Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman by Catherine Robson (review)

Abstract

MLR, 98.4, 2003 975 and copious poet of intermittent but often considerable skill [. . .] [producing] fluent and innocuous volumes'. But this was before Stuart Curran's influential essay 'The I Altered' in Anne K. Mellor's Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington: Indi? ana University Press, 1988), before other reinterpretations by Marlon Ross, Norma Clarke, Cora Kaplan, Isobel Armstrong, Gary Kelly, Tricia Lootens, and Jerome McGann, and before Paula R. Feldman's welcome edition of Hemans's 1828 volume Records of Woman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999). These critics have advanced a case for Hemans as a Romantic poet to be reckoned with: a more complicated, darker, and less comforting poet than most contemporary or, especially, later Victorian and Edwardian readers allowed. Susan Wolfson, too, is a leading rereader and supporter of the subtler side of He? mans. As she puts it, 'more than a few poems come trailing dark clouds of "glory"' (p. xvi). Carefully placing Hemans in a post-Revolutionary, intellectually cosmopolitan but politically cautious context, Wolfson sees in Hemans's work 'representations of insoluble conflicts in all spheres': 'Woman and Fame', for example, is read as 'an? other poem at war with its lesson' (p. xxv). In addition to a selection of Hemans's work, including poems written for monthly magazines and annuals, Wolfson's edition con? tains an illuminating introduction, a chronology, and a comprehensive bibliography (including websites); even more importantly, there is a selection of Hemans's letters, many appearing here for the first time since the 1830s; samples of contemporary reviews; landmark memoirs; elegies written by other poets; and extracts of Victorian interpretations of her work. Even with the large amount of controversy surrounding Hemans, there is still no complete edition or a full biography. Feldman's edition of Records of Woman partially filled the gap; this latest offering from Susan Wolfson will undoubtedly become a common reference-point and focus for further consideration of Hemans. Even though a complete edition of Hemans's writing and letters is outstanding (we need, forexample, 'The Siege of Valencia' in full and at least extracts from 'The Vespers of Palermo'), there should now be littleexcuse forfurtherneglect of Hemans or fora lack of recognition of the 'representations of insoluble conflicts in all spheres' to be found in Hemans's lyrics, dramatic monologues, plays, essays, translations, life, and letters. University of Reading Myra Cottingham Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman. By Catherine Robson. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2001. xii + 250 pp. ?I9-95- ISBN 0-69100-422-6. Catherine Robson's attractively presented and accessible study Men in Wonderland promises an intriguing new angle on the subject of Victorian masculinity. Robson suggests that writings by various nineteenth-century British male authors 'insist that perfect childhood is always exemplified by a little girl, and [. . .], despite the logical and biological impossibilities of the stance, lament a man's lost girlhood' (p. 5). Such a proposition rests on a division between the 'feminine' world of the Victorian nursery in which all young children were dressed in frocks and supervised by female carers and the 'masculine' world of school in which a boy donned trousers, and began his journey into Victorian manhood under the superintendence of male educators. Robson contends that middle-class men, having experienced such 'a definitive break' (p. 8) between their childhood and their later years, look back nostalgically to the Edenic world of the nursery represented in the figure of the little girl. Her concern then lies with 'the male figure who constructs, in one way or another, a fantasy of his feminine childhood' (p. 11), and working chronologically she moves through the 976 Reviews nineteenth century tracing 'the rise and fall of the ideal girl' (p. 11) with reference to a range of literary and socio-historical materials. Chapter i begins with the study of the juvenile delinquent in the firstpart of the nineteenth century: 'by 1850 it is a truism that there is nothing so unlike a criminal as a little girl' (p. 12). In a corresponding literary analysis, Robson explores the figure of the innocent, otherworldly girl in Wordsworth's poems and De Quincey's autobi? ography. Chapter 2 demonstrates...