The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature: Subject, Ecology, Form (Routledge Research in Art History) [1 ed.] 9781032356785, 9781032356808, 9781003327998, 1032356782

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The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature

Resonating with contemporary ecological and queer theory, this book pioneers the theorization of the Victorian idyll, establishing its nature, lineaments, and significance as a formal mode widely practised in nineteenth-​century British culture across media and genre. Chapters trace the Victorian idyll’s emergence in the 1830s, its flourishing in the 1860s, and its evolution up to the century’s close, drawing attention to the radicalism of idyllic experiments with pictorial, photographic, dramatic, literary, and poetic form in the work of canonical and lesser-​known figures. Approaching the idyll through three intersecting categories—​subject, ecology, and form—​this book remaps Victorian culture, reshaping thinking about artistic form in the nineteenth century, and recalibrating accepted chronologies. In the representations by a host of Victorian artists and writers engaging with other-​than-​human forms, and in the natures of the subjectivities animated by these encounters, we find versions of Victorian ecology providing provocative imaginative material for ecocritics, scholars, writers, and artists today. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, English literature, Victorian studies, British history, queer and trans* theory, musicology, and ecocriticism, and will enliven debates pertaining to the environmental across periods. Thomas Hughes is an art historian who has published on John Ruskin, Victorian art, ecology and temporality. Emma Merkling is Rome Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and Deputy Associate Director of Research at the Centre for Nineteenth-​Century Studies International at Durham University.

Routledge Research in Art History

Routledge Research in Art History is our home for the latest scholarship in the field of art history. The series publishes research monographs and edited collections, covering areas including art history, theory, and visual culture. These high-​level books focus on art and artists from around the world and from a multitude of time periods. By making these studies available to the worldwide academic community, the series aims to promote quality art history research. Claes Oldenburg’s Theater of Vision Poetry, Sculpture, Film, and Performance Art Nadja Rottner The Visual Legacy of Alexander the Great from the Renaissance to the Age of Revolution Víctor Mínguez and Inmaculada Rodríguez-​Moya The Sublime in the Visual Culture of the Seventeenth-​Century Dutch Republic Stijn Bussels and Bram Van Oostveldt The Book of Hours and the Body Somaesthetics, Posthumanism, and the Uncanny Sherry C.M. Lindquist Art Patronage and Conflicting Memories in Early Modern Iberia The Marquises of Villena Maria Teresa Chicote Pompanin The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature Subject, Ecology, Form Thomas Hughes and Emma Merkling The Primitivist Imaginary in Iberian and Transatlantic Modernisms Edited by Joana Cunha Leal and Mariana Pinto dos Santos For more information about this series, please visit: www.routle​dge.com/​Routle​dge-​Resea​rch-​in-​Art-​Hist​ory/​ book-​ser​ies/​RRAH

The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature Subject, Ecology, Form Edited by Thomas Hughes and Emma Merkling

Designed cover image: Julia Margaret Cameron, Maud, c. 1874, albumen silver print, 32.9 × 27.1 cm on mount (43.6 × 31.7 cm). Published in Illustrations to Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’, and Other Poems, 2 vols (London: King, 1874–​75), II (1875), unpaginated. Digital image courtesy of Getty’s Open Content Program. First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 introduction and editorial matter, Thomas Hughes and Emma Merkling; individual chapters, the contributors. The right of Thomas Hughes and Emma Merkling to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised 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. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​35678-​5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​35680-​8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​32799-​8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003327998 Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

For Caroline and Clare

Contents

List of Contributors Foreword by Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt Acknowledgements Introduction

ix x xiii 1

TH O M A S H U GH E S A N D E MMA ME RKL IN G

1 Idyll as Refuge: The Settler’s Dream

13

C H A R L O TTE CA RY- ​B E CKE TT AN D JO SE P H IN E MC DONAGH

2 ‘Cutting So “Sweetly” ’: Idyllist Wood Engravings and the Lost Boxwood Forests

36

B E TH A N S TE V E N S

3 Multicolour as Disavowal: The Racial Politics of the Nineteenth-​Century Idyll

60

C A R O L I N E A RSCO TT A N D CL A RE P E TTITT

4 John Addington Symonds’s Theocritus and the Homoerotic Idyll in Sicily

85

DANIEL ORRELLS

5 Ancient and Modern: Attention and Environmental Change in the Victorian Pictorial Idyll

105

K ATE F L I N T

6 Queer Pastoral Soundscapes and the Idyllic Voice: Vernon Lee, A. Mary F. Robinson, and Lady Archibald Campbell

125

F R A S E R R I D DE L L

7 Plant Subjects, Plant Erotics: Julia Margaret Cameron’s Creeping Idyll E M M A M E R K L IN G

145

viii  Contents

8 Wondrous Transformation in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s La Ghirlandata

167

TH O M A S H U GH E S

Index

184

Contributors

Caroline Arscott is Emeritus Professor in the History of Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art, UK. Charlotte Cary-​Beckett is PhD Candidate in English at the University of Chicago, USA. Kate Flint is Provost Professor of Art History and English at the University of Southern California, USA. Thomas Hughes is an art historian who has published on John Ruskin, Victorian art, ecology and temporality. Josephine McDonagh is George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago, USA. Emma Merkling is Rome Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and Deputy Associate Director of Research at the Centre for Nineteenth-​Century Studies International at Durham University, UK. Daniel Orrells is Professor of Classics at Kings College London, UK. Clare Pettitt is Grace 2 Professor of English at the University of Cambridge, UK. Fraser Riddell is Assistant Professor in English and Medical Humanities at Durham University, UK. Bethan Stevens is Reader in English and Art Writing at the University of Sussex, UK.

Foreword Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt

On Midsummer’s Day in June 2018 a group of scholars assembled at The Courtauld Institute of Art around a miniature grove of white snapdragons. Potted plants were dotted down the table, alternating with bottles of water—​essential on a very hot afternoon. The windows were wide open; we could hear the fountains in the courtyard. As we came towards the tea break the scent of fresh strawberries filled the air from bowls of fruit set out on the side tables. This book of essays springs from discussions held on that occasion, taking the initial formulations and provocations from that germinal event to a more extensive group of writers and thinkers. In the 2018 symposium the organizers Caroline Arscott from The Courtauld and Clare Pettitt from the English Department, King’s College London, brought together a multidisciplinary group of scholars representing a range of generations from doctoral to emeritus, bridging the academy and the museum sector, from London departments and further afield—​in one case reaching across the Atlantic. The symposium involved specialists in the History of Art, Literature, Print History, Classics, and Music. They had come in response to an invitation to discuss the idea of the idyll in late nineteenth-​century culture. Participants were invited to address a number of questions. How does the idyllic relate to the pastoral, and to the utopian? Where are the edges of the idyllic? What are its politics and its sexual politics? How might the idyll open onto social critique? Can we identify musical modes that are distinctly idyllic? How important is classical literature (e.g. the idylls of Theocritus) in the construction of the idyllic in late nineteenth-​century writing? Does an idyll have to be rural? What is the relationship of the idyllic to the Aesthetic Movement? How do the so-​called idyllic painters (e.g. John William North, Frederick Walker, and Helen Allingham) differ from the Pre-​Raphaelites? What is the affective range of the idyllic? How does nature writing and/​or writing for children invoke the idyllic? How does the representation of landscape change in this period? Do the technologies of image reproduction (wood engraving, photographic image making) inflect the idyllic? If the idyllic is suspended between realism and idealism, what philosophic work does it do? What kinds of materiality does the idyllic represent? What are its temporalities? Can we see a variation in idyllic forms across Europe, in America, and elsewhere in the world? Free-​flowing conversation ensued which elucidated a number of features of the late nineteenth-​century idyllic and convinced us of the historical variability of the category. Our starting point was the 1860s. We were especially interested in the impact of technology and commerce on the imaginative resources of British culture from this decade because, as much as this was an inaugural event for a new project, it was also a concluding event for a prior collaboration on technology and culture. The Arscott and Pettitt team had been leading a four-​year AHRC-​funded project ‘Scrambled Messages: The

Foreword  xi Telegraphic Imaginary 1857–​1900’ looking at the impact of innovation in electrified telecommunication on Victorian art and literature. A recognition of the importance of electrical interference on the international telegraphic lines led researchers on that project to discriminate between (clear) signal and (muffled) noise—​not in message sending only, but in artistic and literary representation in general in the era of the establishment of the telegraph. The adoption of noise, the thrill of buzz, the abandonment to the formless or unshaped were features of the cultural forms we identified on our telegraphy project, evident from the 1860s onwards. What we understood as a ‘telegraphic imaginary’ dissolved the human body, scrambled the senses, and disavowed distance, while at the same time materializing space in novel ways.1 The next steps were to think about how those processes translated to aesthetic pleasure, and to articulate the aesthetic and formal categories which allowed for pleasure in this soft and fuzzy, electrically charged world. We noticed a preponderance of relevant literary and artistic works in the 1860s which declared themselves to be ‘idylls’. Our Midsummer Day symposium yielded rich materials for further study of emergent formal and aesthetic categories. We asked each participant to nominate an object, which could be an image, a text, a piece of music, or anything that they wanted us to think about as idyllic. The diversity of objects selected made for a wide-​ranging and surprising discussion. From Music came a focus on repetition and on the looping of time; from Classics, questions about where agency resides and the gains and losses of a translocation from the classical to the modern. Literature foregrounded an interest in doubling and osculation and in the mirroring enacted in passionate encounters. We went on to a conversation about the way in which queerness can shape the idyll, negotiating the barriers to pleasure by mapping secluded zones of permissiveness. The discussion also considered the physiological as it manifests itself through the senses; for example, the sense of smell aroused by perfume, or of idyllic soundscapes triggering particular mental states. These physiological triggers necessitate particular structures that serve in the idyll to amplify emotional states and indications of pleasure. Art and Print History specialists drew our attention to the relationships between commercially produced graphic art and exhibition paintings and located the emergence of an exceptionally fluid interchange between the two from the 1860s onwards, partly due to the arrival of new technologies of printing and reproduction. Illustration emerged as particularly important to the idyll as its status and relationship to text shifted in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Both wood engraving and the newly important medium of photography began to reveal the remediated idyll as not only located in the space of the sunshine-​ drenched bower but equally as a place of gloom and shadowiness. This darkness created an amplification of both dread and anticipated pleasure, extending the idyllic time frame to impose a period of waiting. Thinking about wood engravings in particular, we noticed the chasms between one place and another proper to the gouging of the woodblock, marking out spaces and gaps in the image. When reinforced by the motif, the idyllic form plays with proximity and distance and can create an affect to be felt as either terror or intense pleasure. Proximity and distance can be temporally represented, for instance, in the relationship between historical time and the time of ‘nature’. Historical time was understood in the nineteenth century as progressive, punctual, and divided by significant events, and could involve repercussions, repetitions, and recapitulations. The time of nature respected the universality of natural law, operating in accordance with a fundamental continuity. Any ecological view of nature in terms of integrated systems probes the resilience and vulnerability of those systems in a way which is impossible with a historical perspective. Study

xii  Foreword of the temporality of the idyll raises the question of whether it can escape historical time, and if it has to function within the time of nature. The forms adopted in idyllic modes emphasize spread and set up systems that act like models of nature. Proximity and distance can also be spatially suggestive for idyllic modes. We considered the relationship of European and British art in the period and the ways in which the idyll relocates and replicates itself across the world in the nineteenth century. This was at a time when European imperialism, colonialism, and so-​called racial science were all in the ascendent, producing important political questions about who owns the idyll and to what ideological uses the idyllic is being put. As our own Midsummer’s Day Idyll showed, the idyll can be investigated in relation to painting, poetry, sculpture, photography, music, interior design, theatre, art writing, illustration, and the novel. In each case the emergence of a space of representation is identified, a space that stands somewhat aside from established high-​art formats. Commercial pressures play their part in this and, in one view, the idyll is tainted by market forces and incapable of elevated effects. What we have found is that this new space annexed to high culture is productive of extraordinary new formulations with respect to feeling and social being. The rules of interpersonal engagement that pertain in high culture are completely overthrown by the idyll. Under the cover of bountiful nature, the unthinkable reaches us through the sensorium, bypassing ethical debate in an unpoliced zone where rational stipulations can be temporarily set aside. Idleness, surrender, bigamy, same-​sex eroticism, blurring of species identity, asexual reproduction, personal dissolution: all become possible frameworks for idyllic pleasure. The anodyne in the idyll is not the refusal of pain. The anodyne is the blotting out of the feelings of unease that might occur in the wake of pleasure. Individual potted snapdragons were taken home by symposium participants in 2018, to be planted and to branch out and flourish in their summer window boxes. Ideas from the day were circulated among a wider community, leading to fresh debates about the chronology and the diverse historical forms of the idyll. In the hands of early-​career researchers Thomas Hughes and Emma Merkling, a challenging collection of essays took shape. The articulation of ecological issues is extremely important in a genre where definitions of nature are paramount. The recognition of the racial assumptions of the idyll allows for a reassessment of the political dimensions of the form. This book sets out the radical edge of the idyll in its play with sexual orientation and gender identity. It is a publication that is thought-​provoking as it makes the familiar strange, and challenges preconceptions about the idyll’s vapid sweetness. Note 1 Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt, ‘Signal Markings in Victorian Miscellanies: Noise and Signal from the Idyll to Aestheticism’, in Coding and Representation from the Nineteenth Century to the Present: Scrambled Messages, ed. by Anne Chapman and Natalie Hume (London: Routledge, 2021), pp. 137–​60.

Bibliography Arscott, Caroline, and Clare Pettitt, ‘Signal Markings in Victorian Miscellanies: Noise and Signal from the Idyll to Aestheticism’, in Coding and Representation from the Nineteenth Century to the Present: Scrambled Messages, ed. by Anne Chapman and Natalie Hume (London: Routledge, 2021), pp. 137–​60.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt; the authors of this volume; and participants in the Midsummer Idyll symposium held at The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2018. We are grateful also to David Gillott for his rigorous copy-​editing; Rachel Sloan for arranging a viewing of Frederick Walker’s mesmerizing watercolour for us at The Courtauld; and the editorial team at Routledge for their support. This publication was supported by generous funding from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Every possible effort has been made to trace the rights holders for all works, including Frederic Leighton’s An Idyll, c. 1880–​81, reproduced in Chapter 5, and the unattributed photograph from Eleanor Calhoun’s Pleasures and Palaces reproduced in Chapter 6.

Introduction Thomas Hughes and Emma Merkling

In Frederick Walker’s modest watercolour The Old Farm Garden (1871) (Figure 0.1), now in The Courtauld collection, a dun sky—​dusk?—​hangs heavy over a pretty, enclosed garden. Across the composition’s centre, along the garden’s edge, runs a mossy, somewhat indistinct brick wall; a row of tulips, sequenced beehives, and straight path slice diagonally across the foreground. Soft-​edged forms push in: a thriving lilac spills over the wall, and soft hedges and grasses texture the middle ground. We are put in mind of sweet floating evening scents, the rustling of creatures in busy hedges, the soft buzzing of bees. In the corner of the composition, a young woman in a black spotted dress stands with her back to us, head bent over her knitting. She has, we might imagine, brought this work out into the dwindling daylight to escape the premature twilight of the farmhouse or cottage interior. The blue wool has tumbled behind her, prey for a crouching tabby cat whose perked ears and swishing tail suggest this peaceful state of affairs is but temporary. So too the tension in the woman’s posture; we imagine the aching discomfort of her shoulders and neck as she cranes over this latest row. This little painting suspends the viewer at a moment before narrative occurs—​or perhaps before it is fully resolved. The cat, we imagine, will leap forward and pick up the ball of yarn, tug on the blue thread falling across the figure’s dress. The figure may, in turn, be yanked from her knitting, turn towards the viewer, chastise the cat, return indoors. Intimations of this little story reach the viewer only partially, displaced by the animacy felt to emanate from the picture’s speckled surface. Visual activity intrudes. Formal dispersal and the burgeoning of soft effects—​a visual buzzing—​crowd out the little story, further curtailing any sense of movement towards narrative progression or resolution. The tulips feather out and set up interludes of colour across the path’s oblique line. The viewer finds and loses patterns composed of clusters of yellow, pinks, purples, blues—​ sequences of balls and flecks of colour floating across the watercolour’s surface, held aloft the mesh of stems and leaves. There is a reproductive logic at work here, a spreading of form across multiple units; we are put in mind of the industrious bees, their hidden, implied honey. Delicate, unpretending, colourful spread; buzzing; suspended narrative; the finding and losing of pattern and form: we are in the world of the Victorian idyll. This idyllic world is the site, the formal basis, of profoundly modern instabilities. Just as the viewer’s attention to the little story in the foreground is disrupted and dispersed across the crowded, soft-​edged effects, subjects represented within Victorian idylls encounter disruption, dispersal, thwarted escape. The figure in The Old Farm Garden attends somewhat anxiously to her task. What is on her mind? What animates the anxious buzz we sense agitating the surface of this picture? The garden becomes charged with an affect that is evidently related to the figure’s subjectivity but that manifests palpably across the DOI: 10.4324/9781003327998-1

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2  Thomas Hughes and Emma Merkling Figure 0.1 Frederick Walker, The Old Farm Garden, 1871, watercolour on paper, 32.9 × 27.1 cm. The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust), Photo © The Courtauld.

Introduction  3 garden’s other-​than-​human subjects, hard to pin down. For whom does she knit? Wider parameters are suggested but also confounded; the farmhouse is, after all, hidden from view, probably ‘behind’ the figure, but ahead of her lie three other buildings, intimating that she faces some kind of choice. Narrative is suspended, then, but also looped, set up in spiralling convolutions, dissipating into the busy garden and amplified in the repetitious formal effects unfolding beneath the oddly suffocating sky. This little rural scene might seem to offer a respite from the ‘modern’ world but—​typically for a Victorian idyll, as this volume reveals—​instead engages realities that can only be characterized as modern. In 1876 John Ruskin singled out The Old Farm Garden, and many of these very effects, for particular, ambivalent attention.1 What Ruskin characterized as Walker’s failure as an artist—​his failure to disentangle himself from modernity and project a revitalized engagement with nature, a failure emblematized for Ruskin by, above all, Walker’s inexplicably ‘buff’ skies—​we contributors to this edited volume see as constituting the radical possibilities of the Victorian idyllic mode. This book establishes the nature, lineaments, and significance of the Victorian idyll as a formal mode widely practised in nineteenth-​century British art and literature. It is the first to delineate the shared characteristics of this mode across a range of media and genres, identifying its earliest emergence in the 1830s, its widespread flourishing across multiple realms of Victorian culture in the 1860s, and its evolution in the following decades as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Essays in this volume pioneer the theorization of the Victorian idyll, drawing attention to the radicalism of idyllic experiments with pictorial, photographic, dramatic, literary, and poetic form in the work of canonical and lesser-​known figures in the mid-​to-​late Victorian cultural milieu. Chapters in this book work across three intersecting categories in approaching the Victorian idyll: subject, ecology, and form. By ‘subject’ we mean both subject matter and agents possessing subjectivity within representations: partly for reasons of literary tradition, Victorian idylls were often annexed to subject matter deriving from the ‘natural world’; they were also peopled with human and other-​than-​human agents in various levels of interaction. These imaginary subjects encounter dispersals of self; modern forms of subjectivity are explored through such dispersals and paradoxes of object choice and desire. ‘Ecology’ as we use it functions in two senses: (1) Victorian idylls depict or formally generate ‘ecologies’ of co-​relations between (semi-​)active agents, human and other-​ than-​human; and (2) this idyllic mode enabled artists and writers to articulate ‘ecological’ relations between the human and the other-​than-​human, or ‘culture’ and ‘nature’, as these relations were being interrogated and redefined in the period (most famously, of course, by Charles Darwin). Ecocritically oriented work in the humanities has drawn fresh attention to the problematics of the term ‘nature’ defined in binary opposition to ‘culture’, complicit as this is in ‘naturalizing’ ideological and cultural norms; similar ideas informed the politically engaged and class-​sensitive pioneering studies The Country and the City (Raymond Williams, 1973) and The Dark Side of the Landscape (John Barrell, 1983).2 More recently, scholars have drawn attention to how nineteenth-​century conceptualizations of ‘nature’ were contingent not only on economic but also gendered relations, and on human fantasies relating to sexuality (notably Timothy Morton and Sam See).3 Ultimately, The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature takes its lead from the artists and writers it investigates, who, in all their diverse, disturbing, and compelling ways, intimated and represented the reality of changing human relations with the other-​than-​ human in the nineteenth century. Like many of these artists and writers, it problematizes the category ‘nature’ and reaffirms substantially the centrality of the other-​than-​human to

4  Thomas Hughes and Emma Merkling the Victorian idyll’s representations of human experiences of modernity. The importance to these essays of ecological questions and approaches means our re-​evaluation of the idyll can enliven debates pertaining to the environmental in other periods as well. Interlacings between idyllic subjectivity and ecology cluster within our third category, ‘form’. The idyll, we find, is generated through a shared set of formal properties across media. Our approach aligns with that proposed by Nathan Hensley and Philip Steer, whose Ecological Form (2018) shrewdly observes that, when engaging with the cultural products of the Victorian Empire and its disastrous planetary effects, the real ‘challenge is not about content but about form’—​not about attending to environmental thematics in isolation, but actually asking how new configurations of representation and imagination were formed in response to the ecological realities of the time, realities with which we still live.4 With respect to the ongoing planetary legacy of empire, one of our findings is that the idyll enables a productive recasting of the scalar problems thrown up by formulations of the ‘global’ and its notional antithesis, the ‘local’. If the legacies of Western imperialism are so vast as to threaten to escape analytic containment, the idyll insists on a ‘littleness’ of approach.5 The idyll is all about ‘littleness’—​the garden, the little story, the bower—​but this littleness contains planetary profundity, encompassing issues such as deforestation, industrialization, emigration, and racialization. In Walker’s ‘buff’ skies, in the representations by a host of Victorian artists and writers engaging with other-​than-​ human forms, in the natures of the subjectivities animated by these encounters, we find contestations that can be characterized as versions of Victorian ecology, and that provide provocative imaginative material for ecocritics, scholars, writers, and artists today. The essays in this volume reveal the idyll to have been a mode operating across paradoxical imaginative scales and temporalities and defying fixed location. In approaching objects as diverse as painting, poetry, photography, theatre, art writing, printmaking, and the novel, we centre close visual and textual analysis of works by key canonical and non-​canonical Victorians—​from Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, Frederic Leighton, and Julia Margaret Cameron, to the Dalziel Brothers, A. Mary F. Robinson, Robert Buchanan, Vernon Lee, and more. The diversity of positionalities and home disciplines from which we write—​occasionally working in collaborative pairs—​is necessary to our theorization of the idyll, which has both pairings and interdisciplinarity at its heart. Though the idyll is historically a literary form, its name (as the Victorians knew) derives from the Greek eidyllion for ‘little picture’; and indeed the Victorian idyll, we find, frequently worked across the poetic and the pictorial.6 Fittingly, then, almost every chapter of this volume analyses both visual and textual forms. Victorians traced the idyll back to the third century B CE and Theocritus, whose idylls they understood to foreground ‘ordinary’ people, often within a rural or otherwise ‘natural’ milieu. These idylls had a littleness about them: smaller-​scale stories, not grand sweeping narratives. These associations persisted into Victorian idylls, the most famous literary versions of which were probably Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, published sporadically and seemingly in a random sequence from 1859. At first brush there is nothing ‘little’ about the Arthurian epic, but Tennyson hived off the saga into smaller, interchangeable units centred on specific characters.7 Engagement with Tennyson—​much like engagement with the classical idyll—​emerges occasionally into a point of direct investigation only to disperse back again beneath this book’s surface. Despite the idyll’s prominence in Victorian culture, it remains an unfashionable object of study, even where it is identified as a viable one. The Victorian idyll tends to be regarded narrowly, as a genre, frequently dismissed as escapist and tied—​often

Introduction  5 exclusively—​to a certain school of English artists and poets in the 1860s and 1870s to which Walker belonged. It is frequently elided with pastorals and their idealizing, blissful, saccharine, and stable depictions of rural, country life. By the same token, it is aligned with such pastorals’ obfuscation of the realities of class, labour, gender, and racialization, modelling them as unchanging, eternal—​and natural. In these ways the idyll is all too often collapsed onto the associations conjured up by the term itself: the excessively and falsely sweet, something incapable of giving a trenchant account of modern experience. G. E. Mingay’s introduction to The Rural Idyll of 1989 is typical, conflating landscape painting, ‘picturesque romanticism’, ‘Gothic country houses’, and ‘rustic scenes of cottage life’, only to characterize these as ‘unreal […] fantasies’, apolitical products of ‘nostalgic escapism’ which would only be challenged by later ‘social realists’.8 What is meant by the term ‘idyll’ in the title of Mingay’s edited volume is not addressed; throughout, the word is used variously as an extension of ‘countryside’ or as an adjective adhered to unreality (‘the idyllic fantasy of rural existence’).9 Painting is set against literature, romanticization against true observation. For Mingay, Victorian literature ‘offered a real, rather than ideal, picture of the contemporary life on the land’, whereas in painting ‘England failed to produce a Millet or a Courbet’, and—​in the words of Rosemary Treble, a Rural Idyll contributor—​the ‘prettily sentimental’ productions of its landscape painters served only to cater ‘for the profound nostalgia of the urban middle classes for their rural past’.10 Some recent scholarship has taken up the genre of the idyll more directly. In A Sweet View: The Making of an English Idyll (2021), Malcolm Andrews moves nimbly between writing and pictures in his exploration of an early nineteenth-​century English idyll in southern England and the aesthetics of the picturesque.11 Building on Donato Esposito’s recovery and survey of overlooked works, Frederick Walker and the Idyllists (2017), the slim exhibition brochure Victorian Idyll (Yale Center for British Art, 2019) outlines some dominant themes in the works of the group of British painters known as ‘the idyllic school’.12 The catalogue is particularly notable for raising issues of social politics addressed by idyllist painters, particularly labour and class. However, the brief analysis in the catalogue is not devoted to interrogating the relationship between this elaborate social content and the idyllic form in which it is presented, leaving open the most compelling paradoxes of the Victorian idyll our edited volume pursues. Our focus on form as well as the varied contents of the idyll—​and our expansion of focus to include a broader set of media, practitioners, and social contents (including race)—​enables a broader vista on mid-​ to-​late Victorian artistic subjectivities and attitudes to the other-​than-​human and human cultural production. This book’s primary intervention lies in redefining the idyll not as a genre but as a widely practised mode. By ‘genre’ we mean a category of art and literature which is understood primarily in terms of a repertoire of motifs or scenarios; by ‘mode’, one which offers a form of representation associated with certain subject types, but which can function regardless of scenario. The artists and writers we study experimented with form and explored modernity’s implications for conceptualizations of nature and human experience within it. They filled the visual field with proliferating, soft-​edged motifs, relied on the finding and losing of visual and auditory patterns, introduced temporal loops, and set up paradoxes concerning personal and sexual identity, and object choice. They arrived at new formulations of nature, emphasizing experience of the other-​than-​human through a shared set of characteristic features, frequently subverted or treated ironically—​notably, imagery of the human subject amidst nature, plant and animal life, rusticity, sentimentality, and moral lessons. Though typically accompanied, on the surface, by experiences of calm and pleasure, the idyllic (these essays reveal) was characterized by ambivalent and

6  Thomas Hughes and Emma Merkling frequently unresolved undercurrents relating to contestations over gender and sexuality, temporality, the urban, and the colonial; these took increasingly explicit form as the idyll developed over the decades. Without denying the idyll’s escapist impulses, this book’s shift in analytic focus generates an entirely different set of understandings of its politics and temporalities, as well as its relation to class, labour, gender, and racialization. Far from evading the modern world (we discover), this artistic mode enabled engagement with issues and experiences of modern reality. The extent to which this modern reality was determined by changing conceptualizations of nature in the period cannot be overstated. The ‘nature’ about which we are talking is, in an important sense, specific to nineteenth-​century Britain (including its colonial exploits), as is the idyll at issue in these chapters. More specifically, it is a vision of nature profoundly influenced by the evolutionary thought that emerged through Tennyson, Darwin, and others in Britain at mid-​century. T. J. Clark has offered a summation of this vision in which the very forms we identify as characterizing the idyllic mode come to the fore. Setting the British vision of beauty in nature against the French, he writes: If for some reason the eternal untouchable middle distance of landscape-​in-​the-​eye is foreign to us on our island, or unattainable, then let there be horrible, stifling closeness in its stead […]. Nature as overgrownness: a vision of things, with Darwin in the background, in which the forked human animal […] is overtaken […] by the sheer dry power of biological replication, convolution, horror vacui. […] Beauty exists in this world, but oxygen for it is always in short supply. The forest is enchanted, but the magic is black.13 Clark is talking about aestheticism, but one finding of this book is that the idyll is not (as it is often assumed) the conservative opposite of the Aesthetic Movement. Rather, we find, the Victorian idyll develops approaches subsequently taken up by aestheticism: its thwarting of narrative, its foregrounding of prettiness, its surface effects, its exploration of multimedia analogies, its investigation of queer experience and of subject relations.14 This intervention is one way in which the arguments of this book remap prior understandings of Victorian culture, reshaping thinking about artistic form in the nineteenth century, and recalibrating the accepted chronology of the period. The Victorian idyll, as uncovered by essays in this volume, blurs nature–​human ontologies; enacts ‘queering’ processes; troubles boundaries yet places emphasis on indistinct edges; generates shifting, unfixed, and unsettling qualities; positions itself askance industrialization and conservative reactions based on ‘countryside’—​but retains, nevertheless, a profound ambivalence. This is undeniable: the Victorian idyll contains the seeds of the radical, yet its politics are ambiguous. Essays in this volume remain clear-​eyed about the idyll’s troubling edge: the way it seeks to efface racial difference and colonial violence, for instance, or the troubling real-​world environmental effects of its production. Thinking back to Walker’s Old Farm Garden: for all its animations of pictorial surface with dynamics of ambiguous desire, the watercolour cannot be said to pursue the radical possibilities it itself opens up. Another way of characterizing this effect is in terms of ‘failure’: the failure, in some sense, of the idyll to achieve something, to conclude anything. Many of these chapters engage with ‘failure’ in one way or another, and—​as we saw with Ruskin—​failure has also been a commonplace charge in dismissals of the Victorian idyll, past and present. We close our introductory analysis, on this point about the idyll’s politics, by pointing towards its

