Nineteenth-century Readers Research Articles

Giambattista Vico's ‘Constructive’ Language and its Post-Revolutionary Readers

Reprinted in 1801, Vico's New Science (originally published 1744) had a profound impact on Bourbon Restoration culture, particularly in Italy and France, where it touched post-revolutionary readers profoundly. The reasons for Vico's revival in the early nineteenth century relate closely to the trauma of the political and social changes of that era. Vico's readership seems to have had significant peaks during periods of rapid social transformation: nineteenth-century readers reread the New Science in an attempt to find the reasons for revolutionary failure, and to relate the terror, the sense of displacement, failure and trauma to recognizable laws, promising that, after a crisis, a period of renaissance must necessarily follow. This article analyses the hermeneutic practices of some post-revolutionary readers of Vico (Carlo Cattaneo, Vincenzo Cuoco, Giuseppe Ferrari, Ugo Foscolo, Francesco Lomonaco) and suggests a comparison with the practices of readers during the Second World War (Eric Auerbach, Carlo Levi, Mario Fubini). By doing so, I propose an interpretation of Vico's New Science as a ‘posthumous’ book, acquiring special shades of significance when its readers experience the feeling that nothing will ever be like before, and meditate upon it in isolation, in fear, in exile, upon return from the front, and in prison.

The Moral Economies of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth-Century Literary MarketplacePlagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions

The Moral Economies of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth-Century Literary MarketplacePlagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions

Novel Commonplaces: Quotation, Epigraphs, and Literary Authority

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, commonplacing was a habitual practice of middle-class US households, undertaken by children and adults alike to record notable quotations and to cultivate their literary taste. Though it declined in popularity with the rise of the scrapbook in the midcentury, commonplacing was for centuries a standard feature of both educational curricula and domestic literacy, with generations of students instructed in the intellectual and moral benefits of selecting and copying passages culled from reading. Commonplace books offer a wealth of vital information about US literary culture, for they not only illuminate eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reading practices by allowing us to discern what US readers valued in various genres, but they also help to document what middle-class and well-to-do Americans were reading. In showing that many Americans were attentively reading and excerpting the works of such less remembered figures as Caroline Sheridan Norton, Charles A. Sprague, and Edward Young, these books may even be said to reveal an alternative canon of nineteenth-century national reading preferences. In addition, commonplace books also affirm the particular status of the quotation, which was so prized that readers dedicated much of their time to the selection and transcription of select passages. According to Barbara Benedict, these handpicked excerpts revealed both the reader’s taste in as well as his or her eye for a well-chosen phrase or a keen observation, and as evinced by the frequency with which commonplacers exchanged and commented on each other’s selections, readers could readily expect to be judged for their choice of quotations (51).

The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings, by Leland S. Person

<i>The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings</i>, by Leland S. Person

Travelling Books: When Dorothe Engelbretsdatter Went to America

AbstractA newly surfaced copy of Norwegian poet Dorothe Engelbretsdatter’s work in The United States is evidence of the seventeenth-century’s author’s enduring hold on nineteenth-century readers. This article places the book in the context of the poet’s Scandinavian reception since her own time and today. The travelling book forms an appropriate illustration of the spread of women’s writing, as studied by the EU-funded project

Elusive Women Authors in Norwegian Nineteenth-Century Reading Societies

Which women authors were read at the ebb of the nineteenth century and around the start of the twentieth? Research on historical readership groups reveals a strikingly different picture from the one transmitted through literary histories and textbooks. Empirical data from the catalogues of Norwegian reading societies from this period form the basis of the proposed conclusions. From a feminist, scholarly point of view, it is doubly interesting to investigate the fate of female authors among female readers; hence, the main emphasis is on the book collection of the women’s reading society based in Oslo from 1874. The collections of other societies, whether male or open to both sexes, are consulted for comparison. Although the material is Norwegian, the results turn out to be comparable to those seen in other countries, not least Finland. The data presented here serve to modify the received canon of European literary history, and to invite future revisions in the reception of female authorship and of women’s place in world literature.

Buying and Borrowing Books: Book Consumption In Late Nineteenth-Century Sweden (pp 121-154)

How did Swedish readers in the late nineteenth century acquire reading materials, and what books were the most popular? And how did their reading preferences change over time?A few unique, recently discovered sources, consisting of sales’ and borrowers’ ledgers from three different institutions – a parish library, a commercial lending library and a bookshop – can help to answer these questions. These three institutions represented key elements of the Swedish book trade, and together they served customers from the entire social spectrum, from farmhands, blacksmiths and labourers to bishops, noblemen and literary critics. Generally speaking, the Swedish reading public of the late nineteenth century was divided into two groups: those who bought books, and those who borrowed them. The bookshop was where all the latest books could be found, and Strindberg, Ibsen and Daudet were among the best-selling authors. The parish library, by contrast, had only a limited range of fiction – mainly written by an earlier generation of authors – and primarily acquired books that would enlighten and educate, rather than entertain. However, the members of the parish library preferred fiction above all, and over the years they transformed from omnivorous to discerning readers. The commercial lending library, which specialised in novels, attracted many bookworms, with some people borrowing from fifty to one hundred books a year, very often historical novels.Different customer groups seem to have had different literary preferences. The study shows for example that female customers of the bookshop tended to buy books on women’s emancipation, and preferred Tolstoy to Strindberg – who was the male customers’ favourite. And while romantic and gothic stories, and the so-called “city mysteries” by Eugène Sue were hugely popular among the students and the artisans of the commercial lending library, they aroused little interest among the bookshop’s customers.

