Literary London Research Articles

Carolyn Dever. Chains of Love and Beauty: The Diaries of Michael Field

Michael Field, the pseudonymous authorial persona of Katharine Bradley and her niece, lover, and life partner Edith Cooper (they characterized themselves as ‘closer married’ that Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning), was the author of one of the most expansive and, until recently, neglected oeuvres in fin de siècle literature. Their published output included 27 verse dramas, eight volumes of lyric poetry, and a handful of short prose pieces. But arguably their greatest achievement was Works and Days, a 28-volume, 9500-page diary, which primarily covers the years 1888 until Bradley’s death in 1914 (Cooper predeceased her by nine months in 1913). Yet the diary has remained largely inaccessible to most readers. While Bradley and Cooper’s literary executor Thomas Sturge Moore (alongside his son) edited a single volume of selected entries in 1933, and a small selection edited by Ivor Treby was published in 2006, viewing the diary in all its messy magnificence required a visit to the British Library’s Manuscripts Reading Room (or from 2003 access to a microfilm copy and the patience of a saint). Yet from around 2015 onwards, the diaries have been digitized and are in the process of being transcribed, saving the neophyte reader the perils and pleasures of familiarizing themselves with Bradley and Cooper’s orthography. The volumes are a treasure trove: Michael Field encountered just about every important figure in fin de siècle literary London and penned vivid (and often amusingly virulent) pen sketches of Robert Browning, Vernon Lee, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Berenson, among many others. More importantly, Bradley and Cooper wrote beautifully about their love for one another, their creative process, their intellectual development, and the tragedy and beauty that dominated their lives. Despite its richness and value, the diary has yet to receive sustained critical analysis, until now.

Apologetics and Antiquity: Book of Mormon Reception, 1830–1844

Apologetics and Antiquity: Book of Mormon Reception, 1830–1844

Understanding experience complexity in a smart learning journey

This paper contributes to a pedagogical model for smart learning by establishing a framework of some considerations based on learner experience of smart learning journeys. Phenomenography is used to investigate variation of learner experience in smart learning journeys. Learners participate in ‘Literary London’, situated in London, UK, and 'Malta Democracy’, situated in Valletta, Malta. An inclusive relational hierarchy of experience complexity is demonstrated with vertical, horizontal and diagonal relationships between four categories of experience variation for a smart learning journey. A pedagogical relevance structure for smart learning is discussed, supporting connectivist-inspired participatory pedagogies for smart learning environments. Sample participants consist of Education degree university students, with one other discipline represented (English Literature and Creative Writing). Various levels of study, cultural and international backgrounds are represented. Understanding learner experience of these kinds of activities may help to support today’s growing culture of learning cities, to "promote lifelong learning opportunities for all" (Unesco SDG4), within a context of the European Commission 2018 Digital Competence Framework for Citizens.

Povertyopolis: Beyond the East-West Binary in the Late-Nineteenth-Century London Literary Imagination

By siting social problems in the eastern half of the capital city, many writers (both fiction writers and those who purported to be reporting fact) in the final years of the nineteenth century collectively and separately assisted in the emergence of an imaginary London cityscape whose east-west axis (placing poverty physically apart from wealth) served to diminish the true nature of these problems. This crude binary of east versus west failed to represent the systemic, pervasive, pan-London (and in fact, pan-global) ill-effects of advanced capitalism. The east-west polarity acted to confuse and blur the full effects and meanings of how the unregulated labour and housing markets impacted on working-class Londoners wherever they lived in the city. It falsified actual, lived experience and needed to be jettisoned so that a more complex and meaningful picture of metropolitan life could emerge. The true process of ‘immiseration’ should no longer, these writers believed, be occluded by this mythopoeic East — which had become a lazy shorthand for a complex set of problems. In this article, I seek to return to the record the opposition to the east-west binary that, as PJ Keating observed, 1 had emerged in the early 1880s. This opposition was presented by fiction writers including George Gissing, Margaret Harkness and Richard Whiteing; philanthropist and campaigner for working-class girls Maude Stanley; and social investigators Robert Valpy and Arthur Sherwell. Each argued against the polarised vision of London’s socio-economic topography offered by most popular novelists and journalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by which the poor East was presented in contrast to the wealthy West.

Wandering and Placemaking in London: Iain Sinclair’s Literary Methodology

Wandering and Placemaking in London: Iain Sinclair’s Literary Methodology

The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit: Victorian Iconoclast, Children’s Author, and Creator of The Railway Children by Eleanor Fitzsimons

