Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Also by Dinah Birch RUSKIN’S MYTHS RUSKIN ON TURNER RUSKIN AND THE DAWN OF THE MODERN RUSKIN AND GENDER (with Francis O’Gorman) OUR VICTORIAN EDUCATION OXFORD COMPANION TO ENGLISH LITERATURE (General Editor)

Also by Mark Llewellyn THE COLLECTED SHORT STORIES OF GEORGE MOORE (with Ann Heilmann) METAFICTION AND METAHISTORY IN CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S WRITING (with Ann Heilmann) NEO-VICTORIANISM: the Victorians in the Twenty-first Century (with Ann Heilmann)

Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature Edited by

Dinah Birch and

Mark Llewellyn

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn 2010 All chapters © contributors 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–22155–0 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Conflict and difference in nineteenth-century literature / edited by Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–22155–0 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Social conflict in literature. 3. Culture conflict in literature. 4. Difference (Philosophy) in literature. 5. Social values in literature. 6. Ideology in literature. 7. Consensus (Social sciences) in literature. 8. Great Britain— Intellectual life—19th century. 9. Literature and society—Great Britain— History—19th century. 10. Ideology and literature—Great Britain—History— 19th century. I. Birch, Dinah. II. Llewellyn, Mark, 1979– PR468.S6C66 2010 820.9'355—dc22 2010007404 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Notes on the Contributors

viii

Introduction: On Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn

1

1 Argument as Conflict: Then and Now Helen Small

14

2 Ever a Fighter: Browning’s Struggle with Conflict Herbert F. Tucker

33

3 Conflict and Imperial Communication: Narrating the First Afghan War Muireann O’Cinneide 4 Off-White Indians Kate Flint

52 66

5 The Interpretation of Daydreams: Reverie as Site of Conflict in Early Victorian Psychology Natalie Mera Ford

80

6 ‘If I am not Grotesque I am Nothing’: Aubrey Beardsley and Disabled Identities in Conflict Alexandra Tankard

93

7 Negotiating the Gentle-Man: Male Nursing and Class Conflict in the ‘High’ Victorian Period Holly Furneaux

109

8 ‘Resolved in Defiance of Fool and of Knave’?: Chartism, Children and Conflict Malcolm Chase

126

9 ‘Conversing with Monstrosities’: Evolutionary Theory and Contemporary Responses to the Novels of Wilkie Collins Janice M. Allan

141

10 Dickens and the Heritage Industry; or, Culture and the Commodity Juliet John

v

157

vi

Contents

11 The King and Who? Dance, Difference, and Identity in Anna Leonowens and The King and I Sharon Aronofsky Weltman

171

12 ‘The Utmost Intricacies of the Soul’s Pathways’: the Significance of Syntax in George Eliot’s Felix Holt, The Radical Melissa Raines

186

13 Culture Wars? Arnold’s Essays in Criticism and the Rise of Journalism 1865–1895 Laurel Brake

201

14 Shrieking Sisters and Bawling Brothers: Sibling Rivalry in Sarah Grand and Mary Cholmondeley Galia Ofek

213

15 After Eternal Punishment: ‘Fin de Siècle’ as Literary Eschatology Matthew Bradley

228

Selected Bibliography

240

Index

251

List of Illustrations 1.1

T. L. B. Huskinson, illustration for chapter 33 Phineas Finn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949)

25

6.1

Aubrey Beardsley, Portrait of Himself (1894)

96

6.2 H. H. Cameron, photograph of Aubrey Beardsley (1897) 9.1 13.1

104

George Du Maurier, ‘The Keeper’s Nightmare’, Punch 60 (1871), pp. 6–7

149

Advert for The Fortnightly Review from The Athenaeum, No. 1955, 15 April 1865, p. 509

207

vii

Notes on the Contributors Janice M. Allan is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Salford. In addition to editing Bleak House: A Sourcebook (2004), she has published various articles on Wilkie Collins and sensation fiction more generally. She is currently working on a sensation fiction sourcebook for Liverpool University Press. Dinah Birch is Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University. Her publications include Ruskin’s Myths (1988), Ruskin on Turner (1990), an annotated selection from Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera (2000), and edited collections of essays (Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern (1999), and Ruskin and Gender (2002, co-edited with Francis O’Gorman). Her book Our Victorian Education appeared in 2007. She is the General Editor of the new edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature (2009). Matthew Bradley completed a D.Phil. on theological contexts for the Decadent movement in England at Oxford before taking up a postdoctoral position at the University of Liverpool (2007–09). He has reviewed for journals including the TLS, English Literature in Transition and Modern Language Review, and his article on the literary responses to city church demolition was published in 2006 in The Yearbook of English Studies. Laurel Brake is Professor of Literature and Print Culture at Birkbeck, and Director of the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse: http://www.ncse. kcl.ac.uk). Books include Print in Transition (2001), Subjugated Knowledges (1994), and Walter Pater (1994). She is currently writing a biography of Walter Pater, and co-editing a Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism. Malcolm Chase is Professor in Labour History at the University of Leeds. His most recent book is Early Trade Unionism: Fraternity, Skill and the Politics of Labour (2000). He is the author of Chartism: A New History (2007). Kate Flint is Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (2000), The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (1993); and Dickens (1985). Her latest book, The Transatlantic Indian 1776–1930, appeared in 2008. Natalie Mera Ford completed her Ph.D. thesis at the University of York, supported by an ORS grant. Her thesis explored her interest in the intersecting notions of reverie in nineteenth-century British scientific and literary discourses. Holly Furneaux is a Lecturer in Victorian Studies at the University of Leicester. Having completed a thesis examining homoeroticism in the work viii

Notes on the Contributors

ix

of Charles Dickens (Birkbeck College, University of London), she is now finishing a book project, Queer Dickens, and embarking on a new interdisciplinary book-length exploration of the cultural history of male nursing in the long nineteenth century. She has published articles on the erotics of nursing in Dickens’s fiction and on the politics of Dickens adaptation. Juliet John is a Reader in Victorian Literature at the University of Liverpool and Director of the Gladstone Centre for Victorian Studies in Wales and the North West of England. She is currently completing a book on Dickens and mass culture and recently finished directing the AHRC-funded resource enhancement project at Gladstone’s (St Deiniol’s) library in North Wales (2006–09). She is the author of Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture (2001). Mark Llewellyn is Senior Lecturer in the School of English at Liverpool University and Honorary Secretary of the British Association for Victorian Studies. His research interests are in literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a specific focus on the fin de siècle and the Anglo-Irish writer George Moore, and contemporary women’s writing. Mark has published widely in both fields, including an essay collection entitled Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women’s Writing (2007). His five-volume co-edited critical edition of The Collected Short Stories of George Moore was published in 2007. Mark is currently writing a book on incest in the Victorian period. Muireann O’Cinneide is a Lecturer in English at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She works on women and politics, in particular the work of aristocratic female writers, and on literature of the supernatural. Her current research project is on class identities in nineteenth-century women’s travel writing. Galia Ofek was a Golda Meir Research Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she currently teaches. She has held several visiting fellowships funded by the British Academy in order to work on a new project examining Biblical narratives, allusions and imagery in New Woman fiction. She is the author of Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture (2009). Melissa Raines graduated in English from the University of Texas at San Antonio and holds an MA in Victorian Literature from the University of Liverpool, where she recently completed her Ph.D. Her research focuses on syntax in the novels of George Eliot, including work on the original manuscripts. Helen Small is Fellow in English at Pembroke College. Her publications include The Long Life (a study of literature and philosophy of ageing) (2007), and (as editor), The Public Intellectual (2002). She has written widely on Victorian literature, especially the novel.

x Notes on the Contributors

Alex Tankard is a Ph.D. student at the University of Liverpool, working on consumptives in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Current research interests include Keats, Beardsley, Romanticism, and Victorian eugenics. Herbert F. Tucker is John C. Coleman Professor of Nineteenth-Century British Literature at the University of Virginia. He has published widely on various subjects in Victorian literary studies, especially on the poetry of Browning and Tennyson. His latest book, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790–1910 was published in 2008. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman is Associate Professor at Louisiana State University. Her work focuses on the intersections between twentieth-century popular culture and nineteenth-century literature. She has published on Ruskin, myth, gender, the musical and popular performance; the book she is currently working on is entitled Victorians on Broadway.

Introduction: On Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn

‘Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.’ ‘You speak of——’ said Egremont, hesitatingly. ‘THE RICH AND THE POOR.’ Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil: or, The Two Nations (1845)1 ‘he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference’ George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–2)2 This collection explores Victorian patterns of engagement with concepts of ‘difference’ and ‘conflict’. In some respects, these terms may be defined in terms of antagonism. Benjamin Disraeli’s identification of one of the most prominent sites of division in the nineteenth century quickly became the dominant binary of the ‘Condition of England’ novel in the 1840s and 1850s, but it is just one reflection of the profound conflicts that characterized the Victorian period. From Disraeli’s ‘THE RICH AND THE POOR’ to Matthew Arnold’s ignorant armies clashing by night in ‘Dover Beach’ (1867) via Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) and Alfred Tennyson’s doubting belief in In Memoriam (1850), the literature of the Victorian period now seems to us to bristle with intellectual, cultural and social oppositions. Dissonance generated by forces of faith and doubt and the educative powers of science and religion, the divide between men and women, the apparent competition between loyalty to nature and industry, not to mention the party-based politics, class conflicts generated by the volatile economic situation, and the military battlefields necessary to 1

2 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

the growth and maintenance of an empire – these features of modernity formed the lives and the writings of the Victorians. The inventiveness of the age was not built on consensus, but on conflict. Beneath these hostilities lay a sharpened sense of divergent orders of human interests and experience. But not all of those who acknowledged the deep-seated distinctions between individuals, classes, genders, and races saw such differences as necessarily leading to conflict. Some argued for a development of older interpretations of social structures, which would often choose to emphasize mutual interests and destinies. The ideal view of a Christian community, or of the harmonious body politic, had acknowledged the distinct roles of particular social classes, or individuals, but customarily did so within the context of a shared purpose, or a general identity. Wordsworth’s Romantic vision emphasizes a common humanity. The alienation and loss of the lonely figures who wander through his poetry might separate them from their communities, but Wordsworth insists that such dislocation confirms a universal vocabulary of feeling, rather than creating inexorable divisions between respectable readers and his dispossessed travellers and exiles. When he writes about the death of Lucy, he writes about the difference that death makes to love, a difference that we must all come to experience: She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her Grave, and Oh! The difference to me. Here the ‘difference’ is a matter of a transformative distress which falls on the bereaved poet as it will one day fall on each of his readers. George Eliot was shaped by Wordsworth’s literary sensibility, and also saw a need to recognize the essential difference between individuals as necessary for the growth of sympathy. When she says of the scholar Casaubon that ‘he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference’ she points her reader to the need to acknowledge the recalcitrant particularity of others, that separate ‘centre of self’ that must be valued in every living being. This, for Eliot, is a positive development. In her fiction, it is the beginning of sympathy rather than conflict. Only then can we move beyond the egotistical struggle for dominance that might otherwise seem the inescapable consequence of a Darwinian fight for survival. Edmund Gosse, writing at the start of the twentieth century in his memoir Father and Son (1907), fuses George Eliot’s concept of the sympathy and respect demanded by an understanding of difference with a bleaker view of the conflicts that such difference will create. He provides a shrewd summary of the deepest tensions of the period, moving from individuals (father and son) to modes of thought (faith and science) to the simultaneous moment

Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn

3

of difference that was the period itself (past and present colliding into a different future). Gosse writes: This book is the record of a struggle between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs. It ended, as was inevitable, in disruption. Of the two human beings here described, one was born to fly backward, the other could not help being carried forward. There came a time when neither spoke the same language as the other, or encompassed the same hopes, or was fortified by the same desires. But, at least, it is some consolation to the survivor, that neither, to the very last hour, ceased to respect the other, or to regard him with a sad indulgence.3 The generational nature of conflict, exacerbated by temperamental difference, is fiercely manifest here. Yet it produces mutual respect that unites even as it divides. Gosse’s situation is representative. When he moves on to write of the specific conditions of ‘the two persons (which were unusual) and . . . the outlines of their temperaments (which were, perhaps innately, antagonistic)’,4 he describes a battle that recurs in the contexts of the period itself. Typical of what Gosse terms the difference between ‘almost two epochs’, his account is part of the continuing debate within that single epoch we label as ‘the Victorian’. Given the chronological diversity of the texts and themes explored in this collection, we have opted for the phrase ‘nineteenth century’ to describe their context, but even that hardly does justice to the range of their implications. Mapping ‘conflict’ and ‘difference’ in relation to such a prodigious body of work is a complex matter, for no overarching theory will contain its scope. Theories fragment or look too neat when confronted by the scale of the Victorians’ own awareness of difference as fundamental to cultural experience. The perception of difference may be presented in constructive terms, as the foundation of a full recognition of the needs and the individual value of those who are not like us. But difference persistently shades into conflict. Disagreement and division underpins the act of writing throughout the period, and the essays collected here suggest new ways of understanding the significance of these conflicts. What provides the coherence of the discussion is the focus on literary texts as the location of a productive range of encounters around these concepts. Conflicts in understanding, belief and interpretation cannot be resolved through literature but the literary can provide a space in which differences in relationships, worldview, politics, aesthetics and ethics can be made meaningful through the very assertion of difference as fundamentally an empowering action. In this sense, we are following the idea that literature has a particular claim and function in the exploration of issues that stimulate conflict and in the interpretation of ‘difference’ within a given culture or period. Derek Attridge, in Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (2004),

4 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

makes a similar point in writing about the function of literature as it grows from Romantic inwardness into modernist diversity. Attridge comments that writers since the Romantics have claimed that literature speaks ‘beyond the small circle of those with a professional commitment to literature, that it can engage with the language and the thoughts of everyone who speaks the same tongue, and that it attains thereby the power to intervene in the ethical and political life of a community or a nation’.5 It is not difficult to see how such a paradigm might be applied to the narratives of the nineteenth century by writers like Dickens and Eliot. A rapidly changing culture calls for the identification of a holding ground for dialectical positions, which may be debated, arranged, formalized, deconstructed and put to good use within its forms. For the Victorians, literature provided just such a space, and the drive of Victorian fiction, poetry and prose in response to the period’s cultural preoccupations became increasingly concerned with conflict as a structural device. This was partly associated with an increased politicization of the literary sphere and a strengthening awareness of opportunities for wider textual interventions in debate. Given that the Victorians did not always recognize disciplinary and intellectual divisions between discourses, the chapters which follow allow fictional and non-fictional texts to occupy the space of ‘literature’. This in itself produces fertile grounds of investigation and exchange which both broaden and help to refine the terms of our broader discussion. This is not to be complacent about defining conflict and difference, however, nor to overlook the tensions between them. Indeed, our coupling of these concepts is intended to provide a point of intellectual debate. Both ideas have the potential to encompass a wide variety of understandings and interpretations in this period. No single collection could provide the scope necessary to explore the full range of possibilities within such identifications. But we have sought to bring a varied range of strands into play within and across the essays collected here, so that each makes a contribution to an ongoing debate not only about the specific themes of a particular essay but also the larger question about the usefulness of such terms for our analysis of cultural experience in this period. Moving from detailed readings of canonical literary figures to explorations of cross-period themes or specific literary movements or moments, the chapters address diverse areas of intellectual inquiry about what mattered most to the Victorians, including politics, empire, religion and gender. They also serve to remind the reader that the notion of ‘the Victorian’ is in itself conflicted. Ultimately, the ‘difference’ at the core of many of the analyses here is both categorical and conceptual, turning on the nature of the Victorian as a discourse and terminology in the nineteenth century. For it is in terms of how the Victorians sought to classify, construct and contain the world around them that many of the most fundamental issues of conflict and difference can be seen. From political, ethical and ideological work to theological interpretation via consumer

Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn

5

culture, the freak-show and early psychological theory, the eclecticism of the cultural experiences we present in the following essays serve as a reminder of the diversity and complexity of the relationship between individuals and concepts, thoughts and realities. Although it is not possible to be comprehensive in such a volume, each of the chapters brought together under our title provides a specific example of the ways in which the Victorians represented conflict or discussions of cultural difference while at the same time creating a collective sense of the continued diversity and creative energy made possible in approaching the Victorians through such debates. The collection is structured in order that the pieces might jostle with the kind of intellectual friction that characterizes the Victorians’ own experience. We begin with Helen Small’s essay, ‘Argument as Conflict: Then and Now’. Small analyses our own conflicted inheritance from the Victorians, and establishes a series of contextual and interpretative debates that persist in the subsequent chapters. Small’s discussion establishes one of the key themes of this collection: that conflict as a productive mode of thought was part of a Victorian system of understanding and interpreting the world, and is crucial to our analysis of the period. As Small notes, claiming intellectual descent from the Victorians has been a regular feature of recent literary and cultural criticism, but one which has often resulted in the smoothing out of issues of difference and dissimilarity. Small identifies a move away from the fractiousness of postmodernist identity politics and the assertion of a renewed commitment to the universal through the return to the Victorian. One of the most prominent figures to feature in this inheritance is John Stuart Mill, whose positive projection of the desirability of conflict, when reasoned, as part of the liberal sphere of understanding, and his hostility to what he saw as the potentially negative effects of a policy of consensus rather than an encounter with difference, has attracted increasing interest among contemporary cultural theorists. Small’s assessment of these issues returns us to the meaning and importance of ‘conflict’ for Mill in order to insist on the need for a nuanced and accurate reading of Mill’s definition of that term, and his discrimination between different levels of conflict across the philosophical, ideological and sociological spectrum. Through her detailed response to the work of the theorist Amanda Anderson, Small considers the temptation she sees in the work of recent critics to imply that a confidence in our ability to agree on procedures for reasoned philosophical disagreement entails the possibility of reasoned agreement at an ideological level. This threatens because it potentially eradicates difference as a cultural and intellectual force. Small argues that Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Finn (1867), a novel contemporaneous with Mill’s work, posits the rootedness of a specifically ‘British’ tradition which allows reasoned ideological differences because it assumes fundamental consensus at the political and sociological level. In fact, Small’s reading suggests, what Phineas Finn demonstrates much more strongly is the possibility that political and

6 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

sociological conflicts will issue in dramas of tragic irresolution at the level of individual lives. Small’s discussion of such philosophical, specifically liberal, conflicts in analysis and representation finds a striking counterpoint in Herbert F. Tucker’s consideration of Robert Browning’s configuration of conflict in Chapter 2. Tucker’s essay complements Small’s discussion in its interest in the nature of liberal conflict in the poetic rather than the political sphere. The interest here is in the Hegelian problematic of conflict as a component of the dramatic and dialectic, and the ways in which Browning’s poetry seems both to establish and continually defer the resolution of conflict, while embracing notions of difference and dissimilarity in his work. Tucker understands these poems as suggestive of the dialectic of classical liberalism in their endorsement of a strategy of reconciliation-by-deferral. But as he points out, they also, increasingly, analyse the appropriateness of that very strategy. Browning’s progress, in Tucker’s reading, teases out a suspicion the liberal poet had harboured early in his career that the patterns he found aesthetically congenial and socially right-minded in fact doubled as instruments of conservative suppression. Ending on a personal note about his own motivation in seeking to write about the preservation, in Browning’s work, of the power and significance of conflict as a pact between writer and reader, poet and critic, Tucker’s conclusion is a move towards engaging with though not conclusively answering Small’s questions about the classical liberal conflict in contemporary literary studies. Both these opening essays facilitate the often implicit furtherance of such debates in the subsequent chapters. From the literary representation of philosophical difference in the work of Small and Tucker, we move to a real military conflict in Muireann O’Cinneide’s discussion of a wide range of imperial communications related to the First Afghan War of 1838–42. Here, in a very different context, we are again reminded that the consequences of Victorian hostilities persist in our own experience, as we consider the motives and consequences of twenty-first century military engagements in Afghanistan. While conflict studies has become an increasingly prominent part of international relations and political theory in recent decades, O’Cinneide’s essay demonstrates the importance of literary interpretation and misinterpretation in the construction and resolution of conflicts in the Victorian period. It charts the conflict as a process of sustained miscommunication, in which different modes of representation collided to produce profound, and ultimately disastrous, misunderstandings in an already complex political situation. Examining the writings of five people involved in the conflict at different levels of influence, O’Cinneide traces the origins of the Afghan War in the readiness to ‘re-write’ official procedures of communication to suppress possibilities of conflict in the work of individuals such as Emily Eden. O’Cinneide’s analysis shows how Eden’s letters and journals construct different forms of gendered

Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn

7

engagement and conflict with masculine communication networks such as those of her brother Lord Auckland. Lady Sale’s accounts emphasize internal conflicts at Kabul as a means of inscribing her own authority as a military wife and witness, while John Kaye’s much later history invokes narratives of failed communication as a textual means of resolving conflict. These responses to the war raise wider questions about the tensions intrinsic to various forms of imperial communication, and thus regulate the modalities of conflict within the empire itself. From these tensions, O’Cinneide argues, there emerges a commentary upon the conflicts intrinsic to the act of communication itself – conflicts that do not simply threaten the administration of empire, but the textual processes through which imperial successes and failures are portrayed in the contemporary moment and in later versions of the event. Rather than modes to be used in a constructive understanding of the potentialities of difference as an intellectual strength, the realities of conflict as war or battle are thus moderated through literature and language to become misunderstandings of cultural difference, and conflicted sites of communication. The following essay by Kate Flint continues the theme of imperial and transnational debate by focusing on the mythic figure of the American ‘White Indian’ in nineteenth-century culture and literature. Flint’s chapter opens up a series of issues concerning the imperial project’s need for mythic tropes of the different and the other and the complicated idealizations, rather than representative realities, these provoked. The essay explores the myth of the White Indian in the Victorian period as a narrative that was inseparable from a desire to establish European origins for some natives within the Americas. These myths were necessary, Flint suggests, to establish human similarity at a time when much so-called racial evidence, and many racial stereotypes, reinforced ideas of racial difference; in this sense, like Eliot’s view on Casaubon, they might be read as humane identification of difference as an opportunity for human sympathy and recognition. As Flint reveals, the myths of White Indians featured in important ways in British fiction during the second half of the nineteenth century. Such encounters raise significant questions about the nature of ‘savagery’, primitivism, civilization and evolution. Moving from one of the most emphatically imperialistic texts, Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! in 1855 to W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions (1904), Flint reveals how the figure of the White Indian serves to display both the anxieties and the idealizations that could be found when racial borderlines were destabilized. Difference here must be recognized in order to be challenged. Flint’s contribution to the collection provides an important link with some of the liberal agenda about debate, difference and conflict raised in relation to ‘the Other’ in Western narratives of this period by O’Cinneide, and highlighted by Small’s opening essay. The ‘imagined quest’ in Flint’s essay also points towards the imagination as a realm of metaphorical and psychological contention, a theme explored

8 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

in Natalie Ford’s essay on psychological arguments about the nature of dreams in a pre-Freudian interpretative sphere. Ford charts the notion of ‘reverie’ as a conflicting presence in both scientific and literary discourses. While Romantic imaginative works portray reverie as a productive condition of the unhampered mind, late treatises regularly figure it as a disorder of the psyche. Ford’s essay explores this conflict between poetic and pathological definitions of reverie in mid-nineteenth-century British mental science. Looking at the work of influential theorists, including John Abercrombie and Robert MacNish, Ford goes on to the specific example of the surgeon Walter Cooper Dendy’s The Philosophy of Mystery (1841). Dendy’s text provides its own conflicted reading of reverie along the poetic-pathological divide and suggests both positive and negative connotations to be associated with the concept. Science serves here as an interpretative model both separate from and engaged with other cultural forms in its desire to explore the parallels between positive and negative understandings of psychological difference and the mind–body dualism, which itself constructed oppositional forces within the same physical body. The next essay, by Alexandra Tankard, is also concerned with medical science’s intersection with issues of creativity, here located in the physical and debated body of the (artistic) consumptive. Drawing on a nineteenth-century narrative of tuberculosis (or consumption) Tankard analyses the work of Aubrey Beardsley in the light of her interest in the self-construction of a late-Victorian disabled identity politics based on a binary conflict between ideas of vitality and disease. Familiar representations of the disease usually depict consumption as beautiful and painless, an aesthetic sickness, exhibiting an apparent ignorance of the reality depicted in scientific texts of the period. Examining Beardsley’s self-projection of the consumptive artist as physically frail yet monstrously subversive and sexually (re-)positioned, Tankard utilizes contemporary notions of disability as a ‘celebration of difference’ to read back to the Victorian conflict over such understandings. As she does so, Tankard investigates the possible roots of our modern understanding of the positive aesthetic possibilities of antithesis and conflict between the strong and the weak, the well and the sick. Moving from late-Victorian patient to mid-Victorian male carer, Holly Furneaux’s essay initiates a new approach to potentially subversive masculine identities in her examination of male nurses in Victorian fiction. Exploring the figure of the male nurse, Furneaux contends that representations of gentle masculine care in the period provided increasingly politicized resistance to accepted and pervasive models of masculinity, especially in relation to class divides of the period. Using an interpretation which is alert to medical, military and social histories, the essay brings into context one of the century’s most eminent texts of class aspiration, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860), a novel preoccupied with the question of the qualities of the ‘gentle-man’. A number of carers who minister to Pip’s body in the text are read by Furneaux as indicative of Dickens’s interest in the social

Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn

9

status of the male nurse. The centrality of male care in popular novels of the 1850s and 1860s by authors as socially, politically and religiously diverse as Dickens, Yonge and Craik is suggestive of the scale of cultural investment in male tenderness connected with the development and demonstration of gentlemanly identity. Care, nurture and childhood are interrelated themes in the Victorian period, and Malcolm Chase’s essay on children and Chartism offers an innovative perspective on the overlooked figure of the child within the radical politics of the Chartist movement. As Chase argues, Chartism was unique as a social movement in placing children and youth at the forefront of its conflict with forces opposed to the reform agenda. The occasional practice of dedicated Chartists naming their children after prominent figures in the movement is routinely noted in studies of Chartism, but, historians have often allowed the humorous aspects of this practice to deflect attention from the substance of what it meant to grow up in a Chartist household, perpetuating a view of children within Chartism as essentially passive objects, serving only to signify the political convictions of their parents. Chase explores the implications of the emphasis placed by Chartism on the integrity of the family in the face of the destructive forces of industrialization. His more rounded appreciation of the role of children within Chartism helps us to understand more fully how the political work of issues of gender and patriarchy shaped the movement. Family and childhood were not merely among those things male Chartists mobilized to defend: they were themselves primary locations of Chartist conflict against the economic, social and political establishment of the period. Chase’s essay thus recovers an important but obscured element of Chartist self-identity. Janice Allan’s chapter on Wilkie Collins and the freak or monstrosity also draws our attention to interpretative differences that have remained hidden, in reminding us of submerged tensions in the genre of ‘sensation fiction’. Opening with a discussion of two famous nineteenth-century examples of human monstrosity, Miss Julia Patrana and The Wild Man of the Prairies, Allan begins by establishing how Collins’s novels – like their human counterparts – were read as a type of abomination: a literary freak show that staged contemporary conflicts and anxieties surrounding the nature and limits of literature and the human. In their ability to transgress and destabilize a range of cultural and material norms, these texts represent a symbol of the body that both demands, and defies, classification. Confronted with the same range of taxonomic border conflicts as the spectator of a freak show, Collins’s critics were forced to ask: are such works a ‘freak’ of literature, a ‘legitimate’ form of art, a new type of writing, or a ‘missing link’ between existing forms? Allan argues that the increasingly anxious response to such questions can be traced back to the cultural climate produced by contemporary scientific conflicts between progressionist and degenerationist understandings of human development, as well as those centred upon the status

10 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

of humanity itself. Bridging the boundaries between science and literature, this debate echoed the most disturbing implications of evolutionary theory. The reviews of Collins’s work, as with the freak show, are littered with references to the mutability of races and species and metaphors of hybridity and miscegenation. In analysing a range of contemporaneous literary and scientific sources, this chapter sheds new light on the anomalous nature of sensation fiction as a genre, and on its relationship with some of the most prominent scientific conflicts concerning bodily, mental and literary conceptualizations of difference in its time. Forcing authors of the period into neat categories may be reductive and can act to silence sites of potential conflict. This point is developed in Juliet John’s chapter on Dickens and cultural capital, which examines the commoditization of the individual author. As John indicates, multiple conflicts and differences of interpretation are at play in the figure of Dickens. Most particularly, the career and critical-cultural afterlife of Dickens foregrounds the ways in which the term ‘culture’ itself is an ideological battleground. Dickens’s populist, commercial leanings have seemed threatening or demeaning to cultural theorists and literary critics from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The rejection of Dickens by those regarding themselves as the guardians of ‘culture’ was most explicit, perhaps, in F. R. Leavis’s exclusion of Dickens from The Great Tradition (1948) for elevating entertainment over seriousness, but since the Soviet film director Eisenstein used Dickens to prove that the modern medium of film had ‘ancestors’ and a ‘pedigree’, Dickens has been used by various kinds of cultural producers as a short-hand guarantee of ‘quality’, respectability, and established ‘Culture’. The film industry, the BBC, and the tourist industry in particular have facilitated Dickens’s upward cultural mobility and continued prominence in the cultural consciousness. John’s chapter examines aspects of Dickens’s relationship with the heritage industry, through these multiple positionings of Dickens within the larger cultural sphere, and specifically the ways in which it typically uses the idea of Culture as a commodity, yet works to hide a commercialism still seen, in Britain at least, as threatening to purist notions of culture and the past. John’s chapter connects contemporary critical concerns about heritage with the Victorians’ own ambiguous relationship with culture in the marketplace. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman’s chapter on the representations of Victorian conflicts in twentieth-century popular culture develops this question through an exploration of the basis for Rogers and Hammerstein’s musical The King and I (1951), providing further evidence of how we are still negotiating aspects of our conflicted inheritance from the nineteenth century. The original source of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I is to be found in Anna Leonowens’s two travelogues, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870) and The Romance of the Harem (1873). Looking at how this adaptation reflects twentieth-century America while representing

Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn

11

nineteenth-century British concerns yields several reciprocal insights into the ways in which the musical relies on nostalgia for a mythologized Victorian past in order to address current problems. In charting the cultural dissemination of the Victorian texts in the mid-twentieth century, Weltman also reminds us and allows us to see in different ways how the Victorians addressed similar issues of conflict in relation to the representation of race, class, and empire with far more richness than our current depictions of them customarily recognize. As with John’s discussion, Weltman’s essay connects at a fundamental level with the collapse of ideas of difference at a critical level in relation to the Victorians’ conflicts over cultural identification outlined by Small in the collection’s first chapter. While John and Weltman seek to provide a bigger viewpoint on cultural conflict and debate, Melissa Raines takes us back to the specifics of the literary text in her detailed analysis of George Eliot’s resolution of conflict through syntax in Felix Holt, the Radical. Eliot was acutely aware of the difficulty of communicating her perceptions of reality through the verbal pathways of syntax. Through a sharp analysis of the language and sentence-structure in Felix Holt, Raines demonstrates how Eliot made a conscious effort to write in a style that emulated the thought-processes of minds in moral conflict. What is at stake here is the registering of simultaneous movements within a linear and successive medium; the evolution of complex clauses, as in the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, is utilized by Eliot as she creates a map of the human mind. In particular, Raines focuses upon the subterranean ‘vibrations’ within the syntax as the initial signs of intense emotional conflict. She compares the published text with the original manuscript, showing the painstaking negotiations made between writer and publisher – as well as within the writer’s own mind through the process of re-reading – so that ultimately, the conflict exists on multiple levels: within the characters at the level of story as reflected through the syntax, as well as between published and manuscript versions. Raines’s essay argues that Eliot’s commitment to preserving these textual vibrations in spite of editorial changes is part of her attempt to create a language, and an accompanying notation through punctuation, that is both well-structured enough to be comprehensible and yet complex enough to make the reading process comparable to the emergence of thought in intimate relation to experience. It is a structure which attempts to illustrate yet also illuminate the conflict of thought and its articulation through language, and to expand the ways in which the positive notions of difference and their recognition might serve to impact on the individual’s own human identity in the process. From Eliot’s syntactic conflicting currents, Laurel Brake’s chapter moves to an examination of difference within genre. Brake’s interest focuses on the conflicts of nineteenth-century journalism, and looks closely at the critical work of Matthew Arnold in relation to journalistic and literary culture. Exploring the omnipresent rhetorical conflict between literature and

12 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

journalism in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Brake demonstrates the inherent tensions of the period’s rhetoric that both fuels and is fuelled by the parallel formation of literature and journalism as professions. Brake parallels the impetus given to ‘criticism’ by Matthew Arnold in his flagship essay of 1864, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, and the volume in which it soon appeared, Essays in Criticism, with the rise of journalism, and places Arnold’s famous advocacy of ‘disinterestedness’ in criticism in this wider context. She examines the practice of journalism through the serial, the daily newspaper and the review, underlining the contemporary conflicts over the position of each, and suggesting how such differences over genre serve as a potentially productive means to re-think divisions in our understanding of the period’s literary culture. Also concerned with the representation of divides connected to the larger culture of the period, Galia Ofek’s chapter analyses a specific aspect of the New Woman debates that were being played out in the journalism of the mid- to late-Victorian period. Writing in the periodical The Saturday Review in 1868, Eliza Lynn Linton famously termed the politically ambitious ‘Girl of the Period’ a member of the ‘the Shrieking Sisterhood’, while the New Women writers retorted that Linton’s version of conservative man was part of ‘the Bawling Brotherhood’. Highlighting ways in which conflicts between these sisters and brothers were constructed at the end of the century, Ofek explores sibling rivalry in Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book (1898) and Mary Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage (1899), specifically in their relation to Biblical discourse. In both novels, the balance of power between brothers and sisters, men and women, hangs on competing narratives and conflicting readings of the Bible as much as it depends on quantifiable legal reforms. Sibling rivalry is presented by Ofek as a direct consequence of women’s efforts to redefine family hierarchies and social structures and to regain their birthright through interpreting and re-writing biblical stories. In so doing, Ofek’s chapter initiates a revised thinking of the ways in which differences in representation and understanding in such foundational texts were appropriated as a means of enhanced political and social conflict by the New Women. Appropriately, the collection concludes with an essay on last things by Matthew Bradley. Bradley’s work explores the meaning of sin and eternal punishment at the fin de siècle by teasing out the theological and literary controversies inherent within elements of the Decadent movement. Retribution for sins, eternal punishment for the damned, and the notion of a God who stood in condemnatory relation to man, were the key concerns underpinning some of the most notorious conflicts in religion in the midVictorian period. Among familiar conflicts on this theme we might include F. D. Maurice’s resignation from the Chair of Theology at Kings College London following his questioning the doctrine of eternal punishment; Pusey’s comments that the concept of the essential seriousness of sin was so essential that it held the fabric of society together; and following the

Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn

13

publication of Essays and Reviews in 1860, the battle over whether the wicked would suffer everlasting pain in hell which was played out in the ecclesiastical courts. Offering a radically different reading of the irresolution of such debates well into the late-Victorian period, Bradley’s chapter explores the possibility that the sidelining of damnatory eschatology from theology’s intellectual mission was partly responsible for its secular re-fashioning within a wider literary discourse. Bradley contends that the term ‘fin de siècle’ and the literary practices with which it was associated illustrate the displacement of a theological conflict into a literary one, a secular eschatology pronounced by Wilde and others, that stresses sin, damnation and collapse when such concepts were rapidly losing purchase in its religious counterpart. The fifteen essays in this collection range over many areas of literary and cultural discourses from the nineteenth century, but are united in arguing for a reinterpretation of conflict and difference through a sharper critical awareness of the implications of such debates, and a clearer understanding of the terminology to be employed. Diverse and multifaceted as the terms ‘conflict’ and ‘difference’ might be in both our period and that of the Victorians, they nevertheless provide their own form of productive contentiousness and stimulation. That the essays in this volume deliver a broad number of positions on a significant series of debates across the period reflects the potential for intellectual interchange within the use of such keywords when applied to an age marked and defined by controversy and contemplation, disputation and deliberation. Approaching the Victorians and their debates through a terminology that is itself unstable serves to reflect the strength and liveliness of nineteenth-century interpretations of the cultural, political and social landscape through a literature that remains open to ideologically, theoretically and conceptually varied investigation. Our aim is not to resolve conflicted cultural moments or movements, but to explore the instabilities which so fascinated, intrigued and inspired the Victorians, and which reverberate within Victorian studies today.

Notes 1. Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil: or, The Two Nations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 96. 2. George Eliot, Middlemarch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 261. 3. Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (Oxford: World’s Classics, 2004), p. 5. 4. Ibid. 5. Derek Attridge, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 1.

1 Argument as Conflict: Then and Now Helen Small

[P]art of what defines the peculiarly Victorian response to the disenchantments of modernity is the attempt to imagine the methods of modern science, critical reason, and cosmopolitan detachment in terms of exemplary or heroic characterology; in this way, what we might call early antifoundationalism was underwritten by ethos, and thereby imbued with value, achieved or earned through practices that could successfully take on a human face. Prominent examples include Arnoldian disinterestedness; [. . .] “moralized objectivity” in scientific practice [. . .]; and the imbrication of character formation and epistemological advance in the thought of John Stuart Mill, where the quality of a particular truth takes its coloring from the dialogical process by which it was obtained.1 Where once literary critics and historians of Victorian culture tended to be at pains to distance themselves from Victorian values (the moralism, the imperialism in matters of thought as well as politics, the belief in the value and virtue of objectivity), current criticism is often readier to acknowledge positive debts. The passage above, taken from Amanda Anderson’s The Way We Argue Now (2006) is among the most striking recent examples. For Anderson, the Victorians were ‘modern’ before their time: ‘early antifoundationalists’, as it were, but with the important difference from today’s antifoundationalists that they understood the commitment to rationalism as having a desirable characterological dimension for its practitioners. Mill is an especially influential antecedent in this regard because, as Anderson puts it elsewhere, he was dedicated to ‘detached evaluation’ of ‘embedded modes of existence’, but nevertheless remained ‘aware of the importance of custom, tradition, and ingrained sentiment’.2 In this renewed respect for Mill, Anderson’s book has close affinities with another recent work, if anything more positive in its identification with certain aspects of his moral and political thought: the philosopher and cultural theorist Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Ethics of Identity (2005). Like Anderson, Appiah finds in Mill an influential precursor – not quite a model, but a formative historical voice, and now a positive help to our 14

Helen Small

15

thinking about how far the politics of identity may or may not be reconcilable with liberal universalism. ‘In so far as this book has a totem’, Appiah acknowledges, ‘it is, of course, John Stuart Mill’.3 There are various ways in which liberal criticism today might claim an intellectual genealogy from the Victorians. Twenty-first-century American/ European democratic liberalism is not the same thing as Victorian liberalism, but in both these cases the debt to Mill is close and telling. It is in part a product of Anderson’s training as a Victorianist, and Appiah’s long-standing interest in liberalism as a universal, or universalizable, moral framework; but it is also, I think, more broadly a feature of the times. That is, even though the prestige of Victorian liberalism in general, and Mill specifically, has taken some blows in recent decades (with a number of critics focusing our attention on the cultural blindspots in his understanding of social diversity 4), his belief in the progressive force of conflict in ideas, politics and morals, along with his particular combination of critical detachment and respect for cultural diversity, retains obvious appeal for a critic wanting to move past the dispersive cultural particularism of much recent cultural theory. ‘Conflict’ is only one term in what might be thought of as a spectrum of concepts important to liberal thinkers in Mill’s tradition – a problematic one not least because its position in that imaginary spectrum is often unclear, and potentially moveable. The spectrum runs, loosely, from consensus, through reasoned agreement, to reasoned disagreement (conflict constrained by rational procedures), to conflict uncontained by rational procedures, to anarchy. Though Mill at times used the term ‘conflict’ to describe actual conflict in the political or social sphere, or to refer to ideological conflict, its most persistent evocations in his work operate at a higher level of abstraction, involving philosophical or conceptual antagonism. He gave a famously positive valuation to reasoned conflicts of view at this philosophical level, and deplored the negative characterological and sociological effects (as he saw them) of consensus. It is, indeed, the ethical component of Mill’s belief in the universal value and virtue of intellectual confrontation between divergent views that has attracted many of his modern followers. In this chapter, however, I argue that any use of Mill to assist a return to rationalism as a universally respected principle for resolving conflict has to avoid the temptation to claim more for what rational procedures can achieve than is warranted. If we are to follow Mill, I claim, we need to start by recognizing, as he did, the limits of what the philosophical case for conflict can offer ideologically and politically. We need also to recognize conflict as something more and other than disagreement: that is, as involving ‘embedded’ interests and ways of life not susceptible of harmonious resolution by the means used to obtain reasoned agreement at the philosophical level. In making this claim, I am not primarily criticizing Anderson or Appiah, both of whom are alert to necessary discriminations between levels of

16 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

abstraction in the way they argue. I am looking, rather, to isolate a possible, and I think likely, misreading of the political terrain opened out for literary and cultural criticism by neo-Millian advocacy of robust rational conflict if those discriminations are not made more explicit.5 To take our Victorian lineage seriously requires the reservation of some scepticism about Mill’s high valuation of ‘conflict’. It means also retaining a sense of the distinct kinds of encounter registered by the term as it operates in the philosophical, the ideological, or the political/social fields. Last but not least, it requires a sense of the limited applicability of academic argument as a model for public-sphere argument.

* It is in Mill’s On Liberty (1859) that we find the most authoritatively optimistic Victorian account of how conflicts of principle contribute to the good of society. Progress in our ideas and our political systems requires conflict, Mill argues: In politics [...] it is almost a commonplace, that a party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life; until the one or the other shall have so enlarged its mental grasp as to be a party equally of order and of progress, knowing and distinguishing what is fit to be preserved from what ought to be swept away. Each of these modes of thinking derives its utility from the deficiencies of the other; but it is in a great measure the opposition of the other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity. Unless opinions favourable to democracy and to aristocracy, to property and to equality, to co-operation and to competition, to luxury and to abstinence, to sociality and individuality, to liberty and discipline, and all the other standing antagonisms of practical life, are expressed with equal talent and energy, there is no chance of both elements obtaining their due; one scale is sure to go up, and the other down. Truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites, that very few have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment with an approach to correctness, and it has to be made by the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners6. Mill’s claims about the value of conflict are made here primarily at the philosophical level, and only secondarily at the sociological or psychological level. He implicitly celebrates political and social diversity as a spur to progress in that it produces lively differences of view which can help to tone the moral and intellectual muscles, but social diversity is presented first and foremost as a diversity of ideas held in binary opposition to one another (democracy/aristocracy; property/equality; etc). Not that Mill thought that

Helen Small

17

philosophical conflict was without implications for ideological or political conflict: his opposition to Intuitionist accounts of knowledge and moral principles was, for example, fuelled by his sense that they gave support to conservative views and social practices. But conflicts of political view are, given his confidence in what a rational encounter between them will achieve, less dispiriting terrain for Mill than the metaphor of ‘fighting under hostile banners’ might superficially suggest. Indeed, the vision of conflict as a kind of internal check and balance system of ideas is pervasive in Mill, informing not just his view of party politics, but his view of intellectual progress as the outcome of a process technically better described as dialectical than ‘conflictual’. This abstractive understanding of conflict is fundamental to the ethical as much as epistemological outlook of On Liberty. We cannot claim the status of truth for our opinions or our values, Mill holds, unless we have done mental battle with the opposition. And it is not enough to hear the opposition’s case second hand: 99 out of 100 people, he says, never possess themselves of the full truth of their principles, because they do not expose themselves to the real test of that truth, the ‘fact which seemingly conflicts’ (p. 39). Even our most secure beliefs must be ‘vigorously and earnestly contested’ (p. 53) if we are to be justified in trusting them, and be confident that they are defensible to others. At which point, Mill asks himself the obvious question: is his vision of the necessity of conflict to truth not self-defeating? If truths become ‘dead’ (p. 37) as soon as we cease contesting them, how is truth ever to be stabilized? For Mill, the answer lies, or should lie, in a serious revival of Socratic methods of teaching – including an end to the modern disparagement, as he sees it, of negative criticism. Truth, in his account, cannot ever be the static achievement or possession of a society, because a society is made up of living, temporal beings, each of whom must ideally come to own the truth as his or her own vital possession. Aiding that process is the business of education (pp. 45–7). On close examination, the ‘vigour’ and the scope and meaning of conflict turn out to be carefully controlled in On Liberty. This is most evident when Mill turns his attention to the proper conduct of arguments. It hardly needs saying that Mill’s interest lies not with rational proceduralism in the modern sense, but with much more gesturally formulated ground rules for rhetorical debate in a liberal society. For example, while everyone gets to talk freely, in Mill, they do not get to talk loudly, nor do they get to employ the weapons associated with ‘polemic’ (p. 55). ‘Invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like’ are off the agenda (p. 54). And if this is a moral directive about what ought to work from Mill, it is also a pragmatic recognition of what has a chance of working. If you are going to oppose the prevailing opinion, you will only receive a hearing by employing ‘studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence’; if you are on the side of majority opinion and choose to exploit that advantage by raising

18 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

the volume, you are likely to suppress the very voices you stand to gain from hearing (p. 55). The objection might, therefore, be made to Mill’s use of the term ‘conflict’ that has been made to Gerald Graff’s much later appropriation of the term. (Graff made his name in America during the curriculum wars of the 1980s and 1990s,7 arguing that instead of resolving the conflicts over the content of ‘culture’ we should ‘teach the conflicts’.) D. G. Myers puts the objection succinctly. Once you have two people in a room genuinely considering each other’s arguments and opening up to the possibility of being wrong, you do not any longer have ‘conflict’: in doing this they are no longer opponents but codeterminers of a joint hearing. They do not take sides, but cooperate in the rational evaluation of arguments. On this showing, the ‘conflict’ [. . .] is put aside, and what remains is a serious examination of a mutual concern.8 When Mill talks of ‘conflict’, one might argue along the same lines, what is meant is not in the strong sense of the term ‘conflict’ at all, but rather a contest of views under the (never challenged) umpireship of universal reason. But Mill’s argument, like Graff’s, is misread as soon as one shifts it from the philosophical sphere (where not just ‘conflict’ but a whole raft of synonyms – ‘opposition’, ‘antagonism’, ‘struggle’, ‘fighting’, ‘hostility’ – are constrained to the conceptual domain), to the domain of cultural politics – say the politics of the educational curriculum. In Mill’s vocabulary, the difference between ‘conflict’ and ‘a serious examination of a mutual concern’ is a difference in the intellectual and moral energy of those who engage in philosophical argument, not a substantive difference in semantics (though it might sound like one). For Mill, as for Graff, conflicts (or ‘serious examinations’) of opinion are never a threat to social or intellectual cohesion. On the contrary, they are signs of the fundamental integrity of our social and moral life, which lies in our assumed common commitment to rationality. The Graff analogy is more pertinent than it might at first seem. The factors which have assisted the positive return to Mill’s liberalism in recent criticism are also factors which must mark out a significant historical difference in the social and political contexts for a liberal debate as it can be theorized now and liberal debate as it was theorized in Victorian Britain. Mill’s twenty-firstcentury descendants are living in and responding to societies in which differences of view have, over several decades, come to be characterized as not primarily rational but deeply, many would say inextricably, cultural (cultural, that is, in the broad sense, involving the meaning of all social relations, and not just the literary or artistic expressions of a society). Both Anderson and Appiah are part of a clearly identifiable return to universalism9 in their reaction against the fracturing of the field for debate that has resulted from

Helen Small

19

that perception of the intrinsically cultural nature of differences of view. Although Mill was alert to the power of cultural attachments in shaping our political and intellectual interactions (after all, it fuelled much of the debate about ‘belief’ in his lifetime), he did not regard socio-cultural identity as possessing the determining power which it is so often assigned today. Modern theorists also write after many decades of philosophical hostility to the assumption that rationalism is a universal ideal, or that it is practicable in accordance with universal procedures. Amanda Anderson’s book deserves extended attention here because she has a particularly sharp sense of the ways in which our terms of debate have been distorted by both these factors: the pressures of cultural diversity, and the pervasive influence of the philosophical critique of reason. Anderson’s concern is that, as literary and cultural critics and as members of progressive liberal democracies, we have now so convinced ourselves of the inevitability of conflicts of principle that we are failing to recognize the more important grounds of our agreement. As she sees it, there is a serious flaw in our current styles of academic reasoning – one she attributes to the twin influences of the post-structuralist critique of reason and a pervasive sociological reductionism which prioritizes group identity and overstresses the limits (‘linguistic, psychological, cultural’) of individual agency. Together these forces have made it ‘impossible to explore shared forms of rationality’ (pp. 1–2). We have, she argues, lost faith in the concept of critical distance – or, if not lost faith in it (what is shabbier) lost the willingness to defend it publicly. Above all, in our readiness to see ethos (by which Anderson means both the individual fostering of an ethical character to one’s life and the cultural development of authenticating collective attitudes) as replacing or eclipsing rationality, we are betraying rationality and endangering the health of our democracy. We must, Anderson urges, in a recognizably Millian vein, change the way we are arguing and acknowledge that the practices of rationality, ‘such as critique, argument, or procedure’, themselves constitute ‘a viable and positive ethos’ (p. 12). The essays in The Way We Argue Now offer, collectively, a detailed and varied account of Anderson’s perception that our cultures of argument have been culpably reluctant to include a commitment to rational procedures in their definitions of ethos. Through readings of a range of recent and not-so recent theoretical conflicts, including the pragmatists’ assault on foundationalism, the never quite actualized ‘debate’ between Habermas and Foucault, and Lionel Trilling’s classic account of the distinction between sincerity and authenticity (which she sees as anticipating many of our current problems), Anderson makes a persuasive case for the retrieval of the terms ethos and character from their position as typically disavowed but nonetheless active components in today’s critical vocabularies. Instead of being relegated to the margins of our rhetorical repertoire, or mystified into the charismatic personality of the theorist (e.g. Foucault), or privileged as

20 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

an (underdefined) authentic mode of living, ethos should be associated with our most basic and indispensable commitment as critics – our commitment to the rational, democratic procedures of argument. The defence of rationality in The Way We Argue Now thus provides a theoretical prescription for a revitalized cultural criticism, and re-energized public debate more generally. This is, evidently, political philosophy as much as cultural studies, or rather, it is cultural criticism presented as a model of democracy. It begs one obvious question: is there only one rationality, even within a model of cultural pluralism? What kind of reasoning practice does Anderson assume we share? As the recurrent references to proceduralism suggest, she has a quite specific idea of the ideal form our reasoning takes – one which gradually takes her some distance from Mill. Although she writes respectfully of Weber, and of various kinds of postMarxist and poststructuralist-inflected criticism, her primary allegiance is to Habermas. The final chapter of her book is a strong defence of Habermasian proceduralism in the face of much critical hostility to his model of rationality, widely seen as narrowingly normative. Far from being opposed to ethos, Anderson argues, Habermas’s defence of rigorously impersonal forms of argument and procedure, directed towards the progressive expansion of our interpretative horizons, becomes itself a relocation of ethos. It is, she writes, ‘paradoxically [...] a kind of anti-ethos ethos’ (p. 178). There is not the space here to pursue in detail the question of what other forms of rationality might be opposed to the Habermasian one (Weberian reasoning towards agreed ends? a more thoroughgoing scepticism, in the Humean tradition, towards pure reason in all its forms?10). What interests me more is the potential for conflict between Anderson’s own critical allegiances. Specifically, what does it mean to advocate a return to Habermasian discourse ethics and democratic proceduralism, while also advocating and practising (as she does, throughout) a generous pluralism of outlook? The combination of pluralism and committed Habermasianism in The Way We Argue Now, is, for the non-Habermasian reader, the hardest aspect of this book to assimilate. Anderson is not blind to the potential difficulty. There may, she acknowledges, seem to be an ‘asymmetry’ in her own critical imperatives – Habermasian normativity not obviously sitting comfortably with many of the other forms of theory and practice treated sympathetically by her. But she declines to raise the ‘asymmetry’ to the status of a conflict. ‘My view’, she writes, is that this is a productive tension, one that informs any attempt to conceptualize a liberal temperament. Inevitably, the postures that liberal pluralism imagines for itself will need to be supplemented by, if not include, an openness to postures and practices different from its own. There thus emerges a felt difference between the principles and orienting postures that one endorses, and those other practices and modes that one

Helen Small

21

takes pains to describe, understand, and sympathetically entertain (as a liberal pluralist). In any event, the tension will be evident throughout the project. (14) When is a philosophical conflict not a conflict? Evidently, when it is absorbed into one’s own critical outlook as a ‘productive tension’ or ‘sympathetic’ inclusiveness; that is, when it is either (re)defined as a dialectical model of reasoning or absorbed into a self-described liberal pluralism that says, in effect, ‘This view is not mine, but I seek to understand it and incorporate it into my view.’ Anderson is here again close to Mill. But can cultural and literary criticism today really sustain such an open pluralism while avowing its attachment to one definition of rational procedure? Can it be at one and the same time wedded to that one set of procedural constraints and genuinely accommodating to other principles and interests (other ideals, even?), as Anderson wants it to be? The closest Anderson comes to admitting that there may be irreconcilable imperatives here is in the final pages of The Way We Argue Now, where she turns her attention to two critics of Habermas. In part she is concerned simply to demonstrate, once again, the privileging of ethos over argument in contemporary debate, but it is evident that she finds the critics in question plausible up to a point – sufficiently so to give them substantial room within her own conclusions. The philosopher Gerald S. Gaus aims his criticism at the unachievable ideal of reasoning involved in Habermasian proceduralism – the non-match, therefore, of the philosophical ideal of conflict with the actual conduct of practical reasoning. Argument, he points out, is a philosophical ideal not a political one: in practice we argue not through exhaustive consideration of information and viewpoints but via shortcuts, relying (often) on vividness of example and (always) on available information. Under these conditions, sincerity, required by Habermas, is not the most relevant principle. It is more likely to produce disagreement than consensus, which requires ‘some fudging and bending, and which fares better under conditions of incomplete honesty’.11 Thomas McCarthy, by contrast, objects to the undue pressure towards consensus within the Habermasian model. Participants in reasoned argument ‘need to recognise the possibility of reasoned disagreements and then use this recognition to devise democratic procedures that will enable and enhance co-existence’ (p. 183, Anderson’s italics). In his counter-model for a pluralist society, tolerance, respect and mutual accommodation would weigh more heavily than the principle of shared reasons.12 Anderson has more time for McCarthy’s criticism than Gaus’s, which she sees as pretty close to cynicism. (Philosophers and politicians alike, she replies, may wish for debate to be animated by procedural ideals and universal principles, whilst accepting that the practice can never be pure.) Though she is unpersuaded by McCarthy’s wish to elevate the principles of ‘tolerance and

22 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

respect’ above commitment to a shared belief in reason, she does not dismiss the point. Instead, she suggests that we should see in McCarthy’s ‘logic of accommodation’ an ‘attitude informing democratic practices that otherwise still need to be based on procedures for ensuring open debate and equitable forms of representation’ (p. 184). This treatment of a conflicting view is, I assume, intended to be exemplary in its effort to respect, and involve, an opponent in argument while nevertheless holding the Habermasian line. But the strain shows in that oddly opaque ‘otherwise’. One can read Anderson as saying that though McCarthy’s ethical requirements do not trump the ethical requirement for commitment to reason they should have a place in that ethos. But I suspect she means something less accommodating: namely, that respect and tolerance are part of what anyone would, anyway, consider part of ethos (they hardly need stipulating), and that they do not satisfy the basic and (in today’s critical climate) more contentious necessity that we agree to put reason first. Anderson concludes with what is, in effect, a characterological prescription for the kind of criticism which would follow from her book: Argument with those from whom we differ is a form of respect and it implies an aspiration to universalism. Committed to the possibility of agreement as well as the conditions of pluralism, it does not attempt to tame or stabilize disagreement: it is capable of reasoned disagreement, but is perhaps more fundamentally characterized by a dissatisfied recognition of disagreement. (pp. 186–7) It is a deft summary of the ethical stance her advocated reforms of ‘the way we argue now’ would produce. It is also, I think, a problematic one, in so far as the description of ethos seems finally to displace the hard work of reasoning. We are not finally given an argument about why commitment to reason should trump commitment to tolerance or respect: we are given an ethical assertion that it should. But why? Because it has logical priority? But it is not clear that it does. At the very least there is more to be said here about why reason should have priority in settling the order of priority between itself and those principles which are in contention with it. One can reframe the question of whether pluralism must find itself in ‘productive tension’ or, more strongly, ‘in conflict’ with the commitment to one form of rational proceduralism by considering a broader question. What kind of interpretation, and valuation, does argument of the kind Anderson advocates ask us to place upon the notion of conflict per se? Here Anderson’s debt to, and difference from, Mill come to the fore again. Her discussions of Mill in The Way We Argue Now, brief though they are, make plain that he represents for her what might have been a different, and in important respects better, trajectory for modernity (see esp. p. 139.) But if Mill is to stand as exemplary of an ethical commitment to rationality in public discourse,

Helen Small

23

and a belief in the importance of the characterological development of its practitioners, he might – and should – also prompt scepticism about how far conflicts of view can be reconciled within a common understanding of what counts as rationality. He should also encourage a leaven of selfawareness about the limits on our ability, as cultural critics or as citizens of modern pluralist democracies, to turn conflict towards progress – that is, he should prompt some scepticism about whether rationality (on whatever terms agreed) has priority in domains beyond the philosophical. More than either of these, he should point us towards recognition of an ongoing unsatisfactoriness in the rhetoric of conflict as it operates within liberal traditions of argument. As I see it, Anderson is able to assume Mill’s optimism about the progressive potential of conflict only because she makes her argument at his high level of abstraction from social reality, but (and this is the problem) always with an eye on the social and political contexts that produced the need for her argument in the first place – i.e. the greater cultural diversity and greater potential for cultural conflict in her world than Mill’s. At the philosophical level her treatment of how we reason through conflict is cogent enough. But there is a problematic gap in her theoretical model at the point where she would, apparently, have us make a transition from philosophical argument to political practice – including, in a much narrower interpretation of ‘culture’, the practice of a politicized literary criticism. That gap is apparent in her closing paragraphs, where she briefly addresses the banning of the hajib in French schools. It is not her conclusion on this issue that troubles me (she argues that citizens of a pluralist French state must go beyond ‘peremptory appeals to cultural identity’ and ‘clarify’ the meaning of their collective responsibility for an education ‘consonant with’ secularism (p. 187)). What bothers me, odd though it may seem as a criticism of a politically concerned and motivated book, is the place this gesture towards actual political decisions has as a closing rhetorical move in her argument. Her point is that pluralist societies today ‘must cultivate an ethos of argument if [they] are to meet the ongoing challenges of [their] political (re)constitution’ (p. 187). That sentence makes a quiet but, on close inspection, very bold move between what we do when we enter into argument, and what we do when we engage in the field of lived politics. It seems to me that Anderson is here in danger of precisely the mystification or ‘aggrandizement’ of ethos (the ethos of argument) that she has, rightly and robustly, criticized, encouraging her readers to overestimate what may be achieved by philosophy, and by cultural criticism, in the world. On the question of what a politicized literary criticism, specifically, can achieve, it has to be said that Anderson’s claims remain implicit. One could question the tone of some of her statements about literary criticism and its influence in the public sphere (‘the dominant paradigms within literary and cultural studies have had an adverse effect on the fostering of public-sphere argument’ (p. 17) – are they really so important? is how we argue within the

24 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

academy really so accessible to the rest of the public sphere?), but it would be fairer to say that literature and literary criticism are remarkable for their near total absence from The Way We Argue Now. Although she addresses herself to literary and cultural theorists, Anderson has almost nothing to say in this book about specific literary works, or even about the idea of the literary, the only detailed consideration of a literary text being at second hand in her political critique of S. P. Mohanty’s reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. To the limited extent that one could derive any assumptions about literature, as opposed to literary criticism, from The Way We Argue Now, it would be through her occasional references back to her earlier published work The Powers of Distance, written in part contemporaneously with it, where literary texts by Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot and Wilde are examined alongside Mill and Arnold as evidence of the range of Victorian thinking about the ‘character-enhancing’ or ‘character-damaging’ consequences of various kinds of rational objectivity (p. 7).13 My own conviction is that neither literature nor (in any ample sense) literary criticism would bear the weight of Anderson’s philosophical claims about the priority of our commitment to the ethos of reason. That priority has rarely if ever been one that literary writers or literary critics have shared. If literature is to have a role at all in this debate about conflict and its meanings for us at various levels of abstraction from reality, it has to be a more modestly complicating one. No single example can suffice, but if one wanted a literary expression, contemporary with Mill, of the flexibility of the term conflict, and of Victorian optimism – often inadequately bolstered by reason – about the role of conflict in ‘public-sphere argument’, one writer immediately comes to mind. This is the writer invoked in Anderson’s title, though curiously nowhere mentioned in her book: Anthony Trollope. At once obsessed by conflict (and, by many reports, temperamentally inclined to it14), Trollope might offer a voice of explicit scepticism about the depth and seriousness of conflict as it was manifested in the most visible arenas of liberal debate during the mid-Victorian period: Parliament, the press, and the world of letters. In the final part of this chapter I treat him as a diagnostician of that weakening of the political sense of conflict that we have seen in Mill, but which also, in Trollope’s eyes, went well beyond Mill, being an identifiable (and almost entirely positive) attribute of English national character. Given that, for Trollope, description of an ethos of non-conflictual conflict was cause for a celebratory view of national temperament (evidently exclusionary in many of its political and historical effects in the period), it is worth taking his analysis of his culture back to The Way We Argue Now. Should not any modern revival of Millian ideas about the value of conflict for our argumentative ethos require more by way of analysis of the historical roots of this liberal optimism – including the nationalistic aspects of its characterology? Does modern cultural or

Helen Small

25

political criticism wanting to follow in the steps of Mill not need also to retain a high degree of alertness to where philosophical conflict stops and lived conflicts begin?

* Figure 1.1 shows T. L. B. Huskinson’s illustration for the 1949 Oxford Trollope edition of Phineas Finn (1869), still in print, though with a new (1982) introduction and notes by Jacques Berthoud. It accompanies the scene in which Phineas Finn, newly elected member for the pocket borough of Loughton (at some embarrassment to his own liberal reformist principles) goes to visit the assistant editor of the so-called radical paper, the People’s Banner. Hutchinson’s line drawing shows Mr Quintus Slide hurling himself violently in the direction of a wildly bewhiskered Phineas, finger pointing at his throat, coat tails, papers, chair flying, and Phineas apparently hitting his head on the door which he had been moving to close behind him. All vigorously conflictual, only it is either a misreading or a heavy exaggeration of a line surely not meant to be taken literally: ‘Mr. Quintus Slide . . . threw down his pen, came off his stool, and rushed at once at his subject.’15

Figure 1.1 T. L. B. Huskinson, illustration for chapter 33 Phineas Finn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949)

26 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

From the inappropriateness of several of Huskinson’s illustrations, it would seem he had not read Phineas Finn with much care, if at all. But one can see why the temptation to read ‘rushed at his subject’ in the physically conflictual sense might arise. Phineas Finn is a novel with a very peculiar purchase on conflict. It is at once obsessively interested in the topic and remarkably shy of it. It holds out vigorous conflict as a virtue in political and private life but at the same time seeks to suppress it as a vice, and perhaps as literary bad taste (a source of cheap melodramatic effects). It deplores the unwillingness of British politicians to have the courage of their differences, and yet it also seems to want us to admire a distinctively British ability to reserve conflict for the debating chamber and keep it off the streets. This ambivalence about conflict is enacted at the level of plot in a series of oddly averted scenes of violence or frank antagonism: an attempted garrotting by street-muggers from which Phineas rescues his successful rival in love, the coldly autocratic Mr Kennedy; a duel with his second successful rival, the hyper-conflictual Lord Chiltern (Phineas deliberately shoots wide, receives a bullet in his own shoulder, but quickly recovers). Triangulated against these two men (the one who brooks no conflict and the one incapable of operating without conflict) Phineas seems to have been set up by Trollope as a case study in the problem of how much aptitude for conflict is admirable in a hero.16 As a politician, Phineas is a self-styled liberal hopelessly compromised by a political system which makes independence of view and freedom of expression next to impossible in practice. ‘Could there be any liberal feeling in such a place’, Phineas reflects on his parliamentary career of some 16 months duration, ‘or, indeed any political feeling whatsoever?’ (I, p. 312). At the end of the novel, Mr Monk, the MP for the radical constituency of Pottery Hamlets, inspires Phineas to resign his place on the government benches in order to vote as an independent on the question of tenant rights for Irish farmers. Until that point, only Mr Turnbull (John Bright) stands as an exception to the representation of parliament as a self-congratulatory gentlemen’s club; but even he presents no exception to Trollope’s sense that in parliament, and in British political life generally, conflict is really just rhetoric. Turnbull is unequivocally satirized as a popular demagogue, strong voiced, if not a great orator, who always catches the speaker’s eye and, ‘[b]eing free from responsibility, [is] not called upon either to study details or to master even great facts’ (I, p. 163).17 The major problem of interpretation posed by Phineas Phinn is whether this perception of conflict as (just) rhetoric amounts to satire, or whether Trollope wants us to see it as, rather, a matter for national complacency. ‘[S]urely in the eyes of strangers our practice must be very singular’, the narrative voice remarks, with more self-congratulation than irony: There is nothing like it in any other country, – nothing as yet. Nowhere else is there the same good-humoured, affectionate, prize-fighting ferocity

Helen Small

27

in politics. The leaders of our two great parties are to each other exactly as are the two champions of the ring who knock each other about for the belt and for five hundred pounds a side once in every two years. How they fly at each other, striking as though each blow should carry death if it were but possible! And yet there is no one whom the Birmingham Bantam respects so highly as he does Bill Burns the Brighton Bully, or with whom he has so much delight in discussing the merits of a pot of half-and-half. (I, p. 82) The Liberal and Tory leaders fight as if to the death, on the parliamentary stage, but walk home arm in arm (a repeated topos in the novel). Things are not like this in America, or so Trollope would have us believe. ‘There the same political enmity exists, but the political enmity produces private hatred. The leaders of parties there really mean what they say when they abuse each other, and are in earnest when they talk as though they were about to tear each other limb from limb’ (I, p. 83). Is it good not to mean what you say? Apparently yes. In passages such as this, one has to assume that Trollope recognizes the factitiousness of political enmity in Britain, but manages still to regard it as a virtue. And yet, we are surely meant to feel, with Phineas, that there is something wrong with a system in which it is so very difficult for a representative of the people, (a) really to represent the people (this is immediately pre-Second Reform Bill England), and (b) to do so independent of the policy compromises agreed by his parliamentary seniors. The idea that one must be ‘for or against’ causes, ideas, people is the staple matter of Phineas Finn but those who urge partisanship do so only as posture. Radicalism makes itself heard only in the same spirit: as, variously, the cynical bluster of Mr Quintus Slide, the teasingly advanced egalitarianism of Lady Glencora Palliser, or, perhaps most tellingly, the aspirational Labour politics of Phineas’s erstwhile landlord, Mr Bunce, who feels that doing battle with his employers or ‘some such antagonism would be manly, and the fighting of some battle would be the right thing to do’ (p. 68), but who is haplessly arrested for merely trying to shake hands with Mr Turnbull at a demonstration for the ballot. It is typical of Trollope that the scene in which Phineas Finn fluffs his maiden parliamentary speech, meant to be about Mr Bunce, removes all narrative attention from Bunce’s case to concentrate on Phineas’s greenness in the art of parliamentary speaking. Trollope has a disconcerting habit of taking the political content out of conflict, and the guts out of satire. Just as he repeatedly turns the plot so that anticipated conflicts evaporate or loss their heat, he gives us scene after scene initially primed to shed an unlovely light on the corruption of the governing classes, or the complacency of the parliamentary system, only to let satire ebb away into tamer ironies directed at the hero. Conservatively liberal, Phineas Finn has it both ways: it exercises a certain amount of scepticism, but

28 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

remains, even at the end, ‘on side’ with the existing system – or at least the existing procedures for changing the system. It is a novel in which gearing oneself up to a virtuous conflict and so entering maturity (Phineas’s story) is finally plotted as a retreat from the field of conflict: our hero ends the novel no longer an MP but Inspector of Poor Houses in Co. Cork – which might, in another novelist’s hands, be an opportunity for practical reformism but looks here rather more like a sinecure. In one area only Trollope’s reluctance to imagine conflict disappears. In the loveless marriage of Phineas’s first political mentor, Lady Laura Standish, to Mr Kennedy, he does give us an irresolvable clash of temperaments and values with tragic consequences for the participants. Almost in proportion as the rest of the novel tempers meaningful conflict, the chapters describing Lady Laura’s marriage ratchet it up. More exactly, Lady Laura herself actively looks to ratchet it up, refusing the gradualism and decorum that temper differences of view through the rest of the novel. Finding her situation intolerable – her freedom of movement constrained, her tastes dictated to, her friendships jealously monitored, excessive religious observance demanded of her – she yearns for the honesty and the hope of change that would come with frank conflict if her husband would only overstep the mark sufficiently to justify it: ‘sometimes she almost longed to talk again about Phineas Finn, so that there might be a rupture, and she might escape. But her husband asserted himself within bounds’ (II, p. 116). The opportunity at last arrives when Kennedy sends for the lawyers and seeks to enforce his legal rights as a husband. At that point Lady Laura considers herself morally justified in leaving England for Europe. There are several hints that this marriage plot might contain an allegory of the political plot – specifically, that we are to see in it a model of the relationship of Ireland to English rule.18 Phineas (the Irish representative) himself sees an analogy between Lady Laura’s situation and his own political exile: ‘“It is hard that you should be driven away.” [...] and he was beginning to think of his case also. Was it not hard that he too should be driven away?’ (II, p. 289). But she demurs and her demurral is a caustic riposte to the conservative liberalism of the rest of the novel. Her case and Phineas’s are not really alike. No new avenues will be legitimately open to her, either in private or in public life. Her conflict with her husband is a stalemate which, until he dies, leaves her leading a drastically constrained and unhappy life. On the surface Phineas’s situation is comparable: his wish to exercise a truly liberal independence gives him no option but to leave England, unless he were to betray his Irish sweetheart and marry the wealthy, and alluringly independent, Mme Max Goestler who would fund a further career for him in politics. But by having Phineas engage himself, without much thought or apparent desire, to Mary Flood Jones (who never approaches his London loves in sexual or intellectual attractiveness), Trollope shuts down any equivalently serious moral conflict for his hero. A Trollope hero can’t ditch

Helen Small

29

the sweet Irish girl and still be a hero. In other words, though there is regret, even distress, there is no real moral conflict in the man’s plot, which is also the political plot. Real conflict is reserved for the woman’s plot, the domestic plot where, perhaps, it can do less general damage. Only in its treatment of women and marriage, then, does Trollope’s novel push with proper seriousness at the question of where conflict ceases to be ritualized and contained by liberal procedures and becomes a serious threat to individual liberty. In theory, that threat to liberty is large and affects the whole political system – it is there in the Irish question, in the perceptible corruption and complacency of the electoral system and of parliament itself, in the inability of the Mr Bunces of the world to exercise very basic rights to free speech and free movement. But in the internal drama of the marriage plot alone does it take the form of a tragic and, for now, insoluble impasse. ‘A woman must be content to be nothing’, Violet Effingham (the second glamorous London heroine) observes with more charm than asperity late in the novel, ‘ – unless Mr. Mill can pull us through’ (II, p. 197). In one sense, Phineas Finn may be read as a novel in search of John Stuart Mill, or rather a novel in need of John Stuart Mill: that is, as a novel about the desirability of taking conflicts of principle more seriously, and with less complacency, than Victorian Britain characteristically does. That they are not taken seriously, except in the form of resignation from the field of play, is both an analysis of a liberal failure, and a liberal failure on Trollope’s part. This is not to say that it is by any means a literary failure. What gets suppressed as narrative and dramatic conflict in Phineas Finn resurfaces, as we are used to saying, as conflicts of ideology and of literary form. But this is also a novel that has something in common with Mill’s liberalism in its tendency to take the real danger out of the idea of conflict. It also has something of Mill in its perception that one of the great strengths of the English national character is an ability to recognize the essentially intellectual nature of conflict – and to trust that intellectual contest will preserve us from deeper social conflicts. From that perspective, Phineas Finn is not a liberal failure, but a diagnosis of the cultural limitation that is mid-nineteenth-century liberal argument’s disinclination (not necessary, but deeply engrained) to take seriously the fact that for others the term conflict has greater social urgency, and greater latent force.

* In several respects, the drive of literary studies for some decades now has been against conflict resolution. It is a relatively recent turn in literary and cultural criticism (well represented by Anderson and Appiah) that would have us recognize the fundamental grounds of our agreement and be less satisfied with our disagreements, and it marks a clear and explicit move to make our practices match up to the challenge of a world deeply mired in conflict. There

30 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

are good reasons to agree with these modern inheritors of Mill that we have undervalued the importance of our own shared procedures of rationality, and that we have sometimes been too quick to enshrine recognition of ideological difference as the mark of our own honesty and (in various forms) our political good faith. But there are also reasons to hold back from agreeing, first, that our shared forms of rationality are adequately described in any one way (for example, by Habermasian proceduralism – even when mixed with a generous liberal inclusiveness of other views); second, that we are all, as literary critics, reading the same texts and doing the same kind of work; and third, that the goal of our rationality must be full agreement. Our practical hopes in the world right now, Peter Mandler has remarked,19 are much less idealistic, lying primarily with the cessation of outright hostility and establishment of a modus vivendi. Far from arguing that our academic practice must tune itself up to the level of conflict in the world, we should, surely, take from the political reality around us a sharp reminder of the limits of reason and of the less than full representativeness of our professional community. Debate about conflict is only one strand within recent cultural and political criticism, but it is sufficiently strong to sustain some large generalizations about recent efforts to reform the way we argue now. A danger in this otherwise welcome revival of a Victorian philosophical tradition of argument is that we might forget the element of caution that accompanied Victorian confidence about what rational debate could achieve. Mill believed philosophical conflict to be progressive, certainly; in tendency formative, also, for the private and public character of its practitioners; but its capacity to produce positive change in the real world of politics he understood to be strictly limited. To rephrase a comment by Appiah: Mill never confused the job description of the philosopher with that of the citizen.20 It is an illusion of language – a slip, as it were, of the term – that allows the conduct and potential resolution of ‘conflict’ in the philosophical arena to be presented a model for conducting and resolving actual political and social conflict. Not that philosophy may not have practical effects in the world but those effects must necessarily be at some remove from the practice of philosophical argument. Any theoretical justification of what we do as literary critics and historians that makes appeal to our shared valuation of reason has to engage with the hard philosophical (and unliterary) work of explaining how a transcendental conviction of our common rationality21 can be connected up to the practical questions of what it means to live out an ethical commitment to reason in the world. In short, it is necessary to acknowledge what rational debate can do for us, but also what it cannot do.22 That means keeping in mind the often sharp distinction between the ideal and the reality of how we reason; it means acknowledging the possibility of reasoned disagreements, and agreeing sometimes to disagree, or to accept a fudge rather than an ideally processed outcome (Anderson and Appiah would, I assume, agree on both these counts); but it also means

Helen Small

31

being wary of the tendency to anaesthetize and glamorize conflict when we are really talking about rational argument. Last but not least, it means avoiding the temptation to self-aggrandizement in any claim that academic argument can be an adequate model for the conduct and resolution of the conflicts of democracy.

