John Halifax Research Articles

Victorian Bestseller: The Life of Dinah Craik, by Karen Bourrier

Reviewed by: Victorian Bestseller: The Life of Dinah Craik by Karen Bourrier Jason S. Farr (bio) Victorian Bestseller: The Life of Dinah Craik, by Karen Bourrier; pp. xvii + 328. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019, $85.00, $69.95 ebook. Since Elaine Showalter and Sally Mitchell’s recovery efforts almost forty years ago, feminist scholars have mined Dinah Craik’s biography and writing for the many insights they offer into Victorian codes of gender, disability, and kinship. Critics have likewise turned to Craik for material histories of the book, the domestic novel form, travel writing, translation work, children’s literature, and family magazines. Recently, Karen Bourrier has been at the forefront of these studies and is therefore particularly well positioned to write the first biography of Craik. With Victorian Bestseller: The Life of Dinah Craik, Bourrier illuminates four decades of Craik’s diaries, along with 1,000 unpublished letters, weaving them together with astute literary analysis and historical context to craft an elegant narrative about a successful Victorian woman’s authorial career, one that is “now all but forgotten” (vii). The result is a learned, tremendously researched, and lucid literary biography that is accessible to a range of audiences. Bourrier deftly guides the reader through the various phases of Craik’s life and career, with chapters organized as follows: three opening chapters dedicated to her parents and childhood; a chapter on Craik’s four early novels; one on the biographical and historical contexts of her most famous work, John Halifax, Gentleman (1856); and later chapters that examine her shift from novel writing to periodical work, along with her marriage, nontraditional motherhood, translation work, and later years. The book concludes with a satisfying epilogue that briefly touches on the lives of Craik’s widower husband and adopted daughter as well as the copious afterlives of her writing. The book’s organization follows a logical trajectory and facilitates a thorough examination of Craik’s life, from her business acumen and massive contributions to women’s writing to the many ways in which her life was marked by disability (most notably, in the men around her). One of Victorian Bestseller’s strengths is the light it sheds on Victorian women’s sociability. Bourrier shows how Craik established her writing career at a young age and, subsequently, how she helped girls and young women throughout her life. As a new arrival to London, teenaged and “chaperoned by her father,” Craik became “a regular attendee at Mrs. S. C. Hall’s soirees,” where she had the “chance to meet the artistic and literary lions of the day” (32). Such gatherings allowed Craik to publish in periodicals from 1844 [End Page 463] to 1848. Craik thus “became part of a sociable nexus that fostered the careers of young woman writers” (60). The immense consequence of these women-led parties, as Bourrier explains, reveals how networking worked for women writers’ careers, affording them “the kinds of opportunities that clubs and dinners offered men” (32). As she became involved later in life in editing and writing for family magazines, Craik developed relationships with publishers that proved lucrative and personally rewarding, and her writing began to appear in family magazines in the United States. Though her fiction often details a heroic, individual striving that resonated with American readers, Craik benefitted from a web of connections and extended similar kindnesses to authors around her. In one of the book’s most vivid chapters, “Motherhood, 1870 to 1879,” Bourrier examines Craik’s nontraditional approach to maternity. She adopted a baby, Dorothy, who was abandoned, and served as substitute mother to other girls and young women. Once established in her home, Corner House, just outside of London in Bromley, she would regularly host parties. As Bourrier explains, “Dinah’s mentorship of young women was part of a larger pattern in women writers’ lives” (192). Victorian Bestseller has as much to relate about disability as it does the material and social conditions of women writers’ experiences. That Craik’s life was shaped by the mental and physical disabilities of loved ones helps to explain her rich, complex portrayal of embodiment in novels like Olive (1850). As Bourrier notes, “Tracing the contours of...

