Arnold Kettle Research Articles

Abstracts and keywords

Peter Holbrook Shakespeare, ‘The Cause of the People’, and The Chartist Circular 1839–1842 Left political critics such as Cultural Materialists are now often rather hostile towards Shakespeare, apparently agreeing with William Hazlitt that great poetry such as Shakespeare's tends to be inimical to ‘the cause of the people’, i.e., democracy. This is a changed situation from that when the Communist Arnold Kettle, writing in the 1960s, could take it for granted that Shakespeare was an indispensable author for a radical working-class culture in Britain. This article explores the politics of Shakespeare through an analysis of how he and a selection of his plays are represented in a Chartist newspaper of the early 1840s. It argues that the Chartists saw Shakespeare as, in broad terms, an ally – they are closer to Kettle's position than Hazlitt's, let alone that of contemporary radical Bard-bashers. Nevertheless, their enthusiasm for Shakespeare did not prevent the Chartists dissenting from what they took to be conservative implications in texts such as Coriolanus and Othello – and in ways that seem to anticipate recent ideological critiques of these plays. (Hamlet the Chartists find a vastly more sympathetic text.) Overall, the explicit political bias of the Chartists' reading of Shakespeare was valuable, alerting them to political implications of the plays, including democratic or progressive ones, that less or differently biased approaches are likely to miss.

Shakespeare, ‘The cause of the people’, and The Chartist Circular 1839–1842

Left political critics such as Cultural Materialists are now often rather hostile towards Shakespeare, apparently agreeing with William Hazlitt that great poetry such as Shakespeare's tends to be inimical to 'the cause of the people', i.e., democracy. This is a changed situation from that when the Communist Arnold Kettle, writing in the 1960s, could take it for granted that Shakespeare was an indispensable author for a radical working-class culture in Britain. This article explores the politics of Shakespeare through an analysis of how he and a selection of his plays are represented in a Chartist newspaper of the early 1840s. It argues that the Chartists saw Shakespeare as, in broad terms, an ally - they are closer to Kettle's position than Hazlitt's, let alone that of contemporary radical Bard-bashers. Nevertheless, their enthusiasm for Shakespeare did not prevent the Chartists dissenting from what they took to be conservative implications in texts such as Coriolanus and Othello - and in ways that seem to anticipate recent ideological critiques of these plays. (Hamlet the Chartists find a vastly more sympathetic text.) Overall, the explicit political bias of the Chartists' reading of Shakespeare was valuable, alerting them to political implications of the plays, including democratic or progressive ones, that less or differently biased approaches are likely to miss.