Notes I am indebted to John Kerrigan, Bruce Robbins and, especially, Stefan Collini for comments on drafts of this essay. 1. The Way We Argue Now: A Study in Cultural Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 138. 2. Amanda Anderson, Review of Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, Victorian Studies 48:2 (2006), pp. 321–3, pp. 321–2. 3. The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 271. 4. See, especially, Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in NineteenthCentury British Liberal Thought (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Also, Eileen P. Sullivan, ‘Liberalism and Imperialism: J. S. Mill’s Defence of the British Empire’, in G. W. Smith (ed.), John Stuart Mill’s Social and Political Thought (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 389–407 (398–400). For a counterview, see Julia Stapleton, ‘Political Thought and National Identity in Britain, 1850–1950’, in Stefan Collin, Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (eds), History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History, 1750–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 245–61 (251). 5. This said, Anderson is not, I think, entirely immune to the wish to see a liberal ethos of philosophical reasoning as bringing with it the promise of social and political progress. 6. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, with The Subjection of Women and Chapters on Socialism, ed. Stefan Collini, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 48–9. Subsequent references will appear in the body of the chapter. 7. That is, the debate between traditionalists and progressives over what the content of American secondary educational curricula should be. 8. ‘Invitation to an Argument’, in William E. Cain (ed.), Teaching the Conflicts: Gerald Graff, Curricular Reform, and the Culture Wars (London: Garland, 1994), p. 182. 9. More obvious, as yet, in America and Continental Europe than in Britain, but becoming observable here too. Key figures cited by Anderson include Etienne Balibar, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, Naomi Schor and Joan Scott. 10. On the much larger question of what counts as reason, see Bernard Williams, ‘Internal and External Reasons’, in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 101–13; and Jean E. Hampton, The Authority of Reason, ed. Richard Healey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. ch. 2 ‘The Anatomy of Reason’, and pp. 225–32 on the problems which arise for proceduralism from differences in how theories of rationality understand reason to function as an instrument. Mill’s important distinction, in Utilitarianism, between the authority and the motivational efficacy of instrumental reason is discussed by Hampton at pp. 135–6.

32 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature 11. Anderson, p. 185, summarizing Gerald F. Gaus, ‘Reason, Justification, and Consensus: Why Democracy Can’t Have It All’, in James Bohman and William Rehg (eds), Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 205–42. 12. Thomas McCarthy, ‘Legitimacy and Diversity: Dialectical Reflections on Analytic Distinctions’, in Michel Rosenfeld and Andrew Arato (eds), Habermas on Law and Democracy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 115–53. 13. Anderson, p. 7. 14. See N. John Hall, Trollope: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 65, 105–9, 200, 265, 370, 390–2, 400, 440, 477, 507–10. 15. Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn (1869), with illustrations by T. L. B. Huskinson and a new introduction by Jacques Berthoud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), I, p. 318. 16. Jacques Berthoud rightly notes that, in the case of the duel, the approval or not of conflict has to be understood as a class issue (p. xvi). 17. Roy Hattersley quotes this line in a recent comment piece on the committee room dramas of government. ‘Give Me Fact, Not Fiction’, The Guardian 29 May 2006. 18. The strongest hint comes with Mr Monk’s choice of metaphor for the Irish situation: ‘In regard to the Church, he had long made up his mind that the establishment in Ireland was a crying sin. A man had married a woman whom he knew to be of a religion different from his own, and then insisted that his wife should say that she believed those things which he knew very well that she did not believe’ (II. p. 181). 19. Discussion session following the presentation of the original version of this essay at the BAVS 2006 conference. 20. Ethics of Identity, p. 51. 21. For a pessimistic articulation of the view that confidence in everyone’s respect for rational fairness in procedure and for ‘rationality in this procedural sense’ rests finally on ‘a kind of transcendental argument’, see Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 41–2. 22. For a similar observation, see Richard Horton, ‘When Reason Fails’ (review of Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence), Times Literary Supplement 11 August 2006, pp. 6–7, p. 7.

2 Ever a Fighter: Browning’s Struggle with Conflict Herbert F. Tucker

I Hegel’s big idea about tragedy, that it was rooted in a conflict whose resolution bore fruit within the progressive course of history itself, was also the nineteenth century’s big idea about narrative action as such.1 This is partly because the prestige of Aristotle’s Poetics had made thinking about tragedy the model for thinking about plot in general: after all, the comic action that prevails in fiction’s great tradition conforms at least as well as its tragic counterpart to a paradigm of progressive conflict-resolution.2 A more important reason is that the playing-out, winding-up, and retrospective justification of conflict, to which Aristotle strikes us now as so strangely inattentive, resonated clear across the cultural register of the nineteenth century. Hegel’s master theme of evolving dialectical synthesis manifestly harmonizes, for example, with evangelical protestantism’s triumphant ethic of deferred gratification, and with the concomitant spread of an investment culture that made minor capitalists of most of the Victorian middle class – to name only two predominant forces that bore hard on the suburban upbringing of our chief figure here, Robert Browning. That conflict had an essential role to play in dramatic action was not a discovery new with Hegel. Sophocles and Shakespeare – the former’s Antigone forms the prime exhibit in Hegel’s Aesthetics – knew all about it; so did Cervantes and Fielding when it came to conflict’s analogous importance to plot in fiction. What Hegel did, characteristically, was to theorize this practical knowledge, bringing it to consciousness as a general principle and giving it a place of honour within a civilizing evolution. In this he was not alone among his generation. Consider Coleridge’s famous affirmation that imaginative power ‘reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities.’3 The accountancy metaphors here are aptly drawn: ‘balance’ and ‘reconciliation’ are bookkeeping terms that say much about the new century’s book-making too. In extended lyric verse Coleridge himself had pioneered modes of 33

34 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

‘conversation’ poetry (‘Frost at Midnight’) and interiorized meditation (‘Dejection’) that re-framed the elegy, epistle, and ode to meet a modern sensibility, while retaining those venerable genres’ civic ambition. Wordsworth at once, and Shelley and Keats soon afterwards, seized on these modes in order to enact the drama of the conflicted mind where consciousness divides against itself. The Romantics’ writings define a genre of greater lyric whose aim is the forward reconciliation, whether gradual or epiphanic, of a postulated interior discordancy (‘Intimations of Immortality,’ ‘Ode to the West Wind’); or whose refuge, where such reconciliation cannot be had, is the neutral balancing-out of opposites (‘Kubla Khan,’ ‘Ode on Melancholy’). Prose fiction in Regency Britain was quick to follow the poets’ lead. The premier novelist of the early century, Sir Walter Scott, was himself a Romantic poet first; and his Waverley novels refined techniques based on the national verse narratives (especially Marmion, 1808, and The Lady of the Lake, 1810) that he had published to acclaim a decade before. Fundamental antagonism between individuals within the core plot represents vaster collective relations within the embedding history that bears them along, witting or not, in its flow. A Scott protagonist represents party or class or nation not allegorically, as in the older canons of romance, but metonymically, his actions being the expressive effects of ingredient socio-historical causes. To understand Jeanie Deans or Darsie Latimer is to grasp the motivating power of cultural determinants, which not only shape out what Scott’s people may be and become, but are also themselves subject to incessant change along an historical vector whose surest mark is the clash of new ways with old, a clash retrospectively synthetized into narrative progress by a retrospect much like his exact contemporary Hegel’s. Something of the same kind also occurs, with admitted differences in focus and proportion, in a Regency novel like Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Where long misunderstanding and contretemps between the principals are systematically abetted by conflicts of social rank viewed against the background of a nation at war, the eventual reconciliation of Anne Elliott and Captain Wentworth carries the balance of the action forward and outward, with quiet but unmistakable aplomb, into a new British century.

II We now call that century Victoria’s, and to Victorian authors of ambition the monumental Romantic achievement of the conflict-resolution plot in lyrical and fictional modes offered at once a step up and a stumbling block. By the 1840s, when Browning’s generation had come of age but not yet come into their own, what Coleridge and Scott had wrought was no longer news but had become an article of business as usual. From Wordsworth and Austen readers had learned the inner discipline of a new

Herbert F. Tucker

35

basic training: secular strife, within the self as with others, was the price paid down for a reward to come; and among the awaited sweets of that reward was membership in an evolving collectivity to which the badge of struggle earned admittance. As these ideas became widely current and shaped the Victorian mainstream of received ideas, their imaginative currency obliged the literary innovator to think again. Because vanguard authors might now take these ideas for granted, that is just what they had to do, in the name not only of creative originality but also of up-to-date mimesis; for the way modern people thought about conflict had changed. The imaginative models that arose with Romanticism had trained up a generation of mental combatants for whom the ideological complex of gratification-deferral and conflict-resolution itself formed a significant part of the arsenal. The consciousness that Hegel and others had disseminated among readers had mutated from a description of the conditions of existence into an instrument to be inventively deployed in what the mid-century found it natural to call, with Charles Darwin, the struggle for existence.4 The idea that change gave conflict its meaning now went without saying; what was new were the opportunities that the idea’s incorporation into a modern outlook offered to those contemporaries who stood ready to wield it. Within early Victorian fiction, distinct species of the Bildungsroman still flourished, but only when they took on board representatives of groups whom the rising tide had left behind by reason of gender (Jane Eyre) or class (Alton Locke). The marked formal challenge of the 1840s novel lay, rather, in showing how the template of Bildung lay open to expropriation, being a secondary phenomenon like any other of the givens in modern life. Hence the kinship between Thackeray’s Becky Sharp and Brontë’s Heathcliff: villainous-heroic outsiders whose mischief, and glamour, inhere in their seeing through the neo-Romantic ideology of striving and then manipulating it for purposes of fresh strife, in the service respectively of roguish short-term gain and sociopathic long-range planning. Among the Victorian poets, likewise, Bildung inspired a revival of the lyric sequence, which in Sonnets from the Portuguese or In Memoriam is instantly distinguishable from its Renaissance originals by the now and then strategically digressive but in the end unrelentingly purposeful directedness of its plot. In each of these 1850 poems the protagonist comes home to a happy, shared faith in the future – but only after a long and stubborn fight sustained in fealty to a ruined past. The frozen extremity of an initial state of alienation makes every reluctant step in the return to social integration feel like a challenge necessitating fresh negotiation of the rules of engagement. If the artistic quick of these poems lies where their artistic successors have consistently told us it does – in the intensity and duration of the dubious battle they wage mid-field – at the end of the day the breadth of favour they have enjoyed since first publication derives

36 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

from the plenary act of conformity Barrett Browning and Tennyson undertook in them to what was essentially a Romantic paradigm of conflict-resolution.5 Robert Browning’s contribution to the resources of modern poetry lay quite another way, through cultivation of the dramatic monologue, a genre that has less in common with the lyric sequence than with the mischief of Vanity Fair and Wuthering Heights. For the dramatic monologue proceeds, contra Coleridge as sponsor of ‘balance or reconciliation,’ from what Robert Langbaum influentially named a state of ‘disequilibrium’: a staged misfit or rivalry between avowal and performance, between what the speaker’s language says and what it does, and thus between the Romantic authority asserted by first-person lyric utterance and the distancing Romantic irony that arises from second-level disturbance within that utterance.6 Constitutively at odds with itself, the dramatic monologue thus maintained a roundabout kind of faith, I shall suggest, with what had been radically new in the poetics, and cultural politics, of Romanticism decades before. It did so thanks to the vigilance with which Browning resisted the tendency of this (like any) genre to subside into its proven formulae. He kept the monologue in vital trouble, across the decades of the mid-century, by changing it up as he went. Having at first expounded his generation’s received ideas about history as the universal solvent of local conflict, he next disavowed those ideas, and then eventually subjected them to refined analytic exploration, in a series of generic mutations that disclose further implications about where he stands in relation to both his Romantic exemplars and his modernist posterity.

III Browning was ‘ever a fighter,’ if ever a poet was. That phrase from the idealized 1864 self-portrait ‘Prospice’ (l. 13) is consistent with the composite image of pugnacity that comes from those poems we have reason to associate closely with the author himself.7 The proxy poet of Pauline (1833) ties off his rhapsodic self-inventory by heading away ‘in the dark / To fight a giant’ (ll. 1026–7). Roughly the same mission resounds, ‘Dauntless’ (l. 203), amid disenchanted remains of the day in ‘ “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” ’ (1855); and it persists, in admittedly overexposed silvertone, on the valedictory calling card of Browning’s official death poem, the ‘Epilogue’ to Asolando (1889): ‘One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,/ . . . / Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better’ (ll. 11–14). Of fighting as such the vast poetic corpus offers remarkably little direct narration or description: Roland traverses a ‘fell cirque’ in which only traces remain of some horrible contest that was; the whole point of ‘Incident of the French Camp’ (1842) is that the mortally wounded messenger is hors de combat; Pheidippides (1879) reports not the course but only the outcome of

Herbert F. Tucker

37

the battle of Marathon, in which he has evidently been a noncombatant. Actual bodily conflict interests Browning’s imagination by way of pretext or aftermath: it is something that one girds for or fantasizes about, or that the blood boils to remember. Which is to say that Browning’s habitual condition of truculent arousal is, even within the fictive world his poetry constructs, already an imaginative state continuous with that to which his art strives to arouse the reader. To this effort ministers virtually every feature that has made his verse notorious for difficulty. The skitter, careen, and lurch of his muscle-bound metric, abetted for good measure in later decades by high-friction alliteration suggestive of the century’s newly unearthed Anglo-Saxon precedents, made Browning sound to contemporaries like the hardest-working man in show business. His curious, superabundant, promiscuous diction gave headaches to fin-de-siècle lexicographers only after doing the same to several generations of readers nonplussed by the violent yoking of inkhorn terms to slang, of demotic to exotic specimens, of straight talk to pernickety kenning.8 Probably hardest of all to take was – and still is – the impromptu squeezebox of Browning’s syntax, now bellowing out over a bridge of thought too long to follow, now compressed by relational and pronominal ellipsis into a pivot too swift to glimpse – and at all events making the reader either adopt a preternatural attentiveness or suffer a regimen of detention: stop, parse, reread. The interrupted resumptiveness thus enforced by the poetic medium has led conflicted readers, naturally enough, to impute their difficulties to Browning himself. Walter Bagehot’s 1860s practitioner of the ‘grotesque,’ whose unpoetic license hunts out humanity ‘in difficulties,’ was a figure heralding the case study that a psychoanalytically inquisitive twentieth century would soon find in Browning the ‘semantic stutterer,’ inhibited adventurer, thwarted agent, crossed lover: a one-man clinical gallery exhibiting the stigmata of barbarism (cultural, also linguistic) and burdens of impediment (to action, also to speech) – not the auxiliaries but ‘the obstacles to poetry,’ clenched in discordant imbalance against the conciliatory sympathies of the day.9 To approach this richly consistent tradition of critical response as so many fighting words is to appreciate how successfully Browning’s array of techniques mobilized his reader for conflict. Forward-deployed at the edge of the chair, bristling for action: this is where Browning wanted us, in that state of artificially induced vigilance which, he maintained, the circumstances of modernity called on poetry to assume. Relaxant palliatives to such Blakean ‘mental fight’ were everywhere in Victorian bourgeois culture, and a rising consumer economy busied itself to devise and broadcast them.10 Of these the most intellectually insidious was the slumber of the Hegelian dialectic set on autopilot: the belief, in other words, that in being spoken for by the century’s new master narrative, which subsumed the struggle for existence into a civilizing history, one was ipso facto a fighter

38 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

already. This Victorian delusion Browning combatted so adroitly because for a time he had subscribed to it himself. It had formed the ideological climax of his first long experiment in historical reconstruction, Paracelsus (1835), whose fifth-act anthem retroactively justified the hero’s aggressions and fallings-off as so many steps in a species-perfecting evolution. Sordello, too, the 1840 epic that made Browning poetically who he was, had flirted with a progressivist literary-political history, which it required all of that text’s pervasive ironizing devices to wrestle to a draw.11 How to calibrate the contest of irony with ideology – how to animate history without succumbing to progress – was the task addressed by Browning’s Dramatic Lyrics. That 1842 title records the dramatic monologue’s generic descent from the Romantic lyricism of monological ‘conversation’ noted above, whereby elegy, ode, and epistle were pressed into the service of a dialectical strategy for reconciling conflicts of a secular and subjective kind. Browning’s counter-strategy was to re-project the internal drama of Romantic lyricism outward, so as to expose its premisses to the irony of historical understanding. ‘Count Gismond’ executes this strategy with an elegance that is all but abstract. The riveting episode recited by the Countess, during the colourful waning of the Provençal middle ages, concerns a trial by combat in which her champion and mate-to-be Gismond has come out of nowhere to vindicate her sexual honour by butchering the kiss-and-tell public impugner Gautier on the spot. All this is told years later to a confidante, and in such confidence moreover that when Gismond himself enters the scene during a final stanza the Countess, without missing a beat, drops the subject and pretends they have been talking about something else. This denouement proves too hurried, its hinted evidence too scanty, to secure any moral or legal conviction when readers provoked by the ending put the Countess on trial all over again.12 But Browning’s framebreaking last stanza does suffice to expose her feminine mystique – wherein an alluring dependency on the kindness of strangers overlays medieval on Victorian ideologies of gender – as, if not a pose, then certainly a performance. The social belief system is denatured as a self-evident order of things, in the same gesture that delyricizes the poem as an utterance simply and consistently sincere. No longer truthful as it seemed, the Countess’ tale instead becomes a part of the truth of history: her self-contradiction betrays a belief system in which, like the legitimacy of the ordeal by combat, we can be sure only that she finds it best to appear to believe. Browning titled the poem in 1842 merely ‘France,’ coupling it with a poem titled ‘Italy’ that adjoined it, and that the world knows now as ‘My Last Duchess.’ Like its sister piece, this famous monologue narrates a contest of wills decided by force majeure yet does so in such a way as to entertain elements of irresolution, pointedly the Duke’s confession that in overmastering his Duchess he has nevertheless failed to understand her, and beyond that his glimmering awareness that her way of being in the world has trafficked

Herbert F. Tucker

39

with vital realities from which his aristocratic-patriarchal vantage cuts him effectually, yet not altogether, off. Patriarchy here throws the span across centuries that chivalry does in ‘Count Gismond.’ In each case the speaker’s thorough yet not quite complete absorption into the ideological system of a vanished day challenges modern readers to a dual recognition: first, that the ghost of that vanished day persists after all within contemporary ideology; second, that contemporary ideologies are no more exempt than bygone ones from a vexing incompleteness of fit. Melodramatically plotted conflict within each poem’s narrative, on one whiggish level, encourages the reader to put history behind and to one side, over there in ‘Italy’ and ‘France’ back then, in the bad old days before bourgeois culture had put the relation between the sexes right at last in idealizing an elective, companionate marriage. At a subtler level of ethical interpretation, however, a recursively abiding conflict within the monologizing narrator makes such progressivist dismissal hard to sustain. Hard, but not impossible. The reception history of ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Count Gismond’ shows how apt modern readers are to condemn the Duke or Countess on grounds that are jointly (if inconsistently) ethical and historical. Those devious aristocrats’ misdeeds are just what we should expect from representatives of a time and place thankfully outmoded. Their narratives of five-hundred-years-old conflict illustrate in retrospect the same meaning – civilized progress – that our conscious difference from them manifests, and that our contemplation nowadays of such case studies in poetry books helps us savour. So the verdict has trended, on the whole; and to observe how neatly it reproduces the complacency with which the Duke and the Countess fold their anecdotes of strife into all’s-well life histories does not make it any less likely to crop up again in class next semester. Its persistence suggests, rather, that with these poems Browning succeeded only too well in the objective extroversion of lyricism; his summons to ironic reversal of the Romantic authorization of sympathy was so clear as to mute the countervailing subtleties of appeal that went with it. Major monologues from Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845) refined on these first efforts by further psychologizing their constitutive conflict, planting it deeper within the speaking self and giving it more expository time. ‘Pictor Ignotus’ and ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s’ both take their occasion in the narration of a lifelong contest – the unnamed painter’s with a younger Rafaelesque competitor who outshines him, the bishop’s with one Gandalf, his predecessor and rival in matters erotic as well as ecclesiastical. In each poem this outward contest opens inward to reveal an analogous contrast fissuring the speaker’s lived outlook: the creative block thrown up within the painter, and luridly rendered in tropes of sexual violation, by agoraphobic aversion to the burgeoning art market; the bishop’s deathbed vacillation between on one hand the habitual offices of a not altogether rote piety, and on the other hand a venal lust for the worldly goods that church offices can be made

40 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

to produce. These intrapsychic divisions Browning also makes fully legible as signs of the Renaissance times that both monologists inhabit. Speaking from an intersection between the ways of medieval fixity and early modern opportunity, artist and prelate alike bespeak an historical clash of values, diversely apprehended as structures of feeling that are respectively pathetic and farcical in tone. While this affective divergence between the two poems militates in itself against single-minded recruitment of the Browning Renaissance as a one-way chapter in history, that has proven to be a losing battle where some influential readers are concerned. Witness John Ruskin’s famous commendation of ‘The Bishop’ as epitomizing his own indictment of Renaissance taste and value, and as scoring a direct, true-blue hit within the complex culture wars of church and state, spirit and matter, faith and doubt, that roiled the Victorian mid-century.13

IV Such polemical conscription notwithstanding, Browning’s refinement of the dramatic monologue gave increasing emphasis to conflict within the psyche as artistically valuable per se, and less to where conflict might reach a narrative end.14 Since one technique for such emphasis was to boost the monologist’s articulate power of self-analysis, intrapsychic conflict became a regular and overt theme in Men and Women (1855). For Karshish the Arab physician the soul and body are at odds, and medicine’s task is (rather like poetry’s) to keep the volatile spirit incarnate (‘An Epistle,’ ll. 3–14). ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ is more explicit: No, when the fight begins within himself, A man’s worth something. God stoops o’er his head, Satan looks up between his feet – both tug – He’s left, himself, i’ the middle: the soul wakes And grows. Prolong that battle through his life! (ll. 693–7) These words fairly describe the secret of the former Bishop’s appeal a decade before, but the St. Praxed’s pontiff of 1845 could never have put it this way. Blougram is, ostentatiously, a modern Englishman, the tension between his flush modernity and his embrace of Rome’s presumptively retro Christianity furnishing indeed a cardinal instance of that same fight within a man of which he speaks. ‘Pictor Ignotus’ too has its 1855 sequel, in ‘Andrea del Sarto,’ as self-consciously perverse a monologue as Browning would ever write. Here the horn-locked dilemma of a modern artist split against himself – sold out in the market, cornered and cuckolded at home, yet perversely content within the garden of extenuative fantasy that this chosen situation

Herbert F. Tucker

41

lets him cultivate – so engrosses focus that we can forget how outward conflict frames Andrea’s entire speech. When at the close he fancies, only to forego, vindication by contest with his greater contemporaries, he is only enlarging after all on the heartfelt, yet at the same time profoundly devious, gambit with which he has broken into speech: ‘But do not let us quarrel any more’ (l. 1). Poem after poem in this and Browning’s next collection (Dramatis Personae, 1864) opens Andrea’s way: in challenge, riposte, or surrender to an interlocutor whose presence matters critically to the monologue but whose silence we scarcely notice. This is because in the poet’s mature art the auditor typically catalyses in the speaker an inventory of internal conflicts whose ramification a second person may prompt or recall but can seldom begin to live up to. Historical curiosity remains intense in ‘Karshish’ and ‘Andrea del Sarto’ (as in their companion pieces ‘Cleon’ and ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’), where density of realized detail answers to complexity of subjective development with a brimming adequacy that anticipates the towering contest of murder with love, passionate with legal wrangling, and spontaneity with historical determination that is The Ring and the Book (1868–9). Most distinctive of the mid-century monologues, however, is Browning’s commitment to do in a poem like ‘Blougram’ what his admired Balzac had done in the novel: update the Scott tradition so as to render contemporary life in the sort of conditionality formerly reserved for historical retrospect. Depicting the present in its unfolding historicity, baggage and promise and all, Browning gave back to his time in verse its very form and pressure, shorn now of the progressivism, i.e. the more or less formulaically idealizing presentism, into which the challenge of Romantic historicism had by now declined. Where Browning’s ventriloquized result looked most like lyrical intimacy, it was least that – sheerly by virtue of its first being so much more. Let’s contend no more, Love, Strive nor weep: All be as before, Love, – Only sleep! So begins ‘A Woman’s Last Word’ (1855), one of Browning’s shortest poems and thus susceptible even in brief space of an extended look. Its ten terse stanzas obey to the jot the pattern established in this one, alternating trochaic trimeter and dimeter, with every even-numbered line choking back its last slack syllable – to catch breath? take stock? sob? pointedly not sob? – and thereby setting up an oscillation between what this poem’s topic practically urges us, for once, to think of as its feminine and masculine rhymes.15 When ‘weep’ and ‘sleep’ are reprised in the final stanza, in feminine-rhyme position at that, our speaker will have gotten what she started out needing, and will have

42 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

gotten it by a remarkable economy of means. Each stanza being shorter by two syllables than a single heroic couplet, this must be pillow talk where every last word counts. Making her way in the lyrical dark by the whisper of ideological radar, and without benefit of Browning’s usual kit of authenticating props, our speaker begins by suspending overt hostilities, in order to pursue conflict by other means along fronts undeclared. This is the opening gambit of Andrea del Sarto – like whom, let us suppose, the speaker means at once to recoup the alienated sympathies of her affronted lover and to gain some inner purchase on the second-nature reflexes that the uneven developments of Victorian gender have both burdened and armed her with. If the ambiguous ‘Last Word’ of the title has us wondering whether to expect from her capitulation (that’s all she wrote) or triumph (and that’s final!), her next move skirmishes, verbally, with the words that police culture: What so wild as words are? I and thou In debate, as birds are, Hawk on bough? See the creature stalking While we speak! Hush and hide the talking, Cheek on cheek! (5–12) Such talk against talking might scandalize Browning’s fellow liberal John Stuart Mill, who in On Liberty (1859) would soon make the open contest of ideas ‘in debate’ the very condition of their truth. But our speaker’s parliament-of-fools trope here announces a subaltern’s counter-truth. ‘Truth’ is a luxury they can ill afford who – made vigilant by others’ trespasses, or their own – regard such forensic exposure as tantamount to menacing surveillance. What good are confessional words when they imperil the one thing needful, the heart’s security in love? What so false as truth is, False to thee? (13–14) We can no more know of this speaker than of her elder sibling the Countess Gismond whether she has been ‘false’ in the sense that the second line not very subliminally flashes our way. What we can know is how she, like the Countess, makes womanly dependency – her high fidelity to canons of femininity exalting troth or loyal subordination over the veracity of propositions

Herbert F. Tucker

43

concerning who did what when – run chivalrous interference and ‘hide’ inquiry into precisely such a question. The canons of femininity the poem invokes are palpably Victorian, but their roots run as deep as Western culture; and in what follows the speaker draws, with breathtaking associative facility, on the West’s ur-myth of tragic moral conflict: Where the serpent’s tooth is Shun the tree – Where the apple reddens Never pry – Lest we lose our Edens, Eve and I. (15–20) Emily Dickinson may have learned something here about the work of implication that transitional page space can do in verse stripped as spare as this. The way the ‘tooth’ and the ‘apple’ attract each other formally on the axes of syntax and line, in spite of the clearly posted semantic signage prohibiting such attraction, rehearses an ancient appetitive knowledge that fuses vulnerability with desire. That the unnamed substrate of this unstable compound is woman – our nameless speaker’s unique identity marker, and the only one she needs – emerges in the flirtatiously chaste solidarity-infallibility that the last line so shockingly affirms: not ‘I and thou,’ as in line 6 above, but ‘Eve and I.’ Nobody here but us naughty girls, whose rehabilitation demands – and how imperative in mood the poem has by this point become! – nothing more than a hero who is man enough to risk the existential glamour the next lines tempt to: Be a god and hold me With a charm! Be a man and fold me With thine arm! (21–4) Borrowing the serpent’s tongue from Genesis 3:5 (‘in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods’), the speaker comes out of hiding, a full-blooded daughter of Eve, into the entire seductiveness of tactical, self-contradictory abandon. Still, in her winning fashion she stays faithful to the gender ideology that bids women make gods of their men; for it is in this ideology that she finds both her refuge and her fulcrum for cultural leverage.16

44 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Under the aegis of culture, which for mid-Victorians still meant primarily education, Browning’s last-worded woman resumes the hazardous linguistic power she earlier sidelined and tells her man-god to tell her what: Teach me, only teach, Love! As I ought I will speak thy speech, Love, Think thy thought – Meet, if thou require it, Both demands, Laying flesh and spirit In thy hands. (25–32) Whatever you say, dear. But do say it. Must I go on like this – as your silence within the dramatic monologue dispensation obliges me to do until somebody stops me – putting into your mouth the words you ‘ought’ by unquestioned gender privilege to be putting into mine? ‘I will speak thy speech, Love, / Think thy thought’ promises a subservience so abject as to make conventional wedding vows look like declarations of independence. But, at the same time and in so many words, the lines also own the I-know-what-you’re-thinking arrogance which Browning’s chosen genre visits on its exponents whenever they go about envoicing other minds. Less a reconciliatory balance than a classic type-seven Empsonian ambiguity, these words about speech mean what they say because they also mean the opposite.17 This shameless contradiction, still seductive if poised by now on the brink of a dare, exposes the speaker’s abjection as performance – again along lines first traced in ‘Count Gismond,’ but now rendered nakedly explicit. Cultural obeisance suffuses not only what a woman learns to say but also how she learns to think. That this practised curtsey in the mind awaits ripest expression in the ritual of sexual submission is frankly acknowledged when the binary of ‘speech’ and ‘thought’ morphs in the next stanza to ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit.’ It is a brilliant final irony that this awaited performance in the flesh must be awaited indeed. In a climax of orthodox reconciliation through deferral, the culturally absolute bourgeois rite of love trumps the blunt seigneurial droit of sex: That shall be to-morrow, Not to-night: I must bury sorrow Out of sight:

Herbert F. Tucker

45

– Must a little weep, Love, (Foolish me!) And so fall asleep, Love, Loved by thee. (33–40) The era’s favourite formula for conflict resolution – gratification postponed for the sake of better joys ahead – comes home to roost, with a classically gendered twist. The truce to contentious strife that was brokered in stanza one has yielded to woman a lopsided victory over man, taken en passant under cover of her surrendering, via the scripted conventions of their culture, to his mastery as to a thing that goes without saying. Given her expert manipulation of variables from within the place to which history has called her, Browning’s anonymous and to that extent generic woman seems as self-aware in her forty lines as Bishop Blougram does in his thousand. We finally owe it to her sophistication to honour the price her victory exacts, and to appreciate the currency in which she must pay it. That the currency is not verbal but bodily we may see by comparing ‘bury sorrow’ here with ‘hide the talking’ in stanza three. Mere tears are expressive, by the same token performable, and indeed rendered dubiously convenient by the stagey parenthesis of line 38. If she is really mourning anything with those tears, it may be just what Victorian funerary logic would propose: the thing that is buried – which is here, with an odd recursivity, ‘sorrow’ as such. But sorrow for what? For the unaffordable luxury, perhaps, of an authentic core of selfhood. That endangered propriety, in order to survive at all, must lie hidden body-deep, in an intimate obscurity that is (she knows it) sex-proof, and (we suspect it) love-proof too.18 The Duke at Ferrara has glimpsed in his Duchess a mode of natural accommodation to this world that he cannot touch; immortal longings for the next world genuinely trouble the Bishop who orders his tomb; Andrea del Sarto nurses up a forfeit genius that he can maintain only by stifling its actual exercise. All find their counterpart in sorrow’s groping subsistence down below the brilliantly deployed acculturations of ‘A Woman’s Last Word.’

V I have tried to illustrate several phases in Browning’s refinement of the dramatic monologue, as a genre especially designed to revitalize the greater lyric tradition of British Romanticism by exposing the indwelling demerit of the tradition’s very success, namely the cultural automation of its premisses. I take it as a paradox, not a contradiction, that his mid-century experiments took Browning in an increasingly inward direction – the same direction, that is, which classically characterized the lyric experimentation of the Romantics

46 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

themselves. For the evil against which Browning dug in, circa 1840 – and with our polemical poet, as with the scores of fictive others he imagined, it is most productive to ask what the discourse in question is resisting – was a pervasive cultural malaise, to which the interiorization of Romantic poetry had contributed only by the by. The real trouble blew in the ill wind of Zeitgeist etiology: an initially historicist shorthand that was run off with by all that was least critical, and most smugly imperial, in nineteenth-century socio-cultural thought. Intellectually a circular non-explanation that made history its own perpetuum mobile of reciprocating cause and effect, ethically a disaster that eviscerated agency, the progressivist ideology that sprang from the generation of Hegel ended as a trap that scarred more than a few of Europe’s best minds, among them Carlyle, Marx, Darwin, Tolstoy – and Browning himself.19 Browning planted his resistance to the debilitating chimera of autochthonous evolutionary change on the resourcefulness of the inner life, which he called the ‘soul’ but which, with a matching resourcefulness of figuration, he kept more than sufficiently limber to elude orthodox re-capture. The inner life he valorized was one that his dramatic poetics exposed to unremitting trial, and that his sophisticated historical imagination understood to have been largely bespoken by contingencies that both prescribed and proscribed much in its makeup. We have seen how circumstances, pared down to virtually algebraic co-efficiency in ‘A Woman’s Last Word,’ fixed the limits of existence within which the poet’s lifelong vindication of human freedom might lay claim to determinate meaning. Circumstances were the contingent outsides that gave definition to a vital idiosyncrasy within. It was not vast sweeps of epochal destiny but the local specifics of our contextedness that set the soul off for Browning. To wrestle with these determinants – against as well as according to them – was what it was to be liberally human. Humanity’s larger collective tale was to be induced upwards from the concrete struggle and its tactical, particular failures and gains, not by strategic deduction vice versa. I offered to contribute to the present collection of essays because I wanted to exercise a conflict in myself. (Exorcising it was out of the question.) I wanted to know how, if at all, my non-violent liberal politics – which aims for peace, as all the world has learned to say these days, by way of truth and reconciliation – might correlate with the aesthetics of stressful conflict that, thanks to temperament and training, I most avidly read for and think about in literature. Although I have not taken this question up here directly, it has stayed at my elbow; and in Browning’s example of testy local negotiation, as against the juggernaut of the settled whole or final cause, I discern an answer in outline.20 Browning’s writing sprang from unease (witness Karshish’s ‘itch . . . a sting to write,’ l. 67, and the creative impulse Caliban imputes to Setebos’ ‘being ill at ease,’ l. 31), and made its way by calibrated disequilibria towards the partial adequations of compromise. His monologues are negotiated settlements making it plain how he preferred the negotiation to the

Herbert F. Tucker

47

settlement – and why. Full resolutions sap resolve; as his soulmate Blake put it, in a Marriage of Heaven and Hell that was wise to what makes a marriage last: ‘Damn. braces: Bless relaxes.’21 The truth about reconciliation is that it has to keep happening; not a done deal but a flexibly firm agenda, it remains as much an itinerary, and as little a destination, as does the work that is peace. Poetry’s way of happening defends and illustrates that truth. Tensed, aslant, patiently anomalous, it practices peace by rehearsing conflict. The forensicism of contentious debate was Browning’s way of sustaining the spirit of Reform, amid whose 1830s atmosphere he came of age, without endorsing the expedients into which Reform legislation in his lifetime sooner, and later (1867, 1884), devolved. The active dialogue of the mind with itself, to recall the phrase a discouraged Matthew Arnold found for it at the same historical juncture on which this paper has focused, Browning shows to be concurrently, indissolubly the interactive dialogue of the mind with its circumstantial contingency, a modus vivendi amid the realia.22 Decades later W. B. Yeats, seeing this rapprochement between self and world as essential to Browning’s art, misprised it; Yeats dismissed his staunchest Shelleyan predecessor as but another Victorian rhetorician who had made essentially unpoetical discourse out of his ‘quarrel with others.’23 In truth, though, Browning already possessed the wisdom Yeats meant to reserve for his own cohort of moderns. Abidingly engaged poetry arises in the poet’s quarrel with himself, however elaborately masked in others’ contingency the self, ever a fighter, may prove to be.24

Notes 1. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), vol. 2, p. 1197: ‘However justified the tragic character and his aim, however necessary the tragic collision, the third thing required is the tragic resolution of this conflict.’ This formulation occurs within ‘The Principle of Tragedy, Comedy, and Drama’ (section III.iii.3.C.c.3.a of that remarkably systematic compilation of lecture notes); but in truth the idea so closely approximates Hegel’s fundamental principle of progressive dialectic that it will be found all over his writings, often illustrated with reference to his favourite case, the Antigone of Sophocles (e.g., pp. 1217–18). 2. Having seen little wear during Aristotle’s medieval ascendancy, the Poetics spread across Europe with the revival of learning from Renaissance Italy (Castelvetro, 16th century) into Neoclassical France (Rapin and Le Bossu, 17th century), and became a point of ready reference for British writers in the Romantic tradition from Wordsworth to Newman and Arnold. 3. This general statement introduces, in the peroration to chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria (1817; rpt. London: Dent, 1965), a long and varied list of the binary opposites that poetic imagination brings into balance (p. 174). 4. Chapter 3 of The Origin of Species (1859) is titled ‘Struggle for Existence,’ a phrase Darwin uses with keen, explicit awareness of its metaphorical reach.

48 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature 5. I am thinking of Christina Rossetti’s sly regret that ‘the Great Poetess of our own day’ was constrained by the accident of ‘happy’ marriage from the austerities of unfulfillment sustaining Rossetti’s own Monna Innominata (1881), in The Complete Poems, ed. R. W. Crump, vol. 2 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), p. 86; and of T. S. Eliot’s judgement that the progressivist faith of In Memoriam is ‘a poor thing, but its doubt is a very intense experience’: ‘In Memoriam’ (1936), rpt. in Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson, ed. John Killham (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 214. 6. Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (New York, Random House, 1957). Among the extensive critical literature on dramatic-monologue poetics see especially Alan Sinfield, Dramatic Monologue (London: Methuen, 1977); Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 288–9 et passim; E. Warwick Slinn’s article in A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 80–98, and his book Victorian Poetry as Cultural Critique: The Politics of Performative Language (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003); Glennis Byron, Dramatic Monologue (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). 7. I cite throughout the Poems, in 2 vols., ed. John Pettigrew and Thomas J. Collins (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), except where otherwise noted. Daniel Karlin, Browning’s Hatreds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), has apt remarks on ‘Prospice’ (p. 22), and indeed on several aspects of my topic in this paper. Not only did Browning hold that ‘conflict is a universal law, struggle is the condition of existence, all progress is dependent on a perpetual warfare between opposed forces’; but this belief of his ‘in dialectical struggle is predominant both in nineteenth-century intellectual culture . . . and in literature’ (p. 20). ‘Every Browning poem is oppositional in nature: both he and the characters he creates are seized with the passion of conflict and argument, whether with others or themselves’ (p. 170). 8. K. M. Elisabeth Murray, Caught in the Web of Words: James A. H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 235. The first chapter of Donald Hair, Robert Browning’s Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), discusses the poet’s education-by-dictionary. 9. See Walter Bagehot, ‘Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning; or, Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry’ (1864), rptd. in Collected Works, ed. Norman St. John-Stevas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), vol. 2, pp. 321–66; Stewart Walker Holmes, ‘Browning: Semantic Stutterer,’ PMLA 60 (1945) 231–55; George Santayana, ‘The Poetry of Barbarism,’ in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York: Scribner, 1905), pp. 166–216; and Richard Howard’s 1971 monologue in Browning’s person, lately re-planted at the heart of Howard’s other Victorian ‘Untitled Subjects’ in Inner Voices: Selected Poems 1963–2003 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004): ‘I am not interested in art. / I am interested in the obstacles / to art’ (‘November 1889,’ p. 49). Browning’s best apologists turn these supposed disabilities to interpretive account, e.g. Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, and David Latané, Browning’s Sordello and the Aesthetics of Difficulty (Victoria: University of Victoria, 1987). 10. ‘I will not cease from Mental Fight, / Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand’: preface to Milton: A Poem (1804), plate 1, in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (1965; rev. edn. Garden City: Doubleday, 1970), p. 95. Challenges reminiscent of Blake’s pervade Browning’s correspondence. ‘I never

Herbert F. Tucker

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

49

pretended to offer such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar, or a game of dominoes, to an idle man’: letter of 27 November 1868 to W. G. Kingsland, in Letters of Robert Browning, ed. Thurman L. Hood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1933), pp. 128–9. ‘I cannot begin writing poetry till my imaginary reader has conceded licences to me which you demur at altogether. . . . You ought, I think, to keep pace with the thought tripping from ledge to ledge’: letter of December 1855 to John Ruskin, rpt. in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, vol. 36 (London: Allen, 1909), p. xxxiv. See especially the triadic dialectical resolution glimpsed on the last page of Paracelsus (5.885–8), together with Karlin’s discussion thereof (pp. 183–85), of Sordello’s late existential gamble on progress (p. 176), and of the bitingly ironic recruitment of progressivism to a reactionary agenda in Browning’s neglected Brechtian Lehrstück of 1846 A Soul’s Tragedy (pp. 133–4, 174). Members of the hung jury in this case include John V. Hagopian, ‘The Mask of Browning’s Countess Gismond,’ Philological Quarterly 40 (1961) 153–5; John W. Tilton and R. Dale Tuttle, ‘A New Reading of ‘Count Gismond,’’ Studies in Philology 59 (1962) 83–95; Sister Marcella M. Holloway, ‘A Further Reading of “Count Gismond”’, Studies in Philology 60 (1963) 549–63; and Michael Timko, ‘Ah, Did You Once See Browning Plain?’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 6 (1966) 731–42. The sagest judge to date is Alison Case, who in ‘Browning’s “Count Gismond”: A Canvas for Projection,’ VP 34 (1996) 213–22, grasps the Countess’ ‘lie’ as ‘a way of repeating, or maintaining, the silence with which she responded to the charge in the first place,’ so that she remains ‘the unknowably opaque woman, whose figured surface creates only the illusion of pellucid depths’ (pp. 216, 221). See also my discussion in ‘Memorabilia: Mnemonic Imagination in Shelley and Browning,’ Studies in Romanticism 19 (1980) 304–8. Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 4 (1856): ‘I know of no other piece of modern English, prose or poetry, in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit, – its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all that I have said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of the Stones of Venice, put into as many lines, Browning’s also being the antecedent work.’ Quoted in W. C. DeVane, A Browning Handbook, 2nd edn. (New York: Appleton, 1955), pp. 167–8. ‘Pictor Ignotus’ is searchingly historicized by Loy Martin in Browning’s Dramatic Monologues and the Post-Romantic Subject (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 34–47. After touching Sordello up for 1863 republication, Browning prefaced the new version with a note that – only a little disingenuously – imputes his matured position to his younger self when composing that headstrong poem (where the maturation we are tracing here began): ‘The historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background requires; and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study.’ Compare his later remark – oddly blind – on a climactic episode from ‘Pelleas and Ettarre’ (lines 447–51) in Tennyson’s Holy Grail volume of 1869. Browning complained in a letter of 19 January 1870, ‘I should judge the conflict in the knight’s soul the proper subject to describe: Tennyson thinks he should describe the castle, and effect of the moon on its towers, and anything but the soul’: Dearest Isa: Robert Browning’s Letters to Isabella Blagden, ed. Edward C. McAleer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1951), p. 328. ‘It is hard to read the poem too slowly. The effect is of caught breath, and a subdued sobbing seems to persist behind the calm words’: Eleanor Cook, Browning’s

50 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

Lyrics: An Exploration (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1974), p. 133. Cook, diagnosing these effects as the symptoms of a merely ‘conciliatory’ victimage (p. 129), reiterates a critical consensus that has been in place since Alexandra Orr, A Handbook to the Works of Robert Browning, (London: Bell, 1896), p. 229, read the speaker’s tears as ‘a last tribute, perhaps, to her sacrificed conscience, and her lost liberty.’ This exquisite lyric remains peculiarly under-served by the critical literature. The best account is a brief note by Patricia Stephens, ‘Browning’s “A Woman’s Last Word”,’ Explicator 43:1 (1984) 35–8, which represents the speaker as a ‘pragmatist’ who ‘uses what works’ in a negotiation where, absolutism being counter-productive, ‘provisional truths must be worked out.’ Stephens’ recourse to military language is especially noteworthy here: evincing ‘feminine strategy and superiority in the battle of the sexes,’ the speaker ‘chooses to abandon her position’ and make an ‘offer of surrender,’ only to complete ‘the final, brilliantly executed maneuver in a victorious battle,’ which will let her ‘regroup her forces.’ Ambiguity of the seventh type, where ‘the two meanings of the word . . . are the two opposite meanings defined by the context,’ according to Empson ‘marks a centre of conflict.’ ‘It is likely,’ he adds, very much to our purpose here, ‘that those theories of aesthetics which regard poetry as the resolution of a conflict will find their illustrations chiefly’ among this type; and he then remarks in a footnote glancing at the (Hegelian-Coleridgean) ‘German tradition’ that ‘the onus of reconciliation can be laid very heavily on the receiving end.’ This transfer of weight to the reader makes of contradiction ‘a powerful literary weapon.’ William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; rev. edn. New York: New Directions, 1947), pp. 192–3, 197. See also, for an instructive parallel with the armory of contradiction in ‘A Woman’s Last Word,’ Empson’s teasing out (pp. 202–3) of Isabella’s description in Measure for Measure I.ii.181–2: ‘a prone and speechless dialect / Such as move men’ might well serve to describe the medium Browning’s speaker uses. Case’s reading of ‘Count Gismond’ (see note 12 above) is apropos here. Each of Browning’s imagined women shows ‘a healthy instinct for self-preservation and a vivid awareness that the terms of male judgment are likely to be stacked against her’ (p. 219). ‘What if she has an inside, a secret, a sexual self? What if she can’t speak out the truth of her being because her “fancy” knows no way to construct her truth without making it tell against her?’ (p. 220). A longer, and much less distinguished, list of Victorian Zeitgeist thinking’s intellectual casualties fills out chapter 11 of my Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). It would be inconsistent not to match this answer of mine with a counter-answer, and one is at hand in Christopher Lane’s Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Lane sees how Browning ‘explodes aesthetic and philosophical assumptions about reciprocity and collective harmony . . . Indeed, his antiheroes wreak revenge on society by insisting energetically that all such ideals about social and interpersonal harmony contain the seeds of their destruction’ (p. 136). Assailing ‘Victorian expectations about reform’ (p. 151) – and Reform? – Browning shows ‘that the expectations we’ve inherited from much Victorian fiction, in which misanthropy either “expires” or passes into love, are not merely facile and naïve but also conceptually impoverished descriptions of humanity’s attachment to enmity’ (p. 159). Without endorsing Lane’s resort to a metaphysics of evil, we may observe that

Herbert F. Tucker

21. 22. 23.

24.

51

no peace process will be sustainable that is blind to the belligerent ‘seeds’ and ‘attachments’ he finds highlighted in Browning. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), plate 9, in Erdman, p. 37. Arnold, Preface to Poems, 1st edn. (1853), in The Complete Poems, 2nd edn. Kenneth and Miriam Allott (London and New York: Longman, 1979), p. 654. ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’: ‘Per Amica Silentia Lunae’ (1917), in Mythologies (New York: Collier, 1959), p. 331. This aphorism belongs with the complaints Yeats lodged against Browning and other Victorians in ‘The Trembling of the Veil’ (1922), that they had filled their work ‘with what I called “impurities,” curiosities about politics, about science, about history, about religion’: The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York: Collier, 1965), p. 112; and with the more vatic pronouncement from ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ (1919) about ‘those that love the world’: ‘And should they write or paint, still it is action: / The struggle of the fly in marmalade. / The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours’ (ll. 42–6). Witness what Browning wrote in an 1842 review ‘Essay on Chatterton’ about the career of artistic genius: ‘Seeing cause for faith in something external and better, and having attained to a moral end and aim, it next discovers in itself the only remaining antagonist worthy of its ambition.’ Ed. Donald Smalley, in The Complete Works of Robert Browning, ed. Roma A. King et al., vol. 3 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1971), p. 165.

3 Conflict and Imperial Communication: Narrating the First Afghan War Muireann O’Cinneide

In April 1839, the British army entered the Afghan city of Kandahar in triumph, bringing with it Shah Shuja ul-Mulkh, the deposed ruler of Afghanistan who was about to be put back on the throne. Sir William Macnaghten, the British Envoy to Afghanistan, and a major architect of the invasion plan, wrote a gleeful account of their reception: Every great chief with numerous followers came out to meet the Shah, and greeted him on his arrival in his own country with every demonstration of joy; the poor crowded about him, making offerings of flowers, and they strewed the road he was to pass over, with roses.1 This jubilation appeared justified by the subsequent ease with which Shah Shuja was installed in Kabul. By November 1841, the British cantonment in Kabul was under siege; by Christmas 1841 Macnaghten’s decapitated body was hanging from a meat-hook in the bazaar while his head was paraded through the city; on 13 January 1842, Dr William Brydon arrived at Jallalabad as one of the last survivors of an army of thousands which had retreated from Kabul. Somewhere along the way, then, Macnaghten’s narrative of triumphal welcome had come into brutal conflict with the realities of hostility and defeat. What had gone wrong? This chapter is about the relationship between language, communication and warfare. Its purpose is not to analyse the causes and consequences of the First Afghan War of 1838–42, but rather to trace some of the narrative tropes through which various documents, official and unofficial, conceptualised this war. These narrative tropes generate processes of sustained miscommunication, in which different modes of representation collide to produce profound, and ultimately disastrous, misunderstandings. The chapter examines the writings of five people: two statesmen, the Governor-General of India George Eden, Earl of Auckland (1784–1849), and William Macnaghten (1793–1841); two women travellers, Auckland’s sister Emily Eden (1797–1869), and Florentia, Lady Sale (1790–1853), who were 52

Muireann O’Cinneide

53

alongside them at Simla and Kabul respectively; and one military historian, Sir John Kaye (1814–76). The statesmen’s papers reveal the way in which Auckland’s readiness to ‘re-write’ official procedures of communication combines with Macnaghten’s fatal insistence on a narrative of imperial success to bind them to continual mis-readings of circumstances. Eden’s and Sale’s letters and journals construct different forms of gendered engagement with masculine communication networks. Finally, years later, Kaye’s history of the war invokes narratives of failed communication as a textual means of resolving conflict. These different responses to the war raise wider questions about the tensions intrinsic to various forms of imperial communication: from these tensions, I argue, there emerges a commentary upon the conflicts intrinsic to the act of communication itself – conflicts that threaten not simply the pragmatic administration of empire, but the textual processes through which its key historical events are shaped and narrated.

India The First Afghan War has been overshadowed in historical and literary critical discussion by the uprisings in India in 1857–8, but it represented a severe shock to British confidence and to those with expansionist ambitions. By ousting the capable ruler Dost Mohammed Khan and restoring the feeble Shah Shuja to the throne, the Governor-General hoped to establish Afghanistan as a stable satellite, which could act as a bulwark against the advance of Russian imperial ambitions towards the borders of India. The initial success of the enterprise was swiftly followed by increasing hostility from the Afghans themselves and eventual loss of control, finally forcing a withdrawal of British forces from Kabul through the Khyber Pass. The retreat turned into a massacre, with thousands of soldiers killed. An army of about 700 Europeans and 3,800 Indian soldiers, together with around 12,000 followers, was reduced to shreds. A punitive expedition was launched later that year which re-took Kabul, but, face-saving chastisement thus administered, Britain hastily withdrew from the country whose conquest had proved so unwise an enterprise.2 The First Afghan War was effectively launched by the Simla Manifesto of 1 October 1838, in which Lord Auckland laid out the grounds for his proposed intercession. Here we can see the foundation of the imperial narrative of easy triumph and righteous conquest which was to cause such disaster.3 The barrage of criticism which greeted the Manifesto in the Calcutta and London Press is unsurprising: the document is a remarkable demonstration of the way in which the rhetoric of state power can transform territorial appropriation into ideological duty. The Manifesto declares that Shah Shuja’s ‘popularity throughout Afghanistan had been proved to his Lordship by the strong and unanimous testimony of the best authorities’ (qtd. Kaye I, p. 373). In contrast, Dost Mahommed becomes a usurper of

54 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

‘unreasonable pretensions’ whose ‘sudden and unprovoked attack on [Ranjit Singh, ruler of the Punjab]’s troops’ (qtd. Kaye I, p. 370) is of a piece with his treacherous behaviour and plotting with Russia. The ideological benefits of such rhetoric are immediately apparent. Instead of a largely unprovoked act of politically-motivated annexation, the British invasion force becomes a restorer of the just order of affairs. The Shah, the Manifesto continues, will enter Afghanistan ‘surrounded by his own troops’, while the accompanying British army will support him ‘against foreign interference and factitious opposition’ (qtd. Kaye I, p. 373). This language offers a perspective that comes eerily close to the reality, since foreign interference and factious opposition were indeed involved, yet serves to block out the actuality that the British themselves would be perceived by Afghans as the foreign interferers and factitious opposers. Far from the ‘best authorities’ having testified to the popularity of Shah Shuja, crucial commentators like the explorer and diplomat Alexander Burnes had expressed doubts about him and urged the merits and amenability of Dost Mahommed. Moreover, rather than being an implacable enemy of Britain and her allies, Dost Mahommed had been eager to make some form of British alliance, he had turned to Russia for support when it looked as if this alliance would be denied him, and many thought he would still be receptive to further advances. Auckland’s Manifesto extends its image of unanimity to India’s highest, claiming that the war had ‘the concurrence of the Supreme Council of India’ – despite the fact that the Council had not been consulted, and even issued a remonstrance against this lack of consultation (Kaye I, p. 381). A surface narrative of universal agreement and righteous intervention became a means of suppressing the reality of conflicting reports, advice and opinions; the Manifesto overrode and over-wrote all other documents in the case even as its publication embroiled Auckland in a further network of conflicts. The elisions, misrepresentations and downright falsehoods of the Manifesto can best be understood in the wider context of the communication systems in place for the governing of India. Looking at the formal letters from Shah Shuja presented to the British Council of War in the middle of the Afghanistan crisis, it is noticeable that the style and tone of the translations are markedly more flowery and elaborate than those of the Council’s proceedings.4 ‘Oriental’ language is being rendered into English in such a way as to accord with the general (British) perception of Eastern speech, represented as quintessentially linguistically ‘Other’, and therefore placed in implicit opposition to the seeming clarity and rationality of the Council’s responses.5 But in the context of such disastrous mis-interpretations of a situation and a people, we can see that this cultural circularity also entraps the colonisers. Returning to the rhetoric of the Simla Manifesto, we see a fundamental willingness to misrepresent reality in order to sustain a grand narrative of how the situation ought to be, just as Oriental languages are translated into how they ‘ought’ to sound. The Simla Manifesto suggests

Muireann O’Cinneide

55

the unstoppable momentum of narrative, the extent to which the version of events propounded in the lead-up to the war had taken on a life of its own that that neither conflicting advice nor even changing political circumstances could overcome. The controversy generated by the Manifesto led to demands for the publication of the information and reports on which it was based; it is perhaps unsurprising that Auckland’s alleged suppression of portions of these reports was a later source of controversy, especially regarding the advice of Alexander Burnes. Whether the reports were mutilated by Auckland in Simla, Palmerston in London, or intermediaries in between, remains unclear, but one thing is plain: both official and unofficial channels of communication are easily manipulable by those in power to accord with the narratives in which they wish to believe.6 The ability to shape an imperial narrative, however, is not automatically beneficial to imperial aspirations. Another perspective on the conflicting network of communications surrounding the Governor-General can be gained from the letters home of his sister and hostess, the Hon. Emily Eden.7 Eden’s travel narrative is predicated upon a carefully-constructed rhetoric of lack of engagement with the public world her brother inhabits, a constant emphasis upon her unwillingness and inability to communicate, and on her uninterest in Indian affairs. We glimpse the train of negotiations and decisions that led to the Afghan disaster, yet they remain on the sidelines of her text. Indeed, the triumphant letter of William Macnaghten with which this piece opened was addressed to Emily Eden, and uncritically welcomed by her: there ‘never was anything so satisfactory’ (Eden, p. 290). Instead, Eden insistently emphasises questions of interpersonal communication: the exchanges between herself and her family in an era when months could separate the writing and the delivery of a letter, the fear of opening a newspaper in case it brings bad news in advance of the latest-received communications from home, the moments of linguistic bewilderment in which language places an impenetrable barrier between herself and those surrounding her. But the barriers between personal and official communications cannot be so easily defined. Eden’s accounts of personal failures of communication connect with a larger narrative of official breakdowns, uncertainties and confusions. Her descriptions of political rituals provide an ongoing commentary on the ‘Orientalised’ linguistic exchange which was the language of negotiation. There is a constant juxtaposition of the flowery platitudes of ritualised exchanges with the implicit undercurrent of her own sardonic literalism – it ‘took a quarter of an hour to ascertain that the roses had bloomed in the garden of friendship’ (Eden, p. 131). At other times, Eden brings this linguistic conflict to the surface of her text. Ranjit’s envoys claim ‘that the canopy of friendship had interposed such a thick cloud that their tents had remained quite dry, which was touching, only it did so happen that the tents were so entirely soaked through that Runjeet [sic] Singh had been

56 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

obliged to hire the only empty house in Simla for them’ (Eden, pp. 131–2). This highlighting of linguistic conflict creates a distancing effect in the text, whereby Eden sets her pragmatic, ironic register up in opposition to the ‘Orientalised’ language in which English and Indian rulers addressed each other. Language, then, becomes another way through which to resist even rhetorical engagement. But, of course, this separation is only a rhetorical one, since in her role as her brother’s hostess Eden has herself an integral part to play in these negotiations. Moreover, Eden’s wry comments on public affairs offer an alarming glimpse into the lack of organisation – not to mention the lack of language – that seems to surround the GovernorGeneral’s communications. The interception of letters from potential Russian agents is rendered wonderfully ludicrous by no one in miles being able to read them. Faced with this linguistic gap, Eden characteristically undermines the essential role the idea of such letters play in the key ‘Great Game’ narrative of relentless Russian encroachment – the narrative that sent the British into Afghanistan. Instead, she appropriates the potential public documents into the continuing personal discourse of her own letters. These possible political time bombs become ‘Caterina Iconoslavitch writing to my uncle Alexis about her partners’ (Eden, p. 145). Eden plays games with ideas of important and unimportant communication, reducing supposedly crucial evidence to precisely the sort of chatty family letters she herself is writing. What is implicit in her text, though, is the realisation that the real interest of the Russian letters lies precisely in their untranslated condition, since the possibility of intrigue between Afghanistan and Russia is in some ways worth more to those advocating war than any confirmation that might fall short of satisfactory proof – as did most of the letters offered as confirmation of Dost Mahommed’s iniquity.

Afghanistan For William Macnaghten, one of the chief proponents of the Manifesto’s ideas, the narrative it laid out never wholly lost its force.8 Macnaghten’s letters on the route to Kabul, and his subsequent accounts once the situation began to worsen, suggest a man obsessed with his narrative of triumph and stability, which renders him almost literally unable to see or hear anything that fails to coincide with it. He remains insistent, in particular, on the nobility and worth of Shah Shuja, whom most of the military leaders despised, and on whose popularity and value as a ruler Macnaghten had staked so much. Writing to Auckland in April 1839 en route, he says that ‘Sir Willoughby [Cotton] . . . assures me that Shah Shuja is very unpopular in Afghanistan and that we shall be opposed at every step of our progress’, but smugly concludes that ‘I think I know a little better than this.’9 Two days later, he is assuring Auckland’s Private Secretary that ‘his Majesty will be cordially welcomed by all classes of the people’.10 Returning to his description

Muireann O’Cinneide

57

of their entrance into Kandahar on 25 April 1839, the scene as Macnaghten paints it seems a glorious fulfilment of everything promised by the Simla Manifesto – above all, the supposed popularity of Shah Shuja, greeted by ‘great chiefs’ and ‘the poor’ alike ‘with every demonstration of joy’ (qtd. Eden, pp. 290–1). The land itself, in Macnaghten’s eyes, seems to welcome the restored and rightful ruler, and to offer up its produce as guarantor of continued success. Whereas the country they had been traversing was ‘barren and desolate’, at Kandahar the ‘contrast now is great; the good things of this life are abundant; luxurious crops, which will be ready for the sickle in three or four weeks; extensive plains of green sward for the cattle . . . in short, we have reached the oasis at last’ (qtd. Eden, pp. 291–2). Even the birds of the region ‘are all song birds’ (p. 292). But while it was roses, roses all the way in Macnaghten’s narrative, the reality was that they were met with apathy verging on hostility. Edward Thompson notes that ‘this cock-a-hoop . . . account . . . is supported by no sober authority’,11 which is perhaps not wholly fair on Macnaghten: it would appear that the actual initial entry into Kandahar was indeed greeted by large crowds.12 However, curiosity did not necessarily translate into popularity, and an attempt to capitalise on this by a public ceremony of recognition for Shah Shuja on 8 May 1839 proved an embarrassing fiasco, with very few Afghans, and none of importance, attending. Yet neither this, nor the subsequent entry into Kabul which John Kaye describes as ‘more like a funeral procession than the entry of a king into the capital of his restored dominions’ (Kaye I, p. 479), seem seriously to have dented Macnaghten’s belief in the ultimate truth of his narrative of triumph. Macnaghten, I would argue, can be seen as a victim of his own publicity. In Macnaghten’s reading of the situation, the British intervention into Afghanistan is both morally and tactically sound, and therefore must be successful. Granted, the cheering crowds may not be on the Kandahar parade grounds or Kabul streets, but they will be there once they realise that the British are intervening for their own good. Even when, by August 1840, it was becoming increasingly clear that Afghanistan was moving towards an uprising, Macnaghten continued to press on Auckland his expansionist agenda of annexing Herat, dismissing others’ assessments of the required resources with the observation that ‘military authorities seldom under-rate the difficulties to be encountered’.13 Yet at the same time, there runs through Macnaghten’s letters a hyperawareness of the possibility of other narratives, and a nervous unease about these (‘false’) narratives coming into competition with his own (‘true’) narrative, in a conflict for the ear of the Governor-General. Hearing that word of dissensions between himself and Brigadier Roberts may have been brought to Auckland (significantly, ‘in the shape of private or demi-official correspondence than in a formal appeal to higher authority’14), he protests angrily at Auckland’s lack of confidence in him. As the situation worsened, this curious combination of near-megalomaniac belief in his own narrative,

58 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

and suspicion of the narratives of others, seems to approach hysteria. Sending Auckland an assessment of affairs written by Alexander Burnes, Macnaghten insists that ‘all things considered we are in as prosperous a condition as could have been expected. Sir A[lexander] of course wishes to prove the contrary, since, by doing so, when he succeeds me, his failures would thus find excuse and his success additional credit.’15 Undoubtedly Macnaghten had a point, but equally undoubtedly, Burnes knew Afghanistan better than most of the British, and to be unable to see his warnings as anything more than career opportunism is indicative of a terrifyingly obdurate blindness. Yet, again, in Macnaghten’s embattled worldview this must have made perfect sense: it must be that the invasion is a success, that Shah Shuja is beloved, that stability (even if currently under threat) will easily be restored. Therefore anyone saying otherwise must have ulterior motives. Even Macnaghten’s death has a certain grim appropriateness to it. He died in a final attempt to negotiate a secret deal with Akhbar Khan, son of Dost Mohammed; brushing aside warnings as he had previously brushed aside advice, he saw this as a chance to reinstate his triumphal narrative over events which were escalating out of control.16 While accounts are confused, it does seem likely that Akhbar Khan’s offer was a test, and Macnaghten’s acceptance of it a confirmation of his bad faith in being prepared to break less favourable agreements. In his belief that he could play one Afghan leader off against the other, Macnaghten was making use of a policy at the heart of the British empire – indeed, at the heart of most major conquests of land – the policy of ‘divide and rule’. The idea that ‘native’ rulers could themselves play this game, or rather, could counter this game, seems simply not to have occurred to him. Just as Emily Eden’s letters allow an additional perspective on the communications surrounding the Governor-General, so too the journal of Florentia Sale offers a perspective on events in Kabul as Macnaghten was writing, a perspective that places conflicting communications at the heart of the British plight. Lady Sale was the wife of the second-in-command at Kabul, General Sir Robert Sale, and during the retreat was taken as hostage together with ten other women, their children, and some of the married officers, under the questionable protection of Akhbar Khan. They were to spend nine months in captivity until their rescue by British forces commanded by Robert Sale himself. Lady Sale’s journal commences in October 1841 with impending insurrection in Kabul, and ends in September 1842 with the end of her captivity. Sale’s account of the situation in Kabul positively sizzles with exasperation at the failure of those in power to read the situation properly. Although publishing in 1843, so soon after the event, she feels no obligation to pull her punches: The state of supineness and fancied security of those in power in cantonments is the result of deference to the opinions of Lord Auckland,

Muireann O’Cinneide

59

whose sovereign will and pleasure it is that tranquillity do reign in Affghanistan [sic]; in fact, it is reported at Government House, Calcutta, that the lawless Affghans [sic] are as peaceable as London citizens; and this being decided by the powers that be, why should we be on the alert? Most dutifully do we appear to shut our eyes on our probable fate.17 Sale sets up here a conflict in representation between the eyewitness authority of those on the spot – an authority often drawn on by women travel writers18 – and the official narratives propagated in centres of command. The problem, she suggests, is that one narrative has overpowered the other. Macnaghten’s and Auckland’s narrative of legitimate and easy conquest and secure dominion has been granted precedence over the actuality being experienced by those who are seeing and suffering on the ground. Yet of course what Lady Sale’s diaries offer her readers is not the actuality of the situation but her own carefully-constructed narrative of conflicting masculine communications, in which her feminine text is implicitly privileged by its immediacy and pointed clear-sightedness.19 Barbara Korte notes the importance of considering travel texts as ‘texts written according to particular strategies’.20 In effect, Sale’s narrative launches a two-pronged, sustained critique of civilian authority (especially that of Macnaghten) and of inadequate military authority. It seethes at the incompetence of those around her: ‘No military steps have been taken to suppress the insurrection. . . . That the insurrection could have been easily crushed at its commencement is evident’ (Sale, pp. 20–1). Her account, as with Eden’s, reveals a rather astonishing network of conflicting and/or incompetent communications among the beleaguered British forces. The division between civil and military figures is the most obvious, but as we read Sale’s narrative, it becomes increasingly clear that almost everyone seems to be locked into separate yet colliding communication patterns. Brigadier Shelton’s separate negotiations to acquire supplies from an Afghan chief leads to his rebuke from Macnaghten (and a later court-martial). The elderly and ineffective General Elphinstone is treated with increasing disdain by his own officers, so his conferences become farcical. Every day sees a new plan being suggested of ever-increasing improbability, drawing Sale’s acerbic commentary. In one emblematic moment in her journal, Sale describes how her son-in-law Major Sturt (who later died in the retreat) observes in passing to a friend that he would be willing to be a hostage, only to find his offer officially taken up. Wishing to prevent this, Sale not unreasonably argues that as the only remaining officer of the engineering corps, he should remain with the main British contingent. Sturt agrees, but feels he cannot withdraw his offer; Lady Sale, however, is ‘not so tied, and have represented (through friends) to the General in a military point of view that he ought to object’ (Sale, p. 73, my emphasis). Even in this short passage, a wealth of forms of communication emerge, all shifting between the spheres of official and

60 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

informal, masculine and feminine, private and public. The lack of stability points towards the chaos and uncertainty dominating the British forces at that particular point of crisis. (Sale’s representations, incidentally, are borne out by a memorandum written by Brigadier Roberts, giving the increasingly contorted exchanges between himself, Macnaghten, Major Sturt and others about crucial matters of security and decision-making.21) Yet the resonances between this exchange and the muddled issues of translation and authority surrounding Auckland and Macnaghten’s official papers suggest, in my view, that it represents merely a more exaggerated version of the ambiguity and conflict which dominated the communication channels of empire in the first part of the nineteenth century.

England For the noted historian Sir John Kaye, producing his History of the War in Afghanistan (1851) was, he claimed, like ‘walking, as it were, with a torch in my hand over a floor strewn thickly with gunpowder. There is the chance of an explosion with every step’ (Kaye, p. x). However, he emphasises the care that he has taken with the sourcing and quoting of his material, including the translations. ‘What the Work has lost by this mode of treatment in compactness and continuity,’ he continues, ‘it has gained in trustworthiness and authenticity. If the narrative be less animated, the history is more genuine.’ (Kaye, pp. x–xi) Kaye, however, wrongs himself: his narrative forms a highly animated, individualistic rhetorical construct, and as such needs to be treated with the same awareness of representative processes as the other forms of texts discussed. The History replaces Macnaghten’s narrative of triumph with a narrative of failure, forming its crucial organising rhetorical tropes out of incompetence, delusion, deception and misjudgement. A particularly striking example of this narrative of failure comes when Kaye is discussing the initial gathering of information about Afghanistan and about Russian ambitions in the area. ‘It was only right’, he says wryly, ‘that [Anglo-Indian statesmen] should have been seen tracing on incorrect maps the march of a Russian army from St Petersburg to Calcutta’ (I, pp. 164–5). The idea of the ‘imperial archive’, the accumulation and categorisation of knowledge as a means of exercising power over an empire, has proved crucial to postcolonial analyses of the inner workings of imperialism.22 Surveys, maps, anthropological writings, travel accounts, scientists’ reports, can all be seen as assisting the construction of a controllable, containable, knowable Orient accessible to British rule. Indeed, Macnaghten himself produced prime exhibits for the imperial archive with his monumental works Principles and Precedents of Mohummudan Law (1825) and Principles and Precedents of Hindu Law (2 vols., 1828–9), which proved highly influential in shaping interpretations of Indian law to accord with English legal traditions of precedent. As Katherine Prior observes, ‘Macnaghten’s fondness

Muireann O’Cinneide

61

for grand designs, though ultimately fatal, ideally suited him for this bold abridgement and synthesis of Indian experience’.23 However, the homogeneity of such processes has been increasingly questioned in recent decades: seemingly objective categories of information were in fact dependent on (often elite) native sources with their own agendas,24 and such categories were constantly vulnerable to re-interpretation by Europeans and Orientals alike.25 With incorrect maps on the one hand, and Burnes’s heavily edited letters on the other, the concept of imperial knowledge displayed in this context becomes a highly unreliable one. But Kaye’s account is, in a way, even more disturbing. His point is not so much about the specificity or inaccuracy of the information gathered, as the way in which the very act of gathering information builds up its own momentum towards conflict. Kaye constructs a narrative whereby accumulating information about Afghanistan creates an impetus towards war – despite the fact that much of the information received was actually counselling against this step.26 So, for example, Burnes’s recommendations in favour of supporting the present Afghan leadership were disregarded or edited. When, however, on being questioned as to the best course of action in the event of Dost Mahommed being deposed, Burnes urged the restoration of Shah Shuja, this report became used as an endorsement of the decision to go to war in the first place (Kaye I, pp. 354–7). In Kaye’s representation, British rulers are not so much the masters of the imperial archive as its helpless subordinates. Tied to outdated maps, responding to conflicting letters, pressurised to go to war by the commissioning of reports about the feasibility of war, they lack any real understanding of the Afghans despite (or perhaps because of) their accumulation of information. These statesmen also become enmeshed in the slipperiness of their own shifting linguistic registers – the same flexibility that politicians like Auckland drew upon for their own purposes. Kaye comments upon the letter of congratulation sent by Dost Mahommed to the newly-appointed Auckland: ‘I hope’, said the Ameer in conclusion, ‘that your Lordship will consider me and my country as your own’, but he little thought how in effect this Oriental invitation would be accepted as a solemn invitation, and the hope be literally fulfilled. Three years afterwards, Lord Auckland, considering Dost Mahommed’s country his own, had given it away to Shah Shuja. (Kaye I, p. 165) Auckland is sarcastically figured here as an Englishman who has, in effect, ‘out-Orientaled the Oriental’, becoming so immersed in Eastern rhetoric that he has lost all touch with either factual reality or the concept of figurative language, and entered a world whose power structures are composed wholly of words. This wry comment by a male historian bears a curious

62 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

similarity to the way in which Emily Eden’s letters play on linguistic conventions – ‘ascertained that the roses were blooming in the garden of friendship’. Margaret Homans’s discussion of the linguistic domains ‘assigned’ to male and female writing argues that ‘women may value . . . the literal differently and consequently understand their linguistic situation in a way that makes their writing unacceptable to those who privilege the figurative’. 27 Yet both Eden and Kaye set up juxtapositions between the world of Eastern formal political rhetoric and the literal factual world in which each implicitly roots their (Western) descriptive voice. They do so for different rhetorical purposes, for whereas Eden’s (apparent) aim is to separate her voice from the public world of statesmanship, Kaye’s irony is a crucial part of his claiming of an authoritative public voice. But both writers are seeking a form of authority through the use of an irony whose deflationary knowingness privileges their narrating voice over the voices of people who have become overly immersed in the figurativeness of language.28 This offers us a valuable caution against a cultural privileging of irony as automatically radical or disruptive in nature, or as a tool solely at the disposal of the marginalised. Ultimately, John Kaye’s History is positing as heroic and positive a narrative as any propounded by Macnaghten or Auckland. Kaye’s depiction of the First Afghan War as a morass of conflicting communications seeks to overcome these conflicts and achieve a definitive form of communication: the supposedly objective, retrospective assessment of the historian who has ‘no other object than that of declaring the truth’ (Kaye I, p. vi). Throughout his History runs the theme of divine displeasure, of an imperial enterprise doomed from the start by its lack of righteousness, ‘an experiment on the forbearance alike of God and man; and therefore . . . sure to set in failure and disgrace’ (I, p. 387). In a sense, the real hero of Kaye’s narrative is himself, or rather the ‘Christian historian’ who upholds ‘the one great truth . . . when the curse of God is sitting heavily upon an unholy cause’ (II, p. 390). This narrative of imperial failure, then, can also be read as a narrative of imperial success – the true communication achieved, the accumulation of knowledge brought under the rigorous control of the historian, the righteous enterprise of claiming and categorising succeeding where the unrighteous one has failed. Yet Kaye’s image of the accumulation of knowledge taking on its own momentum creates a conflict for him between this and the historian’s task to control and contextualise information. In order to create his textual paradigm of ordered communication, Kaye has to bury some of his own conflicts in the gathering of information. For example, at one point in particular, he seems to have transformed a crucial anecdote in Lady Sale’s selfrepresentation, when she is trying to shame soldiers into fighting by offering to take a musket (Sale, p. 156), into bald, unattributed fact: the soldiers were ‘scarcely able to hold a musket. And they had lost heart’ (Kaye III, p. 355).

Muireann O’Cinneide

63

Significantly, any reference to Lady Sale’s offer is omitted, and whereas elsewhere he has referenced her frequently if often critically in footnotes, here there is no citation. Sale is being put in her place, where the information provided by her model of female heroism can be put to the best use without giving her self-representation a scope which might challenge the truly heroic male historian’s overriding rhetorical authority. Even Kaye’s irony, so important to his authoritative voice, lends itself to conflicts of misinterpretation. In the later 1857 edition he is forced to defend his ironic observation ‘Diplomacy is not intended to be subjected to such a test [of strict truthfulness]’ (Kaye I, p. 325), against attack, following its out-of-context misquoting in James Hume’s memoir of Henry Torrens (1854) as a straightforward dictum that ‘diplomacy should not be subjected to the test of truth’ (qtd. Kaye I, p. 325n).29 ‘I should not have thought that the drift of this passage could be misunderstood’, he observes plaintively (Kaye I, p. 325n). The factual and linguistic authority that Kaye so carefully constructs from his ordered narrative of failure generates its own internal conflicts and complications, having been acquired at the cost of burying the internal and external conflicts with which his text is riven. Such complications, though, seem almost inevitable when considering the First Afghan War and the manifold representative tensions it generates. What should we make of a historical event so richly productive of imperial narratives of triumph and order, which nevertheless becomes enshrined in narratives of defeat and confusion? How should we view the so-called imperial archive which fuelled the move towards war? Who is gathering what? Who is processing and filing it? Who is reading it? And can we ever really view the imperial archive as a source of imperial confidence and control while it remains so ambiguous? Knowledge is power. Knowledge is shaped and controlled by narrative. These assumptions form the basis for much postcolonial criticism, yet the representations of the First Afghan War suggest strongly that to know is not to control, and to narrate is not to make real.

Notes 1. Quoted Emily Eden, Up the Country: Letters Written to her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India, intro. Elizabeth Claridge, notes Edward Thompson (1866; London: Virago, 1983), p. 290. Subsequently cited in text as Eden. 2. For the historical facts of the First Afghan War, see Jan Morris, Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress (London: Faber & Faber, 1998) pp. 86–113, and J. A. Norris, The First Afghan War 1838–1842 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). 3. Kaye notes conflicting accounts of the origins of the Manifesto, but contends that chief responsibility for it must lie with Auckland. John Kaye, History of the War in Afghanistan, 3 vols. revised edn. (London, 1857) I, pp. 369–74. All references to the Manifesto are quoted from this source, which will be subsequently cited in the text as Kaye.