Reviewed by: The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit: Victorian Iconoclast, Children’s Author, and Creator of The Railway Children by Eleanor Fitzsimons Sarah Bilston (bio) The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit: Victorian Iconoclast, Children’s Author, and Creator of The Railway Children by Eleanor Fitzsimons; pp. 400.Harry N. Abrams, 2019. $24.98 cloth. E.nesbit is a somewhat marginal figure in Victorian studies. Beloved by bookish Brits of a certain age, she is far less well known in North America and draws mixed reactions from readers (typical Amazon.com reviews designate her stories “very English,” written in a perplexing “British dialect”). She has not, in spite of Julia Briggs’s magisterial A Woman of Passion (1987), entirely benefited from literary studies’ late twentieth-century reclamatory urge (unlike, say, Mary Elizabeth Braddon), perhaps because she is best known for that perennially under-appreciated genre, the children’s novel. She is also one of those writers awkwardly on the cusp between Victorian and Edwardian, not quite in the “spirit of the age” of either. Yet Nesbit was, as Eleanor Fitzsimons’s new biography makes plain, not only a talented, [End Page 330] generative writer but also in the thick of Victorian and Edwardian literary and political life. Known to and by just about everybody, Nesbit’s at-homes were important nodes in the era’s social and literary networks. She attracted all sorts of rising journalists, writers, and thinkers to her suburban houses in and around south London to “discuss politics into the small hours,” enjoy literary talk, and play hide-and-seek (137). Victorianists and literary scholars will find a veritable Who’s Who of familiar figures in the pages of Fitzsimons’s new book: Olive Schreiner, Oscar Wilde, Richard Le Gallienne, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, G.B. Shaw, H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster, Annie Besant, and more attest to Nesbit’s important and valued place in turn-of-the-century literary and political culture. Fitzsimons’s book identifies the wellsprings of Nesbit’s quirky, imaginative literature in the writer’s unconventional life, from a childhood spent touring crypts to an adulthood in a ménage à trois. Nesbit’s friend, Alice Hoatson, lived with the writer and her husband, Hubert Bland, as housekeeper, companion—and Bland’s lover; Hoatson bore two children, both of whom were raised and adopted by Edith. Indeed, Nesbit seems largely to have accepted the relationship, and she enjoyed numerous extra- marital amours herself, including with fellow Fabians Shaw and Le Gallienne. Inevitably, a fair portion of Fitzsimons’s biography focuses on Nesbit’s entanglements and on the romances of the next generation—Rosamund, one of the Hoatson/Bland offspring, was involved with H.G. Wells as a teenager. Fitzsimons finds in Nesbit’s intriguing life history clues to her imaginative power, connecting the distinctive, “extraordinary” fiction with Nesbit’s “extraordinary” life (x), although, paradoxically, it is the author’s ability to connect with the ordinary, the everyday, that really distinguishes her: “The key to her brilliance was that she was one of us, and her magical adventures felt as if they could easily happen to you or to me” (x). The biographer’s passion for her subject, and for Nesbit’s fiction, is evident on every page, and Fitzsimons gives ample room to Nesbit’s coolly ironic voice, too. This is an immensely readable book that works hard to remind us of Nesbit’s place in literary London and in the field of children’s literature. Yet there is not, strictly speaking, much new here, in terms of raw facts: earlier biographers have covered similar ground, including, most recently, Elisabeth Galvin, in The Extraordinary Life of E. Nesbit (2018). Two earlier Nesbit biographies in particular laid out key new discoveries—Doris Langley Moore’s E. Nesbit (1933) drew on interviews with and letters from Nesbit’s family and friends, while Briggs’s A Woman of Passion was the first to really come to grips with the ins and outs of Nesbit’s unconventional marriage. And, indeed, a student keen to know more about, say, Wells’s love affair with Rosamund will find more in Briggs’s study, which remains the most serious, meticulously...

"Charles Dickens and his Wife:" A Sketch by Henry Doyle

"Charles Dickens and his Wife:"A Sketch by Henry Doyle William F. Long (bio) The Southern Illinois University at Carbondale holds a number of original drawings by the artist Henry Doyle. Among them is a previously undescribed sketch of Charles and Catherine Dickens. This contribution considers the sketch, its context and its significance. The Artist Henry Edward Doyle1 was the third son of the artist John Doyle.2 His father, under the pseudonym "H. B.," published a highly popular series of gently satirical political drawings that extended from the late 1820s for over twenty years. John Doyle had moved from Dublin to London in about 1820, and, after the early death of his wife, Marianna née Conan, raised a family of seven that was close, cultured, privately educated and devoutly Catholic. During his working life, John is said to have been on familiar terms with many figures prominent in London's literary and artistic circles.3 John Doyle's five sons all showed early artistic talent and, although not formally trained, were schooled in drawing and painting by their father and encouraged to appreciate and appraise the work of others. The five included [End Page 65] Richard ("Dick" or "Dicky"),4 who achieved eminence as an illustrator of Punch and of The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth and The Battle of Life, and Charles Altamont,5 an Edinburgh civil servant and artist manqué, who was the father of Arthur Conan Doyle. Of the brothers, Henry was perhaps the most active in the expression of his faith6 and was soon illustrating publications of a religious nature. In 1850, following Pius IX's re-establishment of the Catholic Hierarchy in England and Wales (the so-called "Papal Aggression") and the appointment of Nicholas Wiseman as Cardinal and Archbishop of Westminster, John, Richard and Henry Doyle were prominent in organizing a fund to meet the expenses that Wiseman's appointment entailed. Subsequently, Henry in particular aligned himself strongly with the new Cardinal, accompanying him during stays at country houses of wealthy Catholics, in part, perhaps, because portrait commissions by their owners sometimes followed. In December 1850 a portrait by Henry of Wiseman himself was advertised. Increasingly, although still active in illustrating and exhibiting, Henry became involved in administering the artistic work of others. On Wiseman's recommendation, he was appointed Commissioner for the Papal States to the 1862 International Exhibition in London. In 1869 he became Director of the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin and he subsequently established a strong Irish dimension to its collection and a National Portrait Collection. Henry was appointed a Knight of the Order of Pius IX in 1862 and made a Companion of the Bath in 1880. After his death, it was said that: by his tact, his good nature and his easy and pleasant manners, he made friends wherever he went and was well known and popular in London society [ . . . ] He was a man who had the knack of getting on in the world.7 [End Page 66] The Collection at Carbondale8 The Henry Doyle collection at Carbondale comprises pen-and-ink portraits on 11 sheets of paper of irregular size, some of which have been used on both sides. Most of the sheets contain multiple portraits, and several of the subjects are represented more than once. The portraits are mainly of heads, usually in full- or half-profile. A few full-figure drawings are also present. Most of the drawings are rudimentary sketches; a few are more developed. Some of the drawings are accompanied by a name or comment apparently written by the artist. These labels, together with, in some cases, a comparison of individual sketches with authenticated portraits of their supposed subjects, enable most of the people in Henry's drawings to be identified. Many of the sketches depict members of the Irish Catholic community prominent in Dublin in the mid-nineteenth century. Those identified are John Ball, Frederick William Burton, William Nicholas Keogh, James Joseph McCarthy, Daniel McGettigan, William Monsell, Daniel Murray, George Petrie, James Quinn, John Reynolds, James Henthorn Todd and Henry William Wilberforce.9 Additional sketches are of two expatriates present in England for a time...