A Woman’s Thoughts About Men: Malthus and Middle-Class Masculinity in Dinah Mulock Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman

ABSTRACT From its publication in 1856 to the present-day Dinah Mulock Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman has intrigued readers in its representation of masculinity and potential to be read “aslant”, offering a divergent model of manliness, or even the “split consciousness” of the woman writer’s self-image refracted through her depiction of a cast of male characters (Showalter, 1975). Most recently Karen Bourrier has discussed the novel’s exploration of industry and invalidism as told through the narrative framework of an “intense homoerotic friendship between a strong man and his disabled friend” (Bourrier, 2015), and, in a 2007 article, Silvana Colella uses gift theory to demonstrate the intrinsic codes of gentlemanliness inherent in capitalist economics faithfully embodied in the text. This article considers Craik’s representation of men in the novel as a lens through which Craik could engage with, and question, some of the largest theoretical areas of nineteenth-century, male-dominated intellectual life: economics, science, and politics. The article begins with an examination of the novel in relation to Malthus’ economic theories of population and the tensions between Lamarckian and Malthusian ideology in the field of evolutionary theory in the works of Robert Chambers, George Drysdale, and others. The article will then explore the effect of Malthusian theory on discourses that emphasised masculine self-control as articulated in the symbiotic relationship of the two male protagonists, before concluding with Craik’s intervention in the history of the woman writer as woman writer. I will demonstrate how this enormously popular novel interrogated and intervened in the assumptions of sentimental fiction by contextualising Craik’s construction of a male narrative voice and an interdependent male relationship in terms of nineteenth-century economic, scientific, and political theoretical debates.

Review

Review

Gender Disassociation and Identity Displacement as an Effect of Victorian Depictions of Disability: John Halifax, Gentleman and ‘The Withered Arm’

Gender Disassociation and Identity Displacement as an Effect of Victorian Depictions of Disability: John Halifax, Gentleman and ‘The Withered Arm’

The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel by Karen Bourrier

BOURRIER, KAREN. The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in Mid-Victorian Novel. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2015. 184 pp. $65.00 hardcover; $35.00 paperback. Over a decade ago. Martha Stoddard Holmes's Fictions of Affliction called for disability studies interventions in Victorian Studies, which has long been invested since work of Bruce Haley in role of health and embodiment. The Measure of Manliness contributes to this developing subfield of Victorian disability studies by putting into conversation long-standing Victorian scholarship on invalidism and illness with more recent disability theory and its investments in social model of disability, where sickness and disability are not fixed biological states but part of a culturally constructed continuum of ideas about fit body (16). Drawing explicitly on Holmes's work. Bourrier focuses on relationship between affect and disability, and how it shapes a normative Victorian masculinity characterized by taciturn strength. Methodologically, her study hinges upon a central dyad: the affective of masculine and disability and impact it has on narrative form of midcentury (16). In a move similar to Georges Canguilhem in The Normal and Pathological and Lennard Davis in Enforcing Normalcy, Bourrier argues for mutual dependence and co-constituency of disability and normative health as key concepts animating Victorian fiction. The archive to which Bourrier turns is mid-century domestic novel, which persistently features what she describes as pairing of strong man and weak man, in which latter serves as an alternative and complementary Victorian mode of masculinity, supplementing masculine strength with his emotional self-consciousness and verbal effusiveness (3). The narrowing of scope to middle-class masculinity enables her to 1 ) connect figure of Victorian disabled man to earlier eighteenth-century man of feeling, and 2) trace strong-weak dualism as a narrative pattern within a particular generic form. Bourrier begins with novels of muscular Christianity: Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) and Kingsley's Westward Ho! (1855) and Two Years Ago (1857). The contrast between taciturn suffering of characters like Guy Morville or Tom Thurnall and their vulnerable, disabled counterparts valorizes an active masculinity that is physically capable and spiritually sound. It is this model of intimate friendship that underpins Bourrier's second paradigmatic example. Dinah Mulock Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman (1856). where Christian masculinity gives way to self-discipline and self-consciousness of self-made man. While represented as individually self-made, John Halifax's social climbing and industry is quietly enabled by Phineas Fletcher's invalidism and influence. Bourrier turns then to Eliot's The Mill on Floss (1860) and Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881) as revisions of this originary strong man-weak man with which both authors were deeply familiar. Eliot's Tom Tulliver and Philip Wakem and James's Caspar Goodwood and Ralph Touchett represent markedly different duos than their predecessors in that disabled weak man does not exist purely to support able strong man; in fact, these men begin to diverge from one another entirely. Measure of Manliness thus traces a trajectory from an uncomplicated and improving friendship between strong man and a weak man to a rivalry to almost no relationship at all (123). …

