Eminent Victorians Research Articles

De volledigheidswaan van biografen

A. Kuiper, Een wijze ging voorbij. Het leven van Abel J. Herzberg; L. van Driel, J. Noordegraaf, De Vries en Te Winkel. Een duografie; W. Hazeu, M.C. Escher. Een biografie; J.W. Renders, Zo meen ik dat ook jij bent. Biografie van Jan Hanlo; M. Derks, S. Verheesen-Stegeman, Wetenschap als roeping. Prof. dr. Christine Mohrmann (1903-1988), classica; F. Zwart, Willem Mengelberg (1871-1951). Een biografie 1871-1920The delusion that the scope of a biography is ever fully completeThis review article observes that, since the 1980s, the art of writing biographies has become fully accepted once more in academic circles in the Netherlands. This revival has been stimulated by positive collaborative efforts between historians and Dutch specialists. This harmony is based on their commitment to the principles of the Modem Biography, a style which counts since the first World War as the ‘ideal type’ of the whole genre. This style — which is mostly identified with Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) - mediates between literature and historical studies. Their followers want to combine: 1. literary eloquence, 2. scholarly accuracy, 3. an analytic and a explicative concept about the personage and his or her work, 4. the skill of placing the character in the context of his or her time. Those four desiderata are used in this article as a point of departure for assessing six Dutch biographies that appeared in 1998. Some of them are excellent, however, all of them show a propensity towards empiricism and prolixity. Unfortunately this trait is characteristic of many recent biographies in The Netherlands

Fictions in the Thought of Sir John Salmond

A Lecture delivered for the Stout Centre's "Eminent Victorians" Centennial Series in the Council Chamber, Hunter Building at Victoria University on 31 March 1999. The author pays tribute to the late Sir John Salmond by discussing the role of "fiction" in law and in the thought of Sir John. The author notes the nature of fiction as a formidable force, as it facilitates provisional escape from the tyranny of apparent fact and forget about the suspensory nature of fiction. There are three types of "fictions" in the legal world: legislative fictions, whereby the world is refashioned in accordance with the legislator's desires; constitutional fictions, which places fictional boundaries on government rule; and corporate fiction, which creates a fictional corporate personality for companies. The author concludes that it is purpose that keeps fiction honest, and that the relationship between fiction and purpose is just as important as that between hypothesis and fact.

Bernard Quaritch as an antiquarian bookseller

This is a brief study of the life and work of the celebrated antiquarian bookseller Bernard Quaritch (1819‐1899). Born in Germany and having served his apprenticeship as a bookseller there, he came to London in 1842 with a letter of introduction to John Murray. After a short period in Paris he finally settled in London in 1845, setting up his own business there in 1845. This flourished and in his Victorian heyday Quaritch had an international fame, priding himself on being bookseller to many “eminent Victorians”. In 1859 he was also first to venture to publish Edward Fitzgerald’s somewhat daring “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”. Quaritch had a firm and lasting influence on books and literature of his time. Apart from his enormous influence on private libraries he helped decisively to build up the collections of the British Museum and of the H.C. Folger Library in the USA. He illustrates how the book trade in Victorian England made its own forceful contributions to the advancement of literature, learning and libraries of all sorts.

Exhibitions and Catalogues

Kendall, Richard Degas Beyond ImpressionismDumas, Ann Degas as a CollectorJones, Stephen; Newall Christopher; Ormond, Leonée; Ormond Richard and Read Benedict Frederic, Lord Leighton. Eminent Victorian ArtistParry, Linda (ed.) William MorrisKaplan, Wendy (ed.) Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Victorian Studies and the History of the Book: Opportunities for Scholarly Collaboration