"Awful Doubt": Milton and Darwin in the Land of Fire

"Awful Doubt":Milton and Darwin in the Land of Fire Ian Bickford "Jemmy believed in dreams, though not, as I have said, in the devil." —Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, 1839 "With regard to 'Paradise Lost,'" Henry James mused in 1876, "some of the cargo must be thrown overboard to save the ship."1 The problem for James is not the size, length, or volume of a poem that, as Samuel Johnson groused, "none ever wished … longer than it is."2 It is instead, I will venture, a problem of reading John Milton after Charles Darwin, for whom, in precedent, Milton presented both a problem and a provisional solution. James's remark was an elaboration upon the French intellectual Edmond Schérer's estimation that Paradise Lost could be appreciated "only in fragments," and it was a fragment of Milton's epic that returned to Darwin as the HMS Beagle "drove before her bows two billows of liquid phosphorous" off the eastern coast of South America: "It is impossible to behold this plain of matter, as it were melted & consuming by heat, without being reminded of Milton's description [End Page 103] of Chaos and Anarchy."3 That reminder is also an important remainder, surviving in a process of textual selection as Darwin, concluding his first full year at sea, begins casting Milton's creationist cargo overboard. The remaining fragments are anything but relics, rudiments, or vestiges. In a Darwinian sense, to survive is to proliferate, and as Darwin confronted a world more abundant, more chaotic, and more mutable than he could have anticipated in his medical studies at Christ's College, the fragmented Milton was always with him: he brought Milton everywhere, and found him everywhere. As Gillian Beer, Joan Richardson, Joseph Wittreich, Robert Richards, and others have remarked, the chronically seasick Darwin carried his copy of Paradise Lost ashore whenever he disembarked, often for long stretches on foot and horseback or Galapagosian tortoise-back, meeting the Beagle at each subsequent port.4 "But what was Milton … doing in the hands of the incipient evolutionist?," asks George Levine—a good but also a guileless question; it would be more surprising for Milton to be missing altogether from Darwin's hands.5 Whether or not Milton's nineteenth century readers were fit to his own poetic standards and political and theological priorities, they were far from few, and "the incipient evolutionist," as Beer and Levine illustrate, possessed an enormous literary knowledge and appetite. What begs attention is not the isolated fact but the insistent repetition—the recursive, iterative, and sustained habit—of Darwin's reading of Milton. "When I could take only a single small volume," he wrote of his excursions in South America, "I always chose Milton."6 He was choosing from a shipboard collection of approximately 400 volumes, large enough for Captain Fitz Roy to "flatter" himself in a letter to his sister, dated March 16, 1826, for having assembled "a complete library in miniature."7 To a catalog dominated by travel narratives and volumes of geology and natural history, Darwin added his own copies of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology and Paradise Lost. The former, famously, provided the framework for reconsidering geological time, a necessary step in Darwin's realizing the longue durée of evolutionary change. The [End Page 104] latter is either an oddity aboard ship, finding its place with very few literary works—Samuel Richardson's Charles Grandison and the works of William Shenstone—along with the King James Bible and two copies of the New Testament in Greek and German; or else, in the company of Carl Linnaeus, Alexander von Humboldt, and Charles Lyell, it achieves a new provisional category, opening, in Darwin's reading, to a generic reconfiguration that would profoundly disrupt its internal argument and essential paradigm, that is, what it seeks to "justify." While serving as a theological contrast and counterpoint to the radically emended version of created reality emerging into Darwin's view, the poem also, if perhaps against its own interests, makes a substantial contribution to that process of emendation, offering up its own substantial interest in and attention to the workings of the natural...

Viewless Scenes: Vividness and Nineteenth-Century Ideals of Reading in and through Gertrude of wyoming

Scholarship on Thomas Campbell's of (1809) has tended to group the poem's geographical errors with its representational errors of real persons. While both errors traffic in New World exoticism, recognizing a difference between such errors allows us to analyze nineteenth-century reading practices to understand the cultural logic of the poem's popularity. Campbell figures Gertrude as a reader, and nineteenth-century readers embraced this figure, framing Wyoming as a locus for contemplating readerly belief. Further, Campbell's inaccurate geographical descriptions prompted American poets to idealize Wyoming on their own terms, creating a topos grounded in the forceful impressions of reading.

Media and Print Culture Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Victorian Reading Experience ed. by Paul Raphael Rooney and Anna Gasperini

