Showing papers in "Victorian Studies in 2001"

Trauma, Memory, and Railway Disaster: The Dickensian Connection

Abstract: n 1865 Charles Dickens narrowly escaped death when the train on which he was traveling from Folkestone to London jumped a gap in the line occasioned by some repair work on a viaduct near Staplehurst, Kent. The foreman on the job miscalculated the time of the train’s arrival; the flagman was only 550 yards from the works and unable to give adequate warning of the train’s approach. The central and rear carriages fell off the bridge, plunging onto the river-bed below. Only one of the first class carriages escaped that plunge, coupled fast to the second class carriage in front. “It had come off the rail and was [. . .] hanging over the bridge at an angle, so that all three of them were tilted down into a corner” (Ackroyd 1013). Dickens managed to get Ellen Ternan and her mother, with whom he was traveling, out of the carriage and then behaved with remarkable self-possession, climbing down into the ravine and ministering to the many who lay injured and dying. With further aplomb, he climbed back into the dangerously unstable carriage and retrieved his manuscript, an account of which is offered in the memorable postscript to Our Mutual Friend (1865). Once back in London, however, Dickens began to develop the symptomatology that today we would recognize as typical of trauma. 1

Writing the Victorian City: discourses of risk, connection, and inevitability.

Abstract: A n essayist writing in the 1860 All the Year Round reflected that "it concerns a man more to know his risks of the fifty illnesses that may throw him on his back, than the possible date of the one death that must come" ("Registration of Sickness" 228). This seemingly unimpressive statement about the value of statistics is remarkable for a number of reasons. The editor, Charles Dickens, had himself famously caricatured and critiqued statistical studies with his early depictions of the Mudfog Association in Sketches by Boz (1833-36) and later in Hard Times (1854). The Mudfog Association's self-important and pointlessly detailed statistical reports, and Sissy Jupe's inability to comprehend, much less to pronounce, the term held dear by the unforgivingly utilitarian Gradgrind and the schoolmaster M'Choakumchild, asserted the emptiness and meaninglessness of statistical inquiry in comparison with what Dickens's novels celebrated: individuals, families, daily lives, and domestic feeling. But the author of this essay, expressing at once a specu

The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (review)

Abstract: SPRING 2001 received payment only if sales exceeded an agreed-upon level) and a striking fifty-eight percent of Paul’s titles were published on commission (which meant that authors entirely financed the production of their books). Howsam’s findings, while often suggestive, fall short in two important dimensions. First, the statistics include neither circulation figures nor information on the relative profitability of Paul’s various strategies. Did Paul make money publishing on commission or simply limit his risk? Were his poetry titles as widely read as, say, his “International Scientific Series”? And just as Howsam’s study fails to indicate the success of Paul’s ventures, it neglects to investigate the issue of their typicality. The great disappointment of Howsam’s study lies precisely in its inability to set the firm’s practices in the context of the transformations in late-Victorian literary production, such as the consolidation of the mass market or the trends in serious publishing that emerged in response. In the absence of this backdrop, neither the biographical records of Paul’s experiences nor the objective analysis of his publishing lists can contribute much to the broader history of the book. Consequently, Howsam struggles to generalize from her chief example: “publishers were gatekeepers, or perhaps mediators—no metaphor is quite right—for the cultures they lived in” (14), she writes, though she also suggests the more memorable image of publishers as “canaries in the coal-mines of contemporary culture” (13). Yet Howsam never provides examples of Paul’s ability to gauge, rightly or wrongly, the reading public’s demands, and the canary metaphor seems singularly inappropriate for a publisher so adept at shifting the burden of risk onto writers. Paul’s name continues to evoke enough intellectual gravitas to be still in use, though his contemporaries were ambivalent about his legacy. Howsam points out that among his obituarists, “Paul was regarded as a failure, unable to resolve the tensions between commercial and literary demands in the life of a publisher”(181). In 1889, he had merged his firm with two others into a limited company, an arrangement Paul hoped would provide the resources that would finally allow him to bring out titles by celebrated authors in the handsome editions he envisioned. But years of financial mismanagement eroded the new company’s prospects, and Paul’s attention turned again to personal questions of faith. Ironically, the same tension that the Victorians perceived as the cause of Paul’s failure—the clash of high culture and philistine capital—has become the basis for Howsam’s most successful insights. The lesson is not that they were violently at odds, but that they were ultimately inseparable. Bradley Deane Northwestern University

