The Victorian Verse-Novel : Aspiring to Life 9780191028939, 9780198718864

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THE VICTORIAN VERSE-NOVEL

The Victorian Verse-Novel Aspiring to Life STEFANIE MARKOVITS

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Stefanie Markovits 2017 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2017 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2017932068 ISBN 978–0–19–871886–4 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Acknowledgments From its earliest inception, this book has taken close to the Horatian nine years to come together, a suitable time frame, as I hope shall become apparent, for a work dedicated in part to exploring experiences of duration and length. Still, this longue durée both determines the vast scale of my debt to a large number of people and will help excuse, I hope, the fact that many will remain unnamed here. Countless people contributed to the framing of my thoughts about the verse-novel, through comments at conferences and in seminar rooms, through invitations to come speak about the project, and through their written words. I’d like especially to thank Sarah Bilston, Robert Caserio, Kenneth Crowell, Angela Esterhammer, Melissa Free, Linda Hughes, Mark Knight, Ivan Kreilkamp, Natasha Moore, Monique Morgan, Cannon Schmidt, Marion Thain, Chip Tucker, and Danny Wright. Particular recognition must go to Dino Franco Felluga, who has been a comrade-in-arms in advocating for the importance of this neglected genre and for listening more closely to what novels and verse have to say to each other. This project may be ending, but that conversation will continue. At Yale, I have benefitted greatly from the expertise of my colleagues, several of whom have supplied the missing term or pointed me to an essay that I needed to read, among them Paul Fry, Janice Carlisle, David Quint, Michael Warner, and Sandy Welsh. The students who were with me in the three iterations of my graduate seminar, “Nineteenth-Century Long Narrative Poetry,” deserve a commendation for their willingness to struggle through the numerous pages with intelligence and curiosity. My acquaintance with Justin Sider may have started when he was a student, but he has long felt more like a colleague and friend, and he has been my most reliable source for quotations and citations during the composition of this volume. For her perpetual encouragement, my warmest thanks go, as always, to Ruth Bernard Yeazell: her standards are those for which I aim, however unsuccessfully. I first encountered Aurora Leigh in an undergraduate seminar on the Victorian Bildungsroman taught by Linda Peterson. The Victorian Verse-Novel would never have happened without her, and the fact that I can’t put a copy of it into her mailbox makes me miserable. At OUP, I have been very lucky to work with Jacqueline Norton and Aimee Wright. Their sanity, patience, and support have been all one

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Acknowledgments

would wish for from an editorial team. The anonymous readers for Oxford—and those others who considered articles out of which this book grew—have shown me manifold ways in which I could improve my ideas. I have tried to listen carefully to these voices, which were consistently worth hearing. One reader at Oxford has emerged from anonymity: Erik Gray. His reliable ear for an echo has not only provided me with allusions I would otherwise have missed (as my notes record) but has also made me feel secure in those I had already heard. Moreover, his incredibly generous and careful scrutiny of the final draft both corrected a number of unfortunate slips and offered an ideal set of last-minute points to consider. The Introduction is partially based on my entry on the “Verse Novel” for the Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, ed. Dino Felluga, Pamela Gilbert, and Linda Hughes (London: Blackwell, 2015); I thank the publishers for permission to include those sections here. Chapter 1 has been revised and expanded from my essay “Adulterated Form: Violet Fane and the Victorian Verse-Novel,” ELH 81.2 (Summer 2014): 633–59 (copyright © 2014 The Johns Hopkins University Press). I am grateful for permission to republish this material. Parts of Chapter 3 came out first in a very different setting in “Form Things: Looking at Genre Through Victorian Diamonds,” Victorian Studies 52.4 (Summer 2010): 591–619. My thanks to Indiana University Press for allowing them to reappear. My greatest thanks are reserved for my family, who have borne with me throughout the process, over a period that included the stresses of tenure. My parents and my brothers and sisters (and their partners) have always been there when I need them. I’d like also to express my gratitude to my nanny, Maria Andrade, who has been a part of my family for longer than it has taken to produce this volume, and without whom it could never have been written. My debt to my husband Ben is beyond measure. I have thought a lot about marriage while writing The Victorian Verse-Novel, and I feel truly fortunate in my own—not least for our children, Nelly, Florence, and little Solly (he arrived halfway through those nine years). The book is dedicated, however, to the first Ben in my life, my brother, who taught me to love poetry and who introduced me to both Byron and Clough.

Contents Introduction: A Short History of a Long Form I. Verse-Novel? II. Aspiring to Life: Aurora Leigh III. A Glance Backward and a Glimpse Forward 1. Adulterated Verse I. Generic Inheritance II. Lyric and Narrative III. Falling into Narrative IV. Paradise Lost and the Forms of Lovetime

1 1 7 17 31 31 39 45 52

2. The Longue Durée of Marriage I. Either/Or? II. “And love, that grows” III. From John Donne to Don Juan, via Petrarch by Train IV. Faithful for Ever? Coda: The Earthly Paradise and The Lovers of Gudrun

73 73 81 90 96 108

3. Circle-Squarers: Tennyson’s and Browning’s Form-Things I. “And the circle—they will square it / Some fine day” II. The Diamonds of Idylls of the King III. Pompilia as Pearl A Marginal Comment (in lieu of a Coda): The Inn Album

125 125 131 138 149

4. Amours de Voyage: The Verse-Novel and European Travel I. Amours de Voyage II. Steam-propelled Stories III. Travelling Texts IV. Genres, Genetics, and Gypsies Postscript: Staying Put with Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland

167 167 171 179 195 206

5. E Pluribus Unum: The American Verse-Novel I. Transatlantic Travels II. The Lay of the Land III. Kathrina: Mediators, Admixtures, and Menstruums IV. An Idyl of Work: “To some new world / They seemed translated” V. The Woman Who Dared: Rights, Laws, and Forms

219 219 223 232

Afterword: Adulterated Verse, the Modernist Remix Works Cited Index

239 249 265 277 295

Introduction A Short History of a Long Form I. VERSE-NOVEL? By the time Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “novel-poem”1 Aurora Leigh—an early and influential example of the form—entered the literary lists in 1856, the generic field of long narrative verse was a recognized battleground. Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough had sparred, both privately and in print, over the need to modernize epic in response to the rise of the novel and the perceived cultural marginalization of poetry. Clough had experimented recently with the combination of verse and novel in Amours de Voyage, an epistolary mock-epic in hexameters relating a failed courtship between English tourists in Italy during the French occupation of Rome in 1849 (Clough wrote a first draft as the shells fell, although he did not publish until 1858). Arnold countered with his Preface to Poems (1853), probably the most important piece of British mid-century poetic criticism. There, Arnold bemoaned the state of epic and condemned calls for the modernization of verse: “A great human action of a thousand years ago is more interesting to [our passions] than a smaller human action of to-day, even though . . . the representation of this last . . . has the advantage of appealing by its modern language, familiar manners, and contemporary allusions to all our transient feelings and interests. These, however, have no right to demand of a poetical work”—which belongs, instead, “to the domain of our permanent passions”—“that it shall satisfy them; their claims are to be directed elsewhere.”2 “Elsewhere” for Arnold meant the novel, the proper place, according to Victorian genre theory, for portraying the quotidian present. Epic poetry, in contrast, required temporal distance; as William Edmondstoune Aytoun put it, reviewing Aurora Leigh: “poets in all ages have shrunk from the task of chronicling contemporary deeds”—rightly, he felt.3 But Barrett Browning explained in her poem that “King Arthur’s self / Was commonplace to Lady Guenever; / And Camelot to minstrels seemed as

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The Victorian Verse-Novel

flat, / As Fleet Street to our poets”; the aura was an optical illusion, the product of historical distance.4 Hence her self-conscious effort to bring epic into the here-and-now. And she recognized that this translation involved not only a temporal shift but also a formal one: “I am inclined to think we want new forms . . . as well as thoughts—The old gods are dethroned. Why should we go back to the antique moulds . . . Let us all aspire rather to Life.”5 Enter a distinctively Victorian literary form: the verse-novel. This book will consider what it means to “aspire . . . to Life” and how a particular generic form might help realize the aspiration. But before I proceed with my inquiry, I must linger a moment over a more fundamental question: What is a verse-novel? What texts can be comprehended under this generic aegis? Some authors, including Barrett Browning, let us know themselves by appending the term or one of a set of related generic labels, such as “novel-poem” or “story in verse,” to their productions. But many didn’t, so some preliminary clarification is in order. A plausible definition for the genre runs along these lines: “a verse-novel is a long narrative poem realistically chronicling bourgeois life within a contemporary setting.” But not all of the poems I look at in the following pages will fit such a definition neatly. In fact, in choosing examples, it may at times seem like I am following something closer to a “pornography model” of generic determination: in the phrase made famous by the now-discarded legal standard, “one knows it when one sees it.” (Given, as we shall see, the abhorrence with which the verse-novel form was often met, and its predilection for taboo subjects, the comparison is not quite as facile as it appears.) Undoubtedly, this procedure for selection will leave some choices open to dispute. Yet, as many recent theorists point out, genre is a heuristic device, one enabling readers and authors to imagine “horizons of expectation” (as Hans Robert Jauss so influentially put it). Pace Goethe, they are not Naturformen. My own understanding of genre resembles that offered by Ralph Cohen: Classifications are empirical, not logical. They are historical assumptions constructed by authors, audiences, and critics in order to serve communicative and aesthetic purposes. Such groupings are always in terms of distinctions and interrelations, and they form a system or community of genres. The purposes they serve are social and aesthetic. Groupings arise at particular historical moments, and as they include more and more members, they are subject to repeated redefinitions or abandonment.6

With such a conception of genre, it matters less that any particular reader agrees that a specific text I consider here belongs to a “grouping”

Introduction

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designated by the term verse-novel than that I am able to convince said reader that there are benefits to considering the given text in the context of this grouping. It also matters that I can demonstrate that the generic categorization helps reveal and explain how and why a set of overlapping and “social and aesthetic” purposes arose at a “particular historical moment.” As it happens, while they had a number of terms and phrases cognate or synonymous with “verse-novel,” the Victorians themselves did not, generally speaking, use the word genre in its modern literary sense, being far more likely to refer to “poetry” as a normative but generically inclusive category.7 Thus E. S. Dallas’s 1852 Poetics: An Essay on Poetry considered all three of Goethe’s three primary Naturformen—epic, drama, and lyric— in both verse and prose. When, however, David Masson published the first book-length treatment of the novel in 1859, British Novelists and Their Styles, he opened with a chapter that asked, “What can Verse do in narrative fiction that Prose cannot?—and, on the other hand, are there any compensating respects, in which, in the same business, Prose has the advantage of Verse?”8 The questions indicate an interest in generic distinctions and a belief in what Caroline Levine has recently termed the “affordances” of different literary forms.9 And indeed our modern usage of genre was available, as the OED notes; it records examples of definition 1. b., “spec. A particular style or category of works of art; esp. a type of literary work characterized by a particular form, style, or purpose,” from as early as 1770, and it gives instances from throughout the nineteenth century, including from George Eliot’s prose writing.10 Nevertheless, all the works I will consider as verse-novels are “poetry” in the simplest sense that they are lineated (no prose-poems here, at least until my Afterword); all are long (thousands rather than hundreds of lines, although the length varies dramatically), and—this is a crucial feature of my principle of selection—all show self-conscious kinship with the novel, even if only the wavering kinship of a prodigal son who refuses to return to the fold. So while most of the poems this book explores would fit neatly into the definition I proposed above, others, like Tennyson’s chivalric Idylls of the King (1859–85) and Robert Browning’s historically remote The Ring and the Book (1867–8), would not. Still, these works are, I hope to show, sufficiently concerned with what it means to write narrative poetry in the age of the novel to merit consideration in a study conducted within this generic rubric. Those more marginal examples of the form that I have included here are present because they demonstrate some kind of recognizable novelistic allegiance—recognizable both by the authors of the works in question and by their audiences. For example, Browning offered the subject of The Ring and the Book not only to Tennyson but also to

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Trollope before deciding to attempt it himself, while Swinburne wrote of Tennyson’s Idylls, “Treated as he has treated it, the story is rather a case for the divorce-court than for poetry. . . . [S]uch ‘camelias’ should be left to blow in the common hotbeds of the lower kind of novelist.”11 But I am interested, too, in how they resist this allegiance. The tug-and-pull between the constituent parts of my central category of observation, verse and novel, constitutes a large part of the story I want to tell about the form. Surprisingly, though, despite Barrett Browning’s insistence on both the novelty and the novelism of her enterprise, critics have often been hesitant to consider even Aurora Leigh as belonging to a recognizable group of midcentury verse-novels. While the past decade has witnessed an outpouring of work on epic of what can (perhaps inevitably) be described as epic proportion—most significantly, in Herbert Tucker’s magnificent and monumental Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse12—the genre that Barrett Browning saw herself as mothering in Aurora Leigh, the novel in verse, has been comparatively neglected. Several of the books that I will be discussing in what follows have been subjected to close scrutiny under the auspices of their relationship to epic, and their generic hybridity has also been explored. In fact, its investment in regendering epic through shifting generic allegiance toward the novel (“Never flinch, / But still, unscrupulously epic, catch / Upon the burning lava of a song / The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age,” the poet reminds herself [V.212–15]) has made Aurora Leigh itself a favorite text for feminist scholars concerned with the interplay between gender and genre.13 But even in the rare instances where critics constellate works like and including the ones I will consider in these pages as a group, they tend to skirt round the issue of categorization. Thus while a few essays—most notably by Dino Franco Felluga—have attempted a head-on account of the genre, Natasha Moore generally prefers to avoid naming the contested category of the novel in verse in her lucid and stimulating exploration of Victorian Poetry and Modern Life (her title is also silent regarding the length that is so crucial a selection criterion for her study).14 Similarly, when Rod Edmond investigated the prevalence of love plots in Victorian poetry thirty years ago in Affairs of the Hearth: Victorian Poetry and Domestic Narrative, he made little effort to gather his various forms of poetic “domestic narrative” under the auspices of the novelistic.15 Partly, these critical decisions reflect a widespread nervousness about genre as a category of inquiry, especially when the category in question must be constructed as a hybrid entity. In her useful work on the recent resurgence of the form, Catherine Addison goes so far as to frame the issue of classification as a question: “The Verse Novel as Genre: Contradiction

Introduction

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or Hybrid?” This fundamental instability of kind holds on a more basic level for generic categories: as Jacques Derrida has remarked (in terms that Cohen echoes at the end of the passage I cited above), “at the very moment that a genre or a literature is broached, at that very moment, degenerescence has begun, the end begins.”16 As Lord Kames had acknowledged already in 1762, “literary compositions run into each other, precisely like colours: in their strong tints, they are easily distinguished; but are susceptible of so much variety, and take on so many different forms, that we can never say where one species ends and another begins.”17 But its very hybridity makes the verse-novel, the predominantly mid-Victorian form that I am attempting to capture here, particularly slippery. With its multiple moving components—not just verse and novel, but lyric, epic, romance, monologue, drama, travel narrative, sage discourse, and so on—it feels especially prone to uncertainty. Generic labels, however combinatorial, inevitably appear inadequate. Think of Clough’s description of his Amours as “my 5-act epistolary tragi-comedy, or comitragedy,” a categorization that fails to mention his debt to either the novel or the epic.18 Nevertheless, the preferred focus on epic—as well as the relative critical neglect of many of the poems I will be considering in the pages that follow—has consequences. First, this focus (and its resulting attention to war and nation-building) has tended to obscure the generic implications of these poems’ explorations of love. Yet, as Isobel Armstrong has argued, love poetry lies at the very heart of Victorian verse; she actually begins her path-breaking study Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics with the observation that the poetry of the period “is unparalleled in its preoccupation with sexuality and what it is to love.” Such preoccupation finds generic expression, as Armstrong observes: “The effort to renegotiate a content to every relationship between self and world is the Victorian poet’s project. It is a simultaneously personal and cultural project and carries the poet into new genres and a new exploration of language.”19 As I hope to show, the verse-novel is a “new genre” that is particularly demonstrative of the exploratory impulse she describes. And, in fact, many of the most sustained considerations in print of verse-novels actually come in books that contemplate Victorian poetry’s investment in romantic relationships. I have already noted Rod Edmond’s Affairs of the Hearth; Natasha Moore includes a chapter on “The Marriage Plot”; and Patricia M. Ball views the contemporary long poem as essential to her theme in The Heart’s Events: The Victorian Poetry of Relationships.20 The emphasis on love intersects in complicated ways with these poems’ generic orientations, and teasing out those complications will be a recurring project throughout this book. But the sheer length of the poems affects how they address emotion. While

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length is unsurprising in the context of the epic (“epic scope” is tautological) or the novel (ditto), it becomes more interesting when viewed through the lens of love poetry, so often the close-bounded province of lyric. Second, the favored focus on epic fails to acknowledge the potential for novelistic forms of radical expressiveness. In the wake of Foucault, the policing force of the novel—as vigorously explained by critics including D. A. Miller and Nancy Armstrong—became, and with good reason, something of a critical mantra.21 Yet for Bakhtin, the novel’s strength comes, rather, from its defiance of generic law, from its embrace of a fundamental generic “impurity.” Felluga and Meg Tasker, two of the most astute commentators on the form of the verse-novel, have both offered accounts of the novel’s impact on Victorian poetry that take such subversiveness seriously. They go back to Bakhtinian “novelization,” the argument that as genres become more novelistic, They become more free and flexible, their language renews itself by incorporating extraliterary heteroglossia and the “novelistic” layers of literary language, they become dialogized, permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parody and finally—this is the most important thing—the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality (the openended present).

Indeed, Bakhtin believes that as the novel exerts its influence on other genres, it also sparks their “renovation,” “infect[ing] them with its spirit of process and inconclusiveness.”22 He might easily have been describing the evolution of the verse-novel. Crucially, most Victorian verse-novels manifest “inconclusiveness” at the most basic structural level. As David Duff has argued, the hybrid poetry of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries tends toward what he calls “smooth-mixing,” the blending of genres within a medium of consistent metrical form (paradigmatically, blank verse). But Victorian verse-novels far more frequently “rough-mix,” awkwardly but powerfully combining passages of radically distinct verse forms.23 Most commonly, these works intersperse blank-verse narrative sections with embedded or intercalary songs and short poems. As Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins have shown, though, such shorter works were progressively more likely to be identified as examples of “the lyric,” a term that was also in the process of changing its significance. Over roughly the same period that the concept of genre and the particular genre of the novel were accruing their modern literary critical meanings, poetry was becoming increasingly associated with the abstraction that became codified in the twentieth century as lyric: a pure, ecstatic representation of immediacy, subjectivity, and

Introduction

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brevity.24 That is to say, if the narrative portions of many of these poems seem to align naturally with their “novel” designations, the interpolated lyrics they contain come to stand for their allegiance to “verse.” In contrast to the Romantic predilection for organic unity in long narrative poetry, then, the more usual form of the Victorian verse-novel seems to insist on its own hybrid nature. As I shall show, poets turned to the mixed form to try to resolve tensions between the novelistic (present, objective, real) and the poetic (past, subjective, ideal). Moreover, Victorian writers self-consciously used the generic indeterminacy of the verse-novel to contest social as well as literary norms, expressing a broad range of cultural concerns that prominently included, but were not limited to, anxieties surrounding gender and marriage. And while it may—rather unusually—eschew the rough-mixing that becomes the norm for the genre, Aurora Leigh nevertheless exhibits its characteristic tensions, something contemporary readers were quick to perceive.

II. ASPIRING TO LIFE: AURORA LEIGH For Barrett Browning, to “aspire” to “Life” during this period of fiction’s growing dominance required telling a story. Writing to Mary Russell Mitford, while still in the early phases of the composition of Aurora Leigh, she protested, “But people care for a story—there’s the truth! And I who care so much for stories, am not to find fault with them.”25 The story she chose, blending Künstlerroman and courtship plots, suggests how the new form would use novelistic plotlines. Aurora Leigh refuses her cousin Romney so as to pursue her poetic calling, but in the end (after he is injured in a Jane Eyre-inspired fire) she accepts him as he accepts her work’s value (a subplot recounts the misadventures of Marian Erle, a seamstress whom Romney intends to marry in order to further social progress). Audiences recognized the novelty of the poem’s plotting; as the critic for the Monthly Review remarked, “Probably the first reflection that will occur to a reader of the work . . . is, that it contains more of a ‘story’ than is usual in poems.” The focus on story determines the generic label the reviewer attached to the poem; since “This is the case—the poem is open to the reproach, if it be one, of being a novel in verse.”26 Many years later, Virginia Woolf remained struck by much the same feature of the work when describing the challenge Barrett Browning had set for herself: “Let us see what happens to a poet when he poaches upon a novelist’s preserves and gives us not an epic or a lyric but the story of many lives that move and change and are inspired by the interests and passions

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The Victorian Verse-Novel

that are ours in the middle of the reign of Queen Victoria.” What happens? Well, “In the first place,” Woolf continues, “there is the story.”27 Note Woolf ’s awareness that Barrett Browning was working in relation to not one but two competing generic formations: epic and lyric. And while the translation to the modern matters, the narrative nature of classical epic means that the underlying generic critique in Barrett Browning’s “car[ing] for a story” is actually primarily directed toward lyric poetry. In rejecting the epic past, the verse-novel implicitly accepts the value of the transitory (Arnold’s transient). But the attribution of value to a kind of meaning that not only comes and goes but that develops in the process of coming and going—that adheres to story—also runs counter to lyric’s methods of reaching after eternal truth through the erection of what D. G. Rossetti would memorably term the “moment’s monument.”28 Again, we experience a change in the temporal order, but rather than addressing contemporaneity, this modification attacks the form of paradoxically eternal presentism associated with lyric, what is sometimes termed the “lyric now.” While, as Jonathan Culler has recently argued, “Fiction is about what happened next; lyric is about what happens now.”29 In contrast to lyric’s kairos—what might be called time out of time, or the capture of the moment of ecstatic intensity—narrative features chronos, an awareness of time passing, of the inevitability not only of death but of aging, of duration.30 In fact, in her defensive admission of a love of story, Barrett Browning may have been thinking of John Stuart Mill’s essay, “What is Poetry” (1833), among the texts most responsible for promoting the “lyricization” of poetry that Jackson and Prins have described; it is this essay that so influentially identifies poetry with “feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude,” “overheard” by the reader. In the same essay, Mill also contrasts the aims of poetry and fiction: “The truth of poetry is to paint the human soul truly: the truth of fiction is to give a true picture of life.” Like Barrett Browning’s, Mill’s italicizing slant seems to mimic the forward rush of narrative action. But his tone is different: the distinction he draws follows on his rather disparaging relegation of the interest in “stories” to childhood and “rude state[s]” of society. In his view, “The same persons whose time is divided between sight-seeing, gossip, and fashionable dissipation, take a natural delight in fictitious narrative; the excitement it affords is of the kind which comes from without. Such persons are rarely lovers of poetry, though they may fancy themselves so, because they relish novels in verse.”31 For Barrett Browning, though, the added dimension of narrative was crucial to her ambition in the new poem, through which she hoped to bridge the gap between popular literature and more elevated forms. Her

Introduction

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admission to a love of story registers the acceptance of a fact: that the novel was the genre of the day and was perceived to be dominant in the literary marketplace.32 But it also reflects her desire to “aspire . . . to Life,” or (in Mill’s terms) “to give a true picture of life”—to capture the spirit of her age. The novel’s generic ascendency and the vogue for narrative painting (despite its flouting of Lessing’s dictum concerning paragone, his observation that visual art works best by capturing not stories but the single pregnant moment) show the Victorian attraction to stories. As Herbert Tucker has argued, the Romantic poets had lived through two great crises that had provoked an urge to make changes intelligible by linking past and present through the arc of a narrative: “The political and economic consequences of [the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution] gave denizens of the nineteenth century every reason to reckon on change as the paradoxically salient constant within modern experience; and their calculus for coping with change took preponderantly the shape of story.”33 Barrett Browning’s period added further stimuli to narrative interpretation, many of which are reflected also in the plot of Aurora Leigh: the fight for the extension of women’s rights and of the franchise; the experience of a rapidly expanding empire; a new wave of European political upheavals, such as the Revolutions of 1848 and the Risorgimento; the Oxford Movement, and the wider crisis of religious faith that it epitomized; the discovery of Darwinian evolution, itself one of the narratives propelling that crisis of faith. How could one record and comprehend such vicissitudes without telling stories? As Cardinal Newman noted in his autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), “Certitude of course is a point, but doubt is a progress.”34 Yet, as Newman’s own life attests, the Victorian age vacillated between faith and doubt, points and progress, the intensity of lyric ecstasy and the long, drawn-out narrative of a triple-decker. The very phrase from which I have extracted my subtitle, “Let us all aspire rather to Life,” combines the rapturous potential of “aspire” with the forward momentum of “Life”: that’s one reason I chose it. And such vacillation is also intrinsic to the broader category of narrative verse, as writers of the period were arguing. Edgar Allan Poe went so far as to claim that the back-and-forth rendered the very idea of the long poem a virtual oxymoron, a generic impossibility. His comments attest to the growing identification of all poetry with lyric concentration: What we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones—that is to say, of brief poetical effects. It is needless to demonstrate that a poem is such, only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating, the soul; and all intense excitements are, through a psychal necessity, brief. For this reason, at least one-half of the Paradise Lost is essentially prose—a succession of poetical

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The Victorian Verse-Novel

excitements interspersed, inevitably, with corresponding depressions—the whole being deprived, through the extremeness of its length, of the vastly important artistic element, totality, or unity, of effect. It appears evident, then, that there is a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art—the limit of a single sitting—and that, although in certain classes of prose composition, such as Robinson Crusoe (demanding no unity,) this limit may be advantageously overpassed, it can never properly be overpassed in a poem.35

For Poe, a poem can become long only through the accumulation of parts that remain experientially distinct; he pays no heed to the kind of whole that grows out of the causal connections creating story out of sequence. Hence the telling dismissal of Robinson Crusoe as “demanding no unity.” And this opinion becomes more prevalent over the course of the century, culminating in aestheticism, as in Walter Pater’s description of hunting for the “crystallised” parts of Wordsworth’s narrative verse, the moments when his poetry shines briefly with the “hard, gem-like flame” of lyric.36 Barrett Browning is sensitive to the charms of such lyricizing of narrative verse—even within Aurora Leigh, as she shows through Marian Erle’s piecemeal approach to literature. Fed parts and scraps of great works by a passing pedlar, Marian further dismantles them, tearing out favorite bits and reassembling them into “a nosegay of the sweet and good / To fold within her breast, and pore upon / At broken moments” (III.990–2). But, as I argue at more length in Chapter 4, Aurora Leigh as a whole resists Marian’s method, instead locating meaning in the connections between the moments, in the journey from one point to another, and in something like Culler’s fictional mantra of “what happened next.” Tucker has pointed to the popularity of segmented verse forms in the Victorian period, whether sonnet sequences, like Rossetti’s The House of Life (1870), or longer works composed of other stanzaic forms, as in Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850). He explains how the “iterated pattern of interruption and resumption” in such forms creates a “tranceful suspense” from which “the narrative thrust of the sequence must be again and again reactivated.”37 Verse-novels may share some of this stop-and-start motion, but they put greater emphasis on the links between the constituent parts. We can see the shift toward story by comparing Barrett Browning’s own sequence of sonnets, Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)—long recognized as a coded history of her courtship with Robert Browning—to the more integrated courtship plot offered by Aurora Leigh. In fact, the ending of Aurora Leigh seems to allude to the Sonnets when describing Romney and Aurora’s perfect communion. “His breath against my face / Confused his words, yet made them more intense,” Aurora explains,

Introduction

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more luminous Because of obliteration; more intense,— The intimate presence carrying in itself Complete communication, as with souls Who having put the body off, perceive Through simply being. Thus, ’twas granted me To know he loved me to the depth and height Of such large natures. (IX.743–5; IX.747–54)

Recall Sonnet 43: “I love thee to the depth & breadth & height / My soul can reach.”38 The intensity of such spiritual union seems an apotheosis of lyric love, as hints of Donne’s “Air and Angels” also suggest (I return to these ideas at more length in Chapters 1 and 2). Yet in Aurora Leigh, the moment of ecstasy is predicated on the preceding narrative, a point reinforced here by Romney’s subsequent words, in which he conveys how his feelings initially grew out of a story related to him as a boy, “the tale / Of how a fairy bride from Italy” would arrive for him (IX.765–6). I am, in fact, reminded of a scene in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1866), where the budding poet Osborne Hamley considers publishing a set of sonnets he has written piecemeal in response to his secret courtship and marriage to a French bonne. As Gaskell records of Osborne, his first step is to take the individual sonnets and put them in chronological succession: He was essentially imitative in his poetic faculty; and of late he had followed the lead of a popular writer of sonnets. He turned his poems over: they were almost equivalent to an autobiographical passage in his life. Arranging them in their order, they came as follows:— “To Aimée, Walking with a Little Child.” “To Aimée, Singing at her Work.” “To Aimée, Turning away from me while I told my Love.” “Aimée’s Confession.” “Aimée in Despair.” “The Foreign Land in which my Aimée dwells.” “The Wedding Ring.” “The Wife.”39

The novel’s 1830s setting offers a number of candidates for the “popular writer of sonnets”: perhaps Wordsworth (who had engaged in his own secret affair with a Frenchwoman), William Lisle Bowles, or Felicia Hemans. But Gaskell herself may have had the Brownings’ romance in mind, as well. Like Osborne, Barrett Browning had first taken a set of sonnets and arranged them to tell a story. Yet although Gaskell sees the

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The Victorian Verse-Novel

romance of such serialized lyric, her own larger novel relegates it to a subsidiary role, promoting a rather more connected narrative through the novel’s central story of Molly Gibson’s love for Osborne’s brother, Roger. Barrett Browning’s shift from Sonnets from the Portuguese to Aurora Leigh represents a similar change in priorities. Of course, while sonnet sequences demonstrate how poets of the period approached issues of serialism that the novel had brought to the fore of public consciousness, by far the most famous of the Victorian period’s formal poetic innovations is the dramatic monologue. Like the versenovel, this genre combines subjective and objective, lyric and narrative modes. Herbert Tucker has described how it alternates between two “constitutive modes—historical line or punctual lyric spot,” producing what he calls “a plot of lyricism resisted,” in which lyric is “what you cannot have and what you cannot forget.”40 The family resemblance between these two types of Victorian hybrid appears in Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, a poem I consider in relation to the verse-novel genre in Chapter 3; Browning’s work comprises a series of dramatic monologues offering different characters’ perspectives on a murder committed in Rome in 1698. Still, dramatic monologues generally want both the length and (in many instances) the belief in plot as a structure of positive meaning-making that are such vital aspects of verse-novels. As Dorothy Mermin has noted, “The monologue lacks the resources to develop the temporal dimension, the notion of life as a continuing process of growth and change, that . . . is essential to the Victorian novelist’s sense of character.”41 These resources are just what the verse-novel affords. So Barrett Browning knew when she sat down to write verse that combined contemporaneity with extended narrative that she was entering into highly contested territory. Her awareness of this fact appears in the increasingly defiant follow-up to the slightly sheepish admission of her perhaps “vulgar” love of story: And now tell me,—where is the obstacle to making as interesting a story of a poem as of a prose work—Echo answers where. Conversations & events, why may they not be given as rapidly & passionately and lucidly in verse as in prose—echo answers why. You see nobody is offended by my approach to the conventions of vulgar life in “Lady Geraldine” [her narrative poem that had appeared earlier in the year to general approval]—and it gives me courage to go on, and touch this real everyday life of our age, & hold it with my two hands. I want to write a poem of a new class, in a measure—a Don Juan without the mockery & impurity, . . . under one aspect,—& having unity, as a work of art, & admitting as much of philosophical dreaming & digression (which is in fact a characteristic of the age) as I like to use. Might it not be done, even if I could not do it? & I think of trying at any rate.42

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The question-and-answer mode attests to the groping after something new, after some form that can respond to the present without forgoing the eternal. Barrett Browning’s insistence on the possibility for “unity” within this form explicitly counters arguments like Poe’s. Still, her “two hand[ed]” approach here—a kind of muscular correlative, perhaps, to the “double vision” that Aurora will declare essential to the poet’s task (V.183)—seems required by the heavy-lifting needed to carry the generic mixture she proposes, a mixture eventually resulting in a poem the sheer bulk of which actually exceeded that of Paradise Lost. Barrett Browning’s cautious optimism was justified. By the time of her death in 1861, Aurora Leigh had already required five British editions and had garnered significant praise from many readers (including George Eliot) who responded to the work’s modernizing spirit. But others viewed her efforts as fundamentally misguided. Those critics were troubled not only by the more risqué elements of the story, such as Marian Earl’s rape, but also by its hybrid experimental form. W. E. Aytoun’s review captures the unease created by Barrett Browning’s novel-poem. He rehearses the standard arguments regarding the propriety of generic divisions, the claim that poetry should represent the ideal, while prose is better suited to depicting the real: It is not the province of the poet to depict things as they are, but so to refine and purify as to purge out the grosser matter; and this he cannot do if he attempts to give a faithful picture of his own times. For in order to be faithful, he must necessarily include much which is abhorrent to art, and revolting to the taste, for which no exactness of delineation will be accepted as a proper excuse. All poetical characters, all poetical situations, must be idealised. The language is not that of common life, which belongs essentially to the domain of prose. Therein lies the distinction between a novel and a poem.43

Aytoun appears here to be countering Wordsworth’s famous call in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) for an end to “poetic diction”: “There will also be found in these volumes little of what is usually called poetic diction; I have taken as much pains to avoid it as others ordinarily take to produce it; this I have done for the reason already alleged, to bring my language near to the language of men.”44 Wordsworth’s views emerged in the context of a hybrid genre combining lyrical and narrative impulses (ballads always tell stories); Aytoun’s essay on Aurora Leigh suggests how they resonated anew in regard to the development of the Victorian verse-novel. Yet while Wordsworth may have insisted on using the “real language of men,” the “realism” of his diction depends not on “its modern language, familiar manners, and contemporary allusions to all our transient feelings

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The Victorian Verse-Novel

and interests,” to return to Matthew Arnold’s formulation, but rather on its permanence. For that matter, Wordsworth’s choice of a rustic milieu arises from his belief that “such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived”: such a language arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art, in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of their own creation.45

In the context of verse-novels, comments like these concerning “fickle appetites” may have prompted a remark made by Walter Bagehot in a more positive response to the form than Aytoun’s, in his assessment, following the poet’s death, of Arthur Hugh Clough’s poems. To get to the heart of the poet’s surprising realism, Bagehot offered readers a warning: “Reconcile what you have to say with green peas, for green peas are certain; such was Mr. Clough’s idea.”46 The question is, can “green peas” be counted among Wordsworth’s “best objects,” or are they “food for fickle tastes”? And in either case, could a Victorian audience be taught to digest them when served in verse? Bagehot’s statement resonates with a remarkable scene from a later, American novel in verse that was strongly influenced by Aurora Leigh, Epes Sargent’s The Woman Who Dared (1869, dated 1870) (this will actually be the final verse-novel I consider in detail in this book). Sargent records a dinner-table conversation between the work’s heroine, Linda Percival, and her parents, a debate about where they should go on their next vacation. Linda’s father opens the dialogue with a question: “The seaside or the mountains shall it be?” “Linda will go with the majority! You’ve spilt the salt, papa; please throw a little Over your shoulder; there! that saves a quarrel. To me you leave it, do you? to decide Where we shall go? Then hear the voice of wisdom: The mountain air is good, I love the mountains; And the sea air is good, I love the sea; But if you two prefer the mountain air,— Go to the mountains. On the contrary,—” “She’s neutral!” cried the father; “what a dodger This little girl has grown! Come, now, I’ll cast Into the scale my sword, and say we’ll go To old Cape Ann. Does any slave object?

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None. ’Tis a special edict. Pass the peas. Our rendezvous shall be off Eastern Point. There shall our Linda try the oar again.”47

“Pass the Peas.” Really? The phrase floored me when I first read it. “Special edict,” indeed, precisely because, for all its alliteration, it feels so far afield from “poetic diction.” The Victorian novel in verse uses such language to undermine the distinctions between verse and prose, often in the interests of radical ideological and political agendas. The Percivals’ dinner conversation might even be read as an allegory of the emancipating effect of the verse-novel’s hybridity: formal and democratic “neutrality” (in Mr. Percival’s phrase) offsets any potential enslavement to paternal edict, which instead liberates Linda by allowing her to “try the oar,” thus demonstrating her agency through metrical motion. But in the context of criticism like Aytoun’s, the passage encourages a further question: Can there be such a thing, for the nineteenth century, as a poetry of peas? Once upon a time, there was a Prince who wanted to marry a real Princess. A maiden came to his castle seeking shelter from a storm and declaring herself to be of royal blood. To test her, the Prince had a single pea (or, in some versions of the story, three peas) put beneath the twenty featherbeds upon which she was to rest; when she revealed her sleepless night, he knew he had found his mate.48 Once upon a time, there was a critic who wanted to find a real poem . . . (I leave it to the reader to complete the analogy). In Chapter 3, I examine how writers of long narrative verse turned to certain objects that I call form-things to think through the implications of their generic settings. My focus there is on diamonds and pearls, which have both conventionally been tied to the intensity and purity of lyric. Might peas be the antithesis of diamonds, things so stubbornly quotidian as to resist poetic ground—or rather, perhaps, so stubbornly quotidian as to convert the generic terrain of poetry to prose, no matter how regularly tilled and cultivated the verse? In fact, the opposition of peas to diamonds was a recognized one: in Daniel Deronda (1876), for example, George Eliot describes the diamonds that Grandcourt takes back from Lydia Glasher to give to Gwendolen on their marriage as “not mountains of light” (a translation of Koh-i-Noor, the most famous of Victorian gemstones) but “mere peas and haricots.”49 And while sweet peas abound in the period’s verse, the common edible kind are rather hard to find. In contrast, they crop up everywhere in Victorian novels. So when in Trollope’s Phineas Finn (1869) the hero is put on a Parliamentary committee to consider the question of potted peas for the Army, we know the subject was carefully picked to register just how far we are from either an epic or a lyric milieu: how entrenched in the world of

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The Victorian Verse-Novel

the quotidian novel, the pea’s proper ground. The verse-novel challenges this assumption. In the process, meter becomes a newly fraught category. Wordsworth’s dismissal of poetic diction occasioned his conclusion that “The only strict antithesis to Prose is Metre; nor is this, in truth, a strict antithesis; because lines and passages of metre so naturally occur in writing prose, that it would be scarcely possible to avoid them, even were it desirable.”50 Aytoun, though, had prepared the way for his diatribe concerning the essentially prosaic nature of Barrett Browning’s material in Aurora Leigh five pages earlier in his essay, when he quoted a verse-paragraph of her poem “without the metrical divisions,” a gimmick he goes on to repeat.51 The same move, which would become a frequent feature of negative reviews of verse-novels, had actually been used by the Literary Gazette when complaining of the prose-like nature of the latest installments of Don Juan in 1823 (somewhat ironically, given that a youthful Byron had dismissed Wordsworth as the poet “Who, both by precept and example, shows / That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose”).52 Aytoun wants to suggest that the poem’s blank-verse form is in no way connected to its content, like a decorative frill on an otherwise quite serviceable dress. It soon becomes clear, however, that these are no frills but seams, essential to the structure of Barrett Browning’s composition.53 The very fact of line divisions helps expose some of the central tensions between the lyric and narrative impulses of verse-novels, importing even to this smooth-mixed example of the genre a miniaturized version of the stop-and-start experience so often engineered by more roughly mixed specimens. As they do in so many of the verse-novels I will be considering in the pages that follow, Aurora Leigh’s hybrid generic allegiances fuel the poem’s argument. For instance, it becomes increasingly evident in Aytoun’s review that he predicates his ideology of separate generic spheres on his fear that generic mixture will infect the social realm, causing the collapse of its hierarchies and borders, as well.54 Thus he understands how Barrett Browning’s attack on generic purity undermines constructions of gender difference. In the Ars Poetica, Horace gives a picture of “a book whose different features are made up at random,” resulting in a painting of a Duessa-like figure, one that “started up at the top like a beautiful woman” but “ended in a hideously ugly fish.”55 Such sexual nervousness and distaste about “impure” generic forms troubled Victorian readers, too, as we see when Aytoun declares of Aurora Leigh, “She is not a genuine woman.” Similarly, Aytoun describes how Barrett Browning’s democratic use of verse tears down class barriers. He contrasts her consistent use of blank verse with Shakespeare’s mixed method, in which prose is reserved for comedy and commoners: “Browning follows the march of modern

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improvement. She makes no distinction between her first and her third class passengers, but rattles them along at the same speed upon her rhythmical railway.” Its measured and distinctly modern rapidity— something that Barrett Browning sought explicitly, as we have seen, and that readers have continued to note as a feature of verse-novels—seems even to catalyze the genre’s inherent dangers, allowing its democratizing structure to spread further afield (as I show in Chapters 4 and 5, where I consider the form’s generic geography). Of course, Aytoun’s recognition of the verse-novel’s cultural force owes something to Barrett Browning’s own sense of the connection between social and artistic reform, one that her work not only attempts to enact but also explores diegetically through its discussion of the relative usefulness of Romney’s phalansteries and Aurora’s poem. Aytoun rejects both kinds of change: “For ourselves, we are free to confess that we have not much faith in new theories of art; we are rather inclined to class them in the same category with schemes for the regeneration of society.” But the terms in which he does so demonstrate that he understands the threat well. And for all his bravado, one can smell his fear: “We doubt not that, before a year is over, many poems on the model of Aurora Leigh will be written and published; and that conversations in the pot-house, casino, and even worse places, will be reduced to blank verse, and exhibited as specimens of high art.”56 He was right, as I shall show. III. A GLANCE BACKWARD AND A GLIMPSE FORWARD Despite Aytoun’s accusations of radical change, the verse-novel didn’t arise out of the blue. Early prose romances like Sidney’s Arcadia (1590) and Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania (1621)—forebears of today’s prose fiction—had generally incorporated significant amounts of poetry. And while the term romance had historically been associated with chivalric verse epics, like Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516), the generic name had migrated to the modern category of the novel in more than one European language (R/roman[zo]); Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605, 1615) records the debt through its story. Moreover, Walter Scott had newly popularized metrical storytelling through his historical romances, including Marmion (1808) and The Lady of the Lake (1810), setting the stage for future practitioners of long narrative verse even as he prepared the way for his own development of the historical novel. A different version of metrical romance had found favor as well in recent decades among women writers concerned with female

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The Victorian Verse-Novel

sensibility and the marriage plot; in fact, in the same year that The Lady of the Lake appeared, Scott published a new edition of Anna Seward’s poems that included Louisa: A Poetical Novel in Four Epistles (1784), which relates the trials and tribulations of a woman of feeling but grants her a much happier ending than Richardson gave Clarissa.57 The year 1810 also witnessed the publication of George Crabbe’s first metrical stories of provincial life, Tales of the Borough, to be followed by Tales of the Hall in 1819. Crabbe provided a more realistic and contemporary model of narrative poetry than Scott’s and Seward’s, one that exerted significant influence on several Victorian poets (as it had done on novelists such as Jane Austen). Clough’s admiration manifests itself in Mari Magno (1861), his collection of tales of marriage recited by a group of passengers on their way to America; contemporary critics almost invariably noted the link.58 Barrett Browning listed Crabbe as someone who had combined aspects of poetry and the modern novel,59 and Coventry Patmore (whose verse-novel The Angel in the House [1854–61] is the subject of Chapter 2) was an admirer, too.60 In fact, like the versenovel, Crabbe’s poems occupy a generic “border land” that enables their consideration of other borderlands: those between classes and periods, for example.61 Jerome McGann has argued for Crabbe’s novelistic concern for local truth and analyzed his “seriatim” conception of narrative.62 These novelistic principles appear prominently in poems such as “Delay has Dangers,” which uses a courtship plot to capture the consequences of an apparently minor decision with all the merciless rigor we associate with George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. As these examples begin to show, Romantic period precursor forms to the verse-novel abound. Consider Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, which, as I have already noted, similarly combined lyric and narrative impulses as well as “high” and “low” forms. Or think of how Romantic closet drama novelistically internalizes action, blending subjective (lyrical) and objective (dramatic) experience.63 As David Duff has argued, a debate about what he calls “the combinatorial method” was actually central to Romanticism. He cites the influence of Friedrich Schlegel’s conception of the universal Mischgedicht, the ever-changing product of a literary system that is continually experimenting by mixing its component parts, “eternally uniting and separating powers” (the metaphor is essentially chemical).64 Schlegel’s “progressive universal poetry” is one that “tries to and should mix and fuse poetry and prose, . . . and make poetry lively and sociable, and life and society poetical”; Barrett Browning’s call for new forms seems remarkably akin in its ambitions.65 Moreover, as in the Victorian period—and as Schlegel’s language hints—debates about genre during the Romantic era occupy the intersection of cultural and political spheres; for Duff, “the

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wholesale politicization of genre in the 1790s” is proof that generic innovation must be considered against the backdrop of the French Revolution.66 This Romantic predilection for mixing forms influenced the development in the 1840s and 1850s, at the same time the verse-novel was beginning to assume shape, of what W. E. Aytoun christened as the “Spasmodic School” of poetry. Aytoun applied the term to a group of hyper-subjective poems, often closet dramas or “monodramas” (to use Tennyson’s designation of Maud [1854]), which sought to explore the experiences of modern life; the name was perceived to identify a kind of latter-day Byronism. He first used it in a review of Alexander Smith’s Poems (1853); this volume included A Life-Drama, a closet drama that had been much admired by Clough, for whom it became ammunition in his attacks on Arnold’s classicism.67 As it happens, while Barrett Browning’s poem has frequently been associated with the Spasmodics, contemporary reviews rarely made the link, and Aytoun never uses the word of Aurora Leigh.68 But although she allows Aurora Leigh to write with some admiration of the closet drama as a form (V.315–42), Barrett Browning’s own remarks have indicated that she herself admitted in the more outwardlooking generic impurity of Don Juan (1819–24) a greater literary precedent for her own formal experiment (for all that she claimed to resist Byron’s sexual impurity). Nor was she the first to use Byron as template for novelizing poetry. Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, one of the earliest recognizable continental verse-novels, had been born of reading Don Juan. Not a novel but, as the subtitle proclaims, “A Novel in Verse” (“the devil of a difference,” as Pushkin wrote to a friend), it appeared in Russia in volume form in 1833.69 German and French versions followed soon thereafter— although, since the earliest English translation did not arrive until 1881, it made little direct mark on British practitioners in the genre.70 But Byron’s poem had already performed its own generic translation: as scholars have noticed, it shifts, over the course of its cantos, from a predominantly (mock) epic register to what seems an increasingly novelistic one.71 Once they reach England, Don Juan and Don Juan become quite different creatures, more subject to the forces of the novelistic courtship plot, from which they appear to escape only through Byron’s premature death at Missolonghi. At the same time, formal effects alter in the “English Cantos.” So, for example, Byron’s famous digressions begin to function more psychologically, as if to illuminate characters’ negotiations with the social realm in which they live and move. The difference between the two songs embedded in the narrative of Byron’s poem can be viewed as paradigmatic of the more general generic shift. The first, “The Isles of Greece” (Canto III, between stanzas 86 and 87), is largely extraneous to the plot and sung by a bard in Lambro’s hall; it offers an

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The Victorian Verse-Novel

elegiac lament for the lost glories of the ancient Attic world, one that might easily be anthologized in a collection of Byron’s lyrics (and often is). In contrast, Byron thoroughly integrates the second, gothic, song, “Beware! Beware of the Black Friar!” within the poem’s story (Canto XVI, between stanzas 40 and 41). It forms the basis for the nighttime romantic confusions with which Don Juan abruptly ends, and it is performed by a major character, Adeline, who may even be imagined to be using it to further her own plotting designs. The increasingly novelistic effect can be considered historically, as well, in the poem’s reception history. Schlegel may have anticipated Bakhtinian novelization at the end of the eighteenth century when he observed how “the novel colors all modern poetry,” but, as Rod Edmond points out, “the narrative poem of contemporary life emerged” visibly only between 1847 and 1850, at the same time as an “unparalleled couple of years” in the history of the novel; he remarks that Dombey and Son (1848), David Copperfield (1850), Vanity Fair (1848), Wuthering Heights (1847), Jane Eyre (1847), Mary Barton (1848), and Alton Locke (1850) all belong to these few years.72 One can underscore the connection by noting that Aytoun’s dismissive review of Aurora Leigh appeared immediately following the first installment of George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life. Such novelistic splendor inevitably casts a glow—or a shadow—upon its generic siblings. So while early readers may have been flummoxed by Byron’s frequent prosiness, as I have suggested, mid-Victorian audiences could begin to assimilate Don Juan into the newly codifying genre of the versenovel. Thus, in 1864, Walter Bagehot classified Byron’s poems alongside other examples of what he termed the “metrical species of sensation novel.”73 By the time we get to the twentieth century, Bakhtin is considering Don Juan as a specimen of novelized verse, while Lukács is declaring it (together with Eugene Onegin) “to belong to the company of the great humorous novels.”74 Similarly, when The Prelude finally appeared publicly in its entirety in 1850, it was likely to strike contemporary readers not just as a revolutionary lyric revision of epic but also in the light of the current vogue for the Bildungsroman or Künstlerroman; David Copperfield appeared that same year. It is in this latter capacity that the poem’s influence on Aurora Leigh is in fact most visible. Victorian poets thus had a feast’s worth of recipes for genre-mixing from which they could and did concoct their own hybrid creations. Of course, the roots of generic mixture lie even deeper in literary history: in the work of Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Sidney, Milton, and even (despite Aytoun’s declaration to the contrary) Shakespeare.75 These writers all provided examples to nineteenth-century poets interested in revising generic contracts in order to reinvigorate poetic vision; we should note

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the prominence in this list of the British tradition, which had largely escaped neo-classicizing French trends. But while their influence over the books I will be considering is profound, the way Victorian verse-novelists filter their sources of inspiration through the contemporary phenomenon of the novel makes their poems something radically new. In the pages that follow, I hope both to demonstrate that novelty and to show why it merits attention. * * * I begin my exploration with Violet Fane’s Denzil Place: A Story in Verse (1875), one of many poems to build upon the success of Aurora Leigh, as Aytoun had feared. While Fane’s verse-novel is a comparatively late example of the form, perhaps for that very reason it manages to synthesize many of the genre’s most remarkable features. Chapter 1, “Adulterated Verse,” introduces the verse-novel’s hybrid energies by means of Fane’s remarkably sympathetic narrative of a surprisingly happy fall into adultery. I start here because the adultery plot is actually exemplary for the form; this chapter explores why by showing how adultery’s cultural dynamics offer intriguing parallels to the literary dynamics of the verse-novel. Moreover, Fane self-consciously uses intertextuality and scenes of reading to explore the ramifications of generic hybridity, above all as they concern the interplay between lyric and narrative temporalities in love. Her work also, therefore, serves to introduce many of the temporal questions that occupy the first half of The Victorian Verse-Novel. Chapter 2 addresses the question of the genre’s length as an aspect of its temporal orientation. “The Longue Durée of Marriage” offers a formal explanation of the centrality of conjugal experience to the Victorian versenovel, despite marriage’s representational challenge (as outlined by Kierkegaard in Either/Or). In Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House, the extended middle responsible for the poem’s length develops out of this difficulty. By using durational narrative to expand lyric forms of love poetry, Patmore had hoped to portray marriage’s duration without sacrificing the intensity of romantic ardor. But, as comparisons to Byron’s Don Juan suggest, the resultant compound proves unstable. I uncover the unsettling results of such extension by showing how the need for length introduces ideas of seriality, including the notion of a sequel to love in the afterlife through (potentially adulterous) marriage in heaven. Finally, a coda turns briefly to William Morris’s The Lovers of Gudrun (1870), the longest and most novelistic tale from his immense Earthly Paradise (1868–70). Chapter 3, “Circle-Squarers: Tennyson’s and Browning’s Form-Things,” serves as an interlude between the temporal and spatial concerns of the book’s two halves. I turn my attention to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King

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The Victorian Verse-Novel

(1859–85) and Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1867–8). Both poems worry about circling the square: creating lyric unity out of a rectilinear narrative. Both center their investigations of the gender- and genredynamics of the age—and of the truth-telling potential of poetry—on tales of marriage and adultery. And both combine dramatically fractured narrative form with extraordinarily violent plots. Despite a historical remoteness at odds with the verse-novel’s modernity, they show the pervasive influence of the genre. The chapter considers how Tennyson and Browning embed into their poems two types of gem, diamond and pearl, that can be termed form-things: objects through which to express and explore generic affiliation. Finally, I move from the jewels at the hubs of these circular forms back to square books, and to Robert Browning’s The Inn Album (1875), a versenovel that consciously modernizes The Ring and the Book even as it embraces its own marginal generic status in an effort to sidestep the intractable geometry of circled squares. In the second half of the book, I shift focus from time to space. “Amours de Voyage: The Verse-Novel and European Travel” reflects on the expansive generic geography of the form. Like the influential ur-text Don Juan, almost all verse-novels exhibit what Clough calls amours de voyage. Chapter 4 considers some overlapping thematic and structural aspects of travel in a group of explicitly cosmopolitan verse-novels (Clough’s Amours de Voyage, Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Owen Meredith’s Lucile [1860] and Glenaveril [1885], and George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy [1868]): their use of the railway, of guidebooks, of epistolarity, and of plots involving hybrid heredity. The spatial energies of verse-novels often avoid not only the epic teloi of nation founding and empire building but also the novelistic telos of the courtship plot: marriage. These works travel in order to destabilize both their generic terrain and their ideological certainties. A postscript considers William Allingham’s Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland (1864), an exception to this travelling spirit that proves the rule. Chapter 5, “E Pluribus Unum: The American Verse-Novel,” travels across the Atlantic to consider how and why verse-novels, both imported and indigenous examples, garnered such remarkable American popularity, especially in the period leading up to and through the Civil War and during Reconstruction. I begin with the journeys of European versenovels to American shores, fostered by what Meredith McGill has called a “culture of reprinting” that existed in the United States. I then turn to look at the native literary scene, which had borne many successful writers of long narrative verse, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (whose Evangeline [1847] was an important source for Clough’s early experiments in the verse-novel). Finally, I examine a trio of American verse-novels, all heavily indebted to Aurora Leigh, which exemplify, in variously

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negotiating that debt, how the form was used to navigate the particular cultural terrain of the post-bellum period: Josiah Holland’s Kathrina: Her Life and Mine, in a Poem (1867), Lucy Larcom’s An Idyl of Work (1875), and Epes Sargent’s The Woman Who Dared. For these writers, verse-novels seemed to offer peculiar purchase on their American publics. In conclusion, an Afterword, “Adulterated Verse, the Modernist Remix,” reflects on the legacy of the Victorian verse-novel by addressing the genre’s substantial influence on modernist fiction. Throughout the book, I find myself turning to the modernists to highlight aspects of the verse-novel; the Afterword attempts to explain why. I circle back to the subject of my Introduction by considering Virginia Woolf ’s response to Aurora Leigh in her essays and in The Waves (both 1931). I then return to the topic of my first chapter by looking at how the theme of adultery enters a series of high modernist novels accompanied both by nods to some of the Victorian poems I have considered in the previous pages and by the same kinds of formal fracturing that I have shown to be characteristic of the verse-novel genre. By locating traces of verse-novels in works such as Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (1904), Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), we can see that, rather than the literary dead end it is so often assumed to be, the Victorian verse-novel was a brave new beginning for generic experimentation.

NOTES 1. Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, letter to Mary Russell Mitford, December 24, 1844, in The Brownings’ Correspondence, ed. Phillip Kelley and Scott Lewis (Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press, 1991), IX.291–4. To avoid confusion, I will consistently use her married name, Barrett Browning, in the text above. 2. Matthew Arnold, Preface to the first edition of Poems (1853), in On the Classical Tradition, ed. R. H. Super, vol. 1 of The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 4. 3. [William Edmondstoune Aytoun], “Mrs Barrett Browning—Aurora Leigh,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 81 (January 1857), 40, 41. 4. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, ed. Margaret Reynolds (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), V.210–13. Hereafter, internally documented by book and line number. 5. Elizabeth Barrett Barrett to Robert Browning, March 20, 1845, in The Brownings’ Correspondence, ed. Phillip Kelley and Scott Lewis (Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press, 1992), X.132–5. The full ellipsis ( . . . ) is mine, but here and elsewhere I preserve EBB’s unusual two-period ellipsis. 6. Ralph Cohen, “History and Genre,” New Literary History 17.2 (Winter 1986), 210.

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7. Charles LaPorte notes the continued “evaluative sense” of the term poetry even after a “more nuanced sense of genre” begins to arise in the midnineteenth century. LaPorte, “Post-Romantic Ideologies and Victorian Poetic Practice, or, the Future of Criticism at the Present Time,” Victorian Poetry 41.4 (2003), 520, 522. 8. David Masson, British Novelists and Their Styles (Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1859), 7. As its title indicates, Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance (1785) had focused on the more idealizing and fantastic branch of prose fiction. 9. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 11. 10. OED cites George Eliot’s Essays: “In every genre of writing it [sc. wit] preserves a man from sinking into the genre ennuyeux.” Still, the most common meaning of the term at the time was the painterly one, OED 2. a.: “A style of painting in which scenes and subjects of ordinary life are depicted.” Such genre-paintings provide a visual analogue to the novel, suggesting the dominance of the latter form in the period. 11. See the “General Introduction” to The Ring and the Book, I–IV, vol. VII of The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, ed. Stefan Hawlin and T. A. J. Burnett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), xi–xv; and Algernon Charles Swinburne, Under the Microscope (Portland, ME: Thomas B. Mosher, 1899), 36, 37 (the book was first published in 1872). 12. See Herbert Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Other books of note to consider epic verse include Colin Graham’s Ideologies of Epic: Nation, Empire and Victorian Epic Poetry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), Matthew Reynolds’s Realms of Verse, 1830–1870: English Poetry in a Time of NationBuilding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), Simon Dentith’s Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), and Clinton Machann’s Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010). The trend has been acknowledged in a volume of the Journal of Victorian Culture, guest edited by Adelene Buckland and Anna Vaninskaya, that considers “Epic’s Historic Form” (as their introduction would have it) in the context of the rise in poetry studies of neoformalist approaches and a growing interest in the forms of history (Journal of Victorian Culture 14.2 [October 2009], 163–72). Suggestively, this joint historical and formal focus also marked one of the earliest accounts of the Victorian long poem—one that continues to exert influence—Carol Christ’s “Myth, History and the Structure of the Long Poem,” in Victorian and Modernist Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 101–41. 13. See, for example, Meg Tasker, “Aurora Leigh: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Novel Approach to the Woman Poet,” in Tradition and the Poetics of Self in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry, ed. Barbara Garlick (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002), 23–41; Dorothy Mermin, “Genre and Gender in Aurora Leigh,” The Victorian Newsletter 69 (1986), 7–11; Susan Friedman,

Introduction

14.

15.

16. 17.

25

“Gender and Genre Anxiety: Elizabeth Browning and H. D. as Epic Poets,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5 (1986), 203–28; and Marjorie Stone, “Genre Subversion and Gender Inversion: The Princess and Aurora Leigh,” Victorian Poetry 25 (1987), 101–27. See Natasha Moore, Victorian Poetry and Modern Life: The Unpoetical Age (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), esp. 10–12. Moore does, however, find herself returning to it at points throughout her study. The best introduction to the verse-novel form is by Dino Franco Felluga, in his brief but immensely rich essay, “Verse Novel,” in the Blackwell Companion to Victorian Poetry; his essay “Novel Poetry: Transgressing the Law of Genre” (Victorian Poetry 41.4 [Winter 2003], 490–9) also considers the subversive aspects of novelized poetry and the instability of genres. While centered on Aurora Leigh, Meg Tasker’s essay, “Aurora Leigh: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Novel Approach,” gives suggestions as to how the genre might operate more broadly. Catherine Addison covers related terrain while drawing attention to the current upsurge in examples of the genre in “The Verse Novel as Genre: Contradiction or Hybrid?” Style 43.4 (2009), 539–62. See Rod Edmond, Affairs of the Hearth: Victorian Poetry and Domestic Narrative (London: Routledge, 1988). Edmond does briefly focus on the form (31–7) and considers it in his treatment of Aurora Leigh (130–2). In Chroniclers of Life: Studies in Early Victorian Poetry (Calcutta: Orient Longman’s, 1962), Amalendu Bose includes a chapter on the verse-novel, “ ‘New Mold’—The Early Victorian Verse-Novel,” in which he protests the comparative critical disinterest in the form (96–139). Matthew Reynolds has homed in on several examples of verse-novels—and their courtship plots— as constituting a “realm of verse” crucial to the process of (epic) nationbuilding; his recognition of the political aspects of form has been important to my own work in what follows. Herbert Tucker offers a provocative if rapid survey of verse-novels in Epic (408–14), in which he largely views such works as demonstrating the novel’s home-bound enmity to the epic impulse. Anyone working on this genre also owes a debt to Adam Roberts’s Romantic and Victorian Long Poems: A Guide (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), a remarkable labor of love combining short prosodic descriptions and plot summaries of a wide range of the period’s longer works of verse with a useful introduction discussing the long poem. Roberts includes an entry for the “distinctly Victorian phenomenon” of the verse-novel (209). While no monographs about the form have been published to date, Raymond E. Colander’s Ph.D. dissertation, “The Victorian Verse Novel” (University of Michigan, 1970), offers a useful overview. Colander is especially good at locating the verse-novel’s forerunners (he identifies these as Byron, Wordsworth, and Crabbe) and discussing the rather scathing contemporary reviews. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” Critical Inquiry 7 (1980), 66. Henry Homes, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: 1762), III.219.

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18. A. H. Clough, letter to F. T. Child, 16 April 1858, in The Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough, 2 vols., ed. F. L. Mulhauser (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1957), II.546. 19. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), 7. 20. Patricia M. Ball, The Heart’s Events: The Victorian Poetry of Relationships (London: Athlone Press, 1976). Ball claims, though, that the poems she considers (including Amours de Voyage, Modern Love, and The Angel in the House, as well as more lyrical works like In Memoriam) are un-novelistic in their “devaluation of incident in favour of inward action” and their “violation” of or “hostil[ity]” to narrative (4, 5). But I have argued elsewhere that the former trait is in fact characteristic of many of the novels of the period (see The Crisis of Action in Nineteenth-Century Literature [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006]). Moreover, the narrative aspect of these poems strikes me as remarkable rather for its presence than its violation, given the historical tendency toward lyric in love poetry. Nevertheless, Ball’s insightful book deserves more critical attention than it has been accorded. Kerry McSweeney also glancingly considers verse-novels in Supreme Attachments: Studies in Victorian Love Poetry (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 9–10. 21. See D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). More recently, a number of critics have called this force into question, arguing that novels rarely contain individual agency as tidily as strict Foucauldian readings would have us believe. See, for example, Amanda Anderson, “The Temptations of Aggrandized Agency: Feminist Histories and the Horizon of Modernity,” Victorian Studies 43.1 (2000), 43–65; Andrew Miller, “Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century,” SEL 43.4 (2003), 959–97; and Caroline Levine, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003). 22. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 7. See Felluga, “Verse Novel,” and Tasker, “Aurora Leigh: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Novel Approach.” 23. For these terms, see David Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 165. 24. See Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, “General Introduction,” in The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Jackson and Prins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 1–8. I am aware that my own use of the concept of the lyric is open to charges of just such lyricization. But I use the term advisedly, since I believe that the verse-novel arose partly in response to the historical shifts in how poetry was conceived, including its increasing identification with the abstraction that came to be called lyric. 25. Elizabeth Barrett Barrett to Mary Russell Mitford, December 30, 1844, in Brownings’ Correspondence, IX.302–5.

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26. Unsigned review of Craigcook Castle and Aurora Leigh, Monthly Review of Literature, Science, and Art I (1856), 749. 27. Virginia Woolf, “Aurora Leigh,” in The Second Common Reader, ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt, 1986), 210. 28. The phrase comes from the introductory sonnet to The House of Life (1870–81). Unlike some Victorian sonnet sequences, which use their serial forms to tell stories with novelistic conventions in mind, Rossetti’s sequence remains resolutely lyrical. As we shall see, George Meredith’s Modern Love (1862) offers a contrasting awareness of the novel. 29. Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 226. Culler has long linked this feature of lyric poetry to its apostrophic tendencies, since “the apostrophe [is located in] a special temporality which is the set of all moments at which writing can say ‘now.’ ” Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 149. 30. Monique R. Morgan, to whose ideas on the subject I will have repeated recourse in what follows, provides a narratological account of the role of time in long poems of the nineteenth century in Narrative Means, Lyric Ends: Temporality in the Nineteenth-Century British Long Poem (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009). 31. “Antiquus” [John Stuart Mill], “What is Poetry?” Monthly Repository 7.73 (January 1833), 64, 61–3. This essay was reprinted and revised together with “The Two Kinds of Poetry” (from the October 1833 Monthly Repository) in 1859 as “On the Varieties of Poetry.” Although the 1859 version is slightly different, both the first and last sentences quoted were retained verbatim— including the reference to “novels in verse” and the original emphasis on “life.” 32. For the novel’s dominance of the literary marketplace and the resultant pressure exerted on the form of poetry, see Dino Franco Felluga, “Tennyson’s Idylls, Pure Poetry, and the Market,” SEL 37.4 (1997), 783–803. 33. Herbert F. Tucker, “Story,” Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 132. 34. John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. Ian Ker (London: Penguin, 1994), 196. 35. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), in Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 531. 36. Walter Pater, The Renaissance, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), xxxi, 152. 37. Tucker, “Story,” 141–2. 38. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet 43, ll. 2–3, in Sonnets from the Portuguese, in Aurora Leigh and Other Poems, ed. J. R. G. Bolton and J. B. Holloway (London: Penguin, 1995), 398. 39. Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, ed. Pam Morris (London: Penguin, 2003), 259.

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40. Herbert F. Tucker, “The Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 232, 231, 235. 41. Dorothy Mermin, The Audience in the Poem (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 10. 42. Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, letter to Mary Russell Mitford, December 30, 1844, in Brownings’ Correspondence, IX.305. 43. [Aytoun], “Mrs Barrett Browning—Aurora Leigh,” 34–5. His metallurgic metaphor is striking here given Robert Browning’s use of the same imagery to explain the relationship between fact and fiction in The Ring and the Book. 44. William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols., ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1974), I.152. He begins the Preface explaining his decision to use “the real language of men” (I.138). 45. Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), I.144. 46. [Walter Bagehot], “Mr Clough’s Poems,” National Review 15 (October 1862), 315. 47. Epes Sargent, The Woman Who Dared (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1870), 99–100. 48. Curiously, E. S. Dallas turns to this fairytale to describe the difficulty of representing the sense of touch in poetry: “Under the name of touch is comprehended a number of impressions . . . ; yet few of them blossom into poetry, and still fewer bear the fruits of poesy. Perhaps the reason is not that they are of a grovelling nature, but that, from their being so customary, we pay little attention to them. And if so, we are bound in all modesty not to deny that those who do cultivate the sensations may find them poetical. . . . Of the fine perceptions of that Eastern princess, who, for three hard lumps, raised by three small peas placed underneath the countless layers of feather and down on which she reclined, was utterly unable to sleep, thereby proving her royalty, who will say that they were unfitted to afford her noble pleasure?” Dallas, Poetics: An Essay on Poetry (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1852), 58–9. 49. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ed. Graham Handley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 289. 50. Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1850), in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, I.157 (note). 51. [Aytoun], “Mrs Barrett Browning—Aurora Leigh,” 30. 52. Review of Don Juan, VI–VIII, Literary Gazette (July 19, 1823), 452. George Gordon, Lord Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, ll. 241–2, in Byron: Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page, rev. John Jump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 116. 53. As Robert Stark has shown, Barrett Browning deviates in complex ways from the “expected norms” of blank verse in order to “transform[] . . . it into a pliant verse-form well suited to the age of the novel.” Robert Stark, “ ‘[Keeping] up the Fire’: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Victorian Versification,” The Journal of Browning Studies 1 (2010), 49.

Introduction

29

54. Tasker uses the phrase “a poetic version of the doctrine of separate spheres” to describe how Victorian genre theory had a habit of “putting poetry on a pedestal” of idealism (the implication is, like women) (“Aurora Leigh: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Novel Approach,” 31). 55. Horace, Ars Poetica, ll. 1–9, qtd. in Duff, Romanticism and Genre, 165 (note 33). 56. [Aytoun], “Mrs Barrett Browning—Aurora Leigh,” 32, 37, 39, 36. 57. Felluga identifies this poem as that which influenced Wordsworth—when he came to assemble his list of the genres of narrative verse for the “Preface of 1815”—to include among them the “metrical novel.” See Felluga, “Verse Novel,” 172. 58. See Albert Morton Turner, “A Study of Clough’s Mari Magno,” PMLA 44.2 (1929), 581. Clough praises Crabbe’s (Dutch) realism in a letter to F. J. Child of November 13, 1856. See Correspondence, ed. Mulhauser, II.520. 59. Elizabeth Barrett Barrett to John Kenyon, October 8, 1844, in Brownings’ Correspondence, IX.176–8. Earlier, however she had been more dismissive, writing that “It used to be and is and ever will be an impossibility for me to call him a poet.” Barrett Barrett, letter to Mary Russell Mitford, July 9, 1836, in The Brownings’ Correspondence, ed. Phillip Kelley and Ronald Hudson (Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press, 1985), III.177–83. 60. See Coventry Patmore, “Crabbe and Shelley,” in Principle in Art (London: George Bell and Son, 1907), 122–8. 61. The phrase occurs in “Delay has Dangers” (l. 219) and has served in the title of a study of Crabbe’s poetry: Gavin Edwards’s George Crabbe’s Poetry on Border Land (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990). 62. Jerome McGann, “The Anachronism of George Crabbe,” ELH 48 (1981), 555–72. 63. See my argument about Wordsworth’s poem The Borderers in chapter 1 of The Crisis of Action. 64. See Duff, Romanticism and Genre, 168; and Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments, no. 412, in Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 83. 65. Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments, no. 116, in Philosophical Fragments, 31. 66. Duff, Romanticism and Genre, 70. 67. [Aytoun, William Edmondstoune], “Alexander Smith’s Poems,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 75 (March 1854), 348. Aytoun may have taken the epithet from comments Charles Kingsley had made on Byron and Shelley, although Kingsley considered Shelley to be the real source of this strain. See [Charles Kingsley], “Thoughts about Shelley and Byron,” Fraser’s Magazine 48 (November 1853), 568–76. 68. See Marjorie Stone, “The ‘Advent’ of Aurora Leigh: Critical Myths and Periodical Debates,” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web. [Accessed September 27, 2016].

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69. See Alexander Pushkin, letter to Prince Vyazemsky, November 2, 1823, quoted in Eugene Onegin, A Novel in Verse, ed. Stanley Mitchell (London: Penguin, 2008), xiv. 70. Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onéguine: A Romance of Russian Life, trans. Lieut.-Col. [Henry] Spalding (London: Macmillan and Co., 1881). 71. See, for example, Richard Lansdown, “The Novelized Poem and the Poeticized Novel: Byron’s Don Juan and Victorian Fiction,” Critical Review 39 (1999), 119–41. Karl Kroeber argues that Don Juan looks forward to “a new kind of novel writing” (Romantic Narrative Art [Madison: University of Madison Press, 1960], 149). Felluga has recently viewed Don Juan as an important influence on the Victorian verse-novel for how it “engages both the novel’s and the lyric’s claims to truth and virtue, thus setting up the maneuvers that would later be exploited by the Victorian verse novel.” Dino Franco Felluga, “Truth Is Stranger than Fiction: Don Juan and the Truth Claims of Genre,” MLQ 77.1 (March 2016), Abstract. 72. Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments, no. 146, in Philosophical Fragments, 36. Edmond, Affairs of the Hearth, 34. 73. “W[alter] B[agehot],” “Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning: or Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry,” National Review 19 (November 1864), 29. Bagehot’s titular categories are only loosely connected to genre, and the contemporary volumes he is reviewing by Tennyson (Enoch Arden) and Browning (Dramatis Personae) offer no clear examples of versenovels (although Enoch Arden can be considered a verse-novella), in spite of his discussion of them in relation to the “metrical species of sensation novel.” Moreover, he does not mention Don Juan by name (as he does The Giaour and The Corsair), although the context of the review suggests he’s thinking about it. But the review as a whole proves how the popularity of the novel colors both the writing and the reception of such hybrid poems. 74. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” 6. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 58–9. For more on the shifting perception of Byron’s poem among readers, see Nick Bujak, “The Novelistic Poem and the Poetical Novel: Towards a Theory of Generic Interrelation in the Romantic Period,” Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 2014, esp. 22–5. 75. See, for example, Barbara Lewalski’s account of Milton’s strategic use of a mixture of genres in Paradise Lost, which she identifies with Renaissance notions of “epic as heterocosm or compendium of subjects.” Lewalski argues, however, that Milton’s generic play resists Bakhtinian forms of dialogism: “Multiple genres give Milton’s modern epic great complexity, but not the indeterminacy and inconclusiveness Bakhtin identifies as the product of generic multiplicity in the modern novel.” Barbara Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 4, 17.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 13/6/2017, SPi

1 Adulterated Verse I. GENERIC INHERITANCE In 1875, a new book by “Violet Fane” appeared in London (the name, taken from a novel by Disraeli, was the pseudonym under which the woman who would end her life as Lady Mary Montgomerie Lamb Singleton Currie published). Fane (as I will call her) had already established something of a reputation as a poet, having produced a volume of passionate lyrics, From Dawn to Noon (1872), that had been what the Dictionary of National Biography calls a succès de scandale, hinting as it did at the unhappy love affair that had pushed Mary Lamb into her marriage in 1864 with the much older Henry Sydenham Singleton.1 But the new book was—at least on the surface—something different. Titled Denzil Place: A Story in Verse,2 this poem takes the form of a twelve-book blankverse narrative, each book prefaced not only by (generally paired) epigraphs but also by an atmospheric lyric introducing the mood of the following section of the story (the latter strategy had been used in other novels in verse to which I will be returning, like A. H. Clough’s Amours de Voyage and Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House). In addition, a “Conclusion,” situated more than a decade after the events of the last book, follows the story proper and offers a glance into the characters’ futures. Finally, the book is rounded off by more paratext: an authorial epilogue, set like the lyric preludes in a smaller font, gives a defense of the poem.3 In fact, Fane had to defend her new work on two fronts. First, she had to validate the content of her tale, a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of an adulterous relationship. Second, she needed to explain her unconventional formal choices. In this chapter, I wish to argue that these two aspects of Denzil Place are actually intimately connected to each other. Moreover, seen in conjunction, they demonstrate the underappreciated but critical importance of the Victorian verse-novel.4 Fane’s story follows the fortunes of Constance Leigh, whose name signals her author’s debt to the single most influential Victorian versenovel, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, the work with which

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I began my own story of the genre in the Introduction. Constance, the “orphan daughter of a ruin’d man,” is married off at a tender age to a widower significantly senior to her, Sir John Leigh, a benign but narrowminded and conservative model-Englishman.5 At first she thinks she is happy: “This calmly negative and passive life / Seem’d good to her, and so the days went by” (10). But her daily round is disrupted by the return to the neighboring estate, Denzil Place, of its radical, cosmopolitan owner, Geoffrey Denzil. Unknowingly, Constance falls in love with Geoffrey, even as she believes she is trying to correct his morals; he, in turn, more consciously becomes enamored of his neighbor’s beautiful young wife while attempting to instruct her in the shortcomings of organized religion and in causes like the push for Italian independence. Constance finally discovers her own feelings when Denzil is injured while rescuing her stepson during a fire at Farleigh Court (another nod to Aurora Leigh). Both parties try to resist their mutual attraction, but they eventually succumb during an unanticipated midnight encounter in Denzil Place, where the Leighs have been invited to stay while Farleigh Court is being repaired. Denzil leaves for the continent to avoid further temptation, but, unbeknownst to him, Constance is also sent abroad by her husband after his sister (who had seen the lovers) reveals the affair. Part Two of the verse-novel follows Constance to Italy (yet more debt to Barrett Browning), where she meets a nun who encourages her to join a convent, falls ill, is rejoined by Denzil—whom the nun had alerted to her illness—and recovers. After a technically chaste but emotionally torrid hiatus during which Denzil and Constance open their minds to each other, Constance is summoned home again by Sir John, who has forgiven her: “All the Past / Should be forgotten” (197), he promises (offering therewith to disband narrative sequence). The night before her intended departure, she and Denzil again consummate their passion. The following morning, though, as they await their parting, a telegram arrives announcing Sir John’s death: his horse had stumbled into a rabbit hole. While his fall proved fatal, Constance’s has a more fortunate outcome: Constance and Denzil marry and enjoy a two-year honeymoon in Italy. But just when it seems that Fane will allow them a real happy ending, Constance dies in childbirth. The Conclusion follows Denzil and his daughter back to England, where it is suggested that the girl will provide a more sanctioned closure in a union with Constance’s stepson.6 Predictably, given this plot, Fane starts the epilogue by worrying about content:

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[I] lay aside my pen,—my story ends, “Of some few years in some few English lives;” Warning of evils wrought by bosom friends To some few English husbands and their wives,—.7 (249)

As a warning, though, her verse-novel fails magnificently; one would be hard-pressed to come up with a more sympathetic account of adultery in Victorian literature—or one that comes closer to allowing its sinners the fruits of their sins. The shock of the reprieve that Constance and Denzil are offered by that deus ex machina in the shape of “A little downy rabbit” (218) is difficult to overstate, especially given that Sir John himself cannot be said to deserve his fate; his forgiveness of Constance even suggests that her fall has worked to widen his provincial moral outlook. Fane seems to acknowledge the fact in a rare admission, following the account of Sir John’s death, of her role as creator of the fiction: Now when this worthy man was sacrificed, I was ashamed I could not sorrow more, But feeling as it were “behind the scenes” I thought “Well, well, since someone must have died (For Death intrudes in fiction as in fact,) I almost think he can be spared the best— So now they will be happy all their lives! And I may tell of how they liv’d and lov’d, And how they henceforth kept the Decalogue And died respected at a ripe old age! (229)

The oddly contrite and only semi-arch tone here shows something of the author’s struggles with the moral implications of her tale. But if the poem ends more conventionally, with the death of one “sinner” and the promise of legitimate love in the next generation, Fane’s decision to name Constance’s more fortunate daughter Violet suggests something of her own investment, both authorial and personal, in a happy ending.8 Moreover this poem— which is always acutely aware of temporality, as I shall argue in more detail below—specifies the substantial two years of joy that precede Constance’s death in a manner that insists on the distinction between such durational (narrative) happiness and the momentary, albeit epiphanic (lyric), pleasures of sex (219). But even stranger than the disingenuous moralizing is the fact that in the next lines of the epilogue, Fane follows her didactic plot précis with a

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defense of the unorthodox form of the book, an issue that she also attempts to diffuse by downplaying it. She calls her tale A simple story—unimproved by rhymes, And unembellish’d with that mystic glow Which hovers o’er the tales of olden times, The chivalresque romaunts of long ago. (249)

While it may emphasize how Fane reserves her rhymes for the least narrative portions of her long poem (the intercalary lyrics), the truth of the first line of this defense is somewhat undercut by the fact that the claim itself appears in rhymed verse. The odd insistence on formal simplicity might thus lead the reader to wonder, Why write in verse at all?—a question addressed, as we shall see, by every contemporary review of the work. This question becomes even more pressing in light of Fane’s subsequent reference to chivalresque romance, the archaic verse form against which she wishes to display her own poem’s modernity. After all, the more obvious contemporary response to such “tales of olden times” is the modern prose Romance, otherwise known as the novel. As David Masson had argued in British Novelists and Their Styles (1859), the first book-length study of the novel in English, the novel’s great advantage over verse lay in its superior ability to deal with the present moment, especially with what he termed “contemporary” “social ‘crisis.’”9 The marriage debates to which Denzil Place belongs, beginning with the establishment of the divorce courts through the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act and persisting throughout the century, offered just such a crisis.10 As the most grievous of assaults on the sanctity of marriage, adultery proved central to these debates: frequently cited as the grounds for a petition for divorce, it was also both a popular and a sensational subject for the divorce court press to cover. Yet, as Tony Tanner has maintained so influentially, adultery was one form of social crisis with which the British nineteenth-century novel had trouble coming to grips; Victorian novels tended to repress awareness of the fact of marital infidelity, so central a feature in the continental tradition.11 And although many critics have contested aspects of this claim, most recognize that it reflects at least a superficial truth. Thus while Barbara Leckie convincingly counters Tanner by demonstrating how the mid-Victorian marriage debates dramatically affected developments within the British novel of this period, she would probably agree that fictional adultery was rarely depicted as straightforwardly as in Denzil Place.12 If “a discursive explosion of representations of adultery exists alongside claims that adultery and the representation of adultery were nonexistent”—including, for example, in

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newspapers and sensation fiction—Leckie nevertheless owns that novelistic treatments of the topic tend to approach it tentatively, both by considering issues of adultery as issues of knowledge and by strictly enforcing punishment: “adultery was translated not as a question of passion, but as a question of epistemology . . . ; sex, to follow Foucault, becomes a question of truth, and adultery becomes a question of truth, and detection and punishment.”13 As J. Herbert Stack put it in a contemporaneous review of “Some Recent English Novels” that seemed to tease readers with the topic, the English novelist faces “a certain peril in any vivid representation of successful sin.” While French fiction writers may wallow in the “illicit poetry” of adultery that they had learned from the tradition of chivalric romance, the English prose tradition staked its ground, rather, on the courtship plot: “for generation after generation, English stories have had the one theme with variations—innocent and ante-matrimonial love.”14 So Fane’s reference to chivalric romance in the epilogue to Denzil Place works both formally and in relation to content: she is acknowledging that her subject owes a debt to a poetic tradition that the British novel has largely repudiated, even as she claims for herself some of the contemporaneity and straightforwardness with which the novel is associated. Of course, Fane’s description of her “simple,” “unimproved,” and “unembellished” tale also comes with a long lineage: while it may recall the title of an earlier novel that considered the consequences of female passion—Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791)—it simultaneously owes something to a great dramatic account of the dangers of misperceived adultery, hinting as it does at Othello’s “round, unvarnished tale.”15 This kind of self-conscious intertextuality is in fact a marker not only of Fane’s poem but also of practically every Victorian verse-novel.16 And while it is a feature of some sensation fiction, too, as Kate Flint has argued,17 such knowing bookishness appears to be intrinsic to the verse-novel form. This should not come as a surprise, given that in the age of the novel, the decision to write “A Story in Verse” necessarily involved a conscious choice not to use the far more dominant prose. Lyric may represent a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”; the novel may seem the natural genre through which to represent social crisis; but the hybrid form of the novel in verse demands some careful grafting, from a wide variety of genetic source texts, both prosaic and poetic. Just as striking, though, is the way in which intertextuality-as-method blends in these works with adultery-as-subject. As practically everyone who has stopped to consider the verse-novel as a form has recognized, perhaps its most arresting characteristic (in both senses) is its tendency to disrupt the novelistic conventions of the Victorian marriage plot.