Introduction  7 troubling, darker qualities. Inherent to the idyll’s operation is a consciousness that it is never a perfect escape from a social reality. This volume reveals not so much a dark side to the Victorian idyll as a darkness pervading the idyllic mode itself. Chapter overview One of the peculiarities of the idyllic mode is its resistance to sequencing and a tendency towards shuffling. Appropriately, then, the chapters of this volume can be read in any order. The book is organized as an ebb and flow. The first five chapters trace the Victorian idyll’s development from an early proto-​form in the 1820s, through its flowering in the 1860s, and to its development well into the 1890s. They tackle the idyll in its most recognizable forms: the classical, the Tennysonian, the ‘idyllist’; poetry, woodblock printing, illustration. Working chronologically backwards from the pivot of Chapter 5, the final three contributions find the idyllic mode further afield in the later nineteenth century than might have been expected. In Chapter 1, Charlotte Cary-​ Beckett and Josephine McDonagh identify, in the 1820s and 1830s, an early version of the idyll explored in this volume. They locate the Victorian idyll’s emergence in a diverse print culture shaped by the mobilization of global populations under colonialism. Focusing on literature concerning British emigration to settler colonies, they identify in these nostalgic texts and their illustrations an ‘idyllic’ view of ‘home’ projected onto the new landscapes and driven by the fantasy of harmonious relationships with abundant ‘natural’ environments. In the process the violence of possession involved in colonialism is disavowed. As Cary-​Beckett and McDonagh reveal, in the 1830s the idyll takes on a ‘bounded’ and ‘exclusionary’ form, ‘its borders enacting the very violence it appears to conceal’. Their chapter identifies aspects of the idyllic mode that would persist into the Victorian idyll’s heyday: ‘soft focus’, ‘hybridity’, ‘assemblage’ of different genres, combination of image and text. The authors highlight ‘the ubiquity as well as the sheer conventionality’ of the writing and images, qualities which cause them to ‘bypass a reader’s attention’; this question of the forms of attention invited by the idyll slips in and out of the chapters which follow, taking on important ecocritical resonance. Chapter 2 brings us into the 1860s and the orbit of the ‘idyllist school’, focusing on gift books produced by the Dalziel Brothers and others. Centring on the wood engravings designed by John William North, Bethan Stevens reveals the environmental contradictions in the idylls she discusses, hinging on the paradoxical relationship between idyllic artistic production and resource extraction. Stevens sees these engravings and texts as ‘on the face of things reassuring cultural objects, bringing together an escapist vision of landscape with a market-​driven approach to culture’. These idyllists’ close and reverent attention to landscape, however, occurred in a context in which increasing demand for boxwood, the material used to make them, was depleting world forests in real time. Stevens does not dismiss the charges of escapism and nostalgia levelled against the idyllists, observing that escapism has always enabled artists to gain purchase on difficult social realities; for the idyllists, it enabled an ambivalent form of environmental engagement. On the one hand, their dreamy, crepuscular engravings can be considered ‘memorials’ to a natural world already disappearing; on the other, these engravings’ very production was exacerbating this environmental exhaustion. Stevens adopts a reflective approach, thinking and feeling through these idyllists’ ambivalent and even ‘beguiling’ vision. Her chapter stands as a demonstration that today, in an era of widespread solastalgia—​acute environmental

8  Thomas Hughes and Emma Merkling anxiety—​artistic forms of escapism deserve reinterpretation with a new seriousness and even compassion. Chapter 3, likewise beginning in the 1860s, looks at a range of visual and textual idylls. Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt ask: ‘what are the ideological stakes of the idyllic in terms of the politics of race and the registration of difference?’ Taking as its chief example Tennyson’s ‘Enoch Arden’ (1864) and works by Arthur Hughes, Thomas Morten, the idyllist George Pinwell, and Robert Buchanan, Arscott and Pettitt probe the formal logic of the idyll and demonstrate how it breaks up subjects and thwarts narrative. With these formal procedures, the Victorian idyll actively produced a disavowal of racial difference. Across a selection of book illustrations and paintings, they identify in the 1860s idyll a marked move away from clear polarities so visible in earlier cultural forms (self, other; white, Black). In their stead the idyllic mode generates ‘a fractured, multicolour zone’, making possible the elision—​and disavowal—​of difference, an ‘idyllic white-​out’. Arscott and Pettitt conclude with a discussion of racial themes in Tennyson’s play Becket (1884), in which racial coding becomes more visible ‘as a stain, a mark, and a threat’; this, they allege, is typical of the aestheticist idyll of the 1880s which reveals more directly ‘the violence that was always churning under the soft and speckled surface of the idyll’. In Chapter 4, Daniel Orrells turns to writer John Addington Symonds and the Victorian reception of the ancient, Theocritean idyll; specifically, its role in writing and photography dealing with same-​sex desire in the 1870s and 1880s. Orrells examines the place of Theocritus’ idylls in Symonds’s writings right across his career, from scholarly lectures and art histories to memoirs, poetic scholarship, and travel writing. Specifically, Orrells argues, Theocritus was important to Symonds’s explorations of the ‘possibilities and impossibilities of revivifying in the nineteenth century ancient Greek sexual ethics which accepted and celebrated sexual desire and love between males’. The relationship between real and ideal is at issue here; Orrells argues that the ‘(un)reality of the idyllic world’ offered Symonds a ‘vocabulary for thinking about the (im)possibilities of realizing “Greek love” in the nineteenth century’. The bucolic voices of Theocritus’ nostalgic idylls are characterized by a multiplicity and polyphony, and a sort of call and response between past and present is indeed generated as Symonds looks back to the ancient idyll to see how an idealized ‘Greek love’ might have been possible—​or not—​in the Victorian present. Such oscillation between desire and loss is also characteristic of the idyll as it is traced across prior and subsequent chapters. Picking up where Orrells leaves off, Kate Flint’s chapter moves from a consideration of the classical idyll in Victorian painting to idylls engaging with contemporary social realities and settings. Following on from the idyll’s development and flowering in the 1860s and 1870s as traced by previous chapters, Flint turns to works created in a period which witnessed a proliferation of paintings explicitly titled ‘Idylls’. Taking in Frederic Leighton, John Everett Millais, and a number of non-​canonical Victorian painters, Flint’s chapter focuses on the temporality of these works and the forms of attention—​the states of mind and ranges of affect—​they engender. Staying with the idyllic mode’s tendency to stall narrative, Flint investigates ‘the possibilities inherent in this pause’, reflecting on its invitation to the viewer to practise ‘reflective attentiveness’, focusing anew on aspects of the work we might otherwise overlook. Flint finds the Victorian idyll conducive to what she refers to as an ‘ecological gaze’—​inviting us to attend to the other-​than-​human temporalities of lichen and the ‘future vulnerability of pine trees’, as much as to the activities of the human. Working against the charge that it offers no more than ‘a passive space of

Introduction  9 tranquil reverie’, Flint thinks through how the Victorian idyll enables a profound ‘provocation to active ecological thought’ in the face of a precarious future. Chapters 6 through 8 flow backwards in time towards a range of visual and textual forms not always explicitly titled idylls. These chapters explore how significant Victorian idylls emerged from writers’ and artists’ investments in queerness, subjectivity, and ecology, and related temporalities and affects generated through desire. Chapter 6 listens out for the sounds of the idyll. Taking as his central objects poems, plays, performances, and essays from the 1880s by A. Mary F. Robinson, Lady Archibald Campbell, and Vernon Lee, Fraser Riddell explores the queer soundscapes of the Victorian idyllic imagination alongside questions of embodiment. His chapter thinks through how the idealized idyllic spaces generated by these authors, including in interpretations of William Shakespeare, were used to mould queer subjectivities through voice and sound. Set in ‘natural’ milieux—​from the English countryside to Tuscan hills—​these texts locate same-​ sex desire in the finding and losing of human and other-​than-​human sounds and voices in what Riddell identifies as an ‘atmosphere of idealized sexual innocence, anachronistic temporal displacement, and spatial dislocation’. Riddell engages productively with contemporary queer theory to identify a specifically lesbian idyllic tradition at the heart of these texts. This tradition is constituted especially by ‘queer dynamics of disappearance’, both playful and painful, which Riddell hears in these works’ soundscapes: their investment in noises that echo and fade away, their ‘encoding of language in natural sounds’, and their fascination with androgynous voices. Riddell identifies qualities of delight, fancy, and charm as comprising the aesthetic categories proper to this mode; these effects point to the ‘tonal complexity’ of the idyll as it engages with a ‘spectacle of erotic innocence’ at once fetishized and disavowed. The final two chapters take on the aestheticist idyll proper, returning to the 1870s to offer new interpretations of the visual productions of two of aestheticism’s most important progenitors: Julia Margaret Cameron and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In Chapter 7, Emma Merkling looks closely at Cameron’s photograph Maud (c. 1874) from her photobook illustrating Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and other poems. Through close reading of its source text (Tennyson’s 1855 poem Maud), sustained analysis of Cameron’s aestheticist photograph, and careful attention to the contemporaneous botanical writings of Darwin, Merkling’s chapter draws out the idyllism of Cameron’s Maud. The chapter’s central focus is the ambiguities at the heart of Cameron’s photographic idyll, in which human and plant are entangled in an eroticized embrace. Clingy tendrils bind unstable subjects together, enabling potentially pleasurable yet certainly unsettling loopings and reversals of desire, agency, and will. Subjectivity is dispersed across the vegetal agents of the garden, ‘nature’ speaking multiply in feminine voices (lily, rose) to express queer desire for Maud. Moving between analyses of photographic process, poetic voice, and scientific findings, Merkling hones in on the dispersals and substitutions of the idyllic mode. Temporality is a key issue, returned to in light of Cameron’s techniques and the findings of her friends Tennyson and Darwin. In identifying how Cameron’s photographic idyll enables the interpenetration and even confusion of categories such as pain and pleasure, death and life, real and ideal, Merkling’s chapter recovers the horror at the heart of the aestheticist idyll. Centring on the years just prior to Cameron’s Maud, and in conversation with some of the same key figures, Thomas Hughes reveals the idyllic structures underpinning Rossetti’s aestheticist oil painting La Ghirlandata (1873). Setting aside the issue of the musical and attending closely to Rossetti’s pictorial effects, Hughes realizes that Rossetti presents the

10  Thomas Hughes and Emma Merkling figure, bower, and musical instrument—​and even attendant angels and exotic bird—​as a single entity, an idyllic assemblage of human and other-​than-​human agents. Situating his reinterpretation of the painting in relation to queer ecology, Hughes argues that Rossetti takes up a view of life in his painting drawn from Darwin’s presentation of natural matter’s tendency towards metamorphosis, driven by a strikingly non-​heteronormative aesthetic and erotic animacy. This opens the door to seeing the figure in La Ghirlandata as evading fixed categories of gender and sexuality, and as characterized, on the contrary, by transformation of all kinds. Taking in contemporary criticism of Rossetti by Walter Pater and others, and deploying queer and trans* theory, Hughes revisits enduring art historical interpretations of the gender politics of late Rossetti to interpret Rossetti’s strange picture as envisioning the possibility that the aesthetic, and art itself, might have a ‘natural’ basis. In this way Hughes proposes that aestheticism should be understood to have emerged from a post-​Darwin entanglement of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, on ground made fertile by the Victorian idyll. These essays interpenetrate, productively contradict, and complement one another. Moving always across pictorial and verbal forms and ways of thinking, the multidisciplinary nature of the Victorian idyll necessitates an analytical procedure that is essentially collaborative, as the form of this co-​edited volume with its co-​authored chapters attests. We hope The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature: Subject, Ecology, Form will serve as a companion for scholars working across nineteenth-​century art, writing, and aesthetics from various disciplinary perspectives, underscoring the relevance of the idyll to the mapping of Victorian culture and to interpretations of the Victorian imagination and its ecopolitics broadly. Notes 1 Ruskin’s analysis comes from an 1876 review of an exhibition of Walker’s works after the painter’s death. See ‘The Frederick Walker Exhibition’, in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, Library Edition, 39 vols (London: Allen; New York: Longmans, Green, 1903–​12), X I V : Academy Notes, Notes on Prout and Hunt, and Other Art Criticisms 1855–​1888 (1904), pp. 339–​45 (p. 340). 2 See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973); John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–​1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). These issues are condensed and put in a much longer history in Raymond Williams’s perspicacious entry for ‘nature’, ‘perhaps the most complex word in the language’, in his 1976 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fourth Estate, 2013), pp. 215–​31 (p. 215). 3 Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Sam See, Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020). 4 Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, ed. by Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), p. 4. Our interests dovetail with those of recent parallel investigations into British cultural forms dealing with similar themes and objects from ecocritical perspectives; most recently, EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Phantoms, Fantasy, and Uncanny Flowers, ed. by Sue Edney (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020). In characterizing the ‘ecogothic’ in Victorian writing about gardens, the book sets the threads of darkness running through such natural-​cultural forms against the ‘picturesque’; our book reveals that in fact the Victorian idyll, which extends beyond literature, encapsulates both modalities.

Introduction  11 5 The Anthropocene is a related, unwieldy, and possibly dubious concept. For an important critique of the Western-​centric problems of the notional period in which humans are judged the determining geological force on Earth, see Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). 6 See essays in this volume by Kate Flint and Daniel Orrells. 7 For an informative overview of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, see Christopher Ricks’s chapter in his classic Tennyson (New York: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 264–​76. Matthew J. Margini’s more recent posthumanist reading in ‘Incoherent Beasts: Victorian Literature and the Problem of Species’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 2018), pp. 248–​83, provides a fresh take foregrounding some similar themes to our own. 8 G. E. Mingay, ‘Introduction’, in The Rural Idyll, ed. by G. E. Mingay (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 1–​6. 9 Rosemary Treble, ‘The Victorian Picture of the Country’, in The Rural Idyll, ed. by Mingay, pp. 50–​60 (p. 54). 10 Mingay, pp. 3, 4; Treble, pp. 53, 59. 11 Malcolm Andrews, A Sweet View: The Making of an English Idyll (London: Reaktion, 2021). 12 Donato Esposito, Frederick Walker and the Idyllists (London: Lund Humphries, 2017); Victorian Idyll, Yale Center for British Art, 2019 https://​bri​tish​art.yale.edu/​sites/​defa​ult/​files/​inl​ ine/​Victor​ian_​Idyl​l_​Bo​okle​t_​FI​NAL.pdf [accessed 8 June 2023]. 13 T. J. Clark, ‘At the V&A’, London Review of Books, 19 May 2011, pp. 30–​31. 14 On these aspects of aestheticism see, for instance, Dustin Friedman, Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019); Caroline Arscott, William Morris and Edward Burne-​Jones: Interlacings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Emma Merkling, ‘The Sensate Body: Consciousness in Albert Moore’s Art’, immediations, 4.3 (2018), 50–​70; Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Benjamin Morgan, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Tim Barringer, ‘Art, Music, and the Emotions in the Aesthetic Movement’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 23 (2016) https://​ doi.org/​10.16995/​ntn.784; and Marion Thain, The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

Bibliography Andrews, Malcolm, A Sweet View: The Making of an English Idyll (London: Reaktion, 2021). Arscott, Caroline, William Morris and Edward Burne-​ Jones: Interlacings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Barrell, John, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–​1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Barringer, Tim, ‘Art, Music, and the Emotions in the Aesthetic Movement’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 23 (2016) https://​doi.org/​10.16995/​ntn.784 Clark, T. J., ‘At the V&A’, London Review of Books, 19 May 2011, pp. 30–​31. Edney, Sue, ed., EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Phantoms, Fantasy, and Uncanny Flowers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020). Esposito, Donato, Frederick Walker and the Idyllists (London: Lund Humphries, 2017). Friedman, Dustin, Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). Hensley, Nathan K., and Philip Steer, eds, Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). Margini, Matthew J., ‘Incoherent Beasts: Victorian Literature and the Problem of Species’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 2018).

12  Thomas Hughes and Emma Merkling Merkling, Emma, ‘The Sensate Body: Consciousness in Albert Moore’s Art’, immediations, 4.3 (2018), 50–​70. Mingay, G. E., ‘Introduction’, in The Rural Idyll, ed. by G. E. Mingay (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 1–​6. Morgan, Benjamin, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Morton, Timothy, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Prettejohn, Elizabeth, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Ricks, Christopher, Tennyson (New York: Macmillan, 1972). Ruskin, John, ‘The Frederick Walker Exhibition’, in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, Library Edition, 39 vols (London: Allen; New York: Longmans, Green, 1903–​12), xiv: Academy Notes, Notes on Prout and Hunt, and Other Art Criticisms 1855–​1888 (1904), pp. 339–​45. See, Sam, Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020). Thain, Marion, The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). Treble, Rosemary, ‘The Victorian Picture of the Country’, in The Rural Idyll, ed. by G. E. Mingay (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 50–​60. Victorian Idyll, Yale Center for British Art, 2019 https://​bri​tish​art.yale.edu/​sites/​defa​ult/​files/​inl​ine/​ Victor​ian_​Idyl​l_​Bo​okle​t_​FI​NAL.pdf [accessed 8 June 2023]. Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973). —​—​—​Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fourth Estate, 2013). Yusoff, Kathryn, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

1 Idyll as Refuge The Settler’s Dream Charlotte Cary-​Beckett and Josephine McDonagh

Abolition’s idyll: The History of Mary Prince We begin our chapter in 1828 in the offices of the Anti-​Slavery Society, in Aldermanbury by London Wall, the remains of the medieval city. Mary Prince, a Black woman born into slavery who had recently arrived in England, reports to the officers of the Anti-​Slavery Society her ill treatment at the hands of her ‘owners’. Later, in 1831, she dictates her life story to a white woman, Susanna Strickland (later Moodie). Tracking events from her early childhood in Bermuda, through an ever-​darkening series of scenarios in which she is both witness and victim, her story is shaped by an itinerary that brings her from Bermuda to Turk’s Island, Antigua, and eventually across the Atlantic to London, where her exploitation continues. Including degradations, physical hardships, rape, and murder, her story that will be published as The History of Mary Prince presents a scandalous narrative of racialized violence against the backdrop of long-​distance, transcontinental travel. Heavily edited by Thomas Pringle, the former South African colonist who at the time was secretary to the Anti-​Slavery Society, and published at a moment of increasing urgency within the campaign for the abolition of slavery, Prince’s History seems as far from an idyll as it is possible to imagine.1 Nonetheless, there are at least traces of an idyll within this narrative.2 Prince’s History is drenched in a desire for a better life than the one in which she is imprisoned. Most pointedly at its beginning and its end, the History holds out hope for a lost idyll that may still be achieved. Her time in Bermuda as a child, recounted on the first page, was the ‘happiest’ she experienced: she recalls playing with her mistress’s daughter ‘with as much freedom almost as if she had been our sister’ (p. 1). And at the end of her narrative, the possibilities of an idyllic life tentatively return, flickering in and out of sight: ‘To be free is very sweet’, she concludes (p. 23). However muffled in its articulation, the idea of the idyll haunts this narrative: a site of pastoral bliss, transformed over its course from a place on a West Indian island to an abstract idea of an existential state of freedom that might be realized anywhere in the world, and available to anyone. The history of the life of an enslaved woman is very different from the matter that fills the idylls of the late nineteenth century that are the principal subject of this volume. The spectacular violence that is such a prominent element of Prince’s History makes the point of departure for this chapter seem oblique. Yet we identify the moment of Prince’s History as one in which the idyll, as both a motif and a genre, comes into prominence in a print culture shaped by the mobilization of global populations. The early decades of the nineteenth century in Britain saw the emergence of new types of writing about place that were closely associated with the demographic changes that characterize this period, DOI: 10.4324/9781003327998-2

14  Charlotte Cary-Beckett and Josephine McDonagh when people in all parts of the world moved in greater numbers and longer distances than ever before.3 At the same time as the abolition movement brought to public notice the experiences of enslaved people like Prince, the print sphere in Britain also witnessed an outpouring of literature concerning the emigration of Britons to settler colonies in South Africa, the Americas, and later, Australasia. Indeed, Pringle’s own accounts of his experience as part of an early government-​backed scheme of emigration to South Africa, just a few years before his encounter with Mary Prince, trailed his anti-​slavery writings. In general enthusiasts for settler colonization were eager to differentiate British emigration from African slavery, and therefore emphasized both the white migrant’s independence in choosing to move and the material benefits that moving offered to families in doing so. Contra slavery, settler emigration was to be undertaken freely by individual migrants and their families, and the life that would be achieved subsequently would be enhanced by, on the one hand, their ownership and accumulation of property and, on the other, their harmonious relationship with environments fecund with natural resources. In their conception, if not in their realization, colonial settlements were meant to be idyllic.4 Depictions of colonial settlements in British print drew conspicuously on the ancient genre of the idyll. In a range of print forms extending from informational literature designed to stimulate emigration, sometimes referred to as ‘booster literature’, to poems, memoirs, and the printed letters of migrants, as well as travel narratives and topographical surveys, the ambient print culture was suffused with images of idealized pastoral environments.5 Frequently hybrid in composition, the texts in which these images existed were assemblages of different types of writing, often accompanied by visual illustrations. Paradoxically, however—​and herein lies a twist—​these soft-​focused, rural scenes which served to represent new colonies also doubled as nostalgic scenes of homelands left behind. The ubiquity as well as the sheer conventionality of these images meant that they tended to bypass a reader’s attention. Yet they presented an adaptable format in which people might express feelings about place and habitation during a time of widespread deracination. Idyllic narratives were thus prominent within the print context in which Mary Prince’s History was first launched in 1831. Moreover, the social milieu which Prince inhabited during her time spent in London was one in which settler migration was a topical concern. Juliet Shields has shown the remarkable extent to which the figures that surrounded Prince and the production of her History were involved in writing about migration: Pringle, who was also a poet, and his wife, had not long returned from a period spent in South Africa as colonists, and Susanna Strickland, to whom Prince dictated her biography, was soon to move to Canada with her new husband, J. W. Dunbar Moodie, recently returned from South Africa himself.6 Later, as Susanna Moodie, she would become a well-​known writer about Canadian settler life through writings published both in Britain and North America.7 Although the three figures of Prince, Pringle, and Strickland-​Moodie had very different experiences of transcontinental migration, nonetheless their convergence in London—​in the offices of the Anti-​Slavery Society and in Pringle’s private home in Islington, where he employed Prince as a domestic servant, and where Strickland was a frequent visitor—​highlights within their works a shared idiom of place, displacement, belonging and unbelonging that draws substantially on the idea of an idyll. It suggests ways in which this typically flat-​surfaced genre retained within it traces of the racialized violence that was part and parcel of the culture of early nineteenth-​century global movement.

Idyll as Refuge  15 In this chapter, therefore, we track the incorporation and adaptation of the idyll—​ whether as a genre, a mode of writing, or a scene—​in the very different works of Prince, Pringle, and Strickland. The idyll, of course, has a long history stretching back to classical times. From the Greek eidyllion for ‘small picture’ or ‘little scene’, the idyll as modelled by Theocritus and Virgil centres tranquil, charmed scenes of everyday life, typically (but not always) in the countryside. Acts of framing and of assemblage and selection are key to the idyll. The titles of Theocritus’ and Virgil’s works capture the relationship between frame or border and the enclosed, irradiated scene: ‘small picture’ (eidyllion) and ‘selections’ (eclogues) conjure the curatorial nature of idyllic representation.8 It is also worth emphasizing that before Romanticism insists on the definitive phenomenon of landscape, the longer history of idyllic writing decentres the sentiment for country living and instead underlines the desire for refuge as the genre’s constituent characteristic. Writing about Theocritus’ Idylls (third century B CE ), Mark Payne argues that the idyll’s significant innovation lay not in the invocation of a bucolic world; rather, he claims, the Theocritean idyll, with its largely plotless narratives populated by labourers without masters and herds without need, invented a kind of fictionality.9 It presented a way of encoding an imagined world whose difference from that of the narrator was its distinguishing feature. This capacity to summon an imaginary and unshored reality invariably leads to an uncritical dismissal of the genre for its naive escapist tendencies. Yet within this context, the idyll nonetheless offered writers the means through which to grapple with the complexities of encounter and exclusion, of disaffection and displacement, that in the early decades of the nineteenth century were the consequences of transcontinental migration. With its emphasis on curation, containment, and a kind of miniaturization, invariably operating between visual and verbal modes, the idyll makes significant formal, thematic, and ontological points of contact with the long nineteenth century’s popular forms and aesthetic categories, including the various types of printed literature associated with emigration, travel writing, and the picturesque. In many ways the picturesque interconnects with our sense of the idyll as an eminently adaptable template for transcribing colonized landscapes. In this respect postcolonial critic Sara Suleri’s concept of ‘the [white] feminine picturesque’, whereby ‘all subcontinental threats could be temporarily converted into watercolours’ and thereby ‘domesticated into a less disturbing system of belonging’ resonates with, shapes, and complicates our reading of the migrant’s idyll.10 Like the picturesque, the migrant’s idyll also presents as a cover-​up technique, obscuring the violence that is structural to all processes of colonial migration. For white settlers like Pringle and Moodie, the idyll provided a representational mode through which to look back to a lost past and forward to a state of organic unity still to be achieved. Meanwhile, the curatorial work inherent in setting enclosed, idyllic scenes in colonized landscapes, where the frame illuminates certain figures and excludes others, inflicts the very violence it attempts to conceal. Ultimately, the severances enacted and upheld by the migrant’s idyll demonstrate the incompatibility of the idyll’s world view of spatialized wholeness and organic kinship with the environment with settler colonialism’s material demands.11 Printed idylls: Friendship’s Offering When Thomas Pringle published Mary Prince’s History as part of his endeavours on behalf of the anti-​slavery cause, he was also employed as the editor of one of the fashionable annuals of the day, Friendship’s Offering. Annuals had been a popular publishing format since the émigré German publisher Rudolph Ackermann introduced

16  Charlotte Cary-Beckett and Josephine McDonagh the successful Forget-​Me-​Not to the British reading public in 1822.12 Handsomely produced literary anthologies of poems and short fiction, some accompanied by engravings and many by elaborate bindings, they were published—​ as their name indicates—​once a year at Christmas time, specifically for a market of gift giving which targeted a largely female readership. This was a lucrative sector of the book trade and a mainstay for authors and publishers alike, especially through the financial crash of 1826 which had impacted publishers heavily.13 With its first issue prepared for the 1822–​23 Christmas season, Friendship’s Offering was one of the first annuals on the market, and when Pringle took over as editor in 1828 it had already been in existence for five years.14 It may seem surprising to see Pringle active in two such different sectors of the book trade, yet the coincidence tells us something about the dominant literary modes of the time. Matthew Shum and others have noticed that, curiously, the two sectors would have drawn overlapping audiences, as both targeted middle-​class women readers.15 Yet similarities also lie at the level of form, especially in their shared idiom and style of representation, derived in part from the print technologies of the time. Although annuals have been dismissed as a lightweight and overly sentimental publishing format, notoriously beloved by frivolous women like Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch, we nonetheless see them as influential drivers of early nineteenth-​century print culture.16 A fashionable illustrated print medium made possible by innovations in steel plate printing, it drew its dynamism from the strata of leisure culture and popular polite entertainment to which it belonged. Moreover, the annual format shared a striking affinity with the idyll. Poised between the public world of print and a private domain of affectionate relations, gift giving, and domestic sentiments, annuals frequently included happy, pastoral scenes within a context that emphasized, like earlier idylls, containment, miniaturization, and curation. Their ekphrastic style and abundant sentimentality presaged the idylls of the later century. It is significant that practices that Ackermann developed in Forget-​Me-​Not of commissioning literary works to ‘illustrate’ engraved images—​a hallmark of the annual format—​were continued in the books of idylls of the 1860s–​80s.17 Friendship’s Offering followed this model too. From its beginning it contained an assemblage of poetry and pieces of short fiction, many commissioned specifically for the annual. The ‘List[s]‌of Embellishments’ also reveal that many images were ‘drawn’ or ‘painted’ and then ‘engraved’ ‘expressly for [the] work’, either to accompany commissioned texts or to make a popular painting available in print form. Readers of early annuals were captivated by the high quality and relative affordability of the engravings. It is, in fact, the ‘good engravings’ that motivated a young John Ruskin’s interest in literary annuals. In his unfinished autobiography Ruskin documented how his cousin—​a ‘shopman’ with Smith, Elder—​would drop recent publications ‘in his pocket’, ‘any which chanced to contain good engravings’.18 The engravings—​there were usually around twelve in an issue—​were small in size. Sometimes they compressed large-​scale paintings to fit Friendship’s Offering’s compact page: at just 14.5 × 8.6 cm, this was a small and intimate format.19 The clean layout of its pages exuded balance and order, and enhanced the sense of privacy it evoked, the feeling readers experienced on opening its pages that they were entering a secluded, miniature world shared between friends and relatives. This was made all the more apparent by the decorative presentation page, printed in gold, which left space for inscribing the owner’s name or a dedication from the person from whom it was gifted.