64 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature 4. Proceedings of Council of War, Jallalabad, January 27–28 & February 12, 1842, Home Misc. Series, H/Misc./545 (pp. 37–78), British Library, Oriental & India Office Collections, esp. pp. 55–6. 5. For the communicative split between English and Persian addresses, see Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: the Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 174–6. 6. See L. J. Trotter, The Earl of Auckland, Rulers of India Series (Oxford: Clarendon, 1893), p. 29. 7. Eden accompanied her brother to India in 1836. In 1866 she published Up the Country: Letters from India, a collection of her letters to her sister in England together with some journal extracts, recounting the Governor-General’s tour of north-western India from 1837–40, and his meeting with Ranjit Singh in the Punjab. 8. Macnaghten, who had begun his Indian career in the army, became a prominent civil servant and legal expert before being made secretary to the then Governor-General Lord William Bentinck, and was appointed chief secretary of the political department before accompanying Auckland (and Emily Eden) on their journey into the Punjab. He was instrumental in formulating British plans to depose Dost Mahommed and the consequent negotiations and treaties, an involvement which resulted in his appointment by Auckland as envoy and minister to Kabul. 9. William Macnaghten to Lord Auckland, April 4, 1839, quoted Kaye I, p. 431. 10. William Macnaghten, April 6, 1839, quoted Kaye I, p. 433. 11. Edward Thompson, notes, Eden, p. 406. 12. See Kaye I, pp. 437–8. 13. William Macnaghten to Lord Auckland, August 12, 1840, quoted Kaye II, p. 67. 14. Kaye II, p. 65. 15. William Macnaghten to Lord Auckland, August 12, 1840, quoted Kaye II, p. 67. 16. Morris, pp. 105–6. 17. Florentia Sale, A Journal of the First Afghan War, ed. Patrick Macrory (1843; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 16. Subsequently cited in text as Sale. 18. Barbara Korte, English Travel Writing: From Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 53. 19. As with much travel writing, the precise dating and status of Sale’s journals remains ambiguous, although she emphasises the immediacy of her accounts. 20. Korte, pp. 2–3. 21. ‘Memorandum of Brigadier Roberts’, Kaye II, Appendix, pp. 400–10. 22. See Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge & the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993) and Edward Said, Orientalism (London & Henley: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1978). 23. Katherine Prior, ‘Macnaghten, Sir William Hay, baronet (1793–1841)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/17705, accessed 30 July 2008. 24. Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993) and Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 25. For detailed accounts of these knowledge-gathering processes and their weaknesses, see Richards, passim, and Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 26. See esp. Kaye I, pp. 350–86.

Muireann O’Cinneide

65

27. Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language & Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 5. 28. See Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 148. 29. Kaye is referring to James Hume, ed., A Selection from the Writings, Prose and Poetical, of the late Henry W. Torrens . . . with a biographical memoir, 2 vols. (Calcutta: R. C. Lepage, 1854). Torrens (1806–1852) was an administrator, translator and author who had accompanied Auckland on his Indian tour, and whom Kaye’s first edition of the History (1851) had blamed alongside Macnaghten for encouraging the invasion of Afghanistan.

4 Off-White Indians Kate Flint

The myth of the White Indian resurfaced at regular intervals during the nineteenth century. Such European beginnings for native peoples were looked for in order that their supposed nobility, or their claim on the care and compassion of white people, might be given some foundation within a superior culture.1 These tales and theories of origin could be found in serious proto-anthropological writing as well as in such obviously fictional forms as Robert Southey’s epic poem Madoc (1805; 1812). As well as serving to legitimize, even elevate the status of Indians in Anglo-American and European eyes, these narratives were part of an ongoing attempt to trace and understand racial difference in general, and to establish whether humanity was descended from one, or several racial bases. What is more, accounts of White Indians also played a telling role in British fiction in the second half of the nineteenth century, contributing to the debate about what constitutes the nature of ‘savagery’ – whether it is something to be found in ‘primitive’ peoples, and eradicated either through evolutionary selection or through education and assimilation; or whether it is innate to all of us, to be concealed, but not eradicated, by the trappings of ‘civilization.’2 White Indians, and lost tribes in general, provided a ready subject for adventure and quest narratives that, in an age of Empire, served either to extol, or, on occasion, to cause the reader to interrogate the nature and supremacy of whiteness. In other words, they played a part in the establishment of new mythic structures, whether of national or racial identity, or of masculinity. For, as the American and Canadian Wests became more known, more settled, Central and South America increasingly provided a set of more or less imaginary spaces – notably the Amazonian jungle and the Argentinian pampas – in which highly improbable scenarios could be acted out in perilous settings in which a man – inevitably a man – could prove himself. Moreover, in addition to providing an exotic setting for dangerous adventure and the exploration of the unknown, Central and South America possessed a material history that could readily be co-opted both into the history of the British Empire, and into broader narratives 66

Kate Flint

67

of national greatness. There were numerous pockets of British settlement over this vast region – ranchers; farmers; prospectors: mine-owners; plantation proprietors and managers (in the mines and ranches of Brazil, British people remained legal slave-owners until 1888): trade and investment in Central and South America played a major role in the Victorian economy. But my concern in this chapter is not so much with the continent as a whole, as with the potential that the Amazon basin offered writers of fiction as a space simultaneously both real and imaginary – a space so huge, so densely foliated, so foreign, that it seemed that all kinds of strange people might live there. Within this literary jungle, encounters with ‘Indians’ were a commonplace, and the homogenized term by which they were almost always identified links them to the indigenous people who lived further north. In Wilkie Collins’s Hide and Seek, (1856), a character explains ‘Me and my scalp parted company years ago. I’m here, on a bridge in London, talking to a young chap of the name of Zack. My scalp’s on the top of a high pole in some Indian village, anywhere you like about the Amazon country.’3 Mat’s casual deployment of vocabulary when he describes waking up ‘in an Indian wigwam, with a crop of cool leaves on my head, instead of a crop of hair,’ (II, 167) reveals the readiness with which Indians tended to be grouped together in the popular imagination and characterized as wild, uncouth, ‘savage’. However, this homogenization was not universal, and the discussions which took place in serious works of travel, history, ethnography and anthropology filtered through, in their turn, to the subject matter of popular fiction. For the terms on which this region was taken as an available location of speculative fantasy was in part due to the crucial circumstance that the past civilizations of the indigenous peoples of Central and South America could readily be recognized, according to Western values, as worthy of the name of civilization. Indeed, the fact that they could be readily seen as having a history precluded their easy relegation to the realm of the primitive. Two particular features were seen as distinguishing them: past architectural achievements, and the evidence of their one-time material wealth. ‘Of course,’ wrote the cultural and linguistic anthropologist Max Müller in his 1885 article on ‘The Savage’, published in the Nineteenth Century, ‘the Spanish conquerors called the inhabitants of America savages, though it is quite now generally conceded that the Spanish conquerors supplanted a higher civilization than they established.’4 He draws attention to the remnants of their material cultures, and adds a further, linguistic factor that ties in Central and Southern peoples with those of North America and, indeed, Africa. ‘The workman,’ Müller writes, ‘must at least have been as great as his work; and if the ruins of Central America tell us of architects greater than any that country could produce at present, the magnificent ruins in the dialects, whether of Fuegians, Mohawks, or Hottentots, tell us of mental builders whom no one could match at present’ (161). Yet for some, such achievements could only have been possible if the native inhabitants

68 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

were, somehow, not natives at all. If their origins were European, their white ethnic purity – before any miscegenation and racial dilution had taken place – must still be locatable, at least within the fantasies of adventure fiction. I want to think through the implications of a couple of novels – one from the mid-century, and one from the very early twentieth century – in which the apparent discovery by an Englishman of a White Indian proves to be something different. In the first case, Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! (1855), the subject is a bronzed, acculturated, but originally European girl. In the other, William Henry Hudson’s Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest (1904), she is a remnant of an ancient people – yet a people who are emphatically differentiated, in customs, values, and apparent genetic make-up, from the ‘savages’ – the ‘Indians’ – who have taken over their lands. What do these particular fantasies signify? In what ways are difference – and sameness – employed, not just in order to make points about national and racial identity, but more interestingly, about what constitutes ‘savage’ and ‘civilized’ behaviour?

I Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! was written to bolster a sense of English national grandeur at the time of the Crimean War. Set in Elizabethan England, it provides an exaggerated template for the patriotic attitudes that were to consolidate into imperialist ideology. The young hero, Amyas Leigh, looks across the Atlantic from his native Devon coast: ‘And as he stands there with beating heart and kindling eye, the cool breeze whistling through his long fair curls, he is a symbol, though he knows it not, of brave young England longing to wing its way out of its island prison, to discover and to traffic, to colonise and to civilise, until no wind can sweep the earth which does not bear the echoes of an English voice’.5 The excesses of this novel appalled a fair number of contemporary English critics, who attacked it from various angles. Henry Crabb Robinson commented that ‘I fear it has been produced by the wish to induce a vulgar hatred of Popery,’6 – and the Spanish are, of course, the prime targets of Kingsley’s religiously motivated xenophobia. The terms in which W. R. Greg complained about Kingsley’s stylistic propensities when it comes to describing such incidents are telling: when once . . . fairly let loose upon his prey – human, moral, or material – all the Red Indian within him comes to the surface, and he wields his tomahawk with an unbaptized heartiness, slightly heathen-ish, no doubt, but withal unspeakably refreshing.7 Despite that last phrase, Greg’s comments show not just that familiar co-optation of the Native American as a touchstone of savagery, but the boundaries between so-called civilization and barbarity are eroded through

Kate Flint

69

the suggestion of a common, if not necessarily praiseworthy, attraction towards violence in pursuit of an enemy. This is, indeed, a line which Kingsley himself develops in Westward Ho!, yet not just in respect of the Spanish. Several times he reminds his reader that although atrocities had been committed against the ’savages’ by the Spanish, they had also in ‘later and worse times’ been carried out by the English (411). The Elizabethan period itself stood as a golden age of British greatness for Kingsley. To quote the narration of Westward Ho!, this was a time ‘when Englishmen still knew that man was man, and that the instinct of freedom was the righteous voice of God; ere the hapless seventeenth century had brutalized them also, by bestowing on them, amid a hundred other bad legacies, the fatal gift of negro slaves’ (435). But we should be cautious when it comes to attributing enlightened racial notions to Kingsley. Significantly, the novel was dedicated not just to George Augustus Selwyn, the first Bishop of New Zealand (who had been extremely supportive of Maori rights in relation to the activities of English land companies) but to the Rajah of Sarawak, Sir James Brooke, against whom charges of inhumanity and illegal conduct – in his suppression of piracy and head-hunting in Malaysia – were brought in the House of Commons. In an extraordinary letter to his friend J. M. Ludlow, written five years before the publication of Westward Ho!, Kingsley calls on the last three chapters of the Book of Revelations to suggest that organs of destruction may in fact be ‘part of the image of God, and Christ the Son of God, to be used in His service and to His glory,’ and draws a very dubious theological parallel to justify the slaughter of Malays and Dyaks: ‘It is expedient that one man die for the people. One tribe exterminated, if need be, to save a whole continent. “Sacrifice of human life?” Prove that it is human life. It is beast-life. These Dyaks have put on the image of the beast, and they must take the consequence.’8 He says, moreover, that he hopes that in Brooke’s position he would have done the same. Kingsley, in other words, was able, like a number of his contemporaries, to take on board a Christian vocabulary of self-justification in order to support the inhumane treatment of indigenous peoples, who are, indeed, characterized as members of a quite different species. Amyas, like the other sailors who voyage from Devon in Westward Ho!, is an Elizabethanized exemplum of the kind of muscular Christianity that Kingsley promoted in the cause of national well-being. In the third part of the novel, he is part of an expedition that sets out to find the fabular city of gold, Manoa: on his quest, he is very content to take the advice of friendly Indians. Although Kingsley’s text is peppered with essentialist remarks about ‘true Indian stoicism’ (386) ‘simple Indians’ (417) and so on, Amyas’ attitudes are largely determined by the need to distinguish him from the national enemy. Although the Spanish might have been attacked by hostile natives, he ‘knew enough of the Spaniards’ brutal method of treating those Indians, to be pretty sure that they had brought

70 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

that catastrophe upon themselves, and that he might avoid it well enough by that common justice and mercy toward the savages which he had learnt from his incomparable tutor, Francis Drake’ (387). Simon Gikandi has remarked – of Kingsley’s travel writing about the West Indies, rather than on his fiction, but the comments certainly hold true of Westward Ho! – on the way his tone is characterized by ‘historical belatedness’. Kingsley, he writes, ‘belongs to an age in which travel – as a horizon of cultural meanings and self-reflection – functions as a vehicle of reason and morality rather than simple sentiment or raw adventure; in the nineteenth century, travel has become a part of a new science of human culture (ethnography), which does not derive its authority solely from a sensory economy’.9 Sensory – indeed, sensuous – description is certainly not absent from the final part of this novel: there is a good deal of luscious foliage and iridescent wild-life, scene-painting of a type that was to become formulaic in adventure stories set in the South American jungle. Kingsley makes no claim that he is authorizing the text through personal experience. Rather, he presents it as fiction that is underpinned by the work of serious scholarship. His major sources are acknowledged at different points in the narrative: Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1598–1600); Robert Hermann Schomburgk’s recent edition of Walter Raleigh’s 1595 Discovery of Guiana (1848); William Hickling Prescott’s 1847 Conquest of Peru, and Alexander von Humboldt’s travel writing. ‘What Humboldt’s self cannot paint,’ he writes in chapter 23, ’we will not try to daub. The voyagers were in a South American forest, readers. Fill up the meaning of those words, each as your knowledge enables you, for I cannot do it for you’ (403). Such an injunction is a tacit acknowledgment of the point that Mary Louise Pratt makes, that Humboldt established a European fascination for the exotic environments of South America, of which the native inhabitants formed but a subservient part.10 Yet it is directly to Humboldt that Kingsley looks – rather than flattering his readers’ presumed knowledge – when he engages explicitly with the issue of indigenous peoples. He draws attention to the German’s ‘curious passage; in which, looking on some wretched group of Indians, squatting stupidly round their fires, besmeared with grease and paint, and devouring ants and clay, he somewhat naïvely remarks, that were it not for science, which teaches us that such is the crude material of humanity, and this the state from which we all have risen, he should have been tempted rather to look upon those hapless beings as the last degraded remnants of some fallen and dying race’ (412). Kingsley wishes that Humboldt had followed his own reason and common sense – as he sees it – rather than the ‘dogmas of a so-called science,’ the early stirrings of evolutionary biology. For such a reading would have tied in with the Biblical theory that ‘man in a state of nature is a fallen being, doomed to death – a view which may be a sad one, but still one more honourable to poor humanity than the theory that we all began as some sort of two-handed apes’ (412). The fact that Kingsley makes

Kate Flint

71

his Elizabethan travellers agree with Humboldt’s innate reaction ‘and not with the shallow anthropologic theories which happened to be in vogue fifty years ago’ (413) opens an interpretive circuit whereby their apparently natural, untaught reactions have value because they come from Englishmen at a high point of national history – and in turn, their responses to their new hosts are likewise a means of validating the attitudes of this period. Over and beyond this, however, the Elizabethan reactions are supported through the generalizations in the narrative voice, which buys into the degeneration theory voiced frequently, in the mid and late century, in relation to native peoples throughout the Americas who come into contact with a superior race. This authoritative commentary proclaims that the mind of the savage, crushed by the sight of the white man’s superior skill, and wealth, and wisdom, loses at first its self-respect; while his body, pampered with easily-obtained luxuries, instead of having to win the necessaries of life by heavy toil, loses its self-helpfulness; and with selfrespect and self-help vanish all the savage virtues, few and flimsy as they are, and the downward road towards begging and stealing, sottishness and idleness is easy, if not sure. (487) When a beautiful young woman appears, like a vision, in the depths of the jungle, her air of refinement would seem to suggest that she has not been spoilt by contact with Western life. Nonetheless, the explanation for her looks and demeanour must assuredly lie in her having different origins from her jungle companions. ‘It was an Indian girl; and yet, when he looked again, – was it an Indian girl? Amyas had seen hundreds of those delicate dark-skinned daughters of the forest, but never such a one as this’ (407). He runs through all the ways in which she appears non-Indian – she is taller than them, more fair skinned than he is himself, her hair not black, straight and lank but glossy brown and curling. All the strange and dim legends of white Indians, and of nations of a higher race than Carib, or Arrowak, or Solimo, which Amyas had ever heard, rose up in his memory. She must be the daughter of some great cacique, perhaps of the lost Incas themselves – why not? And full of simple wonder, he gazed upon that fairy vision, while she, unabashed in her free innocence, gazed fearlessly in return, as Eve might have done in Paradise, upon the mighty stature, and the strange garments, and above all, on the bushy beard and flowing yellow locks, of the Englishman. (407–8) The idea of a lost white race was to become something of a staple of the imperial romance as this genre came to dominate the adventure story market. Its best-known manifestation is in Rider Haggard’s She (1886–7), where the

72 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

action takes place in Africa, but it was also to be found in fiction set in Central and South America. In George Griffith’s A Criminal Croesus (1904), the gold to finance a war designed to unify South America is provided by a subterranean lost race; the very English orphan hero of Frank Aubrey’s King of the Dead (1903) finds that he is the long-lost, sought-after chief of a white tribe deep in the Venezuelan jungle. But Kingsley’s ‘mysterious maiden’ (416) doesn’t come from these wilder realms of fantasy: rather, the writer follows decisively in Humboldt’s footsteps. As Nigel Leask puts it, the Prussian was ‘quick to demolish such Eurocentric myths which attributed the high American civilizations to bearded white gods – Quetzalcoatl, Bochica, or Mango Capac – deriving ultimately from Europe or, in the various biblical versions, Semitic western Asia’.11 Ayacanora proves to be the daughter of an earlier British adventurer, John Oxenham, and his Spanish mistress. The natives had found her wandering in the forest as a child, and, ‘wondering at her white skin and her delicate beauty, the simple Indians worshipped her as a god, and led her home with them’ (417). The almost child-like reverence of the native people is at once testimony to their apparent acknowledgment of the superior attractions of whiteness, and makes it very clear to the reader that the narrative of Westward Ho! does not duplicate the stuff of captivity tales. As C. J. W.-L. Wee has noted, Ayacanora’s primitive strength ‘turns out to have been apparently nothing more than a degenerate wildness. Rapidly, the self-sufficiency and possible competitiveness of the primitive woman’ disappears, ‘with the result that Ayacanora can be Amyas’s true complement’ (83).12 For the comradeship between Ayacanora and Amyas grows, inevitably, into an affective romance, complete with separation, and then reunion in the final pages, in terms that have an uneasy intertextual relationship with Jane Eyre. George Eliot was not the only reviewer to suggest that Kingsley might have borrowed the blinding of his hero from Brontë’s plot: what she did not pick up on was the way in which Kingsley simultaneously effects an anti-feminist revision.13 Whilst Jane is made to signal her desire for autonomous decisionmaking through the employment of anti-slavery terminology, by contrast, when Ayacanora eventually turns up at Amyas’ home in Devon, she prostrates herself before his blind helplessness: ‘Oh, do not weep! I cannot bear it! I will get you all you want! Only let me fetch and carry for you, tend you, feed you, lead you, like your slave, your dog! Say that I may be your slave!’ and falling on her knees at his feet, she seized both his hands, and covered them with kisses . . . The section ends ‘ “I am but a poor wild girl – a wild Indian savage, you know: but – but . . .” and she burst into tears’ (590). As they fall into each other’s arms, it is as though a fantasy of the voluntary assimilation of the native to English – or more generally, white – superiority is being enacted, and yet the assimilation is unproblematic, sanctioned by the fact of the

Kate Flint

73

forest girl’s essentially Caucasian appearance and ancestry. The threat of miscegenation that might have surfaced should Ayacanora have been an Indian by birth is transmuted into a mere absorption of partial Spanish heritage into the bloodline of the power that was to grow to dominance in the Americas.14 The myth that is being laid down is not one dependent on fantastical invention and wishful back-projections. The fiction of White Indians, in other words, is introduced, and then just as rapidly dispelled. However attractive in its sensationalism, the trope of the White Indian needs to be a fiction, in order that a foundational myth of the origins of imperial manliness may have its plausibility underscored.

II Westward Ho! ends with Kingsley looking forward to transatlantic expansion, to the ‘heroes who from that time forth sailed out to colonise another and a vaster England, to the heaven-prospered cry of Westward-Ho!’ (591). He employed the Amazon as a site on which the future spirit of imperialism could be nurtured. But by the end of the century, the function of this Central American terrain was somewhat different, and confidence in imperial manliness decidedly more uncertain. In his book Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle (1991), Chris Bongie writes about the shift in versions of exoticism that he sees occurring during the nineteenth-century. He defines ‘exoticism’ as ‘a nineteenth-century literary and existential practice that posited another space, the space of an Other, outside or beyond the confines of “civilization”,’ but notes that the initial optimism of the exoticist project gives way ‘to a deep pessimism spreading from the rapid spread of colonial and technological power’.15 As McArdle, the news editor at the beginning of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) puts it: ‘The big blank spaces on the map are all being filled in, and there’s no room for romance anywhere.’16 In W. H. Hudson’s novel of 1904, Green Mansions, Mr Abel, the narrator, performs a peculiar act of geographical violence. It is an act, however, of shrinkage rather than expansion. He has climbed the great hill of Ytaioa with Rima, the strange, ethereal forest girl whom he has encountered deep in the Venezuelan jungle, and is telling her about the countries which lie beyond the rim of their vision, and her knowledge. ‘ “What is beyond the mountains over there, beyond the cities on that side – beyond the world?” she asks. “Water, only water.” replies Abel. “Did I not tell you?” I returned stoutly; for I had, of course, sunk the Isthmus of Panama beneath the sea.’17 This envisioning of South America as something completely distinct from the northern part of the continent represents the performance of a desire which is latent within many imaginative treatments of South America by British writers in the Victorian period: a desire which ignores or negates both the historical intertwining of different parts of the land-mass, and the contemporary economic and cultural ties which were developing between South and North.

74 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

In a large number of cases, moreover, it seems that the authors of these fictions are counting on their readers being ignorant of, or ignoring, the political significances attached to their chosen locations. This is true, for example, of Frank Adams’ (publishing under the name of ‘Fenton Ash’) The Radium Seekers, which appeared the year after Green Mansions, in 1905, and is set in precisely the same general area of the Venezuela-British Guiana border – presented as though it is a blank space on the map of the popular imagination. It is an extraordinary mixture of the fancifully archaic – it’s another lost white race story – and the modern – radium had been discovered in 1898. This novel’s scientific scope of references merges this ‘new metal about which so many extraordinary things are being told’18 (15) and an as yet undeterminable substance that, being anti-gravitational, can be used to allow human flight, and also acts as a prophylactic against poisoned arrows. One of the novel’s two English overgrown schoolboy heroes explains where he obtained his lump of the precious substance: ‘In the country which lies at the back of British Guiana and Venezuela there are vast tracts of the wildest possible description which, so far as is known, have never been explored by a white man. If you look at a good map of South America you can see where this region lies, for it is very extensive, comprising, indeed, something like a million square miles.’ ‘Jiminy!’ What visions of possible new discoveries such a fact raises in one’s mind!” ‘You are right, Harry . . .’ (13) Yet what this novel, Green Mansions, The Lost World and many other contemporary fantasy fictions completely ignore is the fact that this mineral-rich area was the location for some very unfanciful political struggles. Venezuela and Britain had been in a long-standing dispute concerning border demarcations in the lands that lay between the Orinoco and the Essequibo rivers.19 In 1841, Schomburgh produced a full-scale survey of the Essequibo area and, on a second expedition, set up posts and marked trees in an attempt to write the boundary onto the landscape itself. Early in 1844 diplomatic negotiations began, which lumbered on for decades, being broken off in 1887, by which time the US had offered its services on Britain’s behalf, invoking the Monroe Doctrine in support of its intervention. This was resented by Britain, who argued that the Monroe Doctrine was hardly applicable in this matter, since Britain had a historical right to the disputed area. Settled by arbitration – in which the United States eventually played an important role – this boundary disagreement demonstrates well how British interests, in the nineteenth century, in one particularized area of Central America, could not be separated from the politics of the entire American continent. But there is only a whisper of this in Hudson’s curious novel, although the year 1887, in which its English framing narrator encounters Mr Abel, in Georgetown, was a crucial

Kate Flint

75

one in terms of the relations between the two countries. The date certainly explains his reference to Mr Abel being ‘an alien, a Venezuelan, one of that turbulent people on our border whom the colonists have always looked on as their natural enemies’ (3). He is a form of outcast, however, both from his own nation, and from the better aspects of himself, and this is the position from which he tells his story to the narrator. Green Mansions is a novel about the death of idealism, whether this relates to the concept of the noble savage, or, more broadly, to the whole idea of idyllic, pastoral nature. Hudson, himself passionate about ecological issues, has Abel initially looking for gold, like Kingsley’s Amyas.20 But he finds something far more powerful and enduring when he experiences ‘a strange sense and apprehension of a secret innocence and spirituality in nature,’ entering a wood which, for a while, looks to be a location existing independently of material and political interests, although not of Abel’s desire for the ‘boundless wealth’ that might be extracted from it (16). The forest’s natural power seems to find its incarnation in Rima, a woman who apparently exists independent of all known races. Speaking a melodious, warbling language, dressed in spiders’ webs, she is a kind of nymph. Her loose, curling hair appears dark, ‘but the precise tint was indeterminable, as was that of her skin, which looked neither brown nor white’ (44). Several pages later, the point that she evades all known taxonomies of race is reinforced: ‘it was her colour that struck me most, which indeed made her differ from all other human beings. The colour of the skin would be almost impossible to describe, so greatly did it vary with every change of mood . . .’ (53). Not only is her form and her skin tone indeterminable, but her personality is also teasingly ambiguous, sometimes ludic and uninhibited, and sometimes demure and submissive, reflecting her acculturation at the hands of Nuflo, her original protector, an old Venezuelan bandit outlaw, and of the mission village where he first took her and where she had been baptized. But the plot refuses Rima’s further assimilation, or explanation. Whilst her strangeness is a powerful element in Abel’s eroticized attraction towards her, it is a source of fear for the Venezuelan Indians. For them she is a supernatural threat, ‘a daughter of the Didi’ and must be killed. They torch the tree in which she’s taken refuge, and she falls from it, crying ‘Abel! Abel!’, ‘like a great white bird killed with an arrow and falling to earth’ (174). Although her skin hue might have been an idealized blend of all races, this image of the ‘great white bird,’ and indeed the emphasis on her ethereality, allows her to be co-joined, however tenuously, with legendary White Indians. This is brought home by the fact that even given the fact that Rima is killed by indigenous peoples, her narrative trajectory is like an early twentieth-century reworking of the Dying Indian trope: one more occasion for nostalgia, for mourning a lost race, and for lamenting the loss of pastoral innocence, signalled through the death of a woman with no apparent living relatives.

76 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

However, a further set of questions are raised by Abel’s behaviour after her death, which demand that we think harder about the relationships between modern man, indigenous peoples, and whatever ur-primitivism Rima might be thought of as representing. Earlier in the novel, Abel spoke scathingly of the ‘Guayana savages,’ saying that one ‘must not [think] that there is any sweetness in their disposition, any humane or benevolent instincts such as are found among the civilized nations’ (13). He deplores their ‘savage, cruel, instincts’ (48), and records his revulsion at being embraced by ‘a naked male savage’ (19). Since this is a first-person narrative, it is impossible to tell whether this is intended to signify unpalatable racial arrogance on Abel’s part, in a manoeuvre designed to place the reader at a wary distance from him, or whether Hudson does not anticipate creating an antipathy towards Abel in his audience. What is clear, however, is Abel’s own moral deterioration after Rima’s death, when a ‘black and terrible suspicion’ about what happened to Rima grows in his heart, and he finds ‘that a new nature, black and implacable, had taken the place of the old’ (170). The repetition of ‘black’ is unmissable, although its deliberate racial, or racist shading is less easy to gauge. Abel turns to revenge, killing Kua-Kó, the Indian whom he suspects was most closely involved in Rima’s death, feeling ‘a terrible raging desire to spill his accursed blood’ (176). More significantly still in its phrasing, when he watched the dying Indian’s blood spurt out, Abel experienced ‘a feeling of savage joy’ (176). After this burst of bloodthirsty revenge, he takes refuge in the forest. To survive, he raids the nests of the birds that had been so dear to Rima (her vegetarianism was something that marked her off from both white and indigenous Venezualans); he eats some ‘huge white grubs which I had found in the rotten wood of a prostrate trunk’ (182), and degenerates into a being who is the very antithesis of his former ‘civilized’ self: ‘Once my soul hungered after knowledge; I took delight in fine thoughts finely expressed; I sought them carefully in printed books: now only this vile bodily hunger, this eager seeking for grubs and honey, and ignoble war with little things!’ (192). Eventually, he makes his way out of the forest, not to his past, but to British Guiana, the possession, as we have seen, of Venezuela’s territorial antagonist, in a quasi-mystical journey through difficult terrain and physical hardships: ‘a new Ahasuerus’ (201) or Wandering Jew, he calls himself. We are led to speculate, at this moment, on various issues. What does it mean for this white man to be a murderer – however much he, and possibly the reader, may believe his action to have been justified? In this short novel with its sustained, but often indecipherable straining after allegory, is he rightly named Abel, or is he in fact Cain, the taker of life? Are we led to conclude that some essential part of (‘civilized’) humanity been killed in him? Furthermore, after having killed, what conclusions are we to draw from the fact that he is, to all intents and purposes, without a nation? Does this underline the idea that

Kate Flint

77

he has experienced some kind of reversion into savagery, for whom national boundaries, at least as they are constituted by late nineteenth-century maps and diplomacy, has no meaning? Or is he a form of ruthless imperialist, ruling native peoples by physical conquest, a mode of aggression that crosses borders indiscriminately? The capacity to collapse the binary between murderer and murdered, native and conqueror, returns one to the question that had been troubling European thinking concerning native others since at least Montaigne’s essay on cannibalism: who, in fact, has the right to make claims about savagery and barbarism? How, indeed, might one recognize a ‘savage’? Hudson’s tale seems in many ways to be following the perception that had taken root, at the very end of the century, that there might be something like the ‘savage’ innate within all of us. This is the ‘dim suspicion’ of ‘remote kinship’ that so troubles Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899),21 and it is the sentiment underlying Andrew Lang’s dedication to Rider Haggard in In the Wrong Paradise and other Stories (1886) when he proclaimed that ‘we are all savages under our white skins . . . We are hunters again, trappers, adventurers bold, while we study you, and the blithe barbarian wakens even in the weary person of letters.’22 Max Müller, nonetheless, expressed a decided wariness in remarking that ‘every definition that has been attempted of a savage in general, has broken down as soon as it was confronted with facts’ (177). Rather than present us with ‘facts,’ however, W. H. Hudson, like Charles Kingsley before him, asks these questions through the medium of fantasy – albeit fantasy that is situated within a known geographical site. Their suggestions about how ‘savagery’ might best be defined are necessarily determined by the different cultural contexts in which each is writing, half a century apart. Nowhere does this come across more clearly than in the use each novelist makes of the apparent ‘white Indian,’ a young woman who, on both occasions, proves not to be an Indian at all. For Kingsley, the savage identity that is invoked by Ayacanora indicates – in a way that Kingsley seems to find completely appropriate – a capacity for subservience and compliance, even if, since it is not genetically determined, her actual submission to Amyas does not have the power to trouble national heritage. This subservience is, moreover, consolidated by the ease with which she adopts a conventional feminine role in relation to her beloved, thus reinforcing the mid-century equation between the female and supposedly inferior races. Ayacanora’s whiteness, what is more, derives from her European heritage: she is no fanciful member of some lost tribe. This allows us to see that her particular brand of savageness is something learned; a matter of upbringing and environment: it is not innate. Ultimately, she cannot be seen as coming from a mythic race, because Kingsley’s mythic version of the origins of national greatness not only needs to be built on historical fact, but is predicated on the inferiority of native peoples.

78 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

But pessimism about humanity in general is far more apparent in Hudson’s work. Through loss and despair, Abel succumbs to uncouth and shameful behaviour that puts him on a par with the Indian inhabitants of the forest. Beyond this, however, lies the mythic figure of Rima. Difference, in the early twentieth century, is here imagined, once again, in terms of racial and gendered otherness. Yet it is an otherness so extreme that regression cannot take one there, and nor does this ur-native have any living descendents. Rima represents a dream of origins, an original state of being so pure that it can never be recaptured – indeed, is doomed to extinction. She is a nebulous being, standing – so far as one might pin her down at all – for such a prelapsarian, untrammelled state of nature that there could be no place for her – indeed, no place for any kind of succouring myth – in a world marked by territorial disagreements, ecological depredation, and the apparent inevitability of human degeneration.

Notes Early versions of this chapter were delivered at the University of Alberta, Columbia University, and the Modern Languages Association’s annual conference. I am particularly indebted to Martin Meisel and Srinivas Aravamudan for their helpful comments on these occasions. 1. Such accounts could be found, for example, in the persistent legend of Welsh Indians: located in the writings of Lewis and Clark, and the American ethnographer George Catlin’s belief that the Mandan tribe were somehow descended from Gallic forebears. Another further recurrent theory was that some, or even all, of the indigenous inhabitants of North America owed their origins to the Lost Tribe of Israel. 2. An extraordinarily compendious list of ‘lost race’ fictions is to be found at http:// www.violetbooks.com/lostrace-check-guide.html [accessed 05.31.08]. 3. Wilkie Collins, Hide and Seek. 3 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1854), II, p. 164. 4. Friedrich Max Muller, ‘The Savage’, Last Essays (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901), pp. 139–82, p. 143. 5. Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho! [1855]. Vol. VI. The Works of Charles Kingsley. (London: Macmillan & Co., 1880–85), p. 10. 6. Henry Crabb Robinson, The Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson: An Abridgement. Ed. Derek Hudson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 298. 7. Wiliam Rathbone Greg, ‘Kingsley and Carlyle’, Literary and Social Judgments (Boston: James Osgood & Co., 1873), pp. 115–45, p. 117. 8. Frances Eliza Grenfell Kingsley, Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of his Life. (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1877), p. 222. 9. Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 99. 10. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 111–43. For a further thoughtful discussion of Humboldt’s writings on tropical America, see chapter 6 of Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 243–98.

Kate Flint

79

11. Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, p. 270. 12. C. J. W.-L. Wee, ‘Christian manliness and national identity,’ in ed. Donald E. Hall, Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) pp. 66–88, p. 83. 13. For discussion of the implications of this mid-Victorian trope, see Mary Wilson Carpenter, ‘Blinding the Hero,’ differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 17 (3), 2006, pp. 52–68. 14. The argument that England and Spain, Protestant and Catholic are being amalgamated through Amyas’s future with Ayacanora (a heritage in which the blood ratio is 3:1 in favour of English Protestantism) is well made in Stanwood S. Walker’s wide-reaching article, ‘“Backwards and backwards ever”: Charles Kingsley’s Racial-Historical Allegory and the Liberal Anglican Revisioning of Britain,’ Nineteenth-Century Literature, 62 (3), 2007, pp. 339–79. 15. Chris Bongie, Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 4–5. 16. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World [1912] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 10. 17. W. H. Hudson, Green Mansions [1904] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 103. 18. [Frank Atkins], ‘Fenton Ash,’ The Radium Seekers, or, The Wonderful Black Nugget (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd.), 1905, p. 15. 19. See Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner, The Venezuelan-Guyana Border Dispute. Britain’s Colonial Legacy in Latin America (Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1984). 20. For more on Hudson, Green Mansions, and ecology, see John Glendening, ‘Darwinian Entanglement in Hudson’s Green Mansions,’ English Literature in Transition (1880–1920). 43 (3), 2000, pp. 259–79, and N. H. Reeve, ‘Feathered women: W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions,’ in eds. Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells, Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and literature (London and New York: Zed Books, 1998), pp. 134–45. 21. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness [1899] (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1988), p. 38. 22. Andrew Lang, In the Wrong Paradise and Other Stories (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1886), p. 5.

5 The Interpretation of Daydreams: Reverie as Site of Conflict in Early Victorian Psychology Natalie Mera Ford

Long before Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams appeared in German in 1899,1 the consolidating field of psychiatry struggled with the interpretation of daydreams. In particular, an extreme form of introspection called ‘reverie’ provoked divided views in early Victorian Britain. Numerous midnineteenth-century mental theorists used this term to denote an undirected, trancelike cognitive mode, developing the notion from the associationist tradition initiated by Locke, who had described ‘Reverie’ as ‘When Ideas float in our mind, without any reflection or regard of the Understanding’.2 Reverie’s nineteenth-century scientific currency paralleled its contemporary literary prominence as a kind of powerful interiority, spread by such Romantic works as Rousseau’s Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1782) and Wollstonecraft’s Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796).3 But while autobiographical and imaginative writers often presented intense reverie as a generative experience of ontological pleasure and visionary inspiration, medical authors portrayed the condition as potentially harmful. In an age favouring self-control over sensibility, early Victorian psychology persistently regarded the unstructured, unguided mind with suspicion. A subject lost in deep daydreaming or ‘waking dreams’ was considered to reside on the borderline of so-called normality, at times drifting into derangement. Indulgence in reverie was therefore deemed unsafe behaviour which risked the slippage into solipsism and immorality, if not outright insanity. A number of important medical and philosophical treatises published between 1830 and 1870 classify ‘reverie’ as a disorder or disease. These include John Abercrombie’s Inquiries concerning the Intellectual Powers and the Investigation of Truth (1830), Robert MacNish’s The Philosophy of Sleep (1830), James Cowles Prichard’s A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind (1835), John G. Millingen’s Mind and Matter (1847), Henry Holland’s Chapters on Mental Physiology (1852), George Henry Lewes’s The Physiology of Common Life (1859–60), and a memorable work by surgeon Walter Cooper Dendy that I will return to shortly. A text probably lying behind all of the 80

Natalie Mera Ford

81

above is Erasmus Darwin’s late-eighteenth-century Zoonomia; or, The laws of Organic Life (1794–96), in which the English physician (Charles Darwin’s grandfather) aligns reverie with sleep, vertigo, and drunkenness as imperfect sensorial forms of suspended volition.4 However, Darwin gives various definitions for reverie depending upon the psycho-physiological state’s force: it is seen to span ‘deep contemplation’, convulsive fits akin to epilepsy, sleepwalking, and hallucinations.5 Darwin dedicated Zoonomia to his fellow scientific inquirers into the mind, and its seminal impact can be traced in the comparable accounts of reverie that emerged in nineteenth-century British psychology, pointing to intertextuality and shared preoccupations in the post-Enlightenment era. Concern about involuntary mental modes in particular escalated in the mid-century as theorists, while frequently lending support to materialist schemas of the brain, continued to endorse selfcommand over strong, unruly thoughts and emotions, or ‘the passions’.6 The stress on self-command was whetted by contemporary experiments in ‘mind control’ such as animal magnetism and electrobiology, contested practices which heightened anxieties about trancelike conditions in general.7 Along with more public spectacles, private ungoverned reverie fell under sharper scrutiny. Mental scientists’ concerns about the pathology of reverie tied into wider debates about the roles of sensation, perception, and volition in semiconscious states. In fact, reverie typically appears in nineteenthcentury scientific discourse alongside hotly disputed phenomena such as somnambulism, spectral illusions, and mesmeric trance. Some nosologists, such as the London society physician Sir Henry Holland in his influential mid-century work, subsumed reverie under broader categories of disorder, affording it a controversial and yet simultaneously elusive, minor status.8 Enduring literary associations of positive Romantic-style meditation seem to have further modified critical views: as I will discuss below, several mental theorists shifted towards a lyrical register when expounding upon reverie. An aesthetic charge arguably adhered to the word itself. With its French resonance especially piquant in the first half of the nineteenth century,9 ‘reverie’ in early Victorian psychological texts designates a more privileged, profound type of inwardness than the quotidian ‘daydream’, although also implying less self-control. Despite such distinctions, the two terms, along with analogous labels such as ‘abstraction’, were regularly conflated and ‘confounded’ by medical theorists, a trend that Scottish physician Robert MacNish lamented in his study of somnolent states.10 This matrix of unresolved nuances of meaning effectively tempered constructions of extreme reverie as unsound by linking the state to milder, normalised, and creative forms of introspection. Conflicting nineteenth-century perceptions of reverie thus originated in the notion’s taxonomical, generic, and lexical ambiguity. Despite the complicated views of reverie reflected in early Victorian psychology, the discourse is overall dominated by a wary critique of unconstrained inwardness. As Terry Castle – one of the few scholars to recognise

82 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

reverie as a historical scientific concept – has pointed out, antiapparitionists since the beginning of the century had denounced reverie as delusive thought.11 In the mid-century, mental theorists such as James Cowles Prichard continued to frame intense reverie in pathological or pathogenic terms,12 fashioning what could be called a ‘poetic pathology’ when influenced by the persisting, competing Romantic literary sense. Considered by alienists to slide from normal to abnormal – or ordinary to extraordinary – degrees, reverie’s placement on a fluid scale mirrors the then popular idea of a graded continuum between sanity and insanity. Notably, a similarly wide range for reverie is found in several contemporary fictional narratives by writers interested in developing theories of the mind, such as Charles Dickens. Dombey and Son (1846–48), for instance, composed during Dickens’s active involvement in mesmerism,13 raises spiritual connotations of the wandering mind for young Paul Dombey yet casts suspicion on the musing of manager Carker, who ‘fell into a deeper reverie, and sat pondering over the blackening grate’.14 Elastic portrayals of reverie in fiction informed by Victorian science relate to the complex response that unregulated mental states evoked in the burgeoning field of psychology: according to Jenny Bourne Taylor, both ‘fascination’ and a desire to control them.15 In the discourse of moral management, which proposed internal restraints as ostensibly humane means to rehabilitate the mentally ill (before more pessimistic philosophies of biological determinism gained sway),16 reverie figures as a significant, if liminal, site of ideological conflict. Its liminality essentially intensified the conflict, as the condition’s frontier status between consciousness and unconsciousness set reverie up as an intriguing, indeterminate area of interpretive strife. The cloudiness of generic divisions in the first half of the nineteenth century has been well established by critics examining intersections between British scientific and imaginative writings.17 This permeable discursive context, I would suggest, fostered the equivocal status held by intense reverie in early Victorian psychology. Theorists treating borderline consciousness depicted reverie as a condition that easily crosses borders, capable of being creative or debilitating, or – more disturbing – both at once. Reverie’s diagnosis was not the only sign of friction, and confluence, between genres: in various instances, its presentation mixes what can be generally termed medical and literary styles. Victorian physicians occasionally asserted cultural prestige by alluding to literature in their works,18 with Shakespeare a favoured source.19 For mental scientists to write in a polished literary style themselves may be seen as likewise intended to boost their authority; reverie seems to be a subject that especially attracted lyrical treatment. MacNish, for example, dubs it ‘a defect in the attention’ in The Philosophy of Sleep20 yet moves towards an aesthetic register when listing topographies that induce reverie. The physician, who also published verse, reveals his poetic side when describing how reverie arises ‘while gazing long and intently

Natalie Mera Ford

83

upon a river’, a scene that echoes Rousseau’s famous lakeside account in the Rêveries, or, echoing Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’, in ‘dim religious light’ seated by the hearth.21 In contrast, Holland self-consciously strives to adhere to a strict scientific register in his Chapters on Mental Physiology, distancing rare literary allusions or quotations from his text by placing them in brackets or footnotes, apologetically acknowledging that ‘poetry is not often admissible in aid of discussions of this nature’.22 The physician aims to found a ‘medical sense’ for reverie yet nevertheless invokes affirmative views that recall its prevailing literary sense: a Romantic form of pensive interiority, which occurs in novels by his cousin Elizabeth Gaskell, for one.23 Although Holland, following Darwin’s lead, regards reverie as a sensorial disorder veering towards insanity, he also exalts the introspective faculty as a mark that ‘characterises man as an intellectual being’.24 The mutability of mid-nineteenth-century psychological writing as a nascent genre, shaped by imaginative literature amongst other discourses, hence reinforces the conflict I am tracing between what could be summed up as generative and degenerative brands of intense reverie. Further evidence of conflicting early Victorian interpretations appears in materialist theories that located aspects of temperament on the contested map of phrenology. MacNish, a convert to the para-science, attributed an inclination to reverie to a subject’s small organ of ‘Concentrativeness’,25 which was found at the back of the skull and labelled number three on the period’s phrenological heads. Concentrativeness itself was a disputed faculty among phrenologists: Spurzheim, introducing his expanded version of Gall’s system into England, called the organ ‘Inhabitiveness’,26 and British phrenologists argued over what innate character qualities Inhabitiveness or Concentrativeness revealed. In 1824, the nation’s most influential proponent of phrenology, George Combe, allied organ three to the sustained ability to focus on and direct feelings and thoughts.27 In accordance with Combe’s determining definition, a person deficient in Concentrativeness would have limited command over their intellectual operations and therefore be prone to disjointed, dissipated thoughts – in other words, an unfocused, floating frame of mind, or reverie in one of its potentially pathological guises. At the same time, a converse link between reverie and the organ of Concentrativeness could be proposed. As mentioned above, early Victorian mental theorists intermittently defined reverie as abstraction, a trancelike state resulting from exceptional, rather than deficient, powers of concentration. English surgeon Walter Cooper Dendy makes this alternative connection in The Philosophy of Mystery (1841), where Evelyn, the voice of natural philosophy, relates reverie to ‘concentrativeness’, a faculty with extremes embodied by ‘the idiot and the sage’.28 The polarities that Dendy assigned to this phrenological organ anticipate Holland’s twofold notion of reverie as a feature of the lowest and highest capacities of the human mind; both men’s views highlight the competing currencies of reverie circulating in

84 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

mid-nineteenth-century British psychology. On the one hand, a figure in reverie resembles what Dendy’s Evelyn refers to as a ‘Cretin’, a monstrous being void of thought.29 On the other hand, a figure in reverie is deemed a man of genius, productively engrossed in riveting ideas within. I use the masculine here to emphasise the gendering that pervades the period’s scientific, and literary, portrayals of acute reverie: subjects shown immersed in contemplative, creative, or ‘intellectual’ reverie are commonly men, while subjects shown in deranged, even if visionary, reverie are usually women.30 This dichotomy is in keeping with Victorian culturo-medical notions of the female sex’s weaker mental physiology. As Jane Wood summarises, medical men considered a woman precariously emotional, ‘less capable of controlling her will and, therefore, more prone to nervous disease’.31 Psychological as well as literary texts bear out the prevalent nineteenth-century gendering of reverie, with Lord Edward Bulwer Lytton setting forth two noteworthy, genre-bending examples in his scientifically researched philosophical essay collection Caxtoniana (1863) and medico-occult romance A Strange Story (1862).32 Victorian literature in particular is populated by more women in distraught reverie than men, reflecting and contributing to the largely pejorative association that was forged between femininity and extreme, unrestrained reverie. Consider, for instance, Lucy Snowe’s ambivalent, mentally expansive yet destabilising, reveries in Villette (1853),33 a novel tellingly preoccupied with the unclear distinctions between psychological health and illness, in which Charlotte Brontë employs Victorian alienist terms, as Sally Shuttleworth has shown.34 Indeed, a male figure undergoing excessive reverie is effectively emasculated by his association with non-rational, passive interiority, as Thomas De Quincey implies in Suspiria de Profundis (1845). Defending Romantic meditative practices, De Quincey ruefully notes that the English school system curtails a boy’s reverie years, forcing even ‘the effeminate into conforming to a rule of manliness’ – that is, practical social activity versus solitary, dreamy, ‘effeminate’ introspection.35 Charles Lamb’s ‘Dream-Children: A Reverie’ (1823) provides an earlier example of the threat that illusory reverie could be seen to pose to developing codes of robust masculinity.36 Such issues of gender subtly inform Dendy’s assessment of profound reverie as inspired and impaired cognition, a dual judgement that recurs in his mid-century psychological writings. The corpus of this eclectic, prolific surgeon indicates an abiding interest in obscure states on the fringe of consciousness, as his book titles make evident: On the Phenomena of Dreams, and Other Transient Illusions (1832); The Philosophy of Mystery (1841); CYXH [Psyche]. A Discourse on the Birth & Pilgrimage of Thought (1853); and A Gleam of the Spirit-Mystery (1861). The generally non-technical titles suggest that Dendy, like many early Victorian philosophical and medical authors, pitched his texts at a larger cultured audience. The wide targeted readership means that Dendy’s multiple, contradictory diagnoses

Natalie Mera Ford

85

of reverie – notably a topic that he tackles on several occasions – may well have reached a significant section of mid-nineteenth-century British society. In The Philosophy of Mystery, his most popular publication, Dendy devotes an entire chapter to the ambiguous subjective state, thereby providing us with a primary case study of conflict over reverie. Looking at this work, we can trace the junction – or clash – of notions of generative and degenerative interiority that prompted curiosity as well as concern about reverie in early Victorian mental science. Although Dendy differentiates reverie from other psychic phenomena such as prophetic dreams, sleep-talking, and catalepsy, virtually all varieties of incomplete consciousness are rendered as problematic in The Philosophy of Mystery. As noted earlier, intense reverie is correlated with cretinism, while less acute reverie is associated with apathy and morbidly lax self-control. On the whole, then, the text conveys serious misgivings about undirected, unfocused mental states. And yet, as in other nosologies from the period, hints of poetic reverie, which I will address below, counter Dendy’s scientific and socio-cultural criticism of pathological reverie. Gesturing in The Philosophy to positive versions of meditative reverie might be a rhetorical manoeuvre comparable to the stylistic ‘lyricism’ that Rick Rylance has argued other Victorian scientists deployed to ease new ideas before a resistant public.37 To broaden and apply this reading here would cast Dendy as adjusting the literary legacy of reverie promoted and performed by British Romantic writers – reverie as creative mental drifting – into a guarded medical view of unregulated semiconsciousness as ultimately posing physical, psychological, and moral risk. Such a gesture might reflect the Victorians’ need to see inspiration and creativity differently to their Romantic predecessors; that is to say, changing conceptualisations of reverie may be partly based in literary differences. Whether or not such conscious purpose is at work in Dendy’s Philosophy, its evocation of poetic alongside pathological reverie accents and perpetuates the term’s intertwined conceptual roots. The surgeon acknowledges fruitful possibilities for the unfixed mind in spite of his chief formulation of reverie as malady. Intimations of generative reverie start with The Philosophy’s transgeneric structure. Dendy presents his anatomy of mystery in a markedly fantastic manner, opening the narrative with two fair girls and two young scholars discussing ghosts at the ‘Abbey Tintern’,38 a setting that calls up cloistral history and Wordsworth’s contemplative poem of 1798, if not Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). The male characters enter into a midsummer eve’s debate on the reality or illusion of phantoms and other puzzling phenomena, while the female characters adjudicate the ‘match’ between the champions of materialism and supernatural, metaphysical belief.39 In other words, Dendy launches a rationalist account of the occult by way of a forceful mix of the Gothic, pastoral romance, and philosophical dialogue. The treatise’s dramatic staging should not, however, veil Dendy’s medical

86 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

authority. A member of the Royal College of Surgeons, fellow and then president of the Medical Society of London, and senior surgeon to the Royal Infirmary for Children, Dendy was influential in his discipline, publishing numerous papers in addition to longer treatises.40 In the light of his commitment to Victorian mental science, the Romantic literary elements of Dendy’s Philosophy stand out as all the more arresting. The literariness of The Philosophy of Mystery, which contributes to its conflicting representation of reverie, derives moreover from the familiar scientific technique of literary allusion. Dendy draws support from Romantic-period poets, essayists, and novelists as much as from contemporary theorists of the mind: references to Coleridge, Scott, De Quincey, Byron, and Percy Shelley flank references to doctors James Cowles Prichard, John Abercrombie, John Conolly, and asylum reformer Samuel Tuke, to name just a few. Unsurprisingly, quotations from Shakespeare proliferate in Dendy’s text, serving as epigraphs for each section: the chapter on reverie begins with the curtly suggestive line ‘That fools should be so deepcontemplative’.41 Jacques’s derisive praise of a fool in As You Like It joins madness and musing – significantly in Dendy, under the banner of reverie. With philosophical and imaginative views intersecting on each page, the hybrid text discredits but simultaneously upholds the Romantic valorisation of non-rational experience. In the end, science and poetry together with mysticism and orthodox devotion are symbolically reconciled through authorial matchmaking of characters. The partnering of scholars and maids metamorphoses Dendy’s Philosophy into ‘a true love-story’ of clear allegorical worth.42 In this complex (and entertaining) work, Dendy puts forth a tense view of ‘reverie’ as a suspiciously elastic condition that encompasses virtually every mode of unregulated thought, from the deranged to the elevated. If the treatise’s overall argument is negative, its specific critique of reverie is nonetheless undercut by the poetic return of the negated in the form of positive cultural allusions. The contradictory representations of reverie in Dendy’s text are anchored in the broad spectrum of meaning integral to the term itself. As philosopher Evelyn explains, ‘the French verb, rêver, is a comprehensive word, signifying all the eccentricities of mind, from idiocy to divine philosophy; so that its derivative, “Reverie,” may be construed into Dream, Delirium, Raving, Thought, Fancy, Meditation, Abstraction’.43 The plurality of nineteenthcentury English definitions exposes reverie’s opposing suggestions of mental corrosion and creative vision. By stressing the word’s scope of significance, Dendy underscores the extremes thought to be within the reach of reverie, ‘from idiocy to divine philosophy’. Weight in this early Victorian text falls on detrimental versions of reverie as Evelyn (and Dendy behind him) avers that each of its manifestations – ‘Dream, Delirium’, and so on – reflects a degree of moral mania or monomania.44 Evelyn declares that even mild reverie afflicts its subjects with intellectual torpor: tired, inattentive minds

Natalie Mera Ford

87

enter a deteriorating ‘wandering of the imaginative faculty’.45 These subjects are effectively condemned by Dendy’s moralistic speaker Ida as ‘castle-builders [who] are, alas! but the dupes of their own mad fancy’.46 The Philosophy thus relates a habitual lapse into daydreams with mental debility and apathy, which were not trivial charges in a society that lauded duty, progress, and self-control. The notion of reverie also triggered conflicting interpretations in early Victorian psychology due to reverie’s mounting association with degenerative material agents. Dendy insinuates this correlation between trancelike, oneiric states and drugs in his account of reverie: the characters make passing reference to nitrous oxide and opium in addition to other physical causes of delusory reverie, such as fever, prolonged study, and head wounds.47 A study of major nineteenth-century narcotics, The Seven Sisters of Sleep (1860), gives later evidence of the contemporary link particularly made between opium and profound reverie. In his chapter on sister ‘Morphina’, English botanist and mycologist Mordecai Cooke cites a euphoric reverie passage from De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821, rev. 1856); Cooke himself then employs the term ‘reveries’ in his framing text, taking his cue from De Quincey.48 Cooke’s text thereby reinforces the strong, troubling mid-century tie made between reverie and opium – and the English Opium-Eater. De Quincey’s model of laudanum-laced reverie affected British cultural and medical understandings of reverie in divisive ways. While his descriptions of the pleasures of reverie advanced a glowing view of the state as mental and spiritual liberation, his notorious reliance on laudanum to achieve fleeting meditative bliss effectively bound reverie in the public’s mind to ruinous addiction.49 The Philosophy of Mystery reflects a similar ideological rift. Dendy’s work emphasises negative long-term effects of opium usage yet notes that the drug cultivates a ‘brilliant imagination’, ‘fluency and confidence in speaking’, and the mind’s ability to ‘luxuriate throughout a night in delightful reverie’.50 Scientific speaker Evelyn rushes in with stern qualifications to contain the positive aspects of reverie he has admitted into the debate, but the records of generative reverie remain. In fact, The Philosophy of Mystery validates certain forms of reverie. Construed as ‘Meditation’ and ‘Abstraction’,51 for example, reverie invokes resilient cultural notions of compelling, inspired inwardness that Dendy keeps in play. Although the chapter on reverie closes with an indicting list of monomaniacal delusions, the following chapter on abstraction offsets this severe view of uncommanded thought. Dendy’s speakers respectfully detail several non-pathological instances of mental fixation under the name reverie: these include ‘the reveries of philosophers and poets’ and ‘that solemn and last reverie of the dying’.52 While the surgeon does not ascribe a spiritual quality to these abstracted states, his sketches of philosophers, composers, and the dying in deep reverie carry a numinous resonance. Slippage between terms – the blurred gradation from suspect reverie to admirable

88 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

abstraction, which Evelyn seeks to trace – is another way that Dendy tones down the overriding mistrust of reverie set out in his Philosophy. Indeed, a brilliant potential for reverie is implied by Evelyn’s assertion that ‘we shall learn, not without some humility, how close an alliance does really exist between great wits and madness’: here reverie signals a contrasting range of psychological states that includes ‘philosophical abstraction’ on top of ‘monomania’ and ‘folie raisonnante’.53 In the amalgam of receding and emerging ideologies of mystery that The Philosophy presents, diverse views of mysterious reverie collide. Effectively, Dendy forges a kind of Romantic materialism,54 or materialist Romanticism, in his work: the strident voice of science wins the debate, yet the scene of writing at the Abbey, with its literary and contemplative associations, endures intact – and reverie survives rationalist dissection. As a case study, Walter Cooper Dendy’s The Philosophy of Mystery therefore exhibits the ideological and generic conflicts that shaped early Victorian psychology’s interpretations of extreme reverie. Taxonomists in the professionalising discipline of British psychiatry who aimed to map reverie and other conditions on the boundary of consciousness are seen to have discovered an already heavily charted literary terrain. These mental theorists essentially struggled to reconcile the powerful Romantic, Rousseauvian heritage that lingered around the term with their medical analyses of trancelike interiority. Clinical diagnoses of unsound reverie were thus complicated by the recognition, and on occasion the endorsement, of an aesthetic, generative alternative. The divided notions of deep waking dreams or ‘reverie’ that I have shown to recur in mid-nineteenth-century British psychology reflect topical, controversial scientific and social concerns about the consequences of uncontrolled introspection. As pointed out above, these concerns also appear in strikingly ambivalent portrayals of reverie in fictional narratives by writers who engaged with the period’s psychological discourse. Scenes of intense reverie in realist novels by Dickens, Brontë, and others such as George Eliot suggest that a subtle, at times conflictual, dialogue existed between some contemporary imaginative and psychological texts on the topic of reverie.55 Thus, in the interpenetrating discourses of literature and science as well as within the emerging field of psychology itself, wariness about reverie persisted throughout the Victorian age, especially in relation to its vague, arguably volatile placement on the shifting and slight line – ‘if line there be’, cautioned pathologist Holland – that was posited to separate sanity from madness, or ‘the healthy actions of mind from those of morbid nature’.56 Later in the nineteenth century, mental disorders were more authoritatively ascribed a genetic cause in accordance with British psychiatry’s growing support of deterministic aetiologies. Models of hereditary madness led to sceptical scrutiny of children’s reverie as a habit that revealed, and furthermore fostered, a nervous predisposition to melancholia. Physician James Crichton Brown promoted this view as early as 1860 in his article ‘Psychical

Natalie Mera Ford

89

Diseases of Early Life’, claiming that ‘much mental derangement in mature life [. . .] is attributable to these reveries indulged in during childhood’.57 In the new paradigm, even the spiritual musings of gentle Paul Dombey and De Quincey’s boy persona in Suspiria de Profundis would bode danger. In line with rising theories of degeneration, the Romantic child genius is replaced by the child monomaniac in Crichton Brown’s account, where imagination yields hallucinations instead of visions. Such vying appraisals of rapt inwardness as creative or illusive lie at the heart of the intersection of Victorian poetic and pathological currencies for reverie. The conflict also surfaces in late-nineteenth-century continental psychological discourse, as when Breuer and Freud in Studies in Hysteria (1895) alternatively identify Anna O’s ‘habitual day-dreaming’ or ‘habitual reverie’ (in Nicola Luckhurst’s translation) as a generative activity and pathogenic state.58 The ‘double perspective’ indicates a broader ambivalence concerning ‘the normality or abnormality of creativity and imaginative life’, a contentious issue Freud returned to in his 1907 ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’.59 Rousseau’s prized idyllic reveries, in light of his infamous psychological instability, could therefore be treated as further equivocal evidence of trancelike interiority. The conflicting, interconnecting interpretations of nineteenth-century reverie that I have explored make a twentieth-century psychoanalytic development all the more interesting, and ironic. As phenomenological literary critic Gaston Bachelard strove to revive and embellish the Romantic notion of reverie as a generative ontological state in 1960,60 so in 1962 psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion instituted reverie as a therapeutic tool, a type of unconscious receptivity he named ‘maternal reverie’.61 Again gendered, reverie here connotes a positive, rather than pathological, essentialist notion of femininity. The dominant sense for reverie in current psychoanalytic practice evolved from Bion’s definition: encouraged in both analyst and analysand, reverie denotes a hovering mode of partial awareness, akin to free association, which is theorised to yield insight through unconscious transference and countertransference.62 One branch of psychotherapy that developed out of nineteenth-century mental science, then, affirmed and continues to affirm reverie as crucial to the intensely introspective work of analysis, albeit significantly when the private activity is embedded in intersubjective relations. Nevertheless, the concept’s more solitary precursor – reverie as a configuration of extreme, unguided interiority – evoked the problematic, divided response outlined in this essay. Numerous early Victorian theorists of the mind constructed ‘reverie’ as a charged site of competing views of elusive semiconscious states that incited suspicion in the inhospitable culture of self-control. Generative and degenerative concepts clashed, but also coalesced, as nineteenth-century British psychology fashioned reverie into a poetic pathology, one whose stubborn literary resonance helped it endure scientific critique to be revived in the Modern age as a condition leading away from, and not towards, mental illness.

90 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Notes 1. Originally released as Die Traumdeutung in November 1899, the third edition of Freud’s work was translated into English in 1913. 2. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), ed. Peter H. Nidditch (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 227. Emphasis in original. 3. On Wollstonecraft’s revision of Rousseauvian reverie, see Lawrence R. Kennard, ‘Reveries of Reality: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Poetics of Sensibility’, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives, ed. Helen M. Buss, D. L. Macdonald, and Anne McWhir (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001), pp. 55–68, pp. 56, 59. 4. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life, corrected 3rd edn., 4 vols (London: Johnson, 1801), I, p. 285. 5. Ibid., I, p. 296; IV, pp. 72–3. 6. See OED ‘passion’ II.6.a, II.6.b. See also J. G. Millingen, Mind and Matter, Illustrated by Considerations on Hereditary Insanity, and the Influence of Temperament in the Development of the Passions (London: Hurst, 1847); and Rick Rylance’s gloss on Millingen’s use of the term in Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 118. 7. For enthusiastic, cynical, and disapproving contemporary responses to the ‘mesmeric sleep’ and the mid-century electrobiology mania, see Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 281ff. 8. Henry Holland, Chapters on Mental Physiology (London: Longman, 1852), p. 31. 9. The OED dates the first use of ‘reverie’ to the fourteenth century, but its English usage remains sporadic and its spelling erratic until the early nineteenth century. 10. Robert MacNish, The Philosophy of Sleep, rev. edn. (Hartford: Andrus, [1834]), p. 46. 11. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, Ideologies of Desire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 163–5. Debra Gettelman has also recently looked at Victorian medical views of reverie in her Ph.D. dissertation, focusing on the pathologisation of lighter forms of daydreaming in connection to reading practices. See Debra Lynn Gettelman, ‘Reverie, Reading, and the Victorian Novel’, Unpublished disseration (Harvard University, 2005). 12. In 1822 and 1835, Prichard related reverie to imagination and to manic ‘ecstasis’, significantly discussing both senses of reverie in the context of lunacy. See J. C. Prichard, A Treatise on Diseases of the Nervous System. Part the First: Comprising Convulsive and Maniacal Affections (London: Underwood, 1822), pp. 125, 131 (cf. pp. 100, 408); and J. C. Prichard, A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind (London: Sherwood, 1835), pp. 454, 458. 13. Fred Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 96–7, 152. 14. Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, ed. Alan Horsman, 1974, introd. and notes Dennis Walder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 681. 15. Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 46. 16. On moral management as a cornerstone of Victorian psychiatry, see Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987), p. 29. Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth contend that the period’s promotion of moral management tied in to concurrent economic ideologies advancing individual responsibility for (financial) success.

Natalie Mera Ford

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

91

Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, eds., Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), pp. 227–8. See, for example, Laura Otis, ‘Introduction’, Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology, ed. Otis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. xvii–xxviii, pp. xvii, xix. Helen Small, Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), p. 59. Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 13. MacNish, p. 45. Emphasis in original. Ibid., pp. 45–6. Cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, ed. Raymond Bernex (Paris: Bordas, 1985), pp. 96–8. Holland, pp. 86–7; cf. p. 51. See, for instance, portrayals of lighter forms of reverie as meditative thought and nostalgic memory in Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, ed. Jennifer Foster (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000), pp. 68, 458. Holland, p. 128. MacNish, p. 46. Emphasis in original. See Johann Caspar Spurzheim, Outlines of Phrenology (London, 1827). George Combe, Elements of Phrenology, enl. 4th edn. (Edinburgh: MacLachlan, 1836), pp. 56–7. Walter Cooper Dendy, The Philosophy of Mystery (London: Longman, 1841), p. 342. Emphasis in original. Ibid., p. 343. Emphasis in original. For early examples, see Darwin, I, pp. 296, 319. The reveries produced when a masculine ‘we’ (Darwin and his physician colleagues) think deeply or read absorbing works contrast the hysterical reverie paroxysms of a ‘young lady’ patient, whose malady Darwin implicitly links to ‘menstruation’, thus anticipating concerns in Victorian psychiatry that Shuttleworth has identified about the female menstrual flow in relation to pathology. Shuttleworth, pp. 97ff. Jane Wood, Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 28. See ‘On the Distinction between Active Thought and Reverie’ in [Edward Bulwer] Lytton, Caxtoniana: On Life, Literature, and Manners, Knebworth edn. (London: Routledge, 1875), pp. 126–34; and instances of Lilian Ashleigh’s dangerous penchant for reverie in [Edward Bulwer] Lytton, A Strange Story, Knebworth ed. (London: Routledge, 1897), pp. 102, 216. Charlotte Brontë, Villette, ed. Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten, 1984, introd. and notes Tim Dolin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 56–7, 132, 449. Shuttleworth, p. 221. It is plausible that Brontë encountered medical views of reverie. Copies of Abercrombie’s Inquiries and MacNish’s Philosophy of Sleep were held at the Keighley Mechanics’ Institute library, and Reverend Brontë quoted MacNish’s text in his own medical annotations. Shuttleworth, p. 282 n2. Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria De Profundis, The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Frederick Burwick, vol. 15 (London: Pickering, 2003), p. 192. In the fading children’s words, they, like the narrative’s reverie, are ‘nothing; less than nothing, and dreams’. Charles Lamb, The Essays of Elia, introd. Augustine Birrell (London: Dent; New York: Scribner’s, 1900), p. 207. Rylance, p. 37. Dendy, pp. 1–2.

92 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature 39. Ibid., p. 5. 40. For biographical information, see G. C. Boase, ‘Dendy, Walter Cooper (1794– 1871)’, rev. Susan Snoxall, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004 (Oxford University Press, 27 Feb. 2005) http://www.oxforddnb.com. 41. Dendy, p. 341. 42. Ibid., p. 443. 43. Ibid., p. 341. Italics in original. 44. Ibid., p. 342. 45. Ibid., p. 344. Emphasis in original. 46. Ibid., p. 345. 47. Ibid., pp. 341, 348, 345, 350. 48. Mordecai C. Cooke, The Seven Sisters of Sleep, Fwd. Richard Evans Schultes and Michael R. Aldrich (Lincoln, MA: Quarterman, 1989), pp. 151ff. 49. Althea Hayter’s study of opium and the Romantic imagination reflects the persistence of linguistic and ideological associations between opium and reverie. See Althea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination: Addiction and Creativity in De Quincey, Coleridge, Baudelaire and Others, rev. edn. (Wellingborough: Crucible, 1988), pp. 227ff. On reverie in De Quincey, see Natalie Ford, ‘Beyond Reverie: De Quincey’s Range of Reveries’, The Cambridge Quarterly 36.3 (2007): pp. 229–49. 50. Dendy, pp. 84, 88. 51. Ibid., p. 341. 52. Ibid., pp. 360, 365. 53. Ibid., p. 347. Italics in original. 54. I use ‘Romantic materialism’ in a more literary sense than Janis McLarren Caldwell, who extends Gillian Beer’s phrase, as elaborated by George Levine, to identify a ‘dialectic hermeneutic’ in pre-Darwinian scientific and imaginative texts. Janis McLarren Caldwell, Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From Mary Shelley to George Eliot, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture 46 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 1–2. 55. Eliot’s established interest in nineteenth-century psychology seems to have extended to the ambiguous state of partial consciousness termed reverie. See, for instance, Mrs Transome’s distraught reveries in George Eliot, Felix Holt, The Radical (1867), ed. with introd. Lynda Mugglestone (London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 22–6, 371–2. Notably, Eliot’s partner Lewes, reflecting Holland’s influence especially, discusses reverie in his scientific work. See George Henry Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1859–60), pp. 366–8, 370. Rylance speculates that Eliot herself was influenced by Holland’s views of reverie states; see Rylance, pp. 130–1. 56. Holland, p. 126. 57. J. Crichton Brown, ‘Psychical Diseases of Early Life’, Asylum Journal of Mental Science 6 (1860), pp. 284–320, p. 303. 58. Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies in Hysteria, trans. Nicola Luckhurst with introd. Rachel Bowlby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), pp. 45, 220. 59. See Laura Marcus, ‘Staging the “Private Theatre”: Gender and the Auto-Erotics of Reverie’, The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms, ed. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, Fwd. Lyn Pykett (Basingstoke: Palgrave – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 136–49, p. 137. 60. See Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de la rêverie, 3rd edn. (Paris: PUF, 1965). 61. W. R. Bion, Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psycho-Analysis (New York: Aronson, 1967 [i.e. 1977]), p. 116. 62. See, for example, Thomas H. Ogden, Reverie and Interpretation: Sensing Something Human (London: Aronson, 1997), pp. 9, 14, 117.

