Victorian Readers Research Articles

Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: "Belgravia" and Sensationalism (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: "Belgravia" and Sensationalism Helena Ifill (bio) Alberto Gabriele , Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: "Belgravia" and Sensationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2009), pp. xxvii + 275, $80 cloth. Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print is a wide-ranging exploration of the "trope of sensationalism" in the Victorian periodical press. Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Belgravia is focussed upon as a "unique example in the history of miscellanies" (28), but also as a case study for considering the ways in which we can approach periodical research. Alberto Gabriele's work is especially important because few single issues of Belgravia complete with paratextual material exist, and he has attempted to piece together, as much as possible, the Victorian reader's experience. Although not all readers would have read "a single issue as a complete unit" (42) from cover to cover, Gabriele effectively argues that researchers should be attentive to the montage effect produced by reading a single issue of Belgravia containing stories, articles, advertisements, illustrations, and poetry. Connected to the notion of montage is the (sometimes oppositional) relationship between fragmentation and unity. The early chapters of this book associate both fragmentation and the periodical press with the shock of the sensational, modernity, and industrialization, and explore how periodicals are inherently fragmentary because of their diverse contents by different authors (including serialized novels delivered to the reader a fragment at a time). Yet Gabriele also argues for a sense of "symbolic cohesiveness that brings together the mosaic of perspectives and disparate stimuli that constitute the magazine" (35); he suggests this reflects the way in which late-Victorian society wove fragmentation "into a larger theory [End Page 99] of culture" (42). Included in this discussion is a consideration of the potentially disruptive influence of sensation fiction, which challenged the social status quo. Braddon's Belgravia as a whole is also shown to be at odds with late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century aesthetic theories, such as E.S. Dallas's The Gay Science (1866), which tend "towards abstraction that dismisses and finally erases the episodic and the fragmentary from artistic appreciation" (53). Chapters three and four consider various relationships between readers, periodicals, and contributors. This includes an assessment of the way in which Belgravia's audience was "defined by the fascination for the controversial issues that the novels appearing in installments provoked" (70); debates over author anonymity; an examination of Victorian advertisements, showing the shift towards "brand-name advertising, which imagined—and created—target niche markets" (84); and "industrial journalism," which took the reader behind the scenes of the factories that produced the items she or he was intended to covet. Gabriele finds in the diversity of advertising "a hidden symmetry of recurrent phrases," speaking a language "of an increased availability of products, of purported thrilling novelties, and of fabled universal access to luxury" (90). Chapter four also considers the anonymously serialized Bound to John Company, or the Adventures and Misadventures of Robert Ainsleigh, started, and later revised, by Braddon into Robert Ainsleigh but finished (due to her nervous breakdown) by an unknown author (1868-69). Gabriele shows how this novel (concerning the East India Company) sensationalises the "telling of British history" (83). Chapter five explores the relationship between popular periodical fiction and pre-cinematic entertainment. Gabriele argues that both periodical literature and magic lantern shows present "episodic" information "as part of a somewhat coherent fragmentary genre" (116), and that Belgravia achieved "the ability to strike the optic nerve with a quick and strong impression," much like a magic lantern slide (120). The chapter concludes by showing how early silent film often directly adapted sensation plots such as Lady Audley's Secret or, like Louis Feuillardes's Les Vampires (1915-16), drew on the sensational. The final chapter, "Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Paris," jumps back to the 1870s and 1880s with the promise of a discussion of Braddon's 1873 feuilleton novel La Chanteuse des rues, yet Braddon is disappointingly only mentioned briefly. Instead we have a discussion of French sensation fiction and the pros and cons of genre distinctions, especially in relation to "sensation" and "detective" fiction. The book concludes with a useful index to Belgravia's contents...

