Studies in Victorian and Modern Literature: A Tribute to John Sutherland ed. by William Baker

Abstract

Reviewed by: Studies in Victorian and Modern Literature: A Tribute to John Sutherland ed. by William Baker James M. Decker (bio) William Baker, ed. Studies in Victorian and Modern Literature: A Tribute to John Sutherland. Lanham: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2015. 362pp. HB $90.00. ISBN 978-1-61147-692-7 A festschrift in honor of John Sutherland, Studies in Victorian and Modern Literature, edited by William Baker, presents twenty-six essays that mirror the eclectic scholar’s wide-ranging interests. While most of the essays in the volume represent original contributions by a host of critics from Rosemary Ashton to René Weis, the editor also includes a reprinted article by novelist David Lodge. Following his introduction, Baker organizes the book into four categories, all dealing either with one of Sutherland’s intellectual interests or with his biography: “The Publishing Dimension,” “Victorians Major and Minor,” “Non-Victorians and Puzzles,” and “John Sutherland’s Life and Work.” By dividing his focus in such a nontraditional way, Baker takes the gamble of alienating an academic audience comfortable with “traditional” distinctions between genres and periods as well as the risk of offering a book that lacks a clear purpose. Because, however, of Sutherland’s own intellectual Catholicism and the various contributors’ concerted efforts to link their own work to the adventurous spirit of their celebrant, the book succeeds presenting a vision that, while diverse in methodology and subject, is uniformly stimulating. Baker’s introduction concisely explains the book’s organizational logic by tracing the trajectory of Sutherland’s career. Remarkably, Sutherland not only pursued his academic curiosity in a number of fields, but he published seminal works in each area. From the magisterial The Longman Companion [End Page 369] to Victorian Fiction and The Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives to Fiction and the Fiction Industry and Is Heathcliff a Murderer: Great Puzzles in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Sutherland tackles his subjects with aplomb and incisive critical acumen while also maintaining an almost preternatural ability to connect micro-level details from the works under discussion to the macro-level patterns of genre and period. Baker also notes that whatever his topic, Sutherland writes in an accessible and vigorous style that is “idiomatic, down to earth, and eschewing the pretentious or literary terminology” (xiii). Considering such a career—and leaving out such facets of Sutherland’s work as his editing and status as public intellectual—Baker aptly observes that Studies in Victorian and Modern Literature “represent[s] the range of his achievement and importance as a scholar, a critic, and a journalist” (xii). The volume’s first section, “The Publishing Dimension,” contains five essays, the subjects of which deal with both broad issues, such as audience and female literary networks, and narrower author-specific questions, such as Margaret Oliphant’s relationship with Blackwood. Additionally, the methodologies presented in this section employ both biographical approaches and quantitative ones. For instance, in “Reconsidering the Unknown Public: A Puzzle of Literary Gains” Simon Frost contemplates Wilkie Collins’s bemusement over just who, exactly, was purchasing penny journals. Frost, echoing Sutherland’s interest in literary puzzles, follows various leads, most of which contradict Collins’s conclusion and that productively use publishing and audience data to expose the “unknown public” as an ideological device for maintaining exclusivity and denying the heterogeneous reading habits of a broad swath of nineteenth-century readers. Two of the other writers in this section, Linda K. Hughes and Joanne Shattock, draw upon Sutherland’s inspiration in identifying a puzzle (“trace” collaboration in Hughes’s case) or relationship (Margaret Oliphant’s connection to the House of Blackwood in Shattock’s case) that they explore via primary sources. In particular, Hughes’ idea of trace collaboration seems a useful concept for reconstructing the impact that an ostensibly marginal figure—so far as the extant evidence is concerned— has had on a more prominent one. As with the other contributors to the “Publishing Dimension” (Frost, David Finkelstein, and Alexis Weedon), Hughes and Shattock expand our knowledge of the context in which Victorian writers produced their work. [End Page 370] The next section, “Victorians Major and Minor,” represents the heart of the collection and contains ten...