Reviewed by: Media and Print Culture Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Victorian Reading Experience ed. by Paul Raphael Rooney and Anna Gasperini Jennifer Phegley (bio) Paul Raphael Rooney and Anna Gasperini, eds., Media and Print Culture Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Victorian Reading Experience (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 241, $99.99 cloth; $69.99 ebook. Reading is the stubbornly resistant element of book history's triumvirate of reading, writing, and publishing. It is notoriously difficult to study and, as a result, has often been neglected or circumvented. Given that most nineteenth-century readers left no trace of their interaction with texts, how do we come to understand their reading practices or responses? Most records of reading come from professional writers whose perspectives are not necessarily representative of the majority. Likewise, our information about who belonged to a particular reading audience comes largely from the potentially biased claims of editors and publishers. Neither of these sources is very effective at enlightening us about the mass reading public. While this is a continuing challenge for scholars, the essays in Media and Print Culture Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Britain, edited by Paul Raphael Rooney and Anna Gasperini, provide new evidence of how readers bought, shared, and responded to written materials. Rooney and Gasperini explain that they hope to offer studies that "turn their attention to the wider nineteenth-century media climate in order to shed light on the ways in which Victorian" readers "were conditioned by contemporaneous contact with cultural content countered in other media" (8). While the editors do not explicitly declare the working-class reader as the focus of the book, the evidence of reading practices offered by many contributors compellingly highlights the common reader. [End Page 825] Isabel Corfe, Anne Humpherys, Ruth Doherty, and Marie Léger-St-Jean devote their attention to deciphering the reading choices of members of what Wilkie Collins famously labelled the "unknown public." Corfe focuses on the lasting power of oral culture in her interrogation of why the consumption of half-penny street ballads remained strong even as the marketplace for higher quality and more diverse penny-press publications thrived. Corfe maintains that while many scholars contend that street ballads were attractive because they were cheaper than newspapers, the archival record shows that ballads remained popular beyond mid-century when the newspaper tax was eliminated. Furthermore, the most popular ballads "were ordinary song sheets rather than sheets pertaining to the gallows," as is often assumed (133). Corfe concludes that ballads were more "portable" as well as more widely available since they were carried to town and country by peddlers. Perhaps most importantly, they remained useful as "songs to be sung" by a semi-literate population looking for a cheap and productive way to spend their free time (140). Humpherys complicates notions of the popular and the canonical in her study of the advertising lists for John Dicks's reprint series. This numbered list of books, including novels priced at sixpence and dramas for a penny, were advertised in all of Dicks's publications including Reynolds's Miscellany (1846–69), Bow Bells (1862–97), and Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper (1850–1967). Humpherys sets out to determine what a "shrewd publisher thought his audience might want access to in cheap reprint editions" by examining the advertising lists (95). She notes that while working-class autobiographies often emphasized highly regarded literary works, Dicks's reprints created a counter-canon "of standard texts, not one organized by the classics, not one organized chronologically, but one of a heterogeneous mixture of all types from all periods" (104). Thus, Humpherys convincingly argues that Dicks offers us a "broader publishing and cultural context" in which to make sense of what the "'unknown public' wanted and would buy" (105). Doherty delves into the genre of the penny dreadful to determine how its narrative form kept readers engaged over an extended period of time, which, in the case of G. W. M. Reynolds's The Mysteries of London, lasted more than a decade (1844–55). Doherty explains that Reynolds kept his massive serial both fresh and familiar by alternating between microscopic and telescopic points of view, which allowed him to "create...

Nineteenth-Century Auction Narratives and Compassionate Reading

Nineteenth-Century Auction Narratives and Compassionate Reading Elizabeth Coggin Womack (bio) Sales by auction resulting from bankruptcy or insolvency are common scenes in nineteenth-century literature, and scholars often take this frequency as evidence of the horror they provoked for contemporary readers. Certainly, the public dismantling of a private home by market forces was a familiar and fearful spectacle during the period; prior to the passing of laws such as the Limited Liability Act of 1855, even well-to-do members of the Victorian middle class were vulnerable to sudden losses. Such scenes constitute, in John McVeagh's words, "an omnipresent calamity in the whole creative writing of the age" (205n7).1 However, this essay argues that the ubiquity of the nineteenth-century auction also posed a problem of representation for novelists, who had to contend with their readers' overexposure to the common threat of bankruptcy—a threat represented in biweekly newspaper reports from the Court of Bankruptcy, but much more frequently through auction advertisements, "a crowd of which," William Makepeace Thackeray notes, appeared "every day in the last page of the Times newspaper" (Vanity Fair 169). While both were appearing in serial form at the height of the 1847 panic, Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son preface sentimental appeals on behalf of dispossessed families with allusions to the often-satirized tropes of these auction advertisements. Acknowledging their readers' familiarity with auction print culture and its euphemisms for financial disaster, Dickens, Thackeray, and their contemporaries ask readers to overcome compassion fatigue and restore the narratives of individual suffering that auction advertisements partly elide. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, auction advertisements were a particularly overdetermined genre that served both social and commercial functions. We can get a sense of these dual functions by recalling the line in When Harry Met Sally (1989) when Harry suggests using the obituaries to find a New York City apartment: "What they can do to make it easier is to combine the obituaries with the real estate section. Say, then you'd have 'Mr. Klein died today leaving a wife, two children, and a spacious three-bedroom apartment with a wood-burning fireplace.'" What Harry intends as a morbid joke is actually a straightforward description of how British auction advertisements were understood for almost two hundred years: they combined listings of newly available real estate and furnishings with oblique references to the personal misfortunes of a proprietor, perhaps a "gentleman going [End Page 229] abroad." Of course, not every auction resulted from bankruptcy or death, but the number of satirical sketches by George Augustus Sala and others mocking the open secret of auction conventions allows us to infer that the nineteenth-century reading public was skilled at interpreting auction ads as narratives of misfortune. Cynthia Wall calls eighteenth-century auction advertisements, with their faint suggestions of character, setting, and action, "quasi-novelistic" (10). She speculates that these conventions might have given attendees the sense that they were participating in a drama; moreover, by purchasing goods at the home of a prominent figure, they could write their own story of social ascent. Surely, these pleasures of emulation were accompanied by an element of schadenfreude, for bankruptcy and insolvency were associated with "fraud and chicanery," as Barbara Weiss has shown; while the loss of a home certainly prompted a measure of pity, especially for the women and children living there, bankrupts were often considered undeserving of sympathy (36). Nineteenth-century auctioneers took some steps to neutralize the auction's gossipy dynamic and to create a more detached and efficient marketplace; the move to centralize proceedings at a new auction mart, for example, signified a hope that "encounters in the auction room would be mediated by nothing more than their own commercial disinterest" (Fitz-Gibbon 312). Yet as Desmond Fitz-Gibbon notes, "the entanglements of social relations were never so easily kept out" (313), and the custom of "quasi-novelistic" advertisements lingered. In novels exploring the competitive dynamics of the British middle class, allusions to auction advertisements are especially potent due to their characteristic jargon. The conspicuous diction, syntax, and paratextual markings of phrases such as "The Capital Modern Household Furniture, &c...

