Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824-1840 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824–1840 Dino Franco Felluga (bio) Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824–1840, by Richard Cronin; pp. viii + 296. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, £55.00, $69.95. Romantic Victorians redresses an egregious lacuna in nineteenth-century scholarship, the ten-year crack that falls between Romanticism and Victorianism, between the death of Lord Byron in 1824 and Queen Victoria's assumption of the throne in 1837. In between, [End Page 684] we witness a rich period of culture that is rarely discussed by either Romantic or Victorian critics, largely because the period is seen as falling outside the province of each group. The fact that Richard Cronin attempts to take this period seriously is reason enough to read his book. By exploring the connections among the period's cultural products, he allows future critics to begin a much-needed reconstruction of exactly how the Victorian period refashioned Romantic aesthetics and politics to usher in all the values and forms of the Victorian bourgeois subject. This does not necessarily mean, however, that one should expect from this book a fully coherent statement on the transition between the Romantic and Victorian periods. The book revels in a conversational, even anecdotal diffuseness that was this reader's delight as well as occasional frustration. As Cronin states in his introduction, "the book as a whole is not an attempt to define the manner in which early Victorian writers assimilated the work of their Romantic precursors, but simply to outline a few of the very various possibilities that were explored" (14). "Very various" indeed characterizes Cronin's own book, which eschews large theoretical arguments in favor of a peripatetic examination of disparate figures, themes, and issues. With the notable exception of John Clare, no one figure or critical work is given extensive treatment, since Cronin chooses, rather, to provide the reader with a wide-ranging examination of disparate material. Indeed, each chapter is deserving of book-length treatment, given that Cronin ranges from the Victorian memorialization of Romantic poets in biography and fiction (chapter 1 on Edward Trelawny; Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington; Thomas Hogg; Leigh Hunt; Caroline Lamb; Mary Shelley; and Benjamin Disraeli); to the Victorian understanding of the French Revolution (chapter 2 on Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Macaulay); to the feminization of poetry in the period (chapter 3 on Felicia Hemans, L. E. L., George Darley, and Alfred Tennyson); to the legacy of Byron in the fashionable novel (chapter 4 on Disraeli, Edward Bulwer, Carlyle, Mary Shelley, and Catherine Gore); to the taming of Romantic revolutionary ideals (chapter 5 on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett); to the importance of realism in Victorian poetry (chapter 6 on Clare); to the Victorian privileging of Christian community over Romantic individualism (chapter 7 on Tennyson and Browning); to Tennyson's domestication of the incestuous and narcissistic sexuality of Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1817 Revolt of Islam (chapter 8). By addressing so many disparate works, Cronin at once opens up many new avenues for exploration and keeps himself from exploring those avenues in any great detail himself. For a more in-depth exploration of any one Romantic author's influence on the Victorian period, the reader would be advised to turn to the ever-growing list of books on offer titled "___ and the Victorians": G. H. Ford's Keats and the Victorians (1944) (or James Najarian's much more recent Victorian Keats [2002]), Andrew Elfenbein's Byron and the Victorians (1995), and Stephen Gill's Wordsworth and the Victorians (1998). What Cronin's book does offer, which these other books tend not to, is a more wide-ranging, if somewhat random, examination of multiple authors, with lesser-studied figures juxtaposed against more canonical work. At its best, this approach leads Cronin into some superb scholarship. The fifth chapter best exemplifies what Cronin's idiosyncratic method makes possible. Entitled "Civilizing Romanticism," it begins by laying out those historical events of 1820 to 1832 that allowed the idea of citizenship to be renewed for the Victorians after the concept was [End Page 685] tainted by the French Revolution's citoyen. Cronin then outlines how figures tied to the...