clark, G. The Making of Victorian England: Being the 1960 Ford Lectures Delivered before the University of Oxford. Atheneum, 1962. Laqueur, Thomas. Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools & Working Class Culture, 1780–1850. Yale UP, 1974. ———. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Harvard UP, 1990. Levine, George. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. Harvard UP, 1988. ———. Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England. U of P Chicago, 2002. MacDuffie, Allen. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2014. MacKenzie, John M. “Empire and Metropolitan Cultures.” The Oxford History of the British Empire,Volume III The Nineteenth Century, edited by Andrew Porter, Oxford UP, 1999, pp. 271–93. Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. California UP, 1989. Priestley, F. E. L. “Rev. of The Victorian Sage By John Holloway.” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 2, 1954, pp. 193–95. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 1993. Sedgwick, Eve. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia UP, 1985. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1, 1985, pp. 243–61.

258

History/Historicism Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. Gollancz, 1963. Trumpener, Katie. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Princeton UP, 1997. Veeser, H. Aram, editor. The New Historicism. Routledge, 1989. Vicinus, Martha. The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British Working-Class Literature. Barnes & Noble, 1973. Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. Oxford UP, 1998. Walkowitz, Judith. Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State. Cambridge UP, 1980. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. 1958. Harper & Row, 1966. ———. Politics and Letters: Interviews with the New Left Review. Verso, 1980.

259

23 LIBERALISM AND CITIZENSHIP Helen Small

1. What is Liberalism? The significance of “liberalism” for Victorianists today lies in its historic influence and the degree to which later critics have articulated their own political and cultural convictions in response. The word had two primary meanings in the Victorian period. It described a school of political thought, still widely influential today, dedicated to advancing the freedom and equality of individuals, and often characterized by confidence in the power of rationality and the progressive tendency of history. In Britain, “liberalism” also had a narrower party-political application: the Liberal Party (mixing radical and more cautious approaches to social change) emerged in 1847 out of the old aristocratic Whig party, and dominated the politics of the United Kingdom and its colonial dependencies for much of the second half of the century. In this party-political sense, Liberalism attracted many writers, including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope (the period’s foremost novelist of parliamentary life), and, with qualifications, Oscar Wilde (who advocated Socialism but defined it in liberal terms as the flourishing of individualism for all). In the first, broader sense, “liberalism” was pervasive, informing in some degree almost all writing about political and social aspirations for change. Early twentieth-century scholars tended to admire nineteenth-century liberal-egalitarian outlooks. In later decades, especially in the United States, scholars’ dominant response was more hostile, detecting complicity with existing power imbalances at home and in the rule of empire abroad. Recent work, however, indicates that critics are returning to a positive engagement with liberalism, admiring its advocacy for equality, tolerance of difference, and distinctive awareness of its own shortcomings and contradictions. To discuss liberalism today requires us to be alert to changes in the meaning of the term. The associations of “liberalism” have stretched significantly since the end of the nineteenth century to the point where the word may seem, as Duncan Bell observes, impossibly over-elasticated. One source of difficulty is the early divergence between American and British usage. Liberalism in the United States never had an explicit place in the label of a major political party, and the country’s republican constitution enshrined core liberal principles (liberty and the inalienability of individual rights) across the political spectrum. Modern American liberalism is strongly associated with the twentiethcentury history of civil rights agendas and social justice movements advanced under the Democratic presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. In the light of that history, the word is often taken to imply not just progressive egalitarianism but “radical” left-wing reformism. It is commonly understood in

260

Liberalism and Citizenship

binary opposition with “conservatism,” so that the positive endorsement of liberalism entails going against the pejorative associations it has for American commentators on the political right. UK usage is not so strongly colored by conservative animosity, retaining a closer connection with a long history of political thought in which “liberal” ideas are differentiated not only from more socially conservative and economically free-market outlooks on the political right but also from more stateinterventionist views on the political left, concerned with protecting general welfare and reducing social inequality. Debates about liberalism have been further complicated by global political-economic trends in recent decades misleadingly named “neoliberal.” The term describes a promotion of laissez-faire and free-market economics, removing many social protections from market forces provided by earlier governments [on economics, see Rajan’s chapter]. The antipathy to liberalism found in American and, to a lesser extent, British Victorian studies during the later 1980s and 1990s was in part a reaction against neoliberal policies adopted under Ronald Reagan’s presidency and, in the UK, their promotion by the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and her successors. Positive attention to liberalism since, roughly, 2000 marks a striking reversal, with many scholars (again, primarily American) now consciously identifying with the political and ethical sensibility of Victorian liberal thought, as they interpret it. The “new liberalism studies” (Psomiades 31) has prompted calls to demarcate neo-liberalism more clearly from liberalism, and to separate liberalism as an ethical stance from liberalism in the party-political and economic spheres (see especially Amanda Anderson’s introduction to Bleak Liberalism). There are three main areas in which Victorian liberalism matters for students and scholars today. First, the principal philosophical interpreters of liberalism in the period, John Stuart Mill (1806–73), Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), and T.H. Green (1836–1882), continue to be important points of engagement. In the first section that follows I focus primarily on Mill, a leading source of critical ideas for anyone interested in advocacy for freedom and equality, the challenges of representative democracy, the conduct of political argument, and principles of free speech. I give briefer attention to Spencer and Green. The second section looks at a wider range of Victorian writing in order to establish the variety of literary liberalisms. It treats three case studies: Matthew Arnold, the chief architect of nineteenth-century thinking about culture and criticism as “liberal” endeavors; George Eliot, whose liberalism found imaginative form in her realist fiction; and Frederick Douglass, who adds to this discussion a distinctively American sense of the challenges posed for liberal optimism by ongoing racial discrimination after the official end of slavery. The final section addresses aspects of the liberal critical tradition that have renewed political urgency today. The “new liberalism studies,” as the current turn back to liberalism is termed, has points of connection with a wider debate about the future of the humanities and the liberal arts as they face pressures to explain their public value. The liberalism of “liberal arts” means something quite distinct from the intellectual and political liberalisms primarily at issue here: the word describes an education on the classical model, aimed at cultivating breadth of mind rather than providing specialist technical or professional training. I end by identifying some telling ways in which recent advocacy for the humanities has drawn strength from Victorian liberal explorations of how best to articulate shared “progressive” values and resolve conflicts in the public sphere, while taking heed of their more and less conscious shortcomings.

2. The Development of Liberalism No philosophical work had greater influence on liberalism in the nineteenth century than J.S. Mill’s On Liberty (1859). Written for a general audience, this book remains a classic, even the classic statement of liberal principles, continually consulted and argued over. Mill’s subject was “Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the 261

Helen Small

individual” (9). His aim was to counter the threat of “social tyranny” in a society that offered obvious rewards for conformism. Social tyranny, he argued, is more insidious than political oppression because it is harder to detect at work, “penetrating . . . deeply into the details of life”—how we speak with and behave toward one another (15). The emphasis on freedom from external constraints explains why Isaiah Berlin thought of Mill as a proponent of “negative” liberty rather than “positive” liberty—that is, the freedom to shape one’s own purposes in life (174–75) (the lesser liberty, in Berlin’s view). However, to read On Liberty closely and in conjunction with the two other works by Mill commonly studied on literature programs, The Subjection of Women (1869) and the Autobiography (published posthumously, 1873), is to find a deep concern with the positive development of character and the role of education and culture in assisting individual and collective happiness. So The Subjection of Women begins with the “negative”—“the legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong in itself ” (206)—but it is propelled thereafter by a sense of the better lives in store for women and for men once the freedom of the sexes is put on an equal footing. Mill prods men to look into their own motives for resisting change: I believe they are afraid . . . lest [women] should insist that marriage should be on equal conditions; lest all women of spirit and capacity should prefer doing almost anything else, not in their own eyes degrading, rather than marry. (257) The argument is carefully logical, but it persuades by its keen awareness that human flourishing cannot be achieved only through clear-headed thinking but must reflect the importance of our feelings and our need to “experiment” freely with living (On Liberty, 101). Mill’s ideas inspired and galvanized literary writers of the time, among them Thomas Hardy, who has the conservatively minded Mr. Phillotson, in Jude the Obscure, stymied by his wife’s assertion that The Subjection of Women supports her in leaving their marriage: “What do I care about J.S. Mill!” Phillotson moans, “I only want to lead a quiet life!” (409). Numerous “New Woman writers” of the 1890s called on Mill as a helpful authority, or point of argument, for their own “experiments of living” (Mill, “On Liberty,” 101), including Emma Frances Brooke, Ménie Muriel Dowie, and Sarah Grand (see Cunningham 47) [on New Women, see Youngkin’s chapter]. Mill was a similarly fierce critic of the illiberal assumptions about race underpinning many white Britons’ and Americans’ sense of their place in the world and playing out in the working of empire [on race, see Tucker’s chapter]. In 1865 he led the campaign for justice after one of the worst abuses of British imperial power, the Governor Eyre controversy. In October of that year, Edward John Eyre brutally suppressed a rebel uprising at Morant Bay, Jamaica, by killing nearly 500 people and seriously wounding hundreds more in retaliation for the deaths of 18 British militiamen. Though Mill was unable to secure a criminal conviction, his chairmanship of the Jamaica Committee and speeches against Eyre in the House of Commons made the case a byword for colonial atrocity. Among those seeking to protect Eyre were Charles Dickens (proof that Liberal party affiliations were no guarantee of liberal views on race and empire) and Thomas Carlyle. The latter had once been a close friend of Mill, but the relationship had not survived Carlyle’s 1849 “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” a notorious attack on the congratulatory liberal-sentimentalism he saw in British policies toward post-slavery Jamaica. The fact that Mill’s “day job,” for 35 years, was with the East India Company, through which Britain exercised its colonial administration of India, puts his liberalism with respect to the Indian struggle for independence under intense scrutiny. His justification of the Company’s presence in India on the grounds that British governance would promote legal rights, respect, and toleration, and his defense of the Company’s actions during the rebellion of 1857, are now the subjects of a large critical literature. The single most influential contribution to a critical, though balanced, view of Mill in recent years is Uday Singh Mehta’s Liberalism and Empire (taken up 262

Liberalism and Citizenship

and developed by Hensley, Mehta, Parekh, and Pitts). More sympathetic views of Mill’s position can still be found, such as Mark Tunick’s. On the question of free speech, Mill’s legacy is less contested. On Liberty’s central claim is the importance of encounter between opposing views if there is to be progress in understanding and social cooperation. It sets out some basic requirements for liberal debate which are still appealed to today: clear reasoning, honesty, a willingness on all sides to hear objections from others. Never a proceduralist (he did not seek to dictate the form or order of debate), Mill understood the need for some ground rules: no one should dominate discussion to the exclusion of others; raising one’s voice and (the written equivalent) polemic were off the agenda—“invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like” were rejected (see Small, “Argument as Conflict,” 17). The requirements for good reasoning had implications for Mill’s thinking about representative democracy: the tendency of government by the people would be toward mediocrity, he warned, if the influence of the better educated minority was not safeguarded. In intellectual-historical terms, Millian liberalism draws on diverse strands of earlier political and philosophical thinking. Many of those strands involve the long, complex history of British “Whig” political thought, now recognized as involving major internal disputes over the rights of property, the importance of self-determination, and the meaning of “civilisation” (J.A. Burrow, J.H. Plumb, Boyd Hilton, and J.G.A. Pocock). The liberal emphasis on individualism owes an obvious debt to John Locke’s “natural rights” arguments for the freedom and equality of individuals (Slaughter). The civic republican influence of Locke is indisputable, though more straightforward in America than in Britain, where it generated obvious tensions with a constitutional monarchy (however limited in its powers) and where fears of revolution forestalled Republican discourse (Pocock). Finally, Mill’s liberalism, and Victorian liberalism generally, owed much, also, to Adam Smith’s understanding of the power of rational self-interest. The influence is clear in the period’s economic writing about the pursuit of wealth, particularly the burgeoning self-help literature led by Samuel Smiles’s best-selling Self-Help (1859). This work became known as the “bible of mid-Victorian liberalism,” but liberalism had no monopoly on the idea of raising oneself from poverty to wealth through self-education, thrift, and hard work, and indeed none of the principal philosophers of liberalism conceived of self-interest as the sole or primary driver of human activity [on life-writing, see Broughton’s chapter]. Mill himself thought Adam Smith’s primary value lay not in his economics (where Mill found numerous “errors”) but in the wider body of his philosophical thought, where altruism and a sense of collective responsibility act as counterforces to self-interest. The Oxford philosopher T.H. Green’s ethical and political writings encouraged a generation and more toward social reform via “settlement” programs which saw university men taking up residence in London’s impoverished East End and undertaking practical social and educational work [on radical culture, see Haywood’s chapter]. Toynbee Hall was founded in 1884 by Arnold Toynbee, a pupil of Green; the Passmore Edwards settlement was established by the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward (Mary Ward) 12 years later. Her best-remembered novel Robert Elsmere (1888) provided a popular fictional representation of the settlement idea, and a striking portrait of Green as “Professor Grey.” Green’s philosophical Idealism (his conviction that we can only know the world through thought, not, as empiricism would seem to promise, through our physical senses) is in line with a less consistently recognized thread in Victorian liberalism. The German tradition of Idealism represented by Immanuel Kant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller, and interpreted for English audiences by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle, was vital to Green’s and Mill’s thinking about how it is that we can advance our own goals in life, in spite of the forces that work to limit our outlook. If less tends to be said by literary critics about the idealist inspiration in liberalism, it is probably because its high philosophical abstraction easily seems at odds with the rational-empiricist aspect best represented by Herbert Spencer. Spencer made (in every sense) huge contributions to the study of psychology, religion, education, and politics. His 1851 “Law of Equal Freedom”—“Every man has 263

Helen Small

freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man” (Social Statics, 103)—is a classic articulation of liberalism’s key tenet, and boldly applied in his thinking about women’s rights, free speech, freedom from state interference, and other rights that go beyond what many liberals might sign up to. A right to “use the earth” (114), for example, raises significant questions about land as property. His robust libertarianism on such points can still be attractive, but most modern critics find unsatisfactory his efforts to bring evolutionary theory to bear on psychology and sociology, and to justify the moral centrality of the individual to his theory. How social progress is meant to occur, for example, remains unclear in Social Statics (and his later work was less optimistic that progress was certain). Indicatively, he was often misunderstood—as in America, where he was received in 1882 as a spokesperson for unrestrained capitalism (see Gray, in Bellamy; and Francis). Even Spencer, who tried so hard to connect together different areas of knowledge, could not match Mill for open-mindedness, given that Spencer was hostile to idealism and to the single most important influence on Mill: Utilitarianism. The key precursors here were Mill’s father, James Mill, historian of India, political and economic theorist, and philosopher of psychology; Jeremy Bentham, philosopher; and David Ricardo, political economist. Their radical politics and rational principles were cornerstones of the young Mill’s education. James Mill provided a famously demanding training in logic, rhetoric, history, and psychology. Bentham was politically inspirational, with criticisms of imperial administration, the poor law, the criminal justice system, prison management, and much more. Ricardo influenced Mill’s views on labor economics, wealth accumulation, taxation and its effects, and competitive markets (see Riley, in Skorupski). The core Utilitarian principle—that society should promote “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”—remained fundamental to Mill’s thinking all his life, but he increasingly resisted the more programmatic elements in Bentham’s moral philosophy and reacted against Ricardo’s prioritization of the role of economic drivers in human lives. Looking to enrich rather than reject Utilitarianism, Mill argued (famously) that quality of pleasure, or happiness, is as important as quantity, and that other motivations (including aesthetic and moral ones) may trump economic self-interest. He strongly contested Bentham’s tendency to present good and bad acts in the world as if they function like pluses and minuses in a mathematical sum (the overall utility of an event being the final balance of good against bad done), and argued that we need some moral rules to constrain action so that Utilitarian principles will not seem, for example, to sanction murder. “Emotional intelligence” is the hallmark of Mill’s liberalism—nowhere more movingly conveyed than in the Autobiography (1873). Here he describes how reading works of literature rescued him, in his early twenties, from the narrow conception of happiness instilled in him by his rationalist education. At a moment of deep crisis in his own motivations, emotional assistance came first through reading Jean-François Marmontel’s French sentimental-didactic memoir, then Coleridge and William Wordsworth. This experience led Mill to incorporate into his thinking a wider range of motives for social and political action in the world, including a wish to achieve “worth of character” (Autobiography, 144). Recent work on Utilitarianism (well represented by Kathleen Blake, Frances Ferguson, Philip Schofield, and the Jeremy Bentham Project) has done much to rescue early Utilitarianism from the mechanistic-rationalist stereotype in which Mill’s criticisms helped to imprison it, but there is still an exemplary clarity and, for literary critics, evident appeal to the confrontation between a quantitative, narrowly “social-scientific” view of happiness and the larger qualitative “liberal” view that recognizes the crucial role and elusive subjectivity of feeling and desire.

3. Case Studies: Major Victorian Liberals Though Mill provided a classic articulation of how literature may assist our full human flourishing, other writers come to the fore when we consider how liberalism influenced the writing of Victorian literature and the critical environment within which it was received. Matthew Arnold’s liberalism was much less systematic than Mill’s but his influence in shaping debate about the value of engagement 264

Liberalism and Citizenship

with literature is still felt today. Liberal principles deeply inform the Arnoldian view of criticism as the “free play of the mind on all subjects, for its own sake” (“The Function of Criticism,” 268)—a view that serves a cosmopolitan account of culture which sets its sights on the moral and spiritual perfection of the individual, the nation, and, ultimately, the world. Never a democrat, Arnold took an ideal view of the state as an expression of “right reason”—that is, correct reasoning in accordance with universal nature—and saw culture as a bulwark against the “anarchy” of individualism and populism (Culture and Anarchy, passim). Arnold often indulged in typecasting of national styles and temperaments, as is apparent from his comments on the Celtic type in On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), but he nonetheless held to universalist aspirations. Here again, a liberal view of how best to live and find purpose in life has deep implications for education. For Arnold, 35 years an inspector of schools for the Department of Education, this was a matter of daily reflection; education was of value to him not primarily in teaching functional literacy but in its deepest civilizing and lifelong effects. The value he placed on culture, and on individual self-development through culture, would soon profoundly affect the literary and critical practices of Walter Pater, Wilde, and the aesthetic school. For George Eliot, what mattered was how to give expression to the agonizing mismatch between an always “imperfect social state” and the needs and desires of individuals (see Finale to Middlemarch, 1871–72) [on ethics, see Mitchell’s chapter]. This makes her liberalism hard to encapsulate. Where Mill concentrates on reasoned argument, and Arnold on “free” criticism, Eliot looks to the imaginative possibilities of fiction to envisage more socially embedded and psychologically informed cultural reforms [on fiction, see Michie’s chapter]. Her writing tends, as realism does generally, to privilege the experience of social constraint: there are no easy answers in real life. But it also works hard to articulate transformative possibilities, particularly via romance and, later, more experimental kinds of character writing. Her liberalism is committed to the idea of moral Bildung (character formation through education) and expansive in its conception of citizenship. It is also attentive to religious and ethnic difference within nations and to international comparisons. Anthony Appiah’s term “rooted cosmopolitanism”—world-citizenship, but with special attachment to one’s own community or culture—finds an early test case here, as Bruce Robbins has observed. Both Tanya Agathocleous’s Urban Realism and Lauren Goodlad’s Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic offer readings of other Victorian texts along such lines. Eliot, famously associated with the idea that reading literature may be a way of expanding our sympathies, was also a trenchant skeptic about how far sympathy can reach, and (increasingly) about how much it can achieve in the world if not supplemented by other modes of engagement and a willingness to curtail sympathy in favor of decisive action. By contrast, Frederick Douglass’s liberalism is articulated as a powerful critique of the dominant liberalism from someone committed to the principles of liberty, equality, reason, and democratic inclusiveness, but whose life experience has taught him the abject failure of principle in practice. Whether a critique so fundamental, born of the experience of slavery and discrimination, can rightly be called an “internal critique” is a matter of judgment. Encouraged by white abolitionists first to suppress his visible racial difference from them, and then to accent it for political effect, Douglass increasingly resisted. The “Editor’s Preface” to My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) quotes a letter that makes the ground of dissent clear: “I have never placed my opposition to slavery on a basis so narrow as my own enslavement, but rather upon the indestructible and unchangeable laws of human nature, every one of which is perpetually and flagrantly violated by the slave system” (6). The autobiography concedes (unhappily) that there is nevertheless reason to go public with a life “exceptional in its character” (6)—to that extent engaging a familiar liberal tension between private truth and public responsibility. But deeper exploration of Douglass’s writing and public speaking, amidst the institutions that enabled and disabled them, suggests a supplementary principle for liberalism of ongoing importance to African American writing traditions: a right not to enter a system that does not fully recognize one. Douglass defended a right to be “let alone,” as he articulated it (qtd in Myers, 110), or the “right to opacity,” as Lloyd Pratt puts it (97). 265

Helen Small

4. New Liberalism Studies The politics of these liberal Victorians were obviously not congruent. Mill and Douglass were by far the more radical thinkers and political actors. Their commitments to freedom and equality were explicitly democratic, as Arnold’s and Eliot’s were not. While scholars have long argued about the limits of liberalism in each case, sympathetic critics have always been willing to credit the liberal tradition with making those limits a productive element in its own thinking. The key twentieth-century figure for understanding Victorian liberalism as a form of intelligent thinking about literature, politics, and ethics (in its collective as well as personal forms) is Lionel Trilling. Matthew Arnold (1939), based on Trilling’s doctoral dissertation, and The Liberal Imagination (1950) have special salience for Victorianists. The first presents Arnold’s writing as an exemplary instance of criticism equipped to counter political dogmatism. As Trilling wrote in a new Preface (1949), Arnold’s claims for the importance of critical training in objectivity and reason seemed, in the light of Nazism and Stalinism, “dreadfully to need no modification” for the modern era ([3]). The Liberal Imagination was “a phenomenon,” as Louis Menand notes in his introduction to a 2008 reprint: it sold “seventy thousand copies in hardcover and one hundred thousand in paperback,” and “changed the role of literature in American intellectual life” (vii). A distinctive facet of Trilling’s writing is its stress on the limits of the literary critic’s power, even as Trilling advances a case for criticism’s moral importance to society. He is clear, for example, that Arnold’s endeavor to “see the object as it really is” (“Function of Criticism” 258) was at best bound to end in partial success. This is not just because perfect objectivity is an impossibility but because Arnold understood that liberalism resists the ease with which the limitations of our abilities give us an excuse not to try harder than we do to realize our best hopes for ourselves and society (Trilling, Introduction, Arnold). The Liberal Imagination only amplifies Arnold’s claims for the importance of criticism, as it teases out the politics operating below the literary surface at the level of “sentiment, custom, and moral aspiration” (Menand, ix): “[u]nless we insist,” Trilling writes, “that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like” (Liberal, 100) During the 1980s and 1990s, Trilling’s influence went into abeyance and the most influential criticism, especially in the US, positioned itself to the left, often associating liberalism with the failings of neo-liberalism and drawing attention to the political blind spots of Victorian progressivism and its overstated achievements in terms of democracy, equality between individuals, and freedom from oppression. This anti-liberal orientation took impetus from the social history movement to write “history from below” (i.e., from the perspective of the “vanquished” not the “victors” of history) with its explicit commitments to feminism, working-class communities, and anti-racism. It also drew on the Foucauldian strain within New Historicist literary studies: often charismatically revisionist, it drew dark conclusions about the disciplinary power of Victorian institutions of education, domesticity, law, and medicine, even or especially when refracted through a liberal literary imagination (for a classic example, see D.A. Miller). The anti-liberal because anti-neoliberal strain in Victorian studies has yet to burn itself out, in part because neoliberal reductions in welfare provision were sometimes abbreviated by their proponents and their opponents as “Victorian” or “Neo-Victorian.” This can be seen, for example, in Pete Alcock’s account of selective appeals to Victorian family values by one of the champions of “1980s neo-liberal thinking about social policy,” Charles Murray. Both Elaine Hadley’s “The Past is a Foreign Country” and David McWilliam’s “London’s Dispossessed” offer further criticism of uses and abuses of the term “Victorian” by “neoliberal” social theorists. The blurring of “liberal” with “neoliberal” is, however, becoming less of a default move. Influential contributions to debate in recent years have put some distance between the two terms and helped restore “liberalism” to its original association with the pursuit of freedom and equality. The “new liberalism studies” (Psomiades 31) explores what

266

Liberalism and Citizenship

literary criticism now stands to learn from a nineteenth-century literature committed to principles it understood to be hard to reconcile: cultivating both rationalism and feeling; valuing the social and other ends of art and valuing art for its own sake; promoting cosmopolitan universalism and respecting national and ethnic particularity; asserting the freedom and distinctiveness of the individual and subordinating the priority of the individual to the equality of all. Today, critics are focusing on the lived quality of liberalism’s aspirations and disappointments. A number of scholars have demonstrated the importance of tone and style in inflecting and nuancing liberal views. An early example, out of sync with the “ideology critique” of the time, is Stefan Collini’s analysis of what the characteristic idioms and argumentative strategies employed by Mill, Arnold, and other public moralists can tell us about their social and political attitudes that is not captured in their more formal political theories (Public Moralists). Andrew Miller’s work on how liberalism’s goal of improvement could be both energizing and psychologically overwhelming is similarly attentive to the stylistic tensions undercutting moral pronouncements. And more recently, David Russell’s Tact has drawn attention to Romantic and Victorian developments in the essay form that made it a particularly good vehicle for expressing the liberal principle of openness to the views of others. Hadley’s Living Liberalism is the most extended consideration to date of the internal tensions in the ideal of “rational deliberation” (190, and passim) in private thinking and public debate. Looking at four topics that caused intense disagreement at mid-century—the secret ballot, signed journalism, Irish land reform, and the representative role of the Liberal leader William Gladstone—she develops sympathetic readings of novels by Trollope and Eliot that give imaginative form to the difficulties of sustaining liberal principles to one’s own satisfaction and that of others. Similarly, Lauren Goodlad attests to the “dueling” relationship (p. 192) between different political priorities in writing by Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and others. In Victorian Literature and the Victorian State, she pushes back against critics who have used Michel Foucault to depict Victorian institutions as controlling and regulating the lives of those within them, arguing instead that his later writing about participatory “governance,” acknowledging tensions between state centralization and individual or collective self-determination, better fits the English case. Goodlad’s Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic looks at a wider range of realism, from Wilkie Collins and Gustave Flaubert through to recent television serials such as Mad Men, in order to explore how the expansion of global capitalism generated tensions within liberalism, and between liberalism and free-trading Toryism. The emphasis in all this work is on a collaborative rather than inimical relationship between politically informed criticism and formalist attention to aesthetic forms, styles, and techniques—a theoretical viewpoint explicitly associated with liberalism in David Wayne Thomas’s Cultivating Victorians, but now widely embraced. The best new work in liberalism is inclusive in its political concerns and attuned to how a radical liberalism in one area might go hand in hand with illiberalism in another. Nathan Hensley’s Forms of Liberalism, for example, focuses on how violence accompanied the liberal pursuit of rational governance and the rule of law. Collins, Dickens, Eliot, Algernon Swinburne, H. Rider Haggard, and many others struggled with the often dismaying dependence of order on force, and developed new forms of narrative and poetic expression to express that recognition. It can be difficult to know when critical work centered on liberalism may accurately be classified as radical. Objections to the new liberalism studies include accusations that such work has limited investment in the egalitarian agendas it theoretically promotes, or that, in concentrating on complexity, it fails to make the tough judgments that more committed political leftists would make about, for example, the oppression of women or the evils of empire. Isobel Armstrong speaks strongly to that effect in Novel Politics, where she observes that liberalism’s pliability easily becomes complicit with a “default conservatism” in literary criticism which suppresses the variety of Victorian political positions and overlooks the trenchancy of Victorian radicalism (53). Concentration on liberalism’s critical self-consciousness nevertheless offers a route into thinking about literary criticism today as a practice that can still possess a sense of intellectual virtues—not 267

Helen Small

just “the moral obligation to be intelligent” (the title given to Trilling’s posthumously published essays), but the moral obligation to articulate principles and expectations that guide intelligence in its institutional settings. The work of Amanda Anderson has come to the fore here. Starting with The Powers of Distance—which explores the forms of “cultivated detachment” (p. 5 and passim) associated with developments in methods of social-scientific objectivity, realism’s use of omniscience, and cosmopolitanism’s complex modes of affiliation—Anderson has gone on to develop a body of work that puts “character” and “ethos” once again at the center of theoretical debate. By “character,” Anderson denotes the individual’s cultivation of values through “habits, dispositions, styles” of reasoning; by “ethos,” she designates the “ambient social conditions” and guiding norms that shape argument (Powers 3). Her approach puts Trilling in a line with later (and strikingly unlike) philosophical figures, including Theodor Adorno, Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas, to offer a defense of liberal values at work in aesthetic practice and analysis, and present that practice as an available model for political and cultural disputation. Only in her most recent book, Bleak Liberalism, does Anderson directly address the challenge of making such claims credible in our new context, where literary work no longer clearly has cultural priority and normative modes of reasoning have been severely rattled by changes in the conduct and temperature of political argument on both sides of the Atlantic. It is not hard to see that the restoration of positive interest in liberal citizenship in recent years has run in tandem with the “crisis in the humanities” and on occasion bears an intimate connection with it. Advocates for the humanities continue to turn to Victorian liberal thought about the value of education and the requirements of informed, rational public debate in the face of sometimes hostile national and state bodies, downward pressure on enrolments, and increasing demands that the subjects justify the cost of investment (see Birch, Collini, Nussbaum, and Small). Whether nineteenth-century liberalism offers a body of thinking and writing sufficient to the moment is not a subject on which there is likely to be agreement. However, for those who hold that effective representation of the humanities requires a persuasive mixture of idealism and pragmatism, education both as individual self-development and as participation in collective efforts at social improvement, liberalism is an ally we do well to keep at hand.

Key Critical Works Tanya Agathocleous, et al., “Editors’ Topic: Victorian Cosmopolitanisms.” Amanda Anderson, Bleak Liberalism. ———. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy. ———. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” Duncan Bell. “What is Liberalism?” Regenia Gagnier. Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the Relation of Part to Whole, 1859–1920. Lauren Goodlad. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society. Elaine Hadley. Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain. J. S. Mill. Autobiography (1873), On Liberty (1859), and On the Subjection of Women (1869). Collected Works.

Works Cited Agathocleous, Tanya. Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century:Visible City, Invisible World. Cambridge UP, 2011. ———, et al. “Editors’ Topic: Victorian Cosmopolitanisms.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 38, no. 2, 2010, pp. 389–614. Alcock, Pete. “Back to the Future: Victorian Values for the 21st Century.” Charles Murray and the Underclass: The Developing Debate, edited by Ruth Lister, IEA Health and Welfare Unit, 1996, pp. 139–49. Anderson, Amanda. Bleak Liberalism. U of Chicago P, 2016. ———. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton UP, 2001.

268

Liberalism and Citizenship Armstrong, Isobel. Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Oxford UP, 2016. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy, with Friendship’s Garland and Some Literary Essays, Complete Prose Works. Edited by R. H. Super, 11 vols., U of Michigan P, 1960–77. ———. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” 1864. Lectures and Essays in Criticism. Edited by R. H. Super. Complete Prose Works, vol. 3, pp. 258–85. Bell, Duncan. “What Is Liberalism?” Political Theory, vol. 42, no. 6, 2014, pp. 682–715. Bellamy, Richard, editor. Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought and Practice. Routledge, 1990. Berlin, Isaiah. Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty Oxford UP, 2002. Birch, Dinah. Our Victorian Education. Blackwell, 2008. Blake, Kathleen. The Pleasures of Benthamism:Victorian Literature, Utility, Political Economy. Oxford UP, 2006. Burrow, J. W. Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought. Clarendon, 1988. Carlyle, Thomas. “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.” 1849. Reprinted as “The Nigger Question.” 1853. The Works of Thomas Carlyle, Chapman and Hall, vol. 29, 1896–1901, pp. 348–83. Collini, Stefan. Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930. Clarendon, 1991. ———. What Are Universities For? Penguin, 2012. Cunningham, Gail. The New Woman and the Victorian Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, 1978. Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. Edited by John David Smith, Penguin, 2003. Ferguson, Frances. “Canons, Poetics, and Social Value: Jeremy Bentham and How To Do Things with People.” MLN, vol. 110, 1995, pp. 1148–64. Francis, Mark. Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life. Cornell UP, 2007. Gagnier, Regenia. Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the Relation of Part to Whole, 1859–1920. Palgrave, 2010. ———. The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society. U of Chicago P, 2000. Goodlad, Lauren. The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience. Oxford UP, 2015. ———. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society. The Johns Hopkins UP, 2003. Hadley, Elaine. Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain. U of Chicago P, 2010. ———. “The Past Is a Foreign Country: The Neo-Conservative Romance with Victorian Liberalism.” Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 10, no. 1, 1997, pp. 7–38. Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. Edited by Patricia Ingham, Revised ed, Oxford UP, 2002. Hensley, Nathan K. Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty. Oxford UP, 2016. Hilton, Boyd. The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865. Clarendon, 1988. Malachuk, Daniel S. Perfection, the State and Victorian Liberalism. Palgrave, 2005. McWilliam, David. “London’s Dispossessed: Questioning the Neo-Victorian Politics of Neoliberal Austerity in Richard Warlow’s Ripper Street.” www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/vic.2016.0210. Mehta, Uday Singh. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought. U of Chicago P, 1999. Mill, J. S. Collected Works. General editor John M. Robson, 33 vols. U of Toronto P, 1963–91. Miller, Andrew. The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Cornell UP, 2008. Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. U of California P, 1988. Myers, Peter C. Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism. UP of Kansas, 2008. Nussbaum, Martha C. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton UP, 2010. Parekh, Bhikhu. “Decolonizing Liberalism.” The End of isms? Reflections on the Fate of Ideological Politics after Communism’s Collapse, edited by Alexander Shtromas, Blackwell, 1994, pp. 85–103. Parry, Jonathan. The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain. Yale UP, 1996. Pitts, Jennifer. A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Liberal Imperialism in Britain and France. Princeton UP, 2006. Plumb, J. H. The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725. Palgrave Macmillan, 1967. Pocock, J. G. A. Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge UP, 1985. Poovey, Mary. Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain. U of Chicago P, 2008. Pratt, Lloyd. The Strangers Book: The Human of African American Literature. U of Pennsylvania P, 2016. Psomiades, Kathy Alexis. “He Knew He Was Right: The Sensational Tyranny of the Sexual Contract and the Problem of Liberal Progress.” The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope’s Novels: New Readings for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Margaret Marwick et al., Ashgate, 2009, pp. 31–44. Russell, David. Tact: Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Princeton UP, 2017.

269

Helen Small Schofield, Philip. Bentham: A Guide for the Perplexed. Continuum, 2009. ———. Utility and Democracy: The Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham. Oxford UP, 2006. Skorupski, John, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Mill. Cambridge UP, 1998. Slaughter, Joseph. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. Fordham, 2007. Small, Helen. “Argument as Conflict: Then and Now.” Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Edited by Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 14–32. ———. The Value of the Humanities. Oxford UP, 2013. Smiles, Samuel. Self-Help. Edited by Peter W. Sinnema, World’s Classics, 2008. Spenser, Herbert. Social Statics: Or, the Conditions Essential to Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed. John Chapman, 1851. Thomas, David Wayne. Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic. U of Pennsylvania P, 2003. Trilling, Lionel. Matthew Arnold, 2nd ed. Unwin University Books, 1949. ———. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. 1949. Introduced by Louis Menand. New York Review of Books, 2008. Tunick, Mark. “Tolerant Imperialism: John Stuart Mill’s Defense of British Rule in India.” The Review of Politics, vol. 68, no. 4, 2006, pp. 586–611.

270

PART IV

Formulations of Identity

24 FEMINISM AND THE CANON1 Talia Schaffer

What does it mean to do feminist criticism in Victorian studies today? I asked myself this question when I read approximately 250 books in the field of Victorian studies between 2014 and 2016, due to a combination of book-prize judging and year-in-review reviewing. During that intensive reading experience, I noticed a lot of new trends and changing practices, but I found myself particularly interested in two things that were not there. Hardly anybody either discussed the canon or identified their work as feminist criticism. It did not take long for me to surmise that these absences were related. The canon wars and feminist criticism were intimately intertwined from the 1970s through the 1990s. In this chapter, I want to offer readers a history of these two crucial critical movements and the way they depended on one another, explore why they may seem currently unfashionable, and suggest a different future for each of them. The scholarship I read covered an enormously diverse range of Victorian materials, but critics almost never identified them in terms of canonicity. Victorian studies today addresses famous texts, obscure publications, popular bestsellers, and work that previous generations would not even have seen as literature, items like posters, periodical publications, advertisements, tracts, textiles, and musichall songs [on popular culture see Daly’s chapter; on radical print see Haywood’s chapter; on material culture see Lutz’s chapter]. Few scholars feel a need to justify these choices, and few would advocate returning to fighting about which sources are permissible. But it seems to me that, although the issue of canonization may be dead, the form of the canon wars continues in Victorian studies today. Feminist criticism’s absence from these books worked differently. Whereas the canon was simply not an issue, feminist criticism tended to be taken for granted, usually combined with other approaches, particularly queer theory, material culture, ecocriticism, or postcolonialism. In coediting this Companion, I have also noticed how much feminism is part of fields like theater studies, melodrama, periodicals, short fiction, and poetry [on short fiction, see Bernstein’s chapter; on poetry, see Chapman’s chapter; on drama, see Weltman’s chapter]. Very few of the books I read explicitly identified themselves as feminist, much less interrogated what that might mean. This may be a sign of feminist criticism’s success inasmuch as it now permeates everything. Yet its omnipresence signals a loss as well as a gain. For when feminist criticism becomes an unspoken corollary to what are perceived to be more theoretically exciting fields, it lives on in a kind of half-life, accepted without being interrogated or updated. In its formative years from the late 1970s through the 1990s, Victorianist feminist criticism tied itself very tightly to the mission of recovering lost female voices. It was, in other words, profoundly bound up with challenging the canon. So the answer to the question “what happened to feminist criticism?” depends, in part, on understanding why the canon debate is defunct. Some 273

Talia Schaffer

crucial questions arise. How does it determine scholarly questions when a field is defined as a salvage mission? How might this approach require reconsideration in the digital era? And what can we, as contemporary critics, learn from the rise and fall of these formative movements?

1. History: What We Read When universities began to develop English departments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, discussions of Victorian literature had often been treated as a matter of personal taste and literary gossip (see Mitton, for instance). F.R. Leavis began to change this approach, starting in the 1930s. In the words of Terry Eagleton, In the early 1920s it was desperately unclear why English was worth studying at all; by the early 1930s it had become a question of why it was worth wasting your time on anything else. English was not only a subject worth studying, but the supremely civilizing pursuit, the spiritual essence of the social formation. (27) Leavis famously declared that “the great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad” (1). With these words, he initiated the Great Tradition (for which, he argued, Dickens, the Brontës, and Hardy did not qualify). Great works were timeless, universal, “vital,” to use a favorite term of Leavis’s. A great author transcended the local conditions of gender and race and class, achieving a universal voice. According to the tenets of New Criticism, literature was to be read as literature, without attention to its political, historical, or cultural conditions [on reading practices, see Buurma’s and Heffernan’s chapter]. In the postwar years, the canon of Victorian “great writers” remained relatively stable. The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction, the collection guaranteed worthy by Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, offered Austen, Scott, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, and Henry James. Of course, there were minor adjustments. Dickens’s reputation rose and Wuthering Heights gradually became more prominent, while scholarly interest in Meredith, and arguably Thackeray, declined. But few if any scholars contested the idea that certain authors were great, nor that such greatness meant a self-evident literary quality as testified by generations of critical attention. This consensus began to crumble in the 1970s, as scholars began to question the supposed objectivity of literary standards, arguing that different readers responded to texts differently. A more diverse academic readership began to query the depiction of people like themselves in canonical fiction, to ask what the unproblematic acceptance of those depictions did to students, and to push for attention to a wider range of texts. Wayne Booth remembered how shocking it was in the early 1960s when the one African American faculty member in the University of Chicago humanities teaching staff, Paul Moses, called out Huckleberry Finn’s troubled attitude toward slavery. Moses’s political, ethical, and personal intervention felt so startling that Booth continued to think through it for 25 years (3–5). In Victorian studies, this intervention occurred most immediately in terms of women’s voices, while the recovery of colonized subjects and people of color began to gear up a decade or so later. The first major publications in Victorian feminist criticism included Vineta Colby’s The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century (1970); Martha Vicinus’s Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (1972); Patricia Meyer Spacks’s The Female Imagination (1975); Ellen Moers, Literary Women: The Great Writers (1977); Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977); and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979). These 1970s books began to argue for recovering women writers and started outlining reasons why they had been neglected, with particular interest in the ways women had been silenced or expressed rage. A model of the suppressed Victorian 274

Feminism and the Canon

woman writer began to coalesce. These texts brought new writers to people’s attention, but also a new valorization of rage, despair, and madness; the emotional qualities that had previously been used to discount women’s writing now became the strongest argument for reading them. Critics agonized over the new trend of valuing previously despised qualities, worrying about how to address the literary quality of their subjects. Lyn Pykett began her The ‘Improper’ Feminine by roundly declaring that she had no intention of treating the sensation and New Women novels as forgotten masterpieces (ix). Ardis also abjured the idea of “great works” but struggled with the uneven aesthetic level of the novels she addressed (175–76). While these critics felt it to be crucial to look at women’s work, they remained uncomfortable with the novels’ poor fit with older metrics. In the 1980s, new research expanded our sense of the cultural conditions that silenced Victorian women’s voices. In the 1980s, Sally Mitchell’s The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class, and Women’s Reading 1835–1880 (1981), Nina Auerbach’s Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (1984), and Mary Poovey’s Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (1987) continued outlining a cultural model for how female characters and women writers had been misread, now enriched with specific, extensive economic and sexual information. The major studies of femaledominated genres of Victorian fiction—sensation fiction and New Woman novels—began to appear during this period [on sensation fiction, see Gilbert’s chapter; on New Women, see Youngkin’s chapter]. Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1990) argued that the novel itself was a feminized form that functioned to domesticate and perpetuate gendered roles. In 1990, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s blockbuster study, The Epistemology of the Closet appeared, the successor to Between Men (1985). Trained as a Victorianist, queer theory pioneer Sedgwick often turned to nineteenth-century texts to illustrate such key issues as the homosocial environment, male homosexual panic, avuncularity, and the closet [on queer readings, see Dau’s chapter]. Along with Judith Butler’s famous theory of gender performativity, published in that same annus mirabilis, Gender Trouble (1990), Sedgwick’s work showed that gender was no immutable biological basis but rather a socially constructed phenomenon, differently produced in different contexts, thus making it possible to problematize the “woman” in woman’s writing. These scholars also became closely associated with Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, strengthening the role of culturally constructed sexuality in queer theory. That such gender theory emerged in queer studies rather than in feminist work seemed unimportant at the time, but in the long run it had profound consequences, leaving the impression that feminist criticism retained a residual essentialist model while all the exciting gender theory occurred elsewhere. Victorianist feminist criticism’s assumption of a white middle-class heterosexual female norm also began, slowly, to diversify. The 1980s and 1990s saw the emergence of readings of postcolonial and racial politics affecting recovery/canonization, further complicating the idea of a victimized silenced woman by showing that global forces were complicit in the policies that exalted or suppressed certain writers [on postcolonial criticism, see Banerjee’s chapter]. The madwoman in the attic was raging about a history of colonial domination, not (just) her own personal history, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985) so influentially showed, while Edward Said shook the foundations of the field by noticing, in Orientalism (1978), that the slave trade undergirded Mansfield Park. During this golden age of Victorianist feminist criticism, from the 1970s through the 1990s, recovering lost writers was thrilling. Such recovery was urgent, according to Carol Poster: While we theorize, unrecovered Victorian women’s writings, printed on acid paper, crumble into permanent and irretrievable oblivion. Like a salvage archaeologist hastily digging a few feet ahead of road crews, racing against time to save artifacts and map edifices, the feminist Victorian scholar races against oxidation. Just as the archaeologist must work quickly with available resources to record unexcavated sites, eschewing the meticulous methodologies 275

Talia Schaffer

employed on more leisurely digs, so feminist scholars cannot indulge in the luxury of letting prolonged theoretical debate replace recovery work. The consequence of delay will be the permanent silencing of the majority of popular Victorian female novelists by permitting physical disintegration of their works. (289) As Poster’s approach indicates, recovery criticism was a material practice, largely based in AngloAmerican English departments, competing with the theoretical ideas coming out of French feminist theory at the same time. French and Anglo-American feminist practices both aimed to multiply the number of texts available for reading. French feminist theory expanded women’s reach through associating femaleness with a semiotic play that overrode conventional boundaries, as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva posited femaleness as fluid and multiple. But Anglo-Americans found more materials by doggedly digging them up, sometimes literally: in A.S. Byatt’s Possession, the great novel of recovery feminism, the researchers have to recover priceless manuscripts from a grave in a lightning storm. Elaine Showalter remembers shivering in unheated libraries when researching A Literature of Their Own. She writes that “in 1971 I went to Bath in search of Sarah Grand, and, on a rainy winter day, opened the cartons in the Municipal Library which had sat untouched since her death” (xxviii). Those who followed this heroic generation dreamed of such a moment. Few could expect literally to dig manuscripts out of a grave, but any researcher might unseal a dusty box that contained treasures. This fantasy forms part of what Suzanne Keen has usefully described as “the romance of the archive.” These are thrilling adventure stories in which a researcher uses the tools of archival research to uncover a secret trove, with villains, clues, grave robbery, and detective work. She identifies Indiana Jones as a formative example. As Keen points out, archival research seems like an odd choice for action heroes, since the real experience involves long periods of drudgery and waiting (29). Yet this vision of triumphant discovery animated dozens of popular novels and films in the last two decades of the twentieth century, as Keen shows, and its popularity surely perpetuated and reinforced recovery feminism in scholarship at the same time. Perhaps it was the very popularity of recovery fantasies that generated a backlash. Conservative opposition to noncanonical texts surged in the 1980s and 1990s, initiating the period we now know as the canon wars. The major books in this wave included Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals (1990), Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education (1991), and Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon (1994). They argued that the purpose of literary study was to learn the great works of the masters, who happened to be white and male. They often tacitly depicted women and people of color as barbarians invading the sacred academy, dragging their own unsatisfactory texts behind them. The National Association of Scholars was founded in 1987 to challenge what it regarded as political correctness in the academy and commit to the great works of Western civilization (“History of NAS”). Feminist scholars’ passionate arguments for recovering (among other texts) sensation fiction novels, popular fiction, and sentimental poetry met indignant resistance, largely on the grounds of literary quality. Critics asserted that Braddon and Hemans had produced texts that were not great works, and why should people be forced to read inferior literature? They were equally hostile to reading texts simply because they were authored by queer, disabled, or non-Western subjects. They felt that efforts to diversify were driven by special-interest lobbying groups whose blinkered efforts would end up debasing the great holdings of Western culture. Thus conservatives used “literary quality” as a stick to beat back women and scholars from historically underrepresented groups as they tried to enter the critical conversation and enrich the field with a wider range of texts. One strategy was to enshrine a token figure who seemed enough like a canonical male writer to feel acceptable, like George Eliot or Henry James, but to read from an “objective” perspective, sedulously ignoring any gendered or queer content. 276

Feminism and the Canon

The conservatives were also battling the rise of high theory, which they regarded as both nonsensical and dangerously anarchic. Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Roland Barthes were revolutionizing the American academy at the same time, although not in the same ways, as the explicitly political recovery movements led by feminists and postcolonialists. (While Michel Foucault also entered the American academy in the 1980s, he initiated a different approach, a cultural studies/ historical tradition that felt much more compatible with political criticism.) Theorists were united in their desire to reform what they saw as moribund, blinkered literary-critical practices, but they did so very differently. Feminists practiced personal identification and passionate investment in history, whereas theorists used a specialized discourse full of French philosophical and psychoanalytic terms to analyze the play of language as it moved freely across national, political, chronological, and textual boundaries. Theory’s apolitical stance felt elitist and dangerous for feminists. Meanwhile, theorists often saw feminist work as old-fashioned and naïvely literal. To be a feminist in the 1990s meant fighting off two groups: hostile conservatives who insisted on sticking to the canon, and disdainful theorists who wanted to focus on signification. By 1995, English curricula had become so controversial that The New York Times covered Georgetown’s alteration to required courses for the English major as national news, evidence of a nationwide decline in standards (“Shakespeare”). Some departments split, the rebels forming breakaway programs while the traditionalists occupied the English department. As someone whose dissertation was about noncanonical women writers, I was warned to include some canonical figures so as to satisfy more traditional departments, and people were skeptical that authors of whom they had never heard could be worth reading. In the middle of a job interview in 1995, one faculty member leapt to his feet and cried, “I believe in the canon!” He spent the rest of the interview trying to convince me to focus on writers who truly deserved attention. (Needless to say, I did not get that job.) There were safe spaces, like the British Women Writers Association, founded by graduate students in 1991, but most of the time, practicing recovery feminism during the canon wars meant constant self-justification, explanation, and contestation. The reformers had strong analysis on their side. The most ambitious study, Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Contingencies of Value (1991), challenged the notion of “the timeless virtues of a fixed object” by asserting that a text might “perform certain desired/able functions quite well for some set of subjects,” and that those functions shifted over time, accommodating different subjects’ needs, according to an evolutionary logic (47). Gerald Graff ’s Beyond the Culture Wars (1993) framed the argument itself as the point; a vibrant, diverse battlefield of ideas could give students a rejuvenating intellectual experience. In Cultural Capital (1995), John Guillory argued that the canon wars were not a debate over democratic pluralism but rather a fight over who was allowed to assert that certain texts deserved cultural capital. Graff, Guillory, and Herrnstein Smith were the generals, but the canon wars were won by the foot soldiers. The vast mass of English professors and their students marched steadily toward inclusivity, for several reasons. One is that given the choice between working on a lot of things and working on very few, most people will prefer the former. Victorianists enjoyed expanding their work, not only into new authors but also into new areas: advertising, periodicals, culinary work, fashion, domestic interiors. Second, the growing work in African diaspora, Caribbean, Latinx, queer, and women’s studies (to pick just a few examples) became its own argument. When new scholarly editions of heretofore unknown works got published, it became possible for people to teach and write about them, and they accrued the kind of scholarly apparatus that marks a text as worthy. By the end of the twentieth century, most students did not perceive any meaningful difference between, say, George Eliot and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Consequently their teachers no longer needed to marshal special justifications for assigning them. By the end of the twentieth century, the literary quality argument against noncanonical texts was pretty much defunct. Most scholars recognized that “quality” was itself a highly suspect metric, 277

Talia Schaffer

measuring only those elements that appealed to one particular population that had been pretending to be a universal norm. In reality, different readers would find different literary components to be powerful. “Literary quality” looked both nebulous and politically suspect. Moreover, a more sophisticated register of the importance of texts had developed, one that articulated worthiness in terms of influence, popularity, and political and cultural interest, evading the quality issue altogether. The canon wars were over, and the reformers had won. Ironically, however, the feminist/noncanonical victory meant that its precepts could be taken for granted, its core assumptions remaining stubbornly unarticulated. Some of those assumptions were ahead of their time, but others presented problems that were never addressed and would end up subsequently destabilizing feminist practices.

2. Analysis: How We Read Recovery feminism was appealing because it fostered a powerful personal connection between the researcher and the subject. Recovery work in the 1970s treated authors as having much in common with the feminists who unearthed them. An empathetic interpretive dynamic was set up, one based on a sense that both the historical writers and the present-day feminists shared the same constructive, nurturing goal of bringing depth and importance to the representation of women’s lives. Jennifer L. Fleissner (46) Feminist criticism’s embodied, identificatory narrative allowed for anecdotes about bad food, aching backs, and sore throats, whereas the reader of high theory, who might also have felt cramped and headachy focusing on difficult language, was not supposed to commemorate this somatic experience. Emotionally, too, if the critic was a relatively obscure scholar (and she often was; in the early years, few feminists had major scholarly jobs), she could identify intensely with a brilliant woman of the past whose writing had not yet received the recognition it deserved. To rescue the deserving Victorian woman was, in some sense, to be enacting the dazzling narrative of salvation and appreciation one hoped for oneself. At the same time, feminist recovery was built on the critic’s personal passion for the writer. It was never just an academic exercise; it was a labor of love. We now have the critical tools to recognize the value of these emotional and somatic connections. Bringing the body into the ivory tower is part of what disability studies fights to do, and of course it is also a feminist act, part of demanding a workplace that recognizes childcare and maternity care needs (Ahmed 8–11) [on disability studies, see Stoddard Holmes’s chapter]. Thus, recovery feminism affirmed the female critic’s bodily and affective experiences and insisted that those elements formed part of the work, an advocacy that Ruddick and Felski continue, while Lynch has explained how the expectation emerged in the first place. Recovery feminism provided a satisfyingly identificatory mode of practicing criticism; it aligned the scholar with thrilling, morally grand quests; but perhaps most importantly, it produced impressive results. Feminist recovery work propelled hundreds of studies and generated whole new subfields (particularly sensation fiction and New Woman fiction), and in conjunction with the great opening up of the canon, it led to an exciting outpouring of work on material culture, periodicals, publishing, daily life, domesticity, and economic conditions. However, recovery feminism’s residual presence is causing problems today, because it feels outmoded next to queer theory and gender studies. Victorianist feminist criticism still retains essential or biological “women” as its subject, an untenable assumption now that gender is widely recognized as a constructed, intersectional category. The identificatory elements of recovery feminism, while personally satisfying, nonetheless perpetuated a kind of simplistic biographic ascription. It allowed a slippage from the work to the author. If one was feminist, suppressed, subversive, endangered, then perforce the other was too, and saving the work was tantamount to saving the person. But in a poststructuralist era, theorists 278

Feminism and the Canon

are accustomed to a far more sophisticated view of textuality than simply seeing it as an intentional product controlled by its author. Recovery feminism can (ironically) reinforce a conventionally gendered narrative. It often tacitly imagines a woman writer who was suppressed, and who is rescued by an ardent, energetic researcher bravely surmounting all obstacles. This savior complex affects many fields, including postcolonialism and disability studies. But as Brian Connolly remarks, the researcher should not be “some heroic individual recovering and resurrecting lost people, but rather a point through which a collective body of knowledge gets filtered into something both new and old.” The notion of the researcher as heroic is just as regressive a myth as the idea that Victorian women were “lost,” silenced or made mad or demonic by a world that refused to accommodate her, as so powerfully argued by Gilbert and Gubar and Auerbach. For 50 years feminist scholarship has started with the baseline assumption that Victorian women were victimized, yearned for freedom, and covertly rebelled, and that their writing reveals this historical trauma through publication history, reception history, and narratives themselves. That story has truth, but it is only one of many possible stories, some of which do not treat the text as the representative of the person quite so directly and do not assign the text/person such a conventional role. Tamara S. Wagner is correct when she points out that the complexities of real Victorian women get “chiefly ignored in ideologically driven appraisals that wish to create the nineteenth-century woman author as an inherently subversive, subaltern, proto-feminist figure” (6). Recent work is beginning to figure out how to address the many Victorian women who did not match this profile; for example, Wagner’s Antifeminism asks how to read anti-feminist writers, while Marcus’s Between Women and my Romance’s Rival encourage us to respect unfamiliar types of social relations among women. Another issue is that the historical drive of recovery exerts its own order. We know where to put that author whose novel was published in 1853. We also know what historical events are likely to have influenced it. We are the custodians of an inherently chronological tale, and we aim to fit a forgotten text into an empty space, sequentially: whom do we slot in between the death of George Eliot and the first publications of Virginia Woolf? who predated Jane Austen? This is not an inherently problematic way of organizing literary experience, but it is limiting, for if we are always trying to fill in gaps in a linear historical record, then we may not be noticing alternative modes of organization, nor the kinds of possibilities, texts, and feminist practices that an atemporal, nonlinear arrangement might support. Scholars of nineteenth-century literature have become increasingly interested in alternative temporalities, and feminist criticism needs to foster such intersectional mutual enrichment. Temporal exploration constitutes some of the most exciting areas in the field today, as explained by Jewusiak and practiced by feminist scholars including Damkjaer, Goodlad, and Michie. Another danger is that recovery can seem like the whole achievement, forestalling more complex readings or an awareness of larger markets. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins astutely comment that recovery work “reduce[s] the history of canon formation to a politics of representation” (522). This was a risk John Guillory warned about in 1993 when he argued that the canon debates were tacitly founded upon American political ideas, with authors whose demographic identities required representation in the syllabus. As Guillory pointed out, adding a few works to a syllabus merely changes the course, without alleviating issues in the rest of the world. The drive to bring back women’s writing is a powerful narrative, but its effects may be limited to students and other scholars. Its focus on personal stories can militate against readings that focus on other issues: genre, style, the complicated production and imbrication of cultural categories.

3. Future: New Ways to Read It is easy to critique recovery feminism for what it ignored, and it is necessary to be grateful to recovery feminism for what it achieved (Booth, “Feminism”). But is there an alternative mode of doing Victorianist feminist criticism that would not take feminist goals for granted while foregrounding 279

Talia Schaffer

what look like more cutting-edge fields? And is there a way we can learn from the short, intense convulsions of the canon wars? At the base of both movements is a new moment of material culture. We can no longer assume that what we are after are always fragile, disintegrating material texts. Contemporary gender theory has put a lot of pressure on the word “women” in “women’s writing,” but we also need to interrogate the second term, “writing.” Today we increasingly often experience texts as digital information characterized by omnipresent accessibility and a kind of perpetual presence [on digital humanities, see Bourrier’s chapter]. As scholars, we are accessing decontextualized, anonymously scanned or digitized texts that often bear no markers of their original state. This is particularly true of scholars with visual impairments, who rely on vocalized versions of texts, as well as those readers who voluntarily prefer to consume audiobooks to written texts (see Mounsey). The problems are obvious: a richly complex artifact can be reduced to a stripped-down current of information—and information that someone else, often a corporation, has decided is important (Fyfe). But the benefits are also obvious. Not only are texts far more available but their hierarchies get disrupted, for when a database calls up Jane Eyre and a temperance tract with equal facility and in identical formats, that powerfully suggests equivalent interest. Digitization makes all texts into data, and for a casual reader skimming information on a screen, no data looks more canonical than any other. Along with our new media access, we have become far more savvy about the material and economic conditions shaping readership. We know about camp reclamation, reading against the grain, symptomatic reading, and reader reception theory. We also recognize the importance of asking whether an author was able to participate in lucrative publishing networks, whether a publisher kept a book in print at the right time, and whether a biography appeared at the moment when it might interest a new generation (Jackson). It will not be possible to return to the naïve belief that a work of art could be timelessly, essentially great. Instead of literary quality, we tend to use two other metrics: popularity and pertinence (Algee-Hewitt et al.). John Sutherland has estimated there may have been 60,000 works of Victorian fiction, double if one counts tracts and short stories—to say nothing of drama or poetry, let alone the vast proliferation of periodicals (1). The popularity of a given text tells us a great deal about what Victorians wanted to read. But we are also drawn to those texts that reveal Victorian constructs of race and gender, define liberalism, generate scientific or environmental visions, problematize empire or illustrate industrialism. If traditional canonicity stressed a mythic timelessness, Victorianists today prize its opposite, the way in which a text is embedded in a highly particular historical nexus. Rather than a narrative of transcendent continuity, we often look for alterity, a different mode of thought. Today Victorianists have virtually no limits on what we can read, and that lifting of canonical policing has made new fields possible: ecocriticism, science studies, studies of religions and spiritualities, periodical studies, studies of imperial culture, travel narratives, material culture, not to mention expanding previous fields like women’s writing and children’s literature, as this volume illustrates. Yet elements of canon-wars discourse survive today, although directed at how we read rather than what we read. In the twenty-first century, Victorianists argue over surface reading, symptomatic reading, distant reading, historicist reading, and affective reading (see Felski; Kucich; Best and Marcus; Ruddick). Those 1990s assumptions resurface most obviously in articles attacking digital humanities. The authors of these articles regard literary study as a zero-sum game where adding new elements displaces others; idealize older methods as disinterested truth; resent newcomers’ institutional support and funding (Brennan, Allington et al.). Digital humanists are depicted as rich STEM-funded invaders storming the gates with their inhumane data processing, short-circuiting the precious feelings of literature. The reformers, meanwhile, keep explaining that they are trying to expand possibilities. The canon wars are over and we can read whatever we want. But now we are battling over how to read, and doing it through the same mischaracterizations. We need to become conscious of these assumptions if we hope to move out of the formulations into which they force us. 280

Feminism and the Canon

Similarly, if we want to move ahead with a new form of Victorianist feminist criticism, we need to think beyond recovery work and try to imagine a theory that fits the twenty-first century. Can we imagine a feminist criticism that would give us something that we do not get from queer, trans, and post-gender theories, for example? A twenty-first-century Victorianist feminist criticism should not just accommodate but actively capitalize on gender fluidity, and it should aim for feminist goals that benefit everyone regardless of their relation to female identity. It would contain multitudes: the many cultural, historical, and material worlds that Victorians ascribed to the female sphere and the global realities of an empire. A twenty-first-century Victorianist feminist criticism should capitalize on the enormous range of digital technologies and texts we can access today. It would allow for “sideways” movement (to use Linda K. Hughes’s term), and varied temporalities and organizations, instead of a linear historiography. It should prioritize formal innovation in research methods and intersectional forms, as Jasbir Puar does. Feminism in the digital age might not work by identifying the content of a found physical document but by interrogating our own process of selecting and juxtaposing them, as Marianne Hirsch and Sara Ahmed do in their different attempts to define a feminist archive (Ahmed 15–16). Recent work on Victorianist feminist criticism by Jill Ehnenn and Alison Booth has highlighted how innovative feminism might creatively adapt queer theory, critical guidelines, and digital research methods. My sense is that “feminism” ought to name our method, not our objects. This means we should specifically interrogate nineteenth-century disrespect for female-associated pursuits (domesticity, caregiving, decoration, sentiment, romance, family) and identify demeaning forms of engagement with female subjects (objectification, condescension, exclusion). We should also tease out the textual modes of resistance to those assumptions. Once we note patterns of belief and language that were intimately connected to the lower status of women, we can see them whenever they crop up, just as awareness of racialized language can help us identify its significance whenever it appears. In so doing, we must constantly articulate the intersectional issues of global empire, racial identification, class, disability, and sexuality as they complicate gender. Of course, realistically, those feminized modes will get invoked most often to subordinate female characters and women writers. In that respect feminist criticism will tend to focus on female figures, just as critical race theory will tend to focus on people of color (however “female” and “people of color” get defined). But that target is incidental, not determinative, and keeping that in mind will help us assert a feminist agenda when analyzing characters of any gender. In other words, being about a female is not prima facie enough to make it feminist criticism. It is feminist criticism if we teach readers to notice feminized elements, resist their automatic devaluation, and respect the strategies with which writers co-opted, revised, resisted, and creatively embraced them. If this is a big goal, so be it: we need a mode that is proportionate to the vastness of the topic to which it proposes to do justice. We need a feminism that is a strategy for reading, not a feminism that is a fantasy of recovery. In the aftermath of the canon wars, let us move from arguing over what to read, to demonstrating how best to read it. My hope is that the readers of this chapter will be some of the ones to do it.

Note 1 I am grateful to VLC for allowing me to republish here material from “Canon,” VLC, vol. 46, nos. 3–4 (Fall/ Winter 2018), pp. 594–97; and “Victorian Feminist Criticism: Recovery Work and the Care Community,” VLC, vol. 47, no. 1, Spring 2019, pp. 63–91.

Key Critical Works Nancy Armstrong. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Jill Ehnenn. “From ‘We Other Victorians’ to ‘Pussy Grabs Back’: Thinking Gender, Thinking Sex, and Feminist Methodological Futures in Victorian Studies Today.”

281

Talia Schaffer Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. John Guillory. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Barbara Herrnstein Smith. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Sharon Marcus. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Talia Schaffer. Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. ———. “The Epistemology of the Closet.” Elaine Showalter. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Duke UP, 2017. Algee-Hewitt, Mark, et al. “Pamphlet 11, Canon/archive.” Stanford Literary Lab, January 2016. https://litlab. stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet11.pdf. Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. Routledge, 2000. Allington, Daniel, et al. “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities.” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 1, 2016. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neoliberal-tools-archivespolitical-history-digital-humanities/. Ardis, Ann. New Women, New Novels. Rutgers UP, 1990. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford UP, 1987. Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Harvard UP, 1982. Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations, vol. 108, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1–21. Booth, Alison. “Feminism.” VLC, vol. 46, nos. 3–4, Fall/Winter 2018, pp. 691–96. ———. “Particular Webs: Middlemarch, Typologies, and Digital Studies of Women’s Lives.” VLC, vol. 47, no. 1, Spring 2019, pp. 5–34. Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. U of California P, 1988. Brennan, Timothy. “The Digital-Humanities Bust.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 October 2017. wwwchronicle-com.ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/article/The-Digital-Humanities-Bust/241424. Connolly, Brian. “The Death of the Author: Historians and Citation.” Public Seminar. www.publicseminar. org/2018/05/the-death-of-the-author/. Accessed 28 May 2018. Damkjaer, Maria. Time, Domesticity, and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave, 2016. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. U Minnesota P, 1983. Ehnenn, Jill. “From ‘We Other Victorians’ to ‘Pussy Grabs Back’: Thinking Gender, Thinking Sex, and Feminist Methodological Futures in Victorian Studies Today.” VLC, vol. 47, no. 1, 2019, pp. 35–62. Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. U of Chicago P, 2016. Fleissner, Jennifer L. “Is Feminism a Historicism?” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 21, no. 1, Spring 2002, pp. 45–66. Fyfe, Paul. “An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers.” VPR, vol. 49, no. 4, Winter 2016, pp. 546–77. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale UP, 1979. Goodlad, Lauren M. E. “Bigger Love.” New Literary History, vol. 48, no. 4, Autumn 2017, pp. 701–27. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. U of Chicago P, 1993. Herrnstein Smith, Barbara. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Harvard UP, 1988. Hirsch, Marianne. “Feminist Archives of Possibility.” Differences, vol. 29, no. 1, May 2018, pp. 173–88. https:// doi-org.ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/10.1215/10407391-6681696. “History of NAS.” National Association of Scholars. www.nas.org/about/history. Hughes, Linda K. “SIDEWAYS!: Navigating the Material(ity) of Print Culture.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 47, no. 1, Spring 2014, pp. 1–30. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter, 1977, Cornell UP, 1985. Jackson, Heather. Those Who Write for Immortality: Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame. Yale UP, 2015. Jackson, Virginia, and Yopie Prins. “Lyrical Studies.” VLC, vol. 27, no. 2, 1999, pp. 521–30. Jewusiak, Jacob. “Temporality.” VLC, vol. 46, nos. 3–4, Fall/Winter 2018, pp. 909–13. Keen, Suzanne. Romances of the Archives in Contemporary British Fiction. U Toronto P, 2001. Kristeva, Julia. “Word, Dialogue, and Novel.” The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi, Columbia UP, 1986, pp. 35–61.

282

Feminism and the Canon Kucich, John. “The Unfinished Historicist Project: In Praise of Suspicion.” Victoriographies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2011, pp. 58–78. Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition. 1948. New York UP, 1963. Lynch, Deidre Shauna. Loving Literature. U of Chicago P, 2014. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton UP, 2007. Michie, Helena. “Hard Times, Global Times: Simultaneity in Anthony Trollope and Elizabeth Gaskell.” SEL, vol. 56, no. 3, Summer 2016, pp. 605–26. Mitchell, Sally. The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class, and Women’s Reading 1835–1880. Bowling Green UP, 1981. Mitton, G. E. Jane Austen and Her Times. Methuen, 1905. Mounsey, Chris. “Henry Crawford as Master Betty: Jane Austen on the ‘Disabling’ of Shakespeare.” EighteenthCentury Fiction, vol. 30, no. 2, Winter 2017–18, pp. 265–86. Parker, Pamela Corpron and Cindy LaCom. “History.” The British Women Writers Association. Excerpted from the introduction to Nineteenth-Century Contexts, vol. 19, 1996. https://britishwomenwriters.org/. Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. U Chicago P, 1988. Poster, Carol. “Oxidation Is a Feminist Issue: Acidity, Canonicity, and Popular Victorian Female Authors.” College English, vol. 58, no. 3, 1996, pp. 237–306. Puar, Jasbir K. “‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory.” Philosophia, vol. 2, no. 1, 2012, pp. 49–66. Pykett, Lyn. The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. Routledge, 1992. Ruddick, Lisa. “When Nothing Is Cool.” The Point, 2015. https://thepointmag.com/2015/criticism/ when-nothing-is-cool. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia UP, 1985. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Epistemology of the Closet. U of California P, 1990. Schaffer, Talia. Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction. Oxford UP, 2016. “Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Get Demoted at Georgetown.” The New York Times, 20 December 1995. www. nytimes.com/1995/12/20/us/shakespeare-milton-chaucer-get-demoted-at-georgetown.html. Showalter, Elaine. “Introduction: Twenty Years On: A Literature of Their Own Revisited.” A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. 1977. Princeton UP, 1999, pp. xi–xxxiii. ———. A Literature of One’s Own: British Women Writers from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton UP, 1977. Sutherland, John. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Literature. Stanford UP, 1990. Wagner, Tamara S. “Introduction: Narratives of Victorian Antifeminism.” Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel, edited by Tamara S. Wagner, Cambria, 2009, pp. 1–18.

283

25 GENDER AND SEXUALITY Duc Dau

In E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey (2012), the two main characters, Anastasia and Christian, allude several times to characters from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). Notably, the modernday lovers remark on the love triangle between the virginal Tess with the devilish Alec and the idealistic Angel. How did a Victorian novel, controversial in its day for its frank sexual content, become a key part in the best-selling erotic novel of all time? This question is especially pertinent given that, since the early twentieth century, the notion has persisted in the popular imagination that the Victorian period was one of sexual silence and prudery. As a result, “Victorian” has long signified for many everything that is oppositional to sexual liberation. This is despite the fact that scholars such as Deborah Lutz (Pleasure Bound) and Ellen Bayuk Rosenman (Unauthorized Pleasures) have explored a myriad of erotic and tactile pleasures—not necessarily genitally focused—that the Victorians experienced and enjoyed. Moreover, William A. Cohen argues that public scandal, often sex scandal, structures the plot of the realist Victorian novels and that a number of alternatives to the marriage plot can appear “at the center of orthodox cultural formations, not just at the margins” (21). Could it be that the appearance of Fifty Shades of Grey marks a gradual change in public assumptions regarding the Victorians? The thought is given credence in the emergence of neo-Victorian erotica such as Jane Eyre Laid Bare, which depicts the Victorians freely enjoying, among other things, bondage, same-sex intimacy, and sex on horseback. This chapter is divided into four sections. The key purpose of the first section is to briefly introduce readers to theories of sexuality from the nineteenth century to the advent of queer theory. In the second section, I look at studies on masculinities from the 1980s onwards, while in the third section I focus on work devoted to women’s same-sex relationships. In the conclusion, I reflect on the future of Victorian gender and sexuality studies.

1. Constructing Sexuality Most literary critics have by and large accepted Michel Foucault’s assertion that our contemporary preoccupation with sex originates with the Victorians. The notion of Victorian repression and evasion is largely untrue, and the idea falls under what Foucault in Part Two of The History of Sexuality calls the “repressive hypothesis.” This concept of repression is not to be confused with John Kucich’s subtle analysis of the Victorians’ eroticization of inwardness, restraint, and secrecy. Just as sexual intimacy, desire, and, by extension, notions of gender and gender relations are explicitly rendered or implied in Hardy’s novels, they were also present in other types of Victorian discourses ranging from the legal to the religious, medical, racial, imperial, economic, literary, erotic, and of course, 284

Gender and Sexuality

pornographic. Indeed, with the dawning of sexual modernity, the Victorian period is now considered crucial in the history of sexuality. The word “sexuality” emerged early in the nineteenth century to mean the quality of being sexual, that is, of relating to being masculine or feminine (See Weeks, What is). Sexology, or the science of sexuality and desire, came into its own in the final decades of the nineteenth century and aimed to uncover and analyze the mysteries of the human condition through the laws of erotic life. Sexologists such as Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld, Karl-Maria Kertbeny, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Karl Ulrichs developed terms such as homosexuality, bisexuality, and heterosexuality, which are now widely used to locate sexual categorization under that of identity and attraction. Other terms such as fetishism, bestiality, sadism, and masochism were also developed before the end of the century. Given that the eighteenth-century forebears to the nineteenth-century sexologists were theorists of masturbation, it is unsurprising that early sexology tended toward diagnosing and analyzing, though not necessarily curing, sexual variations and so-called perversions such as homosexuality. As a result, queer theory is deeply invested in the nineteenth century. The major change from the earlier theories of masturbation to the later study of sexology saw the shift in the assumption of immoral acts—of episodic deviations from the ethical norm—to an innate, psychiatric sexual instinct. The histories of sexuality and gender throughout much of the twentieth century were likely to have been shaped by scientific paradigms. Steven Marcus’s groundbreaking The Other Victorians, published in 1966, fueled the growing interest in these histories. But, as influential sociological historian Jeffrey Weeks has observed, Marcus’s work is itself clearly rooted in the sexological tradition (What is 31). Despite Marcus’s inclination for psychoanalyzing his subjects, his study makes extensive use of the Kinsey Institute’s archives and has been called “the single most influential account of sexuality in Victorian Britain before the work of Foucault” (Miller and Adams 2). Foucault, however, challenged the repressive hypothesis that saturates much of Marcus’s account of Victorian sexuality; indeed, Part One of the first volume of The History of Sexuality is titled, “We ‘other Victorians’.” Beginning in the 1970s, a number of emerging literary critics, sociologists, social anthropologists, and historians began to view sexuality as a fundamentally social and thus historical structure. In so doing, they challenged the assumption that the erotic is a natural phenomenon to which society reacts. As Weeks puts it, what is conventionally seen as a biological truth is in fact shaped by cultural forces into “a complex unity of plural and diverse identities, subjectivities, beliefs, behavior, ideologies and erotic practices” (What is 11). In looking at sexuality and gender through a historical lens, we can observe that Victorian ideas and attitudes did not develop ex nihilo. As James Eli Adams observes, several key Victorian ideologies regarding sexual matters were inherited from their predecessors (“Victorian,” 126–28). Mary Poovey has demonstrated that “the representation of biological sexuality, the definition of sexual difference, and the social organization of sexual relations are social, not natural phenomena,” meaning, gender and sexual ideologies are not static but continually open to revision and contestation (2–3). While Poovey’s study centers on the ideological work of gender in 1850s middle-class Britain, Joseph Bristow notes that her critical model can also shed light on how gender and sexualities were organized and constructed in later decades. In addition to analyses focusing on the social construction of sexuality, scholars have engaged in the study of its interaction with social and interpersonal power structures. In asking, “what is a history of sexuality actually a history of?” Weeks explains that the history of sexuality is “inextricably intertwined with the structures of power” (What is 3). His 1985 study, Sexuality and its Discontents, discusses power at some length, though Weeks considers Foucault’s idea of biopower to be a limited way of addressing this issue in the context of sexuality. Weeks in What is the History of Sexuality? acknowledges the need to explore the history in relation to issues of gender (cisgender, femininity, intersex, masculinity, transgender, and so on), identities and related elements (age, class, geographies, locations, race, and religion), and the language of emotions (the languages that give sense to, and disciplines, inchoate passions and a range of associated emotions) (3–4). 285

Duc Dau

Similarly, studies of Victorian sexuality have turned to the analysis of power structures in terms of race, gender, and class. In Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock maintains that these three categories are not distinct realms of experience, for they come into existence in and through relation to each other. In recent decades, scholars have brought to light the issue of sexuality and racial otherness in canonical Victorian novels. A prime example is the troubling depiction of Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). In a highly-cited essay from 1985, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak revisits Brontë’s “cult text of feminism” (244) to critically evaluate its colonialist depiction of Bertha as monstrous and bestial other. For Spivak, the tendency among Anglo-American feminist critics to privilege the firstperson narrative of the titular character overlooks the political significance of Rochester’s first wife, Bertha Mason, a Creole woman reduced to a subhuman in the novel’s Gothic subplot. J. Halberstam likewise explores the depiction of the racial other in another canonical novel, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Addressing the extent and nature of anti-Semitic representation in the novel, Halberstam argues that the representation of the vampire tells us nothing about Jews but everything about anti-Semitic discourse, which seems able to transform all threat into the threat embodied by the Jew. The monster Jew produced by nineteenth-century anti-Semitism represents fears about race, class, gender, sexuality, and empire—this figure is indeed Gothicized or transformed into an all-purpose monster. (92) Dracula resembles the Jew of anti-Semitic discourse through his appearance, relation to money, parasitism, degeneracy, lack of national allegiance, and effeminacy. He is an assemblage of the constructions of race, femininity, and sexuality. As Gothic monster, he “transform[s] the fragments of otherness into one body” (92). These and similar studies demonstrate the permeable boundaries between fictional discourses of gender and sexuality and that of institutional and political power [on race, see Tucker’s chapter; on the Gothic, see Luckhurst’s]. Scholars have observed that the racialized body was not the only body that was considered sexually other. Victorian bodies came under varying degrees and kinds of legal and medical regulation, with some being more closely monitored than others. Prostitutes were predominantly, though not exclusively, working class and female, thus leaving them open to careful scrutiny. Adams observes that prostitution was for many women a means of supplementing or replacing the dismal wages and working conditions of domestic service or piece work (“Victorian” 132). This was an economic factor obscured by Victorian ideologies of femininity. Lynda Nead’s Myths of Sexuality (1988) examines two types of Victorian femininity: respectable femininity and deviant femininity (notably, the adulterer and prostitute). Nead argues that, in general terms, female sexuality was organized around the dichotomy of the virgin/whore, the respectable and the fallen. According to Deborah Epstein Nord, in David Copperfield (1850) Charles Dickens draws a direct link between the prostitute Martha, disease, and death (9), thus implying that the fallen woman offers morally and physically tainted sex. In addition to Nead and Nord, scholars engaging with the regulation of prostitution include Michael Mason and co-authors Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, as well as Judith Walkowitz with City of Dreadful Delight and Prostitution and Victorian Society. Prostitution would precipitate the single most controversial state intervention of the time: the series of Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1860s. Under the Acts, women suspected of prostitution could be subject to forced medical examination for sexually transmissible infections along with detention without trial for up to three, and later six, months. Walkowitz holds that the Contagious Diseases Acts reflects “a new enthusiasm for state intervention into the lives of the unrespectable poor” (Prostitution 3), thereby highlighting the inequities associated with gender and class hierarchies [on class, see Betensky’s chapter; on feminism, see Schaffer’s]. Not surprisingly, perhaps no field of scholarship has impacted sexuality studies more than gender studies, which emerged from feminist and gay and lesbian studies. The 1970s saw an increased focus 286

Gender and Sexuality

on research in feminist studies, which produced Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s 1979 classic, The Madwoman in the Attic, and opened up the field of literary studies to include long-neglected works by female authors. Gay and lesbian studies came to prominence in the early 1970s, and had deep roots in the activism of the gay liberation movement, which sought equal rights for, and an end to discrimination against, gays and lesbians. American essayist and poet Adrienne Rich brought together the aims of feminism and lesbian activism in her major work, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” One of the aims of Rich’s 1980 essay was to challenge the erasure of lesbian existence from feminist scholarship. Rich coined the term “lesbian continuum” to embrace the many aspects of women’s bonds, including “a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of women-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman” (51). Rich’s notion of the lesbian continuum would influence, among others, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and her pioneering theory of homosociality in Between Men (1985). Sedgwick’s study of the intersection between gender and sexuality in the nineteenth century was among the first to engage in what was then a new theoretical approach to literature, queer studies. It is queer theory’s rejection of binaristic identity categories that forms the key difference between queer and lesbian and gay studies. While Sedgwick’s 1990 study Epistemology of the Closet does not use the word “queer,” she acknowledges in a preface to an updated 2008 edition that her work is grounded in queer theory because of its resistance to treating homo/heterosexual categorization—still so very volatile an act—as a done deal, a transparently empirical fact about any person. . . . For the dividing up of all sexual acts— indeed all persons—under the “opposite” categories of “homo” and “hetero” is not a natural given but a historical process, still incomplete today and ultimately impossible but characterized by potent contradictions and explosive effects. (xvi) In keeping with the deconstructive nature of queer theory, David M. Halperin’s definition of “queer” extends it beyond the categories of sexuality: “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers” (62; emphasis original). Nonetheless, given its origins in gay and lesbian studies, queer theory (and queer studies) is still largely concerned with what is frequently articulated as sexually or romantically non-normative. It has been particularly invested in same-sex attraction and intimacy, including to some extent bisexuality and fluidity. Certainly, homosexuality and lesbianism have long been central to the study of sexuality; as historian Laura Doan has remarked, the history of homosexuality is the field’s “gravitational center” (13). Indeed, according to my manual calculations, from 2014 to 2018, at least half of the articles published in the discipline-defining Journal of the History of Sexuality were on homosexuality, with a few on transgender topics, while only one article addressed heterosexuality directly.

2. Men and Sexuality Much of the Victorian world was what we would call homosocial, a word now in common use as a result of Sedgwick’s Between Men. Sedgwick developed the methodologies of queer theory into an analysis of masculinity and diverse systems of male-male relationality. She addresses a continuum that links the homosocial and the homosexual through what she terms male homosocial desire: male bonds in relationships of power such as all-male work spaces, boarding schools, universities, and gentlemen’s clubs. This homosociality is often accompanied by a homophobia built into the obligatory heterosexuality of male-dominated kinship systems aimed at maintaining male privilege. While Sedgwick’s 287

Duc Dau

concept has been influential, Andrew Dowling argues that, just as the proliferation of sexual identities is not in itself liberating, the topic of masculinity, along with homosociality, is not bound by the sole reality of homophobia (6). A number of studies about Victorian masculinity do not necessarily emphasize homosociality, but they do focus on institutions of male domination such as the workplace (see Danahay). Scholars draw on the various forms of homosociality, from Linda Dowling’s study of Hellenism and homosexuality at Oxford to Karen Bourrier’s publication on disability and masculinity in the mid-Victorian novel. Tosh notes in his analysis of the late-Victorian male that, as a social identity, masculinity was constructed in three arenas: home, work, and all-male spaces. He argues that the middle years of the Victorian period saw an unprecedented commitment by middle-class men to domesticity, which was in conflict with male homosociality. However, the latter half of the Victorian period saw an unsettling of domestic norms, disillusionment with domesticity, and an increasing male preference for marrying later in life or, even, for bachelorhood. The “flight from domesticity” (to use the title of Chapter Eight of Tosh’s book, A Man’s Place) helped consolidate homosocial structures, as men sought out male-only spaces in the empire or in clubs and societies that, like their elite public schools, were detached from the domestic sphere and maternal influence [on domesticity, see Gregory’s chapter]. Barbara Black’s fascinating literary-cultural study of leisure and social capital in the form of club culture—often called “Clubland”—describes how these homosocial places afforded opportunities for middle-class men to self-display as gentlemen and build a corporate identity of Englishness. In this light, clubs became extensions of public-school culture into adulthood and, likewise, extensions of the “gentlemen’s” rooms within the ideal bourgeois home—rooms that were considered retreats from family matters. At the turn of the twentieth century, London, the heart of Clubland, boasted around 200 gentlemen’s clubs, with half of these enclaves having been founded in the last 30 years of the century. Black also reminds us that England’s ultimate gentlemen’s club was the Houses of Parliament. Scholars have not only interrogated male spaces, but also male bodies. After Sedgwick, Richard Dellamora was among the first to discuss the cultural construction of masculinities in relation to male-male desire. James Eli Adams’s study of masculinity and sexuality, Dandies and Desert Saints, is compulsory reading for any student of the field. Influenced by Judith Butler and Foucault, Adams explores the middle-class self-fashioning of masculinity as self-discipline and “virtuoso asceticism” (2). Eschewing traditional approaches to masculinity primarily in terms of patriarchy or a medicojuridical model of regulation, Adams argues for unexpected points of continuity and contact between normative and transgressive masculinities, and between the following icons of middle-class masculinity: dandy, gentleman, priest, prophet, and soldier. In taking up the topic of muscular Christianity, discussed in great depth by Norman Vance ten years earlier and in an edited collection by Donald E. Hall, Adams addresses its ideal, arguing that, while Charles Kingsley’s concept was formulated largely in opposition to John Henry Newman’s ascetic discipline, Kingsley’s muscular ideal of manhood was in fact structured by the very asceticism he attacked. At about the same time as Adams, Herbert Sussman published a study on Victorian masculinities that likewise emphasizes the importance of discipline and “controlled energy” in Victorian masculinity (13), of which the disciplining of sexuality is simply one aspect. Seeking to counter a monolithic view of Victorian masculinity, Sussman stresses the multiplicity and plurality of male gender formations. A more recent study like Andrew Dowling’s Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature extends the work of Adams and Sussman by looking at deviations from the ideal of male discipline. Noting both the extent to which Victorian men wore black “as never before” and the Victorians’ fondness for painting armored knights, he argues that “while Victorian manliness was defined by discipline, these definitions always contained within them the suggestion of deviance” (14, 13; for more on deviance, see the Introduction to Bauer). I am reminded of Charles Dickens’s reverence for the police force and detectives who, to his mind, were the new paragons of masculinity. These men helped keep at bay the criminal elements of the East End, or deviance externalized. Dickens’s 288

Gender and Sexuality

unsigned piece, “On Duty with Inspector Field,” from the June 14, 1851, edition of Household Words, portrays Inspector Field and his men as strong, phallic men, in stark contrast to the slippery thieves they keep under control. Literary critics this century have turned to the investigation of less phallocentric ways of being men and of gentler forms of masculinities, particularly in relation to family dynamics and affect. Catherine Robson has charted middle-class masculinity’s surprising connection to childhood, and in particular girlhood. Aiming to answer the question of why Victorian men of letters were invested in the figure of the girl, she argues that girlhood was part of the subjectivity of both males and females, one that males had to shed in order to become men. Through a study of affect and fatherhood from the fathers’ perspective, Valerie Sanders dismantles the stereotypical image of the cold and bullying Victorian father. In The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood, she contends that, while there is a wealth of memoirs published by traumatized children, relatively little has been written from the fathers’ position. This is despite the fact that the inner lives of fathers can be gauged from examples of voluminous correspondence: letters to their children or to friends who were also fathers, comparing notes on the stages of their children’s progress, and expressing their feelings about fatherhood in an often-unguarded manner [on children’s literature, see Straley’s chapter]. Holly Furneaux associates mid-Victorian masculinity with warmth and sensitivity in her two studies, Queer Dickens and Military Men of Feeling. What strikes me about the first work is Furneaux’s partiality to the words “tender” and “tenderness,” which to me is a welcome shift in masculinities and queer studies. Though ostensibly about Dickens, the book is also an insightful study of a broad range of erotic, emotional, and tactile bonds between men and of lives beyond the life-scripts of marriage and reproduction. In her second work, she extends her interest in masculinities, tenderness, emotions, tactility, and families to the topic of military masculinities during the Crimean War. The Crimean War was pivotal in shaping British attitudes toward military masculinity, and Furneaux considers how the military man of feeling contributes to the rethinking of gender roles, class, and military hierarchy. Turning to the end of the century, Tara MacDonald focuses on the late-Victorian counterpart to the New Woman, the New Man, whom she explores through a range of experimental “models of gentle, healing and compassionate masculinity” (The New Man 18). While looking at instances of the failure of the utopian model, she also maintains that the model signaled a progressive masculinity, a political ally to the New Woman, and one that offered an alternative to models of dangerous or aggressive men. Literary scholars and historians have explored Victorian male homosexuality through the lens of masculinity, its fragility, and (fears of) effeminacy. Oscar Wilde is by far the most prominent figure in such studies. Dennis Denisoff observes that Wilde fashioned himself “as both aestheticism’s main promoter and its most popular persona,” and even maintained the image of the dandy-aesthete during his 1895 trials for gross indecency (Aestheticism 82, 87). Wilde’s significance among scholars is largely a result of these trials, in a decade that could be considered a turning point in the history of sexual modernity. Adapting Foucault’s assertion that Victorian medical discourse created the homosexual as a “species” (43), Ed Cohen argues that, by the time of his conviction, not only had Wilde been confirmed as the sexual deviant for the late nineteenth century, but he had become the paradigmatic example for an emerging public definition of a new “type” of male sexual actor: “the homosexual.” (1–2; emphasis in original) Indeed, Wilde is so central that historian Charles Upchurch’s study of sex between men from 1820 to 1870, which thereby excludes extensive discussion of Wilde, includes his name in the title: Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform. Studies that do not focus solely on Wilde also feature his name in their clever titles, including Alan Sinfield’s The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment, and Morris B. Kaplan’s Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love and Scandal in Wilde Times. 289

Duc Dau

A camp aesthete and a brilliant wit, he became, or so it seemed, a martyr to the limits of Victorian tolerance of male homosexual contact [on aestheticism and decadence, see Evangelista’s chapter]. In his exploration of Wilde and masculinity, historian Sean Brady rejects the assertion by “historians of the Weeks/Foucault tradition” (40) that homosexual identity was constructed by a medicojuridical classification of the “species” of abnormal male in the nineteenth century. In evaluating the Home Office’s response to Wilde’s petition for clemency a year after his conviction, Brady writes that, to the Home Office, Wilde “was simply a common criminal who, by his sexual actions, had cast himself outside society” (41). In reading masculinity as a social status, Brady argues that a man demonstrated masculinity by being married and by his ability to support his spouse. Moreover, masculinity as a social status required full movement between the home, the workplace, and all-male spaces, so that the bachelor (whether or not he was engaged in same-sex practices) threatened the cultural concept of masculinity. Through his trial, Wilde lost his marriage, family, and ability to move freely in society, thereby forfeiting his masculine social status. In Effeminate England, Joseph Bristow declares Wilde to be the most notorious victim of the Labouchère Amendment of 1885, which put a complete ban on acts of “gross indecency” between men. After Wilde’s trials, effeminacy became the main stigma attached to homosexuality in the eyes of English society, occurring at the same time when ideas of femininity were being called into question by the emergence of the New Woman and “an increasingly self-conscious style of lesbian writing” (8). Both Brady and Bristow have provided valuable and fascinating insights into the multifaceted nature of Victorian masculinity and the ways that it could be undermined, whether intentionally or otherwise [on the New Woman, see Youngkin’s chapter].

3. Women and Sexuality Given that the majority of the research on femininity, feminine ideals, and marriage has been conducted through a heterosexual framework, this section will focus on key studies devoted to relationships between women. There has been considerably less attention devoted to women’s and queer studies, compared to male homosociality, homosexuality, and masculinities. Could it be that the lack of legal recognition of same-sex intimacy between women has resulted in fewer written sources about female relationships? And yet much more remains to be discovered about Victorian experiences of female relationships, of being queer and female, and about societal (or at least writers’) attitudes toward queer women, especially if we look beyond the realist novel and Christina Rossetti’s often-discussed “Goblin Market.” For instance, Black’s epilogue to her aforementioned study of club culture explores the rise of women’s clubs at the close of the century, which proved invaluable to the suffrage movement and cross-class networks. Such clubs also offered places where women could find a quiet space, private bathrooms, and bedrooms. Additional research about women’s clubs in literary culture, and of other homosocial spaces such as women’s cycling clubs, would offer fresh insights into the changing role of women and likely provide insight into cross-class and queer contact between women. Much of the scholarship about relationships between women revolves around middle-class friendship, female marriage, and nebulous forms of affect and intimacy. Lillian Faderman’s landmark study, Surpassing the Love of Men, first published in 1981, charts romantic friendships between women from the sixteenth century onwards. She believes that such friendships were socially acceptable if they were not sexual. Indeed, it is her contention that the vast majority of romantic friendships were not sexual because, prior to the twentieth century, women apparently internalized the idea of themselves having little sexual passion. Faderman believes that romantic friendships were only widely discouraged when theories of sexology became common knowledge and provided a weapon against same-sex love. In contrast, Martha Vicinus’s Intimate Friends turns to instances of erotic and sexual relationships between women, sometimes using the words “lesbian” and “same-sex sexuality” to highlight the sexual nature of its subject matter. Using case studies of educated women, Vicinus shows that women configured their love in terms of husband-wife and mother-daughter couples (and by every other kin relation, 290

Gender and Sexuality

though rarely father), thereby linking their relationships to psychologically and socially important ties. Both Faderman and Vicinus approach desire between women as something marginal, non-normative, and oppositional to heterosexuality, whereas Carolyn Oulton more recently focuses her research on romantic friendship as a primarily heterosexual ideal accessible to males and females, thereby taking her discussion largely beyond the purview of gay and lesbian or queer studies. One of her arguments is that, at least before the 1890s and the influence of sexology, romantic friendship was considered a socially sanctioned rehearsal for marriage. In her 2007 study, Between Women, Sharon Marcus adopts a capacious approach to relationships between Victorian women, arguing for their social centrality rather than their peripherality. Her paradigm-shifting study of women’s relationships expands our understanding of Victorian friendship, erotic desire, and marriage. Drawing on Sedgwick’s Between Men, Marcus takes seriously Sedgwick’s precept that, to understand any particular aspect of gender and sexuality, we must draw equally on feminist and queer theories and histories. Between Women offers a history of sexuality and gender that does not focus its gaze on power differences, oppositions between polarized genders and antithetical sexualities, homophobia, or the male traffic in women. Instead, Marcus maintains that a broad range of relationships between women formed an essential rather than an outlawed or a hidden element of Victorian gender and sexuality. In moving beyond the heterosexual/homosexual binary, she is able to explore the important but ignored friendships between women in the marriage plot; female marriages as a variation on, rather than a challenge to, the married couple; the eroticized bonds between mothers and daughters; and how women who were not what we might call lesbians could still eagerly consume images of desirable femininity. Jill R. Ehnenn’s Women’s Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture returns to the notion of the transgressive in terms of the literary work of four female couples, including the auntniece couple, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who lived and wrote together under the name of Michael Field. Seeing her own sexual and political identities prefigured in these queer collaborators, Ehnenn delves into the multiple ways by which the writers “come together” (4–6) to articulate their personal and political commitments. Ehnenn revels in the perceived pleasures, agency, and utopian qualities of collaboration. She is critical, however, of the term “romantic friends” for its tendency to obscure lesbian sexuality, and instead favors historian John Boswell’s (and, following him, Ruth Vanita’s) term “homoerotically inclined” over “homosexual” or “gay” to be the most useful for a period when such terms were not widely used, if at all. Nonetheless, she uses the word “lesbian” to indicate “same-sexed identity-based bonding within the category of woman as a critique of compulsory homosexuality” (15). Though not comparable in iconic status to Oscar Wilde, Michael Field has become a key figure in the study of female collaboration and relationships—a result of Bradley’s and Cooper’s fascinating history, including their devotion to their dog Whym Chow, their friendships with cultural luminaries, the extensive nature of their oeuvre, and their volumes of journals and correspondence, largely unpublished. The study of Michael Field crosses over into established and emerging areas of research, including gender and sexuality, classical and biblical reception, visual culture, religious culture, family studies, and interspecies relationships. Ruth Vanita, Yopie Prins, and Frederick S. Roden were among the first to publish major studies that incorporated explorations of Michael Field’s work. Marion Thain’s book devoted solely to Michael Field, Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson’s edited collection of essays, Sharon Bickle’s collection of Michael Field’s love letters, and Thain and Ana Parejo Vadillo’s edition of selected poems and manuscripts have confirmed Michael Field’s place as a major late-Victorian writer. Most commentators, however, focus on Bradley’s and Cooper’s pre-Catholic writing, thereby neglecting some of their most important work, ideas, and friendships from the later part of their lives. Furthermore, the common assumption among scholars that Bradley and Cooper were lesbians erases their passionate infatuations with men, thereby minimizing the range of their sexual and romantic desires. Readers today are likely to call them bisexual or pansexual. 291

Duc Dau

4. The Future of Victorian Gender and Sexuality Studies What is on the horizon for Victorian gender and sexuality studies? Wilde’s trials and similar public scandals of the late-Victorian era bring into relief the limits of Victorian acceptance of sexual difference. Holly Furneaux (“Victorian”) argues, however, that such examples should not blind us to the surprisingly open or mobile attitudes of the period. For instance, several studies have thrown light on the rich interaction between religion and gender or sexuality. Early edited collections on masculinity and spirituality (Bradstock et al.) and the impact of the figure of the Angel in the House on women of faith (Hogan and Bradstock) have provided insights into the connection between religion and gender. In Erotic Faith, Robert M. Polhemus explores canonical writers to argue that erotic faith is an emotional conviction that meaning, value, hope, and the possibility of transcendence can be found in love. John Maynard’s Victorian Discourses on Sexuality and Religion examines the productive relationship between the discourses of sex and religion in the work of Arthur Hugh Clough, Thomas Kingsley, Coventry Patmore, and Thomas Hardy. In Decadence and Catholicism, Ellis Hanson explores the convergence of eroticism and aestheticism, noting that, more than any other literary movement, the Decadent movement was drawn to the relationship between homoeroticism and Roman Catholicism. Also in relation to the movement, Denisoff offers illuminating insights in to the study of queer sexuality, eco-feminism, and Decadent paganism, for instance arguing that “the queer character of Decadence could not be separated from its pagan respect for the natural environment” (“Dissipating,” 444. See also “Women’s”). Roden’s Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture looks at Victorian religious writing through the lens of queer theory in order to chart the emergence of the modern queer in relation to religious rather than exclusively sociological discourses. This study is one of the few in Victorian gender and sexualities to give precedence to the work of poets. Amanda Paxton likewise turns her gaze to religious verse in her 2017 Willful Submission. Though the study intersects with my previous work (see Touching God) on spiritual marriage, God as lover, and the Song of Songs in Victorian poetry, my focus has largely been on mutual tenderness and theology, while Paxton attends to sadomasochism and ideology. A great deal more remains to be written about poetry and religion in relation to gender and sexuality. Indeed, considerations of love, affect, and sex are central to both poetry and religion, especially in view of Christian traditions that emphasize the notion of God as lover and in turn have inspired men and women to rapturous verse [on new religions and esotericism, see Ferguson’s chapter; on Christianity and Judaism, see Knight’s]. The concept of virginity, which preoccupied the Victorians, spans both the fields of religion and the family. Lloyd Davis’s edited collection, Virginal Sexuality and Textuality in Victorian Literature, which includes essays exploring virginity as a complex cultural and literary sign, was published in 1993. A monograph on Victorian virginity awaits, especially given the most recent developments in gender and sexuality, including masculinities; the opening up of the canon; and the burgeoning scholarly interest in popular literature, periodicals, visual culture, fashion, advertisements, religion, and pornography. The queering of the family in recent years has created exciting possibilities for the study of gender and sexuality. While interest in the family has been a feature of feminist studies for some time, sexuality studies has only comparatively recently turned its interest to questions of kinship and family structures, particularly in light of contemporary debates around marriage equality, the definition of family, and the interrogation of the nuclear family. I have already cited some of the most important work in the field (Marcus, Vicinus, Furneaux. See also Cleere, Corbett, Hager and Schaffer, Schaffer). For our edited collection, Queer Victorian Families, Shale Preston and I brought together a range of essays that explored the family through the Victorian definition of queer as strange or odd, along with Halperin’s aforementioned definition. Our definition of the queer family was equally elastic, despite our desire to give emphasis to families structured around same-sex relationships or gender nonconformity. Though the area of queer Victorian families is relatively new, it has found productive relationships with other fields such as animal studies (see Flegel).

292

Gender and Sexuality

The study of gender and sexuality in Victorian studies continues to evolve along with developments in gender and queer theories. We still have some way to go, however, to break down the heterosexual/homosexual binary in the research on queer sexuality; Sharon Marcus’s Between Women offers a way forward. Transgender studies are finally receiving the book-length treatment, with the 2018 release of Ann Heilmann’s Neo-/Victorian Biographilia and James Miranda Barry. The preponderance of studies on the fin de siècle means that comparatively few works exist on the earlier periods of the nineteenth century. Finally, the turn to affect in Victorian studies has the potential to illuminate how emotions such as love or passion might be stirred with the aim of galvanizing subjects to action, as with the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Algernon Charles Swinburne, who were both inspired by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s political verse. Unlike much of Fifty Shades of Grey, the Victorian era was by no means a pornotopia, but it was far from the straitlaced past that people imagine. If we are seeking to understand Victorian gender and sexuality, then much more could be written about pornography and erotica, with the application of close readings alongside historical contextualization and theorization pertaining to class, race, gender and sexual roles, the publishing industry, and the black market. I have yet to see a sustained discussion of the profusion of humor in Victorian pornographic verse and prose, such as that found in the magazine The Pearl (1879–80). Religious allusion in pornography has likewise been an area of neglect. Steven Marcus began the modern study of Victorian pornography with The Other Victorians, yet we now know that the Victorians were not as other to us as we might think. Our sense of gender and sexuality has been shaped by Victorian science, writing, religion, and law. So it is that, through the study of Victorian literature and history, we recognize that we ourselves are among the other Victorians.

Key Critical Works James Eli Adams. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity. Michel Foucault. History of Sexuality:Volume One. Ellis Hanson. Decadence and Catholicism. Sharon Marcus. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Steven Marcus. The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid- Nineteenth-Century England. Ellen Bayuk Rosenman. Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. ———. Epistemology of the Closet. Jeffrey Weeks. What is Sexual History?

Works Cited Adams, James Eli. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity. Cornell UP, 1995. ———. “Victorian Sexualities.” A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, edited by Herbert F. Tucker, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, pp. 124–37. Bauer, Gero. Houses, Secrets, and the Closet: Locating Masculinities from the Gothic Novel to Henry James. Transcript, 2016. Bickle, Sharon, editor. The Fowl and the Pussycat: Love Letters of Michael Field, 1876–1909. U of Virginia P, 2008. Black, Barbara. A Room of His Own: A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland. Ohio State UP, 2012. Bourrier, Karen. The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel. U of Michigan P, 2015. Bradstock, Andrew et al., editors. Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Brady, Sean. Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861–1913. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Bristow, Joseph. Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885. Columbia UP, 1995. Cleere, Eileen. Avuncularism: Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Nineteenth-Century English Culture. Stanford UP, 2004. Cohen, Ed. Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities. Routledge, 1992. Cohen, William A. Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction. Duke UP, 1996. Corbett, Mary Jean. Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf. Cornell UP, 2008. Danahay, Martin H. Gender at Work in Victorian Culture: Literature, Art and Masculinity. Ashgate, 2005.

293

Duc Dau Dau, Duc. Touching God: Hopkins and Love. Anthem, 2012. Dau, Duc, and Shale Preston, editors. Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature. Routledge, 2015. Dellamora, Richard. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism. U of North Carolina P, 1990. Denisoff, Dennis. Aestheticism and Sexual Parody: 1840–1940. Cambridge UP, 2001. ———. “The Dissipating Nature of Decadent Paganism from Pater to Yeats.” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 15, no. 3, 2008, pp. 431–46. ———. “Women’s Nature and the Neo-Pagan Movement.” History of British Women’s Writing: 1880–1920, vol. 7, edited by Holly Laird, Palgrave, 2016, pp. 125–35. Dickens, Charles. “On Duty with Inspector Field.” Household Words, vol. 64, 1851, pp. 265–70. Doan, Laura. Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War. U of Chicago P, 2013. Dowling, Andrew. Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature. Ashgate, 2001. Dowling, Linda. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Cornell UP, 1994. Ehnenn, Jill R. Women’s Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture. Ashgate, 2008. Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. Women’s Press, 1985. Field, Michael. Michael Field, the Poet: Published and Manuscript Materials. Edited by Marion Thain and Ana Parejo Vadillo, Broadview, 2009. Flegel, Monica. Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture: Animality, Queer Relations, and the Victorian Family. Routledge, 2015. Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality:Volume One. Translated by Robert Hurley, Penguin, 1998. Furneaux, Holly. Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War. Oxford UP, 2016. ———. Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities. Oxford UP, 2009. ———. “Victorian Sexualities.” Literature Compass, vol. 8, no. 10, 2011, pp. 767–75. doi:10.1111/j.17414113.2011.00834.x. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale UP, 1979. Hager, Kelly, and Talia Schaffer. “Extending Families [Special Issue].” Victorian Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Victorian Studies, vol. 39, no. 2, 2013, pp. 7–199. Halberstam, J. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke UP, 1995. Hall, Donald E., editor. Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age. Cambridge UP, 1994. Halperin, David M. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford UP, 1995. Hanson, Ellis. Decadence and Catholicism. Harvard UP, 1997. Heilmann, Ann. Neo-/Victorian Biographilia and James Miranda Barry: A Study in Transgender and Transgenre. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Hogan, Anne and Andrew Bradstock, editors. Women of Faith in Victorian Culture: Reassessing the Angel in the House. Palgrave Macmillan, 1998. James, E. L. Fifty Shades of Grey. Arrow Books, 2012. Kaplan, Morris B. Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times. Cornell UP, 2005. Kucich, John. Repression in Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens. U of California P, 1987. Lutz, Deborah. Pleasure Bound:Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism. W.W. Norton, 2011. MacDonald, Tara. The New Man, Masculinity and Marriage in the Victorian Novel. Pickering and Chatto, 2015. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton UP, 2007. Marcus, Steven. The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England. Basic Books, 1966. Mason, Michael. The Making of Victorian Sexuality. Oxford UP, 1994. Maynard, John. Victorian Discourses on Sexuality and Religion. Cambridge UP, 1993. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Routledge, 1995. Miller, Andrew H., and James Eli Adams. “Introduction.” Sexualities in Victorian Britain, edited by Andrew H. Miller and James Eli Adams, Indiana UP, 1996, pp. 1–15. Nead, Lynda. Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain. Basil Blackwell, 1988. Nord, Deborah Epstein. Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City. Cornell UP, 1995. Oulton, Carolyn. Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature. Ashgate, 2007. Paxton, Amanda. Willful Submission: Sado-Erotics and Heavenly Marriage in Victorian Religious Poetry. U of Virginia P, 2017. Polhemus, Robert M. Erotic Faith: Being in Love from Jane Austen to D. H. Lawrence. U of Chicago P, 1990. Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. U of Chicago P, 1988.

294

Gender and Sexuality Porter, Roy and Lesley Hall. The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950. Yale UP, 1995. Prins, Yopie. Victorian Sappho. Princeton UP, 1999. Rich, Adrienne. Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Pose 1979–1985. Virago, 1987. Robson, Catherine. Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman. Princeton UP, 2001. Roden, Frederick S. Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture. Palgrave, 2003. Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk. Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience. Cornell UP, 2003. Sanders, Valerie. The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood. Cambridge UP, 2009. Schaffer, Talia. Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction. Oxford UP, 2016. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia UP, 1985. ———. Epistemology of the Closet. U of California P, 2008. Sinclair, Eve. Jane Eyre Laid Bare: The Classic Novel with an Erotic Twist. St. Martin’s Griffin, 2012. Sinfield, Alan. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment. Columbia UP, 1994. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1, 1985, pp. 243–61. Stetz, Margaret D., and Cheryl A. Wilson, editors. Michael Field and Their World. Rivendale, 2007. Sussman, Herbert. Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art. Cambridge UP, 1995. Thain, Marion. ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin De Siècle. Cambridge UP, 2007. Tosh, John. A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. Yale UP, 1999. Upchurch, Charles. Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform. U of California P, 2009. Vance, Norman. The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought. Cambridge UP, 1985. Vanita, Ruth. Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination. Columbia UP, 1996. Vicinus, Martha. Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928. U of Chicago P, 2004. Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. U of Chicago P, 1992. ———. Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State. Cambridge UP, 1982. Weeks, Jeffrey. Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities. Routledge, 1985. ———. What Is Sexual History? Polity Books, 2016.