Idyll as Refuge  17 The idea of an idyll thus infused Friendship’s Offering and presented its principal idiom of expression. Within this, Pringle, as editor, used the annual as a vehicle through which to publicize the political causes to which he was committed. He exercised considerable control over the selection and commission of both literary works and engravings, leveraging his own networks of friends and associates, some of whom he knew from his time in South Africa and his work in the Anti-​Slavery Society. Thus we find poems by the abolitionist poet James Montgomery alongside short stories by naturalist and travel writer Sarah Bowditch Lee, writings by Pringle’s friend Leitch Ritchie, as well as by Susanna Strickland, and he often included his own poems (Shum, Improvisations, pp. 141–​43). As a consequence, during the five years of his editorship, Friendship’s Offering comprised a very high proportion of works and engravings dealing with colonial themes, placing accounts of settler emigration to South Africa and North America adjacent to discussions of African slavery and the corruption of European colonial governments. They often presented enslaved and colonized people as objects of sympathy, yet always within the context of highly stylized and fashionable representational forms. To be sure, these trends were already evident in Friendship’s Offering, but Pringle intensified what became one of its characteristic features. The combination of high feeling and pleasurable entertainment gave a distinctive tone to Friendship’s Offering’s representation of colonial issues, invariably diluting and deflecting their political message, bringing everything in the end into the comfortable arena of the annual’s affective domain. The keynote running throughout Friendship’s Offering was the idea of home as a haven, a place of safety and comfort, and of familial sociability. It was often scaled up to encompass Britain as a nation; but equally it was an ideal that could exist on a small scale anywhere in the globe, so that in many of the stories and poems making a new home, or returning to one’s native home, was the ultimate aim. This theme of ‘coming home’, so present in the 1829 and 1830 editions of the annual, very much aligns with the ‘re-​energized debates over Black freedom’ in the late 1820s and early 1830s which specifically imagined (or foreclosed) possibilities of homecoming for Black subjects (Wong, p. 20). Edlie Wong has shown how the ambiguous legal status of enslaved people in Britain, particularly after the ruling in the 1827 case of Slave Grace (King v. Allan), restricted the rights to ‘freedom’ of formerly enslaved people to within Britain. It either kept ‘informally free’ subjects forever ‘exile[d]‌’ from their homes and communities (she calls this a ‘punitive’ freedom) or left them very much vulnerable to re-​ enslavement upon return to a slave jurisdiction (p. 50). Within the context of the annual, the politics of homecoming were often sublated, submerged in affective outpourings. But for formerly enslaved people, burdened by a contentious legal status, ‘home’ and ‘return’ were freighted with political consequence and personal risk. The interplay of visual and verbal forms in Friendship’s Offering created a distinctive representational language. Many of the engravings were portraits of individual subjects, often celebrities, such as famous beauties, aristocrats, musical performers, or actors. Paired with poems or short stories, the portrait invariably became the stimulus for a narrative or plot, and the subject of the portrait became a character within what had become a narrative or history painting. In the 1828 issue, for instance—​the first published by Smith, Elder—​then-​editor Charles Knight included Edward Finden’s engraving of ‘The Captive Slave’ (after a painting by John Philip Simpson exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1827) as an explicit contribution to the abolition campaigns.20 The near life-​size painting—​reduced in the engraving to the annual’s small dimensions—​is of an enslaved man of African descent in the clothing of a prisoner, his tearful eyes uplifted imploringly

18  Charlotte Cary-Beckett and Josephine McDonagh towards a beam of light in the top right corner of the image, his hands manacled.21 At the time this was both a fashionable image and a powerful expression of abolitionist sentiment, repeating in outline the familiar constituents of abolitionist iconography.22 The sitter for the portrait was most likely the celebrated Black Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge, a free-​born American, highlighting the element of performance in the image. Beside the engraving, Knight placed an unattributed poem entitled ‘The Captive’, a poem of seventeen six-​line stanzas in ballad metre, which tells the story of a Spanish slave ship stranded in the Atlantic Ocean, and in which all but one of six hundred ‘captive slave[s]‌’, their enslavers, and the crew die of disease.23 The single survivor, ‘the Captive’ of the title, stands triumphant in his freedom, even as the ship itself sinks: His joy no fear of death could drown,—​ He was a slave no more. The helmless ship that night went down On Senegambia’s Shore.24 Here, death, freedom, and homecoming converge in the single image of the solitary man on the sinking ship. In ‘The Captive’ the singularity of the African man is emphasized by the detail that he (like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner) is the sole survivor of so many passengers. Pringle calls upon the popular literary trope of the ‘dying Indian’, wherein the indigenous people of North America were collapsed into a single, timeless figure, existing as a mere object of pathos on the point of ‘inevitable’ extinction.25 In the 1830 edition of Friendship’s Offering, the same motif is repeated in another poem on a similar theme, this time entitled ‘The African’, also unattributed. Now in eight-​line stanzas but with the same metre, the poem tells of the journey of an African man who has been freed from slavery in Britain, and now struggles to return to his homeland, ‘My own, my native home!’. The final scene of the poem repeats that in ‘The Captive’: an image of a man, standing alone on the ship’s deck in a storm. Here the crew have gone below deck to pray: All but the gallant African, Who stood undaunted there—​ And gloomily his white eyes shone Amid the lightning’s glare.26 In contrast to the radical actions of Black rebels depicted in contemporary reports of anti-​colonial uprisings in the West Indies, these ‘captives’ are single figures, heroic in their isolation, but rendered completely powerless and vulnerable through this intentional aestheticization.27 As in the engraving, the lines highlight the man’s upturned eyes and their shining whiteness, drawing the figure into the well-​known emblem of a supplicating Black man. True to the sentiments of the annual, the poems celebrate the values of ‘home’, even in the distant, and over-​generalized, context of ‘Africa’. Yet in both cases, the man is about to die before arriving home, so that the framed figure of a solitary Black man merges ‘home’ and ‘death’ as a placeholder for the limited ‘freedom’ that is achievable through abolition. The images flicker between generalized scenes of suffering, often presented in the allegorical form of ‘Africa’, localized images of alleviation associated with the interventions of British agents, and a vision of freedom that is invariably realized as a kind of heroic

Idyll as Refuge  19 or beautiful death. The assemblage of images on different scales, and the constant shifts in attention that they entail, is a recurrent element in Friendship’s Offering and becomes a second notable technique within its formal repertoire. In the 1830 issue, for instance, a poem by Montgomery, ‘A Cry from South Africa’, presents a similar passage between abstracted scenes of suffering (‘Afric, from her remotest strand, | Lifts to high heaven one fettered hand’) and scenes of local activism. In this case the poem is accompanied by a note by Montgomery situating it precisely in the context of his anti-​slavery campaign in Cape Town: These lines were written for the Rev. Barnabas Shaw, of Cape Town, in aid of his appeal to British benevolence to enable him to build a place of worship there for the Slaves, of whom there are about forty thousand in the Colony. Sheffield, Nov. 28 1828. J.M.28 The poem and the note balance a retelling of slavery’s horrors in abstract form with detailed proofs of ‘British benevolence’, a structure of movement between abstraction and localization that recurs throughout the annual. Stories and poems set in colonial contexts frequently present the strife and suffering of colonized people alleviated by the kindness of Britons, enabling the signature sentiment of the title, the value of friendship and home, and the virtues of gift giving on which the annual as a print commodity is founded, to be replicated on a national and international scale. The oscillation of attention between localized scenes and national or abstract ideals, between small-​scale events of suffering or the alleviation of suffering, and large-​scale concepts of, for instance, ‘freedom’, ‘benevolence’, or ‘slavery’, in the manner of a montage, serves as a means of meaning-​making, and part of the annual’s characteristic style. This kind of oscillation, or flickering, between images is a dominant technique within Friendship’s Offering for combining the diverse constituents of the anthology. Itself a fashionable and innovative new print medium, part of the expanding sector of urban popular entertainment that characterizes this period, the annual also referenced other new technologies of spectatorship and consumption within this milieu, foregrounding these as a source of pleasure in themselves.29 The frequent allusions to what we might now anachronistically call ‘new media’ are the third gesture that we identify as constitutive of the annual’s modus operandi. It has the effect of reversing the spotlight from the content of the annual to the spectator or reader and the world of commodified leisure that they inhabit. A good example from the 1828 issue is in Pringle’s own poem, ‘A Noon-​Day Dream’. Notes at the beginning and again at the end inform us that Pringle composed the poem while in South Africa, and the poem appears to tell a familiar story of an emigrant’s longing for home. As the poet drifts asleep, scenes of the South African desert ‘melt’ into ones of his remembered home in Scotland, idealized as a ‘sweet glen, where the young lambs were racing | And yellow-​hair’d children the butterflies chasing’.30 Significant here is the word ‘melt’, repeated twice in the poem, to describe the fading of one scene into the next. It recalls popular optical technology, particularly the dissolve effect achieved by the diorama, which delighted urban audiences in these decades.31 Contemporary accounts of these ‘dissolving views’ described how subjects would ‘melt into another’—​‘there are but half indications of forms.’32 As the poem proceeds, this idyllic Scottish scene ‘melts’ again, revealing, first, an ‘urban pageant’, a scene of metropolitan corruption, which dissolves to reveal a new scene on a ‘wild shore’, where rises the spectre of colonial ‘TYRANNY’, and the prostrate bodies of races oppressed by

20  Charlotte Cary-Beckett and Josephine McDonagh slavery and colonial corruption. Finally, the entire scene crumbles and he awakes. Highly formulaic, yet nonetheless engaging, these sequential displays of idyll and anti-​idyll provide Pringle with a structure in which to encase a vague critique of slavery and colonial government, typically focusing on ‘Belgian’ rather than British colonists, while at the same time, and for the lighter purposes of the annual, highlighting the generic ‘sweet’ pleasures of the Scottish natural environment.33 But it is the allusion to the dissolving image in the ‘melting’ of the scenes from one to another that reassures the reader that the sentiments expressed in the poem exist within a zone of fashionable entertainments, distant from any real situations of colonial exploitation. These techniques are evident in Pringle’s ‘The Bechuana Boy’, a poem first published in the 1830 issue of Friendship’s Offering and reprinted multiple times in other books by Pringle. Framed by a first-​person narrative in the voice of the poet himself, ‘The Bechuana Boy’ tells of his encounter with a young South African boy who has endured the violence of slavery and colonization.34 Here Pringle adapts the form of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) to present the boy’s suffering at the hands of African and European enslavers alike. Speaking ‘in the language of his race’, albeit ventriloquized by Pringle in standard English, he tells his ‘strange sad history’ (p. 31): rebel forces attacked his village, murdered the men, captured the women and children, and sent them on an arduous journey eventually to be sold to ‘white men’; separated from his mother and siblings, he became the solitary slave of a Boer farmer on an isolated farm; he escaped, wandered in the desert, and, finding the camp of British settlers, asked for refuge. On hearing the boy’s ‘touching tale’, the narrator and his wife take the boy, named Marossi, ‘as their own’. ‘Love gushed forth, till he became | Her child—​in everything but name’ (p. 36). Thus rescued from this treacherous colonial scene, Marossi is implanted in the bosom of a British family. The poem reverses a common trope in colonial fiction, the nursing idyll, in which a young white child is nursed by a ‘native’ woman, who is ‘civilized’ in the process, and drawn into a happy extended family and a projected utopian community.35 Here the native child is nursed by a white mother, so that the white family and, by extension, Britain, is the ultimate sanctuary for ‘The Bechuana Boy’. Positioned near the front of Friendship’s Offering, the raw violence recounted in ‘The Bechuana Boy’ is mediated by the familiar literary and visual techniques of the annual: the Wordsworthian ballad form that highlights the child’s native innocence, marked on his first appearance by his relationship with a pet springbok (‘Caressing with a kindly hand | That fawn of gentle brood’ (p. 31)); a paratactic frame that provides information about the ethnography and natural history of the region; a note that explains the circumstances of the initial meeting, as though it were lived experience (‘The chief incidents of this little Tale were related to the Author by an African boy, whom he first met with near the borders of the Great Karroo or Arid Desert’ (p. 30)); the fixation on the solitariness of the Black child, whose opening statement, `I’m in the world alone’, prefigures a series of experiences which, although involving many other agents, as in ‘The Captive’, always emphasize his isolation; and the tale’s resolution, in which the innocent child kindles the love of the British couple, turning the Pringles’ new family into a representative national ideal and rescaling the Pringles’ home as the nation. Moreover, through its variations in scale between local events and abstract ideals, and the flickering of attention that this provokes, Pringle effectively harnesses the techniques of the annual into his sentimental abolitionist narrative. The framing of the poem through the eyes of the narrator foregrounds the elements of spectacle and popular entertainment in the poem: the boy’s fast-​moving journey across

Idyll as Refuge  21 the ‘exotic’ South African landscape turns the poem into a mechanized, moving panorama of sorts; the interjection of menacing and disturbing sounds—​‘the gorged wolf to his comrade calling’, the ‘Huge sea-​cows […] snorting’, the ‘laughter loud’ of ‘white men’ at the vendue, the ‘mother’s scream, so long and shrill’, ‘[his] little sister’s wailing cry’—​ makes for an all-​the-​more graphic, theatrical spectacle (pp. 32, 33). As countless violent encounters puncture the ‘dreary wild’ ‘[he] track[s]‌’ (p. 32), an unsettling spectatorial dynamic emerges; all we can do is watch and listen. For all of the poet’s seeming effort to emphasize the humanity of this romantic solitary figure and to highlight the ultimate intimacy of the encounter and resulting kinship (‘love gushed forth’), the representation and spectacularization of colonial displacement and mass death necessitate a readerly withdrawal and detachment.36 In her account of how destruction becomes at once an ‘illusion’ and ‘expectation’ for nineteenth-​century viewing publics, Mary Favret details how ‘events of the Napoleonic Wars account for half of all panoramas shown up until the 1820s’.37 In the decades following the Napoleonic Wars, views of colonized territories and depictions of imperial violence, especially the wars and mutinies in India and Afghanistan, become prime content for the panorama and other metropolitan optical shows.38 Pringle shares with other Romantic poets both a suspicion of optical entertainments and, at the same time, a panoramic vision or mode of viewing. Despite operating within an early Wordsworthian lyric modality, where ‘touching tale[s]’ are embedded within tales and aetiological oral stories unwind from encounters with ‘rustic’ or ‘romantic’ figures, the visual cues and optical tropes of early nineteenth-​century entertainment formats, and the sonic interjections designed to shock, combine to remediate a local tragedy and Hinza Marossi’s personal experience into a panoramic spectacle of historical and national significance. Drawing instances of racialized violence and suffering into the pleasurable and profitable formats of public spectacle, in the end ‘The Bechuana Boy’ presents an early example of imperialist entertainment. Pringle reprinted ‘The Bechuana Boy’ in a number of other anthologies, notably as the lead poem in his African Sketches published by Edward Moxon in 1834. In this volume he also included two illustrative engravings, one of which was designed by Charles Landseer on the theme of the poem (Figure 1.1). The scene captures the initial encounter between Pringle (pictured here holding a rifle) and the boy, but strikingly also includes Pringle’s wife and three unnamed South African figures arranged in front of a tent and a caravan. The landscape—​described in the poem as ‘Desert dun’ and ‘waste’ (p. 30)—​ is represented visually as a distinctive mountainous terrain, populated with birds and plants. The image thus transforms the one-​to-​one encounter in the poem into a harmonious, racially integrated ensemble, located in an idyllic and fecund pastoral scene. In this edition too, Pringle adds a long note which reveals that Marossi, who when in Britain underwent a Christian conversion, died shortly afterwards of ‘a pulmonary complaint under which he had for many months suffered with exemplary meekness’.39 His death is presented with full pathos as the culmination of an innocent and virtuous life, as though his dying were in some way redemptive, like the deaths by drowning in ‘The Captive’ and ‘The African’. In this case the engraving and the note underscore and enhance the idyll-​like elements of the poem, making yet more emphatic the sentimental message present in Friendship’s Offering. Yet they also, despite this, allow us to catch a glimpse of the reality of colonial violence and the consequences of displacement, continued rather than alleviated by the boy’s migration to London: the boy’s death was likely hastened by the change in climate that his migration had entailed. Moreover, recent research by Matthew Shum

22  Charlotte Cary-Beckett and Josephine McDonagh

Figure 1.1 C. Landseer and J. Stewart, ‘The Bechuana Boy’, illustrative engraving, African Sketches (London: Bentley, 1834). This particular engraving is taken from The Poetical Works of Thomas Pringle (London: Moxon, 1839). Image courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago.

has revealed the extent of Pringle’s complicity in the boy’s history: rather than a chance encounter, the Pringles met Hinza Marossi through a transaction initiated by Pringle and organized by a British missionary society placing refugees into domestic service with settler families.40 Pringle went to some lengths to conceal the contractual basis of their relationship, drawing on all the framing devices that the annual and the illustrated book offered. In the end, however, the brute fact of Hinza Marossi’s death could not help but disclose the catastrophic failure of the idyll that these publishing forms imagined. Through examining the techniques of the annual, patterns emerge that shed light on the History of Mary Prince and its relationship to the idyll. ‘The Bechuana Boy’ was an attempt to present Hinza Marossi as a suitable character for abolition’s cause, in the same way as the engraving of ‘The Captive Slave’ and the poems discussed above sought to forge versions of the heroic victim. We might see Pringle’s framing of Mary Prince in a similar light. Many commentators have observed the extent to which Prince’s story was censored by both Strickland and Pringle, so as to make her a respectable cause.41 Placing the History alongside Friendship’s Offering makes legible the various conventions at work that contribute to this process, in particular in its mobilization of notions of home and home-​going. As noted above, in this phase of the campaign against slavery, the principal

Idyll as Refuge  23 object was to outlaw slavery in the colonies, so that eyes focused on a number of prominent cases, including Prince’s, in which a formerly enslaved person who had achieved freedom in Britain was unable to return to their families and friends because their legal status as the property of their ‘owner’ reverted when in the colonies (Wong, pp. 19–​76). Friendship’s Offering thus draws this highly charged narrative of home-​going into the affective terms of the annual, as part of the sentimental narrative of home-​going that runs throughout.42 There are also formal similarities between the annual and the History. With its complicated array of prefaces, footnotes, and supplements, and its presentation of different voices and authors, the History, like the annual, is a curated collection, closer to a miscellany than a single-​voiced autobiography. Pringle’s footnotes, which are dotted throughout, display an impulse to contain and sometimes miniaturize elements of Prince’s narrative and, as in the annual, we see a frequent oscillation between the local contexts of Prince’s biography and larger, abstract principles of freedom sought. As in the annual, the various constituents of the History repeat themes, so that the work of reading is one of extracting common threads, comparing, and endorsing. The inclusion of a second autobiographical narrative in the same pamphlet, ‘Narrative of Louis Asa-​Asa, a Captured African’, is a case in point. This very short account—​the length of a typical short story in Friendship’s Offering—​tells of an African boy, displaced (like Marossi) from his native home by a marauding gang who sell him into slavery, and who arrives in Britain, where he enjoys freedom; but his wish to ‘see my friends again’ is thwarted by the persistence of slavery abroad (Prince, pp. 43–​44). It reinforces, by repetition, Prince’s motivating desire to go home and the obstructions she faces and turns an individual experience into a generalizable principle: slavery is wrong because it keeps people from home. Although there are no illustrations in the History, in common with Friendship’s Offering it sometimes adopts an ekphrastic mode. For instance, midway through Prince’s narrative, Pringle inserts an elaborate footnote commenting on Prince’s disturbing account of the slave vendue at which she, her mother, and her sisters were sold to different slaveholders. In the note Pringle explains: Let the reader compare the above affecting account, taken down from the mouth of this negro woman, with the following description of a vendue of slaves at the Cape of Good Hope, published by me in 1825, from a letter of a friend. (Prince, p. 4) The move from Prince’s first-​person, quasi-​autobiographical account to the footnoted third-​person account of another sale of a comparable family group, both doubles the impact of the description (cruelty twice, in two locations) and at the same time controls and contains its effect. At this point, the note shifts into picturesque mode: There could not have been a finer subject for an able painter than this unhappy group. The tears, the anxiety, the anguish of the mother, while she met the gaze of the multitude, eyed the different countenances of the bidders, or cast a heart-​rending look upon the children. (p. 5) Presented as though on the pages of an annual, the sideways glance from text to image removes emphasis from the subject of suffering to the viewer of that suffering subject: now it is us, the spectators, who are affected by the heart-​rending look, not the

24  Charlotte Cary-Beckett and Josephine McDonagh children. Ultimately, it makes evident the scene’s universal applicability: the scene is ‘a striking commentary on the miseries of slavery and its debasing effects’ (p. 5), which flickers between the local scene of abuse, the general miseries of slavery, and the promise of freedom embedded in the form of an idyll. The migrant’s idyll: making still When Pringle refigures Mary Prince’s highly wrought personal account of family rupture and trauma as a ‘fine group’ for a beautiful painting, all in the space of one footnote, he freezes the scene in medias res and enacts the kind of perennial violence that is seen across all colonizing literatures. The paratext of The History of Mary Prince is presented by Pringle as its own body of evidence, supporting documents that seek to verify and authenticate Prince’s account. But this same paratextual practice, also evident in Friendship’s Offering, occurs across his entire oeuvre. While one might think that all this appending and distending and pointing outwards might amount to a dynamic kind of world-​making and sense-​making, the impression remains that Pringle’s strong preference is for stillness over moving images. The desire to make still is evident throughout the contents of Friendship’s Offering, as well as in Pringle’s poems written earlier during his South African ‘residence’ (although often published much later, once he had relocated to England). These provide strong examples of how unfamiliar landscapes can become both pretty and familiar in the space of a few short stanzas. We argue that this desire or even pressure to make still—​and by extension, to sublate—​is very much the impulse of idyll-​writing, and that the desire to compress and contain the features of ‘new’ landscapes takes on fresh urgency in these imperial contexts. It may seem paradoxical that a genre of writing fundamentally connected to geographical movement should be transfixed by the desire to make still, yet this is what we find. The emigrants’ idylls of this period, especially those in verse, recurrently demonstrate a tendency to arrest all motion, to preserve a scene in stillness. Once again Friendship’s Offering provides a good example. In Pringle’s second-​to-​last volume (1834) we find together on the page Mary Prince’s editor and amanuensis reunited, but now as authors of emigration poetry: Pringle-​the-​migrant and Moodie-​the-​migrant. Arranged side by side, Moodie’s ‘A Canadian Song’ and Pringle’s ‘An Emigrant’s Song’ strike the same chord.43 With Pringle, the prelusive strangeness of new climes is swiftly followed by the cheering scene of a ‘beehive’ cabin, bathed in light at the edge of the woods. With Moodie, the warmth of the ‘blazing hearth’ and the prospect of visitors, as promised by the ‘sleigh-​bell’s chime’, makes the ‘howl’ of nearby wolves and the ‘crash’ of falling trees less terrifying. And yet, despite the Canadian migrant’s insistence that ‘these sounds bring terror no more’, the poem ends by rhyming ‘fear’ with ‘hear’ (the reader might also hear a deictic ‘here’). Pringle’s emigrant, although ‘content with the Present’, ends his song by summoning the courage of his ‘brave Scottish sires in the blithe Olden Day’. Framed by ‘huge forests’ or ‘dark-​pine woods’, both accounts of migrant life are framed by fear, denied or resisted but seemingly ever-​present. These pictures of home appear less as aesthetic pictures of hardship and more as richly hued reminders of the refuge still desired. Pringle’s song, after all, is mostly written in the future tense: ‘our home, like a bee-​hive, shall stand by the wood’ (‘An Emigrant’s Song’, emphasis added). Pringle’s and Moodie’s mobilization of a conventional visual–​ verbal vocabulary evokes that same ‘ideological urgency’ Sara Suleri points to in her reading of the picturesque as a British imperial project. For Suleri the picturesque becomes ‘synonymous

Idyll as Refuge  25 with a desire to transfix a dynamic cultural confrontation into a still life’ (pp. 198–​99). The verses’ subtle tension between iterated peace and latent terror keeps these small, otherwise inert accounts of colonial life from truly sitting ‘still’. Printed side by side in a ‘richly embossed’, ‘handsome’ volume of Friendship’s Offering, these little verse snapshots of KwaZulu-​Natal, South Africa and Ontario, Canada nevertheless insist on a quiet kind of happiness.44 They are meaningful not because they are particular to a local context, but precisely because they are not. Quebec appears to Moodie as a ‘second Eden’ (Roughing It, I , 18), Pringle’s estate ‘the Promised Land’ (African Sketches, p. 153), and consumers, cast as reader–​spectator across countless similar scenes in verse, are offered a conventional point of entry to imagine themselves on the threshold of Eden, wherever it might be. In 1834 Pringle would publish his South African writings together in the anthological African Sketches, ‘an unusual combination’, as he describes it, ‘of Verse and Prose—​not blended, but bound together’ (p. iii).45 The collection includes a large number of poems previously published in annuals, including ‘The Bechuana Boy’ and his earlier collection of poems, Ephemerides (1826), with some notable additions. In one such addition, ‘The Emigrant’s Cabin’, the poem to which the collection’s engraved frontispiece refers, the first stanza stages a ‘steep mountain’ background, a ‘rustic cabin’ upon a mid-​ground ‘knoll’, with ‘fair acacias’ and ‘willows bending’ at the margins of the vignette.46 This is the poet’s ‘South African residence’, or ‘[their] summer-​seat’, framed and contained. This same secluded setting and its set pieces reappear across the anthology. Here and elsewhere, Pringle balances features of the European picturesque (the ‘summer-​seat’) with conventional loco-​descriptive priorities, the backdrops of Poussin and Lorrain and the decorative staffage ‘speckled o’er’ the canvas and ‘reclin[ing] on margins of green’.47 In the foreground of the illustration, a group of figures has been artfully arranged among the rocks along a riverbank, framed by a picturesque tree and local flora. Although the poet describes the setting of the vignette in the first stanza of ‘The Emigrant’s Cabin’, we do not learn about the foregrounded group until the poem’s final stanzas: ‘But who are these upon the river’s brink’, the speaker asks (p. 46, emphasis in original). Without the context of the poem, a viewer might imagine that the artists are simply drawing upon the well-​rehearsed picturesque tradition of arranging ‘banditti’ within the foreground of a rugged landscape, an impression reinforced by Pringle’s own obsession with describing his encounters with ‘native banditti’ in his ‘Narrative of a Residence in South Africa’ (Figure 1.2).48 The poem tells us, however, that the figures in the engraving are ‘Powána […] | The Amatémbu Chief’ and his men, who have come to ‘smoke the Pipe of Peace with Scottish men’, an idyllic image of rapprochement within the colonial landscape (pp. 46–​47). In the verse Pringle’s ‘Glen-​Lynden’ emerges as the reconstituted family estate, where ‘Lothian Friends’ and ‘these simple folk’ can dine together (pp. 42, 43, 47). As with Landseer’s engraving, ‘The Bechuana Boy’, this conclusive image of an idealized, unified community, of domestic bliss, is yet another example of a subtle but substantial negation or misrepresentation on Pringle’s part. In the notes to the poem, he writes: ‘With Powána, and his clan […] we had friendly intercourse on several occasions; but the scene in the text is a poetical fiction’ (p. 519). For a writer elsewhere so keen on testimony and the ‘truth of the facts’, this ‘poetical fiction’ proves somewhat surprising. But if we think of the constitutive work of idyllic writing as selective by nature, we can see how these accounts of colonial encounter are manipulated and reshaped to fit an ill-​suited form.

26  Charlotte Cary-Beckett and Josephine McDonagh

Figure 1.2 W. Purser and J. Stewart, ‘The Emigrant’s Cabin’, Frontispiece to African Sketches (London: Bentley, 1834). This particular engraving is taken from The Poetical Works of Thomas Pringle (London: Moxon, 1839). Image courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago.