The enchanted path: magic and modernism in psychogeographical walking

Geographers have a developing interest in the place of enchantment and the ‘extra‐ordinary’ in the modern city. The paper shows that magic has a significant role in the work of many psychogeographical writers, artists and activists, and argues that this phenomenon needs to be understood in the context of the wider use of magic as a site and symbol of creativity and subversion in modernist cultural expression. Drawing on a survey of British psychogeographical forms and a more detailed study of three London literary examples, it examines how psychogeographical walkers have expanded and developed ‘magical modernism’. Across the varied terrain of psychogeographical walking, magic is used to conjure an openness and vulnerability to voices ‘hidden’ in the landscape. As well as providing more in‐depth discussion of these themes, the three examples of London psychogeography that I explore complicate them by illustrating further specific and diverse uses of magic – namely, magic as environmentalist critique, magic as humour/humour as magic and magic as activism.

Dickens, Miscellanies, and Classical Traditions of Satire

Dickens, Miscellanies, and Classical Traditions of Satire John Drew (bio) Adetailed examination of Charles Dickens's influence on the genesis and development of the periodical that was originally advertised in the Autumn of 1836 as "The Wits' Miscellany" has yet to be made. Nevertheless I am going to argue that the context of its establishment was something of a watershed in the development of Dickens's approach to satirical writing as a journalist, editor and author.1 "The Wits' Miscellany" was the planned title for the new monthly magazine that the publisher was projecting in 1836, to be jointly penned by the leading humorists of the day, and edited by the intensely fashionable "Boz," creative force behind a strange monthly confection of narratives known as The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, then taking literary London by storm. At Dickens's suggestion, we are led to believe, the title soon mutated from "The Wits' Miscellany" to Bentley's Miscellany, prompting R. H. Barham's quip "but why go to the other extreme?" The joke acts as an illustration of something that will also be touched on in this article, namely the place in satirical traditions of the hit which depends for its effect upon the identification of an individual victim. This gives satire a particular kind of hold which is more of a bite than an embrace. In exploring such matters, Dickensian satire will inevitably be brought into conversation–perhaps even criminal conversation–with the central Dickensian theme of conviviality.2 With its emphasis on shared [End Page 221] enjoyment, sociability and consensus, the convivial would seem to be at odds with the properly satirical, which has to leave its sting in somebody's flesh, and which usually exposes two sides to any question, leaving some unfortunate soul–at times even its readers–uncomfortably stranded on the wrong bank, and scrambling for safety. This naturally prompts the question of what Dickens himself, as a young writer already being lionized for his wit in the mid 1830s, understood by such terms, as they affected the practice of his craft. In other words, how did Dickens orientate himself as a budding humorist against the existing satirical and comic traditions of his day? To be sure, this is not a fashionable line of enquiry.3 Following the great twentieth-century re-evaluation of Dickens as an artist, we have perhaps become conditioned to look for ways in which his works anticipated, predicted and prototyped his Modernist and postmodern successors and influenced the international current of prose fiction that was to come after. Nevertheless, it must occasionally be permissible to glance upstream as well as down, and try to understand Dickens's aesthetic and ethical development as a writer in terms of those he acknowledged and navigated amongst as forerunners: in this case well-established exponents of classical traditions of literary attack and reform. Dickens's "small Latin and less Greke" as a schoolboy is, in this respect, irrelevant, because such traditions were so widely diffused in Regency, Georgian and Victorian print culture, partly though the periodical press, but also through the warp and weft of parliamentary rhetoric, which of course, Dickens himself was as responsible as anyone for weaving into text during the 1830s (Hessell ch. 5). As George Augustus Sala would put it, in his book-length obituary of his mentor and former employer, Dickens as a young journalist "had listened to masters in every style of rhetoric: he had followed Henry Brougham the Demosthenes, Shiel the Cicero, O'Connell the Mirabeau, of their age" (36–37). A classical education was by no means a prerequisite to participation in a literary culture imbued with neoclassical tendencies, and which was thoroughly accustomed to adapting familiar stylistic formulae and imaginative reference points in the contest between conservative and radical traditions. Dickens was literally and literarily in the thick of it. [End Page 222] Party spirits, party warfare and the satirical stakes were all high during the stormy passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829), the "Great Reform" Act (1832), and the implementation of the radical Whig reform agenda during the Grey and first two Melbourne ministries (1830–39)–in particular as effects of the...

Nation and Migration: The Making of British Atlantic Literature, 1765–1835 by Juliet Shields