Counting from One to a Million: Whitman's Engagement with Large Numbers

This minute that comes to me over past decillions,There is no better than it and now.-Whitman, Song of Myself, Section 221I do not think seventy years is time of a man or woman,Nor that seventy of years is time of a man or woman,Nor that years will ever stop existence of me, or any one else.-Whitman, Who Learns Lesson Complete (LG1881 305)There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is fate - genetic and neural fate - of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.-Oliver Sacks, My Own Life2One of many unique aspects of Whitman's poetry that would have unsettled nineteenth-century readers of Leaves of Grass is poetic presence of large numbers.3 Whitman expanded realm of poetic diction in many ways, of course, but one of most striking remains his absorption of terms for large numbers that long had been familiar in realm of mathematics4 and more recently had been utilized in a widening array of sciences, particularly astronomy. The names for large numbers, then, were in language but in early years of nineteenth century were still not commonly used; as 1840 Penny Cyclopaedia of Society for Diffusion of Useful Knowledge put it: the terms billion, trillion, &c., though defined by arithmetical writers, have never found their way into common use, want of such numbers having never been experienced.5 These large numbers had long been a theoretical tool in mathematics, but, with advances in astronomy and geology, and early glimmerings of atomic physics, vast numbers gradually entered into realm of actual. The explosion in perception of time and distance brought on by scientific advances necessitated thinking of earth's age and earth's place in cosmos in terms beyond familiar and comfortable numbers that had previously served most humans well for dealing with material world.As a former teacher of arithmetic himself, and as a journalist keenly interested in emerging genre of American schoolbooks, Whitman was well aware of how these large numbers had quickly become a staple of every child's education. The arithmetic book he recommended in 1846 for use in Brooklyn schools, James B. Thomson's Practical Arithmetic,6 provides students with a numeration table taking them up to quadrillions, and among student exercises is a directive to read large numbers (like 504069470300400) and to write out in figures numbers like One hundred and thirteen billions, six hundred and fifty thousand.7 And very first section (Numeration) of Benjamin Greenleaf's influential 1847 Introduction to National Arithmetic (Designed for Common Schools) requires students to memorize and write out numbers from units to thousands to millions to billions to trillions to quatrillions to quintillions to sextillions and on up to tridecillions. Student assignments included writing out in words names of numbers up to forty-five digits long.8Arguably, then, audience for Whitman's poetry was better attuned than twenty-first-century audiences to particular definitions of numerical terms that Whitman so frequently employed in his poetry, even if they would have been surprised to find such arithmetical diction in a poetic context. Not only did these giant numbers appear in arithmetic textbooks, they were also frequently tossed about in early debates over whether scientific discoveries about vastness of time and space made existence of God more or less likely. Baptist minister Eli Noyes, for example, in his 1853 Lectures on Truth of argues that the scientific man, who looks into intricacies of can only ultimately corroborate teachings of Bible, for the one who studies nature, becomes more devout. …

“Modern-Antiques,” Ballad Imitation, and the Aesthetics of Anachronism

Rubbishy seems the word that most exactly would suit it. All the foolish destructions, and all the sillier savings, All the incongruous things of past incompatible ages, Seem to he treasured up here to make fools of present and future. --Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage Writing to the Irish poet and ballad anthologist William Allingham in the summer of 1855, Dante Gabriel Rossetti explained that he was underwhelmed by the former's poem, Music Master, as it lacked the enticements he expected of ballads: [O]ne can only speak of one's own needs & cravings: & I must confess a need, in narrative dramatic poetry ... of something rather exciting, indeed I believe something of the element, to rouse my mind to anything like the moods produced by personal emotion in my own life. That sentence is shockingly ill-worded, but Keats's narratives would be the kind I mean. (1) One is struck both by the aesthetic feeling that Rossetti attempts to discriminate-the connection he draws between romance narrative and personal emotion-and by the hesitation with which he does so: before he wrote romantic, Rossetti wrote schoolgirl, then crossed it out. The strikethrough has the force of an embarrassed admission about the appeal of ballads to an otherwise high-minded literary reader, particularly when the ballad in question is neither antiquarian artifact nor popular street song but artfully contrived pastiche. This self-conscious mode of genre performance had its roots in such eighteenth-century ballad scandals as Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw's Hardyknute. (2) Ballad forgeries turned eventually to avowed imitations, and, after picking up sentimental, romance, and gothic elements from Thomas Chatterton, Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and many others, the literary ballad had thoroughly saturated the literary field by the early decades of the Victorian period. This essay explores the ballad aesthetics inherited by Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites and, more particularly, those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a less-remarked influence on Pre-Raphaelite medievalism. The ballad in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was less a stable form than an evolving discourse-an overlapping assembly of ballad collections and antiquarian scholarship that gathered together metrical romances, broadside ballads, ballad romances, hymns, lays, ballad parodies, and lyrical ballads that variously expanded and chastened the idea of the ballad. The ballad's prominence as cultural form has been given considerable attention, though recent work has focused primarily on antiquarianism, popular balladry, or the ballad's significance within print culture and romantic nationalism. (3) Turning to the relatively neglected form of the literary ballad, I am interested less in specifying what this genre was than in exploring what we might call the historical aesthetics of genre-the kinds of feelings and judgments that get attached to a given genre and their role in its style, rhetoric, and form. (4) What language did nineteenth-century readers use to distinguish their impressions of poetic genres, and what relationship can we see in this language between aesthetic judgment and poetic form? How do aesthetic categories shore up, innovate, or otherwise inflect categories of genre? In particular, my discussion aims to uncover the aesthetic and affective dimensions of the stylistic anachronism-Rossetti called his poems, after Walter Scott, modern-antiques-that characterizes the literary ballad in its tendency to evoke without fully inhabiting the conventions of traditional songs and ballads (Correspondence, 1: 389). (5) The subgenre of the literary ballad represents an important aspect and outgrowth of what Albert Friedman has termed the ballad's museum-life, its abstraction within the discourses of antiquarian revival, sophisticated poetry, and historical scholarship (p. …