"Making the Working Man Like Me": Charity, Pastorship, and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain; Thomas Chalmers and Dr. James Phillips Kay

Abstract: ����� �� Charity once extended an invisible chain of sympathy between the higher and lower ranks of society, which has been destroyed by the luckless pseudophilanthropy of the [Old Poor Law] Few aged or decrepid [sic] pensioners now gratefully receive the visits of the higher classes—few of the poor seek the counsel, the admonitions, and assistance of the rich in the period of the inevitable accidents of life The bar of the overseer is however crowded with the sturdy applicants for a legalized relief, who regard the distributor of this bounty as their stern and merciless oppressor, instructed by the compassionless rich to reduce to the lowest possible amount the alms which the law wrings from their reluctant hands This disruption of the natural ties has created a wide gulph between the higher and lower orders of the community, across which, the scowl of hatred banishes the smile of charity and love

Making History with Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminism, Domestic Violence, and the Language of Imperialism

Abstract: Writing in 1878 on the question of what she termed ‘Wife Torture in England,’ Frances Power Cobbe stated that ‘the whole relation between the sexes in the class we are considering is very little better than one of master and slave’.1 Through her invocation of the master and slave analogy for women’s position in marriage, Cobbe draws upon a thirty-year history of Victorian feminist critique in which the representation of marriage as a form of slavery was a central rhetorical and conceptual framework. Yet though she has this history immediately available to her as an authorising source, Cobbe is very careful to distance herself from it: I have always abjured the use of this familiar comparison in speaking generally of English husbands and wives, because as regard the upper orders of society it is ridiculously overstrained and untrue. But in the ‘kicking districts,’ among the lowest laboring classes, Legree himself might find a dozen prototypes, and the condition of the women be most accurately matched by that of the negroes on a Southern plantation before the war struck off their fetters. (137)

Art for the Nation: Exhibitions and the London Public, 1747-2001 (review)

Abstract: SPRING 2001 between TV fabrication and reality was understood by 65 percent of English children” (192–93). Even assuming, in the absence of any stated credentials, some degree of reliability in this survey, that still presumably leaves 35 percent who cannot make such a distinction. Perhaps the most remarkable lapse for a social historian is the blithe assumption that vaguely similar phenomena (similar only in being subsumable under the baggy heading of “popular culture”) in radically different periods and societies can be unproblematically compared in their effects, regardless of historical, social, and economic context, technological change, individual psychological proclivity, and the unreliability of that most approximate of yardsticks, “community standards.” Is there no difference between the likely effects of a medium that works primarily linguistically and one that works primarily visually, between one experienced in solitude and another engaged with communally, between the read and the heard, between the static and the volatile, between the overtly fantastic and that which simulates “reality”? This book, which claims to be the first “to examine, over a lengthy time span, examples of both British and American popular culture that supposedly incited juvenile crime, among other iniquities, and also to test the accuracy of such claims” (3), conducts the examination but does nothing of substance to test the accuracy of the claims, although it is certainly not reluctant to assert (often with the support of such interested parties as the sanguinary Mr. Nolan) that such claims are untenable. Keith Wilson University of Ottawa

George Eliot and the Precious Mettle of Trust

Abstract: people, however, to acknowledge that something as precious as one's money depends on something as untrustworthy as other people is unthinkable. Far safer to trust in God, as American currency proclaims. Safer still to trust, in addition to God, gold. The Victorians found the international gold standard trustworthy because it was, at least in theory, an expression of the free market rather than the meddlings of government. At the same time, however, Victorian trust in gold remained troubled by gold's age-old rival-paper money-itself increasingly backed not by gold but by a paper bureaucracy. Indeed, as the convenience of paper money caused it to proliferate, it called into question the very sanctity of trust in gold. Should one trust only the "natural" form of money (gold and, arguably, paper receipts for gold known as bank notes), or should one also trust paper instruments of credit such as checks and bills of exchange? As J. G. A. Pocock and others have documented, Victorians were not the first to worry about the relationship between gold and paper. Two factors, however, made the Victorian anxiety exceptional. First, Victorian England helped pioneer the modern regulatory state, whatJeremy Bentham termed "bureaucracy." Not surprisingly, one of the chief functions of Victorian bureaucrats was to manage and regulate Victorian money. As described in Walter Bagehot's Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (1873), it was during the Victorian period that the Bank of England, although nominally a private institution, became a de facto arm of government whose bureaucrats were charged with regulating the supply and general soundness of English

