Memory and Memorials, 1789-1914: Literary and Cultural Perspectives (Routledge Studies in Memory and Narrative)

Memory and Memorials, 1789–1914

Focusing on the ‘long’ nineteenth century, from the French Revolution to the beginnings of Modernism, this book examines the significance of memory in an era of turbulent social change. Through an investigation of science, literature, history and the visual arts the authors explore theories of memory and the cultural and literary resonances of memorializing. Drawing on the work of many of the most influential literary figures of the period, such as Tennyson, Scott and Hardy, this book explores key topics such as: • gender and memory • Victorian psychological theories of memory • cultural constructions in literature, science, history and architecture. Memory and Memorials, 1789–1914 employs a range of new and influential interdisciplinary methodologies. It offers both a fresh theoretical understanding of the period, and a wealth of empirical material of use to the historian, literary critic or social psychologist. Matthew Campbell lectures in English Literature at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry. Jacqueline M.Labbe is Senior Lecturer in English at Warwick University. She is the author of The Romantic Paradox: Love, Violence and the Uses of Romance, 1760–1830. Sally Shuttle-worth is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology.

Routledge Studies in Memory and Narrative Series editors: Mary Chamberlain, Paul Thompson, Timothy Ashplant, Richard Candida-Smith and Selma Leydesdorff

1 Narrative and Genre Edited by Mary Chamberlain and Paul Thompson 2 Trauma and Life Stories International perspectives Edited by Kim Lacy Rogers and Selma Leydesdorff with Graham Dawson 3 Narratives of Guilt and Compliance in Unified Germany Stasi informers and their impact on society Barbara Miller 4 Japanese Bankers in the City of London Junko Sakai 5 Memory and Memorials, 1789–1914 Literary and cultural perspectives Edited by Matthew Campbell, Jacqueline M.Labbe and Sally Shuttleworth

Memory and Memorials, 1789–1914

Literary and cultural perspectives

edited by Matthew Campbell, Jacqueline M.Labbe and Sally Shuttleworth

London and New York

First published 2000 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. © 2000 Matthew Campbell, Jacqueline M.Labbe and Sally Shuttleworth The photograph on page 149 by Jack E.Boucher is reproduced by kind permission of the Library of Congress, Washington. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Campbell, Matthew (Matthew J.B.) Memory and memorials, 1789–1914: literary and cultural perspectives/Matthew Campbell, Jacqueline M.Labbe, and Sally Shuttleworth. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Literature and history—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. Great Britain—History—Victoria, 1837–1901. 4. Great Britain—Civilization—19th century. 5. Autobiographical memory in literature. 6. Memory in literature. I. Labbe, Jacqueline M., 1965– II. Shuttleworth, Sally, 1952– III. Title. PR468.H57 C35 2000 820.9’358–dc21 ISBN 0-203-46664-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-77488-4 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-22976-6 (Print Edition)

99–054179

Contents

List of figures List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction

vii ix xiii 1

MATTHEW CAMPBELL, JACQUELINE M.LABBE AND SALLY SHUTTLEWORTH

PART I Memor y: cultural constructions in literature, science and histor y

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1 Romanticism and the re-engendering of historical memory GREG KUCICH

15

2 Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian and the disordered memory CATHERINE A.JONES

30

3 ‘The malady of thought’: embodied memory in Victorian psychology and the novel SALLY SHUTTLEWORTH

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4 The unquiet limit: old age and memory in Victorian narrative HELEN SMALL

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Contents

5 Memory through the looking glass: Ruskin versus Hardy PHILIP DAVIS

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6 Twisting: memory from Eliot to Eliot RICK RYLANCE

PART II Writing and remembering: elegy, memorial, rhyme

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7 Gender and memory in post-Revolutionary women’s writing GARY KELLY

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8 Re-membering: memory, posterity and the memorial poem JACQUELINE M.LABBE

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9 ‘All that it had to say’: Henry Adams and the Rock Creek Memorial DUCO VAN OOSTRUM

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10 Memory enstructured: the case of Memorial Hall CLYDE BINFIELD

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11 Memorials of the Tennysons MATTHEW CAMPBELL

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12 Rhyming as resurrection GILLIAN BEER

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Notes Name index Subject index

208 229 233

Figures

6.1 The conscious brain as business headquarters 6.2 Galton’s ‘composite portraiture’ 9.1 The Adams memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery

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109 115 149

Contributors

Gillian Beer is King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge and President of Clare Hall. Her books include Darwin’s Plots (1983; second edition, 2000), Arguing with the Past (1988), Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996) and Virginia Woolf: the Common Ground (1996). Clyde Binfield OBE is Professor Associate in History at the University of Sheffield. His extensive publications focus on the cultural and architectural context of English Protestant Nonconformity from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Matthew Campbell lectures in English at the University of Sheffield. He has written Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (1999) and published articles on English and Irish poetry in Essays in Criticism, Bullan, English, and the European Journal of English Studies. He is the editor of the Tennyson Research Bulletin. Philip Davis is Reader in the English Department of the University of Liverpool. He has written Memory and Writing, The Experience of Reading, Real Voices: On Reading, as well as books on Johnson and on Malamud, and edited a selected Ruskin. He is currently writing the volume on the Victorians for the Oxford English Literary History. Catherine A.Jones is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Aberdeen. She is currently completing a book on Scott and Enlightenment Psychology. ix

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Gary Kelly is Professor of English at the University of Alberta and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has published The English Jacobin Novel, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft, and Women, Writing, and Revolution. He has edited Wollstonecraft’s novels, Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall, and two volumes of Bluestocking Feminism, of which he was General Editor. Greg Kucich is Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. His publications include Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism (Penn State University Press 1991), recent articles on women Romantic writers, and a book in progress on Romanticism and the Gendering of History. He is also co-editor of Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Jacqueline M.Labbe is Senior Lecturer at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism (Macmillan, 1998), The Romantic Paradox: Love, Violence, and the Uses of Romance, 1760–1830 (Macmillan, 2000), and articles on poetry and gender in the nineteenth century. She is currently working on a study of Charlotte Smith and the culture of gender. Duco van Oostrum is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Sheffield and the author of Male Authors, Female Subjects (Rodopi, 1995), a study of Henry James and Henry Adams. Besides a continued interest in Henry Adams and autobiography, he is currently working on a book on American Sports Writing. Rick Rylance is Professor of Modern English Literature at Anglia Polytechnic University, Cambridge. He is author of a number of studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and intellectual history, including Roland Barthes (1986) and Psychological Theory and British Culture 1850–1880 (Oxford 2000). He is presently writing the mid-twentieth-century volume of the Oxford English Literary History covering the period 1930–70. Sally Shuttleworth is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield, She is the author of George Eliot and NineteenthCentury Science (1984), and Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (1996), and co-editor of Nature Transfigured: Science

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and Literature, 1700–1900 (1989) (with John Christie), Body Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science (1990) (with Mary Jacobus and Evelyn Fox Keller), and Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890 (1998) (with Jenny Bourne Taylor). Helen Small is Fellow in English Literature at Pembroke College, Oxford. She is the author of Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800–1865 (1996) and co-editor of The Practice and Representation of Reading in England 1996). She is currently writing a book about old age in literature from the classics to the present day.

Acknowledgements

The articles in this volume are based on a selection of papers originally delivered at the interdisciplinary conference on Memory, 1789–1914, sponsored by the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, University of Sheffield in 1996. We were privileged to have as one of our keynote speakers the late Raphael Samuel, author of Theatres of Memory. This volume is necessarily impoverished by his absence. Our thanks are due to Gowan Dawson, Louise Henson, Caroline Lucas and Amy Waste. Sally Shuttleworth’s article first appeared in Australasian Victorian Studies Journal 2 (1996).

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Introduction Matthew Campbell, Jacqueline M.Labbe and Sally Shuttleworth

In 1861, when Prince Albert died and Queen Victoria entered her permanent state of mourning, memory became enshrined in British culture. Its process of symbolization had been firmly inscribed a few years earlier, with the publication in 1850 of Victoria’s favourite book, In Memoriam. The enculturation of memory is thus firmly established by mid-century, but its usefulness as a metaphor stretches back into history; indeed, its use as history is one of the focuses of this collection. Memory in the nineteenth century takes on a variety of guises and reflects a number of needs; as a political and literary marker of custom and continuity, it functions to capture, represent, and symbolize that which is always in danger of being lost. As the essays in this collection argue, memory itself can be seen as a defining sign of the period 1789– 1914, bookended by war, revolution, change, and loss. As many recent studies have shown, the nineteenth century, far from reifying stagnating truisms, was a period of furious change; in science, politics, literature, and medicine, for instance, practitioners were required to fuse old and new, or to substitute the new altogether. Memory became a necessary tool, allowing the collective act of memorializing, encouraging and bolstering social progression and the transformation of the past into the future. And yet, for all the brashness of the nineteenth-century sense of social progress, optimism was, crucially, underpinned by a sense of pervading loss. The symbolism of Victoria’s unending grief was not lost on her subjects, who saw her sadness as pathologizing memory, even as it indicated its power. Encoded, then, into nineteenth-century memory are a variety of conflicting impulses and anxieties; the chapters in this collection work both to recover memory and discover its uses. Divided into two parts, this collection addresses itself to understanding and reconstructing memory first as a cultural 1

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phenomenon, exploring literature, science, and history; and then as a written and architectural trope, in its forms of elegy and memorial. Throughout, the chapters demonstrate a keen alertness to the ramifications of writing memory and relying on its powers. The sense of impending loss that infiltrates memory is, of course, most lyrically captured by the voice of the nation, Tennyson, in In Memoriam. In section XCV of the poem, the poem’s speaker recounts a summer evening spent with his family in the garden at Somersby. Left alone, the poet takes out the letters of his dead friend and finds that, reading through them, ‘word by word, and line by line / The dead man touched me from the past’. The speaker’s vision through reading then grants him a moment of vision into the ‘pulsations’ of Time, Chance and Death, until he finds the trance cancelled, and the poem’s dominant note of doubt casts uncertainty over the whole experience. Memorializing the virtues of his dead friend, Tennyson’s poet asks memory to recreate the touch of the dead, and the experience of contact with a living, immortal soul. Words, speech, intellect and eventually memory itself fail: Vague words! But ah, how hard to frame In matter-moulded forms of speech, Or even for intellect to reach Through memory that which I became: (In Memoriam, XCV, 45–8) These words are vague indeed: intellect attempts to ‘reach/Through memory’—with its aid—but it is also as if it tries to reach through memory and out the other side, to the irrecoverable past or even to an intangible spiritual experience. The chapters in this book look at the ways in which writers from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries approach the problems of memory which here, at the middle of the nineteenth century, are shown cruelly pointing up Tennyson’s loss. Tennyson’s connection of a failure in language, intellect, and memory, for all his sense of the imperative of keeping contact with the past through his memorializing, is the connection that many chapters here chart. Through writing in history, poetry, fiction, psychology, and autobiography, the faculty of memory is posited as central to constructions of the nineteenth-century human subject, both in the sense of the history of the self, and the sense of the historical community to which it may belong. A human life, George Eliot observes in Daniel Deronda (1876), ‘should be well

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rooted in some spot of a native land…a spot where the definiteness of early memory may be inwrought with affection’. In this nostalgic yearning for a lost era when the stability of community was reflected in the formation of selfhood, memory is key. Although a Wordsworthian impulse underlies Eliot’s statement, the healing powers of memory were, by the mid-Victorian era, no longer so clear. Literary texts of this period repeatedly trace the ways in which social dislocation is registered in the psyche, as forms of memory cease to express a continuity of selfhood. Gwendolen Harleth’s nervous breakdown in Daniel Deronda, like the social debasement of the English Jewish community also depicted in the novel, stands as a figure of the corruption of English society, ruled not by order and continuity, but by gambling and the uncertainties of the stock market. Dickens’s epic social canvases similarly locate social disruption symbolically in the fragmentation of selfhood and loss of memory in key figures. For literary characters the past is often difficult to recall, while memories can be overwhelming and confused. Unreliable narrators abound in both the fiction and poetry of the period, as writers place the problems of memory at the structural centre of their work. The urgent need to set down, order, and define the past is framed by an increasing awareness of the fragility and unreliability of memory. The importance of memory at this period was increased by the new ideological labour it had to perform. The epistemic shift identified by Foucault in The Order of Things spreads throughout the disciplines as classification of the order of nature is replaced by study of the processes of transformation and growth. True understanding, Darwin argued, will have arrived when we no longer look as a savage would at a ship, but seek to comprehend the processes which lie behind its creation. Evolutionary biology, with its redefinition of what it is to be human, obviously recast in fundamental ways cultural understandings of the mind and the workings of memory. As a science, however, it formed only one of the new disciplines devoted to historical modes of understanding. Comparative anatomy, geology, physiology, anthropology and philology all sought to explain present form by locating it as an outcome of past development. Social and psychological forms of understanding and explanation registered a similar shift. The nineteenth-century cultural map was governed, as Mandelbaum has argued, by historicism: the belief that an adequate understanding of the nature of any phenomenon and an adequate assessment of its value are to be

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Introduction

gained through considering it in terms of the place which it occupied and the role which it played within a process of development.1 The consequences for social and psychological understanding, and hence the role of memory, of these new forms of historicism are legion. The Victorian literary editor and essayist, John Morley, complained bitterly about the enervating effects of the historical method which could lead, he suggested, to a greater concern with origins than goodness or badness: ‘Character is considered less with reference to its absolute qualities, than as an interesting scene strewn with scattered rudiments, survivals, inherited predispositions. Opinions are counted rather as phenomena to be explained than as matters of truth and falsehood.’2 Morley draws on the language of evolutionary biology as he shows how the application of the historical method to the analysis of human conduct produces the dreaded spectre of relativism. Historicism seemed to offer a new certainty, as the transcendental explanations of religion and philosophy could be supplanted by new explanatory structures based on observable laws of development. Such an insistence on process brought with it, however, new forms of uncertainty. Morley s hostile analysis none the less pinpoints many of the tensions located within writings of the time, even in the most resolute supporters of historicist thought. In place of Descartes’ rational model of selfhood we are offered, as Morley suggests, a self who is a bundle of accumulated impulses, attributes, and uncontrolled memories, with no firm, directing centre. Moral judgement is undermined by the endlessly retreating nature of historical process, while the whole issue of reliable observation, upon which the scientific and historical methods must depend, is called into question by the mutating nature of selfhood, and the uncertain processes of memory. Every age, Morley argues, is in some sense an age of transition, but our own is characteristically and cardinally an epoch of transition in the very foundations of belief and conduct. The old hopes have grown pale, the old fears dim; strong sanctions are become weak, and once vivid faiths very numb.3 The twin impulses of rapid social change and the development of historical sciences helped to shatter the old religious certainties, yet the

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5

epistemological authority set in their place rested crucially on a centre which was seen increasingly to be flawed: the workings of human memory. As a notion of the pathology of the subject develops, along with the social, cultural, and medical economies in which it operates, the power of memory in holding its past together becomes crucial. When memory is proved wanting, then the sense of contest over what the past of subject and community means becomes a fertile ground for the literary history which many of these chapters address. Greg Kucich finds this sense of contest over history in the histories written by women at the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. An early Jane Austen heroine, Catherine Morland, can say that ‘History, real solemn history…is very tiresome’, because, as Anne Elliot in Persuasion will later point out, ‘the pen has been in their [men’s] hands’. Captain Wentworth promptly drops his pen and turns to writing a love letter, in vindication of Austen’s sense of reproof against the syntheses of male versions of the past. Catherine Macauley’s History of England was the first to be written by a woman, and in it, Kucich shows, the memories of the individual return to create what he calls ‘a form of historical memory that locates and supports communities of marginalized victims whose pointed divisions…dissolve amid their shared suffering’. This sharing of suffering, of extending history into the memories of those who have previously been excluded, creates ‘in the present…more fluid, egalitarian communities liberated from divisive organizations of race and class as well as gender’. Suggesting a wealth of writing, only beginning to be touched by historians and literary scholars, Kucich sets the tone of a book which investigates a new approach to ‘historical memory’ which can reconfigure our conceptions of how those in the past viewed their own past. ‘Remembrance’, as Catherine Jones quotes Thomas Reid, ‘is an act of mind’. According to her account of Scott’s Heart of Midlothian, the novel’s plot is dependent on the precarious witness of the disordered mind of the character Madge Wildfire. She lacks active control, and thus the novel works within a dispute between Romantic and commonsense versions of the self. Taking up specific literary examples in nineteenth-century fiction, Jones, Sally Shuttleworth and Helen Small show the disparity of views of self and memory, from delirium to old age, and expand on Kucich s notion of historical memory. Conceptions of memory are grounded in history, as much as memory is posited as the grounds of history itself. Similarly, the order of Romantic and post-Romantic narrative is dependent on the order of mind governed

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by memory. Walter Scott was influenced by both Reid and Hume, in which the mind is both a ‘heap of different perceptions’ (Hume) and the ‘ordered progression of associated elements’ (Reid). Between the two we have Romantic narratives in which plot itself is dependent on a creative confusion of competing eighteenth-century ideas of memory and imagination. Indeed, Jones concludes that Scott Vindicates the wayward workings of imagination, in opposition to the precepts of Scottish Common Sense philosophy’. The workings of philosophical psychology, and the discoveries about the self coming from the new science of psychiatry, Shuttleworth argues, lead us to ‘one of the central tenets of midVictorian social, psychological and fictional discourse: in this increasingly secular age, memory, with its assurance of a continuous identity through time, functions as the grounding for social and personal morality’. The description of murderous desires of a character like Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda have their source in George Eliot’s acquaintance with a psychiatry which posited that nervous disorders originated in a sense of selfhood which loses coherence as past and future actions become confused with memories. Memory and imagination must act together in order to produce identity, to control the ‘critical sense of self which holds that memories are not mere fantasies. If this is put in the Darwinian frame of struggle against the psychological and physiological organization of the species, then personal memory can find itself ‘supplanted by the organic memory which frequently works against the desires of the conscious individual’. Memory, more than history, can link the human ‘back to the animal chain’. By the time we come to late century, in Hardy and Wilde, the options are either to be imprisoned within the cruelly fictive sense of a moral self which only conceptions of memory can encourage, or to resist it entirely in favour of a ‘registration of despair with reference to the physiological tyranny of memory’. The young Charles Darwin, after taxing his father for details of his senile patients, went on to ask himself, ‘What is instinct but an unconscious memory physically written into the brain?’ For Helen Small, both the long memories of the elderly and the failings of their shortterm memory suggest an approach to the physiological tyranny of memory which affected all areas of Victorian life. The histories of distinguished elderly politicians—Gladstone was 84 when he eventually resigned as Prime Minister—provide the starting point for her chapter which suggests that the memories of the old contain history itself,

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marking the change that had worked through their long lives. Add to this the sense of instinct as unconscious memory, as collective and not personal, and the biological history of the ageing human subject becomes one which marks not so much personal identity confirmed by memory, but the truly intimate sense that the irrecuperable memory of species is shared by all. Darwin’s ‘theory of heredity’, Small says, ‘could more properly be said to have abolished memory’, and in its place we have archaeology, ‘disinterring the remains of what we have been, piecing together the evidence of a past we did not know we had’. What Greg Kucich calls ‘historical memory’ may be an unconscious, collective, and not individual, phenomenon. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, according to Philip Davis, in the midst of this sense of a broad ‘biological memory’, is ‘an ancient almost panpsychic sense of what I shall call world memory’. This ‘world memory’ he finds primarily in Ruskin’s Modern Painters, where it amounts to ‘a unity that links mind and matter’. Through ‘sympathy’ the human observer of the natural scene discovers ‘sublime memory’, which works outside the voluntary operations of the mind, but only finds form within the perceiving individual mind. This is Wordsworthian territory, but Davis finds that it is Thomas Hardy’s challenge to this ‘world memory’ which moves it into the twentieth century. When, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Hardy describes Tess in love, where ‘spiritual forgetfulness co-existed with an intellectual remembrance’, he is describing what Davis states is memory as ‘not merely some electro-chemical implant’, but also ‘an experiential dimension in space and time’. Sensing the conflict of memory, of external and internal, the nineteenth century experienced the ‘second, secular Fall’ of autobiographical selfconsciousness, in which the experience of sympathy with the external only serves to imprison the self within itself. In Davis’ reading of Hardy, memory half-frees ‘human beings from living merely transiently in linear time’. ‘Real histories’, Rick Rylance points out, ‘like memories, are not processional.’ The nineteenth-century idealism which was one of the formative intellectual influences on T.S.Eliot is carried through into an early modernist text like Eliot’s ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’. Despite the growing orthodoxy of sceptical views that the mechanism of self is let down by the failure of memory to provide psychic coherence, the work of an idealist like F.H.Bradley still serves to show that there was a residual belief that memory ‘is subject to a higher criterion’, the need to ‘order and harmonise our world’. This is,

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though, constrained by the frailty of human faculties, as much as it serves to posit what Rylance calls ‘the need to defend their integrity in unstable mental environments’. Yet there can be false memories, as in Rylance’s example of the woman in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, who, just because she is seen by a street-lamp, is consistently understood to be a prostitute. In Bradley an terms, this turns on the fallacy that ‘memories are often indistinguishable from interpretations’. Rylance ends his chapter with a desire to restore connections between Victorian and modern accounts of mind, suggesting, as many of the contributors here also do, a new way of approaching the ‘joint myths of the utilitarian-idealist stalemate’. Just as in Small, Shuttleworth and Davis, the challenge of science, and particularly that of the challenge of instinctual memory to the transcendent conception of world memory, or an ‘Absolute’, must work with a corrective implicit within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophical psychology. G.H.Lewes objected to models of acts of memory as mechanical—what in the twentieth-century would result in ideas of the mind as filing cabinet or computer—because the models are inorganic. The activities are dynamic, and while they exist in a material medium, memory is process. As Rylance concludes, ‘Memory is revisable…it prompts forms of action which validate the integrity of the recollection and the self experiencing it.’ The chapters in Part I show that memory, in its embodiments as historical, scientific, and literary process, serves to enhance as well as to challenge the securities of self and intellect in the long nineteenthcentury. Part II addresses the question of memory from a more metaphorical and expressive angle: how does memory enact itself in literature? What can we learn from the strategies and techniques of harnessing memory? Whether as a means of ensuring the transmission of custom (Kelly), as the acceptance of influence and its ramifications (Labbe), in its elisions and reappearances as monument and memorial (van Oostrum, Binfield), through its representations and silences (Campbell), or as the only means by which language and order— scientific, natural—restore themselves (Beer), the physical act of remembering finds play in the public arena marked by texts, mourning and grief, stones and mortar. Each chapter in this part approaches memory as performing history—that is, as essential to defining our understanding of the past and the future. The presence of the present symbolizes and contains our need and desire for maintenance. For instance, Gary Kelly finds in women’s writing of the postRevolutionary period a self-aware exploitation of feminine roles for

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the purpose of transferring to the female voice the power to describe, and hence embody, history. Through a new emphasis on female powers of endurance and talents for memory, women writers exploited their social position to allow for an increased influence in the transmission of cultural history. Kelly discusses the political and cultural uses of a feminized trope of memory by women writers; he argues that in this way, women attempted to maintain and further the feminization of culture apparently heralded by the French Revolution and its consequences: ‘women writers…capitalized on changing characterizations of the feminine to make distinctive, significant, and pioneering contributions to the post-Revolutionary poetics of memory’. Indeed, women parlayed this into a canny colonization of the hitherto unapproachable boundaries of the public sphere. As Kelly notes, the early nineteenth-century turn towards feminine virtues to repair the schisms caused by Revolution ‘could be converted into a justification for women writers to merge the discourse of repair, reconciliation, and harmony with domesticity…and extend those discourses, implicitly or explicitly, into what was viewed as the public, political sphere’. In this way, memory is enlisted in the cause of forgetting: roles are renewed and reviewed. But the links to forgetting backfired as cultural amnesia eventually obscured the very women whose writing was cited as ensuring cultural continuance. Jacqueline Labbe also discusses forgetting in a chapter that argues for a new form of influence, one that welcomes and makes use of the predecessors’ power, but that also literalizes—that is, turns into literature—the predecessor. In discussing memorial poems that name the predecessor in the title, she postulates that remembering for posterity’s sake allows a poet to make poetry from other poets’ reputations: ‘poetry is made from the living bodies of contemporaries, or based on the new graves of immediate forerunners, and anxious self-preservation is transmuted into efforts at (re)placement—the self in the place of the other’. However, this kind of poetic remembering has its dangers: an over-reliance on memorial can lead to forgetfulness in the living, even as a constant hearkening back to the past deprives the future of energy. Labbe, like Kelly, concludes that too much memory provokes forgetting. Indeed, as Duco van Oostrum shows, memory itself can be enlisted as the mask forgetting requires. Discussing Henry Adams’s Education, van Oostrum reveals its central paradox: Adams’s deliberate discarding of twenty years of his life, and his burial of his

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wife’s suicide, and her memory, in that silence. Van Oostrum’s chapter links the private act of mourning with public silence; his examination of Adams’s Autobiography and its strange elision of the wife’s death rotates round another version of memorial, the statue by SaintGaudens that heads Marian Adams’s grave. For Henry Adams, silence and speech merge in the empty space between chapters, and memory of the dead is only tolerable if unspoken. Van Oostrum concentrates on the physical memorial of the funeral monument as a signifier of grief both hidden and displayed: ‘the Memorial becomes a narrative of mourning, where the actual Statue delivers a message of completion and deliverance’. Clyde Binfield’s chapter also concerns the need to embody memory physically, and the disconcerting ease with which time can disable the best human efforts to memorialize. Focusing on the building of the Congregationalist’s Memorial Hall, Binfield explores the notion that ‘memory has to do with a shaping of history’. He excavates the facts of an architectural monument: the fund-raisers, the architect, the builders, and illuminates the physical cost of establishing memory with a building. Binfield reads the construction and the eventual destruction of Memorial Hall as evocative of memory itself: the building created, predicated, and finally faded into history. The building of Memorial Hall coincided with a ‘transformation’ of the past manifesting itself, among other ways, architecturally—history traded for the new, only to be, inevitably, discarded as the old. Memorial Hall thus emblematizes a central feature of memory: even as it establishes the past, it is replaced by the future—another form of forgetting. As Matthew Campbell shows, writing functions as a textual replacement for memory itself; even as Memorial Hall embodied the memory of the Congregationalists, so too Tennyson’s funeral ode on the death of Wellington provoked and encouraged the memorializing of a hero. Further, Campbell investigates how the public act of mourning the death of Tennyson himself performs memory: remorse and grief embody the lost poet, whose own body of work had relied so heavily on remembering others. For Tennyson, mourning and remembering hold together both the bereaved and the State; the memorial poem, Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, ensures that history and memory collude to produce national identity. The Ode is ‘a memorial text which would unify poet, people and hero in grief’, accompanied by Hallam Tennyson’s Memoir of his father’s own life and death: ‘memorial poem and Memoir alike attempt to provide a model of the individual around

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which the nation can be gathered’. Memory is necessary not only for personal, but for political cohesion; forgetting leads to national disintegration. Again, the faculties of memory and its loss coexist. Gillian Beer’s chapter concludes the collection. In it, she shows rhyme itself to be a mnemonic, a fusion of the mechanic and the organic that allows for a return to the beginning always already predicated by progressing to the end. Placing rhyme as a vehicle for cultural memory, she shows this to be an identity which struggles with its simultaneous association with the primitive and the childlike. This contradiction is complicated by rhyme’s capacity to effect change: ‘rhyme is performative. Whether or not we share the beliefs, we take part as we speak in rhyme’s performances of resurrection.’ Provocatively linking rhyme to aspects of history, science, and religion, Beer uncovers another function: rhyme produces memory in the form of resurrection, ‘life changing into life’. As this collection demonstrates, the nineteenth-century—preModernism, post-Enlightenment—regarded memory as a key to its civilization. Whether in the form of history, science, religion, literature, or architecture, the ‘correct’ use of memory ensured the successful transition from past to future, from immaturity to maturity, from weakness to power. And yet, the endemic presence of forgetting illustrates the dangers of a reliance on such a changeable, fluctuating, unreliable faculty. As each chapter shows, the guises of memory are manifold—and in this flexibility is both its power, and its risk.

Part I

Memory Cultural constructions in literature, science and history

Chapter 1

Romanticism and the re-engendering of historical memory Greg Kucich

History and memory intersect in various, complicated ways throughout the nineteenth century, especially in the rise of autobiographical discourses, but I wish to distinguish a particularly volatile, gendered form of this intersection. My focus centres on a relatively understudied component of that cultural process, associated by Benedict Anderson with the growth of European nationalisms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, through which history was constructed to produce collective memories that help solidify ‘imagined’ communities and their political aspirations.1 The ‘desire’ for this kind of historical memory, as Stephen Bann terms it in his recent book on Romantic historiography,2 emerged around the turn of the nineteenth century as an intense compulsion, shared across multiple class and national boundaries, that pervaded European academic institutions, literary discourses, philosophical circles, scientific inquiry, antiquarian societies, the visual arts, architecture, museum culture, public theatre and spectacle. Bann, following Foucault, attributes this unprecedented fascination with the past, in part, to an extreme historical nostalgia caused by the general decentring of the subject in the later eighteenth century. But the most immediate force mobilizing Clio’s massive popularity, Bann and Anderson would agree, involved the growing power of historical memory to authorize competing political communities, along with their postulated rights and imperatives, amid the social dislocations caused by the French Revolution and the spread of nationalisms. Hence the prodigious, creatively exuberant outpouring of countless narrative, theatrical, and pictorial histories of nationalities, ethnic groups, economic classes, monarchies and nobilities, artistic traditions, linguistic and religious communities, all of which transformed history into a commanding discipline of knowledge and power around the turn of the nineteenth century. I am particularly 15

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concerned here with the gender dynamics of such a formidable cultural investment in historical memory. For the gendering of historical memories and their related imagined communities bears striking and generally unexamined implications for the recovery work on women writers that is currently revolutionizing studies of British literary Romanticism Recent groundbreaking studies on Romantic era women writers and gender by Anne Mellor, Marlon Ross, and Stuart Curran, among others, have inspired one of the most vigorous reassessments ever of literary Romanticism, through which major reappraisals of women writers and their resistance to the gender codes of their time continue to open up the canonical and ideological limits of Romanticism.3 This revisionary endeavour generally springs from a shared commitment to historicize the literatures of Romanticism, particularly situating the alternative writing practices of women authors within their immediate historical contexts; but it has not yet substantially addressed the way many of the period’s women writers took up historical writing itself, and the empowering forms of memory it could produce, to forward their gender politics. In a survey of the recent pioneering work on Romanticism, gender, and women writers, Stuart Curran notes that we have only begun to recognize ‘the pervasive engagement with history’ that runs throughout the period’s writings by women.4 The astonishing range and diversity of this ‘engagement’ include various types of straightforward and parodic historical narratives by figures like Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Charlotte Smith, Hester Piozzi, Lucy Aikin, Anna Jameson, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Elizabeth Benger, to name but a few, as well as countless forms of historically grounded poems, novels, and plays attempted, it would seem, by the great majority of women writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Such a massive investment in the field of historical construction by so many women who, to varying degrees, thought of themselves as champions of their sex implies that they clearly recognized the power of historical memory in shaping social relations and the politics of gender. That recognition is fully borne out, as we shall see, in their multiple strategies for re-engendering historical memory in the service of producing new, more progressive social relations of gender and power. Yet as Gary Kelly, Nanora Sweet, and Antoinette Burton reveal in their recent exploratory studies of the historical writings of Mary Hays, Felicia Hemans, and Jane Austen, we are only in the earliest phase of trying to map this crucial site of

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contention where Romanticism interrogated its own ideologies of gender and power.5 To extend our reappraisals of Romantic writing, politics, and gender into this field of historical revisionism is thus to widen considerably our maps of alternative Romanticisms and the gender negotiations that stretch the limits of traditional Romanticism. As a step toward that goal, I will first sketch the general contours of a sustained effort among the period’s women writers to re-engender models of history, memory, and community. My focus will then narrow to the specific challenges, opportunities, and problematics of several different but representative examples of this historiographical strategy for re-imagining gender relations.6 Our neglect of the revisionary gendering of history among women Romantic era writers is probably owing to the general absence of gender considerations in much of the most important theoretical work on the interrelation of Romantic historicism, memory, and politics. Anderson, for instance, unquestioningly assumes a masculine principle of organization for all communities produced by historical memory, which he generally refers to as ‘fraternities’ or ‘brotherhoods’. Bann’s record of the nineteenth-century’s popular fascination with history similarly traces, also without overt considerations of gender, what appears to be an exclusively masculine ‘desire’. In response to the gender blindness that continues to preponderate in academic historiography, even among the more theoretically sophisticated forms of the discipline, feminist historians like Joan Scott have focused critical attention on the gender hierarchies and subordinations broadly enforced by nineteenth-century constructions of historical memory. However much those powerful modes of knowledge production may have imagined different kinds of national ‘truths’ and varying forms of social communities, Christina Crosby argues, they generally combined to affirm, on a deeper epistemological level, the absolute priority of ‘man’s truth’ and, one might add, man’s community.7 History’s emergence as the guardian discipline of ‘truth’ in the nineteenth century, Crosby concludes, thus made it one of the most potent discursive mechanisms for articulating the period’s divisive ideologies of gender and power. The critical response of current feminist historians to these disciplinary regimes can provide the most useful guidance to the strategies and problematics of those efforts by women Romantic era writers to re-engender the past. Interrogating and dismantling the disciplinary procedures of nineteenth-century historiography, and their persistence into our

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own time, has become one of the principal objectives of many feminist historians today. ‘[W]e cannot understand history’, Catherine Stimpson representatively argues ‘unless we graph the causes and effects of sex/gender systems’.8 To map the workings of those systems is not only to become conscious of ‘the deeply gendered nature of history itself, as Joan Scott puts it, but also to recognize that ‘[u]ntil recently, most history written exemplified the centrality of white men and the marginalization of most others’.9 The resulting imperative to contest these sexist biases has mobilized feminist historians to produce new histories that feature women’s experience and the functions of gender in social relations. But writing women back into history does not simply mean, as Janet Todd warns, creating new feminine memories— ‘herstory’—and imagining new communities of women in binary relation to masculine time and experience.10 Instead, a feminist approach to the past re-imagines history and social relations altogether by reconfiguring the fundamental structures of knowledge in masculine historiography that authorize its visions of the past and the social systems they enforce.11 On this radically transformative level, feminist historiography seeks to displace the rhetorical and epistemological ‘categories’ of ‘men’s history’, as Elaine Showalter puts it, with what Josephine Donovan calls a ‘women’s way of seeing, a women’s epistemology’.12 Such a basic re-engendering of the structures of knowledge and power in mainstream history makes up a unifying project for the group of feminist historians that Ann-Louise Shapiro introduces in her new volume, Feminists Revision History. Although feminists in the academy have attempted to refocus attention on the lives of women and to recover [their] lost stories, the goals of feminist theoretical work are considerably more far reaching. Feminists theorists have called upon scholars to examine the way that knowledge is constituted: to unpack the processes that select and preserve evidence, to decenter the narrative…to interrogate the categories of analysis within each discipline; to demonstrate the way that gender works to legitimize structures of power.13 The ultimate goal of such narrative and epistemological decentrings is not to produce, in nineteenth-century fashion, new exclusionary memories that authorize yet another dominant community, but rather to dismantle such hierarchical structures of power completely as well as

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the traditional formulations of historical memory that continue to authorize them. Generating this different kind of interrogative historical memory finally opens up the possibilities in the present for new types of social relations, for more fluid, egalitarian communities liberated from divisive organizations of race and class as well as gender. This revisionary agenda may be fraught with difficulties and internal divisions—Denise Riley, for instance, warns against the essentializing tendencies of universal histories of ‘woman’, and Cécile Dauphin critiques the scenario of perpetual victimization in much feminist historicism.14 But it is precisely in this combination of priorities, interventions, and liabilities that current feminist historiography bears its most revealing connections to the gender contestations among women writers of the Romantic era. Although the assumption still persists among many feminist historians that, as Scott argues, ‘Concern with gender as an analytic category has emerged only in the late twentieth century’,15 ‘man’s truth’ did not go unchallenged among women writers of the Romantic era. In fact, their massive intervention in the discursive structures and imagined communities of masculine history anticipate many of the central practices and problems of contemporary feminist historiography. Their prolific experimentation with different historiographical forms, moreover, often coalesced in resistance to the procedures of knowledge production and community building that current feminists critique in masculine history. And while their own historical experiences of severe gender inequality may have inflected their views on the past and their visions of the future differently from their twentieth-century counterparts, deepening their sorrow over the wrongs of woman and limiting their outlook on the prospects of gender reform, they did produce multiple types of alternative narratives that ‘brush history against the grain’, as Walter Benjamin puts it,16 by re-engendering historical memory and reimagining new, socially progressive communities. They even struggled with the same problems of essentialism and victimization that continue to challenge contemporary feminist historians. If current feminist historiography can help us recognize such patterns in its earlier incarnations, its own revisionary effort may also profit from a greater familiarity with the relative successes and liabilities of those early practioners of feminist historicism. That many Romantic era women writers-were alert to and keenly critical of men’s history may be judged from Catherine Morland’s representative response to conventional historiography in Jane

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Austen’s Northanger Abbey.‘[H] istory, real solemn history,’ she declares, I cannot be interested in… I read it a little, as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome.17 Austen’s more mature heroine, Anne Elliot of Persuasion, is more precise in locating the problem of these ‘tiresome’ histories in the masculine consciousness that produces them. To Captain Harville’s insinuation that ‘all histories’ prove the inferiority of women, Anne responds, ‘if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.’18 It is certainly no coincidence that just as Anne delivers this charge against male authorship of history, Captain Wentworth drops his pen—and, perhaps along with it, the phallic attributes of his social and writing demeanour—in order to begin a new kind of writing performance, a love letter or history of his heart. For if the ‘truth’ of ‘solemn history’ alienated female consciousness, inciting Anna Jameson to complain that ‘history…disdains to speak of [women]’,19 its exclusions also provoked the formulation of alternative, feminine models of history and community that seek to transform the contours of man’s truth by writing women’s experience back into historical and political life. The most important and potentially redemptive history that ultimately emerges in Persuasion, the one historical narrative that displaces the public recordings of aristocratic and military history pored over by Sir Walter Elliot and his followers, is ‘the little history of sorrowful interest’ tracing the interior drama of Anne’s troubled but enduring love for Captain Wentworth.20 This interiorized reformulation of the abstract ‘truths’ of ‘solemn history’ suggests how the alternative historicism of women writers could go beyond simple irritation at the absence of women in traditional accounts of the past. Their revisionary projects tended to focus even more significantly on the exclusionary basis of masculine history’s fundamental narrative and epistemological structures of understanding. This critique centred on its totalizing inclination to delineate grand sweeps of historical process that subsume and efface individual subjects, particularly women, within universal paradigms of historical development. For all of the rich variety of tropological,

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narrative, and political strategies that theorists like Benjamin and Hayden White have uncovered in mainstream historical writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many of these diverse historical renderings share a common tendency to organize their accounts of the past and the truths of human destiny within abstract, totalizing frames of linear progress and decline. The drama of this type of history subordinates human actors to such universal patterns of growth and degeneration, which may be construed variously as the liberal progressions of Whig history, the millennial advances of Priestley, Godwin, and the early advocates of the French Revolution, the perfectibility scenarios of Godwin’s Political Justice, the cyclical patterns of destruction and renovation outlined by Volney, Condorcet, Cuvier, and Hegel, the brutal oscillations of supply and dearth in Malthus’s population theory, or the degenerative motion of Gibbon’s history of empire. The most sophisticated form of this universalizing strategy collapses the historical lines of progress and decline into a dynamic tension of contrary motion. Thus Hume presents a theory of ‘contrary’ linear ‘direction[s]’ of progress and decline that is developed with increasing sophistication by historians throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.21 Indeed, the leading historiographical theorists of this era—such as Gibbon, Goldsmith, Condorcet, Volney, Kant, Hegel, Malthus—may differ widely in their political investments and in their conclusions about the relative progress of different cultures at different historical moments. But they all tend to conceptualize human history and the truths of experience with abstract models of universal tension between the linear contraries of progress and decline. For liberal historians like Godwin and Condorcet, learning how to recognize those contraries establishes historical memories of gain and loss from which imagined communities of republicans glimpse their ultimate progress towards the New Jerusalem of political reform. Missing from all these highly theoretical accounts of history is the particularized story of the human subject, especially the marginalized individual. Instead of detailing that human record, these universal narratives of linear history make up what Crosby calls ‘man’s truth’ in their general exclusion of human subjectivity and their more specific effacement of female identity from historical and political life. Such historical ‘truth’ also informs and authorizes many of those transhistorical, idealizing systems in literary Romanticism that feminist critics like Anne Mellor find contributing, no matter how progressive they may seem, to patriarchal communities and

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codes of knowledge that deny women’s participation in public experience—Milton’s Eve is gently invited to withdraw when God’s angel explains providential history to Adam. The rights and privileges such histories support, however differently inflected in political terms, will always remain, in Tom Paine’s famous and revealing title, The Rights of Man. To contest the universalizing structures of understanding in such histories of ‘man’s rights’ was thus to challenge fundamentally the gender ideologies and subordinations that operate throughout much of Romanticism’s dominant writing practices. Such a challenge widely took the form of alternative efforts to humanize the past, replacing abstract patterns of historical development with localized evocations of the interior, often devastated lives of individual subjects within domestic communities that have been ravaged by social and political tyranny. These ‘histories of sorrowful interest’, as Austen phrases it, were both produced and even theorized by many of the period’s most prominent female writers, including: Maria Edgeworth, who renounces in Castle Rackrent what she calls ‘heroic history’ for ‘secret memoirs’ and ‘private anecdotes’ of loss and suffering; or Joanna Baillie, whose ‘Introductory Discourse’ subordinates the abstract military and political considerations of what she calls ‘real history’ to the intricate griefs and passions of specific individuals grappling in sympathetic union with heavy burdens; or even Austen, herself, whose wickedly parodic History of England scorns the abstractions of Goldsmith’s historicism and foregrounds the plight of numerous ‘poor wom[e]n’ victimized by court intrigues.22 Personalized narratives of this sort do not foster historical memories of political origin or providential truth; and they do not imagine communities exclusively comprised of oppressed women. Instead they provoke an individuated form of historical memory that gathers together all who suffer amid the ruins of time, regardless of political persuasion, national background, or gender identity, into one community of vulnerable equals—Austen even makes room in this group for her arch political enemy, the ‘wicked’ Queen Elizabeth.23 Catharine Macaulay exploits the full political implications of this kind of personalized historicism in her controversial History of England (1764–83). The first major history of England composed by a woman and arguably the most theoretically sophisticated example of feminist historiography in its time, it elaborately demonstrated to ensuing generations of women writers how alternative constructions of historical memory could help them imagine new social communities liberated from traditional hierarchies of gender and power.24

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Although Macaulay emphasizes her commitment to the rational principles of empirical analysis that governed mainstream historiography in the eighteenth century, characterizing herself as a ‘rational being’ whose historicism is the product of what she calls a ‘masculine mind’, she also represents herself as a ‘female opposer’ to the abstractions of ‘solemn history’.25 Hume’s historiography strikes her as deficient, in fact, specifically because its author remains ‘perfectly ignorant as to characters [and] motives…’,26 In contrast to the representative ignorance of Hume’s depersonalized historicism, Macaulay foregrounds ‘knowledge of the human character’ as the great aim of historical writing and punctuates her narration of facts and records with penetrating descents into the hearts and minds of particularized subjects.27 This interiorized approach to history specifically focuses on the heartfelt sorrows of those individuals— men and women, famous and little known—who have been victimized by the crush of events beyond their control. Thus she frequently pauses in her narrative of England’s political turmoil throughout the seventeenth century to evoke the pathetic ‘situation’ of various ‘sufferers’, including those she wholeheartedly supports—such as the ‘illustrious sufferer’ and martyr to republicanism, Sir Henry Vane, or the ‘tender mother’ and ‘weeping wife’ devastated by the Irish Rebellion of 1641—as well as those she politically deplores—such as Laud and Cromwell, both of whom are plagued by unbearable ‘grief and vexation’.28 Macaulay’s levelling ‘compassion’ for all historical ‘sufferers’ causes her to ‘shed many tears’ over a past that ultimately strikes her as a ‘history of human misery’, making what she calls ‘sympathising tenderness’ for acutely localized pain the governing principle of her ‘historical knowledge’.29 This kind of ‘knowledge’ certainly writes women’s sufferings back into history and shares in the ‘ethic of care’ that Mellor, drawing on Carol Gilligan, finds so many women Romantic writers opposing to the abstract epistemologies and exclusionary gender politics of the period’s masculine systems of writing and power.30 But Macaulay’s sympathetic historicism is most potentially efficacious for feminist practice in its sustained production of a form of historical memory that locates and supports communities of marginalized victims whose pointed divisions—republicans and royalists, peasants and nobles, wives and statesmen—dissolve amid their shared suffering. Such a memorializing of the past would inspire the next generation of women writers with a model of historically constructed community that not only declared the political wrongs of woman but also promoted networks of social and gender equality.

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The powerful appeal of this historical model registers in its various adaptations by most of the major feminist writers of the next two decades. Mary Wollstonecraft, for instance, pauses in her Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution to ‘shed tears’ over the individual victims of Revolutionary violence, no matter what their political background. She laments at the ruins of Versailles: Weeping—scarcely conscious that I weep, O France, over the vestiges of thy former oppression… I tremble, lest I should meet some unfortunate being, fleeing from the despotism of licentious freedom, hearing the snap of the guillotine at his heels; merely because he was once noble, or has afforded an asylum to those, whose only crime is their name’.31 Helen Maria Williams regularly displays a similar empathy for the ‘situation of sufferers’ amid the wreck of revolution, punctuating her records of the French Revolution with poignant vignettes of individuated affliction like the following portrait of victims of the Terror: the wives of some of the prisoners came regularly every day, bringing their children with them to the terrace of the gardens. You often saw the mother weeping, and the children stretching out their little hands and pointing to their fathers, who stood with their eyes fixed upon the objects of their affection.32 Mary Hays, in her Memoirs of Queens, similarly dismisses the political controversies swirling around the notorious scandals involving Queen Caroline in order to present Caroline not as an injured queen, but rather as ‘a neglected and contemned wife’ unsustained by tenderness or sympathy.33 Perhaps the most striking example of these revisionary histories of suffering communities can be found in Charlotte Smith’s reconfiguration of Burke’s famous lament over the downfall of Marie Antoinette in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Where Burke’s sympathy for Marie Antoinette’s disgrace turns into a general nostalgia for the age of chivalry and all its social graces, Smith s approach to the fallen queen in The Emigrants centres on Marie Antoinette’s maternal grief for the perilous fortunes of her child. ‘[M]uch I mourn thy sorrows…wretched Mother’, Smith sighs, her sympathy all the more personalized by its association with her own sufferings under the power of a masculine legal system and by its movement, like Macaulay’s, across

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party lines to embrace the sorrows of political opponents.34 That histories of this subjective order memorialize the plight not only of women but of all social outcasts and, ultimately, critique the codes of knowledge and power that marginalize them should explain why so many feminist writers of Smith’s era transformed the abstractions of ‘solemn history’ into personalized communities of the abandoned, the victimized, the griefstricken—emigrants all, their former conflicts dissolved in their shared suffering and pursuit of redress. Now it would be reductive to claim that all historical writing by women of the Romantic era conformed to these modes of constructing historical memory and community, or that it shared a unified, feminist agenda. Even those writers who enlisted the general form of sympathetic history to promote women’s causes experimented with a wide variety of particular historicist strategies put to different, sometimes divided and limiting, political purposes. The range of varying opportunities, challenges, and problematics raised by such diversified histories of the heart becomes most apparent in those numerous acts of historical recollection that imagine communities of equalized sufferers, past and present, through more specialized histories of women: such as Mary Hays’s Female Biography and Memoirs of Queens, Lucy Aikin’s Epistles on Women, Felicia Hemans’s Records of Woman, and Anna Jameson’s Characteristics of Women. Aikin and Hemans offer a particularly revealing contrast in their respective poetic constructions of personalized women’s histories. Both writers carry out substantial critiques of masculine history’s abstractions in their revisionary efforts to trace with minute particularity the emotional, often sorrowing experiences of women throughout time. In fashioning these historical memories of female suffering, both writers also seek to produce more egalitarian communities of sympathetic readers in the present sensitive to the continuing wrongs of women. However, the significant differences in their modes of shaping these alternative historical frameworks point to the specific divisions, problems, and opportunities in the period’s various forms of feminist historicism. Although recent critical discussion of Hemans’s poetry often focuses on her conservative gender politics, Nanora Sweet has suggested her inclination toward a feminist form of historicism in Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy.35 We may find such a feminist outlook on history receiving its fullest articulation in Records of Woman, an 1828 collection of poems that share many of the distinctive features of the kind of ‘sympathetic’ historicism practised by so many of Hemans’s immediate female predecessors. These

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‘records’ subordinate the abstract concerns of public, political history to the personal, often devastating impact of historical events on the emotional lives of individual subjects, particularly women, whose interior conditions are frequently traced in highly discriminating accounts of the look of their eyes, the tremor of their lips, the furrows of their countenances. This descent into the personal situations of historical sufferers recurrently valorizes the ties of affection and domestic community over the dictates of public policy— Arabella Stuart, for instance, rejects the festivities and intrigues of court life to blend in private harmony with her beloved, William Seymour; Joan of Arc turns from ‘the pomp… [t]he plumes, the banners’ of a triumphal military procession to fall back into the arms of her loving father and brothers.36 Domestic scenes like this, usually presided over by nurturing women, assume centre stage throughout Hemans’s records of history, but they are recurrently disrupted by the brutal forces of public life—by political imperatives, military violence, and, most particularly, the domineering power of patriarchy and the gender inequality it enforces. Although the tragedies that result are often shared by men as well as women, Hemans’s vision of history dramatically shows, in a relentless variety of episodes, that women bear the greatest burden of this suffering— from the Greek bride abducted by pirates, to the female sculptor Properzia Rossi rejected by her beloved, to the suicidal Indian woman abandoned with child by her husband, the list goes on. If Hemans’s historicism gives plangent voice to women’s ways of knowing and feeling, the historical memory it produces is one of heartrending sorrow and pain wrought by the depredations of masculine power. This form of historical memory certainly writes women’s experience back into the past and fosters identification with that history among women readers who continue to suffer from the crushing effects of gendered systems of power. Yet Hemans’s strategy also incurs a number of liabilities that current feminist historians warn against in their own efforts to gender the past. Her way of recording female suffering confines women to an essentialist category—‘Woman’—that collapses historical and cultural differences. Hemans also distinguishes that category primarily in terms of impotent victimization and complete marginalization from entrenched systems of power. These manoeuvres work against some of the central aspirations of Romantic feminist historiography, particularly its aim to memorialize gender inclusive models of egalitarian community that authorize female empowerment in the present. Any separatist

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history of ‘Woman’, Joan Scott contends, can merely reinforce the inclinations of traditional historicism to essentialize women’s experience and situate it solely in domestic space while removing it from ‘political and economic history’.37 To make subjection and suffering the defining principles of women’s experience, moreover, is to overlook, as Cécile Dauphin argues, ‘forms of resistance’ to dominant social practices. Historical visions of this sort, Dauphin continues, can ‘sometimes lead to a sort of hypnotic auto-fascination with misfortune’.38 If Romanticism’s modes of feminist historiography could lapse into this kind of hypnosis, however, they could also assume a more activist and politically complex form of interrogating and redefining gender systems, as the case of Lucy Aikin reveals. Aikin’s (1810) collection of verse essays, Epistles on Women, shares many of the basic characteristics of Hemans’s historicism. It also produces a distinctive historical memory of women’s experience, what Aikin calls ‘sing[ing] the fate of Woman’,39 and the pattern of that recollection is similar to Hemans’s history of victimization. Depicting women as ‘[p]oor victim[s]’ of man’s ‘brutal force’,40 Aikin presents, like Hemans, numerous historical accounts of particularized female subjects who are abandoned or abused by masculine power. The ‘female heart’ she tracks through time, like the interior condition of Hemans’s protagonists, is a ‘desert’ of grief.41 This memorializing of victimization is specifically designed, moreover, to produce a sympathetic, if not outraged community of female readers, Britain’s ‘bright daughters’.42 In constructing such a memory of oppression, however, Aikin also rewrites masculine history in ways that give women a more activist role in resisting male authority and correcting gender inequalities. Reconstructing the biblical story of Eden with great panache, for instance, she depicts Adam as a slobbering baboon, a ‘moping idiot’ with ‘sullen lips’ and vacant stare, whose Neanderthal stupidity is rectified by Eve’s civilizing influence.43 It is Adam’s subsequent transformation into a kind of sensitive 1990s’ guy that creates paradise, a new Eden based on gender equality. ‘Alike the children of no partial God’, Aikin proclaims, ‘Equal they trod….’44 Aikin actually performs this very kind of gender correction herself, in her spirited charge against the ‘blasphemous presumption’ of Milton’s sexist history of Eden, and, even more fundamentally, through the basic structure of her epistles, which brilliantly parody what she calls Alexander Pope’s ‘war upon the [female] sex’ in his ‘Epistle to a Lady’.45 If Aikin fosters a historical memory of female impotence and suffering, she also proffers alternative memorials of

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female intervention that help inspire the feminist activism of her own poem. This more redemptive approach to the gender struggles of the past similarly conditions the kind of sympathetic communities, past and present, that Aikin fashions out of her contestatory historicism. In depicting women’s social experience through time, she moves away from essentialist categories of ‘woman’—she writes epistles of ‘Women’, not records of ‘Woman’—toward historically discriminating analyses of the way sex/gender social systems operate at different historical moments. She contrasts the different forms of masculine oppression, for instance, practised within primitive cultures and through the more complex forms of gender inequality in chivalric institutions. Even more significantly, she avoids the binarism of separatist women’s histories by expanding this treatment of female suffering and social relations into broader accounts of harmoniously gendered communities. Her Epistles ultimately memorialize, or ‘imagine’, a unified series of politically progressive societies—like Anglo-Saxon Germany, fourteenth-century Switzerland, and Republican England of the mid-seventeenth century—whose flourishing civilizations spring directly from their principles of gender equality. Such models of integrated communities, extracted from time’s dismal records of female victimization, foster a redemptive historical memory of gender relations from which to build new social groupings and the reality of female empowerment in the present, a task that an inspired Aikin rallies her women readers to commence in her closing exhortation: ‘Improve, excel, surmount, subdue, your fate!’46 Aikin’s critique of sex/gender systems may represent one of her era’s most complex forms of revisionary feminist historicism, but its many intersections with the historical constructions of her female peers reveal more than anything else the startlingly diverse creativity of their efforts to re-engender historical memory. To trace their various attempts to surmount their fate by reappropriating history is both to expand current feminist revaluations of literary Romanticism and to broaden the theoretical contours of recent feminist historiography. For these early, personalized alternatives to the abstractions of ‘solemn history’ frequently overlapped with and intensified both the critique of masculine visionary poetics and the redemptive promotion of domestic community that we are learning to recognize throughout the literary productions of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century women writers. A sprawling, relatively unexplored genre of writing against

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the grain of Romantic gender ideology thus invites us to broaden, yet more widely, our ongoing investigations of the roles of women’s writing and gender contestation in the discourses of Romanticism. These experimental rewritings of history can similarly extend the latest developments in feminist historiography, not only by offering an important tradition and inspiration for this new work but also by pointing out possible directions for it to follow. Aikin’s redefinition of sex/gender systems offers precisely the kind of historical revisioning that Joan Scott urges feminist historiographers to pursue when she argues, It might be better to [show how] gender is a primary field within which or by means of which power is articulated.’47 The fundamental challenge of giving that new story currency and social impact, Scott and her colleagues agree, involves transforming many of the basic ways in which academic historicism is still understood and practised today within male-dominated institutions. And here, also, Aikin’s generation may supply useful directions, for the new historical memories it produced could not only mobilize women readers to surmount their fate but could also influence male writers like Keats and Shelley to modify their historical outlooks and the records of time they put into poetry. But the story of that early incursion into masculine consciousness is another history, still waiting to be written.48

Chapter 2

Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian and the disordered memory Catherine A.Jones

The manner in which trains of imagery and consideration follow each other through our thinking, the restless flight of one idea before the next, the transitions our minds make between things wide as the poles asunder, transitions which at first sight startle us by their abruptness, but which, when scrutinized closely, often reveal intermediating links of perfect naturalness and propriety— all this magical, imponderable streaming has from time immemorial excited the admiration of all whose attention happened to be caught by its omnipresent mystery. William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890)1

It’s a strange thing now—I hae spoke mair gude words to you in ten minutes, than I wad speak to my mother in as mony years. It’s no that I dinna think on them—and whiles they are just at my tongue’s end; but then comes the Devil, and brushes my lips with his black wing, and lays his broad black loof on my mouth …and sweeps away a’ my gude thoughts, and dits up my gude words, and pits a wheen fule sangs and idle vanities in their place. Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian (1818)2