Tirra-Lirrical Ballads: Source Hunting with the Lady of Shalott

Early in 1868, two critics were speculating about origin of Alfred Tennyson's already classic Lady of Shalott. Here Frederick James Furnivall writing to William Michael Rossetti with an answer from horse's mouth: As you kindly took trouble about The Lady of Shalott for me, you are entitled to copy of Tennyson's own account:-'I met story first in some Italian novelle: mirror, island, etc., were own.' (1) A notebook from Tennyson's days at Trinity College records, Legends. / The Lady of Scalot. Novelle Antiche, apparently confirming that he had found inspiration in thirteenth-century collection of tales called Cento novelle antiche (One hundred ancient tales). (2) The collection was known in nineteenth century for having inspired many of stories in Boccaccio's 1353 Decameron. Among hundred ancient tales is, indeed, brief novella about damigella di who diet! for love of Lancelot. But no amount of explanation or evidence satisfied scholars, who have doggedly sought additional sources for Tennyson's 1832 ballad. Without discounting connections to novella, they have argued for range of other influences, from Malory romance Tennyson claimed not to have used to Sappho, Spenser, and Shelley. (3) Even avowed Italian source yielded more questions than answers: Was Tennyson working from an Italian-language edition of Cento novelle antiche available to nineteenth-century readers of Italian, or was he working from an English translation of novella in Thomas Roscoe's 1825 The Italian Novelists? What use did he make of two contemporaneous poems by Louisa Stuart Costello and Letitia Elizabeth Landon also derived from novella? (4) And why Italian story missing so many of Tennyson's crucial details: web, mirror, island, etc. that he claimed as my own? (5) These discrepancies led Isobel Armstrong to agnostic conclusion that poem has no source, and in fact conflation of number of mythic structures-but same mismatches have tantalized many other source-hungry critics with prospect of further discoveries. (6) Why did Victorians care so much about origin of this poem, and why do we still care? Perhaps vertigo reader experiences on first learning that this consummately English ballad about England's mythic past so embroiled in Italian literary history. I myself have spent countless hours tracking source of Tennyson's source. On tip from Victorian translator Thomas Roscoe, who suggested that novella was first recorded by Dante's mentor Brunetto Latini, I have searched Latini's work for references to Lady of Shalott-or to variants Scalot and Scalotta-and I have searched for information about Arthurian romance that Latini was thought to own a beautiful copy of. (7) I was hoping to find in poem's shadowy prehistory some clue to form of Lady of Shalott, to learn something more about Tennyson's particular variety of lyrical ballad. But poem's source problems are only replicated in literary history of tale. In choosing story of Lady of Shalott-by whatever means he found it-Tennyson was engaging with source question as much as source. In 1814 History of Fiction, work that Roscoe drew on for his introduction to The Italian Novelists, John Colin Dunlop characterizes Cento novelle antiche as both an origin point and collection of enigmatic histories. It constitutes the first regular work of class [of short fiction] in Europe, and laid foundation of most splendid efforts of human genius. At same time it was not new and original production, compilation of stories already current in world. The diverse tales, from diverse literary cultures, may have been recorded by one author or many, but who these authors were, Dunlop announces, is still problem in literary annals of Italy (my emphasis). …

Studies in Victorian and Modern Literature: A Tribute to John Sutherland ed. by William Baker