Darwin's special difficulty: the evolution of “neuter insects” and current theory

In the Origin of Species, Darwin discussed several challenges that worker insects presented to his theory of natural selection. Complex instincts such as building of combs of hexagonal cells were one problem and were explained by showing plausible intermediate stages. A more serious challenge was posed by the multiple worker castes seen in many ants. How could sterile individuals continue to evolve? A careful reading of the Origin suggests that Darwin was not primarily concerned by the evolution of worker sterility itself, which he considered a minor difficulty. Some modern commentaries on Darwin and insect workers seem to be cases of present interests interfering with the interpretation of the past. From a modern perspective, the evolution of a worker caste, and its corollary altruism, are evolutionary puzzles inasmuch as natural selection normally favors greater, not lesser, individual reproduction. These puzzles were resolved by Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness. We now have a good functional understanding of how natural selection can cause both the origin of workers and their elaboration into greater levels of sterility and multiple morphological castes. Mechanistic understanding of morphological castes is also increasing via research into alternative developmental pathways. When the Origin was written, genetics did not exist and it would have been virtually impossible for Darwin to elaborate such ideas. However, the Origin probably addressed the main questions in the minds of Victorian readers in relation to insect workers. Darwin was prescient in having insights with close relationships to modern-day interests and the key principles involved, including kinship and benefits to the colony, even if these are not exact precursors to modern thinking.

Toward a Book History of William Wordsworth's 1850Prelude

This essay argues for the necessity of a book history of the 1850 first edition of William Wordsworth's poem The Prelude, which is currently a liber non gratus: a marginalized, unwelcome book. Editing of and scholarship on The Prelude since 1926 have promoted earlier, manuscript versions at the expense of the 1850 edition, despite accepting it as a "fact of literary history". Thus, attention to the material life of the 1850 poem with Victorian readers — such as in criticism and biographies of Wordsworth, and the giving of books as gifts — recovers its significance to our conceptions of nineteenth-century literary history.

“TO FACE APPARENT DISCREPANCIES WITH REVELATION”: EXAMINING THE FOSSIL RECORD IN CHARLOTTE YONGE'S THE TRIAL

Charlotte Yonge placed religious belief at the centre of her world view, yet this did not prevent her from engaging with nineteenth-century geological theories traditionally associated with crises of faith, namely the discovery that the earth pre-dates the existence of humans by millions of years and that forms of life long extinct once populated its surface. Fossils, which call to mind both geological “deep time” and the extinction of species, figure prominently in her 1864 novel The Trial, and Yonge herself avidly collected fossils. Yonge represents fossils in The Trial as buried traces uncovered after an unfathomably long time, and this article will argue that they serve as metaphors for a divine providence which eventually reveals the truth, despite the apparent success of erroneous human judgement. Instead of symptoms of a deep religious anxiety, Yonge's fossils allowed Victorian readers to further appreciate the transcendence of God.

ADVERTISING AND FICTION INTHE PICKWICK PAPERS

It is well known that manyof Dickens's novels were published in monthly serial parts. Not so commonly known is that each of these monthly numbers consisted not only of Dickens's words and his illustrator's pictures but also a substantial advertising supplement. In the original serial numbers ofThe Pickwick Papers, the presence of advertising cannot escape notice. Before reaching the illustrations that precede the novel in each serial part, the Victorian reader would have encountered “The Pickwick Advertiser,” a paratextual supplement that consisted of page upon page of advertisements for all manner of commodities. At the end of the last chapter of the serial number were usually around ten further pages of advertising stitched in before the back cover (which was also filled with publicity material). Almost one third of the material text ofPickwickin parts consisted of advertising material (Hatton and Cleaver xiii).

A History of Victorian Literature (review)

