Victorian Debates Research Articles

Articulating Self and Other: Edward Henry Palmer—"Sheikh Abdallah"—and the Middle East

abstract: This essay draws on Stuart Hall's theory of articulation by examining the writings of Edward Henry Palmer. Palmer (1840–82) was a scholar and man of letters widely known in Victorian Britain for his Middle Eastern travels and his studies of Arabic culture and literature at Cambridge University. Palmer's writings on Middle Eastern society, poetry, history, and religious traditions allowed him to develop critiques of dissenting voices in Britain, mainly those of atheists and working-class communities. He also addressed fears of Islam at a time when Britain was concerned about safe access to Middle Eastern routes to India—a time marked by Christian-Muslim clashes in Eastern Europe and Muslim rebellion in India. By examining how Self and Others were articulated in non-reductionist, non-essentialist ways, this essay reveals that Victorian debates about religion, empire, and material progress shaped and were shaped by British encounters with the Middle East.

Dickens’s Signs: Language, Authority, and Communication Problems

ABSTRACT This article focuses on a particular aspect of language in Dickens that has not been studied: the authority over the signs as shaping interpersonal, ethical, and social relations. Who masters linguistic signs? What does it mean for a Dickensian character to aspire to control language? Surprisingly, the work of one of the greatest geniuses of the English language betrays a distrust of those who presume to master the signs. A question that preoccupies Dickens throughout his career is whether the purpose of communication systems is, indeed, to communicate, commune, and form a community or, instead, to assert one’s exclusivity and privilege. This article compares two characters who serve as contrasted analogues: Doctor Strong in David Copperfield, the compiler of an unfinished dictionary, and Doctor Marigold, the protagonist of Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions, who adopts a deaf child and invents a private sign language. The article explores Dickens’s changing conceptualization of communication, agency, and disability in the context of Victorian debates over these issues. His growing support of signing over lipreading indicates his developing view of disability and linguistic marginalization as an arena of acquired ability that the privileged agents of language are unable to possess.

‘Is Childhood Then so All-Divine?’: Representations of Childhood in the Poetry of Anne Brontë

Despite the increasing criticism of her traditional critical and cultural reputation as the “third Brontë” in recent years, the underestimation of Anne Brontë’s philosophical and political engagement remains tenacious. This is especially relevant when it comes to scholarly work on her poetry, where biographical and/or religious critical frameworks dominate. By contrast, this article is interested in Brontë’s poetic intervention in Victorian debates surrounding political and aesthetic conceptions of the child and childhood. Brontë simultaneously deploys and subverts traditionally Romantic imagery, interrogating this mode most explicitly in later poems such as ‘Memory’, ‘Dreams’ and ‘Z-’s Dream’. In these mature pieces, Brontë undercuts the more conventional presentation of such topics in her earlier poems with a self-reflexive meditation on the authenticity of nostalgic visions. Therefore, Brontë’s engagement with childhood becomes more vexed over time, mirroring the more realist representation of childhood in her novels. However, Brontë’s poetic work also reveals a deeper and more conflicted identification with the Romantic aesthetic of childhood than one might imagine the writer of Agnes Grey (1847) could possess, providing access to a more complete picture of Brontë’s position on these essential questions of innocence, nostalgia and childhood.

Revolutionary Greece in Victorian popular literature

Revolutionary Greece in Victorian popular literature

The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century

The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century

Amateur Lunatics: Investigative Journalism, Asylum Reform, and the Undercover Authorship of Lewis Wingfield

This essay examines the literary career of Anglo-Irish peer Lewis Strange Wingfield (1842-1891) in relation to the rise of investigative journalism and Victorian debates over the treatment of mental illness. Situating his work in the context of the first covert investigations into asylums in Britain and the United States, it focuses on Wingfield's use of disguise to infiltrate a private London asylum for the purpose of researching his novel Gehenna; or, Havens of Unrest (1882). Wingfield's pioneering experiment in undercover authorship, we argue, sheds new light on investigative journalism's impact on both the form and thematics of the nineteenth-century realist novel.