Reviewed by: Nation and Migration: The Making of British Atlantic Literature, 1765–1835 by Juliet Shields Robin Runia Juliet Shields, Nation and Migration: The Making of British Atlantic Literature, 1765–1835 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Pp. 195. $74.00. Juliet Shields's aim to "decenter the Anglo-American focus of transatlantic literary studies by extending the reach of archipelagic criticism to include the literature of the early American republic" is fully realized in this systematic study of Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and American identities on both sides of the Atlantic (139). She organizes her study around each of these regions and the literary genres in which they are represented in order to complicate scholarly narratives that continue to position them against a metropolitan England. Chapter 1 examines Samuel Johnson's Taxation No Tyranny alongside Edmund Burke's "Speech on Conciliation with America" and John Jay's contributions to the Federalist Papers. This comparative approach enables Shields to examine [End Page 352] the strategic deployment of racialized discourses by an English center and its subordinate and colonized possessions. In particular, she demonstrates how while Johnson defines English public spirit as the foundation of liberty, Burke insists on Ireland's and Scotland's resistance to submission as definitive of a British love of liberty. Interestingly, Shields also outlines how Jay and his detractors deploy both of these concepts in defense of America as an ethnically homogeneous republic. The role of the Gothic in Romantic Irish and American novels produces an opportunity for Shields to reconsider the nature of political threat within an American post-revolutionary context. In chapter 2, she examines Charles Brockden Brown's fiction as both an American response to the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and a manifestation of the motives behind the United States' 1798 Naturalization Act and the Alien and Sedition Acts. Through close reading of the relationship between the Irish, the American Indians, and the occult in Brockden Brown's work, Shields reveals American anxieties about the role of homogeneity, both racial and cultural, in the new republic. Chapters 3 and 4 explore the depiction of American Indians in the work of James Fenimore Cooper, William Joseph Snelling, and early nineteenth-century repetitions of the Welsh legend of Prince Madoc, the purported twelfth-century discoverer and settler of the North American continent. Shields first focuses on representations of the Scottish to come to opposing conclusions about the role of racial purity in The Last of the Mohicans and Snelling's Tales of the Northwest; or Sketches of Indian Life and Character. Specifically, she identifies how both fictions rely on a Scottish identity "defined by chivalry and cunning, courtesy and prudence" and perceived as archaic and ultimately disposable in its replacement by more commercially progressive behaviors (90). Shields subsequently focuses on the complexity of Welsh history to explain Robert Southey's Madoc and its descriptions of an alternative American tradition of martial valor and colonial resistance. She also analyzes Gilbert Imlay's novel The Emigrants; or the History of an Expatriated Family as an example of England's ongoing interest in and claim upon Western American territories. The literary sketch is the target of Shields's last chapter, in which she considers how American writers, like those in Ireland and Scotland, challenged London's literary centrality within the British Atlantic. Washington Irving's The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon is celebrated for its innovations of addressing both American and British readers while simultaneously offering tales of life in both the old world and the new. However, Shields compares Sidney Owenson's Patriotic Sketches of Ireland to Mary Russell Mitford's Our Village to conclude that while both Irish and American writers recognized regional identities as components of a national one, American writers were distinct in their incorporation of migration and emigration on both the regional and national levels. Shields's monograph is essential reading for anyone engaged in research on the Anglophone Atlantic world. Not only does she provide essential political and historical context for the focus of each chapter's reasoned literary analysis, she proves, unquestionably, the ongoing and transformative role of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales in shaping regional, British, and American identities. Shields's study...

“The Language of Behavior”: Gurdjieff and the Emergence of Modernist Autobiography

“The Language of Behavior”: Gurdjieff and the Emergence of Modernist Autobiography Cecily Swanson (bio) Russian-Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff was a controversial and intriguing figure when he arrived in New York in January of 1924.1 A year before, he had caused an uproar when Katherine Mansfield died of tuberculosis under his care at Le Prieuré, his spiritual retreat near Fontainebleau. Gurdjieff capitalized on this attention, sending his appointed proselytizer, A. R. Orage—former editor of the influential London literary journal, The New Age—to New York a few months ahead of his own arrival to drum up interest. Orage’s introductory talks ensured captivated crowds at Gurdjieff’s mystical dance performances at Carnegie Hall and Lesley Hall. Newspapers reported celebrity sightings at these “cult” events at which “Psychic Secrets of the Ancient East” were divulged: Theodore Dreiser, Rebecca West, Gloria Swanson, and John O’Hara Cosgrave were counted among the notable attendees.2 Soon, Gurdjieff’s transatlantic following of writers and artists had grown to include Jean Toomer, Frank Lloyd Wright, P. L. Travers, Michael Arlen, Jane Heap, Margaret Anderson, Waldo Frank, Gorham Munson, Lincoln Kirstein, Zona Gale, Muriel Draper, Mable Dodge Luhan, Kathryn Hulme, Solita Solano, Dorothy Petersen, Aaron Douglas, Carl Zigrosser, and Israel Solon. Throughout the 1920s and early 30s, the press was a swirl of gossip about the Svengali of modernist bohemia. Gurdjieff had killed Mansfield. He could shape-shift, read minds, and give women orgasms with his eyes. His Middle Eastern cooking was incomparable, as was his stockpile of vintage Armagnac. His dances outshone the Ballets Russes. He was, as Janet Flanner [End Page 695] wrote in the New Yorker, “one of the most mysterious, eccentric, and discussed modern mystics.”3 For all this, Gurdjieff is now little more than a footnote in modernist criticism. A few works consider his impact on Mansfield, Toomer, and Orage, but many of these are hagiographies by fellow travelers.4 Other critics who mention Gurdjieff tend to agree that he had a deleterious effect on literature—a principal justification for ignoring him. This article argues that modernism’s Gurdjieff craze in fact played a surprising role in the development of an overlooked canon of popular autobiographies: Muriel Draper’s memoir, Music at Midnight (1929); Margaret Anderson’s memoir, My Thirty Years’ War (1930); and Kathryn Hulme’s autobiographical novel, We Lived As Children (1938).5 Draper was already recognized as a socialite and activist but rose to literary acclaim after the publication of her memoir. Anderson, best known for her work as the editor of The Little Review, would go on to write two more autobiographies, each garnering critical interest. Hulme was unknown before the publication of We Lived as Children, a bestseller that launched her career as an extremely successful writer. Situating these American women writers and their texts within the Gurdjieffian movement requires rethinking what counts as a modernist experiment in life-writing. The autobiographical works by Draper, Anderson, and Hulme impressed their first readers with their chattiness, informality, and transparency—qualities that today do not seem to demonstrate modernist experimentation, but were heralded as breakthroughs in their own era. Yet the difficulty of recognizing these memoirs’ innovation does not alone explain their obscurity. While they offer winsome access to social scenes and daily life—what Anderson called modernism’s “mise-en-scéne”—they are surprisingly silent about the inner lives of their writers.6 That silence suggests another central reason that they are ignored in contemporary accounts of the characteristic moves of the modernist memoir. What is not yet well understood is how the Gurdjieffian writing exercises inspired a distinct mode of modernist autobiography: one that rejected introspection in favor of the subject’s careful study of her social environment. I situate Gurdjieffianism in relationship to the behaviorist psychology of John B. Watson, whose ideas Orage taught to Gurdjieffian novitiates, and whom Gurdjieff met in 1931. Like Watson in his lectures on Behaviorism (1925), both Gurdjieff and Orage taught their students to ignore the hidden depths of human psychology, focusing instead on observable habits and especially attending to oral conversation as factual bases for reporting about bodily mechanisms and social conditions. But unlike Watson, who...