295

26 NEW WOMAN WRITING Molly Youngkin

As Victorian literary critics, how do we read the popular genre of proto-feminist fiction that flourished in the 1890s under the label “New Woman writing”? This chapter examines how recent developments in criticism around genre, gender, and technology can inform our understanding of New Woman writing as a genre of (mainly) fiction that features independent, educated, progressive women who did, and did not, correspond with real Victorian women. Drawing on the work of Emma Heaney, Patricia Murphy, and Lena Wånggren, all of whom published compelling books about the New Woman in 2017, I argue that New Woman writing can be read from a “trans” perspective—by which I mean across gender, but also across genre and technology. Read this way, the New Woman persona emerges as an even more complex representative of progress toward a future in which gender boundaries cannot be fixed. In making this argument, I first situate reading from a trans perspective within a review of existing criticism, which began with the second-wave feminist recovery of the genre and continues today through a variety of different approaches: New Women writers as literary innovators, as journalists in the periodical press, as writing in relation to race and empire, as writing in relation to other disciplines in the late-Victorian and Modernist period, and as participants in other late-Victorian literary movements such as aestheticism and decadence. I then propose that a new direction for New Woman criticism is emerging, a trans approach, which should not replace but can supplement existing approaches. Finally, I apply concepts articulated by critics who are practicing a trans approach to key New Woman texts by playwrights Sydney Grundy and Henrik Ibsen, poets Mathilde Blind and Constance Naden, short story writers “Victoria Cross” (Annie Sophie Cory) and “George Egerton” (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright), and the novelist “Sarah Grand” (Frances Elizabeth Bellenden Clarke McFall). By reexamining texts by these authors, I show how New Women were represented as both restricted by and savvy in their use of technologies to cross gender boundaries and create realms in which people who did not conform to normative gender roles, including transgender people, might be represented. Further, I show that reading across genre reveals how genres and literary movements that challenge realism (such as the Gothic, aestheticism, and decadence) become sites for non-normative figures to emerge, even if these figures are not always able to transform the culture in which they live. The trans approach I practice—which engages gender but also genre and technology and highlights the intersections between these concepts—can provide a model for readers of New Woman writing. New Woman criticism still is a relatively new field and will benefit from new directions, especially those that encourage a fluid approach to reading that mirrors a fluid approach to gender identity. 296

New Woman Writing

1. The rise of New Woman Criticism As a genre of Victorian literature focused on the position of women in patriarchal culture, the New Woman novel rightly garnered its first scholarly attention via second-wave feminism. Its inclusion in Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977) encouraged scholars to highlight its noteworthy literary qualities and cultural influence, even as Showalter herself would later recognize in a revised edition of her study that she had minimized the contributions of New Woman authors and mischaracterized the genre’s place in literary history (xxvii). Building upon Showalter’s landmark study, critical understanding of the New Woman novel became more nuanced in the 1990s, with the publication of studies such as Ann Ardis’s New Women, New Novels (1990), Lyn Pykett’s The Improper Feminine (1992), and Sally Ledger’s The New Woman (1997) [on feminist recovery work, see Schaffer’s chapter]. These studies discussed the genre from formalist and New Historicist perspectives, in which the dialogic relationship between literary construction and political context was emphasized. Ardis, revising Showalter’s characterization of New Women novelists as “a pool of mediocre talents out of which the great female modernists emerged,” argues that the genre influenced Modernism precisely through what had been perceived as its artistic shortcomings (3). Rather than seeing New Woman novels as “the final failure of nineteenth-century realism,” Ardis urges scholars to conceive of their authors as representing “desires that have never been realized before” (3). Like Ardis, Pykett complicates Showalter’s assumptions, rejecting her “inflexible concept of genre” and advancing formal and cultural rationales for linking the 1860s sensation novel and the New Woman novel (48–49, 192–93). Acknowledging that Ardis and Pykett expanded readers’ understanding of the relationships between genres and created a more flexible interpretation of literary history, Ledger focuses more fully on the heterogeneity of the genre, arguing that the diversity of forms attempted by New Woman writers was precisely what made their work modern (6). Ledger maintains the dialogic between form and culture, arguing that late-Victorian “textual configurations of the New Woman” were “as historically significant as the day-to-day lived experience” of Victorian women, since “the New Woman was largely a discursive phenomenon” (3). More diverse textual representations became available through scholarly editions of New Woman novels published since the early 1990s. Those by women writers—such as Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883), Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893), and Mona Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus (1894)—now occupy a place in a more inclusive literary canon, next to those published by male writers, such as George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). Further, anthologies such as Showalter’s Daughters of Decadence (1993), Carolyn Christensen Nelson’s A New Woman Reader (2001), and Talia Schaffer’s Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (2007) brought attention to other subgenres in New Woman writing, especially short stories, poetry, and drama. Nelson and Schaffer place fictional representations in dialogue with nonfictional ones to reflect the range of political contexts in which the New Woman might be considered. For example, Schaffer’s inclusion of Naden’s “The New Orthodoxy” encourages attention to how women with access to university-level education engaged science and crossed gender boundaries as they acquired knowledge previously seen as men’s domain. With the recovery of diverse texts, critical approaches also have become more diverse, though many retain a feminist foundation. A continued interest in New Women as literary innovators can be found in Ann Heilmann’s New Woman Fiction (2000), which situates their writing in historical and conceptual contexts. This approach includes analysis of the “structural specificities of the genre,” such as “the interrelationship between the authors’ (sexual) politics and the formal characteristics of their works” (13). Heilmann is also interested in the role journalism played in the articulation of new ideals by New Woman writers (5), an interest shared by Margaret Beetham and Margaret Stetz, whose work on New Women writing for the periodical press has been particularly noteworthy [on periodicals, see Hughes’s chapter]. In a 2001 special issue of Media History, Beetham asserts that “the New Woman

297

Molly Youngkin

both made and was made by print media” (5). Referencing the comic periodical Punch’s ridicule of the New Woman writer, Beetham points to the ways in which the New Woman persona was made by print, and the articles about Elizabeth Banks (by Barbara Onslow) and Mary Cholmondeley (by Linda Peterson) show how New Women built print media by taking advantage of conditions of the market to advance their work, even as they were subject to these conditions. Stetz, meanwhile, in “The New Woman and the British Periodical Press of the 1890s” (2010), shows how even as some periodicals poked fun at the New Woman, others capitalized on the popularity of this figure in order to “affirm their own newness and boldness” through “appropriating or affiliating with the New Woman” (273). For example, the Bookman, which began in 1891 with the aim to keep those people involved in the book-selling industry up to date on industry-relevant topics, ran stories about innovative women writers while not estranging its primary audience (274). Beetham also points to the international aspects of the New Woman persona, a topic that overlaps with the significant body of criticism on New Women as writing in relation to race and empire. In The New Woman and the Empire (2005), Iveta Jusová shows that Grand, Egerton, Amy Levy, and Elizabeth Robins all engaged with “scientific racism” in the 1890s, even as their own national and cultural identities shaped their differing approaches to “adopting or resisting racial biases then prevalent in the British colonial superpower” (7) [on race, see Tucker’s chapter]. Further, LeeAnne M. Richardson, in New Woman and Colonial Adventure Fiction in Victorian Britain (2006), illustrates how authors’ choices regarding genre influenced their representations. Emphasizing how seemingly masculine imperialist adventure fiction and seemingly feminine New Woman novels arose at the same time (2–3), Richardson recalls Ardis’s and Pykett’s attention to the links between genres as part of a complex literary history. Late-Victorian genres often reacted to social conditions cited as evidence of “decline” or “evolution” (1), and Richardson’s insights about New Women and empire overlap with those by critics who focus on these authors as writing in relation to other disciplines, since much of the debate around societal decline and evolution centered on the rise of new scientific and artistic disciplines [on evolutionary theory, see Psomiades’s chapter]. Economics, religion, science, and the visual arts are among the late-Victorian and Modernist disciplines emphasized in criticism. Angelique Richardson’s and Chris Willis’s essay collection The New Woman in Fiction and Fact covers a range of disciplinary influences, including Regenia Gagnier’s consideration of the influence of political economics on the “productive” bodies of New Women (32). Richardson’s Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century takes a more in-depth look at the influence of population geneticism, arguing that Caird, Egerton, and Grand engaged eugenics in crafting their fiction in order to show why women’s reproduction was integral to the continuation of “the British imperialist race” (xvii). Alexandra Gray’s Self-Harm in New Woman Writing (2018), meanwhile, illustrates that the same authors were influenced both by specific forms of religion (Christianity) and psychology (psychiatry) as they represented women’s survival strategies, which included self-harming through starvation, excessive drinking, and mutilation. Finally, Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco’s The New Woman International (2011) shows how early photographs in the United States, Japan, Germany, and India depicted women who resisted traditional gender norms in different photographic forms, including “stereoviews, offset printing, mug shots, and portraiture,” some of which appeared before literary depictions of the New Woman became widespread (10). Kathy Alexis Psomiades and Schaffer have established the influence of the visual arts on aestheticist, decadent, and New Women literature of the 1890s, and their work continues to influence discussions of this aspect of the New Woman [on visual culture, see Flint’s chapter]. Psomiades, in Beauty’s Body (1997), includes analysis of aestheticist author Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown, now often classified as a New Woman novel. Psomiades argues that Lee, drawing on Pre-Raphaelite paintings, creates a literary protagonist who is “an imitation of a woman who imitates aetheticist paintings” (166), and through a “radical aestheticist critique of aestheticism,” Lee produces one of the “first decadent texts” in England (176). Schaffer’s The Forgotten Female Aesthetes (2000) shows some of the reasons why 298

New Woman Writing

late-Victorian women writers such as Lee, Lucas Malet, Ouida, and others became participants in aestheticism and decadence. These movements encouraged them to use enticing conventions that pleased readers while also pushing the envelope with bold ideas, providing a space for them to “negotiate competing notions of identity,” including “living like a New Woman while admiring Pre-Raphaelite maidens” (5). As Schaffer notes, though, female aesthetes were more interested in joining a “highart tradition” than the “political movement” advocated by New Women (25). Nevertheless, they all moved in the same world, sharing principles and publishers, and those New Women who participated in aestheticism or decadence were able to explore alternate roles rooted in gender and sexuality.

2. Queering the New Woman Critics who focus on aestheticism and decadence inevitably bring attention to women’s bodies, and the relationship between bodies and sexual identities have increasingly become the focus of articles about New Woman writing [on queer readings, see Dau’s chapter]. In the past two years, one third of the 17 articles listed in the MLA International Bibliography with “New Woman” and “1800–1899” as subject headings also have either “body,” “sexual identity,” or “queer” as an additional subject heading. While other articles with this focus may be coded with other subject headings or not listed in the MLA database, these articles represent an important new direction in New Woman criticism. Laura Chilcoat’s article “How to Make a Heterosexual Romance Queer” (2018) is particularly innovative, being, as far as I am aware, the only full application of transgender theory to a late-Victorian text. It focuses on Ellen Williams’s New Woman novel Anna Marsden’s Experiment (1899) as presenting a gender-fluid person whose “queerness . . . exceeds any representations either in the sexological or fictional literature of the time” (143). This is the sort of criticism that changes our thinking entirely— not just about the text to which the new theories are applied, but to other texts in the same genre. Great potential lies in taking a trans approach, as I define it, to New Woman writing. It accounts for the embodiment of genres that challenge realism within the so-called realistic New Women writing, mirroring New Women’s advocacy for a gender-fluid conception of the self, in which masculine traits could be embodied in female form. Three books published in 2017 provide appropriate frameworks for practicing this approach. In The New Woman Gothic (2017), Murphy provides fodder for trans-genre criticism, since she focuses on the influence of the eighteenth-century Gothic on the New Woman novel and shows how perceived feminine threats to masculine authority cross historical boundaries but also are represented within specific cultural contexts. While Murphy does not necessarily read New Woman texts through Gothic texts, she does show how Gothic conventions are transformed from one literary-historical period to another [on Gothic fiction, see Luckhurst’s chapter]. In novels already recognized for their realistic representations of New Women, Murphy argues that Gothic conventions indicative of feminine threats—such as the labyrinth, live burial, entrapment, and the ruined body—reappear in culturally specific forms. The “mysterious labyrinthine passages” that imprison women in Gothic homes in Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790), for example, become the labyrinthine city streets of London in late-Victorian New Woman novels (19, 106). Further, the feminine threat is so extreme in some novels, such as Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), that the New Woman becomes “an entirely different species,” typifying alienity and linking the New Woman novel to genres that challenge realism (245–48). In practicing a trans-genre approach, Murphy helps us understand how crossing genres reveals more fully just how great a threat women were perceived to be, even as some women were emancipated from Victorian gender strictures. Heaney, in The New Woman (2017), provides a useful transgender framework for analysis of Victorian New Woman writing because she revises third-wave feminist and queer theory to include transgender people. Heaney argues that Victorian sexologists shaped the development of cissexism (the assumption that “assigned sex and identified sex always align”) and determined how transfeminine figures (people designated as male but who identify as feminine) were represented in literature (xiii, 299

Molly Youngkin

xvii). From the 1860s onward, sexologists characterized same-sex desire as “inverted gender,” and by the 1890s, transfemininity was seen as “an extreme expression of this inverted condition” (4). By the early twentieth century, sex change surgery was available as a perceived solution to gender inversion, but even this medical advance assumed the transfeminine person was a “woman trapped in a male body” (5). In taking a transgender approach, Heaney asks literary scholars to see New Woman writing in a significantly different light. Finally, Wånggren, in Gender, Technology, and the New Woman (2017), provides the foundation for a trans-technology approach to New Woman writing [on technologies, see Menke’s chapter]. Acknowledging the late-Victorian period as rich in new technologies, Wånggren reveals how specific technologies—the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical innovations—contributed to the construction of spaces by New Women that encouraged their and other women’s emancipation. Women used “freedom machines” to transverse into new occupational realms (via the typewriter and medical innovations) and urban spaces (via the bicycle) and then reformed these realms and spaces through their gendered presence (2–4). Further, their use of Modernist stylistic technologies helped advance new concepts around gender identity (5). Wånggren’s analysis shows that New Woman writers drew on available technologies to encourage the regendering of masculine spaces through their feminine presence but also exposed the fact that certain technologies did not yet exist for such purposes.

3. Rereading New Women Through Gender, Genre, and Technology With these recent developments in mind, I wish to turn to an application of trans concepts to specific texts. I begin with two plays, Grundy’s The New Woman (1894) and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1891), which represent New Woman drama for many scholars. In her introduction to Grundy’s play, Nelson rightly points out that the New Woman had become, by the time of his writing, a “comic figure who could be easily caricatured and mocked,” and indeed Grundy pokes fun at the figure as “strident and aggressive” (295). Further, his male characters are “languid and effeminate” (295), typifying the Wildean dandy, who often was paired with the New Woman because they both blurred normative gender boundaries [on aestheticism, see Evangelista’s chapter]. What Nelson does not explain, however, is the problematic way in which cissexism is sustained in Grundy’s text. Mrs. Sylvester—a New Woman who collaborates on a book about marriage with an effeminate man named Gerald Cazenove—assumes a cis framework in her interactions with other characters, despite her commitment to advocating for more progressive forms of marriage. In line with other New Women, she sees marriage as a relationship based on a love in which “soul and soul” rather than different sexes meet (305–06), suggesting that relationships that challenge cissexism are possible. Yet when Gerald falls in love with another woman, Mrs. Sylvester reverts to a cis perspective and even uses her progressive definition of marriage to try to convince Gerald that their own heterosexual relationship is the better of the two (330–31). In addition, a trans-technology approach to Grundy’s play reveals how medical technologies shape the context in which cissexism is upheld, but it also provides an opening for reading against this framework. Dr. Mary Bevis is introduced as the equivalent of a “beastly man” (300), yet she effectively articulates the progressively modern views of New Women, arguing that science will emancipate women who are being constrained because of their procreative ability. She says, “[W]hen the attention of science is directed to the unequal incidence of the burden of maternity, some method of re-adjustment will be devised” (310). Further, new developments in the field of math will change life for men and women, since they will prove not simply that the “sexes are parallel lines” that have no “physiological necessity” to converge, but indeed that men need not be involved in reproduction (333, 335). Unlike Mrs. Sylvester, who cannot see beyond a cis world, Mary is able to envision one in which heterosexual assumptions about gender and sexuality will not dominate. 300

New Woman Writing

Using a trans-technology approach to reread Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, perhaps the best-known New Woman play, also proves fruitful, since the challenges faced by women in light of developing medical technologies are also evident here. Hedda presumably commits suicide after realizing she is trapped in a sexual relationship with Judge Brack, who blackmails Hedda after she provides the means for a former lover, Eljert Lövborg, to kill himself (230–31). Yet her suicide might also be seen as an attempt to escape the cissexism that not only requires her to meet Brack’s demands but also restricts her to the role of wife and mother. Without medical technologies that might emancipate Hedda, she uses the technology she has at hand that will allow her to escape these roles. She kills herelf with a gun she received from her father (75), has pointed at Brack (77), and which is the partner to the gun she gave Lövborg (190); she thus takes control of a masculine technology in order to resist the patriarchal constraints of her relationships with all three men. As Gray has shown, the New Woman uses suicide as a release, and when the “weapon of choice” is “symbolic of phallic power,” she challenges masculine authority even as she becomes its victim (183). The New Women in Grundy’s and Ibsen’s plays must wait for further medical innovations (such as birth control and safe abortions) to dismantle cissexism completely, but they do use existing technologies to challenge it until such innovations emerge. Reexamining New Woman poetry also highlights how late-Victorian feminists used specific technologies, including communication technologies, to challenge gender assumptions. Andrea Kaston Tange has argued that, in “The New Orthodoxy” (1887), Naden uses caricatures to resist the “gendering of science as a masculine province” and to show that “Victorian ideas about relationships need to evolve” (221, 235). The Girton-educated female speaker, Amy Merton, “reverses the . . . paradigm of a male speaker talking at/about a female love-object” by questioning whether her Oxford-educated admirer Fred will adopt the scientific views she has embraced (225–26). If he does not, Amy plans to end their relationship, showing that she possesses agency in the relationship (226). Tange draws attention to, but does not fully explicate, how New Women drew upon communication technologies to resist normative gender expectations, noting that Amy asks Fred to “Write—or telegraph—or call!” about whether he will embrace her ideals (227). Christopher Keep has argued that the development of the telegraph—from a visual technology in the 1790s to an aural one in the 1830s—facilitated the modern blurring of gender boundaries. The uncanny feeling produced by the 1830s electric telegraph, which could deliver messages immediately and which was operated by young women who were thought to be particularly sensitive, signaled that ways of knowing were shifting from what was understood as the “disembodied form of masculine reason” to what was viewed as the “embodied form of feminine sympathy” (191). That Amy calls upon Fred to telegraph her to accept her way of knowing, which is both masculine and feminine by virtue of Amy’s university-level education, suggests that New Women should use communication technologies to establish ways of knowing that can transform normative views about gender and sexuality. Mathilde Blind’s Ascent of Man (1889) also advocates that New Women use communication technologies, especially in combination with naturally occurring scientific technologies, to transform normative views. James Diedrick has discussed Ascent of Man as a collection of poetry that “became part of the larger cultural debate concerning the New Woman and decadence” (205), and Diedrick characterizes the long title poem as one in which “the violence of tectonic creation” is linked to “the physical upheaval of childbirth, as well as other forms of redemptive female struggle” (214). Further, it is a direct response to Charles Darwin’s ideas about sexual selection in The Descent of Man (1871), with Blind revising Darwin to suggest that humankind can be “redeemed” by the “creative power” of mythical and real-world women (215–16). Diedrick’s reading is reinforced by examining how Blind associates naturally occurring scientific technologies, especially lightning, with the ability of genderfluid people to communicate with and transform the world. Early in the poem, lightning appears as a “shock of electric vapour” produced by “volcanic convulsion” due to the movement of atoms through water (7), and Love, a key figure who can heal the world from the wounds inflicted by Man as he develops according to Darwin’s evolutionary theory, 301

Molly Youngkin

hovers over the “chaotic waters” produced by the convulsion to “mould” the basic elements of Nature into Life (9). With Love (initially not gendered) at its foundation, Life (gendered feminine) sends another “electric spark” through “cells and pulps and worms” to weave “the web of life and death” through a variety of different life-forms (10). Though higher forms of life become destructive, with many stanzas devoted to Man’s oppression of other humans, Love ultimately returns in the forms of the goddess Venus and a transfeminine Christ-like boy (48–49, 70). These personifications of Love highlight how Blind, as an aestheticist poet, rewrites Darwin by using pagan and Christian images to illustrate the beauty of life. Love, as the Christ-like boy, takes the decadent narrator of the poem (who sometimes appears to be male and other times female) through “the penfolds of sin” and “purlieus of shame” (72). Still, those people such as the narrator who encounter Love are “born once again” (73), suggesting that even decadents can communicate with humankind to transform the world. Diedrick points out that the gender fluidity of the narrator may signal Blind’s own complex sexual identity, which is best characterized as “sexual nonconformist” and “bisexual” (107, 173). In creating a gender-fluid character, Blind suggests that the (trans)feminine is, if not foundational, then at least key to the workings of naturally occurring scientific phenomena. While new technologies clearly are important in New Woman writing, George Egerton’s “A Cross Line” (1893) and Victoria Cross’s “Theodora. A Fragment.” (1895) revert to technologies from the past to create alternate worlds in which people who do not conform to gender and sexuality norms can exist. In these alternative worlds, non-normative people are protected from the restrictions imposed by the present world, but they are not necessarily able to transform the present to change the material conditions that confine them. Murphy focuses on the Gothic as the genre that provides a site for this ideological work, although this function can also be served by other genres and literary movements that challenge realism, such as aestheticism and decadence. The New Women protagonists of Egerton’s and Cross’s stories are characterized as mannish (Egerton 14, Cross 77), yet they also strongly identify with the forcefully feminine Salomé, the biblical character who dances for her stepfather Herod before asking him for the head of John the Baptist in return. The dance in Egerton’s story—in which the unnamed protagonist senses that those who watch her dance are “spellbound by the motion of her glancing feet” (15)—has been characterized by Sarah E. Maier as a “re-visioning of Salomé’s mythic draw for male artists,” in which Egerton “asserts woman’s right to her own body,” exposing the “social construction of the ideal, passive Victorian angel as a masquerade to be discarded as archaic truth” (281). In Cross’s story, Theodora identifies with Salomé by asking for the effeminate male protagonist’s, Cecil Ray’s, sketchbook from his time in the East in a manner similar to Salomé’s request for John the Baptist’s head (89). As Ana Raquel Rojas has argued, “Theodora is defined by her queerness, by the way she escapes definition through standard gender binaries” (109); her cross-dressing in Eastern clothes that are simultaneously masculine and feminine is part of what seduces Cecil (113). Both Theodora and Egerton’s unnamed protagonist enter decadent Orientalist fantasy worlds via their identification with Salomé, and these worlds provide a space in which “peculiar” people can express their sexual desires as they experience aesthetic “pleasure” but also material “pain” (Cross 71, 75). In Egerton’s story, the present world is defined by the natural, rural surroundings that typify mid-Victorian realism, while the section of the story in which the protagonist identifies with Salomé and expresses her sexual identity is signaled by a distinct change to a natural setting suggestive of the dark atmosphere of late-Victorian decadence (15). In Cross’s story, Theodora and Cecil conclude an afternoon of immersion in technologies of the past—Cecil’s “idols and curiosities” from the East (80)—by kissing in a “dark passage” with a kind of passion that could be interpreted as same-sex desire or love between two transgender people. “We dared neither of us to speak” (89), says Cecil of the experience, bringing to mind the phrase that has become synonymous with same-sex desire: “the love that dare not speak its name.” As Heaney’s work shows, the pathologizing of people by Victorian sexologists prevented nonconforming transgender people from resisting cissexism, yet Egerton and 302

New Woman Writing

Cross use Orientalist decadence and technologies from the past to envision spaces in which they could challenge traditional roles, if not eliminate them entirely. I turn, lastly, to Grand’s novel Ideala (1888), not as well known as The Heavenly Twins but equally important, since Ideala demonstrates how a New Woman writer used the Gothic, literal symbols of modernity, and Modernist stylistic technologies to create space for non-normative gender identities to emerge, reflecting the trans approach I am advocating. From the beginning of the novel, the protagonist Ideala is characterized as defying rigid notions of identity, since she is described as “full of inconsistencies” (7) by her male friend, Lord Dawne, who narrates the story and becomes an important influence on Ideala’s development as a New Woman. Much of Ideala’s transformation focuses on recovering from marriage to a man whose transgressions recall what Mary Wollstonecraft called the “wrongs of woman” in her Gothic novel Maria; Or the Wrongs of Woman (1792). Early in their marriage, Ideala’s husband proves his cruelty by locking his wife out of their house after she expresses interest in participating in women’s charity work (42). After she confirms her husband’s infidelity eight years into their marriage (105), she relies on the railway to visit a hospital administrator, Lorrimer, who inhabits a Gothic space, a “Great Hospital” built according to John Ruskin’s principles of architecture (78–79). The railway as a mode of women’s emancipation is not explicitly discussed by Wånggren but is acknowledged by other critics who have written about the modernity of nineteenth-century technologies, such as Ana Parejo Vadillo in Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism (2005). Furthermore, references to the modernity of the railway can be found in other New Woman novels that rivaled Grand’s. In Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, for example, the New Woman Sue Bridehead comments on how railway stations are “the centre of town life,” much in the same way the medieval Cathedral had performed this function in the Middle Ages, leading her lover Jude to proclaim about Sue: “How modern you are!” (128). Grand provides an interesting twist on typical transportation patterns (urban to rural, as opposed to rural to urban) by sending Ideala from the industrial city where her Gothic husband resides to a more rural Gothic setting, where she engages in intellectual conversation with Lorrimer. Like Ideala, Lorrimer defies rigid notions of identity, since he is described as “many-sided” (121), possessing “the face of a man who is midway between the two extremes” of “manly” and “efferminate” (120). The subversive work performed by Ideala and Lorrimer is possible because of the Gothic setting, but the space in which they do this work is both archaic and modern, since Ideala uses modern technology to access an archaic space. Gray has argued that Grand uses the railway as a “traumatic locus” in which Ideala’s “thin body” is similar to that of a “train wreck” (104). However, in a section of the novel that includes Modernist narrative conventions, Ideala speaks of the railway in a manner true to Wånggren’s concept of the freedom machine, as a technology that engenders a feeling that change is possible. “Have you ever felt the fascination of trains?” Ideala wonders, “[T]he trains rush past[, . . . ] and I cling to the railing for a moment until it passes, and quiver with excitement, feeling as if I must be swept away” (122–23). Ideala’s sense that she will be “swept away” by a larger force rather than enabling change through her own will or actions suggests there are modern models for subversive work emerging, complicating the nineteenth-century liberal model in which agency resides in the individual. The subversive work of Ideala and Lorrimer facilitated by the railway is tempered by Lord Dawne, who interferes in their work after Lorrimer suggests to Ideala a romantic relationship without marriage. In what is the most Modernist section of the novel, Dawne travels to see Lorrimer to convey that Ideala will not participate in a free union. He experiences the same “rush and rattle of the train” that Ideala had experienced (153), confirming that stylistic technologies are linked to more literal symbols of the New Woman. Still, even as Dawne tempers the subversive work of the two lovers, he cannot foreclose Ideala’s challenges to traditional gender roles entirely. After separating herself from Lorrimer, she travels to China to find her “purpose” (166), a plot turn seen in other New Woman novels, such as Gissing’s The Odd Women and Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus, in which New Women go out into the world to create change for a wider community of women. Upon Ideala’s 303

Molly Youngkin

return to England, she more fully embodies the New Woman and tells Dawne that she wants to make women “discontented,” so they can “use their influence steadily” to support each other (184). Similar to Rhoda in The Odd Women, Ideala chooses to live with other women rather than pursue romantic relationships with men, and this choice signals an acceptance of the non-normative gender and sexual identities Heaney highlights in her transgender approach to New Woman writing. New Woman texts, then, are readily embedded with the components of genre, gender, and technology that I argue define a thoroughly trans approach to reading literature. Much good scholarship exists about New Women writing, and the approaches discussed at the beginning of this chapter— New Women as literary innovators, as journalists in the periodical press, as writing in relation to race and empire, as writing in relation to other disciplines in the late-Victorian period, and as participants in other late-Victorian literary movements such as aestheticism and decadence—have been important for recognizing this complex figure as one constrained by cultural assumptions, sometimes able to challenge these assumptions and sometimes perpetuating these assumptions, especially with regard to race. As new critical approaches emerge—including the trans-genre, transgender, and transtechnology approaches articulated by Murphy, Heaney, and Wånggren—there is an opportunity to expand existing criticism and reorient New Woman criticism toward something that emphasizes even more fully a fluid way of reading and knowing. The transgender approach I have practiced in this chapter—with its emphasis on recognizing people who have been marginalized because of their fluid gender and sexual identities—intersects well with the emphasis on empire and race criticism from the early 2000s, since it recognizes that some New Woman writers’ biases extended to sexualities, even as other New Woman writers worked to reverse these biases. Further, my adoption of a trans-genre approach should encourage scholars to continue examining the connections between different subgenres in New Woman writing. Criticism that articulates how the interlocking of genres undermines dominant ideologies can ensure a more complex history of literature, in which traditional literary movements speak to each other more than previously thought. Examining the Gothic, aestheticist, and decadent imagery in New Women writing also furthers the blurring of gender boundaries, since this imagery created a means for representing non-normative sexual identities even if it did not always transform the conditions under which non-normative people lived. Finally, my adoption of a trans-technology approach contributes to the spread of fourth-wave feminism, which leverages online technologies to organize women (and people who identify as women, as a transgender perspective would acknowledge) across the world. While Victorian New Women could not imagine a world in which the Internet, iPhones, and apps would connect women from diverse cultures together, they recognized the constraints and the power of emerging technologies and could foresee that future technologies would transform their lives. Marking the history of technologies in the lives of women—both fictional and real—who laid the foundation for fourth-wave feminism can inform our own activist work today. As a relatively new area of study, New Woman criticism is particularly open to fresh approaches. As we have seen through its interest in ways of reading that engage imperialism, economics, the visual arts, and queer bodies, New Woman criticism embraces cutting-edge theoretical directions, and trans theory is no exception. By embracing a trans approach that encompasses gender, genre, and technology, scholars can reconsider New Woman texts from a perspective that encourages more inclusive views of people who have lived on the margins—and, in the case of transgender people, who continue to live on the margins of contemporary mainstream culture. As transgender people work to break through this marginalization, they can claim a proud lineage of literature that is inherently gender-fluid and that has expressed this fluidity through innovative stylistic methods that promote intersectionality and hybridity. As part of this lineage, New Woman writing emerges as a genre that is original because it embodies the fluidity that is fundamental to trans identity in the twenty-first century, and our articulation of a trans way of reading this genre from the past will contribute to the acceptance of non-normative identities in the future. 304

New Woman Writing

Key Critical Works Ann Ardis. New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism. Ann Heilmann. New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism. Iveta Jusová. The New Woman and the Empire. Sally Ledger. The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle. Carolyn Christensen Nelson. A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles, and Drama of the 1890s. Lyn Pykett. The Improper Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. Angelique Richardson. Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman. Angelique Richardson, and Chris Willis. The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin de Siècle Feminisms. Talia Schaffer. The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England. Elaine Showalter. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing.

Works Cited Ardis, Ann. New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism. Rutgers UP, 1990. Beetham, Margaret. “Editorial.” Media History, vol. 7, no. 1, 2001, pp. 5–6. Blind, Mathilde. The Ascent of Man. 1889. T. Fisher Unwin, 1899. Chilcoat, Laura. “How to Make a Heterosexual Romance Queer: Anna Marsden’s Experiment and the Limits of Sexual/Gendered Inversion.” ELT: English Literature in Transition, vol. 60, no. 2, 2017, pp. 131–51. Cross, Victoria. “Theodora. A Fragment.” A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles, and Drama of the 1890s, edited by Carolyn Christensen Nelson, Broadview, 2001, pp. 70–90. Diedrick, James. Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters. U of Virginia P, 2016. Egerton, George. “A Cross Line.” A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles, and Drama of the 1890s, edited by Carolyn Christensen Nelson, Broadview, 2001, pp. 8–22. Grand, Sarah. Ideala. 1888. Edited by Molly Youngkin, Valancourt Books, 2008. Gray, Alexandra. Self-Harm in New Woman Writing. Edinburgh UP, 2018. Grundy, Sydney. “The New Woman: An Original Comedy, in Four Acts.” A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles, and Drama of the 1890s, edited by Carolyn Christensen Nelson, Broadview, 2001, pp. 297–351. Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. 1895. Edited by Patricia Ingham, Oxford University Press, 2002. Heaney, Emma. The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Category. Northwestern UP, 2017. Heilmann, Ann. New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Ibsen, Henrik. Hedda Gabler: A Drama in Four Acts. 1891. Translated by Edmund Gosse, William Heinemann, 1903. Jusová, Iveta. The New Woman and the Empire. Ohio State UP, 2005. Keep, Christopher. “Touching at a Distance: Telegraphy, Gender, and Henry James’s in the Cage.” Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch, edited by Margaret Linley and Colette Colligan, Routledge, 2011, pp. 189–99. Ledger, Sally. The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle. Manchester UP, 1997. Maier, Sarah E. “Trivialized Female Idealism and Valourized Male Realism: The Importance of Being George.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadinne de Litterature Comparée, vol. 31, no. 3, 2004, pp. 267–85. Murphy, Patricia. The New Woman Gothic: Reconfigurations of Distress. U of Missouri P, 2016. Nelson, Carolyn Christensen. “Introduction.” A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles, and Drama of the 1890s, edited by Carolyn Christensen Nelson, Broadview, 2001, pp. 295–96. Otto, Elizabeth, and Vanessa Rocco. The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s. U of Michigan P, 2011. Pykett, Lyn. The Improper Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. Routledge, 1992. Richardson, Angelique. Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman. Oxford UP, 2003. Richardson, Angelique, and Chris Willis. The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin de Siècle Feminisms. Palgrave, 2001. Richardson, LeeAnne M. New Woman and Colonial Adventure Fiction in Victorian Britain: Gender, Genre, and Empire. U of Florida P, 2006. Rojas, Ana Raquel. “The Mustachioed Woman, or The Problem of Androgyny in Victoria Cross’ Six Chapters of a Man’s Life.” Cahiers Victoriens Et Édouardiens, vol. 74, Autumn 2011, pp. 107–21. Schaffer, Talia. The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England. U of Virginia P, 2000.

305

Molly Youngkin Showalter, Elaine. “Introduction.” A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. 1977. Princeton UP, 1999, pp. xi–xxxiii. Stetz, Margaret. “The New Woman and the British Periodical Press of the 1890s.” Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. 6, no. 2, 2001, pp. 272–85. Tange, Andrea Kaston. “Constance Naden and the Erotics of Evolution: Mating the Woman of Letters with the Man of Science.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 61, no. 2, 2005, pp. 200–40. Wånggren, Lena. Gender, Technology and the New Woman. Edinburgh UP, 2017.

306

27 DISABILITY STUDIES Martha Stoddard Holmes

1. Woodstock Moment Twenty-five years ago, disability studies in the humanities had a Woodstock moment, and I was lucky enough to be in the middle of it.1 As a doctoral student writing my dissertation on representations of physical disability in Victorian literature and culture, I had begun the enthralling experience of researching my many questions about the larger landscape for characters like Tiny Tim, Lucilla Finch, Madonna Blyth, and Olive Rothesay. What messages circulated outside of novels, co-creating the meanings of blindness, deafness, mobility impairments, and other embodied differences? I spent hours squinting at microfiche of the Charity Organisation Reporter (1872–84), learned to use the scary movable stacks of the archival sections of medical libraries, and inhaled a lot of dust in order to piece together the fragmentary answers I could find in published texts. But 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 . . .”). That changed when I presented a paper at the first academic conference on disability studies in the humanities, the “Discourse of Disability in Literature, Art, and Film,” convened in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, in early 1993. I returned from the conference with a name for what I was doing: disability studies in the humanities. Even more crucially, while I had arrived knowing no one, I came back as part of a community of colleagues, many of whom (Simi Linton, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, David Mitchell, and Sharon Snyder) would create the foundational theories for disability studies. Others, such as Patrick McDonagh and Cindy LaCom, would make important contributions to Victorian disability studies. I believe that we all felt dramatically more situated and energized in our work, especially if our home institutions—and those colleges and universities to whom we would apply for jobs—may not have had any idea what “disability studies” meant. Our “place” was in the spaces between activism and the academy, between disciplines, and across geographic locations. The Mayagüez conference signaled progress toward an eventual tipping point that I experienced personally and saw in the patterns of the profession. At first individual papers related to bodymind issues were grouped on panels whose participants sometimes felt like a drawer of odd socks. Nonetheless, for those of us doing work in a field that had nearly zero visibility as compared to panelists speaking to a packed ballroom on Charles Dickens or George Eliot, these encounters were life-sustaining, especially given the barriers to many scholars in the field. As Kylee-Anne Hingston notes, inclusion of disability scholarship does not always mean that professional conversations are accessible to participants with disabilities (“Victorian Bodies”). Thus,

307

Martha Stoddard Holmes

it is notable that much of the development of disability studies in the humanities occurred online and usually asynchronously. The development of the scholarship of a subfield and the development of practices that allow us to do the work of that field are inextricably, though often invisibly, linked. Many of us in the field met on the DS-HUM mailing list and digital community, launched through the initiative of Garland-Thomson in the early years of online academic communities (1998) and now sustaining over 1,000 members. Those virtual relationships persist decades later, to the extent that a particular name on a screen or screen reader can fairly hum with rosy warmth. The need for such access (like its availability) is uneven—and changes for each of us over time—but is nonetheless universal. Eventually, enough scholarship emerged to make entire conference panels on disability, and people writing calls for papers began to mention disabilities and disability studies in the “possible topics” sections. Individual essays, monographs, and collections were published, among them works articulating the crucial theoretical models for disability studies in the humanities. Lennard Davis’s Enforcing Normalcy (1995) and Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies (1997) were foundational works of lasting value. Davis historicizes disability as a problem created by nineteenth-century theories of normalcy and the (new) use of statistics as a method; “normalcy is constructed to create the ‘problem’ of the disabled person” (24). Garland-Thomson argues, similarly, that disability is “not so much a property of bodies as a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do” (6). Focusing on literary tropes and patterns, David T. Mitchell’s and Sharon L. Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2000) notes the pervasiveness of disabled characters in literary works, but they argue that these disabled characters are never used to promote explorations of actual experiences of disability. Instead, disability forms a “crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight” (49). These books not only produced useful theoretical tools but also created models of effective disability studies in the humanities, teaching readers to see disability representations in relation to lived experiences rather than as pure metaphors or supposedly essential truths (for example, that disability is essentially a tragedy). Alongside these important monographs, collections of essays on disability studies in the humanities appeared, some including Victorianist scholarship, such as Mitchell’s and Snyder’s The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (1997) and Snyder’s, Brueggemann’s, and Garland-Thomson’s Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (2002). The Disability Studies Reader (1997), edited by Lennard Davis, provided a crucial teaching text that has retained its importance both for the comprehensiveness of its content and for the fact that each edition—the fifth was published in 2016—includes new material reflecting the changing dimensions of the field. This development of disability studies in the humanities in the late 1990s built on the core concept of the social model of disability promoted (from the 1970s on) by sociologically based disability studies and activists. The social model explicitly opposed the dominant medical model, which considers disability an individual problem needing cure or rehabilitation to achieve normalcy. Shifting the focus from individual bodies to social and institutional environments with which disabled people interact, the social model analyzes the degree to which these environments, along with physical and cultural ones, are disabling and discriminatory. A later wave of disability studies, led in part by humanities scholars like Tobin Siebers, remarked on the potential invisibility of lived bodily experiences, including pain, in the social model. Disability scholarship has also struggled to engage fully with intellectual differences in a field dominated by physical disabilities. As the field developed, its scholarly work has become intersectional in nature, examining, for example, the co-construction of race and disability to incrementally marginalize disabled people of color, or the inherent queerness of disability as a social category (see Barker and Murray 7–8). Meanwhile, as Garland-Thomson explains, by the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century, scholars of disability “got jobs and tenure, and professional institutions such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the MLA incubated and incorporated disability studies.” Her 308

Disability Studies

useful description includes the hallmarks of the “emergence” of what she terms “critical disability studies”: publications, book series, and dedicated conferences. After her article appeared, the field also gained handbooks and Adams’s, Reiss’s, and Serlin’s important Keywords for Disability Studies (Field, 916). Today, a quarter-century after that conference I attended early in my career, Victorian disability studies has enough critical mass to invite and perhaps demand the process of stock-taking and critique. Just as disability studies was an excellent tool for making us question what we thought we knew about the Victorians, we now need to rethink what we think we know about how to do Victorian disability studies. Tracing recent waves of scholarship shows us where new scholars can perform innovative work on familiar texts. For whether we are reading or teaching J.M. Barrie, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Dickens, Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, or Anthony Trollope, disability is everywhere in Victorian literature and culture.

2. The State of Scholarship, 1994–2019 Victorian disability studies built on several decades of scholarship, from the 1970s on, that emphasized embodied conditions we now call “disability” in fields including the sensation novel, the Gothic, melodrama, children’s literature, and the domestic novel. Further, treated as a mark of hereditary decline and improper breeding, disability was central to degeneration theory, eugenics, and the creation of mutually reinforcing categories of social and physical pathology in which gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and class informed an algorithm of disease, criminality, and deviance. A rich, often Foucault-inflected landscape of Victorian studies of illness, disease, and the medicalized body included impressive work on madness, nerves, hysteria, pain, consumption, cholera, and more, as well as “health” broadly considered, as in Bruce Haley’s The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (1978) [on psychology, see Keen’s chapter; on brain science, see Stiles’s chapter]. Scholars focused on representations of clinical scenes and spaces, as well as on the larger picture of epidemics, public health, and social bodies, including those across the British empire. Works like Sander Gilman’s Difference and Pathology (1985) created powerful models for analyzing how social and medical discourses of embodied difference reinforced each other, while M. Jeanne Peterson’s The Medical Profession in Mid-Victorian London (1978) explored the professionalization of medicine. Three decades of scholarship on Victorian bodies, including the intersecting and mutually inflecting realms of age studies, women’s and gender studies, queer studies, postcolonial studies, and animal studies, set the stage for disability studies. One particularly complementary field is that of the medical humanities (now often termed health humanities), which includes literature, history, philosophy, and the arts, and sometimes the behavioral and social sciences, usually in the context of medical training and clinical practice: The humanities and arts provide insight into the human condition, suffering, personhood, our responsibility to each other, and offer a historical perspective on medical practice. . . . Attention to literature and the arts helps to develop and nurture skills of observation, analysis, empathy, and self-reflection—skills that are essential for humane medical care. (“Medical Humanities”) Medical schools near where I taught had libraries, academic authority, and sometimes funding to bring in humanities scholars. As a voluntary clinical professor teaching medical school electives, I brought disability into conversations about “reading, writing, and doctoring” with medical students and often staff. Yet scholars in disability studies and medical humanities were not always engaged in the same conversations, either virtually or in person at academic gatherings. 309

Martha Stoddard Holmes

One point of tension was the long shadow that the medical model casts over the lives of people with disabilities. As Lennard Davis articulates in Enforcing Normalcy, the nineteenth century was the period of the invention of “normalcy” (a term he ascribes to Francis Galton and dates around 1850), so that bodies that did not function, look, or work in the newly developed standard ways were increasingly pathologized. Turning to medicine at all, even with the critical lens of a cultural history of illness and medicine, was sometimes perceived as reinforcing the institutions of medicine that located disability in the body of a “patient” rather than in relationships between bodies and social, physical, and cultural environments. In Victorian studies, early work on disability in literature mirrored scholarly trajectories in women’s studies and ethnic studies: beginning with attention to the positive or negative tenor of images, it progressed to more nuanced analyses [on feminist readings, see Schaffer’s chapter]. Scholars noted striking moments of representation: the animalized portrayal of mad Bertha Rochester, the sexualization of Trollope’s Madeline Neroni, the hauling off of wooden-legged Silas Wegg in a cart, the courtroom appearance of the unusually handsome Miserrimus Dexter driving his wheelchair, with bulging torso, flowing hair, and silken robe, in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875). By the 1990s, scholarship moved beyond individual characters to consider representational patterns, asking what historical social conditions and concerns shaped disabled characters’ capacities, as fiction explored unresolved social questions using the tools of imaginative writing [on narrative theory, see Auyoung’s chapter]. Scholars interrogated the emotional registers assigned to disabled characters: innocence and pity (Tiny Tim, Bertha Plummer); anger and uneasiness (Rosa Dartle, Jenny Wren); or malignity and loathing (Quilp, Edward Hyde, Pew). Disability turned out to be neither solely marginal nor completely central; rather, disabled characters had specific functions in Victorian fiction. Courtship and work—those key elements of the marriage plot and the Bildungsroman—seemed to demand disabled characters, as did novels depicting family and domestic life, whether the tenor was sentimental, realistic, or sensational [on domestic life, see Gregory’s chapter]. And the presence of disability in both Gothic and social-problem novels is not surprising, given disabled people’s depiction as sometimes terrifying social problems [on Gothic fiction, see Luckhurst’s chapter; on social-problem novels, see Michie’s chapter]. Thus, an important goal of Victorian disability studies became not simply to point out how a figure like the much-analyzed Tiny Tim articulated notions of disability but also to anatomize and historicize how these compelling characterizations worked and how they contributed to a larger cultural production of disability and normalcy. At the same time, scholars noticed instances— some recurring in the works of authors like Collins, Dinah Mulock Craik, and Charlotte Mary Yonge—in which texts threw a wrench in the production of normalcy by overturning expectations of what disabled characters could be or do. Terminology was both a focus and a challenge: Victorians rarely used “the disabled” as a term to describe people with a range of physical and mental distinctions as a group. Rather, they might be classified as “those unable to work” in texts like Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1861–62). Language used to describe kinds of disablement included modifiers like “deaf and dumb,” “deformed,” or “defective” and nouns like “lunatic,” “dwarf,” “cripple,” or “idiot.” Scholars needed to situate their uses of such language explicitly and carefully, especially since some terms still circulate uncritically. The first (British) Victorian disability studies monographs were published by scholars who did not name the work they were doing as disability studies. Miriam Bailin’s The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill (1994) and Athena Vrettos’s Somatic Fictions (1995) engaged the cultural history of medicine and particularly its inflection by gender. Erin O’Connor’s Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture followed in 2000, analyzing pathology as a vehicle for a wide range of Victorian concerns. These monographs prepared the way for Maria Frawley’s Invalidism and Identity in NineteenthCentury Britain and my Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture, both published in 2004. While two data points hardly make a range, our books nicely sketch the diversity of the field. 310

Disability Studies

Frawley’s monograph is a richly researched history of a signature Victorian cultural formation that placed people with disabilities or chronic and serious illnesses in positions of cultural power and significance. Invalids’ intimates and carers, medical professionals who attended to them, spiritual traditions, newly designed appliances and fashions, and literary works in which “the invalid” was “a legitimate authorial identity” (17) are all part of Frawley’s research. Anchored to a range of primary texts and to some wonderful visuals of advertising, Invalidism and Identity continues to be a model for effective Victorian studies scholarship and effective cultural history of the body in health, illness, and disability, with significant attention to gender. Frawley’s focus on identity is crucially a focus on agency: in the context of limiting and painful embodied experiences and social constructions, people disabled by chronic illness chose and created rhetorical positions that afforded them power. Her book exemplifies the goal of incorporating the voices and experiences of disabled people in disability studies. My own book focuses on representations of blindness, deafness, and mobility impairments in Victorian literature, education, social work, life-writing, and philanthropy. I argue for the crucial role of melodrama in shaping Victorian understandings of disability by providing readers an emotional language to contain two key concerns about disabled men and women: in a nutshell, can he work?— and should she marry? Victorian texts often inscribed restrictive norms, but in some cases, broke with them. Fiction by Collins, Craik, and Yonge depicted disabled women as desiring and desirable and allowed them the heteronormative happy ending of marriage and motherhood. Both Frawley and I engage many literary works, some by the same authors, but where Frawley focuses on Robert Louis Stevenson (for example) as an invalid author, I reference him as a maker of disabled characters. Frawley and I both analyze life-writing and meet, as it were, in Harriet Martineau, on whom Frawley is an expert. While Frawley traces variants on one figure across multiple locations, her study’s deep focus is contrasted by my survey of variations on two emotion-laden tropes (the innocent disabled child and the begging impostor) around which attitudes and representations seem to cluster. Although libraries catalog us both in Victorian literature/disability, our divergent approaches signal the continuing diversity of Victorian disability studies from that point forward. Victorian authors who engage disability in multiple texts have understandably generated the most scholarship. Julia Miele Rodas’s important attention to Dickens’s use of disability was followed by Paul Marchbanks’s fine three-part study of intellectual disability in Dickens’s works. A disability focus increased critical attention to Dickens’s less-discussed fiction, such as “The Cricket on the Hearth” (1845) and “Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions” (1865). Disability-focused analyses have generated a remarkable renaissance of interest in Craik and Yonge, two immensely popular authors often belittled by critics in their own time and ignored in ours. Both writers included disability in their novels not as a source of sensation but as part of the community fabric of ordinary life. These anti-sensational representations retrain the modern reader’s expectations about disability and genre. Research on disabled characters in specific relation to melodrama, sensation, and the Gothic has been generative indeed. While much of my work focuses on melodramatic representations of disability in Victorian theatre, fiction, and nonfiction, Mark Mossman and I discuss disability’s centrality to the sensation novel (building on work by D.A. Miller, Ann Cvetkovitch, and others on the bodily and affective aspects of sensation fiction) [on theater, see Weltman’s chapter; on sensation fiction, see Gilbert’s chapter]. Heidi Logan’s monograph Sensational Deviance (2018) focuses entirely on disability and sensation in the works of Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, observing not only contextualizations in science and medicine but also inclusive attitudes toward disability. Gothic literature, from its earliest iterations at the turn of the eighteenth century, features extraordinary bodies and conditions (shapeshifting Geraldine in Coleridge’s “Christabel”; lycanthropy; vampirism) referencing the characteristics of disablement and chronic illness. Foundational studies on Gothic bodies by Kelly Hurley and David Punter were joined by Ruth Bienstock Anolik’s edited collection Demons of the Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature (2014), which features several essays on Victorian literature, including some we might expect and others—like Middlemarch—we might not. 311

Martha Stoddard Holmes

Freak studies is another important thread of scholarship. Marlene Tromp’s important edited collection Victorian Freaks (2008) was followed in 2009 by Nadja Durbach’s historicist Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture and Lillian Craton’s The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Physical Differences in 19th-Century Fiction, a monograph that both extends the scholarship represented in Tromp’s collection and draws on the fat studies scholarship of Joyce L. Huff and others. The development of freak studies has explored representations, contexts, questions of agency, and material culture (including Huff ’s wonderful study of Daniel Lambert, “King of the Fat Men”), as well as the freak show as an occasion for public explorations of embodied social differences. Blindness and deafness have dominated studies of Victorian disabilities, including Elisabeth Gitter’s essays on Dickens and Kate Flint’s The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (2000). Scholars like Vanessa Warne and Heather Tilley articulate a growing field of nineteenth-century blindness studies that engages larger realms of reading, writing, literacy, and aesthetics. Scholarship that treats vision itself as a historically shaped concept has dramatic implications for the cultural position of blindness. Other exciting synergies that have emerged in “sensorium studies” are evident in Jennifer Esmail’s phenomenal Reading Victorian Deafness (2013), which converses with Victorianist work on soundscapes, poetics, and prosody. Patrick McDonagh’s Idiocy (2008) complements David Wright’s historicist analysis of the Earlswood Asylum (2001) by providing a broader view of literary representations of intellectual disability contextualized across Victorian culture. Some studies build on theories of gender and sexuality. Karen Bourrier’s The Measure of Manliness (2015), for example, engages mobility, health, and masculinity in entirely new ways. Pointing out that, in Victorian fiction, the manly titan of industry was often paired with a sensitive disabled man, Bourrier unpacks the way disability permitted both homoerotic tenderness and emotional articulation in an era when masculine norms often precluded such behavior. Similarly, Elizabeth Donaldson’s work in mad studies builds not only on the scholarship of hysteria, shattered nerves, and the discourse of Victorian psychology but also on foundational work in feminist and gender studies, including feminist science studies, to stress the costs of using madness metaphorically.

3. New Currents A few particularly interesting current examples of disability scholarship bring important conversations of the present moment into the study of the past, transforming both in the process. Studies of care, of the family and marriage, and of disability aesthetics and prosthetics exemplify the future of Victorian disability studies: a shift from how disability was made (culturally constructed, including material as well as discursive elements) to disabled people as makers of culture, and possibly a remaking of the discipline itself. The work I have been discussing, produced from 1994 to the present, might be considered the first two waves of Victorian disability studies, focusing on the representation and production of disability. I would argue that we have been anchored by a habit of thinking of disability as a discursive category produced by various clinical, philanthropic, and social practices. Victorian disability was literally manufactured as a widespread condition by industrialization and dangerous workplaces, as well as made into a category of invalidism by medical treatments for conditions that in the past had been fatal. Theater, fiction, and poetry reinforced and revised disability as a convention. The first wave of scholarship explored patterns in disabled characterization; the second saw disability as a by-product of Victorian culture that defined, from the margins, coalescing concepts of normalcy; it began to examine the production of disability identities, including those articulated by disabled people on their own behalf. The next wave will, I hope, move us into thinking about how disability itself produced and shaped Victorian culture. Care, for example, is an increasingly energized topic in health humanities as well as feminist philosophy and bioethics; it has long been a critical focus for disability studies. How we theorize—or 312

Disability Studies

even name—acts of caring reveals assumptions about what care is, who is empowered to “give” it, and what power accrues to someone who “receives” it. The term “caregiver” can imply that care flows in one direction, from an empowered agent to a disempowered recipient; histories of oppression and abuse in “care” contexts undeniably freight the phrase with implications of inequality or worse. The sometimes-preferred term “personal assistant” returns agency to the person who directs the provision of care. “Access workers” is another. Louise Hickman suggests the phrase “intimate colleagues” as a way to make visible, as collaborations among partners, the relationships between disabled people and those who assist them. Inter/dependency is a core issue for such debates. By exploring Victorian care, disability studies scholars Christopher Gabbard, Rachel Herzl-Betz, Paul Marchbanks, Talia Schaffer, Kristin Starkowski, and Tamara Wagner have been able to historicize, explicate, problematize, and expand twenty-firstcentury theories and practices. Important examples include Gabbard’s analysis of Jane Eyre, which contrasts Rochester’s “custodial care” for Bertha with Jane’s “caring labor” for Rochester. Gabbard grounds this account in contemporary British institutional reforms. Marchbanks analyzes models of care in works by all three Brontë sisters, noting Jane’s observation of Rochester’s caregiving and marital practices. Care theory has helped foster scholars’ new interest in writers like Yonge, given her relevance to writing about disability, gender, interdependency, and care. Yonge articulates community relationships as “networks of care” and disability as a pervasive and relatively normal aspect of domestic life (Wagner 114). Wagner and I have noted that care is “mutual and dispersed across an ensemble cast rather than focused on saintly, capable givers and afflicted, dependent recipients” (“Introduction,” forthcoming). Schaffer illuminates the relational dynamics represented in Victorian novels by drawing on feminist care ethics and work on notions of interdependency, bringing contemporary feminist philosophy into conversation with representations of “care communities” in Victorian literature and culture. Meanwhile, Starkowski reexamines “selfish” and “reciprocal” care in nineteenth-century domestic fiction, troubling the assumption that self-serving care is inherently a failure (2017). Even more provocatively, Hertzl-Betz critiques conventional notions of care as “gentle and generous.” She argues, through Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875), that non-normative relationships (then and now) “complicate assumptions about acts of care in scholarship on disability and interdependence” (35). Queer studies, with its synthesis of theory and activism, has become a crucial model for disability studies, and scholars like Robert McRuer, Alison Kafer, and Eunjung Kim have explored their intersection [on queer studies, see Dau’s chapter]. In Victorian studies, scholars have been queering the marriage plot. Schaffer’s concept of “familiar marriage” includes disability marriage, a literary convention in which a lonely woman finds a disabled male partner who can provide the tenderness and social networks that she has lacked. Disability is a positive trait here, ushering the man into a gentler kind of relationship. Clare Walker Gore also discusses the queering of Victorian families, noting that, while “disabled characters are generally excluded from the marriage plot because of the authors’ unwillingness to write disability into reproductive heterosexual unions, they are not necessarily excluded from the families” (117). Disability makes a different ideal of romantic love. It is heterosexual but not necessarily heteronormative, as it is “antithetical to reproductive heterosexuality and . . . thrives off disability” (Gore 127). Mia Chen argues, similarly, that in Yonge’s fiction, disabled characters are responsible for “social reproduction and ideological inculcation, for a form of reproduction which supplements and even corrects the biological reproduction of the non-disabled women” of the novel. Further, while the 1851 census defines the family in predictable ways as a “social unit . . . composed of husband, wife, children, and, ideally, servants,” it also notes the presence of families “‘variously constituted’” (Dau and Preston 6). Jill Ehnenn analyzes how disability and queerness, in novels by Lucas Malet and Hardy, undercut the progressive Bildungsroman’s emphasis on compulsory heterosexuality and able-bodiedness. A third new area in Victorian disability studies is the emphasis on aesthetic categories and technological prosthetics. Certainly nineteenth-century aesthetics included ableist assumptions like John 313

Martha Stoddard Holmes

Ruskin’s argument in “Fiction Fair and Foul” (1880) that sick authors created disabled characters. “Ugly laws” prohibiting the public appearance of people with some visible disabilities enforced a particular social aesthetic of regularity, notwithstanding Gerard Manley Hopkins’s celebration of “all things counter, original, spare, strange.” Scholarship by Heather Tilley, however, has illuminated how technologies of tactile reading developed by and for blind people informed an entire area of Victorian culture. Similarly, as Esmail shows, the category of deafness produced a broader interest in what it meant to hear words and to write words, how language operated (signing was thought to be an originary language), and the meanings of rhythm and rhyme in the context of works by deaf poets. In a recent essay on dysfluencies, Daniel Martin notes that while the nineteenth century developed regimes of speech normalcy and correction that created a cultural identity of the stutterer as melancholic and mockable, stuttering also made “a limit-point for critical engagement with modernity’s economic, cultural, and aesthetic rhythms” (forthcoming). This disruption and critique of cultural norms for speech rhythms was another form of “making.” Technologies of accommodation are another area in which disability produced Victorian culture. Recent scholarship by Bourrier, Warne, and Ryan Sweet has moved away from prosthesis as metaphor to the actual prosthetic objects that Victorians used. Sweet notes that using prosthesis as a metaphor can overshadow the lived experiences of prosthetics users, suggesting the need for research that returns to the materiality of prosthetics while also exploring the cultural discourse of wholeness (a focus of Haley’s and O’Connor’s prior scholarship). In considering the field of prosthetics as a location in which disability shaped culture, we might also identify the places where prosthetics are a product of collaborative work that included the expertise of disabled people. Disability, with functions other than narrative prosthesis, also produced changes in Victorian literary forms [on literary forms, see Greiner’s chapter]. Hingston’s formalist study of Victorian narratives articulates how changing ideas about disability—from spectacle to specimen, as she phrases it—shaped textual and aesthetic changes, specifically those involving focalization or narrative location. Clare Walker Gore’s analysis of plotting found that, rather than being curtailed by expectations of disabled people’s limitations, disability enabled novelistic explorations; it was “used to test the possibilities and limitations of the marriage plot, to explore questions of social and narrative justice, and to probe the connection between embodiment and identity” (forthcoming). While it is not exclusively Victorian in scope, Rodas’s new book Autistic Disturbances (2018) explores mental difference as a central aesthetic mode for the novel. This research shows disability not as a deficit, but as a rich and significant catalyst to Victorian aesthetic inquiries and innovations.

4. Future Directions in Victorian Disability Studies This new work mentioned in the previous section illustrates the ways in which Victorian disability scholarship is already remaking itself through studies that unfold the material, textual, familial, and aesthetic complexities of Victorian culture. However, following Michael Bradshaw’s groundbreaking Disabling Romanticism, we need not only to ask what it means to do Victorian studies with a disability sensibility but also to investigate where the very assumptions of Victorianism have interfered with our work. One recent critique posits that “disability” tends to presume structural privileges that are isolated in the global North and among white, educated, socioeconomically privileged people; Julie Avril Minich notes that the field has “persistent difficulty in addressing questions of race” (3). Jasbir Puar notes that, taken in global contexts, particularly the global South, the random experience of disablement is contrasted by the purposeful one of debilitation. The thriving of the academic field of disability studies thus contrasts sharply with the situation of most debilitated people, to whom it is not actively accountable. But debility is also problematic. As Janet Lyon argued in a 2019 MLA presentation, the concept is grounded in an economic system that already excludes people with intellectual disabilities and is ahistorical in its framing; debility is thus a limited concept when applied to 314

Disability Studies

differences associated with the mind. Indeed, one of the most active conversations in disability studies in the humanities today is how to move beyond an historical emphasis on physical disabilities (and particularly on sensory and mobility differences), because this work tends to bypass mental differences, treating them as afterthoughts or assuming they are “covered” when the theories actually erase them (see work by Michael Bérubé and James Berger). Mad studies scholar Margaret Price’s term “bodymind” can be a useful way to keep both orientations present and articulate how “mental and physical processes not only affect each other but also give rise to each other”; body and mind are not added to each other, but enmeshed, in “bodymind” (269). Perhaps the deepest answer is to reframe the field itself. Minich offers the promising idea of “recognizing disability studies as a methodology rather than a subject,” aiming to dislodge “disability studies” from being applied to all work that engages disability as subject matter, including scholarship that “objectifies disability; places it under the medical gaze; pathologizes it; deploys it as a device of characterization; or uncritically treats it as a metaphor for decay, decline, and/or failure” (3). At the same time, a focus on methodology would allow the recognition and inclusion of work that contributes meaningfully to the “archive of disability studies,” even if it has not been labeled as such. As Rodas noted in an important review essay, not all work with tremendous relevance to disability sees itself as doing disability studies or is cataloged as such (“Mainstreaming” 380). This work might include early work like Bailin’s and Vrettos’s, which may or may not have located itself within disability studies, if disability studies was then a readily available scholarly location. Not all scholars who study such subjects as blindness, deafness, mobility impairments, chronic illnesses, consumption, corpulence, epilepsy, freakery, hysteria, “idiocy,” infertility, lunacy, madness, stuttering, and other related topics in Victorian culture consider themselves to be “doing” disability studies (see, for instance, Gilbert). Alex Tankard’s recent book on tuberculosis in nineteenth-century British literature explicitly positions itself as a study of “disabled lives,” arguing that consumption produced more incidences of disability than the sensory and mobility impairments on which Victorian disability studies has focused. But other analyses of illness often retain the frame of social history of medicine, demonstrating the complicated relationship between disability studies and health humanities. From one perspective, we are all working on the dynamic, complicated social and representational body we all share. From another, we are radically at odds in the sensibility we bring to the study of that body. For those of us who operate in many body studies contexts, especially if we have shifted in and out of disability identities ourselves, the situation can be confusing. Victorian disability studies is now established to the extent that we can engage all these questions, reimagine the field without fear of its disappearance, and acknowledge the immense differences among embodied conditions sometimes classified as disabilities. As I have noted, disability studies has become capacious enough to accommodate subfields on blindness, deafness, cognitive differences, care, aesthetics, and prosthetics. There may also be more room for scholars not to situate themselves as disability studies scholars, while contributing immensely to the field. Volume 5 of the Cultural History of Disability, The Long Nineteenth Century (coedited by Joyce Huff and me) showcases the work of scholars in disability studies, mad studies, disfluency studies, history of medicine, and the history of deafness. Literatures of Madness includes essays from multiple entry points, including feminism, graphic narrative, mad studies, health humanities, and disability studies; Donaldson frames the collection as “a provisional hub or way station: a point at which to meet together collectively, to commune, build on synergies, and honor differences, before continuing on the longer journeys forward” (3). I want to end, however, by pointing out that the naming of disability is still important. Disability enters all lives at some point, and that entrance may be what shifts its cognitive location from margins to center in our work as well. For scholars who already identify as disabled, it is important to communicate that this is a field in which they are welcome—not as objects of study, but as agents of analysis and change. Likewise, Victorian body studies should not subsume Victorian disability studies, but 315

Martha Stoddard Holmes

continue to tag and sign scholarship both in terms of content (disability) and, as appropriate, in terms of its theoretical and political anchors (disability studies), to continue and widen access where it is so clearly needed. It is needed, indeed, in Victorian studies. In 2004, I compiled a list of over 80 fictional characters with physical disabilities in canonical British literature alone (Fictions 197–9). Victorian literature is a literature of disability, and disability already is (or will be) part of our lives or the lives of those we love. Reading specifically for disability—no matter what we call the field, no matter how we do it—has the capacity to benefit us as much as it enhances our field.

Note 1 This history is very much a personal one, shaped among other things by the fact that for much of my professional life as a disability studies scholar, I have appeared as, been treated as, and experienced myself as primarily non-disabled while living in a disabled family. Ovarian cancer and cataracts have provocatively disabled my cultural and academic location, though I do not always “show up” as disabled and have experienced far less of the precarity of most disabled people even in the academy.

Key Critical Works David Bolt, Julia Miele Rodas, and Elizabeth J. Donaldson, editors. The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability. Karen Bourrier, The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel. Lennard Davis. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. Jennifer Esmail. Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture. Maria H. Frawley. Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Martha Stoddard Holmes. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. David T. Mitchell, and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Tobin Siebers. Disability Theory. Rosemarie Garland Thomson. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Marlene Tromp, editor. Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain.

Works Cited Adams, Rachel, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin, editors. Keywords for Disability Studies. New York UP, 2015. Anolik, Ruth Bienstock, editor. Demons of the Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature. McFarland, 2010. Bailin, Miriam. The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill. Cambridge UP, 2004. Barker, Clare, and Stuart Murray, editors. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability. Cambridge UP, 2018. Bérubé, Michael. The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter: How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read. New York UP, 2016. Berger, James. The Disarticulate: Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity. New York UP, 2014. Bolt, David, Julia Miele Rodas, and Elizabeth J. Donaldson, editors. The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability. Ohio State UP, 2012. Bourrier, Karen. The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel. U of Michigan P, 2015. Bradshaw, Michael, editor. Disabling Romanticism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Chen, Mia. ‘“And There Was No Helping It’: Disability and Social Reproduction in Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 2008. http://ncgsjournal.com/issue42/chen.htm. Craton, Lillian. The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Physical Differences in 19th Century Fiction. Cambria, 2009. Dau, Duc, and Shale Preston, editors. Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature. Routledge, 2015. Davis, Lennard, editor. The Disability Studies Reader, 5th ed. Taylor and Francis, 2016. ———. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. Verso, 1995. Donaldson, Elizabeth, editor. Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Durbach, Nadja. Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture. U of California P, 2009.

316

Disability Studies Ehnenn, Jill. “Reorienting the Bildungsroman: Progress Narratives, Queerness, and Disability in The History of Sir Richard Calmady and Jude the Obscure.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, 2017, pp. 151–68. Esmail, Jennifer. Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture. Ohio State UP, 2013. Flint, Kate. The Victorians and the Visual Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2000. Frawley, Maria H. Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain. U of Chicago P, 2004. Gabbard, Christopher. “From Custodial Care to Caring Labor: The Discourse of Who Cares in Jane Eyre.” David Bolt, et al., pp. 91–110. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie (see also Thomson, Rosemarie Garland). “Disability Studies: A Field Emerged.” American Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 4, 2013, pp. 915–19. Gilbert, Pamela. Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History. Cornell UP, 2019. Gilman, Sander L. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness. Cornell UP, 1985. Gitter, Elisabeth A. “The Blind Daughter in Charles Dickens’s ‘Cricket on the Hearth’.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, vol. 39, no. 4, Autumn 1999, pp. 675–89. ———. “Deaf-Mutes and Heroines in the Victorian Era.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 20, 1992, pp. 179–96. Gore, Clare Walker. Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Edinburgh UP, forthcoming, 2020. Haley, Bruce. The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture. Harvard UP, 1978. Herzl-Betz, Rachel. “A Painfully ‘Nice’ Family: Reconstructing Interdependence in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 2015, pp. 35–51. Hickman, Louise. Access Workers, Transcription Machines, and Other Intimate Colleagues: Disability, Technology and Labor Practices in the Production of Knowledge (1956-Present). Doctoral dissertation. U of California, San Diego, 2018. Hingston, Kylee-Anne. Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction. Liverpool UP, 2019. ———. “Victorian Bodies and Disability’s Centrality to Victorian Scholarship.” The Floating Academy, 20 May 2015. https://floatingacademy.wordpress.com/2015/05/20/victorian-bodies-and-disabilitys-centrality-tovictorian-scholarship/. Holmes, Martha Stoddard. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. U of Michigan P, 2004. ———. “Intellectual Disability.” Victorian Review, vol. 40, no. 1, Spring 2014, pp. 9–14. ———. “Victorian Fictions of Interdependency: Gaskell, Craik, and Yonge.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 2007, pp. 29–41. Huff, Joyce L. “Freaklore: The Dissemination, Fragmentation, and Reinvention of the Legend of Daniel Lambert, King of Fat Men.” Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain, edited by Marlene Tromp, Ohio State UP, 2008, pp. 37–59. Huff, Joyce L., and Martha Stoddard Holmes, editors. A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Nineteenth Century. Bloomsbury, 2019. Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin De Siècle. Cambridge UP, 1996. Kafer, Alison, and Eunjung Kim. “Disability and the Edges of Intersectionality.” The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability, edited by Clare Barker and Stuart Murray, Cambridge UP, pp. 123–38. Logan, Heidi. Sensational Deviance: Disability in Nineteenth-Century Sensation Fiction. Routledge, 2018. Lyon, Janet. “Modernism, Debility, and Intellectual Disability.” Conference paper. Modern Language Association conference, 9–11 January, 2019. Marchbanks, Paul. “A Costly Morality: Dependency Care and Mental Difference in the Novels of the Brontë Sisters.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2010, pp. 55–71. ———. “From Caricature to Character: The Intellectually Disabled in Dickens’s Novels.” Dickens Quarterly, vol. 23, nos. 1–3, 2006, pp. 3–14, 67–84, 169–80. Martin, Daniel. “Speech.” A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Nineteenth Century. Bloomsbury. McDonagh, Patrick. Idiocy: A Cultural History. Liverpool UP, 2009. McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York UP, 2006. “Medical Humanities.” Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database. http://medhum.med.nyu.edu/about. Minich, Julie Avril. “Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now.” Lateral, vol. 5, no. 1, Spring 2016. http://csalateral.org/issue/5-1/forum-alt-humanities-critical-disability-studies-now-minich/. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder, editors. The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability. U of Michigan P, 1997. ———. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. U of Michigan P, 2001. Mossman, Mark, and Martha Stoddard Holmes. “Disability in Victorian Sensation Fiction.” Blackwell Companion to Sensation Fiction, edited by Pamela Gilbert, Blackwell, 2011, pp. 493–506.

317

Martha Stoddard Holmes ———, editors. Critical Transformations: Disability and the Body in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Special Issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 2008. O’Connor, Erin. Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture. Duke UP, 2000. Peterson, M. Jeanne. The Medical Profession in Mid-Victorian London. U of California P, 1978. Price, Margaret. “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain.” Hypatia, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 268–84. Puar, Jasbir. The Right to Maim. Duke UP, 2017. Punter, David. “‘A Foot Is What Fits the Shoe’: Disability, the Gothic and Prosthesis.” Gothic Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 2000, pp. 39–49. Rodas, Julia Miele. Autistic Disturbances. U of Michigan P, 2018. ———. “Mainstreaming Disability Studies?” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 34, no. 1, 2006, pp. 371–84. ———. “Tiny Tim, Blind Bertha, and the Resistance of Miss Mowcher: Charles Dickens and the Uses of Disability.” Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 34, 2004, pp. 51–97. Schaffer, Talia. “Disabling Marriage: Communities of Care in Our Mutual Friend.” Replotting Marriage in NineteenthCentury British Literature, edited by Jill Galvan and Elsie Michie, Ohio State UP, 2018, pp. 192–210. ———. Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction. Oxford UP, 2016. Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980. Pantheon, 1985. Shuttleworth, Sally. Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology. Cambridge UP, 1996. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. U of Michigan P, 2008. Snyder, Sharon L., Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson, editors. Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. MLA, 2002. Starkowkski, Kristin H. “Curious Prescriptions: Selfish Care in Victorian Fictions of Disability.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 461–76. https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2017.35. Sweet, Ryan. Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming. Tankard, Alex. Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Invalid Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland (see also Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie). Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Columbia UP, 1997. Tilley, Heather. Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing. Cambridge UP, 2017. Tromp, Marlene, editor. Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain. Ohio State UP, 2008. Vrettos, Athena. Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture. Stanford UP, 1995. Wagner, Tamara. “Home Work: The Ambiguous Valorization of ‘Affliction’ in Charlotte Yonge’s The Pillars of the House.” Victorian Review, vol. 35, no. 2, Fall 2009, pp. 101–15. Warne, Vanessa. “‘To Invest a Cripple with Peculiar Interest’: Artificial Legs and Upper-Class Amputees at MidCentury.” Victorian Review, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009, pp. 83–100. Wright, David. Mental Disability in Victorian England: The Earlswood Asylum, 1847–1901. Oxford UP, 2001.

318

28 THE CONCEPT OF CLASS IN VICTORIAN STUDIES Carolyn Betensky

Scholars working in the field of Victorian studies engage with questions of class all the time, whether they do so deliberately or not. It is probably safe to say that there is no aspect of Victorian literature, as in other domains of Victorian culture, which was not conditioned to some degree by social class. It is also true that there are few elements of the class system in Victorian Britain that were not addressed by literary interventions. Yet despite the importance of class for Victorians (and hence for Victorianists), the category “class” as a vector of analysis seems to have slipped out of the spotlight. Considered from a broader perspective, however, class critique is alive and well—in studies of working-class literature, domesticity, gender, and the family, as well as in work on professionalism and ritual behaviors. If class is not an exclusive or primary focus in the literary and cultural projects we see today, it is because it has generally been interpolated into other intersecting modes of analysis. Viewed in this way, class remains a vital concern in the field.

1. Defining Class Getting a handle on the way social class functions is essential if we want to make sense of political, social, and cultural formations in the nineteenth century, but following the class dynamics in Victorian literature can be daunting. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853), for instance, we meet a circle of small-town women of varying degrees of gentility who are put in a bind when they learn that a noblewoman, Lady Glenmire, is to marry a common doctor, Mr. Hoggins. This news sends them into a general panic: We looked into the darkness of futurity as a child gazes after a rocket up in the cloudy sky, full of wondering expectation of the rattle, the discharge, and the brilliant shower of sparks and light. Then we brought ourselves down to earth and the present time, by questioning each other (being all equally ignorant, and all equally without the slightest data to build any conclusions upon) as to when IT would take place? Where? How much a year Mr. Hoggins had? Whether she would drop her title? And how Martha and the other correct servants in Cranford would ever be brought to announce a married couple as Lady Glenmire and Mr. Hoggins? But would they be visited? Would Mrs. Jamieson let us? Or must we choose between the Honourable Mrs. Jamieson and the degraded Lady Glenmire? (115)

319

Carolyn Betensky

Reading this passage, it is easy to become as confused as these characters about what the prospective behaviors mean and what is at stake. This is because the rules governing class distinctions seem designed to be at once self-explanatory and opaque. While it is possible to figure out, in general terms, the classes to which characters and authors belong, the protean relationships class encodes exceed attempts at simple definition. Scholars often speak of the upper, middle, and working—or increasingly, according to Brian Maidment, “labouring” (416)—classes, but these categories occlude the differences between and similarities across significantly discrete strata among their members—say, between skilled artisans and factory workers, who could all be considered to belong to the working classes. The “middle classes” do not form a monolithic category, either; Lauren Goodlad has suggested that the term misleadingly conflates the class of capitalist profiteers with the class of professionals who laid the groundwork for the welfare state (144). A classical Marxist scholar might find, after the Industrial Revolution, distinctions between upper and middle classes less relevant than the opposition between the working and middle classes. In Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams tracks the slippage in “class” back to a complex history in which ranks, groupings, and formations were conflated (61–69). David Cannadine, on the other hand, has written that three separate classifying schemes operated (and continue to operate) concurrently: a hierarchical scheme that gauged social position according to minute gradations of relative prestige; a tripartite model that funneled subjects into categories of the upper, middle, or lower classes; and variations on the oppositional model of “us” versus “them” (20). If class were just an economic designation, it would be relatively easy to assess what it meant: we could say that anyone clearing a certain income threshold, for instance, was definitively middle-class. However, class in Victorian Britain depended not only on economic status, but also at least as much on how one came about one’s wealth or earned one’s living and whether one had to earn one’s living (or, for women, how and whether the man one lived with—such as one’s father or husband—earned a living). The “gentle-born” were never regarded in the same way as the sons or daughters of a millworker, no matter how poor the aristocrat or member of the gentry became or how much money the child of a laborer ended up with. Yet as the middle classes grew richer and more powerful through the nineteenth century, their wealth did win them entry into the most prestigious domains of British culture and politics. For the middle classes, the “accidents of position,” to borrow a phrase from Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845), meant to express the randomness of the social and economic circumstances into which one was born, were not fatal—but for the working classes, they could be, quite literally. Even the ways that class as a concept functioned were unequal, depending where on the spectrum of social position one was. For E.P. Thompson, “[C]lass is a relationship, and not a thing” (11). In his preface to The Making of the English Working Class, he is careful to explain that class is a phenomenon that comes into being contingently and historically. “Class happens,” as he puts it, “when some men [sic], as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs” (9). Much like race, as contemporary critics understand it, class does not exist other than as a social construct but, in spite of its constructedness, class is—also like race—a lived, historical reality [on race, see Tucker’s chapter]. A relational approach to understanding the way social class functions in Victorian literature might incorporate historical data on contemporaneous economic and cultural conditions, but it might also incorporate knowledges of a different kind, such as those described by Turkish-American writer Elif Batuman. Upon encountering numerous racist references to Turks in canonical Victorian novels, she developed a way of interpreting them as a young reader that enabled her to insulate herself from their hurtfulness. While she eventually came to think differently about the demands these novels imposed on her, she learned early on to become their intended reader: 320

The Concept of Class in Victorian Studies

To feel personally insulted when reading old books struck me as provincial, against the spirit of literature. For the purposes of reading an English novel from 1830, I thought, you had to be an upper-class white guy from 1830. You had to be a privileged person, because books always were written by and for privileged people. What Batuman means when she says that she had to be this guy from 1830 is not, of course, that she felt she had to assume any of his attributes or ideological positions in any permanent fashion, beyond her immediate experience of the novel she was reading. Rather, she is suggesting that she had intuited from reading nineteenth-century novels that a literary text was intelligible (and palatable) only from a particular subject position. Batuman had figured out that the books she wanted to read came with an unspoken key, a set of implicit and seemingly self-evident assumptions concerning social and racial hierarchies she would have to adopt—temporarily, strategically—in order to understand them. She had acquired what Pierre Bourdieu, in The Logic of Practice, calls “practical sense,” a “feel for the game,” a deep sense of the way things worked, derived from her experience of reading the literature itself. Batuman’s immersion into Victorian novels enabled her to understand what they were really asking of her. At the same time, it was her awareness of her twenty-first-century self in relationship to the novels that allowed her to contrive empathy long enough to diagnose their configurations of class and race.

2. “Victorian Literature” and Social Class For much of the twentieth century, the classed subject position intuited by Batuman—the position of relative privilege—was widely taken to be characteristic of “Victorian Literature.” Certainly, middleand upper-class Victorians wrote important and persuasive texts that protested the crushing and dehumanizing conditions under which working-class Britons lived, but they were written from—and appealed to—the perspective of an observer situated in a relatively comfortable class. Canonical “Victorian Literature” was, essentially, literature by middle- and upper-class white men and some women, even though, according to Florence Boos’s calculations, some 80% of British Victorians belonged to the working classes (2). Indeed, for some scholars, canonical literature is still what “Victorian Literature” means. Since the 1970s, however, the field has begun to recognize literature by working-class and popular authors. From the 1980s or so onward, Victorian studies has also become keenly interested in the production of the very subject position that had for so long gone unmarked: namely, the cluster of dispositions known as a middle-class Victorian ideology. Given that for so long the dominant focus in Victorian literary scholarship was on texts by and for the middle and upper classes, it should come as no surprise that the literary works explicitly about social class and class conflict that twentieth-century critics have most written about should be by middle- and upper-class authors. While scholars have certainly devoted attention to the work of class in novels published later in the century by such authors as George Gissing and Thomas Hardy, the most abundant and foundational twentieth-century criticism treating class in the Victorian era tended to focus on these mid-nineteenth-century novels. Significantly, this criticism also favored novels over other genres [on the novel, see Michie’s chapter]. The subgenre of the Victorian novel known as the Condition-of-England novel (also as the social-problem novel, the industrial novel, or the factory novel) is generally thought to consist of a fairly stable list of texts by authors who were not themselves members of the working classes. These novels appeared roughly in the middle third of the nineteenth century and often took for their themes some of the same problems Chartist writers were addressing; titles include Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837) and Hard Times (1854), Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845), George Eliot’s Felix Holt the Radical (1862), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850), and Frances Trollope’s The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, Factory Boy (1840). Scholars have actively and fruitfully debated 321

Carolyn Betensky

the often-ambivalent political positions these novels take on: questions such as the right of workers to organize, strike, vote, receive monetary aid, and be paid decent wages. Some of the most insightful scholars working on the subgenre—including Jonathan Arac (Commissioned Spirits), Rosemarie Bodenheimer (The Politics of Story in British Social Fiction), Patrick Brantlinger (The Spirit of Reform), Catherine Gallagher (The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction), and Raymond Williams (Culture and Society: 1780–1950)—are fully aware that they are writing about relatively well-off authors’ perceptions of physical and psychic pain that primarily afflicted others. Such scholars are under no illusion that we are gaining access to the experience of working-class Victorians through our readings of novels that thematize their abjection. However, by giving voice only or primarily to the largely middle-class pool of authors whose earnest interventions make up the subgenre, this scholarship may (inadvertently) give readers the impression that, for example, Gaskell was justified in her assessment in her preface to Mary Barton that the working classes were a “dumb people,” with no voice of their own (38). Some recent scholarship has attempted to correct the absence of working-class perspectives, especially in works of “Victorian literature” (i.e., middle-class Victorian literature) concerned with class conflict and Chartist agitation, by studying Chartist texts alongside more canonical fiction. In some cases, scholars have challenged the very classification of “social-problem novels,” while others have questioned the idea that these different novels even belong together. Two recent studies have made opposing cases for recuperating these novels from the constraints of their categories: one takes the novels’ activist intent off the table, and the other maintains that we have underappreciated their radically democratic agendas because we have been evaluating the novels through their political, instead of genealogical, plots. Both studies, by Chris Vanden Bossche and Isobel Armstrong, respectively, restore a broader context to the consideration of class conflict by including novels by working-class authors. Vanden Bossche, whose Reform Acts studies discourses of agency that emerged from Chartist struggles for the franchise, prefers to classify the novels he studies as “Chartist” or “political” novels, as opposed to “social-problem” novels (4–5). The way he assembles his archive allows him to read fiction by Chartists alongside novels by middle-class reformists, although his emphasis on reading these novels for their explicit negotiations of political agency means that he excludes considerations of what is at stake in the social and economic divisions of class. Vanden Bossche echoes an earlier challenge from Josephine Guy to the “social-problem novel” nomenclature. Guy argues that none of the novels so designated actually aim to resolve the problems the category itself disposes us to think they intend to resolve, and thus it is unfair to judge them as failed efforts (10). In Novel Politics, on the other hand, Armstrong holds that the designation “political novel” keeps a novel like Felix Holt from getting the appreciation it merits for the radical potential it embodies in its undermining of legitimacy (7–26). While Armstrong favors the term “Condition-of-England Novel,” she, like Vanden Bossche, includes in her study of the democratic imagination novels written by working-class authors that do not promote “middle-class” values. By putting reformist texts by and for the middle classes in the company of those by laboringclass authors, Vanden Bossche and Armstrong remove them from their hall-of-mirrors focus on middle-class concerns and stress what they have in common with working-class purposes. This is both a strength and a liability in these studies, as a primary characteristic of social-problem novels is their treatment of the suffering of working-class subjects as a problem for middle- and upper-class communities. Reformist novels strive to speak for the working classes to their middle- and upperclass readers and, along the way, they create new ways of being middle-class readerly subjects. By setting aside the novels’ construction of middle-class subjectivity in favor of locating their common ground with laboring-class novels that contest middle-class entitlement, these authors develop a more textured sense of class conflict in the Chartist era. At the same time, however, by focusing on the novelists’ commonality of purpose across the class divide, these studies encourage us to look past what I suggest (in Feeling for the Poor) is one of the most distinctive aspects of middle-class 322

The Concept of Class in Victorian Studies

social-problem novels: namely, their tendency to understand the suffering of workers as a problem calling for middle-class readers to develop their capacity to feel for them. Because of this elision, social-problem novels may ultimately benefit from being read in association with Chartist fiction more than the other way around. Like Vanden Bossche’s and Armstrong’s titles, Gregory Vargo’s An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction is a comparative study of Chartist and middle-class social-problem fiction. Vargo takes a different approach to the back-and-forth between the radicals and mainstream novelists; seeing more mutual influence across the class divide than antagonism, he maintains that the Condition of England debate in fiction was not only a conversation among dominant-class reformists but also included vocal, persuasive working-class dissidents. Vargo suggests that the work scholars have done to recover forgotten or actively repressed working-class voices can mislead us into believing that there was less dialogue, borrowing, and commentary across middle- and working-class print cultures than actually existed. Ironically, the recovery of dynamic, innovative narrative forms in the Chartist press ends up sidelining, if not silencing, middle-class authors’ contributions to conversations about labor, capitalism, and the franchise.

3. Working-Class Literature An alternative line of study has focused solely on literature written by working-class authors, most often Chartists. Since 1974, when Martha Vicinus published The Industrial Muse: A Study of NineteenthCentury British Working-Class Literature, one of the first academic studies to treat working-class literature as a serious object of inquiry, many notable studies of working-class, radical, and popular literature have appeared. Ian Haywood’s important The Revolution in Popular Literature calls for a reevaluation of the history of literature of the 1840s “from the bottom up”: this reevaluation is necessary because, for “most Victorian readers, the discourse of the ‘Condition of England’ was first experienced in popular periodicals—including those produced by Chartism—and not expensive novels” (141). Conditionof-England novels in particular need to be understood in the context of Chartist literature by such popular writers as G.W.M. Reynolds. A novelist and popular press impresario, Reynolds was the target of a campaign of organized amnesia in his own time, brought by rival contenders for “respectable” working-class readership. Haywood draws our attention to a deep and forgotten history in which working-class literature was both popular and radical. He also points to a “process of continual appropriation and reappropriation, of rapid response, innovation, imitation, assimilation and subversion” that characterized publishing practices across boundaries of middle-class and laboring-class, high and popular, “respectable” and radical culture (4) [on Chartism, see Haywood’s chapter]. Haywood’s call to resituate the Condition-of-England debate in the context of popular literature has been heeded by scholars of Chartist poetry and prose. In The Poetry of Chartism, Mike Sanders claims that verse written by Chartists and published in the radical press was itself politically transformative. More than any messages encoded within the poems, it was the experience of reading poetry itself that gave Chartists a sense of how they might conceive themselves and their world differently (7–8). Chartist poetry did not simply reflect the political moment in which it appeared but rather played an active, central role in creating it. Further, Sanders argues, the poetry of Chartism needs to be included as part of the canon of Victorian poetry, not as a curiosity but rather as “a distinctive variant” within it (31) [on poetry, see Chapman’s chapter]. Sanders calls the awareness of potential agency and change that Chartists introduced through their verse the “Chartist imaginary.” This capacity is key as well in important scholarship by Margaret Loose, who brings the concept to bear on Chartist fiction. Loose suggests that the Chartist imaginary, in its status as challenger of received beliefs and expressions, gave birth to new literary forms. The political transformation embodied in Chartism went so far as to inform the “genre selection, the choices of stanza forms and narrative devices, the diction, the rhyme schemes, the fictional settings 323

Carolyn Betensky

and character development, and even the grammar of Chartist literature” (2–3). Agreeing with Sanders and Hayward that “any conception of Victorian literature minus Chartist literature can only be incomplete,” Loose also urges that middle-class novels about the working classes “be balanced with writings by working people themselves, with their own self-representations and ideas for the betterment of England’s oppressed” (10). In The Oppositional Aesthetics of Chartist Fiction, Rob Breton attends primarily, like Loose, to the formal characteristics of Chartist literature and, also like Loose, contends that Chartist form reinvents the genres in which it takes expression. However, his interests lie in narrative functions and the nature of Chartist melodrama. Breton notes the relentlessly bleak arc of Chartist narratives: bad things almost always happen to good people, suffering goes unabated, and the rich triumph over the helpless poor. Yet for Breton, Chartist authors used what seem to be common tropes of melodrama to different ends than their middle-class contemporaries. The repeated failures in Chartist fiction constitute a deliberate, politically informed rejection, he claims, of the norms of the realist novel—which were, for the Chartists, not realistic enough. Chartist melodrama spells out the same message, over and over again: political change will not arrive without the Charter, i.e., without organized political action. Breton maintains that Chartist fiction is “a determinedly anti-fictional act, a type of literary criticism undermining both the form and content of its middle-class equivalent” (2). In his positioning of Chartist fictions as not only alternative narratives to realist (middle-class) novels but also as anti-narrative in nature, Breton distances himself from some of the optimistic claims that Sanders and Loose make regarding the Chartists’ literary self-empowerment [on narrative theory, see Auyoung’s chapter]. Although Chartist literature has been a dominant focus among scholars of working-class culture, some of the most important research on the working classes and Victorian literature has come from scholars interested in questions of readership, literacy, and the material aspects of literary production and distribution. Studies on working-class readership have greatly expanded our notions of the “the Victorian reader.” Investigations into how reading materials were circulated—from lending libraries to public readings to shared coffee house subscriptions—have yielded new understandings of how readers without the means to purchase texts could access them. In his concise but provocative afterword to The History of British Working Class Literature, Brian Maidment reviews the progress of these new scholarly developments and points to questions regarding working-class literature that stand in need of further attention. Richard Altick’s The English Common Reader remains a valuable resource for contemporary specialists working at the intersections of class, literacy, and media history, as do Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes and David Vincent’s The Rise of Mass Literacy. The contributions of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, including their bibliographical databases and journal Victorian Periodical Review, to our appreciation of Victorian popular media and its readers cannot be overstated. Because of their work, we can now track and study periodicals targeted to readers of different classes in ways unimaginable to earlier generations of scholars [on reading, see Buurma’s and Heffernan’s chapter]. The fact that so many texts published in the nineteenth century appeared first and usually only in periodicals and newspapers has made it clear that the earlier scholarly standard object of study, the bound book, excluded the lion’s share of what the vast majority of Victorians, and especially workingclass readers, typically read—and wrote. Robert Patten’s “When is a Book Not a Book?” suggests that critical assessments of Dickens’s Oliver Twist based on its publication as a bound volume, as opposed to its original appearance in serialized installments, cannot appreciate the meanings its contexts contributed to the novel itself. Removed from its first print habitat in the apolitical Bentley’s Miscellany, for instance, the novel “loses some of its shock value” (357). Furthermore, as Laurel Brake points out in “The Serial and the Book in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” the same novel often appeared in different versions for readerships in different economic brackets. As scholars of print culture and reading practices have taken up periodicals for serious study and thus broadened our conceptions of readership and authorship, the field’s core notions of what counts as literature have also changed. One striking example of such redefinitions of literary value is Kirstie Blair’s “The Newspaper Press and 324

The Concept of Class in Victorian Studies

the Victorian Working Class Poet.” Blair challenges the notion of excessive conventionality in poetry published in provincial newspapers, arguing that working-class poets tailored their writing to the demands of this specific marketplace. Understanding the primary goal of working-class poets not as the creation of original verse but rather as the seeing of their work in print, she enables us to perceive the production of “generic” poetry in a new light [on periodical studies, see Hughes’s chapter].

4. Producing a Middle-Class Ideology In recent years, some of the most intriguing work in Victorian studies on social class has analyzed the production of middle-class cultures. Viewing middle-class identity as actively produced through gendered practices, various sorts of rituals, and the novel itself, much of this scholarship reflects the ongoing influence of late twentieth-century feminist historiography and literary criticism, as well as the continued impact of post-Marxist theories of the social. Lenore Davidoff ’s and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1950 (1987) challenges received ideas regarding gender roles and work in the Victorian period. Instead of taking at face value the supposedly timeless ideology of the separate spheres (according to which men earned money in the public sphere as their womenfolk presided over the home but did no work outside it), Davidoff and Hall show how the idea of the separate spheres was pitched in the period to fashion a respectable identity for the rising middle classes. Middle-class women worked in the nineteenth century as they had in earlier periods, but their work was framed in new ways that kept it out of view. The very notion of middle-class subjectivity, according to Davidoff and Hall, was premised on a gendered ideal that did not match contemporaneous practices. Published the same year as Family Fortunes, Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction came at the production of middle-class ideology from a feminist and Foucauldian literary-historical perspective. For Armstrong, novels written by and about women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shaped the female middle-class reading subject and thereby paved the way for the hegemony of middle-class domestic ideology. Along with other important feminist texts of the 1980s and 1990s (including Mary Poovey’s Uneven Developments and Elizabeth Langland’s Nobody’s Angels), Family Fortunes and Desire and Domestic Fiction spurred research on the centrality of gender as a vector of analysis in studies of Victorian culture. Yet they also made significant contributions to our understanding of the complex, intersectional, and opportunistic nature of middle-class ideology. In the wake of Family Fortunes, the rich lode of contemporary studies on women’s work, marriage, the family, and the home often also operates, if not always explicitly, as exploration of the production of middle-class ideology. The legacy of Desire and Domestic Fiction, on the other hand, may be observed in studies that track the ways the novel, reading, and novel readers shaped and continue to shape middle-class horizons of expectation. The legacy of Armstrong’s work on the links between novels, reading, and the production of middle-class ideology may be observed in studies so diverse as Rachel Ablow’s The Marriage of Minds, John Kucich’s Imperial Masochism, and Jennifer Phegley’s Educating the Proper Woman Reader [on domesticity, see Gregory’s chapter]. A significant body of research has emerged in the field that charts the production of middle-class ideology by studying Victorian rituals and social practices. Following post-Marxist theorists of social production such as Pierre Bourdieu, this line of scholarship analyzes the intricate, opportunistic sets of dispositions that make up the “rules” that determine classed behaviors. From the principles that govern taste and tact and rituals of professionalism to the guidelines that govern the admissibility of certain types of dwellings and their furnishings, these dispositions produce middle-class practices that, when repeated, naturalize a middle-class sense of “the way things are” (“habitus,” for Bourdieu). Scholars analyzing the construction of middle-class ideology investigate the often trivial-seeming practices that allow class difference to appear inevitable—and the construction itself to become invisible. This is the path taken by scholars of professionalization such as Albert Pionke and Jennifer Ruth, who have demonstrated how different kinds of professionals generated standards of conduct in such a way as to 325

Carolyn Betensky

guarantee class privilege. Barbara Black’s work on Victorian men’s clubs speaks as well to the manner in which social practices created rituals that performed and thus assured middle-class authority. Elsie Michie’s scholarship on the class-policing rules of vulgarity also belongs to this subfield of study. Another related vein of scholarship on the production of middle-class ideology includes studies, such as those of Julia Prewitt Brown, Deborah Cohen, Elaine Freedgood, Talia Schaffer, and Andrea Kaston Tange, which analyze the contributions of middle-class architecture, interiors, and material things to the construction of a broader middle-class sense of self [on material culture, see Lutz’s chapter]. Also supporting the construction of middle-class identity were a heady set of fantasies that took the shape of upward and downward mobility narratives. Bruce Robbins analyzes (mostly) nineteenthcentury British and US rags-to-riches narratives in Upward Mobility and the Common Good. In the very tales that have traditionally been seen as emblems of rugged individualism, Robbins uncovers a surprising but sustained line of representations that demonstrate the virtues of mutual assistance and imagine some of the characteristics of the future welfare state. Seth Koven’s Slumming explores the ways that middle- and upper-class investigators, journalists, and philanthropists satisfied their own often transgressive (and often otherwise unacknowledged) desires in the context of their work with the urban poor. In her introduction to her anthology of Victorian women’s accounts of slumming in Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920, Ellen Ross provides a helpful overview of the different social and economic forces that conjoined to inspire women of means to explore the impoverished households of London. Diana Maltz’s British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class explores a strand of late-Victorian philanthropy that was neither pecuniary nor religious in nature, focusing rather on the potential of art to improve the lives of slum-dwellers. Slumming tends to be downward “mobility” only in the most abstract sense, as those who ventured across class boundaries to commune with the poor and working classes seldom remained among them. A different and provocative take on performances of class mobility appears in John Kucich’s “Reverse Slumming: Cross-Class Performativity and Organic Order in Dickens and Gaskell.” Like classic slumming in Koven’s usage, reverse slumming is a frequent practice of self-fashioning on the part of middle-class characters in Victorian novels that does not imply actual social mobility. Rather, reverse slumming entails the temporary appropriation of conventions that signify upper-class affiliation, the better both to mock them and affirm the social order.

5. Conclusion In fall 2018, the journal Victorian Literature and Culture published an updated, multi-authored version of Raymond Williams’s Keywords. Deborah Epstein Nord’s entry on “Class” stresses the importance of the concept not only to the Victorians themselves but also to the development of the discipline of Victorian studies. Nord worries that class analysis has largely disappeared from the field it once dominated. Asking why this is so, she points to a host of possible culprits behind its demise, including the ascendancy of categories of race, gender, and sexuality; a shift in focus from nation to empire and then globe; the discrediting of Marxist criticism in the wake of Communism’s decline; the weakening of the labor movement in the U.S.; a Foucauldian emphasis on discourse (the linguistic turn) and the impossibility of group or class-based mobilization and resistance; a critical emphasis on types of “reading” and form rather than ideology, covert meaning, and literature as Jeremiad; and (perhaps) our own American allergy, in this season especially virulent, to seeing class. (628) While I share some of Nord’s concerns, I have tried to suggest in this chapter that class is very much alive as a category of analysis for contemporary critics of Victorian literature and culture. In order to 326

The Concept of Class in Victorian Studies

see where this analysis lives, however, we must include—along with canonical (middle- and upperclass) texts and criticism—studies of working-class literature, literacies, and cultural modalities. Furthermore, studying the production of middle-class Victorian culture is a way of studying class. Finally, if we adjust our attachment to class as a single vector of analysis and instead include, under the aegis of class critique, the work being done at the intersections of class and gender, class and the family, class and ritual, and class and institutions, we may well see that if class, always shifting in its meaning, has to some extent eluded a particular critical idiom, it has not slipped out of our collective critical consciousness. Much work remains to be done analyzing and theorizing class in Victorian culture. A few of the questions future scholars might research (or continue to research) include: •

•

•

Were literary texts by middle- and upper-class authors read by members of the working classes, and vice versa? How can we tell which classes were reading what? What difference did gender make in reading practices across class divides? Such an inquiry would continue the work begun by Altick, Rose, Vincent, Kate Flint, and Brantlinger (The Reading Lesson). An archival project of this type would be rewarding but would require creativity and patience, as it would demand review of publication and distribution records of periodicals and book publishers, as well as readers’ correspondence, diaries, memoirs, and marginalia—for starters. The new techniques of data analysis and collection in digital humanities are promising in this regard. What difference did the mode in which a text was published—as a bound book, in serial parts, or in a periodical or newspaper—make to the readers it reached? This is the kind of project that would build on the work of Brake, Robert Patten, and Mark Turner, among others. Two projects that would call for a deep engagement with theoretical issues relating to class in addition to literary and historical preparation include: (a) the thorny question of how or whether a writer such as Dickens, who experienced childhood poverty but subsequently rose dramatically in wealth and social status, retains a claim to being a working-class author (and conversely how or whether the work of an author born into privilege but who falls on hard times counts as a working-class text), and (b) how or whether we can determine if there was such a thing as a working-class (or middle-class) aesthetic—and what it might mean if we could. The former project would take inspiration from the work of scholars such as Koven and Kucich, whereas the latter project could start by consulting studies by Maltz and Breton.

These questions only begin to suggest the range of potential projects that scholars might next undertake that would enrich our understanding of the meaning of class for the Victorians.

Key Critical Works Nancy Armstrong. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. David Cannadine. The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850. Ian Haywood. The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics, and the People 1790–1860. Seth Koven. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Elizabeth Langland. Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture. Mary Poovey. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Jonathan Rose. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.

Works Cited Ablow, Rachel. The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot. Stanford UP, 2007. Altick, Richard. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900. U Chicago P, 1957.

327

Carolyn Betensky Arac, Jonathan. Commissioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville, and Hawthorne. Rutgers UP, 1979. Armstrong, Isobel. Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Oxford UP, 2016. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford UP, 1987. Batuman, Elif. “Reading Racist Literature.” Cultural Comment. The New Yorker, 13 April 2015. www.newyorker. com/culture/cultural-comment/reading-racist-literature. Betensky, Carolyn. Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel. U Virginia P, 2010. Black, Barbara. A Room of His Own: A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland. Ohio State UP, 2012. Blair, Kirstie. “The Newspaper Press and the Victorian Working Class Poet.” A History of British Working Class Literature, edited by John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan, Cambridge UP, 2017, pp. 264–80. Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. The Politics of Story in British Social Fiction. Cornell UP, 1991. Boos, Florence S. Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women: The Hard Way Up. Palgrave, 2017. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice, Stanford UP, 1990. Brake, Laurel. “The Serial and the Book in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Intersections, Extensions, Transformations.” Mémoires du livre, vol. 8, no. 2, Spring 2017. https://doi.org/10.7202/1039697ar. Brantlinger, Patrick. The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. U Indiana P, 1998. ———. The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics 1832–1867. Harvard UP, 1977. Breton, Rob. The Oppositional Aesthetics of Chartist Fiction: Reading against the Middle-Class Novel. Routledge, 2016. Cannadine, David. The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain. Columbia UP, 2000. Cohen, Deborah. Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions. Yale UP, 2009. Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850. Routledge, 1987. Flint, Kate. The Woman Reader 1837–1914. Oxford UP, 1995. Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. U Chicago P, 2006. Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative, 1832–1867. U Chicago P, 1985. Gaskell, Elizabeth. Cranford. Oxford Modern Classics, 1998. ———. Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life. Penguin Classics, 1985. Goodlad, Lauren M. E. “‘A Middle Class Cut Into Two’: Historiography and Victorian National Character.” ELH, vol. 67, no. 1, Spring 2000, pp. 143–78. Goodridge, John, and Bridget Keegan. A History of British Working Class Literature. Cambridge UP, 2017. Guy, Josephine M. The Victorian Social-Problem Novel: The Market, the Individual, and Communal Life. Palgrave, 1996. Haywood, Ian. The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics, and the People 1790–1860. Cambridge UP, 2004. Kaston Tange, Andrea. Architectural Identities: Domesticity, Literature, and the Victorian Middle Classes. U Toronto P, 2010. Koven, Seth. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton UP, 2004. Kucich, John. Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class. Princeton UP, 2009. ———. “Reverse Slumming: Cross-Class Performativity and Organic Order in Dickens and Gaskell.” Victorian Studies, vol. 55, no. 3, Spring 2013, pp. 471–99. Langland, Elizabeth. Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture. Cornell UP, 1995. Loose, Margaret. The Chartist Imaginary: Literary Form in Working-Class Political Theory and Practice. Ohio State UP, 2016. Maidment, Brian. “Afterword.” A History of British Working Class Literature, edited by John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan, Cambridge UP, 2017. Maltz, Diana. British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes. Palgrave, 2006. Michie, Elsie B. The Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James. Johns Hopkins UP, 2011. Nord, Deborah Epstein. “Class.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, nos. 3 and 4, Fall 2018, pp. 625–29. Patten, Robert L. “When Is a Book Not a Book?” The Book History Reader, edited by David Finkelstein and Alastair McCleery, Routledge, 2006, pp. 354–68. Phegley, Jennifer. Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation. Ohio State UP, 2004. Pionke, Albert D. The Ritual Culture of Victorian Professionals: Competing for Ceremonial Status, 1838–1877. Ashgate, 2013. Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. U Chicago P, 1988.

328

The Concept of Class in Victorian Studies Prewitt Brown, Julia. The Bourgeois Interior. U Virginia P, 2008. Robbins, Bruce. Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Modern Welfare State. Princeton UP, 2007. Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Yale UP, 2002. Ross, Ellen. Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920. U California P, 2007. Ruth, Jennifer. Novel Professions: Interested Disinterest and the Making of the Professional in the Victorian Novel. Ohio State UP, 2006. Sanders, Mike. The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History. Cambridge UP, 2002. Schaffer, Talia. Novel Craft:Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Oxford UP, 2011. Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. Vintage, 1966. Turner, Mark. Trollope and the Magazines: Gendered Issues in Mid-Victorian Britain. Palgrave, 2000. Vanden Bossche, Chris R. Reform Acts: Chartism, Social Agency, and the Victorian Novel 1832–1867. Johns Hopkins UP, 2014. Vargo, Gregory. An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel. Cambridge UP, 2018. Vicinus, Martha. The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British Working-Class Literature. Barnes & Noble, 1974. Vincent, David. The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe. Polity, 2000. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780–1950, 2nd ed. Columbia UP, 1983. ———. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Revised ed. Oxford UP, 1983.

329

29 RACE Tracing the Contours of a Long Nineteenth Century Irene Tucker

For all the things that are known to have begun in the middle decades of the Victorian British nineteenth century, the moment is equally noteworthy for at least one ending: that of what, at the time was known as “natural history.” As the term implies, the discourse of natural history imagines a world in which the same energetic swirl of forces that animates and directs the movement of stars across the sky, the shape and color of the rocks beneath that sky, the brush and flowers and humidity and bears and deer, also drives the making of art and the building of social relations, institutions of government, languages, cathedrals, and schools. Natural history’s nature was both history’s driving force and the expression of its actors, human and transcendental. Once natural history ceased to explain human behavior, Victorians had to look elsewhere to explain phenomena like race. What emerged in the wake of natural history’s demise, as Martin Fichman describes in his 1997 essay, “Biology and Politics: Defining the Boundaries,” were a range of disciplines and discourses detailing the specific dynamics of the interactions of the human and natural worlds: the theories of natural selection detailed by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, and the accounts of human development generated by Frances Galton, Thomas Henry Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and John Tyndall. Over the course of the 1860s, as these thinkers drew out the interactions of various models of what we would now call “natural science” and “social science,” particularly as they concerned questions of evolution and human difference, Fichman argues, they felt impelled to insist upon the independence of each from the other. Only by creating a clear line between these two modes of thought could the practitioners of natural science lay claim to the ideological neutrality of their work, and it was this claim of ideological neutrality, a “rigorous professionalism,” that justified using the discoveries generated by this work as the basis of public policy. Contemporary debates concerning race figured the concept variously as a natural force driving human behavior, the instantiation of fundamentally linguistic differences, and the embodied expression of a range of human impulses. That race could be framed in such widely divergent terms is, paradoxically, what enabled it to function as a site where the various elements of natural history might be prized apart, divided into social and natural sciences. The self-evidence of race as a thing to be analyzed that followed in the wake of natural history’s demise can be seen to mark the triumph of that pulling apart. What is equally remarkable is the extent to which the legacy of this autonomy and self-evidence continues to structure the academic study of nineteenth-century race in our contemporary cultural studies/literary critical moment. For all the diverse accountings offered by Victorian—and Victorianist—analysts of race, what is striking about most analyses is the degree to which the thing to be understood, race, is taken to be self-evident and autonomous. They, and we, have lots and lots 330

Race

to say about it, and many of the things we say take place in radically divergent political contexts that cannot be reconciled with one another. But notwithstanding the range of the meanings and framing contexts that might be invoked to make sense of that thing “race,” the presumption remains that we know what it is we are talking about when we talk about race. The self-evidence of the quality to be made sense of is what made race the object of such contention, as it promised, with the authority born of this self-evidence, a foundation upon which otherwise speculative analytical frameworks might build their own explanatory force. As I will detail later, conflicts over race functioned as occasions for reconceiving the nature of British citizenship, launching the discipline of anthropology (along with a proliferation of disputatious professional organizations jockeying over the right to function as the institutional representative of the new discipline), and providing a colonialist rationale for both British and American abolitionism. But while our impulse may be to understand the multiple discourses invented to make sense of race to stand as proof of its status as a recognizable thing, I want to make the case that the apparent self-evidence of race is not simply a natural ground upon which a variety of discourses come to be built over the course of the nineteenth century, but, rather ought to be seen as the consequence of the emergence of a particular discourse linked to the splitting of natural history. In drawing attention to the degree to which today’s Victorianist scholarship recapitulates as much as it analyzes the autonomy and self-evidence of race, I aim not only to offer a gloss on the historiography of Victorian race, but also to clear the way for a longer, and significantly messier, history. Fichman’s account emphasizes the processes by which one sort of study of race came to be cordoned off from another, as well as the degree to which such a separation was essential to establishing both the authority of the natural science of race and the status of race as a natural and self-evident thing to be studied. I hope, however, to show the degree to which the Victorian history of race entails a history of the creation of race itself as an autonomous category, unconnected to other modes of physical being like health and sickness. I move the starting point of this historiography from nineteenth-century Britain back into eighteenth-century Europe, to a moment in which what was known as “human variety” envisioned bodily marks of difference like skin color not as marks of a given population’s genealogy but as one element of a more general dynamic that included an individual’s climatological and geographical locale, states of sickness and health and qualities of character. By beginning at this earlier eighteenthcentury moment, I mean in part to recover the process by which race became an autonomous, selfevident, and largely unchanging quality to which a range of social, natural, genealogical, and political meanings could be appended. But I also mean to show the degree to which a range of nineteenthcentury racial discourses can be seen to be animated by the incoherencies within the model of the body that replaced the much less narrowly defined dynamics of human variety—that of modern, anatomical medicine. These incoherencies within this newer, more narrowly construed paradigm of the medical body inhibited its power to displace fully the earlier eighteenth-century model, a model that, in the spirit of the capaciousness that was the hallmark of natural history, understood sickness, health, and human variety to be manifestations of a single dynamic system of forces. But while the never-quite-settled quality of the newer anatomical medicine kept it from fully relegating to the past natural history’s notion of human variety, the internal contradictions within this newer and narrower medical model proved as generative as its scientific triumphs.