VICTORIAN STUDIES AND THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK: OPPORTUNITIES FOR SCHOLARLY COLLABORATION LESLIE HOWSAM University of Windsor Victorian Studies, that exciting and promising interdisciplinary field of study, developed in the 1960s when scholars began to take seriously the novels and poems and essays of the nineteenth century. New editions of die letters and diaries of authors were undertaken, editions adhering to rigorous editorial principles; major projects such as the Mill, Darwin, Disraeli, Tennyson and Gladstone editions got under way. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals was initiated. Victorian Studies at tiiat time were self-consciously interdisciplinary, and die two chief disciplines were literature and history, with significant contributions from art, music and architecture, and sometimes from the social sciences. The linkage of literature and history was part of a recognition that the historical context for those literary works was more than just "background" — tiiat the political and social turmoil of decades like the 1840s and 1870s, for instance, were intrinsic to the preoccupations of writers. At the same time, social historians learned to look into literary works for subtle evidence of contemporary attitudes to what the Victorians termed "questions": the woman question, the drink question, the "condition of England" question. And biographers used a combination ofevidence that was traditionally literary as well as historical. A recent article by Richard Altick, entitled "Eminent Victorianism", is a provocative play on Strachey's Eminent Victorians; the subject is the significance of biography to Victorian Studies. Altick says that "It was under the auspices of biography that the redemption of the Victorian age began" (84). While the writing of nineteenthcentury lives remains an important scholarly pursuit, I want to argue that in the 1990s "Victorianism" may need another dose of "redemption" and that the source of that redemption might be the history of the book. Victorian Review 22.1 (Summer 1996) 66Victorian Review The enthusiasm of the 1960s and 1970s has waned a little in recent years. The Wellesley Index and die Mill project are finished, and die Darwin has got past the publication of The Origin and into the almost uncharted waters of Darwin's study of botany — but foundations and research councils are not looking widi particular favor on the initiation of equivalent ventures. It is difficult to envision an Alfred Rüssel Wallace Letters project on the same scale as the Darwin industry in Cambridge, for example. And die hurdles are not merely financial: the application of literary theories, rather than research methodologies, to die texts die Victorians produced may have diminished die demand for indexes and for bibliographical and textual analyses. Victorian Studies is not yet in trouble; but it is no longer the innovative "scholarly industry" whose "productivity" Altick celebrates. Another newly articulated, if not altogether newly constituted, field of study began to appear in the late 1980s: the history of the book. A number of scholars who had formerly regarded themselves as literary historians, bibliographers, and textual critics found tiieir work cited by people working in something translated from me French "histoire du livre" as "die history of the book", or sometimes simply "book history". Perhaps we were reacting to one too many doomsayers prophesying "the death of die book" in the wake of new electronic technologies (just as Altick suggests that his generation of Victorianists reacted to Strachey's "cheap shots" at Horence Nightingale and die rest). In any case, starting in the early 1980s, the history of the book began to be heard of. Historians of France, notably Robert Darnton and Natalie Zemon Davis, and their studies of "print culture" were mentioned; Anglo-American analytical bibliographers commented on die subject from the perspective of their work. When D.F. McKenzie did this in his British Library Panizzi Lectures in 1985, his thoughts on "the sociology of texts" were elevated by his admirers almost to die status of high theory. He called for an understanding of books as physical objects, objects tiiat convey in their physical form much of the meaning of the text they incorporate. It is his view that: In the pursuit of historical meanings, we move from the most minute feature of the material form of the book to questions of authorial, literary and...

CHRISTIAN MISSION AND THE FREEDOM OF RELIGION

For me Jesus Christ is the revelation of God, but I am opposed to proselytisation. Our task as Christians is simply to live attractive lives that are transparent with the gospel. We take ourselves too seriously when we think that God is relying on our evangelical campaigns to make everyone Christians, in order for them to enter into communion with God.(1) Religious pluralism has always been a characteristic of South African society. The Declaration on Religious Rights and Responsibilities, and the clauses on the freedom of religion recommended to the Constituent Assembly due to be elected on 27 April 1994 suggests, however, that pluralism should be enshrined within the legal identity of a new South Africa. This will require Christianity, which has been shown preferential treatment by the state since the beginning of white conquest, to reassess its missionary activity. For the first time churches will seriously be confronted with the institutionalized claims of other religions. Christians will be required to share with people of other faiths -- as well as atheists, secular humanists, Marxists and others who are not Christian -- in the nation-building process. They will be structurally engaged with people who are not Christians, but have often done more to fight the evils of apartheid than most church members. In the process, it is hoped that Christian triumphalism will be a thing of the past. Rediscovering the Incarnation Missionary activity in South Africa has been largely influenced by Protestant piety. It has also been almost exclusively western. This has given Christianity in South Africa a strong christocentric character -- requiring any assessment of mission history in South Africa to take Eastern Orthodoxy's concern that christocentric theology separates Christ from the mystery of the Trinity seriously. Metropolitan George Khodr argues that having displaced (Christ) from the bosom of the Father, christocentrism tends to further neglect the continuing work of the Holy Spirit in revealing the hidden Christ.(2) A peril of such theology is the reduction of the divine mystery to an identifiable object (whom we call the Christ), that can be possessed, owned, exploited and used to serve our own ideological ends. This is a concern also central to Evangelical Reformed theology, showing obvious common ground between this tradition and Eastern Orthodoxy.(3) Karl Barth was correct: To reduce Christ to an archetype of the existing order is to reduce him to little more than an eminent Victorian with quaintly democratic instincts, or a German pater-familias given to highmindedness and sweet talk.(4) The outcome is a christology that provides divine legitimation for a dominant ideology. This has been the case in colonial and apartheid South Africa. By definition, the incarnation is at the same time a kenotic activity, within which the eternal Son is divested of all heavenly attributes in order to become human. It is within Christ's self-abasement -- as the one who is hungry, in prison, exploited and marginalized -- that the incarnate God is found. In brief, the mystery of God and the self-emptying of that mystery constitute a dialectic within a biblical doctrine of the incarnation that triumphalistic notions of Christian mission tend to overlook. The Council of Chalcedon was compelled to conclude that although the union between the two natures of Christ was complete, the differences between the divine and human natures remained. Jesus is the eternal Son of God. Jesus is also a first century Palestinian Jew. Put differently, to encounter the self-revelation of God in Christ is never to encounter a stranger.(5) Yet, herein lies an extreme danger. The Christ of South African missions has all too often (with some exceptions), borne the marks of a European settler. Speaking in a different context, Stanley Samartha asks, How can we sing a foreign song in the Lord's land? …