Parliament the Mirror of the Nation: Representation, Deliberation, and Democracy in Victorian Britain, by Gregory Conti

Reviewed by: Parliament the Mirror of the Nation: Representation, Deliberation, and Democracy in Victorian Britain by Gregory Conti Philip Harling (bio) Parliament the Mirror of the Nation: Representation, Deliberation, and Democracy in Victorian Britain, by Gregory Conti; pp. xi + 408. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019, $120.00, $34.99 paper. Thomas Hare is one of those eminent Victorians you have probably never heard of. A barrister and sometime assistant commissioner of London Charities, his hobby was to make the British electoral system perfect, and Hare scribbled a lot in pursuit of this goal. His magnum opus was Treatise on the Election of Representatives (1859). This was a formidably dense tome that nevertheless spoke to John Stuart Mill, who teamed up with Henry Fawcett to write a pamphlet that sought to translate Hare’s ideas into plainer English. The biggest of those ideas involved proportional representation (PR) and the single transferable vote (STV). PR was an electoral system in which the preferences among voters were intended to be reflected more proportionately within the elected body than could be achieved via pluralities or bare majorities within a winner-take-all [End Page 452] system, which “wasted” the votes of losing candidates (203). STV was Hare’s prescription for achieving PR in a way that made every vote count toward the electoral outcome. Today, STV is popular in Australia and Ireland, while PR—usually the party-list variety, and simpler than STV—is in wide use in Europe and far beyond, from Austria to Argentina, Italy, and Indonesia. There is therefore no doubting the global impact of this Hare-brained scheme. And while Hare’s home country still clings to the winner-take-all, first-past-the-post system, the debate about its relative virtues and vices compared with the PR alternatives continues to this day. If that debate within Britain remains vigorous now, it was even more so in Hare’s day. In Parliament the Mirror of the Nation: Representation, Deliberation, and Democracy in Victorian Britain, Gregory Conti guides us through this Victorian conversation with skill and erudition. His book is a history of political thought and, as such, some of us who are not chiefly political thinkers will get lost from time to time within the denser thickets of that erudition. But Conti convinces that even this sort of reader should care about Victorian debates about STV and PR, in part because they are germane to our growing contemporary anxieties that the composition of our political bodies inadequately reflects the diversity and divisions within our societies. Even more, we should care because those debates show that the Victorians believed deeply, a lot more deeply than we do, in what Conti calls “the transformative, world-altering character of political deliberation” (364). They felt a moral urgency to get their electoral system right, as they did about so much else. Like his admirers and critics, and virtually all mid-Victorians, Hare thought that the British people were the greatest on earth. The proof of their greatness lay in the soundness of their democratic political institutions, which held firm while the Continent veered between bloody revolution and bloodier reaction. The British Parliament has never been held in higher esteem than it was in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. There was nevertheless much talk of improvement. How could Parliament be made a more accurate image of the society for which it made laws? How could it be made a proper mirror of the nation? This was the ruling theoretical question, Conti convincingly argues. The most common answer involved improving upon the 1832 electoral settlement by increasing suffrage. Thus Whig-Liberals like Walter Bagehot and Henry Davis Pochin could agree with Conservatives such as Henry Warwick Cole that parliamentary seats needed to be redistributed and consolidated so as to bring so-called respectable workingmen more squarely into the political nation. Free-thinking radicals like G. J. Holyoake could likewise concur with Tories such as Augustus Stapleton that corporate interests needed better representation within the post-1832 British Parliament, even if they disagreed about which of those interests merited better access to the House of Commons. Arrayed against these varieties-of-suffrage...

From Spinster to Career Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Victorian England, by Arlene Young

