Victorian Review Research Articles

Editors’ Note

Editors’ Note Mary Elizabeth Leighton, Judith Mitchell, and Lisa Surridge In this special issue of Victorian Review, we welcome guest editors Joy Dixon and Naomi Hetherington, who have assembled a rich collection of articles on the fascinating and timely topic of religion and sexuality. To complement this theme, the Victorian Review forum focuses on the theme of chapter and verse. We challenged experts in religion, literature, and history to examine the importance of one passage from a key religious text and to explain its importance in the period. We are excited by the provocative responses we received, from Emma Mason’s analysis of poetic references to Psalm 130 and Timothy Larsen’s explorations of race politics and Acts 17:26 to Clinton Bennett’s exploration of retribution in Qur’an 2:178. Finally, we thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for awarding us a further three-year grant in support of the journal. the Victorian Review editorial team [End Page 1] Copyright © 2011 Victorian Studies of Western Canada

The Crimean War in the British Imagination (review)

Reviewed by: The Crimean War in the British Imagination May Caroline Chan (bio) Stefanie Markovits, The Crimean War in the British Imagination (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. xi + 287, $95 cloth. Many readers will never look at a balaclava or a cardigan the same way after reading this engaging study about the Crimean War’s underexamined legacy in mid-Victorian novels, poetry, visual culture, and journalistic practices. Stefanie Markovits asks why this significant military conflict seems to have left little visible impress on mid-Victorian culture besides the figure of Florence Nightingale, Lord Cardigan’s name, and the woollen souvenir from the Balaklava battlefield. Answering the question shows how a vexed public sentiment produced a complicated, troubled response toward what ultimately became a failed war, and how a new journalism gave voice to this ambivalence. Markovits provides an extensive treatment of the Times, especially in the first chapter, while the subsequent chapters use the Examiner, the Illustrated London News, and Punch to present the new interactive journalistic practice influencing authors and artists attempting to capture the conflicted patriotism and wrestling with the implications of a stillborn British military masculinity at midcentury. The first and third chapters are notable in their ability to reexamine texts for their responses to public discourse about the Crimean War’s problems within a newspaper context. This is not to say the other chapters are not periodical-oriented, but that these two chapters offer instructive ways of performing work with periodicals and are impressive in persuading readers to reconsider the long but previously hidden reach of Crimean war discourse. The first chapter presents a compelling examination of how the Crimean War changed journalistic practices by situating it firmly within a mutual participatory relationship with its reading public, boosting a democratic journalism and the editorial power to influence policy (or to motivate individuals, such as Nightingale, to act). Markovits details how readers’ letters to the editor in the Times took on increased significance for their ability to supply much-needed information about conditions in the Crimea from soldiers’ letters, complementing war correspondents’ reports and responding to the imagined conditions. This dynamic is echoed in the third chapter, where Markovits shows how difficult it was for Tennyson to sympathize with Lord Cardigan’s “blunder” at Balaklava in his poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Markovits sees his hesitation as resulting from a belief that “a journalist is the Homer of this age . . . . The poet’s ‘frenzy’ is thus simultaneously a mark of excess and of sham” (126). The creation of Tennyson’s iconic poem was an exercise in negotiating the credibility [End Page 448] and relevancy gaps, as well as solidifying the troubling wartime identity. It would have been interesting to hear more on Markovits’s thoughts about the famous recording of Tennyson’s reading of this poem in relation to these reflections. After consistent close readings of numerous texts and newspaper articles in her chapters, Markovits achieves her goal of arguing persuasively that “the influence of the war on the literature and art of the day was broader than has been recognized . . . and that the relative paucity of more straightforward responses to the conflict may have owed something to the difficulty in embodying its ‘incidents’ and ‘details’ in a suitably patriotic fashion, not to mention a ‘picturesque’ one” (212). May Caroline Chan The College of Saint Rose May Caroline Chan May Caroline Chan is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. Her specialties lie in travel literature and Rudyard Kipling. Her most recent essays are “Orientalism Multiplied: Rudyard Kipling’s View of Easternness in India and East Asia” in On and Off the Page: Mapping Place in Text and Culture (2009) and “Canton 1857” in the upcoming Victorian Review special forum, “Beyond Britain.” Copyright © 2011 The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

Persephone Rises, 1860-1927: Mythography, Gender, and the Creation of a New Spirituality (review)

Reviewed by: Persephone Rises, 1860-1927: Mythography, Gender, and the Creation of a New Spirituality Sharon Aronofsky Weltman (bio) Persephone Rises, 1860-1927: Mythography, Gender, and the Creation of a New Spirituality by Margot K. Louis; pp. xvi +171. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. $117.31. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's goddess gazes unsmilingly from the cover of Margot Louis's new book, Persephone Rises. She holds her glowing pomegranate open, showing the fatal seeds that promise pain and terrible joy, a fit icon for the Victorian and Modernist uses of the myth that this monograph examines. Louis argues for Demeter and Persephone as an "ideal nexus" for considering nineteenth-century reactions to rape, negotiations between Christianity and alternative spiritualities, and explorations of mother-daughter relationships. Persephone Rises joins a growing number of important books studying the conjunction of myth and gender in Victorian literature and culture that go back at least as far as Nina Auerbach's Woman and the Demon and include Adrienne Munich's Andromeda's Chains, Dinah Birch's Ruskin's Myths, and Nina daVinci Nichols's Ariadne's Lives. Citing Frank Turner, Robert Ackerman, and Catherine Gallagher, Louis responds to "the specific historical and cultural contingencies informing each mythopoeic text rather than asserting a universal and transcendental value reaffirmed in each appearance of the myth." Leaving behind what came to be derisively called the "myth-lit-crit" of the 1970s and 80s, Louis participates in "a new myth criticism—employing the methods of historicist and cultural studies" (xi). The introduction outlines two trends in Victorian mythography that helped bring Persephone into prominence: a growing interest in Greek chthonic ritual as mediating death (in contrast to the Homeric Olympians as representing immortality) and a gradually increasing respect for ancient Greek religion as genuine faith rather than mere superstition. Chapter 1 usefully compares the myth's classical sources: the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, discovered in a Moscow stable in 1777 and a crucial influence on the Victorians; Ovid's Metamorphosis; and Claudian's De raptu Proserpinae. Louis moves on to Chaucer, Shakespeare (the first to focus on Persephone's experience rather than her mother's), and Milton. Each creates a paradigm that subsequent British and American authors have followed: a sardonic take on women's domination by patriarchal institutions, a story of growing feminine power that culminates in happy reunion, and a prophesy of Christian resurrection, a vision to which many Victorians clung while more radical ways of seeing the myth emerged. The chapter continues with a powerful reading of Mary Shelley's closet drama Proserpine, in which "we hear the mother's rage and rebellion against the male powers that have bereaved her of her child" (35). A glance at Hawthorne's tale "The Pomegranate Seeds," with its Pollyanna-like Persephone, brings in Margaret Fuller, whose "Conversations" shift Persephone from the helpless child of Ovid and Milton and from Wordsworthian affect to an emphasis on intellectual maturation. Far-reaching and erudite, both chapters 1 and 2 analyze the contributions of [End Page 247] Victorian mythographers such as Max Müller, Karl Otfried Müller, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Jane Ellen Harrison. Of greatest interest to Victorian Review readers are chapters 2, 3, and 4. Chapter 2 reads Jean Ingelow and Dora Greenwell's Persephone poems compellingly through the lens of J.J. Bachofen's theory that matriarchy preceded patriarchy and of McLennan's notion that patriarchal marriages were originally based on the brutal capture of wives. Both Ingelow and Greenwell depict marriage as a violent tragedy that severs the primary bond between mother and daughter. A well-known Swinburne scholar, Louis shines brilliantly in chapter 3, exploring at length his focus on Proserpine as the queen of the underworld and teasing out the tensions between oblivion and immortality, pessimism and the life force, raised not only in Swinburne but also in Mathilde Blind, Tennyson, Walter Pater, D.G. Rossetti, George Meredith, and Edith Wharton. While in many ways the book's most exciting chapter, replete with beautiful and persuasive readings, it also includes the book's most awkward moment, abruptly referring several times to a very brief appendix on the origins of fin de siècle pessimism that...