Reviewed by: A History of Victorian Literature Juliet John (bio) A History of Victorian Literature, by James Eli Adams; pp. xii + 463. Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, £75.00, $157.95. Herbert F. Tucker’s foreword to James Eli Adams’s History of Victorian Literature waxes lyrical about its achievement in terms extravagant enough to arouse suspicion. After relatively conventional praise for the work as “a signal work of literary historiography,” Tucker’s conclusion is self-consciously hyperbolic: “It has been many decades, and several major reorientations in critical scholarship, since we last saw a literary-historical synopsis on this scale. Rejoicing to imagine this book representing our generation’s Victorianism to posterity, we must admit that to have Adams as our spokesman feels a little like boasting” (viii). Having spent days immersed in Adams’s History—this is a book that cannot properly be rushed and read—it is difficult to disagree with Tucker’s hymn of praise. This is a beautifully written, truly intelligent book that understands the Victorians. Reading this volume was a pleasure that brought home rather forcefully the relatively functional nature of so much professional academic prose. Part of the appeal of Adams’s History resides in the self-effacing way in which he situates the book as somewhere “between chronicle . . . and the ‘guide’” (ix). This book is explicitly about Victorian literature and only implicitly about professional Victorian studies and Adams’s stake in it. Key methodological questions are thus treated with common sense and a light touch. On the vexed question of how the term “Victorian” is defined, for example, Adams concentrates on the period between 1830 and 1901, but he makes no inevitably superficial claims for these dates as bookending the real history of Victorian literature, beginning the book with the death of Byron in 1824 and ending it with Anne Frank’s March 1944 diary entry: “Daddy read out loud to us from Dickens” (qtd. in Adams 433). Likewise, a decision seems to have been made throughout to associate the term Victorian with British literature written during this time, though authors and literatures from beyond the British Isles are included when they are judged to have significantly affected the history of Victorian literature. Again, though the volume is first and foremost A History of Victorian Literature, Adams clearly understands the extent to which the very idea of “Literature” was (and is) a shifting cultural construct: his text is thus very much a history of Victorian literature and culture, and could indeed have been so titled. Key to this metamorphic sense of Victorian literary culture is Adams’s decision to pay “a great deal of attention to Victorian reviews of major writers” (ix). Reviews enable us, Adams argues, to “crystallize what seems distinctive, sometimes strange, in Victorian structures of feeling” and to “see literary careers less as unbroken, fixed expanses and more as ongoing, changing constructions, within which Victorian readers confronted phenomena very different from what we encounter in our Penguins” (ix–x, x). Adams is honest about the study’s limitations: indeed, his regret about “not having more space for journalism, the economics of publishing, history, literature by [End Page 463] working-class authors, science writing, and writing from and about imperial dominions” perhaps underplays the extent to which these subjects are in fact discussed (x). The only note in Adams’s preface that jars a little is his intention “to give sustained attention to lesser-known authors and forms—most obviously, sensation fiction and the ‘new woman’ novel—not only because they change our understanding of more familiar landmarks, but because they offer neglected intrinsic pleasures” (xi). To describe sensation fiction and the New Woman novel as “lesser-known” and “neglected” seems a little outdated when in many universities, such texts—particularly sensation fiction—have been more of a staple of Victorian curricula than the Victorian “sages” for at least a decade. But this book has no doubt been a long time in the making. Though respectful of the traditional literary history of the period, and indeed of the Victorians’ own scales of literary value (which elevated sagacity over sensation), Adams’s History is generally far from outdated, however...

Who Put Kurtz on the Congo?

Who Put Kurtz on the Congo? Harry White (bio) and Irving L. Finston (bio) Our article included in this issue, "The Two River Narratives in 'Heart of Darkness,'" showed that Joseph Conrad imagined Kurtz's Inner Station to be located on the Kasai River and not on the Congo as has been generally assumed. We now ask how one of the most important, influential, and widely read and studied works of modern fiction has been so consistently and unquestioningly misread for so long on such a basic level. In what follows we show that something akin to a cover-up was initiated by the author regarding the location and direction of Charlie Mar-low'sc voyage. We will then reveal the primary source for many of the current interpretations and misinterpretations of "Heart of Darkness" by showing how one very influential scholar was the first to place Kurtz's station on the wrong river. Nowhere in any of his writings did Conrad report that Marlow's venture into the heart of darkness followed his own voyage from Stanley Pool to Stanley Falls. Nowhere in "Heart of Darkness" does it say that Marlow voyages up the Congo to find Kurtz. Yet critics and scholars have persisted in placing Kurtz's Inner Station on the Congo. This misunderstanding arose in large part from the fact that Conrad was anything but forthcoming about the direction of Marlow's voyage. He was informative when he noted for his publisher that "An Outpost of Progress" took place alongside the Kasai, but withheld the name of the river when writing to his other publisher about "Heart of Darkness" (CL 1: 294; CL 2: 139). Conrad kept from William Blackwood what he revealed to Thomas Fisher Unwin, that the narrative he hoped to have published took place on and alongside the Kasai River (we use the usual spelling and not Conrad's). After all, the Kasai would not likely have been known to either Blackwood or the British reading public. The "voyage Conrad outlines in his novella would have already been familiar to Victorian readers" only if his readers were to presume that the voyage he outlined takes place on the Congo (Griffith 23). The Congo after all was the subject of much adventure and controversy, as the doctor who examines [End Page 81] Marlow remarks: "'So you are going out there.' Famous. Interesting, too" ("Heart" 58). However, as Alexandre Delcommune observed two years before Conrad arrived in the Congo: "It is [. . .] scarcely six years since it [the Kasai] has been known" (221, translation White). Readers could very well have found Marlow's voyage much less interesting if they realized that it took place along a scarcely known river rather than a very famous one. There was a related problem. Conrad also informed Blackwood that his story dealt with a "subject [that] is of our time distinc[t]ly" (CL 2: 140); so if he were to be as precise and explicit about the direction of Marlow's voyage as he was about his own, readers might realize that the central episode in this work of fiction described a river journey that took the narrator far from the Belgian exploitation of the Congo River and its environs. Then the timely subject of the novella might be seriously compromised; and in the long run, "Heart of Darkness" might never have gained the reputation which it now enjoys of being "one of the most scathing indictments of imperialism in all literature" (Hochschild 146). We may gauge something of that concern by Conrad's remarks to R. B. Cunninghame Graham, a man with strong political convictions who had already expressed interest in the timely subject of the first parts of the novella. Conrad noted that the upriver portions he was composing did not deal so distinctly with the political issues of the time (CL 2: 157). Lastly, if Conrad had identified the river in the novella as the Congo or somehow indicated that it was based on that river, then anyone familiar with seamanship or that particular stretch of waterway could readily refute any claim that Marlow was supposedly traveling up the Congo, since the river and its environs which...

