Kirstie Blair, Victorian poetry and the culture of the heart, Oxford English Monographs, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2006, pp. ix, 273, £50.00 (hardback 978-0-19-927394-2).

Abstract

The cultural history of the heart and its diseases is a subject of growing historiographical relevance and research. This book represents an important and scholarly contribution to that historiography by shedding new light on the cultural meanings and languages of heart disease in Victorian literature. It begins by acknowledging the richness of the heart as a “vital literary image” (p. 4) since the medieval period. Much of the Victorian rhetoric of the heart as the repository of truth, authenticity and desire, Blair demonstrates, originates from this earlier time. Yet, in this detailed study of literature c.1800–c.1860, she identifies a “renewed concentration of interest in heart-centred imagery and, crucially, a shift in focus towards the pathological” (p. 6). Blair roots this perceived shift in broader historiographical debates over the “rapid rise of physiological and medical explanations of bodily processes” in nineteenth-century medical culture (p. 2). There are some problems with this emphasis, partly because it is couched within a relatively outmoded narrative of progress in which a series of “great discoveries” gave medicine “ever more accurate diagnoses” of bodily processes (p. 17). Nevertheless, there is a notable increase in nineteenth-century medical treatises on the heart as an organ subject to a variety of pathologies, and this is where Blair begins her analysis of nineteenth-century poetic forms. Tracing links between literary and medical languages of the heart, she shows that, as concepts of heart disease grew more complex, traditional and figurative uses of the heart acquired medical implications. Conversely, “actual heart disease” became “read as a metaphor for cultural and social problems” (p. 2). Moreover, this was not purely a literary agenda: “both poets and doctors were engaged in a mutual exchange of ideas about the heart which helped to shape a ‘culture of the heart’ specific to Victorian Britain” (p. 18). This analysis lends further weight to a growing body of material concerned with the links between the medical and the literary realms. In the diagnosis of disease, and in the language used to describe it, literary scholars and doctors participated in a shared system of meanings. By approaching heart disease through perceived conjunctions of the metaphysical and the literal, Blair incidentally raises pertinent questions about the relationship between feeling and representation. Of “heartache”, she asks, does the loss of love manifest itself in the breast because the metaphor of heartbreak has taken on some materiality, or does the metaphor itself stem from the bodily location of such pain? Such philosophical speculations aside, this is primarily a literary work, explicitly focused on how writings on the heart were shaped, “in form and metre”, by broader cultural assumptions about the role of the organ (p. 3). As such, it provides invaluable insights into the narrative treatment of the heart by selected writers—most notably by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, and Alfred Tennyson. Yet the sophistication with which Blair tackles her subject means that what could have been a narrowly literary analysis also becomes an important reference point for historians of medicine, gender, religion and literature. There are some points where I might disagree with Blair on detail, including her analysis of the feminization of heart disease throughout the nineteenth century, and the lack of specificity with which she addresses concepts of “functional” as opposed to “structural” disorders. There are also some question marks over Blair's analysis of medical developments more generally. But these criticisms are outweighed by the strengths of the book. This is a rich and detailed analysis of the language of the heart and its disorders at a particular moment in Victorian literary history. As such, it is a well-written and learned book, which makes an important contribution to many aspects of nineteenth-century studies.