The History of the Novel Writ Large—and New

The History of the Novel Writ Large—and NewJerry C. Beasley The Columbia History of the British Novel, edited by John Richetti with (as his associates) John Bender, Deirdre David, and Michael Seidel (Columbia University Press, 1994) is a massively ambitious book that represents the first attempt to provide a comprehensive account of the British novel in more than thirty years, since the publication of Lionel Stevenson's The English Novel: A Panorama in I960. Stevenson's work concluded a period of great activity by historians of the novel, beginning with Ernest Baker's ten-volume chronicle (1924-39) and continuing through Edward Wagenknecht's Cavalcade ofthe English Novel (1943), Arnold Kettle's Introduction to the English Novel (1951), and Walter Allen's readable The English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954). These works, to a greater (Baker) or lesser (Allen) extent, pursued essentially the same purpose: to provide a detailed linear record of the development of English fiction and to trace its evolutionary progress from primitive beginnings to twentieth-century sophistication. They always affirmed the accepted canon, eitiier by omitting anyüiing not widely considered to be part of it (Allen, Wagenknecht) or by alluding to "minor " works and writers only to denounce them as "inferior"—with a moralistic huff of contempt (Baker) or a word of cool academic dismissal (Stevenson). The prevailing attitude defined by this collectively generated version of the novel's history was encouraged and compounded by the mid-century pieties of New Criticism, with its idealized notions of form (me literary work as "icon"), and—even more—by the arrogant foolishness of F.R. Leavis and his Cambridge crowd of critical dogmatists . When I first read Stevenson, and men Allen and Leavis, as an EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 8, Number 1, October 1995 74 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION undergraduate English student in the early 1960s, I was pretty sure theirs were the last words I would ever need to know on their subject. I was wrong, of course; but men so were the teachers who persuaded me to believe such a thing, and so was the conventional wisdom they were repeating. There was no way then really to anticipate what would happen in the next generation to change the way we study the literary past, determine and record its meaningful context, and write its history. What happened is well known—which is a good thing, for it is far too complex to summarize in a review essay like this one. It is enough simply to mention that the 1960s witnessed a sudden burst of new bibliographical research and the eventual unearthing of scores—hundreds, actually—of novels not previously familiar to (much less read by) even the most serious and diligent students of British literature, changing forever the landscape of the novel's history and certainly helping to promote what now seem to have been inevitable challenges to the old canon and to old ways of assessment. These challenges were carried out—are still being carried out—by proponents of the various critical and theoretical "-isms" that began to spring up (or to flourish) in the same decade of the 1960s, or in some cases after: feminism, Marxism, cultural materialism, structuralism, deconstructionism, New Historicism, post-colonialism. The result has been a dizzying—and also exhilarating—proliferation both of texts and of approaches. In retrospect it is not difficult to understand why, since the work of Lionel Stevenson, the history of the novel has been written piecemeal instead of whole—a process that actually began (for the study of early fiction) in the mid-1950s with Kathleen Tillotson's Novels ofthe Eighteen-Forties (1954) and Ian Watt's equally pioneering Rise ofthe Novel (1957) and has since continued unabated in important books by (among many others) John Richetti, Percy Adams, Michael McKeon, J. Paul Hunter, Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Mary Poovey, Patrick Brantlinger, and Michael Gorra. How else could the task be managed? How could it ever again be possible to prepare a comprehensive historical work, one that could accommodate all that is essential in the great new abundance? John Richetti and his associate editors have found a way: assemble a large, talented, and...

An Interview with Arnold Kettle

An Interview with Arnold Kettle

Reviews

Syed Amanuddin, World Poetry in English: Essays and Interviews. New Delhi: Sterling, 1981. Douglas Jefferson and Graham Martin, eds., The Uses of Fiction: Essays on the Modern Novel in Honour of Arnold Kettle. Milton Keynes: The Open University Press, 1982.