In a private letter posthumously published in his Memoirs, Pringle describes his process in similar, albeit less critical terms. Accounting for his ‘aims’ when writing ‘The Bechuana Boy’, in particular, Pringle writes, ‘Condensation and simplicity are now my great aims in any poetical attempts.’49 With ‘simplicity’, Pringle certainly marshals the earlier language of Wordsworth, but this additional aspiration to ‘condense’ evokes a different kind of work, one that is very much editorial. As vignettes, Pringle’s South African idylls are framed and contained visually and verbally, our attention constantly drawn to the frame, and its acts of inclusion and exclusion. With the addition of scenes that are confessed ‘poetical fiction[s]‌’ and with the resignation of certain information to the footnotes, Pringle’s distribution of attention and soft-​focus aesthetic takes on more hesitative and anxious undertones. The latent desire to assimilate difference and collapse confrontation ‘into a still life’ fades in and out of focus across both Pringle’s and Moodie’s writings in verse. But while conventional imagery and a kind of default generality or vague idyllism obscure violent, imperial realities in poetry, the writers’ prose accounts of colonial life often turn to more ‘perilous’ experiences. In the work for which she is best known, Roughing It in the Bush, published two decades later, Moodie reflects on her arrival in Canada: she describes

Idyll as Refuge  27 lofty mountains ‘lost in the blue of the sky’ and a landscape ‘sprinkled over with neat cottages’, ‘the green slopes that spread around them covered with flocks and herds’ (I , 8). Approaching shore for the very first time, the new world ‘looks [like] a perfect paradise’ (I , 10). En route to Grosse Isle (the temporary holding place for new migrants), she remembers a hopefulness that the ‘new world’ will be ‘the land of all [their] hopes’: ‘so eager was I to go on shore—​to put my foot upon the soil of the new world for the first time’ (I , 10). And yet, the initial, formulaic idyllism transitions to horror and ‘disgust’. ‘Torment[ed]’ by mosquitoes, the ‘poor baby’ was ‘not at all pleased with her first visit to the new world’ (I , 14). The European migrants, quarantined on the island, form a ‘motley crew’, ‘a cargo of lively savages from the Emerald Isle’, ‘all talkers and no hearers—​each shouting and yelling in his or her uncouth dialect’. ‘We were literally stunned by the strife of tongues’ and ‘I shrank, with feelings almost akin to fear, from the hard-​featured, sun-​burnt harpies, as they elbowed rudely past me’, Moodie writes before ‘turn[ing] in disgust’ from the ‘revolting scene’ (I , 10, 11). Pringle had recounted a similar scene and critique, a moment of recoil, in the opening chapter of his earlier narrative account of colonial life. Typically included in the second half of his anthological African Sketches, Pringle’s ‘Narrative of a Residence in South Africa’ documents ‘animated and interesting scene[s]‌’ from the ‘bustle and confusion’ of the coast over ‘frightful and perilous’ roads into the interior of the Cape Colony (pp. 124, 127, 145). Like Moodie, Pringle adopts the narrative mode of the travel narrative. Yet disappointment registers even sooner than for Moodie, as Pringle documents the ‘grave faces’ of fellow passengers as they sight shore, exclaiming ‘this is an ill-​favoured and outlandish-​looking country’ (p. 118). Once ashore, Pringle ‘strolled along the beach to survey more closely the camp of the settlers, which had looked so picturesque from the sea’ (p. 129). Despite initially presenting the civility and neatness of the encampments of the ‘higher class of settlers’, the picture of the ‘middling and lower classes’ and their ‘regular rows’ descends into descriptions of slovenliness that cannot be contained or aestheticized (pp. 129, 130). In contrast to the solitary figures that he identifies elsewhere as poetic and picturesque subjects, now we see only a formidable reality of thousands of ‘motley and unprepossessing’ emigrants, ‘squalid in their aspect’ (p. 130): I should say that probably about a third part were persons of real respectability of character, […] but that the remaining two-​thirds were for the most part composed of individuals of a very unpromising description—​persons who had hung loose upon society—​low in morals or desperate in circumstances. […] Too many appeared to be idle, insolent, and drunken, and mutinously disposed towards their masters and superiors. (p. 131) In both Pringle’s and Moodie’s prose accounts, the characteristic language of the idyll (‘a second Eden just emerged from the waters’ (I , 17)) is here replaced by the horror of the irreducible many and, by extension, what Pringle implies and Moodie explicitly calls something ‘almost akin to fear’. The hesitation and indeterminacy of that syntactical equivocation, almost akin, captures the uncertainty of migrant experience and the representational anxiety around racial and class difference. The representation of the Irish peasantry as ‘drunken’ and ‘idle’ in both fiction and ethnographic writing is a well-​rehearsed example of British imperialist ideology, but within these new landscapes and contexts the

28  Charlotte Cary-Beckett and Josephine McDonagh additional warning that they are ‘mutinously disposed towards their masters’ highlights a pervasive fear that the colony is a brutalizing force (African Sketches, p. 131). Not only do both writers reinforce racist ideologies, literally upon arrival, they insert and insist on an English vocabulary of docility and civility versus mutiny and primitivism in ‘new’ landscapes. Moodie and Pringle might insist on the ‘natural courtesy’ and ‘decency’ of the indigenous peoples they encounter elsewhere, but these introductory moments of disorder and personal recoil mobilize a phobic, fearful language that hangs over the rest of their narratives.50 Ultimately, the juxtaposition of ‘lower class’ migrants who are granted a mutinous agency alongside denuded, neutralized, solitary Black ‘figures’ in Pringle’s writings and of ‘Nature’s gentlemen’ in Moodie’s, further emphasizes the degree to which Black and indigenous peoples do not register as political subjects in these landscapes. For all of Moodie’s warm-​toned portraits of meals shared with ‘Our Indian Friends’ or the expressed ‘grief’ over the ‘corruption’ of a ‘people with such generous impulses’, dispossession and mass death are presented as ‘mysterious forces’: ‘a mysterious destiny involves and hangs over them [the Mississauga], pressing them back into the wilderness, and slowly and surely sweeping them from the earth’ (Roughing It, II , 51). We see in these moments of disavowal and in these trivializing characterizations the traces of idyllic writing and abolitionist rhetoric, wherein all threat of action is excluded from the frame and figures emerge as compelling aesthetic—​and pathetic—​objects. Reading Moodie, Pringle, and Prince in the 1830s emphasizes both the politically forceful contours of idyll-​making and the very fictiveness of settling and making still. Mary Prince’s unambiguous, unembellished account of violence and highly personal trauma set physically alongside Pringle’s tableau of the ‘exhibited family’ ‘wiping their eyes’ as a ‘fine subject’ for ‘painter’ and ‘spectators’ most memorably dramatizes the colonialist impulse to occlude and naturalize violence and, in doing so, further to commodify human suffering (Prince, p. 5). Pringle’s footnotes to Prince and in his own writings reveal that the language and techniques of the idyll and the shape of the picture—​the bracketing off by margins and the miniaturization of font—​can exert a repressive power and control over the expressions of marginalized voices and experiences. In the illustrated texts of the nineteenth century, the idyll is not for everyone. In this chapter we have endeavoured to show how the inherited form of the idyll infuses a complex and contentious literature of settler migration during the 1820s and 1830s. The particular form that the idyll takes is shaped by new and emerging middle-​ class cultural forms: more cheaply available high-​quality book illustration, which enabled the production of the popular annuals; as well as forms of visual entertainment, in art galleries and optical displays—​panoramas, dioramas, and a host of novel technologies of spectatorship. In this context the idyll’s inherited techniques of curation, miniaturization, and framing start to assume new, modern forms: the compression of prints within the intimate pages of the annual; the dissolving images that transport readers across time and space; and the kinds of assemblage that print affords—​the mixing of image and text, of extraction, and collage. We began by thinking about the ways in which these techniques of the idyll enabled writers like Pringle to occlude the kinds of violence that colonial settlement entails—​especially the displacement necessary to render a space empty and uninhabited. The migrant’s idyll in this casting is an unconscious and magical technology for finding an inhabited landscape vacant. But we end by thinking about the more intentional uses of the idyll in framing—​and possessing—​a landscape. In the colonial context of 1830 the idyll is a bounded and exclusionary territory, its borders enacting the very violence it appears to conceal.

Idyll as Refuge  29 Notes 1 Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (London: Westley and Davis, 1831). Pringle’s Preface specifies that he published the narrative ‘in his private capacity’, and that ‘the Anti-​Slavery Society have no concern whatever with this publication’ (pp. iii–​ iv). Nonetheless, the History contributes to the increasing presence of anti-​slavery literature in the print sphere in the period directly preceding the abolition legislation enacted in 1833 and enforced in 1834. On the controversies around British anti-​slavery legislation, see Edlie L. Wong, Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (New York: New York University Press, 2009), pp. 19–​76. 2 Sven Halse suggests the adaptability of the idyll mode lies in its habit of simultaneously generating idyll and anti-​idyll. See ‘The Literary Idyll in Germany, England, and Scandinavia 1770–​ 1848’, in Romantic Prose Fiction, ed. by Gerald Gillespie, Manfred Engel, and Bernard Dieterle (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2008), pp. 383–​411. 3 On the new kinds of transnational mobility that shape the period, see Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. by Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 117–​67. 4 On the significance of slavery in liberal ideology, see Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); and Wong, Neither Fugitive nor Free. On slavery as a factor in the British ideology of settlerism, see Josephine McDonagh, Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815–​1876 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 18–​19. Reconsidering the relationship between slavery and ‘self-​ determined movement’, Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo shows how Prince defines self through her own relationships to ‘home, region, and world’: see Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-​Century Americas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), pp. 157–​86. 5 On ‘booster literature’, see James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-​World, 1783–​1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). On the ‘informational literature of migration’, see McDonagh, pp. 8–​22; and Fariha Shaikh, Nineteenth-​ Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). 6 Juliet Shields examines this particular network of writers in her recent work, Mary Prince, Slavery, and Print Culture in the Anglophone Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​978110​8866​392, unpaginated. 7 Married in the spring of 1831, J. W. Dunbar and Susanna Moodie emigrated to Upper Canada in 1832; from there, John would publish his two-​volume Ten Years in South Africa (1835) and Susanna would contribute countless poems and essays to literary magazines before compiling a selection of sketches documenting their experience in the Canadian backwoods: Roughing It in the Bush; or, Life in Canada, 2 vols (London: Bentley, 1852). In this chapter we refer to her by the name under which the work we cite is published: Strickland until marriage, thereafter Moodie. 8 Richard F. Jones points out that, unlike Virgil’s eclogues, idylls are formally heterogeneous. See ‘Eclogue Types in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 24 (1925), 33–​60. 9 Mark Payne, ‘Pastoral’, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, ed. by Richard Eldridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 117–​38; and Mark Payne, Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 10 Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 198–​ 99 (and also, pp. 75–​101). Ian Baucom takes up Suleri’s ‘idiom of the picturesque’, reading it as an ‘idiom of containment’ and ‘an idiom of comfort in refusal’. See Ian Baucom, ‘Mournful Histories: Narratives of Postimperial Melancholy’, Modern Fiction Studies, 42 (1996), 259–​88 (p. 286).

30  Charlotte Cary-Beckett and Josephine McDonagh 11 For M. M. Bakhtin, the idyll is a ‘concrete, spatial corner of the world’, ‘little’, and ‘spatially limited’, where ‘a sequence of generations is localised’, ‘potentially without limit’. See M. M. Bakhtin, ‘The Idyllic Chronotope in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 224–​36. 12 For the history of the literary annual, see Katherine D. Harris, Forget Me Not: The Rise of the British Literary Annual, 1823–​1835 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015). On Ackermann, see John Ford, Ackermann, 1783–​1983: The Business of Art (London: Ackermann, 1983). 13 John Sutherland, ‘The British Book Trade and the Crash of 1826’, Library, 9 (1987), 148–​61. 14 Established by Lupton Relfe, a bookseller at 13 Cornhill, London, it was taken over by Smith, Elder, a young publishing house also located in Cornhill (at no. 65), five years later in 1827. The 1828 edition was edited by Charles Knight; Pringle took over as editor the following year. See David C. Hanson, ‘Friendship’s Offering’, The Early Ruskin Manuscripts, 1826–​1842 https://​ erm.selu.edu/​notes/​annua​ls_​n​ote [accessed 7 June 2023]. 15 Matthew Shum notes how both literary annuals and abolitionist literature addressed similar readerships. See Matthew Shum, Improvisations of Empire: Thomas Pringle in Scotland, the Cape Colony and London, 1789–​1834 (London: Anthem, 2020), p. 156. See also, Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–​1870 (London: Routledge, 2016). Both Shum and Juliet Shields speculate that the readership of Friendship’s Offering would have been ‘evangelically minded’ (Shields), or ‘sympathetic to abolition’ (Shum, p. 156), but we think the readership of the annuals is wider than this implies. The copy of Friendship’s Offering for 1830 that we have consulted in University of Chicago Regenstein Library Special Collections is inscribed with the name of Lady Grant of Monymusk, the wife of Sir Archibald Grant of Monymusk, Baronet, a slave owner in Jamaica. By the late eighteenth century, the family in fact owned and operated Bance Island, one of the bloodiest and most grossly profitable transfer stations on the Middle Passage on the coast of West Africa. This legacy of slave ownership reveals that readers often had ambivalent, or superficial, relationships to the abolitionist sentiments they encountered in the annual. See ‘Sir Archibald Grant 3rd Bart. Of Monymusk’, in Legacies of British Slavery Database www.ucl.ac.uk/​lbs/​per​son/​view/​214​6652​ 037 [accessed 17 May 2023]; and Iain Whyte, Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery, 1756–​1838 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 41–​69. 16 She is gifted a copy of The Keepsake, ‘the gorgeous watered-​silk publication which marked modern progress at that time’. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. by David Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 253. 17 For examples of popular idyllic works, see the Dalziel brothers’ ‘fine art gift books’: A Round of Days (1866), Picture Posies (1874), and English Rustic Pictures (1882). 18 Ruskin’s cousin (Charles Richardson), an ‘apprentice’ or ‘shopman’ with Smith, Elder, gifted a young Ruskin (just ten years old) the 1829 volume of Friendship’s Offering. Appropriately then, Pringle’s final volume of Friendship’s Offering (1835) includes Ruskin’s very first poems in print: ‘Saltzburg’ and ‘Fragment’, both signed J.R. For more on the young Ruskin’s relationship with literary annuals, see Hanson. 19 These are the dimensions of the 1828 and 1829 issues published by Smith, Elder, slightly larger than Relfe’s. By 1830, Smith, Elder increased its size again to 15.4 × 9.5 cm. Although a marginal enlargement to what remains a small format, it indicates a sustained commitment to improving the production values of the publication. 20 Simpson’s entry for the exhibition catalogue included lines from William Cowper’s abolitionist ‘Charity’, a poem that highlights the (now, in 1827) well-​rehearsed claim that slavery brutalizes and corrupts enslavers: ‘But ah! What wish can prosper, or what prayer | For merchants rich in cargoes of despair’ (II, 138–​41). For an account of the recent (2009) rediscovery of the painting, see Martin Postle, ‘The Captive Slave by John Simpson (1782–​1847), a Rediscovered Masterpiece’, British Art Journal, 9.3 (2009), 18–​26.

Idyll as Refuge  31 21 John Philip Simpson, The Captive Slave, 1827, oil on canvas, 127 × 101 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago; Edward Francis Finden, The Captive Slave after John Philip Simpson, 1828, line engraving, 8.5 × 6.6 cm (image/​plate). 22 In the introduction to their work on slave portraiture, Agnes Lugo-​Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal read Simpson’s passive subject as waiting on the ‘goodwill of others for his liberation’. As with the iconic seal of the abolitionist society—​the ‘shackled black man appeals to the viewer for mercy: Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’—​they ask what it means to ‘capture’ the ‘likeness of a slave’. See Agnes Lugo-​Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal, ‘Introduction: Envisioning Slave Portraiture’, in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, ed. by Agnes Lugo-​Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 1–​40 (pp. 18, 19). 23 Reprinted as ‘The Slave-​Ship’ in the Penny Magazine, 24 November 1832, p. 336. 24 ‘The Captive’, in Friendship’s Offering: A Literary Album (London: Smith, Elder, 1828), pp. 378–​83 (p. 383). 25 James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans was published at this same moment in transatlantic print culture, 1826. It is no mere coincidence that this literary sentimentalization of ‘inevitable’ mass death shares its historical moment with Andrew Jackson’s legislated, legalized violent intervention in the form of the Indian Removal Act (1830). For more on nineteenth-​ century British encounters with and representations of indigenous peoples of North America, see Sadiah Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-​ Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); and Kate Flint, The Transatlantic Indian, 1776–​1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 26 ‘The African’, in Friendship’s Offering: A Literary Album (London: Smith, Elder, 1830), pp. 177–​80 (p. 180). 27 It is worth noting that our moment in print history (namely the early 1830s) succeeds decades of global political revolution and transformation, including the radical actions of Black rebels or maroons across the Caribbean and North America fighting the very system that enslaved them. See Claudius Fergus, ‘ “Dread of Insurrection”: Abolitionism, Security, and Labor in Britain’s West Indian Colonies, 1760–​1823’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 66 (2009), 757–​80; and Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020). 28 James Montgomery, ‘A Cry from South Africa’, in Friendship’s Offering (1830), pp. 37–​39 (p. 37). 29 On visual entertainments in London in this period, see London—​World City, 1800–​1840, ed. by Celina Fox (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 30 Thomas Pringle, ‘A Noon-​Day Dream’, in Friendship’s Offering (1828), pp. 24–​27 (p. 24). 31 In his third volume on optical devices, Stephen Herbert distinguishes between the ‘miniature model scene’, also termed diorama, and Daguerre’s dioramas in the 1820s and 1830s: ‘our use of the word is different; it was first used by Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre to describe his giant translucent painted canvas views’, the modulation of light which affected ‘changing pictures’. See A History of Pre-​Cinema, ed. by Stephen Herbert, 3 vols (London: Routledge, 2000), III , 18. See also, Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–​ 1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), the seminal account of Victorian lens-​culture, and especially of the ‘dissolving view’. 32 Cited in Armstrong, p. 258. 33 Before Belgium was established as an independent nation in 1830, ‘Belgian’ refers to inhabitants of the Low Countries. Pringle draws on a similar vocabulary of fashionable optical display in his poem ‘Glen Lynden: A Tale of Teviotdale’, in Friendship’s Offering (London: Smith, Elder, 1829), pp. 19–​35. The poem is accompanied by a specially commissioned engraving, ‘A Landscape and Ruin’, ‘designed and engraved for this work by John Martin’. 34 Thomas Pringle, ‘The Bechuana Boy’, in Friendship’s Offering (1830), pp. 30–​36.

32  Charlotte Cary-Beckett and Josephine McDonagh 35 Katie Trumpener considers ‘imperial nurse stories’ in her chapter ‘The Old Wives’ Tale: The Fostering System as National and Imperial Education’, in Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 193–​241. 36 W. J. T. Mitchell considers the ‘indeterminacy of affect’ brought about by what he terms ‘the landscape imperative’, a ‘mandate to withdraw, to draw out, by drawing back from a site’. Mary Favret builds on Mitchell’s ‘aestheticizing distance’ in her own account of how visual–​ verbal accounts of violence in the Napoleonic Wars period illicit ‘out of touch’, ‘cosmopolitan responses’, ‘a kind of resistance’, quoting Mitchell, ‘to whatever practical or moral claim the scene might make on us’. See Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 197–​98; and Landscape and Power: Space, Place, and Landscape, ed. by W. J. T. Mitchell, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. vii–​viii. 37 Favret, pp. 217–​18. Jan Mieszkowski’s work on the spectacularization of modern warfare also accounts for the violent subject matter of the early nineteenth-​century moving panorama. See Jan Mieszkowski, Watching War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), pp. 88–​91. 38 For example, The Battle of Kabul in the Afghan War (1842), The Afghanistan War; or, The Revolt at Kabul and British Triumphs in India (1843), and The Storming and Capture of Delhi (1857). For more examples and an account of the role of panorama in imperial relations, see Tanya Agathocleous, ‘Wordsworth at the Panoramas: The Sublime Spectacle of the World’, Genre, 36 (2003), 295–​316; and Robert D. Aguirre, ‘Annihilating the Distance: Panoramas and the Conquest of Mexico, 1822–​1848’, Genre, 35 (2002), 25–​53. 39 Thomas Pringle, African Sketches (London: Moxon, 1834), p. 501. 40 According to Shum, the Pringles contracted several refugees to work for the extended family. Hinza Marossi was specifically contracted to assist Pringle’s wife. See Matthew Shum, ‘The Prehistory of The History of Mary Prince: Thomas Pringle’s “The Bechuana Boy” ’, Nineteenth-​ Century Literature, 64 (2009), 291–​ 322 (pp. 293–​ 97). See also, Shum, Improvisations, pp. 149, 152. 41 See, for instance, Jenny Sharpe, who shows how Prince’s narrative was reimagined to fit the confines of white, Christian morality. Jenny Sharpe, ‘ “Something Akin to Freedom”: The Case of Mary Prince’, differences, 8.1 (1996), 31–​56. 42 On ‘homecoming’ as a recurrent trope in Pringle’s works, see Jason R. Rudy, Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), pp. 80–​82. 43 Friendship’s Offering; and Winter’s Wreath (London: Smith, Elder, 1834). For Pringle’s ‘An Emigrant’s Song’, see pp. 94–​95; for Moodie’s ‘A Canadian Song’, see p. 96. 44 Reviews of Friendship’s Offering typically praised the luxuriousness of the object and, as previously noted, the quality of the engravings. See, for example, ‘The Annuals for 1828’, Le Belle Assemblée, November 1827, pp. 189–​207. 45 The second part of African Sketches, the prose ‘Narrative of a Residence in South Africa’, was later published as a standalone text (London: Tegg, 1851). 46 ‘The Emigrant’s Cabin: An Epistle in Rhyme’, in African Sketches, pp. 35–​49 (p. 35). Despite its later publication date, ‘The Emigrant’s Cabin’ is one of the first poems Pringle wrote in South Africa. Pringle signs the poem ‘Glen-​Lynden, 1822’. 47 ‘An Emigrant’s Song’, in African Sketches, pp. 50–​51 (p. 51). 48 African Sketches, pp. 117–​498 (p. 362). 49 Letter (29 August 1829), in ‘Memoirs of Thomas Pringle’, in The Poetical Works of Thomas Pringle, with a Sketch of His Life by Leitch Ritchie (London: Moxon, 1838), pp. ix–​cxlix (p. cxliii, emphasis in original). An advertisement for the work explains that it was ‘not published in the usual way, but entirely for the benefit of Mr. Pringle’s Widow’ (p. iv). 50 Moodie contrasts the ‘uneducated barbarians’ of Europe, the ‘sun-​burnt harpies’ (a portrait of Irish migrants that is, also, racialized), with the indigenous population, who she describes as ‘Nature’s gentlemen’ (I , 11). Pringle, meanwhile, identifies ‘an aspect of civility and decent respect,

Idyll as Refuge  33 of quietude and sober-​mindedness’ among ‘the native peasantry’ (p. 135). Unsurprisingly, Mary Prince is described by Pringle in similar condescending tones; ‘She is remarkable for her decency and propriety of conduct—​and her delicacy’ (Prince, p. 25, emphasis in original).

Bibliography ‘The African’, in Friendship’s Offering: A Literary Album (London: Smith, Elder, 1830), pp. 177–​80. Agathocleous, Tanya, ‘Wordsworth at the Panoramas: The Sublime Spectacle of the World’, Genre, 36 (2003), 295–​316. Aguirre, Robert D., ‘Annihilating the Distance: Panoramas and the Conquest of Mexico, 1822–​ 1848’, Genre, 35 (2002), 25–​53. ‘The Annuals for 1828’, Le Belle Assemblée, November 1827, pp. 189–​207. Armstrong, Isobel, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–​ 1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, ‘The Idyllic Chronotope in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 224–​36. Baucom, Ian, ‘Mournful Histories: Narratives of Postimperial Melancholy’, Modern Fiction Studies, 42 (1996), 259–​88. Belich, James, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-​World, 1783–​1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Brown, Vincent, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020). ‘The Captive’, in Friendship’s Offering: A Literary Album (London: Smith, Elder, 1828), pp. 378–​83. Eliot, George, Middlemarch, ed. by David Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Favret, Mary A., War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Fergus, Claudius, ‘“Dread of insurrection”: Abolitionism, Security, and Labor in Britain’s West Indian Colonies, 1760–​1823’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 66 (2009), 757–​80. Flint, Kate, The Transatlantic Indian, 1776–​1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Ford, John, Ackermann, 1783–​1983: The Business of Art (London: Ackermann, 1983). Fox, Celina, ed., London —​World City, 1800–​1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Halse, Sven, ‘The Literary Idyll in Germany, England, and Scandinavia 1770–​ 1848’, in Romantic Prose Fiction, ed. by Gerald Gillespie, Manfred Engel, and Bernard Dieterle (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2008), pp. 383–​411. Hanson, David C., ‘Friendship’s Offering’, The Early Ruskin Manuscripts, 1826–​1842 https://​erm. selu.edu/​notes/​annua​ls_​n​ote [accessed 7 June 2023]. Harris, Katherine D., Forget Me Not: The Rise of the British Literary Annual, 1823–​ 1835 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015). Herbert, Stephen, ed., A History of Pre-​Cinema, 3 vols (London: Routledge, 2000). Jones, Richard F., ‘Eclogue Types in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 24 (1925), 33–​60. Lowe, Lisa, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). Lugo-​ Ortiz, Agnes, and Angela Rosenthal, ‘Introduction: Envisioning Slave Portraiture’, in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, ed. by Agnes Lugo-​ Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 1–​40. McDonagh, Josephine, Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815–​1876 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). ‘Memoirs of Thomas Pringle’, in The Poetical Works of Thomas Pringle, with a Sketch of His Life by Leitch Ritchie (London: Moxon, 1838), pp. ix–​cxlix.