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In German, the concepts of marriage and genre are linked lexically, the word Gattung referring to both.18 Verse-novels underscore the connection through the potential for division indicated by the hyphen with which, following Barrett Browning’s designation of her novel-poem, I have chosen to join, however tentatively, the two parts of the generic type (often, the hyphen is omitted). Beginning with Byron’s Don Juan, which can in many ways be viewed as father of this bastard genre, a surprisingly large percentage of the period’s long narrative poems address matrimonial failure: both courtships that fail to yield weddings (as in Clough’s Amours de Voyage and George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy) and marriages that break apart through adultery.19 Victorian examples of long poems that use novelistic conventions to consider (if not always fall prey to) adultery include not only Denzil Place but also works as stylistically diverse as Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Eva, or the Ill-Omened Marriage (1842), his son Owen Meredith’s Lucile, Alfred Austin’s The Human Tragedy (1862), George Meredith’s Modern Love (1862), Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, Augusta Webster’s Lota (1867), William Morris’s The Lovers of Gudrun and The Pilgrims of Hope (1885), Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s Griselda (1893).20 (Both Aurora Leigh and Patmore’s immensely influential Angel in the House provide interesting counter-examples to this tendency to which I will return; as I noted in my Introduction, Barrett Browning even wrote her “novel-poem” with the express intention of creating “a Don Juan, without the mockery & impurity.”21) Indeed the trend is so pronounced as to make one wonder whether the form here “leads to” the adulterous content, even as Melissa Valiska Gregory has suggested that “the very form of the dramatic monologue itself . . . not only allows for a sustained examination of the psychology of domestic violence unavailable in other mid-century genres, but actually leads [Robert] Browning to engage the disquieting and outlandish (for the period) subject of domestic conflict in the first place.”22 After all, the dramatic monologue and the verse-novel are themselves closely affiliated forms, sharing as they do the combination of lyric and narrative modes, subjective and objective perspectives, individualist and social drives, and timeless and historicist orientations.23 It may seem perverse to attribute such force to genre, but as Susan Wolfson has shown in relation to Romantic poetry, there is such a thing as “formal agency.”24 For Caroline Levine, different forms possess affordances, a term she uses to designate the “potential uses or actions latent” in them.25 Recognizing formal agency helps us see how powerful an organizing principle genre can be, not only for readers but also for writers; as John Frow defines it, “Genre . . . is a set of conventional and highly organized constraints on the production and interpretation of meaning.”26

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Wordsworth even writes of a poet’s “formal engagement” with his audience in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), language that curiously calls to mind the conventions of the courtship plot that the novel in verse disrupts.27 The prevalence of the adultery plot in the verse-novel—itself a sign of a desire to break the constraints of Victorian marriage—thus highlights genre’s function as a conceptual interface between individual artists and the institutional structures, both political and cultural, they inhabit; work by Franco Moretti (among others) has helped to show that no matter how self-conscious an artist’s generic choices, genre is a social production.28 Fane’s nun preaches to Constance that “lawless love / Must needs assume to all discerning eyes / A shape of dread, a form to be abhorred” (195);29 while the shape of the verse-novel was frequently abhorred and even branded as illegitimate, its rise at mid-century points to the need for a new form to address this particular social crisis. As Carolyn Williams has suggested, “it might well be that in the play of genres”—something the verse-novel seems preeminently to contain—“we can find one perfect place to study the way culture takes form.”30 But for all that this particular form was new, its intertextuality simultaneously alerts us to what might truly be called its storied history. Fane’s classic twelve-book structure suggests that the verse-novel’s embrace of the adultery plot may owe something to the legacy of the founding form of narrative poetry known as epic, the genre at the heart of much of the recent renewal of scholarly interest in the nineteenth-century long poem, as I noted in my Introduction. Adultery has played a central role in epic ever since Helen ran off with Paris: to rewrite both Spenser’s and Byron’s versions of the theme, such poems have always been not only about fierce wars but also about faithless loves. Even the great epic of marriage, the Odyssey, is shadowed by the ghastly story of Orestes’s revenge on his adulterous mother, Klytaemnestra, the example that serves both as warning and as counterfactual possibility to Odysseus and his family. Similarly, in the Aeneid, Dido’s tragedy depends at least in part on our sense that her relationship with Aeneas is a kind of double-adultery: Aeneas is unfaithful to Dido because he must remain proleptically true to his future wife, Lavinia; while Dido herself is acting out a kind of posthumous adultery in forsaking her vow to her dead husband never to remarry. Virgil seems to recognize that the adultery plot brings with it a potential for formal hybridity, suggesting a generic slant to Tanner’s argument that “adultery offers an attack” on “the rules governing what may be combined.”31 Critics have noted the dramatic aspects of Book IV of the Aeneid. These aspects are both citational (Virgil compares Dido in her desperation to Orestes, “hounded on the stage,” who “Runs from a mother armed with burning brands”) and more broadly structural (for

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example, the tripartite nature of the book, divided by the repetition of the phrase, “the Queen, for her part,” recalls the tripartite nature of Aeschylus’s drama).32 For that matter, the Oresteia had itself translated an episode from Homeric epic into dramatic form in order to consider more closely the emotional burdens that adultery places on the heroic ideal. As in so much Victorian sensation fiction, the generic translation also helped to contain both the threat of adultery and the violence of its aftermath in the bounds of law, as represented by the Eumenides. For the Victorians, these amorous aspects of the classics, both epic and dramatic, were particularly attractive. Moreover, readers inevitably interpreted the ancient stories through the conventions of the novels that they were so avidly consuming. In a fascinating review by George Brimley of Patmore’s Angel in the House, in which he called for a new English poetry of “wedded love,” the critic commented how classical epics and dramas were now most appreciated for their love stories. But such works—in the rare instances when they considered marriage (rather than the more common courtship)—usually treated it much like the French novelists: “according to that terrible mot of Sophie Arnauld—as the sacrament of adultery.”33 More recently, David Quint has suggested a justification for such generically transformative reading by arguing that epic adultery played a crucial role in the early development of the novel. He posits that references to the adultery plots of the Odyssey served as one way for Cervantes to inject non-heroic realism into the new, novelistic world that he was creating in Don Quixote (1605).34 Nevertheless, if the heteroglossic novel might once have provided a locus of illicit generic combination, by the nineteenth century, in Britain, it had become largely conventionalized. The ostentatiously hybrid verse-novel arose to take on its adulterating, form-breaking energies. Yet the generically sensitive intertextuality evoked by the history of the adultery plot is not just metatextual but also diegetic. That is to say, fictional treatments of adultery regularly include scenes of reading in order to comment not only on adultery as a subject but also on their own generic status. The Quixote’s role in this genealogy is indicative of such a connection, but one sees it even more forcefully by looking further back into the tradition of what Fane calls “chivalresque romaunts,” at Arthurian legend. One primal site for the trope comes in Dante’s Inferno, in the circle of the lustful, where Francesca famously records the scene of her fall into adultery: One day we read, for pastime and sweet cheer, Of Lancelot, how he found Love tyrannous: We were alone and without any fear.

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Our eyes were drawn together, reading thus, Full oft, and still our cheeks would pale and glow; But one sole point it was that conquered us. For when we read of that great lover, how He kissed the smile which he had longed to win,— Then he whom nought can sever from me now For ever, kissed my mouth, all quivering. A Galahalt was the book, and he that writ: Upon that day we read no more therein.35

Now it is worth noting that this scene, alluding though it does to Arthurian romance, also has an epic angle: Dante (twice) points out Dido among the lovers spinning through his second circle, probably motivated in part by his recollection of Augustine’s musings in the Confessions about the dangers of literary seduction that he had faced as a schoolboy studying Virgil (“For what more miserable than a miserable being who commiserates not himself; weeping the death of Dido for love to Aeneas, but weeping not his own death for want of love to Thee, O God”).36 While all forms of fiction tend to demonstrate unusual self-consciousness when they engage with quixotic reading (just think of Northanger Abbey’s “only a novel”37), such a history of generically diverse intertextuality helps explain why the formally adulterated verse-novel might be particularly apt both to turn to and to register such moments, even (or perhaps especially) in a culture where prose fiction not only reigns but has largely repudiated the adultery plot. Still, the generic stakes of textually engendered adultery are most clearly demonstrated in Violet Fane’s Denzil Place, the verse-novel to which I will now return in more detail. II. LYRIC AND NARRATIVE I might summarize the connections I have been drawing between the verse-novel and the adultery plot with an observation: even if (rather unusually) she is not portrayed as a reader, Tennyson’s Guinevere is the British equivalent to Madame Bovary.38 But her story is told in verse, not in prose.39 The Idylls of the King are in fact crucial to Fane’s thinking about both form and content in Denzil Place. The intertext’s importance appears most clearly when we consider the verse-novel alongside Fane’s earlier collection of love poetry. Since its inclusion in the Oxford Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Women Poets, “Lancelot and Guinevere,” a poem extracted from From Dawn to Noon, may well have become Fane’s bestknown work.40 Much like Denzil Place, the shorter poem is striking because of its content: over the course of its twenty-eight tetrameter quatrains, it tells a story of adulterous reading, with a twist. A wife who

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(it soon becomes apparent) is in an adulterous relationship begs her husband to “read to [her] some other lay” than “The Idylls of the blameless king” he has chosen (the text makes clear he is reading Tennyson’s “Lancelot and Elaine”): Her husband did not seem to hear, Or, if he heard, he heeded not, And so he read of Guinevere And of her love for Lancelot.41

While here the husband is the one doing the actual reading—one might infer that he intends thereby to teach his wife a lesson—the results are much what they had been for adulterous heroines from Francesca to Madame Bovary. That is to say, potentially didactic reading becomes sympathetic, even sensational.42 Tennyson’s “moral,” which the husband wants to instill in his wayward wife, falls afoul of the identificatory impact of immersion in the story; rather stupidly, the husband has chosen to read from that portion of Tennyson’s poem in which the reader (or in this case, listener) is granted her first real insight into Guinevere’s thoughts and feelings about the affair (even though much of this idyll is focalized through its titular protagonists, Lancelot and Elaine). What results is a kind of “play by play” textual commentary in which Fane reveals the wife’s thoughts as the husband proceeds through the idyll; both the narrative voice and the wife’s responses offer periodic hints as to his progress through the poem. Fane’s own poem thus depends upon our close familiarity with Tennyson’s immensely popular intertext, which had first appeared in 1859. As the two narratives progress in tandem, we hear how the wife “sigh[s] anew” for love of Lancelot, while she bemoans the sad fate of Guinevere: “The sneering word, the tarnish’d name, / The galling mask for him she bore.” “Give me the risk, the shame, the sin,” she concludes, even as she begs her husband to “read no more”—an ironic echo of Dante—and “fl[ings] the book upon the ground.” By the poem’s end, although she may “seem[] to pray,” “the coming step of Lancelot” announced in its final line causes “Reader and book alike” to be “forgot”: it is clear that the affair will continue. Victorian genre theory viewed poetry as relatively safe for even the most susceptible readers largely because it was perceived to idealize its content. As David Masson put it, while prose is suited to the real and to matters of the day, “Verse, narrative or other, seeks the general under the particular, the constant under the varying.”43 By offering perfections toward which readers might strive, poetic idealization mitigated the dangers of possible readerly identification, both because those goals were desirable and because they were foreign to the reader’s experience. “In a poem, the

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wildest language of passion, though it may appeal to the feelings, is generally called forth in circumstances remote from the experience of the reader,” wrote Maria Grey and Emily Shirreff in their Thoughts on Self-Culture Addressed to Women (1850), a book that recommended women read poetry because of its ability to “sublime[] the soul by lifting it above the present to the contemplation of ideal beauty”—even as it warned against the “pernicious” effects of novel reading.44 Nevertheless, it has been suggested that Victorian poets were actually able to adopt more radical content than the novelists precisely because the dangers of sympathetic identification are allayed by the particular generic purview of verse: its formal reliance on figurative language, its intellectual challenge, its ostensible distancing from the real. Thus, for example, Meg Tasker has argued (when considering the passionate language of Aurora Leigh) that For men as well as for women, sexual matters were much easier to write about in verse. Not only may sexual desire or activity be described indirectly, through metaphor and allusion (this, after all, is possible in prose), but they could be more freely employed as metaphor in poetry. Poetry allowed such lines as “all that strain / Of sexual passion, which devours the flesh / In a sacrament of souls” (V.14–16) to be used as part of a catalogue of ecstatic forces driving and impelling poetry to speak “in mysterious tune with man and nature,” with a license that might have had a novel (even if written by a man) banned from circulating libraries or severely scolded in the Saturday Review.45

The relative unpopularity of verse also offered poets some leeway in comparison to popular novelists, especially those whose sensational methods attempted most directly to affect the supposedly vulnerable female reading body.46 So while the Saturday Review did scorch Denzil Place, calling Constance “a very dull harlot,” the reviewer remarked that “It is perhaps a fortunate thing when a writer who has a taste for depicting vice suffers also from the poet’s itch. There are a great many stupid people”—soon identified by the reviewer as women—“who would relish an immoral story, but who have too poor an opinion of their own ability to read anything that is printed like poetry. Had not Miss Fane . . . in her folly mistaken herself for a poet, she might have filled three volumes of a novel with her story, and have secured for herself as many readers as any other writer of her class.” (The reviewer does, however, worry that “there is a danger that in the form in which the story has appeared it may spread its insidious poison in quarters where it will be unsuspectingly received.”) Similarly, The Athenaeum described Denzil Place as “a novel, of a rather objectionable type, told in verse,” and speculated, “What reason can have

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induced the author to tell the story at all is difficult to guess; the motive for putting it into verse is probably that the writer may plead poetic license in vindication of the warmth of her descriptions.”47 But “Lancelot and Guinevere” is generically significant both because its narrative mode adopts sexual content as well as sexually figurative language and because it self-consciously shows a reader of (or, rather, listener to) narrative poetry—and narrative poetry set in a remote past, at that—losing herself in a sympathetic reading process akin to that of novel-readers: Then throbb’d the heart of her who heard, As though the spirit of the queen Within her bosom lived and stirr’d, And made of her what she had been. (133)

The regular, throbbing heartbeats of the iambic meter heighten the experience of sympathetic identification, encased as they are in the extraordinarily dense alliteration and assonance of the phrase “heart of her who heard,” the aural repetitiveness of which is emphasized by its metrical beat. (The phrase also curiously recalls Tennyson’s “he who tells the tale,” his circumlocution in the Idylls for distinguishing between his own narrative voice and those of his source texts, which can similarly work to conflate what it intends to separate.) That Fane has chosen octosyllabic quatrains, a meter and rhyme scheme that had become closely identified with Patmore’s Angel in the House, emphasizes the irony of putting the one-two of an iambic pattern, used by Patmore to propagate the two-in-one of conjugal feeling, to such adulterous purposes.48 But adulterous purposes are also readerly purposes: the identification between the listening wife and Guinevere is further highlighted by the stanza’s struggle to differentiate pronouns, especially at its end, where the poet must resort to italics to distinguish between her two “she”s. And the poem’s easy transference of the name “Lancelot” to the lover in its final line demonstrates the completeness of the identification, as does Fane’s revision of the idyll’s title, removing Elaine and substituting Guinevere. The epigraph to Fane’s collection of lyrics proves that she was already thinking about sympathetic reading through the lens of a verse-novel, Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh: To sit alone And think for comfort how, that very night, Affianced lovers, leaning face to face, With sweet half-listenings for each other’s breath, Are reading haply from a page of ours,

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To pause with a thrill (as if their cheeks had touched) When such a stanza, level with their mood, Seems floating their own thought out—“So I feel For thee—and I for thee”. (iv.; Aurora Leigh V.446–54)

In these marvelous lines, Barrett Browning seems also to be revisiting and revising Francesca’s account of her fall—her lovers are safely “affianced”; their thoughts float through an ideal medium that preserves their bodies from the need for more physical contact (“as if their cheeks had touched”). It is a fall that Fane will reinscribe (although with that odd substitution of present husband for absent lover). But both poets use such scenes of reading to offer their own readers templates of how they themselves would ideally like to be read. And for both poets, the empathetic experience of love— whether affianced or adulterous—provides the model for ideal reading. Still, the placement of “Lancelot and Guinevere” in the Oxford Anthology, where it is followed by a couple of later, rather political poems (the first imagines the thoughts of the noble sitters to antique portraits up for sale at Christie’s; the second, a sonnet, is written in tribute to Fane’s fellow poet and fellow verse-novelist, friend, and sometime lover, Wilfrid Scawan Blunt, to celebrate his work for Irish Home Rule), obscures its strangeness in the context of the early collection and thus also much of its specifically generic impact. For of the sixty-one poems that comprise From Dawn to Noon, “Lancelot and Guinevere” is the only narrative work, the only poem to abandon the lyric “I” in favor of a combination of third-person narrative and dialogue. This fact is rendered even more conspicuous by its penultimate placement within the volume: to come upon it as one does after having read through one hundred and thirty pages of resolutely, indeed aggressively, lyric poems is to feel all the force of a fall into narrative. Something of the motivation for this move can be gleaned by considering the collection’s final poem. Its title, “Now,” suggests a deliberate return to lyric. But for all its lyricism, this poem concludes with a kiss that registers a surprising modal ambiguity to the volume as a whole: And give to me, ’ere yet these moments die, The bliss of half a death beneath thy kiss! Again, and yet again! Like this—and this! Once more, my darling! ’ere I say Goodbye! (140; original emphasis)

The ecstatic final lines thus remind us of this lyric’s own larger narrative frame, and of the way in which, for all the loyalty to the moment expressed by individual poems, the collection of lyrics has taken us—over the course

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of its two volumes, titled for these times of day—From Dawn to Noon. The farewell gesture, belonging equally to poem and volume, reminds us also of both the desirability and the impossibility of staying in the “noon” moment; Fane probably alludes to Donne’s brilliant “Lecture Upon the Shadow”: “Love is a growing, or full constant light, / And his first minute, after noon, is night.”49 Thus the kiss serves not only as symbol of the perfect two-in-one of lyric love but also of its momentary nature. The rhyme of this and kiss (rhyme itself is a kind of sound-kiss50)—the very ability of the words to serve as synonyms on the page—suggests even that this sheet of verse (the italics emphasize material embodiment) is a kind of reified kiss, a paper “moment’s monument” that can represent all lyric poetry: “and if in after years / This page, then long forgotten, meets your eye, / Think once on one, before you lay it by, / Who gave you all her kisses” (140). Similarly, the halting punctuation, internal rhyme, and repetitive phrasing of the volume’s final two lines seem to repeat the collection’s effect as a whole, stringing together as they do a series of momentary kisses that stand in for the assembled pages of lyrics.51 In a way, then, what the more obviously narrative Denzil Place does is not so much negate all that has come before as reverse the proportions of the earlier collection, by shifting the balance away from lyric and toward story. In fact, Denzil Place’s intercalary lyrics are as invested in exploring the moment as were those of From Dawn to Noon, but each discrete moment these poems describe looks backward or forward to an instant that has been integrated into the surrounding narrative sections. Consider a few of the lyrics’ opening lines (all the lyrics, with the exception of the last, recording Denzil’s response to Constance’s death, can be attributed to Constance’s voice): It came as I lay dreaming As it doth ever, (22) Oh, under my breast I can feel it still My foolish heart that is throbbing yet— (97) You said to me, in that sad hour of parting, So much, so little, and yet everything— (191) To my heart I waking, say “This must be Love.” (213)

In every case, these expressions of momentary feelings can easily be tied to events in the surrounding discourse: to Constance’s first recognition of

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her love for Denzil, to her guilty feelings, to her thoughts on leaving him, to her joy at finding that their love need no longer be denied.52 But within this textually conscious verse-novel they also call to mind a readerly response; in some ways they hearken back to the wife’s interpolated thoughts in “Lancelot and Guinevere.” It is as though Constance were reading her own life’s story and recording (we can imagine the lyrics being written in her diary) her emotional reaction to it as she progresses. This impression is heightened by the additional paratextual apparatus provided by the doubled epigraphs, which similarly comment upon the narrative. The closeness among all three sections of text even works to undermine the distinction between lyric and narrative modes, and in fact the ostensibly narrative parts of the poem contain several distinctly lyrical passages. Fane seemed to recognize this quality when publishing her two-volume collected Poems by Violet Fane (1892), where she included as extracts from Denzil Place not only eight of the lyrics but also three particularly lyrical selections from the narrative portions of the poem (now titled “Snowdrop Immortality,” “Wakeful Hours,” and “‘Good-bye! ’ ”), which can be distinguished in this collection only by their use of blank verse.53 What From Dawn to Noon is missing, though—with the notable exception of “Lancelot and Guinevere”—is the binding causality of narrative action, the sense of choice and consequence that require story to hold them in place. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning had declared lyrically in Sonnets from the Portuguese, suggesting the need for some “depth and breadth” to find the measure of her passion; she would soon thereafter offer not just a count (a series of sonnets) but an account (a story) of love in the versenovel that provided Fane’s epigraph in From Dawn to Noon and her generic inspiration in Denzil Place.54 Fane’s two volumes thus provide the perfect lens through which to consider that quintessentially midVictorian adulteration of the long poem known as the verse-novel and, in particular, to explore how this form uses the theme of adultery to approach the interplay of lyric and narrative drives. III. FALLING INTO NARRATIVE Fane actually references “Lancelot and Guinevere” in Denzil Place, in the context of a discussion of both reading and allusion. Long before Constance and Denzil become lovers—before Constance has even recognized her feelings—“the scandal-loving neighbourhood” begins its “Gossip and slander” concerning the pair (77). But, rather typically, Fane is as interested here in the method of the gossip as in its content, and her observations have a generic slant. She records the neighbors’ imagining how to

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phrase their hints to the lovers in language that would be suitable for use in front of Sir John’s son, Roland, whose youthful presence seems to serve as surrogate for a dangerously impressionable reading public: Their ready minds imagined many words Wrapp’d up in metaphor, or said in French, Italian, German, of so many tongues Denzil was master—surely some of these Might even mystify poor dear Sir John If spoken as tho’ quoted from a book— Ah, then those books! a language in themselves!— Accomplices in crime! The subtle mark Beneath those passages that breathe of love!— The Lancelots and guilty Guineveres— All their forbidden converse underlined— The Fausts and Marguerites, and Héloise And Abelard, Francesca—all the throng Of wicked lovers and illicit loves! (76)

Fane describes the role of reading—specifically, reading of poetry—in leading to adultery. But she also suggests that such reading allows the pleasures of “forbidden converse” to extend into the broader reading community: it is not clear exactly who underlined those amorous texts, as both the lovers and the community are using the books as surrogate speakers, to enable a version of the silence about adultery that Tony Tanner would describe. Just as curiously, poetry appears to be functionally equivalent to the translation into a foreign language with which the passage begins (compare how foreign films long escaped the censorship of the Ratings Board, something art films still manage to do); hence the neighbors’ shift in strategy from other tongues to books of verse, not all of which are foreign. Indeed the reference to Lancelot and Guinevere self-consciously extends the argument to English poetry (both Fane’s own and Tennyson’s). It also switches the audience from naïve son to naïve father, a point emphasized when the narrator continues recording the neighborhood’s opinions (this time, in something like free indirect discourse): Nay, they might almost spare themselves the pains Of even this, and use the English tongue, And it would seem the same to good Sir John As Hebrew or Chaldean—such to him The language of the poet or the flow’r,— The cunning compliment—the tender glance, Who was so simple, thick-headed and good! (76–7)

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The equivalences in the fourth through the sixth lines of this passage are both stunningly compressed and comprehensive: Hebrew, Chaldean, poetry, the language of flowers,55 cunning compliments, tender glances. The point seems to be that all these forms of language require a process of translation that renders them unintelligible, not exactly to the masses (as the scandal-loving neighborhood seems to be in the majority), but to some desirably innocent (and ignorant) portion of society. With a husband “As blind”—or, rather, as prosaic—“as was that husband in the tale / Of Pope and Chaucer” (Fane references the Merchant’s Tale), poetry can serve as a secret code between the verse-infected lovers and a community of eager readers, who are themselves, like us, eagerly awaiting “a ‘thick’ning of the plot!’” (77), who require story as well as verse. But Fane’s observations here on the impenetrability of poetry preempt the arguments of those very critics who were thankful that she “had the poet’s itch”; these passages thus display her typically knowing stance. Yet if the discussion of poetic language comes embedded in a discussion of adulterous reading, it is worth noting that it is the community, not Fane’s narrator, who attribute the lovers’ sinfulness to such books. Because for all that “Lancelot and Guinevere” offered a model of adulterous sympathetic reading, Denzil Place presents a rather more complicated account of a fall into textuality. Unlike Madame Bovary, Francesca, and Fane’s own “Guinevere,” Constance does not read any pulsating accounts of sinful lovers, either in verse or in prose. As Fane goes to some efforts to point out in her epilogue, in the course of offering the defense of her poem, No naughty novels did my Geoffrey lend,— No Ernest Feydeaus, and no Paul de Kocks, He was the “working man of England’s friend” And talk’d of Progress whilst she knitted socks, ’Twas thus they fell . . . . ! E’en as they sagely plann’d The reformation of the human kind. (251)

Fane must have chuckled to herself over the pairing of Paul de Kocks56 with knitted socks; the rhyme offers a good example of the colloquial verse style encouraged by the verse-novel but abhorred by critics of the genre, who saw it as contaminating the ideality of poetry. Socks could give the peas I discussed in my Introduction a run for their money in this regard; a “poetry of socks” seems to push the very limits of conception. But her point is clear enough: French novels play no role in her lovers’ adultery. Fane may have knowledge of such books—she actually quotes Feydeau’s infamous aphorism, “Ce que les poêtes appellant l’Amour, et les moralistes

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l’Adultère,” as an epigraph to Book V of her verse-novel, the book that includes the lovers’ first sexual encounter. But Constance does not. Other verse-novels had made even more pointed allusion to risqué, French romances in the process of translating the adultery plot not only into poetry but also into moralizing English. Consider George Meredith’s Modern Love, his sonnet sequence recording the breakdown of a marriage (his own), which in its central sonnet, the twenty-fifth of fifty, “step[s] outside of poetic form,” as Dino Franco Felluga has astutely observed, “to remark upon its surrounding poems as not, in fact, poetry at all, but a novel”: You like not that French novel? Tell me why.57 You think it quite unnatural. Let us see. The actors are, it seems, the usual three: Husband, and wife, and lover. She—but fie! In England we’ll not hear of it. Edmond, The lover, her devout chagrin doth share; Blanc-mange and absinthe are his penitent fare, Till his pale aspect makes her overfond: So, to preclude fresh sin, he tries rosbif. Meantime the husband is no more abused: Auguste forgives her ere the tear is used. Then hangeth all on one tremendous If:— IF she will choose between them! She does choose; And takes her husband, like a proper wife. Unnatural? My dear, these things are life: And life, they say, is worthy of the Muse.58

As so frequently in Modern Love, the speakers here are hard to pin down: Is this the narrator talking to the reader, or the husband talking to his wife? The poem’s toggle between pronouns and voices is among those aspects that make it such a challenging work, since the failure to be consistent undermines the thread of the narrative. The ambiguity also diminishes the distinctions between diegetic and extradiegetic discourse, again suggesting the metafictional quality of the form. But Meredith displays the versenovelist’s typical generic self-consciousness: he is acknowledging his debt to the French novel both formally and in terms of its content (one might add that, after Modern Love, Meredith spent the next twenty years writing novels). Fane opens her own adulterous verse-novel with a subtle bow to Meredith’s poem via the form of its initial lyric, a sixteen-line sonnet (3).59 But when she comes to compose her tale of adultery, Fane shows her interest in novels to be far more abstract. The fact that Constance’s fall occurs in Book V—the book of Francesca in the Inferno—hints that reading will have a role here, too. And it does,

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but the reading material in question proves unexpected. Constance has been staying at Denzil Place while the necessary repairs go on to the fire-damaged Farleigh Court. Denzil, though, is supposedly in Germany, where he had planned to go to escape the temptation posed by Constance. It is night. To pass the time (she is suffering from insomnia), Constance has picked up a book: “Constance had long been reading, now she paused, / Push’d back her hair, and softly sighing, closed / The finish’d second volume of her book” (100). As her thoughts return, inevitably, to the absent but present Geoffrey (she has been staying in his boyhood room), Fane herself pauses to describe both Constance’s efforts to control those thoughts and the book in question: Alas, her book (A simple story of a city life— The wholesome history of honest toil, Inventions, strivings after modest fame Amongst the smoke of London,) she had read. It was a book the very thought of which Would exorcise perforce all foolish fears Of midnight phantoms, bringing as it did Such unromantic scenes of common life Before the mind, unsentimental—real— She took it up, and listlessly turn’d o’er The pages she had read, then starting up Bethought her that the third last volume lay Upon the sofa in the library. (102–3)

Constance’s book appears to be a Bildungsroman60 in the resolutely British, moral, and realist tradition, in many respects the antithesis of the French novel, although one might note that both subgenres lay claim to realism (as Meredith’s sonnet also suggested). Actually the book’s description presages Fane’s take on her own work in its epilogue, discussed above, as “A simple story—unimproved by rhymes, / And unembellish’d with . . . mystic glow.” Yet if Constance’s reading material and the otherwise very different text she inhabits share at least a notional realism, their more pressing resemblance lies in the even more fundamental fact that both books are narratives. Observe Constance’s explicit rejection of the repetition that is rereading, the “listless[]” (a suggestive term) turning over, in any particular order, of predigested material, material no longer requiring the logic of sequence to be absorbed. Constance’s desire to pursue the tale into novel territory propels her into the library, where she meets none other than Geoffrey Denzil himself (he has snuck back into the house to deal with some urgent legal matters). “She utter’d one low incoherent cry, / And

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fainting, fell in Geoffrey Denzil’s arms”—like Dante into Virgil’s arms, at the end of his conversation with Francesca—only to “recover[] consciousness” after the first of a pair of very pregnant lines of ellipsis in Book V that next time will stand in modestly for the sexual act itself (104). Thus when Denzil insists that “now some stronger, some more subtle pow’r / Than I possess, has will’d that we should meet / Here in the dead of night” (105), we as readers are able to name that force: it is the desire for narrative itself, pure and “simple”—the urge, which we share with Constance, to continue with the “story,” any story. It is an extraordinary moment. Fane has self-consciously stripped the scene of its quixotic content, substituting realism for romance. Yet she has just as self-consciously left its narrative shell intact: the tale Constance reads has a clear trajectory, emphasized not only by an obvious developmental thrust predicated on that greatest of Victorian paeans to Progress, the narrative of the self-made man, but also (and even more emphatically) by Constance’s need to turn to the next and final volume. While the emphasis on the materiality of the text, its embodiment in three volumes, is yet another instance of Fane’s more general hyperawareness of textuality, in this case, the most relevant characteristic of the book seems to be its novelistic drive, the fact of its seriality.61 Constance follows the flow of even the purest narrative to her fall. In so doing, she shows herself to be a reader to whom the progress of story itself is significant, offering some necessary relief from her current oppressed state. It is not exactly the relief of hermeneutic suspense—the book in question hardly seems to be a page-turner, like that in Punch’s 1868 cartoon “Sensation Novels,” depicting a servant entering into a room to ask a lodger: “Please, Sir, I’ve been Looking everywhere for the Third Volume of that Book you was Reading.” LODGER. “Oh, I took it back to the Library this Morning, I—” MARY. “Oh! then will you tell me, Sir, if as how the ‘Markis’ found out as she’d Pisoned ’er Two fust ’Usbands?!”62 MARY.

Nor is the relief of the kind offered by total immersion, “losing oneself ” in a book through readerly identification; the protagonist’s gender (likely male, given the focus on a career) and the urban setting would work against such absorption. Nevertheless, Constance’s need to read is real, contrasting, say, with Caroline Bingley’s readerly purposes in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), a novel that pays a similar attention to the divisions of a text into volumes. Miss Bingley reads as pretense for flirtation, choosing her book merely because “it was the second volume of ” Darcy’s, and her boredom indicates the consequences of such narrative disorder.63

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I am in fact reminded of another scene in a novel of adultery in which the volumes of a triple-decker play an important role in the plot: the episode in The Golden Bowl (1904) charting the climactic confrontation between Maggie Verver and Charlotte Stant (coincidentally, it occupies book V, chapter 5 of Henry James’s novel). Charlotte has escaped into the garden at Fawns, to “an ancient rotunda” that is described as outside of narrative, “conscious hitherto of no violence from the present and no menace from the future.” She has brought with her a volume of “an old novel,” with which she intends “to cultivate romance in an arbour.” But just as she has disrupted the conventional course of the marriage plot in the first volume of James’s own novel by entering into an adulterous affair with Maggie’s husband, Prince Amerigo, so has she disrupted the narrative order of the book she was intending to read by mistakenly taking up its second volume. Desiring to confront Charlotte, Maggie is thus able to use the “pretext”—both literal and figurative—of bringing her the first volume of the story: “I saw you come out—saw you from my window and couldn’t bear to think you should find yourself here without the beginning of your book. This is the beginning; you’ve got the wrong volume and I’ve brought you the right.”64 As Joseph Allen Boone has argued, the moment is “Emblematic of [Maggie’s] attempt to ‘rewrite’ (as well as re-right) the plot of their lives”—albeit somewhat late into the game—something she does throughout James’s own second volume (named, after her, “The Princess”), in which she reasserts narrative control by restoring the “traditional fictional order” dictated by the conventional marriage plot.65 Boone describes how “the narratological innovations characterizing The Golden Bowl work to subvert [the] ideological structures of institutionalized wedlock by outmaneuvering the spatial and developmental ‘rules’ that govern the traditional marriage plot.” In fact, he argues, such narrative reformation typically accompanies critique of the dominant wedlock and courtship plots in British fiction: “Some novelists . . . since the rise of the [novel], have made inroads against the sexual-marital economy underlying the novel’s dominant tradition. These advances they have accomplished by coupling their thematic expressions of discontent with form-breaking narrative structures.” But Boone’s list of form-breaking structures will strike any reader of Victorian verse-novels as remarkably familiar, rather characteristic of that genre than otherwise: these works strategically displace, reverse, and rewrite the crises, thresholds, and climaxes associated with marriage fiction. . . . [They] tamper with conventional perspectival structures, using narrative viewpoint, spatiality, and distance to create eerie overlappings and repetitions that, in breaking

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narrative linearity, instill new genealogies of meaning and relation . . . [They offer] dual or multiple plot structures [with] decentering energies . . . [and display] complex interweaving of subgeneric modes, styles, and voices . . . [Counter-traditional novels] self-consciously flaunt their generic modalities in order to heighten the tensions residing in their content.66

The counter-traditional impulses that can hide underneath the more overtly disciplinary structures of novels ostentatiously offer themselves up for exhibit in novels in verse. For example, while Henry James himself famously sought out “The Novel in The Ring and the Book,” Browning’s work (which I discuss in Chapter 3) actually makes use of almost all of the disruptive tactics that Boone attributes to James’s own novel. One might recall that James has led critics to seek out “the poem in The Golden Bowl ”;67 the inverted quest suggests how counter-traditional impulses emerge, if not from, then at least in association with, generic hybridity. Nevertheless, even if the various formal strategies James employs in his novel demonstrate his radical designs, Maggie’s restoration of proper narrative order, her wresting of the trajectory of story back from the adulterous Charlotte, offers us a kind of “rewind” moment, a revision of volume one in which the garden at Fawns—and the characters in it—can be returned to something like their prelapsarian state (albeit a much more knowing innocence). It marks a belated return, then, to the novelistic status quo, to the traditions of that old-fashioned triple-decker.68 In contrast, the analogous scene in Denzil Place uses its triple-decker to insist on the need to press forward, to move on. In placing that third volume on the sofa (a sexually suspect item of furniture if ever there was one), Fane hints that the traditional novelistic narrative of Bildung that pushes Constance into the library and into Denzil’s arms shares, perhaps perversely, an element with the countertraditional adultery plot that Constance (and Fane) will embrace. That element is its narrative trajectory, its assertion of the moral force of action. Recall Fane’s description of how her lovers “talk’d of Progress”: “’Twas thus they fell. . . . ! E’en as they sagely plann’d / The reformation of the human kind.” Fane’s own insertion of a principle of novelistic “Progress” into poetry yields not only the generic “reformation” of verse but also a reformulation, even an undoing, of the strictures of the conventional wedlock plot.69 IV. PARADISE LOST AND THE FORMS OF LOVETIME The act of adultery is nevertheless presented ambiguously, signifying simultaneously the possibilities attendant upon reform and its dangers. Constance herself describes this mixed consequence when, in Italy, she

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defends her choice of the vita activa to the nun who has befriended her there (champion of the competing vita contemplativa): I should rejoice To leave the weary world, and come to you And live in pray’r and peace amongst these hills And happy olive-grounds; but that, to me Who have so sinn’d and striven, this the life You lead, would seem too passive and inert Tho ’tis a life free from the bitter sting Of self-reproach. (145–6)

Constance not only recalls her passive condition in the verse-novel’s opening lyric but also echoes Faust in doing so: “Es irrt der Mensch, solang er strebt” (“Man sins as long as he strives”).70 Yet the dangers of her position are suggested by the narrator’s intrusive comment on Constance’s words: (There was a tinge in this, her argument Of Geoffrey Denzil’s subtler sophistry, A few short years ago she had not dared To speak thus boldly upon sacred things.) (146)

Fane seems rather uncertain here of how to view such speech, whether as a sign of laudable human yearning for freedom of action or as proof of our fallen state; perhaps it is both. Still, that “subtler sophistry” in “argument” sounds positively Satanic, and just as many readers have been tempted by the seductive rhetoric of Milton’s fallen Archangel, so Fane calls into doubt our response to Constance, a fallen Eve to Denzil’s Satan. After all, both use doctrines of liberty ex post facto, to justify sins already committed. Actually, Paradise Lost is Fane’s second major intertext in Denzil Place (second to Aurora Leigh, which was of course itself deeply indebted to Milton’s great epic). It is in the garden of Denzil Place that Constance first sees Geoffrey; it is there that their love first blossoms; and it is in yet another garden, this time in Italy, that their love will be renewed. That is to say, for all that Constance’s fall occurs in a library, the site is Edenic. Or, to put it another way, the library location reminds us that Fane is citing the fall in Paradise Lost. Moreover, the allusion further underscores how the poem’s treatment of love illuminates the contest it stages between lyric and narrative drives—especially as regards their competing temporalities. Fane most overtly signals her debt to Milton in Book IX of her poem, the book in which Constance and Denzil resume their relationship, if not yet their sexual relations, in Italy (recall that Milton’s Book IX records the fall). As epigraph to the book, she quotes the passage from Book IV of

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Paradise Lost in which Eve describes her feelings when talking with Adam: “With thee conversing I forget all time; / All seasons, and their change, all please alike” (171; Fane quotes the entirety of Paradise Lost IV.639–56). While almost all other books in Denzil Place begin with paired quotations, Eve’s beautiful paean to the lyric quality of love-talk serves as the only epigraph here (the other exception is Book II, where Fane gives Wordsworth sole billing to introduce Denzil to the narrative). If it seems strange that Fane turns to a moment in Paradise Lost before the Fall to describe the conversation between her postlapsarian lovers, it hints at her dual investment in portraying Constance and Denzil as innocent in spite of their sexual experience and in portraying the fall as more than a one-time event, as something that must be repeated to be confirmed. This principle of repetition is important to Fane, because it highlights the lovers’ “freedom to fall”: if to fall once may be regarded as misfortune, to fall twice looks not so much like carelessness as like choice. That is, if for Milton the paradoxes of “sufficient to have stood yet free to fall” are primarily moral and theological in implication, for Fane they also appear to be generic. Naturally Milton, a poet whose understanding of epic action is rooted in his conviction that “they also serve who only stand and wait” (see, for example, Abdiel and the Son of Paradise Regained ), would also have been alive to the generic implications of this paradox; in the manner of so many novels, his poem internalizes the epic struggle. Fane’s interest in her poetic forebear confirms my belief that Milton generally attracted the Victorians as much for what was protonovelistic in his work as what was epic. Just think of the number of Victorian novels that end by alluding to the conclusion of Paradise Lost (The Mill on the Floss, Great Expectations, Tess of the d’Urbervilles . . . ). So while, as David Duff has argued, Milton’s generic indeterminacy was central to earlier British debates about genre, as well, the verse-novel becomes the perfect form through which to respond to him.71 Fane’s preoccupation with Milton arises from her preoccupation with issues of agency, about which her verse-novel seems as uncertain as its hybrid shape would predict. This uncertainty also manifests in one of the poem’s principal metaphors. From its opening lyric, where Constance describes her soul as “drifting down a stream / To meet some unknown, unexpected thing,” Denzil Place uses the imagery of a river to express a particularly fatalistic conception of narrative flow, a conception that is associated with lyric (3). The metaphor functions similarly to Wordsworth’s central use of the river in The Prelude, where the imagery allows the poet to trace the various tributaries that make “the river of [his] mind.”72 Monique Morgan has argued that Wordsworth’s river imagery contributes to his long poem’s

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“narrative means” to “lyric ends.” She contrasts the figure’s deterministic effect with the more conventional narratological metaphor of a forked path: “In a text with a plot structured like a river, there is no guesswork involved about which path the plot might follow, because there is always only one point toward which all the plot elements could and will converge.”73 Fane’s flowing water follows the progress of the love plot through the lyrics: “As a straw floats upon the gleaming, / Dashing river, / So my heart seems tossing, teaming,” another of the lyrics exclaims (23), its present participles emphasizing the ceaseless predictability of the action; or, later yet, “I seem a straw upon the tide / Of Life’s inevitable stream” (152). In Book V, Fane uses an epigraph (it precedes the Feydeau) to pick up on this fatalistic account of Constance’s fall, quoting from the lyric in Tennyson’s The Princess (1847) that presages Ida’s surrender to love: “Ask me no more: thy fate and mine are seal’d, I strove against the stream and all in vain; Let the great river take me down the main: No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield; Ask me no more.”74

But when the metaphor slides into the narrative in the crucial fall scene of Book V, it seems to shift a bit: “As when a long pent-up river breaks its banks / . . . / so did the heart of Constance overleap / Its breastwork of resolves” (106). In contrast with Ida’s, Constance’s heart becomes the river itself, rather than the straw that floats upon it; that straw is transformed into the far more substantial wooden “breastwork” of her “resolve.” Moreover in breaking its banks, in spreading laterally, the river appears to be resisting its inevitable ocean-bound flow. Again, we can hear an allusion to Paradise Lost: recall that Satan, who experiences Eden “As one who long in populous City pent” feels after an escape into nature, had first entered Eden having “overleadp’d all bound / Of . . . highest Wall.”75 The overleaping heart even suggests that Constance may possess not only Satan’s energy but also some of Macbeth’s “vaulting ambition,” which “o’erleaps itself, / and falls.” Both allusions reinject a principle of (dramatic) agency into the fall and associate this complex agency with temporal convolutions; Milton’s time-bends overlap with how Macbeth’s admission of his “sole spur to [his] intent” comes in the famous soliloquy in which he contemplates “jump[ing] the life to come” to avoid the various repercussions of his forecast deed, the murder of Duncan. “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly,” Macbeth ruminates;76 the feeling seems to be one shared by Constance. But for the actors, such play with time cannot undo responsibility for the deeds done.

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During the lyric love-talk of Book IX that precedes Constance and Denzil’s second, more deliberate and deliberated fall, Fane again turns to the river imagery, this time literalizing it. The lovers watch a rushing, ocean-bound spring torrent coming down the mountains, carrying in its wake the “floating corpses of departed trees” (181). Fane imagines Geoffrey and Constance using the available pathetic fallacy to hold a secret, coded conversation on forbidden topics (in a manner strangely recalling the neighborhood’s scandalous gossip): “Hark to that thund’ring sound!” Constance declares, “Is it a coming storm or floating tree . . . ?” But to Geoffrey “Her words would seem to say—‘Ah, I was frail! / I drifted with the tide—the headlong stream’” (184). Yet those tree-corpses, whose girth seems as appropriate to the bulk of this verse-novel as the earlier straws had been reminiscent of the delicate embedded lyrics that held them, remind us—much like the books they materially resemble—that for all its apparent ability to stop time, even the most lyric love-talk cannot hold back death. Still if, as in Milton, the fall forces mortality upon lovers, it also carries with it a new, narrative form of happiness: history, the vision of the future that Michael shows to Adam, or that Fane herself provides in the forecast offered by her Conclusion. Fane’s evocation of Milton as the poet of lyric marital discourse even within his great epic retelling of the happy fall reminds us, too, that one thing at stake in her verse-novel is the fate of what might be called lovetime, the contest between the sense of love as lyric ecstasy (kairos) and the sense of love as durational (chronos), as wedded not only in but also to time, as dependent upon the serial actions of a story, the three volumes of the novel of a woman’s life—not to mention the various sequels represented by her children.77 While I have argued here that adultery can display the verse-novel’s particular narrative energies, since Petrarch started writing to Laura, extramarital seduction has been more closely associated with lyric (the lyric quality to Adam and Eve’s conjugal converse actually marks them as prelapsarian, subject to a different set of generic rules). Yet for all that it insists on narrative progress, both Fane’s scene of the fall in Book V and the verse-novel as a whole also exhibit significant nostalgia for lyric stasis, manifested in a hyperconsciousness about the passage of time, one of the categories most clearly distinguishing narrative from lyric. Following their initial sexual encounter, when Constance returns to her room after Denzil’s tearful farewell, she notices how The candles still Were flick’ring, but a regiment of dwarfs Compared to what they had been when she left— This told her first she had been long away,

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For in her fever’d brain the flight of Time She could not calculate; so mad, so swift Were those enchanted moments; yet a life, Nay more, it seem’d a whole eternity Of wild emotion, passion, ecstasy, Had pass’d since those four tapers first were lit! (107–8)

The constant smolder seems to betray human experience, which expands and contracts at different tempos, and which, like lyric, can find “a whole eternity” in the “ecstasy” of a moment—a point reinforced here by the turn in the blank verse to lyric rhyme. Fane captures the impossibility of temporal calculations with the two successive iambs, “so mad, so swift”: the first lingering over the madness with its drawn-out “a” sound, both preceded and followed by strong caesuras; the second rushing forward on the force of its alliterative sibilants and careening over the edge of the line, only to pause again to take the measure of “those enchanted moments.” Within lyric, candles tend to validate the worth of the “hard, gem-like flame” of Pater’s ecstatic awareness: brevity and intensity are their be-all and end-all.78 As Edna St. Vincent Millay memorably puts it, “My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night.”79 Such candles are signs of an either/or logic of death and life in which the real point is the transcendence of the distinction in lyric experience. But Fane’s four tapers show how, set within narrative—even narrative verse—candles’ function changes: they serve as visible reminders of the passage of time. Novelistic candles remind us, rather, of the slow burn that accompanies the turn of pages. Constance’s attempt to calculate lovetime continues in her next thoughts, which consider yet another material token of temporality. This time she uses the very “language of flowers” that the neighborhood had identified with verse: “She saw some flow’rs she gather’d yesterday / Unfaded, tho’ it seemed so long ago.” If the candles seem to have burnt too fast, these flowers appear surprisingly slow to fade; the magnetic forces of love have broken Constance’s internal clock. Yet the flowers’ longevity also hearkens back to an earlier moment in the poem; most likely, these are those same snowdrops that had caught Constance’s eyes while wandering through the garden in the previous book, and had occasioned Fane’s own lyric reflections on “snow-drop immortality” (one of the passages excerpted for the 1892 collection): Alas, for snow-drop immortality!— The same to careless eyes, yet not the same,— Heir to the drooping head and fragile stem,—

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The Victorian Verse-Novel Heir to the chaste traditions of the race— Emblem to trusting hearts of those belov’d Whose sleeping bodies, wrapp’d in silent clay, Await the second wakening to life, To rise like these fair blossoms, from a dark Mysterious imprisonment! Ah, who May say if this long-cherish’d metaphor Which Spring each year renews, is, as a whole, Perfect, or but the visionary hope Begot of Faith and Love? Ah true indeed The wondrous resurrection of the flow’r,— The flow’r of kin, the fragrant heir-in-fee, But not, alas, that flow’r of bygone Spring Which brown and faded, lies between the leaves Of some old book, a soulless scentless thing. (79–80)

The passage captures perfectly the difference between the cyclical time of nature, in which snowdrops reemerge each spring, and the cruelly linear narrative of end-stopped human life, in which individual essence (“that flow’r,” as opposed to a mere “flow’r of kin”) is both what matters most and what will inevitably be lost, only to be preserved in “some old book,” with “dim pages like a living tomb” (80). Thus Constance’s still-“unfaded” flowers stand not only as symbols of the eternity of lyric love but also as harbingers of the inevitable ends of the kinds of individual stories that even the longest novels record: as harbingers of death. Constance’s reflections participate in Fane’s own uncertainty in her verse-novel concerning the proper investment in characters’ individuality. On the one hand, here Constance admits that to human lovers, the individual matters more than the species: we care about “that” man or woman, not any man or woman. On the other hand, Fane argues elsewhere—in yet another of the poem’s riffs on forms of textuality— that “all tales of love” are more or less alike: The legend ’graven on the scarabee,— The pictured emblem of the Ninevite,— The roll of papyrus, held in the grasp Of the illustrious mummy,—all of these Translated, doubtless would resemble much Our modern histr’ies of despairing sighs. (114)

Commenting on the generic distinctions between verse-novel and epic, Herbert Tucker argues that “To epicize the story of personal development required an author to hold the protagonist in a longer view, and perhaps a

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blurrier one: a view that subordinated individuating particulars to a collective history,” a perspective that conflicted with “the verse-novelist’s overriding allegiance to the individual case.”80 But the verse-novel is itself conflicted on this front, as Denzil Place demonstrates. And that conflict owes much to the form’s hybrid temporality, as we shift among a lyric “eternal now,” the more chronological “longer view” of an epic “collective history,” and the novelistic lifespan of the individual. The language of flowers also draws renewed attention to the importance of the poem’s garden motif as temporal locus. After those snowdrops have faded and Constance’s fall has been discovered by her petty-minded sisterin-law, she escapes once more to the garden of Denzil Place to collect a more durable posy to take with her to Italy, a “garland” of “evergreen / A dear memento,” to which she adds a label (in case we didn’t get it), “This wreath of leaves was gather’d in the garden / Of Eden;—to be kept for evermore” (125). In Italy, having re-consummated their love, Geoffrey and Constance leave another garden, a different “earthly Eden” (207), as Adam and Eve left Milton’s Paradise: The two poor lovers, as they sought the town, Clinging together sadly to the last, Or arm in arm, or holding hand in hand Like little children. Down the walk they pass’d; The East was red, and speeding on the wings Of Destiny, they saw the boding signs Of dread To-morrow.81 (210–11)

But dread tomorrow proves to bring new hope with Sir John’s death, and time becomes a more benevolent force for Constance: as Fane puts it, “For time had made her Geoffrey Denzil’s wife” (220). Of course, what time can give, it can also take away, and Constance’s death comes all too soon. She is buried along with her lyric evergreen wreath, memento of Denzil Place, in a grave that is also festooned with more perishable “scented southern flowers” (236). Again, Fane seems to want to have it both ways. Perhaps the poem’s ambivalence regarding lovetime can best be captured by Fane’s narrator’s rather oddly personal calculations regarding the value of Denzil and Constance’s two years and a bit of wedded bliss: Oh, for but half a year of such a dream How willingly would I exchange the rest— Those future years of loveless solitude Which Heaven may predestine me to live! (221)

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The gesture weirdly recalls the valediction of “Now”: “And give to me, ’ere yet these moments die, / The bliss of half a death beneath thy kiss!” But the substitution of that “half a year” of married love for the “half a death” of sex celebrated by the earlier lyric signals a shift in generic allegiances. It comes at a price, premised as it is on the fact of Constance’s all-toowhole death and the “future years of loveless solitude” that might follow for both Denzil and his creator. Moreover, Fane’s thoughts about “Snowdrop Immortality” indicated that she has no assurance of compensatory amorous happiness in the afterlife (as I argue in Chapter 2, the question of love’s fate in heaven was an obsession of the age that particularly preoccupied verse-novelists). Yet “half a year” also seems the appropriate measure for a poem half lyric and half novel. This period of lovetime reminds me, too, of Virginia Woolf ’s claim that for all its drawbacks, the great advantage of the versenovel lies in its rapidity. Considering Aurora Leigh, she comments, “As we rush through page after page of narrative in which a dozen scenes that the novelist would smooth out separately are pressed into one, in which pages of deliberate description are fused into a single line, we cannot help feeling that the poet has outpaced the prose writer. Her page is packed twice as full as his.”82 With a page twice as packed, a half-year can feel like a year, and lyric ecstasy can expand into something more durational: into a narrative form of happiness that can hold the serial ups and downs of life. Fane offers us but the briefest glimpse of such happiness; the poet to whom I turn in Chapter 2 makes it a primary concern. NOTES 1. See Helen Small, “Currie, Mary Montgomerie, Lady Currie (1843–1905),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edition, May 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/ 32673. 2. In America, the book was published as Constance’s Fate: A Story of Denzil Place (New York: G. W. Carleton and Co., 1876). It garnered enough attention to merit further editions. I consider the issue of the verse-novel’s American popularity in Chapter 5. 3. As Gérard Genette has shown, paratexts are particularly sensitive to the generic status of the works to which they are appended, serving as the loci for the “transaction” among author, publisher, and public. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin, foreword Richard Macksey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2. Genette devotes a section of his study to the explicit “genre indentifications” that often serve as subtitles (i.e., “A Story in Verse”) (94–103).

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4. Terence Allan Hoagwood and Nicole Stewart also note in the introduction to their facsimile reprint of Denzil Place that “the genre [of the verse-novel] warrants study that it has not received” ([Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1996], 11 n. 8). 5. “Violet Fane,” Denzil Place: A Story in Verse (London: Chapman and Hall, 1875), 6. Further references to this work will be internally documented by page number. 6. The trope of second-generation legitimization of illicit love also occurs in two other prominent novels in verse, Owen Meredith’s Lucile (1860) and (more obliquely, as I discuss in Chapter 2) Coventry Patmore’s sequel to The Angel in the House, The Victories of Love (1861). In both these instances, though, the elder generation of potential lovers avoids actual adultery. 7. The initial “I” is missing in the printed book, although Terence Hoagwood and Kathryn Ledbetter argue convincingly that this is a printer’s error. See Colour’d Shadows: Contexts in Publishing, Printing, and Reading NineteenthCentury British Women Writers (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 140. 8. Hoagwood and Ledbetter note this choice in the context of their claim that over the course of the verse-novel, Fane becomes a more intrusive presence in the text, more of a character in it. They see this trend as contributing to the poem’s self-conscious investment in artifice (Colour’d Shadows, 148). 9. Masson, British Novelists, 17. 10. For the history of Victorian marriage law, see (among others) James A. Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (London: Routledge, 1992); Joan Perkins, Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1989); and Allan Horstman, Victorian Divorce (London: Croom Helm, 1985). 11. Tanner argues that “the invisible, inaudible [adulterous] deed becomes a silence and an absence in the text that gradually spreads, effectively negating what is made audible and present.” “We can see adultery,” he suggests, “as the gap, or silence, in the [British] bourgeois novel that finally leads to its dissolution and displacement.” Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 14. 12. I refer here to the centrality of the adulterous relationship in the poem; Fane is necessarily oblique in her descriptions of the sexual act itself. 13. Barbara Leckie, Culture and Adultery: The Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law, 1857–1914 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 3, 14. As to Leckie’s claim about the epistemological slant given to questions of adultery in the novel of the period, it is interesting that this tendency also applies to the adultery plots of two long narrative poems that flirt with (rather than fully embrace) verse-novel status: Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book. I say more about these works in Chapter 3. For the tendency of adulterers to face punishment in sensation novels, see also Winifred Hughes’s foundational account of sensation fiction, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), which notes that the plots of sensation fiction tend

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14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

The Victorian Verse-Novel to uphold social norms (176). Recent critics who have been more open to considering potentially liberating effects in reading sensation fiction via generic considerations include Anna Maria Jones, who argues that “[t]hrough generically self-conscious plots, [sensation] novels explore the reader’s vexed agency, asking what it means for a reader to choose to both accept and critique (critique while accepting) the discipline of the novel.” Anna Maria Jones, Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007), 16. J. Herbert Stack, “Some Recent English Novels,” Fortnightly Review 15 (June 1871), 732, 735, 739. William Shakespeare, Othello, in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974), I.iii.90. All further references to Shakespeare will be to this edition and will be indicated by act, scene, and line numbers. In their introduction to Denzil Place, Hoagwood and Stewart cite several instances of intertextuality in the poem and comment on its broader “reflexive awareness of textuality itself ” (3), speculating further that “It may be that other Victorian verse novels will be found similarly to textualize the theme of textuality in the service of a social criticism” (11). It is a speculation that the present exploration will validate. See also Margaret Reynolds’s discussion of Aurora Leigh’s intertextuality in the “Critical Introduction” to her edition of that verse-novel. Reynolds, citing Cixous, associates the effect with what she sees as Barrett Browning’s proto-feminist agenda: “this magpie form, which steals fragments of a tradition or language from which women have been alienated, to rewrite or invert them, can be defined by itself (though practiced in modernist and postmodernist works by both women and men) as culturally feminine” (50). See Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1993), 274–93. Flint considers the phenomenon in relation to sensation novels’ effects on their (women) readers: “The reader is habitually acknowledged as possessing a wider, more subtle interpretive system than that granted to the heroine” (293). She argues that the New Woman fiction of the fin de siècle shares this quality. But Flint is relatively uninterested in the generic aspect of intertextuality, merely pointing out that characters’ references to poetry tend to demonstrate sensitivity (284). She also considers Othello’s appearance in relation to the bigamy plot of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1863) (287). Fane’s own verse-novel acknowledges its flirtation with sensation fiction in having Constance reject a “sensational” (the scare quotes are Fane’s) solution to her situation: entering a convent (201). For a longer discussion of these connections, see Derrida (“The Law of Genre,” 73), who cites Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s L’Absolu litérraire for further discussion of the relationship. Adam Roberts also notes the form’s debt to Byron as an indication of its opposition to “bourgeois values” (Long Poems, 209). Describing the versenovel’s “potentially subversive” form, Dino Felluga announces that “It is no

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20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

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coincidence that all the examples of the Victorian verse novel I have mentioned so far revolve around perverse or failed domestic relationships.” As he usefully puts it, citing Hayden White, “What distinguishes the verse novel’s approach to novelistic critiques is an ability to question domestic ideology not just at the level of content, or even the form of the content, but at the level of . . . ‘the content of the form’ ” (“Verse Novel,” 174, 177). Herbert Tucker observes that “With the exception of Aurora Leigh, none of the verse novels we have sampled . . . ends where Victorian prose fiction was supposed to end”—that is, with marriage (Epic, 411). For a generically attuned treatment of the failed courtship of Amours de Voyage in relation to contemporary doubts about action, see my Crisis of Action, chapter 2. Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, an important and early continental example of the verse-novel, similarly addresses adultery. One might note that Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, composed in the 1380s, offers an even earlier example of an extended verse narrative—one with many proto-novelistic aspects, including realistic domestic details and characters—that considers sexual unfaithfulness. Bigamy also appears in several verse-novels and -novellas, like Tennyson’s Enoch Arden (1864), Edmund C. Nugent’s Anderleigh Hall: A Novel in Verse (1866), and Epes Sargent’s The Woman Who Dared (1869–70), a point I touch on in Chapter 2. Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, letter to Mary Russell Mitford, December 30, 1844, in Brownings’ Correspondence, IX.305. Melissa Valiska Gregory, “Robert Browning and the Lure of the Violent Lyric Voice: Domestic Violence and the Dramatic Monologue,” Victorian Poetry 38.4 (2000), 494. As I argue in Chapter 3, the verse-novel also shows an affinity for the subject of domestic violence. See my comments on the relationship in the Introduction. Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 27. Levine, Forms, 11. John Frow, Genre (New York: Routledge, 2005), 10. Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), I.140. See, for example, Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005). That “shape of dread” also recalls Milton’s Death, “If shape it might be call’d that shape had none,” especially given the context here of the nun’s warning about Denzil’s Satanic temptations and the verse-novel’s wider interest in Milton’s epic, discussed below. Milton, Paradise Lost, II.667, in John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1957). All further references to Milton’s writings will be to this edition. Carolyn Williams, “ ‘Genre’ and ‘Discourse’ in Victorian Cultural Studies,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27 (1999), 520. Wai Chee Dimock makes a related point when she describes, in tracking the various generic offshoots of the Sanskrit epic Ramayana, how “Switching genres is one of the most

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31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

The Victorian Verse-Novel eloquent signs of political agency.” Dimock, “Genres as Fields of Knowledge,” PMLA 122.5 (2007), 1384. Tanner, Adultery, 13. Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, 1990), IV.652–3. A similar overlap of generic hybridity and the adultery plot appears in Book III of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590)—the most proto-novelistic book of the poem, centering as it does on the courtship and Bildung of a young woman, Britomart. Here the oddly fabliau-like tale of Malbecco, Paridell, and Hellenore offers a parody of epic; its generic distinctiveness from the surrounding romance marks an effort to contain the threat posed by adultery. [George Brimley], “The Angel in the House,” Fraser’s Magazine 54 (October 1856), 476. I consider this review at greater length in Chapter 2. Quint highlights the references in the inset narrative of the “Curioso impertinente.” Suggestively, he views the offer of a lucrative (bourgeois) marriage to Nausikaa as a second counterfactual plot with which epic flirted (before rejecting it to pursue the heroic ideal) but which Cervantes would embrace through the other major embedded tale of Part I, the Captive’s Narrative. Extrapolating from Quint’s model, one can argue that the Odyssey sets the stage for not only the French novel’s “realist” adultery plot but also the alternative realism represented by the English novel’s bourgeois courtship plot. See David Quint, “The Genealogy of the Novel from the Odyssey to Don Quijote,” Comparative Literature 59.1 (2001), 23–31. I use Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s version of the lines in “Francesca da Rimini (Dante),” from Poems: A New Edition (London: Ellis and White, 1881), 293–4. The passage translates Inferno V.127–38. This translation, which was first published in 1879, was composed in 1862. Flint argues for Francesca’s importance to the history of female reading, proposing that she serves as one prototype (although by no means the only one) for the dangers of sensational reading (The Woman Reader, 17–22). In an analysis that resonates with many of my concerns here, Matthew Reynolds considers Don Juan in the light of Byron’s interest in Paolo and Francesca in his chapter on “Byron’s Adulterous Fidelity.” See The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer and Petrarch to Homer and Logue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), esp. 161–71. The Confessions of Saint Augustine, ed. Temple Scott, intro. Alice Meynell (London: Grant Richards, 1900), 16. This edition reprints the text of E. B. Pusey’s 1838 translation. The allusion to the Confessions also adds autobiography to the generic mix Dante works with in this scene. David Duff has described Dante’s importance to eighteenth-century conceptions of generic hybridity, like Schlegel’s Mischgedicht (Romanticism and Genre, 44, 170). Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. James Kinsley and John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 24. Suggestively, William Morris’s La Belle Iseult (1858), his only extant painting of his adulterous wife Jane (née Burden), is often misidentified as a portrait of

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39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48.

49.

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Guinevere—probably in part because she is shown reading a book. Jane’s relationship to Dante Gabriel Rossetti helped inspire Morris’s The Lovers of Gudrun, which I discuss in the coda to Chapter 2. Of course, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) was itself anglicized by Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensation novel, The Doctor’s Wife (1864) (see Flint, The Woman Reader, 288–91; Leckie, Culture and Adultery, 139–53). But my point is that Guinevere’s prominence in the British cultural imaginary of adultery makes her Madame Bovary’s more potent double. Oxford Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Women Poets, ed. Isobel Armstrong, Joseph Bristow, and Cathy Sharrock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Hoagwood and Ledbetter also note the content overlap between these poems, although their primary concern is with their related print apparatuses (Colour’d Shadows, 137–8). Clare Broome Saunders offers a brief reading of the poem in Women Writers and Victorian Medievalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), focusing on Fane’s sympathy for the adulterous Guinevere (143–4). Violet Fane, From Dawn to Noon (London: Longman’s, Green, and Co., 1872), 131–6. Further references to this volume will be internally documented by page number. See Flint’s The Woman Reader for an excellent account of the (pseudo-) physiology of female reading in the period. Masson, British Novelists, 11. Maria Grey and Emily Shirreff, Thoughts on Self-Culture Addressed to Women (London: Moxon, 1850), II.224–6. Tasker, “Aurora Leigh: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Novel Approach,” 36. See also Tucker, who notes that “Novels in verse could handle culturally hazardous material (like adultery and cynicism) because the foregroundedness of poetic form put more distance between the reader and that material than did the comparative transparency of fictional prose” (Epic, 410). See also Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), who argues that in scenes of reading depicted in novels, good books tend to be read by the few, while bad books are those read by the masses. “Denzil Place,” Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art 40.1030 (July 24, 1875), 120; “Recent Verse,” The Athenaeum 2492 (1875), 143. Fane did go on to write a couple of three-volume novels, although none quite as “immoral” as Denzil Place. Patmore’s choice of measure was much mocked by his contemporaries; Edmund Gosse, for example, called it “humdrum” and “jigging” (in Coventry Patmore [New York: Scribner’s, 1905], 56), and Henry Chorley reviewed the poem in The Athenaeum by parodying its octosyllabics (The Athenaeum 1421 [January 20, 1855], 76). As I discuss in more detail in Chapter 2, Patmore defended the measure as being suited to the celebration of married love. “A Lecture Upon the Shadow,” lines 25–6, in John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (London: Penguin, 1986). Further references to Donne’s poems will be to line numbers in this edition.

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50. See Coventry Patmore, who in “The Paragon” writes of the desire to produce “perfect words / Ruled by returning kiss of rhymes” (The Angel in the House, The Betrothal [London: John W. Parker and Sons, 1854], 30). 51. In a reading that resonates with my claims here, Erik Gray has proposed that “A kiss is . . . the objective correlative of a Petrarchan love sonnet.” He points to three shared features: a “paradoxical” or “self-contradictory” aspect; a “borrowed nature”; and “self-perpetuation” (like a kiss, “The aim of a Petrarchan sonnet sequence is not closure but perpetuation”). Gray opens his treatment of the kiss as the paradigmatic form of the sonnet series by quoting Don Juan (a poem I look at in more detail in Chapter 2): A long, long kiss, a kiss of youth and love And beauty, all concentrating like rays Into one focus, kindled from above; Such kisses as belong to early days, When heart and soul and sense in concert move, And the blood’s lava, and the pulse a blaze, Each kiss a heart-quake, for a kiss’s strength, I think, it must be reckoned by its length. By length I mean duration . . . (II.186–7) This elongated kiss, though, has a necessary limit (the stanza): either the lovers must come up for air, or the kiss must develop (narratively, I am tempted to say) into something else. Erik Gray, “Sonnet Kisses: Sidney to Barrett Browning,” Essays in Criticism 52.2 (2002), 130. 52. Here I diverge from Hoagwood and Ledbetter, who claim that the lyrics do not share content with the chapters and call them, rather, “thematic wrapper[s]”: “None of the lyrics shares characters, action, or setting with the narrative books of the poem, but instead the lyrics ornament the book from without. Each lyric offers itself as other work by the same poet who wrote the narrative in twelve books” (Colour’d Shadows, 142, 141). It seems to me that their mistake stems from an uncharacteristic generic insensitivity: it is not in the nature of pure lyric to possess the kinds of “characters, action, or setting” that Hoagwood and Ledbetter find missing. And while Fane’s obvious autobiographical investment in her tale does allow for some extra-narrative clouding of the lyric voice, in the context of the verse-novel itself, the link between Constance and the lyrics appears clear from the start, when the lyric declaration that “This is not living, tho’ I move and breathe” (3) introduces us to what the narrator describes, in the first book, as Constance’s “lifeless life” (7). 53. Poems by Violet Fane, 2 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1892), I.59–76. The narrative selections are from Denzil Place, 79, 99, and 177. The three excerpts from Denzil Place retain their sequence in the source text. Poems, for all its lyricism, also gestures its awareness of temporality. The introduction announces of the edition that “It has been limited to 365 copies, after the

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56.

57.

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printing of which the type has been broken up and dispersed” (viii); Fane presumably chose the print run to reflect the number of days in the year. Sonnet 43. Of course, this is not to discount the narrative elements of Barrett Browning’s sonnet sequence, which has long been taken as a record of the Brownings’ courtship, as I discuss in my Introduction. The language of flowers appears as something of an outlier in this list, suggesting an innocence and naturalism that seems the opposite of, say, “cunning glances.” But it is likely that the community is thinking here not about Romantic organicism (Wordsworth’s “glory in the flower”) but about the highly codified Victorian form of this language, in which flowers come to represent specific (usually amorous) messages. As we shall see, Fane’s versenovel obsesses over flower language, which the narrator treats in a manner that fluctuates uneasily between Romantic and Victorian resonances. Appropriately, given this obsession, a floral ornamental device (a sprig of honeysuckle, a Victorian symbol of the bonds of love) offers the final mark of punctuation to the text (disregarding the printer’s colophon). As Hoagwood and Ledbetter point out, it also provides further linkage to From Dawn to Noon, since such floral devices were frequent intercalary markers between the lyrics of the earlier collection (Colour’d Shadows, 150–1). The mention here of Paul de Kock might remind us of yet another account of adulterous reading that uses a hyperconscious generic intertextuality to present an argument about the need to break political and social restraints: James Joyce’s Ulysses (Molly recalls reading de Kock in the context of her thoughts about The Sweets of Sin, the new novel Bloom has brought for her). I will return to Ulysses in my Afterword. Felluga, “Verse Novel,” 180–1. Felluga suggests that the question of “the natural” resonates generically here, too, hinting at “the artificiality of form” and Meredith’s own sense of his “arguably unnatural mixing” of genres in Modern Love. Kerry McSweeney contrasts this “French novel” with the realism of Madame Bovary, of which Meredith had written admiringly in the Westminster Review in 1857 (Supreme Attachments, 110). See also David Kurnick’s account of how the introduction of a French novel into Henry James’s The Awkward Age occasions both generic disruption and plot disruption (“‘Horrible Impossible’: Henry James’s Awkward Stage,” The Henry James Review 26.2 [2005], 109–29). Flint notes the prominence of references to French novels in sensation fiction (The Woman Reader, 287); Lynda Nead points out that a Balzac novel forms the basis for the house of cards depicted in (and by) Leopold Augustus Egg’s triptych painting Past and Present (Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988], 73, 78). In contrast, in Don Juan, Byron explicitly states of Juan and Haidée that “No novels e’er set their young hearts bleeding,” a gesture that points to the particularly lyrical, unfallen nature of their love. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan, ed. T. G. Steffen, E. Steffen, and W. W. Pratt (London: Penguin, 1982), IV.19.4. Hereafter, references to Don Juan will be documented internally by canto, stanza, and line numbers, and will be to this edition.

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58. George Meredith, Modern Love XXV.1, in Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads, ed. Rebecca N. Mitchell and Criscillia Benford (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 47. Further references will be to this edition. Wilfred Scawen Blunt takes the final two lines of Meredith’s sonnet as the epigraph to Griselda, another “Society Novel in Rhymed Verse” (as his subtitle puts it) that uses the form to sympathize with an adulteress. Blunt’s eponymous heroine’s name indicates his debt to Chaucer (she is patient, for all that she falls), as does the poem’s first line, in which he announces his tale as “An idle story with an idle moral” (an echo of Morris’s opening for The Earthly Paradise). Another measure of Blunt’s sympathies comes in his comparison of his adulterous heroine not to Guinevere but to Elaine, the “maid of Astolat.” In fact, the poem’s general allusiveness is as typical of the verse-novel form as is its adulterous subject. See [Wilfred Scawen Blunt], Griselda: A Society Novel in Rhymed Verse (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1893), 5, 110. Blunt actually had affairs not only with Fane but also with Jane Morris. 59. See Hoagwood and Stewart’s introduction to their edition (9). 60. The three-volume format, the word “story,” and the Bildungsroman subject suggest that it is a novel like David Copperfield or Dinah Mulock Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), although the term is never used, and it might also be a biography or autobiography. 61. In discussing Fane’s work’s awareness of its own textual materiality, Hoagwood and Ledbetter allude to the idea of the museum: “Fane museumizes poetry, puts it in a glass case for self-conscious inspection under the sign of artifice. This feature of the poem intimately relates to its narrator’s reflections on fiction, and to the physical features of the printed book” (Colour’d Shadows, 138). Mieke Bal has considered the generic status of the museum exhibition, in which works of art are “framed” not only individually but within the larger “narrative” structure introduced by installation (“Exhibition Practices,” PMLA 125.1 [January 2010], 9–23). Suggestively, she likens this effect to that produced by poetry (11), and one might consider it in reference to Fane’s careful assembly of her lyrics in From Dawn to Noon. Denzil Place exhibits both a rigorous attention to the material “framing” of its narrative books and a sustained interest in diegetic gallery spaces: while staying in Geoffrey’s home, Constance spends hours contemplating the “many portraits” of his ancestors that graced its “panell’d walls” (80–5), and (in a move that recalls Barrett Browning’s use of the portrait in the opening lines of Aurora Leigh) the narrative body of the poem closes with reference to Constance’s own portrait, imagining her daughter’s children contemplating “pretty grandmamma, who died so young, / And whose sweet picture, in a muslin dress / ‘With coral-color’d sash and shady hat, / And looking like an angel,’ they will see / Hanging within the walls of Denzil Place” (248). Constance thus enters into the gallery of ancestors. If individual paintings function analogously to lyrics, as monuments to the moment, their serial installation renders them historical—it narrativizes them.