Eighteenth-century psychology explains the operation of memory in terms of the laws of association. In a letter to George Crabbe of 1818, Scott refers to the association of ideas as ‘the universal pick-lock of all metaphysical difficulties…when [he] studied moral philosophy’.3 This chapter will examine the way in which Scott brings eighteenth-century theories of memory into the writing of fiction. It will focus on associationist psychology and the act of literary creation as a means of exploring the role of memory in narrative composition. As ballad collector, antiquary, and editor of The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–3), Scott was concerned from the beginning of 30

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his career with the relation between the past and the present and the recovery of that relation. In his ‘Introduction’ to the Minstrelsy, Scott regrets that the recollection of many ballads has ‘of late years, become like that of a “tale which was told’”. Compositions are now irrecoverable, except for ‘the frail chance of recovering some old manuscript, which can alone gratify our curiosity regarding the earlier efforts of the Border Muse’.4 Paradoxically, writing is seen as the only guarantor of the truth of the oral tradition. In the historical notes and dissertations attached to the ballads, Scott aims to bring together ‘a variety of remarks regarding popular superstitions and legendary history which, if not now collected, must soon have been totally forgotten’.5 Scott presents himself as the mediator between the precariously situated collective memory of the Borders and the individual reader. Scott’s long verse narratives compress and select from the extended and anonymous folk memory of the ballad tradition. Jane Millgate has examined the crucial step in Scott’s career from editor to creator of an ancient Minstrel, the last of his race, for his first long poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805).6 A tale of the sixteenth century is placed in the mouth of a minstrel, who is supposed to have survived the Revolution, and might have ‘caught something of the refinement of modern poetry, without losing the simplicity of his original model’.7 The collective memory of the Minstrelsy is held by the privileged individual. As the Minstrel pauses, the Duchess marvels: how so well His legendary song could tell Of ancient deeds, so long forgot; Of feuds, whose memory was not;… Of manners long since chang’d and gone.8 Folk memory is mediated through the created, subjective mind. In the Waverley Novels, such mediation is at the heart of the compositional process. Scott’s interest in the psychology of the individual memory is such that story-telling passes from character to character and cannot be subsumed into the ordered prose of a narrator. Scott describes his mode of composing the Waverley Novels as ‘Hab nab at a venture’, a ‘perilous stile’ which he cannot help. ‘It is’, he writes in his journal entry for 12 February 1826, ‘the difference between a written oration and one bursting from the unpremed[it]ated exertions of the speaker which have always something of the air of enthusiasm and inspiration.’ The act of composition

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always dilated some passages and abridged or omitted others and personages were renderd important or insignificant not according to their agency in the original conception of the plan but according to the success or otherwise with which [he] was able to bring them out.9 Characters ‘bewitch’ the composition of the tale. In this chapter, I will focus on the part played by the disordered memory of Madge Wildfire in the formation of the narrative of The Heart of Midlothian. According to Allan Cunningham, one of Scott’s earliest biographers, Madge was little more than a faithful delineation of poor Peggy Macdonald, who went mad about a natural child, and wandered through Dumfries and Galloway singing snatches of the old songs, uttering quaint witty sayings, and drawing the characters of all who annoyed her with words of aquafortis rather than of honey. She was ‘usually known by the name of Mrs. Cazey, from frequently singing a song of that name; but those who wished to be well with her called her Margaret Macdonald’.10 In his portrayal of Madge Wildfire in The Heart of Midlothian, Scott carries forward folk memory into the individual memory for narrative formation. Madge’s disordered memory proves increasingly to hold the key to the truth of the past. The difficulty for the other characters in the narrative is to interpret the unnatural or inappropriate progression of the associative memories of her disturbed mind. Scott’s formal understanding of memory was conditioned by the theories of the Scottish Enlightenment, the tradition in which he was educated.11 William Cullen, Professor of Medicine in Edinburgh from 1766, argues in his Institutions of Medicine (1772) that ‘memory depends upon an association of perceptions, which is formed by their being frequently repeated after each other; by their being parts of the same complex idea; and by their having relations marked’.12 Although memory is generally faithful to such associations, it is ‘more or less so in different persons, according to the frequency of the repetition of the sensations, and the marking of their relations; and according to the different states of the brain, very little known’.13 Memory differs from imagination in that although both renew combinations of our ideas, in the one case we are conscious of the absence of the object, while in the other we imagine that it is present. Cullen notes that the common account explains this difference entirely

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upon the vividness of the impression. He suggests, however, that imagination or the perception of things which do not exist is the result of the brain not allowing the recovery of the several relations necessary to determine the identity or presence of any object.14 Thought depends upon memory and memory upon the association of ideas. The mind, Cullen describes, easily runs over that train of associations to which it has become accustomed: Thus, I come to a gentleman and tell him that he owes me five guineas; he hesitates, perhaps unwilling or willing to remember, and asks how do I owe you such a sum? I mention the persons that were present, perhaps, the reason why he wanted it, &c.; and, if he is an honest man, he is made to follow an association formerly made; and now he remembers the whole of the circumstances, and that it is justly demanded.15 The associations of common sense distinguish the ordered mind, unnatural or inappropriate associations distinguish the patient mind. Cullen argues that the whole of our intellectual operations consists in the recollection and accurate judgement of former associations and relations: this is what is called a man’s having common sense. When, upon the contrary, a man does not recollect the relations that he had formerly established, we say that he is out of his senses…. So it is nothing but pursuing our ordinary train of associations, and marking their relations, and acting with the consistency that belongs to them, that constitutes what is called a sensible man; and delirium is where we do not follow our ordinary train, but, on the contrary, pursue one inconsistent with all our former established principles or notions. This delirium will accordingly depend upon some fault of memory chiefly; but this will be more considerable still, if not only the ordinary train of our associations is disturbed, but at the same time the imagination so far prevails as to obtrude upon the mind ideas which do not belong to the train which we are pursuing. Erroneous judgment accordingly consists chiefly in disjoining ideas which ought to be joined, or in joining those which ought not to be joined.16 Scottish Common Sense medical and aesthetic philosophy depends upon the opposition of the ordered to the disordered mind. In the ordered mind, the faculties are active. The mind is an agent: to have a sensation is to be

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sensing; to have a memory is to be remembering. ‘Remembrance’, writes Thomas Reid, ‘is an act of my mind.’17 Active memory is positive and enables selection and self-construction. When the mind is disordered, it is no longer held together by the active faculties. The disordered experience is projected in passive memory, when the mind is at the mercy of the spontaneous progression of ideas. The passive-patient mind is the sufferer of memories. Identity fragments and madness results. According to Cullen, the three states of delirium are false imagination, erroneous judgement, and irregular passion. He finds a very unusual association of ideas in delirium, which prevents the individual from forming ‘the ordinary judgment of those relations which are the most common foundation of association in the memory’.18 In mania or madness, the mind often turns on one single subject, but more commonly ‘rambles from one subject to another with an equally false judgment concerning the most part of them’. This false association, Cullen concludes, increases the confusion of ideas, and therefore the false judgements.19 The active/passive, order/disorder opposition of Common Sense philosophy is central to Scott’s understanding of memory and the nature of cognition. Yet where Common Sense philosophy insists on the importance of regulating the operation of the mind, Scott negotiates a creative relation to both active and passive memory. Active memory exists in the Waverley Novels at the narrative level as the ordered progression of associated elements. Active memory makes story-telling available to another by providing it with a structure which extends beyond the privacy of the mind. Passive memory or disordered selection overrules active memory in Scott’s writing when his imagination ‘lights’ upon a character who leads the text astray. Passive memory involves the suspension of the regulating powers of the mind over the association of ideas. This distinguishes Scott’s representation of the speech of Madge Wildfire in The Heart of Midlothian. Inappropriate associations are first apparent in The Heart of Midlothian when Effie Deans tries to hide surprise and confusion in song, as she unexpectedly encounters her sister, Jeanie, who has spotted the vanishing form of George Robertson or Staunton on a summer evening at St Leonard’s. ‘The elfin knight sate on the brae,’ Effie carolles, The broom grows bonny, the broom grows fair; And by there came lilting a lady so gay, And we daurna gang down to the broom nae mair. (p.98)

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Fending off Jeanie’s enquiries, Effie ‘carr[ies] the war into the enemy’s country’, and with a sly air finds a ballad analogy for Jeanie’s relationship with the Laird of Dumbiedikes and Reuben Butler: Through the kirkyard I met wi’ the Laird, The silly puir body he said me nae harm; But just ere ’twas dark, I met with the clerk… (p. 99) Effie’s associative memory progresses towards those unnatural associations, which become more fully marked in Madge Wildfire. If ye will learn fule sangs,’ Jeanie protests, ‘ye might make a kinder use of them’ (p. 99). The significance of her balladic exchange with Jeanie emerges on the appearance of Madge, for whom ‘fule sangs’ are the main resort in her disturbed state of mind. Madge’s misfortunes, like Effie’s, began with a liaison with Robertson/Staunton. Her favourite refrain, from which she acquired her name, is a ballad composed by her former lover: I glance like the wildfire through country and town; I’m seen on the causeway—I’m seen on the down; The lightning that flashes so bright and so free, Is scarcely so blithe or so bonny as me. (p. 164) Madge cannot actively tell her story. Her experience is projected in passive memory. Ballads are a part of communal memory which enable Madge to form some kind of relation to an inaccessible and unspeakable past. Her disordered memory, as in Common Sense medical-aesthetic terminology, makes a disturbed selection of associations. Introduced to Butler by the magistrate Sharpitlaw as Madge Wildfire, she replies: ‘Ay, that I am,…and that I have been ever since I was something better—Heigh ho’—(and something like melancholy dwelt on her features for a minute)—‘but I canna mind when that was— it was lang syne, at ony rate, and I’ll never fash my thumb about it.’ (p. 164).

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With this, she sings Robertson/Staunton s ballad to avoid the pain of encountering the past in speech. The words of the ballad hold the memory of her love for Robertson/Staunton and the cause of her fall, her ‘giddiness and vanity’ (p. 301). Where Effie fatally eludes Jeanie’s questions through the concealment afforded by the two ballads, Madge’s view of both the past and the present can only be heard in song. As the chapter epigraph from Shakespeare’s Hamlet describes: She speaks things in doubt, That carry but half sense: her speech is nothing, Yet the unshaped use of it doth move The hearers to collection; they aim at it, And botch the words up to fit their own thoughts. (p. 158) ‘Of all the madwomen who have sung and said,’ the narrator comments, ‘since the days of Hamlet the Dane, if Ophelia be the most affecting, Madge Wildfire was the most provoking’ (p. 166). Sharpitlaw and his erstwhile prisoner, James Ratcliffe, have to decipher the clues let out by Madge’s ‘unretentive memory’ (p. 165) to find what Laertes terms in Hamlet, ‘a document in madness, thoughts and remembrance fitted’.20 Sharpitlaw is convinced that Madge’s fragmentary memories hold information as to the events which led to the storming of the Tolbooth and the mob’s execution of Porteous, in the wake of the Crown’s reprieve. Scott thus situates the disordered memory in the context of Revolutionary uprising. According to Reuben Butler, who was forced to accompany the mob in his capacity as minister, the leader of the rioters during the storming of the Tolbooth and the execution of Porteous was a man in female disguise, termed Madge Wildfire. When Madge is brought in for questioning, Butler insists that there is no resemblance between the two, except perhaps in height. Sharpitlaw, however, tries to coax Madge into disclosing what she did with her ‘ilka-day’s claise’ the preceeding day. His interrogation is unsuccessful: ‘Where was ye yesterday at e’en, Madge?’ ‘I dinna mind ony thing about yesterday, ‘answered Madge; ‘ae day is eneugh for ony body to wun ower wi’ at a time, and ower muckle sometimes.’ ‘But maybe Madge, ye wad mind something about it, if I was

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to gie ye this half-crown?’ said Sharpitlaw, taking out the piece of money. ‘That might gar me laugh, but it couldna gar me mind.’ ‘But, Madge,’ continued Sharpitlaw, ‘were I to send you to the wark-house in Leith Wynd, and gar Jock Dalgleish lay the tawse on your back.’ ‘That would gar me greet,’ said Madge, sobbing, ‘but it couldna gar me mind, ye ken.’ (p. 165) Ratcliffe is more cunning. He indirectly seduces her to become communicative. By asking if she has any male admirers, Ratcliffe gains access to Madge’s disturbed associative memories: ‘See if I haena then,’ said Madge, with the toss of the head of affronted beauty—‘there’s Rob the Ranter, and Will Fleming, and then there’s Geordie Robertson, lad—that’s Gentleman Geordie—what think ye o’ that?’ (p. 165). In the ‘eagerness of contradiction’, Madge discloses ‘all that she would have most wished to keep concealed’ (p. 165). When Ratcliffe suggests to Madge that ‘the lads only like [her] when [she] ha[s] on [her] braws’— ‘they wadna touch you wi’ a pair o’ tangs when you are in your auld ilka-day rags’—Madge replies: ‘Ye’re a leeing auld sorrow then,…for Gentle Geordie Robertson put my ilka-day’s claise on his ain bonny sell yestreen, and gaed a’ through the town wi’ them; and gawsie and grand he lookit, like ony queen in the land’ (p. 165). But when Sharpitlaw puts a direct question—‘And when did he change his clothes again, hinnie?’—Madge resumes ‘an appearance of stolidity’ (p. 166). She feigns ignorance: ‘Robertson?—Lord haud a care o’ us! what Robertson!…Geordie Gentle!…I dinna ken naebody they ca’ Geordie Gentle’ (p. 166). Madge’s passive memories are brought into the active ordering of memory which constitutes the narrator’s story-telling, when she is forced to accompany Sharpitlaw and Ratcliffe in an attempt to apprehend Robertson/Staunton at Muschat’s Cairn. Madge is to be their guide. ‘I ken I can keep her in tune’, Ratcliffe tells the magistrate, ‘and garr her haud the straight path—she aften sleeps out, or rambles about amang thae hills the haill simmer night, the daft limmer’ (p. 171). The disordered memory provides a catalyst for plot formation. Knowing that she is approaching her former lover, fragments of memory disturb Madge’s actions and speech. She accuses Ratcliffe of selling the blood of his associates. Ratcliffe is conscience-struck and decides that he will have ‘nae wyte of Robertson’s young bluid’

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` (p. 175). He asks Madge if she can remember any of her ‘auld sangs’, hoping to alert Robertson to their presence. After Madge has sung one verse, Ratcliffe ‘began to hum, but in a very low and suppressed tone, the first stanza of a favourite ballad of Wildfires, the words of which bore some distant analogy with the situation of Robertson’ (p. 176). He trusts that the power of association will not fail to bring the rest to her mind. On receiving the catch-word from Ratcliffe, Madge sets off with the song: O sleep ye sound, Sir James, she said, When ye suld rise and ride? There’s twenty men, wi’ bow and blade, Are seeking where ye hide. (p. 176) Ratcliffe is able to see in the distance that Robertson/Staunton has heard the warning. Sharpitlaw can only summon Ratcliffe to the spot where he holds Jeanie Deans in custody, telling him first ‘to knock out that mad bitch’s brains’ (p. 176). Robertson/Staunton thus escapes and passes out of the narrative until his meeting with Jeanie in his father’s house. Fragmentation is brought into structural coalescence. Scott reveals in Madge Wildfire the inter-play of memory and imagination which forms her sense of self. Her disordered experience finds expression in song, as her mind turns repeatedly on a past which she cannot actively remember. Her song to the moon, in which she asks to have revealed ‘the form and the features, the speech and degree/Of the man that true lover of mine shall be’ is followed by disordered reminiscence: ‘But I need not ask that of the bonny Lady Moon—I ken that weel eneugh mysell—true-love though he wasnaBut naebody shall say that I ever tauld a word about the matter. But whiles I wish the bairn had lived’ (p. 174). Fragmentary perceptions, memories and imaginings form the content of Madge’s self, unstructured by the active faculties of Scottish Common Sense philosophy. Thomas Reid argues in his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) that personal identity ‘implies the continued existence of that indivisible thing which I call myself: Whatever this self may be, it is something which thinks, and deliberates, and resolves, and acts, and suffers. I am not thought, I am not action, I am not feeling; I am something that thinks, and acts, and suffers. My thoughts, and actions, and feelings,

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change every moment—they have no continued, but a successive existence; but that self or I, to which they belong, is permanent, and has the same relation to all the succeeding thoughts, actions, and feelings, which I call mine.21 Scott’s representation of Madge Wildfire denies that sense of control and possession. Reid’s great opponent, David Hume, likens the mind in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) to ‘a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance: pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations’.22 Hume demolishes the basis of previous stories of the self by arguing that the self is constituted merely by those impressions or ideas which strike the memory and the imagination. Beyond memory and imagination there is no self, even though we all have a sense of self. The mind, he writes, is ‘nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations, and suppos’d, tho’ falsely, to be endow’d with a perfect simplicity and identity’.23 According to Reid, Hume’s sceptical epistemology is as insubstantial as the magical island of Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: ‘the whole universe about me…all things without exception, which I imagined to have a permanent existence…vanish at once; “And, like the baseless fabric of a vision, I Leave not a track behind.’”24 In The Heart of Midlothian, Scott enters into the ‘enchanted castle’ of Hume’s philosophy, while simultaneously grounding his text in the narrator’s ordered progression of associated elements.25 When Jeanie Deans first encounters Madge Wildfire on her way to London seeking mercy for her sister from the Crown, she is ‘stupified with undefined apprehensions’ (p. 282). Madge’s speech and actions, the narrator comments, came near to ‘the supernatural sounds’ in Milton’s Comus (1634): ‘The airy tongues, which syllable men’s names/On sands, and shores, and desert wildernesses’ (p. 282). Jeanie, however, is undeterred by Madge’s seeming insubstantiality and responds in a manner which makes fitting the continuing passage from Milton: These thoughts may startle well, but not astound The virtuous mind, that ever walks attended By a strong siding champion—Conscience. (p. 282) Madge accompanies Jeanie on the most dangerous part of her journey, after she falls into the hands of Meg Murdockson and her associates. As

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a ‘fine jink’ (p. 295), she effects Jeanie’s escape from captivity and suggests that they take a walk in the nearby woods. From this point in the narrative, Jeanie’s journey to London takes its shape from the associative memory of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678/84). The connection is made directly by Madge Wildfire. ‘Did ye never read the Pilgrim’s Progress?’ she asks Jeanie: And you shall be the woman Christiana, and I will be the maiden Mercy—for ye ken Mercy was of the fairer countenance, and the more alluring than her companion—and if I had my little messan dog here, it would be Great-Heart their guide, ye ken. (p. 298) The narrator describes how the parable entered Madge’s head ‘to the exclusion of every thing else’ (p. 298). She is thrown into a paroxysm of sorrow by their entry into the deepest part of a patch of woodland, where stood a beautiful poplar, and beneath, ‘a variegated hillock of wild flowers and moss, such as the poet of Grasmere has described in his verses on the Thorn’ (p. 297). The allusion provides a clue to Madge’s history. ‘Ah me!’ writes Wordsworth in that poem, what lovely tints are there! Of olive-green and scarlet bright, In spikes, in branches, and in stars, Green, red, and pearly white! This heap of earth o’ergrown with moss… So fresh in all its beauteous dyes, Is like an infant’s grave in size.26 ‘I canna shed tears but maybe anes or twice a-year’, Madge tells Jeanie, ‘and I aye come to wet this turf with them, that the flowers may grow fair, and the grass may be green’ (p. 297). Jeanie urges Madge to try to settle her mind: ‘Just resist the devil, and he will flee from you—and mind that, as my worthy father tells me, there is nae devil sae deceitfu’ as our ain wandering thoughts’ (p. 298). Our associative memories are sinful to the Puritan conscience, as they represent vain thoughts. Such imaginings were the prelude to Effie’s fall; they are Madge’s torment. ‘I’ll keep a fast haud o’ your arm’, Madge replies to Jeanie, ‘for fear Apollyon should stride across the path, as he did in the Pilgrim’s Progress’ (p. 298). For Madge, associative memory functions as confessional. Her

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lost self finds momentary expression through the disordered imagination: Ye see, there was an auld carle wi’ a bit land, and a gude clat o’ siller besides, just the very picture of old Mr Feeblemind or Mr Ready-to-halt, that Great-Heart delivered from Slaygood the giant, when he was rifling him and about to pick his bones, for Slaygood was of the nature of the flesh-eaters—and Great-Heart killed Giant Despair too—but I am doubting Giant Despair’s come alive again, for a’ the story book—I find him busy at my heart whiles. (p. 299) As the narrative is taken up by Madge, the active mind’s selection of ordered associations is overruled by the associative memory of the passive-patient mind, which is unable to control their spontaneous progression. The passive memory provides clues for the narrative which the active memory must resolve. The narrator compares the mind of Madge to ‘a quantity of dry leaves, which may for a few minutes remain still, but are instantly discomposed and put in motion by the first casual breath of air’ (p. 298). As she listens, Jeanie was ‘painfully interested in getting to the truth of Madge’s history, which she could not but suspect was in some extraordinary way linked and entwined with the fate of her sister’ (p. 299). Yet Madge’s narrative is disturbed by the doubting of fiction—despair lives in her heart—and by that fiction’s potential to dissolve into actual revelation. ‘Gentle George’, who ‘could take [the auld carle] aff brawly’ turns into ‘Geordie Robertson, ye ken, when he was in Edinburgh’. The story is cut short: ‘But what is your business wi’ his name?’ said she, as if upon sudden recollection. ‘What have ye to do asking for folk’s names?—Have ye a mind I should scour my knife between your ribs, as my mother says?’ (pp 299–300). Madge is driven by associations but she cannot give answers. The author draws his reader into one relationship with The Pilgrim’s Progress, at the same time as he establishes a different relationship between his characters and Bunyan’s parable. Simultaneously, the reader’s attention is drawn to the gap between the two. Jeanie has to interpret Madge’s story without having read The Pilgrim’s Progress. Although a rigid Calvinist, Bunyan was ‘also a member of a Baptist congregation, so that his works had no place on David Deans’s shelf of divinity’ (p. 304). Moreover, Jeanie s

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ordered mind, which eschews the wanderings of the imagination, struggles to comprehend her companion’s passive thinking. Crucially, however, the narrative proves that the key to the pasts of Effie and Robertson/Staunton is held in Madge’s fractured mind. Madge insists on her intention to take Jeanie to the Interpreter’s house, for [she] ken[s] a man that will play the Interpreter right weel’: we’ll knock at the gate, and then the keeper will admit Christiana, but Mercy will be left out—and then I’ll stand at the door trembling and crying, and then Christiana—that’s you Jeanie— will intercede for me; and then Mercy—that’s me, ye ken—will faint; and then the Interpreter—yes, the Interpreter, that’s Mr Staunton himself, will come out and take me—that’s poor, lost, demented me—by the hand, and give me a pomegranate, and a piece of honeycomb, and a small bottle of spirits, to stay my fainting—and then the good times will come back again, and we’ll be the happiest folk you ever saw. (p. 304) Jeanie reads this confused assemblage of ideas as an endeavour on Madge’s part ‘to obtain the pardon and countenance of some one whom she had offended; an attempt the most likely of all others to bring them once more into contact with law and legal protection’ (p. 304). But on their arrival in the village, Madge’s imaginative projection of the future, in which associative memory acts as wish-fulfilment, is shattered. After disrupting the church service, which was being taken by Mr Staunton, with her ‘extravagant behaviour’ (p. 309), Madge is chased from the parish by the beadle. The end of her make-believe is announced by the chapter epigraph from Crabbe, representing the eruption into the text of a more harshly controlling chain of images— clericism, book-learning, formal interpretation: There govern’d in that year/A stern, stout churl—an angry overseer’ (p. 311).27 Madge’s inspired association of Jeanie’s journey with The Pilgrim’s Progress is taken up by the active mind of the author in the process of composition. It becomes central to the imaginative unfolding and shaping of the narrative. Scott thus vindicates the wayward workings of imagination, in opposition to the precepts of Scottish Common Sense philosophy. Jeanie’s journey becomes a series of trials which search the extent and the quality of her self-possessed faith. The associative memory of Bunyan’s text allows for a providential interpretation of Jeanie’s adventures. The trials which

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she undergoes are experienced in the context of a faith which is already determined. ‘Would’st read thy self, and read thou know’st not what’, writes Bunyan in ‘The Author’s Apology For His Book’, And yet know whether thou art blest or not, By reading the same lines? O then come hither, And lay my Book, thy Head and Heart together.28 The Heart of Midlothian reads The Pilgrim’s Progress with Jeanie as protagonist. Jeanie’s most serious temptation occurs in the ‘House of the Interpreter’, the clerical mansion of Mr Staunton. She discovers Effie’s seducer, who offers her the means to obtain her sister’s pardon by delivering him up to punishment as the leader of the Porteous mob. Through close self-examination, Jeanie avoids departing from the road of the Christian traveller, who trusts in God’s Providence. She decides: What right had she to make a barter between the lives of Staunton and of Effie, and to sacrifice the one for the safety of the other? His guilt—that guilt for which he was amenable to the laws—was a crime against the public indeed, but it was not against her. (p. 340) Personal vengeance gives way to measured judgement and reliance on God: ‘The Lord support and direct me!’ said Jeanie, ‘for it seems to be his will to try me with difficulties far beyond my ain strength’ (p. 341). Jeanie’s pilgrimage culminates in her impassioned plea to the Queen to save her sister’s life. The associative memory of The Pilgrim’s Progress enables the imaginative resolution of the novel. Bunyan’s parable tells of the tempering of justice with mercy. The roll of assurance held by Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress makes mercy possible. Like Christian, Jeanie knows that mercy is only available in the context of faith. This knowledge ensures the certainty of Effie’s pardon. After listening to Jeanie’s eloquence, the Queen promises her ‘warm intercession with his Majesty’ (p. 370). The narrative turns safely to the comic, as Charlotte presents Jeanie with a small embroidered needle-case. Madge does not survive the resolution of Jeanie’s pilgrimage. A mob in Carlisle lay violent hands upon her, as Jeanie passes through the town on her return to Scotland. Taken to hospital, she retreats

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into song. When Jeanie addresses her by name, Madge only calls out: ‘Nurse—nurse, turn my face to the wa’, that I may never answer to that name ony mair, and never see mair of a wicked world’ (p. 395). As she dies without communicating to Jeanie the fate of her sister’s child, Madge ceases to have a constructive influence on the narrative’s plot formation. The disordered memory is thus contained in The Heart of Midlothian. The ‘Highland Arcadia’ (p. 432) of Roseneath is disturbed by illegitimacy—the Whistler’s murder of Robertson/Staunton in an act of parricide—not madness. In Scott’s later novels, however, the disordered memory has the power to effect and to image social destruction. Although Lucy Ashton in The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) and Clara Mowbray in Saint Ronan’s Well (1823) are more withdrawn than Madge Wildfire, they step out of their patient-hood to disorder life around them. The Ashton family and that of Ravenswood do not long survive the catastrophe of The Bride of Lammermoor, the stabbing of Bucklaw by Lucy on their wedding-night. In Saint Ronan’s Well, the new town is demolished following Clara’s death. Although the fragments of the past are co-ordinated by the recluse Touchwood, memory is represented as impotent in effecting personal or social resolution. Richard Middlemas in ‘The Surgeon’s Daughter’ (1827) tries to reclaim his past and his inheritance by piecing together the fragmentary memories of others, but the attempt is inconclusive and fatal to himself and his parents. His mother, Zilia Monçada, does not survive the disturbance of memory caused by his appearance. Richard becomes an exile and a renegade in the service of the East Indian Company. The disordering of memory exists in Scott’s writing on the level of story and biography. The later novels coincide with fragmentation in Scott’s own life, following the financial collapse of Constable and Ballantyne. Memory increasingly breaks down within the fictional text, as disorder characterizes Scott’s private experience. In his journal, begun in 1825, memory’s power to disrupt coalesces with Scott’s perception of the increasing disintegration and chaos of society. As he finds his life thrown into fragments, Scott aims to bring the past into focus through the journal’s ‘species of selfintercourse’.29 His motto on the title-page is that of the soliloquist in the nursery rhyme: ‘As I walked to myself/I talkd to my self/ And thus my self said to me’.30 Memory is isolating and threatens to be circular. Forced to confront the imminence of his own ruin, Scott writes on 18 December 1825:

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What a life mine has been. Half educated, almost wholly neglected or left to myself—stuffing my head with most nonsensical trash and undervalued in society for a time by most of my companions—getting forward and held a bold and clever fellow, contrary to the opinion of all who thought me a mere dreamer-Broken-hearted for two years—My heart handsomely pieced again—but the crack will remain till my dying day— Rich and poor four or five times—Once at the verge of ruin yet opend new sources of wealth almost overflowing—now taken in my pitch of pride and nearly winged…because London chuses to be in an uproar and in the tumult of bulls and bears a poor inoffensive lion like myself is pushd to the wall—And what is to be the end of it? God knows and so ends the catechism.31 Scott aims in the journal to piece the fragments of his memories together to counteract the sense of disintegration attendant upon the Crash, the death of Lady Scott, his failing health and his anxiety over Parliamentary Reform. But Scott is no longer himself secure from disturbances of memory. Like Madge Wildfire, he finds that he cannot order his trains of thought. ‘Could not write to purpose for thick coming fancies’, he writes on 22 November 1825; ‘The wheel would not turn easily and cannot be forced.’32 Walter Benjamin writes in his essay ‘The Storyteller’ (1936): storytelling is always the art of repeating stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained. It is lost because there is no more weaving and spinning to go on while they are being listened to. The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory.33 The disordered memory cannot retain stories. When stories are not retained, they become fragments of memory. In The Heart of Midlothian, such fragments are brought positively together. The process of making the fragments whole is the novel’s story. Madge Wildfire’s disordered memory is intrinsic to the ‘weaving’ and ‘spinning’ of the narrative. In Scott’s later works, however, memories remain fragmentary or, if completed, as in Saint Ronan’s Well, prove disastrous. The narratives either tell of the failures of memory or themselves retreat into the formulaic.

Chapter 3

‘The malady of thought’ Embodied memory in Victorian psychology and the novel Sally Shuttleworth

In his Christmas book for 1848, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, Dickens takes as his protagonist a chemist, a man who has the destructive power to ‘uncombine’ things ‘and to give back their component parts to fire and vapour’.1 Redlaw is a man haunted by memories, a man for whom Christmas constitutes only ‘More figures in the lengthening sum of recollection that we work and work at to our torment’ (p. 255). He is offered release from the torment of memory by a Phantom who holds before him the power to cancel remembrance. He will lose ‘No knowledge; no result of study; nothing but the intertwisted chain of feelings and associations, each in its turn dependent on, and nourished by, the banished recollections’ (p. 270). In addition, he will be granted the power to destroy memory in all individuals with whom he comes into contact. The chemist accepts the bargain, only to discover, to his horror, that on his approach he transforms happy, moral beings into whining, snivelling wretches. The uncomplaining mother starts wishing she’d never married, the merry old grandfather becomes a petulant, old windbag. The only being he does not affect is a street urchin whom he has taken in, ‘A baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might live to take the outward form of man, but who, within, would live and perish a mere beast’ (p. 272). In the end the chemist has his powers of memory restored: in place of his destructive chemistry, with its power to uncombine things, he learns a new Christian chemistry, and applies one of his chemical laws to his own personal life: In the material world, as I have long taught, nothing can be spared; no step or atom in the wondrous structure could be lost, without a blank being made in the great universe’ (p. 322). Science, from being an image of man’s 46

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presumption, now becomes the vehicle of moral resolution through an invocation of the laws of the conservation of energy. The moral of Dickens’s tale is quite clear: our very humanity is dependent on the power of memory. The urchin alone remained unharmed, the Phantom helpfully informs us, because, in his subhuman state, he was bereft of memory. He is the ‘perfect type’ of what Redlaw had wished to be. Without memory he exists in a state of complete amorality, immune to any humanizing touch. The Phantom paints an apocalyptic vision of the consequences for society of the indifference which could permit such neglect of its children. Growing up a mere beast in a ‘barren wilderness’ the urchin and his kind are sowing seeds of evil ‘until regions are overspread with wickedness enough to raise the waters of another Deluge’ (p. 327). Dickens’s tale gives voice to one of the central tenets of mid-Victorian social, psychological and fictional discourse: in this increasingly secular age, memory, with its assurance of a continuous identity through time, functions as the grounding for social and personal morality. Dickens here goes even further than his contemporaries in suggesting that memory will keep at bay not only the suppressed clamours of amoral selfhood, but also the threatening, rising mass of the great unwashed. But for all its overt, insistent and sentimental morality, the tale also registers a very different message: one of fear, fear that if control is for one moment allowed to slip, the social mask, be it of angelic motherhood or benign paternity, will be torn off to reveal below an uncontrolled ferment of conflicting desires. The tensions which lie at the heart of Dickens’s story are also to be found in mid-century psychological debates, debates which Dickens would have been familiar with through his friendship with two of the leading figures in these areas, John Conolly and John Elliotson. 2 The centrality of concepts of control in Victorian psychological thought is clearly registered in John Barlow’s popular text, On Man’s Power over Himself to Prevent or Control Insanity (1843) which made available to a wider audience some of the central tenets of Conolly’s theories of ‘moral management’ of the insane. The very title of Barlow’s text highlights the interconnections between economic and psychological rhetoric in the mid-century: we find refracted here images of the self-made man, and the self-controlled actor of laissez-faire economics. The connections are further reinforced by the text’s vocabulary which focuses on the efficient channelling of force. The text makes a supreme statement of faith in the powers of self-control. It also suggests, however, that such control

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is very fragile, under imminent threat, not just in an unstable few, but in all of us. The difference between sanity and insanity, Barlow argues, consists entirely in ‘the degree of self-control exercised’. Sceptics are asked to consider the thoughts and feelings that pass through their own minds: ‘were they all expressed and indulged, they would be as wild, and perhaps as frightful in their consequences as those of any madman’.3 Sanity is defined by the ability to exert the powers of self-control and to demonstrate the will to repress the urges of our less conscious mind. Barlow’s work draws attention to the contradictions at the centre of mid-century psychiatric and psychological writing: while stressing the importance of the will, and hence of memory, as a way of sustaining a coherent personal identity, texts were increasingly preoccupied with movements of the mind which lay outside the control of conscious memory and the will. Case studies in psychiatric texts focused on the loss of control when the balance of mind was disturbed, frequently highlighting loss of memory as one of the primary symptoms of disturbance. The case, cited by Coleridge in Biographia Literaria of the maid who started to speak Latin, Greek and Hebrew when in a state of delirium became a model for innumerable similar cases, which were all explained by forgotten, unconsciously absorbed knowledge which had remained latent in the mind.4 Another prominent form of case involved sufferers, most frequently women, who lost their memories with the onslaught of nervous disorder, and on recovery obliterated all memory of their period of suffering.5 Throughout there was a fascination with multilayered selfhood. In the field of physiological psychology, we find Henry Holland formulating his theories of double consciousness in the 1830s, and William Carpenter in the 1850s outlining theories of unconscious cerebration. Mesmerism, which became popular in England in the late 1830s, reaching its height with the ‘mesmeric mania’ of 1851, also reinforced popular interest in the hidden movements of the mind, outside conscious control. The tension between, on the one hand, this fascination with the ungoverned processes of the mind and memory and, on the other, a firm moral belief in the power of the conscious exertion of the will, is peculiarly marked in the work of William Carpenter, from his 4th and 5th editions of Principles of Human Physiology in 1852 and 1855 to Principles of Mental Physiology in 1874. Memory, he argues, is essentially automatic but it can, and indeed must, be directed by the Will. His texts register a real sense of fear as to what

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will happen if the Will is not ever vigilant to guard against the unhealthy eruption of undesirable, unconscious memories. The volitional direction of memory becomes, for Carpenter, both the foundation of personal identity, and the means to stem both undesirable urges, and the excesses of lunacy which arise from a deficiency of volitional control. His language, like that of Barlow, has strong economic undertones: memory is at once a Public Record Office, and an old established commercial trading house.6 Selfhood is similarly grounded in memory in the work of Henry Holland, although with less emphasis on the power of the Will. Holland, like Carpenter, distinguishes between what he calls simple memory and the art or faculty of recollection. The distinction is important, he argues, as it offers ‘one of the best marked lines of demarcation between the human intellect and that of other animals’. No animals possess, this recollective faculty of the will. A moment’s thought must make it obvious how much of the intellect and mental superiority of man depends on this single power; furnishing voluntary combinations in place of those which come unbidden and vaguely into the mind.7 In line with the Victorian preoccupation with the exercise of self-control, the defining qualities of humanity are here grounded in a union of memory and control, in the ‘recollective faculty of the will’. Like Carpenter, however, Holland is fascinated by the realm beyond control. The individual character, he remarks, is not a unity, but fluctuates incessantly, both from pressures emanating from outside, and the shifting balance of thoughts and emotions within. The strongest guard against insanity is to preserve through memory a sense of continuous identity and thus resist these pressures.8 Dreams, and certain states of insanity, are defined by the fact that the memory fluctuates beyond the control of the will, and the sense of conscious identity is thus lost. Holland developed as early as 1839 in his first edition of Medical Notes and Reflections his theory of the brain as a double organ, ‘the double-dealing of the mind with itself. He explored in his work what he termed ‘double consciousness’, ‘where the mind passes by alternation from one state to another, each having the perception of external impressions and appropriate trains of thought, but not linked together by the ordinary gradations, or by mutual memory’.9 The phenomena of dreams, somnambulism, reverie and insanity are all referred to this disruption in the unity of consciousness where mutual memory is absent.

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Earlier in the century, John Haslam, in Sound Mind (1819) had distinguished man from animals through his power to comprehend the past and have apprehensions about the future: ‘Man alone can repent; he alone can retrace the facts of former commission and resolve an amelioration for the future. Thus we find that moral responsibility has its basis in the comprehension of Time.’10 By mid-century this exercise of moral responsibility was firmly grounded in a theory of memory, but a memory which was increasingly seen to be divided, unreliable, and outside the domain of responsibility. The moral value placed on memory in psychological thought is also central to the work of George Eliot, a novelist who, even more than Dickens, put memory at the moral centre of her fiction. In her secular philosophy of social organicism, memory supplies the emotional glue which links past and present together. It also offers, in psychological terms, a physiological grounding for morality, for the operations of what Eliot termed ‘that inexorable law of consequences’.11 In the moral, as in the physical world, all actions follow a strict sequence of cause and effect. Following work in physiological psychology by Alexander Bain, and her partner G.H.Lewes, Eliot believed that all individual choices and actions leave a physiological record in the brain, creating an internal moral structure which cannot be escaped.12 In more general terms this philosophy emerges in a valuation of the past, as it is carried in the memory. As Maggie Tulliver demands of Stephen in The Mill on the Floss, If the past is not to bind us where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.’13 She renounces the amorality of her actions when she had drifted away in the boat with Stephen, a time when ‘memory was excluded’.14 The Mill on the Floss (1860) is one of Eliot’s strongest statements on the role of memory in furnishing the foundations of both personal and social morality. George Eliot did not write The Mill on the Floss uninterrupted, however. She broke off in the middle to write her macabre tale ‘The Lifted Veil’, the story of a man with a ‘morbid organisation’ and ‘diseased sensibility’, who sees into the minds and thoughts of others, and has visions of the future.15 In many ways the tale can be seen as an inversion of all the values and ideals proclaimed in Eliot’s other works. The understanding of others brings, not greater social integration, but horror. There are strong parallels between this tale and Dickens’s The Haunted Man: where one loses his memories, the other acquires a vision of the future, but both are equally cursed.

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Both also, crucially, encounter a figure who is resistant to their powers. The savage, inhuman child in The Haunted Man is paralleled by Bertha, the girl whom Latimer, despite warning visions of the future, takes as his wife. Ostensibly Bertha seems very far removed from the street urchin, being an elegant member of the upper classes. Latimer is to learn to his cost, however, that the reason her mind alone remained closed to him was that in her cruelty, self-interest, and lack of any higher sensibilities, she too exists almost at a sub-human level. Eliot’s tale offers an interesting reversal of Dickens’s story and, more profoundly, of her own philosophy which grounds social and personal morality in the operations of memory. Latimer s future is ruined by memory; not the plaguing recollections of past misdeeds or suffering, but rather the haunting, devastating memories of his future life which destroy all contentment within the present, all hope for the future. Eliot’s speculation here is based on the interest in prevision in contemporary psychological texts. Mesmerism, of course, had suggested a similar combination of powers to see both into the minds of others, and into the future. Mainstream psychological texts tended to dismiss the claims of seeing into others’ minds but not, interestingly, those for prevision. A.L.Wigan in The Duality of the Mind (1844), Carpenter, Holland and Lewes all explore the phenomenon, treating it generally as an interesting example of the instability of memory and perception. Wigan, who argued that the brain itself was a dual organ, attributed the ‘sentiment of preexistence’ to the fact that one brain experiences on its own, and then both are subsequently conjoined.16 The most influential work in this area continued to be that of Henry Holland, pioneer of the notion of ‘double consciousness’.17 Eliot’s treatment of Latimer’s ‘diseased sensibility’ bears strong parallels to Holland’s work. The phenomena of memory in its healthy state, Holland argues, are more striking under a state of disease when the fluctuations of memory are removed from the control of will and pass into morbid associations which disorder the mind. The sense of a unified identity built up through conscious memory is shattered as doubleness of perception and feeling takes over. Eliot turns her protagonist’s presentiments into another form of double consciousness: Are you unable to give me your sympathy—you who read this? Are you unable to imagine this double consciousness at work within me, flowing on like two parallel streams which never mingle their waters and blend into a common hue? Yet you

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must have known something of the presentiments that spring from an insight at war with passion; and my visions were only like pre-sentiments intensified to horror. You have known the powerlessness of ideas before the might of impulse; and my visions, when once they had passed into memory, were mere ideas—pale shadows that beckoned in vain, while my hand was grasped by the living and the loved. (p. 307) Although Latimer experiences a horrific vision of Bertha in the future, this insight is powerless to restrain the strength of his desire in the present. In this crucial passage, presentiments here become another form of memory, and Latimer s diseased sensibility is merely a mirror of our own. Eliot here takes her tale out of the frame of the supernatural in order to highlight the fact that we all suffer from a similar form of double consciousness in our inability to make our actions and desires conform to our rational insights into future possibilities. Latimer struggles to bring his selfhood into the unitary sequence which for Carpenter and Holland defined psychological health. His ability to read and hear the thoughts of others marks a further erosion of the boundaries of his constructed identity, for, as Holland observes, our sense of identity is not innate but evolved through repetition until we obtain ‘that singleness in all acts of perception, volition and memory’ which marks the mind in its ‘adult healthy state’.18 Eliot’s text, however, seems to question the possibility of ever obtaining that desired state of unity. The very openness to others which, in the rest of her work, marks the moral development of character, here becomes the basis of dissolution. Without strong internal control, his sensibilities are at the mercy of others. He is unable to impose coherence, either on his perceptions or his sense of self. The pessimism of this text is registered in its very form: it opens with a vivid presentiment of the precise moment of death which is then fulfilled at the close. No concluding postscript from another figure or omniscient narrator is required; the life of the narrative is consonant with that of the narrator who expires as he writes the final line. The structure of the narrative registers the impossibility of hope: the potentiality of the future is entirely foreclosed. Latimer dwells in a world where the future holds no sense of anticipation, no space for imaginative construction or development. Far from offering the promise of the unknown, the future has become a form of horrific memory which can only be erased by death.

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‘The Lifted Veil’ was written shortly before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) which was to revolutionize the understanding of memory with reference to individual identity. In Eliot’s final novel Daniel Deronda (1876) we find her reworking many of the themes of ‘The Lifted Veil’, but this time in the context both of inherited memory, and the more pessimistic strain of psychological thought of the 1870s. The divisions so often noted in the text could usefully be expressed as a conflict between two different models of memory. On the one hand, we have the optimistic model of organic memory associated with Daniel and his rediscovered Jewish ancestry. Presentiment here functions positively: the prophet Mordecai’s vision that Daniel is their race’s long-awaited leader is given physiological grounding when Daniel discovers his concealed Jewish heritage. Memory does not function here simply as a register of personal identity, but actively binds the individual to a shared, biologically grounded history. Jewish heritage is defined as ‘the inborn half of memory’ and Hebrew culture ‘an inheritance that has never ceased to quiver in millions of human frames’.19 For Mordecai, the Jews are ‘a nation of whom it may be as truly said that their religion and law and moral life mingled as the stream of blood in the heart and made one growth’ (II, p. 385). Physiologically given memory here offers a grounding for moral and social continuity: culture is literally carried in the blood. Significantly, biological inheritance, in the Jewish section of the novel, seems to be given priority over personal memory. Mirah’s memories of a dark childhood of abuse, or Daniel’s early worries concerning his missing mother and illegitimacy, all seem miraculously erased by their immersion within the stream of biological memory.20 Set against their history, however, we have that of Gwendolen Harleth, a rootless creature whose life seems dictated more by Darwinian chance than rooted inheritance, and who moves progressively not towards unity but personal disintegration. Presentiment, again plays a role, but as in ‘The Lifted Veil’, it is a presentiment full of horror, which is to reach its fulfilment when Gwendolen sees her murderous desires externalized in the form of her drowning husband. Gwendolen’s attempts to exert control over her life seem to be constantly thwarted by memories, and presentiments turned to memories, which refuse to be repressed and she finds herself unable to hold together a sense of coherent selfhood. In her representation of Gwendolen’s inner divisions, Eliot is drawing on contemporary developments in theories of nervous

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disorders, theories which greatly interested Lewes at that time, and formed the basis of much of their nightly reading. Gwendolen seems frequently to lack that sense of personal coherence and contuinuity, which, Carpenter argued in Principles of Mental Physiology (1874), was dependent on a sense of ‘consciousness of agreement’ between past and present states.21 Memory, according to Carpenter, is not on its own a sufficient grounding of identity, there must also be a recognition of a reproduced state of consciousness: ‘Without this recognition, we should live in the present alone; for the reproduction of past states of consciousness would affect us only like the succession of fantasies presented to us in the play of the Imagination.’22 Such a state defines Gwendolen’s being when Klesmer’s criticism of her musical performance shatters her sense of self: ‘All memories, all objects, the pieces of music displayed, the open piano—the very reflection of herself in the glass—seemed no better than the packedup shows of a departing fair’ (I, p. 394). As in Carpenter’s image, Gwendolen loses any sense of consciousness of agreement between past and present; memories, with no critical sense of self to locate them, take on the role of mere fantasies, without order or memory. In her breakdown following the death of her husband, Gwendolen becomes incapable of separating past, present and future, actuality and desire: the turbulence of her inner life erupts to shatter her tenuous control of surface identity. Memory, as for Latimer in ‘The Lifted Veil’, becomes a curse, and one which leads to the fragmentation of selfhood. Although Deronda might offer a partial healing, the only words of comfort he can offer at the height of her distress, ‘I will not forsake you’ (III, p. 223) are implicitly broken by his departure with Mirah for a new future in the Middle East. Eliot in this novel was writing in full consciousness of the dramatic shifts in psychology which had occurred post-Darwin. The control of memory is still cited as both the definition of sanity, and the foundation of identity, but belief in the possibility of control has been massively eroded. As Maudsley, the pre-eminent figure in postDarwinian psychology, observed, in typically gloomy vein, in his Responsibility in Mental Disease (1874): Most persons who have suffered from the malady of thought must at one period or other of their lives have had a feeling that it would not be a hard matter to become insane, that in fact something of an effort was required to preserve their sanity.23

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The emphasis on control of earlier psychological texts is here placed in a Darwinian frame of perpetual embattlement: with the mind ‘as with the body, to cease to strive is to begin to die’.24 The battle, for Maudsley, is not simply against internal, unruly desires, but rather against what he terms ‘the tyranny of organisation’—one’s psychological and physiological inheritance. As he observes in his (1870) text Body and Mind, No one can escape the tyranny of his organisation; no one can elude the destiny that is innate in him, and which unconsciously and irresistibly shapes his ends, even when he believes that he is determining them with consummate foresight and skill.25 The sense of personal control so crucial to earlier psychology is here identified as an illusion: memory in this formulation ceases to be the grounding of individual coherence and becomes, instead, the very element which lies outside of personal control. Memory as a personal act of recollective will has been supplanted by organic memory which frequently works against the desires of the conscious individual. In post-Darwinian psychology, memory, which for Holland had defined man’s distance from animals, becomes precisely the ground on which man is linked back to the animal chain. In Eliot’s works one can see a very divided response to this shift: in the representation of Daniel and his Jewish heritage we are given a positive representation of the workings of organic memory which supplies a unity and continuity which Daniel’s personal life lacked, and gives historical grandeur to the individual life. To set against that, however, there is the depiction of Gwendolen’s fragmentation, her lack of unity, continuity and control; and also the evolutionary imagery surrounding the terrifying Grandcourt who is depicted frequently in terms of lower reptilian life. Barlow’s firm belief that all psychological ills were in the power of the individual to control comes to seem, increasingly, a chimera. The growing pessimism of late nineteenth-century psychology is strongly registered in the later novels of Thomas Hardy, who had steeped himself in the works of Darwin and Maudsley.26 We find in these texts a clear awareness of the ways in which psychology has been shifted outside the frame of individual life. All these works deal with what Hardy defined in The Return of the Native as ‘the mutually destructive interdependence of spirit and flesh’: individual aspiration is continually thwarted by the tyranny of physiological

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determinism.27 Selfhood for Hardy is ruled by the operations of organic memory on multiple levels: memories of the individual life are overlain with those of family inheritance, then race memory, and finally animal memory, all contributing to the make-up of the individual, and increasing the difficulties of pursuing a coherent course of action. The problems of control registered in mid-century psychological texts are here firmly historicized, and memory itself takes on increasingly negative connotations, as suggested in Hardy’s poem, ‘Heredity’: I am the family face; Flesh perishes, I live on, Projecting trait and trace Through time to times anon, And leaping from place to place Over oblivion. The years-heired feature that can In curve and voice and eye Despise the human span Of durance—that is I; The eternal thing in man, That heeds no call to die.28 Where Shakespeare’s sonnets to the young man celebrate reproduction as a way of defeating the ravages of time, the family face here holds a menacing threat: a macabre, skeletal structure that dominates individual life, refusing to relinquish its control, or obey the natural cycle of life and death. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) questions of hereditary memory are placed centre stage, with the whole plot mechanism revolving around questions of hereditary descent. As Gillian Beer has shown, Darwinian ideas suffuse the text, registering in its pessimism, but also in its attention to the physical, material qualities of life, tracing the natural exuberance and sheer ‘appetite for joy’ experienced by Tess.29 Yet even in the depiction of Tess’s vitality Hardy is at pains to show how her actions are beyond her own control, ruled by animal or ancestral memory. Tess creeps towards Angel’s music like a ‘fascinated bird’ or stealthy cat, caught by the workings of sexual instinct which will force her, like the other dairymaids, to ‘palpitate’ with ‘hopeless passion’.30 Lying in their beds at night, they,

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writhed feverishly under the oppressiveness of an emotion thrust on them by cruel Nature’s law—an emotion which they had neither expected nor desired… The differences which distinguished them as individuals were abstracted by this passion, and each was but portion of one organism called sex. (p. 171) In their interchangeability, the dairymaids register the powerful legacy of animal inheritance. The workings of ancestral, or family memory are more complex, for Hardy deliberately leaves it unclear whether the imprisonment of heredity, captured in the insistent recurrence of the d’Urberville connection, functions at a physiological level, or merely as a psychological trap, controlling perception. Tess’s most decisive actions are tentatively linked to the workings of heredity. When she strikes Alec across the face with her ‘warrior’s’ glove, ‘Fancy might have regarded the act as the recrudescence of a trick in which her armed progenitors were not unpractised’ (p. 373). Angel, on hearing that she had murdered Alec, immediately wonders ‘what obscure strain in the d’Urberville blood had led to this aberration’ (p. 432). In the elusive narrative, however, such suggestions are left as mere conjecture, to be filtered through his readers’ own understanding of probability in the light of contemporary psychology. Tess’s sexuality, which would seem to distance her from passivity, only reinforces, finally, her powerlessness, leading directly to her extinction. While it is possible to read the ending of the novel, where Angel stands with Tess’s younger sister, Liza-Lu, high above the site of Tess’s execution, as a suggestion of future potentiality, it should perhaps, more persuasively, be read as an image of perversion: Liza-Lu is ‘half girl, half woman—a spiritualized image of Tess’ (p. 444): Tess, in other words, without her sexuality. Placed in a Darwinian frame, this image constitutes the negation of history: the erasure of sexuality spells the end of the human race. These implications are brought out more strongly in Hardy’s following novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), where Sue, the modern woman who is a bundle of nerves and has no desire to breed, is a clear example of what Maudsley termed ‘the intensification of the neurotic type’ in late Victorian culture,31 Her intense mental energy figures not as a form of self-determination, but rather as an example of the ‘tyranny of organisation’. Both Tess’s sexual drive, and Sue’s lack of such instincts illustrate the controlling role of biological inheritance. Memory, in all its physiological and psychological forms,

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functions primarily in Hardy’s later novels to thwart, rather than sustain, the actions of the individual will. Hardy’s Tess can be set beside another text of 1891, Oscar Wilde’s, The Picture of Dorian Gray which, although seemingly quite dissimilar, also offers a meditation on the interpretation of the body and mind and the role of memory, informed by nineteenth-century psychological and Darwinian theory. Wilde’s text offers an outcry against the ‘tyranny of organisation’. The workings of memory, and of historical determination, which George Eliot saw as offering a guarantee of moral structure, Wilde sees as ultimate imprisonment. The separation of body and mind which structures the novel (where the consequences of Dorian’s acts are registered not on himself, but on his picture) can be seen as an attempt to escape the oppressiveness of memory and the physiological registering of history. Dorian accepts as his own the sense of internal complexity and multi-layered selfhood to be found in contemporary psychology: He used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable and of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.32 The instability of selfhood which so troubled the early Victorians is for Dorian a cause for celebration. Like Tess, Dorian confronts his ancestral portraits, but rather than being overwhelmed by this legacy, and by the additional inheritance offered by his ‘ancestors in literature’, he tries to dominate it: There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstance, but as his imagination created it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions. (p. 113) Rather than being a mere iteration of previous history, Dorian tries to reverse the process so that, through the play of imagination, all past events become mere echoes of his own life. The text exposes, however, the impossibility of such dominion over time.

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Dorian longs to live in ‘a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain’ (p. 105). His desire is to live in the eternal present without any impingement from memory. Wilde, however, is too thoroughly imbued with the nineteenth-century belief that to be without memory is to be without selfhood to allow this to happen. Living in the eternal present, Dorian would be without that sense of ‘conscious agreement’ between past and present which for Carpenter defined selfhood, or the sense of successive order in time which for Holland differentiated human experience from that of an animal. The ending of Dorian Gray, where Dorian thrusts a knife into the picture which images the history of his moral corruption, and causes that historical registration to be transferred to his own body, is often read in simple moral terms. If we take seriously, however, Wilde’s initial epigram, that ‘an ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style’, such a reading becomes difficult to sustain. Rather, we could read the ending not as an endorsement of Eliot’s moral vision of the world, where all actions have inescapable consequences, but rather as Wilde’s registration of despair with reference to the physiological tyranny of history—despair that we cannot control our own lives and erase the workings of memory. The changes in fictional representations of memory over the fifty years covered in this chapter closely parallel those in the psychological domain. In the mid-century, memory was celebrated as the power which distinguished us from the animal chain: the power of volitional recollection stood testimony to man’s powers of self-control. Such spirited defences of man’s power over himself (whether to rise up the economic and social ladder, or to keep insanity at bay) were, however, indelibly linked to a growing interest in the multiplicity of mind, and the waywardness of memory which could not be controlled. In the psychology and literature of the closing decades of the century memory has been transformed: no longer is it the faculty which distinguishes us from the animal chain. Far from betokening our powers of control it comes, instead, to demonstrate both our animal inheritance, and our powerlessness in the face of physiological memory. Wilde imaginatively opens up a space where the ‘inexorable law of consequences’ no longer operates, and selfhood can float free of the constraints of history. He is too much an heir to the Victorians, however, to sustain this vision. Dorian dies at the hand of embodied memory.