34  Charlotte Cary-Beckett and Josephine McDonagh Midgley, Clare, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–​ 1870 (London: Routledge, 2016). Mieszkowski, Jan, Watching War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). Mitchell, W. J. T., ed., Landscape and Power: Space, Place, and Landscape, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Montgomery, James, ‘A Cry from South Africa’, in Friendship’s Offering: A Literary Album (London: Smith, Elder, 1830), pp. 37–​39. Moodie, Susanna, ‘A Canadian Song’, in Friendship’s Offering; and Winter’s Wreath (London: Smith, Elder, 1834), p. 96. —​—​—​Roughing It in the Bush; or, Life in Canada, 2 vols (London: Bentley, 1852). Nwankwo, Ifeoma Kiddoe, Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-​ Century Americas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). Osterhammel, Jürgen, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. by Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). Payne, Mark, Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). —​—​—​‘Pastoral’, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, ed. by Richard Eldridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 117–​38. Postle, Martin, ‘The Captive Slave by John Simpson (1782–​1847), a Rediscovered Masterpiece’, British Art Journal, 9.3 (2009), 18–​26. Prince, Mary, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (London: Westley and Davis, 1831). Pringle, Thomas, ‘A Noon-​Day Dream’, in Friendship’s Offering: A Literary Album (London: Smith, Elder, 1828), pp. 24–​27. —​—​—​‘Glen Lynden: A Tale of Teviotdale’, in Friendship’s Offering (London: Smith, Elder, 1829), pp. 19–​35. —​—​—​‘The Bechuana Boy’, in Friendship’s Offering: A Literary Album (London: Smith, Elder, 1830), pp. 30–​36. —​—​—​African Sketches (London: Moxon, 1834). —​—​—​‘An Emigrant’s Song’, in Friendship’s Offering; and Winter’s Wreath (London: Smith, Elder, 1834), pp. 94–​95. Qureshi, Sadiah, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-​ Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Rudy, Jason R., Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). Shaikh, Fariha, Nineteenth-​ Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Sharpe, Jenny, ‘“Something Akin to Freedom”: The Case of Mary Prince’, differences, 8.1 (1996), 31–​56. Shields, Juliet, Mary Prince, Slavery, and Print Culture in the Anglophone Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​978110​8866​392 Shum, Matthew, ‘The Prehistory of The History of Mary Prince: Thomas Pringle’s “The Bechuana Boy” ’, Nineteenth-​Century Literature, 64 (2009), 291–​322. —​—​—​Improvisations of Empire: Thomas Pringle in Scotland, the Cape Colony and London, 1789–​1834 (London: Anthem, 2020). ‘Sir Archibald Grant 3rd Bart. Of Monymusk’, in Legacies of British Slavery Database www.ucl. ac.uk/​lbs/​per​son/​view/​214​6652​037 [accessed 17 May 2023]. ‘The Slave-​Ship’, Penny Magazine, 24 November 1832, p. 336. Suleri, Sara, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Sutherland, John, ‘The British Book Trade and the Crash of 1826’, Library, 9 (1987), 148–​61. Trumpener, Katie, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Idyll as Refuge  35 Whyte, Iain, Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery, 1756–​1838 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 41–​69. Wong, Edlie L., Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

2 ‘Cutting So “Sweetly” ’ Idyllist Wood Engravings and the Lost Boxwood Forests Bethan Stevens

Idyllist artists paid a serious if otherworldly attention to landscape; at the same time, in the medium of wood engraving, the increasing demand for boxwood blocks materially contributed to irreversible deforestation throughout the nineteenth century. This chapter explores the contradictions in these positions, analysing wood engravings by artists of the idyllist school and beyond.1 The idyllist aesthetic often appears to avoid social realities, but in fact it was deeply concerned with how we engage with our environment. Here, I am interested in an approach to landscape that values the social and cultural importance of dreaminess, a privileged mood within idyllist wood engraving. Wood engraving’s monochrome techniques facilitated a distinctive crepuscular dreaminess when idyllist artists worked in the medium. The editors to this volume point out that cultural historians have done a disservice to the idyllic mode by associating it dismissively with escapism. This chapter also explores this charge of escapism in idyllist book illustration. Escapism has always functioned as part of art’s purchase on social reality, responding to a human desire to find strategic and meaningful ways to step away from aspects of life and society that are intolerable—​and apparently unanswerable. Today, in an age of acute environmental anxiety, escapism deserves to be considered conceptually with a new seriousness. Escapism is often linked to nostalgia, an important concept that has gained critical force in recent decades thanks in large part to work by Svetlana Boym. Boym’s work differentiates between ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia is concerned to ‘conquer […] time’ and ‘evoke national past and future’; reflective nostalgia is more engaged with individuals, ‘cultural memory’, and ‘memorial signs’, and it ‘cherishes fragments of memory’ and ruins.2 The idea of creating memorials to a natural world that is under threat will be crucial throughout this chapter. Escapism and nostalgia are inextricably linked; at the same time, each suggests a different focus and direction: while nostalgics look backwards towards home and the past, escapists are instead fleeing—​they are more present-​orientated, seeking to stretch and expand the present moment to create a different and safer space within it. Their urgency often fuels creative and community-​focused projects of reflective and productive dreaming. Yi-​Fu Tuan’s cultural geography sees escapism as a significant means of mediating threats from the natural world: ‘A major defect is nature’s undependability and violence. The familiar story of people altering nature can thus be understood as their effort to distance themselves from it by establishing a mediating, more constant world of their own making.’3 The idyllists’ response to the fragile natural world that surrounded them should be considered in these contexts. Printmaking by Victorian idyllists is well positioned to engage with both environmental change and escapism. Idyllist artists worked frequently in a commercial context DOI: 10.4324/9781003327998-3

Idyllist Wood Engravings and the Lost Boxwood Forests  37 of gift book production. They worked seriously and experimentally on nostalgic work around landscape and genre scenes, engaging passionately with nature. However, we also need to think through the silence of idyllist and other wood engraving artists about the environmental costs of the art they made. The massive, burgeoning wood engraving trade—​key to the establishment of mass visual culture in the Victorian period—​came at a cost of the decimation of boxwood forests globally. The landscapes celebrated in idyllist prints came at a cost to actual landscapes. In this respect there is a kind of blindness at the heart of idyllist representation; of course, we will have a distinctive response to this as contemporary viewers today. The first part of my chapter explores a gift book published by Dalziel Brothers, an illustrated edition of Jean Ingelow’s Poems (1867). I particularly focus on memorializing illustrations designed by John William North for the poem ‘The Star’s Monument’. The second part of the chapter analyses the environmental impact of the Victorian trade in boxwood, largely for the purpose of wood engraving. The final part explores an earlier gift book, Birket Foster’s Pictures of English Landscape (1862), and analyses its unusual visual and textual representations of tree felling. The gift book and ‘The Star’s Monument’: John William North and Jean Ingelow Chief among the artists of the idyllist school were Frederick Walker, George John Pinwell, and John William North. They were friends, all studying under wood engraver Josiah Whymper, and their work as illustrators shaped their artistic careers. Donato Esposito outlines the history of the term ‘idyllist’, which was not explicitly adopted by the artists concerned, but developed out of a critique published in The Times in 1871, reflecting on ‘the school which aims at making pictorial idylls out of the unpromising materials of lowly life in town and country’.4 For me the word ‘lowly’ is of particular interest; later, I will come to associate this not so much with class (though there are promising avenues to be explored in that regard) but rather with a kind of visual modesty which I believe is crucial to the aesthetic of idyllist art and its commercial reception. A significant portion of wood engraving designs by Pinwell and North, including much of their best work, was made for the series of Fine Art Gift Books that were engraved, printed, and published by Dalziel Brothers. The Dalziels were major supporters of Walker, North, and Pinwell, also acting as private patrons of their drawings (this is recorded in their memoir and evidenced by gifts and sales of the artists’ work by Dalziel to the British Museum and V&A).5 I have shown elsewhere how Dalziel used photographic transfer methods to preserve drawings by artists they personally valued, including Pinwell, Walker, and North (Stevens, pp. 282–​84). Indeed, in their memoir George and Edward Dalziel specifically associate idyllist artists with ‘rustic drawings, fortunately, through the aid of photography […] saved […] at Kensington Museum’ (now the V&A) (pp. 197–​98). It may be because of the engraver–​publishers’ personal tastes that an idyllist look was dominant in their gift book listings—​or it may be because a nostalgic approach to place was seen as commercially valuable. More likely, these factors grew up inextricably together. The popular gift books of the 1860s were expensive, ornately bound volumes that combined high-​quality illustrations with poetry, published with an eye to exploiting the Christmas market.6 Jean Ingelow’s Poems included forty-​four illustrations engraved after designs by Pinwell and North, who featured prominently alongside other artists (particularly Arthur Boyd Houghton and Thomas Dalziel). ‘The Star’s Monument’ is a long poem occupying thirty-​two pages in this edition. It has a complicated narrative frame,

38  Bethan Stevens being narrated by a male character, who alternately thinks and speaks. His interlocutor is an unnamed woman, who remains (for the most part) ‘mute’. The landscape speaks for her, as the wind in the apple tree, the ‘prattling’ brook, and the singing lark all form her voice: ‘She let their tongues be her tongue’s substitute’.7 The landscape itself, however, is incomprehensible: what nature ‘had said, | We cannot tell, for none interpreted’ (p. 108). The male character’s love for the woman remains painfully unrequited from his perspective. The final two stanzas offer two equal, alternative endings, finally inviting us to speculate on the perspective of the powerfully silent woman. In the first of these she feels nothing for the man, remaining happy in her idyllic ‘ancestral home’, ‘still the home of happiest years’. In the second she is imagined in love and miserable. It is worth considering the final three stanzas in full, which follow on from the moment of the pair’s separation: And then she stooped toward the mossy grass,      And gathered up her work and went her way; Straight to that ancient turret she did pass,      And startle back some fawns that were at play. She did not sigh, she never said ‘Alas!’      Although he was her friend: but still that day, Where elm and hornbeam spread a towering dome, She crossed the dells to her ancestral home. And did she love him?—​what if she did not?      Then home was still the home of happiest years; Nor thought was exiled to partake his lot,      Nor heart lost courage through foreboding fears; Nor echo did against her secret plot,      Nor music her betray to painful tears; Nor life become a dream, and sunshine dim, And riches poverty, because of him. But did she love him?—​what and if she did?      Love cannot cool the burning Austral sand, Nor show the secret waters that lie hid      In arid valleys of that desert land. Love has no spell can scorching winds forbid,      Or bring the help which tarries near to hand, Or spread a cloud for curtaining faded eyes That gaze up dying into alien skies. (pp. 109–​10) In the final stanza, when the woman is imagined as silently in love, the picture is particularly bleak. There is an ambivalent overlay of romantic love, imperialist othering, and environmental nightmare in these lines. Earlier, the woman’s peace and happiness had been linked to an absence of love, and to her location in a privileged ‘ancestral home’, a romantic ‘ancient turret’ in Britain, where ‘mossy grass’, ‘fawns’, ‘elm and hornbeam’ all flourished. But in the second of the alternative endings, we are imaginatively transported to a colonized landscape, Australia, in which an ‘alien’ environment is inextricably linked to both the pain of a lost romantic love (following the common trope of an absent colonizer-​lover), and the horror of an unstable climate and environment

Idyllist Wood Engravings and the Lost Boxwood Forests  39 that are perceived as hostile to humanity. The narration is suddenly and unexpectedly transported to a place that is ‘burning’, ‘arid’, and ‘scorching’, and ends with a fantasy of death by exposure. The final illustration to ‘The Star’s Monument’ illustrates the stanza third from the end (Figure 2.1). It shows the unnamed woman just after she has left her interlocutor: ‘Straight to that ancient turret she did pass, | And startle back some fawns that were at play. | […] Where elm and hornbeam spread a towering dome | She crossed the dells to her ancestral home.’ All these textual elements are included in Dalziel and North’s print. The engravers’ proof is illustrated here. Interestingly, in the finished publication, the book designer at Dalziel chose to position this illustration on the final page of ‘The Star’s Monument’, which it shares with just a single stanza: that last apocalyptic stanza about the ‘arid valleys’, ‘desert land’, and ‘scorching winds’ (p. 110). It would have been possible to position the engraving on the previous page, just before the section quoted above, and coinciding with the lover’s departure: ‘the wind sighed again—​and he was gone’ (p. 109). Such a placement would have given the illustration more prominence, positioning it on a right-​hand page (more visible when reading books left to right). It would have meant the illustration very slightly preceded its precise textual referent, which was common practice in Victorian illustrated books. Instead, the placing of the illustration meant that it came significantly after the textual referent and had a less prominent position to anyone casually browsing the book. The position chosen allows the illustration to create a startling juxtaposition between an idyllic illustration celebrating life in a lush English environment and an apocalyptic final stanza imagining a colonial death in an environmental wasteland. The layout also positions the engraving as a punctuation point at the end of a major poem. The landscape of Figure 2.1 is lush, but also fleeting. The fawns are in the act of running out of the frame of the illustration. The ‘ancestral home’, while sturdy, has a foreboding yet variegated form: note how it seems at first glance to be an impenetrable wall, but on closer examination resolves into a series of random gables. It is reminiscent of what Sophie Thomas has referred to as ‘the variegated and visually indeterminate nature of much Gothic architecture, particularly but not always in a state of ruin’.8 Despite standing firm, the ancestral home evokes the idea of a ruin through its form. For Boym, ruins have ‘a patina of intense nostalgia’, and they ‘make us think of the past that could have been and the future that never took place, tantalizing us with utopian dreams of escaping the irreversibility of time’.9 In the foreground of Figure 2.1, the frail timber bridge likewise brings a sense of impermanence. Combine this with the stanza below the image, with its evocation of ‘scorching winds’ and ‘burning […] sand’, and we indeed have a landscape—​or two landscapes, in globally polarized positions—​ that threaten to disappear even as we look on. This fragility, I think, is part of the idyllist aesthetic: landscape is viewed nostalgically as if it were vanishing. This is a flickering picture, an ungraspable present moment. The idyll is both there and not there (in a disturbing parallel to the necessary but diminishing boxwood, as we shall see). The illustration also relates to a strain in Victorian culture identified by Laurence Mazzeno and Ronald Morrison, who have explored connections between ecocritical and postcolonial perspectives; they demonstrate how British Victorians were ‘more likely to project on to imperial landscapes their fears and concerns over environmental degradation’.10 The word–​image juxtaposition on this page of Ingelow’s Poems is reminiscent of this history, connecting as it does a vanishing idyllic British visual landscape and a textual environmental disaster in Australia.

40  Bethan Stevens

Figure 2.1 Dalziel Brothers after John William North, ‘The Star’s Monument’, wood engravers’ proof for Jean Ingelow, Poems (London: Longmans, 1867). Dalziel Archive Volume 18 (1863–​68), BM 1913,0415.179, no. 791. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. All Rights Reserved. © Sylph Editions, 2016.

Various tales are also narrated within the frame narrative of ‘The Star’s Monument’. Chief is the story of a poet in an unnamed city, who witnesses the death of a star, and decides to build a monument to its loss. Throughout, the poem interrogates a binary between memory and forgetfulness, with its opening line asking ‘If there be memory in the world to come’, and the futility of memorializing monuments being gradually revealed (p. 79). For the unnamed poet, the loss of a star is a devastating environmental occurrence, proving that ‘the very skies | Were mutable’ (p. 86). Likewise, an old astronomer laments the loss of ‘the steadfast stars’ as amounting to ‘the death of light’ (p. 88). The poet raises a monument to the star, but the gesture is futile: the mass of people who

Idyllist Wood Engravings and the Lost Boxwood Forests  41 were quick to forget the star also forget the purpose of the monument. Witnessing this, and having faith in the forgotten star’s historical importance, the unnamed poet receives a lesson in humility. At the start of the narrative, he was obsessed with securing his own fame. Gradually, inspired by the star, he reflects on the importance of its quiet but profound impact, which means more than any public recognition. The poet eventually travels as a ballad singer, influencing the world but content to receive little credit for his art: ‘He taught them, and they learned, but not the less | Remained unconscious whence that lore they drew’ (p. 99). For me, this meditation on modesty speaks to the idyllist aesthetic. The fictional poet learns to value ‘glorious maxims in a lowly dress’ (p. 99)—​another instance of this word ‘lowly’, associated with the idyllists by the critic in The Times. Returning to Figure 2.1, I see a distinct celebration of modest spectatorship in the woman wandering through North’s landscape. This composition engages with models offered by an earlier generation of Romantic landscape painters, such as Caspar David Friedrich, in including a prominent figure that is a privileged viewer of the represented landscape. However, in the way she is positioned in relation to the landscape, she is decidedly more modest and less self-​ aggrandizing than Friedrich’s famous beholders (see, for example, Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (1817) in the Hamburger Kunsthalle). In Figure 2.1 the woman in the engraving turns slightly away from us, so we can feel ourselves looking over her shoulder, imagine ourselves walking through the landscape in her shoes, and sharing her view. Instead of showing a female figure as part of the landscape, to be consumed with it—​as Houghton often did in Dalziel’s gift books (Figure 2.2)—​North both presents the female figure as part of the view, to be consumed, and encourages us to participate in and value her viewpoint. If the ‘star’s monument’ built by Ingelow’s fictional poet seeks to memorialize an environmental loss, we also hear repeatedly that this monument was ‘graven’, and it is hard not to see the graven images of idyllist illustrations as themselves a fragile memorial to landscape (pp. 95–​96). Something in the distinctive approach to light in Dalziel’s wood engravings after both North and Pinwell resonates with Ingelow’s theme of fleeting starlight. In the first wood engraving for ‘The Star’s Monument’, both the apple blossom and the reflected light on the surface of the lush, waving grass are made to resonate with the luminosity of the titular star (Figure 2.3). Incidentally, in this illustration we see the not-​quite-​lovers in the background, but is there not also another trace of our imagined modest spectator here? Note the strange, curved triangle on the left-​hand side of the print, cut off by the frame. Could this be the edge of a spectator’s gown—​Jean Ingelow herself, or one of the middle-​class women readers at whom fine art gift books were particularly marketed?11 One of the inherent problems with wood engraving was that the often-​beautiful drawings made by designers on the surfaces of woodblocks would be destroyed in the process of cutting them. This destruction of finished drawings was simply part of the engraving process, but it was troubling to those involved. Drawings on woodblocks have a unique quality. Although many artists prepared the blocks with a surface of white before they began to draw, the wood’s warm tones showed through, lending such drawings unique chromatic qualities. I have written elsewhere about how artists as diverse as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Dalziel family themselves were concerned about the loss of these drawings.12 George and Edward Dalziel’s memoir explicitly makes a causal link between their involvement in new technologies of photographic transfers onto woodblocks and a desire to preserve drawings:

42  Bethan Stevens

Figure 2.2  Dalziel Brothers after Arthur Boyd Houghton, ‘Songs of Seven’, wood engravers’ proof for Jean Ingelow, Poems (London: Longmans, 1867). Dalziel Archive Volume 18 (1863–​68), BM 1913,0415.179, no. 811. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. All Rights Reserved. © Sylph Editions, 2016.

Idyllist Wood Engravings and the Lost Boxwood Forests  43

Figure 2.3 Dalziel Brothers after John William North, ‘The Star’s Monument’, wood engravers’ proof for Jean Ingelow, Poems (London: Longmans, 1867). Dalziel Archive Volume 18 (1863–​68), BM 1913,0415.179, no. 792. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. All Rights Reserved. © Sylph Editions, 2016.

44  Bethan Stevens After spending much time and labour in experimenting, as well as spoiling a great many blocks, we succeeded in getting fairly good photographs for the engraver’s purpose on other pieces of wood, and so the valuable original drawings were preserved. (p. 42) In this passage the initial focus is on photographically transferring a drawing from a woodblock to another woodblock, so that the drawn version can be saved and a different block engraved for printing. The Dalziels were admirers of work by artists of the idyllist school and, as a result, made a particular effort to preserve their drawings; see, for example, a beautifully drawn woodblock by John W. North, showing a new bride leaning out of a window into a starry evening landscape (Figure 2.4). The block was signed ‘Dalziel’ on the back, and preserved intact by the firm. The account quoted above suggests the engravers were conscious but also relatively careless of the loss of boxwood through the processes of experimentation and transfer, as they mention in passing ‘spoiling a great many blocks’. Nevertheless, the success of the new process eventually led to less waste, since drawings could be made on paper and transferred photographically to blocks. The V&A archive preserves documentary evidence that work by North and Pinwell for Ingelow’s Poems was produced in this way.13 Technical questions about the way wood was used in the production of engravings may seem rather distant from the issue of how these collaborative works engaged with questions of memorialization, loss, and the environmental idyll. But there is evidence in Ingelow’s Poems that whoever designed this book at Dalziel was attuned to linked questions around making, medium, and the subject matter of English woodland. Let us take another poem in the collection, again a tale of unrequited love, ‘The Four Bridges’. At the start of the poem, lovers’ memorials carved on a yew tree are compared to the memorializing engravings on tombstones. This is illustrated by Dalziel and North’s engraving of a yew in a churchyard, with carved initials visible on the trunk (Figure 2.5). The published page is reproduced here; the engraving is positioned immediately above the line, ‘For none could carve like me’.14 Both wood engraving and page design thus draw attention to the act of woodcarving in the poem, speaking to those who were engraving the illustrations and financing the book. Later in ‘The Four Bridges’ the soul and body of the beloved become poetically intermingled with the wood itself, and North and Dalziel’s illustration shows her lover searching for her through the trees (Figure 2.6). In this print the woodland is interpreted through a mass of formalized patches of line and cross-​hatching, so that the engraving begins to represent the woodblock itself, and the textures of wood engraving, as much as it does a wooded landscape. Medium and world, woodblock and environment, start to coalesce. In the following section I will explore the relevance of this to nineteenth-​ century environmental history, and the increasing scarcity of boxwood thanks to its exploitation for illustrations. ‘Cutting So “Sweetly” ’: disappearing box The Victorian period’s boom in illustration was built on boxwood, which provided raw material for printing matrices for wood engravings. As a medium, wood engraving relied on the distinctive qualities of box. It was comparatively easy to cut and yet had a close-​ grained density that allowed prints to be cut, on wood, with a fineness of detail that could compete with more laborious and expensive print media such as copper and steel

Idyllist Wood Engravings and the Lost Boxwood Forests  45

Figure 2.4 John William North, ‘Love’, unengraved drawing on woodblock for Jean Ingelow, Songs of Seven (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1866). BM 1992,0406.414. Donated by Robin de Beaumont. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. All Rights Reserved. © Sylph Editions, 2016.

engravings. Crucial for wood engraving, boxwood was also widely prized for carving and turning, and was prime material for various tools and products, from shuttles and carpenters’ rules to wind instruments, roller skate wheels, and mathematical instruments. Nevertheless, wood engraving was the most important use of this precious material, as the illustrator William Coleman observed in 1859:

46  Bethan Stevens

Figure 2.5 Dalziel Brothers after John William North, ‘The Four Bridges’, illustrated page from Jean Ingelow, Poems (London: Longmans, 1867). Author’s collection.

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Idyllist Wood Engravings and the Lost Boxwood Forests  47

Figure 2.6 Dalziel Brothers after John William North, ‘The Four Bridges’, wood engravers’ proof for Jean Ingelow, Poems (London: Longmans, 1867). Dalziel Archive Volume 18 (1863–​68), BM 1913,0415.179, no. 835. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. All Rights Reserved. © Sylph Editions, 2016.

48  Bethan Stevens By far the most important application of the Box in the present day, is in the art of wood-​engraving, for which Box-​wood is superior to any other known material, and it is probable that the high perfection of the art, as now practised, is in a great measure due to the use made of this substance, so admirably fulfilling in every respect the requirements of the engraver.15 However, stocks of this precious wood were in significant decline. And since boxwood owes its density to its slow growth, there was no prospect of an easy reversal to this problem, as we shall see. Although wood engraving was developed as a distinct emerging medium in the 1780s and 1790s by Thomas Bewick and others, it was in the Victorian period that the medium gained real commercial and artistic prominence, reaching its height in the 1860s and 1870s. It then started to decline in the 1880s and 1890s as new photomechanical techniques began to displace it. Near the start of the period of wood engraving’s dominance, in 1839, a landmark Treatise on Wood Engraving, Historical and Practical was published by engraver John Jackson and critic William Andrew Chatto. Jackson advises engravers on all aspects of their art, including how to select, season, and treat boxwood blocks. His comments reveal attachments to certain qualities of particular types of boxwood, stressing his (patriotic) preference for English box, as enabling the finest and most precise engravings: American and Turkey box is the largest; but all large wood of this kind is generally of inferior quality, and most liable to split; it is also frequently of a red colour, which is a certain characteristic of its softness, and consequent unfitness for delicate engraving. From my own experience, English box is superior to all others; for though small, it is generally so clear and firm in the grain that it never crumbles under the graver; it resists evenly to the edge of the tool, and gives not a particle beyond what is actually cut out.16 In Jackson’s authoritative account English box is seen as the best option for professional engravers, though smaller than other varieties. Other sources confirm the commercial significance of English boxwood (from Box Hill in Surrey) at the start of the century. William Marshall’s Reports to the Board of Agriculture and William Stevenson’s General View of the Agriculture of the County of Surrey report falling costs of boxwood in the early years of the nineteenth century caused by a glut in the market, since in 1802 ‘the former proprietor of the [Box Hill] estate sold the box for 15,000l.: the purchaser was to be allowed 14 years to cut it down’; they were reported to have cut forty tons of this slow-​growing wood.17 Jackson’s wood engraving treatise had warned against the red tones of foreign wood, which he associated with poor cutting. He preferred English wood with a yellow colour indicative of good technical qualities: A clear yellow colour, and as equal as possible over the whole surface, is generally the best criterion of box-​wood. When a block is not of a clear yellow colour throughout, but only in the centre, gradually becoming lighter towards the edges, it ought not to be used for delicate work; the white, in addition to its not cutting so ‘sweetly,’ being of a softer nature, absorbs more ink than the yellow, and also retains it more tenaciously, so that impressions from a block of this kind sometimes display a perceptible inequality of colour;—​from the yellow parts allowing the ink to leave them freely,

Idyllist Wood Engravings and the Lost Boxwood Forests  49 while the white parts partially retain it, the printed cut has the appearance of having received either too much ink in one place, or too little in another. (p. 638) The language in this account is loaded, suggesting attachments that go beyond the merely technical. The wood cuts ‘sweetly’, is ‘softer’, and ‘tenacious’ (humanlike) of ink. One senses an artist’s personal attachment to the qualities of the material in the preferred English woodland. Decades later, accounts of wood engraving dismiss the possibility of using English box because, in the words of Mason Jackson, ‘the box of English growth is so small as to be almost useless for commercial purposes.’18 Mason Jackson was the younger brother of John Jackson (two decades his junior) and was trained by him; he wrote about sources of box in his account of commercial illustration in 1885, The Pictorial Press. It is no surprise that at this point, forty-​five years later, English boxwood had become too small and scarce, considering the box tree is so slow growing. This situation reflects three complex and overlapping changes: the increasing demand of the growing illustration industry, the increasing preference later in the century for larger illustrations, and the depletion of English box. On 31 July 1858 the Illustrated London News (ILN) published an article exploring the source material required for its own profuse illustrations, commenting that English box is ‘very much smaller and inferior to that of Turkey in Asia’.19 Increasingly, not only the size but the quality of imported boxwood is preferred. Accompanying the article was an unusual wood engraving, depicting the logging of box trees that enabled the illustrated press, and signed by prominent engraver Harvey Orrin Smith, then working for the ILN. I am struck by the lack of care with which this print is designed and engraved; surely, we might have expected an image about the making of their own medium to elicit creativity and care from the artists involved? According to the caption, ‘Boxwood Forest on the Shores of the Black Sea’, the forest is ostensibly the subject of the illustration. But the engraved forest is relegated to the background, largely undifferentiable; some of it (on the right), is a little clearer and could pass for mature box—​or for many other kinds of tree. While the landscape is generic, the illustration is more attentive to processes of logging, chopping, and deforestation—​we see the labour of this in the foreground, with a tidy pile of trunks ready for export (and eventually, for engraving). There is a cursoriness to the illustration, its coldness notable when we think back to John Jackson in 1839, who had written so tenderly of his own relationship with boxwood, of how the graver ‘cuts more pleasantly, gliding smoothly through the wood, if it be of good quality, without stirring a particle on each side of the line’ (p. 657). Jackson’s language in the 1830s had registered a sensory—​almost erotic—​response, in his piling up of verbs and adverbs about pleasurable cutting and caressing: ‘cuts […] pleasantly, gliding smoothly’. Quality wood is described by John Jackson as not ‘stirring a particle’ beyond the line—​‘stirring’ is an odd verb to use for an inanimate woodblock. This kind of response could not be more different from the ILN illustration. Engraved by Orrin Smith—​or an employee or apprentice—​after an unidentified draughtsperson or photographer, one senses that the artists involved could not care less about the boxwood industry at the heart of their labour. The entire upper-​left sector of the block (a background that takes up around two-​thirds of the surface) is monotonously engraved in mechanical parallels. There is no attempt to create any variation of form—​except for the small boat—​nor any colour (as engravers termed the play of solid blacks, varying tones, and contrast in their work).

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50  Bethan Stevens Figure 2.7 Harvey Orrin Smith after unidentified draughtsperson or photographer, ‘Boxwood Forest on the Shores of the Black Sea’, Illustrated London News, 31 July 1858. Author’s collection.