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62. Punch, March 28, 1868. As Flint rightly points out, the real thrust of this cartoon concerns uneasiness about reading material that is shared between classes and genders (The Woman Reader, 278). Its public library functions quite differently from the private library that is the scene of Constance’s fall. 63. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 41. 64. Henry James, The Golden Bowl (London: Penguin, 1987), 538, 540, original emphasis. 65. Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition, Counter-Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 197. For yet a further take on the three-volume life, one might turn to the conclusion of Little Dorrit (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1857), where the church registrar literalizes the trope in entering Amy Dorrit’s name into the marriage volume: “ ‘For, you see,’ said Little Dorrit’s old friend, ‘this young lady is one of our curiosities, and has now come to the third volume of our Registers. Her birth is in what I call the first volume; she lay asleep on this very floor, with her pretty head on what I call the second volume; and she’s now a-writing her little name as a bride, in what I call the third volume’ ” (624–5). He refers back to the night on which, after her evening visit to Clennam, Little Dorrit and Maggy were locked out of the Marshalsea and were rescued from the surrounding fallen women by the registrar, who recognized her and took her to the vestry. There she fell asleep with her head on the burial volume (128). The episode plays weirdly with the idea of the fallen woman narrative, hinting at (even as it aggressively avoids) the transgressive implications of Amy’s nighttime visit to the man she loves, in which she practically declared her love. The presence of the death register here might suggest that Amy is arising to second life from a nearly avoided fall; hence the unusual ordering of the “volumes” of Amy’s life. While Little Dorrit itself uses a two-book structure to great effect to chart out its course, the novelistic implications of Dickens’s final gesture are clear (illustrated in the novel’s last plate, by H. K. Browne, “The Third Volume of the Registers”). But the move also reminds us of what Dickens’s courtship plot shares with so many other Victorian novels: the culmination in marriage and transposition of death to the middle (where it is inevitably someone else who dies). I say more about the artificiality of this plot structure in Chapter 2. 66. Boone, Traditions, 193–4, 137, 216. See also Leckie’s chapter on The Golden Bowl (Culture and Adultery, 154–201). 67. Susan Crowl, “Henry James, the English Spirit of Robert Browning, and the American Century,” The Henry James Review 20.3 (1999), 283. I’ll return to this idea in the Afterword. 68. See also Michael Reid’s account of the scene: “Maggie’s triumph over Charlotte requires that she has learned to read and narrate her own life, which is to say that she has revised and rejected the antecedent adultery plot Charlotte has instantiated in the first book. Maggie’s narrative triumph is figured in her possession and knowledge of the entirety of a novel of which

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and in which Charlotte merely has a part.” Reid argues that the book can plausibly be identified as Walter Besant’s 1876 novel, The Golden Butterfly, and that the episode thus contributes to James’s ongoing argument with Besant about “The Art of Fiction.” Michael Reid, “The Aesthetics of Ascesis: Walter Besant and the Discipline of Form in The Golden Bowl,” The Henry James Review 22.3 (2001), 283. 69. I say more about the verse-novel’s concern with revolutions in Chapter 4. Elsewhere, Fane underscores the analogy between the breaking of political bonds and of the marriage bond; in Italy, she describes Constance as

70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77.

E’en more unfortunate than that sweet land She groan’d in faster fetters;—all in vain For her Italia’s liberators rose, Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour, Breaking a bondage less inveterate Than was her own; weighing upon the heart The burden of a fatal servitude Defies emancipation;—thus she sigh’d A lovely slave in chains—(those chains that seem To some [i.e., the happily married] like brittle bands of summer flowers. (134–5) As this passage and Constance’s second marriage make clear, Fane does not reject the institution of marriage per se: she merely wishes to allow those in unhappy marriages a means of egress. Goethe, Faust: Erster Teil, “Prolog im Himmel.” My own translation. See Duff, Romanticism and Genre, 43–4. See also my review of Erik Gray’s Milton and the Victorians (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009) for NBOL-19 (www.nbol-19.org). William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), 2.209 (1805). Morgan, Narrative Means, Lyric Ends, 83. The passage can be found in The Princess: A Medley, [VI^VII.11–15], in The Poems of Tennyson, 2nd ed., 3 vols., ed. Christopher Ricks (Harlow: Longmans, 1987), II.279. Further references to Tennyson’s poems will be to this edition unless otherwise noted. The Princess is itself a hybrid “medley” poem that plays with novelistic conventions, including the courtship plot. I will return to it repeatedly. Paradise Lost IX.445; IV.181–2. My thanks to Erik Gray for pointing out these echoes to me. Macbeth I.vii.25–8; I.vii.1–2. Mary Favret discusses the temporal complexity of wartime (in War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009]); I believe that lovetime—and especially

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82.

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wedded lovetime—is a category meriting similar attention and one that the verse-novel engages with in a particularly sophisticated manner. I return to this topic in more detail in Chapter 2, where I consider Patmore’s Angel. Of course my term has a lyric source in e e cummings’ declaration that “springtime is lovetime.” Pater, The Renaissance, 152. Edna St. Vincent Millay, “First Fig,” in A Few Figs and Thistles: Poems and Sonnets (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1922), 1. Tucker, Epic, 492–3. The comparison to children here suggests that Fane might be filtering Milton’s famous lines through a recollection of George Eliot’s allusion to them in her description of the childhood of St. Theresa in the Prelude to Middlemarch. Virginia Woolf, “Aurora Leigh,” in The Second Common Reader, 212.

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2 The Longue Durée of Marriage I. EITHER/OR? For a poem to be called long, there has be a lot in the middle. The observation may seem banal, but it highlights a critical challenge. As Peter Brooks has noted, “The novelistic middle . . . is perhaps the most difficult of Aristotle’s ‘parts’ of a plot to talk about.”1 The difficulty stems from its comparative formlessness, a product of its longue durée; Catherine Gallagher points out that since “form contends against time,” “the kind of attention that has been paid to temporality has further ensured a disregard, if not an outright abhorrence, of length.”2 Yet some scholars (perhaps surprisingly, especially ones working in a neoformalist vein) have taken up the interpretive task: Linda Hughes and Michael Lund deftly described the expanding centers of Victorian serial fictions a quarter-century ago, and middles have recently garnered attention from critics of the Victorian novel—appropriately, given the period’s and genre’s commitments to the middle class and its virtues.3 If novelists demonstrate themselves to be self-aware navigators of the vast oceans between their points of departure and arrival, how much more so the verse-novelists, who consciously choose to expand the lyric forms they have inherited, as I argued in Chapter 1. Moreover, these poets often relate the length of their works to a subject that the courtship-obsessed British novel is relatively reticent about, at least until later in the century: marriage. As Martin Meisel has remarked, “Declining mortality rates and the difficulty of divorce meant that [Victorian] marriages lasted longer than before or since”:4 when addressing marriage, then, verse-novels are also bound to consider duration. In the novel in verse I consider here— Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House—the extended middle develops out of the challenge of depicting conjugal experience. In showing how it does so, I will offer a formal explanation for marriage’s centrality to the Victorian verse-novel.5 Before I turn to the poetry, though, it is worth spending some time thinking about the aesthetics of love in both its conjugal and anti-conjugal forms. I argued in Chapter 1 that the moment of adultery is paradoxically

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capable of displaying the particular narrative energies of the verse-novel. Indeed, Meisel has also noted how convenient adultery was as a subject for Victorian narrative painting. Such paintings frequently used their formal arrangements to depict the way actions have effects. The Rossetti translation of Dante’s Paolo and Francesca episode from which I quoted earlier was composed to accompany his triptych watercolor of the scene. Its format was perhaps inspired by Augustus Leopold Egg’s similarly tripartite representation of the consequences of adultery for a family in Past and Present (1858). Both suggest the essentially serial or narrative aspect of the adultery plot, with its clear “before” and “after,” separated by the climactic act. When discussing Egg’s paintings, Lynda Nead mentions several contemporary cartoons that use multiple vignettes to offer visual “narratives” of adultery, much like eighteenth-century “progress” paintings à la Hogarth (which more often traded on regress), or like condensed precursors to graphic novels. Nead even calls the triptych structure of Egg’s work “the pictorial equivalent to the three-decker novel.”6 Yet, as I also mentioned in Chapter 1, extramarital seduction has long been closely associated with lyric. Søren Kierkegaard makes this latter connection in Either/Or (1843), the work that Eric Walker has called “the biggest book about marriage from Romanticism”7—although it actually belongs properly to a post-Romantic period that is slowly sliding into the perspective of mid-century. The choice signified by the title of Kierkegaard’s bizarre treatise lies between an “aesthetic” life, which he figures in terms of its focus on seduction, and an “ethical” life, which is constituted rather by commitment to marriage. But the reason I bring it up here is that Kierkegaard’s book is as interested in questions of genre as in the fate of marriage: in fact, it regards these two categories as having the kind of intimate relationship suggested by their lexical identity in German (Gattung).8 One indication of this dual focus appears already in the work’s own generic hybridity. The book that Kierkegaard released anonymously upon the public is presented as a collection of found manuscripts, arranged by an editor (identified as Victor Eremita), and written by two authors, who are designated A and B (although it later becomes possible to ascribe a name— Vilhelm—and a career—judge—to B). The circumstances surrounding the discovery of the manuscripts are described in an editorial preface, as is the editorial effort itself. Tellingly, Eremita explains that while the documents written by the proponent of marriage, B, consisting of a series of consecutive letters, were “fairly easily” arranged, those of the voice of seduction, A, were much more challenging to sequence.9 “I have therefore let chance determine the order,” he declares, elucidating further that he has left the documents in the sequence in which they were found (31). The first section of A’s contribution is particularly resistant to logical organization; it is

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comprised of a set of aphorisms, which (as Eremita puts it) “have a lyrical character” (32). Only one part of A’s oeuvre appears dependent upon narrative principles: “The Seducer’s Dairy,” a novella-like tale (since reprinted independently many times) along the lines of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), which details the deliberate and drawn-out seduction and abandonment of “Cordelia” by “Johannes.” Appropriately, this more narrative document draws the editor into a historicizing mode: he calculates on the basis of a few indications of dates and days of the week that the events chronicled must have occurred in 1834 (33). Once we arrive at the body of the text, it becomes evident that the genres chosen by the proponents of seduction and marriage are expressive of their respective doctrines. For A, lyricism and the aesthetic are practically coterminous. So the initial aphoristic section, “Diapsalmata” (the name, which the editor retrieved from a scrap of paper [31], is taken from the Psalms and means “refrain”), not only opens with what the editor describes as “a little French verse” as epigraph (31), but follows with the question, “What is a poet?” (43). Throughout this section and those that ensue, it emerges that the aesthetic life is composed, according to A, by a proto-Paterian dedication to the intensity of the moment, an essentially lyric stance. “As everyone knows, there are insects that die in the moment of fertilization,” announces an early aphorism, continuing, “Thus it is with all joy, life’s supreme and most voluptuous moment of pleasure is attended by death” (43). Alongside the valorization of the moment stands the repudiation of narrative time and the particular kinds of causal agency (“plans”) that accompany it: “Time passes, life is a stream, people say, and so on. I haven’t noticed it. Time stands still and I with it. All the plans I form fly straight back at me, and I want to spit in my own face” (47). But while A begins with lyric aphorism, he gradually slides into more expansive forms. In the essays that follow the opening section, his commitment to the moment is linked not only to the lyric mode but also to the medium of music. The reason A turns to music to find the expression of what he seeks is that for all his resistance to sequence, he is looking for something that has extension—if not exactly “in time,” then with “an element of time in it”: The most abstract idea conceivable is the spirit of sensuality. But in what medium can it be represented? Only in music. . . . [I]t is an energy, a storm, impatience, passion, and so on, in all their lyrical quality, existing not in the single moment but in a succession of moments, for if it existed in a single moment it could be portrayed or painted. Its existing in a succession of moments indicates its epic character, yet in a stricter sense it is not an epic, for it has not reached the level of words. It moves constantly in an

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immediacy. Nor can it be represented, therefore, in poetry. The only medium that can represent it is music. For music has an element of time in it yet does not lapse in time except in an unimportant sense. What it cannot express is the historical in time. (69–70)

Music protects from the narrativity (the “historical” element) inherent to linguistic expression: “Sensual genius is absolutely lyrical, and in music it breaks out in all its lyrical impatience, for it is qualified spiritually and is therefore power, life, movement, constant unrest, continual succession. But this unrest, this succession, does not enrich it; its spirit remains always the same, it does not develop but rages on uninterrupted as if in a single breath” (81). It also protects from the possibility of ascribing agency—and thus morality—to characters: “What is called an action in a stricter sense, a deed undertaken in the consciousness of a purpose, cannot find expression in music, but only what might be called immediate action” (123). This anti-historical conception of time, offering “succession” yet avoiding those forwards and backwards glances that enable the perception of such changes as constitute “develop[ment]” or narrative trajectory, can be found, A claims, in the legend of Don Juan, with its seemingly endless consecutive seductions. But it is significantly not present in Byron’s Don Juan, rejected by A for what might be deemed its more novelistic aspects: “Byron has dared to bring Don Juan into existence for us, to tell us of his childhood and youth, to reconstruct him from a context of finite lifecircumstances. The result is to make Don Juan into a reflective personality who loses the ideality that is in his traditional conception,” one who furthermore “feels the pressure and chains of [his] environment” (111). For A, it is precisely the developmental and situated aspects of Byron’s poem, its elements of Bildung, that detract from its aesthetic value. In a later essay, “Crop Rotation,” A suggests that to counteract the progressive thrust of narratives one should cultivate arbitrariness: “You see the middle of a play, read the third part of a book” (239). Contrast Constance’s urge to continue with the third volume of her novel, which I argued for in Chapter 1 as a sign of the narrative drive of the verse-novel.10 Instead, A finds his ideal model for the aesthetic translation of the Don Juan legend in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, aided, no doubt, by the fact that the opera’s words are partially stripped of their essential linguistic temporality through the difficulty of understanding an operatically intoned foreign language (again, I am reminded of Denzil Place and its discussion of how dangerous talk can be sanitized by translation). But while A may be justified in ignoring the opera’s libretto, his own use of a novella—“The Seducer’s Diary,” complete with a Don Juan figure in the aptly named Johannes—to exemplify aesthetic existence seems odd, to say the least. One might argue that the novella’s form, a “semi-poetic” (the editor’s

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phrase) combination of diary entries and collected correspondence, is like lyric in its method of what Samuel Richardson termed “writing to the moment”; as Eremita puts it, “His Diary . . . was not historically exact or a straightforward narrative, not indicative, but subjunctive. Although of course the experience was recorded after it happened . . . it was often described as if taking place at the very moment” (248). Moreover, Johannes uses this form to reflect on the primacy of instantaneous experience: “It has often been a matter of consideration for me what situation, what moment, might be regarded as the most seductive,” he muses (368). Nevertheless, just as Lovelace contributed an element of plotting agency to Clarissa (the great precursor to the lyrical novel of consciousness), so Johannes must and does plan to bring about Cordelia’s fall in order to inject interest into a threateningly dull existence.11 And curiously, the moment he most yearns to experience is that of witnessing the bride on the very cusp of her marriage, “when she stands decked out as a bride . . . and she too turns pale, when the blood stops, when her bosom rests, when her look falters” (368). It is a moment dependent not merely upon seduction but upon the presence of a preceding courtship plot. The slight falling-off from theory to practice suggests that the either/or dichotomy might be less pure than initially posited, that some aspects of narrative might be required even for the strictest aesthete, that some kind of hybridity might better represent genuinely aesthetic experience. Still, the shift, following “The Seducer’s Diary,” into the marital consciousness of Vilhelm (or B) is a marked one. In place of the generic diversity of A’s thoughts, we get the straightforward, point-by-point reasoning of Vilhelm’s sequential essay-epistles, beginning with the vigorously argued composition, “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage.” And instead of a radically anti-historical attitude, we have a full-fledged embrace of historicity, of experience in and through time, of duration: “The historical nature of marital love is apparent from its being a process of assimilation; it tries its hand in what it experiences and refers its experience back to itself ” (435). As Eric Walker usefully glosses Vilhelm’s strategy: “Judge Wilhelm in counterattack zeroes in on Johannes’s fetish for the moment. . . . The beauty of marriage, he claims, inheres in the durational, not in the moment.”12 This perspective has the benefit of realism; as Vilhelm puts it to A, “It is, after all, the meaning of time, and the lot of mankind and of individuals, to live in it. So if all you can say is that it is not to be endured, you will have to look for another auditorium” (455).13 But Vilhelm ultimately seeks an ideal every bit as potent as A’s—and Johannes’s—lyrical fetishization of the moment. What he calls “the protractedness of marriage” is paradoxically responsible for a “historically” conceived version of “the poetic” (455, 434). It is crucial to Vilhelm’s

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project that he not forgo claim to aesthetic experience but rather change its temporal orientation; for him, its particular durational qualities actually bind marriage conceptually to the experience of the eternal in heaven—a subject that, as we shall see, both Victorians in general and verse-novelists in specific obsessed over. (This idealizing bent also puts a premium on the experience of first love, so that the first can be the last in a positive sense.) Thus what might be termed Vilhelm’s narrative orientation transforms temporality from a danger into not just a necessary evil but also a genuine aid to aesthetic experience. If you “think historically,” “you are not afraid of the time that precedes the culmination”—of eternal love in heaven— “on the contrary, you love it” (455–6). “As a true victor,” he explains, “the husband has not killed time but saved and preserved it in eternity” (463). John Donne may have used lyric paradox to circumvent the threat of Death (“Death thou shalt die”), but Vilhelm uses the narrative historicity of marriage to defeat Time. Eric Walker has pointed out that Vilhelm’s theories of conjugality result, for Kierkegaard, in the recognition of a mimetic crisis. Quoting Vilhelm’s comment that “Romantic love lends itself superbly to representation in the moment; not so married love, for an idealized husband is not a husband once in his life but is that every day” (460), he remarks that “this observation leads [Vilhelm] to a set of observations about the incommensurability of marriage and representation.”14 As Vilhelm argues, marriage “cannot be poeticized, for it demands the protractedness of time”: Poetry . . . is the most complete of all the arts and therefore that form which knows best how to do justice to the significance of time. It does not need to confine itself to the moment the way painting does, nor vanish without trace the way music does. Yet it, too, as we have seen, is obliged to concentrate itself in the moment. So it has its limits, and cannot . . . represent something whose very truth is temporal succession. (361)

Yet both this emphasis on “temporal succession” and the invocation of the “every day” suggests that an appropriate genre to display the virtues of marriage, its peculiar form of historicity, does exist: the novel.15 While Vilhelm remains silent about this possibility, the novel can contain the “growing progression” of love in marriage, with its distinct “idea of time and of the meaning of repetition” (465), wherein “the essential thing is time in its extension” (464). Still, a reason for Vilhelm’s reluctance to turn to the novel as a solution to his problem appears in his earlier observation that “novelists and their readers” have “for centuries worked their way through one volume after another to come to a halt with a happy marriage,” a “pernicious and unhealthy” literary habit that has produced books “that end where they should begin” (392).

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I myself have begun here because Vilhelm’s remarks about the representational challenges posed by marriage actually bear an uncanny resemblance to those of a British critic, George Brimley, writing some dozen years later, and commenting on what he recognized to be a novel experiment in English poetics: Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House.16 The essay is the same to which I drew attention in Chapter 1, when I quoted Brimley’s argument that Victorian readers tended to translate epics into novelistic love stories, generally involving courtship or adultery. These socio-descriptive opening salvos are mere preparation for Brimley’s real target, though, which concerns the very same representational crisis to which Vilhelm has drawn our attention. “It is a remarkable fact that wedded love has been almost uniformly rejected, as offering no material for high poetry, except in its corruption, as a theme for tragedy,” Brimley announces, adding, “we are tempted to inquire into some of the causes of this one-sidedness, . . . and to indicate briefly some of the real poetic capabilities of wedded love, and the sort of treatment they require in being wrought into actual poems.” Brimley identifies the preference for courtship plots over wedlock plots as a matter of form: the “temptation to limit the poetical representation of love to the period before marriage, lies in the fact that this period seems spontaneously to supply that beginning, middle, and end which narrative or dramatic poems are truly enough supposed to require.”17 Married love (at least absent adultery, divorce, and death) seems comparatively formless and eventless: it is all middle.18 Brimley’s previous discussion, which includes not only epic but also tragedy and novels, shows that he is using the category of “poetry” normatively rather than generically here. If anything, the focus on courtship is a particularly novelistic phenomenon, as Kierkegaard suggested and as novelists were increasingly coming to question. Consider Thomas Hardy, who in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) contributed an early effort (for the British novel) to include married life in the plot. Hardy offers the following exchange between Bathsheba, his heroine, and Troy, her first, unfortunate choice of husband (the novel does conclude, rather more traditionally, with a second marriage, to the far more promising Gabriel Oak). “What do you regret?” Troy asks his wife. “That my romance has come to an end,” Bathsheba laments. To which Troy quips: “All romances end in marriage.”19 Sensation fiction can also be considered as a response to the artifice of the courtship plot’s weddingbells conclusion; as Mary Elizabeth Braddon put it in Aurora Floyd (1862): Now my two heroines being married, the reader versed in the physiology of novel writing may conclude that my story is done . . . Yet, after all, does the business of real life-drama always end upon the altar-steps? Must the play

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needs be over when the hero and heroine have signed their names in the register? Does man cease to be, to do, and to suffer when he gets married? And is it necessary that the novelist, after devoting three volumes to the description of a courtship of six weeks’ duration, should reserve for himself only half a page in which to tell us the events of two-thirds of a lifetime? Aurora is married, and settled, and happy; sheltered, as one would imagine, from all dangers, safe under the wing of her stalwart adorer; but it does not therefore follow that the story of her life is done.20

Yet if portrayals of unhappy marriages were on the rise, the narrative of happy marriage proved far more resistant to novelistic chronicling (as Tolstoy would famously remark, and as Brimley also recognized in writing of the prominence of the theme of marital “corruption” in literature).21 Together, Brimley and Kierkegaard begin to suggest how the verse-novel, which can combine the idealizing perspective of poetry and the temporal longevity of prose narrative, might offer a solution to marriage’s representational dilemma. Coventry Patmore’s best-known poem has with some justification become the go-to work for critics who wish to condemn the wrongs of Victorian domestic ideology, for which “the angel in the house” has come to stand as metonym. Yet it is also worth reflecting on the fact that this “angel,” perhaps the most famous of Victorian types, originates not from a novel—the literary mode that we tend to see as quintessentially Victorian—but rather from the far less celebrated and scrutinized genre of the verse-novel.22 As recent readers of The Angel in the House have pointed out, Patmore’s perspective on gender relations is actually rather more vexed than most accounts suggest.23 I want to demonstrate that much of the inconsistency arises from his struggle not just with gender but also with genre, and, in particular, with his efforts to fashion a form appropriate to the representation of marriage. In expanding lyric love through durational narrative, Patmore’s Angel attempts a positive portrayal of wedlock. Over the course of its four volumes, The Angel in the House follows two couples. The first two volumes—often all that is read of the work—tell the tale of The Betrothal and The Espousals (as the 1854 and 1856 installments were respectively titled) of Felix Vaughan to Honoria Churchill. Felix is a gentleman-poet and the author of the poem itself, which he describes in the work’s preface, set on the tenth anniversary of his wedding, as an effort to accord the same poetic status to domestic matters as chronicles of war are generally given. The third volume, originally published as Faithful for Ever (1860), changes direction to focus rather on the boomerang marriage of Honoria’s cousin (and rejected suitor), Frederick Graham, to the rather déclassé daughter of his ship’s chaplain, whom we know only as Jane; the marriage of Felix and Honoria occupies the background, offering a more

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idealized contrast to the “realistic” struggles of the Grahams. Finally, a fourth installment, The Victories of Love (originally published serially in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1861), records Jane’s death and the marriage of her son John to Honoria’s daughter Emily. Stylistically, the two halves of the poem also differ considerably, shifting from a more lyric mode to a more novelistic one as Patmore elaborates on his poem’s thesis concerning married love’s durational nature. In what follows, I will begin by looking at Patmore’s treatment of lyric in the verse-novel, concentrating on its first two installments and on how Patmore makes use of the poetry of John Donne in his portrayal of the longue durée of marriage. Reversing course, I will then turn from John Donne to Don Juan, and to the work’s later volumes, in order to ponder the concept of seriality, a necessary consequence of the poem’s length. One form such seriality takes is in considering a sequel to love in the afterlife: I will trace the verse-novel’s obsession with marriage in heaven, something it shares with Kierkegaard’s Judge Vilhelm. What emerges from the whole is a radically unstable compound—perhaps so unstable as to undermine the project of generic blending that this book considers. But it also reveals a work that is less conservative and more interesting than critics have generally given it credit for being. Finally, a coda will reflect on the sequence of marriages portrayed in William Morris’s The Lovers of Gudrun, the longest and most novelistic tale from his immense Earthly Paradise. II. “AND LOVE, THAT GROWS” The representational challenge posed by marriage results from the kind of acts that constitute it. As George Brimley notes, courtship offers “the poet who seeks mainly to amuse his audience . . . a series of connected occurrences,” culminating, I would add, in a climactic speech act with the “I will” of the wedding vows.24 Marriage, in contrast, seems to be eventless—made up, as Kierkegaard’s Judge Vilhelm also sees, not so much by recognizable outward deeds as by a habitual state of mind: “an ideal husband,” one who has been “faithful for fifteen years,” has “At the end of the fifteen years . . . apparently come no further than at the beginning” (462). For married love, Vilhelm explains, “is the divine through being the everyday,” but that means that it “does not come with an external mark” (464–5). Thus he insists on the importance of chronicling the inward life: “Only internal history is true history” (459). And Brimley turns to the microscopic eye of science for an analogy for the kinds of motions that constitute marriage: “instead of having to do with a problem

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mainly dynamical, we advance into the higher because more complex and mysterious region of chemistry, and are dealing, not with the mutual action of distinct bodies, but with the composition of bodies, with the changes their constituent bodies undergo by combination, and by the action of the subtle elements—heat, light, electricity and so forth.”25 Patmore seems to agree that in order to create a narrative of marriage he must first encourage us to revise our understanding of plot. In the Prologue to his initial volume, The Betrothal, Honoria asks Felix if he intends to stake his ground on proper epic terrain, such as “the Life / Of Arthur, or Jerusalem’s Fall”;26 recall that in The Prelude, Wordsworth considers much the same options before embarking on his autobiographical subject. Felix likewise demurs from these suggestions. In his view, song “should have no incidents, / They are so dull, and pall, twice read: / Its scope should be the heart’s events” (B 7).27 So the poet names his theme: “Yourself, and love that’s all in all” (B 5). While Patmore uses a traditional twelve-book epic structure in the first two parts of The Angel, his lyric agenda registers not only in the shift from “incident” to “the heart’s events”—Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads similarly indicts the vulgar “craving for extraordinary incident” that modern literature has created—but also in the desirability of rereading espoused in this passage.28 We are a far cry from “reading for the plot.” As critics including Brimley and R. H. Hutton complained, though, while the early volumes of The Angel in the House may have proposed to tell a tale of marriage, they actually ended with the lovers’ honeymoon, taking us just over the conjugal threshold.29 But if these installments focus on courtship, they self-consciously (almost parodically) avoid the kinds of suspense that the courtship plot conventionally involves. Novels tend to rely on the possibility of alternative outcomes, frequently occasioned by forces antagonistic to the smooth flow of courtship, like competing suitors or antagonistic families. In Patmore’s poem, these forces are represented, but only in a manner that renders them almost immediately impotent. Thus in The Betrothal, we are introduced briefly to a rival—a cousin, Frederick Graham, who will become the protagonist of the poem’s final two installments. But no sooner does he appear than he is shipped off for a “two years’ cruise in the Levant,” leaving the field free to Felix, who in any case recognizes that Honoria looks on her cousin with a love conditioned “on the majestic terms / That she should not be loved again” (B 50). As the critic of the Saturday Review put it, reminding his audience of the plot of the earlier volumes in a review of Faithful for Ever, “Readers of The Angel in the House may remember a transient sailor cousin who, on the eve of the declaration, varies by a passing cloud of jealousy the quiet felicity of the lovers.”30 Similarly, in The Espousals we encounter the possibility

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of family objection in the person of an Aunt Maude, who says “cruel things” about Felix to Honoria.31 But by the end of one evening’s conversation, Aunt Maude is vanquished: “And, now I’ve done my duty, Sir, / And you’ve shown common-sense, we’re friends!” she tells Felix (E 48). While later editions of the poem may change the title of this Idyl from “Aunt Maude” to “The Course of True Love” (Poems 146)—that is, never did run smooth—the smallness of this bump in the road makes it laughable.32 Such reduction of plot threatens to dispense with the action altogether. The honeymoon finale of the second volume also indicates the poem’s hybrid nature. While it hints at Patmore’s desire to avoid a wedding-bells conclusion, the honeymoon is a threshold state, its lunar duration suggesting a threshold temporality between ideal lyric love and real, quotidian, prosaic marriage. Victorian novelists could make use of this liminality by unmasking it as fiction. Think, for example, of Dorothea Brooke’s visit to Rome, which crushes her with simultaneous historical and marital awareness. But a lyric novelist like Thomas Hardy could take advantage of the malleability of the category. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1892), he offers Tess two honeymoons, the first novelistic, the second lyric. During Tess and Angel’s first, nightmarish honeymoon in the ruined d’Urberville mansion, the couple fall precipitously and disastrously into history and structures of family inheritance—and into the human, end-stopped temporality on which they are predicated. Yet near the end of the novel, Hardy gives the lovers a happier, second honeymoon at the historically sanitized Bramshurst Court (“this desirable Mansion to be Let Furnished”): the point is that all the furniture there is rented—or, in their case, borrowed—rather than owned, and the lovers can come to it without any “personal baggage.” For all its lyricism (one might argue, because of its lyricism), this state of suspended lovetime can’t last; there are no real second chances in Hardy’s universe, ruled over by a relentless Father Time.33 In contrast, Patmore’s honeymooners have a happier fate. Yet their visit “By the Sea,” as the last part of The Espousals is titled, also leaves the lovers on a shifting, sandy surface and at the water’s edge. They are neither secure on the solid ground of marriage nor floating in the heavenly clouds of courtship.34 As sign of this interim condition, the section opens with Felix’s purchase of sandals for his new wife: if shoes are the Heideggerian symbols of the real (quite literally, the pedestrian) in art, sandals seem to reflect a state that skims both earth and air.35 One might call them the cobbler’s correlative to the verse-novel. Still, in the mix of lyric interludes and narrative sections in the first two volumes, the formal balance is toward lyric. The poem’s poetic structure highlights this preference. Each narrative section, originally titled an Idyl (no doubt with Tennyson’s English idyls—also spelled with one

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“l”—in mind; later editions called these sections Cantos), is prefaced by a series of lyric Accompaniments (later renamed Preludes, in keeping with the musical nomenclature of the Cantos).36 In the original poem, the Accompaniments also closed with a set of Sentences—aphoristic and often gnomic comments on the subject of the Idyl, each generally consisting of a single, octosyllabic abab quatrain, the verse form used throughout the first two volumes. (In later editions, these Sentences are subsumed into the Preludes, perhaps in order to dissipate critics’ frequent complaints about their impenetrability.) For all their length, Patmore’s initial volumes thus also seem to adhere formally to a principle of lyric condensation: in general the individual Accompaniments become progressively shorter until we are left with the basic atomic structure of the poem, the quatrain. Once this fact is recognized, it becomes apparent that even though the narrative Idyls are laid out as stichic rather than strophic verse, one can almost always break them down into logically coherent quatrains. Because enjambment between quatrains occurs infrequently, such strophic structure helps to emphasize the poem’s commitment to a form of extension that depends upon repetition rather than change, a formal equivalent to Patmore’s commitment to marriage. Patmore further suggested the basic lyricism of his Accompaniments by moving them about in his many revisions of the poem. Such portability indicates that for all that the first two parts of the poem make use of the architecture of a courtship plot, Patmore is actually invested in undermining the concept of linear plotting. Even the narrative portions of the poem were occasionally shuffled around from edition to edition.37 Patmore’s aphoristic mode (which ironically can seem remarkably similar to the adulterous A’s style in Either/Or) drew a lot of commentary. Like many other critics, Brimley notes the frequent sense of the “paradoxical” in his review of the first volume. Paradox tends to be a feature of lyric love poetry, like Petrarch’s or Donne’s—so much so that Cleanth Brooks has equated the language of poetry with that of paradox. Petrarch’s paradoxes often focus on how love combines pleasure with pain and so do not always fit easily with Felix’s development of properly harmonious conjugal feeling. But Donne’s paradoxes have been seen to limn ideas central to legal conceptions of marriage, like coverture. Thus “The Ecstasy” can talk of a “dialogue of one,” while “The Canonization” offers that “The phoenix riddle hath more wit / by us; we two being one, are it.”38 Yet for all that Patmore writes of a “paradox of love” that makes the lover “most humble when he most aspires” (B 46), his push is not so much toward lyric paradox as toward even more closed—and, the intimation is, more conjugal—systems of chiastic tautology, again demonstrating the ever-reducing logic of the first two volumes of his verse-novel.

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For example, in a Sentence later titled “The Praise of Love” Patmore calls on a “Spirit of Knowledge” to grant the lover the ability “To praise the thing whose praise it is / That all which can be praised is it” (E 25). Or consider the following Sentence (it accompanies one of the early courtship Idyls): Love in the Loved his likeness loves, But loves the lovely difference more, And like in diverse doubly moves His love t’ward each, twice loved before. (B 74)

Here, surely, is one of those “Beloved tautologies of love” (B 189) that Felix mentions in his Epilogue to the volume. The multiple repetitions of “love” opening the quatrain imply how love is not so much a matter of liking but of “likeness.” The unusual trochaic substitution in the first foot emphasizes the tautological effect by creating the initial chiasmus. Not even the introduction of “difference” in the second line quoted can undermine this impression; indeed, here the apparently either/or nature of Patmore’s treatment of gender seems linked to poetic form, as Felix recognizes these dichotomies as self-creating and self-defining. Likeness and difference collapse into “like in diverse.” The pun must be intentional, and it suggests the arbitrariness of the distinction between the “a”s and “b”s of its interlocking rhyme pairs.39 The poem as a whole offers constant tactile and visual correlatives to such “tautology”: in the kisses that seem the physical instantiation of the pattern, as husband and wife “kiss and kiss to make [love’s ‘sweet tale’] plain” (B 189), and in “the beauty” that the woman sees “in her lover’s eyes,” which proves mere “admiration of her own” (E 41). Such tautological repetition of key words like love gains greater emphasis in the poetry because Patmore’s much-mocked rhythms tend to stress the recurrences.40 The doggerel octosyllabics, which Patmore himself defended as being suited to the celebration of married joy, thus serve an ideological function.41 They accentuate the embrace of repetition and steadiness that Patmore sees as undergirding conjugal happiness. Adela Pinch has written eloquently of Patmore’s use of meter to mimic the feel of thought, especially of what she calls (alluding to one of The Angel’s lyrics) “the uncertainties of love thinking.”42 Love thinking may be uncertain, but the measure is meant to secure love feeling (although, as the following discussion should make clear, it does not always have the intended effect). Eric Griffiths has described Patmore as having had a “conjugal understanding of prosody”: the poet understood marriage both as “a technical ideal of his writing” and “the subject of its celebration.”43

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And Jason Rudy explains how the rhythm “urges readers toward restraint.” He cites as example the stabilizing influence of an ideal woman: She seem’d expressly sent below To [t]each our erring minds to see The rhythmic change in time’s swift flow As part of still eternity.44 (Poems 67)

Here meter, as created by the pendulum of perfect womanhood, joins the “change in time” on earth to the “eternity” of heaven in a manner that collapses the temporal distinctions between chronos and kairos and between narrative and lyric. This heartbeat will persist even after death.45 But if the metrical contract lets us bridge earth and heaven, it does so through its resemblance to the marriage contract, which, according to Patmore, will similarly endure into the afterlife (as we shall see).46 Still, the banality of love poetry, accentuated as it is by Patmore’s meter, poses a threat—especially when extended over the duration of a long poem. Patmore knows well that repetition can cause boredom, undermining the very enterprise upon which he has embarked. So he chooses to fight the threat by making it part of the story he tells. In Felix’s final first-person appearance in the poem, in the second installment of The Victories of Love, he is still worrying over this problem: “How sing of such things [i.e., the pleasures of married love] save to her, / Love’s self, so love’s interpreter!”47 And in a way, his anticipatory struggle with boredom—ours and his own—becomes the plot of the initial two volumes of the poem, as he looks forward to what it might mean to lose the thrill of the chase. The Espousals begins with a series of interruptions that stage a contest between epic and domestic subjects precisely by acknowledging the dullness of the latter. As the volume opens, husband and wife converse about the joys of married love: They praised the days that they’d been wed, At cost of those in which they woo’d, Till everything was three times said, And words were growing vain. (E 14–15)

Again and again, Patmore indicates his awareness that conjugal love poetry can sound rather silly; words “three times said” “grow[] vain.” To some degree, the problem arises from the context of the Crimean War, being fought even as Patmore wrote. So at this very moment in the poem, the post-bag enters with its news of the world, presumably not only the acclaim and “death-knells toll’d” by a critical press, responding to Felix’s

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first volume, but also the reports of more literal death-knells from the front in the East. Against such a backdrop, the new volume of the versenovel that Felix then begins to recite makes it sound like he has switched to an epic mode: “The pulse of War, whose bloody heats Sane purposes insanely work, Now with fraternal frenzy beats, And binds the Christian to the Turk, And shrieking fifes”—. (E 17)

But the marital and the martial are in certain respects as interchangeable as their anagrammatic names suggest: part of the point of these spasmodic lines is that such bloody, shrieking frenzy is even sillier than the loveydovey language that had preceded it—and incorporates its own paradox of sane insanity, as well as its own binding of difference with its marriage between Christian and Turk.48 Hence our relief at a second interruption, as “In rush’d the Loves”—that is, the children—to restore the right subject of the verse and remind the poet of his purpose: “Is this for love, or love for this?” he asks Honoria; we are once more in the realm of marital tautology. And when the poem resumes in proper, following the prologue, we learn that the martial lines that Felix had been reciting were just a tease, a preamble to his real intent to sing “more song-worthy and heroic things / Than hasty, home-destroying War” (E 21–2).49 But if the political context threatens Patmore’s success, the poetic context is even more menacing. That’s because a more fundamental issue lies in the threat identified by Kierkegaard and others, in the fact that marital duration can seem incompatible with the intensity of true lyric love. Felix had acknowledged as much in the Prologue: Ten years to-day she has been his; He but begins to understand, He says, the dignity and bliss She gave him, when she gave her hand: And she replies, He disenchants The past! and, flatter’d, answers he, For him the present nothing wants But briefness to be ecstasy! (E 14)

Felix’s growing understanding, so dependent upon the passage of time, clashes with the ecstasy that, in good proto-Paterian fashion, demands “briefness.” We have here the crux of the formal problem to which Patmore wishes to offer a solution in his poem.

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Later editions attempt a fix through what I have described as the versenovelist’s favored intertextual method. This method allows Felix to differentiate his marital conception of love from the feeling described in Donne’s poetry, a locus classicus of amatory lyric. Patmore preserves the lines on briefness, altering them only slightly. But he offers a crucial addendum. Felix continues by recalling having carved Honoria’s name into a tree trunk: .

Upon a beech he bids her mark Where, ten years since, he carved her name; It grows there with the growing bark, And in his heart it grows the same. (Poems 138)

The trope has a long tradition in pastoral poetry: Virgil uses it in the Eclogues, as does Spenser in “Colin Clout Comes Home Again.”50 Yet here the metaphor serves perfectly not only for the ideal conjugal love it describes but also for the poem that contains it, which similarly grows and grows over the course of decades without any essential change (even its initial version took a Horatian nine years to appear in full, if one measures from the 1863 single volume release of The Victories, as did the reviewer for the Illustrated London News51). We might in this context contrast such carving in wood to Donne’s “A Valediction: of my Name, in the window,” to which it also appears to allude. In Donne’s pure lyric, the poet considers his lover’s etching of his own name in glass as a promise— albeit a brittle one—of fixity, of constancy in love, even in the face of absence: As no one point, nor dash, Which are but accessories to this name, The showers and tempests can outwash So shall all times find me the same. You this entireness better may fulfill, Who have the pattern with you still.52

Here we have the identical rhyme pair, name–same. But what happens when you cross Donne with narrative? The name in the window becomes a name in a tree, allowing a principle of growth to enter the verse without any of the disruptions of real mobility. The tree rings serve as a nice analogue to the circling patterns of Patmore’s octosyllabics.53 If Donne hovers over the lyrics of the first two volumes of the poem, Patmore returns to the poet at the very end of the final book of his versenovel to make a similar point. Dr. Churchill, Honoria’s father, offers a further correction to Dr. Donne (or at least to the lyric poet he had been)

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in the last section of the wedding sermon he has written to sanctify the nuptials between Felix and Honoria’s daughter and Frederick and Jane’s son. Previous editions had placed this advice in an earlier letter written to Frederick; it is a sign of its importance to Patmore that he chose to move it to the poem’s end.54 Dr. Churchill is advising on a subject that seems contrary to the idealizing vision of The Angel in the House that holds sway in the literary-historical imagination, a subject about which I will say more below, when I come to discuss these latter volumes of the poem: What if you discover that you have married the wrong person, someone who is not your soul-mate? Here is what Dr. Churchill preaches: If unto any here that chance Fell not, which makes a month’s romance, Remember, few wed whom they would. And this, like all God’s laws, is good; For nought’s so sad, the whole world o’er, As much love which has once been more. Glorious for light is the earliest love; But worldly things, in the rays thereof, Extend their shadows, every one False as the image which the sun At noon or eve dwarfs or protracts. A perilous light to light men’s acts! (Poems 335–6)

The Doctor seems to have in mind Donne’s “A Lecture upon the Shadow,” where the poet tracks the course of love through comparison to the sun’s diurnal route. In love’s infancy, as in the morning, shadows are created by the need for the lovers to disguise their feelings from the world; in the afternoon, lovers disguise things from each other, casting “new shadows . . . the other way.” Thus for Donne, it is only at the instant of noon that love escapes shadow: “Love is a growing, or full constant light; / And his first minute, after noon, is night.”55 One might call the poem the cri de coeur of the lyric poet, chasing the perfection of the moment. In contrast, for Patmore, true love must have the temporal extension of narrative. A single day can hardly offer a fair comparison; the “dwarf[ing]” of shadow at noon gives no more reliable picture than its “protract[ion]” at eve. Rather than think in terms of days, or even the “month’s romance” of a honeymoon, however ideal it may seem, one must recognize that it takes years to build real love. “A five years’ wife, and not yet fair? / Blame let the man, not Nature, bear!” Dr. Churchill pronounces. Moreover, the sun in his metaphor shifts from being a source of light to becoming a source of life: “For, as the sun, warming a bank / Where last

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year’s grass droops gray and dank, / Evokes the violet,” “So vernal love, where all seems dead, / Makes beauty abound” (Poems 336–7). Surprisingly, Dr. Churchill’s sermon ends with what may be a glancing nod toward the famous “entangled bank” conclusion of the recently published On the Origin of Species (1859). As Darwin explained, the “endless forms” of that bank were the “evolved” product, over what was a very longue durée, of the various laws of Nature that he had detailed in his book—first among these “being Growth with Reproduction.”56 Patmore’s initial volume originally opened with the declaration of his theme: “Yourself, and love that’s all in all” (B 5). In later editions, he alters this line to include the principle of growth that he has come to recognize as essential, both to his poem and to the form of conjugality that it advocates: “your gentle self, my Wife, / And love, that grows from one to all” (Poems 62). If Wordsworth had chronicled “the growth of the poet’s mind,” Patmore describes the growth of the poet’s heart. And if for Wordsworth growth depends on a “love of nature leading to love of mankind” (Prelude VII), for Patmore, the mechanism of growth is marriage, its form the verse-novel.

III. FROM JOHN DONNE TO DON JUAN, VIA PETRARCH BY TRAIN While the spirit of Donne presides over the first two volumes of The Angel in the House, Petrarch’s poems actually appear within the story as a token of Felix’s lyric love. Towards the end of The Betrothal, Honoria and her father take a train to London: She had forgot to bring a book. I lent one; blamed the print for old; And did not tell her that she took A Petrarch worth its weight in gold. I hoped she’d lose it; for my love Was grown so dainty, high, and nice, It prized no luxury above The sense of fruitless sacrifice.57 (Poems 114)

Felix seems to have learned the lesson of the master; his desire for sacrifice accords with the Petrarchan tradition of courtly love. Nevertheless, the volume she was initially given to occupy herself on the train becomes a symbol not so much of a lyric eternal that is predicated on the unattainable (“A something evermore about to be,” as Wordsworth would have it) but rather of a more humdrum, novelistic form of temporality, suggested both

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by its function of passing the time and its status as “portable property,” possessing monetary value equal to its “weight in gold.”58 Moreover, like the proper wife she is about to become, Honoria does not lose the book. As though correcting Felix’s dangerous desire, she keeps the Petrarch carefully, and it reappears to signal her very attainability: the vanquished Aunt Maude instructs her niece to show Felix the volume as proof of the new friendship for him that will smooth the couple’s road to marriage (Poems 152). So, as with the candles of Denzil Place, the generic backdrop transforms the book. Patmore uses the Petrarch to bring some of lyric’s intensity into the realm of married love by changing the implication of its durational nature. When Petrarch resurfaces in the epilogue to “The Espousals,” set, as I have noted, ten years after the wedding, he once again casts the Italian poet’s lyric glow upon everyday conjugality. Felix has just commended the “sweetness” of “the ten years’ wife, / Whose customary love is not / Her passion, or her play, but life” (Poems 207). As he walks companionably beside Honoria, he muses upon a different form of love, one that he had previously sought: “How strange,” said he, “’twould seem to meet, When pacing, as we now this town, A Florence or a Lisbon Street, That Laura, or that Catherine, who, In the remote, romantic years, From Petrarch or Camoens drew Their songs and their immortal tears!”59

And once again, his heady romance is interrupted by a reality that offers the poet not just a gentle corrective but also an appealing alternative: But here their converse had its end; For, crossing the Cathedral Lawn, There came an ancient college-friend, Who, introduced to Mrs. Vaughan, Lifted his hat, and bow’d and smiled, And fill’d her kind large eyes with joy, By patting on the cheek her child, With, “Is he yours, this handsome boy?”60 (Poems 208)

The insistence on time as a positive force, a force capable of creating both “ancient” college friends and handsome boys, offers a compensating vision against the lost Lauras of lyric antiquity. Indeed, the point seems rather that Honoria herself represents a new and improved Laura, improved for being a wife and mother rather than an unattainable ideal.

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Still, the difficulty of combining the principles of lyric intensity and narrative temporal extension remains. Don Juan offers a stark expression of the problem. Byron takes it as axiomatic that poetry—or, at least, lyric— and marriage cannot coexist. Conveniently for me, he makes the case by reference to both the novelistic courtship plot and to Petrarch: There’s doubtless something in domestic doings, Which forms in fact true love’s antithesis. Romances paint at full length people’s wooings, But only give a bust of marriages, For no one cares for matrimonial cooings; There’s nothing wrong in a connubial kiss. Think you if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife, He would have written sonnets all his life? (III.8.1–8)

Although Kierkegaard’s proponent of seduction had dismissed Byron’s poem for being too like a novel, Don Juan, with its picaresque comedy and its tale of serial loves, can seem a far cry from the world of The Angel in the House. Yet for all Byron’s quip about the incommensurability of lyric and marriage, both he and Patmore consider the relationship between the experience of love and the production, not of lyric, but of long narrative verse. Byron’s poem, which like The Angel appeared over the course of many years and in a series of parts, came to an end only with the poet’s death in the camp at Missolonghi; as Peter J. Manning has pointed out, the result is a work that “is all middle.”61 The poem generates length through the sequence of Juan’s lovers. That is, if one might represent Patmore’s poem as attempting to grow in the pattern 1, 1, 1, 1, Don Juan grows via a linear numerical process: 1, 2, 3, 4. Byron’s joke about Petrarch comes on the heels of his musings about the inevitability of serial installments, once love (or, rather, sex) enters the picture. As the narrator puts it, when it comes to lovers, “there are some, they say, who have had none, / But those who have ne’er end with only one” (III.4.7–8). This pattern of serial repetition is mirrored in the ottava rima verse form, which similarly takes on a life of its own, creating lines out of the need for meeting the requirements of the ornate pattern in rhyme-stingy English. The connection between form and content is perhaps most densely encoded in the repetitions of the “b” rhyme of the poem’s first stanza: I want a hero: an uncommon want, When every year and month sends forth a new one, Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, The age discovers he is not the true one;

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Of such as these I should not care to vaunt, I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan—. (I.1.1–6, emphasis added)

Here already we can see the tension between singularity and seriality opening up in the context of passing time: the need for a “new one”—a further installment in the gazettes’ records of heroism—seems predicated on the failure to find a “true one,” someone invested with an immortal spirit of heroism. The bastardized pronunciation of the name Don Juan appears to be a product of this conflict, emerging out of the demand for a third rhyme in the ottava rima. As though to emphasize its importance, the poem recurs twice to the triple rhyme in its opening canto (stanzas 48 and 86). Even Juan’s first lover, Julia, receives a feminized treatment of the pattern. It comes, appropriately, in the second canto, in the context of Juan’s second love, for Haidée: But Juan, had he quite forgotten Julia? And should he have forgotten her so soon? I can’t but say it seems to me most truly a Perplexing question, but no doubt the moon Does these things for us, and whenever newly a Strong palpitation rises, ’tis her boon, Else how the devil is it that fresh features Have such a charm for us poor human creatures? (II.208.1–8, emphasis added)

Here the natural (and fittingly feminine) moon takes over from the social gazette as signal of passing time, but the effect is much the same as in the opening stanza, reminding us of the truth of Byron’s proposition: that once you have had one lover, you are bound to have more. And if, despite her placement in Canto II, the poem privileges Haidée as being Juan’s “real” first love—and perhaps his only “true one”—it also consigns the experience of such love to the realm of romance and impossibility, allowing it to flourish only in the prehistoric atmosphere of the cave. Moreover, Byron destroys the romance as soon as historical time—in the figure of Haidée’s father, Lambro—reenters the picture. With Haidée behind him, Juan can return to the pattern of serial love required to build up the length of the poem he inhabits.62 In contrast to Byron’s treatment of seriality as both proof and rule of sexual licentiousness, Linda Hughes and Michael Lund have argued persuasively how, in Patmore’s poem, the considerable duration of “serial reading could extend, augment, and influence the perception of domestic themes,” schooling The Angel ’s readers in those very virtues of gradual

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development, patience, and endurance that marriage demands and that I have shown the poem to endorse.63 Yet, at least in places, Felix seems startlingly like a provincial version of Byron’s Juan (who is, after all, himself an innocent, unlike the traditional figure: hence the possibility of imagining not only an adultery plot with Lady Adeline but also a courtship plot with Aurora Raby in the increasingly novelistic English Cantos). Consider, for example, what Edmund Gosse described as Vaughan’s “delicately polygamous and universally inflamed” feelings at the start of The Angel:64 I confess I never went to Ball or Fete Or Show, but in pursuit express Of my predestinated mate; And still to me, who still kept sight Of the sweet chance upon the cards, Each Beauty blossom’d in the light Of tender personal regards; And in the records of my breast, Red letter’d eminently fair, Stood sixteen, who, beyond the rest, Up to that time had been my care: At Berlin three, one at St. Cloud, At Chatteris, near Cambridge, one, At Ely four, in London two, Two at Bowness, in Paris none, And, last and best, in Sarum three: But dearest of the whole fair troop, In judgment of the moment, she Whose daisy eyes had learn’d to droop. (B 39–40)

Sixteen! And just as shockingly, those “daisy eyes” belong not to Honoria but to her sister Mildred, who reappears in the later parts of the poem as the worldly Lady Clitheroe. Of course, the lines hint toward the work’s broader lesson: that “the judgment of the moment” is not to be relied upon. Moreover, the promiscuousness of Felix’s love is paradoxically predicated on his obsession with marriage, his “pursuit express” of a “predestined mate”—a goal suggested also by his avoidance of a Parisian (and therefore by implication potentially adulterous) love-object. Nevertheless, both the poem and Felix express concern about what it might mean to lose that principle of pursuit, as one must properly do after marriage. “The Churl” (as a lyric in The Betrothal is titled) may be marked by the fact that “when spousals crown / His selfish hope, he finds the

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grace, / Which sweet love has for even the clown, / Was not in the woman, but the chace” (Poems 135). But when Honoria agrees to marry Felix, he hardly seems ecstatic: “The summit won, I paused and sigh’d, / As if success itself had fail’d” (Poems 137). And the needlessly detailed list of this early passage might make us reconsider what it means for something to grow “from one to all” (Poems 62), as the poem insists that marital love should grow. It is a concern that Honoria confirms in Faithful for Ever, when she describes her maneuverings to extinguish what she calls Felix’s “little lawless loves” (FFE 196).65 If repetition bolsters the ideal of marriage, sequence undermines it. But it can also generate narrative length. Patmore is acutely alert to seriality, yet he combines a desire to promulgate the virtues of duration with an awareness that the poem’s extension can lead, à la Don Juan, to the possibility of sequential loves. Like Byron, he wonders whether absent a “true one” you might choose a “new one.” When the rejected cousin Frederick Graham finds Honoria married in Faithful for Ever, the possibility of multiple loves initially seems to offer consolation; as Mrs. Graham enjoins her son, with a logic that sounds positively Byronic, “Remember, Frederick, this makes twice / You’ve been in love; then why not thrice, / Or ten times!” (FFE 42). And years after his boomerang marriage to Jane, Fred can nevertheless instruct his mother that He whose daily life Adjusts itself to one true wife, Grows to a nuptial, near degree With all that’s fair and womanly. (FFE 208)

These thoughts come to him just after he encounters Honoria on a lonely walk; they are meant to excuse the fact that, as he says of Honoria, “I love her rather more than less! / But she alone was loved of old; / Now love is twain, nay manifold” (FFE 208). Yet the form of serial love the poem considers most carefully takes into account not only mundane but also heavenly experience, viewing the latter not just through the lens of Kierkegaardian lyric kairos (as a way to make eternal the experience of the moment) but as a further installment in the history of a romance (chronos). The first edition of Faithful for Ever uses as its epigraph a quotation from Tennyson: “Of love that never found his earthly close, / What sequel.”66 One answer to this question—an answer that makes The Angel in the House look a lot more like Don Juan (and Denzil Place) than one might have expected—comes through considering what Patmore’s poem calls “the adulterous hope of change in heaven” (FFE 213).67

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According to Patricia Ball, Patmore answers Byron’s question—“Think you if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife, / He would have written sonnets all his life?”—with a hearty affirmative.68 Instead of writing sonnets, though, Patmore opts for something decidedly more narrative post-marriage, in keeping with the durational nature of conjugal lovetime. Beginning with Volume III, Faithful for Ever, The Angel in the House switches not only focus but also form, leaving behind both what Frederick calls “the lyric time of youth” (FFE 207) and the double structure of the first two books, which alternated between shorter lyrics and more overtly plot-based sections.69 Instead, the poem assumes a novelistic epistolary mode (as the title, a version of the common valediction, “Yours faithfully,” suggests) with multiple correspondents: Frederick and Jane; Frederick’s mother, Mrs. Graham, and Dr. Churchill; Honoria’s rather urbane sister, Lady Clitheroe (Mildred of the first two parts of the poem), and her pious sister, Mary; and Felix and Honoria, who provide cameo letters. Dr. Churchill’s wedding sermon, which takes up the final section of the poem’s fourth and final installment, The Victories of Love, adds yet another generic type to the mix. These different voices offer a certain amount of dialogism as they record the history of Frederick’s marriage to Jane: the disappointment and apathy that occasion it; Frederick’s initial despair at finding himself locked in marriage; Jane’s fear that her husband regrets his choice; the gradual development of love through the birth and death of children and Frederick’s growing recognition of his wife’s virtues, culminating during a long-delayed and much-dreaded visit to the Vaughans (where he is surprised to find Jane is admired by all); and finally, in The Victories of Love, Jane’s death (preceded by her composition of a series of letters to her husband that are to be read only when she is gone) and the marriage of Fred and Jane’s son to Honoria and Felix’s daughter. The verse form also becomes more prosaic: while Patmore preserves the octosyllabics, the abab quatrains disappear and are replaced by straightforward couplets. In marriage, the back-and-forth dance of courtship becomes (at least ideally) a steady tandem march forward. And the tendency that I remarked upon to end-stop every fourth line dissipates in favor of frequent enjambment, something that reviewers saw as contributing to the overall prosaic effect of this new installment of the poem.70 As it was first published, Faithful for Ever represents the work’s most obviously novelistic portion, with a three-book structure and Bildungsroman plot (albeit an adult, conjugal version thereof ) reminiscent of the contemporary triple-decker.71 But if the tale describes Jane’s education, as

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the déclassé girl grows to be a more suitable wife for her husband, the more pressing concerns turn out to be Frederick’s: How can he come to love Jane properly, and how might his feelings for Honoria be channeled into an acceptable path? In other words, Frederick needs to understand that if you can’t be with the one you love, you must learn to love the one you’re with. Recall Dr. Churchill’s advice in the wedding sermon: “Remember, few wed whom they would.” This surprising focus appears in the volume’s original book titles, “Honoria,” “Jane,” and “Rachel,” which refer us back to a lyric Accompaniment to Idyl VI of The Espousals: Rachel. You loved her, and would lie all night Thinking how beautiful she was, And what to do for her delight. Now both are bound with alien laws! Be patient; put your heart to school; Weep if you will, but not despair: The trust that nought goes wrong by rule Makes light a load the many bear. Love, if heav’n’s heav’n shall meet his dues, Though here unmatch’d, or match’d amiss; Meanwhile, the gentle cannot choose But learn to love the lips they kiss. Ne’er hurt the homely sister’s ears With Rachel’s beauties: secret be The lofty mind whose lonely tears Protest against mortality.72 (E 99–100)

In Genesis 29 Jacob is forced to labor for an extra seven years to gain Rachel as wife after Laban initially tricks him into wedding her older sister, Leah. Here, though, the speaker locates reward not in this world but in the next. Just wait, he promises, and you will be joined to your Rachel in heaven; in the meantime, you should “learn to love” Leah. Note, however, that while Patmore’s “learn to love” line positively chugs along on the alliteration of those “l”s and the slant-rhyme of “lips” and “kiss,” scanning the promise that “Love, if heav’n’s heav’n shall meet his dues” requires a real leap of faith.73 The story of Rachel and Leah becomes one of the controlling narratives of the final two volumes of The Angel in the House, especially in their original versions. But it also appears in other Victorian novels-in-verse. A traditional allegorical reading of the story views it as describing the need to combine ideal and real in a marriage, something that the verse-novel as

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a genre is acutely attuned to, as it combines idealizing verse with the quotidian novel. Arthur Hugh Clough makes use of this significance at the end of The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1849), where a friend sends a letter of congratulation and advice to the hero, Philip Hewson, on his marriage to Elspie Mackaye.74 “Go, be the wife in thy house both Rachel and Leah unto thee,” the friend writes. And he explains what he means: For this Rachel-and-Leah is marriage; which, I have seen it, Lo, and have known it, is always, and must be, bigamy only, Even in noblest kind a duality, compound, and complex, One part heavenly-ideal, the other vulgar and earthy: For this Rachel-and-Leah is marriage, and Laban their father, Circumstance, chance, the world, our uncle and hard taskmaster. Rachel we found as we fled from the daughters of Heth by the desert; Rachel we met at the well; we came, we saw, we kissed her; Rachel we serve-for, long years,—that seem as a few days only, E’en for the love we have to her,—and win her at last of Laban. Is it not Rachel we take in our joy from the hand of her father? Is it not Rachel we lead in the mystical veil from the altar? Rachel we dream-of at night: in the morning, behold, it is Leah. “Nay, it is custom,” saith Laban, and Leah indeed is the elder. Happy and wise who consents to redouble his service to Laban, So, fulfilling her week, he may add to the elder the younger, Not repudiates Leah, but wins the Rachel unto her! Neither hate thou thy Leah, my Jacob, she also is worthy; So, many days shall thy Rachel have joy, and survive her sister; Yea, and her children—Which things are an allegory, Philip, Aye, and by Origen’s head with a vengeance truly, a long one!75

In The Bothie, Rachel-and-Leah are happily hybridized—as the poem happily hybridizes novelistic and lyric elements (and a prominent epic component)—in the singular person of Elspie; the alternative loves of the “real” peasant girl, Katie, and the “ideal” aristocrat, Lady Mary, who had earlier tempted the hero, have been painlessly left to the side.76 In The Angel in the House, though, alignments are trickier. In a reading that would go along with the conventional allegorization (which they do not, however, mention), Hughes and Lund view Honoria and Jane as consecutive “phases of married life, the romanticized female icon prior to marriage and the earthy, embodied woman encountered after.”77 But while there’s clearly much truth to this interpretation, it fails to recognize the consequences of the poem’s use of novelistic structure: in such a generic context, neither woman can be a simple “icon” (in fact, as Hughes and Lund themselves note, Honoria’s voice in Faithful for Ever is refreshingly human, offering an antidote to the idealized portrait of the first parts

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of The Angel 78). And the “phases” take place in a realistic temporal framework: Patmore is constantly reminding the reader of the precise passage of time by references to wedding anniversaries and the growth of children. Honoria does not become Jane but rather continues to live on, both in Frederick’s mind and in the world described in the poem. Moreover, the poem’s fascination with the fate of marriage in heaven— something that the lyric Accompaniment “Rachel” hints at—means that, even if Frederick’s loves for Honoria and Jane could be viewed as sequential, the sequence has not yet ended. The titles of the three books of Faithful for Ever thus lay out both the poem’s basic trajectory and its central uncertainty: Which of these two women will be Frederick’s Rachel? To whom must he be “Faithful for Ever”? In other words, Patmore seems to wonder: Could Honoria be Frederick’s “soul-mate”? In such a reading, Jane becomes a mere Leah, to be relegated to inferior status after years of wifehood, when, in death, Frederick will finally be united to Honoria. Learning of Honoria and Felix’s wedding, Mrs. Graham counsels her son against a rebound marriage, warning that Frederick may come to feel “dread / In Leah’s arms, to meet the eyes / Of Rachel, somewhere in the skies” (FFE 93). But while the letter containing this advice is sent months before Frederick’s marriage to Jane, it arrives—with a temporal convolution typical of the poem— “too late” to serve its purpose. Mrs. Graham can now only offer caution: Fred must avoid “the adulterous hope of change in heaven.” This most conservative of verse-novels suddenly seems alert to the adulterating energies of the form. The poem’s conception of marriage becomes tied, then, to questions of temporality, sequence, and eschatology. And the allegory of Rachel and Leah combines with another biblical story linking the sequential perspective of earth (narrative, chronos) with the eternal perspective of heaven (lyric, kairos). I refer to Jesus’s discussion with the Sadducees about the fate of marriage after death. The Sadducees, who do not believe in heaven, test Jesus: Moses said, If a man die, having no children, his brother shall marry his wife, and raise up seed unto his brother. Now there were with us seven brethren: and the first, when he had married a wife, deceased, and, having no issue, left his wife to his brother: Likewise the second also, and the third, unto the seventh. And last of all the woman died also. Therefore in the resurrection whose wife shall she be of the seven? for they all had her.79

The parable alters the scenario set up by Jacob’s double marriage: it concerns a single woman wed to multiple men, rather than a single man

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wed to multiple women; and it imagines the earthly marriages to be serial rather than bigamous, as in the Mosaic narrative. But, crucially to Patmore, the New Testament tale takes the history of marriage into the next life. In contrast, the Old Testament displays almost complete lack of interest in what happens after death. So when, in “Rachel,” Patmore’s Jacob figure thinks about his reward in heaven, he is Christianizing the tale of Rachel and Leah in a manner that aligns its concerns with those of Matthew 22. Jesus responds to the Sadducees by denying that the conjugal bond persists in the afterlife: “in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.” So the potential scandal of celestial polygamy is averted. A surprising number of Victorian long narrative poems, both verse-novels and works in closely associated genres, consider this text.80 Elizabeth Barrett Browning makes Marian Erle recall Matthew 22 in refusing Romney Leigh’s proposal of marriage at the end of Aurora Leigh; her rape having left her dead to all but her son, “And gone away where none can give or take / In marriage,” how could she possibly “revive, return / And wed” (IX.309–11)? In Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, Pompilia cites the same chapter and verse thankfully at the conclusion of her monologue, as something that offers relief from her horrific experience of earthly marriage: Marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit, Mere imitation of the inimitable: In heaven we have the real and true and sure. ’Tis there they neither marry nor are given In marriage but are as the angels: right, Oh how right that is, how like Jesus Christ To say that! Marriage-making for the earth, With gold so much,—birth, power, repute so much, Or beauty, youth so much, in lack of these! Be as the angels rather, who, apart, Know themselves into one, are found at length Married, but marry never, no, nor give In marriage; they are man and wife at once When the true time is: here we have to wait Not so long neither! Could we by a wish Have what we will and get the future now, Would we wish aught done undone in the past? So, let him wait God’s instant men call years. (VII.1824–41)

Notice how her reflections on the status of marriage in heaven come in the form of thoughts about temporality, about “God’s instant men call years”

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and about the “true time” of the resurrection, in which one can be “found at length married” without ever doing anything. In Clough’s Amours de Voyage, Claude finds a rather less spiritual form of relief in the notion that death promises a definite endpoint to earthly marriage. We “Talk of eternal ties and marriages made in heaven,” as Claude admits; nevertheless, “But for his funeral train which the bridegroom sees in the distance, / Would he so joyfully, think you, fall in with the marriage-procession?” (III.vi.112, 117–18). Absent divorce, death offers the only certain release from the need to be faithful forever, without which such a decisive human action as the “I will” of the wedding would seem too imposing a risk.81 Still, for all Clough’s skepticism, “Explaining how marriage continued in heaven in spite of the New Testament denial, comprised an important element in [nineteenth-century] theological discussions,” as Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang have described.82 The Victorian vogue for spiritualism shows the desire to find identity preserved after death, and countless books paid tribute to the yearning for a heaven that kept the beloved ties of home sweet home. Charles Kingsley explained to his wife that Matthew 22 indicated only the absence of celestial weddings, not the dissolution of the marriage tie83—something Pompilia suggests also in the passage quoted above when she describes angels who “are found at length / Married, but marry never, no, nor give / In marriage” (she may even be thinking of Caponsacchi). In Idylls of the King, Lancelot’s relationship to Guinevere is first sung round in terms of the heavenly love of Matthew, in an effort to avoid the scandal of adultery: Sir Lancelot worshipped no unmarried girl But the great Queen herself, fought in her name, Sware by her—vows like theirs, that high in heaven Love most, but neither marry, nor are given In marriage, angels of our Lord’s report.84

Yet by the poem’s conclusion, Arthur thinks longingly towards heaven as a place where Guinevere can correct her earthly infidelities with Lancelot and become at last a true and loyal wife. He pleads, Hereafter in that world where all are pure We two may meet before high God, and thou Wilt spring to me, and claim me thine, and know I am thine husband—not a smaller soul, Nor Lancelot, nor another. Leave me that I charge thee, my last hope. (G 560–5)

In heaven, he will finally find the conjugal soul-mate of his desires.

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The frequency with which verse-novels and related hybrid works broach the topic of marriage in heaven suggests the form has a peculiar purchase on the subject, something Patmore’s poem confirms. In The Espousals, Patmore also worries over the verses of Matthew, in a lyric titled “Marriage Indissoluble”: “In heaven none marry.” Grant the most Which may by this dark word be meant, Who shall forbid the eternal boast “I kiss’d and kiss’d with her consent!” If here, to Love, past favour is A present boast, delight and chain, What lacks of honour, bond, and bliss, Where Now and Then are no more twain! (Poems 191)

Notice how, like Pompilia, Patmore figures the question in terms of competing temporalities and modes. In this world, the memory of “past favour” is “A present boast”; it’s as though the experience of love is needed to create a “bond” or “chain”—a narrative—between moments (the discrete “I kiss’d”s) that would otherwise scatter into unintelligibility (recall my discussion of Fane’s lyric, “Now,” in Chapter 1). In the next world, though, the distinction between past and present, “Now and Then,” will disappear, making the experience of love both perfect and perfectly lyrical. Patmore views his poem as an analogue to love, something that, like marriage, can survive the Resurrection. As Felix, says, “My faith is fast / That all the loveliness I sing / Is made to outsleep the immortal blast, / And blossom in a better Spring” (B 12). The ambiguity in these lines—it is unclear whether “all the loveliness” refers to the song or its subject—implies that they both will make it through the barrier. The hybrid form of The Angel in the House makes it fit to function in both time zones. If the first two installments of The Angel hint toward an interest in marriage in heaven, though, the latter volumes bring the topic of what Jane calls “love’s after-life” front and center.85 As Patmore’s friend and biographer Basil Champneys put it: “About the time when the English Legislature was, by the divorce laws, relaxing the marriage tie, Patmore was devoting his genius to idealizing it and asserting its permanence in time and eternity.”86 The question of what happened to husbands and wives after death played a significant role in the legal debates about marriage during the period, as Maia McAleavey has recently shown. Matthew 22 appears frequently in contemporary discussions, especially in relation to the marriage of a man to his deceased wife’s sister. The illegality of such

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marriage was firmly established by the Marriage Act of 1835. But, as Anne D. Wallace notes, “In 1842, the first bill calling for legalization of marriage with a deceased wife’s sister was introduced in Parliament, and from that time until the passage of the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act in 1907, the issue was revisited almost yearly.”87 McAleavey argues that a significant part of the objection to the relationship stemmed from the fear that such marriages would lead to incestuous bigamy in the afterlife; the vehemence associated with the subject is thus a byproduct of the Victorian rejection of Jesus’s response to the Sadducees. McAleavey couches her argument in the context of David Copperfield (1850), a novel that did so much toward popularizing the wifely ideal as the angel in the house that one must wonder about its influence on Patmore.88 “You are always my good Angel,” David tells Agnes. But Agnes’s answer, “that one good Angel (meaning Dora) was enough,” demonstrates how in Dickens’s novel, as McAleavey shows, the focus on marriage in heaven (Agnes is repeatedly figured with her finger pointed toward heaven, as in the very last line of the novel) transforms David’s sequential loves for Dora and Agnes into a form of “spiritual bigamy.”89 As McAleavey puts it, “Anticipating marriage in heaven transforms remarriage on earth. A social, and particularly a conjugal, heaven places remarriage on a strangely uncertain footing and revises its apparently natural sequence (two successive spouses, separated by mourning and years) into a disturbing, or fantastic, simultaneity.”90 McAleavey mentions Patmore’s poem in the context of the Victorian fascination with conjugal heaven, but only its first two installments. In fact, as I have started to describe here, the later parts resonate even more with her claims, since they consider in depth what it might mean for a man to love more than one woman, both in this world and in the next. Like Dickens, Patmore plays with the distinctions between simultaneous and sequential love (although in keeping with the conventions of the verse-novel, the poem frames the problem in terms of adultery rather than bigamy). Moreover, “love’s after-life” features so centrally in Patmore’s verse-novel—and is so regular a subject in other novels-in-verse—because the genre’s hybrid temporal orientations make it perfectly suited to considering the topic. The thought of marriage in heaven permeates the second half of The Angel in the House; indeed Frederick’s marriage to Jane is predicated on this eschatological foundation. Having seen Felix and Honoria blissfully together on their honeymoon, Frederick initially despairs, And now I know The ultimate hope I rested on, The hope beyond the grave, is gone,

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But this hopelessness does not last. Soon after his marriage to Jane, Frederick writes to his mother in a very different vein: My gain Is very great in this good wife, To whom I’m bound, for natural life, By hearty faith, yet crossing not My faith towards—I know not what! As to the ether is the air, Is her [i.e., Jane’s] good to Honoria’s fair; One place is full of both, yet each Lies quite beyond the other’s reach And recognition. Star and star, Rays crossing, closer rivals are, Sequestered in their separate spheres. (FFE 101)

Even if he doesn’t want to express his desire, his metaphor gives him away; when his term of “natural life” with Jane expires, he hopes to find Honoria in her proper heavenly sphere. Notice how the separate spheres ideology of the poem has shifted; now it is not a question of distinctions between man and woman, but between ideal and real woman—and between this world and the next. Suggestively, Patmore uses this language of separate spheres to describe the distinctions between prose and verse, as well. “There’s little here [i.e., on earth] that story tells / But music talks of nothing else,” Frederick writes of Honoria (FFE 106); she is the lyric to Jane’s prose. In a review of Tennyson’s In Memoriam—a long quasi-narrative poem that like David Copperfield was published in 1850 and shares Patmore’s concern for the fate of love after death—Patmore considers the question of meter. (Notably, the In Memoriam stanza is also an octosyllabic quatrain; in the review, Patmore calls it “the most striking instance of thorough knowledge and pure feeling for metre which has been displayed by a modern poet.”92) For Patmore, meter, like marriage, is a matter of law, and “All beauty, from the highest to the lowest, . . . is life expressed in law.” But he turns to an odd expression in his efforts to explain how freedom and law can

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coexist: “By the superinduction of metre, language is lifted out of the sphere of prose expression altogether, and a free poetical diction becomes not only allowable, but necessary, in order to balance and relieve the artificial law.”93 Superinduction has a conjugal significance: “the taking on of a second wife ‘within the lifetime of the first (or, by extension, shortly after her death).’”94 The conjunction of terms and ideas—Patmore is talking about the laws of verse, but he might as well be talking about those of love, given his terminology—hints that we are dealing here with a nexus of related issues for the poet: metrical, marital, and eschatological. And the verse-novel stands at the crossroads. The original Faithful for Ever ends by returning to both biblical texts, Old and New Testament. Jane recounts to Mrs. Graham a conversation with her husband about the possibility of marriage in heaven: He told me that “The Sadducees Inquired not of true marriages When they invoked that dark reply, Which now costs love so many a sigh.” (FFE 235)

But, as Jane records, Frederick then shifts to the story of Rachel and Leah: “All I am sure of heaven is this: Howe’er the mode, I shall not miss One true delight which I have known. Not on the changeful earth alone Shall loyalty remain unmoved T’wards everything I ever loved. So Heaven’s voice calls, like Rachel’s voice To Jacob in the field, ‘Rejoice! Serve on some seven more sordid years, Too short for weariness or tears; Serve on; then, oh Beloved, well-tried, Take me for ever as thy bride!’ ” (FFE 237)

Jane initially finds these claims reassuringly “orthodox,” seeing them as intended to comfort her: “Was it not kind to talk to me / So really confidentially!” Her husband’s words make her “giddy” in the confirmation of his love (FFE 237). But the effect on the reader is rather to confuse than to confirm. The allusion to Rachel and Leah reminds us of that earlier lyric and makes us ask again: which woman, in this comparison, is to be Rachel? Frederick’s conviction that in heaven he will find “everything I ever loved” may include his wife, but surely, the implication is, it will also include Honoria. It is only in reference to her that the idea of

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waiting for some future compensation makes any sense; after all, he already has Jane.95 Actually, Jane’s giddiness appears to stem as much from her relief that she is not to be abandoned in heaven (she is included in that “everything I ever loved”) as from any real conviction that she is the Rachel in this scenario. Understandably, given her husband’s talk, the subject of “love’s afterlife” becomes Jane’s idée fixe. The term appears in a letter (the first of three) that Jane writes in The Victories of Love for Frederick to read after her death (she is now suffering from what she foresees to be a fatal illness), one that offers an exegetical argument for the persistence of marriage in heaven; this letter might be said to half-enact its ideological content through its form by creating a dialogue between living husband and deceased wife.96 As Jane argues, “Poor image of the spousal bond / Of Christ and Church, if loosed beyond / This life!” (VL I.441). Like Frederick’s, though, her thoughts of heaven cannot be separated from earthly conjugal emotions. Her modestly repressed envy of Honoria’s graces becomes a crucial part of her eschatology. Soon after meeting Honoria and witnessing her husband’s admiration, she confesses to her mother-in-law: in another life, Where all are fair that have been true, I hope I shall be graceful too, Like Mrs. Vaughan. (FFE 191)

This hope becomes the obsession of Jane’s deathbed, offering her a solution to the volume’s central dilemma. It culminates in the third posthumous letter to Fred, which concludes with Jane’s vision of herself in the afterlife: I saw myself, myself no more. In such a shape henceforth I dwelt That love me most of all I felt You must! (VL I.446)

As later editions clarify, Jane’s conviction is achieved only by imagining fusion with Honoria. A Lady (who seems to have migrated from Dante’s Divine Comedy) comes to Jane and lets her know that Frederick’s “hope found grace!” (Poems 300): She bade me then, in the crystal floor, Look at myself, myself no more; And bright within the mirror shone Honoria’s smile, and yet my own! (Poems 300)

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Both versions of the poem have the Lady explain that “Many a bride / In heaven such countersemblance bears, / Through what love deem’d rejected prayers” (Poems 300–1; VL I.448). The unfamiliar coinage countersemblance (not in the OED) masks the meaning a little, but not enough: the dying Jane knows that Frederick’s love for her is at best split with his devotion to Honoria. The “mournful honeymoon / Of death” (VL I.444) on which she says he must now embark before rejoining her in heaven is thus layered over the mournful honeymoon of life that he has been experiencing throughout the poem, as he awaits his eventual and eternal union with Honoria (what happens to Felix in this scenario isn’t quite clear). If anything, the prefix counter reminds us of the potential for competition between the women. So while this lyric vision seems meant to give comfort to Jane and Frederick, its effect is rather an unsettling reminder, in McAleavey’s terms, of “a disturbing, or fantastic, simultaneity” to relationships that were supposed to have taken the form of prosaic serial monogamy. Moreover, an impression that remains largely implicit in a novel like David Copperfield here becomes all-too-explicit, as if the very nature of his chosen genre leads Patmore to explore such fusions of real and ideal. Still, in proper verse-novel fashion, the poem concludes with not only a lyric solution—the anticipation of Fred’s marriage in heaven to a melded Jane-Honoria—but also a more quotidian, novelistic answer. “Now, in your children, you will wed” (VL I.446; Poems 300), Jane promises Fred. And so they do. As if to emphasize the continued importance of the mundane to Patmore’s conception of marriage, in the first edition, the last voice we hear prior to Dr. Churchill’s wedding sermon belongs to the work’s most worldly figure, Lady Clitheroe, who writes to her niece, the recent bride, to offer both advice and (courtesy of her more pious sister Mary) a transcription of “Papa’s Discourse.” And the last line of her letter, “Adieu, for there’s the Luncheon Bell,” provides its own “countersemblance”—or, perhaps more rightly, melodic counterpoint—to the implied wedding bells, not to mention a comic corrective to the pealing bells of In Memoriam (VL II.37; Poems 321). The final installment of The Victories of Love, consisting exclusively of that enclosed sermon, was published in Macmillan’s Magazine in December of 1861—the very month Prince Albert died, leaving Queen Victoria to begin her own forty-year “mournful honeymoon of death” (remember: she was buried in her wedding veil, prepared to meet her once and future husband). And even as the nation mourned, Patmore would soon encounter the trials to which he had subjected Frederick: in 1862, his wife Emily succumbed to a long and lingering illness. On her deathbed, she is said to have made a gift of her wedding band to Patmore, for him to bestow upon his next wife. Patmore remarried. Twice.97

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The Victorian Verse-Novel CODA: THE EARTHLY PARADISE AND THE LOVERS OF GUDRUN

If Patmore’s poem can end only by reminding us that “every limit is a beginning as well as an ending,” to steal a phrase from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (a novel that also demonstrates an obsession with duration98), it thereby implies the enduring importance of life’s middle. When we recall how Denzil Place shows resistance to ending—it keeps putting off closure, refusing to leave us at Constance’s graveside in Italy, taking us in its Conclusion back to England and into the next generation, and finally into the authorial reflections of the Epilogue—we might posit that verse-novels more generally become long in part by not ending neatly when they should, even when (as with The Angel ) they reach conventional novelistic points of closure like death and marriage. In works like these, while a king may die, he is bound to return sometime, as Tennyson would have us believe and as I will discuss at more length in Chapter 3. But no long poem of the Victorian era avoids endings as obsessively as William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise (published in four volumes, 1868–70). This monumental story cycle records the twenty-four tales exchanged over the course of a year between a group of Norse Wanderers who have fled the Black Death in search of a rumored “Earthly Paradise” of eternal life, and the survivors of a Greek colony they discover in their travels, the remnants of an ancient civilization. As Linda Hughes and Michael Lund have argued, “The prolonged middle of The Earthly Paradise reinforces the poem’s central theme, the desire to avoid life’s end.”99 Indeed, much like the recursive patterns of Morris’s gorgeous fabrics and wallpapers, his massive poem can be said to be all middle; as soon as the year is over, both it and the cycle of stories can begin again. Most of these tales feel very much like tales, of either the mythological or the legendary variety. But there is one exception: as readers have long recognized, the brooding and tragic narrative The Lovers of Gudrun achieves a psychological complexity that is generically associated with the novel. This Norse story, the one for November, goes far beyond its source text, the Laxdaela Saga, especially in its concern for the realistic characterization of its protagonists.100 The narrative centers on a love triangle, but that triangle is configured through two marriages and a plot of “the sailor’s return.”101 The star-crossed lovers are Gudrun and Kiartan, who are separated by Bodli, Kiartan’s foster brother and best friend, when Bodli falsely informs Gudrun that Kiartan intends to marry a foreign princess he had met while away on a three-year quest (he had gone abroad to find fame and glory). In her anguish, Gudrun weds Bodli. Kiartan

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returns to discover the betrayal and, eventually, to marry Refna—a kind of Elaine-figure who gets her Lancelot, only to realize that he can’t really be hers. (That said, the idealized and rather repressed Kiartan is really the Arthur of the tale; and, Lancelot-like, Bodli receives our sympathy for his anguish over his own treachery.) The story climaxes in Bodli’s unwilling murder of Kiartan at Gudrun’s instigation. But it does not end there. Gudrun survives Bodli and also yet another husband—her fourth, since she had been twice married, once widowed, and once divorced before falling in love with Kiartan. Finally, much like Guinevere, Gudrun comes to rest in a nunnery.102 Although, at roughly two hundred pages, The Lovers of Gudrun is by a significant margin the longest of The Earthly Paradise’s stories, Morris was paradoxically pleased at its comparative economy: “the book would have done me more credit if there had been nothing in it but the Gudrun, although I don’t think the others the worst things I have done—yet they are all too long and flabby—damn it!”103 Morris’s self-evaluation here might remind us that Walter Pater’s famous aestheticist call for a life of lyric intensity—“To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life”—his closing note to The Renaissance (1873), originally arose, rather surprisingly, in response to the first volume of Morris’s Earthly Paradise. It reminds us, that is, that Pater’s impossible longing was not for momentary lyric perfection—that we can and do achieve—but for a durable version of it: “to burn always”; “to maintain this ecstasy.” And while Pater may have believed that in Morris’s earlier tales, the songs and interludes “detach themselves by their concentrated sweetness from the rest of the book” like true lyrics, he also recognized some of those remarkable durational qualities in these stories that would come to characterize The Lovers of Gudrun: “We have become so used to austerity and concentration in some noble types of modern poetry, that it is easy to mislike the lengthiness of this new poem. Yet here mere mass is itself the first condition of an art which deals with broad atmospheric effects.” The review is rife with its own paradoxical yearnings for both lyric intensity and a kind of extended experience that requires greater length and narrative structure; he praises Morris’s “perfect story-telling.”104 In fact, the emotional power of The Lovers of Gudrun derives from our sense of time’s “wearing on,” in the tale’s favorite phrase: “So time wore”; “Now the days wore”; “time wore away”; “So the days wore.”105 “How long shall it last?” Kiartan asks Bodli at one stage (470). It’s a question the reader shares, but enjoyably: the smooth flow of Morris’s remarkably regular iambic pentameter couplets buoys us up as it carries us inexorably on toward the tragic climax. Like Bodli awaiting Kiartan’s return, we “saw the end and waited it” (433)—all the more so since the story had opened

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by describing how a visitor to the clan had interpreted Gudrun’s dreams as signifying the succession of her various marriages. And throughout, the sense of time is palpable, becoming almost another character in the saga. “End,” though, is a misnomer, since in its recurring cycles, Morris seems to connect this most novelistic of the tales to the structure of The Earthly Paradise as a whole: “Unheeding all, the year moved as before, / And Autumn came again” (459). Such circularity and foreshadowing appear in another instance of the recurring pattern of time’s “wearing on.” Having planned Kiartan’s murder, Gudrun already sees the deed as done: That day Like years long told, past Gudrun wore away, She knew not how, but when the next day came She cried aloud, “The same, ah still the same, Shall every day be, now that he is dead!” (490)

What makes these lines so strange is that Kiartan isn’t yet dead, as Gudrun knows well. In such a timescape, ends becomes middles and death becomes an “every day” reality. That is to say, life has assumed the temporal dimensions of the afterlife. So it makes sense that this poem also considers love’s fate after death. The Lovers of Gudrun, in measuring time through days and years, filters it through the experience of love; as we are told when Kiartan first leaves for his travels, “Though fast away the lovesome time did go, / [Gudrun] Wept long through lonely hours” (419). In the midst of her unhappy marriage to Bodli, Gudrun imagines a hellish translation of the marriage in heaven envisioned by Patmore’s Jane (perhaps with an echo of Francesca, too), in which the feelings that were improperly matched on earth become redirected: “Who can tell, / O Bodli Thorleikson, but down in hell / We twain shall love, and love, and love again.” Perhaps then she will finally understand “Why upon earth I loved a weak heart so / That loved me not”— that is, Kiartan—“while I was ice to thee” (458). Bodli wants to believe in a better fate for his love in the afterlife. In the wake of the murder, he jealously considers how, for Kiartan, “time is dead . . . and thou mayst wait / A thousand years for her and deem it nought” (507). He wonders, though, “What shall we do, if, each of each forgiven, / We three shall meet at last in that fair heaven / The new faith tells of?”106 “Wilt thou not give my love Gudrun to me,” Bodli imagines asking Kiartan, “Since now indeed thine eyes made clear can see / That I of all the world must love her most?” (507). Such visions of an escape from temporality jar sharply, however, with the slow progress of time on earth: “I speak of time

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destroyed, when unto me / Shall the world’s minutes be as lapse of years” (508), he laments. Yet while Bodli anticipates suffering a Cainlike existence (511), he survives only three years after the murder, brought down in the clanwarfare that it initiates. In contrast, Gudrun, like the Wife of Bath who must have been her partial inspiration, survives both husbands and poem. In the tale’s own afterlife, a final chapter that functions as an afterword following the climax of Kiartan’s death, Morris recurs again to the leitmotif of durable time to describe the last of Gudrun’s serial lovers. “And still she lived long,” Morris’s storyteller continues, and when Bodli’s sons were men And many things had happened, she wed again, And though her days of keen joys might be bare Yet little did they bring of added care As on and on they wore from that old time When she was set amidst mad love and crime. (522)

“This husband’s end” arrives as well, as had been predicted at the start of Morris’s tale. In contrast, the three most resilient forces in the poem— Gudrun, time, and love—continue to “wear on” (although love has again changed its object): The tale saith That she lived long years afterwards, and strove, E’en as she might, to win a little love From God now, and with bitter yearning prayer Through these slow-footed lonely days to wear. (522)

Few individual lines of iambic pentameter are as long as that last one, with its punning reference to its own slow-moving feet. But, like Patmore and like Fane, Morris has used the extended scope of his verse-novel to describe the experience of lovetime, its lyric intensity and its novelistic longue durèe.