Chapter 4

The unquiet limit Old age and memory in Victorian narrative Helen Small

In April 1859, Notes and Queries published a letter on a question which had been vigorously debated in the journal’s pages some years earlier. Exactly how old was the famously long-lived Countess of Desmond? Francis Bacon recorded that she expired in 1612 at the age of 140 having renewed her teeth three times;1 other accounts had it that she lived to be 145 or even 162.2 A writer to Notes and Queries in its second year of publication, 1850, had been puzzled at the existence of so many conflicting versions, and asked for clarification.3 Over the next two years no fewer than sixteen readers wrote in, some urging the accuracy of one or other of the stories, some pouring scorn on the absurdity of the whole matter, others being content to add further footnotes to the historical confusion.4 The new correspondent in 1859 revived the subject cautiously, providing a transcription of a letter from the late Marquis of Bristol in the hope that it might shed a little anecdotal light. While unable to offer ‘any very precise and satisfactory information’ on the subject of the Countess of Desmond’s age, the 83year-old Marquis was in a position to supply a personal reminiscence: when I was a young man, the Dowager Lady Stanhope…used to say that she knew a lady who had known a lady who had seen the Countess of Desmond, who had danced at court with Richard the Third when Duke of Gloucester.5 The curiosity of the anecdote struck new fervour into Notes and Queries readers, and letters on the subject were still being printed in the journal as late as 1879. The Countess of Desmond also inspired at least one biography,6 and her name circulated through numerous periodicals during the 1860s, including Dickens s journal All the Year Round, where an anonymous contributor teased out some of the 60

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literary possibilities of such historical overleaping. What is the smallest number of conceivable lifetimes between us and Shakespeare? How many connections are there between us and Milton?7 The longer the individual lives forming the ‘links in the chain’, the more dizzying the proximity of the past. Improbable ‘long-livers’ like the Countess of Desmond, or Henry Jenkins (said to have died in 1670 at the age of 169), suggested gargantuan imaginative strides across history. These computations presented history as simple recollection: anecdotes passed directly down from individual to individual. They might be corrective (the Countess of Desmond was said to have reassured posterity that Richard III was no hunchback), but they were, essentially, hostile to the concept of change. They indicated that memory could encompass and subdue history. They made the distant past immediate, puncturing its remoteness with disarming ease. Indeed, it was presumably the flamboyance with which such stories disregarded the pastness of the past that made them so fascinating to Victorian readers. Richard III was plucked out of history and made a subject of gossip; Shakespeare became virtually an acquaintance; Milton was almost approachable. Like the 1930s’ song, I’ve danced with a man, who danced with a girl, who danced with the Prince of Wales’, these chains of association and memory were giddy with the tenuousness of their own achievement. The anecdote of the Countess illustrates the strange distortions the aged can effect upon our sense of the past, and in doing so prompts the question this chapter will be concerned with: what was the value of a long memory in mid—to late nineteenth-century Britain? Victorian writers’ fascination with the Countess of Desmond was in keeping with a long-standing antiquarian, sometimes theological, more usually quasi-medical interest in longevity which had attracted writers sporadically across the previous two centuries. But their approach was also distinctively Victorian in character, most urgently so in its concern with the historical verification of dates of birth and death, and, as I shall be arguing, in its keen fascination with the convoluted relations pertaining between the individual memory and what Halbwachs would later call, problematically, ‘collective memory’—relations that, in several contexts, were beginning to feel the influence of evolutionary science. This chapter does not attempt to broach the question of how the ageing process affects the memory physiologically; nor is it interested, per se, in retrieving the purported recollections of long-lived Victorians. Rather, it focuses on the . narratives that accumulated around the

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contemplation of memory in old age—particularly in relation to those elderly men, such as eminent politicians, who had the strongest claims to authority by virtue of their gender, their class, or their profession. What value might the memories of the old possess at a time when the perception of what it meant to be old was increasingly under debate? What did the very old have to tell younger men and women about the world they were inheriting? What could a long memory achieve? The old ‘live by memory rather than by hope’, wrote Aristotle: for what is left to them of life is but little compared with the long past; and hope is of the future, memory of the past. This, again, is the cause of their loquacity; they are continually talking of the past, because they enjoy remembering it.8 Anthropologists and historians have tended to stress the positive functions of this pleasure in turning memory into ‘talk’. It is a familiar observation that the old are the conveyors of our family memories, and the guardians of our societies’ collective memories. They alone can tell us more of our ancestors than written records, photographs and letters will yield: the curious habits of speech, the characteristic gestures, the nature of specific friendships and enmities. And only those who have survived history can claim the immediate authority to contest our collective sense of what that history was like. The current effort to preserve oral memories of the First and Second World Wars reflects just such an awareness that the old are our last chance to know—to adjust the historical record, to make it embrace as much as possible of the diversity of social and individual experience. The perception that the old bear a special responsibility for the preservation and transmission of knowledge from and about the past is probably true for all cultures. As Paul Connerton notes in How Societies Remember (1989), the old in ancient rural societies maintained the collective memories of the community or the tribe. Within the home, it was the grandmother, above all, who taught ‘the language of the group’ to the youngest generations: When the ancient Greeks called stories ‘geroia’, when Cicero called them ‘fabulae aniles’, and when the picture illustrating the Contes of Perrault represented an old woman telling a story to a circle of children, they were registering the extent to which

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the grandmother took charge of the narrative activity of the group.9 Cultural continuity here demands both ‘memory’ and ‘narrative’: the past is recalled and ordered in the form of stories. The old had the time to spend in such acts of narration, and they might also be expected to have learned enough from experience to bear their responsibility judiciously. This was the view promulgated by the early Church fathers when (like the Stoics before them) they extolled the sober virtues of the aged mind: maturity, gravitas, wisdom. Aristotle himself was not so sanguine, however, either about the capacity of the old to keep their recollections in good order, or about the public-spiritedness of their loquacity. The temper of the old mind was unpropitious from the start: The old have lived many years, and they have often been taken in, and often made mistakes; and life on the whole is a bad business. The result is that they are sure about nothing and under do everything. They ‘think’, but they never ‘know’; and because of their hesitation they always add a ‘possibly’ or a ‘perhaps’, putting everything this way and nothing positively. They are cynical; that is, they tend to put the worst construction on everything.10 For Aristotle, the effect of a long memory was likely to be a reduction of the rhetorical powers, a meanness of view and a crippled cautiousness of expression. The elderly mind was essentially ‘chilly’, and the love of recollection was not a generous communicativeness towards younger generations but selfish detachment and miserly hoarding of the past. Memory, after all, was mentally and sensuously the only thing the old had left in abundance. The tension between these two views—age as authority over the past, and age as deprivation of all but the past—persists through the centuries, yet it is also a tension susceptible to reinterpretation according to the concerns and pressures of a particular historical moment, not least because questions about how the old remember are also questions about how societies remember. The old link ‘the dead past with the living present’, wrote one Victorian commentator on longevity and centenarianism,11 and the wording suggests how much ambivalence might attach to this connectedness with societyas-it-was. The elderly possessed the power to provoke the sense of

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anachronism: bearing the ‘dead past’ with them, they sometimes troubled a progressive society’s assurance that the past was, indeed, past. Etymology tells us that to remember is to ‘piece together’, to ‘recollect’ is to gather again what has been lost. In this sense, memory is always recuperative, restorative, an act of reclamation, and our sense of progress as well as of heritage depends upon such acts. But like so many of its derivative and associate terms, memory is also about repetition—having again, claiming again—and it can all too easily threaten its bearers and its recipients with stagnation, regression, decay. The ability of the old to prompt recognition of that threat took on particular power in two arenas of nineteenth-century debate, the first political, and the second more broadly philosophical. Responses to old age are always political in so far as they can be seen to involve class considerations: hence the Victorians’ veneration for white-haired gentlemen whose fireside memories were affectionately indulged, while the ‘pollard old men’12 of the working classes were thrust into the workhouse. But conflict over the respect to be afforded to the longest lived was also liable to arise at the highest levels of parliamentary politics. In October 1865, the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, died in office two days before his 81st birthday. ‘Old Pam’ had been a member of every government since 1807, and, as The Times reflected, none but ‘old men’ could recall the time when he had not been a member of the Cabinet.13 The sheer length of his political career permitted him to be seen as the embodiment of the nation’s collective memories. Palmerston’s life had encompassed and, as The Times represented it, contained change, from the turbulence of the late Georgian and Regency periods, through the reformist agitations of the 1830s, to ‘peace in the 1860s’. This was a life which permitted the upheavals of the nineteenth century to be benignly ‘re-membered’ in the most active sense. But the likelihood of Palmerston’s succession by Lord Russell, then 73 years old, led The Times to take a very different view of old age. Their resistance to Russell’s candidacy prompted a sudden access of concern over the possible emergence of a political gerontocracy in Britain: ‘In our eyes it is no recommendation’, intoned the paper, ‘that [Lord Russell’s] early manhood was spent in Parliamentary struggles the effects of which we feel, but the details of which have long been forgotten.’14 Russell would be better put out to retirement. Twenty-seven years later the question of age was once again at the forefront of British politics as William Gladstone entered on his third administration at the age of 82. By the time he resigned as

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Prime Minister in March 1894, Gladstone was 84 years old and had been a sitting member of the House of Commons for over sixty years. No one was more aware than Gladstone himself that his age made him a ‘totemic’ figure.15 Like Palmerston before him he played up his status as a living representative of the past, conscious that his longevity (in his biographer’s words), linked the generation of the 1890s to an epoch by now almost mythical: the epoch of the 1830s,…of Scott, Wordsworth and Coleridge. [He] had been in office, as a Treasury whip and an undersecretary for war and the colonies, in those days of William IV. He could even recall the defining years of nineteenth-century Britain, for, as a four-year-old, he had heard the guns of Edinburgh Castle rattling the windows as they announced the abdication of Napoleon.16 But Gladstone, like Russell, had to contend with public mutterings of concern from his opponents about his physical fitness to lead the country. As importantly, he had to wrestle with his own anxiety about whether, in his eighties, he should be leading his party and his country. From the 1880s his short-term memory was faltering and he would forget the names of some of his correspondents for the daily lists in his diary.17 But while he was prepared to acknowledge most of the physical humiliations of age, he would not accept that his remarkable powers of recollection had begun to fail. In his diaries and letters his experience of old age was always registered as a contention with diminishing physical, as opposed to mental, fitness, and he developed a well-honed rhetoric of Abraham-like obedience to a God who had chosen to exact ongoing service from him long after his strength had begun to wane. Left to himself, Gladstone repeatedly affirmed, he would have chosen retirement and preparation for death.18 The meanings of old age thus proved highly flexible in the political arena: longevity might uniquely qualify a man for exercising power but it might equally disqualify him from doing so; it might invest him with a unique claim on respect, or it might slowly leach regard from him; it might endow him with a ‘totemic’ personality or it might become the means by which personality was dissolved into civic responsibility and religious duty. None of these alternatives was essentially wanting in respect for old age, nor was any of them necessarily hostile to the idea that an individual might continue to possess remarkable powers of mind well beyond the time when his

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contemporaries had welcomed retirement from public life. Context and speaker were everything. Admittedly, nineteenth-century medical writing offered little support to the more positive interpretations of old age. As Stephen Katz has recently indicated, the 1850s saw the start of a newly vigorous medical (as opposed to philosophical) interest in longevity, focusing primarily on ‘dietary, exercise, and behavioural regimes’ and calling for more extensive clinical investigation into the ageing process.19 The most weighty contribution to the debate was William J.Thoms’s Human Longevity: Its Facts and Its Fictions (1873) which rejected the ‘erroneous and unjustifiable conclusions’ reached by biologists and physiologists who had been willing to accept as facts what were ‘in the majority of cases, mere assertions’.20 The new, scientific climate prioritized caution in estimating the potential duration of life. The French physiologist Pierre Flourens, widely read in Britain though sneered at by the rising stars of British comparative anatomy,21 declared 100 years the upper limit, and had to answer to protests that this was extending it too far. ‘I have only intended to establish a term, a limit, the experimental and normal limit,’ he responded in the Preface to his second edition.22 Yet what force did an experimental figure have? Reviewing five recent publications on longevity and centenarianism for the Quarterly Review in 1868, James Davies put the point succinctly: ‘If persons within our knowledge have reached ninety-seven or ninety-eight years, why limit a man’s life to that bound, and discredit all alleged excesses of four, five, or half a dozen years?’23 There was considerably more consensus when it came to the physiological effects of old age. The physician and mesmerist John Elliotson (drawing heavily on Gall) provided a grimly schematic summary: After 60 ‘the brain rarely executes anything original… The power of intellect is now exerted on things formerly learnt and chiefly through the faculties given by habit.’… At from 70 to 75 in the female, and from 75 to 80 in the male, the age of Decrepitude begins… ‘The brain, after having remained stationary for 10 or 20 years, begins to decline and lose its fullness and turgescence, and, in the same proportion, its activity. But all the cerebral parts change more or less; the man loses the power of combining a large number of ideas, of seizing the relations of objects and the connection of cause and effect. New impressions slide, as it

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were, off the exhausted brain, and the old man remembering no longer the occurrences of the previous day, takes delight in diffused and everlastingly repeated recitals of the adventures of his youth: his state grows worse and worse, till nothing is left at last but inert cerebral fibres, insensibility, and dementia.’24 If there was a medical narrative of old age, Elliotson suggested, it was one of deceleration, arrest, and then decay: impervious to the skills of the doctor, and yet possessing a certain grotesque energy. Such medical descriptions provoke a mixed reaction. In part they appear to be stating the obvious: as Samuel Butler put it, ‘The developments of old age are generally things we should be glad enough to avoid if we knew how to do so.’25 Yet there can be no definitive statement of when deterioration begins or of how, and how far, it will affect any individual. Both medical and non-medical writers about old age were clearly captivated by evidence of defiantly extended powers in some individuals, breaches of the expected norm. Not every memory ended in dementia, not every old man and woman dwindled into repetition, diffusion, and a final insensibility. In fact the debates over the limit of longevity and over the physiological description of old age were of minor importance compared to the fundamental questions evolutionary science was putting both to old age and to memory. Charles Darwin’s thinking about instinct and evolution was considerably advanced in the 1830s by his enquiries into the way recollection functioned in the old, and, oblique though his contribution to the sciences of memory was, it did more to unsettle the established narratives than any other body of writing until William James’s Principles of Psychology. Taxing his father, Dr Robert Darwin, for details of his senile patients— old men and women who could remember nothing of their own lives, but who sang the songs they had learned in childhood almost as if they were birds singing by instinct—he began to wonder about the possibility of memories lying dormant throughout life, unrecognized by their owners. ‘What is instinct,’ he mused, ‘but an unconscious memory physically written into the brain?’26 In common usage the term ‘memory’ usually implies that the past is recuperable to us—willingly or unwillingly—as thought. But might not some memories be more intimately part of us than others? How far is memory then personal to each one of us, an internal record of our experience forming the core of our identity? How far is it familial, part of a particular biological inheritance? And how far is it collective,

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part of anyone s birthright by virtue of living at a particular place and time, part even of the broad development of the species? Might parts of our history be so intrinsic to us that they cannot be isolated or recouped as traces of events? Darwin was not the only one to trouble over such questions in the late 1850s and early 1860s. The writer of an article entitled ‘Life in Round Numbers’, published in All the Year Round just six months before the publication of The Origin of Species found his thoughts on the unimaginability of death leading him to a similar conclusion: What is life, after all, but the sequel of the life of our grandfather and our great-grandfather? Certainly, we may not have been present, as actual eye-witnesses, at the first French revolution,…the burnings of heretics by bloody Queen Mary, or at the landing of William the Conqueror; but our minds are really affected by those historical facts in the same way as by events occurring at some distant place a little while ago, of which we hear as of a matter of course, and which are brought to our knowledge by the post and the newspapers…. [W]e trace and follow back ancient history in our thoughts, almost as if it formed a portion of our own memoirs.27 This writer’s anxiety about the separability of individual memories from collective knowledge was quickly recast as whimsical speculation—an, in the end, comfortable sense that history and memory are firmly yoked. Darwin’s version of the same insight was altogether less amenable to the individual desire to keep history under the control of thought. What value could the longest memory possess in a world where, even respectable gentlemanly science now asserted, history stretched back over unimaginable aeons of time? Sir Charles Lyell’s The Antiquity of Man, published in 1863, shocked the Anglican establishment by conceding what radical geologists had been urging for decades, that human life must have originated Vast ages’ ago–millions of years before the sixty centuries traditionally taken to be the limit of man’s existence on earth.28 In short, it ‘made man old’29 and at the same time informed him that most of his history was beyond recall. The reviewer of The Antiquity of Man in that conservative organ, The Athenaeum, spoke for many when he denounced such blasphemous turncoatism by the country’s most eminent geologist. In fact, as Charles Darwin recognized immediately, Lyell’s was a timid radicalism. It went only a little way towards accepting Darwin’s own far bolder

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conception of the time-scale necessary to explain the development of species. On the evolutionary scale, recorded history barely registered; individual experience was a blip. The repercussions for thinking about memory were profoundly unsettling. Evolutionary science recast the nature of the individual’s relationship to the past, making it simultaneously closer and more remote. Later biologists wrestled with Darwin’s adoption of the term ‘memory’, because his theory of heredity could more properly be said to have abolished memory as a means by which one could comprehend one’s biological history, substituting more forensic procedures including those of archaeology—disinterring the remains of what we have been, piecing together the evidence of a past we did not know we had had. Yet in another sense science had made memory more potent, more intimately part of human physiology than it had ever been before. Theory of instinct tells us that we bear the memories of the species in the very shape and functioning of our bodies and our minds. As Laura Otis has argued in her comprehensive account of the subject, the concept of ‘organic memory’ provided a powerful answer to the question of where history is located. By identifying memory with heredity, it gave history ‘a locus’, centring it ‘in the individual, in the body, in the nervous system;…pull[ing] memory from the domain of the metaphysical into the domain of the physical with the intention of making it knowable’.30 The old played a curiously unsettled role in the fierce debates over organic memory throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century as, in their attempts to explain the nature of heredity and of instinct, biologists turned to the figure of the elderly man. Ewald Hering, in his celebrated lecture ‘Memory as a General Function of Organized Matter’ (1870), invoked old age in order to familiarize his readers with the concepts of cellular replication and biological inheritance: If in a parental organism by long habit or constant practice something grows to be second nature, so as to permeate, be it ever so feebly, its germinal cells, and if the germinal cells commence an independent life, they increase and grow till they form a new being, but their single parts still remain the substance of the parental being… If, then, the filial organisms reproduce what they experienced as a smaller part of a greater whole, this fact is marvelous indeed, but no more so than when an old man is surprised by reminiscences of his earliest childhood.31

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The comparison patently didn’t wash. As Herbert Spencer, Théodule Ribot and (less successfully) Samuel Butler all insisted, ‘one missed the whole point of memory by focusing on the individual life span’.32 If memory was unconscious, even the longest lifetime must fail to express the manner of its working. The old man might possess some rhetorical value as the closest approximation to an embodiment of instinct: in him voluntary actions had come closest to involuntariness, repetition and habituation had made thought and action virtually unconscious. Yet if the notion of embodied memory was taken seriously, age was an irrelevance: the smallest child was as representative of the power of heredity as the oldest man. In the debate over organic memory, the old were rhetorical straw men. To look for direct echoes of political and scientific debates about old age in the novels of the period would be to mistake the complexity of the relations between literature and the wider culture. The subject of old age raises, in any case, problems of definition comparable to those facing the analysis of class. When does old age begin? Is it a social and political category or a physiological one? Do ‘the old’ constitute a definable group? Rather than blocking enquiry into the novel, such questions have to be seen as active within its representations of the subject. To be deemed, or to deem oneself, ‘aged’ in Victorian fiction is almost always to be making more than just a statement about one’s years. The hero of Anthony Trollope’s An Old Man’s Story (published posthumously in 1884), for example, is only 50, but relinquishing his hopes of marriage, for the second time in his life, leaves him bitterly solitary, anticipating a cheerless age. To be ‘old’ is, in this novel, primarily an expression of exclusion from a fulfilled domestic life. Trollope was acutely fearful of the onset of age, as his letters often reveal, and his late novel, The Fixed Period (1882), provides the century’s most bitterly satirical consideration of attitudes to ageing—if not quite Swiftian, the closest Victorian fiction came to it. It takes the evidence of physiology to a brutally logical conclusion. A futuristic fantasy, set in the 1980s, The Fixed Period imagines a former British Colony, Britannula, whose President has attempted to institute compulsory euthanasia for every man or woman reaching the age of 67. President Neverbend is tellingly heedless of the value of a long memory. In Britannulan society, proud of its progressiveness and of its newly won independence from the imperial yoke, little worth is attached to the reminiscences of those old enough to recall

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the days before self-government. Early in the novel, he explains the logic of the now-outlawed Fixed Period: It consists altogether of the abolition of the miseries, weakness, and fainéant imbecility of old age by the prearranged ceasing to live of those who would otherwise become old. Need I explain to the inhabitants of England, for whom I chiefly write, how extreme are those sufferings, and how great the costliness of the old age which is unable in any degree to supply its own wants? Such old age should not, we Britannulists maintain, be allowed to be.33 Trollope’s novel poses starkly the question of when old age begins. It also indulges in some surprisingly off-beat satire on late Victorian attitudes to death, including the campaign to legalize cremation, and, significantly, it incorporates a number of sly references to Gladstone. (Gladstone’s failure to reply to a letter, apparently a sign of his failing memory, had given affront to Trollope shortly before he began work on the novel, although he continued to support Gladstonian Liberalism.) For Trollope, old age evidently constituted a point of acute conflict between the individual and the culture. To be old was to be perceived, perhaps to perceive oneself, as a burden and a liability to society. The Fixed Period gains not a little of its satiric force from its aggressive dismissal of the sentimental traditions of representing old age. The Reverend Thomas Moss’s poem ‘The Beggar’s Petition’ (1769), remained popular right through the nineteenth-century and encapsulated the sentimentalists’ strongly felt imperative to honour and protect old age—‘the sacred age’, as Flourens designated it, ‘in which the soul feels itself nearer to God’: Pity the sorrows of a poor old man Whose trembling limbs have borne him to your door, Whose days are dwindled to the shortest span, O, give relief, and Heaven will bless your store.34 The poem was a favourite of Dickens, in whose sentimental vocabulary, as Sylvére Monod has pointed out, the word old preserved a peculiar force.35 Old men possess a frail and, in the later novels, an increasingly beleaguered charm. Wemmick’s Aged P in Great Expectations may be free to grow old in eccentric rural comfort,

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defended from the perils of the city by his devoted son, but elsewhere in Dickens a loved old father is less easily protected. Rather than take food out of the mouths of his grandchildren, Old Mr Nandy, in Little Dorrit, chooses to enter the workhouse under whose rules he is permitted only occasional day-visits to his daughter’s home. The tunes he sings for the family entertainment are ‘pale and vapid little songs’, musical remnants of the London pleasure gardens picked up in the course of his erratic career as a music-binder. An old memory here functions both sentimentally and ironically, pointing up the fragility of the longing for a better life which no longer exists in the form imagined. Dickens’s most sustained consideration of age, however, is to be found in one of his more contentious and, initially, less popular novels, Martin Chuzzlewit. At least one editor has suggested that the dissatisfactions expressed by many critics and readers stem from the novel’s preoccupation with things old, both in its subject matter and in its narrative methods. The plot of Martin Chuzzlewit hinges upon old Martin’s temporary abdication of authority, feigning senility in order to test the limits of his family’s selfishness. The narrative depends, also, upon a second, more genuinely decrepit old man for the revelation of the Dostoevskyan irony at its core. Old Chuffey, devoted to his singularly unattractive employer, Anthony Chuzzlewit, alone knows (or thinks he knows) the truth about the aged man’s death, but only in extreme distress can he gather his wits sufficiently to impart what he knows. ‘[I]f it had pleased Heaven to visit such infirmity on my old age as really had reduced me to the state in which I feigned to be, I should have brought its misery upon myself,’36 old Martin declares at the end of the novel, and his words pinpoint the uncomfortably exposed manipulativeness of Dickens’s narrative in its engagement with old age. The old recall and speak when the novel’s moral schema dictates, and even then their moral authority is awkwardly dependent not just upon their retention, or retrieval, of their mental powers but on their having access to the protection of wealth. It is in the detective fiction genre that one finds the compromised authority of old age most sharply exposed. Detectives are aggressive disinterers of memory. They dig deep into histories that have been determinedly concealed from view. When, as happens surprisingly often in later nineteenth-century fiction, the detective is an old man, that determination to know and to expose the misdeeds of the past can become knottily intertwined with contemplation of the relationship between experience and authority. Wilkie Collins’s Detective Cuff is

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a grizzled, elderly man, so miserably lean that he looked as if he had not got an ounce of flesh on his bones in any part of him…. His face was as sharp as a hatchet, and the skin of it was as yellow and dry and withered as an autumn leaf….his long lanky fingers were hooked like claws.37 The signs of age also speak of a predatory, forensic intelligence— indeed Cuff looks ‘more like an undertaker’ than a detective, as though to be near death in years is to know death already better than other men. To be old in this novel is, at least in principle, to take authority from the past and to wield authority over it, only Sergeant Cuff wants nothing more than to surrender this obligation to disinter secrets. He hankers to retire and cultivate his roses, and the song he whistles to himself as he pieces together the evidence of The Moonstone’s crime would have been recognized by Collins’s first readers as a poignantly oblique lament for old age, a residual sentimentalism that accompanies the grim business of investigation: ‘Tis the last rose of summer left blooming alone, All its lovely companions are faded and gone; No flower of its kindred, no rosebud is nigh, To reflect back its blushes, or heave sigh for sigh. I’ll not leave thee, thou lone one, to pine on the stem, Since the lovely are sleeping, go sleep thou with them; Thus kindly I scatter thy leaves o’er the bed, Where thy mates of the garden lye senseless and dead. So soon may I follow when friendships decay And from love’s shining circle the gems drop away; When true hearts are wither’d, and fond ones are flown, O who would inhabit this bleak world alone.38 In the event, Sergeant Cuff wields only a partial, and an increasingly removed, authority over the plot of The Moonstone, mistaking the criminal at first. Though his revised deduction is correct he is an onlooker at the discovery of the criminal, rather than the prime agent of his exposure. As Jenny Taylor has demonstrated,39 this is a novel which—in spite of the plot’s direction towards elucidation and recollection—speaks more persuasively of the elusiveness of memory and the difficulty and hazardousness of recollection. The surface of the

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novel tells the reader that the past is verifiable (‘the reader will remember…’, ‘as the reader will recall…’) as to an extent the past must always be in fiction (it is always possible to turn back the pages and see what was written), but the stronger message of the novel is that memories deceive, obscure, betray. Its plot tugs towards the relief of retirement and forgetting. It is tempting to infer that Collins’s novel had some measure of influence on Fortuné Du Boisgobey’s popular sequel to the Monsieur Lecoq novels of France’s most famous detective novelist, Emile Gaboriau. La Vieillesse de Monsieur Lecoq (1878) was first translated into English in 1885 as The Old Age of Lecoq the Detective. Lecoq, one-time doyenne of the French detective police, now in retirement, wants, like Sergeant Cuff, nothing more than to forget his profession: had he chose to remain active…[Lecoq] might have amassed an enormous fortune. But once in possession of adequate means, all his efforts were directed towards forgetting himself, to assuming a new skin, and substituting for Lecoq the detective a quiet homely citizen.40 Lecoq is, however, forced out of retirement by the wrongful arrest of his son for murder, and he pursues the proof of the boy’s innocence through a plot where the clues take the form of imperatives against amnesia: most forcefully a photograph inscribed ‘Do not forget me’. Lecoq’s contrary longing to forget has a purpose: the desire to erase the public memory of his insufficiently genteel profession so that his son may marry well. To remember is to disinter a past that is criminal or, at the very least, unwanted; and Du Boisgobey’s resolution is tantalizingly suggestive of a historical dimension to that compulsion to forget. Having restored his son’s name and brought the real murderer to justice, M.Lecoq installs himself in a fine château and estate in the country, once the property of an ancien régime ‘aristo’. Reading Du Boisgobey one English reviewer was put strongly in mind of the activities of an evolutionary scientist: The romances of Gaboriau and Du Boisgobey picture the marvellous Lecoq and other wonders of shrewdness, who piece together the elaborate details of the most complicated crimes, as Professor Owen, with the smallest bone as a foundation, could reconstruct the most extraordinary animals.41

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It is a striking connection, and one which recurs in relation to late nineteenth-century detective fiction,42 but one can’t help feeling that, here at least, it says more about the popular perception of comparative anatomy than it does about the novels’ narrative methods. There are, however, novels in which contemporary science’s contribution to the ways in which it was possible to think about age and memory made itself felt more deeply, even if less explicitly. Silas Marner’s interest as a working through of George Eliot’s developing ideas about the nature of inheritance—specifically the complications in the organicist model of development and descent–has been noted by a number of critics,43 but the bearing of the novel’s depiction of old age upon those ideas has remained less remarked. Eliot’s thinking about heredity and, particularly, about instinct is integral to Silas Marner’s unusually sustained interest in the contemplation of old age, and it makes the novel a natural point of conclusion for this chapter. In the opening pages of Silas Marner, the otherwise distant narrator makes an unexpected intervention in the first person. Looking to illustrate the oddly time-warped quality of ‘the grey— haired peasantry’ of Raveloe, she (or he) introduces a brief anecdote: To [these people] pain and mishap present a far wider range of possibilities than gladness and enjoyment: their imagination is almost barren of the images that feed desire and hope, but is all overgrown by recollections that are a perpetual pasture to fear. Is there anything you can fancy that you would like to eat?’ I once said to an old labouring man, who was in his last illness, and who had refused all the food his wife had offered him. ‘No,’ he answered, I’ve never been used to nothing but common victual, and I can’t eat that.’ Experience had bred no fancies in him that could raise the phantasm of an appetite.44 To the narrator’s mind, the old man’s recollection of hardship and want operates like a weed, stifling the growth of the imagination, and suppressing even the ghost of physical appetite. This is a metaphor which insinuates itself into literalism, and which appears only the more binding when the narrator’s role in the scene is taken into account. On a charitable visit to a poor man’s deathbed, the speaker offers both material and imaginative sustenance—something other than common fare, something more than the devoted wife can provide—only to be refused because the paucity of the dying man’s experience has stunted desire. As the very offering of this anecdote to the reader confirms, the

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narrator can draw on memory and imagination at will; the labourer is condemned to poverty. And yet, there is something sturdily independent in the old man’s rejection of charity which survives the heavily directive metaphor and which quietly politicizes the relationship between memory and experience. The anecdote, placed so early in Silas Marner, might seem in retrospect out of keeping with a narrative which finally endorses ‘common’ recollection over the claims of privilege. Eppie’s decision to stay with her adoptive father, Silas, rather than accept her rightful inheritance from the Squire Godfrey Cass when he declares himself as her natural father, is founded on her refusal to forget what she has been ‘used to’. Yet, as Sally Shuttleworth has argued, this moment, like several others in Silas Marner, betrays its author’s ambivalence towards any understanding of memory as foundational to an organic development of life and mind. Indeed, the narrator’s opening account of a failed attempt to rouse an old man’s appetite out of the barren pastures of his recollections comes to seem representative of this novel’s acute sense of the degree to which memory resists such control—a resistance which continues to make itself felt in the novel’s depiction of two fundamentally conflicting versions of old age: the one (represented by Macey) benign, binding the community through the preservation of its collective memories; the other (represented by the young/old Silas) Darwinian, instinctual, belonging to the species and profoundly threatening to the life of the individual. Mr Macey, ‘tailor and parish-clerk’ is (apparently) the oldest inhabitant of Raveloe. Able to remember the time before the Lammeters bought the great house from the old Warren family, Macey presides over the collective memory of the villagers. Like the traditional storytellers referred to earlier, he belongs to an old order, the time before machines, when narrative was the privileged responsibility of the oldest members of the community. Macey is first seen in the Rainbow pub, holding his white head on one side and ‘twirl[ing] his thumbs with an air of complacency’ (p. 97), waiting to be called upon as the decisive authority on all matters of dispute with regard to Raveloe history. The old parish clerk’s memories are not, as might be expected, narratives about the unchanging solidity of Raveloe life. Rather than relate old tales about the district’s oldest family, the Osgoods (‘Mr Osgood’s family was…understood to be of timeless origin—the Raveloe imagination having never ventured back to that fearful blank when there were no Osgoods’ [p. 71]), Mr Macey tells stories about those moments of danger when Raveloe life was faced

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with the incursion of a newcomer. The Lammeters came to Raveloe two generations back, after the old squire (formerly, like Macey, a tailor) died ‘raving’ driven insane by the death of his only son and by the maddening sense of his own failure to erase his humble origins and win the respect of the neighbouring gentry. Mr Macey’s firm conviction that the ghost of Mr Cliff haunts the stables yet is the triumphant conclusion of his story—and it paves the way for the community’s first encounter with Silas Marner. Like a sudden condescension on the part of Mr Cliff’s ghost, Silas appears, his unearthly eyes introducing panic into the hitherto warm atmosphere. The Silas Marner Mr Macey sees before him is a terrifying alternative to his own old age. Marner is old before his time: worn out by betrayal, made bent and short-sighted by long, obsessive hours of weaving, hoarding his money as the only object of desire he has left. He has all the Aristotelian symptoms of ‘chill’ old age, but he is also far outside the terms of Aristotle’s description. Still in his thirties, he is ‘so withered and yellow’ that the Raveloe children call him ‘Old Master Marner’. By 55 he will be so enfeebled, so bent and white-haired that he will have ‘almost the look of advanced age’ (p. 196). Where Mr Macey’s old age is the natural outcome of ‘organic development’—a life slowly running itself out in the same channels of habit and memory—Marner’s old age is the consequence of his life having been too brutally uprooted early on for it ever to recover its full or ‘natural’ strength. Mr Macey’s memory can be a source of deep ‘complacency’ to him: literally a pleasure with himself. Parts of Marner’s memory will always remain ‘dark’ to him. He embodies a nightmare of induced old age: unable to grasp the past as thought (he recalls almost nothing of his life before he was rejected by the religious community in which he was raised), he is nevertheless inescapably bound to that past. He is, in his misery, a creature of instinct, bent unthinkingly on survival, having fled the home of his youth in obedience to ‘something not unlike the feeling of primitive men, when they fled thus, in fear or in sullenness, from the face of an unpropitious deity’. At Raveloe, he weaves ‘like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection’ (p. 64). Feeding himself, fetching water, keeping himself warm, are all responses to the same ‘immediate promptings’. Like Dr Darwin’s senile patients, he presents memory reduced in old age to its most atavistic form, instinct. Something very odd happens in Eliot s novel when these two versions of old age and memory confront one another, and only with a degree of narrative wrenching can they be made to cohere.

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As Q.D. Leavis complained (‘Appendix’, p. 247), Mr Macey is uncomfortably overcharged with the responsibility of his function as chorus, at times seeming to have stepped out of a novel by George Sand. The final comic resolution also leaves the reader unsure how far, if at all, Marner’s inability to lay the ghosts of his past remains a source of pain to him. Eliot’s resolution, in other words, endorses collective memory over the more troubling vision of memory reduced to instinct, but it does so at some cost to the novel’s complexity. But a third old man, who finds no place in the novel’s ending, suggests something of the degree to which this narrative energetically overrides its own more Darwinian imaginings. At precisely the point in the narrative when the child Eppie is stumbling towards Silas Marner’s open door, where he stands in one of the fits to which he is prone, unable to resist this turn of chance that will be the means of bringing him into the collective story of Raveloe, a dance is going on at the great house with old Mr Macey and a few privileged guests in attendance. Following tradition, old Solomon the fiddler plays the Squire’s favourite tunes—pieces which Mr Lammeter recalls from his childhood more by instinct than by memory. ‘Thank ye, Solomon, thank ye’, he says when the fiddle pauses after a rendition: There’s a many tunes I don’t make head or tail of; but that speaks to me like the blackbird’s whistle’ (p. 157). But old Solomon, ‘a small hale old man with an abundant crop of long white hair reaching nearly to his shoulders’ (p. 156) is not interested in Mr Lammeter’s reminiscences. He has his part in the evening to get on with. He plays the Raveloe people onto the dance floor with manic energy, a geriatric pied piper compelling the old and the ageing to dance to his tune: ‘Old Solomon, in his seedy clothes and long white locks…luring that decent company by the magic scream of his fiddle’ (p. 157). It is a comic, but quietly eloquent, image of instinct overruled by the needs of the collective. Tennyson, reworking the myth of Tithonus in 1833, imagined that to live an infinitely extended old age, denied release either in death or in metamorphosis, would be to inhabit ‘the quiet limit of the world’. By the time the poem was published in 1860 such ‘quiet’ belonged more forcefully to the domain of myth than it had done at the time of the poem’s writing. The intellectual developments of the century had, by 1860, largely discredited the possibility of extreme longevity and had put in question the very meaning, and value, of a long life. ‘Old age, the prospect of loss without reparation, absence that cannot become potential presence, throws us back to archaic

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anxieties at the limit of thought’, one writer on literature and ageing has declared.45 Nineteenth-century Britain recognized the force of that perception, but recognized also that old age offers the tantalizing possibility of a plenitude of experience, possession of the most life can offer, not least in the form of memory. In their contemplation of old age, Victorian novelists, like their scientific and political counterparts, felt the full force of the tug between those two extreme alternatives encapsulating as it did some of the most fundamental questions relating to life: how long do we have? What is the relationship between what we have been in the past and what we are now, both as individuals and as a species? What sort of knowledge, if any, is to be found at the unquiet limit of life?

Chapter 5

Memory through the looking glass Ruskin versus Hardy Philip Davis

There is, said Carlyle in ‘Signs of the Times’, a science of Dynamics as well as of Mechanics. In contrast to the ever-increasing pursuit of a modern mechanical science well suited to explain the mere clockwork of human behaviour, the science of Dynamics, he argued, was an older way of knowing which addressed the mysterious energies and primary forces of man. This distinction between the dynamic and the explicable may all too easily become another of those simplified and mutually weakening alternatives beloved of late Romanticism, yet I shall argue that between Carlyle’s essay of 1829 and the work of Henri Bergson at the turn of the century, it remains particularly pertinent to the study of both the theory and the practical experience of memory in the nineteenth century. I have argued elsewhere that direct, non-fictional nineteenthcentury prose autobiography is all too often a mechanical form of remembering, offering a false model of an adult self and a false model of memory. 1 Nineteenth-century prose autobiography characteristically treats life as an historical narrative, and as Carlyle himself famously put it in his essay ‘On History’, ‘Narrative is linear, Action is solid’ 2 That is to say, an autobiographical narrative tends to render merely spatially ‘successive’ what in life itself was often ‘simultaneous’. It thins out the form of life, making it like a mere conveyor belt of orderly passing events, until the meaning of a life becomes the story of a moving series of temporal blocks. The forward movement of linear prose in describing such a life is in fact a thing of the past, moving forward only with uncreative hindsight, whilst the sudden backward movement so characteristic of the dynamic experience of memory is hidden within the steady sense of life narrated onwards as a completed story. There is in the writing of chronological memoirs a circular closing of accounts by a solid and 80

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successful self—a self all too confidently absorbed into taking charge of the story of what has made it what it now securely thinks itself to be. We are in danger of inheriting from the nineteenth century that mechanical model of adult self and linear memory as if it were normative. In such a model, memory is in charge, as if it were a distinct faculty which is freely available to consciousness, the steady container of the past into which the past is merely poured. My argument is that memory as it comes into human experience is not a container; memory is first of all the contained. It is in its origins of being more like irrepressible content than like a controlling form; a message from one’s life, rather than the voluntary narrator of it. In nineteenth-century writing, it is when the autobiographical impulse does not choose to express itself directly in conventional and continuous linear autobiography that memory becomes truly dynamic again, as it is in living experience. In the dynamic of literature, the sudden power of tacit resonance creates around words and sentences an aura or force-field of memory. Yet I shall also suggest that the history of nineteenth-century literature from Wordsworth to Hardy is a struggle to keep this original dynamism of memory in mind. Carlyle was right to complain that the age always tended to substitute mechanical explanations in place of creative and dynamic thinking. In the midst of its ever-increasing commitment to democratic, scientific and secular ordinariness, nineteenth-century culture struggles to recall the mystic sense of what memory first used to be, as a primal power. I say mystic, because the sudden, bursting remembering of part of one’s life is an exciting fragmentary image of what all together is impossible: namely, the remembering of the whole of a life within a moment in the very midst of it. In the increasingly felt absence of God, there remains in the nineteenth century instead, only the faculty of memory to stand, intermittently yet recurrently, as the latent recorder of the book of life. Writing about Wordsworth, the Victorian literary critic R.H.Hutton entitled one of his articles ‘The Mystic Side of Good Sense’. Thinking of memory in terms of everyday experience, Hutton writes that every one who has any insight at all knows that the false notes he has struck during his hours of work come back to him most clearly when he is no longer absorbed in the strain or passion of the moment—when, indeed,

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he is not even consciously reviewing the events of the day, but when they re-visit him involuntarily, with a new significance and in new relations of which he had no glimpse before.3 This is a common enough experience, but for the poet Wordsworth who thought of himself as a man speaking to men, his poetry differing from the prose of the world not in kind but only in degree, just such a commonplace may also be the origin of a mystic thought—the sort of simple, big original thought Augustine had in Book X of his Confessions, in not taking commonplaces automatically for granted. As Hutton indicates, the thought here is simply but dynamically this: How could I remember later what I was never conscious of even seeing at the time? Memory is the sign that our conscious minds cannot fully contain all that we are. This lack of an immediately synchronized coordination between event and meaning, or between emotion and thought, suggests that the conscious mind is always in evolutionary terms the later mind. Moreover, this human time-lag also denies the efficacy of simple chronological narration as a just means of experiential expression. The left-over reservoir of subconscious experience that memory comes out of is the nineteenth-century’s innate defence against the secular idea that humans can possibly treat life and their own feelings as merely transient. Memory bears witness to the continuing resonance of emotion, stored beneath the level of consciousness. When Wordsworth writes of the legacy: My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky. So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! resonance is that which is effected in the next, most famous line: The Child is father of the Man Crucially the line itself is not straightforward, like most Victorian autobiography. The Child is Father. The line turns round on itself, even as it turns us round on our selves, in dynamic memory of the life behind and beneath us.

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It seems to be a law of biology or of time that a memory can only be experienced or re-experienced for a very short duration. At any rate, resonance is memory coming into mind before memory has time to settle itself, at the far end of time, as a controller. The difference between that sudden deep burst of emotional recognition and what we conventionally think of as memory is thus no more than a matter of speed and time: the faster that memory’s message comes to mind, without time for consciousness to unpack its implicit connection with what stirs it, the more such memory takes the form of emotion as its flashing messenger. Such emotion is, in the words of Von Hartmann, an ‘echo’ given to consciousness, by way of sentiment, from the realm of Being anterior to consciousness.4 That was what emotion was for Daniel Deronda—an unconscious biological memory which, stirred by the singing in the synagogue, was even thus looking for a future for itself, in offering its experiencer a clue to his own purpose. The term ‘emotion memory’ was coined by the late nineteenthcentury French psychologist, Theodule Ribot and refers not to the memory of feelings but to feelings themselves acting physically as implicit memories. ‘My heart leaps up when I behold/A rainbow in the sky.’ Or again, there is the opening of that great Hardy poem, ‘Under the Waterfall’: Whenever I plunge my arm, like this, In a basin of water, I never miss The sweet sharp sense of a fugitive day Fetched back from its thickening shroud of grey. It is as though in reaching beneath the surface of the water, the hand feels for the past, touch blindly registering its meaning through the transferred sense of taste (‘sweet, sharp’), in place of sight. Through that transference of sense, the action itself offers in the physical world what metaphor provides in the mental one. Repeatedly—‘Whenever I plunge my arm’—the act of sudden recall seems to retell in the individual the evolutionary story of how thought comes to mind; and of how, moreover, mind consolidates its own existence in time, as the consciousness of an anterior inner life. Nineteenth-century evolutionary theory might have helped nineteenth-century consciousness to see that memory is not a distinct faculty according to some firm line of taxonomic demarcation; that on the contrary, mind is everywhere continuous; and that what we

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classify as distinct faculties are actually functions of each other, emerging at different levels, developing through processes of transformation in encoded memory of each other. As a dynamic of reproduction, memory is a property of or a relation between different systems long before it is the consciousness of such a relation. Similarly, a moving molecule of inorganic matter does not possess mind or consciousness but already moves about as if it were implicitly a thinking thing; but that thought becomes increasingly explicit in living matter. Among others, W.K.Clifford and Samuel Butler were insistent upon such homology. None the less, the nineteenth-century school of empirical psychology objected to any thus extended use of the term ‘memory’. Ewald Hering’s essay of 1870, ‘Memory as a general function of organized matter’, provoked extensive criticism. To such criticism Hering retorted thus, in Samuel Butler’s translation: The word ‘memory’ is often understood as though it meant nothing more than our faculty of intentionally reproducing ideas or series of ideas. But when the figures and events of bygone days rise up again unbidden in our minds, is not this also an act of recollection or memory? We have a perfect right to extend our conception of memory so as to make it embrace involuntary reproductions of sensations, ideas, perceptions, and efforts; but we find, on having done so, that we have so far enlarged her boundaries that she proves to be an ultimate and original power, the source, and at the same time the unifying bond, of our whole conscious life.5 The source and the bond. Human memory is thrown up like a subjective realization of the way things in the world recall each other: their connection is its source. The extension that Hering thus had in mind was not only from conscious to unconscious memory, and from mind to brain, but also from the human to the natural, from the organic to the inorganic world, as if all were echoes of each other. ‘How is it that the one great personality of life as a whole, should have split itself up into so many centres of thought and action?’ wrote Samuel Butler in Life and Habit: ‘Is it possible to avoid imagining that we may be ourselves atoms, undesignedly combining to form some vaster being?’6 Against such broad visions of biological memory, conventional nineteenth-century empirical science all too often presented itself

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as a form of demystification. But there was still in Victorian cultural memory, in the very midst of its science, an ancient almost panpsychic sense of what I shall call world-memory—which, as the work of Samuel Butler testifies, theories of evolution could as equally well have supported as debunked. The renewed Victorian interest in Spinoza is also significant here. But the major Victorian spokesman for world-memory is that descendant of Wordsworth, who helped keep alive in the later nineteenth-century the memory of what Wordsworth represented: John Ruskin. What is world-memory? The living world as represented in Modern Painters possesses a form of primary recollection, which is ancient, mystical, almost magical—the item in the world recalling another, one thought bringing into being another by a form of necessary reminding, in a unity that links mind and matter. Here, for example, is Ruskin considering the spectacle of a series of mountain ranges—of each of its members: the greater portion of its lines will be such as unite with, though they do not repeat, those of its neighbours and carry out the evidence of one great influence and spirit to the limits of the scene. This effort is farther aided by the original unity and connection of the rocks themselves, which though it often may be violently interrupted, is never without evidence of its existence; for the very interruption itself forces the eye to feel that there is something to be interrupted, a sympathy and similarity of lines and fractures.7 Modern Painters exists descriptively to re-echo a world of unity in which even the differences in nature almost literally recall connections in the mind of humans. Man on his own merely repeats himself; Nature does not. Conscious human repetition is only a superficial substitute for the deeper trust involved in our relying instead upon the world’s memory.8 As Ruskin looks at the mountain ranges, the history in those rocks comes to the mind of the human observer like a corresponding memory inside him, demanding the human word that Ruskin suddenly finds himself registering: the word ‘sympathy’. For Ruskin, the recognition of an original ‘influence and spirit’ hidden amidst the apparent fragmentation of things was not something humanly premeditated or invented but revealed as non— humanly emergent, like a background presupposition or a linking memory coming out of the very mind of nature itself. The holistic

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form of Modern Painters itself comes and goes even as form came to Ruskin in looking at a mountain: dim sympathies begin to busy themselves in the disjointed mass; line binds itself into steady fellowship with line; group by group the helpless fragments gather themselves into ordered companies…until the powerless chaos is seen risen up with girded loins, and not one piece of all the unregarded heap could now be spared from the mystic whole.9 Then it is that discovery feels like sublime memory, revelatory of what is recognized as having already been there beforehand—independent of the very recognition itself. Following his master’s footsteps in his own translations of Ruskin, Marcel Proust inserted footnotes whenever he was struck by the recollection of kindred thoughts of Ruskin’s from other works. These echoes were not, insisted Proust, either deliberate repetitions or mere accidents. Shadowing Ruskin like Ruskin’s own memory, Proust found passages coming to mind like fragments dynamically reassembling themselves into an unpremeditated whole, beyond any voluntary human systematization. What Ruskinian thinking felt like, microcosmically, was this: the world seemingly remembering itself, putting itself back together again, in the individual mind. But the crucial movement in the study of memory in literature 1785 to 1914 takes place, I suggest, not from Wordsworth to Ruskin but between Wordsworth and Hardy.10 For it is a movement that involves within Hardy himself a damaging transformation of the very role of world-memory. If anyone embodies Carlyle’s story of the threatened loss of dynamic powers in the nineteenth century, it is Hardy. He had read his Ruskin and, as his notebooks show, he had sampled the writings of Von Hartmann, Hering and Ribot. At a level primitively and emotionally anterior to his nineteenth-century consciousness as a separate adult, Hardy always began from an intuition of mystic or biological linkage. His form of insight was ever quick and dramatic. It is significant that Ribot’s idea of emotion memory became most influential in the twentieth century through Stanislavski, in relation to the dynamics of drama and acting. For drama was precisely the form that Victorian culture was always most in danger of losing, and with the loss of drama there was the danger of losing too the sense of a swift, direct and primary human power, anterior to consciousness. It was Hardy

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who instinctively knew what was at stake here, for The Mayor of Casterbridge tells the story of the death of drama and of primal dramatic man giving way to the smaller, more compromised and self-consciously relativistic world of the nineteenth-century novel. Virginia Woolf was to testify that Hardy was the novelist who most reminded her of the force of poetry contained within Elizabethan theatre. He could have been the most sheerly dynamic writer of the century. For Woolf saw in Hardy the best and the lost chance of developing later nineteenthcentury literature in the direction of poetic drama.11 In Woolf’s view, Hardy’s was the mind most aware of natural life as a force and of human beings as its lightning conductors. ‘People with any weight of character,’ wrote Thomas Hardy in The Return of the Native, ‘carry, like planets, their atmospheres along with them in their orbits’ (Chapter 3). That atmosphere, that dynamic resonance, is—in the deepest sense—in memory of such people as Michael Henchard: the weight of character converted into speed, and registered as something memorably more than a sheer moment of time can fully contain or express. Hardy’s powerful people carry around themselves an aura of meaning, or leave behind them deep and involuntary traces of themselves in the wake of their onward living movements. There is a resonance surrounding them which corresponds to Cardinal Newman’s account of a writer’s expressive style: ‘a faithful expression of intense personality, attending on their inward world of thought as its shadow’.12 This is the dramatic and dynamic Thomas Hardy that Virginia Woolf recognized, when she said of his characters that their relationships were not depicted ‘finely, gradually, from step to step and from stage to stage’ but as though ‘life is too stirring to give them time’.13 That sheer excess and residue of experience, when an instantaneous lifeforce is barely given time, is memory in embryo. In Hardy’s novels there is always that sense of the past being almost immediately created in the very midst of the present. That almost immediate past is the stuff that memory will evolve from, if ever there is time for the protagonist to register it, before being overtaken by events. For example: the violation and subsequent pregnancy of Tess prematurely takes her at once from girlhood to womanhood. As Hardy says in the Preface, her life is virtually ended before ever she has had the chance to begin it. Only, for so long in the novel, she simply does not know that it is all already over. The third phase of the novel, ‘The Rally’, is about an irresistably innocent biological drive on the part of the natural life-force in her—the drive for a

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fresh start, a second chance, a new life. Thus, in love with Angel, Tess lives in an atmosphere, a photosphere, in which (Chapter 36), spiritual forgetfulness co-existed with an intellectual remembrance. She walked in brightness, but she knew that in the background those shapes of darkness were always spread. They might be receding, or they might be approaching, one or the other, a little every day. As the Nietzsche of the Genealogy of Morals would have noted with approval, the life-force in Tess will not let her simply take the past into her head, using her own life against herself. That is why the past is out there in that psychic field of shadowy possibilities that surrounds her every day. For there are two forms of psychic memory here in conflict, one inside, and one out. The inside memory, felt as fear and as conscience, is like the revenge of a later consciousness upon the primal efforts of the spirit to live on and forget. The externalized memory, in part a displaced facet of her inner fears, signals none the less the original, anterior reality of life as felt outside us—a reality which internal memory only later, in the second place, seeks to reproduce, assimilate, alter or control. In short, memory is not merely some electro-chemical implant in Tess; it is an experiential dimension in space-time. Thus, in Hardy’s novels we see alive in the outside world the original dynamic resonance which memory evolves out of and then tries to re-present from within us. But when in Chapter 44 of The Mayor of Casterbridge, a man such as Michael Henchard becomes self-conscious, recalling himself in his own head, that is the very point at which he begins to die as a dramatic and dynamic being: And thus Henchard found himself again on the precise standing which he had occupied a quarter of a century before. Externally there was nothing to hinder his making another start on the upward slope… But…he had no wish to make an arena a second time of a world that had become a mere painted scene to him. ‘Precise’ in the first sentence is the memory-word which devours the energy of ‘another’ in the second, turning the arena of life-drama into the worn-out consciousness of a painted scene: ‘No wish…a second time.’ There is in Hardy’s view of the nineteenth century a second,

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secular Fall, which takes place when the individual mind finds itself autobiographically separate and enclosed in its own slow and private mentality. It is not now a consciousness, like Ruskin’s, related to the world as microcosm to macrocosm, but paradoxically referring outwards only to be enclosed within itself. He cries out to Emma’s ghost in ‘The Voice’, ‘Can it be you that I hear?’, but the lack of outward confirmation, as in ‘The Shadow on the Stone’, throws him back in upon himself: ‘And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf/As a sad response’. In this stunned incredulity at what after all is shown even to himself to be only his own subjectivity, and in the resulting rational necessity to take this second-order recognition of instinctive emotional error back inside the primal self, Hardy felt that he was no more and no less than a symptom of an ontological failure occurring at the final stage of nineteenth-century consciousness. To Hardy it felt as if he carried inside him precisely that evolutionary story of the movement from an original intuition of dynamic linkage with the outside world to a later sense of separated subjective disinheritance. On first thought, it seemed to Hardy intuitively inconceivable that you could have strong feelings about something or someone, as though they were inside you; and yet outside, in turn, the creature or the place could be totally unaffected by your feelings. ‘Why…do you make me notice you?’ he cried, half-desperately, half-absurdly, to a starving bird in the winter cold on the other side of his window (‘The Reminder’). But the primitive man kept meeting in Hardy the mind of nineteenth-century scientific rationalization. ‘Man, even to himself,’ he writes in Far from the Madding Crowd (Chapter 36), ‘is a palimpsest, having an ostensible writing and another beneath the lines.’ Out of his later self, he writes as follows to Roden Noel, 3 April 1892: You may call the whole human race a single ego if you like; & in that view a man’s consciousness may be said to pervade the world; but nothing is gained. Each is, to all knowledge, limited to his own frame. Or with Spinoza, & the late W.K.Clifford, you may call all matter mind-stuff (a very attractive idea this, to me), but you cannot find the link (at least I can’t) of one form of consciousness with another.14 Hardy had read in W.K.Clifford and in Hering, how the same vibrations form the substance remembered and modify the brain that does the remembering; how thought and thing might be made of the same stuff.

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In ‘The Photograph’, he casually sets fire to a picture of a girlfriend of long ago and suddenly—‘I felt as if I had put her to death that night!…’. He could not believe what his reason so obviously told him—that, alive or dead, the woman felt nothing of this. Hardy instinctively believed that to think about something was to become it. And yet from bitter personal experience, as the ‘Poems of 1912–13’ testify, Hardy knew how even in the midst of living together people really lived apart; how their very similarities were the source of their clashes. ‘You cannot find the link’: his wife dies and meanwhile under the same roof he can simply know nothing of it: Unmoved, unknowing That your great going Had place that moment, and altered all. (‘The Going’) Not even poetry remedies that lack of synchronization. Even here at the line-ending, in renewed shock, the ‘great going’ again ‘has place’ a moment before it can ever be said to have done so. Even in writing, Hardy could never catch up with what in ‘On the Departure Platform’ he paradoxically calls life’s ‘eternal flying’. You cannot find the link: or worse, the link is only an ironic one, forming disconnections. For take as an image of that irony, Giles Winterborne in The Woodlanders resolutely and scrupulously remaining in the cold and the wet outside the warm hut in which the separated Grace sleeps in shelter. He keeps his distance from her, out of love for her. Hardy speaks of Giles’s ‘strange self-sacrifice in lonely juxtaposition to her own person’ (Chapter 42). That is the Hardyesque sense of rebounding paradox—‘lonely juxtaposition’: the closer things are together, the more consciousness registers how they are apart. The dynamic process that throws up individual human beings works within them only to produce a consciousness of their separation from that process. Tess suddenly thinks that annually she passes without knowing it the very date on which one year she will die; Hardy thinks of the brain inside him that enables him to do such thinking. At those mind-blowing points of almost implosive self-reflection, something has to give: the unhappiness of individual separation, dawning again upon Hardy, produces that slower washedup form of consciousness which always comes upon him when he formalizes that unhappiness into a pessimistic philosophy against life. The pessimism goes hand-in-hand with the consciousness that

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articulates it, because that is what grown-up, finished nineteenthcentury consciousness feels like, miserably to Hardy, in comparison with the dynamic he knew before and behind it. It is that safer and yet essentially dying tone of ‘Well, well! All’s past amend,/ Unchangeable’ in ‘The Going’—that non-dynamic note which so often crops up as weary rationalization at the beginning of a poem’s last stanza. It is as though, in comparison with Ruskin seeing in the mountain distinctions the very memory of their original unity, we have gone through the looking glass, when Hardy sees connections that serve only to produce separation. Paradoxically, Hardy’s world offers loneliness as the quintessentially ironic form of relation—and memory, like feeling, becomes an ironically self-isolating mode: As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers, I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers; Yet my love for her in its fullness she herself even did not know; Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go. (‘Wessex Heights’) To Hardy, that is to say, emotions felt first of all absolute, and yet secondarily were seen to be relative; seemed universal as though they came from their object in the world and bespoke one’s connection with it, and yet on a mental rebound turned out to be only personal. Though Tess of the d’Urbervilles seemed only an insignificant milkmaid in the world, still originally: Upon her sensations the whole world depended to Tess; through her existence all her fellow-creatures existed to her. The universe itself only came into being for Tess on the particular day in the particular year in which she was born. (Chapter 25) Yet at the next stage of the evolution of consciousness, it was clear to Hardy if not to Tess herself that: She was not an existence, an experience, a passionate structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all mankind besides Tess was only a passing thought. (Chapter 14)

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All his life Hardy struggled to find a mental or neural ‘link’ between the sense of these two worlds, subjective and objective. Nor could he ever steadily remember the link between the world of safety and the world of trouble: that is why memory for him always felt like renewed surprise, the I-could-kick-myself or here-we-go-again sort of shock, that another opposite world of possibility was still there. Writing on the Soviet dissident Andrey Sinyavsky, Dan Jacobson well describes this problem of mental integration and narrative coherence in a life, when faced with radically unassimilable realms of temporal experience: What if the circumstances we know suddenly undergo a wholesale transformation? If the world proves itself to be quite other than the place we had previously imagined it to be? If fate or our own choice or some unfathomable mixture of both plunges us suddenly into a wholly different context, into a war, a natural catastrophe, a prison? Or into a hospital? ‘What is so disconcerting is not so much this other reality in itself, as the mere possibility of its being so near that we only have to make one step to cross over into a new existence just as self-contained and valid as the previous one; and thus find the thought of a plurality of worlds confirmed with a terrifying suddenness.15 The only conscious link that Hardy could make was the second-order defensive one of trying pessimistically to expect disappointment. Yet in truth he could hardly believe what he wrote in ‘The Minute Before Meeting’: that what is now about to be Will all have been in O, short a space! The rhyme and form of poetry enabled him to put it in two lines, like two time-bands: the present always on the verge of becoming the future, the future always foreseeably going to make any present past. But putting together those two lines, like two incompatible worlds, into one whole sentence nearly maddened Hardy. As the words form the meaning of time as if in slow motion (‘that what is now’ ‘is now about to be’) you can feel Hardy almost banging his own head in that most powerful of memory’s trochees: ‘Will all have been. Memory has turned around and become a predicter of the future. Hardy had nowhere to turn.