Finding a Transatlantic Audience: Reading Dinah Mulock Craik’s Mistress and Maid in Good Words and Harper’s Magazine

While scholars have long assumed that success came to bestselling novelist Dinah Craik with the publication of John Halifax, Gentleman in 1856, this article uses new archival evidence to show that the watershed moment of her career was actually the publication of a lesser-known novel, Mistress and Maid (1862), in serial form on both sides of the Atlantic. Craik developed a long and lucrative relationship with one of the new illustrated family magazines, Good Words , in Great Britain, and with Harper’s Magazine in the United States. The emphasis of Mistress and Maid underwent a subtle thematic shift in these two national contexts, foregrounding the Christian value of women’s labor in Good Words and the significance of class-based aspirations in Harper’s .

Biographies

While scholars have long assumed that success came to bestselling novelist Dinah Craik with the publication of John Halifax, Gentleman in 1856, this article uses new archival evidence to show that the watershed moment of her career was actually the publication of a lesser-known novel, Mistress and Maid (1862), in serial form on both sides of the Atlantic. Craik developed a long and lucrative relationship with one of the new illustrated family magazines, Good Words, in Great Britain, and with Harper’s Magazine in the United States. The emphasis of Mistress and Maid underwent a subtle thematic shift in these two national contexts, foregrounding the Christian value of women’s labor in Good Words and the significance of class-based aspirations in Harper’s.

A MEDIATED INTIMACY: DINAH MULOCK CRAIK AND CELEBRITY CULTURE

This article analyses Dinah Mulock Craik's acute, early appreciation of celebrity culture and articulates how Craik manages her literary persona via a mediated intimacy with her admirers. Credited with first using the word in our modern understanding of the term, Craik's thematic use of celebrity in her novel The Ogilvies (1849) highlights the need for nineteenth-century literary stars to market themselves and not just their work in order to become famous. Herself constructing a persona out of fiction, this essay also excavates Craik's reputation as it develops through her association with her most famous novel, John Halifax, Gentleman (1856). It explores how the author successfully creates an identity palatable to middle-class Victorian readers but an identity that does not withstand ideological changes at the fin de siècle, posthumously leaving Craik open to personal critique for the same reasons that she was first so popular.

NARRATING INSANITY IN THE LETTERS OF THOMAS MULOCK AND DINAH MULOCK CRAIK

Scholars have had a difficult time assessing the significance of Dinah Mulock Craik (1824–1887), best remembered as the author of John Halifax, Gentleman (1856). The critical verdict on her life and letters has swung toward extremes. Some critics have seen her, to quote Henry James, as “kindly, somewhat dull, pious, and very sentimental” (172); her novels embody the Victorian values of self-help, moral earnestness, and hard work, and it is assumed that her life did too. Elaine Showalter's and Sally Mitchell's feminist recoveries of Craik's work in the 1970s and early 1980s found that just the opposite was true, and that Victorian sentimentality allowed Craik to voice the subversive desires of her female readers covertly, in a form that was acceptable to the general public (Showalter 5–7, Mitchell 31). This critical tradition tended to overemphasize the melodramatic aspects of Craik's life and career as a means of dramatizing the struggles of women in a patriarchal society. The most recent scholarship eschews Craik's life altogether for the most part, focusing on her novelistic representations of disability, of Irish and Scottish nationality, and of class and enfranchisement. This criticism engages Craik's writing as an interesting cultural artifact rather than as an aesthetic object: her work is once again seen as embodying normative Victorian values, but to what extent the author was the cognizant promoter of these values, and to what extent she was their unwitting filter, and whether it matters, is unclear. But new archival work shows the importance of her life in understanding her career. The Mulock Family Papers, held at the University of California at Los Angeles, underscore Craik's challenges in managing an abusive father, who suffered from periods of dejection followed by periods of great happiness, and who was frequently absent and incarcerated. Craik was intensely private when it came to her personal life, and scholars like Showalter have read her reserve as a bow to womanly decorum in a life otherwise dominated by literary celebrity. But the archive suggests that Craik's taciturnity was instead a strategy for managing the threat of violence and scandal.