1. Eighteenth-Century (Pre-)History The very notion that a category called “race,” consisting primarily of a collection of physical characteristics, might be cordoned off from a range of other human and environmental characteristics is itself a conceptual invention, coinciding generally, if imperfectly, with the end of natural history. The announcement of the idea that many social, cultural, and political dynamics associated with the 331

Irene Tucker

Victorian era can best be understood by analyzing them within the slightly more capacious context of “the nineteenth century,” and that that context might benefit by being nudged even wider by being designated “long” has by now become as much a ritual of framing as a declaration of historiographical revolution. In the case of race, the “long” of race’s “long-nineteenth century” requires going back to the second half of the eighteenth century, during which the category of human variety— encompassing states of sickness and health, skin color, character, and climatological fitness—came to be supplanted by the narrower category of race. This transformation was European rather than simply British: indeed, France and Germany were the loci of the essential intellectual paradigm shifts that animated the movement from human variety to race. Accordingly, the most important cultural analyses of this transition are either centered in French thought—Andrew S. Curran’s The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (2011)—or trace the influence of theologically influenced accounts of human origins upon versions of European philosophy that then make their ways into British science and natural history—Roxanne Wheeler’s The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (2000; see also David Bindman). Although it may appear counterintuitive, the transformation from a conception of human variety to one of race was as much the result of a revolution in medical understandings of the body as it was due to a shift in models of human types. According to the humoral model of the body that predominated from the second-century Greek philosopher-physician Galen to the final decades of the eighteenth century, human bodies were constituted and defined by a mixture of four “humors”: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Each body boasted its own particular combination of the humors. The particular proportions not only determined what counted as a healthy state for that particular person, but also constituted a given individual’s “complexion,” a term that referred both to a person’s skin color and also to his or her temper or disposition. Because the humors inside a given body were understood to operate in conjunction with the particular conditions of the immediate environment—the proportions of heat, cold, wetness, and dryness—a healthy body was not one that contained a particular mix of humors but rather one whose relation to its environment allowed those particular proportions to remain in balance. Humoralism, that is, rests on the premise that there is no hard-and-fast distinction between the forces that operate within individual bodies and determine those bodies’ conditions of sickness, on one hand, and the forces that operate within the environment, on the other. So although each body was understood to have its own particular healthy balance, the fact that such balances were created and sustained by local environmental forces meant that inhabitants of a given climate were likely to possess not only similar skin colors, but common characters and capacities as well. The contiguity between the state of the body and its environment meant that such a body was understood to be legible by both the person inhabiting it and the physician treating it. As Mary Fissell details in Patients, Power and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Bristol, patients’ eyewitness reports of the series of steps or events by which they became ill were often used by their doctors to determine what precisely was wrong with a given patient.1 Moreover, this model of the body as continuously formed and reformed by the qualities of the environment it inhabited also allowed visible human differences to be reconcilable with a biblical understanding of human creation (what would later come to be known as monogenesis). God created all people in His own image; it was their sustained experience in different climates that produced visible differences among them. Such a model of the body predicted that, when people’s environments changed for a sustained period of time—when, for example, residents of Africa were captured and relocated as slaves to the British colonies in the Caribbean or North America, or British colonial tradespeople took up residency on the African coast—their complexions and characters would eventually change as well. When these expected changes were not forthcoming, a range of different kinds of analysts of the body began to search for new models of bodily function that would account for this surprising imperviousness to climatic dislocation. It was the physicians’ new theorizing of the human body that ultimately had the most transformative effects. 332

Race

According to the precepts of the so-called “Paris” or “anatomical” medicine laid out over the final decades of the eighteenth century and early decades of the nineteenth as an alternative to the humoral conception of the body, diseases were located on particular organs in the interiors of bodies, and those bodies were understood to be fundamentally like one another, rather than rendered particular by a specific, climatically-informed mix of humors. But if the era’s physicians were highly rigorous in laying out the logic of this new post-humoral body, some theoretical incoherences remained. As I argue in my monograph, The Moment of Racial Sight: A History, it is these incoherencies within the new conception of the medical “standardized” body that generated the modern notions of race. While modern medicine was premised on the idea that all bodies are fundamentally like one another, the fact that diseases manifested themselves on organs that could not be seen meant that an entirely new diagnostic protocol needed to be put in place. Whereas medicine had been largely viewed as a craft up until that point, with medical training taking the form of locally arranged apprenticeships, the emergence of the new anatomical paradigm drove the professionalization of the field, as the autopsying of bodies became central both to the process of diagnosis and, as a consequence, to the education of physicians [on medical studies, see Stoddard Holmes’s chapter]. This new professionalization of physician education was a necessary outcome of the gradual abandonment of the humoral conception of the body for the anatomical one. Since the disease in anatomical bodies was located on organs deep within a patient’s body and therefore could not be directly observed, physicians learned to correlate external systems exhibited by the patients with the condition of the internal organs they uncovered by the autopsies that were central to the newly regulated, newly formalized physician education process. Under the new model of anatomical medicine’s “standardized” body, the sick body of the patient and a different dead, autopsied body were presumed to be like one another for the sake of diagnosis, even though that likeness could not be directly observed. The fact that universal bodily likeness was a foundational proposition of anatomical medicine, something to be taken as a given rather than observed empirically, meant that the shift from humoral to anatomical conceptions of the body was not as sudden or complete as the radical differences between the models might have led people to expect. The humoral model, with its vision of human varieties of bodies shaped by the forces of their local environment, continued to exercise a powerful hold over a wide range of thinkers: the extended, often vicious mid-nineteenth-century debate between monogenists and polygenists, as well as the contours of the emergent discourse of anthropology, can be seen to have been shaped by the opacities, even incoherencies, within anatomical medicine. The formative power of the race-medicine link becomes more evident when we look to a thinker who is only rarely associated with his writing on race: Immanuel Kant. For all that Kant is likely to be associated, in our contemporary moment, with his three Critiques, he was the first thinker to isolate skin color as the preeminent mark of racial legibility. He was cited by Charles Darwin in the preface of The Descent of Man as one of Darwin’s primary influences. Interestingly, Kant structures his understanding of race as a means of managing the incoherence within anatomical medicine to which I alluded earlier. If anatomical medicine was predicated upon the idea of a standardized body that allowed the knowledge gleaned from autopsies to function as evidence of the otherwise inaccessible goings-on within the body of a sick patient, such a diagnostic presumption effectively rendered incoherent such medicine’s therapeutic project. If a sick body and a dead body are identical with one another then what sort of medical intervention is possible? The very possibility of making a sick person well is predicated, it would seem, on the notion that the sick body is not yet dead, that the sick body and the dead body are pointedly different from one another. In the final essay of his late career work The Conflict of the Faculties, Kant explores the relationship between philosophy and medicine in relation to his own experience of dying—as a meditation, in other words, on the significance of the difference between being sick and being dead. Given that Kant’s critical method is built around the presumption of the lawfulness—the sameness over time—of both the material world and the thinking subjects who would make sense of that world, the experience of dying presented the same challenge 333

Irene Tucker

to his own philosophical system as the difference between a sick body and a dead body presented to anatomical medicine.2 How could a body that inevitably ages and dies be understood to function lawfully, to be a “standardized” thing? For Kant, the racialization of the body becomes the solution to the threats that the inevitability of dying posed to his own philosophical method, as well as to the newly emergent system of anatomical medicine that shared many of that philosophy’s suppositions. Kant’s most carefully articulated theorization of race comes in a 1788 essay that would seem, from its title, to have nothing whatsoever to do with the topic: “On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy.” In this essay, he offers a critique of a humoralist travelogue written by physician-anthropologist George Forster, whose analysis of racial differences in the South Seas had emphasized the correlation between differences in skin color and tribal character, on one hand, and climatological differences across the topography of the various islands, on the other [on travel writing, see Tange’s chapter]. The anthropologist’s error, Kant insists, lay in Forster’s understanding the variations between races to be material qualities in the world to be studied. Race, in Kant’s view, is not a thing to be discovered in the world but a way of thinking about what has taken place in the world, an account of how the world as we know it has come into being. Whereas Forster attributed differences in skin color to the contingent effects of being in a given climate at a given moment, for Kant differences in skin color were legible manifestations of a fundamental human sameness, a sameness that transcends time and place and allows humans to understand the world they inhabited as well as be comprehensible as a species. Differences in skin color marked and rendered legible the universal human capacity to live anywhere and everywhere, the “potential to be fitted for all climates,” (47) a quality of bodily likeness he linked to Keim (seeds), the same word he had used to name the inaccessible interiors of the bodies in which diseases were located. What might seem on the face of it a paradox was for Kant a structure for making the universal human capacity for freedom instantaneously perceptible. As he puts it, The variety among human beings even from the same race was in all probability inscribed just so purposively in the original line of descent in order to establish—and, in successive generations, to develop—the greatest diversity for the sake of infinitely diverse purposes, just as the difference among races establishes fewer but more essential purposes. (47) Put another way, Kant saw differences in skin color as a structure for making human likeness—the essential human capacity for freedom—perceptible in an instant. In this function, we can glimpse the ways in which the deep interconnections of race and medicine that had been established within humoralism continued to structure Victorian (and arguably post-Victorian) conceptions of race long after race appeared to establish itself as an entirely autonomous phenomenon, something to be made sense of in and of itself. The problem haunting anatomical medicine, we recall, had been that the premise of the essential likeness of the sick body and the dead body that had made autopsies a useful diagnostic device required setting aside the changes within bodies as they aged. But by reconceiving skin color as a mark of humans’ essential likeness, Kant turned that likeness into something that could be perceived in an instant, visibly, on the skin. With this new understanding of race, Kant solved the analytical incoherence at the heart of anatomical medicine. Kant invented this skin-based notion of race that registered sameness in an instant and, in so doing, made the differences between particular sick and dead bodies moot.

2. Early Anthropology Along with Kant’s idea of racialized skin, another new analytical approach to race emerged at the turn of the century: the science of comparative anatomy, a field that put aside the notion of the standardized body altogether and allowed scientists to detail the multiple forms of bodily differences both within and across species. In his field-defining work De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa (“On the Natural Varieties of Mankind,” 1776), Johann Friedrich Blumenbach emphasized the variations among 334

Race

specific human bodies made evident by the newly widespread practice of autopsy. The predictable relations of causation between the inner workings of the body and their external instantiations led Blumenbach to establish a five-race taxonomy (Caucasian, Mongolian, Malayan, Negroid, American) that structured much of the scientific and social accountings of race across Europe in the century that followed. Comparative anatomy’s proliferation of particular types seemed to offer persuasive evidence for the notion of polygenesis, the idea that humans were not a single species derived from a single divine act of creation. A different strand of thinkers, however, worked to reconcile the existence of empirically distinct physical types with the claim of a single, common origin [on anthropology, see Psomiades’s chapter].3 In his 1813 Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, James Cowell Prichard, building on the work of William Jones, argued that apparently disparate peoples shared a common origin, one revealed by the linguistic affinities among their languages. George Stocking explains that Prichard sought “derivation” rather than “development,” “the source rather than the causal process” allowing him to focus on their common origins rather than their different results. In his 1819 Analysis of Egyptian Methodology, Prichard professed “no concern with the causes that gave rise to these establishments” [of the political systems of Egypt and India]. Rather, his comparisons were designed “to determine whether they are of separate derivation and growth, or manifest congruities so clear and extensive as to leave no doubt of their common origin” (qtd. in Stocking 51) Philology became a central methodology for establishing such unitary origins. While contemporary Indian and Western European cultural practices might appear to have little in common with one another, Prichard, like his predecessor Jones, insisted that a structural analysis of Sanskrit revealed important similarities to “European” languages including Latin, Greek and Celt. The concept of an “Indo-European” family of language was born of this body of scholarship. For mid-century scholars like Max Müller, who was born and trained in Germany but eventually made his way to Great Britain, comparative philology served as a way of not just tracing linguistic links between peoples but also showing the ways in which language might animate the development of cultural beliefs, the guiding myths of a people. In order “to reconstruct . . . the primitive and undivided family of the Aryan nations,” researchers needed to employ a kind of “linguistic paleontology” (Stocking 59). Stocking described Müller’s new methodology as follows: Any natural object, human artifact, or social relationship described by the same root form in all Indo-European languages could be assumed to be part of the primitive Aryan heritage; any for which there were two or more different roots must be a later innovation. . . . Each common Aryan word was “in a certain sense a myth”—an appellation that by ‘a kind of unconscious poetry’ expressed particular attributes out of the range of possible attributes. Terminations of gender forced the sexual personification of nonhuman forces. . . . Müller: “Whenever any word that was at first used metaphorically is used without a clear conception of the steps that led from its original to its metaphorical meaning, there is danger of mythology; whenever those steps are forgotten and artificial steps put in their places, we have mythology, or, if I may say so, we have diseased language. (59–60) In this regard, Müller viewed his linguistic paleontology not simply as a means of uncovering a cultural family tree, but as an instrument of disenchantment. To understand how one’s beliefs come into being is to see them for what they are—what Müller saw as mere belief. One of the few nineteenth-century thinkers to actively and explicitly resist the cordoning off of the social and physical sciences from one another was the anatomist and amateur historian Robert Knox, whose 1850 treatise The Races of Man made the case for the structuring centrality of race in all human endeavors. Knox had a central place within the history of Victorian anthropology, especially as 335

Irene Tucker

a purveyor of the era’s virulent racialism. He transformed Prichard’s monogenic theory into the basis of a permanent racial hierarchy. As Laura Callanan explains, The study of race over the first half of the nineteenth century moved from a more humanitarian stance, influenced by the anti-slave trade and abolitionist movements, to a split within the scientific population dividing a less influential humanitarian branch from a more flamboyant and derogatory anthropological vein. Knox was a key figure in the break between these two factions, influencing the move away from humanitarianism. (55) Much of the debate that preceded Knox turned on the question of whether racial differences were understood to be the consequence of the progress or degeneration of what had once been a unitary— because God-created—humanity. For Knox, however, racial differences were static and irremediable, what he termed “physiological history” (45) at once the cause and the instantiation of all cultural differences, the engine of history’s multiple unfoldings. Douglas Lorimer has detailed the ways in which the ongoing dispute over the origins and nature of racial difference as well as the proper professional practices for studying those racial differences led to a prolonged battle for institutional dominance within the emerging field of ethnology/anthropology. In 1835, Thomas Fowell Buxton established a Parliamentary Select Committee on Aborigines, charged with the task of determining what measures ought to be adopted with respect to Native Inhabitants of Countries where British settlements are made, and to the Neighbouring Tribes, in order to secure them the due observation of justice and the protection of their right, to promote the spread of Civilization among them, and to lead them to the peaceful and voluntary reception of the Christian religion. (Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes, February 20, 1837; qtd. in Lorimer 21). This parliamentary group was reorganized into a permanent Aborigenes Protection Society (APS) in 1837, while in 1844, some APS members decided to break off from the parent body to form the Ethnological Society, designed as a scholarly organization to promote the scientific study of race free from the political goals of the APS. In the 1860s, yet another rival society, the Anthropological Society of London, was formed by racialists including Knox and Hunt. Their goal was to liberate the study of race from the “humanitarianism” of the Ethnological Society by creating a professional organization committed to detailing racial hierarchies. While the Ethnological Society was primarily composed of monogenists who stressed the role of environment in shaping racial traits and Anthropological Society of London was made up of polygenists who saw a racial hierarchy as fundamentally inalterable, their shared opposition to American slavery led the two groups to re-merge at the end of the decade. With his notion of “transcendental anatomy” (167), Knox sought to move beyond the opposition between monogenesis and polygenesis in the debate roiling the just-emerging field of anthropology. In Knox’s account, races could emerge from a single source and yet nonetheless be organized into in alterable hierarchy. What differentiates species, or races, from one another is the point of developmental maturity each achieves. In Knox’s paradigm, the point of achievement is formal, rather than a matter of ongoing change. The point of development is what defines a given race or species as such, and that point of development determines from the outset the cultural accomplishments of which they are capable. As Knox puts it, “Race is everything: literature, science, art—in a word, civilization—depends upon it” (qtd. in Callanan 52). No races, not even those possessing superior qualities, could escape the fate imposed by their collective and inborn aspects. So while many of Knox’s anthropological 336

Race

peers advocated for European colonization of Africa and other tropical environments on the grounds that such colonial intervention would civilize primitive cultures, Knox insisted that such colonization would be certain to end in failure, since he believed Europeans as ill-equipped to flourish in the deep tropics as the dark-skinned races were to flourish in northern climes. On the one hand, Knox’s physical determinism seems like a despairing reaction to the collapse of the humoralist vision of race, the realization that people do not become differently “various” when they move from one climate to another. But on the other hand, Knox offered a kind of cultural compensation in his late work, Great Artists and Great Anatomists, advancing a formalist aesthetic philosophy in which he saw the static quality of racial identity as the grounds for timeless art. In this account, the persistence into the present of the aesthetic form of beauty found in Greek sculpture stands as evidence of the unchanging quality of the European race. By the same token, the very existence of transcendental aesthetic forms ought to be seen, in Knox’s view, as the central expression of the value of racial stasis, the grounds by which a confining immobility is itself revealed to be eternal. While the interconnections of aesthetic and racial theories within Knox’s oeuvre have been carefully studied by scholars including Callanan and Stocking, there remains important scholarly work to be done analyzing the relations between Knox’s racialized aesthetics and the aesthetic and racial theories of Victorian thinkers like Ruskin and Mill.

3. Colonial Abolitionism Was Knox’s form of racism destined to serve nineteenth-century Britain’s colonization projects in India, Africa, and the Caribbean? Indeed, in his 2011 Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians, Patrick Brantlinger argues for an historical continuity between the resistance to abolition in the 1830s and the imperialism of the second half of the century, a project of political, cultural, and economic domination culminating with “a scramble for Africa launched by the Berlin Conference of 1884.” Brantlinger sees abolitionism and empire as necessarily opposed to one another, and thus traces how eighteenth-century narratives of enlightenment and emancipation turned into a narrative about a savage and barbaric Africa in dire need of the civilizing tutelage of imperial Britain [on postcolonialism, see Banerjee’s chapter; on enlightenment liberalism, see Small’s chapter]. He writes, Above all, the ideologies of racism and imperialism were powerfully symbiotic and often indistinguishable from one another. That the discursive roots of modern racism lie in British, European and colonial writing that deals with the slave trade and imperialist expansion is now widely acknowledged. (6–7) Similarly, in her influential Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (1995), Ann Laura Stoler presumes that racism drawn from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century versions of natural history aligned with the project of colonial expansion. In offering a detailed account of the processes by which “the technologies of sex” were harnessed in the name of the “’hygienic necessity’ of cleaning and invigorating the social body” in the service of what she terms “the racisms of the state,” Stoler takes evidence of the role of “the vast theoretical and legislative apparatus that was the theory of degeneracy” (30–31) in securing the relationship between racism and sexuality to stand as self-evident proof that the goals and interests of scientific racism and those of the colonial interests of the state are of necessity aligned with one another.4 In fact, she explicitly takes Foucault himself to task for his failure to engage the question of empire. However, what Stoler’s invocation of a pervasive and multidirectional “governmentality” obscures is the complex history of the relationships between British colonialism and abolitionism. I have detailed the ways in which this history has been inflected by the shifting natural historical and scientific paradigms of race. 337

Irene Tucker

But Stoler’s and Brantlinger’s presumption that racism and colonialism are necessarily aligned with one another might lead us to overlook the radical break in understandings of British colonial authority brought about by the American Revolution. While Brantlinger’s and Stoler’s conflation of racism and colonialism often appear to reduce all relevant history to the crossings of a vaguely defined “power,” Christopher Leslie Brown’s choice of the late eighteenth century as his analytical starting point enables him to trace the ways in which the same uneven transition from humoral to anatomical conceptions of race that sparked the decadeslong monogenesis-polygenesis debate also allowed for an abolitionist case for colonialism. In his essay, “Empire without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of the American Revolution” as well as in his monograph, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism, Brown details the ways in which pragmatic economic interests undid some early coalitions. Although early English antislavery activists like John Wesley originally rejected colonialism—in particular its expansion into the American territories—on principle, the movement quickly took a more pragmatic turn. Antislavery advocates began to make the case for emancipation by outlining possible political futures for the newly manumitted slaves, along with the advantages and disadvantages of each: liberated slaves would need to be incorporated into colonial society or, alternatively, relocated to the frontiers of the existing British empire, or even to territories beyond that empire’s current boundaries. Within this framework, emancipation was repositioned as an instrument for bolstering the British empire, particularly as a means of “solidify[ing] and refurbish[ing] faltering British control in North America.” (213) Such advocates of emancipation looked to humoralism, which was still regarded as possessing significant explanatory power, to provide the authority for the claims for emancipation’s economic benefits. Toward the end of the 1770s, Maurice Morgann, an advisor on colonial administration to the Second Earl of Shelbourne, issued an addendum to his earlier Plan for the Abolition of Slavery in the West Indies (1772), making the case for the establishment of an independent settlement for freed Africans in Florida. In Morgann’s vision, white racial dominance and British economic interests ought to be understood to be in fundamental tension with one another. While Europeans tended to perish in tropical climates, because racial differences were understood to be largely the consequence of differences in climate, Africans and their descendants were seen as especially well suited to tropical labor. African laborers were more likely to be productive if they were given political and civil autonomy rather than being enslaved. As autonomous subjects of the British crown, they could produce staple crops for European markets as well as conduct trade with Spanish colonies, allowing Britain to expand beyond the perimeters of power enabled by native European climatological capacities. Morgann envisioned the eventual cultural assimilation of freed Africans to the language, literature, and laws of Britain. While intermarriage would eliminate some of the racial differences between blacks and whites, to the extent to which differences remained, white Britons could inhabit and labor in the northern zones while black Britons would inhabit and labor in the more tropical areas. As Morgann saw it: Then with “one tongue,” a “united people” would “commemorate the auspicious era of universal freedom” while “the sable arm” of British authority would reach “through every region of the Torrid Zone,” “shake the power of Spain to its foundations,” and elevate Great Britain “to the seat of unenvied and unlimited dominion. (280) Morgann’s vision was something of a discursive hodgepodge, mixing not entirely compatible elements of humoralist racial climatology and a kind of Müllerian commitment to language’s power to direct cultural behavior. But the fact that these various elements remained present and available for mixing and remixing suggests that the absence of discursive hegemony often determines historical choices as much as its presence.5 338

Race

4. The Ending That Never Ends If Brown’s scholarship reveals how the British abolitionist and colonial agendas reinforced one another in the early decades of the nineteenth century, we then have to ask when and how the British colonial project got racialized and what its political and social consequences were. To begin to answer that question, we need to return to Prichard and his most lasting contribution to anthropology’s analytical topography: his insistence on distinguishing between racial derivation, which links the significance of race to its originating source, and racial development, which understands race’s force to lie in its status as the effects of immediately present causes. Prichard’s distinction between derivation and development was essential to Knox’s aesthetic racialism, as I noted earlier, inasmuch as it lay the theoretical groundwork for Knox’s claim that racial capacity was determined from the outset, a point of derivation never to be moved past. However, the divergence of the two concepts has generated a second genealogy as well, one that is arguably at the heart of the vision of nineteenth-century race, and which continues to structure much of contemporary criticism as well. While Knox saw a racial derivation that dispensed with development altogether, Darwin’s evolutionary model can be understood to do the opposite: to offer a vision of genealogy in which present relations of causation, not original points of departure, are paramount. According to Darwin’s concept of natural selection, species come to possess particular traits as consequences of the ways in which those traits offer them advantages in relation to some present and immediate quality of their environment. Individual members of a species that possess that advantageous trait by chance are more likely to live longer and produce more offspring; over time, the trait in question is transformed from an accidental mutation into a regular, predictable, and defining quality of the species. Darwin was famously reluctant to acknowledge that the theory of natural selection he laid out in 1859 in On the Origin of Species might apply to humans as well as other animal and plant species. When he finally ceded to public pressure to offer an account of human differences with the publication of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex in 1871 and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals the following year, the system he laid out was largely derived from his earlier account of natural selection. So what precisely is the debt that our contemporary conceptions of race owe to Darwin, in particular to his claim that human difference is caused and re-caused by an ever-present, always-new present? Arguably, the dominant conceptual model of race today is one that understands it to be constructed, which is to say, understands it to function as a kind of symbolic system, in which relatively stable signs—primarily, though not exclusively, differences in skin color—are attributed meanings that shift from one political and cultural context to the next. Much as Darwin’s natural selection jettisons the significance of origin for forces of causation that appear and disappear from one moment to the next, the race-as-sign model of racial construction can be seen to cast off the various histories of the ways in which race has operated—the jostling of humoralism and the skin-centered likeness of standardized bodies, theories of monogenesis that disappear into polygenesis and then resurface—for a presentist history of the meanings that have been appended to the racial sign itself. According to this presentist vision, although meanings of racial signs may change from one moment to the next, cause replacing cause, the symbolic, constructionist model of race is taken as a given, without origin or history. When we assume that race is constructed, we place ourselves, without knowing it, in the conceptual throes of the nineteenth-century battle waged between the Knoxian originalists and the Darwinian causalists. In taking race to be a kind of language, we commit ourselves to remaining in a racial world the Victorians invented.

Notes 1 Roxann Wheeler offers a concise account of the foundational premises of humoral medicine in the introduction to her Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture, pp. 21–33. Mary Fissell details the sociopolitical effects of this narrative of patient-centered medical authority in Patients, Power and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Bristol.

339

Irene Tucker 2 According to the epistemological system Kant describes in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), subjects know the material world exists because they can have thoughts about it. By the same token, the fact that subjects can have thoughts about a real, ongoing, and necessarily interconnected world stands as evidence of the existence of those subjects. For Kant, establishing the persistence through time of both subjects and the object world they perceive is essential to the mutually constitutive relationship between the two: he terms this sameness over time “lawfulness.” 3 The critical literature on the nineteenth-century emergence of anthropology as a discipline, which largely takes the form of intellectual history, is relatively old, but deep. Some essential texts are Christine Bolt’s Victorian Attitudes to Race, Nancy Leys Stepan’s The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, and George Stocking’s Victorian Anthropology. 4 For more on the dynamics of the British-American colonial and postcolonial relationship as it is registered in the interrelations of race and gender, see Jennifer DeVere Brody. 5 Recent literary scholarship has traced the mutual influences of British and American abolitionism. See Vanessa Dickerson, Dark Victorians. (U of Illinois Press, 2008); Cristin Ellis, Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materialilty in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. (Fordham UP, 2018); Daniel Hack, Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature. (Princeton UP, 2017); and Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion and Antebellum America. (U Chicago Press, 2008).

Key Critical Works David Bindman. Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century, Reaktion, 2002. Patrick Brantlinger. Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians, 2011. Jennifer DeVere Brody. Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity and Victorian, 1998. Christopher Leslie Brown. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism, 2006. Laura Callanan. Deciphering Race: White Anxiety, Racial Conflict and the Turn to Victorian Fiction in Mid-Victorian English Prose, 2006. Vanessa Dickerson, Dark Victorians, 2008. Jessica Howell. Exploring Victorian Travel Literature: Disease, Race and Climate, 2014. Nancy Leys Stepan. The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1982. George Stocking. Victorian Anthropology, 1987. Ann Laura Stoler. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” and the Colonial Order of Things, 1995. Irene Tucker. The Moment of Racial Sight: A History, 2012. Roxann Wheeler. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture, 2000.

Works Cited Bindman, David. Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century, Reaktion, 2002. Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich. De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa [On the Natural Varieties of Mankind]. 1776. Bergman, 1969. Bolt, Christine. Victorian Attitudes to Race. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971. Brantlinger, Patrick. Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians. Cornell UP, 2011. Brown, Christopher Leslie. “Empire without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of the American Revolution.” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 2, April 1999, pp. 273–306. ———. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. U of North Carolina P, 2006. Callanan, Laura. Deciphering Race. Ohio State UP, 2006. Curran, Andrew S. The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment, Johns Hopkins UP, 2011. DeVere Brody, Jennifer. Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity and Victorian Culture. Duke UP, 1998. Dickerson, Vanessa. Dark Victorians. U of Illinois P, 2008. Fissell, Mary. Patients, Power and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Bristol. Cambridge UP, 1991. Howell, Jessica. Exploring Victorian Travel Literature: Disease, Race and Climate. Edinburgh UP, 2014. Kant, Immanuel Kant. “On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy” [“Uber den Gebrach teleogisher Principen in der Philosophie”]. 1788, translated by John Mark Mikkelsen, Race, edited by Robert Bernasconi, Blackwell, 2001, 37–56. Knox, Robert. The Races of Men: A Fragment. Henry Renshaw, 1850. Leys Stepan, Nancy. The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, 1982.

340

Race Lorimer, Douglas. Science, Race Relations and Resistance. Manchester UP, 2015. Prichard, James Cowell. Researches Into the Physical History of Mankind. 1813. Edited by George Stocking, U of Chicago P, 1973. Stepan, Nancy Leys. The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, 1982. Stocking, George. Victorian Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, 1987. Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” and the Colonial Order of Things. Duke UP, 1995. Tucker, Irene. The Moment of Racial Sight: A History. U of Chicago P, 2012. Wheeler, Roxann. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture. U of Pennsylvania P, 2000.

341

30 THE EMERGENCE OF ANIMAL STUDIES Martin Danahay and Deborah Denenholz Morse

Let us open with a telling anecdote: when we suggested that a document calling for equal treatment should change “all people” to “all persons, including those of other species,” a colleague in the vanguard of gender studies objected: “It’s not their time yet. We waited.” But the 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. A search of the MLA International Bibliography for “animal studies” illustrates the dramatic surge in publications in the field since the 1990s. A search under “animals” indeed produces citations from 1890 onwards, while the first citation using the terms “animal” and “studies” combined is dated 1938. As the bar graph here shows, however, there has been an enormous increase in the number of publications in animal studies in the last 30 years, with the most dramatic increase in publication occurring from 2010 to the present (see Figure 30.1). The graph reveals a range of five citations a year from 1930 to 1959, a slight increase to 63 citations in 1960 to 1969, and a staggering 1,010 citations in the period from 2010 to 2019. Why might this explosion of attention have occurred? Notably, this rise in interest in animals coincides with growing concerns about the extinction of species, which is a possibility that was first articulated in the nineteenth century. Animal studies is a highly interdisciplinary field, with scholars in biology, philosophy, history, anthropology, literature, law, and religion, as well as other interdisciplinary fields such as environmental and gender studies constituting an ever-expanding area of scholarship. While “animal studies” is a useful umbrella term for this interdisciplinary field, there are also important subdivisions within it that cross disciplinary boundaries: “animality studies,” which studies animals in cultural history without invoking advocacy; “critical animal studies,” which by contrast studies the position of animals with an explicit political agenda; “companion animal studies,” which focuses on human relationships with domesticated animals; and “zoocriticism,” which has emerged from ecocritical studies and unites postmodernism, a concern for the global environment, and the need for environmental justice (see Huggan and Tiffin). Some scholarly essay collections include several or all of these subfields, such as the 2018 Animals, Animality, and Literature (edited by Boehrer, Hand, and Massumi). Many other books cross the boundaries of these subfields of animal studies while focusing largely upon one geographical or historical area or a particular subset of animals. The field of Victorian animal studies has grown along with this explosion of academic interest in animal studies as a whole. Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate (1987) was a landmark publication in the field both for its breadth and for its approach to human/animal relationships in the Victorian era. Her study addressed the exhibition of prize bulls and racing horses at agricultural shows, the Kennel 342

The Emergence of Animal Studies

1200

1000

800

600

400

200

0 1930-39 1940-49 1950-59 1960-69 1970-79 1980-89 1990-99 2000-09 2010-19

Figure 30.1 Citations of Animal Studies from 1930 to 2019

Club and the breeding of dogs, the formation of the RSPCA and the promotion of legislation against cruelty to animals, the fear of rabid animals, the creation of the London Zoo in Regent’s Park, and trophies from big-game hunting. Her approach was to read the representation of animals in terms of Victorian ideologies of class, race, and imperialism. The Victorian belief in their superior position visà-vis other animals undergirded their treatment of both domestic and exotic animals for most of the century. The breeding of prize bulls, for example, reinforced the upper-class belief in the importance of lineage, while certain breeds of domestic dogs connoted the class status of the owner as a person with the means and leisure to keep certain types of pets. The study demonstrated how animals could be used to interrogate a spectrum of ideologies, especially class prejudice and imperialism. Ritvo has continued this work, perhaps most notably in the 2010 Noble Cows & Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals & History, in which she explores both animal consciousness (63–72) and human attitudes toward animals from the eighteenth century to the present (50–62). Below we outline the major theoretical influences on Victorian era animal studies before discussing particular examples.

1. Major Approaches in the Field Social activism has been a part of animal advocacy since the Victorian era, with campaigners such as Frances Power Cobbe and Henry Salt linking the rights of animals with those of humans, and Quaker writer and disabled horsewoman Anna Sewell’s protesting in Black Beauty (1877) against the use of the painful equine bearing rein. Philosopher Peter Singer’s 1975 landmark book Animal Liberation echoed Jeremy Bentham’s famous query about the ethical treatment of animals—“Can they suffer?”—and called for an end to speciesism, the encultured privileging of any one species over others, especially as it leads to animal suffering. Biologist and feminist theorist Lynda Birke, in Feminism, Animals, and Science: The Naming of the Shrew (1994), interrogated the binary of human/animal in relation to feminist discourse in her argument for animal rights. In Minding Animals (2002) and The Emotional Lives of Animals (2007), evolutionary biologist and ecologist Marc Bekoff expanded upon Singer’s insights from a scientific perspective, while philosopher Angus Taylor provided a good overview of the philosophical debates in Animals & Ethics (2009). 343

Martin Danahay and Deborah Denenholz Morse

Legal scholar and animal rights activist Steven Wise’s insistence in the courts and in classes at Harvard Law School that we recognize the personhood of chimpanzees and bonobos is documented in Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals (2000). Wise, director of the Nonhuman Animal Project, continued his argument for personhood to include other primates, including gorillas, as well as dolphins, dogs, elephants, and parrots in Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights (2003). Focusing upon the ethical treatment of animals in an environmentally threatened world, philosopher Cary Wolfe, in Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (2012), builds upon his earlier theoretical work (Animal Rites 2003). In How Animals Grieve (2013) and Personalities on Our Plates (2017), biological anthropologist Barbara King continues this advocacy by exploring animal individuality, stressing the meaning of their lives to animals themselves rather than to human beings. This interest in individual animal subjectivity informs philosopher and diver Peter GodfreySmith’s Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (2016), expanding the conversation from earth to ocean creatures. The most vexing problem for all fields of animal studies is anthropomorphism: is it possible to discuss animals through human language without making them vehicles for specifically human values? While this is a pressing issue for animal studies as a whole, most studies in the Victorian period assume that animals were used as surrogates for various ideologies and proceed from there to analyze their human cultural context. As Jed Mayer argues, animals can’t talk back in human language, which complicates the task of trying to represent them adequately (“Ways of Reading” 349); Erica Fudge has made the same point in arguing: “[W]e are never looking at the animals, only ever at the representation of the animals by humans” (6). Mayer sees the anti-vivisection debates in late nineteenth-century Britain as a fruitful context in which to rethink human/animal relationships and avoid the trap of defining the human in terms of language because the issue helps raise ethical issues about animals who were not given a voice in scientific discourse. As Mayer notes, Jacques Derrida sees language as already anthropomorphized because it is defined “in such a way that it is reserved for what we call man” (“Ways of Reading” 354). Giorgio Agamben in The Open (2002) has argued that the human/animal binary encoded in language is an “anthropological machine” that defines human society as the locus of all value, and everything “outside,” including the “animal,” as subordinate and available for exploitation. Derrida in his essay “The Animal That Therefore I Am” attempts to bridge this divide by examining the way in which animals “look back” at humans, creating a zone where each is the “other” in this mutual recognition. Derrida is not claiming that animals are “just like us” but that at a nonverbal level this encounter disrupts the human/animal binary (372). Similarly, Donna Haraway in Companion Species Manifesto (2003) and When Species Meet (2007) suggests human/animal bonds of “significant otherness,” a concept later transformed in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), which considers the tentacular interdependence of all creatures on damaged earth.

2. Changing Victorian Attitudes Toward Animals The nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic change in British attitudes toward animals. At its outset, the British had a reputation as carnivores, a national appetite represented by the portly figure of John Bull. Popular “sport” included bull and bear baiting, in which dogs were unleashed on tethered animals and bets placed on how long the animal would survive and how many dogs would die. In 1800, MP Sir William Pulteney introduced a bill to ban bull-baiting with dogs that was defeated by two votes. Bull and bear baiting was finally formally outlawed in 1835, thanks to a bill introduced by Member of Parliament Joseph Pease. Cock-fighting and dog-fighting were also banned under that act. Richard Martin, a member of parliament and advocate for the humane treatment of animals, introduced a bill to protect cattle and other farm animals from mistreatment in 1822, and it passed with strong support. What became known as Martin’s Act was expanded thanks to the work of the 344

The Emergence of Animal Studies

Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) to include domestic pets, showing a rapid change in attitude toward animals from the beginning of the century. At the century’s close, such bloodthirsty sports were anathema, the RSPCA had been formed, animal cruelty legislation was widely accepted, and authors like Henry Salt were arguing for animal rights on an equal footing with humans. The RSPCA emerged out of early attempts to pass anticruelty bills such as Pulteney’s and growing sentiments that animals needed legal protection. The organization was founded as the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824, and was granted royal status by animal-loving Queen Victoria in 1840. The RSPCA attempted to change public opinion through publications and sermons. These efforts coincided with the rapid urbanization of Britain, and the changing perception of animals as people moved from the countryside to the city where their relationship to animals as a source of food would be less obvious. The RSPCA mainly prosecuted abuse of domestic animals, not wild ones; Ritvo quotes Viscount Mahon, chair of the society’s general meeting in 1839, as saying that “innocent amusements, such as fishing and shooting” were not relevant to anti-cruelty efforts so long as sportsmen were careful “to protect from causeless pain those sources of our amusements” (Animal 134). Activities such as hunting were upper-class pastimes and not classified as violent, whereas both the laws and RSPCA reports “implicitly identified the lower classes as sources of brutality” (137), thus reading Victorian prejudices onto the natural world. A change in scientific and popular attitudes followed the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. One of Darwin’s most provocative assertions was that humans and apes had evolved from a common ancestor, which was threatening to many Victorians both because it challenged the assumption of human superiority and dominion over animals and because it subverted ideas of heredity that were central to upper-class lineage. In a debate on evolution between Thomas Henry Huxley, who was defending Darwin’s Origin of Species, and Samuel Wilberforce, who was challenging the concept, Wilberforce is reported to have asked whether Huxley claimed descent from a monkey through his grandfather or grandmother. The question, along with parodies of Darwin himself as a monkey, illustrates how Darwin’s theory of evolution undermined a hierarchical conception of animals that placed humans at the apex. Darwin went further in later publications such as The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) by arguing that humans expressed the same emotions as animals, and that some of these expressions were passed on from an earlier form of the species. Angelique Richardson’s collection of essays After Darwin: Animals, Emotions and the Mind (2013) explores the impact of such ideas on Victorian and contemporary society. Darwin himself referred to the “lower animals” so that, while he argued for an evolutionary linkage, he still saw them as subordinate to human intelligence. However, Darwin’s publications were part of a debate that led to the gradual acceptance that humans and other animals could be treated on an equal footing.

3. Dogs, Cats, Horses, and Birds: Engaging the Domestic The subject of animals and their treatment is obviously vast and could take up many volumes, so given space constraints, we offer a summary of some of the most prominent publications in Victorian animal studies organized by the animal being studied or by an overarching theme such as imperialism or extinction. We generally divide animals into “domestic” and “wild,” but the categories are not set in stone. How animals are perceived changes over time as cultural values shift. Given their long history of coexistence with humans, not to mention the array of different types produced by selective breeding, dogs in particular appear frequently in Victorian representations and there are, as a result, many studies that use them as a way to interrogate different aspects of nineteenth-century culture. Coral Lansbury’s The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England (1985) was an early analysis that showed how workers and suffragettes rallied around the statue of an “old brown dog” that commemorated the victims of vivisection because of a common identification with the animal 345

Martin Danahay and Deborah Denenholz Morse

as victim. The animal in this case became a unifying symbol for different human social groups. Dogs could be used as surrogates for many different forms of human identification, including class, gender, and racial subject positions. The novels of Charles Dickens frequently have dog characters, and Dickens himself owned dogs. Beryl Gray Farnham, in The Dog in the Dickensian Imagination (2014), examines the role of dogs such as Bull’s-eye in Oliver Twist (1837–39), Jip in David Copperfield (1849–50), and Lion in Little Dorrit (1855–57). She sees a contradiction in the representation of the dogs which are the objects of both affection and violence, leading to a disturbing level of cruelty. In “Dying Like a Dog in Great Expectations,” Ivan Kreilkamp argues that dogs in Victorian representation were “inconsistently treated as incomplete or as part-humans” (81) and anthropomorphized as disposable “characters” in subplots. Philip Howell by contrast, in At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Fiction (2015), rather than seeing dogs as victims of cruelty, emphasizes that they had agency, examining their representation in Dickens’s novels, Darwin’s texts, and the Battersea Dogs’ Home (which still exists today), showing how the canines transgressed human boundaries and were thus disruptive figures in their own right. In “Beastly Criminals and Criminal Beasts,” Grace Moore examines how the dog Bull’s- eye in Oliver Twist is constructed as a “criminal animal” (201). Meanwhile, Anna West, in her study of Thomas Hardy and animals, reads dogs and sheep together as indices of what Hardy saw as an intrinsic and natural moral sense. Elizabeth Barrett Browning famously wrote effusively about her cocker spaniel Flush, who garnered new attention after Virginia Woolf ’s biography Flush was published in 1931. Jennifer McDonell argues that, rather than dismiss such writing as Barrett Browning’s as sentimental, it should be seen as a response to urbanization and the need for domestic affective relationships in this new environment. Like Howell, McDonell also sees dogs as disruptive of species boundaries by “destabilizing hierarchical binary structures” (19). Similarly Kevin A. Morrison sees Flush as supplying a central emotional nexus, both in the poet’s relationships with others and in her poetry. In her Introduction to Woolf ’s Flush, Kate Flint focuses upon the gender issues aligning the Modernist and Victorian women writers. In a broader context, Keridiana W. Chez’s Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (2017) charts the rise in status of dogs from working animals to emotional accessories for their human owners. Building on Kreilkamp’s term “anthroprosthesis” in his 2009 essay “Anthroprosthesis or Prosthetic Dogs,” Chez labels dogs “prosthetic” to emphasize how they were defined as supplements who were essential to defining the “human” for their owners. Chez’s analysis draws on masculinity studies by analyzing how “man’s best friend” both supported imperial manliness and subverted male gender identity. Just as Chez brings masculinity studies to bear, Monica Flegel in Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture (2015) looks at works from Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847) and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) and Middlemarch (1972) to F. Anstey’s comic novel The Black Poodle (1884) and Mary Ward’s Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898), using the lens of queer theory to show how pets could transgress sexual boundaries and thus undermine Victorian heteronormative values. Kathleen Kete’s The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (1994) is concerned with emerging bourgeois urban domestic animal culture, while in “Animal Angst: Victorians Memorialize Their Pets,” Teresa Mangum focuses upon middle-class culture in England as she “explores Victorian dog elegies as expressions of anxiety about the mourners’ own old age, the senescent Queen, and the Victorian age itself ” (6). In the recently published Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel (2018), Kreilkamp argues that, despite their ubiquity in Victorian fiction, dogs and other domestic pets were not represented as possessing either the consciousness or the character of their human counterparts. Kreilkamp’s attention to canine cognition demonstrates how recent neuroscientific studies are influencing scholarship [on gender, see Dau’s chapter; on brain science, see Stiles’s]. Flegel also addresses cats in one chapter of Pets and Domesticity and in an article on children’s literature, where she argues that cats were the working-class pets of the Victorian household because they 346

The Emergence of Animal Studies

were seen as servants who earned their keep as “mousers.” Amato corroborates this, saying that “cats were often classed with rabbits and cavies (guinea pigs) as lesser fancy animals and pets of the working man” (29). Flegel also reads cat stories as covertly educating children about romance and sexuality [on children’s literature, see Straley’s chapter]. The mischievous Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865), illustrated by John Tenniel, is perhaps the most famous Victorian feline, although Krook’s intimidating cat Lady Jane in Bleak House is certainly memorable. Jenny Pyke in “Charles Dickens and the Cat Paw Letter Opener” looks at the author’s letter opener which was made from a deceased family cat and argues that it formed a vital tactile function in the writing process. While this may seem macabre to us now, the Victorians were much less squeamish about their proximity to death; this use of a cat belongs to the category of memento mori that includes hair jewelry made of a deceased loved one’s hair. The Victorians collected many preserved animals, sometimes using them as “particularly respectable” furniture, with the dead bodies of monkeys being turned into candelabras and a baby giraffe made into a chair (Amato 200, 203). Mangum argues that it was part of their culture of mourning so that taxidermy evoked sensations that “ranged from deliberate avoidance to guilt, dread, fury, longing, deep personal attachment, sentimental idealization, and anthropomorphism” (15). Both living and dead animals therefore functioned as repositories for a range of human emotions [on material culture, see Lutz’s chapter]. The most important text that takes a horse as its central character is unquestionably Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, The Autobiography of a Horse, Translated from the Original Equine (1877). Adrienne Gavin’s Dark Horse is the definitive biography of Sewell, and various essays on Black Beauty relate the book to a number of Victorian discourses. For example, Ruth Padel’s “Saddled with Ginger” and Gina Dorré’s “Horses and Corsets” connect the physical and psychic constrictions placed upon Victorian women to those enforced upon horses, particularly the mare Ginger. In “Breaking in Englishness,” Moira Ferguson links the oppression of women and the lower classes to imperial dominion, and Deborah Denenholz Morse focuses upon animal consciousness in relation to gender (“Animal Subjectivities”). Several essays focus upon sentimental discourse, emotion, and affect in Sewell’s novel. “Sentimental Masculinities,” by Peter Stoneley, discusses Uncle Tom’s Cabin in relation to Black Beauty, linking Sewell’s novel to race consciousness, enslavement, and abolitionist discourse as well as to Victorian ideals of masculinity, with a focus upon the beautiful, suffering black body. Kristen Guest analyzes the conflicting cultural ideals for masculinity that pit sentiment against capitalism. And in “Re-reading Sentimentalism,” Jopi Nyman argues that Sewell constructs “hybrid spaces” in which human-animal cooperation is most evident. And then there are the birds. Walter Howell Deverell’s painting “A Pet” (1853) exemplifies the strong identification in Victorian representation between women and caged birds. As Lisa Surridge argues, wives were often represented as pets in the period. Although we may now interpret the cage symbolism as a critique of women’s confinement in the domestic sphere, in Victorian terms as expressed by John Ruskin in “Of Queen’s Gardens” from Sesame and Lilies (1865), the house as a female space was seen as a location of peace and comfort rather than incarceration. Bird cages “proclaimed the morality and harmony of the household” and keeping birds was seen as a respectable pastime that elevated the character of the owner (Amato 41). The young woman’s body in Deverell’s painting mediates between “inside” and “outside” (Shefer 437), but is ultimately identified with an enclosed, domestic space. Catherine Burton also examines caged birds, especially canaries, as idealized representations of domestic space and of humans’ superiority over animals [on domesticity, see Gregory’s chapter]. In “Pacific Harvests,” Anca Vlasopolos reads short-tailed Albatrosses, along with whales, in terms of the initial exploitation of animals by Victorian industry that nearly eradicated some species as a precursor to the current global assault on marine life by relentless harvesting (167–78). And Barbara Gates reminds us of the organized campaigns against using bird feathers in fashion, in Kindred Nature (1999). On a lighter note, there were Edward Lear’s fantasy birds, as well as his Owl in “The Owl and the Pussycat” (1871) for Victorians’ avian pleasures. 347

Martin Danahay and Deborah Denenholz Morse

4. Crossing the Wild/Domestic Divide By contrast with caged birds, wild animals in Victorian representation emblematized danger as well as male prowess in killing them; a painting like Sir Edwin Landseer’s “The Otter Speared” (1844) in which a hunter holds up an otter on a long spear above a pack of baying hounds is a good example of such masculine iconography. Meanwhile, the fear of rabies cut across the domestic/wild divide, with the potential for even the most placid of animals to become the source of contagion. It was extremely unnerving for Victorians to imagine pets as acting violently and rabies therefore was seen as both a personal and national domestic threat (Danahay 97–109). Neil Pemberton and Michael Warboys’s Rabies in Britain: Dogs, Disease and Culture, 1830–2000 (2007) is the definitive source, tracing the history of both medical and cultural manifestations (see also Ritvo Animal 167–202). The comic novels of Robert Smith Surtees portray hunting as a masculine enterprise, as do the many such scenes in the novels of Anthony Trollope, who was himself an avid hunter of foxes. Smaller animals such as foxes, rabbits, and otters were the usual prey in the British Isles, while “big-game” hunting in Africa targeted elephants, giraffes, lions, and antelopes, to name but a few (Steinhart 144). Tigers were a particularly prized trophy for Victorian men, which they “saw as equals,” as Heather Schell explains in “Tiger Tales,” describing how “the hunters’ sense of kinship with tigers was infused with a nascent conviction that masculinity itself was essentially predatory” (230). Even Darwin saw a primordial “love of the chase” as innate in men (Abberley 63), as he and Victorian zoologists emphasized their emotional detachment from nature that elevated men “to a higher, intellectual plain” and therefore justified hunting as well as studying other animals (Abberley 61). Nigel Rothfels, in “Killing Elephants,” examines nineteenth-century attitudes toward elephant hunting (53–63), while various satiric stories by Saki, such as “The Music on the Hill” (1911) and “Sredni Vashter” (1911) slyly encourage readers to laugh at their own assumed human exceptionalism. Beatrix Potter drew both domestic and wild animals in her children’s books, in which Peter Rabbit and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle held conversations. These and other talking animals are discussed by Tess Cosslett and Amy Ratelle. Wild animals were also collected and exhibited at London Zoo, opened in 1828 and originally created for scientific study by the Zoological Society, which had formed in 1826. London Zoo was envisioned as “a collection of captive wild animals that would serve not just as a popular symbol of human domination but also as a more precise and elaborate figuration of England’s imperial enterprise” (Ritvo Animal 206). Amato too sees the zoo as part of the imperial “civilizing” process whereby the superiority of British culture was implicitly reinforced (112). The Zoological Society and the zoo were thus directly linked to imperialism and the domination of other countries through animal bodies. Originally restricted only to members of the Zoological Society, as the century progressed London Zoo shifted its emphasis to “mass consumption” by opening to the public in 1847 (Jones 2). Takashi Ito’s London Zoo and the Victorians, 1828–1859 (2016) situates London Zoo within the discourses of imperial, metropolitan, and intellectual history. One of England’s great wildlife animal illustrators, Joseph Wolf, painted London Zoo animals. Outside London, zoos and menageries were also pervasive and often more undisciplined and dangerous for both animals and humans, as Helen Cowie argues in Exhibiting Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Empathy, Education, Entertainment (2014). In Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain (2014), Ann Colley also addresses zoos and how the Victorians touched both live and dead animal skins, which she reads as a desire to transcend the boundary of human skin through physical contact (128). As Colley describes, outside of zoos, Victorians collected not only live animals but the skins of dead animals for a variety of purposes, from museum specimens to decorations for the home. Although they collected exotic wild animals, the Victorians did not in general eat them, with one notable exception in Frank Buckland, who founded the English Acclimation Society in 1860. As a child Buckland “had dined on hedgehog, puppy, and crocodile at the table of his father” and he carried on this expansive menu into adulthood when he arranged to cook and eat the Society

348

The Emergence of Animal Studies

members’ dead animals; as a result, his dinner guests were served panther, elephant trunk soup, and roast giraffe (Ritvo 238; Mayer “Come buy” 215). The aim of the society was to include such animals in the English diet, but the suggestion that people eat wombats and antelopes met with unexpected resistance (Mayer 149). While the Victorians were happy to look at and touch exotic wild animals, in general they did not want to classify them as food.

5. Animal Politics: Experimentation, Animal Rights, and Empire The RSPCA paid little attention to vivisection as animal cruelty in its early years, and then tried to articulate a position between inflicting unnecessary pain and “justifiable” scientific experimentation (Ritvo Animal 157–58). Frances Power Cobbe became a vocal critic of the practice, establishing the National Anti-Vivisection Society in 1875 and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection in 1898, as discussed in Sally Mitchell’s biography. Susan Hamilton has written on Cobbe’s opposition to vivisection and also collected primary materials on the subject in Animal Welfare and Anti-vivisection 1870–1910. As Mayer notes, a key issue in the debate was the degree to which animals could feel pain, and the closeness or distance of their emotions in relation to humans (“Expression” 399–400) [on ethics, see Mitchell’s chapter]. Toward the end of the century, resistance to eating any animals, whether domestic or foreign, gained more adherents. Henry Salt was an important late-century figure in animal rights who combined vegetarianism with social activism for their rights. His Animals’ Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1894) advocated that Victorians “recognize the common bond of humanity that unites all living beings in one universal brotherhood” (8). Darwin’s ideas had subverted the distinction between humans and other animals, and Salt pushed this further by arguing for equal status for the other animals, although he still referred to them as “brutes.” Salt’s ideas were refracted through fiction by H.G. Wells. In The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) it is unclear initially whether the Beast People (a fusion of animal and human) are humans who have devolved into animals or animals who have been made human by Dr. Moreau’s vivisection. The book equates eating animals with cannibalism because the animal/human divide has been crossed by the Beast People. “Vegetarian discourse increasingly described meat eating as a degenerate practice, pushing civilized culture down a slippery slope to cannibalistic savagery” (Lee 174), and Wells’s text raises the specter of cannibalism among both humans and the Beast People as they transgress the prohibition against eating their own kind as meat. Notably, Wells has Dr. Moreau’s inhumane experiments occur on a tropical island far from the home base of England. The history of animals in the Victorian era is intimately connected to the expansion of the British Empire. Britain had occupied parts of India since Robert Clive won the battle of Plessy in 1757 and took control of Bengal, so tigers and elephants were familiar animals to the British public. John Miller traces the intersection of animals with the expanding British Empire as represented in colonial discourse such as R.M. Ballantyne’s The Gorilla Hunters (1861) and H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885). Miller also looks at the way in which such representations opened “a range of violent and repressive possibilities for colonial rulers as racial others are emptied of their human status” (2). These encounters between Victorian humans and animals were often violent, as the latter were hunted, collected, and displayed as trophies (Steinhart 144). Miller examines the ways in which elephant body parts were turned into commodities (48–51), joining the giraffe and monkeys listed by Amato (200, 203). In “The Mark of the Beast,” Morse examines both domestic and wild animals as sites of imperial encounter (181–200), and in “The Empire Bites Back,” Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge explore representations of the racialized crocodile (249–70). The flora and fauna of Australia, however, presented a special challenge to Victorian taxonomies. An animal like the platypus (not to mention the kangaroo) undermined established systems of classification because it was a mammal that laid eggs rather than a bird or lizard (Ritvo Platypus 5–15). The effort to create classifying systems was part of the overall imperialist effort to order 349

Martin Danahay and Deborah Denenholz Morse

and control new territories according to British customs. An extension of this was the deliberate introduction of species native to the British Isles into new ecosystems, with the disastrous effects of releasing rabbits in Australia as one of the most glaring examples [on postcolonialism, see Banerjee’s chapter; on economics, see Rajan’s].

Conclusion: Extinction The concept of extinction initially entered Victorian consciousness through Charles Lyell’s dating of the earth in geology and the gradual recognition of dinosaur fossils as the remains of an extinct species. [on paleontology, see O’Connor’s chapter; on the Anthropocene, see Taylor’s]. Darwin addressed the topic in the Origin of Species, making it quite clear that extinction of species occurred, although he saw it as a gradual process rather than a cataclysmic event (218). The Victorians knew of the extinction of one famous species in the Dodo, a flightless bird on the island of Mauritius that was hunted out of existence by sailors in the seventeenth century, leading to the expression “as dead as a Dodo.” The most famous Victorian representation of the Dodo is in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Jeremy Gaskell’s Who Killed the Great Auk? (2001), among other extinction studies, has focused upon the Victorian era and the loss of species. Fears of extinction due to the rapacity of human commodity culture is also illustrated in W.H. Hudson’s late Victorian ornithological studies such as Lost British Birds (1894) and British Birds (1895) and in his early Edwardian eco-romance Green Mansions (1904). Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), meanwhile, equates Victorians with the Dodo and other animals as the victims of an invasion by the technologically superior Martians. Wells’s message in this novel, as in his nonfiction essays, was that humans should not be complacent because they could well join the dinosaurs and the Dodo in the annals of extinction, and in the era of Anthropocenic climate change, this is more true than ever. Animal studies today is an urgent endeavor—Victorianists recognize that the time for animal studies is now, before many more glorious species are lost forever.

Key Critical Works Giorgio Agamben. The Open: Man and Animal. Bruce Boehrer. Molly Hand, and Brian Massumi, editors. Animals, Animality, and Literature. Keridiana W. Chez. Victorian Dogs,Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Ann C. Colley. Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain: Zoos, Collections, Portraits and Maps. Donna Haraway. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Ivan Kreilkamp. Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel. Coral Lansbury. The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England. Laurence W. Mazzeno, and Ronald D. Morrison, editors. Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture: Contexts for Criticism. Deborah Denenholz Morse, and Martin A. Danahay, editors. Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture. Harriet Ritvo. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age.

Works Cited Abberley, Will. “‘The Love of the Chase Is an Inherent Delight in Man’: Hunting and Masculine Emotions in the Victorian Zoologist’s Travel Memoir.” RCC Perspectives, vol. 4, 2017, pp. 61–68. Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Translated by K. Attell, Stanford UP, 2002. Amato, Sarah. Beastly Possession: Animals in Victorian Consumer Culture. U of Toronto P, 2015. Bekoff, Marc. The Emotional Lives of Animals. New World Library, 2007. ———. Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart. Oxford UP, 2002. Birke, Lynda. Feminism, Animals, and Science: The Naming of the Shrew. Open UP, 1994. Boehrer, Bruce, Molly Hand, and Brian Massumi, editors. Animals, Animality, and Literature. Cambridge UP, 2018.

350

The Emergence of Animal Studies Burton, Catherine. “Poeticizing the ‘Pet of the Parlor’: Domesticated Canaries in Victorian Periodicals.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, vol. 39, no. 1, February 2017, pp. 15–31. Chez, Keridiana W. Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Ohio State UP, 2017. Colley, Ann C. Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain: Zoos, Collections, Portraits and Maps. Ashgate, 2014. Cosslett, Tess. Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914. Ashgate, 2006. Cowie, Helen. Exhibiting Animals in in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Empathy, Education, Entertainment. Palgrave, 2014. Danahay, Martin A. “Nature Red in Hoof and Paw: Domestic Animals and Violence in Victorian Art.” Morse and Danahay, pp. 97–119. Darwin, Charles. The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. John Murray, 1872. Darwin, Charles. The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. John Murray, 1872. ———. On the Origin of Species, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. John Murray, 1859. Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 2, Winter 2002, pp. 369–418. Dorré, Gina. “Horses and Corsets: Black Beauty, Dress Reform, and the Fashioning of the Victorian Woman.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 30, no. 1, March 2002, pp. 157–78. Farnham, Beryl Gray. The Dog in the Dickensian Imagination. Ashgate, 2014. Ferguson, Moira. Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 1790–1800: Patriots, Nation, and Empire. U of Michigan P, 1998. ———. “Breaking in Englishness: Black Beauty and the Politics of Gender, Race, and Class. Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 5, no. 1, 1994, pp. 34–52. Flegel, Monica. “Everything I Wanted to Know about Sex I Learned from My Cat: Animal Stories, WorkingClass Life Troubles, and the Child Reader in Victorian England.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 2, Summer 2016, pp. 121–41. ———. Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture. Routledge, 2015. Flint, Kate. Introduction. Flush. Oxford, 2009, pp. xii–xlvi. Fudge, Erica. “A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals.” Rothfels, pp. 3–18. Gaskell, Jeremy. Who Killed the Great Auk? Oxford UP, 2001. Gates, Barbara T. Kindred Nature:Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World. Chicago UP, 1999. Gauld, Nicola. “Victorian Bodies: The Wild Animal as Adornment.” British Art Journal, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 37–42. Gavin, Adrienne. Dark Horse: A Life of Anna Sewell. History, 2004. Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2016. Guest, Kirsten. “Black Beauty, Masculinity, and the Market for Horseflesh.” Victorians Institute Journal, vol. 38, 2010, pp. 9–22. Hamilton, Susan. Animal Welfare and Anti-Vivisection 1870–1910: Nineteenth Century Woman’s Mission. Routledge, 2004. ———. “Reading and the Popular Critique of Science in the Victorian Anti-Vivisection Press: Frances Power Cobbe’s Writing for the Victoria Street Society.” Victorian Review, vol. 36, no. 2, Fall 2010, pp. 66–79. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm, 2003. Howell, Philip. At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Fiction. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2015. ———. When Species Meet. Minnesota UP, 2007. Hudson W. H. British Birds. Longmans, Green. 1895. ———. Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1904. ———. Lost British Birds. Society for Protection of Birds, no. 14, 1894. Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. Routledge, 2010. Ito, Takashi. London Zoo and the Victorians, 1828–1859. Boydell, 2014. Jones, Robert W. “‘The Sight of Creatures Strange to Our Clime:’ London Zoo and the Consumption of the Exotic.” Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 1997, pp. 1–26. Kete, Kathleen. The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris. U of California P, 1995. King, Barbara. How Animals Grieve. Chicago, 2013. ———. Personalities on the Plate. Chicago, 2017. Kreilkamp, Ivan. “Anthroprosthesis, or Prosthetic Dogs.” Victorian Review, vol. 35, no. 2, Fall 2009, pp. 36–41. ———. “Dying Like a Dog in Great Expectations.” Morse and Danahay, pp. 81–94. ———. Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel. Chicago UP, 2018. Lansbury, Coral. The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England. U of Wisconsin P, 1985. Lee, Michael Parish. The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Palgrave, 2016.

351

Martin Danahay and Deborah Denenholz Morse Leighton, Mary Elizabeth, and Lisa Surridge. “The Empire Bites Back: The Racialized Crocodile of the Nineteenth Century.” Morse and Danahay, pp. 249–79. Mangum, Teresa. “Animal Angst: Victorians Memorialize Their Pets.” Morse and Danahay, pp. 15–34. Mayer, Jed. “‘Come Buy, Come Buy!’: Christina Rossetti and the Victorian Animal Market.” Mazzeno and Morrison, pp. 213–31. ———. “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Laboratory Animals.” Victorian Studies, vol. 50, no. 3, 2008, pp. 399–417. ———. “Ways of Reading Animals in Victorian Literature, Culture and Science.” Literature Compass, vol. 7, no. 5, 2010, pp. 347–57. Mazzeno, Laurence W. and Ronald D. Morrison, editors. Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture: Contexts for Criticism. Palgrave, 2017. McDonell, Jennifer. “Ladies Pets and the Politics of Affect: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Flush.” Australian Literary Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, June 2010, pp. 17–34. Miller, John. Empire and the Animal Body:Violence, Identity and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction. Anthem, 2012. Moore, Grace. “Beastly Criminals and Criminal Beasts: Stray Women and Stray Dogs in Oliver Twist.” Morse and Danahay, pp. 201–14. Morrison, Kevin A. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Dog Days.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 30, no. 1, 2011, pp. 93–115. Morse, Deborah Denenholz. “Animal Subjectivities: Gendered Literary Representation of Animal Minds in Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty.” Boehrer, et al., pp. 180–96. ———. “‘The Mark of the Beast’: Animals as Sites of Imperial Encounter from Wuthering Heights to Green Mansions.” Morse and Danahay, pp. 181–200. Morse, Deborah Denenholz, and Martin Danahay. Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture. Ashgate, 2007. Nyman, Jopi. “Re-Reading Sentimentalism in Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty: Affect, Performativity, and Hybrid Spaces.” Affect, Space, and Animals, edited by Jopi Nyman and Nora Schuurman, Routledge, 2015, pp. 65–79. Padel, Ruth. “Saddled with Ginger.” Encounter, November 1980, pp. 47–54. Pemberton, Neil, and Michael Warboys. Rabies in Britain: Dogs, Disease and Culture, 1830–2000. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pyke, Jenny. “Charles Dickens and the Cat Paw Letter Opener.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, vol. 19, 2014. www.19.bbk.ac.uk/articles/10.16995/ntn.701/ Ratelle, Amy. Animality and Children’s Literature and Film. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Richardson, Angelique, editor. After Darwin: Animals, Emotions, and the Mind. Rodopi, 2013. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Harvard UP, 1987. ———. Noble Cows & Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals & History. U of Virginia P, 2010. ———. The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination. Harvard UP, 1998. Rothfels, Nigel. “Killing Elephants: Pathos and Prestige in the Nineteenth Century.” Morse and Danahay, pp. 53–64. ———, editor. Representing Animals. Indiana UP, 2002. Salt, Henry Stephen. Animals’ Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress. Palgrave MacMillan, 1894. Schell, Heather. “Tiger Tales.” Morse and Danahay, pp. 229–48. Shefer, Eliane. “Deverell, Rossetti, Siddal, and ‘The Bird in the Cage’.” Art Bulletin, vol. 67, September 1985, pp. 437–48. Sewell, Anna. Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, the Autobiography of a Horse, Translated from the Original Equine. 1877. Edited by Adrienne Gavin, Oxford, 2012. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. Harper Collins, 1975; rev. 2009. Steinhart, Edward I. “The Imperial Hunt in Colonial Kenya.” Animals in Human Histories: The Mirror of Nature and Culture, edited by Mary J. Henninger-Voss, U of Rochester P, 2002, pp. 144–81. Stoneley, Peter. “Sentimental Emasculations: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Black Beauty.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 54, no. 1, June 1999, pp. 53–72. Surridge, Lisa. “Dog’s Bodies/Women’s Bodies: Wives as Pets in Mid-Nineteenth Century Narratives of Domestic Violence.” Victorian Review, vol. 20, no. 1, 1994, pp. 139–59. Taylor, Angus. Animals and Ethics: An Overview of the Philosophical Debates. Broadview, 2003. Vlasopolos, Anca. “Pacific Harvests: Whales and Albatrosses in Nineteenth-Century Markets.” Morse and Danahay, pp. 167–78. Wells, H. G. The Island of Dr. Moreau. Heinemann, 1896. ———. The War of the Worlds. Heinemann, 1898.

352

The Emergence of Animal Studies West, Anna. Thomas Hardy and Animals. Cambridge UP, 2017. Wise, Steven. Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights. Basic Books, 2003. ———. Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals. Perseus, 2000. Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthuman Theory. Chicago, 2003. ———. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. Chicago, 2012. Yarborough, William. Masculinity in Children’s Animal Stories 1888–1928. McFarland, 2011.

353

PART V

Science and Spirit

31 TECHNOLOGY AND LITERATURE Richard Menke

From the 1830s to the turn of the century, the refinement of older devices and industrial processes as well as the development and adoption of new ones became more and more consistent parts of the lives of many Victorians. In the early nineteenth century, the expanded use of coal power continued to reshape industrial production and labor. Factory owners used coal to supplement or supersede other power sources such as running water, while inventors and capitalists applied steam power to new domains such as printing. Railways—in which a mobile steam engine on wheels became part of a vast topographic mechanism of tracks and tunnels, signals and stations, cuttings and embankments— created the largest infrastructure project in British history, radically altering the physical geography of the nation as well as the circulation of goods and people (see Schivelbusch; Carter). The project also brought the Railway Mania of the 1840s, a frenetic speculative investment bubble followed soon enough by its inevitable collapse. Looking back on the period from the late eighteenth century to the 1840s, the Victorian economic historian Arnold Toynbee would influentially identify it with what he called an “industrial revolution.” In the second half of the period, scientific knowledge and experimentation were brought to bear more systematically on the march of invention. The application of advances in chemistry, metallurgy, and—most of all—electricity came to characterize what was later sometimes called a second industrial revolution. The dynamo, suggested in the 1830s by the work of Michael Faraday, was developed into an electrical generator suitable for industrial uses in the 1860s by Charles Wheatstone and Faraday’s former student Samuel Alfred Varley in England, as well as by Werner von Siemens in Germany. Dynamos were usually powered by coal and steam, but they helped to suggest the possibilities of more comprehensive electrical infrastructure. In these decades, new inventions and emerging technologies also began to become part of a growing consumer economy, reshaping not only labor but also leisure and life at home. The Victorian age didn’t simply witness a succession of technological innovations. Rather, its institutions and ideologies helped to produce and shape a rising culture of invention, a development affirmed in arenas ranging from advertising and journalism to patent reform. The application of science to meet human wants and to make money, the idea of a social and economic revolution centered on changes in industrial production, a culture of invention: all of these became increasingly familiar to Victorians. Yet one thing the nineteenth century lacked was the umbrella term in the title of this chapter that would encapsulate it all. Newly appointed as Regius Professor of Technology at the University of Edinburgh in 1855, George Wilson worried that the word “technology” was “mysterious” (On the Objects of Technology 3)—“so unfamiliar to English ears, 357

Richard Menke

and so inexpressive to English minds, that I must, at the very outset, explain what . . . I am called upon to profess” (What Is Technology? 3). Indeed, Wilson devotes the whole of his inaugural lecture to explaining the term, under the assumption that it will be largely unfamiliar to his listeners. As a starting point, he defines “technology” as systematic, practical knowledge of the industrial or applied arts that goes far beyond the older meaning of the term as a piece of writing, a treatise dealing with such useful arts or techne. Wilson wrote: “[T]he true object of technology . . . if you translate the word into plain English, is how to answer most sumptuously the questions, ‘What shall we eat?’ and ‘What shall we drink?’ and ‘Wherewithal shall we be clothed?’” (On the Objects of Technology 5). Technology deals with “common” wants, “everyday life,” the needs that human beings share with other animals. And yet technology is also what gives humanity a noble “power and dignity” that is “immeasurabl[y]” beyond animal life (What Is Technology? 7). Other animals create beautiful and useful objects to fulfill their own wants, including objects that exceed human beings’ abilities or understanding. But they do so according to instinct, along predetermined lines. Technology—as refined and transmitted knowledge, as potential for species-progress, even as subject of daily controversy, politics, and discussion—is precisely what they lack: No feathered Ruskin appears among the birds, to discuss before them whether their nests should be built on the principles of Grecian or Gothic architecture. No beaver, in advance of his age, patents a diving-bell. No glow-worm advocates, in the hearing of her conservative sisters, the merits of new vesta-lights, or improved lucifer-matches. The silk-worms entertain no propositions regarding the substitution of machinery for bodily labour. The spiders never divide the House on the question of a Ten Hours Working Bill. The ants are at one on their Corn-laws. (8–9) Few Victorian writers used the word “technology,” as Wilson indicates. But from industrialism and parliamentary debate to aesthetics, his list of technological issues is a précis for many of the most famous debates in mid-Victorian culture. Nevertheless, Wilson’s explanation of technology stops significantly short of our current use of the word to sum up the devices, processes, or practices that followed from such knowledge about how to make things to meet our needs, what we mean when we describe the Lancashire loom or telephone or bicycle as “technologies.” This meaning only became common in the twentieth century, an era in which some of the most significant products of human ingenuity and advanced science became widely recognized as existential threats to our species and indeed to life on our planet. In this chapter, I will freely employ the word “technology” in this later sense, a sense that treats machines and methods as concrete embodiments of our knowledge. But it’s worth remembering that, for even an advanced Victorian technologist, “technology” itself meant a growing body of practical knowledge for debate—more than just a piece of writing but not yet a piece of gear. As I will discuss, writing about technology and Victorian literature has often meant seeing the concerns of the scholar’s own age reflected back, perhaps in part because of the suggestive but imperfect match between Victorians’ categories and later ones. In the middle of the twentieth century, during the early years of Victorian studies as a discipline, scholarship often emphasized strands of Victorian literature and cultural critique that opposed the mechanical to the organic. Since the 1990s, accounts of Victorian literature and technology have tended not to take the putative divides between mechanism and organism, or between technological discourse and imaginative writing, as categorical, stable, or predetermined. Scholarship has also responded to larger intellectual movements in theory, technology, and media studies, as well as to the current exigencies of our own relationships to our technologies and to technological change.

358

Technology and Literature

1. The Machinery of Critique With his readiness to view great contemporary debates as case studies in the applied arts, Wilson—like so many writers and thinkers of his time—is responding to and appropriating a paradigm set out most forcefully by Thomas Carlyle. In “Signs of the Times” (1829), Carlyle decries the era as quintessentially a “Mechanical Age,” the “Age of Machinery, in every outward sense and inward sense of the word.” Carlyle starts with the fate of the laborer, “the living artisan . . . driven from his workshop to make room for a speedier, inanimate one,” but his catalog of modern machinery includes steam transport, devices to chop cabbage, even incubators to hatch chickens (442). Such devices have helped satisfy human needs with less and less expenditure of human labor, he concedes, although he pauses to observe that they also seem to have increased the inequality of rich and poor. But for Carlyle, the most baleful side of the machine age is its extension of the belief in machinery to the social realm; the turn to associations, institutions, and political reforms as fonts of progress confirms a general mechanical mind-set. “There is no end to machinery,” he asserts (442). Wilson would disagree with Carlyle’s denunciations, but he fully concurs that labor-saving devices and Corn-law debates alike are what Carlyle calls “mechanical” and Wilson “technological.” Entranced by the mechanical, argues Carlyle, nineteenth-century culture has neglected “the dynamical,” a heading under which he includes nature, growth, vitality, wonder, the soul (449). Other Victorian public intellectuals would not only emulate Carlyle’s role as sage and cultural critic but also offer their own variations on this opposition. In his famous chapter “The Nature of Gothic” from The Stones of Venice (1851–53), John Ruskin draws a sharp contrast between the roughness, naturalism, and grotesquerie of Gothic architecture and the ideal of machine-made perfection expressed in modern building, reading it as the material sign of the freedom of the medieval craftsman as compared to the servile status of the modern worker. Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) takes up Carlyle’s critique of the mechanical more directly, attacking Victorian complacency about the outward tokens of social progress as “faith in machinery,” broadly construed: “What is freedom but machinery? what is population but machinery? what is coal but machinery? what are railroads but machinery? what is wealth but machinery? what are, even religious organisations but machinery?” (96). Against machinery, Arnold poses “culture” as the questing, dynamic study of perfection. Machines and the mechanical offer a kind of all-purpose characterization of modern life in Britain, even though Arnold, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Wilson would ascribe different valences to that life. In the teaching of Victorian literature as established in the middle of the twentieth century, “Signs of the Times” might well feature as the first text in a survey course, offering the paradigm for a cultural split between the mechanical and the organic. Following the cues of Lionel Trilling and others, Victorian scholars in the twentieth century might treat a rift between organism and mechanism, between organic communities and atomistic modern societies, and between the literary imagination and the complex of science and technology, as a rehearsal for the two cultures debate in postwar Britain. In a 1956 article (“The Two Cultures”) that was soon expanded into lectures and a book, the novelist C.P. Snow decried what he considered the Luddism of literary intellectuals at a time when science and technology seemed to hold the keys to unprecedented social improvement or utter annihilation— provoking a furious counterblast by the literary critic F.R. Leavis. Discussions of the Snow-Leavis controversy regularly treated the sparring of Arnold (“Literature and Science”) with T.H. Huxley (“Science and Culture”) over the focus of Victorian higher education—classical literature or modern science?—as a preview of the less civil twentieth-century dispute. In fact, the Arnold-Huxley dispute arose as part of a debate over educational reform among liberal Anglican elites rather than as a kind of existential war between science and literature (see White). With the links it draws between the factories of the fictitious Coketown and the soul-destroying educational machinery of the Gradgrind school, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) offers fiction to match the Victorian sages’ essays. The work rejects a mechanistic philosophy, embraces the imagination, and insists

359

Richard Menke

on natural development as an inescapable counter-norm (its three sections are “Sowing,” “Reaping,” and “Garnering”). If mechanism and organism offered competing models for human beings and their societies, these oppositions might be smoothly mapped onto a rift between the scientific and the literary in a way that gratifyingly affirms the moral and spiritual importance of literature. In a stranger vein, Samuel Butler’s satirical novel Erewhon (1872) imagines a hidden country at the antipodes where the ill are considered criminals while those who commit crimes are pitied and sent for treatment, and where machines are banned. In “The Book of the Machines” (originally published by Butler as a separate essay called “Darwin Among the Machines”), we learn why Erewhon is a land without machinery: extrapolating from the rapid improvement of machinery, an Erewhonian sage concluded that machines were destined not only to achieve their own version of consciousness but also ultimately to outpace and enslave human beings. Butler’s writing might offer the earliest version of what has more recently been named “the technological singularity,” a point when machine intelligence dramatically exceeds human capacities, with radical and disastrous implications for the future of human life. More than a century later, the novelist and computer scientist Vernon Vinge would offer the most influential modern description of an imminent future in which rise of artificial intelligence ushers in the “post-human” era. It is possible to read Victorian writing as a story of literary technophobia, of organic versus mechanical philosophies, extending to encompass William Morris, the Arts and Crafts movement, and even the horrors of industrialized warfare in the Great War. Critical accounts such as Herbert Sussman’s impressive Victorians and the Machine (1968) could support such a narrative, although Sussman analyzes not only Victorian writers’ rejection of the mechanical or their fixation on its ugliness, but also the comparative technophilia of H.G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling at the end of the century. But this story is incomplete at best. For one thing, it tends to be one-sided. As Sussman notes incisively, in an essay written several decades after his first book on the subject, “The Victorians loved machinery” (“Machine Dreams” 197). Modern publishers regularly issue popular illustrated collections of serious or quirky nineteenth-century patents and inventions that richly demonstrate the sheer Victorian love of mechanical devices and commitment to freewheeling technological innovation. Stephen van Dulken’s Inventing the 19th Century is a particularly useful and well-documented example of this genre. Yet as Sussman pointed out, “one would have little sense of Victorian machine dreams and the Victorian pleasures in machinery from the writings of contemporary Victorianists” (197). And as Joseph Bizup’s Manufacturing Culture (2003) demonstrates, industrial writers were fully prepared to defend and justify Victorian industry, often in cultural and aesthetic terms that ran parallel to those of its critics. Sussman’s own Victorian Technology (2009) offers a balanced and accessible introduction to the era’s most important technological innovations and their relationships to Victorian life and culture. Moreover, by the end of the twentieth century, theorists such as Donna Haraway offered stimulating new approaches to technology and science, more critically accounting for the construction of the natural while rethinking the divide between the organic and mechanical in the first place. Along with literary studies’ extension to a cultural discourse beyond novelists, poets, and sages, such approaches emphasized that writers and audiences did not simply respond to technological developments but helped to produce and articulate the cultural matrix in which those developments took place and had meaning. Scholars (even in the disciplines we still call “the humanities”) began to challenge anthropocentricism, in keeping with Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory or the object-oriented ontology articulated by Graham Harman and others. The continuing impact of digital media also prompted a focus on Victorian communication and information technologies, alongside the already well-established interest in industrial production and transport. Most recently, inspired by the work of ecological historians such as Andreas Malm as well as by the unfolding climate catastrophe that poses an existential threat to life on our planet, studies of Victorian literature and culture have begun to engage more closely with the environmental and energy humanities [on ecocriticism, see Voskuil’s chapter]. Such scholarship often views the Victorian implementation of steam technologies and coal as the beginning of a ramped-up carbon economy and anthropogenic climate change (MacDuffie, 360

Technology and Literature

Victorian Literature; Taylor)—and even looks to nineteenth-century culture to understand the roots of climate-change denialism (MacDuffie, “Charles Darwin”) [on industry, see Carroll’s chapter; on the Anthropocene, see Taylor’s chapter].

2. Literary Devices Haraway took the cyborg as a feminist model for crossing boundaries such as the putative divide between nature and culture, and as an embodiment of the actual state of contemporary human beings. In so doing, she raised compelling questions about the complex interrelations between living things and technoscience under postmodernity. But such questioning of boundaries also characterized the nineteenth century; after all, scholars had already shown how central technology was to Victorian debates about social values, progress, and the self. Tracing out these possibilities, Tamara Ketabgian’s The Lives of Machines (2011) finds powerful alignments between the human, the biological, and the machinic across Victorian culture, including the representation of the bestial appetites of workers and machines in industrial discourse and, more unexpectedly, the mechanics and metaphorics of steam as emotion in George Eliot’s bildungsroman The Mill on the Floss (1860). Perhaps Ketabgian’s centerpiece reading is an examination of Hard Times’s repeated description of factory machinery as “melancholy mad elephants,” a grim allusion to a famous performing elephant named Chunee, whose long and apparently placid career terminated in a sudden outburst of murderous violence. For Ketabgian, this comparison helps to open up the novel’s supposed opposition between the regularity of mechanism and the unpredictability of living things to a model of complexity, mystery, and affect that runs between the organic and the mechanical. Under an earlier critical paradigm, at least, Hard Times might have seemed to sustain the impression of Victorian literature’s clear and simple opposition between life and machinery. But in a larger sense, part of Dickens’s distinctiveness as a novelist derives from his tendency to place inanimate objects in psychic proximity to living characters, describing them in similar terms. While tics and catchphrases help define characters whose outward characteristics announce their inner life even at the risk of a flat or cartoonish effect, inanimate objects in Dickens’s fiction often seem imbued with life. Technological things, such as steam engines animating factory work or riding on rails, often seem endowed with particular power and meaning. Dickens also attacked the unreformed patent system in his journal Household Words as well as in Little Dorrit (1855–57), presenting the plights of sympathetic fictitious inventors. Writing to Charles Eliot Norton shortly after Dickens’s death, Ruskin dismissed the novelist as “a pure modernist—a leader of the steam-whistle party par excellence,” seeing him as more an ally of industrial modernity than a critic of it (7). In Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41), Nell and Grandfather’s wanderings take them to an industrial city, the nadir of their adventures and the novel’s vision of hell. Alone and ignored, they are rescued by a strange figure, a man who takes them into the factory where he watches the fire. It’s a landscape to match the promethean energies unleashed by coal, but—against expectations—it ends up not crushing or blasting the workers but making them into demigods: echoing to the roof with the beating of hammers and roar of furnaces, mingled with the hissing of red-hot metal plunged in water, and a hundred strange unearthly noises never heard elsewhere; in this gloomy place, moving like demons among the flame and smoke, dimly and fitfully seen, flushed and tormented by the burning fires, and wielding great weapons, a faulty blow from any one of which must have crushed some workman’s skull, a number of men laboured like giants. (342) Here, next to the factory fire, in a setting like nothing else in the novel, the travelers sleep and find comfort. 361

Richard Menke

Dombey and Son (1846–48) leaves behind the picaresque plots of Dicken’s first decade as a novelist and exchanges the fairytale timelessness of The Old Curiosity Shop for an up-to-the-minute sense of global commerce and railway building in the 1840s. Yet its treatment of the railway ultimately reiterates the treatment of steam technology as an extension of human powers. Early in the novel, the coming of the railway alters Staggs’s Gardens, the London neighborhood of Polly Toodles and her family, utterly beyond recognition; later, traveling in a railway carriage as he grieves for his son, Dombey sees its speed and power as analogs for the intransigence of death itself. But the full import of the railway finally becomes clear many chapters later, and many miles away, as an exhausted James Carker flees from Dombey, whose unhappy wife Edith he has attempted to seduce. Walking along the tracks, Carker looks up, too late, to find an engine nearly on top of him, and to see his former employer staring first in anger and then in horror as the train mangles Carker’s body and leaves it in fragments. A modern machine annihilates a human life but, in context, the accident hardly seems to imply a breach between mechanism and organism or between technology and literature. Arriving just in time to play its role in the climax of this plotline, the implacable engine embodies not only Dombey’s vengeance but also Dickens’s careful planning of Dombey and Son, a sharp contrast to his earlier work. Machines and plot machinery align again in Little Dorrit, not only with the story of Daniel Doyce, the unfortunate inventor, but also with the work of Pancks, the “little labouring steam-engine” of a man who gratuitously researches the Dorrits’ family connections, enabling the novel’s passage from “Book the First: Poverty” to “Book the Second: Riches” (141). From the 1840s on, transport technologies offer Victorian writers images of change and progress as well as chronotopes, ways of representing time and space. The restive, romantically disappointed, and chauvinistic young man who is the speaker of Alfred Tennyson’s poem “Locksley Hall” (1842) sets aside his dissatisfaction with the present and with his personal future by imagining the world riding into the future on railway tracks: Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range, Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change. Thro’ the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day; Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. (lines 181–84) (Tennyson had the mistaken impression that the rails were grooved, as he later admitted.) For all their global language, these lines imagine a Western realm of change, growth, and technological advancement that is defined against the “shining Orient” in general (line 154) or China in particular, a country typically treated as a stand-still nation and the antitype to Victorian progress. Even when writers wanted to contest that progress, they often turned to the railway as the physical incarnation of the modern movement through time. Thomas De Quincey’s essay “The English MailCoach, or the Glory of Motion” (1849) contrasts the sensation of riding on a mail coach, the fastest vehicle of a just-vanished era, to the experience of movement on the railway. For a passenger steaming ahead on board a train, speed is only “lifeless knowledge,” asserts De Quincey. But on a careening mail coach, “we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it”; drawing on the sense of bodily speed and danger, De Quincey builds the essay into “dream-fugue” about (among other things) living out history in the Napoleonic era (193, 224). George Eliot’s opening for Felix Holt, The Radical (1866) also makes the contrast between incipient and just-vanished forms of travel into a reflection on the transports of writing and remembrance: Posterity may be shot, like a bullet through a tube, by atmospheric pressure from Winchester to Newcastle: that is a fine result to have among our hopes; but the slow old-fashioned way of 362

Technology and Literature

getting from one end of our country to the other is the better thing to have in the memory. The tube-journey can never lend much to picture and narrative. (3) The pneumatic tubes Eliot imagines never did become an alternate technology to rival the railway, remaining more useful for moving light documents than for transporting people or freight. Still, Eliot invokes the prospective technology as a figure for future speed and a contrast to her narrative of the early 1830s, the era just before the arrival of the railway and electric telegraph. Middlemarch (1871–72), also set in the 1830s, imagines preparations for the railway that will come to materialize the novel’s famous social web—but also to disrupt it by connecting the eponymous provincial town more closely to London and the rest of Great Britain. Changes in transport technology offered writers new ways of seeing the connections between individuality and community, between space and time, between local stories and a sense of national belonging (see Grossman; Livesey). Victorian novelists took advantage of new technical and narrative possibilities: of the railway as a system that brought the city and country into closer contact, for instance, and of the railway station as a place of public and private interchange. A potentially compromising visit to the station in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854–55), an awkward trip in a railway carriage followed by awkward fisticuffs in Anthony Trollope’s The Small House at Allington (1862–64), the deracinated railway journeying of Thomas Hardy’s protagonists in Jude the Obscure (1894–95): all of these typify the creative possibilities novelists could find in the realities of railway travel. Other genres had still more intimate connections to the rise of railway technology as a modern experience that mingled boredom, excitement, speed, and danger. Sensation novels such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–60), Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1860–61), and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1861–62), could look to the railway as a means of synchronizing mystery plots as well as the source and inspiration for feelings of modern nervousness and shock [on sensation novels, see Gilbert’s chapter]. Indeed, Nicholas Daly contends that the sensation genre itself registers the feeling of a world of mobility and careful timing that was always on the brink of sudden disaster, an affect appropriate to those who suddenly and collectively found themselves in a railway age. The railways also shaped Victorian literature in another way, when W.H. Smith opened his first railway stall at Euston station in 1848. Like Gwendolen Fairfax in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), many readers wanted something sensational to read on the train. Of course, the railway did not exhaust the roster of Victorian transportation technologies. Like the latchkey, the bicycle and the omnibus became symbols and practical expressions of the freedom and modernity associated with the New Woman near the end of the century, in fiction and out of it. Transport technology didn’t leave poetry behind; by the final decades of the century, women poets such as Amy Levy were creating a new poetics of urban transport (see Parejo Vadillo). Daly argues that the railway shaped sensation novels not simply via direct references in their plots or settings but more deeply, by giving a shape to emerging ways of experiencing the world. Similarly, the era’s new technologies of representation influenced Victorian literature, and literature in turn shaped those technologies. Scholars have focused particularly on electrical communication and photography, which were becoming established by the 1850s and 1860s. Photography might provide a model for the visual precision of Victorian realist fiction (in Nancy Armstrong’s account) or a rich analog for its tendency to produce types, composites, or abstracts (in Daniel Novak’s). Engaging with electrical communication could help Victorian novelists imagine the possibilities of long-distance truth-telling via the emergent idea of neutral, modern information; even a moment of mystical connection such as Jane’s famous psychic summons by Rochester at the climax of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) was recognized by its first readers as a version of psychic telegraphy (Menke, Telegraphic Realism 77–88), a paradigm later extended by Marie Corelli’s fantastically popular A Romance of Two Worlds (1886) into a gospel of electricity (Galvan 89–90). Teletechnologies could also become a means 363

Richard Menke

of imagining, and perhaps of strengthening, the bonds of empire (Worth). Although prose fiction tends to receive the most attention in accounts of Victorian literature and technology, practical and theoretical explorations of electricity could provide a model of the power of charged poetry language to galvanize communities of readers; Tennyson, Felicia Hemans, and especially the extravagantly emotional poets of the “spasmodic school” turned to electricity as the model of a mysterious force that compelled powerful, embodied responses (Rudy). From photography and electric telegraphs at mid-century to telephones, phonographs, and even the early years of cinema and radio, Victorian-era technoculture might have seemed increasingly devoted to creating alternatives to print and writing. Yet some of the most rapid and immediately significant technological developments took place in the production of print media themselves: stereotyping, the turn to steam power, the rotary press, hot-metal typesetting machines such as the Linotype and monotype, offset printing, developments in image reproduction (chromolithography, half-tone photoengraving, photogravure) (see Beegan). Not even paper remained the same, thanks to the epochal move from rag paper to wood pulp via newly developed technical processes. Moreover, the dominance, reach, and generic multiplicity of print meant that print culture also became the main forum where the Victorians could come to terms with new media and other innovations, assess their meanings, and consider the prospects that they opened up (see Menke, Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, as well as the excerpts in Jennings). In the final years of the era, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)—ostensibly a mosaic of typescript transcriptions from shorthand diaries, phonograph recordings, letters, newspaper articles, telegrams, and other sources—represents a late Victorian fantasy of tracking an ancient, foreign predator in a modern, multimedia world. Victorian experiments with old and new media also open the era to contemporary approaches such as media archaeology. An interdisciplinary consideration of media influenced by media art and curation, media archaeology rejects the notion of the smooth, triumphant advance of technology and refuses to privilege technologies associated with human expression and cognition, drawing attention instead to weird, failed, or imaginary media, to alternative narratives and unexpected historical trajectories as embodied in media devices (see Parikka). Going still further, an understanding of media in terms of cultural techniques dissolves the specificity of media technologies in favor of a deeper history of processes or operations [on digital technologies, see Bourrier’s chapter]. Analyses of cultural techniques focus on the interplay between physical affordances and symbolic meaning, especially when it comes to making fundamental cultural distinctions—say, between self and other, or between signal and noise (see Siegert) [on reading techniques, see Buurma and Heffernan’s chapter]. This redefinition of culture as chains of operations utterly defies Matthew Arnold’s opposition between culture and machinery, but work along these lines might help Victorian studies consider the connections between signs, technologies, and concrete social and technical practices.

3. Back to the Future Works of imaginative literature don’t simply reflect the technologies of the age. Rather, as all of these accounts of Victorian literature and technology should confirm, they interpret technologies, critique them, recast them, help lay the ground for them, extrapolate from them. Sometimes they also offer writers and readers ways of imagining otherwise. “The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there,” asserts Wilde in “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1891). “Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends” (269). In another revision of the contrast between culture and machinery, the continued improvement of technology now becomes the basis for selfdevelopment and culture itself. “Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia

364

Technology and Literature

is not worth glancing at” (269); Wilde looks to future technologies as an expression of deep utopian longings. More recently, reimagined and remixed Victorian technology has become a repository for cultural fantasies and desires in our own time (see the essays collected in Bowser and Croxall). The steampunk aesthetic became popular in the early twenty-first century, just as an array of older analog media technologies, many of them with roots in the nineteenth century, finally gave way to a dominant culture of interlinked digital media. An earlier moment of digital popular culture that exalted electronic hobbyism and hacking was quickly superseded by the realities of Big Tech, closed platforms, digital rights management, and a vision of technology as a sealed black box with no user-serviceable parts. Like a device-driven media archaeology, steampunk has been accused of fetishizing cool technology for its own sake. It also runs the risk of promoting ahistorical nostalgia for white dominance and empire. Still, contemporary steampunk visions suggest that reimagined, fictionalized versions of Victorians’ analog, hackable, hands-on technologies can haunt the twenty-first-century imagination as a critical past or an alternative future. As I’ve noted, Victorian scholarship has often viewed literature and technology through the lens of present dilemmas. But future researchers might make such presentism more methodical and genuinely strategic. As both an aesthetic and an alternative history, steampunk confirms that the Victorians and the technoculture they wrote, built, and critiqued can offer inspiration for rethinking our own relationships to technology—past, present, and prospective. For instance, scholars might think anew about the interrelations between nineteenth-century industries and ecologies. Media archaeology might offer new ways to investigate that most crucial of Victorian media, print, including its changing technological affordances. Analyses of nineteenth-century cultural techniques could examine the operations with which the Victorians constituted their culture and defined its realities, processes that we might read across writing and technology alike. Indeed, from Carlyle and Wilson to Wilde, the Victorians might cue us to reconsider what technology is, to see it as an entangled field where material culture comes together with vital problems of our lives and our values. The challenge seems especially promising—and especially urgent—as STEM fields continue in the ascendant both in the academy and in the wider culture as we hurtle further into our own Age of Technology, in every Victorian and modern sense of the word.

Key Critical Works Joseph Bizup. Manufacturing Culture:Vindications of Early Victorian Industry. Ian Carter. Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity. Jill Galvan. The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859–1919. Humphrey Jennings. Pandæmonium, 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers. Tamara Ketabgian. The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture. Richard Menke. Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900: Many Inventions. Daniel A. Novak. Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Wolfgang Schivelbusch. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Herbert L. Sussman. Victorians and the Machine: The Literary Response to Technology. ———. Victorian Technology: Invention, Innovation, and the Rise of the Machine.

Works Cited Armstrong, Nancy. Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Harvard UP, 1999. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. 1869. The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 5. Edited by R. H. Super, U of Michigan P, 1960–77, pp. 85–256. ———. “Literature and Science.” 1882. The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 10, edited by R. H. Super, U of Michigan P, 1960–77, pp. 53–73.

365

Richard Menke Beegan, Gerry. The Mass Image: A Social History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian London. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Bizup, Joseph. Manufacturing Culture:Vindications of Early Victorian Industry. U of Virginia P, 2003. Bowser, Rachel A., and Brian Croxall, editors. Like Clockwork: Steampunk Pasts, Presents, and Futures. U of Minnesota P, 2016. Butler, Samuel. Erewhon. 1872. Edited by Peter Mudford, Penguin, 1985. Carlyle, Thomas. “Signs of the Times.” Edinburgh Review, vol. 49, June 1829, pp. 439–59. Carter, Ian. Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity. Manchester UP, 2001. Daly, Nicholas. “Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses.” ELH, vol. 66, no. 2, Summer 1999, pp. 461–87. De Quincey, Thomas. “The English Mail-Coach, or the Glory of Motion.” 1849. Confessions of an English OpiumEater and Other Writings, edited by Grevel Lindoop, World’s Classics and Oxford UP, 1985, pp. 183–233. Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. 1855–57. Edited by Harvey Peter Sucksmith, Clarendon, 1979. ———. The Old Curiosity Shop. 1840–41. Edited by Elizabeth M. Brennan, Clarendon, 1997. Eliot, George. Felix Holt, the Radical. 1866. Edited by Lynda Mugglestone, Penguin, 1995. Galvan, Jill. The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859–1919. Cornell UP, 2010. Grossman, Jonathan H. Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel. Oxford UP, 2012. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, 1991, pp. 149–81. Huxley, Thomas Henry. “Science and Culture.” 1880. Science and Culture and Other Essays, Palgrave Macmillan, 1881, pp. 1–23. Jennings, Humphrey. Pandæmonium, 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers. Edited by Mary-Lou Jennings and Charles Madge, Free Press, 1985. Ketabgian, Tamara. The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture. U of Michigan P, 2011. Livesey, Ruth. Writing the Stage Coach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Oxford UP, 2016. MacDuffie, Allen. “Charles Darwin and the Victorian Pre-History of Climate Denial.” Climate Change and Victorian Studies, special issue of Victorian Studies, vol. 60, no. 4, Summer 2018, pp. 543–64. ———. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2014. Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso, 2016. Menke, Richard. Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900: Many Inventions. Cambridge UP, 2019. ———. Telegraphic Realism:Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems. Stanford UP, 2008. Novak, Daniel A. Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge UP, 2008. Parejo Vadillo, Ana. Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Parikka, Jussi. What Is Media Archaeology? Polity, 2012. Rudy, Jason. Electric Meters:Victorian Physiological Poetics. Ohio State UP, 2009. Ruskin, John. “John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton, 19 June 1870.” The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 37, edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, Allen, 1903–12, p. 7. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. U of California P, 1986. Siegert, Bernhard. Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Fordham UP, 2015. Sussman, Herbert L. “Machine Dreams: The Culture of Technology.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 28, no. 1, Spring 2000, pp. 197–204. ———. Victorians and the Machine: The Literary Response to Technology. Harvard UP, 1968. ———. Victorian Technology: Invention, Innovation, and the Rise of the Machine. Praeger, 2009. Taylor, Jesse Oak. The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf. U of Virginia P, 2016. Tennyson, Alfred. “Locksley Hall.” 1842. Tennyson’s Poetry, edited by Robert W. Hill, Jr, Norton, 1999, pp. 115–21. Toynbee, Arnold. Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England. Rivingtons, 1884. Van Dulken, Stephen. Inventing the 19th Century. New York UP, 2001. Vinge, Vernor. “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era.” Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace, edited by G. A. Landis, NASA, 1993, pp. 11–22. White, Paul. “Ministers of Culture: Arnold, Huxley and Liberal Anglican Reform of Learning.” History of Science, vol. 43, no. 2, June 2005, pp. 115–38.

366

Technology and Literature Wilde, Oscar. “The Soul of Man under Socialism.” 1891. The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, edited by Richard Ellman, U of Chicago P, 1982, pp. 255–89. Wilson, George. On the Objects of Technology and Industrial Museums: Two Lectures. Sutherland and Knox, 1856. ———. What Is Technology? An Inaugural Lecture Delivered in the University of Edinburgh on November 7, 1855. Sutherland and Knox and Simpkin, Marshall, 1855. Worth, Aaron. Imperial Media: Colonial Networks and Information Technologies in the British Literary Imagination, 1857–1918. Ohio State UP, 2014.

367

32 BRAIN SCIENCE Anne Stiles

In 2018, I authored not one but two brief state-of-the-field essays on nineteenth-century neurology and its intersections with Victorian literature. Now, at the beginning of 2019, I am already starting to question some of the conclusions I drew in these earlier pieces, because a single year makes a difference in a field that is growing as rapidly and multidirectionally as this one. Victorian literature and brain science has become a hot topic, so much so that a single individual can have difficulty tracking recent developments or reliably predicting future research trends. The field’s rapid growth may be a source of frustration for anyone seeking a short, uncomplicated overview of the topic. Yet we should celebrate having such a rich body of work to draw on. Even a decade ago, when I was writing my book Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century (2012), this was not necessarily the case. At that time, I drew on a relatively limited number of works by pioneers in the field such as Nicholas Dames, Laura Otis, Alan Richardson, Sally Shuttleworth, and Jenny Bourne Taylor. Today, the task of writing such a book (or even a short book chapter like this one) would be considerably more complex, due to the greater variety of scholarship available. Complicating matters further is the overlap between Victorian literature and brain science—itself an interdisciplinary topic—and several neighboring subjects. These include the wider field of cognitive literary studies, which examines “the centrality of the mind to multiple critical approaches within literary studies” by drawing on twenty-first-century neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, computer science, anthropology, and education (Auyoung 1). Broadly speaking, one might say that cognitive literary studies focuses on the mind as opposed to the brain and nervous system, though there are exceptions to this rule. This chapter begins with an overview of cognitive literary scholarship and its influence on Victorian studies, followed by a brief history of nineteenth-century British neuroscience for those seeking greater familiarity with the field. It concludes by suggesting promising directions for future scholarship on literature and Victorian brain science.

1. Recent Scholarship on Victorian Brain Science Cognitive literary studies took off in earnest during the 1990s, which U.S. President George H.W. Bush proclaimed the “Decade of the Brain,” and has grown rapidly since the millennium (Richardson, “Once Upon a Mind” 359). While cognitive literary scholars lack a “common program, shared methodology, or a unifying theoretical framework,” as Richardson explains, they share a commitment to the idea of an embodied mind whose behavior is governed by widely accepted principles such as the dominance of vision as a sensory mode, the complexity of language, and the entanglement of 368

Brain Science

cognition and emotion (361). Cognitive literary scholars might seek to uncover, for instance, “the ways in which mental processes mediate between literary texts and their authors, audiences, and historical contexts,” or to establish how “literary texts take shape by means of an author’s mental acts,” in the words of Elaine Auyoung (1). Cognitive literary scholarship has had considerable influence on the subfield of Victorian literature and neuroscience, making it difficult to draw a hard and fast line between the two. Take, for instance, recent cognitive approaches to Victorian literature such as Alan Palmer’s Social Minds in the Novel (2010) or Auyoung’s When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind (2018). Palmer’s work draws on the insights of social neuroscience to emphasize the “active, public, social nature” of thinking in novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot. Palmer argues, for example, that Eliot’s fictional town of Middlemarch functions as an “intermental unit” that acts as a character in its own right (39). By contrast, Auyoung’s book asks how authors such as Dickens, Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Leo Tolstoy create rounded characters that strike readers as real or lifelike [on narrative realism, see Auyoung’s chapter]. Fascinating though they are, it is difficult to decide whether such works—which center on the mind, broadly conceived, as opposed to the brain—truly belong in this brief survey. Despite its rapid growth and increased visibility over the last three decades, cognitive literary studies can incite controversy due to its perceived anachronism and insensitivity to cultural context (Richardson, Neural Sublime 3). Cognitive literary scholars have also been accused of “illicitly borrow[ing] an aura of authority from the sciences,” as Richardson explains (British Romanticism xvi). Mindful of these critiques, Richardson inaugurated a new approach called “cognitive literary historicism,” which applies discoveries of twenty-first-century sciences to texts of earlier periods while simultaneously honoring “issues of cultural difference, historical specificity, and change over time” (The Neural Sublime 3). Much recent scholarship on nineteenth-century literature falls into this hybrid category. This includes Richardson’s The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (2010), Kay Young’s Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy (2010), and Susanne Keen’s Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination (2014). A closer look at Keen’s volume demonstrates the range of a cognitive historicist approach [on psychology, see Keen’s chapter]. Thomas Hardy’s Brains combines Palmer’s work on intermental thinking with close readings of Hardy’s literary notebooks, poetry, and novels, emphasizing the author’s “up-to-date knowledge of the psychology of his day” (20). At once archival and theoretical, Keen’s book has a richly textured feel and challenges readers to toggle between historical and cognitive chapters. Those who prefer historical purism to cognitive studies can turn to scholarship that privileges Victorian understandings of the brain and nervous system and uses the scientific concepts and vocabulary of the era, bearing in mind how these ideas have shaped our modern intellectual landscape. Jill Matus’s Shock, Memory, and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction (2009), for instance, unearths long-forgotten Victorian discourses about trauma that see it as a disturbance in affect rather than a disruption in memory, while Dames’s The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (2007) discusses a strain of physiologically oriented literary criticism pioneered by polymaths such as Alexander Bain, E.S. Dallas, George Henry Lewes, and James Sully. Their criticism—which might be considered a Victorian precursor to cognitive literary studies—focused on the brain and nervous system by observing readers’ pacing, attention, and somatic responses to fiction. A related body of poetry criticism attended to the somatic effects of verse on readers, as Jason Rudy explains in Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (2009) [on poetry, see Chapman’s chapter]. Rudy argues that poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Alfred Lord Tennyson “demands to be read as physiologically inspired: rhythms that pulse in the body, a rhetoric of sensation that readers might feel compelled to experience” (2). Rudy’s book notwithstanding, foundational work on Victorian literature and brain science has tended to focus on prose, especially literary realism, and on a handful of canonical authors: namely, Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy. 369

Anne Stiles

Scholarship from the last decade extends this limited range of authors and genres by showing how Gothic novels, science fiction, and Pre-Raphaelite literature and art addressed the brain and nervous system [on Gothic novels, see Luckhurst’s chapter]. My own book on late-Victorian cerebral localization research, Popular Fiction and Brain Science, traces a specific neurological trend and its impact on Gothic and science fiction novels by Grant Allen, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and H.G. Wells. Elisha Cohn’s “Oscar Wilde and the Brain Cell” (2013), meanwhile, explores Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s neuron doctrine in Wilde’s Gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, revised 1891), in which the protagonist traces “the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the brain” (qtd. in Cohn 20). Along with best-selling romance novelist Marie Corelli, Wilde was one of the first literary authors to use the image of the neuron in fiction following the discovery of this controversial anatomical unit in the early 1890s (Cohn 19). More recently, Benjamin Morgan’s The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (2017) shows how Victorian physiologists, artists, and literary authors explained the neural underpinnings of aesthetic response, focusing on PreRaphaelites and aesthetes such as Vernon Lee, William Morris, Walter Pater, and Wilde. Obviously, there is no shortage of historically informed research on Victorian literature and brain science, much of it excellent. Yet gaps in the field become apparent when one has a broader grasp of nineteenth-century neurological developments. Specific decades as well as particular authors and genres remain underrepresented, while mid-century realists like Eliot continue to receive the lion’s share of critical attention. A brief overview of nineteenth-century neurology can help us understand what has been left out, why these gaps are significant, and what kinds of work could rectify these oversights. The next section of the chapter will provide such a history, and the one after it will return to the critical landscape in order to suggest needed interventions.

2. Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience: A Brief History The nineteenth century was an especially fruitful time for the study of the brain and nervous system. During this period, the brain was firmly established as the organ of mind. Watershed moments included Charles Bell’s and François Magendie’s independent discoveries of the sensory and motor functions of the spinal nerves (published in 1811 and 1822, respectively); Paul Broca’s cerebral localization work with aphasics in the 1860s; Gustav Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig’s animal experiments pinpointing the location of the motor cortex during the 1870s; David Ferrier’s groundbreaking cerebral maps published in his landmark work, The Functions of the Brain (1876); and Cajal’s neuron doctrine, introduced in 1889. Over the course of the century, neurology evolved from the independent research of a few gentlemen amateurs and generalist physicians to an emergent academic discipline with its own professional organizations, journals, government-sponsored laboratories and hospital wards, named university chairs, and specialist jargon. The early decades of the nineteenth century witnessed unprecedented collaborations between literature and science. As scholars like Otis and Rick Rylance have explained, the early- to midnineteenth century boasted a generalist intellectual climate in which disciplinary boundaries were far more permeable than they are today (Otis “Introduction” xvii; Rylance 1). Scientific writings remained accessible to lay readers due to their largely anecdotal character and lack of field-specific jargon. Thus, literary authors like Wilkie Collins, Dickens, and Eliot could comment with authority on the latest physiological discoveries, while scientific authors frequently cited poems, novels, and classical myths to support their arguments. Moreover, many nineteenth-century periodicals published articles on scientific topics cheek-by-jowl with fiction, poetry, and literary criticism (Otis, “Introduction” xvii). To cite only one example, three essays by Robert Louis Stevenson—“An Apology for Idlers,” “On Falling in Love,” and “Franҫois Villon, Student, Poet, and Housebreaker”—appeared in the same volume of Cornhill Magazine as scientific popularizer Richard Proctor’s “Dual Consciousness” (1877), a coincidence that may have inspired Stevenson’s exploration of multiple personalities and bilateral 370

Brain Science

brain hemisphere asymmetry in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) (Harrington 136; Stiles, Popular Fiction 27–49). This period of freewheeling collaboration can seem almost utopian in contrast with the modern research university, where disciplinary silos prevail and meaningful interactions between sciences and humanities are unusual. The relative parity of science and humanistic inquiry during this period also seems enviable in hindsight. While the sciences now receive the lion’s share of funding and prestige, this was not the case before professional academic disciplines took on their modern forms. In fact, what Victorians considered scientific was remarkably capacious in scope, including pseudosciences such as phrenology (the reading of bumps on the skull to determine personality traits) and physiognomy (the study of facial features as an index of character). Excellent scholarship on phrenology and physiognomy includes Lucy Hartley’s Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (2005), Sally Shuttleworth’s Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (1996), and the first two chapters of Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth’s invaluable Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890 (1998). Though now debunked, phrenology was an important precursor to cerebral localization research because it introduced the idea of specific brain regions controlling given behaviors and functions, as historian Robert Young explains (4). It is no wonder that literary scholars have gravitated toward the mid-century period, when novelists took part in rich interdisciplinary conversations about psychology and brain function and dabbled in pseudoscientific hobbies—Eliot, for instance, famously had a phrenological cast of her head made in 1844 (Gray 409). This intellectual openness was facilitated, in part, by the relatively slow development of neurology as a discipline in Britain. Despite the groundbreaking discoveries in the field taking place on English soil—including Ferrier’s cortical maps and John Hughling’s Jackson’s studies of right brain hemisphere function—neurology as an independent medical specialty was not firmly established in Britain until after the First World War, as historian of science Stephen T. Casper explains (5). Nor was the term “neurology” itself in wide circulation. Coined by Thomas Willis in his 1664 treatise Cerebri Anatome, “neurology” was seldom used before the late nineteenth century, first appearing in the Lancet in 1859 and in the British Medical Journal in 1861 (5). Neurology as a discipline, moreover, was slow to emerge as an independent field as opposed to a subfield or offshoot of psychology, psychiatry, physiology, or anatomy. This delay stemmed from the generalist medical culture that prevailed in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, which privileged the gentleman scholar or Renaissance man above the emergent class of medical specialists (2). Neurological researchers also had difficulty conducting animal studies in the United Kingdom, where anti-vivisection sentiment ran higher than on the Continent or in America (Stahnisch 139–142). The passage of the British Cruelty to Animals Act in 1876, for instance, required experimenters to be licensed each year by the government and imposed severe penalties for the abuse of laboratory animals (141) [on animal studies, see Danahay and Morse’s chapter]. These challenges notwithstanding, the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s ushered in a vogue for cerebral localization research: that is, the study of which regions of the brain control specific motor functions, emotional responses, and intellectual abilities. This trend has only intensified since the nineteenth century. For instance, the invention of technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET) scans, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) enable twenty-first-century scientists to pinpoint areas of activity in the brain with greater precision. Along with this increased focus on cerebral localization came a greater reliance on clinical studies, animal experimentation, and quantitative methods. This sea change began in France in the 1860s, where Paul Broca’s work with aphasics linked the third frontal convolution of the left brain hemisphere to linguistic ability. In 1870, meanwhile, Prussian physicians Gustav Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig performed experiments on dogs in which brain lesions and electrical stimulations were used to pinpoint the location of the motor cortex (Finger, Origins of Neuroscience 38, 52). Paradigm-shifting experiments like these helped solidify the status of neurology as a discipline on the Continent and in the United 371

Anne Stiles

States. In 1882, for instance, French physician Jean-Martin Charcot was honored with the first European professorship in neurology, an event that historians of science sometimes identify as the beginning of neurology as an independent field (Goetz 203). In America, where neurological pioneers such as George Miller Beard, William Alexander Hammond, William James, and Silas Weir Mitchell advanced the field through clinical studies and animal experimentation, the first professorship in neurology was founded in Philadelphia in 1903 (Casper 1). Equally groundbreaking developments took place in Britain, where John Hughlings Jackson carefully observed patients who had sustained damage to the right brain hemisphere. Based on his observations, he speculated that this hemisphere was involved in spatial perception, facial recognition, and memory (Finger, “The Birth of Localization Theory” 122). Arguably the leader of the “localizers,” however, was Scottish physician David Ferrier, who saw Jackson as his mentor (123). Working at the West Riding Lunatic assignment in England in the 1870s, Ferrier damaged the brains of monkeys, cats, dogs, and rabbits and observed the resultant behavioral dysfunctions. These long-term animal experiments allowed him to create detailed maps of the human cerebral cortex, published in his landmark work The Functions of the Brain (1876). These maps later saved human lives by allowing surgeons to locate brain tumors and hemorrhages without first opening the skull. Ferrier’s work proved extremely controversial, however. To conduct his research properly, he had to keep his monkeys alive long after their initial surgeries and use a minimum of narcotic pain medications. These experiments led to Ferrier’s well-publicized trial for animal cruelty in 1881. Though he was ultimately acquitted, Ferrier’s trial damaged public perceptions of science, especially neurology. As Otis has memorably observed, fictional responses to Ferrier’s trial included Wilkie Collins’s 1882 novel Heart and Science and H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau in 1897, both of which depict mad scientists who inflict pain on defenseless animals (“Howled Out of the Country” 37–51). Ferrier’s work and that of other localizationists also undermined revered theological concepts like the soul or will by suggesting that human beings are the sum of their nerve impulses (Stiles, Popular Fiction 2). Despite these setbacks, British neurology began to emerge as an independent field in the 1870s, with the foundation of the journals Mind (1876–present) and Brain (1878–present) and the formation of professional groups such as the Neurological Society of London (later, the Neurological Society for the United Kingdom), which first met in 1886 (Casper 36). With such developments, neurology began to distance itself from neighbor disciplines like psychology and psychiatry. Still, decades would elapse before British neurology assumed its modern form. As late as 1934, British universities had yet to appoint a single professor of neurology (1). While the British medical establishment was slow to recognize neurology as an independent discipline, literary authors quickly seized upon the moral and social implications of neurological discoveries in their fiction, as the examples of Collins and Wells suggest. This remained the case even as British neurology became more specialized and resistant to outsiders. In the late-Victorian era, scientifically trained authors such as Allen, Stevenson, Stoker, and Wells deftly wove neurological concepts into their fictions. Thanks to the robust tradition of popular science writing in mainstream British periodicals, meanwhile, even less scientifically educated writers like Corelli could weigh in on the neuron doctrine. By the 1890s, Cajal and others had established the existence of the nerve cell as the basic until of the brain and nervous system, replacing the earlier idea of the nervous system as a continuous net or reticulum. Corelli took this idea in frankly occult directions, viewing neurons as storehouses of light, heat, and God’s love. Notably, Corelli’s version of neuron doctrine relied on willful misunderstanding of the nerve cell and its functions, suggesting that cerebral localization was still mysterious and troubling to the author and her sizable fan base. Nonetheless, Corelli’s unorthodox fusion of cerebral localization and Spiritualism in works like A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), The Soul of Lilith (1992), and The Life Everlasting (1911) represents an important attempt to bridge the gap between science and faith at the fin de siècle (Stiles, Popular Fiction 23–4). 372

Brain Science

3. Suggestions for Future Research This brief history helps to explain why literary critics have focused primarily on the early and middle years of the nineteenth century, when brain science was more accessible to lay readers and crossdisciplinary collaborations between writers such as Eliot and Lewes were more frequent. Not only is the science of this period easier to understand than the localization research that followed but also it hearkens back to a time before literature and science existed as “two cultures,” to use C.P. Snow’s terminology. In the current intellectual climate of disciplinary divisions and hierarchies, it makes sense that literary scholars would wish to revisit this quasi-utopian moment of cooperation between fields— one in which scientists, philosophers, physicians, and literary authors stood on relatively equal footing. That said, scholars of Victorian literature and brain science have an opportunity to move beyond the triumvirate of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy (whose late-century poems and novels draw on midnineteenth-century psychological theories) and give due weight to neuroscientific developments of the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, following the lead of authors like Otis, Cohn, and Morgan. This task is not as daunting as it may seem. Though late-Victorian neurological writings in journals like Mind or Brain are more quantitative and technical than those of previous decades, they are still largely understandable to lay readers (as I discovered, gratefully, in the process of writing Popular Fiction and Brain Science). The many excellent histories of neurology available today, some of which appear on the 0 list at the end of this chapter, make such research more feasible. Casper’s recent book The Neurologists: A History of a Medical Specialty in Modern Britain, 1789–2000 (2015) is especially helpful in constructing a history of neurology as a profession, as opposed to a series of linked discoveries. His book also sheds light on the unique research climate in Britain, which was more restricted in some ways than that of neighboring lands. The volume History of Neurology (2010) edited by Stanley Finger, Franҫois Boller, and Kenneth L. Tyler, also includes many helpful essays on nineteenth-century cerebral localization theory, animal experimentation, and related topics written in clear, nonspecialist language. Older histories of neurology by Robert M. Young, Stanley Finger, Anne Harrington, and others are classics that reward repeated readings. On a personal note, I have found that many historians of science wish to collaborate with literary scholars, and that such collaborations can be extraordinarily fruitful (particularly because historians may hold us to a higher standard of evidence than we are used to in our field). Such scholarship is valuable because it challenges the two-cultures divide that pervades twentyfirst-century academia. It is well worth starting conversations between, say, literary scholars, historians, and neurologists, even if (perhaps especially if) those conversations don’t always end in harmonious agreement. Studying late-Victorian literature alongside the history of neurology also helps us understand classic literary texts that might otherwise remain impenetrable. One cannot fully appreciate Wells’s Martian invasion fantasy The War of the Worlds (1898), for instance, without understanding the now-defunct theories of Lamarckian brain evolution on which it is based. Wells’s Martians have become “heads—merely heads” without legs or entrails following a course of unchecked cerebral growth that supposedly parallels human intellectual development, as I have explained elsewhere (Wells 125; Stiles, Popular Fiction 145). On a more speculative note, it will be interesting to see how emergent scholarship on neurodiversity influences Victorian studies [on neurodiversity, see Stoddard Holmes’s chapter]. Work on neurodiversity blends neuroscience and disability studies to help us understand the lived experience of mental alterity in all its forms, from genius to mental illness. While the term has been most widely used in discussions of autism—as in Steve Silberman’s influential book, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity (2015)—it might conceivably apply to any neurological differences that affect our understanding and perception of the world. In her recent book Rethinking Thought: Inside the Minds of Creative Scientists and Artists (2015), for instance, Otis interviews 34 exceptionally creative people—including novelist Salman Rushdie, autistic engineer Temple Grandin, and Nobel-Prize-winning biologist Elizabeth Blackburn—to develop a better understanding of human

373

Anne Stiles

cognitive diversity. She concludes that “people’s mental worlds vary astonishingly” when it comes to visual-spatial versus verbal learning styles and other, less commonly studied differences (3). Otis herself, for instance, reports that she is excellent at processing sound but has difficulty with pictorial and spatial thinking, whereas Grandin is an excellent visual-spatial thinker who struggles with language-based thought (1). Each person Otis interviews possesses neurological quirks that could be advantageous in certain situations and detrimental in others. I relate to the topic of neurodiversity thanks to my identity as a synesthete. Like approximately three to five percent of the population, I involuntarily mix sensory modes such as vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. I experience the most common type, called grapheme-color synesthesia, where a person perceives letters and numbers as having specific colors. For instance, I see the letter “m” as green, the number seven as yellow, the number nine as pink, and so forth. I used to assume that everyone associated letters and numbers with colors, but I have since learned that this is not so. Otis’s Rethinking Thought suggests that such seemingly inconsequential differences in perception might affect one’s skill set and career trajectory. Synesthetes, for instance, include a disproportionate number of successful artists, writers, and musicians such as Franz Lizst, Vladimir Nabokov, and Vincent Van Gogh. Nineteenth-century literature is particularly rich in synesthetic imagery, from John Keats’s and Tennyson’s verse to Walter Pater’s famous injunction to “burn always with this hard, gemlike flame” (210). To date, relatively few books examine neurodiversity in the Victorian era, though this may be changing. In Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe (2018), for instance, Julia Miele Rodas suggests that the narrator of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) exhibits linguistic habits characteristic of people on the autism spectrum, such as frequent digressions, odd silences, and neologisms (27). Rodas also suggests that Edward Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72) might be regarded as an autist: “With his endless reams of excerpts and quotations, his neatly ordered notebooks, scrupulously organized and indexed, Casaubon is the emblematic listmaker, the petty, vacuous, myopic intellectual tyrant who exists as a popular stand-in figure for other listmakers” (17). Autism was not, of course, a diagnosis available to Victorians, as it was first described by American psychiatrist Leo Kanner and Viennese pediatrician Hans Asperger in the 1940s. Yet its well-known symptoms can still help us understand patterns of behavior and patterns of language observable in nineteenth-century fiction, Rodas suggests. The existence of apparently autistic characters in Victorian fiction also gives readers on the spectrum a lineage of which they may be justly proud. While Rodas’s book opens up new directions for the study of Victorian literature, it has been criticized for relying too heavily on the fifth edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2013), whose controversial restructuring of the autism diagnosis is not universally embraced. (Thanks to Ralph Savarese for bringing this criticism to my attention.) There is also danger in viewing autism or any other diagnosis as a transhistorical reality disconnected from specific cultural contexts. Silberman suggests in a recent interview, for instance, that Hans Asperger’s emphasis on high-functioning children with autism was part of his (sadly failed) attempt to protect these children from the Nazis, who sought to eradicate people with neurological differences both in Germany and in Asperger’s native Austria (Leviton n.p.). In 1940s America, where the Nazis were a more distant threat, Kanner focused on low-functioning autistics and formed a very different understanding of this neurological condition. These examples show how cultural differences—even at roughly the same historical moment—affect the way clinicians construe a diagnosis. In pursuing neurodiverse approaches, we should consider alternative modes of thinking and feeling modeled by Victorian literature itself. A 2019 MLA panel on “The Neurodiverse Nineteenth Century” suggested how this might work in practice. Panelists examined American literature by Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nat Turner, using the term neurodiversity to encompass autistic behaviors as well as mental illness and variations in intelligence. They emphasized how these mental phenomena were understood in the nineteenth century and how nineteenth-century science paved the way for the current intellectual landscape. In the question and answer session that followed, 374

Brain Science

panelists stressed their shared desire to go beyond medical understandings of illness and disability that pathologize difference. Benjamin Riess stated, for instance, that the study of neurodiversity is a “nonstigmatized, non-medicalized, and non-hierarchical way of thinking about minds.” As someone working at the intersections of medical humanities, history of neuroscience, and Victorian literature, I think about what each of these fields might contribute to the others. Here, I believe, is an opportunity to broaden the scope of Victorian studies. Surely Victorians experienced the same range of neurodiverse experiences that we do—from mental illness to non-pathological variations in perception and ability—and must have made sense of these differences somehow, though not necessarily in the manner familiar to us. Examining how individuals from another time period understood and represented the workings of their own minds, using the terminology and conceptual vocabulary available to them, seems like one fascinating direction for future research.

Key Critical Works Stephen Casper. The Neurologists: A History of a Medical Specialty in Modern Britain, 1789–2000. Nicholas Dames. The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction. Jill Matus. Shock, Memory, and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction. Benjamin Morgan. The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature. Alan Richardson. The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts. Jason Rudy. Electric Meters:Victorian Physiological Poetics. Anne Stiles. Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century. Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth. Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890.

Works Cited Auyoung, Elaine. “Cognitive Studies and Victorian Literature.” The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, edited by Dino Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Linda K. Hughes, Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. Boshears, Rhonda, and Harry Whitaker. “Phrenology and Physiognomy in Victorian Literature.” Literature, Neurology, and Neuroscience: Historical and Literary Connections, edited by Anne Stiles, Stanley Finger, and François Boller, Elsevier, 2013, pp. 87–112. Casper, Stephen. The Neurologists: A History of a Medical Specialty in Modern Britain, 1789–2000. Manchester UP, 2015. Cohn, Elisha. “Oscar Wilde and the Brain Cell.” Literature, Neurology, and Neuroscience: Historical and Literary Connections, edited by Anne Stiles, Stanley Finger, and François Boller, Elsevier, 2013, pp. 19–39. Dames, Nicholas. The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction. Oxford UP, 2007. Finger, Stanley. “The Birth of Localization Theory.” History of Neurology, edited by Stanley Finger, et al., pp. 117–28. ———. Origins of Neuroscience: A History of Explorations into Brain Function. Oxford UP, 1994. Finger, Stanley, François Boller, and Kenneth Tyler, editors. History of Neurology. Elsevier, 2010. Goetz, Christopher. “Jean-Martin Charcot and the Anatomo-Clinical Method of Neurology.” History of Neurology, edited by Stanley Finger, et al., pp. 203–12. Gray, Beryl M. “Pseudoscience and George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 36, no. 4, March 1982, pp. 407–23. Hartley, Lucy. Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture. Cambridge UP, 2005. Harrington, Anne. Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain. Princeton UP, 1989. Keen, Suzanne. Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination. Ohio State UP, 2014. Leviton, Mark. “Misdiagnosed and Misunderstood: Steve Silberman on the Mysteries of Autism.” The Sun Magazine, March 2017. www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/495/misdiagnosed-and-misunderstood. Matus, Jill. Shock, Memory, and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction. Cambridge UP, 2009. Morgan, Benjamin. The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature. Chicago UP, 2017. Otis, Laura. “Howled Out of the Country: Wilkie Collins and H.G. Wells Retry David Ferrier.” Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920, edited by Anne Stiles, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 27–51. ———. “Introduction.” Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology, edited by Laura Otis, Oxford UP, 2002, pp. xvii–xxviii. ———. Rethinking Thought: Inside the Minds of Creative Scientists and Artists. Oxford UP, 2015.

375

Anne Stiles Palmer, Alan. Social Minds in the Novel. Ohio State UP, 2010. Pater, Walter. Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Palgrave Macmillan, 1873. Richardson, Alan. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind. Cambridge UP, 2001. ———. The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts. The Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. ———. “Once Upon a Mind: Literary and Narrative Studies in the Age of Cognitive Science.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 61, no. 2, 2015, pp. 359–69. Rodas, Julia Miele. Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe. U of Michigan P, 2018. Rudy, Jason. Electric Meters:Victorian Physiological Poetics. Ohio State UP, 2009. Rylance, Rick. Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880. Oxford UP, 2000. Shuttleworth, Sally. Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology. Cambridge UP, 1996. Stahnisch, Frank. “On the Use of Animal Experimentation in the History of Neurology.” History of Neurology, edited by Stanley Finger, et al., pp. 129–48. Stiles, Anne. “Neurology.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, no. 3–4 (2018), pp. 784–7. ———. Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century. Cambridge UP, 2012. ———. “Victorian Literature and Neuroscience.” Literature Compass, vol. 15, no. 2, 2018, pp. 1–8. Wells, H.G. The War of the Worlds. Edited by Patrick Parrinder, Penguin, 2005. Taylor, Jenny Bourne, and Sally Shuttleworth. Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890. Clarendon, 1998. Young, Kay. Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy. Ohio State UP, 2010. Young, Robert M. Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier. Oxford UP, 1990.

376

33 BRITISH PSYCHOLOGY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Suzanne Keen

Victorian psychology was not really about Sigmund Freud. True: he studied neurology in Ernst Brücke’s physiology lab in the 1870s and 1880s, contributing to the anatomical studies of the nervous system that led to modern neuroscience (Costandi). But this work was very little recognized, although it was later acknowledged by the founder of the neuron doctrine, Santiago Ramón y Cajal. The Father of Psychoanalysis, whose ideas would be so important for Modernists, was not known to most Victorians. Though he began publishing in German in the 1890s, his first major work to be translated into English, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899/1900) appeared in translation in 1913. Important though he was for several generations of modern writers, his influence on British writers in the very late nineteenth century was limited to those few who were following his work in German, written with his co-author Josef Breuer. To better understand Victorian psychology, I argue in this chapter, we should consider those who predated Freud and made not only his psychoanalytic work but also the work of mainstream psychology possible. The fact that psychoanalysis was not formulated as a theory until the late nineteenth century has not discouraged critics of Victorian literature from applying it to writings and writers, emboldened by Freud’s own forays into literary interpretation and psycho-biography. Few Victorian writers have escaped the scrutiny of latter-day diagnosticians, and some of the most influential literary theories of the twentieth century, such as Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973), employed Freudian concepts (e.g., the Oedipus Complex) to develop an account of intergenerational dynamics among poets (in Bloom’s accounts Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson make the cut as strong poets). Psychoanalytic work on Victorian writers, situated theoretically in relation to Freud and other practitioners—such as Karen Horney, D.W. Winnicott, Jacques Lacan, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—remains a live interpretive critical tradition. For example, Bernard J. Paris applies Horneyan theories to Victorian writers such as George Eliot and Joseph Conrad. Many Victorian novels, especially sensation fiction, have been subjected to Lacanian analyses (e.g., Sharoni), even after the passing of the heyday of 1980s theorizing dimmed the stars of Lacan, Deleuze, and Guattari. The best of the psychoanalytically informed works on Victorians engage critically with intersecting concepts, as in William A. Cohen’s study of sensation, affect, and intersubjectivity, Embodied:Victorian Literature and the Senses (2009), which takes on Deleuze and Guattari, and Christopher Lane’s genderfocused The Burdens of Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity (1999), which is especially fine on Hardy, Olive Schreiner, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. D.W. Winnicott, the twentieth-century psychoanalytic practitioner and developmental psychologist best known for his theorizing of the transitional object, and a theorist well known to feminist Shakespeareans (see Adelman), has been 377

Suzanne Keen

employed in criticism of Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) by Patricia Pulham and is enjoying a modest revival. Recently Amanda Anderson drew in her 2015 Clarendon Lectures on postwar British object relations theorists such as Winnicott to illuminate Henry James and Eliot in work subsequently published in book form (Anderson). For the most part, though, contemporary literary interpretation has parted company with psychoanalysis in favor of cognitive literary theories and contextual approaches sensitive to the history of science. Jill Matus offers a useful overview in “Victorian Framings” (see also Anger, Dames, Shuttleworth “The Psychological,” and Stiles). The effort of some literary cognitivists and theorists of mind to stay in conversation with contemporary psychoanalytic discourse indicates the continuing significance of ideas that began in the late nineteenth century with Freud (see Young). However, Victorian psychology sprang from alternative wellsprings than the source in Vienna, and they did not require familiarity with Freud to research or theorize, for example, the unconscious, hysteria, or dreams. This chapter focuses on Victorian psychology as the Victorians knew it, honoring the long-term commitment of Victorian studies to a contextual and historicized approach to the writing and thought of the period.1 In it I sketch the story of the emergent discipline as historians of psychology record it and indicate both the points of contact with Victorian literature and the missed connections generated by literary Victorian studies’ traditional focus on madness, mesmerism, phrenology, and sexuality. I remind readers of important figures all but forgotten by literary studies, the recovery of whose contributions to psychology might help scholars of Victorian literature better understand the complexity of psychology’s interpenetration of the imaginative writing of the period.

1. Victorian Origins of the Discipline As the historian of science Hearnshaw reports, the term psychology (in English) was introduced to British readers by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had attended Blumenbach’s psychology lectures in Göttingen in 1798–99. Not until the 1840s and 1850s, however, did the label appear, denoting an empirical science of mind, in the titles of books and a journal (Hearnshaw 3). An emerging field during the later nineteenth century, Victorian psychology was indebted to international developments, particularly in Europe and the United States. Readers of Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) will recall that young Doctor Tertius Lydgate hopes to discover the sources of psychological states through scientific research. In Eliot’s narrator’s words, Lydgate wants to pierce the obscurity of those minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth of happy or unhappy consciousness. (165) He has developed these interests during his medical studies in Edinburgh and Paris: Lydgate is well trained, if not adept at the introspection and canny understanding of others that would better assist him as he sets up as a physician in the provincial town of Middlemarch. As is well known, Eliot subjects her idealist physician to a humbling series of circumstances and temptations that lead him away from his lofty (and up-to-date) research interests to running a lucrative practice for wealthy gout sufferers by the end of the novel. Moving to a university is not an option for a man with a wife like Rosamond: he needs to earn money. In real life, the French-trained medical internists, German and Austrian students of psychiatry, the first neurologists, and many experimental psychologists found more congenial homes for their research careers in universities (though Freud himself left postgraduate research with neurologist Jean Charcot to establish his private practice in Vienna). Especially since the scientific research labs established in France and Germany hosted many younger researchers who went on to found laboratories in the United States and in Great Britain, a 378

British Psychology in the Nineteenth Century

link to European training provided a bona fide for academic psychologists from the start. Most neuroscientists with academic degrees and university psychology faculty working today can trace their intellectual lineage back through their dissertation advisors’ advisors to one of two iconic nineteenthcentury points of origin represented by psychology labs. The first such lab, William James’s lab at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1875), boasted academic descendants that included G. Stanley Hall, Mary Whiton Calkins, and Edward Thorndike. James’s lab supported his course on “The Relations between Physiology and Psychology” with teaching demonstrations. James’s functionalist psychological study started in the field of philosophy, out of which psychology was founded at Harvard. His publications, especially his 1890 book Principles of Psychology (in two volumes), were widely read and reviewed through the last decade of the nineteenth century. The second site by chronology (first in some accounts because it was a research lab rather than a demonstration theater), was Wilhelm Wundt’s experimental psychological lab in Leipzig, Germany (1879). Wundt’s students, some of whom also studied with James, spread the practice of experimental study of mind and behavior, branching off to various American universities, which were at that time establishing graduate education on the German model. For example, Wundt’s student G. Stanley Hall established an experimental psychological lab in the United States in 1883, at Johns Hopkins; James McKeen Catrell joined the faculty of University of Pennsylvania as the first Professor of Psychology; and Edward Titchener established the structuralist school of psychology at Cornell University. This basic genealogy of the late nineteenth-century origins of the discipline of psychology, with its commonly accepted narrative of starting points and differences among branches, emphasizes the scientific laboratories where researchers studied human and animal behavior [on brain science, see Stiles’s chapter; on animal studies, see Danahay and Morse’s]. It conveys the standard disciplinary history that students of psychology learn in their courses on History and Systems of Psychology.2 I remark on it here because this history and its iconic names (with the occasional exception of William James) are rarely invoked when literary scholars consider Victorian psychology. For example, not a single person mentioned in the preceding paragraph appears in the contents, primary bibliography, or index of the standard representative sample of Victorian psychological texts, Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth’s Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830–1890 (1998). This noteworthy publication marked a significant turn in Victorian studies’ recovery of the “two-way traffic of ideas,” in Gillian Beer’s phrase (5), between psychological scientific discourse and humanistic writing, shared in a common literary and intellectual culture during the Victorian period. That two-way traffic now flows again in the twenty-first century, encouraged by cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary collaborations and conversations. The relatively recent effort to bridge the divide between what C.P. Snow identified in the twentieth century as “The Two Cultures”—the mutually uncomprehending, separate realms of science and letters—is an ongoing project of Victorian studies. To participate in that bridge-building, students of literature should know more than what literary scholars have typically found the most compelling psychological topics: asylums and the threat of confinement in them; phrenology, mesmerism, and hypnosis; the psychological aspects of sexuality; and disorders such as hysteria, lunacy, monomania, and criminal insanity. Especially when widely read fictional works could crystallize a contemporary debate and convey urgent concern to the reading public, literary texts contributed to the discourse about controversial developments and practices. The literary preoccupation with madness and confinement, as, for example, in the works of sensation writers, can be set against the passing of the Criminal Lunatics Act in 1860 and the establishment of the Broadmoor lunatic asylum for the criminally insane in 1863 (Hearnshaw 146). Though generally regarded as an improvement on Bedlam (first known as the Bethlehem Hospital) and workhouse confinement, the more medicalized treatment of lunacy opened the door to abuses, as Sarah Wise discusses in Inconvenient People (2012). The scenario in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novel Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) participated in the contemporary discourse of madness, as Jill Matus has argued, and made a subject of concern for women suffering 379

Suzanne Keen

from mood disorders, including post-partum depression. Jane Welsh Carlyle, for instance, nervously expressed skepticism about medical men and noted when husbands put their wives away in her letters (Carlyle, v. 2, 184).3 However, literary scholars hoping to participate in a conversation that includes psychologists should also know what psychological disciplinary history emphasizes about its Victorian roots. A division of the American Psychological Association dedicated to the study of the history of the discipline was founded by Robert I. Watson and his colleagues in 1966, Watson having recognized the need in 1960 (Watson 251–5). The sensational aspects of Victorian psychological diagnoses (and their sometimes barbaric treatments) and the wide dissemination in the earlier nineteenth century of personality-reading techniques now regarded as quack science do receive attention in histories of the subject. However, the classics of nineteenth-century psychology according to the field itself center on behaviorism, cognition, developmental psychology, evolutionary theory, experimental psychology, perception, structuralism, the emotions, the mental functions of healthy people, and the beginnings of psychometrics. In my view, these less sensational concerns also illuminate imaginative literature, especially when authors such as Hardy attempted formal literary experiments that enacted contemporary understandings of emotion and cognition, as I have earlier argued (Keen).

2. Psychological Contexts for Victorian Studies In the past two decades, more complicated strands of Victorian psychological interests have emerged as important contexts for the study of Victorian literature (accompanied by influential contributions to the study of Romanticism by Alan Richardson, David Miall, and Francis Steen). Embodied Selves, the anthology edited by Taylor and Shuttleworth, still provides an excellent road map and first introduction to these subjects. It documents the deep and abiding interests of nineteenth-century intellectuals in matters of brain and behavior, mind and spirit, mental science and mental disorders. Sections on physiognomy, phrenology, and mesmerism indicate the widespread interest in matters of personality and mind-reading, augmented by selections illustrating discourse about the unconscious, dreams, double-consciousness, memory, sexuality, insanity, heredity, degeneration, childhood, race and hybridity, and education (and the differing mental powers of the sexes). Many sections include extracts from popular or literary writers, though there is a frequent recurrence of the prominent scientific names (including some less well known now, such as Paul Broca, William Benjamin Carpenter, Thomas Laycock, Henry Maudsley, Frederick Myers, Théodule Ribot, and George Romanes). As Taylor and Shuttleworth write in their introduction, the psychological discussions of the Victorians “so pervaded contemporary life through popular newspaper reporting, advertising, and domestic manuals, that it would have been almost impossible for any writer to have remained untouched” (xvii). They represent that popular conversation with excerpts from literary texts by Charlotte Brontë, Thomas De Quincy, and Dickens (and one could go on to fill a volume with the psychologically attuned writings of Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Eliot, Hardy, Anthony Trollope, and Ellen Wood). Before the academic field of psychology opened its first laboratories in the 1870s, Victorians were already debating and theorizing fundamental questions about human and animal minds, perception, emotions, the physiology of the nervous system, consciousness and the unconscious, the soul, mental diseases, sexuality, and evolved human nature. These questions were explored by theologians, by naturalists and evolutionary biologists, by medical neurologists (in Europe and the United States) and experimental physiologists, by philosophical monists (at least one of whom was a mathematician), by mesmerists and practitioners of mental science, and by generalists, including physicians and men of letters. To make matters more complicated, these writings were not always categorized under the heading of “psychology,” and the experts represented widely variant intellectual allegiances, including anti-supernaturalist medical psychologists such as Maudsley, evolutionary biologists such as Romanes, and Darwinians such as Huxley and Ribot, but also including psychical researchers such as Myers, 380

British Psychology in the Nineteenth Century

Edmund Gurney, and Henry Sidgwick. The Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, studied telepathy, hallucinations, hypnotism, and ghosts, and had a strong sideline in debunking spiritualist frauds [on new religions and esotericism, see Ferguson’s chapter; on evolution, see Psomiades’s]. The research and philosophical interests of British psychology as promulgated by nineteenthcentury theorists and practitioners (and their European and American counterparts) are apparent from the diversity of their interests. These included such studies as James Mill on the philosophy of the mind, George Coombe on phrenology, James Cowles Prichard on insanity and other disorders, G.H. Lewes on Auguste Comte’s work, and Comte himself on positive religion, to name but a few. When one reviews the tributary works flowing from the 1820s, when Thomas Brown’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Mind (1820) was published, through the phrenological vogue of the 1830s and the interest in criminal insanity of the 1840s, the 1850s emerge as a vital early decade for the development of psychology and social science more generally. Works published in that decade by J.D. Morrell, Lewes, George Drysdale, Herbert Spencer, and the hugely influential Comte laid out broad platforms; also appearing were focused investigations of the emotions (Bain), hallucinations (Boismont), emergent neuroscience (Laycock), and implications for human thriving in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859). In the 1860s and 1870s the debate between dualist and monist views in philosophy and publications on physiology and pathology enriched the emergent psychological field, which now embraced heredity (Galton) and began to plumb the unconscious (von Hartmann). The impress of German and French thought was felt: Comte’s 1851–54 Système de Politique Positive (System of Positive Polity: A Treatise on Sociology, Instituting the Religion of Humanity) introduced positivism to the British scene well before its translation in 1875–77, and an extraordinarily influential book, Gustav Theodor Fechner’s Elemente der Psychophysik (1860) though only read in German in the Victorian period, provided the basis for the experimental and quantitative study of psychological phenomena, including memory as studied by experimentalist Hermann Ebbinghaus. Though Comte’s positivist religion faded out, Fechner’s psychophysics is still regarded, over a century and half later, as a foundational investigation of the quantitative relations between stimuli and the resultant sensations (Robinson 409). Mental testing helped develop the science of individual differences (Galton, Ebbinghaus). Darwin and Darwinians hove into view in the 1870s and 1880s, making important contributions through the 1890s on moral sentiments (Spencer); the emotions (Darwin himself); heredity in psychology (Théodule Ribot; George Romanes); ethics (Leslie Stephen); criminality, and sexuality (Havelock Ellis); and the nervous system (John Hughlings Jackson). As is well known, some of Darwin’s sources and correspondents gave only qualified support to his views or advanced different models, but these neuroscientists, alienists, and statisticians, William Carpenter, Henry Maudsley, Francis Galton, and David Ferrier, also contributed directly to the science of psychology. By the close of the Victorian period, child psychology (Crichton-Browne, Preyer; Sully) and educational psychology had been firmly established. The complex strands of psychological investigation came together as the academic discipline formed in Europe, the United States, and in Great Britain. A consequential 75 years did not bring consensus among philosophers, psychologists, and neurologists, but by the end of the nineteenth century research scientists and practitioners were poised to respond to and learn from the paradigm-shifting and traumatic events of the twentieth century, which consolidated psychology as a legitimately academic endeavor with practical applications of social utility.

3. Psychology in Victorian Britain: From Associationism to Experimentalism What did Victorian psychology look like to Victorians outside the research laboratories and hospitals? Associationist psychology (or philosophy) was the dominant empiricist school of thought about mental processes in Britain up through the development of professional, academic psychology in the late Victorian period. Associationist theories, starting with Hume, share the belief that learning occurs through the experience of an organism, in which ideas or thoughts arising from external 381

Suzanne Keen

stimuli become paired with one another in the subject’s mind. In literary studies we habitually pair associationism with its prime novelistic exemplar, Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759), a work that bears the impress of Sterne’s reading of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Locke and subsequent associationists stand against rationalists’ theses about innate ideas, and Sterne has tremendous fun demonstrating with hilarious examples how one external stimulus becomes inextricably bound to another. Nineteenth-century novelists, including Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, and Eliot, also engage with associationist ideas in their experiments with prose style (Aschkenes 1–7), and G.H. Lewes was informed by associationist theory in his criticism and appreciation of the novels he reviewed (1–2). For the philosophers and psychologists studying the formation of thoughts and mental processes in an associationist mode, observing empirically how links form along lines of similarity, contiguity, and contrast leads to generalizations, or laws, about the contents of the mind. Nineteenth-century thinkers influenced by associationism include Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Alexander Bain. Bain’s career illustrates how closely philosophy and psychology were intertwined in the nineteenth century, for this professor of moral philosophy attained renown as a psychologist who applied physiological studies to psychological research into mental states. The author of The Senses and the Intellect (1855), The Emotions and the Will (1859), and Manual of Mental and Moral Science (1868), Bain founded the philosophical journal Mind in 1876. It was to transform the study of mental life into psychological science (Staley 259), though Bain was not an experimentalist himself, nor even strictly speaking an associationist alone, for he also recognized the importance of physiology. Associationism, though a solidly British intellectual tradition and still regarded as an important influence on behaviorist psychology, was not the only game in town. This was especially the case for those with German training in experimental laboratories. The German experimentalists’ ideas reached English-speaking audiences in the early issues of Mind. Though Victorian literary representations of topics in psychology gravitated toward the sensational—hallucinations, monomania (as in Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right [1869]), mesmerism, split personality, and colorful phobias (as in the remarkable Poor Miss Finch [1872] by Collins)—experimentalism did make its mark on the fiction. Published in the same year, Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) provides an outstanding example of the incursion of foreign experimentalism in the person of Ezra Jennings, and Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1868) represents the anatomizing ambitions of a would-be medical neurologist, Dr. Fitzpiers. Yet given the importance of continental-trained research psychologists in the development of the discipline, most found their way to the United States rather than Britain. A close look at the career of a scholar— James Ward—who made the unusual choice of returning to Britain helps to illuminate the gradual transition from associationism to experimentalism, in a period when idealism was in vogue among philosophers (see Basile). Although he was among the most prominent and distinguished Victorian psychologists, he has attracted little attention from Victorianists, though he is remembered by philosophers (see Basile). This brief account remedies that oversight. After taking a B.A. in England, and studying theology, Ward showed interest in philosophy of mind; by the late 1870s he had begun publishing neuroscientific articles. How did this intellectual leap happen? Ward’s moves in 1870 marked his transition from theology to idealist philosophy and metaphysics to psychology, just as psychology was emerging in Germany. A fellowship enabled him to travel to Germany, first to Berlin and then to Göttingen, where he studied under the German psychological aesthetician Rudolf Hermann Lotze. He began formal study at Cambridge University, where he worked in the mid-1870s on a dissertation on “The Relation of Physiology to Psychology.” Ward returned to Germany to hone his skills as an experimental physiologist in Leipzig. Back at Cambridge, Ward (in collaboration with a visiting American, James McKeen Catrell) helped set up its first, short-lived, psycho-physiological lab in 1887 (Sokal 145–7). After Catrell’s departure with most of the lab’s equipment (his personal property), Ward endeavored to find the funds to re-equip it, and eventually to hire W.H.R. Rivers (depicted in Pat Barker’s Regeneration [1991]) to teach the subject, as lecturer on the Physiology of the 382

British Psychology in the Nineteenth Century

Special Senses (Hernshaw 172). German experimental physiology and psychology had a beachhead in Cambridge, England.4 Ward matters to our understanding of what Victorians knew about psychology not only because of his interdisciplinary background and his efforts to establish the field at Cambridge but because he wrote one of the most widely disseminated essays on the topic in the period. The ninth edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and General Literature (1878–89) contained authoritative essays that reflected the contemporary state of knowledge, authored by preeminent experts. Known as the “Scholar’s Edition,” it was celebrated for its contributions from the notable experts of the day.5 The Encyclopedia was a huge success, and it could be found in libraries, rectories, and in affluent homes, where it served as a reference resource. The 1885 issue featured a detailed essay “Psychology,” by James Ward, MA, Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge. According to Richard Rylance, Ward was offered the opportunity to author the essay because first choice George Croom Robertson was not able to complete the task and second choice James Sully demurred (321). Ward’s Encyclopedia Britannica essay, which ran nearly to 50 double-columned pages in volume XX, was accompanied elsewhere in the reference work by a 20-page essay on the physiology of the nervous system and by treatment of mental diseases (but no separate entries on brain or nerves). This tripartite and separate coverage of psychology, the beginnings of neuroscience, and medical psychiatry reveals three prominent strands at a moment when psychology was still in deep dialogue with its parent discipline of philosophy. Ward’s “Psychology” opens by diving into the problem of probing consciousness through introspection, a practice he critiques, in pursuit of a defining standpoint. Ward refers to Darwin on the emotions, understands individual traits as heritable, and suggests that “presentations” should be used in reference to the relations between objects (including ideas) and subjects, rather than “that vague and treacherous word ‘consciousness’” (41). Ward’s exploration of mind and mental life includes cognition, emotion, and conation, registering attention, feeling, and objects or presentations. He writes, “The simplest form of psychical life . . . involves not only a subject feeling but a subject having qualitatively distinguishable presentations which are the occasion of its feeling” (41, italics in original). The central pages of the essay present a painstaking critique of the philosophy of the association of ideas, especially its laws, which Ward subjects to logical scrutiny. The essay, and Ward’s subsequent textbook, were accorded respect by colleagues, even those working in the associationist tradition. Bain praised Ward’s “Psychology” as “among the masterpieces of the philosophy of the human mind” (Bain 1886, cited in Hearnshaw 136). Though Ward’s essay represents a break with associationism, he also argued against both monism and scientific materialism, out of which positions twentieth-century psychology and neuroscience emerged. Ward’s views have something in common with Gestalt psychology and phenomenology, as Hearnshaw observes (139). Though he offered a German-influenced alternative to the Lockean British tradition, Ward was not an experimentalist himself, and he preferred to study the individual experience of unitary selves over faculties or qualities subject to psychometric measurements. His commitment to elucidating the feeling subject’s active role in perception made individual consciousness a dynamic center in his thought. As his biographer in the National Dictionary of Biography writes, Ward’s novel psychology emphasizes “the importance of subjective as well as natural selection in mental development, and the stress laid on the function of inter-subjective intercourse in leading to knowledge of the external world and of self ” (Sorley 886). In keeping with evolutionary science, Ward stuck with heritable traits, and played an important role in establishing psychology as an empirical science at Cambridge, where the emergent discipline developed in collaboration with anthropology, as in the 1898 Torres Straits Expedition. In addition to his widely read Britannica essay, Ward addressed audiences in public lecture series. He spoke on the psychology of education and delivered distinguished lecture series in Aberdeen, St. Andrews, his home University of Cambridge, and the University of California at Berkeley. He gave a paper at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 (Sorley 886). Well known in his own time, Ward has vanished from view in literary studies, though his work is still 383

Suzanne Keen

remarked upon by philosophers. Literary scholars’ emphasis on the more sensational manifestations of Victorian psychological research has foreclosed attention to academic figures such as Ward, working within a university structure to fund and equip a lab, to foster interdisciplinary research, and to reach out to a general audience with up-to-date thinking about a new field. Sinister asylum-keepers taking fees to imprison unruly wives, charlatans reading bumps on the skulls of the credulous, mesmerists engaging in the theater of hypnosis, and anatomists lusting after the brains of elderly people made better copy for titillating readerships, and literary scholars of the period have understandably focused on the depictions that most often turn up in novels and melodrama. I think that Ward’s advocacy for an intersubjective, responsive, subjective psychology brought ideas that resonate with those of Spinoza to a broad audience of Victorian readers—and potentially, Victorian writers. While Ward was insisting that the proper study of psychology was the whole of individual experience (interacting with an environment full of other psyches), across the Atlantic another thinker with a deep commitment to studying experience was to have a far greater influence on psychology, educational theory and practice, political theory, and aesthetics. Writing in 1884, the year he earned his doctorate in philosophy from the Johns Hopkins University, pragmatist John Dewey described what was going on in what he termed “The New Psychology,” inspired by developments in experimentalism and in neighboring disciplines. Dewey argues that myth, folklore, anthropology, and history constitute psychological problems. His theory extends to individual life histories, presaging what will later become developmental psychology and abnormal psychology: [A]lso influential in the development of the New Psychology, is that movement which may be described as the commonest thoughts of everyday life in all its forms, whether normal or abnormal. The cradle and the asylum are becoming the laboratory of the psychologist of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The study of children’s minds, the discovery of their actual thoughts and feelings from babyhood up, the order and nature of the development of their mental life and the laws governing it, promises to be a mine of greatest value. (Dewey 286–7) The New Psychology that was emerging in the nineteenth century was nothing less, according to Dewey, than an ethical study bent on comprehending (human) psychical life, itself arising not from innate inheritance, but out of experience [on ethics, see Mitchell’s chapter]. One could say the same of the parallel developments in the English novel, which had a deep investment in the relations of character and circumstance, in Hardy’s phrase. Though some novelists, including Dickens and Wood, represented the inborn quality of characters as derived from their parentage, class, and race, a deep interest in the impact of unexpected circumstances, the influence of chance or chosen companions, and the testing-grounds of institutions and society make the Victorian novel a laboratory of emergent psychological ideas. A strand of the determinism that characterizes the French and American fiction of the period does exist in naturalistic work by Arnold Bennett, George Gissing, Sarah Grand, George Moore, and in the lesser-known slum-fiction writers such as Arthur Morrison. Yet the dominant traditions in British Victorian fiction could fairly be described in Deweyan terms, as investigating the interaction of experience and mental life. Documented everyday experience, scientific observation, and experiment were hallmarks both of the literary fiction and of the psychology of the late Victorian period. Though Dewey’s educational ideas, emphasizing child development and the signal power of experience (tested at the University of Chicago Laboratory School), were not to be implemented in Britain until the mid-twentieth century, Victorian novelists paved the way for their acceptance. Victorian fiction carried out the remit of the Bildungsroman with its interest in development of the self, and bent fairy tale and fantastic tropes to the population of psychologically resonant social worlds. It also depicted with painstaking interest the pressures exerted on girls, women, and disadvantaged people by society, while also developing narrative techniques for the rich representation of interior 384

British Psychology in the Nineteenth Century

life, what Dorrit Cohn called “transparent minds.” Victorian novelists delved into the experiences, perceptions, uncanny abilities, suffering, and neglect of children, in the very years when child labor was progressively regulated and then reduced, education for boys and girls established and eventually made mandatory, and cruelty to children exposed with gradual introduction of legal protections for victims of abuse. Child psychology received some of its most vivid and influential illustrations in Victorian works of fiction, by Charlotte Brontë, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy. In a 1980s revival of the two-way-traffic of ideas, Carol Gilligan explained her argument about gender differences in developmental psychology with illustrations drawn from the imagined lives of Maggie and Tom Tulliver. The centrality of the novelistic genre of Bildungsroman, or the novel of development, in introductions to Victorian fiction emphasizes the lasting contribution that novelists made to the period’s invention of a psychology rooted in observation of children, as Sally Shuttleworth has richly documented [on children’s literature, see Straley’s chapter]. Though I suggest in the preceding pages that literary scholars would benefit from a view of Victorian psychology that more closely attends to the thought and discoveries of nineteenth-century theorists and practitioners in the emergent field, following the exemplary work of Rachel Ablow, Nicholas Dames, Shuttleworth, and Gregory Tate, I also feel certain that we have not exhausted the insights of the novelists and poets who recorded, contested, synthesized, and experimented with the psychological science of their time. In reconciling accounts of the period that differ so markedly with respect to psychology, Victorian imaginative literature provides a rich resource.

Notes 1 See Beer, Darwin’s Plots (1983), Dale, In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age (1989), Dixon, Thomas, The Invention of Altruism (2008), Logan, Nerves and Narratives (1997), and Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880 (2000). 2 For the typical content of these courses, which are often required for psychology majors, see the textbooks: Wertheimer’s A Brief History of Psychology (2000), Hothersall’s History of Psychology (2004), Schultz and Schultz’s A History of Modern Psychology (2010), or Hergenhahn and Henley’s An Introduction to the History of Psychology (2014). 3 Wise argues (on the basis of archival research) that more men than women were actually incarcerated on the basis of false lunacy diagnoses (xviii-xix). 4 Oxford and Edinburgh lagged behind Cambridge in establishing formal programs in experimental psychology (see www.psy.ox.ac.uk/about-us/120-years-of-psychology-at-oxford and http://ourhistory.is.ed.ac.uk/ index.php/Psychology). Hearnshaw indicates that the enduring popularity of T.H. Green’s idealist Prolegomena to Ethics (1883) at Oxford “inoculated them against the deceptions of empirical psychology” (128) and holds that the places in Cambridge, London, and Manchester psychology got started earlier because idealism was weaker (Hearnshaw 120). On the history of empirical science in the period, see Garrett, Victorian Empiricism (2010). 5 Peruse the contributor’s list in a scan of the ninth edition here: https://archive.org/stream/encyclopediabrit2 5newyrich#page/483/mode/1up.

Key Critical Works Rachel Ablow. Victorian Pain. William A. Cohen. Embodied:Victorian Literature and the Senses. Nicholas Dames. The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction. Thomas Dixon. The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain. L. S. Hernshaw. A Short History of British Psychology 1840–1940. Anna Neill. Primitive Minds: Evolution and Spiritual Experience in the Victorian Novel. Angelique Richardson. After Darwin: Animals, Emotions, and the Mind. Rick Rylance. Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880. Sally Shuttleworth. The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science and Medicine, 1840–1900. Gregory Tate. The Poet’s Mind.

385

Suzanne Keen Jenny Bourne Taylor, and Sally Shuttleworth, editors. Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830–1890. Alison Winter. Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain. Kay Young. Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy.

Works Cited Ablow, Rachel. Victorian Pain. Princeton UP, 2017. Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to the Tempest. Routledge, 1992. Anderson, Amanda. Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life after Psychology. Oxford UP, 2018. Anger, Suzy. “The Victorian Mental Sciences.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, 2018, pp. 275–87. Aschkenes, Deborah. “In the Mind’s Eye: Associationism and Style in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel.” Doctoral dissertation, Columbia U, 2015. Bain, Alexander. The Emotions and the Will. John W. Parker, 1859. Basile, Pierfrancesco. “James Ward.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2017. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/james-ward/. Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 1983. Cambridge UP, 2009. Boismont, Alexandre Brière de. On Hallucinations. 1845. Translated by R. T. Hulme, Henry Renshaw, 1859. Brown, Thomas. Lectures on the Philosophy of Mind. W. and C. Tait and Longmans Hurst Rees Orme and Brown, 1820. Carlyle, Alexander, editor. New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle. John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1893. Carpenter, William. The Principles of Mental Physiology. Henry S. King, 1874. Cohen, William A. Embodied:Victorian Literature and the Senses. U of Minnesota P, 2008. Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton UP, 1978. Combe, George. Elements of Phrenology. John Anderson, Jr. and Simpkin and Marshall, 1824. Comte, Auguste. The Catechism of Positive Religion. Translated by Richard Congreve, John Chapman, 1858. ———. System of Positive Polity, or Treatise on Sociology, Instituting the Religion of Humanity. 1851–54. Translated by John Henry Bridges, Frederic Harrison, and Edward Spencer Beesly, Longmans, Green, 1875–77. Costandi, Mo. “Freud Was a Pioneering Neuroscientist.” The Guardian, 10 March 2014. www.theguardian.com/ science/neurophilosophy/2014/mar/10/neuroscience-history-science. Crichton-Browne, James. “Psychical Diseases in Early Life.” Journal of Mental Science, vol. 6, 1860, pp. 284–320. Dale, Peter Allan. In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age. U of Wisconsin P, 1989. Dames, Nicholas. Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810–1870. Oxford UP, 2001. ———. The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction. Oxford UP, 2007. Darwin, Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. John Murray, 1872. Dixon, Thomas. The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain. Oxford UP, 2008. Dewey, John. “The New Psychology.” The Andover Review, vol. 2, 1884, pp. 278–89. https://babel.hathitrust.org/ cgi/pt?id=inu.32000000486482;view=1up;seq=296. ———. Psychology. Harper, 1887. Drysdale, George R. Elements of Social Science, 4th ed. Truelove, 1867. Ebbinghaus, Hermann. Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology, 1885. Translated by Henry A. Ruger, Teacher College, 1913. Elfenbein, Andrew. “Cognitive Science and the History of Reading.” PMLA, vol. 121, no. 2, March 2006, pp. 484–502. www.jstor.org/stable/25486327. Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1871–72. Edited by Rosemary Ashton, Penguin Classics, 2003. Ellis, Havelock. The Criminal. Walter Scott, 1890. ———. Studies in the Psychology of Sex. UP, 1897. Ferrier, David. The Functions of the Brain. Smith, Elder, 1876. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. 1899/1900. Translated by A. A. Brill, George Allen, 1913. Galton, Francis. Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences. Palgrave Macmillan, 1869. ———. Inquiries into Human Faculty. Palgrave Macmillan, 1883. Garrett, Peter. Victorian Empiricism. Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2010. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard UP, 1982. Hartmann, Eduard von. The Philosophy of the Unconscious. 1869. Translated by William Chatterton Coupland, Trübner and Hill, 1884.

386

British Psychology in the Nineteenth Century Hearnshaw, L. S. A Short History of British Psychology 1840–1940. Methuen, 1964. Hergenhahn, B. R., and T. B. Henley. An Introduction to the History of Psychology. Wadsworth, 2014. Hothersall, David. History of Psychology. McGraw-Hill, 2004. Huxley, Thomas H. Lessons in Elementary Physiology. Palgrave Macmillan, 1866. Jackson, John Hughlings. “The Croonian Lectures on Evolution and Dissolution of the Nervous System.” British Medical Journal, vol. 1, no. 1214, 5 April 1884, pp. 660–3. James, Williams. The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. Henry Holt, 1890. Keen, Suzanne. Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination. Ohio State UP, 2014. Lane, Christopher. The Burdens of Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity. U of Chicago P, 1999. Laycock, Thomas. Mind and Brain. Sutherland and Knox and Simpkin, Marshall, 1859. Lewes, George Henry. Comte’s ‘Philosophy of the Sciences’. Henry G. Bohn, 1853. Logan, Peter. Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose. U of California P, 1997. Malane, Rachel. Sex in Mind: The Gendered Brain in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Mental Sciences. Peter Lang, 2005. Matus, Jill L. “Disclosure as ‘Cover-Up’: The Discourse of Madness in Lady Audley’s Secret.” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 3, Spring 1993, pp. 334–55. ———. “Victorian Framings of Mind: Recent Work on Mid-Nineteenth Century Theories of the Unconscious, Memory, and Emotion.” Literature Compass, vol. 4, no. 4, 2007, pp. 1257–76. Maudsley, Henry. Body and Mind: An Inquiry into Their Connection and Mutual Influence, Specially in Reference to Mental Disorders. Palgrave Macmillan, 1870. ———. Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings. Kegan Paul, Trench, 1886. ———. The Physiology and Pathology of Mind. Appleton, 1867. Mill, James. Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind. Baldwin and Cradock, 1829. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. John W. Parker, 1859. ———. “Utilitarianism.” Fraser’s Magazine, vol. 64, October–December 1861, pp. 391–406; 525–34, 659–73. Morrell, J. D. Elements of Psychology. William Pickering, 1853. Paris, Bernard J. Rereading George Eliot: Changing Perspectives on Her Experiments in Life. SUNY P, 2003. Preyer, W. T. The Mind of the Child. Translated by H. W. Brown and introduction by G. Stanley Hall, Appleton, 1888. Prichard, James Cowles. On the Different Forms of Insanity in Relation to Jurisprudence. Hippolyte Baillière, 1842. ———. Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders. Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper, 1835. Pulham, Patricia. Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales. Routledge, 2008. Ribot, Théodule. Heredity: A Psychological Study of Its Phenomenon. Appleton, 1875. ———. The Psychology of the Emotions. Walter Scott and Scribner’s, 1897. Richardson, Alan. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind. Cambridge UP, 2001. ———. The Neural Sublime. Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. Richardson, Angelique. After Darwin: Animals, Emotions, and the Mind. Rodopi, 2013. Robinson, David K. “Gustav Fechner: 150 Years of Elemente der Psychophysik.” History of Psychology, vol. 13, no. 4, November 2010, pp. 409–10. Romanes, George. Mental Evolution in Man. Kegan Paul, Trench, 1888. ———. Mind and Motion and Monism. Longmans, Green, 1895. Rylance, Rick. Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880. Oxford UP, 2000. Schultz, Duane P., and Sydney Ellen Schultz. A History of Modern Psychology, 10th ed. Wadsworth, 2012. Sharoni, Josephine. Lacan and Fantasy Literature: Portents of Modernity in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Fiction. Brill and Rodopi, 2017. Shuttleworth, Sally. The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science and Medicine, 1840–1900. Oxford UP, 2010. ———. “Psychological Definition and Social Power: Phrenology in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë.” Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature, 1700–1900, edited by John Christie and Sally Shuttleworth, Manchester UP, 1989, 121–51. Snow, Charles Percy. The Two Cultures: And a Second Look: An Expanded Version of the Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge UP, 1963. Sokal, Michael. “Psychology at Victorian Cambridge: The Unofficial Laboratory of 1887–1888.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 116, 1972, pp. 145–7. Sorley, W. R. “Ward, James.” 1922–1930. The Dictionary of National Biography, edited by J. R. H. Weaver, Oxford UP, 1930, 884–7. Spencer, Herbert. First Principles. Williams and Norgate, 1862. ———. “Morals and Moral Sentiments.” The Fortnightly Review, vol. 15, April 1871, pp. 419–32.

387

Suzanne Keen ———. The Principles of Psychology. Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1855. Staley, Thomas W. “The Journal Mind in Its Early Years, 1876–1920: An Introduction.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 70, no. 2, April 2009, pp. 259–63. Steen, Francis F. “‘The Time of Unrememberable Being’: Wordsworth’s Autobiography of the Imagination.” Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 1998, pp. 7–38. Stephen, Leslie. The Science of Ethics. Smith, Elder, 1882. Stiles, Anne. “Victorian Literature and Neuroscience.” Literature Compass, vol. 15, no. 2, 15 January 2018. https:// doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12436. Sully, James. Studies of Childhood. Longmans, Green, 1895. Tate, Gregory. The Poet’s Mind. Oxford UP, 2012. Taylor, Jenny Bourne, and Sally Shuttleworth, editors. Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830– 1890. Oxford UP, 1998. Vrettos, Athena. “Displaced Memory in Victorian Fiction and Psychology.” Victorian Studies, vol. 49, no. 2, 2007, pp. 99–107. Watson, Robert I. “The History of Psychology: A Neglected Area.” American Psychologist, vol. 15, 1960, pp. 251–5. Winter, Alison. Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain. U of Chicago P, 1998. Wise, Sarah. Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty, and the Mad Doctors in England. Counterpoint, 2012. Young, Kay. Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy. Ohio State UP, 2010.

388

34 ANTHROPOLOGY AND CLASSICAL EVOLUTIONISM Kathy Alexis Psomiades

What is Victorian anthropology and why has it interested literary scholars? A range of different kinds of Victorian writing might be called “anthropology”: travel writing—including the accounts of natural historians, missionaries, and colonial administrators; racial “science”—including debates about whether humans were one species or many; medical and anatomical inquiries into physical difference; and philology and other speculations on the origins of language. But the work that began to define anthropology as a discipline is generally identified with the cultural anthropology that emerged in the 1860s and that would lead to the establishment of anthropology as an academic discipline at the end of the century. Some of the major figures associated with the Victorian beginnings of anthropological theory were Henry Sumner Maine (Ancient Law, 1861), John McLennan (Primitive Marriage, 1865), John Lubbock (The Origin of Civilization, 1870), Edward Burnett Tylor (Primitive Culture, 1871), the American Lewis Henry Morgan (Ancient Society, 1877) and James Frazer (The Golden Bough, 1890) What these writers have in common, according to historians of the discipline, is a progressive cultural evolutionist account of human culture. The term “classical evolutionism” was used by George Stocking in Victorian Anthropology (1987) to describe what was distinctive about Victorian social or cultural anthropology. He distinguished this kind of evolutionary thinking from Darwinian evolutionism, because, although Charles Darwin was one influence on the anthropologists, other earlier kinds of evolutionary thinking about how cultures and societies change over time were arguably greater influences. Cultural evolutionism had its roots in eighteenth-century Enlightenment conjectural history and the stadial narratives (so-called because they divided human history into stages) that traced man from savagery through barbarism to civilization [on Enlightenment racial theories, see Tucker’s chapter]. Writers of the 1860s, however, had a far larger series of observations of different cultures on which to draw, and they also had the broader time scheme afforded by the new evolutionary sciences that allowed them to speculate on what the earliest humans must have been like. The Victorian cultural anthropologists borrowed a thought style from evolutionary biology and combined it with some older narratives of political economy and elements of August Comte’s positivist philosophy in order to put together a theory about the diversity of cultures on the globe that sequenced those cultures in evolutionary time. Just as biologists could look at living organisms and fossils and figure out how different forms of life must have emerged out of other forms, so too, the anthropologists hazarded, could one look at stories, languages, customs, and artifacts from very different cultures and figure out how cultures had progressed from simple to complex, savage to civilized. Tylor famously wrote, “To the ethnographer, the bow and arrow is a species” (I.7). Wherever in time and space bows and arrows were being used, they signal the universal stage of human development in which they emerged. No 389

Kathy Alexis Psomiades

matter how different the cultures that used them seemed, if they served the same function in those cultures, their appearance indicated that those cultures were at the same stage of development. If the bow and arrow had dropped out of everyday use, but was still used occasionally for sport, it was a survival from an older stage of culture that could only be explained by reference to that earlier stage. The main concerns of Victorian anthropology centered on marriage and myth. When I say “marriage,” I am using the term as the Victorian anthropologists did, to signify not only what we understand by marriage but also the debates about family structure that led to theories about a universal stage of primitive matriarchy, speculation about the development of incest taboos, and the concepts of exogamy and endogamy (John McLennan invented those terms to designate marriage outside the group and marriage inside the group). Victorian anthropologists used the term “marriage” loosely to refer to any kind of organized sexual relations. By myth, I mean the speculations on “primitive” religion and belief that took place around concepts like fetish, totem, animism, and ritual, all of which involved some attention to the long-standing question of how to interpret myth. Why, then, would literary scholars be interested in Victorian anthropology? There are broad general reasons: like the other social sciences, anthropology seems intimately related to literature’s social concerns; like history, anthropology shares with literature the Victorian obsession with time and history. In particular, the two central concerns of Victorian anthropology—marriage and myth—are also literary concerns. Marriage is both the subject matter and the plot of domestic fiction (Psomiades, “Marriage Plot in Theory”) [on domestic fiction, see Gregory’s chapter]. Myth is fundamental both to fiction and poetry, and to Victorian theories about genre and literary writing (Psomiades, “Mythic Marriage”). When anthropology theorized these concepts, it took up literature’s traditional material and both situated it in global culture and placed it in deep time. The theories that resulted both were influenced by literary writing on marriage and myth, and in turn had an influence on literary writers. And both literary and anthropological writers shaped and were shaped by Victorian ideas of gender, family, race, and history. Furthermore, because anthropology did not become a separate academic discipline until the last years of the nineteenth century, the early anthropologists moved not only in scientific but also in literary and journalistic circles. They wrote for the same periodicals and belonged to the same societies. Maine, for example, reviewed Anthony Trollope’s novels for the Saturday Review, and George Eliot read and took notes on Maine’s work. John McLennan’s essays appeared in the Fortnightly Review, which also ran essays by Walter Pater and serialized novels. McLennan was friendly with Dante Gabriel and William Michael Rossetti in the 1850s and wrote some art criticism before he began his anthropological career. Similarly, literary figures participated in anthropological circles. Algernon Charles Swinburne and Richard Burton were members of the Anthropological Society in the 1860s. Andrew Lang, the literary critic, poet, and friend of H. Rider Haggard, was influenced by and popularized the work of Tylor both to a general public and to Haggard himself. Thomas Hardy read anthropological writing about folklore, and was influenced by Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890). In short, anthropologists and literary writers shared a common intellectual culture throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Finally, Victorian anthropology’s theoretical investigations, antiquated as they might seem, had a huge impact on the twentieth-century knowledges that shaped the discipline of literary study. Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralist anthropology, feminist theory, genre theory, and cultural studies were all significantly shaped by Victorian anthropological thinking about the family, marriage, sex, culture, and interpretation. Victorian anthropology imagined cultural productions as carriers of meaning that was not always obvious on the surface but yielded itself up to the right interpretive tools and methodologies. It also brought sexual relations out of the realm of nature and into the realm of social theory.

1. Critique In 1998, in the concluding essay of an issue of Victorian Studies devoted to Victorian Ethnographies (edited by James Buzard and Joseph Childers), Christopher Herbert noted the remarkable absence of 390

Anthropology and Classical Evolutionism

Victorian anthropology itself from the issue: “This exclusion of the tradition of Victorian evolutionary anthropology from the field of reputable inquiry, and its corresponding near-erasure from the historical record, is consistent with the practice of many intellectual historians and historically-minded anthropologists” (487). Herbert accurately describes both the journal issue and, more generally, critical work about Victorian literature and anthropology. This erasure has a lot to do with the disciplinary history of anthropology and the role the Victorians played in that history (for more on the history of anthropology, see Kuklick). The modern discipline of anthropology was in many ways founded on the repudiation of Victorian anthropology in the early twentieth century. Modern anthropologists rejected Victorian social evolutionist explanations of cultural phenomena: Victorian hierarchies of culture, Victorian ideas about “the mind of primitive man” (to quote the title of Franz Boas’s seminal work), and the theories about kinship and universal “stages” that came out of social evolutionism. They also rejected Victorian physical anthropology’s obsessive concern with bodily difference. And finally, there was a wholesale rejection of Victorian anthropology’s method. Modern anthropology centered on fieldwork; the anthropologists traveled to the people they studied and lived with them as participant-observers, to get a sense of the particularity of their cultures. The Victorians were “armchair anthropologists,” who read accounts of travel narratives to different places and looked across time and space for similar cultural features that they could assign a place in the history of culture (although Shera-Shriar has recently complicated the “armchair anthropology” narrative). In order to study cultures with real understanding and respect, then, anthropologists thought they needed to clear away the remnants of Victorian error. So Victorian anthropology was first studied as error, and pointing up its errors and their vestigial remains in popular and academic thinking was a project that shaped its study. Arnold Kuper’s The Invention of Primitive Society (1988), Cynthia Eller’s Gentlemen and Amazons (2011) and The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory (2000), and Andrew and Harriet Lyons’s Irregular Connections (2004) are examples of this corrective approach. When George Stocking came to write his magisterial Victorian Anthropology (1987), he noted how deeply prior study of Victorian anthropology had been shaped by the needs of disciplinary history and the question of what Victorian anthropologists had contributed to the discipline. What he set out to do was a thorough history of Victorian anthropology on its own terms: an account of the traditions of philosophical and cultural inquiry from which it emerged, the way it was shaped by Victorian history and culture, the formation of its institutions. His main precursor in this kind of inquiry, and one he acknowledged, was J.B. Burrow, whose Evolution and Society (1966) had focused more narrowly on Maine, Tylor, and Herbert Spencer. Stocking and Burrow notwithstanding, however, anthropology’s repudiation of its own past meant that literary scholars tended to focus on twentieth-century anthropological concepts when they wrote about Victorian literature, or they tended to write about Victorian anthropology without writing about literary writing. There was thus nothing in Victorian studies like the substantial body of work that exists on twentieth-century modernism and anthropology, or on James Frazer’s impact on twentieth-century literature (Vickery). Thus, two of the most important books of the last 30 years about Victorian writing and anthropology actually do not focus on the embarrassment of Victorian anthropology at all but on the way that Victorians anticipated the culture concept of twentieth-century anthropology. Christopher Herbert’s Culture and Anomie (1991) set out to trace the origin of twentieth-century anthropology’s culture concept in a rich variety of Victorian writing—political economy, theology, travel narratives, the novel, sociological journalism [on travel writing, see Tange’s chapter]. The “culture concept,” the idea of an underlying totalizing logic that shapes the multiple objects and practices of a group connected by their residence in a common geographical area and that is invisible to those embedded inside it but visible to the anthropologist’s trained eye, is an idea that has been extensively critiqued and ultimately repudiated by contemporary anthropology (Clifford). Nevertheless, it structured anthropology for most of the twentieth century, replacing nineteenth-century armchair anthropologists’ temporal evolutionary fantasies with a geographic and relativistic way of seeing the world—not as the location 391

Kathy Alexis Psomiades

of different stages of civilization but as a place where everyone has a culture. At a point at which cultural studies was a dominant mode of literary-critical inquiry, and in which ideas about cultural construction and cultural relativism were central to literary debate, the culture idea itself seemed to have “the status of a manifest truth unsullied by historical contingency” (Herbert 1). The idea that “human life consists of the multifarious phenomena of a condition or a set of conditioning factors or processes called ‘culture’” (1) was something, Herbert argued, that certain discourses had come to take for granted. By showing how this idea actually emerged in the nineteenth century out of a range of older ideas, he hoped to disturb the unreflective use of it. What makes Culture and Anomie literary criticism, as well as intellectual history, was Herbert’s method: “to insist on the illogic inherent in the ethnographic culture concept and then to portray it as deriving historically from configurations of emotionally saturated symbolic imagery which ramify throughout disparate fields of nineteenthcentury thought” (303–4). Herbert is an extraordinary reader of Victorian extraliterary prose, and any literary scholar seeking to make connections between literary and extraliterary writing would do well to turn to this book and his Victorian Relativity for examples of how literary reading can make extraliterary writing into much more than merely context or contrast to the literary. While Tylor does make an appearance here, and Spencer and Frazer appear in the relativity book, the texts Herbert reads are primarily not Victorian anthropological theory and, with the exception of a chapter on Trollope, not literary. James Buzard’s Disorienting Fiction (2005) was also interested in the nineteenth-century origins of the culture concept but located those origins not in Victorian extraliterary writing but in Victorian novels. Realist fiction, through its unique techniques of narration, constitutes for Buzard a kind of autoethnography. To see the nineteenth-century origins of the twentieth-century culture concept, we need look no further than the way novel narrators anticipate the techniques of the “participantobserver,” the term twentieth-century anthropology uses to describe the ethnographer as one who both participates in the culture they describe and yet separates themselves from it in order to observe it. It is, Buzard claims, this inside-outside stance that enables the conception of “culture” as a whole with an internal logic that shapes all its parts. Unlike Herbert, who focused on the theoretical underpinnings of the concept in the Victorian period, Buzard focuses on the methodology of practice of ethnography. The idea of “culture” allows him to historicize narrative form. For Buzard, ethnography and the participant-observer require each other, and the participant-observer—who stands simultaneously inside and outside the culture s/he studies and produces—actually originates in the nineteenthcentury novel’s narrators. Literary techniques and conventions—first- and third-person narration, the interplay of identification and dis-identification between narrator and characters, the structure of the bildungsroman—take on a brand-new valence when narrators are seen as autoethnographic participant-observers in the making. In the 1980s and 1990s, literary critics wrote not only about literature’s relation to anthropology but about Victorian anthropological thinking itself. As feminist scholarship came into its own across the disciplines in the 1970s and 1980s, feminist anthropologists, political philosophers, theorists, and literary critics sought resources for a feminist rethinking of knowledge from past and present anthropology [on feminist criticism, see Schaffer’s chapter]. Victorian anthropology gave an account of culture as the progressive regulation of sexual relations that impacted psychoanalysis through the idea of the incest taboo (see, for example, Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo) and Marxism through Friedrich Engels’s adoption of Lewis Henry Morgan’s ideas in The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s debt to both Freud and Morgan is evident in The Elementary Structures of Kinship, which posited the exchange of women as the origin of culture. Feminist theorists like Gail Rubin and Luce Irigaray used the concepts of psychoanalysis and poststructuralist anthropology to theorize gender and sexual relations in pieces like “The Traffic in Women” and “Women on the Market,” respectively. Rather than looking at Victorian anthropology in the context of anthropology’s disciplinary history, feminists were interested in the role it had played 392

Anthropology and Classical Evolutionism

in the formation of the feminist theories they were using. Critics like Elizabeth Fee (“The Sexual Politics of Victorian Social Anthropology,” 1974), Rosalind Coward (Patriarchal Precedents, 1983), and Rosemarie Jann (“Darwin and the Anthropologists” 1994), to name a few, looked to the Victorians as the source of theoretical errors that marred feminist theory itself. The point was not to debunk current popular assumptions based in Victorian mistakes but to see the ways in which ideological projection could trip up scholars engaged in the admirable enterprise of trying to denaturalize and historicize sexual relations (Fee, Jann). These feminist scholars demonstrated that the aims and structures of Victorian anthropological thinking limited the thought of those who came after them, not necessarily because of ideology but because they remained limited by factors internal to an older intellectual project (Coward). Fee and Jann in particular were interested in the Victorian roots of the impulse to theorize gender and sexuality, and although their work was primarily critique, they acknowledged the importance of that thinking to current thinking. Coward, Fee, and Jann all engaged in ideology critique, but they also deeply engaged the question of what Victorian anthropology could tell them about their own theoretical models. Herbert’s observation, then, about a general lack of serious scholarly engagement with Victorian anthropology is somewhat less applicable to feminist scholarship of this period, which really is the only place, outside of anthropological disciplinary history, where this engagement occurred. Anita Levy was arguably the first critic to treat Victorian anthropology as what Michel Foucault called a “sexual science”: one of the new power/knowledges whose rise he described in The History of Sexuality, Volume I (1976). In Other Women (1990), she argued that it was through anthropology that middle-class culture “came to know itself and others according to the norms of sexuality, gender and the nucleated family” (56). Victorian anthropology imagined primitive cultures as those in which family organization and political organization were one and the same, and civilized cultures as those in which the familial and the political were carefully delineated and marked off from one another. In so doing, it projected the aristocratic kinship structures of the European past, in which family organization and political organization were intimately connected, onto other people’s pasts. “Anthropology, that is, rewrites history by relegating the relationship between sexual and political alliance, a very real feature of English aristocratic culture, to the history of the ethnic or racial other” (65). For Levy, anthropology is part of the mechanism producing the shift that Foucault describes between alliance and sexuality. It is one of the knowledges that makes the family both “an instrument of alliance and the center of sexual desire” (74). Levy is, of course, engaged in critique, but it is a critique that is also a fascinating take on what it is that anthropology did for the Victorians, beyond merely reaffirming racist and sexist hierarchies. As the focus on colonialism and imperialism in Victorian studies ramped up in the 1990s, scholars became interested in anthropology as an imperial knowledge [on postcolonial criticism, see Banerjee’s chapter]. These scholars mostly did not directly engage with Victorian cultural anthropology as the feminist critics did, but their work has important implications for the student of the field. Mary Louise Pratt’s important Imperial Eyes (1992) inspired a lot of work on Victorian travel writing as ethnography. Thomas Richards’s Imperial Archive (1993), while it did not deal with anthropology, did point up the compensatory role knowledge and information played in the construction of an imperial imaginary. Armchair surveys and organization of materials from different cultures could make it possible to create in imagination a world that could be managed, classified, and controlled, unlike the actual world, which was not so malleable. Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather (1995) and Robert Young’s Colonial Desire (1995) both mainly referenced physical anthropology as they showed how sexuality also entered into the discourses of race and empire. Like Coward, who wanted feminist theorists to be aware of the Victorian origins of some of their ideas so that they could be aware of the limits of their current efficacy, Young argued that the Victorian origins of the concept of “hybridity” limited its usefulness for postcolonial theory’s liberatory political project. Young sought to show that culture, rather than being a progressive alternative to the idea of physiological racial difference, was actually a 393

Kathy Alexis Psomiades

form of race by other means. Cultural “hybridity,” then, was loaded with the biologistic racist baggage of the past, hopelessly contaminated by the very forces of domination it sought to combat, because “culture” itself was not the other of “race” but a version of it.

2. Current Work: Economics, Marriage, Liberalism/Nation/Empire, Secularism The scholarship that most concerns itself with the interrelations between Victorian literature and Victorian anthropology has primarily occurred over the past 20 years. In what follows here, I have organized my discussion of this work around the critical conversations in literary studies in which it participates. There is some wonderful work on individual authors and anthropological thinkers: George Meredith (O’Hara), Hardy (Radford, Zeitler), Haggard (Reid), Eliot (Paxton, Duncan), but I have focused here primarily on book-length works treating a range of authors. Some of the most important critical arguments about Victorian anthropology and literature focus on the role it played in helping the Victorians conceptualize economic life in modernity [on economics, see Rajan’s chapter]. Victorian anthropology of marriage and kinship sexualized the origin stories of political economy, turning property into sexual property, contract into sexual contract. This is what made it so useful to Engels when he sought to explicate the roles marriage and family played under capitalism. Although “exchange” comes to replace “property” as the master term in Lévi-Strauss’s work, the notion of the compatibility of sexual and economic systems is common to nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropology. In “Heterosexual Exchange and Other Victorian Fictions” (1999), I argued for the Victorian origins of this idea, and showed how Trollope’s Eustace Diamonds might be read in conversation with Maine and McLennan. In The Vulgar Question of Money (2011), Elsie Michie sees anthropologists and novelists alike as “using familiar folktale patterns to think through anxieties raised by nineteenth-century social developments” (226, n32). Nineteenth-century anthropology, she claims, “links the questions of property and ownership that were being raised by political economists in the context of nineteenth-century society to the evolution of marriage as a social form” (6). The marriage plot, whether in anthropology or in novels, is “a symbolic structure,” a kind of “working through” in the psychoanalytic sense, a “mythic” plot that registers “a century-long reaction to the social transformations brought about by the evolution of capitalism in England” (17, 24, 254). In inventive readings of a broad range of novels, Michie showed how the figure of the rich heiress functioned both in Victorian fiction and anthropology to express and manage concerns about those transformations. For Michie, novelists and anthropologists alike are engaged in telling stories to manage the problematic conditions of Victorian economic life by turning them into problems about women and marriage. Yet there is also a sense in which twentieth-century anthropology operates as a theoretical tool for Michie, in thinking about the economics of marriage plots in fiction. If Victorian anthropology and novels do some of the same things with marriage to help them manage economic problems, part of what makes that visible are twentieth-century theories about marriage and exchange. Although also about anthropology’s relationship to political economy, Catherine Gallagher’s work is more intensely focused on Victorian anthropology as a Malthusian science, both in her essay on Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1998) and in the final chapter of her Body Economic (2006). In these pieces, Gallagher puts forward a reading of Victorian anthropology both as an origin story that makes culture the product of Malthusian bioeconomic population management, and as a theory of literary-cultural production. Thomas Malthus made sexual desire a universal human constant. As Gallagher puts it, “No one before Malthus contended that the sexual instinct was at the very core of our human nature or that it was as permanent and intractable as the instinct for self-preservation” (Body Economic 159). Victorian anthropologists put the Malthusian dilemma—that the sexual instinct will always result in the population exceeding the food supply—at the origins of cultural production. From McLennan to Frazer, the anthropologists “sex the arche” (Tess 422), telling an origin story about managing the relation between population and food supply. In Frazer, fertility rituals are motivated by this kind of 394

Anthropology and Classical Evolutionism

management, as they seek to adjust human and vegetative fertility through symbolic acts. In incorporating Frazerian ritual into the very structure of Tess, Gallagher argues, Hardy seeks to activate ritual affect through his own art. In so doing, he anthropologizes his own novel in a move that for Gallagher undermines the very generation of ritual affect for which he had hoped. She also shows how some of this dynamic works in Eliot’s fiction and how it shaped Modernist literary production. Gallagher is not uncritical of this process. She is, however, as deft and subtle a reader of McLennan and Frazer as she is of Hardy and Eliot: she takes their intellectual enterprise seriously. Finally, as one might expect from its title, Supritha Rajan’s A Tale of Two Capitalisms (2015) argues that nineteenth-century political economy actually produced a double narrative about capitalism. On the one hand, it offered the familiar liberal, progressive, individualist, competitive, enlightened pursuit of self-interest narrative that we associate with figures like Bentham and Mill. On the other, we find a narrative that is more and more occluded as the century progresses, involving ethical investments in community, reciprocity, and just distribution. This second side of capitalism, she claims, was denarrativized in political economy but recuperated and rearticulated in the new discipline of anthropology, where it appears in notions of primitive magic, ritual, religion, gift exchange, and kinship. Anthropology articulates this complex of ideas that make up “the sacred” as pre-capitalist and pre-modern, thus obscuring the fact that the sacred is not the other of capitalism but the form in which political economy’s ethical ideals have been expressed and contained. In other words, in the eighteenth century, political economy had an ethical component that was purged from it in the nineteenth century, only to be recuperated and yet contained in the idea of the sacred. For Rajan, nineteenth-century literature mediates between political economy and anthropology by synthesizing capitalism’s two narratives. Yet literature often invokes the sacred as part of its critique of capitalist ideology in ways that mask how economics and religious categories are mutually implicated. Both domestic fiction and McLennian theories about marriage and religion, Rajan argues, bring together women, the sacred, things, marriage, and the economic, investing “women with an intrinsic value that is necessary to the capitalist economic and social order” (184). All three of these critics are interested in how anthropology sexualizes political economy, and, for all three, literature plays a central role as well. For Michie, literature is engaged in a parallel enterprise to Victorian anthropology; for Gallagher, at least in her work on Hardy, literature comes to understand itself in anthropological terms; and for Rajan, literature is not only a mediator but also a resource for anthropology. (For Rajan, Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son, although it precedes McLennan’s linking of sacred and domestic in his theories of the totem, can be seen as the location of ideas about the domestic that anthropologists will take up and build upon.) Marriage and sexual relations are important to the arguments of all three in somewhat different ways—the marriage plot is at the center of Michie’s argument; reproduction is a central concept for Gallagher; and the novel’s imagination of the relationship between economics and domesticity is also important to Rajan. Rajan also has a tourde-force reading of how Victorian anthropology’s conception of the sacred extra-economic object in the figure of the “totem” prefigures the turn from commodity theory to thing theory in the late twentieth century. It may be that part of what made it possible to look at Victorian anthropology with fresh eyes in the new millennium was that the twentieth-century anthropological ideas that required its repudiation had by then themselves been repudiated. The culture concept, Lévi-Straussian exchange, the concept of kinship itself—all were subject to reexamination. If these concepts no longer had the status of truth, then the ideas whose repudiation had structured them no longer had the status of mere error. Victorian anthropology appears in a remarkable number of important contributions to the new marriage criticism, which has in turn been shaped by the new kinship studies in anthropology and queer theory (for new kinship work in anthropology, see Franklin and McKinnon, and for new marriage/kinship in Victorian literature, see Hagar and Schaffer and Galvan and Michie). Key figures in what I might call the new kinship and marriage scholarship include Sharon Marcus, Mary Jean 395

Kathy Alexis Psomiades

Corbett, and Talia Schaffer. Significantly, all three make reference to Victorian anthropological theory of marriage. Both Marcus’s Between Women (2007) and Corbett’s Family Likeness (2008) reference Henry Maine, but with a new focus on his theories of how the legal fiction of adoption points us toward the constructed nature of the concept of blood in his work. Marcus also is interested in how Maine and Trollope handle contractual marriage differently, as well as in how Victorian feminists like Edith Simcox themselves used anthropological ideas in their writing (see also Boos). Corbett’s Family Likeness reminds us that who is and who isn’t part of the family is historically contingent by looking at the ways in which marriage with a deceased wife’s sister was considered incest while marriage with a first cousin was not. For Corbett, Victorian anthropology marks the beginning of modern conceptions of incest. For Schaffer, in Romance’s Rival (2016), Victorian anthropology marks the beginnings of the construction of ideas about marriage and sexual desire that would shape psychoanalytic and anthropological theory in the twentieth century. Reading the Victorian novel through twentiethcentury theory, Schaffer argues, distorts Victorian marital ideals, which far from being about desire and exogamy, are very much about families and familiarity. While all of these works are about marriage and family, rather than about Victorian anthropology, its presence in all three of these fieldshaping contributions to the new marriage criticism demonstrates how profoundly the conditions Herbert described in 1998 have shifted. I want to turn now to the presence of Victorian anthropology in larger discussions about Victorian liberalism—discussions on the formation of liberal subjects, and on liberal governance, liberal nation, and liberal empire [on liberalism, see Small’s chapter]. The 1860s, the decade of anthropology’s emergence, is also the era of the Reform Bill of 1867, and the conversations about gender, race, and nation that went along with it. Victorian anthropology sexualizes not only political economy, but also some of the concepts of liberal political theory, as I argue in “He Knew He was Right.” Maine and Lubbock were involved in politics, Maine in the legal administration of empire in India, and Lubbock as a Member of Parliament. The progressive stories they told were intimately connected to the progressive stories of liberal political philosophy. Political scientist Karuna Mantena’s Alibis of Empire (2010) is a very detailed exploration of Maine’s work and the role his theories about traditional society played in helping produce the logic of late empire and, ultimately, the concept of “indirect rule.” While not literary criticism, Mantena’s book is a wonderful resource for scholars who want to know more about Maine’s work. Recently, in The Ploy of Instinct (2014), Kathleen Frederickson has argued for the importance of the idea of instinct for biopolitical governmentality at the end of the nineteenth century. Whereas Victorian liberalism is classically associated with reason and rational reflection, Frederickson argues that instinct is also vitally important to late-century liberal governance. The interplay of reason and instinct is a feature of the Victorian anthropology of marriage and kinship. Late Victorian anthropologists make their appearance in Frederickson’s chapter on Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913), arguably itself a very late version of Victorian anthropological narrative. Both Levy’s and Frederickson’s projects combine literary and extraliterary texts in order to make visible the larger work of Victorian sexual knowledges—Levy with the Foucauldian concept of discipline, and Frederickson with the (later) Foucauldian concepts of governmentality and biopolitics. The anthropologists have also proved useful for critical work on nations and nationalism. Sexual relations when viewed from the perspective of reproduction, genealogy, and lineage are central to the constitution of national groups; they are crucial to the imagination of what Étienne Balibar has called “fictive ethnicity” (10). In Wayward Reproductions (2004), Alys Eve Weinbaum draws upon and develops Balibar’s insights, reading the work of the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan precisely in this way, as productive of an ideological linking of race and reproduction into a genealogy. For Weinbaum, Morgan’s idea of the matrilineal gens [family] is a racialized reproductive idea. In valuing the communal and in drawing examples of communal property and matrilineage from the Iroquois, Morgan made anthropology of kinship newly available for the nationalist valuing of 396

Anthropology and Classical Evolutionism

the group. In taking it up, Friedrich Engels produced a nostalgic discourse of German nationalism, which problematizes his Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. One of the very things that appealed to Marx and Engels as socialists about Morgan’s work thus also turned out to enable a nationalism potentially at odds with socialist internationalism (106–44). The question of genealogy has also been taken up by Stephanie Engelstein, whose Sibling Action (2017) argues that nineteenth-century conceptions of the sibling “as relation, structure, and action” were fundamental to “epistemological systems on which subjectivity, civic organization, economic networks, and scientific methodologies were grounded” (1). Linguistic theory, race theory, comparative religion, comparative anthropology, evolutionary theory: all are shaped by a genealogical imagination of relationships that conceptualized relations between similar terms as somehow like sibling relationships. Engelstein’s big picture argument about sibling and genealogy connects Victorian anthropology to longer intellectual arcs, historicizing the theoretical structures of modernity. The idea of culture has also historically figured large in scholarly discussions of Victorian liberalism. Scholarship on the role Victorian anthropology played in helping construct this idea continues in recent work. In Colonies, Cults and Evolution (2007), David Amigoni seeks to explain how the modern concept of culture is tied to evolutionary thought in different kinds of writing, including anthropology. In Victorian Fetishism (2009), Peter Logan shows how, for Matthew Arnold, Eliot, Tylor, Richard Krafft-Ebing, and Freud, the concept of fetishism operates as a defining opposite to culture, and plays a key role in the development of both anthropological and literary-cultural theory. Sebastian Lecourt’s Cultivating Belief (2018) brings together a range of anthropological and literary writing to argue that Victorian anthropology helped liberal writers at the time imagine religion as an involuntary inheritance, akin to race or ethnicity, rather than a reasoned choice [on religion, see Ferguson’s chapter]. Focusing on the usefulness of the conflation of race and culture in imagining a many-sided liberal subject, he addresses the ways in which Arnold, Eliot, and Pater employ race/religion/culture to imagine a new kind of liberal individualism that valued many-sidedness over agency and depth. Lecourt’s project has parallels with Frederickson’s subject of instinct, although Lecourt is not critical of late nineteenth-century liberalism as Frederickson is. Meanwhile, the interest in the role anthropology plays in imagining the sacred and the secular is one Lecourt shares with Rajan, although he does not share her interest in the ways in which this distinction helps manage Victorian economic life. Like Young, too, he notes the conflation of “race” and “culture” at the end of the century, although for him this conflation is more productive than pernicious. Cultivating Belief brings Victorian anthropology of religion into critical conversations about secularism and liberalism in illuminating ways.

3. The Future Where might work in Victorian anthropology and literature go next? Given its global reach and its long-term influence, Victorian anthropology might expand out in time and space from Victorian England. There is already a Global Spencerianism (2016), a collection of essays edited by Bernard Lightman that looks at how Spencer’s ideas were disseminated in countries around the globe. The question of how Victorian anthropological ideas play out globally, and how writers reflect on, criticize, and revise them from a variety of cultural sites has yet to be explored in detail. In addition to moving across space, Victorian anthropological ideas also move into the twentieth century, sometimes in unexpected ways, and more work that puts them in the context of a long durée seems likely. One example of this kind of temporally and geographically wide-ranging work is a book not about Victorian anthropology but about a concept important to it, myth. Andrew Von Hendy’s 2002 The Modern Construction of Myth traces different kinds of ideas about myth across a range of disciplines, including Victorian and twentieth-century anthropology, from the Romantic period to now. As Von Hendy notes, myth used to be a central topic for literary criticism: by the time he had finished the book, it was not central any more. In a way, this allows him a kind of distance on the topic that makes for a 397

Kathy Alexis Psomiades

fascinating exploration of a set of ideas that were for a long time vitally important to many disciplines. Mimi Winick’s recent article, “Scholarly Enchantment,” likewise expands the temporal boundaries of Victorian anthropological thinking. She reclaims Jesse Weston, the author of From Ritual to Romance (the book that popularized Frazerian ideas about ritual for modernist writers like T.S. Eliot) for nineteenth-century studies. Weston, she argues, was a participant in the late nineteenth-century conversations about religion and the occult that took place across disciplines, including anthropology. In 2019 as I write this, it is no longer possible to say, as Herbert did in 1998, that Victorian anthropology has been excluded from the field of reputable inquiry. Over the past 20 years, literary scholars have begun reexamining both the anthropologists and the relationships between anthropological and literary writing. These scholars have opened up new conversations about marriage, myth, secularism, and Victorian social science that promise to continue into the future. Victorian anthropological writing turns out to be at the base of many of the ideas that inform modern Victorian studies: feminism, empire, race, the family, marriage, history, political economy, religion, science, and form itself. Studying this work shows how its presuppositions continue to shape our thinking today.

Key Critical Works J. W. Burrow. Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory. James Buzard. Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels. Rosalind Coward. Patriarchal Precedents: Sexuality and Social Relations. Catherine Gallagher. The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel. (Especially Chapter 4). ———. “Tess of the d’Urbervilles: Hardy’s Anthropology of the Novel.” Christopher Herbert. Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century. Sebastian Lecourt. Cultivating Belief:Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination. Anita Levy. Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832–1898. (Especially Chapter 3). Peter Melville Logan. Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives. Elsie B. Michie. The Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James. Kathy Psomiades. “Heterosexual Exchange and Other Victorian Fictions: The Eustace Diamonds and Victorian Anthropology.” Supritha Rajan. A Tale of Two Capitalisms: Sacred Economics in Nineteenth-Century Britain. George Stocking. Victorian Anthropology.

Works Cited Amigoni, David. Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Writing. Cambridge UP, 2010. Balibar, Étienne, and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. 1988. Translated by Chris Turner, Verso, 1991. Boas, Franz. The Mind of Primitive Man. 1911. Palgrave Macmillan, 1938. Boos, Florence. “A History of Their Own: Mona Caird, Francis Swiney, and Fin-de-Siècle Feminist Family History.” Contesting the Master Narrative: Essays in Social History, edited by Jeffrey Cox and Shelton Stromquist, U of Iowa P, 1998, pp. 69–92. Burrow, J. W. Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory. Cambridge UP, 1966. Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918. Clarendon, 1993. ———. Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels. Princeton UP, 2005. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Harvard UP, 1988. Corbett, Mary Jean. Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf. Cornell UP, 2008. Coward, Rosalind. Patriarchal Precedents: Sexuality and Social Relations. Routledge, 1983. Duncan, Ian. “George Eliot’s Science Fiction.” Representations, vol. 125, no. 1, 2014, pp. 15–39. Eller, Cynthia. Gentlemen and Amazons: The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, 1861–1900. U of California P, 2011. ———. The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future. Beacon, 2000.

398

Anthropology and Classical Evolutionism Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. 1884. International, 1972. Engelstein, Stefani. Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity. Columbia UP, 2017. Fee, Elizabeth. “The Sexual Politics of Victorian Social Anthropology.” Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women, edited by Mary S. Hartman and Lois Banner, Octagon, 1974, pp. 86–102. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. 1976. Translated by Robert Hurley, Random House, 1990. Franklin, Sara, and Susan McKinnon, editors. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Duke UP, 2001. Frazer, James G. The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, 1890. Frederickson, Kathleen. The Ploy of Instinct:Victorian Sciences of Nature and Sexuality in Liberal Governance. Fordham UP, 2014. Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. 1913. Translated and edited by James Strachey, Norton, 1950. Gallagher, Catherine. The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel. Princeton UP, 2006. ———. “Tess of the d’Urbervilles: Hardy’s Anthropology of the Novel.” Tess of the d’Urbervilles, edited by John Paul Riquelme, Bedford and St. Martin’s, 1998, pp. 422–40. Galvan, Jill, and Elsie Michie, editors. Replotting Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Ohio State UP, 2018. Hager, Kelly, and Talia Schaffer, editors. “Extending Families.” Special issue of Victorian Review, vol. 39, no. 2, 2013. Herbert, Christopher. Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century. U of Chicago P, 1991. ———. “Epilogue: Ethnography and Evolution.” Victorian Studies, vol. 41, no. 3, 1998, pp. 485–94. ———. Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery. U of Chicago P, 2001. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. 1977. Translated by Catherine Porter, Cornell UP, 1985. Jann, Rosemary. “Darwin and the Anthropologists: Sexual Selection and Its Discontents.” Victorian Studies, vol. 37, no. 2, 1994, pp. 287–306. Kuklick, Henrika. A New History of Anthropology. Blackwell, 2008. Kuper, Adam. The Invention of Primitive Society. Routledge, 1988. Lecourt, Sebastian. Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination. Oxford UP, 2018. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. 1949. Translated by James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer, Beacon, 1969. ———. Totemism. 1962. Translated by Rodney Needham, Beacon, 1963. Levy, Anita. Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832–1898. Princeton UP, 1990. Lightman, Bernard. Global Spencerism: The Communication and Appropriation of a British Evolutionist. Brill, 2016. Logan, Peter Melville. Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives. SUNY P, 2009. Lubbock, John. The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man. 1870. Longmans, 1970. Lyons, Andrew P., and Harriet D. Lyons. Irregular Connections: A History of Anthropology and Sexuality. U of Nebraska P, 2004. Maine, Henry Sumner. Ancient Law, Its Connection with the Early History of Society and Its Relation to Modern Ideas. 1861. Dorset, 1986. Mantena, Karuna. Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism. Princeton UP, 2010. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton UP, 2007. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. Routledge, 1995. McLennan, John. Primitive Marriage: An Inquiry into the Origin of the Form of Capture in Marriage Ceremonies. 1865. Edited by Peter Rivière, U of Chicago P, 1970. Michie, Elsie B. The Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James. Johns Hopkins UP, 2011. Morgan, Lewis Henry. Ancient Society: Or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization. 1877. Meridian, 1969. O’Hara, Patricia. “Primitive Marriage, Civilized Marriage: Anthropology, Mythology, and The Egoist.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 20, 1992, pp. 1–24. Paxton, Nancy L. George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction of Gender. Princeton UP, 1991. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. 1992. Routledge, 2008. Psomiades, Kathy Alexis. “He Knew He Was Right: The Sensational Tyranny of the Sexual Contract and the Problem of Liberal Politics.” The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope’s Novels, edited by H. M. Marwick, Deborah Morse, and Regenia Gagnier, Ashgate, 2009, pp. 31–44.

399

Kathy Alexis Psomiades ———. “Heterosexual Exchange and Other Victorian Fictions: The Eustace Diamonds and Victorian Anthropology.” Novel, vol. 33, no. 1, Fall 1999, pp. 93–118. ———. “Mythic Marriage: Haggard, Frazer, Hardy, and the Anthropology of Myth.” Replotting Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, edited by Jill Galvan and Elsie Michie, Ohio State UP, 2018, pp. 55–75. ———. “The Marriage Plot in Theory.” Novel, vol. 43, no. 1, Spring 2010, pp. 51–9. Radford, Andrew. Thomas Hardy and the Survivals of Time. Ashgate, 2003. Rajan, Supritha. A Tale of Two Capitalisms: Sacred Economics in Nineteenth-Century Britain. U of Michigan P, 2015. Reid, Julia. “‘She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed’: Anthropology and Matriarchy in H. Rider Haggard’s She.” Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. 20, no. 3, 2015, pp. 357–74. Richards, Thomas. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. Verso, 1993. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” 1975. Feminist Theory: A Reader, edited by Wendy K. Kolmar and Frances Bartkowski, McGraw-Hill, 2013, pp. 240–52. Schaffer, Talia. Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction. Oxford UP, 2016. Sera-Shriar, Efram. The Making of British Anthropology, 1831–1871. Pickering and Chatto, 2013. Stocking, George. After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888–1951. U Wisconsin P, 1995. ———. Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. Free, 1968. ———. Victorian Anthropology. Free, 1987. Tylor, Edward Burnett. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Custom. 1871. Cambridge UP, 2010. Vickery, John B. The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough. Princeton UP, 1973. Von Hendy, Andrew. The Modern Construction of Myth. Indiana UP, 2002. Weinbaum, Alys Eve. Wayward Reproductions: Geologies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought. Duke UP, 2004. Winick, Mimi. “Scholarly Enchantment.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 73, no. 2, 2018, pp. 187–226. Young, Robert J. C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. Routledge, 1995. Zeitler, Michael A. Representations of Culture: Thomas Hardy’s Wessex and Victorian Anthropology. Peter Lang, 2007.

400

35 GEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY Ralph O’Connor

Geology’s impact on Victorian literature and culture is, at one level, well known. The new science rose to cultural prominence during the adolescence and student years of some of the most important literary Victorians— George Eliot, Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson—who wove its vertiginous perspectives on the earth’s past into their work and thought. Numerous critics have illuminated these interactions, frequently in the context of geology as a handmaiden to evolutionary thinking or its challenges to Christian doctrine. The last two decades have seen those well-traveled paths supplemented by a network of equally important and stimulating approaches, in which literary criticism and history of science have come into fruitful conjunction. There is still no usable survey of geology and Victorian literature as a whole, so I will highlight some of the most invigorating developments in this field and indicate helpful items of further reading before finally taking a brief literary stroll down the path most traveled, geology’s role in the Victorian “crisis of faith.” Geology had emerged in the decades around 1800 from an innovative combination of mineralogy, antiquarianism, and stratigraphy (mapping layers of different rock formations in the earth’s crust). Contrary to popular misconception, the incalculable vastness of past time had been a working assumption for most natural philosophers since the mid-eighteenth century. But new knowledge about fossils and strata now enabled its depths to be organized in time and space: deep time became deep history. By identifying certain fossils as characteristic of certain rock formations, then correlating these across geographical locations, geologists were, by 1830, plotting an outline-chronology of geohistory and producing large-scale maps. Fossils known previously—ammonites, trilobites, mammoths, Megatherium—now found places in geohistory and were recognized as extinct. Paleontology emerged as the study of their remains, but the word “geology” commonly functioned as an umbrella term for both sciences, as I use it here. The procession of creatures became more varied in the Regency period, with extinct lizard-like beasts such as ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and Iguanodon lurching into the limelight. In 1842 the three largest known fossil land animals were baptized by Richard Owen with one of Victorian Britain’s best-known contributions to the modern lexicon, “dinosaur.” In 1854 these ancient reptiles became even more familiar thanks to the iconic life-sized concrete models built by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins for the Crystal Palace Gardens in Sydenham, where they remain today. Hugh Torrens (“Politics”) has given an authoritative account of the dinosaur’s emergence in Victorian science, while James Secord (“Monsters”) and Will Tattersdill (“Work”) are essential starting points when investigating the dinosaur’s wider cultural manifestations. 401

Ralph O’Connor

What had caused these creatures to become extinct, and the other changes visible in the rocks, would remain hotly debated throughout the nineteenth century. But we need to be clear what geologists were not arguing about. Young-earth interpretations of the Creation-narrative in Genesis 1 loomed large in public understandings of earth history, and it is often assumed that such biblical literalism was widespread in the science as well. But all leading Victorian geologists, clergymen included, assumed (without much soul-searching) that the earth was unimaginably old, millions of years or more; that species extinction was a fact; and that Genesis 1 was not a straightforward account of pre-human life on earth [on Christian beliefs, see Knight’s chapter]. These assumptions, to which I will return at the end, were independent of evolutionary theorizing. They were controversial in the public domain but not among geologists (Philip Henry Gosse, for all his gifts as a naturalist, was not a geologist). By Victoria’s reign, even the biblical Deluge had ceased to have scientific significance for any leading geologists. It is important to get these points of intellectual history right if we want to glimpse how and why geology animated Victorian hearts, minds, and texts. Fortunately for us, the history of nineteenthcentury geology has recently been much studied. The resulting scholarship has plenty to offer to literary scholars but is under-exploited. Some are still unaware that history of science underwent its own “cultural turn” in the 1970s: students of English literature, stumbling across their work by chance, are often pleasantly surprised to find that historians of science write like cultural historians rather than scientists, as we shall see.

1. The Literary Uses of the New Historiography The foremost living historian of geology, Martin Rudwick, has managed to make coherent sense of the international welter of methods, discoveries, individuals, and institutions which established geology between the 1780s and 1840s. This story is told fully and vividly in Bursting the Limits of Time and Worlds Before Adam. The whole nineteenth century is included in Rudwick’s shorter book Earth’s Deep History, aimed at a wider audience, and geologists’ work on human prehistory in the second half of the century has been expertly surveyed in Rudwickian vein by Bowdoin van Riper and Anne O’Connor. All these books explore the work of leading (“elite”) geologists, with less prestigious figures playing supporting roles. Other historians have revealed the social and cultural construction of geology within a wider public sphere. Geology’s rise to cultural authority has been analyzed in relation to scientific institutions by Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, civic philosophical societies by Simon Knell and Diarmid Finnegan, and individual careers by Torrens (on Mary Anning), Sandra Herbert (on Charles Darwin as geologist), and Morrell (on John Phillips). Other wide-ranging biographical studies include Dennis Dean’s study of Gideon Mantell, biographies of the elite men of science Richard Owen and William Buckland by Nicolaas Rupke, and Michael Taylor’s concise biography of the self-taught stonemasongeologist Hugh Miller. The last two books are especially useful for literary scholars for their attention to contemporary literary and religious as well as scientific contexts. Historians’ interest in the cultural construction of scientific knowledge has brought this discipline closer to literary studies, as their range of “legitimate” source material has expanded to include lectures, theaters, exhibitions, paintings, and works of popular science. With the demise of top-down models of popularization and new understandings of active audiences, book history and histories of reading have taken on significant explanatory power for scholars like Jonathan Topham and Gowan Dawson. This, in turn, has brought novels and poetry into the history of science. Secord’s work has been fundamental here. His Victorian Sensation shows what evolution meant for the early Victorians by recovering, with unforgettable verve, how individuals and communities in diverse social and geographical contexts read and responded to the best-selling anonymous transmutationist treatise Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), itself rooted in geological discussion. Fiction, poetry, and

402

Geology and Paleontology

imaginative nonfiction are integral to Secord’s argument: Vestiges itself becomes a descendant of Scott’s historical novels. Building on Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots (1983), Secord’s work has helped literary scholars and historians of science contribute to each other’s fields, especially geology with its narrative possibilities and public vogue. One result, developed in my Earth on Show and elsewhere, has been a widening of the literary genres available for close reading and a renewed appreciation of the poetics of imaginative nonfiction about science, a huge body of literature conventionally lumped together as “popular science.” Canon-busting is old news in other areas of Victorian literary studies, but science’s present-day status as the antithesis of “literature” has slowed the literary canon’s embrace of imaginative scientific nonfiction (O’Connor “Science”) [on the canon wars, see Schaffer’s chapter]. Secord’s Visions of Science, a kind of prequel to Victorian Sensation, focuses on the early history of one such genre, the reflective treatise, in which form some important early contributions to geology reached the public. Another genre, the “history of life” or “evolutionary epic,” has received close literary-critical attention from David Amigoni, James Elwick, and Richard Somerset. Geology exemplifies the mutual enrichment of science and fantastic narratives such as myth, legend, and fairy tale, as seen in Vybarr Cregan-Reid’s wide-ranging analysis of the rediscovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh and a slew of studies of “scientific fairy tales” and paleontological dragons.1 Nineteenth-century geologists’ resistance to narrative organization has also come into view. Here Adelene Buckland’s work has been transformational. Her Novel Science relates key Victorian novelists’ intense interest in geology to a complex attitude toward seductive plot lines shared by geologists and novelists alike: narrative and plot are not the same thing. This corrects a prevailing assumption about geology and storytelling. In the wake of Beer and George Levine’s pathbreaking work on evolutionary narrative, critics often assume that literary allusions to geology always involved some sort of plot, preferably a Lyellian one with no room for unheard-of catastrophes, geological or narratological. Buckland, by contrast, emphasizes the conflicted outlook on narrative explanations shared by many early Victorian geologists and relates this to a renewed skepticism about narrative truthfulness visible in realist novels from Scott onwards. Novel Science exemplifies the value of a fully historicized narratology for the study of scientific fiction and nonfiction. More recently, Gowan Dawson’s Show Me the Bone has extended Secord’s approach to the knowledge-making potential of literary form by tracking one core rhetorical trope of Victorian paleontology, its alleged power of reconstructing an animal from a single fossil fragment via the anatomical law of correlation, through a dizzying range of specialist and nonspecialist settings. He shows (among much else) that paleontological thinking underpinned not only Sherlock Holmes’s forensic skills but also the very construction and criticism of Victorian serial fiction. These studies of literature and geology can be difficult to pigeonhole as history of science or literary criticism, but this should not discourage readers—unless they are worried about having assumptions about disciplinary boundaries overturned. Rather than worry, just read Victorian Sensation and go wild. I have already emphasized how important it is to understand the basic consensus within which Victorian geologists operated. For the newcomer, it is helpful to sample some of the main internal controversies; the next section outlines these. What looks like an orderly succession of discovery and agreement usually conceals long periods of cut and thrust, vividly brought to life in the work of Adrian Desmond, Rudwick, Secord, and others. For instance, the Geological Society of London (founded in 1807) held meetings that selected outsiders sometimes attended just “to see the fellows fight” (Thackray). Of course, most Victorians did not enjoy direct access to the geologists’ debates, but encountered versions of the science mediated through lectures, sermons, exhibitions, and printed texts [on periodical publications, see Hughes’s chapter]. More than today, access to these media varied according to socioeconomic and geographical position. If geology was in the air, some breathed it more freely than others.