Victorian Sexual Politics and the Unsettling Case of George Eliot's Response to Walt Whitman

George Eliot and Walt Whitman, two of the most influential writers of the nineteenth century, are rarely discussed in relation to one another. They did not correspond, nor did either writer ever cross the Atlantic. There may have been several degrees of separation between Eliot and Whitman personally, but even from a distance, the two writers influ- enced each other's careers. There has been some misconception that Eliot disdained and discounted Whitman. This essay seeks to refute that assumption by examining the context in which Eliot appeared to reject him. Perhaps more significantly, this essay breaks new critical ground by attributing a second review of Whitman's 1855 Leaves of Grass to George Eliot.This study examines statements Eliot and Whitman made about one another, and considers the interrelationships of the people they knew in order to demonstrate that Eliot and her domestic partner George Henry Lewes played significant roles in Whitman's British reception. This new information about their mutual friendships and avenues of promotion supplements several foundational studies of Whitman's British or European reception undertaken by Clara Barrus, Harold Blodgett, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, M. Wynn Thomas, Joann P. Krieg, Betsy Erkkila, and Michael Robertson.1 These scholars have traced Whitman's network of supporters across the Atlantic without noticing that Eliot and Lewes were members of the relatively small circle of in- fluential British intellectuals that embraced and promoted Whitman in Britain early in his career. Finally, this essay posits several reasons why, after initially endorsing Whitman in 1856, Eliot appeared to withdraw her support in 1876. We see in her changing response to Whitman an example of how Eliot responded to the pressures of nineteenth-century sexual politics and her own celebrity status by self-censoring and cod- ing sexuality, particularly same-sex desire, in her fiction, which extends scholarship by Nancy Henry, Kathleen McCormack, Laura Callanan, and Dennis S. Gouws, among others.2The Victorian writer who called herself George Eliot and her part- ner George Henry Lewes occupied positions of prominence in Britain's literary world at the time Whitman was publishing his various editions of Leaves of Grass in the United States. Eliot and Lewes interacted regu- larly with many of the Victorian era's best-known authors, critics, and publishers.3 Before she became a famous novelist with the pen name George Eliot-the name on her tombstone, on all her biographies, and by which she still is known-she was Marian Evans, the enterprising journalist. By 1851, she was living independently in London, writing articles and reviews for several periodicals and serving as the managing editor of one of Britain's leading journals, the Westminster Review.4 Her work brought her into contact with prominent intellectuals including George Henry Lewes, a frequent contributor to the Review. Lewes was well established in literary London as one of the most versatile of writers and editors. He wrote novels, biographies, philosophy, theater and book reviews, scientific articles, and he abridged plays. In 1850, Lewes co-founded with Thornton Hunt the Leader weekly newspaper; in 1860, Lewes became consulting editor of the Cornhill, while Hunt assumed leadership of the Spectator. By 1865, Lewes had become the inaugural editor of the Fortnightly Review. He also acted as adviser for George Smith's Pall Mall Gazette from 1865-68 while he was editing the Fortnightly Review (Baker and Ross 421). These literary associations demonstrate that Lewes and Eliot, who were a couple by 1852 and living together by 1854, were closely connected with the writers and editors of the Victorian British periodicals that favorably reviewed Walt Whit- man's poetry for more than twenty years, specifically the Westminster Review, the Spectator, the Cornhill, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Leader, and the Fortnightly Review.The copies of Whitman's original Leaves of Grass that were cir- culated in London in the early spring of 1856-remaindered copies of the original 1855 edition-had pasted into them several American notices of the book. …

Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850–1914 by Alexis Easley (review)