The Oxford pamphlets, leaflets, and circulars of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson

Between 1860 and 1897 Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, known to the ages as Lewis Carroll, produced (in addition to the Alice books and his well-known photographic works) over 180 booklets, leaflets, pamphlets, and instruction manuals. Varying radically in length and subject matter, they testify to Dodgson's unparalleled creativity and eclecticism. Collected now for the first time, these writings shed light on many of the intellectual and cultural enthusiasms of this eminent Victorian. Famed as a writer, photographer, and mathematician, Dodgson was also a moral crusader and a diligent churchman who nourished a then-illicit passion for the theatre. He was also a prolific creator of games, puzzles and brain twisters. Indeed, one of his earliest independent publications was the 1860 Rules for court circular, a blueprint for an original game bearing some resemblance to rummy. This volume, the first of a planned series, concentrates on the work associated with Dodgson's career as an Oxford don. Much of the material collected here has not appreared in print since the author's lifetime; included among many other items is all the work connected with Dodgson's curatorship of the Christ Church Room. An enthusiastic participant in university life, Dodgson left a lively paper trail that lavishly documents his positions on various local disputes. He preferred this form of discourse to debates, in which - partly because of a speech impediment - he was not particularly successful. Modern readers are the beneficiaries of this inclination to print: the writings are of interest not only for the logic and high moral principle they display, but also for their genuine wit and whimsy. Appearing in chronological order, the pamphlets are presented with background information placing them in context. Taken together, they offer real insight into Dodgson the man and into the Victorian period in general.

Eminent Victorians and science at the grass roots

Eminent Victorians and science at the grass roots

A History of Henry Manning’s Religious Opinions, 1808–1832

Henry Manning has proved to be a figure of considerable interest for biographers, and versions of his life story have been committed to print in various different forms. First, came E. S. Purcell’s Life of Cardinal Manning: full of subtle insinuation and open attack, constructed around a cab load of pilfered papers, riddled with errors, and therefore, of course, immensely popular. Several other smaller works of some interest but no great merit appeared subsequently, but then came Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians: Purcell’s animus against Manning was transplanted into a man who had little to say for the Victorians and a great deal to say against them. The result was malicious, unfair, vitriolic, and even more popular. So Shane Leslie, when a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, set out a few years later to write a fairer study and to restore the damage, but his book lacks sustained scholarly depth and, as I shall attempt to show in this study, cannot always be relied upon in its opinions.