<em>A History of Victorian Literature</em>, by James Eli Adams

Reviewed by: A History of Victorian Literature Juliet John (bio) A History of Victorian Literature, by James Eli Adams; pp. xii + 463. Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, £75.00, $157.95. Herbert F. Tucker’s foreword to James Eli Adams’s History of Victorian Literature waxes lyrical about its achievement in terms extravagant enough to arouse suspicion. After relatively conventional praise for the work as “a signal work of literary historiography,” Tucker’s conclusion is self-consciously hyperbolic: “It has been many decades, and several major reorientations in critical scholarship, since we last saw a literary-historical synopsis on this scale. Rejoicing to imagine this book representing our generation’s Victorianism to posterity, we must admit that to have Adams as our spokesman feels a little like boasting” (viii). Having spent days immersed in Adams’s History—this is a book that cannot properly be rushed and read—it is difficult to disagree with Tucker’s hymn of praise. This is a beautifully written, truly intelligent book that understands the Victorians. Reading this volume was a pleasure that brought home rather forcefully the relatively functional nature of so much professional academic prose. Part of the appeal of Adams’s History resides in the self-effacing way in which he situates the book as somewhere “between chronicle . . . and the ‘guide’” (ix). This book is explicitly about Victorian literature and only implicitly about professional Victorian studies and Adams’s stake in it. Key methodological questions are thus treated with common sense and a light touch. On the vexed question of how the term “Victorian” is defined, for example, Adams concentrates on the period between 1830 and 1901, but he makes no inevitably superficial claims for these dates as bookending the real history of Victorian literature, beginning the book with the death of Byron in 1824 and ending it with Anne Frank’s March 1944 diary entry: “Daddy read out loud to us from Dickens” (qtd. in Adams 433). Likewise, a decision seems to have been made throughout to associate the term Victorian with British literature written during this time, though authors and literatures from beyond the British Isles are included when they are judged to have significantly affected the history of Victorian literature. Again, though the volume is first and foremost A History of Victorian Literature, Adams clearly understands the extent to which the very idea of “Literature” was (and is) a shifting cultural construct: his text is thus very much a history of Victorian literature and culture, and could indeed have been so titled. Key to this metamorphic sense of Victorian literary culture is Adams’s decision to pay “a great deal of attention to Victorian reviews of major writers” (ix). Reviews enable us, Adams argues, to “crystallize what seems distinctive, sometimes strange, in Victorian structures of feeling” and to “see literary careers less as unbroken, fixed expanses and more as ongoing, changing constructions, within which Victorian readers confronted phenomena very different from what we encounter in our Penguins” (ix–x, x). Adams is honest about the study’s limitations: indeed, his regret about “not having more space for journalism, the economics of publishing, history, literature by [End Page 463] working-class authors, science writing, and writing from and about imperial dominions” perhaps underplays the extent to which these subjects are in fact discussed (x). The only note in Adams’s preface that jars a little is his intention “to give sustained attention to lesser-known authors and forms—most obviously, sensation fiction and the ‘new woman’ novel—not only because they change our understanding of more familiar landmarks, but because they offer neglected intrinsic pleasures” (xi). To describe sensation fiction and the New Woman novel as “lesser-known” and “neglected” seems a little outdated when in many universities, such texts—particularly sensation fiction—have been more of a staple of Victorian curricula than the Victorian “sages” for at least a decade. But this book has no doubt been a long time in the making. Though respectful of the traditional literary history of the period, and indeed of the Victorians’ own scales of literary value (which elevated sagacity over sensation), Adams’s History is generally far from outdated, however...