NOTES 1. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 125. 2. Catherine Gallagher, “Formalism and Time,” Modern Language Quarterly 61.1 (2001), 232.

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3. Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991). In conceptualizing the “prolonged” or “extended middles” of serial fictions, Hughes and Lund focus on William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise, the poem to which I will turn in my Coda (108–11). A more recent example of the move toward the middle is found in Caroline Levine and Mario Ortiz-Robles, eds., Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011). Levine and Ortiz-Robles define neoformalist critical approaches—in which category I would include my own work—as ones that aim to show how writers are “aware of the ways that aesthetic forms can mold and intervene in the social world” (5). See also Rebecca Rainof ’s The Victorian Novel of Adulthood: Plot and Purgatory in Fictions of Adulthood (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015). Rainof focuses on fictions of midlife that swim against the tide of the Victorian Bildungsroman. She pays special attention to the intervals of lyrical stasis that suspend the forward movement of conventional narrative, and her particular concerns for the purgatorial motifs and “gradual plotting” in the texts she considers resonate with my eschatological observations in this chapter. 4. Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 30. 5. Natasha Moore has also focused on the prevalent concern with the subject of marriage in the long poems she considers in Victorian Poetry and Modern Life. She views the focus as a product of these poems’ commitment to the real over the ideal. See chapter 2, “The Marriage Plot,” 109–44. Helena Michie points to George Eliot as an exceptional novelist for her recognition of marriage as a “middle” worthy of contemplation: “In Middlemarch—one of the first English novels to move beyond the wedding ceremony, through the honeymoon, and, painfully, through the tribulations, compromises, and accommodations of marriage—there is always at work a conflict between marriage as an ending and as a beginning or, particularly in a novel with this name and focus, as a middle.” See “When in Rome: Honeymoon Tourism in the ‘City of Visible History,’ ” in Nineteenth-Century Geographies: The Transformation of Space from the Victorian Age to the American Century, ed. Helena Michie and Ronald R. Thomas (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 142. 6. As Meisel also notes, however, the two wing panels of Egg’s triptych show different views of what we presume to be the same time period after the fall. See Meisel, Realizations, 25; and Nead, Myths of Sexuality, 65–6, 72. 7. Eric C. Walker, Marriage, Writing and Romanticism: Wordsworth and Austen after War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 32. Sue Zemka has recently considered Kierkegaard’s temporal orientations in Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), although she does not look at Either/Or. 8. Kierkegaard’s interest in generic mixing appears also in the subtitle of his other work of 1843: Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric.

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9. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. and abridged Alistair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1992), 31. This edition, which is only lightly abridged, will be internally cited hereafter. 10. The advice anticipates Marian Erle’s Romantic—and lyric—education in Aurora Leigh, where she makes a posy of her favorite moments from the scraps and pieces of great books that a (Wordsworthian) pedlar has given to her (III.969–95). I will look at this moment in more detail in Chapter 4. 11. See G. Gabrielle Starr, Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), and my Crisis of Action, 123. I will return to Clarissa in Chapter 3. 12. Walker, Marriage, Writing and Romanticism, 33. 13. I am reminded here of Wordsworth’s lines in The Prelude—a justification for his “realistic” theme and language, as well as an excuse for his political engagement—about our need “to exercise [our] skill” “in the very world which is the world / Of all of us, the place in which, in the end, / We find our happiness, or not at all” (Prelude X.722, 725–7 [1805]). 14. Walker, Marriage, Writing and Romanticism, 33. 15. For the relationship of the “everyday” to marriage, see Walker, Marriage, Writing and Romanticism, who cites Stanley Cavell as a significant proponent of the concept. For the importance of the everyday in the theory of the novel, see Ian Watt’s classic account of the genre as “a fictional narrative in which an ordinary person’s daily activities are the center of continuous literary attention” (The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957], 74). 16. A direct influence is extremely unlikely. While Either/Or established Kierkegaard’s fame in Denmark, it was not translated into English until the twentieth century (though the British Library does hold a German translation from 1885). 17. [Brimley], “The Angel in the House,” 477. 18. D. A. Miller also considers the impossibility of narrating marriage in his treatment of Jane Austen’s works in Narrative and its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). He begins his account of the inherent tensions residing in novelistic narration (the paradox that “the narratable . . . can never generate the terms for its own arrest” but that it nevertheless proves consistently “stronger than the closure to which it is opposed” [266–7]) by remarking that “the narrative of happiness is inevitably frustrated by the fact that only insufficiencies, defaults, deferrals, can be ‘told’ ” (3). Miller’s account focuses on novels, and he doesn’t consider the various generic implications of the non-narratable moments he identifies in the texts he considers. But his sense that Austen’s novelistic form values the very thing (marriage) that reduces its own “plot” to “a largely gratuitous, or inessential, middle” (8) resonates with my argument here, as does his recognition that the tension he finds in the closing moments of novelistic discourse owes much to the “sheer length” of novels (279); what

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19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

The Victorian Verse-Novel I am suggesting is that the kinds of transcendence that disrupt or close off narration might, in verse-novels, be allied with lyric form. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, ed. Ronald Blythe (London: Penguin, 1985), 330. Hardy’s own later turn from the novel to poetry suggests his ongoing dissatisfaction with the demands of plot—especially the popular demands. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 163. Maia McAleavey has referred to this passage as sensation fiction’s ars poetica. McAleavey, The Bigamy Plot: Sensation and Convention in the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 151. In her treatment of the “everyday” middles of Anne Brontë’s novels, Amanda Claybaugh argues that the adultery plot and the reform plot (she is thinking in particular of the temperance plot) “are the most common way in which the nineteenth-century novel, at least prior to George Eliot and Henry James, managed to ‘go on’ past the marriage that ends the courtship plot.” “Everyday Life in Anne Brontë,” in Narrative Middles, 122. When one combines this observation with the claim I made in Chapter 1 that the British Madame Bovary is Tennyson’s Guinevere, one sees even more clearly how central the genre was to Victorian conceptions of womanhood. While Dickens uses phrases similar to Patmore’s “Angel in the House” (see, for example, chapter 25 of David Copperfield, “Good and Bad Angels”), the expression gained currency only later, after Patmore’s poem became popular. Its status as iconic emblem of the Victorian period was, of course, cemented by Virginia Woolf ’s struggle against what the figure represented in “Professions for Women” (based on a speech delivered in 1931). See for example Joseph Bristow, “Coventry Patmore and the Womanly Mission of the Mid-Victorian Poet,” in Sexualities in Victorian Britain, ed. Andrew H. Miller and James Adams (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 118–39; and Linda K. Hughes, “Entombing the Angel: Patmore’s Revisions of The Angel in the House,” in Victorian Authors and Their Works: Revision, Motivation, and Modes, ed. Judith Kennedy (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991), 140–68. [Brimley], “The Angel in the House,” 477. [Brimley], “The Angel in the House,” 478. Curiously, this is the same metaphor upon which Goethe’s adulterous Elective Affinities is based. These comments are also reminiscent of George Eliot’s language regarding Lydgate’s microscopic quest for “the primitive tissue” in Middlemarch (Bk. II, ch. 16), which we might compare to Eliot’s own novelistic quest. Patmore, The Betrothal, 5. In what follows, I will alternate as needed between citing page numbers from the first editions—indicated, after the first citation, by the initial letters of the relevant volume: B, E, FFE, and VL (further discriminated by a Roman numeral to indicate the part)—and the 1886 edition that is used in the standard collected Poems of Coventry Patmore, ed. Frederick Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949) (indicated Poems). Patricia Ball takes the phrase “the heart’s events” as the title to her consideration of Victorian love poetry, noting also how it suggests “an energy which is

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29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

37.

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hostile to narrative in the simple sense, even while it appropriates some storytelling characteristics by admitting the question, ‘and then?’ ” This sense of modal complexity resonates with my own reading of the mixed impulses of the verse-novel form (The Heart’s Events, 4). These lines don’t appear in the 1886 version of the poem. Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), I.150. Compare also Patmore’s claim about rereading in his review of “New Poets” (Edinburgh Review 104 [1856]), where he argues that “a poem, unlike a novel, ought to contain no element of effect calculated to diminish or fail in its operation after repeated perusals” (339). See [R. H. Hutton], “Poems by Coventry Patmore,” North British Review 28 (May 1958), 542. Review of Faithful for Ever, Saturday Review 10 (November 10, 1860), 590. Coventry Patmore, The Espousals (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1856), 44. Hereafter, E. The change may have been made in response to Richard Garnett’s review of Faithful for Ever in Macmillan’s, where he notes that “In ‘The Angel in the House,’ the course of true love runs exceedingly smooth.” Richard Garnett, “Poetry, Prose and Mr. Patmore,” Macmillan’s Magazine 3 (December 1860), 126. As the title indicates, this review offers the usual strictures on the attempt to novelize poetry. Natasha Moore mentions that Aubrey de Vere commented in the Edinburgh Review on the fact that the frame narrative shows the couple already married, thus renouncing “the stimulus of curiosity.” See Moore, Victorian Poetry and Modern Life, 45. See Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 409. As Eric Griffiths points out, “Coventry Patmore and Thomas Hardy in their explicit pronouncements on marriage stand as far apart from each other as [George] Meredith and Barrett Browning—for the former, it is a sacrament, for the latter, a contract on questionable terms—but they share a conjugal understanding of prosody.” Griffiths, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1989), 198. For the cultural significance of the Victorian honeymoon, see Helena Michie, Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). See Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), where his reflections arise from his contemplation of a painting “by Van Gogh that represents a pair of peasant shoes” (19). As Patricia Ball remarks, “The relation between the two (Preludes and Canto) can be seen as a union of spirit and body, for the advance to the specific story can simply be termed an act of incarnation” (The Heart’s Events, 193). Rather than emphasizing incarnation, though, I want to stress the different temporal orientations of the sections and view the Cantos as acts of narrativization. Patmore’s process of revision has led Linda Hughes to lament the ways in which the work’s formal properties increasingly “entombed” its women: “the

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38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

43.

The Victorian Verse-Novel female becomes entombed, drained of life and vitality and encased in form.” In effect, the women of the poem cease to be active participants in (and often, vocal speakers of) the work, becoming rather its lyric objects. Hughes, “Entombing the Angel,” 141. Hughes relates the shift to the poem’s changed publication format: from a serial composition that enables the portrayal of a “living woman” to the carefully edited object of the final authorized edition (164–5). John Donne, “The Ecstasy,” l. 74, “The Canonization,” ll. 23–4. Contrast Tennyson’s Prince’s final assessment of Princess Ida in The Princess—“For woman is not undevelopt man, / But diverse” (VII.259–60)—to which these lines may well allude. The gender and genre dynamics of Tennyson’s “medley” poem, an early approach to the verse-novel, have been much debated (see, for example, Stone, “Genre Subversion,” and Veronica Alfano, “Generic Collaboration and Lyric Betrayal: A Reading of Tennyson’s The Princess [1847],” Critical Matrix 18 [2009]: 34–57). But while the plot concludes with this essentialist construction of gender difference, the preceding narrative is at times less rigid. Princess Ida has forsworn the world of men to found a women’s college, but she is pushed back into the courtship plot when the Prince, to whom she was betrothed in infancy, comes to “rescue” her. Still, he can’t do so without assuming female costume to penetrate into the college and without being wounded and restored to health by Ida’s ministrations; the poem’s construction of gender is much less contained than its formal division into masculine blank-verse narrative and feminine intercalary lyrics would suggest. Indeed, the Prince sings a song and the Princess tells a tale: it is a medley. See, for example, Henry Chorley’s review of the poem, which parodied Patmore’s measure, in The Athenaeum 1421 (January 20, 1855), 76. See Patmore’s essay, “English Metrical Critics” (later retitled “An Essay on English Metrical Law”), where he discusses the history of octosyllabics in erotic poetry and the meter’s “joyous air” (North British Review 27 [August 1857], 77). In the line Pinch analyzes, a woman tells a friend about having accepted a kiss from her lover while pretending to sleep: “He thought I thought he thought I slept.” Pinch describes how, as in this line, “throughout The Angel in the House, the cynical and the ideal are alluringly close together, and meter is the switchpoint between them. In Patmore’s words: ‘in metre, there is but half a foot between the ridiculous and the sublime.’ ” Adela Pinch, Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 138. The specifics of conjugality are an essential element of this closeness—not just between the ridiculous and the sublime but also between the conjugal and the anti-conjugal. Thus while Pinch is predominantly concerned with the surprising stress on “thought” in the line quoted above, Patmore more frequently stresses “love” in a potentially ludicrous manner. Griffiths, Printed Voice, 198–9.

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44. Jason R. Rudy, Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 113. Rudy identifies the woman as Honoria; in fact the lines refer to her mother, but the distinction is not important, as the point is that they are the same. The initial “t” in “teach” is missing in Poems, a printer’s error. 45. For the connection between meter and the heartbeat in Victorian poetry, see Kirstie Blair, Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 46. Rudy also notes that for Patmore, at its best, even English prosody concerns duration, in the manner of Greek and Latin poetry, rather than pure stress, as it is conventionally understood to operate (he makes the argument in the “Essay on English Metrical Law”). Lines should be isochronous, regardless of the number of syllables they incorporate. As Rudy points out, the regular meter of The Angel hardly seems reflective of this program (Electric Meters, 114–15). 47. Coventry Patmore, The Victories of Love, Macmillan’s Magazine 5.25 (November 1861), 27. Hereafter, VL II. 48. Rudy has argued that The Angel in the House “was meant explicitly to challenge the aesthetics of his contemporaries, and the Spasmodics in particular” (Electric Meters, 113). See also Rudy’s essay, “Material Patmore,” in Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth-Century, ed. Jason David Hall (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), 135–53. 49. For more on this backdrop’s effects on the poem, see my Crimean War in the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), chapter 2. 50. Virgil, Eclogues 10.53–4: “Well I know that in the woods, amid wild beasts’ dens, it is better to suffer and carve my love on the young trees. They will grow, and you, my love, will grow with them.” In Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, trans. H. R. Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916). “Colin Clout Comes Home Again,” lines 632–3: “Her name in every tree I will endosse, / That as the trees do grow, her name may grow.” In Edmund Spenser’s Poetry, ed. and sel. Hugh Maclean and Anne Lake Prescott, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1993). My thanks to Erik Gray for pointing me to these earlier instances of the metaphor. 51. See Hughes and Lund, Victorian Serial, 18–19. 52. Donne, “A Valediction: of my Name, in the window,” ll. 13–18. 53. For another example of how Patmore uses allusion to make his point, consider Felix’s question (in the penultimate installment of The Victories of Love): “And, ah, how tell of love that glows / The lovelier for the fading rose?” (VL II.27). Here he revises Wordsworth’s famous preference for “The budding rose above the rose full-blown” (Prelude XI.705 [1805]). 54. See Coventry Patmore, Faithful for Ever (London: John W. Parker and Sons, 1860), 140. 55. Donne, “A Lecture upon the Shadow,” ll. 15, 25–6. 56. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, By Means of Natural Selection (London: John Murray, 1859), 489–90.

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57. The Idyl is titled “Sahara,” perhaps in comic allusion to David’s use of the Desert of Sahara as a symbol of the less optimistic passages in his courtship of Dora in David Copperfield. I will say more about the links between Dickens’s novel and Patmore’s poem below. In early editions, it’s Tasso not Petrarch that Vaughan gives to Honoria: the focus is thus on chivalry via an epic romance. The revision acknowledges the importance of lyric to the first two books of the poem, something the revision of the “Accompaniments” into “Preludes” also suggests. 58. In using the Dickensian term, I am referencing John Plotz’s Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 59. Here and elsewhere, I am for the sake of readability quietly eliding the quotation marks used in the period at the start of each line to indicate continuing dialogue, preserving only the marks that show where speech begins and ends. 60. A version of these lines also concludes the first edition. 61. Peter J. Manning, “Don Juan and Byron’s Imperceptiveness to the English Word,” Studies in Romanticism 18.2 (1979), 221. In a letter to his publisher, John Murray (February 16, 1821), Byron wrote of his intentions for his work: “The Fifth [canto—the most recent that Murray had read] is so far from being the last of Don Juan, that it is hardly the beginning. I meant to take him the tour of Europe, with a proper mixture of siege, battle, and adventure, and to make him finish as Anacharsis Cloots in the French Revolution . . . I meant to have made him a Cavalier Servente in Italy, and a cause for a divorce in England, and a Sentimental ‘Werther-faced’ man in Germany, so as to show the different ridicules of the society in each of these countries, and to have displayed him gradually gâté and blasé, as he grew older, as is natural. But I had not quite fixed whether to make him end in Hell, or in an unhappy marriage, not knowing which would be the severest.” In The Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, With Notices of his Life, ed. Thomas Moore (London: John Murray, 1873), 496. This account of the poem contrasts with the increasingly novelistic effects of the English Cantos, which I discuss in the Introduction, and which seem to shift the work from a picaresque mode to something that resembles a courtship plot, promising closure. 62. Curiously, the triple rhyme returns in the English Cantos, just after the narrator announces Adeline as a “heroine” (with a forced rhyme that this time presses on her title as such rather than on her name [XIV.90.7–8]): She knew not her own heart; then how should I? I think she was not then in love with Juan. If so, she would have had the strength to fly The wild sensation, unto her a new one. She merely felt a common sympathy (I will not say it was a false or true one) In him, because she thought he was in danger, Her husband’s friend, her own, young, and a stranger. (XIV.91.1–8, emphasis added)

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63. 64. 65.

66.

67. 68. 69.

70.

71. 72. 73.

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Here, though, the register shifts slightly, showing a poet who is grappling with ideas of novelistic interiority—and the French novel’s adultery plot— rather than with the intensity of lyric experience. Hughes and Lund, Victorian Serial, 18. Gosse, Coventry Patmore, 86. In the final edition, these comments are given to Mildred, Lady Clitheroe, who hints that Felix’s admiration of Jane (who with Frederick is on a visit to the Vaughans) may be harder to staunch (Poems 280). Although this might seem to be a more dangerous idea, attributing it to Mildred actually undermines its validity, as the poem tends to view her as blinded by worldliness to the nuances of real love. The change thus functions as one of many amendments that work to minimize the original poem’s adulterous energies (about which more below). The epigraph is from “Love and Duty,” cited in the review in Macmillan’s as a lyric analogue to Patmore’s work. In Tennyson’s poem, which critics have read as a response to his need to break off his engagement with Emily, the quotation is followed by the call to “Wait: my faith is large in Time, / And that which shapes it to some perfect end.” By the 1863 edition, Patmore substitutes this epigraph with some lines from St. Augustine: “Da quod amo: amo enim, et hoc tu dedisti” (“Give me what I love, for I do love it; and this thou hast given me” [Confessions XI.22]), a quotation more in accordance with the work’s insistence on being satisfied with what one has. Like the epigraph, this line was removed in later revisions of the poem, which seem to step back from some of the work’s more radical implications. Ball, The Heart’s Events, 192. An exception to the relative diminishment of the lyric impulse comes in a letter that recounts Jane and Frederick’s celebration of their wedding anniversary (their twelfth in the first edition; later their eighth). The episode, a picnic interrupted by a rainstorm, feels rather like a Wordsworthian “spot of time” and actually owes its genesis to one of Patmore’s lyrics in Tamerton Church Tower, his first collection of poems. Appropriately, it also sees a return to the tautological formations of the earlier parts of The Angel, as in Fred’s claim that “I saw again as then I saw, / And then I saw I saw again” (FFE 223). See, for example, the critic of The Athenaeum, who opens his review by declaring that “ ‘Faithful For Ever’ is no more to be called poetry than a page of Bradshaw,” and goes on to compare the work to other “unpoetical” novels in verse like Aurora Leigh and Lucile. “Faithful for Ever,” The Athenaeum 1721 (October 20, 1860), 509–10. In later editions, Faithful for Ever becomes Book I of a two-book section of the poem that has The Victories of Love as title of both the whole and the second section. Originally, this lyric was part of “The Revulsion,” in which Felix imagines Honoria’s death; in later editions, the poem was moved up to follow a lyric titled “The Rejected,” thus aligning it with Fred, the rejected suitor (Poems 93). In later editions, it was smoothed over to “Love, if there’s heav’n, shall meet his dues.”

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74. See McSweeney, Supreme Attachments, 81. 75. Arthur Hugh Clough, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, IX.167–87, in The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, 2nd ed., ed. F. L. Mulhauser (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1974). All further references to Clough’s poetry will be to this edition and will be internally documented. See also The Ring and the Book, where the court of Rome argues that while Guido might have divorced Pompilia had he found her a Leah after being promised a Rachel, since he was given a Rachel—although one with an unexpected paternity—the contract cannot be breached. Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, ed. Thomas J. Collins and Richard D. Altick (New York: Broadview, 2001), V.1304–6. Further references to this poem will be to this edition and will be internally documented. 76. Clough is less optimistic, though, when he returns to the biblical narrative a year later in “Jacob’s Wives,” in which he records a debate between the sisters which is “dominated,” as John Goode has argued, by “the ethically superior and psychologically depersonalizing Leah,” who “offers a compromise [to Jacob] which is a savage comment on bourgeois marriage”: dream of Rachel all you want, as long as you continue to embrace Leah. See John Goode, “1848 and the Strange Disease of Modern Love,” in Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Lucas (London: Methuen, 1971), 70. 77. Hughes and Lund, Victorian Serial, 25. 78. Hughes and Lund, Victorian Serial, 25. Hughes argues, though, that subsequent editions of the poem restrict Honoria’s voice (“Entombing”). 79. Matthew 22:24–30, The Bible, Authorized King James Version, with Apocrypha, ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 80. Another long, quasi-narrative poem of the period that considers the continuation of marriage in the afterlife is Edwin Henry Bickersteth’s Yesterday, To-day, and Forever (1866), a massive and hugely popular epic that takes its neo-Bunyanesque Christian hero on a tour of the afterlife; in Book 9 (of twelve), the hero is joined by his wife. For more on this decidedly unnovelistic poem, see Tucker, Epic, 405–7. In Epes Sargent’s verse-novel The Woman Who Dared (1869) (to which I will turn in Chapter 5), the American writer and future spiritualist offers a line that might serve as a gloss to Faithful for Ever when he imagines tracking the love that his book will describe into what he calls “The serial life beyond the eclipsing death” (“Overture,” 4). While it does not concern marriage per se, Dante’s Divine Comedy also uses long narrative poetry to consider the union between a man and his soul-mate in heaven. 81. Mary Wollstonecraft cites the lack of marriage in heaven as part of her argument against making women focus all their energies on the perpetuation of their husbands’ desire for them. “How women are to exist in that state where there is neither to be marrying nor giving in marriage, we are

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82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87. 88. 89. 90.

91.

92. 93. 94. 95.

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not told,” she remarks. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 103. Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 229. See McDannell and Lang, Heaven, 262. Alfred Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King, ed. J. M. Gray (London: Penguin, 1996), “Merlin and Vivien,” 11–16. Vivien soon undermines this description of their love, which was offered by a traveling minstrel. Coventry Patmore, The Victories of Love, Macmillan’s Magazine 4.24 (October 1861), 441. Hereafter, VL I. Basil Champneys, Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore, 2 vols. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1900), I.35. Notice that Champneys recognizes Patmore’s dual concern for (earthly, novelistic) time and (heavenly, lyric) eternity. Anne D. Wallace, “On the Deceased Wife’s Sister Controversy, 1835–1907,” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Accessed June 3, 2013. I have not been able to find any evidence of a connection, but it is tempting to speculate. See also note 57 for a possible allusion. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Nina Burgis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 500; McAleavey, The Bigamy Plot, 202. McAleavey, The Bigamy Plot, 193. Her argument might also be used to read Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), another text closely concerned with the injustices of Victorian marriage law, as a novel of bigamy. Stephen Blackpool’s love— from whom his early marriage separates him—is even called Rachael. “Thou art an Angel,” he tells her, imagining their union after death, “when thou and me at last shall walk together far awa’, beyond the deep gulf.” Dickens, Hard Times, ed. Paul Schlicke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 87. This scene occurs a quarter of the way through Faithful for Ever, even though it coincides chronologically with the conclusion of The Espousals. That is to say, while we know that Honoria is married at the start of Faithful for Ever, Fred does not. The narrative convolution is typical of the poem, contributing to our heightened awareness of competing temporalities. The time is “out of joint” for Frederick. Coventry Patmore, “In Memoriam,” North British Review 13.26 (August 1850), 545. Patmore, “In Memoriam,” 533, 533–4. See Rudy, Electric Meters, 120. He is quoting the OED, “superinduce.” Rudy notes this meaning in passing in a discussion of the word’s electric significance. In the poem’s final version, this passage is moved. It concludes a letter Frederick writes to Honoria after their children are married (Poems 305), thus becoming Fred’s last words in the poem. While the meaning remains

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96. 97.

98. 99. 100.

101. 102.

103.

104.

The Victorian Verse-Novel somewhat ambiguous, moving the passage to a time after Jane’s death heightens our sense that he is talking about reunion with her. So the overall effect becomes much more orthodox than in the original poem. Along with an initial letter to Mrs. Graham, these three missives make up installment one of The Victories of Love. He remarried in 1865 and 1881. Nevertheless, his continued love for Emily—and his hope of being reunited with her in heaven—finds expression in his most highly regarded volume of poetry: The Unknown Eros (1877). As Patricia Ball demonstrates, this collection of elegiac lyrics offers its own complicated narrative temporality. See Zemka, Time and the Moment, 147–73, and Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and Form in Victorian Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 123–65. Hughes and Lund, Victorian Serial, 191. Most criticism of the tale concerns divergence from the source text, often focusing, like Linda Julian, on the addition of “extensive descriptions of the character’s feelings.” Julian quotes E. R. Eddison on sagas: “The novelist is often introspective; the saga never.” Linda Julian, “Laxdaela Saga and ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’: Morris’ Poetic Vision,” Victorian Poetry 34.3 (1996), 357. Florence Boos’s headnote to the tale is also useful in this regard: see William Morris, The Earthly Paradise, ed. Florence Boos, 2 vols. (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), II.279–83. Henry A. Beers compares the work to Wuthering Heights (A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century [New York: Henry Holt, 1918], 335); I myself think it anticipates the emotional urgency and fateful pessimism of Thomas Hardy’s novels. It was immensely popular and was often reprinted as an individual volume. George Eliot used to take it into the woods to read aloud. See Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-century Britain (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2002), 263. McAleavey calls this the “plot of bigamous return” and locates a paradigmatic example in Tennyson’s verse-novella, Enoch Arden (The Bigamy Plot, ch. 1). As readers have noticed from the start, the central love triangle owes something to the vexed relationships between Morris, his wife Jane, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti—a fact that both adds to the poem’s psychological realism and aligns it oddly with Meredith’s semi-autobiographical Modern Love. To Swinburne, December 1869; in Letters I.100. Quoted in Julian, “Laxdaela Saga and ‘The Lovers of Gudrun,’ ” 355. The book is divided into sections that are given italicized headings that closely resemble chapter titles, further contributing to the novelistic effect of the poem’s length. [Walter Pater], “Poems by William Morris,” Westminster Review 90 (October 1868), 311, 309. The review also encompassed two earlier volumes of Morris’s poetry, The Defense of Guinevere and Other Poems (1858) and The Life and Death of Jason (1867), but its occasion was the publication of the first volume of The Earthly Paradise. Pater’s evocation of “atmospheric

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effects” chimes with current criticism invested in the idea of the climates and atmospheres of Victorian fictions. 105. William Morris, The Lovers of Gudrun, in The Earthly Paradise, Part III: September, October, November, ninth impression (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), 417, 442, 452, 472, 490. All further references to this work will be internally documented by page number. 106. Christianity, which comes to Iceland within the long temporal frame of the tale.

3 Circle-Squarers Tennyson’s and Browning’s Form-Things I. “AND THE CIRCLE—THEY WILL SQUARE IT / SOME FINE DAY ” If Francesca’s fall is crucial to Victorian verse-novelists’ imaginings of the adultery plot (as I argued in Chapter 1),1 Dante’s personal take on the epic quest as proto-Bildungsroman—his sense of his own position as everyman, neither an Aeneas nor a Paul, lost “in the midway of this our life below”— also makes him an important precursor for the poets I consider in this study.2 But as his Comedia shifts from the physical journey of Inferno through the developmental trials of Purgatorio and into the supernatural spectacle of Paradiso, it simultaneously becomes increasingly lyric in mode. The shift culminates in his transcendent vision of the Incarnation at the very end of Paradiso’s Canto XXXIII, the poem’s conclusion. Looking for a way to describe the indescribable, Dante turns to a metaphor for impossibility itself: Geometrician, searching eagerly To square the circle, seeks and seeks in vain A principle that may his wants supply;— Such with regard to that new sight was I: How they agreed I wish’d to ascertain— The Circle and the human Effigy: But vainly my own wings to this aspired; When struck my mind such splendour from above, It straight accomplished all I had desired. The glorious Vision here my powers o’ercame;— But now my will and wish were sway’d by Love— (As turns a wheel on every side the same) Love—at whose word the sun and planets move.3

The contention of this chapter is that as authors of long narrative verse, Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning find themselves in something like

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Dante’s position, not only in their efforts to reconcile real and ideal (the problem of incarnation4), but also in their attempts to convert the rectilinear progress of narrative sequence into something capable of spherical lyric transcendence. That is, these poets want not so much to square the circle as to circle the square—the equivalent mathematical dilemma, but one with a distinct emphasis for poetry.5 Few writers tackle the task with Dante’s numerological obsessiveness—or his success. This perfectly rounded thirtythird Canto of the poem’s third Canticle, ending, like the other two, by reaching for the stars (in the original, each Canticle concludes with the word stelle), is also the hundredth of the Comedia: a perfect square. But the problem is intrinsic to long narrative verse, and thus also to verse-novels. One might think of Coleridge’s oft-cited comments on the ideal form of poetic narrative: “to convert a series into a Whole: to make those events, which in our real or imagined History move on in a strait Line, assume to our understandings a circular motion—the snake with its Tail in its Mouth.”6 A similar predicament confronts the more lyrical novelists. The ouroboros lauded by Coleridge as poetic end (precisely because it turns narrative into something without an end—something that has achieved the timelessness and unity commonly associated with lyric) actually appears as “the principal device” that Clarissa Harlowe directs to be inscribed on her coffin in Richardson’s monumental story, in an artistic act registered by Gabrielle Starr as the novel’s most potent acknowledgment of “the power of the lyric mode.”7 In her reading of the book’s generic ambivalence, Starr compares Clarissa’s lyric strategies to Donne’s in “The Canonization.” One might say that Donne’s round funerary urn competes symbolically with the dead finality of rectangular coffins. But looking forward in literary history, Clarissa’s self-elegy via the appropriation of the symbol of a “crowned serpent, with its tail in its mouth, forming a ring, the emblem of eternity,” and enclosing in its circle the square narrative facts of Clarissa’s name, age, and the date of her flight from her parents’ house, also anticipates the final act of Tennyson’s Elaine in Idylls of the King.8 Like Clarissa, Elaine decorates her coffin with words and devices. But if the heroine of the epistolary novel turns to lyric symbol at the end, the heroine of Tennyson’s poem (as I shall discuss) writes a letter to tell her story.9 Elaine—again, like Clarissa—dies as sacrifice to the demands of virgin purity, continuing to narrate her tale from beyond the grave (in this latter fact both heroines resemble Patmore’s Jane, too). The women become dead bodies made to speak, like the macabre pontiffs recalled by Robert Browning’s Pope at the start of his monologue, where he also reflects on texts, coffins, and their contents.10 Contemplating his own end alongside those of his papal predecessors, he cites the same line from Ecclesiastes

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(12:12) with which Aurora Leigh begins, “Since of the making books there is no end” (X.9). The Pope, though, suggests one kind of textual conclusion: “So [i.e., by exploring papal history], do I find example, rule of life; / So, square and set in order the next page, / Shall be stretched smooth o’er my own funeral cyst” (X.21–3). That “cyst”—here, a coffin, although technically a “sac or bladder” (p. 572, n. 1)—seems chosen in part to facilitate the translation of the square page of history into something that can be stretched over a round, biomorphic form. Of course, in the domestic causes of their violent ends, Elaine and Clarissa resemble not so much Browning’s Innocent XII as Pompilia, whose body and voice reside at the very center of The Ring and the Book. A ring and a book. And here we have yet another circle and square, as Browning’s opening questions in his great poem make clear. “Do you see this Ring?” (I.1), Browning begins, only to turn soon to a second enquiry: “Do you see this square old yellow Book?” (I.33). While critics have long focused on the act of “repristination” achieved by the metallurgical ring metaphor of the narrator’s opening monologue (I.23), that process is far less magical than the geometrical maneuver that attempts to translate the Old Yellow Book’s narrative, what “everyone” calls “the story, long and strong, / A pretty piece of narrative enough” (I.446–7), into the circular form of Browning’s poem as it moves, ouroboros-like, from “The Ring and the Book” (I) to “The Book and the Ring” (XII). As Susan Blalock notes in an early Bakhtinian reading of the poem, “Circles are congruent with squares only if we are beguiled by the clever poet-narrator’s opening line.”11 Nevertheless, this is what Browning’s narrator tries for when he tells how “the book was shut,” and he steps out onto his Roman balcony to envision the events it had narrated: “this round from Rome to Rome” (I.526), as he lyrically redescribes the plot, giving it the circular form that enables his imagination. I am reminded that Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh had berated the human tendency, in which she felt complicit, for akratic behavior by musing discontentedly on the breach between vision and realization: “What creature else / Conceives the circle, and then walks the square?” (Aurora Leigh, VI.1011–12). Robert accepts the challenge to walk the circle. Indeed he shows his true colors (or perhaps, more accurately, true shape) in a curious misuse of the word “round” itself, as in Guido’s “Then round us in the ears from morn to night” (IV.600): although the verb actually means “to whisper” (p. 198, n. 3), “to round” is a Browningism for a loud, insistent utterance. Hence the Ring’s echochamber, one of “Deep calling unto deep,” in the language of both Browning’s narrator and of Psalms 42:7 (I.521). In the language, too, of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, which traces yet another round in recounting the story from Arthur’s “coming” (the first of

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the poem’s twelve Idylls) to his “passing” (the last): “From the great deep to the great deep” we go (PA 445).12 The “Morte D’Arthur,” the Idylls’ earliest published episode, even concludes their final configuration. While Idylls of the King is full of circles—it is bestrewn with shields, crowns, necklaces, and golden circlets, and its embedded songs are identified as “roundels”—it has almost no squares (although it does have one rather important book, about which more below). But you can think of the “Table Round” itself as an effort to “circle the square”: to translate the geometry of something with a head and a foot into something endless, as, for that matter, Tennyson’s archaic and metrically convenient inversion of the two parts of its name suggests he has been able to do (more commonly, it’s the “Round Table”). Actually, a surprising number of factors, formal and thematic, link these two great nineteenth-century epics. Both poems place marriage—and a woman’s (possible) adultery—at the very heart of their investigations of the gender- and genre-dynamics of the age and of the truth-telling potential of poetry. In spite of their desire for circular unity, both dramatically fracture narrative form in a way that puts the reader’s quest for truth in place of the epic hero’s quest. And in both, the fracturing of form is accompanied by extraordinary violence of plot. While they also share a historical remoteness and dependence on antique source texts that might seem to put them beyond the purview of this study, when read in the wake of the poems I have just been considering, they offer an interesting angle onto the pervasive influence of the verse-novel in the mid-Victorian period. Many readers, early and recent, have registered the connection, whether to uphold or to argue against it. It is evident, for example, in Swinburne’s complaint about the Idylls’ subject: “Treated as he has treated it, the story is rather a case for the divorce-court than for poetry. . . . [S]uch ‘camelias’ should be left to blow in the common hotbeds of the lower kind of novelist” (and this complaint might just as well have been directed toward Browning’s poem, given its concerns for both divorce and the courts).13 More recently, Dino Franco Felluga has described Idylls of the King in terms of the poet’s efforts to negotiate the simultaneous marketdriven demands to realize (like the novel) and idealize (like poetry).14 For Herbert Tucker, though, if Tennyson’s 1859 volume of the Idylls (known, rather suggestively, as “The Ladies”) is “a book that looks and feels like a work of fiction in so many respects” (“its physical size and shape; its mode of third-person narrative omniscience, governing four extended episodes whose sequence suggests a novel-like seriality; its domestic and marital focus, signaled by the eponymous heroine titles; and above all its author’s ambition to bring traditionary materials home by conforming antique legends to contemporary ethical and narrative canons”), later additions to

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the work (especially, in 1869, The Holy Grail and Other Poems) reinstate an epic master-plot in the narrative.15 Similarly, The Ring and the Book has long been recognized as implicated in mid-Victorian Britain’s embrace of the novel. After all, Browning had offered the Old Yellow Book to Trollope before taking on the subject himself. Tucker reads Browning’s poem, like Tennyson’s, as an epic, citing the poet’s “punningly explicit rejection of the ‘novel country’ (I.1148) into which The Ring and The Book might have settled given a lesser author in a duller day.”16 But it is precisely a sign of the times that the poem enters novelistic terrain. In fact, Blalock had earlier treated the same phrase from Browning’s poem “straight” in her account of the work’s embrace of the carnivalesque; and for Susan Brown, “the multi- and transgeneric aspects of The Ring and the Book dialogize the poem, and make it what critics have begun increasingly to call it, a novel.”17 Earlier readers had also registered the poem’s novel-like aspects. Consider Gerard Manley Hopkins’s comments: I read some, not much, of The Ring and the Book, but as the tale was not edifying and one of our people, who had been reviewing it, said that further on it was coarser, I did not see, without a particular object, sufficient reason for going on with it. So far as I read I was greatly struck with the skill in which he displayed the facts from different points of view: this is masterly, and to do it through three volumes more shows a great body of genius. I remember a good case of “the important collection of particulars” of which you speak in the description of the market place at Florence where he found the book of the trial: it is a pointless photograph of still life, such as I remember in Balzac, minute upholstery description; only that in Balzac, who besides is writing prose, all tells and is given with a reserve and simplicity of style which Browning has not got. Indeed I hold with the oldfashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.18

Hopkins’s comparison of Browning to Balzac takes him from the novelist through a variety of genres and media, from photography to textiles. But he ends up in a lapidary mode that not only recalls the ring metaphor with which Browning’s poem opens but also resembles Walter Pater’s description of searching for the “crystallised” parts of William Wordsworth’s narrative verse, those moments when the poetry shines briefly with the “hard, gem-like flame” of pure lyric.19 Hopkins had applied related language, two years previously, to Tennyson’s Idylls, in a letter written to the same correspondent, complaining of that work’s generic impurity: “his poetry appears ‘chryselephantine’ [that is, combining gold and ivory after the manner of some ancient Greek sculpture]; always of precious

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mental material and each verse a work of art, no botchy places . . . ; but the form, though fine, not the perfect artist’s form, not equal to the material.”20 Gold and ivory may both have value, but the combination is monstrously chimerical; I am again reminded of the Ars Poetica, where Horace compares “a book whose different features are made up at random” to a painting with no unified form, one that “started up at the top like a beautiful woman” but “ended in a hideously ugly fish.”21 The link between hybrid or flawed jewels, genres, and women will prove relevant to both Tennyson’s and Browning’s poems, as I hope to show. Yet Hopkins’s invocations of “pearls without the string,” of “raw nuggets and rough diamonds,” of gold and ivory, are apropos also in helping to remind us that in the worlds of these hybrid poems, rings, books, and Tables Round are not only forms—circles and squares—but things. That is, they simultaneously serve as symbols of abstract qualities belonging to the works of art they enclose and as objects within those works. Indeed for mid-Victorian writers, jewels frequently function as generic touchstones—precisely because they can shift both their meaning and their ontological status so significantly in different formal settings. Other things can function this way; recall my discussion of a “poetry of peas” in the Introduction, or of candles in Denzil Place, or of the sandals and volume of Petrarch in The Angel in the House. But gems do so with extraordinary regularity. Contrast, for example, how they operate in detective fiction—a genre that epitomizes narrative method, as Tzvetan Todorov has shown—with how they work in lyric poems. In the former generic setting, gems tend metonymically to encode plot. Arthur Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes offer a paradigmatic expression of such encoding in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” (1892): “In the larger and older jewels every facet may stand for a bloody deed. This stone is not yet twenty years old. . . . In spite of its youth, it has already a sinister history. There have been two murders, a vitriol-throwing, a suicide, and several robberies brought about for this forty-grain weight of crystallized charcoal.”22 But in the context of poetry, jewels generally represent metaphorically both the material condensation of lyric form and its ability to transcend matter, as Walter Pater’s search after the gem-like moments of narrative verse suggests. In what follows, I want to focus on how such generic affinities operate in regard to two particular varieties of jewel in these two hybrid poems: diamonds and pearls. I will keep in mind the distinction between circles and squares that I have introduced here; I am interested in these things for their formal qualities—their discrete shapes (the squared facets of a diamond’s molecular structure that make it both the name of a stone and of a shape; the smooth roundness of pearls) as well as their potential to

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be strung serially, in closed circles and open chains (as Hopkins thinks Browning fails to do with the raw materials of his poem). But I want also to reflect on their narrative potential, both as it accrues through the process of the gems’ formation over time and as it sticks to them once formed as they move through the space of the poems. (These stones will help us track the affinities between poetic conceptions of time and space, so beginning the transition from my own focus on temporal issues in the first half of this book to a closer attention to spatial geography in its second half.) And I want to look at how the gems’ narrative potential—especially in its violent aspects—interacts with their traditional symbolic value, in particular with the symbolism linking both diamonds and pearls not only to lyric poetry but to women, and specifically to notions of feminine purity or “truth.” Starting with an examination of Tennyson’s Idylls that will concentrate on the fate of the diamonds in “Lancelot and Elaine,” I’ll turn to a consideration of the pearl-like Pompilia in The Ring and the Book. Finally, I will shift from the jewels and women at the hubs of these circular forms—forms that make both poems, placed though they are at the very center of this study, rather marginal examples of the versenovel—back to books, and to a text that while ostentatiously marginal (it is said to be composed in part in the margins of its titular volume) is also less controversially exemplary of the genre that is my subject here. Robert Browning’s The Inn Album consciously modernizes The Ring and the Book, even as it embraces its own fringe generic status in an effort to side-step the obdurate geometry of circled squares. Moreover, Browning’s intentional “neglect of form” in this work makes explicit the connection between the formal ends of these poems and their violent contents. The Album provides evidence not only of Browning’s bloody plot but also of his verse-novel’s knowing transgression against what Derrida has called the Law of Genre: the (impossible) injunction to preserve generic purity. And, once again, generic purity proves to depend on the purity of a woman. II. THE DIAMONDS OF IDYLLS OF THE KING Tennyson’s Idylls of the King makes a curious cameo appearance in a novel by Trollope that had formed around a prominent collection of gems. The Eustace Diamonds (1872) represents an unusual foray for its author into the realm of plot-driven fiction, his self-proclaimed emphasis as a writer being rather on character. In the Autobiography (1883), Trollope suggests how his diamonds display the aberrant focus when declaring his plot to be as “well arranged” as the gems in the titular necklace.23 Yet, in the novel itself, he had both highlighted his work’s flaws of circularity (the fact that

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its “personages” could not “operate backwards and forwards on each other from the beginning to the end” like the stones in the necklace24) and insured that, by book’s close, the necklace itself had been broken up and its diamonds dispersed. The potential for such dispersal had also been discussed earlier in the tale: its easily disaggregable, serial form had led the lawyer Mr. Dove to find the necklace both “fictitious” and at “risk of . . . annihilation” (II.298)—a “temporary structure[]” that, according to the novel’s legal logic, must be contrasted with genuine heirlooms, which can accrue permanent “Chivalric associations” (I.258). If the idea of a temporary fictitious structure hints at Trollope’s worry over the fate of his novel, the phrase “chivalric associations” serves as a code-word for Tennyson’s—and poetry’s—role in his design. The contrast in the book between the “true” Lucy Morris (the real diamond) and the “false” Lizzie Eustace (mere “paste” [II.230]) reflects the influence of the 1859 edition of the Idylls, which was originally subtitled The True and the False. Trollope even includes Tennyson’s poem in his narrative: when Lizzie admits that she “like[s] Launcelot [sic] better than Arthur” (I.174), she has just been reading a “volume of poetry” that can only be the most recent installment of Tennyson’s work, The Holy Grail and Other Poems (December 1869). Trollope records his heroine’s thoughts concerning this “story of certain knights of old, who had gone forth in quest of a sign from heaven,” calling her pleasure in the poem a “false enthusiasm on things which were utterly outside herself in life.” Thus while Lizzie imagines “abandon[ing] all things” to go “in search of that holy sign,” “as for giving up a string of diamonds, in common honesty,—that was beyond her” (I.173). Like her author, then, Lizzie has been meditating on the different kinds (or genres) of thing. Yet if the “Holy Thing” (LE 209, 213, 218) that is Tennyson’s Holy Grail is a matter for poetry in Trollope’s view— perfect, immaterial, and circular—Tennyson’s poem has its share of more novelistic things, including a prominent collection of diamonds that seem to anticipate Trollope’s in some of their functionalism. For example, Lizzie’s recurring fantasy of throwing her jewels into the sea had already been realized by Guinevere. In fact, the generic mix of Idylls of the King (attributed by Herbert Tucker to Tennyson’s typically mid-Victorian “genre jitters”25) is reified by its diamonds. Scholars have long turned to diamonds to explore the imperial and gender politics of Victorian fictions such as The Eustace Diamonds and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) (another great diamond novel of the period and a work that had influenced Trollope’s). In this vein, Michael Hancock reads the Idylls’ many jewels as “poetic reflections on material culture.” Gesturing toward thing theory’s concept of misuse, which links the role of things in fiction to their narrative

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properties, he traces how Tennyson’s “gems shift in meaning and value as they move. . . . [U]sed in a manner contrary to custom, conduct, or character, they bring disappointment and even death.”26 Ultimately, Hancock argues that “By portraying gems as fickle forms that often abandon their owners, especially women, Tennyson implicates Queen Victoria’s own crown jewels as failed representations of imperial dominion.”27 While Hancock implicitly couples the poem’s many stone “collections” to Victoria’s collection of not only jewels but countries—and thus to the difficulties of maintaining Empire—I want rather to explore how the diamonds of “Lancelot and Elaine” address the Idylls’ fickle generic form: their status as a scattered, quasi-serialized narrative, at turns both epic and novelistic in mode, which nevertheless attempts poetic coherence. Tennyson’s diamonds demonstrate the Idylls’ dependence for length not on causally bound narrative but on an expansionary concept of lyric similitude, a “bond of like to like” encoded in them (LE 240). These gems have formed where genres collide. The diamonds of “Lancelot and Elaine” perform crucial narrative functions. Much like the jewels of detective fiction, they spur the plot of this central poem (alongside “Merlin and Vivien”) of the Idylls.28 Appropriately, “Lancelot and Elaine” recounts the tale of a center, offering the closest we get to a head-on view of the otherwise glancingly told story of Lancelot and Guinevere’s adulterous affair. This affair emerges in telling how Lancelot wins and Guinevere throws away (with its fellows) the centerpiece stone of a circular crown, the ninth and last prize for the annual Tournament of Diamonds. That crown comes with a bloody back-story typical, as Doyle would later suggest, of fictional diamonds: Arthur finds it upon the bleached skull of a king who had been killed by his brother. And like other narrative gems, these mark time, both educing the cycles of history and defining the duration of its current cycle, something otherwise impossible to track in the disjointed, episodic discourse of the Idylls. For nine years, Lancelot has been jousting for Guinevere. The number is evocative, bringing to mind the nine years that Horace advocates as the appropriate period for the successful production of a poem.29 Or, perhaps, the nine months of gestation, thereby transforming Guinevere’s defenestration of the stones into the recognition and burial of a stillbirth.30 Yet the timeline also evokes the poem’s circular temporality; while the epic unfolds over many years, the individual idylls are organized seasonally, as we move from the springtime of the early idylls to the winter of the late ones. Such cyclical chronology puts it at odds with more Whiggish and progressive or teleological concepts of history. In this sense, the crown of diamonds resembles the Holy Grail, which, as Elliot L. Gilbert has argued, holds a “cyclical promise” that should be contrasted with its

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“companion relic,” the “phallic, linear” spear “Wherewith the Romans pierced the side of Christ.” The latter relic belongs to King Pellam, whose known descent from “the Saint / Arimathaean Joseph” contrasts sharply, Gilbert observes, with Arthur’s murky origins (BB 111, 98–9). Gilbert points out that his dissociation from this phallic spear and the all-male community that supports it—much like his association with the chaliceformed Grail—contributes to our sense of Arthur’s womanliness. He speculates that Tennyson’s surprising avoidance of the sword-in-thestone story of Arthur’s origin in preference for the Lady of the Lake represents the poet’s effort to eschew the masculine, patriarchal, historical implications of that tale, something also implied in Arthur’s insistence that the sword Excalibur (itself gem-encrusted and nine years in the making31) be finally returned to the waters.32 But the diamonds make clear that a circular conception of history offers no security from violence and aggression. After all, the concept of revolution also implies a cyclical understanding of history. While their seriality points to historical narrative (whether epic or novelistic), the diamonds’ once-and-potentially-future configuration links them as well with a perfectly rounded unity akin to Coleridge’s poetic ouroboros. Approached this way, the individual stones can be seen as representative of the lyric gems that are embedded in narrative verse. The language Tennyson forges to connect the jewels to the women of his poem enhances this association. Lancelot and Guinevere’s love reveals itself partly through Lancelot’s relationship to Elaine, of whom he declares on first meeting that she, too, might justly receive the prize diamond: “this maid / Might wear as fair a jewel as is on earth, / Not violating the bond of like to like” (LE 238–40). If Elaine is like a jewel in her purity and value, the relationship between woman and diamonds, so widely found in lyrics of the period, is also symbolic of lyric poetry more broadly. Moreover, as Roman Jakobson has argued, versions of “the bond of like to like,” such as metaphor, simile, and symbol, distinguish lyric method. For example, Shelley’s “To a Skylark” suggests simile as the underlying principle of lyric poetry—one might even say its “spirit.” In his “Defense of Poetry” (1821, publ. 1840)—a key text in the evolving conception of lyric in the nineteenth century—Shelley defines the imagination as the faculty that recognizes “similitudes.”33 Catherine Gallagher has described how the “Defense” whittles away at the term poetry, which initially is used broadly to express artistic value, until it finally “exclud[es] even cause-and-effect plotting from [its] domain” and we are left with an “eternal [that] takes a form so fleeting that it hardly appears at all.”34 What remains, that is, is a lyric essence based on similitude and represented, as in the Idylls, by diamond “bond[s] of like to like.”

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When thrown into flowing narrative, though, those fleeting forms can disappear altogether—rather like diamonds into a stream. More troublingly, throughout the Idylls, those things that should guarantee unified, constant character (whether diamonds or shields or names themselves) don’t just disappear into the deeps, they slide easily from person to person. Diamond’s double nature as both lyric and narrative thing emphasizes the generic aspect of this threat. We can hear something of the danger in Coventry Patmore’s surprising assertion in The Angel in the House, voiced through his rather novelistic Aunt Maude, that “A woman, like the Koh-i-Noor / Mounts to the price that’s put on her” (Poems 185)—one of many places where this poet’s embrace of narrative ideas undermines the lyric essentialism (woman as pure-as-diamond) with which he is commonly associated. As so many Victorian novels show, a woman who can rise in price can also fall. In Tennyson’s poem, while Gawain assures Elaine that even if Lancelot “change[s] like a leaf ” “A diamond is a diamond” (LE 682, 691), the poem’s diamond-exchange fluctuates in ways revealing the gap between “like” and “is.” As Guinevere puts it, rejecting Lancelot’s hard-won offering, “Diamonds for me! they had been thrice their worth / Being your gift, had you not lost your own.” “Not for me! / For her! [that is, Elaine],” she concludes in her jealousy, recognizing the stones’ unstable value and easy transferability (LE 1205–6, 1208–9). Moments later, she flings them from the window, converting the lyric symbol of eternal love into a novelistic thing-in-motion, almost a weapon. “Diamond me / No diamonds!” Lancelot had declared earlier, on being asked to accept his prize at the tournament, also recognizing in the gems a source of his wounds (LE 502–3). But in transforming noun into verb, Lancelot simultaneously implies dangers in the forced conjunction of lyric and narrative practice. Putting diamonds in motion destabilizes the text, dissolving as fiction the idea of lasting lyric transcendence. When diamonds cease to be forever, couples (man and woman, tenor and vehicle, word and deed) cannot be contained in fixed binary structures, “bond[s] of like to like,” whether married or adulterous (see LE 1184, 1199). So if a “momentary likeness to the King” bathes Arthur’s knights upon taking their vows (CA 270), it lasts but a moment, “for a space” (CA 16, 514), the “little space” (LE 916) of lyric idyll: it cannot extend to epic or novelistic duration.35 It seems, rather, more akin to the flash of diamonds meeting their reflection in the water: “down they flash’d, and smote the stream. / Then from the smitten surface flash’d, as it were, / Diamonds to meet them, and they past away” (LE 1227–9). Many critics note how the diamonds rush to meet their true tenor, Elaine, floating downriver below, already dressed and decked “like the Queen”

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(LE 1112) (the real diamond to Guinevere’s paste, in Trollope’s terms). But the passage, both literal and literary, also represents perfect lyric intensity: the briefest instance when the fleeting forms of real and reflected diamonds, substance and symbol, tenor and vehicle, touch. Of course momentary likenesses can spread through a community constituted by similitude, either to good or (more frequently here, given the poem’s entropic force) to ill ends. So to be “pure as Guinevere” (PE 41) comes to mean to be a vector of falsehood, as in Vivien’s multiplying tales of licentiousness (MV 702–87). The lyric “bond of like to like” shifts its generic mood as it expands, becoming narrative in function. A parallel process unfolds in the passage that James Eli Adams has pointed to as the Idylls’ one moment of temporal ordering: Arthur’s accusatory “then came” litany that (rather belatedly) makes Guinevere the cause of the realm’s ruin: Then came thy sinful shame with Lancelot; Then came the sin of Tristram and Isolt; Then others, following these my mightiest knights, And drawing foul ensample from fair names, Sinn’d also, till the loathsome opposite Of all my heart had destined did obtain, And all thro’ thee! (G 484–90)

While Adams calls it a “chain” of “chronological” and “logical” “sequence,” he acknowledges Arthur’s version of the story is established entirely by “rumor and innuendo”—by what he suggestively calls the “circulation” of scandal.36 In fact, in the Idylls as a whole, a synchronic spread of similitude— rather than a clear diachronic chain of cause and effect—serves as the primary source of narrative accretion. It is like stringing together matched stones.37 Arthur himself escapes the serialization of simile represented by the poem’s diamonds: “I never saw his like” (LE 315).38 Such escape places him apart, solitaire and solitary figure amidst the Idylls’ gem collections. As for Elaine, her lyric longing for eternal bonds of likeness brings death. Her father looks upon his fading daughter “As when we dwell upon a word we know, / Repeating, till the word we know so well / Becomes a wonder, and we know not why” (LE 1020–2). Such defamiliarization through repetition characterizes the Idylls’ method. Yet if a broader language of similitude yields something akin to narrative by offering likenesses that are not quite samenesses, the more constant “burthen” of Elaine’s “Song of Love and Death” (LE 1000–11)—“Him or death” (LE 898)—puts a stop to story. When he proves false, death proves true. Meanwhile, like other

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lyrics in the Idylls, Elaine’s embedded song becomes subject to narrative method, as it is translated into the plot summary of her final letter to Lancelot: “I loved you, and my love had no return, / And therefore my true love has been my death” (LE 1268–9). “Too late, too late!” (G 130), I am tempted to interject, as with the “and then” passage of “Guinevere”: by the time the cause and effect of that “therefore” has been absorbed by Elaine, it has already killed her. Lancelot, in “yearn[ing] to make complete / The tale of diamonds for his destined boon” (LE 90–1), had hoped Guinevere would bind his jewels into some “happy” arrangement, “making them / An armlet for the roundest arm on earth, / Or necklace” (LE 1174–7). Although the Idylls’ serial release contrasts with Lancelot’s all-at-once gift of the stones, Tennyson (born lyricist that he is) shares such yearning for unity; his real Holy Grail, as I have been suggesting here, is a narrativized “well wrought urn.”39 Yet the discarded diamonds of the disbanded crown tell a different tale, one hinted at in an earlier story of a different kind of jewel. While she is associated with Guinevere’s diamonds, Elaine initially seems more “like” pearl; hence the “red sleeve / Broider’d with pearls” (LE 370–1) that is her favor. As E. S. Dallas puts the standard opposition: “Beauty is a jewel that may be cut into a thousand shapes: truth is a pearl ever one and entire, in whose formation we have had no hand.” Dallas uses this aphorism to distinguish modern, pluralistic, dramatic, or novelistic poetry like Tennyson’s (diamond) from primitive, singular forms like lyric (here figured as pearl).40 In other words, on their surface, at least, pearls seem a less generically compromised stone; if the facets of diamond indicate a many-sidedness that we might associate with both narrative verse and with novels, pearl’s circular whiteness seems to guarantee both womanly and lyric purity. Still, set within Tennyson’s narrative, pearls also prove volatile: known to wear no favor but the Queen’s, Lancelot takes the pearl sleeve to disguise himself at the tournament—much as he puts aside the emblem of his fixed identity, his shield. As it happens, while in “Lancelot and Elaine” she is Queen of Diamonds to Elaine’s Princess of Pearls, Guinevere had herself once worn pearls. In “Merlin and Vivien,” Vivien sings about the need for trust in a world in which name, fame, and shame can be as easily transferred from one person to the next as their rhyme insinuates: “My name, once mine, now thine, is closelier mine, For fame, could fame be mine, that fame were thine, And shame, could shame be thine, that shame were mine. So trust me not at all or all in all.” (MV 444–7)

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She describes her song’s impact through simile: “This rhyme Is like the fair pearl-necklace of the Queen, That burst in dancing, and the pearls were spilt; Some lost, some stolen, some as relics kept. But nevermore the same two sister pearls Ran down the silken thread to kiss each other On her white neck—so is it with this rhyme: It lives dispersedly in many hands, And every minstrel sings it differently.” (MV 448–56)

By the end of “Lancelot and Elaine,” though, it is Lancelot who takes over Vivien’s song, as he questions the Queen’s love: “May not your crescent fear for name and fame Speak, as it waxes, of a love that wanes? Why did the King dwell on my name to me? Mine own name shames me.” (LE 1389–92)

For a few lines (and in a manner oddly reminiscent of Byron’s Don Juan) rhyme—like simile, like jewels on a string—forms the arc of narrative, here adding the inevitable “wane” to the cascade of verse. But as many have remarked in considering Vivien’s words, the rhyme that lives most dispersedly is Tennyson’s own serial poem, his Idylls, for all his eventual binding of its pieces into the whole of his conventionally twelve-part epic.41 The diamonds of “Lancelot and Elaine” expand Vivien’s simile, offering a story about the yearning for poetic narrative unity—and its impossibility— even as they provide a lyric counter-vision of how a poem might use similitude to reach epic or novelistic proportions in the absence of such unity. The cultural reasons for the poem’s disaggregation are manifold.42 But the social and political milieu that caused the fracturing of Tennyson’s narrative verse also thrust these diamonds to the surface of his poem and into (and out of ) the hands of the women with whom they became associated.

III. POMPILIA AS PEARL Guinevere’s broken necklace brings to mind again Hopkins’s comments on Browning’s Ring : “Browning is not really a poet, . . . he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should

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say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.” When Browning names his chosen terrain, at the start of The Ring and the Book, as “A novel country” (I.1348), part of what makes the country novel is his promise to show “Each facet-flash of the revolving year!” (I.1361) (the language here, as in Tennyson’s Idylls, characteristically conflates this poem’s temporal and geographical range). Herbert Tucker has seen a nod to William Morris’s seasonally arranged Earthly Paradise, appearing at the same time as Browning’s epic, in the idea of a “revolving year.”43 The concept of a “facet-flash” is closer, however, to the fractured narrative effect produced by Wilkie Collins’s great diamond novel, The Moonstone (also published in 1868), which, like The Ring and the Book, is told from a variety of perspectives; that novel’s eight sections might even be deemed to reflect diamond’s octahedral structure.44 Which is to say, perhaps the phrase offers a flash of diamond. But while we can just glimpse where Hopkins may have come upon the idea of “rough diamonds,” the notion of equating Browning’s poem with “raw nuggets” of gold requires little explanation; after all, that’s the material the poet himself turns to in his all-encompassing ring metaphor, no doubt motivated in part by the yellow of the original book on which he has to work his alchemy. Still, while not discounting the allure of diamonds and gold, I want to focus here on the metaphor Hopkins rejects: “pearls without the string.” Hopkins’s language recalls E. S. Dallas’s complaint in his Poetics that “some of our makers fall into the gross error of writing not a poem, but a book of beauties, stringing their pearls almost at random, in the vain hope that they may give up the unity of the whole for the exceeding beauty of the parts.”45 Even absent string, though, pearls (unlike diamonds) are generally spherical in form. So while the golden ring of Book I, “Romework, made to match / (By Castellani’s imitative craft) / Etrurian circlets” (I.2–4), offers the most obvious analogue to the poem’s circular structure, the nature of that structure—and of Pompilia’s central place in it— emerges more clearly by thinking not only of pounded gold but also of rounded pearl. Curiously, an article in the Atlantic Monthly of March 1861 titled “Diamonds and Pearls: Facts and Fantasies about the Most Sought-After Stone,” by James T. Fields, begins much like The Ring and the Book in describing a visit to Castellani’s “sparkling rooms in the via Poli.”46 Fields’s essay has caught scholars’ attention as a source for Emily Dickinson’s great lyric “I asked no other thing,” which reflects on the cultural association between diamonds and lyric poetry.47 But when Dickinson actually named her own lyric practice as “Gem-tactics,” the stone to which she was referring was not diamond but pearl.48 Browning also makes this link in stanzas he composed about another ring that joins pearls, women, and lyric poetry in the conventional

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manner. And while there’s no book this time, there is “an Eastern scroll,”49 the rounded shape of which perhaps suggests a formal affinity with the roundness of both pearl and lyric that the poem underscores. “A Pearl, A Girl” is part of Browning’s late collection of lyrics, Asolando (1889), the last volume of poetry he published (it appeared on his death-day). This is the poem in full: A simple ring with a single stone To the vulgar eye no stone of price: Whisper the right word, that alone— Forth starts a sprite, like fire from ice, And lo, you are lord (says an Eastern scroll) Of heaven and earth, lord whole and sole Through the power in a pearl. A woman (’tis I this time that say) With little the world counts worthy praise: Utter the true word—out and away Escapes her soul: I am wrapt in blaze, Creation’s lord, of heaven and earth Lord whole and sole—by a minute’s birth— Through the love in a girl!50

If the shift from that scroll to Browning’s own voice (“’tis I this time that say”) rehearses a version of the translation from Old Yellow Book to The Ring and the Book, the rapturous “minute’s birth” of an escaping soul recalls Caponsacchi’s vision of “the perfect soul Pompilia” (VI.1162), whose emergence after his long watch he describes in similarly transcendent terms: —till, at last, When the ecstatic minute must bring birth, Began a whiteness in the distance, waxed Whiter and whiter, grew near and more near, Till it was she: there did Pompilia come: The white I saw shine through her was her soul’s. (VI.1138–42)

The similarity reinforces our sense that Pompilia’s whiteness is part of a pearl-like nature, something to which The Ring and the Book repeatedly calls attention. Take, for example, Bottinius’s strategy as advocate for the state; he begins by building a portrait of Pompilia through jewels, an attempt to capture “A faultless nature in a flawless form.” And while in Bottinius’s vision Pompilia ends up as opal, reflecting his own somewhat prurient gaze (“Womanliness and wifehood opaline, / Its milk-white pallor,—chastity—

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suffused / With here and there a tint and hint of flame”), her early, purest form is pearl: “First, infancy, pellucid as a pearl” (IX.195, 204–6, 199). Moreover, she resumes that form at the end of his argument, when he condenses his strategy through a final gem metaphor: “Beside my pearl, I prove how black thy jet / And, through Pompilia’s virtue, Guido’s crime” (IX.1412–13). Bottinius’s prosecution rests on the common association of pearls with truth. Another lyric in Asolando, “Summum Bonum,” also makes use of this connection: All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee: All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem: In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea: Breath and bloom, shade and shine,—wonder, wealth, and—how far above them— Truth that’s brighter than gem, Trust that’s purer than pearl,— Brightest truth, purest trust in the universe—all were for me In the kiss of one girl.

While here an unspecified gem (truth) and pearl (trust) appear more or less interchangeable, the virtue of pearl seems particularly allied to ideas of integrity. Recall Dallas’s opposition: “Beauty is a jewel that may be cut into a thousand shapes: truth is a pearl ever one and entire, in whose formation we have had no hand.” If the “thousand shapes” of diamond reflect The Ring and the Book’s dispersed and dialogic narrative tactics, the “truth” of pearl might hold promise that in Pompilia’s monologue at the center of the poem, we could actually find a voice we can “trust.” Consider the monk-confessor Celestino’s injunction, toward the end of The Ring and the Book, in a language of spectatorship that seems to mimic Browning’s narrator’s voice at the poem’s start: “As ye become spectators of this scene, / Watch obscuration of a fame pearl-pure / In vapoury films, enwoven circumstance” (XII.554–6). Or think of how the Pope, for whom faith is itself “the pearl” too often ignored by men seeking to satisfy their venial appetites with whelks (X.1441–50) (as Bottinius notes, the Pope “relishes a sea-side simile” [IX.373]), proclaims his own faith in Pompilia: “Such I pronounce Pompilia, then as now, / Perfect in whiteness” (X.1005–6). Even Guido had recognized Pompilia as a “pearl” “filched” from a “dung-heap” (XI.1211–12). But if pearls seem to be like both diamonds and women in their purity, the simile also complicates that vision of purity. One complication emerges in a striking mention in The Ring and the Book of real (rather than metaphorical) pearls, one connecting pearls explicitly with a

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sexualized female body. Appropriately, it comes from Hyacinthus de Arcangelis, whom Herbert Tucker has identified as the poem’s proponent of novelistic domestic realism. At the end of his monologue, Hyacinthus imagines the transfer of a strand of pearls: The Wife should get a necklace for her pains, The very pearls that made Violante proud, And Pietro pawned for half their value once,— Redeemable by somebody, ne sit Marita quae rotundioribus Onusta mammis . . . baccis ambulet: Her bosom shall display the big round balls, No braver proudly borne by wedded wife! With which Horatian promise I conclude. (VIII.1802–10)

The Horatian promise stems from the Epodes 8.13–14: “and may no matron walk around in public with rounder pearls.” As Collins and Altick point out, Arcangelis initially commits a Freudian slip—mammis (breasts) for Horace’s bacis (pearls)—before correcting himself (p. 511, n. 2). But the corrected reference remains incriminating when one realizes that the female addressee of the epode is actually an adulterous lover who has failed to arouse Horace’s speaker and with whom he is terminating a relationship.51 Moreover the easy exchange of the pearls—their flexible ownership—seems linked to the slippage of language and the transferability of women in a manner recalling the transactions surrounding both Trollope’s and Tennyson’s diamonds. Still, the more pressing problem of pearl has little to do with a subjection to the market it shares with diamond. As the facets of diamond suggest a complexity undermining that gem’s link to purity, pearls’ formal properties also entail risk for the women with whom they are associated. Fields’s Atlantic Monthly article considers the two stones in comparison by highlighting the connection between pearls and the female body not merely for reasons of roundness and whiteness but also for reasons of fragility: “If the diamond be the hardest known substance in the world’s jewel-box, the pearl is by no means its near relation in that particular. . . . Pearls are perishable beauties, exquisite in their perfect state, but liable to accident from the nature of their delicate composition.”52 As the Idyll’s diamonds are implicated in the poem’s violence, Pompilia’s pearly nature becomes a sign not so much of her purity but of her own perishable beauty’s liability to “accident” through very particular forms of abuse. Tertium Quid brings up the most interesting version of the danger encoded by pearl, a hint that the association of pearls with women might yield some kind of “intermediate” perspective on Pompilia. The discussion

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does not explicitly concern the fate of Pompilia’s pearl-like body— although the thought of that damaged, dying form, lying in the church, is never far from our consciousness as we read53—but rather its earlier growth and development. At stake is how to consider Violante’s “lie at the base of all” (IV.306): the feigned pregnancy and motherhood with which the story really begins. In response to those who would object to Pompilia’s worth on this basis, Tertium Quid offers a metaphor (although in a manner typical of the poem’s conflation of real and ideal, this metaphor also presumably refers to an actual gem worn by a guest at the gathering that forms the setting for the monologue54): Why, thou exact Prince, is it a pearl or no, Yon globe around the Principessa’s neck? That great round glory of pellucid stuff, A fish secreted round a grain of grit! Do you call it worthless for the worthless core? (She doesn’t, who well knows what she changed for it.) (IV.307–12)

Recall the poem’s opening question: “Do you see this Ring?” And much as with the description of the ring’s forging that begins Browning’s first monologue, this metaphor undermines distinctions between fact and fiction, truth and lies. But while both processes result in perfectly rounded forms, pearls achieve their form through a rather different method. The ring emerges from a technique of “repristination” as pure gold, its alloy sublimated away by a “sprit” of “fiery acid” (I.23–4). In contrast, pearl, for all its “great round glory” (note the emphatic triple stress), never purges itself of the “lie at the base of all.” Tertium Quid’s vision of the grit inside thus punningly shifts the meaning of not only Violante’s but also, by implication, Pompilia’s integrity (after all, she is the real pearl of the poem). When considered through this metaphor, The Ring and the Book’s value rests on the foundation of Pompilia’s central, gritty monologue—and I mean to capture the American sense of fortitude and “pluck” implied in the term without losing sight of Tertium Quid’s recognition of a core impurity.55 Suddenly, the question of whether or not Pompilia is telling the truth seems to ignore the poem’s more fundamental recognition of our essentially mixed nature. Rather than the pure pearl of lyric—a “transparently truthful” voice56—we have in Pompilia something more ambiguously “pellucid,” something founded on fiction. Not only founded on fiction, but created through time. The layers of pearl develop over the years in a manner reminiscent of the rings of a tree used by Patmore to such advantage in his verse-novel.57 With a notable

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difference, though: oysters amass deposits of nacre in response to a threat rather than as part of ordinary growth and maturation. As an article in Household Words from 1859 describes, while Pliny may have thought of pearls lyrically as the result of an oyster’s “feeding upon the heavenly dew,” they are actually produced by a “source of irritation”: they form in an attempt to “balk[]” the “nefarious design” of an “enemy” “intruder.”58 It is a process that resounds in the context of Guido Franceschini’s violent breach of the Comparini household at the climax of The Ring and the Book’s plot. But what I find even more resonant is the fact that the source of irritation at the pearl’s core is constant and iterated. That is, pearls form as a protective response to a kind of torture. Moreover, Browning’s focus on the concept of torture proves to be related to the pearl-form his poem assumes. Torture suffuses Browning’s poem; it is the atmosphere in which the poem grows. And, like the work’s rings, books, and pearls, it appears both literally and figuratively. Guido recognizes this doubleness at the start of his first monologue, when he describes being “put to the rack” as a “quite novel form of taking pain, / This getting tortured merely in the flesh” (V.14, 22–3). While it may be going too far to find another pun in that use of “novel,” the dual nature of torture as both spiritual and bodily, metaphor and fact (even the metaphor is here a kind of fact: mental torture is after all real), signals the poem’s hybrid generic nature. The Ring and the Book treats torture as both theme and method. Contemporary reviews invoked the idea to describe the difficulty of Browning’s language, what the critic for the Cornhill Magazine called his “torturing lines.”59 More recently, W. David Shaw has reflected on this quality in relation to the poem’s vast length: “To read The Ring and the Book” is “to undergo exquisite and refined torture,” “to stretch oneself out on the rack of a tough, obscure poem. By combining the tortures of the Roman murder trial with a real trial of the reader’s own endurance Browning uses the physical extent of his poem, its great duration, to disclose the inconclusiveness and agony of history.”60 But the torturous length of Browning’s poem also grants access to a very specific form of temporal consciousness: the experience of unhappy marriage, a nightmarish analogue to that described by Patmore’s Angel. Torture appears in the contemporary debates about domestic violence; in her discussion of The Ring and the Book’s participation in the Woman Question, Brown quotes an 1856 article by John William Kaye, “Outrages on Woman”: Marriage is looked upon as the aim and end of woman’s life. What else, it is said, can she do? What but misery, it would be better to ask, can result from

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such a system—what but wife-beatings or slow-torturings can be the growth of such ill-sorted marriages as this fatal necessity involves?61

One wonders, in fact, whether Frances Power Cobbe had Browning’s poem in mind when a decade later she wrote her influential article, “Wife Torture in England,” which would aid in the passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1878, legislation that provided for legal separation for abused wives.62 The two writers were acquainted personally and had worked together to oppose vivisection. Cobbe’s essay compares domestic abuse to vivisection in terms that resonate with Pompilia’s slow bleeding to death in the church (and, for that matter, with Guido’s torture upon the rack). As Cobbe explains, the term torture emphasizes a narrative arc through time, how “Wife-beating in process of time, and in numberless cases, advances to Wife-torture, and the Wife-torture unusually ends in Wife-maiming, Wife-blinding, or Wife-murder.”63 Against this backdrop, it makes sense that torture, both word and idea, often arises in the poem in the context of unhappy marriage. Consider how Tertium Quid describes Pompilia’s domestic life: They also say,—to keep her strait therein, All sort of torture was piled, pain on pain, On either side Pompilia’s path of life, Built round about and over against by fear, Circumvallated month by month, and week By week, and day by day, and hour by hour, Close, closer and yet closer still with pain, No outlet from the encroaching pain save just Where stood one savior like a piece of heaven, Hell’s arms would strain round but for this blue gap. (IV.787–95)

Notice how the build-up resembles the pearl’s accretion of layers. But the language also hovers between lyric and narrative connotations. Hence the contradiction: that it takes a process of “circumvallation”—a kind of circling that I have been associating with lyric method, as is highlighted here by the iterations of verse, both metrical and alliterative—to keep Pompilia on the “straight” “path of life,” a trajectory that one might ordinarily align with novelistic narrative progress. Similarly, if the “blue gap” here seems like an escape into lyric transcendence, it also marks the beginning of a journey, a key feature of both the epic and the Bildungsroman. But, as Monique Morgan has argued, this poem’s journey itself assumes many of the characteristics of a lyric interlude when recalled by Caponsacchi and Pompilia.64 Pearl is the perfect form to translate such paradoxes.