John Halifax, Gentleman

John Halifax, Gentleman

John Halifax, Gentleman by Dinah Mulock Craik, Lynn M. AlexanderVillette by Charlotte Brontë, Kate LawsonThe Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, Maria K. Bachman, Don Richard CoxShe: A History of Adventure by H. Rider Haggard, Andrew M. StaufferThe Hound of the Baskervilles with 'The Adventure of the Speckled Band' by Arthur Conan Doyle, Francis O'Gorman'Hauntings' and Other Fantastic Tales by

MLR, 103.2, 2oo8 5I9 her fiction.Nevertheless, its careful consideration of theways inwhich 'Eliot asks questions about themind throughout her fiction' (p. I2) forms the basis for some thoughtful reflection on the psychological complexities manifested in her texts: on theworkings of conscious and unconscious memory in TheMill on theFloss forex ample, and its role in the formation of her heroine's identity,or on the 'drama of intricatemental dynamics' (p. 155) that, inMiddlemarch, makes Bulstrode '[m]uch more than a simple villain' (ibid.). Davis makes some perceptive observations on the role of language inboth articu lating and limitingmental lifeand on Eliot's 'experimental' deployment of language to create a fictive medium inwhich no one system of psychology holds explanatory power. Her writing constantly represents differentpossibilities without marginalizing the significance of any of the fluidand complex relations between thebody andmind, emotion and reason, the conscious and unconscious, thematerial and the spiritual. Readers might wish formore adventurous readings to enliven the expository con tentofDavis's book. None the less, in itsview of the mind as intricately linked to the knowable material world, yet enduringly apart, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Psychology isuseful as an acknowledgement that thepiercing lightof Lydgate's ima ginative enquiry remains part of thedarkness that it sets out to illuminate. THE OPEN UNIVERSITY DELIA DA SOUSA CORREA JohnHalifax, Gentleman. By DINAH MULOCK CRAIK. Ed. by LYNN M. ALEXANDER. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press. 2005. 585 PP. ?9.55. ISBN 978-I 55III-500-9. Villette. By CHARLOTTE BRONTE. Ed. by KATE LAWSON. Peterborough, Ont.: Broad view Press. 2006. 647 PP. ?7.99. ISBN 978-1-55III-46I-3. The Woman in White. By WILKIE COLLINS. Ed. by MARIA K. BACHMAN and DON RICHARD COX. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press. 2oo6. 694 PP. ?5.99. ISBN 978-I-5 5 I I I-644-0. She: A History of Adventure. By H. RIDER HAGGARD. Ed. by ANDREW M. STAUFFER. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press. 2006. 359 PP. ?6.99. ISBN 978-I 55III-647-I. The Hound of the Baskervilles with 'TheAdventure of theSpeckled Band'. By ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE. Ed. by FRANCIS O'GORMAN. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press. 2006. 300 pp. ?5.99. ISBN 978-1-55III-722-5. 'Hauntings'and Other Fantastic Tales. By VERNON LEE. Ed. by CATHERINEMAXWELL and PATRICIA PULHAM. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press. 2oo6. 35 I pp. ?9.99. ISBN 978-1-55III-578-8. My Antonia. By WILLA CATHER. Ed. by JANET SHARISTANIAN. (Oxford World's Clas siCs)Oxford: Oxford University Press. zoo6. XXXiV + 228 pp. ?7.99. ISBN 978 0-I9-283200-9. The Age of Innocence. By EDITH WHARTON. Ed. by STEPHEN ORGEL. (Oxford World's Classics) Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2oo6. xxv + 265 pp. ?7.99. ISBN 978-o-Ig-280662-8. London: A Pilgrimage. By BLANCHARD JERROLD,illustrated by GUSTAVE DORE. Ed. by PETER ACKROYD. (Anthem Travel Classics) London: Anthem Press. 2005. XXXi+223 pp. ?9.99. ISBN 978-I-84331-I93-5. Readers and, more particularly, teachers of literature and their students once again have good reason to be grateful forWorld's Classics and Broadview editions. For 520 Reviews decades thewell-established Oxford series has not only been making literary texts available at reasonable prices, but also keeping them in print. Now the Canadian publisher also isbecoming known for thehigh quality of itscontribution to this task. The range shown in thechoice of texts is impressive, andmaking a selection ofVic torian and early twentieth-century examples thatmay appeal particularly to feminist interest isby nomeans difficult. World's Classics presents twonovels from theUnited States. Both written bywomen in the years just after theGreat War, they offer two contrasting pictures of life inAmerica, not at that time,but in thenineteenth century. Nostalgia colours the interpretation both of harsh pioneer life in the Mid-West and of over-polished manners inNew York society.Broadview shows catholicity of taste in six texts that show a number of aspects of British Victorian fiction,without, of course, coming near to exhausting its infinitevariety.Yohn Halifax, Gentleman raises crucial social questions, while Villette reveals a finersensibility. The Woman in White can excite curiosity by relating its intriguing storywith more acumen than is found in much of the fictionof itsperiod. Vernon...