Reviewed by: Studies in Victorian and Modern Literature: A Tribute to John Sutherland ed. by William Baker James M. Decker (bio) William Baker, ed. Studies in Victorian and Modern Literature: A Tribute to John Sutherland. Lanham: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2015. 362pp. HB $90.00. ISBN 978-1-61147-692-7 A festschrift in honor of John Sutherland, Studies in Victorian and Modern Literature, edited by William Baker, presents twenty-six essays that mirror the eclectic scholar’s wide-ranging interests. While most of the essays in the volume represent original contributions by a host of critics from Rosemary Ashton to René Weis, the editor also includes a reprinted article by novelist David Lodge. Following his introduction, Baker organizes the book into four categories, all dealing either with one of Sutherland’s intellectual interests or with his biography: “The Publishing Dimension,” “Victorians Major and Minor,” “Non-Victorians and Puzzles,” and “John Sutherland’s Life and Work.” By dividing his focus in such a nontraditional way, Baker takes the gamble of alienating an academic audience comfortable with “traditional” distinctions between genres and periods as well as the risk of offering a book that lacks a clear purpose. Because, however, of Sutherland’s own intellectual Catholicism and the various contributors’ concerted efforts to link their own work to the adventurous spirit of their celebrant, the book succeeds presenting a vision that, while diverse in methodology and subject, is uniformly stimulating. Baker’s introduction concisely explains the book’s organizational logic by tracing the trajectory of Sutherland’s career. Remarkably, Sutherland not only pursued his academic curiosity in a number of fields, but he published seminal works in each area. From the magisterial The Longman Companion [End Page 369] to Victorian Fiction and The Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives to Fiction and the Fiction Industry and Is Heathcliff a Murderer: Great Puzzles in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Sutherland tackles his subjects with aplomb and incisive critical acumen while also maintaining an almost preternatural ability to connect micro-level details from the works under discussion to the macro-level patterns of genre and period. Baker also notes that whatever his topic, Sutherland writes in an accessible and vigorous style that is “idiomatic, down to earth, and eschewing the pretentious or literary terminology” (xiii). Considering such a career—and leaving out such facets of Sutherland’s work as his editing and status as public intellectual—Baker aptly observes that Studies in Victorian and Modern Literature “represent[s] the range of his achievement and importance as a scholar, a critic, and a journalist” (xii). The volume’s first section, “The Publishing Dimension,” contains five essays, the subjects of which deal with both broad issues, such as audience and female literary networks, and narrower author-specific questions, such as Margaret Oliphant’s relationship with Blackwood. Additionally, the methodologies presented in this section employ both biographical approaches and quantitative ones. For instance, in “Reconsidering the Unknown Public: A Puzzle of Literary Gains” Simon Frost contemplates Wilkie Collins’s bemusement over just who, exactly, was purchasing penny journals. Frost, echoing Sutherland’s interest in literary puzzles, follows various leads, most of which contradict Collins’s conclusion and that productively use publishing and audience data to expose the “unknown public” as an ideological device for maintaining exclusivity and denying the heterogeneous reading habits of a broad swath of nineteenth-century readers. Two of the other writers in this section, Linda K. Hughes and Joanne Shattock, draw upon Sutherland’s inspiration in identifying a puzzle (“trace” collaboration in Hughes’s case) or relationship (Margaret Oliphant’s connection to the House of Blackwood in Shattock’s case) that they explore via primary sources. In particular, Hughes’ idea of trace collaboration seems a useful concept for reconstructing the impact that an ostensibly marginal figure—so far as the extant evidence is concerned— has had on a more prominent one. As with the other contributors to the “Publishing Dimension” (Frost, David Finkelstein, and Alexis Weedon), Hughes and Shattock expand our knowledge of the context in which Victorian writers produced their work. [End Page 370] The next section, “Victorians Major and Minor,” represents the heart of the collection and contains ten...

Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain's Age of Print by Joshua King

Reviewed by: Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain's Age of Print by Joshua King Caley Ehnes (bio) Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain's Age of Print by Joshua King; pp. 368. Ohio State UP, 2015. $86.95 cloth. Joshua King's recent publication, Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain's Age of Print, represents a significant intervention in the fields of book history and Victorian literature. While the weight of the archival and textual evidence provided by King often overwhelms his argument, the ultimate result of King's careful methodology and interaction with key scholars in the fields of Victorian literature, religion, and history (including Kirstie Blair, Mark Knight and Emma Mason, Charles LaPorte, and William R. McKelvy) is a book that will provide a solid and incontestable foundation upon which future scholars can build arguments about the spiritual communities developed and nurtured through Victorian literature. While I wish that King's monograph had more breadth in its discussion of poetry, it provides an excellent starting place for scholars interested in issues such as readership, audience, and the function of literature (especially fiction and poetry) in the religious press. Focusing on how the rise of print media reframed the way Victorians experienced religion, King argues that the networks created through the proliferation of print supported the development of an imagined spiritual community within Britain and, eventually, its empire. The core of King's argument lies in his self-described extension and revision of Benedict Anderson's influential conceptualization of nationalism in Imagined Communities.1 As his in-depth and comprehensive survey of essay collections, poetry volumes, and miscellaneous periodical contributions suggests, King agrees with Anderson about the role that print media played in the development of national communities. Each chapter implicitly, and often explicitly, reinforces the importance of print media in both defining and facilitating the creation of an imagined spiritual community—with one major difference: while Anderson aligns the development of a national community with the process of secularization, King builds on the recent work [End Page 381] of scholars such as Hilary M. Carey and McKelvy, who challenge traditional narratives of secularization and nationalism to articulate the development of a national consciousness "as the secularizing successor of religion" (5). For King, such secularization narratives efface the important role that religion and the religious press played in the development of Britain's national identity. In Imagined Spiritual Communities, King thus reorients the discussion of nineteenth-century print media and the development of nationalism to consider the "intersection of nineteenth-century reading, religion, and conceptions of nation" through the networks created by the era's print media (11). Significantly, King does not view this development of a spiritual community through literature as divided along denominational lines. Rather, he argues that the Victorian reader's familiarity with the cyclical structures upon which John Keble, Alfred Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti built The Christian Year (1827), In Memoriam (1850), and Verses (1847, 1893), respectively, collapsed the sectarian divide. The first part of the book provides the theoretical foundation for King's reading of Keble, Tennyson, and Rossetti. Throughout part 1, King traces the evolution of nineteenth-century debates about the rise of print media and the role of the clerisy in mediating the public's interaction with popular materials. From Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Aids of Reflection (1825) (chapter 1) through F.D. Maurice's career as an essayist and author of fiction (chapter 2) to Matthew Arnold's essays on culture and the Church (chapter 3), King examines how each writer presents an argument for the "transformation of Britain's print network into a medium through which readers of all classes and ideologies could imagine themselves in a Christian community spanning the nation" (97). For King, the evolving arguments made by Coleridge, Maurice, and Arnold about a British spiritual republic of letters set the stage for the reception and continuous influence of Keble's The Christian Year (chapter 4), which, King argues, provided Victorian readers with "a means for imagining private and domestic acts of reading as private ways of participating in a print-mediated, national religious community" (130). The final three chapters of King's monograph examine how Tennyson's In...