6 ‘If I am not Grotesque I am Nothing’: Aubrey Beardsley and Disabled Identities in Conflict Alexandra Tankard

Decadent artist Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) died of consumption at the age of twenty-five. Although many contemporaries rushed to eulogise Beardsley’s short, sickly life and premature death as a tragedy, Beardsley’s artistic persona is an unmistakeable example of what modern disability activist Tom Shakespeare calls a ‘celebration of difference’.1 Beardsley was keen to acknowledge his disease openly, publishing portraits and self-portraits that not only expose his genuine physical frailty, but also project an image of the consumptive artist as a monstrous, subversive, and playfully sexual being rather than a miserable patient. Beardsley honed his uniquely self-assertive, confrontational consumptive persona in his very public conflict with critics and with contemporary consumptive stereotypes. In their essay on cultural representations of disability, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder observe that: The power of transgression always originates at the moment when the derided object uncharacteristically embraces its deviance as a value. In perversely championing the terms of their own stigmatization, marginal peoples alarm the dominant culture with a seeming canniness over the terms of their own subjugation.2 Mitchell and Snyder’s characterisation of ‘disability pride’ or ‘celebration of difference’ as something generated in conflict with stigma and oppression is crucial to understanding Beardsley’s artistic persona. I would suggest that Beardsley’s celebration of difference must be placed in the context of the contemporaneous emergence of eugenically-motivated hostility towards consumptives as physical and mental ‘degenerates’, and that his persona represents a gleeful manipulation of earlier Romantic consumptive stereotypes, rejecting their characteristic passivity and tragic incompleteness as a 93

94 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

liability in his own quest for artistic and personal self-determination in the face of hostile criticism.3

* In nineteenth-century England, to be diagnosed with consumption, also called phthisis or later tuberculosis, was to become ‘a consumptive’. Scientific texts as diverse as James Clark’s mainstream medical textbook A Treatise on Pulmonary Consumption (1835) and S. A. K. Strahan’s eccentric eugenic propaganda text Marriage and Disease (1892) characterise the consumptive as a distinct ‘type’ of individual whose identity was defined by their biological difference. The fate predicted for the individuals so differentiated was tragic. George Thomas Congreve’s best-selling self help manual Consumption and Other Chest Diseases (1881) declares: I know not of any one thing more painful in the annals of disease than the premature and rapid decline of the young, especially when the mental powers remain unimpaired amidst bodily decay; the more still when strong attachments have been formed, and the pangs of hopeless love contribute to the patient’s misery.4 Such representations of life with consumption as ‘painful’ ‘decay’ and ‘misery’ did not offer much hope for people actually diagnosed with the disease and likely to survive for months or even years in this supposedly unendurable state. Trained as an apothecary and surgeon before diagnosing himself with incurable consumption, John Keats (1795–1821) wrote to his friend Charles Brown that ‘I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.’5 Keats survived for one year under this self-fulfilling sentence of unproductive living-death, attempting to terminate his engagement to Fanny Brawne and writing little more poetry, declaring that ‘I will not sing in a cage’; it is tempting to wonder whether a different interpretation of his situation would have precluded this premature self-exile from life.6 An examination of writing on or by nineteenth-century consumptives reveals that their experiences of illness were shaped not only by the impairment itself, but also by socioeconomic exclusion and cultural stereotyping of people with that impairment: the Victorian consumptive was therefore a ‘disabled’ person in the modern theoretical sense.7 Diagnosed with chronic consumption at the age of seven, Beardsley missed several years of school, thereby experiencing periods of abnormal social isolation, and gained no qualifications or training. In adulthood, the Victorian era’s inaccessible buildings, exclusionary labour customs and inadequate state support for people incapacitated by illness left him physically and financially dependent on others, suffering what he referred to as the humiliating ‘mortal funk of the pauper’s life – and death’.8 Beardsley’s persona as a consumptive artist

Alexandra Tankard

95

may be regarded as a persona born of conflict – a defiant celebration of difference provoked by social marginalisation that threatened to condemn the consumptive to what he described, in a rare moment of despondency, as ‘this abject sort of life’.9 Mitchell and Snyder suggest that the ‘championing or critique of one disabled writer by another demonstrates that a disability consciousness has been available during prior ages’.10 This ‘disability consciousness’ is not merely the consciousness that others share the same medical diagnosis; rather, it is the consciousness of sharing the same sense of relation to the non-disabled world as one of abnormality and ‘difference’. Beardsley identified publicly with other consumptive cultural figures throughout his career. His early work includes cartoons of artists Molière and Niccolò Paganini, and numerous drawings of the heroine of Alexandre Dumas fils’ novel La Dame aux Camélias (1852). At the height of his fame in 1894, Beardsley conspicuously attended the unveiling of a memorial to Keats, later informing Penrhyn Stanlaws ‘with a shadow of a smile’ that ‘I shall not live much longer than did Keats’.11 Beardsley’s critical and discerning expressions of consumptive identity should be interpreted as expressions of ‘disability consciousness’, and even of what Tom Shakespeare describes as ‘disability pride’.12 As art editor of The Yellow Book, in July 1894 Beardsley published Walter Sickert’s oil sketch of him stumbling over the graves in Hampstead churchyard at Keats’s memorial ceremony. The portrait publicly exposed his extreme frailty, emaciation and limited lifespan, as well as his exquisite dandyism: according to Matthew Sturgis, one critic observed that the portrait ‘accounts for much that is eccentric in Mr Beardsley’s work’.13 Thus, when Beardsley published his Portrait of Himself (Figure 6.1) in the October number, the public could guess why the artist depicted himself in bed. The tension between his expert use of space and his foolish miniaturisation of his professed subject flaunts his absolute command over the piece: Beardsley exerts such control over the composition that he can afford to break its formal rules. This aesthetic risk-taking is echoed in his simultaneous exhibition and denial of his own invalidism. The artist is a miniscule figure swamped by the bedclothes and curtains, potentially reinforcing commonplace Victorian representations of the consumptive as a helpless creature whose proper habitat is the sickbed, as in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1847) and Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861), and in Henry Peach’s photograph Fading Away (1858).14 Yet Beardsley’s bed is opulent and glamorous rather than clinical or domestic, facilitating the invalid’s self-expression rather than merely hindering his activity; its eclectic exoticism, with Classical phallic hermaphrodite pillar, Oriental canopy, Rococo frills, exhibits a greedy, sensual enjoyment of the outside world, rather than a timid retreat. While it is unclear whether the tiny artist is asleep or awake, the tilt of his head and the prominence of one (possibly peeping) eye suggests an air of wakeful cunning that may be contrasted with the supine helplessness in consumptive deathbed portraits

96

Figure 6.1

Aubrey Beardsley, Portrait of Himself (1894)

Alexandra Tankard

97

like Joseph Severn’s sketch of John Keats (1821) or Teofil Kwiatkowski’s of Frederic Chopin (1849). Crucially, Beardsley’s sick body is not exposed by others for the viewer’s pitying gaze: his self-portrait is a masterpiece of controlled self-exposure and concealment. The obscure phrase in the corner – ‘by the twin gods, not all the monsters are in Africa’ – adds to the mystery, as Beardsley hints at his own exotic monstrosity and difference in a way that is arch and playful rather than revealing. His celebration of consumptive difference exploits every possible point of tension and conflict, aesthetic, thematic, and personal. Of course, Beardsley was not the first consumptive artist to embark on a risky ‘celebration of difference’. Clark Lawlor’s Consumption and Literature (2006) shows that the Romantic era generated a highly influential model of consumptive identity by remodelling earlier secular and religious discourses of consumption in the context of contemporary scientific understanding of the disease. Lawlor also explores ways in which some consumptive artists, including Laurence Sterne (1713–68) and Henry Kirke White (1785–1806) selfconsciously embraced this identity in conceptualising themselves and their work. Exemplified – although certainly not initiated – by posthumous representations of John Keats, the Romantic stereotype celebrated the consumptive’s social vulnerability and physical frailty as signs of emotional refinement. According to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s preface to Adonais (1821): The genius of the lamented person [Keats] to whose memory I have dedicated these unworthy verses was not less delicate and fragile than it was beautiful; and where canker-worms abound, what wonder if its young flower was blighted in the bud? The savage criticism on his Endymion, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, produced the most violent effect upon his susceptible mind; the agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued.15 The consumptive is seemingly a passive victim of a cruel world too harsh for their ‘delicate and fragile’ sensibility. The Romantic consumptive stereotype certainly embraces the ‘deviance’ of hypersensitivity and weakness as a virtue, as outlined by Mitchell and Snyder; however, the fact that Beardsley’s own artistic persona featured an absolute negation of passive victimhood in the face of harsh criticism suggests that at least one consumptive artist regarded this particular celebration of difference as potentially problematic. Nineteenth-century representations of Keats emphasise his supposed incompleteness as an artist. Keats’s first (published) biographer, Richard Monckton Milnes, stated that ‘all Keats’s poems are early productions, and there is nothing beyond them but the thought of what he might have become’.16 Thus, the consumptive artist’s real work is not what they actually wrote, but what the posthumous critic imagines might have been written. Such artists do not determine their own identity; rather, their fully-realised

98 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

self is constructed by posthumous criticism. Dying young and incomplete, they are a void begging to be filled by the interpretations and speculations of others. Beardsley refused to align himself wholeheartedly with the established Romantic consumptive identity. According to his friend O’Sullivan, at some point Beardsley began to modify his initial identification with Keats and other consumptive poets: ‘Keats [. . .] he professed to hate – though Wilde said that this was sheer perversity and an illustration of the truth that we often hate what is akin to us’.17 Perhaps this ‘perversity’ really did originate in a youthful self-identification with which Beardsley had become disillusioned – a conscious selection and rejection of the specific consumptive clichés unsuited to his own evolving vision of his place within 1890s cultural discourses. The legends of Keats’s helpless victimhood and incompleteness may have influenced Beardsley’s ambivalent attitude to Keats, as well as his own conflict with contemporary critics. Beardsley’s critical, discerning exploitation of the Romantic stereotype illustrates his self-conscious engagement with oppressive contemporary discourses on the consumptive: realising that the conventional Romantic identity was no longer entirely fit for purpose, Beardsley determined to forge something new. Before discussing examples of Beardsley’s manipulation of Romantic consumption, I will explore the nature of the conflict in which Beardsley so exuberantly engaged by this exposure of himself as a disabled artist. In 1894, twelve years after Robert Koch proved that tuberculosis was contagious, Dr Owen J. Wister anticipated that ‘instead of regarding the unfortunate victims of consumption with compassion they will be looked upon as peripatetic fountains of danger, and a feeling of hostility to them will arise’.18 In fact, public hysteria about contagion was delayed by continuing medical emphasis on the consumptive diathesis. J. Edward Squire’s humane, insightful Hygienic Prevention of Consumption (1893) reassured anxious readers that: Predisposition assumes great importance in considering the aetiology of phthisis [consumption], for though the bacillus tuberculosis is the essential and necessary cause of tuberculosis, the bacillus is virtually powerless for harm without predisposition or susceptibility in the individual exposed to infection.19 Although this emphasis on the consumptive’s essential ‘difference’ was made with the intention of protecting them from social ostracism, asserting that they were no danger to ‘normal’ people, it perpetuated the common Victorian belief in the ‘consumptive type’ of person. I would suggest (albeit tentatively) that, in the 1890s, fear of contagion was expressed through denial as the ‘normal’ majority sought to assert their invulnerability by distancing themselves – if only metaphorically – from the vulnerable ‘type’: the

Alexandra Tankard

99

disease may be catching, but only they, and not I, can catch it. Unfortunately, the ‘type’ of person who can catch tuberculosis was a defective degenerate. According to Strahan: [T]hat there exists a diathesis which predisposes the owner to the attack of this particular disease germ, there can be no possible doubt. That this particular constitutional state is a degeneration, that is, like every other degeneration, hereditary, and that it is frequently associated, both in individual and in family, with other degenerate conditions, such as idiocy, insanity, deaf-mutism, cancer, drunkenness, epilepsy, and crime, it is now my business to prove.20 He goes on to remark that ‘phthisis in the parent not only deepens to scrofula in the child, but to that lowest of all types of humanity, the scrofulous idiot’.21 Such is the price of emphasising difference. Although Beardsley’s letters indicate that he seldom experienced open hostility in his private life, it appears to have been a defining feature of his professional life. Pseudo-scientific condemnation of the diseased body was reflected in condemnation of art by diseased artists. Strahan pathologised the feverish creativity of consumptive geniuses, declaring that ‘even there there are unmistakeable signs of the decay which has attacked the system generally’ while, in 1894, The Spectator claimed:22 The beauté maladive of certain works of art is the reflection of the sickly soul in the sickly body. The very best artists, like those who have succeeded best in other human efforts, are the essentially healthy.23 In 1895, The Spectator used the term ‘Yellow-Bookishness’ as a synonym for ‘degeneracy’.24 Hostile press reviews described Beardsley’s work as ‘meaningless and unhealthy’, describing the figures depicted in his drawings as ‘unnecessarily repulsive’ and ‘bilious, lackadaisical, backboneless, anaemic, “utter” and generally disagreeable’.25 A review in Public Opinion in 1893 declared of Beardsley’s Girl and a Bookshop poster for Pseudonym Library that: The whole thing has charm, but it is undoubtedly the charm of degeneration and decay. These things do not belong to the sane in body or mind, and they do not find their out-and-out admirers in men of robust intellect, or of wholly healthy moral tone . . .26 These assertions are almost certainly not inspired by the innocuous commercial print itself, but by a desire to prove that everything a consumptive artist produces must necessarily be ‘degenerate’, and that anyone who admits to admiring ‘these things’ (conveniently unspecified) must be infected with degeneracy too. Evidently, the mythical consumptive creativity once lauded by the Romantics in a ‘celebration of difference’ was, in some quarters at

100 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

least, being undermined as inferior to ‘healthy’, normal art. Even his friend D. S. MacColl claimed that ‘Beardsley’s was a feverish, morbid fancy mated with a rare gift of art and housed in a fragile impatient frame’, undoubtedly alluding to flattering Romantic clichés surrounding consumptive artists, but implying a relationship between diseased body and diseased mind that is nonetheless problematic in the context of contemporary suspicions about ‘these things’.27 Eager to enter the fray, Beardsley declared in one magazine interview that ‘I have one aim – the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing.’28 In emphasising his difference, Beardsley risked being marginalised even by his admirers as nothing more or less than a consumptive artist – a victim of ‘feverish, morbid fancy’ rather than a skilled professional. In the light of critical and scientific hostility towards the consumptive as ‘degenerate’, Beardsley was flirting with danger. It is highly significant, therefore, that Beardsley eschewed the tried-andtested Romantic consumptive ‘celebration of difference’. Arguably, the Romantic consumptive persona is, if not inherently oppressive or dehumanising, then at least an unwieldy tool for the individuals by whom it is used. Because consumptive poets die young, and are often socio-economically marginalised, they have little time or energy to project their own self-image and must rely on others interpreting their life and work posthumously. Lawlor remarks of early criticism of Michael Bruce (1746–67), Kirke White and John Keats that: The struggle for power over these narratives of illness gained a new dimension in the new role of the literary critic, who often had the upper hand in his ability to convey opinions about a poet to the ever-increasing literary public [. . .]. The critical frenzy which pursued consumptive poets helped further raise the visibility of the disease and its mythology, but at the cost of contradicting the messages sent by the poets themselves.29 Romanticism undoubtedly emphasised the consumptive poet’s ‘celebration of difference’. However, partly because that ‘difference’ was one of abnormal passivity and incompleteness, and partly because it applied to artists who only entered the public consciousness close to death or even posthumously, the Romantic persona was likely to leave its user vulnerable to misinterpretation and marginalisation as a victim and an unfinished failure. How did Beardsley express objections to Romantic consumption in the context of his conflict with contemporary critical derision? Firstly, it is clear that Beardsley did not wish to be represented as a passive victim of his critics like Keats before him. After Beardsley’s death, his mother Ellen recalled that: People said his drawings were degenerate and vicious, but it wasn’t true. He was clean-minded, and such a child. I used to get very angry at the

Alexandra Tankard

101

things they said about him in the papers, but he only laughed at me. ‘But what does it matter?’ he would say.30 Ellen Beardsley appears to have interpreted condemnation of the drawings as condemnation of the artist: her reaction is to separate the two, rather than to celebrate both. Although Beardsley apparently refused to be hurt by such insults, he was not indifferent. When the editor of St Paul’s magazine, Haldane MacFall, accused him (via his work) of being ‘sexless and unclean’, Beardsley wrote to reply that: No one more than myself welcomes frank, nay hostile, criticism, or enjoys more thoroughly a personal remark [. . .]. As to my uncleanliness, I do my best for it in my morning bath, and if he really has any doubts as to my sex, he may come and see me take it.31 This flirtatious letter is nonetheless a tool by which the artist asserts himself as an aggressive, confrontational consumptive rather than as a passive victim. He resents MacFall’s insults but ‘welcomes’ the opportunity for conflict. Recognising the critic’s prurient interest in his ‘unclean’, diseased body, Beardsley taunts him with a threatening/enticing offer to display the object in question. Secondly, while accepting the likelihood of a short lifespan, Beardsley refused to be represented as incomplete. Arguably, his obsessive desire to control his artistic reputation was necessitated by prevailing Romantic clichés. After Beardsley’s death, O’Sullivan remarked that ‘[h]e had by no means reached the epoch of permanent opinions or the summit of his powers. He was still in what is called a state of becoming when he died at twenty-five.’32 O’Sullivan implies that Beardsley failed in his own quest for self-realisation and self-expression, awaiting the evaluation of the critic to determine his real significance as an artist and even as a private individual. Presumably anticipating such representations as a likely consequence of his celebration of consumptive difference, Beardsley made strenuous attempts to avoid them. Ross recalled that ‘[h]e would rarely exhibit an unfinished sketch, and carefully destroyed any he was not thoroughly satisfied with himself.’33 His chosen medium of pencil and ink on paper was ideally suited to the often bedridden invalid. His tiny black and white drawings exemplify his approach to art and to life; sparse and small in scope but perfectly formed, reducing the chances of leaving anything unfinished in case of death. Beardsley’s contempt for contemporary consumptive poet Ernest Dowson (1867–1900) is particularly revealing about his notions of the proper way for a consumptive artist to present himself in public. The critic Richard La Gallienne described Dowson as: a frail appealing figure, with an almost painfully sensitive face, delicate as a silverpoint, recalling at once Shelley and Keats, too worn for one so

102 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

young, haggard, one could not but surmise, with excessive ardours of too eager living.34 Arguably, Beardsley’s rejection of Dowson, a poet so often identified with Keats, may reveal which aspects of (the posthumously-constructed) Keats Beardsley ‘professed to hate’: frailty, victimhood, and explicitly Romantic self-lacerating sensitivity. O’Sullivan recalled that: In sight of Dowson’s appearance and way of life, Beardsley lost all patience and tolerance, of which he had not a large stock. He knew he had only a few years to live, but he loved life, was interested in lots of things, was not in the least morbid, and if he had been able, would have taken part in all the manifestations of life where were to be found brightness, music, comely women, beautiful dresses. The spectacle of a man slowly killing himself, not with radiance, still less with decorum, but in a mumped and sordid way, with no decoration in the process, but mean drink shops, poisonous liquor, filth and malady, for all the accompaniment to the march down under – that, when he saw it in Dowson, irritated Beardsley beyond control.35 Where La Gallienne saw echoes of Keats and Shelley, Beardsley saw an unsympathetic ‘spectacle’ of ‘sordid’ ‘filth and malady’, self-pity and helplessness. Informed that ‘Dowson is a great poet’, Beardsley declared ‘I don’t care. No man is great enough to excuse behaviour like his.’36 Clearly, Beardsley was repelled by glamorisation of self-destruction as a source of creativity – a crucial theme in the myth of consumptive genius; it is also significant that Beardsley wanted to make his contempt for Dowson’s ‘behaviour’ known.37 In contrast with Dowson’s notoriously appalling personal hygiene and drunken violence, Beardsley’s charming manners and impeccable dresssense suggest that he valued the same degree of polished perfection in his social life as he did in his art. Furthermore, Beardsley’s ‘celebration of difference’ did not permit public expressions of despair. This conflicts radically with Congreve’s florid representation, quoted earlier, of consumptive life as inevitably tragic. Interviewing Beardsley for The Idler, A. Lawrence quoted him: ‘How can a man die better than by doing just what he wants to do most!’ he adds with a laugh. ‘It is bad enough to be an invalid, but to be a slave to one’s lungs and to be found wintering in some unearthly place and sniffing sea-breezes and pine-breezes with the mistaken idea that it will prolong one’s threatened existence, seems to me utter foolishness.’38 In fact, the interview apparently took place in or near Bournemouth, where the seriously ill Beardsley was ‘wintering’ as ‘a slave’ to his lungs. The deception

Alexandra Tankard

103

is significant in terms of the image of consumptive life Beardsley wished to project to the public. While emphasising the inevitability of his death, Beardsley sought to deny preconceptions of invalid life as a miserable exile from society, overshadowed by consciousness of mortality and enslaved by one’s decaying organs.39 Beardsley attempted to depict the consciouslydying man as one still capable of self-determination and pleasure. A similarly wilful transformation may be observed in Beardsley’s descriptions of his appearance. Although as a child Beardsley informed his mother that he would like a bust to be placed in Westminster Abbey ‘because I am rather good-looking’, during an uneasy consumptive adolescence he described himself unsparingly as ‘eighteen years old, with a vile constitution, a sallow face and sunken eyes, long red hair, a shuffling gait and a stoop’.40 In adulthood, however, while his letters complain increasingly of specific symptoms and functional impairments, it is significant that he soon ceases to express that adolescent loathing of the tubercular body itself. Rather, he is always delighted by portraits of himself, writing to his publisher Leonard Smithers that ‘I liked Billy [Rothenstein]’s portrait of me immensely, a very distinguished affair. Although my nose is not tip tilted yet at the same time it is. Hence my subtle beauty.’41 His close analysis of his nose both in life and in the portrait reveals his eagerness to admire his own body. However facetiously, Beardsley engages in conflict with contemporary medical and eugenic characterisations and insists that his consumptive body is beautiful. Beardsley’s most accomplished demonstration of celebrating consumptive difference in the face of critical conflict is perhaps the Book of Fifty Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley (1897). His letters first mention plans for this volume in August 1896, just after his twenty-fourth birthday. His health had deteriorated dramatically and, realising he was unlikely to live much longer, he determined to publish a collection of his favourite drawings as a testament to his achievements, including a detailed iconography to present the illusion of a complete life’s work. Between bouts of life-threatening lung haemorrhage, depression and exhaustion, Beardsley’s letters are crammed with boasts and enquiries about the volume’s progress, declaring to Smithers ‘[h]ow furious I should be if I went away without ever having seen it’: ‘went away’ is Beardsley’s rarely-used euphemism for dying.42 He appears to have regarded the volume as an assertion of the success and importance of his life even as that life ebbed away. The Book of Fifty begins with several drawings for J. M. Dent’s 1892 edition of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. The subject is staid, the style ostensibly Pre-Raphaelite; their inclusion may even represent a flirtation with the sentiments of courtly romance in which the Romantic glamorisation of consumption partly originates.43 Yet, the drawings themselves, populated by hermaphrodite satyrs, are a grotesque parody of Pre-Raphaelite Kelmscott Press illustrations, while the modern reproduction method is a travesty of

104 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

the archaic Kelmscott techniques. Beardsley alludes to romance and convention, only to subvert them. Furthermore, the volume boldly includes illustrations for the English translation of Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1894), reasserting Beardsley’s professional association with this scandalous figure, as well as the Avenue Theatre poster and Girl and a Bookshop design that provoked public disgust several years earlier. The inclusion of these commercial prints also emphasises the artist’s status as an unsentimental, mercenary and successful professional, rather than as an unworldly, unremunerated Romantic waif like Keats and Dowson. Most importantly, Beardsley’s selection of controversial, subversive, or unashamedly commercial prints is a statement of his willingness to engage in conflict with his critics, and to make this conflict his final testament as an artist. Beardsley originally intended the album to contain at least four portraits: evidently, he regarded his own image as an essential adjunct to his work.44 The particularly distressing photograph (Figure 6.2) he provided as the frontispiece exemplifies his eagerness to represent himself as a diseased, dying invalid. He informed his publisher that ‘[y]outh and beauty are my only

Figure 6.2

H. H. Cameron, photograph of Aubrey Beardsley (1897)

Alexandra Tankard

105

boasts! My beauty will of course be demonstrated by Cameron’, and that the ‘Cameron photo is superb; pray God it is not the only good thing in the book’.45 In this photograph, Beardsley has slicked back his usual fringe, exposing his gaunt features to emphasise the extreme emaciation characteristic of advanced tuberculosis. Yet, while forcing the viewer to speculate on his proximity to death, he is impeccably dressed as ever: Beardsley projects disability pride even in refusing to present terminal illness and stylish tailoring as mutually exclusive.

* Aubrey Beardsley celebrated his consumptive difference by emphasising his frailty and short lifespan while simultaneously asserting his self-assurance and perfect completeness. He acknowledged publicly that he was a dying man, but refused to dramatise this fact as a Romantic tragedy, or to depict himself as incapable of enjoying worldly pleasures. He exhibited his invulnerability to hostile criticism of his sickness, abnormality and dandyish affectations by embracing it, apparently joking that ‘I’m so affected, even my lungs are affected’.46 The tension that resulted from his flirtation with the riskiest consequences of ‘difference’ flaunted his fearless control over his own public image. Although there is no evidence of self-consciously political motivation, Beardsley’s discerning manipulation of existing consumptive stereotypes suggests an implicit awareness that disabled identity can be determined by cultural pressures and, potentially, by disabled people themselves. Liz Crow has remarked upon the disability movement’s tendency to marginalise discourses on life-limiting illness partly because shortened lifespan is not ostensibly a form of socio-political oppression and partly because it does not wish to associate disability with pain and death.47 Yet, Beardsley’s aggressive assertion of consumptive life as replete with possibilities for full self-realisation exposes the existence of opposing cultural preconceptions that potentially invalidate the short, sickly life: his Book of Fifty Drawings constitutes a challenge not only to these preconceptions, but also to the disability movement’s traditional tendency to depoliticise life-limiting illness. His artistic persona exemplifies the possibilities of reclaiming tired stereotypes for a new cultural context, of exposing the disabling consequences of cultural and medical representations of life with impairment as necessarily tragic, and of celebrating difference.

Notes 1. Tom Shakespeare, ‘Disability, Identity, Difference’ in Colin Barnes, and Geof Mercer (eds.), Exploring the Divide: Illness and Disability (Leeds: The Disability Press, 1996), p. 106.

106 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature 2. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, ‘Representation and its Discontents: the Uneasy Home of Disability in Literature and Film’ in Gary L. Albrecht, Katherine D. Seelman, Michael Bury (eds.), Handbook of Disability Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001), pp. 208–9. 3. According to Sir Francis Galton, who coined the term in 1883, ‘Eugenics co-operates with the workings of Nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races. What Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly.’ Francis Galton, ‘Eugenics: its Definition, Scope and Aims’ in Essays in Eugenics (1909; Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific, 2004), p. 42. 4. George Thomas Congreve, On Consumption of the Lungs, or Decline; and its Successful Treatment (1881; London: Published by the author and Elliot Stock, enlarged edition c.1887) p. 2. 5. Keats to Brown, 30 November 1820 in Letters, ed. by Robert Gittings (1816–1821; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 320. Subsequently Letters JK. 6. Keats to Fanny Brawne, c.1 March 1820 in Letters JK, p. 365, and c.February 1820, p. 356. Fanny refused to terminate her engagement to Keats, who died before they could marry. 7. In 1976 the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) defined disability as ‘the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by contemporary social organisation which takes no or little account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from participation in the mainstream of social activities’. Quoted in Colin Barnes ‘A Legacy of Oppression: A History of Disability in Western Culture’ in Len Barton and Mike Oliver (eds.) Disability Studies: Past, Present and Future, (1988; Leeds: Disability Press, 1997), p. 4. 8. Beardsley to Leonard Smithers, 31 May 1897 in The Letters of Aubrey Beardsley, ed. Henry Maas, J. L. Duncan and W. G. Good (1878–1898; Oxford: Plantin Publishers, 1990, 2nd edn.), p. 328. Subsequently Letters AB. Beardsley’s mother complained that in their hotel ‘There is of course no lift, so he has to be carried upstairs for fear of haemorrhage, and this is rather a nuisance’. Mrs E. A. Beardsley to Robert Ross, 22 March 1897 in Margery Ross (ed.), Robert Ross, Friend of Friends: Letters to Robert Ross, Art Critic and Writer (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), p. 47. See A. W. King, An Aubrey Beardsley Lecture, ed. by R. A. Walker (London: R.A. Walker, 1924) on Beardsley’s problems at school: King was Beardsley’s housemaster during his three years at Brighton Grammar School. 9. Beardsley to Smithers, 11 June 1897 in Letters AB, pp. 334–5. 10. Mitchell & Snyder, p. 208. 11. Penrhyn Stanlaws, ‘Some Personal Recollections of Aubrey Beardsley’ in The Bookbuyer (October 1898), p. 212. Beardsley outlived Keats by three months. 12. Shakespeare, p. 106. 13. Matthew Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography (London: Harper Collins, 1998), p. 211. Sturgis’ source for this quote is unclear. 14. See Catherine Arnold, Necropolis: London and its Dead (2006; London: Pocket Books, 2007), p. 215 on Peach, and F. B. Smith, The Retreat of Tuberculosis 1850– 1950 (London: Croom Helm, 1988) on other consumptive deathbed images. 15. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Preface to Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, author of Endymion, Hyperion etc., in Romanticism: an Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu (1821; Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 970. Although Shelley suggests that reviews caused Keats’ consumption, having lost his mother, brother and uncle to the disease,

Alexandra Tankard

16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

107

Keats would be regarded as vulnerable to hereditary consumption already. See Leigh Hunt, ‘Mr Keats’ in Selected Writings, ed. David Jesson Dibley (1828; Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1990), p. 109. Richard Monckton Milnes, Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats, (London: Edward Moxon, 1848) V.2, p. 105. Vincent O’Sullivan, Aspects of Wilde (London: Constable & Co. Ltd., 1936), p. 30. ‘Discussion on the Advisability of the Registration of Tuberculosis’, from the Transactions of the College of Physicians in Philadelphia, Ser.3, 16 (1894), pp. 2–27 in From Consumption to Tuberculosis: a Documentary History, ed. Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz, (New York & London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1994), p. 304. J. Edward Squire, M.D., The Hygienic Prevention of Consumption (London: Charles Griffin and Company Ltd., 1893), p. 23. This book places particular emphasis on improving patients’ quality of life. S. A. K. Strahan, Marriage and Disease: A Study of Heredity and the More Important Family Degenerations (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co. Ltd., 1892), p. 197. Strahan, p. 205. Strahan, p. 200. ‘The Literary Advantages of Weak Health’ in The Spectator, 20 October 1894, p. 521. ‘Degeneration’ in The Spectator, 2 March 1895, p. 292, reviewing the 1895 translation of Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892). The Globe and The Pelican 21 April 1894, commenting on Beardsley’s design for the Avenue Theatre programme and poster; quoted in Sturgis, p. 184. ‘Utter’ was an 1890s exclamation of affectation, i.e. ‘oh how utterly utter!’ Public Opinion, 24 November 1893, quoted as footnote in Letters AB, p. 59. D. S. MacColl, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’ in A Beardsley Miscellany, ed. R. A. Walker (c.1920; London: Bodley Head, 1949), p. 31. Beardsley interviewed in Arthur H. Lawrence, ‘Mr Aubrey Beardsley and His Work’, The Idler, 11 (March 1897), 188–202 (p. 198). Clark Lawlor, Consumption and Literature: the Making of the Romantic Disease (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 134. Ellen Agnus Beardsley, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’ in A Beardsley Miscellany, ed. R. A. Walker (c.1920; London: Bodley Head, 1949), p. 80. 28 June 1894 in Letters AB, p. 92. O’Sullivan, pp. 130–1. Robert Ross, Aubrey Beardsley (London: John Lane, 1909), pp. 22–3. This obsession found its ultimate expression in his deathbed plea – apparently made under the influence of Catholicism and morphine – for his publisher to destroy his most ‘obscene drawings’ (Beardsley to Smithers, 7 March 1898 in Letters AB, p. 439). La Gallienne, The Romantic ’90s, p. 110, quoted in Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: the Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent (London, New York: I. B. Tauris, 2000), pp. 38–9. O’Sullivan, pp. 127–8. O’Sullivan, p. 130. Dowson remained fond of the younger artist and, just weeks before his own death, Beardsley asked their publisher to ‘[g]ive my best love to Dowson and tell him how pleased I am that he is editing’. Beardsley to Smithers 7 January 1898, Letters AB, p. 418.

108 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature 38. Beardsley in Lawrence, pp. 198–200. 39. Ross appears to have endorsed Beardsley’s celebration of life as a consumptive artist, see pp. 27–8. 40. Ellen Beardsley, p. 79; Beardsley to A. W. King, 13 July 1891, Letters AB, p. 23. 41. 3 June 1897, Letters AB, p. 331. 42. 26 September 1896, Letters AB, p. 171. 43. See Lawlor, pp. 21–5. 44. Beardsley to Smithers 18 August 1896, Letters AB, p. 152. 45. 11 September 1896, Letters AB, p. 162. 46. Sturgis, p. 201. According to Chris Snodgrass, Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 22, Beardsley ‘even contrived to have a human skeleton seated next to him when he played the piano’; however, I cannot find a primary source for this attractive anecdote or even for the oft-quoted ‘affected’ remark. 47. See Liz Crow, ‘Including All Our Lives: renewing the social model of disability’ in Exploring the Divide (1996), pp. 55–73. Tom Shakespeare, Kath Gillespie-Sells and Dominic Davies in The Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires (London and New York: Cassell, 1996) also discuss the uneasy association between HIV/AIDS patient-advocates and the traditional disability movement.

7 Negotiating the Gentle-Man: Male Nursing and Class Conflict in the ‘High’ Victorian Period Holly Furneaux

This chapter could alternatively be entitled ‘Never Was There Such a Nurse as He’, after a ringing endorsement of masculine care in Charlotte’s Yonge’s hugely popular 1853 novel, The Heir of Redclyffe.1 Yonge’s gendering of her exemplary nurse and hero, Sir Guy, raises questions about mid-Victorian ideals of masculinity and the gendering of tenderness. A paragon of the sickroom, ‘Guy persevered indefatigably, sitting up [. . .] every night, and showing himself an invaluable nurse, with his tender hand, modulated voice, quick eye and quiet activity. His whole soul was engrossed: he never appeared to think of himself, or to be sensible of fatigue; but was only absorbed in the one thought of his patient’s comfort!’ (p. 322). Like many, variously classed, male nursing figures of the period, Yonge’s heir confirms his moral worth through a sacrificial act of nursing. In these high Victorian explorations of the gentle-man, tenderness, rather than ancestry or class position, becomes the defining feature of social value. Literary and historical acts of physical male tenderness have, however, tended to slip under the critical and cultural radar. In what he identifies as ‘the first book written about and for men in nursing’ Chad O’ Lynn discusses the historical lack of recognition of male nurses, and the difficulties this causes for the men who comprise 5.4 per cent (about 10 per cent in the UK) of the US nursing profession today.2 Histories of nursing have understandably been dominated by approaches that value the profession as a historically rare space in which women could be celebrated for developing skills and careers. The foremost icon of ‘New’ or reformed nursing, Florence Nightingale, was invested in feminising nursing and making it a more respectable profession for women to enter. She bolstered her famous statement ‘Every woman is a nurse’ in her 1859 Notes on Nursing: What It is and What it is Not through a continued commitment to demonstrating that male is what nursing is not.3 The very differently circumstanced Creole nurse Mary Seacole similarly insisted in her 1857 memoir and travelogue that ‘only women know how to soothe and bless’ sickbeds.4 Seacole, a skilled family- and vocationally-trained Jamaican 109

110 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

nurse whose offer to serve with Nightingale in the Crimea was famously rejected, now receives the attention she deserves for her remarkable independent venture to the Crimea, where from the base of her general store, eatery and sometime makeshift hospital, ‘The British Hotel’, she provided the soldiery with much-needed provisions, medical care and field nursing. In this context, Seacole’s efforts to gender effective nursing as feminine are qualified by her frequent acknowledgements of the tenderness of the men she saw caring for their fellow soldiers in appalling conditions, often without basic medical supplies. She speaks, for instance, of ‘the Christian sympathy and brotherly love shown by the strong to the weak’ at the sick wharf: ‘The task was a trying one and familiarity, you might think, would have worn down their keener feelings of pity and sympathy; but it was not so’ (WA, p. 88). Coming after her accounts of ‘rough bearded men [who would] stand by and cry like the softest-hearted women at the sights of suffering’, Seacole’s assertion of the superiority of female sensitivity seems more than a little strained: ‘Only women could have done more than they did who attended to this melancholy duty; and they, not because their hearts could be softer, but because their hands are moulded for this work’ (WA, pp. 88, 90). Seacole’s accounts of male–male sympathy and tenderness anticipate the findings of the nineteenth century’s most famous male nurse, Walt Whitman, who, whilst caring for the wounded of the American Civil War, recorded many instances of other male nursing volunteers and tender ministrations between soldiers.5 Similarly, Louisa M. Alcott’s sketches of the Washington hospital where she nursed briefly in the Civil War emphasise the physical and emotional care that male patients gave to one another.6 Such narratives point to a far richer history of male nursing than has yet been uncovered by recent efforts within journals of nursing to retrieve a more fully gendered history of the profession.7 Attention to the way that nursing reforms, from the 1840s on, enabled a professionalisation of a (largely) female work force has meant that there is almost no research into the histories of all the male orderlies, corps men and attendants who performed nursing duties before and alongside the ‘new’ nurse in both general and military hospitals. Men also dominated the profession in asylums.8 Men in nursing have been occluded variously by worthy feminist attention to the ‘New’ women of nursing, by widespread assumptions about nurturing roles as women’s work, and by insidious cultural connections of masculinity and aggression. As the accounts of Seacole, Alcott and Whitman suggest, there is space even within the most harmful militarism for countering acts of male tenderness. Santanu Das has made such a case for the complexity of masculinities within the First World War trenches, a deeply embattled space within which unprecedented physical devastation combined with surprisingly pervasive experiences of more tender and affirmative male touching.9

Holly Furneaux

111

While many of these accounts register male nursing in the context of predominantly masculine warfare, novels of the 1850s and ’60s also repeatedly explore domestic practices of male healing. By exploring physical tenderness as an integral part of that most quintessential figure of nineteenth-century masculinity, the Gentleman, in some of the most commercially successful and widely read novels of the high-Victorian period, this chapter seeks to complicate the persisting association of masculinity and aggression. The centrality of male care in popular blockbusters by authors as socially, politically and religiously diverse as Charlotte Yonge, Charles Dickens and Dinah Craik alerts us to the scale of the Victorian cultural investment in male nursing and tenderness. I build here upon Carol Christ’s foundational essay, in which she recognises the widespread ambivalence amongst writers such as Tennyson, Patmore and Newman towards ‘a society that valued and rewarded male aggressiveness’.10 Despite the development of nuanced attention to the multiplicity of Victorian masculinities in the decades since Christ’s article, the critical over-determination of the relationship between militarism and nineteenth-century masculinity and a corresponding association of manliness with aggression and violence persists in work on this period.11 The overstatement of Victorian masculine aggression is related to a wider reluctance to embrace more gentle tactility. As Constance Classen notes, ‘one of the ideological barriers to writing about touch in culture is the customary Western emphasis on the brute physicality of touch’.12 This chapter departs from forceful conceptions of tactility and aggressive models of manliness by making a case for the significance of more gentle forms of tactility to Victorian negotiations of masculinity. I suggest that representations of the male nurse not only complicate traditional boundaries of gender and sexuality, but that tender depictions of the gentle-man also encourage a rethinking of the designation of masculine social worth in the 1850s and ’60s. I will focus upon three roughly contemporaneous novels; Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe, Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860), and Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman (1856). These novels are most ostensibly concerned with social status. However, as my opening example suggests, this preoccupation with the question of what makes a gentleman extends, in perhaps initially surprising ways, into explorations of masculine tactility. Dickens’s classic of class aspiration is intimately concerned with the physical, as well as the social, face of gentility. While Pip’s body is a magnet for various forms of violence in Great Expectations, it also attracts numerous nursings, and it is through this more tender laying on of hands that Pip’s variously classed and eroticised relations with Herbert Pocket and Joe Gargery are explored. In my work on homoerotics in Dickens, I was concerned to show that violence is not the only way in which same-sex attraction can be registered. The more affirmative touch of nurse and patient has its own erotic currency both in the culture at large and in Dickens’s novels. Elsewhere I have discussed how this wider cultural association of nursing and eroticism, provides a suggestive structure for Herbert’s assiduous physical care

112 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

of Pip, which recurs throughout Great Expectations.13 Here I shift my focus to the social. In this novel fisticuffs are immediately displaced by Herbert’s particular predilection for nursing Pip. The conspicuously undermotivated fight between the two boys in the garden of Satis House most plausibly, though insufficiently, relates to a contest for romantic possession of Estella, and to animosities of class. This distinction of rank is made clear through the differing epithets that the combatants select for one another; Pip as a ragged uneducated visitor is called ‘young fellow’ by Herbert, the ‘inky’ scholar, who through a family connection belongs there. Pip, in turn, tellingly describes Herbert as the ‘pale young gentleman’.14 However, an initial class animosity between Pip and Herbert is immediately transformed into tenderness. Even in their pugilistic encounter Herbert is more concerned with healing than harming his adversary. Pip reminisces that in this fight Herbert ‘seemed to have no strength, and he never once hit me hard’ (p. 92). Indeed, Herbert proves himself most efficient as a sponge boy, promptly providing ‘a bottle of water and a sponge dipped in vinegar. “Available for both”’ (p. 91). Later, when Pip is badly burnt, Herbert readily transposes this caring role into their adult relationship. Drawing on his aptitude for bodily treatment he becomes ‘the kindest of nurses’ (p. 404). This restorative touching is re-enacted when Herbert saves Pip from Orlick’s malevolent, class-fuelled attack. Having rescued his injured friend, Herbert improvises dressings and acquires medicine for Pip, which he administers ‘all the night through’ (p. 432), with the assistance of Startop, who plays the role of auxiliary nurse. This makeshift first-aid offers an appropriate balance to a near-fatal attack perpetrated through the tools of Orlick’s trade. Orlick only menaces Pip with ‘a gun with a brass-bound stock’ – ‘making as if he would aim’ (p. 424). Orlick’s preferred blunt instrument is a ‘stone-hammer with a long heavy handle’ (p. 429), not too dissimilar to the everyday tools of the forge. His animosity is explicitly provoked by the difference in treatment that he and Pip have received at the forge, and more widely by society: ‘You was favoured and [. . . Orlick] was bullied and beat’ (p. 426). Significantly this statement of the reason for his violence is prefaced by Orlick’s menacing of Pip with the portion of the gun that also has strong connotations of class and ancestry in Dickens’s specific description of ‘the stock’. Orlick’s actions are figured as a class-fuelled attack on the newly made gentleman, who hoped to use his money and influence to expatriate the less well connected man (p. 424). The first-aid that Herbert provides to Pip after Orlick’s attack is carried further by the true ‘harmonious blacksmith’ of the novel, Joe, who comes to the debilitated Pip’s aid and nurses him to the highest standard recommended in Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing. Throughout Pip’s fever Joe maintains a quiet, well ordered and ventilated sickroom, judiciously

Holly Furneaux

113

providing his patient with ‘a little nourishment at stated frequent times’. Pip describes the arrangements thus: My bedstead, divested of its curtains, had been removed, with me upon it, into the sitting room, as the airiest and largest, and the carpet had been taken away, and the room kept always fresh and wholesome night and day [. . .] He did everything for me except the household work, for which he engaged a very decent woman. (pp. 464, 467) Through the body of this ‘very decent woman’ Dickens points to the accepted gendering of domestic labour at the very moment that he challenges it, highlighting Joe’s infringement of what would have been held in ideology, if not in practice, the sacrosanct female duty of domestic nursing. Alison Bashford has explored the crucial coincidence of the reconfiguring of the new nurse as a ‘middle class figure of efficiency, neatness and whiteness’ with the movement for sanitary reform.15 She examines the inextricability of ideals of the purifying domestic woman and the cleanly new nurse citing an 1869 letter written to Nightingale from an Australian hospital (at this time, due to a shortage of women particularly in remote outposts, colonial hospitals were mainly staffed by male nurses) in which men are firmly excluded from discourses of hygiene: [Their wards were] grimed and insect infested . . . dirty corners, where all kinds of filth and rubbish was stowed away . . . [which] sufficiently attested to what their ideas of order and cleanliness were . . . I hope they will never again resume their work where women have been introduced. (p. 33) Though Nightingale shared this view, Dickens (along with many other Victorian writers, carers and health workers such as Seacole, Alcott and Whitman) firmly resists any easy equation of masculinity and brutality. Instead, Dickens’s fiction offers extended instances of effective male nursing, which even break down the gendered association of women with cleanliness and domestic hygiene. Joe’s treatment of Pip is absolutely by the book of Nightingale’s Notes, which is concerned with such practical management of the domestic sickroom, with chapters advising on ‘ventilation’, ‘taking food’, ‘bed and bedding’, ‘cleanliness of rooms’. The presentation of treatment in Great Expectations contradicts Nightingale’s gendered statement: ‘On women’ (implicitly middle-class women, who have been the imagined audience throughout) ‘we must depend, first and last, for personal and household hygiene’ (p. 79). Pip, however, can depend on Joe, whose body fits neither the gendered or classed ideal of purifying angel. Indeed, as nursing blacksmith (a job in itself that requires force together with delicacy and precision) Joe presents a gender conundrum.16 Pip’s vacillation between feminine and mechanical descriptions of

114 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Joe shows the way in which this figure taxes existing taxonomies which provide no adequate terminology for such masculine nurture: Joe laid his hand upon my shoulder with the touch of a woman. I have often thought him since, like the steam-hammer, that can crush a man or pat an eggshell, in his combination of strength with gentleness. (p. 141) Joe’s aptitude for healing is more than merely practical; Pip recognises this contact as ‘Joe’s restoring touch’ (p. 478). Indeed, Joe’s ability to ‘restore’ goes beyond the bodily, as the supplanting of social relations with those of nurse and patient work to heal, albeit temporarily, the class rift between himself and Pip. The cessation of the discomforts of class difference between Joe and Pip is skilfully coincident with Joe’s literal healing of the wounds of class violence that Orlick has inscribed on Pip’s body. Where Pip has previously noted his murderous attacker’s ‘great strength’ (p. 471), under Joe’s tender care this descriptor becomes redefined as a measure of moral as well as physical power, as the recovering Pip observes the benevolent might of Joe’s ‘great good hands’ (p. 471). According to Mamie Dickens’s somewhat hyperbolic reminiscences of her father, Dickens himself had a deft hand for the suffering: ‘His sympathy, [. . .] with all pain and suffering, made him quite invaluable in a sick-room. [. . .] I can remember now, how the touch of his hand – he had the most sympathetic touch – was almost too much sometimes – the help and hope in it making my heart full to overflowing.’17 Lucinda Hawksley’s recent biography of Dickens’s second daughter, Katey, reveals Katey’s comparable enthusiasm for being nursed by her father.18 John Tosh, notable for his pioneering work on domestic masculinity, provides an account of fathering which does find space for more intimate practices as well as absent, tyrannical, and distanced styles of paternity.19 More recent work has further complicated prevailing ideas about the Victorian paterfamilias, showing that an aptitude for hands-on child care was widely celebrated.20 Joe’s nursing of Pip, whose older sister he has married as an explicit act of care for the young boy, also points towards the nurturing component within ideals of fatherhood. Perhaps drawing upon a personal experience of the sympathetic and reconciliatory atmosphere of the sickroom, Dickens fashions Pip’s chamber as the (albeit temporary) setting for a fantasy of equality and class harmony. In this recovery-room the malevolent blacksmith’s acts are recouped by the selfless, preservative cross-class healing of two gentle men, Herbert (a ‘gentleman’) and Joe, whom Pip learns to call ‘this gentle Christian man!’ (p. 463). The parity of tenderness offered by Herbert and Joe supports Dickens’s broader determination to de-couple aggression, as well as gentleness, from class. Whilst Orlick’s disenfranchised brutality suggests the violent rage of the ‘lower’ orders, his brutishness is echoed by his ostensibly well-to-do

Holly Furneaux

115

counterpart, wife-beater Bentley Drummle.21 Dickens’s prioritising of domestic nurse/patient roles over divisions of class resonates with the commitment of many prominent war-time practitioners to a non-prejudicial provision of care. Mary Seacole proudly narrates her efforts to relieve wounded Russian soldiers, anticipating Whitman’s ringing declaration of his refusal to recognise distinctions of allegiance, rank and race in his egalitarian provision of care: ‘I can say that in my ministerings I comprehended all, whoever came in my way, northern or southern, and slighted none.’22 In Great Expectations, then, Dickens draws on a wider cultural recognition of healing as a means of circumventing social barriers. As The Life of Our Lord, the version of the New Testament that Dickens wrote in 1849 exclusively for his children, makes clear, Dickens perceived radically egalitarian acts of healing to be central to Christ’s earthly ministry. Chapter three, for example, combines characteristically detailed attention to Christ’s curing (here of leprosy – ‘Jesus, always full of compassion, stretched out his hand’ – palsy and the sick servant) with Dickens’s humanist manifesto: ‘Never be proud or unkind, my dears, to any poor man, woman or child [. . .] And when people speak ill of the Poor and Miserable, think now how Jesus Christ went among them and taught them, and thought them worthy of his care.’23 As Robert Newsome has argued, Dickens is best understood as ‘a Christian of the broadest kind’: ‘The goods that he associates with Christ are – appropriate to Dickens’s rather domestic conception of heaven – the goods of a kindly companionship: healing, teaching, loving. They can be summed up in one word (one of Dickens’s favourites): “comfort”.’24 It is entirely understandable then, that Joe, whose touch is experienced by Pip as ‘the rustle of an angel’s wing’ (p. 141), is described at this domesticated and companionate moment of social and physical reparation in terms of Dickens’s highest ideal of healing masculinity, as ‘this gentle Christian man’. Robin Gilmour offers an affirmative and persuasive reading of Pip’s (and Dickens’s) separation here of ‘the word “gentleman” into its classless elements, the gentle man who, living by the Christian ideals of love and forgiveness, is the one type of gentlemanliness which the novel at the end unequivocally affirms’.25 Readers may, however, with healthy cynicism, detect an ambivalence about the valuing of tender moral worth over social status in this novel. Such re-evaluation seems to be at work in Pip’s confusion of moral and social terms in the description: ‘dear, good, noble Joe’ (p. 479) and in the neat severing here of the social term ‘gentleman’. We might want to question whether this careful formulation still bespeaks a anxiety about class differentiation even at the moment that Pip recognises the classless ‘wealth of [ Joe’s] great nature’ (p. 467). Though it is not fully articulated, Dickens represents male nursing as an ennobling act in order to complicate conventional boundaries of class, as well as gender and sexuality. He tentatively prescribes a model of masculine gentleness that, in redefining social value according to individual worth, can avert class antagonism.

116 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Other novels of this era are less hesitant in their celebration of a meritocracy in which the gentleman is proved, and even formed, through acts of male nursing. Diana Craik’s novel John Halifax, Gentleman charts the rise of her hero to gentleman status despite his beginnings as a ragged orphan of obscure parentage. As Sally Mitchell and Arlene Young have argued, John Halifax’s meteoric rise parallels the broader transfer of power from the aristocracy to the middle classes. The action occurs between 1780–1834, a period that covers enclosure to the Reform Act. As Young puts it ‘John Halifax is the nineteenthcentury self-made man who lays his own claim to status and as such he represents the ultimate victory of manners over lineage as the essential defining quality of gentlemanliness.’26 It has been overlooked, however, that John’s best manners are those of the bedside. Every stage in John’s class progression is explored through his aptitude for healing. As a boy his combination of physical robustness and tenderness literally brings life to the debilitated narrator, Phineas Fletcher.27 Engaged, by chance, by Phineas’s father to wheel his sick son home, the two boys begin an intense, life-long friendship. John, like Joe Gargery, blends a muscular physique with a delicacy of touch and manners that seems in and of itself to heal. Both figures bear a resemblance to the heroic, socially reformist figures of Muscular Christianity championed by Broad Church writers of this period such as F. D. Maurice, Thomas Hughes and Charles Kingsley. Proponents of Christian Socialism (or Muscular Christianity as it became popularly called), a movement explicitly concerned with masculine physique and the embodiment of faith in an active pursuit of Christian ideals, presented what Joseph Bristow has described as an ‘idealisation of the fighting fit body’ or what Donald Hall has called the ‘aggressively poised male body’.28 While this is a fair assessment of the appetite in this movement for forceful tactility – the opening chapter of Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), for example, eulogises the Brown family’s propensity for fighting, while combat between gamekeepers and poachers forms the central climax of Kingsley’s Yeast (1851) – these authors also find space for less aggressive muscle flexing, occasionally drawing on nursing narratives to delineate the model gentleman. While Hughes’s Tom Brown is from fighting stock, his alternative hero Arthur is descended from a more gentle line; indeed, Arthur’s father dies nursing his poor parishioners during a typhus epidemic.29 Although this ‘good death’ is more conventionally attributed to the principal female character in Yeast, Kingsley’s novel includes brief moments of male nursing, most notably Tregarva’s nursing of dying old Harry after the skirmish with poachers: ‘Here you be a-nursing of me as my own son might do.’30 These moments suggest that aggressive muscularity has been somewhat over determined in critical responses to this school of writing. Craik, particularly through her friendship with the publisher Alexander Macmillan, had a connection with the Christian Socialists, and was reported to be a disciple and visitor of Maurice.31 This provides a useful context for

Holly Furneaux

117

understanding John Halifax, who presents a rehabilitated form of Muscular Christianity, in which bodily strength is firmly channelled into acts of care. John’s ‘rough-looking boy’s hand’ is ‘infinitely light and tender’ (p. 34). He is soon carrying Phineas on his back, supporting him around the home and garden, and making him comfortable in rugs and blankets: Well nursed and carefully guarded as I had always been, it was the first time in my life I ever knew the meaning of that rare thing – tenderness. A quality different from kindliness, affectionateness, or benevolence; a quality which can exist only in strong, deep and undemonstrative natures, and therefore in its perfection is oftenest found in men. John Halifax had it more than any one, woman or man, that I ever knew. (p. 29) Despite this de-naturalising of tenderness as a purely feminine characteristic, the novel, like many other accounts of male nursing of this period, continually falls back upon feminine models for which there was no established male equivalent. Phineas’s variously gendered imaginings about himself and John complicate the culturally ascribed femininity of both nurse and sufferer. Whilst Phineas describes John’s healing voice as ‘as tender as any woman’s’ (p. 15), he reverses this image when he thinks of himself as patient: ‘If I had been a woman, and the woman that he loved, he could not have been more tender over my weakness’ (p. 65). Phineas’s imaginings, especially those in which he imagines himself as John’s nursed ‘wife’, have interesting implications in terms of gender and sexuality. Their shared physical intimacy and languages of a ‘David and Jonathan’ friendship ‘surpassing the love of women’ (pp. 16, 152) has a homoerotic resonance that made some contemporary reviewers uncomfortable. An 1858 reviewer complained that ‘during the early part of the tale, it is difficult to suppress a fear that Phineas Fletcher will fall hopelessly in love with John Halifax, so hard is it to remember that Phineas is of the male sex. Afterwards when he professes to be an uncle, the reader is aware constantly that he is really an aunt, and a curious perplexity is apt to arise in the mind on the subject.’32 Such ‘curious perplexity’ – generated by Craik’s treatment of male/male love, her reworking of the conventional gender roles of both hero and narrator, and her related rethinking of the composition of family – points to the great extent of this novel’s queer creativity. As the review suggests, Craik’s insistence on the continuing importance of the relationship between these men leads to a celebration of the expandability of family beyond relations of marriage and biology. When John marries, Phineas initially feels that he has been physically supplanted.33 Though Phineas temporarily struggles to relinquish his exclusive hold on John’s affection, the intimacy between the two, developed through years of John’s tender attentions to Phineas’s fragile body, is figured, in an intermale reworking of the marital vow, as more powerful than conventionally recognised commitments: ‘Whatever new ties might gather round each, our

118 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

two hearts could cleave together until death’ (p. 154). Craik portrays the two men as forging and then happily cohabiting in a family of choice, in which Phineas, as ‘Uncle’, has a central place despite his lack of any official familial tie to any of its members.34 This alternative configuration of family occurs in various male nursing narratives. It echoes, for example, the triangle of Pip, Herbert and his wife Clara who cohabit together in Egypt for several years. It also resonates with the confirmation of Joe’s paternal bond to Pip in the sickroom scene, a fatherliness that is divorced from biology and founded entirely on an eagerness to nurture. Such domestic refashionings bear out Miriam Bailin’s findings from sick-room diaries and correspondence, written by sufferers such as Nightingale and Harriet Martineau: ‘Often [. . .] illness summons a society suited to one’s own specifications and substitutes for the coercions of blood and marriage a physical tie as voluntary as friendship and as essential as survival.’35 Depictions of male nursing, then, allow for a re-envisaging of social organisation. The expandability and redefinition of the social microcosm of family that recurs in accounts of male nursing, motions towards – and very often supports – a wider rethinking of social relations. Through the privileging of the (often lifelong) bond of nurse and invalid, conventional boundaries of class and gender are challenged, at the same time as alternative models of sexuality and the family flourish. The connection between John Halifax’s exemplary physical tenderness and his ability to become a gentleman is made clear in Craik’s novel through the more minor character of Lord Ravenel. Entering the Halifax family as an aristocratic idler, Lord Ravenel proposes to John’s daughter, Maud, and is emphatically rejected. The titular but not titled hero admonishes him: ‘Do you recognise what you were born to be? Not only a nobleman, but a gentleman; not only a gentleman, but a man-man, made in the image of God. How can you, how dare you give the lie to your creator?’ (p. 400). As other critics have noticed, Ravenel is ‘completely rehabilitated when he forsakes his wealth and title for bourgeois status.’36 This rehabilitation, however, is orchestrated through Ravenel’s nursing of John’s son. In an episode which closely reworks the central incident of Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), Ravenel follows Halifax junior to America, where he devotes himself to saving his young friend’s business and his life. As John’s son tells it: He knew nothing whatever of business when he offered himself as my clerk; since then he has worked like a slave. In a fever he nursed me; he has been to me these three years the best, truest friend. He is the noblest fellow. (p. 430) For readers acquainted with Martin Chuzzlewit the significance of nursing in this potted history would be clear. Ravenel’s actions repeat, in brief, Dickens’s much more fully fleshed account of Mark Tapley’s assiduous nursing of Martin Chuzzlewit junior when he succumbs to fever, after embarking on an

Holly Furneaux

119

ill-advised business venture in the swampy Mississippi region. In Dickens’s account, Mark risks his own life to preserve Martin’s. For the knowing reader this implicit back-story embellishes Craik’s account, pointing to the extremity of Ravenel’s selfless care for Guy. Guy Halifax’s narrative ensures that Ravenel’s ‘nobility’ is recuperated; his acts of care transform him from titled wastrel to ‘moral hero’ (p. 430). John follows his son’s narrative of overseas recovery with an immediate request that he ‘invite the gentleman’ to the family home (p. 430). Ravenel’s worth and his right to aspire to the hand of a Halifax is proved through an act of self-sacrificing nursing, similar to those that John himself performs so adeptly. The questioning, and ultimate confirmation, of moral as well as aristocratic ancestral worth is the central focus, rather than the subplot, of Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe. Like Craik’s Ravenel, Yonge’s titled and titular heir, Sir Guy, is transformed into a hero through a sacrificial act of exemplary nursing (his patient’s encomiums on his bedside manner opened this essay) which claims his own life. Through progressively more involved acts of care, Sir Guy is exonerated from a (largely self-imposed) charge of a taint in the blood, exchanging what he sees as his tendency towards an inherited and dangerously violent temper, for a remarkable aptitude for healing. Though he begins at the opposite end of the social spectrum to John Halifax, the orphaned Sir Guy’s entry into family life is similarly orchestrated through his capacity to care for its physically weaker members. As a youth Guy is first integrated into the Edmonstone home (a connection he will later make official through marriage) by caring for the disabled son Charles: ‘He was beginning to interest them all greatly by his great helpfulness and kindness to Charles, as he learned the sort of assistance he required’ (p. 19). Like John Halifax, the young man quickly becomes indispensable to his invalid friend, carrying him to and from bed, supporting him to the sofa and anticipating his every need (pp. 21, 30, 38, 48). As well as these more tangible forms of aid, he provides Charles with ‘a new interest in his listless life’, as life sustaining as the vital presence of John Halifax to the young Phineas Fletcher: ‘to watch Guy was one of Charles’s chief amusements’ (pp. 22, 45). Later, while enjoying a continental honeymoon, Guy is called upon to employ his nursing skills in a more urgent case. His one-time enemy Philip, also travelling abroad, has succumbed to an aggravated malaria fever. Guy’s care, though claiming (what Yonge makes clear is only the earthly portion of) his life, does cure him and his patient of a ‘strange ancestral enmity’ (p. 323). Again questions of moral and ancestral virtue are explored through a figure who exhibits the finest skills of nursing. Sir Guy, like John Halifax, Joe Gargery, and Dickens himself (if we are to believe his daughter’s testimony), has healing ‘tender hand[s]’ (p. 322). His patient offers unequivocal praise, emphatically reversing a gendered cultural model through which women were perceived as the best nurturers: ‘there never was such a one for a sickroom’ (p. 335) and ‘never was there such a nurse as he’ (p. 338).

120 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Sir Guy’s practice of the most tender heroism was widely applauded, and particularly so by young Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who ‘were inspired by this modern interpretation of knightly endeavour’.37 As Mark Girouard has amply demonstrated, The Heir of Redclyffe, through intertextual references to chivalric classics and courtly languages of knightly heroism, fully participates in the Victorian chivalric revival. Perhaps drawing upon a continental history of male nursing – in organisations such as the Knights Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem – as an alternative knightly tradition, Yonge proffers a highly popular non-aggressive new chivalrous ideal, in which the sword is exchanged for the soothing swab. Whilst Guy’s prior knowledge of his lack of constitution and ‘tendency to low fever’ (p. 334) emphasises the physical heroism and sacrifice required in his nursing, in his role in the sickroom Guy is unarguably more of a carpet-knight than a thrusting lancer-wielder of conventional chivalric acclaim. This rethinking of knightliness to value tenderness rather than force is in conflict with other contemporary reworkings of chivalric conventions, such as the ‘knightly tough’ recommended in G. A. Lawrence’s 1857 Guy Livingstone.38 Yonge, by contrast, celebrates a more recuperative, healing chivalric mode, emphasising this through the Doctor’s insistence that ‘if le malade was saved, it would be owing to the care and attention of le chevalier’ (p. 326). Craik makes a parallel move by insisting on the compatibility of heroism and healing through John Halifax, who is said to ‘look like a young knight of the middle ages’ (p. 144). A similar rethinking of chivalry as part of the interrogation of gentlemanliness is apparent in Dickens’s description of Wemmick’s suburban Castle. Wemmick’s ingenious reworking of chivalrous architecture with his contrivances of moat, drawbridge and battery complete with firing gun, are chiefly for the delight of his father, ‘the Aged’. Here the apparatus of inherently violent militarism is appropriated into the benevolent service of male nurturing, a reversal of intent neatly dramatised by the Aged’s joyous response to Wemmick’s ritual sounding of the Stinger: ‘He’s fired! I heerd him!’ (p. 209). For the Aged, whose acute deafness otherwise cuts him off from social interaction, the nightly firing of the gun is a significant, ritual moment of emotional bonding with his son. This ‘great nightly ceremony’ (p. 208) resounds with Dickens’s wider attention to acts of male care throughout this novel. A similar rejection of a traditional model of masculine status upheld by force, albeit in a highly regulated form, informs the Victorian debate about duelling. Though, as Donna T. Andrew demonstrates, knightly and duelling codes had distinct separate histories, Victorian rethinking of the desirability of both traditions followed a similar trajectory. At the same time as knightliness was tenderised, the definition of gentlemanliness based on being ‘challenge-able’ and willing to fight a duel, which persisted throughout the eighteenth century, was widely rejected.39 John Henry Newman’s famous 1852 definition of the gentleman as ‘one who never inflicts pain’,40 follows

Holly Furneaux

121

on directly from his critique of the ‘unchristian practice of duelling’ – ‘the remnant of a barbarous age’ (p. 145). In Newman’s extended description the terms ‘tender’, ‘gentle’ and ‘merciful’ proliferate, as this ideal gentle-man preserves the equanimity, and more specifically, the physical comfort of those around him, avoiding ‘topics which may irritate’ or the militaristically described ‘clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling’. Furthermore, he is defined in opposition to the brutality of ‘better, perhaps, but less educated minds; who like blunt weapons tear and hack instead of cutting clean’ (p. 146). As Martin Danahay notes, Newman’s ideal gentleman is described in terms that make ‘him sound closer to Florence Nightingale than to models of aggressive masculinity’.41 Here Newman’s delineation of ‘the ethical character’ follows a familiar trajectory in which violent, feudal displays of a rank proved by the sword, are rejected in favour of a meritocracy of moral worth, in which gentility is both social and tactile. The parity between Dickens’s, Craik’s and Yonge’s representations of physically tender gentlemanliness, suggests a parallel rehabilitation of masculinity across divergent and sometimes conflicting religious positions. The loosely Broad Church work of Dickens and Craik, in sympathy with Christian Socialism, advances a very similar model of the nursing gentleman to the Anglo- or Roman-Catholic vision represented here by Yonge and Newman. Lori Miller and James Eli Adams have both pointed to the parities between Anglo-Catholic and Muscular Christian ideals of masculinity, suggesting that these embodiments of manliness are not as dissimilar as we once thought.42 While they focus on a shared valorisation of physical hardihood, my work on the commensurate celebration of more tender tactility suggests a parallel in the opposite direction. The consensus on masculine gentleness suggests a shared investment in a physically ministering Christianity through attention to Christ’s acts of healing rather than his experiences of suffering, which is in line with the a mid-century shift in emphasis from atonement to incarnation.43 These diverse authors participate in a mutual cross-religion and cross-class project to regenerate the ideal gentleman as a healing figure through a determined disarming of chivalric precedents. In the mid-eighteenth century Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4) demonstrates his true honour by refusing to fight a duel. As Young has put it, Richardson challenges ‘the moral authority of the aristocratic version of the gentleman as sustained by the secular and militaristic code of honor’. As the transformation of ‘the gentleman from the embodiment of aristocratic honor into the embodiment of bourgeois respectability’ accelerates throughout the nineteenth century, a capacity for tenderness, made flesh in the figure of the male nurse, is increasingly valued.44 Henry James viewed John Halifax as ‘a sort of Sir Charles Grandison of the democracy, faultless in manners and morals’.45 We might expand upon this, seeing the specifically physical gentleness of John and the other nursing males portrayed in novels of this period as the completion of an anti-feudal concept of worth.

122 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Such tender models of gentility were highly valued even, and perhaps especially, by those engaging in military campaigns. During the Crimean war Charlotte Yonge’s brother, Julian, reported that ‘nearly all the men in his regiment had a copy’ of The Heir of Redclyffe.46 Whilst the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade clearly enjoyed the gentle heroics of Sir Guy, twentieth-century military men accessed the similarly tender narrative of John Halifax through a specially designed reprint ‘on thin paper to go into soldiers’ pockets’.47 Evidence of such audiences points to a more complex composition of Victorian masculinity in which aggression is not celebrated, nor is it a dominant, unchallenged mode. In our own hyperbolically militaristic twenty-first century it is vital to denaturalise the pervasive cultural association of manliness and aggression by acknowledging the physical gentleness inherent in a central historical model of ideal masculinity, the Victorian gentleman. As well as complicating the conventional gendering of gentleness, this masculine heritage, which locates gentlemen across the social spectrum, offers a powerful reminder that tenderness is not a privileged attribute of a particular class. In the gentle manly nursing narratives of the high Victorian period masculinity across its classed and religious inflections is rehabilitated, as tenderness becomes the most celebrated aspect of masculine touch.

Notes I am deeply grateful to Ben Winyard for sharing his capacious knowledge of Victorian religious thought, and for his incisive comments about this piece. I am also thankful for the thought provoking comments of delegates at BAVS 2006 and Dickens Day 2005, where I first presented sections of this work. 1. Charlotte Yonge, The Heir of Redclyffe (London: Macmillan, 1909), p. 338. All further references are to this edition. By 1876 the novel had been issued in a remarkable 22 editions, many of which were subject to numerous reprints. Yonge acknowledged the great commercial success of this novel by designating herself on later title pages as the ‘author of the Heir of Redclyffe’ [DNB]. 2. Chad O’Lynn and Russell E. Tranbarger (eds.), Men in Nursing: History, Challenges and Opportunities (New York: Springer, 2007), opening dedication. Figures from 2000 taken from Chad O’Lynn, ‘Men Working as Rural Nurses: Land of Opportunity’ in Rural Nursing: Concepts, Theory and Practice, eds. Helen Lee and Charlene Winters (New York: Springer, 2006), pp. 232–47, p. 233, and Christine McCarthy, ‘Nursing a Female Bias’, BBC News, 12 May 2000, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/746218. stm (last accessed 25 June 2008). 3. Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing: What it is and What it is Not (London: Duckworth, 1970), p. 6. For Nightingale’s denunciation of men in nursing see also Notes, p. 23 and her correspondence, such as the 1867 letter on the importance of reforms that ‘take all power over the nursing out of the hands of men, and put it into the hands of one female trained head’ [Quoted in B. M. Dossey, Florence Nightingale: Mystic, Visionary, Healer (Springhouse, PA: Springhouse, 1996), p. 291].

Holly Furneaux

123

4. Mary Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 70. 5. See Whitman’s war memoir Specimen Days and Collect (Philadelphia: Ross Welsh, 1882–3), and his poem ‘The Wound Dresser’ in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York and London: Norton, 2002). Colin Macduff offers an important recognition of the central significance of nursing to Whitman’s life and work in ‘Meeting the Mother Man: Rediscovering Walt Whitman, Writer and Nurse’, International History of Nursing Journal, 3.2 (1997–8), pp. 32–44. 6. Louisa M. Alcott, Hospital Sketches (1863; rpt. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1960). 7. Significant efforts in this direction include Vern Bullough, ‘Men in Nursing’, Journal of Professional Nursing, 10.5 (1995), p. 267; Bullough, ‘Men, Women, and Nursing History’, Journal of Professional Nursing, 10.3 (1994), p. 127; Carolyn Mackintosh, ‘A Historical Study of Men in Nursing’, Journal of Advanced Nursing, 26.2 (1997), pp. 232–6; Linda Sabin, ‘Unheralded Nurses: Male Care Givers in the Nineteenth Century South’, Nursing History Review, 5 (1997), pp. 131–48, as well as Chad O’Lynn and Russell Tranbarger’s 2007 book. 8. See especially David Wright, ‘The Dregs of Society? Occupational Patterns of Male Asylum Attendants in Victorian England’, International History of Nursing Journal, 1.4 (1996), pp. 5–20. Wright’s research challenges Victorian literary stereotypes of the brutal male asylum nurse, a figure particularly popular in Sensation novels such as Charles Reade’s Hard Cash (1863). In his mid-nineteenth century manual, The Construction and Government of Lunatic Asylums and Hospitals for the Insane (London: John Churchill, 1847), John Conolly, physician to the Middlesex Lunatic Asylum, critiques the selection of male staff ‘on account of their possessing the frame of a prize-fighter’, asserting instead that ‘the first requisite for an attendant, if conjoined with a moderate share of understanding, is benevolence’ (p. 86). Conolly describes asylum nursing as ‘a delicate task’ (p. 83) and discusses the benefits of ‘kind-hearted attendants’ (p. 103). 9. Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 10. Carol Christ, ‘Victorian Masculinity and the Angel in the House’ in A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women, ed. Martha Vicinus (1977, rpr. London: Methuen, 1980), pp. 146–62, p. 160. 11. For militaristic overdetermination see for example, Peter Stearns: ‘For men, the nineteenth century, effectively launched and ended by major wars, was a militant, indeed military century’ [Be a Man: Males in Modern Society (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979, rpr. 1990), p. 189] and Mark Girouard: ‘“Fighting” was one of the most honourable words in the vocabulary’ [The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 281]. Such approaches contribute to work such as that by Joseph Kestner on the phallocentric militarism of nineteenth-century art, with its worrying conclusion that ‘inevitably, maleness and male bonding catalyse aggression, which may or may not be manifest in violence; team sports, war, imperialism and organisational competition are forms of such aggression [Masculinities in Victorian Painting (Aldershot: Scholar, 1995), p. 18]. 12. Constance Classen, ed., The Book of Touch, ‘Fingerprints: Writing about Touch’ (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005), pp. 1–9. 13. See Holly Furneaux, ‘“It is Impossible to be Gentler”: The Homoerotics of Male Nursing in Dickens’s Fiction’, Critical Survey, 17.2 (2005), pp. 34–47.

124 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature 14. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 90. All further references are to this edition. 15. Alison Bashford, Purity and Pollution: Gender, Embodiment and Victorian Medicine (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), p. 21. 16. Joe embodies a similar dichotomy to that which Tim Barringer has explored in relation to James Sharples, mid-Victorian blacksmith and artist. Sharples’s famous steel engraving, ‘The Forge’, was completed and widely reviewed in 1859, the year before Dickens began work on Great Expectations. As Barringer puts it, ‘to confront the historical figure of a blacksmith who was an artist by night – an artist who was a blacksmith by day – is to enter an uncomfortable territory in which traditional ideas of class and status are overturned’ [Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 136]. Similarly discomforting, and suggestive of the overhauling of traditional connections of masculinity and force, is the combination of power and physical care that is materialised in Sharples’s work: ‘Each line, incised with both force and delicacy, is a visible trace of the work of a man, who, with mighty blows of the hammer, also fashioned the components of steam-engines’ (p. 135). 17. Mamie Dickens, My Father as I Recall Him (New York: Haskell, 1974), pp. 17–18. 18. Lucinda Hawksley, Katey: The Life and Loves of Dickens’s Artist Daughter (London: Random House, 2006), pp. 35–9. 19. John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999). 20. See Margaret Markwick, ‘Hands-on Fatherhood in Trollope’s Novels’ in Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Trev Lynn Broughton and Helen Rogers (Basingstoke: Palgrave – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) pp. 85–95. 21. In an important early reading of the significance gentlemanliness in Great Expectations, Robin Gilmour observes the doubling of Orlick and Drummle, which ‘remind[s] us that violence and brutality are not confined to life on the marshes, that they also exist in the supposedly refined society of London’ [The Ideal of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), p. 139]. 22. Seacole, pp. 142–3; Whitman, Specimen Days, p. 78. 23. Charles Dickens, The Life of Our Lord (London: Associated Newspapers, 1934), pp. 30, 28. 24. The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens, ed. Paul Schlicke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 499, 501. Indeed the significance of a biblical tradition of a ministering incarnate Christ (which is also alluded to in Seacole’s description of ‘the Christian sympathy and brotherly love shown by the strong to the weak’ in the Crimea), might usefully supplement recent work by Tim Barringer and Martin Danahay that acknowledges the importance of a working Christ to dominant formulations of labour and Victorian masculinity. 25. Gilmour, p. 143. 26. Arlene Young, Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel: Gentlemen, Gents and Working Women (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), p. 37. See also Sally Mitchell’s chapter, ‘John Halifax: Epitome of an Age’ in her Dinah Muloch Craik (Boston: Twayne, 1983). 27. Dinah Craik, John Halifax, Gentleman (Gloucestershire: Nonsuch, 2005), p. 9. All further references are to this edition. 28. Joseph Bristow, ‘“Churlsgrace”: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Working-Class Male Body’, ELH, 3 (1992), pp. 693–711, p. 696; Donald Hall (ed.), Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) p. 9.

Holly Furneaux

125

29. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), Part 2, chapter 2. 30. Charles Kingsley, Yeast (London: Dent, 1976), p. 124. 31. Mitchell, p. 11. 32. ‘Novels by the Author of John Halifax’, North British Review, 29 (1858), pp. 466–81. Mitchell identifies the author as R. H. Hutton (p. 47). 33. The ‘heroine’, Ursula – who re-enters the novel once she is need of John’s inexhaustible supply of physical care – is accommodated in Phineas’s old room: ‘He carried her across the kitchen into our own little parlour, and laid her down on my sofa [. . .] I could see that his first glance [. . .] was to the window of the room that had been mine’ (my emphasis, p. 139). Phineas later acknowledges that John ‘was a married man now, the head of a household; others had a right – the first, best, holiest right – to the love that used to be all mine’ (p. 203). 34. In ‘Tales of the Avunculate’, Eve Sedgwick suggestively examines the familyexpanding/re-fashioning potential of ‘Uncle’, which is often used as a friendly rather than a strictly relational term, and has an established lexical history of homosexual inference. She further explores the queer potential of uncles and aunts as ‘adults whose intimate access to children needn’t depend on their own pairing or procreation’ [Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 63]. 35. Miriam Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 17. 36. Young, p. 42. 37. Elizabeth Jay, ‘Charlotte Yonge’, ODNB. See also Girouard, p. 148. 38. For more on Guy Livingstone and the influence of this aggressive model see Girouard, p. 149 and Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literary and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 14. 39. Donna T. Andrew, ‘The Code of Honour and its Critics: The Opposition to Duelling in England, 1700–1850’, Social History, 5.3 (1980), pp. 409–34, p. 415. 40. John Henry Newman, The Idea of A University (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), Discourse VIII, p. 145. 41. Martin Danahay, Gender at Work in Victorian Culture: Literature, Art and Masculinity (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2005), p. 19. 42. Lori Miller, ‘The (Re)gendering of High Anglicanism’ in Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, eds. Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp. 27–43; James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1995). 43. For an influential account of the shift from an ‘age of atonement’ (c.1780–1850) to an ‘age of incarnation’ (c.1850–1900) see Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1795–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 44. Young, p. 6. 45. Review of ‘A Noble Life, by the author of John Halifax, Gentleman’, The Nation, 2: 35, 1 March 1866, p. 276. 46. Christabel Coleridge, Charlotte Mary Yonge: Her Life and Letters (London: Macmillan, 1903), p. 183. 47. Mitchell, p. 50.