Idyllist Wood Engravings and the Lost Boxwood Forests  51 Even in the foreground, the execution is banal with no attention to detail. The labouring men are almost faceless, and the trees in the middle ground are executed with no attempt to mimic their varying textures. This is a story about environmental exploitation going hand in hand with artistic alienation in an increasingly capitalized and global system of image production. Publications about boxwood continued to lament its scarcity and highlight the search for (usually inadequate) substitutes. The Times commented in 1878 that supplies from the Black Sea—​the source being celebrated twenty years earlier in the ILN—​had ‘for some years past been decreasing’.20 Despite supply challenges, The Times comments that 10,000 tons of boxwood had been imported in 1876, largely from the forests on the Caspian Sea. In contrast, in the following year, 1877, only 4,000 to 5,000 tons were imported, a decrease which was in this case ‘an illustration to some extent of the effects of the war’—​the Russo-​Turkish War of 1877–​78. The article finally notes the presence of ‘untouched’ forests of boxwood in Russian territory and hopes that after the war these will become available, opening up ‘abundant supplies of good wood for some time to come’. Global politics, conflict, trade, and forest management were all forces that hovered at the edges of the illustration industry, making wood engraving as a medium—​ on the face of things—​an unlikely and hostile space for idyllic representation. In January 1875 the journal Nature published the following note on the scarcity of boxwood and its management. It is worth quoting at length since it was frequently republished—​both with and without alterations and acknowledgement—​in other British and American journals.21 It underlines the environmental implications of commerce in boxwood, as well as its dependence on Britain’s dominance in global trade: Boxwood, the wood of Buxus sempervirens, which is almost exclusively used for the best kinds of wood-​engraving, has been for some years becoming more and more scarce. Wood of the largest diameter is the produce of the forests of the countries bordering on the Black Sea. Large quantities are produced in the neighbourhood of Poti, from which port the wood is shipped direct to England. The supply, however, from this port is, we learn, becoming fast exhausted; and it is said, unless the forests of Abkhassia are opened to the trade, it must soon cease altogether. The quantity exported from Poti during the year 1873 amounted to 2,897 tons, of the value of 20,621l; besides this, from 5,000 to 7,000 tons of the finest quality annually pass through Constantinople, being brought from southern Russia and from some of the Turkish ports of the Black Sea for shipment, chiefly to Liverpool. […] With regard to the boxwood forests of Turkey, the British Consul at Constantinople reports that they are nearly exhausted and that very little really good wood can now be obtained from them; in Russia, however, where some little Government care has been bestowed upon forestry, a considerable quantity of choice wood still exists; but even there it can only be obtained at an ever-​increasing cost, as the forests near the sea have been denuded of their best trees. The trade is now entirely in English hands.22 Similarly, in 1876 the Journal of the Society of Arts commented on the increasing scarcity of boxwood, noting the control exerted on the trade by the Russian and Turkish governments working to preserve forests and boxwood’s continuing ‘consumption for wood engraving, which is now very great’. Britain’s global power is called on to support the trade, as entrepreneurs looked further afield for substitutes: ‘various other foreign and colonial hard woods have been tried for engraving purposes, none of which, however,

52  Bethan Stevens have been found to equal box.’23 ‘Substitutes for boxwood’ were debated in papers as diverse as The Times and the Labourer.24 Although commercial boxwood was by this point sourced overseas and not in England, locally, the theft of valuable boxwood trees could nevertheless be reported as significant news, as in 1877 when two trees worth a total of £22 were stolen at Darlington, and the thief buried the pieces of boxwood and sold them from a nearby pub.25 Artists were inevitably conscious of these changes. An unusual testimony was left on two very large whole woodblocks (approximately 225 × 252 mm and 197 × 228 mm, both of uneven dimensions) now at the British Museum. They came from the engraving office of Josiah Whymper (sold to the museum by his son), and a manuscript note carefully pasted on each—​recorded as being in Whymper’s hand—​ruefully notes: ‘Before 1850, boxwood of this size could be obtained.’26 Whymper also kept specimens of box and substitute box from different parts of the world, and taught idyllists North, Walker, and Pinwell.27 Anecdotally, anyone who has spent time examining woodblocks will tell you that the increasing scarcity of box can be readily traced on the printing matrices. Having examined large numbers of engraved woodblocks in numerous public and private collections, it has become very clear to me that early in the century it was far easier to find a decent-​sized woodblock formed of a single piece of wood. Blocks from later in the century are more commonly composite, made up from smaller pieces attached in different ways with screws, joinery, or glue, even when it came to modestly sized illustrations for octavo books. As early as 1839, John Jackson commented that ‘it is extremely difficult to obtain a perfect block of a single piece equal to the size of an octavo page’ (p. 638). Nevertheless, until around the early 1860s, such blocks could be found. They were to become increasingly rare as wood became scarcer, and smaller trees were felled. Although this narrative of boxwood depletion is relevant to all Victorian wood engravings, it seems particularly pertinent to the idyllists because of their nostalgic engagement with landscape. Of course, many Victorian engravings depicted rustic and natural scenes. Nevertheless, this subject did not then dominate the medium in the way it had dominated earlier traditions involving such engravers as Thomas Bewick, William Blake, and Edward Calvert (and indeed later ones such as Eric Ravilious). The Victorian moment—​in which wood engraving was commercially dominant and in which the environmental damage was therefore particularly great—​largely coincided with a breadth of subject matter for the medium, which was used to represent diverse aspects of modern life, including urban, global, and commercial culture. Within that vast body of work, artists like the idyllists stand out as continuing an earlier tradition, connecting wood engraving with a rustic, reflectively nostalgic vision of the natural world. Myles Birket Foster’s ‘idyllic beauty’: illustrations of felled trees George and Edward Dalziel observed that North’s art ‘reminded one vividly of’ an earlier artist, Myles Birket Foster (p. 17). An artist of landscapes and genre pictures, Foster was a watercolourist, painter, and illustrator, at the height of his reputation in the late 1850s. He knew Walker, Pinwell, and North through Whymper’s wood engraving office, and was friends with Walker and Pinwell.28 Foster would be crucial to the 1860s development of Dalziel’s Fine Art Gift Books, the series that was to offer a strong home to the idyllists. In 1858 Dalziel commissioned Foster to make thirty drawings for an ambitious collaboration, Birket Foster’s Pictures of English Landscape, eventually published in 1862 at Christmas. As Lorraine Janzen Kooistra has demonstrated, Foster was well

Idyllist Wood Engravings and the Lost Boxwood Forests  53 positioned to design for a high-​profile gift book, due, for instance, to his previous work for the ILN: he was known for ‘disseminat[ing] his images of bucolic Britain to a mass readership’ (p. 105). The title Birket Foster’s Pictures of English Landscape makes a discreet nod to an earlier high-​profile print series, John Constable and David Lucas’s English Landscape mezzotints, published in the 1830s. Though working in the cheaper medium of wood engraving, Foster and Dalziel, like Constable and Lucas, produced a landscape series that was at once personal and nation-​focused, experimenting with the formal and aesthetic potentials of their medium. The Dalziels’ memoir recorded that the Art Journal’s review praised Foster’s work for its ‘idyllic beauty’, positioning him in terms that would later define the loose school encompassing North, Pinwell, and Walker.29 Deforestation is explicitly addressed in one print in Pictures of English Landscape, ‘The Wood-​Wain’. The composition presents a mixture of woodland and clearing, and the central focus is a cart laden with logs. In the foreground three spectators look avidly on, their viewing position similar to our own. These spectators’ positions—​lounging on felled tree trunks—​speaks of a relaxed and intimate connection between local rural people and the felling of trees. The contrast between live trees and dead ones is the stark focus of the print. The rather ramshackle wooden cart that is transporting the logs looks as if it may collapse under the strain at any moment, and the logs themselves seem as if they may imminently topple off to the left. This creates a pleasing visual variation that could not be more different from the regulated pile of logs in Figure 2.7. But the overladen cart also suggests a rather lackadaisical husbandry of this outstanding natural resource, which is celebrated in the beautiful living tree on the right. Throughout Pictures of English Landscape, Dalziel and Foster’s wood engravings are complemented by verbal ‘illustrations’ by Tom Taylor, with contributions by Laura Taylor, née Barker. The poem for ‘The Wood-​Wain’ (Figure 2.8) is striking for the way it anthropomorphizes the suffering of the trees. The first stanza comprises a fearful lament of a century-​old ‘stout oak’, talking to a ‘slim beech’. Here are the last nine lines of the stanza: ‘I saw the wood-​bailiff of late go by,      And he eyed us both with a cruel eye. In hedge-​row and copse the axe’s stroke      I hear, and the shuddering crash, That tells of the death of brother-​oak,     Or sister-​ beech and ash; So bid good-​bye to earth and sky,      From roots low down to limbs on high,         Our time is come, and we must die!’30 The second stanza develops the anthropomorphization, describing the tree felling as if it were a devastating plague or massacre, with ‘bared’ and ‘pale’ felled trees ‘Upon the dead cart thrown, | As it rolls along the grassy ride’. Like undead corpses, the trees suffer even as they are transported on the cart: ‘The naked trunks they quake and quiver, | Where on the wain they lie’. The living trees alongside the route are then described as terrified witnesses, which ‘shake and shiver, | As the dead trees are borne by’. Taylor—​ who is writing after the prints—​observes the frailty of the wooden cart in the engraving, describing how the ‘wheels and axles groan and gride […] | And […] grieve for the trunks above them tied.’ The components of the cart feel a kinship for the felled trunks, ‘for they

54  Bethan Stevens

Figure 2.8 Dalziel after Myles Birket Foster, ‘The Wood-​Wain’, wood-​engraved proof for Pictures of English Landscape, with Pictures in Words by Tom Taylor (London: Routledge, 1862). Dalziel Archive Volume 15 (1862), BM 1913,0415.176, no. 977. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. All Rights Reserved. © Sylph Editions, 2016.

Idyllist Wood Engravings and the Lost Boxwood Forests  55 [too] were trees’. We can see this writing in a tradition of mid-​Victorian art writing on the environment. Mark Frost has explored how John Ruskin’s early observation of nature combined with his ‘ability to transcribe visual experience into textual form’ in order to build an ecological approach to the natural world founded on the concept of sympathy; to engage with non-​human life forms, we must ‘sympathetically enter their lived experience’.31 Taylor’s poem on ‘The Wood-​Wain’ invites readers of this gift book to engage with Dalziel and Foster’s print in just this sympathetic way, connecting the engraving of deforestation with our own ideas about death and tragedy. While in 1858 Ruskin was already warning of environmental risks under Victorian capitalism, later he would more explicitly draw attention to the dangers of prioritizing economic gain over the conservation of valuable natural resources (Frost, pp. 22–​24). The Saturday Review’s notice of Pictures of English Landscape in December 1862, part of its wider article on ‘Christmas Books’, makes no reference to ‘The Wood-​Wain’. However, it comments both on the scarcity of boxwood and on deforestation. While press reviews of Dalziel and Foster’s book had been largely positive, this particular reviewer was unimpressed. Their work is first mentioned in an introductory paragraph rounding up the year’s gift books: Mr Birket Foster must have drawn almost all the commons and groves in England; and the price of boxwood must have risen from the incessant and annual calls made upon it by the manufactory of the Brothers Dalziel. In a word, every variety of the ‘illustrated book’ must have been worked out. It is a real comfort to have to say that this year’s outburst of Christmas books is scanty in quantity.32 Once again, the over-​exploitation of boxwood is presented as an economic concern, over and above an environmental one—​but the two go hand in hand. Before giving a lukewarm account of the ‘pleasing’ Pictures of English Landscape, the reviewer considers another illustrated book, John Wise’s The New Forest. Discussing how that particular landscape has been exploited for ‘navy timber’, the writer comments that ‘it is probably doomed; and we are glad that Mr Wise has, in this handsome volume, preserved a memorial of the New Forest when, as it yet is, it was a forest’ (pp. 721–​22). Unlike the other gift books under review, Wise’s New Forest is praised for its seriousness as ‘a monograph’: ‘we feel a difficulty in treating it as a Christmas book at all’ (p. 721). This was on 13 December 1862; two weeks later, the reviewer returned with a ‘Christmas Books (Second Notice)’. Again, Dalziel and Foster’s work is compared unfavourably with another volume, this time Robert Bell’s Golden Leaves from the Works of the Poets and Painters. The latter gift book is praised as ‘by far the most important book of the season’, while the reviewer claims the public is ‘saturated with Mr Birket Foster and his clever workmen, and with the Brothers Dalziel and their abounding atelier’.33 One aspect of Bell’s volume that is particularly praised is the decision to offer ‘good artistic [steel] engravings’. The review argues that the market is glutted with wood engravings, ‘and as everything drawable has been drawn and cut on wood, it is something to get back, as in Golden Leaves, to metal’ (p. 783). This unsympathetic two-​part review thus placed Dalziel and Foster’s English Landscape in several revealing and connected contexts: a preference for metal engraving, a scarcity of boxwood, a cultural glut of wood engravings, and a concern for ‘doomed’ woodlands. Returning to ‘The Wood-​Wain’, Taylor’s representation of a tree massacre makes particularly uncomfortable reading in the context of this commercial Christmas marketplace, with its ostentatious use of resources.

56  Bethan Stevens Questions about boxwood supply must have arisen during production of Pictures of English Landscape. Twenty-​three of the project’s thirty woodblocks survive at the University of Reading. The illustrations are significantly larger than the average octavo; the blocks’ height ranges from 171 to 178 mm, and the width from 134 to 136 mm. Most are composite woodblocks, but despite the rarity of large, single pieces of boxwood by this date, eight of the twenty-​three surviving woodblocks are formed of a single piece of wood (more or less).34 Such specimens were unusual, but engravers do appear to have made efforts to set aside high quality, large, single pieces of box for their most ambitious projects. A similar tendency can be observed in surviving woodblocks for the equally ambitious Dalziels’ Bible Gallery, now at Birmingham Museums. To conclude: idyllist gift books were on the face of things reassuring cultural objects, bringing together an escapist vision of landscape with a market-​driven approach to culture. Like other wood engravings that represented woodland landscapes, their illustrations ironically contributed to the destruction of the kinds of environments they were celebrating. For Victorian producers and commentators, concern for the global exploitation of boxwood through the century—​a damage that, with such slow-​growing wood, could never be easily reversed—​was mostly a concern with economics, but there was also a strong sense of overlap between an awareness of resource management and other intrinsic values associated with the natural world. For those working in print culture, this was a complex situation and many of those involved appear to have been aware of it and to have registered considerable ambivalence both in the works produced and their responses and reviews. Idyllist gift books, with their particular reflective approach to nostalgia and escapism, were positioned to create haunting cultural memorials of landscape. Gift books presented an understated, beguiling vision of a natural world always on the verge of vanishing. They did this at all levels: through visual and textual forms, through engraving technique and book design, and inescapably, in the material history of the print medium on which they relied. Notes 1 I am extremely grateful to Thomas Hughes and Emma Merkling, the editors of this volume, for their generous and insightful comments, which hugely helped in refining this chapter and its argument. Thanks also to Caroline Arscott, Clare Pettitt, and to all who attended the ‘Midsummer Idyll’ workshop at The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2018. And my thanks to the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding research on the Dalziel Archive which informs this chapter. 2 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), pp. 49–​50. 3 Yi-​Fu Tuan, Escapism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 10. 4 Donato Esposito, Frederick Walker and the Idyllists (London: Lund Humphries, 2017), p. 9. See also, particularly, pp. 66, 92 for the artists’ early careers. 5 [George and Edward Dalziel], The Brothers Dalziel (London: Methuen, 1901), pp. 196–​98, 210–​18, 230–​34. Esposito gives a useful account of Dalziel’s patronage to Pinwell (pp. 81–​82). For a history of the British Museum and V&A’s collecting of wood engravings and drawings purchased from Dalziel, see Bethan Stevens, The Wood Engravers’ Self-​Portrait: The Dalziel Archive and Victorian Illustration (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), pp. 44–​56. 6 For more on the gift book as a genre, see Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855–​1875 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011).

Idyllist Wood Engravings and the Lost Boxwood Forests  57 7 Jean Ingelow, ‘The Star’s Monument’, in Poems (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, & Dyer, 1867), pp. 79–​110 (p. 108). 8 Sophie Thomas, Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 116. 9 Svetlana Boym, ‘Ruins of the Avant-​Garde: From Tatlin’s Tower to Paper Architecture’, in Ruins of Modernity, ed. by Julia Hell and Andrea Schönle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 58–​85 (pp. 58, 59). 10 Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison, ‘Introduction: Representing Victorian Environmental Nightmares’, in Victorian Environmental Nightmares (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 1–​21 (p. 10). 11 For the commodified middle-​class woman reader of gift books, see Kooistra, p. 5. 12 The Wood Engravers’ Self-​Portrait, pp. 263–​66, 282–​84, 307–​10. 13 See London, V&A Archives, Dalziel Brothers file, MA/​1/​D116, report, 12 October 1909; V&A Word and Image department, museum numbers E.4151–​1909 to E.4198–​1909; Stevens, pp. 282–​83. 14 ‘The Four Bridges’, in Ingelow, pp. 252–​88 (p. 253). 15 William Stephen Coleman, Our Woodlands, Heaths, and Hedges (London: Routledge, 1859), p. 100. 16 John Jackson [and William Andrew Chatto], A Treatise on Wood Engraving, Historical and Practical (London: Knight, 1839), p. 637. 17 William Stevenson, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Surrey (London: Phillips, 1809), p. 446; see also, [William] Marshall, A Review (and Complete Abstract) of the Reports to the Board of Agriculture: From the Southern and Peninsular Departments of England (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817), pp. 380–​81. 18 Mason Jackson, The Pictorial Press: Its Origin and Progress (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1885), p. 315. 19 ‘Boxwood Forest on the Shore of the Black Sea’, Illustrated London News, 31 July 1858, p. 99. 20 All quotations in this paragraph are from ‘Substitutes for Boxwood’, The Times, 5 February 1878, p. 3. 21 See Locomotive, March 1886, p. 47; Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, September and October 1885, p. 111; Family Herald, 17 April 1875, p. 383; Perry & Co’s Monthly Illustrated Price Current, 5 June 1875, p. 14; Littell’s Living Age, 17 April 1875, p. 192; Garden: An Illustrated Weekly Journal, 20 March 1875, p. 234; Journal of Horticulture, Cottage Gardener and Country Gentleman, 11 February 1875, p. 123; British Boys’ Paper, 30 June 1888, p. 285. 22 ‘Notes’, Nature, 28 January 1875, pp. 253–​56 (pp. 254–​55). 23 ‘The Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus at South Kensington’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 24 (1876), 980–​82 (p. 982). 24 ‘Substitutes for Boxwood’, The Times, 5 February 1878, p. 3; ‘Substitutes for Boxwood’, Labourer, 9 February 1878, p. 2. 25 ‘The Robbery of Boxwood Trees at Darlington’, Northern Echo, 25 April 1877, p. 4. 26 London, British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings, unidentified printing blocks with engravings of a cow and a horse, museum numbers 1911,0714.60–​1. 27 British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings, specimens of unengraved printing blocks from the Whymper collection, museum numbers 1911,0714.62–​7. 28 Esposito, pp. 42, 51, 81, 86, 92. 29 Quoted in Dalziel, p. 154. I cannot find this phrase in either of the Art Journal’s reviews that mark this book’s publication. Nevertheless, if this is a misquotation, it is a revealing one. I am grateful to Katharine Martin for sharing expertise on John Constable and David Lucas. 30 ‘The Wood-​Wain’, in Birket Foster’s Pictures of English Landscape (London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1862), unpaginated.

58  Bethan Stevens 31 Mark Frost, ‘Reading Nature: John Ruskin, Environment, and the Ecological Impulse’, in Victorian Writers and the Environment: Ecocritical Perspectives, ed. by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), pp. 13–​28 (pp. 14, 17). 32 ‘Christmas Books’, Saturday Review, 13 December 1862, pp. 721–​23 (p. 721). Cited in part in Kooistra, p. 107. 33 ‘Christmas Books (Second Notice)’, Saturday Review, 27 December 1862, pp. 783–​84 (p. 783). 34 Several of these single-​piece blocks nevertheless have a very small corner piece replaced, most likely because of the limited size of the boxwood trunk or possibly to allow for a correction. The remaining fifteen are formed of two or three joined pieces of wood, as was common practice. For the blocks, see the University of Reading’s woodblocks from the Frederick Warne collection, boxes 2, 11, and 26.

Bibliography ‘Boxwood Forest on the Shore of the Black Sea’, Illustrated London News, 31 July 1858, p. 99. Boym, Svetlana, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). —​ —​ —​ ‘Ruins of the Avant-​ Garde: From Tatlin’s Tower to Paper Architecture’, in Ruins of Modernity, ed. by Julia Hell and Andrea Schönle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 58–​85. ‘Christmas Books’, Saturday Review, 13 December 1862, pp. 721–​23. ‘Christmas Books (Second Notice)’, Saturday Review, 27 December 1862, pp. 783–​84. Coleman, William Stephen, Our Woodlands, Heaths, and Hedges (London: Routledge, 1859). [Dalziel, George, and Edward], The Brothers Dalziel (London: Methuen, 1901). Esposito, Donato, Frederick Walker and the Idyllists (London: Lund Humphries, 2017). Frost, Mark, ‘Reading Nature: John Ruskin, Environment, and the Ecological Impulse’, in Victorian Writers and the Environment: Ecocritical Perspectives, ed. by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), pp. 13–​28. Ingelow, Jean, Poems (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, & Dyer, 1867). Jackson, John, [and William Andrew Chatto], A Treatise on Wood Engraving, Historical and Practical (London: Knight, 1839). Jackson, Mason, The Pictorial Press: Its Origin and Progress (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1885). Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen, Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855–​1875 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011). ‘The Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus at South Kensington’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 24 (1876), 980–​82. London, British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings, unidentified printing blocks with engravings of a cow and a horse, museum numbers 1911,0714.60–​1. —​—​—​specimens of unengraved printing blocks from the Whymper collection, museum numbers 1911,0714.62–​7. London, V&A Archives, Dalziel Brothers file, MA/​1/​D116, report, 12 October 1909. London, V&A Word and Image department, museum numbers E.4151–​1909 to E.4198–​1909. Marshall, [William], A Review (and Complete Abstract) of the Reports to the Board of Agriculture: From the Southern and Peninsular Departments of England (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817). Mazzeno, Laurence W., and Ronald D. Morrison, ‘Introduction: Representing Victorian Environmental Nightmares’, in Victorian Environmental Nightmares (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 1–​21. ‘Notes’, Nature, 28 January 1875, pp. 253–​56. Reading, University of Reading, Frederick Warne collection, boxes 2, 11, and 26. ‘The Robbery of Boxwood Trees at Darlington’, Northern Echo, 25 April 1877. Stevens, Bethan, The Wood Engravers’ Self-​Portrait: The Dalziel Archive and Victorian Illustration (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022).

Idyllist Wood Engravings and the Lost Boxwood Forests  59 Stevenson, William, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Surrey (London: Phillips, 1809). ‘Substitutes for Boxwood’, Labourer, 9 February 1878, p. 2. ‘Substitutes for Boxwood’, The Times, 5 February 1878, p. 3. Thomas, Sophie, Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (London: Routledge, 2008). Tuan, Yi-​Fu, Escapism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). ‘The Wood-​Wain’, in Birket Foster’s Pictures of English Landscape (London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1862), unpaginated.

3 Multicolour as Disavowal The Racial Politics of the Nineteenth-​Century Idyll Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt

Taking as a central example Tennyson’s long poem ‘Enoch Arden’ (1864), this chapter explores the idyll as a mode in literature and art in Victorian culture after 1860. We focus on work by the artists Arthur Hughes (1832–​1915), Thomas Morten (1836–​1866), George Pinwell (1842–​1875), and the writers Alfred Tennyson (1809–​1892) and Robert Buchanan (1841–​1901). This chapter asks: what are the ideological stakes of the idyllic in terms of the politics of race and the registration of difference? Our argument is that this format actively produces disavowal of racial difference. In a revised idyllic mode, emerging in the 1860s, there is a move away from clear polarities, familiar in mid-​century discourse: self and other, white westerners and Black ‘orientals’ or Africans, colonial heartland and colonized regions. In their place a fractured, multicolour zone is established where the ever-​diminishing scale of the subunits serves to hamper visibility, producing a white-​out and effecting an elision of difference. We conclude with a discussion of racial themes in Tennyson’s play Becket (1884), tracing the evolution of the idyllic mode as it is deployed differently in an emergent aestheticism. In aestheticist works of the 1880s, idyllic spread and dazzle are maintained but are no longer fully effective in securing disavowal; racial coding becomes more visible. Part one: Alfred Tennyson, ‘Enoch Arden’ Tennyson’s ‘Enoch Arden’ was published in an 1864 volume which was originally to be called Idylls of the Hearth. The idyll is a long-​standing literary mode which focuses on nature and presents sweet and sentimental aspects of the rustic. In the 1860s Victorian authors and artists redeployed the idyllic to produce a particular emotional tenor built upon modest pleasure without indulgence. This new idyll mixes quotidian sweetness with sensationalist techniques mingling sentimentality and extreme emotion. In his extensive investigation of idyllic modes, Tennyson makes an outstanding contribution to the 1860s iteration of the idyll in ‘Enoch Arden’. ‘Enoch Arden’ begins with the long duration of geological erosion—​‘long lines of cliff breaking have left a chasm’—​then sweeps us from beach to wharf to town, up the high street to the ‘tall-​tower’d’ mill, and onto the downs on the top of the cliffs, past the ancient ‘Danish barrows’ or burial mounds, to deposit us in a ‘hazelwood’ which ‘flourishes | Green in a cuplike hollow of the down.’1 This topographical introduction nudges us towards a reading of the poem in which space becomes metonymic of action-​ in-​time or narrative. It is our contention in this chapter that the art forms that adopt the idyllic mode set aside progressive narrative in favour of looping structures. In doing so they recalibrate representation towards the axis of space rather than time and undertake DOI: 10.4324/9781003327998-4

The Racial Politics of the Nineteenth-Century Idyll  61 a spatialized dispersal of both the medium (whether verse or picture) and the motif. Alison Chapman has suggested that an idyll is ‘a verbal picture’ and has written of ‘Enoch Arden’ as ‘a poem about visuality and its uncanny limitations’ (p. 47). We suggest that the idyllic mode of the 1860s is more dynamic than ‘pictorial’ would suggest and is always actively engaged in the redistribution of energy and the consequent dispersal of form.2 The reproductive engine

Again and again in ‘Enoch Arden’, small and enclosed spaces are precariously braced against a vast edgeless openness, ‘the little haven’ on the edge of the ‘chasm’, or Philip’s ‘little garden square and wall’d’ overlooking the sea, ‘With one small gate that open’d on the waste’, for example (pp. 40, 47). We contend that a defining trope of the idyll in the 1860s is such opposition of inside to outside, black to white, man to woman, land to sea, dry to wet, etc., but it also works to undermine these binary separations and de-​ differentiate these pairings, and ultimately works to disavow difference. Oddly, the effect of this threatened dispersal is more conservative than radicalizing, but we contend that it holds the seed of a radical aesthetic. This splitting is most obvious in the doubling of the characters Philip Ray and Enoch Arden in the poem and their bigamous relation to Annie. When the three are playing together as children, Enoch boasts, ‘This is my house and this my little wife’, but the conciliatory Annie protests that she ‘would be little wife to both’, and so it transpires (pp. 2, 3). When he returns after more than ten years lost, Enoch sees Philip with Annie in a family group through a lit window, ‘Stout, rosy, with his babe across his knees; | And o’er her second father stoopt a girl’ (p. 41). The girl is Enoch and Annie’s daughter, but the babe, ambiguously described as ‘his’, is in fact Philip and Annie’s child: the ‘his’, which could refer to either Enoch or Philip, is significant. The doubling is not a simple substitution. Miriam Bailin has noticed that, in ‘Enoch Arden’, ‘simultaneity threatens the emergence of a scandalous doubleness or competition for the same space’, but she claims that such a scandal never erupts: Enoch cedes his place at the hearthside to Philip.3 In the idylls of the 1860s the singular subject is liable to be spread across multiple identities and can find him or herself ousted and witness to another self, as Enoch is here. He is not so much ceding to, or being replaced by, Philip as being reproduced in the person of Philip and forced to watch himself parted from himself and at a distance. Genealogically, the poem is not interested in sequence or in the unique or single, but in replication, and even in the cloning of copies. Feminist critics have called out the absence of Annie’s story in ‘Enoch Arden’.4 It is true that Annie’s subjectivity rarely dents the surface of the poem. Nevertheless, the female is spread and dispersed all over its surface. One insistently female genital mons-​like image appears twice in identical form: ‘Just where the prone edge of the wood began | To feather toward the hollow’ (p. 4). This feathery fuzzy place is the edge of the hazel grove: a place of harvest (nutting) and fecundity as well as a place of abjection and grief where Philip has ‘his dark hour unseen’ (p. 5). It is both the fertile womb and the abject rectum.5 We are given a gendered body in Annie translated into landscape, but the reader intuits the possibility of asexual reproduction through chopping up into subunits or budding. The reproductive body is converted into the landscape as engine in this poem; ‘Enoch Arden’ is far more interested in reproduction than in character, or even gender. The poem self-​ consciously reproduces one of the oldest stories of all, the story of the fatal return, and it

62  Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt is also about reproduction: splitting, seeding, and budding and the creation of new ‘little ones’. As we shall see, the word ‘little’ recurs frequently in the poem: Annie Lee is ‘[t]‌he prettiest little damsel in the port’; the sea washes away the children’s ‘little footprint[s]’ each day; and children are repeatedly described as ‘little ones’ (pp. 2, 13). Reproductive energies are very closely packed in the poem: Enoch ‘made a home | For Annie, neat and nestlike’; and when he leaves on his long sea voyage, he fits up the shop: ‘The space was narrow,—​having order’d all | Almost as neat and close as Nature packs | Her blossom or her seedling’ (pp. 4, 10). But this tight-​packed neatness of commodities or germinal units gives on to a loss of organization and coherence at other times: in the ‘feathering’, the ‘dissolving’ sands, and ‘the hollows of the wood’ into which Philip creeps. The result is that both tightness and looseness are dispersed widely across the poem, and emptiness undermines fullness, like the breaking cliffs in the first line, falling into a ‘chasm’. Walter Bagehot remarked of Tennyson’s ‘ornate style’ in ‘Enoch Arden’ that ‘it is somehow excessive and over-​rich; that it is not chaste in itself or chastening to the mind that sees it. […] [There is] a want of “definition”.’6 This want of definition, and the erotic charge that Bagehot hints at, is crucial to our reading of the idyllic mode, which deliberately fails to hold categories apart. ‘Can one love twice?’ asks Annie, and the poem suggests one can become two by a process of asexual budding (p. 24). The energy of the idyll is the energy created by the mixing of one agent with another: like foam or yeast, which are both referenced in the poem, the mixture ferments and grows, extending over all surfaces to fill all available space. Bagehot adds that Tennyson’s style in the poem ‘works not by choice and selection, but by accumulation and aggregation’ (p. 45). This is true, but the accumulation and aggregation in the poem are not, as Bagehot claims, merely a series of ‘miscellaneous adjunct[s]‌’ but rather represent its reproductive logic. The accumulation of the word ‘little’ in the poem, for example, offers a clue to its poetics and its politics. Annie Lee is the ‘prettiest little damsel’; the children’s footprints in the sand are ‘little’; there is a ‘little wife’, a ‘little cloud’, a ‘little […] sitting room’ (which is ‘Almost as neat and close as Nature packs | Her blossom or her seedling’); Enoch’s ‘little ones’ include his ‘weakly little’ baby whose ‘little innocent soul flitted away’ soon after he leaves; Annie retreats into a ‘little garth’ (or enclosed courtyard) when Philip begs ‘to be loved | A little after Enoch’ and Annie pleads that he ‘wait a little!’; Philip’s ‘little garden square’ into which Enoch trespasses, only to see the sight that nearly breaks him as ‘he fail’d a little’—​all this takes place in ‘the little haven’ of ‘the little port’ where Enoch is finally buried (pp. 2, 8, 10, 11, 15, 19, 24, 40, 43, 47). All these ‘littles’ are spread across the poem, blurring its distributive logic and flattening its narrative hierarchies. Reticulation and substitution in ‘Enoch Arden’