“Will he rise and recover[?]”: Catullus, Castration, and Censorship in Swinburne’s “Dolores”

I beg you ... do not seek to castrate my poems. Than a Priapus Cybele's priest nothing more disgusting. --Martial, Epigrams I.35 (1) Old poets outsing and outlove us, And Catullus makes mouths at our speech. --Dolores, ll. 339-340 (2) Swinburne is Victorian poet who most obviously devoted to (3) so it not surprising to find speaker of Dolores invoking ancient poet in order to measure degradation of poetry under moralistic constraints of this ghastly, thin-faced time of ours (Faustine, l. 139). As George M. Ridenour remarks, Swinburne's writings often position Catullus as a kind of Roman Gautier, a poet of art for art's sake, (4) which effectively recruits elder poet an ally in battle against the prurient prudery and virulent virtue of Victorian reviewers, (5) which Swinburne launched with publication of Poems and Ballads (1866). Swinburne's dubious choice of poetic company was not left unnoticed by hostile reviewers of volume: Mr. Swinburne's last volume of poems, though Catullus need not have blushed for some, will not suit our present civilization. (6) Another irate critic was prompted to ask (and answer): Should we tolerate a Catullus now, however exquisitely he hymned his uncongenial objects of worship? No! (7) And finally, in a premonition of Fleshly School scandal, Robert Buchanan observed that the 'lepidum novum libellum' [of Catullus] seems to me really an work, and I wish that dry pumice-stone had rubbed out at least half of poems: If an Englishman to-day were to write like Catullus ... we should hound him from our libraries. (8) Considering readiness of contemporary reviewers to associate Swinburne's poetry with immoral work of Catullus, of which they (like Swinburne himself) were familiar from their school days, it should be unsurprising to find Swinburne both anticipating and exploiting these associations by embedding his direct reference to Roman poet in an erudite and complex web of allusions designed to comment wickedly (albeit obliquely) on state of moralistic Victorian criticism, literary censorship, and even pedagogical and curricular policies of public school education. The image of Catullus mak[ing] mouths at our speech (l. 340) occurs roughly two-thirds of way through a (second) vision of (l. 329), extending roughly from lines 297 to 368, conjured-up by speaker to please his dark goddess: thou dream of what was and no more is, / The old kingdoms of earth and kings? / Dost thou hunger for these things, Dolores, / For these, in a world of new things? (ll. 257-260). The direct reference to Catullus occurs after vision disrupted by arrival of an aggressive rival to Dolores: From midmost of Ida, from shady / Recesses that murmur at morn, / They have brought and baptized her, Lady, / A goddess new-born (ll. 333-336). Our Lady Cybele, Great Mother (or Mother of Gods), whose cult was centred in Pessinos near Mount Dindymus (l. 345). She was also associated with Mount Ida (l. 333) in Phrygia (l. 330), and often depicted with her chariot-drawing lions (l. 346) (PB no mother of Gods or God; no Cybele, served by sexless priests or monks, adored of Origen or of Atys; no likeness of her in Dindymus or Loreto (Swinburne Replies, p. …

Editors' Note

Editors' Note Rebecca Gagan, Mary Elizabeth Leighton, Judith Mitchell, and Lisa Surridge Recent critical work in disability studies has suggested disability as another mode of analysis alongside class, race, gender, and sexuality in the understanding of culture. This special issue of Victorian Review takes on the topic of Victorian disability. In our special forum on Victorian prostheses, contributors contemplate how addition, substitution, and extension have come to define the nature of both the body and the body politic. Understood in this light, the concept of the prosthesis includes everything from telescopes and baby incubators to artificial intelligence. Participating scholars write on technological and political as well as physical prostheses, challenging themselves (and us) to consider what the history of the prosthesis tells us about Victorian ideas of limits and the desire to expand, of ability and disability. For the articles in this volume, we welcome guest editors Jennifer Esmail (Rutger's University) and Christopher Keep (University of Western Ontario). Under their guidance, contributors consider how a focus on ableness not only complicates traditional readings of gender, class, race, and sexuality in the period but also throws into relief the challenges that disability studies pose for Victorian studies. [End Page 7] Copyright © 2009 Victorian Studies of Western Canada

Review: A Brontë Encyclopedia, by Robert Barnard and Louise Barnard

Book Review| December 01 2008 Review: A Brontë Encyclopedia, by Robert Barnard and Louise Barnard Robert Barnard and Louise BarnardA Brontë Encyclopedia. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Pp. xii + 397. $99.95. Beth E. Torgerson Beth E. Torgerson Assistant Professor of English at Eastern Washington University, and author of Reading the Brontë Body: Disease, Desire, and the Constraints of Culture (2005) as well as articles in the Victorian Review and Disability Studies Quarterly. She is currently working on a project on Thomas Hardy. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (2008) 63 (3): 417–420. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2008.63.3.417 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Beth E. Torgerson; Review: A Brontë Encyclopedia, by Robert Barnard and Louise Barnard. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 December 2008; 63 (3): 417–420. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2008.63.3.417 Download citation file: Ris (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 All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2008 by The Regents of the University of California2008 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World by Amanda Claybaugh (review)