Reviewed by: From Spinster to Career Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Victorian England by Arlene Young Lise Shapiro Sanders (bio) From Spinster to Career Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Victorian England, by Arlene Young; pp. x + 217. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019, $110.00, $29.95 paper. Arlene Young’s scholarship has been influential in shaping research on women, work, and Victorian culture for over two decades: in addition to editing two novels for Broadview Press (Tom Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys [1903] and George Gissing’s The Odd Women [1893]), she is the author of the monograph Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel: Gentlemen, Gents and Working Women (1999). In her most recent book, From Spinster to Career Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Victorian England, Young extends her scope to include historical and literary perspectives on middle-class women’s struggles to gain entry into two key professions in the nineteenth century: nursing and typewriting. Young approaches her subject with an interdisciplinary methodology based in close attention to Victorian newspapers and periodicals, revealing the heated debates about the transformations wrought in both fields. This is an engaging book that will be of interest to scholars in literary studies, history, and periodical studies, and to readers invested in exploring the relationship between gender and class in discourses around women’s work in the Victorian era. As Young notes in her introduction, “At the beginning of the Victorian period, to be a middle-class woman was to be a dependent—a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother. . . . By the end of the century, middle-class women . . . could choose not to be dependent, not to be limited to a domestic life. . . . This change was little short of revolutionary” (3). To explore the cultural significance of this societal shift, Young addresses Victorian debates over the “Woman Question” in her first chapter, examining depictions of several types including “the Strong-Minded Woman, the Glorified Spinster, and the New Woman” (12–13). The latter type has been much studied, but Young usefully reorients our attention to the first two figures and to their agency and cultural roles. Florence Nightingale, the iconic “Strong-Minded Woman” in George Whyte-Melville’s 1863 essay on the topic, evokes the power associated with the intelligence, judiciousness, and attention to duty associated with this figure, one who also, Young notes, “retains essential characteristics of the ideal Victorian woman” (37). The “Glorified Spinster,” by contrast, recasts the figure of the “Old Maid” as (in the words of Frances Martin, whose 1888 essay in Macmillan’s Magazine [1859–1907] coined the term) not “a woman minus something,” but “a woman plus something” (36), and importantly, a woman defined neither by marriage nor even her career, but by “what work allows her to do and to be” (37). In subsequent chapters, Young examines the two types of employment that structure her study. The nurse and the typewriter (which was the period’s term for the woman worker herself, not solely the machine she worked on) represent for Young two distinct aspects of middle-class women’s employment: a traditionally feminine field (nursing), redefined through debates over female agency, authority, and caregiving, and a newly modern occupation (typewriting) waiting to be defined by the women workers who would come to be associated with technological capability and modern innovation. In paired chapters on the historical context and literary representations of Victorian nursing, Young debunks the myth of Nightingale as the gentle Lady of the Lamp, recontextualizing her and other influential figures as assertive and authoritative in period disputes over hospital reform. Young then analyzes a wide range of fictional narratives [End Page 447] that critique and reimagine Charles Dickens’s caricature of Sairey Gamp, the drunken and disreputable nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit (1842–44). In texts ranging from Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853) to fictionalized memoirs and sketches published in periodicals like Fraser’s Magazine (1830–82), Work and Leisure (1880–93), and the Girl’s Own Paper (1880– 1956), to little-known novels like Elisabeth J. Lysaght’s A Long Madness (1877) and George Manville Fenn’s Nurse Elisia...

Commemorative Print: Serialized Monuments during the Shakespeare Tercentenary Debates

Abstract This essay concerns Victorian debates about how best to commemorate Shakespeare at the tercentenary of his birth in 1864. Victorian enthusiasm for Shakespeare was all but ubiquitous, but it evolved in unpredictable ways. The National Shakespeare Committee’s proposal for a Shakespeare statue, for instance, ended in controversy and failure. By contrast, alternative forms of commemoration enjoyed notable success, such as Howard Staunton’s serialized facsimile of the First Folio (1864–66). Both the controversy and its potential resolution in Staunton’s Folio are revealed in essays published in the Reader, a short-lived literary weekly. Staunton’s facsimile came to be regarded by the Reader and commentators in other periodicals as the most apposite of tercentenary monuments. It remade the First Folio for middle-class Victorian readers, trading on the prestige of the First Folio and remaking a high-end book version of Shakespeare in the image of ‘shilling monthly’ serial literature. Taken together, the Tercentenary monument controversies and the Staunton Folio show the Victorian relationship to Shakespeare to be less settled than we have previously appreciated.

Medieval Stained Glass and the Victorian Restorer

The recovery of the ‘true principles’ of stained glass as an integral part of the Gothic Revival of the nineteenth century grew out of a complex relationship between restoration, reinvention, and startling creativity. The tensions between craft, commerce, art, and scholarship were quick to surface in Victorian debates about restoration, and the descriptions of earlier nineteenth-century restoration practices found in the relevant literature in the years from c. 1900 onwards, much of it derogatory, imply that there was a homogeneous approach to stained glass restoration that could be described as both ‘Victorian’ and destructive. Infamous restorations, such as the Betton and Evans work at Winchester College, have been compared (unfavourably) to the projects in which pioneering stained glass scholar Charles Winston exerted an ‘enlightened’ influence. This article considers to what extent, and why, medieval stained glass required restoration by the Victorians, and to what extent they rescued rather than diminished an endangered heritage. It discusses the surprising variety of approaches adopted across the period, and to what extent these principles and approaches have shaped and influenced modern practice. It will also suggest that by the turn of the twentieth century the proponents of stained glass and its restoration, predominantly artists, were beginning to lose touch with an increasingly science-based understanding of the underlying causes of stained glass deterioration, factors that are also now undermining the survival of our nineteenth-century stained glass inheritance. In many late twentieth-century restorations of ancient stained glass, the work of Victorian restorers was ruthlessly stripped away, usually with little, if any, documentation. A proper understanding of the significance and impact of this complex history is essential if we are to conserve historic stained glass responsibly and ethically, a challenge that now extends to the conservation and protection of the works of the Gothic Revival as well.