Teaching Students to Imagine Nineteenth-Century British Readers

Teaching Students to Imagine Nineteenth-Century British Readers Joanne Nystrom Janssen (bio) Literature professors regularly assign Victorian novels to be read in serial installments, an activity that helps students imagine how an original reader might have experienced the texts.1 Such an activity draws attention to formal issues, such as how an author reminds readers of previously introduced characters who might not have appeared for several installments. Reading serially also helps students notice an author’s decisions about plot, pace, and structure—especially when they must stop reading at a particularly gripping cliffhanger. Absorbing the text more slowly also recreates, in part, the social aspects of reading because students often find themselves discussing scenes, characters, and predictions outside as well as inside class. While reading serially can effectively and enjoyably help students imagine nineteenth-century readers, it is not the only way that people of the period read—or that contemporary students can approximate their reading experiences. In my “British Literature since 1780” course, I introduce students to two additional nineteenth-century reading strategies: reading aloud and creating a commonplace book. Assignments based on these ways of reading allow students to experience texts with fresh eyes, which leads to deeper understandings of literature, history, culture, and even themselves. In order to create a structure that supports these two assignments, I build my course on the topics of reading, writing, and publishing. Such a foundation allows the students to trace common themes and issues that rose to prominence in the nineteenth century, when changes in education and printing technologies (among other factors) radically increased literacy rates and altered reading audiences. At the same time, this approach is loose and broad enough to allow exploration of varied topics. For example, throughout the semester, we discuss the changing sources of authorial inspiration, new or modified genres of writing (such as social-problem fiction, the dramatic monologue, and Modernist experimentation), and the role of the literary marketplace in shaping writing opportunities (especially for women and postcolonial writers). We also discuss the period’s common reading practices to understand how writers might have shaped their writing decisions out of their awareness of audience reading conventions or how reading practices may have altered a text’s reception. Therefore, in [End Page 306] the context of the course, mimicking nineteenth-century ways of reading becomes an integrated and natural component of the class. In our unit on the Romantic period, students learn that people commonly read aloud to each other. In fact, reading aloud was such a universal experience that Muriel Harris calls it an “institution” in the nineteenth century (346). Multiple factors influenced this practice. First, books were expensive, and, according to Richard Altick, at the time there was still “a low literacy rate among the masses” (35). Altick provides several anecdotes that reveal people’s responses to those challenges: in one case, twenty people assembled in a locksmith’s shop to listen to Pickwick Papers, which they had borrowed from a circulating library (11); in another, laborers pooled their money to buy radical periodicals, reading them aloud in alehouses (324). Second, because reading matter proliferated like never before, there was cultural anxiety about reading, and reading aloud gave parents an opportunity to protect children (or husbands to protect wives) from objectionable texts. Parents or authority figures found this “improving” function particularly attractive because they could, as Karen Flint describes, “check the dangerous delights of solitary reading” and “introduce children to valued works of literature” (100, Flint’s emphasis). As an example, Sarah Stickney Ellis in The Young Ladies’ Reader (1845) writes, “It is scarcely possible to imagine a prudent and judicious mother allowing the unrestrained and private reading of Shakespeare amongst her children; but if herself a good reader, thoroughly imbibed with a sense of the beautiful and the pure, it is possible to imagine her reading passages from Shakespeare to her family in such a manner, as to improve the taste of those around her, and to raise their estimate of what is great and good” (qtd. in Flint 83, Ellis’s emphasis). Finally, research (and common sense) also suggests that people found pleasure and unity in the shared social experience, much in the...

Waiting for the Sequel: Serial novels and Early Readers of Lithuanian Periodicals

In this analysis the author discusses the interplay between late nineteenth century readers and the first Lithuanian periodicals, proposing that the history of the Lithuanian press be seen as the writing of a single text. To interpret the reader-text relationship, the author draws on the concepts of Paul Ricoeur (who sees the text as offering a project for a possible world) and Rita Felski (who argues that recognition is a significant mark of the reader-text relationship) – their description of the interaction with the text and its restructuring of the reader’s world. The author posits that in this situation the collective authors of a text create a projection of the world and propose a way of being in it; as a result, the plots lived out by early readers who gradually became “heavy-handed scribes” become part of press history.Recovery of voice and the need for a sequel emerge as the most important motifs in the reader’s inscription into press history. Recovery of voice is related to melodramatic expression, whose characteristics are manifest in translations of the Polish author Maria Rodziewiczówna’s novels. The promise of a sequel is guaranteed by the means of the texts’ distribution – their serialization in magazines. This writer’s work appears as a modification of positivist attitudes and a recognition-based invitation to the reader to inscribe herself/himself into the text. Rodziewiczówna’s melodramatic narrative establishes the most common kind of recognition structure – rituals of moral address appear as narratives of self-discovery, encouraging the reader to become part of the sequel.