LOSS OF FAITH

Journal Article LOSS OF FAITH Get access Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-Eminent Edwardian. By JOHN SUTHERLAND. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990; £16.95. (paper £9.99) IAN KER IAN KER Ascot, Berks Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Essays in Criticism, Volume XLII, Issue 2, April 1992, Pages 148–152, https://doi.org/10.1093/eic/XLII.2.148 Published: 01 April 1992

Mrs Humphry Ward: eminent Victorian, pre-eminent Edwardian

Mrs Humphry Ward: eminent Victorian, pre-eminent Edwardian

Eminent Victorians: S. R. Gardiner and the Liberal as Hero

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The Biographer's art: new essays

Leon Edel has recently noted that there exists, I am sorry to say, no criticism of biography worthy of the name. Reviewers and critics have learned how to judge plays, poems, novels-but they reveal their helplessness in the face of a biography. The Biographer's Art, by concentrating on the aesthetics of the genre, responds to the need for serious criticism of life-writing. This book is both a history of the genre and a substantial analysis of the great literary biographies from Johnson's Life of Savage (1744) and Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791) through Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918) and Symons' The Quest for Corvo (1934) to the three greatest biographies of the mid-twentieth century: Ellmann's James Joyce (1959), Painter's Marcel Proust (1959, 1965), and Edel's monumental Henry James (1953-72). The masterful biographies by Ellmann, Painter, and Edel, that continue the tradition begun by Johnson and Boswell and show the influence of Strachey's innovative work, confirm that biography is still a flourishing art form. By firing the facts of an author's life with their own imagination, illuminating the relationship between daily existence and imaginative life, these life-writers follow the same process as fiction writers and create their own significant works of art.

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access F. J. A. Hort: Eminent Victorian. By GRAHAM A. PATRICK. Pp. 127. Sheffield: the Almond Press, 1988. £21.50/$36.50. IEUAN ELLIS IEUAN ELLIS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 40, Issue 2, October 1989, Pages 690–692, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/40.2.690 Published: 01 October 1989

Telling Lives

TELLING LIVES / Steve Weinberg WHEN ROBERT CARO finished his biography of Robert Moses in 1974, he marked an end to seven years of research on the man who built twentieth-century New York City, influencing urban planners the world over. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York won the PuUtzer Prize for biography as weU as the Francis Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book which "best represents the union of the historian and the artist." It was quite an accompUshment for a former newspaper reporter turned first-time biographer. The Power Broker did more than win accolades for Caro—it also deeply influenced the modern-day craft of biography. Biographers had a new model: The nearly 1300-page book was much longer than the average biography; artfuUy written while stiU adhering to chronology; unusual in the depth of its portrayal of Moses' times, as weU as of his life; heavily dependent on previously secret documents; daring in its analysis of Moses' motives; and quintessentiaUy muckraking. His book contrasted with that of the other biographer winning a PuUtzer Prize in 1975—Dumas Malone, who achieved the pinnacle in the history category for his sixvolume , thirty-four hundred page Ufe of Thomas Jefferson. Unlike Caro's book, Malone's admired its subject. Malone noted that after thirty-eight years of researching and writing the Jefferson volumes, the former president had "withstood microscopic examination even better than I expected. This is not to claim that his judgment was always right, but no one can read his voluminous state papers without gaining increased respect for his abiUty." Malone was more loathe than Caro to psychoanalyze his subject's motives, noting, "I must confess that even with the benefit of hindsight, I have often found it extraordinarily difficult to arrive at a defensible judgment as to what he ought to have done." The spiritual ancestor of Caro's work was Lytton Strachey's four biographical essays, pubUshed as Eminent Victorians in 1918. Srrachey revolutionized mainstream biography. His Uves were artfuUy presented , with an emphasis on "the inward creature." Strachey determinedly shattered the conventional wisdom about his four revered subjects, as did Caro about Moses. Reviewing The Power Broker in the Washington Post Book World (October 6, 1974), WiUiam Greider Steve Weinberg The Missouri Review · 249 said, "when a truly exceptional achievement comes along, there are no words to praise it. Important, awesome, compelling—these no longer summon the fuU flourish of trumpets this book deserves. It is extraordinary on many levels and, despite its price and length, it is certain to endure." The book had its detractors, to be sure. It was controversial not only because of its substance, but also because of its techniques, so it was bound to spark debate—as books that shake up the estabUshed order often do. Moses issued a twentythree page rebuttal. Dick Netzer was one angry reviewer among a smaU but vocal group. Writing in The New Republic (September 7, 1974), Netzer said, "Exposés make for bad biography, and this is an unusuaUy bad example of the genre." The disagreement among the reviewers was part of a debate that continues to this day: What makes for good biography? For centuries before Caro, there was Uttle discussion about biography as a craft, because it was not considered to be a separate discipline. As Katherine Frank said, "Depending on its subject, biography was generaUy considered a chameleon form: history, Uterary criticism, or what you read in bed at night, and there seemed Uttle need to go any further, theoreticaUy, than that" (Genre, Winter 1980). Reviewers of biographies for book pages usuaUy wrote about how the subject Uved his or her Ufe, rather than analyzing how the biographer told that life. AU of that began to change during the 1970s, as demonstrated by the controversy over Caro's effort. Fourteen years after the pubUcation of Caro's book, the debate about what constitutes responsible biography continues, fueled by a pubUshing explosion: During the 1980s, American pubUshers have issued an average of about 2000 biographies annuaUy. Readers flock to buy them. "A good many more people are interested in reading about...

