The Victorians, 1830-1880 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Victorians, 1830–1880: The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 8 Herbert F. Tucker (bio) The Victorians, 1830–1880: The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 8, by Philip Davis; pp. xiv + 631. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, £35.00, £17.99 paper, $49.95, $29.95 paper. Nearly all the virtues of this fine book spring from its root in a widely read critic's deeply observant personal sensibility. General editor Jonathan Bate has expressly staked Oxford's new thirteen-part English literary history on the "individual scholar's vision" (vi); and in this, the second series volume to be released, the gamble pays off handsomely. Philip Davis constructs a comprehensive account of the Victorian half-century from 1830 to 1880, and it is an account built from the ground up. Unencumbered by existing literary-historical scholarship (which gets its due in sixty appended pages of annotated bibliography), Davis grows his own trends, correlations, and explanations out of an unremittingly careful attention to the many Victorian scientific and social studies, reports, poems, essays and books in literary criticism, plays, and—above all—novels on which he draws. He is a close reader less apt to pause over verbal nuance than over articulations of tone and temper that register the Victorians' often highly self-conscious stance toward a world whose transformation was transforming them as well. If the result is, even to a fault, sympathetically earnest, the very high success rate of Davis's formulations leaves no doubt that an earnest sympathy is the side on which to err just now, when the nineteenth century is receding annually from familiar grasp. From an opening gambit that dismisses as "depressing" (1) the derogatory mode entrained by Lytton Strachey's 1918 Eminent Victorians, to a summary vindication of that "commitment to the human" whereby Victorian literature "recovers and preserves the memory which history may dissolve into outcomes" (548), Davis casts his lot with "the direct imaginative experience of deep meaning that reading constitutes for serious Victorians" (10). The book lives up to each pondered adjective in this last quotation, and to other stalwarts too, like "real" and "true." There is little point in calling such a critical vocabulary old-fashioned; it is something more interesting than that, it is neo-Victorian. As such it fairly represents the approach Davis has adopted at large, for instance in embracing as his de facto office mates not our contemporaries but working nineteenth- century litterateurs like John Morley and (the book's unsung hero) that discerning reader R. H. Hutton. As Davis takes stock of the obsessively stock-taking Victorians, one feels him at their elbow in the spirit, not so as to jostle the Victorian writer's hand—much less mock it—but in order to say with utmost candor what that writer's endeavor to conceive an unprecedented set of realities felt like. It felt critically urgent, of course, even to the point of unction; and so does The Victorians, where across five hundred pages and more the insistence on ultimate value questions never lets up for long or strays far from a religious idiom. Davis concedes to the nineteenth century's cultural revolution no more than a "semi-secularization" (4). In consequence, when D. G. Rossetti reverently invokes sexual union, it is in order to [End Page 95] perform the hallowing function of religion (508); Hardy's stand at the end of the line is ultimately Victorianized by staying "broken-heartedly loyal" to "the human ideals and the religious needs it finds so utterly defeated" (546). Whereas Trollope depicted "life which had not yet arrived at the recognition of its own implicitly religious grounding," the high- realist novel would meet its "final challenge" in confronting a world holding "no shared faith, no recognized access to dimensions" of religious experience (403). Each of these claims has merit, and none is definitively clinched; rather, they conspire in a tone of concern that governs the whole book. Such an ambience, true enough, will tend to undervalue not only light literature per se but also the deeper literary purposes that realize themselves obliquely in modes of wit or masquerade. Thus Thackeray must yield...