The Designer’s Eye: Ancient Spanish Ballads, Poetry, and the Rise of Decorative Design

In 1841 John Murray published a sumptuously ornamented edition of John Gibson Lockhart’s Ancient Spanish Ballads. Murray’s new edition, printed using the very latest bookmaking technologies and pitched at a readership newly accustomed to paying exorbitant prices for book ornaments and illustrations, was radically different from the first edition of Lockhart’s ballads, which had appeared without accompanying ornament in 1823. Illustrated by the leading illustrators of the day and decorated throughout in multiple colors by the architect Owen Jones (who would go on to become famous as a Superintendent of the Great Exhibition and the author of The Grammar of Ornament), Murray’s edition represents a stunning departure in Victorian printing and a highpoint in mid-Victorian design generally. At the same time, it crystallizes a debate about the nature and application of artistic design that was beginning to emerge in the early years of Victoria’s reign and that would erupt with maximum vigor ten years later in the confrontation between John Ruskin and the South Kensington School. The tension between flat, stylized design and what Ruskin was later to term “truth to nature” is already palpable in the conflict between illustrations and ornaments to Murray’s book. However, it was the involvement of Owen Jones that especially distinguished the volume, as it gave Jones the opportunity to demonstrate in a practical way ideas about design, color, and style that he would theorize fifteen years later in The Grammar of Ornament. Those ideas are especially resonant today, given recent work on the history of the book and the “bibliographic codes” of literature, since the effect of Jones’s work is to expose the textual condition of Lockhart’s poetry itself and to harness the eye as an active constituent in the act of reading. Fifty years before the work of William Morris at the Kelmscott Press, Jones and Murray showed Victorian readers that a printed book might be a thing of real beauty and that poetry, no less than painting or architecture, is dependent on the perceptual structure of its textual vehicle.

Swinburne and Thackeray’s The Newcomes

In Home Life of Swinburne (1922), Clara Watts-Dunton, widow of Swinburne's close friend and latter-day guardian Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton, details the domestic habits and routine of the poet as she observed them at Pines, Putney, after her marriage in November 1905. Clara Watts-Dunton's biography is sometimes mocked for its banality, but nonetheless remains valuable record of Swinburne's last years, providing useful information about his writing habits, friendships, literary and other tastes. Moreover, Clara's seemingly artless chatty style belies the fact that she was almost aware of certain chapters in the poet's private history--something she hints at obliquely in the following comment: He was, I remember, extremely fond of Thackeray. The was one of his favourite novels, and Ethel Newcome was his favourite heroine in fiction. Ethel, I have always thought, must have appealed to him as resembling some member of his own family, perhaps one of his sisters. (1) When Swinburne first read Thackeray's Newcomes is not clear. He was sixteen when the first monthly number of the novel came out in serial form in October 1853, with the last number appearing in August 1855. He was from child voracious reader and had already formed an enduring passion for Dickens whose novels were being published in serial form during his schooldays. (2) Swinburne's future friend, Edward Burne-Jones wrote an earnest essay on the Newcomes in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, the journal he founded with William Morris, which was published in January 1856, the month Swinburne entered Balliol College. Swinburne had certainly read the novel by February 25, 1860, because we find him alluding to one of its characters, Sir Barnes Newcome, in letter to William Bell Scott (Letters, 1:32). Three years later he would meet himself along with his two daughters during Easter (April) 1863, at Fryston, the home of Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton. Thackeray's daughter, the author Annie Ritchie, who would remain lifelong friend of Swinburne's, famously described her first impressions of the poet for his biographer Edmund Gosse, noting her father's sympathetic liking for the young man. (3) Unfortunately there was no chance for deeper relationship to develop as died on December 24 that same year. Newcomes, which for Henry James ranked among the novels he described as large loose baggy monsters, does not appeal as much to modern tastes as Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847-8), but was, with Henry Esmond (1852), considered by the Victorians to be one of his two most important books. (4) Burne-Jones wrote that last and greatest work of Mr Thackeray had done good work for society in giving us this story of manner of life so faithfully and tenderly, and offering a wonderfully faithful picture of the great world as it passes daily before us, many-sided, deeply intricate. (5) Set in the 1830s and 1840s, Newcomes, is nonetheless for modern readers an illuminating, often satirical guide to the period, documenting the manners and morals, the triumphs and crises that constitute what the subtitle of the novel somewhat sardonically refers to as History of Most Respectable Family. Of that family the figure who most won favor with Victorian readers was Colonel Thomas Newcome, simple, sincere, an exemplum of the benevolent gentleman. His fortunes and disappointments are contrasted with those of his more worldly-wise and aspirant twin half-brothers Hobson and Brian (later Sir Brian) Newcome. Though not without flaw and capable of woeful misjudgement, Colonel Newcome emerges as the epitome of noble, upright behavior in adversity, his eventual demise entailing one of Victorian literature's most celebrated and edifying deathbed scenes. Swinburne, although he liked the character of the Colonel--and cherished an engraving of him--was not an uncritical admirer, commenting judiciously in his short monograph A Note on Charlotte Bronte (1877) that our sense of his intellectual infirmity and imperfection is never quite overcome or transfigured by sense of his moral and chivalrous excellence. …

Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: travel, empire, and the author's profession

Robert Louis Stevenson's departure from Europe in 1887 coincided with a vocational crisis prompted by his father's death. Impatient with his established identity as a writer, Stevenson was eager to explore different ways of writing, at the same time that living in the Pacific stimulated a range of latent intellectual and political interests. Roslyn Jolly examines the crucial period from 1887 to 1894, focusing on the self-transformation wrought in Stevenson's Pacific travel-writing and political texts. Jolly shows how Stevenson's desire to understand unfamiliar Polynesian and Micronesian cultures, and to record and intervene in the politics of Samoa, gave him opportunities to use his legal education, pursue his interest in historiography, and experiment with anthropology and journalism. Thus as his geographical and cultural horizons expanded, Stevenson's professional sphere enlarged as well, stretching the category of authorship in which his successes as a novelist had placed him. Rather than enhancing his stature as a popular writer, however, Stevenson's experiments with new styles and genres, and the Pacific subject matter of his later works, were resisted by his readers. Jolly's analysis of contemporary responses to Stevenson's writing, gleaned from an extensive collection of reviews, many of which are not readily available, provides fascinating insights into the interests, obsessions, and resistances of Victorian readers. As Stevenson sought to escape the vocational straightjacket that confined him, his readers just as strenuously expressed their loyalty to outmoded images of Stevenson the author, and their distrust of the new guises in which he presented himself.