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In the turn of mind that produced Hardy, there is a crucial area of being that may be specifically located on the boundary between mind and body. It is an area of being on the cusp of self-reflection in which, I shall argue, the whole fate of nineteenth-century human consciousness hung in the balance. The largest expression of that area is the evolutionary turningpoint described by T.H.Huxley in his Romanes Lecture of 1893, Evolution and Ethics. For there, as he writes of how man begins to try to create an artificial moral world separate from the indifferent cosmos which produced him, of the point at which ‘the microscopic human atom’ turns round upon ‘the illimitable macrocosm’ and finds it guilty of an indifference which humans must compensate for— there, indeed, Huxley identifies a crucially specific human capacity. The mental capacity of human beings to recognize their own mechanisms, and then interfere in order to modify those mechanisms is, says Huxley, like the work of the governor in a steam engine:16 a part of the machine which none the less can make the machine’s power work against itself, the faster it goes, the more its very effect upon the governor serving to make it then go slower. Always in the midst of his poetry, at that tinier individual level of being, Hardy was desperately looking for something like Huxley’s governor, for Archimedes’ lever, for some way of converting entrapment into a source of new power. Looking in his mirror, Hardy said, ‘Why should a man’s mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his own body’?17 But the frequent use of hard rhymes in Hardy’s poetry is precisely to keep his mind contained, for better or worse, within the tight pressurized spaces of an equivalent physical frame, trying to find a word by which to work on himself as from the very midst of his predicament: And nothing is much the matter; there are many smiles to a tear Then what is the matter is I, I say. Why should such an one be here?… (‘In Tenebris II’) Even in such small ways (‘is I, I say’), Hardy was looking for Huxley’s missing governor. Hence even the symbolic force of Hardy’s technical experiments in triolets, where the fourth and seventh lines repeat the first line, but each time appear in the context of different sentences, the same verbal things re-worked in different combinations of meaning.18 If

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human beings could not radically change things, even within themselves, at least they might be able to use the same things differently. Hardy had read in W.K.Clifford an account of how initially the mind merely shadows the brain like a memory of it in different terms, a mere replication of it in the form of consciousness. But the two-way interaction between micro and macro levels, between nerves in the brain and parallel thoughts in the conscious mind, becomes the very essence of further evolutionary development. For at the next level of evolution, by a swift turnaround upon its own relation to the brain, the mind might shift itself from second place to first, precisely by using itself as a modifying tool within the brains own structure. As Clifford imagines it, voluntary movements differ from involuntary acts in requiring that the nerves’ call for blood be sent on a wider circuit for revision via the cerebrum: To say the same thing in terms of my feelings, a particular class of memories roused by the original suggestion may seize upon my attention before I have time to choose what I will attend to; or the appeal may be carried to a deeper part of my character dealing with wider and more abstract conceptions, which views the conflicting motives in the light of a past experience of motives, and by that light is drawn to one or other of them. We thus get a sort of motive of the second order or motive of motives. Is there any reason why we should not go on to a motive of a third order, and the fourth, and so on? None whatever that I know of, except that no one has ever observed such a thing. There seems plenty of room for the requisite mechanism on the physical side; and no one can say, on the mental side, how complex is the working of his consciousness.19 That is what the mind could do, as it were in the very midst of itself: find ‘time’ to use one set of memories against another, rework neural pathways to make new moves out of a recombination of the repertoire of old ones, thus get on top of itself. That is Hardy’s project. Hence the area marked out in the poem ‘The Pedigree’ where, as Hardy stares at the family pedigree, before his very eyes it seems to turn into a map, a mirror of that determining nervous system behind his forehead which is doing the seeing. Not knowing which way to turn, he feels like a conscious mind caught precisely between the brain behind him and the paper before him. Hardy holds that mind of his down in the tight spaces of rhymed

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stanzas, forcing it under pressure of space to find time as if between the very stanzas: As I drive to the junction of lane and highway And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette, I look behind at the fading byway, And see on its slope, now glistening wet, Distinctly yet Myself and a girlish form benighted In dry March weather. (‘At Castle Boterel’) ‘Yet’ is that finding of time. It is in very the midst of the sentence and the poem the lever, the resisting means, by which Hardy turns the benighted past into something distinct in the light of memory, transforming the present rain (so different from the ‘dry March weather’ he recalls) into something ‘glistening’ with emotion too. Rhyme here is, as Bergson might put it, a means of creating out of necessity an instrument of freedom: ‘to make a machine which should triumph over mechanism’.20 Creativity here consists not in creating wholly new things but in no more and no less than moving existing things into a new place, a new relation, a new electro-magnetic field. For as Samuel Butler intuited, in refinement of Hering: Ideas and actions seems almost to resemble matter and force in respect of the impossibility of originating or destroying them; nearly all that are, are memories of other ideas and actions, transmitted but not created, disappearing but not perishing.21 There are no new actions, no free imaginations created out of nothing: there are only memories, thoughts forgotten and revived under circumstances like those which originally brought them into being, or, alternatively, recalled and reworked in the light of new contexts. Clifford said that the parallelism between body and mind was like the analogy of structure between a spoken sentence and the same sentence written, two unalike things each none the less made up of the same basic elements. When Hardy wrote and felt his own words ‘call to me, call to me’, there was just such a parallelism between what his hand wrote in front of him and what his nerves spoke to him behind his forehead: the two before and behind his

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forehead were tied by the memories that, passing through him, both fuelled the words and were reactivated by them. ‘Distinctly yet’. It was as if even while his eyes saw the writing of his sentences, his nerves heard and registered the inner temporal meanings of the lines, played off against the ongoing movement of present grammar and structure. For so it is in ‘Your Last Drive’ when the line-endings function like time-bands, crossed and re-crossed by retrospective narrative-sentences that yet seem unbelievable: Here by the moorway you returned, And saw the borough lights ahead That lit your face—all undiscerned To be in a week the face of the dead, And you told of the charm of that haloed view That never again would beam on you. And on your left you passed the spot Where eight days later you were to lie, And be spoken of as one who was not; Beholding it with a heedless eye As alien from you, though under its tree You soon would halt everlastingly. The last two lines of the first stanza and the first two lines of the second are experientially impossible sentences which, like Einstein’s relativity, make Hardy’s head seem to spin even while, craftsman-like, he continued doggedly writing them. This was a man who in writing sat at the very heart of the relation of mind and body, of the counterpoint between sequential time and dynamic memory, of the separated connection between verbal and neural patternings. It was exactly the right place, biologically, for poetry to exist, if it was to attempt a further creative leap in evolution. And yet though Hardy could recreate his memories, he could not use his memories to recreate his life or himself. In ‘Your Last Drive’ he can only imagine his wife wryly foreseeing his belated repentance: True: never you’ll know. And you will not mind. But shall I then slight you because of such? Dear ghost, in the past did you ever find The thought ‘What profit?’ move me much? Yet abides the fact indeed the same.

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He found no lever by which the mind could turn itself around, rather than just back. The poetic gift felt to Hardy like a half-broken biological promise, a neurasthesia in the face of the still abiding facts of the prosaic world. The legacy from the period 1789 to 1914 that Hardy leaves behind him is this: that like a half-promise itself, memory exists exactly on the borderline of human creativity, poised between the possibilities of regression or renewal. The first function of memory is to halffree human beings from living merely transiently in linear time, half-free them by offering itself as a mental holding-ground in between past and present, conscious and unconscious, inside and outside. But I say half-free because of the fear that Hardy represents: that though memory may provide a dimension other than linear time, it may be a dimension within which, even so, our consciousness has to register how much linear time still determines what we are.

Chapter 6

Twisting Memory from Eliot to Eliot Rick Rylance

I have called this chapter ‘twisting’ because in it I wish to twist a number of ideas around T.S.Eliot’s early poem ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ and then unravel the tangle back forty years to the others in the three or four decades around the turn of the century. It suggests new frames of reference, but also tries to revision a general narrative for these theories. It charts a crisis in ideas of memory coincident with modernism, but insists that the crisis does not lie in some sudden break from the Victorians. Real histories, like memories, are not processional. Nor are they stories of deliverance. They are convoluted and dispersed like experience itself, and the contexts we attribute in them are often sinewy and contingent. The organization as well as the substance of this chapter tries to recognize these facts. ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ was begun in 1911 and published in 1915. It was Eliot’s first British publication. The poem is obviously ‘about’ memory—a topic to which it repeatedly returns—though quite what it has to say about it takes some teasing out. This is partly because the literary strategy avoids clear argument. But it is also because the poem is enmeshed in complex debates within philosophical psychology about the role, status and constitution of memory as a psychological faculty. None the less, ‘Rhapsody’ is usually read as a poem of ‘modernist’ accidie in Eliot’s distinctive manner. Its apparent formal dis-organization, the isolation of the central consciousness and the debris-strewn, urban setting locate it so. Ending on a note of humbling banality (it is perhaps the first major poem to use the word ‘tooth-brush’), its conclusion juxtaposes empty daytime routine—acerbically called ‘life’—with the repressed turmoil of the night. No explicit preference for light or dark—soul— destroying banality or in the context of theories of memory developed 98

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by psychologists and soul-tormenting rambling—is indicated. Instead, the poem describes a debilitating spiritual and psychological oscillation characteristic of Eliot’s influential version of modernity. A number of critics (Lyndall Gordon, A.C.Moody and Piers Gray, for example1) read ‘Rhapsody’ as Eliot’s reply to Henri Bergson, whose lectures Eliot attended in Paris in 1910. Bergson’s Matière et Mémoire of 1896 had argued that memories constitute the human soul and thereby transfigure the quotidian self. ‘Rhapsody’, on this reading, is about the failure of such transcendence and with it a major nineteenth-century tradition of Romantic thought. In Eliot’s poem, memory is unregenerative, incoherent, arbitrary and banal: Midnight shakes the memory As a madman shakes a dead geranium.2 ‘Rhapsody’ can thus be understood as an exercise in philosophical bathos and anti-Romantic sarcasm. This is certainly one aspect of the poem, but there are other intellectual contexts in play. Shortly after drafting the first version of ‘Rhapsody’, Eliot began his doctoral thesis on the Oxford philosopher F.H.Bradley. Bradley was a leading figure in the so-called ‘idealist revival’ in British philosophical psychology, one of whose aims was the refutation of the materialistically grounded psychology which had grown in influence in Britain since the mid-century. The intellectual resources of the new psychological materialism came from an amalgam of knowledge traditions alien to idealism. These included the associationist-sensationalist tradition of empiricist psychology stemming from Locke, recent findings in the bio-medical sciences, early brain research, and, in the 1860s, evolutionary biology. Crucial to the development of these ideas were important members of George Eliot’s circle such as Alexander Bain, T.H.Huxley, Herbert Spencer and her partner G.H.Lewes. They represented a new and, for some, abrasive intellectual formation in Victorian Britain whose major intellectuals were often from provincial backgrounds, frequently lower-middle or working class in origin and unaffiliated to the major universities.3 They were religious sceptics, liberal or radical in politics, and their embrace of new ideas prospered in the re-formation of intellectual careers which accompanied the growth in prestige of scientific opinion. For intellectual and political reasons, therefore, their work made traditionalists uncomfortable, including F.H.Bradley and T.S.Eliot.

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Bradley opposed the new psychology by resisting explanations of human phenomena derived from natural science, especially physiology. He believed that such explanations threatened religious and cultural values and compromised humanity’s special dignity and potential in the order of Creation. He objected to the atomization of mental life into processes based upon physiological functions and the rudimentary mental operations, and he maintained a psychological taxonomy which privileged the independence of the higher faculties such as memory, ratiocination, judgement, faith and self-reflection. These alone, he believed, constituted the special mode of existence of human beings.4 These arguments have in common an anxiety about the loss of established order. Opposition to the ‘levelling-down’ of the higher faculties to their physiological base is accompanied by castigation of threats to cultural, religious and political authority. Like many opponents of the new psychology, Bradley was a severe conservative, and for him the issues posed by the new work were ones of sovereignty: of philosophy (in a certain tradition) over the upstart discipline of psychology, for example, or of religious faith over corrosive rationalism, or of the traditional centres of learning over the dispersed community of scientists and auto—didacts gaining in influence about him. The political association, in many minds, between some aspects of the new physiological psychology and ‘French materialism’ (some of the pathbreaking research on physiological structures and mechanisms had been undertaken in France) buttressed the case. In one of his essays on memory Bradley asks his reader to choose between ‘monarchy and chaos’.5 He has in mind the sovereignty of Oxford philosophy, but the metaphor is readily understood in a general sense. Central to Bradley’s idealist psychology was Immediate Experience’, a concept he found in Hegel. Immediate Experience represents for Bradley an original plenitude. Rich and momentarily comprehensive, it is the founding moment in human development from which we gradually decline. Our adult experience is therefore composed, for Bradley, of the decaying relics of abundance. His problem as a psychologist, therefore, is to map his way beyond its loss; his problem as a moralist is to give hope and significance to this entropic condition. He does these things through the prospect of psycho-metaphysical reward. The riches of Immediate Experience are eventually recouped in what he terms ‘the Absolute’, the goal of both the ideal community and human maturity. Bradley held that the exercise of will-power, reason, judgement and moral choice enables consciousness to recover its Absolute reward.

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It is easy to see the connection between this theory and Christian orthodoxy. It is also easy to see how it answers social fears. In psychological terms it accepts disorder, but finds reparation in the authority of the higher faculties. In social and moral terms, it provides security against disorder by investing sovereignty in traditional institutions, as Bradley argued in his first book Ethical Studies (1876).6 It is not difficult, therefore, to see why Bradley appealed to a poet of conservative temperament who had just written, in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, an early masterpiece of psychological disturbance. Like Bradley, the poem highlights issues of order and disorder, meaninglessness and significance, disarray and recovery—though its reparations are a good deal less certain. Bradley’s theory of memory has two parts. The first is that human memory has nothing to do with what he calls ‘basal’ mechanisms such as the reflex arc in physiology, routines of habit formation, or the behaviour of animals.7 The second proposition is that memory is not a retrieval of past mental states or contents, but an ideal construction. Acts of memory, he argues, although to some degree constituted by past experience, owe their meaning to the continuity of the self towards the future. In Bradley’s schema, the mind continually posits an ‘ideal identity’ between past and future and this is the act of memory. We remember forwards, he arrestingly puts it, not backwards.8 Experience, therefore, cannot be thought to possess a separate, ontologically—independent existence, and memory is not simple retrieval: ‘We have no memory until that which is reproduced is ideally separated from and is ideally connected with my present.’9 Memory, therefore, is an ideal, consistent formation. Bradley avoids exemplifying these ideas and his language is light on the materializations of metaphor. This mirrors the thrust of the argument which demands coherence, not turbulence. ‘Memory itself, he writes, ‘is subject to the control of a higher criterion’ than experience. This criterion is the need to ‘order and harmonise our world’.10 In fact, when metaphors are introduced they frequently tangle up the argument; for example: ‘The current of our lives and thoughts in short runs opposite to the stream of mere event.’11 It is hard to navigate waters where currents and streams flow in opposite directions. As a result, the argument is pressed to a level of ideal construction and abstract consciousness. What these contrary, metaphorical waters reveal, however, is Bradley’s acute sense of both the frailty of the special human faculties like memory, and the need to defend their integrity in unstable mental environments.

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Objections can be made to this theory of memory from the viewpoint of Bradley’s opponents in the rival psychological school. Not only does the theory ignore the body and its neurological system, it also ignores other people. Memory, for Bradley, is only ever inward and individual. It is separated from any intersubjective contact whose rewarding interplay and limiting determinations alike are emphasized by theorists like Lewes or a novelist like George Eliot. Bradley s theory also presents a rather circular system, a loop of identification between past, present and future in which conflicts and contradictions, repressions and desires, are brushed aside. Again, there is an important difference here from the historically and intersubjectively oriented account of memory to be found in George Eliot, Lewes and others which will be described later in this chapter. They held that the past is structurally formative of present identity, but we know this because we are no longer wholly what we were. For the George Eliot circle, change is crucial. We can know the past, they argue, by virtue of its difference from us.l2 In his doctoral thesis and related work written either side of the First World War, T.S.Eliot approved Bradley’s views, including those on memory. The conceptual architecture of some well-known critical essays, for instance, is strikingly similar to key Bradleyan propositions. In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) the relationship between the past monuments of European literary culture and modern work resembles the negotiations between past and present in Bradley’s theory of personal memory. They form a ‘simultaneous order’.13 Similarly, Eliot’s influential speculation in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921) that English history has fallen into a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ since the early seventeenth century, replays on a grander scale Bradley’s notion of the original plenitude and subsequent loss of Immediate Experience. Nevertheless, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley, the published form of Eliot’s doctoral thesis written between 1914 and 1916, appears somewhat anxious about these formulations. Eliot endorsed the fundamental scheme, and the cultural attitudes to which it is related, but continued to ponder problematic areas. He is, for instance, concerned about the germ of epistemological scepticism to be found in Bradley’s conception of memory: In short, it appears that the past in the sense in which it is supposed to be recalled, in popular psychology, simply never

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existed; the past lived over is not memory, and the past remembered was never lived.14 Ideas about the evanescence of knowledge, and the floating relationship between truth and experience, haunt Eliot’s career. Four Quartets, for instance, is in one sense an extended meditation upon them. However, though late work like the Quartets found transcendental solutions to the problems, the thesis on Bradley is not quite able to take this confident step, and the integrative hierarchy of mental forces posited by Bradley does not quite capture Eliot’s firm commitment, despite the formalities of agreement. Eliot’s language is, in fact, sometimes rather too demure. For example, a characteristically assertive Bradleyan description pictures the mind dramatically riding life as it comes ‘wave on wave out of the future’.15 But if Bradley’s psychology is in this respect heroic, Eliot’s is etiolated, wavering, Prufrockian. In Knowledge and Experience he writes of the ‘instinctive selection and exclusion’ which is ‘characteristic of the human personality at its highest’,16 and of the way the will can reinforce this rather prim if spontaneous activity.17 Such statements are scarcely compelling. The mind, for Eliot, appears hollow, awkward and uncoordinated, deeply unsure of the links it can make within itself, and between itself and others. These links include acts of memory and the processing of perceptual data: ‘I can connect/ Nothing with nothing’ as The Waste Land has it.18 The revealing oddity of this statement lies in the positive form of its proposition (compare ‘I can’t connect anything with anything’ which might, at least, be a lament for lost immediacy). This, also, is the mood created in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’. I have four observations to make about ‘Rhapsody’. The first is that, though the poem proposes memory as its subject, it in fact cancels or neutralizes the distinctions between past and present, memory and perception, to such an extent that readers are left unsure what such categories might mean. Memory may be apostrophized at the close, but the body of the poem demonstrates that the faculty barely exists as a coherent structure. For instance, it is hard to say whether a particular image is a product of remembering, observation or fantasy (the various utterances of the street-lamp are examples). As in Bradley, therefore, it is the present, the point at which stimuli become conscious, which is the crucial category. In the poem this is signalled by the clock ticking its tiny round from twelve to four. Second, many of these images are calculated to leave the reader

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uncertain how to place, understand or evaluate them. The woman in the doorway in the second stanza is a good example: Half-past one, The street-lamp sputtered, The street-lamp muttered, The street-lamp said, ‘Regard that woman Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door Which opens on her like a grin. You see the border of her dress Is torn and stained with sand, And you see the corner of her eye Twists like a crooked pin.’19 Many professional commentators, and thousands of undergraduates, call this woman a prostitute for no reason that is explicit in the text. The professionals are perhaps led by a knowledge that Eliot used CharlesLouis Philippe’s 1901 novel of Parisian low-life Bubu de Montparnasse as a source, but close readers have no such excuses. The woman may be putting out the milk or the cat—which appears later—and her apparent dishevelment is no different in tone from anything else seen by this jaundiced observer. What such details do—what they ‘perform’—is interesting. One thing they seem to do is to create a critical-interpretative ‘false memory’ as readers leave the poem with a prostitute in mind. Such ‘false memories’, of course, enact a basic tenet of Bradley’s thinking on memory—that memories are often indistinguishable from interpretations. But I do not think that Bradley would be happy with the implications of this. Third, although the poem appears to be about a mind freewheeling, in fact the poem is more concerned with blockage. We have remarked one such moment already at the interpretative level—the categories of memory and perception, past and present, do not hold—but a second concerns the way the poem renders the impenetrability of other minds. The text says something to this effect in stanza four (‘I could see nothing behind that child’s eye’), but more strikingly it enacts the point in its poetic demeanour. Though it ostensibly lays open the speaker’s thoughts, in fact what is presented is so inscrutable that intersubjective communion between reader and speaker is limited. The reader’s only recourse appears to be to the forensic scrutiny which gives Prufrock the shivers (‘And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,/When I am pinned and

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wriggling on the wall’20), and which Bradley and other anti-materialists deplored as a mode of psychological analysis. The poem therefore confronts the reader with an interpretative double-bind. One is either excluded from the poem by the recalcitrance of its subjectivity, or indulges a form of analysis to which the poem is inimical and which in any case is made exceeding difficult because the categories ordinarily pro—posed in such an analysis—the perception/memory distinction, for instance—do not hold. The poem’s use of pronouns provides an example. According to Emile Benveniste, pronouns are ‘shifters’, stable linguistic markers which none the less accommodate infinitely variable referents. (We all say ‘I’, though actually we refer to different persons.21) In one sense therefore, pronouns are ineluctably inter-subjective. When first-person literary works present an ‘I’, for instance, the pronoun can represent a point of identification between reader and speaker and hence, it can be argued, moments of sympathetic enlargement. George Eliot, for example, often works for this effect in her direct addresses to the reader, and it is a key point in her ethical justification for realism. ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, however, works in the opposite way. It refuses entry to a mental world twisted violently away from the reader. At the close of the poem, ‘I’ turns into ‘you’ which may appear a moment of contact between reader and speaker. But if it is, its only purpose is to scorn the reader’s banality. The turn from ‘I’ to ‘you’ is, therefore, an aggressive, cynical flirtation as the speaker continues his (it could even be her) conversation with him- (or her-) self. Finally, the poem is full of a kind of taunting uselessness, not just in the scrap and debris which constitute its imagery, but also in its redundant detail and poetic manoeuvres. The ‘crowd of twisted things’ which decorates the poem is quite deliberately twisted away from the reader, frustrating meaning. This includes the things of memory which are withdrawn to a private circuit of undecidable relations between past and present, memory, perception and fantasy. So one casualty of the poem could be said to be the efficacy of the processes of memory in Bradley’s theory. The poem supports Bradley in so far as it denies the categorical distinction between past and present in memories, and reinforces the essential privacy of the self. But it also implies a failure of the ordering set of mind which is the cornerstone of Bradley’s psychology, that is, his faith in the organizing authority of the mind’s present judgements made by the higher faculties.

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‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, therefore, is not just an antiBergsonian squib. It seems much more an examination of memory’s failure to ground an integral selfhood, a sense of personal identity, a set of orientating convictions or a secure epistemology—all those things, indeed, which memory performs in major nineteenth-century writers from Wordsworth onwards and of which tradition Bradley’s work is, in one sense, a late if precarious version. And this is the particular intellectual anxiety in Eliot’s poem. It simultaneously deploys Bradleyan ideas, and corrodes them. Written within the philosophical precincts of late nineteenth-century idealism, the poem is also about its exhaustion. And, to state the obvious, this is not a poem about rebellion. It is a poem about submission. The closing note is of resigned preparation for a ‘life’ of listless automatism with the modern conveniences of a toothbrush and a servant to clean one’s boots. The self is irrecoverably split between the personality of the night and the personality of the day as grotesquely as Jekyll was split from Hyde twenty years previously. But this is not a matter of simple epochal mood. It has a precise cultural bearing and point of reference in the history of psychology. The filing cabinet was invented, in America, in 1892. It was one of a number of inventions which transformed the communication and information-storage practices of the modern office in this period (others included the telephone, the typewriter and the time-and-motion study). Eliot himself, of course, was about to begin his career as an office worker, first at Lloyds and then at Faber and Faber, and in The Waste Land became an early laureate of commuterism. I would like to suggest that it is not just Bradley and Bergson who are at large in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ but a third body of psychological theory, and a third model of memory. This third theory is implied in the poem’s opening lines when memory is described as the spatial organization of recorded information, as in a filing cabinet: Dissolve the floors of memory And all its clear relations, The divisions and precisions.22 This kind of imagery was used widely in the early decades of the new century to promote a new conception of the mind with far-reaching consequences. The following quotation is from a popular encyclopaedia of the 1930s aimed at children. It makes explicit the analogy between memory and a filing cabinet.

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Imagine your brain as the executive branch of a big business… Seated at the big desk in the headquarters office is the General Manager—your conscious self—with telephone lines running to all departments… Suppose you are walking absent-mindedly in the street and meet your friend Johnny Jones. He calls your name, you stop, say ‘Hullo!’ and shake hands. It all seems very simple, but let’s see what happened during that time in your brain. The instant Johnny Jones called your name, your Hearing Manager reported the sound, and your Camera Man flashed a picture of him to the camera room. ‘Watch out!’ came the signal to your desk, and at the same instant both messages were laid in front of you. As quick as lightning your little office boy, Memory, ran to his filing case and pulled out a card. The card told you that that voice and that face belonged to a person named Johnny Jones and that he was your friend. Instantly you began issuing orders.23 It might be amusing to describe the action of ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ in these terms, but the two pieces have more in common than imagery. Both, for instance, accept that one’s first reaction to others should be guarded antagonism: ‘Watch out!’, there’s Johnny Jones—or a woman in a doorway. In his 1927 essay on Bradley for the Times Literary Supplement, written three years after Bradley’s death, Eliot praised him as a spokesman for ‘catholic, civilised and universal’ philosophy against its old adversary ‘crude, raw and provincial’ utilitarianism.24 The essay ends by setting Bradley in opposition to J.B.Watson, the founder of Behaviourist psychology and modern inheritor of a utilitarian psychology that was increasingly influential in popular psychological discourse, especially in the business world. Watson’s classic essay ‘Psychology as a Behaviourist Views It’ was first published in 1913. It is thus exactly contemporary with Eliot’s ‘Rhapsody’. In it Watson argues that Behaviourism’s value lies in its applications for ‘the educator, the physician, the jurist and the business man’. The aim of psychology is ‘the control of human behaviour’ to make it more adaptively efficient in the work place, especially the new ‘vocational bureaus [sic] which really apply psychology’, such as advertising and what we would now call public relations.25 Watson’s view of memory is bluntly instrumentalist. The point of studying memory, he argues, is to understand the habit-forming repertoires which adapt workers to their environments. Seven years later, he abandoned academic work for a career as an advertising executive.

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The re-modelling of memory, mind and identity proposed by Watson was widespread during the period of early corporate capitalism as can be seen from Figure 6.1. This is an example of the new mental topography designed to explain brain mechanisms and psychological functions to popular audiences.26 The entire cerebral structure now resembles business headquarters. There is a clear division of labour between operators, managers and superintendents, and each member of the ensemble is as smoothly adapted to the cheerful performance of tasks as Walt Disney’s seven dwarfs. At least two things may strike you about this illustration. One is the absence of women in the workforce, and the other is the absence of memory. Memory has been entirely assimilated to the performance of behavioural routines, and its significance for personal history has evaporated. This is to ‘dissolve the floors of memory’ indeed. It is a radical downsizing of the conceptual architecture of the self proposed by the Romantic tradition. It is also, disconcertingly, a kind of smartened-up echo of what happens in Eliot’s poem. In both, memory vanishes—though here corporate solidarity replaces the grotesque contortions of Eliot’s night on the streets. The ending of Eliot’s poem appears critical of the kind of automization of life shown in Figure 6.1 and Behaviourist theory. Yet the riddle is that Eliot also abolishes memory as a basis for human identity and psychological integrity. His philosophical and political allegiances oppose those of the Behaviourists, but memory still slips away, and Eliot’s exhaustion of Bradleyan idealism mirrors the ‘piracy’ of psychological theory by Behaviourism. (This is Eliot’s own way of putting it at the end of the 1927 essay on Bradley.27) In dissolving memory, utilitarianism and its opposite come merely to match each other. It seems that Behaviourism and Bradleyan idealism both partake in a general crisis in conceptions of memory around the turn of the century in which memory is withdrawn from the central role it performed in much nineteenth-century psychology and literature. The idealists removed memory into a more general theory of transcendent consciousness. But even for a sympathizer like Eliot, when the authority of transcendent consciousness is doubted, partly under the social pressures alluded to at the close of ‘Rhapsody’, the conceptual and experiential disarray evident in the poem results. At the same time, in functionalist psychologies like Behaviourism, and cognate work such as Francis Galton’s eugenics, memory becomes a mere label for behavioural routine. Galton’s Inquiries Into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883) exploits bastard versions of the new

Memory from Eliot to Eliot

Figure 6.1 The conscious brain as business headquarters

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physiological psychology and evolutionary theory to classify ‘human stock’ with a view to supplanting ‘inefficient strains’ with a more serviceable population. A factitious evolutionary teleology is used to legitimate the advantage of certain social or racial ‘types’, and neurological reductionism eliminates the complex human and social experience of memory and other faculties. Galton writes: The physiological basis of memory is simple enough in its broad outlines. Whenever any group of brain elements has been excited by a sense impression, it becomes, so to speak, tender, and liable to be easily thrown again into a similar state of excitement. If the new cause of excitement differs from the original one, a memory is the result. Whenever a single cause throws different groups of brain elements simultaneously into excitement, the result must be a blended memory.28 The terminological vagary spurs the breezy reductionism (what, exactly, is a ‘brain element’?). The effect is to turn physiology into a vulgar mechanism in a way feared by G.H.Lewes, T.H.Huxley and others from the 1860s onwards. A conception of memory such as that held by George Eliot—one in which complex issues of personal experience are correlated with observations about both body states and social relations without explanatory priority—vanishes because qualitative distinctions between kinds of memory are lost and with them a more scrupulous language to articulate them. Any full history of the fortunes of the idea of memory in this period would need also to take account of, at least, the contribution of William James and developments in psychoanalysis, where conscious memory becomes a mask for, or residue of, deeper processes of repression, displacement, condensation and fantasy which then become the centre of enquiry. But instead I want to end this chapter by discussing in some detail the rival tradition of enquiry about memory against which T.S.Eliot and Bradley reacted with such hostility, that associated with the new materialistic psychology of the George Eliot circle. I want to do so because this is, in a sense, a story about a forgetting. Much of this work has fallen into neglect partly due to the joint myths of the utilitarian—idealist stalemate and the dramatic ‘modernist’ rupture which T.S.Eliot and others promoted. This, then, is an attempt to start the narrative in a different place and to restore connections back to the long nineteenth century with which this book is concerned. For this is a body of theory as different from

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Behaviourism as it is from Bradley and I offer it as a forgotten ancestor of some very recent thinking on the problem of memory. In the last, unfinished volume of Problems of Life and Mind, written in the mid-1870s, G.H.Lewes criticized conventional images of memory based on storage-retrieval models. In essential respects, therefore, he is criticizing the conception of memory also targeted by Bradley and the idealists. Storage-retrieval models define memory as a circuit in which a piece of the past is recorded, stored and then recovered with its fundamental forms unaltered. Lewes criticized the metaphors commonly used in this line of thought: pictures in a gallery, the photographer’s plate, telegraphy and so on (had he lived he would have added the filing cabinet and the computer). These metaphors imply that acts of memory are largely mechanical, essentially passive and occur in stable-state systems. For Lewes, however, they cannot give a satisfactory sense of the mind as a dynamic structure, partly because the models they use are inorganic. In fact, Lewes remarks, the idea that memory is ‘the retention of impressions’ is ‘only a materialistic form of the spiritualistic hypothesis that the revival of past feelings is the unveiling of veiled images’, despite the fact that its metaphors are drawn from the latest technology.29 As we shall see shortly, Francis Galton’s work provides an example of the error Lewes here identifies, but Lewes himself was more interested in promoting more complex models. Metaphors, he continually insists, are heuristic, not representational, and those he chooses suggest three things: that the mind is a complexly related, interactive energy system in dynamic relations with the body; that it exists in a material medium which both determines and enables its features; and that memories are processes and not fixed entities. Examples of the kind of image he uses include the transmission of waves through a liquid, a trail of gunpowder that can be ignited anywhere along its length, the play of forces around an object in a magnetic field, the energy exchanges performed in an engine and the movement of atoms in heat loss or chemical decomposition. Lewes’s conceptual architecture for memory, therefore, is different to that described elsewhere in this chapter, and it presents a direct contrast to that used by Eliot in ‘Rhapsody’. The language of both writers, for instance, resists false coherence, and both make use of ideas of dissolution and entropy. But Eliot does little to suggest significant transformation or recombination, and his ‘crowd of twisted things’ is one that has lost structure and energy of relationship: skeletons, rust, dead branches, people who are on the way to

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becoming objects themselves. By contrast, Lewes and others stressed not the display of twisted objects, but active processes of twisting and recombination. The point can be illustrated from George Eliot, who shared Lewes’s views: In the first few minutes when Dorothea looked out she felt nothing but the dreary oppression; then came keen remembrance, and turning away from the window she walked around the room. The ideas and hopes which were living in her mind when she first saw this room nearly three months before were present now only as memories: she judged them as we judge transient and departed things. All existence seemed to beat with a lower pulse than her own, and her religious faith was a solitary cry, the struggle out of nightmare in which every object was withering and shrinking away from her. Each remembered thing in the room was disenchanted, was deadened as an unlit transparency, till her wandering gaze came to a group of miniatures, and there at last she saw something which had gathered new breath and meaning: it was the miniature of Mr Casaubon’s aunt Julia, who had made the unfortunate marriage—of Will Ladislaw’s grandmother. Dorothea could fancy that it was alive now—the delicate woman’s face which yet had a headstrong look, a peculiarity difficult to interpret. Was it only her friends who thought her marriage unfortunate? or did she herself find it out to be a mistake, and taste the salt bitterness of her tears in the merciful silence of the night? What breadths of experience Dorothea seemed to have passed over since she first looked at this miniature! She felt a new companionship with it, as if it had an ear for her and could see how she was looking at it. Here was a woman who had known some difficulty about marriage. Nay, the colours deepened, the lips and chin seemed to get larger, the hair and eyes seemed to be sending out light, the face was masculine and beamed on her with that full gaze which tells her on whom it falls that she is too interesting for the slightest movement of her eyelid to pass unnoticed and uninterpreted. The vivid presentation came like a pleasant glow to Dorothea: she felt herself smiling, and turning from the miniature sat down and looked up as if she were again talking to a figure in front of her. But the smile disappeared as she went on meditating, and at last she said aloud— ‘Oh, it was cruel to speak so! How sad—how dreadful!’30

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Again, there are points of connection between this passage from Middlemarch and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’. Both deal with experiences of—as this passage has it—objects ‘withering and shrinking away’, of disenchantment and the pressures of meaninglessness and crushing banality. Both also blur distinctions between memory and perception. But the differences are yet more striking. Memory in this passage is not the retrieval of stored images— or, at least, it is not only this. Nor is it a haphazard collocation of impressions. It is a mobile, multi-layered process in which there are different stages and kinds of activity. There are memories within memories, and the boundaries between these are percolated by pressures of emotion and desire. Memory is also intersubjective. It is able to have reference to the experience of others and this shapes personal interpretation. Memory is revisable too, and, most importantly, it prompts forms of action which validate the integrity of the recollection and the self experiencing it. George Eliot co-ordinates acts of remembering, perception, fantasy and erotic reverie to give a dynamic account of memory.31 It seems to me likely that she had a source for this passage in the work of Sir Henry Holland, who was a member of an informal circle of advanced medical opinion centred on W.B.Carpenter in the 1840s and 1850s interested in psycho-somatic phenomena and the therapeutic applications of the new psycho-physiological research.32 Holland’s work was well known to Eliot and Lewes, not least because he was their doctor. His Chapters on Mental Physiology (1852) was used by Lewes in The Physiology of Common Life (1859–60) and Problems of Life and Mind, and Eliot took notes from it in her Middlemarch notebooks.33 In his book Holland discusses the way ‘past images and memories rise up unbidden to perplex both sensations and acts by mingling with them, without control or direction of the rational will’.34 His illustration concerns the way we recognize someone already known to us in a daguerreotype. The conventional account would have it that we match the silhouette against our memory to produce the likeness. But, Holland argues, because a daguerreotype is only an outline, the mind has actively to supply as many details as it recollects, and because it does so other mental energies are allowed into play. This is exactly the process described for Dorothea in Middlemarch, and it represents a challenge to conventional storageretrieval models, and ideas of ideally constructed memories in Bradley. Holland, Lewes and George Eliot are interested in memory’s dialectical structure as it shuttles between past and present, desire

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and fact, self and other. Memory, as we would now say, is a ‘fuzzy’ system for them. But it is its shuttling instability which in fact enables cognitive development, acts of moral sympathy and a realist epistemology. The sensationalist brutalism of Francis Galton provides a useful point of comparison. To support his theories of human ‘types’, Galton developed a method he called ‘composite portraiture’ (see Figure 6.2). He photographed a selection of representative faces. These he then rephotographed onto the same plate using very brief exposures in order to superimpose the outlines one upon another. In this way, he believed, he could ‘bring into evidence all the traits in which there is agreement, and to leave but a ghost of a trace of individual peculiarities’.35 What was typical was scored into the image by repetition; what was untypical was left faint. An artist then reproduced the composite portrait in the form illustrated. Galton’s method is open to criticisms similar to those made of Gall’s phrenological faculties by John Stuart Mill and others earlier in the century.36 Specifically, the taxonomy of social types it uses is tendentious, not least because it mixes together unlike categories (for example, the consumptive and the criminal); the criteria on which individuals are selected to represent these types are also inexplicit and probably equally factitious; and the language used to describe them is crudely reductive. Environmental factors in behaviour are also ignored, and the method assumes a direct correlation between surface appearance and behaviour. Composite portraiture petrifies humans. Its pictures are static; its individuals eliminated. It cannot incorporate change and it removes difference. It cannot be intersubjective because all subjects are alike. It is the exact opposite of the dynamism of Dorothea’s mind before her miniatures in Middlemarch. And it is easy to see that Galton’s neurologically reductionist account of memory quoted earlier is a transposed version of his obsession with cameras. His ‘brain elements’ are the photographic plate’s chemicals; their source of ‘excitement’ is light; and the distinction between single and ‘blended’ memory is the difference between single and superimposed images. It is the camera, and the range of social attitudes and theories it unconsciously implies in Galton’s work, that holds together the physiological speculation about memory. The hidden camera in Galton performs a function not unlike the hidden filing cabinet in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’. Both produce a role for memory of passive instrumentality. Galton has a representative significance for this argument. The

Memory from Eliot to Eliot

Figure 6.2 Galton’s ‘composite portraiture’

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freeze-frames of his composite portraiture stare like gargoyles across the abject landscape of the stimulus-response, storage-retrieval, intensely predicted world of crude utilitarianism and its historical neighbours. George Eliot, Henry Holland, G.H.Lewes and others looked for a less-flat horizon. Theirs is a world of loops, curves and twists, and I see in it a significant forerunner of the sort of conceptual architecture now entertained by recent influential writers on memory such as Steven Rose and Gerald Edelman.37 With due allowance for their differences, all insist that human memory is both biological and cultural; that its components are historically constituted at both these levels; that it is intersubjective, developmental and open-ended; and that it is a transitive operation involving learning, categorization and re-categorization in which it is change and not repetition that governs its most significant operations. It is this line of enquiry— with its twisting, dialectical levels of explanation—that allows some of the most interesting, and most forgotten, of nineteenth-century conceptions of memory to be again remembered.

Part II

Writing and remembering Elegy, memorial, rhyme

Chapter 7

Gender and memory in post-Revolutionary women’s writing Gary Kelly

In the aftermath of the French Revolution crisis many women writers in Britain and elsewhere exploited conventional models of femininity and domesticity. They did so partly to avoid the opprobrium and defeminization that had attached to women’s writing on public and political issues during the Revolution debate of the 1790s.1 They also did so, however, to sustain the kinds of intervention in the public, political sphere that women writers had achieved through the oppositional, preRevolutionary literature of Sensibility and in the Revolution debate. PostRevolutionary women writers sustained or subsumed these achievements—paradoxically it may seem—by working largely within the re-emphasis on the domestic ideology that was a leading concern and characteristic of the Revolutionary aftermath.2 These writers did so by representing themselves and the role of women as social mediators, political reconcilers, and reproducers and custodians of cultural continuity. These were vital cultural roles and issues after a prolonged Revolutionary cataclysm that seemed to many to have radically undermined confidence in continuity and identity of all kinds—personal and social, cultural and temporal, national and imperial. In the Revolutionary aftermath the restoration of such confidence became a pressing and widespread concern in cultural production. The theme of memory proved especially useful during this restoration for developing a discourse of personal, social, cultural, historical, and national identity and continuity. Memory of various kinds became a focus both for a horrified fascination with ruptures in discourse and for a fervent quest for reparatory and therapeutic practices in subjectivity, society, culture, and politics. Like the post-Revolutionary reassertion of the domestic ideology, the development of a post-Revolutionary poetics of memory was quickly and actively exploited by women writers. Memory was of 119

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course a central topic in the Romantic movement. The contributions of male writers, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Scott, and De Quincey, to the construction of a post-Revolutionary or Romantic memory are well known. Almost forgotten, ironically, are the contributions to the post-Revolutionary poetics of memory made by women writers such as Joanna Baillie, Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, and Felicia Hemans, working respectively in drama, fiction, and poetry, the dominant ‘literary’ genres of the time. These women writers, and others, working in other, less ‘literary’ genres, capitalized on changing characterizations of the feminine to make distinctive, significant, and pioneering contribution to the post-Revolutionary poetics of memory. Memory has been treated variously as an individual psychological faculty,3 a private act,4 a public event,5 a form of collective knowledge,6 and a social discourse.7 In the p articular historical moment of the Revolutionary aftermath, memory was given certain social, cultural, and political uses in order to address an important and prolonged crisis in Briain. These uses of memory were, however, part of a longer history of memory as a social and cultural institution in what is now called modernization.8 Modernization in this sense may be described as the displacement of historic, ‘traditional’, apparently unchanging customary culture, social and economic relations, and political practices by practices of a self-conscious modernity, including apparently unlimited rational critique, social and cultural relativity, enlightened self-interest, the market, commercialized consumption, capitalism, civil society, meritocracy, philosophical sexism and racism, and the modern state, internalized in the individual subject. In customary culture memory often served to validate the actual or idealized condition of the present by constantly reshaping the past, or ‘tradition’, to justify or insist on the maintenance of ‘custom’, or certain forms of economic and social relations.9 In fact, custom was not a settled knowledge or set of social practices but a field of struggle between classes and groups with different, often incompatible material interests.10 During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a social coalition led by the gentry and assisted by members of the professional middle class, attacked custom under such pejorative renamings as ‘prejudice’, ‘superstitition’, and ‘ignorance’ in order to advance modernization in their own interests.11 By the latter part of the eighteenth century, a highly formalized and textualized form of memory—the discourse of history, or more particularly Enlightenment ‘philosophical history’—was used to

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advance modernization by incorporating a critique of both courtlyaristocratic and plebeian ‘unreason’, including forms of memory designated ‘custom’, ‘prejudice’, and ‘superstition’. During the Revolution and reform debates, however, memory was redeployed, notably by Edmund Burke, in defence of enlightened court government and upper-class hegemony against what were now represented as dehistoricized methods of analysis and theory used by what Burke represented as deracinated, self-interested, and irrational sections of the middle classes and their plebeian dupes and aristocratic abettors.12 In the Revolutionary aftermath, the association of Enlightenment critique with Revolutionary violence and reformist agitation and destabilization induced a reconstruction of memory during the late 1790s and first decades of the nineteenth century. The post-Revolutionary search for discourses of cultural repair, social reconciliation, political accommodation, and national and imperial unity created the need for a refiguring of memory. There were several major elements of this refiguring, some subsumed from pre-Revolutionary figurings. One aspect of memory could be described as ‘memories of class’,13 the adherence by individuals or groups to pre-modern social memory, especially of upper-class rank or plebeian customary ‘rights’. In either case, such memory is shown to be socially divisive and an obstacle to social conciliation and ‘progress’. By contrast, memories of a ‘heroic’ or socially harmonious past could be represented as an inspiration for the post-Revolutionary present, especially while Britain still faced the global challenge of Napoleonic militarist expansionism or postNapoleonic social alienation and conflict. Especially useful, however, was the representation of memory as the repository of a supposedly ‘national’ identity, culture, and history, to be used in the postRevolutionary struggle against external challenge and internal divisions.14 In this refiguration, memory as the basis of customary culture was subsumed in a new discourse merging eighteenth-century localism, regionalism, and antiquarianism in a continued but covert agenda of modernization. This movement involved invention of what later became known as folklore, or popular and plebeian knowledges and discourses that were steadily historicized, systematized, textualized, and fictionalized, and thus popularized within print culture.15 Thus the discourse of the now depoliticized ‘people’ was made the basis of a newly conceived ‘national’ identity, culture, history, literature, and imperial destiny.16 Most important, this ‘Romantic’ nationalism was designed to displace and eradicate

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customary culture and its memory as the basis of an alternative culture in which a plebeian political consciousness and culture could be developed and mobilized. Several major elements of this refiguring of memory were exploited—indeed, pioneered—by women writers. In part, these writers did so out of necessity. In the Revolutionary aftermath the discursive order, or set of social, cultural, and literary practices of the ‘reading public’, continued to be gendered, and in fact became more distinctly gendered. Women continued to be barred, by ‘nature’ and by social and cultural convention, from the public, political sphere, and from elevated, learned, and controversial genres. Immediately before and during the Revolution debate, women writers had exploited the oppositional potential of the feminized culture of Sensibility and the possibilities opened up by the Revolutionary moment to extend the range of their activities in this gendered discursive order.17 In counter-Revolutionary discourse such extension was contaminated politically by association with Revolutionary violence and reformist confrontation. A renewed insistence on the domestic ideology and domestic roles of women was part of that reaction. The culture of the Revolutionary aftermath, however, with its emphasis on repair, reconciliation, accommodation, and harmony provided new opportunities for women writers because women were historically and conventionally accepted as ‘naturally’ suited to such practices, though predominantly in the domestic and local sphere.18 Thus the post-Revolutionary re-emphasis on the domestic ideology and women’s limitation to the domestic sphere could be converted into a justification for women writers to merge the discourse of repair, reconciliation, and harmony with domesticity and localism and extend those discourses, implicitly or explicitly, into what was viewed as the public, political sphere. Furthermore, association of women with the domestic, the local, and the small community made women signficant figures in the continuation of customary memory, in the Revolutionary aftermath appropriated to the new ‘national’ culture, identity, and history in the various forms of what later was named folklore, including folksong. The evidence that the post-Revolutionary condition of Britain and Europe offered opportunities to women writers, despite re-emphasis on the domestic ideology and exclusion of women from the public, political sphere, is seen in the fact that several women writers took the lead in developing themes of repair, reconciliation, and harmony, centred in various ways on post-Revolutionary memory, and especially

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in regard to the figure of woman as repository or expert in appropriatable customary memory. Furthermore, in developing a postRevolutionary poetics of memory, women writers constructed a complex comprising memory, oblivion, and narrative within a representation of history as a field of struggle between masculine and feminine, martial and pacific, destructive and constructive, aggrandizing and victimized, selfish and selfless, impulsive and patient, courtlypopulist and genteel-bourgeois, Revolutionary and conservative forces. One of the first successful post-Revolutionary women writers was Joanna Baillie, whose first series of Plays on the Passions (1798) created a literary sensation when it was published. Baillie, like many other writers of the time, was concerned with the disruptive and destructive potential of ‘memories of class’, along with memories of race and religion. This kind of memory has two aspects: memories of rights and wrongs, leading to conflicts of class, race, religion, or nation; and memories of former greatness in culture, social preeminence, or political power. These aspects of memory are used by Baillie and other writers, both men and women, to represent what are seen as dangerous vestiges—memories—of both the preRevolutionary ancien régime and Revolutionary confrontation over ‘rights’ and social grievances. For example, one of the first of Baillie’s Plays on the Passions, ‘De Monfort’, centres on what was by that time a familiar aspect of the disruptive effects of memories of class, namely aristocratic ‘honour’, or sense of class superiority and social distance from others, especially those newly elevated by chance or merit—the same theme figures in Jane Austen’s satire on post-Revolutionary courtly arrogance and decadence, Persuasion. In Baillie’s play the protagonist is tormented by memories of the superior merit of the man whom he hates unto murder for such merit. The theme recurs in other of Baillie’s Plays on the Passions. The disabling power of memories of class is taken up and developed by Felicia Hemans, largely as a comment on the social and political rigidity that many thought had caused the Revolution in France and could cause a revolution in Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Baillie continued to work on this aspect of memory in subsequent series of Plays on the Passions. For example, in the second series (1802), The Election’ dramatizes, in comic rather than tragic form, the dangerous effects of ‘memories’ of class on the social border between lesser gentry and rising commercial bourgeoisie, in an explicitly political contest—the struggle between these classes for

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local dominance in the old regime of parliamentary representation. This struggle would create national crises often in the decades down to the Reform Bill of 1832. In her play, Baillie deals with the social and political antagonisms caused by memory of past social injuries and rights or by past social eminence and ‘honour’. She uses comic tone to gently mock and thus distance and relativize these dangerous memories, and she uses comic plot to represent a reconciliation of them. Baillie’s ‘Constantine Palaeologus; or, The Last of the Cæsars: A Tragedy’ (Miscellaneous Plays, 1804) represents the internal social conflicts of Constantinople in the days before the Turkish conquest. Here the last of the Byzantine emperors and his loyal followers are a vestige, or embodied memory, of the greatness that once was Rome, but that is about to be overwhelmed by forces both internal and external—upper-class corruption and self-interest and plebeian unreason within Constantinople and the apparently inexorable imperialist barbarism of the Turks. Significantly, female characters are instrumental in the plot of all these plays, for better or worse, thus pointing to the renewed emphasis in the Revolutionary aftermath on women’s central role in solidarities or weaknesses of family, class, nation, and empire. One of the first, most innovative, and popular (in the sense of widely read) novelistic treatments of post-Revolutionary memory was Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent. This experimental work was constructed in the crisis and turmoil of Revolutionary Ireland in the 1790s and published at the moment of founding the new United Kingdom in 1800. Edgeworth’s experiment was inspired by her father Richard Lovell Edgeworth and his comprehensive plan of modernizing Ireland under the leadership of the Anglo-Irish gentry informed by the ideas of the pre-Revolutionary English Midlands Enlightenment. The novel is based on the Edgeworth’s considerable knowledge, if not complete understanding, of the oral, communitarian culture and folk memory of their Irish tenants. The text of Castle Rackrent is designed to frame that memory in an authoritative—if at times also parodied—‘enlightened’ modernizing consciousness and knowledge. The text is presented as the edited and annotated written record of an Irish house-servant’s oral memorial of an unenlightened Anglo-Irish gentry family. The narrator, Thady Quirk, is clearly unreliable and the narrative is meant to be read ironically, as blame-by-praise. At the same time, the gentry family of the Rackrents is shown to be divided and self-destructive in large part because of its dependence on memories of its own social and legal claims as members of a particular class.