The Disappearing Act: Heritage Making in Charlotte Riddell’s Novels

This article examines the strategies of heritage making in Riddell’s City novels, popular in the 19th century, but little known today. Drawing on late Victorian debates about the preservation of the past and its material remains, the article focuses on the relationship between fictional and non-fictional elements, in Riddell’s urban realism, which frequently pivots on heritage concerns. The main argument is twofold: 1) heritage discourse provides an apt frame for the self-validation of the author’s daring narrative choices; 2) Riddell’s understanding of heritage changes as her vision of capitalism darkens, culminating in a vocal denunciation of the destructive forces at work in the very idea of progress. Her novels generate heritage value in the very gesture of recording the many disappearing acts mournfully witnessed by the narrator.

The Disappearing Act: Heritage Making in Charlotte Riddell’s Novels

This article examines the strategies of heritage making in Riddell’s City novels, popular in the 19th century, but little known today. Drawing on late Victorian debates about the preservation of the past and its material remains, the article focuses on the relationship between fictional and non-fictional elements, in Riddell’s urban realism, which frequently pivots on heritage concerns. The main argument is twofold: 1) heritage discourse provides an apt frame for the self-validation of the author’s daring narrative choices; 2) Riddell’s understanding of heritage changes as her vision of capitalism darkens, culminating in a vocal denunciation of the destructive forces at work in the very idea of progress. Her novels generate heritage value in the very gesture of recording the many disappearing acts mournfully witnessed by the narrator.

Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology, by Linda M. Austin

Reviewed by: Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology by Linda M. Austin Anne Stiles (bio) Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology, by Linda M. Austin; pp. x + 260. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018, £75.00, $99.00. Linda Austin’s Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology aims to show how various art forms—from landscape painting, memoirs, novels, and photography to classical ballet—addressed psychological debates about human automatism from approximately 1870 to 1911. During this time period, scientists such as T. H. Huxley, Alexander Bain, William James, William Benjamin Carpenter, Henry Maudsley, Théodule Ribot, and others contested the degree to which human neurophysiology was analogous to mechanical mechanism. Mechanistic conceptions of brain function such as theories of reflex action or studies of the autonomic nervous system proved controversial because they undermined a mentalist understanding of human psychology that stressed the autonomy of the human mind, will, or soul. As Austin acknowledges, Victorian debates about human automatism have been ably explored by historians and literary scholars alike, including Anson Rabinbach, Rick Rylance, Nicholas Dames, Deanna Kreisel, Jill Matus, and Jenny Bourne Taylor. Austin’s principal intervention is to broaden these debates to a wider range of art forms and genres than previous critics. Her book thus requires readers to maintain working knowledge of several fields at once, from early photography to popular journalism to classical dance. This makes Automatism and Creative Acts a challenging read at times, but one that rewards determined readers. Austin shows the ways in which literary authors, painters, photographers, librettists, and choreographers weighed in on the debate surrounding human automatism with varying degrees of success and conviction. Part 1, titled “Automato-phobia,” demonstrates how early-nineteenth-century memoirist John Stuart Mill and travel writers Richard Jefferies and John Davidson favored mentalist interpretations of brain function that privileged the [End Page 121] independent mind, soul, or will above a mechanistic view of human neurophysiology. Part 2, “Technologies of the Automatic: Process and Movement,” explores the ways in which landscape photographers, spiritualists, novelists, and choreographers understood their works as simultaneously intentional and automatic, mental and mechanistic. While most of the book focuses on British texts and contexts, the final chapter turns to continental ballet to understand how “the preeminent nineteenth-century art of human movement” served as a battleground for debates surrounding human automatism (169). Austin’s monograph gets progressively better as it goes on. The first two thirds of the book make for challenging reading, especially the highly technical chapter on landscape photography (though perhaps a historian of photography could better appreciate Austin’s discussion of this medium). By contrast, chapters 4 and 5 gather momentum by describing how late-Victorian artists and scientists gradually abandoned mentalist theories of brain function to embrace automatism in its various forms. Because the fin-de-siècle works described in later chapters more closely approach modern understandings of brain function, they are more likely to resonate with twenty-first-century readers. Of greatest relevance for literary scholars is chapter 4 on professional writing, with its brilliant discussion of George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891). Austin likens the novel’s antihero, journalist Jasper Milvain, to an automaton whose speed and efficiency allow him to thrive in the cutthroat late-Victorian literary marketplace. By contrast, novelist Edward Reardon is a throwback to an earlier era of literary realism and moral sincerity whose human rate of production dooms him to failure. The two- and three-decker novels he laboriously produces are old-fashioned, as are his mentalist views of literary composition and his adherence to the Romantic ideal of the literary genius. Milvain thus serves as an avatar of the new psychology, while Reardon represents older modes of thinking that privileged the mind or soul over mechanistic understandings of brain function. Gissing reveals clear sympathy with Reardon’s mentalism and his obsolescent literary values, and the novel ultimately condemns both “the climate of forced, frenetic activity” that made late-Victorian publishing inimical to sincere and ambitious writers like Reardon, and the erosion of mentalist values that accompanied this change (133). At the same time, Gissing’s...