‘Enoch Arden’ was first published without illustrations, but the periodical the Leisure Hour commissioned a wood-​engraved illustration from A. R. Fairfield of the key voyeuristic scene in the poem (Figure 3.1).7 In the Leisure Hour Enoch is pictured as he is pulled inexorably towards ‘The ruddy square of comfortable light’:     By and by The ruddy square of comfortable light, Far-​blazing from the rear of Philip’s house, Allured him, as the beacon-​blaze allures

The Racial Politics of the Nineteenth-Century Idyll  63 The bird of passage, till he madly strikes Against it, and beats out his weary life. Enoch ‘stole | Up by the wall, behind the yew’ to spy through the window upon Annie with her new family inside the warm parlour (p. 40). This very first image to be made of the poem materializes a reticulation in the leaded casements of the window which is already present in Tennyson’s poem. Arthur Hughes clearly drew upon this image, elements of which reappear in his better-​known illustrations and cover designs for the 1866 illustrated volume edition of the poem (Figure 3.2).8 Hughes had clearly seen the original illustration in the Leisure Hour and he used the same scene, echoing the raised hand of the baby carefully, but he goes inside the cottage and offers its obverse. The new family are still gathered around the new baby (Philip’s baby who has replaced Enoch’s) at the reticulated window, but this is a contained scene of whiteness and brightness in contrast to the darkness of the Leisure Hour’s edgeless outdoor night scene. The switch from outdoors to the luminosity of indoors retains elements of the dark scene of despair. Knowing that Enoch is cast into the darkness outside complicates the ethics of this snug and idyllic domestic scene because the reader understands that it rests on a disconcerting disavowal. At one and the same time, we apprehend comfort

Figure 3.1 [Arthur Rowan Fairfield], Illustration for review of Tennyson, ‘Enoch Arden’, Leisure Hour (1864), p. 761. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

64  Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt

Figure 3.2  Arthur Hughes, Illustration for Tennyson, Enoch Arden (London: Moxon, 1866), p. 68. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

and discomfort, pleasure and self-​denial. To create a wood engraving, an artist gouges out an image from the end grain of a block of wood, often boxwood which is peculiarly hard and adapted to detailed carving. The areas that the artist cuts away carry no ink and will show as white if printed on white paper. The images left at surface level on the block carry the ink to produce the print. Wood engraving produces a distinctive white-​ on-​black character and was developed into a serious art form by, among others, Thomas Bewick and Gustave Doré. The whiteness of Hughes’s inside scene, where the surface of the white paper shows through the printed lines, contrasts with the dense patches of ink in the night scene. The idyllic in graphic art of the 1860s makes a virtue of the show-​ through of whiteness produced by the excavated portions of the woodblock, tending to compositions characterized by ‘all-​overness’, softened forms, and dispersed and lighter tonality. Hughes works with this effect of spread and edgelessness in his illustrations for ‘Enoch Arden’.9 In his cover designs, for example, Hughes wraps the poem in a net: a fishing net on the front cover (Enoch’s fishing), and a butterfly net made of wheat stalks surrounded with criss-​crossed cereal stems on the back cover (Philip’s milling) (Figure 3.3).10 This introduces the reticulated imagery which Hughes further emphasizes in his series of illustrations to the text inside. The snugness of the miniature that Tennyson asks us to enjoy in the protective ‘garth’—​the hedged and walled gardens, the nut groves, and the

The Racial Politics of the Nineteenth-Century Idyll  65

Figure 3.3 Arthur Hughes, Cover for Tennyson, Enoch Arden (London: Moxon, 1866). Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

nested shapes and sanctuaries of the poem—​is undone by the multiplication of the ‘little’ across the poem’s whole surface. This ramifying littleness creates a fractured, particulate, ‘pixelated’ image of multiplicity and the multiple ‘littles’ ultimately escape any binary emotional, sexual, or political structures. The reticulation also generates a category identity between the reticulated parts. The ancient ‘Danish barrows’ or burial mounds described in the opening lines of the poem inaugurate a repeated image of mounds in the poem itself which Hughes also uses to organize his illustrations: the prone bodies of Philip and Enoch form mounds like landscape forms (Figure 3.4). Reticulation, which implies an identity between parts, allows for substitution. Philip’s small baby replaces Enoch’s small baby. Philip replaces Enoch. Enoch sits in the graveyard gazing at his baby’s grave, the texture of his unkempt beard the same as that of the tangled grass on the grave. He is making or repairing a fishing net as he sits there, looping the cord over his extended foot. The net’s repeated squares govern the story as it continues. The last illustration that Hughes made for the poem is of the mound of Enoch’s grave. While there are two husbands in ‘Enoch Arden’, the poem continues to hold together these bits and makes a claim for the equality of each piece, like biological cells dividing from a primal protoplasmic substance. This is the idyll. Even in its conclusion, the plurality continues as bodies follow one another into the ground (see Figures 3.5 and 3.6).11 Enoch’s burial mound does not resemble the shape of a human body at rest, but rather the bulked-​up form of a body burgeoning, an unquiet bulge of nested energy. As if to emphasize this danger of escape, the grave is covered with a ‘mortsafe’, or iron grille.

66  Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt

Figure 3.4  Arthur Hughes, Illustration for Tennyson, Enoch Arden (London: Moxon, 1866), p. 70. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Mortsafes were used in the early nineteenth century to protect bodies from grave robbers. There is no mention of such a precaution in the poem, but, as we are told that ‘the little port | Had seldom seen a costlier funeral’, Hughes perhaps introduced it to echo the funeral’s expense (p. 50). But it also works well for his visual lexicon of reticulation: like the nets of the cover image, the window casements, and pixelated natural forms, the mortsafe becomes a machine for fragmentation, cutting up the mass into little distributed pieces and disarticulating the body beneath. Opposite the image of his burial mound, the illustrated 1866 Moxon edition juxtaposed a picture of the fierce storm that rises on the night that Enoch dies: ‘There came so loud a calling of the sea, | That all the houses in the haven rang’ (p. 49). In his picture of the stormy sea, Hughes uses the woodcutting technique to emphasize the whiteness of the bulked-​up waves which seem like solid mounds but which are also breaking up into drops, floating foam, and flying specks of whiteness. The next section of this chapter suggests that this evocation of agitated particles and sonic buzz, which is represented both in Tennyson’s text and in Hughes’s illustrations for ‘Enoch Arden’, is a characteristic technique of the idyll and one of its central tools of disavowal.12 Part two: the idyllic white-​out of the 1860s In idyllic graphic work colouristic effects are produced in black and white by means of shimmering patterns produced across the surface of the printed page.13 Cognate effects

The Racial Politics of the Nineteenth-Century Idyll  67

Figure 3.5  Arthur Hughes, Illustration for Tennyson, Enoch Arden (London: Moxon, 1866), p. 73. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Figure 3.6  Arthur Hughes, Illustration for Tennyson, Enoch Arden (London: Moxon, 1866), p. 81. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

68  Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt are achieved in Tennyson’s text by his use of word repetition and images of vibration and energy. The colour white appears in a very specific relation in the poem to labour and work. The miller, Philip, is described with a striking simile—​‘like the working bee in blossom-​dust, | Blanch’d with his mill’—​and Philip’s blanching corresponds to Enoch’s association with the frothing of the sea, and ‘the white breaker[s]‌’ of the waves which is the particular whiteness associated with his work as a fisherman (pp. 2, 20). The poem describes the work of grinding and mixing. The miller’s work of the land and the fisherman’s work of the sea are displayed on the cover design, and the windmill sails embossed on the book’s back cover suggest the energy required by disavowal. And Tennyson’s own work in making the poem is also of grinding and mixing. In the words of one of its first critics, ‘Enoch Arden’, with a skill unseen since Shakespeare, ‘quickens the iambic movement of blank verse with frequent anapaest’, and inaugurates a new style for Tennyson who displays for the first time ‘his power to deal with the commoner passions of our kind’.14 Patrick Scott has pointed out that for many readers the poem was associated with the sensation fiction of the 1860s, but Tennyson’s structure and verse in ‘Enoch Arden’ allow for its melodramatic spasms to be ground and mixed with the earthiness of the ballad and the energy of Shakespeare’s verse.15 This mixing is very energetic because disavowal cannot be inscribed or put in place but has to be maintained. This new style abjures the polished intricacies and arch poetic formalities of, for instance, Tennyson’s earlier explorations of the idyll in the 1840s and 1850s sections of Idylls of the King.16 In ‘Enoch Arden’ this work of mixing produces a most extraordinary affect as asymmetry and otherness are set aside by the mesmerizing white-​speckling which makes a unity of the poem’s disturbing encounters. Comparable issues are raised by an illustration, ‘Hassan’, designed by Thomas Morten and published in the 1867 collection of poems and pictures, Idyllic Pictures (Figure 3.7).17 Like the scene selected initially for ‘Enoch Arden’ (and reversed by Hughes in the first Moxon illustrated edition), it features the misery of the shelterless figure in the night-​time street in contrast to the comfortable circumstances of the child of the family shown in the illuminated window. Their faces are on a level because the child has climbed onto a chair to look out, her tiny hands clutching the chair back. She catches sight of him from the window. Here the polarity fundamental to the contrast is not marital standing—​the disbarred husband versus the accepted second husband—​but racial differentiation: the dark-​ skinned lascar versus the pale-​skinned white girl. The racist tenor of the poem by D. P. Starkey is predictably offensive; it urges compassion, but calls for the lascar ‘pedlar, tramp or juggler’ to go back to the Orient since he is unfitted for the European winter. There is no allusion in the poem to any witness to his misery beyond the reader/​narrator—​the girl at the window is not referenced. Nor is there reference to the policeman who stands alert near the entrance to the house in the engraving, looking the other way as the lascar passes, but constituting a pictorial guarantee against robbery, assault, or miscegenistic outrage. The idyll here depends on an amplification of the sentiment in the scene, programmed to include a rush of approval for the child’s power of compassion—​the image is poised, not yet showing a shift from the blank phlegmatic stare of the girl which is quite out of balance with the hyperbolic emotion of the lascar. What the picture sets in motion is a whiting out of the lascar’s Blackness. The communication of his misery to the child and a sympathetic response from her (finding an echo in the heart of the reader) depends on the partial undoing of polarized difference. The picture indicates that they are equivalents as well as opposites by means of the feminization of the spindly Indian: his windswept

The Racial Politics of the Nineteenth-Century Idyll  69

Figure 3.7 Thomas Morten, ‘Hassan’, in Idyllic Pictures. Drawn by Barnes, Miss Ellen Edwards, Paul Gray, Houghton, R. P. Leitch, Pinwell, Sandys, Small, G. Thomas, etc. etc. (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1867), p. 81. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

70  Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt coat and flared trousers giving his garb a skirted aspect; the fluffy curls escaping from his cap, and his earring emphasizing the femininity of his saucer-​eyed and delicately featured face. Crossed arms across his breast suggest the stance of Eve, ashamed of her nudity, expelled from Eden. A falling tear trembles on the lower margin of his eye, his thin lips spasm and tremble. This feminization is accompanied by the transformative effects of the falling snow which, as excisions in the woodblock, removes the uniform darkness of the night, whitens his eyebrows, removes the blackness of the upper portion of his hair, and cuts away a track across the back of his massive hand. The engraving allows the whirling snow to even out dark and light across the entire image and, most importantly, across the gulf between penniless lascar and English middle-​class girl. He still casts a shadow on the pavement; this is not an image devoid of threat, but it moves towards a disavowal of difference, building, on the basis of that disavowal, an idyll where love and empathy can blossom.18 We can see this negotiation of polar difference and the work undertaken to stifle otherness as an option taken up by the idyll rather than as a standard formula for Victorian culture.19 Morten experimented with the manoeuvres that we are associating with the idyllic mode in his image of Hassan of 1867. Asymmetry gives way to a snowy unity of the pulsing affective encounter.20 One exhibition picture that adopts some of the idyllic procedures that we have identified in ‘Enoch Arden’ and in Morten’s illustration ‘Hassan’ is the 1872 watercolour by George Pinwell, Gilbert à Becket’s Troth (the Saracen Maid), also known as Gilbert à Becket’s Troth—​the Saracen Maiden Entering London at Sundown. This picture too approaches racial difference with a strategy of disavowal, achieving an assimilative white-​ out, in this case based on a scattering of colour. Pinwell had already made another illustration of the theme for a poem, ‘À Beckett’s Troth’ by Robert Buchanan in the journal Once a Week in 1864 (Figure 3.8).21 In this poem Buchanan made much of the rhythms of alien language. He based his version of Gilbert à Becket on the long-​standing legend which was circulating in manuscripts as early as 1300 and had been popularly retold in ballads from the seventeenth century. Gilbert, a Northumbrian lord, is held captive in Palestine. He forms a romantic attachment to the daughter of his captor and teaches her two words of English, his own name Gilbert and his dwelling place London. She helps him escape. When he fails to return to marry her, she travels to seek him. Buchanan tells of her standing on the shore: ‘[She] heard the murmur of the waves, that seemed | Like Gilbert’s speech she could not understand’. As she arrives in Europe, she repeats the two words: ‘ “Gilbert” and “London” sweetly made for her | A melody such as a bird’s twin wings | Murmurs in flying’ (p. 573). Once she arrives in England she hears everywhere the intonations that she recognizes as his language: A beauteous speech, she knew was Gilbert’s speech, A hollow murmur deafening soul and sense, A blessed tearful memory, a voice Like the sea’s voice she could not understand. (p. 573) Pinwell illustrated the poem in upright format for Once a Week. His scene emphasizes the curiosity of onlookers and the awkward looming presence of the immigrant maid, differentiated by the beaded fringes on her costume. Her otherness, her ‘out of place-​ ness’, verges on the monstrous. She seems twice the size of the wimpled dame and blots out the staring child with her dangling sleeve.

The Racial Politics of the Nineteenth-Century Idyll  71

Figure 3.8 [George Pinwell], Illustration for Robert Buchanan, ‘À Beckett’s Troth’, Once a Week, 14 May 1864, pp. 573–​74 (p. 574). Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

However, having experimented with frieze-​like or processional compositions for some of the paintings that he exhibited at the Society of Painters in Watercolours, including the Pied Piper of Hamelin (1869) and The Elixir of Love (1870), Pinwell decided to reapproach the subject of the Saracen Maid. Gilbert à Becket’s Troth—​ the Saracen Maiden Entering London at Sundown adopts what had become his preferred horizontal shape, adapting it in this case to a meandering format (Figure 3.9). In this Pinwell finds an equivalent for the rhythmic senselessness that Buchanan made key to his poem. Figures move along the winding path from the seashore like a procession from a dance of death. People of all ages and different estates follow the route or sit on the bank: crone and children, lord and peasant, dancers and mourners, lovers, family units, and lone widows. All are described with Pinwell’s meticulous tiny brush strokes in muted earth tones, spotted with scattered patches of scintillating viridians, blues, and reds. The maid has a subtly darker skin tone, picking her out from the throng. In Pinwell’s representation, the class of the maid, who is a princess or of noble family in the versions given in ballads, is rendered irrelevant or visually illegible. This is part of the process of assimilation, dependent on the idyllic heightening of the natural features of the environment. Insofar as her otherness is registered within the picture it is done so without differentiation between Arab or Indian identity. Our eye is drawn to the maid

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72  Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt Figure 3.9 George Pinwell, Gilbert à Becket’s Troth—​the Saracen Maiden Entering London at Sundown, 1872, watercolour and bodycolour over graphite, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight (LL 3984) Purchased 1922. Artepics/​Alamy Stock Photo.

The Racial Politics of the Nineteenth-Century Idyll  73 by the unpeopled space of road to her rear; her white costume and jet-​black hair set her apart in startling monochrome from the all-​over mosaic effects of the rest of the picture. And yet the picture offers a commentary on assimilation—​of the undoing of this presence where black is opposed to white, this point of optical polarization. A pointing stem waved by the child reaches across the path behind the maid, pointing to her oddity and yet closing the pictorial gap; the flowing shawl wrapped around her swings across the space, not unlike the drape and twist of the fine lady’s costume ahead of her. The interdependence of other figures, linked in loving embrace, mutual comfort, grasping need, and comic cavorting might extend to this figure. Literal assimilation beckons in the story as the Arab princess travels to her white lover. This miscegenistic union is set to efface the chasm of monochrome and pull the gap in the scene shut in a multicolour continuum. This multipart, agglomerated unity is the tendency set out by the idyll. The environs are cohesive, cellular, expansive, all-​embracing, formed of rhythmic repetitions. Above all they are ‘natural’, encompassing the cycle of life and death and the sweet multiplicity of nature. But the invocation of nature and the activation of the idyll’s mechanisms do not naturalize racial difference: they move the representational formula to a point that achieves the racial mixing that is, otherwise, anathema. The distinct paint marks coalesce to provide a shuddering optical field, melodic like the wingbeats of the birds swooping down to the land. The story and the picture offer the promise of a barely socially permitted colonialist mixedness obliterated from notice by the ever more minutely divided visual field. With this comes the dim promise of the unleashing of the conjoined particles in a future shedding of ‘mixed’ blood on the floor of the cathedral when the mixed-​race child Thomas à Beckett, son of the immigrant maid, meets his end. Part three: balladic forms of reproduction Pinwell’s subject in his elaborate watercolour would have been familiar to viewers not just because they knew of Robert Buchanan’s poem ‘À Beckett’s Troth’ which Pinwell had previously illustrated. The source ballad was much retold in many versions, printed and sold on cheap ballad sheets and remediated by authors such as Cruikshank, Thackeray, and Dickens. Names and details varied. The prison was in Turkey or Palestine; the maid found the Northumbrian lord, still unmarried; Beckett, Bateman, or Beichan was in his counting house in London or else at his castle in Northumberland just at the point that he had married another—​a new bride who was bought off and sent packing in favour of the maid, Susie-​Pie, or Sophia. In that alternative scenario the union of Beckett and the Eastern damsel is bigamous and yet condoned, just like the second marriage to Philip in ‘Enoch Arden’.22 The mechanisms of the idyll can be discerned in Pinwell, as in Tennyson. Also commonly known to viewers of Pinwell was the link between this story and the life of the sainted Thomas à Becket (the son of the mixed-​race marriage that occurs at the end of the ballad). Dickens, in his Child’s History of England, serialized 1851–​53, gives an account of Thomas à Becket’s quarrel with the King, and his martyrdom, immediately after the story of Gilbert à Becket: ‘This merchant and this Saracen lady had one son, THOMAS À BECKET. He it was who became the Favourite of King Henry the Second.’23 The anti-​Catholic Dickens is sceptical about Thomas’s saintliness, imputing resentment, anger, and pride to the man in his self-​flagellating humility, but he tells the story of King and Archbishop at length and conveys the courage and dignity of Becket’s stand in the cathedral and the gruesomeness of the murder in the vast shadowy space. The spreading

74  Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt of his blood and body tissue on the pavement is aligned with the points of red light in the gloomy space: Then they cruelly killed him close to the altar of St. Bennet; and his body fell upon the pavement, which was dirtied with his blood and brains. It is an awful thing to think of the murdered mortal, who had so showered his curses about, lying, all disfigured, in the church, where a few lamps here and there were but red specks on a pall of darkness; and to think of the guilty knights riding away on horseback, looking over their shoulders at the dim Cathedral, and remembering what they had left inside. (pp. 65–​66) The scattering of colour in Pinwell’s watercolour technique and the mobile cohesion of the composition produce an overall soft animation borne by near-​linkage of figures, crumbling clay, tufty grass, scattered daisies, wafts of chimney smoke, hazy hillsides, skeins of birds, and fluttering flags and draperies. The landscape is as biologized as the slopes and dell of ‘Enoch Arden’. In this case the visual effects and suggested substances enact the melding of the mixed-​race marriage, foretold as a healing of the interrupted surface of the picture, engulfing the glaring polarity instantiated in the dark-​skinned, white-​clad central figure. The scattering of colour, so powerful in its move to dedifferentiation and disguise, nonetheless portends the undoing of the cohesion, the possibility of its spreading into widely separated gouts and specks of colour akin to the bodily dissolution in the cathedral. The soft mossiness and the work undertaken by that murmuring form of representation is characteristic of the idyllic mode. Racial difference is disavowed in Pinwell’s almost fully ‘idyllized’ vision but, as always with disavowal, the framework is fragile, the idyllic body is liable to be dissevered or to burst asunder. The ballad form itself was subject to much analysis in the late nineteenth century. Andrew Lang the folklorist looked closely at the ballad ‘Lord Bateman’ and its retellings, discerning in it a shift from the true poetry of the oral tradition to a degraded literary form in the nineteenth century. He identifies the universal story form of ‘The Captor’s Daughter’ that structures ‘Lord Bateman’. He leans somewhat on the satirical footnotes that Thackeray produced for an edition of Cruikshank’s retelling, asserting that Cruikshank heard the ballad being sung outside his window in already degraded form by a street seller called ‘Tripe Skewer’ and went on to further cockneyfy it. In Lang’s view the poetic folk ‘germs’ are scarcely visible in the urban reformulations made under the pressure of modern social structures and commerce. He follows Walter Scott in differentiating the communal poetic feeling of balladry from later, more individualistic literary forms. The chopping of offal and sticking lumps in sequence onto a skewer is suggestive of the kind of literary butchery to be seen in the nineteenth century: The degraded populace of the slums may be unpoetical, like the minstrel named ‘Tripe Skewer’, and may deprave the ballads of its undegraded ancestry into such modern English forms as ‘Lord Bateman’. […] To the true folk we owe the legend of Lord Bateman in its ancient germs; and to the folk’s degraded modern estate, crowded as men are in noisome streets and crushed by labour, we owe the Cockney depravation, the Lord Bateman of Cruikshank and Thackeray.24

The Racial Politics of the Nineteenth-Century Idyll  75 Frances Gummere in 1904 takes this argument of Lang’s further, among the debates spurred on by new editions of ancient ballads and proliferating learned commentary. He engages with positions taken by Thomas Finlayson Henderson and Bernhard ten Brink:25 The late Professor ten Brink admirably defined old and vanished balladry as a making which ‘oscillated between production and reproduction.’ Preserved only by a mingling of individual art, this old communal ballad begins with the smallest possible amount of production—​one thinks, for matter, of the so-​called cumulative songs; for style, of incremental repetition as developed out of refrains—​to the greatest possible amount of reproduction; and gradually reverses this proportion, until the communal element has too little energy of its own, and too little aid from social conditions, to keep up its life.26 Here reproduction is understood as repetition and production as literary intervention. Our argument is that the idyll in the 1860s and beyond seeks to re-​find the poetic fecundity associated by the folklorists with the fundamental oral traditions of poetry. It does not adopt the courtly formats associated with earlier idylls where one might say that the idyll was congruent with the pastoral, always leaving a possible opening for aristocrats to pose as shepherds. Instead, a plainer form of language is adopted, noted by some critics and associated with a wholesome British tradition of blank verse.27 We might say that it attempts a ‘folk’ idyll, just at the moment that idyllic writing and picture-​ making were finding a mass market. In ‘Enoch Arden’ there is a density of lush descriptive writing, as Bailin has pointed out, but, as she argues, it is description where spatiality supplants temporal progression, where everything is interchangeable (esp. 320–​21). The density of description is made up of ‘pictorial’ units which could occur in any order. The substitutional logic of the plot puts the story into this mode too. Bailin associates this commutative, convertible logic with the harnessing of intense sentimentalism, so prevalent in the period, permitting, as it did, the tendency for ‘transformation of the aggressive into the acquiescent’ (p. 314). Our argument is that this is the format that allows for the disavowal of racial difference. Brink’s identification of the poetic, undegraded early ballad with reproduction and repetition is appropriate for the loop structure of the idyll as we see it in ‘Enoch Arden’ and the murmuration that structures Pinwell’s take on the story in The Saracen Maid. The making of multiples—​multiple marks, multiple husbands, multiple families, multiple graves—​is all a matter of the kind of reproduction that is multiplication, and remultiplication without difference. ‘Gilbert, Gilbert, Gilbert’ is the soundscape of The Saracen Maid. This is a kind of cloning logic rather than a fantasy of sexual reproduction entailing difference and permitting progress and individuation. We intuit that the nuts of the dell gathered each year are each one of these multiplied germs. The story of ‘Enoch Arden’ ultimately makes many by subdivision, cutting each unity into reticulated squares, each acting as a new cell for being. However, the poem also references productive labour, the worthy working efforts of Philip, in particular, building up viable financial support for a household which has a future—​if we attend to the folklorists’ idea of the poetic, this would take us perilously close to the productive realm of individualistic literary efforts that wipe out and obscure the poetic germ. Yet Tennyson’s story, by bringing back Enoch from his desert island, makes us attend to another aspect of Philip’s labour: the grinding into particles, each identical and liable to pass through a different

76  Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt gap in the mesh.28 So long as Enoch is known to exist alongside Philip, that ancient poetic mode of ‘incremental repetition’ is available. Only if we were to edit out Enoch could the novelistic family unit be stabilized. The figure of the Saracen Maid is the locus of the operations undertaken by the idyll. There is the potential for visual absorption into a mode of all-​over patterning and velvety substance. She can be absorbed in a mise en abyme of belonging; she can swap in for the new bride of Lord Bateman, her Blackness can be whited out. But the condition of integration is the loss of singularity in the original figure. The bride, in the idyll’s re-​finding of the poetic ballad, is liable to tesselate, be distributed, thereby anticipating the shedding of blood in the cathedral, and recalling the shedding of Saracen blood at Crusaders’ hands, or the shedding of Asian and Near-​ Eastern blood at the hands of nineteenth-​century colonists. Late Tennyson and the avowal of the disavowed

Tennyson, having experimented with the emotional parameters of the idyll in ‘Enoch Arden’, approaches the idyll again in his play Becket drafted in the late 1870s and published in 1884.29 The parameters of the idyll in ‘Enoch Arden’ encompassed a sing-​ song domesticity, wrapped around in reassurance and felicity, animated by the pounding heartbeat of the sensational aspects of the plot: sweet patterns set against the shuddering, silent anguish of ongoing sacrifice. In Becket the sweet rural retreat is traumatically invaded, and suppressed agony is vented. The two ‘husbands’ in ‘Enoch Arden’ become the two ‘wives’ of King Henry II in Becket. His official wife is Queen Eleanor, his unofficial wife is his lover Rosamund. Henry hides his marriage to Queen Eleanor from Rosamund and allows Rosamund to think that she is legally married to him, making their son seem legitimate. Additionally, there is a doubling (Enoch/​Philip-​like) between Henry and Becket. Their youthful friendship makes Henry imagine an idyllic outcome when he makes Thomas Archbishop: Hoped were he chosen archbishop, Church and Crown, Two sisters gliding in an equal dance, Two rivers gently flowing side by side—​30 Tennyson’s play focuses on the dashing of these hopes for an unsexed, utopian parallelism. The dramatization of their quarrel ends with Becket’s murder. Although Becket does not resist, he says to Hugh the knight: Hugh, I know well thou hast but half a heart To bathe this sacred pavement with my blood. God pardon thee and these, but God’s full curse Shatter you all to pieces if ye harm One of my flock! (p. 208) In these words, a violent scattering, contingent on the forcing of Crown in place of Church (or the abandonment of the disavowal that looks away from their incompatibility), is referenced. The play’s end sets out the final explosive disintegration of the idyll.