GIFTS AND INTERESTS:JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMANAND THE PURITY OF BUSINESS

IN HIS INTRODUCTIONtoThe Question of the Gift, Mark Osteen claims that “economism … is the land mine of gift theory” (5). For many theorists, he explains, gift-giving and market exchanges share the same forms of calculation; for others, more specifically, self-interest is the “objective truth” of the gift. The challenge that gift discourse has taken up in recent years is how to rethink reciprocity, altruism, and generosity while at the same time avoiding both the “Scylla of sentimentality and the Charybdis of economism” (Osteen 31). In this paper I discuss Dinah Mulock Craik's mid-Victorian bestseller,John Halifax, Gentleman(1856), using gift theory (or some insights thereof) as my main analytical tool. Why is gift theory relevant to the understanding of a novel that openly extols the advantages of self-help and economic individualism?

Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel: Gentlemen, Gents and Working Women

Introduction 'A Kind of a Sort of a Gentleman': The Gentleman's Progress from Sir Charles Grandison to John Halifax The Literary Evolution of the Lower Middle Class: The Natural History of the Gent to Little Dorrit Voices from the Margins: Dickens, Wells, and Bennett Bachelor Girls and Working Women: Women and Independence in Oliphant, Levy, Allen, and Gissing Modern Prometheus Unbound: May Sinclair and The Divine Fire Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Did Emersom Blackball Frederick Douglass from Membership in the Town and Country Club?

most fantastic staccato sentences, are his unfailing characteristics both in writing, and speaking, while a lavish opulence of illustration carries his statements home to the mind. He is a great original genius, yet few will ever read him for his philosophy, his idealism, or pantheism; but all must love the beauty and truthfulness of his aspirations towards the noble excellence of intentional inner life, because they are the conventions of an honest-hearted, thorough-brained man. John Halifax, Gentleman.

The author of 'John Halifax, gentleman'

The author of 'John Halifax, gentleman'

The author of ‘John halifax gentleman’

Journal Article The author of ‘John halifax gentleman’ Get access W. J. Fitzpatrick W. J. Fitzpatrick Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume s7-IV, Issue 105, 31 December 1887, Page 535, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s7-IV.105.535c Published: 01 December 1887

The author of ‘John Halifax, gentleman’

The author of ‘John Halifax, gentleman’

The author of ‘John Halifax, gentleman’

The author of ‘John Halifax, gentleman’