Daniel Defoe’s Moral and Rhetorical Ideas by Robert James Merrett

Progress of Poetry,” without noting how Swift makes the very process of arguing by analogy suspect, which again further compounds the ironies. As I have said before, England thinks in two’s, as when he finds two interpre­ tations of “ Caetera desiderantur” at the end of the “Rapsody,” when at least one more is possible: that the remainder is not just lost or non-existent, but also to be desired. The method is most viable as applied to the early pindarics, but is inadequate for exposing the full satiric subtlety of most of the other poems. In his long analysis of “Cadenus and Vanessa,” England builds upon that of Gareth Jones (in Essays in Criticism, 1970). An earlier version of this analysis, first delivered as a paper at one of the Modern Language Associa­ tion’s special sessions on Swift’s poetry, is included in Contemporary Studies of Sw iffs Poetry (1981). In his introduction to the collection, John Irwin Fischer points out the strength and weakness of England’s method: Eng­ land carefully and fully studies the text as “patterned artifact,” but anything beyond the pattern, be it “authorial confusion” or “unpatterned insight,” cannot find its way into the analysis. The same neatness mars Energy and Order. England has not fully reduced the tiger of English literature to a pussycat, but he has considerably lessened the gleam in its eye. Swift would have been both delighted and appalled with this study of his energy and order — and, no doubt, with my review of it. a n n m e s s e n g e r / Simon Fraser University Robert James Merrett, Daniel Defoe’s Moral and Rhetorical Ideas, ELS Monograph Series, No. 19 (Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 1980). 112. $4.25 Defoe’s novels are not illustrations. He is careful to point out the moral, insistent in his claim to be instructing the reader, but in fact the insistence is quite bogus. There is no ‘moral discovery’ to be made in Moll Flanders for all the moral talk. It seems many years since these words were written. Actually it was only thirty years ago, and the author was no less a person than Arnold Kettle, in his Introduction to the English Novel. Since then Kettle has somewhat moderated his views on Moll Flanders, but in the meantime a series of important books on Defoe have made it impossible to return to the older view. Maximilian Novak in Defoe and the Nature of Man (1963), G. A. Starr in Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (1965) and Defoe and Casuistry (19 71), J- Paul Hunter in The Reluctant Pilgrim (1966) and Michael 229 Shinagel in Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility (1968) have made us aware of the importance of contemporary philosophy, religion and economics in understanding Defoe’s thought and literary method. It is in this tradition that we must view R. J. Merrett’s monograph. The new area which he has marked out for himself is Defoe’s rhetorical ideas: his method is much like that of his predecessors, i.e., to examine carefully Defoe’s non-fictional writ­ ing and his minor fiction for indications as to his views, which can then be applied to the major fiction. Merrett draws upon a wide range of Defoe’s writings, including journalism, political tracts, biographies, and such miscel­ laneous works as Conjugal Lewdness, The Political History of the Devil, and the Serious Reflections During the Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, in order to report on a wide range of Defoe’s opinions. Thus in his first chapter, “ Defoe and Religious Sense,” Merrett attempts to define De­ foe’s views on religion by describing his attitudes toward contemporary think­ ers as diverse as Bacon, Descartes, Sir Thomas Browne, Hobbes, John Toland , and the Earl of Shaftesbury. Merrett’s thesis is that Defoe is not primarily a systematic thinker, but rather a rhetorician, in the sense that his writings are always aimed to persuade a real audience of whom Defoe is keenly aware. Consequently, Defoe is not primarily concerned with consis­ tency of thought, but with his own image as a speaker, and with his audi­ ence’s presuppositions...

The Portrait of a Lady: A Question of Freedom

T H E P O R T R A I T O F A L A D Y : A Q U E S T I O N O F F R E E D O M WAYNE TEMPLETON Simon Fraser University S u c h is the complex and subtle nature of The Portrait of a Lady that any of a myriad of interpretations is possible, and applicable, but no matter what the critic’s particular perspective is, he must eventually involve himself, as does the novel, as does the reader, with the question of Isabel Archer and her quest for freedom. She will be free, and in that this passionate desire of hers involves itself ultimately, as the title suggests, with seeing, with the develop­ ment of mature perception or expanded consciousness, the quest directs, even motivates, the entire action of the novel. It is a quest both social and philosophical, for it involves a woman who is at once a nineteenth-century American in Europe, married, and thus to some degree inhibited, and a human being, a kindred spirit, as it were, whose pursuit of freedom is as old as Plato and Kant, and as modern as the most recent reader of the novel. Such, in fact, is the vast and immutable nature of this concept that one may, as Arnold Kettle does, see the novel as one of theme rather than character. As James informs us in his Preface, the novel has as its cornerstone “the conception of a certain young lady affronting her destiny,” to which Kettle adds, “The Portrait of a Lady is a novel about destiny. . . a novel about freedom. It would not be outrageous, though it might be misleading, to call it a nineteenth-century Paradise Lost.”1 Cer­ tainly the novel does not derive its seriousness from the plot, which, as Leon Edel notes, would almost deny the theme its integrity, for it is “almost pure fairy-tale — a rich banker fairy-god father, a poor niece, a sickly renunciatory cousin, glamorous suitors. . . when the fairy-tale ceases, the story acquires melodramatic overtones. The Portrait of a Lady derives its authority not from these curious elements of its story, but from the nature of the heiress’s ‘American dream’ and her rude awakening.”2 ■ The novel is all these things, for while it cannot be denied that certain thematic philosophical concerns are projected through the character rather than plot or setting, as an individual Isabel also projects her own very hu­ man, very complex problems, of which just one is the socio-moral dilemma common to nineteenth-century married or even single women, concerning inE n g l is h St u d ie s in C a n a d a , vii, 3, F all 1981 dividual rights.3For Isabel, an intelligent young woman, theoretically knowl­ edgeable and practically naive, the conflict is intense; she is able to under­ stand the origins of her situation, and is therefore able to prescribe what she sees as a viable alternative, while having the greatest difficulty in achieving that end. In her youth Isabel has been encouraged, even trained, to ignore life’s harsh realities. She is ignorant not only, as she tells Mrs. Touchett, of money matters, but of sex, vice, or anything else in the world outside the printed page. Raised by a father whose own habit of “doing as one liked” sharply contrasted his edict prohibiting anything disagreeable from reaching the senses of his aesthetically pure daughter — and the similarity with Osmond would seem more than coincidental — Isabel “had had everything that a girl could have: kindness, admiration, flattery, bouquets, the sense of exclusion from none of the privileges of the world she lived in, abundant opportunity for dancing, the latest publications, plenty of new dresses, the London Spec­ tator, and a glimpse of contemporary aesthetics.” 4 In other words, she had been made a recluse by the very liberalism with which her father sought to free her, and to the extent that her journeys into the real world have been superficial, she has gleaned experience, such as it is, from books and an overactive imagination. The effects of such a...