8 ‘Resolved in Defiance of Fool and of Knave’?: Chartism, Children and Conflict Malcolm Chase

One Sunday morning in 1848, when I was barely nine years old, on coming home from chapel I saw two men washing the blood off their heads and faces at the pump opposite our house in Haggerston. I asked my father who had done this, and he replied that the police had beaten them at a meeting in ‘the Ruins’ (now known as Columbia Gardens), because they had held a meeting to demand the vote. He explained as simply as he could what a vote meant. Then I asked him if he had a vote, and he replied ‘No’, he being then a compound householder, whose rates were directly paid by the landlord of the house. My father was to me then the perfection of wisdom and goodness; so I said, ‘What do you call these men?’ He replied, ‘Chartists’. I at once said, ‘Then I am a Chartist.’ That was my first object lesson in politics.1 Howard Evans, author of the above account, grew up in a terraced house, in the shadow of a gasworks in Haggerston Lane, East London. His recollections almost certainly relate to Sunday 4 June 1848, the morning of which saw a series of running battles across Bethnal Green between, on the one hand the Metropolitan Police, and on the other Chartists and Irish Confederates. Later that evening, violence broke out again on a wider scale, ‘an indiscriminate, wanton, unhuman, and brutal attack was made upon Men, Women, and Children by the Police not only in the Field where the Meeting was held but in all the various Localities for near a Mile around’, according to one of many letters of protest lodged by residents of the area.2 Uniquely among Victorian political movements, Chartism frequently placed children and youth at the forefront of its conflict against forces opposed to reform. Within a broader defence of its particular vision of the working-class family, Chartists both mobilised to defend childhood and frequently located it at the centre of a conflict with the economic and political establishment. Neither historians of Chartism nor childhood have, however, given much thought to this phenomenon.3 Only the practice of dedicated Chartists naming their children after prominent figures in the movement 126

Malcolm Chase

127

is routinely noted in studies of Chartism. All too often, historians have allowed the humorous aspects of this practice to deflect attention from the substance of what it meant to grow up in a Chartist household: for who can resist smiling at the thought of Fanny Amelia Lucy Ann Rebecca Frost O’Connor McDouall Leach Holberry Duffy Oastler Hill Boden, whose birth was registered at Birmingham in 1842?4 The naming of children after radical heroes was no novelty (Henry Hunt was a popular choice earlier in the century) but it required nerve on the part of parents and the act of naming potentially thrust the new-born infant into a situation of conflict: ‘I suppose they want the child hanged’, the vicar of Selby told the congregation at the baptism of little Feargus O’Connor Mabbot. The vicar of Sowerby, near Halifax, disputed the choice of Feargus O’Connor Vincent Bronterre for one child: when the parents held firm, he retained the baby after baptism to say additional prayers over it.5 Even Civil Registrars were not above arguing with parents who sought to register ‘a young patriot’.6 Nor was life necessarily plain-sailing for the child afterwards. Feargus O’Connor Holmes, born in 1842 the son of two Keighley woolcombers, went through school referred to only as ‘F’ by a master who refused to let such names pollute his lips. He toughed it out, however, and still gave his full name to the enumerator of the 1901 Census, by which time he was a worsted machine maker, and still living in Keighley.7 However, the overwhelming majority of Chartist parents resisted such adulatory gestures as the Mabbots or Holmes. Around 3¼ million people signed the Chartist petition of 1842 but judging by the 1851 Census, fewer than 500 English or Welsh couples named their child after Feargus O’Connor.8 Furthermore, the concentration of historiographical attention on this phenomenon has perpetuated a view of children within Chartism as essentially passive objects, serving only to signify the political convictions of their parents. For some children, as we shall see, this was certainly the case. However, this chapter explores the broader implications of the central position children assumed within Chartist rhetoric and associational activity, tracing its implications both for the role of women within the movement, and for the stress Chartism placed on the integrity of the family in the face of the destructive forces of industrialisation. This was a recurrent theme in Chartist rhetoric and it connected closely to the ideal of the male breadwinner, the defence of which was central to Chartism’s broader social objectives, increasingly so in the mid-1840s. Critics of Chartism tended to see the presence of youths and children at Chartist demonstrations as compelling evidence that the movement lacked seriousness of purpose or solid support.9 In 1839 the patriotic Sheffield dialect poet ‘Dame Flatback’ attacked so-called physical force Chartists for recruiting ‘prentis lads into yer regiment’ – a generalisation that proved spectacularly wide of the mark when, just weeks later, plans for a Sheffield rising were exposed. For the Sheffield conspirators – like the overwhelming

128 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

majority of Chartists receiving custodial sentences nationally in 1839–41 – were not the ill-disciplined youths of popular imagination but older men, usually married, with a median age of 31 and of whom 62 per cent had dependent children.10 Few hostile press reports of Chartist meetings, however, could resist diminishing their importance by stressing that youths were present in large numbers. The frequency with which such comments embraced young people of both genders may well have derived from a particular wish to denigrate the movement; but it also reflected the wide communal basis for Chartism. Thus at Whitsuntide 1848, the Manchester Guardian commented that ‘[i]n Stockport, the numbers who attended were insignificant, and the great majority were boys and girls, actuated by a thoughtless love of mischief [rather] than by political feelings’.11 To what extent might children’s participation in Chartism have been actuated by political feelings, and was their attendance at meetings in large numbers (where it occurred, as opposed to being claimed by hostile critics to belittle the movement) ever a conscious decision? Whether their motivation derived primarily from themselves, or was learnt, or even imposed by their parents is difficult to discern, though it will be argued shortly that a rare surviving Chartist sampler is suggestive of at least one child expressing political opinions largely independently of direct adult intervention. More conventional evidence than needlework, however, does yield a number of examples of children who reacted sympathetically to Chartism independently of parental influence. For example Charles Bradlaugh, the great radical and freethinking controversialist of the second half of the nineteenth century, dated his political conversion to 1843–44. Aged ten and living in Hackney, he was inspired by the conversation of an elderly Chartist to buy a copy of The People’s Charter for a halfpenny.12 In Nottingham, the thirteenyear old William Booth (later founder of the Salvation Army) experienced the first stirrings that led to his religious conversion, a process that began – he freely admitted to W. T. Stead – from listening not to hell-fire sermons but to the impassioned oratory of Feargus O’Connor: ‘“The Chartists were for the poor,” so the boy reasoned, “therefore I am for the Chartists”’.13 In 1838 in Bingley, West Yorkshire, ‘a man lent me his paper when it was a week old for a penny’, recalled Thomas Wood (a sixteen-year old apprentice mechanic at the time), ‘I giving him the paper back when I had had it a week’.14 In 1846, when O’Connor opened the Ancoats’ People’s Institute, seventeen-year old William Chadwick had to be called to order by the chairman for a speech from the floor in which he declared ‘the blow should be struck and the tyrants upset that very night’. Thus too did William upstage his younger brother Richard, who merely recited a poem he had written honouring O’Connor (‘. . . the bright flag of Liberty shall shed, / Its heavenly signal over the patriot’s head’).15 More typically, children were led to Chartism as part of the natural process of growing up in a politicised household. ‘My father frequently took

Malcolm Chase

129

me to Radical meetings’, Howard Evans remembered, ‘where I listened to Ernest Jones, George Thompson, Edward Miall, Henry Richard and Henry Vincent.’16 Evans’s participation in politics was primarily as a spectator, and the mention of Miall, Thompson and Vincent signals that his father’s Chartism was very much in the constitutional tradition of agitation. However, there are several recorded examples of lads in their late ’teens serving as officers in local National Charter Association (NCA) branches: for example William Chadwick, the seventeen-year old Ancoats hot-head, had matured into the corresponding secretary of the Manchester Chartists less than two years later. At a similar age Henry Clubb of Colchester combined the secretaryship of both the town’s NCA and Land Plan branches.17 Other households, especially in the early years of the movement, propelled children into more combative roles. For example at Lye Waste (a squatters’ settlement comprised mainly of nail makers and their families) near Stourbridge, children were widely employed in the summer of 1839 making ‘craws’ feet’ or caltrops (a spiked iron ball that, when thrown to the ground, disabled cavalry horses).18 More prosaically, there are numerous accounts in later Victorian workingclass autobiographies of children who had some schooling being enlisted to read Chartist newspapers to adults. ‘Before I entered my teens I was a sympathetic Chartist, and early in my life read with avidity the pages of the “Northern Star”’, wrote Joseph Kavanagh of Barnsley, the son of immigrant Irish linen weavers. He recalled how, in March 1848: One Sunday night I read, for a houseful of listeners, ten columns of the proceedings on the banks of the Seine which culminated in the deposition and flight of Louis Philippe, king of the French. Of course the Chartists in England and the Young Irish Repealers in the sister isle were jubilant, for they nursed the delusion that the revolutionary waves would soon beat up against the White Cliffs of Dover.19 Another youngster, Ben Grime of Oldham, purchased the paper every Saturday to read aloud to his father and neighbours over ‘a tot of whoambrewed’.20 A teenage handloom velvet weaver from Failsworth, Lancashire, recollected that the Star was ‘subscribed for by my father and five others. Every Sunday morning these subscribers met at our house to hear what prospect there was of the expected “smash-up” taking place. It was my task to read aloud so that all could hear at the same time.’21 The political education of some Chartists’ children was more dramatic. Referring to Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1789–92), a Birmingham journeyman silversmith told an open air meeting in November 1839 that ‘he intended for his children to learn the whole of it and if they did not he would give them a jolly good thrashing’.22 This statement was probably alehouse rhetoric. But it underlines that children were far from being autonomous

130 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

subjects in the eyes of many working people, especially perhaps their fathers’. Working-class males made a significant emotional investment in their children, one that was increasingly evident through their commitment to the ideal of the male breadwinner. Indeed, the ideal of the male breadwinner increased during the early nineteenth century, as the status of many male wage earners outside their families diminished through the erosion of their command in the labour market, their independence as producers, and their capacity to exercise discretion and control over the work process. Within that context, attachment to the notion that a husband’s primary role was that of provider for their whole family had considerable appeal. (It also helped rationalise male workers’ hostility to female intrusion into masculine workspace.) The timing of the main three surges of support for Chartism paralleled downturns in the economy, when unemployment and wage cuts hit the family economy of the working class. The significance of this was vividly apparent in powerloom weaver Richard Pilling’s explanation for his leading role in the ‘general strike’ of 1842. For three weeks, at rally after rally across Lancashire, Pilling urged workers to strike ‘for a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work, and until the Charter becomes the law of the land’. Defending himself at his subsequent trial, Pilling spoke of fathers carrying babies to the cotton mills to be suckled by their wives at meal times, of the sexual harassment of women on the factory floor, and of his own feelings of injured masculinity: I have . . . a good wife – a dear wife – a wife that I love and cherish, and I have done everything that I could in the way of resisting reductions in wages, that I might keep her and my children from the workhouse, for I detest parish relief. It is wages that I want. I want to be independent of every man, and that is the principle of every honest Englishman; and I hope it is the principle of every man in this court.23 Child rearing then, was not just a biological or personal and emotional process, it was a political act. Chartist parents took pride in raising their children to share in their principles. Salford carpenter Reginald Richardson wrote from gaol in 1840 that ‘detestable faction . . . never can destroy, except with my life, the firm and deep-rooted hatred that animates my bosom. My children, like young Hannibals, shall be trained to hate my persecutors, so that for one martyr the Whigs make of me, I will leave FOUR SONS trained to my principles.’ 24 The leading Baptist divine of Edwardian England, John Clifford (born 1836) recollected, ‘I was brought up to admire Will Lovett . . . and to detest Feargus O’Connor as a wild demagogue.’25 There was nothing novel about Chartist parents radicalising their children: interviewed by a prison inspector in 1841, Chartist Isaac Johnson blamed his lack of formal education on the fact that he was expelled from school ‘at Peterloo time’, for wearing at his father’s insistence a white hat (the badge of the Regency ultra-radical).26

Malcolm Chase

131

Children were naturally at the heart of the educational initiatives Chartist branches developed. Almost two-fifths of Lovett and Collins seminal 1840 book Chartism: A New Organisation of the People, is actually about children’s education; and the Gazette of the Working Men’s Association, with which Lovett was closely associated, even went so far as to have a children’s column.27 Chartist culture in this respect contrasted sharply with the middleclass anti-Corn Law agitation, but it had much in common with Owenite socialism.28 Owen’s views on the formation of character naturally led to an emphasis upon children’s education and their participation within the cultural life of the community. Lovett, who had originally entered radical politics through Owenism, remained convinced that nurture, not nature, shaped children’s character and intellect. A clumsy generalisation within early Chartist historiography was that education was mainly the preoccupation of Lovett and his circle, and not O’Connor’s.29 However, education for all age groups was emphatically at the heart of the O’Connorite Chartist project. The influence of religious nonconformity infused Chartism’s educational initiatives and Chartist Sunday schools were commonplace, in many localities along with day schools. These might be situated in a Chartist Hall or institute (as at Stalybridge for example) or more typically in the home of a Chartist activist, as at Bethnal Green, where Elizabeth Neesom ran a school in the room behind the radical newsagency run by her husband Charles, one of the leading teetotal Chartists.30 Neesom was the author of one of the most trenchant arguments for a distinctively Chartist education, embedded within the Address of the female Chartist total abstinence group, of which she was the prime mover. In it she urged her fellow female Chartists to ‘secure a sound and proper education for our children, in accordance with our views and feelings’, adding: Depend upon this fact, the charity and policy badge of national schools, is the remnant of the ancient Saxon serf’s collar. Why should our feelings be wounded by seeing the finger of scorn pointed at our children, and the sad appellation of ‘charity brat’ applied to them? A well-regulated mind disdains servility and cringing. Let us reject their Church and State offers of education for our children, which is only calculated to debase the mind, and render it subservient to class interest; let us teach our offspring to do unto others as they would others should do unto them.31 Opportunities for self-directed education were seen as an important factor in the struggle to reform society. Such was the social and political gulf between Chartists and their social ‘betters’, there was widespread suspicion of initiatives designed by others to ‘improve’ workers and their children. Reports of Chartist schools uniformly stressed that they were autonomous: for example the ‘Democratic Sunday School’ in Thwaites (west Yorkshire) proclaimed it was ‘the people’s own’, ‘their little commonwealth’ and ‘entirely of the

132 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

labouring class’.32 These were powerful attractions even in Scotland, where provision of publicly funded education was more generous and carried little stigma. ‘Let us, therefore, send all our juveniles to their [i.e. Chartist] schools’, the True Scotsman argued, ‘and not to any of the rotten old regime’.33 Choosing a Chartist schooling was therefore an overtly political act on the part of the parents. It placed the child in a potentially conflictual situation both because the political content of Chartist curricula met with establishment hostility, and because young Chartists were expected to understand and assert their rights. ‘The minds of all children naturally incline to good’, Sophia, a Birmingham Chartist, argued. ‘Children should ask questions, they have a right to do so’, she continued, adding ‘Children are much more acute observers than they are generally supposed. . . . Let us, as Chartist women and mothers, instruct and encourage each other, that our children shall be better informed of their rights as citizens.’34 The corollary of this stance was that the Chartist educational project was held to reside as much in the home as in formally organised schools. Henry Vincent, a charismatic orator with an extensive following in western England and South Wales, addressed the women of this region thus: So long as our rulers could persuade women they had nothing to do with politics, the present unjust system was bound to continue. The tyrants knew that all the children would grow up slaves; but now that women think for themselves, the tyrants feel their end approaching! Talk of putting down the Chartists, forsooth, why every kitchen is now a political meeting house; the little children are members of the unions, and the good mother is the political teacher . . . [C]hildren will suck in Radicalism with their mothers’-milk.35 Some Chartist localities went so far as to establish separate branch organisations specifically for young people. The constitution of the National Charter Association tacitly encouraged the recruitment of all ages.36 Young people’s associations were particularly evident in 1842, the peak popular community-based mobilisation for the Charter. Examples include the Bristol Young Men’s Charter Association, Dundee Youths’ Democratic Charter Association, Sheffield Chartist Youth Association, the Salford Juvenile Chartists and the Stockport Youth Association, described as ‘in connection’ with the local branch of the NCA. ‘The Stockport Youths are resolved to extend the association of young men into every town of the County of Chester’, the Northern Star’s local correspondent reported.37 These juvenile associations imitated the organisational and cultural forms of NCA localities, in order both to strengthen the sense of solidarity among their members as young Chartists and to make visible Chartism’s assault upon conventional definitions of political personhood. Thus in June 1843 the Manchester Youths’ Charter Association organised the funeral of one of

Malcolm Chase

133

its number at the Ancoats Bible Christian Chapel. A band played the dead march as the cortege wound its way round the monument to Henry Hunt in the Chapel grounds and, after several orations, proceedings concluded with the singing of the Marseillaise and a wake, fuelled by tea, in the Ancoats’ Chartist rooms.38 The participation of children in Chartist demonstrations was everywhere apparent and, occasionally, even demanded by the movement’s leaders. For example the Nottingham NCA, in organising O’Connor’s visit to the town in February 1842, circulated extensive details of his processional route and instructed the ‘Men & Women of Nottingham ! ! DO YOUR DUTY, Prepare Flags for your Children, and let us have a glorious demonstration’.39 Prepare they did and the Nottingham Review duly reported that a large number of children processed with these flags en masse, behind a brass band and in front of portraits of O’Connor, the factory reformer Richard Oastler and the United Irish hero Robert Emmet.40 The general strike later that year affords further examples of children’s concerted participation in public demonstrations: ‘the first day the mills were stopped, a body of five-hundred girls, belonging to the dissenting Sunday-schools at Oldham, marched at the head of the rioters, singing their school-hymns’.41 Chartism was at heart a constitutional agitation, exemplified in the three great petitions presented by the movement to Parliament in 1839, 1842 and 1848. At its heart was The People’s Charter, and each petition was presented not from the movement, nor its constituent members, but from ‘the People’, ‘the industrious classes’. The addition of children’s names to Chartist petitions was encouraged and this was done not clandestinely but openly. It is debatable whether the Chartists ever truly believed that petitioning would succeed. Rather, it had a totemic significance as the righteous expression of a people’s will and the people in this context was frequently construed to include children of all ages. ‘Silence them, give it to them: let every man, woman and child sign the Petition; disarm all your enemies at once’, declared Feargus O’Connor in 1839. ‘Go on, good men! Go on, virtuous women! Go on little children! We are engaged in the cause of justice, which is the cause of God. Sign the Petition. It is the last, the very last.’42 During the 1848 controversy over the integrity of the third Chartist petition, the Rector of Alfreton (Derbyshire) wrote to the Home Secretary that one of his parishioners, whose name was recorded on the petition, was an infant just three weeks old.43 The admission of children to the ranks of a people seeking redress was simply another facet of the Chartist redefinition of what constituted the political nation. Some Chartists, for example the Scot John La Mont, argued for the further ‘extension of the Suffrage to sane minded males of 18 years of age, instead of 21, already provided by our Charter; and the enfranchisement of females – notwithstanding the amount of blackguardism, folly and coercion which will be arrayed against this

134 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

extension by the aristocratic debauchés’.44 To seek to legitimate youths’ and women’s political voices was thus to intensify Chartism’s challenge to unrepresentative old corruption. * Britannia’s the land where fell slavery’s chain Had bound fast its victims in hunger and pain Where no eye would pity, when no hand would save Then came forth to break it o connor the brave A band of brave fellows, whose hearts caught The sound arose from their slumbers and Rallied around resolved in defiance of fool And of Knave for freedom to fight with O Connor the brave for The Charter and No Sorender 45 What did children’s participation in Chartism mean, especially given that the movement’s greatest leader, Feargus O’Connor, was apt to characterise his adult followers as ‘my children’? Did Chartism privilege childhood or, perhaps, efface much of its distinctiveness from adulthood? Can we tell if children were themselves ‘resolved in defiance of fool and of knave’? The above quotation is taken from a verse worked into a needlework sampler around 1847 by Ann Dawson (born 1842). Ann was the daughter of Isaac Dawson (a journeyman baker and NCA activist) from Droylsden, east Lancashire, and his wife Hannah.46 Hannah, Ann’s brother and her older sister Betty were all cardroom operatives, employed in the mills in the tedious, dust-ridden drudgery of preparing cotton fibres for spinning. Their family of seven had to supplement its income by taking in three factory weavers as lodgers. Despite their precarious economic situation, Ann Dawson, her sister and two of her three brothers were all enrolled by their parents in the Chartist Land Plan. The enrolment of children in the plan was not uncommon, though few families’ incomes stretched to enrolling four. This was a sizeable financial investment. Momentarily, we are afforded a very human glimpse of the aspirations of a grassroots Chartist family. Ann’s sampler is one of the most affecting, and certainly most colourful, material remnants of Chartism. Naivety of execution combines with vibrancy of colour to create an impression at once youthful and sunny, elegiac and optimistic. Ann’s needlework, depicting the O’Connorville schoolhouse, is a vivid reminder that Chartism embraced men, women and all ages, and at its heart was a profound commitment to education and self-improvement. But this commitment does not translate into political quietism: far from it, for an allegiance to O’Connor’s uncompromising commitment to the politics of the mass platform is the sampler’s central poetic statement.

Malcolm Chase

135

One of the great attractions of O’Connor’s land plan was that it appeared to offer both a practical means to end children’s employment in factories and reinstate the mother at the heart of domestic life. Both the rhetoric of the plan and the geography of its settlements contrasted sharply with those of early Victorian socialism. Communal living was at the heart of the Owenite vision; but the Chartist colonies comprised isolated cottages (wherein the kitchen was the largest room), each situated within an individual landholding.47 O’Connor’s vision, however, resonated powerfully with the factory reform movement, which consistently argued that the employment of women outside the home inverted the ‘natural’ order. If the Dawsons were among the Lancashire pilgrims to the opening of the Land Plan’s first colony on Mayday 1847, they would have heard O’Connor warm to this theme in a speech delivered in the schoolhouse itself: I have brought you out of the land of Egypt, and out of the house of bondage. And must I not have a cold and flinty heart if I could survey the scene before me without emotion? Who can look upon those mothers, accustomed to be dragged by the waking light of morn from those little babes now nestling to their breasts? (Here the speaker was so overcome that he was obliged to sit down, his face covered with large tears, and we never beheld such a scene in our life; not an eye in the building that did not weep.) After a pause Mr. O’Connor resumed: Yes, this is a portion of the great feature of my plan to give the fond wife back to her husband, and the innocent babe back to its fond mother. (Here the speaker was again compelled to pause, and delivered the remainder of his address sitting down.) See what a different race I will make – see what a noble edifice for the education of your children. (Cheers.) While a sectarian government is endeavouring to preserve its dominion, and fostering sectarian strife, I open the sanctuary of free instruction for the unbiased instruction of youth, and woe to the firebrand parson who shall dare to frighten the susceptible mind of infancy by the hobgoblin of religious preference. (Tremendous cheering and waving of hats.) Let the father nourish, and the fond mother nurture, their own offspring (cheers) and then we shall have a generation of FREE CHRISTIANS. (Loud cheers.)48 It was one of O’Connor’s most bravura performances. Modern secularisation still does not blunt the opening biblical imagery, in which the audience is cast in the role of Israel, a chosen people against whom are contrasted (inverting the establishment view of Chartism) the firebrand parson and a narrow sectarian government. Robust anticlericalism of this kind was common in Chartism. O’Connor’s sentiments on this occasion, as so often, show how powerful the idea of independence was among Chartists, independence from the caprice of undemocratic government and a state church,

136 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

and from industrialism’s ‘house of bondage’. The key to his popularity as a Chartist leader, especially in the Pennine textile districts, was his capacity to reflect back to his audience and readers their own perceptions of their place in society and their aspirations to improve it. Though religion meant little to O’Connor, he well knew how close it lay to the heart of popular radical feeling. In the sampler this is vividly conveyed by the bible and anchor, recalling the words of St Paul (‘hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast’). For Ann Dawson and her family the concept probably also resonated with the words of Benjamin Stott, a Chartist poet from nearby Middleton: Lift up your faces from the dust, Your cause is holy, pure and just; In Freedom’s God put all your trust, Be he your hope and anchor.49 Ann Dawson’s is the only known Chartist sampler. Thousands of other nineteenth-century samplers survive, typically worked with exacting precision and often expressing sententious or religious sentiments that lead almost inevitably to the conclusion that they were accomplished only under close adult supervision. Ann Dawson’s work, however, has a subversive quality, for several reasons. Firstly, the expression of overt political sentiment in samplers is extremely rare; the inclusion even of secular verse is atypical.50 The increasing prominence during the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of improving verse, in a genre that had formerly been confined to the depiction of stylised icons and abstract decoration, has been seen by feminist textile scholars as inculcating profoundly patriarchal ideals of femininity.51 The verse Ann Dawson chose, however, is certainly not ‘improving’ in any conventional sense. Although its dedication to O’Connor clearly reflects the patriarchal nature of authority within the Chartist movement, the overall effect is equally indicative of the key role played by mothers and other older women in working-class households in the politicisation of children. Ann’s Dawson’s handiwork, however, is also subversive in terms of technique as well as content. By the 1840s samplers worked by working-class children tended to be highly stylised. Teaching embroidery to the poor gathered momentum in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Books were published setting out how this should be done and needlework became a major component of the curriculum of both secular and religiously organised schools. One consequence was a marked move away from spontaneity, ornament and variety of colour as samplers typically came to be dominated by cross-stitched alphabetical and numerical sequences and tended to the monochromatic. By contrast, the work of Ann Dawson decidedly does not exhibit the order and precision of the overwhelming majority of Victorian samplers. For example, from the fifth line she loses sight of the structure

Malcolm Chase

137

of her verse and submerges its rhymes.52 This is suggestive of something natural and unforced rather than the regimented presentation of school work based on a copybook or teacher’s worked example. It is also riotously colourful and situates its political verse amidst stylised elements typical of earlier centuries which had become uncommon in the Victorian period. * No other Victorian social movement posed so extensive or searching questions to the social or political establishment of its day than did Chartism. We may conceptualise its activities as constituting a multiplicity of sites of conflict; and this generalisation extends even to the ostensibly more innocuous activities of education and self-improvement in which children were quite naturally involved. The active participation of children is evident across the whole spectrum of Chartist opinion, ‘physical’ and ‘moral’ force, those who idolised Feargus O’Connor and those who felt most comfortable with the artisan intelligentsia typified by William Lovett. Children’s involvement in Chartism extended far beyond its educational initiatives. They were consistently participants in virtually all Chartist political and cultural activities short of conspiracy and insurrection. Even here some Chartists suggested children should potentially be mobilised if peaceful resistance to tyranny failed: ‘let the women take the scissors, the child the pin or needle’, Joseph Rayner Stephens declaimed; and there were examples – as at Lye Waste in 1839, quoted earlier – of children actively preparing weaponry.53 A more-rounded appreciation of the role of children within Chartism may help us to understand more fully the political work that issues of gender and patriarchy undertook within the movement. Female Chartists emphasised their role as educators in order to reinforce their own claims to participate in the political arena: ‘Mothers, claim the Rights of your children’ a banner unfurled at an early Chartist rally declared.54 The involvement of children often stemmed from the initiative of their parents, but it could be autonomous and even spontaneous. Children’s participation reflected Chartist notions of active citizenship, a concept that (although with increasingly emphatic gender distinction) embraced both males and females. Chartism also privileged childhood through its emphasis upon a particular version of the domestic ideal and the integrity of the working-class family in the face of the corrosive effects of industrialism. However, while it fought to preserve the distinctiveness of childhood that the employment of children outside the family unit eroded, Chartism’s politicisation of children arguably diminished distinctions between children and adults. For Anglican reformers, such as the contributors to John Sinclair’s study of the causation of the 1842 strike wave, the politicisation of the family provided compelling evidence of the need to expand provision of education by the establishment.55 The family and childhood were not merely among those things male Chartists mobilised to defend: they were themselves primary locations of Chartist conflict

138 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

against the economic, social and political establishment of the period. As a social institution, families lay at the heart of Chartist rhetoric.

Notes 1. Howard Evans, Radical Fights of Forty Years (Manchester: Daily News & Leader, [1913]), pp. 19–20. 2. National Archives, Kew, MEPO 2/66 (Complaints against police conduct, May– August 1848). For a detailed account see David Goodway, London Chartism, 1838– 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 83–4 and 119–22. 3. P. Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), pp. 40–5 is the only serious consideration of Chartist youth. 4. General Register Office (London), England & Wales Civil Registration Index, Births: June–September 1842; cf. D. J. V. Jones, Chartism and the Chartists (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 1975), p. 24. 5. Northern Star [hereafter NS] 31 July 1841, 12 December 1840. 6. See for example reports of disputes in NS 3 October 1840 and 13 March 1841. 7. A. Briggs, ‘Industry and politics in early nineteenth-century Keighley’, Bradford Antiquary ns 9 (1952), p. 314; 1901 Census for Keighley, RG 13/4077/90/12. 8. An electronic search of the 1851 English & Welsh Census reveals 316 children given ‘Feargus’ as a first name, 46 of whom had ‘O’Connor’ as their middle name. A critical contextual point here is that the 1851 Census lists only seven Englishborn males named Feargus who had been born before 1837. 9. Similar claims were subsequently made by critics of women’s suffrage: see, for example John Tenniel’s cartoon, ‘An ugly rush’, Punch 28 May 1870. 10. Dame Flatback’s Advice to t’ Queen . . . a Supplement to the Shevvild Chap’s Annual for 1840 (Sheffield: Chaloner, 1839), p. 1; C. Godfrey, ‘The Chartist prisoners, 1839–41’, International Review of Social History 24 (1979), p. 199. 11. Manchester Guardian 7 June 1848. 12. H. B. Bonner, Charles Bradlaugh: A Record of His Life and Work (London: Unwin, 1895), p. 6. 13. W. T. Stead quoted in H. Begbie, Life of William Booth, the Founder of the Salvation Army (London: Macmillan, 1920), vol. 2, p. 50. 14. Wood quoted in J. Burnett, Useful Toil (London: Allen Lane, 1974), p. 308. 15. J. Bellamy and J. Saville (eds.), Dictionary of Labour Biography volume 7 (London: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1984), p. 53. 16. Evans, Radical Fights, p. 8. 17. For Clubb see A. F. J. Brown, Chartism in Essex and Suffolk (Chelmsford: Essex Record Office, 1982) and Anon., History of the Philadelphian Bible-Christian Church (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1922), pp. 67–89. 18. Charter 28 July 1839. 19. J. Kavanagh, ‘A Barnsley Man’s autobiography’, Barnsley Chronicle 9 June 1900. 20. B. Grime, Memory Sketches (Oldham: Hirst & Rennie, 1887), p. 26. 21. B. Brierley, Home Memories and Recollections of a Life (Manchester: Heywood, 1886) p. 23. 22. Prosecution notes, R. v Brown, 1840, TS 11/813 fos 4–8.

Malcolm Chase

139

23. The Trial of Feargus O’Connor, Barrister at Law, and Fifty-eight Others (Manchester: Heywood, 1843) p. 254. See also Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 229–35. 24. NS 25 April 1840. 25. Quoted in P. d’A. Jones, The Christian Socialist Revival, 1877–1914 (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 343. 26. National Archives, Kew, HO 20/10, quoted in D. Thompson, ‘Women and nineteenth-century radical politics’, in Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley (eds), The Rights and Wrongs of Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 120. 27. Gazette of the Working Men’s Association 2 (1 June 1839), copy in BL Add MSS27,835 fos 161 et seq. 28. The cultural dimensions of the Anti-Corn Law League are explored by P. A. Pickering and A. Tyrell, The People’s Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League (London: Leicerster University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 116–216. For Owenism see E. Yeo, ‘Robert Owen and radical culture’, in S. Pollard and J. Salt (eds.), Robert Owen, Prophet of the Poor (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1971). 29. For example, M. Hovell, The Chartist Movement (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 3rd edn, 1966), pp. 203–9; R. H. Tawney, introduction to W. Lovett, Life and Struggles (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1920), vol. 1, p. xxviii; D. Read and E. Glasgow, Feargus O’Connor: Irishman and Chartist (London: Arnold, 1961), p. 92; J. T. Ward, Chartism (London: Batsford, 1973), p. 144. 30. M. Tylecote, Mechanics’ Institutes of Lancashire and Yorkshire before 1851 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1957), p. 241. For Elizabeth Neesom see especially J. Bellamy and J. Saville, Dictionary of Labour Biography, volume 8 (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1987), pp. 171–81 and ‘Chartist Lives: Elizabeth Neesom’, in Chase, Chartism: A New History. 31. East London Female Total Abstinence Association, ‘Address’, Northern Star 30 January 1841. 32. NS 8 August 1840. 33. True Scotsman 29 February 1840. 34. ‘The true principles of education’, English Chartist Circular vol. 1, no. 19 [June 1841]. 35. Western Vindicator 28 September 1839. 36. ‘Aims and rules of the National Charter Association’, NS 1 August 1840. 37. NS 8 and 29 January, 12 February 1842; 16 December 1843. 38. NS 24 June 1843. 39. Nottingham NCA poster, 21 February 1842, National Archives, Kew, HO 45/254 fo. 2. 40. Nottingham Review 4 February 1842, quoted in R. Church, Economic and Social Change in a Midland Town (London: Cass, 1966), p. 139. 41. J. Sinclair, National Education and Church Extension (London: Rivington, 1849) p. 67. 42. NS 23 February 1839 (original emphasis). 43. HO 45/2410 pt 1, fo. 350 [April 1848]. 44. John La Mont, ‘The Movement’, English Chartist Circular vol. 2, no. 33 [September 1842]. See also Dorothy Thompson, ‘Who were ‘The People’ in 1842?’, in M. Chase and I. Dyck (eds.), Living and Learning (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996), p. 130. 45. Anon., text of needlework sampler embroidered by Ann Dawson, 1847, private collection. Photographs of this remarkable artifact can be found on the covers

140 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

46. 47.

48. 49.

50.

51. 52.

of S. Roberts and D. Thompson, Images of Chartism (Woodbridge: Merlin, 1998) and M. Chase, Chartism: A New History. NS 10 April 1841; 1851 Census for Droylsden, HO 107/2234/37/15. E. Royle, Robert Owen and the Commencement of the Millennium: A Study of the Harmony Community (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 118–21, 145–8; M. Chase, ‘We wish only to work for ourselves’, in Chase and Dyck (eds.), Living and Learning, pp. 140–1. NS 8 May 1847. For a detailed analysis of this speech see Chase, ‘We wish only to work for ourselves’, pp. 136–7. Hebrews 6: 19; B. Stott, ‘Song for the million’, NS 24 September 1842, reprinted as ‘Friends of Freedom’, in his Songs for the Millions (Middleton: Horsman, 1843), p. 28. For Stott see J. Bellamy and J. Saville (eds), Dictionary of Labour Biography, Volume 4 (London: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1977). National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, Instructions on Needlework and Knitting (London: the Society, 1847); J. Toller, British Samplers (Chichester: Phillimore, 1980); S. Mayor and D. Fowle, Samplers (London: Studio, 1990), plate 6; L. Synge, Antique Needlework (London: Blandford, 1982), pp. 71–2. See especially R. Parker, The Subversive Stitch (London: Women’s Press, 1984). A rhyming and metrically ‘correct’ rendering of the poem would be as follows: Britannia’s the land where fell slavery’s chain Had bound fast its victims in hunger and pain, Where no eye would pity, when no hand would save. Then came forth to break it O’Connor the brave. A band of brave fellows, whose hearts caught the sound, Arose from their slumbers and rallied around, Resolved in defiance of fool and of knave For freedom to fight with O’Connor the brave For the Charter and No Surrender.

Although unlikely to be the work of Ann Dawson herself, the poem does not appear to have been published (I am grateful to Mike Sanders for his help in searching for it). 53. NS 6 January 1838. 54. Quoted in J. Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), p. 302. 55. See Sinclair, National Education and Church Extension, pp. 49–83.

9 ‘Conversing with Monstrosities’: Evolutionary Theory and Contemporary Responses to the Novels of Wilkie Collins Janice M. Allan

[I]t is plain that conflict be most imminent and most deadly between species that are most similar. ‘A Biological View of Our Foreign Policy’, The Saturday Review (1896) In July of 1857, readers of the Illustrated London News were invited to attend the Regent Gallery in order to view the latest human monstrosity: ‘the BABOON LADY, MISS JULIA PASTRANA known as the “Nondescript”’.1 The naturalist, Frances Buckland, was one of many to take advantage of the opportunity, describing Pastrana in the following terms: her eyes were deep black, and somewhat prominent, and their lids had long, thick eyelashes; her features were simply hideous on account of the profusion of hair growing on her forehead, and her black beard; but her figure was exceedingly good and graceful, and her tiny foot and wellturned ankle, bien chaussé, perfection itself.2 Encountering the opening description of The Woman in White’s Marian Halcombe less than three years after the Regent Street exhibition, many readers must have experienced a strange sense of déjà vu.3 Possessing the same womanly shape, ‘delightfully undeformed by stays’, as well as the ‘thick, coal-black hair, growing unusually low down on her forehead’, Collins’s character embodies the same conflicting amalgamation of masculine and feminine characteristics evidenced in Pastrana.4 Reading the striking similarity between Julia and Marian through contemporary discourses of teratology, Richard Collins has shed new light on the novel’s ambivalent treatment of sexual identity.5 Yet the broader generic questions raised by such comparisons demand further attention. Concentrating on the contemporary response to Collins’s novels, this chapter explores how they were 141

142 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

read – like their human counterparts – as a type of ‘abomination’:6 a literary freak show that staged contemporary conflicts and anxieties surrounding the nature and limits of literature and the human. Unsurprisingly, given the circumstances of her introduction, both contemporary and current readings of The Woman in White tend to single out Anne Catherick as its quintessential figure of sensation.7 In contrast, I would suggest that this dubious honour belongs to Marian herself. As the site of irreconcilable ‘anomalies and contradictions’ (p. 32), her character effectively signals one of the most salient characteristics of Collins’s writing as well as sensation fiction more generally: its ability to transgress and destabilise a range of cultural and material norms and boundaries. Thus Marian – like Pastrana before her – represents the genre’s ‘nondescript’ status as ‘a person or thing that is not easily described, or is of no particular class or kind’.8 In this respect, a more productive point of comparison may be the ‘WILD MAN OF THE PRAIRIES’. Opening with a series of seemingly unanswerable questions, the Illustrated London News advertisement for this 1846 phenomenon demands: Is it an Animal? Is it an Extraordinary Freak of Nature? Or is it a legitimate member of Nature’s Works? Or is it the long-sought for Link between Man and the Ourang Outang, which Naturalists have for years decided does exist, but which has hitherto been undiscovered? The Exhibitors of this indescribable Person or Animal do not pretend to assert what it is. They have named it the WILD MAN OF THE PRAIRIES; or ‘WHAT IS IT?’ because this is the universal exclamation of all who have seen it. Its features, hands, and the upper portion of the body are to all appearances human; the lower part of its body, the hind legs, and haunches are decidedly animal! . . . ‘WHAT IS IT?’ is decidedly the most extraordinary being that ever astonished the world.9 In the event, such questions were answered all too easily, when it was almost immediately revealed that this fraud upon nature was a more straightforward fraud, orchestrated by P. T. Barnum and perpetrated by the disabled actor Harvey Leech. According to the London Times: This extraordinary cripple . . . exhibits the very rare combinations of perfect symmetry, strength, and beauty, with a great amount of deformity. The head is remarkably fine in form, and the expression intelligent and benign; the chest, shoulders, and arms form a perfect model of strength and beauty . . . In the place of legs there are two limbs, the left about 18 inches from the hip to the point of the toes, the right about 24 inches from the same points.10

Janice M. Allan

143

As described, Leech bears a remarkable resemblance to Miserrimus Dexter, the ‘strange and startling creature – literally the half of a man’ – that dominates the imaginative arena of Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1874).11 More specifically, it is the conflicting presence of both ‘symmetry’ and ‘deformity’ – a combination that renders classification so difficult – that is shared by these characters. Echoing the London Times, Collins’s novel notes of Dexter that: To make this deformity all the more striking and all the more terrible, the victim of it was – as to his face and his body – an unusually handsome, and an unusually well-made man. His long silky hair, of a bright and beautiful chestnut colour, fell over shoulders that were the perfection of strength and grace. His face was bright with vivacity and intelligence . . . Never had a magnificent head and body been more hopelessly ill-bestowed than in this instance! Never had Nature committed a more careless or a more cruel mistake than in the making of this man! (p. 173) Recognising the centrality of such aberrations to Collins’s work, A. C. Swinburne suggests that this author ‘could not, as a rule, get forward at all without the help of some physical or moral infirmity’.12 ‘[D]isplayed . . . in every conceivable sort of garish light’,13 anomalous bodies, such as that of Miserrimus Dexter, were seen to dominate Collins’s fiction. What we must recognise, however, is that this human hybrid – like Marian before him – is not simply an isolated example of how the anomalous functions within Collins’s work; he is, rather, a particularly insistent signifier of Collins’s work as anomalous. Like the human curiosities paraded through the country’s shows and galleries, Collins’s novels, deemed to be ‘curiosities of literature’,14 reflect what James W. Cook distinguishes as a ‘distinct and secondary meaning’ of the term ‘nondescript’, which came into circulation in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Not simply designating that which has yet to be described and classified, it also came to assume ‘the more liminal sense of resisting classification, or straddling descriptive boundaries’.15 Although this use of the term was most commonly employed in discussions of human anomalies such as Pastrana and Leech, its relevance to the literary productions of Collins should not be underestimated. His novels, like their human counterparts, were seen to constitute ‘an ambiguous [body] whose existence imperils categories and oppositions dominant in social life.’16 Engaged in an attempt to explain the sensation phenomenon and render it socially meaningful, Collins’s critics were thus forced to ask: was it a ‘freak’ of literature, was it a ‘legitimate’ form of art, was it a new type of writing, or a ‘missing link’ between established forms? As such questions resonated all too clearly with contemporary scientific debates about taxonomic borders and their

144 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

role in differentiating the acceptable from its abject other, it is hardly surprising that the anxiety feigned in Barnum’s advertisement was, in the case of the contemporary reviews of Collins’s fiction, all too real. In part, this heightened sense of anxiety may be traced back to the cultural climate produced by the transmutationists and given new momentum, in 1859, by Darwin’s assertion that ‘No clear line of demarcation has as yet been drawn between species’.17 The resulting fascination with hybrids, as Harriet Ritvo suggests, ‘transcended intradisciplinary partisanship, and merged with that of the larger public’.18 Ritvo writes that In a culture that valued boundaries of all kinds between people, and that devoted great energy to establishing and defending them, taxonomic border areas and the intermediate animals that inhabited them had very interesting implications, both pragmatic and symbolic . . . Thus the fascinating influence exerted by hybrids was compounded of horror as well as pleasure, in parts that varied with the mood and predilections of the observer. The range of reaction was often signalled by choice of vocabulary.19 During the 1860s and 70s, this fascination with hybrids was given particular expression in the critical response to Collins’s corpus, which was itself seen as a sort of ‘intermediate animal’ that defied and problematised a range of literary and social taxonomies. To date, however, the role and significance of the critics’ ‘choice of vocabulary’ has not been adequately recognised.20 According to Lawrence Frank, for example: Throughout the detective fictions of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle (unlike those of Wilkie Collins), there appear terms, figures of speech, and methodological practices indebted to nineteenth-century philology, geology and paleontaology, archaeology, and evolutionary biology.21 I would argue, to the contrary, that discourses of evolutionary biology are a signal feature of many of Collins novels and the contemporary readings they generated.22 As we shall see, the latter are littered with references to the mutability of races and species, as well as metaphors of hybridity and miscegenation. Indeed the persistent use of evolutionary metaphors within the contemporary response to Collins’s novels suggests that this discursive field played a key, if as yet under-recognised, role in how such texts were read and hence produced and positioned by contemporary critics. Moreover, only when the centrality of such ‘terms, figures of speech, and methodological practices’ is recognised do we gain a full understanding of Collins in relation to some of the most pressing scientific and social issues of his time. For, as Gillian Beer asserts, the strategic deployment of such discourses represents ‘a cross-category movement of concepts . . . most active in areas of unresolved

Janice M. Allan

145

conflict or problem. It signals the significant anxieties of a period . . . [and] the function of transposition may be as much to disguise as to lay bare.’23 In order to explore how this dual function of transposition operates in the contemporary response to Collins’s novels, I would like to offer a few examples of how evolutionary discourses were employed in discussions of the genre’s origins. Readers are now well-versed both in the modes of production associated with sensation fiction and its role in delineating and challenging the boundaries between high and low. From its very inception, the genre was viewed as a commodity rather than a disinterested form of art. Perceived as pandering to the vitiated tastes of a readership constructed as not fully civilised, Collins’s novels offered fast paced narratives to those who were seen to crave the unhealthy and insubstantial over the more wholesome, if somewhat plainer, faire offered by domestic realism. The resulting debates about literary status are well documented,24 yet what has not been adequately recognised is how such debates resonate with the key tenets of evolutionism. The revolutionary impact of evolutionary theory lay in its denial of the divine origins of humankind that stripped it of its privileged place within God’s creation. Thus it is significant that the influential literary critic, Henry Mansel, does not simply lament the taint of commercialism that lingers amongst sensation novels; he also articulates the much more disturbing possibility, raised by evolutionary theory, that ‘No divine influence can be imagined as presiding over the birth of [such] works’.25 Construing the advent of the genre in explicitly Darwinian terms, he reads it as an unfortunate example of the blind mechanisms of evolution that are indifferent both to human valuations and divine design: These tales [‘the cheap publications which supply sensation for the million in penny and halfpenny numbers’] are to the full-grown sensation novel what the bud is to the flower, what the fountain is to the river, what the typical form is to the organized body. They are the original germ, the primitive monad, to which all the varieties of sensational literature may be referred, as to their source, by a law of generation at least as worthy of the attention of the scientific study as that by which Mr. Darwin’s bear may be supposed to have developed into a whale. (pp. 505–6) At the same time, the rapid ascendancy of sensation fiction was both read and explained in terms of the principles of natural selection, where such novels were deemed to be better adapted to prosper within the highly competitive conditions created by serial publication. As Harry Quilter suggests: In times of change, such as the present, when fresh growths are continually struggling up into daylight, there is some danger that older and, hitherto, well-loved forms of art and literature may disappear almost

146 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

unheeded, and that, while we stand gladly watching the bean-stalk-like rise of our new specimens, we may become just a little ungrateful to those authors who have gladdened us in former days.26 Within this environment, ‘Mr. Wilkie Collins’ productions sell by thousands of copies, [while] Romola with difficulty reaches a second edition’.27 Turning, for a moment, from the contemporary response to the novels themselves, it is clear that they do possess certain qualities – most obviously an emphasis on incident-laden plots that espouse the physicality of affect – that did indeed render them better adapted to cope with the climate of serial publication. Yet the prevailing critical tendency to read such formal properties primarily in relation to the conditions of the literary marketplace, fails to recognise how closely Collins’s plot mechanisms mirror the mechanisms of evolutionary theory. In their aim to produce a physical sensation rather than address the higher faculties, these plots may be seen both to reflect and engage with existing anxieties about the material – as opposed to moral – worldview implied by evolutionary theory. At the same time, Collins’s tendency to foreground the exigencies of plot over the governing control of character may be read as a reflection of the newly diminished stature of humanity signalled by the advent of a theory that acknowledged the role of chance, environment and a range of external factors over which the species had no control. Thus, it is only appropriate that a contemporary reviewer of Armadale should complain that Collins ‘has raised “plot interest” to the rank of a science’.28 In contrast to the comforting fictions of domestic realism where, according to E. S. Dallas, ‘man appears to be moulding circumstances to his will’, sensation novels put Darwinian principles into action by representing man ‘as made and ruled by circumstance, he is the victim of change and the puppet of intrigue’.29 According to Philip Davis, the significance of Dallas’s distinction between novels of incident (sensation fiction) and novels of character (realism) is that the former, ‘far from being self-evidently primitive and inferior . . . [were] actually offering a radically different account of the relation between the world of events and the formation and maintenance of human identities within it’.30 Yet what Davis’s reading does not fully appreciate is the extent to which Collins’s specifically Darwinian ‘account of the relation between . . . events . . . and identities’ calls into question that crucial sense of difference – between the ‘primitive’ racial other and civilised English identity – upon which Dallas’s defence is based. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the conflict between realism and sensationalism as staged in the contemporary reviews. Straddling the borders between science and literature, this debate echoed, in generic terms, Darwin’s disturbing assertion about the impossibility of demarcating the boundaries between species. Consider a single significant example of the images of racial alterity commonly employed by Collins’s critics. In a review of Armadale that appeared

Janice M. Allan

147

in the Westminster Review in 1866, John Richard De Capel Wise begins a vitriolic attack on sensation fiction by likening the current English taste for such novels to the ‘primitive’ habits of the Esquimaux and the Chinese (p. 269). Moving from questions of race to those of species, he then proceeds to compare Lydia Gwilt to ‘[a] big black baboon’ surrounded by ‘a number of small baboons and monkeys, for by no stretch of language can [such characters] be called human creatures’ (p. 270). As Amanda Hodgson reminds us, the 1860s were characterised by a pressing need ‘to distinguish humankind from animals (particularly from apes), and an associated attempt to redefine the difference between white European civilised races, and what were then generally known as “savages”’.31 Bearing this in mind, the full implications of Wise’s comment become clear. By undermining such differences Collins’s novels provoked what Susan Bernstein has termed ‘an anxiety of simianation, a discomfort over evolutionary ties between humans and other primate species’.32 The fear generated by such boundary transgression is evident in the repeated acknowledgements that sensation fiction is able to blur both geographical boundaries (it is ‘a plant of foreign growth’33) and social boundaries (it may ‘boast, without fear of contradiction, of having temporarily succeeded in making the literature of the Kitchen the favourite reading of the Drawing room’34). Nor is it irrelevant that such criticisms were often closely interlinked, mirroring the tendency of Victorian anthropology to conflate the ‘savage’ racial other with the ‘primitive’ working classes at home. At a time when the concept of difference – between humankind and animals, civilised and savage, acceptable and abject – played such an important role in the production of ‘the human’, the destabilising tendencies of sensation fiction were decidedly threatening. Thus it should not surprise us that many critics responded to this threat by attempting to erect a cordone sanitaire around the genre in order to contain and control its most unsettling properties. By sharply demarcating the boundaries between realism and sensation fiction, such critics attempted to construct two distinct species, or fixed forms, separated by a gulf as wide as the one the anti-evolutionists wished to impose between humankind and both brute animals and primitive racial others. This attempt to demarcate generic and/as specific boundaries is, perhaps, most evident in Margaret Oliphant’s declaration, in the course of a review of both realistic and sensation novels, that ‘we think it right to make as distinct a separation as the printer’s skill can indicate between the lower and the higher ground’.35 Inhabiting the ‘lower’ ground, it is only appropriate that The New Magdalen (1873) be compared to ‘the scratching of a savage’.36 Clearly positioned on the other side of this cultural divide, ‘a writer like George Eliot may look down from a very far height on such a dweller in the plains as he who wrote “The Woman in White”’.37 Regardless of how comforting such an illusion might have been, any attempt to cordon off the two genres was quickly recognised as futile and critics were forced to acknowledge that Collins’s novels represented nothing

148 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

so much as a generic hybrid that amalgamated both realistic and sensational characteristics. Thus Oliphant describes Collins as a writer who ‘boldly takes in hand the common mechanism of life, and . . . thrills us into . . . breathless interest’.38 According to the Spectator, his stories are ‘told in the fantastically realistic way which Mr. Collins has uniformly affected’,39 while a reviewer for The Times states that Collins ‘has shown himself a master of the art of amalgamating the most unmalleable and inconsistent of facts – fatalism and Hindoo mysticism and devotion, English squirearchy, detectives, and housemaids’.40 Such cross-fertilisation between genres did little to bolster the readers’ belief in the fixity of forms, literary or otherwise. It is important to recognise that nineteenth-century attitudes towards hybridity and crossbreeding ranged from those that advocated them as a means of investing stock with new vitality all the way down to the position of those, like Robert Knox, who saw them as both perverse and unnatural: ‘Nature produces no mules; no hybrids, neither in man nor animals.’41 In any case, the common assumption was that crossing ‘must be undertaken with a distinct and defined object’.42 In turn, the progressivist model just cited informed the admittedly slippery distinction between mongrels and hybrids. According to Darwin, mongrels are ‘descended from varieties often suddenly produced and semi-monstrous in character’ while hybrids are ‘descended from species slowly and naturally produced’.43 Clearly falling into the first category, Collins’s novels were commonly viewed, like the mongrel, as ‘semi-monstrous in character’ and the contemporary reviews were quick to condemn them as a form of miscegenation, labelling them as ‘perverse’,44 ‘spurious’,45 or ‘mutilated’.46 The assertion, within the Reader, that Collins’s novels constitute the product of ‘illegitimate connections,’47 is echoed in Putnam’s Magazine, where they are referred to as ‘the natural result of unnatural causes’.48 Capturing both the alleged permanence of distinct types, as well as Collins’s ability to call such permanence into question, a reviewer for The Spectator claims that: Moral deformity is as much a matter of growth, organisation, and permanence as is physical deformity; and the latter can be thrown aside at a moment’s warning, just as little as the former. But alas! some artists have so little regard for the integrity of nature, that they would be willing to let the sun rise in the west, if thereby they might create a more striking effect.49 This fixation with deformity and monstrosity is also evident in the Saturday Review’s comment that ‘Mr. Collins joins the beautiful woman to the fish without trying to conceal the transition.’50 While recalling the anomalous bodies displayed at freak-shows, this statement echoes nothing so precisely as George Du Maurier’s 1871 cartoon ‘The Keeper’s Nightmare’: an explicit representation of the potential monstrosity associated with miscegenation (Figure 9.1).51

Figure 9.1

George Du Maurier, ‘The Keeper’s Nightmare’, Punch 60 (1871), pp. 6–7

149

10.1057/9780230277212 - Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Edited by Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn

150 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Having constructed his works in terms of a mongrel misalliance, Collins’s critics may have comforted themselves with the widely held belief of the polygenists regarding the infertility of mixed breeds. Hence early reviews routinely reassure their readers that the sensation novel is a ‘temporary mania’,52 while later reviews continually stress the idea that ‘Each successive work becomes more of a strain and an effort’.53 Yet the unabated ‘multiplication of these tales’ (‘Recent Novels’ p. 108), coupled with the increasingly dominant understanding of hybridity that acknowledged the fertility of so-called ‘proximate’ species,54 further confirmed that sensation fiction and realism – and, by extension, the savage and the civilised – existed in a relation of sameness rather than difference. It is, at this juncture, worth reminding ourselves of Beer’s comments on ‘the missing link’. As she suggests, the ‘fear disguised [by this concept] was not, in the end, of otherness but of sameness: [that] the “other” of social class, or racial theory, or primate life, might prove to be indistinguishable from those who set out to describe it’.55 In much the same way, Collins’s novels represent that liminal space between spectator and stage (civilised subject and freakish object) where contemporary conflicts between difference and contiguity are played out. As this distance between self and other is broached, the spectre of degeneration comes to loom large, and such images and metaphors dominate contemporary discussions of the politics of sensational reading. According to H. F. Chorley, for example, sensation novelists ‘have placed themselves in a groove which goes, and must go, in a downward direction, whether as regards fiction or morals’.56 Moreover, the affective potential of these novels rendered them a particularly potent agent of contagion, allowing undesirable traits to be transmitted from text to reader. As the cited comments of Wise suggest, reading sensation fiction erodes racial differences. In the words of Alfred Austin, it ‘will end by enfeebling the minds of men and women, making flabby the fibre of their bodies, and undermining the vigour of nations’.57 Figuring the appeal of such fiction as evidence of a ‘poverty-stricken mind’ (Wise, p. 270), the act of reading also transgressed class boundaries, eliding crucial differences between the middle and working classes. Moving from the individual to the social body, Mansel acknowledges that: sensation novels must be recognised as a great fact in the literature of the day, and a fact whose significance is by no means of an agreeable kind. Regarding these works merely as an efflorescence, as an eruption indicative of the state of health of the body in which they appear, the existence of an impure or a silly crop of novels, and the fact that they are eagerly read, are by no means favourable symptoms of the conditions of the body of society. (p. 512) It was precisely this ‘marked disproportion’ between ‘its actual merits [and] its seeming popularity’58 that allowed the sensation genre to undermine

Janice M. Allan

151

any notion of progress implied by evolutionary theory, as well as the more specific standards of cultural ‘superiority’ used to demarcate British culture from its more ‘primitive’ counterparts. Serving as ‘a kind of barometer, whose indications we must study with thoughtfulness and care’ (‘Recent Novels’ p. 124), such texts were read as a worrying symptom of national, as well as individual, degeneration. As it might be suggested that much of what I have argued thus far applies to sensation fiction in general, rather than Collins in particular, I would, at this point, like to turn from the reviews to the novels – and from the Origin of Species to the origins of language – to suggest that the use of evolutionary discourses is, in the case of Collins, more obviously motivated. When the anti-evolutionary philologist, Max Müller, posed the question ‘Where, then, is the difference between brute and man?’ he was able to answer ‘without hesitation: the one great barrier between the brute and man is Language. Man speaks, and no brute has ever uttered a word. Language is our Rubicon, and no brute will dare to cross it.’59 As Christine Ferguson suggests, language, so conceived, is ‘not the product, but the embodiment of human thought, a transcendent faculty’.60 This idealised notion of language is, quite literally, logocentric: a collection of stable signs bestowed by God. Yet crucially, it is this very conception of language that Collins’s novels call into question, destabilising that all important ‘Rubicon’ that separates humans from brutes. In 1863, Alexander Smith asserted that ‘every trifling incident [in Collins’s novels] is charged with an oppressive importance: if a tea-cup is broken, it has a meaning, it is a link in a chain’.61 What we must recognise is that the significance of this strategy, like that of Marian and Dexter, is not limited to any individual text but, rather, sheds light on the corpus as a whole. For Collins, each signifier is, precisely, a link in a chain of signification, one charged with the trace of others. Consider the relationship between Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie in The Woman in White. Analysing his early impressions of Laura, Walter Hartright is troubled by a ‘sense of incompleteness’ and ‘the idea of something wanting. . . . which hindered [him] from understanding her’ (p. 76). As a supposedly stable sign – a single link decoupled from its chain – Laura is characterised by a lack that renders her illegible. It is only when Walter inscribes her into a network of textual referrals that he is able to recognise her striking resemblance to Anne and thus endow her with meaning, however provisional. The mutability and instability of the sign is foregrounded even more obviously in Armadale, where the proper name – supposedly the most stable of all signs – is subject to a most unnatural proliferation: ‘Allan Armadale’ denoting four separate characters. In this text, as in the others, a distinct rupture between signifier and signified allows the sign to function as ‘at once the truth in itself, and a lie’.62 So constructed, language is neither ‘the embodiment of human thought, [nor] a transcendent faculty’ but, rather, the product of material signification.63

152 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

In emphasising the materiality of the signifier, Collins was effectively echoing the suggestion made by Robert Chambers, in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), that the origins of language were material rather than miraculous. Moreover, Collins’s novels consistently suggest that there is ‘something wanting’ in language itself. More specifically, I would argue that Collins’s language is characterised by that most fascinating lacuna – a missing link – between signifier and signified. Nor is it insignificant that the missing link, constructed along both temporal and spatial boundaries, is ‘an epitome of “différance” . . . : difference and deferral at once’.64 The fact that Collins’s novels embody the missing link within language itself – that final bastion of human uniqueness – goes a long way towards explaining the almost morbid fear expressed in the contemporary response. For many Victorians, the ability to converse was what made us human; but to engage with Collins’s novels was, in the words of Smith, to ‘[hold] converse with monstrosities’.65 Thus these texts, like such ‘nondescripts’ as Julia Pastrana and ‘The Wild Man of the Prairies’, became an all too prominent link between the values of civilisation and its most feared others. Lyn Pykett recently provided a salutary reminder that the literary canon is not just a body of works but, in addition, a way of reading.66 I would, in conclusion, like to explore the implications of such an assertion in relation to the issues raised in this chapter. Adopting a pragmatic approach to genre that focuses on ‘use-value’,67 Richard Nemesvari argues that the point of the 1860s genre debate ‘was not just to define realism and sensationalism in relationship to each other, but to generate a clear set of expectations that the first was superior to the second’ and, in so doing, ‘to generate a canon of legitimate fiction’.68 Thus ‘sensation fiction is constructed not as a unified form, but as an alterity against which opposed literary/cultural expectations may be recognized’.69 This type of oppositional definition is becoming increasingly prevalent within recent criticism of sensation fiction.70 Concentrating on image clusters relating to disease, the corporeal, consumption and addiction, such readings tend to interpret sensation fiction not as a coherent body of texts sharing the same formal features but, rather, as an alternative or oppositional discursive formation that sheds light on a range of extratextual issues relating to class, mass readership and the conflict between high and low literary forms. While not disputing the role and significance of such discursive and interpretive frameworks, I would like to suggest that we need to broaden the field upon which sensationalism’s ‘alterity’ is established to include the cultural climate produced by Darwinian evolution. If the aim of the realism/sensationalism debate was to create ‘a canon of legitimate fiction’ – and, by extension, to excise its illegitimate other – we must remember that this term denotes not only that which is ‘valid or acceptable’, ‘sanctioned or authorised by law or right’71 (definitions most relevant to discussions of the high/popular divide), but also that which has ‘the status of one

Janice M. Allan

153

lawfully begotten’ or ‘real’ as opposed to ‘spurious’.72 Returning us to the realm of evolutionary biology, these latter definitions are directly relevant to a Darwinian inflected construction of sensation fiction as an example of generic miscegenation. Produced and consumed at an historical moment when it was ‘impossible to separate science from other knowledge and from daily life’,73 the anomalous, or nondescript, nature of Collins’s novels – their ability to confound and destabilise taxonomic boundaries – allowed them to function as a sort of secondary stage upon which one of the most pressing scientific conflicts of the era could be played out. Yet if these texts confirmed contemporary fears regarding the lack of definitive boundaries between species, that ‘forms were not fixedly imposed upon matter from above, but evolved from below’,74 the critical response effectively redressed such concerns through an active process of reading and canon formation that emphasised the primacy of both human agency and valuations. Thus the ‘use-value’ of sensation fiction may, in part, be located in its role in promoting literary criticism – the power ‘to make the best ideas prevail’75 – as an antidote to the blind mechanisms of an indifferent universe.

Notes 1. Cited in Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 266. 2. Ibid., p. 267. 3. The audience for such exhibitions, like that of sensation fiction, transcended class boundaries. As Teresa Mangum suggests, ‘Though city councillors and journalists alike presumed lower-class audiences funded the display of “freaks,” the exhibitions also captivated . . . well-educated, middle-class consumers.’ See Teresa Mangum, ‘Wilkie Collins, Detection, and Deformity’, Dickens Studies Annual, 26 (1998), pp. 285–310 (p. 290). 4. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, ed. Julian Symons (1860; Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1974), pp. 31; 32. Further references to this edition will be given in the text. 5. See Richard Collins, ‘Marian’s Moustache: Bearded Ladies, Hermaphrodites, and Intersexual Collage in The Woman in White’, in Reality’s Dark Light: the Sensational Wilkie Collins, ed. Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2003), pp. 131–72. 6. [H. F. Chorley], ‘Armadale’, Athenaeum, 2 June 1866, pp. 732–33 (p. 733). 7. See, for example, Margaret Oliphant, ‘Sensation Novels’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 91 (1862), pp. 564–85 (p. 572) and D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 146–91 (p. 152). 8. James W., Cook Jr., ‘Of Men, Missing Links, and Nondescripts: The Strange Career of P. T. Barnum’s “What is It?” Exhibition’, in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thompson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 139–57 (p. 147). 9. Cited in Altick, p. 265.

154 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature 10. Cited in Cook, p. 142. 11. Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady, ed. Jenny Bourne Taylor (1874; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 173. Further references to this edition will be given in the text. 12. A. C. Swinburne, ‘Wilkie Collins’, Fortnightly Review, n.s. 275 (November 1889), pp. 589–99 (p. 590). 13. Anon., ‘Armadale’, The Saturday Review, 16 June 1866, pp. 726–7 (p. 726). 14. Anon., ‘The Moonstone: A Novel’, Nation, 7, 17 September 1868, p. 235. 15. Cook, p. 147. 16. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit’, in Thompson (ed.), Freakery, pp. 55–66 (p. 57). 17. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (1859; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 44. 18. According to Charles Edward Mudie, Darwin and Huxley’s works were ‘as eagerly demanded as the latest production of Miss Braddon or Mr. Wilkie Collins’. See William Leatherdale, ‘The Influence of Darwinism on English Literature and Literary Ideas’, in The Wider Domain of Evolutionary Thought, ed. David Oldroyd and Ian Langham (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983), pp. 1–26 (p. 6). 19. Harriet Rivko, ‘Barring the Cross: Miscegenation and Purity in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Human, All Too Human, ed. Diana Fuss (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 37–57 (pp. 44–5). 20. It is not without significance that the appearance of Collins’s first sensation novel, Basil (1852), provoked a realisation that, ‘To write effectively of [Collins’s novels] we ought to have another vocabulary at hand.’ See Norman Page (ed.), Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 46. Further references to this volume will be given in the text. 21. Lawrence Frank, Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 4. 22. According to the contemporary critic, Harry Quilter, Armadale (1866) represents an attempt to ‘deal from the imaginative point of view with the doctrines of heredity, both physical and moral’. See Harry Quilter, ‘A Living Story-teller’, rpt. in Page, pp. 229–47 (p. 245). This comment applies equally well to both The Fallen Leaves (1879) and The Legacy of Cain (1889) amongst others. Described as ‘half monkey, half man’ (p. 347), The Law and the Lady’s Miserrimus Dexter offers a particularly obvious instance of the indebtedness of Collins’s novels to evolutionary biology. For recent discussions of how such discourses are employed in Collins’s novels, see Mangum and Gabrielle Ceraldi, ‘The Crystal Palace, Imperialism, and the “Struggle for Existence”: Victorian Evolutionary Discourse in Collins’s The Woman in White’, in Bachman and Cox (eds.), Reality’s, pp. 173–94. 23. Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 97–8. 24. See, for example, Richard Nemesvari, ‘“Judged by a Purely Literary Standard”: Sensation Fiction, Horizons of Expectation, and the Generic Construction of Victorian Realism’, in Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre, ed. Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina (Columbus: The Ohio University Press, 2006), pp. 15–28 and Pamela K. Gilbert, Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 25. [Henry L. Mansel], ‘Sensation Novels’, Quarterly Review, 113 (1863), pp. 481–514 (p. 483). Further references to this article will appear within the text.

Janice M. Allan

155

26. Quilter, p. 229. 27. [ John Richard De Capel Wise], ‘Belles Lettres’, Westminster Review, 86 n.s. 30 (1866), pp. 268–80 (p. 271). Further references to this article will be given in the text. 28. Rpt. in Page, p. 150. 29. Eneas Sweetland Dallas, The Gay Science, 2 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866), II, p. 293. 30. Philip Davis, The Victorians: 1830–1880, The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 333. 31. Amanda Hodgson, ‘Defining the Species: apes, savages and humans in scientific and literary writing of the 1860s’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 4.2 (1999), pp. 228–51 (p. 229). 32. Susan C. Bernstein, ‘Ape Anxiety: Sensation Fiction, Evolution, and the Genre Question’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 6.2 (2001), pp. 250–71 (p. 255). 33. Anon., ‘No Name’, The Reader, 1, 13 January 1863, pp. 14–15 (p. 15). 34. [W. Fraser Rae], ‘Sensation Novelists: Miss Braddon’, North British Review, 43 (1865), pp. 180–205 (p. 204). 35. [Margaret Oliphant], ‘Novels’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 102 (1867), pp. 257–80 (p. 275). 36. Swinburne, p. 596. 37. Anon., ‘Recent Popular Novels’, Dublin University Magazine, 62 (1861), pp. 192–208 (p. 200). 38. [Margaret Oliphant], ‘Sensation Novels’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 91 (1862), pp. 564–85 (p. 566). 39. Anon., ‘Jezebel’s Daughter’, The Spectator, 53, 15 May 1880, pp. 627–8 (p. 628). 40. Rpt. in Page, p. 175. 41. Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Fragment (1850; Miami, Florida: Mnemosyne Publishing Co., 1969), p. 52. 42. C. W. Spooner, ‘On Cross-Breeding in Horses’, The Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, 20 (1865), pp. 148–66 (p. 150). 43. Darwin, p. 223. 44. [H. F. Chorley], ‘No Name’, Athenaeum, 3 January 1863, pp. 10–11 (p. 10). 45. [D. E. Williams], ‘Poor Miss Finch: a Novel’, Athenaeum, 17 February 1872, pp. 202–3 (p. 202). 46. Anon, ‘No Name’, p. 15. 47. Ibid. 48. Anon., ‘Literature – At Home’, Putnam’s Magazine 16 (1870), pp. 339–43 (p. 339). 49. Rpt., in Page, p. 210. 50. Anon., ‘Man and Wife’, The Saturday Review, 30, 9 July 1870, pp. 52–3 (p. 52). 51. [George] D[u] M[aurier], ‘The Keeper’s Nightmare’, Punch, 60 (1871), pp. 6–7. 52. Anon., ‘Recent Novels: Their Moral and Religious Teaching’, London Review, 27 (1866), pp. 100–24 (p. 103). Further references to this article will be given in the text. 53. Anon., ‘Poor Miss Finch’, The Saturday Review, 33, 2 March 1872, pp. 282–3 (p. 283). 54. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 18. 55. Beer, p. 145. 56. Chorley, ‘Armadale’, p. 732. 57. [Alfred Austin], ‘The Vice of Reading’, Temple Bar, 42 (1874), pp. 251–71 (p. 251). 58. Anon, ‘Recent Popular Novels’, p. 200.

156 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature 59. Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, rpt. in The Origin of Language, ed. Roy Harris (1861; Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 1996), pp. 7–41 (p. 14). 60. Christine Ferguson, Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: The Brutal Tongue (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing 2006), p. 1. 61. [Alexander Smith], ‘Novels and Novelists of the Day’, North British Review, 38 (1863), pp. 183–5 (p. 183). 62. Wilkie Collins, Armadale, ed. Catherine Peters (1866; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 655. 63. For an extended discussion of Collins’s destabilisation of language, see Janice M. Allan, ‘“A Lock without a Key”: Language and Detection in Collins’s The Law and the Lady’, Clues: A Journal of Detection, 25.1 (2006), pp. 45–57. 64. Beer, p. 121. 65. Smith, p. 183. 66. Lyn Pykett, ‘What canon? Which canon? Victorian writing at the turn of the twenty-first century’, Keynote Lecture delivered at Victorian Literature: The Canon and Beyond (University of Chester, June 2007). 67. The term belongs to Thomas O’Beebee who states: ‘The identification of a genre lies not in its features, but in the use it puts them to’. See Thomas O’Beebee, The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 274. 68. Nemesvari, p. 19. 69. Ibid., p. 18. 70. See, for example, Bradley Deane, The Making of the Victorian Novelist: Anxieties of Authorship in the Mass Market (New York and London: Routledge, 2003) and Davis, pp. 318–35. 71. Oxford English Dictionary, A. adj. def. [2.]e.; A. adj. def. 2.a. 72. Ibid., A. adj. def. 1.a.; A. adj. def. 1.b. 73. Cited in Davis, p. 68. 74. Ibid., p. 63. 75. Matthew Arnold, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, in Four Essays on Life and Letters, ed. by E. K. Brown (1864; New York: Appleton-Century, 1947), pp. 1–33 (p. 5).