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Thady’s narrative is constructed according to the principles of what folklorists now identify as oral narrative, with the earlier generations, remotest in memory, receiving briefest treatment, and the recent generation, nearest in memory, receiving the most detailed. There are other features of oral narrative: repetitive form, personal voice and idiom, assertion of the narrator’s account as authoritative and common knowledge, that is, an assertion of customary memory. This narrative is set, however, in a complex framework of the ‘editor’s’ introduction and afterword, glossary, and explanatory notes. The ‘editor’s’ text purveys an implied consciousness, implicitly to be shared by the reader, that is enlightened, modernizing, condescendingly amused, and somewhat reflexive. The supposed temporal context is of conditions prevailing from time immemorial to the period just before the reform movement of the Anglo-Irish gentry in the 1780s, when the Edgeworths returned to Ireland. The text as a whole, then, represents customary memory and culture as mutually destructive to both unmodernized gentry and unmodernized common people. The text as a whole sets that premodern culture against Enlightenment modernization for economic and social development, and the ‘editor’ suggests that such development will be furthered by the political revolution of union between Ireland and Great Britain. Edgeworth faced difficulties in advancing this project, however. In practising the discourse of modernization in such an overtly political way she was transgressing gendered boundaries of discourse—a difficulty she accommodated by publishing anonymously and professing in private to be acting as her father’s agent, a role she was already fulfilling in a practical sense as his agent on the family estate.19 More unexpected was the reaction to Castle Rackrent. Though the work was well received, the reading public seemed amused, entertained, and charmed rather than warned, instructed, and motivated by the figure of pre-modern memory and culture embodied in the narrative of Thady Quirk. The construction of memory as nostalgia was already part of the postRevolutionary reflex in Romantic culture, disarming memory as history of cataclysm. Edgeworth did not try this experiment again, but henceforth narrativized the discourse of modernization and history-as-progress in fictions using the more conventional and controllable omniscient third-person narration (Popular Tales, 1801; ‘The Absentee’, in Tales of Fashionable Life, second series, 1812) or first-person narration by a courtly but reformable upper/middle-class character (‘Ennui’, in

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Tales of Fashionable Life, first series, 1809). The historically conscious omniscient third-person narrator was the one that Walter Scott would follow Edgeworth in adopting, with qualifications, in his hugely successful and globally influential modernizing fictions, the ‘Waverley Novels’. It seemed that customary memory and culture had to be more than just ‘edited’, framed, and brought within the middle-class discourses of writing and literature if it were to be successfully subsumed and directed for post-Revolutionary modernization and nationalism under the emergent social coalition of gentry and professional middle class. Thus Scott adopts various narratorial personae with the character of a historiographer of the Scottish Enlightenment—Scott’s own intellectual and cultural background. Scott does, however, frequently represent women as the repository of customary ‘folk’ culture, whether as the real-life sources for some of the ballads ‘collected’ in his first notable work, Border Minstrelsy (1802–3), or in such fictional—and socially disruptive—figures from different classes as the aristocratic Jacobite Flora MacIvor in Waverley (1814) or the social outcast Madge Wildfire in The Heart of Midlothian (1818). Scott both subordinates women as repositories of pre-modern memory and represents them as sources of popular knowledges but also of disruptive energies, like the plebeian crowds of Revolutionary Europe, or the march of the women of Paris on Versailles in October 1789, famously treated by Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France. Nevertheless, middle-class women writers could capitalize on a conventional characterization of women as somehow more familiar with the kinds of local knowledges possessed by the ‘folk’. For example, one of Scott’s predecessors in this line, whom he did not acknowledge as an influence, was another Irish woman writer, Sydney Owenson, later Lady Morgan. Owenson subsumes the premodern, customary cultural margin again, though differently from Edgeworth, in her series of novels of Ireland and other unmodernized nations. Unlike Edgeworth, Owenson does not try to discredit or displace customary memory by Enlightenment modernizing discourse, but rather in a more thoroughly post-Revolutionary move represents the sublation of customary memory in a modernizing project of dialectic and reconciliation. Owenson, too, used her father’s knowledge of customary ‘folk’ culture to inform her fictions, but in this case the father was a participant in, repository, and performer (on the stage) of traditional Irish folklore, folksong, and folkways. Owenson supplemented this knowledge with reading in the

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translated Gaelic literature of Ireland, or of the other pre-modern cultures she represents—principally Greece and India. In The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (1806), Owenson makes a woman, rather than a man, and a noble, rather than a plebeian, the repository of popular customary memory and culture. The heroine, Glorvina, is a member of the historic and almost entirely dispossessed ancient Irish (and Catholic) nobility. She holds in her memory and performs orally and in song ‘traditionary’ Irish ‘national’ culture, thereby inspiring love and effecting the de-courtization and conversion from imperialist arrogance of the novel’s aristocratic English hero. In fact, Glorvina is a subjectively and socially ennobled representation of women of the ‘folk’, or lower classes, as repositories and transmitters of a historic, if fragmented and dispersed, ‘national’ culture. In many works of the period, both fictional and non-fictional, women are presented, for better or worse, as a major source of folk-song, folk tale, and proverbial customary wisdom (what modern folklorists call folksay). Women are represented as performing this cultural work for the worse when they pass on pre-modern, retrograde popular culture, especially to the ‘irrational’ common people (as with Flora MacIvor in Waverley), to the younger generation, as in many moralistic children’s books of the period, or in such counter-Revolutionary texts as Hannah More’s Cheap Repository tale of the mid-1790s, Tawny Rachel. Women perform or are represented as performing this cultural work for the better when they pass on memories of a heroic and socially harmonious past, as in Ann Grant’s Essays on…the Highlanders (1811) or when they serve as souces for modernizing writers, as in Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl. Owenson accompanied her fictional representation of customary memory and culture integrated into an Anglo-Irish hegemony and British imperial system with a variety of other works, including a collection of Irish songs from her father (1805), a belletristic adaptation of similar material (The Lay of an Irish Harp, 1807), and the non-fiction Patriotic Sketches of Ireland, written in Connaught (1807). These diverse materials had a wide influence. They helped inspire the fashion in England for Irish traditionary culture exploited by Tom Moore’s Irish Melodies (1808). They partly altered the longstanding stereotype image of the stage Irishman as either an ignorant fool or a fortune hunter. They also helped to further the Irish Catholic nationalism led by Daniel O’Connell which eventually resulted in Catholic emancipation in the late 1820s, and finally resulted in the dispossession of the Anglo-Irish gentry which Edgeworth and Owenson

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both thought would continue to lead the modernization of Ireland. Owenson became increasingly critical of colonial modernization, however, and extended her critique to the matter of Greece (Woman; or, Ida of Athens, 1809) and the East (The Missionary: An Indian Tale, 1811), before returning to Ireland with O’Donnell: A National Tale (1814) and Florence Macarthy: An Irish Tale (1818). Elements of Edgeworth’s and Owenson’s treatments of postRevolutionary memory are taken up by the period’s—indeed the century’s—most widely read woman poet, Felicia Hemans. Significantly, one of Hemans’s most important sources for treating memory was Joanna Baillie, but Hemans made the theme of memory more explicit and developed it in several directions to become a dominant theme in her work. Her poem ‘The Last Constantine’ (1823), for example, is based directly on Baillie’s play ‘Constantine Palaeologus’ but insistently foregrounds the debilitating effect on the emperor and his followers of memory of past greatness in the face of internal divisions caused by those who do not share such memory and in the face of an aggressive and historically ‘new’ force from outside. As in many of Hemans’s poems, there is a powerfully elegiac note to this representation, meant to indicate that the age of ‘national’ heroic endeavour and glory is past and has not been renewed or sustained, for the leadership of Byzantium if not of Britain. References to elegiac memory abound in this glamorization of a civilization about to disappear into the abyss of history. The lesson to the British reading public lies beyond or outside what the poem represents, in the suppression of self-interested groups and reconciliation of dissenting groups within, in the face of external threats in the form of new imperial rivals. Similar lessons are found everywhere in Hemans’s work. Her early poems, including England and Spain; or, Valour and Patriotism (1808), The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy (1816), and Modern Greece (1817), arose from and address the national crisis of confidence in the period of the Peninsular War and the end of the Napoleonic wars, and the increasing sense of imminent apocalyptic ending found in public debate and literature in Britain. In these works Hemans’s central theme is national extinction and recrudescence, or the choice between them that is made, largely unwittingly, by an entire people. Hemans licensed herself to address these clearly public and political issues partly by advertising her family relationship to soldiers involved in these wars (her brother and her husband) and partly by working through acceptably ‘feminine’ discourses of art and culture.

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In the political crises of the later 1810s and early 1820s Hemans focused even more sharply on the prospect of national self-extinction due to inappropriate remembering or forgetting. In most of the poems of this period Hemans again gives women an instrumental role, for better or worse. She also returns to a device used since the age of Sensibility by many women writers to comment on the public political sphere without apparently transgressing the gendered boundaries of discourse. This device involved representing the effect of public events and political actions, especially of a belligerent and martial nature, on women, as wives, daughters, and mothers. Hemans adds to this device the representation of women as repositories of a potentially renovative and rallying memory of past honour and glory, on the individual or national level, often in the face of men’s forgetting or betrayal of such memories. In ‘Wallace’s Invocation to Bruce’, published in the year of Peterloo, Hemans focuses on the importance of remembering a heroic and virtuous personal, familial, or national past in order to avoid internal dissension in the face of external threat, and thus to avoid personal or national oblivion. In ‘The Abencerrage’, however, from Tales and Historic Scenes, an act of political betrayal and factional murder by men cannot be forgotten, thus unleashing a vendetta that weakens the state and separates the hero and heroine who, like Romeo and Juliet, belong to different and opposed families or tribes. Thus the collapse of the last remnant of the Moorish empire in Spain is attributed partly to the inability to forget a collective wrong and the consequences are represented at the domestic level as blighted young love, made more painful by the lovers’ inability, narrated at length and thus the central subject of the poem, to forget their love for each other. Memory here is the potential for personal and thus familial and tribal reconciliation, and national survival; but this memory is countered by memory of a murderous family vendetta. As Zayda tells Hamet: Still must a gulf divide my fate from thine. I may forgive; but not at will the heart Can bid its dark remembrances depart. As usual in Hemans, and indeed in much literature of the Romantic period, this impasse can be resolved only by death, the figure for ultimate impasse: Zayda and Hamet die and are buried in the same mountain cave. As the narrator puts it, they are ‘Severed in life, united in the tomb’.

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The end is not quite oblivion, however, for the lovers live on united, in two ways. In transcendental and sublime, if non-human, Wordsworthian mode the lovers are somehow remembered in nature: ‘Their dirge’ becomes ‘the eternal moan’ of ‘woods and waves’. The lovers are also remembered, however tenuously, in human and social terms, and the lesson of their lives and deaths is passed on into history, for the narrator discloses that ‘Some exiled Moor… Hath taught his mountain-home the tale of those/Who thus have suffered, and who thus repose’. Zayda and Hamet are remembered in folktale, presumably of just the kind that was then being collected, edited, and entered into the ‘national’ history, culture, and destiny. Furthermore, Hemans’s poem, avowedly based on historical fact though fictionalized and versified, presumably serves a parallel function, disseminating the instructive tale as the new national institution of literature, or written verbal art of permanent artistic and cultural value. Hemans implicitly claims for herself, then, the role that she celebrates often elsewhere in her work—that of bard, or repository and reproducer of national identity, culture, history, and destiny, though in print rather than an oral culture, within a modern rather than a customary culture. In fact, almost throughout her career Hemans also translated or invented and published ‘national’ verse from a variety of languages and cultures. In her poems of the early and mid-1820s Hemans shifts her emphasis to the dangers of internal conflict arising from destructive memory. The Vespers of Palermo and ‘The last Constantine’, The Siege of Valencia, ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’ (all 1823) were published just after Britain had seemed to come to the brink of revolution over the ‘Queen Caroline affair’ in 1820–1, and while Spain, in which Hemans always had a special interest, was in the throes of a liberal revolution against a stubbornly traditionalist regime. The Siege of Valencia: A Dramatic Poem returns to the struggle of Christians and Moors in medieval Spain, and reprises the conflicts represented in ‘The Last of the Constantines’, with women playing both defeminizingly heroic and weakly disabling roles, yet defending ties of the domestic affections in face of masculine memories of heroic codes of honour and patriotism. Though the latter prevail, the cost is domestic loss. The Vespers of Palermo: A Tragedy represents the fatal effects, individually and collectively, of memories of class, as a faction led by the exiled noble Procida raises a murderous revolt against those who have injured them. In the process, the conspirators unwittingly

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destroy those they love, who represent the domestic affections and the socially conciliatory ‘feminine’ virtues of love and forgiveness. In The Forest Sanctuary (1825) and Records of Woman (1828), her major works, Hemans deals particularly with contradictory effects of memory on the individual, the family, the community, and the nation. On the one hand, certain kinds of memory, such as lost love, concern for honour and reputation, religious bigotry, and political ‘rights’ are shown to be destructive. On the other hand, certain kinds of memory are shown to inspire acts of selfless domestic heroism, religious faith, and patriotic national resistance. Significantly, however, Hemans did not continue to develop these themes in major poems or collections. She turned instead to lyrics and brief narrative poems of various kinds. She continued with collections of literary versions of folk poetry of the kind she had been writing for some time, including Greek Songs (1823), Lays of Many Lands (1826), and Welsh Melodies (1832). Increasingly she turned to collections of personal lyrics celebrating nature and religious devotion, including Hymns for Childhood (1827), Songs of the Affections (1830), and Scenes and Hymns of Life (1834), often dealing with ostensibly personal kinds of memory. Women writers, as part of their attempt to sustain a feminization of culture, society and politics for the Revolutionary aftermath, developed the theme of memory in various and even contradictory ways; in doing so they pioneered major techniques in the literary representation of the long revolution that was the modernization, for better and worse, of Britain, and indeed of the West and its empires. The paradox is that much of this writing by women was subsequently forgotten, occasionally burlesqued, or driven downmarket, and thus out of ‘literature’, as books for children or merely ‘popular’ verse, as in the case of Hemans. In the Victorian period it was the ‘masculine’ mode of writing nation and memory, in the pseudo-historiographical, authoritative, third-person omniscient narrative form devised by Scott, that became dominant in the field of literature.

Chapter 8

Re-membering Memory, posterity, and the memorial poem Jacqueline M.Labbe

During the Romantic period (and before and after) it was not uncommon for male and female writers to address poems to each other, to assume and deny influence by the other, to dictate to, chastise, and praise the other. In this chapter, I will be exploring the cultural and poetic significance of a series of poems taking as their subject other poets.1 They construct a species of poetic conversations based on an implicit recognition of the inevitability of influence. Poetry is made from the living bodies of contemporaries, or based on the new graves of immediate forerunners, and anxious self-preservation is transmuted into efforts at (re)placement—the self in the place of the other. A particular type of memory is involved when poets simultaneously invoke and erase their contemporaries. They ask their readers to remember and to forget, all at once; they depend on a willing suspension of memory that allows for the rewriting of poetic figures often already more established than their own. And they rely on a kind of collusion that is ready to supply the missing information: so that Hemans, for example, can invite her readers to believe in the Wordsworth or the Tighe with which she provides them, even as they draw on their own memories. The new poet—Hemans, Landon, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Barrett Browning—does not war with her or his subject, but rather pieces that subject together. As they re-member their subject-poets, then, the writing poets displace the actual, render it unreal, poetical. Memories of poets past and present are transmitted to the readers of the present and the future: the scene of influence is staged between the writing poet and her or his audience. How memory, representation, and a kind of directed interpretation function is the machinery that underpins this chapter. Its workings are the poems that cast their title-subjects as fodder for poetry and supplant their texts and reputations with the writing poet’s own.2 132

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My scene of influence maintains the importance of the present; the classic Bloomian ideal scenario of influence depends on a cultural concern with the past, a willingness and even desire to engage with ‘great figures’ to prove one s own worth. When the works at hand suggest a ‘burden of the present’, the terms of the argument change as well; misprision yields to appropriation, as poets cast their contemporaries into an imaginative realm wherein admiration, veneration, disappointment and resentment mingle. Concern with past progenitors is replaced by an evident desire to acknowledge influence, to publicize an appreciation of another poet’s strength, beauty, significance, or artistry. Keats’s ‘To Lord Byron’ is one example. Perkins’s headnote tells us that this poem is ‘typical of the so-called plaintive sonnet of the time’, that it is written when Keats is 19, and ‘proves he was by no means precocious’.3 And yet the poem skilfully combines adulation and transformation to eulogize a Byron few would recognize. Given Byron’s immense popularity, the young Keats has chosen a fit subject: venerating Byron betrays a desire, one could say, to be Byron. This partly reflects Bloom’s theory, especially when he notes that ‘poetic influence…always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation’.4 According to the standard picture of Byron, such lines as the following indicate exactly such a misreading on Keats’s part: ‘Byron! how sweetly sad thy melody!/…./O’ershading sorrow does not make thee less/ Delightful: thou thy griefs dost dress/ With a bright halo…/ …/ Still warble, dying swan! still tell the tale,/ The enchanting tale, the tale of pleasing woe’ (ll.1, 6–8, 13–14). The difference, however, from Bloom’s point is important and insistent: Keats does not misinterpret Byron’s work, but reinterprets Byron’s persona, replacing irony with pathos, detachment with despair. In fact, even as he addresses his sonnet ‘To Byron’ and presents it as an admiring comment on Byron’s work, he takes the familiar picture of Byronthe-poet and recreates it, so that Byron becomes a character in a Keatsian romance, a proto-Knight, a practice Porphyro. Keats valorizes Byron, but he also replaces him: the subject of ‘To Lord Byron’ is not Byron but Keats’s idea of Byron, his poeticization of Byron, and the poem itself is a tribute to Keats’s skill in re-presenting Byron in Keats’s own style. It is, and isn’t, Bloom’s anxiety of influence: the ‘parent’s’ influence is acknowledged, but immediately subverted. Keats is not anxious—yet neither is he triumphant. The transformation has been carried out with a sureness and a facility

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that suggests that the poet feels, not threatened by Byron, but empowered by his creative appropriation of Byron. To paraphrase U.C.Knoepflmacher, Keats, the romantic subject, discovers that his desire to venerate another has all too easily converted that other into ‘a mere projection of the lyricists…self’.5 Keats s treatment of Byron is an extreme example, admittedly. The young Keats exaggerates his need for self-placement when he rewrites Byron to the extent that the icon of male sexuality (even as early as 1814) can be represented through a feminized sensibility. Keats s act of re-membering requires a re-ordering of Byron’s parts. In general terms this style of poeticizing works to place the title poets within a community of greats. Indeed, the encomiums evident in the poems indicate a positive eagerness for a relationship, its legitimacy signalling the writing poet’s fitness to write. The younger poet has recorded an imaginative debt for future readers, has inscribed a memorial that proclaims rather than obscures influence, that says ‘I recognized genius, and in so doing indicate my own.’ It is one thing to approach or rewrite Milton or Shakespeare in an age devoted to the memory of each: one proclaims not insight, not originality, but conformity when emulating legendary masters. Asserting the genius of a contemporary, however, on whom time or history has not yet passed judgement, advertises a confidence in one’s own powers of discrimination, of criticism, and of memory. The younger poet becomes history when she or he assumes the mantle of judgement, fixing that admired contemporary poet not only as one who influenced the writing poet, but as one who deserves to influence the poet, and the times; the writing poet as much as says that her or his subject is worth remembering, a value proved through her or his poeticizing. Through this kind of textual memorial, homage, testimonial, and self-placement may jostle with each other, but the Poet remains a viable currency. We are offered creative community over creative anxiety: instead of demonstrating a fear of repetition, even of being a replica, such poems can be said to welcome the possibility of becoming like one’s admired contemporary. Addressing a poem ‘to’ another poet, then, manifests the writing poet’s acknowledgement of another’s ability as well as an implied desire to achieve the eminence, both poetic and public, so thoroughly deserved by the subject poet. The younger poet courts identification with the object of her or his esteem: veneration facilitates validation, so to speak, as the older poet’s acknowledged power subsidizes the younger poet’s ambition. And yet this cannot

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be the entire story. The power relations inherent in remembering— that is, the claim to a superior knowledge implicit in the ‘last word’ status of a textual memorial—undercut the subject-poet’s primacy in the text. This means that, even as the younger poet valorizes the other in part to bolster her or his own poetic standing, so too the dynamics of the poems work against an uncomplicated reading that merely substitutes one monolith of influence for another.6 Instead, we read one poet who has transformed another poet into poetry; that poetry is under the control of the present poet; and that poet assumes an active, poetic control over the poet she or he also licenses. This arrival of the self in poems ostensibly devoted to another permeates the works under discussion. Layers of memory begin to emerge: the poet superficially positions her- or himself as subordinate to the title-poet. Then a transmutation ensues, as the poet presents both the subject poet’s persona and works as fit for emulation, and yet subtly transforms both by filtering them through her or his own poetry. The subject poet’s voice is privileged and silenced simultaneously, and the author poet substitutes her or his conception of the subject poet to a reader dependent on, or at least engaged with, the present poet. The final picture is not of the subject poet but of the author poet, and what may have seemed a dialogue reveals itself to have been a monologue all along. There is, one realizes, a danger in being admired, for the subject poet is at the mercy of the author poet. The objective—to create a community of poets of which the present poet is now a member, admitted by virtue of the very work in which a poetic line was posited—is accomplished once the writing poet’s remembering proves more memorable than the subject poet. Formally (that is, through the poem’s form), the subordinate becomes, not merely dominant, but all-encompassing, responsible for her or his own initial admiration, for creating the admirable aspects of the subject poet, for assuming into existence a poetic community, and for placing her—or himself within that community. ‘Poetry, like all art, can distort the other into what [it] is not’, remarks Knoepflmacher;7 the process here outlined goes further, having dispensed with the other before the poetic process is very far under way. Mary Robinson, for example, who remembered her self in her posthumously published Memoirs, celebrates Coleridge through a shrewd rewriting of ‘Kubla Khan’, a revision that becomes the basis of To the Poet Coleridge’.8 As the poem opens, the reader finds herself confronted with a rapture that originates outside the poem’s confines:

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Rapt in the visionary theme! Spirit divine! with thee I’ll wander, Where the blue, wavy, lucid stream, ‘Mid forest glooms, shall slow meander! With thee I’ll trace the circling bounds Of thy new Paradise extended; And listen to the varying sounds Of winds, and foamy torrents blended. (lines 1–8) The speaker invites herself along on poetic retracing of ‘Kubla Khan’, to which she refers implicitly and explicitly throughout the poem. Placing herself as a companion of the ‘spirit divine’, Coleridge, she tours the ‘sunny dome’, the ‘caves of ice’, the ‘fields of dew’ (lines 13, 14), constructing a second version of Xanadu conspicuous for the ambiguous ownership she imports. While marking the ‘poet Coleridge’ as the creative force behind these scenes with ‘thy’: ‘thy sunny dome’ and so on, she subsumes his poem into her own, omitting quotation marks so that the scene becomes doubly poeticized: first by Coleridge, then by Robinson quoting Coleridge.9 More concretely, she eventually leaves behind, or rather simply drops, her ‘companion’. ‘With thee I’ll wander’ (stanza 1) becomes I’ll mark thy sunny dome…/…/Then will I climb the breezy bounds’ (stanza 2); ‘with thee I’ll trace’ (beginning stanza 3) becomes ‘There will I trace’ (end stanza 3); and by stanza 4 the ‘with thee’ disappears entirely: ‘And now I’ll pause’, I’ll gather’, I’ll raptured trace’. Indeed, by stanza 5 Robinson herself invades Xanadu: ‘And now, with lofty tones inviting,/ Thy nymph, her dulcimer swift smiting,/ Shall wake me in ecstatic measures!’ (lines 59–61). Clearly, the power of Coleridge’s poem is enough to awake in Robinson a conviction that she too can participate in its mysteries; less overt but none the less inescapable is the implication that ‘Kubla Khan’ now exists only for Robinson, that she is the auditor, if not the new author, of the poem. She strengthens her claim by asserting her presence in Coleridge’s poem even as she disembodies him: never more solid than a ‘spirit divine’, he becomes the less corporeal ‘Genius of Heaven-taught poesy’—in the idiom of the time, more a muse than a muser—and finally ends up subordinated as the ‘favour’d child of minstrelsy’, while his poem becomes a ‘airy dream’ (lines 2, 52, 69– 70, 72). By the poem’s end, Coleridge is less substantial than his own poem, while the ownership of that poem is itself in question;

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Robinson’s rewrite becomes, for her readers, the poem itself, while she as poet now occupies the place Coleridge has grown too misty for. Robinson posits her poetic individuality by avowing her appreciation of Coleridge’s poem, the permeability of that poem to her poetic skills, and the value she both imputes to Coleridge and, by extension, to herself. Less a strategy of opposition than of dismissal, Robinson’s tactic—rewriting, re-presentation—means that for her, panegyric becomes possession. Like Byron in Keats’s sonnet, Coleridge is rewritten, but more than that, his product, that which defines him as poet, is taken over from the inside by a poet who declines the office of ‘damsel with a dulcimer’ for that of poet, flashing eyes, floating hair, and all. In so doing she records her admiration for Coleridge but, more than that, she registers her admiration for her own poetic talents. Robinson’s poetic selfhood is effected through re-membering, spiced with hints of what Cixous sees as the violation of the ‘closure’ of sexual opposition originating in the ‘search for authenticity’.10 In this case, resolving sexual opposition falls in favour of affirming poetic authenticity. In these poems the role gender plays is neither neat nor consistent. The act of re-membering depends in part upon who remembers and who is remembered, and yet Robinson’s strategy of recomposition is not, for example, Felicia Hemans’s: when Hemans eulogizes Wordsworth, for instance, she positions herself as acceptably feminine, and yet a close reading of Hemans’s poem will reveal condescension mixed with veneration, an assumption of self-confidence at odds with cultural expectations of femininity. And while poems addressed to living poets can force both subjects into antagonistic poses, they are not always played out through the masculine, Bloomian trope of battle, as Robinson’s To the Poet Coleridge’ shows. Her strategic moves of self-substitution, or creative re-vision of another’s poetic work, and steady replacement of that work with her own, develop a subtle confrontation that on one level supports ideals of gendered behaviour—feminine submissiveness—while on another crippling them. Keats, too, in his recreation of Byron, uses gender to sidestep the pressures of class: feminizing Byron allows Keats to assume the primacy afforded men. The Keatsian move also informs Shelley’s and Coleridge’s poems to, and on, Wordsworth; both poets reinstitute their strength by chastizing Wordsworth, although Coleridge, typically, cannot sustain his critique. Hemans’s address, unlike Shelley’s, detects only praiseworthy qualities, and unlike Coleridge, she is neither anxious

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nor hostile. She is most like Keats, for the Wordsworth she composes is a ‘True bard, and holy!’ (line 25) whose song infiltrates nature and his readers’ hearts. Gillian Beer asks ‘what kind of voice can women [poets] discover in a world which instructs them to be silent?’11 Revising this standard, Hemans establishes her voice in this poem by silencing Wordsworth’s, and she does this by moving him deeper and deeper into the domestic sphere, creating a Wordsworth she characterizes as suiting spaces increasingly enclosed. She starts out by locating Wordsworth-as-nature-poet ‘among the hills/…by the source/ of some free stream’ (lines 1, 2–3), an appropriate site for the poet of nature and complete with (or in) the solitude so common to the Romantic character. In the second stanza Hemans situates a Wordsworth she conjures through his works in a ‘garden-bower’; in the third stanza ‘by some hearth’, where his ‘lay’ is link’d with household words’ and where ‘women’s lip might move’, but makes no sound; in the fourth stanza, alarmingly, ‘where the shadows of dark solemn yews/ Brood silently o’er some burial ground’. Hemans’s living contemporary has just been dispatched to the grave, linking him with the female precursors I will discuss below, and establishing the primacy of Hemans’s own verse. By moving the male subject into the feminine sphere and finally depositing him in the grave, taking care to render even that space ‘silent’, Hemans, like Robinson, unsettles complacent poetic hierarchies, and complicates her own final stanza wherein Wordsworth’s poetic genius flows outward to ‘every spot beneath the smiling sun’ (line 27). The dedicatory ‘To Wordsworth’ functions to hoist a kind of challenge to the ‘true bard’: Hemans both writes and erases her admired contemporary, first giving him a character and then neatly enclosing that character within the confines of her poem. That Wordsworth is potentially a reader of her poem adds to the irony, for Hemans seems to declare that she venerates Wordsworth for writing the kind of poetry she has decided he writes; the very persona that disappointed Shelley is here celebrated, precisely because his existence allows Hemans to formulate and uphold her own poetic authority. The Wordsworth she remembers informs the tribute she offers; indeed, it necessitates her memorial. These poems, addressed to the living (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron), are characterized by a more or less able recreation of the self through the poeticizing of the other. Like short-term memory, such a technique works with what is readily available, what is too recent to have been forgotten. The immediacy of such poems flows from the proximity of their subjects, yet what readers are confronted with is a

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version of competing memories. Whose word(s) do we take? What we see (or read), however, are poets who approach their model with relative confidence, performing self-placing moves that establish their poetic voices in a community of living—and male—poets. Even as there exists a long and recognized line of poetry defined through and by male poets, so too the hierarchy established within these poems participates in this evaluating process. This is the ‘“masculinely marked” poetics’ wherein ‘historical perspective is attained when the poet strikes up active dialogue with his [or her] precursors…with poets of his [or her] own speech’.12 Male and female poets seem to see the masculine line as the living line, linking them to history and to posterity; they address living male precursors to place their voices in the long-running conversation based on historically validated authors. In the poems under scrutiny here, one sees anxiety or uncertainty not in the poetry addressed to their living male contemporaries: here, poets assert their poetic skill and their right to participate in the continuity and power represented by the male line. When one considers poems written to female contemporaries, however, two things are immediately apparent: it is harder to find male-authored panegyrics to female precursors (although they exist, they seldom name the poet in their titles), and in those by female poets the precursor has become the predecessor in the word’s most literal sense. So, for instance, Hemans dedicates ‘The Grave of a Poetess’ to the dead Mary Tighe, Letitia Landon her ‘Felicia Hemans’ and ‘Stanzas on the Death of Mrs. Hemans’ to the recently deceased Hemans, while Elizabeth Barrett Browning eulogizes Landon in ‘L.E.L’.s Last Question’. The female poets gain poetic power and strive for permanence when they use living male poets as material. These companion poems display a desire for the same sense of community the other poems create, and indeed make analogous moves towards it, when they mythologize or re-present their title-poets. But Annette Kolodny’s claim that ‘the woman poet’s repeated need to assert for herself some validating female tradition and to repossess its voices for her own needs’13 especially underpins a poem addressed to a female precursor: this is the process of thinking back through the mother advocated by Virginia Woolf. In poems that poeticize a dead contemporary, however, we are confronted with mothers who have died young. In the second part of this chapter, I ask what happens when female authors attempt to create or join a poetic community that is defined, not by the living body of the precursor, but her new grave? What are the ramifications of remembering the dead?

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Sex-linked criticism, when applied to female poets, agrees broadly that they suffer the anxiety of being forced constantly to remake a feminine poetic history: as Kolodny notes, ‘a women’s sense of belatedness may derive from the anxiety that her unique resources have yet to find a place in poetic discourse’.14 Elaine Showalter has also commented that each new generation of women writers is ‘without a history’ and must ‘rediscover the past anew’,15 while Adriana Rodenas elaborates: Not only is the woman writer condemned to marginality, but also the solitude of her creative act is greater, because she is not supported by a literary community in the same way as the ‘individual talent’ of the male writer.16 Finally, Leigh Gilmore recommends we view women poets as ‘originals’ rather than ‘anomalies’ who thus ‘demand we revise the context that marginalises them’17 Gilmore’s rhetoric makes clear what these analyses have in common: all posit the female writing experience as isolated, anomalous, so many Emily Dickinsons shut up in bedrooms. From one point of view they are right: most scholars today know only of individual voices; in this they are guided in part, ironically, by Woolf’s baffled search for literary mothers. It takes precisely the sort of demystification of the canon that has characterized Romantic studies over the past few years to show that, historically, there are many mothers. The poems I will now discuss show, too, that women writers were aware of and celebrated those mothers; while ‘women’s literary history’ may be ‘marked by discontinuity and lack’,18 that lack is, as it were, cosmetic, and a function of scholarship more than history: foremothers are not lacking, but, rather, disappear, become invisible. They are forgotten. What is insidious and troubling about this kind of memory loss is the complicity of the writing poets in the process; these poems simultaneously invoke and dismiss the mother, betraying a desire for continuity that expresses itself most clearly through her burial. In one sense it is the strongest proof needed that there does indeed exist a feminine poetics, since dead foremothers support the construction of a line, a tradition of female writing. They bury the mother in a constant quest to remake poetry as properly or even wholly feminine; they counter the tradition of male poetry (although they do not refuse to participate in it) figured by the living male poet with their own established line of female poetry built on and through the dead mother-poets their poems eulogize. They are not haunted: they grieve, and in so doing replace the dead mother with

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their own living verse. This is what should happen: in a strategy of re-membering, one is confronted with an embodied poetics. And yet it appears that, in the process of creating tradition, female poets erase their own. In an ironic perversion of a trope meant to establish a line, community is buried: one might say, death becomes them. And yet this outcome is not at all prefigured in the poems themselves, which insist on their authors’ viable presence. Indeed, Hemans’s The Grave of a Poetess’ celebrates its writer’s new-found facility with verse, going beyond substitution to appropriate the poetic voice of her predecessor. Indeed, the reader notes that the poem begins and ends with the same self-placing move: ‘I stood’, and ‘poet’s eye’. The two words merge, producing a ‘poet’s I’ who has seen, mourned, and finally assimilated her predecessor. In this work, the female poet strengthens her own claim to poetry when she visits the grave of a valued, and valuable, foremother. Hemans institutes a public tradition of female poetry but maintains a decorous propriety: she names Wordsworth, but her female predecessor is implied, suggested through layers of allusion that depend on the reader’s co-operation and/or knowledge. Letitia Landon, not content with hints, sets her poem ‘Felicia Hemans’ in the named tradition with which this chapter is concerned, and emphasizes the public nature of her poem. There is a subtle change: Landon deletes the ‘to’. Suggestive in its brevity, this shortened form presents the named forebear more as a figurehead than a person to be addressed; in a way Hemans is placed into her own collection Records of Woman with their similar titles: ‘Gertrude’, ‘Madeline’, ‘Arabella Stuart’. This initiates the poeticization on which Landon soon embarks in full, for what the reader gets in ‘Felicia Hemans’ is not a poem to Hemans, or even about Hemans, and yet it is not a Robinsonian rewriting of the forebear either. In fact, in ‘Felicia Hemans’ we read the story of Landon’s life transplanted onto Hemans, displaced from the living to the dead, in a move that is part repression, part exorcism, perhaps even part relief at having survived, and thus being able to mourn, at the grave of another poetess. This most sincere of memorials also presents the most complete of re-memberings. The poem opens, like ‘Grave’, with a conventional eulogy, although its excessive grief foreshadows the partial triumph the reader detects by the poem’s end: No more, no more—oh, never more returning, Will thy beloved presence gladden earth;

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No more wilt thou with sad, yet anxious yearning Cling to those hopes which have no mortal birth. In this opening Landon imputes a kind of constitutional sadness to Hemans, a ‘sad, anxious yearning’, for as-yet-unspecified hopes. In many ways, this first stanza reworks Hemans s ‘Grave’, much as Robinson’s poem to Coleridge rewrote ‘Kubla Khan’; it situates Hemans as the sad, comfortless poetess, gives to her a more explicitly adamic power over the leaf or flowers which thou hast named’ and which ‘inherit/ A beauty known but from thy breathing there’ (‘Here a vain love to passing flowers/ Thou gav’st’, ‘Grave’), and refers to Hemans’s ‘Deep thoughts that at thy will to being started’ (‘thy song,/ A voice not loud, but deep!’ ‘Grave’). Hemans has lent her ‘own sweet image’ to the world she creates in poetry, as God did to his creation: the first stanza does not hesitate to set up Hemans as a creative genius, but it also hints at a concomitant tortured soul. We see here that when Landon elevates Hemans’s poetic skills to the level of the martyred divine, she also implies her own privileged ability to detect such divinity. The enchantment works in other, less expected ways as well, however, for Landon is also weaving a kind of spell that will eventually re-present Hemans to her—and now Landon’s—readers. As the poem progresses, Landon devotes another stanza to the strengths and significance of Hemans’s poetry, her ability to invoke distant lands and give voice to ‘Italian measures’, ‘Castilian song’, ‘the echoes of the Susquehanna’s rivers’, and so on. Again, knowledgeable readers will notice allusions to Hemans’s Records of Woman in these phrases, to poems such as ‘The Sicilian Captive’, ‘Imelda’, and ‘Madeline’. The second stanza ends at a high point of praise—‘Thy name was lovely, and thy song was dear’ (line 32). And here the change begins, for the next stanza questions, ‘Was not this purchased all too dearly?—never/ Can fame atone for all that fame hath cost’ (lines 33–4). One is tempted to read in the enjambment of ‘never’ an answer to the question just posed, but Landon does not allow her reader to dwell in such a possibility. Instead, she repositions herself as, not the writer of the present poem, but the reader of Hemans s life, setting it as one of anguish and grief. Her manoeuvre is complex: she introduces a ‘we’, an outside readership who knows only the ‘goal’ but ‘not the endeavor’, who says ‘the song is sorrowful, but know[s] not/ What may have left that sorrow on the song’ (lines 35, 41–2). Landon seems to want to disassociate herself from the sorrow she writes of as endemic to the female poet: What do we know of the unquiet pillow,

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By the worn cheek and tearful eyelid prest, When thoughts chased thoughts, like the tumultuous billow, Whose very light and foam reveals unrest? (lines 37–40) And yet her detailed scenario destabilizes her own distancing technique: the result is a ‘we’ wilfully ignorant of what ‘we’ have just described. Indeed, the effort needed to maintain this split personality is spent by line 14 of this 16-line stanza, for abruptly the ‘we’ becomes descriptive of the community of women poets rather than the community of readers: ‘They [words] cannot paint the long sad hours, passed only/ In vain regrets o’er what we feel we are’ (lines 45–6). The last words indicate a feeling of monstrousness, at the least of alienation; to be a woman and a poet is to be constructed of warring elements: a new version of Frankenstein’s Creature. From here to the end, ‘Felicia Hemans’ celebrates not poetry, not the rewards of genius, but a kind of masochistic embracing of the muse: ‘The fable of Prometheus and the vulture/ Reveals the poet’s and the woman’s heart’ (lines 55–6). And it is here that the reader encounters a slippage in subject matter. By rights the ‘poet and woman’ is Hemans, but the trials she undergoes in this poem are Landon’s own: Unkindly are they judged—unkindly treated— By careless tongues and by ungenerous words; While cruel sneer, and hard reproach, repeated, Jar the fine music of the spirit’s chords. (lines 57–60) Further, one senses some envy when Landon asks (rhetorically, one assumes), ‘Wert thou not weary—thou whose soothing numbers/ Gave other lips the joy thine own had not?/ Didst thou not welcome thankfully the slumbers/ Which closed around thy mourning human lot?’ (lines 61–4). Despite the eerie presence of the dead suggested by Landon’s persistent questioning, it is clear that Landon well and truly buries Hemans, with all honours to be sure, but also burdened by the weight of Landon’s living sorrows. Critics agree that Landon’s initial immense popularity eventually transformed itself into suspicion and dismissal: those who devoured her poems of tragic love ended up identifying writer and subject matter. Her critics and readers consistently conflated her poetry and her self, ‘replacing the poem as

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text with the poet’,19 to the point that one of her most fervent admirers wrote tragically, ‘She is fallen!’ Hemans, contrastingly, enjoyed a reputation built on propriety and the domestic virtues; even Francis Jeffrey approved of her ‘deep moral and pathetic impression’, which Anne Mack enlarges on as ‘her elegiac tone, the emotional sign of a condition or experience of inveterate loss’.20 It was Landon, not Hemans, who was ‘unkindly judged’ and ‘unkindly treated’, but ‘Felicia Hemans’ repositions Hemans as the outcast poetess. Where ‘Grave’ allowed Hemans to inherit the dead poetess’s spirit, ‘Felicia Hemans’s ‘grave which is a shrine’ (line 80) permits Landon to pass off her own sorrows as Hemans’s, a kind of cleansing that diminishes the real Hemans even as it cements the picture of her divinity. Landon simultaneously creates Hemans as a contemporary and poetic mother and as a scapegoat; she enables her own poem by projecting her doubts and fears, her struggle, onto one who can no longer feel either. She perpetuates the community and tradition of female poetics, but she also distances herself from it. Anne Mack tells us that as Hemans became more famous in the 1820s, ‘she shrank from leaving the narrow confines of her house’,21 a foreshadowing of the grave that pursues her into Landon’s poetry. The dominant tone of ‘Felicia Hemans’ is eulogistic, but the rewritings and substitution of ‘Landon as Felicia Hemans’ for Hemans herself leaves the foundation of community of female poets shaky. Bloom’s notion that ‘all major elegies for poets do not express grief but center upon their composers’ own creative anxieties’22 finds play here. The relief Landon feels at being the one still writing relies on her ability to displace her own insecurities and, indeed, anger at her readers’ reactions onto Hemans, to create for them a new memory of Hemans the poetess. And her success is mitigated by the treatment she herself receives, both during life and after death, in the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Barrett Browning’s ‘Felicia Hemans. To L.E.L. Referring to her monody on the poetess’ makes overt the subtext in ‘Felicia Hemans’, that it was at least at times more about Landon than Hemans, for, despite its title, this poem too situates Hemans in terms of Landon. At the centre of Barrett Browning’s poem lies a reproach to ‘Thou bay-crowned living One’ for ‘bowing’ ‘o’er the bay-crowned Dead’. Barrett Browning objects to the impersonation that underpins ‘Felicia Hemans’, but she characterizes it as a futile inability to let go of the dead:

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Reserve thy tears for living brows where all such tears are meeter,23 And leave the violets in the grass to brighten where thou treadest, No flowers for her! no need of flowers, albeit ‘bring flowers!’ thou saidest. (lines 6–8) At the heart of Barrett Browning s objection seems to be a discomfort with the idea of mourning, and a special unease with speculating on Hemans’s life of grief. One senses that for Barrett Browning, to dwell on the miseries attendant on the female poet’s strained existence is to ‘wron[g] that mystic breath which breathed in all her breathing’ (line 22; this line echoes Landon’s The leaf or flowers which thou hast named inherit/ A beauty known but from thy breathing there’). Further, it is to ignore that, in death, Hemans will learn the ‘sweet “new song” she will not mourn in knowing’ (line 28) from Jesus himself. This is the afterlife to which Hemans consigns her dead poetess in ‘Grave’, but spiced with a Christianity Hemans does not mention; her ‘grave’ gives ‘peace [to] the woman’s heart’ and ‘joy [to] the poet’s eye’ but refrains from naming the source. Barrett Browning presses on Landon the value of this new song and the uselessness of grief; she constructs a memorial and also its ideal ‘reader’. Suggesting that her version—her memory of the events of Hemans’s life—is superior to Landon’s, Barrett Browning pointedly filters her poem to Landon through the dead body of Hemans, retaining the flavour of death characteristic of ‘Grave’ and ‘Felicia Hemans’. She closes her poem with a benediction, advising the ‘crowned and living One’ to ‘be happy’, followed immediately by a conclusion that reminds one of Hemans’s strategy with Wordsworth: she imagines the death of Landon in a move she has worked towards throughout the poem, saying Be happy, crowned and living One! and as thy dust decayeth May thine own England say for thee what now for Her it sayeth— ‘Albeit softly in our ears her silver song was ringing, The foot-fall of her parting soul is softer than her singing’. (29–32, emphasis added) This expresses less a desire for community than a dismissal of it; throughout the poem Barrett Browning salts her veneration of Landon with a disdain at her (misplaced) sorrow, again reminding one of the condescension with which Hemans complicated her veneration of Wordsworth. The ambiguity of the closing lines, that apparently

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valorize the sound of a ‘parting’ soul over a living ‘silver song’ in a troubling privileging of a woman’s death over her life,24 emphasizes Barrett Browning’s relative unconcern with establishing herself as in any way an heir to her poetic mother. As if she purposely invites amnesia, Barrett Browning instead claims that ‘I look everywhere for grandmothers and see none’. Barrett Browning professes a lack, a feeling of isolation: if there are no grandmothers, how can there be mothers? Even sisters? Despite her own poems to female poets, Barrett Browning refuses to see a line of female poetry; she, like Woolf, like modern scholars, is stymied by what is actually a perceived, an artificial, lack of a female writing tradition. There are many reasons why we forget about those women who wrote—I suggest here only one of them, that an emphasis on death functions cumulatively, carrying a force outside the individual poem, resonating strongly enough to erase, for subsequent generations, the memory of a tradition and community that gave the writers themselves such a full and populated world. There is something to be said for the view that women poets writing about the past bring that past forward, creating not emptiness but a continually populated and self-propagating arena of creative energy. Indeed, the presence of memorial poems dotting the two centuries preceding the period here discussed suggests an engagement with a feminine poetic past that might undermine my own emphasis on loss. But, as with Landon, Hemans, and others, those female poets eulogizing each other in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also, for the most part, disappeared from literary consciousness until resurrected by late twentieth-century scholars. The almost endemic forgetting that informs Woolf’s search, for one, persuades me of the pervasive cultural effect of this kind of poem. The self-characterization of lateRomantic female poets is, I think, too successful in its emphasis on isolation and loneliness, an emphasis at odds with the simultaneous reliance on, and creation of, tradition that these poems imply. But it is an emphasis that is, in the end, more powerful than the community that allowed, even encouraged, these poets to poeticize each other. I began this chapter by asserting the need to examine male and female poets writing a similar poetics in tandem; I am aware that at this point I have perversely redirected my critical attention back to a single-sex model. In this way, I have performed my own remembering: the critical act of interpretation has yielded up a select list, a community whose self-referential acts have been filtered through yet another version of memorial.

Chapter 9

‘All that it had to say’ Henry Adams and the Rock Creek Memorial Duco van Oostrum

One puzzle about Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams (1907, 1918) is that it does not mention Mrs Adams once. The Education of Henry Adams purports to narrate the failures of Henry Adams’s education from his birth (1838) to the present moment of writing (1905) and those dates also encompass his life with his wife. Adams had married Marian Hooper on 27 June 1872; she committed suicide on 6 December 1885. Yet in an astonishing move, Adams leaves out the entire period from 1872–1891, simply calling Chapter 21: Twenty years after (1892)’. While ostensibly writing about himself, Adams uses the third person, i.e. the ‘character’ Henry Adams, as his protagonist, setting the stage for intense discussion about the nature of his ‘autobiographical self’. However, The Education is a carefully grafted (auto)biography, intended as ‘a mere shield of protection in the grave’.1 Caught up in a narrative of writing his life, he describes it to Henry James as ‘taking his own life’, ambiguously seeing the act of autobiography as a proclamation of life and as an act of suicide. The narrative of halves he offers there is itself part of a strategy to divide his life into a public and private life, with The Education as expressive of his public persona. The masculine world of The Education, in which the Virgin operates as a conscious masculine model of female idealization, narrates a story of education in politics, history, war and power. By contrast, the story of the 1870s and 1880s, including his life with Marian Hooper-Adams and the story of his success and failure of his private education, lies buried in a twenty-year gap in the middle of his autobiographical description of his life. In The Education, Adams famously posits that the transition of a traditional society to that of a modern American society resembles a transition from one governed by the metaphor of the Virgin (Unity) to that of the Dynamo (Chaos). For many critics, Adams’s analysis signals the 147

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beginning of American modernism.2 His opposition between men and women in the text forms part of an overturning of traditional hierarchies and he bestows great praise on the level-headedness of women as opposed to the waywardness of men. As he tells the reader: ‘he made a general law of experience—no woman had ever driven him wrong; no man had ever driven him right’.3 It is ironic, to say the least, that someone who so idolizes the power of women in his autobiographical account of his life can find no space for his wife. A relatively simple explanation of that disparity is that his praise of women in general is in fact a reference to the importance, or perhaps even dominance, of his wife. Adams’s act of omission has led to vociferous debates among critics, and Eugenia Kaledin’s reason for writing a biography of Marian Hooper, entitled The Education of Mrs. Henry Adams, was outrage.4 By re-reading The Education for coded references, it is possible to offer some suggestions for Marian Hooper’s appearance in the text, most notably perhaps the description of the death of Louisa, Adams’s sister.5 Her structural absence in literally the middle of the text paradoxically asserts Mrs Adams’s presence. The entire text bears the marks of a veiled monument to his wife and is evidence of what Freud has called ‘profound mourning’: Profound mourning, the reaction to the loss of a dead person, contains the same feeling of pain, loss of interest in the outside world—insofar as it does not recall the dead one—loss of capacity to adopt any new object of love, which would mean a replacing of one mourned, the same turning from every active effort that is not connected with thoughts of the dead. It is easy to see that this inhibition and circumscription in the ego is the expression of an exclusive devotion to its mourning, which leaves nothing over for other purposes or other interests.6 Adams’s insistence on failure in The Education, his adoption of a pose as ‘ghost’, and his label of post-1885 life as ‘after-life’ or as ‘posthumous life’ demonstrate his ‘loss’ of his wife and ‘loss of interest in the outside world’. From within The Education there is clear evidence that Adams intends his text to work similarly as a monument or testament to his wife when he describes Rock Creek Memorial, the Memorial for his wife he had commissioned by the famous sculptor Augustus SaintGaudens (see Figure 9.1). One of the only veiled appearances of Marian Hooper occurs when Adams visits the cemetery at Rock Creek ‘to see the bronze figure which St.Gaudens had made for him in his

Henry Adams and the Rock Creek Memorial

Figure 9.1 The Adams memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery

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absence’ (Education p. 306). The Memorial mediates Adams’s silence about his wife’s suicide and his subsequent depression and wanderings after her shocking death. Through the Memorial, the reader is supposed to materialize the absence of his wife in the text, dramatically uncovering the monument of its veiled references. Yet since the Memorial itself is veiled in a uniquely coloured bronze cloak, only showing part of a face, the statue appears to raise more questions than to reveal answers. As Adams expresses it: ‘he was apt to stop there often to see what the statue had to tell him that was new; but, in all that it had to say, he never once thought of questioning what it meant’ (ibid.). At once a figure that embodies his wife and makes her memory present, it also manifests Henry Adams’s own psychological struggles to cope with her death. The dramatic appearance of the Memorial in the text of The Education provides a moment of rest and contemplation; the presence is asserted, the meaning not asked. The Memorial becomes a narrative of mourning, where the actual statue delivers a message of completion and deliverance. Significantly, the Memorial channels the haunting memories in two ways: the first is probably the most obvious in that it signals the presence of personal loss. As such, the Memorial appears in the chapter ‘twenty years after’ to note the Memorial as an end point in a twenty-year personal narrative. The second way is that the process of mourning is coterminous with the time of the Memorial’s construction. While the Memorial is being planned and built, Adams himself is travelling across the globe seemingly seeking refuge on a mythological South Seas island. When the Memorial is complete, in June 1891, he can start his life anew, even if post-humously. The Education picks up the narrative again in 1892. The veiled figure of the Memorial appears to drape both Marian Hooper and the events after her suicide until the Memorial’s completion in 1891. When Adams acknowledges the communicative powers of the Memorial in ‘all that it had to say’, he leads us to his ‘other’ unspoken life. After his wife’s suicide, Adams departs for Japan and when he returns, commissions Augustus Saint-Gaudens to sculpt a Memorial. In an interview with Gustav Kobbe of the Evening Star (Monday, 17 January 1910) John La Farge explained that he was present when Henry Adams gave the commission to Saint-Gaudens. La Farge is quoted: Mr. Adams described to him in a general way what he wanted, going, however, into no details, and really giving him no distinct

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clue, save the explanation that he wished the figure to symbolize ‘the acceptance, intellectually of the inevitable’. Saint-Gaudens immediately became interested, and made a gesture indicating the pose which Mr. Adams’s words had suggested in his mind. ‘No’ said Mr. Adams ‘the way that you’re, that is a Penseroso’. Thereupon the sculptor made several other gestures until one of them struck Mr. Adams as corresponding with the idea. As good luck would have it, he would not wait for a woman model to be brought in and posed in accordance with the gesture indicated by the sculptor, so Saint-Gaudens grabbed the Italian boy who was mixing clay, put him into the pose, and draped a blanket over him. That very blanket, it may be stated here, is on the statue, and forms the drapery of the figure. ‘Now that’s done’, said Mr.Adams ‘the pose is settled. Go to La Farge about any original ideas of Kwannon. I don’t want to see the statue till it’s finished.’7 These are the final instructions Adams gave to Saint-Gaudens, despite Saint-Gaudens’s requests for more. Immediately, there are the interesting moments of reading ‘the pose’, the ‘idea’, the ‘veil’, and the ‘gender’ of the figure. While the figure finally bears the dress of a female figure, the gender of the figure remains slightly ambiguous, perhaps as a result of the boy model. The pose reflecting the acceptance of the inevitable links the hand to the face, while the coat apparently veils the material reality of the inevitable. Adams delivers the germs of the statue but then withdraws involvement. Even for Adams’s current ‘original ideas’ on Eastern religion, Saint-Gaudens is directed to La Farge. It is as if the confrontation with the statue will remind him of his own unfinished mourning, and that with the completion of the statue, not only will the Memorial be finished but his own mourning will be as well. When he returns to his seemingly possessed new house (his house on 1603 H.Street, with Richardson its architect, had been completed at the time of Marian Adams’s death), he finishes his long overdue project, the History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison; he then immediately journeys to the South Seas with John La Farge from 1890–2. On this journey, he finally confronts his wife’s death, its effects on him, and begins a process of mourning. In his letters, he asserts that his last ties to Washington are part of his ‘old’ life, and that the travels to the South Seas will constitute a new life. After his mother’s death in 1889, he melodramatically proclaims himself the

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last of the ‘house’ of Adamses;8 he fashions his own posthumous existence as that of a ghost: ‘I am only a ghost, dead as the great Pan’;9 or, ‘I am as dead as a mummy myself, but don’t mind it. As a ghost I am rather a success in a small way, not to the world, but to my own fancy, which I presume to be a ghost’s world, as it is mine.’10 His reason for choosing the islands of the South Seas for his particular excursion is Clarence King’s description of the beautiful women on Hawaii on his trip a few years earlier. Clarence King used to boast about the ‘old-gold-girl’ of the South Sea islands, and Adams now embarks on a quest to find ‘archaic womanhood’ (Clarence King’s ‘old-gold-girl).11 His ‘tie’ to the old house will be the correspondence with his friends, and in particular with Elizabeth Cameron (two out of every three of the letters written by Adams during this journey were to her12). And one of the topics of their epistolary affair is Saint-Gaudens’s completion of the Memorial. As the phantom of his own private existence, he journeys into his subconscious underworld by crossing the Pacific Ocean. When he actually embarks on Samoa, he uses the language of rebirth, ‘regaining consciousness’ after the labour of seasickness. The proliferation of discourses associated with Adams’s mourning process is mindboggling and there are many contradictory directions. The split, or the ‘cleavage’ in Henry Adams assumes shape in split personas, one pre-1871, re-establishing himself post-1892, and one coming to maturity in the twenty-year episode.13 The old persona re-establishes a tie to the old-Washington life through transferring his love for Clover (as Marian Adams was called by her friends) onto Elizabeth Cameron. The new persona, however, becomes an ambivalent mix of Adams imagining himself as a woman (an impossible identification with his wife) and the actual women on the islands of the South Seas whom he is trying to measure into his idea of archaic woman. With the loss of his wife and the dark shadow she extends over him, Adams needs to repossess the loss within his ego and does so through transference and identification. His quest after the ‘old-gold-girl’ takes an unexpected turn on Tahiti. In contrast to events on Samoa, Adams acquires a new name, a new royal heritage, and a ‘feminine’ identity. In a formal ceremony, Adams is adopted into the royal Teva family, by the old Queen Ariitaimai: I was quite upset, last Monday morning, just before they all went away, when the old lady with a certain dignity of manner,

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drawing a chair near mine, sat down and made me a little formal speech in native words, which of course I did not understand and which Marao, who was in on the secret, instantly translated. The speech was, I believe, the proper, traditional and formal act of investiture, and conferred on me the hereditary family name of Taura-atua, with the lands, rights, and privileges attached to it.14 With the acquisition of his new name, Taura-atua i Amo, Adams assumes a new persona, whose voice appears feminine. Already early on in meeting with the last royal members of Tahiti, Adams identifies with the old Queen, whom he later calls his Hinary (Tahitian grandmother). The parallel between her story of the disintegration of Tahiti and her royal family and his own displaced aristocracy in America presents a recognizable moment of identification.15 When he decides to chronicle the history of Tahiti from the perspective of its last queen, Adams writes in his letters that he has become Hinary’s favourite child, telling Adams things ‘she would never tell them [her ‘biological’ children]’.16 The telling itself, however, is done by Queen Ariitaimai’s daughter because he sleeps when Hinary does the storytelling and only wakes up for the translation. The process of transferring his wife’s modern American womanhood onto a prelapsarian motherhood seems part of a therapeutic model of coming to terms with her death. His identification with his idea of Tahitian motherhood is still part of Adams’s colonial masculine appropriation, in which he metaphorizes a woman into his need, yet at the same time, Adams’s role switching between the powerful American man and the disenfranchised Tahitian woman affords him a curious double perspective. The new persona asserts his power by means of lands, rights, and privileges’. On his journey to come to terms with his life and to both bury and build a posthumous existence, Marian Adams’s Memorial is simultaneously erected as symbolic closure of the episode. Initially, Elizabeth Cameron reports delay after delay. Adams angrily responds that he would like to sacrifice the architects: Thanks and thanks for your visit to Rock Creek Church. Formerly, in Hawaii, whenever a new house or temple was built, a human victim had to killed to be put under its first post. If I could, I should club St.Gaudens and Stanford White, and put them under their own structure. Nothing has distressed me like their outrageous disregard of my feelings in this matter. Never spare

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an architect or artist hereafter. Make their lives intolerable, and have no pity, for they will have none on you.17 One can imagine Adams’s uncharacteristic emotional response, when he confesses that the architects outrageously disregard his feeling. As an uncanny coincidence which enforces the symbolic correspondences between Adams’s life in America and his experiences on Tahiti, Adams, as Taura-atua-i Amo, also gains a sacrificial temple where he can order human sacrifices. Immediately, Adams remembers his curse on the architects: ‘As Taura atua I had also a private Marao and the right to order human sacrifices. St.Gaudens and Stanford White had better avoid Taiti.’18 The Memorial and his sacrificial Maroa merge into a bizarre burial ground and ritual that elides North American and Tahiti; Adams’s psychological ‘deliverance’ would be complete with the erection of the Memorial. He recalls his instructions and intentions in a letter to Theodore Dwight, yet he doubts whether the Memorial ‘will ever be delivered’: ‘From the first I told Saint-Gaudens that he should be absolutely free from interference. The result is that after nearly five years I am not certain that his work will ever be delivered.’19 When finally, in June 1891 he receives photographs from Rock Creek accompanied by John Hay’s and Elizabeth Cameron’s descriptions, a weight seems to fall from Adams’s shoulders. On the same day, he writes: The Richmond suddenly arrived this morning, bringing your March and April letters from Samoa, with the photographs of the St.Gaudens work. St.Gaudens himself, and Dwight and Hay also wrote about it, but none of them gave me so much as you, though Hay’s little description of it gave me a regular oldfashioned fit of tears, and I have not yet at all recovered from the effect of reading and re-reading what you have said. As for you, I can say nothing that I have not said so often as to be ashamed of not saying more. I am infinitely grateful. You make me feel as though my last anxiety was removed, and I had no more worry about in life. If the statue is half what you describe it, I can be quite contented to lie down under it, and sleep quietly with her. At the end of all philosophy, silence is the only true God.20 As yet another uncanny coincidence, he receives the proofs for the completed Memorial by means of photographs. In all his letters about the South Seas up this time, he had railed against the crude realism of