An Artist at Odds with Himself and His World

An Artist at Odds with Himself and His World Henry Hart (bio) Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life by Paul Mariani (Viking, 2008. 496 pages. $34.95) Having begun his scholarly career with A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins and having recently published the memoir Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius, Paul Mariani is well suited to write a biography of Hopkins. Although other biographies of the Victorian poet exist, Mariani's familiarity with St. Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises gives him a unique perspective since it was this book that guided much of Hopkins's religious career and many of his finest poems. The fact that the subjects of Mariani's last three biographies—Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman—were deeply influenced by Hopkins also makes Mariani especially well qualified to write about the poet's life and legacy. To distinguish his biography from preceding ones, Mariani took a chance by composing it as a journal. For the most part his colloquial style, constant use of the present tense, and numerous quotations from Hopkins's journals give the impression that he—Mariani—is a fellow traveler, a kind of latter-day Boswell recording what his subject is drinking, worrying about, looking at, writing, and reading on particular days. The narrative structure provides a sense of immediacy and intimacy that more formal biographies sometimes lack. As Michael Dirda has pointed out in Book World, Mariani does a good job of tracing the upheavals in Hopkins's spiritual and artistic life, but "also includes the kind of human details that vivify a biography." Mariani begins his story in medias res—on July 18, 1866—when Hopkins will soon turn twenty-two and make his momentous conversion from the Anglican faith of his parents to the Roman Catholicism of his mentor, John Henry Newman. Mariani backtracks to discuss the impulses behind this conversion, returns to Hopkins's birth date (July 28, 1844) for a discussion of his family and upbringing, then jumps forward to August 28, 1866, for a fuller account of the conflicts engendered by his conversion. What emerges from Mariani's narrative is a portrait of an artist at odds with himself, his parents, his poetic contemporaries, his country, and even his fellow Jesuits, whose religious order he joined in 1868. Like many of the modernists who followed him, Hopkins was a baffling mix of revolutionary and reactionary attitudes. His first act of rebellion was against his parents' religious principles. According to his father, this rebellion was devastating: "His determination to join the Church of Rome," his father wrote an Oxford minister, was a "blow . . . so deadly & great that we have not yet recovered from the first shock of it." His second most significant rebellion was poetic. Although as a poet he employed traditional stanzaic and rhyming patterns and wrote about traditional Victorian subjects such as God and nature, his idiosyncratic syntax and obscure diction were calculated to disorient the audience of the day. Perhaps realizing the effect his poems [End Page lxxiii] would have on Victorian readers, he was shy about circulating them. In the end he showed them to only three or four people. His closest friend, the future poet laureate of England, Robert Bridges, confirmed his fears of an unsympathetic audience when he mocked his most ambitious experiment, "The Wreck of the Deutschland." Bridges vowed never to read the poem again, no matter how much money he was paid. Years after Hopkins died, Bridges decided to publish the poems Hopkins had sent him in manuscript, but he continued to lampoon "The Wreck of the Deutschland" as "a great dragon folded in the gate to forbid all entrance" to Hopkins's oeuvre. The fact that Hopkins remained loyal to his insulting friend says something about his own divisions and self-loathing. It was almost as if he internalized his conservative critics and partly agreed with them. Contemptuous of the poems he wrote before becoming a Jesuit, he burned them, vowed to write no more, and, when he could not help writing more and when a periodical (The Month) rejected "The Wreck of the Deutschland" and "The Loss of...

Scott’s Victorian Readers

This essay considers the degree to which Sir Walter Scott’s novels were available to Victorian readers. To answer some of the questions about his popularity and status, and types of readerships, it...

The Victorian studies reader - Edited by Kelly Boyd and Rohan McWilliam

The Victorian studies reader - Edited by Kelly Boyd and Rohan McWilliam

Editorial


 
 
 The cover of this issue of Papers features an image which appears in the First Book of the Victorian Readers, originally published in 1928. As Jane McGennisken demonstrates in her essay on Australian mythologies of childhood in the Tasmanian and Victorian readers, the literary texts selected for these readers represent Australian children as innocent inhabitants of a young country, a conceit also proposed by Ethel Turner at the beginning of Seven Little Australians: ‘the land and the people are young-hearted together’. McGennisken argues that these imaginings of an innocent Australian childhood are analogous with mythologies of an innocent nation, which act to divert attention from the (less innocent) histories of imperialism fundamental to the nation’s foundation. Another preoccupation of the readers is the idea of the child as leader, in stories about courageous children like Grace Bussell, who in rescuing the victims of a shipwreck demonstrates the qualities of Australian girlhood by exercising a motherly concern. The readers constitute an important component of reading material for Australian children from the late 19th century until the 1940s; the online database AustLit: the Australian Literature Resource now includes a section on the Victorian Readers and the Victorian School Papers, at: http://www.austlit.edu.au/ (go to ’research Communities’, ‘Australian Children’s Literature’ and ‘the Victorian Classroom’).
 
 

Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday : The Geography of Class in Late-Victorian Britain

A regular feature of Ally Sloper's Half-Holiday, an illustrated comic newspaper published from 1884 until 1923?though sporadically after 1916, is Ally Sloper's travels in and around London and to the seaside.1 Ally's journeys and their chronicling by his daughter Tootsie serve as kind of travel literature for the working-class and lower-middle-class readership of the paper. On one hand, Tootsie's accounts of Poor Papa running afoul of Victorian ideas about social decorum, whether at the seaside, back stage at a music hall, at Ascot, at the Lord Mayor's Ball, in the pit at Drury Lane, at the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, or countless other places, are mere back drop for the paper's jokes and satires. On the other hand, the vast range of locales and events visited by Ally and his motley band of companions serves to give us a sense of the types of places the varied readership of Ally Sloper's Half-Holiday (ASHH) may have visited in search of leisure. These travelogues tell us what the Victorian readership of the paper may have actually done (or hoped to do) while there. I emphasis the Victorian readership of the paper because even though ASHH continued publishing well into the twentieth century, I am largely concerned with the Victorian versions of the paper and have confined my discussion and examples to the 1880s and 1890s. Beyond telling us where the paper's Victorian readers may have gone on their holidays and showing us what they may have done once there, ASHH engages in a sustained critique of class. In short, ASHH operates as a satirical geography of leisure and class of the late-Victorian era in which physical and class boundaries are overcome with a degree of ease and even shown to be unimportant. In its critique of late-Victorian class, we can see the ways in which popular culture has the potential to