403

Ralph O’Connor

2. Why the Fellows Fought By far the bitterest controversies in the early period concerned not timescales or causal explanations but the spatial mapping of the Paleozoic formations. The hammering-out of a “Devonian” system between Silurian and Carboniferous strata between 1834 and 1840 (Rudwick Great) was followed by a grinding dispute over Cambrian and Silurian rocks which set the former controversy’s leading allies, Sedgwick and Roderick Murchison, at each other’s throats for the rest of their lives. Feelings ran high in these territorial disputes, which bled over into real-life empire building (Secord Controversy). Rather than being freighted with existential angst, for geologists the fossil record bore more tangible scars of ambition thwarted and friendships betrayed. By contrast, debates between leading geologists about sudden and gradual causes of geological change were far more amicable. This makes sense as soon as we forget the red herrings of miracles and biblical literalism: even in the popular press, proponents of young-earth cosmologies had no sympathy with either side on this question. A lively debate about the adequacy of present-day geological phenomena in reconstructions of past changes was sparked off by Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33). Lyell’s “actualist” methodological assumption that the same laws of nature and the same kinds of phenomena had operated in former ages (erosion, deposition, earthquakes, eruptions) was nothing new to geology in 1830, but he was acclaimed for putting the case so strongly. The principle for which Lyell is best known today, labeled “uniformitarianism” by his admiring opponent William Whewell, was received with less enthusiasm. Lyell condemned as unscientific any supposition that the earth’s surface might have undergone changes of a scale unknown to the historical record (Hooykaas, Rudwick “Uniformity”). This view failed to explain the so-called “diluvial” phenomena in the more recent formations of the north—U-shaped valleys, erratic boulders, gravel deposits—which pointed to agencies unlike any then known (Boylan, Rupke Chain). Hypotheses of catastrophic deluges and mega-tsunamis with natural, earthbound causes (no longer identified with the biblical flood) were reasonable in this context, although Lyell tried to make them look unreasonable by disingenuously conflating them with antiquated hypotheses of miraculous cataclysms. Almost all Lyell’s fellow geologists felt that his exclusion of larger-scale causes was too anthropocentric, a sentiment later echoed in George Eliot’s diaries (Buckland Novel 224). By the 1840s the most recent deluge had congealed into an Ice Age, thanks in part to the advocacy of the erstwhile floodtheorist William Buckland (Boylan, Rudwick Worlds 501–39). Debate still rumbled on over the relative importance of glaciers or icebergs, how much of the world had been frozen, and whether there had been one Ice Age or several. Later in the century, physics and astronomy were brought in to help settle these questions, not without further controversy. These debates about how to reconstruct the past, with their dramatically suggestive imagery of fire and flood, had multiple resonances for Victorian poets and novelists. The analogy between novelistic realism and “actualist” geology, with their shared foregrounding of mundane detail—unnoticed causes accumulating to produce earth-shattering effects—has been insightfully exploited by literary scholars from George Levine onward. The drawback has been a tendency to map certain narrative devices onto an incorrect (not just oversimplified) theoretical schema with Lyell the “uniformitarian” on one side and his opponents on the other, while novelists and poets are seen to have pinned their philosophical colors to the mast (and given critics a useful key to their texts’ meanings) by creating narrative structures which privilege continuity or discontinuity, openness or teleology. The truth is not just more complicated: it falsifies the whole dichotomy. Lyell’s opponents were “actualists” like him and shared his emphasis on the incalculably extended agency of low-level causes; they just disagreed with him about whether the earth might also have been more unstable in the past, given prevailing models of a gradually cooling planet. Conversely, Lyell’s Principles is awash with floods and eruptions: for Lyell these were as mundane as the gradual silting-up of a river, although terrifying to witness. It is this last consideration which makes Whewell’s label “catastrophism” totally

404

Geology and Paleontology

inappropriate for Lyell’s opponents. Not only did they prioritize just the kinds of mundane causes (and vast time scales) Lyell emphasized, but as a testament to the ubiquitous power of catastrophes, Lyell’s Principles upstaged them all. In this light, the flood which so memorably concludes one of the period’s subtlest sublimations of geology in fiction, Eliot’s Mill on the Floss (1860), does not invoke the methodology of Lyell’s opponents: it could have come straight out of the Principles (Smith 121–51). Or, as Eliot’s narrator hints, it could result from agricultural activity; its cause remains unknown. It comes as a surprise to the people it sweeps away because (as her narrator insists) it falls outside their ordinary daily experience: they are human beings, limited in their horizons (Buckland Novel 232–3). This is another strongly Lyellian theme, but has nothing to do with uniformitarianism. The flood has many layers of meaning, as critics like Shuttleworth and Jonathan Smith ably elucidate, but the contest between gradual and catastrophic models of earth history is not foremost among them. Instead, as Buckland shows (221–38), the flood and the novel’s other self-consciously geological moments point up Eliot’s larger emphasis on the incalculable nature of causality and the inadequacy of any narrative model to contain reality—a theme which also emerges from her other fiction once we remove the distorting lens of these geological “isms.” Her fiction echoes Lyell’s geology in resisting the “coercive force of plot” (Buckland Novel 233) as a totalizing explanation, even if, also like Lyell, it harnesses aspects of that force to achieve its effect. The Mill on the Floss exemplifies the need to tread softly when tracing the literary ramifications of scientific debate. The debates were as multifaceted as the texts we analyze, so awareness of what geologists were really thinking about can only enhance our appreciation of the literary works which drew on those debates, often at several conceptual removes. In conventional accounts of this debate, the ideological stakes are raised by awareness that Lyell’s most wholehearted follower, Darwin, built uniformitarian methodology into an evolutionary theory. Here we approach territory even more relevant to wider cultural and literary concerns, but there has been confusion about where battle lines were drawn. The geologists who opposed uniformitarianism are often seen by literary scholars as motivated by a reactionary desire to uphold the fixity of species against new scientific trends—forgetting that it was precisely this reactionary desire which motivated the most uncompromising aspect of Lyell’s uniformitarianism, his denial that the history of life had any direction at all. In this, Lyell was in a minority of one in the 1830s. What united his opponents was not a penchant for mega-cataclysms but awareness of the fossil record’s consistent pattern of increasingly complex life-forms over time. Lyell was aware that this directional pattern opened the door to Lamarckian transmutationist interpretations of species change. Contrary to stillpersistent claims that Lyell’s Principles portrayed transmutationism sympathetically (Frederickson 688), he abhorred the idea that humans might be descended from lower animals and accordingly combated that hypothesis’s directionalist basis in the Principles. In the 1850s he admitted defeat on directionalism; later, under pressure from Darwin, he reluctantly accepted the possibility of transmutation. Michael Bartholomew’s study of Lyell’s struggle with evolution points up the gulf between Lyell’s and Darwin’s geohistories and poignantly reveals the controversy’s human side. In the meantime, transmutationism’s stock had risen. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) brought a cosmically extrapolated “development hypothesis” into Victorian drawing rooms and exposed it to playful, horrified and reflective literary treatment just as Darwin’s theory did a generation later (Secord, Victorian). Fossils were Brandished with gusto on both sides. Like Lyell, most geologists initially responded by shoring up the assumption that each living kind had been separately created (“special creation”) over millions of years. Some pointed to degenerative patterns within individual animal groups over time, throwing a spanner into the upward escalator of transmutationist “development.” But virtually all agreed that earth history showed a progressive and, for some, providential trend overall (Desmond, Rupke Chain). Some conservative naturalists—notably Owen, Britain’s foremost paleontologist—developed theories of theistic evolution or “creation by law.” Owen’s vision of a divinely “ordained becoming,” made 405

Ralph O’Connor

palatable by biblical allusions, bridged the narrowing gap between creationism and evolutionism, inspiring both supporters and opponents of the “development hypothesis” (Rupke Owen 147–65). We indelibly associate narratives of the history of life with evolution, but in the German Romantic idealist tradition in which Owen worked, the direction of change was often more important than its mechanism. Depictions of the progressive sequence of life-forms could thus leave room for creationist or transmutationist explanations (O’Connor “Epic”). When the protagonist of Kingsley’s novel Alton Locke (1850) dreams of undergoing animal reincarnations in successive worlds from the Paleozoic to the present, it is easy to mistake the resulting freeze-frame narrative of “ordained becoming” for a transmutationist fantasy, and thus misconstrue its ideological resonances. Kingsley would go on to produce just such a fantasy in his novel The Water-Babies (1863), by then under Darwin’s influence but no less evangelical for all that (Beer 129–39). When we encounter references to the progressive history of life in imaginative writing, we should assume neither that it must be evolutionist nor that, if it is, its Victorian readers would have viewed that as undermining religious faith. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) persuaded many that species transmutation was a fact, so transmutationism was often subsequently called “Darwinism.” But Darwin’s distinctive contribution to these debates, natural selection, was not accepted as evolution’s primary driving force until the midtwentieth century (Bowler Evolution). Its scientific and literary purchase remained potent, as John Holmes forcefully argues (Bards), but non-Darwinian models of directed evolution, with or without God, long prevailed. Similarly, images of “Nature, red in tooth and claw” (to quote Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H., 1833–49) suffused creationist as well as evolutionary visions of life’s progress from ferocious beasts to civilized humans. To appreciate these continuities between pre- and post-Origin thinking does not detract from Darwin’s stature. How (or whether) to include humans within these evolutionary explanations was another matter. With a few exceptions prefiguring our concept of the Anthropocene (Heringman “Deep Time”), geologists before the 1850s generally left humans to be discussed by historians and antiquaries because the emergence of humans was still conventionally dated to the historical period, around 6,000 years ago, in a hangover from biblical chronology [on the Anthropocene, see Taylor’s chapter]. Mounting evidence for much older fossil humans and their tools became a major focus for geological discussion only in the late 1850s. The Paleolithic or Old Stone Age emerged as a boundary zone fought over by geologists, ethnologists, and antiquaries well into the twentieth century (O’Connor Time, Goodrum). This is what Victorians called “prehistoric”; only later did that term extend its reach back into prehuman times. These investigations had obvious implications for racial theorizing (Livingstone; both Tucker and Psomiades, this volume). After the initial furores over human antiquity and cultural evolution sparked off in 1871 by Darwin’s Descent of Man and Edward Tylor’s Primitive Culture, geology is sometimes assumed to have dropped out of public view. It had certainly lost something of its novelty as a science, but new windows upon the distant past continued to grip the imagination. Controversies about the nature of evolution drew on new fossil finds, such as the spectacular procession of extinct animals unearthed from the 1860s onwards in the American West (Bowler Drama, Manias, Fallon). Arguments continued about whether life “progressed,” feeding into fin-de-siècle debates about the decline of civilization and human degeneration epitomized by H.G. Wells’s Time Machine (1895). In earlier literature, fossil monsters had often evoked the inevitable progress of civilization, emblematizing conservative forces (as with today’s ideological use of the epithet “dinosaur”), but they could equally be used to evoke the extinction of the human race, as with the fossil displays in the Palace of Green Porcelain visited by Wells’s Time Traveler. By the 1890s the word “dinosaur” had finally bedded down as a vernacular category, and H. Rider Haggard’s “lost race” adventure-romances were now emulated in the dinosaur-haunted “lost world” and “saurian survival” stories listed by Allen Debus (38–9). Here, as in Arthur Conan Doyle’s better-known Lost World (1912), physical struggle against the planet’s former “lords of creation” 406

Geology and Paleontology

enacted the triumph of imperial masculinity while exploring doubts about the reality of progress (Deane 156–7). Comparing this fiction with American and French equivalents would offer a rewarding new avenue for Victorianist scholars.2 The age of the earth, too, became a pressing concern. Contrary to popular belief, early Victorian geologists had taken little interest in estimating this timescale, simply assuming a time scale of “millions of years” which, in Joe Burchfield’s phrase, “meant little more than ‘a whole lot’” (139). But the 1860s onwards saw several attempts to quantify the earth’s age, degenerating into a battle between geologists (who favored longer time scales, >96 million years) and the physicist Lord Kelvin. Applying thermodynamics in a period before the discovery of radioactivity, Kelvin whittled earth history down in successive estimates, eventually settling at 24 million years. It was under Kelvin’s influence that Wells’s Time Traveler was made to witness the closing scenes of life on earth 30 million years in the future, as humanity’s last visible descendant flopped about on a reef. The earth’s crust remained a puzzle, especially how mountains had been uplifted (orogeny). Not until the twentieth century would theories of continental drift be seriously considered, but those were built on late-Victorian debates about continents’ changing forms over time. Sober geological hypotheses of ancient supercontinents, land-bridges, vanished islands such as that which geologists named Atlantis, and “living fossils” still flourishing on isolated islands like Madagascar, provided scientific contexts for the new lost-race and lost-world novels, fueled ongoing speculation about sea serpents, and brought geology into unexpected conjunctions with theosophy and mythology in occult speculations about the mythical Atlantis and Lemuria.3 Clearly, geology had lost none of its capacity to provoke controversy. It had remained hugely popular since the 1830s, widely practiced and discussed by specialists and non-specialists from Prince Albert to self-taught artisans. It had obvious practical and economic uses for an industrializing nation, but its appeal went beyond that. It opened up dizzying depths of pastness whose immense obscurity was lit only by disputed fragments of evidence, its denizens remote from most life-forms in the present world. Contemplating that past was as exhilarating and destabilizing for Victorians as it had been for Romantics.4 Because geology’s insights and objects were so remote, reason was insufficient to make them conceivable. A powerful effort of the imagination was needed. Imagination does not spring from nowhere, so existing conceptions of the ancient and the remote, whether historical or fabulous, naturally came into dialogue with the new science: the Old Testament, ancient history, epic, romance, fairy tale. The mythopoeic renewal of old origin-narratives is best known to Victorianists from Beer’s classic account of Darwinian natural selection emerging in dialogue with older models of creation, producing an originmyth which novelists and poets took in unexpected directions. But equally far-reaching transformations of established discourses had already been achieved by geologists, adapting metaphors and explanations from antiquarianism, philology, and biblical exposition to make their science (Rudwick Bursting). When packaged in more sensational forms, this disciplinary mix imported romantic and apocalyptic overtones appropriate to popular manifestations of the component disciplines, from historical novels to hellfire sermons (Rudwick Scenes, O’Connor Earth). Such poetic license often increases in works not designed to teach or practice geology. This makes fiction, poetry, drama and life-writing valuable sources for mapping the cognitive and aesthetic spaces occupied by geology in Victorian culture.

3. The Meanings of Geology What, then, did geology mean for the Victorians, and how were these meanings given literary embodiment? Its meanings went beyond the reconstruction of evolutionary narratives of the history of life. This science proved iconic in debates about modern science’s power to transcend human limitations (Buckland “Inhabitants”); the shape of history and future of humanity; biblical interpretation and divine design; colonial and imperial ambitions; even cryptozoology and lost civilizations. It also 407

Ralph O’Connor

prompted epistemological questions about the reality-claims of objects, narratives, or concepts constructed upon fragmentary evidence. Small wonder that geology also furnished organizing metaphors for experimental narrative and lyric forms. One thinks of Cregan-Reid’s and Buckland’s discussions of closure denied in Kingsley and Eliot, the innovations in Dickens’s late novels explored by Zimmerman (143–75), Dawson, and Buckland (Novel 247–73), and the diverse forms of disjunction in Carlyle’s history writing and Tennyson’s poetry, analyzed by Stott, Ulrich, and Geric. Geology played important roles in all these innovations. But if we seek a global meaning for Victorian geology, the most popular answer is encapsulated in the phrase “the Victorian crisis of faith,” usually followed by quotations from Tennyson’s In Memoriam and John Ruskin’s 1851 comment about geologists’ hammers clinking menacingly at the end of each Bible verse, and perhaps a mention of Gosse’s Omphalos (1857). This is the picture presented by the only wide-ranging surveys of geology in Victorian literature known to me, Dean’s 1981 essay “Through Science to Despair” (whose title says it all) and Michael Freeman’s Victorians and the Prehistoric (2004). Dean’s account remains an invaluable bibliography of geological allusions in literature, but his claim that geology fostered religious doubt and despair does not stand up to scrutiny. To cite Edward Bellamy’s ebullient utopia Looking Backward (1888) as a text teaching “that human civilization, our species, and even life itself are in decline” (130) is bizarre, even if one agrees that geology has anything to do with it. Freeman shies away from any sustained argument, presenting instead a “postmodern” dossier of relevant materials and disclaiming the need to engage fully with historiography (6, 264 n. 18). His underlying meta-narrative, however, is identical to Dean’s: “Victorians contemplating geological time found themselves peering into . . . a meaningless past” (254). This becomes clearer when Freeman defends his decision to ignore the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s: by this time “the challenges and spectres of the prehistoric” had “run their course.” Geology had “faded from central view” because its cultural work was done; “the Victorian mind” had “accommodated the new narratives of earth history,” while unbelief had become “an accepted feature of the cultural milieu” (7). The implication is that accepting geology meant losing one’s faith. The stereotype at work here is a version of the so-called “conflict thesis” which holds that science and religion compete in a zero-sum game: a gain for science must be a loss for religion, and vice versa. As I have summarized elsewhere (“Religion”), this idea assumed its modern form in the late nineteenth century during the struggle by Western secularizing movements to free politics and knowledge-making from religious authorities. Since the 1970s, a new historiography of science and religion spearheaded by John Hedley Brooke has shown that most episodes of conflict before 1900 have been struggles between competing factions within a faith-community, not between science and the church. The commonsense “young-earth” interpretation of Genesis 1 was certainly challenged head-on by geologists, but Victorians did not face a stark choice between Genesis and geology. Their compatibility was trumpeted by clerical geologists like Buckland and Sedgwick, but also, more tellingly, by eminent non-geologists such as the conservative evangelicals who led the Church of England and Free Church of Scotland in the 1840s (John Bird Sumner and Thomas Chalmers). Diehard literalists and freethinkers alike claimed that abandoning the commonsense interpretation of Genesis 1 meant rejecting the Bible and religion in general. In reality, as James Moore shows, a range of commitments was available, from liberal theism (Christian or otherwise) to the increasingly conservative doctrines of biblical authority, biblical inerrancy, and a “young-earth” exegesis of Genesis 1. Each of these three positions nests within the previous category in a series of concentric circles. Only the last and smallest circle pitted the faithful against modern geology; even here, some found ways to have their cake and eat it (most famously Gosse). Later, when evolutionism and new approaches to biblical criticism made the text of Genesis less important to most scientific investigators, Christian perspectives remained part of the fabric of science in the public sphere, as Lightman’s Victorian Popularizers reveals. Believers of diverse denominations promoted geology in evolutionist terms, like the Reverend Henry Hutchinson, unsung apostle of dinomania. 408

Geology and Paleontology

Criticism of Victorian poetry and fiction has not fully assimilated the new historiography of science and religion, partly because of the enduring influence of earlier critics who incorporated the “conflict thesis” into their otherwise brilliant interpretations. But this is beginning to change. Jan Klaver’s 1997 book Geology and Religious Sentiment includes a survey of Victorian novels dramatizing crises of faith. Those predating Darwin’s Origin of Species, written by authors who were aware of geology as well as evolution, emerge as “remarkably undisturbed by scientific discoveries” (162), with some finding spiritual sustenance in geology (xvi). Only much later did Samuel Butler (The Way of All Flesh, 1873–84), Winwood Reade (The Outcast, 1875), William Hale White (Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, 1881), and George Gissing (Born in Exile, 1892) portray geology as corrosive of traditional Christian belief. For Klaver, this difference reflects post-Darwinian skepticism, which novelists projected back onto geology. But a closer look at the timing suggests that it may relate more to changing ideologies of science after 1870, when agnosticism and materialism became respectable philosophical positions. This gives the fin-de-siècle novels a double hindsight, making them unreliable witnesses of geology’s initial impact, just as Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907) tells us more about the son than the father. These findings chime with an increasing awareness among historians that the sciences’ part in the “Victorian crisis of faith” has been overestimated (Eisen 1–2, Lightman Naturalism). Similarly, recent work by Michael Tomko on Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Mia Chen on Charlotte Yonge’s novel The Trial (1864) has uncovered ways in which visions of deep time could serve religious ends in mid-Victorian poetry and fiction. According to Chen, fossils re-enchant—not disenchant— Yonge’s fictional world, reminding characters and the reader of God’s transcendence and justice. These fossils are “mute prophecies,” to quote Hugh Miller—the only geologist named in The Trial (Chen 368), whose own poetic prose bathes fossils in a similarly numinous glow of aesthetic and devotional energy (Brooke “Like Minds”). Analogous insights are offered by Tomko about Tennyson’s use of Lyell, whose Principles of Geology has been uncritically identified with a universe drained of divine meaning only (as Tomko shows) by ignoring Lyell’s recuperation of that meaning in the Principles, not least its conclusion. Returning to Tennyson and Ruskin, kings of Victorian “geo-angst,” shows again how delicate it is to pin cultural meaning onto scientific theories. Lyell’s attack on evolutionary and creationist teleologies undermined one popular means of infusing meaning into an increasingly inscrutable cosmos. Several In Memoriam lyrics show Tennyson linking geology with spiritual desolation. Many scholars follow Susan Gliserman’s landmark study of In Memoriam in tying this resonance exclusively to Lyell. But this is not the whole story. Tennyson’s and Ruskin’s biographies show periods in which they, or the personae they project, viewed geological perspectives in existentially affirming ways. Ella Mershon has recently shown how prone Ruskin was to changes of heart about even such a superficially depressing subject as decay and erosion. Dean’s careful chronology and source-criticism of Tennyson’s geological poetry (Tennyson) shows how he, too, found different resonances in the same objects over time, an approach complemented by the insightful close readings of three major poems in Michelle Geric’s recent Tennyson and Geology. In Memoriam, by assembling lyrics written over many years, dramatizes these fluctuations within its poetic structure, pitting different existential inferences from geology against each other: terrifying, dehumanizing, contemplative, optimistic. Its dialogic structure exemplifies the challenges involved in diagnosing geology’s spiritual implications. Attention to this has enabled recent critics to escape the futile labyrinth of extracting a single “geological vision” from this poem as if it were a treatise—an approach initiated by Victorian readers (Holmes “Poet”). Nor do the poem’s tensions necessarily reflect a simple duality, a meaningless Lyellian vision of earth history pitted against a providential, purposeful “progressionist” vision which is then unconvincingly made to round the poem off (Geric 117). As Tomko notes, Lyell’s Principles itself ends with a resounding affirmation of divine purpose. Its metaphysical insistence on the human soul’s special status cannot be dismissed as “a strategy and therefore not specifically formulated for spiritual reasons” (Geric 118). To articulate claims as part of a philosophical argument does not invalidate their sincerity, and Lyell’s “spiritual reasons” are amply documented (Bartholomew). 409

Ralph O’Connor

As for In Memoriam’s final, uplifting vision of the history of life, whether or not it seems convincing is ultimately a subjective judgment. Even its scientific affiliations are elusive. Dean (Tennyson 18–19) and Griffiths (158–63) argue that this final peroration reflects Tennyson’s reading of his friend Owen’s evolutionary creationism, Secord links it to the deistic evolutionism of Vestiges (Victorian 530–32), and Geric (139–43) argues that it draws on Miller’s anti-evolutionary creationism. All are plausible; perhaps it reflects all three. It is hard to know because none of these critics addresses each other’s readings. Once again, we must tread softly when pinning ideological meanings to scientific allusions. Clearly, there is plenty of room for more discussion, even of a poem which wears its philosophical heart on its sleeve as prominently as In Memoriam. And if the “crisis of faith” paradigm is too simple to describe the geology of In Memoriam, then it is certainly inadequate to explain geology’s impact on Victorian imaginations more generally. Nevertheless, many of the critical gains enabled by that paradigm—its emphasis on areas of uncertainty, its sensitivity to the inadequacies of easy teleologies— remain available for exploration as long as the urge to impose larger, monolithic conclusions on such intimate and elusive material is kept in check. Geology may have become a well-known science by the end of the nineteenth century, but with its inhuman timescales, enigmatic remains, and complex resistance to “plot,” it can hardly be described as “familiar” in the full sense of that term. Nor may it today, for all that Anthropocene human activity has become part of that deep history, inscribed in polar ice and coral reefs (see Heringman “Deep Time” and Taylor, this volume). For each new generation, the effort to think geologically has remained as sublime, unsettling, and necessary as it had in 1800.

Notes 1 O’Connor “Varieties,” Roussillon-Constanty, Talairach-Vielmas Fairy 141–59, Keene Science 21–53, 110–38. Prickett (79–95) is indispensable, but is unreliable on religious aspects. 2 See McKechnie, and Tattersdill “Looking.” The essays in Talairach-Vielmas’s Lost explore the French connection. This book is not commercially available and I am grateful to its editor for sending me a copy. 3 On these issues, see Bowler Drama 389–418, Lyons 17–50, and Ramaswamy. 4 On Romantic geological aesthetics, see Heringman (Rocks), Sommer (“Cave”) and Dean (Landscapes).

Key Critical Works Adelene Buckland. Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology. Gowan Dawson. Show Me the Bone: Reconstructing Prehistoric Monsters in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America. Michelle Geric. Tennyson and Geology: Poetry and Poetics. John Holmes and Sharon Ruston, editors. The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science. Bernard Lightman. Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences. Ralph O’Connor. The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856. James G. Paradis. “The Natural Historian as Antiquary of the World: Hugh Miller and the Rise of Literary Natural History.” Martin J. S. Rudwick. Earth’s Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters. James A. Secord. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. ———. Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age. Michael Tomko. “Varieties of Geological Experience: Religion, Body, and Spirit in Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Lyell’s Principles of Geology.”

Works Cited Amigoni, David, and James Elwick, editors. The Evolutionary Epic, vol. 4. Dawson and Lightman. Bartholomew, Michael. “Lyell and Evolution: An Account of Lyell’s Response to the Prospect of an Evolutionary Ancestry for Man.” BJHS, vol. 6, 1973, pp. 261–303.

410

Geology and Paleontology Bowler, Peter J. Evolution: The History of an Idea, 4th ed. U of California P, 2009. ———. Life’s Splendid Drama: Evolutionary Biology and the Reconstruction of Life’s Ancestry 1860–1940. U of Chicago P, 1996. Boylan, Patrick J. “William Buckland, 1784–1856: Scientific Institutions, Vertebrate Palaeontology, and Quaternary Geology.” Unpublished PhD dissertation. U of Leicester, 1984. Brooke, John Hedley. “Like Minds: The God of Hugh Miller.” Shortland, pp. 171–86. ———. “The Natural Theology of the Geologists: Some Theological Strata.” Images of the Earth, edited by Ludmilla Jordanova and Roy Porter, BSHS, 1979, pp. 39–64. ———. Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives. Cambridge UP, 1991. Buckland, Adelene. “Geology.” Holmes and Ruston, pp. 257–71. ———. “‘Inhabitants of the Same World’: The Colonial History of Geological Time.” Philological Quarterly, vol. 97, 2018, pp. 219–40. ———. Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology. U of Chicago P, 2013. Burchfield, Joe D. “The Age of the Earth and the Invention of Geological Time.” Lyell: The Present is the Key to the Past, edited by D. J. Blundell and A. C. Scott, Geological Society of London, 1998, pp. 137–43. Chen, Mia. “‘To Face Apparent Discrepancies with Revelation’: Examining the Fossil Record in Charlotte Yonge’s The Trial.” Women’s Writing, vol. 17, 2010, pp. 361–79. Cregan-Reid, Vybarr. Discovering Gilgamesh: Geology, Narrative and the Historical Sublime in Victorian Culture. Manchester UP, 2013. Dawson, Gowan. “Dickens, Dinosaurs, and Design.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 44, 2016, pp. 761–78. ———. “Literary Megatheriums and Loose Baggy Monsters: Paleontology and the Victorian Novel.” Victorian Studies, vol. 53, 2011, pp. 203–30. ———. Show Me the Bone: Reconstructing Prehistoric Monsters in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America. U of Chicago P, 2016. Dawson, Gowan, and Bernard Lightman, editors. Victorian Science and Literature, 8 vols. Pickering & Chatto, 2011–12. Dean, Dennis R. “‘From Science to Despair’: Geology and the Victorians.” Paradis and Postlewait, pp. 111–36. ———. Gideon Mantell and the Discovery of Dinosaurs. Cambridge UP, 1999. ———. Romantic Landscapes: Geology and Its Cultural Influence in Britain, 1765–1835. Scholars’ Facsimiles, 2007. ———. Tennyson and Geology. Tennyson Society, 1985. Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914. Cambridge UP, 2014. Debus, Allen A. Dinosaurs in Fantastic Fiction: A Thematic Survey. McFarland, 2006. Desmond, Adrian. Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London 1850–1875. Blond & Briggs, 1982. Eisen, Sydney. “Introduction.” Helmstadter and Lightman, pp. 1–6. Fallon, Richard. “‘Literature Rather Than Science’: Henry Neville Hutchinson (1856–1927) and the Literary Borderlines of Science Writing.” Journal of Literature and Science, vol. 11, 2018, pp. 50–65. Finnegan, Diarmid A. Natural History Societies and Civic Culture in Victorian Scotland. Pickering and Chatto, 2009. Frederickson, Kathleen. “Evolution.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, 2018, pp. 687–91. Freeman, Michael. Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World. Yale UP, 2004. Geric, Michelle. Tennyson and Geology: Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Gliserman, Susan. “Early Victorian Science Writers and Tennyson’s In Memoriam: A Study in Cultural Exchange.” Victorian Studies, vol. 18, 1975, pp. 277–308, 437–59. Goodrum, Matthew. “The Idea of Human Prehistory: The Natural Sciences, the Human Sciences, and the Problem of Human Origins in Victorian Britain.” History & Philosophy of the Life Sciences, vol. 34, 2012, pp. 117–45. Griffiths, Devin. The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins. Johns Hopkins, 2016. Helmstadter, Richard J., and Bernard Lightman, editors. Victorian Faith in Crisis: Essays on Continuity and Change in Nineteenth-Century Religious Belief. Palgrave Macmillan, 1990. Herbert, Sandra. Charles Darwin, Geologist. Cornell UP, 2005. Heringman, Noah. “Deep Time at the Dawn of the Anthropocene.” Representations, vol. 129, 2015, pp. 56–85. ———. Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology. SUNY P, 2004. Holmes, John. Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution. Edinburgh UP, 2009. ———. “‘The Poet of Science’: How Scientists Read Their Tennyson.” Victorian Studies, vol. 54, 2012, pp. 655–78. Holmes, John, and Sharon Ruston, editors. The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science. Routledge, 2017. Hooykaas, Reijer. “Catastrophism in Geology, Its Scientific Character in Relation to Actualism and Uniformitarianism.” Philosophy of Geohistory: 1785–1970, edited by Claude C. Albritton, Jr., Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross, 1970, pp. 310–56.

411

Ralph O’Connor Keene, Melanie. “Dinosaurs Don’t Die: The Crystal Palace Monsters in Children’s Literature, 1854–2001.” After 1851: The Material and Visual Cultures of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, Manchester UP, 2017, pp. 159–74. ———. Science in Wonderland: The Scientific Fairytales of Victorian Britain. Oxford UP, 2015. Klaver, J. M. I. Geology and Religious Sentiment: The Effect of Geological Discoveries on English Society and Literature between 1829 and 1859. Brill, 1997. ———. “Jean Paul, Carlyle and Kingsley: The Romantic Tradition in Alton Locke’s Dreamland.” Linguæ &, vol. 2, 2003, pp. 37–44. www.ledonline.it/index.php/linguae/issue/view/16/showToc. Lightman, Bernard. Evolutionary Naturalism in Victorian Britain: The ‘Darwinians’ and Their Critics. Ashgate, 2009. ———. Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences. U of Chicago P, 2007. Lindberg, David C., and Ronald L. Numbers, editors. God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science. U of California P, 1986. Livingstone, David N. Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins. Johns Hopkins UP, 2008. Lyons, Sherrie Lynne. Species, Serpents, Spirits, and Skulls: Science at the Margins in the Victorian Age. SUNY P, 2009. Manias, Chris. “Progress in Life’s History: Linking Darwinism and Palaeontology in Britain, 1860–1914.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C, vol. 66, 2017, pp. 18–26. McKechnie, Claire. “The Human and the Animal in Victorian Gothic Scientific Literature.” Unpublished PhD dissertation. U of Edinburgh, 2010. Menely, Tobias, and Jesse Oak Taylor, editors. Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times. Pennsylvania State UP, 2017. Mershon, Ella. “Ruskin’s Dust.” Victorian Studies, vol. 58, 2016, pp. 464–92. Moore, James R. “Geologists and Interpreters of Genesis in the Nineteenth Century.” Lindberg and Numbers, pp. 322–50. Morrell, Jack B. John Phillips and the Business of Victorian Science. Ashgate, 2005. Morrell, Jack B., and Arnold Thackray. Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Clarendon, 1981. O’Connor, Anne. Finding Time for the Old Stone Age: A History of Palaeolithic Archaeology and Quaternary Geology in Britain, 1860–1960. Oxford UP, 2007. O’Connor, Ralph. The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007. ———. “From the Epic of Earth History to the Evolutionary Epic in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” JVC, vol. 14, 2009, pp. 207–23. ———. “Religion and Science.” The Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion, edited by Robert Segal, Blackwell, in press. ———. “Science for the General Reader.” Holmes and Ruston, pp. 155–71. ———. “Varieties of Romance in Victorian Science.” Science as Romance, edited by Ralph O’Connor, vol. 7 of Dawson and Lightman, pp. xi–xxxvi. ———. “Victorian Saurians: The Linguistic Prehistory of the Modern Dinosaur.” JVC, vol. 17, 2012, pp. 492–504. Paradis, James G. “The Natural Historian as Antiquary of the World: Hugh Miller and the Rise of Literary Natural History.” Shortland, pp. 122–50. Paradis, James G., and Thomas Postlewait, editors. Victorian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives. Rutgers UP, 1985. Prickett, Stephen. Victorian Fantasy. Harvester, 1979. Ramaswamy, Sumathi. The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories. U of California P, 2004. Robson, John M. “The Fiat and Finger of God: The Bridgewater Treatises.” Helmstadter and Lightman, pp. 71–125. Roussillon-Constanty, Laurence. “Des dragons de Ruskin aux dinosaures de Darwin: Art, science et la peur de l’origine.” Interfaces, vol. 31, 2011, pp. 13–25. Rudwick, Martin J. S. Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. U of Chicago P, 2005. ———. Earth’s Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters. U of Chicago P, 2014. ———. The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists. U of Chicago P, 1985. ———. Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World. U of Chicago P, 1992. ———. “Uniformity and Progression: Reflections on the Structure of Geological Theory in the Age of Lyell.” Perspectives in the History of Science and Technology, edited by Duane Roller, U of Oklahoma P, 1971, pp. 209–27. ———. Worlds before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform. U of Chicago P, 2008. Rupke, Nicolaas A. The Great Chain of History: William Buckland and the English School of Geology (1814–1849). Clarendon, 1983.

412

Geology and Paleontology ———. Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin, 2nd ed. U of Chicago P, 2009. Secord, James A. Controversy in Victorian Geology: The Cambrian-Silurian Dispute. Princeton UP, 1986. ———. “Monsters at the Crystal Palace.” Models: The Third Dimension of Science, edited by Soraya de Chadarevian and Nick Hopwood, Stanford UP, 2004, pp. 138–69. ———. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 2nd ed. U of Chicago P, 2003. ———. Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age. Oxford UP, 2014. Shatto, Susan. “Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, and the Monstrous Efts.” Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 6, 1976, pp. 144–55. Shortland, Michael, editor. Hugh Miller and the Controversies of Victorian Science. Oxford UP, 1996. Shuttleworth, Sally. George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning. Cambridge UP, 1984. Smith, Jonathan. Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. U of Wisconsin P, 1994. Somerset, Richard. “Bringing (Anti-)Evolutionism into the Nursery: Narrative Strategies in the Emergent ‘History of Life’ Genre.” Science in the Nursery: The Popularisation of Science in Britain and France, 1761–1901, edited by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Cambridge Scholars, 2011, pp. 140–63. ———. “Palaeontological Pedagogues of the 1830s: The Prehistory of the ‘History of Life’ Genre.” BJHS Themes, vol. 3, 2018, pp. 15–42. Sommer, Marianne. Bones and Ochre: The Curious Afterlife of the Red Lady of Paviland. Harvard UP, 2007. ———. “The Romantic Cave? The Scientific and Poetic Quests for Subterranean Spaces in Britain.” Earth Sciences History, vol. 22, 2003, pp. 172–208. Stott, Rebecca. “Thomas Carlyle and the Crowd: Revolution, Geology, and the Convulsive ‘Nature’ of Time.” JVC, vol. 4, 1999, pp. 1–24. Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence. Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. ———, editor. Lost and Found: In Search of Extinct Species. Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de Toulouse, 2013. Tattersdill, Will. “Looking at the Issues: Science and Fiction as Genres in the fin de siècle Magazine.” Textual Practice, vol. 31, 2017, pp. 417–31. ———. “Work on the Victorian Dinosaur: Histories and Prehistories of 19th-Century Palaeontology.” Literature Compass, vol. 14, 2017. Taylor, Michael A. Hugh Miller: Stonemason, Geologist, Writer. NMS, 2007. Thackray, John C. To See the Fellows Fight: Eye Witness Accounts of Meetings of the Geological Society of London and Its Club, 1822–1868. BSHS, 2003. Tomko, Michael. “Varieties of Geological Experience: Religion, Body, and Spirit in Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Lyell’s Principles of Geology.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 42, 2004, pp. 113–33. Topham, Jonathan R. “Beyond the ‘Common Context’: The Production and Reading of the Bridgewater Treatises.” Isis, vol. 89, 1998, pp. 233–62. ———. “Scientific Publishing and the Reading of Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain: A Historiographical Survey and Guide to Sources.” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, vol. 31, 2000, pp. 559–612. Torrens, Hugh S. “Mary Anning (1799–1847) of Lyme: ‘The Greatest Fossilist the World Ever Knew’.” BJHS, vol. 28, 1995, pp. 257–84. ———. “Politics and Paleontology: Richard Owen and the Invention of Dinosaurs.” The Complete Dinosaur, edited by M. K. Brett-Surman, et al., 2nd ed., Indiana UP, 2012, pp. 24–53. Ulrich, John M. “Thomas Carlyle, Richard Owen, and the Palaeontological Articulation of the Past.” JVC, vol. 11, 2006, pp. 30–58. van Riper, A. Bowdoin. Men among the Mammoths: Victorian Science and the Discovery of Human Prehistory. U of Chicago P, 1993. Wyatt, Jonathan. Wordsworth and the Geologists. Cambridge UP, 1995. Zimmerman, Virginia. Excavating Victorians. SUNY P, 2008.

413

36 NEW RELIGIONS AND ESOTERICISM Christine Ferguson

For many years, the story of religion in nineteenth-century Britain was narrated primarily, even sometimes exclusively, in relation to doubt, decline, and disenchantment. Drawing upon an evocative literary terrain composed of Matthew Arnold’s receding Sea of Faith and John Ruskin’s dreadful Hammers (Arnold 21; Ruskin 115), scholars painted the period as one in which secularization was inevitable, undeterred, and productive of crisis. Indeed, writing in 1977, Robert Lee Wolff suggests that religious doubt was so inescapable during the years of Victoria’s reign that practically every citizen experienced their own bespoke variety of it. “Victorians,” he writes, were troubled not only about what to believe and how to practice their religion, but also about whether to believe at all, and how continued belief might be possible. . . . There seem at times to have been as many varieties of doubt as there were human beings in Victorian England. (2) While staking this claim in an introduction to a reprint series of 121 Victorian novels specifically selected to reflect the faith and doubt paradigm, Wolff makes no allowance for a possible incongruence between his pointed thematic focus and the experience of the general populace at large. Surveying a demographic which grew in size from some 13 million to 32 million between 1837 and 1901, he confidently assigns to it a single spiritual keynote: doubt. The scholarly landscape has changed significantly since the time of Wolff ’s pronouncement. The pioneering work of Joshua King, Mark Knight and Emma Mason, Timothy Larsen, Julie Melnyk, Alex Owen, and others has shown us that the rumors of religion’s death, or even anxiogenic retreat, in nineteenth-century Britain have been much exaggerated. Far from simply waning, religion transformed and adapted in the wake of secularization. Furthermore, the more liberal social and political conditions that this process ushered worked to foster rather than suppress the growth of new religious formations and spiritual identities. Consider for example the case of the Anglican Church, an institution which held a stranglehold on state power in England at the start of the nineteenth century; only those (men) who had received its communion and accepted its 39 articles were eligible to serve as Members of Parliament or to take degrees at Oxford or Cambridge. In the decades which followed, such restrictions and sanctions against those outside the Anglican fold would gradually drop—1828 saw the repeal of the Test Act, which had mandated Church of England membership of all government officials; in 1833 the franchise was extended to Jewish men who met the property requirement; and male Dissenters and Jews were admitted to degree courses at Oxford and Cambridge in 1854 and 414

New Religions and Esotericism

1856 respectively (Melnyk 43). By the mid-century, Catholic, Dissenting, and Jewish men no longer had fewer legal rights than their Anglican counterparts, and, while still subject to religious bigotry, were able to claim more space in the public sphere [on Christianity and Judaism, see Knight’s chapter]. This loosening of Church authority helped to produce a more liberal faith environment in which qualms or doubts about Christian doctrine, many of which long predated the Victorian era, were able to be expressed more freely. “[W]hat had changed from the eighteenth century,” writes Larsen, “was not so much that some people now doubted, as that more of those who did now insisted on being open and honest about it” (11). New challenges to scriptural authority emanating from the domain of science in this period—most notably Darwinian natural selection and Lyell’s geological gradualism— may have intensified these doubts for some, but they did not exclusively originate them. Furthermore, as the success of Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) demonstrates, believers were perfectly capable of reconciling such paradigm shifts with continued faith in a loving God. This new flexibility and diversification of religion compels us to exercise caution as we consider the well-documented decline of Church attendance in this period (Melnyk 155). Rather than signifying a straightforward rejection of spiritual identity per se, this drop off might be equally representative of a growing dissatisfaction with traditional forms of Christian observance, authority, and eschatology. Nowhere is this dissatisfaction more apparent than in the explosion of new religions and esoteric movements which alternately originated or took root in Britain during the nineteenth century. Some of these, including Mormonism and Christian Science, clearly situated themselves within the Christian tradition, albeit offering new scriptural interpretations and/or gospels. Others, such as Modern Spiritualism, the Theosophical Society, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, had no explicit or exclusive connection to Christianity at all, or were even directly critical of its teachings. Before discussing such currents in further detail, we must clarify the terms in our chapter title, some of which are not only anachronistic to the era under discussion but would have been vehemently rejected by those believers to whom they are latterly applied. What is esotericism, and what is a new religion; and are the two interchangeable? The quick answer is “not necessarily,” although some movements such as Theosophy can and have been described as both. Theosophical historian James Santucci, for example, assesses the movement as an esoteric current in the Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (2006) and then later as a new religion in his chapter for The Cambridge Companion to New Religious Movements (2012). Each definitional category has been subject to an extensive and ongoing critical interrogation impossible to fully reproduce here; researchers seeking an introduction to such debates should consult Lewis, Stuckrad, and Bergunder, as well as Hanegraaff ’s Esotericism.

1. What Are New Religions and Esotericism? Etymologically, “esotericism” first appeared as a substantive noun in the early nineteenth century, featuring initially in French in Jacques Matter’s Histoire Critique du Gnosticisme et du Son Influence (1828) and then in English later in the century. While Hanegraaff attributes its first English usage to Theosophist A.P. Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism (1883), the word does not actually appear in that text. The OED identifies its more likely first appearance to J.E. Worcester’s 1846 Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language (“Esotericism”). The term gained popular currency through association with the high-profile magical practitioners Éliphas Lévi and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who used it to describe an allegedly ancient set of secret spiritual truths long suppressed by the Church but preserved through the ages by a hidden band of initiates. Blavatsky is best known as the co-founder and seminal theorist of the Theosophical Society, a group of 16 spiritual seekers who came together in New York City in November 1875 to attempt to explore and synthesize new and old occult traditions in a systematic way (Santucci 231). A Russian aristocrat and former spiritualist medium, Blavatsky authored the two magnum opuses, Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), that, along with Sinnett’s more accessible The Occult World (1881) and Esoteric Buddhism (1883), came to form the core of Theosophy’s 415

Christine Ferguson

first-wave teaching. Allegedly written under the inspiration of a secret group of spiritually elevated teachers, known as the Mahatmas or Masters (Sinnett, Esoteric 9), Blavatsky’s writings describe a spiritually monadic universe in which all human souls gradually cycle through a chain of incarnations on earth and other planets before ultimately reuniting with the Divine. To expedite their progress, individuals could purify themselves through study and initiation in what Blavatsky called the “ancient wisdom tradition” (Chajes 3), a spiritual path preserved and newly revealed within contemporary Theosophy but by no means originated by it. Now ready for dissemination to carefully trained seekers, this wisdom promised to open a window into the concealed world of spirit and restore to their rightful place the occult sciences discarded by Enlightenment modernity, including alchemy, scrying, astral projection, clairvoyance, astrology, and spirit communion. Understood in this way, esotericism promoted individualism through its emphasis on the importance of spiritual self-development; seekers were encouraged to forge a direct, albeit carefully prepared, relationship with the supernal world. Like many traditional Christian believers in this period, Victorian students of esotericism also rejected what they viewed as the cruel and irrational doctrine of damnation, preferring instead to envision a future in which individuals continued to grow and improve after the death of their current physical bodies. Victorian esotericists routinely articulated this narrative of progress through what Olav Hammer terms a discourse of “scientism” (203), one in which the rhetoric, specialized vocabulary, and theories—if never the methods—of scientific naturalism were invoked to legitimize spiritual claims. Thus, for example, Blavatsky could claim in her esoteric magnum opus Isis Unveiled (1877) that “the discoveries of modern science do not disagree with the ancient traditions” of ancient Egyptian medicine (187), without subsequently feeling any compunction to test this alignment under laboratory conditions or to publish the results of her occult researches in scientific journals where they might be reproduced or discredited. In this respect, she differed significantly from the researchers of the Society of Psychical Research, who would in 1885 investigate and then denounce Blavatsky as a fraud (Hodgson 1885). Such techniques and positions contributed vitally to what is now known as the Victorian “occult revival,” namely, the surge of public interest in supernatural phenomena and belief fostered, if not solely initiated, by the advent of Modern Spiritualism in mid-nineteenth century New York State. Among the best analyses of the historical origins and emergence of this revival in Britain are Janet Oppenheim’s The Other World, Joscelyn Godwin’s The Theosophical Enlightenment, and Susanne Mitchell Sommers’s The Siblys of London. Esotericism and Spiritualism, although often lumped together under the aegis of this revival, were, however, by no means identical despite the constituents, networks, and spaces they shared. Most dramatically, the two currents often sharply disagreed on the nature of séance room manifestations: while spiritualists believed these communicants to be the spirits of their beloved dead, Theosophists regarded them as nonhuman entities known as “elementaries” with whom contact was potentially dangerous (Godwin 282). The two groups are further distinguished by their differential approach to the question of dissemination. The secrecy that, as Kocku Von Stuckrad has shown, became so important to esoteric groups in this period, even if always more in rhetoric than practice, had little to no value within the decidedly more exoteric milieu of Victorian Spiritualism. Notoriously heterodox, spiritualists shared no common belief except for their insistence that it was possible to communicate with the dead (Oppenheim 95). Far from concealing the results of their séances, or sharing them only via initiation, they sought to publicize them as widely as possible. Anyone with a table and planchette, they argued, could and should attempt to contact the spirit land. Those in esoteric movements, by contrast, tended to emphasize caution, preparation, and selectivity as prerequisite to any excursion into the realm of spirit, even if their actual membership criteria were quite broad. Applicable to all faith groups at some (early) point in their institutional history, the term “new religion” is today most frequently applied to religions of post-Enlightenment origin, and in particular to those produced as part of a “wave of nontraditional religiosity” elicited by the West’s mid-twentiethcentury counterculture (Lewis and Tøllefson 2), including Scientology, Wicca, the International 416

New Religions and Esotericism

Society of Hare Krishna, the Rajneesh Movement, Heaven’s Gate, and Raëlism. Such emergent spiritual collectivities have often been viewed with suspicion by the established religious mainstream due to their participation in unorthodox, controversial, or sometimes dangerous activities; indeed, as Olav Hammer and Mikael Rothstein note, their legitimation as subjects for serious academic inquiry owes much to the anti-cult controversies of the 1970s (2). New religions can be esoteric in teaching and structure, as Henrik Bogdan reminds us, but they need not necessarily be so; only those which prioritize “the discourse on secrecy and unveiling,” he suggests, belong in this category (457). Nonetheless, many of today’s new religions are indebted to concepts first popularized by nineteenth-century esoteric movements, such as the figures of the Theosophical Masters who have since become central to the “I AM” group and the Church Universal and Triumphant. Victorian esoteric groups were often described by their contemporary observers as “new religions”; for example, the reviews of Alfred Percy Sinnett’s Theosophical novel Karma (1885) consistently referred to occultism and Theosophy as “new religions” (See “Recent Novels” [13] and “Opinions of the Press” [1–2]). Nevertheless, it is worth remembering that many of their members would have aggressively rejected one or both parts of this designation. Theosophists, for example, claimed an ancient provenance for the beliefs, insisting that their teachings predated those of all the established world religions by some tens of thousands of years. In the introduction to Volume I of Isis Unveiled (1877), Blavatsky argues that the Theosophical theory of emanationism is “founded upon seventy thousand years of experience” and “has been entertained by hermetic philosophers of all periods.” To a movement which derived authority from the supposed antiquity of its tenets and supernatural intermediaries, any charge of novelty would have been greeted as an insult. Similarly, Blavatsky refused the badge of “religion” for her movement, associating this term with the narrow sectarianism, materialism, and hypocrisy which Theosophists routinely diagnosed in contemporary Christianity (see for example the Lucifer articles “Our Christian XIXth Century Ethics,” by Adversa, and “Sunday Devotion”). Elsewhere, it was not so much the negative connotations of religion which bothered Theosophists, as the indefinite article which typically preceded it. In 1888, the London-based Theosophical journal Lucifer claimed, “Theosophy is not a Religion . . . but RELIGION itself, the one bond of unity, which is so universal and all-embracing that no man . . . can be outside its light” (“Is Theosophy a Religion?” 179–80). Ironically, of course, many of these exact arguments, in particular the argumentum ad antiquitatem, are now recognized as definitive characteristics of new religions (Hammer and Rothstein 8). One could say, then, that Theosophy never seemed more like a new religion than when it was insisting on its great age. As applicable as the “new religion” designation might today seem to such movements, however, we must nonetheless remain sensitive to the complexities and problems of retrospective classification, and aim to avoid conceptualizing these movements in ways that would have been wholly unrecognizable, or unwelcome, to their historical participants. The statistical impact of esoteric and new religious movements on the Victorian religious landscape remains difficult to assess. The 1851 Census of Religion, which enumerated believers on the basis of attendance at religious services, predated many of the era’s most influential new religious movements, such as Christian Science. Indeed, of the 35 religions listed in the report, only two—the Latter-Day Saints of Jesus Christ, and the Plymouth Brethren—are likely to have been perceived as new religions by their contemporaries (Census of Great Britain 1851). Furthermore, it did not include participation in spiritualist séances or magical initiation ceremonies within its return categories. R.A. Gilbert, in an admirably painstaking attempt to reconstruct this lost history, notes that the two censuses of British spiritualist societies conducted in 1868 and 1880 never recorded more than 3,200 members in total; the membership figures for late-century esoteric institutions like the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn are even lower (Gilbert 17; 20–1). If we confine our analyses of such movements to their card-carrying, paid-up members alone, their influence will seem to have been so small as to be almost negligible. Such, indeed, is the very conclusion that Gilbert reaches, causing him to declare that “there was no occult revival” in nineteenth-century Britain (231). Such 417

Christine Ferguson

a verdict, however, seems premature. Theosophy and Spiritualism were heterodox spiritual currents which did not require official membership, specific observance rituals, or doctrinal conformity from the seekers in their folds. While valuable historical documents, the subscription lists of their societies will never tell us how many people conducted séances in their own homes or privately subscribed to the beliefs in clairvoyance or metempsychosis popularized by esoteric writers. If we turn to the realm of literature, however, the impact of esotericism and new religions—and indeed of esoteric new religions—on Victorian culture is both easier to calculate and much more significant. In the latter half of the century, when the occult revival was taking root in Europe, the British fiction market was saturated with esoterically attuned themed plots and motifs. Furthermore, when the triple-decker publishing format finally collapsed at the fin de siècle, it was occult novels such as Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds (1886) and The Sorrows of Satan (1895) that dominated the bestseller lists. The era’s occultural turn arguably had its most profound influence not on the religious but on the literary marketplace. We can observe this effect with particular clarity in the fictional reception and creative repurposing of one of the most controversial esoteric beliefs to be culturally mainstreamed during Victoria’s reign: namely, reincarnation.

2. Reincarnation in Victorian Britain Reincarnation belief, as Hammer points out, had virtually no significant presence in the West until the latter part of the nineteenth century (455). The fact that the concept is so well known today owes much to the proselytizing efforts of a single late-Victorian esoteric movement: Theosophy. So central was Theosophy to the popularization of reincarnation, writes Helmut Zander, that, in this respect, its “significance . . . cannot be overestimated” (985–6). Not initially a central tenet of the Society’s philosophy, it became so several years after two of the organization’s key founders, H.P. Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, moved to India in 1879 to seek inspiration and new converts. At that juncture, as Julie Chajes demonstrates in Recycled Lives, Blavatsky started preaching a universalist schema of reincarnation in which individuals were allotted karmic awards or demerits on the basis of their efforts to improve their spiritual lot (Chajes 13). Those who worked hard to develop themselves and to minimize the sufferings of others could accrue good karma for use in subsequent incarnations; those who did not, started their next lives in karmic deficit. No sin was so great, however, that it could not ultimately be expiated through trial and penitence. Between lives, individuals were said to rest in the “rosy sleep” of the state known as Devachan for a period of approximately 1,500 years (Sinnett Esoteric 85), restoring themselves before going on to reap the rewards or penalties of their previous actions in a new body [on ethics, see Mitchell’s chapter]. As this brief synopsis suggests, Theosophy’s reincarnative schema was driven by the same dissatisfaction with, and moral objection to, punitive accounts of the afterlife simultaneously evident within contemporary Christian denominations. Geoffrey Rowell has shown how theologians came increasingly to challenge the doctrine of damnation over the course of the nineteenth century, their critiques impelled by a sense that eternal punishment, even for the most prolific of sinners, was neither “morally defensible” nor “consistent with contemporary ideas of progress and humanitarianism” (152). For Sinnett, such a fate represented as much a failure of mathematical proportion as it did of moral compassion. “[T]here is a manifest irrationality,” he writes in Esoteric Buddhism, in the commonplace notion that man’s existence is divided into a material beginning, lasting sixty or seventy years, and a spiritual remainder lasting for ever. The irrationality amounts to absurdity when it is alleged that the acts of the sixty or seventy years—the blundering, helpless acts of ignorant human life—are permitted by the perfect justice of an all-wise Providence to infinite duration. (30) 418

New Religions and Esotericism

Theosophy, with its clear system of karmic cause and effect, its set pattern of incarnations through a specified planetary chain, promised to provide eschatological order where previously there had reigned only chaos and inequity. This sense of order and justice also worked to render reincarnation more suitable for fictional exploitation than it had ever been before, at least in the West. Prior to the advent of Theosophy, the substantially more vague and evasive ideas about metempsychosis present in the Western philosophical tradition via Plato and Plotinus had struggled, not only to take hold, but to make sense in the Victorian literary imagination. This failure is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in Mortimer Collins’s Transmigration (1874), a triple-decker novel published one year prior to the foundation of the Theosophical Society and loosely aligned, via its fleeting allusions to William Wordsworth and Pythagoras, with Classical and Romantic concepts of preexistence and rebirth. Collins is remembered today—when indeed he is at all—as a minor Victorian poet and a Tory journalist who briefly coedited the London Globe and contributed to Punch and the British Quarterly, among other journals (Mullin). Although there is no evidence that he was ever an occult initiate himself, he is linked to the networks of Victorian esotericism through his status as father of Mabel Collins, the leading first-wave Theosophist who coedited Lucifer with Blavatsky from 1887 to 1889 and wrote some of the movement’s most important early devotional works and trance novels, including Idyll of the White Lotus (1884), Light on the Path (1885), and The Blossom and the Fruit (1888). Mortimer may indeed have influenced his daughter’s spiritual seekership, given the personal and highly eccentric interest in metempsychosis and extreme life extension he pursued both in Transmigration and his anonymously published The Secret of Long Life (1871). A pre-Theosophical text, Transmigration epitomizes the chaos into which reincarnation fiction can fall without a coherent ontology to appropriate and exploit. It tells the story of its protagonist Edward Ellesmere’s three consecutive incarnations: the first, in late eighteenth-century Northamptonshire; the second, on the planet Mars; and the third (and perhaps final) in the London suburbs of the book’s mid-Victorian publication period. The work seems to have been intended as a serious Utopian romance with a spiritually didactic mission, one which Collins anticipated would elicit comparison to Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871). Its goal was to instill readers with the same faith in reincarnation that its protagonistic had gained through his metempsychotic experience: “What I have done others may do,” Ellesmere surmises. “I know the soul to be immortal: the unfortunate people who only hope that it is immortal may get proof if they go the right way to work” (III: 290–1). It is difficult, nonetheless, to imagine how any reader might have emerged from Transmigration with a coherent spiritual position of any sort. The novel is a bizarre, often grotesque, and sometimes indecent cosmological picaresque which fluctuates wildly in tone and fails to make sense of reincarnation as anything other than a device through which to prompt its hero’s further travels, meals, and seductions. Transmigration is an attack on stasis of all kinds: of location, of body, and of genre. Its first volume reads like a nostalgic neo-Pickwickian elegy for the lost glories of the English countryside, tracing Ellesmere’s first life as a son of the English gentry who studies at Eton, enlists in the Army, runs up debts, and then retires to the countryside to immerse himself in studious isolation after accidentally killing the brother of his beloved fiancée Lucy Lovelace in a spurious duel. Volume 2 opens with a vertiginous mode shift; no longer on earth, Ellesmere now finds himself disembodied and floating in a translucent Hall of Spirits deep in space, where he is offered a choice of planet on which to spend his next incarnation. Picking Mars simply for its proximity, he finds himself in a territory which resembles eighteenth-century rural England and classical Greece in equal parts, and in which he comports with mythological creatures, famous literary characters and lascivious Greek goddesses while drinking water laced with the intoxicating Martian element of Pyrogen. Ultimately tired with this constant satiation, Ellesmere returns to earth again in the new body of Reginald Marchmont. As in his last earthly incarnation, he is again heir to a considerable fortune which he puts to good use as 419

Christine Ferguson

he grows to manhood and ultimately wins the hand of Grace Smith, granddaughter of his erstwhile fiancée Lucy Lovelace. The novel ends with their wedding, after which he is able to tell Grace about the previous lives he has been uniquely permitted to remember because he was in his first incarnation a believer in metempsychosis. Transmigration appalled critics, and it is not difficult to see why. The novel is so frantically thick with startling, disconnected incidents as to become, perhaps counterintuitively, profoundly boring. “Mr Collins is in great danger of being given up to mere eccentricities,” observes the British Quarterly Review. “There is no sequence in Mr Collins’s idea of transmigration; neither duty nor agency is involved in it. It is a mere fancy dependent on the fates, not upon ourselves” (574). Indeed, the novel exemplifies in its chaotic wandering style the very problem which the protagonist laments in the Martian segment. “Here I was, free to wander whithersoever I chose, pleasantly surrounded by strange fantasies, free from any kind of care,” he remarks. “[Y]et there came on me at intervals a sort of homesickness, a longing for that native sphere where man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward” (II 260). Ultimately, he pronounces “Man is born to trouble. . . . If he is set wholly free from care and annoyance, he loses the strength of his fibre, the fighting power that belongs to him. A tranquil race may dwell on Mars happily enough; it is no place for the beings who commence existence by rebellion and murder” (II 262). This allusion to the foundational episodes of Genesis, namely Eve’s temptation and Cain’s fratricide, provides a sharp and uncomplimentary contrast to Collins’s own whimsical cosmology. While these scriptural incidents set off a fatal, and narratable, chain of cause and effect which Christ, and humanity through Christ, would seek to redress, there is no such similar causational logic in Transmigration. A murderer, albeit an accidental one, in his first life, Ellesmere is rewarded with sex and drugs in his second; his third seems near identical to his first. Reincarnation proves here neither progressive, punitive, nor even didactic; after all, the infant Marchmont has to actively conceal the knowledge he acquired in previous lives lest it frighten his loved ones. Arbitrary and aimless, the novel magically extends the span of human existence without giving it the structure requisite for suspenseful literary plotting and soteriological judgement alike. For reincarnation to work as a fictional device, it would need a much more coherent and personalized structure of cause and effect, a moral impetus that would provide meaning to the successive lives delegated to characters. From 1880 onwards, the requirement would be fulfilled increasingly through the principle of karma newly popularized by Theosophy. This principle lies at the heart, and forms the title, of leading British Theosophist A.P. Sinnett’s 1885 debut novel. Karma dramatically showcases the representational and ethical dilemma which reincarnation posed for Theosophical fiction writers in the movement’s early years. Like many of his co-believers, Sinnett recognized the strong appeal of reincarnation to the late Victorian public, offering, instead of finality and judgment, the potential for both literary sequels and serial lives. This interest would reach a zenith with the publication of H. Rider Haggard’s (1856–1925) best-selling She: A History of Adventure (1887), an imperial romance set in a mysterious African locale which “sold twenty-five thousand copies in a matter of weeks and became a global phenomenon” (Luckhurst 163). British Theosophists subsequently capitalized on this success through the regular publication of reincarnation-focused articles and stories in their periodical outlets. In Lucifer alone, we find the serialized version of Mabel Collins’s The Blossom and the Fruit, running from September 1887 to August 1888, alongside reincarnation-focused articles such as W. Kingsland’s “Some Thoughts on Karma and Reincarnation” (1888) and W. Ashton Ellis’s “An Infant Genius” (1887). But this diffusion also brought risk; popularization might simply fuel further garish and spiritually debased fantasias such as Collins’s. Worse yet, it might deflect seekers from the true path by fostering in them the kind of narcissistic obsession with their own past exploits. How were Theosophists to employ reincarnation in a way that would simultaneously exploit and withhold its imaginative potential? Sinnett addresses this quandary head on in Karma, without managing to solve it [on serialization and short fiction, see Bernstein]. 420

New Religions and Esotericism

The novel appeared at a time when Sinnett, newly elected as President of the TS London Lodge, was widely recognized as Theosophy’s leading mouthpiece in Britain. As such, critics recognized in it an earnestness of belief and didactic ambition that they might otherwise have sidelined (“New Novels” 21–2; “Four Novels”; Wallace 344). Palpably uneasy with fictional form, Sinnett’s preferred mode of instruction is definitely to tell rather than show, interpolating the readers as students in various scenes of occult training. His plot follows a group of British spiritual seekers as they study occult science and perform psychic surgeries on their past lives with the mysterious occult adept Baron Von Mondstern. These explorations reveal the current sexual and romantic trials of two group members to be the consequence of transgressions committed while they lived in Ancient Rome “nearly two thousand years before” (II 135). Played out in the present, the karmic results of these historical acts tarnish the group’s contemporary reputation. This damage, however, is offset by the achievement of the plot’s larger spiritual goal: namely, the acceptance, on behalf of the characters, of the reality and morality of karma. Sinnett has to carefully manage this acceptance without too much recourse to titillating demonstration. The circle’s scrying sessions into ancient Rome take up only a fraction of a plot which is generally much more comfortable with indirect intellectual exposition. Thus the Baron lectures at great and, to many reviewers, tedious length about the primacy of reincarnation to human existence, calling it the “only possible solution” to “a great many mysteries of life” (I 172) and insisting that it “must eventually be recognized . . . as the crown and complement of evolution already recognized in physiology” (I 175). Nonetheless, he hesitates when it comes to probing the records of the group’s past lives accessible on the astral plane, warning that “the less interest you take in the theatrical or sensational aspects of occult powers the better” and suggesting they would do better to model their conduct on those singers who learn more by staying at home to practice scales than by going to the opera (I 285). Mondstern’s analogy here is telling, combining a focus on individual development with a deep suspicion of performance embodied by the space of the opera house. Rather than spectate or perform, esoteric seekers are bid to practice for no other audience than themselves. This advice nonetheless rings hypocritically hollow in a fictional milieu in which Mondstern’s seekers are subjected to constant lecture and rarely ever shown engaging in personal, practical experiment. Characters peer only briefly onto the astral plane for the purpose of “discerning the way in which Karma operates” (II 111); “except for this purpose,” cautions the Baron, “I am not sure if knowledge about one’s previous incarnations could have any other effect than that of feeding personal vanity, and so doing one the worst possible service” (II 106). If self-renunciation was to be the true goal of esoteric seekership—as for Sinnett it most certainly was—it could not be achieved through extended and lurid recapitulation of our former lives in other times and on other planets. Ultimately, this line of thinking leads Karma to write itself into a corner, unable to exploit the sensational potential of the very principle on which its readerly appeal is premised. In using Theosophy to solve the problem posed by Collins’s Transmigration—how to give moral weight and meaning to reincarnation—Sinnett succeeds only in creating a new difficulty: to fictionalize reincarnation at all is to risk subverting the project of selfabnegation toward which the process was in his estimation geared. For the less esoterically affiliated writers of reincarnationist romance who followed in Sinnett’s wake, this dilemma simply did not exist. They had no need to curtail their representational scope in line with Theosophical doctrine, even if they would retain its preoccupation with justice. Chief among these was queen of the bestsellers Marie Corelli, whose debut occult novel A Romance of Two Worlds (1886) appeared one year after Sinnett’s Karma and dramatically outsold it. For Corelli as for fellow romancer H. Rider Haggard, reincarnation would become a fictional dominant motif, featuring as a keynote in novels such as Ardath (1889), The Sorrows of Satan (1895), The Life Everlasting (1911), and, most prominently, Ziska (1897). The latter demonstrates the propensity for sustained and eccentric theological exegesis which separates Corelli’s reincarnationist plotting from the more action-based narratives of Haggard. Ziska tells the story of the ancient Egyptian dancing girl Ziska-Charmazel who 421

Christine Ferguson

tracks down and enacts revenge on decadent French painter Armand Gervase, the nineteenth-century incarnation of the warrior Araxes who seduced and then killed her in the days of Amenhotep. No stereotypically malevolent femme fatale, Ziska is instead a wronged woman and a devoted Christian, albeit a decidedly heterodox one; she practices a version of Hermetic Christianity which combines faith in Christ’s salvific power with a belief in reincarnation. Her ultimate murder of Gervase in a hidden chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza works to free him from an incessant cycle of punitive incarnations. Gervase and Ziska are liberated alike by this dramatic disbursement of karmic debt, one that Corelli takes as much pains to describe as she does its instigating act of sexual betrayal in Pharaonic Egypt. Ziska was one of the most popular novels of its publication year, incorporating into its esoteric interests elements of Egyptomania and decadence. [on decadence, see Evangelista’s chapter]. The Bookman reported that 40,000 advance copies had been ordered in the month before its publication; after its issue, it featured on the Academy’s list of “most bought titles” for most of the spring “Monthly Report of the Wholesale Book Trade” and “The Book Market.” Ziska promotes a brand of reincarnation that successfully fuses the exoticism, sensuality, and incident of Collins’s Transmigration with the causational logic and morally redemptive mandate of Sinnett. In the decades which followed, reincarnation would continue to be retooled in popular and avantgarde literature alike, featuring in works as diverse as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Joan Grant’s Winged Pharaoh (1937), and Dennis Wheatley’s The Ka of Gifford Hillary (1956). The present ubiquity of reincarnation as a cultural concept, if not belief—although, as Hammer points out, some polls have suggested its uptake by approximately 20% of the American population (455)—owes much to these fictional treatments, even though a substantial history of literary reincarnationism has yet to be written. First emerging in the late nineteenth century, the reincarnation novel captures the dynamic religious transformations underway in the era which gave it birth. Reflecting an ongoing attraction to independent spiritual inquiry and the eclecticism of belief fostered by secularization, it also compels us to rethink the primacy and utility of the faith and doubt paradigm to the Victorian religious landscape. Reincarnationism, like Victorian esoteric movements more broadly, allowed individuals to be believing doubters, skeptical of the old hellfire sermons but confident that death was not the end, and able to experience the loss of traditional faith as the source of renewed spiritual optimism. Reworking the Latin credo of Dum spiro spero, esoteric reincarnationists found hope not (just) in life, but perhaps most profoundly in a death which was only ever temporary, in a cosmos which continually extended the possibility of one more shot at karmic restitution, pursued in, rather than out of, the flesh. “A new birth,” as Christian esotericist Marie Sinclair, the Countess of Caithness, writes in Old Truths in a New Light, “provides a new and pliant brain as a clean page on which to record new impressions of a new period, a new age, and of new surroundings” (417). Her metaphor beautifully captures the literary alignments and uses of reincarnationism in the faith and fiction of the fin de siècle alike. With the disciplinary growth of esotericism studies and the development of pioneering digitization projects such as the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals (IAPSOP), scholars are better equipped than ever to navigate the literary and cultural stakes of beliefs such as reincarnation across the nineteenth century. Among the many new approaches and methodologies now used to illuminate this no longer marginal territory, feminist historiography has proved particularly useful; landmark studies in this vein include Alex Owen’s The Darkened Room (1989), Joy Dixon’s The Divine Feminine (2001), and Per Faxneld’s Satanic Feminism (2017). Also important in the context of sex- and gender-related esotericism studies is the work of Dennis Denisoff on the queer cultures of late-Victorian paganism (see Denisoff, “Decadent Animal Sympathies” and “Women’s Nature and the Neo-Pagan Movement,” both 2016). Other scholars, such as Mark Morrison, Olav Hammer, Egil Asprem, and I have examined the relationship between esotericism and the history and philosophy of science in and beyond the nineteenth century. The broader geographical and political dimensions of these currents as they manifested across Europe and the United States have received careful scrutiny in the work of John Warne Monroe, Cathy Gutierrez, 422

New Religions and Esotericism

and Julian Strube; scholars of Victorian esotericism have much to learn from this transnational body of work. Finally, and for readers of this Companion to Victorian Literature, perhaps most importantly, the last decade has witnessed a growing surge of interest in the literary sources, genres, and reception of the period’s esoteric and new religious ideas, manifest in monographs by Andrew McCann, Susan Johnston Graf, and J. Jeffrey Franklin. As of yet, these studies have only been able to address a tiny fraction of the fiction produced by, about, and for Victorian occultists; much of the period’s literary occulture, particularly that published out with the novel form, and before the fin de siècle, remains critically untapped. As such, the potential for new knowledge production within this exciting new field of Victorian studies—one aided by massive strides in the digitalization of occult archives—is immense. As this work comes to fruition in years to come, it will be increasingly impossible to tell any story about Victorian religion, whether one of doubtful decline or not, without addressing the energy and influence of the era’s new spiritual movements.

Key Critical Works Julie Chajes. Recycled Lives: A History of Reincarnation in Blavatsky’s Theosophy. Joy Dixon. Divine Feminine: Feminism and Theosophy in England. Christine Ferguson, and Andrew Radford, editors. The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875–1947. Joscelyn Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction. Olav Hammer. Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age. Wouter Hanegraaff. Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. Janet Oppenheim. The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914. Alex Owen. The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. ———. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern.

Works Cited Adversa. “Our Christian XIXth Century Ethics.” Lucifer, vol. 2, no. 12, August 1888, pp. 482–5. Arnold, Matthew. “Dover Beach.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. E, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and M. H. Abrams, W. W. Norton, 2006. pp. 1368–9. Asprem, Egil. The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900–1939. Brill, 2014. Bergunder, Michael. “What Is Esotericism? Cultural Studies Approaches and the Problems of Definition in Religious Studies.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religions, vol. 22, no. 1, 2010, pp. 9–36. Blavatsky, H. P. Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, vol. 1. Theosophical UP Web Edition. www.theosociety.org/pasadena/isis/iu1-00in.htm#contents. Bogdan, Henrik. “Western Esotericism and New Religious Movements.” The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements, vol. 2, edited by James R. Lewis and Inga Tøllefson, Oxford UP, 2016, pp. 455–66. “The Book Market.” The Academy, 20 February 1897, p. 238. Butler, Samuel. Erewhon: Or, Over the Range. Trübner, 1872. Caithness, Countess of [Marie Sinclair]. Old Truths in a New Light, or, an Earnest Endeavour to Reconcile Material Science and Spiritual Science, with Scripture. Chapman and Hall, 1876. Census of Great Britain 1851: Religious Worship in England and Wales. G. Routledge, 1854. Chajes, Julie. Recycled Lives: A History of Reincarnation in Blavatsky’s Theosophy. Oxford UP, 2019. Chambers, Richard. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and Other Evolutionary Writings. 1844. U of Chicago P, 1994. Collins, Mabel. The Blossom and the Fruit: A True Story of a Black Magician. Published by the Author, 1888. ———. The Idyll of the White Lotus. Reeves and Turner, 1884. ———. Light on the Path: A Treatise Written for the Personal Use of Those Who Are Ignorant of the Eastern Wisdom and Who Desire to Enter within Its Influence. Reeves and Turner, 1885. Collins, Mortimer. The Secret of Long Life. Henry S. King, 1871. ———. Transmigration, 3 vols. Hurst and Blackett, 1874. Corelli, Marie. Ardath: The Story of a Dead Self. Richard Bentley, 1889. ———. The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance. A. L. Burt, 1911. ———. A Romance of Two Worlds. Richard Bentley, 1886.

423

Christine Ferguson ———. The Sorrows of Satan. Methuen, 1895. ———. Ziska: The Problem of a Wicked Soul. 1897. Valancourt Books, 2009. Denisoff, Dennis. “Decadent Animal Sympathies in Simeon Solomon, Ouida, and Saki.” Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism, vol. 1, no. 1, 2016, pp. 5–22. ———. “Women’s Nature and the Neo-Pagan Movement.” History of British Women’s Writing: 1880–1920, edited by Holly Laird, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 125–35. Ellis, W. Ashton. “An Infant Genius.” Lucifer, vol. 1, no. 4, December 1887, pp. 296–8. “Esotericism.” Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com. Faxneld, Per. Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture. Oxford UP, 2017. Ferguson, Christine. Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity, and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spirtiualist Writing, 1848–1930. Edinburgh UP, 2012. Ferguson, Christine, and Andrew Radford, editors. The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875–1947. Routledge, 2018. “Four Novels.” Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art, 19 September 1885, pp. 392–4. Franklin, J. Jeffrey. Spirit Matters: Occult Beliefs, Alternative Religions, and the Crisis of Faith in Victorian Britain. Cornell UP, 2018. Gilbert, Robert Andrew. The Great Chain of Unreason: The Publication and Distribution of the Literature of Rejected Knowledge in England during the Victorian Era. Dissertation. U of London, 2009. Accessed 31 August 2018. Godwin, Joscelyn. The Theosophical Enlightenment. SUNY P, 1994. Graf, Susan Johnston. Talking to the Gods: Occultism in the Work of W.B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune. SUNY P, 2016. Grant, Joan. Winged Pharaoh. Arthur Baker, 1937. Gutierrez, Cathy. Plato’s Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance. Oxford UP, 2009. Haggard, H. Rider. She: A History of Adventure. Longmans, Green, and Co., 1887. Hammer, Olav. Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age. Brill, 2004. Hammer, Olav, and Mikael Rothstein. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to New Religious Movements, edited by Olav Hammer and Mikael Rothstein, Cambridge UP 2012, pp. 1–9. Hanegraaff, Wouter. “Esotericism.” Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, edited by Wouter Hanegraaff, Brill, 2006, pp. 336–40. ———. Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. Cambridge UP, 2012. Hodgson, Richard. Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate Phenomena Connected with the Theosophical Society. Society for Psychical Research, 1885. “Is Theosophy a Religion?” Lucifer, vol. 3, no. 15, November 1888, pp. 177–87. Joyce, James. Ulysses. Sylvia Beach, 1922. King, Joshua. Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain’s Age of Print. Ohio State UP, 2015. Kingsland, W. “Some Thoughts on Karma and Reincarnation.” Lucifer, vol. 2, no. 8, April 1888, pp. 122–6. Knight, Mark, and Emma Mason. Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction. Oxford UP, 2006. Larsen, Timothy. Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England. Oxford UP, 2006. Lewis, James R. Legitimating New Religions. Rutgers UP, 2003. Lewis, James R., and Inga Tøllefson. “Introduction.” The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements: Volume 2, edited by James R. Lewis and Inga Tøllefson, Oxford UP, 2016, pp. 1–14. “Lucifer to the Archbishop of Canterbury.” Lucifer, vol. 1, no. 4, December 1887, pp. 241–51. Luckhurst, Roger. The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy. Oxford UP, 2012. Lytton, Edward Bulwer. The Coming Race. William Blackwood and Sons, 1871. McCann, Andrew. Popular Literature, Authorship, and the Occult in Late Victorian Britain. Cambridge UP, 2014. Melnyk, Julie. Victorian Religion: Faith and Life in Britain. Praeger, 2008. Monroe, John Warne. Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France. Cornell UP, 2007. “Monthly Report of the Wholesale Book Trade.” The Bookman, February 1897, pp. 135–6. Morrison, Mark. Modern Alchemy: Modern Occultism and the Emergency of Atomic Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Mullin, Katherine. “Collins, (Edward James) Mortimer (1827–1876), Novelist and Journalist.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. www.oxforddnb.com. ———. “New Novels.” Graphic, 30 May 1885, pp. 21–2. “Opinions of the Press.” Appendix to Karma, edited by A. P. Sinnett, Chapman and Hall, 1885, n.p. Oppenheim, Janet. The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914. Cambridge UP, 1985. Owen, Alex. The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. U of Chicago P, 1989. ———. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. U of Chicago P, 2004. “Recent Novels.” The Times, 31 July 1885, p. 13. Rowell, Geoffrey. Hell and the Victorians: A Study of the Nineteenth-Century Theological Controversies Concerning Eternal Punishment and the Future Life. Clarendon, 1974.

424

New Religions and Esotericism Ruskin to Henry Acland, May 24, 1851. The Complete Works of Ruskin, vol. 36. Edited by E. T. Cooke and Alexander Wedderburn, Allen, 1903–1912, p. 115. Santucci, James. “The Theosophical Society.” Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, edited by Wouter Hanegraaff, Brill, 2006, pp. 1114–23. ———. “Theosophy.” The Cambridge Companion to New Religious Movements. Cambridge UP, 2012, pp. 231–46. Sinnett, A. P. Esoteric Buddhism. Trübner, 1883. ———. Karma, 2 vols. Chapman and Hall, 1885. ———. The Occult World. Trübner, 1881. Sommers, Susan Mitchell. The Siblys of London: A Family on the Esoteric Fringes of Georgian England. Oxford UP, 2018. Strube, Julian. “Occultist Identity Formations between Theosophy and Socialism in fin de siècle France.” Numen, vol. 64, nos. 5/6, 2017, pp. 568–95. ———. “Socialist Religion and the Emergence of Occultism: A Genealogical Approach to ‘Secularization’ in Nineteenth-Century France.” Religion, vol. 46, no. 3, 2016, pp. 359–88. Stuckrad, Kocku Von. “Western Esotericism: Towards an Integrative Model of Interpretation.” Religion, vol. 35, no. 2, 2005, pp. 78–97. “Sunday Devotion to Pleasure.” Lucifer, vol. 2, no. 7, March 1888, pp. 1–5. “Transmigration.” British Quarterly Review, vol. 118, April 1874, pp. 574–5. “Transmigration.” Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art, 28 February 1874, pp. 279–80. Wallace, William. “New Novels.” The Academy, 16 May 1885, p. 344. Wolff, Robert Lee. Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England. John Murray, 1977. Zander, Helmut. “Reincarnation II: Renaissance-Present.” Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, edited by Wouter Hanegraaff, Brill, 2006, pp. 983–7.

425

37 STUDIES OF CHRISTIANITY AND JUDAISM Mark Knight

Back in the late 1990s, when I first began working on Victorian religion and literature, there was surprisingly little criticism available. The mid-twentieth-century obsession with reading religion as a struggle between faith and doubt often gave the impression that doubt had the final word, and the consequence was that literary scholars lost interest in finding other ways of talking about Christianity and Judaism. Several important works continued to appear—including books by Valentine Cunningham (1975), Elisabeth Jay (1979), George Landow (1980), Stephen Prickett (1986), Michael Wheeler (1990), and Christine Krueger (1992), and Ellis Hanson (1997)—but as the twentieth century came to a close, the penetration of religion into the way that scholars thought about Victorian literature as a whole was minimal, and the number of books on Christianity and Judaism in the Victorian period did not come close to reflecting the importance of religion for the nineteenth century. Religious belief was a crucial part of the way in which the Victorians thought about the world. As I frequently remind my students, when the 1851 religious census led to estimates that approximately 60% of the country was attending church on a given Sunday, some commentators expressed surprise that the figure was so low. The estimates were probably generous, with the attendance figures not taking account of those who attended multiple services; K.D.M. Snell and Paul S. Ell make it clear that the actual statistics were more complex than this headline figure. We should remember, too, that church attendance offers just one clumsy marker of the role that faith plays in cultural life. The parish system of the Church of England was one of several means through which religion was closely tied to social structures in the Victorian period: one could go to a church service or attend a church-run event without necessarily believing in God, and, conversely, religious belief and practice could took place outside the confines of church or chapel. Whatever we might initially think of the references to religious practice, sacred texts, and theological vocabulary in the literature of the period, then, we need to acknowledge that they deserve sustained attention. If the choice of title for J. Hillis Miller’s influential The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (1963) signals how many scholars writing in the second half of the twentieth century saw only tales of religious decline, then the first two decades of the twenty-first century have featured very different lines of thought. This transformation owes much to the “religious turn” in the humanities, which has seen several prominent theorists (such as Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Bruno Latour, Gianni Vattimo, and Slavoj Ž ižek) write about different aspects of religious thought and practice. Thinkers such as Talal Asad and Charles Taylor have offered increasingly sophisticated and probing accounts of the relationship between the sacred and secular, and, in the more specific context of criticism on Victorian literature, the reenergized interest in religion has led to numerous 426

Studies of Christianity and Judaism

books, journal special issues, conferences, and other professional networks, as I discuss in more detail elsewhere (“Victorian Literature”). This resurgence of interest has so many expressions and explanations that it has become a challenge to represent them adequately in a single article. Therefore, in the discussion that follows, I have chosen to highlight three particularly energizing aspects of recent scholarship in the field: new ways of theorizing religion, ongoing explorations of biblical reception, and developments in how we think about religious print culture and materiality.

1. Theorizing Religion The secularization thesis that dominated so much of our thinking in the twentieth century insists on the inevitable decline of religion in modernity. Recognizing how this account relies on static and narrow conceptions of the sacred, those involved in the religious turn have sought to reconsider what religion means and the paradigms we use to examine it. There are no simple answers to such questions, and when those within literary studies seek to reexamine religion, they are continuing some of the older debates that have long occupied those who work in theology and religious studies. At the majority of modern universities, there is a distinction between departments of divinity or theology and departments of religious studies. Those who think of their discipline as divinity or theology are often willing to link their consideration of religion to ministerial training and/or the life of practicing faith communities. By contrast, faculty in departments of religious studies prefer to stand back and analyze their subject matter from more of a distance. Religious studies is shaped heavily by the methodology of the social sciences, and it continues an intellectual lineage that dates back to the emergence of comparative religion in the second half of the nineteenth century. Back then, the desire to examine different religious traditions alongside one another was one of the prompts for scholars to look for more scientific frames of reference by which this work might be done. In the case of Max Müller, a key though not uncontroversial figure in the emergence of comparative religion, his methodological approach was shaped by his interest in comparative philology. While his work reveals the increasing influence of the social sciences, subsequent thinkers have asked whether his new methodology went far enough. Tomoko Masuzawa observes that “during his lectures on the science of religion,” Müller “is found discoursing on the deeper stratum of language” (210). The consequence, argues Masuzawa, is Müller’s failure to rise “to the sphere of generality adequate for the presentation of any ‘characteristic features’ or ‘defining beliefs’ of this or that religion” (210). Masuzawa’s criticism is indicative of a suspicion that many who work within religious studies show toward any mystical and or theological approach that seems too personally invested and lacking in scientific rigor. And on the other side of the debate, those who identify as theologians display their own prejudices, wondering how the study of the divine and its relation to the world can proceed when one remains on the outside and refuses to see God as properly axiomatic. The division between theology and religious studies is not always as stark as I describe it here, and there is no intrinsic reason why a single department cannot accommodate the methodological plurality that we find across different fields such as systematic theology, the sociology of religion, and religious history. Indeed, one might cite the existence of a single professional organization—the American Academy of Religion—as evidence that different approaches can share a common space. Yet the division alerts us to the very different assumptions we bring to the term “religion.” Is it to be understood functionally, whereby any equivalent activity to those practiced by believers is deemed religious? Should we treat “religion” as a catch-all term for anything vaguely transcendent or mystical? Or does religion depend more closely on the creeds and rituals of particular faith communities? And if it does depend on these specific beliefs and practices, should we start with some version of Christianity (Catholic or Protestant, Established or Dissenting Church), which was the dominant faith in nineteenth-century Britain, or should we look elsewhere, to the Jewish faith that occupied so large a space in Victorian thoughts and fears and from which Christianity ultimately derives, or 427

Mark Knight

to other world religions which were present in the nineteenth century despite being less prominent than Christianity and Judaism? These discussions about the meaning of religion and the best way of studying it inform the work of recent scholarship and have proved highly generative. Throughout the essays that appear in Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion: Literary, Historical and Religious Studies in Dialogue (2019) and in the 2018 double special issue of Nineteenth-Century Literature, on “New Religious Movements and Secularization,” we see scholars self-consciously working with very different accounts of religion. In doing so, there is recognition of an important point Sebastian Lecourt makes in Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination (2018), that by the end of the nineteenth century there was “a well-developed scholarly conversation about the social origins and function of religion” (11). The breadth of thinking about what the term religion might mean benefits our reading of Victorian literature, encouraging greater self-awareness of the limits of our purview and widening the scope of what we consider to be a relevant topic of discussion. In the case of the special issue of Nineteenth-Century Literature, contributors are willing to consider a variety of religious traditions, esoteric spiritual practices, and the occult. While exploring these areas can involve a break from established religious traditions, as J. Jeffrey Franklin has suggested, a more flexible understanding of religion retains the possibility of thinking about the liminal borders of belief in conjunction with Christianity. The lack of a definitive distinction between the orthodox and heterodox can be seen in Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds (1886) when the narrator explains the Electric Principle of Christianity, and also, elsewhere, in writing that some view as blasphemous and others see as a radical way of explicating belief. When Jude is led into drunkenly reciting the creed in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), he worries that he has committed blasphemy or something “next door to it” (158). The lack of clarity about where the borders of blasphemy start and end is confirmed later on in the novel, when Sue outlines her project of cutting up Bibles and argues for the benefits it confers. As scholars such as Joss Marsh, Jan-Melissa Schramm, and Yvonne Sherwood have made clear, our understanding of blasphemy is tied to various cultural influences on the ways that we conceive of religion [on anthropology, see Psomiades’s chapter; on new religions and esotericism, see Ferguson’s]. A corollary of theorizing religion more carefully is paying closer attention to what we understand by the secular. In modernity, the sacred and secular need to be understood in relation to one another, and a reevaluation of one has implications for how we think about the other. Where the second half of the twentieth century routinely saw literary scholars thinking of religion as a private matter—mental assent to certain beliefs about God, an emphasis on private piety, and so on—recent scholarship has helped us see how this view stems from a secular perspective that has a vested interest in narrowing the scope of religion and removing it from public life. This is not to suggest, however, that secularism can only be understood in one way. Naomi Seidman begins her account of Jewish secularization by noting its difference from Protestant versions and remarking that “it is now clear to most critics that no single “secularism exists (including in the Jewish world)” (7). In a similar vein, Lecourt identifies different traditions in the secularism of the nineteenth century, and Colin Jager’s work on the literature of the Romantic era helps us better understood how both the religious and the secular are “mobile” discourses answering “particular needs at particular historical moments” (6). Recognizing this mobility of meaning, others have explored the capacity of the term postsecular to register a nuanced account of the relation between religion and the secular. For Lori Branch, talk of the postsecular does not entail “a new master narrative, whether of the supersession of the secular by the postsecular or a triumphal return of the religious repressed,” but, rather, the means of opening “up new understandings of religion and secularism as they have been mutually constituted and as they reconfigure themselves in culture” (94). Working with a sophisticated and mobile understanding of religion and the secular, we can rethink the long-standing assumption that literature is inevitably on the side of the secular. Since its emergence as an academic subject in the second half of the nineteenth century, the study of literature has 428

Studies of Christianity and Judaism

often been thought about as a secular discipline, with particular forms, most notably the novel, especially prone to be thought of in this way. The claim about the novel’s inherent secularity is present in older accounts by Georg Lukács and Ian Watt, but it continues to be voiced in recent work by Frederic Jameson and George Levine, albeit for different reasons. Turning to the bildungsroman, Jameson admits traces of an older religious vocabulary but insists that the form is resolutely secular, with the bildungsroman merely organizing “its new social material in an analogous way” (102) to earlier spiritual autobiography. And Levine reaches a similar conclusion when he insists that the novel is “a secular form if ever there was one” (210). Like Jameson, Levine acknowledges traces of an older religious language, but he shares Jameson’s willingness to ignore it, arguing that the novel’s concern with the materiality of everyday life offers a new account of the universe in which a “determinedly detailed and accurate look at the new industrial and capitalist society . . . puts pressure on the providential narratives bequeathed to it by Christianity” (213). While Levine mounts a forceful case for the role that money plays in Little Dorrit (1855–57), the novel he turns to as a test case, his argument suffers from an understanding of religion that cannot think beyond absolute transcendence and a moral outlook rooted in personal piety. If we expand the definition of Christian religion—by looking at how Christology insists on immanence as much as it does on transcendence, or by exploring the theological traditions that root ethics in a more communal tradition—then the case for the novel’s secularity is less clear-cut and we are able to see a Christian incarnational impulse in the repeated references at the conclusion of Little Dorrit to how Amy and Arthur “went down into a modest life of usefulness and happiness” (859; emphasis added) [on the novel, see Michie’s chapter]. The secular conclusion that Levine reaches is also rendered less tenable if we bring a different range of novels into consideration. Doing so might involve turning to realist works that continue to insist on an inexplicable intervention informed by the Christian faith, such as Jane Eyre (1847) and the voice that calls Jane, or the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Yonge, steeped, respectively, in the theological language of the Unitarian faith and the Oxford Movement. Alternatively, we might consider the combination of Judaism and realist thought in Israel Zangwill’s The Children of the Ghetto (1892), a novel which, writes Jessica R. Valdez, is noteworthy for its author’s “use of Yiddish, Hebrew, and English” to highlight “the extent to which meanings and contexts are not portable across languages” (316). And there are also other genres that sit alongside realism in the Victorian period and further disrupt our secular histories of the novel. These genres include the fantasy works of George MacDonald. In novels such as At the Back of the North Wind (1871) and Phantastes (1858) the use of fantasy allows MacDonald more freedom to explore nebulous but central Christian ideas such as providence and the work of the Holy Spirit. Whether we think about realism or fantasy or anything else, the point is not that the Victorian novel is unambiguously religious, any more than it is secular, but that the fiction of the period reveals the imbrication of religion and secularity in modernity.

2. Biblical Reception Given the centrality of the scriptures to the Jewish and Christian traditions, it is unsurprising that the afterlife of these texts in the literature of the Victorian period has long been of interest to critics. Recent contributions to this area have sought to remind us that the biblical text is not always read in the literal way one might expect. This is particularly apparent in Timothy Larsen’s A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (2011), which offers a series of chapter-length case studies. While the underlying argument of Larsen’s work—that the Bible remained of great interest to a wide range of Victorians—is straightforward, the value of his book lies in the detailed accounts he offers of particular Victorian reading habits. In addition to exploring the various forms of engagement with scripture offered by those associated with different parts of the church (e.g., Nicholas Wiseman and Roman Catholicism, Elizabeth Fry and the Quakers, Charles Spurgeon and Protestant Dissent), Larsen explores the extensive biblical reading of atheists and agnostics such as Charles Bradlaugh and 429

Mark Knight

T.H. Huxley. Larsen’s interest in thinking about how those who were sometimes critical of the Bible remained influenced by it is shared by Chares LaPorte. In Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible (2011), LaPorte begins with Higher Criticism, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century development in biblical studies that saw scholars distancing their interpretative efforts from the teaching of the Church and the life of faith. The Higher Critics focused instead on matters of biblical historicity and textual composition. Although they became best known for their skepticism toward some of the miraculous and historical claims of the Bible text, LaPorte makes a persuasive claim for the importance of their mythological understanding of scripture: “[T]he higher criticism presented the revolutionary practice of studying the Christian scriptures as the collected poetry and mythology of an ancient, primitive people—as a mythical, rather than a strictly factual, record” (6). LaPorte goes on to consider the fertile ground that this offered for nineteenth-century authors, and he includes chapters on the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, George Eliot, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. While some of these writers continued to think about the Christian faith in a relatively orthodox manner, the insights of the Higher Critics played an important role in the way that the Bible was read and reworked in their work and in other poetry of the period. The willingness of the Victorians to explore new ways of reading the Bible was not as innovative as it may seem: the Jewish and Christian traditions have never reached a settled reading of their scriptures, and even in those parts of the Protestant tradition that insist on the stability and clarity of the biblical message, there remains a recognition that individual scriptural texts can always be read differently. This recognition can be seen in the willingness of preachers to return to biblical passages they have spoken about previously. Although individual preachers often kept their readings within a narrow range and eschewed the radicalism of the Higher Critics, the collective reading of those who saw themselves as orthodox Protestants involved considerable variation. As Daniel J. Treier quips: “[S]tories of evangelical biblical interpretation range from the awe-inspiring to the absurd” (40). While the reading of scriptures within faith communities is more fluid and varied than many suppose, the greater interpretative license typically enjoyed by literary authors saw biblical books, stories, and motifs being taken up in diverse ways throughout the Victorian period. Some of these rewritings courted controversy, as was the case with Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1893) when it embellished a short scene in the Bible and did so in a way that struck some members of society as a particularly egregious breaking of the law prohibiting the performance of the Bible onstage [on drama and performance, see Weltman’s chapter]. In other cases, particularly when the Bible was being referenced by writers clearly associated with parts of the Christian church (e.g., Dinah Mulock Craik, Dora Greenwell, and Hannah More), the use of scripture was less likely to be seen as an issue. These various attitudes to literary reworkings of scripture can be explained in part by thinking about who was writing and who was reading. But the choice of biblical form also played a role. Books of the Bible with a less clearly defined message, such as the Book of Revelation, were more likely to cause alarm when they were reimagined by different authors. One reason for this was, as Kevin Mills explains, the complexity of the apocalyptic form which, when reworked in literature, invites us to look for “deeper affinities” and “hidden ideological substrates” (30). By contrast, some parts of the Bible seemed less problematic when taken up by writers. Indeed, the material in the Bible offering potted histories and short narrative episodes seem to call for further imaginative exploration, and many literary reworkings of the lives of minor biblical characters proceeded without significant theological controversy. And then there were those parts of the Bible, such as the parables in the Gospels, that seemed to explicitly shift interpretative weight onto readers. When these forms were taken up by literary authors, the reworking sometimes made for uncomfortable reading, but the discomfort could be seen as being in line with the work of the original text. Susan E. Colón examines how the parabolic form was reworked in the longer form of the realist novel, and her book Victorian Parables (2012) offers convincing readings of several texts, including Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) and the way in it explores biblical stewardship parables. 430

Studies of Christianity and Judaism

In Anthony Trollope’s “The Widow’s Mite” (1863), first published in the evangelically oriented periodical Good Words, the question of what literature might bring to scripture is introduced through Trollope’s choice of biblical text. Trollope reworks the short tale of the widow’s mite (Mark 12: 41–4; Luke 21:1–4), in which Jesus draws attention to a woman who gives all that she has, two mites, to the Temple treasury. The characters in Trollope’s short story dwell at length on charity and the difficulty of a gift that is truly sacrificial, and the narratives is built around the efforts of Miss Norah Field to work out how she might make a similarly sacrificial gift in marriage. In his reworking of the biblical story, Trollope expands the gendered dimension of the source text and highlights the practical difficulty of giving for Victorian women whose already limited agency was further diminished through marriage. This exploration may not be as different from biblical commentary as it initially seems: although the most common readings of the biblical story focus on sacrificial giving, other commentators have argued that Jesus is drawing attention to the unjust situation in which a woman is expected to sacrifice all that she has while the wealthy man gets to keep the majority of his money. Our reaction to Trollope’s reworking of the biblical story depends to a large extent on the way that we read the source text. But as Trollope reflects on scripture and helps readers reimagine its implications for the world in which we live, he is also, analogically, asking us to consider what his small fictional offering might contribute to people’s understanding of the Bible. While the story is fairly minor in itself, it is a reminder of how literary reworkings of the Bible were part of a larger set of reflections on the purpose of religious writing. As the George-Herbert-inspired motto for Good Words put it, “[G]ood words are worth much and cost little.” While there is plenty of evidence showing how Victorian reflections on the meaning of the literature that they read was contiguous with the efforts of religious communities to understand the Bible, most of the scholarship in this area is grounded in the Christian tradition rather than the Jewish. This is not intrinsically wrong, but there is much of importance to say about the particularity of Jewish interpretative practice and its significance for how we think about the reception of the scriptures. The challenge, however, is working out how to recover this. Recognizing that “the Hebrew scriptures serve as a shared text for both Jewish and Anglican traditions,” Cynthia Scheinberg offers a comparative reading of the ways in which Victorian “Jewish and Christian women turn to the discourse of the Judaic, Hebraic, and Jewishness in their poetry” (3). Doing so allows Scheinberg to explore differences between the traditions and recover a hermeneutic that is not exclusively Christian. Yet the separation between Christianity and Judaism is complicated, as she readily admits. Elsewhere, discussing Grace Aquilar’s The Women of Israel (1845), Nadia Valman notes how, “citing the feminine metaphors for divine love from the Hebrew Bible, Aquilar constructs a Jewish God whose fundamentally feminine character constitutes Judaism’s appeal for women” (97). But as Valman goes on to explain, it is hard to distinguish this picture of God from that given by the Christian tradition, with Aquilar immediately going on to recast her account of Judaism “in the feminised and personalised terms of Evangelicalism” (98). In the same way that our involvement in the reception history of the Bible makes it impossible to read the source text impartially and objectively, Victorians found it hard to articulate an account of Jewish interpretative practice that had not, in some form, been influenced by Christian thought. There are ways of addressing this problem, though, even if they do not solve it altogether. In Jewish Feeling: Difference and Affect in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Women’s Writing (2015), Richa Dwor turns to midrash, a specifically rabbinic method of exegesis, and seeks “to articulate a mode of affect arising from Jewish interpretative strategies and to note the presence of this mode, ultimately, in the writing and reading of literary, not just biblical, texts” (19). The focus on one specific instance of a much longer tradition of Judaic commentary helps us to start thinking about how Jewish interpretations of scripture in the Victorian period differed from Christian readings.

3. Print Culture and Religious Materiality One of the many contributions that Judaism makes to our reading of the scriptures is to insist that our understanding of the meaning and role of divine texts requires attention to matters of religious 431

Mark Knight

identity and practice. This insight can sometimes be found in the work of those who are shaped by the Protestant tradition, but the Protestant interest in sola scriptura has sometimes been a barrier to thinking about how words are mediated. Earlier work by Leslie Howsam (1991) and Mary Wilson Carpenter (2003) helped Victorian scholars to start thinking about how print culture shaped the role that the Bible played in the period and, in the years since, there has been increasing scholarly interest in the production, advertising, circulation, and reception of the sacred text. In addition to Bibles and book-length works of literature were a vast array of other printed materials—including tracts, printed sermons, religious magazines, and biblical commentaries—all of which testified to the various ways in which literary and cultural forms helped mediate the Word of God. Whether or not we agree with Leah Price’s claim that the primary significance of tracts lies in the way they were used rather than the frequency with which they were read, her intervention alerts us to the complex material nexus in which religious words existed in the age of print. William McKelvy’s The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774–1880 (2007) demonstrates how attending to print culture enables us to see the religious vocation that accompanied the rise of literature in the Victorian era, and Joshua King’s Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain’s Age of Print (2015) builds on some of these ideas to argue for the way in which the age of print encouraged spiritual communities that were less dependent on fixed points in time and space. Some of the writers King considers, such as Matthew Arnold, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and F.D. Maurice, sought to promote “reading strategies . . . to help Britons transform the millions of texts daily circulating through their nation into mediums for imagining themselves in a united spiritual, and generally Protestant, community” (11). Others, such as John Keble, Christina Rossetti, and Alfred Lord Tennyson provided material by which “extra-institutional communities of Christian readers” (14) might be fostered, beyond the confines of the Anglican Church. As King argues, the labor to imagine and build a truly national Christian community through reading is replaced by demarcations of competing religious and irreligious audiences within a still broadly “Christian” national reading group that itself remains unidentified with any single religious institution or group. (16) Not all of the communities fostered by religious print culture were positive. Anna Johnston’s Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 (2003) examines the output of the London Missionary Society and considers its relation to the imperial project. While we might question her unwillingness to allow for any sort of theological resistance to imperialism in the huge array of writing published by nineteenth-century missionaries, there is little doubt that religious print culture enabled the spread of imperial ideology. And we should note, too, the myriad other occasions on which religious print culture helped circulate anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic ideas, cultivating an environment in which literary characters such as Fagin (Oliver Twist, 1837–1839) could exist and prove popular. But if we are going to move beyond simply finding fault with religious ideology, we might shift focus and consider how Judaism and Christianity are tied to the material concerns of the period. Mike Sanders’s essay “‘God is our guide! our cause is just!’ The National Chartist Hymn Book and Victorian Hymnody” highlights one of the many occasions on which religion and everyday material life intersected, and Krista Lysack’s reading of Christina Rossetti’s Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885) offers another. In her explanation of how “Rossetti both describes and tries through the disparate elements of her book to create an experience of time that coordinates modern, industrial rhythms with the eternal time that hints at something apart from it” (465), Lysack helps us to understand precisely how particular religious and material concerns were mediated through print [on book history, see Stauffer’s chapter; on popular fiction and culture, see Daly’s; and on radical print culture, see Haywood’s]. 432

Studies of Christianity and Judaism

Lysack is not alone in seeing the writing of Rossetti as an especially rich site for thinking about the connection between religion and the material world, and one can see why. In the case of “Goblin Market” (composed in 1859, published in 1862), Rossetti moves freely between economics, sex, and the body, on the one hand, and divine salvation, on the other. While this juxtaposition proved confusing to many of the scholars writing about Rossetti in the late-twentieth century, more recent critics have had less trouble in identifying the Christian resources that make these connections possible. In “Goblin Market” the most prominent of these resources is the Eucharist, the Christian ceremony that played such a vital role in Rossetti’s Anglo-Catholic faith. Returning from her visit to the goblin men, Lizzie uses intimate and bodily Eucharistic language in her invitation for Laura to participate in her salvific sacrifice: Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices Squeezed from goblin fruits for you, Goblin pulp and goblin due. Eat me, drink me, love me; Laura, make sure of me: For your sake I have braved the glen And had to do with goblin merchant men. (80) For Rossetti, the taking of the bread and the wine is more than an ethereal opportunity to remember the sacrifice of Jesus. Instead, the Eucharist act makes Christ present, with the broken lives symbolized by the elements and those who take them undergoing divine transformation. Reading Rossetti in theological ways can help us appreciate the multiple theoretical resources that religion makes available. Many of these resources are explored in Emma Mason’s recent book, Christian Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (2018). The doctrines of Creation and Incarnation gave Rossetti a language for thinking about how the physical world is endowed with God’s presence and redeemed through his willingness to take on flesh; Rossetti’s reading of Trinitarian theology enables her to see the interdependence of all living things; and, in the final stages of her book, Mason explains how Rossetti’s eschatological reading of grace involved “both the deep from which all things are generated eternally without beginning or end, and also the expression of God’s dynamic and perichoretic gathering of creation’s diversity into his being” (160). These ideas are distinctly Christian and rooted in Rossetti’s Anglo-Catholic theology. But when one looks elsewhere, to other parts of the Christian tradition and also to the Jewish tradition, we find other theoretical resources to make sense of the world in which we live. In Judaism, these include, but are not limited to, the messianic, the calling of a people, the Hebrew language, a focus on shared religious practice, and the language of exile. Focusing on the last of these in her recent study of nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish poetry, Karen Weisman explores how the poets she is writing about offer “a story of the foreign, [and] a story of the Lord,” but also, and even more importantly for her, “a story about themselves as singers” (11). The language of song and story is suggestive, for it reminds us how many different voices are included in talk of religion, and why the twenty-first-century resurgence of interest in Jewish and Christian studies has an exciting future that deserves to be heard.

Key Critical Works Kirstie Blair. Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion. Ellis Hanson. Decadence and Catholicism. Michael Hurley. Faith in Poetry:Verse Style as a Mode of Religious Belief. Joshua King. Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain’s Age of Print.

433

Mark Knight Mark Knight. Good Words: Evangelicalism and the Victorian Novel. Mark Knight, and Emma Mason. Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction. Charles LaPorte. Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible. William McKelvy. The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774–1880. Patrick R. O’Malley. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance and Victorian Gothic Culture. Cynthia Scheinberg. Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture. Jan-Melissa Schramm. Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative. Nadia Valman. The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture.

Works Cited Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford UP, 2003. Blair, Kirstie. Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion. Oxford UP, 2012. Branch, Lori. “Postsecular Studies.” The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion, edited by Mark Knight, Routledge, 2016. pp. 91–101. Carpenter, Mary Wilson. Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies: Women, Sexuality, and Religion in the Victorian Market. Ohio State UP, 2003. Colón, Susan E. Victorian Parables. Continuum, 2012. Corelli, Marie. A Romance of Two Worlds. 1886. Methuen, 1910. Cunningham, Valentine. Everywhere Spoken against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel. Clarendon, 1975. Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. Edited by Stephen Wall and Helen Small, Penguin, 2003. Dwor, Richa. Jewish Feeling: Difference and Affect in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Women’s Writing. Bloomsbury, 2015. Franklin, J. Jeffrey. Spirit Matters: Occult Beliefs, Alternate Religions, and the Crisis of Faith in Victorian Britain. Cornell UP, 2018. Hanson, Ellis. Decadence and Catholicism. Harvard UP, 1997. Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. Edited by Cedric Watts, Broadview, 1999. Howsam, Leslie. Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society. Cambridge UP, 1991. Hurley, Michael. Faith in Poetry:Verse Style as a Mode of Religious Belief. Bloomsbury, 2017. Jager, Colin. Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age. U of Pennsylvania P, 2015. Jameson, Frederic. “The Experiments of Time: Providence and Realism.” The Novel, vol. 2, edited by Franco Moretti, Princeton UP, 2006. pp. 95–127. Jay, Elisabeth. The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Clarendon, 1979. Johnston, Anna. Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860. Cambridge UP, 2003. King, Joshua, and Winter Wade Werner, editors. Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion: Literary, Historical and Religious Studies in Dialogue. The Ohio State UP, 2019. Knight, Mark. Good Words: Evangelicalism and the Victorian Novel. The Ohio State UP, 2019. ———. “Victorian Literature and the Variety of Religious Forms.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, no. 2, 2018, pp. 517–29. Knight, Mark, and Emma Mason. Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction. Oxford UP, 2006. Krueger, Christine. The Reader’s Repentance: Women Preachers, Women Writers, and Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse. The U of Chicago P, 1992. Landow, George. Victorian Types,Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology and Victorian Literature, Art, and Thought. Routledge, 1980. LaPorte, Charles. Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible. The U of Virginia P, 2011. Larsen, Timothy. A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians. Oxford UP, 2011. Lecourt, Sebastian. Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination. Oxford UP, 2018. Levine, George. Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science. Cambridge UP, 2008. Lysack, Krista. “The Productions of Time: Keble, Rossetti, and Victorian Devotional Reading.” Victorian Studies, vol. 55, no. 3, 2013, pp. 451–70. Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: A Historical-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock, Merlin, 1978. Marsh, Joss. Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England. The U of Chicago P, 1998. Mason, Emma. Christian Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith. Oxford UP, 2018. Masuzawa, Tomoko. The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. The U of Chicago P, 2005.

434

Studies of Christianity and Judaism McKelvy, William. The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774–1880. U of Virginia P, 2007. Miller, J. Hillis. The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers. U of Illinois P, 1963. Mills, Kevin. Approaching Apocalypse Unveiling Revelation in Victorian Writing. Bucknell UP, 2007. O’Malley, Patrick R. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance and Victorian Gothic Culture. Cambridge UP, 2006. Price, Leah. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton UP, 2012. Prickett, Stephen. Words and the Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation. Cambridge UP, 1986. Rossetti, Christina. “Goblin Market.” Christina Rossetti: Selected Poems, edited by Dinah Roe, Penguin, 2008, pp. 67–83. Sanders, Mike. “‘God Is Our Guide! Our Cause Is Just!’ The National Chartist Hymn Book and Victorian Hymnody.” Victorian Studies, vol. 54, no. 4, 2012, pp. 679–705. Scheinberg, Cynthia. Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture. Cambridge UP, 2002. Schramm, Jan-Melissa. Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative. Cambridge UP, 2012. ———. Censorship and the Representation of the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century England. Oxford UP, 2019. Seidman, Naomi. The Marriage Plot: Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love and with Literature. Stanford UP, 2016. Sherwood, Yvonne. Biblical Blaspheming: Trial of the Sacred for a Secular Age. Cambridge UP, 2012. Snell, K. D. M., and Paul S. Ell. Rival Jerusalems: The Geography of Victorian. Cambridge UP, 2000. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Harvard UP, 2003. Treier, Daniel J. “Scripture and Hermeneutics.” The Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology, edited by Timothy Larsen and Daniel J. Treier, Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 35–49. Valdez, Jessica R. “How to Write Yiddish in English, or Israel Zangwill and the Multilingualism in Children of the Ghetto.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 46, no. 3, 2014, pp. 315–34. Valman, Nadia. The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture. Cambridge UP, 2007. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. U of California P, 1957. Weisman, Karen A. Singing in a Foreign Land: Anglo-Jewish Poetry, 1812–1847. U of Pennsylvania P, 2018. Wheeler, Michael. Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology. Cambridge UP, 1990.

435

PART VI

Spatiality and Environment

38 DOMESTICITY Melissa Valiska Gregory

One of the most important and far-reaching concepts of the nineteenth century, domesticity is an urgent preoccupation in every major literary genre of the period. Questions related to home and family organized the nineteenth-century novel, motivated a huge body of advice and conduct literature, drove new formal developments in the lyric, and captured the spotlight on the Victorian stage. Indeed, literature played a pivotal role in the evolution of domesticity over the course of the lateeighteenth and the nineteenth century, helping to expand the definition of domestic from a set of basic housekeeping practices to a powerful and elaborate ideology that importantly intersected with major cultural debates regarding nationality, empire, social class, human rights, and gender. More than one scholar has suggested that the rise of the domestic ideal, a vision of middle-class home life as the center of moral and Christian virtue, was as much the product of the novel as the nineteenth-century evangelical movement. This is not to say there was universal agreement on the domestic ideal in Victorian literature—it was a contested concept that could be the aspirational focus of realist fiction, or the fragile myth shattered by the sensation novel, or anything in between—but to suggest that the widespread fixation on domestic life in literature kept it front and center in the Victorian cultural imagination. Literature, in other words, was not only a reflection of domestic ideology but also one of its most powerful agents. Yet despite the ubiquitous presence of domesticity as a theme across the fiction, poetry, and drama of the period, it was not until the latter third of the twentieth century that scholars began to appreciate fully its centrality as a fundamental organizing principle in Victorian literature and culture. Tracing the emergence of nineteenth-century domesticity in literary scholarship over the past 40 years reveals a dynamic research field in which the integration of women and families into academic inquiry leads to the recognition of new writers, genres, and relationships that reshaped—and continue to influence—the field of Victorian literary studies.