REVIEWS

REVIEWS Get access Fact in Fiction. The use of literature in the systematic study of Society By JOAN ROCKWELL Pp x+212London Routledge & Kegan Paul 1974 £3.95 net ARNOLD KETTLE ARNOLD KETTLE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXVI, Issue 104, November 1975, Pages 512–513, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXVI.104.512 Published: 01 November 1975

Toward a Syntax of Fiction

THE THEORY OF FICTION, to give it its common if somewvhat inflated designation, has developed into one of the major industries of English and American criticism of the last decade. After a long period during which Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction (1921) more or less dominated theoretical or quasi-theoretical discussions of the novel, and most other studies consisted either of disjunctive essays in individual explication (as in the work of R. P. Blackmur or Dorothy Van Ghent), or historical panoramas of varying proportions of fact and evaluation (as with Arnold Kettle or Walter Alien), the mid-1950's saw a resurgence of interest in the deep-structure properties of the fictive act itself which continues to produce a variety of systems and approaches whose excitement is not diminished by their frequent partiality. Such books as Northrop Fryes' Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), W. J. Harvey's Character and the Novel (1965), and Robert Scholes' and Robert Kellogg's The Nature of Narrative (1966) represent important contributions to a new

King Lear: The Disguised and Deceived

S every reader of Shakespeare knows by now, King Lear is an irrational figment of critics' imaginations. The thing itself is as lost as Gloucester at Dover-but there is no Edgar * 7i3 to hear the beaten drum and bestow us with a friend. Fortune, that arrant whore, has inveigled critics into compromising positions, has set them in opposing tents so that instead of becoming reconciled with each other, they become diametrically opposed. At the moment, there are two respectable camps of Learists-to change the metaphor and coin a word. Many recent critics are aligning themselves with one of the two fundamental philosophic positions in interpreting Lear: one camp holds that essence precedes existence (Maynard Mack and Virgil Whitaker might be called its leaders), the other (led by Walter Kaufmann, David Horowitz, and the Polish critic Jan Kott) is certain that existence precedes essence. Hardly so presumptuous as to think I have heard the beaten drum, I hope merely to suggest a possible direction from which the beating might be coming, although admittedly my ears are more closely attuned to the existence than to the essence camp. The content [of drama] is thematic material, which, like everything that enters into a work of art, has to serve to make the primary illusion and articulate the pattern of 'felt life' the artist intends.' Arnold Kettle's comments on the novel are similar to Susanne Langer's on drama. He writes, must be emphasized that the two elements-life and pattern-are not separate. If we ask of any particular novel that 'lives' the question, 'what is it that gives it vitality?' we shall find that the vitality is inseparable from the novelist's view of life.2 Kettle's thesis is not confined to the novel: its implications for drama are evident. Although his terms differ, he is writing about that ineffable moral which A. C. Bradley suggests is the common substance of Shakespearean tragedy, or the order of nature and grace to which Virgil Whitaker finds view of tragedy compelled him . . . to relate his fundamental action,' or the motive-force of artistic energy . . . which perhaps Keats was seeking to express when he referred to Shakespeare's 'negative capability.' It is because Kettle's thesis is so fundamental to artistic judgment that critics continue to discuss Shakespeare's view of life. If the end of criticism