249 Reviews The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World by Amanda Claybaugh; pp. 246. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2007. $45.00 cloth. This book offers a compelling perspective on the history of reform, the history of literary realism, and the history of that somewhat vague entity called “Anglo-America.” In wonderfully clear prose, Amanda Claybaugh has much to say not only about each of these historical developments but also, crucially, about their proximate and in some cases mutually constitutive relationships . Nineteenth-century reform was clearlyAnglo-American in scope, as Frank Thistlethwaite (TheAnglo-American Connection) argued long ago. Reformers in the United States and Great Britain worked jointly against slavery and for temperance , women’s rights, the humane treatment of animals, and international peace. Claybaugh goes beyond merely elaborating these connections to offer a theory of a“new transatlanticism”—one rooted in material connections as well as imagined literary relations—that is both nuanced and dynamic. By focusing on the interconnections between two networks—that of social reform and of the literary marketplace—she demonstrates the multiple and shifting relations that marked British andAmerican interaction, from cultural authority to mutual influence to friendly competition. Underlying all manner of interactions, she argues, is the fact that “the United States and Great Britain formed as nations in a transnational context. Each, that is to say, came to conceive of itself as a nation with, through, and against the other” (16). Reform depended on print, as it was through stories, fables, and narratives that reformers sought to shape the attitudes and consciousness of their readers. If theAnglo-American literary marketplace produced what Claybaugh calls a“literature in English,” its archetypal form was the“novel of purpose,” a genre that embodied the nineteenth-century reformist faith“that transforming readers was a necessary first step in transforming the world” (34). Claybaugh further demonstrates how Anglo-American literary“realism” (different from its continental cousin) grew up with the novel of purpose, as both made use of the same subject matter and employed many of the same narrative strategies and techniques. The nineteenth-century Anglo-American novel became so well integrated with reform, Claybaugh argues, that even non-reformers worked within the genre to some extent. Attentive to this phenomenon, Claybaugh therefore includes compelling discussions of writers who had a change of heart about transatlantic reform (Charles Dickens), distanced themselves from reform (George Eliot and Henry James), and even subtly mocked reform (MarkTwain), as well as chapters on novelists devoted to temperance and the“woman question .” To this reader, the chapter on Twain (brilliantly subtitled “Reformers and Other Con Artists”) is worth the price of the book alone. The book concludes with a thoughtful discussion of how the novel of pur- victorian review • Volume 34 Number 2 250 pose lost its power in both literary and reformist terms.The story here is not simply the emergence of a new, more self-consciously theoretical“realism” that improved upon the verisimilitude of the earlier novelists. It has also to do with the shifting meaning of“Anglo-America,” from a“willed affiliation” based on a shared set of reformist commitments and sustained by ties of trade, politics, and intermarriage to an often racialized (“Anglo-Saxon”) alliance rooted in imperial conquest. Claybaugh’s reading ofTwain’s own complex musings on imperialism, civilization, and violence provides a fascinating coda. Claybaugh convincingly demonstrates the coherence of an expansiveAngloAmerican literary marketplace and reform network in which, cultural nationalist squabbling aside, a“literature in English” thrived, but her work seems less clear on how national differences mattered. Such questions may be beyond the scope of her study, but her fresh and skilful handling of the material here suggests she would have interesting observations to make on the topic. The Novel of Purpose is a most welcome addition to nineteenth-century studies and should appeal to historians and literary scholars alike. Leslie Bu tler Dartmouth College • Sex,Lies and Autobiography:The Ethics of Confession by James O’Rourke; pp. xiv + 215. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2006. $35.00 cloth. In Sex, Lies andAutobiography, literary texts function as unique sites of ambiguity and contradiction.Within these indeterminate spaces, O’Rourke...

Editors’ Note

8 Editors’ Note • We dedicate this issue of Victorian Review to the memory of Margot K. Louis (1954–2007), our colleague and friend. In keeping with Margot’s excellence in teaching and scholarship, we honour her with an issue that combines a forum on Teaching the Victorians with a special research focus on Victorian Literature and Classical Myth, both areas of passionate interest and commitment for Margot.We are delighted that Catherine Maxwell agreed to guest edit a collection of articles for this issue, breaking new ground in Margot’s own research field. We are also pleased to include forum contributions byVictorianists who share Margot’s passion for the classroom. Many of these teaching discussions were first presented at the 2007 NAVSA-VSAWC Victorian Materialities conference inVictoria, and we gratefully acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in making possible their publication here. As we approach the anniversary of her death, we celebrate Margot’s life: her love of nature, her feminism, her collegiality, her principled approach to scholarship and community, her courage in the face of disability, and her dignity and grace during her battle with cancer.We are also thrilled to announce in these pages the publication of Margot’s last work, Persephone Rises,1860–1927: Mythography, Gender, and the Creation of a New Spirituality (forthcoming from Ashgate Press, 2009). Rebecca Gagan Mary Elizabeth Leighton Judith Mitchell Lisa Surridge The Victorian Review Editor ia l Tea m ...

Sex, Lies and Autobiography: The Ethics of Confession by James O’Rourke (review)

victorian review • Volume 34 Number 2 250 pose lost its power in both literary and reformist terms.The story here is not simply the emergence of a new, more self-consciously theoretical“realism” that improved upon the verisimilitude of the earlier novelists. It has also to do with the shifting meaning of“Anglo-America,” from a“willed affiliation” based on a shared set of reformist commitments and sustained by ties of trade, politics, and intermarriage to an often racialized (“Anglo-Saxon”) alliance rooted in imperial conquest. Claybaugh’s reading ofTwain’s own complex musings on imperialism, civilization, and violence provides a fascinating coda. Claybaugh convincingly demonstrates the coherence of an expansiveAngloAmerican literary marketplace and reform network in which, cultural nationalist squabbling aside, a“literature in English” thrived, but her work seems less clear on how national differences mattered. Such questions may be beyond the scope of her study, but her fresh and skilful handling of the material here suggests she would have interesting observations to make on the topic. The Novel of Purpose is a most welcome addition to nineteenth-century studies and should appeal to historians and literary scholars alike. Leslie Bu tler Dartmouth College • Sex,Lies and Autobiography:The Ethics of Confession by James O’Rourke; pp. xiv + 215. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2006. $35.00 cloth. In Sex, Lies andAutobiography, literary texts function as unique sites of ambiguity and contradiction.Within these indeterminate spaces, O’Rourke’s fascinating study identifies the“counterformations” (6) that shadow and fracture the legitimating narratives “that give our lives a sense of ethical coherence” (1). The“ethical aporia[s]” (7) that result are examined through a Janus-like close reading of six diverse first-person narratives: Rousseau’s Confessions, William Wordsworth’s Prelude, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette, andVladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. O’Rourke’s juxtaposition of conventional autobiographies with fictional texts provides this study with a useful reflexivity, offering nuanced critical readings that view the latter genre as a metafictional interrogation of its historical counterpart. At the heart of O’Rourke’s “ethical turn” is a call for active reader engagement . Using a Foucauldian model of local, contingent, and negotiable power, O’Rourke reimagines the writer and reader of autobiography as“exhibitionist” and “voyeur” (13) locked in a fraught bilateral relationship.The voyeur must read for and recognize the legitimate and shadow narratives within a text, confronting the ethical conflicts that are exposed while being aware that the 251 Reviews exhibitionist writer will seek to evade this surveillance. O’Rourke makes good use of this conceptual model throughout his study, and each chapter of the book illuminates further the potentialities and complexities of ethical readerly engagement.After first establishing how readership is involved in this shifting balance of power, O’Rourke demonstrates how the diverse and contradictory narratives within a single text impede a reader’s ability to make definite moral judgments. Insightful close readings of these ethical complexities follow, culminating in O’Rourke’s surprising but compelling assertion that inflexible moral judgments are not only impossible but undesirable. He favours instead a fluid textual engagement capable of “weighing out the exact distribution of power” (189) between narratives, a nuanced reading practice that facilitates greater ethical self-awareness. O’Rourke’s first two chapters map the working dynamics of his reading model.This dyadic structure is at its most interesting, however, when the bilateral arrangement between writer and reader breaks down and one side gains ascendancy. For example, Rousseau’s Confessions is bifurcated into“veritable” and “bizarre” (19) economies that engage with the material world and the sexual imagination, respectively.The first is marked by real consequences and guilt; the second is marked by an ambiguously innocuous shame. Rousseau is able to play with the voyeuristic power of the reader within the bizarre economy, raising expectations of sexual explicitness only to disappoint, performing a textual coitus interruptus that teases readers but leaves them unsatisfied. However, such “bonds[s] of intimacy” are “sever[ed]” (46) in the veritable economy where inescapable consequences and feelings of guilt curtail playfulness, breaking the “contract between Rousseau and his reader” (47). Power becomes unilateral as the reader...