1. The Feminist Wave Literary scholars first turned their attention to Victorian domesticity in the wake of second-wave feminism—although a nuanced understanding of the various permutations of the concept was hardly that movement’s professed goal at the time. The famous trio of feminist monographs published in the 1970s—Ellen Moers’s Literary Women: The Great Writers, Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own: British Women Writers from Brontë to Lessing, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination—used “domesticity” mostly as shorthand for the oppression of women, defining it as a set of ideological expectations and material 439

Melissa Valiska Gregory

duties that impeded women’s creative energies, interfered with their sexual desires, and thwarted their professional ambitions. Indeed, in Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar embed the concept of the domestic within their central thesis about women’s authorial anxiety to argue that, for nineteenthcentury women, domesticity routinely operated as the antithesis to creative achievement. “[S]ince they were trapped in so many ways in the architecture—both the houses and institutions—of patriarchy,” they remark, “women expressed their anxiety of authorship by comparing their ‘presumptuous’ literary ambitions with the domestic accomplishments that had been prescribed for them” (85). For Gilbert and Gubar, the tension between “literary ambitions” and “domestic accomplishments” that pervaded women’s writing from the nineteenth century was both a symptom and a cause of the lack of an established female literary tradition [on feminism, see Schaffer]. At the time of Madwoman’s publication, Gilbert and Gubar’s thesis resonated not only as a compelling academic argument but also as an important comment on the challenges all women were facing at that time, leading to the book’s nomination for multiple awards beyond the academy, including the Pulitzer. In the preface to the second edition, Gilbert and Gubar recount the challenge of raising children and working as academics in the “overwhelmingly Protestant and masculine ethos of productivity” (xvi) exuded by their male colleagues, who would begin every Monday with the question, “Have you had a productive weekend?”—the implication being, of course, that weekends were opportunities for single-minded focus on one’s own scholarship, not domestic responsibilities. It’s no surprise that feminist scholars were interested in domesticity primarily as an ideological force to be challenged and subverted, a perspective that helped other scholars recognize within Victorian literature the evidence of women’s frustration with and resistance to dominant patriarchal paradigms. Gilbert and Gubar’s interpretive model continues to help today’s readers of nineteenth-century literature ask important questions about gender and power. But feminist criticism’s focus on women also opened the door to more nuanced investigations of the concept of domesticity, inviting literary scholars to explore the concept as both a complex set of ideological pressures and a lived, material reality. Indeed, in the decade that followed Madwoman in the Attic, the discourse relating to the subject shifted from a purely oppositional one to one in which domesticity also provided women with new forms of agency, sometimes making them complicit in the very power structures that prescriptively limited women’s roles. Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel and Mary Poovey’s Uneven Developments both insist that the rise of domesticity in the nineteenth century—and particularly the moral and spiritual authority of the domestic ideal—made women an integral part of the expansion of the middle class. For Armstrong, women authors’ representations of domestic life in the novel became the foundation of female moral authority and, indeed, of the new bourgeois modern self. Conduct manuals and domestic novels positioned women as the primary agents of moral virtue, offering them social authority to help to consolidate middle-class power. Poovey similarly suggests that domesticity helps women become agents of class consolidation, as we see when the eponymous hero of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849) achieves the middleclass goals of self-regulation and private selfhood through the female domestic ideal. Armstrong and Poovey foreground social class in a way that earlier work on domesticity and women had not; instead of seeing the middle class as the default, both writers show domestic literature as contributing actively to class formation and women as supplying the model of the bourgeois self [on class, see Betensky’s chapter; on ethics, see Mitchell’s]. But I would argue that perhaps the most enduringly influential monograph from the late-1980s to take up the relationship between domesticity, women’s agency, and the expanding power of the middle class did not focus on literature but was instead a massive work of social history: Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. Enormously ambitious, Davidoff and Hall looked at middle-class families from urban Birmingham and rural East Anglia to argue that the institution of the family advanced the growth of capitalism in England. At the time of its publication, the aspect of Family Fortunes that most captured reviewers 440

Domesticity

was its revelation that women’s domestic responsibilities often overlapped with their involvement in family businesses. Davidoff and Hall demonstrated that, in spite of the legal principle of coverture (the wife’s absorption into the husband’s legal person), domestic structures could nevertheless facilitate women’s participation in economic enterprise. For instance, Ann Martin Taylor and her daughters Ann and Jane not only moved seamlessly between household responsibilities and their father’s engraving business, but also brought in income through their writing careers. Ann Martin Taylor published a series of highly successful domestic advice manuals, while her daughters almost singlehandedly revolutionized the field of original children’s verse with their two-volume Original Poems for Infant Minds (1804–05). Davidoff and Hall’s compelling description of the permeable boundaries between domestic and professional labor offered a new, more flexible model for thinking about the power that might have been available to middle-class women within domestic ideology and practice. The opportunity for women to exercise agency despite conventional restrictions continued to be one of the most important questions for scholars interested in gender, domesticity, and power throughout the late 1980s and the 1990s. Elizabeth Langland’s 1995 Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture, for example, enlists the nineteenth-century novel, home guides, and cookbooks to argue that the middle-class wife’s training in managing servants and running the household taught her organizational skills that could apply to the future feminist movement (although Langland observes that these skills also reinforced a strict class hierarchy that did not support a vision of class equity). More broadly, Davidoff and Hall’s historical methodology revealed the value of turning to material culture in studies of domesticity, an approach that seeded the bed for a new crop of inspiring work in the 1990s that engaged the fine-grained details of Victorian life. Scholars frequently enlisted a wide range of cultural texts—etiquette books, home furnishing guides, scrapbooks, various household management texts, and so forth—as a dynamic context for readings of Victorian literature, usually the novel. Thad Logan’s cultural study of the Victorian parlor from 2001 is a good example of this approach: the book uses cultural and historical texts to tell the story of the parlor as one of the home’s most important domestic spaces, concluding, in the final chapter, with representations of the parlor in Victorian graphic arts and fiction. Logan’s argument that the parlor operates as both a microcosm and consolidation of bourgeois identity in Victorian culture depends heavily on her ability to offer a historically accurate understanding of domestic architecture—her book includes parlor floor plans—as well as an exhaustive account of the parlor’s real-life material furnishings and ornaments. Attention to the space of the Victorian home continued well into the 2000s, in which the materiality of Victorian domesticity became central to several important historical studies, including Judith Flanders’s The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed, Deborah Cohen’s Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions, and Jane Hamlett’s Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910. Although it focuses more broadly on the evolution of modern ideas of public-private relations, Michael McKeon’s The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge also offers some important insights on the subject [on material culture, see Lutz’s chapter]. This historical work clearly influenced literary scholars such as Andrea Kaston Tange, whose Architectural Identities: Domesticity, Literature, and the Victorian Middle Classes argues that Victorians used their domestic spaces to define themselves, citing cultural texts such as architectural treatises alongside literary readings of Margaret Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks (1865–66) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864–66). Meanwhile, Talia Schaffer’s Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction traces the representation of women’s handicraft work in both canonical novels and lesser-read works to demonstrate that craft culture was an opportunity for middle-class women to demonstrate creative self-expression. Similarly, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra’s Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855–1875 argues that ornate drawing-room books were opportunities for women poets to move into popular culture. 441

Melissa Valiska Gregory

2. Print Culture As these material studies suggest, the 1980s’ characteristic emphasis on canonical novels slowly fell away, with Oliphant as likely to be cited as Dickens, and this movement was especially visible in scholarship on Victorian print culture. With the 1990s, literary scholars began to recognize rich overlaps between the rise of domestic ideology and the Victorian periodical press, particularly women’s periodicals and literary annuals. One of the first and most important of these studies was Margaret Beetham’s A Magazine of Her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914. Beetham traces how domestic practices were advertised, scrutinized, and debated within the “feminized space” of the woman’s magazine and pays particular attention to the presence of male editors and publishers, illuminating the structures of male power that sustained the feminine ideal. This historical study mirrors her personal account of how male professionals intent on managing women’s access to archival materials and professional credentials almost impeded the completion of A Magazine of Her Own entirely. First written as her doctoral dissertation, Beetham reports that the book was initially rejected by her university’s PhD committee without a report, a devastating failure (“How I Came”). Beetham’s story of the discrimination she faced as a female graduate student with children, who had already been in the workforce for some years prior to beginning her studies, is a valuable reminder of the ongoing relevance that this research on the domestic has in an academic context where women still lag behind when it comes to securing tenure-track jobs or achieving the rank of Professor. Perhaps it is not entirely surprising that most of the work on domesticity in Victorian periodicals in the 2000s has been written by women, including Jennifer Phegley’s Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation, Kathryn Ledbetter’s British Victorian Women’s Periodicals: Beauty, Civilization, and Poetry, and Katherine Harris’s Forget Me Not: The Rise of the British Literary Annual, 1823–1835 [on periodical studies, see Hughes’s chapter]. Beetham’s work also demonstrated that studies of Victorian domesticity had the potential to reorient our understanding of which women were important within the historical landscape, as she revealed that Isabella Beeton might have been as important a figure as Florence Nightingale. In Beeton’s Book of Household Management, the author created the literal taste of the middle class, using the genre of the cookbook to disseminate a vision of domesticity that achieved widespread commercial success (Beetham, “Good Taste”). Kathryn Hughes’s major 2005 biography of Beeton, which followed Oxford’s critically edited reissued version of the household manual in 2000, shows how “Mrs. Beeton” was a deliberately commercial construction invented by Beeton and her husband (the actual Mrs. Beeton was a modern, entrepreneurial woman who continued to edit the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine even immediately after the birth of her first child). Hughes’s account advances our understanding of the ways in which women could exploit domestic ideology for professional gain. Beeton was once the butt of jokes, the quintessential stand-in for the stodgy Victorian; as Hughes observes, Lytton Strachey considered writing a biography of her but didn’t, claiming he thought of Beeton as “a small tub-like lady in black—rather severe of aspect, strongly resembling Queen Victoria” (qtd in Hughes 6). Beetham and Hughes, however, transformed Beeton into a savvy, market-conscious writer and editor, one of the most significant contributors to constructing bourgeois identity and class hierarchy in Victorian culture. By now it should be evident that, since the second-wave feminist movement, most of the major work on Victorian domesticity has focused on women within traditional, heterosexual family structures. Helena Michie’s Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal uses couples’ letters and diaries to reveal the growing importance of the honeymoon to the emerging ideal of the married couple as a recognizable social unit. Rachel Ablow’s The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot explores the relationship between the role of wives and novels, both of which were conceived of as having important moral influence. Mary Jean Corbett’s Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf traces the cultural shift in attitudes toward family marriages between

442

Domesticity

first cousins, looking at novels alongside legal and political debates to investigate how the definition of acceptable marital partners evolved and changed over the course of the nineteenth century. Talia Schaffer’s award-winning Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction returns to the marriage plot but with a new focus, revisiting the work of Armstrong and Langland through the lens of extended relationality and disability studies. Schaffer argues that the literary convention of “familiar marriage”—women choosing male partners not out of sexual desire but because they will uphold bonds of kinship and provide women with social empowerment—reveals that women often made pragmatic choices within the restricted boundaries of domesticity. By reading with rather than against the grain of Victorian familiar marriage, Schaffer suggests that domesticity was an opportunity for women to set their own priorities.

3. Alternative Approaches to Family The study of domesticity now extends beyond the feminine and the heterosexual. Beginning in the mid-1990s, literary scholars drew on social history by John Tosh and Martin Wiener and gender studies work by James Eli Adams and Herbert Sussman to suggest that Victorian men had multiple “styles” (Adams’s word) of masculinity available to them that affected their domestic relations. Monographs such as Claudia Nelson’s Invisible Men: Fatherhood in Victorian Periodicals, Valerie Sanders’s The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood, and Tara MacDonald’s The New Man, Masculinity, and Marriage in the Victorian Novel argued that men played diverse and complex roles within the Victorian family, establishing affective relations with wives and children that were just as significant to domesticity as those established by women. MacDonald’s claim, for example, that Victorian literature’s representation of the “New Man”—a compassionate, gentle version of masculinity that offers an important alternative to a more overtly brutal or selfish version of the domestic patriarch—enriches our understanding of the range of options that were available to Victorian husbands. Similarly, historian Julie Marie Strange’s Fatherhood, Attachment and the British Working Class, c. 1865–1914 enlists autobiographies to argue that working-class fathers used a range of possible strategies to establish emotional bonds with their children. The father’s role as provider, for example, was consistently configured as affective, read as a sign of his devotion to his family. Meanwhile, domestic rituals like tea time offered fathers the chance to bond with their family as a strategy for surviving economic stress. Nicola Wilson’s Home in British Working-Class Fiction is another example of a work that takes up domesticity in relation to the working class. This scholarship reveals that the character and temperament of the husband and father was often just as urgent a question for Victorian writers and readers as the character of the wife and mother. The rise of queer studies has led to an even more radically revised understanding of domestic ideology and practice in the Victorian period. One of the most important insights into the family in the 2000s is that nineteenth-century domesticity was not always heterosexual. The most groundbreaking book to consider this question is Sharon Marcus’s landmark Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage (2007). Marcus takes as her point of departure Eve Sedgwick’s well-known Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, a book from the mid-1980s that revolutionized readings of desire in nineteenth-century literature but which—as Marcus points out—largely ignored same-sex relations between women. In Marcus’s view, the “master discourse” (12) of lesbian theory inadequately accommodates the range of female relationships available at the time. Female friendships were not clandestine, transgressive liaisons; rather, intimacy between women often resembled and sometimes even worked to sustain traditional heterosexual marriage. Following Marcus, Duc Dau and Shale Preston’s collection, Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature, for example, includes essays on romantic female friendship by Ellen Brinks and on neo-Victorian novelist Sarah Waters by Lauren Hoffer and Sarah Kersh. Echoes of Marcus’s argument can be seen in Simon Goldhill’s A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian

443

Melissa Valiska Gregory

Britain, which explores the voluminous archives of Edward White Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to tell the story of a family whose members resisted conventional heterosexuality on a number of fronts. Goldhill’s story of Minnie Benson’s relationship with Lucy Tait shows how queer desire could be grafted onto normative heterosexual family structures [on sexuality, see Dau’s chapter]. To what degree queer sexuality in the family was accommodated across social classes is difficult to say, since most of this work has focused on the middle class. For instance, since the early 2000s, there has been an explosion of literary scholarship on Michael Field, the joint pen name of Katherine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper, who were lovers and literary collaborators for over 40 years. Starting with Yopie Prins’s Victorian Sappho, more than one literary scholar has explored the lesbian erotics and queer aesthetics of Field’s poetry, yet almost no one has considered how either the construction of Michael Field, the poet, or the queer relationship between Bradley and Cooper could be interpreted as expressions of bourgeois privilege. To my knowledge, only Carolyn Tate has explored the class politics of Michael Field. How much did the social authority of the middle class empower couples like Minnie Benson and Lucy Tait or Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper? Were such companionate relationships accommodated in working-class families, and might working-class queer domesticity have worked differently? Susan Fraiman’s Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins offers some inspiration. Fraiman argues that, for marginalized groups, including the working class, the homeless, and queer families, domesticity can be an opportunity for political resistance against middle-class norms, as well as an occasion for creative self-expression—a chance to invent new models of domesticity rather than to adapt existing middle-class, heterosexual ones. Although Fraiman includes eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, her monograph ranges widely across literary-historical periods and genres, suggesting that there is ample opportunity for more targeted, deep drilling into relationships between domesticity, the working class, and queer desire in the literature of the nineteenth century.

4. Global Domesticity Heteronormative or not, all of the scholarship discussed thus far has limited the geographical range of the Victorian domestic primarily to England. However, global enactments of domesticity in the nineteenth century have changed assumptions about our understanding of both family relations in England and living arrangements in the colonies. Tracing this topic takes us back to second-wave feminism, when Gaytri Spivak’s now famous 1985 response to Gilbert and Gubar’s reading of Jane Eyre argued that Jane’s evolving agency and ultimate ascension to mistress of the house depends on her tacit internalization of an imperial ideology that oppresses the colonial subject in order for the white middle-class citizen to advance. Using Bertha Mason as a “figure produced by the axiomatics of imperialism” (896), Spivak argues that the depiction of Bertha as half-human is what allows Jane to triumph. Spivak’s vision of middle-class domesticity as allied with the brutality of imperialism inspired considerable scholarship throughout the 1990s and 2000s and continues to have repercussions today [on postcolonialism, see Banerjee’s chapter; on settler colonialism, see Wagner’s]. Investigations of the relationship between domesticity and empire in Victorian literature have tended to fall into two broad categories: work that focuses on imperial ideology within the English family, and work that examines the effect of exporting middle-class English domesticity out into the Empire. Suzanne Daly’s The Empire Inside: Indian Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels is an example of the first, an exploration of Victorian novels that reveals the middle-class absorption of imperial ideology through the acquisition of Indian commodities such as Indian cotton or tea in novels like Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters and Charlotte Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family (1865). By contrast, Diana Archibald’s Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel and Priya Joshi’s In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India belong to the second group. Archibald concentrates on Victorian fiction set in white settler colonies, arguing that the enactment of English domestic conventions undermines rather than supports white colonizers. Joshi focuses 444

Domesticity

on English novels that were consumed by Indian readers in the nineteenth century, exploring in particular how Indian readers tended to reject realist fiction in favor of more melodramatic forms of domestic representation. Whether taking up empire within family or family within empire, such scholarship still tends to focus primarily on Victorian novels, particularly by white, middle-class authors. Some of the most interesting work on domesticity and empire in recent years, however, moves away from recognizable examples to consider less well-known texts by writers with more direct knowledge of India. Shuchi Kapila’s Educating Seeta: The Anglo-Indian Family Romance and the Poetics of Indirect Rule, for example, explores interracial marriage in relation to colonial subjectivity by focusing on Anglo-Indian romances written by British colonials living in India during the system of colonial governance known as indirect rule. Kapila explores the memoirs, letters, histories, and fiction written by these authors to reveal that they persistently rewrote colonial relations in domestic terms, working through the complexities of British indirect rule through narratives of interracial romance. Kapila takes up writers such as Bithia Mary Croker, Maud Diver, and Flora Annie Steele to argue that narratives of interracial romance support a vision of imperial rule as ultimately benevolent. More recent scholarship has begun to attend to the canon of English fiction written in India and by Indian citizens. Sukanya Banerjee’s 2014 essay on the Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, whose novel Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) is considered the first Indian novel in English, explores the relationship between its story of conjugal fidelity, imperial ideology, and the transition to modernity in Indian literature; Banerjee’s focus, in other words, is the trajectory of Indian fiction, not the history of the Victorian novel. But her essay, which stresses the entanglement of English and Indian domestic fiction through a historical-literary context that includes the English Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, the English-named “Indian Mutiny” of 1857, and the rise of English sensation fiction, ultimately argues that mid-century domestic narratives are always mobile and transimperial, inviting a re-visioning of all Victorian domestic narratives. Banerjee’s reading of Rajmohan’s Wife reveals both the rewards and importance of working from the perspective of non-English, non-white writers. London has almost always been the focal point for studies of family, home, and marriage even in a collection of excellent and diverse essays such as Tamara Wagner’s Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature. But reconceiving of the nineteenth century as a subfield that is inherently global—without London as the imperial center from which all scholarly inquiry radiates out, and where Chatterjee could just as easily be the starting point for an investigation of nineteenth-century domesticity as Gaskell—gives scholars the opportunity to rethink traditional hierarchies of power and to reverse traditional assumptions about what literature deserves to be prioritized. Some of the most interesting work to revisit the chronological and geographical limits of domesticity in the nineteenth century has focused on the transatlantic circulation of narrative. Transatlanticism has come surprisingly late to Victorianists given that Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic was published as early as 1993. Indeed, in 2003, Sharon Marcus remarked that one of the biggest missing pieces in the subfield of Victorian studies was its “almost complete neglect of the United States,” a neglect she attributed to “the resistance to displacing Victorian England from the center of inquiry” (“Same Difference?” 682). Although not all of the recent transatlantic scholarship takes domesticity as its framing question, revisions to Victorian domestic narratives often play a central role in transatlantic reappraisals of Victorian texts. Joselyn Almeida’s Reimagining the Transatlantic, 1780–1890, Kimberly Snyder Manganelli’s Transatlantic Spectacles of Race: The Tragic Mulatta and the Tragic Muse, Monica Rico’s Nature’s Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West, and Jennifer Phegley’s, John Cyril Barton’s, and Kristin Huston’s collection of essays titled Transatlantic Sensations illuminate the rich possibilities inherent in recognizing transatlantic conversations, exchanges, and points of conflict in domestic literature. Both Daniel Hack’s Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature and Tricia Lootens’s The Political Poetess: Victorian Femininity, Race, and the Legacy of Separate Spheres in particular reveal the rewards that can be gained from an examination 445

Melissa Valiska Gregory

of the different meanings of femininity and home in the context of American slavery and AngloAmerican political relations.

5. Conclusion If studies of domesticity now have the potential to de-center the white, middle-class perspective of Victorian literature, then this scholarship has come a long way from the initial hostility toward domesticity in the 1970s. Moving from the studies of domestic power and agency in the Foucauldian 1980s, then through reconsiderations of family history, colonial, and global contexts in the 1990s, up to potential new trends in the present suggests that studies of domesticity can continue to enrich our understanding of Victorian literature and culture. In her engaging take on domesticity and print culture, for example, Maria Damkjær’s Time, Domesticity and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain redirects attention from space to time, arguing that writers such as Beeton, Dickens, Gaskell, and others often depicted the middle-class home as a safe haven from the accelerated temporality of modernity. Damkjær’s work invites additional studies of domesticity as a temporal construct, a focus that could easily lend itself either to a deeper dive into material domestic processes or—to take her idea in a much different direction—to the domestic temporality conveyed by poetic meter. Ivan Kreilkamp’s Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel revisits domesticity by way of animal studies, arguing that the novel, as a domestic form, is more responsible than other genres for establishing the centrality of the Victorian pet. By positioning the animal at the center of domesticity’s development of affective relations within the family, animal studies makes a strong case for the ongoing importance of complicating our vision of domesticity as either an ideology or a set of lived practices that coalesced around white, middle-class heteronormativity. Moving away from the middle class is potentially one of the most exciting possible developments in studies of domesticity. Strange’s book on Victorian fatherhood is one of the few scholarly works in recent memory that zeroes in on the working class, and there is ample room for additional studies of working-class domesticity, perhaps by directing our attention toward other literary genres. Kirstie Blair’s scholarship on poems by working-class authors in Victorian Scottish newspapers, for example, suggests that parental love was a common theme. Could a more dedicated investigation of workingclass poems on parenthood yield fresh insights into Victorian domesticity that look different from those we might gain from the novel? More broadly, how might a more concerted consideration of poetic genre in relation to domesticity illuminate new or different categories of domestic experience? The huge number of child elegies that were published throughout the period, for example, offer a surprisingly wide range of representations of parental grief; how might this genre inform our reading of child death in the novel or in actual families? My point is less concerned with the importance of bringing studies of domesticity into conversation with poetic genre and more interested in stressing the importance of considering domesticity in relation to multiple fields of inquiry. Domesticity is not a niche category but instead operates as a mode of thought that names familial and erotic relations, imperial and class interactions, and genre concerns. As I hope this chapter has suggested, the more that studies of domesticity come into contact with questions and methodologies from other fields, the more our understanding of Victorian domesticity as both ideology and lived practice evolves in exciting new ways.

Key Critical Works Nancy Armstrong. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Margaret Beetham. A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914. Leonore Davidoff, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. Elizabeth Langland. Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture.

446

Domesticity Sharon Marcus. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Mary Poovey. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Talia Schaffer. Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction.

Works Cited Ablow, Rachel. The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot. Stanford UP, 2007. Adams, James Eli. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity. Cornell UP, 1996. Almeida, Joselyn. Reimagining the Transatlantic, 1780–1890. Routledge, 2011. Archibald, Diana. Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel. Missouri UP, 2002. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford UP, 1987. Banerjee, Sukanya. Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire. Duke UP, 2010. ———. “Troubling Conjugal Loyalties: The First Indian Novel in English and the Transimperial Framework of Sensation.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 42, 2014, pp. 475–89. Beetham, Margaret. “Good Taste and Sweet Ordering: Dining with Mrs. Beeton.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 36, no. 2, 2008, pp. 391–406. ———. “How I Came to Write A Magazine of Her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 50, no. 1, 2017, pp. 238–43. ———. A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914. Routledge, 1996. ———. “Of Recipe Books and Reading in the Nineteenth Century: Mrs. Beeton and Her Cultural Consequences.” The Recipe Reader: Narratives, Contexts, Traditions, edited by Janet Floyd and Laurel Foster, Ashgate, 2003. pp. 15–30. Blair, Kirstie. “‘A Very Poetical Town’: Newspaper Poetry and the Working-Class Poet in Victorian Dundee.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 52, no. 1, 2014, pp. 89–109. Cohen, Deborah. Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions. Yale UP, 2006. Corbett, Mary Jean. Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf. Cornell UP, 2008. Daly, Suzanne. The Empire Inside: Indian Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels. U of Michigan P, 2011. Damkjær, Maria. Time, Domesticity and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. U of Chicago P, 1987. Dau, Duc, and Shale Preseton. Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature. Routledge, 2015. Flanders, Judith. The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed. Harper, 2004. Fraiman, Susan. Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins. Columbia UP, 2017. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. “Introduction to the Second Edition: The Madwoman in the Academy.” The Madwoman in the Attic, 2nd ed. Yale UP, 1984, pp. xv–xlvi. ———. The Madwoman in the Attic. Yale UP, 1979. Goldhill, Simon. A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain. U of Chicago P, 2016. Hack, Daniel. Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature. Princeton UP, 2017. Hamlett, Jane. Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910. Manchester UP, 2010. Harris, Katherine. Forget Me Not: The Rise of the British Literary Annual, 1823–1835. Ohio State UP, 2015. Hughes, Kathryn. The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton. Knopf, 2006. Joshi, Priya. In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India. Columbia UP, 2002. Kapila, Shuchi. Educating Seeta: The Anglo-Indian Family Romance and the Poetics of Indirect Rule. Ohio State UP, 2010. Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855–1875. Ohio State UP, 2011. Kreilkamp, Ivan. Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel. U of Chicago P, 2018. Langland, Elizabeth. Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture. Cornell UP, 1995. Ledbetter, Kathryn. British Victorian Women’s Periodicals: Beauty, Civilization, and Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Logan, Thad. The Victorian Parlor: A Cultural Study. Cambridge UP, 2001. Lootens, Tricia. Victorian Femininity, Race, and the Legacy of Separate Spheres. Princeton UP, 2017. MacDonald, Tara. The New Man, Masculinity, and Marriage in the Victorian Novel. Pickering and Chatto, 2015. Manganelli, Kimberly Snyder. Transatlantic Spectacles of Race: The Tragic Mulatta and the Tragic Muse. Rutgers UP, 2012. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton UP, 2007.

447

Melissa Valiska Gregory ———. “Same Difference? Transnationalism, Comparative Literature, and Victorian Studies.” Victorian Studies, vol. 45, no. 4, 2003, pp. 677–86. McKeon, Michael. The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge. Johns Hopkins UP, 2005. Michie, Helena. Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal. Cambridge UP, 2002. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women: The Great Writers. Doubleday, 1976. Nelson, Claudia. Invisible Men: Fatherhood in Victorian Periodicals. U of Georgia P, 1995. Phegley, Jennifer. Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and Culture Health of the Nation. Ohio State UP, 2004. Phegley, Jennifer, John Cyril Barton, and Kristin Huston, editors. Transatlantic Sensations. Ashgate, 2012. Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. U of Chicago P, 1988. Prins, Yopie. Victorian Sappho. Princeton UP, 1999. Rico, Monica. Nature’s Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West. Yale UP, 2013. Sanders, Valerie. The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood. Cambridge UP, 2009. Schaffer, Talia. Novel Craft:Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Oxford UP, 2011. ———. Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction. Oxford UP, 2016. Sedgwick, Eve. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia UP, 1985. Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Writers from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton UP, 1978. Spivak, Gayatri Chakrovorty. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” 1985. Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, Rutgers, 1997, pp. 896–912. Strange, Marie. Fatherhood, Attachment and the British Working Class, c. 1865–1914. Cambridge UP, 2015. Sussman, Herbert. Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art. Cambridge UP, 2008. Tange, Andrea Kaston. Architectural Identities: Domesticity, Literature, and the Victorian Middle Classes. U of Toronto P, 2010. Tate, Carolyn. “Lesbian Incest as Queer Kinship: Michael Field and the Erotic Middle-Class Victorian Family.” Victorian Review, vol. 39, no. 2, 2013, pp. 181–99. Tosh, John. A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. Yale UP, 1999. Wagner, Tamara. Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Routledge, 2011. Wiener, Martin. Men of Blood:Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England. Cambridge UP, 2006. Wilson, Nicola. Home in British Working-Class Fiction. Ashgate, 2015.

448

39 REGIONALISM AND PROVINCIALISM Where Is the Local? Mary Ellis Gibson

Leafing through Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap-Book in 1836, a reader would find herself drifting hither and yon, from Ambleside in Cumbria to Linmouth in Devon, from the Coleraine Salmon Leap in Ulster, to Niagara and Montmorency Falls in the Canadian provinces, and then to the ruins of the Taj Mahal and Bombay harbor. The Scrap-Book combined outtakes from the publisher’s stock of engravings with poems by its famous editor, Letitia Landon. Between its covers, the publication enacts the larger cultural and ideological processes that created an important narrative about the “provincial” in Victorian Britain. The “provincial” maps first onto the edges of England, seen from a metropolitan (or London and the Home Counties) perspective, and then onto the British Isles and beyond. It is predominantly rural in character and picturesque in representation. The physical text and even the volume’s name, the Drawing Room Scrap-Book, indicate, too, that this version of the provincial is not only metro-centric but middle-class. The allusion to the drawing room itself, along with the size and elaborate cover of the volume, clearly indicated to its readers that it was priced beyond the reach of the working classes and was designed for parlor tables. This provincial/metropolitan binary provides the basis for understanding a canon of provincialism—running from Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (beginning serially in 1821), to novels by Emily Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell in the 1840s, to George Eliot’s work of the 1870s, to 1890s novels by Thomas Hardy. Victorians also had a different if overlapping understanding of the provincial and later of the term “regional,” an understanding that went beyond the rural picturesque. The provincial could also be defined by differences from the metropole as represented in urban locations beyond London, by customs as expressed in regional dialects, and by a Britain made up of four nations—Scotland, England, Ireland, and Wales. These understandings of region and province were exported, adapted to, and sometimes rejected in the larger empire. Who speaks to whom, where, and in what dialect became key questions in the representations of the cultural differences that constituted provincialism and regionalism. Where then is the provincial and when and for whom? Is “provincialism” fully attached to particular spaces or places, or does the word gesture toward class position and access to cultural capital? And how is the provincial tied to both the vernacular and the empire? In addressing these questions, I follow scholars of working-class writing in turning the provincial inside out, by pointing first to the provincial as an ideological construction of the metropole rather than a place or space or set of social practices in itself. The provincial usually operates in an implicit—and sometimes explicit— binary with the metropolitan, which is not to deny the specificity of the writing that emerges from or attempts to represent the local, be it urban or rural. 449

Mary Ellis Gibson

In pursuing provincialism and regionalism in the interlocking frameworks of empire, internal colonialism (four nations), and regions of England, and by attending to the specificities of the local, we can see how attachments to place are mobilized for political and aesthetic ends. An emphasis on local specificity suggests ways to destabilize the binaries of province/metropole or rural/urban; the local is a combination of material and cultural practices which both persist and shift on the ground, in memory, and in representation. If we think of the local as an intersection of material conditions (geography, landscapes, economies), lifeways, and vernaculars, then the provincial can be seen either to emerge from (and remain grounded in) the local, or to be partially portable. My thinking about the local and the provincial relies on Raymond Williams’s foundational The Country and the City, Elizabeth Helsinger’s Rural Scenes and National Representation, and Alison Booth’s Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers’ Shrines and Countries. James Buzard’s Disorienting Fiction and John Plotz’s Portable Property have emphasized the cultural dislocation implicit in the construction of the provincial.1 At the same time, scholarship on the provincial press and working-class writing, such as Andrew Hobbs’s A Fleet Street in Every Town, provides an antithetical corrective, starting from and maintaining the perspective of the local. The defense of the local and of working-class voices provides another view of the provinces. I turn first to definitions of the provincial and then focus on that which persists in the local and also circulates it: the provincial press, vernacular differences, dialect poetry, and periodical circulation across the empire.

1. Contending Definitions and Material Conditions Although an intersectional and perspectival approach to the provincial is possible, such analytical mobility is scarcely characteristic of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century approaches to the subject. Two major reference points in the discussion of British provincialism are the views of Matthew Arnold and E.M. Forster. Arnold famously inveighed against English provincialism in the “Literary Influence of Academies.” He argued against English provincialism root and branch, finding even London too provincial. “The less a literature has felt the influence of a supposed center of correct information, correct judgment, correct taste,” Arnold intoned, “the more we shall find in it this note of provinciality.” The provincial, Arnold said, was “caused by remoteness from a center of correct information” and “correct taste” (31–58). For Arnold, London need not remain provincial, but rather must become cosmopolitan—leaving behind the ragged edges of dialect and local specificity. Some half century later, in Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster largely agreed with Arnold. Though admitting that it would be priggish to complain of Daniel Defoe as “cockneyfied” or Thomas Hardy as “countrified,” nonetheless Forster decried British critics’ provincialism. Critics, he argued, were inclined to make much of little. They mistook “tiny mansions” for grand edifices. Ostensibly “at random,” Forster lamented critics’ praise for four of these “tiny mansions”: Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853), and George Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859). Only provinciality, Forster argued, could induce a critic to overrate such novels (26). Not coincidentally, Scott’s novel is set in Edinburgh, Brontë’s in Yorkshire, and Gaskell’s in Cheshire; Meredith was of Welsh stock. Forster’s tiny mansions, then, were built by the Welsh, the Scots, and two women from the north. For Arnold and Forster, the provincial is small, inferior, ignorant; it speaks an unfamiliar language and explores unimportant or unacknowledged history. “Provincialism” and “provinciality,” then, can be reduced to taunts developed from the metropole and directed toward the provinces. But it need not be only that. The Oxford English Dictionary charts the meanings of “provincial” as first pertaining to religious or civil provinces (ecclesiastical or Roman) and then to administrative divisions especially of British colonies; thirdly, the provincial is simply local, rather than national. Only then does the OED acknowledge the Arnoldian version of the provincial: lacking “the culture or polish of the capital.” 450

Regionalism and Provincialism

On the other hand, “regionalism,” the second and less potentially pejorative term addressed in this chapter, is defined in the OED in a more neutral way than “provincialism” and, in general use, is of much later birth. The OED circularly defines regionalism as tending to “regional” methods; it lists the term’s first use in 1881. “Regionalism” as a practical term evolved in a discussion of Italian unification and from what we might call the science and sociology of planning, whether governmental/ administrative planning or agricultural policy. Google Ngrams indicate a steady but growing use of the term “provincialism” between the mid-1830s and the 1860s, with a rapid increase in use after 1870 and particularly between 1880 and 1905. The “provincial” spiked in the 1830s, not surprisingly given the importance of the provincial press in the run up to the Reform Bill of 1832 (Lopatin 337). “Regionalism,” by contrast, was seldom used before the 1890s and spiked at about 1905–06. Examining the ideological valences of these definitions in Keywords, Raymond Williams pointed out that, like the word “dialect,” “regional” can be used to indicate subordinate and inferior places and practices, though it may also have a more positive valence than the “provincial.” “It is interesting,” Williams writes, “in these terms, to see how far out in England it is necessary to go before regional and provincial appear to begin” (266). As Williams points out, a novel set in Cornwall or Cumbria is regional—a novel set in the Home Counties is not (266). Distinctions between regionalism and provincialism have, since the 1970s, been adapted to analysis of the Victorian novel, despite the fact that, as Williams’s definitions imply, such distinctions are problematic. Contesting this distinction, Josephine McDonagh argues that provincial and regional novels cannot be so easily differentiated from each other. She takes Ian Duncan’s and Franco Moretti’s work as representative of this distinction and argues against Duncan’s contention that the provincial novel tends to be ignorant of the global, while the regional novel is open to exploring the local in global contexts. McDonagh points out, for example, that Gaskell’s Cranford, despite Morettis’s view, is not willfully impervious to, but rather connected to, the global or the larger world (400–1). The provincial in the nineteenth century and the regional from the late nineteenth century onward are thus created in a shifting set of intersecting binaries. The local, the provincial, and the regional are variously understood in contrast to the metropolitan, the cosmopolitan, and the global. Contrasting the regional to the provincial and applying these terms differentially to particular literary works appeals to an implicit aesthetic judgment—between major and minor literature for instance—that remains remarkably persistent in discussions of the provincial, despite recent critiques of major/minor distinctions. Instead of recapitulating the prejudices implicit in the terms, recasting the provincial as the networked local—locality + globality—would open further opportunities for research. That is, a notion of the networked local (rather than the local as isolated and picturesque) might capture the complex relationships of local and global in a century that saw the rapid expansion of the British empire—an expansion made possible by, though it was not largely financed by, people from the provinces [on global economics, see Rajan; on settler colonialism, see Wagner]. Likewise, the networked local would allow us to rethink the terms of (metropolitan) cosmopolitanism. It could provide a further context, for example, for Amanda Anderson’s discussion of Arnold’s “disinterested” cosmopolitanism and what James Buzard calls George Eliot’s conflicted cosmopolitanism. Although they may be subtler than Forster’s derision, conflicted cosmopolitanism and liberal disinterestedness might be viewed as, likewise, metropolitan perspectives on the non-metropolitan or provincial. Reponses to Eliot’s novels call into sharp relief the complex claims of province, region, and metropolitan or cosmopolitan sensibilities. Buzard, for example, describes Eliot’s work as metropolitan autoethnography, in which the narrator (and many characters) are constructed as insider outsiders. Eliot’s narrative voice speaks to “the shape of the culture,” and yet the novel is insistently positioned as outside “a particular inside” (Disorienting Fiction 12). The concept of metropolitan autoethnography allows Buzard to read Dickens’s and Eliot’s novels as distinct “from the putatively unsituated outsideness of theory or cosmopolitanism as conventionally represented” (12). Buzard captures the productive tension between the cosmopolitan and the provincial when he characterizes Eliot as “a 451

Mary Ellis Gibson

cosmopolitan intellectual” with “a strong anticosmopolitan streak,” deriving from her own childhood and from a Romantic “belief in the morally grounding force of rural childhood locales” (Buzard, “How George Eliot Works,” 147). The distance that Amanda Anderson describes as key to liberal cosmopolitanism, including Arnold’s, is for Eliot an uneasy compromise. Distance, in Eliot’s case is both spatial (the country seen from an implicitly metropolitan perspective) and temporal (the provincial is the past). Raymond Williams argued in The Country and the City that “knowable community” (that which in Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch could be described as the provincial) for Eliot belonged “ideally in the past”: “value is in the past, as a general retrospective condition, and is in the present only as a particular and private sensibility, the individual moral action” (Williams 180) [on liberalism and citizenship, see Small’s chapter]. In contrast to Eliot’s fears about deracination, for Arnold dislocation itself is a kind of groundless first principle underlying a conflicted cosmopolitanism. For Arnold, as Amanda Anderson has shown, cosmopolitanism—and the rejection of the provincial—was as problematic as it was for Eliot, but the conflicts within Arnold’s cosmopolitanism were resolved in a different way. Anderson argues that for Arnold cosmopolitanism and the powers of detachment are problematically linked to ethos; consequently the best and most ethical vantage for understanding culture, nation, or society for Arnold is, ultimately, the Olympian view. Arguing in favor of cosmopolitanism, Arnold opposed provinciality to totality (Anderson 108–11). As Anderson notes in passing, citing Robert Young’s postcolonial reading of Arnold, Arnold “never attributes insight to the distancing effects of class difference, but only to international or intercultural viewpoints” (111). Local dialects or usages would, by definition, be provincial in Arnold’s negative sense of the word. I would argue, then, that Arnold moves fully away from knowable community and even from the local itself. Anderson concludes that Arnold’s individualism means that he cannot construe “social interaction in concrete terms” (118). This problematic, I would argue, also underlies Arnold’s poetic practice. He cannot, for instance, enter a meaningful conversation with Wordsworth’s nature or the addressees of his poems despite their shared provincial place (Ambleside) or personal situation (Victorian domesticity). In much of Arnold’s poetry, the local or provincial or even the rural picturesque disappears into allegory as seen from an Olympian height [on poetry, see Chapman’s chapter]. When we come down from Olympus and return to the networked local or to the local within the global, however, the view is distinctly different from Arnold’s or Forster’s. Here we find provincial people going about their provincial—and national and global—business. We find the provincial being created and recreated through the circulation of print and the conversational dynamics of dialect.

2. The Provinces, the Provincial Press, and the Circulation of Print If we turn from the definitional challenges of the provincial, the regional, the metropolitan, and the cosmopolitan to the practices of print culture broadly understood, we can move away from a normative understanding of the provincial and toward a multi-variable approach that focuses on representations of local dialects, customs or lifeways, and material circumstances. The provincial press was central to the articulation of what the provincial might mean in the nineteenth century. McDonagh shows that the provincial was “produced out of the print culture of newspapers and magazines rather than exclusively via book production” (401). She reminds us that the “national press, fully configured in the way that we think of it today, was not established until the end of the century. Although London newspapers such as The Times, for example, had always circulated nationally, they nevertheless were London papers, rather than records of national and international news” (McDonagh, 403; Brown 32). The press, as McDonagh and Hobbes have shown, grew rapidly across the country in the course of the century, and the local press was crucial to political, social, and economic life. The Provincial Newspaper Society was established in 1836 (McDonagh 403). Some five years later a similar understanding of the provincial was explicit in the decision of the College of Surgeons (in London) to recognize ten provincial schools of medicine (in addition to the ancient Scottish 452

Regionalism and Provincialism

universities). Alongside the recognition of these schools in Newcastle-on-Tyne, Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, York, Birmingham, Hull, and Nottingham, the College founded the Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal (1841) to serve provincial needs and create a network of communication among them [on serialization, see Bernstein’s chapter; on periodical studies, see Hughes’s]. Even earlier, the provincial press had a key role in creating a public sphere across the country (Lopatin, 338). It published and recirculated news, advertising, fiction, and poetry. These networks of circulation meant that at mid-century the provinces—towns beyond the capital—formed a “diffuse and uneven geography of power and affiliation” connected “to networks of communication that extended throughout and beyond national boundaries” (McDonagh, 403–4). The provincial press was key in circulating rural “scenes” or sketches in prose and poetry, as well as dialect writing about both town and country. Thus, the provincial was described and produced in the provincial press, as well as reproduced and recirculated both in the metropole and in the Anglophone press of the empire. The provincial press was a product and a producer of commerce and governance in new cities, old market towns, and the countryside; but it also created unevenly shared spaces in which national, regional, class, and gender differences might be negotiated. Andrew Hobbs’s A Fleet Street in Every Town is an indispensable treatment of these negotiations. Examining the provincial press and in a case study of Preston, Hobbs shows how local or provincial newspapers “shaped popular understandings of politics, poetry, government (local and central), citizenship, fiction, and history” (4). Newly digitized archives are now creating easy access to much of the provincial press, to literary annuals, and to nationally and globally circulated periodicals; these archives are yielding a trove of unsuspected provincial and regional writing. Scholarly projects to regionally identify provincial “scenes,” “sketches,” and local poems and to follow their circulation can now begin to put the understanding of provincial writing in the nineteenth century on its proper footing. Both Ryan Cordell’s and Natalie Houston’s work traces the paths of provincial publishing and recirculation. Cordell and David Smith’s Viral Texts project maps reprinting as circulation across the century, while Houston’s The Field of Victorian Poetry 1840–1900 project (summarized in Virtual Victorians) traces multiple links among metropolitan and provincial publication of poetry. Victorian writers of all sorts participated in these networks. For instance, in 1861 one Joseph Hatton published his Provincial Papers: Being a Collection of Tales and Sketches, which was printed at the Mirror newspaper office in Bristol. The printer was likely located in the shop of the local paper, which was published from 1811 to 1864 as the Bristol Mirror (see British Newspaper Archive). One can easily imagine Hatton’s volume being primarily intended for local—that is provincial—consumption. The author’s note to his readers makes clear, however, that his sketches were well traveled, circulating in the local and global networks of the provincial press: Some of the papers forming this volume have previously appeared in print, and led a vagabond sort of existence, under a variety of guises, in the miscellaneous columns of newspapers, travelling in more than one instance to our colonies, and coming back to me in Cape of Good Hope and Australian mail bags. Others have enjoyed a more limited circulation: these I have fitted with new clothing (some with fresh titles) for longer journeyings. (vi) Although the rise of Victorian provincial writing was dependent upon the circulation of local “scenes” like Hatton’s and local poetry in the provincial press, it also depended upon further national circulation. Local newspapers along with periodicals published in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh circulated in the colonies, where “scenes” were thus reproduced in radically different environments. Indeed, the rural “scene” and the provincial “sketch” were used as nearly interchangeable generic markers, though the scene typically indicated the visual and the picturesque while the sketch tended to be used to mark brief tales of interactions among provincial people. 453

Mary Ellis Gibson

Among the most popular products of provinciality were sketches constituting Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1824–32) which first appeared in the Lady’s Magazine. Mitford’s Village was highly influential. As Alison Booth has shown in Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers’ Shrines and Countries, Mitford was scarcely alone in publishing sketches of provincial life. Having paid attention to Cobbett’s Rural Rides, Washington Irving’s Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, and Charles Lamb’s essays, Mitford developed her own English provincial sketches which in turn influenced the periodical publications of William and Mary Howitt, Samuel Carter, and Anna Maria Hall among others (Booth 90). Howitt edited the literary annual The Amulet, and similar provincial fare furnished other annuals too, both domestic and foreign, many of which were exported to the colonies (or those other ‘provinces’). Landon’s friend Emma Roberts, for example, had it both ways. She published English provincial sketches in the Calcutta Literary Gazette and Monthly Magazine and in her own Calcutta newspaper the Oriental Observer; simultaneously, she published sketches of Anglo-Indian domestic life in London periodicals (Gibson, “The News from India”). When she collected her Indian writings, Roberts included in her title both generic markers of this new discourse—“scenes” and “sketches”: she called her three-volume collection Scenes and Characteristics of Hindustan, with Sketches of Anglo-Indian Society. As the circulation of Fisher’s Scrap-Book makes clear, the provincial was also created through engraving technology and antiquarian researches. Walter Scott and his Edinburgh publisher Robert Cadell brought out in parts and then in two volumes the Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland (1818–25), with the letterpress by Scott designed as “illustrative” of the engravings. Engravings for William Daniell’s magisterial Voyage around Great Britain included 308 aquatints resulting from his years of sketching the coast of Britain, including Scotland and Wales. Published by Longman in London in eight volumes between 1814 and 1825, Daniell too owed local knowledge and letterpress to Scott. Such engravings, and Daniell’s earlier collaborative work with his uncle Thomas Daniell in India, created an extended sense of what might be meant by the provincial and shaped the market for engravings with accompanying text for decades to come. It is only apparently a paradox that the decades marking the prominence of provincial writing were also the decades marked by the expansion of empire and the tipping point in population movement from rural to urban in the British Isles. Based on census data, R. Lawton has shown that much population growth in cities in England and Wales in the first half of the century was “initially promoted by migration from rural areas” (195). Urban population growth was later self-sustaining, but “the increasing proportion of Englishmen who were town-dwellers also pointed to the draining of population from the countryside” (195). According to Lawton’s calculations, the census of 1851 represented the moment when Britain’s urban population was greater than its rural population, at just over 50%. By 1891, fully 72% of Britons were urban dwellers. The peak of Britain’s rural population during the nineteenth century in absolute numbers occurred in 1861, at 9.1 million. By 1901, that number had decreased to 7.5 million, while the urban population had climbed to 25.1 million. Thus, rural depopulation occurred both absolutely and still more markedly in relative terms in the second half of the century. The provincial press itself throve in a country that was becoming increasingly urban; it was read by those who migrated from the country to the city and by those who were first generation internal migrants, and it penetrated the empire as well (Wales, 115–17). Moreover, as Katie Wales has shown, much northern rural-to-urban migration (with the exception of port cities such as Liverpool) occurred within fairly narrow geographical ranges; therefore, a considerable degree of linguistic stability of regional dialect was maintained, particularly in Lancashire, in the course of industrialization.

3. Provincialism and Dialects From rural to urban; from Highland to Lowland; from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland to England; and from them all into the reaches of a global empire: migrations were the matrix for defining and sometimes for disparaging various provincialisms. These movements also intensified the nineteenth-century 454

Regionalism and Provincialism

concern with dialects. Dialects mark distances from the metropole, but also class differences and geographical/social mobility within the provinces. Hobbs’s treatment of class, dialect, and locality identifies these complexities (301–26). Dialects shift not only their forms but their meanings as they mark the movement of peoples from the rural to the urban and the urban to the metropolitan. The social valence of dialects then also shifts as texts circulate locally, nationally, and globally. To think of the regional or the provincial without taking dialect into account is to relegate nonmetropolitan and non-elite language to an implicit second-class status. It also means that, for students of Victorian literature, the dialect sequences in Victorian novels may come to stand for dialect in all its various uses. Dialect sequences, especially in novels by Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Thomas Hardy do contribute strongly to the sense of regional variation within the received canon. In British literature, as in nineteenth-century American literature, dialect may serve as a marker of local color and of regional authenticity; it may be charming or amusing. Yet such authenticity can, from a metropolitan perspective, also measure a gulf between social classes or geographical regions. Though, for instance, dialect in Walter Scott’s novels measured a kind of Scottish authenticity, when Scott’s friend and fellow poet John Leyden arrived in India he was admonished by another Scot, John Malcolm: “For God’s sake, learn a little English” (qtd. in Scott, “Memoir,” xli). When success equals fluency in received pronunciation, authenticity may be less important than conformity. Thus dialect has multiple valences, even as it marks provinciality. A wider consideration of poetry published both in book form and in the provincial press makes for a richer understanding of the varieties of nineteenth-century English than can be afforded by the novel only. Perhaps the most succinct and refreshingly polemical treatment of Victorian dialects and canon formation is T.L. Burton and K.K. Ruthven’s “Dialect Poetry, William Barnes and the Literary Canon.” Burton and Ruthven trace the irony that dialect poetry is still largely absent from the canon despite the fact that “the nineteenth century was the golden age of English dialectology, thanks to an English Dialect Society which by 1896 had published 76 books on regional speech” (310). Burton and Ruthven argue that “regional speech” is acceptable in Victorian canonical writing “only when restricted to working-class characters and embedded in a standard English narrative, as the Yorkshire dialect is in . . . Wuthering Heights (1847) or the North Staffordshire and Derbyshire dialects are in . . . Adam Bede (1858).” They acknowledge that a focus on history from below and on poetry of the laboring classes has allowed more space for linguistic variation and has provided contexts in which to understand writing in nonstandard (or other than polite) English. Burton and Ruthven point to work by E.P. Thompson, Martha Vicinus, Donna Landry, William Christmas, Brian Hollingsworth, and Brian Maidment which has made available a wide range of nineteenth-century dialect and laboringclass poetry (not always the same thing, especially as many or even most texts by laboring-class poets are not in written dialect). I would add Kirstie Blair’s work to this list. Burton and Ruthven argue that nineteenth-century dialect writing should renew the canon “from the margins,” in much the same way that postcolonial writers in English and postcolonial critics championed the rich and multiple uses of English. Nineteenth-century scholars of dialects tended to focus on the antiquarian and the rural while underestimating the continuing importance of oral performance and recitation in dialect verse and song. But as Wales, Burton and Ruthven, and Hobbs have pointed out, oracy was not killed by literacy, nor dialect by urbanization.2 The investment of the upwardly mobile laboring and middle classes in standard English did not kill dialect. Rather, nonstandard varieties of English were “living speech used by both working and middle classes” (Wales 128). Wales focuses on Northern English, but much the same could be said for other rural locations and newly enlarged towns. Wales cites the “vibrant body of literature, and later the music hall to which it is related” as making more conscious than before, rather than diminishing, regional identities and differences. Dialects, she reminds us, are not dead but rather are markers of identity often cherished by those who speak them. In addition, the late-century revival of Scots and Irish Gaelic and of Welsh also marks identitarian politics and an explicit argument 455

Mary Ellis Gibson

for the virtues of the regional, the provincial, or the internal colony in countering or supplementing metropolitan power and cosmopolitan ideals.3 We might take as brief examples of how dialects serve as identity markers Edwin Waugh from Rochdale in Lancashire, William Barnes from Dorset, and, to engage with the fully canonical as well as the “regional,” Alfred Tennyson from Lincolnshire. As Taryn Hakala argues, the disappearance from the canon of Lancashire writers—such as Ben Brierley, whose best work is in prose, and the variety of Lancastrian dialect poets—“demonstrates not only the loss of interest in regionalism but also a substantial narrowing of our literary canon” (396). Both Brierley and the most significant of Lancashire dialect poets, Edwin Waugh, wrote in Lancashire and Standard English dialects, though it would appear that Waugh never orally adopted the “metropolitan standard accent” (396). Brierley’s and Waugh’s working-class commitments to self-improvement and their authenticity as Lancastrians were enacted in their ability to move within a complex linguistic repertoire. Often called the Burns of Lancashire, Waugh like Burns linked his dialect poetry to song. He often indicates an appropriate tune along with a poem’s title. His poem “Heigh, Lads, Heigh!” is a fair example; in five stanzas, the poet describes a young man elated and then rejected by love. Although he does not suggest a tune for “Heigh, Lads, Heigh!,” his refrain indicates the poem’s suitability to song: Oh, I’re fidgin’ fain to drop my wark When gloamin’ shades coom softly down; An’ off I went, at th’ edge o’ dark, To th’ bonniest lass i’ Rachda’ town. I’re i’ sich a flutter to tak the gate That I’d hardly time to tee my shoon; For my heart beat wild, with love elate, An’ my tinglin’ feet kept time to th’ tune. Sing heigh, lads, heigh; sing ho, lads, ho; What’s to betide us who can know? Like the fickle lover in this poem, Waugh himself hailed from Rochdale, or Rachda’. Those who knew Lancashire intimately felt they could place his language with great specificity. William Barnes, the Dorset poet, interestingly prefaced his late edition of poems by calling them “sketches.” He has created a “key to the meanings of the verse,” he indicates, “by appending a list of Dorset words “with some hints on Dorset word shapes,” with further learned hints from Grimm’s law pertaining to vowel shifts. In this sense, Barnes was creating not autoethnography as Buzard says Eliot did, but what we might call auto-philology. The learned and the colloquial combine in Barnes’s poem. For instance, “Eclogue: The Common A-Took In” is subtitled “Thomas an’ John.” It draws on the long-standing dialogue tradition in ballads, even as its title evokes literary antecedents. Barnes addresses the latest wave of agricultural enclosure of common land when he has his questioner Thomas uncover his friend John’s plight. John has been forced to sell his stock. At the moment, he can put a loaf on his shelf, but soon, thanks to enclosure, he will be driven to the workhouse: No; they do meän to teäke the moor in, I do hear, An’ ’twill be soon begun upon; Zoo I must zell my bit o’ stock to-year. Because they woon’t have any groun’ to run upon. Barnes’s most famous poem, “Come Whoam to Thy Childer and Me,” as Kirstie Blair shows, fostered “a notion of sentimental working-class domesticity that was to prove hugely influential on the dialect 456

Regionalism and Provincialism

tradition”; it “neatly plays upon the strain of tragic temperance ballads, in which the family is abandoned to drink” (283). We see a similar strain even in Tennyson’s dialect poems. Situating Tennyson among Victorian working-class poets, Blair outlines Tennyson’s familiarity with both Barnes and the Lancashire poets. She reviews his dialect works to show that these poems function “rather as translations of this tradition for a higher-class audience than an organic part of it” (285). Blair cites Tennyson’s “The Northern Cobbler” for its pleasure in dialect, though she differentiates its subject, the drunken and reformed cobbler, from Tennyson’s more usual prosperous farmers. The cobbler, now a teetotaler, describes his escape from drink. He recapitulates key tropes from the ballad tradition, including the narration of his downfall and redemption: That Sally she turn’d a tongue-banger, an’ rated ma, ‘Sottin’ thy braiäns Guzzlin’ an’ soäkin’ an’ smoäkin’ and hawmin’ about I’ the laäms. Soä sow-droonk that tha doesn not touch thy ‘at to the Squire;” An’ I looök’d cock-yed at my noäse an’ I seeäd ‘im a-gittin’ o’ fire; But sin’ I wur hallus i’ liquor an’ hallus as droonk as a king, Foälks’ coostom flitted away like a kite wi’ a broken string. (Tennyson, III: 41) Before his redemption, the cobbler drives his family into poverty. Tennyson’s rhymes neatly capture the social gradations the poem both takes for granted and reinforces. Tennyson wrote just a dozen and a half such dialect poems. But the importance of the provincial for Tennyson extended well beyond these. Patrick Scott has detailed Tennyson’s ambivalence about—and dislocation from—his own provincial Lincolnshire beginnings, a dislocation which I take as typical of writers with metropolitan ambitions (George Eliot’s conflicted cosmopolitanism would be the obverse of Tennyson’s dislocation). Tennyson retained his Lincolnshire accent all his life and married a Lincolnshire woman, but Scott argues that Tennyson’s uprootedness still more than his attachments spoke to his generation. Scott anatomizes Victorian notions of provinciality and the Arnoldian posited transcendence of provinciality through culture, reading In Memoriam in terms of provincial awkwardness. Scott shows that Tennyson never achieves (or entirely wished to achieve) a Romantic sense of belonging in landscape; nor, on the other hand, did he achieve Arnoldian transcendence of the provincial. Tennyson’s “geographic center” was always conflicted: [T]he dissemination of value from the known landscapes of his youth to the dispersed sites of his adult experience left him not with a new idealist confidence [about place] or modernist cosmopolitanism, but awkwardly self-conscious about the roots of his adult identity. (Scott 48) In its treatment of human dislocation, uprootedness, and geological and evolutionary instability, Tennyson’s awkward provinciality was at the root of In Memoriam’s cultural power. Dislocation, from rural to urban, from urban to metropole, from Britain to the colonies, from a putatively stable to a radically unstable religious and geological landscape was the Victorian condition.

4. The Provincial, Four Nations, and the Empire Despite mentioning Edwin Waugh as the “Lancashire Burns,” I have thus far largely ignored the world beyond the borders of England. Yet Raymond Williams was right to ask how far from London one must go to be provincial or regional. Once one enters the borders of Wales or Scotland or crosses the Irish Sea, regions have regions—the Lowlands, the Highlands, the islands, the West of Ireland, Snowdonia. These regions have multiple dialects in different languages. Scotland, moreover, has its 457

Mary Ellis Gibson

own capital which serves both as a northern metropole and a center for publishers with national as well as regional distributions. The contours of belletristic writing in all three regions have been shaped significantly by the Romantic ballad revival, the national tale (especially John Galt and Walter Scott), the Celtic revival, and the proliferation of antiquarian researches. A “four nations” approach to literary history suggests reframing virtually the entirety of this essay. To do so I would need to reconceive that which is potentially provincial within differing nationalist frameworks for Ireland and Scotland. For instance, Forster’s “tiny mansion”—that is Scott’s Heart of Midlothian (and the wildly popular Waverley novels that preceded it)—did the considerable work of creating a nation within the nation, in part by evoking distinctive linguistic and physical geographies of Scotland. Ian Duncan and Katie Trumpener have done similar work for these Romantic-era texts, which could be extended to readings of Victorian fiction and poetry. A consideration of the regional or provincial, then, that refuses a London-centric understanding of space and time, would admit geographies and histories of the nations constituting Britain in the nineteenth century. If we take the provincial in an even broader framework than four nations and consider writing in the empire, it becomes evident that regional, provincial, and linguistic differences are portable, vigorously reproduced, and paradoxically disavowed. For instance, Alexander McLachlan, much influenced by Glasgow laboring-class radicalism, on his emigration to Canada praised the “Anglo-Saxon” colonist (“He’s ruler in the end”) and yet lamented, in dialect, his longing for Scotland: “Oh, why did I leave thee and wander awa’/Frae the hame o’ my childhood, Gleniffer an’ a’?” (Gerson and Davies 94, 98). Perhaps the best treatment of this kind of code switching—the creation of dialect song as a unison for identity—appears in Jason Rudy’s Imagined Homelands. Rudy shows that, for such writers as Thomas Pringle, arriving in South Africa from Scotland, “‘Scottish culture’ becomes roughly homogenized abroad, allowing for a sense of collectivity among Scots emigrants” (80). Any putative British identity for those not claiming to be English would have been cross-cut both with local and provincial identifications and with identifications of oneself as Scottish (or Irish or Welsh). Schooling would have played an important part in this complex export of identifications. In Calcutta, for instance, the nineteenth-century schoolmasters David Drummond and David Hare hailed from the lowlands of Scotland, and their Indian and mixed-race students would have grown up under their tutelage with broad Scots in their ears and a literary and historical canon replete with texts from the Scottish Enlightenment.4 This export of the Scottish local or provincial was not limited to the British born. Take for example Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, son of an Indian father of mixed Portuguese descent and an English mother. His first volume of verse (Poems, published in Calcutta in 1827) contained in a single stretch, “To My Brother in Scotland,” “Here’s a Health to thee, Lassie!” and “Ode from the Persian of Hafiz, Freely Translated” (Derozio, 108–11). Examples could be easily multiplied in Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, anywhere emigrants—and those whom they taught—recreated and invented traditions through recollected or transmitted specificities of local language, custom, and geography. Where, then, is the local? Good answers should be particular. But nonetheless, we can say the local is never static. The local is both rejected and returned to, never fully portable but always on its travels. I am arguing here, then, for a mobile or intersectional understanding of the provincial as emerging in the networked local, as constituted in print cultures broadly understood, and as making salient widely varying linguistic practices. At the same time, the contesting definitions of the provincial and the cosmopolitan remain at the heart of much of the Victorians’ discourse about themselves. The now multiple and perhaps stale discussions of cosmopolitanisms could perhaps be reframed with equal attention to the provincial or regional, the other half of the always implicit binary. Newly available newspaper and periodical archives and digital tools open not only the possibility of a richer understanding of Victorian literature, but they also offer new opportunities for pushing our theoretical understanding of what we mean by Victorian literature(s). Work on provincial newspapers from the point of view of poetry, prose sketches, and the valuation of dialect has—given the size of the 458

Regionalism and Provincialism

archive—scarcely begun. Andrew Hobbs’s and Kirstie Blair’s recent work suggests many further paths. Similarly, one might want to look carefully at the provincial-for-export—as Jason Rudy and Katie Trumpener have done. Again, much remains to do as we think of the networked empire of print. Early Canadiana Online or Trove: The National Library of Australia offer much material for this line of inquiry. A “four nations” approach, too, has significant potential. Mid-nineteenth-century Scottish literature has been much less often studied than earlier texts (even Robert Louis Stevenson and Margaret Oliphant have received attention that does inadequate justice to the complexities of Scottish, rather than generically English, literature). The subtlety of Trumpener’s and Duncan’s work can be a touchstone for Victorianists as well. Similarly, recent work on dialect poetry and prose suggests that much is still to be done in this area. It is interesting, for instance, that men seem to have written more often in dialect than women did. A project of defining the provincial that attends to the intersections of local language and gender and class still offers considerable room for new archival research and theoretical refinement. A theory of the intersecting provincial, national, and global in a networked local—and in a semi-portable local—could be further developed. Finally, though, we could take John Stuart Mill’s characterization of his time as an “age of transition in ideas” in a geographical as well as a temporal vein. We might then see the very idea of the provincial as the product of movement in space—movement both of people and of print—and we might view the broader condition of Victorian culture as the condition of dislocation. Paradoxically, then, the local or the provincial could itself become the measure of movement: a measure of dislocation, deracination, rootlessness, internal and imperial migrancy. All these movements, whether of people or of print, are implicated in and shaped by the partially portable or impossibly forgotten local.

Notes 1 Sukanya Banerjee’s notion of groundedness also provides a background for my insistence on the local, though I am unable here to think in detail here about that which does not travel and the agency of the nonhumans. 2 As Forster’s backhanded compliment to the “cockneyfied” Defoe indicates, the whole of my discussion should be applied as well to the metropole. Dickens’s representations of dialect and the many class-inflected representations of laboring London could certainly be read as other manifestations of the same problematic as the regional or provincial. 3 See Hechter’s foundational study of internal colonialism. 4 On identity and schooling in India, with particular reference to Scotland, see Gibson (Indian Angles, pp. 63–99) and Chaudhuri, introduction to Derozio: Poet of India.

Key Critical Works Kirstie Blair, editor. The Poets of the People’s Journal: Newspaper Poetry in Scotland. Alison Booth. Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers’ Shrines and Countries. T. L. Burton, and K. K. Ruthven, “Dialect Poetry, William Barnes and the Literary Canon.” James Buzard. Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels. Elizabeth Helsinger. Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain, 1815–1850. Andrew Hobbs. A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855–1900. John Plotz. Portable Property:Victorian Culture on the Move. Jason Rudy. Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies. Katie Wales. Northern English: A Cultural and Social History. Raymond Williams. The Country and the City.

Works Cited Anderson, Amanda. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton UP, 2001. Arnold, Matthew. “The Literary Influence of Academies.” Essays in Criticism, First and Second Series, A. L. Burt, 1865, pp. 31–58.

459

Mary Ellis Gibson Banerjee, Sukanya. “Drama, Ecology and the Ground of Empire: The Play of Indigo.” Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, edited by Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer, Fordham UP, 2018. Barnes, Edwin. Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1889. https://en.wikisource. org/wiki/Poems_of_Rural_Life_in_the_Dorset_Dialect. Blair, Kirstie, editor. The Poets of the People’s Journal: Newspaper Poetry in Scotland. The Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2016. ———. “Tennyson and the Victorian Working-Class Poet.” Tennyson Among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays, edited by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry, Oxford UP, 2009, pp. 276–95. Booth, Alison. Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers’ Shrines and Countries. Oxford UP, 2016. British Newspaper Archive. www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/titles/bristol-mirror. Brown, Lucy. Victorian News and Newspapers. Clarendon, 1985. Burton, T. L., and K. K. Ruthven. “Dialect Poetry, William Barnes and the Literary Canon.” ELH, vol. 76, no. 2, Summer 2009, pp. 309–41. Buzard, James. Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels. Princeton UP, 2005. ———. “How George Eliot Works.” Raritan, vol. 36, no. 3, Winter 2017, pp. 130–51. Cordell, Ryan, and David Smith. Viral Texts: Mapping Networks of Reprinting in 19th-Century Newspapers and Magazines, 2017. http://viraltexts.org. Cordell, Ryan, et al. “Oceanic Exchanges Project Team, 2017.” Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks in Historical Newspaper Repositories, 1840–1914. doi: 10.17605/OSF.IO/WA94S. osf.io/wa94s. Daniell, Thomas, and William Daniell. Oriental Scenery. Thomas and William Daniell, 1795–1808. Daniell, William. Voyage around Great Britain. Longman, 1814–25. Derozio, Henry Louis Vivian. Derozio, Poet of India: The Definitive Edition. Edited by Rosinka Chaudhuri, Oxford UP, 2008. Duncan, Ian. “The Provincial or Regional Novel.” A Companion to the Victorian Novel, edited by Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing, Blackwell, 2002. pp. 318–35. Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. Penguin, 2005. Gerson, Carole, and Gwendolyn Davies, editors. Canadian Poetry from the Beginnings through the First World War. New Canadian Library, 2010. Gibson, Mary Ellis. Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore. Ohio State UP, 2011. ———. “The News from India: Emma Roberts and the Construction of Late Romanticisms.” British Romanticism in Asia, edited by Alex Watson and Laurence Williams, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 39–65. Hakala, Taryn. “A Great Man in Clogs: Performing Authenticity in Victorian Lancashire.” Victorian Studies, vol. 52, no. 3, Spring 2010, pp. 388–412. Hatton, Joseph. Provincial Papers: Being a Collection of Tales and Sketches. W. Kent, 1861. Hechter, Michael. Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 2nd ed. Routledge, 2017. Helsinger, Elizabeth. Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain, 1815–1850. Princeton UP, 1996. Hobbs, Andrew. A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855–1900. Open Book, 2018. Hollingworth, Brian. Songs of the People: Lancashire Dialect Poetry of the Industrial Revolution. Manchester UP, 1982. Houston, Natalie. “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. Lawton, R. “Rural Depopulation in Nineteenth-Century England.” English Rural Communities: The Impact of a Specialised Economy, edited by Dennis R. Mills, Palgrave Macmillan, 1973, pp. 195–219. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-1-349-15516-3_10. Leyden, John. Poems and Ballads. J. and J. H. Rutherford, 1858. Lopatin, Nancy P. “Refining the Limits of Political Reporting: The Provincial Press, Political Unions, and the Great Reform Act.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 31, no. 4, Winter 1998, pp. 337–55. McDonagh, Josephine. “Rethinking Provincialism in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Our Village to Villette.” Victorian Studies, vol. 55, no. 3, Spring 2013, pp. 399–424. Milner, George. “The Dialect of Lancashire Considered as a Vehicle for Poetry.” Papers of the Manchester Literary Club, vol. 1, John Heywood, 1875. ———. “Introduction.” Lancashire Sketches, edited by Edwin Waugh, John Heywood, 1892, pp. ix–xlii. Mitford, Mary Russell. Our Village: Sketches of Rural Character and Scenery. G. and W. B. Whittaker, 1824. Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees. Verso, 2005. Murphy, Paul. Towards a Working-Class Canon: Literary Criticism in British Working-Class Periodicals, 1816–1858. Ohio State UP, 1994. Peyt, Kenneth Malcolm. Emily Brontë and the Haworth Dialect. Yorkshire Dialect Society, 1970. Plotz, John. Portable Property:Victorian Culture on the Move. Princeton UP, 2008.

460

Regionalism and Provincialism Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, 2 October 1841. Roberts, Emma. Scenes and Characteristics of Hindustan, with Sketches of Anglo-Indian Society. W. H. Allen, 1835. Rudy, Jason R. Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies. Johns Hopkins UP, 2017. Scott, Patrick. “Tennyson, Lincolnshire, and Provinciality: The Topographical Narrative of ‘in Memoriam’.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 34, no. 1, Spring 1996, pp. 39–51. Scott, Walter. Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland. Robert Cadell, 1818–1825. ———. “Supplementary Memoir.” Poems and Ballads, edited by John Leyden, J. and J. H. Rutherford, 1858, pp. 1–72. Tennyson, Alfred. The Poems of Tennyson, 3 vols. Edited by Christopher Ricks, U of California P, 1987. Wales, Katie. Northern English: A Cultural and Social History. Cambridge UP, 2006. Waugh, Edwin. Poems and Songs. Gilbert G. Walmsley, 1889. http://gerald-massey.org.uk/waugh/c_poems_11_3. him#108. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford UP, 1975. ———. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford UP, 1983.

461

40 POSTCOLONIAL Sukanya Banerjee

To say that the term “postcolonial” bears signal relevance to what we refer to as “Victorian” might seem counterintuitive. After all, the Victorian period, if taken at its chronological face value, marked the apogee of Britain’s colonial prowess. If the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 proclaimed Britain’s eminence as the “workshop of the world,” then such recognition was largely on account of Britain’s colonial territories—proudly displayed in the exhibition hall—that served to supply cheap raw materials for British industries as well as provide a captive market for manufactured goods. It was in Queen Victoria’s name that Britain embarked on an aggressive campaign of militarist expansion that secured those colonial possessions, especially in Africa. It was in Victoria’s name that traders, explorers, and amateur scientists branched across different parts of the globe, often paving the way for the extension of the British sphere of influence, if not for a formal colonial takeover. And it was also in Victoria’s name that Britons concentrated not just on territorial expansion and brute military subjugation but also on a professedly loftier “civilizing mission” that was predicated on liberal notions of tutelage, education, and governance. In 1858, the East India Company’s rapacious tenure was abolished, and its governing authority transferred to the British Parliament. Indians became British subjects, Victoria their “benevolent” empress (she was proclaimed Empress of India at the Delhi Durbar of 1877). And even though, by the end of Victoria’s reign, settler colonies such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa had shaken off the direct authority of British rule and organized themselves as selfgoverning dominions, they were loath to sever imperial ties. Victoria was still the formal head of state. Her reign marked an age of empire. How then, postcolonial? Indeed, if the term “postcolonial” is taken to serve as a temporal marker of that which comes after colonization, then it is not just counterintuitive but also a misnomer as far as the Victorian period is concerned. By 1913, after all, British rule, one way or the other, held sway over 24% of the earth’s population. However, the term “postcolonial,” is not used only in a descriptive sense to denote what comes after colonialism, the post-colonial. Rather, as scholars such as Ania Loomba have suggested, “postcolonial” also denotes a stance of critical inquiry which, informed by colonial histories and legacies, studies how structures of power—including that of colonialism—function (12). This second connotation of “postcolonial” renders it more portable and accounts for its usefulness to scholars working across historical periods and geopolitical domains. By the same token, it also makes “postcolonial” a particularly apt term for studying the Victorian period, the age of empire. Twinning “postcolonial” with “Victorian,” then, is not an anachronistic move; rather, it allows for a more informed reading of the structures, ideologies, and institutions constituting the Victorian period. In what follows, I wish first to articulate the impact of postcolonial analysis on Victorian literature, as well 462

Postcolonial

as key ways in which we have studied it so far. However, as I point out in the second section, this very process of scholarly analysis has raised many of its own doubts and questions in ways that not only invite a recalibration of the term “Victorian” but also provide an impetus to rethink the term’s relation with postcolonial studies in the context of a global order that is markedly different from the statist framework that we inherited from the twentieth century. In the final section, I consider how a renewed relation between Victorian studies and postcolonial scholarship might offer a critical and scholarly framework for moving forward in ways that respond not only to a shifting geopolitical order but also to the ecological urgencies of our time.

1. Postcolonial Readings A postcolonial methodology has influenced our reading of nineteenth-century texts in significant ways. Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism is a foundational text for postcolonial studies that has had farreaching influence across fields and disciplines. It is of particular interest to Victorianists because Said focuses on how British and French imperial projects over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries abetted and benefited from a particular representational paradigm. As Said points out, works in literature, history, philology, music, and other areas presented an exoticized image of “the East,” depicting it in terms of irrationality, excess, and barbarism in ways that also placed it outside the domain of history: the Orient was timeless; it was denoted by the “simple copula is” (72). Not surprisingly, such frames of representation implicitly accord a cultural superiority to “Europe,” which was characterized in terms of rationality, restraint, and autonomous progress. As Said’s argumentative logic reveals, orientalism clearly had more to do with Europe’s need to construct a self-image in contradistinction to the “Orient,” but the upshot of this vested self-construction was that prevalent depictions of the “Orient” had very little correspondence with the lived reality of the East. This non-correspondence, however, was not on account of the lack of firsthand knowledge of the non-West. It is true that the monumental The History of British India (1817), which argued for the necessity of British rule in a barbaric land otherwise run over by despotic rulers, was authored by James Stuart Mill, who had never visited India. But multiple travel accounts of the Victorian period— such as Harriet Martineau’s observation of Egyptian women in the harem (Eastern Life, Present and Past, 1848) or Emily Eden’s accounts of her visits with Indian women in Up the Country (1866)—do not necessarily offer a very different picture despite the authors’ firsthand experiences. “Orientalism,” then, refers more to a self-generating discursive strategy. As Said points out, “That Orientalism makes sense at all depends more on the West than on the Orient, and this sense is directly indebted to various Western techniques of representation that make the Orient visible, clear, ‘there’ in discourse about it” (22). In this, Victorian literature both reflects and constitutes the abiding hold of the orientalist project. This is evident in the portrayal of figures from the East, like the figure of the inscrutable Malay apparently capable of consuming a bolt of opium in Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Though De Quincey’s popular narrative was written in 1815, the association that it establishes between excesses of opium consumption and the East is noted in Victorian culture throughout the nineteenth century, as is evident in Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) and Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, 1891). Figures from the “Orient” were also depicted in terms that bespoke a gendered logic of excess. Indian male figures, for instance, were often depicted in terms of a menacing masculinity that needed to be brought under control, as in the depictions of the lecherous mutineers in the spate of “Mutiny novels” written in the aftermath of the so-called “Indian Mutiny” of 1857 in which Indian soldiers of the East India Company took up arms against their British officers. Jenny Sharpe elaborates on this particular gendered dynamic in Allegories of Empire. An emergent class of Western-educated Indian males, on the other hand, were caricatured as weak, effeminate, and ineffectual, as in the figure of Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) (for an 463

Sukanya Banerjee

analysis of the depiction of colonial male figures in terms of effeminacy, see Mrinalini Sinha’s Colonial Masculinity). That a gendered logic should inform depictions of the orient is perhaps inevitable, for accepted gendered hierarchies effectively naturalized the asymmetrical relation between Europe and the East. As Said notes, “[T]he essential relationship, on political, cultural, and even religious grounds, was seen—in the West . . . to be one between a strong and a weak partner” (40). Not surprisingly, female figures were depicted through the lens of an exoticized femininity, such as the female characters in Anglo-Indian romances (see Shuchi Kapila’s Educating Seeta). In what is a troubling though familiar conflation between land and the female body, the landscape itself was highly sexualized. Instances can be found, for example, in many of the descriptions of Africa in fin de siècle adventure and travel narratives such as H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887) and King Solomon’s Mines (1885), which describe the landscape in enticing yet forbidding ways as part of the trope that Patrick Brantlinger refers to as the “imperial gothic” (230). This cataloging of orientalist tropes notwithstanding, I do not mean to suggest that Victorian novels are all orientalist in the same way, or that they are unreflexively so. A mid-Victorian novel, such as Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), for instance, is critical of Britain’s colonial plunder (as well as of its self-righteousness). However, the three Brahmin priests/jugglers in the novel are depicted, nonetheless, in terms of their fanaticism and inscrutability. The novel also ends with an image of India that, divorced from political reality, is cast in a realm of timeless spirituality. Similarly, Joseph Conrad’s novella, The Heart of Darkness (written in 1898–99; published in 1902) is profoundly ambiguous about the imperial project. However, even as the narrator is bluntly critical of imperial adventurism and plunder (as depicted in his disparaging comments about the “Eldorado” team in the novel), he barely humanizes the natives of the Belgian Congo, even as he is pointedly critical of the degrading treatment to which they are subject. It is important to make note of these discrepancies, for they index the deeply fraught nature of Victorian imperialism. For all its expropriation and plunder, British imperialism legitimated itself by professing the “nobler” aims of a “civilizing mission.” Imperialism, as the narrative of a civilizational imperative would have it, was not so much about a self-interested, profit-making venture but about guiding more benighted populations along the path of civilizational progress. As John Darwin puts it tongue in cheek, “[R]edeeming people from superstition and savagery was bound to be messy and quite often bloody” (1). Such a narrative of redemption was no doubt underwritten by a liberal ideology that was predicated along notions of growth, improvement, and education. Imbued with these values, many colonial administrators took on a self-consciously tutelary role, convinced of their ability (or, at any rate, their “need”) to “improve” or reform natives. It was precisely these liberal aims that also opened up space for the guilt, self-critique, and doubt that we find in various accounts of colonialism, be they official or literary. Upon arriving at one of the trading stations in the Congo, the narrator in The Heart of Darkness is taken aback by the extent to which the entire European enterprise there is underwritten by sheer greed for ivory: The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I’ve never seen anything so unreal in my life. (27) However, as Uday Mehta has argued with reference to John Mill’s writings, while the liberal objectives of imperialism were guided by a teleology of progress, they were also embedded in an abiding belief in the innate barbarism or backwardness of native cultures (in dependencies such as India and parts of Africa), which meant, very plainly, that the “civilizing mission” could never be complete (7). Natives would always be confined to what Dipesh Chakrabarty refers to as the “waiting-room of history,” and even a redemptive vision of India, as in The Moonstone, could only be cast in terms of timelessness. Indeed, traces of such thinking are visible in our current terminology of “developing 464

Postcolonial

nations” (how long have they been “developing”? when, if ever, will they fully “develop”?), thereby lending credence to Said’s notion of “latent orientalism” (206). Indeed, the representational framework that Said describes in Orientalism played a key role in consolidating an imperial worldview, and Victorian literary and cultural production played a significant role in fomenting that view. While the literary examples mentioned earlier bear explicit references to the Orient in ways that naturalize the purported asymmetries implied by colonialism, it was not only novels with a visibly oriental setting or characters that carry the imprint of the imperial project. Rather, as Said notes, in his equally influential work, Culture and Imperialism (1993), the narrative logic of the Victorian novel—regardless of specificities of character or setting—hinged on an assumption of Britain’s colonial standing and mission. As an example, Said refers to Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), cogently arguing for the ways in which the “domestic” setting of the novel is sustained by a more expansive colonial economy: life in Mansfield Park is sustained by the profits from Sir Bertram’s sugar plantations in Antigua. A similar argument can be made for a host of Victorian novels, where “empire” either literally sustains the domestic economy or makes for a narrative resolution. Industrial novels, such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) or Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), for instance, focus quite explicitly on the “condition of England question,” but, narratively speaking, this question is conclusively addressed by shipping the characters to the colonies: Mary and Jem migrate to Canada at the end of Mary Barton and Tom Gradgrind Jr. can only be redeemed in the concluding section of Hard Times by being relocated to an unnamed colonial location [on settler colonialism, see Wagner’s chapter]. But it is not only in terms of oft-overlooked plot details that the salience of empire to the Victorian imaginary becomes visible. In her pathbreaking essay, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak brilliantly argues for how the production (and annihilation) of the gendered and racialized colonial subject was key to the subject-making agenda of the Victorian novel. Drawing on Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1848), Spivak argues that Jane can move from the peripheral narrative (and social) space to the center only through rendering Bertha Mason deranged, animalistic, and, ultimately disposable. The gendered colonial dynamic outlined by Spivak has constituted the mainstay of postcolonial feminist criticism in ways that have productively questioned assumptions of “global sisterhood,” arguing for a more nuanced accounting of how factors such as class and race both interrupt and coalesce formations of female alliance and solidarity. It is particularly important to take note of this dynamic in the nineteenth century, especially because British women’s bid for professional or political equity (or, at least, their attempts to bid for it) was often predicated on a perpetuation of the “Eastern” woman’s otherwise pitiable condition. For instance, Antoinette Burton’s work on the professionalization of female doctors in the Victorian period reveals how male opposition to women’s foray into professional medicine could only be quelled by arguing for the need of female doctors in countries such as India, where, because of purdah restrictions, upper-class Indian women were prohibited from coming into open contact with men other than immediate family members. For British women attempting to consolidate their position as doctors, the image of the helpless veiled Indian women, therefore, became an abiding necessity even as they struggled to overcome the exclusionary gendered norms that hindered their own professional aspirations. This gendered dynamic made for an uneven rhetoric of female emancipation: British women could chart their professional advancement only by ensuring that Indian women remained confined by purdah restrictions. It is worth noting, though, that this unevenness did not necessarily split along predictable racial/ colonial lines, the example of Cornelia Sorabji (1866–1954) being a case in point. The first woman to study law in Oxford (in the 1880s) and the first woman to practice law in India, Sorabji served as the legal liaison between upper-class Indian purdahnashin women (women observing purdah restrictions) and the Government of India. Because the colonial state only haltingly recognized her legal expertise—a reluctance that was not dissimilar to what she experienced as a law student in England—it became necessary for Sorabji to underline her own professional status vis-à-vis the 465

Sukanya Banerjee

imputed backwardness of the purdahnashin women whom she represented even as she was at pains to dispel common English/colonial misperceptions about them (as indeed she had to negotiate her own exoticized positioning as the “Eastern woman”). Traces of this intricate negotiation are evident in her autobiography (India Calling 1935) as well as in the numerous quasi-fictional accounts of purdahnashin women, which she circulated among a primarily metropolitan audience. That Sorabji sought at once to distinguish herself as the authentic (and sole) representative of veiled Indian woman but also distance herself from them can be gleaned from Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava’s introduction to Sorabji’s collection of vignettes about her work among purdahnashin women, Love and Life Behind the Purdah (1901). Sorabji’s stories, she writes, are full of incident, and they exhibit to us from the inside, as it were, customs and ways of living and thinking which we usually contemplate from the outside only. . . . The writer herself is an Indian, and one whose strength of character and talent have enabled her to face the difficulties of a University education. (7) Of course, Sorabji’s particular biography (she was presented to Victoria at court) makes her more of an exemplary figure rather than a representative one. Yet I cite her example here for several reasons. First, her ambivalent position as a female professional indicates the extent to which the axis of gender (one among other axes) problematizes any easy divide between colonial subjects along the all too obvious axis of race. In fact, taking this point a step further, Mrinalini Sinha notes with reference to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indian and British feminisms: The point of bringing British and Indian feminisms into the same field of analysis . . . is to demonstrate their co-implication in the history of a combined and uneven evolution of a system whose economic, political, and ideological reach was worldwide. (1079) Not only does the example of Victorian female professionalism indicate the difficulty of isolating a study of nineteenth-century British feminisms from the context of empire, but from a broader perspective it also underlines the extent to which the relation between metropole and colony was an intimate, mutually constitutive one, making it imperative for us to consider metropolitan and colonial cultures within the same analytical frame, a point that has been made by feminist historians working on the nineteenth century, such as Antoinette Burton, Catherine Hall, and Mrinalini Sinha. Such a reading counters what were, as Burton describes, “very Victorian distinctions between ‘home’ and ‘away’ that defined the imagined geography of empire in the nineteenth century” (“Who Needs the Nation?” 45). In fact, as her essay suggests, such a reading also pushes back against a rearguard imperial historiography that seeks to preserve that very myth of Britain’s splendid isolation. An understanding of the mutually constitutive nature of metropolitan and colonial cultures, I argue, forms the keystone of the relation between the terms “Victorian” and “postcolonial” and also gestures to how we can continually rethink that relationship in productive ways [on metropolitan/ regional literatures, see Gibson’s chapter]. In fact, the linked vexations attending nineteenth-century female professionalism (British and Indian) provides a historical analog to the observation that Spivak makes—albeit on a cultural and literary register—in “Three Women’s Texts”: “It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England’s social mission was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English” (243). Of course, even as Spivak’s argument about Jane’s ascendancy coming at the cost of Bertha’s displacement from the text correlates in many ways with the depiction of the continual helplessness of Indian women by British female professionals, the case of those such as Sorabji, who do not fit the 466

Postcolonial

bill of the “colonial woman,” also extends the contours of that argument, underscoring the need for more layered thinking and linkages. The reason I return to Spivak’s essay here is that it sparked, almost two decades after its publication, a retrospective debate about the effect of the relation between “Victorian” and “postcolonial” in Victorian literary criticism. In a highly polemical essay, “Preface for a Post-Postcolonial Criticism” (2003), Erin O’Connor took postcolonial studies to task, insisting that it in fact had colonized readings of the Victorian novel by positing it as a synecdoche of the imperial project. Singling out Spivak’s “Three Women’s Texts,” O’Connor argued that Spivak’s intervention effectively “set[s] the tone for subsequent postcolonial approaches to Victorian culture, which tend to read the novel as a cipher for imperial ideology” (218). Apart from flattening the nuances of postcolonial literary analysis (does postcolonial studies really “hate” the Victorian novel as she imputes? [219]), O’Connor also overstates Spivak’s influence (or at least of Spivak’s essay). To be sure, O’Connor’s essay generated a robust response from scholars who identify themselves primarily as Victorianists. Deirdre David protested, among other things, the slavish obeisance that O’Connor ascribed to feminist scholars in terms of their response to Spivak’s seeming dictate (106). Patrick Brantlinger noted that there was no gainsaying the fact of empire and Victorian literary culture’s imbrication with it (in other words, Spivak’s argument is not without a referent) but also that O’Connor’s bemoaning of an overtly politicized reading of the Victorian novels—one that postcolonial studies apparently pushes for—stages, in its lament for an apolitical literary criticism, a highly political stance in itself (100–1). My interest in recounting this debate, which took place more than a decade and a half ago, lies not so much in salvaging Spivak or her essay (neither of which requires any salvaging). Rather, I am interested in the terms that frame O’Connor’s repudiation of postcolonial studies. I am particularly interested in O’Connor’s desire to wrest Victorian studies (and the Victorian novel) away from the seemingly incursive advances of postcolonial analysis. She refers, for instance, to the “critical imperialism of postcolonial literary studies, whose profitable investments in the Victorian novel may be read as a textual instance of reverse colonization” (227). Her self-conscious use of colonial metaphors aside, it is evident that, for O’Connor, “Victorian” and “postcolonial” are distinct and antagonistic terms that should ideally be kept distinct from one another. Indeed, the relation posited between them—on an academic register—is arguably akin to what was historically spatialized as “Home” and “Away.” What is evident in both these instances, historical and academic, is an abiding assumption of what constitutes “Victorian,” and, relatedly, who we consider “Victorian,” an assumption whose geoethnic basis is taken for granted even in Brantlinger’s and David’s otherwise sharp rejoinder to O’Connor. Indeed, even as we have stretched, widened, and lengthened the term “Victorian” beyond the chronological parameters of a monarch’s reign, it is almost as if the considerable latitude that we are willing to accord the term is not commensurate with our geographic objects/subjects of study. In other words, we still seem to stick quite closely to a geoethnic notion of who or what counts as Victorian, and, by extension, what we can study under the rubric “Victorian.” Ironically, however, a frustration with the apparent exclusiveness of the term prompts many Victorianists to abjure the term altogether. Therefore, quite contrary to O’Connor’s seeming nostalgia for a Victorianism that is free from the troubling advances of postcolonial analysis, Kate Flint—among other scholars such as Sharon Marcus and Elaine Freedgood— expresses deep skepticism about the term “Victorian” itself, not least because “it poses significant limitations when discussing the dynamics of transnational cultures,” carrying as it does “strong national and nationalist overtones” (230). Accordingly, Flint wonders aloud if we should consider “jettison[ing]” the term (231), a sentiment that was also recently voiced by several panelists at the 2019 MLA roundtable on “Decolonizing Victorians” [on the term “Victorian,” see Denisoff ’s introduction]. Flint’s and others’ concerns about the ethnocentrism of “Victorian” are of course entirely on the mark. However, to do away with the term on account of its geoethnic moorings would, surely, only serve to strengthen them. By turning away from “Victorian,” it would be as if we took its ethnocentrism for granted; as if we left it untouched. It would only reaffirm Paul Gilroy’s scathing observation 467

Sukanya Banerjee

that “There ain’t no black in the Union Jack.”1 But colonial history, as we know, tells us—for better or worse—otherwise. In other words, to think of “Victorian” from a postcolonial perspective would realign the term with its political and historical materiality—glimpses of which this chapter opened with, and one that the more neutral nomenclature of the “nineteenth century” cannot quite approximate. A postcolonial understanding of “Victorian” continually gestures to the term’s irreducibly diverse and heterogenous address, which remains the undeniable legacy of the history of the nineteenth-century British empire. Howsoever counterintuitive this may sound, in contrast to an earlier moment of scholarship when the term postcolonial put pressure on how we read Victorian literature and culture (as the earlier section of this chapter outlined), at this current juncture, it is actually a postcolonial understanding of Victorian that seems well positioned to argue for the continued relevance of the term.

2. Redefining “Victorian” Postcolonially I want to make clear, though, that the desire to argue for the continued relevance of “Victorian” does not stem so much from a sympathetic attempt to rehabilitate a term that is otherwise losing its currency as from an impatience to have “Victorian” take its place as an important analytical category. At a time when terms such as “transnational” and “global” have profitably opened up ways to think of expansive linkages and connections, “Victorian,” it seems, can play an equally critical role. To think about the “Victorian” postcolonially, as I have suggested, would be to denationalize the term; it would be to denaturalize its automatic linking with a British nation-state (complicated enough as that configuration is, then and now). In fact, a clearly defined nation-state was, at any rate, anachronistic in the context of the imperial configuration that the Victorians constituted in the nineteenth century. “Victorian,” then, refers not so much to going beyond national boundaries as to supplanting the nation itself as an a priori unit of belonging or identification. In this, the decidedly non-national setting of empire—a setting that we might term “transimperial”—renders Victorian an important category of analysis for a global framework that actually comprises a more complex and layered geopolitical configuration than the isomorphic statal system assumed by terms such as the “transnational.”2 This renewed sense of the term “Victorian,” then, bespeaks a knotted, heterogeneous collectivity that constitutes a transimperial system of which British Victorians, whom we conventionally study, constitute only a part, albeit the part that wielded the most political, economic, and cultural capital. Thus, decolonizing the Victorians would entail paying attention to the other parts of the system and the various linkages threading through and between them. It does not necessarily lead to dispensing with what we have studied so far under the rubric of Victorian.3 In thinking about Victorian as a transimperial system, I am aware that the word “system” comes with a pejorative connotation, preordained as it is in its boundedness. And, in this specific context, we may even take issue with the system itself—which, here, is that of capitalist modernity, an ensemble of economic, cultural, and political practices writ across and through empire, for which the term “Victorian” functions as a key signifier [on economics and empire, see Rajan’s chapter]. Martin Hewitt uses the less bounded or regularized term “assemblage” to describe the “compounds of technologies, practices, institutions, knowledges, meanings, values, and ideologies” that collectively constitute what we might term as the Victorian period (tentative as he is to periodize in the first place) (397). Hewitt’s particular enumeration of assemblages helps us identify the various routes and relays of modernity across empire without viewing the non-Western constituencies only in terms of “lag” or belated modernities. Yet, productive as it is to think about “assemblages,” I lean, in this instance, toward thinking of transimperial more as a system, one that demands an attentiveness to all its parts as a matter of necessity and not as a benevolent gesture of inclusiveness that might be contingent or arbitrary. In other words, thinking about “Victorian” in terms of a systematicity makes thinking about the other parts an interpretive imperative, a hermeneutic precondition, if you will. 468

Postcolonial

But an acknowledgment of systematicity requires the hard work of tracing the linkages between the different parts: parts that, for us as literary scholars, are constituted by and through texts, authors, genres, histories. These linkages may be read through visible moments of contact and exchange, or they can be arrived at through an understanding of what is less visible but nonetheless a shared experience of modernity among different colonial constituencies. Which is to say that decolonizing is also about acknowledging coevality, the denial of which is the signature ploy of any colonial regime. If we were to think of different Victorian constituencies in terms of coevality, we arrive at what is a considerably stickier, messier picture, one in which the geoethnic lines cordoning off our “familiar” Victorians seem less sharp. An acknowledgment of systematicity, therefore, requires us to read different archives, differently located authors, and texts written in different languages. To do so would ensure that our expanded notion of “Victorian” follows something other than an accretional logic that merely enhances the metropolitan center. It also means that we need to expand the linguistic boundaries of what we include under the purview of Victorian study. Indeed, using a monolingual lens—as we mostly do, at least in North America and the UK—to study what was a remarkably polyglot empire seems woefully inadequate, and recent emphases in Victorian studies on the importance of translation do well to redress our otherwise lopsided—and therefore limited—scholarly engagements with the Victorians (I refer here to scholarship on translation by Annmarie Drury and Yopie Prins, among others). While my use of “Victorian” here refers to the expanded notion of Victorians that I referred to earlier, I also want to emphasize that not only were colonial writers from and across different parts of the empire routinely multilingual, but British Victorians, too, were more polyglot than what we give them credit for. In fact, it is, for many of us, our linguistic skills that are delimiting in being considerably more modest than that of our subjects of study, particularly of those subjects located in the non-West. But because we can only work with what we have, it is imperative that we make more room for studying texts in translation. Moreover, as S. Shankar rightly notes with reference to the purported access to literary texts that translation yields, it is simply not enough to read texts in translation; one needs to have an informed understanding of the cultural and literary life worlds that the texts inhabit (44). The importance of such an understanding, I suggest, necessitates a closer engagement with disciplinary fields such as Area Studies that, in contrast to Comparative Literature, were primarily instituted to study regions demarcated as the non-West. Of course, Area Studies is the bearer of a troubled legacy, as it was institutionalized in the Cold War era primarily to secure US hegemonic interests.4 Despite this onus, however, Area Studies has also consistently reinvented itself—often in a spirit of autocritique—in ways that make it a fertile ground for collaboration. In fact, in the face of critiques leveled against Area Studies by postcolonial scholars (on account of the former’s purported imbrication with neoimperial interests), it is well worth noting that Area Studies has historically provided a venue for interdisciplinary studies, and as David Szanton noted in as early as 2002, “can well work institutionally and conceptually across national boundaries, following transnational process to forge new projects of comparison and collaboration” (qtd. in Chari 791). While Area Studies has arguably delivered on such a promise, as witnessed in the work of scholars such as Engseng Ho or Isabel Hofmeyr, it can, at this critical juncture, quite literally provide the ground for a “situated” transimperial Victorian studies in ways that can also give a historical thickness to postcolonial studies which, with its intellectual debt to poststructuralism (a debt that is certainly not misplaced), otherwise bears a somewhat angular relation to the more positivistic bent of Area Studies. In other words, it is a triangulated alignment between Victorian studies, postcolonial studies, and Area Studies that can not only revivify each of these fields but also offer a perspective on “Victorian” that is at once more grounded and expansive, or, as I would argue, more expansive precisely on account of being “grounded.” I have purposely emphasized words such as “grounded” or “situated,” for I would like to emphasize the importance of concepts of “groundedness” and “immobility” to our study of empire. Not only has postcolonial studies conventionally focused, and understandably so, on tropes of migration, 469

Sukanya Banerjee

displacement, and exile, but Victorian studies, too, has so far studied the terrain of empire primarily through the lens of travel and mobility [on travel, see Tange’s chapter]. Thinking about immobility—or groundedness—on the other hand, allows us to consider more fully texts and subjects that, on account of their immobility—cultural, linguistic, physical—remain beyond the pale of metropolitan recognition. Indeed, dwelling upon what is grounded also directs attention to the nonhuman entities of empire—other animals, the rock, soil, or plants—that are equally vital to our understanding of a transimperial Victorian. As ecotheorists such as Jason Moore have pointed out, we must consider colonialism an ecosocial process (114), a fact that postcolonial studies too is fast catching up with, as evident in the works of scholars such as Elizabeth Deloughrey, Rob Nixon, and Pablo Mukherjee. The ecological imperative to consider the nonhuman, then, intersects with the Victorian/postcolonial imperative to study the ecological, given that the “age of empire” was also, as Nathan Hensley and Philip Steer, among others, have recently pointed out, “the age of coal” (2) [on ecocriticism and industry, see Voskuil’s and Carroll’s chapters, respectively]. What this particular alignment of interests demands, I argue, is that we pay more attention to nonhuman objects and immobile subjects: to what remains “grounded.” If groundedness guides both our methods and objects of study, then we do not have to study the Victorian empire only through the lens of what circulates, travels, or is mobile, a critical tendency that has been prevalent in both Victorian studies as well as postcolonial scholarship. Rather, “groundedness” shifts “empire” from the vector of referentiality or representation to that of materiality or ontology, allowing for a fuller reading/accounting of an imperial ecosystem, as it were (Bewell). A call for groundedness of course necessitates a heightened vigilance against reductive claims of nativism or autochthony, precisely what postcolonial studies militates against and can well keep in check. But overall, while at a larger intellectual and institutional level an emphasis on groundedness can enable closer collaborations with fields such as Area Studies, as I have already described, at the level of literary studies, it can lead us to dwell on more “grounded” aesthetic forms, such as drama, which in any way have longer literary histories, than does, say, the novel, in the places that we designate “empire” [on drama, see Weltman].5 Therefore, if to think ecologically is to think of “geosocial formations” (Clark and Youssef), then Victorian studies and postcolonial studies may well have a long way to go together.

Notes 1 This is the title of Gilroy’s book on Black British cultural politics, in which Gilroy argues for a more inclusive analysis of British identity formation. 2 For an elaboration of the term transimperial with reference to Victorian studies, see my essay, “Transimperial.” I also refer here to Amanda Anderson’s comment on the importance of thinking of “Victorian” through the lens of political theory rather than history alone, which is most often the case. 3 For thinking about the relation between Victorian studies, world literatures, and system-thinking, see Pablo Mukherjee’s “Introduction: World Literatures.” 4 For the importance of translation and Area Studies, see the co-authored introduction to a special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture on “The Wide Nineteenth Century” that Ryan Fong, Helena Michie, and I are co-editing. 5 For an extended discussion of studying drama as a “grounded” form in relation to empire, see my essay, “Drama, Ecology, and the Ground of Empire: The Play of Indigo.”

Key Critical Works Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Antoinette Burton, “Who Needs the Nation? Interrogating ‘British’ History.” Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Catherine Hall, editor. Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Ania Loomba, Colonialism-Postcolonialism. Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought.

470

Postcolonial Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism. ———, Orientalism. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.”

Works Cited Anderson, Amanda. “Victorian Studies and the Two Modernities.” Victorian Studies, vol. 47, no. 2, Winter 2005, pp. 195–203. Banerjee, Sukanya. “Drama, Ecology, and the Ground of Empire: The Play of Indigo.” Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, edited by Nathan Hensley and Philip Steer, Fordham UP, 2018, pp. 21–41. ———. “Transimperial.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, nos. 3–4, 2018, pp. 925–8. Banerjee, Sukanya, Ryan Fong, and Helena Michie. “Introduction.” The Wide Nineteenth Century, Special Issue of Victorian Literature and Culture, forthcoming. Bewell, Alan. Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History. Johns Hopkins UP, 2017. Brantlinger, Patrick. “Let’s Post-Post-Post Victorientalism: A Response to Erin O’Connor.” Victorian Studies, vol. 46, no. 1, Autumn 2003, pp. 106–10. ———. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Cornell UP, 1996. Burton, Antoinette. Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915. U of North Carolina P, 1994. ———. “Who Needs the Nation? Interrogating ‘British’ History.” Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, edited by Catherine Hall, Manchester UP, 2000, pp. 137–53. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton UP, 2000. Clark, Nigel, and Kathryn Youssef. “Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene.” Theory, Culture, and Society, vol. 34, nos. 2–3 (2017), pp. 3–23. Conrad, Joseph. The Heart of Darkness and Selections from the Congo Diary. Introduced by Caryl Philips. Modern Library, 1999. Darwin, John. Unfinished Empire: The Global Project of Britain. Bloomsbury, 2012. David, Deirdre. “She. Who Must Be Obeyed: A Response to Erin O’ Connor.” Victorian Studies, vol. 46, no. 1, Autumn 2003, pp. 97–105. Drury, Annmarie. Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry. Cambridge UP, 2015. Flint, Kate. “Why ‘Victorian’?: A Response.” Victorian Studies, vol. 47, no. 2, Winter 2005, pp. 231–9. Freedgood, Elaine. “Islands of Whiteness.” Victorian Studies, vol. 54, no. 2, Winter 2012, pp. 298–304. Gilroy, Paul. There Aint No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. Hutchinson, 1987. Hall, Catherine, editor. Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Manchester UP, 2000. Hensley, Nathan, and Philip Steer, editors. Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire. Fordham UP, 2018. Hewitt, Martin. “Why the Notion of Victorian Britain Makes Sense.” Victorian Studies, vol. 48, no. 3, Spring 2006, pp. 395–438. Kapila, Shuchi. Educating Seeta: The Anglo-Indian Family Romance and the Poetics of Indirect Rule. Ohio State UP, 2010. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism-Postcolonialism. Routledge, 1998. Marcus, Sharon. “Same Difference? Transnationalism, Comparative Literature, and Victorian Studies.” Victorian Studies, vol. 45, no. 4, 2003, pp. 677–86. Mehta, Uday. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago UP, 1999. Moore, Jason. “Ecology, Capital, and the Nature of our Times: Accumulation and Crisis in the Capitalist WorldEcology.” American Sociological Association, vol. 18, no. 1, 2011, pp. 107–46. Mukherjee, Pablo. “Introduction: Victorian World Literatures.” The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 41, no. 2, 2011, pp. 1–19. ———. Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture, and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. O’Connor, Erin. “Preface for a Post-Post Colonial Criticism.” Victorian Studies, vol. 45, no. 2, Winter 2003, pp. 217–46. Prins, Yopie. Ladies’ Greek: Translations of Tragedy. Princeton UP, 2017. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage Books, 1993. ———. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 1978. Shankar, S. Flesh and Fish Blood: Postcolonialism, Translation, and the Vernacular. U of California P, 2012. Sharpe, Jenny. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. U of Minnesota P, 1993.

471

Sukanya Banerjee Sinha, Mrinalini. Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the Effeminate Bengali in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester UP, 1995. ———. “Mapping the Imperial Social Formation: A Modest Proposal for Feminist History.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 25, no. 4, 2000, pp. 1077–82. Sorabji, Cornelia. Love and Life Behind the Purdah. 1901. Edited with an introduction by Chandani Lokugé, Oxford UP, 2003. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1, 1985, pp. 243–61.

472

41 TRAVEL WRITING Andrea Kaston Tange

Is “travel writing” literature? Anthropology? Autobiography? Journalism? History? Its genres vary remarkably, well beyond the guidebooks that would prepare a person for a trip and the travelogues that narrate what happened on that trip. A quick survey of the Dictionary of Literary Biography volumes for British travel writers in the nineteenth century reveals a generic range that includes settler narratives, anthropological essays, accounts of exploring territories unmapped by Europeans, scientific notebooks and the conclusions they produced, fiction—including works for children—based on the author’s rambles in foreign places, diaries and letters, memoirs, and journalistic reports or feature stories in periodicals of all kinds. In addition to these popular and personal forms, scholars of travel are also interested in categories of documents without singular or identifiable authors, both official (ship’s logs, maps, military reports, government publications) and promotional (guidebooks, transport timetables, tour descriptions, advertising). Visual images of foreign places, or deploying tropes of travel or encounter, also figure in the mix. As this array might imply, travel writing is the subject of study by historians and literary scholars, and by those in other disciplines who are interested in questions of empire, identity, diaspora, geography, botany, colonial settlement, environmental studies, art history, and tourism, among other topics. Travel writing might be defined most broadly as nonfiction texts about journeys; however, travel studies is also interested in travel as a metaphor, motif, or historical and material condition that shapes the development and impact of traditional literary forms like novels, poetry, and plays. Thus, for example, a reading of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) that is attentive to the novel’s silences about British colonial fortunes might bring together histories of trafficking enslaved people from Africa to Jamaica, abolitionist writings, Parliamentary papers, work on Anthony Trollope’s travel narrative The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1859), and the very recent Legacies of British Slave-Ownership project to build a picture of the British fortunes made in, and attitudes toward, Jamaica (Hall). All of this remains below the surface of Brontë’s novel, and yet to understand what makes it possible for Rochester to assume his right to the body and inheritance of the Creole Bertha Antoinetta Mason—and why this right required no explanation for Brontë’s first readers—one needs to know much that derives from the theoretical and historical work of those who study travel documents of all kinds. As this example suggests, travel writing has much to offer those interested in the power dynamics within nineteenth-century British culture. Yet Victorian travel writing received relatively little critical notice until the 1990s, when its position at the center of an overlapping set of scholarly concerns suddenly brought it into focus. The recovery work of second-wave feminism had expanded literary studies’ sense of authors who merited serious consideration; it also drew in types of life-writing 473

Andrea Kaston Tange

beyond the formal autobiography that had traditionally been the purview of men [on life-writing, see Broughton’s chapter; on second-wave feminism, see Schaffer’s chapter]. Because letters and diaries were routinely the basis for popular travelogues, women travel writers came to scholarly attention. In addition, cultural studies had identified cross-genre study as important for understanding a given moment in time, and the flourishing field of postcolonial studies enhanced critical awareness of the place of travel in colonial power structures [on postcolonialism, see Banerjee’s chapter]. This combination of theoretical approaches produced interest in, among other things, the intersections of identity and empire, and led scholars to think about how nineteenth-century travelers processed their experiences in foreign places for a readership back home, as well as how travel worked as a powerful literary trope. Not surprisingly, then, some of the most important books of travel writing theory that focus on the nineteenth century emerged in the 1990s (Bedad; Duncan and Gregory; Morgan), as did the two main humanities journals focused primarily on travel writing—Studies in Travel Writing and Literature of Travel, Exploration and Empire—which between them encompass travel writing across historical periods and as it intersects with anthropology, colonial history, art history, and empire building. Tourist Studies, an important publication that draws mainly from sociology, anthropology, and geography, tends to focus on current travelers rather than history or literature of travel. Because of the noteworthy diversity of authors, topics, and kinds of work that fall under the general heading “travel writing,” tracing threads in the scholarship is a useful way to understand the contours of the category. The first decade of widespread scholarship on nineteenth-century travel writing may be characterized as focusing largely the politics of representation, both of the self and the other, especially in relation to the depiction of intercultural contact. Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992, revised 2008) remains an essential text for theorizing the experience and writings emerging from what she dubbed “contact zones.” Her groundbreaking work begins in the seventeenth century, with particular concern for how travel writing narrated and defined the rest of the world for a European readership that was bent on justifying its projects of empire. She argues persuasively both that travel writing was central to the ideological power of Empire and that the space of the contact zone was, paradoxically, one of negotiation and exchange rather than simply reaffirming the hierarchies that many travelers might have expected. Pratt’s influence can be seen in the generation of work that has been produced since, as scholars have continued to explore the implications of the act of travel for individual, national, and spatial concepts of identity (as in, for example, Politics, Identity, and Mobility in Travel Writing, edited by Miguel A. Cabañas et al.). Rather than offering broad theories of the ideological and cultural power of travel writing, however, more recent work tends to focus on particular places and moments in time. Because at its essence, travel writing is about encounters with people, built environments, and landscapes that the author formulates as “foreign,” there is enormous latitude for the topics that travel writing might take up and for the theoretical and disciplinary approaches that might be most useful for thinking critically about that writing—with anthropology and geography often influencing work by literary scholars and historians. The collection edited by Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst has particularly good essays operating in an interdisciplinary theoretical frame. Studies of travel writing do not typically focus on genre; rather than offering theories of travel letters as letters, for example, scholarship tends to bring together multiple genres around categories that describe the goal of the traveler. The most common of these are tourism, empire building, and scientific inquiry, with studies often focusing on a single location or author. For example, a 2017 special issue of Studies in Travel Writing focused on that consummate Victorian tourist, Isabella Bird; there have been excellent studies of the diaries of soldiers’ wives during the 1857 Siege of Lucknow (Hart; Klaver) and whole books devoted to the documents that reveal the material facts and imaginative power of Arctic expeditions (Craciun; Hill). Scholars have also produced studies of travelers in literary texts, from imperial explorers in H. Rider Haggard’s novels (Monsman) to the convict transport history that shaped colonial settlement in Australia and that shapes how Charles Dickens’s readers would have understood Magwitch in Charles 474

Travel Writing

Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) (Grossman). Elaine Freedgood’s chapter on the tobacco Magwitch smokes is particularly interesting both because it connects the convict-settler economy with the horror of Aboriginal genocide, and because it provides a model for examining the rich ideas that lie in a text’s silences. A few field-defining books, such as Pratt’s, have had tremendous influence. But by and large the constellation of work on which scholars draw depends on the location and situation about which they are writing. For instance, a history of working-class English seaside tourism (Troschitz) requires an entirely different reading list than examining Catharine Parr Traill’s or Susanna Moodie’s narratives of colonial settlement in Canada (see James; Mitchell; Morris) [on settler colonialism, see Wagner’s chapter]. It would be impossible to cover the varied work on travel writing in locations throughout the vast British Empire in a single essay, so what follows begins with a brief overview of some historical studies of the rise of travel and travel writing throughout the nineteenth century and then addresses formative directions in the scholarship. I have indicated a few scholarly contributors within each category, as well as identified some key issues and trends that shape the field, in the service of highlighting some of the most interesting Victorian travel writers.