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The “slow-torturings” (to use Kaye’s phrase) that create pearls remind us, too, of the degree to which different forms of temporality are at the heart of the poem’s consideration of crime and punishment. While it is tempting to redescribe Browning’s “Roman murder mystery” as a mystery about Pompilia’s guilt or innocence (after all, we know who committed the crime; at issue is merely its justifiability), Guido’s guilt stems not merely—perhaps not even primarily—from the question of Pompilia’s innocence but also from the timing of his own act.65 That is to say, again and again Browning’s speakers let us know that had Guido committed the crime in the instant of discovery at the Inn, with the immediacy of instinct, there would likely have been little question of a guilty verdict. Rather, it was the delay—the “lapse of time” (IV.1536)—that created the crime. In Tertium Quid’s rehearsal of this side of the argument, “We look he should have cleared things on the spot” (IV.1134);66 Guido’s refusal of “the power o’ the pulse” and his turn, instead, “to law” (IV.1146, 1147) make him culpable. In the same manner, Half-Rome’s defense of the culminating murders rests on its portrayal as action committed in “the fury of the moment” (II.1391), albeit a fury occasioned by the drip of one “last drop” (II.1373) “on Guido’s wound,” following a process of torture leading up to the climactic action (“Ever in due succession, drop by drop, / Came slow distilment from the alembic here” [II.1267–9]). Similarly, while the shift from the old to the new order appears in the move from Catholicism, with its emphasis on embodied ritual, to the internalizations of Molinism, it can be seen also in the transition from Guido’s slow bodily torture in Book V to his place in Book XI, where he anticipates the instrument of his pending execution, a “brand-new engine” we know as the guillotine (XI.125). This device had been developed to ensure instantaneous—and thus painless and humane—death. But both Guido and the poem seem to recognize the falsehood behind the promise: like pearls, bodies are constituted through processes of time, and they should be allowed to decay in the same slow manner. Such process underlies human experience, as conscious subjection to time differentiates the human body from all other things. Anticipating Foucault, Guido sees the sleight of hand that tries to sanitize death by ignoring this distinction: “the phrase ‘I lose my head!’ / How euphemistic! Lose what? Lose your ring, / Your snuffbox, tablets, kerchief !—but your head?” (XI.279–81). Rings, snuff-boxes, tablets (or books), kerchiefs: these may all be things. But heads belong to a different category altogether. Still, while its thingly nature can’t be denied, fragile pearl begins to capture an aspect of what Guido describes as “The tick of time inside me” (V.343); it is this “tick of time” against which he must race to tell his story in his two monologues. Pompilia, too, must compete with a biological clock whose minutes are marked by the blood flowing from

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her wounds; this fact is implicit in her observation that her “life seems lengthened as to serve” the purposes of her narrative (VII.1193) (as Guido himself also notes ruefully [XI.1690–705]). The focus on torture thus acts as a constant reminder that narrative time is a bodily force in The Ring and the Book, even as the poem’s discourse of instinct—something that applies especially to Pompilia and Caponsacchi’s mutual recognition—offers a lyric counter-vision of humanity as based in the capacity for transcendence. Again, pearl can capture both these aspects of experience. Earlier, Pompilia had been trapped in circumvallations that reminded us of her pearl-like nature. Toward the poem’s conclusion, Guido finds himself in a similar position: Only I lie trapped, Writhe in a certain novel springe just set By the good old Pope: I’m first prize. Warn me? Why? Apprise me that the law o’ the game is changed? (XI.114)

I have been arguing that the law of the game that’s changing here is partly a generic law. Admittedly, the “novel springe” represented by the guillotine is novel for promising an immediacy of escape that I have been associating with lyric. But, then, what Guido finds so hard to deal with is the in-between-ness of it all: the mix of old and new, past and present, ideal and real, lyric and novel (and drama and epic). Hence his hatred of Pompilia, who, along with her parents, becomes a “three-headed thing,” “the brute, Chimaera which I slew!” (XI.1119; 1127); recall Horace’s similarly monstrous figure for genre-mixing in the Ars Poetica. Moreover if “law” may here end in the rapid descent of a blade, the process leading up to this end was novelistic: slow, torturous narrative— not so much ring as chain. This point had been made by Tertium Quid, who describes his reply to the mob’s confusion and frustration over the murders—their desire for some clear resolution, like a deus ex machina— in these terms: I tell the simpletons “Could law be competent to such a feat ’T were done already: what begins next week Is end o’ the Trial, last link of a chain Whereof the first was forged three years ago When law addressed herself to set wrong right, And proved so slow in taking the first step That ever some new grievance,—tort, retort! On one or the other side,—o’ertook in the game, Retarded sentence, till this deed of death

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The Victorian Verse-Novel Is thrown in, as it were, last bale to boat Crammed to the edge with cargo—or passengers? ‘Trecentos inseris: ohe jam satis est! Huc appelle! ’—passengers, the word must be.” Long since, the boat was loaded to my eyes. To hear the rabble and brabble, you’d call the case Fused and confused past human finding out. One calls the square round, t’other the round square— And pardonably in that first surprise O’ the blood that fell and splashed the diagram: But now we’ve used our eyes to the violent hue Can’t we look through the crimson and trace lines? It makes a man despair of history. (IV.19–41)

Tort, retort—and I have been proposing we might add a third term: torture. The repetition suggests not only the relationship established by the poem between law and torture but also the degree to which this relationship creates narrative as well as violence. The reference to Horace underscores the literary context for these forces. The lines quoted from the Satires (1.5.12–13) refer to the overfilling of a vessel that is to be taken on a journey; they offer an analogue not only to the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back but also to the final drop of acid on Guido’s wound that precipitated the murders. But the preceding satire includes Horace’s most direct reflection of the poetic status of his own work: First, be it understood, I make no claim To rank with those who bear a poet’s name: ’Tis not enough to turn out lines complete, Each with its proper quantum of five feet; Colloquial verse a man may write like me, But (trust an author) ’tis not poetry.

Poetry demands, rather, “genius,” “a soul / Of Heaven’s own fire.” Of his own “Comic Muse,” Horace admits, “save that she talks metre, she talks prose.”67 The Satires as a whole thus pose an ancient version of the question I have been considering throughout this study: can there be such a thing as a verse-novel? Is it “Fused” or “confused”? Yet perhaps most striking in the context of the argument I have been pursuing in this chapter is how Tertium Quid imagines the “rabble and brabble” confronting the question of ends through a version of the metaphor I began with: squaring the circle. This is the figure they are purported to use to describe their bafflement. But it was also the metaphor with which Browning himself confronted the reader at the opening of the poem: his own Ring, as I have said, is created to circle the square of the

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Old Yellow Book. No thing better displays how that circling manages to encompass the properties of narrative—its temporality, its embodiment, its violence—than the torture-induced form of pearl.

A MARGINAL COMMENT (IN LIEU OF A CODA): THE INN ALBUM “It makes a man despair of history,” Tertium Quid had lamented when faced with the stubborn confusions of the circle-and-square narrative of The Ring and the Book. In some ways, history is just what Robert Browning avoids when he recasts The Ring and the Book in the form of The Inn Album (1875), the most radically up-to-date poem he ever wrote. Browning declared that it “is on so very modern a subject that it concerns last Whitsuntide”; as scholars have recognized, its characters reference a veritable barrage of the kind of contemporary cultural cues rarely found in the poetry of the day.68 Moreover, if the earlier work took as its source text an antique manuscript, The Inn Album first appeared in America in The Times, as though to emphasize its journalistic impulse. For all its contemporaneity, though, The Inn Album’s relationship to The Ring and the Book emerges from the start, when its opening line offers up the Album in a manner analogous to the Ring: “That oblong book’s the Album, hand it here!”69 Like the Old Yellow Book, the Album becomes a repository of criminal evidence, as the work’s violent plot— which includes blackmail, murder, and suicide—unravels through its pages, with characters writing their own actions into the blank spaces of the volume. Not only story but also characters recall the earlier poem. At a country inn, an elder man, a roué, has lost at cards to the nouveau-riche young man he has taken under his wing (and whom he had intended to hustle). As the plot progresses, the two men (none of the poem’s characters is named) discover that four years previously, they had fallen in love with the same “superb” woman (l. 1115), who had succumbed to the elder’s seduction. This woman is now married to a country vicar, “cold and old” (l. 1637), but she has escaped her self-imposed exile to come help an old school-friend, known as the girl, to judge whether or not to marry—the younger man, as it turns out. The elder decides that to pay off his gambling debt he will offer his former mistress to the younger man, an arrangement he will secure by blackmailing her. The threat is inscribed in the Album, and (after the elder man’s perfidy is discovered and the younger has killed him) so is the woman’s testimony of the killing as an act of justifiable defense. This she writes just prior to her own death, having

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imbibed poison upon finding herself the victim of blackmail. Versions of Guido (the elder man), Caponsacchi (the younger man), and Pompilia (the woman) thus populate the work, and it also ends in a slaughter from which only the younger man emerges alive. (The Inn Album’s fourth character, the girl, seems to have migrated rather from Pippa Passes.) Formally, too, the works are comparable in their hybridity, although in the later poem a narrative voice helps set the stage for and aids visualization of the poem’s dramatic core; almost all of the eight-sectioned poem is composed of dialogue, but character cues are missing, and, as many readers remarked, it can be difficult to distinguish who is actually speaking. Here, then, is a final book—and a final form-thing of mixed qualities— to consider. From the first, the Album’s motley generic configuration becomes a sign of the poem’s own hybrid nature. Indeed both the “prop” Inn Album and Browning’s larger work make for “Queer reading! Verse with parenthetic prose,” as the younger man declares in one of the many knowing gestures that mark Browning’s poem as self-consciously experimental (l. 130). But in contrast to The Ring and the Book’s negotiations of poetic circles and prosaic squares, The Inn Album ostentatiously explores and exploits what it names as the margins of its titular text. In these border regions, Browning seems to seek an escape from the intractable geometry of the earlier work. As the poem opens, we see the elder man calculating the details of his gambling debts in the blank edges of the titular text. “I praise these poets: they leave margin-space,” he declares. Paradoxically, marginality is central to The Inn Album.70 “That bard’s a Browning; he neglects the form” (l. 17), the elder man complains of a scrap of poetry that a previous guest had inscribed into the Album and that is quoted in the poem’s text. The inscription itself—“If a fellow can dine On rumpsteaks and port wine, / He need not despair Of dining well here—” (ll. 14–15)—offers an incredible simultaneity of very rough blank verse and the “original” doggerel anapestic quatrain (indicated by capitalization), the margins of which have been appropriately reduced in being embedded into the form of Browning’s more prose-like Inn Album; Bayard Taylor’s parody-review of The Inn Album actually commented on the “scant” margins of the Osgood and Co. edition of the poem.71 Like many others, Henry James considered the poet’s tongue-incheek preemptive mea culpa “irresponsible frankness,” claiming the work “reads like a series of rough notes for a poem” and calling it “barely comprehensible.” “We are reading neither prose nor poetry. It is too real for the ideal, too ideal for the real,” James declared, giving what I have shown to be the standard period critique of the verse-novel.72 Swinburne likened it to sensation fiction, as did A. C. Bradley (albeit in order to draw a distinction); Edmund Clarence Stedman referred to it as “an electric

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novel in verse.”73 In fact, at one point the younger man declares, “It’s a novel writ / Already, I’ll be bound,—our dialogue!” (ll. 308–9) and proceeds to imagine how the narrative would go on, taking for his companion the same character epithet, “the elder and yet youthful man,” used by the poem’s own narrator (l. 310). The generic medley of the Album is supplemented by myriad quotations and allusions to a variety of artists and works in different genres and media (Trollope, Dickens, Shakespeare, Wagner, newspapers, Milton, Ruskin, Holman Hunt, and I could go on) that punctuate characters’ dialogue and emphasize the poem’s novelistic heteroglossia and up-to-date-ness.74 While the Album’s “margin-space” becomes a location for generic mixing, it also serves as a site of violence, as blackmail threat and vindication fill the available void. In this regard Browning’s volume also hearkens back to the one “square” to be found in the circle-filled world of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King: Merlin’s book of spells. Elliot Gilbert calls that tome “the paradigmatic book of history, passed down through the generations from one male magician to another”; he actually suggests the book plays the same role for Merlin that Malory had played for Tennyson.75 But the crucial charm, which Vivien is able to extract from Merlin and use to imprison him—so ultimately bringing down Camelot—comes not from a “square of text” but from the margins of the text. Here is Merlin’s description: Thou read the book, my pretty Vivien! O ay, it is but twenty pages long, But every page having an ample marge, And every marge enclosing in the midst A square of text that looks a little blot, The text no larger than the limbs of fleas; And every square of text an awful charm, Writ in a language that has long gone by. So long, that mountains have arisen since With cities on their flanks—thou read the book! And every margin scribbled, crost, and crammed With comment, densest condensation, hard To mind and eye; but the long sleepless nights Of my long life have made it easy to me. And none can read the text, not even I; And none can read the comment but myself; And in the comment did I find the charm. (MV 665–82)

How might one approach texts like Merlin’s book and Browning’s Inn Album? Is the proper response, “I praise these poets, they leave margin

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space”? Or, perhaps, “It makes a man despair of history”? But maybe these reactions can be brought into line if we recognize that both books register their authors’ concerns regarding the place of poetry in modern times. Tennyson’s location for the curse Vivien appropriates in order to enslave Merlin shows he is wondering about the cultural efficacy of both writing in and speaking from the margins. Discussing the novelization of poetry in Idylls of the King, Dino Franco Felluga has formulated the issue as one of cultural centers and sidelines: “Why is poetry marginalized? Because it is driven to it by its very nature: either poetry works better from the margins in its curative role or poetry should be marginalized because it is inherently diseased.”76 Browning is worrying about the same dynamics. “From the beginning, Browning . . . raised the question of whether poetry was marginal to his culture,” as Mary Ellis Gibson has noted.77 The Inn Album literalizes the issue by undermining the status of its titular text’s verses. So on one level, as Walter Kendrick has argued, Browning’s poem addresses not merely the margins left by poetry but the marginalization of poetry in a consumer culture.78 The threat creates The Inn Album’s very atmosphere. Witness the narrator’s introduction to the setting: —Inn which may be a veritable house Where somebody once lived and pleased good taste Till tourists found his coign of vantage out, And fingered blunt the individual mark And vulgarized things comfortably smooth. (I.29–33)

Note the predictable pun in “coign of vantage.” If the Inn has been so vulgarized, so has the Album’s poetry. Browning gestures toward the Annuals that had come to represent the feminization and commodification of high culture, describing how “Each stanza seems to gather skirts around, / And primly, trimly, keep the foot’s confine, / Modest and maidlike” (ll. 5–7). The narrator’s portrayal of the “stuffy little room— / Vulgar flat smooth respectability” (ll. 43–4) that serves as the stage for much of the poem reminds us, then, that stanza is Italian for room. No wonder Browning opts rather for a form that “oversprawls,” more after the manner of what the elder man calls “lubber prose” (l. 7); Browning’s poetry is uneven here because he feels the need to rough things up a bit. But while I agree with Kendrick’s reading of the poem as self-conscious self-parody, intended to show the questionable fruits of the soil of contemporary culture (“In this debased world, even poetry has no privilege,” Kendrick observes79), I want to suggest that the poem’s forms of vulgarity—above all, sex and violence—also relate to the poem’s form. If verse-novels adulterate both form and content, as I argue in Chapter 1,

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The Inn Album ostentatiously links the violence of its plot to the hybridizing effects of the Album itself. After all, as William Ian Miller has remarked, in the legal arena violence “is distinguished from more generalized force because it is always seen as breaking boundaries rather than making them.”80 Melissa Valiska Gregory has shown how Browning’s dramatic monologues, including The Ring and the Book, use formal elements (especially the alternating demands they make of readers’ sympathies and judgments) to create space for the depiction of domestic violence that the novel of the period had difficulty accommodating. Similarly, Ellen O’Brien has demonstrated ways in which “the formal features and generic conventions of poetry generated opportunities for cultural critique and poetic experimentation” in the vast number of Victorian poems written about murder—many of which, like Browning’s dramatic monologues and verse-novels, or like the rash of Medea plays written during the peak of the marriage debates of the 1850s, were generically hybrid.81 So the The Inn Album’s overlap of thematic violence and generic hybridity indicates a deep connection between these two trends in the Victorian novel in verse. In other words, we can see culture taking form in this poem through the simultaneous violent breach of literary and social laws, a breach literalized both by and in the text. As those of us realize who borrow library books and guiltily annotate them—of course with the lightest touches of the pencil— writing in the margins of other people’s books is breaking the rules, precisely by crossing the ruled borders of the text. Browning’s intentional “neglect of form” makes the connection explicit: the Album offers evidence not only of Browning’s violent plot but also of his poem’s knowing transgression against what Derrida has described as the Law of Genre, a prescription of an unattainable purity. Moreover, once again, a woman is at the heart of the deed, her own purity becoming implicated in the process— like Guinevere’s, like Vivien’s, like Pompilia’s. Appropriately, The Inn Album’s woman recalls her past affair with the elder man as a violation of law: “I changed for you the very laws of life,” she laments (l. 1868). But the Album itself represents the poem’s most explicit example of such violation; its vandalized state becomes the subject of the younger man’s conjecture, as he jokes about being charged not only for a “brandnew book” but also fined for “Defacement” of the volume and “literary loss” in its desecration (ll. 116, 117, 122). A metaphor employed by characters in the poem provides an interesting correlative to this transgression. As I have been arguing, verse-novels tend to be particularly conscious of the ways in which time and space can be alternately compressed and expanded by varying poetic form. The Inn Album (like other examples of the genre I discuss in Chapter 4) turns to the railway to

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consider this process, as its plot is determined by the fact that the elder man misses his train while reminiscing with the younger about the opportunity for true love he had passed up with the woman four years earlier (l. 834); the ensuing extra time allows for the recognitions that bring on the violent climax. Here, though, I am intrigued by the elder’s own figure for the varied temporalities of experience. He describes that long-ago missed opportunity by comparing it to a physical wound: I had a ball lodge in my shoulder once, And full five minutes, never guessed the fact; Next day, I felt decidedly: and still, At twelve years’ distance, when I lift my arm A twinge reminds me of the surgeon’s probe. (ll. 227–31)

Like the grain of grit that remains in a pearl, this ball leaves a trace—here even after it has been excised. It is a trace that time seems to magnify, much as verse-novels expand and alter the intensity of their lyric passages. The ball also resembles the embedded quotations of this particular text, the way the textual body of both Browning’s poem and the Album in it are violated by inserted quotations from other sources, and by their excision. For example, at the end of the poem, the younger man tears out of the Album the page containing the blackmail to remove the evidence of the woman’s earlier fall. Violation and purification coincide when the threat “That blackens yet this Album”—and the woman’s good name—is deleted, leaving both “white again” (l. 3037) (recall the Pope’s verdict on Pompilia). Bear in mind, also, how the poem’s characters quote obsessively, the Album and each other. The phrase “album-language” (l. 261) comes to stand for the difficulty of finding genuinely original speech, and the struggle one experiences as a reader to attach the dialogue to the poem’s separate speakers seems due to Browning’s intentional exaggeration of this intrinsic aspect of The Inn Album’s discourse. In fact, characters recur to the metaphor of the “ball-experience in the shoulder-blade, / [The] bit of life-long ache to recognize” (ll. 289–90), echoing how they keep repeating the poem’s leitmotif poetic extract from the album, “Hail, calm acclivity, salubrious spot! ” (ll. 11, 131, 260, 467, 842, 1076, 1386, 2402, 2949, 3078). So in a way, such “ball-experience” becomes not merely the poem’s embodied version of a Wordsworthian “spot of time” but a reminder, as well, of the relationship premised by the poem between bodies and texts. The lingering pain described in the metaphor offers a ghostly reminder of the tortured, ever-present bodies of Pompilia and Guido in The Ring and the Book. (As though recalling the centrality of torture in the earlier

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work and the accusations made against Browning’s style in it, The Inn Album’s woman expresses her relief at having swallowed the poison that will kill her by saying that, finally, “talk no more means torture” [l. 3026].) Henry James imagined Browning as having started to write The Inn Album with a vision of the dead bodies in the room at the narrative’s conclusion; they were what he would later have termed the “germ” of the story.82 Still, for all that we, too, can imagine the bodies, the phantom ball also hints forward to perhaps the poem’s most obscure moment, the scene of the deaths: the murder of the elder man by the younger, followed closely by the suicide of the woman. In his review of the poem, Robert Louis Stevenson confessed not to have understood the catastrophe until he underwent what he called “a sort of coroner’s inquest in [his] own mind.”83 What makes this climactic scene impenetrable is (appropriately) the absence of weapons. There’s no trace of a gun, nor its accompanying ball, no sign of rope or dagger—not so much as a handy letter opener. In other words, what is missing is a thing. And, once again, the missing thing can be linked to the concept of quotation. The climax is set in motion when the woman adopts phrases from the elder man’s blackmail threat in the Album, which she has just read out in full; “Consent—you stop my mouth, the only way,” the elder man had written (l. 2996). The woman begins: “Once snake’s ‘mouth’ / Thus ‘open’—how could mortal ‘stop it’?” (ll. 3013–14). Note how the adopted phrases are both italicized and granted quotation marks in the text, as such quotations generally are here, thus doubly recording their derivativeness. (This in spite of the fact that “open” isn’t actually in the original note written by the elder man; in the world of the poem, even original speech appears as fundamentally derivative.) The woman’s speech is itself “stopped,” though, by a one-word, deictic performative rejoinder— “So!”—belonging to the young man (l. 3015). Yet it is worth observing that the source of this utterance becomes clear only after several rereadings of the scene; it is a major element of the scene’s obscurity. One might expect that obscurity to be lifted by the reappearance of the poem’s third-person omniscient voice. When the narrator enters, he also does so quoting—none other than Horace: A tiger-flash—yell, spring, and scream: halloo! Death’s out and on him, has and holds him—ugh!84 But ne trucidet coram populo Juvenis senem! Right the Horatian rule! There, see how soon a quiet comes to pass! (ll. 3015–19)

Given the absence of a weapon and the focus on “stopping” the mouth, we can assume, I think, that the elder man has been suffocated. But it remains

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an assumption, since the crucial information has itself been stopped— stopped by the narrator’s quotation of the Horation rule (from the Ars Poetica): “You will not let the young man slay the old in front of the audience.” The act of quotation, used as cover while the mouth of the original speaker is stopped, makes me wonder whether the younger man may have taken up the Album itself as weapon here, its pages serving as the needed plug.85 Even without the book, the quotation has itself become a kind of thing, a weapon of sorts, reminding us that the blackmail threat inscribed into the Album had already weaponized text. Notice, too, that we once again find ourselves facing a question of ends. How might one “stop it,” the vicious cycle of history? How bring about a full stop, a period? Of course, in the narrator’s description, instead of periods, we have a string of no fewer than four exclamation points—five if one adds the younger man’s “So!” Actually, though, Browning’s narrator is not so much quoting Horace as freely adapting (even more freely than the woman) his injunctions against implausible dramatic violence: the original passage references Medea’s slaughter of her children and Atreus’s cannibalism as events best kept offstage. In a way, then, the poem’s opacity only winkingly upholds Horace’s rule, as the Latin text, with its revision of the original that reveals agent and victim—“Juvenis senem”—both announces (to the learned, for whom the action of the scene becomes clear upon reading the Latin tag) and hides (from the rest of us, for whom it serves as further obfuscation). Recall that one of the books Browning’s narrator finds but dismisses in the Florentine bookstall in which he discovers the Old Yellow Book is a “Vulgarized Horace for the use of schools” (I.79); in this modern remix of The Ring and the Book, the Latin may seem original, but Horace’s more general meaning has indeed been vulgarized. The resulting macaronic lines represent a frequent feature of verse-novels, indicating their hybridity and cosmopolitanism (the subject of Chapter 4). Browning himself had earlier put this tactic to good use in Hyacinthus’s monologue, where the auto-translation of phrases from Latin into English brings the poem’s history into the present and transforms its idiom into a novelistic one. Yet, as we have seen, Horace’s treatise is nothing so much as an argument for literary decorum. It was actually he, not Derrida, who coined the phrase “the law of genre.”86 Browning’s poem, in contrast, is nothing so much as a knowing breach of such decorum, even as it offers a prime example of the monstrosity that Horace saw as the product of genre-mixing. To quote the rule at the very moment that propriety is being most violently breached is to recognize this work as Browning’s own “yell, spring, and scream” at being kept in the cage of generic convention. The violence to language and form unmasks the stifling obligations of

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purity, whether sexual or literary.87 “So!” he shouts with the younger man: “This is how you can do it!” You might even say that—much like the younger man—he’s throwing the book at his critics.

NOTES 1. The lyrics in the section heading come from W. S. Gilbert, Princess Ida: Or Castle Adamant (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1912), 21. Coming as it does from a libretto based on Tennyson’s The Princess, a hybrid experiment that is a forerunner to the verse-novel (see Chapter 2, n. 39), this Victorian example of the phrase seems especially apropos. But I am also tickled by the name given the castle in Gilbert and Sullivan’s version: it has become a diamond fortress of womanhood, making it a nice point of departure for my discussion in this chapter of women and gems. 2. The Inferno of Dante, trans. Ichabod Charles Wright, M.A. (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1833), II.32; I.1. 3. Dante, trans. Ichabod Charles Wright, M.A., Vol. III: The Paradiso, rev. ed. (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1845), XXXIII. 133–45. 4. The problem of incarnation is prominently expressed both in Browning’s titular metaphor, which melds “Fancy with fact” to produce what he calls a “ring-thing,” and in Tennyson’s Arthur, “Ideal manhood closed in real man.” See Browning, The Ring and the Book, ed. Collins and Altick, I.464, I.17; hereafter references to this text will be cited internally by book and line numbers. See also Tennyson, Idylls of the King, ed. Gray, “To the Queen,” l. 38; hereafter, references to this text will appear internally by idyll and line number. Patricia Ball notes that the relationship of lyric Prelude to narrative Idyl in Patmore’s Angel also represents “an act of incarnation” (The Heart’s Events, 193). 5. The term “circle-squarers” in my chapter title has a Victorian source. I take it from Lewis Carroll, who in a diary entry for 1855 listed among the books he hoped to write one to be titled “Plain Facts for Circle-Squarers.” Quoted in Martin Gardner, The Universe in a Handkerchief: Lewis Carroll’s Mathematical Recreations, Games, Puzzles, and Word Plays (New York: Springer Science, 1996), 29. Edward FitzGerald also turns to the metaphor to describe the challenge of narrative verse—or, to be more specific, the challenge of composing English hexameters. In a letter to W. H. Thompson (July 15, 1861), he announces “grounds for . . . belief ” in the possibility of the measure, admitting, “To be sure, the Philosopher’s Stone, and the Quadrature of the Circle, have had at least as many Followers.” Somewhat ironically, the paragraph continues by declaring, “Mrs. Browning’s death is rather a relief to me, I must say: no more Aurora Leighs, thank God!” Her form of circle-squaring seems to have been less to his taste; in the same passage, he advises women authors to stick to “little Novels.” The Letters of Edward FitzGerald, Volume II, 1851–1866, ed.

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

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A. M. Terhune and A. B. Terhune (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 407. My thanks to Erik Gray for bringing this letter to my attention. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, letter to Joseph Cottle, March 7, 1815, in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 4.545. Starr, Lyric Generations, 32. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, Or, the History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (London: Penguin, 1985), 1305 (letter 451). Clearly, Clarissa composes her own flotilla of post-mortem epistles, as well. Renee Fox considers what she calls Browning’s “necropoetics” in The Ring and the Book, how he offers in the poem “a galvanic theory of innovation (old body, new spark) in which poetry will always be a memorial project, both abolishing and obsessively remembering the dead in the resuscitative act of pushing old formal lines to new limits.” When Robert Browning describes how No less, man, bounded, yearning to be free, May so project his surplusage of soul In search of body, so add self to self By owning what lay ownerless before,— So find, so fill full, so appropriate forms (I.722–6), Fox sees him revising the famous injunction against thinking about form in Aurora Leigh (V.223–7) by arguing that the poet can reanimate dead forms. See “Robert Browning’s Necropoetics,” Victorian Poetry 49.4 (2011), 465–6. Susan Blalock, “Browning’s The Ring and the Book: ‘A Novel Country,’ ” Browning Institute Studies 11 (1983), 43. Here and throughout I use Gray’s standard abbreviations when referencing line numbers in the Idylls: CA (“The Coming of Arthur”), BB (“Balin and Balan”), MV (“Merlin and Vivien”), LE (“Lancelot and Elaine”), PE (“Pelleas and Ettarre”), G (“Guinevere”), and PA (“The Passing of Arthur”). Swinburne, Under the Microscope, 36, 37. The book was first published in 1872. See Felluga, “Tennyson’s Idylls.” J. Phillip Eggers has also pointed to the “novelistic” aspect of “The Ladies.” Eggers, King Arthur’s Laureate: A Study of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (New York: NYU Press, 1971), 144–5. Herbert Tucker, “Trials of Fiction: Novel and Epic in the Geraint and Enid Episodes from Idylls of the King,” Victorian Poetry 30.3/4 (1992), 442–3; Epic, 450–1. Tucker, Epic, 391. Note the typically disparaging tone taken by Tucker toward the “novelistic.” Key to Tucker’s reading is his account of the satire of novelistic domesticity offered in Hyacinthus’s monologue in Book VIII. But I would argue that epic is granted a similar treatment in the monologue of the opposing counsel, Bottinius, in the subsequent book (as evidenced by the many ludicrous references to the epic tradition).

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17. Susan Brown, “Pompilia: The Woman (In) Question,” Victorian Poetry 34.1 (1996), 30. For Brown, the hybridity is a response to “the political moment which saw the emergence of a female political subject in Victorian Britain” (31). 18. Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to R. W. Dixon, October 12, 1881, in Browning: The Critical Heritage, ed. Boyd Litzinger and Donald Smalley (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 472. 19. Pater, The Renaissance, xxxi, 152. 20. Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to Richard Watson Dixon, February 27, 1879, in Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, ed. John D. Jump (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 334. 21. Horace, Ars Poetica, ll. 1–9, qtd. in Duff, Romanticism and Genre, 165 (n. 33). 22. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, ed. Richard Lancelyn Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 157. 23. Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, ed. Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 344. Trollope’s narratives usually offer only what D. A. Miller calls “archly conventional” closure, as with the marriages of The Eustace Diamonds; the novel forms part of a longer series— or strand—of Palliser novels (The Novel and the Police, 122). 24. Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds, ed. W. J. McCormack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), II.350. Further references to this text will be cited internally by volume and page number. 25. Tucker, Epic, 447. In his reading of the novelistic aspects of “Geraint and Enid,” Tucker also compares Tennyson to Trollope (“Trials of Fiction,” 445). 26. Michael Hancock, “The Stones in the Sword: Tennyson’s Crown Jewels,” Victorian Poetry 39 (Spring 2001), 3, 2. Bill Brown argues that because things become most visible when objects are misused, “thingness” “can be exemplified only syntactically, only in time”; examples of it are necessarily “narrative.” Bill Brown, “The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism),” Modernism/Modernity 6.2 (1999), 3. 27. Hancock, “The Stones in the Sword,” 3. 28. These two idylls are central both as they first appeared in 1859 and in the poem’s final twelve-part configuration. 29. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst observes this connection. See Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 271. 30. The point is highlighted by comparison with the work’s other prominent collection of gems, the Ruby Carcanet of “The Last Tournament,” which is found alongside the short-lived Nestling and becomes the prize of the Tournament of the Dead Innocence. 31. See Erik Gray, “Getting it Wrong in ‘The Lady of Shalott,’ ” Victorian Poetry 27.1 (2009), 54.

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32. Elliot L. Gilbert, “The Female King: Tennyson’s Arthurian Apocalypse,” PMLA 98.5 (October 1983), 870. 33. Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” Language in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 95–119. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Defense of Poetry,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1977), 480. 34. Gallagher, “Formalism and Time,” 234, 235. 35. One might compare the process by which the Table Round serves as “model for the mighty world” (G 462) and the geographical condensation of Empire into the diamonds suggested by Hancock’s imperial reading of the poem’s gems. In other words, the Idylls condense both time and space, categories that—as the very phrase, “a little space,” a favorite with Tennyson, suggests—are themselves convertible in the poem’s logic. For Elliot Gilbert, the poem actually shows Space Defeating Time (as in the allegory of “the war of Time against the soul of man” that Gareth overcomes) and Woman Defeating Man. His reading follows James R. Kincaid’s. Kincaid argues that “The overlaid seasonal progress in [the poem] suggests not so much objective, physical time as the spatial representation of time in medieval tapestry or triptychs. This emphasis on space seems to imply the absence of time, the conquest of time.” Tennyson’s Major Poems (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 151–2. 36. James Eli Adams, “Harlots and Base Interpreters: Scandal and Slander in Idylls of the King,” Victorian Poetry 30.3–4 (Autumn/Winter 1992), 433–4. 37. One can also see the narrativization of simile as leading to parody: thus the Ruby Carcanet is a parody of the diamond crown; the Red Knight is a parody of Arthur. Such a reading highlights the resemblance between simile and parody. In a world with no “is”es but only “likes” (or debased “is”es, as in “a diamond is a diamond”), “likes” too quickly devolve into mimicry rather than mimesis. Of course, as I implied earlier, the Carcanet also reveals the bloody potential contained in the diamonds. While these seemingly pure gems may have been bleached by time (like the king’s skull upon which they were found), they, too, are blood diamonds of a sort. 38. Curiously, in “Guinevere,” the adultery first arises when simile, the token of lyric, fails: “not like him / Not like my Lancelot,” Guinevere recalls thinking upon her first sight of Arthur (G 403–4). This fact suggests once more the essentially narrative aspect of the adultery plot. 39. As in Trollope, the Grail serves as the diamonds’ alter ego: antimatter to their matter, singular vision to their multiple verse. My reading here contrasts with that offered by Herbert Tucker, for whom the Grail offers a diachronic solution to Tennyson’s “quest for a master narrative,” one rendering the previously synchronic Idylls of 1859 more truly epic (Epic, 450–1). 40. See Dallas, Poetics, 107, 146. 41. See, for example, Adams, “Harlots and Base Interpreters,” 435.

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42. For Herbert Tucker, the decentralized narrative signals the public’s increasing sovereignty in the wake of the Reform Bills of 1867 and 1883 (Epic, 449); for James Eli Adams, it signals a growing media culture that threatens to dissolve distinctions between public and private talk; for Michael Hancock, it signals the fundamental instability of Empire; for Charles LaPorte, it signals the religious controversies of the day, especially the debates between practitioners of higher criticism and biblical inspirationists (Victorian Poetry and the Changing Bible [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011], 67–110); for Matthew Margini it signals the dawn of a posthuman era (“ ‘The Beast with the Broken Lance’: Humanism and Posthumanism in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King,” Victorian Poetry 53.2 [Summer 2015], 171–92). 43. See Tucker, Epic, 436. 44. See Alexander Welsh’s influential reading of these two texts in conjunction. Suggestively, he joins them with a reading of The Golden Bowl, a novel to which this study finds itself repeatedly turning, and which I consider again in my Afterword. In Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 197–256. 45. Dallas, Poetics, 197–8. 46. [James T. Fields], “Diamonds and Pearls,” Atlantic Monthly 7 (March 1861), 361–71. 47. See my essay, “Form Things: Looking at Genre Through Victorian Diamonds,” for a reading of Dickinson’s poem that focuses on lyric practice (Victorian Studies 52.4 [Summer 2010], 591–619). 48. Sharon Cameron has shown how intent Dickinson was on exploring the limits of the lyric genre in which she pursued her craft, which she called “Gem-tactics” in her pearl poem, “We play at Paste.” See Cameron, Lyric Time: Emily Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 151. Swinburne also associates the rounded forms of pearl with the roundness of lyric in the dedicatory poem to his “century” of “roundels,” which begins by describing how his titular form is “wrought as a ring” and concludes by calling it “round as a pearl or a tear.” In keeping with the usual metaphoric resonances, this dedication is to Christina Rossetti, symbol of and practitioner in (female) lyric purity. Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Century of Roundels (London: Chatto and Windus, 1883), vi. 49. This text has been identified as the Arabian Nights. See Richard S. Kennedy, Robert Browning’s Asolando: The Indian Summer of a Poet (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 43. Kennedy stresses the lyric qualities of this poem and of Summum Bonum (discussed below), which both use pearl to explore not only the condensation of space but also of time (through the creation of an “eternal moment,” as Browning phrases it in another lyric from the collection, “Now”) (43, 46). 50. All quotations from Browning’s poetry other than The Ring and the Book are from Robert Browning, The Poems, Volume 2, ed. John Pettigrew and Thomas J. Collins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981). 51. See Lindsay C. Watson, A Commentary on Horace’s Epodes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 42.

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52. [Fields], “Diamonds and Pearls,” 368. Such vulnerability also appears in the medieval Pearl poem, a dream-vision about a jeweler who loses his most precious pearl, alternately identified as a maiden, a pearl, or his dead little daughter. As Naomi Levine has recently charted, when this poem appeared in a scholarly edition by Richard Morris in 1864, it was received as a lyrical elegy along the lines of In Memoriam. Levine shows how what Hans Robert Jauss has called a generic “horizon of expectations” determined this reading. Her account resonates with my own sense that the presence of pearls in poetry created generic expectations. See Naomi Levine, “Victorian Pearl,” Victoriographies 6.3 (Spring 2016), 238–55. 53. In her treatment of the narrative properties of Caponsacchi’s monologue, Monique Morgan cites Ross Posnock’s observation that “The terrible fact that ‘Pompilia is bleeding out her life . . .’ is the agonizing reality that exerts a continuous pressure and intensity upon Caponsacchi’s monologue” (Narrative Means, Lyric Ends, 178 n. 54). 54. Jennifer McDonnell has written about Browning’s obsession with things— especially beautiful ones—in “Browning’s Curiosities: The Ring and the Book and the ‘Democracy of Things’ ” (the titular quotation comes from G. K. Chesterton, writing of what he called “the turbulent democracy of things” in The Ring and the Book). See Literary Bric-à-Brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities, ed. Jonathan Shears and Jen Harrison (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 67–81. See also Bernard Beatty’s article, “The Bric-à-Brac Wars: Robert Browning and Blessed John Henry Newman,” in the same volume (83–98), for an account of how Browning’s poetry is composed of literary bric-à-brac that resonates with my argument about The Inn Album, below. For Beatty, though, this method indicates a fundamental lack of interest in sequence—and thus also in narrative (88). In contrast, I see Browning’s attitude toward narrative as problematic but evincing serious interest, as is evidenced both in his use of the pearl metaphor and in the fact that the twelve monologues of the poems, while narratologically complex, are themselves sequenced chronologically. 55. “Gritty, adj.3.” OED Online. March 2014. Oxford University Press. Accessed May 22, 2014. The OED cites an example of this usage from 1843. 56. A. K. Cook, A Commentary upon Browning’s The Ring and the Book (New York: Oxford University Press, 1920), 138. 57. Of course, Browning likens Pompilia to a variety of things: she is at different times a painting, an egg, a nightingale. Several of these metaphors shed light on her precarious position—not only caused by her gender but also manifested (as I am suggesting) in her hybrid generic representation. Consider when Guido compares the purchase of his wife to the purchase of a tree: “As when I buy, timber and twig, a tree—/ I buy the song o’ the nightingale inside” (V.605–6). Here we see another figure for lyric embedded in or encircled by narrative (again, those tree-rings!): the nightingale is the ring here, the tree is the book. Moreover, that nightingale opens onto a pair of divergent literary traditions that belong to different genres: is she the pure

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58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

64. 65.

66.

67. 68.

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lyric voice of, say, Keats’s great “Ode: To a Nightingale”? Or is she, rather, a symbol of domestic violence and muteness, as in Ovid’s classical narrative? [Robertson], “Pearls,” Household Words 19 (February 1859), 228. [Frederick Greenwood], “Browning in 1869,” Cornhill Magazine 19 (February 1869), 255. W. David Shaw, The Lucid Veil: Poetic Truth in the Victorian Era (London: Athlone, 1987), 54. Hughes and Lund discuss Shaw’s claims in the context of their reading of Browning’s poem’s use of “sequential argument” to illuminate historical experience, although they also note Browning’s contrasting emphasis on “instant, intuitive judgment” (Victorian Serial, 106). John William Kaye, “Outrages on Women,” North British Review 25 (1856), 256; qtd. in Brown, “Pompilia,” 20. See Martin J. Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 162. [Frances Power Cobbe], “Wife Torture in England,” The Contemporary Review 32 (April 1878), 72. Wiener points out that while prosecutions of murder in general remained constant between 1850 and 1879, prosecutions of wife murder doubled and convictions tripled—he surmises in response to increased public awareness of the problem due in part to the increase in press coverage (Men of Blood, 165). See Morgan, Narrative Means, Lyric Ends, 181, 184 n. 62. The fact suggests a further overlap with The Moonstone—another mystery in which the timing behind the crime plays a crucial role in both its commission and its discovery. Together, the works remind me of a problem philosophers of action like to consider: If agent A shoots victim B at time t, and B dies at time t1, when does A kill B? The language of a “spot” here recalls the Wordsworthian idea of a lyric “spot of time” (to which I will return in my final section), again conflating temporal and geographical issues. But one might argue that the place is as important an element of guilt here as the time—that Inn and Home (site of the eventual murders) serve as analogous opposites to the instantaneous and delayed temporality on which I am focusing. In such a reading, the Inn becomes a place of lyric, whereas the Comparini home is aligned with novelistic narrative. Horace, Art of Poetry I.IV. In The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry by Horace, trans. John Conington (London: Bell and Daldy, 1870), 16. For Browning’s remarks, see Walter Kendrick, “The Inn Album: Browning’s Marginal Poem,” Browning Institute Studies 11 (1983), 113. For more on the up-to-date-ness of the poem, see Charlotte C. Watkins, “Robert Browning’s ‘The Inn Album’ and the Periodicals,” Victorian Periodicals Newsletter 6.3/4 (December 1973), 11–17. I am reminded of Arthur Hugh Clough’s comment about the modern novelist’s willingness (in contrast to the modern poet’s refusal) to represent “indispensable latest addenda—those phenomena which, if we forgot them on Sunday, we must remember on Monday.” [Clough], “Recent English Poetry,” North American Review 77 (July 1853), 3.

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69. All quotations taken from Robert Browning, The Inn Album, in Poems, Volume 2, ed. Pettigrew and Collins, 333–414. Hereafter, The Inn Album will be cited internally by line number. 70. Naomi Levine has recently explored Barrett Browning’s interest in marginal annotation—including her discussion of the critical practice in Aurora Leigh V.1224–7. See “Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Historiographical Poetics,” MLQ 77.1 (2016), 81–104. 71. See Bayard Taylor, New York Daily Tribune (December 4, 1875), 8. 72. [Henry James], rev. of The Inn Album, The Nation 22 (January 20, 1876), 49–50, in Henry James, Literary Criticism, Volume One, ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 782–3, 786, 785. 73. Swinburne, letter to Joseph Knight, November 28, 1875, in The Swinburne Letters, 6 vols., ed. Cecil Y. Lang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959–62), III.87. A. C. Bradley, “Mr. Browning’s The Inn Album,” Macmillan’s Magazine 33 (1876), 347. Edmund Clarence Stedman, Victorian Poets, rev. and extended ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), 425. This edition was first published in 1887. As I discuss in Chapter 5, Stedman had also experimented with the verse-novel form. 74. Indeed, one of the stranger things about the poem is how the characters’ namelessness registers in the context of all this name-dropping. 75. Gilbert, “The Female King,” 874–5. It may also recall Sir Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel, which figures another “Mighty Book” (2.161) containing a potent and “glamour[ous]” “spell” (3.102–3) that seems partly there to consider the earlier generic battle between oral and written verse. Felluga discusses Scott’s book in The Perversity of Poetry (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 64–6. 76. Felluga, “Tennyson’s Idylls,” 797. While he does not mention Merlin’s book, I can’t help but see Felluga’s question as resonating with Tennyson’s location of the charm. 77. “Introduction,” in Mary Ellis Gibson, ed., Critical Essays on Robert Browning (New York: G K Hall, 1992), 3. 78. See Kendrick, “The Inn Album,” passim. 79. Kendrick, “The Inn Album,” 123. 80. Quoted in Wiener, Men of Blood, 10. 81. Ellen O’Brien, Crime in Verse: The Poetics of Murder in the Victorian Era (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008), 240, 200. 82. See [James], rev. of “The Inn Album,” in Henry James, Literary Criticism, 785. 83. [Robert Louis Stevenson], rev. of The Inn Album, Vanity Fair 180 (December 11, 1875), 332. 84. Henry James, who praises little about this poem, liked these two lines— especially if read to rhyme (784); Donald Hair and Richard Kennedy have an interesting argument about rhyme as one of the poem’s subjects of ethical contest, given its manipulative power. Hair and Kennedy, The Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning: A Literary Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007), 349 ff.

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85. I focus here on the murder, but a parallel argument could be made about the suicide, which requires that we interpret the woman’s admission that she has “bor[ne] about [her], for prompt use / At urgent need, the thing that ‘stops the mouth’ ” (ll. 3031–3) as a description of the otherwise unnamed poison with which she takes her own life. That is, she repurposes the very same phrase from the Album. 86. See Max Cavitch, “Genre,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed., ed. Roland Green (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 552. 87. On this point, it’s worth noting that Browning seems to be arguing that the woman’s sexual purity can be compromised without hurting her integrity.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 13/6/2017, SPi

4 Amours de Voyage The Verse-Novel and European Travel I. AMOURS DE VOYAGE I have focused thus far on how verse-novels use their formal features to think about temporal experience, especially the experience of duration. In so doing, I have followed Bakhtin, who tends to privilege ideas of time in constructing his generic categories: “the chronotope . . . defines genre and generic distinctions, for in literature the primary category in the chronotope is time.”1 But the idea of the chronotope does take space into account, as well, as its name suggests. Franco Moretti has worked to counterbalance the critical weight given to time, noting in his Atlas of the European Novel (1999) “The ortgebunden, place-bound nature of literary forms: each of them with its peculiar boundaries, its spatial taboos and favorite routes.”2 The characteristic feature of the Victorian verse-novel, though, lies not so much in how it is “ortgebunden” as in how little it seems to be constrained in its generic geography. Verse-novels cover not only long stretches of time but also vast areas of land and sea. They forcefully exhibit what Amanda Anderson has so influentially described as “the powers of distance.”3 So pronounced is this bent that it is harder to think of verse-novels that stay in one country (much less place) than it is to list ones that roam; almost all examples of the genre exhibit what Clough calls amours de voyage.4 Like the adultery plot, the travelling tendency is partly a matter of precedent—not only of the epic precedent set by the voyages of Odysseus, Aeneas, and Dante, but also of the subsequent reconfigurations of these voyages found in Wordsworth’s Prelude and Byron’s Don Juan. Both Romantic poems filter epic concern for travel through the eighteenthcentury genre of the tour. And, like the verse-novel, literature of the tour inclines to generic hybridity. One might think of works like Samuel Roger’s immensely popular Italy: A Poem (1822, with a second part appearing in 1828), which records the poet’s journeys around the

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continent in 1814; subsequent editions interspersed that narrative with an increasing proportion of “stories from the old Chroniclers and many Notes illustrative of the manners, customs, and superstitions [of Italy]”—not to mention illustrations by J. M. W. Turner.5 Or, on the novelistic front, consider how Madame de Staël’s hugely influential Corinne, Or Italy (1807) (long recognized as a major source for Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh) uses elements of the tour to locate the courtship plot of its poet-heroine, whose lyrical “improvisations” dot the narrative, alongside a number of quotations from other poets. William Combe’s Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (1812), a satire of Gilpin illustrated by Thomas Rowlandson, begins by describing the author’s method as fundamentally mixed: “I’ll make a TOUR—and then I’ll WRITE IT / . . . I’ll prose it here, I’ll verse it there. / And picturesque it ev’ry where.”6 If, as Carolyn Williams has argued, a genre can be defined as a literary form that can be parodied, the fact that a parody of “TOUR” focuses on its mixture of prose and verse suggests how fundamental such hybridity is to the constitution of the category.7 In discussing the touring impulse of Romantic-period long poems, paradigmatically expressed for him in the Simplon Pass episode of Book VI of The Prelude, Alan Liu has argued that the tour operates as a function of poets’ negotiation of a motley generic field in which the novel is becoming increasingly prominent: The generic field in any age, I suggest, distributes itself between master and servant genres with some unstable mediator always filling the role played by tour and georgic in Wordsworth’s time. Tour and georgic are preeminently mixed genres in which the stability of genre as a convention is threatening to come apart under the pressure of the times. Tour and georgic in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are the pressure points where the entire generic field is beginning to rearrange around the massive intrusion of specifically historical reality and the form jury-rigged to imitate it: the novel.8

Liu’s comments suggest how the verse-novel might play a similar role in the Victorian period to that which Liu attributes to tour and georgic in the Romantic, as “unstable mediator” between master (novel) and servant (verse) genres. His argument also highlights how “the pressure of the times” operates to bring opposing genres together, albeit precariously. The historical crucible for the Victorian verse-novel was the experience of the European revolutions of 1848 and of the various nationalist movements that followed in their wake, such as the Italian Risorgimento and Fenianism. These events themselves incorporate what might be considered to be competing impulses: the pluralistic drive toward democracy and expanding suffrage and the

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unifying (and potentially purist) imperative of nationalism. The revolutionary movements of the 1840s and 1850s touched many of the poets discussed in this chapter on a personal level. As scholars and readers have long recognized, Clough’s verse-novels—among the earliest characteristically Victorian examples of the genre—arose directly out of his experiences in Paris in 1848 and Rome in 1849. In the epistolary Amours de Voyage, which records the tale of a failed love affair between two British tourists against the backdrop of the French invasion of Rome, expressions and phrases from Clough’s private correspondence with friends and family are repeatedly translated into the letters sent to England by his protagonist, Claude. Indeed, the uprisings in Paris and Rome act as crisis point for Clough in a manner that can be compared to Wordsworth’s experience of the French Revolution.9 Thus John Goode sees Clough’s career as tracking the initial excitement of and later disillusionment with the European revolutions, as he moves from the optimism of The Bothie (1848) to the “irony” of Amours (and through to the “bitter[ness]” of the less novelistic Dispychus and the Spirit, begun in 1850).10 It is in a way fitting that a poet so influenced by European revolutions should finally come to rest in Europe: having travelled to Italy in pursuit of healthier air, he died there in 1862. His grave lies in the Protestant Cemetery in Florence. It lies across the way from the tomb of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Barrett Browning’s poems also show the influence of the times in their concern for Europe. As G. K. Chesterton observed, she was “by far the most European of all English poets of that age; all of them, even her own much greater husband, look local beside her.”11 Christopher Keirstead agrees, opening his book on the European cosmopolitanism of Victorian poetry by remarking that “If one were to attempt to compose an Atlas of Victorian Poetry”—he doesn’t cite Moretti, but presumably he is thinking of him—“something to chart its destinations locally, nationally, and abroad—no poet would likely pose a greater logistical challenge than Elizabeth Barrett Browning.”12 For her, though, the key political movement is not so much the revolutionary burst of 1848 (the year to which she relegates the aborted marriage between Marian Erle and Romney Leigh, as Matthew Reynolds notes in his reading of Aurora Leigh13) but rather the Italian Risorgimento. The formal consequences of this engagement have been recognized by Reynolds, who analyzes how Barrett Browning’s drive toward aesthetic unity—be it between ideal and real, man and woman, poetry and novel—reflects her political interest in Italian unification.14 Keirstead, who also appreciates the historical drive toward Europe inaugurated by the revolutions at mid-century, goes so far as to view “the ‘People’s Spring’ of 1848 [as] the moment, in many ways, when

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the Victorian poem of Europe first begins to take shape.” He rightly urges us to consider the implications of the fact that when Matthew Arnold describes the age as “Wandering between two worlds” the “oft-repeated expression of the Victorian crisis of faith is a geographical metaphor not just a temporal one.” My claim about the relationship between the form of these mid-century poems and their engagement beyond the borders of England is larger: the most paradigmatic “shape” taken by such “poems of Europe” is that of the verse-novel, albeit with the variations native to this hybrid species. Poems of “travel, border-crossing, and transnational identity” also tend to be poems of genre-crossing, especially between verse and the novel.15 As has already been suggested, the corresponding historical pressure exerted on the Romantic precursor poems to the Victorian verse-novel came from the French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic Wars. Both The Prelude and Don Juan include significant passages of wandering—not only geographical but also amatory—set against these revolutionary backdrops, before they settle down “at home” in England (although Juan’s coming to rest might be argued to depend upon his poem’s aborted conclusion).16 In other words, in both works, wandering is a matter of “fierce loves and faithless wars,” as Byron put it (VII.7.1). He is of course misquoting the “fierce warres and faithfull loves” that Spenser had named as the theme and the dual propellers to his romance narrative. These are also the forces that lie behind Clough’s Amours de Voyage, a fact he recognizes in hinting at and further revising (not to mention again undermining) Spenser’s line when his protagonist, Claude, questions the process of courtship he feels enfolding him even as the French siege of Rome encircles the city: “faithful it seemeth, and fond, very fond, very probably faithful.”17 Love, revolution, and travel: these will be recurring themes, too, in this chapter. Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Spenser may all have been aware of the relationships among the three categories, but the geographical concerns of epic change when they are reconfigured to coincide with the novelistic realm of the courtship plot. Surprisingly, the combination of epic and novel frequently entails a shift in focus from a nation-building drive that is the large-scale analogue to the nesting drive of novelistic home-making to something more radical: to an acceptance (if not necessarily an embrace) of a cosmopolitan version of homelessness in some ways resembling the “transcendental homelessness” so essential to Lukács’s understanding of the novel.18 And even when the poetry is more teleological in orientation—as in Aurora Leigh—the geography of that teleology allows escape from the more disciplinary aspects of homecoming. In other words, while much of the Foucauldian scholarship of the past

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thirty years or so has encouraged us to explore the policing energies of novelistic form, I want to consider how the novelization of verse (or the versification of the novel) actually recovers some of the open-endedness that both Lukács and Bakhtin saw as crucial to fiction’s revolutionary potential.19 Taking stock of the role of place in nineteenth-century novels, Josephine McDonagh has remarked that “Only in radical novels is the constant movement of characters embraced in an unambiguously positive way.”20 In verse-novels, though, such movement is generally both “constant” and “embraced.” Moreover, a number of these works suggest that it is through travel itself, rather than through arrival at a destination, that truth can be accessed. As Byron puts it in Don Juan, Now there is nothing gives a man such spirits, Leavening his blood as cayenne doth a curry, As going at full speed; no matter where its Direction be, so ’tis but in a hurry And merely for the sake of its own merits, For the less cause there is for all this flurry, The greater is the pleasure in arriving At the great end of travel—which is driving. (X.72.1–8)

As usual, Byron’s jest covers serious claims: such motion may lead to a form of enlightenment. “Solvitur ambulando”—“It is solved by walking”—states one of the mottos to Clough’s Amours de Voyage. The quotation is a retort to Xeno’s paradox, but it also suggests how the actual pragmatics of covering ground might yield a kind of meaning in these poems.21 In what follows, I offer a rapid tour through a series of Victorian verse-novels that take travel as both method and subject. My own readings will also roam more widely than they have in the previous chapters, touching down in the landscapes of a wide array of poems in order to distinguish characteristic features of the verse-novel’s generic geography. These works take advantage of the idea of amours de voyage to destabilize both their generic terrain and their ideological certainties.

II. STEAM-PROPELLED STORIES Walking is certainly a characteristic feature of Romantic-period verse, as well: just think of Wordsworth and Coleridge traversing the English countryside as they engaged in the conversations—with each other, with strangers, with themselves—that were soon translated into the measured

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feet of their poems. Perhaps, though, a more accurate term to describe the kind of walking that particularly occupies the Romantics is wandering; a “Wanderer” even serves as Wordsworth’s great figure for the power of poetry in The Excursion. The distinction between these activities might be compared to that drawn by Liu in differentiating the tour from the voyage of discovery: the former seeks “only to make sense of a passage, not a goal.”22 When another Romantic, John Keats, conceptualized the long poem, he did so in order to relate the experience not just of its composition but also of its reception to the practice of such aimless walking: “Do not the Lovers of Poetry like to have a little Region to wander in where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second Reading: which may be food for a Week’s stroll in the Summer?”23 Keats’s description of “pick[ing] and choos[ing] among images,” as though careless of their order and the connections among them, suggests that he considers neither teleological thrust nor a more general conception of plot to be essential components of the verse. Barrett Browning demonstrates such a Romantic attitude toward wandering through Marian Erle’s piecemeal education in literature. As she “tramp[s]” the English countryside behind her abusive parents, she encounters forms of relief from a variety of “people on the roads,” including a very Wordsworthian pedlar, who stopped, and tapped her on the head With absolute forefinger, brown and ringed, And asked if peradventure she could read, And when she answered “ay,” would toss her down Some stray odd volume from his heavy pack, A Thomson’s Seasons, mulcted of the Spring, Or half a play of Shakespeare’s, torn across, (She had to guess the bottom of a page By just the top sometimes,—as difficult, As, sitting on the moon, to guess the earth!) Or else a sheaf of leaves (for that small Ruth’s Small gleanings) torn out from the heart of books, From Churchyard Elegies and Edens Lost, From Burns, and Bunyan, Selkirk, and Tom Jones,— ’Twas somewhat hard to keep the things distinct, And oft the jangling influence jarred the child Like looking at a sunset full of grace Through a pothouse window while the drunken oaths Went on behind her. But she weeded out Her book-leaves, threw away the leaves that hurt, (First tore them small, that none should find a word)

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And made a nosegay of the sweet and good To fold within her breast, and pore upon At broken moments of the noontide glare, When leave was given her to untie her cloak And rest upon the dusty highway’s bank From the road’s dust: . . . (III.969–95)

Fed parts and scraps of great works, Marian further dismantles (and re-naturalizes) them, tearing out her favorite “leaves” and reassembling them into a “nosegay” that may appear similar to Aurora Leigh in its generic mix. But the “broken moments” at which Marian “pore[s] upon” her nosegay recall, rather, lyric temporal experience. Such marking of Marian’s experience of the poetry of wandering recognizes Barrett Browning’s debt to her Romantic forebears, who taught her the value of journeying. But it also sets the young Marian apart, as belonging to a different time and place from Aurora Leigh, and to a different generic mode. When Aurora travels, she does so with an end in mind if not in sight— she does so with a purpose, as the very first lines of her “novel-poem” announce (citing Ecclesiastes): “Of writing many books there is no end; / And I who have written much in prose and verse / For others’ uses, will write now for mine” (I.1–3). While the question of ends here seems georgic (what is the “use” of writing?), Aurora’s physical journey proves it also concerns destinations. The poem argues that these two senses of “end” are inextricably linked. Crucially, she writes to tell a story connecting not only past and present but also Italy and England, as I shall show. To grasp the significance of her narrative, we must travel with her, following in her footsteps along the way; to “weed[]” her poem of all but its “sweet and good” moments would be to destroy its impact. Moreover, while she may walk and wander at points of her story, in order to get to places further afield, Aurora Leigh has to travel by steam. Writing of “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” the work that served as a kind of apprentice piece for Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning (or Barrett Barrett, as she then was) had described how it concerned “railroads, routes, & all manner of ‘temporalities’”; her examples are hardly random, not least for how such “temporalities” depend rather upon their spatial aspects.24 As a matter of fact, as the genre of romance is to “pricking o’er the plain” astride a horse (the first line of Spenser’s Faerie Queene), as epic is to journey by foot or by oar (just think of how Odysseus’s travels will end only after he reaches a land where his oar is mistaken for a winnowing fan), so the verse-novel is to journey by rail and steamer. Almost all verse-novels with contemporary settings make reference to train travel, even when, as in the Inn Album, they stay pointedly in one spot.25

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Perhaps the most vivid instance of the phenomenon is again found in Clough’s Amours, where Claude’s desperate, and ultimately failed, effort to catch up with Mary Trevellyan after her family has left Rome to escape the unrest of the French invasion takes place fueled in spirit (if not, perhaps, largely in fact) by “railway travel, or steamer” (III.vi.107). The fourth canto of Clough’s “five-act epistolary tragi-comedy, or comitragedy” does little beyond tracking the crisscrossing travels of its hero and heroine by “boat” and by “post,” as Claude fruitlessly attempts to catch up with Mary. “I am sick of the statues and pictures!— / No, to Bologna, Parma, Piacenza, Lodi, and Milan, / Off we go tonight” (IV.i.16–18), he announces to his main correspondent in Amours, his friend Eustace, as he embarks on the chase. The poetry reads like the transcription of the stops in a railway guide, with the names of places “plotting” both Claude’s travels and Clough’s poem through points on a map.26 At other times, poets take advantage of the motif to offer virtuosic examples of the ability of their chosen verse forms to render vivid the experience of train travel. Thus Aurora Leigh includes an extraordinary description of Aurora and Marian’s railway journey through France to Italy, in the process translating her blank-verse meter into something novel: we swept Above the old roofs of Dijon: Lyons dropped A spark into the night, half trodden out Unseen. But presently the winding Rhone Washed out the moonlight large along his banks Which strained their yielding curves out clear and clean To hold it,—shadow of town and castle just blurred Upon the hurrying river. (VII.417–24)

Note how often here the poetry formally reflects the experience of rapid travel, as when the line of verse that describes the effort of rounding a bend itself “strain[s]” against the length of the line (it is the longest one here) until the long vowel sounds of “strain” and “yield” shade into the tighter and faster alliteration and assonance of “clean and clear,” as they “hold” to the verse form even while turning the line’s corner. Or consider how we are “swept” across a line break without pause; or, how the expression “shadow of town and castle” must be radically “blurred” in order to fit the metrical requirements of the line. Or how, at the next bend in the verse, the phrase “just blurred / Upon the hurrying river” uses the line’s enjambment to emphasize the lack of clarity even as the assonance (“just blurred,” “upon the hurrying”) and consonance (“blurred,” “hurrying river”) onomatopoetically evoke the rush of the rails.

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In contrast, subsequent lines, which describe the effect of going into and out of a passageway cut through the mountains, use much less enjambment, instead taking advantage of the line breaks to accentuate the feel of being “shot through tunnels” (I hear a triple stress, for emphasis): So we passed The liberal open country and the close, And shot through tunnels, like a lightning-wedge By great Thor-hammers driven through the rock, Which, quivering through the intestine blackness, splits, And lets it in at once: the train swept in Athrob with effort, trembling with resolve, The fierce denouncing whistle wailing on And dying off smothered in the shuddering dark, While we, self-awed, drew troubled breath, oppressed As other Titans, underneath the pile And nightmare of the mountains. Out, at last, To catch the dawn afloat upon the land! (VII.429–41)

Here, the words at line ends heighten the effect of sharp transition: wedge, rock, splits, last, land. Only the wailing whistle echoes around the turn. The passengers’ shared release on leaving the tunnel comes in the form of a signature sunrise that seems to anticipate the conclusion of Aurora Leigh as a whole, where the heroine’s courtship plot arrives at its destination with Romney by having Aurora describe for him the Italian sunrise (which the blind Romney can no longer see for himself ) as the building of the New Jerusalem. The early glimpse here of that terminus hints that Aurora achieves release from the tunnel not only though being transported by the “vehicle of verse,” as we are accustomed to thinking of meter, but also by the actual train travel that gets her to Italy. (And this without touching on the incredible sexual and political energies that set Barrett Browning and Aurora “athrob,” “trembling,” and “shuddering” as they escape the oppression of the passage—literary, literal, and figurative— through the tunnel!) What might be called the ontological import of steam propulsion appears in Amours, too, where Clough sets up his account of actual train travel across Italy with a metaphorical use of the railway journey as a figure for the arbitrariness of the mechanics of the courtship plot.27 It is Claude’s “To be, or not to be” moment, the place where he wonders most explicitly about the fact of death—the journey to the country “From whose bourn no traveller returns.”28 But for Claude, who inhabits the generic terrain of the verse-novel, the deed at stake (the “action” into which he fears “to be

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circumscribed” [III.vi.124]), is not revenge for his father’s murder but commitment to a woman in marriage: Look you, we travel along in the railway-carriage, or steamer, And, pour passer le temps, till the tedious journey be ended, Lay aside paper or book, to talk with the girl that is next one; And, pour passer le temps, with the terminus all but in prospect, Talk of eternal ties and marriages made in heaven. Ah, did we really accept with a perfect heart the illusion! Ah, did we really believe that the Present indeed is the Only! Or through all transmutation, all shock and convulsion of passion, Feel we could carry undimmed, unextinguished, the light of our knowledge! But for his funeral train which the bridegroom sees in the distance, Would he so joyfully, think you, fall in with the marriage procession? (III.vi.108–18)

Here the regular rocking of Clough’s hexameters evokes the inescapable rhythms of both the rails and the conventions of courtship that Claude finds so binding. Once you have boarded the train, you can get off only at the appointed stops along a predetermined route (which is why, for all that he mentions “steamers,” trains are the dominant vehicle for the metaphor: while steamer-routes may be similarly predetermined, the sea itself feels boundless in comparison to the strict dependence of a train on its tracks). And, as Aurora Leigh concludes her tale with a sunset that reminds us of her earlier emergence from the tunnel during her journey to Italy, so in his penultimate letter, having given up on Mary, Claude also recalls this earlier moment by using rail travel as a metaphor for release: “Shall we come out of it all, some day, as one does from a tunnel?” he muses, dreaming of how “We shall behold clear day, the trees and the meadows about us” (V.ix.181–3). Of course, the fact that Claude is still asking questions at the end of the poem suggests the difference between his journey and Aurora’s: by the time we leave Aurora, she has seen the light at the end of the tunnel in the dawn of the New Jerusalem; when we part ways with Claude, he is still rushing along in the dark. But for both Clough and Barrett Browning, life—like the verse-novel’s plot— follows the tracks of the railway. This is not to suggest that other genres of the period ignore the new technology of the train; railways have long been recognized as crucial to the plots of Victorian novels, especially sensational ones, and the railway is one of the web-like structures that George Eliot uses as a loom for weaving Middlemarch. The innovation also appears to serve a generic function in two shorter railway poems composed by Clough himself, “As, at a railway junction” and “Natura Naturans,” both of which consider the

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experience of meeting (and passing) in a train in chronological terms underpinned by the brevity (and the potential immortality) of lyric form. When, in The Railway Journey, Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes how rapid train travel erased vast distances in a manner that translated the curtailment of time into an experience of shrinking space, his argument seems potentially to point to the contained chronotope of lyric poetry.29 At the same moment at which Clough was using his familiarity with train travel to organize his plot in Amours de Voyage, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was writing A Trip to Paris and Belgium, which experiments with a variety of different lyric forms to record the poet’s month-long tour of the region in the autumn of 1849. While Rossetti’s collection skirts the verse-novel’s more narrative conception of a journey, it does so in order to explore the disjointed nature of his experience of the trip. As James Buzard notes, “The loosely organized collection exhibits an uneasy fascination with rail travel’s fragmentation of perception, which Rossetti felt himself unable to master in verse.”30 In fact, journeys by rail frequently highlight the tensions between narrative and lyric modes of experience, something to which verse-novels are fundamentally attuned, as I have been arguing. When the Earl of Lytton (Edward Robert Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, the man who had earlier published under the nom de plume “Owen Meredith”)—whose long service in the diplomatic corps, including as Viceroy of India, gave him extensive knowledge of travel—reflects on the railway’s impact on the space–time continuum in his late, far-ranging verse-novel, Glenaveril (1885), he does so to emphasize an experience of contraction like that pinpointed by Schivelbusch: Of old, some dozen leagues the traveller went, And having travelled, he arrived at last; To-day he traverses a continent, Yet neither travels nor arrives; tho’ fast Across the world he flies, securely pent In a snug cage, with pause for brief repast At intervals, in places that remind him Exactly of the places left behind him. Europe exists no longer. In its place Are railway stations. Watches supersede Geography, and Time has swallowed Space. “Two hours!” That means plain, mountain, moorland, mead, Lake, river, seacoast, valley, forest, chase, Cathedrals, castles, cities. ’Tis agreed To call this fiction’s finish an arrival, Tho’ ’tis departure’s horrible revival.31

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The ottava rima shows the influence of Don Juan here. As in that poem, the rhyme adds to the rush of the verses, allowing us rapidly to “traverse” the many kinds of scenery listed in the second stanza, until we stop at the “fiction” of arrival. Yet the asyndeton of that list recalls nothing so much as Milton’s description of Satan’s legions dispersing themselves “O’er many a Frozen, many a fierie Alpe, / Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death.”32 It’s a sinister echo. For Lytton at this moment, what we sacrifice—what we lose grammatically through the use of that asyndeton—is the genuinely connective, narrative experience of a journey. Similarly, notice how both the couplets that conclude these stanzas stress the repetition of beginning and endpoint, enhanced by the exaggerated repetition of the double (feminine) rhymes. Thus while Lytton’s replacement of Europe with a set of points—railway stations that figure almost as geographically arranged spots of time—suggests how train travel might open up new opportunities for lyric as well as narrative modes, the description also hints that it potentially rides roughshod over both narrative’s investment in the logical connections between moments and lyric’s investment in distinctions of place. The latter feature helps explain Wordsworth’s 1844 campaign to stop the Kendal-to-Windermere railway line; it could have been motivated, in part, by his sense of the threat the new technology posed to the kind of grounded poetry that he practiced. He may have been afraid of something like the disruption that Henry James recorded in 1872 while visiting Chillon: “the railway train whizzed by . . . and the genius loci seemed to flee howling in the shriek of its signal.”33 The genius loci might shriek, but, then again, perhaps Byron’s prisoner would have been able to escape his cell in the ensuing commotion, catching the train to make his getaway. We can almost hear the budding novelist’s chuckle. For while it is true phenomenologically that space shrinks with more rapid travel, the railway sure does let you get around. The vast preponderance of verse-novels feature description of train travel both to facilitate characters’ extensive geographical movement and as signs of a kind of modernity characterized by rapid movement. This rapid movement has verse analogues, too, as we saw in Lytton’s stanzas; Virginia Woolf recognized this feature of the genre (in a passage quoted already at the end of Chapter 1) when she noted that “speed” is one of the qualities that keep us enthralled as we read Aurora Leigh: “As we rush through page after page of narrative in which a dozen scenes that the novelist would smooth out separately are pressed into one, in which pages of deliberate description are fused into a single line, we cannot help feeling that the poet has outpaced the prose writer. Her page is packed twice as full as his.”34 What the Pope memorably describes as Pompilia’s “foot’s feel” in The Ring

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and the Book (X.1885) may sometimes be sacrificed in the process, leaving the steam-and-hexameter-propelled Claude yearning to “plant firm foot” (I.xii.250) somewhere, anywhere. Nevertheless, he keeps on going, even at the conclusion of Amours, where we leave him travelling, presumably by steam, first to Naples and “Eastward, then, I suppose, with the coming of winter, to Egypt” (V.x.205).