Introduction

73 Introduction Cather in e M a x w ell • It was with great sadness that I learned of the death of Margot Louis, who passed away on 28 August 2007. I had been approached earlier in the year to guest-edit a collection of essays for Victorian Review to honour Margot’s brave battle against ovarian cancer, a task I was more than happy to undertake, for, although I never met Margot in person, I admired her work and had had the good fortune to correspond with her at regular intervals over the last few years. Margot was delighted that this collection would be published in her name, and although she did not live to see it for herself, she would, I think, be pleased with a memorial that signally celebrates her principal interests: namely, the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), mentioned in many of the essays in this issue; the interconnected topics of literary influence and the literary tradition; and the more general topic of classical myth andVictorian literature. Anyone who works on Swinburne will be indebted to her Swinburne and His Gods:The Roots and Growth of an Agnostic Poetry (1990), a remarkable study of how the radical form and force of the poet’s innovative verse depends on a pervasive and transgressive recasting of Christian language, ideas, and imagery. Moreover, her invaluable annual summations of the year’s work in Swinburne studies for Victorian Poetry consistently provided lucid, judicious assessments of scholarly work in the field, demonstrating both her intimate and wideranging knowledge of Swinburne’s considerable oeuvre and her enthusiastic and generous reception of new critical research and interpretation. She also co-edited with G. Kim Blank Influence and Resistance in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry (1993), an important collection of essays that bears witness to her fascination with literary traditions—a fascination also present in her most recent work on classical mythology,Victorian mythography, and literature, which concentrates on the myth of Persephone, the maiden snatched from the earth by the god of the underworld and mourned and sought after by her mother, the goddess Demeter. There is a poignant irony in the fact that Margot Louis’s final project centred on Persephone, a woman prematurely gathered to the underworld. Persephone does, however, make her return in the cycle of the year, and, while we no longer have the consolation of Margot’s presence, we know, as Swinburne victorian review • Volume 34 Number 2 74 did, that books can be “living things” (Poems 1. xxi) and are able to share in the legacy of her words, which live on to inspire new generations of scholars . From her recent research on myth, Margot Louis had already published two fine articles—these forming part of her larger monograph, Persephone Rises: Mythography,Gender,and the Creation of a New Spirituality 1860–1927, complete at the time of her death and scheduled for publication by Ashgate in 2009. One of these articles, which doubles as the introduction to her book, provides a brilliant overview of the developments in nineteenth-century mythography and the allied treatment of myth by the poets.A major emphasis of this introductory essay is the shift away from the Olympian deities, described by the eminent classicist Jane Harrison as “definite, distinct” or “clear-cut and departmental” (cited in Louis,“Gods” 353) and seen as removed from or indifferent to human concerns and feelings, with that shift being“toward the chthonic deities and the gods of the Mysteries,” complex, dynamic, ever-evolving gods such as Dionysus and Persephone, whose rites“are increasingly seen as expressions of human anguish, hunger or desire— revelations of the sacral within the swift, bloody, and beautiful cycles of natural life” (Louis,“Gods” 341, 354). Margot would, I think, have been intrigued by the fact that the essays published in this memorial collection predominantly examine authors and artists who use myth to explore the complexities of human desire, and that in terms of its own discursive chronology, which features a period ranging from the 1860s to 1897, the collection itself concludes with essays that feature Dionysus and Persephone. Along with Margot’s book on Persephone, this collection will, we hope, help...

Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class by John Kucich (review)

255 Reviews ers with numerous illustrations and quotations from the original literature. In brief, Bursting the Limits ofTime will constitute, for a long time, a basic reference book and a rich source of inspiration. Works Cited Voltaire. Des singularités de la nature. Basel, 1768. Cuvier, Georges. Recherche sur les ossements fossiles. Paris: Deterville, 1812. Pasca l R ichet Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris • Imperial Masochism: British Fiction,Fantasy,and Social Class by John Kucich; pp. 270. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. $35.00 cloth. With the publication of this (his fourth) book, John Kucich confirms his reputation as one of the most original voices in the study of Victorian literature . In a recent keynote address, he spoke of “shadow-discourses,” discourses that have gone (or been allowed to go) “dormant” in the cultural imagination.The chief virtue of Imperial Masochism is that it succeeds in coaxing out of intellectual hibernation not one but two shadow-discourses—those of masochism and of social class—that have largely dropped out of recent studies of nineteenth-century British imperial fiction. He analyzes acutely the interweaving of these two discourses in the work of four nineteenth-century Anglophone writers—Robert Louis Stevenson, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad—arguing that in the colonial fiction of all four, masochism “focused one particular conjunction more than any other: the relationship between imperial politics and social class” (1). Many postcolonial scholars have written about imperialism and its discontents—the anxieties, confusions, and ambivalences of the colonial subject—but Kucich’s approach is rare in linking the suffering of this subject to the category of class.The concepts of race, gender, and sexuality have served as lenses through which scholars have examined colonial literature, but class has largely been ignored as an analytical rubric. Lately, historians have tried to remedy the neglect of class in the study of imperial history—the best example being David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism: How the British SawTheir Empire—but, until Kucich, literary critics have been slow to explore this theme in the analysis of imperial literature. His book is thus a fresh and welcome development. Kucich has chosen to focus not on the predominant image of masochism— the Freudian model of sexual submission associated with the Oedipal stage—but on a“shadowy,” alternative masochism: the model, put forward by relational psychologists, of a narcissism linked to the pre-Oedipal stage of psychological victorian review • Volume 34 Number 2 256 development. According to the latter model, disruptions in the parent-child bond open a narcissistic wound in the child that finds its compensation in omnipotent fantasies of control over oneself and others. Kucich examines the metaphors generated by such masochistic fantasies, metaphors that, in latenineteenth -century Britain, often insinuated themselves into imperial narratives that glorified pain, victimization, and sacrifice.According to Kucich, the metaphoricity of masochistic fantasy received a class (usually middle-class) inflection within two discourses in particular—those of evangelicalism and professionalism—that often underwrote lateVictorian imperial narratives. He does not dismiss the heuristic usefulness of the concept of Oedipal masochism; indeed, he finds that in works of colonial fiction, fantasies of eroticized and non-eroticized masochism sometimes work together both to energize characters ’ relationships with one another and to galvanize the ideological configurations those relations embody. However, he asserts that pre-Oedipal masochism’s emphasis upon the relational (suffering as an imagined path to love and sympathy ) offers more diverse and nuanced interpretive possibilities than does the narrow emphasis on sexualized submission in Oedipal masochism that often dominates current psychoanalytical approaches to literature. Kucich argues that in the Scottish novels of the late 1870s and 1880s, Stevenson used bourgeois and anti-bourgeois doubles to disrupt the psychological economy of a pre-Oedipal masochism, thereby exposing the social incoherence of the Scottish middle class. In his South Pacific writings of the 1890s, however, Stevenson showed that through the self-martyrdom of a self-styled, evangelical anti-imperialism, he might overcome the psychosocial schisms that plagued the middle-class milieu of his earlier works. The chapter on Schreiner is the most controversial.There, Kucich contends that in both The Story of an African Farm and her later non-fiction, Schreiner...

Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel by Carolyn Lesjak (review)

241 Reviews Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel by Carolyn Lesjak; pp. 270. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. $79.95 cloth; $22.95 paper. Carolyn Lesjak’s Working Fictions is the best academic book I have read this year. Gracefully written and cogently argued, it is a page turner for the reader, like William Morris, interested in how labour functions “as the foundation of all social relations and hence the basis of an emancipatory politics” (143) and for the reader interested in how this function of labour works in theVictorian novel.As I was reading, I thought of Franco Moretti’s comment that “now, more than ever, pleasure and critique should not be divided” (x). While Moretti’s call to unite pleasure and critique is complex—as is Lesjak’s call to unite pleasure and labour—my response to reading Lesjak’s book was very simple: it was a pleasure.Although, of course, after Working Fictions, pleasure is no longer as simple as one might have thought.What happens, Lesjak asks, when the Victorian novel attempts to represent work? What pressure does such an endeavour put on the work of representation itself? And how is work in both of these senses related to pleasure? To be sure, the topic of work is not typically seen as the motor of narrative: it is not perceived to be especially compelling (except in novels, like industrial novels, explicitly devoted to its depiction). Working Fictions seeks to change that, to make work and labour not only pivotal to the novel but also wedded to pleasure in hitherto unacknowledged ways.This is a book written with spirit and conviction and wisdom. Lesjak focuses on the relationship between labour and pleasure in the nineteenth-century novel and its implications for both modernist novelistic developments and current critical practices. While she begins with a nod to Foucault by way of explaining the “genealogy” of her subtitle, this book remains firmly located within a tradition of Marxist, socialist, Frankfurt-school, and leftist critical thinking.This focus gives a seamlessness to the book that produces its own pleasures as well as, inevitably, making the reader wonder about directions not taken. At first glance, Working Fictions is oddly organized.The first section addresses the industrial novel, with a focus on Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Eliot’s Felix Holt, to recover connections between labour and pleasure that have been overlooked or obscured in earlier studies.The second section turns to two novels central to the realist tradition—Dickens’s Great Expectations and Eliot’s Daniel Deronda—to illustrate the ways in which labour goes underground, but remains powerful in its subterranean force, in realism.The third section turns to two utopian writers (William Morris is an obvious choice here, whereas Wilde is more surprising) to offer optimistic and buoyant—indeed utopian—responses to the labour/pleasure impasse. But it is precisely this idiosyncratic approach— combining industrial novels with realist novels with Bildungsromane with utopian victorian review • Volume 34 Number 2 242 novels—that constitutes one of the many strengths of Working Fictions, for it makes perfect sense in terms of Lesjak’s claims for the centrality of the labour/ pleasure nexus, in general,in both nineteenth-century fiction and today. Instead of confining her study to novels that thematize work, for example, Lesjak wants to trace the way that work works, to understand labour as “problematic rather than an object easily seen” (11). Lesjak asks: what happens if we attend to the organization of labour when we readVictorian novels?“What if,” she asks,“we recognize that labor is always hard to see in the novel…and that its visibility (or lack thereof) is an integral part of its composition? What if,” she asks, Rather than reproducing the elision of work and workers from the cultural sphere that the novel encourages…we were to follow labor in all its inscrutability in order to make visible its continued and often vexed presence, its unwillingness, as it were, to go away? (2–3) The answer to these questions is the story that Working Fictions tells. Lesjak is excellent at offering the big picture: the connections and dislocations between labour and pleasure in...

Fire Escape

victorian review • Volume 34 Number 1 52 Johnston, M. George. History of the British Zoophytes. 2 vols. London: J.VanVoorst, 1847. Jordan, Steven L.“TheTalisman of the Deep: Coral Jewelry.” Collector’s Universe 1999. 20 August 2007 . Kingsley, Charles. Glaucus,or the Wonders of the Shore. London: Macmillan, 1855. Lewes, George Henry. Sea-side Studies. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1858. Lightman, Bernard. Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2007. Montgomery, James. The Pelican Island,and Other Poems. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827. O’Day, Deirdre. Victorian Jewellery. London: Letts, 1974. Rudwick, Martin J. Science from DeepTime: Early Pictorial Representation of the Prehistoric World. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. “Something About Coral.” Peter Parley’s Annual: A Christmas and NewYear’s Present forYoung People 1853: 241–46. Stafford, Barbara.“Images of Ambiguity: Eighteenth Century Microscopy and the Neither/Nor.” Visions of Empire: Voyages,Botany and Representations of Nature. Ed. David Philip Miller and Peter Hans Reill. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1993. 230–57. Stoddart, David R.“Darwin, Lyell and the Geological Significance of Coral Reefs.” British Journal for the History of Science 9 (1976): 199–218. Stott, Rebecca.“Darwin’s Barnacles: Mid-Victorian Natural History and the Marine Grotesque.” Transactions and Encounters: Science and Literature in the 19th Century. Ed. Roger Luckhurst and Josephine McDonagh. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002. 151–81. Tolini, Michelle.“‘Beetle Abominations’ and Birds on Bonnets: Zoological Fantasy in Late-Nineteenth-Century Dress.” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide Spring 2002 . Turkle, Sherry, ed. Evocative Objects:Things toThink With. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2007. Wiley, George, ed. The Poems of James Montgomery. Sheffield: Hallamshire, 2000. • Fire Escape Jen n ifer Bla ir • The term “fire escape” seems to describe an action rather than a thing.An “escape” is an event, a motion, a traversal beyond some sort of constrictive place or situation. Scientifically speaking, “fire” is an event too. Put the two terms together, however, and we find ourselves with something that counters what each one signifies individually: a“fire escape,” at least as we know it today, is a structure fixed to or within a building. It does not move and is hardly an event, since it carries on its service of providing the means of escape even in the absence of fire. In theVictorian period of fire-escape design, however, it had not yet been decided that fire escapes should be structures that stayed still, functioning as “escapes” only by providing an apparatus upon which people could leave burning buildings by means of their own self-propelled movements (walk- 53 Victorian Things: Blair ing, descending stairs, etc.).There were escapes of this sort in the nineteenth century, escapes that most often took the form of iron staircases and balconies fixed to building exteriors. But there were also several others in use at this time that were designed on the principle that the fire-escape structure itself should do the moving, with—and sometimes even instead of—the people. In the Burrows Escape, for example, building inhabitants were lowered to the ground inside a wire basket attached to ropes on a pulley system.The basket would travel from window to window to pick up passengers—around five at a time—before delivering them to safety on the ground. Halifax, Nova Scotia, city planner Edward Henry Keating praised the Burrows Escape in an 1883 report of his tour through the northeastern U.S., where he investigated new fire safety measures to bring back to Canada. Keating provided the illustration given here in order to “show more explicitly the manner of attaching and operating this form of fire escape which the Inspector of Buildings has approved of and considers the best and cheapest appliance for saving life yet invented” (26). Keating saw the Burrows Escape at Riggs’ Hotel inWashington, where there was a basket installed on each of the building’s four sides (Keating 25). Hotels were of particular concern for fire-escape designers because the occupants would always be unfamiliar with the building.They might also be, as the New The Burrows Escape. Illustration from Edward Henry Keating, Fire Departments,Fire Apparatus,and Fire Escapes,A Report on...