"We Should Be That Iago": Counterfactual Sympathy and the Lyric "We" in Augusta Webster's Portraits and A Housewife's Opinions

Augusta Webster called her 1870 collection of poems Portraits, but according to a review in Nonconformist, title is misleading. The poems, reviewer explains, not portraits, but sketches, since Webster's of prevents her from achieving exacting objectivity required by true portraiture. (1) Specifically, reviewer claims that Webster's dramatic imagination overwhelms her critical faculty in poem Castaway. The poem, a first-person account of life of Eulalie, a contemporary high-class courtesan, is plausible as the kind of pleading a pure might offer on behalf of a sister but implausible as a monologue spoken by an actual prostitute. Referring to Eulalie's introspective account of her past, including a failed attempt to start a new life at a Magdalene refuge for women, reviewer reasons that [t]he woman who had resolution enough to subject herself to so keen a torture as all this remembrance and self-judgment involve, would have been able to break away from her entanglements, and could have borne discipline of 'the Refuge' (p. 417). In speculating about what would have been able to do if she had possessed a particular moral quality, reviewer invokes contemporary Victorian debates about women, moral responsibility, and social reform. More specifically, in phrasing that speculation as a statement--if a woman had resolution to produce such a self-searching text, she would have been able to bear Refuge--the reviewer makes use of a set of values that Webster's poem actively works to question, criticize, and re-form. (2) While critics have usefully pointed out ways in which Castaway addresses contemporary Victorian debates about prostitution, women's work and education, and Woman Question in general, argue that Webster engages with these discourses not only thematically but on level of sentence. (3) Examining Webster's own use of statement in Portraits and in essays that she collected in 1879 under title A Housewife's Opinions gives us access to a developing line of Webster's poetics and social thought. In these texts, Webster mounts a critique of thinking that so often shaped Victorian novel and Victorian literature of social reform, in which narratives feature contingencies leading to individual moral failure or redemption. As an alternative, Webster proposes a specifically poetic version of thinking, a mode refer to as counterfactual sympathy. In this mode, readers' identification with and radical sympathy for a poetic speaker produce expanded imaginative communities that can enact real social change: individual I is replaced by a collective we through reading of poetry. This essay traces development of Webster's poetics of we--from Portraits, in which Webster experimented with use of we as an alternative to I most often associated with both lyric and poetry, through A Housewife's Opinions, in which she codified these ideas into an extensive social and poetic theory--in order to demonstrate that Webster's goals as a political activist and her techniques as a poet are intimately linked. begin by considering statements in Castaway and in an essay from A Housewife's Opinions, Poets and Personal Pronouns, to show how Webster's poems served as a testing ground for theories of reform and social thought that she went on to develop in her essays. Eulalie in Castaway, attempting to imagine an alternative reality in which she might not have fallen or been cast away, tests multiple solutions to problem of prostitution by incorporating them into a series of statements and questions. Ultimately she rejects thinking as unproductive, as do speakers in many of other poems in Portraits. …