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the photograph, even exclaiming in a letter with horrifying resonances ‘the photo killeth’. The moment when the burial of his wife appears to have been completed, it’s as if she’s enshrined into her art, photography. Adopted into archaic motherhood, he now quests for Elizabeth Cameron; his last anxiety’ is removed as well. The entire correspondence about Rock Creek between Elizabeth Cameron and Henry Adams breathes awkwardness. While he is courting her in his letters and while she encourages him, they write anxiously about one of the causes of their special bond: Clover’s suicide. Through expressing their feelings about the Memorial, Adams and Cameron close a certain era in their relationship. Again in a metaphorical death, Adams says goodbye to the Adams between 1871–1891; he will now gladly lie beside Clover and sleep; the last sentence emphasizes the silence that covers up and gives voice to the crucial twenty years with Clover. Not coincidentally, in the same extended letter to Elizabeth Cameron, Adams starts on his new journey: ‘My only source of energy is that I am actually starting on a ten-thousand-mile journey to see—you?’.21 The desire to understand his wife’s life and death culminates on Tahiti in an impossible identification with feminine experience in combination with the transference of his love for his wife to Tahitian motherhood. He now offers himself as an objectified, passive femininity to signal his internalization of both archaic woman and ‘old-gold-girl’. His earlier masculine appropriation of women only led to a distorted male portrait of woman. His Tahitian identity, however, makes Adams himself the embodiment of appropriated femininity, placing him partly in his wife’s role, and burying his old existence under his Memorial. The two personas of Washington and Tahiti return in The Education in its double structure. The text of The Education proliferates with powerful images of women. Inside the twentyyear silence, Adams voices his representation of women from within his own feminine experience on Tahiti and from the desire to identify with his wife, yet to leave her unappropriated. Paradoxically, the complex motive of the extraordinary act of writing The Education is partly an effort to guard his privacy. After he has read Thomas Reid’s Life, Letters, and Friendships of Richard Monckton Milnes (1890), Adams exclaims in a letter to his friend Charles Milnes Gaskell: What should be done with a wretch who kills your soul forever, and piles feather-bolsters on it till eternity becomes immortal

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struggling for breath and air?… The moral should be that every man should write his own life, to prevent some other fellow from taking it.22 The act of writing, then, becomes a means of preserving his ‘life’ that otherwise might be corrupted and killed. Writing himself provides an eternal resting point. And he reiterates to Henry James: ‘The volume is a mere shield of protection in the grave. I advise you to take your own life in the same way, in order to prevent biographers from taking it in theirs.’23 That Adams now takes his own life by writing The Education is especially relevant in that his autobiography now becomes a kind of epitaph, a naming of the dead: he is constructing it as his own Memorial. By leaving out the happy 1870s and the destructive 1880s in The Education and by labelling those decades ‘the rest’, Adams’s original recipients could read the silence in between Chapters 21 and 22.24 Even Adams’s contemporaries were well aware of what was left out because Marian Adams’s death, as Ernest Samuels has documented, had been front page news.25 In fact, labelling this moment ‘silence’ seems a misnomer because Adams has so carefully grafted the gap at the centre of the book that paradoxically the silence is written. For the contemporary reader the structural silence must also be written in order to read the rest of The Education. Until the very end, The Education remained a personal text; he felt ambivalent about publishing his private life to the world. On 1 March 1916, he sent a corrected copy to Henry Cabot Lodge complete with an editor’s preface to which Adams added Lodge’s initials, which has served as the basis of the contemporary text of The Education. To many of its readers, Adams’s fear that the book might be too personal certainly does not reflect a reading experience; in most of the literary criticism on The Education, Adams poses as the detached intellectual whose disassociation from contemporary life provides him with a bird’s-eye mocking, restless view of American power. The textual Memorial brings the person to life in this peculiar autobiography. By discussing the Memorial in The Education, Adams is able both to elaborate an abstract concept of Force—art—and locate a deeply personal moment. From the centre of political power in Washington, Adams suddenly turns to Rock Creek Cemetery. On this textual site of death, Adams strolls like a nineteenth-century wanderer of cemeteries (Ann Douglas even speaks of ‘a cemetery movement’26). Adams seeks out his Memorial to watch both the statue

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and the audience (the parallels with Marcher in Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle’ abound). Later, when Saint-Gaudens guides him to see the cathedral of Amiens, Adams reiterates: ‘one sees what one brings’.27 The idea of art as a mirror signals the importance of a reader’s response to his work of art, The Education, but Adams’s idea also suggests that juxtaposing the Rock Creek Memorial and The Education reflects the artistic purpose of both. Thus, Adams passionately refuses any label to the mystical statue because that would immediately assign a meaning to the statue and close off the reflective function of the Memorial. When Adams discusses Saint-Gaudens’s contribution to American art, he ascribes him the qualities that he has given women throughout the text. Saint-Gaudens is ‘inarticulate’, works from ‘instinct’ and art to him boils down to ‘taste’: Of all the American artists who gave to American art whatever life it breathed in the seventies, St.Gaudens was perhaps the most sympathetic, but certainly the most inarticulate. General Grant or Don Cameron had scarcely less instinct of rhetoric than he. All the other—the Hunts, Richardson, John La Farge, Stanford White—were exuberant; only St.Gaudens could never discuss or dilate on an emotion, or suggest artistic arguments for giving to his work the forms that he felt. He never laid down the law, or affected the despot, or became brutalised like Whistler by the brutalities of his world. He required no incense; he was no egoist; his simplicity of thought was excessive; he could not imitate, or give any form but his own to the creations of his hand. No one felt more strongly than he the strength of other men, but the idea that they could affect him never stirred an image in his mind.28 Adams appears to have forgotten that he refused to discuss the Memorial, not Saint-Gaudens. All the feelings of the 1885–1891 era are transposed onto Saint-Gaudens. Saint-Gaudens feels the strength of other men, but remains curiously independent. The artist and his art appear to have fused in Adams’s image. Stanford White, who designed the stone behind the monument, and Saint-Gaudens embellished the figure with a small classical ornament: ‘an egg and dart pattern at the cornice and a ribboned laurel wrath at the base’.29 These designs seem oddly out of place against the resigning pose of the figure, and Adams apparently forgets Saint-Gaudens’s insistence on these ornamental features. Significantly though, writing is notably absent from this

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Memorial. Adams explicitly instructed that ‘no inscription, dates, letters, or other attempts’ should ever mark the Memorial. Here too, the absence of text, as in the middle of The Education, enlivens the figure. Adams’s adamant instructions could be usefully considered in the context of Jacques Derrida’s discussion on ‘the violence of the letter’. In his discussion of the implicit hierarchy of speech and writing, Derrida discusses the power of not-naming. As soon as anthropologist LéviStrauss has tricked his subjects into revealing their proper names to him, he gains a controlling power over ‘his subjects’. Adams’s resistance to name his wife in the text and to label the Memorial is in this context a resistance to supplement her ‘proper’ name violently.30 At all times, the Memorial must remain devoid of any references, and only mystify. After Saint-Gaudens’s death, his son Homer asks for Adams’s correspondence with his father. In his response to Homer SaintGaudens on 24 January 1908, Adams reiterates the virgin condition of the Memorial by demonstrating the degrading consummation and commercialization of naming: I have only one favour to ask of you in return. Do not allow the world to tag my figure with a name! Every magazine writer wants to label it as some American patent medicine for popular consumption—Grief, Despair, Pear’s Soap, or Macy’s Mens’ Suits Made to Measure. Your father meant it to ask a question, not give an answer; and the man who answers will be damned to eternity like the men who answered the Sphinx.31 The popular name tags ‘grief’ and ‘despair’ suggest references to his wife’s suicide, which somehow immediately prevents the onlooker from asking other questions. As Elizabeth Bronfen suggests in her discussion of deathbed scenes in nineteenth-century American literature, ‘the rhetoric of the Victorian deathbed scene seems to promise its spectators a fleeting glance of what might lie beyond death’.32 By draping the figure with Macy’s Men’s Suits Made to Measure, Adams links his mannequin of The Education to the veiled statue. The suit of the mannequin, Adams’s autobiographical alter ego, corresponds to the fashioned identity of the individual. Not in the unveiling of dress does identity become visible but in the veiling lies the essence of identity. With one hand touching the lower face on the right side, the figure appears lost in contemplation. Only the face, neck, part of the right side, breast and shoulder, and the lower right arm are not veiled underneath the ‘suit’, and the figure’s eyes and mouth are

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closed. The dark shadow inside the hood permits no light from underneath the veil. Veil and figure appear as one, and an unveiling would destroy the figure.33 Importantly, the entire figure, both its cover and its face, is ungendered. Adams explains it to Roosevelt: ‘As [SaintGaudens] meant it, he wanted to exclude sex, and sink it in the idea of humanity. The figure is sexless.’34 The fold between the legs suggests a boy, whereas the facial expression bears feminine qualities. The Memorial eventually serves as a grave for Marian and Henry, and the monument strangely unites the two in one figure that seems beyond gender division. As Ernst Scheyer has asserted, Saint-Gaudens’s Rock Creek Monument is ‘one that truly anticipates modern trend’.35 Its unique malachite-green bronze and the mottled red of the stone make the Adams monument ‘the first colourful memorial in the history of American sculpture’.36 At the time when La Farge is working stained glass and colour and Richardson designs the first coloured church in America, Saint-Gaudens drapes the Memorial in restful hues. While Saint-Gaudens appreciated Rodin’s ‘Gates of Hell’ and ‘The Thinker’ (with which sculpture there are fascinating links), he was confused by his later abstract work. As art, Adams’s The Education and SaintGaudens’s Rock Creek Sculpture straddle the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The echoes of inter-artuality between The Education and the Memorial resonate in the burial ground of the unwritten twenty years. Here lies the voice of Marian Hooper Adams. His private Tahitian identity and his public Presidential identity may join Marian in the statue. In the Memorial, Adams sees his own mannequin whose patchwork fashioned an ego that meant to ask questions. These questions juxtapose the many answers Adams provides in The Education. When Elizabeth Cameron describes the statue to him while he is in Tahiti, Adams’s response parallels the statue to a religious aesthetics of silence: ‘If the statue is half what you describe it, I can be quite contented to lie down under it, and sleep quietly with her. At the end of all philosophy, silence is the only true God.’37

Chapter 10

Memory enstructured The case of Memorial Hall1 Clyde Binf ield

Caroone House is a large, bland and slightly shabby office block of the early 1970s on the east side of Farringdon Street, well below Holborn Viaduct and almost at Ludgate Circus. It is leased by British Telecom from Sun Life and it looks the part. Its name is a nod to history, more obfuscation than memory: ‘Caroone’ derives not from some duly enobled and swiftly forgotten captain of commerce but from the levy for driving a cart in the City of London.2 One room on the first floor is occupied by the freeholder of Caroone House—not Sun Life at all but the Congregational Memorial Hall Trust (1978) Limited, Company No. 1389165, Charity No. 260601. Caroone House stands on the site of the Congregational Memorial Hall. A memorial is preservative of memory. It can be a monument, a record or a petition. If it is the last it communicates a sense of grievance, and implies a rebuke; it is a remonstrance. From its opening in 1875 to its demolition in 1968 Memorial Hall, as it was invariably known, was all of these. As the committee which nursed its thirteen years of creation put the matter at their first meeting, the Hall was to be ‘in connection with the Bicentenary commemoration of the ejection of the Nonconforming Ministers of the established Church in 1662’.3 There you certainly find monument as grievance, rebuke and remonstrance. And also monument as record, for this Devonshire limestone, Free Gothic fireproof rockface, mansard-spired and hammerbeam-roofed and pitchpine-panelled, contained a library, ‘8, 000 volumes ready to be placed on the shelves’.4 A building, however, by its enclosure of space, determines the activities and attitudes of those who use that space. It presupposes a future. ‘Here our Congregational Union meetings can be held; here our religious societies may assemble, here special religious services may be promoted; and all the interests of our common Christianity advanced.’5 That was how the Hall’s secretary paraphrased his committee’s prospectus. 160

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That sort of prospectus demands apparatus and people competent to use it, in this case offices and officials. Offices mean corridors. Corridors should lead to power. The evolution of power in a congregational polity is a finely balanced process. It is inseparable from the collective exercise of responsibility. Hence the hall as a principal feature, in which could be squeezed up to 1500 Congregationalists, and hence the feeling ‘that the library ought to claim special attention, and be made the means of promoting a healthy Christian intercourse, and of developing new sources of intelligence for the benefit of the rising ministry, and especially of the young men connected with the denomination’. (The first young woman minister was forty years in the future.) So this memorial had purpose. There was a course to be set. The words which described its opening—that ‘day on which they were met to inaugurate the building and consecrate it to the service and glory of God’—were predictable but entirely accurate. This was ‘an event in the history of Congregationalism which deserves special remembrance’.6 That advice to the future brings us back to memory, the exercise— in this instance facilitated by a building—of that mental faculty which retains and recalls previous ideas and impressions. It has to do with a shaping of history. The Congregational Memorial Hall and its diffused afterlife as a Trust triggers an alternative shaping of English history waymarked by a consciousness of key dates: 1593, 1620, 1649, 1662, 1688 and 1689, 1714, 1828: the Separatist martyrs, the Pilgrim Fathers, the execution of Charles 1, the Great Ejectment and the Clarendon Code, the Glorious Revolution and the Act of Toleration, Schism, Occasional Conformity and ‘Queen Anne’s Dead’, the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Those dates signify sacrifice, separation, victory, inferiority, escape and constant engagement with the nature of citizenship. They provide a structure for a Dissenting counterpoint to what came to be called the Whig interpretation of History: an emphasis on 1689, and perhaps on 1649, rather than on 1688. That counterpoint could be played to some effect on representative occasions. To switch for a moment from the Hall to one of its feeder congregations: Union Chapel Islington was the sort of suburban chapel which could expect statesmen to accept its invitations. Gladstone attended the opening of its new building in 1877; Asquith was heckled by suffragettes there in 1908. It was one of two neighbouring London churches—the other was Harecourt on the further side of Canonbury—to have played a consistently conspicuous

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role in furnishing committee members and contributors to the Memorial Hall scheme. In January 1880 its minister, Henry Allon, asked John Bright if he would chair a lecture given by R.W.Dale. Here was a suburban opportunity to confound—yet possibly also to vindicate— Matthew Arnold. Allon was metropolitan Congregationalism’s most statesmanlike minister. He was on breakfasting terms with Gladstone.7 Dale was provincial Congregationalism’s most statesmanlike minister.8 His sermons were read by Gladstone. As for Bright, he was the best known Nonconformist in public life, a household name among English statesmen, his standing grandly incommensurate with his brief, inglorious, bouts of office.9 Bright was Dale’s MP What a coup for Islington: ‘It is not easy to refuse anything you ask—’, Bright wrote to Allon from Rochdale; and to be able to do any service to Mr.Dale must always be a pleasure to me—therefore, tho’ contrary to my custom during the session of Parlt, I will endeavour to come to your ‘Church building’… I suppose I shall be not only excused, but applauded if I only occupy 5 minutes with my opening observations?10 Dale’s lecture was to be on 10 February. On 6 February Bright wrote again from Rochdale, this time in his role as prime political valetudinarian: I hope I may be able to keep my engagement with you on Tuesday next, but it is not very certain. Since Sunday last I have been kept indoors by a severe cold and cough which have prevented me from going to the opening of the Session, and whether I shall be well enough to travel on Monday must depend on the condition I find myself in on the morning of that day. I hope I may be able to come… I write this just to tell you of the possibility of my not being with you—tho’ I still hope to come. Perhaps I can say something more positive on Monday.11 Monday came and Bright was still in Rochdale: I had some hopes yesterday that I should be able to go up to London to-day, but I am disappointed. I had so bad a night, and my cough is so troublesome, that I dare not venture out. I do not therefore expect to be with you tomorrow evening…

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I am really sorry not to be able to be with you—but there comes a time in one’s life when one must not be careless or run needless risks…12 However, Tuesday came and Bright was there: ‘Mr Bright took the chair at a Lecture on “The Rise of Nonconformity in England” by Rev. R.W.Dale of Birmingham in Union Chapel, Islington, Feb. 10, 1880. He spoke 40 min.’13 Bright left his notes with Henry Allon, four sheets of soundbites with three texts, one from Macaulay (‘It is an unquestionable, and most instructive fact, that the years during which the political power of the Anglican Hierarchy was in the zenith, were precisely the years during which national virtue was at the lowest point’), one from Hume (‘so absolute was the authority of the Crown, that the precious spark of liberty had been kindled, and was preserved, by the Puritans alone; and it was to this sect that the English owe the whole freedom of their constitution’); and best of all from William Penn: ‘we can never be the better for our religion, if our neighbours be the worse for it’. Here most certainly was Whig history’s Dissenting counterpoint, orchestrated by the old Manchester School’s greatest surviving teacher so that its Birmingham posterity could interpret it for a North London audience: Compliment. Why accepted? Great subject Special Interest… NONCONS—learn from Fathers—lessons of freedom adherence to truth—conscience—what results? CHURCHMEN—errors of their Fathers—failure of policy grandeur of aims and rights of those they persecuted. There was a bracing comparison of French and English history, to the disadvantage of the French largely because England had been blessed by the survival of Nonconformity, and France had not. Last 100 YEARS Noncons—great advancing and reforming force in English political life Some enlightened Churchmen with them… If Churchmen could discover greatness of all this, grand principles out of which has sprung Only touched great question…

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One knows how he feels. The most suggestive soundbite came early on: ‘Nonconformity, few Noncons and fewer Churchmen understand great history, and great results’. 14 For what right had such an audience to appropriate such history? After 1883, each time its minister walked to his pulpit from his vestry he would pass under a chunk of Plymouth Rock encased in the lintel of the door. That was a relic as beckoning as any saint’s finger and it was as fraudulent. It was a gift of the Pilgrim Society of America, a result of Henry Allon’s friendship with leading East Coast Congregationalists, particularly the historian H.M.Dexter and the Brooklyn ministers, Theodore Cuyler and Henry Ward Beecher.15 It could not reflect any lineal descent, for Union Chapel (the name reflected an original union of Evangelical Dissenters and Anglicans) was an early nineteenth-century product of the Evangelical Revival and Allon himself had been a Wesleyan Methodist before he became a Congregationalist. Union was certainly an exemplary chapel: it can claim with some justice to have been the congregation which first popularized ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ since the four-part version of ‘Irby’, the tune which made it famous, was published just before its composer, H.J.Gauntlett,16 became Union’s organist; and the building, not yet completed, in which Bright spoke, was designed to accommodate the needs of a congregation trained to sing in four-part harmony, so that the choir could take a back seat and the glories of a Willis organ could be exploited rather than worshipped. Those resonances—the hymn by an Irish bishop’s wife, the tune by an English parson’s son, the building in ‘Lancet Gothic of a French type’—are evangelical and catholic—romantic rather than Puritan. They are the cultural outworking of the Great Revival’s ‘catholic Christianity’. So what was happening on that February Tuesday evening in 1880 when John Bright came down from Rochdale to introduce R.W.Dale who had come from Birmingham to tell North London about the rise of Nonconformity ? Three things were happening. There was certainly an antiquarian element to the evening: a touch Lit. and Phil, or Mutual Improvement for cultural Gradgrinds eager to collect interesting facts authoritatively delivered. The data might lie dormant (‘few Noncons… understand great history’) but some minds might be furnished. There was also a propagandist side to the evening. John Bright’s presence two months before a general election which would see a keenly anticipated Liberal victory, with electoral reform firmly on the party’s agenda, could hardly be construed as politically neutral. And when

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the time came to reap what that reform had sown Islington would find itself with four parliamentary constituencies, in three of which Nonconformists—one Wesleyan, one Unitarian and one Congregationalist—were Liberal candidates and in two of which they were victorious. One of these two, Henry Spicer, was a deacon of Union Chapel.17 The other, Richard Chamberlain, was a brother of John Bright’s Birmingham running mate, Joseph Chamberlain.18 R.W.Dale and Henry Allon were instrumental in introducing him to the Liberals of Finsbury and West Islington: ‘few Noncons and fewer Churchmen understand great history, and great results.’ A livelier apprehension of memory, however, must be added to the contrasting antiquarian and propagandist charms of Bright and Dale on the Rise of Nonconformity. Memory may be a problematic faculty for adherents of a felt religion, for memory of itself does not save. But it can be an active agent in salvation: memory as representing. What you remember comes alive as you remember it. It represents itself. That is a transforming act. It acts on you. That sort of remembering, of representing, of real presence indeed, is implicit in the memorial ordinance, the central memorial act at the Lord’s Table. Such memory came naturally to Union whose architect, James Cubitt,19 a Baptist minister’s son, expressed his Gothic idea by concentrating on the crossing, the point of intersection in Catholic church architecture between the nave, or people’s part, and the chancel, or priests’ part; there he gathered Union’s Protestant believers, joined in shared priesthood. Thus he recreated the essence of traditional Christian architecture, extracted from the past for contemporary needs, an arena in which the sacred art and music of other times could be naturally appropriated. There was a further representing, enacted no less powerfully in countless chapels and meeting houses entirely innocent of Gothic ideas, for wherever a pulpit or reading desk is prominent there is the Word: the rehearsal of God’s action in History, shaping His people and now reacting on you; the promise reheard through prayer, exploded into praise, explored as sermon, calling each soul to its inheritance as described week in and week out in scripture. That constant representing provided its hearers with their true line of descent. It justifed Dale’s lecture to Allon’s people. It explained the care with which Cambridge’s Congregationalists transcribed their ministerial succession from the late seventeenth century, misreadings and all, into each new minute book. It illuminates the church book still used by Wrentham’s Congregationalists in the 1880s as it had been

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in the 1680s, when their membership included some Mayflower kinsfolk; from Wrentham, Suffolk, to Wrentham, Massachusetts, almost justifies Union’s relic of Plymouth Rock. It softens the old prejudice against marrying carnally, that is to say, outside the meeting-house world, for memory is more swiftly represented through the godly family. If all believers were likely agents in this congregational process, it was the ministers who were naturally representative. What is notable is the number of mid-century ministers who combined evangelical vigour, executive clout and civic prominence with the historical nerve. They were successful spiritual entrepreneurs. Henry Allon was one. He orchestrated the life of Union Chapel, was the advisory force behind Cheshunt, the largely Congregational theological college in Hertfordshire, edited the British Quarterly Review and twice chaired the Congregational Union of England and Wales. R.W.Dale was another. He reshaped Carrs Lane Church, Birmingham into a semblance of his own image, was the driving force behind Spring Hill, the Congregational theological college in Birmingham which moved, largely on Dale’s encouragement, to Oxford where it survives as Mansfield College; he edited The Congregationalist, wrote magisterially on Congregational history and creatively on its polity, and chaired the Congregational Union. A third, from an earlier generation, was Robert Vaughan.20 He too chaired the Congregational Union, enjoyed influential pastorates in Worcester and Kensington, was Allon’s predecessor as editor of the British Quarterly and, as principal rather than eminence, directed Lancashire Independent, the Congregational theological college in Manchester, through stormy times. It was Vaughan especially, in his role as Professor of History at University College London, who developed the Dissenters’ version of Whig history. Although his inaugural lecture was On the Study of General History, he wrote steadily on John Wycliffe, England under the Stuarts and the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. The work for which he is best known, however, The Age of Great Cities, published in the year when he left the metropolis for Cottonopolis, is a reminder that he was as much a man of the platform and pulpit as of the study: it survives as a foundational text for the study of urban history. With Vaughan we return to Memorial Hall and the Bicentenary and its necessary committee work.21 Recently retired to St.John’s Wood after a spell in Uxbridge, Vaughan was well on his way through his three-decker Revolutions in English History (1859–63), and the obvious man to produce English Nonconformity, the Bicentenary’s official

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Memorial Volume, as well as to enjoy a pamphleteering skirmish, I’ll tell you: an Answer to ‘How did they get there?’ But Vaughan was the Bicentenary’s memorialist. He was not its impresario. That role fell to an obstinately unlikely man, Joshua Wilson, an elderly barrister of antiquarian tastes in Tunbridge Wells whose retiring disposition (as his obituaries described it) was aggravated by a long martyrdom to chronic cystitis. Thanks to the comfortable fortune left by his domineering father, a silk manufacturer, Joshua Wilson was a man of means and connections. The father, Thomas Wilson, had been in his time a one-man chapel-building society, college council and ministerial deployment committee, and Joshua loyally and feelingly inherited those obligations. Despite his age, health and temperament he remained a man of strategic grasp. He seldom now attended the numerous committees on which he sat, but his written advice was freely given and to the point. He prepared a plan for celebrating the Bicentenary.22 Congregationalism does not make for rapid or easy mobilization of forces. Its adherents congregate out of principle but their method of congregating is a matter of convenience. It is remarkable that Wilson’s plan—a massive building of chapels, a concerted propagation and publication of principles and history, and a London meeting centre (Congregationalists do not take naturally to headquarters)—was so successful. In the course of a decade townscapes were inspired; money was raised; so were profiles. Notwithstanding considerable economic fluctuations the commemoration occurred at an unusually convenient moment. It provided a focus for what would have happened anyway, a building and rebuilding at the psychological point after the publication of the previous decade’s Religious Census, a reassertion of representative rights as pressures were rising for further parliamentary and municipal reform and as confidence was growing in an ability to undertake that reform. The most instructive focus for this accumulating activity was the creation of Memorial Hall. This brought together a flexible but working committee of nationally weighty but London-based ministers and laymen in a greater and larger concentration of clout devoted to a primarily denominational, that is to say internal, purpose than had previously been seen among Congregationalists. None of them can have anticipated the dozen years of ultimately satisfied frustration which faced them: that was the price to be paid if Congregational memory were to stamp the townscape of Europe’s most rapidly changing capital.23 Joshua Wilson’s strategy was launched in October 1861 by a resolution of the Congregational Union’s Autumnal Assembly at

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Birmingham. The Birmingham resolution led to a London Conference which issued in a committee which gave way to another committee from which there emerged a trust. The inaugural resolution was memorial as remonstrance: This Assembly in anticipation of the 24th of August 1862 the Bicentenary day of the ejectment of two thousand Ministers from their homes and livings as Ministers of Christ in the Church of England under the stringent, unhuman and unjust provisions of the Act of Uniformity, deems it a most suitable opportunity for commemorating the zeal, self denial, and consistency of these noble men to whom the Nonconformity of this and every subsequent age is and will be indebted; and of magnifying the grace of God in their high conscientious attachment to religious truth and freedom: and would earnestly call on all the Pastors and Churches of the Congregational Order in England and Wales to make such provision for a due observance of the event as may appear desirable.24 The consequent conference, sensibly convened by the committees of the national Congregational Union and the English and London Chapel Building Societies, determined on a Memorial Fund to promote ‘the erection of new Congregational Chapels, the extinction of Chapel debts, the establishment of a Pastors’ retiring fund (already initiated), the strengthening of local Missions, and especially the erection of a Congregational Memorial Hall’. There followed what the necessary committee described as a year of ecclesiastical instruction: ‘Many in our Congregations have received teachings respecting the ejected, the principles which they held, and the events by which they suffered which to them were perfectly new’. £129, 000 was paid or promised, rising over the next decade, it was calculated, to £250, 000, if one included earmarked gifts (for ‘every contributer [sic] should be at liberty to allocate his own subscription’). That was certainly ‘a noble expression…of the Congregational Body in every part of England and Wales’. It was time to concentrate on the Hall. Deputations ranged the country: Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, Bradford, Halifax, Birmingham, Worcester, Essex. Yorkshire was played off against Lancashire. There were drawing room and vestry meetings in London. Invariably the giving was accompanied by protests that times were hard, though a gratifying number, not all of them predictably, gave between £100 and £5000. Some were memorially anonymous:

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‘Descendant of an Ejected Minister’, £100; ‘Ladies, two descendants of Philip Henry, per Revd. T.Binney LL.D, ‘£5; ‘Nonconformist’, Wellingborough, 10s Od.25 Some were in kind. In May 1866, the Vicar of Postling, near Hythe, Kent, whose surname, Winter, suggests a notably Dissenting ancestry, offered a small portrait of the Revd. Andrew Rivett DD, ‘supposed to be an early production of the celebrated painter Rembrant [sic]’ for which, understandably, he was cordially thanked.26 Time was pressing as well as opportune. For some thirty years the Congregational Union’s affiliated societies and library had been lodged in Blomfield Street, just east of Finsbury Circus.27 The location was convenient but the premises were cramped, their lease was running out and the Metropolitan and District Railway had plans for the site. This brings into sharp relief an underlying motif of the present chapter. The evidence of the nation’s age, as a nation, was in its surroundings. The past had formed it. And now it was under transformation. It was being uprooted here, obliterated there, more thoroughly and intensively than at any previous time.28 The English were becoming most aware of their past at the point where there was more present than ever before. No wonder they clothed new building types in old styles, snatched from oblivion and draped out of scale, anachronism made relevant. Congregationalism’s search for its Memorial Hall was caught in this turmoil. The demands of the road-wideners and railway companies, both overground and underground, the competition of property developers and the vested interests of the City, the Livery Companies, the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s, let alone the hazard of Ancient Lights, took a decade to sort out. In the twenty years after the Bicentenary Queen Victoria Street cut a swathe from the Embankment to the Bank, Holborn Viaduct vanquished hill and dale across the City’s northern side, Ludgate Hill was successively widened and the London, Chatham and Dover Railway, the first to cross the Thames into the City, opened its station at Ludgate Hill in June 1865; the District Line followed at Blackfriars five years later. Hotels, company headquarters and department stores—the Keyset’s Royal, the Imperial, the Holborn Viaduct, Thomas Cook’s on Ludgate Circus, the Prudential and Gamage’s on High Holborn—grew in grandeur.29 Historic chapels vanished east, west and north. Amidst all this the Memorial Hall Committee set its sights on Doctors’ Common, the London Tavern, Newgate Market, the old Bridewell; it even toyed with the Inns of Court Hotel between Holborn and Lincoln’s Inn Fields and it actually bought a site close

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to the Mansion House. None of them answered the need and the Mansion House site was threatened by the new Queen Victoria Street and gobbled up by the Metropolitan District Line. In this context the balance of personalities and abilities of the committee members became particularly important. The Committee was in principle a loosely formed collection of town and country members. In practice it was a sensibly fluctuating core of London activists, held together by an overlapping trio of secretaries who organized the campaign, took care of public relations and kept a finger on the country pulse. Whether ministerial or lay their connections were formidable. Today, they survive as names and little else, diminished once more into a bourgeois sectarianism; but in their lifetime each name told: John Remington Mills, silk manufacturer, landowner, Liberal back-bencher, millionaire (he gave at least £10, 000 and probably £12, 000, to the Hall), Joshua Wilson s first cousin and a dogged working chairman (Wilson himself seldom attended but he regularly wrote notes to the secretary or chairman and he acted as a conduit for the Committee’s most persistent northern correspondent, George Hadfleld, the rich Manchester solicitor who represented Sheffield’s crustier Liberals in Parliament); Samuel Morley, hosiery manufacturer, landowner, Liberal backbencher; John Morley, Samuel’s elder brother and partner, whose interest waned as he switched loyalties to the Plymouth Brethren; William Revell Spicer, paper manufacturer, whose brothers, sons and nephews were committed through him and his Scottish-born family connection from Bristol; William Sommerville, also a paper manufacturer, who frequently attended because he was often in London; Henry Wright, who lived and worshipped in Kensington, though he made railway carriages in Birmingham and was doubly welcome because of a prime Bradford link—he was Sir Titus Salt’s son-in-law and Salt was a £5, 000 giver; George Frederick White, the Portland cement manufacturer from Bayswater though he worshipped in Clapham, whose son Frederick, in switching allegiances, would serve Church House Westminster as the father was serving Memorial Hall; William Henry Willans, eventually to move from Highbury to Holland Park, with political ambitions, invaluable northern contacts, German experience and an imaginative involvement with Farningham’s Cottage Homes for Little Boys—he was the richest of Herbert Henry Asquith’s forgotten uncles and one of Henry Allon’s deacons. These men took the chair turn and turn about. Sometimes they took the opening prayer, and they regularly

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conducted diplomacies with powerful City figures, ideally working through Benjamin Scott, the City Chamberlain, whose spiritual home was Weybridge Congregational Church, or Charles Reed, a Willans connection (though each of these men was connected somehow to the next) and city printer and liveryman who was a useful link with the Court of Common Council.30 The ministerial members of the committee matched the laymen: powerful pastoral wirepullers, verging now on retirement, like Thomas Binney of the Weigh House and Josiah Viney of Highgate, whose joint brother-in-law, the builder Thomas Piper, author of a Digest of the Building Acts, was brought in at an early stage to offer his advice; George Smith, of Trinity Poplar, related by marriage to both the Morleys and the Crossleys of Halifax; Alexander Raleigh of Harecourt and Kensington, John Kennedy of Stepney Meeting; Robert Vaughan. Others were executive wirepullers, secretaries of useful denominational societies—Arthur Tidman of the London Missionary Society and Vaughan’s brother-in-law; Robert Ashton of the Evangelical Continental Society; J.C.Gallaway of the English Congregational Chapel Building Society, who had trained as an architect and had helpful links with Cotswold manufacturers; Alexander Hannay, who from 1870 was the national Congregational Union’s secretary and already breathed a fresh executive air.31 The hero of them all, however, was one of the oldest, Thomas James, a retired minister who sat under Henry Allon and was the committee’s chief secretary in its crisis years until his health collapsed and old age told.32 Unlike most of the others James was a man of genuinely 1662 descent. He was also a brother of that Evangelical beau idéal, John Angell James of Birmingham, R.W.Dale’s predecessor.33 In him, therefore, met the old Evangelicalism and the new. His son Joseph James, moreover, though overloaded with work, was among the best known of the younger generation of chapel and institutional architects, already with the Crossleys’ great gothic Square Chapel, Halifax, and Spring Hill College, Birmingham, to his credit and about to land Taunton School.34 Joseph James had his supporters on the Committee, but he was passed over; so, as it happens, was Alfred Waterhouse, the nominee of shrewd Joshua Wilson, backed with commendable candour by Thomas James, who ‘conscientiously’ believed him to be ‘the fittest man in the list, but he is unknown to the Committee’.35 The victor, however, was not to be cavilled at. John Tarring, the ‘Dissenters’ Gilbert Scott’, was at the height of his career and by any standards a successful practitioner.36 He had a

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strong line in town and country houses as well as chapels, chiefly for Congregationalists but also for Wesleyans and Baptists. Tarring’s spires, usually at the side but sometimes centre gable, clustered mainly in London and the Home Counties but they were to be found throughout England. They are rarer than they were because his favoured stone, Kentish rag, has not worn well, and because contemporary congregations do not warm, literally or metaphorically, to his large yet spindly spaces. His Dissent was confirmed (he was an Albany Chapel man, gentrified into Tolmers Square, which he designed for his fellow members) and he benefited as much as any individual from the Bicentennial building spree, for he knew what he was about. He embodied the transition from artisan tradesman to professional gentleman, beginning in Plymouth as a carpenter and plasterer, but one of the 9 per cent or so of architects to belong to the Institute of British Architects (not yet Royal) by 1845. By the mid-1860s he had a long experience of chapel committees and an easy way with them. It was Tarring, often in alliance with Charles Shepheard, the committee’s invaluably attendant solicitor (the Shepheards were the Tarrings of their profession37), who saw the committee through to their eventual site in Farringdon Street. Unlike Joshua Wilson, George Smith, Thomas James, Robert Vaughan, Arthur Tidman, Thomas Binney and several more, Tarring lived to see his building opened: he died eleven months later. His association was not trouble-free. The workmen went on strike and there were blazing rows over the heating and the extras with White, the cement manufacturer. But his Memorial Hall worked surprisingly well as concept and as fact. Its committee congratulated themselves that they had secured the best site that they had yet seen, central, freehold and monumental, with literally foundational associations, for it was where the old Fleet Prison had been, and while the foundations were being prepared the builders uncovered ‘two of the wretched cells, in which some of their martyrs were confined and cruelly used’.38 Thus grounded, the new Memorial projected Congregationalism into a steadily redefining future. The relationship between the Congregational Memorial Hall Trust and the Congregational Union of England and Wales, which was the Trust’s chief tenant, was not always clear, but the Hall which had already so steadily focused a nationwide Congregational generosity and justified a dogged Congregational committee work was more and more easily seen as a denominational headquarters, busy with more than twenty offices,

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staffed by men for whom such central service was more career than incident: in time such alien, yet convenient and therefore not entirely uncongregational, concepts like provincial moderators or central Union-directed, funds or even that contradiction in terms, a Congregational Church of England and Wales, could be nationalized and accommodated within the rockface of Memorial Hall. It facilitated a turn of mind. That turn was not only organizational and administrative. Among the Hall’s first tenants was the newly formed (1872) London Congregational Union. The Bicentenary Committee had been constantly frustrated by the ragged commitment of the London churches, but when that committee met, there, also, met Grafton Square Clapham, Harecourt Canonbury, Chase Side Enfield, Stamford Hill, Union Islington, Highgate, Kensington, the Weigh House. In such company a London Congregational Union, masterfully serviced, made sense. Would that mind-turning penny-dreadful, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, have appeared or had such impact otherwise?39 So to the most suggestive perspectives of all. The Hall was built on industrial unrest. A month after the stonelaying the carpenters and joiners were on strike, the masons threatened to join them, the price of raw materials had risen inexplicably, and the contractors, Jackson and Shaw, begged piteously for flexibility, which was why they had not yet got round to signing the contract: ‘When we sent in our Tender we did not anticipate any difficulty this year owing to the slackness of trade but singularly enough this is made the foundation of their demand as they wish to work shorter hours in order to employ the men who are idle, and at the same time to have wages increased.’ The solicitor’s advice was unambiguous and John Remington Mills was brisk: ‘they [had] felt they were dealing with honourable men and never imagined any question of this kind would be raised’. So it was not.40 The men’s congregational spirit, however, infected the building. Back in May 1866 the Committee convened a larger than usual meeting, ten-a-side of ministers and laymen, town and country, to confront the question of fundraising. Among them was an up-andcoming young minister from Ongar, Samuel Conway.41 It was always anticipated that when the building was completed its galleried, hammerbeamed hall would generate income from kindred learned and benevolent societies. That included socialist meetings. William Morris, Karl Marx, Edward Aveling (the last as of right since he was

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a son of the manse), found their way to Memorial Hall. Forty years on from that May committee meeting of 1866, the Hall housed the formative meeting for the day’s new Labour, among the delegates Conway’s son-in-law, Bruce Glasier.42 Thus socialism consorted with capitalism, for other outworkings of Congregationalism were marking the roadscape from Holborn Viaduct to Blackfriars Bridge. On the Viaduct and a step ahead, for it was opened in 1874, stood the one major historic City chapel to remain in the City: the Poultry Chapel recreated as the City Temple, a Dissenting St Pauls without the dome, for Wren did not entirely vanish in Victorian England. By Blackfriars Bridge were two commercial palaces. On the site of the old Bridewell Palace, which might have been Memorial Hall’s, stood Unilever House (completed in 1931), a classical monument to imperial commerce grander than India, Australia, South Africa, or Canada Houses. Its architect had begun his career with an exquisitely Norman Congregational Church (provocatively called St George’s) for the country estate of Unilever’s chief English founder, the first Viscount Leverhulme, whose son in the 1930s remained one of Lancashire Congregationalism’s prime benefactors.43 Next to Unilever House, and nearly twenty years older, though looking much more up-to-date, was Blackfriars House, a taste of Otto Wagner’s Vienna translated to London, whose architect, bred in Anglo-Scottish Congregationalism and trained in the Arts and Crafts, compromised that formation by joining with Herbert Baker to aggrandize the Bank of England.44 His clients at Blackfriars, who had been at that address since 1874, were Spicer Brothers, the older of the two big Spicer paper-making firms. In the 1930s Spicers, like Levers, remained a Congregational force. By the 1990s all, Congregationally speaking, had become memories, and Memorial Hall itself survived only as a Trust, hidden in its Caroone, a Memorial—to what?

Chapter 11

Memorials of the Tennysons Matthew Campbell

Alfred Tennyson died at 1.35 a.m. on Thursday 6 October, 1892, aged 83. His son Hallam Tennyson’s Memoir ends ‘The Last Chapter’1 of Tennyson’s life, by picturing a family wait by the sickbed, his father’s death and finally the progress of his coffin to burial in Westminster Abbey. It is followed only by a long parenthetical notice of the death, four years later, of his mother Emily, and her burial in a humbler grave in the churchyard at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. Before giving the reader over 100 pages of appendices, the biography proper ends by quoting the family memorial in the Freshwater church, finishing with the epitaph of Emily: ‘Dear, near and true, no truer time himself can prove you, tho’ he make you evermore dearer and nearer.’ The last days of the Tennysons—Alfred and Emily—in the Memoir are one of the great tours de force of Victorian biography, but these are also last days written from within the family of a poet whose career was fashioned out of the endings of others. As Cecil Lang has rather grimly put it, ‘No great writer has been more fortunate in the death of others than Tennyson was’.2 The deaths of Arthur Hallam, Arthur Wellesley and, all through Tennyson’s career, the mythic bringing together of these men and their endings in that of King Arthur,3 provided Tennyson with the subjects of his memorializing poetry. Hallam Tennyson’s Memoir carries on the family tradition, as it shows us the last night of Victoria’s Laureate, lying in bed with Cymbeline opened at his favourite lines in Shakespeare, the curtains open and the room flooded with Autumn moonlight, ‘in solemn stillness’. The gathered family, like many other Victorian families, all inwardly remembered In Memoriam, and as his father died, holding his wife’s hand, Hallam tells us that he ‘spoke over him his own prayer, “God accept him! Christ receive 175

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him!” because I knew that he would have wished it.’4 This is the last line of Tennyson’s Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, the prayer which departs the poem, leaving the body of the Duke to lie in peace in St Paul’s Cathedral. Hallam invokes this Funeral Ode of his father’s in a modest enough way, since he is aware that he is writing the death of an equally eminent Victorian in a biographical memorial, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son. Like his father’s poem on Wellington, Hallam memorializes the death of another by mixing the elegiac, heroic and civic modes of Victorian culture. The end of the Memoir is not in itself a laying in state. Yet speaking from within its subject’s family it is aware of its civic duty to a public who might read in the memorial such last moments above the earth: We placed Cymbeline with him, and a laurel wreath from Virgil’s tomb, and wreaths of roses, the flower which he loved above all flowers, and some of his Alexandrian laurel, the poet’s laurel. On the evening of the 11th the coffin was set upon our waggonette, made beautiful with stag’s horn moss and the scarlet Lobelia Cardinalis; and draped with the pall, woven by working men and women of the north, and embroidered by the cottagers of Keswick; and then we covered him with wreaths and crosses of flowers sent from all parts of Great Britain. The coachman, who had been for more than thirty years my father’s faithful servant, led the horse. Ourselves, the villagers, and the schoolchildren followed over the moor through our lane towards a glorious sunset, and later through Haslemere under brilliant starlight. The coffin was taken to Westminster Abbey, and, at the request of the Prince of Wales, covered with a Union Jack—lent by Lord Methuen and the brigade of Guards, quartered in London. He was laid that night in the chapel of St Faith.5 This passage enacts a ritual move away from the family who had shared in the experience of the death, initially towards the local community, but ultimately out to the nation, which was to receive Tennyson with a state funeral. At Westminster Abbey, many of the mourners in that nation were, according to Hallam, seen to make public their sense of the occasion by reading that most private of elegies In Memoriam while waiting for the service. At Tennyson’s deathbed his family had also done this: Hallam allows the outward forms of the mourning of the general public to share in that of his family.

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Much of this is dutiful, as befits a biography written by the son of the deceased. But it is not conventional. Until we are told that some of the wreaths that were received were in the shape of crosses, and the eventual placing of the borrowed flag over the coffin, this is a funeral procession which is initially hesitant about displaying the trappings of Christianity and the State. Hallam tells us that his mother left the decision about the final resting place to the Dean of the Abbey, preferring a burial in the local churchyard, with a simple English flag on his coffin. The flag, according to Emily, would ‘represent the feeling of the beloved Queen, and the nation, and the empire he loved so dearly’. Hallam adds a note about his father’s ‘detestation of the gloomy pomp of funerals’.6 In the description of the actual funeral procession, with Shakespeare in the coffin, Virgil’s wreath, roses, and Alexandrian laurel above him, and then the moss and the lobelia, Hallam tells us of a mixture of Classical funereal symbolism and a makeshift homely hearse, ‘made beautiful’ with moss and lobelia. It was only at the request of the Prince of Wales that the flag of the United Kingdom, the Union Jack, was placed on the coffin. Hallam holds his scene together with the most sombre descriptive prose as he opens it out to receive a pall from ‘the north’, with embroidery from Keswick and wreaths ‘from all parts of Great Britain’. The nation contributes to the funeral of one of its dead, before he is buried in state. The people speak before the state. Immediately after the account of the funeral, The Memoir now quotes the last fifteen lines of Tennyson’s memorial, the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington: On God and Godlike men we build our trust. Hush, the Dead March wails in the people s ears: The dark crowd moves, and there are sobs and tears: The black earth yawns: the mortal disappears; Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; He is gone who seemed so great.— Gone; but nothing can bereave him Of the force he made his own Being here, and we believe him Something far advanced in State, And that he wears a truer crown Than any wreath that man can weave him. Speak no more of his renown, Lay your earthly fancies down,

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And in the vast cathedral leave him. God accept him, Christ receive him. (lines 266–281) Hallam uses one of his father’s own memorials to memorialize him, reaching out to one account of a great occasion for the nation to hit the register for his own account of another great national occasion. There are dangers of familial hubris, but Hallam finds in his father’s poem the tone in which to avoid them. This is in the silencing of the end of the Ode and the earthly loss of the poet who so often wished to exchange that sense of loss for the heavenly gain of his own death. Hallam exchanges St Paul’s for Westminster Abbey, but he does lose something else in the exchange. Tennyson’s Ode ends with an ambivalent note, mourning one who has passed but trusting to communal belief (‘we believe’) that its subject has an immortal future. Hallam attempts to invoke the same belief of his father, for his father’s soul, advancing the terms of earthly renown into what he believes to be a more lasting version of what it is to be ‘immortal’. The Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington ends here with ‘God and Godlike men’ and ‘our’ trust that ‘we’ put in them. That ‘we’ is both the readership which is the nation for whom Tennyson’s poem attempts to speak, and the poet who shares in the grief of that readership. In this placing of ‘trust’ the writer of the Funeral Ode becomes part of the Ode’s readership, the ‘we’ for whom the poem speaks. But as soon as such ‘trust’ is invoked, so is silence. ‘Hush’, Tennyson says before the Dead march begins, wilfully tempting the echo of trust, that is in ‘hush’ to move us to the silence of that trust. In silence, he tries to bring all voices together. ‘The people’s voice’ (line 151) which had been so clamorous in its gratitude to the Great Duke earlier in the poem, is now silenced and exchanged for ‘the people’s ears’, those of a mourning crowd. The burial brings this people together, and they all focus on the character of the dead. The dead man had been victorious General and Prime Minister, yet for all that, careless of his personal advancement, interested only in the interests of his country. Now he is ‘Something far advanced in State’. It is daring to allow in a pun at such a solemn moment, but Tennyson wants to work the transition from the pinnacle of earthly achievement into that of personal immortality in Heaven. This is from his position as the focus of grief of the entire state, which mourns at this point of burial, out of the state which the Duke served so long, and then up to the heavenly

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‘state’ into which he will serve, and in which he will gather his true immortality. Thus the poem can leave off its memorializing and allow itself to forget: ‘renown’ and all mere ‘earthly fancies’ will pass. The ode has performed its business, yet it acknowledges in that final forgetting of the trappings of fame that the public need for a memorial has nevertheless been served. The narration of these two events, the deaths of Wellington and Tennyson, crossed as they are by Hallam Tennyson, are both stories dependent on the move from private grief to public memorial to a necessary forgetting of fame. Their context is national, and the national context which can allow in a grief which is also public. The context demands a response which is far advanced in State, that is, a response which is not only shared with others across the state, but a response which puts forward the consolation— immortality—which is necessary for the grief of both author and readership. Yet such moments carry with them immense difficulties for their narrators. The Funeral Ode, a work of elegiac poetry which demands a register for public feeling, must in some way speak in the people’s voice, become a vehicle for more than private grief. The Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington was Tennyson’s first published poem after In Memoriam. It was also the first poem he published as poet laureate. He was given two months in 1852 in which to compose it, between Wellington’s death in September and his funeral in November. Some 10, 000 copies of it, at a shilling each, were finally published two days before the funeral. In one of the most fascinating bibliographical stories of recent literary scholarship, a team of Tennyson editors—Edgar Shannon, Christopher Ricks, Aidan Day and P.G.Scott—have revealed over twenty or so years, from I960 to 1982, the twenty years of revision that subsequently followed those first two months of work.7 They show Tennyson’s poem moving towards the voice of the people. In that voice he works to express the gratitude that the public owed to the man who had preserved their nation. For all of the sureness of Tennyson’s work on the Ode’s extraordinary rhetorical successes, in process of composition and revision and ultimately in its choice of subject, the poem does have great difficulty in becoming the artefact to which it aspires, a memorial text which would unify poet, people and hero in grief. Like Wellington himself, the poem is partial in the ‘nation’ that it represents. That nation, after rebellion in Ireland and invasion by the French in 1798 had, since 1801, been called the United Kingdom of Great

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Britain and Ireland, one result of which was the adoption of the Union Jack as its flag. That United Kingdom is, though, only partially represented by the Tennysons, as indeed Wellington himself is shown only partially defending it. Both Tennyson s Ode and Hallam’s Memoir write what are self-consciously national, even, we might say, unifying public occasions. Hallam Tennyson, for instance, is careful to state that his father received wreaths from all over ‘Great Britain’, and that it was only at the request of the Prince of Wales that the Union flag was draped over his coffin. Emily Tennyson had preferred the flag of St George. It is only in 1862, ten years after the first edition of the poem, that Alfred Tennyson incorporates the word ‘Briton’ into his Ode.8 Until then the nation in the poem had been ‘England’, and its denizens ‘Saxon’. Yet throughout all of the editions of the poem, the nation is spoken of in terms of its strategic good fortune in being an island, which England alone is not. In Tennyson’s Ode, the Duke of Wellington is ‘The last great Englishman’ (line 18). This is contestable, because Arthur Wellesley was born in Merrion Square in Dublin. The Wellesley family, according to Elizabeth Longford, arrived in Ireland with Henry II in the 1170s. They were Anglo-Norman, yet had not lived in England for over 600 years. In spite of this they never surrendered their claim to difference from the Irish population. Lady Longford, of similar stock herself, married indeed to an Anglo-Irish scion of Wellington’s wife’s family, writes thus of the extraordinary sense of exclusivity that Wellington and his caste would have felt through their long period in Ireland: What did these six centuries of a strikingly homogeneous past mean for Wellington? Behind him stretched an embattled English race who had occupied an alien land, marrying strictly with their own kind and becoming not only a ruling caste but a ruling garrison. Knights of the Pale par excellence, they kept order and exacted obedience, usually faithful to their sovereign, always to their caste. It would be hard for Wellington to escape from such a heredity.9 After the Union, the ‘strikingly homogeneous’ purity of this garrison ‘English race’ is something which could no longer claim strict marriage only with kind. It was effected in large part by Wellington himself in Europe and in Ireland: the early nineteenth-century attempt to create the hybrid nation—state which was the United Kingdom was still reliant on those who maintained their homogeneity. In later life, so the

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story goes, Wellington was accused of being Irish because of his birth. He is supposed to have responded, blasphemously, ‘Because a man is born in a stable that does not make him a horse.’10 Robert Young has said that ‘it became increasingly common for the later nineteenth century to invoke Defoe’s account of “that Het’rogeneous Thing, an Englishman.”’ Englishness, Young says, ‘has often been constructed as a heterogeneous composite of contrary elements, an identity which is not identical with itself. It is only overstating slightly to go on to say that the concept of ‘Britishness’ needed ‘illicit acts of union’ to bring the uncertainty of English identity into the larger, unified ‘British’ identity.11 The Acts of Union with Scotland in 1707 and Ireland in 1801 were perfectly legal, since the governments of both countries, oligarchies as they were, assented to the Union. Still, in Tennyson’s poem it was England which owed a debt of gratitude to Wellington. Much of Ireland, and parts of Scotland, I’m sure, were not so grateful, and, with a little fictional constitutional and geographical adjustment, they are excluded from the poem and its nation. A Funeral Ode of thirteen years later, which participates in its own national grief, and owes much to the model of Tennyson’s Ode,12 Walt Whitman’s elegy for Lincoln, ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’, speaks of a United States which is held together in its moment of mourning. Whitman, though, moves his own voice into the voice of a unified democracy which shares with the living and the recently dead a need to hold together a precarious union. Where Whitman invokes the ghosts of the Civil War dead to share in the experience of a country united in mourning, if nothing else, the ghost in Tennyson’s poem is Nelson, the victorious ‘greatest sailor since our world began’. The dead hero Wellington is joined by another dead hero, and Tennyson, in recourse to the heroic, slides over the tricky national question of calling up all who died in the recent past. Betsy Erkkila points out that all constructions of nationhood as unions of disparate peoples (for Whitman the United States, as for Tennyson the United Kingdom) posit a myth of organic wholes in order to legitimize states which may owe their constitutional arrangements to coercion, or worse, Civil War. In Whitman’s preCivil War ‘Poem of Remembrance for a Girl or Boy of These States’ (1856, later dropped from Leaves of Grass), he urges his own national readership to ‘Remember the organic compact of These States’. Erkilla notes the language of contract (‘pledge…promulged…ratified… signed…read’ [lines 2–5]13) which is implicit in speaking of a Republic

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with a written constitution. Yet that language of contract or compact moves to that of the organism, uniting to form the ‘organic compact’ of the United States: In fact, Whitman’s representation of the organic compact of the States as both the Declaration of Independence and the living body of the Union—both a political document and the principles of life, liberty, and equality that lived in and through the body of the nation—marks the transition in mid-nineteenth-century America from the Union as political practice, or means, to the political mystification of the Union as absolute, indissoluble, and binding in perpetuity.14 Whitman achieves his consolation at the end of ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ by suggesting that such a Union is now possible, with the Civil War dead at rest with Lincoln, and those left behind united in their suffering and grief. His Funeral Ode ends: Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night, The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird, And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul. With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe, With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird, Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well, For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this for his dear sake, Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul, There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim. (lines 198–206) This final twining of the figures which unite the poem—lilac, star, bird—matches the twining of hands, of ‘each’ and ‘all’, and the final comfort in numbers: ‘Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep’. The poem must serve a memorial function for its poet’s comrades, both those left and those dead. ‘In the midst’ that poet will write the unifying text, sharing with and supported by a now united people. It has taken a violent death to achieve this consolation, and the omission of reference to the manner of Lincoln’s death is a

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significant elision in the poem.15 The poem works to legitimize a Union, the disunity of which has resulted in war and assassination. Tennyson is speaking for a people who are no less uncertainly united. The celebrated Tennysonian ‘Passion of the Past’ was matched by a sense of foreboding in the 1852 edition of the Ode: there, ‘a darkening future yields/Some reverse from worse to worse’. Edgar Shannon reminds us that the older Tennyson held that ‘a society may as easily disintegrate as advance and that progress may be retrograde as well as ameliorative.’16 All versions of the Ode keep a sense of the importance of remembering the example of the Duke against the sense of renewed national insecurity. A new Napoleon had risen in France, and Tennyson worries over the loss of resolve of the politicians left in the wake of the Duke. Strophe VII of the Ode speaks in and for the voice of the people. The ‘We’ who speak here, though, end up in a quandary of ‘overtrust’: A people’s voice! we are a people yet. Though all men else their nobler dreams forget, Confused by brainless mobs and lawless Powers; Thank him who isled us here, and roughly set His Briton in blown seas and storming showers, We have a voice, with which to pay the debt Of boundless love and reverence and regret To those great men who fought, and kept it ours. And keep it ours, O God, from brute control; O Statesmen, guard us, guard the eye, the soul Of Europe, keep our noble England whole, And save the one true seed of freedom sown Betwixt a people and their ancient throne, That sober freedom out of which there springs Our loyal passion for our temperate kings; For, saving that, ye help to save mankind Till public wrong be crumbled into dust, And drill the raw world for the march of mind, Till crowds at length be sane and crowns be just. But wink no more in slothful overtrust. Remember him who led your hosts; He bad you guard the sacred coasts. (lines 151–71) The British constitutional arrangement to which Tennyson alludes here, the seed sown ‘Betwixt a people and their ancient throne’, creates

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the conditions for the civic virtues of people and political system: ‘sober freedom…loyal passion…temperate kings’. The picture is Burkean, a blend of the upright, the sane, and the traditional contributing to gradual progress: the throne is ‘ancient’ for instance, no mere new imperial court such as that returning to France.17 Yet there is a worry, a need to counsel against ‘the march of mind’ and ‘slothful overtrust’. Memory, specifically the act of remembering implicit in this memorializing, serves then to keep these people on their guard. This act of memorializing will keep these people of England ‘the eye, the soul/Of Europe’. The enjambed line is a masterstroke here, falling over into the one great reminder to the world that the poem allows itself that more than England was saved by Wellington. The Ode has its modesty too, since it insists, with much good grace, on the importance of the Prussians at Waterloo, and the effort of a European alliance, led by Wellington, in that victory. It has a confidence about debts, alliances, and indeed luck, that does not create the poetic for which it is necessary that it ‘conceals an act of revisionist historicist criticism’ in order to legitimize itself and its nation. This phrase is Jerome McGann’s, describing ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, written two years after the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington. In ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, according to McGann, Tennyson had a ‘chance to change the outcome of England’s spiritual and ideological defeat’18 after Waterloo. McGann omits entirely to mention the Ode as he moves to this interpretation, and thus he cannot acknowledge the mixture of generous confidence in the victorious past and unease in the future which the Ode envisages for its uncertainly united kingdom. The poem speaks in ‘A people’s voice’ which the poet joins as he declares ‘we are a people yet’. But the line is voiced in a deliberately awkward register. Is it ‘we are still a people’ and always will be? Or is it, we are just about a people and we should fight to stay that way? Either way, the line seems to be geeing itself up before a profound doubt. Maud has its speaker mix his ‘breath/With a loyal people shouting a battle cry’ (lines 34–5), and says ‘We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still’ (line 55). The ‘still’ there is as ambiguous as the 0de’s ‘yet’, on the verge of dissolution. Forgetting will lead ‘the people’ into the mob, and that is ‘brainless’ and ‘lawless’. Maud brings its hero to his doom in war, but that is in terms of one who declares ‘I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind.’ Tennyson has to find just how he can work such remembering as the Ode enacts into his nation, a noble England he wishes to keep ‘whole’.

