What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History by Tom Mole

Abstract

Reviewed by: What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History by Tom Mole Paul Westover (bio) Tom Mole. What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. xii + 317. $45. Prominent theorists of reading, reception, memory, and critical practice have argued that literary scholarship too often privileges contexts of origin (that is, histories of composition, publication, and initial reading). Several have called for rigorous approaches that account for literature’s movement across time and its downstream ability to engage new readers and even non-readers. Tom Mole has taken up the challenge; in resistance to what he calls “punctual historicism”—something like the “box” historicism Rita Felski has criticized—Mole’s What the Victorians Made of Romanticism extends the catalogue of recent studies that take seriously the mobility of Romantic writing across generations. Other important studies in this vein include [End Page 135] Heather Jackson’s Those Who Write for Immortality (2015), Devoney Looser’s The Making of Jane Austen (2017), Ann Rigney’s The Afterlives of Walter Scott (2012), and Catherine Robson’s Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (2012)—books quite different from one another yet sharing a strong trans-temporal orientation that illuminates how literature “resonates,” to borrow a term from Wai Chee Dimock. These books may not tell us what specific texts mean in the way of interpretive criticism, but they do pursue the question of what literature as a whole means, or has meant, to people. At the same time, by focusing on the paths by which literature has made itself part of people’s lives, these studies combat pure methodological textualism, insisting that “literature” in the broad sense operates far beyond the page. It isn’t that questions of long-term reception are new to scholarship, but rather that fresh attention to media ecology, book history, material culture, and cultural practices opens new ways to think about them. What the Victorians Made of Romanticism aims to expand the literary field to include the whole “web of reception,” which for Mole includes human actors—readers, adapters, repurposers—as well as all sorts of books (not just early editions), multiple media channels, and a world of literary things. We have long known that works of literature and authors’ reputations do not “survive” without help, but Mole’s research highlights some of the forms that help has taken at particular historical junctures. On some level, Mole’s work might be understood as the latest major book in the mode of “(Insert Author) and the Victorians” (e.g., Andrew Elfenbein on Byron [1995], Stephen Gill on Wordsworth [1998]) to the extent that it traces the late-nineteenth-century reception histories of Scott, Byron, Shelley, Hemans, and Wordsworth. Mole asks how these writers became newly relevant for certain kinds of Victorian readers even as they seemed in danger of being forgotten. However, in its focus on (re)mediation, this study is more accurately thought of as a sequel to Mole’s earlier books on Byron, book history, and celebrity. As Mole clarifies from the outset, “I’m mainly interested in what the Victorians made of Romanticism rather than what they wrote about it” (3). Mole’s five section titles offer a sense of the book’s scope: “The Web of Reception,” “Illustrations,” “Sermons,” “Statues,” “Anthologies.” Each section contains three chapters, evocative case studies that spar entertainingly with critical conversations in related fields. The range of materials determines the range of methods: bibliography, influence history, media theory, tourist history, “distant reading,” and so forth, all blending to match the mix of visual, material, and textual artifacts. While a table of contents listing fifteen chapters plus introduction and coda might give some readers pause, Mole’s book does not in fact over-whelm [End Page 136] with its scale. The average chapter length, excluding the shorter introduction and coda, is under fourteen pages, and the longest chapter comes in at nineteen. Lively, economical divisions offer packages of thought for a single sitting, though significant arguments cross chapters. Generally, Mole launches each section by describing a key historical shift and offering an overarching claim concerning...