Reviewed by: Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850–1914 by Alexis Easley Katherine Malone (bio) Alexis Easley, Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850–1914 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011, 2013), pp. vii + 273, $39.99/£24.95 paper. Alexis Easley’s Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850–1914 is a testimony to the wealth of new discoveries available through periodicals studies. Originally published in 2011, it was recently released in paperback. Through careful attention to a wide range of British and American periodicals, guidebooks, works of history, biography, and autobiography, Easley demonstrates how the phenomenon of literary celebrity intensified alongside developments in popular print culture, and she persuasively connects journalists’ and readers’ fascination with literary celebrity to anxieties about national identity. Easley’s first book, First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830–1870 (2004), explored how women created authorial identities within the system of anonymous publication. Literary Celebrity investigates the politics of women’s authorial self-fashioning by discussing how celebrity could enhance a woman writer’s marketability or reduce her to an ephemeral commodity. The book is divided into three parts, focusing on celebrity and literary tourism, historiography, and fin de siècle print culture. Although the emphasis sometimes shifts between gender issues and national identity, each chapter builds a scaffold for the next. For example, Chapter 1 demonstrates how literary tourism at the end of the century developed in response to the changing urban landscape. Easley shows how tourists attempted to define a British cultural heritage in the remnants of “Dickens’s London” as reformers knocked down buildings and widened roadways. As landmarks of British heritage were becoming increasingly difficult to locate, guidebooks often used ghostly discourse to point to the old haunts of London authors. Chapter 2, “The Haunting of Victorian London: Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot,” demonstrates how these spectral metaphors effectively wrote women out of literary London. In contrast to these examples, chapter 3 highlights Harriet Martineau’s [End Page 150] ability to capitalize on the emerging tourist industry to enhance her celebrity status. Given the complex relations between this book’s many subjects and themes, Easley takes the fin de siècle as her reference point because it marks the “emergence of celebrity media as a major cultural preoccupation” (17). This approach allows her to move backward and forward to examine contradictory and surprising details that would be elided in a more linear history. For example, because the first chapter presents the literary tourism industry at its height in the 1890s, we can fully appreciate the innovations of Martineau’s “self-conscious attempts at self-memorialization” in the 1850s that are discussed later (95). Part 2, “Celebrity and Historiography,” also juxtaposes slices of time to reveal connections between publishing trends and women’s celebrity authorship. Chapter 4 focuses on the 1850s to read Martineau’s History of England during the Thirty Years’ Peace and her Autobiography as “complementary texts [that] illustrate Martineau’s efforts to authorize herself as a contemporary historian and literary celebrity” (95). Chapter 5 widens its scope to connect the popular media’s promotion of architectural education for women during the 1830s and 1840s to “the historic preservation movement and the activities of literary societies in the 1890s” (114). This chapter discusses reformist periodicals, including Howitt’s Journal, highlighting the journalism of Mary Gillies and, once again, Harriet Martineau. Indeed, Martineau figures in four of the book’s eight chapters and provides another organizing locus for the various threads of Easley’s argument: she was a celebrity woman writer whose home was a destination for literary tourists; she wrote guidebooks as well as works of history that helped incorporate women’s experiences and reformist ideals into the national identity; and although she was a conscious manipulator of her celebrity image, her “authorial body” was nonetheless objectified by the fin de siècle press (163). In part 3, Martineau serves as an example of the unfortunate consequences of literary celebrity, particularly for women. This section returns to the fin de siècle, tracking new uses of celebrity images for such diverse projects as professionalizing medical discourse and preserving open spaces as part...

Conflicted Life: William Jerdan, 1782–18617. London Editor, Author and Critic by Susan Matoff

Susan Matoff. Conflicted Life: William Jerdan, 1782-1869. London Editor, Author and Critic. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2011. Pp. 659. 65 [pounds sterling] William Jerdan is largely forgotten today. If is known, it is mainly lover of Letitia Landon with whom had three children, Cynthia Lawford demonstrated some years ago. But in her prodigiously detailed and impressively well-researched study, Susan MatofF argues convincingly that, especially long-serving editor of Literary Gazette, he was vital facilitator and promoter of aspirants literature and many other cultural endeavours. MatofF observes in her useful Epilogue that Jerdan's multifarious writings are used in studies on art, crime, antiquarianism, photography, electricity, gas lighting and animals. As literary figure, seems at times like much less talented version of Leigh Hunt, with whom shared financial incompetence, extraordinary industry, belief in diffusion of ideas, and wish promote work of others. Hunt and Jerdan had falling-out, in fact, after Literary Gazette trashed Charles Lamb's Album Verses in slashing review that MatofF agrees may have been written by Landon. Hunt's Tatler amused itself with rhyming abuse, arguing that previous lampoon conferred an / Honour unmerited on jerdan, / Saying his intellect was small; / 'Twas thought that had none at all. Jerdan dunce enjoyed brief vogue, but played other roles in his long and busy life. He had way of being present at occasion and event. He detained assassin of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval in 1812, a feat not too heroic, MatofF comments with judicious dryness that is welcome feature of book, as by this time Bellingham was sitting quietly on bench, offering no resistance. He befriended many writers, including Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Dickens, reprinting (without permission) latter's story of Sam Weller from first installment of The Pickwick Papers, but helping young novelist by advising him to develop Sam Weller's character 'largely--to utmost.' Later would bring work of Hans Christian Andersen attention of his readers, and effected meeting between Andersen and Dickens. He helped found Royal Society of Literature, throwing himself with gusto into scheme intended help indigent writers. More generally, product of Scottish Enlightenment culture (he grew up and was schooled in Kelso), welcomed into George Canning's circle, networking, dining, and toasting, Jerdan dealt with and hovered round great, bad, and good of literary London for many decades. His career involved Micawber-like risings and fallings, minor triumphs and considerable adversities, huge amounts of work, quarrels with rival periodical editors and owners, financial disaster, and running of three separate families. Apart from his three children with Landon, had six children who survived infancy with his wife Frances Jerdan, and a large family with another woman, Mary Maxwell, with whom began an affair in 1830s. Matoff allows facts accumulate towards characterization rather than writes with much overt display of inward feeling for her subject. This procedure leads uniformity of tone and cautiousness, in places, but it also means that her readers are in possession of evidence they need arrive at judgments. Hers is not book that dazzles with novelist-like perceptions, but it possesses historian's less flamboyant virtues of care for detail and patient accuracy. Tall, angular and convivial, Jerdan comes across diffusely energetic point of near self-cancellation, likeable, slightly banal, warm-hearted, capable of impressiveness. In first volume of his Autobiography (1852) writes, Matoff notes, about the difficulty of writing about 'Self,' and if this makes him sound, for faintly absurd moment, like proto-deconstructive post-Romantic, truth seems be more that Jerdan's inner core was his outer shell, or, put it more generously, with Madame Merle in mind, from Henry James's The Portrait of Lady, the whole envelope of [his] circumstances. …

