Reviewed by: Victorian Literary Culture and Ancient Egypt ed. by Eleanor Dobson Marilyn Booth (bio) Victorian Literary Culture and Ancient Egypt, edited by Eleanor Dobson; pp. xiv + 226. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020, £85.00. In the first Arabic-language magazine targeting female readers and written by women, an 1893 article on women in history proclaimed that in ancient Egypt, men and women “shared . . . all positions and all kinds of work.” This article contrasted ancient Egypt’s (period undefined) gender regime with that of “the barbarians of the North.” Ancient Egyptian women enjoyed “freedom, culture and civilisation,” and “acquired intellectual and moral knowledge, since education was compulsory for every girl to the age of eighteen” (“Misr wa-Baghdad wa-Qurtuba wa-Urubba,” 1893, translated in Marilyn Booth, Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Feminist History through Biography in Fin-de-siècle Egypt [Edinburgh University Press, 2015], 22). Reading nineteenth-century women’s aspirations through an imagined local past, the article claimed ancient Egyptian women as standards for contemporary women defining an Indigenous modernity. The article drew on, and challenged, the terms of European thinkers’ civilizational ladder, whereby societies’ progress was defined by perceptions of women’s status; the assumed trajectory more typically marched from Greece to Britain. “Egypt, Baghdad, Cordoba, Europe” (the article’s translated title) summed up its findings: “Most of European women’s customs and clothing were adopted from those of the ancient Egyptian women” (Booth, Classes, 23). As urban Egyptians were becoming familiar with their ancient past—schoolboys were reported as taking field trips to the pyramids, the Egyptian Museum opened, and histories and guidebooks on ancient Egypt appeared in Arabic—they voiced pride in ancient Egypt’s contributions to modern garb and hygiene products. In 1873, the school magazine Rawdat al-madaris (1870–7) featured a scientific article on cosmetic treatments, authored by a male chemistry professor at the Khedival Engineering Institute. He noted that amongst important ancient sources was a treatise by Cleopatra VII: “As beautiful as she was, she did not neglect beautification in her medical writings” (Mansur Efendi Ahmad, “al-Muzayyanat al-muhassina,” Rawdat al-madaris, vol. 4, no. 12 [1873], 3). Two decades later, an Arabic-language biographical [End Page 684] dictionary of world women noted that Cleopatra’s writings on cosmetic practices were “well-known in the medical profession” (“Kliyubatrah malikat Misr,” 1894–5, translated in Booth, Classes, 332). Proud of this heritage, Egyptians and Ottoman Syrians resident in Egypt were conscious of Europeans’ intense interest in Egypt’s ancient past—and their appropriations of it, physically and discursively. Victorian Britain, as Victorian Literary Culture and Ancient Egypt argues, was saturated in Egyptological wonder. Excavation reports, mummy fiction, theatrical spectacle, and advertisements for Egyptian Deities cigarettes assailed British readers. Editor Eleanor Dobson, a scholar of English literary engagements with ancient Egypt’s texts and artifacts, has assembled studies on a wide range of media and cultural genres, with thematic emphases on visual and performance culture; ancient Egypt as a resource for rethinking religious belief; and consumption practices (as in Dobson’s chapter on the marketing of perfume, cigarettes, and novels). Dobson tries to carve out a distinct niche for this volume by arguing that the diverse array of sites and sources demonstrates, in a way that discrete studies of particular genres cannot, that ancient Egypt “permeated Victorian culture” (3). The variety of foci means also that this volume is a useful window into the vigorous field of ancient Egyptian reception studies. Victorian Egyptiana correlated strongly with the increasing reach, ambition, and barely disguised greed of Britain’s and other European powers’ imperialist invasions in Asia and Africa. Britain’s occupation of Egypt in 1882 brought heightened scrutiny; increasing opportunities for tourism had brought familiarity of a different sort. Both sustained the already existing Egyptological fascination, but British imperial politics also drew criticism, as Molly Youngkin notes in her chapter on stage Cleopatras. An 1889 poem in Punch (1841–1992) remarked that H. Rider Haggard’s novel of that year, Cleopatra: Being an Account of the Fall and Vengeance of Harmachis (1889), was “just as ‘dull’ and ‘stale’ as the Egyptian Question” (123). But the era’s writers, artists, entrepreneurs...
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Nov 4, 2024
Arabella Cortese 
Open Access
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