History, Poetry, and the Terms of Fiction in the Eighteenth Century

gross and in the detayl are mere invention, but invented only for default of truth: such are the imaginary Originals of most Nations. To these, he continues, romances are as innocent masquers to Rogues who taking the name, and personating such as are dead or absent, possess themselves of their goods by favour of some resem1 This paper has been completed with the assistance of the Charles Phelps Taft Memorial Fund of the University of Cincinnati. 2 The significance of history in eighteenth-century thought has most recently and fully been discussed by James William Johnson in The Formation of English Neo-Classical Thought (Princeton, 1967). See especially chap. ii (The Role of Historiography), and for a partial summary of recent scholarship, see the headnote, p. 270. Unless otherwise indicated, the place of publication of single works referred to in this paper is London. 3 Among other commentaries on the matter besides the standard works of J. M. S. Tompkins, A. D. McKillop, Ian Watt, and Arnold Kettle, of interest are Sidney J. Black, Eighteenth-Century 'Histories' as a Fictional Mode, Boston University Studies in English, I (1955), 38-44; Myron W. Taylor, Two Analogies for Poetry in the Seventeenth (unpublished dissertation, Washington University, St. Louis, 1960); Arthur Johnston, Enchanted Ground (1964), especially Appendix 3: 'History,' 'Romance,' and 'Novel,' pp. 234-37. More recent relevant material may be found in the work of Robert Donovan and William J. Farrell cited below. 4 In this respect the discussion in H. T. Swedenberg, Theory of the Epic in England, 1650-1800 (Berkeley, 1944), is useful; see especially chap i (Foundations of English Theory); see also Ralph C. Williams, Two Studies in Epic Theory, Modern Philology, XXII (1924), 133-58 (especially Part I, Verisimilitude in the Epic). More recently the particular question of the Christian merveillieux in the epic is discussed in R. E. Sayce, The French Biblical Epic in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1955); Robert M. Durling, The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), is relevant (see especially the discussion of Tasso, pp. 192-200). The prefaces of Georges de Scud6ry to Alaric (Paris, 1654) and Ibrahim are especially pertinent; the latter is available in the translation of Henry Cogan (1674) in Augustan Reprint Society Publication No. 32 (1952).

Form, Theme, and Imitation in Realistic Fiction

The diversity of critical approaches to literature is reflection of multiplicity of values to be found in it and product of differing interests and temperaments of critics. Not all approaches equally valid. The most satisfactory criticism is somehow congruent with form it addresses and faithful to distribution of interests in work itself. Criticism of realistic fiction has paid too little heed to nature of form-it has, as result, tended to obscure primary values and to make inappropriate demands. The primary values of fiction can be described in variety of terms; I shall classify them as mimetic, thematic, and formal. Fiction is mainly concerned with representation, interpretation, and aesthetic patterning of experience. In different works and in different fictional modes distribution of emphasis varies; and in some works one of these interests may be far more important than others. When work concerns itself seriously with more than one of these interests, it must bring its various impulses into harmony if it is to be organically unified. From middle of eighteenth to beginning of twentieth century, attempted, by and large, to realize all of these values; but its primary impulse seems to have been mimetic one. Henry James is reflecting not only his own taste but essential nature of genre when he characterizes as a picture, and proclaims that the only reason for existence of is that it does attempt to represent life.' It is not its interpretation of life or its formal perfection but its air of reality (solidity of specification) that James identifies as the supreme virtue of novel (p. 14). Arnold Kettle distinguishes between moral fable, dominated by pattern or significance, and in which pattern is subordinated to life. Despite frequently strong commitment to thematic interests, great realists, says Kettle, are less consciously concerned with moral significance of life than with its surface texture. Their talent is devoted first and foremost to getting life on to page, to conveying across to their readers sense of what life as their characters live it really feels like.2