Fragments and assemblages: forming compilations of medieval London

In Fragments and Assemblages, Arthur Bahr expands the ways in which we interpret medieval manuscripts, examining the formal characteristics of both physical manuscripts and literary works. Specifically, Bahr argues that manuscript compilations from fourteenth-century London reward interpretation as both assemblages and fragments: as meaningfully constructed objects whose forms and textual contents shed light on the city's literary, social, and political cultures, but also as artifacts whose physical fragmentation invites forms of literary criticism that were unintended by their medieval makers. Such compilations are not simply repositories of data to be used for the reconstruction of the distant past; their physical forms reward literary and aesthetic analysis in their own right. The compilations analyzed reflect the full vibrancy of fourteenth-century London's literary cultures: the multilingual codices of Edwardian civil servant Andrew Horn and Ricardian poet John Gower, the famous Auchinleck manuscript of texts in Middle English, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. By reading these compilations as both formal shapes and historical occurrences, Bahr uncovers neglected literary histories specific to the time and place of their production. The book offers a less empiricist way of interpreting the relationship between textual and physical form that will be of interest to a wide range of literary critics and manuscript scholars.

United Islands?: The Languages of Resistance (Poetry and Song in the Age of Revolution) ed. by Michael Brown, John Kirk, and Andrew Noble, and: Robert Fergusson and the Scottish Periodical Press by Rhona Brown, and: The Correspondence of Samuel Thomson (1766–1816) ed. by Jennifer Orr

Michael Brown, John Kirk, and Andrew Noble, eds. United Islands?: The Languages of Resistance (Poetry and Song in the Age of Revolution). No. I. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012. Pp. 272. $99. Rhona Brown. Robert Fergusson and the Scottish Periodical Press. Famham, UK: Ashgate, 2012. Pp. 280. $134.95. Jennifer Orr, ed. The Correspondence of Samuel Thomson (1766-1816). Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012. Pp. 242. $70. Over the last two decades there has been been a serious readjustment of Romantic studies away from anglo-centrism towards a more view of relations between England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. This archipelagic turn, if I may add another methodological twist to recent scholarly tergiversations, has been propelled by a growing awareness about varieties of nationalism in our own time. Among the landmarks in this process are Katie Trumpener's Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (1998), Ina Ferris's The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (2002), Ian Duncan's Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (2007), and Murray Pittock's Scottish and Irish Romanticism (2008); the list could go on. All these books are important contributions in different ways, but each of them has wrestled with the recognition that if the Romantic period saw the idea of nation emerging into a recognizable modern sense, that sense does not map easily onto the complications and irregularities of the cultural experience of the time. Pittock, for instance, is committed to the idea of Irish and Scottish traditions as distinct from an English Romanticism identified with literary London and its provincial others (most obviously in the Lake District), but he is also committed to a sense of irreducible relatedness in Irish and Scottish traditions. The term archipelagic, first drafted into use in Renaissance studies, usefully signals the interculturalism of what otherwise might too readily be constituted as national traditions, acknowledging also that the very word tradition may too readily imply an originally evolving autonomous entity. It might be added, of course, that the roles of the Irish, Scots, and Welsh, not to mention the regional English, for instance, in literary London warrant further study. Going to the great wen was not always an act of disaffiliation. It is instructive, for instance, how many Scots were involved in the London radical movement of the 1790s, as the historian Bob Harris has shown. They include Robert Watson (some-time secretary to Lord George Gordon), Robert Thomson (radical songwriter and brother to the eminently respectable George Thomson, editor of Burns), both of whom fled to France in the 1790s, and the founder of the London Corresponding Society itself, Thomas Hardy. None of these abandoned their Scottish interests in order to concentrate on London or even global radicalism. Indeed after the LCS had been driven underground, Hardy became a major figure in the setting up of the William Wallace Society, while Watson, by this time styling himself the Chevalier Watson, brought the Stuart papers back to Britain from Rome. Hardy played a major role in helping Thomson and Watson set themselves up when they returned to London after the defeat of Napoleon, visiting Watson to see the Stuart papers, and helping Thomson with the application to the Literary Fund and with the publication of a sadly execrable poem on Wallace. A sense of the complexity of these literary relations between the four nations characterizes each of the three volumes covered by this review. Rhona Brown's excellent study of Robert Fergusson aims to rescue him from being seen simply as John the Baptist to the Christ of Robert Burns (to use a formulation of Robert Crawford's). Previous studies have tended to discount Fergusson's English poetry in favor of the presumed authenticity of the Scottish vernacular poetry. Brown does valuable work in showing the diversity of resources on which Fergusson drew for the volume he produced before his death at the early age of 24. …