From Harry Partch to Dolly Parton

Sir George Grove, polymath and classic eminent Victorian, published the first volume of his great Dictionary of Music and Musicians with Macmillan in 1879. By the fifth edition of 1954 its four volumes had grown to ten, while retaining a fair amount of the original writing. A clean sweep was made in Grove 6 (The New Grove) of 1980, whose twenty 900-page volumes, edited through a decade of preparation by Stanley Sadie and currently costing over ?1000, contain almost entirely new material. Immensely successful (Macmillan are rumoured to have recouped the ?1 million or more invested in it within a month of publication), The New Grove has led to various spin-offs, with more to follow. Many of the major articles have been updated and re-issued, separately or in small groups, as paperback books (the idea of a Grove article having the scope of a small book is not new : several of Sir George's original contributions, such as his great articles on Beethoven and Schubert, were on a similar scale). The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments appeared in three volumes in 1984, containing articles partly new, partly reprinted or expanded from the parent publication. The New Grove Dictionary of American Music (popularly known as Amerigrove) was planned along similar lines, with a nod in the direction of the American Supplement that had first appeared in conjunction with the second edition of 1904-10, planned single volume materializing after ?ve years' preparation as the present four. No other arts subject possesses such an encyclopaedic yet commercially viable reference tool as the Grove enterprise (though Macmillan, flushed with its success, are now rectifying this with their projected Dictionary of Art). The New Grove's role in the growth of musicology as a consumer product, could it be assessed, would surely prove considerable. The dictionary's scope has always been broad, but it was only with the 1980 edition that the plurality of musical culture could be addressed in a modern perspective : there are numerous articles, some of them very extensive, on ethnic and folk musics, and popular and commercial music,

Richard Cobden: A Victorian Outsider

Richard Cobden, one of the great figures of nineteenth-century English liberalism, had a career that touched on many aspects of Victorian life and thought. This new biography by Wendy Hinde is the first to be based on a thorough study of his letters and papers. Hinde's life of Cobden focuses on his fascinating career and his singular personality. She describes how, with his friend John Bright, he became the successful leader of the seven year campaign to repeal the corn laws, which removed protective tariffs from domestic agricultural goods and brought the working man within reach of a decent standard of living. For this achievement Cobden won both national and international fame. However, a few years later he forfeited his immense popularity by his outright opposition to the Crimean War. Because he insisted that the British should stop interfering in the affairs of other countries, he was characterized as unpatriotic and as an advocate of peace at any price. Then, after he had urged England to emulate America's peaceful progress, the United States became involved in its Civil War - a shattering blow to Cobden. The last years of his life were clouded by domestic tragedy, ill health, and his growing frustration at his country's apparent lack of interest in further reform. However, he had one final success when he negotiated, on behalf of a British government in which he had refused office, a treaty that brought down the tariff barriers between England and France. Hinde captures Cobden's character - his personal charm, courage and single-mindedness, intellectual liveliness, and the lack of self ambition - and argues convincingly that he was one of the most original and attractive figures in the pantheon of English politics. Her subtle and sympathetic biography of Cobden brings this eminent Victorian statesman to life. Wendy Hinde worked on 'The Economist' and was editor of 'International Affairs'. She is the author of distinguished biographies of two other nineteenth-century statesmen, George Canning and Castlereagh.