Ephemeral Forms: E. S. Dallas, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Review

Ephemeral Forms: E. S. Dallas, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Review

Dick Doyle’s Journal by Richard Doyle (review)

victorian review • Volume 34 Number 1 180 Dick Doyle’s Journal by Richard Doyle, edited by Juliet McMaster et al; pp. 109. Sydney: Juvenilia Press, 2006. $8.00 paper. Dick Doyle’s Journal is an annotated edition of five months of writing and illustrations taken from young Richard Doyle’s year-long journal written from January through December 1840. This edition, published by Juvenilia Press, begins with the first journal entry written and illustrated on 1 January and continues through the opening of the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy at the National Gallery, on 11 May 1840. In her critical introduction , the editor, Juliet McMaster, describes the Royal Academy opening as the “climax” of the journal.The Royal Academy experience, emphasizing Doyle’s professional growth and artistic interests, in conjunction with a bustling crowd scene in a cultural venue focused on the creative arts, concludes the journal at a significant moment for understanding and appreciating Doyle’s growth as an artist from young boy to famed Punch artist and illustrator for such Victorian heavyweights as Ruskin, Dickens, andThackeray. This edition of Dick Doyle’s juvenilia includes a critical introduction, edited manuscript, illustrations, and scholarly endnotes. McMaster’s critical introduction to the volume provides background information about the developing artist; details about the creative Doyle family and their private“Sunday shows,” outings, feedback, and collaborative behavior; and discussion of significant familial contacts and larger cultural influences relevant to Doyle’s growth as an artist. Overall, the introduction presents a detailed context within which to view and better understand this artist’s growth. In addition to providing a thorough context, the introduction also serves as a reading guide of sorts by directing the reader’s attention to prominent themes that emerge throughout the journal. McMaster claims early on that “the journal is an account of a keen young professional who rejoices at his own early success” (xiii). She emphasizes Doyle’s strengths as a spectator and budding art critic, the way his interest in reading informs his art, and his humour and wit. McMaster praises Doyle for his attention to social details, his ability to capture the energy of lively crowd scenes, and his talent for creating caricatures. Categorizing his work according to two modes—the realistic and the grotesque—McMaster concludes the introduction by discussing Doyle’s induction into Punch and the way he carried over to his professional life interests and practices described in the journal, such as extrapolating details from social circumstances, capturing scenes from the“world of print culture,” and creating effective caricatures of public figures.These thematic touchstones pave a clear reading path through some of Doyle’s more formless and undeveloped adolescent musings. The tone of the writing from the initial journal entry on Wednesday, 1 January 1840 is conversational, honest, and witty. Doyle reports: 181 Reviews The first of January. Got up late, very bad. Made good resolutions and did not keep them.Went out and got a cold. Did keep it. First thought I would, then thought I would not, was sure I would, was positive I would not, at last was determined I would, write a journal. Began it.This is it and I began it on the first of January, one thousand eight hundred and forty. Hope I may be skinned alive by wild cats if I don’t go on with it. (1) Doyle maintains this approach to journal writing throughout. Most of his entries are fairly brief. He responds physically and emotionally to scenes and occurrences, remains focused on the present (or immediate past), and tends not to rely on writing to help him work through serious issues. Doyle’s entries show that at this point in his professional development, he is most interested in and self-consciously aware of the act of publication itself and not the process of publication. While he comments on time constraints, negotiation among projects, illness, distractions, resources, and money, these comments are most often made regarding failures or successes in reaching an end-product and not directed toward understanding the publication process itself. His fixation on finishing TheTournament, a humorous representation of the Earl of Eglinton’s expensive medieval tournament held the year...

The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins ed. by Jenny Bourne Taylor (review)

victorian review • Volume 34 Number 1 178 The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins Edited by Jenny BourneTaylor; pp. xix+207. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2006. $85.00 cloth; $29.99 paper. During the last decade of the twentieth century, studies ofWilkie Collins began to flourish, following a century or more of neglect. In 1995, Wilkie Collins to the Forefront,Some Reassessments, edited by Nelson Smith and R. C.Terry, was published. It consists of fifteen essays originally presented at theWilkie Collins Centennial Conference, held at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, from 29 September to 1 October 1989.The year 1998 witnessed the publication ofAndrew Gasson’s Wilkie Collins:An Illustrated Guide.A year later saw the first publication of Collins’s earliest novel, Ioláni;Or,Tahiti as ItWas, written nearly 150 years earlier, in an edition edited and introduced by Ira B. Nadel (curiously, this text receives scant attention in The Cambridge Companion). In 2003, the University ofTennessee Press published Reality’s Dark Light:The SensationalWilkie Collins, edited by Maria K. Buchman and Don Richard Cox, which has fourteen contributors on various aspects of Collins’s oeuvre and aims to deliberately expand Collins’s afterlife beyond The Woman in White and The Moonstone. In the meantime, primary materials continue to emerge.These include a six-volume edition ofWilkie Collins’s letters (1999 and 2005) and a reconstruction of his library (2002).There are two outstanding biographies: Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors (revised edition 1993) and William M. Clarke (the husband of Collins’s great-granddaughter), The Secret Life ofWilkie Collins (revised edition 1996). So the introduction and thirteen essays in Jenny BourneTaylor’s volume rework some familiar territory; however, there are very welcome contributions to neglected areas. John Bowen writes well on “Collins’s shorter fiction,” observing appositely that“Wilkie Collins was adept at exploiting the narrative possibilities that the growth of magazine and periodical publishing in the nineteenth century created” (37). Moreover, Bowen’s contribution is the most pertinent for students of Victorian periodicals, although he misses some analytical opportunities, perhaps understandably, as his subject is Collins’s shorter fiction. However, Collins’s non-fiction prose, mainly written for HouseholdWords and All theYear Round, receives short shrift in The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins. Jim Davies’s “Collins and the Theatre” is a succinct account of Collins’s fascination with the theatre and his attempts to earn a good deal of money by writing a London hit. Rachel Malik’s“The Afterlife ofWilkie Collins” encompasses a good deal in a short space, including a brief discussion of television and other adaptations. Interestingly, for Malik,“Collins proved a rich resource for early films” (183), an observation unfortunately insufficiently developed. Lyn Pykett, author of the recently published, very good Wilkie Collins (2005) in the Oxford“Authors in Context” series, while writing succinctly, retreads familiar territory in her“Collins and the Sensation Novel.” Similarly, Ronald R.Thomas in “The Moonstone, Detective Fiction and Forensic Science” contributes little 179 Reviews that we did not already know, and Lillian Nayder’s essay“Collins and Empire,” which is largely confined to The Moonstone, does not add anything to what has previously been said about this text. Graham Law’s “The Professional Writer and the Literary Marketplace” draws upon useful findings from his Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (2000).At least Law does refer to Collins’s and James Payn’s neglected joint assault on literary piracy in A National Wrong (1869); a deeper analysis of this work would have added considerably to his contribution . Carolyn Dever’s“The Marriage Plot and Its Alternatives” draws attention to rich complexities in Armadale (1866). John Kucich’s “Collins andVictorian Masculinity” includes an arresting opening sentence—“Wilkie Collins’s novels abound in melancholic male protagonists” (125)—and a reasonably detailed discussion of The Woman in White (1860). Kate Flint’s“Disability and Difference” acknowledges that“Wilkie Collins’s fiction repeatedly foregrounds a number of individuals who are challenged in their relationship to the material world” (153). Flint’s discussion of the neglected Hide and Seek (1854) and The Law and the Lady (1875) is replete with insights.Tim Dolin writes interestingly on“Collins’s career...