Amateur Hours: The Visual Interpretation of Tennyson’s Poetry in Two Manuscript Albums

This article seeks to gauge Victorian readers’ responses by looking not at how readers wrote about their experience of texts, but at how they responded to their reading visually. To this end, the article presents a case study of two Victorian manuscript albums from the Tennyson Research Collection in Lincoln, in which Tennyson’s poetry has been transcribed alongside amateur illustrations. While these items improve our understanding of nineteenth-century manuscript culture in a similar way to commonplace books or scrapbooks, their sustained attention to individual texts is distinctive. The private nature of amateur illustration, and the fact that the amateur illustrator’s interpretations remain implicit, can encode responses to texts that are less articulable in other media. The first album, which contains Tennyson’s ‘The Day-Dream’, sheds new light on the problems of signification posed by the poem’s multiple endings; the album shows a reader who uses amateur illustration to create the ‘meaning suited to his mind’ that is mentioned and then dismissed by Tennyson’s narrator. In the second album, a talented group of sisters, including the amateur artist Ella Taylor, illustrated the 1859 Idylls of the King. The sisters’ pairings of word and image interpret the original four-poem Idylls in significant ways, for example, mitigating Guinevere’s guilt through the editing of extracts, and tacitly revelling in Vivien’s triumph over Merlin via an arresting illustration of Vivien in motion. As such, the album intervenes in Victorian debates surrounding female character, as the Taylor sisters sympathize even with the villainesses of the Idylls.

ARTHUR HALLAM’S SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPH AND TENNYSON’S ELEGIAC TRACE

Blanche Warre Cornish's 1921–22tripartite memoir, “Memories of Tennyson,” begins in 1869 when she meets the poet by way of her parents’ friendship with Tennyson's neighbor, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (145) (Figure 1). The photograph that Cornish recalls as “psychophotography” is one instance of a trend in Victorian England of spirit photography that was first practiced around 1872 after it was imported from America, where William Mumler had developed it (Tucker 68; Doyle 2: 128). Reactions to these spirit photographs took various forms: while some viewers regarded them as a credible medium for communication with the dead, their detractors saw them as deliberate acts of deception. Others employed photography's spectral qualities for entertainment, such as the London Stereoscopic Company that had marketed photographs of angels, fairies, and ghosts for their customers’ amusement in the 1860s (Chéroux 45–53). By the time the “shadowy figure of a man” appears beside Arthur Hallam's erstwhile fiancé, Mrs. Jesse, Tennyson's sister, the practice had been subject to public intrigue and scandal as a part of broader and contentious Victorian debates about the status of photography as art or document. The already surreal qualities of Cornish's anecdote are amplified by Tennyson's question, “Is that Arthur?,” which entertains the possibility of Hallam being present in a visible, spectral form while unrecognized by his beloved friend.