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It is what Tennyson remembers of the virtues of the dead who, if I may say it, ‘populate’ his poetry, that effects this. As already stated, Tennyson’s civic poetry always worries over the future, as much as his private poetry worries over his own immortality. The civic/private distinction is false though, since the note is there from the first lines written after Arthur Hallam’s death. ‘Ulysses’, for instance, is a poem written in grief, wondering just how to go on. It goes on, by writing out an act of abdication, surrendering the civic duties of the king for a last voyage which is bound to end in annihilation. Ulysses bequeaths his crown and country to his son Telemachus,19 before he leaves, pleading unsuitability for the business of administration and mere politics. Wellington, of course, has martial as well as civic virtues in Tennyson’s poem (though he worked hard in his revisions to soften early suggestions that the Duke was unbending), and these are given by the poem to the people. The memorial poem is involved in the act of making a legacy, enumerating it, delivering it, reminding the people of their possession of this virtue. ‘Ulysses’ is also a poem which conveys a legacy, leaving the island to the son. It is Arthur Hallam, though, who brings together Tennyson’s concern with this legacy-making. A legacy, a bequest, what is left in a will, is a contract between the dead and the living. The possessions of the dead are left behind for designated living persons. In a contract with the dead, who are in no position to ensure that their wishes are being carried out, the social or legal system co-operates to make sure the will is executed. The memorial performs something of the same social, even legal, function. That is presuming you have something to leave. Ulysses or Wellington, or indeed Tennyson himself, could leave their kingdoms or the memory of the example of their great careers. Arthur Hallam died when he was 22. Apart from a few tantalizing essays and some immature poetry he left nothing but his memory. Those who had memories of Arthur Hallam, went on to give their society much, for example, as Prime Minister and Poet Laureate: Gladstone was Hallam’s best friend at Eton, Tennyson at Cambridge. In Memoriam LXXXIV allows itself at one particularly wilful moment to imagine the dead Hallam maturing through a successful life into fatherhood, middle age and death, ‘Leaving great legacies of thought’. Tennyson did not see a poetic future for his friend: a great critic or philosopher was expected. But in those sections of In Memoriam where Tennyson does think of the virtues of his friend, we find virtues close to those of the Duke of Wellington, close to those which have made England

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great. Section XCVI commemorates Hallam’s virtues. It follows the central vision in the garden at Somersby of the grieving poet’s communion with the dead, and its doubt over the powers of memory to recreate the experience. The section locates virtue in doubt and the courage to face it, but it ends with an image of deferred deliverance: Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds, At last he beat his music out. There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds. He fought his doubts and gathered strength, He would not make his judgement blind, He faced the spectres of the mind And laid them: thus he came at length To find a stronger faith his own; And Power was with him in the night, Which makes the darkness and the light And dwells not in the light alone, But in the darkness and the cloud, As over Sinaï’s peaks of old, While Israel made their Gods of gold, Although the trumpet blew so loud. (lines 9–24) The book of Exodus tells us that while the children of Israel cease their wandering and turn to worship ‘Gods of gold’, Moses is receiving the ten commandments from God. Hallam’s moral virtues are to dwell in the ‘the darkness and the cloud’ with Moses. He would be such a deliverer, indeed the bringer of God’s law to a people who were easily led astray. Of course he died young, before he could achieve any of this. In Memoriam makes that bequest for him. Between it and the completion of its civic concerns in the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington it leaves the legacy of the memory of virtue. Acting in memory of the dead, England is reminded of the virtues of those who have died and of how those virtues might save it. These are private, inward—‘He faced the spectres of the mind’—and public or civic: the Duke has ‘an iron nerve’, he ‘stood four-square to all the winds that

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blew!’ (lines 37–9) Both Arthurs, Hallam and Wellesley, in both of the poems which memorialize them represent the same saving Englishness for the people who must be kept ‘whole’. As he grew older, Tennyson saw what many others in his nation saw, the dissipation of this nation unified in victory and Empire. It is left to King Arthur, in Idylls of the King, to preside over the dissolution of that wholeness. The events of Tennyson’s death and burial prompted another writer who often felt bound to respond to great public events. This is the opening of the Scottish poet William McGonagall’s ‘Death and Burial Of Lord Tennyson’: Alas! England now mourns for her poet that’s gone— The late and the good Lord Tennyson. I hope his soul has fled to heaven above, Where there is everlasting joy and love. He was a man that didn’t care for company, Because company interfered with his study, And confused the bright ideas in his brain, And for that reason from company he liked to abstain. He has written some fine pieces of poetry in his time, Especially the May Queen, which is really sublime; Also the gallant charge of the Light Brigade— A most heroic poem, and beautifully made. He believed in the Bible, also in Shakespeare, Which he advised young men to read without any fear; And by following the advice of both works therein, They would seldom or never commit any sin. (‘Death and Burial of Lord Tennyson’)20 McGonagall has read Tennyson’s memorial poetry. The solitary poet, the fearless reader, the virtuous teacher, these are all perfect examples of a Victorian version of character strengthened through the dwelling on the virtues of the dead that the act of memorialization gives. Tennyson is mourned by England, he is ‘her poet’. These virtues, though, the virtues by which an England felt it was held together are forged in part by Tennyson. For all the disunity which confronted Wellington and Tennyson’s United Kingdom, memorial poem and memoir alike attempt to provide a model of the individual around

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which the nation can be gathered. It is perhaps an impossible task, but this is the poet’s legacy—remembered and read—of which he reminds us, that in memory he speaks across the fact of his own death and burial.

Chapter 12

Rhyming as resurrection Gillian Beer

Rhyme as return Max Müller, invited in 1895 to comment on the work of Constance Naden, Hylo-Idealist and poet, responded with condescending modesty: I liked the poems when they first came out; but I never trust my judgment as to English poetry. I am no judge of English poetry, so far as the jingle of rhyme and the glamour of words are concerned. Tennyson once told me that the only excuse for rhyme was that it helped the memory. That may have been so in ancient times; but is it so now? My only test of poetry is: Does it stand translation into prose?1 For Müller, mythographer and Sanskrit scholar, the sounds of poetry (the jingle and glamour) are distractions that may be stripped away to reveal bare prose. As a non-native speaker he fears to be led by their allurements to value verse that is without grounding. (Constance Naden is, by his grace, allowed to pass the test of being reducible to prose: It struck me when I read Miss Naden’s poems that several of them would stand that test, and I am glad to hear that the world has found it out.’) Müller writing in the mid-1890s, harks back to, and puzzles over, a dictum he remembers Tennyson uttering: ‘the only excuse for rhyme is that it helps the memory’. That was the case, Müller remarks, in ‘ancient times’—times by implication preliterate, oral, primitive—‘but is it so now?’ Condensed here are puzzles about the powers of rhyme that are part of a long tradition of distrust, and sometimes of poet’s boast. Ben Jonson’s ‘A Fitt against Rime’ is a famous example: 189

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Still may syllables jarre with time, Still may reason warre with rime, Resting never.2 In this tradition the poet draws attention to the difficult skills of his craft by expressing resentment against the demands of rhyme. Clive Scott opens his excellent book on French rhyme, The Riches of Rhyme, by denigrating English rhyme: Rhyme in English verse has always had something of a bad press. Poets have tended to be shamefaced about it and accordingly have implied that rhyme should be shamefaced about itself. The blame lies for the most part, it seems, with the English language: without the assets of a rich fund of inflexions, and a stress system which would accentuate word endings and thus make rhyme a natural resource of the language, rhymed English verse finds itself drawing most of its rhymes from a quickly overfamiliar stock of monosyllables whose very frequency anaesthetizes the reader’s critical response to them.3 My argument will move in a direction contrary to that of Scott to demonstrate the intricacy and resilience of nineteenth-century poets’ English rhyming. And I shall show the ways in which rhyming responds to, and forms a part of, Victorian anxieties about belief and origins. What is rhyme for, apart from difficulty? This question is raised and its later nineteenth-century premises indicated by Müller. Is rhyme part of an archaic world that pre-dates the advanced order of the present? Is it ritual? Even libation to power? In Browning’s poem ‘Caliban Upon Setebos’ (c.1863) Caliban is a sophisticated thinker in unrhyming iambic pentameters like these: His dam held that the Quiet made all things Which Setebos vexed only; ‘holds not so. Who made them weak, meant weakness he might vex. Had he meant other and while His hand was in, Why not make horny eyes no thorn could prick, Or plate my scalp with bone against the snow. But at the poem’s end Caliban is driven back by terror into insistent incantatory rhyme, rhyme crammed both within and at the end of the

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line. Hate, consecrate, celebrate, state, mate; Thee, Thee, envy, me: all this within two and a half lines. While myself lit a fire, and made a song And sung it ‘What I hate, be consecrate To celebrate Thee and Thy state, no mate For Thee; what see for envy in poor me?’ The rhyme forms obeisance to the angry God Setebos. It is atavistic, obsessional, abasing. Rhyme here is made to seem an emanation from a primitive world and expresses the Victorian assumption that cultural history, in Comtean terms, has gone through stages from the fetishistic to the present scientific era. Rhyming, in this understanding, is not reminiscence only; it performs the primitive now, bearing a freight of communal memory from early human history into the present. Rhyme is thus dangerously close to magic lore. And, with the Victorian tendency to identify the development of cultures with the development of the individual, rhyme’s childhood familiarity in nursery rhyme may make it also seem literally ‘puerile’—not fully adult. Perhaps that hint of the primitive—whether it be tribal past or nursery past—helps to explain why Tennyson, himself renowned as a rhymester, must—according to Mtiller’s anecdote—seek an ‘excuse’ for rhyme: that it simply helps the memory. Rhyme is a mnemonic, sure, but coming from the poet of In Memoriam Tennyson’s remark has more resonance. Rhyme aids recollection; it also brings things back. It creates memory within the poem, raising again words that might die out in the mind and straining them across lines as echoes, deformations, recurrences. LVIII In those sad words I took farewell: Like echoes in sepulchral halls, As drop by drop the water falls In vaults and catacombs, they fell; And, falling, idly broke the peace Of hearts that beat from day to day, Half-conscious of their dying clay, And those cold crypts where they shall cease.4

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Taking farewell in rhyme conceals the purpose not to take farewell. The drops continue falling; words and heartbeats are synchronized: LVII I hear it now, and o’er and o’er, Eternal greetings to the dead; And ‘Ave, Ave, Ave,’ said, ‘Adieu, adieu’ for evermore. So ends the preceding poem. Iteration prolongs the moment to its utmost, making of it greeting and parting (Ave and Adieu) at once and for evermore. But rhyme does not prolong only: it renews and transforms. It can encompass change—indeed, is change, producing improbable liaisons, or uttering again time-honoured sutures between familiar words (O’er/more). Rhyme is both echoic and falling: resting never. In In Memoriam Tennyson bends rhyme back within each stanza (abba) so that obsession prevails and forward movement is impeded; yet even that tight control does not cancel rhyme’s mobility. Rhyme never quite closes; further rhyme words lie in wait. Rhyme, belief and the repressed Rhyme not only makes things memorable; it seems to vouch for them. It confirms; it persuades; it is part of the rhetoric of belief. But it includes its own improbability, its semantic vagrancy. This combination of affirmation and instability makes rhyme apt both to comedy and to authority. Memory is the prior condition of belief. The repetition that inheres in rhyme affirms the existence of something known already, already experienced. What is said in rhyme seems more true (as writers of advertising jingles and retailers of proverbs know: ‘Not just nearly clean, but really clean’; ‘Birds of a feather flock together’). The effect in advertising is often to provoke the reader’s resistance (this conjunction is improbable) and then to overcome it (these things do lie alongside). Sound triumphs over semantics. The absurdity becomes persuasive. A recent advertisement for the chocolate bar ‘Yorkie’ at York railway station runs: York Where the men are hunky And the chocolate chunky

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I have written elsewhere about rhyming as comedy;5 here I want to think further about rhyme and belief, and to consider rhyme as a performance of resurrection. What I shall argue will not always apply only to the nineteenth century, though the conditions, emotional and intellectual of the time, did give rhyme peculiar significances seized by poets as various as Swinburne, Clerk Maxwell, Constance Naden, Gerard Manley Hopkins, May Kendall and Mathilde Blind. In the nineteenth century not only what to believe but the possibility of believing (what it means to believe) troubles many. How to sustain continuity with the past under the pressures of the new? Rhyme, burrowing beneath reason, bypassing it, or apparently underpinning it, becomes implicated in the rhetoric of belief. Hymns manifest that function. But rhetorics of belief do not belong to theologians only but to scientists and to those who read either Punch or Nature or both. Belief, moreover, has as its corollary resistance to belief, and rhyming light verse in the Victorian period specializes in satiric inversion. Constance Naden in ‘The New Orthodoxy’ has her spirited Girtonian Amy rebuke her fiancé in the rigorous tones of a true believer for his backsliding from faith. The saints of the new orthodoxy are ‘Huxley, Tyndall, Clifford, Bain’: Oh, the wicked tales I hear! Not that you at Ruskin jeer, Nor that at Carlyle you sneer, With his growls dyspeptic: But that, having read in vain Huxley, Tyndall, Clifford, Bain, All the scientific trainYou’re a hardened sceptic! Things with fin, and claw, and hoof Join to give us perfect proof That our being’s warp and woof We from near and far win; Yet your flippant doubts you vaunt, And—to please a maiden aunt— You’ve been hear to say you can’t Pin your faith to Darwin!6 In That Very Mab (1885) the poet May Kendall collaborated with Andrew Lang in a ranging satire on contemporary intellectual movements. The fairy Queen Mab has fled England for Samoa when

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belief in fairies ceased here. She is taken now for a butterfly and captured by a lepidopterist. In the chapter called ‘The Poet and the Palaeonto-Theologist’, Mab has escaped and a debate ensues between a materialist professor and a scientific theologian, with a poet in the middle trying to write a sonnet to the butterfly-fairy. The poet complains about their systems while pursuing his own. ‘How can a fellow write a sonnet with you two for ever sparring away at your musty scholasticisms? Haven’t we heard enough about Paley and Darwin? You have frightened away the fairy between you, and that is plenty of mischief for one day. ‘Fair denizen of deathless ether, doomed For one brief hour to languish and repine.’ Entombed? that will do, but I’m afraid there are not many more rhymes to “doomed”. “Loomed,” “boomed”, “exhumed”, “wellgroomed.” My thoughts won’t flow, damn it all!’7 Provocative, inconsequential, at the mercy of association, rhyme is with difficulty curtailed to the high and mighty ‘doomed’: ‘well-groomed’ lies as close as ‘exhumed’ or loomed’. That complaint about a paucity of rhyme words for semantically important concepts is, incidentally, echoed in the new Oxford Companion to English Language: ‘There is not a large range of rhymes for words as semantically important as God, Spirit, and life; the frequent occurrences of such words in poetry eventually makes the chosen rhymes seem stale and predictable.’8 The sated commentator has fallen into the trap of what has been chosen: the question is not availability of words tout court, but their availability within the semantic range preferred: a question of register rather than range. For example, ‘life’ rhymes quite well with ‘wife’ and ‘knife’ and ‘strife’ but not, perhaps, so frequently with lofty concepts. The period I am discussing was also, of course, the heyday of William McGonagall: The icy mountains they’re higher than a brig’s topmast, And the stranger in amazement stands aghast As he beholds the water flowing off the melted ice Adown the mountain side, that he cries out, Oh! how nice!9 Proof, if proof were needed, that homophony alone cannot give rhyme the force of persuasion. The bump across linguistic registers makes for absurdity here.

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Rhyme does not preserve intact: it shifts, extends, bowls over what have seemed initially autonomous words, revealing an affinity to slips of the tongue.10 Freud does not directly discuss rhyme in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901; though he adds a footnote in 1915) or in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1903) but much of his argument illuminates the activities of rhyming. His categories for slips of the tongue come revealingly close to the disturbances rhyme produces in words: transpositions, pre-sonances or anticipations, postsonances or perseverations, contaminations, substitutions.11 All these terms draw on issues of memory repressed, embarrassment anticipated. Freud claims, pace Wundt, that sound resemblances never alone explain such substitutions (parapraxes): he sees them as having also the quality of unconscious admissions. The erotics of rhyme play on substitution, delay, anticipation. That quality of slippage, of dangerous near-disclosure, is one of the pleasures of rhyme in light verse, a form in which the Victorians excelled and to which I shall return later in my argument. Rhyme is also, by only a small extension, a graveyard form in which the undead of words re-surges: ‘the incompletely suppressed psychical material which, although pushed away by consciousness, has nevertheless not been robbed of all capacity for expressing itself’.12 The ingenuity of rhyme has in it also a whiff of scandal, something glimpsed and half-promised then curtailed. James Clerk Maxwell works with that libidinous material in his poem ‘Lectures to Women on Physical Science’, written in the voice of a young woman repelling her lecturer, a ‘Prim Doctor of Philosophy/ From academic Heidelberg’. Technical terms (‘plane’, ‘impulsive couple’, ‘screw’) are rhymed liberally with non-technical terms (‘pain’, ‘supple’, ‘do’). The effect, with its foot-notes, is to unmask the erotic urges of the teacher:13 ‘In the invariable plane,’ You told me, ‘lay the impulsive couple.’3 You seized my hand—you gave me pain, By torsion of a wrist so supple; You told me what that wrench would do— “Twould set me twisting round a screw.’4 3 See Sound and Music, by Sedley Taylor, p. 89. 4 See Poinsot, Theorie nouvelle de la rotation des corps.

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The poem’s own salaciousness comes from its representation of the young woman as on the verge of knowing. The janus effect of rhyme can occupy the threshold between conscious and repressed knowledge. Rhyme, which may regiment and ritualize, confirming the preordained associations of a community, may, also license the apparitional appearance of flouted or denied elements of experience. May Kendall plays with that idea in her poem ‘The Conscientious Ghost: Psychica’.14 Moreover, the striations of rhyme do not cancel the first word; instead the first word is preserved alongside as well as transformed—and in that it bears affinity with Freud’s description of how memory retains mnemic material: Mnenic material is subject in general to two influences, condensation and distortion… The unconscious is quite tireless…all impressions are preserved, not only in the same form in which they were first received, but also in the forms which they have adopted in their further developments.15 Let us now consider further, then, the effects of rhyme, either at line end or internal to the line, in relation to memory manifest or repressed. First a caveat is necessary: the present frequent style of reading aloud that runs with embarrassed monotone across line ending, in order to submerge the old-fashioned habit of rhyming, obliterates the effects, intellectual and emotional, that rhyme can achieve. Rhyme was in the nineteenth century still taken for granted as endemic to English lyric verse and given its full presence. Rhyme and transformation: evolution and thermodynamics At the level of phonemes, and often of words, rhyme performs resurrection. Rhyme revivifies words. It keeps things going. A word, even at line ending, does not impress itself deeply on the auditory memory, but when coupled to another in rhyme it is taken forward and becomes part of a skein of recollection. That is to say, there is no rhyme until the second word enters: so rhyme is always recollective. The previous, buried word revives when rhymed. Rhyme drags signs back from the abyss of obliteration, to put it at its most animistic. Rhyme plays in with auditory memory, whose absolute span is a little under four seconds (so I am informed), a duration of memory which is repeated and prolonged each time the chime occurs. So words loop

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across from line to line, making skeins of meaning not wholly under the control of the poem in consciousness. In long narrative poems, particularly, rhyme often tells another story, moving askance the surface plot. Rhyme keeps connections floating. Sometimes it describes boundaries, knits up connectives. But always it includes the likelihood of further rhyme words. For that reason rhyme can sometimes in the nineteenth century represent the new vision of the cosmos as without close, everextending as waves pulse through the universe, transformed and realized as heat, as light, as sound. The theories in physics of Helmholtz and Thomson (quite as much as evolutionary theory) suggest fresh forms for continuity—not the resurrection of the body at the last trump but a process of endless continuance and transformation: ‘life changing into life’.16 Swinburne’s poem in Songs Before Sunrise, ‘The Eve of Revolution’, imagines revolution in two major senses: political transformation and the turning of the planets round the sun. Near the poem’s end the speaker sets aside his trumpet in favour of the human voice: I take the trumpet from my lips and sing. O life immeasurable and imminent love, And fear like winter leading hope like spring, Whose flower-bright brows the day-star sits above, Whose hand unweariable and untiring wing Strike music from a world that wailed and strove, Each bright soul born and every glorious thing, From very freedom to man’s joy thereof, O time, O change and death Whose now not hateful breath But gives the music swifter feet to move Through sharp remeasuring tones Of refluent antiphones More tender-tuned than heart or throat of dove, Soul into soul, song into song, Life changing into life, by laws that work no wrong. (stanza 24) Time and change become part of the percussion of rhyme and of life. Such transformation draws on recurrence: ‘sharp remeasuring tones’ and ‘refluent antiphones’ contribute periodicity to this pulse. This Shelleyan verse needs rhyme not only as ornament but as example of

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the transformative powers of life, a power which rhymes death onward with breath in the next line. (‘Life’—that word with a narrow band of high rhymes—Swinburne skilfully ranges at different points within lines, repeated but unrhymed.) In ‘The Eve of Revolution’ nothing can be lost; all that has been continues, but is endlessly merging and changing: ‘Soul into soul, song into song’. The power of rhyme to look back and catch up anew the almost lost word, and its power of presaging what is to come, are both needed for Swinburne’s eschatology. Rhyme and panoptic scale together reinforce the poem’s intensity. There is no struggle between them, rather an onward surge that requires recurrence in order to reach its changing form. Swinburne himself connects rhyme and the natural in his review of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1862): ‘it seems merely natural to him always to use the right word and the right rhyme’…every verse has the vibration in it of naturally sound and pure metal’.17 For him, writing of Shelley, ‘Rhyme is the native condition of lyric verse in English; a rhymeless lyric is a maimed thing, and halts and stammers in the delivery of its message.’ Rhyme embodies poetry and sustains its wholeness (that connection of rhyme with the body is a condensation I pursue in ‘Rhyming as Comedy’). The manuscript of ‘A Vision of Spring in Winter’ clearly demonstrates that, despite all his revisions there, Swinburne only rarely changed the rhyme-words, as if they link the whole securely onward while the line can be revised from within.18 Once the sound-structure is established by the initial word to be rhymed he just occasionally experiments with possible variants, but not often (an example is the second line ‘born’ of stanza 4 where he tries ‘unworn forlorn unborn’ before settling on the less expected ‘overworn’). The presaging quality of rhyme, again, sustains the topic and seems essential to its working out for Swinburne. But, in Under the Microscope, Swinburne wrote of Whitman: ‘The poet of democracy must sing all things alike? let him sing them then, whether in rhyme or not is no matter, but in rhythm he must needs sing them.’ Swinburne hears the long-breathed lines of Whitman as another means of including life’s capacities, continuing the past into an expanding future. But what were life’s capacities now? And how to tell the truth about memory in a world where, evolution indicated, almost all past species had vanished, time extended long back before humankind, and individuals were of value to long process only in the acts of reproduction and nurturing. That was one disturbance. Another was implicit in new physics: how to tell the truth about

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memory in a world where the second law of thermodynamics indicated that energy consumed was no longer available to be harnessed, could not return, but became part of an ever-increasing slide through disorder to the annihilation that is equilibration. Even Balfour Stewart and Peter Tait, physicists and committed Christians, acknowledged in The Unseen Universe, or Physical Speculations on a Future State:19 Immortality is, therefore, impossible or hardly possible in such a universe; but even allowing all this to be the case, it is at least conceivable that man may be at death drafted off into some superior rank of being connected with the present universe, and thence ultimately removed into a new order of things when the present universe shall have become effete. Clerk Maxwell would have no truck with such vain speculation; he bore the brunt of the pressures between his active religious faith and the implications of his scientific work. He will not soften what he observes to accommodate to humankind’s favoured patterns. But he produces pattern, with bravura, in his own poetry, sauced with spry rhymes which fix and spring. In two poems, ‘Molecular Evolution’ and The Song of the Cub’, he praises nonsense as a way out of the too rapid encoding, the too law-bound assumptions, of his scientific peers. The last lines of ‘Molecular Evolution’ run: What combinations of ideas, Nonsense alone can wisely form! What sage has half the power that she has, To take the towers of Truth by storm? Yield, then, ye rules of rigid reason! Dissolve, thou too, too solid sense! Melt into nonsense for a season, Then in some nobler form condense. Soon, all too soon, the chilly morning, This flow of soul will crystallize, Then those, who Nonsense now are scorning, May learn, too late, where wisdom lies.20 But he uses the rules of rhyme to rally his praise of disorder. Rhyme, it is sometimes argued, trivializes. That may indeed be

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an important cultural function for rhyme, observable in some of these Victorian verses: trivializing can defuse anxieties—while at the same time the agitation of rhyme can give expression to anxiety. Anxiety and release are held together, neither negated. Rhyme contaminates. It can cross speech registers and cultural zones kept wide apart. It may, thus, become a form of cultural treachery (or critique), at odds with authority. Its mimicry of the first word rhymed-on may call the bluff of that term and challenge its autonomy. This is a form of resurrection more akin to exposure and disagreeable to authority. These are reasons why satiric verse makes free with rhyme. Rhyme’s unargued juxtaposition of unlike words can topple all the grave hierarchies of what it is polite (or politic) to couple with what. So ‘light verse’ may throw light on the dark corners of a culture. May Kendall and Constance Naden both use rhyme and dialogue within their poems to cast an ironic eye on the authority of science and its cultural control. They note the gender of the practitioners of science (though Naden in particular was extremely well trained scientifically). The knowingness of rhyme is foregrounded in their satiric verses: the element of artful self-congratulation in achieving rhyme forms an ironic relation to the kinds of knowledge described. May Kendall has a shrewd eye for all forms of aggrandizement, particularly those of the self: as she memorably opens From a Garret (1887), ‘I suppose I must have been a remarkable child—children are.’ She believes in equality, delights in cleverness, and she mocks it. The fairy in That Very Mab is a ‘denizen of deathless ether’, that new (and old) medium of motion in an endless universe. May Kendall was the only woman poet represented in Alfred Miles’s volume of Humour, Society, and Occasional Verse which formed part of his great ten- volume anthology of nineteenth-century verse.21 Her poem ‘Ether Insatiable’ is given prominence. Its sombre inclination towards cosmic equilibration and death is half-mimicked by feminine ending rhymes that threaten to overrun, but that are—sometimes—stayed reassuringly by line-ending (muffled, unruffled; dispelling, dwelling; malediction, friction; whether, ether). The second and third verses run: All’s quietly caught up and muffled By a strange and intangible foe, The ether serene and unruffled, The ether we see not nor know. Life, radiance, in torrents dispelling, The universe spins to its goal;

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And radiance and life find one swelling— This ether’s the tomb of the whole. There is not a hushed malediction, There is not a smile or a sigh, But aids in dispersing, by friction, The cosmical heat in the sky; And whether a star falls or whether A heart breaks—for stars and for men Their labour is all for the ether, That renders back nothing again. In everything that Kendall writes there is a plangent awareness of lost possibilities and alternative forms for knowledge, most poignantly drawn together in ‘A Fossil’ where the crabbed and unthinking believer momentarily reawakens to felt life, as if a fossil grew flesh again.22 Both May Kendall in her poems on science and Constance Naden in her ‘Evolutional Erotics’ (as she titles one group of poems) take the position of the others of evolution: for Kendall, the trilobite, the ichthyosaurus, the jelly-fish, the dweller in four-dimensioned space, the woman. Constance Naden adopts the voice of scientific young men—and scientific young women. She poises herself sceptically across the new fairy tales as well as the old, the new systems of authority. And in ‘Solomon Redivivus 1886’ she uses rhyme to produce a version of evolution as the splitting out of men and women into separate spheres. We were a soft Amoeba In ages past and gone, Ere you were Queen of Sheba, And I King Solomon. Unorganed, undivided, We lived in happy sloth, And all that you did I did, One dinner nourished both: Till you incurred the odium Of fission and divorce— A severed pseudopodium You strayed your lonely course, (stanzas 6–8)

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They pass through the phases of evolution—as fish, reptile, and mammal—to the present day of the 1880s: So, from that soft Amoeba, In ages past and gone, You’ve grown the Queen of Sheba, And I King Solomon. (stanza 16) All Naden’s poems in ‘Evolutional Erotics’ are love poems of a sort, from ‘Scientific Wooing’ to ‘Natural Selection’ and all, save ‘The New Orthodoxy’, in the voices of men, jejune, frustrated, or resigned to the new order where they prove Darwin correct by failing to win the woman in the face of ‘more dandified males’: Of Science he hasn’t a trace, He seeks not the How and the Why, But he sings with an amateur’s grace, And he dances much better than I. (stanza 6) Shall I rage as they whirl in the valse? Shall I sneer as they carol and coo? Ah no! for since Chloe is false, I’m certain that Darwin is true! (stanza 8)23 Belief, to Naden’s satirized young men and women, matters most, and absurdly. In contrast to these self-controlled and sceptical voices Mathilde Blind in ‘The Ascent of Man’ and Emily Pfeiffer in her sonnets to Evolution and to Nature try to plumb the darkness of a natural world newly natured, denatured. Blind, combating the masculinist understanding of evolution focuses on the figure of Latona, mother of Phoebus and Diana: fugitive, outcast, finding refuge on the wandering isle of Delos: Did not the sea, more merciful than earth, Bid Delos stand—that wandering isle of Ocean— Stand motionless upon the moving foam, To be the exile’s wave-encircled home,

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And lull her pains with leaves in drowsy motion Where the soft-boughed olive sighing Bends above the woman lying And in spasms of anguish crying, Shuddering through her mortal frame, As from dust is struck the flame Which shall henceforth beam sublime Through the firmament of Time? Blind in particular uses an erotic merging of like with like in rhyme to suggest the unlike of her version of evolution, a version full of women’s pain and the pain of those outcast from evolution: ‘yea, who prowl there, hunger-nipped and pallid, /Breathing nightmares limned upon the gloom?/ Tis but human rubbish, gaunt and squalid, /Whom their country spurns for lack of room’.24 Blind works with a variety of verse forms in her ‘Ascent of Man’ but after the introductory rhymeless two pages of the primeval formless, intricate rhyme patterns pursue new relations. Evolution created new forms for memory—a backward search without a stable origin—an onward seeking into a future without eschatology. For these writers rhyme sometimes simply assuaged, but sometimes it formed a thread to lead the mind backward and onward at once. Rhyme seems to provide links that make a kind of sense beyond history, drawing on oral consonance and primal sounds, such as the ‘oo’ of the wind which is transformed into ‘blue’ and ‘you’ and ‘view’, blowing through them all as the remembered woman, here, not here, in Hardy’s profoundly named poem ‘The Voice’. Rhyme at the last Rhyme is one of the last things; it stays—a final skill—when other ordering principles have fled the mind: a skein of language to touch and follow if we enter (as any of us may) the literally clueless world of dementia. That is a use for rhyme that we may hope not to have to claim, but it is one well attested in the literature on dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. The sounds of words sustain the sounds of memory, even if its content has been mislaid. Rhyme in that extremity offers connection still, even when semantic clues may have been voided. My two final examples have to do not with madness, but with

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the last hour, imagined or actual, and with the presence of rhyming in the written and auditory forms that belief (either scientific or religious, or both) may then take. In the final hours of life, the protean forms of rhyme may not be apt. Resolution’s needed; something sturdy, something stilled. That resolution, in the later nineteenth century, had to be imagined in the face of the two dominant scientific forms of endless transformation: the laws of evolution and of thermodynamics. In ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection’ Hopkins crowds rhymes like the clash of cymbals (the word ‘clash’ is represented but unvoiced in these lines whose presented words are ‘trash’, ‘ash’, ‘flash’, ‘crash’an example of the silently substantiated rhyme I earlier discussed). Across my foundering deck shone A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire, leave but ash; In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond. Rhyme is here first broken up and garbled (almost meriological): ‘I am, and’ must match (fail to match) ‘diamond’. Then rhyme is surpassed, become its own absolute: ‘immortal diamond is immortal diamond.’ Here rhyme is both at its most assertive and yet outgoes itself, ceases to be, becomes identity. What elsewhere shifts and crumbles is here condensed, adamant. The entropic consuming of energy (‘world’s wildfire, leave but ash’) is stayed in the figure of the diamond. The poem’s ending will not budge: the diamond is not fluxful like all that has poured through the poem before. It is scintillating, alive with light, but obdurate, confirmed. Diamond and self-rhyme announce eternity for Hopkins but with an effort that blasts the nature of rhyming, that human resource of language. Immortal diamond matches absolutely and only with its self.25 Clerk Maxwell’s researches led him away from determinism, and into a universe composed of waves without bounds or centre. But he retained his religious faith and his conviction of pre-destination for the soul. He was troubled, like Hopkins, by the changefulness implied by evolutionary theory, its unstayed transformations, its

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refusal to imagine or recuperate a first cause. Some of his verses, as we have seen, encapsulate his observations with arch Scots wit. For example, he represents the non-objectivity of Force in a stanza which recalls an epithalamion, the expulsion from Eden, and elegy at once: Both Action and Reaction now are gone; Just ere they vanished Stress joined their hands in peace, and made them one, Then they were banished.26 Here things are concluded: rhyme and meaning resolve (resolve into) nothingness. In his essay on ‘Molecules’27 Maxwell argues that ‘No theory of evolution can be formed to account for the similarity of molecules, for evolution necessarily implies continuous change, and the molecule is incapable of growth or decay, of generation or destruction’.28 The discourse opens ‘An atom is a body which cannot be cut in two. A molecule is the smallest possible portion of a particular substance. No one has ever seen or handled a single molecule. Molecular science, therefore, is one of those branches of study which deal with things invisible and imperceptible by our senses’.29 The essay ends by asserting that though in the course of ages catastrophes have occurred and may yet occur in the heavens, though ancient systems may be dissolved and new systems evolved out of their ruins, the molecules out of which these systems are built—the foundation stones of the material universe0151remain unbroken and unworn. They continue this day as they were created, perfect in number and measure and weight, and from the ineffaceable characters impressed on them we may learn that those aspirations after accuracy in measurement, truth in statement, and justice in action, which we reckon among the noblest attributes as men, are ours because they are essential constituents of the image of Him Who in the beginning created, not only the heaven and the earth, but the materials of which heaven and earth consist.30 Maxwell nails his faith to the unchanging nature of the fundamental building blocks of nature (luckily he was dead before the splitting of the atom unrhymed—or rhymed—that belief). His acknowledgement of endless transformation exists alongside his longing for the foundation ‘unbroken and unworn’.

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Together they may lie behind a moving encounter that occurred when he was dying, in his forties, of cancer. A friend in orders came to give him communion, and as the priest robed himself in his ritual garments, Maxwell, barely able to speak, whispered aloud from memory George Herbert’s poem ‘Aaron’.30 It is a poem from the 1630s about human inadequacy, authority, responsibility, transformation; all grounded in a formal and almost invisible virtuosic exercise in rhyming. The role of the scientist, like that of the priest, is to utter authoritative arguments, but also—in Maxwell’s terms—to be a vessel for the absolute. Maxwell suffered the stress of understanding the different directions in which his theories and his fundamental religious beliefs were driving him. He was skilled in surface irresolution, practising as a Presbyterian in Scotland and an Episcopalian in England, but he took the full weight of responsibility for what he understood. Holiness on the head, Light and perfections on the breast, Harmonious, bells below, raising the dead To lead them unto life and rest. Thus are true Aarons drest. Profaneness in my head, Defects and darkness in my breast, A noise of passions ringing me for dead Unto a place where is no rest: Poor priest thus am I drest. Only another head I have, another heart and breast, Another music, making live, not dead, Without whom I could have no rest: In him I am well drest. Christ is my only head, My alone only heart and breast, My only music, striking me e’en dead; That to the old man I may rest, And be in him new drest.

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So holy in my head, Perfect and light in my dear breast, My doctrine tuned by Christ, (who is not dead, But lives in me while I do rest) Come people; Aaron’s drest.32 From verse to verse the rhyme words never change, and they occur always in the same order. ‘Perfect in number, weight, and measure’, ‘unbroken and unworn’, like Clerk Maxwell’s molecules, the rhyme words yet undergo a seismic semantic shift that carries them through and transforms them into the absolute at the poem’s ending. Aaron the priest, who as a man feels himself unworthy of his office, is confirmed in the full presence of his priesthood in Christ: ‘Come people: Aaron’s drest.’ The burden of discovery and of belief is resolved. Rhyme here can chime with Maxwell’s religious and his scientific beliefs in the unchanging ‘essential constituents’ of ‘the materials of which heaven and earth consist.’ Such rhyme is performative. Whether or not we share the beliefs, we take part as we speak them in rhyme’s performances of resurrection.

Notes

Introduction 1 Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 42. 2 John Morley, On Compromise (London, 1874), p. 24. 3 Morley, On Compromise, p. 28.

1 Romanticism and the re-engendering of historical memory 1

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 1991). In the final chapter of this study (pp. 187–206), Anderson provides a sustained discussion of the interconnected functions of history and memory in the process of constructing myths of origin and destiny that legitimize imagined national communities. 2 Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History, (New York: Twayne, 1995), p. 10. 3 The innovative studies of Meilor, Ross, and Curran, among others (Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, (New York: Routledge, 1993); Marion B.Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Stuart Curran, ‘Romantic Poetry: The I Altered’, in Anne K.Mellor (ed.) Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 185–207), have generated a surge of revisionary criticism on women Romantic era writers, which has generally inspired the production of a series of new anthologies that radically reassess the canons of Romanticism. For the most gender-balanced new anthology of Romanticism, see Mellor and Richard E.Matiak (eds) British Literature 1780–1830 (New York: Harcourt, 1996). For new anthologies of women Romantic era poets, see Jennifer Breen (ed.) Women Romantic Poets 1785–1832 (London: Everyman, 1994), and Andrew Ashfield (ed.), Romantic Women Poets 1770–7838 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). For collections of critical essays on women Romantic era writers, see Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (eds), Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837 (Philadelphia: University of

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6

7 8 9 10 11

12

13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20

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Pennsylvania Press, 1994), and Paula R.Feldman and Theresa M.Kelley (eds) Romantic Women Writers (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995). Curran, ‘Women Readers, Women Writers’, in S.Curran (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 191. Gary Kelly, Women Writing and Revolution 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 80–125; Nanora Sweet, ‘History, Imperialism, and the Aesthetics of the Beautiful: Hemans and the Post-Napoleonic Moment’, in Mary A.Favret and Nicola J.Watson (eds) At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural and Materialist Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 170–84; Antoinette Burton, “Invention Is What Delights Me”: Jane Austen’s Remaking of English History’, in Devoney Looser (ed.) Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995) pp. 35–50. This reading expands the range of my previous essay, ‘Romanticism and Feminist Historiography’, The Wordsworth Circle (1993), vol. 24, pp. 133–40, and develops a new focus on the gender dynamics of historical memory and the reconstruction of social community. Joan Wallach Scott (ed.) Feminism and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Christina Crosby, The Ends of History, (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 1. Catherine Stimpson, Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces (London: Methuen, 1988), p. 117. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, (New York: Columbia, 1988), pp. 18, 179. Janet Todd, Feminist Literary History, (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 96. Hence the ‘writing of women into history’, claim three contributors to one of the earliest collections of feminist essays on women’s history, ‘necessarily involves redefining and enlarging traditional notions of historical significance, to encompass personal, subjective experience as well as public and political activities. It is not too much to suggest that however hesitantly the actual beginnings, such a methodology implies not only a new history of women, but also a new history’, Ann D.Gordon, Mari Jo Buhle, and Nancy Shrom Dye, ‘The Problem of Women’s History’, in Berenice Carroll (ed.) Liberating Women’s History (Urbana, ILL: University of Illinois Press, 1976), p. 89– Elaine Showalter, ‘Women’s Time, Women’s Space: Writing the History of Feminist Criticism’, and Josephine Donovan, ‘Toward a Women’s Poetics’ in Shari Benstock (ed.) Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 31 and 98. Ann-Louise Shapiro (ed.) Feminists Revision History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), p. 2. Denise Riley, ‘Does a Sex Have a History?’, and Cecile Dauphin et al., ‘Women’s Culture and Women’s Power: Issues in French Women’s History’ in Scott (ed.) Feminism and History, pp. 17–33 and 570. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, in Feminism and History, p. 166. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.) Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 257. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 123. Jane Austen, Persuasion (London: Penguin, 1985). Anna Jameson, Characteristics of Women: Moral, Political, and Historical (London: Saunders and Otley, 1832), vol. 1, p. xvii. Austen, Persuasion, p. 57.

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21 David Hume, The History of England, (New York: Harper, 1851), vol. 2, p. 508. 22 Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 2; Joanna Baillie, Introductory Discourse’, in The Dramatic and Poetic Works of Joanna Baillie (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1976), p. 5; Austen, The History of England (London: The British Library, 1993), p. xvii. 23 Austen, The History of England, p. xxi. 24 Like most readers of Macaulay’s History of England, Bridget Hill denies it a feminist orientation, see The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). This lack of recognition of Macaulay’s feminism probably derives from her own recurrent efforts to gender herself as a masculine writer capable of entering firmly into the male-dominated terrain of political history. 25 Catharine Macaulay, The History of England (London: 1764–83), vol. 1, p. 2; Macaulay, ‘Account of the Life and Writing of Mrs.Catharine Macaulay Graham’, The European Magazine and London Review, 1783, vol. 4, p. 331. 26 Macaulay, The History of England, vol. 6, p. vi. 27 Macaulay, The History of England, vol. 5, p. 48. 28 Macaulay, Letters on Education: With Observations on Religion and Metaphysical Subjects (London: 1790), p. 177; The History of England, vol. 6, p, 125; vol. 3, pp. 70–2, vol. 5, p. 195. 29 Macaulay, The History of England, vol. 8, p. 59; vol. 6, pp. xii, 130. 30 Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, p. 3. 31 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (London: 1795), p. 163. 32 Helen Maria Williams, Letters from France, in David Perkins (ed.) English Romantic Writers, (New York: Harcourt, 1995), p. 163. 33 Mary Hays, Memoirs of Queens (London: T. and J.Allman, 1821), p. 101. 34 Charlotte Smith, The Emigrants, in Stuart Curran (ed.) The Poems of Charlotte Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), Book II, lines 152–4. 35 Sweet, ‘History, Imperialism, and the Aesthetics of the Beautiful’. 36 Felicia Hemans, ‘Joan of Arc in Rheims’, in The Complete Works of Mrs. Hemans, (New York: D.Appleton, 1861), lines 71–2. 37 Scott, ‘Gender’, p. 155. 38 Dauphin, ‘Women’s Culture and Women’s Power’, p. 570. 39 Lucy Aikin, Epistles on Women; Exemplifying Their Character and Condition in Various Ages and Nations, in Anne K.Mellor and Richard E.Matlak (eds) British Literature 1780–1830, (New York: Harcourt, 1996) Epistle I, line 3. 40 Aikin, Epistles, Epistle I, line 91; Epistle II, line 101. 41 Aikin, Epistles, Epistle II, line 138. 42 Aikin, Epistles, Epistle IV, line 460. 43 Aikin, Epistles, Epistle I, lines 120, 132. 44 Aikin, Epistles, Epistle I, lines 166–8. 45 Aikin, Epistles, pp. 817–18. 46 Aikin, Epistles, Epistle IV, line 479- Mary Hays aspires toward a similar goal of female empowerment through the models of gender integration she presents in her Female Biography, a work she consciously designs to promote the ‘advancement [of women] in the grand scale of social existence’ (London: Richard Phillips, 1803), vol. l,p. iv. 47 Scott, ‘Gender’, p. 169.

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48 Several recent gestures toward this ‘new history’ include Mellor’s chapter on ‘ideological cross-dressing’ in Romanticism and Gender, pp. 171–208; Anne Janowitz’s ‘“A Voice from across the Sea”: Communitarianism at the Limits of Romanticism’, in Mary A.Favret and Nicola J.Watson (eds) At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, and Materialist Criticism, pp.59–100; and Greg Kucich’s ‘“This Horrid Theatre of Human Sufferings”: Gendering the Stages of History in Catharine Macaulay and Percy Bysshe Shelley’, in Thomas Pfau and Robert Gleckner (eds) Lessons of Romanticism (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 448–65.

2 Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian and the disordered memory 1 William James, The Principles of Psychology, 3 vols, in The Works of William James, general editor Frederick H.Burkhardt, 16 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975–86), viii, 519. 2 Sir Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian, ed. by Claire Lamont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 298. Subsequent references are in the text. 3 The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. by HJ.C.Grierson et al., 12 vols (London: Constable, 1932–37), iii, 211. 4 Sir Walter Scott (ed.) Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border: Consisting of Historical and Romantic Ballads Collected in the Southern Counties of Scotland with a Few of Modern Date Founded upon Local Tradition, ed. by Thomas Henderson (London: Harrap, 1931), pp. 64–5, p. 64. 5 Scott, Minstrelsy, p. 70. 6 Jane Millgate, Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984), p. 14. 7 Sir Walter Scott, The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, ed. by J.Logie Robertson (London: Frowde, 1904), p. 1. 8 Scott, Poetical Works, p. 30. 9 The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. by W.E.K.Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 86. 10 Allan Cunningham, ‘Some Account of the Life and Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart.’, The Athenaeum, 6 October 1832, pp. 641–53 (p. 648). 11 Scott was a student at Edinburgh University from late 1783 to mid-1786 and from autumn 1789 to 1792. He attended Dugald Stewart’s Moral Philosophy class from 1789–90, where he would have studied the science of the mind. 12 William Cullen, Institutions of Medicine, in The Works of William Cullen, ed. by John Thomson, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1827), i, 46. 13 Cullen, Institutions, in Works, i, 46. 14 Cullen, Institutions, in Works, i, 140. 15 Cullen, Institutions, in Works, i, 143. 16 Cullen, Institutions, in Works, i, 144. 17 Thomas Reid, ‘Essay III: Of Memory’, in Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), in The Works of Thomas Reid, D.D., ed. by Sir William Hamilton, Bart., 6th edn (Edinburgh, 1863), p. 341. 18 Cullen, First Lines of’the Practice of’Physic (1776–84), in Works, ii, 511. 19 Cullen, Practice of Physic, in Works, ii, 521.

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20 William Shakespeare, Hamlet: Prince of Denmark, ed. by Philip Edwards, The New Cambridge Shakespeare, general editor Brian Gibbons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 201. 21 Reid, Essays, in Works, p. 345. 22 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. by P.H.Nidditch, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 253. 23 Hume, Treatise, p. 207. 24 Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), in Works, p. 96. 25 Hume’s philosophy, Reid argues, turns the outer world into an ‘enchanted castle’ and the mind is merely imposed upon by spectres and apparitions. Reid, Inquiry, in Works, p. 103. 26 William Wordsworth, ‘The Thorn’, in Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798 edn with additional 1800 poems and the Prefaces), ed. by R.L. Brett and A.R.Jones (London and New York: Methuen, 1963), p. 71. Wordsworth’s ‘The Mad Mother’ and the journey of The Idiot Boy’ from Lyrical Ballads are other possible associations in this part of The Heart of Midlothian. 27 The epigraph is taken from The Borough, Letter xix, ‘The Parish-Clerk’, 235–6. 28 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. by James Blanton Wharey, 2nd edn, rev. by Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, I960), p. 7. 29 Anonymous 1826 review by Scott for the Quarterly Review of the Memoirs of Samuel Pepys, ed. by Richard Lord Braybrook (1825), in The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, 28 vols (Edinburgh, 1834–36), xx, 97. 30 Scott, Journal, title page. 31 Scott, Journal, pp. 42–3. 32 Scott, Journal, p. 7. 33 Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (London: Cape, 1970), pp. 83–109 (p. 91).

3 ‘The malady of thought’: embodied memory in Victorian psychology and the novel 1 Charles Dickens, ‘The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain. A.Fancy for Christmas Time’ in The Christmas Books ed. M.Slater, vol. 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 246. 2 John Conolly, superintendent of the Middlesex County Asylum at Hanwell from 1839, was one of the foremost proponents of the new principles of ‘moral management’ in the treatment of the insane. John Elliotson, one of England’s most eminent physicians, was forced to resign his post at University College, London due to his support of mesmerism. For an illuminating discussion of Dickens and Elliotson see Fred Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). 3 John Barlow, On Man’s Power over Himself to Prevent or Control Insanity (London: William Pickering, 1843), p. 45. 4 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (1817: London: Dent, 1965), ch. 6.

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5 See, for example, William B.Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology (London: Henry S.King, 1874), p. 463. 6 Carpenter, Principles, pp. 470, 442. 7 Henry Holland, Chapters on Mental Physiology (London: Longman, 185 2), p. 155. 8 Holland, Chapters, pp. 116, 200. 9 Holland, Chapters, pp. 196, 198. 10 John Haslam, Sound Mind; or Contributions to the Natural History and Physiology of the Human Intellect (London: Longman, 1819), p. 189. 11 George Eliot, The Progress of the Intellect’ (1851) in Essays of George Eliot, ed. T.Pinney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 31. 12 See G.H.Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life (1859–60) and Alexander Bain, The Senses and the Intellect (1855) and The Emotions and the Will (1859). Their ideas were also available earlier in article form. 13 George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed. Sally Shuttleworth (I860: London: Routledge, 1991), p. 440. 14 Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, p. 430. 15 George Eliot, ‘The Lifted Veil’, in Silas Marner, The Lifted Veil, Brother Jacob: The Works of George Eliot, Cabinet Edition (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1878–80), pp. 295, 305. The Lifted Veil’ was first published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, July 1859. Eliot notes reading The Haunted Man’ with pleasure on 2 January 1858 (The Journals of George Eliot, eds M. Harris and J.Johnston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p- 73). 16 A.L.Wigan, The Duality of the Mind (London: Longman, 1844). Wigan’s work was in Lewes and Eliot’s library, see William Baker, The George Eliot and George Henry Lewes Library: An Annotated Catalogue of their Books at Dr Williams’s Library, London (London and New York: Garland, 1977). Although Wigan’s arguments were never fully accepted, his ideas none the less continued to be cited with respect throughout the century. Wigan had dedicated his text to Henry Holland. 17 Holland’s Chapters on Mental Physiology figures extensively in G.H.Lewes’ The Physiology of Common Life which he was working on while Eliot wrote The Lifted Veil’. 18 Holland, Chapters, p. 200. 19 George Eliot, Daniel Deronda. The Works of George Eliot. Cabinet Edition. 3 vols. (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1878–80), II, 393–4. All future references to this work will be given in the text. 20 For a rather different slant on the role of biological memory in late nineteenthcentury European literature see Laura Otis, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Lincoln, Neb: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). 21. Lewes notes reading this work in April 1874 (Ms Journal, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University). 22 Carpenter, Principles, p. 454. 23 Henry Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental Disease (London: Henry S.King, 1874), p. 268. 24 Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental Disease, p. 296. 25 Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind: An Inquiry into their Connection and Mutual Influence, Specially in Reference to Mental Disorders (London: Macmillan, 1870), pp. 75–6. Lewes records in his journal that he read this work in February 1871 (Ms., Beinecke Library, Yale University).

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26 For an analysis of some of the aspects of Maudsley’s influence on Hardy see Patricia Gallivan, ‘Science and Art in Jude the Obscure’ in Anne Smith (ed.) The Novels of Thomas Hardy (London: Vision Press, 1979). 27 Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, ed. James Gindin (1878: New York: Norton, 1969), p. 109. 28 Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 434. The poem was first published in Moments of Vision (1917). 29 Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), chapter 8. 30 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (London: Macmillan, 1957), pp. 145, 171. 31 Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental Disease, p. 281. 32 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray. In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, intro. Vyvyan Holland (London: Collins, 1966), p. 112.

4 The unquiet limit: old age and memory in Victorian narrative 1 Francis Bacon, Historia Vitae et Mortis (London: Matthew Lownes, 1623), p. 269. Also noted in his Sylva Sylvarum; or, A Naturall Historie. In Ten Centuries (London: John Haviland, 1627), p. 194 (cent, viii, sect. 755). 2 James Easton and Sharon Turner both gave the age as 145: Easton, Human Longevity: Recording the Name, Age, Place of Residence, and Year of the Decease of 1712 Persons, who Attained a Century, and Upwards, from A.D. 66 to 1799, Comprising a Period of 1733 Years. With Anecdotes of the Most Remarkable (Salisbury: James Easton, 1799), p. 5; Turner, The Sacred History of the World, Attempted to be Philosophically Considered, in a Series of Letters to a Son, 3 vols (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, 1832–37), III, p. 283, n. 8. James Granger, A Biographical History of England, from Egbert the Great to the Revolution, 5th edn, 6 vols (London: William Baynes and Son, 1824), II, p. 189, gave her age as ‘probably not less than 162’. For the 1840s’ and 1850s’ debate about the authenticity of such sources see particularly Richard Sainthill, An Olla Podrida; or, Scraps, Numismatic, Antiquarian, and Literary, 2 vols (London: Nichols and Son, 1844), I, pp. 231–3, and Herbert F.Hore, ‘The Old Countess of Desmond’, Quarterly Review, 1853, vol. 92, pp. 329–54. 3 Notes and Queries, 1st s. 2, 3 August 1850, p. 153. 4 Notes and Queries, 1st s. 2, 17 August 1850, pp. 186–7; 31 August 1850, pp. 219– 20; 12 October 1850, p. 317; 1st s. 3, 29 March 1851, p. 250; 26 April 1851, p. 341; 1st s. 4, 25 October 1851, pp. 305–6; 29 November 1851, pp. 426–7; 1st s. 5, 3 January 1852, pp. 14–16; 10 January 1852, p. 43; 14 February 1852, pp. 145–7; 13 March 1852, p. 260; 3 April 1852, pp. 323–4; 17 April 1852, p. 381; 5 June 1852, p. 539; 12 June 1852, pp. 564–5. 5 See Notes and Queries, 2nd s. 7, 16 April 1859, p. 313; and further correspondence in Notes and Queries, 2nd s. 7, 30 April 1859, p. 365; Notes and Queries, 2nd s. 7, 28 May 1859, p. 431. The story is also found in Horace Walpole, Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (London:J.Dodsley, 1768), p. 102. 6 A[rthur] B[lennerhasset] Rowan, The Old Countesse of Desmonds: Her Identitie; Her Portraiture; Her Descente (Dublin, M.G.Hill, I860).