Book reviews

R.M. Crawford, Manning Clark, Geoffrey Blainey, Making History, McPhee Gribble/Penguin, Melbourne, 1985, pp.102, $6.95. K.S. Inglis, The Rehearsal: Autralians at War in the Sudan 1885, Rigby, Sydney, 1985. pp.176. $24.95; P. Stanley (ed.), But Little Glory: The New South Wales contingent to the Sudan, 1885, Military Historical Society of Australia, Canberra, 1985. pp.79. $7.50. Michael Blakeney, Australia and the Jewish Refugees 1933–1948, Croom Helm Australia, Sydney, 1985, pp. vii & 335, $29.95. H.O. Browning, 1975 Crisis, An Historical Overview, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1985, pp. xi & 340, $29.95, paper $14.95. Len Richardson, The Bitter Years, Wollongong during the Great Depression, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1984 pp. xvi + 256, $29.95, paper, $14.95. Arthur Murdoch, Sheer Grit, New South Wales University Press, Sydney, 1984, pp. 107, $11.95. Melbourne Historical Journal, Vol. 16, 1984, ‘The Politics of History’, University of Melbourne, pp. 114, $3; Drew Cottle (ed.), Capital Essays: Selected Papers from the General Studies Conference on Australian History, University of New South Wales, 1983, Sydney, 1984, pp. 104. David Dunstan, Governing the Metropolis, Politics, Technology and Social Change in a Victorian City: Melbourne, 1850–1891 Melbourne University Press, 1984, pp. xvii + 362, $24.50. R. J. W. Selleck and Martin Sullivan (eds), Not So Eminent Victorians, Melbourne University Press, 1984, pp. xvii + 244, $22.50. Tim Duncan and John Fogarty, Australia and Argentina, On parallel paths, Melbourne University Press, 1985, pp. xiv + 203, $22.50. Margaret Hazzard, Punishment Short of Death, Hyland House, Melbourne, 1984. pp. xiii + 284, $25.00.

The Importance of Being Earnest: The Fairy Tale in 19th-century England

The Importance of Being Earnest:The Fairy Tale in 19th-century England Patricia Miller Students of the history of children's literature are thoroughly familiar with the dispute surrounding the reputation of the fairy tale in England at the beginning of the 19th Century. On the one hand, moralists and religious leaders found it hard to believe that tales of giant beanstalks, seven-league boots, and men the size of one's thumb could provide ethical guidance for their young pupils. Similarly, educational reformers regarded fairy tales suspiciously because of their failure to teach anything specific. After all, weren't lessons in arithmetic, geography, and religion more valuable than having a good time? In 1853, of course, Charles Dickens vigorously attacked these narrow and utilitarian views of fairy literature in his article, "Frauds on the Fairies," which asserted that in an age when men were rapidly becoming machines and slaves to reason, fairy tales were to be respected and permitted to do their important job of nurturing men's feelings and imagination. Dickens was also quick to point out, however, that in addition to providing imaginative stimulation to children, fairy tales could also teach: It would be hard to estimate the amount of gentleness and mercy that has made its way among us through these slight channels. Forbearance, courtesy, consideration for the poor and aged, kind treatment of animals, the love of nature, abhorrence of tyranny and brute force—many such good things have been nourished in the child's heart by this powerful aid.1 While Dickens' essay does much to defend fairy tales in general against the stern pietism of Puritan literature and the bleak didacticism of the Age of Reason, it does not address the unique qualities of the fairy tale in 19th-century England. How, for example, are the fairy tales of two eminent Victorians such as Dickens or John Ruskin different from those of Perrault or Grimm? What makes them distinctly Victorian? One quality which helps to distinguish the Victorian fairy tale from its European counterparts is its unique quality of earnestness. The one thing that every scholar of 19th-century literature knows is that the Victorians were "earnest," but what is meant by this and why they were is difficult to say. We know that the Victorians regarded earnestness as a positive moral attribute, and that the absence of it—whether in an individual or in a society—was decidedly bad. Among modern critics, Walter Houghton has provided perhaps the most helpful definition of the term in The Victorian Frame of Mind: The [Victorian] prophets of earnestness were attacking a casual, easy-going, superficial, or frivolous attitude whether in intellectual or in moral life; and demanding [End Page 11] that men should think and men should live with a high and serious purpose.2 Such purposefulness and revolt against moral indifference manifest themselves in much of the period's fiction and non-fiction for adults. For Thomas Carlyle in Sartor Resartus, earnestness is an assertion of Christian faith and a celebration of the virtues of hard work. For Tennyson in poems like "Ulysses," it is a quest for self-perfection and truth, an effort "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." For novelists such as George Eliot and Dickens, earnestness is a scrupulous attention to matters of conscience and a desire for social responsiblity in the face of an expanding industrialism. Finally, for Matthew Arnold, it is a belief in the transforming and sustaining power of love in a world which "hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain."3 But this value system of hard work, moral awareness, consideration for others, and love is present not only in the adult literature of the period, but also in the children's literature, particularly the fairy tale. In the Christmas books of Charles Dickens, published between 1843 and 1888, and in John Ruskin's fairy classic, The King of the Golden River (1857), one can find clear illustrations of the importance of being earnest. In fact, both works serve as paradigms of Victorian earnestness. As Harry Stone acknowledges in Dickens and the Invisible World...