"Hedda Is All of Us": Late-Victorian Women at the Matinee

Abstract: n December 1896, H. E. M. Stutfield attended a matinee perfor- mance of Ibsen's Little Eyolf at the Avenue Theatre in London. Looking around the seats before the performance began, he noticed, somewhat uneasily, that most of the spectators were women. Later, in the pages of Blackwood's, he describes the audience: I arrived early, but found the house already full. There was a small sprinkling of males, but woman had assembled in force to do honour to the Master who headed the revolt of her sex. The new culture and the newest chiffon were alike represented in the audience (. . .) Through a forest of colossal and befeathered hats I obtained occasional glimpses of the stage and the performers. (113) Stutfield's experience at the Ibsen matinee was not atypical, nor was his unease. Of the Ibsen plays premiered in London between 1880 and 1900, all but three were originally produced as matinees, and male reviewers often found themselves in an unaccustomed and uncomfortable minority. 1 Indeed, women in matinee audiences sometimes outnum- bered men by as much as twelve to one (Burnand 422). As originally conceived in the 1870s, the theatrical matinee had two purposes: the first was to extend the number of performances of a popular play, the second to encourage new dramatists and performers by giving them a venue for untried works. 2 Yet because both popular and independent matinees were dominated by women—as spectators, actresses, and dramatic protagonists—they served a further purpose, providing a space for the observation and critique of staged femininity. Thus the matinee encouraged the development not only of a new drama but also of a new feminist self-consciousness. Stutfield's descrip- tion of Ibsen's matinee audience comes at the center of what is, after all, a discussion about the emergence of feminism. A hundred years later, we can appreciate his prescience. For it is clear that the Ibsen matinees of the 1890s contributed to the creation of turn-of-the-century I

Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze (review)

Abstract: VICTORIAN STUDIES Redmond, Arthur Griffith, and Padraic Pearse. Among the leaders regularly caricatured after the Easter Rising may be found Michael Collins, Eamon De Valera, William Cosgrave, Bobby Sands, Gerry Adams, and all the British politicians and Ulster Unionists with whom they had to contend. Teachers keen to illustrate their lectures on modern Irish history with examples of graphic humor will find this volume a visual smorgasbord, given all the diverse images and scenarios cooked up by such gifted artists as Gillray, Tenniel, William Boucher, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Bernard Partridge, Michael Cummings, and Martyn Turner. Although the authors deserve credit for finding the occasional French and German cartoon, it is regrettable that they did not cast their nets across the Atlantic where American (or European emigré) comic artists pilloried prognathous Paddy in such comic weeklies as Harper’s, Judge, Puck, and the Wasp. All of these publications wallowed in some form of Hibernophobia (not to mention xenophobia) from the 1860s to the 1890s; and many of the cartoons therein contain splendid examples of the simianized Irishman with his wild eyes, flaring nostrils, receding forehead, and huge, bulbous upper lip, all of which signified savagery or primitivism and a propensity for lethal violence. Unfortunately, a significant minority of the cartoons in this book lack numbers and for this reason they are not properly keyed into the explanatory passage in the text. This deficiency makes it hard for the reader to connect the cartoon in question to the accompanying explication. No doubt true afficionados of both Irish history and political cartoons will find this book a lively and amusing companion after dinner, when all the guests have left and a glass of Guinness or Jameson stands invitingly near at hand. L. Perry Curtis, Jr. Brown University

Buying Brains: Trollope, Oliphant, and Vulgar Victorian Commerce

Abstract: G rant Allen's 1894 description of the shift from "the old asceticism [which] said, 'Be virtuous, and you will be happy' [to] the new hedonism [which] says, 'Be happy and you will be virtuous"' (377) applies to large-scale economic movements of the nineteenth century. During the era preceding the expansion of the credit economy, capital was hard to come by; in order to expand businesses, entrepreneurs had to save, borrow from relatives and friends who had also saved, or both save and borrow. "In these circumstances abstinence became a buttress of industrial expansion because what was not spent on personal account stayed in the business. Personal abstinence is one of the qualities most universally attributed to the entrepreneurs" (Mathias 143). With the expansion and centralization of the banking industry in the 1860s and 70s, commerce was no longer based on saving but on the ability to borrow capital and amass credit, which led to the development of a "plutocracy of big business men and great landowners [...] in which the old virile, ascetic and radical ideal of active capital was submerged to the [... .] supine, hedonistic and conservative ideal of passive property" (Perkin, Origins 436). These changes were associated with the emergence, in the early 1870s, of marginalist economics, which negotiated what Regenia Gagnier calls a "paradigm shift" (137), when it turned critical attention from production, and the habits of saving associated with it, to consumption, and the habits of expenditure associated with it. I examine here a pair of interconnected novels by Anthony Trollope and Margaret Oliphant, authors noted for their explicitness in dealing with money and money-making. Published in 1867 and 1876 respectively, The Last Chronicle of Barset and Phoebe Junior: A Last Chronicle of Carlingford bracket the moment when the