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7 ‘Links in the Chain’, All the Year Round, 17 January 1863, pp. 439–41 (p. 439). 8 Aristotle, Rhetoric, Bk. II, Ch. 13, 12; trans. W.Rhys Roberts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924). 9 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 39. 10 Aristotle, Rhetoric, Bk. II, Ch. 13, 1–3. 11 [James Davies], ‘Longevity and Centenarianisn’, review article, Quarterly Review, 1868, vol. 124 , pp. 179–98 (p. 184). 12 A reference to the closely-cropped hair demanded by workhouse regulations, which helped to make paupers immediately recognizable to the ‘outside world’. Dickens, Little Dorrit, ed. Harvey Peter Sucksmith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 358. 13 The Times, 20 October 1865, p. 6. 14 Ibid. 15 H.C.G.Matthew, Gladstone: 1875–1898 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 298. 16 Matthew, Gladstone, p. 303. 17 The Gladstone Diaries, 14 vols, ed. M.R. D.Foot and H.C. G.Matthew (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1968–94), VIII, p. 463. 18 See, for example, Gladstone Diaries, XII, 428; XIII, 173; XIII, 345. Significantly, Gladstone’s most direct acknowledgement of the need to debate the question of when men should retire from public office was contained in a letter to A.W.Peel (then chief whip), written in February 1874, when Gladstone was 65, but apparently never sent. It is a letter conspicuous for its evasiveness, anxiously closing down the case for public debate and preferring to leave the matter to the individual’s private conscience. See VIII, 463. 19 Stephen Katz, ‘Imagining the Life-Span: From Premodern Miracles to Postmodern Fantasies’, in Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick (eds), Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 61–75. Katz notes particularly Sir John Sinclair’s The Code of Health and Longevity (1807) and Sir Anthony Carlisle’s An Essay on the Disorders of Old Age (1817). 20 Quoted in Katz, ‘Imagining the Life-Span’, p. 67. 21 See Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 1989), pp. 56–8. 22 Pierre Flourens, How to Live One Hundred Years, Clearly Proved and Demonstrated from Practical Results of the Philosophers Cornaro, Buff on and Cuvier, 2nd edn (London: H.Baillière, 1855), p. vi. 23 [Davies], ‘Longevity and Centenarianism’, p. 181. 24 John Elliotson, ‘Decrepitude’, in his Human Physiology, 5th edn (London: Longman et al., 1840), p. 1025, quoting Franz Joseph Gall. A long footnote (p. 1026) invokes the work of the Austrian anatomist in order to prove that the brain and skull shrink, grow lighter—and at the same time thicker and more spongy—in old age. 25 Samuel Butler, Unconscious Memory: A Comparison between the Theory of Dr. Ewald Hering, Professor of Physiology at the University of Prague, and the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” of Dr. Edward von Hartmann (London: David Bogue, 1880), p. 267. 26 Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844, ed. P.H.Barrett et al. (Cambridge: British Museum (Natural History)/Cambridge University Press, 1987), notebooks M7–8; R.Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and

216

27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45

Notes Behaviour (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), pp. 96–7; The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, ed. F.Burkhardt and S.Smith, 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985–91), II, p. 432. ‘Life in Round Numbers’, All the Year Round, 1, 7 May 1859, pp. 31–5 (pp. 31–2). See Sir Charles Lyell, The Antiquity of Man with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation (London: John Murray, 1863), p. 386. On competing chronologies of Biblical history see Sam Smiles, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 5. Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 515. Laura Otis, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), p. 3. Ewald Hering, Memory: Lectures on the Specific Energies of the Nervous System, 4th edn enlarged (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1913), pp. 16–17. See Otis, Organic Memory, p. 25 and preceding discussion. Anthony Trollope, The Fixed Period, ed. R.H.Super (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1990), p. 2. In [Moss], Poems on Several Occasions (Wolverhampton: G.Smart, Mr. Longman, and Mr. Dodsley, 1769), p. 1. Sylvère Monod, Dickens the Novelist (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), p. 337. Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, ed. Margaret Cardwell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 803. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 133– In Dugald MacTaggart, The Last Rose of Summer, etc. (Edinburgh, n.p., n.d.) In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and NineteenthCentury Psychology (London: Routledge, 1988, ch. 6). Fortune Du Boisgobey, The Old Age ofLecoq the Detective and An Omnibus Mystery, 2 vols (London: Vizeteily & Co., 1885). Du Boisgobey, Old Age of Lecoq, facing title page. See particularly Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Five Orange Pips’, in The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), pp. 224–5. See particularly Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) Chapter 4; and Gillian Beer, George Eliot (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1986), pp. 125–33. George Eliot, Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe, ed. with an introduction by Q.D.Leavis (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 53. Murray M.Shwartz, Introduction to Kathleen Woodward and Murray M. Schwartz (eds), Memory and Desire: Aging—Literature—Psychoanalysis (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 5.

5 Memory through the looking glass: Ruskin versus Hardy 1 See my ‘Why Do We Remember Forwards and Not Backwards?’, in Vincent Newey and Philip Shaw (eds) Mortal Pages, Literary Lives (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996), pp. 81–102. 2 Thomas Carlyle, Selected Writings, edited by Alan Shelston (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971), p. 55 (‘On History’, first published 1830). 3 In R.H.Hutton, Brief Literary Criticisms, ed. Elizabeth M.Roscoe, 1906 (Port Washington, N.Y. and London, 1970), p. 113.

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4 Von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious, quoted in Samuel Butler, Unconscious Memory, first published 1880 (London: A.C.Fifield, 1910): ‘Then does the peculiarity of the unconscious display itself in the clairvoyance of which consciousness perceives only a faint and dull, and partly, as in the case of man, a more or less definite echo by way of sentiment’ (p. 133). 5 In Butler, Unconscious Memory, p. 68. 6 Samuel Butler, Life and Habit, first published 1878 (London: A.C.Fifield, 1916), pp. 102–3, 111. 7 John Ruskin, Modern Painters, first published 1843, vol. I, pt. II, sec. IV, ch. III, para 13. 8 Turner’s sky in ‘Rouen from St Catherine’s Hill’, says Ruskin, is ‘one ocean of alternate waves of cloud and light, so blended together that the eye cannot rest on any one without being guided to the next’, till ‘there is not one line out of the millions there which repeats another, not one which is unconnected with another’. Since these forms ‘are too mysterious and too delicate for us to analyze’, this subtle sense of infinity ‘can only be based on truth, and must be nature because man could not have originated it’ (Modern Painters, vol. I, pt. II, sec. III, ch. III, para 25) 9 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. I, first published 1851, ch. XXI, para. 17. 10 See Philip Davis, Memory and Writing: From Wordsworth to Lawrence (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1983). 11 Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, edited by Leonard Woolf, 4 vols (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966), vol. I, pp. 256–66. 12 J.H.Newman, The Idea of a University, first published 1852 (London: Longman, 1912), p. 276 (‘University Subjects’, vol. II, 3). 13 Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. I, p. 261. 14 The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, edited by Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate, vol. 1 (1840–92), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 262. 15 Dan Jacobson, Adult Pleasures (London: André Deutsch, 1988), pp. 83–4. 16 Thomas H.Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1893), pp. 13, 57. 17 F.E.Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, first published 1928, 1930 (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 251 18 For example, ‘The Coquette, and After’ (first stanza): ‘For long the cruel wish I knew/That your free heart should ache for me/While mine should bear no ache for you; /For long—the cruel wish!—I knew/How men can feel, and craved to view/My triumph—fated not to be/For long!… The cruel wish I knew/That your free heart should ache for me!’ 19 W.K.Clifford, Lectures and Essays, first published 1879, edited by Leslie Stephen and Sir Frederick Pollock, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1901), vol. II, pp. 136–7. 20 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, translated by Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1914), p. 278. 21 Unconscious Memory, p. 165.

6 Twisting: memory from Eliot to Eliot 1 Lyndall Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 40–1; A.C.Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 26–7; Piers Gray, T.S.Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development 1909–1922, (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), pp. 38–48.

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2 T.S.Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber, 1969), p. 24. 3 For a study of these developments see Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 4 The major source for Bradley’s ideas on memory and psychology are the essays collected in Essays on Truth and Reality (1914). For helpful commentary on Bradley see Richard Wollheim, F.H.Bradley (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1959), Anthony Manser, Bradley’s Logic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983) and the essays collected in The Philosophy of F.H.Bradley, ed. Anthony Manser and Guy Stock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). For discussion of Eliot’s relationship to Bradley see Richard Wollheim, ‘Eliot and F.H.Bradley: an Account’, in Eliot in Perspective: A Symposium, ed. Graham Martin (London: Macmillan, 1970); Ann Bolgan, ‘The Philosophy of F.H.Bradley and the Mind and Art of T.S.Eliot: An Introduction’, in English Literature and British Philosophy, ed. S.P.Rosenbaum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971); Lewis Freed, The Critic as Philosopher (LaSalle: Purdue University Press, 1979); Sanford Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot and Early Twentieth-Century Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Andrew Ross, The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Richard Shusterman, ‘Eliot as Philosopher’ in The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot, ed. A.David Moody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 5 F.H.Bradley, ‘On Memory and Judgement’ (1908), in Essays on Truth and Reality, p. 381. 6 F.H.Bradley, Ethical Studies (London: Henry S.King, 1876), esp. essay 5. 7 Bradley, ‘Some Remarks on Memory and Inference’ (1899) in Essays on Truth and Reality, pp. 353–7. 8 Bradley, ‘Some Remarks on Memory and Inference’, pp. 357–9; ‘On Memory and Judgement’, p. 382. 9 Bradley, ‘Some Remarks on Memory and Inference’, p. 360. 10 Bradley, ‘Some Remarks on Memory and Inference’, p. 372. 11 Bradley, ‘Some Remarks on Memory and Inference’, p. 358. 12 This position is developed by Lewes throughout Problems of Life and Mind, but a succinct, early statement can be found in the Prolegomenon to his History of Philosophy from Thales to Comte, 2 vols (London: Longman’s, Green, and Co., 1867). It is, of course, a cornerstone of George Eliot’s realist aesthetics. 13 T.S.Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1975), p. 38. 14 T.S.Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H.Bradley (London: Faber, 1964), p. 51. 15 Bradley, ‘Remarks on Memory and Inference’, p. 357. 16 Eliot, Knowledge and Experience, p. 61. 17 Knowledge and Experience, p. 5 2. 18 Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays, p. 70. 19 Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays, p. 24. 20 Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays, p. 14. 21 Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral G|bles: University of Miami Press, 1971). 22 Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays, p. 24 23 Quoted in Steven Rose, The Making of Memory: From Molecules to Mind (London: Bantam Press, 1992), p. 78.

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24 Eliot, ‘Francis Herbert Bradley’, Selected Prose, p. 199. 25 J.B.Watson, ‘Psychology as a Behaviourist Views It’ (1913) in Modern Philosophy of Mind, ed. William Lyons (London: Everyman, 1995), pp. 33–4. 26 The illustration is taken from Steven Rose, The Conscious Brain, rev. edn, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), Plate 3. 27 Eliot, Selected Prose, p. 204. 28 Francis Galton, Inquiries Into Human Faculty and Its Development, 2nd edn. (London: J.M.Dent and Co., n.d.), p. 229. This passage comes from a paper first delivered at the Royal Institution in April 1879. 29 G.H.Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind: Third Series Continued (London: Trübner and Co., 1879), p. 57. 30 George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. W.J.Harvey (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1965), p. 308. 31 It should be said that George Eliot in other places offers a somewhat different, and less interesting, account of the function of memory. This is the static, ideologically sanctioned account which has tended to gather an unequal share of attention in commentary on this aspect of her work. In it memory is hypostasized within an over-explicit conceptual scheme, as in this passage from Daniel Deronda (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967).

32 33 34 35 36

37

Pity that Offendene was not the home of Miss Harleth’s childhood, or endeared to her by family memories! A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give this early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood. (p. 50). Here sentimentalism, inert language and un-dynamic provincialism go hand in hand in a way quite different from the Middlemarch passage, or indeed other parts of Daniel Deronda itself. Lewes protested against the reification of memory in the telegraph or photographer’s plate, but its fabulation as dogs and donkeys seems to me to perform a similar role. L.S.Hearnshaw, A Short History of British Psychology 1840–1940 (London: Methuen, 1964), pp. 19–20. George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’ Notebooks, ed. John Clark Pratt and Victor A.Neufeldt (London: University of California Press, 1979, p. 41. Henry Holland, Chapters on Mental Physiology (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman’s, 1852), p. 29– Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, p. 7. The illustration faces p. 8. John Stuart Mill, August Comte and Positivism, 2nd edn (London: Trübner and Co., 1866), pp. 65–6. See also G.H.Lewes, Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences (London: Bohn, 1853), pp. 210–11. See for instance, Rose, The Making of Memory; Gerald Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992).

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Notes

7 Gender and memory in postRevolutionary women’s writing 1 Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, New York and London: Cornell University Press, 1988). 2 Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 3 Mary Warnock, Memory (London: Faber and Faber, 1987). 4 Thomas Butler, (ed.) Memory: History, Culture and the Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 5 William Rowe, and Vivian Schelling Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America (London and New York: Verso, 1991). 6 Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Mary Douglas (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). 7 James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992). 8 Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), Chapter 9. 9 Bob Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1700— 1880 (London: Junction Books, 1982). 10 Edward P.Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: The New Press, 1993). 11 Robert W.Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society 1700—1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). 12 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). 13 Zygmunt Bauman, Memories of Class: The Pre-History and After-Life of Class (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982). 14 Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740— 1830 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). 15 Richard M Dorson, The British Folklorists: A History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968). 16 Victor Kiernan, ‘Tennyson, King Arthur and Imperialism’, Raphael Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones (eds) Culture, Ideology and Politics: Essays for Eric Hobsbaum (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 126–48. 17 Anne Vincent-Buffault, The History of Tears: Sensibility and Sentimentality in France, translated (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1991). 18 Nancy Armstrong, ‘The Rise of Domestic Woman’, in Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (eds) The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 96–141. 19 Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).

8 Re-membering: memory, posterity and the memorial poem 1 Ideally, this is a subject that should be served by a book-length study. In the interests of space, however, I am forced to limit myself to a selection of those poems that actually name another poet in the title.

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2 The gender politics that mark this process serve to emphasize the imprecise, mixed, transferable nature of an ideology based on the physical body, and hence socialized behaviour. The act of re-membering is not gender-blind, as this chapter will demonstrate. 3 Headnote to Keats, ‘To Lord Byron’, English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967), p. 1123. Subsequent references, to line numbers, will be made in the text. 4 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 30. 5 Knoepflmacher, ‘Projection and the Female Other: Romanticism, Browning, and the Victorian Monologue’, Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender{ed} Criticism, eds Laura Claridge and Elizabeth Langland (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), p. 152. Knoepflmacher’s whole phrase is ‘those romantic subjectivists who had sadly discovered that their desire for fusion with another could all too easily convert that other into a mere projection of the lyricist’s male self. 6 Deborah Kerfoot and David Knights note that ‘Derrida’s critique [of language] is…that in privileging what is present, the process of signification in effect denies what is absent’ (‘Into the Realm of the Fearful: Power, Identity and the Gender Problematic’, Power/Gender: Social Relations in Theory and Practice, eds H. Lorraine Radtke and Henderikus J.Stam (London: SAGE Publications, 1994), p. 76, emphasis added). In the context of this chapter,‘what is present’ becomes the writing poet’s take on her or his subject-poet; ‘what is absent’—hence, denied—is the other poet. 7 Knoepflmacher, ‘Projection and the Female Other’, p. 167. 8 For a treatment of ‘To the Poet Coleridge’ that stresses other aspects of this important poem, see Daniel Robinson, ‘From “Mingled Measure” to “Ecstatic Measures”: Mary Robinson’s Poetic Reading of “Kubla Khan’”, The Wordsworth Circle 26 (1995), pp. 4–7; see also Lisa Vargo, ‘The Claims of “real life and manners”: Coleridge and Mary Robinson’, The Wordsworth Circle 26 (1995), pp. 134–7. 9 Although the use of quotation marks to indicate direct quotes wasn’t standard when Robinson wrote ‘To the Poet Coleridge’, it was expected that poets at least acknowledged their source. Further, Robinson’s poem was published before Coleridge’s, so that her readers had only her version at hand: ‘To the Poet Coleridge’ is an exercise in pre-remembering, so to speak. 10 Quotation, from Laugh of the Medusa, found in Adriana Méndez Rodenas, ‘Tradition and Woman’s Writing: Toward a Poetics of Difference’, Engendering the Word: Feminist Essays in Psychosexual Poetics, ed. Temma F.Berg (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 43. 11 Gillian Beer, “Our unnatural No-voice’: The Heroic Epistle, Pope and Women’s Gothic’, Yearbook of English Studies 12 (1982), p. 128. 12 Rodenas, ‘Tradition and Woman’s Writing’, p. 32. 13 Annette Kolodny, ‘The Influence of Anxiety: Prolegomena to a Study of the Production of Poetry by Women’, A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Marie Harris and Kathleen Aguero (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1987), p. 122. 14 Kolodny,‘Influence of Anxiety’, p. 116. 15 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Charlotte Brontë to Doris Lessing (London: Virago, 1982), pp. 11, 12. 16 Rodenas, ‘Tradition and Woman’s Writing’, p. 33.

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17 Leigh Gilmore, ‘The Gaze of the Other Woman: Beholding and Begetting in Dickinson, Moore, and Rich’, Engendering the Word: Feminist Essays in Psychosexual Poetics, ed. Temma F.Berg (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 84. 18 Rodenas, ‘Tradition and Woman’s Writing’, p. 34. 19 Glennis Stephenson, ‘Letitia Landon and the Victorian Improvisatorice: The Construction of L.E.L’. Victorian Poetry 30 (1992), p. 14. 20 Anne Mack, J.J.Rome, and Georg Mannejc (Jerome J.McGann), ‘Literary History, Romanticism, and Felicia Hemans’, Modern Language Quarterly 54 (1993), p. 226. The Jeffrey quote comes from this article. 21 Mack et al., ‘Literary History’, p. 231. 22 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 151. 23 This usage suggests a poetic pun on ‘meter’, which, in the context of a line wherein Barrett Browning stresses the propriety of concentrating one’s talents on life and the living, conflates meaning and expression, underscoring her point. 24 Barrett Browning’s ‘L.E.L’.s Last Question’ more fully kills off Landon; in this poem, Barrett Browning reads Landon’s poeticized plea ‘Do you think of me as I think of you’ as a regrettable descent into a stereotyped femininity, and concludes that her question is ‘not much; and yet too much’ to ask. Instead of admiring her dead fellow-poet, Barrett Browning can only muster up a kind of exasperated pity.

9 ‘All that it had to say’: Henry Adams and the Rock Creek Memorial 1 Henry Adams, The Letters of Henry Adams, ed. J.C.Levenson et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982–88), vol. 6, p. 136. 2 See for example, John Carlos Rowe, Henry Adams and Henry James: The Emergence of a Modern Consciousness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976); David Minter, A Cultural History of the American Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 3 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973). 4 Eugenia Kaledin, The Education of Mrs. Henry Adams (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981). See also J.C.Levenson, The Mind and Art of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957) and Carolyn Porter, Seeing and Being (Middleton, CONN: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), p. 180. 5 See for example, William Merrill Decker, The Literary Vocation of Henry Adams (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 64–5. 6 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, trans. Joan Riviere, Collected Papers, vol. 4 (New York: Basic Books, 1959), p. 152. 7 Ernst Scheyer, The Circle of Henry Adams (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), pp. 223–4. 8 Adams, Letters, vol. 3, p. 179 9 Adams, Letters, vol. 3, p. 207. 10 Adams, Letters, vol. 3, p. 209. 11 See Patricia O’Toole, The Five of Hearts (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1990) for an account of Clarence King’s stories about the South Seas. 12 James M.Cox, ‘Henry Adams and the apocalyptic never’, American Literary History, 3.1 (Spring 1991): 144.

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13 Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, p. 159. 14 Adams, Letters, vol. 3, p. 452. 15 See, among other others, Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 16 Adams, Letters, vol. 3, p. 472. 17 Adams, Letters, vol. 3, p. 406. 18 Adams, Letters, vol. 3, p. 453. 19 As quoted in Ernst Scheyer, The Circle of Henry Adams (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), p. 225. 20 Adams, Letters, vol. 3, pp. 480–1. 21 Adams, Letters, vol. 3, pp. 482. 22 Adams, Letters, vol. 3, pp. 527. 23 Adams, Letters, vol. 6, p. 136. 24 Cf. Earl N.Harbert, The Force So Much Closer To Home (New York: New York University Press, 1977): ‘the small number of readers who received copies of The Education in 1907, all of whom were well acquainted with the author, could be expected to know already the facts of history and inheritance in the Adams family’ (p. 148). 25 Cf. Samuels, pp. 200–3. 26 Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Avon Books, 1977), see chapter 6, ‘the domestication of death’, pp. 240–72, especially pp. 249–56. 28 Adams, The Education, p. 359. 28 Adams, The Education, pp. 385–6. 29 Scheyer, p. 230. 30 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 111. 31 Adams, Letters, vol. 6, p. 109— 32 Elizabeth Bronfen, Over her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 91. 33 For wonderful photographs of the memorial see Lincoln Kirstein (essay) and Jerry L.Thompson, Memorial to a Marriage (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, Abrams, 1989). 34 Letters, vol. 6, p. 198. 35 Scheyer, Circle of Henry Adams, p. 2 3 5. 36 Scheyer, Circle of Henry Adams, p. 236. 37 Adams, Letters, vol. 3, p. 481.

10 Memory enstructured: the case of Memorial Hall 1 In the preparation of this chapter I owe a particular debt to Bernard J.Reeve, Secretary of the Congregational Memorial Hall Trust (1978) Limited, who answered many queries and put the Trust’s records at my disposal. 2 Thus the Evening Standard, 30 July 1969— 3 Congregational Memorial Hall Minute Book (hereafter CMHMB) 1862–6, headed ‘Bicentenary Memorial Hall: Minutes of Committee’, p. 1: entry for 4 April 1862. 4 Congregational Year Book (hereafter CYB) 1876, p. 474. 5 Ibid., p. 473.

224

Notes

6 Ibid., pp. 473–4. The first English Congregational woman minister was Constance Todd, later Coltman, who went up to Somerville College, Oxford, in 1908, entered Mansfield College, Oxford, to train for ministry in 1914, and was ordained in 1917. See Elaine Kaye, Mansfield College, Oxford: its Origin. History and Significance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 161–2. 7 For Henry Allon (1818–92) see Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter DNB) (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 8 For Robert William Dale (1829–95) see DNB. 9 For John Bright (1811–89) see DNB. 10 John Bright, One Ash, Rochdale, to Henry Allon, 15 January 1880: see A.Peel, Letters to a Victorian Editor: Henry Allon, Editor of The British Quarterly Review (London: Independent Press Ltd., 1929), p. 36. 11 Bright to Allon, ibid., p. 36 12 Bright to Allon, ibid., p. 37. 13 Ibid., p. 37. 14 Ibid., pp. 38–9. 15 Letters from Cuyler (1822–1909) and Beecher (1813–87) are printed in ibid., pp. 226–45; for R.M.Dexter see pp. 224–5. 16 For Henry John Gauntlett (1805–76) see DNB. 17 For Henry Spicer (1837–1915) MP Islington South 1885–6, see M.Stenton and S.Lees, Who’s Who of British Members of Parliament, vol. II 1886–1918 (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1978), p. 335. 18 For Richard Chamberlain (1840–99), MP Islington West 1885–92, see ibid., p. 62. 19 For James Cubitt (1836–1912) see C.Binfield, ‘A Chapel and its Architect: James Cubitt and Union Chapel, Islington, 1874–89’, in Diana Wood (ed.) Studies in Church History, 28: The Church and the Arts (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), pp. 417–47. 20 For Robert Vaughan (1795–1868) see DNB. See also C.Binfield, ‘Hebrews Hellenized? English Evangelical Nonconformity and Culture, 1840–1940’, in S. Gilley and W.J.Sheils (eds), A History of Religion in Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 323–7. 21 See Mary Hora, ‘English Nonconformity and the Invention of Tradition: Robert Vaughan and the Bicentenary of 1862’ (to appear in a forthcoming issue of Journal of the United Reformed Church Histoty Society). For a more general context see T.Larsen, ‘Victorian Nonconformity and the Memory of the Ejected Ministers: The Impact of the Bicentennial Commemorations of 1862’ in R.N. Swanson (ed.), Studies in Church History 33: The Church Retrospection (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998) pp. 459–473. 22 For Thomas Wilson (1764–1843) and Joshua Wilson (1795–1874) see DNB. Joshua Wilson is the subject of an article by John Creasey in Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society (forthcoming). 23 The fullest denominational account of this remains A.Peel, These Hundred Years: A History of the Congregational Union of England and Wales, 1831–1931 (London: Congregational Union of England and Wales, 1931), pp. 236–9 (see especially the chapter entitled ‘Cruising Round the Bicentenary Lightship, 1858–70’). 24 Introductory survey, ‘Congregational Memorial Hall’, in CMHMB, 1871–81, pp. 4–5. The following paragraph is drawn from this ms. account.

Notes

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25 List of Subscribers to the Congregational Memorial Hall Building Fund, CMHMB ns. For Philip Henry (1631–96) see DNB; for Thomas Binney (1798–1874), the larger-than-life minister of King’s Weigh House Chapel, see DNB. 26 CMHMB, 1862–6, 22 May 1866; Rivett died in 1650, aged 78, so he was at least a contemporary of Rembrandt. 27 Originally a concert room, the premises had been opened by the newly formed Congregational Union in May 1831; see Peel, These Hundred Years, p. 48. 28 Thus, of every five buildings in the City of London in 1855, only one remained in 1901. C.H.Holden and W.G.Holford, The City of London: A Record of Destruction and Survival, (1951), p. 173, as quoted in D.Kynaston, The City of London, Vol. II: Golden Years 1890–1914 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1995), p. 245. 29 See P.Jackson, Walks in Old London (London: Brockhampton Press, 1995), esp. pp. 47–50, 113–14, 133–4. 30 For George Hadfield (1787–1879), Samuel Morley (1809–86), Sir Titus Salt (1803– 76), Benjamin Scott (1814–92) and Sir Charles Reed (1819–81) see DNB; for John Remington Mills (1797–1879) see J.O.Baylen and N.J. Gossman (eds), Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals Vol. 2:1830–1870 (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1984), pp. 352–4. For John Morley (1807–96) see H.Pickering (ed.), Chief Men Among the Brethren: 100 Records and Photographs of Brethren Beloved, 2nd. edn nd. (London: Pickering and Inglis, 1931), pp. 76–9; William Revell Spicer (1805–85) was an uncle of Henry Spicer MP, and like him was a deacon of Union Chapel; William Sommerville of Bilton Mills was a power in Bristol Congregationalism from the 1850s and his daughter Alice married W.R.Spicer’s son Augustin (1845–1920); for Henry Wright (1819–93) see F.Boase (ed.) Modern English Biography, Supplement III, London: 1965; George Frederick White (1817– 98) was the brother of a leading, if idiosyncratic Congregational minister, Edward White (1819–98) and his son, Frederick Anthony White (b. 1842), was an early patron of Norman Shaw and a founder in 1877 of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings; for W.H. Willans (1833–1904) see Who Was Who 1897– 1916. 31 For Alexander Raleigh (1817–80) see DNB; for Alexander Hannay (1822–90) see A.Peel, The Congregational Two Hundred 1530–1948 (London: Independent Press Ltd., 1948), pp. 199–200; for Josiah Viney (1816–96) see Boase, Modern English Biography, Vol. III; Thomas Piper (1800–70), a second generation builder, of Threadneedle Street and Camberwell, wrote Digest of the Building Acts, 1856; for George Smith (1803–70) see CYB 1871, pp. 346–9; Arthur Tidman (1792– 1868) was Foreign Secretary of the London Missionary Society 1839–68; for James Charles Gallaway (1809–86) see CYB 1887, pp. 197–201 (his brother-in-law was Sir Samuel Marling Bt. MP [1810–83]); for Robert Ashton (1798–1878) see CYB 1879, p. 297; for John Kennedy (1813–1900) see CYB 1901, pp. 192–4. 32 For Thomas James (1789–1873) see CYB, 1874, pp. 335–7. 33 For John Angell James (1785–1859), the great protagonist of ‘We must build, build, build (Peel, Hundred Years, p. 149), see DNB. 34 For Joseph James (1828–75) see C.F.Hayward, The late Mr. Joseph James’, Journal RIBA, 7 June 1875, p. 221; and The Builder, 19 June 1875, p. 549; R. StanleyMorgan, ‘Some Victorian Chapel-Builders’, Congregational Quarterly, July 1955, vol. XXXIII, no. 3, pp. 241–2. I am indebted to James Bettley and Christopher Kyle for this information. 35 For Alfred Waterhouse (1830–1905) see DNB.

226

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36 For John Tarring (1806–75) see Boase, Modern English Biography, vol. III; The Builder, Vol 34, 8 January 1876, p. 30. 37 Several generations of legal Shepheards can be found in membership of the influential Congregational Churches in Kensington, Ealing and Hampstead. They (especially A.J.Shepheard, d. 1928) were invaluable advisers to official Congregationalism. 38 CYB, 1876, p. 474. 39 This was published under the auspices of the London Congregational Union in 1883. While most authorities prefer to attribute it to the Union’s masterful Secretary, Andrew Mearns (1837–1925), there is compelling evidence in favour of the former journalist, W.C.Preston (1837–1902). The Socialist, Ben Tillett, thought it was by Arnold White, G.F.White’s erratic and increasingly right-wing nephew (see R.Tudur Jones, Congregationalism in England 1662–1962 (London: Independent Press Ltd., 1962), p. 343, esp. note 4). 40 CMHMB, 1871–81, 28 June 1872. 41 CMHMB, 1862–6, 11 May 1866; for Samuel Conway (1834–95) see CYB, 1896, pp. 205–6. 42 ‘List of Societies affiliated to the L.R.C, numbers of members and amount paid in 1905–6, with names and addresses of Secretaries and Delegates attending the London Conference 1906’, CMHMB ms. The Labour Representation Committee had been formed at a conference of trade unions and socialist societies convened in Memorial Hall on 27 February 1900. Conway’s daughter, Katherine, referred to in CYB 1896 p. 210 as ‘a well-known writer’, married J.Bruce Glasier, the pioneering socialist. 43 For William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme (1851–1925) see DNB. His architect was James Lomax Simpson (1882–1977), see The Times, 20 June 1977; Simpson was quite clear that he, and not Sir John Burnet, Tait and Lorne, the distinguished partnership invariably associated with Unilever House, was its sole begetter (personal information). 44 For Francis William Troup (1859–1941) and the Spicer connection see N. Jackson, F.W.Troup, Architect, 1859–1947 (London: The Building Centre Trust, 1985).

11 Memorials of the Tennysons 1 Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir By His Son, one volume edn (London: Macmillan, 1899), pp. 770–80. 2 Cecil Y.Lang, ‘Tennyson’s Arthurian Psycho-Drama’ (Lincoln: Tennyson Society, 1983), p. 3. 3 ‘Morte d’Arthur’ was written in 1833–4, but Idylls of the King, which ends with ‘The Passing of Arthur’, was not finally published complete until 1885. See The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London: Longman, 1987), II, p. 3 and III, pp. 255–62. All subsequent quotations from Tennyson’s poetry are from this edition. 4 Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, pp. 776–9. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., p. 777.

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7 Edgar F.Shannon, The History of a Poem: Tennyson’s Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, Studies in Bibliography, 13 (1960), pp. 149–77; Edgar F.Shannon and Christopher Ricks, ‘A Further History of Tennyson’s Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington: The Manuscript at Trinity College and the Galley Proof at Lincoln’, Studies in Bibliography, 32 (1979), pp. 125–57; Aidan Day and P.G. Scott, Studies in Bibliography 35 (1982), pp. 320–3. 8 See Poems, II, p. 487, note to line 155. 9 Elizabeth Longford, Wellington: The Years of the Sword (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), p. 7. 10 Ibid., pp. 128–9. 11 Robert J.C.Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 17 and 3. 12 In addition to the appearance of ghosts in both poems, they gain such narrative as they have from following funeral processions, but most notably neither poem names their subject. F.O.Matthieson noticed this in Lincoln’s ode, in American Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 621. Cf. Shannon and Ricks (1979), pp. 141–6, on Tennyson’s ‘resolute abstention from names’. 13 Quoted from Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems, ed. F.Murphy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975). 14 Betsy Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 133–4. 15 See Erkkila, Whitman, p. 229: Whitman’s ‘failure to refer to the actual circumstances of Lincoln’s death—the fact that his death was not an act of nature but an unnatural act of violence against the state—remains a significant silence in the poem.’ 16 Shannon (1960), pp. 166–7. 17 See Shannon and Ricks (1979), p. 134. 18 Jerome McGann, ‘Tennyson and the Histories of Criticism’, in The Beauty of Inflections: Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 200. 19 Ulysses’ departing address to his son consciously adopts the language of the will: This is my son, mine own Telemachus,/To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle—’ (lines 34–5). 20 Quoted from The Oxford Book of Death, ed. D.J.Enright (Oxford: University Press, 1987), p. 137.

12 Rhyming as resurrection 1 The Complete Poetical Works of Constance Naden, explanatory foreword by Robert Lewins (London: Bickers and Son, 1894), Appendix, p. 8. 2 Ben Jonson, C.H.Herford and P.E.Simpson (eds.), 11 vols. (1925–52), vol. VIII, p. 184. 3 Clive Scott, The Riches of Rhyme (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 1. 4 The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longmans, 1969), p. 913. 5 ‘Rhyming as Comedy: body, ghost, and banquet’, English Comedy, ed. Michael Cordner et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 180–96. 6 The Complete Poetical Works of Constance Naden, pp. 312–13.

228 7 8 9 10

11

12 13

14 15 16

17 18

19 20 21

22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Notes Anon [May Kendall and Andrew Lang], ‘That Very Mab’. (London: Longmans, Green, 1885), pp. 48–9. Oxford Companion to English Language, ed. T.McArthur (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 868. William McGonagall, McGonagall: A Library Omnibus (London: Duckworth, 1980), p. 22. Garrett Stewart in Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990) writes an excellent chapter about what he calls ‘Rhymed Treason’. Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. VI (London: Hogarth Press, I960), pp. 53–4. Freud, p. 279. Lewis Campbell and William Garnett, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell with a Selection of his Correspondence and Occasional Writings and a Sketch of his Contributions to Science (London: 1882), p. 633. Dreams to Sell (London: 1887), p. 17. Psychopathology, p. 274, n. 2. I have discussed these issues in detail in Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), especially in ‘Helmholtz, Tyndall, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Leaps of the Prepared Imagination’ and ‘Wave Theory and the Rise of Literary Modernism’, pp. 242–72 and pp. 295–320. Clyde K.Hyder, Swinburne as Critic (London: Routledge, 1972), pp. 29, 35. The manuscript is reproduced in printed form in Jerome McGann, Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1972), pp. 227– 31. 4th edition, revised and enlarged (London: Macmillan, 1876), p. 180. The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, pp. 637–8. Alfred H.Miles, The Poets and Poetry of the Century, 10 vols (London: Hutchinson, 1898); Humour, Society, and Occasional Verse, p. 624, taken from her Songs from Dreamland. Collected in Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds (eds), Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 629. The Complete Poetical Works of Constance Naden, p. 315. Mathilde Blind, The Ascent of Man, with an introduction by Alfred R.Wallace (London: T.Fisher Unwin, 1899), p. 47. Peter McDonald in ‘Rhyme and Determination in Hopkins and Edward Thomas’ (Essays in Criticism 43 [1993], pp. 228–46) revealingly discusses the exigencies of rhyme and its relations to repetition. Nature, vol. XXI (1880), p. 321. Nature, vol. VIII (1873), pp. 437–41. Nature, vol. VIII (1873), p. 441. Nature, vol. VIII (1873), p. 439. Nature, vol. VIII (1873), p. 441. The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, p. 635. The Works of George Herbert, ed. F.E.Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 174.

Name index

Adams, Henry 9–10, 147–59 Adams, Marian 152, 153, 155, 156 Aikin, Lucy 16, 25, 27–9 Albert, Prince 1 Allon, Henry 162, 163, 164, 165, 166 Anderson, Benedict 15, 17 Ariitaimai, Queen 152 Aristotle 62, 63, 77 Arnold, Matthew 162 Arthur, King 175 Ashton, Robert 171 Asquith, Herbert Henry 161 Austen, Jane 5, 16, 19–20, 22, 123 Aveling, Edward 173 Bacon, Francis 60 Baillie, Joanna 22, 120, 123, 124, 128 Bain, Alexander 50, 99, 193 Baker, Herbert 174 Bann, Stephen 15, 17 Barlow, John 47–8, 49, 55 Baudelaire, Charles Pierre 198 Beecher, Henry Ward 164 Beer, Gillian 8, 11, 56, 138, 189–207 Benger, Elizabeth 16 Benjamin, Walter 19, 21, 45 Benveniste, Emile 105 Bergson, Henri 80, 95, 99, 106 Binfield, Clyde 8, 10, 160–74 Binney, Thomas 171 Blind, Mathilde 193, 202–3 Bloom, Harold 133, 137, 144 Bradley, F.H. 7, 8, 99–108, 110–11 Bright, John 162, 163, 164, 165

Bristol, Marquis of 60 Bronfen, Elizabeth 158 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 132, 139, 144–6, 190–1 Bunyan, John 40, 41, 42, 43 Burke, Edmund 24, 121, 126, 184 Burton, Antoinette 16 Butler, Samuel 67, 70, 84, 85, 95 Byron, George Gordon 134, 137, 138 Cameron, Don 157 Cameron, Elizabeth 152, 153, 154–5, 159 Campbell, Matthew 8, 10, 175–87 Carlyle, Thomas 80, 81, 86 Caroline, Queen 24 Carpenter, William 48–9, 51, 52, 54, 59, 113 Chamberlain, Joseph 165 Chamberlain, Richard 165 Cicero 62 Cixous, Hèlene 137 Clifford, W.K. 84, 89, 94, 95, 193 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 48, 65, 120, 132, 135–7, 138, 142 Collins, Wilkie 72–4 Condorcet, Marquis de 21 Connerton, Paul 62 Conolly, John 47 Conway, Samuel 173 Crabbe, George 30 Cromwell, Oliver 23, 166 Crosby, Christina 17, 21 Cubitt, James 165

229

230

Name index

Cullen, William 32–3, 34 Cunningham, Allan 32 Curran, Stuart 16 Cuvier, Georges 21 Cuyler, Theodore 164 Dale, R.W. 162, 163, 164, 165, 166 Darwin, Charles 3, 6–7, 53, 55–58, 67–9, 77–8, 202 Darwin, Robert 67–8 Dauphin, Cécile 19, 27 Davies, James 66 Davis, Philip 7, 8, 80–97 Day, Aidan 179 De Quincey, Thomas 120 Deans, David 41 Defoe, Daniel 181 Derrida, Jacques 158 Descartes, René 4 Desmond, Countess of 60, 61 Dexter, H.M. 164 Dickens, Charles 3, 46–7, 50, 51, 60–1, 71, 72 Dickinson, Emily 140 Disney, Walt 108 Donvan, Josephine 18 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 72 Douglas, Ann 156 Du Boisgobey, Fortune 74 Dwight, Theodore 154 Edelman, Gerald 116 Edgeworth, Maria 22, 120, 124–5 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell 124–5, 126, 127, 128 Eliot, George 2–3, 6, 50–5, 58–9, 75–8, 98–116 Eliot, T.S. 7, 98–116 Elizabeth, Queen 22 Elliot, Sir Walter 20 Elliotson, John 47, 66–7 Erkkila, Betsy 181 Foucault, Michel 3, 15 Fourens, Pierre 66, 71 Freud, Sigmund 148, 195, 196 Gaboriau, Emile 74 Gall, Franz 66, 114

Gallaway, J.C. 171 Galton, Francis 108, 110, 111, 114–15 Gaskell, Charles Milnes 155–6 Gauntlett, H.J. 164 Gibbon, Lewis Grassic 21 Gilligan, Carol 23 Gilmore, Leigh 140 Gladstone, William 6, 64–5, 71, 161, 162, 185 Glasier, Bruce 174 Godwin, William 21 Goldsmith, Oliver 21, 22 Gordon, Lyndall 99 Grant, Ann 127 Grant, General 157 Gray, Piers 99 Hadfield, George 170 Halbwachs, Maurice 61 Hallam, Arthur 175, 185, 186 Hannay, Alexander 171 Hardy, Thomas 6, 7, 55, 56–7, 58, 80– 97, 203 Hartmann, Eduard von 83, 86 Haslam, John 50 Hay, John 154 Hays, Mary 16, 24, 25 Hegel, G.W.F. 21, 100 Helmholtz, Hermann von 197 Hemans, Felicia 25–7, 120, 123, 128–32, 137–9, 141–2, 144–6 Herbert, George 206 Hering, Ewald 69, 84, 86, 89, 95 Holland, Henry 48, 49, 51, 52, 55, 59, 113, 116 Hooper, Marian 147, 148, 150, 159 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 193, 204 Hume, David 6, 21, 23, 39, 163 Hunt, Richard M. 157 Hutton, R.H. 81–2 Huxley, T.H. 93, 99, 110, 193 Jacobson, Dan 92 James, Henry 147, 156, 157 James, John Angell 171 James, Joseph 171 James, Thomas 171 James, William 30, 67, 110 Jameson, Anna 16, 20, 25 Jeffrey, Francis 144

Name index Jenkins, Henry 61 Joan of Arc 26 Jones, Catherine 5, 6, 30–45 Jonson, Ben 189–90 Kaledin, Eugenia 148 Kant, E. 21 Katz, Stephen 66 Keats, John 29, 132, 133, 134, 137, 138 Kelly, Gary 8–9, 16, 119–31 Kendall, May 193, 196, 200–1 Kennedy, John 171 King, Clarence 152 Knoepflmacher, U.C. 134, 135 Kobbe, Gustave 150 Kolodny, Annette 139, 140 Kucich, Greg 5, 7, 15–29 La Farge, John 150–1, 157, 159 Labbe, Jacqueline M. 8, 9, 132–46 Lamb, Charles 120 Landon, Letitia 132, 139, 141, 142, 143– 4, 145, 146 Lang, Andrew 193 Lang, Cecil 175 Laud, William 23 Leavis, Q.D. 77–8 Lever, William Hesketh, 1st Viscount Leverhulme 174 Leverhulme, Viscount 174 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 158 Lewes, G.H. 8, 50, 51, 99, 102, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116 Lincoln, Abraham 182 Locke, John 99 Lodge, Henry Cabot 156 Longford, Elizabeth 180 Lyell, Sir Charles 68 Macaulay, Catharine 5, 16, 22–3, 24, 163 McGann, Jerome 184 McGonagall, William 187, 194 Mack, Anne 144 Malthus, Thomas 21 Mandelbaum, Maurice 3–4 Marie Antoinette 24 Marx, Karl 173 Maudsley, Henry 54, 55, 57

231

Maxwell, James Clerk 193, 195, 199, 204–7 Mellor, Anne 16, 21, 23 Miles, Alfred 200 Mill, John Stuart 114 Millgate, Jane 31 Mills, John Remington 170, 173 Milton, John 22, 27, 39, 61, 134 Monod, Sylvère 71 Moody, A.C. 99 Moore, Tom 127 More, Hannah 127 Morland, Catherine 19 Morley, John (Victorian essayist) 4 Morley, John (Liberal MP) 170 Morley, Samuel 170 Morris, William 173 Moss, Reverend Thomas 71 Müller, F. Max 189, 190, 191 Naden, Constance 189, 193, 200–2 Nelson, Horatio 181 Newman, Cardinal John 87 Nietzsche, Friedrich 88 Noel, Roden 89 O’Connell, Daniel 127 Oostrum, Duco van 8, 9–10, 147–59 Otis, Laura 69 Owenson, Sydney (later Lady Morgan) 120, 126–7, 128 Paine, Tom 22 Palmerston, Lord 64, 65 Penn, William 163 Perkins, David 133 Pfeiffer, Emily 202 Philippe, Charles-Louis 104 Piozzi, Hester 16 Piper, Thomas 171 Pope, Alexander 27 Priestley, J.B. 21 Proust, Marcel 86 Raleigh, Alexander 171 Reed, Charles 171 Reid, Thomas 5, 6, 34, 38, 39, 155 Ribot, Théodule 70, 83, 86

232

Name index

Richard the Third 60, 61 Richardson, H.H. 151, 157, 159 Ricks, Christopher 179 Riley, Denise 19 Robinson, Mary 135–7, 142 Rodenas, Adriana 140 Rodin, Auguste 159 Roosevelt, F.D. 159 Rose, Steven 116 Ross, Marlon 16 Ruskin, John 7, 80–97 Russell, Lord 64, 65 Rylance, Rick 7–8, 98–116 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 157, 158, 159 Saint-Gaudens, Homer 158 Salt, Sir Titus 170 Samuels, Ernest 156 Sand, George 78 Scheyer, Ernst 159 Scott, Benjamin 171 Scott, Clive 190 Scott, Joan 17, 18, 27, 29 Scott, P.G. 179 Scott, Walter 5, 6, 19, 30–45, 65, 120, 126, 131 Seymour, William 26 Shakespeare, William 35, 39, 56, 61, 134 Shannon, Edgar 179, 183 Shapiro, Ann-Louise 18 Shelley, Mary 16, 29, 132, 137, 138, 197–8 Shepheard, Charles 172 Showalter, Elaine 18, 140 Shuttleworth, Sally 5, 6, 8, 46–59, 76 Sinyavsky, Andrey 92 Small, Helen 5, 6, 7, 8, 60–79 Smith, Charlotte 16, 24, 25 Smith, George 171 Sommerville, William 170 Spencer, Herbert 70, 99 Spicer, Henry 165, 170, 174 Spinoza, Baruch 85, 89 Stanhope, Dowager Lady 60 Stanislavski, K. 86 Stewart, Balfour 199 Stimpson, Catherine 18 Stuart, Arabella 26

Sweet, Nanora 16, 25 Swinburne, Algernon 193, 197–8 Tait, Peter 199 Tarring, John 171–2 Taylor, Jenny 73 Tennyson, Alfred 2, 10, 78, 175–88, 191–2 Tennyson, Emily 175, 177, 180 Tennyson, Hallam 10, 175–88 Thorns, William J. 66 Thomson, William 197 Tidman, Arthur 171 Tighe, Mary 139 Todd, Janet 18 Trollope, Anthony 70–1 Tyndall, John 193 Vane, Sir Henry 23 Vaughan, Robert 166–7, 171 Victoria, Queen 1 Viney, Josiah 171 Volney, Constantin 21 Wagner, Otto 174 Waterhouse, Alfred 171 Watson, J.B. 107–8 Wellesley, Arthur, Duke of Wellington 175, 180–1, 184, 185, 186, 187 Whistler, James 157 White, George Frederick 170 White, Hayden 21 White, Stanford 153, 154, 157 Whitman, Walt 181–2, 198 Wigan, A.L. 51 Wilde, Oscar 6, 58, 59 Willans, William Henry 170 Williams, Helen Maria 24 Wilson, Joshua 167, 170, 171 Wilson, Thomas 167 Wollstonecraft, Mary 16, 24 Woolf, Virginia 87, 139, 140, 146 Wordsworth, William 3, 7, 40, 65, 81–2, 86, 106, 120, 130, 132, 137–8, 141, 145 Wright, Henry 170 Wundt, W. 195 Wycliffe, John 166 Young, Robert 18

Subject index

‘Aaron’ 206 ‘Abencerrage, The’ 129 ‘Absentee, The’ 125 Absolute 8, 100 active memory 34 Age of Great Cities, The 166 Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son 10, 175, 176, 177, 180 All the Year Round 60–1 An Old Man’s Story 70 ancestral memory 57, 62 animal memory 56, 59; see also biological memory Antiquity of Man, The 68 ‘Arabella Stuart’ 141 ‘Ascent of Man, The’ 202–3 associative memory 32, 33, 35, 37, 40, 41, 42, 43 ‘At Castle Boterel’ 95 Athenaeum, The 68 auditory memory 196 authority 72–3 ‘Author’s Apology For His Book, The’ (Bunyan) 43 autobiography 9–10, 80–1, 82, 89, 147– 59 ‘Beast in the Jungle, The’ 157 ‘Beggar’s Petition, The’ 71 Behaviourism 107–8 belief 192–6 ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’ 130 Biographia Literaria 48 biography 25, 44, 148, 175

biological memory 7, 84 Bitter Cry of Outcast London, The 173 blended memory 110, 114 Body and Mind 55 Border Minstrelsy 126 Bride of Lammermoor, The 44 British Quarterly Review 166 Bubu de Montparnasse 104 ‘Caliban Upon Setebos’ 190 Castle Rackrent 22, 124, 125 Chapters on Mental Physiology 113; see also Medical Notes and Reflections Characteristics of Women 25 ‘Charge of the Light Brigade, The’ 184 class memory 121, 123–4 collective memory 31, 61, 62, 76–8 common sense 5, 33, 35; see also Scottish Common Sense philosophy communal memory 35 composite portraiture 115–16 Comus 39 condensation 110 Confessions 82 Congregationalism 160–174 Congregationalist, The 166 ‘Conscientious Ghost: Psychica, The’ 196 conscious memory 48, 84, 110 consciousness 90 ‘Constantine Palaeologus; or, The Last of the Caesars: A Tragedy’ 124, 128 cultural memory 11, 85, 123

233

234

Subject index

custom 121 customary memory 123, 125, 126, 127 Daniel Deronda 2–3, 6, 53, 83 ‘De Monfort’ 123 ‘Death and Burial of Lord Tennyson’ 187 delirium 34 destiny 130 destructive memory 130, 131 Digest of the Building Acts 171 disordered memory 30–45 displacement 110 dissolution 111 double consciousness 48, 49, 51–2 drama 86–7, 88 dreams 49 Duality of the Mind, The 51 dynamic memory 80, 81, 82, 96 Education of Henry Adams, The 147–8, 150, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159 Education of Mrs. Henry Adams, The 148 ‘Election, The’ 123 elegiac memory 128 embodied memory 46–59, 70 Emigrants, The 24 emotion memory 83, 86 England and Spain; or, Valour and Patriotism 128 English Nonconformity 166 English rhyme 190 Enlightenment 121 ‘Ennui’ 125 enstructured memory 160–74 entropy 111 Epistles on Women 25, 27–8 erroneous judgement 34 Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man 38 Essays on…the Highlanders 127 ‘Ether Insatiable’ 200–1 Ethical Studies 101 ‘Eve of Revolution, The’ 197–8 evolution 3–4, 54–9, 83, 110, 196–203 Evolution and Ethics 93 ‘Evolutional Erotics’ 201–2 externalized memory 88

false imagination 34 false memory 104 family memory 57, 62 fantasy 105, 110, 113 Far from the Madding Crowd 89 ‘Felicia Hemans’ 139, 141–2, 143–5 Female Biography 25 feminism 18, 19, 21, 25, 27, 28, 29 Feminists Revision History 18 ‘Fitt against Rime, A’ 189 Fixed Period, The 70–1 Fleurs du Mal, Les 198 Florence Macarthy: An Irish Tale 128 folk culture 126 folk memory 31, 32, 124 folksong 122, 26, 127 folktale 127, 130 folklore 121, 122, 125 folksay 127 Forest Sanctuary, The 131 forgetting 9–10, 65, 74, 76, 88, 110, 129, 131, 132, 146, 157, 179, 184 ‘Fossil, A’ 201 Four Quartets 103 fragmentary memory 36 French Revolution 15, 119, 121, 122, 123 French rhyme 190 From a Garret 200 ‘Gates of Hell’ 159 gender 15–29, 137, 139–40: and memory 119–31;politics 25 Genealogy of Morals 88 ‘Gertrude’ 141 ‘Going, The’ 90, 91 ‘Grave of a Poetess, The’ 139, 141–2, 144–5 Great Expectations 71 Greek Songs 131 Hamlet 36 harmony 122 Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, The 46–7, 50–1 Heart of Midlothian, The 5, 30–45, 126 hereditary memory 56, 57, 69, 70 historical memory 5, 7, 15–29

Subject index Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution 24 historicism 3–4 History of England 5, 22 History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison 151 How Societies Remember 62 Human Longevity: Its Facts and Its Fictions 66 Humour, Society and Occasional Verse 200 Hymns for Childhood 131 idealism 7, 99–103, 108 identity 38, 52, 54, 119, 121, 122, 130 idiom 125 Idylls of the King 187 I’ll tell you: An Answer to ‘How did they get there?’ 167 imagination 6, 38, 39, 76 ‘Imelda’ 142 Immediate Experience 100 In Memoriam 1, 2, 176, 179, 185, 186, 191–2 ‘In Tenebris II’ 93 individual memory 31, 32, 61, 68 inherited memory 53, 75 Inquiries Into Human Faculty and Its Development 108 insanity 34, 49 inside memory 88 instinctual memory 7, 8, 69 Institutions of Medicine 32 Introductory Discourse’ (Joanna Baillie) 22 Irish Melodies 127 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious 195 Jude the Obscure 57 Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H.Bradley 102, 103 ‘KublaKhan’ 135, 136, 142 ‘Last Constantine, The’ 128, 130 Lay of an Irish Harp, The 127

235

Lay of the Last Minstrel, The 31 Lays of Many Lands 131 Leaves of Grass 181 ‘Lectures to Women on Physical Science’ 195 ‘L.E.L.’s Last Question’ 139 Life and Habit 84 Life, Letters, and Friendships of Richard Monckton Milnes 155 ‘Lifted Veil, The’ 50, 53, 54 linear memory 81 Little Dorrit 72 ‘Madeline’ 141, 142 madness see insanity mania 34 Martin Chuzzlewit 72 Matiere et Memoire 99 Maud 184 Mayor of Casterbridge. The 87, 88 Medical Notes and Reflections 49 Memoir, see Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son Memoirs (Mary Robinson) 135 Memoirs of Queens 24, 25 Memorial Hall 160–74 memorial poem 132–46 ‘Memory as a general function of organized matter’ 69, 84 memory loss 48, 140 mesmerism 48, 51 metaphors 101, 111 ‘Metaphysical Poets, The’ 102 Middlemarch 98, 112–13, 114 Mill on the Floss, The 50 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border 30–1 ‘Minute Before Meeting, The’ 92 Miscellaneous Plays 124 Missionary: An Indian Tale, The 128 Modern Greece 128 Modern Painters 7, 85–6 modernization 120, 121, 125, 126, 128, 131 ‘Molecular Evolution’ 199 ‘Molecules’ 205 Moonstone, The 73 moral responsibility 50 mutual memory 49 ‘Mystic Side of Good Sense, The’ 81

236

Subject index

nationalism 15, 121, 126, 127 ‘Natural Selection’ 202 ‘New Orthodoxy, The’ 193, 202 Northanger Abbey 20 Notes and Queries 60 Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington 10, 176, 177–9, 180, 181, 183–4, 186 O’Donnell: A National Tale 128 Old Age of Lecoq the Detective, The 74 old age and memory 60–79 ‘On Departure Platform’ 90 ‘On History’ 80 On Man’s Power over Himself to Prevent or Control Insanity 47 On the Origin of Species 53 On the Study of General History 166 oral memory 62 oral narrative 125 Order of Things, The 3 ordered mind 33, 34 organic memory 6, 53, 55, 56, 69, 70 ‘Passion of the Past’ 183 passive memory 34, 35, 37, 41 Patriotic Sketches of Ireland, written in Connaught 127 ‘Pedigree, The’ 94 perception 103, 105, 113 personal morality 51 personal voice 125 Persuasion 5, 20, 123 ‘Photograph, The’ 89–90 physiological memory 59 Physiology of Common Life, The 113 Picture of Dorian Gray, The 58, 59 Pilgrim’s Progress, The 40, 41, 42, 43 Plays on the Passions 123 ‘Poem of Remembrance for a Girl or Boy of These States’ 181 ‘Poems of 1912–13’ 90 Political Justice 21 politics 17, 23 Popular Tales 125 posterity 132–46 power 18, 22, 23 prejudice 121 present memory 103, 104, 105, 113

Principles of Human Physiology 48 Principles of Mental Physiology 48, 54 Principles of Psychology 30, 67 Problems of Life and Mind 111, 113 profound mourning 148 pronouns 105 psychic memory 88 psychoanalysis 110 psychology 46–59, 99–100 ‘Psychology as a Behaviourist Views It’ 107 Psychopathology of Everyday Life, The 195 Quarterly Review 66 race memory 56 recollection 49 Records of Woman 25, 131, 141, 142 Reflections on the Revolution in France 24, 126 Reform Bill 1832 124 religious memory 123, 131 remembering 113, 129, 132–46 ‘Reminder, The’ 89 repetitive form 125 repression 110, 192–6 Responsibility in Mental Disease 54 Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy, The 25, 128 Return of the Native, The 55, 87 reverie 49 Revolutions in English History 166 ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ 7–8, 98–9, 101–3, 105–8, 111, 113–14 rhyming 189–207: belief and the repressed 192–6; and transformation: evolution and thermodynamics 196–203 ‘Rhyming as Comedy’ 198 Riches of Rhyme, The 190 Rights of Man, The 22 rights and wrongs memories 123 Rock Creek Memorial 147–59 Romanticism 5–6, 15–29, 80, 99, 108, 120–1, 125, 129, 132, 140 Saint Ronan’s Well 44, 45

Subject index Scenes and Hymns of Life 131 ‘Scientific Wooing’ 202 Scottish Common Sense philosophy 6, 33, 38, 42. Scottish Enlightenment 32 self 81, 114, 135, 138 self-control 47–8, 49 selfhood 49, 56, 58–9 Sensibility 119, 122, 129 ‘Shadow on the Stone, The’ 89 short-term memory 65 ‘Sicilian Captive, The’ 142 Siege of Valencia: A Dramatic Poem 130 ‘Signs of the Times’ 80 Silas Marner 75–8 simple memory 49 single memory 114 social memory 121 ‘Solomon Redivivus’ 201 somnambulism 49 ‘Song of the Cub, The’ 199 Songs of the Affections 131 Songs Before Sunrise 197 Sound Mind 50 ‘Stanzas on the Death of Mrs.Hemans’ 139 ‘Storyteller, The’ 45 superstition 121 ‘Surgeon’s Daughter, The’ 44 Tales of Fashionable Life 125–6 Tales and Historic Scenes 129 Tawny Rachel 127 Tempest, The 39 Tess of the d’Urbervilles 7, 56, 58, 91 ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire’ 204

237

That Very Mab 193–4, 200 thermodynamics 196–203 ‘Thinker, The’ 159 ‘To Lord Byron’ 133 ‘To the Poet Coleridge’ 135, 137 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ 102 Treatise of Human Nature, A 39 ‘Ulysses’ 185 unconscious memory 6, 7, 67, 83, 84 Under the Microscope 198 ‘Under the Waterfall’ 83 unretentive memory 36 Unseen Universe; or, Physical Speculations on a Future State 199 Vespers of Palermo, The 130 victimization 27–8 Vieillesse de Monsieur Lecoq, La 74 ‘Vision of Spring in Winter, A’ 198 ‘Voice, The’ 89, 203 ‘Wallace’s Invocation to Bruce’ 129 Waste Land, The 103, 106 Waverley Novels 31, 34, 126, 127 Welsh Melodies 111 ‘Wessex Heights’ 91 ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ 181, 182 Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, The 127 Will 48–9 Woman; or, Ida of Athens 128 Woodlanders, The 90 world memory 7, 8, 85, 86 ‘Your Last Drive’ 96