Album

13 Album Sa m a n th a M atthews • In The Woman inWhite (1860), the lawyer Gilmore describes an interview with his client, Laura Fairlie, shortly before her forced marriage to Sir Percival Glyde. He notices as they talk that she toys with an album containing“a small water-colour landscape” (Collins 143).At the mention of Glyde’s name, Laura “took her hand off the little album as suddenly as if it had turned hot and burnt her” (143). The reader knows, as Gilmore does not, that the landscape was painted by Walter Hartright, and that the book signifies her suppressed love for the drawing master. Laura’s handling of the album narrates her unspeakable emotional struggle: when her fingers“beat gently on the margin of the drawing, as if her memory had set them going mechanically with the remembrance of a favourite tune” (145), she is recalling musical evenings with Hartright; but when“the hand on the album resigned its hold, trembled a little, and moved the book away” (145), Laura is resigned to her fate and bursts into tears. An album, broadly defined, is a blank book that contains, protects, and orders a unique collection of personally significant texts or objects, such as prints, letters, stamps, photographs, or printed “scraps.” My focus here is a specific genre derived from the album amicorum or “album of friends,” which contains personal tributes—autographs, poems, quotations, drawings, souvenirs —that the book’s usually female owner solicited from family, friends, and occasionally celebrities. The album was an essential item of feminine paraphernalia; in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Mayflower (1843), suitor Joseph Adams enters a room hoping to find his romantic object, but finds instead a still life of objects signifying her: There was a vase of flowers on the table, two or three books of poetry, and a little fairy work-basket … there was a small writingdesk , and last, not least, in a lady’s collection, an album, with leaves of every colour of the rainbow, containing inscriptions, in sundry strong masculine hands,“To Susan.” (49–50) To Adams’s jealous eye, Susan’s album is primarily a record of his rivals, but albums were not simply instruments of courtship.They were vessels of memory and autobiography,collections of tokens of diverse people and places that added up to more than the sum of their parts. Read as an example of the souvenir theorized by Susan Stewart in On Longing, the album typifies the urgent “search for authentic experience and … for the authentic object” within an exchange economy, where “as experience is increasingly mediated and abstracted, the lived relation of the body to the phenomenological world is replaced by a nostalgic myth of contact and presence” (133). The album’s significance for victorian review • Volume 34 Number 1 14 its owner lies in its preservation of signatures or autographic texts—unique traces of identity mediated by the hand. Derrida has accounted for the aura of signature, which “implies the actual or empirical nonpresence of the signer,” by its capacity also to mark and retain the signer “having-been-present” and therefore continuing to be present “in the transcendental form of nowness (maintenance)” (107). Albums also invoke the signer’s absent presence and body more literally—by synecdoche,with locks of hair or fragments of ribbon or lace; by representation,with painted portraits and later carte-de-visite photographs;and less directly,by dried flowers,leaves,or other tokens associated with significant occasions.While annotations provide reminders of provenance and assurances of authenticity, the meaningfulness of such souvenirs depends on personal or family associations. In the early twentieth century, albums that had become detached from their originating contexts often suffered mutilation for the sake of valuable literary manuscripts or were discarded as crumbling records of that embarrassing Victorian fusion of sentimental idealism and materialism. By providing an arena for human interaction at one remove, the album functions both as an extension of the owner’s body, on which contributors inscribe their tributes, and a substitute for the physical presence of absent friends and family. Laura Fairlie’s“little album” is the repository for her secret emotional life, yet her gestural...

Coral Jewellery

47 Victorian Things: Rugg end of the Victorian period, the cemetery had lost its nobler purposes. The borough engineer was generally called in to add grid-like extensions to the original undulating designs, usually with the remit of maximizing grave space. The landscape became subsumed under a riot of grave furniture that proved impossible to maintain, and the graves of the poor—which were rarely more than unmarked pits, in the less salubrious corners of the sites—consumed vast acres that offered little consolation. The materialist turn encourages the historian not to take objects for granted. The cemetery is a fine case in point.A simplistic assumption that population growth required an increase in burial space is poor explanation for cemetery development in the nineteenth century.The act of inquiring into the meaning of things reveals, for cemeteries, shifting connotations.The implications of the shifts are that basic questions on why a particular cemetery was established, and when, and by whom, always merit detailed study. Further Reading Brooks, Chris, Brent Elliot, Julian Litten, Eric Robinson, Richard Robinson, and Philip Temple. Mortal Remains. Exeter:Wheaton, 1989. Matthews, Samantha. Poetical Remains: Poets’Graves,Bodies,and Books in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Rugg, Julie.“The Emergence of a New Burial Form: Cemetery Development in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century.” Grave Matters: A History of Burial 1700-1850. Ed. M. Cox. York: Council for British Archaeology, 1998. 44–53. • Coral Jewellery K ath a r in e A n derson • Coral jewellery, from elaborate tiaras to simple strings of beads, was one of the most characteristic forms of personal jewellery in theVictorian period. The origins of the fashion have been variously traced to Napoleon’s Italian campaigns, to the coral jewellery of a royal bride (the Duchess d’Aumale in Naples in 1845), or (more circularly) to the era’s general interest in decorative naturalism (Flower; O’Day; Jordan).The European centre for coral design was Naples, with easy access to beds of red coral (Corallium rubrum) in the Mediterranean, which were indeed largely destroyed by the popularity of coral in this era. In London, the prominent designer Robert Phillips directed the fashion from his studio in Cockspur Street. Its heyday in Britain—particularly of the naturalistic strain, which preserved the spiky natural shapes of the coral forms—was the 1850s. Later the fashion collapsed, perhaps under its own weight.The journalist and novelist George Augustus Sala, reviewing the Paris victorian review • Volume 34 Number 1 48 exhibition in 1867, wrote in obvious relief that the craze for“twisted sticks of seeming red sealing-wax” and “fragments of ginger or orris root or even the domestic forked radish” had passed (qtd. in Flower 18). Evidently, this fashion can tell us about new patterns of wealth, consumption, and leisure in the middle classes. Equally obviously, coral joined other midVictorian fashions for stylizing the pursuit of natural history: insect jewellery, feathered clothing, framed displays of shells or butterflies, even the careful arrangements of parlour aquariums (Tolini; Brunner). In this sense, the interest in coral was part of a wider concern for the aesthetics of natural forms, as well as a manifestation of the appeal of popular natural history (Allen; Barber; Lightman). But the history of the study of coral suggests that the jewellery held further and more complicated significance. The limestone exoskeleton of marine invertebrates, decoratively transformed, evoked a particular set of intellectual and cultural ideas about geohistory, the nature of organisms, and the tropical societies where coral reefs were most common. A coral object brought these concerns imaginatively down to earth, where they could be easily stroked by the fingers or held on the palm. Examining material objects is an established practice in the history of science , represented, for example, by work on instruments, pressed specimens, paper trails, and laboratory spaces. It reflects the influence of other disciplines, like anthropology and sociology, but equally emerges from the traditions of specialized subfields like the history of instruments and the history of cartography, A tiara of coral branches and beads, made by Phillips Brothers, c.1860. Courtesy of theVictoria and Albert Museum, London. 49 Victorian Things: Anderson disciplines to which material objects...

