Victorian Poetry: An Annotated Anthology by Francis O'Gorman

Abstract

MLR, IOI.3, 2oo6 833 her argument often strays. A danger is that, in the absence of any thorough economic discussion, it is difficult to imagine what 'inclusive society' might actually imply (a fairer society? amore inclusive culture?). Pronouncements like the following on mid-nineteenth-century Britain are neither good style nor sense: 'The problem that engaged the collective imagination, especially that of the "cultivated" classes ... .]was how tomaintain social distinctions within amass society' (p. i66). All three definite articles are dubious (the third actually provokes an apologetic set of quotation marks round 'cultivated'). As for 'especially', are we really saying working-class activists (for example) were anxious to justfy the squire and his relations? Morris borrows the idea of a 'code of sincerity', but the codes of her own writing are often opaque. The price of safeguarding the 'mediocrite bienveillante' demanded of politically correct academics is the evasion of historic differences, which carries its own nemesis of leaving current orthodoxies unchallenged. Sentimental misreadings and botched shots at epigram fumble the argument. Mrs Boffin, for instance, does not actually have 'an instinct for fashion' (p. 2z8): she aspires, but cannot attain, a fact (Morris misses even this level of subtlety) that does not diminish our respect for her. Again, Spencer was not 'a social-Darwinian before Darwin' by virtue of his writings 'throughout the I850s' (p. i66), since Darwin had been publishing his findings from I836. Even as an essay in late twentieth-century neo-scholasticism, the quality of writing provokes comparison with the language of those fashionable works in French by German authors regretted by de Stael: 'elle a pourtant un defaut, c'est qu'elle est morte'. UNIVERSITYOF LANCASTER MALCOLMHARDMAN Victorian Poetry: An Annotated Anthology. Ed. by FRANCISO'GORMAN. Oxford: Blackwell. 2004. xxxviii+697pp. ?ig.99. ISBN o-63I-23435-7. In the introduction to this new annotated anthology, Francis O'Gorman writes that 'theVictorian period now seems, suddenly, further away' (p. xxxvii). There are few scholarly forms more illustrative than an anthology of this perceived, if not empiri cally regular, form of distance. On one level instruments of access and insight, such works also make a virtue of popular alienation from the cultural milieu they invoke. Providing opportunities for re-evaluation of familiar and neglected works, they foster a second, more productive, sense of distance. The publisher's claims for this selection-a 'provision of key texts, canonical and post-canonical, with detailed annotation, sufficient to facilitate close reading, for use on specialist and appropriate survey courses' (p. ii)-are those upon which the volume should first bejudged. Whether or not we deem the term 'post-canonical' ameaningful designation, it is true that O'Gorman manages to give space to such stalwarts as Macaulay, Tennyson, Clough, and Arnold without crowding out Pre-Raphaelites such as D. G. Rossetti and Swinburne, or the women poets of the century. The introductions to authors and to individual poems aremostly very helpful. They are clearly written, and rarely guilty of over-simplification. Equally good, itwould seem, is the textual apparatus. Some may think itunfortunate that O'Gorman feels it necessary to gloss a reference toWaterloo (p. 449) inAlfred Austin's 'Henry Bartle Edward Frere', and indeed the name 'Zeus' (p. 579) inW. E. Henley's In Hospital (I875), but generally speaking he exercises judicious restraint where explanatory interventions are concerned. In the light of these editorial labours, it is disappointing that all the lines of poetry have been individually centred. This contrasts with an otherwise well-designed page. The text is not cluttered with references, and room has been found for instructive illustrations. Examples include Filippo Lippi's Coronation of the Virgin (I44I-7) 834 Reviews as an aid to understanding Robert Browning's poem 'Fra Lippo Lippi'; and B. R. Haydon's Marcus Curtius (I843) as an 'intertext' (p. 30) to Elizabeth Barrett's 'Rime of the Duchess May'. It is also refreshing to leaf through an anthology that does not carve up the longer stanzaic poems of the period. Here we find Tennyson's In Memoriam (I850) and Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market' presented in their entirety. O'Gorman's policy of 'eschewing selection and abridgment' (p. xxxvii) deserves...