10 Dickens and the Heritage Industry; or, Culture and the Commodity Juliet John

In the years since Dickens first found fame as an author, his image has been used in many contexts, most suggestively as the face for over a decade of the £10 note.1 On the Dickens note, his image is superimposed on the ‘inimitably English’ scene of the Dingley Dell cricket match in The Pickwick Papers.2 The note associates Dickens, and British currency, with an image of cosy pre-urban, communal life. It fossilises the image of England and of Dickens in a past or ‘heritage’ at odds with the competitive, conflicted context of Victorian Britain. The note captures some of the tensions this chapter will explore – most notably, the paradoxical repression of Dickens’s commercialism, promoted in the unlikely context of the £10 note. I seek to expose the conflict in the heritage industry between the promotion of an anti-materialist ideal of Culture and the commercial, materialist context of that industry’s evolution. In a broader sense, I hope to shed light on the ways in which the history and theory of the term Culture has been haunted by the idea of an antagonism, or even conflict, between the notions of Culture and commerce. In his book on Victorian afterlives, John Gardiner cites the view that today, ‘Charles Dickens is the Victorian era’; the term ‘“Dickensian” often illuminates “Victorian” rather than vice-versa’, he argues.3 It is true that in the popular imagination at least, the idea of Dickens and the idea of the Victorian period are often conflated. Dickens’s relationship with the heritage industry is central to this conflation. I will make only two points about this relationship here: first, that the heritage industry promotes an idea of culture and of Dickens which represses commercialism. Given Dickens’s naked commercialism, his heritage afterlife is thus particularly interesting. Second, I am arguing that Dickens differs from other authors who play a key part in Britain’s ‘heritage’ industry – Shakespeare and Jane Austen would be obvious examples – in the sense that he actively worked to further his own literary and financial fortunes by marketing his image both at home and abroad. He forged a Dickens industry and indeed a Dickens heritage industry 157

158 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

and was therefore not simply its posthumous object. He was modern in the sense that he consciously worked to create and control a worldwide market for his novels and his image. There are multiple ways in which Dickens did this; for example, ‘working the copyrights’ of his novels (as he put it) , involving himself in all business arrangements surrounding his work, elevating authorship above publishing, forging a distinct and controlled public image for himself through his readings, journalism and public appearances.4 It is not difficult to demonstrate the extent to which Dickens was the impetus behind the Dickens industry of his day; what is perhaps more risky is to suggest that Dickens literally willed the posthumous Dickens industry. The destruction of letters relating to Ellen Ternan, and the acquiescence of all his friends and acquaintances in this airbrushing is perhaps the most well-known evidence of Dickens’s attempt to exercise posthumous control. A quirkier anecdote also vividly demonstrates the point, as well as illustrating subsequent unease with Dickens’s commercialism. After Dickens’s death, his ‘representatives’ organised a public sale of Dickens’s (mainly domestic) belongings that met with opposition among many who no doubt found something distasteful about it. In a report in Chambers’s Journal, though the reporter attempts to show support for the sale (claiming that ‘Charles Dickens was far too free-handed and generous a man to die rich’), his distaste for proceedings is apparent in the ambivalent conclusion that ‘No living Englishman for certain, and perhaps no Englishman of the future, will ever see such a sale again.’5 The public sale for money of the domestic belongings of England’s foremost author seemed in dubious taste in any case, but especially so because the objects sold seemed to be second-rate – no Pickwick manuscripts, but unimpressive pictures, drawings and art objects, as well as a model for Grip the raven from Barnaby Rudge. What seemed most surprising is that Dickens had desired the sale. No doubt he wanted to raise money for his family from the sale of such ‘artefacts’, as the article calls them. But the striking aspect of his desire for the sale is the implied consciousness on Dickens’s part of the dynamics of the business of heritage, of his living consciousness that fame and posthumousness could transform even the most vulgar of objects into artefacts and into money. Of all Britain’s ‘cultural heritage’ figures, Dickens is the only one who literally willed the association between the artist’s image and material things which is the mainstay of the heritage industry. He would probably not have disapproved of the decision of the Dickens Centenary Testimonial Committee in 1912 to issue one penny ‘stamps’ of Dickens, profits from which would go to Dickens’s ‘necessitous dependants’ if sales reached ten million.6 Although there was some ill feeling about this in the press because it was felt that not many of Dickens’s descendants were ‘necessitous’, the Secretary of the Centenary committee defended the scheme by explaining, ‘The idea is that Dickens lovers should buy one stamp for every volume they

Juliet John

159

have, and stick it in the cover as a proof that the debt to Dickens’s memory has been paid.’7 The use of the word ‘debt’ to suggest both financial and moral obligation echoes Dickens’s own unembarrassed discursive layering. In the Dickens Museum’s uncatalogued clippings of all things Dickensian, articles published in 1913 about Dickens the reformer are juxtaposed with articles suggesting a commercial rather than a radical ‘popularity’. ‘Dickens in Pottery’, for example, announces with excited awe that the latest development in pottery collection is the manufacture of specimens of pottery of all descriptions and in a wide variety of forms, from plates to mugs, vases to bowls, embellished with the characters of Dickens, especially when it is carried out in such famous ware as that issuing from the ovens of the Doulton establishment. ‘Dickens “Doultonised”’ has become a colloquialism, and it is a development which will be keenly appreciated by all lovers of the novelist.8 The piece protests a little too much about the ‘technical excellence’ of the pottery and the ‘faithful portrayal of characters’ like Mr Pickwick, before explaining that ‘Americans, who are among the keenest admirers of Dickens, have extended an enthusiastic welcome to the movement in pottery, and are developing an acute rivalry in the acquisition of specimens of the ware’. The insistence that ‘the fact they are the creations of the Doulton works is sufficient guarantee of their perfection’ suggests some insecurity about whether or not these products of a marriage of literature and pottery are in good taste. What is interesting is the subsequent disassociation of Dickens from materialism in the public imagination. In the visitors’ book at Dickens’s former home in Bloomsbury, now the Charles Dickens Museum, among the most striking remarks comes from a visitor from Illinois, USA, who claimed that the visit had been ‘worth the 3,500 mile pilgrimage’ (12 October 2005): the idea that a visit to Dickens’s former home is a pilgrimage makes explicit the almost spiritual investment made by some cultural tourists in material things. Material things must be spiritualised, sublimated into something beyond or outside the material and commercial sphere, in order to be ‘valuable’; heritage artefacts can become elevated to the status of religious relics. An Australian visitor to the Museum made explicit the common need of the heritage tourist to translate or ‘romanticise’ the heritage artefact (in this case, the home): ‘Just what you romanticise about all things English’ (7 November 2005). Another made clear the need to mentally detach the idea of the past from modernity: ‘Charmingly old-fashioned museum’, ‘very pleased to note there is little in the way of modern touches. Excellent!’ (27 November 2005). A couple from New Orleans commented in the wake of the devastating hurricane that has destroyed their city: ‘This is a truly delightful house. We could use Dickens in America in post-Katrina relief

160 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

efforts’ (23 December 2005). Their moving remark associates Dickens with a passionate belief in social justice and with a willingness to campaign vociferously to that end in public. In apparently stark contrast, a family visiting the museum the same week struck a different chord with their attention-seeking rejection of heritage ideals: ‘not at all cosy reminds me of a hospital’, writes one; another, in a piece of character dialogue that could have been written by a modern Dickens, states ‘I would not like to live in them times, there would not be plugs for straighteners’ (29 December 2005). In fact, these non-believers in heritage share with the believers the idea that the Victorian period represents a time when commodities or material things were not valued in the way that they are in today’s market-driven western societies. What all these varied comments have in common is a belief that Dickens pre-dates materialism, that his identity and home represent a kind of authenticity at odds with the values of today’s consumer society. If the commodity represents to heritage tourists what one critic has called ‘the dead center of the modern world’, the heritage figure or site suggests a world in which the centre is invested with meaning. 9 A vital component of the heritage industry, of course, is nostalgia, an emotionally infused view of the past which serves a present need for feelings of wholeness, belief and simplicity. As David Lowenthal puts it, heritage ‘is not an inquiry into the past but a celebration of it, not an effort to know what actually happened but a profession of faith in a past tailored to present-day purposes’.10 Heritage tourism feeds both the need to see the past as different or ‘Other’, and the need to experience a sense of organic and emotional connection to our ancestors, a sense of roots and of belonging. This doubleness is no doubt partly a response to the disorientating environment of secularised, western modernity, to the experience of fragmentation which can accompany the emphasis on difference in postmodern culture. What is interesting is that in heritage tourism, the commodity is not seen as representing a link to the Victorian past but as symbolising the difference or conflict between past and present. In reality, of course, as Thomas Richards has argued, Victorian culture was a commodity culture.11 In the case of Dickens, his immersion in this culture extends beyond his business practices to the novels themselves, which exude an intrinsic commercialism the extent of which no doubt evaded even Dickens and which goes far beyond the often cited serialisation of the novels, the use of ‘cliffhanger endings’, stereotypical characters, ‘popular sentiment’, etc. My contention is that Dickens’s poetics are steeped in the new commodity culture, drawing on it and offering a shop window back to it – literally so, in the case of The Old Curiosity Shop, which exists to sell curious things. Even at a sub-textual level in Dickens’s writings, things are animated and exhibit themselves. But the materialism of the novels is of a particular kind: it is imbued with a markedly modern, heritage sensibility (a paradox only if one fails to understand that the heritage market was

Juliet John

161

created by industrialisation). The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1), for example, contains ‘tapestry and strange furniture that might have been designed in dreams’, and is itself strange and dreamlike.12 Like a museum, it invests curious objects with emotional, cultural and economic value. The Dickens world is a self-conscious, framed world, yet steeped in an urge to believe, an urge to feel, that the framed world is the better reality. In this way, it could be argued, a heritage aesthetic is engrained in Dickens’s novels. The tendency in Dickens’s novels to make objects ‘live and breathe’, to announce their status as anthropomorphic spectacle, simultaneously places them in a glass case and intensifies their presence or ‘aura’.13 The heritage aesthetic is most obvious in Dickens’s descriptions of inns or homes, places he invested with a particularly Dickensian nostalgia: not a watercolour nostalgia, but an unusually intense feeling (and indeed an unusual feeling), of nostalgia satisfied. As in Dickens’s depictions of eating and drinking, the reader feels that s/he is literally or perhaps physically consuming the images: feelings of desire and plenitude co-exist. A classic example of Dickens’s heritage aesthetic is in his description of the Maypole inn, which opens Barnaby Rudge (1841): In the year 1775, there stood upon the borders of Epping Forest, at a distance of about twelve miles from London – measuring from the Standard in Cornhill or rather from the spot on or near to which the Standard used to be in days of yore – a house of public entertainment called the Maypole; which fact was demonstrated to all such travellers as could neither read nor write (and at that time a vast number both of travellers and stay-at-homes were in this condition) by the emblem reared on the roadside over against the house, which, if not of those goodly proportions that Maypoles were wont to present in olden times, was a fair young ash, thirty feet in height, and straight as any arrow that ever English yeoman drew. The Maypole – by which term from henceforth is meant the house, and not its sign – the Maypole was an old building, with more gable ends than a lazy man would care to count on a sunny day; huge zig-zag chimneys, out of which it seemed as though even smoke could not choose but come in more than naturally fantastic shapes, imparted to it in its tortuous progress; and vast stables, gloomy, ruinous, and empty. The place was said to have been built in the days of King Henry the Eighth; and there was a legend, not only that Queen Elizabeth had slept there one night while upon a hunting excursion, to wit, in a certain oak-panelled room with a deep bay window, but that next morning, while standing on a mounting block before the door with one foot in the stirrup, the virgin monarch had then and there boxed and cuffed an unlucky page for some neglect of duty. The matter-of-fact and doubtful folks, of whom there were a few among the Maypole customers, as unluckily there always

162 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

are in every little community, were inclined to look upon this tradition as rather apocryphal; but whenever the landlord of that ancient hostelry appealed to the mounting block itself as evidence, and triumphantly pointed out that there it stood in the same place to that very day, the doubters never failed to be put down by a large majority, and all true believers exulted as in a victory.14 Dickens’s writing runs the gamut of heritage techniques in this passage: he introduces specific details of place/distance to create a feeling of authenticity; he alludes to the folk history of ‘olden times’, thus appealing to heritage notions that the past is intrinsically more valuable than the present; his appeal to an agrarian, pre-urban ideal of Englishness is foregrounded in his mention of the ‘English yeoman’ and his straight arrows. What is interesting about the passage is not that Dickens links the inn with some of the ‘great’ figures of English history, Henry the Eighth and Queen Elizabeth – he had a low opinion of both15 – but that he lays bare the tangential and superstitious relationship between objects and stories in our consumption of history. Henry VIII and his daughter have generated their own niche in the tourist industry as much because they are celebrities as because of the comforting idea of roots and lineage suggested by their royal status. The ‘oak-panelled room’ in which Queen Elizabeth is said to have slept and the ‘mounting block’ are objects invested with their own lives and histories by believers. The passage is clear, however, that both heritage and history involve story-telling and a willed fetishisation of objects. Whereas Gardiner argues that ‘The cost of “heritage”, [. . .] is a highly selective view of history’, Dickens’s sceptical view of history suggests that history itself is highly selective and, as John Bowen argues, irrational.16 The Barnaby Rudge passage is of course an extreme – and indeed an easy – example of Dickens’s heritage aesthetic at work as it is an historical novel. But the same self-conscious yet emotional framing permeates all Dickens’s re-presentations of buildings, people and places. To cite the most obvious examples, in Bleak House (1852–3) the heritage aesthetic is both deployed and interrogated – not only does the title hold up the romanticising of home for scrutiny; Esther is given a replica of the real thing by Jarndyce, her father-figure turned suitor turned fairy godfather. The title of Bleak House immediately objectifies the named house itself, not simply because the book is named after the house but because the name of the house is so uninviting. When John Jarndyce introduces Esther to the house that will become her home, he does so in the role of Benevolent Agent, as if waving a wand or lifting a curtain. ‘Come, girls, come and see your home’, he tells Ada and Esther; the home itself is far from bleak – ‘one of those delightfully irregular houses’ containing ‘furniture, old-fashioned rather than old, like the house’.17 When Esther is presented with her own ‘Bleak House’, a substitute

Juliet John

163

for the home she had shared with Jarndyce, the heritage aesthetic is both obvious and complex. The first thing Esther notices is that, ‘the beds and flowers were all laid out according to the manner of my beds and flowers at home’.18 The new house which is to become her home is ‘a cottage, quite a rustic cottage of doll’s rooms’ which replicates in miniature ‘in the papering on the walls, in the colours of the furniture, in the arrangement of all the pretty objects, my little tastes and fancies’.19 The replica house is preferable to the original, of course, because in starting a new life with Woodcourt there, she can leave the discomfort of her relationship with Jarndyce in a different place. That there is something willed and fantastical about this compartmentalising of people and emotions, of which Dickens is clearly aware. The Preface explains that in the novel he has ‘purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things’. Though Esther’s miniature Bleak House commoditises her by making her (before Bella Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend (1864–5) a doll in a doll’s house, Esther chooses to dwell on ‘the romantic side of familiar things’. The purposeful dwelling on ‘the romantic side of familiar things’, as Dickens calls it in the Preface to Bleak House, plays an important part in the heritage aesthetic. The investment of the home with romance, with almost sacred significance, is closely associated with Dickens and his writings.20 Dickens’s homes in London and Rochester are long-standing visitor attractions, as are the homes of other ‘cultural heritage’ figures like Wordsworth and the Brontës. The home is considered an especially important physical relic of posthumous celebrities because since the nineteenth century, western culture has constructed the home as the space in which the private self, or the ‘real’ self, as so many believe, gained its fullest expression. What is fascinating about Dickens is the way in which he himself fictionalised or fetishised his own homes. Like Jarndyce, he self-consciously invests houses with nostalgia. Home-sick for Devonshire Terrace on his first visit to America, he effuses: Oh for Jack Straw’s! Oh for Jack! oh for Topping! – oh for Charley, Mamey, Katey – the study, the Sunday’s dinner, the anything and everything connected with our life at Home! How cheerfully would I turn from this land of freedom and spittoons – of crowds, and noise, and endless rush of strangers – of everything public, and nothing private – of endless rounds of entertainments, and daily levees to receive 500 people – to the lightest, least-prized pleasure of ‘Den’ner Terrace’! I turn my eyes towards the picture [. . .] and yearn for Home, three thousand miles away.21 Elements of the fictional are clearly in evidence here: the letter functions as a framed picture of home and home-sickness (which as Gardiner points out was the original meaning of the word ‘nostalgia’.22) Dickens is even more stagey in a letter to his American friend Felton describing

164 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

his summer seaside home at Broadstairs, Kent. He sets the ‘scene’ very deliberately: This is a little fishing-place; intensely quiet; built on a cliff whereon – in the centre of a tiny semicircular bay – our house stands: the sea rolling and dashing under the windows. [. . .] Under the cliff are rare good sands, where all the children assemble every morning and throw up impossible fortifications which the sea throws down again at high water. Old gentleman and ancient ladies, ‘flirt’, after their own manner, in two reading rooms and on a great many scattered seats in the open air. In a bay-window one pair sits from nine o’Clock to one, a gentleman with rather long hair and no neck-cloth who writes and grins as if he thought he were very funny indeed. His name is Boz. [. . .] Nobody bothers him unless they know he is disposed to be talked to; and I am told he is very comfortable indeed. He’s as brown as a berry, and they do say, is a small fortune to the innkeeper who sells beer and cold punch. But this is mere rumour. Sometimes he goes up to London (eighty miles or so, away) and then I’m told there is a sound in Lincolns Inn Fields at night, as of men laughing: together with a clinking of knives and forks and wine-glasses.23 Dickens’s description acts a seaside picture postcard. The writer of Sketches by Boz (1839) and Pictures from Italy (1846) is aware of his own habit of picturing scenes, as he is of his self-mythologising. All the elements of the hale and hearty Dickens are here: home, health, comfort, male companionship, and inns. If we thought Dickens could not possibly be any more extravagant in his descriptions of home, his late letter to another American, Annie Fields, describing his homecoming to Gad’s Hill after the last American tour, is almost comic in its flamboyant sense of the homecoming (and the letter) as a spectacular exhibition. His repetition of the word ‘usual’ reveals a desperate need for the idea of normality and stability, and a need to convey the impression of a domestic stasis at odds with Dickens’s wanderlust. The picture presented is very much of himself as a village squire or lord of the manor who happens to receive the treatment of a returning celebrity author: The two Newfoundland dogs, coming to meet me with the usual carriage and the usual driver, and beholding me coming in my usual dress out of the usual door, it struck me that their recollection of my having been absent for any unusual time was at once cancelled. They behaved [. . .] exactly in their usual manner [. . .]. But when I drove into the stableyard, Linda (the St. Bernard) was greatly excited; weeping profusely, and throwing herself on her back that she might caress my foot with

Juliet John

165

her great fore-paws. Mamie’s little dog, too, Mrs. Bouncer, barked in the greatest agitation [. . .] and tore round and round me, like the dog in the Faust outlines. You must know that all the farmers turned out on the road in their market-chaises to say ‘Welcome home, sir!’ and that all the houses along the road were dressed with flags; and that our servants, to cut out the rest, had dressed this house so that every brick of it was hidden. They had asked Mamie’s permission to ‘ring the alarm-bell’ (!) when master drove up, but Mamie, having some slight idea that that compliment might awaken master’s sense of the ludicrous, had recommended bell abstinence. But on Sunday the village choir (which includes the bell-ringers) made amends. After some unusually pious reflections in the crowns of their hats at the end of the sermon, the ringers bolted out, and rang like mad until I got home.24 His description of the house itself, though highly idealised – reminiscent of the rural idylls in Oliver Twist but more convincing – is shot through with intense feeling. Here we have the fusion of fantasy and feeling which for Dickens can be more real than mundane reality. To Dickens at times, in the words of Esther Summerson, ‘the unreal things were more substantial than the real’.25 The metamorphic line between the real and the unreal in Dickens’s worldview is evidenced by the fact that it had been Dickens’s childhood dream, prompted by his financially feckless father, to own Gad’s Hill. In the letter to Annie Fields, the desire to own the home is fulfilled yet the childhood dream inhabits the description of this ‘perfect’ abode: Divers birds sing here all day, and the nightingales all night. The place is lovely, and in perfect order. I have put five mirrors in the Swiss chalet (where I write) and they reflect and refract in all kinds of ways the leaves that are quivering at the windows, and the great fields of waving corn, and the sail-dotted river. My room is up among the branches of the trees; and the birds and the butterflies fly in and out, and the green branches shoot in, at the open windows, and the lights and shadows of the clouds come and go with the rest of the company. The scent of the flowers, and indeed of everything that is growing for miles and miles, is most delicious.26 The surviving photographs taken of Dickens’s friends and family gathered at Gad’s Hill capture the idyll for posterity. Gardiner argues that ‘photographs capture an irretrievable moment that is history as soon as it is taken’.27 Dickens’s writings do likewise.28 What at first jars with the amount of attention Dickens lavished on the idea of home, is the number of homes and dwellings Dickens lived in during his lifetime. He had fourteen homes in as many years as a child and although, after the age of 27, he had only three permanent homes, his

166 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

peripatetic existence seems at odds with his idealisation of particular homes. It is difficult not to conclude that the idealisation of home functions as an anchor for his restless and at times rootless existence. It is notable that in his letters, Dickens refers most often to his houses by naming them; we read far more often of ‘Doughty Street’, ‘Tavistock Square’, ‘Broadstairs’, ‘Gad’s’, or ‘Gad’s Hill’ – than we do simply of home. Dickens’s habit of objectifying his houses by naming them is an attempt to personalise, particularise and familiarise. It was also perhaps a practical necessity because of Dickens’s wandering ways. But the naming of specific homes is also an indication that Dickens’s longing to be at one with his homes was never fulfilled to the extent that home could remain nameless, to the extent that the word could speak for itself. Dickens’s rootlessness made him, of course, sensitive to the urban context of modernity and his urban cityscapes are as important to the heritage industry as his representation of cosy homes and inns. Indeed, Dickens’s grim cityscapes have been influential on the negative associations currently associated with the adjective ‘Victorian’. Yet there is a thriving market for grimness: Dickens has become associated with London to such an extent that there is a flourishing industry for books on Dickens’s London, and walks around Dickens’s London. As Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens’s London puts it, ‘London created Dickens, just as Dickens created London’.29 In a 1990s tourist survey, Dickens was the writer most associated with place and mostly with London.30 What is important is that Dickens’s commodification of place underpins his cityscapes as well as his snug inns and homes. Dickens does not simply represent urban deprivation: he exhibits it. The filmic descriptions of London in Bleak House and Oliver Twist (1837–9) announce themselves as grand productions, both setting the scene from a distance to begin with, then honing in on detail, mayhem and multiplicity. In Oliver Twist, we are positioned as tourists, literally led to Jacob’s Island: NEAR to that part of the Thames on which the church at Rotherhithe abuts, where the buildings on the banks are dirtiest and the vessels on the river blackest with the dust of colliers and the smoke of close-built lowroofed houses, there exists, at the present day, the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are hidden in London, wholly unknown, even by name, to the great mass of its inhabitants. To reach this place, the visitor has to penetrate through a maze of close, narrow and muddy streets.31 Like the opening of Bleak House, the description of Jacob’s Island is teeming with reminders of the materialism and consumerism of the times. Even in this poorest of areas, ‘provisions are heaped in shops’, ‘the coarsest and commonest articles of wearing apparel dangle at the salesman’s door’, and wagons bearing ‘great piles of merchandise’ clash. The picture of ‘every imaginable

Juliet John

167

sign of desolation and neglect’ is held up to the reader who is positioned as a visiting outsider. What is clear from the description and in the novel more generally is that the underworld and the world of the Brownlows are intimately related: they are alternate streaks in a side of streaky bacon, to quote the novel’s most memorable image. The commercial culture in evidence even in Jacob’s Island creates winners and losers: Jacob’s Island with its crime, poverty and disease, and Brownlow with his splendid townhouse and his book-buying budget. In his landmark volume, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline, Robert Hewison associates the heritage industry with ‘the imaginative death of this country’, accusing it of placing a ‘screen between ourselves and our true past’.32 In Dickens’s novels, the idealisation of place and the past is not the opposite to the problems of modernity; chocolatebox heritage functions in a dialectical relationship to the modern and the urban. The heritage sensibility serves imaginative needs and does not simply signal imaginative death; the problematic, nostalgic idea of a ‘true past’ is itself a heritage ideal, the product in the context of his writing on the 1980s, of a commodity culture that cannot be erased. Dickens typically appreciated that commodification was not falsification but permeated modern urban living as well as modern versions of the past. He may not then have been surprised as some of its detractors at the multi-million pound Dickens entertainment site opened in Chatham, Kent in 2007 – costing £62 million and expected to attract up to 300,000 visitors a year. An article in the Evening Standard on the park entitled ‘Forget Disneyland, try Dickens world’ stressed its backers’ view that the venture represents a commitment to both our cultural heritage and to commerce. Dickens World, it was hoped, ‘would introduce a new generation to Dickens and his characters’ and generate £700 million of investment.33 Dickens World’s combined commitment to cultural heritage, cultural access and commerce is arguably true to Dickens’s values. However, the hostility it has generated in some quarters represents in no small part a reaction to the foregrounding of the association between Dickens and commercialism or commodification that Dickens World has seemed to represent.34 While the heritage industry industry in general has worked to silence Dickens’s commercialism, Dickens World, like Disneyland, has seemed to its detractors to celebrate the commodification of culture. Dickens has been traditionally associated in the public consciousness with an idea of the Victorian past rather than with the idea of Disney. Of all Dickens’s texts, A Christmas Carol has done most to shape popular perceptions of Dickens: it has been the most adapted, widely disseminated and commercially successful of all Dickens’s works and has established a ‘heritage’ image of a quintessentially Victorian Dickens fiercely opposed to greed and materialism – a Dickens who elevated feelings and people above money and commodities. It is fascinating, therefore, that A Christmas Carol

168 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

in fact holds a mirror up as much to the intrinsic connection between our emotional needs and our commercial environment as to their opposition. More than this, it demonstrates the dialectical ‘structure of feeling’ underpinning the heritage industry to which it has become so central.35 It is popular not simply because it offers ‘redemption’ for those corrupted by materialism but because it acknowledges the urban, commercial context of that materialism and the emotional needs it creates. One of those needs is for something more than the material or the monetary; another is the need to revisit the past and to transform it, to sublimate it as a salve to present conflicts. It is perhaps because A Christmas Carol dramatises and anatomises the heritage sensibility that it has become such an important object of that sensibility. A Christmas Carol has become central to the popular mythology of the Victorians, of Christmas, and of Dickens, not only because it offers a simple and reassuring Victorian allegory, but because that allegory is predicated on seemingly straightforward conflicts (between past and present, the material and the spiritual, individualism and community) that can also function, depending on perspective, as continuities and connections. Put one way, A Christmas Carol frames Christmas for the new commodity culture and the heritage sensibility that grew from it. It offers a new iconography of Christmas befitting the modern age, self-consciously freezing in time utopian and dystopian images of the main Christian festival (and of the past) for Scrooge and the consumer/reader to choose. The idea of choice, central to modern capitalist democracies, is enshrined, as are the effects of choice. It is not only a sentimental Carol; it offers a re-presentation of the dynamics of sentimentality, nostalgia, longing, and desire. It upholds an apparently simple ideal of Christmas which transcends material values, at the same time that it shows the effort of will necessary to summon and believe in such a vision. Despite its complex relationship to commodity culture and the riches it has generated through the ages, A Christmas Carol enshrined Dickens as an icon of benevolence and selflessness. That it did so captures the dynamics of the heritage mentality at its purest and most paradoxical. The image of the uncommercial Dickens is testimony to an ongoing modern need to sublimate money matters in the cultural sphere; it is also testimony to the extent to which Dickens commodified himself for money as well as for the masses.

Notes 1. Dickens’s image appeared on the £10 note between 1992 and 2003. 2. John Gardiner, The Victorians: An Age in Retrospect (London: Hambledon and London, 2002), p. 167.

Juliet John

169

3. Ibid., p. 161. 4. Dickens used the phrase ‘working the copyrights’ in a letter to Bradbury and Evans, 8 May 1844 – The Letters of Charles Dickens, Pilgrim edn., ed. Kathleen Tillotson, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), IV, p. 121. 5. [Anon.], ‘At Dickens’s Sale’, Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, no. 345 (6 August 1870), pp. 502–5 (pp. 503, 505). 6. An anonymous article headed ‘The Dickens Stamp Controversy’ in The Dickens Newspaper Clipping Archive, The Charles Dickens Museum, File 13. The archive is not catalogued and File 13 (‘Diary for 1913’) contains documents, newspaper clippings and handwritten notes on Dickens from that year. The sources are not always identified. The stamps under discussion were not postage stamps but labels or decorative stamps. 7. This letter from Beckles Willson is included with ‘The Stamp Controversy’ article described in n. 6. 8. [Anon.], ‘Dickens in Pottery’ in The Dickens Newspaper Clipping Archive, The Charles Dickens Museum, not catalogued, File 13. 9. Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 1. 10. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York: Free Press, c. 1996; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. x. 11. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England; see n. 11 above. 12. The Clarendon Dickens, ed. Elizabeth M. Brennen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), chapter 1, p. 10. 13. For Walter Benjamin, in his essay ‘The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), ‘aura’ is the idea of a special ‘essence’ or ‘authenticity’ which in traditional theories of art seems to attach itself to the ‘great’ works of art or artists. In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), pp. 211–44 (p. 215). 14. Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of, Eighty (1841), ed. John Bowen (London: Penguin, 2003), chapter 1, p. 7. 15. See Dickens’s A Child’s History of England (1853). Henry VIII is described as ‘one of the most detestable villains that ever drew breath’ and Queen Elizabeth I is portrayed as ‘coarse, capricious, and treacherous’ despite her ‘fine qualities’. (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1853–54), II, 86, 187. 16. The Victorians: An Age in Retrospect, p. 90; Bowen, Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 159. 17. Ed. Nicola Bradbury (London: Penguin, 2003), Chapter 6, pp. 85, 85, 86. 18. Ibid, chapter 64, p. 962. 19. Ibid., chapter 64, p. 963. 20. See, for example, Malcolm Andrews, Dickens on England and the English (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979), pp. 1–25. 21. Letter to Daniel Maclise (27 February 1842); The Letters of Charles Dickens, Pilgrim edn., ed. Madeleine House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), III, 94. The picture he refers to here is Maclise’s crayon drawing of the four Dickens children with the raven. 22. The Victorians: An Age in Retrospect, p. 86. 23. (1 September 1843); Pilgrim Letters, III, 548. 24. Letter to Mrs J. T. Fields (25 May 1868), in The Letters of Charles Dickens, Pilgrim edn., ed. by Graham Storey, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), XII, 118-20 (pp. 118–19).

170 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

Bleak House, chapter 59, p. 913. Letter to Mrs J. T. Fields (25 May 1868); Pilgrim Letters, XII, 118–19. The Victorians: An Age in Retrospect, p. 89. Nancy’s Armstrong’s Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999) explores the photographic aesthetic Victorian realist writing. Dickens’s London: An Imaginative Vision (London: Headline, 1987), p. 7. In 1993, a visitor survey conducted at Jane Austen’s house at Chawton asked respondents to ‘identify up to five British places which they linked with specific writers’. Dickens was mentioned most of all – by 40 per cent of respondents – and ‘usually linked with London’; see David T. Herbert, ‘Heritage as Literary Place’, in David T. Herbert (ed.), Heritage, Tourism and Society (London: Mansell, 1995), pp. 32–48 (p. 37). The Clarendon Dickens, ed. Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), Chapter 50, p. 338. (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 10. Ross Tydall, ‘Forget Disneyland, try Dickens World’, Evening Standard (6 April 2005), p. 19. See Juliet John, ‘“People mutht be amuthed”?: Reflections on Chatham’s Dickens World’, Dickensian, 104 (2008), 5–21, for a fuller analysis of Dickens World and the hostility towards it. See Raymond Williams’s Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford: University Press, 1977, repr. 1986), pp. 128–35, for his explanation of the idea of ‘structures of feeling’.

11 The King and Who? Dance, Difference, and Identity in Anna Leonowens and The King and I Sharon Aronofsky Weltman

In 1951, when the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I premiered, the United States still occupied Japan and was already in Korea. Set in Siam (now Thailand), a south-east Asian country that, unlike its neighbors Viet Nam, Laos, Malaysia, Cambodia, and Burma, was never colonized by a European nation, The King and I negotiates the dilemma of twentiethcentury American imperialism by displacing it onto a Victorian stage and imagining a route toward global leadership that eschews violent take-over or direct control. In the process, the musical draws from nineteenth-century accounts to create both Anna, the ultra-Victorian English schoolteacher and advocate of human rights, and the King, a forward-thinking monarch who – of his own free will – brings his kingdom to the edge of liberty. The crown prince Chulalongkorn, educated in part by Mrs Anna, completes the task of ending slavery in Siam. As Christina Klein points out, in the era from Presidents Truman to Kennedy, cold war rhetoric employed metaphors of anti-slavery to justify anti-communism, and an important part of what The King and I presents is an American worldview in which the modernization and democratization of less industrial nations occurs through friendly although uneven exchange with the US.1 In The King and I’s mythologized Victorian milieu, the white British governess represents in part an idealized United States in the seemingly non-colonizing, non-militaristic role Americans generally find morally palatable, educating rather than conquering the East into Western democracy.2 Yet this is only part of the cultural work that The King and I accomplishes. Both this classic twentieth-century American play and its ultimate sources, Anna Leonowens’s The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870) and The Romance of the Harem (1873), raise important issues regarding the roles of difference and conflict in identity construction through cultural texts across time. Leonowens describes the life of women in the Siamese harem as simultaneously more repressive and more open than life for western women, using nineteenth-century American tropes of slavery and women’s rights to analyze Siamese culture. Further complicating the view of gender, 171

172 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

race, class, and nationality is Leonowens’s own presentation of herself in her writing as a refined English lady when, as has previously been hypothesized and as Susan Morgan has now proven in Bombay Anna: The Real Story and Remarkable Adventures of The King and I Governess (2008), Leonowens was from a lower-class family, of mixed racial origin, born in Bombay rather than Wales. Certainly, Gertrude Lawrence in the original Broadway production of the play and Deborah Kerr its movie incarnation (1956) presented an Anna as English as the persona Leonowens not only invents for herself in her books but also successfully performed in real life. She passed as white, English, and middle-class from her third decade to her eightieth year, moving during that time from Singapore to Siam to the United States and finally to Canada.3 Yet while Leonowens’s personal performance of racial and national identity is masked in her own books, the performative elements of these and other identity categories are made much more explicit in the way characters other than Leonowens are enacted in the musical play. In this essay, I argue that Leonowens’s nineteenth-century books offer a significantly broader understanding of gender roles than the twentieth-century The King and I, and that the musical play deflects these more flexible gender differences and their often conflicting elements onto race performance. The most overt site of this racial performativity is the musical’s twenty-minute play-within-a play, ‘The Small House of Uncle Thomas’ which is of course an adaptation of another nineteenth-century book, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Successful in America, particularly among post-Abolitionist readers, Leonowens’s books were less well received in England.4 In 1870 The Athenaeum regretted that her first book ever ‘saw the light’, citing Leonowens’s inaccuracies about the Siamese language and culture and her unseemly criticism of King Mongkut.5 In reviewing her second book, The Athenaeum accused her in 1873 of outright ingratitude to her royal employer,6 perhaps suggesting that a British subject ought to be more respectful of monarchy in general. But the criticism has not been exclusively British or Victorian. Generations of Thai readers have even more emphatically repudiated her less than flattering picture of a revered king.7 Twentieth-century historians have also castigated Leonowens’s books for numerous factual errors about Thai history.8 Most recently, feminist and post-colonial critics have pointed out ways in which Leonowens’s books participate in the patriarchal and imperial projects of her time.9 She is reviled by many, for different and often conflicting reasons. Yet remarkably Anna Leonowens did serve as the governess to King Mongkut’s children, including the crown prince Chulalongkorn, from 1862 to 1867, until shortly before he became king in 1868. She was the only British subject (or Westerner of any country) in the nineteenth century to gain intimate access to life in the Siamese harem and to write an account of it.10 She received letters expressing esteem from both her employer King Mongkut and her former pupil, King Chulalongkorn. The critical backlash

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman

173

against Leonowens makes her all the more interesting as she has modulated from the no longer accessible historical woman to the governess and social critic of her travel writings, to the sentimental Victorian heroine of Margaret Landon’s 1943 novel, to the feisty powerhouse of Rodgers and Hammerstein, to the brave and loving schoolteacher in Jodie Foster’s 1999 film Anna and the King, and most recently to the extraordinary figure in Susan Morgan’s new authoritative biography, Bombay Anna (2008).11 Leonowens’s Siam books, particularly The Romance of the Harem, focus largely on Thai women. In describing their lives, Leonowens appeals to a readership of former abolitionists both by declaring that in Siam, ‘woman is the slave of man’ (p. 11), and by detailing the harem women’s sexual attractiveness and the misery it causes, as in the story of the beautiful young Tuptim and the tragic result of efforts to ‘render her a fitter offering for the king’ (p. 15). She links the plight both of the King’s concubines and of their own female slaves to what American slaves had suffered. Portions of her books were first published as essays in the abolitionist magazine Atlantic Monthly, whose most famous contributor in the 1860s was Harriet Beecher Stowe.12 Situating herself within a long tradition of feminist Orientalism, which puts her in company with Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale, and Charlotte Brontë, Leonowens relies on her audience’s stereotypical expectations about tales of Oriental potentates to help them accept and organize the information she presents about harem life as a feminist stance.13 Contemporary American reviews certainly received her books in that light; for example, in 1873 The Princeton Review praises The Romance of the Harem, commenting that ‘no recent book gives so vivid a description of the interior life, customs, forms and usages of an Oriental Court; of the degradation of women and the tyranny of man’,14 and in 1871 the Overland Review pities the women in An English Governess in the Siamese Court ‘who languish out their lives in this splendid misery’.15 The same reviewer, far from making any connection between harem life and women’s legal position in the United States without the vote or many other rights, simply concludes with a self-complacent Orientalist relief that ‘we are heartily glad that we are not subjects of the Golden-Footed Majesty of Siam’ (p. 293). In contrast, Leonowens herself does not present polygamy as exclusively Eastern; in fact, she pointedly invokes Western polygamy when she derisively terms the Siamese Prime Minister’s harem as ‘his Excellency’s private Utah’ (p. 18). While using erotic Orientalist motifs to promote a feminist agenda, Leonowens pushes her readers to recognize not only the differences between women’s roles in America and Siam but also their troublesome similarities. The 1951 musical explicitly promotes an ideology of women’s rights, but – like the self-complacent review from Overland – the rights promoted are those that women in the mid-twentieth-century American audience already enjoyed. A chief example of how Leonowens depicts a much larger and

174 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

more complex gender landscape than the musical play provides is that in both The English Governess at the Siamese Court and The Romance of the Harem, she focuses on the variety of jobs women hold. She describes women as armed guards in the City of Women, for example, calling them Amazons. She tells of female judges who resolve conflicts involving women, such as in the court that convicts Tuptim, the concubine who runs away from the harem to live in gender-bending disguise as a Buddhist monk for several weeks. As Leonowens presents them, the King’s wives and concubines (whose individual official relationships to the King create a vast diplomatic web of familial ties throughout Siam and Southeast Asia) are enormously wealthy and wield great power. They live in the City of Women, a walled compound of many blocks, housing over 9,000 inhabitants, and boasting houses, shops, gardens, and streets. Women there fill virtually every role, including many they could never hold in a contemporary Western society: ‘This woman’s city is as self-supporting as any other in the world: it has its own laws, its judges, policy, guards, prisons, and executioners, its markets, merchants, workers, teachers, and mechanics of every kind and degree; and every function of nature is exercised by women, and by them only’ (Harem p. 13). Susan Brown characterizes Leonowens’s harem as a ‘community of women’ in Nina Auerbach’s terms.16 Brown also points out that, in addition to including women whose occupations are more traditionally seen as masculine, the Siamese harem, far from being the private feminine world of western stereotypes, includes public and very political activities; for Leonowens, ‘private and public, inside and outside, female and male spheres influence each other despite the walls, just as [her] representation of the harem as a city blurs the boundaries of domestic and non-domestic space.’17 The King’s wives and concubines and their children were served by women of many classes as well as a multitude female slaves, all within Nang Harm, as the harem was called.18 In The King and I, however, Thai women are generally depicted as enslaved wives or concubines for the sole purpose of serving the pleasure of and procreation with the King. Although luxuriously pampered, they are simply without any rights at all, let alone opportunities to engage in a career as a judge or a shopkeeper. Female guards silently stand at the doors in many scenes, but they are generally unnoticed by the dialogue and many viewers would be unaware that these characters are women at all; the costuming, while not unisex, is in both the Broadway productions and the 1956 musical film sufficiently different from the rest of the women’s alluring attire and sufficiently similar to the men’s that audiences are likely to miss their gender altogether. There are no female judges in the musical. Far from successfully escaping and passing as a man, in the play Tuptim is caught trying to flee from the palace with her beloved, Lun Tha. After questioning by the musical’s male Secret Police, her punishment is immediate and without trial: upon the King’s order, she is about to be summarily whipped by male

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman

175

guards; the musical’s King explains that this is what is usually done is such cases (p. 125). No female-run system of justice operates here. In direct contrast to the subservient position of the wives and concubines in The King and I is the governess Mrs Anna, whose power struggle with the King to maintain her independence (figured primarily through her insistence on having a house of her own outside the palace) propels both the plot and the humor. Although the King repeatedly bests her through an appeal to her attachment to his children, she remains independent in an important sense. The musical play signals her freedom from the system of slavery or concubinage by emphasizing her profession as a schoolteacher. Indeed, the stage musical makes this explicit when Anna emphatically sings ‘Shall I Tell You What I Think of You?’ (cut from the film version) about not being a servant: Your servant! your servant! Indeed I’m not your servant, (Though you give me less than servants pay) I’m a free and independent employé. · · · · · · · · Because I’m a woman You think, like every woman, I have to be a slave or concubine – You conceited, self-indulgent libertine –. (p. 54) It is her paid work that distinguishes her from both the harem women and their slaves. This concept comes straight from Leonowens, who realizes that, despite her description of multiple roles in the City of Women and the fabulous personal wealth of the royal women, her western readers will interpret the harem wives as de facto slaves. She gives her audience plenty of evidence for this response. For example, when she describes telling the Prime Minister that she wants her own house, where she ‘might be free from intrusion, and at perfect liberty before and after school hours,’ she imagines that ‘he had doubts as to the use I would make of my stipulated freedom, and was puzzled to conjecture why a woman should wish to be free at all’ (Governess p. 16). In this brief statement, she twice uses the word ‘free’ along with ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty.’ Leonowens hints that, despite their riches and high position, the king’s wives and concubines – particularly the young ones – are prohibited from leaving the walled city even temporarily, and are certainly not permitted to lead other kinds of lives or to choose their own husbands. Another example comes later when the women of the harem ask why Anna would not want to marry the king or the prince, and she gives two answers: first,

176 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

that as a Christian, she would never marry a pagan; and second, that she is unlike the playful wives of the harem, because she must work to support herself and her children: ‘I am only here to teach the royal family. I am not like you. You have nothing to do but to play and sing and dance for your master; but I have to work for my children, and one little one is now on the great ocean, and I am very sad’ (Governess pp. 21–2). Susan Brown points out that: in dissociating herself from marriage as a woman who must work Leonowens echoes English and American feminist critique of marriage and arguments in favor of remunerative employment for women. In so doing, the passage destabilizes the initial opposition between Christian and pagan marriage practices by implicitly aligning married Christian women whose only role is to please their husbands with women of the harem.19 While both halves of her answer are central to Leonowens’s construction of herself within her books as a white Christian Englishwoman and a governess, they are not as contradictory as Brown suggests in that the Buddhist harem women’s playfulness is presented in contrast to Leonowens’s Protestant work ethic. In other words, women’s work in western discourse is still called work, even if it is not paid. While ‘obey’ is part of the Anglican marriage ceremony, ‘play’ is not. On the one hand, it is because of their huge wealth, unconnected to their marriage or concubinage with the king, that the harem women can afford to play all day. In fact, women are slave-owners in Leonowens’s books as often as they are slaves. But on the other hand, this description of their task in life, ‘to play and sing and dance for your master,’ resembles the job of many a slave. In fact, it is precisely the role of little Harry, Eliza’s son in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who is asked to ‘show this gentleman how you can dance and sing’20 and whose sale immediately after that moment to the trader Haley in the first chapter throws the novel’s plot into motion. Yet Leonowens is careful to articulate differences between the position of the royal wives and that of actual slaves. Even when describing Tuptim, Leonowens takes care to present her as both slave-owner and enslaved: the young gift to the king has a loyal slave of her own, Phim (Romance p. 32). In Romance of the Harem Leonowens describes enjoying a dinner party with particularly good food, music, and service, given by Sonn Klean (or ‘Hidden Perfume’): ‘When dinner was over, my friend, in concert with her sisters and slave-girls, performed on several musical instruments with wonderful effect. At last all Sonn Klean’s slave-women with their children appeared in a group, one hundred and thirty-two in all, in nice new dresses, all looking particularly happy’ (p. 249). Leonowens then records her hostess’s announcement that she has freed her slaves; Sonn Klean says she will ‘never

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman

177

buy human bodies again but only to let go free once more, and so I have now no more slaves, but hired servants. I have given freedom to all of my slaves to go or to stay with me as they wish. If they stay with me, . . . I will give them each four ticals every month after this day, with their food and clothes’ (p. 249). Her inspiration for emancipating her slaves is Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Leonowens reports Sonn Klean saying, ‘I am wishful to be good like Harriet Beecher Stowe’ and signing her name Harriet Beecher Stowe from then on. Again Leonowens appeals to American post-abolitionist readers while detailing a range of differences among Thai women. The musical shifts the complex multi-dimensional, multi-class, multi-role depictions of women’s possible identities in Leonowens to a one-dimensional portrait in which all the women characters (other than the British schoolteacher Mrs Anna) are slaves to the king, who, in fact, is presented as the only slave-owner. While Leonowens’s text revels in particularities and differences among women, the musical simplifies and essentializes them. For example, the musical retains Leonowens’s description of how the Siamese prime minister and people in the palace address her as ‘Sir’ (Governess pp. 16, 70). While this could have been a way for the musical to incorporate the books’ more nuanced treatment of gender, it becomes instead a way to reinforce the depiction of all the harem women as enslaved. In the musical, the King’s head wife, Lady Thiang, explains that they call their new teacher ‘Sir’ because Mrs Anna is ‘scientific. Not lowly, like woman’ (p. 26). The musical Anna’s response, that she does not think that ‘all women are more lowly than men,’ advocates some parity between the sexes. But it does not extend to expanding women’s roles in the way that Leonowens’s description of the City of Women does. That phrase, ‘lowly, like woman,’ echoes the subtitle to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life among the Lowly. Complicating The King and I’s flattened understanding of possibilities for women is its depiction of race and slavery in its play within a play that retells the story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In order to impress a British diplomat whom the King suspects of a plan to paint him as a barbarous despot in order to provide England with an excuse to seize Siam as a protectorate, the King and Mrs Anna prepare an elaborate banquet with entertainment that will show off how civilized the country and its ruler really are. This action reinforces Anna’s role as an antiimperialist, underscoring her advocacy of peaceful pedagogical techniques of democratic influence in resolving potential conflict rather violent imposition of colonial rule. Tuptim, the King’s newest and most unhappy concubine, has written the script for the ballet’s narration. To catch the conscience of a king à la Hamlet, Thai dancers present her version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the iconic American abolitionist text about the escape of African-American slaves from white slave-holders. This ballet, called ‘The Small House of Uncle Thomas’, serves both to provide an allegory justifying Tuptim’s later attempted escape and to provide a teachable moment for the King.

178 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

It also suggests to its audiences that the United States has much to offer other nations in its own example of having recognized and ultimately rejected the evil of slavery. The dance operates on the assumption that everyone watching The King and I agrees that slavery is contrary to the basic democratic values that constitute American society. Set in 1862, The King and I repeatedly alludes to the American Civil War and to King Mongkut’s support of President Lincoln; the use of Uncle Tom’s Cabin serves to highlight the King’s blindness to his own status as a slave-owner and monarch of a slave country. As Donaldson points out about the movie musical, the insertion of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin “westernizes” the film’s concept of freedom.’21 Tuptim narrates the ballet herself. Her performance provides an example of performativity as a method of achieving change. By speaking the part of an American slave running for freedom, Tuptim prepares for her own attempted escape from the king’s harem to be with Lun Tha. Whereas Leonowens presents Tuptim as a royal concubine with devoted slaves of her own, in the play, as a ‘gift from the prince of Burma,’ Tuptim is inherently a slave, singing bitterly when she first arrives about having to please her ‘lord and master’ (p. 18). This introduction, combined with her appropriating Uncle Tom’s Cabin, conflates her position with American slaves. Caren Kaplan argues that ‘the figure of Tuptim clearly equates North American slavery and Siamese concubinage, allowing the audiences to make the same ideological link without examining or questioning the historical accuracy.’22 She rightly points out that the institutions are very different, that Siamese slaves could purchase their freedom and that the slaves belong to the concubines themselves. Although we have seen that Leonowens herself makes these points, the musical does not, erasing differences that Leonowens is careful to acknowledge. It is through the intricate series of race performances in the ballet ‘The Small House of Uncle Thomas’ that the play deflects the concept of slippery and often conflictual gender identity onto race. A cast of all female dancers of any ancestry portray African-American slaves of both sexes; this portrayal of Thai women as performers is true to Thai dance-drama tradition.23 But to complicate the layers of race and gender representation even further, the Jerome Robbins choreography (retained in the film and 1996 revival)24 suggests that the Burmese author Tuptim and royal Thai dancers have created characters based partly on nineteenth-century blackface minstrels’ representations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, very commonly produced versions of the story that survived both in Vaudeville and in cinematic form well into the twentieth century. While some of the dancers use large, elaborate masks that recall both Thai dance-drama conventions and Victorian pantomime, some also wear whiteface makeup in a kind of reverse blackface to register the characters’ racial difference from the performers. In fact, Thai theater included a tradition of blackface; the historical King Chulalongkorn, who was the historical Anna Leonowens’s student as crown prince, wrote a

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman

179

blackface drama called Bot lakho’n Ngo Pa ‘A Negrito Drama’ about the Semang, a people of Southern Thailand and the Malay Peninsula.25 Robbins did not worry too much about scrupulous authenticity in creating a Thai dance-drama; like Richard Rodgers, he avoided what Oscar Hammerstein called ‘research poison.’26 Yet Robbins did investigate Thai, Cambodian, and Loation dance in choreographing the ballet. He hired Mara von Selheim, who had studied Cambodian dance at the court of Phnom Penh, to work with his dancers in establishing a vocabulary of movement that might approximate Thai style. Deborah Jowitt describes Robbins following ‘the Cambodian court-dance custom of an all-female cast in terms of the principal dancers, as well as making use of some of its flexible hand gestures, hyperextended elbows, crawls, and the ‘celestial walk’ (standing on one bent leg, the dancer raises the other bent leg behind her, flexed foot flat to the sky) or a similar pose kneeling.’27 He also borrowed from Japanese theatrical conventions in several facets of the ballet. For example, Kabuki drama uses symbolic props like the rippling fabric that represents water, as in Robbins’s Ohio River; visible but unobtrusive stage assistants wear black; actors wear whiteface. Noh drama uses masks and introduces characters individually, as does ‘The Small House of Uncle Thomas.’28 These Japanese inflections to his south-east Asian dance about African-American slaves may have been partially influenced by two of Robbins’s principal dancers, women of Japanese descent (and at least some upbringing in Japan) who studied a variety of Asian dance forms and served not only as principal dancers but also as consultants on this ballet: Michiko Iseri played the Angel from Buddha; Yuriko Kikuchi, Jerome Robbins’s assistant, played Eliza. A JapaneseAmerican, she had been interned in the Gila River War Relocation Camp in Arizona during World War II. The Asian-fusion quality of Robbins’s ballet heightens its artificiality in a way that highlights its theatricality. Audiences watching the play within a play need to see a piece of theater that seems even more theatrical than its frame play, even though the frame is a musical, a form that revels in artifice. But the dance also emphasizes identity performance: even its fictional players cross multiple boundaries of gender, race, and nationality in each portrayal, its actual players – always understood by the audience to be actors playing actors – double that performative experience. Changing the ballet’s title to ‘The Small House of Uncle Thomas’ defuses the negative connotations of an ‘Uncle Tom’ lingering from the book’s original title. Despite the novel’s pivotal role in promoting abolition and ending slavery in the United States, the self-sacrificing characteristics of the title character became associated with servility. By 1951, indeed as early as the 1920s, ‘Uncle Tom’ was a derogatory term. Stage adaptations suffered a similar fate. The anti-slavery message of the novel was augmented by George L. Aiken’s popular 1852 melodrama, a version of the play Harriet Beecher Stowe herself enjoyed; it and other versions were performed so

180 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

often it was accurately billed as ‘The World’s Greatest Hit.’29 But the play was soon co-opted for minstrel shows; in particular comic dance scenes involving the slaves became standard fare in ‘Tom shows’ and other frankly racist entertainments. These were generally performed in blackface, and continued on stage and film as mainstream entertainment into the 1930s and beyond. Yet some well known twentieth-century blackface performers were actually African-American, such as Bert Williams; others were Jewish, such as Eddie Cantor (whose early career included playing Bert Williams’s son in blackface), both groups adding an additional layer of racial performance to the concept of blackface.30 All would be very familiar to Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Robbins. Additional complexity to issues of racial or ethnic identity in The King and I derives from Andrea Most’s point that all three of these men (composer, lyricist, and choreographer) were Jewish. She convincingly argues that they had in mind the American immigrant experience as much as anything else, so that Anna’s job in teaching English language and American values – but most significantly not Christianity like her missionary predecessors – resembles the task of Americanization teachers in the Jewish ghettos of New York’s Lower East Side.31 Seeing the King in this context suggests that he may have influenced the character of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof (1964), whose effort to negotiate between the traditions of an Eastern patriarchal past and a Western future in which women have the right to marry for love results in his crying out, ‘If I bend that far, I will break,’32 as indeed the King does break when he finds that he can no longer bear to follow tradition and whip Tuptim for her escape. Certainly the Jewish-American experience must have affected The King and I’s creators in their sensitivity to the need for education without missionary baggage, but the desire is already explicitly expressed and is indeed the historical King Mongkut’s stipulation in his initial letter of offer to Leonowens, in which he states that he will employ her for instruction in ‘English language, science, and literature, but not for conversion to Christianity’ (Governess p. vi). By changing the name to ‘The Small House of Uncle Thomas’ and by presenting it not in blackface but in whiteface, Robbins distances his ballet from the racist traditions that had grown up around theatrical presentation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the same time that it alludes to them and subverts them. Furthermore, by resetting it in a pan-Asian milieu, appropriating dance forms that recall both eastern and western traditions, and by mediating race performances through multiple layers (actual dancers of any race playing Siamese dancers playing African-American slaves), Robbins undermines the inherited racist potential of Tom shows by revealing its performativity and refreshes the abolitionist point of Stowe’s text in a way that perhaps anticipates the more radical presentation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin provided by Bill T. Jones’s late twentieth-century interrogation of black and

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman

181

gay issues in his revolutionary modern dance ‘Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land.’33 Both in Leonowens’s writing and in the musical play, Stowe’s novel serves as a radicalizing agent, bringing women to resist their own positions as slaves or – much more prominently in the source text – as slave-owners. As mentioned above, in Romance of the Harem, Lady Sonn Klean has already read the novel; she translates it, adopts Stowe’s name, and frees her own slaves. In the play, Tuptim, to whom Anna has lent Uncle Tom’s Cabin, writes a ballet for performance as a court event. Donaldson rightly points out that Leonowens’s Tuptim is far more heroic and accomplishes a far more daunting task in gaining her freedom for a time successfully, living as a priest’s acolyte in a monastery, whereas the show’s Tuptim’s effort to escape with her lover is thwarted by her immediate capture. Becoming an author of a play based on another female author’s book makes the musical’s Tuptim the only named female character other than Mrs Anna to take on a task resembling a career outside her connubial duties, to cast off the restrictions of women’s lowliness mentioned in the first act. The act of writing her play signifies her rewriting her own identity. The King and I underscores the significance of Stowe’s and later Tuptim’s being a woman writer when, upon hearing Tuptim ask Mrs Anna for a copy of Stowe’s novel, the King asks, ‘A woman has written a book?’ (p. 23). But ultimately the stylized dancedrama, with all its fascinating slippage between races and genders, fails to bring about freedom for Tuptim. In ‘Shall We Dance’, the King and Anna whirl in an electrifying polka, the closest their relationship gets to a romantic climax. An iconic moment in both play and film, it often appears in advertising and provides the cover art for the 50th anniversary edition DVD (Twentieth-Century Fox). It emphasizes the differences between the King and Anna as they embrace in exuberant choreography: male and female, king and governess, east and west. Costuming enhances the difference. When confronting Anna in her revealing silk finery, the King speaks for his audience as well as himself when he indicates that, although Thai outfits generally display more skin than the Victorian dress, covering up everything below the bust in a vast swath of swirling fabric magnifies the bareness of Anna’s neck, shoulders, arms, and bosom. ‘Is different’, the king says (p. 85), disturbed and admiring, his reaction to many of the western traditions Anna embodies. By ‘different’ he means several things: he finds the European costume exotic and thus erotically charged, as the Thai costumes may be for western audiences; but in a way Anna’s dress is also exotically different for those same audiences, for whom, in 1951 or in 2009, bare midriffs and close-fitting pants are not unusual, but tight-waisted, low-cut crinoline ball gowns are. This moment again highlights the difference between mid-twentieth-century (and later) audiences and the Victorian world the play invokes: women no

182 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

longer must wear corsets or hoop skirts, having long ago won the fight for what the Victorians called ‘rational dress’. The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical sets out explicitly to promote women’s rights, yet within its 1951 context, those rights have already been achieved. There is little revolutionary potential in mid-century America in the depiction of an effective female schoolteacher, in upholding a young woman’s right to choose her own husband, in the rejection of absolute monarchy as a form of government, or in the firm abolition of slavery as a social system. While the books The English Governess at the Siamese Court and The Romance of the Harem focus on the intricacies and inequities of harem life, the play conflates the plight of all women in the harem with all slaves and erases their differences; the net result is that audiences feel good about their own level of freedom and their own virtue in not owning slaves. Indeed while the old king is dying, the young one asks his mother, Lady Thiang, to demonstrate the innovative (and western) way of bowing that he has just decreed as law; this gesture symbolizes the importance of the historical King Chulalongkorn’s abolition of slavery in 1905.34 The orchestra plays ‘Something Wonderful’ (Lady Thiang’s earlier song about loving her husband) as Anna and the Kralahome (or Prime Minister) recognize and grieve at the king’s death. Unaware, his queen bows to her son; in this act she demonstrates to the others on stage the new way to show respect without complete prostration, while simultaneously becoming the first subject whose obeisance acknowledges the new sovereign and the first actor to bow to the audience as the curtain falls. The intensity of the swelling music underscores the audience’s torn emotions, both sadness at the death of Mongkut and pleasure at recognizing the value of progress toward democracy that the king, by encouraging the crown prince to make his first proclamations, has tacitly approved. The conflict between slave-owner and slave seems resolved by the new freedom from bowing low. But the condition of women remains unchanged. The focus on women’s rights, so important in Leonowens, has disappeared by the final curtain. The applause for the performance is in part applause for the American audience’s self-satisfaction in having achieved everything needed: Uncle Tom’s Cabin already did the job, and nothing is left to be done because polygamy is illegal and the slaves were emancipated long ago. Curiously, despite Hammerstein’s liberal worldview and well deserved recognition for his humanitarian accomplishment, despite the intricate race performances in ‘The Small House of Uncle Thomas’, the end result of this play is not so much to make connections between the harem women and the play’s audiences, but to emphasize their differences. The cultural work of the musical play, beyond presenting the English schoolteacher as a stand in for the United States in an effort to modernize and democratize through education rather than armed conflict, is to express western self-complacency. From a feminist perspective, the play is a glorification of the 1950s status quo.

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman

183

Notes 1. Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 207. 2. See also Caren Kaplen (p. 43) and Lauren Berlant (pp. 292–302) for additional analyses situating The King and I historically, in Caren Kaplan, ‘ “Getting to Know You”: Travel, Gender, and the Politics of Postcolonial Representation in Anna and the King of Siam and The King and I,’ in Late Imperial Culture, ed. Roman de la Campa, Ann Kaplan, and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 33–52; and Lauren Berlant, ‘Poor Eliza’ in No More Separate Spheres, ed. Cathy Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 291–323. 3. Susan Morgan, Bombay Anna: The Real Story of the English Governess Who Went to Siam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 7–10. 4. Susan Morgan, ‘Introduction,’ The Romance of the Harem. Anna Leonowens (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), pp. ix–x. 5. Review of The English Governess at the Siamese Court: being Recollections of Six Years in the Royal Palace at Bangkok, The Athenaeum 2252 (December 22), p. 836. 6. Review of The English Governess at the Siamese Court, Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 6.3 (March 1871), p. 293. 7. Charlermsri Thuriyanonda Chantasingh, ‘The Americanization of The King and I: The Transformation of the English Governess into an American Legend,’ Unpublished Dissertation (University of Kansas, 1999). 8. See A. B. Griswold, King Mongkut of Siam (New York: The Asia Society, 1961); W. S. Bristowe, Louis and the King of Siam (London: Chatto and Windus, 1976); A. L. Moffat, Mongkut, The King of Siam (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961); B, J. Terwiel, A History of Modern Thailand, 1767–1942 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983). 9. Most recent critics of the fictional or historical Anna Leonowens attack her for participating in the British imperialist project. For example, Laura Donaldson (discussing the film version of the musical) argues for a complex view of Anna’s ‘oppressed and oppressive participation in the Anglo-European imperial project’ (p. 55) in ‘The King and I in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or On the Border of the Women’s Room,’ Cinema Journal, 29.3 (Spring 1990), pp. 53–69. Like Donaldson, who sees Leonowens’s use of feminist abolitionist discourse as complicit with racism and the uplifting educational project as complicit with imperialism, Caren Kaplen argues that in Leonowens’s own books, her ‘role as a producer of colonial harem discourse hinges on their construction of a form of international sisterhood that legitimates Western intervention’ (p. 37). She argues that ‘the sisterhood that Leonowens constructs as part of her autobiographical strategy lends credence to whatever statements she makes about the Nang Harm; . . . their ‘freedom’ is linked to her own’ (p. 42). 10. Susan Morgan, ‘Introduction,’ The Romance of the Harem, p. xvii. 11. Over time, Leonowens’s books about Siam have become a novel, a television series, a cartoon, three popular films, and the Broadway hit The King and I, which won the Tony Award for best musical in 1951 and again in 1996 for best revival, prompting major productions all over the world. In 1951 it also won the Tony for best actress (Gertrude Lawrence), best actor (Yul Brynner), best scenic design (Jo Mielziner) and best costume design (Irene Sharaff). In 1996, besides best revival, it won best actress (Donna Murphy), best scenic design (Brian Thomson), and best costume design (Roger Kirk).

184 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature 12. Susan Morgan, ‘Chinese Coolies, Hidden Perfume, and Harriet Beecher Stowe in Anna Leonowens’s The Romance of the Harem,’ in White Women in Racialized Spaces: Imaginative Transformation and Ethical Action in Literature, ed. Samina Najmi and Rajini Srikanth (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002) pp. 243–256, p. 253. 13. See Joyce Zonana, ‘The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre’ in Signs 18.3 (Spring 1993), pp. 592–617; Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity, and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996); and Ruth Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). 14. ‘Review of Romance of the Harem,’ Princeton Review 2.6 (April 1873), p. 378. 15. ‘Review of The English Governess at the Siamese Court,’ Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 6.3 (March 1871), p. 293. 16. Susan Brown, ‘Alternatives to the Missionary Position: Anna Leonowens as Victorian Travel Writer,’ Feminist Studies: 21.3 (Fall 1995), pp. 587–614, p. 598. For the opposite interpretation, see Susan Zlotnick, who argues that Leonowens’s depiction constitutes a ‘feminist dystopia’ in ‘Jane Eyre, Anna Leonowens, and the White Woman’s Burden: Governesses, Missionaries, and Maternal Imperialists in Mid-Victorian Britain,’ Victorian Institutes Journal, 24 (1996), pp. 27–55. 17. Brown also points out that Leonowens often criticizes Christianity, ‘through ‘dialogues’ with Mongkut and other Buddhists’ (p. 600). 18. In fact, sometimes they could leave. This is one of the historical inaccuracies critics note. See Brown (613n49). 19. Brown, p. 595. 20. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life among the Lowly (New York: Airmont Publishing, 1967), p. 15. 21. Donaldson, p. 62. 22. Kaplan, p. 42. 23. Often Hispanic actors have played principal non-British roles (another interesting twist on depicting racial difference), including the 1956 Hollywood film (Puerto Rican actress Rita Moreno as Tuptim and Mexican actor Carlos Rivas as Lun Tha), the 1996 revival (Filipino-Americans Lou Diamond Philips as King Mongkut and Jose Llana as Lun Tha), and late-1990s touring companies. Actors of any Asian descent (Korean, Japanese, and Chinese, for example) have also played smaller roles in major productions of The King and I throughout American production history, and very prominent roles in the 1996 revival. 24. The choreography appears with few changes, performed by many of the same dancers, in the 1956 musical film. 25. Rachel Harrison, ‘Review of Chulalongkorn, Roi de Siam. Itinéraire d’un Voyage à Java en 1896’ by Chanatip Kesavadhana in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 59:3 (1996), pp. 610–11. 26. Richard Rodgers, Musical Stages: An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 274. 27. Deborah Jowitt, Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), p. 181. 28. Jowitt, p. 183. 29. Harry Birdoff, The World’s Greatest Hit: Uncle Tom’s Cabin. (New York: S. F. Vanni, 1947). 30. In Black Face, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), Michael Rogin argues that in part black face performance by Jewish actors, particularly scenes in which they don the make

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman

31. 32. 33.

34.

185

up and take it off again, demonstrated their not-blackness, and so partially constituted their identity in America as white. Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 186. Sheldon Harnick, Jerry Bock, and Joseph Stein, Fiddler on the Roof (The Times Square Music Publications Company, 1964), p. 88. See Jacqueline Shea Murphy, ‘Unrest and Uncle Tom: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company’s Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land’ in Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance, ed. Ellen W. Goellner and Jacqueline Shea Murphy (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 81–105. In fact, the historical King Chulalongkorn also rejected the public practice of complete prostration before the king in 1873, at the time of his second coronation when he turned 21. For more information, see Anand Panyarachun, ‘Chulalongkorn,’ Time Asia Online 154:7/8 (August 23–30, 1999).

12 ‘The Utmost Intricacies of the Soul’s Pathways’: the Significance of Syntax in George Eliot’s Felix Holt, The Radical Melissa Raines

In a passage from the introduction of George Eliot’s Felix Holt (1866) that stands as a clear precursor to the famous lines from Middlemarch (1871–2), regarding the ‘roar which lies on the other side of silence’,1 the narrator observes that in spite of the universality of human suffering, the particulars of individual sorrows ‘are often unknown to the world; for there is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence.’2 The disparity between the intensity of the word ‘agonies’ and the subtle ‘whisper’ suggests the level of attentiveness demanded both of the characters within the story and of the readers experiencing it through them. To develop a level of observation that is almost extrasensory, and so to understand Eliot thoroughly, the reader must attempt to feel the minute ‘vibrations’ that are the subliminal manifestation of anguished emotional and syntactical conflict. Using evidence from both Eliot’s manuscript and published text, in this chapter I argue that a careful observer would have to travel along sentences with, as it were, a worm’s eye view of each individual phrase, moving along a line word by word, rather than reading with a bird’s eye view of entire chapters, paragraphs, and pages. It is through this kind of committed experience within the text that we can feel the vibrations Eliot describes pulsating through her very sentences, announcing themselves through unsettling, often confusing twists in syntax that make grammatical sequence anything but simply linear. In essence, the vibrations are the linguistic equivalent of what Eliot’s friend and contemporary, Herbert Spencer, might describe as those tiny nervous blows that truly are ‘the ultimate unit of consciousness’.3 As Spencer argues in The Principles of Psychology regarding the basic human reaction to strong stimuli working on the senses: The state of consciousness so generated is, in fact, comparable in quality to the initial state of consciousness caused by a blow (distinguishing it 186

Melissa Raines

187

from the pain or other feeling that commences the instant after); which state of consciousness, caused by a blow, may be taken as the primitive and typical form of nervous shock. (pp. 150–1) For Spencer, consciousness is analogous, in its most primal form, to a physical jolt – as he explains it, ‘a nervous shock.’ For Eliot, as evidenced throughout her prose fiction from her collection of short stories Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) to her final novel Daniel Deronda (1876), these shocks exist but in a much quieter and more demanding form – a subterranean ‘whisper’ that must be heard amidst ‘the roar of hurrying existence.’ The context of Eliot’s narrative ‘demands from her readers an alertness to the world around them’, but this is only a fraction of her larger purpose in writing.4 Readers are also urged to feel the grammatical blows or shocks in the syntax of her novels, to find themselves in difficult places where both they and the characters are being challenged by nerve-like thoughts that are caught somewhere between painful conscious recognition and instinctive subconscious sensitivity. The difficulty for Eliot then is two-fold: to create that moment of emotional conflict within the grammar, and then to produce a syntax that accurately expresses a character’s thought-process as he or she attempts to close the gap between initial awareness and fully conscious, conceptualised understanding. Felix Holt is generally viewed as a novel of solid social and moral commentary.5 As such, it is at first glance a curious place to begin a discussion of the narratorial penetration of individual characters’ consciousnesses so intense that it saturates the language with vibratory pangs. Interestingly, however, few other Eliot works begin with such a powerfully personal and immediate look into the mind of one of its central characters. Mrs Arabella Transome’s thoughts are subjected to the narrator’s scrutiny with a rapidity that reminds us that, ‘[c]onsciousness of the consciousness of others – this is the primary focus of fiction’.6 In the introduction to the Clarendon edition of the novel, Fred C. Thomson addresses the seeming incongruity of this deeply private opening of a public novel by hypothesising that the political aspects of the text were actually a secondary thought and that Eliot’s first inspiration for the work was the tragedy of the Transome family.7 Yet, it seems more likely that the decision to take the novel within a character quite quickly – more specifically, by immersing us in the painful quiverings of Mrs Transome’s agonised consciousness – is a larger, structural statement regarding the impossibility of ignoring the inner world at the expense of the outer one.8 What is important to Eliot is the existence of the individual vibrations even within an apparently social dimension, full of noise. Significantly, even Eliot’s structural choice, her decision of where to begin, heightens our awareness and prepares us for the grammatical move inward. Chapter One of Felix Holt begins with a clear sense of anticipation: ‘On the 1st of September, in the memorable year 1832, some one was expected at Transome Court’ (Holt, p. 13). In obvious contrast with the bold specificity

188 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

of time and place in the sentence, the almost anonymous ‘some one’ claims the reader’s immediate attention. The ambiguous word-choice is particularly fitting, as even Mrs Transome, the ‘some one’s’ mother, is unsure of what kind of son is returning to her after a protracted absence. The narrator details the mother’s uncertainty: She sat still, quivering and listening; her lips became pale, her hands were cold and trembling. Was her son really coming? She was far beyond fifty; and since her early gladness in this best-loved boy, the harvests of her life had been scanty. Could it be that now – when her hair was grey, when sight had become one of the day’s fatigues, when her young accomplishments seemed almost ludicrous, like the tone of her first harpsichord and the words of the songs long browned with age – she was going to reap an assured joy? – to feel the doubtful deeds of her life were justified by the result, since a kind of Providence had sanctioned them? – to be no longer tacitly pitied by her neighbours for her lack of money, her imbecile husband, her graceless eldest-born, and the loneliness of her life; but to have at her side a rich, clever, possibly a tender, son? Yes; but there were the fifteen years of separation, and all that had happened in that long time to throw her into the background in her son’s memory and affection. And yet – did not men sometimes become more filial in their feeling when experience had mellowed them, and they had themselves become fathers? Still, if Mrs Transome had expected only her son, she would have trembled less; she expected a little grandson also: and there were reasons why she had not been enraptured when her son had written to her only when he was on the eve of returning that he already had an heir born to him. (Holt, p. 16) Of immediate note in the passage is the sense of barely contained nervous energy – the obvious physical manifestation of the vibrations in the repeated description of Mrs Transome’s ‘quivering’ and ‘trembling’, in stark contrast with her pale lips and cold hands, which imply nothing so much as death. The fifteen years of her son Harold’s absence have been a strange living death to her, spent entirely in waiting. It is significant that as Eliot slips into Mrs Transome’s mind through the use of free indirect discourse, the sentences first become interrogative. Not only does Mrs Transome paradoxically question her ‘assured joy’, but she also seems unable to accept Harold’s imminent arrival, as expressed through her almost painfully hopeful question, ‘Was her son really coming?’ Distrust becomes stronger in the persistent language of hesitation. Each ‘Yes; but’, ‘And yet’, and ‘Still, if’ functions as a small, painful linguistic twinge to reinforce the vibratory vacillation between, and aching interconnectedness of, hope and doubt. Indeed, as the sentences progress, they move in rhythmic waves, alternating so that either hope or doubt comes out on top, but only slightly so. This idea is evoked most interestingly in the last few difficult lines, the conclusion of the

Melissa Raines

189

movement that begins with ‘Still, if’. I want to focus specifically on ‘there were reasons why she had not been enraptured when her son had written to her only on the eve of returning that he already had an heir born to him.’ Not only does the sentence seem confusing and almost slightly out of order, but the troublesome ‘already’ contrasts with the tensely reproachful ‘only on the eve of returning’. This is a rather ominous reminder to Mrs Transome and the reader that if Harold had truly experienced a resurgence of love for his own parents by becoming a father, it should have been formally expressed at the time of the birth of his son. Instead, his announcement of this life-changing event is an afterthought – painfully too late. As a result of this sense of multiple temporalities, Mrs Transome focuses desperately on her future in spite of her harsh awareness of past disappointment because the emptiness of her present is too painful to contemplate. Yet the conflict is not straightforward, even if oversimplified into an issue of future hope versus present doubt. The linear sentences express a troubling sense of simultaneity because the seemingly polarised positions of hope and doubt actually exist at once within Mrs Transome’s mind in a sort of anguished symbiosis. A rise in one leads to an equal fall in the other, but while the distinct emotional states vary, the pain is constant. The complexity of a large section of this passage is best considered by comparing the published text with the original manuscript.9 While proofs of Felix Holt have not survived, making it difficult to identify revisions as either stylistic changes by the publishing house or changes by Eliot herself, it is still possible to make educated guesses regarding the source of alterations and to see significant evolutionary moments in these syntactical conflicts between manuscript and published text.10 In Author and Printer in Victorian England, Allan Dooley highlights the fact that over the course of a successful author’s career, the balance of power in editorial matters usually shifted towards authorial preference. Indeed, he states that ‘from the time of Silas Marner (1861) on, George Eliot had complete control over the printed editions of her texts’.11 The question of responsibility for textual variants becomes more complex, however, in matters of punctuation, where printers generally tried to assert their preference for the more structured ‘“grammatical” school’ (Dooley, p. 10). My argument is that the ‘minor’ issue of punctuation would not have been considered universally minor to Eliot. This is especially apparent as the differences in punctuation, while seemingly slight, have noteworthy effects on the vibratory nature of the narrative. Here is a section from Mrs Transome’s intense self-questioning in manuscript: Could it be that now<,> when her hair was grey, when {her} sight had become one of the day’s fatigues, when her young accomplishments seemed almost ludicrous, like the tone of her first harpsichord and the

190 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

words of the songs long browned with age<,> she was going to reap an assured joy? o feel that the doubtful deeds of her life were justified by the result, since a kind of Providence had sanctioned them? o be no longer tacitly pitied by her neighbours for her lack of money, her imbecile husband, her graceless eldest-born, and the loneliness of her life; but to have at her side a rich, clever<–>possibly a tender/ son?12 The most noticeable variances between these two versions are all related to the use of the dash. The original manuscript had only one, placed before the vulnerable ‘possibly a tender son’. By setting off ‘tender’ from the other adjectives, Eliot’s previous punctuation heightens the importance of sympathetic feeling: even more than a son to be proud of, Mrs Transome longs for a son who will love her. That this dash was ultimately lost is almost certainly related to other revisions in this section of the text – namely, the addition of several other dashes with a strongly organisational role. The first dash added must be considered together with the second, for they function as temporal parentheses, containing the actual effects of the fifteen years of separation on Mrs Transome. Not only is she viewed differently by the world at the end of this period, but she also views both her own present and past worlds differently and negatively. Her very ability to see has ‘become one of the day’s fatigues,’ and her past life all seems somewhat ‘ludicrous’. The fact that the effects of the separation, as rendered by the punctuation, now visually separate Mrs Transome’s hopeful ‘Could it be that now’ from ‘she was going to reap an assured joy?’ acts as a sort of syntactical signpost for the readers – an interrupted and consequently unconsummated pathway. The dashes that follow make the repeated ‘to’ questions – ‘To feel that the doubtful deeds’, ‘To be no longer tacitly pitied’ – veritable supplements to that first mental inquiry. In the manuscript, the original breaks between questions give them a peculiar sense of energy. Each capital letter, beginning what is actually a fragment of a sentence anew, appears to re-emphasise Mrs Transome’s misery over those fifteen years. Thus it seems initially that the final choice to use dashes and create a flowing segment of thought weakens the overall emotional impact in the manuscript. However, by allowing this new punctuation, Eliot forces us to accept that not only are Mrs Transome’s hopes and doubts closely interrelated, but so are her love for and anticipatory disappointment in her son. Furthermore, by creating one long, complicated internal question that seems to end, at least marginally, on the side of hope, Eliot creates the first vibratory wave in the passage, which is then carried on through the remaining three sentences. This can be seen in the sad ‘Yes; but there were the fifteen years of separation’, where Mrs Transome reminds herself that her son has probably forgotten her; the resurgent ‘And yet – did not men sometimes become more filial in their feeling’, where she hopes fatherhood has altered him; and the frustrated ‘Still, if Mrs Transome had expected only her son’, where

Melissa Raines

191

she remembers that this is unlikely. Interestingly, what we can see in the adjustments is a move away from the delineation of sharply emotional nerve-like impulse felt in the initial experience of writing in favour of the creation of a more marked vibratory pattern to the overall narrative. As readers, this gives us a firmer guidance throughout but leaves us to feel the torturously conflicted core of Mrs Transome’s hope ourselves within the very structure of the sentences. While it is possible that the initial suggestion for some kind of punctuation change came from the publishing house,13 Eliot’s approval and likely involvement in the actual structuring of the new punctuation would have been a direct result of her feeling that the original vibrations in the text could still be felt through this new syntax. The tense movement of the original manuscript – that initial felt experience of Eliot translating Mrs Transome’s thought-process into a readable sentence structure – is not lost, but mapped more definitively for the reader through the final punctuation. The vibrations within the language of Mrs Transome’s narrative are clearly palpable. However, as the novel is concerned with the presence of varying individual expressions of ‘human agonies’, the use of vibrations is not character-specific. Esther Lyon first awakens to them when the title character himself feels compelled to upbraid her for her superficiality. When confronted with her faults, Esther is offended and dismisses Felix with no intimation that his words have had an effect on her. Yet as soon as he has departed, she is thrown into tearful meditation that argues otherwise – both on the level of character and on the more microscopic level of language: For the first time in her life Esther felt herself seriously shaken in her selfcontentment. She knew there was a mind to which she appeared trivial, narrow, selfish. Every word Felix had said to her seemed to have burnt itself into her memory. She felt as if she should for evermore be haunted by self-criticism, and never do anything to satisfy those fancies on which she had simply piqued herself before without being dogged by inward questions. Her father’s desire for her conversion had never moved her. [. . .] But now she had been stung – stung even into a new consciousness concerning her father. (Holt, pp. 110–1) Once again we see a direct temporal conflict within both character and the syntax. Esther’s suddenly questionable present is colliding with her virtually unexamined past, as exemplified by the central section of the passage, where the structure of the language temporarily arrests the progress of the reader over a seemingly linear sentence. This occurs just as Esther’s thoughts are caught in an intense fluctuation between the paired hyphenates ‘self-contentment’ and ‘self-criticism’. In the final text, the fourth sentence begins, ‘She felt as if she should be for ever more haunted by self-criticism’, but in the manuscript, only a comma separated that phrase

192 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

from the preceding ‘Every word Felix had said to her seemed to have burnt itself into her memory.’ The change to a new sentence in the published text feels more fitting, as it marks the moment in which Esther begins to work through the sense of self-realisation inspired by Felix: the sentence clearly needed to stand alone. The vibration surfaces to the awakening of Esther’s new consciousness, sending that troubling impulse racing confusedly along her mental processes and along the conflicted sentences, which seem to be searching for a place to resolve themselves. In essence, the syntax itself becomes an ‘essential nerve-fibre’ that ‘pursues an outward course’, just as the painful vibrations simultaneously become both the forward-moving neural impulse as well as the complex, multi-level fluctuations around that impulse (Psychology, p. 27).14 But Esther’s process of transformation also draws attention to another aspect of the vibrations. Conflict is created in Esther by Felix Holt, so that the vibrations which underlie character consciousness are not only being translated into language and felt by us as readers, but are also being felt between characters – creating reciprocal vibratory effects at the level of story. The primary result is complication, as Herbert Spencer expresses it: ‘From the law that every active force produces more than one change, it is an inevitable corollary that through all time there has been an ever-growing complication of things.’15 We can see how Esther’s complications begin to unfold painfully after the ‘active force’ of Felix’s disapproval in that difficult fourth sentence of the passage, where Felix’s thoughts become internalised as ‘self-criticism’: namely within the clause, ‘and never do anything to satisfy those fancies on which she had simply piqued herself before without being dogged by inward questions.’ It is now a complicated case of ‘never’ ‘without’ – with two negatives not necessarily making a positive. After the initial negation, the section is punctuated by superficial words: specifically, reference to Esther’s beliefs as ‘fancies’ and the description of her response to any contradiction between those beliefs and her actions as being ‘simply piqued’. Then the words move more deeply inward and temporally forward as Esther realises that the time when she was not ‘dogged by inward questions’ is gone. The word ‘dogged’ is a complement to the more intangible ‘haunted’ earlier in the sentence, just as the aforementioned ‘inward questions’ challenge the very ‘self-contentment’ that no longer exists in its unexamined form. Like the sentences themselves, development and progress are no longer merely straightforward. Herbert Spencer argues for a similar outlook on the real meaning of development in his essay ‘Progress: Its Law and Cause’, saying that the widely accepted concept of advancement based on mere easy accumulation is not so much the reality of Progress as its accompaniments – not so much the substance as the shadow. That progress in intelligence seen during the

Melissa Raines

193

growth of the child into the man, or the savage into the philosopher, is commonly regarded as consisting in the greater number of facts known and laws understood: whereas the actual progress consists in those internal modifications of which this increased knowledge is the expression. (pp. 1–2) For Spencer, what is vital is the ‘internal modifications’ that make growth possible; for Eliot, these modifications must be created not just within a character but within the language used to describe a character’s inner conflicts. Thus the syntax moves back and forth between Esther’s superficial past and troubling present, creating a sort of linguistic vibration in the reader just as Esther is experiencing a jarring moral vibration in her newly awakened consciousness. This ability for the language to vacillate, to circle itself without coming to a definite conclusion, might seem like the antithesis of progress, but it is the essence of Esther’s emotional growth. She is being pushed painfully into ‘a new consciousness’, where she knows that her old ideals will no longer work, but she has yet to discover new ones. Her progress has its foundation in nothing; indeed, she is being challenged to ‘unlearn’ the wrong way before she has found the right one. While the vibrations that permeate the narratives of Mrs Transome and Esther share a common source in the ache of unavoidable consciousness, they ultimately move in very different ways. Mrs Transome’s seem to form waves that swell around the empty reality of her existence, while Esther’s are the twists and convolutions of burgeoning self-awareness. Their greatest difference, however, is related to their treatment of time. The temporal aspect of Mrs Transome’s heartbreak is demonstrated by examining the passage in which she first admits fully to her disappointment in the long-awaited return of her son: It had come to pass now – this meeting with the son who had been the object of so much longing; whom she had longed for before he was born, for whom she had sinned, from whom she had wrenched herself with pain at their parting, and whose coming again had been the one great hope of her years. The moment was gone by; there had been no ecstasy, no gladness even; hardly half an hour had passed, and few words had been spoken, yet with that quickness in weaving new futures which belongs to women whose actions have kept them in habitual fear of consequences, Mrs Transome thought she saw with all the clearness of demonstration that her son’s return had not been a good to her in the sense of making her any happier. (Holt, p. 21) The most striking section of the entire passage occurs just before the end, where the convoluted syntax between the words ‘yet’ and ‘consequences’ forces the reader to hesitate. Mrs Transome’s impulse towards anticipation

194 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

has left her with futures that never manifest themselves and with a past continuously being swallowed by disappointment. It is here that one comes to understand that Mrs Transome’s life is, as the narrator expresses at another point, ‘absorbed by memories and prospects’ (Holt, p. 15): there is no real present for her. The lost wanderings of the language earlier in the passage – fluctuations between future and past, between waiting and remembering – are framed by recurring clauses that focus on that single moment for which Mrs Transome had waited being completely unrealised. The clauses ‘It had come to pass now’ and ‘The moment had gone by’ form temporal borders, noticeably surrounding the first half of the passage, which is essentially a dense list of past moments filled, almost paradoxically, with a fierce thirst for a desired future that never manifests itself. In essence, Mrs Transome’s is a conflict that she knows will never be resolved in an emotionally fulfilling way. It is through Esther that the reader witnesses a more proactive approach to the struggles with an existence that is riddled with simultaneous temporalities. Once again, her enlightenment comes through her connection with Felix Holt: She began to look on all that had passed between herself and Felix as something not buried, but embalmed and kept as a relic in a private sanctuary. The very entireness of her preoccupation about him, the perpetual repetition in her memory of all that had passed between them, tended to produce this effect. She lived with him in the past; in the future she seemed shut out from him. He was an influence above her life, rather than a part of it; some time or other, perhaps, he would be to her as if he belonged to the solemn admonishing skies, checking her self-satisfied pettiness with the suggestion of a wider life. (Holt, pp. 301–2) The focal point of the passage is the second sentence, beginning ‘The very entireness of her preoccupation about him’. It is here that Esther is most in danger of losing her present self to immersion in a past that seems much more appealing than a future without Felix. She is in danger of becoming almost like Mrs Transome and surrendering herself to a passive, cyclical existence based solely on remembrance. Interestingly, the second sentence even contains a literal repetition of a phrase from the one just before – ‘had passed between’. In a way, the syntax is mimicking ‘the perpetual repetition in [Esther’s] memory’. The fact that the sentence just after the treacherous focal point begins with ‘She lived with him in the past’ seems like a confirmation of the reader’s fears. Yet while Esther’s present is painful and the possibility of her future with Felix seemingly hopeless, she never evades the emotional depths of her situation. She cannot forget Felix, nor can she be with him, but she hopes for a time or a place when the painful memory of his love will bring a strengthening impulse for her to be a finer person.