"A Sword of a Song": Swinburne's Republican Aesthetics in Songs before Sunrise

Abstract: A lgernon Charles Swinburne composed Songs before Sunrise (1871) as "lyrics for the crusade" of Italian and worldwide republicanism. In doing so, he placed himself within a radical literary tradition that included not only canonical figures such as William Blake and Percy Shelley but also little-known working-class poets such as W. J. Linton and Gerald Massey. This tradition, which I call "republican aesthetics," developed as radical writers began to envision poetry as an agent of social and political change and as they attempted to translate republican ideals, especially their dedication to equality, into poetic form. In the wake of the American and French Revolutions, republicans came to believe that what Blake called the "mind-forg'd manacles" of ideological oppression supported the brute force of the state, and that poetry had a unique ability to sever these manacles ("London" 8). Formal strategies designed to "cleanse the doors of perception" (Marriage of Heaven and Hell Plate 14) were at once the poetic expression of republican philosophy and a weapon in the war against "priestcraft" and "kingcraft." Swinburne articulated his understanding of this poetic theory, and placed himself within his "church of rebels," in two main texts (William Blake 55). The first is William Blake (1868), both a critical biography and a manifesto of radical poetics, in which Swinburne describes republican verse as the "fusion" of the political and artistic "senses." The second is Songs before Sunrise, which puts radical aesthetics into practice, enacting the power of poetry to "break and melt in sunder" the "clouds and chains" that bind the "eyes, hands, and spirits" of humanity ("Eve of Revolution"

Culture and Adultery: The Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law, 1857-1914, and: Promising Language: Betrothal in Victorian Law and Fiction (review)

Abstract: VICTORIAN STUDIES and art and at least some attempts at literature (the Madame Bovary trial, for instance). It is especially good in offering information from the lost land of the German middle-class and artistic nineteenth century. We are still recovering for general culture what was lost in the wholesale disowning of Germany after the war; Gay’s expertise is very welcome here, the more so in that it includes particular awareness of the major place of German Jews in this history. In all three of the major cultures (to which the United States is often added) Gay is especially good in showing us how important Jewish contributions were to culture and to the social worlds of culture. I would also praise Gay for what many in our moment may not: his unflagging interest in the individual and in the Freudian motivations—if I may use such a shorthand—that make her or him not merely a cog in a social or discursive community. This seasoned historian is richly aware of the part of personal motive, idiosyncrasy, interpersonal conflict, even desire, in the life of history. He offers charming accounts of monarchs’ interference with the more typical growth of middle-class cultural institutions in Ludwigian (I) Bavaria or Wilhelmine (I) Germany. His account of Charles Hallé’s Germanic push and musical high standards in the long development of Manchester’s orchestral distinction rightly shows what a difference a temperament can make. He has a fine eye for the personal confrontation and quirks that make history more fun than discourse systems. I certainly will recommend the book to my middle-class friends (including, as Arnold would add, my middle-class self when not on Victorian duty). Nor do I find his thumbnail psychoanalyses of so many characters offensive or irrelevant. Gay has a good sense of the passing passions of the world and has my permission to try to explain, for instance, the great Gustave Flaubert’s hatred of the bourgeoisie as a projection of qualities he disliked in himself. And I don’t find his love of a good story about human nature irrelevant to his broad subject either: for instance, Degas’s irrational dislike for Camille Pissarro’s work because of the latter’s Judaism: “When he called Pissarro’s work ignoble and was reminded that he had once appreciated his work, he snapped, ‘Yes, but that was before the Dreyfus affair’” (211). These are the insights of an enlightened and Freudianized historian; and they helped make the earlier volumes, especially those on private lives, memorable. They are certainly the memorable moments in this less useful work. John Maynard New York University

The Quest for the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art, 1840-1920 (review)