III. TRAVELLING TEXTS Propelled as they are—one might even say, inspired—by steam, versenovelists need special guidance. Enter the publishing house of John Murray, whose famous handbooks, much like the French novels discussed in Chapter 1, make a number of notable cameo appearances in the versenovels of mid-century. In composing Lucile (1860), Lytton (or “Owen Meredith,” as he then called himself, and as I shall call him when referring to this work) actually drew heavily on an example of scandalous French fiction, George Sand’s Lavinia (1833). But he forces his poet-narrator to stop at the exact midpoint of his two-part, twelve-canto journey to offer praises to Murray, whom he recognizes as his real muse. He needs Murray to aid him in guiding his reader to his new locale, the spa town of Ems (we have already spent time in Bigorre, in the southwest of France, and, by the time the verse-novel concludes, we will make it all the way to Crimea): Hail, Muse! But each Muse by this time has, I know, Been used up, and Apollo has bent his own bow All too long; so I leave unassaulted the portal Of Olympus, and only invoke here a mortal. Hail, Murray!—not Lindley,—but Murray and Son. Hail omniscient, beneficent, great Two-in-One! In Albermarle Street may thy temple long stand! Long enlighten’d and led by thine erudite hand, May each novice in science nomadic unravel Statistical mazes of modernized travel!35

Meredith keeps on going in this vein—lauding the book that promises to “Cheer each poor British pilgrim, who trusts to thy wit / Not to pay through his nose for just following it!”—for another fifteen lines before concluding with another invocation: “Yes, thy spirit descends upon mine, O John Murray! / And I start—with thy book—for the Baths in a hurry” (122). Meredith is hurrying to guide us physically to the place where he will reunite the star-crossed lovers we had seen last sheltering from a storm on the slopes of the Pyrenees: Lucile de Nevers and Lord Alfred Vargrave

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(now accompanied by his English wife, Matilda). To get us to them, the poet offers a full page of rhymed pastiche of what is presumably Murray’s Handbook for Belgium and the Rhine, With travelling map (1852), complete with quotation marks and a paragraph citation. It is worth noting that Meredith’s characters would not yet have had access to this tool, the scene being set around 1830, before the first of the handbooks was published. But we can imagine the book lying open on Meredith’s desk as he writes; I picture the young diplomat working at a travelling desk: “At Coblentz a bridge of boats crosses the Rhine; And from thence the road, winding by Ehrenbreitstein, Passes over the frontier of Nassau. (N.B. No custom house here since the Zollverein,” See Murray, paragraph 30.) “The route, at each turn, Here the lover of nature allows to discern, In varying prospect . . . ” (122)

He concludes in a notably sardonic vein by “quoting” Murray’s advice to “Female visitors” that they take advantage of the “proverbially strong” and “sure-footed” “troops of donkeys” available for the ascent of the mountains, before giving his narrator the Byronic clincher: “And the traveller at Ems may remark, as he passes, / Here, as elsewhere, the women run after the asses” (123).36 Meredith may not have intended it, but this witticism makes the perfect lead-in to Lucile’s reunions with both the rather stiff Vargrave and with his former rival for Lucile’s affections, the caddish (and, naturally, French) Duke de Luvoir. The latter promptly proceeds to attempt to seduce Matilda in order to avenge himself on Lucile (for having rejected him) and Vargrave (for having secured Lucile’s love, albeit without consummation). The tone and ton of the scene owe something to Byron, then, even though Meredith’s debt may be a little less obvious here than it will be in the ottava rima of Glenaveril. His choice of Murray as muse also nods to the Romantic poet. As Buzard has explained, the link between Romanticera poetry and Murray’s famous guidebooks was close from the start. What makes it especially related to the development of the verse-novel at mid-century—as Meredith’s use of Murray in Lucile satirically documents—is that guidebooks and verse-novels share several prominent features, not least their dependence on the advent of the railways and a generic hybridity that owes something to their mutual tendency toward consciously citational intertextuality. The verse-novel and Murray’s

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handbooks might even be said to share a generic ancestry in Byron’s poetry; while the classification of handbook is Murray’s own, created by John Murray III in 1836 to designate the portability of his new guide, the term “guidebook” was coined by none other than Byron himself in Don Juan, where, with a gesture of occupatio, he describes Juan’s entrance into the Sultan’s hall: I won’t describe; description is my forte, But every fool describes in these bright days His wondrous journey to some foreign court, And spawns his quarto, and demands your praise— Death to his publisher, to him ’tis sport; While Nature, tortured twenty thousand ways, Resigns herself with exemplary patience To guidebooks, rhymes, tours, sketches, illustrations.37 (V.52.1–8)

Buzard chronicles the close ties—so close that the modern marketing idea of a tie-in operates—between the poet’s work and his publisher’s new series: “when the Murrays had entered the guidebook business, they produced a pocket-sized Lord Byron’s Poetry, ‘so as to enable travellers to carry it with their other HANDBOOKS.’” They also sprinkled the handbooks liberally with quotations from Byron’s poems. As Buzard puts it, “By recasting excerpts to suit his needs, Murray reinvents Byron, making the poet’s stanzas read as though they were created for no other purpose than to guide the finer feelings of the tourist.”38 So while Murray quotes Byron, Meredith quotes Murray: poetry and guidebook merge in a perfect blend of marketability, joining high and low. Hence, perhaps, Claude’s distaste, in Amours de Voyage, at the Childe Harold-quoting Mrs. Trevellyan (Mary’s mother), whose “slightly mercantile accent” “grates the fastidious ear” even in its “loftiest flights” (I.xi.211–12) (as the source of the phrase “Roman holiday,” Byron’s poem makes sense as a point of reference for her). But Claude’s irritation is aggravated by his awareness of his own debt to Byron, whose poems, especially Don Juan, he is constantly appropriating. Consider his take on Julius Caesar’s “tide in the affairs of men, / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”39 When Claude translates this into his own declaration that “There is a tide, at least in the love affairs of mortals, / Which, when taken at flood, leads on to the happiest fortune,—” (IV.iii.33–4), he is following in the footsteps, both literary and literal, of Byron, who had already undermined Shakespeare’s assertion of heroic action by quipping, “There is a tide in the affairs of women / ‘Which taken at the flood leads’—God knows where” (VI.2.1–2).40 It’s hard to parody a parody.

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Is his act of quotation really so different from Mrs. Trevellyan’s? Or from Murray’s? If Byron seems constantly to be running through Claude’s mind while he writes letters back home, he actually carries around a copy of Murray, presumably the Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy (1843). Clough repeatedly reminds us that it is under Murray’s direction that Claude examines the wonders of Rome even as the French invade the city. When Claude first learns of the impending battle, he is sitting at a café, “Murray, as usual, in hand.” Like the tourist he is, he registers the coming storm not as political but as though it were a spot of rain that might impede his sightseeing; as he acknowledges to Eustace, he had been “thinking mostly of Murray” when the waiter arrives to declare the lack of milk that serves as harbinger of the siege (II.v.96–9). Later, he has his closest brush with battle when, returning from St. Peter’s, “Murray, as usual, / Under [his] arm,” he becomes “conscious / of a sensation of movement opposing [him]” that gradually resolves into a crowd of angry Romans who, it turns out, have killed a priest for fraternizing with the invading force (II.vii.167–71). He catches a glimpse of the dead man: “Passing away from the place with Murray under my arm, and / Stooping, I saw through the legs of the people the legs of a body” (II.vii.196–7). While the episode clearly fulfills the mock-epic objective of highlighting how Claude is a tourist of war rather than a genuine epic hero, the guidebook plays a rather complicated role. The constant repetitions of “Murray” suggest its talismanic force, the degree to which it might serve as a shield in offering proof of Claude’s status as tourist (and therefore disengaged foreigner). He needs the protection: as he notes, “I was in black myself,” a costume that not only reminds us of Claude’s role as a modern Hamlet but also, as he recognizes, risks his being mistaken for a (potentially fraternizing) priest (II.vii.193). After all, as Claude later puts it, the French are invading Rome in order “to reinstate Pope and Tourist” (III.xi.239); Clough and the priest are in a sense brothers in arms. In this context, the Murray occupies the place of a bible. A guidebook indeed. How good, how useful a guidebook is it? This is a question Clough’s Amours de Voyage requires us to ask and refuses to answer definitively. Dean McCannell has argued that “‘the tourist’ is one of the best models available for modern-man-in-general” because tourism implies alienation from “the authentic,” or, in Claude’s terms, proves one to be “factitious” (II.xi.271).41 But while there is no doubt that Claude’s “tourist” status shows up the distinction between his restlessness and that of the genuine Romantic wanderers (the Cains, Ancient Mariners, Pedlars, and even Don Juans of the previous generation), travel also appears as a kind of solution here: Solvitur ambulando. Moreover, if we are all tourists of a sort, isn’t the

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only authentic thing to do to acknowledge the fact and carry our Murrays around for all to see? * * * Guidebooks are one kind of text featured prominently in verse-novels as a consequence of their amours de voyage. But the most obvious textual reflection of these works’ travelling itineraries appears in their frequent use of epistolarity, either as organizing structure or as important plot device. Unlike lyric poetry, which we tend to see as rooted in a single “spot of time” and a specific locale, letters negotiate the gaps between places. Janet Gurkin Altman describes how “Given the letter’s function as a connector between two distant points, as a bridge between sender and receiver, the epistolary author can choose to emphasize either the distance or the bridge.”42 In verse-novels, distance generally wins out. Of course, such distance can be temporal rather than spatial; one can write a letter for a future reader. (In a way, this is what Aurora Leigh is claiming to do at the start of the verse-novel, when she compares her poem not to a letter but to a portrait hidden away in a drawer, for later retrieval that will enable its owner to “hold together what he was and is” [I.8]). I am tempted to call such letters lyrical in their generic orientation, as vessels of emotion to be recollected in tranquility. But usually, the temporal gap between writing and reading a letter is an unfortunate side effect of the need to cover physical distance. Victorian verse-novels use letters to locate meaning in the experience of distance, thereby literalizing—and narrativizing—the concept of lyric address. While most verse-novels feature letters (Lucile actually opens with one), Amours de Voyage offers the clearest example of how they use such texts to think through the experience of covering distance. Although each of the five cantos opens and closes with elegiacs of uncertain origin (is the voice Claude’s or Clough’s? readers have long pondered), Amours de Voyage is for the most part composed of a series of letters sent from and within Italy. Compounding the poem’s epistolary effect, echoes and borrowings from Clough’s personal correspondence permeate the verse-novel. Christopher Keirstead reads the work as an extended “Letter from Europe” (to quote his chapter title) that might be compared with newspaper reportage; Claude even signs off on one of his letters to Eustace with the journalist’s tag of “Your Own Correspondent” (II.iv.94).43 For Keirstead, participation in what he calls a “postal nexus,” linking private and public as well as home and away, contributes significantly to the poem’s cosmopolitan destabilization of “one’s own cultural and ideological attachments.”44 The distance between the here of writing and the there of reception necessitates having a foot in both locations, guaranteeing a view from

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afar onto each. As in many novels, epistolarity further destabilizes the view in Amours through the dialogism that emerges when we encounter different takes on the same events from various correspondents; finally to hear Mary’s voice, for example, in the postscript to her sister Georgiana’s letter at the end of the poem’s first canto, is to receive a refreshing jolt out of both her sister’s conventionalism and Claude’s vacillation. How letters record distance becomes clearest, though, not through the mail to England but in correspondence sent within Italy in Canto IV. Here we track Claude’s futile pursuit of Mary through the tourist’s Italy via the changing locations that now head the letters (no such headers featured in the earlier, Roman missives). Moreover, Mary’s letters, written from Lucerne and addressed to her former governess Miss Roper in Florence, show immediately through their location tag that Claude is on the wrong track. He has been misled by two failed communications: the first, an unsigned line left by Mary in a hotel register (a moment that anticipates Browning’s Inn Album), indicating a plan to proceed “By the boat to Bellagio” (IV.iv.41), which Claude correctly interprets as being in Mary’s hand; the second, an undelivered “note” of “three lines” left later by her at the hotel to inform him of a change in the plans in favor of Como and Lucerne (IV.vi.65, 68). The sequence highlights the difficulties of communication that prevent Claude and Mary’s union; in this sense, it literalizes the impediments to and failures of direct address that we saw when they were together in Rome and that were reflected upon in their correspondence with others (even as we saw how potentially well suited they were to one another). Commenting on the miscarried messages, Keirstead observes that “the most important letter in Amours de Voyage is the one between Claude and Mary that was never written.”45 It is, however, also striking that both notes Mary did compose stand out for being intended to communicate only through time, not through space: they were meant to be picked up by Claude when he arrived on the spot. Words that could travel geographically may have proved more efficacious. Claude’s more acute problems of communication reappear in his move into a diaristic mode toward the poem’s end, once he gives up his quest for Mary. “YES, it relieves me to write, though I do not send, and the chance that / Takes may destroy my fragments” (V.v.70–1), Claude muses, admitting his salutation to Eustace to be a fiction of address. Such “pretending to talk to,” in Northrop Frye’s formulation, has long been seen as a feature of lyric, as in John Stuart Mill’s formulation of poetry as “overheard”—as “feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude.”46 The mention of “fragments” heightens the Romantic effect, as does an allusion to Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode: “THERE was a time, methought it was but lately departed, / When, if a thing was denied me,

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I felt I was bound to attempt it” (V.v.77–8). Form follows function. From this echo forward, this “letter’s” verse enters into five regular nine-line chunks, separated by dashes rather than the usual epistolary paratextual apparatus (salutations, valedictions, etc.): in other words, stanzas replace the colloquial verse-paragraphing. Claude hints at the allure of the lyrical mode when he records how, while wandering the streets of Florence, “All of a sudden my ear met the sound of an English psalm-tune, / Comfort me it did, till indeed I was very near crying” (V.vi.89–90).47 The passage recalls Clarissa’s shift into lyricism in the mad papers toward the end of Richardson’s novel. But while Clarissa’s death soon after seems necessary to preserve the truths accessed within the lyrical mode, here Claude emerges again into epistolary narrativity. For Keirstead, Claude’s admission that he won’t send this letter proves that he, “in some sense, has been writing only to himself all along.”48 Perhaps. Still, one of the most remarkable things about Amours de Voyage is Clough’s recognition of both the necessity and the efficacy of such fictions. We may always be writing to ourselves, but only through such pretense do we actually manage to connect. That’s why Claude accepts that “ACTION will furnish belief,” although he can’t help but worry, “but will that belief be the true one?” (V.ii.20). Yet that worry may be mistaken, given the misleadingly stable conception of truth undergirding it. Hence Claude’s astonishing claim in the lyrical letter: “Fact shall be fact for me; and the Truth the Truth as ever / Flexible, changeable, vague, and multiform, and doubtful” (V.vi.101–2). While Claude may have had to enter the lyric mode to reach this epiphany, the nature of his realization also requires an exit into something more narrative; the very word multiform seems to hint at the hybrid generic allegiances of Amours de Voyage. If truth is as he here describes it, then a lyrical psalm can’t furnish belief: Claude will need something more moving. In this context, the psalm’s Englishness suggests the limits not only of lyricism but also of the rootedness to a spot in time with which we associate the mode. Such rootedness threatens to become parochialism; Claude must travel farther afield. In fact, Claude’s lyrical passage ends when he receives a letter from Eustace: “At the last moment I have your letter, for which I was waiting” (V.viii.166). This letter forces him from monologue back into dialogue (although here, as elsewhere, we have no direct access to Eustace’s voice), even if only to insist to Eustace that he must “Take no measures” (V.viii.169). But one might also argue that Claude escapes from his lyricism through reference to one of the poem’s central metaphors. We saw earlier how, contemplating his possible marriage, Claude had imagined his situation as being akin to that of a traveller by rail; the terminus of death gives one the courage to act in life. When Claude now

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returns to the train and tunnel metaphor, he provides a narrative corrective to the poem’s competing, more static trope of the limpet attached to rock (V.ix.181; V.v.66–7). While he ponders his emergence “from a tunnel” of lyricism into “clear day” (V.ix.181–3), Claude’s metaphor itself emerges into fact, into the actual practice of travel as he continues eastward on his journey. So although the failure of the courtship plot here indicates the frustration of one kind of significant progress, the poem leaves room to consider Claude’s continued movement as a meaningful quest for an elusive because changeable truth. “But do you not, in the conception, find any final Strength of Mind in the unfortunate fool of a hero?” Clough wrote to a friend, defending what Emerson would later bewail as the poem’s “baulking end or no end.”49 Notice how, in declaring Claude’s strength, Clough slips back into dactylic hexameters—imagine a line break before “final”—as though to demonstrate how the forward momentum of the verse helps constitute Claude’s brand of heroism. And in fact, there is a kind of consummation to the love plot here; it just turns out that the love mentioned in the title of the poem refers not to a love affair experienced while on a voyage but the actual love for the experience of voyaging.50 Of course, the final voice we hear in the poem is neither Claude’s, in his last letter to Eustace, telling of his intention to proceed to Egypt, nor Mary’s, when she informs Miss Roper of her family’s anticipated return to England in the poem’s ultimate missive. The work finishes, instead, as it began, with the ambiguous elegiacs—set apart not merely metrically but also by their italic font. I mentioned earlier that readers have disagreed on how to attribute these: Are they in a narrator’s voice, perhaps Clough’s own? Or can we imagine them as Claude’s poetic jottings? Keirstead offers an intriguing suggestion: that we consider them as a kind of “envelope” to the letters that make up the main body of the Amours. In this sense, the elegiacs “pos[e] questions about Claude’s direction and purpose.”51 Reading them as envelopes also lets us see how the elegiacs make us wonder who is speaking and to whom the speech is addressed; they seem to literalize the problem of address that is so central a concern for lyric poetry. “Come, let us go,” Amours de Voyage begins. The form is that of an “invitation poem,” an ancient variety of lyric love poetry.52 But in this case, it is not so much an invitation to love—the normal subject of such lyrics—as an invitation to travel: “Come, let us go.” Keirstead’s suggestion that we consider the poem’s intercalated elegiacs as envelopes thus emphasizes the geographical element of their address: to where must these letters be sent? Where must we go in order to receive them? Amours de Voyage concludes with an envoi that alludes to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, an important pretext for the genre of the verse-novel, as has been noted:

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So, go forth to the world, to the good report and the evil? Go, little book! thy tale, is it not evil and good? Go, and if strangers revile, pass quietly by without answer. Go . . .53 (V.217–20)

The injunction here seems to comprehend not only the text itself, as is usual—the little book—but also, by implication, characters (Mary has just declared, “We go very shortly to England” [V.xi.216]), speaker, and even reader. Come, the poem, began; Go, it concludes. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. While Aurora Leigh concludes very differently, it, too, contains a traveloriented invitation poem that revises the form’s usual sexual dynamics. When Aurora learns how Marian had been sold into prostitution and raped, she makes her an offer: “Come with me, sweetest sister,” I returned, “And sit within my house, and do me good From henceforth, thou and thine! ye are my own From henceforth. . . . ”

“Come,—and, henceforth, thou and I, / Being still together will not miss a friend,” she repeats, concluding, “I am journeying south” (VII.117–25). That journey south enables the unconventional family proposed here. One might even say that it makes the geographical implications of the thrice-repeated henceforth—on the surface a marker of temporality—stand out. And while the poem may end with the promise of a more conventional domestic arrangement for Aurora and Romney, the radical nature of this vision lingers. But Aurora’s own journey is precipitated by the composition of a letter. The scene takes place in her attic room in London, in the verse-novel’s pivotal Book V. Aurora has just recorded the evening’s events: a party at which she has learned—mistakenly, it will turn out—that Lady Waldemar is to marry her cousin, Romney Leigh. “This reckoning up and writing down her talk / Affects me singularly,” she admits to herself (V.1042–3), in partial and unwilling recognition of the love for Romney that slowly dawns on her over the course of the narrative. So she decides to shift from diaristic “reckoning” to a real epistolary communication, paradoxically to defend her privacy by offering a public front of congratulation: “May you be / Most happy,” she writes, with a line break that allows us to imagine the withheld curse covered by her blessing (V.1140–1). Aurora soon realizes, however, that her note might lead to a correspondence: “ah, I see her writing back,” she worries, “She’ll make a nosegay of her words, / And tie it with blue ribbons at the end / To suit a poet”

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(V.1157–60); the image oddly recasts the nosegay of lyric leaves that Marian Erle had composed during her youthful wanderings. To prevent this, Aurora must take herself further afield: A postscript stops all that, and rescues me. “You need not write. I have been overworked, And think of leaving London, England even, And hastening to get nearer to the sun, Where men sleep better. So, adieu.”—I fold And seal,—and now I’m out of all the coil; I breathe now, . . . (V.1167–73)

It is as though the very act of writing a letter gives Aurora the idea of heading south. I called Book V pivotal, and it has often been recognized as such. It is the central book of the nine-book verse-novel, and it opens with the poem’s most self-conscious reflections on its author’s poetic agenda; it is here that we get Aurora’s (and Barrett Browning’s) thoughts on the need for a modern epic to record “The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age” (V.216) and her observations about the relative importance of form and spirit (“Let me think / Of forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit, / As sovran nature does, to make the form” [V.223–5]). Recent critics have also paid attention to this book’s surprising temporal orientation: it is here that the time of composition, which has generally been retrospective, most obviously catches up with the time of experience—that the narrative voice becomes what Richardson called, in the context of Clarissa’s strange brand of epistolarity, a kind of “writing to the moment.”54 In an influential reading of Aurora Leigh, Alison Case goes so far as to suggest that Aurora may have been composing Book V itself over a stretch of six months. She points to the place where Aurora tallies up the time that has passed since her last meeting with Romney: “At least, earth separates as well as heaven. / For instance, I have not seen Romney Leigh / Full eighteen months . . add six, you get two years” (V.571–3). Case surmises that the ellipsis here may stand in for a half-year that separates the composition of the first part of Book V (the reflections on poetry) from the second (the account of the evening’s party).55 But, as Aurora recognizes in this very passage, “Earth separates as well as heaven”: if the temporal gap between the dead and the living, “a-ticking like a clock,” may prevent “communion,” so can the spatial distances of our own world (V.565; V.570). To note this is to shift the emphasis from the rupture in temporal perspective instantiated by Book V to its geographical break: from here on out (or henceforth, as she will soon put it),

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we must follow Aurora to the South. In discussing Aurora Leigh’s quirky temporality, Herbert Tucker writes of the poem’s “migrant narrative viewpoint”;56 I am stressing rather its geographical migrancy. “It always makes me sad to go abroad,” Aurora begins her description of the evening’s social events (V.579); perhaps, to find real happiness, she will need literally to journey “abroad.” As has been proposed, writing a letter helps Aurora reach this conclusion. Her missile-missive to Lady Waldemar is not the first letter we encounter, though; we may not think of Aurora Leigh as epistolary, but letters feature with remarkable regularity and prominence, even in the English books.57 Think of how Aurora and Romney exchange notes after the failed engagement scene in Book II, reiterating their oral communication (II.816–54); recall also the “letter with unbroken seal” found in Aurora’s dead aunt’s hands that, sensationally, would have ensured her inheritance of thirty thousand pounds, a gift from Romney (II.934; 1130).58 And then there are the various letters from critics, fans, and friends that bring us up-to-date with Aurora’s professional and social progress at the start of Book III. In Book IV, Marian leaves a letter behind to explain her failure to show at her wedding to Romney (IV.890–985). These letters do not, however, tend to travel far; Marian may flee abroad by “train” and “ship” (VI.1189, 1207), but her note can be “brought running” by “a ragged child” (IV.885–6). In the case of Romney’s letter in Book II, Aurora’s aunt’s death highlights that the failure of communication here is temporal rather than spatial, a separation made by heaven, not earth, to use the distinction that Aurora will later draw. Once we get to Italy, the poem naturally increases its reliance on letters. Especially in Book VII, letters become the primary means of communication— and the crucial source for miscommunication—between England and Italy and (through third-party correspondents) between Romney and Aurora. Thus as soon as Aurora hears of Marian’s misadventures, she sends her record of this history under cover of a warning to Lord Howe, to be passed on to Romney if it is received before he has married Lady Waldemar. Aurora also dashes off a scorching denunciation and threat to the lady herself, prefaced by her admission that her directness has been enabled by the very physical distance that she had earlier presumed would let her cut off communication: Now, there’s space Between our faces,—I stand off, as if I judged a stranger’s portrait and pronounced Indifferently the type was good or bad. (VII.284–7)

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The moment emphasizes how travel might provide critical distance on a subject. It also offers an uncanny revision of the metaphor of the selfportrait with which Aurora Leigh began, with a stranger standing in place of the “friend” who there looked carefully at the painting from a temporal rather than a spatial remove.59 Of course, while the image suggests some of the power and freedom that distance can provide, it will come to seem like a warning of sorts: Lady Waldemar’s furious letter of self-defense, which Aurora receives from Romney’s hand, and which opens the poem’s final book, may not entirely vindicate her, but it does imply that an attempt at sympathy might have made Aurora a better judge— and that her stated “indifference” was a mask, covering a very personal dislike of her rival.60 In terms of the plot, though, a more crucial pair of letters creates the misunderstanding that allows the delayed recognition of Romney’s blinded but single state. First, there is the letter from Vincent Carrington, which in referring opaquely to a “this” that has “happened,” a Romney “changed” by some loss and arrived at some “end,” leaves Aurora assuming that the event indicated—the fire at Leigh Hall that brought on Romney’s illness—is rather his marriage to Lady Waldemar (VII.626–49). Then, we hear about an undelivered letter from Lord Howe, which would presumably have explained all, but which Aurora avoided when she pretended not to see Sir Blaise Delorme. “In England we were scarce acquaintances,” she excuses herself, as though to refuse the ex-pat camaraderie that would prove her a tourist rather than the replanted native she wants to be (VII.1292). This second, missed letter is largely extraneous, but it emphasizes the importance of letters in the set-up. That is, while Books VIII and IX are structured as an extended dialogue between the lovers, letters play a surprisingly prominent role in both fostering and undermining that dialogue. The two failed epistolary communications dominate the beginning of the exchange, first when Aurora uses Carrington’s letter to try to prove herself knowledgeable concerning Romney’s affairs, and then when both parties discuss the undelivered letter, as they maneuver around the unspoken facts it would have contained. As in Amours de Voyage, epistolarity highlights the desperate difficulty of communing over a distance; the letters confound what the face-to-face dialogue must slowly clarify (although it takes yet another letter, Lady Waldemar’s, to bring everything to light). In other words, no magical voices drift over the moors. Many readers have recognized the similarities between the climaxes of Aurora Leigh and Jane Eyre, with their burning houses and blinded masters.61 But to make the comparison is also to see the important distinction in how Barrett Browning and Brontë think about geography. If for Brontë no distance

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can divide her lovers, who are joined in spirit, for Barrett Browning, the physical experience of travel becomes a necessary element of her characters’ learning processes, both romantic and otherwise. Moreover, if communication has to cover distance by the somewhat more conventional means of the post, that requirement also forces Romney to follow Aurora to Italy, first via a letter and then in propria persona. Jane goes “home” to Rochester—albeit not to Thornfield but to the less patriarchally compromised Ferndean, which neighbors it. In contrast, in Aurora Leigh, Romney must journey, too; only after having both “waited long and travelled far” can he join Aurora at her home (VIII.75). It takes distance in addition to duration. And, as Herbert Tucker has recognized, the shift in destination significantly alters the poem’s “generic geography”; by moving the marriage onto Italian ground, Barrett Browning allows it epic potential, simultaneously stripping it of some of the more domestic and conservative implications of the novelistic courtship plot.62 But Aurora Leigh’s letters also highlight, because they literalize, a more general interest in how words can be transplanted from one location to another and what the effects of such uprooting might be. How meaning can “catch up” with us, both temporally and geographically, proves to be one of the verse-novel’s major concerns. Much of the poem is comprised of transplanted words, as Aurora recollects conversations in recording them. Of course, autobiography depends upon this process. Thus David Copperfield regularly muses about both what he remembers and what he forgets, consistently drawing attention to the locational, even phenomenological, aspects of memory, the need to put himself back into position to retrieve an experience: “Once more the little room with its open corner cupboard,” he begins a typical reminiscence; “I see it now,” is the constant refrain and goal of the narrative.63 But while we may often be reminded of the when from which David writes his tale and the where to which his memory takes him, the novel does not actually make much of its own where: the location of writing. In contrast, such location matters a great deal in Aurora Leigh; it matters whether Aurora is writing in England, in Paris, or in Florence, and we are often even made aware of local details about the room in which she composes the words we read. Think, for example, of the moment in Book VII where Aurora sits dissecting the contents of the letter she has just received from Carrington, only to discover “—Why, this room stifles. Better burn than choke; / Best have air, air, although it comes with fire,— / Throw open blinds and windows to the noon” (VII.696–8). Aurora’s emphasis on the heat draws our attention to the fact that she is stewing in Italy over words that had themselves been put down on paper in England.

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This attention reflects Aurora’s sensitivity to her own status as transplant, her experience of having been torn from her home ground by her father’s death. As a result, even those words that should be most native to her feel geographically remote: Who loves me? Dearest father,—mother sweet,— I speak the names out sometimes by myself, And make the silence shiver. They sound strange, As Hindostanee to an Ind-born man Accustomed many years to English speech; Or lovely poet-words grown obsolete, Which will not leave off singing.64 (V.540–6)

While we might note the culturally pervasive and pernicious identification of colonial space with a distant past here—India as archaic—the fact that such words “will not leave off singing” is equally striking. In other words, the image participates in the poem’s fascination with what is known as an earworm: music, or, more frequently here, word, that keep recurring in the mind. And, as the double simile suggests, this feature seems a product of having lived not only in time but also through the experience of physical dislocation. Consider how Aurora describes her ceaseless thinking about Romney in Book VII: Romney, Romney! Well, This grows absurd!—too like a tune that runs I’ the head, and forces all things in the world, Wind, rain, the creaking gnat, or stuttering fly, To sing itself and vex you,—yet perhaps A paltry tune you never fairly liked, Some “I’d be a butterfly,” or “C’est l’amour:” We’re made so,—not such tyrants to ourselves But still we are slaves to nature. Some of us Are turned, too, overmuch like some poor verse With a trick of ritournelle: the same thing goes And comes back ever. (VII.959–70)

These thoughts have been set in motion by the letter from Carrington I mentioned above, from which Aurora proceeds to quote at length— something she does throughout Book VII. In a way, such moments serve as the verse-novel’s more “realistic” take on Jane Eyre’s voices over the moors. Yet that “trick of ritournelle” seems also to anticipate some of the formal features of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King to which Chapter 3 drew

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attention: the circling language, the “roundel” forms, and especially Elaine’s dangerous inability to escape the “burthen” of her “Song of Love and Death” (LE 1000–11). The comparison highlights an important distinction, though: while words recur in Aurora Leigh—“the same thing goes / And comes back ever”—they do not “come back” to the same place. Indeed, as the line break here promises, the second, return iteration is likely to occupy a very different geographical position (and occasionally, as here, a different prosodic one); hence the role of the letter in establishing the pattern. This narrative movement interrupts the pattern of lyric circling. Contemplating the fact that, for all our aspirations toward perfection, humanity may be more drawn to the earth than the stars, Aurora uses a metaphor that also resonates (as noted in Chapter 3) with my reading of Tennyson’s Idylls: “What creature else / Conceives the circle, and then walks the square?” (VII.1011–12). While words circle in Aurora Leigh, the all-toohuman protagonists of the verse-novel have to walk significant distances to hear the echoes. And when they hear them, it is always with a difference. In a way, then, such circling as persists in the verse-novel is more epic than lyrical in its generic orientation. Although letters introduce this narrative feature of the poem, we see it most prominently in the dialogues that help to reinforce the epic ring structure overlaying a teleological quest form.65 Taking Book V as the center, we can see how, as with the underworld in the Odyssey’s wanderings, other episodes form concentric rings around it: Book I removes Aurora from Italy, while Book IX brings Romney to Italy; Books IV and VI focus on Marian Erle, in London and France. But Books II and VIII make the pattern obvious: Book VIII gives an extended reprise of the birthday conversation in Book II, during which Romney had proposed and Aurora had rejected him. Elements of this conversation have echoed through the intervening books; as I noted above, by the end of Book II Aurora and Romney have already repeated the main points of their dialogue in an exchange of notes. Still, here we witness the most extensive recurrence of the earlier dialogue’s form and content, a fact that both Aurora and Romney clearly recognize. For example, Romney quotes at length from Aurora’s early warning to him that “life develops from within,” as poets recognize and as the Fouriers of the world must learn (II.476–85; VIII.427–36). And Barrett Browning seems to allude to this reprisal’s epic spirit when she makes Aurora describe her “changed” nature by claiming that, unlike “Ulysses’ dog,” her own Argos, had he existed, would not have known her again after the ten years’ gap that separates her from her birthday-morning self in the garden (VIII.506–15) (notice, though, how the allusion highlights Barrett Browning’s addition of novelistic Bildung to the epic structure).

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Crucially, in recalling the conversation, Romney and Aurora not only bring it forward ten years but also transplant it from an English garden onto an Italian terrace. In this context, I find it suggestive that of all the lines Aurora had spoken, Romney recurs most frequently to one, repeating it not only at the beginning of his extended rehearsal of Aurora’s birthday words but singling it out again later, when he returns to the subject of his failure. This is his earworm: “So I failed indeed Once, twice, and oftener,—hearing through the rents Of obstinate purpose, still those words of yours, ‘You will not compass your poor ends, not you! ’ But harder than you said them; every time Still farther from your voice, until they came To overcrow me with triumphant scorn[.]” (VIII.452–8)

Aurora even adds the unusual emphasis in recording the conversation. Her doing so reminds us that while their objectives may have been different at the poem’s outset, both she and Romney have been thinking in terms of ends from its very first line, when Aurora acknowledged the problem as fundamental to the act of composition: “Of writing many books there is no end.” But it also reminds us that if to compass is to engage in a circular, enclosing movement, a compass serves as a tool of the traveller. Aurora Leigh teaches its protagonists to switch their obsession from the former meaning to the latter. So it makes sense that Romney’s recollection of the earlier dialogue had been prefaced by an acknowledgment of how far he has come: “This night is softer than an English day, And men may well come hither when they’re sick, To draw in easier breath from larger air. ’Tis thus with me; I come to you,—to you, My Italy of women, just to breathe My soul out once before you, ere I go.” (VIII.354–9)

My Italy of women: the expression underscores not only that Aurora is his destination but also that the destination has a literal geographical component. If one bothers to go back and compare Romney’s words in Book VIII to Aurora’s earlier speech (II.476–85), one notices a few insignificant changes, as though added for realism. But his general accuracy is striking (of course, both these dialogues are recorded by Aurora, at a further temporal remove). Even more striking, though, is the image he uses to describe how her phrases have stuck with him:

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“I say Your words,—I could say other words of yours, For none of all your words will let me go; Like sweet verbena which, being brushed against, Will hold us three hours after by the smell In spite of long walks on the windy hills.” (VIII.436–41)

Once again, we are asked to consider how words might fare through travel, sticking to us despite “long walks.” Contrast Aurora’s earlier description of her nostalgia at being back in Italy: I took up the old days With all their Tuscan pleasures, worn and spoiled, Like some lost book we dropt in the long grass On such a happy summer-afternoon When last we read it with a loving friend, And find in autumn when the friend is gone, The grass cut short, the weather changed, too late, And stare at, as at something wonderful For sorrow . . . (VII.1040–8)

While some pleasure may be gained from the retrieval of the long lost book, the fact that it is picked up from the very place it had been dropped suggests a limitation to that pleasure. This is a static retrieval, operating through time but not through space—in the manner of the painting with which the verse-novel opened (or Mary’s notes in Amours de Voyage). Like letters, though, the words of that lost summer afternoon need to travel somewhere new for their content to be legible with a difference, by the novel light of a new dawn.

IV. GENRES, GENETICS, AND GYPSIES Before we leave the subject of letters altogether, consider one final example, one that operates in a rather different register. The plot of Glenaveril; or, The Metamorphoses is far too complex to summarize fully, but at its core is a question of identity, as its subtitle hints. When Edwin James Milliken parodied Lord Lytton’s verse-novel as “Fitzdotterel; or, T’other and Which” in a couple of fake cantos that were published in separate issues of Punch in 1885, each was prefaced by the following epigraph:

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The basic tale involves a pair of babies born, orphaned, and (we surmise, although this is never stated definitively as fact in the poem) mixed up in a single day: one, the heir of Lord Glenaveril, whose family is cursed by a propensity for violent demise; the other, the son of a German Lutheran pastor named Müller. The boys are raised as friends and, as young men, make a pact to travel the world together under each other’s guise (that is, having unbeknownst to themselves assumed their hereditary identities). On this journey, they experience a variety of adventures, culminating in a deadly fall in the Swiss Alps that brings the “real” Glenaveril (the young man who was born to the line, that is) to his predestined family end, even as it seriously injures the “false” Glenaveril (he who has been raised as such, although he is now travelling under what he takes to be the false identity of “Müller”). After a long illness, the latter awakes to discover that his dead friend has been buried as Glenaveril and that he has been stranded, so to speak, in the persona of Müller—that is, in his hereditary self. T’other and which, indeed. The romance plot gets going before the friends embark on their travels, when a young American woman named Cordelia, the daughter of the former fiancé of Müller’s mother, attempts to fulfill her father’s will by bestowing on Müller the riches that her father had earned in the New World. (This back-story has matter enough to fill its own sensational verse-novel: when Cordelia’s father failed to come back from America, where he had travelled to make the fortune he needed to marry, he was presumed dead. Enoch Arden-like, though, he ultimately returned to claim his bride, but decided to leave well-enough alone when he discovered her already wed to Müller.) In Book II, Canto III, Cordelia communicates her intentions in a letter that, through its literalization of questions of address, highlights the mixed identities of the poem’s two heroes: her missive reaches “Müller” (that is, the hereditary Glenaveril), but he pushes it aside, too focused on his Hebrew studies, tossing it instead to his friend “Glenaveril,” to look over if he cares to do so. So it finds its true addressee, who is deeply stirred when reading it, even though the man whose name it bears deems it tawdry schoolgirl stuff.67 Still, he allows “Glenaveril”—that is, the real Müller—to reply in his name, and this letter manages to reach Cordelia, despite multiple possible interceptions. The entire sequence thus highlights the destined nature of the communion between these two second-generation lovers, a theme that we saw also in Fane’s Denzil

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Place and that had appeared in Lytton’s (or Meredith’s, as he had then been known) earlier Lucile. While the narrative, like these letters, travels widely across Europe, the tale concludes with a marriage between Cordelia and her soul-mate and their removal to found a utopian community in America (my own destination for the verse-novel in Chapter 5, my final chapter). As the reviewer in The Athenaeum noted, Glenaveril explores “the inexorable nature of hereditary tendencies”: This central idea is one which has also laid the deepest hold of our generation, Darwin and Mr. Herbert Spencer having convinced us of the inevitable law of heredity, while George Eliot was probably the first to embody their scientific teaching in fiction. The motive of “Felix Holt,” “The Spanish Gypsy,” and “Daniel Deronda” is partly the same as that of “Glenaveril”— that of an individual severed at birth from all the links which would have made him a member of a particular family, rank in life, nation, and even race, and placed in conditions and among influences destined to radically alter original character and mental bias, but showing that the force of ante-natal tendencies and inherited instincts is stronger than all after effects of circumstance and education, and that the current of life will inevitably seek to mingle with its source. In this respect there are curious similarities between “The Spanish Gypsy” and “Glenaveril.”68

Since I am constitutionally incapable of passing up on an alliterative opportunity, my subtitle for this section references “genetics” rather than “heredity” (it may actually be an inherited trait). But while the former term is obviously anachronistic, the science behind it was being discovered even as the verse-novel was in its prime: Gregor Mendel’s study of inheritance patterns in peas was conducted between 1857 and 1864 (the research was first published in 1866, although it would not be known widely until decades later); and in his Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), Charles Darwin names his theory of inheritance pangenesis, taking advantage of the Greek term genos (“race, offspring”). By the time Glenaveril was published, then, this reviewer could assert that the science that would come to be called genetics “is one which has also laid the deepest hold of our generation”—invoking yet another offshoot of the root. The Greek genos also gives us the term genre, which was itself beginning to acquire its modern literary usage, as noted in the Introduction. This overlapping set of terms draws our attention to the fact that the hybrid genre of the verse-novel includes an astonishing number of central protagonists whose own origins are somehow hybrid—and lets us see that both the geographical range of the poems and their complex politics often

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reflect these mixed identities. We can roughly divide the types into two families: one group consists of those born hybrid, like Aurora Leigh (British father and Italian mother) and Lucile (French father and South Asian Indian mother); the other is made up of characters whose upbringing has thrust an uncomfortable hybridity upon them, like Glenaveril and Müller and (as the reviewer recognizes) Eliot’s Spanish Gypsy, Fedalma, to whom I will turn shortly. There are naturally important distinctions between these two varieties of mixture. But both character-types seem created in part to test the viability of hybrid identity, not only as a social ideal but also as a literary one. The Athenaeum’s review had in fact opened by noting genre-mixing as another characteristic feature of the age: To be sure, it is difficult to define the precise limits where the province of poetry ends and that of fiction begins in an age when the tendency of the arts and of the different branches of the same art is to exchange characteristics,— or, at any rate, to enhance their own by borrowing the graces which had seemed the peculiar property of another—in an age when music has successfully amalgamated with the drama, and thus become a distinctly new art [i.e., opera], when pictures aspire to be symphonies and symphonies strive to paint landscapes. Seeing that this is the tendency of our time, there seems no reason why we should not have novels which are prose poems and poems which are novels in verse.69

To take up the chiasmus of that last remark, it is not incidental that the double preoccupation with genre and what would become known as genetics holds for the two novels by George Eliot cited in the review: in Felix Holt (1866), Esther Lyon is caught between the appeal of Harold Transome’s Byronic oriental romance and Felix’s British prose, a tug-ofwar initiated by her half-French heritage and her Puritan-English upbringing; while with Daniel Deronda, it is a critical commonplace to remark on the conflict between the romance of Daniel’s plotline, as he discovers his Jewish birth, and the realism of Gwendolen’s. The Athenaeum review suggests that the plot of inescapable heredity is deeply conservative in its implications; we might draw lines from the argument that reach toward the horrors of social Darwinism and beyond (as Herbert Tucker notes, Lytton was “a close friend of the racial apologist Count Gobineau,” whose Essay on the Inequality of Human Races [1853–5] saw in racial hybridity a threat to human civilization70). But the fact that the race of Glenaveril dies out by the poem’s end, while the son of the pastor who had once borne that family name has departed to found a new utopian community in the New World, suggests a rather unstable politics. This lack of stability appears also in the verse-novel’s nomenclature. Aspects of the ending, like the union of the “real” Müller

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and Cordelia and the “real” Glenaveril’s violent death, feel predestined. Still, the effect of the verse-novel’s many metamorphoses is very much what Milliken describes in the Punch satire: the two protagonists are so often conflated that, at many points in the narrative, it can be hard to know with whom we are concerned. Coming back to the story at some remove heightens the effect: if you take a Keatsean dip into it to try to dredge up a passage, not only can it be almost impossible to tell with whose body you have emerged, but you are at some risk of drowning yourself. Late in this interminable tale (Lytton composed the work in six books, as though to try to cover up the fact of its length by halving the traditional dozen of epic, but he didn’t fool anyone), “Glenaveril”’s tutor and mentor describes the impossibly hybrid status of his charge by calling him “IVOR-EMANUEL!”—hyphenating the Christian names of both the living and the dead protagonists (VI.III.lxxii.3). The gesture seems an effort to liberate the surviving friend from the bonds of inheritance, not only through its avoidance of the inherited surname but also through its suggestion of a potential for mobile and mixed identity. Lytton almost immediately closes off this option by making this the moment at which Cordelia reveals her theory of the cradle-swap, which brings the characters back to “the inevitable law of heredity” and explains and resolves their rampant identity confusion. By the poem’s end, the young man who had been named Ivor Glenaveril as a baby departs for the New World having been rechristened with her kiss: Glenaveril stooped, and tenderly embraced The lips no more denied him. In the New Emanuel the Old Ivor seemed effaced Miraculously, all at once . . . (VI.III.cviii.3–6)

Yet the tutor’s hyphenated formulation highlights the fact that, up to this point, first names have bypassed some of the confusion of the doubleidentity-switch plot: Lytton and the characters themselves tend to use “Ivor” and “Emanuel” in a consistent manner, even after the characters have swapped places. So these “given names” feel oddly more authentic than the inherited surnames that the plot is constructed to prove as bearing preordained significance. Moreover, when he does at last take on the name “Emanuel,” the former Ivor Glenaveril also assumes a more abstract messianic identity (Emmanuel is the name given the messiah in the Old Testament). It’s a fitting title for one who is about to leave a Europe scarred by history not only for a New World but for a nowhere, a utopia. Again, there’s an obvious analogy to be made with Aurora’s assumption of her name’s full significance when she describes the dawning

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of the New Jerusalem at the end of her verse-novel, in a moment that looks forward to both social renovation and marriage. And in both instances—as in Amours de Voyage, for that matter—the poems conclude by departing on new journeys, rather than in the retrospective mode, firmly located in a stable home, that is more common in novels.71 The contortions of Glenaveril highlight some of the overlapping genetic and generic preoccupations common to verse-novels. As the Athenaeum’s reviewer had remarked, similar concerns had appeared already (in much more readable form) in George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy (1868). Eliot’s title designates her work simply as A Poem, but her “Notes” on The Spanish Gypsy indicate that, while the idea for it was actually triggered by seeing a painting of an annunciation, she was thinking primarily about drama—specifically, the conditions of tragedy—when she was composing the work. As the “Notes” postulate, tragedy is determined by the conflict between the “dire necessities” of “hereditary conditions” (also known as “duty”) and “our individual needs.”72 This conflict emerges, against the poem’s backdrop of fifteenth-century Spain, when Eliot’s heroine Fedalma, who has been raised as a ward in the court of Don Silva (the Duke of Bedmar), learns on the eve of her marriage to him that she is really the daughter of the recently captured and imprisoned Zarca, chief of the Zincali. Fedalma embraces her inherited lot and joins her tribe. But when Don Silva decides to leave his home to follow his love to the gypsy camp, he is in effect taking the opposite course: he is rebelling against his birth. Matters reach a crux after Zarca leads an attack against Bedmar (he is aiding the Moors, who have offered the Zincali safe passage and a grant of territory to found a homeland in northern Africa). Discovering his own bond to “hereditary conditions,” Don Silva kills Zarca to revenge the slaughter of his people. If the poem’s premise is dramatic, though, its form is more mixed. Eliot recognized that her work was “eminently unsuited for an acting play.”73 She also divided it into “books” rather than acts, and while there may be a Shakespearean five, they are of very uneven length. Moreover, in addition to interspersing the dramatic passages of the poem (that is, those using speaker cues) with blank-verse narrative descriptions, the poem includes several lyric songs in various measures. These are performed by a minstrel, Juan, whose name seems chosen to gesture toward Byron’s earlier hybrid production. Herbert Tucker dismisses the idea that The Spanish Gypsy might be considered a verse-novel, citing in evidence what he takes to be the poem’s aggressively anti-novelistic portrayal of how impossible it is to forge an authentic, liberal self through the exertions of individual agency. When Fedalma decides “To wed [her] people’s lot” instead of Don Silva,

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Tucker argues, she proves the work an epic.74 For his part, Henry James called The Spanish Gypsy a “romance”: “We may contest its being a poem, but we must admit that it is a romance in the fullest sense of the word. Whether the term may be absolutely defined I know not; but we may say of it, comparing it with the novel, that it carries much farther that compromise with reality which is the basis of all imaginative writing.”75 Still, as the product of a novelist’s pen and in the context (as the review of Glenaveril placed it) of both other verse-novels of the period and novels like Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda, which set up similar conflicts between will and destiny, it is hard not to find aspects of the novel in the poem’s generic mixture. Like Eliot’s prose fiction and that of Hardy after her, the poem can evoke and describe individual longings that it does not quite believe to be realizable. As in Glenaveril, hybrid identity, both genetic and generic, emerges within a world in which movement across national borders is the norm. The poem’s first line encourages the reader to embark on a journey. “’Tis the warm South, where Europe spreads her lands / Like fretted leaflets,” Eliot begins, and we immediately imagine the potential for those “leaflets” to be shaken up by winds of change (I, 3). In fact, we can think of The Spanish Gypsy as offering a critique of the effort to police and contain the frontiers of Europe, to preserve it from the Moorish invasion (it’s a poem that resonates in the current climate of Europe). This is Don Silva’s stated mission at the outset: “To keep a Christian frontier—such high trust / Is young Duke Silva’s” (I, 4). But, as Book I makes clear, this mission—or, “hereditary battle,” as it is also called (I, 8)—has failed before the poem has even begun. The world we encounter is saturated with forms of hybridity; Spain has been formed by its long history of foreign migrations and invasions. Isobel Armstrong has listed the many racial and religious hybrids that we meet when we first enter Bedmar.76 For example, the inn at which the tale opens is presided over by a host who is a Converso,77 and the very church at the Plaça Santiago, where we first meet Fedalma, is “A mosque converted” (I, 42). Moreover, Eliot renders the drive for purity suspect by associating it with the poem’s closest approximation to villainy, the Prior Isidor, who “seems less a man / With struggling aims than pure incarnate Will,” and whose objection to the mixed marriage between Fedalma and the Duke threatens this union of “light and darkness” (I, 30) even before Zarca’s appearance persuades Fedalma to break off the engagement. In contrast, most of the poem’s appealing characters are hybrids after some fashion or another. Thus, like Byron’s Manfred, whose “mix’d essence” renders him “Half dust, half deity, alike unfit / To sink or soar,” Don Silva is described as “Born of a goddess with a mortal sire” and

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possessed of “A nature half-transformed, with qualities / That oft betrayed each other” (I, 56–7).78 While this particular mixture may ultimately prove his undoing, it is also what makes him a locus of sympathy. Racially, however, Don Silva is presumed to be pure. And so is Fedalma: her father announces her to be “of a blood / Unmixed as virgin wine-juice” (I, 108). (She also has her own Byronic source; Eliot names her mother Lambra [I, 107], perhaps gesturing toward Haidée’s father, the pirate Lambro, in Don Juan.) But as Armstrong notes, she is nevertheless “patently a hybrid”;79 in her case, the mixture she expresses comes out of a clash between nature and culture. “Are you aught less than a Zincala?” her father demands of Fedalma. Her answer: “No; / But I am more. The Spaniards fostered me” (III, 199). So while her choice may be a matter of destiny, her authentic nature cannot be fully represented by that choice; hence the tragedy of her tale. We might think of the poem’s title, The Spanish Gypsy, as a kind of thought experiment, after the manner of Glenaveril ’s “IVOR-EMANUEL!”: a test of the potential for a certain type of hybrid identity. One might compare how German Jews, even today, will ask an American visitor whether she identifies primarily as Jewish or American—a question that, for most Americans, as products of a relatively successful melting-pot culture, simply makes no sense. While the poem may describe Spain as its own form of melting pot, the temperature there threatens to make it into a crucible, designed to smelt out impurities. But even if Eliot’s gypsies may be typed as racially pure, they are also, almost by definition, figures of and for migration, another kind of bordercrossing. As Josephine McDonagh has pointed out, “the gypsy expresses the pathos of the migrant.”80 When Zarca first announces her inherited lot to Fedalma, he emphasizes precisely this aspect of it. Fedalma has just called hers a “race / More outcast and despised than Moor or Jew,” and her father elaborates: Yes: wanderers whom no God took knowledge of To give them laws, to fight for them, or blight Another race to make them ampler room; A people with no home even in memory, No dimmest lore of giant ancestors To make a common hearth for piety. (I, 108)

Her tendency to wander marks Fedalma well before Zarca explains it; the suggestion is that it is in her blood. When we first see her, she has been “wandering” through the marketplace (I, 69) only to launch into dance upon hearing music performed there. In her dance, she is compared to

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Miriam (I, 49), an allusion that takes us back to Aurora Leigh (II.171), even as it gestures forward to Eliot’s later exploration of a wandering race in search of a homeland in the Jewish plot of Daniel Deronda. Again and again, she is represented as having the urge to escape, to “see the river travelling toward the plain, / The mountains screening all the world beyond,” to “fly far, far away” (I, 83). Curiously, Eliot choreographs Fedalma’s choice between stasis and wandering, between being Spanish and being gypsy, by comparing it to the choice between two pieces of jewelry that Don Silva offers his bride-tobe: a set of rubies and a chain-linked necklace of gold. Fedalma first considers the rubies: These rubies greet me Duchess. How they glow! Their prisoned souls are throbbing like my own. Perchance they loved once, were ambitious, proud; Or do they only dream of wider life, Ache from intenseness, yearn to burst the wall Compact of crystal splendor, and to flood Some wider space with glory? Poor, poor gems! We must be patient in our prison house, And find our space in loving. . . .

But then her attention is drawn to the “wondrous necklace”: And these twisted lines,— They seem to speak to me as writing would, To bring a message from the dead, dead past. What is their secret? Are they characters? (I, 87)

It emerges that the necklace had once belonged to Zarca (that is, Fedalma’s father, as she will soon discover). When Fedalma had first noticed him at the head of a band of prisoners, while she was dancing in the marketplace, Zarca had been “wear[ing] a solitary chain” that prefigures the necklace (I, 54). So, on one level, the choice here is between the Spanish rubies and the gypsy gold. But, as my analysis in Chapter 3 suggests, these jewels also have generic implications. The “intenseness” of the “crystal splendor” of the rubies, which promises to transcend “our prison house” by bursting forth into a “wider space of glory,” offers all the hallmarks of lyric compression and ecstatic potential. In contrast, the golden necklace has the temporal resonance of narrative, with its hints of a past tale to be unfolded by deciphering “twisted lines” of text. So when Fedalma chooses the necklace, she accepts not only her gypsy heritage but also the narrative movement it

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necessitates. As the shared repetition and measure of the phrases suggest, the “dead, dead past” will eventually propel Fedalma “far, far away.” She enters into a “journeying dream,” as the narrator, encouraging us to transport ourselves with Fedalma, describes it: first, out of Bedmar (III, 179), and then, by the poem’s end, onwards, in anticipation, toward Africa. There, in a move that foreshadows Daniel’s mission in Daniel Deronda, Zarca had hoped to found a homeland for his people: They have a promised land beyond the sea: There I may lead them, raise my standard, call All wandering Zincali to that home, And make a nation,—bring light, order, law Instead of chaos. . . . (I, 122)

But Eliot makes clear that this dream will not come to fruition. When Don Silva kills Zarca, he also destroys the force that keeps the Zincali banded together and directed toward their goal: “His image gone, there were no wholeness left / To make a world of for Zincali thought” (IV, 261). Still, for all that it ends in failure, The Spanish Gypsy also asks us to consider whether Zarca’s ambition was itself fundamentally misguided. Armstrong argues as much when she posits that “The experiment fails, fails essentially because of racial strife, but also because racial categories distort and corrupt.” The quest for “racial unity” and purity that characterizes both the expulsion of the Moors (and Jews) from Spain and the propulsion of the gypsies toward Egypt is, as Armstrong notes, “full of impossibilities and contradictions.”81 Not least of these contradictions is the fact that the unity of the Zincali is a function not merely, nor even primarily, of race but of their tendency to wander. Thus the notion of a “gypsy homeland” may be as oxymoronic as that of a “Spanish Gypsy”—and may well represent a less desirable goal; as the minstrel Juan sings, “For to roam and ever roam / Is the wild Zincali’s home” (III, 186). Conversely, the suggestion that the Zincali will lose unity under Fedalma’s leadership (“itself would break in small and scattered bands” [V, 272]) may hold a form of promise for hybridity. Perhaps, when we leave Fedalma “Seeing long travel under solemn suns / Stretching beyond it,” we leave her in a position of authentic freedom (IV, 265). Like Claude, she is travelling toward Egypt having escaped “factitious” restraint. Earlier, Zarca had described Fedalma’s choice to join the Zincali as a decision “To be the angel of a homeless tribe” (I, 112); while such a role may offer more scope than being an “Angel in the House,” the appellation suggests its own forms of restriction. Maybe what she needs to become fully human is to dispense with being an angel altogether.

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Still, the question remains: what comes of Eliot’s experiment with hybridity? Might it give birth to new forms, or is it, like the proverbial mule, a barren creation? No children will be born to Fedalma, much less nations be made by her deeds. We leave her in the position of another verse-novel hybrid, Lucile. Midway through the poem Meredith named after his French-Indian heroine, the narrator informs us: “The woman felt homeless and childless / That her path led from peace and that path appeared endless!” (135); by the verse-novel’s end, Lucile’s position is not much improved, as she accuses the man who came between her and her beloved: “Eugene de Luvois, but for you, / I might have been now—not this wandering nun, / But a mother, a wife—” (249). And while it is some consolation that she makes this accusation in the context of pleading for Luvois to grant permission for his daughter to marry the son of her true love, Vargrave, her own bloodline has no place in this resolution. So while the failed courtship plots of these verse-novels, like that of Amours de Voyage, leave our protagonists free to wander, they threaten to leave little else behind. The same has been said of the form through which they have been brought to life: in her essay on Aurora Leigh, Virginia Woolf (a critic always conscious of questions of literary heredity) observes, “the best compliment we can pay Aurora Leigh is that it makes us wonder why it has left no successors.”82 It’s a belief this book contests, but it is worth pointing out here that the writers of verse-novels themselves pondered the issue of issue, as one might put it. Is the form a genetic and generic dead end? In The Spanish Gypsy, the question obviously relates to the failure of both courtship and epic plotlines. But if Fedalma’s quest is bound to fail, if both Don Silva and Zarca have deserted her by its end, she does have someone for company as she heads eastward: the minstrel Juan. At the start of the poem, we are told that his minstrelsy is a belated form. “For Juan was a minstrel still, in times / When minstrelry was held a thing outworn” (I, 13); his position can be compared to that of the marginalized Victorian poet. Throughout the remainder of The Spanish Gypsy, Juan seems to be experimenting with ways to address his contemporary moment. When he first anticipates accompanying Zarca and Fedalma, at a time when their goal still seems achievable, he considers a turn to epic. Noting that his bent has thus far been lyric—“a honey-sipping butterfly. / I am a throng of rhythm and redondillas”—he announces that once “in Africa,” he plans to “grow epic, like the Florentine, / And sing the founding of our infant state, / Sing the Zincalo’s Carthage” (III, 194). That song, we know, is not to be. But perhaps, in its place, Juan will find a new, more mixed measure: one more like Eliot’s own in the poem that contains him.

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Of course, the most common answer to “the issue of issue” in the poems I have considered here is not so much a how as a where: in Egypt, in the New Jerusalem, or (most often) in the New World we call America.83 Verse-novels imagine the possibility of radical reform by relocating it to “virgin” territory, whether real or spiritual. To note this fact is to underscore the importance of travel to these works. It is also to pave the way for the subject of my final chapter, Chapter 5: the transatlantic fate of the form of the verse-novel itself. But before we cross the larger ocean, I want to take a trip over the Irish Sea, to look at a novel in verse that actively resists the travelling impulse so characteristic of the genre. William Allingham’s twelve-“chapter” verse-novel Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland: A Modern Poem (1864) contemplates the fate of the Irish tenant classes in the context of absenteeism and the budding movement for Irish home rule.84 Writing in heroic couplets (with the odd alexandrine or triplet for emphasis), Allingham cites Chaucer as his unresponsive muse when he admits the challenge of singing of “every-day affairs” (X, 199, 200).85 While it might not quite reach the humane depths of The Canterbury Tales, Allingham’s poem conveys its story in easy and natural verse. The atmosphere is in some ways like that of a Trollope novel, perhaps as filtered through Maria Edgeworth; the world described anticipates that of the Irish sections of Phineas Finn (1868). The story follows the fortunes of yet another hybrid protagonist, whose mixed nature reflects the form that records it: Bloomfield is Irish born and English bred, Surviving heir of both his parents dead; One who has studied, travell’d, lived, and thought, Is brave, and modest, as a young man ought; Calm—sympathetic; hasty—full of tact; Poetic, but insisting much on fact; A complex character and various mind, Where all, like some rich landscape, lies combined. (I, 6)

The poem begins with Laurence’s return from his foreign education and travels to his Irish home district, where he plans to assume his role as landlord. But in his absence, his tenants have been primed to rebellion by the abuses of his agent, Pigot; the early Irish nationalist movement known as the Ribbonmen provides the revolutionary backdrop to the story.86

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Backdrop is not quite the name for it, though: as its readers have noted, one of the odder structural elements to the work is that for its central chapters, four through nine (half of the verse-novel), we leave Laurence “offstage,” in order to follow a family of peasant-tenants, the Dorans.87 For this portion of the poem, we see our “hero” only in inefficacious glimpses, as when he gives money for a poor girl’s funeral only to have her father squander it on drink. The poem thus formally mimics its concern for absenteeism; Laurence may be back in Ireland, but he is not yet fully committed to his situation. Allingham shifts focus to the tenant family’s son, Neal Doran, who is enticed to join the Ribbonmen and whom Bloomfield eventually reprieves from punishment for his rebellion upon the discovery of his agent’s cruelty (by poem’s end, Neal is serving as Laurence’s steward). In the climactic scene, Bloomfield meets his tenants “face to face” and announces his decision to accept the charge for their wellbeing. “I am your Agent, and no other man,” he tells them, while they respond with delight and doubt: “If Bloomfield were an angel from the skies / They could not hunger more with ears and eyes” (X, 208). It seems that what is needed is an angel-Agent in the house. (Still, Bloomfield’s anagnorisis and his dismissal of his agent do not prevent Pigot’s subsequent murder at the hands of the Ribbonmen.) The last two books of the poem return the focus to Laurence. Seven years have passed, and we see him comfortably ensconced in his newly refurbished home with a wife and two children, a responsible landlord who has realized the potential of his name by bringing his fields to bloom. Such fruition had been implied not only by that name but by his earliest description, as the possessor of a mind “like some rich landscape.” For that matter, the real subject of Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland is the land itself, a focus that Elaine Hadley has shown to be deeply implicated in mid-century liberal thought about the Irish Question. In discussing the Irish Land Act of 1870, which locates the interest of Irish tenant farmers in their “occupation” of the land rather than in proprietorship, she observes that “One cannot overemphasize the extent to which the Irish were almost universally portrayed as organic components of Irish soil.”88 Such rootedness is the constant theme of Allingham’s poem, although for Laurence (as, presumably, for Allingham), proprietorship offers the cure to what ails the nation. At a dinner hosted by local landlords near the tale’s beginning, Laurence insists that “ownership, however small it be, / Breeds diligence, content, and loyalty” (III, 45); by poem’s end he has developed a program he intends to pursue, albeit “on petty scale.” Asked by a friend if he wants to run for government office, he explains that he prefers to eschew “Church affairs, or party politics.” His plans are more practical in nature:

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The Victorian Verse-Novel “Waste and indebted lands Being wisely bought into the nation’s hands, You might thereon create a novel class Of Irishmen, to leaven all the mass With hope, and industry, and loyalty, (My favorite crotchet—well, so let it be) Small Owners, namely. North, south, east, and west, I’d plant them, and they’d surely do their best; With great and permanent results, if slow.” (XII, 258–9)

(This focus on the fertility of the land could explain what Herbert Tucker has drawn attention to: the poem’s peculiar silence on the subject of the Great Hunger of the 1840s.89 Allingham may have felt that mentioning the potato blight that caused it would have suggested some kind of failure in the land to grant what its cultivators had asked of it. Insofar as it appears, the primary cause of famine here is that resulting from the removal of Irish cattle to “glut the maw of England” [VIII, 159]. That said, the export of cattle did in fact contribute significantly to the devastation caused by the blight, having helped bring about the monoculture that made the Irish population so dependent upon the crop.) Laurence’s agenda reminds us that the effort to cultivate Ireland with a “novel class” of “[s]mall Owners” to the “North, south, east, and west” emerges against a landscape in which such directions—especially the last of them—operate, often threateningly, at a larger scale. As Neal Doran’s mother Maureen laments, “Och, mureen boys and girls, where are ye all? / Through the wide world they’re scatter’d, fareer gair! / Search for them, barrin’ Ireland, everywhere” (VII, 145).90 Neal’s decision to join the Ribbonmen results from his awareness that his own family is at risk of being evicted in the same ruthless manner that he has seen so many of his neighbors be uprooted; what his father Jack has achieved for the family— “A patch of culture, won with patient toil” (IV, 63)—can be taken away at his landlord’s (or his agent’s) whim. Any moment, the Doran household might be “compell’d to sail” “across the sea,” like so many others they have known. Right before his dismissal, Pigot had actually announced that the Dorans must go. In the context of such a pervasive threat of exile and emigration, travel becomes not a sign of promise but an existential threat to Ireland itself. As Laurence laments to his wife in the final pages of the poem, translating from a “song in Gaelic,” “Poor land! ‘There’s honey where her misty vales expand.’ Her sons and daughters love her; yet they fly As from a city of the plague . . . ”

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“The people flee by myriads,” he adds, “and their place / Knows them no more” (XII, 287–8). Ireland has become a country of “exile” (X, 204).91 Such flight, the argument goes, can only be stopped when absentee landlords (and those landlords who are technically present but have relinquished their duties to their agents) resume full responsibility for their domains. This line of reasoning helps explain why the atmosphere of tantalizing travel hovers over their parts of the story, as well. Realizing the mess he has returned to, Laurence initially debates whether to stay or go: “Was all his duty to his rental bound? / Might not he better serve on other ground?” (III, 56). In a choice he describes as the “crisis of his life” (III, 59), Laurence contemplates the experiences of “poetry and art” he could enjoy overseas (III, 59). Bloomfield’s agent Pigot also dreams of the release of travel. When he is first dismissed, the narrator declares “his landmarks of a sudden lost,” a gesture of metaphysical contrapasso toward the man who had so often evicted tenants from their land (X, 207). But Pigot then spends his final moments on earth considering the fact that this condition leaves him free to roam. He imagines comforting his wife, “Come, let us travel, pitch our tent elsewhere, / And for our children and ourselves enjoy / A wider world, a world without annoy” (X, 211). “Come, let us go”: here we are again. Finally, in what is perhaps the strangest example of this tendency, Laurence’s discussion with his wife at the close of the poem about the pervasive threat of exile hovering over Ireland happens in the context of their own contemplated holiday “To Thor and Odin’s land, resolved to see / (Bold travellers they in many a far countrie) / The rough and jagged edge of Europe” (XII, 280). Blood will out—the form can’t help but journey. Nevertheless, a few pages later we hear Ireland itself described as “A wavy ten-league landscape, light and large, / Lonely and sad, on Europe’s furthest marge” (XII, 287); the Norse world to which Laurence plans to travel, so reminiscent of William Morris’s poems, is itself a version of his Irish homeland. Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland has a kind of afterlife in another hybrid work that imagines through its paired protagonists the tug of travel and the lure of home. In the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses, we find Allingham’s verse-novel catalogued among Leopold Bloom’s books: Hozier’s History of the Russo-Turkish War (brown cloth, 2 volumes, with gummed label, Garrison Library, Governor’s Parade, Gibraltar, on verso of cover). Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland by William Allingham (second edition, green cloth, gilt trefoil design, previous owner’s name on recto of flyleaf erased). A Handbook of Astronomy (cover, brown leather, detached, 5 plates, antique letterpress long primer, author’s footnotes nonpareil, marginal clues brevier, captions small pica).92

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It’s easy to imagine Poldy himself, not to say Joyce, seeing the book on a table in front of a used bookstore like the one he drops by in “Wandering Rocks,” getting a kick out of the similarity of his own name to that of Allingham’s protagonist, and spending a few coins to purchase it (to be recorded later in his ledger). Linda Hughes, who mentions the place of the poem in Ulysses, also notes the “tantalizing” similarity between the names and the fact that both characters “are in one sense residents, in another sense aliens, in Ireland.”93 But while Bloom has finally made his way home by the time we encounter Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland, Stephen Dedalus is about to steam off again to foreign lands. Fittingly, in locating the volume in Bloom’s catalogue of books, Joyce wedges this bit of the homeland between the foreign (not only a work about the Russo-Turkish War, but a copy that has travelled from Gibraltar!) and an even-moredistant extraterrestrial realm. NOTES 1. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, 84–5. 2. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel (New York: Verso, 1999), 5. 3. See Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 4. One can contrast this aspect of the verse-novel with the localism of the “family chronicle”—a prose novel form that shares the verse-novel’s interest in portraying the longue durée. One might also compare it to what Adela Pinch has called “the global reach . . . of lyric poetry of the 1820s and 1830s, in which, in the hands of [L. E.] Landon and in particular of Felicia Hemans, a Byronic predilection for exotic locations combined with the realities of British overseas expansion . . . to place a premium on lyric poetry that documented global travel and separation” (Thinking, 89–99). But if Pinch sees poetry as serving a need for thoughts to bridge distance in a fashion that in some ways anticipated the advent of the telegraph, verse-novels are about bodies in motion. 5. Samuel Rogers, Italy: A Poem, a New Edition (London: Edward Moxon and Co., 1859), “Preface,” iii. 6. Quoted in James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1993), 21. 7. See Carolyn Williams, Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 8. Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 20. Liu’s sense that “the disappointment at the origin of Imagination in the Alps inheres in any tour aimed toward a goal” resonates with the question of ends—especially of failed ends—considered here (4). While I will not focus on georgic in what follows, the influence of this genre is also felt in

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9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

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many verse-novels, none more so than Aurora Leigh. Consider how the young Aurora defends her chosen profession to Romney with a reference to bees that seems to come right out of Virgil’s Georgics: “Yet, concede, / Such sounding brass has done some actual good / . . . / In colonising beehives” (II.175–9). See my Crisis of Action, chapters 1 and 2. Goode, “1848 and the Strange Disease of Modern Love,” 52. Quoted in Christopher M. Keirstead, Victorian Poetry, Europe, and the Challenge of Cosmopolitanism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 20. In Networking the Nation: British and American Women’s Poetry, 1840–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), Alison Chapman argues that Aurora Leigh demonstrates how the figure of the “English Poetess” is in fact predicated on her expatriation and considers the “large geographical scale” of the poem in this light (102). Keirstead, Challenge of Cosmopolitanism, 1. Actually, Owen Meredith would pose an even greater challenge, as we shall see. See Reynolds, Realms of Verse, 125. See Reynolds, Realms of Verse, 106. Recall that the political backdrop of the Risorgimento also suffused Violet Fane’s Aurora Leigh-influenced Denzil Place, the subject of my Chapter 1. Keirstead, Challenge of Cosmopolitanism, 14, 18, 6. For the aborted ending of Don Juan, see Chapter 2, n. 61. The connection between physical roaming and sexual roaming is obvious in Byron, but it can also be found in Wordsworth, in the strange inset narrative of “Vaudracour and Julia” in The Prelude, which has long been recognized as a stand-in for the poet’s affair with Annette Vallon, the royalist Frenchwoman with whom he conceived a child during his time in France in 1792 (he subsequently excised this episode from the autobiographical poem, although he published it separately). Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage III.viii.174, in The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Mulhauser. Further references to Clough’s poetry will be to this edition unless otherwise noted and will be internally documented by the relevant section and line numbers. Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 121. For Bakhtin, though, a crucial part of this open-endedness is temporal, having to do with the genre’s focus on contemporary subjects; since the novel speaks to the present, it is constantly in a state of “becoming.” In this way, it shares in something of the lyric’s “now”-ness (see “Epic and Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, passim). Josephine McDonagh, “Place, Race, and Migration,” in The NineteenthCentury Novel 1820–1880, ed. Jenny Bourne Taylor, John Kucich, and Patrick Parrinder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 374–5. It seems to have been a favorite personal motto for Clough—a way to move forward in the atmosphere of uncertainty in which he lived. He quotes it again in a letter of March 1852, in the context of a salute to the benefits of hard work. In The Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough, 2 vols., ed. and intro. Blanche Clough (London: Macmillan and Co., 1869), II.174.

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22. Liu, Sense of History, 4. 23. John Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey, October 8, 1817, in The Letters of John Keats, sel. and ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 27. He is actually quoting an earlier letter to his brother George. 24. Elizabeth Barrett Barrett to Hugh Stuart Boyd, July 31, 1844, in Brownings’ Correspondence, IX.65. 25. Natasha Moore also notes the prevalence of the motif in the genre, reading it as marking these works’ investment in exploring the experience of modernity (Victorian Poetry and Modern Life, 22–6). 26. I am reminded of the Athenaeum’s review of Patmore’s Faithful for Ever, which begins by declaring that the work “is no more to be called poetry than a page of Bradshaw.” The Athenaeum 1721 (October 20, 1860), 509. 27. This is the same passage discussed in Chapter 2 in relation to the concept of marriage in heaven. Moore points to the curious slippage here “between the symbolic and the actual,” given how travel functions both as metaphor and plot device in the poem (Victorian Poetry and Modern Life, 134). 28. See Markovits, Crisis of Action, 83. 29. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 30. Buzard, Beaten Track, 42. See also Yopie Prins’s account of Browning’s elliptical and compressed style as an expression of the poet’s modernity that has parallels to the compression of time and space experienced in rail travel. Prins looks at an edition of Browning that was published in America as an appendix to a railway timetable. Yopie Prins, “Robert Browning, Transported by Meter,” in The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange, ed. Meredith L. McGill (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 205–30. Indeed, Elizabeth Porter Gould records in The Brownings and America (Boston: The Poet-lore Co., 1904) how Robert Browning “procure[d] for the British Museum, as one of the curiosities of literature, the first complete edition of his works as reprinted in the Official Guide of the Chicago and Alton Railroad in monthly issues from 1872 to 1874. He flattered himself that in the Railway Time Table he came near to the hearts of the people” (39–40). 31. Earl of Lytton (Owen Meredith), Glenaveril, or The Metamorphoses, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1885), I.iv.iii–iv. Further references to this work will be internally documented by book, canto, and stanza number. 32. Milton, Paradise Lost II.620–1. 33. Quoted in Buzard, Beaten Track, 40. 34. Woolf, “Aurora Leigh,” in The Second Common Reader, 212. 35. “Owen Meredith,” Lucile, illustrated by George du Maurier (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868), 121. This edition includes some light revisions of the 1860 edition. Further references to this text will be to this edition and will be internally documented by page number. 36. Since Meredith does not quote directly (sadly, Murray’s handbooks were not written in rhymed anapestic couplets), the edition is a little hard to pinpoint. But while I was unable to trace the reference to “paragraph 30” in any of the

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37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

47.

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handbooks Meredith would plausibly have been citing, the 1852 handbook alludes to some of the same details he records, including information on the hire of donkeys and activities for “females.” Handbook for Belgium and the Rhine, With Travelling Map (London: John Murray, 1852), 203–4. See Buzard, Beaten Track, 66. Buzard, Beaten Track, 120, 125. Byron imagines his poetry travelling in an even less dignified manner when he envisions young men’s servants using “this my canto” to line their masters’ “new portmanteaus” prior to embarking on their travels (Don Juan II.16.7–8). Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, IV.iii.218–19. The discussion here and throughout of Amours de Voyage builds on my chapter on Clough in The Crisis of Action, especially my account of the role of the voyage in the poem (77–81). Dean McCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 1. Quoted in Buzard, Beaten Track, 90. Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), 13. Matthew Reynolds notes (Realms of Verse, 148) that you can date Claude’s letters very precisely against the historical record, a fact that suggests their journalistic qualities. He also surmises that Thomas Moore’s comical epistolary verse-novel, The Fudge Family in Paris (1818), may have helped spur Clough to his letter format for the poem (152). Keirstead, Challenge of Cosmopolitanism, 29, 26. Keirstead, Challenge of Cosmopolitanism, 58. Quoted by Pinch, Thinking, 92 (she is citing Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism); [Mill], “What is Poetry,” 64. One might also look to Jonathan Culler’s understanding of lyric as a kind of apostrophe (see The Pursuit of Signs, 149, and Theory of the Lyric, esp. 211–43). Of course, novels incorporate fictions of address, as well, conscripting their audiences in their realist programs through injunctions to a “dear reader.” See Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). See also Joseph Phelan, “Absent Friends: Addressees in Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage,” Journal of Browning Studies 2 (June 2011), 44–57. Phelan argues that “By the end of the poem Claude’s unanswered letters have become an ironic commentary on the impossibility of communication, a testimony to the failure to achieve a state of ‘rapport’ with any of his fellow human beings” (44). In Clough’s earlier and sunnier verse-novel, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, letters also feature prominently in the generally third-person omniscient narrative. Here, though, epistolary address both brings the lovers to a successful resolution to the courtship plot and tends to serve a notably more public function. When Philip Hewson returns to Oxford to finish his degree after securing his engagement to Elspie Mackaye, the college butlers comment on Mr. Philip’s many letters to David Mackaye in Scotland (the engagement is still secret); they know where the letters are going because

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48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57.

The Victorian Verse-Novel the address on the cover of a letter is its most public aspect. But at the Highland post office where the letters arrive, the postman shows them to his wife, who shows them to “the lasses,” who peer inside to see an “E.” (for Elspie), proof of the real addressee of the missives. The episode thus both emphasizes the social and narrative element of epistolarity and redescribes even its more private, interior, and lyrical portions as public. See The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, IX.4–10. Keirstead, Challenge of Cosmopolitanism, 59. To J. C. Shairp, in Correspondence, ed. Mulhauser, I.278; R. W. Emerson, letter to Clough, May 17, 1858, in Correspondence, ed. Mulhauser, II.548. I should acknowledge that my reading of the poem here is far more optimistic than the reading I gave in The Crisis of Action, where I take the failure of the courtship plot to indicate a broader failure of agency in the work. But I think my own vacillation reflects that of both Clough and his hero on this front: it is hard to know whether to read the ending as a defeat or a victory. Should Claude have kept trying to find Mary? Would she have cured him of his uncertainty? Do we want him to be cured, or is it wrong to see such uncertainty as disease? Keirstead, Challenge of Cosmopolitanism, 46. See Erik Gray, “Come Be My Love: The Song of Songs, Paradise Lost, and the Tradition of the Invitation Poem,” PMLA 128.2 (2013), 370–85. See also Don Juan I.222.1; Byron quotes Southey disparagingly and shows no indication of the Chaucerian (or Spenserian) precedent. In “Where ‘Byron Used to Ride’: Locating the Victorian Travel Poet in Clough’s Amours de Voyage and Dispychus” (Philological Quarterly 77.4 [Fall 1998], 377–95), Christopher Keirstead reads the envoi as a figure for the poem itself as “a kind of time and space traveller,” a “text, set free to travel the earth” (391). See Alison Case’s chapter on Aurora Leigh in Plotting Women: Gender and Narration in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), Herbert Tucker (“Aurora Leigh: Epic Solutions to Novel Ends,” in Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure, ed. Alison Booth [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993], 67; Epic, 381), and Morgan (Narrative Means, Lyric Ends, chapter 3) for slightly different accounts of the poem’s unusually mixed temporal orientation. All three, though, highlight Book V as an important moment of present-tense intrusion into the poem. Case, Plotting Women, 118. Tucker, Epic, 382. Letters stand behind Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, too, as Adela Pinch has noted in the context of a discussion of thinking about the beloved and lyric address—in part because the Browning’s own love affair began in an epistolary mode. But there’s a significant difference between such love letters and the written communications that dot the narrative of Aurora Leigh, as I hope becomes clear in what follows. See Pinch, Thinking, 106.

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58. The “fiction of address” inherent to poetry takes on a more sinister note here, as it applies to the gulf between the living and the dead (recall that in Patmore’s The Victories of Love, Jane Graham also attempts to bridge this gap—with what the poem treats as some success—by writing a series of “posthumous” letters to her husband Frederick). As Aurora puts it to Romney,

59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

this letter, (unread, mark, still sealed) Was found enfolded in the poor dead hand: That spirit of hers had gone beyond the address, Which could not find her though you wrote it clear[.] (II.1130–3) She even adds, “here’s no proof, sir, of acceptancy, / But rather disproof ” (II.1156–7), before she tears the note to pieces. A version of this weirdly sensational episode turns up again in Epes Sargent’s far more obviously sensational The Woman Who Dared, discussed in my Chapter 5. There, not only does the attempt to right a wrongful dispensation of wealth get cut off by the death of the writer (in this case, the heroine’s father, who dies trying to compose his will), but his death comes as a result of a train crash. (“Dead hand” also anticipates George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which uses the phrase to consider questions of female inheritance and the laws of mortmain.) Recall, too, that Romney’s blindness stems from his effort to rescue from the burning Leigh Hall the portrait of an ancestor who had resembled Aurora. Keirstead has argued that this rivalry can be figured in terms of the two women’s statuses as travellers; he suggests that Lady Waldemar’s “woman of the world” designation (III.629), attributable in part to her cosmopolitan travels, should be distinguished from Aurora’s more committed role as a “citizen” of the world (Challenge of Cosmopolitanism, 77). See the “Critical Introduction” to Margaret Reynolds’s edition of Aurora Leigh (49 n. 159). Herbert F. Tucker, “Epic,” in Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Anthony Harrison (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 29. Dickens, David Copperfield, 72. Matthew Reynolds has paid close attention to the poem’s concern for how words in different languages feel different to Aurora: “The verse recreates for the reader what one can only call the ‘feel’ of the different countries to Aurora. As we read on, there appears in the texture of the poem a drama of relationship between the aspiring, affective use of language which carries with it the atmosphere of Italy, and a flatter, more subjugated kind of writing which is associated with England” (Realms of Verse, 119). Tucker has noted this pattern in “Aurora Leigh: Epic Solutions to Novel Ends,” esp. 63–6. The recognition lets us see, for example, that Book VI

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(Aurora’s encounter with Marian in Paris) offers the traditional visit to the underworld. 66. [Edwin James Milliken], “Fitzdotterel; or, T’Other and Which,” Punch 89 (August 29, 1885), 108. 67. Here we get a generically characteristic, self-conscious reference to novels as “Müller” calls attention to Cordelia’s derivative style:

68. 69. 70. 71.