Melissa Raines

195

That is why the sentence must find in itself that higher or wider place for Felix ‘above her life’, even though not temporally ‘part of it’. From within its own linearity, the syntax creates a dimension in which to hold onto him. Thus Esther allows the past to exist simultaneously with the present, forming the basis for a future that may be somehow, somewhere, possible in relation to what is stored ‘above’, even if not available at the level of linear story. Hers is a much more constructive approach than Mrs Transome’s. Perhaps part of this comes from the reciprocity of Felix’s feelings, as the manuscript revisions make very clear: She {——} began {——} to look on {her feelings towards} ˆall that had passed between herself andˆ Felix {Holt} as something not buried/ but embalmed and kept ˆas a relicˆ in a private sanctuary. (Holt MSII, p. 54) The exchange of the one-sided phrase ‘her feelings towards Felix’ for ‘all that had passed between herself and Felix’, as well as the choice to delete Felix’s surname within the manuscript, suggest mutual attachment and intimacy – the very things Mrs Transome cannot seem to achieve with her son. Perhaps the healthy incorporation of these simultaneous temporalities has less to do with time itself and more to do sustaining, in spite of time, an accurate perception of the individual that a particular character either wishes for or remembers – an image that overlaps as closely as possible with the individual as he or she truly exists – to avoid the deeply vibratory ache of disappointed hope and tainted remembrance. If Felix is, for Esther, a source of spiritual conversion, he rarely has a similarly intense affect on readers. We are undeniably excluded from the same kind of intimate acquaintance with Felix that is established with Esther and Mrs Transome. This is partly due to the fact that Felix’s inner story, his struggle to find his proper pathway in life, has essentially occurred before the novel begins. In an unsigned review of the novel in the Spectator, R. H. Hutton argues this point, explaining that the great struggle in [Felix’s] mind between political and moral radicalism which gives the thread of unity to the story is almost past away before it opens; and though it has left behind it a sort of torso enthusiasm which flings itself nobly but half wildly into the social life around, with bare, if any recognition for that about it, there is no sufficient development in the character, or doubt about its decisions, to make it a really great central interest. (p. 258) To know Felix properly, we would have needed to have met him prior to or in the midst of his own moral conflict: instead, we catch him not just at the end of it but undeniably after. As a result, the narrator rarely gets inside the mind of Felix Holt, essentially refraining from much analysis and

196 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

leaving characterisation to come through dialogue. Yet Eliot still chooses to make him the title character of the novel – the thematic if not the characterdriven focus of the text. While the absence of the same intense vibratory movements within Felix’s few examples of free indirect thought could be seen as a statement on the difference between male and female receptiveness, something more subtle is also implied. Through Felix, we must come back to the issue of the novel’s political dimension: its treatment of the true potential, or lack thereof, for ‘the interconnection of the private and public’ (Beer, p. 143). Felix Holt is not so much a character as the dedicated representative of an ethical stance: an opinion about the possibility of a greater good coming from political action. In Eliot’s, and consequently Felix’s view, this possibility becomes increasingly negligible. Eliot’s difficulty with politics comes from its sweeping and inherently preemptive scope: namely, its tendency to affect widespread change in policy before its constituents are, in Eliot’s estimation, individually ready to handle the responsibility of their newfound power. As Felix says to several working men who have yet to gain the power to vote: Now, all the schemes about voting, and districts, and annual Parliaments, and the rest, are engines, and the water or steam – the force that is to work them – must come out of human nature – out of men’s passions, feelings, desires. Whether the engines will do good work or bad depends on these feelings. (Holt, p. 250) The ‘passions, feelings, desires’ that Felix refers to are the subtler individual whispers connected with the ‘internal modifications’ that Herbert Spencer described in ‘Progress’ – the small changes which make development possible. Through Felix, Eliot expresses her own belief that individual changes must happen before actual political change – that characters must feel the painful vibrations within their own thought-processes, and sense and be influenced by the vibrations in the people around them, before change can take place on the larger plane. From this passage, we can discern why the conflict in the novel is not one between political parties, as might be expected from the title, but between ‘political and moral radicalism’ (Hutton, p. 258). Terry Eagleton argues that this presentation of political movements ‘consists in a reformist trust in moral education and a positivist suspicion of political change’ – an idealistic view that fails to address the issue of social determinism.16 Eliot’s paradoxically romanticised and fearful treatment of the public sphere ultimately leaves Felix a Radical without a Radical platform – a man with decided opinions who cannot quite made the connection between inner and outer worlds. It is only in Felix’s struggle with and eventual surrender to romantic love that the reader comes close to knowing him. The reader catches Felix at a

Melissa Raines

197

rare and particularly candid internal moment shortly after confession of his deeper feelings to Esther Lyon: Felix reproached himself. He would have done better not to speak in that way. But the prompting to which he had chiefly listened had been the desire to prove to Esther that he set a high value on her feelings. He could not help seeing that he was very important to her; and he was too simple and sincere a man to ape a sort of humility which would not have made him any the better if he had possessed it. Such pretences turn our lives into sorry dramas. And Felix wished Esther to know that her love was dear to him as the beloved dead are dear. He felt that they must not marry – that they would ruin each other’s lives. But he had longed for her to know fully that his will to be always separate from her was a renunciation, not an easy preference. (Holt, p. 263) Of immediate interest are the sentences that begin with conjunctions – that begin in what one would generally consider the middle of a thought. I am referring specifically to ‘But the prompting to which he had chiefly listened’, ‘And Felix wished Esther to know’, and ‘But he longed for her to know’. The sentences before each of these progress to a certain point and should naturally connect with the ones just after via commas, which would help to internalise the ‘and’ or ‘buts’. That would make for a true George Eliot-like act of integration. Instead, there is a break in the flow of thought and thus a new sentence. Essentially, the longer sentence is aborted, begun again only in fragmented aspiration – a pattern that is present in both manuscript and published text, where with the exception of an unreadable deletion and the insertion of the phrase ‘sort of’ to describe Felix’s ‘humility’, the punctuation and sentence breaks are identical (Holt MSI, p. 525). This gives a halting, unsettled tone to the entire passage, as well as a syntactical dimension to some critics’ descriptions of Felix as an underdeveloped character. Henry James called Felix ‘a fragment’, and as we can see, the grammar used to describe his private conceptions is fragmented.17 Terry Eagleton names him a ‘“false” centre’, and many of these sentences lack or displace their centres (Eagleton, p. 116). The syntactical loss is partly due to Felix’s previously determined convictions as, presumably, sentences describing Felix’s past would have had these necessary intricate and conflicted moments. However, they are also symptomatic of a failure to connect inner principles with political action. If Felix ultimately fails as a character, it is almost certainly by Eliot’s design and part of her definitive ‘rejection of political action in Felix Holt’ (Myers, p. 85). The fractured syntax expresses the failed connection between sympathy on an intimate, personal level and larger, political sympathy – but not the failure of sympathy entirely. The relationship between Esther and Felix, as well as the transformative nature of his effect on her, stands as clear evidence of Felix’s intimate

198 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

sensitivity to the vibratory pangs in the individuals around him that Eliot valued most highly – even, perhaps sometimes unfortunately, at the expense of widespread political movements for the betterment of society. In the end, Felix does effect change within his own life and through his relationship with Esther, but it is social change at a microscopic level. While Eliot’s rendering of different characters’ responses to the vibrations of human suffering are, in and of themselves, remarkable, her most striking achievement is her ability to recreate those vibrations for the reader through the very structure of her sentences – to make the language pulse with her characters’ mental deliberations and moral conflicts. Within her grammar, the ‘vibrations that make human agonies’ become suddenly, subtly palpable, and we, as readers, are subconsciously urged to look more closely at the text as well as the story. Five years after the publication of Felix Holt, Eliot would describe another of her determined heroes, the Middlemarch doctor, Tertius Lydgate, as he peered eagerly into his microscope. He finds himself enamoured of that arduous invention which is the very eye of research, provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more and more exactness of relation; he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares which are the first lurking places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth of happy or unhappy consciousness. (Middlemarch, p. 162) Lydgate’s research is really a metaphor for what Eliot attempts through her language. She strives to travel from the macroscopic level of human emotion and ‘the growth of happy or unhappy consciousness’ to the microscopic level of the thought-processes themselves and the impulses that inspire them, penetrating ‘those minute processes’ within. She then registers internal contradictions through the underlying nervous systems of the prose. By syntactically expressing these minute movements, she shows the full intricacy of moral conflict and the impossibility of expressing that conflict in terms of distinct polarities in clear opposition. This is George Eliot’s attempt to assemble a more intricate and involved mode of communication – to generate a grammar of being that mirrors the complexity of existence itself. Perhaps the simplest way to explain Eliot’s efforts, however, is to look to Esther’s father, Mr Lyon, who says at one point of his own eternal search for the elusive right words, ‘I am an eager seeker for precision, and would fain find a language subtle enough to follow the utmost intricacies of the soul’s pathways’ (Holt, pp. 62–3). In this sense, Eliot was really not so different from the figure of her creation. She did her best to make the emotions palpable to the readers, but in the process of this search for a syntax that could move along ‘the soul’s pathways’, she was compelled to make the language more difficult and to make the sentences and the reading experience itself

Melissa Raines

199

closer to the very process of actually hearing the intangible ‘whisper in the roar of hurrying existence’.

Notes 1. See the Clarendon edition of George Eliot’s, Middlemarch, ed. by David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 189; hereafter Middlemarch. 2. George Eliot, Felix Holt, The Radical, ed. by Fred C. Thomson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 11; hereafter Holt. 3. Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Psychology, first published 1855, 2 vols (London: Williams and Norgate, 1881), I (1881), p. 151; hereafter Psychology. 4. Michael Davis, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Psychology: Exploring the Unmapped Country (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 1. 5. Most critics of Felix Holt focus heavily on its status as a political novel that ultimately rejects conventional political action. See contemporary reviews by R. H. Hutton and E. S. Dallas collected in George Eliot: The Critical Heritage, ed. David Carroll (New York: Barnes & Noble Inc., 1971), pp. 258–62 and pp. 263–70, respectively. See also William Myers’s The Teaching of George Eliot (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1984), pp. 82–5; and Arnold Kettle’s ‘Felix Holt, The Radical’ collected in Critical Essays on George Eliot, ed. Barbara Hardy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 99–115. Further references to Hutton and Myers will be placed within the text and abbreviated as ‘Hutton’ and ‘Myers’, respectively. 6. J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction: Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), p. 2. 7. See pp. xiii–xiv and pp. xvii–xviii of Fred C. Thomson’s introduction to George Eliot’s Felix Holt, The Radical. 8. Gillian Beer discusses ‘the interconnection of the private and public’ worlds of the novel, as well as the inherent contradictions between political stance and personal feeling and action. In fact, she points out ‘that the arch-conservative, Mrs Transome, is far and away the most radical person in feeling.’ See p. 145 and pp. 133–6 of Beer’s George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986); hereafter Beer. 9. The comprehensive Clarendon edition details many of the variations between the manuscript and different versions of the published work; however, punctuation changes are not often cited unless they occur within longer textual revisions. For the purposes of this study, I believe these small alterations can be particularly relevant. Listed below are the symbols I will use to highlight variations in subsequent passages from the manuscript: [ ] text not in original manuscript < > text or punctuation later altered in published version { } cancellation within manuscript version {——} unreadable cancellation within manuscript version ^ ^addition within manuscript version / location where punctuation is later added in published version 10. It has been confirmed that Eliot, as well as her husband in all but name, George Henry Lewes, did read proofs for the first edition of the novel, on which the Clarendon edition is based. Thus any changes made would have been, at the very least, approved by her. See the introduction to Felix Holt, p. xxx.

200 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature 11. Allan C. Dooley, Author and Printer in Victorian England (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1992), p. 150; hereafter Dooley. 12. The manuscript of Felix Holt is split into two volumes. Volumes one and two of the published text comprise the first manuscript volume, with the third volume of the published text forming the second volume of the manuscript. Further references to the manuscript will be placed within the text and abbreviated as ‘Holt MSI’ or ‘Holt MSII’, respectively. The pages of the manuscript of Felix Holt are numbered twice. I have chosen to use the page numbers that are centred at the top of each page, as opposed to those in the upper right-hand corner. See the manuscript of Felix Holt, The Radical, collected in Nineteenth Century Literary Manuscripts: Part One, the Browning, Eliot, Thackeray, and Trollope Manuscripts from the British Library, reel 7 of 20 (Marlborough: Adam Matthew Publications, 1997), p. 7. 13. The page proofs of Felix Holt have been lost, so there is no documentation of the changes made between the time of the original writing and publication other than the differences themselves. However, study of the surviving page proofs of several other Eliot novels, primarily those with multiple sets of page proofs from the early stages of editing such as The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, shows that Eliot was very involved in even the small changes to her text. More extensive changes to wording and punctuation are almost always in Eliot’s handwriting. Smaller changes are sometimes unaccounted for, in which case I have hypothesised that the editor initiated the change which Eliot approved. 14. Both Michael Davis and Sally Shuttleworth discuss the importance of physiological metaphor in George Eliot’s language, particularly as it applies to the nervous system. I agree and would go further to argue that Eliot wanted the language itself to function as neural pathways for the character and reader. See Davis’s George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Psychology, p. 11, pp. 21–4, and pp. 97–9. Also see Shuttleworth’s George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 72–3, 91. 15. Herbert Spencer, ‘Progress: Its Law and Cause’, collected in Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, vol. 1 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1883), p. 33; hereafter Progress. 16. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: NB, 1976), p. 116; hereafter Eagleton. 17. Henry James, review of Felix Holt, collected in George Eliot: The Critical Heritage, ed. David Carroll (New York: Barnes & Noble Inc., 1971), pp. 273–7, p. 275.

13 Culture Wars? Arnold’s Essays in Criticism and the Rise of Journalism 1865–1895 Laurel Brake

Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born . . . Fenced early in this cloistral round Of reverie, of shade, of prayer, How should we grow in other ground? How can we flower in foreign air?’ Matthew Arnold, ‘Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse’1 Matthew Arnold’s concept of ‘Essays in Criticism’ in 1865 coincided with an upsurge of journalism, including the appearance of two innovative forms of the Fourth Estate that were significantly to influence their successors: the Pall Mall Gazette, a review-like daily, and the Fortnightly Review, a news-oriented review in its initial fortnightly phase, 1865–66.2 Like these serial publications, Arnold’s ‘essays’ and ‘criticism’ were generically hybrid, with their implicit displacement of journalism’s ‘articles’ and polemics, and their gestures toward literature and Art. At this time and for the rest of the century, journalism and literature (in the wider sense in which it was used in the period, to include writing in the arts and social sciences) often overlapped, in a symbiotic relationship that in 1864–65 Arnold began to prise apart, with his invocation and revival of a literary tradition that includes Pope’s ‘Essay on Criticism’. Although Arnold’s subsequent practice is regular publication of articles in journals and newspapers that fuel his future publication of volumes of literature, his attempt to separate journalism from literature persists, famously ending only a year before his death, in his denunciation of the ‘new journalism’ in 1887.3 Criticism, journalism and literature, then, were not as divergent or distinct as Gissing avers, dramatically, in New Grub Street in 1891, or as Arnold, Wilde and Henry James imply in their pejorative references to journalism and journalists.4 While ‘literature’ and ‘journalism’ are persistently juxtaposed 201

202 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

in the nineteenth century, anxiety characterises the rhetoric. Its strength and insistence reflect the increasing self-consciousness of literature and journalism which, in their simultaneous development as professions, were pushing toward divergence and distinction,5 while the close, day to day, discursive involvement of journalism and literature in writing and publication was equally tenacious. That is, although journalism and literature are experienced by writers as overlapping and interchangeable throughout the period, there are numerous instances of reflexive debate about distinctively literary and journalism matters: with regard to literature these include ‘criticism’, the novel, poetry, copyright, and the morality of literature, and with respect to journalism, ethics, anonymity and signature, the functions of journalism, and its relations to the state and to the people it represents. Moreover, as full-time staffing of newspapers increased with the multiplication of dailies and weeklies after the abolition of stamp and paper duties (1855; 1861), so the differences of practice and the location of production between the journalists in their offices and the writers at home became more pronounced. Respective outcomes include the examining and teaching of English literature in the universities, the creation of specialised literary journals, and the formation of journalism schools, specialist journalism periodicals, and the NUJ. I begin this chapter by looking at the significance of the aspirations behind the hybrid forms of the Fortnightly, the Pall Mall Gazette, and Arnold’s Essays in Criticism in 1865, and go on to examine W. T. Stead’s later and alternative high claims for journalism. These hybridities, and the discourses of criticism and journalism will form the basis of the last part of the discussion, on Walter Pater’s and Oscar Wilde’s ‘use’ of journalism in their writing careers. The process of the migration of their journalism to the status of literature is a connivance of both publishers and authors. Is there any basis for claiming Wilde and/or Pater for journalism as well as literature? This chapter is a contribution to a longstanding debate among scholars. Elements of this argument – hybridity in Arnold’s work, and in the Fortnightly Review, Arnold’s thirst for publicity and income, and his dialogue with the Daily Telegraph – have been fully explicated, notably by Sidney Coulling, Chris Baldick, Kate Campbell, and Mark Turner.6 I hope to broaden understanding of the functions of Arnold’s book by analysis of its complicated cultural production in the university and the press, how it bears out Arnold’s intellectual commitment to high culture, and how it relates to the growing differences between literature and journalism. The year in which Arnold most clearly positioned his ‘disinterested’ criticism above the entire sphere of ‘the practical’, with its facts, factions, and parties, and above what he called the ‘sterile conflict’ they engender was 1865. Even then, 20 years before his denunciation7 of the new journalism, Arnold’s choice of what he was defining criticism against clearly included the activities, institutions and organs of the middle classes, the ‘Philistines’8 whose

Laurel Brake

203

values were engaged with the practical sphere of politics and government, for which ‘journalism’ was among Arnold’s recurrent tropes. This is explicit in his apocalyptic ‘Preface’ to Essays in Criticism, where he characterises his own ‘vivacity’ as the last sparkle of flame before we are all in the dark . . . the drab of the earnest, prosaic, practical, austerely literal future. Yes, the world will soon be the Philistines’! and then, with every voice, not of thunder, silenced, and the whole earth filled and ennobled every morning by the magnificent roaring of the young lions of the Daily Telegraph, we shall all yawn in one another’s faces with the dismallest, the most unimpeachable gravity.9 The absence of disinterestedness in this combative, name-calling and practical Preface was soon privately acknowledged and regretted by its author, who amended its contents in later editions.10 However, its existence and paratextual position at the beginning of the volume signal what I read as the pervasive hybridity of the collection of essays, as does its anxious dialogue between transcendence of the practical and engagement with it. Arnold’s practice in Essays in Criticism, later reproduced by Pater and Wilde, of the collection into books of previously published periodical articles meant that his signed pieces attracted reviews before volume publication; in the case of Essays in Criticism this meant that the volume appeared (in February 1865) in the midst of a volley of indignant criticism by journalists, largely occasioned by the appearance of its lead piece on the functions of criticism four months earlier in November 1864. The volume was born in conflict, in which Arnold participated: the intemperate Preface was one response; another was an article (‘My Countrymen’) that appeared a year later in a popular monthly (the Cornhill), which would maximise the circulation of Arnold’s views to his niche audience.11 There are two conditions of the production and consumption of Function/s that I believe indicate the underpinnings of its hybridity, and the juxtaposition of literature/criticism with journalism in this keynote text of the volume: its pre-volume history reveals it has double ‘origins’ – as a university lecture by a Professor of Poetry to the Oxford academic community, and the specific location of its subsequent periodical publication, in the National Review. That the lecture was delivered in Arnold’s persona as Professor of Poetry identifies the literary and aesthetic as frameworks for its author and consumers. Its emphasis on ideas and their disinterested circulation in an intellectual and aesthetic sphere, their alleged isolation from the practical, its dismissal of the intellectual capacities of the uneducated, and its aesthetic objection to Wragg12 – all may be accommodated by Arnold’s perception of ‘Oxford’: as ‘that sweet City, with her dreaming spires’ redolent of his undergraduate years, associated with his ‘buried life’, and regarded by the Inspector of Schools as a refuge from the world.13 In that context, the

204 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

primacy of the intellect and the aesthetic, along with their isolation from the overweening practical world of politics and work are overdetermined both by the audience of the Oxford academic community and his personal mythology of his undergraduate years. Coupled with his Oxford listeners, there was another audience, of readers, to contend with, that of the quarterly National Review, to which Arnold had promised the lecture. Indeed, by the time the lecture was orally delivered, on 29 October 1864, the National Review had the MS, and had advertised its forthcoming publication on 1 November in the Athenaeum of 29 October. Occasioned by the commencement of a New Series in this November number of the National Review, the Athenaeum advert included a manifesto for the new series that contains points central to Arnold’s article, and to the title of his forthcoming book. The National Review manifesto is all about the contemporary history of journalism, and the changing function and nature of the quarterly review as a genre. Arnold’s work, and this particular essay, are part of the history of journalism as well as the history of literature. In the new series of the National Review, the Manifesto explains, it will abandon its allegedly redundant book review function, and substitute ‘essays’ for reviews. While the original plan of the National Review in 1855 – to have ‘a more constant reference to general principle than is now usual in this country’ – is retained in 1864, the new project is to publish ‘Tracts for the Times’,14 which will be ‘made more distinctly visible by an entire separation’ from ‘mere reviews of ordinary books’ on subjects of ‘subordinate interest’. Of ‘extended scope and aim’, these tracts are to ‘discuss the broad aspects of the pressing questions’.15 The desire of the new series of the National Review to transcend the journalism of the monthlies and weeklies, and to separate itself from the mere day to day are clear here, and re-enforced by its plan for extended intervals between numbers, ‘half yearly’ issues rather than quarterly. As, in the event, this first issue of the New Series is the last number ever of the National Review, this halving of the number of issues per year must also be seen as an end game, but the nature of the reform of the project, and its expression are nevertheless germane to Arnold’s essay on ‘The Functions of Criticism at the Present Time’ (my italic ‘s’), which is indeed a broad discussion of a pressing question of the day as the new mandate stipulates. This piece – which is subsequently bound into a volume entitled Essays in Criticism – is as clearly located in the history of journalism as it is in the history of literature; it is a moment in the articulation of an attempt to displace the periodical ‘review’ by the literary ‘essay’. Arnold’s article and later volume also function as a tailpiece in and for the National Review which, at its commencement in 1855, wryly brought to its readers’ attention the imperfect and elephantine review-like essays and essay-like reviews characteristic of the older quarterlies. Walter Bagehot, the author

Laurel Brake

205

of ‘The First Edinburgh Reviewers’16 and editor of the National Review (with R. H. Hutton) at its launch as well as sole editor at its demise, undoubtedly had his earlier article in mind when he penned the manifesto of the Review’s swan song a decade later, the precepts of which frame Arnold’s essay. There is one other factor in the National’s transformation that is germane to Essays in Criticism. The shift from the date-stamp of journalism towards the broad truths of the more considered ‘tract’ is accompanied by a move from anonymity, characteristic of journalism in the 1850s, to the option of signature, now ostensibly admissible perhaps because of the new essay contents, with its link to literature and its concomitant value on attribution to named authors. Defended in the 1860s as a guarantor of more responsible journalism, signature in journalism is also commercially productive (thereby a lure to the foundering National), attracting readers by its personal and celebrity appeals. As a poet, as Professor of Poetry, and as a ‘celebrity’ contributor to the press accustomed to signature, even in journals such as Cornhill where it was rare, Arnold opts for signature in the National Review; his is one of the five out of ten signed pieces in the number, and it seems unlikely that he would have published there had signature not been an option. The signed essay, published in November 1864, is an effective trailer to Arnold’s volume issued in February 1865, the title of which echoes the emphasis on the ‘essay’ in the revamped National Review. The demise of the National Review according to the editor of the Wellesley Index is attributable to the inability of a disinterested periodical like the National, which had abandoned its Unitarian orientation, to survive: Walter Houghton in Wellesley quotes Arnold in ‘Functions’: ‘the notion of combining all fractions in the common pleasure of a free disinterested play of mind meets with no favour.’17 Arnold it seems was quite aware that his ideal was impossible for journalism, the medium in which he was publishing his essay, and in which he would continue to publish. Meanwhile both the Pall Mall Gazette and the Fortnightly Review, debuting on 7 February 1865 and 15 May 1865 respectively, both appeared within weeks of Arnold’s volume in February of that year. Like his book, they were hybrids, blurring borders, and self-conscious and articulate in their particular combinations of generic features. The 2d Pall Mall Gazette, edited by Frederick Greenwood, was launched as an upmarket evening daily newspaper which, given its freedom from the necessity to publish verbatim parliamentary and law reports that attached to morning papers, instead proposed to include opinion pieces, high-end gossip in its ‘Occasional Paragraphs’, review-like and indeed literary features, and eventually investigative journalism. Taking its title from Thackeray’s fiction (Greenwood had worked for Thackeray at the Cornhill in the early 1860s),18 the Pall Mall Gazette sought to harness daily journalism to letters rather than to maintain the separation between the two. Greenwood wanted ‘to bring into Daily Journalism the full measure of thought and culture which

206 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

is now found only in a few Reviews’,19 specifically, it was later suggested, the Cornhill Magazine and the Saturday Review. While also looking to the contemporary reviews for models, the Fortnightly Review in its manifesto identified its experiment with the French feuilleton, Le Revue des deux Mondes (see Figure 13.1).20 The Fortnightly sought to combine the weight of a Review (traditionally quarterly and, by 1865, serious and considered) with the topicality and news orientation of a weekly. Its innovative frequency – fortnightly like the Revue des deux Mondes – was poised between the weekly and the monthly, doubling the intervals of the weekly, and halving the frequency of the monthly. But if its high frequency aligned it to news – the entirety of its 18 month run as a fortnightly publication included a ‘Public Affairs’ section at the back (contributed by its editor G. H. Lewes)21 – at two shillings per issue its expensive cover price ignored the new shilling monthlies, and echoed the six shilling quarterly Reviews. Its combination of Politics, Philosophy, Science and Art – topics to be found in traditional quarterlies – with popular serial fiction allied it as well to monthly magazines and weeklies, which alone carried such ‘light’ contents. Moreover, by including fiction, the Fortnightly Review was making a bid, along with the monthlies, for female readers, whom most of the traditional quarterlies (with the exception of the Westminster Review) largely ignored.22 Another distinctive feature of the Fortnightly – which made it unique among the quarterly Reviews in the UK – was to follow its monthly predecessor Macmillan’s, and the New Series of the National in 1865, and adopt signature. The continuities with the National are curiously significant, given the imminent demise of its model. They include the same publisher, an overlap of contributors (with Bagehot a prestigious and named contributor to the first number of the Fortnightly), and the claim to non-sectarian diversity. As Mark Turner and others point out,23 this was short lived, and when John Morley took over from Lewes as editor in 1867, it quickly became Liberal. From the publisher’s perspective, the religious (Unitarian) character of the National, and its archaic infrequency were profitably replaced by the modish frequency and secularism of the new Fortnightly, while other elements of the spent title conveniently transferred seamlessly to its successor. In the mid 1860s, then, some daily newspaper and periodical titles are demonstrably bent by their founders on combining literature with journalism in the press, rather than separating them out. A roll call of the contributors to both the Fortnightly and the Pall Mall Gazette over the remainder of the century shows a persistent distribution across the categories of literature and journalism that are only retrospectively distinctive – not only journalists like G. H. Lewes, Frederick Greenwood, John Morley and W. T. Stead, but in equal if not greater numbers, literary figures, in the widest sense, such as Trollope, Swinburne, and Pater. The architecture of nineteenth-century literature – the chapters of Trollope’s and Meredith’s novels, the non-fiction parts of Lewes’s ‘The Principles of Success in Literature’ and Bagehot’s ‘The English

207

Figure 13.1 Advert for The Fortnightly Review from The Athenaeum, No. 1955, 15 April 1865, p. 509

208 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Constitution’, and the ‘essays’ of Pater and Swinburne – all conform to the article-length format and market niche of the Fortnightly Review. In the 1880s and 1890s, as editor of the daily Pall Mall Gazette and from 1890 of the monthly Review of Reviews, W. T. Stead was producing a critical body of work on journalism to parallel that of Arnold’s on criticism and culture. I have written about this elsewhere,24 but whereas Arnold extols ‘disinterestedness’ in criticism, Stead makes a virtue of what Arnold most deplores, and advocates its opposite: in ‘The Future of Journalism’ in 1886 Stead calls for a personal journalism that stems from the personality of its editor and the diversity of interests and influences ‘of an ably conducted paper’. For Stead, ‘Impersonal journalism is effete’.25 A year later, with Stead’s ‘Maiden Tribute’ in mind, Arnold, now a veteran critic, openly denounces the ‘new journalism’, if characteristically unselfconsciously in the discourse of a journalism article located clearly in a journalism space.26 The rhetoric of the two ‘sides’ is ripe for Gissing’s plot of binary opposition of literature and journalism in New Grub Street of 1891. I want to conclude by considering the implication in journalism of two literary critics of the late nineteenth century, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. The question of their identity as journalists has arisen for me in two connections recently, in relation to a dictionary of nineteenth-century journalism project which I co-edited, and in relation to the high profile accorded to Wilde’s journalism by an inclusion of a volume dedicated to it in the OUP edition of Wilde’s complete works. With respect to Pater, the entry for a Dictionary entry on Pater’s publishing practice rather than his aesthetic pronouncements and literary reputation (see Appendix) makes the case for journalism as a significant factor in Pater’s writing and career. While Pater cheekily took on Arnold in 1873, by a deft if unmistakeable re-alignment of Arnold’s focus on the object of criticism to his own on the subjectivity of the critic,27 Wilde’s interrogation of Arnold and ‘criticism’ is more flamboyant. Among the articles collected to make up Intentions, Wilde’s 1891 volume of criticism, was a periodical version of what was later entitled ‘The Critic as Artist’; but its original title, when it was published in two parts in the Nineteenth Century (28 [July and September 1890], pp. 123–47 and 435–59) referenced Arnold explicitly, as it was called ‘The True Function of Criticism, with some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing’. Like Pater, Wilde plays on Arnold’s dicta, but while appropriating the term ‘critic’, and the binary opposition Arnold posits between Art/creative work and criticism, Wilde conflates the two – the ‘Critic as Artist’ – and overturns the hierarchy of criticism as subservient to creative art. Not only does he blur the edges, he privileges criticism. At the same time, Wilde takes risible jabs at journalism and art critics, although these are self-consciously rhetorical, and wry; if ‘Journalism is unreadable . . . literature is not read’: that is Gilbert’s explanation of their difference in the article.28 Wilde’s negotiation of journalism, criticism, and literature is knowing and self-incriminating.

Laurel Brake

209

Like Pater, Wilde uses journalism to earn his living, and to circulate and test the building blocks of his books before he publishes them. Nowhere is this clearer than the first publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray, in an American family magazine, which through circulation of Wilde’s flamboyant novella assured its (revised) book publication, For a short period Wilde worked directly as a staff journalist, when he edited a monthly magazine, the Woman’s World, in an effort to command a regular salary, and to try his hand in shaping and commissioning the contents of a periodical publication. He contributed regularly to journals of the day – to augment his income, but also to build up the contents of future books and articles, for which he freely self-plagiarised earlier writing. Moreover, in the 1880s and early 1890s Wilde’s project of self-publicity was also served by the press, internationally and at home; he solicited reviews and news stories, and on occasion provocatively engaged with their writers in witty, published ripostes. In precisely the same period as Gissing’s novel, Wilde buoyantly defied the rigid borders that Gissing erects in New Grub Street, laughing at criticism, literature, and journalism and writing them all. Where Arnold and Gissing saw anarchy in journalism and the Philistine ‘democracy’, Wilde saw a cacophonous carnival of plurality and diversity. Ultimately, I am arguing that the discourses and writers of journalism and English Literature in the 1880s and 1890s shared a desire and a necessity to nurture distinctions in order to establish themselves, but that the alleged and longstanding ‘conflict’ between journalism and literature in the latter part of the century in Britain is largely a function of the rhetoric of discursive communities rather than working practice.

Appendix: Walter Pater (1839–1894), entry in DNCJ (London and Gent: British Library and Academia Press, 2009), pp. 482–3 Although Walter Pater was an Oxford academic for the whole of his career, and although he gained a reputation as an aesthete, associated first with PreRaphaelite Aestheticism of the 1870s and then with the Decadents, he constructed most of his books from his journalism. University based, aesthetic, explicitly daring in his writing, and author of studied and highly wrought prose as he was, Pater’s involvement with the press may appear anomalous. It is not. Rather it is typical of a generation of nineteenth-century ‘university men’ such as Pater, Swinburne, and J. A. Symonds, and of a press with the power to attract and accommodate them. Like many men and women of letters, Pater served his apprenticeship in the journals. Between 1866–68 he was the anonymous author of articlelength reviews in a single liberal quarterly, the Westminster Review. In 1869 he began a sustained association with the high culture, monthly reviews and magazines. There he published his careful and considered prose, now signed, in the Fortnightly Review, the Contemporary Review, the Nineteenth Century,

210 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

the Bookman, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, the New Review and in the magazine of his publisher, Macmillan’s Magazine, which he largely confined to his short stories (Imaginary Portraits) and novella (Gaston de Latour). He also contributed anonymously to the weekly (Church) Guardian (1886–90), where he published reviews he preferred not to sign, of French fiction on occasion, but mainly of work by friends. This common form of puffing was a two-way process, and friends reviewed his books as well: Wilde’s favourable review of Appreciations in 1890 was repaid by Pater’s 1891 obligatory review of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Pater’s use of anonymity early in his career is also telling. His anonymous reviews for the Westminster Review were among the most explicit of his career, on (Coleridge and) religion, homosexual culture (Winckelmann), and hedonism (William Morris). Once launched, and released from the terms of writing anonymous (and probably unpaid) reviews on disparate subjects for the WR, Pater published in the FortR a succession of four signed articles on the Renaissance, a single subject of his choice. Having thus ‘found’ the subject of his controversial and exquisite first book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), he produced the volume largely from unsigned and signed published work from the two journals. Repeating this process for three of his four subsequent books, Pater gathered four short stories from Mac (1885–7) to constitute Imaginary Portraits (1887), articles written over twenty years to make up Appreciations (1889), and university lectures on Plato, some of which first appeared in the Contemporary Review and Macmillan’s Magazine (1891, 1892) to comprise Plato and Platonism (1893). Many of the journals for which he wrote published his obituary. After his death, Macmillan produced three additional volumes, the bulk of which were uncollected journalism. Regarding the first, those in Greek Studies, Pater had found that although he could publish widely on this subject in a number of journals without censure, he could not afford to collect them without criticism. Even Pater’s prose – risky, homosocial, highly finished, and demanding – was safely accommodated by the proliferation and diversity of nineteenth-century journalism, whereas books were subject to the notice and castigation of reviewers. Serial publication in journals allowed Pater to work up a subject over time, remunerated him piecemeal, trailed the contents of his book and his name to readers before book publication, advertised his books, and reviewed them once they appeared. Almost all of Pater’s volumes were thus implicated in journalism from conception to realisation, their very structure (articles or ‘chapters’) included.

Notes 1. Matthew Arnold, The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed Kenneth Allott; 2nd edn. Miriam Allott (London and New York: 1979), pp. 305, 311. 2. Although from Number 1 the Fortnightly appeared every two weeks, after 18 months, in November 1866, it was forced by the hostility of newsagents and

Laurel Brake

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

211

the distribution system to adopt a more ordinary frequency; rather than going weekly, ‘towards’ news, it went monthly, ‘towards’ the magazines, thus becoming one of a rare breed at the time, a monthly that invoked the high seriousness of a traditional ‘Review’. ‘Up to Easter’, Nineteenth Century, 21 (May 1887), pp. 629–43. For commentary on Arnold’s allegations, see Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain, 1850s–1914, ed. Joel Wiener (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1989), pp. 1–73. Wilde’s numerous witticisms on journalism are normally derogatory, commonly by associating it with popular public taste and contrasting it with literature and beauty, as in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/91): ‘But there is no literary public in England for anything except newspapers, primers, and encyclopaedias. Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature’ (Chap III, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. J. Bristow [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006], p. 39). Alternatively Wilde highlights the association of the press with reality, facts, and ‘real ugliness’ in ironic contrast with a favoured ‘yellow book’ (ibid, pp. 106–7). Journalists appear regularly in the fiction of James; see ‘The Death of the Lion’ (1894), and Laurel Brake, Print in Transition (Basingstoke: Palgrave – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 145–70. For more on this topic, see D. J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965); Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (London: Verso, 1984), and Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1850 (London: Routledge, 1985). See Christopher Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); Kate Campbell, ‘Matthew Arnold and Publicity: A Modern Critic as Journalist’, in Journalism, Literature and Modernity, ed. Kate Campbell (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp. 91–120; Sidney Coulling, ‘The Background of ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, Philological Quarterly, 42.1 (Jan. 1963), pp. 36–54 and ‘Matthew Arnold and the Daily Telegraph’, Review of English Studies, 12.46 (May 1961), pp. 173–9; Mark Turner, ‘Hybrid Journalism: Women and the Progressive Fortnightly’’, in Campbell, pp. 72–90. See Matthew Arnold, ‘Up to Easter’, Nineteenth Century, 21 (May 1887), pp. 629–43. See Matthew Arnold, Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), pp. 111, 276. Matthew Arnold, ‘Preface’, ibid., p. 287. Ibid, p. 483. Matthew Arnold, ‘My Countrymen’, Cornhill Magazine, 13 (February 1866), pp. 153–72. Arnold’s famous objection to ‘hideous names’ among which is Wragg, a Nottingham mother allegedly guilty of having murdered her baby is found in ‘The Function of Criticism’, Lectures and Essays in Criticism, p. 273. See Arnold’s poems, ‘Thyrsis’ and ‘The Buried Life’. The title echoes the Tracts for the Times published anonymously by members of what came to be known as ‘the Oxford movement’ between 1833 and 1841. ‘National Review. New Series’, Athenaeum (29 Oct 1864), p. 548. Walter Bagehot’s piece, ‘The First Edinburgh Reviewers’, in which he discusses the ‘review-like essay’ and the ‘essay-like review, was first published in the National Review (Oct. 1855) as the lead article in Number 2 (pp. 253–84), in order to locate the new quarterly ambitiously in the tradition of the great, early nineteenth-century quarterly Reviews such as the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly.

212 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature 17. [Walter Houghton], ‘The National Review’, The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900, III (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press and Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 145. 18. The Pall Mall Gazette appears as a fictional newspaper in Thackeray’s The History of Pendennis, first published in 1848–50. 19. Frederic Greenwood, ‘Birth and Infancy of the Pall Mall Gazette’, Pall Mall Gazette (14 April 1897), p. 2. 20. ‘Manifesto’, reprinted in E. M, Everett, The Party of Humanity: the ‘Fortnightly Review’ and its Contributors, 1865–1874 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1939), pp. 331–2. The ‘Manifesto’ first appeared in adverts in the Athenaeum, 25 March 1865, p. 436 and 15 April, p. 509 and then in the first issue of the Fortnightly Review, 15 May 1865, on the verso of the front cover. 21. The ‘Public Affairs’ section outlived Lewes, and John Morley continued it under his editorship of the monthly Fortnightly Review for seven issues; in August 1867 a piece signed by Morley on ‘The Liberal Programme’ appeared in its slot, and the section never re-appeared. 22. Insofar as the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review were stocked with a single category of article, the review, and their quarterly (in)frequency made serialised fiction impossible, they were singularly closed formally to deal with the pressures of signature on the one hand implied by the serial, and on the other, the mischief of two of their employeed. 23. Turner in Campbell, p. 76. 24. See L. Brake ‘“Who is ‘We’?” The “Daily Paper” Projects and the Journalism Manifestos of W.T. Stead’, Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-Fashioning, 1880–1930, ed. Marysa Demoor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 54–72, and L. Brake, ‘ “Fiction d’un autre type”: Actualites et roman dans le journalisme de W.T. Stead’, Au Bonheur du Feuilleton, eds. MarieFrançoise Cachin, D. Cooper-Richet, J. Mollier, and Claire Parfait (Paris: Creaphis, 2007), pp. 179–92. 25. W. T. Stead, ‘The Future of Journalism’, Contemporary Review, 50 (November, 1886), p. 663. 26. See Matthew Arnold, ‘Up to Easter’, Nineteenth Century, 21 (May 1887), pp. 629–43. 27. See Walter Pater, ‘Preface’, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1873), p. viii: ‘in aesthetic criticism, the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is.’ 28. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’ [Intentions 1891], The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 349.

14 Shrieking Sisters and Bawling Brothers: Sibling Rivalry in Sarah Grand and Mary Cholmondeley Galia Ofek

My eldest brother contests all my legal and moral rights upon Bible grounds . . . I may be a very wicked creature to argue my ‘rights’ against such authority . . . Will you state the Bible texts wherein the personal and intellectual rights of woman are made subservient to those of her brother? Letter to The Herald of Progress, 12 May 18601 I heartily rejoice that the baby is a girl; you will give her strength to endure and struggle with the evils which are the birthright of her sex. Letter from Louisa Hill to Caroline Hill, on the birth of Octavia Hill2 This chapter explores conflicts between brothers and sisters in Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book (1897) and Mary Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage (1899), where domestic disputes over property and money focus the discussion of rivalry on material issues. Yet the balance of power between the siblings hangs on competing narratives and conflicting readings as much as it depends on quantifiable legal and pecuniary gains. Contrasting interpretations of the text that both brother and sister claim to share – the Bible – promote their competing claims to authorship and possession. Both novels locate the issue of unequal inheritance at the core of the power struggle between the sexes in general, and family discord in particular. Grand and Cholmondeley present primogeniture as a system that perpetuates women’s cultural, social and financial dispossession, and examine its effects against the backdrop of contemporary political debates about women’s rights to their own possessions and biblical tales of sibling rivalry. Margaret Homans claims that in The Mill on the Floss (1860), Maggie Tulliver’s obedient reading of patriarchal texts and her admiration for the elder brother curtail her independent thinking and stifle her imagination.3 The temptation to ‘feminine’, passive reading, silence and repetition leads 213

214 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

the sister, whose fear of losing her brother’s love is uppermost, to accept his values. However, the sister cannot gain access to the brother’s authority by imitating his language while relinquishing hers. Valerie Sanders has examined the central role that the brother–sister relationship played in Victorian culture, and described it as ‘the very cornerstone of middle-class family life’, observing that even in the later decades of the century, when social reforms and political debates took place, ‘the brother–sister relationship was increasingly presented as a place of relative safety’.4 However, as Paul Milton suggests, the growing ‘interest in questions of property and law’ was reflected in ‘situations in which women are affected negatively by inheritances’ in various Victorian novels.5 My analysis of sibling rivalry is informed by two parallel late-nineteenth-century trends: women’s political struggle for property rights and their growing engagement with biblical studies and interpretation, particularly of Genesis.6 In the last decades of the century, the dominance of male-oriented translations and interpretations was contested by a growing number of women who became conscious of their potential to re-conceptualise power-relations and hierarchies in society and to reshape political structures. Alternative readings of the Bible were particularly resonant in the period of intense religious inquiry that followed the ascendancy of the Higher Criticism in Germany.7 Late nineteenth-century feminist interpretations of the Bible, following historical-critical scholarship, challenged the doctrines of divine inspiration and of an absolute, timeless revelation that reiterated immanent truths about the role of women as subordinates. Feminist critical readings suggested that women’s civil status was inseparable from the entrenched views of ‘the ecclesiastical system’, which ‘deeply affected [women’s] legal and political condition. The laws of a country are largely influenced by the attitude assumed by religion on the subject of moral questions.’8 Grand and Cholmondeley conceptualised the passive consumption of canonical male texts through brotherly mediation as the sister’s exclusion from cultural, intellectual and actual inheritance. Both examined the Bible’s relevance for women’s efforts to redefine their status in society through inheritance narratives from Genesis, insisting on the inextricable links between the material practice of primogeniture and men’s position as the principal readers of and instructors in the Bible. They offered a wider and more liberal interpretation of ‘birthright’ as a native right not only to property, but also to education, self-expression, and authority. Their retelling of inheritance narratives from Genesis was subversive because they insisted that the contested birthright was also the right to read and reinterpret the Bible and its messages. Their allusions to stories of sibling rivalry were a means of demanding an equal distribution not only of wealth, but also of authority and power through a modern interpretation of the Bible’s heritage. Finally, both enabled the sister-heroine to construct unconventional stories that would supersede traditional ones, and to find alternative sisterly

Galia Ofek

215

ties which could replace the flawed relationship with the elder biological brother. By the end of the century, the brother–sister relationship was no longer perceived as a peaceful sanctuary, a domestic refuge from the political clashes between the movement for women’s emancipation and its conservative opponents. On the contrary, the brother–sister tie became enmeshed in the struggle for reform, and constituted an important part of its vocabulary. Eliza Lynn Linton nicknamed politically ambitious women ‘the Shrieking Sisterhood’, and New Women responded in kind, calling Linton’s camp of conservative men ‘the Bawling Brotherhood’.9 In March 1894, Grand presented sisterhood as a defensive political alliance forged in order to counter the ‘Bawling Brotherhood’ that mounted an offensive against women’s rights.10 In The Beth Book, the heroine is accused of ‘join[ing] the unsexed crew that shriek on platforms’,11 calling attention to Grand’s analogy between young dispossessed sisters in the domestic sphere and the Shrieking Sisters’ demands in the political sphere. As Ann Heilmann notes, in her ‘endeavour to neutralise women’s socio-political mandate, Grand utilised a standard feminist device of the time’: drawing on the domestic sphere for metaphors that expressed women’s public mission.12 However, the application of domestic metaphors to the political arena was not only a rhetorical strategy. Rather, as Grand herself acknowledged, the early education of children often conditioned them to accept fixed gender roles, which in turn reinforced socio-political injustice. Grand complained that many parents ‘frequently compel[led]’ their daughters ‘to lead an idle, useless, and irksome existence’ while their sons were ‘allowed to act on [their] own worst impulses’.13 They assumed that the sister ‘should be satisfied to see her stupid brother sent to school, to enjoy advantages which would have made her life worth having, but are only lost upon him’.14 Recalling her own childhood experience, Grand said that her brothers were always favoured: her mother took ‘little interest in her three daughters while expending her energies, affection and material possessions on her two sons and their expensive private education’.15 Grand’s experience was not exceptional, as brothers and sisters often acted out the wider social injustices of Victorian culture and society,16 so that elder brothers were sent to the best public schools in preparation ‘for future membership of the ruling classes’,17 and permitted ‘degrees of freedom and inconsideration’ which their sisters were educated to accept as natural, innate privileges.18 Grand’s experience of the wide disparity between male and female siblings finds expression in The Beth Book, where she develops a family history as a narrative of repetitive dispossession of sisters by elder brothers. The representative of the first generation in the novel is Uncle James, whose decrees at home carry the authority of the King James Bible. He usurps the family’s land and property, disinheriting his sister, Beth’s mother. Mrs Caldwell ‘ought to have had Fairholm, but she was away . . . when grandpapa died, and . . . so Uncle

216 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

James frightened the old man into leaving the place to him’ (p. 100). James allows his sister a small annuity of fifty pounds only. Having accomplished this, he proceeds to rob his mother’s sister, Victoria Bench. He swindles her out of her money, and turns her out of the family’s mansion. If this treatment of his maternal aunt seems too harsh, it is not unrealistic: non-payment and repeated postponements of the entitlement of an unmarried aunt was not rare at the time. In one legal case, a long-unpaid portion of the family fortune which was due to a daughter who never married came to be seen as a debt that her brother’s children owed her through an encumbrance on the family’s realty, but the portion remained unpaid for 25 years, and was still unpaid at the aunt’s death.19 Aunt Victoria introduces Beth to the Bible and its teachings, and wills the remains of her fortune to her niece. The aunt–niece bond is well-documented in legal history, as female donors – whether spinsters or widows – preferred female legatees.20 Significantly, in both novels, paternal inheritance is inaccessible to young sisters. In Red Pottage, too, Rachel West loses her father and finds that he has left her great debts instead of a patrimony. Her friend Hester Gresley is rescued from poverty – like Beth – by her aunt, Lady Susan, who fulfils her intellectual, social and material needs. In Cholmondeley’s own family, the aunt made a formidable figure. The father’s uncle, Richard Heber, who owned the family property, got into debt and had to mortgage the family estate. His sister came to the rescue, took over the management of the property, and at her death it passed – free of debt – to her niece.21 In the light of both personal experience and common practice, it is clear that in both novels, the father’s material inheritance is exchanged for a more sustaining financial and cultural inheritance from the older and wiser sister figure – the aunt. In Beth’s case, the aunt’s inheritance is not immediately available since the mother orders her to pass Victoria’s money to Jim, the elder brother. Jim spends the family’s fortune on beer and pipes in the appropriatelynamed club ‘The United Kingdom’, while Beth is denied access to proper education. Mrs Caldwell thus forces the family plot of disinheritance on her own daughter: she is ‘determined to give her boys a good start in life . . . there would be little or nothing left to spend on the girls . . . It is customary to sacrifice the girls of the family to the boys’ (pp. 114, 121). That the disinheritance at stake is cultural no less than it is material becomes evident when we compare the pattern of the sisters’ financial dispossession with the analogous and no less repetitive pattern of their educational deprivation. Jim, having ‘a good deal to say about the uselessness of sisters’, insists that his sister does not need to be educated since girls have ‘no brains’. Beth retorts: ‘How can you tell we’ve no brains if you never try to teach us?’ and later, confronted with a similar accusation, she replies: ‘Robbing women of the means to develop their talents doesn’t prove that they haven’t any’ (pp. 154, 247). Beth’s vocabulary – her use of the term

Galia Ofek

217

‘robbing’ – reinforces the analogy that Grand establishes between actual and cultural dispossession. Grand’s attack on primogenitive habits that were entrenched in law, custom and culture, reflected a real contemporary mood. As early as 1776, Adam Smith condemned primogeniture for blindly privileging the male sex and giving the exclusive right of inheritance to the eldest son while ‘beggaring’ the rest of the children.22 A century later, primogeniture came under a more concerted attack with the demand to shift inheritance practices from eldest-son succession towards a more equitable, or bilateral distribution of patrimony.23 In 1881, George C. Brodrick, one of many late-Victorian writers who participated in the movement for land law reform, published English Land and English Landlords. He claimed that the practice of primogeniture enriched elder sons while sacrificing their siblings and that the unquestionable status and privileges of the eldest sons often created frivolous and irresponsible future heirs: ‘the heirs of ancestral estates ha[d] been spoiled and demoralized by their great expectations’.24 These claims for legal and political reforms converged with women’s increasing demands for property rights. Josephine Butler, Lydia Becker and Elizabeth Wolstenholme campaigned for reforms in property laws. Wolstenholme herself had ‘an early and vivid realisation of the unjust disparity of . . . life chances that awaited [siblings] in one . . . family, according to the difference of sex’,25 as she was left to fend for herself while her brother could lead a comfortable and leisurely life. The last decades of the century were notable for legislative and property reforms which rendered the issue of women’s inheritance topical as diluted versions of the Married Women’s Property Act were passed in 1870, 1873, 1882, and 1891, gradually facilitating women’s accession to ownership.26 Both novels persuasively present the link between women’s dispossession by their brothers and their subsequent disempowerment by husbands. Cholmondeley defines the link as a causal one: ‘It is the blessed custom of piling everything on to the eldest son, and leaving the women of the family almost penniless, which provides half of us with wives without any trouble to ourselves. Whatever we are, they have got to take us . . . [they] can’t face the alternative, a poverty to which [they were] not brought up.’27 Thus, the sister’s disinheritance means that she must accept the first suitor, predetermining the power-relations in the new family. Grand, on the other hand, shows how the sister’s education to selflessness preconditions her to be a submissive wife. As Beth grows up, her relationships with men outside the family are often mediated and foreshadowed by her relationship with her brother Jim. Grand passes judgement on primogenitive models through her allusion to sibling rivalry in Genesis, indeed to the first rivalry between brothers. She casts Beth and Jim as Abel and Cain when she describes how Jim expects Beth ‘to act as a keeper for him’ (p. 153). In the Genesis story, Cain, who is jealous of Abel, ‘a keeper of sheep’, kills him (Genesis 4:2). When asked

218 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

by God ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ he replies: ‘I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?’ (Genesis 4:9). The fact that Beth is expected to act as a ‘keeper’, like Abel, is contrasted with Jim’s Cain-like refusal to be his sibling’s keeper, and to act as the guardian of his family. Beth’s brother is thus shown to be unworthy of his status as the family’s prospective heir, for by aligning him with Cain, Grand is drawing on and contributing to a long philosophical, religious and literary tradition that Philo originated when he claimed that Cain’s name was etymologically related to the Hebrew word ). The possessive attitude the name for taking possession (Cain/cana; denotes leads to ‘a kind of heedlessness’ and ‘false appropriation’ which are the true signs of Cain, as opposed to the ‘ideal of right conduct’ represented by Abel.28 This tradition is both modernised and elaborated in The Beth Book and Red Pottage, where elder brothers prove unworthy of their position as the guardians of their family’s inheritance, be it moral, intellectual or financial, but young sisters, rather than brothers, are presented as the just claimants. Both Grand and Cholmondeley show that the brother’s accumulation of the family’s fortune involves an act of theft, which reverberates with Genesis tales of disinheritance. Their brother figures are portrayed as a combination of the deceitful Jacob and the greedy Esau, who, according to the Dean of Gloucester’s 1868 tracts, ‘took counsel only of weak flesh’,29 and subsequently lost not only ‘a double portion of territorial possessions’ but also his ‘spiritual privileges’, his status ‘as ruler in the house’ and his ‘teacher’s chair’.30 Many verses suggest that the coveted inheritance is not only material, but also moral and intellectual: ‘Wisdom is as good as an inheritance’ (Ecc. 7:11). Moreover, since moral uprightness constitutes an important part of one’s inheritance, ill-begotten riches are impermanent, as ‘the end thereof shall not be blessed’ (Proverbs 20:21). Both Grand and Cholmondeley dramatise the complexity of biblical inheritance values and patterns in their rendition of the brother–sister relationship. They suggest that the elder brothers’ claims to inheritance are unjustified by focusing on their lack of moral authority, their improvidence, wastefulness, and, above all, disrespectful attitude to the value of their own birthright. The authors’ case for the younger sister’s appropriation of the birthright (through the brother’s misuse and subsequent loss of his) is firmly grounded in the religious discourses of the period. As Stephen Prickett observes, Victorian writers of religious commentary had some misgivings on account of the moral aspects of Jacob’s behaviour (theft, counterfeit, deceit and dispossession). However, they sided with him, choosing to condemn Esau who would ‘depart from the right way’.31 They justified the switch of inheritance by claiming divine intervention, asserting that Esau did not respect his birthright, and therefore was deemed unworthy by God, who ‘ordained that Jacob rather than Esau should be the head of the great nation through which all the families of the earth should be blessed’.32

Galia Ofek

219

Cholmondeley, a clergyman’s daughter, was likely to know that, in Abraham’s family, the birthright meant more than just property: until the establishment of the Aaronic priesthood, the head of the family exercised priestly rights and the birthright entailed the promise of a holy land and spiritual leadership. Even if she did not read Beacons of the Bible, she must have recognised the warning: ‘[y]ou are self-slain when you prefer the pottage to Christ’ from contemporary sermons and tracts.33 Cholmondeley’s novel was informed by F. W. Farrar’s popular discussion of the Esau-Jacob story in Everyday Christian Life (1887), where the Dean of Canterbury quoted not only from Genesis but also from the Hebrews warning ‘Lest there be any fornicator, or profane person, as Esau, who for one morsel of meat sold his birthright. For ye know how that afterward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he was rejected: for he found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears’ (12: 16–17). Farrar described the moment of the transaction between the siblings as ‘pregnant with fatal consequences . . . Esau’s guilty moment was but the expression and heritage of all his past life . . . what he had sold for a mess of pottage was not only the birthright, but the blessing, the glory, the dominion, the prosperity, of years’.34 Farrar’s point is that Cain’s apostasy is irrevocable, and that prioritising material desires is tantamount to renouncing God. Cholmondeley’s novel resonates with Farrar’s analogy between a problematic moral heritage and a wasteful attitude to one’s material inheritance, and his influence is evident from the start, as the novel’s motto quotes Farrar’s ‘On Selling the Birthright’: ‘After the red pottage comes the exceeding bitter cry’.35 Cholmondeley makes an innovative use of this motto as she applies it to her own text in order to explore the brother–sister relationship in particular and the legal and power relations between the sexes in general. She names her hero Hugh Scarlett, so that the association with the mess of red pottage is immediate, prefiguring the selling of his birthright for a transient, illusory gratification. Hugh knows that his sister ‘had transferred the interest in life, which keeps body and soul together, from her [own] colourless existence to that of her brother’ (p. 166). His illicit affair with a married woman, Lady Newhaven, eventually kills the betrayed husband and forces Scarlett to put an end to his own life. Cholmondeley underlines the connection between Hugh’s devaluation of his birthright, his self-indulgence and the ensuing violence through the repetition of the word ‘red’: ‘His hands are red with blood. He murdered [Lord Newhaven] . . . He had sold his birthright for a mess of red pottage . . . He had not believed in his birthright, and holding it to be worthless, had given it to the first person who had offered him anything in exchange’ (pp. 212, 347). In Grand’s novel, too, Arthur Brock willingly sells his birthright when he is unwell. Beth’s selfless nursing finds an appropriate expression as she tells Brock: ‘You had only to say “Sister!” and I should have come’ (p. 497). His reply is in tune with Grand’s brotherly tradition: ‘Talk about selling one’s

220 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

birthright! I’d sell my brains, I believe, for a cup of tea at this moment.’ As soon as the brother–sister analogy is established, the misuse of birthright returns to the novel’s foreground as Brock, like brother Jim and Uncle James before him, regards his birthright as a transferable commodity that may be sold, bought, stolen or consumed at the expense of the heroine. While Jim denounces his sister after her separation from Dan, warning her ‘not to apply to him if she should be starving’ (p. 490), Angelica and Ideala search for Beth and nurse her back to life. They invite her to live with them as one of their alternative ‘family’. It is thus clear that, in the novel’s plan, elective sisterhood transcends and supplants biological brotherhood. The vision of constructive sisterhood is a recurrent motif in New Woman fiction, representing the utopian idea of egalitarian and respectful relationships which would eventually replace patriarchal hegemonies and express the political principle of a ‘sisterhood of women’.36 Sisterhood is also associated with retrieving one’s lost inheritance and with developing individual interpretation and self-expression. In Red Pottage the brother, Reverend Gresley, keeps intruding on Hester and interfering with her writing. By contrast, Hester’s best friend, Rachel, inspires her first novel, and encourages her to write the second one. To learn how to read and write without following brotherly or patriarchal instruction is at the core of both novels: while preparing to write her own book, Beth reads Macaulay, De Quincey, Carlyle and Ruskin. As in her personal life, she first succumbs to the temptation to accept, repeat and imitate their style. Eventually she perceives ‘the effect they were having on her . . . Her English became turgid with Latinities’ (p. 375). Latin, representing the brother’s exclusive knowledge (to which many women had no formal access), marks the sister’s imitation of her brother’s tongue. However, shortly after Beth meets Ideala, who urges her to speak up for ‘her sisters’, she reaches a turning point in her career: ceasing to ‘follow in other people’s footsteps’, she finds ‘her own language, strong and pure’ (ibid.). Developing a critical, questioning attitude towards canonical texts is an important part of Hester’s and Beth’s growth as women and as writers, but it also means that they become irreverent and ‘unfeminine’ readers. One of the most significant texts that Beth and Hester learn to criticise and reinterpret in untraditional ways is the Bible. Beth, who reads Genesis, is told ‘it is absurd for a girl . . . to call in question the teaching of the best and greatest men that ever lived’ (p. 305). In particular, Beth notices ‘the discrepancy between the first and second chapters’ of Genesis, the two different accounts of creation. The first version describes the creation of man and woman as a simultaneous and unified event, in a non-hierarchical account: ‘in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them’, whereas the second positions the woman as second to man in the order of creation, and as man’s ‘helper’ (Genesis 1:27). Since both The Beth Book and Red Pottage are New Woman novels about New Woman writers and readers, they are

Galia Ofek

221

self-reflexive and inter-textual, calling attention to the process of writing and reading them with relation to other texts. Grand seems to point out – through Beth – that even within the first book of the Bible, the origin of womankind and its relation to mankind is a matter of interpretation and contention.37 Grand’s reference to the two versions of creation in Genesis also echoes contemporary theological debates on the discrepancies between the accounts. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible was published in London in 1896, and parts of it were printed in the periodical Shafts. She emphasised the differences between the Priestly and the Yahwistic accounts of creation. For her, the Priestly version was the only acceptable one, and she called on her (female) readers to reject the second and less equal version.38 Other women commentators who wrote for Shafts explored the issue of female inheritance and exegesis through biblical allusions. In 1892, Charlotte C. Stopes, Mary Stopes’s mother and a scholar in her own right, urged upon her readers that woman must ‘work out her inheritance . . . not less surely than her older brother did’.39 Similarly, readers were asked to recognise that although free ‘by birthright’, they should ‘maintain [their] liberty’, since the ‘woman who does not claim her birthright of freedom will remain in the wilderness’.40 An earlier influential voice is that of one of the most prominent activists for reform in the English property law, Josephine Butler, whom Sarah Grand greatly admired.41 Butler herself had to tackle the problem of inheritance and sisterhood when she dedicated her life to her father’s social causes and in return was described as ‘a shrieking sister, frenzied, unsexed’.42 Her dedication to property reforms was deeply rooted in religious faith, and she presented herself ‘as having inherited the mantle of her father. But this inheritance was not an easy matter. In regard to public work, as in regard to wealth, it [wa]s the son and not the daughter who inherit[ed] directly from the father’.43 Butler found justification for women’s equality in civil and property rights in the New Testament: ‘Search throughout the Gospel history, and observe His conduct in regard to women, and it will be found that the word liberation expresses, above all others . . . the principle of the perfect equality of all human beings’.44 Grand’s depiction of Beth’s visionary and oratory powers, as well as the assertion ‘that a proper relationship between the sexes is the source of redemption’, follow Butler’s vision of an ideal society whose members would be ‘children of God’, an extended family united by love, equality and mutual respect.45 However, in the realistic description of a society which falls short of this ideal, the repercussions of religious and authorial independence for women can be unsettling, as Red Pottage demonstrates. Hester’s claim to revere God in her own way enrages and provokes her brother, Reverend Gresley, who censures her having ‘fallen through want of solid Church teaching into freethinking, and ideas of her own upon religion’ (p. 53). His alarm reflects the fear that her individual reading might question his claim to exclusive religious, social and familial authority. The fictional brother’s disapproval

222 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

may also reflect Cholmondeley’s own fears of brotherly disapprobation of her interpretation and representation of family life and faith in her literary work. Like her heroine, Cholmondeley lived in a clergyman’s house, and she, too, felt that her writing could be viewed as an act of sacrilege. She wrote to her friend Rhoda Broughton: ‘I rather tremble in my shoes as to what . . . those two excellent men my brothers will think of [my book] . . . and I greatly fear that what seems to me character drawing will seem to them disloyalty.’46 Both Grand and Cholmondeley take issue with men’s exclusive authority as the Bible’s formal interpreters and the family’s official representatives. Beth, for example, asks her aunt why she is terrified of Uncle James, to which the aunt answers that she only fears ‘the dear Lord’. Beth’s response underscores the inextricable ties between property and religious authority in traditional societies: ‘But Uncle James is the lord . . . he’s lord of the manor’ (p. 100). Similarly, Cholmondeley condemns Reverend Gresley as ‘a preacher in the twin pulpits of church and home’ (p. 120). The Reverend’s self-appointed authority as the final arbiter of texts is exactly the reason that he betrays Hester and ruins her manuscript and with it, her literary career. A writer of conservative religious pamphlets, he entreats his sister not to write profane and immoral novels. When finding the manuscript of Hester’s second novel, he cannot resist reading and altering it without her permission. Significantly, the brother is annoyed by the fact that the book is dedicated to Rachel rather than to himself, the ‘blood relation’. The word ‘blood’ here is ominous, as it reverberates with the blood imagery in Scarlett’s story, the other plotline in the bifurcated Red Pottage. It also foreshadows future plot developments and their Christian and symbolic significance. Cholmondeley establishes an analogy between Hester’s mutilated text and Abel’s slain body. As Gresley attributes the new novel ‘to the Evil One himself’ (pp. 256–61), he concludes that it is his duty to burn the text before it is printed, and promptly burns the only copy. The burning of the manuscript is presented as a brutal violation of Hester’s birthright, since, by destroying the book, Gresley ruins Hester’s spiritual and literary legacy. It is also the ultimate act of dispossession: as the only copy is ruined, Hester is robbed of the thousand pounds she was to receive from the publisher. The physical and metaphorical location that Cholmondeley chose for this act of betrayal suggests that the author herself located the brother–sister rivalry at the core of gender injustice and inequality. Hester’s manuscript is burnt in the Vicarage garden, which is tended by the ‘gardener Abel’. The allusion to Abel presents Gresley’s act as a crime which is on a par with murder, as Hester cries: ‘I did not let your child die. Why have you killed mine?’ (p. 276). Similarly, the garden evokes both the expulsion from Eden and the betrayal of Jesus at Gethsemane. Hester’s hands are injured in the process of trying to recover the manuscript from the cinders, and the wounded bleeding hands evoke the image of the betrayal of Christ by his disciples: ‘What are these wounds in

Galia Ofek

223

thine hands? . . . Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends’ (Zechariah 13:6). Christ’s betrayal by his closest and most trusted circle in the garden is intertwined with a reconfiguration of the Fall, as the violent scene in the garden is contrasted with Hester’s early memories of innocent happiness with her brother ‘as children in our old garden of Eden’ (p. 191). As Adam and Eve, expelled from Eden, could never resume their pre-lapsarian relationship, so Hester and Gresley lose the myth of an innocent and harmonious siblinghood, and Hester flees the Vicarage to which she never returns. The metaphorical and allegorical dimensions of this scene become clearer in the light of Stopes’ claims that ‘Cain ruled over Abel, even unto the death’ while Abel, dying ‘under the cruel blow’ cried ‘Forgive him, Lord, he knows not what he does’ (Luke 23:34). According to Stopes, ‘Cain takes his father’s position. Abel inherits his mother’s “Fate”’.47 She and Cholmondeley identify the elder murderous brother with Man and the younger, virtuous victimised sibling with Woman. Moreover, since both choose to link Abel with Christ, the analogy between Abel and modern women implies that the suffering sisters are Christ-like, too. The struggle between brother and sister is centred on competing texts and interpretations: the brother’s religious tracts as opposed to the sister’s novels; the brother’s narrow, literal, and conventional reading of the Bible and its teachings as opposed to the sister’s more liberal, imaginative reading of scripture and her creative allusions to it. The preoccupation with textuality, and the juxtaposition of different narratives and readings, invites us as readers to examine the competing claims of both siblings in the light of their conflicting attitudes to the Word. Reverend Gresley’s decision to burn Hester’s manuscript as a means to avert the dangers of freethinking seems childish and literal-minded, equating the destruction of the written text with the obliteration of daring and challenging liberal views. Yet the very act of burning, propelled by the brother’s literal-minded attitude towards the written word, may have served Cholmondeley to depict a school of thought rather than one character. It may have been an apt contemporary reflection of a wider conservative camp: the orthodox readers of the Bible, whose faith was badly shaken in the 1860s and 1870s, when the Higher or Historical criticism of the Bible called into question traditional literalist exegesis and gained widespread academic acceptance. The ‘historical study of the Scriptures quickly suggested that traditional ideas concerning revelation and inspiration, as well as the customary style of literalist exegesis, were due for revision’.48 The Higher criticism promoted the notion that the Bible was not supernaturally inspired, that it formed an historical record that should be scientifically investigated. The ramifications of these new ideas extended far beyond the discipline of biblical criticism and legitimised the questioning of authority in the matter of woman’s true nature and sphere. In this light, Hester’s alternative reading of the Bible may well represent new critics, whom Gresley would not have been able to silence had he

224 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

burned all their books. In addition, most of the novel’s characters and events are defined and focalised by Hester’s point of view, so that she is not silenced, although her manuscript is destroyed. Moreover, Cholmondeley’s own biblical references offer a radical and modern interpretation of the New Woman writer’s spiritual and religious vocation. Hester’s writing is presented as a sacred, almost saintly mission, which the heroine is called to fulfil at all costs, as – like Christ – she is summoned to walk ‘upon the troubled waters’ (p. 154), in this case, of female literary creation and its reception. Further, Cholmondeley’s alternative biblical interpretation was accepted as such by her readers: the reviewer for The Spectator, for example, commented that Hester was made to ‘suffer a perfect martyrdom at the hands of her brother’.49 Grand is even bolder in her representation of Beth as a female prophet whose calling is to preach about women’s rights and to change their future. The novel starts – like Genesis – with a description of the beginning of creation, Beth’s coming into the world. But the opening chapter is not only the beginning of Beth’s individual life. Rather, it heralds the coming of a new race, the race of New Women, who will inherit the earth and change history: ‘Beth was one of the first swallows of the woman’s summer. She was strange to the race when she arrived, and uncharitably commented upon; but now the type is known’ (p. 527). Grand’s rhetoric suggests that the New Woman’s ethos and struggle are of biblical dimension and magnitude. As Israel Zangwill claimed in 1898, Grand’s chosen title suggested to readers that The Beth Book was – like the Book of Ruth – an integral part of the Bible, a feminist ‘addition to the Biblical canon’.50 The Book of Ruth, as Ilana Pardes observes, is notable for its ‘respectful approach to femininity’, and its polemic edge is enhanced by the narrative choice to focus the central plot on the history of Israel’s founding mothers and the life-giving and redemptive friendship between women.51 Kate Flint observes that while New Woman novels did not reward their protagonists with ‘happy endings, thus emphasizing the struggles ahead, these fictions served, potentially, as confirmation of the fact that independently-minded women readers were not without others who thought and felt along the same lines’, and offered them images of articulacy and self-determination.52 If Grand and Cholmondeley did not restore the heroines’ lost possessions or redress their compromised property rights, both authors pointed out alternative, more accessible versions of empowerment. The inextricable links between material inheritance and cultural legacy, property and authority are evident in both novels. These links serve Grand and Cholmondeley to explore and challenge the relationship between primogeniture as a patriarchal legal system that privileges sons from an economic and financial point of view, and traditional religious institutions that privilege sons from an educational, cultural and ideological point of view. Adam Smith claimed that primogeniture had evolved to ensure ‘[t]hat the power, and consequently the security of the monarchy,

Galia Ofek

225

may not be weakened by division’.53 Restrictive readings of the Bible as a monolithic text with a single inherent meaning transmitted by one group of authorised teachers seemed to have achieved similar internal ideological cohesion through a parallel politics of exclusion. As opposed to earlier nineteenth-century references to women’s ‘birthright’, such as Sarah Stickney Ellis’s claim that since women should distinguish themselves morally rather than intellectually, ‘the possession of genius is, to a woman, a birthright of very questionable value’,54 New woman writers insisted on the links between the intellectual, moral, social and political senses of the word. Finding within the biblical canon a subversive pattern of inheritance laws, pointing out the heterogeneity of the canon and broadening the range of valid biblical interpretations served New Woman writers to claim their own share in the literary canon of late-Victorian culture. They proved that intellectual and assertive women could command a dialectics with which to defend their cultural and property rights.

Notes 1. Quoted in Ann D. Braude, ‘Spirits Defend the Rights of Women: Spiritualism and Changing Sex Roles in Nineteenth-century America’, in Women, Religion and Social Change, eds. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Ellison Banks Findly (New York: SUNY Press, 1985), p. 422. 2. Edmund Maurice, ed., Life of Octavia Hill as Told in her Letters (London: Macmillan, 1913), p. 4. 3. Margaret Homans, ‘Eliot, Wordsworth and the Scenes of the Sisters’ Instruction’, Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), p. 54. 4. Valerie Sanders, The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature from Austen to Woolf (Basingstoke: Palgrave – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 11, 4. 5. Paul Milton, ‘Inheritance as the Key to all Mythologies: George Eliot and Legal Practice’, Mosaic 28.1 (1995), p. 49. 6. Elizabeth Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets, William Veeder, The Woman Question: Social Issues 1837–1883, vol. 2 Society and Literature in Britain and America (New York: Garland, 1983), pp. 165–7. 7. For a discussion on the cultural impact of the Higher criticism, see Bernard Reardon, Religious Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 4–5. 8. ‘Womanhood and Religious Mis-Education I’, Shafts 1.1 (5 November 1892), p. 7. 9. Sarah Grand, ‘The Bawling Brotherhood’, Review of Reviews (1894) 9, p. 384. Rpr. in Ann Heilmann, Journalistic Writings and Contemporary Reception, in Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 354. 10. Grand, ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’, North American Review (1894) 158: 271–6. Rpr. in Heilmann, Journalistic Writings, p. 29. 11. Sarah Grand, The Beth Book (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994), p. 509. 12. Ann Heilmann, New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 18.