Abstract: SPRING 2001 (1859), superbly conserved, takes its place among the finest of all Victorian history paintings, a boldly composed nocturne which explores Cromwell’s motivation with a Carlylean level of historical and psychological penetration. Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Diploma work, On the Way to the Temple (1882), a masterly exercise in historical genre painting, is joined by a second work, a nocturne entitled Improvisatore (1872), whose luminous and poetic qualities place it closer to Whistler than any simple academic/avant-garde dichotomy would allow. Among British Orientalists, John Frederick Lewis emerges as a painter of extraordinary power; his A Door of a Café in Cairo (1865) is distinguished by compositional intricacy and a subtle subversion of imperial power relations. Despite the Academy’s obvious significance for the history of British art, there has been no substantial, critical history to replace the late Sidney Hutchison’s worthy bicentennial tribute, A History of the Royal Academy (1968, revised 1986). New approaches are emerging, making possible a rethinking of the history of the institution itself, a process which Taylor has inaugurated in Art for the Nation (1999). The broader potential for this type of revisionism is revealed in the essays collected by Rafael Cardoso Denis and Colin Trodd in Art and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century (2000). By making visible a unique and hitherto submerged collection and bringing it to a wide audience, this volume marks an important stage in this process of revision and will facilitate further work in the future. Tim Barringer Yale University

When Is a Victorian Poet Not a Victorian Poet? Poetry and the Politics of Subjectivity in the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract: ion, they are empty of meaning. And this emptiness allows the poem to manipulate ideological conformism to reactionary values. Another of Tennyson's tactics is to pose an uninterpretable allegoricity, a saying otherwise that ducks reference. This way the text can occlude the contradictions of the dominant discourses it wants its readers to accept (for example, the contradictions between Christianity and capital) and enable its audience to write into its terms whatever conservative ideological positions it is invited to construct-whether religious, monarchical, imperialist, antifeminist. I wonder if Harrison's conviction that dominant discourses are monolithic and stable leads him to surrender too readily to the conservative elements in the text. At times, despite his understanding of ideology in process, his methodology forces him to posit a wholly unfractured or prefabricated conservative dominant in order to prove his poets' consent to or dissent from it. Certainly Arthur's daunting list of round table obligations--"To reverence the king [ . .] To break the heathen [...] To love one maiden only [...] teach high thought [...] And love of truth" (465-80) -is crushingly authoritarian and imperialist in spirit. What are the implications of reading differently? Interestingly, Graham's Ideologies of Epic takes up some of the passages Harrison discusses-including Tennyson's disavowal of his intention to write epic in the Idylls-but interprets them rather differently. Graham's understanding of ideology and discourse to some extent converges with that of Harrison, but his Bakhtinian model more emphatically refuses the monolithic status of discourse. He adroitly adapts Bakhtinian paradigms, arguing, as Bakhtin did, that the only context in which monologism is possible as an aspiration is the epic. Three elements of epic preserve a single discourse: the unity of a

The Motivation of Tennyson's Reader: Privacy and the Politics of Literary Ambiguity in The Princess

Abstract: ith the publication of "The Motivation of Tennyson's Weeper," Cleanth Brooks's essay on "Tears, Idle Tears" in The Well Wrought Urn (1947), a fragment of The Princess (1847) appeared at the source of what would become a major debate in English literary criticism between formalists and antiformalists. 1 There, Brooks performed an exemplary close reading of Tennyson's lyric without any analysis of the surrounding text or context, and with no mention of The Princess as the place where the lyric gem first appeared before being salvaged from the wreck of the longer poem by later anthologists. 2 If Brooks's essay represents the extreme of formalist discussions of The Princess, antiformalist criticism of the poem has tended to ignore the lyrics altogether. Critics such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick have sought rather to decode the ideological work performed by the verse-narrative, where a complex interplay of gender and class dynamics reveals the poem to be either a liberal or a conservative political tale of the triumph of domesticity and the consolidation of the state. 3 Even when critics do tackle both the lyrics and the verse-narrative, they frequently maintain the parallel distinction between formalist aesthetic and antiformalist sociological concerns. 4 So Laurence Lerner, in a study of competing ideologies in The Princess, writes: "(I)n relating a poem to its society we ought never to ignore what makes it poetry," that is, elements of "pure technique" of sound and image (210). The fact that the lyrics and verse- narrative have attracted two different kinds of critics has blinded both to the extent to which The Princess constitutes a defense of poetry, in the sense that it explores the distinctive political effects of lyric and song. By situating the lyrics within a verse-narrative about women's higher education, Tennyson developed an argument about the polit- ical effects of poetry with a degree of sophistication not recognized by either fans of his fine ear or critics of his social agenda. The lyrics serve