Review

Reviewed by: German Popular Stories. By the Brothers Grimm. Adapted by Edgar Taylor ed. by Jack Zipes Jennifer Schacker (bio) German Popular Stories. By the Brothers Grimm. Adapted by Edgar Taylor. Edited by Jack Zipes. Kent, UK: Crescent Moon, 2012. 387 pp. The bicentennial anniversary of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen (KHM) generated renewed dialogue about the significance of that landmark publication, including the international scope of its influence in the nineteenth century and beyond. It is in this context that Crescent Moon has issued a reprint of the first English treatment of the Grimms’ fairy tales: Edgar Taylor’s German Popular Stories, with an introductory essay and appendixes by Jack Zipes. Working with the 1819 edition of the KHM, Taylor took many liberties as a translator, combining stories, Anglicizing names and titles, eliminating some religious references, downplaying violence and bloody detail, rendering threatening figures comical, and so on. Such choices have generated nearly 200 years of unfavorable critique (at least from many scholars), and Taylor has become a relatively obscure figure in fairy-tale studies today. Nevertheless, the 1823 edition of German Popular Stories, Translated from the Kinder und Haus Märchen [sic] Collected by M.M. Grimm, from Oral Tradition, illustrated by George Cruikshank and published by Charles Baldwyn, was an immensely popular and influential book. It was reprinted in 1824 and 1825, followed by a second volume in 1826 and a revised edition in 1837 (shortly before Taylor’s death). In fact, the publishing history of German Popular Stories rivals that of the KHM in its complexity. To begin with, Taylor was not the sole translator of the first volume, but neither his name nor that of his collaborator, David Jardine, appears on that book. Moreover, the edition of German Popular Stories cited most frequently—and the one on which this reprint edition is based—is a single-volume edition published by John Camden Hotten thirty years after Taylor’s death. The 1868 edition combined the contents of the 1823 and 1826 volumes and was introduced by John Ruskin (himself a small child when the book first appeared). The current volume is neither a facsimile edition nor an annotated one, but in addition to the introduction, Zipes has included [End Page 394] important documents as appendixes: Ruskin’s influential introductory essay from the 1868 edition (which offers a snapshot of later Victorian debates about the nature of the genre and its audiences); letters to Taylor from Sir Walter Scott and Taylor’s correspondence with the Grimms, all from the 1820s; and the opening pages and introduction to the 1837 edition of German Popular Stories, which firmly established Grimms’ fairy tales as English children’s literature. In his own introduction Zipes traces the complex history of German Popular Stories and offers critical context for what he calls “a revolutionary book” (16). Zipes argues persuasively that the success of German Popular Stories canonized Grimms’ fairy tales as English literature for children and established a specific vision of the fairy tale as viable print commodity. Importantly, Taylor’s interest in the KHM and his initial approach to the project were informed by the ideas and rhetoric of antiquarianism, and to his credit Taylor did address some of his editing choices in the notes he appended to each of the 1823 and 1826 editions, combined and included (with only minor emendations) in Hotten’s 1868 edition and also in the current Crescent Moon reprint. Those first editions of German Popular Stories stand as early examples of a marriage between popular print culture and scholarly discourse so characteristic of nineteenth-century British folklore study, and the Grimms’ own “small edition” of 1825 was inspired by the success of Taylor’s English book (see pages 26 and 360–66). Although Zipes addresses the ways in which both the Grimms and Taylor negotiated that borderline between scholarly and popular discourses, his main concern in the introductory essay is the role that Taylor played (perhaps inadvertently) in transforming the Grimms’ collection into “amusing popular reading material for children” (32). As a result, Zipes attends less than he might to the book’s history as a story of textual experimentation or the...

The Appeal of Panpsychism in Victorian Britain

This article argues that current trends in the humanities that embrace panpsychism, vibrant matter, object-oriented ontologies, and extended or dispersed conceptions of consciousness, could benefit from an examination of Victorian debates about panpsychism. The article does this by exploring panpsychism’s relation to Victorian theories of evolution, late nineteenth-century idealism, and above all to conversations about desire, will, and consciousness. The article suggests further that understanding Victorian panpsychism can illuminate key aspects of Victorian aesthetics: detail, pattern, and dispersal. Authors discussed include philosophers W.K. Clifford, William James, and May Sinclair; the article then turns to Victorian translations of Lucretius, the poetry of Swinburne, the designs of William Morris, and the literary theory of Vernon Lee.

Virginia Woolf and “The Third Generation”

Research Article| March 01 2014 Virginia Woolf and “The Third Generation” Mary Jean Corbett Mary Jean Corbett Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2014) 60 (1): 27–58. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2014-2007 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mary Jean Corbett; Virginia Woolf and “The Third Generation”. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 March 2014; 60 (1): 27–58. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2014-2007 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 by Hofstra University2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Essays You do not currently have access to this content.

Revelations of Romantic Childhood: Anna Jameson, Mary Howitt, and Victorian Women's Spiritual Autobiography

Anna Jameson and Mary Howitt, two Victorian professional women of letters, unusually chose to express their spiritual autobiographies through the popular narrative of childhood. They interpreted their childhood experience to embody and promote their adult religious views, Jameson in her 1854 ‘Revelation of Childhood’ and Howitt in her 1889 Autobiography. Both writers deploy images of childhood as popularised through Romantic discourse to achieve this. The child's association with innocence and natural wisdom lends authority to their views, and the idealisation of childhood imagination in particular lends itself to express the adult writers' commitment to ‘Romantic’ religion. Both use the childhood spiritual autobiography to protest against dogmatic, formalised religion in the name of a spirituality based on imagination and feeling. These self-constructions have feminist implications as the women reject patriarchal authorities to form independent religious views, and to implicitly claim a spiritual authority denied women in formal religious argument. These narratives thus constitute a striking intervention into Victorian faith debates, as well as forming a distinctive contribution to traditions of women's self-writing, and of Victorian spiritual autobiography.