Avant-Pulp Psychogeography

Avant-Pulp Psychogeography Sukhdev Sandhu (bio) Savage Messiah. Laura Oldfield Ford. Verso Books. http://www.versobooks.com. 464 pages; paper, $29.95, £19.99. The apocalypse, when it came to London in summer 2012, was welcomed with open arms. “The Olympics,” they called it: Tories and Lib Dem MPs from the ruling Coalition used it to bury bad news and deflect grim tidings about the state of the economy; broadsheet editors trimmed their commissioning budgets by filling page after page with breathless boosterism from a few postcodes down the road rather than expensive investigations of foreign pastures; pop stars, fading footballers, and prime-time TV personalities gave good glow at the Opening Ceremony. Nearly everyone, keen post-Jubilee to have another knees-up jamboree, succumbed to coercive amnesia. Forgotten by all but the gnarliest naysayers was the fact that London, already a Rings of Steel enclave, already CCTV-congested and drone-plane-surveilled, an ultra-security-conscious military fortress, had now become a state of exception: surface-to-air missiles were installed on public-housing towers in Leytonstone; the British military’s largest warship sailed up the Thames; the Mayor brought in 3,500 extra troops at the last moment to satisfy what he claimed was public demand. Olympic Games are branding exercises, opportunities for cities to present to the world artfully constructed model-visions of themselves; for all the talking up of heritage, eccentricity, and street-savvy creativity, London was doing some of its best business in the realm of panopticon placement. It’s tempting to blow raspberries at the Games. They compel chiliastic prose, sandwich-board doomsdayism. Iain Sinclair, writing in 2008, portrayed/prophesized the “scam of scams,” a “tsunami of speculative capital, wanton destruction” in which “every civic decency, every sentimental attachment, is swept aside.” But the destruction of the Lea Valley—its transformation from wildscape to velodrome—to say nothing about the use of deadline urbanism (A.K.A. pick a year, any year: 2008 in the case of the Beijing Olympiad, 2010 for the Delhi Commonwealth Games, 2013 for New York University’s coronation—and all existing civic regulation and planning restrictions will be relaxed to ensure target completion) as a strategy for cartographic upheaval is just a footnote to a bigger story. That story is one in which London, formerly demonized as an inner city, an extended ghetto-in-the-making that was losing its industrial base and was now in the throes of white flight and ex-urbanization, had become a poster-child for neoliberalism. The role of culture in marketizing down-at-heel neighbourhoods is well known. And the “unworthies” displaced by developers and Olympic Delivery Authority henchmen—whether allotment holders, canal-boat dwellers, Romani men and women, small businessmen who had been trading on East London pastures now designated Eminent Domain—are but the most recent evictees in broader processes of gentrification. The vastly different possibilities for profiting from the Games afforded to local entrepreneurs (bereft of naming rights) and to multinational sponsors mirrors the chasm between a city comprised of an ever-growing precariat of immigrants, couch-surfing twenty-somethings, and demonized estate-dwellers on the one hand and, on the other, a boss class of bluebloods and plutocrats. Many a novelist has sought to create panoramas of this modern London. Its asymmetries, inequalities, parallel realities. Think Zadie Smith’s NW (2012); think John Lanchester’s Capital (2012). Martin Amis, even. Publishers love to append the adjective “Dickensian” to any half-competent effort to map the metropolis. But perhaps the novel is the wrong form, a false container, too tidy—a gentrified landscape in its own right. There are other sly ways and lapsed lanes which are worth wandering for less exalted but at least as penetrating insights: semi-reputable realms fecund with fugitive textualities and ephemeral outpourings. Flyers, chatboards, billboard graffiti, saved-to-desktop documents in sticky cybershacks—all this noise, versions of what J.G. Ballard called “invisible literature”—offer clamorous intensities more compelling than the smooth sonorities to be heard in the gated compound of “literary London.” A prime example is Savage Messiah, a zine produced from 2005–2009 by Laura Oldfield Ford. Taking its name from...

Review: Conjuring the Real: The Role of Architecture in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century Fiction, by Rumiko Handa and James Potter

Rumiko Handa and James Potter, editors. Conjuring the Real: The Role of Architecture in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century Fiction . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011, 232 pp., 33 b/w illus. $35.00, ISBN 9780803217430. Given how much has been written about architecture and literature over the last few decades, the subtitle of this book might seem to promise a belated subject. The essays collected here are the result of a lecture series held in 2007 at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, though the length and density of some of them suggest versions that preceded their presentation at that conference. This density is in fact one of the strengths of this book, which strays far from its title and announced theme. The other strength is the astounding roster of contributors, many of whom will be familiar to readers of this journal. For those not familiar with them, this volume is valuable as an introduction to some of the leading figures in fields as far apart as literary medievalism, structuralist art history, poststructuralist architectural theory, and Victorian set design. Most of the chapters restate arguments or present evidence that the authors have published in earlier forms. An analogy might be some projects that bring in a team of superstar architects to design separate buildings for what is supposed to be a common project. Rumiko Handa, one of the editors, provides the introduction to the volume, explaining that the lecture series was part of an effort to integrate architecture into the study of the humanities. One aspect of this effort is a …

Inventing the London of Literary Tourists: Walking the Romantic City in Leigh Hunt's “Wishing-Cap” Essays

Whereas scholarship on London literary tourism has tended to focus on the Victorian Age and early twentieth century, this essay locates the origins of the practice in the Romantic period, linking it specifically to the Cockney familiar essay as cultivated by Leigh Hunt. Beginning in the 1820s but continuing throughout his career, Hunt published numerous essays on London's literary and memorial charms. Recognizing a persistent demand for Londoniana in the marketplace, he depicted the metropolis as a realm of friendly literary ghosts and endless associative layers. In doing so, he helped create the expandable yet walkable London (still with us) of the literary tourist. This essay aims to provide a sense of how Hunt as a Romantic essayist and virtual tour guide came to be read by Victorians and by Anglophiles across the Atlantic. Hunt emerges from this discussion as an early and influential theorist of the intersections between real and imaginary travel, a proponent of literary tourism as a means to self-culture, and an under-acknowledged influence on one of Britain's principal heritage industries.

Conjuring the real: the role of architecture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction

List of Illustrations Foreword: Iain Borden Introduction Rumiko Handa 1. All That Life Can Afford? Perspectives on the Screening of Historic Literary London, Ian Christie 2. Norman Abbey as Romantic Mise-en-Scene: St Georges de Boscherville in Historical Representation, Stephen Bann 3. Architecture in Historical Fiction: A Historical and Comparative Study, Michael Alexander 4. Performing History on the Victorian Stage, Richard Schoch 5. Shops and Subjects, Andrew Ballantyne 6. Pride and Prejudice: Establishing Historical Connections amongst the Arts, Josh Silvers and Toby D. Olsen Contributors