A Backward Glance over Some Leading Citizens in the Poe World

Having grown up, academically speaking, in the shadow of Arthur Hobson Quinn, who lived roughly half an hour from my college, Ursinus, and with so many of my college teachers having studied their American literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where Quinn was supreme when American literature was still a fairly new subject in university instruction, and now with myself looking like I might well be a contemporary of Quinn, or even Poe and John Greenleaf Whittier, and being from a family in which genealogy was important, it may be natural that I should represent historical memory and share my recollections of some persons who pioneered in and opened up Poe studies. Some may be surprised to learn that Professor Quinn was, first and foremost, not a Poe specialist, but that his preeminent scholarly love was American drama. For pre-twentieth-century American plays, Quinn’s studies typically remain, after nearly a century, almost the only informed commentaries. Many have become increasingly aware that William Dunlap, America’s first major playwright, and the novelist Charles Brockden Brown, might each properly be deemed the Adam to American literary Gothicism. To return to Professor Quinn: when I began my own academic studies, he was in his eighties, ill, and housebound. He spent most of his time nestled in a chair, swathed in blankets and quilts, and wearing a sun shade, claiming that reading so many early American plays had ruined his eyesight. Before such ills befell him, Quinn was active in having established the Clothier Collection of American Drama at the University of Pennsylvania, which remains one of the foremost collections of early American plays. The Poe interest emerged from Quinn’s own work in American drama—Poe’s parents being actors—and from his aim to furnish an accurate biographical portraiture of Poe which would demolish the long-standing depiction by Rufus Griswold. Spending more than twenty years in preparing that biography, which appeared first in 1941 but has stood the test of time well enough to go through several reprintings, Quinn achieved a solid narrative account, though many of his critical opinions have been modified or superseded in the work of others. A Quinn student, J. Albert Robbins, followed his mentor’s practices in determining to present factually accurate scholarship, as some early volumes in the American Literary Scholarship journal attest. Robbins often recounted to me anecdotes of his days as Quinn’s student. Those who know Quinn primarily for

Sentimental Readers: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of a Disparaged Rhetoric by Faye Halpern (review)

Reviewed by: Sentimental Readers: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of a Disparaged Rhetoric by Faye Halpern Amy Coté Faye Halpern. Sentimental Readers: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of a Disparaged Rhetoric. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013. 215pp. $45.00 paper. Faye Halpern’s Sentimental Readers offers a nuanced examination of what she terms a “disparaged rhetoric.” This vigorous volume takes up the question of nineteenth-century American sentimental fiction by authors including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry Ward Beecher, asking how and why twenty-first-century readers approach these texts, how these approaches might differ from those of nineteenth-century readers, and how we might learn from the “uncritical” practices advocated by sentimental rhetoric. Halpern’s potential audience is broad: this book holds obvious appeal for specialists in nineteenth-century American fiction and rhetoric, but its detailed historical contextualization, careful close readings, engagement with affect and reader response theory, and feminist literary criticism make it a compelling text for scholars from various disciplines, periods, and geographical areas. Furthermore, Halpern’s reflections on and assertions about the role sentimental rhetoric might play in pedagogy makes this book a valuable asset for anyone involved in teaching, especially early years of undergraduate English. Halpern begins her volume by addressing widespread assumptions about sentimental fiction: that it is socially conservative, tied to traditional gender roles, full of derivative plots and forced deathbed conversion scenes, and ultimately a “lesser” form of literature. As Halpern succinctly claims, though, “Certainly, sentimental novels do have favourite plots and themes, but it is a premise of this book that we should see sentimentality as less of a what than a how: how does a sentimental text direct its audience to read?” (xv). Various incarnations of this question and its implication occupy the remainder of Sentimental Readers. Halpern grounds her first chapter in vigorous research and detailed socio-historical context. This chapter, while somewhat lengthy, sets out [End Page 210] the foundational problem encountered by professional rhetoricians and sentimental novelists alike throughout the nineteenth century. Through an investigation of Edwart Tyrrel Channing (1790 to 1856), Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, Halpern articulates the circular debate surrounding disingenuous eloquence and the potentially dangerous powers of persuasion wielded by public figures. Was the ability to persuade an audience an innate quality, or could it be learned through instruction and study? If the former, what was the function of professorships in rhetoric and oratory; if the latter, how was an audience to tell a true conviction from a manipulative performance? Using Channing’s writings and biography as a springboard, Halpern tackles the complexities of this question, reaching backwards as far as Socrates and forward to the “scribbling women”—the sentimental writers of the mid-nineteenth century. Harriet Beecher Stowe is the subject of Halpern’s second chapter. Here, Halpern asks why scholars have not explored connections between professional orators and sentimental writers, who so often use rhetorical strategies in their fiction. Through an examination of The Minister’s Wooing, which she calls Stowe’s “rhetorical manifesto” (34), Halpern tackles the question of disingenuous eloquence as sentimental novelists encountered it. Halpern contends that The Minister’s Wooing employs the conventional love triangle plot to stage a battle between different types of persuasion. A successful orator, according to Stowe, is someone whose outside and inside align perfectly: someone for whom “seeming” and “being” are indistinguishable. Halpern extends this reading into Uncle Tom’s Cabin, addressing what she terms the “paradoxes of sentimentality” (54). Chief among these paradoxes is the way sentimental fiction relies on orality in spite of its textual status—they “speak” and persuade, inspiring strong feelings in audiences both within and beyond the novel through reported speech, apostrophes, and direct appeals. This orality is bound up with a suspicion of the written word as unreliable and prone to conceal and thus implicated in the problem of disingenuous eloquence. As Halpern writes, “far from the medium being the message, the medium is undermined and … transformed by it. The pinnacle of sentimentality saw readers accepting this transformation and being transformed by it in turn” (63). For Stowe, then, characters must exist within the text without belonging exclusively...