1. The History and Technologies of Travel Until the 1830s, land travel relied entirely on feet—one’s own or those of a horse or other animal in harness. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the spread of the railway (over 13,000 miles of track existed in Britain by 1870), in combination with the advent of steamships and massive infrastructure projects such as the Suez Canal, radically lowered the time and expense of travel and increased its accessibility [on technologies, see Menke’s chapter; on industry, see Carroll’s chapter]. As the telegraph, rising literacy rates, and an explosion of the periodical press brought news and images of the world into Britain, and new modes of travel carried more British people across the globe, the logical result was an increased curiosity about the world, which was met with an exponential growth of published travel writing in many forms—from missionary treatises like Mary Louisa Whatley’s Ragged Life in Egypt (1862), to official diplomatic narratives such as Laurence Oliphant’s Narrative of the Earl of Elgin’s Mission to China and Japan (1859), to extensive newspaper coverage of the series of expeditions launched to try to recover the arctic explorer Captain John Franklin and his crew after all trace of his ships, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, was lost during their 1845 expedition. Although easy to overlook when thinking about theories of travel writing, it is important to consider how technologies opened up the globe and affected British perspectives on the world. Jack Simmons’s The Victorian Railway offers a comprehensive history of the growth of the railway in Britain, covering infrastructure development, its impact on local tourism, its relationship to the periodical press, and much more. Tina Young Choi’s recent article on the power of the railway guide to help travelers make sense of space, and Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s study of how the railroad shaped cultural perceptions of time and space provide useful complements to this history. While they focus on the railway in Britain and the US, their work offers much that may be extrapolated to other locations, as expansion of this infrastructure in Australia, Canada, Egypt, India, Japan, and other locations was a direct result of British colonial or tourist influences (see Aguiar). Studies of travel technologies also include work that examines their role in fiction. Alison Byerly (“Technologies”) and Ruth Livesey both cover the impact of changing technologies of transport— stagecoaches, railways, steamships, bicycles, and hot air balloons—as they opened up the globe literally and imaginatively. Cara Murray’s Victorian Narrative Technologies in the Middle East considers both the Suez Canal and the novel as technologies that helped develop a global understanding of the British place in the world. Another important technology that affected travel is that of print culture itself, whose popularity exploded during this time [on popular culture, see Daly’s chapter; on print culture, see Haywood’s 475

Andrea Kaston Tange

chapter] . In addition to the advent of documents that advised people on how to travel (dispensing packing advice and suggesting routes, for example), travel narratives enabled what are often called armchair travelers: people who did not undertake journeys themselves, but who read voraciously about the discoveries, adventures, perils, curiosities, and encounters of British travelers around the world. Virtual tourists—some might say voyeurs—devoured the writings by missionaries, colonial settlers, scientists, tourists, journalists, diplomats, and soldiers that appeared in periodical and book form [on periodicals, see Hughes’s chapter]. Byerly’s recent Are We There Yet? explores how new technologies of representing places contributed to this surge in imaginative travel. The Victorian publisher John Murray became the most prominent to focus on travel writing, and his extensive book list covered a variety of types of travelers and imagined reading audiences. One of his most prolific authors was Isabella Bird, whose 1856 success with The Englishwoman in America led to another dozen books published with Murray, perhaps the best known of which is her A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879), an adventure narrative of her horseback journey hundreds of miles across the Rockies. Murray also published everything from Francis Galton’s The Art of Travel (1855)—a book aimed at soldiers, missionaries, and explorers, to prepare them with practical advice for making their way across uncharted land—to Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), part-memoir, part scientific treatise based on field journals from his journey on the HMS Beagle onto which he had been hired as the voyage’s geologist and naturalist. Darwin’s work was originally published under the vague title Journals and Remarks, which was quickly changed to Journal of Researches, perhaps as a nod to the fact that science research was increasingly popular as travel writing; its final title was not bestowed until 1905. Because of Murray’s strong focus on all sorts of travel, those contemplating a deep dive into the work of many prominent Victorian travel writers will find the John Murray Archive, contained within the National Library of Scotland, an unparalleled resource; the collection Travels into Print (edited by Innes Keighren, Charles Withers, and Bill Bell) is an excellent first stop for comprehending that archive.

2. Tourism Victorian tourism is a direct descendant of what in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was known as the Grand Tour: an extended journey throughout continental Europe taken by wealthy and often aristocratic young men before they settled down to married life or other responsibilities. It was intended to expose them to everything from classical antiquities to contemporary art masters, as well as the philosophy, architecture, culture, and society of Europe. Chloe Chard’s Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour is an excellent study of the purposes and effects of these tours, in terms that frame many of the concepts central to thinking about travel writing, including spectacle, observation, and the gendered position of travelers. Young women were far less frequent travelers on such a Tour, which could last a year or more, although as Brian Dolan’s Ladies of the Grand Tour ably demonstrates, there were important exceptions and women who derived immense personal enrichment from breaking that mold. By the 1840s, the Grand Tour had been largely eclipsed by less elite forms of travel. The 1836 advent of John Murray’s Handbooks changed the face of tourism by providing pocket-sized “little red books” that steered people through foreign streets and translated phrases, money, customs, and cultural experiences into an itinerary of sights that could be at once intriguingly different from home and comfortingly packaged into digestible moments. Baedeker’s guidebooks, launched in 1828 in German, had a similar intent; their English editions—issued to compete with Murray—did not begin until 1861. Esther Allen offers a useful overview of the long history of guidebooks to Europe that predate Murray’s, as well as discussion of what makes Murray’s books unique. Murray’s handbooks were generally written by distinguished personages with firsthand knowledge of the places they enumerated, and their readers were expected to want to do things 476

Travel Writing

in fine style. Nonetheless, there was something more accessible about Murray’s itineraries and advice; even the detailed architecture and art histories they contained suggested a democratizing of the Grand Tour model of wealthy tourism as finishing-school education. The first Murray’s Handbooks focused on western Europe and the locations that had traditionally been part of the Grand Tour, although the series expanded to include Egypt (1847), Syria and Palestine (1858), Japan (1891), Asia Minor (1895), and many other far-flung destinations over the course of the nineteenth century. There are numerous Victorian travelogues about western Europe whose antecedents lie in the Grand Tour. They chronicle trips of the sort Murray’s Handbooks catered to: the travels of a tourist who could spend two months in Italy on a honeymoon, say—modest, compared to 12 months on a Grand Tour, but nonetheless hardly accessible to working-class travelers. The most often studied of these is Dickens’s Pictures from Italy (1846), which was pitched to ingratiate himself with readers who were put off by his earlier travelogue, American Notes for General Circulation (1842). The 1846 collection of essays traces his family’s trip through France to their short-term home in Genoa, as well as his excursions throughout Italy. Because of its rich prose and dreamlike qualities, it serves as an important touchstone for many scholars interested in literary depictions of British tourism in Europe. For those interested in this topic, however, it is worthwhile moving beyond Dickens’s well-examined text and considering other travelogues popular in their own time. Continental Europe, traditionally the site of art and culture, was also of interest in terms of politics; see, for example, Florence Nightingale’s letters from Rome, which describe Italy’s new governance structure and the role of the Catholic church in it. One might also think about the relationship between gender, education, and travel in works as varied as Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), or the papers and drawings from John Ruskin’s European travels. It took Thomas Cook, and the advent of the package tour, to democratize travel even further by creating affordable jaunts to the seaside, the Great Exhibition of 1851, and other destinations that could be enjoyed by working-class travelers on a small budget in a day or a weekend [on regional travel, see Gibson’s chapter]. Cook’s travel agency got its start in 1841, harnessing the technology of railway transport with the economics of group ticket sales to plan one-day excursions to temperance meetings. Cook’s innovations included same-day return fares, overnight fares with arranged accommodations, and thoughtful attention to the needs of working-class leisure. Scholars interested in working-class travel tend to focus on the infrastructure that supported it, and on the destinations themselves, as there is relatively little in the way of firsthand travel writing about what were often much shorter trips. Lynne Withey’s Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours traces the trajectories between the older model of the Grand Tour and the “modern” tourism of the nineteenth century that ultimately led to the invention of the package tour. Her book provides a thorough history of the meteoric rise of Cook’s business from its humble beginnings to his 1871 launch of an eight-month world tour. And in the process, she offers a historical primer on tourism more generally, including the technologies that made Europe accessible to people of more modest means and shifted the focus from the journey itself to the destination, as the speed of transport increased exponentially. Lisa Colletta’s edited collection includes a range of essays that consider the influence of the Grand Tour model on travel writers throughout the nineteenth century. The combination of the advent of guidebooks and the speed of the railway helped consolidate the assumption that a successful trip was predicated on consuming a specific set of sights. To experience the real Rome, for example, was to explore its antiquities and prominent art history: the Colosseum, the Forum, St. Peter’s, the Trevi Fountain, and works by Raphael, Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Bernini. Scholars have shown that this has been a prominent feature of tourism since antiquity, when the Romans, for example, sought out the great sights of ancient Greece. However, the technologies that enabled mass tourism in the nineteenth century exponentially increased the perception of a beaten path and obvious itinerary for tours. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72), the dry Mr. Casaubon 477

Andrea Kaston Tange

offers a pointed example of how such beaten paths were perceived as tiresome, as he talks to his much younger bride Dorothea, on their honeymoon in Rome: What was fresh to her mind was worn out to his; and such capacity of thought and feeling as had ever been stimulated in him by the general life of mankind had long shrunk to a sort of dried preparation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge. When he said, “Does this interest you, Dorothea? Shall we stay a little longer? I am ready to stay if you wish it,”—it seemed to her as if going or staying were alike dreary. Or, “Should you like to go to the Farnesina, Dorothea? It contains celebrated frescos designed or painted by Raphael, which most persons think it worth while to visit.” “But do you care about them?” was always Dorothea’s question. “They are, I believe, highly esteemed.” (182–3) Smug travelers, who wanted to distinguish themselves from hordes of sheep-like tourists content to take in predictable and commodified sights, positioned themselves as the more enlightened versions of Mr. Casaubon. Where his mind was merely withered and bored by sights tediously familiar, “which most persons think it worth while to visit,” superior travelers went a step further and began to strive for—and write about—experiences “off the beaten path.” This was taken to demonstrate both that the traveler had had a more authentic experience in a foreign place, and that he or she was open to the changes that travel might produce within the self. Consider Lucy Honeychurch in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), who is better able to find herself, through the medium of exploring Italy, once she abandons her Baedeker. As Victorian travel writing became a subject of scholarly study, some of the most important discussions opened with thinking about tourism—both in terms of the implications of rendering some part of the world and its inhabitants as spectacle, and in terms of how to define the spectators. James Buzard’s field-defining The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture 1800–1918 was the first, and remains one of the most important, texts to theorize the position of the tourist. He explores the resistance that self-styled travelers have long had to being called tourists, and argues that this distinction is a false one in part because all such encounters turned on the question of what counts as an “authentic” experience in a foreign place. Buzard’s work has inspired an important thread in travel studies, which increasingly also draws on the work of anthropologists to interrogate the concept of authenticity and to think through the commodification of cultures. Of course, Victorian tourism was not limited to Europe, although much tourism scholarship is focused there. Victorians often contrasted the culture of Europe, with its roots in classical antiquity, with the rough-and-ready lack of sophistication in the United States and with the lack of “civilization” in the Americas more generally. If Dickens got himself in trouble for characterizing the United States as prone to violence, corrupting individualism, and general filth, he was hardly alone in those generalizations. Frances Trollope was among many others who offered similar critiques (see her Domestic Manners of the Americans). Such juxtapositions were a staple of tourist writing: Japan, for example, was routinely represented as exquisitely clean and aesthetically marvelous in contrast to China’s supposed dirt and unpleasant strangeness. In 2015, the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies published a special issue on “The Victorians and China” that covers a wide range of representations of the country. The people whom travelers encountered throughout the world were similarly understood through tropes that reflected larger British assumptions: with indigenous people in South America depicted as noble savages, native Hawaiians as naïve and artless, or the people of India as unruly heathens in need of colonial subjugation. As all of these examples suggest, at the intersection of Buzard’s work on tourism and Pratt’s on contact zones lie travelogues that move beyond Europe 478

Travel Writing

and that offer provocative studies of how the perspectives of tourists are also shaped by the hierarchies of empire.

3. Projects of Empire As I have begun to suggest, there is not a hard line separating tourist narratives from travel writing that emerges from projects of empire. British tourism engaged with nineteenth-century constructions of race, hierarchies of civilization, global migration patterns, and narratives of discovery. Italians, Spaniards, European Jews, the Roma, and even the Irish were often discussed as distinct “races,” and, as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) makes patently clear, people as geographically close as eastern Europeans were explicitly Orientalized. Numerous scholarly studies, building on Edward Said’s important Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, examine the growth of Orientalizing tourism as western Europe ceased to be the only place a person could go on a vacation (see, in particular, Bedad). One important distinction between tourist travelogues and other forms of travel writing, however, lies in the purpose of the journey: tourism is a trip undertaken primarily for pleasure, while other journeys with missionary, diplomatic, military, or settlement purposes fulfilled more directly the goals of empire building. Because these types of journeys are so disparate, one useful way to think about travel writing that explores locations within the global British empire is through the paradigms that differentiate travel writing in gendered terms. Monica Anderson’s Women and the Politics of Travel is one excellent example of such work. As travel writing exploded in popularity, it also quickly became a form in which women could find equal voice with men. In the two volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography that cover British travel writers from 1837–1909, 66% of the authors profiled are women. By and large, the men who appear there tend to be explorers and scientists, while the women are tourists, colonial homemakers, and wives or sisters of men stationed throughout the empire. Scholars have consequently focused substantial attention on differentiating masculine and feminine modes of travel writing. Masculine modes are associated with mapping, naming, cataloguing, comparing, measuring, and categorizing; while feminine modes are associated with sympathy, connection, observation, assimilation, and inquiry. Importantly, these are not necessarily presumed to map neatly onto the gender of authors: thus, Isabella Bird, who was an intrepid and independent explorer of places as far flung as China, Korea, Persia, and the Hawaiian archipelago, for example, comes under criticism from some scholars for oscillating between the more authoritative masculine modes and the sympathetic feminine ones. Explorers with the most stereotypical sense of British superiority often fit into studies interrogating the masculinist project of empire building. Thus, for example, we find plenty of scholarship critiquing the racist, objectifying, or commanding work written by the likes of Richard Burton, Francis Galton, David Livingstone, or Henry Morton Stanley—even while they did not all agree on the desirability of British colonial policies. These men’s travels through and writings about the continent of Africa participate in figuring the space as a largely mysterious land, undifferentiated by western maps, and ripe for exploration, naming, and conquest. Mary Kingsely’s work is useful for considering how gendered differences shaped writing about imperial locations. Kingsley was self-conscious about her lack of formal education; concerned that her narratives would be treated with skepticism because their author was female, she combined humor with meticulous attention to detail to produce pointed articles that sought to correct prevailing British assumptions about particular inferiorities of African cultures and people. Comparing the work of Edward William Lane and Sophia Poole in Egypt is particularly useful for illuminating the more interesting slippages of this gendered model of writing. Lane produced what was taken for decades to be the definitive tome in English on Egypt: An Account of the Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians (1836, and continuously in print since). Exhaustive and authoritative, it strove to describe not only the built environments and sights that were the common point of interest for tourists but the people and culture as well. His sister, Sophia Poole, wrote a follow-up, An 479

Andrea Kaston Tange

Englishwoman in Egypt: Letters from Cairo (1844), which contained numerous observations from her time within harems, where her brother could not visit. These scenes position her as sympathetic with the women she meets and vulnerable, as she finds herself an object of curiosity within the harem; yet she clings to a sense of superiority and cannot resist drawing presumptuous conclusions despite obvious language barriers. The book oscillates between “feminine” modes of writing about encounters within all-female spaces and more authoritative passages, some of which are Poole’s and some that were written by Lane himself and transposed into Poole’s voice through use of the pronoun “I.” Reading their two works alongside each other produces the richest understanding both of the value of thinking in gendered terms about travel writing and of the ways in which gendered identities are also necessarily dependent upon one’s position within hierarchies of empire. There are many other Victorian authors whose work adds interesting complexities to the ways we might think about intersections of gender and empire. Louisa Anne Meredith, for example, wrote multiple narratives that combine a serious interest in botany, her prior career as a painter, and her difficulties homemaking in the antipodes, thus producing documents that are fascinating studies of Australian colonial settlement as travel writing. Jamaican Mary Seacole’s autobiography tells the story of her “British Hotel,” which provided vital food, medical supplies, and nursing to soldiers in the Crimea War, and yet, as an entrepreneurial project (Florence Nightingale had refused Seacole a place on her nursing staff), left her bankrupt and in need of public assistance after the War’s end. Emily Eden’s diaries of her life traveling with her brother, the Governor General, on his 1837–40 tour throughout northern India were not published until 1867, by which time British governance in India had changed dramatically in the wake of the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion; the tremendous popularity of Up the Country thus also suggests the power of gendered tourism to reinforce certain kinds of cultural nostalgia. And one important avenue of recent scholarship considers gender and empire in terms of sexuality studies, perhaps most thought-provokingly reading authors such as Charles Darwin, Mary Kingsley, or Alfred Wallace in terms of what Mark Clement has called “queer colonial journeys” (see also Kelly and Laity).

4. Science It might seem as if science writing and travel writing have little in common, but Victorian botanical, animal, and environmental sciences relied heavily on global exploration and the collection of “exotic” plants, geological samples, and observations of animals in their natural habitats [on ecological collections, see Voskuil’s chapter]. Moreover, tourism and science often intersected on the same journey. It was not uncommon to include scientists—particularly those then called “naturalists,” whom we would now designate by more precise terms like botanist, geologist, or herpetologist—on a pleasure journey. There were several “scientific fellows” aboard Lady Annie Brassey’s 11-month voyage around the world in her private yacht; narrated in her popular travelogue, The Voyage of the Sunbeam (1878), her trip ranged from socializing with the Hawaiian royal family to collecting plants, rocks, and other natural specimens with her children. Such intersections of amateur-naturalist curiosity and professional presence on luxurious tourist journeys materially aided the Victorian effort to amass collections that would support understanding the species of the world. These collections were both vast and literal, as can be seen in the expansion of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew to include its now-iconic greenhouses (the Palm House built in the 1840s and the Temperate House begun 1859) whose construction relied on Victorian innovations in cast iron and wrought iron. Kew Gardens were the most important repository of living plant specimens collected in the nineteenth century, although private collections of preserved specimens, as well as a huge rise in botanical artwork, are a testament to the nineteenth-century travelers’ obsession with cataloguing the natural world. Marianne North is a particularly interesting figure in this regard: her autobiography, Recollections of a Happy Life (1894), is mostly a travel narrative, which provides a fascinating companion to the hundreds of botanical paintings she produced in her journeys through North and South 480

Travel Writing

America, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. The paintings themselves are all on display in the Marianne North Gallery at Kew Gardens, a spectacular collection that complements the botanical specimens in the greenhouses and can be browsed online at the “Marianne North Online Gallery.” North’s body of work both encompasses and modifies the genres of autobiography, scientific travel writing, landscape painting, and botanical specimen drawing; as such, it is of interest to scholars who study the relationships between verbal and visual arts, as well as those who theorize the role of gender in producing Victorian botanical sciences. Victorian science writing was often designed to appeal to an audience that included intelligent lay readers [on science writing, see O’Connor’s chapter]. The best of it was highly literary prose, and much of it combined travelogue with field notes to produce texts that rendered the natural world as engaging a spectacle as world cultures were in more traditional travel narratives. The published Proceedings of professional societies—such as the Royal Geographical Society or Royal Asiatic Society—demonstrate the importance of travel to the development of groundbreaking new scientific understandings of the world, while book-length works garnered even more widespread readerships, in part because they were often written with a nonspecialist audience in mind. Darwin is perhaps the most well-known traveling scientist whose writings are also appreciated on their literary merits, but there were many notable Victorian authors who drew together travel and science—particularly in fields of botany, geography, and geology. Recent scholarly studies of the intersections of travel and science also address medicine, physiology, archaeology, and more. See, for example, Lila Marz Harper’s Solitary Travelers and Narin Hassan’s Diagnosing Empire, as well as Amanda Adams’s collection of biographies, Ladies of the Field.

5. New Directions in Travel Studies Following the paradigms suggested by Edward Said’s powerful work, scholars have focused on those Victorian travel writers who fit critical assumptions about British citizens’ support for hierarchies of imperial power and colonial domination but have paid relatively little attention to travel guides despite their importance to travel and tourism. Scholars may also have felt less interest in these books because, while early travel guides were written by experienced travelers, the genre as a whole is somewhat tedious because its goal is comprehensive control of the foreign environment. However, the information within them provides a fascinating glimpse into ways of thinking about foreign places through a combination of their casual comments about the locals; their recommendations for itineraries, modes of travel, and even packing tips; and the positions they take on the history they convey. The expectations travel guides set for would-be travelers thus suggest a rich field of inquiry. There is also room for more work on tourism in locations throughout the British empire. To date, much of the work on Victorian tourism centers on Europe, while scholarship on travel in the rest of the world centers primarily on projects of imperial domination. However, empire also facilitated leisure. Empire dug the Suez Canal and then flooded Egypt with tourists. Empire engaged in Opium Wars but also represented China in the periodical press for eager armchair travelers in Britain. Empire colonized Australia and then mourned (even as it was responsible for nearly eradicating) the loss of Aboriginal culture there, which it often turned into a spectacle for consumption by a curious public in the metropole. As all of these examples suggest, there are obvious connections between imperial domination and tourism’s constructions of the Other—and these are connections, and tourist writings, worth exploring in greater detail, now that some of the most prominent travel writing by colonial settlers, military officers, and diplomats in these regions has come under some study. Scholarship on travel has moved toward a paradigm of “travel and . . .” in which travel is considered as a metaphor, motif, or literal fact in conjunction with aesthetics, colonialism, environmental concerns, representations of other cultures, interrogations of moves toward modernization, and 481

Andrea Kaston Tange

much more. This “travel and . . .” model moves away almost entirely from singular authors and instead relies on constellations of primary documents that are revelatory of particular locations and moments in time. One relatively new thread of study considers “dark tourism”—the increasing acknowledgment that people eventually treat as spectacles places that once were anything but vacation spots: battlefields, sites of tragedy, landscapes that face destruction by forces of “progress.” Scholarship on Victorian memorial photographs of the Well at Cawnpore or the devastation at Lucknow in the aftermath of the Sepoy Rebellion thus enables us to consider what it means to turn the titillated gaze of retrospection on sites of war (Hensley). Museum studies is perhaps a cousin of travel studies, as the processes of collecting antiquities for display in places like the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum both relied on travel and on the hierarchies of empire that allowed relics to be seized and removed from their cultures of origin in the name of aesthetic preservation and reform (Kriegel). As we consider the movements of people throughout the globe in the nineteenth century, there is still much important work to be done on the travels of those who often did not document their own movements: children, forcibly displaced indigenous people, those who moved out of the metropole and into the periphery out of the desperation of poverty, members of persecuted religious minorities, or migrating laborers. The experiences of childhood throughout the empire are a particularly understudied topic, which could be productively examined at the nexus of the work by postcolonial theorists, anthropologists, intersectional feminists, and critical race scholars. As Victorianist scholars, we have come to think of travel studies as a means of reckoning with the past. To interrogate travel as an act that is part fantasy fulfillment, we are indebted to anthropological theories of what it means to be an observer of another culture and to articulate an “authentic” experience of a place. Thus, the vast majority of work in the period has focused on the travels of privileged, white Britons. One unintended consequence of these important critical inquiries, however, is that the nineteenth-century writings under consideration generally position everyone else in the world on the Other side of one or more important binaries: colonizer/colonized, west/east, Christian/heathen, civilized/“savage.” This suggests a final direction for further study, one that examines writing that decenters hegemonic, white Victorian identities. This work is already beginning—for example, with scholarship on travel narratives by Indians about tourism through India (Gupta), on Indian poets in England (Boehmer), and on essays by Japanese travelers to Europe (Fukuzawa). The important collection Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse (Paravisini-Gebert et al., eds.) is an excellent model, refocusing our view of the Caribbean through the writings of Caribbean women. There is far more work to be done in this vein, particularly given that to study the travelers of the past is to enable self-critical location within a historical frame through which one can acknowledge one’s own forms of privilege. In conjunction with efforts to decolonize the canon, we might productively think about how to diversify the voices we consider important, the spectators who were observing, and the bodies who were traveling, throughout the nineteenth-century globe.

Key Critical Works Monica Anderson. Women and the Politics of Travel, 1870–1914. Ali Behdad. Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution. James Buzard. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918. Miguel A. Cabañas, Jeanne Dubino, Veronica Salles-Reese, and Gary Totten, editors. Politics, Identity, and Mobility in Travel Writing. James Duncan, and Derek Gregory, editors. Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing. Lila Marz Harper. Solitary Travelers: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Travel Narratives and the Scientific Vocation. Julia Kuehn, and Paul Smethurst, editors. Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility. Susan Morgan. Place Matters: Gendered Geography in Victorian Women’s Travel Books about Southeast Asia. Mary Louise Pratt. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Wolfgang Schivelbusch. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century.

482

Travel Writing

Works Cited Adams, Amanda. Ladies of the Field: Early Women Archaeologists and Their Search for Adventure. Greystone Books, 2010. Aguiar, Marian. Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility. U of Minnesota P, 2011. Allen, Esther. “Money and Little Red Books: Romanticism, Tourism, and the Rise of the Guidebook.” Lit: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, vol. 7, nos. 2–3, 1996, pp. 213–26. Anderson, Monica. Women and the Politics of Travel, 1870–1914. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2006. Behdad, Ali. Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution. Duke UP, 1994. Boehmer, Elleke. Indian Arrivals 1870–1915: Networks of British Empire. Oxford UP, 2015. Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918. Oxford UP, 1993. Byerly, Alison. Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism. U of Michigan P, 2012. ———. “Technologies of Travel and the Victorian Novel.” The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel, edited by Lisa Rodensky, Oxford UP, 2013, pp. 289–312. Cabañas, Miguel A., Jeanne Dubino, Veronica Salles-Reese, and Gary Totten, editors. Politics, Identity, and Mobility in Travel Writing. Routledge, 2016. Chard Chloe. Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830. Manchester UP, 1999. Choi, Tina Young. “The Railway Guide’s Experiments in Cartography: Narrative, Information, Advertising.” Victorian Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Social, Political, and Cultural Studies, vol. 57, no. 2, 2015, pp. 251–83. Clark, Steve, editor and introduction, and Paul Smethurst, editor. Asian Crossings: Travel Writing on China, Japan and Southeast Asia. Hong Kong UP, 2008. Clement, Mark. “Queer Colonial Journeys: Alfred Russel Wallace and Somerset Maugham in the Malay Archipelago.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 26, no. 2, May 2017, pp. 161–87. Colletta, Lisa, editor. The Legacy of the Grand Tour: New Essays on Travel, Literature, and Culture. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2015. Craciun, Adriana. Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration. Cambridge UP, 2016. Dolan, Brian. Ladies of the Grand Tour: British Women in Pursuit of Enlightenment and Adventure in Eighteenth-Century Europe. HarperCollins, 2001. Duncan, James, and Derek Gregory, editors. Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing. Routledge, 1999. Eliot, George. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. Edited by Gregory Maertz, Broadview, 2004. Freedgood, Elaine. “Realism, Fetishism, and Genocide: Negro Head Tobacco in and around Great Expectations.” The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. U Chicago P, 2006, pp. 81–110. Fukuzawa, Naomi Charlotte. “Autoexotic Literary Encounters between Meiji Japan and the West: Sōseki Natsume’s ‘The Tower of London’ (1905) and Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan (1904).” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 132, no. 2, March 2017, pp. 447–54. Grossman, Jonathan H. “Living the Global Transport Network in Great Expectations.” Victorian Studies, vol. 57, no. 2, Winter 2015, pp. 225–50. Gupta, Jayati. “Modernity and the Global ‘Hindoo’: The Concept of the Grand Tour in Colonial India.” Global South, vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 2008, pp. 59–70. Hall, Catherine, et al. “Legacies of British Slave-Ownership.” Department of History, U College London. www. ucl.ac.uk/lbs/. Harper, Lila Marz. Solitary Travelers: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Travel Narratives and the Scientific Vocation. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2001. Hart, Catherine. “‘Oh What Horrors Will Be Disclosed When We Know All’: British Women and the Private/ Public Experience of the Siege of Lucknow.” Prose Studies, vol. 34, no. 3, December 2012, pp. 185–96. Hassan, Narin. Diagnosing Empire: Women, Medical Knowledge, and Colonial Mobility. Ashgate, 2011. Hensley, Nathan. Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty. Oxford UP, 2016. Hill, Jen. White Horizon: The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination. SUNY P, 2008. James, Suzanne. “The ‘Indians’ of Catharine Parr Traill’s the Backwoods of Canada.” The Rhetoric of Canadian Writing, edited by Conny Steenman-Marcusse, Rodopi, 2002, pp. 107–23. Keighren, Ines M., Charles W. J. Withers, and Bill Bell, editors. Travels into Print: Exploration, Writing, and Publishing with John Murray, 1773–1859 , U of Chicago Press, 2015. Kelly, Alice M. “‘My Sable Ingramina’: Queering Colonial Gender Roles in Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, vol. 13, no. 3, 2017, pp. 43–55. Klaver, Claudia. “Domesticity under Siege: British Women and Imperial Crisis at the Siege of Lucknow, 1857.” Women’s Writing, vol. 8, no. 1, 2001, pp. 21–58.

483

Andrea Kaston Tange Kriegel, Lara. Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture. Duke UP, 2008. Kuehn, Julia, and Paul Smethurst, editors. Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility. Routledge, 2009. Laity, Cassandra. “Eco-Geologies of Queer Desire: Elizabeth Bishop’s Love Poetry and Charles Darwin’s Beagle Geology Travel Narratives.” Contemporary Women’s Writing, vol. 10, no. 3, November 2016, pp. 429–50. Livesey, Ruth. Writing the Stage Coach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Oxford UP, 2016. “Marianne North Online Gallery.” Kew Royal Botanical Gardens. www.kew.org/mng/gallery/index.html. Mitchell, Elise. “There’s No Place Like ‘Home’: Susanna Moodie, Shelter Writing, and Dwelling on the Earth.” New International Voices in Ecocriticism, edited by Serpil Oppermann, Lexington, 2015, pp. 101–16. Monsman, Gerald. H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier: The Political & Literary Contexts of His African Romances. ELT, 2006. Morgan, Susan. Place Matters: Gendered Geography in Victorian Women’s Travel Books about Southeast Asia. Rutgers UP, 1996. Morris, Paul. “A European Journey to the Bush: Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush as Travel Literature.” Pioneering North America: Mediators of European Culture and Literature, edited by Klaus Martens and Andreas Haus, Königshausen and Neumann, 2000, pp. 171–83. Murray, Cara. Victorian Narrative Technologies in the Middle East. Routledge, 2012. Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth, and Ivette Romero-Cesareo, editors. Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge, 2008. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. U of California P, 2014. Simmons, Jack. The Victorian Railway. Thames and Hudson, 1991. Troschitz, Robert. “Liminal Seaside? Working-Class Tourism in the Nineteenth Century.” The Making of English Popular Culture, edited by John Storey, Routledge, 2016, pp. 104–17. Withey, Lynne. Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750–1915. William Morrow and Company, 1997.

484

42 SETTLER COLONIALISM Tamara S. Wagner

In Catherine Helen Spence’s settler novel Clara Morison (1854), the eponymous heroine receives a letter from her wealthy uncle in Scotland shortly after she has taken up a situation as a servant. The letter is cursorily summed up in indirect speech to underscore the irony of exaggerated or fallacious expectations of emigration. Having disposed of his niece by paying her passage to Australia, he is surprised that she should have failed in getting a situation in a colony where, by statistical returns which he had been at the pains to examine for himself, there were so few teachers and so many scholars; feared that her manners would be ruined, and that it would be impossible for her to take any position in society. (2:72–3) Clara Morison describes the mundane, domestic adventures of a young female emigrant who is persuaded by her relatives to move to Australia, where they expect her either to obtain a well-paid position as a governess or—and this they consider even more likely—to marry well. Statistically, there was a scarcity of female settlers in nineteenth-century Australia and, correspondingly, a muchdebated superfluity of middle-class, but impoverished single women in Victorian Britain. Matrimonial colonization—the targeted recruitment of unmarried female emigrants to balance a surplus of male settlers—produced complaints in colonial reports, such as the Colonization Circular, published by the Colonial Land and Emigration Society, that there simply did “not exist at present any demand for governesses, or other persons of superior attainments, and the emigration hither of such persons, unless for the purpose of joining friends or relatives able to maintain them on arrival, should not be encouraged” (4). Cautionary narratives such as Clara Morison similarly warned of the disappointment in store for middle-class emigrants expecting instantaneous success, while at the same time reacting critically to misrepresentations both of the receiving colonies and of particular groups of emigrants. Clara, in Spence’s novel, is already subject to offensive remarks on the ship out, suspected of “[g]oing out on speculation . . . because she can’t hook any one at home, and trying it on in the colonies” (1:14). Even though a somewhat implausible marriage plot allows Spence to provide a conventional happy ending for her heroine in Australia, the less fortunate end of one of Clara’s doubles, another would-be governess who “has lost name and fame, and joy and hope [in what] has been an unfriendly land for her” (2:35), acts as a warning against unprepared emigration. Simultaneously defending female emigrants and realistically detailing everyday settler life, Spence upends misleading representations of colonial society in Victorian Britain. 485

Tamara S. Wagner

Having emigrated to Australia at age 14 in 1839, Spence wrote Clara Morison in response to an 1850 article by William Makepeace Thackeray in the satirical magazine Punch, in which the latter implied, as Spence put it, that “anything wearing petticoats” could get advantageously married in the colonies, “as if there was such a scarcity of educated women there” (Spence, Ever Yours 52). In “Waiting at the Station,” Thackeray describes a shipload of single women gathered together by the patrons of “the Female Emigration Scheme” (92). As part of an ironic sketch, Thackeray commented on what he perceived as the lack of gentility among this supply, concluding with the dismissive remark that such women may perhaps be deemed unsuitable as wives for English gentlemen, but that “a sunburnt settler out of the Bush” would probably not object to rough hands, clumsy ankles, and dropped aitches: “[H]e will take her back to his farm, where she will nurse his children, bake his dough, milk his cows, and cook his kangaroo for him” (92). Reflective of several distorted images of settlers and of Australia that were circulating in mid-Victorian Britain, Thackeray’s sarcastic description inspired Spence to write a realist novel about settler life that simultaneously asserts the gentility of middleclass female emigrants. Subtitled A Tale of South Australia during the Gold Fever, Clara Morison eschews adventurous descriptions of the goldfields. Instead, how the rush for gold affects daily life is presented from the vantage point of women who regard themselves as the grass widows of the men deserting settler homes for the goldfields. Exoticized scenes at the diggings are singularly absent from the narrative, in pointed contrast to better-known Australian fiction about the period such as several of the adventure novels of Rolf Boldrewood (Thomas Alexander Browne), including his highly successful Robbery Under Arms (1888), as well as the tellingly titled The Miner’s Right: A Tale of the Australian Goldfields (1890), Percy Clarke’s The Three Diggers (1889), and Henry Kingsley’s Geoffry Hamlyn (1859), published after Kingsley’s comparatively short sojourn in Australia from 1853 to 1857. Recent research on settler colonialism has drawn critical attention both to such divergent representations and to the intertextual exchanges between metropolitan, or British-based, writing and settler narratives [on travel writing see Tange’s chapter; on provincial culture see Gibson’s chapter]. Most scholars think of India and Africa as paradigmatic spaces of empire, but those differed importantly from what the nineteenth-century historian J.R. Seeley termed the “empire of settlements” in his influential The Expansion of England (1883). For the Victorians there existed two separate and antithetical empires: one of settlements and another of India (Seeley 10). In contrast to what we now consider colonies of occupation or conquest, colonies of settlement were thought of as “brand-new” and “ultra-English” (Seeley 10). Coining the popular term “Greater Britain” in his 1868 travelogue, Charles Dilke had likewise defined Britain’s settler spaces as “English-speaking, white-inhabited, and self-governed lands” (394). These lands were problematically conceived as terra nullius (no one’s land). In actively exporting settlers to these spaces, the British defined the resulting settlements through imported imperial culture. Both their historical development and their current geopolitical roles have further contributed to the unique position of these settlements in cultural and literary history. The newly acknowledged variety of literary works produced in Britain’s settler colonies prompts us to reconsider the transoceanic cultural as well as commercial connections that not only bound together the empire, but also shaped English language literature. Two particularly insightful literary developments allow us to unpack these connections and their impact on colonial self-representation: domestic settler fiction (with its focus on claiming domesticity and respectability for settler spaces) and, in pointed contrast, the transoceanic circulation of Victorian sensation fiction. These diametrically opposed developments exemplify how the adaptation of imported genres expressed a search for settler identity, while participating in transoceanic exchanges of cultural, including literary, products. Much of the current reevaluation has been rendered possible, or more feasible in an international context, through the growing presence of online resources, including electronic copies of nearly forgotten, once popular fiction. There is consequently now a much better awareness of the diversity and self-reflexivity of settler writing. In reacting to perceived readers’ expectations, Spence’s novel, therefore, provides an insightful point-of-entry into the discussions that have dominated the reappraisal 486

Settler Colonialism

of nineteenth-century settler narratives over the last decades. Much of the current scholarship concentrates on the rediscovery, or reassessment, of hitherto neglected domestic novels (predominantly written by women) and, further, on a wholescale reconsideration of the dynamic influences between writing produced in Britain’s settlements and metropolitan publications of the time. In particular, settler writing adapted sensational literary strategies, yet incidents in colonial settlements featured in British-authored sensation fiction, transforming attitudes toward these settlements, while often also marking them out as sensational spaces [on sensation, see Gilbert’s chapter]. Settler fiction, in turn, reacted self-consciously to these representations at the imperial center. A reconsideration of the diverse popular culture productions that grew out of and contributed to the transoceanic sensationalization of the so-called Tichborne Claimant lets us track the two-way exchanges between center and periphery that shaped writing about and in the settlements. Before analyzing these examples in detail, I shall first provide a brief overview of what we understand by Britain’s settler colonies and how recent scholarship has shifted from tracing the emergence of national literatures to reevaluating transoceanic literary developments.

1. Victorian Settler Narratives The nineteenth-century English-speaking colonial settler world is now commonly understood as comprising Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, although, more rarely, Rhodesia and South Africa are included among the colonies of settlement that became British “dominions” (Cohen Migration 42). From 1815 to 1920, approximately 17 million people emigrated to settler spaces. James Belich speaks of an “Anglo exodus” and a resulting “Anglo world” that differs from most of the communities covered in conventional diaspora studies in that it “began earlier, was more permanent, and its migrants went to reproductions of their own society, not someone else’s” (126). Although the lost colony that had become the United States of America remained the favored destination for emigrants throughout much of the century, both its representation in British-authored narratives and its own literary history set it apart from the colonial settlements that continued to belong to—and to a significant extent be identified with—the empire. Colonial settler societies not only “have a number of features in common in terms of their colonial histories” but also share an “ambivalent relationship to the imperial metropolitan centre” (Coombes 1). “Imperial diaspora” might be a better term, as Robin Cohen argues, for a form of diaspora marked by a continuing connection with the homeland, a deference to and imitation of its social and political institutions and a sense of forming part of a grand imperial design— whereby the group concerned assumes the self-image of a ‘chosen race’ with a global mission. (Global 69) This definition usefully encapsulates the prevailing understanding of settler colonialism during much of the Victorian period. Settler colonies are thus distinguished from the lost spaces that had become the United States on the one hand and from colonies of occupation on the other. In the British context, scholars define settler writing as the works of settlers during the period of empire. Traditionally, its discussion has fallen into two main categories: the literary histories of individual settler colonies and analyses of Victorian texts featuring any settlements, regardless of an author’s birthplace or residence. At the end of the century, Arthur Patchett Martin symptomatically struggled with the definition of an Australian literature. Asserting that the concept should refer to “the works of those few writers who reflect the life, describe the scenery, and reveal the social conditions of Australia” (165), he rejected the inclusion of Mrs Humphry Ward simply on the basis that she had been born in Australia, and instead warmly recommended Kingsley’s Geoffry Hamlyn and The Hillyars and the Burtons (1865). Suggesting that these fictionalized accounts of gold-digging and life in 487

Tamara S. Wagner

the outback had set the tone for settler narratives, Martin further regarded Boldrewood as Kingsley’s “most popular disciple and follower” (178). Boldrewood specialized in adventure tales modeled on Wild West stories that were popular at the imperial center. In the twentieth century, literary overviews focused on nationalist writing, chiefly by male authors, although critical attention slowly became directed to issues of gender and ethnicity. Miriam Dixson influentially highlighted women’s roles at the heart of the settler debate. More recently, Robert Dixon juxtaposes ripping yarns such as Boldrewood’s with Rosa Campbell Praed’s occult romances, crime fiction, and the representation of Asia in fin de siècle Australian writing, and Andrew MacCann has explored the representation of Aboriginal Australians in Praed’s fiction (“Unknown”). By contrast, in her seminal study of British fiction featuring Australia, Coral Lansbury compared the works of travelers, sojourners, and returnees to identify the key themes of “convict settlement, emigration and gold” in the Victorian imagination (2). References to Kingsley, even Dickens (whose projected reading tour to Australia never took place), and Anthony Trollope—specifically to the antipodal Christmas story Harry Heathcote of Gangoil (1873) and the returnee narrative in John Caldigate (1879)—have remained standard in discussions of how settler colonialism impacted on Victorian literature, and vice versa, how literary developments informed settler culture (Archibald; Piesse; Wagner). Several monographs concentrate on Britain’s “antipodes” (Australia and New Zealand), ensuring that nineteenth-century writing about these settler colonies have entered mainstream Victorian studies (Woollacott; Myers; Blythe). New interest in comparative approaches likewise informs scholarship on colonial Canada (Chilton; Coombes; Hanson). Current critical work generally considers colonial and metropolitan writing in tandem with each other to explore how a genre becomes transformed when it travels from the center to the periphery. In Distant Reading, Franco Moretti asserts that “movement from the periphery to the centre [is] still quite unusual, while that from the centre to the periphery is by far the most frequent” (112). However, as literary forms are adapted and the representation of the periphery becomes revised, the resulting adaptations expand and reshape genres. Within transatlantic studies, it is now an accepted premise to track how “genre ‘travels,’ what sorts of deformation or transformation are observable, and what critical conclusions may be drawn from the comparison” (Manning and Taylor 10). In his discussion of emigration and publishing, Simon Frost further argues that the “circulation of any literatures that were shared on both sides of the Atlantic” forms “part of a common currency,” defying “the logic of transmission that sees production rippling outward from metropolitan centers, or as the result of a simple two-way process between centre and periphery” (35). Scholars of book history have discussed evidence of on-board reading and writing, the holdings of colonial libraries, and the changing cultural impact of imported works [on book history, see Stauffer’s chapter]. The latest novels “steamed their way toward the antipodes, often to be received, assessed, and distributed by the proprietors of the circulating libraries which had become important ports of call in the literary landscapes of colonial cities, and welcome depositories of literature from ‘Home’” (Martin and Mirmohamadi 37). Narratives encoded values and, through the adaptation of popular genres, aimed to render a new world familiar. Cultural studies scholars now often speak of the Victorians’ concept of a “cultural portability” as a “new way of imagining community” (Plotz xiii-xiv), a concept that, in a settler context in particular, included a “portable domesticity” (Myers 6). As tangible objects, novels constituted portable cultural property; as narratives, they transported values and negotiated self-definition. John Plotz describes them as “the logical breeding ground for reflections on cultural portability” (72). In the settler world, novels about daily life became a way to reconceptualize and thereby to remake shifting ideas both of the colonial home and of the imperial homeland [on domestic life, see Gregory’s chapter]. This focus on colonial homemaking has furthered growing interest in domestic settler fiction, and yet this new attention also forms part of a large-scale reconsideration of the sheer variety of settler literature. Colonial Australian writers worked in many genres of popular fiction, including bushranger stories, explorer stories, gold rush stories, colonial romances, and crime fiction (Gelder and Weaver 1). Mary Fortune, for example, was one of the first female authors of detective fiction. She wrote over 500 488

Settler Colonialism

stories, including a detective series, which appeared in the Australian Journal from 1868 to 1908. In recent reassessments, Angela Woollacott has directed attention to New Woman fiction, while Kirstine Moffat has looked at the representation of Māori (Ko Méri 173). Such recovery work has thus been the most intensive with regard to popular fiction, although the last years have also seen reassessments of poetry in a transoceanic context. If Paul Kane’s insightful examination of Australian poets explores their changing reactions to Romanticism, Jason Rudy’s comparative study sets in the foreground how the poetry of Victorian-era Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa was vitally engaged in the social and political work of settlement. Poetry, Rudy shows, acted as a mediator between imported ideals and new colonial paradigms within emergent literary markets. Similarly, Manu Samriti Chander’s reconsideration of nationalist poetry within a global nineteenth century contains a chapter on the Australian poet Henry Lawson, best remembered for his poetic exchanges with A.B. “Banjo” Paterson. Indeed, Lawson’s disillusioned depiction of the untamed bush in “Up the Country” and Paterson’s response “In Defence of the Bush” (both 1892) have come to be considered as contrasting companion pieces that exemplify opposed responses to the Australian countryside. Reflecting divergent voices, their poems also illustrate that an ambiguous relationship to the bush did not run exclusively along gender lines. In addition, poetic works by women writers—such as the Strickland sisters (Susannah Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill)—are now being read in the context of their domestic settler manuals as well as their fiction (Peterson; Keppler). Altogether, the growing interest in popular culture and noncanonical writing has benefited otherwise seldom discussed subgenres, which scholars are now able to reevaluate as transoceanic genre developments.

2. Settler Domesticity and Imported Genres: Spence’s Clara Morison Spence’s Clara Morison exemplifies the adaptation of the Victorian governess novel to the context of settler colonialism. The novel promotes a workable settler domesticity, while asserting the value of domestic fiction in contradistinction to adventure tales. The point that Spence seeks to make is hence as much about genre as it is about domesticity. In reacting to Thackeray’s satirical sketch, Spence emphasizes the gentility and respectability of emigrants—an emphasis that remained central to her writing. In an article published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1877, Spence yoked her investment in a unified empire to her ongoing defense of colonial settlers, asserting that they were far from being an “inferior set of people” defined by their “parvenu social position” (“Australian” 526). Instead, Spence premised her definition of settler domesticity on both continuity and adaptability. The colonial variant of the governess novel lent itself to an exploration of these parameters. As Marion Amies has suggested in a study based on 136 nineteenth-century Austration novels and short stories, Australian governess narratives strove to make available patterns of adapted ladylike behavior which “helped to legitimate and reinforce the behaviour of colonial readers and to influence the expectations of intending immigrants” (538–9). In showing how leisured womanhood might incorporate work, these novels argued that a governess’s social position could match colonial ideals, resolving the problem of the governess’s status while preparing immigrants for colonial conditions (Amies). Not all colonial governess novels were so optimistic. Elizabeth Murray’s Ella Norman; Or, a Woman’s Perils (1864), for example, has received new critical attention precisely for its representation of failure as part of an indictment of emigration societies. Taking up the superfluity debates in emigration discourses, Murray suggests that genteel emigrants are regarded as superfluous in colonial settlements and ends her novel by exporting all deserving characters back to England—a resolution which reverses the cliché familiar to readers of nineteenth-century fiction that frequently deployed emigration as a convenient ending (Wagner, Failed Emigration ch. 5). For Murray, settler societies are a topsy-turvy place, where the lower classes suddenly gain fortunes at “the anti-podes, you know, [where] every body is up-side down” (1:91), so that gentlefolk are considered “impediments in our social progress” (1:188). If Spence similarly satirizes the ill-matched finery of diggers’ brides or the incongruous living 489

Tamara S. Wagner

spaces of a former washerwoman who uses a piano as an impromptu bedstead, Clara’s adaptability also elevates the importance of domestic work. A false assumption of gentility condemns the newly rich, whereas impoverished middle-class emigrants succeed by adjusting to the demands of practical settler domesticity: washing their own laundry and scrubbing the floor without forfeiting their gentility. With its underpinning twofold agenda to defend the respectability of single female emigrants and to assert the possibility of domestic settler life and fiction, Clara Morison ultimately produces a fond portrayal of the expanding settler town of Adelaide, while detailing the demands of everyday colonial homemaking. A vivid example is Clara’s stint as a maid-of-all-work. Clara’s decision to adapt herself to any honest labor after her repeated failure to obtain a position as governess displays an exemplary adaptability. Simultaneously, Clara acquires useful practical skills—something that middle-class emigrants notoriously lacked, as both the Strickland sisters in Canada and Lady Barker in New Zealand bewailed in strikingly similar terms. Indeed, emblematic of a general ignorance, the first attempt to bake bread is described with the same mixture of self-irony, frustration, and didacticism in Chapter 6 of Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1852) and in Chapter 4 of Mary Anne Barker’s Station Life in New Zealand (1870). In Spence’s novel, by contrast, Clara’s cousins, the Elliots, model ideal colonial housekeeping in doing their own housework. Nonetheless, domestic labor is evoked with uncompromising realism as “dreadfully hard, and by no means fascinating,” and Clara, in her first weeks as a servant, is “very awkward” and produces “a considerable smashing of crockery” (1:90). In a plot-twist lifted from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Clara fortuitously discovers that a sibling group of hitherto unknown cousins lives next door, just as she faces extreme poverty and dependence. Ultimately, Clara marries a moderately successful settler, Reginald, of a good English family, who is introduced early in the novel as unattainable because of his engagement to a young lady in England. While facilitating Reginald’s choice of Clara (as the more capable colonial helpmeet), the subplot of his first fiancé’s unrealistic demands further dispels distorted expectations of emigration and settler life. Similarly, neither the outback nor gold-digging is described as in any way adventurous, exciting, or even particularly lucrative. In a subplot that dismantles clichés surrounding the gold fever, all the male members of the Elliot family leave Adelaide for the diggings. While the narrative focuses on the deserted town and farms, embedded letters somewhat incongruously highlight the diggers’ struggles with cooking and the laundry. One of the brothers writes about holes in his stockings, accentuating the absence of anything more adventurous: “I manage everything better than the stockings, for I always make my darns into a hard knot, which is ugly to look at, and uncomfortable to wear. I have not many adventures to tell you” (2:45). Eschewing “absurd tales of the insecurity of life and property at the diggings,” they instead appreciate the difficulties of domestic work: “[W]hen we sit down to sew on a button, or set about our miserable washings, we remember whose hands were always ready to work for us, and whose good nature never complained of the trouble we gave” (2:49–50). While indisputably at once self-congratulatory and intensely self-defensive in terms of class differences as well as gender, Spence upends the expected narrative of male adventure. A new mapping of divergent perspectives in fiction promises a more comprehensive account and hence also a deeper understanding of settler literature. It likewise allows us to trace intertextual engagements. Whereas tales of “bush adventures involving prowess and male camaraderie” present a world in which “women are sidelined, appearing only as a necessary refining influence and a reward for the successful male pioneer” (Moffat, “European Myths” 7), female settler authors often consciously dismantle ideals of male “mateship” by instead setting domestic concerns in the foreground. Marion Lake speaks of a frontier feminism in which ideas of respectability and domesticity presented a form of resistance to a settler identity that saw the elevation of drinking, gambling, and a predatory sexuality “to the status of a national culture” (94). In frontier societies, “white men roamed free,” but this mobility could offer a threat to women (Lake 94). Female authors, however, were also more likely to highlight the precariousness of social standing, so that gold-digging, for example, presented foremost a threat to imported class standards. While celebrating the comparative freedom of girls in the settlements, Praed 490

Settler Colonialism

coined the term “the Bush Girl”: “emphatically the Australian type,” she “may run almost wild, hobnob with blacks, ride after cattle, and scrub, cook and clean” and still remain “always a natural little gentlewoman” (250). Recent research in girlhood studies in a transoceanic context foreground parallels between New Zealand, Australia, and Canada (Moruzi; Smith). Domestic settler writing—whether as instruction manuals for female emigrants or as cautionary narratives—provided an important alternative to the tales of adventures that circulated through an increasingly transoceanic book market.

3. Transoceanic Sensationalism The Tichborne Claimant embodied a transoceanic sensationalization of settler colonialism that involved a fascinating spectrum of narratives. Not only did the so-called Claimant traverse—at least putatively—several oceans, with his much-debated travels stretching from Britain to South America, Australia, and back, but this real-life case of a colonial returnee suspected of being an impostor also showcases how incidences involving the antipodes reverberated through the empire. The role that fiction—and in particular the sensation novel—played in the production, circulation, and ambiguous celebration of the Claimant forms startling evidence of the two-way exchanges not only between metropolitan and antipodal narratives, but also between fiction and the general sensationalization of settlements, emigrants, and returnees. In 1866, Arthur Orton, a butcher from New South Wales, declared that he was Sir Roger Tichborne, who was generally believed to have died in a shipwreck off the coast of South America in 1854. After nearly a decade of trials and campaigns, supported by Tichborne’s mother, who firmly believed in the Claimant, Orton was convicted of perjury in 1874. Several factors tickled the popular imagination: the daring imposture, the exotic locales, anxieties about returnees and about returning, as well as Sir Roger’s tattoo and deformed penis (which Orton lacked). A sensational phenomenon, the Claimant inspired public performances and popular fiction, in the process setting the antipodes firmly on a sensational world map. The Claimant and the fantasies surrounding him became a conduit for sensational associations with settler spaces. While capitalizing on expectations of exotic transformations in the colonies, the Claimant had drawn on sensation fiction to devise his impersonation. During the trials his notebooks proved how Orton had plagiarized the blackmail-plot of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1863). Sensation fiction thus provided an interpretative context for real-life trials, with the judge citing Orton’s excerpts from Braddon’s novel in court (Martin and Mirmohamadi 34–5; Myers 78). The publicity surrounding the trials inspired both sensation and emphatically anti-sensational fiction, as well as metropolitan and colonial, fiction that capitalized on this publicity, and yet these narratives also negotiated representational strategies, in particular with reference to the antipodes as exoticized, other spaces. The allusions both to the real-life case and to its shifting fictionalization were indeed markedly self-reflexive. In Britain, Charles Reade dedicated his Tichborne-inspired novel The Wandering Heir (1875) to Braddon, while Braddon herself further developed the trope of colonial absence as a sensational plot-device in Fenton’s Quest (1871), partly also to rewrite her earlier, cursory evocation of unexpected reappearances from Australia in Lady Audley’s Secret (1862).1 Conversely, Trollope worked an explicit mention of the Claimant into the anti-sensational blackmail-plot of John Caldigate. Accused of bigamy by a woman in Australia, the titular hero not only terms his blackmailers “these claimants,” but they also compare themselves to Orton as they hope they will not get “fourteen years for perjury, like the Claimant” (429). Although Trollope parodies sensational strategies, Caldigate’s awkward situation dramatizes the pressure of imperialism at home (Wagner, “Settling” 122–7). In the settler colonies, by contrast, Orton’s ultimate conviction re-channeled anxieties about return as well as about metropolitan representations of returnees. While popular ballads in London celebrated the butcher who dared to impersonate a member of the aristocracy, and impostor-plots in middle-class triple-deckers crystallized fears of class-crossing colonists, settler writing complicated the figure of the disbelieved returnee (Dawson 7). Evidence of its cultural impact, the Tichborne 491

Tamara S. Wagner

case produced examples of each of the two popular genres of fiction that we have been discussing: sensation fiction as well as the domestic, female-centered novel, predominantly by women writers. In significantly different ways and for divergent agendas, Marcus Clarkes’s Australian convict novel For the Term of His Natural Life (1874) and Clara Cheeseman’s novel about remittance men in New Zealand, A Rolling Stone (1886), both deliberately eschew the clichéd sensationalization of returnees in British-based fiction of the time. Both novels draw on the Tichborne case in order to present a corrective to metropolitan representations. Originally serialized as His Natural Life in the Australian Journal between 1870 and 1872 before appearing in book form in 1874, Clarke’s novel upends clichéd representations of convicts in Britishbased fiction such as Reade’s sensation novel It is Never Too Late to Mend (1856) [on popular fiction, see Daly’s chapter]. Clarke sought to expose systematic injustices and sadist exploitations in penal settlements by demonstrating how a falsely accused convict is brutalized and ultimately driven to an unacknowledged sacrificial death. Capitalizing on the topical associations of the antipodes with imposture and false claims, Clarke introduces sensational doubles in the opening chapter. Having just learned that his estranged son, Richard, is really Lord Bellasis’s illegitimate child, the millionaire Sir Richard Devine spurns the son, demanding that “he abandon for ever the name he has usurped” (16). Only hours later, Lord Bellasis is murdered by what turns out to be another illegitimate son, John Rex. Assuming the name of Rufus Dawes, Richard is wrongfully condemned for this murder, enmeshed by a “web of circumstantial evidence” (22), while Sir Richard dies of apoplexy before he can alter his will in favor of his nephew, Maurice Frere. Like Tichborne, Dawes is then believed to have died in a shipwreck. However, while he suffers as a transported convict, both Rex and Frere become false claimants who commit fraud. Capitalizing on his resemblance to Dawes, Rex assumes his name and fortune after his own return from the penal settlement, whereas Frere lays false claims to Dawes’s heroic deeds during several emergencies. Clarke additionally draws on lurid real-life sensations, basing the character of Dawes’s fellow prisoner Gobbett on the convict-cannibal Alexander Pearce. Transported to Van Diemen’s Land, Pearce several times escaped from prison, and allegedly twice ate his companions in order to survive. While condemning the system, Clarke’s novel indisputably underscored the transoceanic sensationalization of Australia’s history as a penal settlement. Martin records that when Mark Twain, in an interview with a colonial reporter in Sydney, noted his intense admiration of His Natural Life, he spoke of “his especial delight in the repulsive character of Gabbett, the convict-cannibal” (172). By contrast, if Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life harnesses the tropes of the Tichborne case to add to the hero’s undeserved suffering, A Rolling Stone renegotiates ideas of return, expanding the motif of the waiting mother. Henry Randall, a vagabond tramping across New Zealand with a valuable violin, is considered a typical remittance man. This term initially described emigrants who, while abroad (especially in a British colony), were supported by money sent to them from home, but this usage became extended to any emigrant “considered undesirable at home” (“remittance”). Reversing these associations, Randall anonymously remits his spurious earnings to England to make up for a financial fraud in the past. Continuing this shattering of expectations, Cheeseman dramatizes a dreamlike, unexpected return. Like the lost heir to the Tichborne estate, Randall is believed dead by everyone except his mother. Whereas Lady Tichborne was generally declared to be in her dotage for believing Orton, the novel realizes her much-debated fantasy. Far from claiming his position as heir, however, Randall declares that he does not wish to live in England: “I do not even feel English. I feel like a foreigner in this country, and people almost look upon me as one” (3:118). Instead of presenting a threat, the returnee renounces the imperial center. As he takes his mother with him, and also rediscovers a faithful fiancée, the final homecoming is relocated to New Zealand as the true place of belonging. In reaction to a sensational case and its transoceanic fictionalization, Cheeseman produces a domestic novel about New Zealand. * 492

Settler Colonialism

By juxtaposing these two clusters of literary representations—domestic settler writing and transoceanic sensationalism—we can better understand the full range of colonial settler writing, its versatile connections to and interactions with cultural developments at the imperial center, as well as the latest trends in critical approaches to the transoceanic settler world. Comparative readings have consolidated a successful shift from overviews of national literatures to an exploration of transoceanic exchanges. This has allowed for a more critical awareness of competing voices within intersecting traditions and facilitated the study of a more global nineteenth century. Now that settler literature has become integrated into Victorian studies, scholars can draw on a combination of settler and metropolitan texts to analyze particular genres or issues. Hopefully, any need to justify or explain such an inclusion will soon have thoroughly disappeared, and we can appreciate the variety of works, while exploring how their interactions with each other has shaped transoceanic literary exchanges.

Note 1 Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret is often referenced as the sensation novel that features a sudden, unexpected, and unwelcome return from the antipodes. Myers reads the trials in conjunction with Braddon’s novel (8). For a brief discussion of Fenton’s Quest, see Wagner (Failed Emigration 125).

Key Critical Works Diana Archibald. Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel. James Belich. Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World. Robert Dixon. Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation in Anglo-Australian Popular Fiction, 1875–1914. Miriam Dixson. The Real Matilda: Woman and Identity in Australia, 1788 to the Present. Lucy Frost. No Place for a Nervous Lady:Voices from the Australian Bush. Carter Hanson. Emigration, Nation,Vocation: The Literature of English Emigration to Canada, 1825–1900. Coral Lansbury. Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth: Century English Literature.

Works Cited Albinski, Nan Bowman. “Handfasted: An Australian Feminist’s American Utopia.” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 23, no. 2, 1989, pp. 15–32. Amies, Marion. “The Victorian Governess and Colonial Ideals of Womanhood.” Victorian Studies, vol. 31, no. 4, 1988, pp. 537–65. Anon. “Demand for Labour.” Colonization Circular, March 1853, p. 4. Archibald, Diana. Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel. U of Missouri P, 2002. Belich, James. Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World. Oxford UP, 2009. Bell, Duncan. The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900. Princeton UP, 2007. Blythe, Helen. The Victorian Colonial Romance with the Antipodes. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Boehm, Beth A. “Nostalgia to Amnesia: Charles Dickens, Marcus Clarke and Narratives of Australia’s Convict Origins.” Victorian Newsletter, vol. 109, 2006, pp. 9–13. Chander, Manu Samriti. Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century. Bucknell UP, 2017. Cheeseman, Clara. A Rolling Stone. 1854. Richard Bentley & Son, 1886. Chilton, Lisa. Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s–1930. U of Toronto P, 2007. Clarke, Marcus. For the Term of His Natural Life. 1874. Nonsuch Publishing, 2005. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction, 2nd ed. U College London P, 2008. ———. Migration and Its Enemies: Global Capital, Migrant Labour and the Nation-State. Ashgate, 2006. Coombes, Annie. “Introduction.” Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa, edited by Annie Coombes, Manchester UP, 2006, pp. 1–12. Dawson, Carrie. “The ‘Slaughtermen of Wagga Wagga’: Imposture, National Identity, and the Tichborne Affair.” Australian Literary Studies, vol. 21, no. 4, 2004, pp. 1–13.

493

Tamara S. Wagner Dilke, Charles. Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries during 1866 and 1867. Macmillan and Co, 1872. Dixon, Robert. Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation in Anglo: Australian Popular Fiction, 1875– 1914. 1995. Cambridge UP, 2009. Dixson, Miriam. The Real Matilda: Woman and Identity in Australia, 1788 to the Present, 4th ed. U New South Wales P, 1999. Evans, Patrick. The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature. Penguin, 1990. Frost, Simon. “A Trade in Desires: Emigration, A.C. Gunter and the Home Publishing Company.” The Book World: Selling and Distributing British Literature, 1900–1940, edited by Nicola Wilson, Brill, 2016, pp. 31–51. Gelder, K., and R. Weaver. The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction. Griffin, 2007. Hanson, Carter. Emigration, Nation, Vocation: The Literature of English Emigration to Canada, 1825–1900. Michigan State UP, 2009. Joseph, Terra Walston. “A ‘Curious Political and Social Experiment’: A Settler Utopia, Feminism and a Greater Britain in Catherine Helen Spence’s Handfasted.” Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth: Century Literature, edited by Tamara S. Wagner, Pickering & Chatto, 2011, pp. 207–19. Kane, Paul. Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity. Cambridge UP, 1996. Kappler, Mary Ellen. “Divided House, Divided Self: Susanna Moodie’s Flora Lyndsay: Or, Passages from an Eventful Life.” Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature, edited by Tamara S. Wagner, Pickering & Chatto, 2011, pp. 71–85. Lake, Marion. “Frontier Feminism and the Marauding White Man: Australia, 1890s to 1940s.” Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race, edited by R. Pierson and N. Chaudhauri, Indiana UP, 1998, pp. 94–105. Lansbury, Coral. Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth: Century English Literature. Melbourne UP, 1970. MacCann, Andrew. Marcus Clarke’s Bohemia: Literature and Modernity in Colonial Melbourne. Melbourne UP, 2004. ———. “Unknown Australia: Rosa Praed’s Vanished Race.” Australian Literary Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, 2005. https://doi.org/10.20314/als.d0884096f4. Accessed 19 November 2018. Manning, Susan, and Andrew Taylor. “Introduction: What Is Transatlantic Studies?” Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader, edited by Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor, Edinburgh UP, 2007, pp. 1–13. Martin, Arthur Patchett. “The Beginnings of An Australian Literature.” Australasia with Two Maps, vol. 4, 1900. Nineteenth Century Collections Online. http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/6tP2B1. Accessed 16 August 2018. Martin, Susan K., and Kylie Mirmohamadi. Sensational Melbourne: Reading, Sensation Fiction and Lady Audley’s Secret in the Victorian Metropolis. Australian Scholarly, 2011. Moffat, Kirstine. “European Myths of Settlement in New Zealand Fiction, 1860–1940.” New Literature Review, vol. 41, April 2004, pp. 3–18. ———. “‘What Is in the Blood Will Come Out’: Belonging, Expulsion and the New Zealand Settler Home in Jessie Weston’s Ko Méri.” Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand, edited by Tamara S. Wagner, Pickering & Chatto, 2014, pp. 161–76. Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. Verso, 2013. Moruzi, Kristine, and Michelle Smith, editors. Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840–1950. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Myers, Janet. Antipodal England: Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination. SUNY, 2009. Peterson, Linda H. “Reconstructing British Domesticity on the North American Frontier.” Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth: Century Literature, edited by Tamara S. Wagner, Pickering & Chatto, 2011, pp. 55–69. Piesse, Jude. British Settler Emigration in Print, 1832–1877. Oxford UP, 2016. Plotz, John. Portable Property:Victorian Culture on the Move. Princeton UP, 2008. Praed, R. C. “A Daughter of Great Britain: The Australian Girl.” The Girl’s Realm, vol. 1, 1899, p. 250. “remittance man, n.” The Oxford English Dictionary. Draft Revision, December 2009. OED Online, http://dictionary.oed.com/entry/50202381/50202381se2? Accessed 25 February 2010. Rudy, Jason R. Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies. John Hopkins UP, 2017. Schaffer, Kay. Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Tradition. Cambridge UP, 1988. Seeley, John Robert. The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures. Palgrave Macmillan, 1883. Smith, Michelle. “The ‘Australian Girl’ and the Domestic Ideal in Colonial Women’s Fiction.” Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand, edited by Tamara S. Wagner, Pickering & Chatto, 2014, pp. 75–89. Spence, Catherine Helen. “Australian Federation and Imperial Union.” Fraser’s Magazine, vol. 16, 1877, pp. 526–7. ———. Clara Morison: A Tale of South Australia during the Gold Fever. Parker & Son, 1854.

494

Settler Colonialism ———. Ever Yours, C. H. Spence: Catherine Helen Spence’s an Autobiography (1825–1910), Diary (1894) and Some Correspondence (1894–1910), edited by Susan Margarey, et al., Wakefield, 2005. Thackeray, William Makepeace. “Waiting at the Station.” Punch, vol. 9, March 1850, p. 92. Trollope, Anthony. John Caldigate. 1879. Trollope Society, 1995. Wagner, Tamara S. “Introduction: Victorian Domestic Fiction Down Under.” Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand, edited by Tamara S. Wagner, Pickering & Chatto, 2014, pp. 1–20. ———. “Settling Back in At Home: Impostors and Imperial Panic in Victorian Narratives of Return.” Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature, edited by Tamara S. Wagner, Pickering & Chatto, 2011, pp. 111–27. ———. Victorian Narratives of Failed Emigration: Settlers, Returnees, and Nineteenth-Century Literature in English. Routledge, 2016. Woollacott, Angela. To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity. Oxford UP, 2001.

495

43 VICTORIANS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE Jesse Oak Taylor

“This is the story of how one species changed a planet.” So begins “Welcome to the Anthropocene,” a short film which opened the United Nations’ Rio+20 Summit in 2012 and which has since garnered more than 250,000 views on YouTube. The seemingly tenuous connection between online videos, UN conferences and Victorian studies becomes clear as the eerily calm narrator continues: “The latest chapter of our story begins in England, 250 years ago,” and then proceeds to overlay an account of the “brilliant inventions” of the Industrial Revolution, “fueled by coal,” and the spread of the “great railways” over a simulation of the globe coming to light. “Welcome to the Anthropocene” dramatizes the accelerating scale of human impact on Earth by conceiving of the planet as a single interconnected, system, and thus offers an effective visualization of its titular concept. The vaguely electronic voice could easily belong to a sentient spaceship, while the globe suspended on screen recalls not so much actual photographs of Earth from space as computer models and simulations that are recurrent features in both science fiction films and Earth System Science. “Welcome to the Anthropocene” deploys what Donna Haraway calls the “god trick” or “view from nowhere” that aligns with the passive voice of the narration, as the events simply unfold without a discernible agent (“Situated” 589). And yet it is as instructive for what it doesn’t depict: this is a film about the “human age” in which no humans are visible, a history without people. As such, it dramatizes the degree to which the Anthropocene concept presents a challenge for history, with particular resonance in the Victorian era. Beginning the “latest chapter” in “our story” of “how a species changed a planet” in Britain 250 years ago aligns the Anthropocene with the same geohistorical forces that produced the Victorian age, most notably the adoption of fossil fuels. More profoundly, in describing the Anthropocene it deploys a Victorian lexicon. “Welcome to the Anthropocene” not only returns to the combined forces of industrialization, urbanization, and globalization that the Victorians would have recognized as paradigmatic of their own era but does so through the evidently disembodied voice of a third-person, omniscient narrator who recounts this “story of a species” as though from an impossible extraterrestrial position that transforms the world into a fictive visualization before our eyes. The voiceover could easily belong to the omniscient narrator of any number of Victorian novels. The film will go on to juxtapose extreme wealth and poverty, overlaying its account of disaster with an unshakable faith in human progress and technological ingenuity—all hallmarks of a worldview that we have come to recognize as Victorian. Indeed, the Victorians were arguably the first society to self-consciously tell their own story as the “story of a species.” The broad popular interest in the Anthropocene, with news articles describing the debates over how and whether to formalize it within the geologic time scale, marks a return to the fascination that concepts like deep time and the fossil record exerted over the 496

Victorians in the Anthropocene

Victorian imagination, while the impending sense of ecological collapse restores some of the terror that many felt at the promise of extinction and the constitutive violence of Tennyson’s “nature, red in tooth and claw” [on geologic time, see O’Connor’s chapter; on evolutionary theory, see Psomiades’s chapter]. In other words, the Anthropocene into which we are “welcomed” is a recognizably Victorian concept, even as it is identified as being a condition of Victorian origin or, perhaps more accurately, a condition in which “we” become Victorian ourselves. The task of Victorian studies in the Anthropocene, then, is not so much in finding the relevance of our objects of study as it is making sense of their uncanny proximity. At first glance, Victorian studies and the Anthropocene might have little to do with one another. After all, none of the most prominent proposed dates for the beginning of new epoch align with Victoria’s ascension to the throne in 1837. The term was proposed by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in a brief article linking the start of the Anthropocene to the Industrial Revolution, with James Watt’s patent of the double-acting steam engine in 1784 standing as a synecdoche for the shift to fossil fuels. However, in part because that historical shift would only become legible at the planetary scale much later, the Anthropocene Working Group proposes locating the Anthropocene’s lower boundary in the mid-twentieth century when the radioisotopes from the first nuclear tests leave a global “signature” of human action that will remain legible for millennia (Waters et al.). Meanwhile, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin take the date further back, suggesting the global reshuffling of biota resulting from European conquest in the Americas, which converges with genocide against Native Americans and the emergence of the capitalist world system. They argue that the planetary impact of these phenomena is evidenced by a dip in atmospheric CO2 around 1610, legible in polar ice cores. They connect this to the near cessation of agriculture and resulting reforestation across much of North and South America, dubbing this the “Orbis Hypothesis,” from the Latin for “globe” (182–3). Other proposals would push the date even farther back—to the invention of agriculture or instrumentalization of fire—or forward to the turn of the twenty-first century when the term “Anthropocene” itself entered widespread usage (Lewis and Maslin 2018 for an overview of possible dates). Regardless of which date is chosen, there remains a profound incommensurability between the Anthropocene and the “Victorian era” as a portion of history linked to the life of an individual monarch. Victorian (unlike, say, Romanticist or Modernist) is a designation explicitly tied to the national history of Britain and its empire. By contrast, to qualify as an official designation within the geologic time scale, the Anthropocene must be linked to a trace that is global—indicating human disruption of the Earth system, which is to say the planet functioning as a single interconnected system, comprised of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, and biosphere—as well as durable across the vast scale of geologic time. As such, it is not merely a new term for environmental destruction, or even anthropogenic climate change, but a phase shift in planetary history, one that demands an equivalent paradigm shift in human thought (Hamilton 2017). Identifying the “signature” that marks the beginning of the Anthropocene depends on the identifying external inscription of a globally synchronous trace that, in turn, occasions a reevaluation of human history in light of its capacity to leave such a trace. When Tobias Menely and I reflected on this scenario, we realized that the Anthropocene is “also the epoch in which our singular species reads itself in the rocks, and in so doing establishes new stories about its identity and this planet” (3). Understanding the Anthropocene as a problem for history thus requires tacking back and forth between an external story of world-altering impact and an internal story of selfconception, while recognizing that those two divergent stories are in fact part of the same narrative, much like the doubled-narration of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852). The uncanny Victorianism of the Anthropocene is perhaps most evident in the effort to situate human history in relation to the vast scales of planetary time. For example, biostratigrapher Jan Zalasiewicz, convener of the Anthropocene Working Group tasked with determining whether the epoch ought to be formalized as an official designation within the Geologic Time Scale (GTS), dramatizes the challenge of determining the legibility of human actions across geologic time by 497

Jesse Oak Taylor

imagining alien stratigraphers arriving some 100 million years in the future to read the history of the human species that lies “written in the strata” (118). Stratigraphy is a science of reading, but unlike literary history it depends on interpreting traces without any prior understanding of their author. Jeremy Davies notes that part of what renders Zalasiewicz’s thought experiment useful is the fact that the aliens would offer “an interpretation of the human species derived from the shape and intensity of its material interactions with other beings and forces—coal, rice, coral, nitrogen, iron—and not from its inward self-imagining” (83). In other words, the aliens offer a view of the human freed from “the illusion of a transcendent human essence” (83). This effort to ventriloquize an inhuman view of human history is in fact an uncanny inversion of the Victorian encounter with their own transience against the immensity of geologic time. In a much-reproduced cartoon by Henry De la Beche (see Figure 43.1), Director of the British Geological Survey, one of the stranger moments in Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33) is satirized. In the passage, Lyell speculates that, as the planet warms, it will become inhospitable to the hairy, warm-blooded mammals that emerged triumphant from the Pleistocene and they will be driven to extinction. “Then might those genera of animals return, of which the memorials are preserved in the ancient rocks of our continents. The huge iguanodon might reappear in the woods, and the ichthyosaur in the sea, while the pterodactyl might flit again through the umbrageous groves of tree ferns” (67). Lyell’s speculative climate future showcases the destabilization of human history occasioned by nineteenth-century geology, positing deep time and extinction as constitutive features of Victorian modernity. Indeed, the resemblance is uncanny in part because it is genealogical. Zalasiewicz’s own field, stratigraphy, dates (along with the rest of modern geology) to the early nineteenth century when it was developed in mines and railway cuts (Lewis and Maslin 46–8; Rudwick 538–43). Indeed, one of the things that is often glossed over in the contemporary Anthropocene debate is the fact that the appearance of humans in the fossil record was one of the definitive features of the Holocene or “very recent” epoch when the geologic time scale was developed in the nineteenth century (Lewis and Maslin 34–5). Hence, distinguishing the Anthropocene from the Holocene depends on discerning the difference between the mere presence of humans as one fossil among others, as Prof. Ichthyosaur does, and the human as agent or force within the Earth system. The “story of a species” recounted in “Welcome to the Anthropocene,” turns to the first-person plural only at the point that it begins to list the crises for which “we” are responsible. Even then, the extraterrestrial perspective might lead one to ask “who is this we?” the inhabitants of that suspended planet, or those running the experiment? Rather than the point at which subjugation of the Earth is complete, the Anthropocene marks the point at which we are forced to reckon with our own planetary internality, whether marked by the atmosphere that contains the accumulated weight of history in an ever-rising atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases in the present, or in the effort to interpret our own fossilized remains from an imagined future retrospect. It is for this reason that Dipesh Chakrabarty sees the task of Anthropocene history as narrating the “conjoined histories” of human societies, capitalism, and empire on the one hand and planetary processes, like evolution, extinction, sedimentation, glaciation, and climate change on the other, thus traversing multiple, “disjunctive” scales (2014, 2). The result, Chakrabarty argues, is a “doubling” of the figure of the human, wherein the human as self-conscious ontological entity must be juxtaposed with the nonhuman-human as sheer “force,” in the sense of “the capacity to move things” within the Earth system (13). Thus, while Chakrabarty maintains that, “as beings for whom the question of Being is an eternal question, we will always be concerned about justice, he also suggests, “if we, collectively, have also become a geophysical force, then we also have a collective mode of existence that is justice-blind” (14). The point is not that justice ceases to matter—far from it—but rather that the question of justice must be taken up in relation to human agency operating at a scale that lies beyond the kind of self-reflexive awareness upon which any conception of justice or moral agency depends. 498

Victorians in the Anthropocene

Figure 43.1 Henry De la Beche, “Awful Changes.” Buckland, Francis T., Curiosities of Natural History. 2nd ed. Richard Bentley, 1858, frontispiece.

In this context, merely rejecting the inhuman perspective from which the Anthropocene comes into view amounts to an abdication of responsibility. Instead, we must find ways of inhabiting it, and incorporating it into our stories, politics, ethics, and historiography, in order to cultivate the new modes of affinity and solidarity that this calamitous new epoch demands. As the legal scholar Jedediah Purdy explains, no one really knows what a democracy on the scale of Anthropocene challenges . . . would look like. To write of a ‘we,’ a polity that could inhabit and constitute such a democracy, in the absence of the institutions and shared identities that would make it real, is to write fiction, imaginative literature” (268) This, to my mind, is the task before the Anthropocene humanities (and indeed humanity), not merely imagining that collective into being but finding the tools, and founding the institutions, that will make it viable. As Victorianists, as humanists, as humans working in an age of planetary crisis, we have to think about how the work we do might contribute to imagining into being that “we” capable of positing a democratic response into being and bringing that vision to pass. The Anthropocene is not simply a question of the geological inscription of the human—which would align it to the appearance of Homo sapiens itself—but rather the geological inscription of a phase shift in the Earth system occasioned or provoked by human action. The Anthropocene concept profoundly reorients historical inquiry, and it is in this regard that I think it is profoundly relevant to 499

Jesse Oak Taylor

Victorian studies, not merely as the context under which all human inquiry must henceforth proceed but also as a distinctly Victorian problem, to which Victorian archives and epistemological frameworks are surprisingly relevant. This is perhaps most evident in relation to the “species question.” No aspect of the Anthropocene debate has been more provocative, or controversial, than the Anthropos itself, the human species. While the “species” turn inaugurated by the Anthropocene concept has been extremely generative for scholarship in the humanities (e.g., Chakrabarty), other humanists remain skeptical and argue that the concept masks inequality and perpetuates ecological injustice and have proposed terms like “Capitalocene” (Malm, Moore) or “Plantationocene” (Haraway, Tsing et al.) to foreground the new epoch’s inherently exploitative character. Dating geologic agency to the industrial shift from water power to coal in the 1830s, historian Andreas Malm describes this new force as “the very negation of universal species being,” in that the forces disrupting Earth systems are the same ones responsible for the divergence in human fortunes (390–1). However, as noted above, from a scientific perspective, distinguishing one species from others (or from non-biological forces operating within the hydrosphere, lithosphere, or atmosphere) operates as a specifying designation rather than a universalizing one. Furthermore, a closer examination of the dating debate quickly reveals that different historical actors are at work in each case. If the original date of 1784 were chosen, then fossil-fuel driven industrialization would become the central force, while choosing 1610 identifies the Anthropocene as an inherently imperial condition and 1945 links it to world-shattering technology. Put differently, the “Anthropos” becomes an industrialist, a conquistador, a cyborg, an agriculturalist, or a caveman depending on where you draw the line. It is only the earliest of these instances that aligns with “the human” as such. All others tie the new epoch to distinct historical conditions. Hence, while terms like Capitalocene or Plantationocene mount important arguments (indeed, that critical edge is both their usefulness and their appeal), the Anthropocene is perhaps better understood as a question. It links the epoch to the human in a capacious manner that can, in turn, be viewed as an ever-unfolding relationship across human history, in which particular social formations, technologies, and/or energy regimes predominate at different points, but which cannot be fully collapsed into any of them in part because of the way they emerge out of one another. The challenge for Victorian studies in the Anthropocene, then, is twofold. First, we must ask how this new context refigures our conception of the Victorian age as an object of study over and against debates about periodization of the Anthropocene itself and how these redefine the agencies at work within it. Second, we must examine the Anthropocene itself as a Victorian concept, or rather the way that it becomes legible only within and through concepts, forms, and terminology that is itself of Victorian origin. Put differently, it is at once an ontological question and an epistemological one. As so often happens, these two dimensions cannot be extricated from one another, and understanding their entanglement reveals a deeper alignment that is arguably the most important contribution that literary, scientific, and cultural history offer the effort to understand and curtail planetary crisis, namely, revealing the persistent coincidence between our understanding of the world and our transformation of it. In this context, I would like to highlight the degree to which the Anthropocene debate revisits Victorian debates over evolution and the age of the earth, in which scientists, theologians, philosophers, writers, and artists grappled with the implications of rethinking the human in species terms. While crystalized in the theory of natural selection, evolution and the species question pervaded nearly all facets of nineteenth-century thought and thus must be treated as historical, aesthetic, and philosophical concepts rather than exclusively biological or geological ones. At the core of this change lies the radical expansion of history occasioned by geologic time and the reorientation of the human within it in a manner commensurate, if in some respects antithetical, to the current focus on the Anthropocene as rupture in Earth’s history (see Shyrock and Smail). Not only did the “developmental hypothesis” in biology have earlier advocates such as Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather) and detractors, including (initially) Charles Lyell and Georges Cuvier, but more importantly, these explicitly biological considerations of species took place within a much more expansive 500

Victorians in the Anthropocene

conversation encompassing language, history, ecology, economics, and religion. For example, Ludwig Feuerbach begins his Essence of Christianity, a work that sought to explain the historical basis of religion, by considering the capacity for symbolic representation and abstract thought as features of human species being. Karl Marx framed his early articulations of the alienation of labor as a rupture within human species being. Hence, when George Eliot noted that The Origin of Species was a book that “marks an epoch” she was referring not to its novelty, but to the way it captured the spirit of the age, punctuating debates already long underway. For authors, theorists, and scientists across a wide political spectrum, to write human history in the nineteenth century was to account for one’s subject in species terms. However, Victorian evolutionary theory’s misdeeds are every bit as vital as its insights for understanding the Anthropocene as an epoch fraught with inequity. Indeed, one might say that the Victorians are useful interlocutors when it comes to thinking about how democracy might function at the level of the species because they failed so spectacularly at it, giving us instead a species concept shot through with racist (and sexist, heteronormative, and ableist) assumptions, both derived from and used to justify the imperial project. The challenge (and opportunity) for Victorian studies in the Anthropocene, then, lies not simply in looking for nascent ecological insights in historical artifacts but in taking seriously the prospect that the Victorian era aligns with the historical period during which the Anthropocene emerged. While the question of dating the Anthropocene customarily focuses on the question of origins, the Victorian era offers a glimpse of the Anthropocene in medias res, from the midst of still-unfolding, slow-motion catastrophe. If the Anthropocene is “the very negation of universal species being” then the long nineteenth century is precisely the geohistorical space within which that negation took place. It is also the period in which many of the conceptual tools and rubrics: from the stratigraphic method, to the greenhouse effect, natural selection to anthropogenic extinction were articulated. The Anthropocene thus performs an uncanny inversion of many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates and anxieties. As Noah Heringman notes, Objectively speaking, the Anthropocene is a new epoch, but inhabiting it requires renewed engagement with the historical processes that condition lived experience in the new epoch, processes ranging from resource exhaustion to the development of the geologic time scale itself. (59) A key question for Victorian studies in the Anthropocene, then, is how to understand the alignment between these conceptual rubrics and epistemological frames and the broader ecological impacts within which they occurred. Furthermore, such alignment is not restricted to those sciences that have withstood the test of time. In one of the most insightful and well-developed articulations of Anthropocene literary history to date, Eric Gidal traces nineteenth-century efforts to verify the authenticity of James Macpherson’s (decidedly inauthentic) Ossian poems, in which “a group of nineteenth-century Scottish eccentrics . . . used statistics, cartography, and geomorphology to map and thereby vindicate” Macpherson’s rendering of Gaelic oral tradition. In so doing, they inadvertently developed “what we can now perceive as a nascent ecological perspective on literature in a changing world” that Gidal, in turn, uncovers through a method he dubs “biblio-stratigraphy,” “tracing the signatures of social and spatial changes” in order to perceive the “dynamic and protean nature of environmental and social conditions over wide scales of time” (1, 5, 183). Gidal’s approach is useful in part because of the very strangeness of his archive, showcasing how its meticulous accuracy—even in the context of a misguided endeavor doomed to failure—can nonetheless “become important environmental records for our own moment” (183). After all, this is the history that we must undo if we are to survive its aftermath At the most literal level, the Victorian era’s relevance for the Anthropocene might be expressed in a single word: coal. While it would not go to scale for more than a century, the shift to fossil fuels remains one of the single most important events in human history, launching an unprecedented 501

Jesse Oak Taylor

transformation that has only accelerated ever since [on industry, see Carroll’s chapter]. This insight was not lost on the Victorians themselves, even if its full implications would not come into view until later. As Elizabeth Miller argues in a perceptive reading of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, “[H]umans are ill-equipped to understand the longer temporal arcs of the energy systems they use . . . because of their short lifespan and transient memories” (93). And yet, in a move of which Eliot herself would no doubt approve, Miller uses her novel to extend both memory and our grasp of human agency across time, thus correcting for the “lapse of human memory across generations” (93). By identifying coal’s centrality to modernity, the industrial Anthropocene returns to a vision that would have been familiar to a nineteenth-century audience and only appears novel to us due to a form of collective amnesia that has written energy systems out of cultural and literary history, albeit one that recent scholarship has already gone a long way to address, as in Allen MacDuffie’s Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (2014), Malm’s Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (2016), my own The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (2016), and a number of recent articles, some of which are listed below [on ecocriticism, see Voskuil’s chapter]. The Industrial Anthropocene thus makes the epoch’s alignment with the Victorian period readily apparent: if the steam engine is invented in the late eighteenth century, it is in the nineteenth that it goes to scale [on technology, see Menke’s chapter]. As citizens of the world’s first industrialized society and a global empire, the Victorians become the Anthropocene’s first inhabitants: the first to undergo the demographic transition to a predominately urban environment and be choked on its airborne effluence, and the first to see themselves as modern in ways that are directly underwritten by vast stores of combustible energy with the power to accelerate historical time. Hensley and Steer seek to locate “the signal form of the nineteenth century—the novel—within the global energy system that increasingly made it possible” in order to understand how the novel form might mediate the “unmooring of productive power” that “decoupled economic growth from the limits of agricultural production for the first time in history” (66–7). This, in turn, becomes a signal contribution to the energy humanities, which are all too often fixated on oil as the paradigmatic fossil fuel, overlooking the substratum of burnable rock that still undergirds the global energy infrastructure and remains its most polluting (Szeman and Boyer 2017; LeMenager 2014). We are nowhere as Victorian as in our continued dependence on coal—indeed, we burn more of it than they did. If the industrial landscapes of mines, railway cuts, and smog-filled skies were among the first sites in the Anthropocene imagination, it was arguably the imperial frontier that first brought the planetary impact of modernity into view. Hence, the congruence between Victorian empire and the Anthropocene is vital, both materially and conceptually. In 1865, George Perkins Marsh could already invoke a sense of global nature in retreat, arguing: “Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords” (36). However, what is perhaps more surprising is the way Marsh’s account dovetails with other nineteenth-century views of global nature. The difference is that where Marsh saw catastrophe, others saw cause for optimism in ways that return in the contemporary debates over the Anthropocene. As Alan Bewell explains, natures were remade in the colonial encounter to the point that “natural history was not simply a form of consciousness” but rather “aimed at transforming the planet itself ” (26). The articulation of concepts like species and ecology in nineteenth-century science are inextricable from the networks of specimen collection, botanical cultivation, and plantation agriculture in an intentional project of planetary refashioning that continues in the palm oil plantations replacing the jungles in which Alfred Russel Wallace sought the orangutan and birds of paradise. As Adelene Buckland has recently shown, even the understanding of geologic time upon which the Anthropocene itself depends was forged, in part, through the encounter with empire (2018). Perhaps even more significantly, Victorian empire offers a glimpse of the Anthropocene future, as the origin of what Pablo Mukherjee calls a “global ideology of disaster” with a direct line from the nineteenth-century famines that Mike Davis evocatively dubs “late-Victorian Holocausts” to Hurricane Katrina (8). Hence, as Amitav Ghosh argues, “[T]he Anthropocene has reversed the 502

Victorians in the Anthropocene

temporal order of modernity: those at the margins are now the first to experience the future that awaits all of us” (63). The importance of acknowledging the Anthropocene to be an inherently imperial condition lies not only in reckoning with the literal, world-shattering force of empire itself (and its constitutive role in making industrialization possible) but also in realizing the applicability of intellectual frameworks developed in postcolonial studies to the problem of the Anthropocene. Each radically refigures the conception of what counts as “Victorian” text (Mukherjee 50). Just as we have come to recognize that there is no document of Victorian culture that is not also a document of empire, we must now come to terms with the fact that there is no document of Victorian empire that is not also a document of the Anthropocene. I invoke Walter Benjamin’s famous juxtaposition of civilization and barbarism here, not merely because his work provides a lodestar for the kind of sensitive, materialist cultural analysis that we so desperately need but also because Benjamin’s image of the “angel” of history finds an all-too-literal realization in the Anthropocene, when the entirety of human history may well be compressed into a single catastrophic line in the strata. For Victorianists, the problem of the Anthropocene is not simply the question of whether a period anchored on the reign of a single British monarch retains coherence in the face of planetary catastrophe on the one hand and deep time on the other. Instead, it arises from the uncanniness whereby so many Victorian artifacts seem to speak to the Anthropocene in ways that belie the historical remove that separates them from our own moment. Put differently, the question is not so much asking why the Victorians didn’t understand the Anthropocene as how to make sense of the multitudinous ways in which they did, even though at times they seem to embrace what we now recognize to be a catastrophic future, whether in terms of melting icecaps (thus opening the long-sought Northwest Passage) or anticipating the inevitable extinction of both dangerous animals and “primitive” peoples (Brantlinger 1996). The challenge thus becomes framing the Victorian era in terms of what Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz call the “modernizing unconscious,” the unsettling realization that this calamity did not come upon us unawares (199). We have been warned, time and again. Indeed, some of those warnings emerge from the midst of the Victorian canon, as figures like John Ruskin howled against the desecration of nature, while William Morris sought to build alternative models of human society (and even factory production) not predicated on planetary destruction. Perhaps these two issues are not so far removed after all. Glimpsed from a distant future, in which all that remains of human society is a compressed stratigraphic trace and radically different climate, the Victorians become our contemporaries. Their words are still with us, just as the carbon from their chimneys lingers overhead, warming our world and altering the conditions of possibility within it. In this regard, it is worth noting that two of the most influential thinkers for understanding, and confronting, the Anthropocene imagination remain Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. Fortunately, this work is well underway. Recent years have seen a spate of important books, articles, and collections on Victorian ecocriticism and the energy humanities, supplementing a long and rich body of scholarship on literature and science in the period. While ecocriticism and the Anthropocene humanities remain distinct, much of the most recent work in this arena does situate the Victorians within an emergent Anthropocene, including special issues of 19, edited by Peter Adkins and Wendy Lesser (2018), which includes an interview with Claire Colebrook on Victorian studies and the Anthropocene, Victorian Studies, edited by Elizabeth Miller (2018), and VLC, edited by Devin Griffiths and Deanna Kreisel (2019), as well as the founding of the “Vcologies” working group and NAVSA caucus (https://vcologies.org). While the origins of the Anthropocene remain debated, it is all too evident that the epoch itself is underway. And yet, the future remains unwritten. As Davies points out, wherever the Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point is affixed it will define the new epoch so much as the end of the old. We are not so much living in the Anthropocene as the “end-Holocene event—an event that is still playing out” (95). As readers, writers, and teachers we are the speakers for the dead, the living media through which our Victorians interlocutors can speak to the shared predicament of a depleted, overheated world. 503

Jesse Oak Taylor

Key Critical Works Christophe Bonneuil, and Jean-Baptiste Fessoz. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us. Dipesh Chakrabarty. The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category. ———. “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories.” ———. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” ———. “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change.” Jeremy Davies. The Birth of the Anthropocene. Amitav Ghosh. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Donna Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Elizabeth Kolbert. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Simon L. Lewis, and Mark A. Maslin. The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene. Andreas Malm. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Tobias Menely, and Jesse Oak Taylor, editors. Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times. Jason Moore. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Jedediah Purdy. After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. Heidi C. M. Scott, Fuel: An Ecocritical History. Jesse Oak Taylor. The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Burbant, editors. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Colin N. Waters, et al. “The Anthropocene Is Functionally and Stratigraphically Distinct from the Holocene.” Jan Zalasiewicz. The Earth after Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks.

Works Cited Adkins, Peter, and Wendy Parkins. “Victorian Ecology.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, vol. 26, 2018. www.19.bbk.ac.uk/95/volume/0/issue/26/. Albritton, Vicky, and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson. Green Victorians: The Simple Life of John Ruskin in the Lake District. U of Chicago P, 2016. Anthropocene.info. “Welcome to the Anthropocene.” www.anthropocene.info/short-films.php. Bewell, Alan. Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History. Johns Hopkins UP, 2017. Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean-Baptiste Fessoz. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us. Translated by David Fernbach, Verso, 2016. Brantlinger, Patrick. Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Buckland, Adelene. “‘Inhabitants of the Same World’: The Colonial History of Geologic Time.” Philological Quarterly, vol. 97, no. 2, 2018, pp. 219–40. ———. Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology. U of Chicago P, 2013. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 46, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1–31. ——— “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 41, no. 1, 2014, pp. 1–23. ———. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009, pp. 197–222. ———. “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change.” New Literary History, vol. 43, no. 1, Winter 2012, pp. 1–18. Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. “The ‘Anthropocene’.” Global Change Newsletter, vol. 41, 2000, pp. 17–18. Davies, Jeremy. The Birth of the Anthropocene. U of California P, 2016. Davis, Mike. Late-Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. Verso, 2000. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. U of Chicago P, 2016. Gidal, Eric. Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age. U of Virginia P, 2015. Griffiths, Devin. The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins. Johns Hopkins UP, 2016. ———. “Petrodrama: Melodrama and Energetic Modernity.” Victorian Studies, vol. 60, no. 4, 2018, pp. 611–38. Griffiths, Devin, and Deanna Kreisel, editors. Special Issue: “Open Ecologies.” VLC, vol. 47, no. 4, Fall 2019. Hamilton, Clive. Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene. New York: Polity, 2017. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016. ———. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 575–99.

504

Victorians in the Anthropocene Hensley, Nathan K., and Philip Steer, editors. Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire. Fordham UP, 2019. ———. “Signatures of the Carboniferous: The Literary Forms of Coal.” Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, Fordham UP, 2019, pp. 63–82. Heringman, Noah. “Deep Time at the Dawn of the Anthropocene.” Representations, vol. 129, Winter 2015, pp. 56–85. Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Henry Holt, 2014. Kreisel, Deanna. “‘Form against Force’: Sustainability and Organicism in the Work of John Ruskin.” Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, edited by Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer, Fordham UP, 2018, pp. 101–20. LeMenager, Stephanie. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Oxford UP, 2013. Lewis, Simon L., and Mark A. Maslin. “Defining the Anthropocene.” Nature, vol. 519, March 2015, pp. 171–80. ———. The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene. Yale UP, 2018. Luciano, Dana. “The Inhuman Anthropocene.” Avidly. Los Angeles Review of Books, 22 March 2015. http://avidly. lareviewofbooks.org/2015/03/22/the-inhuman-anthropocene/. Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso, 2016. Marsh, George Perkins. Man and Nature. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2003. Menely, Tobias, and Jesse Oak Taylor, editors. Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times. University Park: Penn State UP, 2017. Mentz, Steve. “Enter the Anthropocene, Circa 1610.” Menely and Oak Taylor, pp. 43–58. Miller, Elizabeth. Special Issue: “Climate Change and Victorian Studies.” Victorian Studies, vol. 60, no. 4, 2018. ———. “Fixed Capital and the Flow: Water Power, Steam Power, and The Mill on the Floss.” Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, edited by Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer. Fordham UP, 2019, pp. 85–100. Moore, Jason. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso, 2015. Mukherjee, Pablo Upamanyu. Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines, Fevers and the Literary Cultures of South Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Nixon, Rob. “The Anthropocene: The Promise and Pitfalls of an Epochal Idea.” EdgeEffects, 6 November 2014. http://edgeeffects.net/anthropocene-promise-and-pitfalls/. Purdy, Jedediah. After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. Harvard UP, 2015. Rudwick, Martin J. S. Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. Chicago UP, 2005. Scott, Heidi M. Fuel: An Ecocritical History, Bloomsbury, 2018. ———. Chaos and Cosmos: Literary Roots of Modern Ecology in the British Nineteenth Century. Pennsylvania State UP, 2014. Shyrock, Andrew, et al. Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. U of California P, 2011. Taylor, Jesse Oak. “Globalize.” Veer Ecology, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, U of Minnesota P, 2017, pp. 30–43. ———. The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2016. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Burbant, editors. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. U of Minnesota P, 2017. Waters, Colin N., et al. “The Anthropocene Is Functionally and Stratigraphically Distinct from the Holocene.” Science, vol. 351, no. 6269, 2016, p. aad2622. Zalasiewicz, Jan. The Earth after Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks? Oxford UP, 2008. Zalasiewicz, Jan, et al. “When Did the Anthropocene Begin? A Mid Twentieth Century Boundary Is Stratigraphically Optimal.” Quaternary International, vol. 383, 2015, pp. 196–203.

505

44 WHY VICTORIAN ECOCRITICISM MATTERS Lynn Voskuil

On the south coast of Cornwall, near the ancient market town of St. Austell, lie the remarkable Lost Gardens of Heligan. Shrouded by brambles and bracken for much of the twentieth century, the gardens fell into ruin when the resident staff was decimated during World War I and the Tremayne family could no longer maintain its estate. Nourished in succeeding decades by frequent English rains and the subtropical climate of Cornwall, domesticated garden plants grew into monstrous invasive species, and the grounds were literally lost from sight—even from the view of their nearby Cornish neighbors. Heligan had become a secret garden. In their Victorian heyday, however, the gardens of Heligan were magnificent, a tribute to the horticultural skill of Victorian gardeners and to the insatiable botanical curiosity of the British populace as a whole. In the second half of the nineteenth century, as Tim Smit has described (122–47), John Tremayne and his son Jack cultivated their own botanical passions by importing exotic specimens from many global locations, including palm trees from China, giant tree ferns from New Zealand, and countless species of rhododendrons brought from the Sikkim Himalayas by the renowned Victorian botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker (see Voskuil, “Specimen to System”). To this day, the spring landscape at Heligan is dominated by the striking hues of towering rhododendrons, some of them actual relics of Hooker’s mid-nineteenth-century Himalayan expeditions. I begin this chapter with nineteenth-century gardens—specifically with Heligan, a garden that has been lost and reclaimed (and is definitely worth a visit!)—not because they are literally and thematically “green” but because they capture new directions in Victorianist ecocriticism in graphically arresting ways. If gardens and plants appear to be an unusually fitting frame for an essay on ecocriticism, their more important role here is to suggest how we might conduct ecocritical work and what the implications of that work might be. Victorian gardens testify, of course, to Britain’s long-standing horticultural knowledge and ambition, its national passion to garden and till the soil—a passion which is not unique to the Victorian period. Throughout history, the people of Britain have been digging, planting, and sharing their knowledge with each other; for centuries, in other words, they have nurtured intimate connections with plants. Victorian gardens, however—most notably lost-and-found gardens like Heligan that feature exotic species from around the world—register the complex mix of historical and ecological forces that Victorianist ecocritics are studying now: 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. In this context, in other words, the term “ecology” (abbreviated as “eco” in “ecocriticism”) refers to far more than nonhuman nature; more significantly, it recognizes 506

Why Victorian Ecocriticism Matters

the broad expanse of humans’ relationships with their nonhuman fellows, whether those relationships are praiseworthy or problematic, and studies the effects of human and nonhuman manipulation of the environment, natural and manufactured alike. This ecological legacy and these challenges are manifestly enormous—so enormous, in fact, that they often frustrate both the study of them and the practical will to address them. Gardens can help ground our awareness and study of such issues, bringing them down to earth and open to our observation. The planet-size ecological problems instigated by some Victorian (horti)cultural practices, for example—practices that we often continue today—are graphically displayed by the proliferation of Gunnera manicata’s gargantuan foliage throughout contemporary Cornwall, including Heligan. A nineteenth-century botanical import from Brazil whose common names include “giant rhubarb” and “dinosaur food,” this species, like the “Red Weed” featured in H.G. Wells’s late-Victorian invasion novel The War of the Worlds (1897), thrives near water and can spread aggressively. Also like the Red Weed, Gunnera manicata entered Cornwall as a product of empire, brought to Britain as but one example (among millions) of the imperial quest to acquire both commodities and knowledge. It thus singularly embodies, before our very eyes, the effects of imperialism, of environmental degradation, and of climate change. At the same time, this plant, along with the gardens it inhabits, can prompt ecological awareness and even a determination to change our ways today. Gunnera’s very size insists that we acknowledge its presence and learn to live with its tenacious habits of growth: its aggressive occupation of garden space compels us to be mindful of our nonhuman companions on earth, and Gunnera’s creation of its own microclimates induces small-scale alertness to the large-scale climate change that is already well underway on our planet. Inspired by Gunnera’s example, this chapter will explore the issues foregrounded by the relatively new, but now exploding, subfield of Victorianist ecocriticism. By using gardens like Heligan as a touchstone, it will showcase not only the large-scale problems that were often prompted by Victorian practices but also their ecological innovations and even solutions. In this process, it will isolate and describe essential features of Victorianist ecocriticism; explain how Victorianist ecocritics aim to transform methodological practices; and show how Victorianist ecocriticism speaks to our current ecological moment. It is a premise of Victorianist ecocriticism that we cannot address contemporary environmental crises unless we draw on our long ecological history, a history that we share with the Victorians. Here, that history will be showcased by means of the horticultural framework of Victorian gardens.