‘A little child shall lead them’: Tasmanian and Victorian School Readers and National Growth


 
 
 Reading, one of the ‘three Rs’ still fundamental to educational theory and reconceptualisations of literacy teaching and learning, is a complex socio-cultural practice. Recent attacks on critical literacy approaches to teaching English reveal that what children are taught to read, and how they are taught to read it, is value-laden and contentious (Slattery 2005, p.31). Critics argue for a ‘back to basics’ approach to teaching a love of reading, a reaction to the ‘postmodern literary theory [that] has infiltrated our schools at the expense of comprehension and expression’ (ibid). Yet these same critics appear unaware that the link between children’s literature and ideology was both recognised by, and institutionalised in, Australian school textbooks of nearly 80 years ago. Indeed, in the 1928 preface to the eighth book, the first of the Victorian Readers to be published, the editorial committee was explicit in its intended literary production of young Australians.
 
 

Reviews: Northern English: A Social and Cultural History, Foxe's ‘Book of Martyrs' and Early Modern Print Culture, Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions 1500–1760, Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England: The Material Life of the Household, Shakespeare's Histories and Counter Histories, the Uses of History in Early Modern England, Women and the Pamphlet Culture of

Reviews: Northern English: A Social and Cultural History, Foxe's ‘Book of Martyrs' and Early Modern Print Culture, Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions 1500–1760, Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England: The Material Life of the Household, Shakespeare's Histories and Counter Histories, the Uses of History in Early Modern England, Women and the Pamphlet Culture of

Anonymity, Corporate Authority, and the Archive: The Production of Authorship in Late-Victorian England

This essay considers the persistence of collective and corporate models of literary authority within late-Victorian literature and print culture. While modern critics often understand Victorian authorship to be individually centered and governed by a dynamic of secrecy and disclosure, the periodical debates about anonymity that intensified in the fin de siècle suggest that Victorian readers and writers embraced a more flexible, collective notion of authorship. The plot, language, and paratext of Mary Elizabeth Hawker's pseudonymously published Mademoiselle Ixe, as well as the author-publisher correspondence concerning the novel, offer a representation of the corporate and collective interpretive modes that would have been familiar to late-Victorian readers, if not to recent critics. Hawker's text and the archival material it brings to light also suggest that modern readers might productively turn to the Victorian past to expand the definitions of authorship that circulate throughout nineteenth-century scholarship today.

Butler's Savage, Paley's Watch

AMONG the more enduring arguments for a divine creation of the universe, there is one that is seldom adduced without some reference to the scholar and divine who advanced it in 1802, as his last reply to Hume. Suppose, writes William Paley, sometime Archdeacon of Carlisle, that ‘in crossing a heath … I pitched my foot against a stone, I might imagine that it had lain there for ever; if, on the other hand, I were to come upon a watch, I would be forced to surmise1 that the watch must have had a maker, that there must have existed, at some time and in some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction and designed its use’. Until it was restored to the common reader by Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker,2 this passage owed its infamy to tendentious paraphrase and trite allusion. Even before the original had disappeared from bookshops, it was possible for Samuel Butler to offer a different version of the conceit to Victorian readers, though still under Paley's name. When the protagonist of his best-known book arrives in Erewhon, he is surprised by the ‘grave displeasure’ which the inhabitants show on discovering his watch:3 I remember how when they first found it, I had thought of Paley, and how he tells us that a savage on seeing a watch, would at once conclude that it was designed. True, these people were not savages, but I none the less felt sure this was the conclusion that they would arrive at; and I was thinking what a wonderfully wise man Archbishop Paley must have been… Let such a sphere to India be convey’d, As Archimede13 or modern Hugens14 made; Will not the Indian, though untaught and rude, This work th’ effect of wise design conclude? You own a watch th’ invention of the mind, Though for a single motion ‘tis designed, As well as that which is with greater thought, With various springs, for greater motions wrought.