72.

73. 74.

75. 76.

“And this young lady, who has used up quite The heroes of Scott, Bulwer, and George Sand, Being herself incompetent to write, Or to get readers if she did write, planned These silly pages, so as to unite In her own person, author, volume and Public at once; creating an ideal Out of calamities—alas too real!” (II.III.xxx) Rev. of “Glenaveril,” The Atheneaum 3018 (Saturday, August 29, 1885), 264. Rev. of “Glenaveril,” The Atheneaum 3018, 264. Tucker, Epic, 492. As Monique Morgan points out, Barrett Browning’s concluding gesture is anticipatory rather than retrospective: “Aurora never says, ‘Reader, I married him.’ Instead, the final lines are Aurora’s description of the dawn—we end with the sense of beginning” (Narrative Means, Lyric Ends, 137). That said, Emanuel’s messianic identity and the open end of Lytton’s verse-novel do resemble Daniel Deronda. Eliot, “Notes on The Spanish Gypsy,” in Oscar Browning, Life of George Eliot (London: Walter Scott, Limited, 1892), 102. Curiously, Eliot explains her approach to this theme by distinguishing it from Clough’s, whose treatment of necessity she discusses at some length as too hopeless (105–6). She also concludes her reflections by opposing Fedalma’s heroic renunciation of love for duty to Guinevere’s contrary choice (106). See Eliot’s journal entry of September 6, 1864, in George Eliot’s Life, As Related in her Letters and Journals, 3 vols., ed. J. W. Cross (Boston: Dana Estes & Company, n.d.), II.305. George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy: A Poem (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868), Book II, p. 125. Further references to this work will be documented internally by book and page number. Tucker associates Don Silva with the novelistic type of the “cosmopolitan liberal” (Epic, 425); his failure thus represents a defeat of the novel by the epic. I see him as more of a Byronic figure than a purely novelistic one, given the frequent descriptions of his mixed nature, which I discuss below. [Henry James], “A review of The Spanish Gypsy. A Poem. By George Eliot,” in Henry James, Literary Criticism, 948. Originally published in North American Review (October 1868). Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 370.

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77. This setting and such characters also link the poem to Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), published in London in 1864, which features among its storytellers a “Spanish Jew.” 78. Byron, Manfred I.ii.40–1, in Byron: Poetical Works, ed. Page, 393. 79. Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 371. 80. McDonagh, “Place, Race, and Migration,” 374. Migration—the subject of the Aeneid—is also a theme in two forerunner texts to the verse-novel, Longfellow’s Evangeline (1847) (Clough’s acknowledged source for his hexameters in The Bothie and Amours) and Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea (1797). As I have noted elsewhere (Crisis of Action, 193 n. 35), both these poems use epic hexameters to tell tales of travel and courtship. In Evangeline, the courtship of a young French couple in eighteenth-century Acadia (Nova Scotia) is disrupted when the lovers are forced south by English political tyranny. In the confusion, they are separated. But unlike Clough’s Claude and Mary, they experience a deathbed reunion in old age. The successful bourgeois courtship plot of Hermann und Dorothea takes place against a background of the French Revolution, which Dorothea is fleeing. 81. Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 370, 371. While the poem does not name Egypt, Tucker notes convincingly that the etymological connection between Egypt and Gypsy suggests that this is the goal (Epic, 424). 82. Woolf, “Aurora Leigh,” in The Second Common Reader, 213. 83. Clough’s first experiment with the verse-novel, The Bothie of Tober-naVuolich, concludes by bringing its happily united lovers to found a new life in yet another new land, New Zealand. 84. The poem first appeared anonymously in a dozen installments in Fraser’s Magazine in 1862–3; it was “much revised and partly re-arranged” for publication in book form. “Preface” to William Allingham, Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland: A Modern Poem (London: Macmillan and Co., 1864), vii. Further references to this poem will be internally documented by chapter and page number. Linda Hughes has argued for the importance of the initial serial publication. See Linda K. Hughes, “The Poetics of Empire and Resistance: William Allingham’s Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland,” Victorian Poetry 28.2 (1990), 103–17. 85. Matthew Campbell has written well about the effect of the couplets, noting that “It is the form of the poem which allows opinions to clash within it.” He is interested not only in opinions but in the divergent national perspectives of the poem’s Irish language and its English couplets. Campbell, “Irish Poetry in the Union: William Allingham’s Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland,” European Journal of English Studies 3.3 (1999), 306. 86. The Ribbonmen were an agrarian nationalist movement that preceded the more urban and better-remembered Fenians, who “went public” at the very moment Allingham’s poem appeared, as Hughes has noted (“Poetics of Empire and Resistance,” 117 n. 8). 87. Hughes talks of Bloomfield as being “offstage” in describing this structure (“Poetics of Empire and Resistance,” 110). She argues that the radical effect

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88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93.

The Victorian Verse-Novel of the shift in perspective toward the tenant-class Dorans was particularly striking in the poem’s original serial publication. But it is a disorienting effect even in an undisrupted reading of the work. Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 242. Hadley’s literary focus in this chapter is on Phineas Finn. Tucker, Epic, 413–14. Note that the line is macaronic, that is, linguistically hybrid. This feature of the verse shows its speaker’s colonized status and the mixed linguistic pressures attendant on such a condition. But in the context of the current chapter and the larger project of this book, it is worth reiterating a point made in passing in Chapter 3: how common macaronic lines are in verse-novels. While Bakhtin’s term heteroglossia indicates a related feature of novelistic discourse, verse-novels also use macaronic lines to gesture toward their combination of colloquial and written, low- and highbrow, as in Clough’s Latin-quoting scholars and the auto-translation of Robert Browning’s Hyacinthus de Archangelis. Campbell sees a pun in Allingham’s earlier use of the term “exiled” (VI, 119), noting it sounds like “ex-isled” (“Irish Poetry in the Union,” 310). James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986), 582. See Hughes, “Poetics of Empire and Resistance,” 116 n. 7. She cites Malcolm Brown, who remarks on the intertextual reference (“Allingham’s Ireland,” Irish University Review 13 [Spring 1983], 8). Campbell also records the presence of the poem in Ulysses and the pun of the heroes’ names (“Irish Poetry in the Union,” 313).

5 E Pluribus Unum The American Verse-Novel I. TRANSATLANTIC TRAVELS When, as I have documented, many of the protagonists of Victorian versenovels eventually make their way to the New World, they are merely doing as the books they inhabit had done. Verse-novels, both imported and native-born examples, garnered remarkable American popularity, especially in the period leading up to and through the Civil War and during Reconstruction. This chapter seeks to describe their popularity and to consider what lies behind it. To that end, I will concentrate on three American verse-novels, all heavily influenced by British precursors of the form, to show how the genre’s radical energies take root and flourish in this different environment. But before I turn to these texts, I want to consider the travels of their British forerunners. Arthur Hugh Clough and Elizabeth Barrett Browning offer vivid instances of the genre’s transatlantic tendency. Clough’s Amours de Voyage first saw publication in America, in the Atlantic Monthly in 1859; Clough himself had spent substantial time stateside, both as a child and as a young man, and he had formed close friendships (with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Eliot Norton, among others) that made him at home in the literary world of New England. His work had thus naturally been influenced by American poets: recall that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline, the source for Clough’s hexameters, had like his Amours told a tale of failed revolutionary courtship (Longfellow had also returned to both measure and theme in a happier vein in The Courtship of Miles Standish [1858], which locates its love affairs against the backdrop of upheavals in the Plymouth Colony). While The Bothie arrives at a new world in New Zealand, and Amours concludes in the ancient past of Egypt, the poem Clough was working on at his death, Mari Magno, composed in 1861 on his final journey to Italy, actually takes place on a voyage from England to America. A story cycle in the manner of The

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Canterbury Tales and The Earthly Paradise, it resembles extremely popular collections published later in the 1860s by Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier. Clough’s final work seems in its setting and raison d’être to literalize the transatlantic exchange of stories: as the poem’s subtitle Tales on Board indicates, it relates the exchange of narratives by the passengers on the journey. These tales are to determine whether or not marriage is as “novels . . . depict it final bliss,” an agenda hinting at Mari Magno’s generic affinity with the verse-novels by Clough that had preceded it.1 Barrett Browning herself never travelled to America, but her books most certainly did, none more successfully than Aurora Leigh. In The Brownings and America (1904), Elizabeth Porter Gould dilated on the enthusiastic reception of Aurora Leigh on its first transatlantic appearance.2 Somewhat paradoxically, the excitement seems to have stemmed from shock at the recognition of a surprising familiarity in attitude. The poem’s reviewer in the United States Magazine called the work “far more Young American than English.”3 The opinion was shared by Edmund Clarence Stedman, who later wrote in Scribner’s Monthly Magazine that “an audacious, speculative freedom pervades it, which smacks of the new world rather than the old.”4 Women responded with special enthusiasm. Susan B. Anthony carried a copy of Aurora Leigh around with her for years and bequeathed it to the Library of Congress on her death, “with the hope that women may more and more be like ‘Aurora Leigh.’”5 As Eric Eisner has observed, the poem encourages a culture of such “fandom” through its presentation of a young American woman, Kate Ward, who idolizes Aurora, even posing for her portrait in a cloak resembling the poet’s. Eisner notes how “Barrett Browning’s real-life fan of fans, Kate Field, would similarly have herself painted as Aurora” (Field would contribute the memorial essay on Barrett Browning to the Atlantic Monthly).6 Field and Anthony weren’t alone in their admiration: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s novel The Story of Avis (1877) is “the American version of the English Aurora Leigh,” complete with an artist-heroine who, in a crucial scene of vocational discovery at age sixteen that mirror’s Aurora’s birthday selfcrowning (both scenes even occur in June), reads Barrett Browning’s verse-novel.7 Remarkably, Aurora Leigh Clubs for girls are listed in the bulletins of the New York Public Library into the early twentieth century.8 And the power of the poem continued to linger, reemerging in some of the most important American feminist scholarship of the final decades of the twentieth century, in which the critics Ellen Moers, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Betsy Erkkila trace the verse-novel’s influence on Emily Dickinson.9 It thus becomes a foundational text for understanding the development not only of women’s poetry but also of American poetry more generally.

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But if the ideological underpinnings of Aurora Leigh may seem to appeal to the democratic impulses of American readers, especially women, the more conservative take on womanhood represented in The Angel in the House found a similarly eager audience. Aubrey de Vere wrote to his friend Patmore from Rome in 1857 to tell him of this fact: “Yesterday evening I was at a party of Americans, all of them very much devoted to Literature and especially to Poetry. They spoke with enthusiasm of yours in particular, saying that there was ‘quite a rage for it in America,’ and that its success there was something quite remarkable.”10 Meeting Patmore in early January 1858 on his visit to England, Nathaniel Hawthorne (who may have been among the party in Rome) records telling him that “I thought his popularity in America would be greater than at home, and he said that it was already so.”11 De Vere appears to have been so struck by the work’s American success that he remarked on it in his 1858 appraisal in the Edinburgh Review, where he mentions that “twenty thousand copies of it are already in circulation” in the United States.12 In fact, an 1856 review in the Critic had previously commented on the American reprinting of The Angel ’s first book, describing how it had been “commanding a large audience in that country.”13 Derek Patmore, the poet’s great-grandson, relates that rumors of the poem’s American popularity (partly encouraged by Emerson, also an admirer) stimulated its British readership.14 Such back and forth over the ocean applied to the verse-novels of both Merediths—“Owen” (later Lord Lytton) and George—as well, although in very different ways. In the latter case, Adela Pinch has described how “the transatlantic travels of Modern Love made the poem modern.” Largely condemned by its initial British readership in 1862, George Meredith’s sequence of fifty sixteen-line stanzas recording the dissolution of a marriage (his) was resuscitated after a pirated American “aesthetic” edition by Thomas Mosher came out in Portland, Maine in 1891, introducing the poem in a new fashion to a new audience of readers, first American and eventually British.15 When Modern Love reappeared before the public after thirty years, it did so in high-art sonnet sequence dress, its verse-novel underpinnings largely hidden from view, as suited to the tastes of a period when the verse-novel form—and narrative poetry more broadly—was on the wane (I return to this shift in my Afterword). In contrast, the publishing wonder that was Owen Meredith’s Lucile chiefly coincides with the height of the verse-novel phenomenon. As late as 1877, seventeen years after its initial American publication, Publisher’s Weekly was still declaring Lucile to be the “most salable volume of poetry” in the United States.16 This popularity—and the many “gift-book” editions that it encouraged—has led the University of Iowa librarian Sid Huttner to

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make the book the subject of an online publishing history and database called The Lucile Project, in which he tracks the myriad editions of the book that appeared; as the site’s home page announces, “During the 78 years 1860–1938, nearly 100 American publishers brought out at least 2000 editions and issues.”17 As even these brief descriptions of their journeys make clear, the British-born poems’ stateside popularity was aided by the lack of rules governing international copyright (Mosher’s Modern Love got in just before the bell, since 1891 was also the year in which the first “modest international copyright law finally passed”18). De Vere’s letter to Patmore citing the “rage” for the poem in America proceeds to pass along advice on how to capitalize on the vogue regardless of this absence: “if you chose, when bringing them [the next volumes of The Angel] out, to apply to some American publishing House (Story and Field, or perhaps Ticknor and Field, I forget which, Boston, were especially named), you would probably be given a handsome sum down for the edition and could also make an arrangement by which a considerable annual profit would come to you from the future sale of the book.” And he concludes the paragraph observing how “Mrs. Browning told me that the American who is republishing ‘Aurora Leigh’ volunteered to give her £100 for it.”19 Of course, The Lucile Project proves that most editions would have been made without such authorial blessing. Meredith McGill has mapped the implications of such a “culture of reprinting” for the American literary scene in the two decades immediately preceding the rise of the verse-novel form. She argues that the proliferation of reprinted texts resulted in a peculiarly democratic conception of authorship, a “republican understanding of print as public property.” For example, in contrast to British periodical culture, in which the anonymity of stories was generally perceived as a protection of gentlemanly virtues and the periodicals themselves were usually aligned with a particular class and ideological camp of readers, the anonymity of American magazine culture served to highlight “the text’s status as common property” belonging to a broad reading public. The text in question also changed as a result: piracy stimulated the embrace of literary variety, “upend[ing] the hierarchy of genres, and troubl[ing] the boundaries of the text-as-object.” McGill cites as evidence the rise of “eclectic” magazines, like Littell’s Living Age (founded in 1844), which were composed entirely of unauthorized reprints in a variety of genres: fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.20 The process of extraction and reframing could push together authors and forms that had previously been kept separate, reorienting both readers’ and writers’ expectations of both generic purity and cultural status.

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Perhaps because verse-novels arrived from England in the decade after the period with which McGill is concerned, she does not mention them. Nevertheless, American print culture’s embrace of literary piracy had profound implications for both the American popularity of British versenovels and the creation of native ones. The genre itself offers a good example of “[h]ow changes in the conditions of publication make themselves felt at the level of literary form.” As I shall show, American versenovels display versions of most of the features McGill sees as characteristic of a culture of reprinting. When she catalogues how “the system of reprinting recasts the reading and writing of poetry and fiction” by creating “relays by which elite culture is redistributed in a variety of mass cultural formats, by which authors are detached from and reattached to their texts, and by which European works are reshuffled for American purposes,”21 all three clauses resonate particularly strongly in the context of novels in verse. These poems self-consciously use their formal hybridity to attempt to bridge the gap between popular and elite genres. They take up and reframe elements from a wide generic range of sources, often (as I have shown) with alert awareness of their own intertextual methods. Finally, they exhibit a special affinity for transatlantic travel, in terms of both their subject matter (as Chapter 4 demonstrates) and, as I have started to argue here, their publication histories.

II. THE LAY OF THE LAND In fact, a more broadly conceived transatlantic generic hybridity characterizes much of the most widely read verse of nineteenth-century America. Mary Loeffelholz has written compellingly about the popularity of poetic story collections, what she calls “nested anthology forms,” a term that “comprises a wide range of nineteenth-century literary works that in one way or another assemble discrete, formally demarcated, and formally diverse shorter poems—lyrics or ballads, conventionally—within a longer narrative setting or into a sequence marked by formal variation among its constituent poems.”22 Many—perhaps even most—of the period’s poetic bestsellers fit into this category. Thus Whittier’s Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl (1866) records the stories exchanged before the fire by a rural New England family over the course of a particularly harsh winter storm; the title of his subsequent poem, The Tent on the Beach (1867), similarly indicates the effort to collect and shelter (albeit perhaps temporarily) a diverse set of speakers and the tales they tell. Several of these works also seem conscious efforts at bringing together the Old and New Worlds, both reflecting and predicting poetic developments in Britain. In

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Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863; second series 1870; third series 1872–3), another compendium poem that combined earlier works (such as “Paul Revere’s Ride”) and new ones, one of the storytellers assembled at the Inn is a Spanish Jew who anticipates the terrain of The Spanish Gypsy, and one of the tales, “The Saga of King Olaf,” relates a narrative that could have formed part of The Earthly Paradise. Loeffelholz suggests the connections between such nested anthologies and the world of the eclectics described by McGill when she writes of them as “an experimental genre aimed at comprehending and, in some instances, actively reforming the print-based liberal public sphere.” She also notes the genre’s link to the novel, citing “anthology form’s characteristic reframing of languages by other languages” as an echo of “Bakhtin’s famous description of the novel: here ‘discourse not only represents, but is itself represented.’”23 The versenovels that I study here can generally be considered as a subcategory of the nested anthology form in which the “narrative setting” is also a novelistic plot, since almost every American verse-novel I have found is rough-mixed (in David Duff ’s terms) by virtue of the songs and ballads scattered through it. Crucially, as Loeffelholz argues, the popularity of this form contradicts the account of American poetry that stresses “the originary moment of ‘our’ rupture with Europe” and “find[s] it in Whitman’s break with traditional poetic form and its alignment, according to Whitman, with the upsurge of American democracy.” In place of Whitmanian “poetic antiformalism with a democratic poetics of immediate presence,” Loeffelholz suggests a kind of hyper-formalist “transatlantic field”—one that she connects back to the “fecundity of nineteenth-century prosody” in Britain.24 In other words, rather that seeking in Whitman an originating genius for an American poetry rooted in free verse, Loeffelholz would have us look for stronger connections to a transatlantic tradition. Whereas “In Democratic Vistas, Whitman argues that reading feudally-inspired British novels in cheap US reprint editions has tainted the average American citizen,”25 this group of American writers found inspiration for American democracy in a wide variety of transatlantic sources. Whereas Whitman once advised writers to “Make no quotations or references to others,”26 poets working with such anthology forms actively sought out and incorporated the work of others, creating poetic quilts from the scraps they had accumulated. One might for that matter consider their approach as methodologically akin to the scrapbooks that Ellen Gruber Garvey has identified as key to how Americans processed a world newly inundated with print culture.27 Again, Longfellow proves vital to this narrative: Christoph Irmscher has described how “Longfellow, who had once too advocated an American poetry ‘as original, characteristic, and national’ as possible, had meanwhile [by the late

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1840s] reached a different conclusion. If Whitman was hoping that, with his active help, American literature would eventually become ‘distinct’ from all others, Longfellow favored ‘indistinctness’—a kind of widely travelled linguistic cosmopolitanism—as one of the assets of a truly ‘American’ tradition in literature.”28 As the poet wrote in 1847, “Much is said nowadays of a National Literature. Does it mean anything? Such a literature is the expression of national character. We have or shall have, a composite one; embracing French, Spanish, Irish, English, Scotch, and German peculiarities. Whoever has within himself most of these is the truly national writer;—in other words, whoever is the most universal, is also the most national.”29 Longfellow’s cosmopolitanism was put into practice by his translation of European materials into an American idiom (as Irmscher describes, Longfellow was also a committed translator of poetry from foreign tongues, and his own works were frequently translated). Of course, such “translation” could seem precariously close to plagiarism if unacknowledged, and the poet endured several accusations along these lines. Most famous among them was “The Little Longfellow War,” as his accuser Edgar Allan Poe termed the attacks he launched in a series of articles in the Evening Mirror in 1846. But, as McGill argues, at the end of one of the most pressing assaults on Longfellow’s methods, Poe nevertheless finds himself identifying the tendency toward plagiarism with the true poetic spirit, which is revealed as what McGill terms “a primary vulnerability to imprinting.”30 After all, if texts belonged to readers, as she propounds, they could also belong to writers: the culture of reprinting encouraged a kind of collaborative approach to authorship, whereby (as we shall see when I turn to the poems) American writers borrowed heavily from European models. The characteristically intertextual nature of versenovels had made them especially vulnerable to accusations of plagiarism even before their arrival on American shores: Owen Meredith was accused of having borrowed too much from George Sand’s Lavinia for the plot of Lucile (an episode that was covered in the periodical press on both sides of the Atlantic and necessitated commentary by Meredith in his preface to later editions31); even Barrett Browning found herself responding privately to comments on the similarity between her verse-novel and Jane Eyre, with their overlapping fires (of Thornfield and Leigh Hall) and blindings (of Mr. Rochester and Romney Leigh).32 But American practitioners of the form generally seem less anxious, in the Bloomian sense, in their borrowings; rather than attempting to best their literary precursors, they appear eager to embrace and resituate them. There were, of course, exceptions. The New York-born Laughton Osborne decided to preface his verse-novel Alice, or The Painter’s Story

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(1867) with an Advertisement describing his extended transatlantic process of composition and his efforts to publish the poem in England (he began writing it in London and sent early drafts both to Moxon and to Chapman and Hall) in order to deny charges of plagiarism that he feared would be leveled against him following the recent publication of a novel that had a similar plot and heroine. And his text itself includes a long explanatory footnote to a pair of lines that he recognized as perilously close to a famous couplet from Longfellow (Longfellow: “Where the brook and river meet / Womanhood and Childhood fleet”; Osborne: “Where life’s river makes division, / Womanhood and childhood meet”).33 The note mentions a charge of plagiarism raised against his earlier verse drama, Virginia (1847), but he may well also have been recalling the brouhaha surrounding Lucile. Alice, however, can be seen as an exception that proves the rule. Before my picture of American poetry as a well-stitched crazy quilt becomes too comfortable, though, I should point out that McGill argues that some of the most radical elements characterizing the American literary field had shifted by the period with which I am here concerned. She notes how “literary markets became centralized and literary culture became stratified in the early 1850s,” undercutting both the regionalism and the leveling impact that she sees as characteristic of the previous era.34 Richard Brodhead has also claimed that after mid-century—just as verse-novels started to appear—divisions between high and low culture began to emerge in the American periodical press, as seen, for example, in the way the newly founded Atlantic Monthly defined itself in contrast to the populism of the “story-papers.” Thus “the same reorganization that stabilized institutional support for writing in America in the 1850s and early 1860s also stratified the field of writing—laid the basis for separate modes of literary production to produce separate bodies of writing to separate social publics.” In the process, according to Brodhead, Europe was transformed into a symbol of high culture: consider how transatlantic travel becomes a marker of class, an American version of the “Grand Tour” familiar from the works of Henry James, or even from Amy’s European journey in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868, 1869).35 So a reference to Aurora Leigh in an American literary work of the 1860s might function differently from a citation of one of Dickens’s earlier novels in a text from the early 1850s, say: it may carry with it a whiff of status. I am reminded of Henry James’s comments in 1865, reviewing the appearance of another mid-century Aurora, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd: “The great public, in the first place, is made up of a vast number of little publics, very much as our Union is made up of States, and it is necessary to consider which of these publics is Miss Braddon’s. We

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can best define it with the half of a negative. It is that public which reads nothing but novels, and yet which reads neither George Eliot, George Sand, Thackeray, nor Hawthorne.”36 Still, it is I believe justified to see the verse-novel as a form that took hold with authors partly through their ambitions to combat these changes—including by appealing to readers not only of both Eliot and Braddon but also of both novels and verse. Again, we can make an analogy between the rise of the verse-novel and Longfellow’s efforts, what Irmscher suggestively terms his “middlebrowsing.”37 Irmscher uses the neologism to link Longfellow’s appreciation for the observations of others (as opposed to championing Romantic or modernist originality) to his ability—even concerted exertions—to reach all audiences, whether high- or lowbrow, elite or popular.38 In fact, already in 1918, Elizabeth Nitchie remarked on the phenomenon of the novel in verse in America as an effort to blend popular sentiment and highbrow realism, as so many of the bestselling novelists of the day were successfully doing on both sides of the Atlantic.39 But, as Nitchie (who was writing under the looming shadow of the Great War) also realized, the coincidence of the highpoint of popularity of the genre with the period of the Civil War also plays a role here. In a passing remark, she postulates that an “impetus” “seemed to have been given to narrative verse by the war,”40 often taking the form of versenovels that directly addressed both the conflict and Reconstruction. Predictably, perhaps, many of these works focus on plots of reunion, following in the footsteps not only of recent poems like Evangeline and Aurora Leigh but also of the Odyssey, the great post-war epic. Consider John Malone Dagnall’s Daisy Swain: The Flower of Shenandoah, A Tale of the Rebellion (1865). Dagnall attempts to lay blame for the war equally between Northern “fanatics” and Southern “demagogues” as he tells the story (in blank-verse “chapters”) of the love between the Southern Daisy and the wounded Federal soldier, Athol, whom she nurses back to health. Separated by a ruthless rebel “Chieftain,” who imprisons her father for aiding the enemy, Daisy and her beloved Athol are reunited after many adventures on the field of battle, where he dies in her arms, in the manner of Evangeline.41 In Edmund Clarence Stedman’s Alice of Monmouth, An Idyl of the Great War (1863), a father and son are divided by the son’s marriage to Alice, a mere “rustic lass”—the marriage runs contrary to his father’s ambitions. But they are reunited at the camp-hospital bedside where his son lies dying when the father realizes how lovingly Alice has nursed him. Again, the concept of reunion shifts from a domestic to a national register: the poem concludes with a vision of a heavenly city in which “A thousand colors blend and interfuse / An aureate wave on wave ascending higher,” predicting the time when the country will be drawn

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into “a pure and holier union.” But the “aureate wave” and hints of a New Jerusalem also bring to mind Stedman’s enthusiastic reception of Aurora Leigh (mentioned above) and his sense that the energies of the British verse-novel were well suited to American themes.42 The work that perhaps most obviously exhibits this unifying impulse belongs to the period of Reconstruction. Josiah Gilbert Holland, a poet, novelist, and newspaper man (both editor and journalist) probably best known today for his wife’s friendship with Emily Dickinson, was also a practitioner in the verse-novel genre. Having found tremendous popular success with the form in Kathrina (1867)43 (which I will consider in more detail below), he returned to it in 1874 to tell a tale intended to heal the rifts left by the war. In the context of this study, The Mistress of the Manse is at first striking for its great prosodic and thematic debts to Patmore’s The Angel in the House. These are indicated not only by the title but also by the stanzaic measure: it is composed of iambic tetrameter cinquains, with an ababa rhyme scheme that adds a final fillip to Patmore’s basic unit (although, in the usual American manner, this measure is broken up by the metrically varied songs that intersperse the narrative).44 Even Holland’s four section names loudly echo The Angel ’s titles and use of divisions: “Prelude,” “Love’s Experiments,” “Love’s Philosophies,” “Love’s Consummations.” Moreover, the storyline mimics Patmore’s: we follow the trials and tribulations of a newlywed couple, Philip and Mildred (her name, too, is recycled from Patmore), as they attempt to negotiate their roles in marriage. Over the course of the verse-novel, which begins in the antebellum period, Holland tells a Patmorean story about the growth of nuptial love, so that by the poem’s middle, Mildred has learned to be A woman, in her woman’s sphere, A loyal wife and worshipper, She only thirsted to appear As fair to him as he to her, And fairer still, from year to year.45

As these lines indicate, a large part of this verse-novel’s lesson concerns the articulation and maintenance of gender roles as love grows through the institution of marriage. In the beginning, Mildred has yet to discover her proper “sphere” or occupation. She muses, “Am I a dew-drop in a rose, With no significance apart? Must I but sparkle in repose Close to its folded, fragrant heart, Its peerless beauty to disclose?” (31)

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Left to fill the time as her husband pursues his work as a minister (“Your breezy robe, your cheerful tone, // As through our pretty home you speed / The busy ministries of life, / Will stir me swifter than my creed,” he tries to reassure her [21]), she decides to take up study: “She thought to match him as a man! / His books should be her daily bread” (71). But when she peruses the books of philosophy and theology that line his shelves, she finds herself repelled by them. Instead, she is attracted to an “ancient volume” containing an “Eastern tale” (81, 83). This she proceeds to read—and Holland proceeds to narrate. The inset tale is indicated metrically by a shift to fourteener triplets. It introduces “Selim, the haughty Jehangir, the Conqueror of the Earth,” and his Empress Nourmahal, who sings a song-within-the-tale to comfort him in his general weariness (83).46 Her song returns to the tetrameter, as though to emphasize its connection to Holland’s larger narrative, although that tetrameter is now trochaic and the stanzas add a sixth line.47 It offers a parable of union, relating the marriage between two glendoveers (sprites), a red and blue. The pair initially debate as to which is the more beautiful, but the issue is resolved (literally) when the two blend into purple: Then they knew that both were wrong, And in sympathy of sorrow Learned that each was only strong In the power to lend and borrow,— That the purple never grew But by grace of red to blue. (95)

“Hearts and wings again united, / Red and blue in purple blent, / And their holy troth replighted,” the couple fly away to live happily together for thousands of years until they are translated into banks of violets on their death (96) (Patmore had used both banks and butterflies to symbolize the growth and rebirth of the soul in The Angel ). And Mildred is quick to apply the tale’s lesson: If blue and red in Hindostan Were blue and red at home, she knew That she—a woman, he—a man, Could never wear the royal hue Till blue and red together ran[.] (101)

So far so Angel-ic. But in the context of a verse-novel that is as much about resolving disputes between the North and the South as about figuring out the proper relations between man and woman, the lesson in

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blending takes on other hues: what Holland (by the poem’s end) calls the “Northern blue and Southern brown” (239) emerge as the work’s most important colors. A version of the desired melding of both pairs of colors appears in the description of Philip and Mildred’s children, whose quasiracial mix seems there in part to displace a more politically charged kind of miscegenation: And eyes were black, and eyes were blue, And blood of mother and of sire, Each to its native humor true, Blent Northern force with Southern fire In strength and beauty, strange and new. (175)

From the start, Holland has emphasized that Mildred is a Southerner and that the sense of newness that accompanies her marriage is heightened by the move to her Northern husband’s domain: “Fine feathers, and a Southern bird!” she overhears her husband’s parishioners complaining (45). So when she attempts to negotiate gender in the early portions of the poem, the language of dominion registers racially, as well; when she asks herself, for example, “Why should a woman stoop to take / The poor endowment of a slave,” one can’t help but hear a hint of the debates concerning slavery that would soon (in the timeline of the poem) erupt into the Civil War (47). Similarly, when Mildred brings home a poor child she sees in the streets to give her something to eat, the picture we get of the “dark brown hand in snowy glove” seems intended to appease not only Philip’s parishioners, who watch “in amaze,” but also the Northern element of the poem’s audience, who might likewise be suspicious of this Southern bride (63). (While Holland supported abolition, it should be noted that he has no desire to contend seriously with the evil of slavery here: his energies are all bent toward reconciliation.) So we are prepared when, in stark contrast to Patmore’s aggressive sidelining of the Crimean War, history intrudes in the work’s final section, “Love’s Consummation,” to disturb the quiet domesticity. The poem also shifts noticeably from an argument based in metaphor (in addition to the song of the blue and red sprites already mentioned, the section titled “Love’s Philosophies” concludes with a rather Tennysonian extended discussion of the masculine mountain’s need for the feminine valley [142–8]) to one based in plot. The storytelling impulse of the versenovel takes over. For the Southern-born Mildred, slavery is a paternalist charitable institution, and “an Afric was a child— / A charge in other ages thrown / On Christian honor” (189). But when war commences and her

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husband takes up the cause, she has to contend both with a different view of the practice and with her torn allegiances: And Philip charged a deadly sin Upon that beautiful domain, Condemning all who dwelt therein, And branding with the awful stain Her friends, and all her dearest kin. (191)

When Philip goes off to war, Mildred fears he will face her family on the field of battle. Instead, though, her brother, who had been taken prisoner after being injured, escapes and comes to her for protection. Meanwhile Philip is badly wounded at Gettysburg. He is transported back home, where his wife has been defending the house from neighbors who want her to relinquish her brother, now lying on his deathbed. Philip enters the room: A tottering figure reached the door; The brother fell upon the bed, And, in each other’s arms once more, With breast to breast, and head to head,— Twin barks, they drifted from the shore. (237)

The scene offers a homosocial riff on the deathbed reunion of Evangeline’s conclusion (perhaps buoyed by a bit of “Morte d’Arthur”). Finally, the brothers-in-law and enemies-in-arms are buried side by side in the graveyard, “Twin coffins and a single grave,” covered by the “neutral soil” of “A woman’s love” (239). The poem ends with a vision of a peaceful United States reaching “From rock-bound Massachusetts Bay / To San Francisco’s Golden Gate” and downward to “The Mississippi’s boiling tide,” and with a picture of Mildred, now in her “silver age,” listening to her eldest son preach from the pulpit at which his father had stood at the poem’s beginning (243–5). When Emerson declared that “America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres,” his call was famously answered by Whitman in Leaves of Grass (1855), a poem that largely eschews novelism, for all its efforts at speaking with what Wordsworth had called “the real language of men” and its democratizing energy.48 Whitman recognized with the anti-narrative drift of his titular “leaves” that long form poetry struggles formally with unity (as did Poe, who, as noted in my Introduction, vehemently denied the possibility of writing a unified long poem). But The Mistress of the Manse attempts to

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achieve its concluding image of e pluribus unum through rhetorical strategies offered by the verse-novel form: its citational capabilities, its play with the gendered associations of the form, its combination of lyrical or metaphorical moments with narrative energies, its accessible yet elevated tonal register, its melding of realism and romance.49 This is not, of course, to argue that Holland’s poem is in any qualitative sense the equal of Whitman’s. While the poetry is often serviceable, it never soars; its sentiments alternate between saccharine and offensive; and the work’s interest lies rather in its themes and the methods Holland uses to solve the problems he faced than in the merits of his achievements. But the fact that the generic capacities of the verse-novel seemed to offer solutions is the point I wish to highlight here. In the rest of this chapter, I look more carefully at three American verse-novels, all heavily indebted to Aurora Leigh, which exemplify, in variously negotiating that debt, how the form was used to navigate the particular cultural terrain of the post-bellum period. For these writers, verse-novels promised peculiar purchase on their American publics.

III. KATHRINA: MEDIATORS, ADMIXTURES, AND MENSTRUUMS An earlier and even more popular work by Holland engages directly with the challenge of writing poetry for an American audience.50 Kathrina: Her Life and Mine, in a Poem is a Künstlerroman, narrated by its poet, Paul, in four blank-verse sections separated by three rhymed lyrics (in different measures) that appear to be the narrator’s compositions and register his emotional state (they are titled “Complaint,” “A Reflection,” and “Despair”). The verse-novel tells the tale of the poet’s education in art and faith (which prove to be interdependent) and, implicitly, of the poem’s composition, developments that occur under the aegis and through the tutelage of the titular Kathrina, who becomes Paul’s wife midway through the story and whose death closes the narrative. In the process, we also track Paul’s movements from his early years in Northampton, Massachusetts—where he loses faith (like the speaker of Maud ) in the aftermath of first his father’s and later his mother’s suicide, and where he meets and marries the devout Kathrina—to Broadway, where he finds himself, in terms that sound Whitmanesque, “A unit in a million.”51 But while Kathrina ostensibly instructs readers that poetry must be motivated by Christian belief to have meaning, an equally urgent and more vexed question asked by the poem proves to be how,

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and even whether, the poet should attempt to reach that million, about the kind of poetry fit for a diverse democratic society. Although the occasional line may ring of Whitman, Holland’s overall approach in Kathrina is much more indebted to Barrett Browning—and to Wordsworth and Milton, two poets who themselves stood behind Aurora Leigh. As Mary Loeffelholz notes, not only does he masculinize (and thus conventionalize) the subject of Barrett Browning’s novel-poem, similarly melding The Prelude’s tale of “the growth of the poet’s mind” with a novelistic courtship plot, but Holland also structures his work by staging a series of recurring debates between the male and female protagonists about the proper role for art in society.52 In the first of these—the lovers’ introduction at the house of Kathrina’s aunt, who had been a friend of Paul’s mother—Kathrina sets the terms of the debate by dividing humanity into three categories, “artist, teacher, taught,” here represented, as she argues, by “yourself, myself, my aunt” (97). We can see in these three categories a surprising revision of the perennial question of the poet’s need for a public. Milton found “fit audience, . . . though few” for his great work;53 Wordsworth claimed a sympathetic audience in Coleridge and Dorothy. The concept had proved rather more unsettling for Aurora Leigh, who discovers that her public success does not satisfy her craving for a perfect audience of one in Romney: We women are too apt to look to One, Which proves a certain impotence in art. We strain our natures at doing something great, Far less because it’s something great to do, Than haply that we, so, commend ourselves As being not small, and more appreciable To some one friend. We must have mediators Betwixt our highest conscience and the judge[.] (V.43–50)

While the male poet, Aurora implies, can be satisfied with fame, the female poet inevitably seeks a more private love and understanding, one available only through the orchestrations of the courtship plot. But if Barrett Browning’s poem worries over the proper relations between art and love, Holland’s concerns have more to do with the conditions of writing and publishing poetry in contemporary America. Holland—in Kathrina’s voice—picks up on Barrett Browning’s terms in order to argue that the male poet, too, requires mediation to reach his goal (in this regard Kathrina distinguishes poetry from the visual arts, which “ask no mediator but the light” [106]). In placing herself among the audience for poetry, Kathrina also assumes a surprising degree of agency

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and power for the woman reader. She does so by ranking herself, for all her youth in this scene, not among the “taught,” like her elderly aunt, but among the “teachers,” or, to use another word that she embraces, the “critics.” The “greatest artists,” she explains, “need the life, If not the learning, of the cultured few Who understand them. If from out my book I gather that which feeds me, and inspires A nobler, sweeter beauty in my life, And give my life to those who cannot win From the dim text such boon, then have I borne A blessing from the book, and been its best Interpreter. The bread that comes from heaven Needs finest breaking. Some there doubtless are— Some ready souls—that take the morsel pure Divided to their need; but multitudes Must have it in admixtures, menstruums, And forms that human hands or human life Have moulded.” . . . (107–8)

One might recall the “base interpreters,” like Vivien, who pose such a threat to the social realm in Idylls of the King (MV 793); Kathrina is their antidote. In so defining herself, though, Kathrina emphasizes that the traffic on which this poem depends occurs not only between what Aurora had described as “our highest conscience and the judge” (i.e., God) but also, and necessarily, between the artist and his public. “You take it [that is, inspiration] at first hand, / And we from yours: the multitude from ours,” Kathrina explains of her mediating function, noting that the “music of the masters” also depends upon being “publish[ed] to the world” by others (104). Moreover, while her role may be distinct from that of the poet, her methods for rendering the bread of heaven digestible seem to be closely connected to forms like that of the poem she inhabits, “forms that human hands or human life / Have moulded.” “Let us all aspire rather to Life,” Barrett Browning had enjoined, and she had followed her prescription by creating a curious “admixture” in her “novel-poem.”54 Indeed, the somewhat obscure and curiously gendered term menstruums (a solvent, but it’s hard not to hear the gynecological meaning) appears chosen to suggest the degree to which Kathrina serves not only as wife to the poet but as mother to his poems: she has “borne / A blessing from the book.” If the language seems feminized, though, the schema she lays out also conflates her role as representative of a female reading public (Kathrina and her aunt) with various occupations of the predominantly male

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publishing industry—critic, publisher, and (as we shall see) editor— without which poetry would never reach the social world. The worry over interpretation plays into the scene in which Paul asks Kathrina to marry him, a scene that includes the only metrically distinct poem in the work to be fully integrated into its plotting. Paul intends these verses, a kind of supernatural lyrical ballad, as an offer of marriage. They tell the story of a young man who is stolen from his ship by phantoms and imprisoned under the sea, where he awaits rescue by the fair maiden hovering in the air above him. The poem concludes, however, without resolution, in a vision of “dumb despair” that he wishes Kathrina to apply to his own position as a lover terrified by the need to propose: “Would God that his coward lips might dare To utter the word to the angel fair, That is life or death to him!” (131)

But ironically, given her self-vaunted role as “best / Interpreter,” Kathrina fails to catch his drift: “Why do you write such things,” she demands, “—or writing such / Leave them so incomplete?” (132). Holland’s compulsion here to preserve Kathrina’s modesty inhibits her role as critic. It is only after Paul has offered a gloss, identifying himself as the young man and her as the angel, that she comprehends “Like the flash / Of the hot lightning, the significance” of the poem (133). The episode hardly bodes well for Paul’s future efforts to reach his audience, or for Kathrina’s ability to help him. As Aurora had lamented, “I must fail, / Who fail at the beginning to hold and move / One man” (V.30–2). But in both Paul’s and Aurora’s cases, it is worth recognizing that narrative is able to step in and push aside the curtain obscuring the truth of the poetry. Characters can respond to the impasse; events can lead one into the next to overcome the obstruction of understanding; story can provide a solution. In other words, the form of the verse-novel itself succeeds here, offering the crucial admixture to the poetry. Initially, the complacent happiness that Paul discovers in marriage threatens his production. Like Tennyson’s Geraint, he seems unmanned by domesticity. Eventually, though, a renewed thirst for recognition impels him to move the family to Manhattan, where he resumes writing. While it owes something to Aurora Leigh’s picture of literary society in London, Holland’s description of the process of publishing constitutes by far the most vivid portion of the poem. This process begins in lyric privacy: “I had hoped / To form and finish my projected work / Within, and by, myself” (198). But Paul is forced to admit the need for a more social kind of production. As if acknowledging the legitimacy of the role

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she had earlier ascribed to herself, he requests that Kathrina serve as a pre-critic—that is, as an editor: I saw That I should find no critic in the world More competent or more severe. I said, Gulping my pride: “Better this ordeal In friendly hands, before the time of types, Than afterward, in hands of enemies.” So, from that reading, it was understood Between us that, whenever I essayed Revising and retouching, I should know Her intimate impressions, and receive Her frank suggestions. . . . (200)

As Loeffelholz recognizes, the poem’s “poetics of editing” emerges from the logic of Kathrina’s mediating function.55 Paul acknowledges, in terms echoing both Paradise Lost and Aurora Leigh, that Kathrina “Held God’s place in me and the multitude’s” (201). But while he as yet continues to resist God’s place in the process, he soon comes to feel the need for that multitude: “I must have recognition in the voice / Of public praise,” he admits to Kathrina (201). So, after a process of “proofs and latest polishing / Of words and phrases—work I shared with her” (202), he arrives at what Holland memorably calls “the time of types”: the book finally appears before the public. Seeing the volume in a storefront window while out on a walk with his daughter, Paul announces, “I’m in the market now!” before promptly entering the store to buy it, thus enacting his realization (203). His fate, though, rests with the wider public. Holland again provides particulars, detailing the poet’s anxious wait for the first review to appear and then offering a significant excerpt from that review, even describing how the critic uses “a change of type / To mark the places where the editor / Had caught a fancy hiding,” or “to emphasize / Felicities of diction that were stiff / In Roman verticals, but grew divine / At the Italic angle” (208). To highlight his awareness of his own debt to his British precursors, Holland concludes with the critic’s exhortation urging “all Americans / All friends of cis-Atlantic literature, / To buy the book” (208). But when Paul expresses delight at the critic’s admiration of his style, Kathrina pours water on his enthusiasm. She points to the fact that the reader has also identified the poem’s aggressive avoidance of moral purpose; “It is enough for God / That they are beautiful, and hold his thought / In fine embodiment,” the critic writes of Paul’s verses (207). And, on one level,

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Holland clearly intends the review to advance Kathrina’s (and Kathrina’s) religious argument: poetry must be motivated by religious ends to be worthy of the name. Yet the effect of all the minutiae chronicling how the message is mediated shifts the focus from the question of ends to that of means. The medium becomes inextricable from the message. “[T]en long years” of literary success follow, in which Paul “pour[s his] poems with redundancy / upon the world” (216), increasingly ignoring the wife who had enabled him and gradually discovering fame to be distasteful. In fact, Paul eventually comes to feel that, as he tells Kathrina, My verse has been Shaped evermore to meet the people’s thought. That which was highest, grandest in my art I have not reached, and have not tried to reach. I have but touched the surfaces of things That meet the common vision . . . (223)

Following this revelation, Paul tries to write a different kind of poem, one that ignores the public, a pure lyric expression of his inspired thoughts and feelings. This work, though, proves impenetrable even to its author, once he has stepped back from the actual excitement of the moment of composition. The experience is another epiphany: Then the first I learned Where language finds its bound—learned that beyond The range of human commerce, save by force, It never moves, nor lingers in the realm It thus invades, a moment, if the voice Of human commerce speak not the demand;— That language is a thing of use;—that thought Which seeks a revelation, first must seek Adjustment in the scale of human need, Or find no fitting vehicle. And more: That the great Possible which lies outside The range of commerce is identical With the stupendous Infinite of God, Which only comes in glimpses . . . (246–7)

He is once more “in the market,” but this time around, the revelation does not seem subject to the same ironizing consciousness. The change comes

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through his new sense of the relationship between form and reform. After his first book had appeared, Kathrina had upbraided her husband for failing to recognize that “service of mankind” (226)—and behind that, service to God—must undergird a work of art to render it worthy. Recall Aurora Leigh’s dictum, “Art’s a service” (IX.915). But Paul now discovers that the need for “human commerce” allows poetry to be part of a service economy. Earlier, the sense of service had been located by Holland (if not by Paul) in Kathrina herself, in her mediating function that could render what is “grandest” accessible to “the common vision”; medium and message had coalesced in her character. Now, though, Paul has a Goldilocks moment: poetry should be neither too hot nor too cold, neither too rarefied nor too common. We have entered the middlebrow terrain of the verse-novel. In so defining the true task of the poet and the proper realm of poetry, Paul also subsumes into the work itself the mediating principle that had previously been embodied in Kathrina. If the poetry can be crafted to reach right from God to the multitudes, what need for “best / Interpreters” to render it accessible? In other words, Kathrina can now be replaced by Kathrina. This is in fact what happens in the work’s suggestively titled final part. “Consummation” describes how Kathrina succumbs to a lingering illness, the effect of which is to allow her to be consumed into textuality. An uptick in Holland’s allusions to his poem’s literary precursor, Aurora Leigh, fosters this impression; as Loeffelholz notes, the final vision of the City of God (and Paul’s mother within it) that the dying Kathrina shares with her grieving husband echoes the concluding description of the New Jerusalem that Aurora had offered to the blind Romney.56 The scene is even set, like the end of Aurora Leigh, on a June day that returns the poet’s thoughts “to life’s bright morning, and the Junes / That flooded with their wealth of life and song / The valley of my birth” (264). And as Kathrina fades away, Aurora rises: “In the East, / Tinged with the golden dawn, the morning star / Was blazing in its glory” (285). The sense of Kathrina’s textualization appears most vividly, however, in the poem’s final lines, which serve as a strange kind of anti-envoi: So here I give The gospel of her precious, Christian life. I owe it to herself, and to the world. Grateful for all her tender ministry In life and death, I bring these leaves, entwined With her own roses, dewy with my tears, And lay them as the tribute of my love Upon the grave that holds her sacred dust. (287)

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The dead body and the pages of the poem blend together in these lines, even as Kathrina’s life has been translated into those pages as the “gospel” of Kathrina. As Loeffelholz sees it, Kathrina’s death enacts her “selfdeclared mission to bear the word in embodied form between the elite male artist and his mass audience,” and the earlier imagery about rendering the bread of culture digestible had prepared the way for this move by hinting at how “Christlike, she incarnates [Paul’s] poetic word.”57 But in straying so far from the detailed descriptions of publication offered earlier, this conclusion suggests that the process of transubstantiation may have been incomplete. What kind of publication do we witness here? Paul may claim a debt to “the world,” but where are the readers for such a gospel, and how will its good word be spread to them? That is to say, how did the book we hold in our hands ever get here, if Paul abandoned its leaves in the graveyard? “Do you see this . . . Book?” asks Robert Browning at the beginning of his own effort at bringing dead bodies back to life to speak to the present. But here, at the end of his poem, Holland chooses to return the pages of his work to the body from which he had drawn them, leaving it a mystery how they have come to circulate in the public sphere. IV. AN IDYL OF WORK: “TO SOME NEW WORLD / THEY SEEMED TRANSLATED” Lucy Larcom’s An Idyl of Work also adapts Aurora Leigh to a distinctively American setting and for an American audience. Indeed, much like Longfellow, Larcom views the translation of European materials as essential to the making of a democratic public sphere. While Holland’s male poet began by attempting a Wordsworthian egotistical sublime, Larcom presents us from the outset with a more collaborative compositional practice through her quintet of female protagonists (the poem is dedicated “To Working-Women, by One of Their Sisterhood”). Esther Hale, Eleanor Gray, Minta Summerfield, Ruth Woodburn, and Isabel (the only girl not to be given the realist marker of a surname, her “plot,” as we shall see, is also the most sensational) meet in a textile mill in Lowell, Massachusetts. Much of the tale describes the girls’ factory life as they work at the looms, talk and read in their dormitory rooms and in the nearby woods, and attend the various Sunday services belonging to their different denominations. Larcom models the mill on that in which she herself worked as an operator during her youth in the 1830s and 1840s (when she also wrote extensively for the Lowell Offering, the mill girls’ periodical), an episode recorded in the book she is best known for, A New England Girlhood (1889). Even though it imparts a similarly nostalgic and rosy view of

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factory life, An Idyl of Work approaches the subject less straightforwardly than the later memoir, embracing a self-consciously mixed form. It comprises twelve iambic pentameter sections liberally interspersed with the hymns, sermons, ballads, and sonnets that are sung, recited, and occasionally composed by the girls (Esther and Ruth both write verse). In her prefatory essay to the poem, Larcom tries to preempt criticism by blatantly denying any effort at “artistic unity” in her long poem.58 But while she may not want to “claim completeness either as poem or as narrative” (vii), in combining the two modes, Larcom seeks a deliberately hybridized “more perfect union” on a national scale. The poem’s focus on female education and its mixed generic template most obviously resemble not Aurora Leigh but rather Tennyson’s The Princess: A Medley (1847). This early experiment in hybridity had combined blank-verse narrative sections with intercalary songs in a fashion anticipating the strategies of later verse-novelists, and, as Mary Loeffelholz has pointed out, Larcom seems to gesture toward Tennyson’s generic tag for his work.59 In a scene typical of An Idyl ’s interest in the transmission of texts, Esther pulls from her shelf “a strange medley book of prose and rhyme” from which to read something to Ruth, who is wallowing in recollections of an unfaithful lover (36). But while the term medley does have a Tennysonian ring (like idyl, for that matter60), here it has found a more local form in the quintessentially American scrapbook Esther has assembled, Cut from odd magazines, or pages dim Of yellow journals, long since out of print; And pasted in against the faded ink Of an old log-book, relic of the sea[.] (36)

This relic appears to belong to McGill’s culture of reprinting; the seafaring nature of the book itself hints that the texts Esther has assembled have travelled far. Still, the ballad Esther selects to read, while a product of the seas, comes from regional waters (very close to home, as it happens, since Larcom, whose father had been a ship captain, is reprinting her own work61). Esther had first tried to boost her friend’s morale with a Wordsworthian lesson in stoic dutifulness by reading “Laodamia” from her prized volume of Wordsworth’s poetry; Larcom quotes the lines, “Learn by a mortal yearning to ascend / Seeking a higher object” (35). The ballad, “Peggy Bligh’s Voyage,” proves less susceptible to Ruth’s dangerous tendency toward “romantic idolatry.”62 It tells how an old New England “witchwoman” exacts revenge on the captain who refuses her passage (39); both the narrative method and message of active female resistance offer

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models for how Ruth might pull herself out of her depression. (In another Romantic translation, Larcom steals Peggy’s surname from Captain Bligh, the notorious victim of the mutiny on the Bounty in 1789 that served as the starting point for Byron’s The Island [1823].) But the formula used by Larcom in An Idyl of Work borrows heavily, too, from a different kind of narrative: the novel. In an early scene the girls are visited at work by a passing British tourist who, as Loeffelholz surmises, may be assumed to be none other than Charles Dickens, making his inspection of American factory conditions on his 1842 tour of the United States (78).63 He is accompanied by the flirtatious Isabel’s would-be gentleman-lover; the episode’s heavy plotting highlights the moment’s novelistic effect. An Idyl of Work can thus also be considered as a verse-novel. In fact, both Loeffelholz (who looks at it as an example of the American “anthology poem”) and Sylvia Jenkins Cook (who calls it an attempt at American epic) have recognized how An Idyl restages the concerns of Barrett Browning’s “novel-poem,” Aurora Leigh.64 Harriet Beecher Stowe had already dubbed Larcom “an American Mrs. Browning”;65 Larcom appears to have wanted to prove herself worthy of the name. The debt to Aurora Leigh emerges in the opening scene, which introduces us to Esther, Eleanor, and Isabel as Three maidens in their different maiden-bloom; Three buds in their rough calyxes,—for sweet And rosebud-like is girlhood everywhere; In culture or wild freedom, lovely still With promises of all the undawned years. (11)

Those “undawned years” remind us of Aurora’s own promise, even as this “latter April” morning anticipates the June mornings of Barrett Browning’s heroine’s birthday, when she finds herself surrounded by “rosebuds reddening where the calyx split” (II.12). The bud of girlhood, Larcom insists, can be as lovely in the “wild freedom” of an American rose as in its more obviously “cultured” British form. Yet the scene that follows proves the distinction to be false: like the best roses (including Aurora herself ), these girls are hybrids. In place of a birthday celebration, though, her working girls enjoy a holiday from the looms granted by the spring floods. They spend their time talking among themselves. The topic of discussion will prove central to the poem as a whole and to the cultural task it takes on: temporarily sitting “idle as queens’ ladies,” as the narrator puts it, evoking Ruskin, they turn naturally to the question of what really constitutes a lady. Isabel asks her friend, who has just entered the girls’ room for a visit, “What ‘lady’ means: for, Minta Summerfield, / They say I’m like one; not the real

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thing!” (14). In characteristically teasing fashion, Minta passes the question on to Esther, the group’s wise mother hen: “Not know what ‘lady’ means, young Isabel, Seeing me straight before you? Esther Hale, The Lady Isabel doubts Lady Me! I’ve heard you called a walking dictionary,— Enlighten us, please!” (15)

In the context of a poem set among operatives in a textile mill, this question resonates, not least for how it echoes recent British novels. If her Christian name may conjure up Dickens’s Esther Summerson (both are self-sacrificing nurturers, and both end up marrying doctors), Esther’s surname, Hale, recalls Elizabeth Gaskell’s Margaret Hale, the heroine of another fiction of factory life in which questions of class loom large. Gaskell’s novel focuses on the relationship between “man” and “gentleman.” In North and South (1855), the well-born Margaret matures in understanding through her growing love for the manufacturer Thornton, whom she initially thinks “not quite a gentleman” and casually dismisses as “that man.” By novel’s end, though, she has learned that the latter term properly encompasses the meaning of the former, even as Thornton must come to recognize that his role of “master” does not make him different in kind from his “men.” The import of these categorizations appears in how they function in the final scene to resolve the novel’s many conflicts—of class, gender, and region. As Margaret and Thornton become engaged, he imagines her snobbish aunt’s reaction: “That man!” Margaret corrects him by predicting his mother’s response: “That woman!” In so doing, she relinquishes the primacy of the class-based categories of “lady” and “gentleman” that she had earlier held high, replacing them with the more fundamental types that can unite (the implication is) the divided nation, even as she and Thornton are joined in marriage.66 In Larcom’s verse-novel, though, the focus shifts from “gentleman” to “lady,” and the central protagonists have become the “hands.”67 While North and South, like its close contemporary Aurora Leigh, performs much of its ideological work through the mechanics of its central courtship plot, Larcom’s Idyl succeeds initially through its broad-spread translation of culture—as in its revisions to prior texts, including those of Gaskell and Barrett Browning. This process is in fact the real subject of Larcom’s first poem section. Thus if Isabel may have “had a lady painted on [her] brain / From English story-books” (14), Larcom adjusts the image by viewing it through her own many-faceted lens. Just as Minta jokes she will, Esther gives a “dictionary” definition for the word lady, but

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her gloss proves to be etymological; that is to say, what interests her is how ideas get translated through time and space, how they move from one language and culture into another: “ ‘Lady’ or ‘girl’ or ‘woman,’ Whichever word you choose,” said Esther, “each Means excellence and sweetness. ‘Lady,’ though, Can slip its true sense, leaving an outside Easy to imitate. At first it meant ‘Giver of loaves.’ . . . ”

And in a manner typical of how Larcom’s verse-novel operates, Esther follows this reference to the Anglo-Saxon root of the word by reciting a lyric debate among the Roman goddesses Minerva, Juno, and Venus as evidence of the perennial nature of the question and the shared culture on which Britain and America are founded. The goddesses look down to earth, seeking a “true lady,” but Answer came slowly From hemispheres two: Dead seemed the Old World, And heedless the New. (15)

Finally, though, they do discover what they seek in the New World, locating a series of mostly working women who give help to the needy: an urban woman who offers alms, a farm wife who nourishes her family, a teacher who educates the young. The moral of the story, Esther explains, is that, then as now, a lady is she who wears “‘Service’ for a badge” (21) (the term again recalls and revises Aurora Leigh’s dictum that “Art’s a service”). But the talk doesn’t rest there; rather, following Esther’s analysis of the poem, Eleanor calls out for a hymn, which Larcom records as another embedded lyric before she narrates how “psalms bubbled into songs, / Songs into ballads” (22). The flow of song in these lines implicitly—even onomatopoetically—mimics how the river rose, and downward bore Strange booty, stolen from the upper farms,— A fence, a hen-coop, torn roots of old trees, And once a little cottage, half unroofed.68 (22–3)

So while the current stops the mills’ looms and their production of textiles, it seems to propel the poem’s own textual work. This is the paradox implied by the verse-novel’s title: An Idyl of Work. The scene as

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a whole allegorizes the flow of culture from East to West and from the Old World to the New; the etymologically inflected “torn roots” and Wordsworthian ruined cottages remind us of the fragments out of which Larcom weaves her verse-novel. The detritus thus anticipates the bookshelf from which Esther will pull forth her “medley book” in order to read out the aforementioned “Peggy Bligh’s Voyage,” another interpolated poem. That ledge hovers like a kind of protecting aegis over the narrative. Still later in the poem, Larcom stops to describe the shelf ’s contents more fully: The bookshelf swung between Two simple prints,—the “Cotter’s Saturday Night” And the “Last Supper,” dear to Esther’s heart, Though scarce true to Da Vinci. On the shelves Maria Edgeworth’s “Helen” leaned against Thomas à Kempis. Bunyan’s “Holy War” And “Pilgrim’s Progress” stood up stiff between “Locke on the Understanding” and the Songs Of Robert Burns. The “Voices of the Night,” “Bridal of Pennacook,” “Paradise Lost,” With Irving’s “Sketch-Book,” “Ivanhoe,” Watts’s Hymns, Mingled in democratic neighborhood. (43)

This “democratic neighborhood” represents the poem’s ideal vision of American classlessness, in which a proper education in cultural literacy can turn all girls into ladies. As Loeffelholz observes, the mill girls’ “shared cultural capital” overlaps substantially with the content of Marian Erle’s nosegay of gleaned leaves in Aurora Leigh.69 But crucially, it also incorporates American poetry, works written by women, and even the American vernacular of the scrapbook. And, just as crucially, the shelf not only mimics but expands the scrapbook’s contents. If Miriam’s nosegay suggested a kind of forced lyricization, the mill girls suffer a similar fate, as we discover when Esther describes their reading practices. Despite a “rule / Against our reading in the mills” (28), she explains how we rebel; at least, evade. Few girls but keep some volume hid away For stealthy reading. Some tear out the leaves Of an old Bible, and so get the whole; For books, not leaves, are tabooed. Others paste The window-sills with poem, story, sketch: No one objects to papering bare walls. (129)

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Fragmentation may be practically enabling under such conditions, but the bookshelf itself, generically varied but composed of intact volumes, offers greater promise. These girls “tear out the leaves” in order to “get the whole.” Loeffelholz perceptively observes that “What circulates through Larcom’s Idyl is a shared mid-century Anglo-American dream of literary culture as a mediator of class division, a dream that Larcom articulates through the anthology-poem’s formal power of dramatizing the passage of poems from hand to working hand.”70 Yet I’d place greater emphasis on the narrative implications of Larcom’s “dramatizing” frame narrative: while Larcom may anthologize widely in An Idyl, she also uses a far more novelistic plot-framework than did many of her better-remembered male contemporaries, including Whittier and Longfellow. The term “lady” continues to facilitate the poem’s discussion of class when in the summer Esther and Eleanor accompany Minta to her home in the New Hampshire mountains, where she works seasonally as a schoolmistress. The girls hope to escape a threatened strike (unlike in North and South or Dickens’s Hard Times, this remains safely in the background of the narrative here) and improve Eleanor’s health (the highest born of the group, Eleanor’s “only heirloom from rich ancestors / Was slow consumption, hers by sure entail” [13]). There they are befriended by a wealthy older woman, Miriam Willoughby, in whom— while others may style her a “lofty aristocrat” (174)—the girls recognize a kindred spirit, since “Human need / With her, drowned out aristocratic claims” (160). And Miriam, for her part, considers the “two young millgirls” to be “ladies, both of them, / As I translate the word,” as she writes in a letter to her nephew Ralph, reminding us of the poem’s opening scene (114). On their arrival in the mountains, the narrator had used the same verb, describing the girls’ feeling that “To some new world / They seemed translated” (102). Loeffelholz details how this “new world” is in many ways an American, communal translation of the Wordsworthian landscape, through which the women walk and talk, discussing such subjects as the Brook Farm experiment (rejected as taking the communal ethos a step too far with its elimination of the private home [138]) and Minta’s dream of founding a school, after the fashion of Mount Holyoke, at which they will all teach (140).71 But Esther’s and Eleanor’s sense of translation also has something to do with the time and space the girls have now been granted to read wholes rather than parts. Eleanor tells how she relishes the opportunity to take in the longueurs of Wordsworth’s Excursion:

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More an Aurora than a Marian, Eleanor similarly inhabits a poem that, Larcom here intimates, will ideally be read start to finish, despite its “barren stretches.” Larcom also uses these portions of the poem to sound a note of caution: far from being a virgin territory or blank slate onto which only the best parts of Old World culture can easily be transcribed, the American landscape bears its own scars of overwriting. In a passage highlighting the poem’s foundation in a conventional analogy between textuality and weaving (notably, the analogy in this verse-novel works both as lyric metaphor and as narrative metonym), Esther laments the bloody mark with which the sin of slavery stains her work at the factory: “When I’ve thought, Miss Willoughby, what soil the cotton-plant We weave, is rooted in, what waters it,— The blood of souls in bondage,—I have felt That I was sinning against light, to stay And turn the accursed fibre into cloth For human wearing. . . . ” (135–6)

While not exactly excusing herself, she explains that her labor answers her “first wish”: “freedom for my books, / Freedom of my own movements” (136). She knows her compositions are rooted in the suffering of others, her freedom in their bondage. In a related vein, Miriam writes to her nephew of a “christening tour” which she and the girls essay. They complain that the surrounding hills suffer under the barest designations—like “‘White,’ ‘Black,’ ‘Green,’ ‘Blue,’ . . . obviously conferred” on the mountains “Out of the settlers’ poverty”—and they deplore the even “worse taste” exhibited in the “shower of Presidential surnames” scattered over the scenery. In place of such travesties, the women suggest native names:

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“we said the red man should receive His own again, and with Chocorua And Passaconaway, should Paugus stand. That crouching shape, a headless heap afar, Glittering as if with barbarous ornaments, Suits well the sachem whose wild howl resounds Through history like the war-whoop of the wind. And all that craggy chaos at his side Shall be the Wahwa Hills, for the grim chief Who after Paugus trails uncertainty Of blood-stained memory, in dim ruin lost. And that bright cone of perfect emerald Whose trout-streams flow through birchen intervales,— An angler’s Paradise,—that shall be called For Wannalancet, peacefullest of all The forest sagamores, the one who loved The white man best, found him most treacherous.” (112–13)

Such good intentions from three white women can hardly undo the treachery of the “white man.” Still, the passage shares with Brian Friel’s play Translations (1980) a concern for the violence of cultural imperialism and an awareness of the danger inherent in the process of translation itself. In the verse-novel’s final sections, though, plot, which has heretofore occupied the poem’s background, interrupts the intellectual reflections of the girls’ New Hampshire sojourn. Events speed up. While they are away, the threatened strike occurs, closing the mill and leaving Ruth and Isabel free—the latter to get into trouble when the wealthy man who had earlier admired her persuades her to elope to Boston, only to abandon her there. The verse-novel’s story culminates in this episode, which brings Esther to the city to find her friend (somewhat in the manner of Aurora’s quest for Marian in Paris). This she manages to do—thankfully, before Isabel has “fallen”—through her discovery that Isabel’s seducer is another nephew of Miriam’s, the good-for-nothing Rodney, whose precipitous and providential flight had been taken to escape imprisonment for embezzling. Esther is helped in the discovery by both Ralph, Miriam’s more responsible and hard-working nephew, and Dr. Mann, a character introduced earlier in the mill scenes as the friend of Esther’s clergyman and a distant cousin of Eleanor’s. If all this seems rather confusing, it is—and I haven’t even mentioned the fact that on the coach journey to Boston (we are reminded that the railway line has yet to stretch this far), Esther also encounters a couple in whom she recognizes the man who had earlier jilted Ruth and the girl for whom she had been jilted, now unhappily married. The general

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confusion stems not only from the rapidity of the plotting and the newly urban setting but also from the increased prominence of the male figures, who had previously hovered around the poem’s peripheries. Those men, like the rush of events, anticipate the need for closure. But here the poem’s multiple protagonists shift the effect dramatically from a more conventionally focused courtship plot resolution like that found in Aurora Leigh and North and South. The shift might be called directional. If Aurora Leigh ends by looking East, and North and South concludes by finding middle ground, An Idyl of Work ostentatiously spins around, facing every-which-way in its final section. The plot’s last big surprise is that Dr. Mann, whom Esther had previously believed Eleanor’s admirer, actually loves her instead. But while Esther and he will marry, the poem emphasizes that the couple will continue to journey beyond the narrative’s borders: the Manns will “emigrate” to find work “Out in the unknown Somewhere of the West” (169). Eleanor herself will look “East,” like Aurora, where she will discover her own “Bridegroom” in the heavenly New Jerusalem. “I do not die!” she tells Esther in the poem’s concluding vision, “I fold my petals for immortal dawn!” (183). (As Loeffelholz notes, the scene offers a homosocial revision of the ending of Aurora Leigh; Eleanor’s actual suitor, Ralph, has been pushed to the margins.72) Minta plans to stay in the North, but she will refuse a proffered offer of marriage to a farmer cousin and instead continue to teach girls: “It is my firm faith that the alphabet / Was meant for woman’s use as much as man’s” (170–1). (Larcom also remained single and worked as a schoolmistress for many years.) Isabel, who, we are assured “will not stray again” (162), stays in place for now, as well, taking up trade as a seamstress and appearing to be on the verge of a courtship with a handsome young carpenter. Ruth, though, will travel in body where Eleanor travels in soul: reversing the course of the books from which An Idyl has drawn— and implicitly enabling the later production of works like this one—she will serve as governess to the daughter of a “rich lady friend” of Miriam’s, accompanying mother and child eastward to Europe, where she will “study of the Old-World ways, / Languages, histories” (168). As though to complete the compass rose with an example of Southern migration, Esther warns Ruth of “a girl I used to know, who went to Mexico When cotton-mills were built there, and is now Wife of some ruling officer, and at home In halls of the Montezumas. . . . ” (169)

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But Ruth promises to take her “democratic heart” with her “and bring it back, whole” (169). Before ending in Eleanor’s dying vision of heaven, Larcom offers a final narratorial warning regarding the waves of more recent migrations, the influx of Europeans who, by the 1870s, were dramatically changing the composition of the New England workforce and altering its cultural landscape:73 Like the sea Must the work-populations ebb and flow, So only fresh with healthful New-World life. If high rewards no longer stimulate toil, And mill-folk settle to a stagnant class, As in old civilizations, then farewell To the Republic’s hope! What differ we From other feudalisms? Like ocean-waves Work-populations change. No rich, no poor, No learned, and no ignorant class or caste The true republic tolerates; . . . (178)

Larcom implies, both here and in Minta’s educational mission, the continued need for governmentally funded schools to erase potential divisions of class. But she is also calling for the production of more “middlebrow” books like the one she has written, books that use their medley methods to translate the Old World into the New, thereby creating an unum out of a pluribus. In a country constituted by migrants, keeping not only Ruth’s but also the nation’s “democratic heart” “whole” depends, Larcom argues, on the textual migrations represented by the “democratic neighborhood” of books lining the shelf in the girls’ dormitory at the mill. From just such migrations, she has woven her verse-novel. V. THE WOMAN WHO DARED: RIGHTS, LAWS, AND FORMS Larcom’s five female protagonists will do much, but their deeds pale beside those of the heroine of my final example of an Aurora Leighinspired American verse-novel, Epes Sargent’s The Woman Who Dared (1869; dated 1870). Sargent was a poet, novelist, dramatist, newspaper editor, educator, spiritualist, and member of the Knickerbocker group. While his late obsession with spiritualism has recently garnered some attention from scholars, he may have been best known in his own day for a much anthologized lyric, “Life on the Ocean Waves,” and for two widely used collections of school textbooks written in the 1850s, The

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Standard Speaker series and The Standard Reader series. These books include reprinted materials selected from a range of genres, roughly half of which are by British authors or are taken from anonymously authored British journals (citations include “Household Words” and “London Lit. Gaz.”). They participate broadly in a culture of reprinting in which works are reframed to suit new ends; an explanatory note prefacing the table of contents in The Standard Fourth Reader for Public and Private Schools announces, for example, that “Where names of authors are Italicized in the following Table, or at the end of pieces . . . , it is intended to indicate that all such pieces have been translated, abridged or altered, expressly for this work.”74 Sargent’s desire to educate the citizens of a diverse democracy had been established earlier, in his newspaper work; in his profile of the writer, Edgar Allan Poe wrote of his short-lived journal, Sargent’s New Monthly Magazine (1843), that it failed because it had attempted a happy medium between the highbrow and lowbrow press: “it had the misfortune of falling between two stools, never having been able to make up its mind whether to be popular with the three or dignified with the five dollar journals.”75 Poe’s terms recall the cultural divide attributed by Brodhead to the following decade. It was a divide Sargent was still trying to span in the late 1860s, when he may be said to have “translated, abridged or altered ” Aurora Leigh to produce his only work in the verse-novel genre, The Woman Who Dared, a sensational response to the marriage debates and the broader Woman Question. In a nine-book blank-verse format that it shares with Barrett Browning’s novel-poem (although here, as in most American examples, the blank verse is liberally rough-mixed with interpolated rhymed lyrics sung by or attributable to various characters), Sargent relates the story of Linda Percival. Story is the keyword, since Sargent does much of his argument via his incredibly intricate, sensational, and quick-moving plot. This feature of the poem is a function of its focus on a “woman who dared”; as E. S. Dallas explained, “The life of women cannot well be described as a life of action. When women are thus put forward to lead the action of a plot, they must be urged into a false position . . . This is what is called sensation.”76 When we meet her at the poem’s beginning, things may seem quiet: Linda is celebrating her seventeenth birthday with her doting parents in their comfortable New England home (surprise, surprise: it is June). But, as she begins to learn that day, Linda is technically illegitimate. Her parents have decided that she has reached the age to be told of her origins, and the story of those origins comprises the second and third books of the poem. Linda’s father, who now lives quietly but comfortably in comparative isolation, was born into a wealthy and well-connected East Coast family. But his fortunes took a downward turn when he was maneuvered into a

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foolish marriage as a young man. On discovering his wife’s adultery soon after that marriage, he fled to Europe, where, after wandering for twelve years, he met Mary Merivale, Linda’s mother, in London. Mary tells her own story of a flight from home. She had gone to London to escape the tyranny of the conventional marriage market into which she had been thrust by her class-conscious and ambitious mother. When she had objected to being pushed into the arms of a suitor, her mother had scolded her, in language recalling both Patmore and Aurora’s maiden aunt, “You’d teach me what is womanly, pert minx!”77 Like Aurora, though, Mary refused to conform to “the mould that social pressure gives / Without one protest native to [her] self ” (56). In a scene that may be inspired by Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), Mrs. Merivale had upbraided Mary’s sympathy for a poor seamstress who was attending her daughters at a ball: “Novel-reading / Has brought you to this insipidity,” she had complained (51). So Mary left home, with the seamstress in tow (a bit like Aurora and Marian), to make her own fortune as a nurse in London. There she fell in love with Percival while attending the bedside of a wounded American millionaire, Kenrick. But they couldn’t marry legally, because Percival’s divorce settlement from his first wife had included a clause prohibiting his remarriage (in order to secure his wealth to the daughter born to his wife out of her adulterous liaison). This impasse brings on one of the poem’s most curious revisions of Aurora Leigh, an overt discussion of form that transposes legal and artistic conventions. Recall Aurora Leigh’s poetic manifesto in Book V of the verse-novel: What form is best for poems? Let me think Of forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit, As sovran nature does, to make the form; For otherwise we only imprison spirit, And not embody. Inward evermore To outward,—so in life, and so in art Which still is life. (V.223–9)

Sargent’s Percival almost quotes Aurora when he announces, in the context of his desire to marry Linda’s future mother, Oh! How we hug the fictions we are born to! Challenging never, never testing them; Accepting them as irreversible; Part of God’s order, not to be improved; Placing the form above the informing spirit; The outward show above the inward life; A hollow lie, well varnished, well played out. (80)

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To note the echo is to see how Percival’s contemplation of an oddly virtuous bigamy offers a legal parallel for the escape into the doubled generic form that we recognize in the term verse-novel. And Percival’s lines, while ostensibly about the structures of law that prop up marriage, actually use the language of novels (“fictions”), painting (“varnished”), and drama (“played out”) to make Sargent’s argument. The implication is that to reform law, we must also reform generic structures and conventions. As the Percivals explain, Mary Merivale (whose very name sounds like both a double marriage and an injunction) proved herself up to such reform. With the “simple rite” of a “formal kiss” (89), she and Percival entered into an engagement and—after a two-year separation to ensure that both were certain in their choice—began their lives together in a strangely un-sensational bigamous “marriage.” For this new beginning, they travelled, like the verse-novel, to America: “could you make / America your home?” Percival had asked Mary by way of proposal (66), and the answer was yes. And here their storytelling ends, having reached the narrative present. Suggestively, though, for all the talk about the emptiness of form, when Linda’s anxious parents inquire how she feels about their revelation, she turns instinctively to a poetic closural device that, like the earlier kiss it resembles, can occupy the place of the legal sanction their marriage has been denied: “Could any form of words approving it [that is, her parents’ union] / Have made us three more intimately near? / Have made us three more exquisitely dear?” (94). Her rhyming lines, one of only two couplets punctuating the poem’s blankverse sections, seem to do the trick. Still, entranced by their story, Linda wants more: “You might have made it longer” (93), she complains. Her wish will prove impossible to grant when Linda soon finds herself orphaned; the substantial length of The Woman Who Dared comes to depend instead upon Linda herself. The catastrophe occupies Book IV, “Paradise Found.” Shortly after Linda’s birthday, Percival learns of Kenrick’s death and his inheritance of his old friend’s millions. As they journey by train to the seaside, where they have planned a holiday, the three Percivals are happily contemplating what they will be able to do with Kenrick’s legacy when a broken rail interrupts the lines of both track and verse. With a formalism that strikes one as overkill, it even breaks the page of the text: Many the joyful— [page break] Ah! A shivering crash! (105–6)

Linda survives, but her parents do not. So even though Linda’s daring has been enabled by that of her English mother (much as Sargent’s has by

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Barrett Browning’s), it will take not merely American transplantation but also another generation for the species of womanhood that she represents to grow vigorous. At this stage in Sargent’s poem, marriage law and inheritance law begin to intersect. Because Linda is technically illegitimate, Kenrick’s millions now go to her stepsister, the daughter of Percival’s adulterous first wife. Despite the fact that Percival tries in his final moments to write a will bequeathing everything to Linda, she is left almost penniless. The episode recalls Romney’s effort to transfer some of his wealth to Aurora via a gift to her aunt, an effort that had failed when her aunt died holding his unopened letter. And, like Aurora, Linda decides to support herself as an artist. Linda is introduced in the poem as a girl for whom “To feel, to be uplifted—was to act” (12). But for all her daring and agency, she displays her artistic genius by painting the most passive and lady-like of subjects, specializing in still-life assemblies of leaves and flowers and birds, visual analogues to the many lyric “songs” and “lullabies” that she also sings throughout the work. This tendency to want to have it both ways is characteristic of the verse-novel genre, as I have been arguing throughout this book. But her painting participates, too, in a further legal strand of the story. Sargent complicates his already tangled legal plot with a subplot about intellectual property. Linda’s artwork begins to be pirated: She found that by the labor of a month In painting flowers from nature, she could earn Easily sixty dollars. This she did For two years steadily. Then came a change. From some cause unexplained, her wild-flower sketches, Which from their novelty and careful finish At first had found a ready sale, were now In less demand. Linda was not aware That these elaborate works, to nature true, Had been so multiplied in copies, made By hand, or printed by the chromo art, As to be sold at prices not one fifth As high as the originals had cost. (130–1)

The focus on copyright here and the negative appraisal of a culture of reprinting seems to mesh oddly with a work that has borrowed so widely from sources.78 As this plot develops, Linda first discovers the theft and then, with the help of a lawyer, manages not only to secure copyright on her subsequent works but also to get back some of her lost earnings from the gallery owner who had been cheating her. The narrative thus highlights how Linda achieves financial independence even without the

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inheritance from Kenrick (which she eventually does receive from her dying stepsister, who bequeaths it to Linda after discovering that her abusive mother had tried to secure the money in anticipation of her own death). But this storyline also suggests the need to master laws in a world where few codes are independently reliable. Sargent’s poem includes bizarre passing references to a number of characters who die or are injured when structures give way; the Percivals perish by railway accident, and they had earlier suffered the death of two children—a boy and a girl—who were killed prior to Linda’s birth when a wall fell on them as they walked to school (8). Similarly, Kenrick’s London injury was caused by a fallen rafter “from a half-built house” (32). Sargent seems to be allegorizing a general structural collapse and the resulting need for a version of selfreliance that grows out of familiarity with all kinds of protecting forms; as Linda tells her father: You taught me how to deal with slippery men! Taught me my rights, the laws, the very forms By which to guard against neglect or fraud In any business—till I’m half a lawyer. You taught me, too, how to protect myself, Should force assail me; how to hold a pistol, Carry it, fire it—Heaven save me from the need! And, when I was a very little girl, You used to take me round to see the houses As they were built; . . . ... So that, as you yourself have often said, I’m better qualified than half the builders To plan and build a house, and guard myself From being cheated in the operation. (96–7)

Linda needs to be flexible and knowledgeable as to “rights,” “laws,” and “forms,” however suspect they may be. It is this skill that can make her what The Woman’s Advocate appreciatively saw in her: “a type of the selfreliant, fearless, yet pure-minded American girl.”79 Sargent proves such independence through another strange plot digression when Linda uses her father’s training in marksmanship to shoot a pair of ruffians she encounters while on a picnic in the woods, thereby saving the young girl who accompanies her. But while such actions make the Catholic World ’s critic deplore Linda as “a man-woman, and the last in the world that a real man could love or

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marry,” marry she does.80 The primary plot of The Woman Who Dared traces Linda’s love for a worthy but diffident schoolteacher, Charles Lothian. (It is no coincidence that American verse-novels are so well populated by educators, given their frequent reforming mission.) Linda first meets Charles on her return railway journey to town after her escape from the ruffians; she does not require a knight in shining armor, although she thankfully accepts his polite offer of a lift home from the station in his carriage. Moreover, Linda’s heroism and the story both climax when she proposes marriage to Charles. Above all else, it is this that she “dares” to do. Contemporary reviews even linked her two most radical deeds by referring to how she “pop[s] a pistol” before she “pop[s] the question.”81 Somewhat paradoxically, then, Linda breaks through the bonds of conventional good form—that is, modesty—by initiating the most conventional and formal devices of closure, marriage. In asking Charles to marry her, Linda embraces the terms of her father’s earlier proposal to her mother, “hearts look to the substance, not the form” (200). It should not matter, in that case, who addresses whom. Sargent dramatizes the question of address—a general concern for poetry and a particular concern for verse-novels, as I argue in Chapter 4—by making it a plot point even before the proposal scene. Charles and Linda cross paths for the second time during a seaside holiday (once again, they meet aboard a train, on the journey to the coast), over the course of which they fall in love. But when, at its close, Charles asks, “And what will your address be, in the city?” Linda, whose plans are admittedly uncertain, inexplicably finds herself modestly refusing to give even a provisional reply: “I do not know, nor care” (208). She regrets her words almost immediately. “And why / Could he not ask again for my address, / I’d like to know?” she wonders (210), sounding very much as though she had taken a page from Mr. Collins’s playbook in Pride and Prejudice. Absent a second enquiry, Linda must herself discover where Charles lives. This she does by proving herself a capable reader of reference works: “I’ve found him—seen him! The Directory / Gave me his residence” (226). She records the discovery in her diary, the leaves of which make up Book VII of the poem. But while in Amours de Voyage Clough switched from letters to a diaristic mode to indicate Claude’s increasingly lyric solipsism, the focus here on real-world addresses shows that Linda’s orientation remains social. Instead, the diary form seems to empower Linda, giving us unfiltered access to her thoughts and acts and putting the pen into her hand. Sargent thus self-consciously ties his conception of gender to the forces of his courtship plot and the various genres and texts undergirding that plot. The effect is rather hyper- than anti-formalist. The Woman Who

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Dared uses its commitments to its constituent genres to upend the conventions upon which it rests, offering, with its happy ending, a far more radical vision of the New Woman than, say, Grant Allen would delineate in his similarly titled novel, The Woman Who Did (1895), in which the final act of the woman in question is her suicide. If Sargent’s first generation of lovers, Percival and Mary, fit the template of the disrupted marriage plot that I discuss in Chapter 1 (in the context of a British work that would itself be republished in America, where Denzil Place became Constance’s Fate), his second generation, Linda and Charles, offer in the reversed proposal scene an unusual spin on this common feature of the Victorian verse-novel. In a way, Sargent’s move is even more reformist that that of the poets of adultery: his upending of the conventional courtship plot works within the system, preserving novelistic form—and the comic ending—even as it overturns the usual gender hierarchies. Again, one might compare Aurora Leigh; Alison Case has argued that Barrett Browning’s work doesn’t so much “reconcile [the] conflicting roles and impulses” that arise when the courtship plot overlaps with the female Künstlerroman as “allow them an uneasy coexistence.”82 But by drawing on different genres, Sargent transforms the ideological significance of courtship in a manner that aligns it far less problematically with the artistic ambitions of his heroine. The poem’s conclusion reveals how hybridization fuels this process. As I have shown, The Woman Who Dared is replete with textual borrowings. After Linda’s pivotal proposal, Sargent transplants Tennyson’s Prince’s final assessment of Princess Ida—“For woman is not undevelopt man, / But diverse”—into the mouth of Charles Lothian: “Yet you do seem a very woman still, / And not at all like any man I know,— / Not even like an undeveloped man!” (204). Most notably, though, drama helps to inject the crucial element of female agency into the poem’s ending, turning the novelistic courtship plot into a performance of daring-do. In the work’s final exchange, Charles and Linda, now married and the parents of an infant daughter, revisit the events that brought them together. Let me again flesh out a bit of plot: while Linda had proposed to Charles first, he had initially declined her offer—not from dismay at her deed but because he was deeply in debt in the wake of his father’s business failures and his own attempt to pay off the losses. Unbeknownst to him, Linda rescues him from this debt, using both the profits of her paintings and the legacy that has recently come to her following her stepsister’s death. Freed financially, Charles proposes and Linda accepts. But in the book’s final scene, Charles tries to revise events into a more conventional pattern:

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“That very day I cleared myself from debt; That very day I sued for Linda’s hand; That very day she gave it willingly;— And the next month beheld us two made one. And so it would have been, if you, my dear, Had made no sign, and waited patiently.” (257)

The provocation is too much; Linda unveils her back-stage machinations, revealing herself as the source of the mysterious legacy that had removed Charles’s debt: “From me the money came, and only me.” Yet her full response, in echoing his anaphora, strongly evokes Shakespearean drama: “You would make straight and have the past undone? To think that by a woman you’ve been wooed, To think that by a woman you’ve been won, Is thought too humbling and too scandalous; Is an indignity too hard to bear! Oh! well, sir, well; do as you please; the child Goes with its mother, though; remember that!” (260)

The most direct allusion here is to Richard III: Linda’s wooing woman echoes Richard’s “Was ever woman in this humour wooed? / Was ever woman in this humour won?”83 But the mood is hardly tragic; indeed, the passage as a whole more evocatively summons up the cross-dressing courtship of As You Like It—especially the repetitive patterns of its final scene, so magnificently directed by Rosalind, Shakespeare’s greatest expression of the positive potential energies that can be unleashed by a “man-woman.” Against this backdrop, the strange threat of Linda’s concluding words, intimating a natural order of inheritance sustaining all these conventions, both legal and artistic (if you want to “make straight,” Linda seems to be implying, you have to be ready to accept the consequences of such essentialist constructions of gender), seems less dark. The exchange brings to mind Rosalind’s more benign vision of revenge-asequity in her “promise to make all this matter even.”84 And Charles accepts Linda’s rebuttal in the comic vein that this comparison suggests. Handing her the child—“Take all your woman’s rights; even this, the best”—he closes the poem in correct Shakespearean fashion, with a couplet, the second in the verse-novel: “Are we not each the richer by the sharing / Of such a gift? I’ll not regret your daring” (261). So for all the deep distrust to which Sargent’s poem subjects individual forms over the course of its narrative, his verse-novel’s final moment

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registers a broad commitment to formal agency. As motto, Sargent had quoted from Milton’s Doctrine of Discipline and Divorce: “Honest liberty is the greatest foe to dishonest license.” Now he recognizes his novel in verse to be an act of daring precisely by virtue of its “shared” approach to the laws of genre. Like his compatriot verse-novelists, Sargent discovers freedom, not in the license of free verse, but rather through the liberal adoption of a wide range of forms and conventions, blending them into a hybrid production that he hopes will suit his diverse American audience. NOTES 1. Arthur Hugh Clough, Mari Magno, or Tales on Board, l. 89, in The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Mulhauser, 376. 2. Gould, The Brownings and America, 26–8. Gould, born in 1848, was a child when the poem first arrived, but she would have been an impressionable young woman during the period of its greatest popularity. 3. “Aurora Leigh,” United States Magazine 4.2 (February 1857). Quoted in Cheryl Stiles, “ ‘Different Planes of Sensuous Form’: American Critical and Popular Responses to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and Last Poems: Annotated Bibliography, American Periodicals, 1856–62,” Research Society for Victorian Periodicals 40.3 (Fall 2007), 246. 4. Edmund Clarence Stedman, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” Scribner’s Monthly Magazine 7.1 (1873), 111. I discuss Stedman’s own verse-novel, Alice, Or a Tale of the Great War (1863), below. 5. Quoted in Eric Eisner, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 152. 6. Eisner, Literary Celebrity, 141. [Kate Field], “Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” Atlantic Monthly 8 (September 1861), 368–76. 7. María Dolores Narbona Carrión, “Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers’ European Connections: The Case of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,” in New Perspectives in Transatlantic Studies, ed. Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson and Will Kaufman (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002), 123. 8. New York Public Library, Bulletin of the New York Public Library 24 (1920), 184. Quoted in Marisa Palacios Knox, “Masculine Identification and Marital Dissolution in Aurora Leigh,” Victorian Poetry 52.2 (Summer 2014), 294. 9. See Ellen Moers, Literary Women: The Great Writers (London: Doubleday, 1976); Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Betsy Erkkila, The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). See also Mary Loeffelholz, “Mapping the Cultural Field: Aurora Leigh in America,” in The Traffic in Poems, ed. McGill, 139. 10. Aubrey de Vere, letter to Patmore, February 14, 1857, in Champneys, Memoirs, II.332.