Back to the Future: Disciplinary Hauntings and Victorian Studies

61 Special Forum: Victorian Studies and Interdisciplinarity that produced, disseminated, and gave an afterlife to it. Moreover, notes Miller, “that context is a dynamic, heterogeneous field, constantly changing” (15).The (ideal) interdisciplinary thinker, then, would be able to account for the linguistic , political, historical, social, and technological origins of a given subject, recognizing the necessarily provisional quality of any conclusions drawn from a context overdetermined by incessant flux. It is arguable whether the typicalVictorianist trained in English or history could produce genuine interdisciplinary scholarship within these exacting terms.As an inspirational model for inventive and illuminating scholarly work, however, Miller’s description of what he calls the polemical (because dialogic and cross-boundary) work of interdisciplinary studies has a good deal to offer. Not least, Miller encourages us to remember that interdisciplinary studies exist largely at the liminal space or plane between two or more disciplinary discourses: to understand how words and pictures signify together, in conjunction with one another, requires a set of interpretive strategies that can account for meaning-production as a process of simultaneity. Ultimately, interdisciplinarity cannot respect disciplinary boundaries because it cannot afford to privilege one kind of disciplinary research over another, one methodology over another. Works Cited Miller, J. Hillis. Illustration. Cambridge MS: Harvard University Press, 1992. Shires, Linda.“Victorian Studies and Cultural Studies: Interdisciplinarity, the Market, and a Call for Critical Realism.” Victorian Literature and Culture (1999): 481–86. • Back to the Future: Disciplinary Hauntings andVictorian Studies M a rjor ie Ston e • One of the questions forum contributors were asked to consider was “How is the field ofVictorian studies informed, structured, and/or haunted by nineteenth-century notions of interdisciplinarity?” Another was “What new approaches are needed in Victorian studies to create a truly inter- /multi-disciplinary field?” Instead of seeing the field as“haunted” by the past, I argue that our constructions of the past are “haunted” by the disciplinary formations of the present. Further, I contend that, if we are to devolve the discipline-function (much as Foucault seeks to deconstruct the ideological formation of the author, replacing it with the “author-function”), we need to historicize the disciplines and excavate the epistemologies of knowledge that preceded their formation. In doing so, we may find that“nineteenth-cen- victorian review • Volume 33 Number 1 62 tury notions of interdisciplinarity” prove to be as productive as some “new approaches” of our time. While some may critique interdisciplinarity as dilettantish or lacking in coherence, and others may celebrate how it breaks out of the boxes of specialization (Amey and Brown), in both instances the underlying assumption is that“interdisciplinarity is derivative of discipline,” as Steven Rogers, Michael Booth, and Joan Eveline observe in “The Politics of Disciplinary Advantage.” They rightly note how this assumption reflects the “strength of hegemonic narrative”:“[d]iscipline positions itself as a prototypical model for generating authority and thus sets the standards for judging what counts as knowledge and who will be afforded access to resources and influence” (2–4). In effect, while interdisciplinarity generates mutations, definitions, redefinitions, and debates, disciplines themselves are treated as “conceptual black boxes,” not as networks of historically and “locally produced practices, mythologies and artifacts” (Rogers, Booth, and Eveline 10).As Foucault reminds us, disciplinary “divisions of discourse” are“always themselves reflexive categories, principles of classification,” and thus “facts of discourse that deserve to be analysed beside others” (22). If we treat the disciplines as historically produced, the nineteenth century emerges as a critical age of “transition,” to echo Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh (BookV, l. 163). In accord withThomas S. Kuhn, Lewis Pyenson identifies the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the time when disciplinary divisions were institutionalized.“Ironically, the specialist ideology derived from an imperializing centralization of knowledge in the natural sciences,” Pyenson notes, and though“the humanities were slower to assert control over one or another domain of knowledge, we still live in the shadow of omnibus, nineteenth-century humanities disciplines: psychology and history (spawned from philosophy), archaeology (deriving from classics), linguistics (emerging from comparative philology), anthropology (splitting off from natural history)” (22).The process of discipline-formation Pyenson describes is illumined by Ekbert Faas’s 1988 literary-historical-psychological study...

Interdisciplinary or Merely Undisciplined?: The Teaching/Research Nexus

35 Special Forum: Victorian Studies and Interdisciplinarity ciplinarity. Conferences and exchanges in journals such as Victorian Review are available, fortunately, to help us negotiate the limits and possibilities of this new interdisciplinary opportunity. Works Cited Barricelli, Jean-Pierre, and Joseph Gibaldi, eds. Interrelations of Literature. NewYork: MLA, 1982. “Lady’s Pictorial,The.” Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals 1800–1900. . • Interdisciplinary or Merely Undisciplined? TheTeaching/Research Nexus J u dith Johnston • For those who undertake both teaching and research inVictorian studies, the nexus between the two is a dynamic factor that enhances both practices. Teaching and research are inseparable in that research keeps academics in touch with the transformation of ideas and genres both within their own discipline and beyond its borders, enabling them to keep their own teaching up to date. But the reverse is also true.Teaching and eliciting responses to particular texts and ideas can provide new insights and provocatively different ways of thinking about our research.There is no more satisfactory moment in a seminar or tutorial than to realize that you have never viewed a particular text from that perspective before. Overall, then, we need to combine communicative and student-centred models of learning in which critical rigour, self-sufficiency in locating and expressing information, creative problem-solving skills, and diverse cultural awareness predominate. Interdisciplinarity, despite the shades of meaning that might attach to that term (such as might be implied in “cross-disciplinary” or “multi-disciplinary”), when included in this mix, offers university graduates and undergraduates further diversity of approaches and knowledges. Fellow panelists for this Victorian Review forum, Nancy Armstrong and Jenny BourneTaylor,both raise the issue of a“home discipline”(to quoteTaylor)—that is, the assumption that the scholar must have at least one research area that constitutes a fund of knowledge and embraces particular, though often varied, ways of reading.This basic tenet seems to me to be indisputable. However,Victorian studies scholars are fortunate that theirs is a field in which specialist demarcations have always been far less rigid than they are in other disciplines. Indeed, Matthew Rowlinson argues of the scholars involved with the first publishing victorian review • Volume 33 Number 1 36 decade of Victorian Studies (1957–67) that a demonstrable interdisciplinarity was practised then and cites the journal’s first special issue (1959) celebrating the centenary of Darwin’s Origin of Species as an instance (244). Forty years on, Linda Shires makes the point that the field calledVictorian studies“has always been committed to social and cultural approaches” and, furthermore, that “it has been laudably difficult to separate out the historians and sociologists from the literary critics” (481).We have been fortunate that our research area has rarely been nominated“Victorian Literature” even though most people immersed in Victorian studies are probably located in English departments. Nevertheless, it is not so long ago that nineteenth-century travel writing, journalism, sea-side studies, geological studies, scientific studies, botany, law, and so on—those “marginalized genres and discourses” (484) to use Shires’s terms—would never have found their way into a university Victorian studies curriculum, unless they turned up in a specific novel or a poem when their presence might be commented on.Today when we teachVictorian studies, I know that a number of these genres (and others) are now no longer marginalized, having achieved full representation in the various kinds of writing to which undergraduates are introduced, and are certainly fully represented in the critical studies that turn up in publishers’ catalogues, in series often quite simply, even disarmingly, designated “Nineteenth-Century Literature.” But what of the larger interdisciplinary issues?Are we, as Catherine Gallagher has put it, in danger of “too often being interdisciplinary all by ourselves” (254)?And is this necessarily“intrinsically wrong” (254)?While I am reluctant to engage in an argument about what constitutes being truly interdisciplinary (as opposed to, say, multi-disciplinary), I acknowledge that being interdisciplinary “all by ourselves” seems to defeat the purpose, especially if we look beyond being interdisciplinary with our more obvious fellow-disciplines such as history or European studies.What happens if we attempt to cross the greater divide into, for instance, science? Paula Gould, reviewing...