1. What Is Victorianist Ecocriticism? Unlike ecocriticism in other areas of literary study—American studies, for example—the ecocriticism of Victorian literature has a relatively short history. As recently as 2015, Jesse Oak Taylor bluntly observed, “The most striking thing about Victorian ecocriticism . . . is that there is so little of it” (877). As I write this chapter in 2019, that situation is changing rapidly, even at lightning speed. Determining the reasons for that earlier scarcity is not my goal here. It is, however, a central concern of this chapter to explore the recent emergence of scholarship that is understood to be “ecocriticism.” It is important to note that these issues are in flux—especially in this emergent subfield—including the term “ecocriticism” itself, which remains under debate and which I use without complete satisfaction. I have settled on it here to reflect this volume’s focus on Victorian literature and the practice of literary scholarship— and to distinguish that practice from the “environmental humanities,” which we might understand as a more broadly interdisciplinary term. “Ecocriticism” also has a metaliterary quality to it that captures the thrust of this chapter: rather than probe the literature itself, it makes a self-referential gesture that points toward our reflections on literature. In this way, “ecocriticism” also differs from “ecology,” “environment,” and their derivatives, terms with distinct and very complex etymological histories and cultural usages that are important but also beyond the scope of my analysis here. 507

Lynn Voskuil

Gardens can help us track and explore these rapidly shifting meanings and topics. For the study of Victorian gardens, like British gardens themselves, is not new. Literary scholars have previously analyzed representations of gardens in Victorian literature, and historians have long explored plants as historical objects. While ecocritics build on this (and related) scholarship, they often make additional strategic moves and take their analysis in certain directions. To understand those directions, we must first briefly explore earlier scholarship on Victorian plants and gardens. When the Tremaynes, father and son, ambitiously expanded their gardens at Heligan in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, they participated in a more than century-long commitment to British horticultural innovation. While Britons had enthusiastically gardened for centuries, the late eighteenth century and the entire nineteenth century were periods of exponential development, driven by hundreds, even thousands, of newly available exotic plants from around the globe [on travel, see Tange’s chapter]. As numerous scholars have documented, these species were imported into the British Isles and colonies as commodities that bolstered its imperial quest. Jayeeta Sharma has documented, for example, the British transfer of tea plants (Camellia sinensis) from China to Britain’s Indian holdings in Assam, a move that greatly augmented the coffers of the British East India Company. “Tea-growing Assam,” she notes, “offered the East India Company the opportunity to produce a commodity increasingly significant for world trade and the British domestic economy” (25; see also Rappaport). Thousands of species were also imported into Britain itself. Plant-hunting expeditions were funded both by the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew (directed first by William Hooker and then by his son Joseph Dalton Hooker) for scientific purposes and by the Royal Horticultural Society for horticultural purposes. These new exotic plants—among them now-common garden species like wisteria, magnolias, peonies, and azaleas, as well as camellias and rhododendrons—satisfied the British imperial urge to acquire new knowledge and commodities from around the world. Indeed, as Janet Browne has argued, the global study of plants and animals in the nineteenth century, known as biogeography, “was one of the most obviously imperial sciences in an age of increasing imperialism” (305). Other scholars—Alan Bewell, Richard Drayton, Jim Endersby, Fa-ti Fan, and Richard Grove among them—have similarly demonstrated the complicity of Victorian botany and horticulture in the imperial project. At Heligan, the Tremaynes made stunning use of the botanical riches afforded to them, courtesy of empire. Restored today to its Victorian abundance, Heligan is shockingly beautiful, its pleasure gardens enameling the Cornish landscape with their brilliant hues and its kitchen gardens bursting through their original Victorian cold-frames and greenhouses. The visual and aesthetic appeal of gardens like Heligan has drawn historians to them for many years. Garden historians Tom Carter and Brent Elliott have documented many of the aesthetic trends that are reflected in Victorian gardens. Historians of other stripes have attributed ideological qualities to the design aesthetic of some gardens. Anne Helmsreich, for example, sees British national identity captured in late nineteenth-century British gardens, while Eugenia Herbert analyzes “the sense of superiority of the British way of doing things” in colonial Indian gardens (2). Both Helmsreich and Herbert “read” gardens for what they can tell us about British nationalism and imperialism, probing horticultural design for evidence of ideology and cultural identity. This scholarship is invaluable for its close attention to British national and imperial ambitions in the nineteenth century. Like much scholarship of the last few decades, it chronicles the global, ideological, and perdurable reach of the British empire in both colonial and postcolonial lands [on postcolonial criticism, see Banerjee’s chapter]. Indeed, this scholarship is essential to sound Victorianist ecocriticism. As Nathan Hensley and Philip Steer remind us, “the Victorian Empire’s worldspanning configuration was the first political project in history to be powered almost exclusively by fossilized plant life” (3), otherwise known as coal. The interwoven advancement of capitalism and imperialism, in other words, and the reliance of both on fossil fuels cannot be separated from the environmental degradation that was accelerated by those practices, if not entirely instigated [on industry, see Carroll’s chapter]. 508

Why Victorian Ecocriticism Matters

An ecocritical perspective can incorporate this awareness of plants as commodities, or gardens as ideological signifiers, but it can aspire to develop new modes of analysis as well. It should also be noted that Victorianist ecocriticism is not limited to the analysis of plants, gardens, or other “green” topics. Rather, it moves far beyond such themes to a broader focus on elements, attitudes, and even large systems (like capitalism and industry) that radically altered the nineteenth-century environment. Hensley and Steer’s “Signatures of the Carboniferous,” for example, locates the novel “within the global energy system that increasingly made it possible,” thus aiming, as they continue, “to offer a test case in adducing how the practices and infrastructures of fossil combustion became legible as literary effect” (66). As it is rapidly evolving among Victorianists, the ecocritical project manifests at least three additional key features in various configurations: an ecological reach toward nonhuman nature, with the goal of comprehending human relations with(in) this collective; a self-reflexive sense for how ecological concerns are both captured in literary forms and modify (or, at least, should modify) literary study; and a related conviction that literary study, even historicist literary study, might speak to contemporary ecological problems. The combined emphasis on empire and ecology is demonstrated persuasively by Elizabeth Chang’s very recent study of plants in British fiction, Novel Cultivations: Plants in the British Novel of the Global Nineteenth Century. Focusing on non-native plants that found their way into British culture via the circulations of empire—precisely those plants whose travels as imperial commodities are analyzed somewhat differently by historians like Drayton and Herbert—Chang shows how botanical specimens represented in literature often emerge from the “thickly descriptive background” to become “operative singular subjects drawn out from that background” (4). These plants, in other words, take on qualities of ontology, mobility, and even agency, qualities that I have also explored in Victorian perceptions of exotic orchids (“Orchids”). Customarily, in our scholarship, we have reserved these qualities for the human characters whose subjectivities we have traditionally tracked, probed, and analyzed in Victorian novels. This reconception of plants as sentient subjects links them not only to humans but to the many elements—animal, vegetable, and otherwise—that form the multi-species collectives and networks conspicuous in the work of Jane Bennett, Cary Wolfe, and like-minded posthuman theorists. Chang’s interest in plants thus transcends matters of mere representation, the question of how they are portrayed in novels and the ideological ends they perform. Instead, in her hands, plants serve important literary functions in an array of Victorian fantasy novels like Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). “Cultivation serves as the vector through which plants, as reality effects, real objects, or influential metonyms,” she writes, “connect individually and collectively to human activities of narrative-making, history-writing, and worldbuilding of all kinds” (6). Chang’s focus on plants, in other words, aims to change the way we read novels, especially nonrealist novels, and urges us to rethink both character and background. Her analysis of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), for example, a twentieth-century novel with deep roots in the Victorian Gothic tradition, features the species of rhododendrons that were planted at Heligan and had become rampant throughout Cornwall by the twentieth century. Unlike the carefully tended Heligan specimens, however, these fictional plants have become invasive, monstrous, and consciously aggressive. “The rhododendrons stood fifty feet high,” Rebecca’s narrator notes, “twisted and entwined with bracken, and they had entered into alien marriage with a host of nameless shrubs, poor, bastard things that clung about their roots as though conscious of their spurious origin” (qtd. in Chang 115). While du Maurier’s rhododendrons anticipate the overgrown landscape that excavators discovered at Heligan in the 1990s, they serve far more significant ends in the novel than the unproblematic reflection of an actual scene. As Chang argues, anthropomorphism is “insufficient to describe what is happening here” because this landscape “overwrites the narrator dreaming its existence” (115). Du Maurier’s “monster shrubs” (qtd. in Chang 114), says Chang, test our traditional literary notions of background, character, and even narration itself. 509

Lynn Voskuil

With these emphases, Chang participates in ecocritical efforts to think beyond human subjectivity and character and to reconceptualize the role of nonhuman elements in narrative. She invites us, that is, to reorient our familiar relationship to the Victorian novel. Novel Cultivations is a new addition to a body of excellent work on plants and literature. Amy King, for example, explores what she calls “the botanical vernacular” to demonstrate how the British novel, particularly courtship novels, drew on Linnaean “system[s] of signification” and the trope of the “bloom” to represent the emerging sexuality of girls and young women. Also significant in similar ways is the persuasive work of Barbara T. Gates, Judith W. Page, Beverly Seaton, Ann B. Shteir, and Elise L. Smith. These scholars explore the relationship of Victorian women to plants and gardens, producing a body of work that has contributed powerfully to our knowledge of Victorian gender constructs, nineteenth-century literature, and representations of gardens and plants. Chang draws on this (and related) work, just as she relies on studies of empire, and considers gender carefully where appropriate. Her methods, however, move beyond gender arguments to make claims that speak to ecocritical goals. Like Chang, Jesse Oak Taylor focuses on a subject—the fog of London—that is recognizably environmentalist in his recent book The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf. Also like Chang, he takes the Victorian (and modernist) novel as his textual venue to help formulate the newly emergent core concerns of Victorianist ecocriticism. In The Sky of Our Manufacture, Taylor moves beyond cultural studies of the city to address not only the history of urban pollution but also the crucial role of fiction in “modeling” climate change (13–17). For Taylor, Victorian novels like Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53), George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), among others, do far more important work than merely represent the London fog (and later smog) in uniquely literary ways, even when they portray it as polluted and unhealthy. In addition, he says, the experience of reading novels—especially the colossal, rambling novels that Victorian writers tended to publish serially—helps readers apprehend the duration and unpredictability of climate change. Reading novels, he writes, “involves the kind of suspended and associative thinking necessary for modeling the experience of climate change as an aggregation of atmospheric effects” (14). In this vein, Taylor analyzes the famous opening to Bleak House—quite possibly the foggiest first chapter in all of Victorian literature—as a portrayal of London “buried beneath the mud of a fossil record in progress, as the modern metropolis morphs into the prehistoric realm of the Megalosaurus, whose long-compressed habitat has become the fuel of a new age” (34). Taylor asks us to read background as foreground, as Chang does, and to remodel our long-standing reliance on character and subjectivity. Equally significant for Taylor, however, is what he calls the “abnatural,” a neologism that approximates the not-quite-definable configurations that nature has assumed under the artificial conditions of late capitalism. “Abnatural ecology,” he says, “attempts to capture the experience of dwelling in a manufactured environment, wherein everything from the bloodstream to the weather bears the traces of human actions” (5). While the natural fog of London originates in the Thames estuary, it mixes with the coal smoke and particulates of the urban setting to become what was eventually known as “smog” and to produce the abnatural, manufactured sky of Taylor’s title. In fact, as Taylor makes clear, Victorians were among the first people to recognize how significantly they had altered the natural world. Later in the book, Taylor offers a stunning reading of Dracula that plays out the implications of abnatural ecology, linking Victorian (and our) undead uses of fossil fuels to the undead logic of Stoker’s novel. In the foul, smoggy environs of late-Victorian London, Taylor finds an atmosphere that eerily models the ravages of climate change. “When the modern Gothic of the fin de siècle . . . replaces its crumbling ancient castles and monasteries with the streets of London,” he observes, “its engagement with an unnatural monster whose dangerous artificial reality cannot be refuted becomes a meditation on the abnatural climate of the city” (125). For Taylor, then, the Victorian novel is a crucial vehicle for grasping not only the reality of climate change but also modeling the experience of it. Without novels or Victorian culture, Taylor suggests, our ecological awareness might be even more limited than it already is. 510

Why Victorian Ecocriticism Matters

Taylor’s notion of abnatural ecology speaks powerfully to the restored gardens now thriving at Heligan. Whether we think of gardens—human creations that use biological materials—as “abnatural” or never natural (as I tend to), they capture the provocative conditions characterized by human interventions in nonhuman nature. Often, these abnatural interventions extended beyond the garden to the domestic parlor, as Talia Schaffer has discussed, when Victorians tried to stabilize botanical structure by preserving dried plants under glass—and sometimes even coating them with shellac (95–6). The current gardens at Heligan, however faithful to their Victorian originals and however compliant with current ecological standards, should be construed as more thoroughly abnatural than the Tremaynes’ Victorian version. Even more than a garden per se, the restoration of a garden involves multiple levels of human manipulation, building on the idea that nonhuman nature can be controlled in the first place. As Victorians have shown us, that idea itself is open to question.

2. How Does Victorianist Ecocriticism Matter? The question posed here, in the heading, may seem quaint in the face of what conservation biologist Thomas E. Lovejoy has called “the climate change endgame.” “Rates of extinction and endangerment of species have soared,” Lovejoy proclaims. “Ecosystem destruction is massive and accelerating. Institutional responsiveness seems lethargic to a reptilian degree” (np). These grim warnings were published six years ago. As I write in 2019, people around the globe are finally beginning to press intensively for the kinds of institutional change that Lovejoy called for in 2013, even as ambitious, collective solutions often themselves seem inadequate to the scale of the cataclysm. And yet many Victorianist ecocritics believe that the study of nineteenth-century texts has something to offer and that at least some interpretations of those texts should address our current planetary crisis. As Elizabeth Carolyn Miller recently put it, “Our climate is changing, but must Victorian studies change too? The real question is, how could it not?” (537). Miller’s questions are posed at the crucial and sometimes controversial juncture of historicist and presentist approaches to literary scholarship. The study of Victorian England—its narratives, its documents, its cultural issues and ideologies—has been a highly historicized discipline for at least the past 35 to 40 years [on historical criticism, see Gallagher’s chapter]. In contrast to New Critics, who, decades before that, often consciously disregarded cultural, historical, and political contexts in order to focus on what they thought of as the unencumbered, disinterested literary text, most Victorianist scholars today premise their study of literature on its rootedness in specific histories and cultures. It has become axiomatic, in other words, that literary texts cannot be wrested from their historical and ideological moorings and that textual analysis must acknowledge these moorings and even incorporate them into literary arguments. Thus, for many Victorianist ecocritics, as we have seen, the economic, geographical, and ideological expanse of the nineteenth-century British empire is omnipresent, its tentacles reaching into every textual nook and cranny. At the same time, Victorianist ecocritics often see potential applications for their scholarship beyond a contribution of knowledge about Victorian period culture, and they frequently read texts with an eye toward our contemporary environmental dilemmas. This practice opens them to a charge of “presentism,” the charge that they (and other critics who take similar positions) are using texts anachronistically. While remaining sensitive to history, Victorianist ecocritics have addressed this issue by theorizing a concept called “strategic presentism.” Probably coined by Daniel Brayton, an Early-Modern ecocritic, strategic presentism acknowledges and analyzes the historical groundings of literary texts—including the qualities that distinguish and distance them from the texts we consume today—but is also selfreferentially prompted by certain elements of the present moment. For Brayton, the conceptual and political position of “strategic presentism” entails a critical method that studies the “deep mutuality” between nature and humanity in Shakespearean texts but also builds on twenty-first-century scientific understanding to “decode” Early Modern literature (5, 6). It also involves a commitment to use 511

Lynn Voskuil

ecocritical knowledge as a tool for advocacy at the present time. As Brayton puts it, “[E]cocriticism is a pursuit in which scholarship and environmental advocacy . . . are inextricably intertwined” (7). For Victorianist ecocritics, a presentist stance enables a variety of strategic perspectives on Victorian texts. Historicist assumptions, however, also remain central, including the historical conditions of empire and the role of imperial capitalism in the process of environmental degradation. Virtually any Victorianist ecocritic working today would take as axiomatic the premise that many of our current ecological crises originated or were greatly intensified in the nineteenth century under the aegis of what Andreas Malm has called “fossil capital” (passim) [on fossil capital, see Taylor’s chapter]. Strategically presentist ecocriticism thus often involves the representation of environmental devastation that rapidly accelerated in the nineteenth century—urban pollution in London, for example—or the analysis of related nineteenth-century ideas and attitudes because that devastation and those attitudes remain with us today. A recent essay by Allen MacDuffie demonstrates this approach. In “The Victorian Pre-History of Climate Denial,” he dismantles and historicizes what he (and others) call “soft denialism,” the perspective of many people today who theoretically acknowledge the crisis of climate change but suppress awareness of it on a daily basis (544). Such people—a group that probably includes many of us—do not deny the reality of climate change and would likely welcome large-scale institutional efforts to address the crisis; even so, we may well live our ordinary, quotidian lives as if our planet were not at imminent risk of catastrophe. Rather than view this cognitive dissonance as a habit of mind that emerged recently, as a feature of our present crisis, MacDuffie finds its roots in Victorian responses to the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859. Darwin’s thought, he notes, “delivered a profound shock to Western culture’s foundational belief in human exceptionalism” (545). While some nineteenth-century people guarded this foundation by arguing directly against Darwin’s ideas, others insulated themselves and found refuge on “different, more contingent, and more precarious ground” (545). This more tentative position has its parallel today, MacDuffie says, in the stance of soft denialism. “That is to say,” he argues, “those features of human existence that Darwin made increasingly difficult for people to flatly deny—our animal nature, our cosmic insignificance, our embeddedness in natural system and processes, and our inevitable extinction—could still be softly denied: pushed out of mind, temporarily suspended, explained away” (545). In MacDuffie’s view, the questions generated by Darwin’s Origin were never fully resolved, with the result that we still live with certain features of the cognitive dissonance generated by Victorians but experienced today with a somewhat different set of cultural, intellectual, and material conditions. His analysis is thus strategically presentist: he explores the reception to and literary representations of Darwinian thought in order not only to adjust the scholarly record but also (and more importantly) to challenge our own habits of mind today. In MacDuffie’s analysis, our connection to Victorian attitudes about evolution is potentially catastrophic—and warrants immediate correction—because it may have taught us, at least in part, how to downplay our own environmental crises. Other scholars, however, have found evidence of sound ecological thought among nineteenth-century writers and artists, thought that we can continue to learn from today. Such scholarship is also strategically presentist. Heidi C.M. Scott, for example, sees nineteenth-century poets as the locus of ecological ideas that anticipated twentieth- and twenty-first-century scientific ecology in its shift from paradigms of ecological balance and harmony to paradigms of instability, disruption, and chaos. Indeed, for Scott, ecocritics (Victorianist and otherwise) have very important roles to play in modeling the literary roots of ecological thought. As she bluntly puts it, “I propose that ecocriticism can do better than play the role of duplicitous sibling to ecological science. Ecocriticism can theorize how the scientific understanding of nature has literary origins” (6). Scott demonstrates this argument by studying the tropes of cosmos and chaos in a range of nineteenth-century literary texts, including one of the first post-apocalyptic novels: Richard Jefferies’s After London Or Wild England (1885). The first four chapters of that novel portray nonhuman nature overtaking southern England following the cataclysmic rupture of an unnamed apocalypse 512

Why Victorian Ecocriticism Matters

and thus modeling “the dynamics of a world made new by environmental upheaval” (56). Jefferies imagines, in other words, how nature reorders itself in the chaos following dramatic rupture, anticipating the emphasis of later ecologists on chaos theory and ecosystem fluctuation. For Scott, novelists like Jefferies presciently show us how to think ecologically about concepts like novel ecosystems well before many terms (“ecosystem,” for instance) had even been coined. Scott has a presentist motivation for studying nineteenth-century literature, discovering in Victorian literary texts a trenchant prefiguration of our own environmental era. If Scott reads a different sort of lesson than MacDuffie does, her renovation of under-read figures like Jefferies could contribute, it might be argued, to the kind of re-education that MacDuffie advocates. Several other scholars also find intellectual resources in nineteenth-century culture, resources with twenty-first-century pertinence. Deanna Kreisel, for instance, explores the mixed legacy of Victorian art critic John Ruskin evident within our own notions of sustainability. Long recognized as an early environmentalist thinker, Ruskin nonetheless supported Britain’s imperial ambitions—a discordant set of attitudes that also underlies his principles of political economy. Acknowledging these contradictions, Kreisel traces in Ruskin’s thought a clear anticipation of our own paradoxical ideas about organicism and sustainability today. As she puts it, “[T]he most compelling reason to turn to the work of Ruskin at this particular historical moment is that it can help us better understand our own culture’s investment in the sustainability idea” (103). Equally persuasive are two interpretations of the fin de siècle Decadent movement as harbingers of our own moment. Dennis Denisoff considers late-Victorian paganism, a specific strain of Decadent thought, as a locus of proto-environmental ideas, exploring in particular the work of art critic Walter Pater [on paganism, see Ferguson’s chapter; on decadence, see Evangelista’s chapter]. Pagan animist belief—the belief that all natural entities, even rocks and insects, have a form of soul that should be respected—“challenges the notion of ‘speciesism,’” says Denisoff, “the anthropocentric privileging of humans over other animals and life forms” (434) [on animal studies, see Danahay and Morse’s chapter]. Linking Victorian writers to recent versions of posthumanist theory (as Kreisel does too), he finds “eco-political potential pulsing through the pagan vein of Decadence” (433). Echoing Denisoff, Benjamin Morgan also analyzes Decadent writers as precursors of our own era, characterizing their movement as “a mode of ecological thought” that anticipates current responses to our own climate predicament (611). Morgan focuses specifically on the little-known Anglo-Indian writer M.P. Shiel, most notably his apocalyptic novel The Purple Cloud (1901), arguing that Shiel’s representations of “conflicts among multiple registers of planetary scale” prefigure recent attempts to grasp the geological and temporal scales of the current anthropogenic moment. Prompted in part by our present environmental crisis, Kreisel, Denisoff, and Morgan all tease out threads of Victorian thought that had been previously disregarded or interpreted differently but are now emerging as significant texts and ideas for Victorianist ecocriticism. The emphasis these scholars place on the ecological insights and heterodoxies of nineteenthcentury writers parallels Taylor’s conviction that the Victorian novel can model climate change even for readers today: for all of these scholars, an ecocritical approach to Victorian literature requires not only new methods of literary analysis but also a fresh acknowledgment of how nineteenth-century texts can help us address our present crisis. In strategic ways, then, they think of Victorian literature as “instrumental”—as useful in ways that exceed its literary, aesthetic, or humanist value. In a recent response to Taylor’s book, Caroline Levine captures this potentially controversial position and its implication for Victorianist ecocritics. Humanists “have typically thought of our work as staunchly anti-instrumental, refusing to serve powerful ends,” she observes. “But Taylor hints that we might put art to use after all. It might just be that building sustainable alternatives to capitalism and imperialism and their poisoning of the air and water will involve creating new models for the future drawn from blueprints sketched in the past.” This logic, if not this precise claim, is increasingly evident in arguments about the ecological value of Victorian literature, even when its subject matter is not focused on nonhuman nature. In the topics already discussed in this chapter —exotic plants, the London smog, 513

Lynn Voskuil

Darwinian thought, ecological tropes, sustainability, decadent nature—there is a strong emphasis on objects and ideas that we might see as recognizably and perhaps suitably “green” or “environmentalist.” If this emphasis is unsurprising and unobjectionable, most Victorianist ecocritics would suggest that their analysis is not limited to obviously environmentalist topics, texts, or concepts. Instead, we should be able to apply ecocritical methods to any literature or find ecological significance even in texts that don’t thematize nonhuman nature in obvious ways—just as we have trained ourselves, following Edward Said, to notice an imperialist “structure of attitude and reference” (76) even in novels that aren’t manifestly about empire. Tina Young Choi and Barbara Leckie provide a compelling recent example of this kind of analysis. For many ecocritics, Choi and Leckie among them, our present environmental plight has occasioned a “representational crisis” as well as an ecological one (565). The sheer scale and long geological time frames of our climate history, ecocritics often assert, challenge our capacity to represent it effectively in virtually any cultural realm—the sciences, the humanities, and public policy alike. Choi and Leckie tackle this enormous issue by focusing on George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72), that enormous and quintessentially Victorian novel, by showing how it addresses the current environmental concerns about representation in the very fabric of its narrative. Middlemarch and other Victorian novels, Choi and Leckie assert, enabled the experience of lengthy, gradual narrative development that rendered “evidence persuasive in the absence of empirical certainty” (575) [on narrative theory, see Auyoung’s chapter]. This narrative logic—which they call “slow causality” (passim)—both enacts and reflects upon this form of causality and its temporal movement. “The omniscient narrator,” they argue, “maps slow, but traceable, causalities, while the digressive asides at once reflect on such causal relations and produce or constitute the very experience of slowness itself ” (576). In this way, readers of Middlemarch, then and now, can learn the skills needed to grasp the much slower causalities of climate change, causalities that are beyond the temporal scope and perception of human lifetimes. Choi and Leckie thus attribute an instrumentalist and presentist benefit to Victorian novels. While remaining responsive to the historical moment of the texts they analyze, their scholarship has a contemporary urgency that belies its historicist method because Victorian writers, they insist, “recognized the power of narrative both to describe and to enact an otherwise elusive causality, whether the slow geological transformations of continents or the effects of a single action upon future generations” (583). For all of the scholars considered in this chapter—and many others whose emerging work is contributing to the rapid growth of Victorianist ecocriticism—nineteenth-century literature is a significant archive not only for exploring the roots of our present crisis but also for learning new ways to address it. In their view (and mine), Victorianist ecocriticism does indeed matter, and it matters at precisely this moment, when the stakes are so astronomically high. To bring closure to this crucial point, I will return briefly to the material, nonhuman enclosure of the Victorian garden—specifically to Heligan and its statuesque, Himalayan rhododendrons. Imported into England under the aegis of empire, these rhododendrons soon escaped their horticultural confines and invaded the surrounding environs, altering both the ecological and aesthetic conditions of the Cornish landscape. For novelists like du Maurier, they had thus become monstrous. Even if the Cornish people now sought to restore their landscape to its pre-imperialist state, such restoration is impossible: we must necessarily live with what we, following our Victorian forebears, have wrought. What we have created, in both gardens and literature, can illuminate the problematic choices we have made but also show us how we might now try to address the consequences of those choices.

Key Critical Works Elizabeh Hope Chang. Novel Cultivations: Plants in the British Novel of the Global Nineteenth Century. Tina Young Choi, and Barbara Leckie. “Slow Causality: The Function of Narrative in an Age of Climate Change.”

514

Why Victorian Ecocriticism Matters Dennis Denisoff. “The Dissipating Nature of Decadent Paganism from Pater to Yeats.” Nathan Hensley, and Philip Steer, editors. Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in an Age of Empire. Deanna K. Kreisel. “‘Form against Force’: Sustainability and Organicism in the Work of John Ruskin.” Allen MacDuffie. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, editor. Climate Change and Victorian Studies, special issue of Victorian Studies. Benjamin Morgan. “Fin du Globe: On Decadent Planets.” Heidi C. M. Scott. Chaos and Cosmos: Literary Roots of Modern Ecology in the British Nineteenth Century. Jesse Oak Taylor, The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf. Lynn Voskuil. “Victorian Orchids and the Forms of Ecological Society.”

Works Cited Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010. Bewell, Alan. Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History. Johns Hopkins UP, 2016. Brayton, Daniel. Shakespeare’s Ocean. U of Virginia P, 2012. Browne, Janet. “Biogeography and Empire.” Cultures of Natural History, edited by N. Jardine, J. A. Secord and E. C. Spary, Cambridge UP, 1996, pp. 305–21. Carter, Tom. The Victorian Garden. Bell & Hyman, 1984. Chang, Elizabeth Hope. Novel Cultivations: Plants in the British Novel of the Global Nineteenth Century. U of Virginia P, 2019. Choi, Tina Young, and Barbara Leckie. “Slow Causality: The Function of Narrative in an Age of Climate Change.” Climate Change and Victorian Studies, special issue of Victorian Studies, edited by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, vol. 60, no. 4, 2018, pp. 565–87. Denisoff, Dennis. “The Dissipating Nature of Decadent Paganism from Pater to Yeats.” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 15, no. 3, 2008, pp. 431–46. Drayton, Richard. Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World. Yale UP, 2000. Elliott, Brent. Victorian Gardens. Timber, 1986. Endersby, Jim. Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science. U of Chicago P, 2008. Fan, Fa-ti. British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter. Harvard UP, 2004. Gates, Barbara T. Kindred Nature:Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World. U of Chicago P, 1998. Grove, Richard H. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge UP, 1995. Helmsreich, Anne. The English Garden and National Identity: The Competing Styles of Garden Design, 1870–1914. Cambridge UP, 2002. Hensley, Nathan, and Philip Steer. “Introduction: Ecological Formalism: Or, Love among the Ruins.” Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in an Age of Empire, edited by Nathan Hensley and Philip Steer, Fordham UP, 2018, pp. 1–17. ———. “Signatures of the Carboniferous: The Literary Forms of Coal.” Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in an Age of Empire, edited by Nathan Hensley and Philip Steer, Fordham UP, 2018, pp. 63–82. Herbert, Eugenia W. Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India. U of Pennsylvania P, 2011. King, Amy M. Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel. Oxford UP, 2003. Kreisel, Deanna K. “‘Form against Force’: Sustainability and Organicism in the Work of John Ruskin.” Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in an Age of Empire, edited by Nathan Hensley and Philip Steer, Fordham UP, 2018, pp. 101–20. Levine, Caroline. “Reflection by Caroline Levine.” V21: Victorian Studies for the Twenty-First Century. http:// v21collective.org/reflection-caroline-levine/. Lovejoy, Thomas E. “The Climate Change Endgame.” The New York Times, 21 January 2013. www.nytimes. com/2013/01/22/opinion/global/the-climate-change-endgame.html. MacDuffie, Allen. “Charles Darwin and the Victorian Pre-History of Climate Denial.” Victorian Studies, vol. 60, no. 4, 2018, pp. 543–64. ———. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2014. Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso, 2016. Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. “Climate Change and Victorian Studies: Introduction.” Victorian Studies, vol. 60, no. 4, 2018, pp. 537–42. Morgan, Benjamin. “Fin du Globe: On Decadent Planets.” Victorian Studies, vol. 58, no. 4, 2016, pp. 609–35. Page, Judith W., and Elise L. Smith. Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape. Cambridge UP, 2011. Rappaport, Erika. A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World. Princeton UP, 2017. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage Books, 1994.

515

Lynn Voskuil Schaffer, Talia. Novel Craft:Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Oxford UP, 2011. Scott, Heidi C. M. Chaos and Cosmos: Literary Roots of Modern Ecology in the British Nineteenth Century. Pennsylvania State UP, 2014. Seaton, Beverly. The Language of Flowers: A History. U of Virginia P, 1995. Sharma, Jayeeta. Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India. Duke UP, 2011. Shteir, Ann B. Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 to 1860. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Smit, Tim. The Lost Gardens of Heligan. 1997. Victor Gollancx (Orion Books), 2009. Taylor, Jesse Oak. The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf. U of Virginia P, 2016. ———. “Where Is Victorian Ecocriticism?” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 43, no. 4, 2015, pp. 877–94. Voskuil, Lynn. “From Specimen to System: Botanical Scale and the Environmental Sublime in Joseph Dalton Hooker’s Himalayas.” Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, edited by Nathan Hensley and Philip Steer, Fordham UP, 2018, pp. 161–81. ———. “Victorian Orchids and the Forms of Ecological Society.” Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age, edited by Shalyn Claggett and Lara Karpenko, U of Michigan P, 2017, pp. 19–39. Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? U of Minnesota P, 2009.

516

45 INDUSTRY Siobhan Carroll

Inhabitants of the early twenty-first century live at a political moment haunted by anxieties over industry. A casual Google search reveals that the word “industry” in the United States is still very much associated with automotive manufacturing; in Britain, with mining and oil. In comparison, the finance industry—although among the most significant contributors to the Gross Domestic Product of both nations—rarely factors into popular invocations of industry, except in discussions of the harm that globalization and financialization has wreaked on organized labor. In the popular imagination, “industry” is as much a historical as an economic term, associated with a receding golden age of blue-collar employment and national strength. Nationalist backlashes against globalization are often positioned as defenses of this blue-collar form of industry against the vagaries of a so-called knowledge economy, which favors workers with intellectual capital over those with manual skills. Given 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—discussions of Victorian industry cannot be abstracted from the issues attending industry in the twenty-first century. Furthermore, 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. What then does it mean to research and teach “industry” today? As I suggest in this chapter, it means that we should acquaint ourselves with older examples of scholarly thinking on labor and economic change, as well as with the fresh tracks blazed by recent scholarship. In developing new avenues of scholarship, we should recognize that we are implicitly always addressing the concerns of the present moment, including our own concerns as inhabitants of polluted, postindustrial locations, as employees in an adjunctified higher education system, and as teachers of a generation of students increasingly burdened with debt and anxious about the future [on the state of the academy, see Denisoff ’s introduction]. To speak of industry is, fundamentally, to speak about work—not only the work that took place in the past, but the work we do now, as scholars, teachers, and potential agents of structural transformation. In the following pages, I chart out the history of that scholarly work as it has engaged with, commented on, and recognized itself in, Victorian industry.

1. The Scholarly Industrial Revolution “Industry”—a word used in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to refer to “skill, ingenuity, or cleverness”—had, by the Victorian period, come to refer to vast, unseen forces of global trade 517

Siobhan Carroll

reshaping society. While the phenomenon since characterized as the “Industrial Revolution” originated in the growth of factory-driven textile production in late eighteenth-century Britain, the phrase itself originated in France, where the term “révolution industrielle” instantly invoked the turmoil and consequential social changes wrought by the political revolution of 1789. Variations on this phrase were subsequently taken up by such influential commentators as Frederick Engels, whose The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845 English trans. 1887) was one of the first major works to analyze the effects of “an industrial revolution” which has “changed the whole of civil society” (3). The phrase gradually infiltrated England, where it was adopted by workers and social commentators alike to describe the transformations they had witnessed. “Industrial Revolution.” A new phrase to describe a new situation. The first and most important respondents to the Industrial Revolution were contemporary observers. Adam Smith, in attempting to calculate why “we are more industrious than our forefathers” (225), observed and explicated the role of capital, division of labor, geography, and legal regulation in national productivity. Thomas Malthus, a determined supporter of industry, nevertheless raised an alarm regarding the limitations of production, noting that “it is not possible for the industry of man to produce on a limited territory sufficient food” (490) to sustain unregulated population growth. In retrospect, however, it is the critics of industry who have come to dominate scholars’ characterization of the Victorian period. In terms of political legacy, the most significant of these critics were Frederick Engels, whose analysis of the impacts of industrialization on the earning power and living conditions of the English working classes suggested the need for urgent political and social redress, and Karl Marx, whose acquaintance with Engels’s depiction of the miseries of industrial England came to inform his economic and social philosophies. To Engels and Marx, England, the “home of [modern] industry” (Marx 285), served as a bellwether for the world’s industrialized future, indicating both the exploitative trends of industrial capitalism and the possibilities of worker resistance. Marxism and communism can thus be seen as philosophies created in response to a vision of industrialization epitomized by Victorian Britain [on class, see Betensky’s chapter]. Victorian Britain had its own critics of industry whose work would come to shape politics and culture. John Ruskin, while skeptical of socialism, looked askance at an industrial society that he saw as contributing to the denigration of human souls and environments. Arguing that the “country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings” (195), Ruskin protested the alienation of workers from beauty and supported attempts to reinvest labor with dignity. Mathew Arnold similarly positioned himself against a liberal industrial culture that sought to create “fresh centres of industry and fresh poor men” (137), influentially arguing instead for a philosophy of Culture that “seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light” (52). Ruskin’s and Arnold’s conception of the importance of culture to the working classes would return in later scholarship, forming one of the touchstones of a British tradition of writing on the Industrial Revolution. In the first part of the twentieth century, academia engaged with Victorian industry along one of two lines: the first, a triumphalist strand of discourse, sought to celebrate the “great men” of science whose inventions triggered industrial changes (always for the better); the second, suggested by Engels and Marx, focused on the class relationships altered by industrialization (always for the worse). Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, these two scholarly approaches had clear implications for contemporary politics. The advent of the Cold War brought with it a new stridency in argument, and a sense of higher stakes, as defenses of the industrial revolution came to be seen as defenses of “Western” democratic ideals. The most important of these early defenses was T.S. Ashton’s The Industrial Revolution, 1760–1830 (1948), which drew on methods such as quantitative analysis to mount a clear and (particularly for the 1940s) persuasive argument in favor of the beneficial effects of industrialization. Part of what made 518

Industry

Ashton’s argument so innovative was not just his methodology, but his tactics: rather than arguing that the Industrial Revolution had been good for society as a whole, he argued that it had been specifically good for the working classes. Not only had the standard of living of the working class improved, he argued, but the Industrial Revolution had created the conditions allowing for the rise of working-class power via the formation of trade unions and the growth of democratic institutions. To strike against industrialization would thus be to strike against the root of working-class political power. In his conclusion, Ashton gestured toward Britain’s post-imperial future, arguing that England had needed its Industrial Revolution in order to avoid the “Asiatic standards” and “unmechanized horrors” attending present-day India and China, the natural penalty for all “who increase their numbers without passing through an industrial revolution” (161). The clear anti-communist and racialized aspects of Ashton’s argument aided its popularity on both sides of the Atlantic, and it swiftly became a model for historical approaches to the Industrial Revolution during the next couple of decades. In the years that followed, Ashton’s portrayal of nineteenth-century industry would catch the attention of scholars more sympathetic to a Marxist view of the period, including E.P. Thompson (the son of Methodist missionaries) and Raymond Williams (the son of a Welsh railway worker), both of whose familial perspectives on working-class struggles fed into their scholarly responses to Ashton. Championing a “history from below” approach that recovered previously ignored working-class perspectives, Thompson’s groundbreaking The Making of the English Working Class (1963) challenged Ashton’s claims about the benefits of the Industrial Revolution. Claiming that “we find that the sympathies of some economic historians today for the capitalist entrepreneur have led to a confusion of history and apologetics” (210), Thompson established a rigorous ethos by identifying weaknesses and omissions in Ashton’s quantitative analysis. Revisiting Ashton’s figures with a careful eye, Thompson suggested that Ashton had focused on measures that produced a distorted, overly positive characterization of the effects of industrialization, such as the increase in the wages of coal miners, rather than measures such as the number of hours worked by coal miners, which tended instead toward a narrative of “immiseration” (211). Having challenged Ashton on his statistics, Thompson went a step further, calling into question his contemporaries’ assumptions regarding proper methodologies in a manner that would have great significance for future scholarship. Noting the ways that statistics were also subject to distortion, Thompson challenged Ashton’s privileging of statistics over “literary evidence” gathered from personal narratives, novels, and periodicals, observing that “it is quite possible for statistical averages and human experiences to run in opposite directions” (211). When working-class writings were admitted back into evidence, he argued, the problems posed by the Industrial Revolution to workers snapped back into focus, as did workers’ own efforts to address the changing culture. Drawing on such evidence, Thompson argued that the working class did not become conscious of rights in response to the Industrial Revolution, as Ashton had suggested, but instead sought to reimagine old rights in response to changing conditions. Ultimately, Thompson asserted, “The working class made itself as much as it was made” (194). This latter part of Thompson’s argument, his determination to articulate a story of “human agency” (205) by recovering forgotten voices, would become a model for future historians engaged with projects that recover or revisit the voices of marginalized peoples. Among the critics Thompson cites in The Making of the English Working Class is a then up-andcoming Marxist scholar named Raymond Williams, whose work had also engaged (although less explicitly) with Ashton’s claims. Williams’s first major work on the Industrial Revolution, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (1958), was groundbreaking for its identification of “culture” as a historically shifting concept shaped as much by the working class as by conservative elites. Inspired in part by twentieth-century debates over government-funded education, Williams aimed to dismantle the idea that working-class Britons (and Americans) encountering literature in schools were being exposed to alien, unhelpful artifacts better left as the province of the upper classes. Organizing his argument around keywords such as “industry,” Williams argued that Britain was heir to a shared national and literary culture that had originated in the social and ideological struggles of the Industrial Revolution. 519

Siobhan Carroll

Like Thompson, Williams asserted the importance of textual archives, claiming that literary genres such as the “industrial novel” (94)—a term that Culture and Society helped popularize—developed as mediators of class conflicts and could be read retroactively as historical artifacts that preserved and informed Victorian—and in many cases, contemporary—ideologies. While industrial novels such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), and Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845) might occasionally engage with the “facts of the new society” by drawing on urban journalism and parliamentary reports to inform their narratives, they far more importantly displayed what Williams termed the “structure of feeling” (an assemblage of conflicted emotions and cultural assumptions) surrounding the social changes wrought by Victorian industry (258). Williams followed his polemical Culture and Society with several tremendously influential works of criticism that continue to shape the field today. Keywords (1976) expanded on one of the methodologies employed by Williams in Culture and Society, showing how the shifting denotative meanings of a word such as “industry” could be used to unfold a history of cultural thought. Whereas “industry” has historically connoted both “the human quality of sustained application or effort” and “an institution or set of institutions for production or trade” (137), it shifted in meaning in the eighteenth century, where the new institution of the workhouse brought together “ideas of forced application and useful work” (137). Industry, in other words, took on a disciplinary connotation during a period roughly coinciding with the Industrial Revolution, suggesting a type of “work” (also a keyword for Williams) that was organized and managed rather than spontaneous or autonomous. Williams proposed that the word “industry” had again begun to change in the wake of the Second World War “under American influence” (139), reflecting a more positive view of the manufacturing institutions whose productivity could be taken as a measure of Western success. Williams would later expand his analysis of the cultural changes instigated by the Industrial Revolution in his highly influential The Country and the City (1973), which unfolds the way concepts of “country” and “city” have been constructed in response to a capitalist economy. Beginning with the observation that the Industrial Revolution “was based on a highly developed agrarian capitalism” (2), Williams analyzes the impacts of industry from the enclosures of the English countryside through what he characterizes as the “countrification” of what would later come to be known as the Global South. Williams notes how writers over the centuries repeatedly turn to an image of a bucolic rural life now (always now) fading from view, a rhetorical move that he argues represents a desire to displace critiques of contemporary power structures onto “the safer world of the past” (36). Williams also observes the way in which the city, far from being a space that has grown distant from rural ideals, is in fact deeply intertwined with the power structures of the countryside and dominated by the same privileged classes. “If what was seen in town could not be approved,” Williams asserts regarding portraits of the evils of urban life, it is “because it made evident and repellent the decisive relations in which men actually lived” (54). The real solution he contends, was never a return to rural values, but “a change of social relationships and of essential morality” (54)—precisely the kind of real revolutionary change that “town and country” fiction would prefer to prevent [on regionalism and provincialism, see Gibson’s chapter]. Notably, in The Country and the City, Williams explicitly drew on his own biographical experience in setting up his argument. His introductory chapters illustrate the degree to which Williams’s analysis is rooted in his own experience as a working-class Welshman sent from the countryside to be educated at the University of Cambridge, learning from “townspeople, academics, an influential version of what country life, country literature, really meant” (2). Williams’s perspective on industry was not informed just by his class position, but also by his embodiment in physical space: reading Daniel Defoe’s remarks in A Tour Through the Eastern Counties of England (1722) on a road that Williams traveled in his daily commute, Williams suggests that he could not help but reflect on the differences between the landscape Defoe describes and the one he sees, and therefore on the hidden histories of the environment around him. This embodied experience leads him to explicate the power relations 520

Industry

inscribed in his environment, from the stamp of manor houses on the countryside to the organization of housing in “cities built as places of work” (220)—rhetorical moves that anticipate ecocritics’ attempts to recover from literary texts the slow violence of environmental change. The topics of inquiry suggested by Williams’s method in this text—from his acknowledgment of his own structural and institutional complicities to his highlighting of his own presence as a nonobjective, implicated body in a changing landscape—anticipate the turn at the end of the twentieth century toward ecocriticism and spatial analysis, while also inviting analyses of environmental justice issues that the recent ecocritical turn has not fully taken up.

2. The Post-Cold War Industrial Reformation While the majority of twentieth-century scholarship on Victorian industry can be said to be shaped by the politics surrounding the ideological clash between communism and capitalism, the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s ushered in a new era in Victorianist scholarship. The culture wars within academia (which have been described elsewhere in this volume) also had an effect, informing such important works as Catherine Gallagher’s The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (1985), which brought the methods of deconstruction and new historicism to bear on the industrial novel. Yet while Gallagher and scholars such as Mary Poovey worked to extend and diversify the subjects of scholarship on industry during this period, the removal of Cold War animus led to a declining interest among Victorian scholars in what had, for decades, been a high-stakes field of inquiry. Rather than “industry,” the scholarship of these decades was increasingly attentive to keywords such as “nation” and “empire,” concepts that might help illuminate this brave new world of supposed international cooperation and—though this term is rarely explicitly used in Victorianist scholarship—globalization. During the 1990s and early 2000s, the rise of global network culture began to suggest new ways in which Victorian industry might be revisited and reimagined. One strand of this discourse involved thinking through the impacts of the financial industry on Victorian Britain. Thus, writing in the wake of the Enron scandal, Mary Poovey argued for a relationship between the Victorian culture of investment and the form of the novel, suggesting that, in novels, Victorian readers could “experience imaginatively the dynamic by which Britain’s financial institutions generated monetary value and reflect upon the affect this dynamic created” (37). Scholars such as Carolyn Lesjak were inspired by different forms of invisibility, such as the “marked absence of representations of work or workers working” in industrial novels (2), to engage with topics not typically associated with the word “industry,” such as leisure and play. At the other end of the spectrum of visibility, objects captured the attention of scholars such as Elaine Freedgood, who, inspired by the advent of thing theory, examined the industrial production and global networks inhering in material forms. More recently, material culture studies has inflected work on Victorian industry via scholarship such as Kate Nichols’s, Rebecca Wade’s, and Gabriel Williams’s essay collection Art versus industry? New perspectives on visual and industrial cultures in nineteenth-century Britain (2018), which attempts to shift the discourse surrounding industrialization from class to the “stories of nineteenth-century arts and crafts practitioners,” “many of whom hail from already marginalised groups” (5), and via innovative arguments such as Aviva Briefel’s recent analysis of the unruly energies of haunted furniture [on material culture, see Lutz’s chapter]. While all these strands of scholarship suggest useful pathways for future research, the most direct intervention in the trajectory of scholarship on industry came from the strategically presentist arguments of Carolyn Betensky who, in Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel (2010), calls into question many of the assumptions of scholarship on Victorian literature and industry. Writing at a postindustrial, post-Cold War, and post-G.I. Bill moment, Betensky did not see the cultural work performed by Victorian novels in her classroom as being the same as the cultural work analyzed by Raymond Williams. Drawing on the insights of critical whiteness studies, 521

Siobhan Carroll

she argues that the industrial novel “subgenre represents less a way of making sense of or coming to terms with the ‘discovery’ of the industrial poor . . . than the discovery of a new way of being a person of comfortable means” (3). Representations of working-class suffering were more immediately aimed at constructing and maintaining sympathetic middle-class identities, she suggests, then at the alteration of society. Concluding with a cynical assessment of the working-class sympathies expressed by American politicians such as George Bush, Betensky challenges literature scholars to construct their scholarship and teaching to forestall, or at least make explicit, the possibility that “reading about the suffering of others [could] end up making readers feel as if they are doing something important just by reading and feeling”—a phenomenon that threatens to make teachers of literature “complicit in an ideological bait and switch” (189). Rather than simply reinscribe old debates about theory and praxis, Betensky’s book strives to examine the less attractive cultural functions of novels, and in so doing provides a thoughtful anticipation of more recent scholarly conversations in areas such as capitalism studies, industrial studies, and ecocriticism.

3. Recent Scholarship and Future Conversations The last decade of scholarship on Victorian industry has been profoundly affected by the explosion of digital culture, by growing anxiety over climate change, and by the economic anxieties occasioned by the 2008 financial crisis. In 2008, the collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment bank roiled world markets, causing even ardent supporters of globalization to reflect on the negative consequences of international entanglement, and drawing attention to what was portrayed in financial journalism as a newly mysterious era of market operations. Despite drastic government interventions, the financial crisis triggered what came to be known as the Great Recession. In this era of growing disenchantment with globalization, tomes such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century (2014) dominated bestseller lists and found readers in socialist groups and business schools alike. As its title suggests, Piketty’s theorization of capital is very much in dialogue with the nineteenth century, not only in its engagement with Marx, but also in the way it undoes the separation of literature and economic theory that Poovey describes in Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Britain (2008). In arguing for capitalism’s inevitable tendency toward the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, Piketty, an economist, strikingly turns not only to statistics but also to literary texts to advance his argument, interpreting works such as the novels of Jane Austen in order to suggest the need for national systems of financial regulation and wealth redistribution. As Silvana Colella notes in her recent book, Piketty’s argument, however much it might mishandle literature from a literary critic’s perspective, nevertheless “exemplifies a renewed interest in cross-disciplinary approaches to the study of capitalism” (254). In Colella’s view, “capitalism studies” warrants not only the embrace of interdisciplinary methodologies, but also a return to the types of texts omitted from the working-class histories constructed by Williams and Taylor, such as the probusiness novels of Victorian novelist Charlotte Riddell. Colella finds novels such as Riddell’s Too Much Alone (1860) compelling for their focus on “the problematic question of work-life balance” (15), and argues that the “appeal of her novels today has a lot to do with the way in which they narrate the complications of living in a capitalist world, where opportunities are many and economic uncertainty a persistent spectre” (15). Like Betensky, in other words, Colella is interested in the ways that Victorian texts engaging with industry speak to twenty-first century middle-class readers, for whom the politics and economic conditions associated with rampant industrial production is a distant cultural memory. While the mantle of “capitalism studies” has not necessarily been claimed by other scholars of the Victorian financial industry, critics such as Aeron Hunt, Nancy Henry, and Jill Rappaport are clearly in dialogue with not only the scholarship of their predecessors but also with concepts such as the “gift economy” (Rappaport), which were given fresh animation by twenty-first century discussions surrounding digital alternatives to twentieth-century forms of exchange. Among the lines 522

Industry

of investigation these scholars have returned to include questions surrounding the role of Victorian women in finance and investment, a role that appears newly evident in an era in which, as Henry notes, “owning a modest portfolio of shares or an invested retirement account has become so ubiquitous as to be invisible and not worth mentioning” (272). Of course, this phenomenon is still very much class-based in a way that may be invisible to middle-class academics; in future years, the experiences of a generation of scholars brought up on austerity and precarity may yet find different relevancies inherent in the literature of Victorian business. For scholars interested in questions of precarity in globalized workplaces, my own “‘Play you Must’: Villette and the Nineteenth-Century Board Game” brings a twenty-first-century perspective to bear on Brontë’s tale of a young teacher forced by financial precarity to seek employment abroad. Sent unwillingly into global circulation, Lucy Snowe, the protagonist of Villette (1853), reluctantly draws on the lessons taught in the educational genre of geographical games in order to accustom herself to the uncertainties of a society dominated by the fluctuations of a chance-based financial market. Drawing on the work of Matthew Kaiser, I suggest that games, like literature, mediate social relations, and that reading Victorian novels alongside these nontraditional texts shows how nineteenth-century novels anticipate twenty-first century concerns, from “the future of economically vulnerable workers in a globalized economy, to the role that new media, as well as the ‘old media’ of literature and film, play in conceptualizing human agency” (44). This and other works of recent scholarship try to make manifest Victorian economic relations that appear more distinct in workplace environments shaped by digital media and the fluctuations of global stock markets. In the last decade, Victorian scholarship on industry has continued to draw on the legacies of Thompson and Williams while becoming increasingly attentive to early configurations of issues that beset postindustrial landscapes and knowledge economies. Contemporary interest in the effects of digital culture on identity and the physical body has given fresh impetus to scholarly work on the impacts of Victorian industrial innovation. Peter Capuano’s Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body (2015) represents a particularly interesting entry into this strand of criticism, given that his argument is a methodological as well as a rhetorical response to digital workplace culture. Drawing on “distant, computer-assisted analysis of thousands of nineteenth-century novels” (12), Capuano joins distant and close reading in an argument contending that Victorian anxiety over the industrial drive to substitute machine labor for that of humans led to an increasing preoccupation with the hand as a signifying body part in literature—a preoccupation that Capuano suggests then came to inform evolutionary discourse. While Capuano avoids articulating an explicit link between literary scholars’ reception of digital analysis and the Victorians’ reception of industrial machinery, his argument implicitly asks scholars to consider what conceptual and cultural possibilities might yet be unfolded by the incorporation of digital technologies into scholarly practices [on technology, see Menke’s chapter]. Capuano’s argument follows in the wake of Tamara Ketabgian’s The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture (2011), which explores the ways in which the Victorians looked to industrial machines as devices that helped explicate and actualize human (or even an early version of posthuman) identity. While at times Ketabgian overstates the homogeneity of previous scholarly perspectives on industry, her argument makes a decisive move toward considering Victorian industry in light of our own digital workplaces, in which fear of automation is coupled with delight in the way that cyber networks and smart phones extend our capacities for memory and social interaction. Moreover, in her third chapter, Ketabgian anticipates recent trends in Victorian ecocriticism as she moves beyond the figure of the machine to examine the Victorians’ awareness of social networks and energy systems in novels such as George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860). Drawing on the work of scholars such as Deanna Kreisel (who has since revisited The Mill on the Floss with an eye to the novel’s ecocritical possibilities), Ketabgian argues that these texts draw on the nascent field of thermodynamics as well as contemporary understandings of industrial machinery in their representation 523

Siobhan Carroll

of power flows in Victorian landscapes. Considering industry in light of its environmental networks, as well as Victorian and current conceptions of human-machine relations, Ketabgian’s book served as an early signal of the direction that Victorian scholarship would take in the next decade [on the Anthropocene, see Taylor,’s chapter; on ecocriticism, see Voskuil’s]. The environmental turn in Victorian scholarship has arguably been the most important contributor to a resurgent interest in the more traditional apparition of industry. In light of this interest, scholars are finding new relevance in Williams’ studies of culture’s engagement with “The Idea of Nature” (1980) and with long temporalities of spatial change. While not all of this decade’s ecocritical works explicitly engage with industrialism, their arguments are built around industrialization’s prerequisites and effects. Allen MacDuffie’s Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (2014) takes the operations of industry as foundational to not only energy consumption but also to the scientific understandings of energy—understandings that, he notes, also came to influence Marx and other critics of industrial capitalism. MacDuffie emphasizes the Victorians’ professed expectation that new scientific developments or inventions would stave off the inevitable consequences of consumption, noting that “the irony is that in our own claims for being or becoming ‘postindustrial’ or ‘post-Victorian’, we recapitulate the same arguments the Victorians themselves made about their own energy future” (20). As one of the first books to explicitly consider the ecological dimensions of Victorian representations of energy, MacDuffie’s book laid important tracks for the Victorian ecocriticism that followed it, while also drawing Marxist critics’ attention to the industrial dimensions of otherwise abstract references to heat and light. Two additional works—these from outside the field of literary studies—proved essential to a middecade rethinking of the relationship between Victorian industry and environmental change— Jason W. Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life (2015) and Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital: The Rise of SteamPower and the Roots of Global Warming (2016)—both of which suggested the relevance of Marxist analyses of Victorian industrialism to analyses of twenty-first century environmental crises. In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Moore, building on the observation that “energy is the capacity to do work” (14), argues for capitalism as a system of organizing the natural world such that the “work” that natural features such as rivers perform is harnessed but not acknowledged. Moore’s argument usefully relates capitalism’s appropriation of nonhuman labor—including the energy generated by animals, fossil fuels, winds, and tides—to its appropriation of the unpaid labor of people not fully granted the status of human, including women and slaves. The “appropriation of Cheap Nature has not only compelled capital to seek out new sources of cheap labor-power, food, energy, and raw materials,” Moore argues, “but to enclose the atmosphere as a gigantic dumping ground for greenhouse gases” (29)—a project arguably begun in the early nineteenth century, that continues through our present day. Andreas Malm takes up some of Moore’s ideas in Fossil Capital, which revisits the birth of the steam age in order to think through the politics of exploitation inherent in British industry’s move from water power to coal-burning steam engines. “Steam won,” Malm contends, “because it augmented the power” (267) of capitalists over the labor force. Malm’s innovative reframing of the industrial revolution reinforced MacDuffie’s observations on Victorian energy systems, suggesting a link between the environmental politics of Victorian novels and contemporary petrofiction. Jesse Oak Taylor enacts his own version of a strategic presentist argument in The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (2016), which interrogates the relationship between nineteenth-century London’s highly visible, highly polluted atmosphere and the novel form. Just as smog serves as evidence of the operations of nearby factories and hearths, for Taylor, smog in Victorian novels frequently serves to invoke the harmful operations of industry, revealing, in the case of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864–5) “the corporate or collective body as the key locus of ecological agency” (63). In Victorian novels, Taylor suggests, alliances between industries and the harms they indirectly produce are both obscured and signified by fog and mist, requiring close readings that unfold the abstracted connection between industry and pollution. Taylor’s important and 524

Industry

innovative argument models his approach to ecocriticism, revealing the degree to which Victorian London appears as “ground zero for both the ‘end of nature’ heralded by global climate change and the aesthetic encounter with that passing” (2). Viewing the field of Victorian studies from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, the crest of the ecocritical wave has hardly passed. Ecocritics will no doubt continue to grapple with the challenge articulated by Betensky for an earlier version of literary scholarship on industry, and find methods to articulate, and think through, the ways in which literature is implicated in acquiescence as well as resistance to destructive social systems. That said, it seems particularly productive in the twenty-first century to think also of the ways in which literature constitutes and puts in motion social as well as individual agencies. Victorian studies has yet to take up the “right to repair” or what Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift have described as “the processes of maintenance and repair that keep modern societies going” (1), though these quotidian, often collective forms of agency seem right for revisiting at a historical moment of social and environmental disruption. Victorianist scholarship on industry has also yet to build substantially on the insights into imperial “war capitalism” (xv) provided by important economic histories such as Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014), or on the engagements of colonized peoples with Victorian environments suggested by Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines, Fevers and the Literary Cultures of South Asia (2014). And then there are the questions brought to the forefront by the politics of the early twenty-first century: questions of what it means to imagine employment in an age of resurgent nationalism and to represent resilience in the face of industrial removal and environmental collapse. The next decade will prove significant for scholarship on Victorian industry not only in terms of what it uncovers regarding the relationship—and the disjunctions—between the Victorian period and our own, but also in terms of what it reveals regarding how and why our work as scholars and teachers matters.

Key Critical Works T. S. Ashton. The Industrial Revolution: 1760–1830. Carolyn Betensky. Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel. Peter Capuano. Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body. Catherine Gallagher. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867. Tamara Ketabgian. The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture. Andreas Malm. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Jason W. Moore. Capitalism in the Web of Life. Mary Poovey. Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Britain. E. P. Thompson. The Making of the English Working Class. Raymond Williams. The County and the City.

Works Cited Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. 1867–1868. Edited by Jane Garnett, Oxford UP, 2006. Ashton, T. S. The Industrial Revolution: 1760–1830. Oxford UP, 1948. Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. Betensky, Carolyn. Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel. U of Virginia P, 2010. Briefel, Aviva. “‘Freaks of Furniture’: The Useless Energy of Haunted Things.” Victorian Studies, vol. 59, no. 2, 2017, pp. 209–34. Capuano, Peter J. Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body. U of Michigan P, 2015. Carroll, Siobhan. “‘Play You Must:’ Villette and the Nineteenth-Century Board Game.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, vol. 39, no. 1, 2017, pp. 33–47. Colella, Silvana. Charlotte Riddell’s City Novels and Victorian Business: Narrating Capitalism. Routledge, 2016.

525

Siobhan Carroll Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. Edited by Oliver Lovesey, Broadview, 2007. Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845. Edited by David McLellan. Oxford UP, 1993. Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. U of Chicago P, 2006. Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867. U of Chicago P, 1985. Henry, Nancy. Women, Literature and Finance in Victorian Britain: Cultures of Investment. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Hunt, Aeron. Personal Business: Character and Commerce in Victorian Literature and Culture. U of Virginia P, 2014. Kaiser, Matthew. The World in Play: Portraits of a Victorian Concept. Stanford UP, 2012. Ketabgian, Tamara S. The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture. U of Michigan P, 2011. Lesjak, Carolyn. Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel. Duke UP, 2006. MacDuffie, Allen. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2014. Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso, 2016. Malthus, Thomas. An Essay on the Principle of Population: Or, a View of Its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness: With an Inquiry into Our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils Which It Occasions, vol. 2. Edited by Patricia James and Donald Winch, Cambridge UP, 1992. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. 1867. International Publishers, 1967. Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso, 2015. Mukherjee, Upamanyu P. Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines, Fevers and the Literary Cultures of South Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Nichols, Kate, Rebecca Wade, and Gabriel Williams. Art Versus Industry?: New Perspectives on Visual and Industrial Cultures in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Manchester UP, 2018. Poovey, Mary. Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Britain. U of Chicago P, 2008. ———. “Writing about Finance in Victorian England: Disclosure and Secrecy in the Culture of Investment.” Victorian Studies, vol. 45, no. 1, 2002, pp. 17–41. Rappoport, Jill. Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture. Oxford UP, 2012. Ruskin, John. Unto This Last, and Other Writing. 1860. Edited by Clive Wilmer, Penguin, 1985. http://tinyurl. galegroup.com.udel.idm.oclc.org/tinyurl/9VyeQ3. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 4th ed., vol. 1, A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1786. http://tinyurl.galegroup.com.udel.idm.oclc.org/tinyurl/9WHGP5. Stephen, Graham, and Thrift Nigel. “Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 24, no. 3, 2007, pp. 1–25. Taylor, Jesse Oak. The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog and British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf. U of Virginia P, 2016. ———. “Where Is Victorian Ecocriticism?” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 43, no. 4, 2015, pp. 877–94. Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. Vintage Books, 1966. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford UP, 1973. ———. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. Columbia UP, 1983. ———. “The Idea of Nature.” Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays, Verso, 1980, pp. 67–85. ———. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford UP, 1976.

526

CONTRIBUTORS

Elaine Auyoung is McKnight Land-Grant Professor at the University of Minnesota, Associate Professor of English, and Affiliate Faculty of the Center for Cognitive Sciences. She is the author of When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind (Oxford UP, 2018). Sukanya Banerjee is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She works at the intersection of Victorian studies and Postcolonial Studies and is the author of Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (Duke UP, 2010) and a coeditor of New Routes for Diaspora Studies (Indiana UP, 2012). She is currently working on a monograph on the centrality of loyalty to notions of modernity in Victorian Britain and its empire. Susan David Bernstein is Research Professor of English at Boston University and Professor Emerita of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her publications include Roomscape: Women Writers in the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf (2013), Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian Literature and Culture (1997), and editions of The Romance of a Shop and Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy, as well as a collection, Victorian Vulgarity: Taste in Verbal and Visual Culture, coedited with Elsie B. Michie. She has published articles on topics including sensation fiction and Victorian science, serialization and Victorian literature, digital studies and Victorian serials, nineteenth-century transatlantic print culture, Victorian Anglo-Jewish literature, and on several writers, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and William Morris. She is working on two projects, one on seriality and Victorian culture and another on death thinking. Carolyn Betensky is Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island. She is author of Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel (U Virginia P, 2010) and co-translator from the French (with Jonathan Loesberg) of Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris (Penguin, 2015). Currently she is working on a new project on compartmentalization in Victorian culture. Karen Bourrier is Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is the author of The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the mid-Victorian Novel (U of Michigan P, 2015) and Victorian Bestseller: The Life of Dinah Craik (U of Michigan P, 2019). She is project director of Nineteenth-Century Disability: Cultures and Contexts (peer-reviewed by NINES, 2014). Her current 527

Notes on Contributors

work in Victorian digital humanities includes a TEI edition of Dinah Craik’s correspondence and a project on Victorian Literary Sociability, which maps the residences of Victorian writers, publishers, editors, and artists to determine the effect that propinquity may have had on writing careers. Trev Lynn Broughton is Reader in English and Related Literature at the University of York, UK, and a member of the Centre for Women’s Studies there. Her recent work has been a collaboration with Dr Helen Kingstone on “Victoria’s Victorians”—the generation born in 1819—in relation to ideas of contemporaneity and periodization. A glimpse of this appeared in the “Key Words” issue of the Journal of Victorian Literature and Culture. She is also working on a book on nineteenth-century cultures of Life writing. She coedits the interdisciplinary Journal of Victorian Culture. Rachel Sagner Buurma is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Florida where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century literature and culture, the history of the novel, literary informatics, and book history. She has recently published essays on epigraphs, Anthony Trollope, and reading in the digital age. She is co-author, with Laura Heffernan, of a new disciplinary history of English, tentatively titled “The Teaching Archive: A New History of Literary Study,” which will be published by the University of Chicago Press. Heffernan and Buurma’s work has appeared in PMLA, New Literary History, Representations, Victorian Studies, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Siobhan Carroll is Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware, where she works on intersections between nineteenth-century literature and the imperial and environmental imaginaries. Her first book, An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750–1850 (U Penn P, 2015), was the runner-up for the First Book Prize of the British Association for Romantic Studies. Her current book project, Improving the Planetary Estate: Human Agencies and the Environment, 1791–1881, examines how Britons and Americans came to see “Nature” as a globe-spanning phenomenon that could be affected by human environmental agency. For a complete listing of her scholarship, see http://voncarr-siobhan-carroll.blogspot.com/. Alison Chapman is Associate Professor at the University of Victoria. She writes on Victorian poetry and digital literary studies, and she is the Director of the Victorian Poetry Network and the editor of the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry. She is the author of Networking the Nation: British and American Women’s Poetry and Italy, 1840–1870 (2015), co-author with Joanna Meacock of A Rossetti Family Chronology (2007), and author of The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti (2000). She is also the editor of Victorian Women Poets (2005) and Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy (2003). She is beginning research for a book on popular Victorian poetry. Nicholas Daly is Professor of Modern English and American Literature at University College Dublin, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. His publications include the monographs Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle (1999), Literature, Technology and Modernity (2004), Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (2009), and The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York (2015), as well as an edition of Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel for Oxford World’s Classics. He has just completed Ruritania: A Cultural History from The Prisoner of Zenda to the Princess Diaries (Oxford UP, 2019), and an edition of The Prisoner of Zenda for Oxford World’s Classics (2019). Martin Danahay is Professor of English at Brock University. He is the author of Gender at Work in Victorian Culture: Literature, Art and Masculinity (Ashgate, 2005) and coeditor with Deborah Denenholz Morse of Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Culture (Ashgate, 2007). He is editor of Broadview editions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 528

Notes on Contributors

(Second Edition, 2005) and H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (2003). He has published numerous articles on a variety of topics in Victorian culture, including the working-class body in Jekyll and Hyde, the Arts and Crafts movement, H.G. Wells, animals, and eugenics. His most recent publication is on steampunk in the Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies. Duc Dau is a Research Fellow in Media and Communication and an Honorary Research Fellow in English and Literary Studies at The University of Western Australia. She is the author of Touching God: Hopkins and Love (2012) and Gender, Sexuality, and the Song of Songs in Victorian Literature and Culture, forthcoming through Ohio State UP. Dennis Denisoff is McFarlin Chair of English at the University of Tulsa and President of the North American Victorian Studies Association. His books include Aestheticism and Sexual Parody (2001), Sexual Visuality from Literature to Film (2004), and the novels Dog Years (1991) and Winter Gardeners (2003). He has edited, among other works, The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Stories (2004), The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer-Culture (2008), a special issue of Victorian Review on “Natural Environments” (2014), and Arthur Machen: Decadent and Occult Works (2018), and coedited Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence (with Liz Constable and Matthew Potolsky, 1999). He is currently editing a special issue on Decadence for Victorian Literature and Culture (Winter 2020) and a monograph on decadent ecology and the new paganism (1860–1920). Stefano Evangelista is Associate Professor of English at Oxford University and Fellow of Trinity College. He specializes in nineteenth-century English and comparative literature, the reception of the classics, gender, and the relationship between literary and visual cultures. He is the author of British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (2009), and his edited collections include The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe (2010), A.C. Swinburne: Unofficial Laureate (2013, with Catherine Maxwell), Pater the Classicist: Classical Scholarship, Reception, and Aestheticism (2017, with Charles Martindale and Elizabeth Prettejohn), and Arthur Symons: Poet, Critic,Vagabond (2018, with Elisa Bizzotto). He is currently working on a monograph on literary cosmopolitanism in the English 1890s. Christine Ferguson is Professor of English Studies at the University of Stirling. She is the author of Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity, and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing (2012) and, with Andrew Radford, coeditor of The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875–1947 (2018). Kate Flint is Provost Professor of Art History and English at the University of Southern California. Her most recent book is Flash! Photography, Writing, and Surprising Illumination (2017), and earlier books have included The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (1993), The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (2000), and The Transatlantic Indian, 1776–1930 (2009). She works on the literary, cultural, and visual history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and her current project, “The Long Today,” explores Victorian treatments of the ordinary and overlooked in the natural world, and considers how contemporary artists and writers refer back to this work in order to bring out long processes of environmental change. Catherine Gallagher is Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, where she held the Eggers Chair in English until her retirement in 2013. She took her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Berkeley and began teaching there in 1980. Her teaching and research focus is on the British novel and cultural history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is the author of two books on Victorian literature—The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–67 (1985) and The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (2006). Her latest book, Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Literature, came out in 2018. 529

Notes on Contributors

Mary Ellis Gibson’s latest book is Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905: Five Tales of Speculation, Resistance and Rebellion (Anthem, 2019). She is author of Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913: A Critical Anthology and English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore (both from Ohio UP). The Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of Literature and Chair of English at Colby College, she is currently writing a biographical study of three British poets in colonial India. Pamela K. Gilbert, Albert Brick Professor of English at the University of Florida, has published widely in the areas of Victorian literature, cultural studies, gender, and the history of medicine. She is the author of Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History (Cornell UP 2019), Cholera and Nation (SUNY P, 2008), The Citizen’s Body (Ohio State UP, 2007), Mapping the Victorian Social Body (SUNY P, 2004), and Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (Cambridge UP, 1997). She has edited collections titled Imagined Londons (SUNY P, 2002) and the Companion to Sensation Fiction (Blackwell, 2011), and has edited a teaching and scholarly edition of Rhoda Broughton’s novel Cometh Up as a Flower (Broadview, 2010). She has coedited Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context (SUNY P, 1999, with Marlene Tromp and Aeron Haynie), and is co-associate editor of the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature (2016). Melissa Valiska Gregory is Associate Professor of English and Associate Dean of the Humanities in the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Toledo. She has published articles on both Victorian poetry and the novel and, along with Dr. Melisa Klimaszewski of Drake University, has coedited and introduced three of Charles Dickens’s collaboratively written Christmas stories for Hesperus Press, as well as written a biography of Dickens for Hesperus’s Brief Lives series. She has been an NEH seminar fellow twice and has also been the recipient of a Huntington Library fellowship. She received the President’s Award “In recognition of extraordinary service and significant contribution to the diversity and vitality of Victorian studies” in 2017. Rae Greiner is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University and coeditor of Victorian Studies. She is the author of Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Johns Hopkins UP) and is at work on a second monograph, Stupidity after Enlightenment, 1700–1950. Ian Haywood is Professor of English at the University of Roehampton, London, where he is Director of the Centre for Research in Romanticism. He is President of the British Association for Romantic Studies 2015–19 and co-organizer of two research networks in “Romantic Illustration” and “AngloHispanic Horizons.” He has worked widely on British radical and working-class writing from the eighteenth century to the present day. His current research focuses mainly on popular literary and visual culture in the Romantic and early Victorian periods, including the development of political caricature. His books include three edited volumes of Chartist fiction (1995, 1999, 2001; republished by Routledge 2016), a “trilogy” of monographs on Romanticism—The Revolution in Popular Literature (2004), Bloody Romanticism (2006) and Romanticism and Caricature (2013)—and three coedited books: The Gordon Riots (2012), Spain in British Romanticism (2018) and Romanticism and Illustration (2019). His next book is The Rise of Victorian Caricature (2020). Laura Heffernan is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Florida where she teaches courses on nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century literature and culture. She is at work on a book about how critics and scholars taught and read modern literature in the early decades of the twentieth century, titled Unliterary Critics, to be published by Columbia University Press. She is co-author, with Rachel Sagner Buurma, of a new disciplinary history of English, tentatively titled The Teaching Archive: A New History of Literary Study, which will be published by the University of

530

Notes on Contributors

Chicago Press. Heffernan and Buurma’s work has appeared in PMLA, New Literary History, Representations, Victorian Studies, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Linda K. Hughes, Addie Levy Professor of Literature at Texas Christian University, specializes in historical media studies (poetry, periodicals, serial fiction); gender and women’s studies; and transnationality, including transatlanticism. Past monographs include The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry (2010), Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters (2005), and The Victorian Serial (with Michael Lund, 1991). She is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Poetry (2019) and coeditor, with Julie Codell, of Replication in the Long Nineteenth Century: Re-makings and Reproductions (Edinburgh UP, 2018). Winner of the Colby Prize for a book contributing to study of Victorian periodicals (2006), she has also published articles in the field, including “Periodical Poetry, Editorial Policy, and W.E. Henley’s Scots and National Observer” (Victorian Periodicals Review, Summer 2016) and “Reading Poet Amy Levy Through Victorian Newspapers,” forthcoming in Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s–1900s, edited by Alexis Easley et al. Suzanne Keen’s interdisciplinary work on narrative empathy draws on the novel, narrative theory, neuroscience, developmental and social psychology, and affective science. Her books include Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination (2014, Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award finalist), Empathy and the Novel (2007), and Victorian Renovations of the Novel (1998). She serves as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty at Hamilton College, where she is a member of the department of Literature and Creative Writing. Mark Knight is Professor of Literature, Religion and Victorian Studies in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. His books include Chesterton and Evil (Fordham UP), Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (with Emma Mason, Oxford UP), An Introduction to Religion and Literature (Continuum), and Good Words: Evangelicalism and the Victorian Novel (Ohio State UP). He has also edited a number of books, including, most recently, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion (Routledge). In addition, Mark is general editor of the journal Literature and Theology and coeditor of the book series New Directions in Religion and Literature (Bloomsbury). Roger Luckhurst is Professor of Modern Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of The Invention of Telepathy (2002), The Mummy’s Curse (2012), Zombies: A Cultural History (2015), and Corridors: Passages of Modernity (2019). Deborah Lutz is the Thruston B. Morton Endowed Chair of English at the University of Louisville. Her books include The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects (W.W. Norton, 2015), which was shortlisted for a PEN biography award; Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge UP, 2015); and The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative (Ohio State UP, 2006). She has won fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Huntington Library, and the Jewish Foundation for the Education of Women. She is the editor of the Norton Critical Editions of Jane Eyre and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Richard Menke, Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia, is the author of Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford UP, 2008) and Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900: Many Inventions (Cambridge UP, 2019). His essays on literature, science, and the history of media have appeared in ELH, PMLA, Critical Inquiry, Victorian Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, English Language Notes, The Henry James Review, The Victorian Periodicals Review, and elsewhere.

531

Notes on Contributors

Elsie B. Michie is Associate Dean and Professor of English at Louisiana State University. Her books include Outside the Pale: Gender Difference, Cultural Exclusion, and the Victorian Woman Writer (Cornell, 1993) and The Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James (Johns Hopkins, 2011) as well as several essay collections and editions. Her essays have appeared in ELH, Nineteenth Century-Literature, Novel, PMLA, Victorian Studies, and other venues. She is currently completing a book-length project (Trollopizing the Canon) about Frances Trollope’s relation to nineteenth-century canonical authors, including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Twain. Rebecca N. Mitchell is Reader of Victorian Literature and Culture and Director of the NineteenthCentury Centre at the University of Birmingham. She has published widely on empathy in Victorian realism, Oscar Wilde, print culture, and fashion. Her recent books include Fashioning the Victorians (Bloomsbury, 2018), Drawing on the Victorians: The Palimpsest of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Texts (coedited with Anna Maria Jones, Ohio UP, 2016) and Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery (co-authored with Joseph Bristow, Yale UP 2015). She is currently coediting Wilde’s Unpublished, Incomplete, and Miscellaneous Works for the Oxford English Text edition of the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Deborah Denenholz Morse is the Sara E. Nance Eminent Professor of English at The College of William & Mary. Deborah edited Victorian Animal Dreams with Martin A. Danahay; she published Animal Studies work most recently in Animals, Animality, and Literature (Cambridge UP, 2018). Deborah has published two monographs on Anthony Trollope, Women in Trollope’s Palliser Novels (1987) and Reforming Trollope (2013); she edited The Routledge Research Companion to Anthony Trollope (2016) with Margaret Markwick and Mark Turner; The Politics of Gender in the Novels of Anthony Trollope (2019) with Markwick and Regenia Gagnier; and four Brontë volumes, including The Blackwell Companion to the Brontës (2016), two coedited with the late Diane Long Hoeveler and two with Amber Pouliot. Deborah is editing Emily Brontë’s poetry for the Cambridge Complete Works, editing a bicentenary journal issue on Anne Brontë, and completing the monograph Brontë Violations. Her most recent Brontë essay is in The Brontës and the Idea of the Human (Cambridge UP, forthcoming 2019). Ralph O’Connor is Professor in the Literature and Culture of Britain, Ireland and Iceland at the University of Aberdeen, where he teaches in the departments of Celtic & Anglo-Saxon Studies, English, and History. He is the author or editor of several books on medieval literature and on modern literature and science, including The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856 (U of Chicago P, 2007), which won the 2008 best book prizes of the British Society for Literature and Science and the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts. With Michael A. Taylor he is currently completing a new edition of Hugh Miller’s geological bestseller The Old Red Sandstone (1841), due to appear in 2020. Other ongoing projects include a study of the mythological resonances of prehistoric animals in Victorian literature and culture. Kathy Alexis Psomiades is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of Beauty’s Body: Gender and Representation in British Aestheticism (1997), and coeditor, with Talia Schaffer, of Women and British Aestheticism (1999). She has published several articles on Victorian literature and anthropology, and is currently finishing a book titled Primitive Marriage:Victorian Anthropology, the Novel and Sexual Modernity. Supritha Rajan is Associate Professor at the University of Rochester. Her articles have appeared in such journals as Nineteenth-Century Literature and Victorian Literature and Culture. Her book, A Tale of Two Capitalisms: Sacred Economics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2015), was awarded the MLA prize for 532

Notes on Contributors

a first book. She is currently at work on a book-length study titled Transparent Forms, which examines the formation of disciplinary temperaments and cognitive/affective attitudes across the human and natural sciences during the long nineteenth century. Talia Schaffer is Professor of English at Queens College CUNY and The Graduate Center CUNY. She is the author of Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction (2016), Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2011), and The Forgotten Female Aesthetes; Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (2001). She has coedited a special issue of Victorian Review, “Extending Families,” with Kelly Hager (2013); a collection called Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (2006); a scholarly edition of Lucas Malet’s 1901 novel, The History of Sir Richard Calmady (2003); and coedited Women and British Aestheticism with Kathy A. Psomiades (1999). Schaffer has published widely on Victorian familial and marital norms, disability studies, ethical readings, women writers, material culture, popular fiction, and aestheticism, and is currently completing a book on the ethics of care. Helen Small is Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. Her books include The Value of the Humanities (2013) and The Long Life (Oxford UP, 2007; winner of the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism, 2008). She has written widely on the literary cultures of liberalism and on conflicts within Victorian public moralism, and is currently completing a book titled The Function of Cynicism at the Present Time. She is general editor, with Paul Strohm, of the Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature series. Andrew M. Stauffer is Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism (Cambridge UP, 2005) and the editor of works by Robert Browning (for Norton) and H. Rider Haggard (for Broadview). He has published widely on Romantic and Victorian literature and book history. His current project is titled, “Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Marks of Reading.” Anne Stiles is Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of Medical Humanities at Saint Louis University. She is the author of Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century (2012) and the editor of Neurology and Literature, 1866–1920 (2007). She also coedited two volumes published by Elsevier in 2013 as part of their Progress in Brain Research series. Her work has been supported by long-term grants from the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; the Huntington Library; and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Martha Stoddard Holmes teaches British literature, creative writing, health humanities, and film at California State University, San Marcos, where she is Professor of Literature and Writing Studies. Author of Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (2004), she is coeditor with Joyce L. Huff of Cultural History of Disability, Volume 5: The Long Nineteenth Century (forthcoming) and with Diane P. Freedman of The Teacher’s Body: Embodiment, Authority, and Identity in the Academy (2003). Her essays have appeared in Genre, Hastings Center Report, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Literature and Medicine, Post Road, Victorian Review, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Women’s Writing, and other journals and essay collections. A Pushcart Prize nominee for creative nonfiction, she is writing and drawing a graphic narrative (comic) about ovarian cancer. Jessica Straley is Associate Professor of English at the University of Utah. She is the author of Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children’s Literature (Cambridge UP, 2016). Her work has also appeared in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Victorian Studies as well as book collections: Oscar Wilde and the Cultures of Childhood (edited by Joseph Bristow), Adapting Frankenstein (edited by Dennis Cutchins 533

Notes on Contributors

and Dennis Perry), and Drawing on the Victorians (edited by Anna Maria Jones and Rebecca N. Mitchell). She is currently working on a book project about the pedagogical treatment of animals from the animal autobiography to the London Zoo. Andrea Kaston Tange is Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture, Chair of the English Department, and Director of Digital Liberal Arts at Macalester College. She is the author of Architectural Identities: Domesticity, Literature, and the Victorian Middle Classes (U of Toronto P), coeditor of the fourvolume Children and Empire collection (Routledge), and author of numerous essays in edited collections as well as journals such as Nineteenth-Century Literature and Nineteenth-Century Contexts. Her current project, tentatively titled “Imagined Encounters: Palimpsests of Victorian Travel,” considers how circulating discourses about and images of particular destinations and people shaped Victorian travelers’ representations of their encounters with the foreign. Related to her abiding interest in travel and its intersections with empire, she has recently undertaken pedagogical collaborations on teaching race in the nineteenth-century studies classroom. Jesse Oak Taylor is Associate Professor of English at the University of Washington, and the author of The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (2016), which won the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment book prize in ecocriticism and the Rudikoff Prize for a first book in Victorian studies from the Northeast Victorian Studies Association, as well as a number of articles on empire and the environmental humanities. He is also coeditor, with Tobias Menely, of Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times (2017) and co-author, with Daniel C. Taylor and Carl E. Taylor, of Empowerment on an Unstable Planet: From Seeds of Human Energy to a Scale of Global Change (2011). Irene Tucker, Professor of English at University of California, Irvine, is the author of two books, The Moment of Racial Sight: A History (2012), which investigated the connections of race, history of medicine, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European philosophy and literature, and A Probable State: The Novel, the Contract and the Jews (2000), which made a case for the links of liberalism, nationalism and the form of the realist novel in nineteenth-century Britain, as well as in the early Hebrew novel. She is currently at work on a collection of essays exploring questions about state sovereignty in modern Jewish thought, provisionally titled State of Ambivalence: Sovereignty and its Limits in Israeli and Modern Jewish Politics and Culture. Lynn Voskuil is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston, where she teaches Victorian literature, empire studies, and the environmental humanities. She is also the President of Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies, the author of Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity (U of Virginia P, 2004), and the editor of Nineteenth-Century Energies: Literature, Technology, Culture (Routledge, 2018). In addition, her work has appeared in a wide variety of journals and collections, including ELH,Victorian Studies, Feminist Studies, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Studies in Romanticism, and the recent volumes Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age (U of Michigan P) and Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire (Fordham UP). Voskuil is currently completing a manuscript titled “Horticulture and Imperialism: The Garden Spaces of the British Empire, 1789–1914,” which is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Tamara S. Wagner is Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her books include Victorian Narratives of Failed Emigration: Settlers, Returnees, and Nineteenth-Century Literature in English (2016), Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction (2010), and Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel, 1740–1890 (2004). She has also edited the collections Domestic Fiction in Colonial 534

Notes on Contributors

Australia and New Zealand (2014), Victorian Settler Narratives (2011), and Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (2009). Wagner is currently working on a study of babyhood in Victorian culture. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman is the Davis Alumni Professor of English at Louisiana State University. Widely published on Victorian literature, theatre, and culture, she recently completed Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical (under contract), which examines Broadway musicals from the second half of the twentieth century such as The King and I, Oliver!, and Sweeney Todd that were adapted from Victorian sources. Her earlier books are Performing the Victorian: John Ruskin and Identity in Theater, Science, and Education (2007) and Ruskin’s Mythic Queen: Gender Subversion in Victorian Culture (Outstanding Academic Book, Choice magazine, 1999), plus a scholarly edition of the 1847 Sweeney Todd melodrama (special issue, Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film 38.1, 2011). Since 2015, she has served as coeditor of NCTF. She is currently working on two new projects: one considers Dickens, performance, and ethical embodiment; the other focuses on the first AngloJewish woman playwright, Elizabeth Polack. Molly Youngkin is Professor of English and Associate Dean in the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. She has published two critical monographs: British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840–1910: Imperialist Representations of Egyptian Women (2016) and Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Woman’s Press on the Development of the Novel (2007). She also has published an annotated edition of Sarah Grand’s 1888 novel Ideala and has contributed to the following essay collections: Wilde Discoveries: Traditions, Histories, Archives, A Companion to Sensation Fiction, and Kindred Hands: Letters on Writing by Women Authors, 1860–1920. She has published articles in ELT: English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, Victorian Periodicals Review, George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies, Prose Studies, Studies in the Novel, and Scottish Studies Review, and she regularly reviews books for Victorian Studies and ELT: English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920.

535

INDEX

abolition, anti-slavery 22, 24–7, 52, 63, 71, 146–7, 265, 331, 336–9, 347, 473; see also slavery adaptation 46–8, 54–5, 85–6, 100, 165–6, 488–9 aestheticism 17, 106–14, 289, 298–9, 302, 304 aesthetics 14, 51–3, 84–6, 109, 133, 171–3, 183, 186–8, 191, 206–16, 222, 229, 232, 237–8, 248, 255, 298–9, 313, 324, 337, 365, 370, 390, 508, 514; see also visual culture affect theory 98, 154, 188, 201, 203, 221, 226–7, 233, 241–2, 253, 289–90, 293, 346, 347, 377, 394, 431, 443, 446, 475 animals 26–9, 64–5, 90, 156, 209–10, 233, 292, 339, 342–53, 358, 370–2, 373, 379, 380, 401, 403, 405–6, 446, 470, 475, 480, 498, 503, 508, 513; nonhuman animal rights 4, 343–5, 349–50 Anthropocene 55, 84, 90–2, 342, 406, 410, 496–505 anthropology 331, 333, 334–7, 383, 384, 389–400, 474 archival studies 42, 47, 55, 70, 119–28, 140, 200, 238, 245, 276, 281, 501; see also digital humanities Arnold, Matthew 7, 18, 142, 145, 146, 212, 214, 227, 239, 250, 261, 264–7, 359, 364, 397, 414, 432, 450–2, 457, 518 art see aesthetics; visual culture Austen, Jane 25, 83, 87, 91, 219, 274, 279, 369, 373, 382, 465, 522 autobiography 69–82, 235, 429, 466, 474, 480–1 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth 5, 13, 14, 15, 20, 146–7, 215, 293, 309, 346, 369, 430, 477 Bible 70–1, 302, 332, 402, 404–10, 420, 427–32 body 16, 61, 62–6, 73–4, 83, 85, 88, 98, 99, 100, 109, 153, 155–6, 185, 187, 206, 208, 214, 221, 239, 254–5, 278, 286, 288, 298–300, 302, 303, 308–12, 315, 331–5, 339, 347, 348, 349, 362, 416, 418, 419, 464, 473, 523; see also disability book history 119–26

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 33, 35, 37, 95, 97, 98, 99, 101–2, 145, 148, 164–5, 166, 167, 191, 276, 277, 311, 363, 379, 380, 491 brain science 368–76 Brontës, the 13, 23, 274; Brontë, Charlotte and Jane Eyre 22, 26, 27–9, 30, 70, 92, 153, 211, 224, 286, 313, 363, 429, 444, 450, 465, 473, 490; Brontë, Emily and Wuthering Heights 151–5, 217, 274, 455 Browning, Robert 12, 13, 14, 18, 191, 215, 377, 430 canon 12–13, 19, 23, 26, 30, 58, 59, 70, 71, 86, 87, 92, 97, 100–3, 106, 109, 110, 111, 113, 119, 141, 166, 172, 174–5, 192, 200, 202, 227, 242, 255, 256, 273–83, 286, 292, 297, 316, 320, 321, 322, 323, 327, 403, 441, 442, 444, 449, 455–6, 482, 489 capitalism 42, 61, 146, 172, 174, 176, 177, 199, 239, 241–5, 251, 253, 264, 267, 323, 347, 394–5, 440, 498, 508–10, 512, 513, 518, 520–5; see also economics; Marxism Carlyle, Thomas 69, 70, 78, 147, 174, 227, 262, 263, 359, 365, 380, 408 Carroll, Lewis 58, 59, 65, 88, 126, 347, 350 catastrophe 91–2, 360, 403, 404–5, 496–9, 501–3, 506, 512 Chartism 13, 25, 70, 142, 146, 162, 163, 171–7, 252, 321–4, 432, 530 children’s literature 34, 58–66, 120, 123, 145, 146, 179, 189, 280, 289, 309, 346–7, 348, 385, 441 class 19, 34, 55, 97–8, 143, 151–2, 176, 238, 244–5, 249, 251–4, 286, 290, 319–29, 343, 384, 452, 455, 463; middle class 12, 15, 24, 42, 47, 52, 70, 73, 76, 84, 95, 98, 102, 136, 141, 145, 153, 160–7, 173, 174, 176, 179, 187, 197, 252, 275, 285, 288–9, 346, 383, 439–41, 442, 444–6, 449, 485, 486, 490, 491, 522; upper class 29, 146, 155, 179, 343, 345, 465; working class 11–12, 18, 25, 29, 48, 52, 54, 61, 63, 70, 72, 76, 79, 91, 95, 96, 145–6, 160–7, 171,

536

Index 174, 176–9, 251, 252, 254, 266, 346, 443–4, 446, 449–50, 455–7, 458, 475, 477, 519, 520, 522 climate and climate change 91, 257, 332, 334, 337–8, 350, 360–1, 497, 498, 503, 506–7, 510, 511–14, 522, 525; see also ecocriticism; fossil fuels; industry cognitive literary studies 62–3, 65, 214, 222–4; see also brain science; psychology Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 84, 263, 264, 311, 378, 432 Collins, Wilkie 35, 47, 95, 96, 98, 99, 102, 161, 168, 176, 190, 211, 223, 267, 309, 310, 311, 313, 363, 370, 372, 380, 382, 464, 509 collaboration 42, 61, 130, 132, 134, 136, 137, 190, 291, 313, 370–1, 373, 382, 469 collections 47, 151, 153–4, 348, 480–1, 482, 502 colonialism 2, 13, 20, 29, 40, 41, 62, 63, 65, 86, 90, 91, 92, 99, 103, 113, 120, 124, 144, 146, 147, 172, 173, 177, 214, 228, 230, 237, 242–3, 245, 256, 260, 262, 264, 273, 275, 277, 279, 284, 286, 298, 304, 331, 332, 337–9, 345, 346–9, 389, 393, 406, 407, 420, 432, 444–5, 446, 450, 451, 452, 455, 459, 462–72, 473–4, 475, 476, 478, 479–80, 481, 485–95, 502, 503, 508, 525; settler colonialism 485–93; see also empire; postcoloniality Corelli, Marie 88, 167, 214, 363, 370, 372, 418, 421–2, 428 cosmopolitanism 41, 87, 106, 109, 111–14, 265, 267–8, 445, 450, 451–2, 456, 457, 458; see also urbanization cultural studies 45, 153, 161, 192, 251, 277, 330, 392, 474, 488, 510 Darwin, Charles 43, 65, 84, 144, 301–2, 330, 333, 339, 345, 347, 349, 350, 380, 381, 383, 389, 402, 405–6, 409, 415, 475, 480, 481, 500, 503, 512, 514 decadence 86–7, 106–14, 154, 182, 187, 208, 292, 296, 298–9, 301–3, 304, 421, 422, 513–14 democracy 12, 19, 22–32, 172, 174, 176, 260, 261, 263, 265–6, 277, 322, 499, 501, 518–19 dialect poetry 13, 449–59 Dickens, Charles 22, 23, 26–7, 29, 33–9, 42, 47, 55, 92, 96, 100, 119, 122, 145, 148, 151, 153, 162–8, 174–6, 182, 190, 201, 211, 213, 214, 219, 226–7, 230, 232, 235, 237, 239, 249, 250, 260, 262, 267, 274, 286, 288–9, 307, 309, 311, 312, 321, 324, 327, 346, 347, 359–60, 361–2, 369, 370, 380, 382, 384, 385, 395, 408, 430, 440, 442, 446, 451, 463, 465, 474–5, 477, 478, 488, 497, 510, 520, 524 digital humanities 12, 19–20, 36, 42, 51, 55, 119, 121, 122, 124–6, 129–37, 142–4, 147, 199, 202, 280–1, 327, 360, 364–5, 423, 458, 523; Omeka 131, 132, 133; see also archival studies disability and disability studies 62, 64, 74, 129–30, 137, 191, 214–15, 234, 278, 288, 307–18, 373, 375, 443; see also body domestic/ity, domestic fiction 17–18, 42, 59, 64, 91, 95, 98, 99, 100, 151–3, 154, 155, 179, 191, 197, 242, 255, 266, 275, 277, 278, 281, 286, 288, 309, 310, 313, 319, 325, 342, 343, 345–8, 349, 380,

390, 395, 439–48, 452, 454, 456, 465, 485, 486–7, 488–91, 492, 493, 506, 511 drama 6, 13, 45–56, 64, 100, 108, 165–6, 217, 221, 273, 297, 300, 311, 430, 439, 470; see also melodrama ecocriticism 5, 54, 65, 90–2, 257, 360–1, 502–3, 506–16, 521, 522–5; see also Anthropocene, climate economics, economy 34–5, 54, 55, 71, 76, 79, 91–2, 96, 113, 114, 119, 121, 141, 237–47, 249, 251, 256, 261–4, 275, 278, 280, 286, 298, 314, 320, 322, 324, 326, 337, 338, 357, 360, 389, 394–7, 403, 407, 433, 441, 443, 451, 452, 465–6, 468, 475, 477, 502, 508, 511, 513, 517–25; see also capitalism; Marxism Egerton, George 42, 110, 111, 296, 298, 302 Eliot, George 22, 23, 24, 26, 29–30, 33, 34, 36, 37, 42, 100, 101, 145, 148, 151, 202, 219, 220, 223, 226, 227, 231, 233, 234, 249, 260, 261, 265–7, 274, 276, 277, 279, 307, 309, 321, 346, 361, 362–3, 369, 370, 371, 373, 374, 377, 378, 380, 382, 385, 390, 394, 395, 397, 401, 404, 405, 430, 449, 451, 457, 477–8, 501, 502, 510, 514, 523 emigration 18, 96, 173, 444, 458, 485–6, 488, 489–90; see also colonialism; race empathy see sympathy empire 17, 18, 29, 41, 42, 63, 99, 113, 124, 147, 175, 256, 260, 262, 267, 280, 281, 288, 296, 298, 309, 326, 337–8, 349, 364, 365, 393, 396, 404, 432, 444–5, 449–50, 451, 453–4, 457, 459, 462–72, 473, 474, 475, 479–80, 481, 482, 486, 487, 489, 491, 497, 498, 502–3, 506–10, 511, 512, 514, 521, 525; see also colonialism environmental humanities see ecocriticism ethics, the ethical turn 71, 106, 112, 130, 183, 212, 220, 226–36, 238, 261, 263, 266, 274, 285, 312, 313, 343–4, 349, 381, 384, 395, 417, 420, 429, 452, 499 evolution 35, 43, 64, 144, 207, 221, 239, 257, 264, 277, 298, 301, 330, 339, 343, 345, 373, 380, 383, 389–400, 401, 402, 403, 405–10, 421, 457, 498, 500, 501, 512, 523; see also animals; extinction extinction 234, 342, 345, 350, 402, 406, 497–8, 501, 503, 511, 512; see also animals; ecocriticism; evolution; fossils factory labor 22, 23, 25, 27–8, 30, 91, 96, 255, 320, 321, 357, 361, 503, 518 faith, spiritual 108, 213, 292, 372, 401, 406, 408, 409, 410, 414–15, 416, 419, 422, 426, 427, 429, 430, 433 feminine, femininity 17, 24, 98, 109, 145, 152, 190, 242, 275, 285–6, 290–1, 297, 298–302, 431, 442, 443, 445–6, 464, 479–80 feminism, feminist theory 3, 77, 83, 97, 98, 108–9, 130, 142, 145, 151, 157, 168, 179, 210–11, 228, 230, 237, 242, 252–3, 254–5, 266, 273–83, 286–7, 291, 292, 296–7, 299, 301, 304, 312, 313, 315, 325, 343, 361, 377, 390, 392–3, 396, 398, 422, 431, 439–41, 442, 444, 465, 466, 467, 473–4, 490

537

Index Field, Michael 46, 109, 110, 134, 291, 444 formalism 49, 65, 112, 113, 200, 201, 206–16, 217, 227, 231, 236 fossil fuel 91, 496, 497, 500, 501, 502, 508, 509, 510, 512, 524; energy 360, 500, 502, 503, 509, 523, 524; see also ecocriticism; industry fossils 350, 389, 401, 403, 404, 405, 406, 407, 409, 497, 498; see also evolution; extinction; geology Foucault, Michel 1, 98, 108, 228, 237–8, 240, 253–6, 257, 266, 267, 268, 275, 277, 284, 285, 288, 289, 290, 309, 325, 326, 337, 393, 396, 446 Freud, Sigmund 59–60, 88, 110, 151, 155, 211, 220, 254, 377–8, 392, 396, 397

journals, nineteenth-century 43, 77, 132, 133–4, 140–50, 164–5, 177–8, 187–8, 197, 255, 372–3, 382, 416, 417, 419, 453, 476, 489, 492; see also periodicals Kant, Immanuel 84, 89, 157, 206–8, 263, 333–4 kinship 287, 292, 348, 391, 392, 393, 394, 395, 396, 443 Kipling, Rudyard 41, 59, 61, 65, 87, 147, 360, 463

Gaskell, Elizabeth 27, 33, 34. 36–43, 70, 151–2, 153, 155, 156, 174, 224, 245, 249, 260, 309, 319, 321, 322, 326, 363, 429, 441, 444, 445, 446, 449, 450, 451, 455, 465, 520 gender: gender/sexuality rights 96, 146, 172, 177, 264, 287; see also feminine; feminism; masculine; queer; sexuality; transgender geology 91, 350, 401–13, 415, 457, 476, 480, 481, 496–500, 501, 502, 513, 514; see also evolution; extinction; fossils Gissing, George 113, 397, 303, 321, 384, 409 Gothic 6, 23, 38, 42, 83–92, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100–1, 106, 154–5, 162–4, 163, 242, 248, 286, 296, 299, 302, 303, 304, 309–11, 358, 359, 370, 464, 509, 510 Haggard, H. Rider 59, 85, 88, 92, 267, 349, 390, 394, 406, 420, 421, 464, 474 Hardy, Thomas 5, 19, 23, 29, 30, 33, 34, 91, 182, 186, 190, 191, 262, 274, 284, 292, 297, 303, 309, 313, 321, 346, 363, 369, 373, 377, 380, 382, 384, 385, 390, 394, 395, 428, 449, 450, 455 historical criticism, new historicism 20, 121, 126, 153, 199, 200, 201, 213, 214, 228, 234, 237, 239, 240, 243, 245, 248–59, 266, 280, 297, 312, 369, 509, 511, 512, 514, 521 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 13, 19, 107, 314, 369 horror 83–92, 162 human 24, 260, 262, 263–4, 415, 439, 519; see also animals industry 3–4, 11, 14, 19, 22–3, 24, 26, 27, 34–5, 42, 76, 77, 83, 91, 119–20, 121, 152, 161, 168, 177–8, 184, 185, 198, 221, 244, 251–2, 254, 257, 280, 293, 298, 303, 312, 320, 321, 347, 357–8, 360, 361, 365, 407, 429, 432, 454, 462, 465, 470, 475, 496, 497, 500–3, 509, 517–26; machinery 28, 96, 358, 359, 523; see also factory; technology interdisciplinary studies 20, 64, 192, 213, 238, 245, 248–9, 250, 257, 341, 364, 368, 371, 379, 383, 384, 468, 474, 507, 512 James, Henry 23, 34, 35, 36, 88, 113, 161, 183, 190, 208, 210, 221, 226, 227–8, 229, 230, 274, 276, 378 James, William 207, 372, 379

laboratories 85, 370, 371, 378, 379, 380, 381, 382, 384, 416 Leavis, F. R. 23, 227–8, 274 Lee, Vernon 7, 109, 110, 186, 232, 298, 370, 378 liberalism 30, 108, 175, 211, 213–14, 230, 237, 260–70, 280, 303, 359, 394–7, 408, 414, 415, 451–2, 462, 464, 518; neoliberalism 235, 261, 266 life writing 69–80, 311, 407, 473–4 literacy 17, 33, 96, 120, 122–3, 144, 148, 162, 252, 265, 312, 324, 455, 475 local, the 3, 112, 122, 124, 154, 155, 255, 274, 331, 332, 333, 363, 449–61, 475, 481, 517 Lyell, Charles 350, 403, 404–5, 409, 415 lyric see poetry madness 22, 95, 97, 160, 166, 275, 309, 310, 312, 315, 372, 378, 379–81 marriage 72, 96, 99, 103, 134, 173, 201, 232, 234, 237, 242, 245, 262, 284, 289, 290, 291, 292, 300, 303, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 325, 390, 394, 395, 396, 398, 431, 442–3, 445, 485; see also kinship Martineau, Harriet 34, 69, 70–5, 76–9, 144, 146, 243, 260, 311, 463 Marx, Marxism 23, 35, 59, 65, 76, 88, 90, 112, 151, 157, 161, 179, 185, 211, 237–40, 243, 251–4, 320, 325, 326, 390, 392, 397, 501, 503, 518–19, 522, 524; see also capitalism; economy masculine, masculinity 63, 70, 107–9, 153, 172, 190, 227, 253, 284, 285, 287–290, 292, 298, 299, 301, 302, 312, 346–8, 407, 440, 443, 463–4, 479 material culture / materiality 2, 12, 15, 17, 55, 62, 124, 142, 168, 178, 183, 187, 190, 237, 273, 278, 280, 312, 314, 365, 427, 429, 431, 441, 468, 470, 521; thing theory 89, 15–17, 200, 395 media 6, 12, 14, 54, 55, 61, 77, 108, 119, 120–3, 126, 131, 135, 140, 145, 147, 167, 183, 255, 280, 298, 324, 358, 360, 364–5, 403, 503, 523; see also periodicals; print culture; publishing medical humanities 7, 234, 309, 375; see also body; disability studies melodrama 6, 46, 48, 53–4, 55, 95, 100, 160, 166, 309, 311, 324, 384; see also drama Mill, John Stuart 69, 70, 72, 147, 238, 261–4, 265, 266, 267, 337, 382, 395 mind see neurology; psychology modernism 46, 69, 87, 106, 110–11, 208, 297, 391 moralism 1, 58, 60, 69, 78, 79, 96, 106, 107, 163, 165, 168, 177, 208, 212, 267, 439; see also ethics

538

Index Morris, William 17, 34, 42, 113, 121, 122, 146, 157, 177, 178, 207, 360, 370, 503 myth 370, 384, 390, 394, 397, 398, 403, 407, 419, 430

11, 17, 33, 34, 36, 47–8, 86, 95–9, 109, 142, 160–8, 175–6, 177, 208, 214, 273, 276, 280, 292, 311, 323, 368, 486–9, 491–2; see also melodrama; periodicals; print culture; sensation fiction; visual culture postcoloniality 2, 7, 58, 63, 64, 66, 113, 214, 228, 230, 227, 256, 273, 275, 277, 279, 309, 393, 452, 455, 462–70, 474, 482, 503, 508; see also colonialism; empire Pre-Raphaelites 15–16, 122, 186–7, 191, 298, 299, 370 print culture 6, 13–20, 22, 45, 47–8, 76, 124, 141, 252, 324, 364, 427, 431–2, 446, 452; radical print culture 48, 171–9; see also periodicals; popular culture; publishing psychology, psychoanalysis 7, 59, 65, 88, 98, 100, 109, 110, 203, 211, 212, 221, 223, 226, 240, 241, 263–4, 298, 312, 368, 372, 377–85, 390, 392; see also brain science; neurology publishing, press 13, 15, 19, 25, 34–5, 41, 74, 76, 77, 86, 96, 99, 101–3, 120–2, 131, 134, 140–8, 161–5, 172–9, 198, 228, 256, 278, 280, 293, 296, 304, 323–4, 404, 418, 442, 450–5, 475, 481, 488; Kelmscott Press 17, 122, 157, 178; see also periodicals; print culture

narrative theory 141, 218–20, 222, 224 needlework 73, 145, 152, 153, 155 neurology 7, 213, 233, 368–75; see also brain science; psychology New Women 41–2, 275, 296–304; see also feminism novel 22–31; Gothic novel 6, 23, 38, 42, 84–92, 95, 97–101, 106, 155, 162–4, 242, 286, 302, 303, 304, 307, 309–11, 370, 464, 509, 510; realist novel, realism 6, 7, 25, 36, 46, 53, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 106, 174, 188, 199–200, 208, 214, 226–7, 228, 231, 241, 242, 265, 267, 268, 290, 296, 297, 299, 302, 324, 404, 429, 430, 486, 490; sensation novel 97–103, 297, 309, 311, 439, 491, 493 object-oriented ontology 6, 90, 157, 360 Oliphant, Margaret 14, 30, 34, 36, 70, 95–7, 161, 168, 441, 442, 459 Ouida 97, 102, 109, 167, 210, 299 paintings 46, 154, 182, 183, 186, 188–9, 191 paleontology 4, 335, 401 Pater, Walter 106–13, 142, 186–7, 208, 210, 212, 239, 265, 370, 374, 390, 397, 513 penny dreadfuls 61, 102, 160, 161, 164, 168 performance 45–56, 61–2, 64, 99, 100, 166, 188, 198, 421, 430, 455, 491 periodicals, nineteenth century 6, 11, 13, 23, 33–40, 43, 47, 59, 63, 76–7, 95–6, 102, 103, 119–20, 122, 125, 131, 133–34, 136–37, 140–8, 164–5, 171, 173, 175–9, 184, 187–8, 255, 256, 273, 277, 278, 280, 292, 298, 323, 324, 327, 370, 372, 373, 382, 390, 416, 417, 419, 422, 442, 453, 454, 473, 492, 519; see also media; print culture; publishing philology 335, 389, 407, 427, 456, 463 plants 154, 470, 480, 506–14 poetry 6–7, 11–20, 35, 48–51, 53, 59, 62, 73, 99, 110, 119, 121–23, 132, 140–1, 145–7, 172, 182, 186, 188–90, 197, 208, 209, 215, 237, 250, 273, 276, 280, 292, 293, 297, 301, 312, 323, 325, 346, 363, 364, 369, 370, 390, 402, 407, 408, 409, 430, 433, 439, 444, 450, 452–9, 473, 489; lyric 11–12, 13, 14, 15–16, 19, 46, 123, 172, 187, 188, 221, 408, 409, 439 political economy 71, 238–45, 389, 391, 394–6, 398, 513 politics 3, 4, 13, 55, 71, 87, 112–13, 141, 144, 145, 147, 173–6, 183, 199, 211, 233, 260–8, 275, 297, 320, 349, 358, 396, 408, 444, 453, 455, 477, 499, 518, 521–5; radical politics 171, 175, 267, 458; see also liberalism pollution 502, 510, 512, 517, 524; see also ecocriticism; industry; fossil fuels popular culture 46–8, 54, 108, 122, 135, 153, 168, 174, 182, 344, 365, 417, 441, 487, 489; popular fiction 7,

queer 63–6, 84–95, 88–9, 107–9, 215, 228, 275, 275–8, 281, 284–93, 299–300, 302, 304, 308, 309, 312, 313, 346, 395, 422, 443–4, 480; see also feminine; masculine; sexuality; transgender race 37, 41–2, 58, 65, 88, 99, 123, 124, 129, 144, 146– 7, 168, 184, 188, 262, 274, 280, 281, 285, 286, 293, 296, 298, 304, 308, 309, 314, 320, 321, 326, 330–9, 343, 347, 380, 384, 390, 393–4, 396, 397, 398, 458, 465–6, 479, 482; see also colonialism; empire railway 75, 99, 303, 357, 362–3, 475, 477, 496, 498, 502 reading: close reading 55, 126, 136, 173, 211, 228, 231, 248, 250, 403, 523; distant reading 198, 199, 201, 202, 242, 280, 523; readership 7, 11, 12, 13, 19, 60, 97, 102, 162, 167, 177, 179, 201, 274, 280. 323, 324, 474; working-class readership 11, 162, 323–4 regionalism 449–59 religion: Christianity 70, 288, 298, 417, 422, 426–33; esotericism and new religion 414–23; Judaism 146, 426–33 Rossetti, Christina 15, 18, 59, 119 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 13, 15 Ruskin, John 48, 49, 79, 92, 113, 148, 182, 186–7, 210, 213, 227, 239, 257, 303, 313–14, 337, 347, 359, 361, 401, 408, 409, 414, 477, 503, 513, 518 Scott, Walter 11, 25, 29, 30, 141, 165, 214, 274, 309, 382, 403, 450, 454, 458 secularism 177, 397, 398, 428 sensation fiction 6, 23, 35, 42, 47, 58, 76, 95–103, 160, 162, 164, 166, 188, 241, 275, 276, 278, 297, 309, 311, 363, 377, 379, 439, 445, 486, 487, 491–3; see also popular culture

539

Index serialization 6, 26, 33–4, 79, 103, 162, 164–6, 176, 324, 390; see also periodicals; print culture sexology 113, 285, 290, 291, 299 sexuality 2, 42, 55, 60, 64, 65, 86, 88, 96, 106, 107–8, 110–11, 112, 134, 166, 174, 183, 190, 228, 253, 254–5, 275, 281, 284–93, 297, 299–304, 309, 310, 312, 313, 337, 346, 347, 378, 379, 380, 381, 390, 392–6, 420, 421, 422, 433, 440, 442–4, 464, 480, 490, 501, 510; see also gender Shakespeare, William 48, 52–3, 188, 197, 511 short fiction, short story, sketch 5, 7, 33–43, 75, 79, 106, 161, 162, 296, 431, 453–4, 456, 458, 486, 489; see also periodicals; serialization slavery 22, 25, 26–9, 91, 99, 146–7, 156, 199, 244–5, 261, 262, 265, 274, 336–9, 347, 360, 364, 446, 473, 524; see abolition; race socialism 178, 260, 518; see also Marx species 64, 144, 289, 290, 291, 299, 334–6, 339, 342–6, 350, 358, 389, 402, 405–6, 408, 409, 480, 496–8, 500–2, 506–9, 511, 513; see also animals Stevenson, Robert Louis 5, 6, 47, 58, 59, 61, 88, 151, 160, 167, 210, 309, 311, 370, 372, 459 Stoker, Bram 83, 88, 90, 286, 309, 364, 370, 372, 479, 510 stratigraphy 401, 498, 501; see also geology structuralism 217, 228, 380; poststructuralism 62, 65, 228, 229, 237, 240, 469 Swinburne, Algernon 106, 107, 112, 267, 293, 377, 390 sympathy 24, 29, 30, 100, 186, 231–4, 241, 265, 278, 301, 309, 321, 348, 479 technology 5, 15, 46, 64, 85, 88, 90, 96, 99, 119, 120, 125, 129–30, 134, 136, 141, 144, 162, 164, 166, 183, 188, 189, 257, 281, 296, 300–4, 314, 337, 357–65, 371, 454, 468, 475–7, 500, 523; see also factory; industry

Tennyson, Sir Alfred 12–18, 70, 88, 107, 122, 188, 362, 364, 369, 374, 377, 401, 406, 408–10, 430, 432, 456–7, 497 theatre see drama; melodrama transgender 5, 281, 285, 287, 293, 296, 299–304; see also queer; sexuality travel writing 5, 144, 334, 389, 393, 486; tourism 144, 473–82; see also settler colonialism Trollope, Anthony 33–6, 70, 97, 145, 148, 153, 161, 202, 211, 223, 241, 242, 260, 267, 309, 310, 348, 363, 380, 382, 390, 392, 394, 396, 431, 473, 488, 491 Trollope, Frances 22–31, 321, 478 urbanization 52, 91, 151, 166, 173, 175, 300, 303, 326, 345, 346, 363, 449–50, 454, 455, 457, 496, 502, 510–12; see also cosmopolitanism Victoria (Queen) 2, 4, 11, 19, 48, 77, 83, 176, 182, 218, 345, 442, 462 visual culture 14–17, 19, 46–7, 59, 100, 107, 112–13, 122, 125, 144, 148, 154, 157, 166, 176, 178, 182–94, 144, 182–92, 301, 312, 326, 364, 473, 480, 508; see also aesthetics; popular culture weird fiction 6, 83–92; see also Gothic Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 36, 140, 142 Wells, H.G. 34, 85, 86, 88, 349, 350, 360, 370, 372, 373, 406–7, 507 Wilde, Oscar 5, 8, 37, 46, 51, 55, 59, 83, 86, 88, 107–14, 142–3, 146, 154, 157, 188, 191, 208, 215, 226–7, 234, 235, 260, 265, 289–92, 300, 363, 364–5, 370, 430, 463, 509 Wordsworth, William 11, 29, 70, 88, 264 Yonge, Charlotte M. 59, 145, 310, 311, 313, 409, 429, 444

540