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11. Nathaniel Hawthorne, English Note-books, quoted in Derek Patmore, The Life and Times of Coventry Patmore (London: Constable, 1949), 84. 12. [Aubrey de Vere], Edinburgh Review 107 (January 1858), 123. 13. Critic, September 1, 1856, p. 422. Quoted in Hughes and Lund, Victorian Serial, 23. 14. Patmore, Life and Times, 83–4. 15. Adela Pinch, “Transatlantic Modern Love,” in The Traffic in Poems, ed. McGill, 160. 16. James David Hart, The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1950), 137. 17. The Lucile Project, http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/lucile/. Accessed June 2, 2016. See also Aurelia Brooks Harlan, Owen Meredith: A Critical Biography of Robert, First Earl of Lytton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), who mentions the existence of over one hundred American editions (143). 18. Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–53 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 4. 19. De Vere, letter to Patmore, February 14, 1857, in Champneys, Memoirs, II.332–3. Alison Chapman has recently explored Barrett Browning’s interaction with American publishers in the context of the verses she composed for the New York Independent in the early 1860s, poetry that, as Chapman argues, combines efforts for the Risorgimento with implied critiques of American slavery. Chapman quotes a letter in which Barrett Browning (referring to the poor British reception of Poems Before Congress) finds some recompense in her American popularity: “being turned out of the old world, I fall on my feet in the new world, where people have been generous, and even publishers have been liberal.” Chapman, Networking the Nation, 231. 20. McGill, Culture of Reprinting, 14, 26, 2, 23. 21. McGill, Culture of Reprinting, 3, 7. 22. Mary Loeffelholz, “Anthology Form and the Field of Nineteenth-Century American Poetry: The Civil War Sequences of Lowell, Longfellow, and Whittier,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 54.1–4 (2008), 217. 23. Loeffelholz, “Anthology Form,” 220, 221. 24. Loeffelholz, “Anthology Form,” 219. She cites Herbert Tucker’s analysis of the period’s anthologies as efforts “to construct a venue for poetry’s survival” in a rapidly changing print culture. 25. Jessica DeSpain, Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Reprinting and the Embodied Book (London: Routledge, 2016), 14. 26. Walt Whitman, Notes and Fragments, ed. Richard Maurice Buck (London: Ont., n.p., 1899), 56; quoted in Christoph Irmscher, Longfellow Redux (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 100. 27. Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 28. Irmscher, Longfellow Redux, 198. 29. January 6, 1847. Quoted in Irmscher, Longfellow Redux, 198–9.

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30. See McGill’s discussion of the back-and-forth and of the ending of Poe’s “Mr. Longfellow and Other Plagiarists: A Discussion with ‘Outis’ ” (Culture of Reprinting, 204–14). 31. For documents relating to these charges, see Huttner’s Lucile Project’s “Oddities” page, http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/lucile/Reviews/oddities.htm. Accessed June 13, 2016. 32. See the “Critical Introduction” to Margaret Reynolds’s edition of Aurora Leigh (49 n. 159). 33. Laughton Osborne, Alice, or The Painter’s Story (New York: Doolady Publisher, 1867), note 3 to p. 110, pp. 256–8. The lines are from Longfellow’s “Maidenhood,” from Ballads and Other Poems (1842). Alice is a bit of an outlier for an American verse-novel in other regards, as well. For one thing, singularly (to my knowledge, at least) it is set mostly in Britain and among the aristocracy (although there is a trip to the continent that is characteristic of British verse-novels). For another, its plot of love between the daughter of an earl and a painter (a plot that seems more reminiscent of “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” than of Aurora Leigh) ends conservatively, with Alice’s tragic demise. Nevertheless, the sensational plot aspects are true to form: the lovers meet when Alice is a thirteen-year-old child whom the painter rescues from the gutter following her abduction as a toddler by a gypsy; she is reunited with her parents when they see his painting of her at the Academy Exhibition. 34. McGill, Culture of Reprinting, 3. McGill’s argument about the regional nature of publishing markets in the antebellum period is central to her analysis but is of less relevance to my argument about verse-novels. 35. Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 77, 80, 97. 36. Henry James, “Mary Elizabeth Braddon” (Nation [November 9, 1865]), in Henry James, Literary Criticism, 744. 37. Irmscher, Longfellow Redux, 50. 38. Irmscher cites Brodhead’s Cultures of Letters and Lawrence Levine’s influential study, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), as well as Joan Shelley Rubin’s The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), which looks at the 1920s and 1930s (Longfellow Redux, 52–3 and note). 39. See Elizabeth Nitchie, “The Longer Narrative Poems of America, 1775–1875,” Sewanee Review 26.3 (July 1918), 289. 40. Nitchie, “Longer Narrative Poems,” 291. 41. John Malone Dagnall, Daisy Swain: The Flower of Shenandoah. A Tale of the Rebellion (Brooklyn, NY: n.p., 1865). 42. E. C. Stedman, Alice of Monmouth: An Idyl of the Great War, with Other Poems, 5th ed. (Boston: Fields, Osgood, and Co., 1869), 90–1. The poem, while less novelistic than some of the other examples I cite here (there’s little by way of realism, and lots by way or romance and sentiment), is remarkable

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44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

51. 52.

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for the prosodic diversity of its twenty sections. As Gay Wilson Allen has pointed out, it includes “practically every meter that was in use at the time” (see American Prosody [New York: American Book Co., 1935], 151). Stedman’s interest in verse forms is apparent, too, in his influential work as an anthologizer toward the end of the century, when he edited An American Anthology (1900) and A Victorian Anthology (1895). Technically, Holland’s first great poetic success, Bitter-sweet (1858), is a verse closet-drama, although its tone and domestic setting make Nitchie consider it alongside other popular verse-novels appearing in the wake of Aurora Leigh (“Longer Narrative Poems,” 289). Hart records that as late as 1877, Holland’s works were second and third in sales to Lucile according to Publishers’ Weekly (The Popular Book, 174). Holland had used this stanza in the “Tribute” to Womanhood that had prefaced Kathrina, suggesting he placed Patmorean emphasis on the measure as appropriate to this theme. Josiah Holland, The Mistress of the Manse (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, & Co., 1874), 149. Further references to this work will be internally documented by page number. This poem was reprinted and illustrated in Scribner’s Monthly Magazine, which Holland edited, as “Mildred in the Library,” from The Mistress of the Manse, by J. G. Holland, Scribner’s Monthly 9.1 (November 1874), 54. Trochaic tetrameter is of course also the measure of Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and was no doubt seen as suited to the exotic “Indian” theme. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: The Library of America, 1983), 465. At the very least, it achieved some popular success: the 1875 Scribner, Armstrong and Co. (New York) edition has the phrase “twentieth thousand” on the title page, presumably referring to the number of copies in print already by that time; in 1877, a richly illustrated gift-book edition was released. Charles Scribner and Sons renewed copyright in 1881 when they again published the work (this time, with “Selim and Nourmahal” appearing as a separate section of the poem). There are also 1884 and 1892 editions. Hart discusses its popularity, stating that “a hundred thousand people soon bought the story” (The Popular Book, 135). In the first three years, Kathrina went through fifty printings and at least one British edition; it continued to be reprinted into the 1890s. There were also, as was typical with Holland’s poems, gift-book editions made. J. G. Holland, Kathrina: Her Life and Mine, in a Poem (New York: Charles Scribner and Co., 1867), 173. All further references will be internally cited by page number. Loeffelholz draws the connection in “Mapping,” 141–8. As my notes will indicate, there is considerable overlap between my understanding of the poem and Loeffelholz’s. In both this section and the next (on Lucy Larcom’s Idyl of Work) I have benefited tremendously from her scholarship and insight.

262 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60.

61.

62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

The Victorian Verse-Novel Milton, Paradise Lost, VII.31. See the Introduction for my discussion of this program. Loeffelholz, “Mapping,” 147. Loeffelholz, “Mapping,” 147. Loeffelholz reads this and other allusions to Aurora Leigh as proof of how Holland’s poem shows that “ ‘high’ British models” can be “broken down for popular British consumption,” much as Kathrina breaks down the bread of high culture for other readers (148). But I am less sure than she that the poem conceives Aurora Leigh as a symbol of elite culture; to my mind, Barrett Browning offers rather a model for admixture than an instance of rarefied purity, the latter being represented here by the Wordsworthian mode. Loeffelholz, “Mapping,” 147, 144. Lucy Larcom, An Idyl of Work (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1875), vii. All further references to this edition will be internally cited by page number. Reviews nevertheless complained of the lack of unity; see, for example, the Atlantic Monthly, which (in spite of some admiration) called the poem “shapeless, and . . . almost storyless.” “Recent Literature,” Atlantic Monthly 36 (August 1875), 242. See Mary Loeffelholz, “ ‘A Strange Medley-Book’: Lucy Larcom’s An Idyl of Work,” New England Quarterly 80.1 (March 2007), 5–34. While perhaps most obviously Tennyson’s (he uses it in both the “English Idyls” and—with a double-l—the Idylls of the King), the term idyl had also been chosen by Larcom’s mentor, Whittier, for the genre-signifying subtitle to Snow-Bound. The ballad can be found in an issue of the journal Today from 1870: “Peggy Bligh’s Voyage,” Today: A Paper Printed During the Fair of the Essex Institute (October 31, 1870), 1–2. A poem generally concerned with modes of transportation, it highlights its nostalgic stance by repeatedly reminding the reader that this New England is not yet linked up by railways. Loeffelholz’s suggestive term (“Mapping,” 152). Loeffelholz looks carefully at the many instances in which the poem critiques the Wordsworthian egotistical sublime, replacing it with a vision of female community. Loeffelholz, “Mapping,” 148. See Loeffelholz, “Mapping,” 148–56, and “ ‘A Strange Medley-Book’ ”; and Sylvia Jenkins Cook, “The Working Woman’s Bard: Lucy Larcom and the Factory Epic,” in Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspirations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 160–87. Quoted in Cook, Working Women, 168. Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, ed. Angus Easson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 64, 436. This term comes up for discussion not only in North and South (120) and An Idyl (142) but also in Dickens’s factory novel, Hard Times (64). Recall also how Constance translates the rush of a spring flood in Denzil Place, which would be published the following year in America as Constance’s Fate.

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69. Loeffelholz, “ ‘A Strange Medley-Book,’ ” 21. 70. Loeffelholz, “ ‘A Strange Medley-Book,’ ” 28. 71. See Loeffelholz, “ ‘A Strange Medley-Book,’ ” 24–5, where she shows how Larcom critiques Wordsworth by revising the ascent of Mount Snowden episode from The Prelude as a communal experience, in which the women come to appreciate that “Who climbs to isolation from mankind, / There thinking to find wisdom, is a fool” (123). 72. Loeffelholz, “ ‘A Strange Medley-Book,’ ” 27. 73. See also Loeffelholz, “ ‘A Strange Medley-Book,’ ” 26–7; “Mapping,” 155–6; and Cook, Working Women, esp. 164–5, for attitudes toward the recently arrived emigrants. As Loeffelholz notes, the metaphor of “interfuse[ing]” to which Larcom turns in the lines following those I quote here suggests through Wordsworthian echo (of “Tintern Abbey”) the cultural work that needs to be done. 74. Epes Sargent, The Standard Fourth Reader for Public and Private Schools (Boston: Philips, Sampson and Company, 1857), vii. With a copyright entered in 1855, this edition is already listed as the sixty-sixth thousand printing. The names in the index split fairly evenly between italic and roman fonts. 75. Quoted in Glenn M. Reed, “Epes Sargent,” in Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Eric L. Haralson (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998), 376. 76. E. S. Dallas, The Gay Science, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866), II.296–7. 77. Sargent, The Woman Who Dared, 55. Further references to this poem will be internally documented by page number. 78. McGill has pointed to the ways in which publishers of gift-books and annuals would use what Hugh Amory has termed “proprietary illustration” to secure the copyright on editions of reprinted works. See McGill, Culture of Reprinting, 27. 79. Rev. of Epes Sargent’s The Woman Who Dared, The Woman’s Advocate II.6 (December 1869). Womenwriters.library.emory.edu/advocacy/. Accessed August 11, 2016. Web. 80. Rev. of Epes Sargent’s The Woman Who Dared, “New Publications,” Catholic World X (January 1870), 572. 81. “Notices of Books,” Southern Review 7.14 (April 1870), 475. 82. Case, Plotting Women, 16–17. 83. Shakespeare, Richard III, I.ii.226–7. 84. Shakespeare, As You Like It, V.iv.18.

Afterword Adulterated Verse, the Modernist Remix When in 1931 Virginia Woolf sat down to consider Aurora Leigh and the diminished state of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s reputation, she wrote in the following terms: The primers dismiss her with contumely. Her importance, they say, “has now become merely historical. Neither education nor association with her husband ever succeeded in teaching her the value of words and a sense of form.” In short, the only place in the mansion of literature that is assigned her is downstairs in the servants’ quarters, where . . . she bangs the crockery about and eats vast quantities of peas on the point of her knife.

These slights cut right to the heart of the verse-novel’s perceived violation of the laws of poetry. We hear once more the familiar complaints about what might be termed bad form, about the absurdity of a “poetry of peas,” with its infringement of class hierarchies. And while Woolf finds many compensating virtues in Aurora Leigh—she praises the work’s ability to enthrall through its story; its compellingly contemporary setting and central figure; and the “rush” of its “narrative,” as “the poet has outpaced the prose writer”—she ends the essay wondering why, given these merits, “it has left no successors.”1 As the preceding pages have, I hope, demonstrated, Woolf was much mistaken in this observation; many Victorian writers followed where Barrett Browning had led. Moreover, as Catherine Addison has pointed out, the verse-novel form is alive and well today—even experiencing something of a renaissance as new specimens appear across the anglophone world.2 Addison notes the attraction of the genre for poets interested in contemporaneity, in seeking a wider popular audience, and in embracing a realist narrative mode. Many of these more recent works also exhibit the same liberating energies and desire to narrate from the margins that I have described in Victorian examples. Thus Vikram Seth uses the Onegin stanza to explore (among other matters) gay life in San Francisco in The Golden Gate (1986), and Anne Carson centers Autobiography of Red

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(1998) on an actual monster, Geryon, and his love for Herakles. In Brown Girl Dreaming (2014), one of several new verse-novels aimed at the Young Adult market, Jacqueline Woodson offers a modern spin on Aurora Leigh by narrating the Bildung of an African American girl growing up in South Carolina and New York City in the 1960s and 1970s. Of course, for her part, Barrett Browning had pondered the absence of (specifically female) forebears: “I look everywhere for Grandmothers,” she had written in 1845, “& see none.”3 So Woolf ’s sense of the barrenness of the verse-novel seems a particularly depressing failure to acknowledge her own status as inheritor of Barrett Browning’s experiment in hybrid form: her blindness as to her own debt to this “Grandmother” continues to foster the patriarchal narrative. Later in the same year in which her essays on Barrett Browning first appeared, Woolf published The Waves, a work she described not as a “novel-poem” but as a “playpoem.”4 The Waves tracks, through a series of rapidly transitioning interior monologues (she called them “dramatic soliloquies”), the lives from childhood to advanced maturity of a group of six friends who meet at school as young girls and boys.5 (An aura of heroism may hover over Percival, the novel’s seventh major figure, but he never receives his own monologue, and he dies in India halfway through the novel when his horse steps into a molehill.) Interspersing the monologue sections, descriptive passages, set in italic font, portray the progress of the sun’s diurnal course over a coastal scene. The combined effect closely resembles the back and forth between narrative sections and intercalary lyrics that is so frequent a feature of Victorian verse-novels. But Woolf complicates the modal tenor of these sections. While the monologues that comprise The Ring and the Book and most of Claude’s letters in Amours de Voyage are embedded in social settings and presume a larger narrative framework, Woolf ’s “soliloquies” here tend rather toward what she called an “abstract poetic” mode;6 her speakers are always identified (“said Bernard”), but they seem to be speaking to themselves, even when in the presence of others. In relating how she wrote the work “to a rhythm not to a plot,” Woolf intimates the lyric bent of her narrative sections.7 Strangely, though, while the narrative sections feel lyrical, the descriptions of the sun’s rising and setting—those parts of The Waves that correspond to a verse-novel’s intercalated lyrics—here not only offer an escape from subjectivity but also gesture through their temporal emphasis toward the underlying condition of narrative progress. Such ambivalence about storytelling appears poignantly through the character of Bernard, who is the novel’s biggest advocate of both sociality and narrative; it is one of Woolf ’s achievements to recognize and describe how intimately these two categories are connected. “[F]inding sequences everywhere,” Bernard realizes, “I cannot bear the pressure of solitude” (99).

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His friend Neville (himself a poet and the member of the group most committed to the aesthete’s perfection of the moment) diagnoses Bernard’s condition early in the novel, when they are still children: “Let him describe what we have all seen so that it becomes a sequence. Bernard says there is always a story” (27). While at university, Bernard finds inspiration in the narrative poetry of Byron’s Don Juan: “It is the speed, the hot, molten effect, the laval flow of sentence into sentence that I need” (58). The language here mirrors the stimulation Woolf found in Aurora Leigh, where she tells how “we rush through page after page of narrative.”8 But Rhoda—the member of the group who perhaps most closely resembles her creator—is less sure of coherent progress: “One moment does not lead to another” (97). Woolf ’s similar doubts about the matter would appear in the title of her posthumously published collection of autobiographical essays, Moments of Being (1976), which was taken from her 1939 essay, “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments, sketch: the terms attest to her sense of the tenuousness of the autobiographical thread holding together both experience and the self. Bernard, too, comes more and more to share Rhoda’s uncertainty: “I begin to ask, Are there stories?” (143). Still, for all this doubt—or perhaps because of it—Woolf gives him the novel’s final monologue, the only such section to be presided over by a single voice. (In stark contrast, Rhoda commits suicide. She is the sole “soliloquizing” friend not to survive the novel, and her death seems in part an ironic and tragic consequence of her refusal to believe in cause and effect and the bonds between people that such connection enables.) But when Bernard tries to “sum up,” as he announces his intention of doing at the monologue’s opening, he finds himself abandoning plot: “Of story, of design, I do not see a trace then.” Instead, he offers the following suggestion to the distant acquaintance with whom he is ostensibly dining (this auditor, however hazy in presentation, also sets the final monologue apart from the others): “But meanwhile, while we eat, let us turn over these scenes as children turn over the pages of a picture-book and the nurse says, pointing: ‘That’s a cow. That’s a boat.’ Let us turn over the pages, and I will add, for your amusement, a comment in the margins.” (184)

As I argued in Chapter 3, an earlier generation of writers who struggled in their efforts to combine fidelity to narrative sequence and dedication to the lyric intensity of moments similarly sought escape in marginal commentary. That said, Bernard doesn’t entirely give up on story; we are still turning pages. Moreover, the next line of his monologue starts, like Genesis, “In the beginning,” and he concludes by invoking the end of

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ends, “O Death!” (228). Between these points, he also presents a number of metaphors for the development of character that resonate with the circular movements so common to verse-novels, whether clear or borderline examples of the form: “A shell forms upon the soft soul, nacreous, shiny, upon which sensations tap their beaks in vain” (196); “The mind grows rings; the identity becomes robust; pain is absorbed in growth” (198); “Tuesday follows Monday; Wednesday, Tuesday. Each spreads the same ripple. The being grows rings, like a tree” (217). Still, if the tropological territory is familiar, the cumulative effect here is much more like Pompilia’s tortured pearl than like Patmore’s slowly maturing oak of marriage; sequence threatens authenticity rather than creates it. Just prior to his death call, Bernard looks out the window and reflects, “There is a sense of the break of day.” But he immediately adds a note of caution: “I will not call it dawn” (228). Barrett Browning had not felt the need for such reticence; she embraced the dawn, and with it a plot that joined quotidian narrative development with a desire to transcend the boundaries of the mundane. Such had been her ambition when she had written, “Let us all aspire rather to Life.” By Woolf ’s day, though, the pendulum had swung back: story was once again suspect. Nevertheless, as Herbert Tucker has argued, “Victorian serial poetry had harboured from the first a possibility that its thread of continuity might be slit, its constituents spilled from the envelope of major narrative into the free-floating suggestiveness of vignette.”9 The threat had been visible in the very refusal of smooth-mixing that characterized most of the verse-novels I have considered—although not, it should be said, Aurora Leigh. With Tucker’s evocation of vignette, we find ourselves sitting next to Bernard, turning the pages of a picture book and commenting in the margins. Yet The Waves also shows just how fine a line separates such “incremental lyric” (Tucker’s term for the form at the heart of poetic modernism) from many of the tenuously balanced verse-novels I have considered in this book. The Victorians had turned to story partly as a corollary to their efforts to understand the experience of living in an age of industrialization, of imperial expansion, of the extension of rights and of the franchise, and (in some ways most fundamentally) of longer lifespans and increased mobility. The modernists had their own reasons for a reaction against story; as Percival’s narrative in The Waves suggests, faith in the benefits of narrative had been undermined by action’s association with the aggressive sins of colonialism and militarism and with the horrors of the Great War. These historical forces appear through the reflections of another member of the group of friends, the Australian-born Louis, whose colonial origins are a constant burden to him, making him feel like a déclassé outsider. Early in

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the novel, Louis remarks of Percival, “Look at us trooping after him, his faithful servants to be shot like sheep, for he will certainly attempt some forlorn enterprise and die in battle” (26). Louis, it turns out, is both right and wrong: right about the forlorn enterprise; ludicrously wrong about the death in battle. But Percival’s very name, with its echoes of the quest for the Holy Grail, reminds us that even Tennyson had had his doubts about such enterprises, doubts that had been translated into the generic ambiguity of both the Idylls of the King as a whole and of “The Holy Grail” as a constituent part of that decentered and disaggregated epic. In other words, one of the stories I have been telling in this book is about literary history, about the way a genre can arise as a testing ground for ideas and methods that will be more widely embraced by a subsequent age. The verse-novel is such an avant-garde genre. Indeed, Percival’s “decease-bymolehill” also evokes the absurd demise of Violet Fane’s Sir John Leigh, her figure for the British patriarchy in Denzil Place, whose death had followed his horse’s stumble into a rabbit hole; it was this fortunate fall that had afforded Fane’s adulterous heroine her two years of wedded bliss. I began this book by arguing that Fane’s verse-novel is exemplary for the ways in which form and content intersect. So perhaps it should not surprise us that the theme of adultery persists in modernist texts that use their generic ambiguity to interrogate literary and societal conventions. As I mentioned in Chapter 5, George Meredith’s Modern Love had paved the way for such thematic and formal migration from mid-century to the fin de siècle; Adela Pinch has traced how the 1862 verse-novel was “made . . . modern” in a pirated American edition of 1891. In this case, the latent modernity of Meredith’s radical subject (Modern Love, we recall, describes the failure of a marriage—the author’s own, only lightly disguised—first through adultery and then through the wife’s suicide) and structural method became more visible when its already fragile narrative arc was further undermined by typography and page-setting. In Thomas Bird Mosher’s American edition, each of the work’s fifty sixteen-line sonnets was “permanently detached” by being accorded its own “creamy white page,” giving Modern Love “its modern, sharp-edged form.”10 The poem had earlier appeared to gesture toward the novel with its knowing wink at French fictions of adultery: “You like not that French novel? Tell me why” (XXV.1). The 1891 reprinting—which, as Pinch notes, would provide the typographical template for most later editions—emphasized instead the difficulty of connecting individual sonnets, each a “moment’s monument” or “vignette” (in D. G. Rossetti’s and Tucker’s respective terms), into a plot. It drifted further toward lyric and away from story. By that point, though, Meredith had himself long since transferred his primary authorial allegiance to the novel. Yet he had imported into his

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writing in that genre his verse-novel’s radical content. The remarkable Diana of the Crossways, which edges dangerously close to the adultery plot, had appeared in 1885; while critics have rightly linked Meredith’s heroine to those of sensation fiction, she also resembles the daring women of novels-in-verse. Still more noticeably, Meredith’s prose style verges on the poetic, both in its frequent intensity and in its failure to follow the ordinary progressions of novelistic narrative. As Virginia Woolf wrote of his fiction, “He has been, it is plain, at great pains to destroy the conventional form of the novel. He makes no attempt to preserve the sober reality of Trollope and Jane Austen; he has destroyed all the usual staircases by which we have learnt to climb.” Those staircases represent the serial steps of plotted narrative sequence; without them, we approach something that at times feels like lyric. “The writer is a rhapsodist, a poet,” Woolf concludes, although she soon retracts this assertion, admitting he is not quite a “poet-novelist,” since his temper was too ready “to dissect” to remain lyrical for long.11 Once again, we see Woolf searching for hybrid designations. Pinch cites a nineteenth-century reader’s coinage of the term Meredithyrambic to describe the odd effect of Meredith’s intoxicating rhythms.12 While Modern Love may have come first, it had many followers— including many that seem to offer their own knowing winks at the adulterated forms of Victorian verse-novels. The story of adultery and suicide at the heart of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) begins when the narrator, John Dowell, recollects meeting his wife Florence “at a Browning tea” in New York City; neither the Browning nor the poem under consideration at this meeting is specified (Dowell’s memory is characteristically hazy), but the novel’s convoluted narrative progression, focus on marital discord, and Dowell’s own unreliability as a narrator seem to gesture toward The Ring and the Book.13 Ford’s book also shares the verse-novel’s international themes, on which I concentrated in Chapters 4 and 5: the American Dowells travel to Europe, where they meet the work’s other unstable couple, the British Ashburnhams. A decade earlier, Ford’s neighbor in Sussex, Henry James, had covered similar terrain in chronicling the adulterous marriages of another pair of transatlantic couples in The Golden Bowl (1904). Here, too, there is a Browning connection. James may have charged Robert Browning with “neglect of form” in The Inn Album, but he would come to imagine the possibilities of “The Novel in The Ring and the Book,” as his substantial 1912 essay on that poem is titled.14 In this essay, James described his impression of being “in the presence not at all of an achieved form, but of a mere preparation for one, though on the hugest scale.” “Which of them all, of the various methods of casting the wondrously mixed metal, is he, as

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he goes, preparing?” James wondered.15 That preparation, though— including its mixture of both methods and metals—seems in many regards to have paved the way for the formal achievements of The Golden Bowl. The experimental genre-bending tactics that Joseph Allen Boone has attributed to James’s late counter-traditional masterpiece can almost all be found in Browning’s much earlier work, as we saw in Chapter 3. In fact, The Golden Bowl has been considered alternately as a founding text of modernist fiction and as a last gasp of the Victorian novel. Ruth Bernard Yeazell explains that the novel’s liminal status owes much to its ambivalence about closure, an ambivalence characteristic of long narrative poems, including verse-novels; recall Edgar Allan Poe’s sense of the impossibility of unity in such works and Coleridge’s longing for the perfect circularity of an ouroboros. Yeazell locates this tension between The Golden Bowl ’s sometimes conventional novelistic plotting (which I discussed in Chapter 1) and its convoluted prose style: “the style of The Golden Bowl resists as much as it encourages the narrative’s drive toward closure. Or rather, it produces that drive as an effect of style itself, as we find ourselves compelled to read, even to reread, simply for the sentence.” As a matter of fact, when she goes on to describe “how thoroughly internalized [James’s] narrative has become and how much the mental ‘action’ registered by the style has replaced novelistic event as ordinarily understood,” Yeazell connects James’s work to Woolf ’s: “In this sense at least, The Golden Bowl seems to many of us to be closer in spirit to a modernist work like Woolf ’s The Waves than to the classic English novels that have preceded it.”16 We have ourselves come full circle; if The Golden Bowl looks forward to The Waves, it also harks back to Victorian hybrids like The Ring and the Book, Aurora Leigh, and Denzil Place (although some verse-novels used their novelistic elements to resist just such internalization of action). I mentioned in Chapter 1 that James’s experimental style has induced critics to seek out “the poem in The Golden Bowl” by considering the many formal and thematic correspondences between his novel and The Ring and the Book.17 Curiously, though, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King offers another angle on the idea of a poem-within-the-novel. In a crucial scene at the close of the first book, while the Prince and Charlotte anticipate the excursion to Gloucester during which they will consummate their affair, Charlotte recalls their earlier outing to the pawnshop where they had discovered the titular golden bowl (the object that will later reveal the now-impending affair to Maggie). Although Charlotte still regrets not purchasing the “beautiful” bowl, the Prince continues to be suspicious of the “treacherous cracked thing.” “I risk the cracks,” Charlotte retorts, but the Prince counters, “what did you tell me the other day you prettily call them in English? ‘rifts within the lute’?—risk them as much as you like for

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yourself, but don’t risk them for me.”18 The quotation-of-a-quotation is lifted from Vivien’s song about the “ever widening” effects of Guinevere’s adultery in “Merlin and Vivien” (MV 385–97, 444–7), effects intimated by the repetitions of Vivien’s lyric. Since such iteration lies in the very nature of the rift, it seems appropriate that Charlotte’s reference appears in this derivative form. That is to say, the conversation of “the other day” had not been recorded in James’s text; this is the first we hear of the earlier exchange. Contrast the more narratively anchored earworms of Aurora Leigh I discussed in Chapter 4; here the effect resembles rather how Tennyson’s diamonds had encoded events and time in “Lancelot and Elaine.” With its further hint (as rift becomes risk) of the charm taken from the borders of the old book of magic that Vivien had extracted from Merlin, we can imagine Charlotte’s quotation of a phrase from Tennyson as her own murmured curse written within the margins of James’s novel. Most obviously, though, James himself quotes Tennyson at this moment in order to remind us of the link between a metaphor and a thing. It is the Prince’s simile of the day ahead as “like a great gold cup that we must somehow drain together” that prompts first Charlotte’s memory of the bowl and then his own memory of the line from Tennyson. James’s late style may be characterized by the manner in which he erases the distinctions between metaphors and things; in these novels, we can rarely tell, for example, whether a shadow James records being cast over a scene is real or merely figurative. When the novel’s material golden bowl reifies the metaphorical rift within the lute, it thus enacts one of the general effects of Jamesian lyrical prose.19 But if the crack in the bowl’s perfectly rounded crystal threatens to divide in half both the novel (as Browning-like, we will shift from the Prince’s perspective to that of the Princess) and the marriages that it describes, then the quotation itself represents another such formal fissure. It hints at the internal instability of hybrid texts— whether James’s or Tennyson’s—that attempt to combine the poetry of metaphor and the portable property of novels. Once again, I am reminded of the lexical link in German between marriage and genre, both of which are designated as Gattung; adulteration makes such forms vulnerable to collapse. Still, something constructive can emerge from the wreckage, as it does in James’s novel. In shattering the bowl to reveal its fundamentally flawed nature, Maggie also initiates her escape from the constraints of its perfect circularity. She can now move forward in her marriage by plotting to send Charlotte and her father back to America. A line of verse, from a Victorian poem that itself flirted with the verse-novel’s formal hybridity, offers the crucial wedge between lyric and story. In a way, then, James’s golden bowl can be thought of as the product of an adulterous union between Browning’s ring of gold and Tennyson’s diamonds, his markers

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of the affair between Lancelot and Guinevere (I am tempted see the Grail as the injured husband in the affair). All these form-things belong to the same family. And to the family of adulterated modernist novels that inherit their impure forms from the Victorian novel in verse, I must add one more member: James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). I mentioned in Chapter 4 that Joyce had found space on Bloom’s bookshelf for a copy of William Allingham’s Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland; somewhat curiously, Bloom also recalls Tennyson’s “rift in the lute” as he contemplates familial discord in “Sirens,” the episode of the novel most explicitly concerned with the musicality of lyric.20 In the style of so many Victorian verse-novels, Joyce’s monumental revision of Homeric epic makes the old new by mixing things up. Bloom himself represents this impulse toward the hybrid: part Hungarian Jew, part Irish Catholic, he is dismissed by the one-eyed Citizen of “Cyclops” as “One of those mixed middlings” (277). And as with the verse-novels I have considered here, such genetic hybridity seems to call for generic crossbreeding, as Joyce tests out a variety of formal innovations through the novel’s eighteen episodes. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), the youthful Stephen Dedalus had lectured his friend Lynch on the three traditional generic divisions that undergird so much of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classical aesthetics: epic, drama, and lyric. That book may have had its share of stylistic and formal innovation, with its five-part structure, reminiscent of Shakespeare, and its moments of lyrical epiphany. But Ulysses makes adulteration both its theme and its method. From the aforementioned fugue-based lyricism of “Sirens”; to the newspaper collage of “Aeolus”; to the sharp, impressionistic episodic shifts of “Wandering Rocks”; to the Browningesque (or Jamesian) split perspective of “Nausicaa,” as we move from Gerty McDowell’s viewpoint to that of Bloom halfway through the episode (and in which the descriptions of the fireworks in the background anticipate some of the objective release of Woolf ’s seaside scene in The Waves); to what has been described as “the narrative closet drama” of “Circe,” in which the stage directions must be attributed to a novelistic “narrator”;21 to the amazing prose-poem that is “Penelope”—and I could go on—each of these episodes demonstrates the spirit of generic experimentation that characterized the verse-novels of the previous century. Nevertheless, Joyce, too, would search for wholeness. We see such yearning in “Ithaca” when Bloom and Stephen, who have been crossing paths all day, unite for the briefest moment in the backyard of 7 Eccles Street as they share the view of “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit” (573). This densely lyrical line echoes the transcendent stellar greeting that met Dante at the end of each of the Canticles of the

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Divine Comedy. We see the desire in Bloom’s fractured thoughts as he falls asleep at the end of the episode, as well: “Going to a dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc’s auk’s egg in the night of the bed” (607). The auk’s egg’s “square round” form hints that Bloom may have successfully circled the square (as I framed the problem in Chapter 3) on his odyssey. But even if we arrive at a point of rest (indicated typographically by the original text’s enlarged period at this juncture), the story doesn’t end here. As an egg—or a golden bowl—must crack open to yield the new form inside, so, in Joyce’s novel, we finally emerge into the flow of Penelope to experience another side of the story. Moreover as Molly’s “yes!” exclaims in the novel’s final word, while we might regret the lost wholeness of form, new hope springs once more from generic wounds. Joyce’s most shocking revision of The Odyssey may be his recasting of Molly’s adultery as a potentially salutary act: if anything can push the indolent Bloom out of his chronically passive acceptance of the dismal state of his marriage, it is this jolt. “Yes”: Molly begins her monologue with the exact word with which she concludes it. Joyce’s association of the episode with the reclining eight that is the symbol for infinity suggests his interest here in rounded forms, whether literary or biomorphic. But Molly’s first affirmative referenced a specific occurrence between the husband and wife, who have presumably conversed briefly after he interrupted her slumber to join her: “because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed” (608). Something has changed over the course of the day Joyce has described. While (like “Penelope”) the novel may have circled back to its beginning (or at least to the beginning of Bloom’s narrative, “Calypso”), it does so with a difference; recall that we had initially encountered Bloom while he was serving his wife her morning meal in bed. So for all that we are back at 7 Eccles Street, Bloom’s request represents a change of address; the ground has indeed shifted. The attachment of a principle of growth to the quotidian circling resembles Patmore’s model pattern for marriage, both in fact and in the form of his verse. Here, though, it has been achieved through Molly’s act of adultery, through her forceful intrusion of story into the established pattern of the Blooms’ daily round. And Joyce’s second, more youthful alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, also exits the novel moving forward: we know he plans to relinquish his job as a teacher; we surmise he will leave Ireland for new lands—as so many verse-novel protagonists had done before. In “Telemachus,” during his own morning routine, Stephen had looked into his shaving mirror only to see “a symbol for Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant” (6). Joyce may view it as Irish, but his glass itself refracts James’s similarly cracked Anglo-American golden bowl. It also

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shadows forth the concluding gesture in the village pageant that provides the structure and setting for Virginia Woolf ’s Between the Acts (1941), where the players parade an assortment of mirrors before the audience to end their procession of the history of England with a vision of the fragmented present. Like Fane’s candles, Patmore’s sandals, Robert Browning’s pearls, and Tennyson’s diamonds, these modernist formthings metonymically stand in both for the specific works of art that contain them and for radically new kinds of writing, combining the forward momentum of narrative drive with the ecstatic potential of lyric escape. Their fracturing is the lesson, at least in part, of the self-divided forms I have considered throughout this book; rather than the literary dead end it is so often assumed to be, the Victorian verse-novel offered a new model for generic experimentation. The balance between verse and novel shifts: reflecting the broader (although by no means universal) trends toward and away from story of their respective periods, Barrett Browning’s injection of story (action) into verse is superseded by Woolf ’s attention to what happens “between the acts.” But all these writers, Victorian and modernist, recognized the need for “new forms ‥ as well as thoughts,” as Barrett Browning had observed. This is what it means to “aspire . . . to Life.”

NOTES 1. Woolf, “Aurora Leigh,” in The Second Common Reader, 202–3, 212, 213. This volume was originally published in 1932, but the essay was based on a pair of articles Woolf had written for the Yale Review and the TLS in June and July of 1931. 2. See Catherine Addison, “The Verse Novel as Genre,” and “The Contemporary Verse Novel: A Challenge to Established Genres?” English Studies in Africa 52.2 (2012), 85–101. 3. See Elizabeth Barrett Barrett to H. F. Chorley, January 7, 1845, in Brownings’ Correspondence X.13–15. 4. Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1981), 203. I briefly discuss this work (and Ulysses, to which I will turn in what follows) in the context of its inter-generic operations in my essay, “The Impact of Lyric, Drama, and Verse Narrative on Novel Form,” in The Cambridge History of the English Novel, ed. Robert L. Caserio and Clement C. Hawes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 549–64. 5. Quoted in Kate Flint, “Introduction” to Virginia Woolf, The Waves, ed. Kate Flint (London: Penguin, 1992), ix. References to The Waves will be to this edition and will be internally documented. As in An Idyl of Work, discussed in Chapter 5, Woolf divides up her focus to critique the

276

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

The Victorian Verse-Novel Wordsworthian egotistical sublime. The critique is again partly a matter of gender; in her quest for balance, Woolf offers three male and three female protagonists. Woolf, Diary, Vol. III, 185. Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III, ed. Nigel Nicolson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 204. Woolf, “Aurora Leigh,” in The Second Common Reader, 212. Tucker, “Story,” 143. Pinch, “Transatlantic Modern Love,” 160, 165. Woolf, “The Novels of George Meredith,” in The Second Common Reader, 228, 229, 232 (originally published 1928). Pinch, “Transatlantic Modern Love,” 163–4. According to Genette, the frequent attribution to Aristotle of the idea of three primary genres—lyric, epic, and dramatic—depends upon the misidentification of dithyrambic verse with lyric. Nevertheless, this identification persisted. See Gérard Genette, sel. from The Architext, in The Lyric Theory Reader, ed. Jackson and Prins, 18–19. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, ed. David Bradshaw (London: Penguin, 2002), 21. As it happens, Ross Posnock has seen in The Inn Album a source for James’s story, “The Lesson of the Master.” See Henry James and the Problem of Robert Browning (Athens: University Press of Georgia, 1985). Henry James, “The Novel in The Ring and the Book,” in Henry James, Literary Criticism, 797. The essay was first presented as a lecture to the Royal Society of Literature to celebrate the centenary of Browning’s birth. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, “Teaching The Golden Bowl as the Last Victorian Novel,” The Henry James Review 17.3 (1996), 278, 279. Susan Crowl, whose phrase I quote here, seeks to locate Browning’s presence in Henry James’s cultural imaginary by tracing the relationships between The Ring and the Book and The Golden Bowl, arguing that James uses Browning to “stage[] a liminal scene between modern and traditional, English and American, sacred and secular, poetry and prose, and steps purposefully toward claiming that space as his own” (Crowl, “Henry James,” 283). James, The Golden Bowl, 292. I thank Justin Sider for pointing this quotation out to me. For a brief but wonderful formalist reading of this golden bowl, see Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 42–3. Joyce, Ulysses, 227. Further references to this text will be internally documented by page number. Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 100.

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Index action 1, 53, 63n19, 163n65, 175, 181, 185, 214n50, 250, 254, 268, 271, 275; see also choice; narrative Adams, James Eli 136, 160n41, 161n42 Addison, Catherine 4, 25n14, 265 address 183–4, 186, 196, 213n46, 213n47, 214n57, 215n58, 255, 274; see also epistolarity; lyric adultery 34–54, 74, 94, 99–107, 133, 142, 160n38, 251, 256, 269–75; see also marriage Aeschylus 38 afterlife, see marriage in heaven agency, see action; choice Alcott, Louisa May 226 Alfano, Veronica 116n39 Allen, Gay Wilson 261n42 Allen, Grant 256 Allingham, William, Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland 206–10, 217n84, 217n85, 273 Altman, Janet Gurkin 183 America 60n2, 149, 195, 197, 206, 219–58, 266, 270, 272, 274, 276n17 Anderson, Amanda 26n21, 167 anthology form 223–4, 241, 245; see also Loeffelholz, Mary Anthony, Susan B. 220 Ariosto 17 Aristotle 73, 276n12 Armstrong, Isobel 5, 201, 202, 204 Armstrong, Nancy 6 Arnold, Matthew 1, 8, 19, 170 audience, see publics Augustine 39, 119n66 Austen, Jane 18, 39, 50, 255, 270 Austin, Alfred 36 autobiography 11, 64n36, 68n60, 191, 211n16; see also diaries Aytoun, W. E. 1, 13, 15, 19, 20 Bagehot, Walter 14, 20 Bakhtin, Mikhail 6, 20, 165, 171, 211n19, 218n90, 224 Bal, Mieke 68n61 Ball, Patricia M. 5, 96, 114n27, 115n36, 122n97, 157n4

Barrett Browning, Elizabeth 18, 69, 173, 234, 265–6 Aurora Leigh 1, 4, 7–17, 19, 36, 42–3, 100, 113n10, 127, 157n5, 164n70, 168, 170, 172–6, 178, 183, 187–95, 198, 199, 203, 205, 211n8, 211n11, 211n14, 214n54, 215n58, 215n59, 215n60, 215n64, 216n71, 220, 222, 225, 226, 227, 228, 232, 233–56, 262n56, 265, 266, 267, 268, 271, 272 Sonnets from the Portuguese 10–11, 45, 214n57 Beatty, Bernard 162n53 Beers, Henry A. 122n100 beginnings 78, 108, 178, 267 Bickersteth, Edwin Henry 120n80 bigamy 63n20, 103, 121n90, 252; see also adultery Blair, Kirstie 117n45 Blalock, Susan 127, 129 blank verse 6, 16, 28n53, 45, 150, 174–5, 200 Bloom, Harold 225 Blunt, Wilfred Scawen 36, 43, 68n58 Boone, Joseph Allen 51–2, 271 Bose, Amalendu 25n15 Bowles, William Lisle 11 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 62n17, 65n39, 79–80, 226–7 Bradley, A. C. 150 Brantlinger, Patrick 65n46 Brimley, George 38, 79–80, 81–2, 84 Bristow, Joseph 114n23 Brodhead, Richard H. 226, 250 Brontë, Charlotte 7, 190–1, 192, 225 Brontë, Emily 20 Brooks, Cleanth 84 Brooks, Peter 73 Brown, Bill 159n26 Brown, Susan 129, 144 Browning, Robert 212n30, 270 Asolando 139–41 The Inn Album 131, 149–57, 173, 184, 270, 276n14 The Ring and the Book 3, 12, 36, 61n13, 100–1, 120n75, 125–30, 138–49, 153, 156, 218n90, 239, 266, 270–1, 276n17

296

Index

Buckland, Adelene 24n12 Bujak, Nick 30n74 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 36 Buzard, James 177, 180–1 Byron, George Gordon (Lord) 178, 180–2, 198, 201, 210n4, 216n74, 241 Don Juan 16, 19–20, 36, 37, 67n57, 76, 92–4, 138, 167, 171, 181, 200, 202, 211n16, 213n38, 214n53, 267 Cameron, Sharon 161n48 Campbell, Matthew 217n85, 218n91, 218n93 Carrión, María Dolores Narbona 258n7 Carroll, Lewis 157n5 Carson, Anne 265–6 Case, Alison 188, 214n54, 256 Cavitch, Max 165n86 Cervantes 17, 38–9 Champneys, Basil 121n86, 258n10, 259n19 Chapman, Alison 211n11, 259n19 character 12, 19–20, 58–9 Chaucer 20, 47, 63n20, 111, 186, 206, 219–20 Chesterton, G. K. 162n54, 169 children/ offspring 32, 46, 56, 61n6, 71n81, 87, 91, 133, 196–7, 205, 207, 230, 256; see also genetics choice 54, 76, 200–1, 202, 203, 209, 216n72 Chorley, Henry 116n40 Christ, Carol 24n12 chronos 8, 56, 86, 95, 99, see also duration; narrative; temporality circles/ circularity 110, 145, 192–3, 268 and squares 125–30, 131, 133–4, 148, 151, 193, 274 see also lyric; pearl; repetition; unity class 16, 181, 207–10, 218n90, 226–7, 237–9, 242–5, 249, 250, 265 Claybaugh, Amanda 114n21 Clough, Arthur Hugh 14, 18, 19, 163n68, 169, 211n21, 216n72, 219–20 Amours de Voyage 1, 5, 36, 101, 167, 169, 170, 171, 174, 175–7, 179, 181–7, 190, 195, 200, 205, 213n46, 214n53, 217n80, 219, 255, 266 The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich 98, 169, 213n47, 217n80, 217n83, 218n90, 219 Cobbe, Frances Power 145 Cohen, Ralph 2 Colander, Raymond E. 25n15

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 126, 182 Cook, A. K. 162n56 Collins, Wilkie 132, 139, 163n65 Combe, William 168 contemporaneity 2, 6, 8, 14, 19, 20, 22, 34, 149–51, 163n68, 178, 212n25, 212n30 Cook, Sylvia Jenkins 241 copyright, see reprinting, culture of; law cosmopolitanism 32, 156, 169, 170, 183, 215n60, 216n74, 225; see also travel, geography courtship plot, see marriage Crabbe, George 18 Crowl, Susan 69n67, 276n17 Culler, Jonathan 8, 10, 213n46 Dagnall, John Mallone 227 Dallas, E. S. 3, 28n48, 137, 139, 141, 250 Dames, Nicholas 122n98 Dante 20, 38–9, 40, 48, 50, 106, 120n80, 125–6, 170, 273–4; see also reading, scenes of, Paolo and Francesca Darwin, Charles 9, 90, 197 De Vere, Aubrey 221, 222 Defoe, Daniel 10 Dentith, Simon 24n12 Derrida, Jacques 5, 62n18, 131, 153, 156 DeSpain, Jessica 259n25 diamond 15, 16, 131–9, see also form-thing diaries 45, 76–7, 184, 187, 255; see also autobiography, lyric Dickens, Charles 20, 54, 69n65, 103, 107, 114n22, 118n57, 121n90, 151, 191, 226, 241, 242, 245, 262n67 Dickinson, Emily 139, 220, 228 diction, poetic 13, see also peas, poetry of Dimock, Wai Chee 63n30 Disraeli, Benjamin 31 distance 167, 177, 183–4, 188–91, 193, 210n4; see also geography; travel divorce, see adultery; marriage Donne, John 44, 78, 81, 84, 88–90, Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert 159n29 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan 130 Drama 38–9, 55, 200, 256–7 closet drama 18, 273 see also Shakespeare dramatic monologue 12, 36, 153, 266 Duff, David 6, 18, 54, 64n36, 224; see also rough- and smooth-mixing duration 8, 77, 91, 108–11, 117n46, 135, 191; see also chronos; temporality

Index Edgeworth, Maria 206 Edmond, Rod 4, 5, 20 Edwards, Gavin 29n61 Egg, Leopold Augustus 67n57, 74 Eggers, J. Phillip 158n14 Eisner, Eric 220 Eliot, George 18, 20, 24n10, 54, 71n81, 112n5, 114n25, 122n100, 176, 197–8, 215n58, 227 The Spanish Gypsy 36, 197, 200–5, 224 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 186, 219, 221, 231 ends/ endings 32, 78, 108, 110–11, 126–7, 147, 172, 175–6, 178, 194, 200, 204, 237, 238–9, 242, 248–9, 256–7, 267–8, 274 envoi 186, 214n53, 238 epic 1, 5–6, 8, 24n12, 37–9, 54, 58–9, 86–7, 128, 129, 138, 145, 158n16, 160n39, 167, 170, 174, 182, 188, 191, 193, 200–1, 205, 241, 269 epistolarity 77, 96, 126, 183–95, 196–7, 213n46, 213n47 Erkkila, Betsy 220 “Fane, Violet” [Mary, Baroness Currie], Denzil Place 31–60, 76, 196–7, 256, 262n68, 269 From Dawn to Noon 39–45 Favret, Mary 70n77 Felluga, Dino Franco 4, 6, 19, 25n14, 27n32, 29n57, 30n71, 48, 62, 128, 152, 164n75 Fenianism 168, 217n86 Field, Kate 220 Fields, James T. 139 FitzGerald, Edward 157n5 Flaubert, Gustave 39–40, 47, 65n39, 114n22 Flint, Kate 35, 62n17, 64n35, 65n39, 65n42, 67n57, 69n62 Ford, Ford Madox 270 form-thing 15, 47, 57–8, 91, 130, 273, 274–5; see also diamond; pearl; peas, poetry of Foucault, Michel 6, 26n21, 35, 146, 170 Fox, Renee 158n10 Freidman, Susan 24n13 Friel, Brian 247 Frow, John 36 Frye, Northrup 184 Gallagher, Catherine 73, 134 Gardner, Martin 157n5 Garnett, Richard 115n32

297

Garvey, Helen Gruber 224 Gaskell, Elizabeth 11–12, 20, 242, 251 Gattung 36, 74, 272; see also genre; marriage gems 10, 130, 159n30, 161n48, 203–4; see also diamond; form-things; pearl genetics 195–205; see also children gender 4, 16, 80, 85, 104, 114n22, 134, 228–30, 242, 256–7; see also women Genette, Gérard 60n3, 276n12 genre 2–3, 6, 36–7, 40, 130, 131, 132–3, 167, 197, 222, 252, 258, 269, 273 geography/space 17, 131, 139, 160n35, 163n66, 167–8, 174, 177–8, 186, 187, 188–9, 191, 194, 207–8; see also travel Gibson, Mary Ellis 152 Gilbert, Elliot L. 133–4, 151, 160n35 Gilbert, Sandra M. 220 Gilbert, W. S. 157n1 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 2, 53, 114n25, 217n80 Goode, John 120n76, 169 Gosse, Edmund 65n48, 94 Gould, Elizabeth Porter 212n30, 220, 258n2 Graham, Colin 24n12 Gray, Erik 66n51, 70n71, 70n75, 117n50, 157n5, 159n31, 214n52 Gregory, Melissa Valiska 36, 153 Grey, Maria and Emily Shirreff 41 Griffiths, Eric 85, 115n33 Gubar, Susan 220 guidebooks 179–83, 212n30; see also tour Hadley, Elaine 207 Hair, Donald 164n84 Hammerton, James A. 61n10 Hancock, Michael 132–3, 161n42 handbooks, see guidebooks Hardy, Thomas 18, 54, 79, 82, 122n100 Harlan, Aurelia Brooks 259n17 Hart, James David 259n16, 261n43 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 221 heaven, see marriage in heaven Heidegger, Martin 82 Hemans, Felicia 11, 210n4 heredity, see genetics Hoagwood, Terence 61n4, 61n7, 61n8, 66n52, 67n55, 68n61 Hogarth, William 74 Holland, Josiah Gilbert 261n43 Kathrina 228, 232–9, 261n44, 261n50, 262n56 The Mistress of the Manse 228–31

298

Index

Homer 37–8, 64n34, 167, 170, 174, 193, 227 honeymoon 82–3, 89 Hopkins, Gerard Manly 129–30, 138–9 Horace 16, 130, 133, 142, 147, 148, 155, 156–7 Hughes, Linda K. 73, 93, 98, 114n22, 115n37, 163n60, 210, 217n84, 217n86, 217n87, 259n13 Hughes, Winifred 61n13 Huttner, Sid 221–2, 260n31 Hutton, R. H. 82 hybridity 4–5, 15, 16, 35, 74, 98, 103, 144, 150, 153, 168, 170, 185, 197–9, 201–2, 204–5, 206, 209, 240, 241, 256, 258, 266, 272–5; see also genetics, intertextuality idealism (of poetry) 7, 13, 29n54, 81, 91, 98, 128, 150 incarnation 115n36, 125, 157n4; see also idealism; realism Inchbald, Elizabeth 35 intertextuality 21, 35, 37–9, 53, 62n16, 62n17, 67n56, 88, 151, 180, 223–5 and (self-) quotation 154–7, 192–5, 272 see also guidebooks; plagiarism invitation poem 186, 187, 209 Irmscher, Christoph 224–5, 227 Jackson, Virginia 6 Jakobson, Roman 134 James, Henry 150, 155, 164n84, 201, 226–7 The Golden Bowl 51–2, 270–3 Jauss, Hans Robert 2, 162n52 jewels, see gems Jones, Anna Maria 62n13 Joyce, James 67n56, 209–10, 273–5 Julian, Linda 122n100 kairos 8, 56, 86, 95, 99; see also lyric; temporality Kames, Henry Homes (Lord) 5 Kaye, John William 144–5 Keats, John 163n57, 172, 199 Keirstead, Christopher 169–70, 183–5, 186, 211n11, 214n53, 215n60 Kendrick, Walter 152 Kennedy, Richard S. 161n49, 164n84 Kierkegaard, Søren 74–8, 81 Kincaid, James R. 160n35 Kingsley, Charles 20, 29n67, 101

Knox, Marisa Palacios 258n8 Kroeber, Karl 30n71 Kurnick, David 67n57 de Laclos, Pierre Choderlos 75 Lang, Bernhard 101 Lansdown, Richard 30n71 LaPorte, Charles 24n7, 161n42 Larcom, Lucy 239–49 law 38, 146–8, 215n58, 254–5, 258 copyright law 222, 253 marriage law 61n10, 102–3, 245, 251–2, 253 of genre 2, 104–5, 131, 153, 156, 254–5, 258 see also Derrida, Jacques; Horace; plagiarism Leckie, Barbara 34, 65n39, 69n66 Ledbetter, Kathryn 61n7, 61n8, 66n52, 67n55, 68n61 Leighton, Angela 276n19 length 6, 9–10, 24n12, 73, 113n18, 144, 245, 252; see also duration Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 9 Levine, Caroline 3, 26n21, 112n3 Levine, Lawrence 260n38 Levine, Naomi 162n52, 164n70 Lewalski, Barbara 30n75 Liu, Alan 168, 172, 210n8 Loeffelholz, Mary 223–4, 233, 238, 239, 240, 241, 244, 245, 248, 261n52, 262n56, 262n62, 263n73; see also anthology form Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 217n77, 217n80, 219–20, 224–5, 226, 227, 231, 239, 245, 260n33, 261n47 love poetry 5–6, 27n26, 186; see also adultery; lyric; marriage lovetime 56–60, 96, 110 Lukács, Georg 20, 170–1 Lund, Michael 73, 93, 98, 163n60, 259n13 lyric 6–7, 8, 9, 83–90, 109, 176–7, 183, 200, 210n4, 213n46, 235, 237, 253 and narrative 42–5, 53–60, 74–8, 96, 115n27, 135, 145, 147, 177–8, 184–5, 193, 203–4, 266, 269 “lyric now” 8, 27n29, 43, 59, 160n41, 211n19 lyricization 10, 26n24 see also circles/ circularity; women Lytton, [Edward Robert] Bulwer- (Earl of), see “Meredith, Owen”

Index McAleavey, Maia 102–3, 107, 114n20, 121n90, 122n101 macaronic verse 156, 218n90; see also translation McDannell, Colleen 101 McDonagh, Josephine 171, 202 McDonnell, Jennifer 162n53 McGann, Jerome 18 McGill, Meredith 222–3, 224, 225, 226, 240, 263n78 Machann, Clinton 24n12 McSweeney, Kerry 26n20, 67n57 Manning, Peter J. 92 Margini, Matthew 161n42 margins 131, 150–2, 164n70, 267 marriage 73–111, 128, 144–5, 175, 220, 228–9, 235, 251–2, 274 marriage debates 34–5, 250 marriage/courtship plot 7, 35–8, 64n34, 79, 82–3, 92, 175, 186, 191, 205, 233, 242, 248, 255–6 Rachel and Leah 97–9, 105, 120n76 marriage in heaven 60, 78, 86, 95, 99–107, 110, 120n80 Masson, David 3, 34, 40 Meisel, Martin 73, 74 Meredith, George, Modern Love 27n28, 36, 48, 221, 269 as novelist 269–70 “Meredith, Owen” [Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton] 211n12 Glenaveril 177–8, 180, 195–200, 201, 202, 216n67 Lucile 36, 61n6, 179–80, 183, 197, 198, 205, 221–2, 225, 226, 261n43 Mermin, Dorothy 12, 24n13 metaphor 54, 125, 135–6, 144, 153, 162n57, 175–6, 185–6, 190, 230, 246, 272; see also simile meter 15–16, 42, 65n48, 85–6, 104, 109, 116n41, 116n42, 117n46, 150, 176, 178, 186, 206, 217n85, 229, 231, 261n42, 261n44, 261n47; see also blank verse metonym 80, 130, 246, 275 Michie, Helena 112n5, 115n34 middles 69n65, 73, 76, 79, 92, 108, 113n18, 114n21 Mill, John Stuart 8, 184 Millay, Edna St. Vincent 57 Miller, Andrew H. 26n21 Miller, D. A. 6, 113n18, 159n23 Miller, William Ian 153 Milliken, Edwin James 195 Milton, John 20, 151, 258

299

Paradise Lost 9, 10, 12, 13, 53–6, 59, 63n29, 178, 233 modernism 62n16, 227, 265–75 Moers, Ellen 220 Moore, Natasha 4, 5, 112n5, 212n25, 212n27 Moore, Thomas 213n43 Moretti, Franco 37, 167, 169 Morgan, Monique R. 27n30, 54, 145, 162n53, 214n54, 216n71 Morris, William 36, 64n38, 122n102, 209 The Earthly Paradise (The Lovers of Gudrun) 36, 81, 108–11, 220, 224 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 76 Murray, John, see guidebooks music 75–6, 84, 104, 151, 185, 192, 198, 234, 243; see also lyric narrative 8, 26n20, 45–52, 74, 130, 159n26, 235, 245, 266–7 narrativization 68n61, 115n36 see also action; lyric and narrative; plot; seriality; story Nead, Lynda 67n57, 74 Newman, John Henry (Cardinal) 9 Nitchie, Elizabeth 227, 261n43 Norton, Charles Eliot 219 novel 6, 15–16, 20, 78, 170, 184, 200–1, 213n46, 224, 241, 269–70, 271 Bildungsroman 20, 49, 52, 96–7, 112n3, 125, 145, 193 family chronicle 210n4 French novel 35, 39, 48, 67n57, 119n62, 179, 269 in Victorian genre theory 1, 34, 40–1, 128, 132 Künstlerroman 7, 232, 253, 256 perceived Victorian market dominance 9, 27n32, 205 see also marriage, marriage/ courtship plot; realism sensation fiction 20, 24, 41, 50, 61n13, 62n17, 79–80, 150, 176, 226–7, 250, 270 Nugent, Edmund C. 63n20 O’Brien, Ellen 153 Ortiz-Robles, Mario 112n3 Osborne, Laughton 225–6, 260n33 Ovid 163n57 painting 9, 16, 24n10, 64n38, 67n57, 68n61, 74, 78, 115n35, 130, 151, 190, 195, 198, 200, 215n59, 252, 253, 260n33

300

Index

paradox 84; see also lyric parody 6, 64n32, 65n48, 150, 152, 160n37, 168, 181 Pater, Walter 10, 57, 75, 87, 109, 129, 130 Patmore, Coventry 18, 115n28, 119n69 The Angel in the House 36, 38, 61n6, 79–107, 126, 157n4, 212n26, 215n58, 221, 222, 228, 229, 230, 251, 261n44, 268, 274, 275 Patmore, Derek 221, 259n11 pearl 130–1, 137–49, 162n52, 268; see also form-thing peas, poetry of 14–16, 45, 265; see also form-thing Petrarch 56, 84, 90–2 Phelan, Joseph 213n46 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart 220 Pinch, Adela 85, 116n42, 210n4, 213n46, 214n57, 221, 269, 270 plagiarism 225–6; see also law plot 73, 82, 172, 174, 230, 247; see also story; marriage plot; narrative; unity, reunion plot Plotz, John 118n58 Poe, Edgar Allan 9, 13, 225, 231, 250, 271 popularity 8, 17, 30n73, 40, 41, 120n80, 122n100, 167, 219, 221–2, 223, 224, 227, 228, 232, 250; see also publics Posnock, Ross 276n14 Prins, Yopie 6, 212n30 prose 9 Puchner, Martin 276n21 publics (reading) 46, 60n3, 65n46, 69n62, 222, 226–7, 232, 233–4, 236–7, 239, 258; see also popularity; women readers Pushkin, Alexander 19, 63n20 Quint, David 38 Rachel and Leah (Genesis 29), see marriage railway 17, 90, 119n70, 153–4, 173–9, 189, 212n26, 212n30, 247, 252, 255, 262n61; see also travel Rainof, Rebecca 112n3 reading, scenes of, Fane, “Lancelot and Guinevere,” 39–43 Fane, Denzil Place 45–52 The Golden Bowl 51 Paolo and Francesca 38–40, 50, 74 see also intertextuality realism 13–14, 38, 49, 76, 81, 82, 98, 128, 142, 227; see also diction, poetic; peas, poetry of

Reed, Glenn M. 263n75 Reid, Michael 69n68 repetition 49, 78, 84–6, 95, 136, 148, 272 as earworm 192–5 see also circles; intertextuality; selfquotation reprinting, culture of 222–3, 225, 240, 250, 253; see also McGill, Meredith rereading 49, 115n28 revolution 70n69, 134, 168–9 French 9, 19, 169, 170, 217n80 Industrial 9, 268; of 1848 9, 169–70, 182 see also Fenianism; Risorgimento Reynolds, Margaret 62n16, 215n61, 260n32 Reynolds, Matthew 24n12, 25n15, 64n35, 169, 213n43, 215n64, 260n32 rhyme 34, 66n50, 85, 92, 96, 118n62, 138, 164n84, 178, 180, 252, 256 Richardson, Samuel, Clarissa 18, 76, 126, 158n9, 185, 188 Risorgimento 9, 21n14, 32, 70n69, 169 Roberts, Adam 25n15, 62n19 Rogers, Samuel 167–8 romance 17–18, 24n8, 34, 174, 201 Rossetti, Christina 161n48 Rossetti, D. G. 8, 10, 64n35, 65n38, 74, 122n102, 177, 269 rough- and smooth-mixing 6, 16, 224, 250, 268; see also Duff, David Rubin, Joan Shelley 260n38 Rudy, Jason R. 86, 117n46, 117n48 Ruskin, John 151, 241 Sand, George 179, 225, 227 Sargent, Epes 249–50 The Woman Who Dared 14–15, 63n20, 120n80, 215n58, 250–8 Saunders, Clare Broome 65n40 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 177 Schlegel, Friedrich 18, 20 Scott, Sir Walter 17, 164n75 seriality/sequels 11–12, 18, 50–2, 56, 74, 92–3, 95–107, 111, 116n37, 120n80, 132, 136–7, 159n23, 162n53, 217n84, 217n87, 268; see also narrative Seth, Vikram 265 Seward, Anna 18 Shakespeare, William 20, 35, 55, 151, 181, 182, 257, 273 Shaw, W. David 144 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 134

Index Sider, Justin 276n18 Sidney, Sir Philip 17, 20 simile 133–8 and parody 160n37 see also lyric Small, Helen 60n1 Smith, Alexander 19 sonnet sequence 11–12, 27n28, 45, 66n51, 67n54; see also Barrett Browning, Sonnets From the Portuguese; Meredith, George, Modern Love spasmodic poetry 19, 117n48 Spenser, Edmund 17, 20, 37, 64n32, 88, 170, 174 squares, see circles and squares Stack, J. Herbert 35 de Staël, Germaine 168 Stark, Robert 28n53 Starr, G. Gabrielle 113n11, 126 steam, see railway; see also travel Stedman, Edmund Clarence 150, 220 Alice of Monmouth 227–8, 260n42 Stevenson, Robert Louis 155 Stewart, Garrett 213n46 Stewart, Nicole 61n4 Stiles, Cheryl 258n3 Stone, Marjorie 25n13, 116n39 story 7–9, 47, 50, 172, 250, 267, 274, 275; see also narrative; plot Stowe, Harriet Beecher 241 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 4, 122n103, 128, 150, 161n48 Tanner, Tony 34, 37, 46, 61n11 Tasker, Meg 6, 24n13, 25n14, 29n54, 41 Taylor, Bayard 150 temporality 1, 8, 27n30, 33, 55–60, 75, 86, 102, 109, 121n91, 133, 143, 146–7, 163n68, 174, 187, 188–9 see also chronos; contemporaneity; duration; kairos; “lyric now” Tennyson, Alfred (Lord), Enoch Arden 30n73, 63n20, 122n101, 196 Idylls of the King 3, 36, 39, 61n13, 101, 125–38, 151–2, 192–3, 234, 235, 269, 271–2, 273, 275 In Memoriam 10, 104, 107, 162n52 Maud 19, 232 The Princess 55, 116n38, 157n1, 230, 240, 256, 262n60 Thackeray, William Makepeace 20, 227 things 132, 135, 146, 155, 159n26, 162n54, 272; see also form-thing

301

Todorov, Tzvetan 130 Tolstoy, Leo 80 torture 144–9, 154–5; see also violence tour 167–8 tourist 181, 182, 190 see also guidebooks; travel translation 19, 46–7, 48, 58, 64n35, 76, 113n16, 156, 208, 218n90, 225, 239, 242–3, 245, 247, 250; see also macaronic verse travel 145, 167–210, 219–20, 248, 274 transatlantic travel 196, 197, 206, 219–25, 226, 248, 252, 270 see also railway; tour Trollope, Anthony 4, 15, 129, 131–2, 151, 206, 270 Tucker, Herbert F. 4, 9, 10, 12, 19, 25n15, 58–9, 63, 65n45, 120n80, 128–9, 132, 139, 142, 158n16, 159n25, 160n39, 161n42, 189, 191, 198, 200–1, 208, 214n54, 215n65, 216n74, 217n81, 259n24, 268, 269 unity, poetic 10, 12–13, 128, 134, 137–9, 169, 231, 240, 262n58, 271, 273–4 national 204, 249 reunion plot 227–31, 274 see also Risorgimento; circles Vaninskaya, Anna 24n12 violence 133, 134, 142, 143–4, 149, 152–7; see also torture Virgil 37–8, 88, 167, 170, 211, 217n80 volumes, see seriality/ sequels Walker, Eric C. 74, 76, 78, 113n15 Wallace, Anne D. 103 Watkins, Charlotte C. 163n68 Watt, Ian 113n15 Wawn, Andrew 122n100 Webster, Augusta 36 Welsh, Alexander 161n44 Whitman, Walt 224–5, 231–2, 233 Whittier, John Greenleaf 220, 223, 245, 262n60 Wiener, Martin J. 163n62, 163n63 Williams, Carolyn 37, 168 Wolfson, Susan 36 Wollstonecraft, Mary 120n81 Woodson, Jacqueline 266

302

Index

women 17–18, 114n22, 120n81, 133, 144–5, 159n17, 239–43, 250, 254–7 women readers 40–1, 62n17, 220–1, 233–5, 262n62 female purity 126, 131, 135, 140–2, 153, 165n87, 235 lyric and women 115n37, 116n39, 131, 134, 139–40, 161n48 see also gender Woolf, Virginia 7, 60, 114n22, 178, 205, 265–6, 270, 275 The Waves 266–8, 271, 273, 275n5

Wordsworth, William 10, 11, 16, 29n63, 54, 90, 154, 163n66, 171–2, 178, 182, 211n16, 239, 240, 244, 245, 262n56, 262n62, 276n5 Lyrical Ballads (and Preface) 13–14, 16, 18, 37, 82, 184–5, 231, 263n73 The Prelude 20, 54, 82, 113n13, 117n53, 167, 168, 233, 263n71 Wroth, Mary (Lady) 17 Yeazell, Ruth Bernard 271 Zemka, Sue 112n7, 122n98