Children's Literature and the History of Ideas

Children's Literature and the History of Ideas Anita Moss (bio) The Renaissance of Wonder in Children's Literature, by Marion Lochhead. Edinburgh: Canongate Publishing Limited, 1977. Childhood's Pattern: A Study of Heroes and Heroines in Children's Fiction, 1770-1950, by Gillian Avery. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975. In The Renaissance of Wonder in Children's Literature (1977) Marion Lochhead attempts to identify the rebirth of an elusive magical quality, the essence of which she calls "holiness," tracing this visionary strain of fantasy from its origins in the fantasies of George MacDonald and Hans Christian Andersen, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, considering Victorian domestic fantasy, the Irish writers Patricia Lynch and James Stephens, Tolkien's Middle Earth and Lewis's Narnia, and concluding with several contemporary British fantasists. Although the study does not pretend to be comprehensive, Lochhead's definitions of "wonder" remain obscure and her process of selection puzzling. Whereas the attempt to establish the existence of such a tradition is undeniably admirable, Lochhead's judgments are hopelessly distorted by an insistently Christian (or, more specifically, Catholic) bias. Throughout her book she dwells on "holiness" and chides modern fantasies which lack this trait. The book is not, strictly speaking, a study of MacDonald's fantasy, but the author does devote five of her sixteen chapters to a discussion of his life, intellectual background, and the literary influences upon his work. Her emphasis upon his Celtic heritage is pleasantly informative, though cursory and sometimes misleading. In tracing the influences upon MacDonald's fantasies, for example, she stresses traditional Celtic stories such as "Tam Lin" and "Thomas the Rhymer," as well as the fairy tales of Andersen, but she fails to mention MacDonald's acknowledged debt to German Romantic fairy tales or the potent influence of Perrault's "Sleeping [End Page 191] Beauty," which MacDonald used as the model for "The Light Princess" and "Little Daylight." MacDonald's powerful affinities with the whole Romantic movement are, in fact, ignored: his Words-worthian vision of childhood, his use of the quest romance form, or his studies in the writings of mystic Jacob Boehme. Even the obvious Calvinism which surfaces in the unpleasant fairy tale, The Wise Woman (1875), is not mentioned. Lochhead stresses parallels between Dante's Beatrice and the white goddesses in MacDonald's works, while omitting any reference to similar powerful female figures in Celtic lore, in the Cabala, in German Romantic stories, or even the stern white female authority figures in Charles Kingsley's Water Babies. Her entire discussion of MacDonald's background and his place in nineteenth-century literature is, in fact, weakened because she has not consulted the most recent research on the subject. Although disparagingly citing Robert Lee Wolff's heavily Freudian study of MacDonald, The Golden Key (1961), she seems unaware of Richard Reis's much more balanced and objective George MacDonald (1972). Lochhead does not note that MacDonald was totally enmeshed in the literary world of his time, enjoying friendships with John Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, and other eminent Victorians, or that he had thoroughly assimilated conventions of fairy tale and fantasy from France, Germany, and the native tradition in England, as well as from Denmark and Scotland. She omits any discussion of Ruskin's King of the Golden River (1851), an important work in any historical treatment of English fantasy, and refers to Carroll and the Alice books only briefly. She also leaves out works that appear to be much more specifically indebted to MacDonald than many that are included—Dinah Mulock's The Little Lame Prince (1874), for example. In general, commentators on MacDonald's fantasies run to extremes: those who adopt an excessively reverential tone in dealing with the theological implications of his work and those who essentially cannot believe in the wholeness of his religious views and who look for signs of psychological and spiritual anguish. Lochhead is definitely a member of the former school. Her religious bias appears in excessively theological interpretations of MacDonald's fantasies. For example, after describing the invisible thread attached [End Page 192] to the Princess Irene's ring in The Princess and the Goblin, Lochhead queries, "Is this, symbolically, the thread of...