226 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature 13. Grand, ‘The Modern Girl’, North American Review (1894) 158: 706–14. Rpr. in Heilmann, Journalistic Writings, p. 38. 14. Grand, ‘The New Woman and the Old’, Lady’s Realm (1898) 4: 466–70. Rpr. Heilmann, Journalistic Writings, p. 73. 15. Heilmann, New Woman Strategies, p. 29. 16. Many girls received good education at home, and some were taught Latin by their parents or their brothers’ tutors. However, as Grand demonstrates in The Beth Book, where Beth is educated (for a short while) by her brother’s tutor, often the sister was expected to put her own intellectual needs (and performance) behind her brother’s. 17. Sanders, p. 108. 18. Ibid., p. 16. This common story reverberates with echoes from earlier Victorian novels such as Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848), both depicting clever and talented sisters who stay at home while their less studious brothers enjoy proper education outside. 19. Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 116–18. 20. For a detailed discussion of spinsters’ preference for female legatees, see Penelope Lane’s ‘Women, Property and Inheritance: Wealth Creation and Income Generation in Small English Towns, 1750–1835’ (pp. 184–90) and Green’s ‘Independent Women, Wealth and Wills in Nineteenth-Century London’ (pp. 217–22), both in Stobart & Owens, Urban Fortunes: Property and Inheritance in the Town, 1799–1900 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). 21. Mary Cholmondeley, Under One Roof (London: John Murray, 1918), p. 4. 22. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, eds. Skinner, Campbell & Todd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 384. 23. Steven Mintz, A Prison of Expectations: The Family in Victorian Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1985), pp. 149–50. 24. George C. Brodrick, An Enquiry into the Origin and Character of the English Land System, with Proposals for its Reform (London, 1881), p. 115. 25. Lee Holcombe, Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth-century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), p. 118. 26. Lee Holcombe, ‘Victorian Wives and Property Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law, 1857–1882’, in A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. 7. 27. Mary Cholmondeley, Red Pottage (London, 1900), p. 130. 28. Richardo J. Quinones, The Chains of Cain: Violence and the Lost Brother in Cain and Abel Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 25–7. 29. Very Rev. Henry Law, Beacons of the Bible (London 1868), p. 221. 30. Ibid., pp. 222–3. For Esau’s loss of inheritance, see Genesis 25, 27. 31. Mrs Sarah Trimmer, Help to the Unlearned in the Study of the Holy Scriptures, quoted in Prickett & Jasper’s The Bible and Literature: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 126. 32. Ibid. 33. Law, p. 228. 34. Frederic William Farrar, Everyday Christian Life or: Sermons by the Way (London, 1887), pp. 175–6. My emphasis. 35. Ibid., p. 183. 36. Ann Heilmann, New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 59.

Galia Ofek

227

37. In America, Sarah Josepha Hale claimed that the creation story testified to Eve’s moral superiority, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s belief in individual interpretation was matched by her distrust of male exegesis. 38. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible (Salem: Ayer, 1988), pp. 14–20. 39. Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, ‘ “Woman” in the Vision of Creation’, Shafts 1.4, 26 November 1892, p. 55. My emphasis. 40. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, ‘An Extract from The Woman’s Bible’, Shafts 5.5, May 1897, p. 141. 41. Teresa Mangum, Married, Middlebrow and Militant (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), pp. 99, 185. 42. Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain 1860–1914 (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 10. 43. Barbara Caine, Victorian Feminists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 163. 44. Holcombe, Wives and Property, p. 120. 45. Rose Lovell-Smith, ‘Science and Religion in the Feminist Fin-de-Siècle and A New Reading of Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 29.2 (2001): p. 307. 46. Linda H. Peterson, Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: the Poetics and Politics of Life Writing (University of Virginia Press, 1999), p. 189. 47. Stopes, p. 54. 48. Reardon, p. 4. 49. The Spectator 83 (28 October 1899), p. 613. 50. Israel Zangwill, ‘The Month in England’, Cosmopolitan 24 (1898), p. 455. 51. Ilana Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 99. 52. Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 311. 53. Wealth of Nations, p. 383. 54. Sarah Stickney Ellis, Women of England, their Social Duties and Domestic Habits (London, 1839), pp. 92–3.

15 After Eternal Punishment: ‘Fin de Siècle’ as Literary Eschatology Matthew Bradley

That the doctrine of eternal punishment was a lodestone around which gathered many of the key religious conflicts in the Victorian period is beyond question. The idea that the tortures awaiting the damned in hell are literally everlasting became, to a growing number of liberal theologians in the Anglican Church, representative of everything that they were trying to purge from Christian thought and worship. The slender Gospel basis for this doctrine, one passage in Matthew 25:46 ‘And these [the damned] shall go away into everlasting punishment’1 made it particularly vulnerable to the Higher Criticism and its methods, although ultimately the doctrine came to symbolize much more than a conflict of methodologies. It became a theatre of war in which the strength of liberal theology was repeatedly tested. F. D. Maurice had been forced to resign the Chair of Theology at King’s College, London for arguing in his Theological Essays (1853) for a more flexible definition of ‘eternal’. According to Maurice, the movement of our thought from the temporal to eternal is the ‘very aim of the divine economy’, and therefore it is extremely dangerous ‘to introduce the notion of duration into a word from which He has deliberately excluded it’.2 In this context, ‘eternal’ refers not to minutes and hours but to a whole new state of being: separation from God. One of the most controversial elements in Colenso’s 1861 commentary on the Romans was its explicit repudiation of the doctrine.3 And one of the two successful lawsuits brought against Essays and Reviews succeeded on the specific point that, in his essay ‘Séances Historiques de Genève: The National Church’, H. B. Wilson had implied refutation of eternal punishment as it was set out in the Athanasian Creed (‘and those who have behaved well will go to eternal life, those who have behaved badly to eternal fire’4), a ruling that resulted in the suspension of Wilson’s benefice for one year in 1862.5 By 1874, the issue loomed so large that the Archdeacon of Westminster F. W. Farrar preached a series of controversial sermons against eternal punishment from the pulpit in Westminster Abbey, arguing that ‘everlasting’ was an incorrect translation.6 228

Matthew Bradley

229

These and the many other controversies involving eternal punishment are superbly compiled in Geoffrey Rowell’s 1974 study Hell and the Victorians: A Study of the Nineteenth-Century Theological Controversies Concerning Eternal Punishment and the Future Life, a book whose subtitle indicates the importance of this specific doctrine to the more general debates about hell and the likelihood of divine punishment that were taking place in the midnineteenth century. It is not my intention to retread this ground. But in 1880, Benjamin Jowett reportedly remarked that: Our problems are not so serious as those of thirty or forty years ago. Then men thought they had to receive as a revelation from God that which conflicted with their sense of justice, and puzzled themselves with trying to reconcile God’s goodness with the doctrine of eternal punishment.7 Rowell’s account also stresses the gradual subsidence of the issue as the century drew on, and his is a narrative in which the debate about eternal punishment comes to an end in the face of what was in essence an unqualified triumph for the liberal opposition. According to Rowell, by 1900 ‘men were no longer deprived of office for teaching a tentative universalism or regarded with suspicion for espousing the doctrine of conditional immortality’, ‘the hell-fire sermons of the great preachers no longer carried conviction’ and the ‘old assurances and the definite doctrines of Christian eschatology had become doubtful, not least because of the controversies over hell.’8 As far as eternal punishment and the punitive theology that it had come to represent were concerned, controversy had fairly quickly become orthodoxy. By the end of the century it seemed that the God who lay behind the doctrine had been all but sidelined from the intellectual mainstream of English theology. In the eighties and the nineties, eternal punishment was yesterday’s conflict. This obviously raises questions of when any conflict can accurately be declared at an end, or what precisely occurs when and if this happens. Can it continue in another form, and if so, can this new conflict be legitimately or helpfully called a continuation? Even in the arena of military warfare, the linguistic lynchpin for most writing on conflict, such judgments are clearly fraught with difficulty. Was the Hiroshima bomb one of the last battles against the Japanese in the Second World War, or one of the first strikes against Soviet Russia in the Cold War? What I want to explore in this chapter is the possibility that the sidelining of eternal punishment and damnatory eschatology in general caused it to emerge elsewhere, a secular re-fashioning of the concept taking place within a wider cultural (and literary) discourse. It is my contention that by the 1890s, when the religious conflict seemed to be all but over, that the notorious term ‘fin de siècle’ and the literary practices with which it was associated might be at least in part the displacement of a theological conflict into a literary one, a secular eschatology that stressed

230 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

sin, damnation and ultimate collapse when such ideas were rapidly losing purchase in its religious counterpart. The huge revival of interest in the literature of this period has tended to concentrate mostly upon canon-reformation and the profits of an interdisciplinary approach, although significantly this latter trend has tended to exclude theology. For example, John Stokes’s 1992 collection of essays Fin de Siècle, Fin du Globe: Fears and Fantasies of the Late Nineteenth Century, despite its editor’s claim that the book is ‘a reassessment of the eschatological ideas of the 1890s in the light of the critical thought of the 1990s’,9 never examines the process by which this theological term crossed into very different spheres at the fin de siècle and consequently, neither is it particularly interested in the ways in which religious ideas of eschatology, legacy of those earlier conflicts, may have continued to have an effect on this process. Its title is taken from a telling moment in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) when Dorian bemoans the fact that the nineteenth century fin de siècle is not apocalyptic enough: ‘Fin de siècle,’ murmured Lord Henry. ‘Fin du globe,’ answered his hostess. ‘I wish it were fin du globe,’ said Dorian, with a sigh, ‘Life is a great disappointment.’10 Obviously, in its wider cultural context, the literary fin de siècle mood draws on a huge variety of tropes – most obviously the Roman decadence – which seem to have little to do with Christian apocalyptic. This is true, of course, of Dorian Gray itself, and the above extract can (and would usually) be read as a contemporary expression of ennui drawn from the pages of Pater, Gibbon or Montesquieu. But the existence of such well-explored areas should not blind us to potent new contexts, particularly when one examines how many assumptions the then-fashionable idea of fin de siècle and the then-unfashionable idea of eternal punishment appear to share. Firstly, what the two notions most obviously have in common is that both proceed from the clear assumption that the ‘end of things’ is in some way revelatory. Eternal punishment is an eschatological doctrine. It reveals what is by what will be, taking what happens at the end of the world as its starting point for defining God and the order of His universe. As Northrop Frye observed, the Greek apocalypsis has the metaphorical sense of truth or taking a lid off,11 and it was of course the type of God that eternal punishment claimed to reveal which particularly outraged the liberals. In its insistence on eternity, the doctrine deliberately disavowed God’s interest in (and the accompanying metaphysical prospects for) man’s amelioration and the forgiveness of his sins in the afterlife. While there is no direct suggestion in Dorian Gray of a God in any orthodox sense, the novel’s central conceit does seem to imply the existence of a supernatural power, and that such a power’s nature is rather to condemn and punish sin than to forgive it.

Matthew Bradley

231

Interestingly, in 1874, at the same time as Farrar was preaching eternal hope in Westminster Abbey, Nietzsche was pondering the ‘Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life’, the idea that an overdevelopment of the historical sense could lead to cultural inactivity and degeneracy. In the course of his essay, Nietzsche castigates historians for tacitly encouraging a belief that the ‘old age of mankind’ has been reached, because they cannot help but claim a final judgment, a final revelation, of history’s true meaning: Does not this paralyzing belief in an already withering mankind rather harbour the misunderstanding, inherited from the Middle Ages, of a Christian theological conception, the thought that the end of the world is near, of the fearfully expected judgment? . . . In this sense we still live in the Middle Ages and history is still a disguised theology.12 For Nietzsche, all history-writing implies a civilization at its conclusion, which in turn implies a Christian apocalypse of condemnation and damnation. The guilt that accompanies any society judging itself to exist at the end of things is unavoidable because the analogy cannot help but invoke the original Christian conception of Last Judgment from which it derives. It is an unpardonably essentialist reading of Christian eschatology, but a more theologically informed reader might say that what Nietzsche is doing here is denying that the idea of a culture-at-the-end-of-things can find a valid analogy in millennialism, the theological idea that history will gradually progress towards millennial paradise in a broadly teleological way. By contrast, he is evoking millenarianism, that is he cleaves to the idea of the Christian millennium as a schism from history, a dramatic intervention on the part of God to judge (and to condemn) mankind. In his view, all absolute judgments are eschatological in nature, and such is the power of the millenarian model that any such authoritative utterance automatically perpetuates the twin poles of guilt and condemnation. Again, what we might call the ‘metaphysics’ of Dorian Gray can be instructive here. There are a few local nods to millenarian eschatology in the novel; for all his fin de siècle dissipation, Basil Hallward appears to be an orthodox Christian of this stamp. At one point he shudders to think of Sibyl Vane and ponders that following her suicide ‘there are horrors in store for that little white body of hers!’13 Although he doesn’t assert the eternity of punishment directly, he is clearly a believer at least in the physicality of the tortures waiting beyond the grave. Faced with the picture itself he desperately searches for biblical inspiration, and his exhortations to prayer, as Joseph Bristow notes, are a mix of the Lord’s Prayer, Psalm 51, and Isaiah 1:16.14 In its original context, this last (‘Wash ye, make you clean; put the evil of your doings from mine eyes’) is a call to cleanliness both to appease the wrath of God, and as preparation for the Last Judgment. It is simultaneously a propitiatory gesture and an eschatological assumption.

232 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

But there is a more obvious connection to Nietzsche’s idea woven into the book’s more general fabric. Throughout the novel, Dorian is represented as desiring an infinite variety of masks along the lines suggested by Henry (‘he spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century . . . the various moods through which the world has ever passed’15), but the existence of the picture stands as a permanent block on this ambition. It offers him a reflection of something contained, unified and, most importantly, something which admits of absolute judgment. If the soul were actually to be the loose collection of experiences and sensations that Dorian wishes it to be, then the idea of a Last Judgment upon it would be impossible. But this is precisely what the picture’s transformation suggests, a divine authority that exists beyond the subjective boundaries of personality, pronouncing judgment and, as per Nietzsche, condemnation. Nietzsche’s essay was not well known in England, but the implications of this idea provide an interesting counterbalance to the millennial optimism of liberal Anglicanism at the time. To thinkers such as Jowett, the result of the conflicts in the 1850s and 60s over eternal punishment had been to produce a desirable waning of belief in the prophetic power of any eschatology that stressed such things. But liberalism had built its own eschatology by the nineties, and one with a very heavy investment in the refining processes and upward movement of history. In fact, a key factor contributing to the doctrinal erosion of eternal punishment had been the basic irreconcilability of a punitive Last Judgment with the Hegelian models of history that had gained enormous popularity in Anglican theology over the years. Frederick Temple’s ‘Education of the World’, the first essay of Essays and Reviews, argues for a model of history in which before Christ, man was as a child, thus needing the strict authority of the Old Testament; immediately after Christ we were provided with an example that we loved and copied but did not necessarily understand. It is only in the modern era that we are fully grown adults, able to appreciate the truths of religion shorn of dogmatic falsehoods and misunderstandings. Moreover: We may expect to find, in the history of man, each successive age incorporating into itself the substance of the preceding . . . This power, whereby the present ever gathers into itself the results of the past, transforms the human race into a colossal man, whose life reaches from the creation to the day of judgment.16 The connection that Temple makes between the principle of historical development and a millennial eschatology is evident. But as Nietzsche might have observed, if the end of the nineteenth century is indeed the age of theological adulthood, the ‘old age of mankind’, then the day of judgment has already been reached, and it is Temple who is enacting it. By the same token, Jowett in his essay ‘On the Interpretation of Scripture’ argued

Matthew Bradley

233

that modern critical techniques were invaluable in realizing the genuine nature of Christianity, and in a significant phrase, noted with satisfaction that ‘it is the old age of the world only that has at length understood its childhood’.17 The account of history implied by an eschatology emphasizing guilt is rendered simply untenable. It would not only be an injustice on the part of God, but counter to the very essence of Christian aspiration. It is a measure of liberalism’s steady march that by the time the fin de siècle came, with its built-in chronological encouragement to the ‘old age of mankind’ idea, these Hegelian models had proved so influential that they had percolated up from the Broad to the High Church. Casting its eye over the past year at the end of 1890, the leader in the Church Times noted with some excitement that it was a time ‘making history’, and ‘in every respect [it has] made us conscious that we are the fin de siècle’.18 The sense of an ending, as far as the leader is concerned, is cause for celebration. The controversial King Judgment, which aimed to provide a definitive answer to the problem of which liturgical practices were legal and which were not, is cited not only as a decisive moment of conclusion for the Ritualist controversies, but also to have ended the whole antagonism between Church and State. The publication of Lux Mundi at the end of 1889, the series of essays on the Essays and Reviews model from High rather than Broad Churchmen, is said to have finally concluded the debate over biblical inspiration. Yet Lux Mundi itself betrays a more open conflict between its contributors’ Hegelian and orthodox loyalties. The editor, Charles Gore, had been a student of England’s foremost Hegelian T. H. Green, but was also the Principal of Oxford’s Pusey House. The principle of God’s revelation of His truth through the historical process was largely unquestioned (one essay was even called ‘The Incarnation as the Basis of Development’), but there is far more concern to reconcile this principle with certain doctrines that the Broad Churchmen had been more than happy to discard. Amongst these, inevitably, was eternal punishment. R. C. Moberly, a future Regius Professor of Pastoral Theology at Oxford, defended the principle of dogma on the grounds that it is the statement of truths as they are best known at the time. The truths are always true, but their expression may be faulty and susceptible to correction by the historical process. When Moberly attempts to explain away the damnatory clauses in the Athanasian Creed he argues that everlasting punishment must be the inevitable result of ignoring the call to God through Christ and is therefore always true, but never addresses the real question of how meaningful the statement that eternal punishment is an unconditional truth can be when its various interpretations are so heterogeneous and elastic.19 Neither did the Church Times’s millennial optimism last very long. By 1895, the newspaper clearly felt that consciousness of the fin de siècle was more undesirable than it had seemed in 1890, speaking out against the ‘shallow shibboleths of fin de siècle cynicism’ and issuing edicts on the modern ‘Decadence of Morals’, very possibly as a result of the Wilde trials.20

234 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

If certain cracks in the Hegelian buoyancy of Anglican liberals in the nineties illustrate that Nietzsche may have had a point, then the impact that the apparently secular idea of fin de siècle made is even more indicative, and can be seen as a powerful contrast to Hegelian liberal eschatology. Seen from the eschatological point of view, the equivalence that Wilde draws between sin and age in Dorian Gray (the older you get the more sinful you become) inverts the liberal teleology of millennialism by anchoring the growth of sin firmly to the passage of time. Dorian is the remarkable exception to this assumed law, but as he notes, it is by means of the picture that ‘his own soul was looking out from the canvas and calling him to judgment’.21 Even more telling is the language used in Max Nordau’s infamous study of the fin de siècle malady, Degeneration (1895). It begins with a scornful attack on the crude anthropomorphism of the term, railing against the essential stupidity of imagining that a century somehow begins a blooming child and dies a senile cripple. But even Nordau recognizes that ‘the mental constitution which it indicates is actually present in influential circles’, a ‘constitution’ that he describes in revealing detail: The disposition of the times is curiously confused, a compound of feverish restlessness and blunted discouragement, of fearful presage and hang-dog renunciation. The prevalent feeling is that of imminent perdition and extinction. Fin-de-siècle is at once a confession and a complaint. The old Northern faith contained the fearsome doctrine of the Dusk of the Gods. In our days there have arisen in more highly-developed minds vague qualms of a Dusk of the Nations, in which all suns and all stars are gradually waning, and mankind with all its institutions and creations is perishing in the midst of a dying world.22 This is a curious compound of millenarianism and thermodynamics, where both combine into an imagined eschatology where the ‘gradually waning’ principle of entropy exists with radical discontinuities of a mythological type, the ‘fearsome presage’ and ‘imminent perdition’ of religious apocalypse. Moreover whatever ridicule Nordau may have poured on the anthropomorphism of the fin de siècle, it soon becomes clear that he himself subscribes to the idea of the late nineteenth century as a cultureat-the-end-of-things: One epoch of history is unmistakably in its decline, and another is announcing its approach. There is a sound of rending in every tradition, and it is as though the morrow would not link itself with today. Things as they are totter and plunge, and they are suffered to reel and fall, because man is weary, and there is no faith that is worth an effort to uphold them . . . Such is the spectacle presented by the doings of men in the reddened light of the Dusk of the Nations. Massed in the sky the clouds

Matthew Bradley

235

are aflame in the weirdly beautiful glow which was observed for the space of years after the eruption of Krakatoa.23 Nietzsche’s precept that all absolute historical judgments tend to be condemnations because of their ancestry in Christian apocalyptic has surely never been more evident than it is here. This is not the imagery of a universe gradually cooling down; on the contrary, things seem to be very much heating up. Furthermore, Nordau describes the fin de siècle men as the ‘false prophets’ of this interregnum, preying on ‘the poor gaping souls gasping for revelations’, pedlars of broken dreams in the ‘hours of darkness till the breaking of the new day’.24 It is almost as if Nordau were expecting a modern St John to arrive to sweep away the false prophets of fin de siècle and issue God’s absolute decrees to whatever is the modern equivalent of the seven Asian churches. T. S. Eliot’s famous notion that Baudelaire’s Satanism was ‘an attempt to get into Christianity by the back door’25 has a pre-emptive echo in Nordau’s idea of fin de siècle as ‘a practical emancipation from traditional discipline, which theoretically is still in force’.26 Part of the reason that so-called ‘decadent’ literature came to be so closely associated with fin de siècle is that both labels themselves invoke absolute judgments, just as Dorian Gray invokes them at the level of narrative. In the case of fin de siècle these tend to be mainly historical, in the case of decadence they tend to be moral (one has to be in decay from some other more ideal state), but, as the extracts from Nordau show, this division is never absolute. To proclaim oneself or someone else a ‘decadent’ is an open invitation to condemnation, an implied appeal to some absolute order in which one has already anticipated the Last Judgment’s unfavourable verdict. It is a relative term, but it is also normative. It is at some level an expression of belief in a transcendental set of values, even when it may be that one is in open revolt from them, or is susceptible to the attractions of being so. Of course, decadence was not a new term in England; Pater had used it in the preface to The Renaissance as early as 1873.27 But the explosion in its use as a cultural signifier in the nineties must in part be attributable to its new partnership with the concept of fin de siècle, which provided a fresh eschatological dimension to the everproblematic relationship between decadent literature and religious concepts of sin and punishment. This is not to imply that there was a tidal wave of calls for more punitive eschatology from within the ranks of decadent or fin de siècle writers (in Nordau’s sense of the latter term) to counterbalance the millennial hopes of contemporary theology – it was a subtler continuation of the conflict than that. Indeed, editing Pusey’s translation of Augustine’s Confessions in 1898, Arthur Symons performed an audacious eschatological re-write when in his introduction to the volume he implored his readers to read the Confessions as the record of a great soul talking to a soul that it has

236 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

perceived outside humanity. He then assures readers that such a soul will remember of them ‘everything which it is important to remember, everything which the recording angel, who is the soul’s finer criticism of itself, has already inscribed in the book of the last judgment’.28 Symons here includes a version of the Last Judgment which is clearly an illegitimate descendant of liberal millennialism, however far the fruit may have fallen from the tree. The Recording Angel is not the deliverer of God’s justice or judgment but is instead recast as the rather Arnoldian-sounding ‘soul’s finer criticism of itself’. It is an eschatology which neither Augustine nor Pusey would have recognized as valid. The twenty-first book of the City of God is one of the major theological texts to support the doctrine of eternal punishment, and Pusey was one of the strongest critics of Farrar’s Eternal Hope sermons, describing his fear ‘that the disbelief in it, to which a great impulse has been given by writings of late years, must be with great peril to souls’.29 Nevertheless, the impulse to belief in some type of absolute condemnation which is in part revealed by one’s position at the end-of-things is a powerful strand in fin de siècle decadence, and it is easy to overlook among Wilde’s claims for the absolute autonomy of art, or the demands for moral and sexual liberation of an Arthur Symons or a George Moore. It is that part of the fin de siècle mode that is drawn to absolute judgments, the element obsessed with issues of sin and punishment, the aspect that provides the fin de siècle with its impressive list of Catholic converts. To finish, I would like to propose Lionel Johnson as being in many ways its representative. Johnson was the man who introduced Wilde to Alfred Douglas and the friend of Yeats, who remembered him thus in Autobiographies: his doctrine, after a certain number of glasses, would become more ascetic, more contemptuous of all that we call human life . . . Even without stimulant his theology conceded nothing to weakness, and I can remember his saying with energy, ‘I wish those who deny the eternity of punishment would realize their unspeakable vulgarity.’30 There had evidently been some change of heart, because as a young man at Winchester Johnson seems to have registered his dislike of Farrar’s theology in broad terms, ‘too much early Christian martyr about him’,31 although he made a particular exception for Eternal Hope. But Yeats provides us with a quintessentially decadent image. The dipsomaniac aesthete, intoxicated by alcohol and the theology of absolute judgment, craves the older certainties of a universal order. The more in transgression from this order that he feels himself to be, the more he insists on its dominance and the inevitability of an awaiting punishment. Johnson’s most famous poem, ‘The Dark Angel’, long since an iconic fin de siècle poem is a work that enshrines the above sense in verse, with

Matthew Bradley

237

its eponymous figure’s ‘aching lust/To rid the world of penitence.’32 It also sounds an explicitly eschatological note: I fight thee, in the Holy Name! Yet, what thou dost, is what God saith: Tempter! should I escape thy flame, Thou wilt have helped my soul from Death: The second Death, that never dies, That cannot die, when time is dead: Live Death, wherein the lost soul cries, Eternally uncomforted. Dark Angel, with thine aching lust! Of two defeats, of two despairs: Less dread, a change to drifting dust, Than thine eternity of cares.33 It was Ian Fletcher who first examined the Augustinian elements of ‘The Dark Angel’ in detail. Fletcher saw Johnson’s escape into Augustine’s eschatology in the above stanzas as an evasion of the poem’s central problem, of reconciling feelings of private guilt with institutional religion. According to Fletcher, ‘the premiss has been clearly defined, but the wrong conclusions follow: after contemplating the Angel with horrified intentness, Johnson escapes through the eschatological trap-door’.34 But Johnson’s specific evocation of eternal punishment, the doctrine that had in past years become such a powerful symbol of opposition to liberal Christianity, sends out a powerful countercultural message. All such internal conflicts, however strongly felt, will ultimately be dissolved on the Day of Judgment. It is not the ‘wrong conclusion’ from Johnson’s premise of individual guilt, because this very premise is eschatologically defined from the first. When music sounds, under the influence of the Angel it turns from a ‘silvery to a sultry fire’. Beauty becomes hellish, alight with ‘flames of evil ecstasy’. The poet frames his guilt in the imagery of hell and apocalyptic punishment because it is the revelation occurring at the end of things that will ultimately reveal the truth of his condemnation, the order upon which it rests. His sense of sinfulness may be a product of the modern malaise, but its status as sinfulness is defined by Christian dogma and its eschatology. Neither are the words ‘eternally’ and ‘eternity’ loosely chosen, and Johnson makes reference to ‘eternal’ or ‘everlasting’ hells in at least two other poems.35 He is clear that the Second Death, the moment of condemnation, is eternal and absolute (and indeed that it is the punishment referred to in Matthew 25:46), just as Augustine himself was. As Augustine said in the City of God, those outside God’s grace ‘shall inherit eternal misery, which is also called the second death, because the soul shall be separated from God’.36

238 Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Besides its emphasis on irrevocable condemnation, another factor attesting to the countercultural power of the poem in the prevailing theological climate of Hegelian-inspired liberal theology is its tacit disavowal of millennialism. Human history, even individual development, is made entirely irrelevant to ‘The Dark Angel’, which moves forward through a series of discrete, timeless images for the Angel to invade; music sounding, sunlight glowing on the flowers, the wind in an autumn wood. The poem dwells in such strongly flavoured Paterian moments until we are suddenly catapulted forward to the moment of the narrator’s death (‘Thou art the adorner of my tomb,/The minstrel of mine epitaph’), and from there directly to the Second Death and the Last Judgment in the above stanzas. There are only two time zones in ‘The Dark Angel’, the present moment and the end of the world. If one succumbs to the Angel’s temptation in the former, one accepts damnation at the latter. Nothing that experience, maturity, or spiritual progress can do affects this relationship. Every moment in time provides equal opportunities to fall into eternal punishment, regardless of where it falls in the life of an individual or on the curve of human history. To deliberately experiment with deeply unfashionable theological tropes is an important animus to the literature of fin de siècle decadence, and eternal punishment and damnatory eschatology were, by the nineties, the most unfashionable of all. By positioning itself at the end of history, the idea of fin de siècle shares with liberal theology its willingness to pronounce a Last Judgment on the past. However, whereas religious thinkers used this as the starting point to develop progressive and universalist eschatology, the account of history provided by fin de siècle returns to an older, rather less kind model of the world’s end. Thus a conflict largely assumed to have run its course in theology finds a continuation elsewhere. With its curious mix of earthly and divine judgments, the idea of fin de siècle may, in Nietzschean terms, turn out to be an account of history whose theology is less well disguised.

Notes 1. KJV, Matthew Ch. 25:46. 2. Frederick Denison Maurice, Theological Essays (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1853), p. 436. 3. John William Colenso, St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: Newly Translated and Explained from a Missionary Point of View (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1861), pp. 216–19. 4. Translated in J. N. D. Kelly, The Athanasian Creed (London: A. and C. Black, 1964), p. 20. 5. Victor Shea and William Whitla, eds., Essays and Reviews: The 1860 Text and its Reading (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), p. 309. 6. The lectures were re-printed in Frederic W. Farrar, Eternal Hope: Five Sermons Preached in Westminster Abbey November and December 1877 (London: Macmillan, 1892). 7. Evelyn Abbot and Lewis Campbell, The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett M.A., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), vol. 2, p. 305.

Matthew Bradley

239

8. George Rowell, Hell and the Victorians: A Study of the Nineteenth-Century Theological Controversies Concerning Eternal Punishment and the Future Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 212–13. 9. John Stokes, ed., Fin de Siècle, Fin du Globe: Fears and Fantasies of the Late Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1992), p. 1. 10. Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde vol. 3: The Picture of Dorian Gray, the 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford: University Press, 2005), p. 318. 11. Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 135. 12. Friederich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: University Press, 1983), pp. 101–2. 13. Dorian Gray, p. 259. 14. Ibid., p. 420. 15. Ibid., p. 274. 16. Essays and Reviews, p. 138. 17. Ibid., p. 478. 18. [Anon.], The Church Times 28, Dec 24th 1890, p. 1272. 19. Charles Gore, ed., Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation, first published 1889; 15th edn., (London: John Murray, 1899), p. viii. 20. [Anon.], ‘Religious Indifference Among Young Men’, Church Times 34 (December 20 1895), p. 705, [Anon.], ‘Decadence of Morals’ (April 19 1895), p. 441. This latter was the day that Wilde and Alfred Taylor were committed to trial. 21. Dorian Gray, p. 290. 22. Max Nordau, Degeneration, trans. unattributed (London: William Heinemann, 1895), p. 2. 23. Ibid., pp. 5–6. 24. Ibid., p. 6. 25. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1951), p. 421. 26. Nordau, p. 5. 27. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. D. Hill (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), p.xxiii. The phrase ‘refined and comely decadence’ appears in the first edition of 1873 and was not altered by Pater subsequently. 28. St Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, ed. A. Symons, trans. E. B. Pusey (London: Walter Scott, 1898), p. xviii. 29. Edward Bouverie Pusey, What is Faith as to Everlasting Punishment? (Oxford: Rivingtons, 1880), pp. 1–2. 30. William Butler Yeats, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats Vol. 3: Autobiographies, eds. Douglas N. Archibald and William H. O’Donnell (New York: Scribner, 1999), pp. 222–3. 31. Lionel Johnson, Some Winchester Letters of Lionel Johnson (London: George Allen and Co., 1919), p. 180. 32. Lionel Johnson, The Collected Poems of Lionel Johnson, ed. Ian Fletcher, 2nd and revised edn. (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1982), p. 52. 33. Ibid., p. 53. 34. John Wain, ed., Interpretations: Essays on Twelve English Poems (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955), p. 173. 35. ‘Visions’ and ‘To a Spanish Friend’, Collected Poems, pp. 61–2 and pp. 68–9. 36. St Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1871), vol. 2, p. 343.

Selected Bibliography Abbot, Evelyn and Lewis Campbell, The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett M.A (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897) Adams, Jad. Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent (London, New York: I. B. Tauris, 2000) Adams, James Eli, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1995) Alcott, Louisa M., Hospital Sketches (1863; rpt. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1960) Allan, Janice M., ‘“A Lock without a Key”: Language and Detection in Collins’s The Law and the Lady’, Clues: A Journal of Detection, 25.1 (2006): 45–57 Altick, Richard D., The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978) Anderson, Amanda, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in Cultural Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) Andrews, Malcolm, Dickens on England and the English (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979) Appiah, Kwame Anthony, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) Armstrong, Isobel, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) Armstrong, Nancy, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) Arnold, Catherine, Necropolis: London and its Dead (2006; London: Pocket Books, 2007) Arnold, Matthew, The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott; 2nd edn. Miriam Allott (London and New York: 1979) ——, Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989) Bagehot, Walter, ‘Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning; or, Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry’ (1864), rptd. in Collected Works, ed. Norman St. John-Stevas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), II: 321–66 Bailin, Miriam, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) Baldick, Christopher, The Social Mission of English Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) Barringer, Tim, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005) Bashford, Alison, Purity and Pollution: Gender, Embodiment and Victorian Medicine (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1998) Beardsley, Aubrey, The Letters of Aubrey Beardsley, eds. Henry Maas, J. L. Duncan and W. G. Good (1878–1898; Oxford: Plantin Publishers, 1990) Beer, Gillian, George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986) ——, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996)

240

Selected Bibliography

241

Berlant, Lauren, ‘Poor Eliza’ in No More Separate Spheres, eds. Cathy Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002): 291–323. Bernstein, Susan C., ‘Ape Anxiety: Sensation Fiction, Evolution, and the Genre Question’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 6.2 (2001): 250–71 Bongie, Chris, Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1991) Bonner, H. B., Charles Bradlaugh: A Record of His Life and Work (London: Unwin, 1895) Brake, Laurel, Print in Transition (Basingstoke: Palgrave – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) ——, ‘“Who is ‘We’?” The “Daily Paper” Projects and the Journalism Manifestos of W.T. Stead’, in Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and SelfFashioning, 1880–1930, ed. Marysa Demoor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004): 54–72 ——, ‘ “Fiction d’un autre type”: Actualites et roman dans le journalisme de W. T. Stead’, in Au Bonheur du Feuilleton, eds. Marie-Françoise Cachin, D. Cooper-Richet, J. Mollier, and Claire Parfait (Paris: Creaphis, 2007): 179–92 Braveboy-Wagner, Jacqueline Anne, The Venezuelan-Guyana Border Dispute. Britain’s Colonial Legacy in Latin America (Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1984) Brown, A. F. J., Chartism in Essex and Suffolk (Chelmsford: Essex Record Office, 1982) Browning, Robert, Letters of Robert Browning, ed. Thurman L. Hood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1933) Bourne Taylor, Jenny, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-century Psychology (London: Routledge, 1988) —— and Sally Shuttleworth, eds., Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998) Bowen, John, Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) Briggs, Asa, ‘Industry and politics in early nineteenth-century Keighley’, Bradford Antiquary ns 9 (1952): 314 Bristow, Joseph, ‘“Churlsgrace”: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Working-Class Male Body’, ELH, 3 (1992): 693–711 Brown, Susan, ‘Alternatives to the Missionary Position: Anna Leonowens as Victorian Travel Writer,’ Feminist Studies, 21.3 (Fall 1995): 587–614 Bullough, Vera, ‘Men in Nursing’, Journal of Professional Nursing, 10.5 (1995): 267 ——, ‘Men, Women, and Nursing History’, Journal of Professional Nursing, 10.3 (1994): 127 Caine, Barbara, Victorian Feminists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) Campbell, Kate, ‘Matthew Arnold and Publicity: A Modern Critic as Journalist’, in Journalism, Literature and Modernity, ed. Kate Campbell (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000): 91–120 Carroll, David, ed., George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes & Noble Inc., 1971) Castle, Terry, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny: Ideologies of Desire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) Chase, Malcolm, Chartism: A New History (Manchester, 2007) Christ, Carol, ‘Victorian Masculinity and the Angel in the House’ in A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women, ed. Martha Vicinus (1977, rpr. London: Methuen, 1980) Cholmondeley, Mary, Red Pottage (London: John Murray, 1900)

242

Selected Bibliography

——, Under One Roof (London: John Murray, 1918) Cohn, Bernard, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Biographia Literaria (1817; rpt. London: Dent, 1965) Colenso, John William, St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: Newly Translated and Explained from a Missionary Point of View (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1861) Collins, Richard, ‘Marian’s Moustache: Bearded Ladies, Hermaphrodites, and Intersexual Collage in The Woman in White’, in Reality’s Dark Light: the Sensational Wilkie Collins, eds. Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2003): 131–72 Collins, Wilkie, Hide and Seek. 3 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1854) ——, The Law and the Lady, ed. Jenny Bourne Taylor (1874; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) ——, The Woman in White, ed. Julian Symons (1860; Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1974) Conan Doyle, Arthur, The Lost World (1912; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) Congreve, George Thomas, On Consumption of the Lungs, or Decline; and its Successful Treatment (1881; London: Published by the author and Elliot Stock, enlarged edition c.1887) Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (1899; New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1988) Cook, James W. Jr., ‘Of Men, Missing Links, and Nondescripts: The Strange Career of P. T. Barnum’s “What is It?” Exhibition’, in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996): 139–57 Coulling, Sidney, ‘The Background of “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”’, Philological Quarterly, 42.1 (Jan. 1963): 36–54 Craik, Dinah, John Halifax, Gentleman (1856; Gloucestershire: Nonsuch, 2005) Danahay, Martin, Gender at Work in Victorian Culture: Literature, Art and Masculinity (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2005) Darwin, Charles, The Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (1859; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) Darwin, Erasmus, Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life, corrected 3rd edn., 4 vols (London: Johnson, 1801) Das, Santanu, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) Davis, Michael, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Psychology: Exploring the Unmapped Country (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) Davis, Philip, The Victorians: 1830–1880, The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Deane, Bradley, The Making of the Victorian Novelist: Anxieties of Authorship in the Mass Market (New York and London: Routledge, 2003) Dendy, Walter Cooper, The Philosophy of Mystery (London: Longman, 1841) Dickens, Charles, Great Expectations (1860; London: Penguin, 1996) ——, Dombey and Son, ed. Alan Horsman (1848; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) ——, The Life of Our Lord (London: Associated Newspapers, 1934) ——, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty ed. John Bowen (1841; London: Penguin, 2003) ——, Letters of Charles Dickens, Pilgrim edn., ed. Kathleen Tillotson, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) Dickens, Mamie, My Father as I Recall Him (New York: Haskell, 1974)

Selected Bibliography

243

Dirks, Nicholas, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993) Disraeli, Benjamin, Sybil: Or the Two Nations (1845; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980) Dooley, Allan C., Author and Printer in Victorian England (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1992) Dossey, B. M., Florence Nightingale: Mystic, Visionary, Healer (Springhouse, PA: Springhouse, 1996) Eagleton, Terry, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: NB, 1976) ——, The Function of Criticism (London: Verso, 1984) Eden, Emily, Up the Country: Letters Written to her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India, intro. Elizabeth Claridge, notes Edward Thompson (1866; London: Virago, 1983) Eliot, George, Felix Holt, The Radical, ed. by Fred C. Thomson (1866; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980) ——, Middlemarch, ed. by David Carroll (1870; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) Evans, Howard Radical Fights of Forty Years (Manchester: Daily News & Leader, [1913]) Farrar, Frederic William, Everyday Christian Life or: Sermons by the Way (London, 1887) ——, Eternal Hope: Five Sermons Preached in Westminster Abbey November and December 1877 (London: Macmillan, 1892) Ferguson, Christine, Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: The Brutal Tongue (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) Flint, Kate, The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) Ford, Natalie, ‘Beyond Reverie: De Quincey’s Range of Reveries’, The Cambridge Quarterly 36.3 (2007): 229–49 Frank, Lawrence, Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) Frye, Northrop, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982) Furneaux, Holly, ‘“It is Impossible to be Gentler”: The Homoerotics of Male Nursing in Dickens’s Fiction’, Critical Survey, 17.2 (2005): 34– 47 Galton, Francis, ‘Eugenics: its Definition, Scope and Aims’ in Essays in Eugenics (1909; Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific, 2004) Gardiner, John, The Victorians: An Age in Retrospect (London: Hambledon and London, 2002) Gikandi, Simon, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) Gilbert, Pamela K., Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Gilmour, Robin, The Ideal of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981) Girouard, Mark, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981) Glendening, John, ‘Darwinian Entanglement in Hudson’s Green Mansions’, English Literature in Transition (1880–1920) 43:3 (2000): 259–79 Goodway, David, London Chartism, 1838–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) Gosse, Edmund, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments ed. Michael Newton (1907; Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2004) Grand, Sarah, Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand, eds. Ann Heilmann and Stephanie Forward (London: Routledge, 2000)

244

Selected Bibliography

Greenhalgh, Paul, Ephemeral Vistas: the Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) Hair, Donald, Robert Browning’s Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999) Hall, Donald, ed., Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) Hall, N. John, Trollope: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) Hampshire, Stuart, Justice is Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) Hampton, Jean E., The Authority of Reason, ed. Richard Healey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Hawksley, Lucinda, Katey: The Life and Loves of Dickens’s Artist Daughter (London: Random House, 2006) Hayter, Althea, Opium and the Romantic Imagination: Addiction and Creativity in De Quincey, Coleridge, Baudelaire and Others, rev. edn. (Wellingborough: Crucible, 1988) Hegel, G. W. F., Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) Heilmann, Ann, New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) ——, New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) Hilton, Boyd, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1795–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) Hodgson, Amanda, ‘Defining the Species: apes, savages and humans in scientific and literary writing of the 1860s’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 4.2 (1999): 228–51 Holcombe, Lee, Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth-century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983) Holland, Henry, Chapters on Mental Physiology (London: Longman, 1852) Holmes, Stewart Walker, ‘Browning: Semantic Stutterer,’ PMLA 60 (1945): 231–55 Homans, Margaret, ‘Eliot, Wordsworth and the Scenes of the Sisters’ Instruction’, Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982) ——, Bearing the Word: Language & Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) Hovell, M., The Chartist Movement (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 3rd edn., 1966) Hudson, W. H., Green Mansions (1904; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) John, Juliet ‘“People mutht be amuthed”?: Reflections on Chatham’s Dickens World’, Dickensian, 104 (2008): 5–21 Johnson, Lionel, Some Winchester Letters of Lionel Johnson (London: George Allen and Co., 1919) ——, The Collected Poems of Lionel Johnson, ed. Ian Fletcher. 2nd and revised edn. (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1982) Jones, D. J. V., Chartism and the Chartists (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 1975) Jones, P. d’A., The Christian Socialist Revival, 1877–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) Kaplan, Caren, ‘“Getting to Know You”: Travel, Gender, and the Politics of Postcolonial Representation in Anna and the King of Siam and The King and I,’ in Late Imperial Culture, eds. Roman de la Campa, Ann Kaplan, and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1995): 33–52 Kaplan, Fred, Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)

Selected Bibliography

245

Karlin, Daniel, Browning’s Hatreds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) Kaye, John, History of the War in Afghanistan, 3 vols. revised edn. (London, 1857) Kelly, J. N. D., The Athanasian Creed (London: A. and C. Black, 1964) Kent, Susan Kingsley, Sex and Suffrage in Britain 1860–1914 (London: Routledge, 1990) Kestner, Joseph, Masculinities in Victorian Painting (Aldershot: Scholar, 1995) King, A. W. An Aubrey Beardsley Lecture, ed. R. A. Walker (London: R. A. Walker, 1924) Kingsley, Charles, Westward Ho! [1855]. Vol. VI. The Works of Charles Kingsley. (London: Macmillan & Co., 1880–85) Kingsley, Frances Eliza Grenfell, Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1877) Klein, Christina, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) Korte, Barbara, English Travel Writing: From Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) Lane, Christopher, Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) Lang, Andrew, In the Wrong Paradise and Other Stories (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1886) Langbaum, Robert, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (New York, Random House, 1957) Latané, David, Browning’s Sordello and the Aesthetics of Difficulty (Victoria: University of Victoria, 1987) Leask, Nigel, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) Leatherdale, William, ‘The Influence of Darwinism on English Literature and Literary Ideas’, in The Wider Domain of Evolutionary Thought, eds. David Oldroyd and Ian Langham (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983): 1–26 Lowenthal, David, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (1996; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Mani, Lata, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) Maurice, Frederick Denison, Theological Essays (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1853) MacColl, D. S., ‘Aubrey Beardsley’ in A Beardsley Miscellany, ed. R. A. Walker, (c.1920; London: Bodley Head, 1949) Macduff, Colin ‘Meeting the Mother Man: Rediscovering Walt Whitman, Writer and Nurse’, International History of Nursing Journal, 3.2 (1997-8): 32–44 Mackintosh, Carolyn, ‘A Historical Study of Men in Nursing’, Journal of Advanced Nursing, 26.2 (1997): 232–6 MacNish, Robert, The Philosophy of Sleep, rev. edn. (Hartford: Andrus, [1834]) Mangum, Teresa, ‘Wilkie Collins, Detection, and Deformity’, Dickens Studies Annual, 26 (1998): 285–310 ——, Married, Middlebrow and Militant (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998) Marcus, Laura, ‘Staging the “Private Theatre”: Gender and the Auto-Erotics of Reverie’, in The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms, eds. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (Basingstoke: Palgrave – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2002): 136–149 Markwick, Margaret, ‘Hands-on Fatherhood in Trollope’s Novels’ in Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Trev Lynn Broughton and Helen Rogers (Palgrave: Basingstoke Macmillan, 2007): 85–95

246

Selected Bibliography

McCarthy, Thomas, ‘Legitimacy and Diversity: Dialectical Reflections on Analytic Distinctions’, in Habermas on Law and Democracy, eds. Michel Rosenfeld and Andrew Arato (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998): 115–53 McLarren Caldwell, Janis, Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From Mary Shelley to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) Mehta, Uday Singh, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999) Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty, with The Subjection of Women and Chapters on Socialism, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) Miller, D. A., The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) Miller, J. Hillis, The Form of Victorian Fiction: Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968) Miller, Lori, ‘The (Re)gendering of High Anglicanism’ in Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, eds. Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2000): 27–43 Millingen, J. G., Mind and Matter, Illustrated by Considerations on Hereditary Insanity, and the Influence of Temperament in the Development of the Passions (London: Hurst, 1847) Mintz, Steven, A Prison of Expectations: The Family in Victorian Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1985) Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Snyder, ‘Representation and its Discontents: the Uneasy Home of Disability in Literature and Film’ in Handbook of Disability Studies, eds. Gary L. Albrecht, Katherine D. Seelman, Michael Bury (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001) Mitchell, Sally, Dinah Muloch Craik (Boston: Twayne, 1983) Monckton Milnes, Richard, Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (London: Edward Moxon, 1848) Morgan, Susan, ‘Chinese Coolies, Hidden Perfume, and Harriet Beecher Stowe in Anna Leonowens’s The Romance of the Harem,’ in White Women in Racialized Spaces: Imaginative Transformation and Ethical Action in Literature, eds. Samina Najmi and Rajini Srikanth, (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002) ——, Bombay Anna: The Real Story of the English Governess Who Went to Siam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008) Morris, Jan, Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress (London: Faber & Faber, 1998) Most, Andrea, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) Muller, Friedrich Max, Last Essays (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901) Myers, D. G. Invitation to an Argument’, in Teaching the Conflicts: Gerald Graff, Curricular Reform, and the Culture Wars ed. William E. Cain (London: Garland, 1994) Myers, William, The Teaching of George Eliot (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1984) Nemesvari, Richard, ‘“Judged by a Purely Literary Standard”: Sensation Fiction, Horizons of Expectation, and the Generic Construction of Victorian Realism’, in Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre, eds. Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina (Columbus: The Ohio University Press, 2006): 15–28 Newman, John Henry, The Idea of A University (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996) Nietzsche, Friederich, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: University Press, 1983) Nightingale, Florence, Notes on Nursing: What it is and What it is Not (London: Duckworth, 1970) Nordau, Max, Degeneration, trans. unattributed (London: William Heinemann, 1895)

Selected Bibliography

247

Norris, J. A. The First Afghan War 1838–1842 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967) O’Beebee, Thomas, The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994) Ogden, Thomas H., Reverie and Interpretation: Sensing Something Human (London: Aronson, 1997) O’Lynn, Chad, ‘Men Working as Rural Nurses: Land of Opportunity’ in Rural Nursing: Concepts, Theory and Practice, eds. Helen Lee and Charlene Winters (New York: Springer, 2006): 232–47 ——, and Russell E. Tranbarger, eds., Men in Nursing: History, Challenges and Opportunities (New York: Springer, 2007) O’Sullivan, Vincent, Aspects of Wilde, (London: Constable & Co. Ltd., 1936) Otis, Laura, ed. Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) Page, Norman, ed., Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974) Palmer, D. J., The Rise of English Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965) Parker, R., The Subversive Stitch (London: Women’s Press, 1984) Pater, Walter, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. D. Hill (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980) Perkin, Harold, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1850 (London: Routledge, 1985) Peterson, Linda H., Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing (University of Virginia Press, 1999) Pickering, P. A. Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1995) —— and A. Tyrell, The People’s Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League (London: Leicerster University Press, 2000) Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992) Pusey, Edward Bouverie, What is Faith as to Everlasting Punishment? (Oxford: Rivingtons, 1880) Quinones, Richardo J., The Chains of Cain: Violence and the Lost Brother in Cain and Abel Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) Reardon, Bernard, Religious Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), Reeve, N. H., ‘Feathered women: W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions’, in Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and literature, eds. Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells (London and New York: Zed Books, 1998): 134–45 Richards, Thomas, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990) ——, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge & the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993) Rivko, Harriet, ‘Barring the Cross: Miscegenation and Purity in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Human, All Too Human, ed. Diana Fuss (London and New York: Routledge, 1996): 37–57 Roberts, S. and D. Thompson, Images of Chartism (Woodbridge: Merlin, 1998) Robinson, Henry Crabb, The Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson: An Abridgement, ed. Derek Hudson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967) Ross, Margery, ed., Robert Ross, Friend of Friends: Letters to Robert Ross, Art Critic and Writer (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952)

248

Selected Bibliography

Ross, Robert, Aubrey Beardsley (London: John Lane, 1909) Rossetti, Christina, The Complete Poems, ed. R. W. Crump (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1986) Rowell, George, Hell and the Victorians: A Study of the Nineteenth-Century Theological Controversies Concerning Eternal Punishment and the Future Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) Ruskin, John, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: Allen, 1903–12) Rylance, Rick, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) Sabin, Linda, ‘Unheralded Nurses: Male Care Givers in the Nineteenth Century South’, Nursing History Review, 5 (1997): 131–48 Said, Edward, Orientalism (London & Henley: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1978) Sale, Florentia, A Journal of the First Afghan War, ed. Patrick Macrory (1843; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) Sanders, Valerie, The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature from Austen to Woolf (Basingstoke: Palgrave – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) Santayana, George, ‘The Poetry of Barbarism,’ in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York: Scribner, 1905): 166–216 Schwarzkopf, J., Women in the Chartist Movement (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1991) Seacole, Mary, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (London: Penguin, 2005) Sedgwick, Eve, Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1994) Shakespeare, Tom, ‘Disability, Identity, Difference’ in Exploring the Divide: Illness and Disability, eds. Colin Barnes, and Geof Mercer (Leeds: The Disability Press, 1996) ——, Kath Gillespie-Sells and Dominic Davies, The Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires (London and New York: Cassell, 1996) Shea, Victor and William Whitla, eds., Essays and Reviews: The 1860 Text and its Reading (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000) Showalter, Elaine, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987) Shuttleworth, Sally, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) ——, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Sinfield, Alan, Dramatic Monologue (London: Methuen, 1977) Slinn, E. Warwick, Victorian Poetry as Cultural Critique: The Politics of Performative Language (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003) Small, Helen, Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996) Smith, F. B., The Retreat of Tuberculosis 1850–1950 (London: Croom Helm, 1988) Snodgrass, Chris, Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) Spencer, Herbert, The Principles of Psychology, first published 1855, 2 vols (London: Williams and Norgate, 1881) Stapleton, Julia, ‘Political Thought and National Identity in Britain, 1850–1950’, in History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History, 1750–1950, eds. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 245–61

Selected Bibliography

249

Staves, Susan, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990) Stearns, Peter, Be a Man: Males in Modern Society (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979, rpr. 1990) Stokes, John, ed., Fin de Siècle, Fin du Globe: Fears and Fantasies of the Late Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1992) Strahan, A. K., Marriage and Disease: A Study of Heredity and the More Important Family Degenerations (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co. Ltd., 1892) Sturgis, Matthew, Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography (London: Harper Collins, 1998) Sullivan, Eileen P., ‘Liberalism and Imperialism: J. S. Mill’s Defence of the British Empire’, in John Stuart Mill’s Social and Political Thought, ed. G. W. Smith, (London: Routledge, 1998): 389–407 Tosh, John, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999) Trollope, Anthony, Phineas Finn, ed. Jacques Berthoud (1869; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) Tucker, Herbert, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) Tylecote, M., Mechanics’ Institutes of Lancashire and Yorkshire before 1851 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1957) Vance, Norman, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literary and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) Vicinus, Martha, A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977) Wain, John, ed., Interpretations: Essays on Twelve English Poems (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955) Walker, Stanwood S., ‘“Backwards and backwards ever”: Charles Kingsley’s RacialHistorical Allegory and the Liberal Anglican Revisioning of Britain,’ Nineteenth-Century Literature, 62: 3 (2007): 339–79 Ward, J. T., Chartism (London: Batsford, 1973) Wiener, Joel, ed., Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain, 1850s–1914 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1989) Wilde, Oscar, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde vol. 3: The Picture of Dorian Gray, the 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford: University Press, 2005) Williams, Bernard, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (1977; Oxford: Oxford: University Press, 1986) Wilson Carpenter, Mary, ‘Blinding the Hero’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 17: 3 (2006): 52–68 Winter, Alison, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) Wood, Jane, Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Wright, David, ‘The Dregs of Society? Occupational Patterns of Male Asylum Attendants in Victorian England’, International History of Nursing Journal, 1.4 (1996): 5–20 Yeazell, Ruth, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature (Yale University Press, 2000) Yonge, Charlotte, The Heir of Redclyffe (London: Macmillan, 1909) Young, Arlene, Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel: Gentlemen, Gents and Working Women (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1999)

250

Selected Bibliography

Young, Robert J. C., Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995) Zlotnick, Susan, ‘Jane Eyre, Anna Leonowens, and the White Woman’s Burden: Governesses, Missionaries, and Maternal Imperialists in Mid-Victorian Britain,’ Victorian Institutes Journal, 24 (1996): 27–55 Zonana, Joyce, ‘The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre’ Signs 18.3 (Spring 1993): 592–617

Index Abercrombie, John 8, 80 Inquiries concerning the Intellectual Powers and the Investigation of Truth 80 abolitionism 172 Ackroyd, Peter 166 adaptation 10 aesthetics 3, 6, 81, 95–7, 203–4 Afghanistan 6, 52–63 See also First Afghan War Alcott, Louisa M. 110, 113 alienation 2 alienists 83, 84 allegory 34, 168 America 7, 10, 66, 74, 159, 171 American Civil War 110, 176–8 anarchy 15 ancestry 112 Anderson, Amanda 5, 14, 15–16, 18, 19, 29, 30 The Powers of Distance 24 The Way We Argue Now 14, 19–20, 24 antagonism 1, 157 anthropology 67 antifoundationalism 14 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 14, 15–16, 18, 29, 30 The Ethics of Identity 14 argument 14, 16 aristocracy 16, 38, 119 Aristotle 33 Poetics 33 Arnold, Matthew 1, 11–12, 24, 47, 201–10 ‘Dover Beach’ 1 ‘Essays in Criticism’ 201, 202–3, 204–5 ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ 12, 204 ‘Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse’ 201 Athanasian Creed 228, 233 Athenaeum 204, 205 Attridge, Derek 3–4

Aubrey, Frank 72 King of the Dead 72 Auckland, Lord (George Eden) 7, 52, 56, 57–8, 60 Auerbach, Nina 174 Augustine 236–7 Austen, Jane 34 Persuasion 34 authenticity 19–20, 159–61, 162, 179 autobiography 80, 109 Bagehot, Walter 37, 204–5, 207 barbarism 68 Barnum, P. T. 141, 144 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth 35 Sonnets from the Portuguese 35 Bashford, Alison 113 Baudelaire, Charles 235 Beardsley, Aubrey 8, 93–105 Girl and a Bookshop 99–100 Portrait of Himself 95, 96 Beardsley, Ellen 100–1 Becker, Lydia 217 Beer, Gillian 196 Berthoud, Jacques 25 Bible, biblical allusion 12, 70, 76, 117, 213–25, 228, 232 Biblical interpretation 12, 70, 135, 219–25, 228, 232 bildungsroman 35 Blake, William 37, 47 body 9, 93–105, 112–13 Bongie, Chris 73 Booth, William 128 Bowen, John 162 Bradlaugh, Charles 128 Britain 24, 26, 27 Brontë, Charlotte 24, 35, 84, 88, 173 Jane Eyre 35, 72, 95 Villette 84 Brontë, Emily Wuthering Heights 35, 36 Broughton, Rhoda 222 Brown, Charles 94

251

252

Index

Brown, Susan 174 Browning, Robert 6, 33–51 ‘A Woman’s Last Word’ 41–5 ‘Andrea del Sarto’ 41, 45 Asolando 36 ‘Bishop Bloughram’s Apology’ 40, 45 ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s’ 39 ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ 36 ‘Cleon’ 41 ‘Count Gismond’ 38, 39, 44 Dramatic Lyrics 38 Dramatic Romances and Lyrics 39 Dramatis Personae 41 ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ 41 ‘France’ 38, 39 ‘Incident of the French Camp’ 36 ‘Karshish’ 41 Men and Women 40 ‘My Last Duchess’ 38, 39, 45 Paracelsus 37 ‘Pictor Ignotus’ 39 ‘Prospice’ 36 Sordello 37–8 Butler, Josephine 217 Byron, George 86, 97 Cameron, H. H. 104–5 canonical literature 4, 152–3, 214–21, 224–5 Carlyle, Thomas 46, 220 Castle, Terry 81 characterological 14, 15, 22–3, 24 Chartism 9, 126–38 childhood 9, 126–38 Cholmondeley, Mary 12, 213–25 Red Pottage 213–25 Christianity 2, 39–41, 62, 110, 176, 180, 216–22, 228–38 church 135, 228, 232, 237 civilization 7, 66, 68 Clark, James 94 Class 1, 2, 8, 35, 109, 111, 115, 126–32, 145–7, 150, 177, 214 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 33, 86 ‘Dejection’ 34 ‘Frost at Midnight’ 33 ‘Kubla Kahn’ 34 ‘Ode on Melancholy’ 34

Collins, Richard 141 Collins, Wilkie 9–10, 141–53 Armadale 146–7, 151 Hide and Seek 67 The Law and the Lady 143 The Woman in White 141, 151 Combe, George 83 commoditization 10, 157–68 communication 6–7 Imperial 7, 52–63 See also language competition 16 ‘Condition of England’ 1 conflict studies 6 Congreve, George Thomas 94 Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness 77 consciousness 80–90, 186–99 consensus 2, 5, 14–17 consumerism 4–5, 10 consumption 8, 93–105 See also tuberculosis Cornhill Magazine 203 Craik, Dinah 9, 111, 116–21 John Halifax, Gentleman 111, 116–19 creativity 5, 8, 35, 39, 85, 102 cretinism 84–5 Crimean War 68, 122 criticism, theories of 11, 201–10 Crow, Liz 105 cultural criticism 5 culture 10, 43 popular 10, 152–63 high vs. low 152, 201–10 custom 14 cynicism 21 Dannahay, Martin 121 Darwin, Charles 2, 35, 46, 81, 83, 145, 146 Darwin, Erasmus 81 Zoonomia 81 Das, Santanu 110 Davis, Philip 146 Dawson, Ann 134 Dawson, Hannah 134 Dawson, Isaac 134 Decadence 228–38 degeneration 9–10, 71, 78, 87, 89, 93, 151, 231

Index 253 democracy 15, 16, 20, 31, 171, 177 Dendy, William Cooper 8, 80, 83–5 The Philosophy of Mystery 8, 83 De Quincey, Thomas 84, 86, 87, 220 dialectic 4, 6, 14, 17, 33, 37 Dickens, Charles 4, 8, 10, 24, 88, 114, 157–68 Barnaby Rudge 158, 161 Bleak House 162–3, 166 A Christmas Carol 167–8 Dombey and Son 88–9 Great Expectations 8, 111, 112–15 Martin Chuzzlewitt 118–19 Oliver Twist 165, 166 Our Mutual Friend 163 The Pickwick Papers 158 Pictures from Italy 164 Sketches by Boz 164 and cultural capital 10, 157–68 Dickens World 167 Dickinson, Emily 43 disability 8, 93–105, 119 studies 93 See also identity politics disciplinarity 4 discourse 20 ethics 20 disease 8, 93–105 Disraeli, Benjamin 1 Sybil: or, the Two Nations 1 domestic space 9, 55–6, 113, 128–9, 134–6, 145–6, 163–5, 166, 213–15 Dost Mohammed Kahn 53, 58, 61 Dowson, Ernest 101–2, 104 Doyle, Arthur Conan 73 The Lost World 73, 74 dramatic monologue 37–51 duelling 120–1 Du Maurier, George 148 The Keeper’s Nightmare 148–50, 149 Eagleton, Terry 196, 197 ecclesiastic 13 economics 1, 9, 33, 73, 157–68 Eden, Emily 6, 52, 55, 56, 58, 62 education 1, 18, 43, 66, 128–9, 131, 136–7, 171, 176–8, 202 Eisenstein, Sergei 10

Eliot, George 1, 2, 4, 11, 24, 72, 88, 147, 186–99, 213 Daniel Deronda 187 Felix Holt, the Radical 11, 186–99 Middlemarch 1, 2, 198 The Mill on the Floss 213–14 Silas Marner 189 Eliot, T. S. 235 Ellis, Sarah Stickney 225 Emmet, Robert 133 Empire 2, 4, 6–7 England 28, 40, 69, 71 epistemology 17 equality 16, 114, 214–22 eroticism 39, 73, 111, 182 eschatology 12, 228–38 eternal punishment, doctrine of 12, 228–38 ethics 3, 4, 14, 15, 22–23, 33 ethnography 67, 68 ethos 19–20, 22 and character 19–20, 22 eugenics 93, 103 Europe/European 7, 28, 66, 72 Evans, Howard 126 evolution 7, 144 evolutionary theory 9–10, 143–53 exile 2 exoticism 73 family 9, 12, 55–6, 113–14, 118, 126–38, 163–5 See also siblings and sibling rivalry Farrar, F. W. 228, 231, 236 fatherhood 114, 118, 130, 165 feeling 2, 9, 167–8 femininity 42–3, 136 feminism 174–6, 214–15 anti- 72 Fergusson, Christine 151 fiction, popular 67–8, 74 fin de siècle 12–13, 37, 228–38 First Afghan War 6, 52–64 First World War 110 Flint, Kate 224 Fortnightly Review 202, 203–7 Foucault, Michel 19 France 23 freak show 5, 9, 141, 142 freedom 26, 29

254

Index

Freud, Sigmund 8, 80 The Interpretation of Dreams Frye, Northrop 230

80

Gallienne, Richard La 101 Gardiner, John 157, 162, 163, 165 Gaskell, Elizabeth 1, 83 North and South 1 Gaus, Gerald S. 21 gender 1, 2, 4, 9, 35, 43, 44, 84, 89, 175–9, 213–25 generational conflict 3 genre 9–10, 11, 12, 33–4, 141–53 gentleman 8–9, 109–22 Gikandi, Simon 70 Gilmour, Robin 115 Gissing, George 201–2, 208, 209 New Grub Street 201–2, 208, 209 Gore, Charles 233 Gosse, Edmund 2–3 Father and Son 2–3 gothic 85 Graff, Gerald 18 Grand, Sarah 12, 213–25 The Beth Book 12, 213–25 Green, T. H. 233 Greenwood, Frederick 206 Greg, W. R. 68 Griffith, George 72 A Criminal Croesus 72 grotesque 37, 100, 103 Habermas, Jürgen 19–20, 21, 22 Haggard, H. Rider 71–2 She 71–2 harem 174–82 Hegel, G. W. 33, 34, 37, 46, 232–3, 234, 238 Aesthetics 33 Heilmann, Ann 215 heritage industry 10, 157–68 hero/heroism 26, 28–29, 37–8, 43, 61–2, 72 female 63 Hewison, Robert 167 Higher Criticism 214, 222–4, 228 historians, male 60–2, 63 Holland, Henry 80, 81, 83–4 Chapters on Mental Physiology (1852) 80

Homans, Margaret 62, 213–14 Hudson, W(illiam). H(enry). 7, 68, 73–8 Green Mansions 7, 68, 73–8 humanity, theories of 9–10, 186–99 Hume, James 63 Hunt, Henry 133 Huskinson, T. L. B. 25–6 hybridity, generic 148, 201–10 ideology 4, 5, 10, 29, 38, 68 identity politics 5, 8, 14, 19, 93–105 See also disability industrialisation 127 imagination 7–8, 44–6 imperial archive 61, 62–3 imperialism 7, 14, 52–63, 68–73, 77, 171–82 India 53, 60–1 industry/industrialisation 1, 160–1 international relations 6, 52–63 intuitionist philosophy 17 Ireland 28 irony 26, 36, 44 Jallalabad 52 James, Henry 121, 197, 201 Johnson, Lionel 236–7 ‘The Dark Angel’ 236–7 journalism 11–12, 201–10 anonymity 202, 206 signature 202, 206 Jowett, Benjamin 229, 232–3 Kabul 7, 52, 57 Kandahar 52, 57 Kaplan, Caren 178 Kaye, Sir John 53, 57, 60, 61, 62 History of the War in Afghanistan 60 Keats, John 94, 95, 97, 98, 100, 102, 104 Kelmscott House 103–4 Kingsley, Charles 7, 68–73, 77 Westward Ho! 7, 68–73 Yeast 116 knowledge 17, 62, 63 Lang, Andrew 77 In the Wrong Paradise and Other Stories 77 language 11, 52–63, 186–99, 229–35

Index 255 See also communication; syntax law 12, 41, 60–1 Lawlor, Clark 97 Leask, Nigel 72 Leavis, F. R. 10 The Great Tradition 10 Legal reform 12 Leonowens, Anna 10, 171–82 The English Governess at the Siamese Court 10, 171–82 The Romance of the Harem 10, 171–82 letter writing 55–9 Lewes, George Henry 80, 207 The Physiology of Common Life 80 liberalism 5, 6, 7, 15, 18, 23, 46, 232 liberal Anglicanism 232–3, 234 liberal society 17 liberal universalism 15, 18–19 Linton, Eliza Lynn 12, 215 ‘Shrieking Sisterhood’ 12, 213, 215 literature as form 3, 4, 9, 24, 29, 33–4, 186–99 See also genre; journalism; sensational fiction literary studies, contemporary 6, 9–10, 23, 24, 29–30, 46–7, 152, 231 Locke, John 80 love 2, 221 Lux Mundi 233 MacColl, D. S. 100 Macnaghten, William 52–63 Principles and Precedents of Hindu Law 60 Principles and Precedents of Mohummudan Law 60 MacNish, Robert 80, 81 The Philosophy of Sleep 80, 82 madness 80, 88 Manchester Guardian 128 Mansell, Henry 145 marriage 117, 174–5 plot 28 Martineau, Harriet 173 Marx, Karl 46 masculinity 8, 58–60, 84, 109, 111, 114, 119–22, 130 Maurice, F. D. 12, 228 McCarthy, Thomas 21–2 medicine 8, 82, 93–4, 103–5, 109–22

Meredith, George 206 mesmerism 82 military 1, 6, 8, 52–63, 229 Mill, John Stuart 5, 14, 18, 21, 22, 24, 30, 42 On Liberty 16, 17, 42 Milnes, Richard Monckton 97 Milton, John 83 missing link 143, 150–3 Mitchell, David T. 93, 97 modernity 2, 14, 22–23, 89, 158, 166 modernism/modernist 36 monarchy 172, 223–4 Monroe Doctrine 74 monstrosity 8, 9, 95–7, 141–53 Moore, George 236 moral conflict 11 moralism 14, 17 morality 11, 85, 148, 218 of literature 202 Morgan, Susan 172 Morley, John 206 Morrison, Toni 24 Beloved 24 Müller, Max 67, 77 ‘The Savage’ 67 muscular Christianity 69, 114–18 Myers, D. G. 18 nation 76–7 National Review 204, 205 Neesom, Elizabeth 131 Newman, John Henry 111, 120, 121 Newsome, Robert 115 New Woman 12, 213–25 Nietzsche, Frederick 231–3, 234, 238 Nightingale, Florence 109–10, 112, 118, 173 Nordau, Max 234–5 Degeneration 234–5 Normativity 20, 82 Habermasian 20 nosology 85 nostalgia 11, 75, 161 nursing 8, 109–22 male nurses/nursing 8–9, 109–22 O’Connor, Feargus 128, 134, 135, 136, 137 Oliphant, Margaret 147

256

Index

optimism 24 Orientalism 54–58, 60–2, 95, 173–82 Other, the linguistic 54, 56 racial 7–8, 54 Pall Mall Gazette 202, 205–6 Palmerston, Lord 55 parliament 26–8, 205 Pater, Walter 201, 203, 206–10, 230, 235, 238 The Renaissance 235 Patmore, Coventry 111 Patrana, Julia 9 patriarchy 38, 135–6, 214–24 Peach, Henry 95 Fading Away 95 periodical culture 12, 201–10 philosophy 5, 20–1 phrenology 83 pluralism 20 poetry 6, 33–51, 232–5 political theory 6, 20–22 political system 9, 26–7, 28 politics 1, 3, 4, 5, 25, 26–8 Party 26–7 post-colonial 172 post-Marxism 20 postmodernism 5 post-structuralism 19 pragmatism 17 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 121 primitivism 7, 66 primitive woman 72 Prior, Katharine 60–1 Pritchard, James Cowles 82 proceduralism 17, 22, 29 Habermasian 20, 21 rational 22, 30 progress 9–10, 15, 16 property 16–17, 213–25 property rights for women 213–25 protestantism 33, 116 psychiatry 80 psychology 5, 7–8, 16, 80–90 public sphere 16, 23–4, 59–60 Public Opinion 99 publisher/s 11 pugilism 112–14 Pusey, E. B. 12–13, 236

Quarterly Review 97 Quilter, Harry 145–6 race 2, 7, 10, 66, 71, 72, 171–82 racial superiority 71 Radcliffe, Ann 85 radicalism 27, 196 rationalism 14, 15, 18, 20, 22–3, 86 reading/readers 2, 6, 11, 34–5, 145–52, 186–99, 201–10, 217–22 realism 145 reason 15, 20 reasoning, academic 18–20 reform 9, 16, 27, 28, 46–7 religion 1, 4, 12, 214–25 Renaissance period 39–40 reverie 7–8, 80–90 Review of Reviews 207–8 rhetoric 17, 19–20, 23, 26, 47, 54, 60, 127, 129, 202, 209, 215–16 Robinson, Henry Crabb 68 Rodgers and Hammerstein 10, 172–82 The King and I 10, 172–82 romanticism 2, 4, 8, 33–4, 35, 36, 39, 41, 45, 81, 85, 88, 93, 98 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 80, 83 Rowell, Geoffrey 229 Ruskin, John 40, 220 Russia 53, 54, 60, 229 Rylance, Rick 85 Sale, General Sir Robert 58 Sale, Lady (Florentia) 7, 52, 58, 62–3 Saturday Review 12, 206 savagery 7, 66, 67, 71, 77 noble savage 75 scepticism 23, 27 science 1, 2, 8, 9–10, 14, 69–71, 83–4 Scott, Walter 34, 85 Seacole, Mary 109, 113 Second World War 229 secularism 34–5, 135, 229–30 selfhood 1, 45–7 sensation fiction 9–10, 141–53 sensory economy 70 sensuality 70 sentiment/sentimentality 14, 168 serialisation 12, 146, 201–10 sexuality 8, 39, 44, 112, 115, 236 Shah Shuja 53, 56

Index 257 Shakespeare, Tom 93, 95 Shakespeare, William 33, 86, 157 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 86, 102 Shuttleworth, Sally 84 Siam 171–82 siblings 12, 42, 213–25 sibling rivalry 12, 214–15 Simla Manifesto 53, 54, 55, 57 sin 12, 228–38 sincerity 19–20, 21 Singh, Ranjit 55–6 slavery 174–6 anti- 72 Smith, Alexander 151 Snyder, Sharon L. 93, 97 Socratic method 17 Sophocles 33 species 10, 69 see also evolutionary theory The Spectator 99 Spencer, Herbert 11, 186, 192–3, 196 The Principles of Psychology 186–7, 192 ‘Progress: Its Law and Cause’ 192–3, 196 spirituality 82 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 221 St. Paul’s Magazine 101 Stead, W. T. 202, 206, 208 Sterne, Laurence 97 Stokes, John 230 Stopes, Charlotte 221 Stopes, Mary 221 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 173, 176–7, 178, 179, 181 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 176–7, 178, 179, 180–1, 182 Sturgis, Matthew 95 subversion 8 Swinburne, Algernon 206 Symons, Arthur 235–6 sympathy 2, 110, 187–96, 221 syntax 11, 37, 43, 186–99 Taylor, Jenny Bourne 82 teaching 17 see also education Temple, Frederick 232 tenderness 9, 114–15, 116 Tennyson, Alfred 1, 35, 111 In Memoriam 1, 35 Ternan, Ellen 158

Thackeray, William Makepeace Vanity Fair 35, 36 theology 4, 12–13, 228–38 Thompson, Edward 57 Thompson, Fred C. 187 tolerance 21–2 Tolstoy, Leo 46 tradition 14 tragedy 33 transgression 9–10 transnationalism 7 travel writing 10, 69–71 by women 58–9, 109 Trilling, Lionel 19 and sincerity and authenticity 19–20 Trollope, Anthony 5, 24, 207 Phineas Finn 5, 25–9 tuberculosis 8, 93–105 Victorian studies 13 Victorian values 14–21 war 6–7 See also First Afghan War; military Weber, Max 20 Wee, C. J. W-L. 72 Westminster Review 147 White, Henry Kirke 97 White Indian 7–8, 66–78 Whitman, Walt 110, 113 Wilde, Oscar 13, 24, 98, 201, 203, 208–10, 230, 233, 236 ‘The Critic as Artist’ 208 The Picture of Dorian Gray 210, 230, 232, 235 Wilson, H. B. 228 Wollstonecraft, Mary 80, 173 Wolstenholme, Elizabeth 217 women 29, 84, 213–25 women’s rights 171–2, 213–25 women’s writing 172–3, 181, 213–25 Wood, Ellen 95 East Lynne 95 Wordsworth, William 2, 34–5, 85 writing processes 11, 186–200 Yeats, W. B. 47, 236 Yellow-Bookishness 99 Yonge, Charlotte 9, 109, 111 The Heir of Redclyffe 109, 111, 119