Milton and the Victorians by Erik Gray

Abstract

MLR, 105.2, 2010 537 impairing literary historical periodization' (pp. 168-69). It is a fact that literary history is habitually organized by authors' birth dates, whereas itwould look ra dically different iforganized by authors' death dates' (p. 169).To give an example: JaneAusten (1775-1817) andWalter Scott (1771-1832) would come before Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) and Fanny Burney (1752-1840). In pursuit of her purpose, after a very richly textured introduction, Looser dedi cates a chapter to Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth, and then single chapters to Catharine Macauley, to JaneAusten, to Hester Lynch Piozzi, to Anna Letitia Barbauld, and to JanePorter: all of them, except JaneAusten, lived to considerable and even advanced old age (between sixty-one and eighty-eight), which brings the reader towonder in the firstplace why a chapter should be dedicated toAusten, who lived only to be forty-two: in this case Looser definitely turns her interest to narrative characters, and precisely to old maids, whose peculiar plight, however, is contained within quite loose age-brackets, not necessarily definable as belonging to old age'. This uncertainty of a theoretical scheme does not mean that Looser does not supply interesting observations on JaneAusten's old maids, characters such as Emmas Miss Bates, 'her [Austen's] most visible old maid' (p. 77), and Persuasions Anne Elliot (both not really old at all, but simply as yet unmarried); from these Looser takes her lead to communicate to us her many findings in publications concerning old maids, such as the periodical The Old Maid (thirty-seven issues in 1755-56, written by Frances Brookes) or The Philosophical Historical and Moral Essay on Old Maids, published in 1785 byWilliam Hayley. Although Looser's assumptions may not be shared by every reader, the book is so well informed and ends with such a vast bibliography that everyone stands to learn by it. Universita degli Studi di Milano Marialuisa Bignami Milton and theVictorians. By Erik Gray. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2009. ix+183 pp. ?21.95. ISBN 978-0-8014-4680-1. This book belongs in the traditions ofAndrew Elfenbein's Byron and theVictorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Adrian Poole's Shakespeare and theVictorians (London: Arden, 2004), and in that ofHarold Bloom, The Anxi etyofInfluence: A Theory ofPoetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), which, of course, posited Milton as theRomantics' major precursor. While being tentative about themeaning of influence, Erik Gray startswith the stark difference between theVictorians and theway that the Romantics needed Milton and rewrote him: the detail about the rifling ofMilton's coffin in 1790, as told in a contemporary pamphlet by Philip Neve, A Narrative of theDisinterment of Milton s Coffin, is a fascinating reminder of a baroque appeal within Romanticism; Gray refers to the pamphlet, perhaps underplaying its significances. He uses, for theRomantics' dual Milton, Lucy Newlyn's 'Paradise Lost' and theRomantic Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993): theRomantics sawMilton doubly, as both authoritarian and a figure of negative capability (p. 8). In contrast, theVictorians used Milton, and cited him, 538 Reviews much more diffusely. Immediately the point is stated, it seems right:where Milton is cited byVictorian poets, it isoften in latent form, among many other Renaissance poets. Itdoes not seem possible to see the same degree of unmistakable influence, a point which Gray keeps returning to, in thisvery gentle and scholarly book, which gives plenty of space to readingMilton without coming to a definite conclusion why it should be so, and leaves it, therefore, as an issue to be developed further: how did modernism's reaction toVictorian poetry include a relationship toMilton? Milton in thenineteenth century gains a new lifeas a result of the discovery, and publication, in translation out of Latin, of Christian Doctrine (1825), which gener atesMacaulay's defence ofMilton in theEdinburgh Review. There are chapters on 'theVictorian Milton', and onMilton as Classic andMilton as Bible, which includes work on Christina Rossetti ('Milton I cannot warm towards', p. 45), and Hopkins, who, disliking Milton fiercelyforhis theology and views on marriage, defines him as a classic, in that it seems that everything in the poetry necessitates everything else, making a firstreading of the poem impossible, because it seems to have been heard...