Control of Sympathy in Wuthering Heights

O NE OF Emily Brontes major achievements in Wuthering Heights is to keep alive the reader's sympathy for both Catherine and Heathcliff, even though their behavior after the former's marriage to Edgar Linton becomes increasingly bizarre and frighteningly akin to the demonic. From the time in Chapter x of Heathcliff's return to Thrushcross Grange after his three-year absence to the end of the novel, we are sustained in a double view: far from condoning the hideous spiritual transformation which Catherine and Heathcliff undergo, Emily Bronte evokes our moral revulsion by employing all the resources of her art to bring its viciousness into the sharpest relief; at the same time, however, she never allows her hero and heroine to forfeit our compassion. This double view is essential if the final effect of the novel is to be tragic and not merely distasteful. We must condemn the sin, but pity the sinner. The view that Emily Bronte is an amoral writer results in large part from a confusion between ethical neutrality and this pity she enlists on behalf of a hero and heroine whose behavior is allowed at the same time to shock us profoundly. (It is also a consequence of attributing to Catherine and Heathcliff a factitious metaphysical status, as I shall try to show later.) The confusion can be removed if we come to understand the precise means by which Emily Bronte accomplishes the delicate task of making us respond in this complex way. The only critic to have specifically addressed himself to this problem in any detail is Arnold Kettle, who justly observes that despite everything he does and is, we continue to sympathize with

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Shakespeare in His Own Age. Edited by ALLARDYCE NICOLL. Pp. xii+278 (Shakespeare Survey 17). Cambridge: University Press, 1963. 50s net. Shakespeare in a Changing World. Essays edited by ARNOLD KETTLE. Pp. 270. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1964. 36s. net. K. M. LEA K. M. LEA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XVII, Issue 65, February 1966, Pages 85–87, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XVII.65.85 Published: 01 February 1966

Ladislaw and the Middlemarch Vision

I T IS A COMMONPLACE Middlemarch criticism find fault wvvith Ladislaw as Dorothea's chosen love. Arnold Kettle, in fact, categorically calls Ladislaw a failure,' and F. R. Leavis states that he can't be said exist,' '2 while another critic reads in him a compulsion his author to feed an appetite for self-justification.3 Less severe are those who voice the dissatisfaction the ordinary reader, that Ladislaw palpably not worthy of Dorothea.4 Such dissatisfaction was expressed George Eliot herself, and she recorded an incident in her journal: When I was at Oxford, in May, two ladies came up me after dinner: one said, 'How could you let marry that Casaubon?' The other, 'Oh, I understand her doing that, but why did you let her marry the other fellow, whom I cannot bear?' The two 'ardent admirers' wished that the book had been quite different from what it is.? Joan Bennett took the author at her word, and argues in her book, George Eliot: Her Mind and Her Art,6 that if the responsive reader feels that Ladislaw is not quite good enough for Dorothea it is probably because that's the way George Eliot herself felt about him. My own reading had already convinced me that this is the only consistent interpretation Ladislaw, and since Mrs. Bennett did

E. L. Voynich: A Forgotten English Novelist

Journal Article E. L. Voynich: A Forgotten English Novelist Get access ARNOLD KETTLE ARNOLD KETTLE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Essays in Criticism, Volume VII, Issue 2, April 1957, Pages 163–174, https://doi.org/10.1093/eic/VII.2.163 Published: 01 April 1957