The Racial Politics of the Nineteenth-Century Idyll  77 A ‘tremendous thunderstorm’ and ‘flashes of lightning thro’ the Cathedral’ are the final stage instructions (p. 213). In the substitution-​logic of the plot, the impossibility of recognizing the utter authority of Crown and of Church at the same time is set into correspondence with the extreme danger caused by the co-​presence of Eleanor and Rosamund. The idyll can only be maintained if Eleanor is kept out of Rosamund’s bower. The scenes set in the secret, secluded bower contain the play’s most poetic, descriptive passages, where the location is like a sun-​filled outdoor cathedral with its ‘tree-​towers, | Their long bird-​echoing minster-​ aisles,—​the voice | Of the perpetual brook, these golden slopes | Of Solomon-​shaming flowers’ (p. 120), but the idyll is radically unstable in this play, even more so than in ‘Enoch Arden’, or indeed in The Saracen Maid. Even when most fulsomely evoked, this glorious natural enclave is under threat, disfigured by a darkness, whether the absence of Henry, as Rosamund states, or his moral disfigurement with what he calls the ‘foul stream’ of his own ‘beast-​body’ (p. 93). The poetic twittering of birds, buzzing of bees among the flowers, breaking of waves against the nearby cliff, and babbling of the brook that runs through the bower are integral to the beauty that is meant to screen the inhabitants from ugly strife, but, in this play, the sounds always hover on the edge of moving from a diffuse buzz into unwelcome decipherable revelation. The comic characters—​whether leprous beggars, court fool, or maidservant in the bower—​fashion crude rhymes which puncture the idyll. Beggars point to sexual transgression, miscegenation and efforts at disguise when they speak of the black sheep rutting with the miller’s white lamb and black turning to white as the miller’s flour is beaten into his back (p. 81). Margery the maidservant is incapable of discretion and lets Rosamund know of Henry’s marriage to Eleanor. She sings in tightly matched rhymes which should give the simple substitutes of the idyll, and her song offers imagery of the buzzing and rustling of nature that should be a shield against unwelcome specifics to guarantee blithe ignorance. Nonetheless, her song is devastatingly clear that secrecy and disavowal have been collapsed, not by abolition of the idyll’s components, but through the very murmuration of the bower: Babble in bower     Under the rose! Bee mustn’t buzz,     Whoop—​ but he knows (p. 122) In the play the bower’s perimeter is breached by the murderous Queen Eleanor—​another figure coded as black-​hearted and racially coloured, not literally, but systematically, by association with Arab culture. Rosamund accuses her of wanton dealings with sundry lovers including Saladin (‘Saladdeen’) (p. 159). The first item to breach the protection of the bower is the Queen’s crucifix, an exotic jewelled artefact brought back from the East, that Henry gives to Rosamund. Second are the deadly items brought into the bower by Eleanor, instruments of death that she challenges Rosamund to choose between: slicing by the marvellously wrought dagger given her by an Arab soldier or bloating by the workings of poison. Significantly, these are the very processes on which the idyll depends. With its doublings and multiplications the idyll always subdivides and cuts into pieces; with its organic softness it always allows forms to billow out with the multidirectional increase of substance. In Becket Tennyson sets forth an idyll in which disavowal

78  Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt fails and the violent technologies of the idyllic mode become apparent. It is not just the precariously disavowed racial difference which becomes apparent but the ‘Orientalist’ formations (ornament, colour, multiplicity) of the idyll itself which are laid bare.31 One secret that the play effectively blurts out, which the threadbare idyll of its scenario allows us to see, is that Henry himself intermittently identifies as part Arabic. Quarrelling with Henry, Becket points out that God forbids the supplanting of sacred authority by temporal authority. Henry’s reply is No! God forbid! and turn me Mussulman! No God but one, and Mahound is his prophet. But for your Christian, look you, you shall have None other God but me—​me, Thomas, son Of Gilbert Becket, London merchant. (pp. 108–​09) The duality of affectionately twinned colleagues Thomas and Henry, ‘idyllically’ doubled, can turn to the singularity of mutually exclusive gods: the Islamic God and the Christian God. Henry, in his rage, sets Islamic monotheism as a contrast to Christian. He would heed the Islamic God, he claims, and even convert to Islam, but in the case of the Christian God he will not heed the instruction because he feels that Thomas has set himself up as God. In this bewildering juggling of opposed identities (Henry and Thomas, Mussulman and Christian, God and his prophet or priest) Henry very nearly blurts out one more hidden truth: that his Archbishop Thomas is son of the Saracen maid as much as the son of Gilbert Becket. Orientalism and the idyll

The idyllic mode facilitates disavowal, and in the 1860s and 1870s—​at an increasingly racialized and imperialistic moment in British history—​what is most likely to be disavowed is race. Already in ‘Enoch Arden’ race is disavowed in a way which makes very visible its crucial role in the politics of the idyll more generally. Enoch’s entrepreneurial journey as a merchant seaman to China is successful: his ship arrives safely ‘in her oriental haven’ where Enoch is able to trade ‘for himself’ (p. 30).32 Hughes provides an illustration which is oddly overdetermined for a poem which gives only three short lines to this episode. On his return voyage, Enoch is shipwrecked and lives for years on an uninhabited tropical island where, ‘Set in this Eden of all plenteousness’, he ‘Dwelt with eternal summer, ill-​content’ (p. 31). Enoch spends years on this featureless, seasonless island and this episode is given a few pages of verse, but both these ‘oriental’ and ‘far and far away’ experiences are topographically faint and vacuous in an otherwise almost obsessively spatially plotted poem. The ‘Oriental’ is an avowed opposite to the European and exerts only a dull 1850s presence as an ‘otherness’ which cannot participate in the more exciting turbulence of the idyll. This is clear in Hughes’s featureless illustration of the tropical island which has lost the sexualized contours of Annie’s body and is unplugged from the intense eco-​spaces of the ‘white’ body of the poem.33 In Tennyson’s text too, the ‘offshore’, non-​British episodes in China and on the tropical island are relegated to second order and are by no means fully participatory in the white plot. While the idyll

The Racial Politics of the Nineteenth-Century Idyll  79 does its grinding and mixing work, the other or the repressed is held at bay and violence intrinsic to the polarizing process is whited out. By looking at cases where direct reference is made to non-​European figures and locations, we have demonstrated that the sweet, sentimental resources of the idyll can be used to set in train processes of disavowal. Formal resources and imagery are drawn upon by authors and artists such as Tennyson, Hughes, Morten, and Pinwell in the period from the early 1860s to the early 1870s. Doubling, reversibility, aural and visual reverberation, repetition and the thwarting of temporal progression, prioritization of space, shuffling of gender positions, and more have been identified in the literary and artistic examples considered here. These formal mechanisms and thematic characteristics consistently combine the subdivision of entities and the massing up of form. Subdivision as a mechanism requires splitting: the dagger can be the tool to emphasize this. Massing up and bulking out of matter stretch and distort the margins of an entity: poison can be the active substance to emphasize this. What could be more Oriental in Victorian fantasy than a jewelled dagger? What could be expected from sly Oriental wickedness but the administering of deadly poison? The ironic finding of our discussion is that the very formal mechanisms relied upon to ‘white out’ disturbing instances of difference are, recognizably for the Victorians, ‘Orientalist’ in their derivation. Tennyson’s ingenious building of a bower and slashing through the idyll in Becket brings this to our attention. Even when indigenous tradition is being invoked, and there is an attempt to reach back to the unsullied germs of the poetic capability of the common folk, the modern idyll looks beyond Europe. In the colonialist period the guarantees of an English poetic take on English nature were jewelled and glittering and seized from the battlefields of the East. Conclusion Racist polarization is never symmetrical. In the revised approach to the idyll adopted by Tennyson in his Becket of 1884 he ventures on a mode that we might identify as aestheticist. In aestheticism, in the total multicolour of nature, the Blackness becomes visible, not as a ‘touch’, but as a stain, a mark, and a threat. The aestheticist development of the idyll is positioned not as melancholic pastoral but as something franker about the murderous and the poisonous, revealing the violence that was always churning under the soft and speckled surface of the idyll. Notes 1 Alfred Tennyson, ‘Enoch Arden’, in Enoch Arden and Other Poems (London: Moxon, 1864), pp. 1–​50 (p. 1). All quotations are taken from this edition unless otherwise stated. ‘This volume, which did not contain illustrations, was initially advertised as Idylls of the Hearth. It was a publishing sensation, selling 17,000 copies on the day of publication and 60,000 before the year’s end.’ See Alison Chapman, ‘ “A Poet Never Sees a Ghost”: Photography and Trance in Tennyson’s Enoch Arden and Julia Margaret Cameron’s Photography’, Victorian Poetry, 41 (2003), 47–​72 (p. 47). 2 Giorgio Ruperto offers a reading of ‘Enoch Arden’ as a poem informed by natural theology which ‘displays a phenomenological view of nature, where spiritual connections manifest between characters and their settings’. While his argument draws close to ours at points, we do not agree with his conclusion that Enoch’s death represents a ‘salvation’ or that the ending is redemptive. Giorgio Ruperto, ‘Idylls of the Hearth: Enoch Arden and the Creation of Paradise’

80  Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt (unpublished master’s thesis, Harvard University, 2017) http://​nrs.harv​ard.edu/​urn-​3:HUL. InstRe​pos:37736​744 (p. 2). 3 Miriam Bailin, ‘Seeing Is Believing in Enoch Arden’, in Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, ed. by Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 313–​26 (p. 322). Our essay argues that, on the contrary, the poem maintains a scandalous doubleness to the end. 4 ‘The failure of readers to notice the absence of Annie’s story in Enoch Arden indicates how much for granted we take this identification of woman and family, and the consequent silencing of the woman’s story.’ Anne Humpherys, ‘Enoch Arden, the Fatal Return, and the Silence of Annie’, Victorian Poetry, 30 (1992), 331–​42 (p. 341). 5 Leo Bersani’s famous 1987 essay, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, was written in the devastating context of the AIDS epidemic and started life as a review of Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Bersani takes issue with Watney’s remark that ‘AIDS offers a new sign for the symbolic machinery of repression, making the rectum a grave’, countering that ‘it may, finally, be in the gay man’s rectum that he demolishes his own perhaps otherwise uncontrollable identification with a murderous judgment against him’, complicating Watney’s association of the rectum with death. Instead, Bersani argues that ‘male homosexuality advertises the risk of the sexual as the risk of self-​dismissal, of losing sight of the self, and in so doing it proposes and dangerously represents jouissance as a mode of ascesis.’ ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, in Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 3–​30 (pp. 29–​30 and p. 30). Emphases in original. 6 Walter Bagehot, ‘Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning; or, Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry’, National Review, November 1864, pp. 27–​67 (p. 47). 7 Arthur Rowan Fairfield (1839–​1915) produced a number of illustrations for Punch and other publications in the 1860s. 8 Alfred Tennyson, Enoch Arden, Illustrated by Arthur Hughes (London: Moxon, 1866). 9 For a detailed discussion of wood-​engraving technique, see Bethan Stevens’s contributions to Woodpeckings, the website of the project exploring the Dalziel brothers and wood engraving, Woodpeckings www.sus​sex.ac.uk/​engl​ish/​dalz​iel/​ [accessed 9 May 2023]. 10 Carey Gibbons has discussed Hughes’s illustrations and the cover designs for Enoch Arden in her PhD thesis. Rebecca Carey Gibbons, ‘The Limits of the Body in Victorian Illustration: Arthur Hughes and Frederick Sandys’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 2016). On both covers the parish bells are ringing, as they do for births and deaths, and Enoch hears the bells in an auditory hallucination when he is shipwrecked and ‘far and far away’. 11 Bailin argues that in order to normalize its conclusion, the story undoes its plurality and puts the duplicates under the ground (p. 322). 12 Here we disagree with Ruperto who registers the physical dispersal but argues that Enoch arrives at salvation in the final stages of the story: ‘He becomes a biological phenomenon, fading into the land and sea, and rising in spirit. He is earth and water incarnate. And he is Tennyson’s greatest hero’ (p. 58). 13 Discussed in Caroline Arscott, ‘Picture Posies: Illustration and the Idyllic Mode 1860–​1875’, keynote address presented at ‘A Single Drop of Ink for a Mirror: A Symposium on Nineteenth-​ Century Literature and Visual Art’, Princeton University, 4 October 2019. 14 Review of Enoch Arden and Other Poems, The Times, 25 August 1864, p. 4. 15 Patrick G. Scott, ‘Enoch Arden’: A Victorian Best-​ Seller (Lincoln: The Tennyson Society, Tennyson Research Centre, 1970). 16 See Jim Cheshire, Tennyson and Mid-​ Victorian Publishing: Moxon, Poetry, Commerce (London: Palgrave, 2016). 17 The illustration ‘Hassan’ was designed by Thomas Morten and published in the collection Idyllic Pictures. Drawn by Barnes, Miss Ellen Edwards, Paul Gray, Houghton, R. P. Leitch,

The Racial Politics of the Nineteenth-Century Idyll  81 Pinwell, Sandys, Small, G. Thomas, etc. etc. (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1867). A note at the front of the volume states that the pictures were in the main previously published in The Quiver, while the poems were created for the volume. The volume contained fifty wood-​ engraved illustrations. See Gordon Norton Ray, The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790 to 1914 (New York: Dover, 1991), p. 97. For Thomas Morten (1836–​1866) and his contributions of the 1860s to Once a Week, London Society, and Good Words, see Thomas Morten—​Aberystwyth University School of Art Museums and Galleries http://​mus​eum.aber. ac.uk/​per​son/​1672 [accessed 9 May 2023]. On the Victorian Web, Simon Cooke offers an introduction to Morten and points out that Morten’s key contribution was in his illustrations in Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1865). Cooke also tells us that ‘Thomas Morten was one of the lesser illustrators of the eighteen sixties. He is best remembered today as a tragic suicide who took his own life at the age of thirty.’ Thomas Morten (1836–​1866) https://​victo​rian​web.org/​art/​illus​trat​ion/​mor​ten/​cooke.html. For Morten’s contributions to illustrated volumes, see Illustration Archive https://​illu​stra​tion​arch​ive.cf.ac.uk [all accessed 9 May 2023]. 18 Anglophone scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s drew attention to parameters governing representation of non-​ white people in British Victorian culture: Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971); Douglas A. Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-​ Nineteenth Century (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978); James A. Snead, ‘On Repetition in Black Culture’, Black American Literature Forum, 15 (1981), 146–​54; Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–​1960 (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1982); and Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–​1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). More recently, within a much expanded scholarly field, the following are especially significant for the nineteenth century: Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (London: Verso, 2019); Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York University Press, 2020); Kyla Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); and Irene Tucker, ‘Historicizing the Theorization of Race: A Nineteenth-​Century Story’, Criticism, 6 (2019), 527–​49. 19 Natalie Hume develops an important discussion of the negotiation of racial difference in Victorian wood engravings with reference to British periodical illustrations of life and locations in America, in Natalie Hume, ‘ “A treacherous mirror”: British Commercial Artists Represent the United States: Case Studies 1869–​76’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 2019). 20 Morten also illustrated Sarah Tytler’s story of 1863 for Good Words, ‘What Hester Durham Lived For’, in which Indian rebels attack a white colonizers’ home. Morten’s image conveys strong intimations of rape and miscegenation as furious black-​faced rebels approach the gap in the curtains of the white colonizers’ dwelling. In this case an alternative strategy to that of the idyll is deployed; we encounter not Blackness whited out, as in ‘Hassan’, but whiteness sullied. The illustration is reproduced on the Victorian Web by George Landow https://​victo​rian​web. org/​art/​illus​trat​ion/​mor​ten/​3.html [accessed 9 May 2023]. 21 Robert Buchanan, ‘À Beckett’s Troth’, Once a Week, 14 May 1864, pp. 573–​74. Buchanan’s crucial role in the development of the idyll is discussed in Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt, ‘Signal Markings in Victorian Miscellanies: Noise and Signal from the Idyll to Aestheticism’, in Coding and Representation from the Nineteenth Century to the Present: Scrambled Messages, ed. by Anne Chapman and Natalie Hume (New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 137–​60. 22 It is significant that among the many sources for the story in ‘Enoch Arden’ are the ballads ‘Auld Robin Gray’ and the Breton ballad ‘Le Chanson de Marin’. See Patrick Scott for a detailed discussion of Tennyson’s sources from Homer to Mrs Gaskell (p. 5). 23 Charles Dickens, A Child’s History of England (London: Chapman and Hall, 1870), p. 59.

82  Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt 24 Andrew Lang, ‘The Mystery of Lord Bateman’, Cornhill Magazine, February 1900, pp. 185–​93 (p. 192). Lang discusses the ancient roots of the ballad and this essay was subsequently reprinted in 1903 in his The Valet’s Tragedy and Other Stories: A Collection of Historical Mysteries. It discusses the authorship of the ballad, including a consideration of the notes in Cruikshank and ideas about Thackeray’s rendering. 25 The Netherlandish Professor Bernhard A. K. ten Brink, based at the University of Strasbourg, wrote a celebrated three-​ volume History of English Literature (1877–​ 93). His research stimulated a revival of British and German study of Geoffrey Chaucer. 26 Francis B. Gummere, ‘Primitive Poetry and the Ballad. III’, Modern Philology, 1 (1904), 373–​90 (p. 386). 27 ‘He has dealt with subjects that come home to every heart in good old English blank verse.’ ‘Enoch Arden’, Leisure Hour, 26 November 1864, pp. 759–​62 (p. 759). 28 Hughes suggests this in his cover design by making the fish small enough to pass through the holes in the net (see Figure 3.3). 29 See Ashby Bland Crowder, ‘Tennyson and Eliot: Two Beckets’, Aevum, 49 (1975), 522–​26. 30 Alfred Lord Tennyson, Becket (London: Macmillan, 1884), p. 60. 31 The term as we use it is one that necessarily activates the points about power imbalance and prejudicial stereotype set out initially by Edward Said in Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). 32 Although we are never told that Enoch’s destination is China, he buys a ‘gilded dragon’ at the market here and Hughes seems to have decided to use Chinese motifs and stereotypes in his illustration. 33 See Valerie Purton, ‘Between “bounded field” and “brooding star”: A Study of Tennyson’s Topography’, in Victorian Writers and the Environment: Ecocritical Perspectives, ed. by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 29–​46; and Emily A. Haddad, Orientalist Poetics: The Islamic Middle East in Nineteenth-​Century English and French Poetry (London: Taylor & Francis, 2002).

Bibliography Anon., Idyllic Pictures. Drawn by Barnes, Miss Ellen Edwards, Paul Gray, Houghton, R. P. Leitch, Pinwell, Sandys, Small, G. Thomas, etc. etc. (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1867). Arscott, Caroline, ‘Picture Posies: Illustration and the Idyllic Mode 1860–​1875’, keynote address presented at ‘A Single Drop of Ink for a Mirror: A Symposium on Nineteenth-​Century Literature and Visual Art’, Princeton University, 4 October 2019. Arscott, Caroline, and Clare Pettitt, ‘Signal Markings in Victorian Miscellanies: Noise and Signal from the Idyll to Aestheticism’, in Coding and Representation from the Nineteenth Century to the Present: Scrambled Messages, ed. by Anne Chapman and Natalie Hume (New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 137–​60. Bagehot, Walter, ‘Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning; or, Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry’, National Review, November 1864, pp. 27–​67. Bailin, Miriam, ‘Seeing Is Believing in Enoch Arden’, in Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, ed. by Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 313–​26. Bersani, Leo, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Bolt, Christine, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971). Brantlinger, Patrick, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–​ 1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Buchanan, Robert, ‘À Beckett’s Troth’, Once a Week, 14 May 1864, pp. 573–​74. Chapman, Alison, ‘“A Poet Never Sees a Ghost”: Photography and Trance in Tennyson’s Enoch Arden and Julia Margaret Cameron’s Photography’, Victorian Poetry, 41 (2003), 47–​72.

The Racial Politics of the Nineteenth-Century Idyll  83 Cheshire, Jim, Tennyson and Mid-​Victorian Publishing: Moxon, Poetry, Commerce (London: Palgrave, 2016). Cooke, Simon, ‘Thomas Morten (1836–1866)’ https://​victo​rian​web.org/​art/​illus​trat​ion/​mor​ten/​ cooke.html Crowder, Ashby Bland, ‘Tennyson and Eliot: Two Beckets’, Aevum, 49 (1975), 522–​26. Dickens, Charles, A Child’s History of England (London: Chapman and Hall, 1870). ‘Enoch Arden’, Leisure Hour, 26 November 1864, pp. 759–​62. Gibbons, Rebecca Carey, ‘The Limits of the Body in Victorian Illustration: Arthur Hughes and Frederick Sandys’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 2016). Gopal, Priyamvada, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (London: Verso, 2019). Gummere, Francis B., ‘Primitive Poetry and the Ballad. III’, Modern Philology, 1 (1904), 373–​90. Haddad, Emily A., Orientalist Poetics: The Islamic Middle East in Nineteenth-​Century English and French Poetry (London: Taylor & Francis, 2002). Hume, Natalie, ‘ “A treacherous mirror”: British Commercial Artists Represent the United States: Case Studies 1869–​76’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 2019). Humpherys, Anne, ‘Enoch Arden, the Fatal Return, and the Silence of Annie’, Victorian Poetry, 30 (1992), 331–​42. Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York University Press, 2020). Lang, Andrew, ‘The Mystery of Lord Bateman’, Cornhill Magazine, February 1900, pp. 185–​93. —​—​—​The Valet’s Tragedy and Other Stories: A Collection of Historical Mysteries (London: Longmans, Green, 1903). Lorimer, Douglas A., Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-​ Nineteenth Century (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978). Purton, Valerie, ‘Between “bounded field” and “brooding star”: A Study of Tennyson’s Topography’, in Victorian Writers and the Environment: Ecocritical Perspectives, ed. by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 29–​46. Ray, Gordon Norton, The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790 to 1914 (New York: Dover, 1991). Review of Enoch Arden and Other Poems, The Times, 25 August 1864, p. 4. Ruperto, Giorgio, ‘Idylls of the Hearth: Enoch Arden and the Creation of Paradise’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Harvard University, 2017). http://​nrs.harv​ard.edu/​urn-​3:HUL.InstRe​ pos:37736​744 Said, Edward, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). Schuller, Kyla, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). Scott, Patrick G., ‘Enoch Arden’: A Victorian Best-​Seller (Lincoln: The Tennyson Society, Tennyson Research Centre, 1970). Sharpe, Christina, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Snead, James A., ‘On Repetition in Black Culture’, Black American Literature Forum, 15 (1981), 146–​54. Stepan, Nancy, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–​1960 (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1982). Tennyson, Alfred, ‘Enoch Arden’, in Enoch Arden and Other Poems (London: Moxon, 1864), pp. 1–​50. —​—​—​Enoch Arden, Illustrated by Arthur Hughes (London: Moxon, 1866). Tennyson, Alfred Lord, Becket (London: Macmillan, 1884). ‘Thomas Morten’, Aberystwyth University School of Art Museums and Galleries [accessed 9 May 2023]

84  Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt Tucker, Irene, ‘Historicizing the Theorization of Race: A Nineteenth-​Century Story’, Criticism, 6 (2019), 527–​49. Watney, Simon, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Woodpeckings www.sus​sex.ac.uk/​engl​ish/​dalz​iel/​> [accessed 9 May 2023].

4 John Addington Symonds’s Theocritus and the Homoerotic Idyll in Sicily Daniel Orrells

The nineteenth-​century English reception of Theocritus’ Idylls was crucial for the development of the Victorian discourse on ‘Greek love’. This chapter examines the place of Theocritus’ poetry in John Addington Symonds’s 1873 work, Studies of the Greek Poets and shows how Symonds’s reading of Theocritus was his first and most public discussion of ‘Doric’ love, which would have a profound impact on the production and the circulation of homoerotic media in late nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century Europe. Theocritus was a poet who was probably from and lived in Sicily (possibly, Syracuse), and very likely also lived and wrote in the city of Alexandria. His literary career began in the 280s BC E and extended into the middle of the century.1 Several of the idylls feature the songs of rustic herdsmen, often singing in competition or in exchange with one another. But Theocritus’ bucolic poems do not record primitive, rural life in nature before the emergence of cultured, civilized modern society which would have been enjoyed by his city-​dwelling readers. The herdsmen’s songs repeatedly sing of lost loves and lost past worlds. The characters in the poems testify to a nostalgia for a past that is already long gone. As Simon Goldhill has put it, ‘The sophisticated city hankering for the absent world of the country finds expression in [these] songs of desire and loss’ (p. 236). The herdsmen’s yearning for loves they have lost and pasts that are gone is encapsulated in their language which itself refers back to a long tradition of Greek literary culture. Much of the pleasure in reading Theocritus’ Idylls is registering the jarring ironic distance between the apparently rustic simplicity of the herdsmen’s country lives and their highly literary, sophisticated songs. Theocritus’ readers are enjoined to think about their own relationship to the singing herdsmen in the poems: are we to be amused that we can recognize various literary references which they themselves seem not to hear, or do their songs of lost love actually hold up a mirror to our own love lives? How far away from or how close to these herdsmen are we ‘modern’ city-​dwelling, educated readers in Alexandria, London, New York meant to be? The competition in and exchange of songs in these poems—​Theocritus’ Idylls are often structured as songs within songs—​also testifies to the multiplicity and polyphony of the bucolic voice. There is no single model of the pastoral song in the Idylls: no one poem is like another. Beyond herdsmen singing, there are poems for rich, powerful patrons Hiero and Ptolemy, a hymn to the brothers Castor and Polydeuces, the songs of the lovesick Cyclops and Simaetha, and the story of Heracles and Hylas. If modern translators and readers have sometimes seen Theocritus as a simple, primitive poet of the countryside, nineteenth-​century responses to his poetry were much more keenly aware of the nostalgia as well as the variety of the Idylls.2 As Robert Browning put it in relation to his Dramatic Idyls: ‘An idyl, as you know, is a succinct little story DOI: 10.4324/9781003327998-5

86  Daniel Orrells complete in itself; not necessarily concerning pastoral matters.’3 Browning was referring to the origins of the word ‘idyll’, which comes from the Greek word eidullion, meaning ‘little picture’ or ‘sketch’ and as such was a diminutive form of the word eidos, meaning ‘form’ or ‘picture’. The most widely read idylls in Victorian literature were Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, a cycle of twelve narrative poems published between 1859 and 1885, retelling the rise and fall of King Arthur’s kingdom. Tennyson was a huge admirer of Theocritus’ poetry, and his use of ‘idyll’ reflected this Victorian understanding of the word as a short poem which told a self-​contained story. Moreover, the sense that an idyll was somehow pictorial was reflected by the visualization of Tennyson’s poetry: his poems were illustrated by the Victorians more than any other writer apart from Shakespeare. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King were visions of a chivalric epoch of brave knights and beautiful damsels and seemed to celebrate highly normative mid-​nineteenth-​ century gender stereotypes. But just as Theocritus’ poems evoked the disappearance of a happier past, so did Tennyson’s Idylls which both envision a mythical patriarchy and a world of emasculated and weakened men at the mercy of the machinations of powerful women. Near the end of the Idylls, Arthur states, ‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new’.4 In Elizabeth Carolyn Miller’s words, ‘The idealism of Tennyson’s poem can be read [as] an ambivalent idealism that asserts the necessity of the moral ideal even as it exposes its own values as steadily eroding with the passage of time.’5 Like Theocritus’ poems, Tennyson’s Idylls were not simply pictures of a bygone, ideal age but images of the sense of loss at the heart of even the primeval past. Symonds’s discussion of Theocritus’ Idylls in Studies of the Greek Poets reflected on these themes in both the poems themselves and their nineteenth-​century reception in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Symonds (1840–​1893) was a major English intellectual of the last third of the nineteenth century. After studying Classics at Oxford, he lived off private wealth and became a prolific writer for a public, educated audience. His books ranged across a wide array of topics, including volumes of evocative travel essays and books on European and American literature. His seven-​volume history of the Italian Renaissance was a hugely important catalyst for popularizing fourteenth-​and fifteenth-​century artistic culture in the Victorian imagination. But he has become best known in the last fifty years for his writings on sexuality and sexual reform. Even though Symonds married and had four daughters, he was sexually attracted to boys and men. His books, A Problem in Greek Ethics and A Problem in Modern Ethics, both clandestinely printed, explored the possibilities and impossibilities of revivifying in the nineteenth-​century ancient Greek sexual ethics which accepted and celebrated sexual desire and love between males. In this chapter we will see that Symonds’s reading of Theocritus, which both voiced intense articulations of male homoerotic desire and repeatedly mourned the disappearance of the male beloved, would play a pivotal role in the development of Symonds’s writings on the past and present of male sexuality. How like or unlike the reader is to Theocritus’ characters—​in particular, Heracles, Hylas, and Simaetha—​would become an important question for Symonds. Various chapters in the present volume examine how the idyll offered Victorians a form of escapism that paradoxically enabled a purchase on reality. In this chapter we will see how the (un)reality of the idyllic world would provide Symonds with a vocabulary for thinking about the (im)possibilities of realizing ‘Greek love’ in the nineteenth century. After exploring his essay on Theocritus, we will trace out the impact of his reading of the ancient Greek poet in A Problem in Greek Ethics and A Problem in Modern Ethics, as well as in his travel writing about the Mediterranean. As we shall see, Symonds would read Theocritus in conjunction with Tennyson’s Idylls and their

J. A. Symonds’s Theocritus and the Homoerotic Idyll in Sicily  87 meditation on masculinity. The appeal of Tennyson’s poetry to the visual imagination of the Victorians would, as we shall examine, underpin Symonds’s reading of Theocritus, as, built into his Idylls, are allusions to the pictorial. Theocritus’ Idylls would anticipate for Symonds the aesthetics of neoclassical homoerotic photography produced by Wilhelm von Gloeden and sold to tourists in Sicily from the late 1880s onwards. As this chapter explores, the nineteenth-​century reception of the ancient Greek idyll would be fundamental to the homoerotic intellectual and artistic imagination in Europe at the fin de siècle. Let us begin, then, by considering how ancient Greek might and might not have offered a vocabulary for Victorian same-​sex male desire. Homosexual codes Historians of Victorian sexuality have become accustomed to talking about what they have called a ‘homosexual code’ in the nineteenth century. In 1989 Linda Dowling’s seminal article examined how ancient Greek and Latin were used at Oxford and Cambridge universities to speak about unspeakable desires.6 Indeed, the use of Greek and Latin words and words associated with ancient Greece and Rome was not only the property of rich university students. As Harry Cocks has shown, Victorian personal ads would sometimes announce an interest in a ‘Socratic’ friend.7 And the homosexual code made its most famous appearance in a courthouse in London in 1895 when Oscar Wilde tried to defend the love that dare not speak its name. Such a code was invoked in response to the sexologists and criminologists who were busy compiling inventories and categories of sexual desires and perversions, in an effort to tabulate the scientific truth of sex. Greek, it seems then, offered certain men the opportunity to express an alternative truth of their sexual desires. But what does it mean to say that ancient Greek pederasty could have offered a mirror for the Victorian homosexual in which to recognize himself? Was this process of identification really quite so straightforward in an age characterized by the institutionalization of positivist historiography and history itself as an academic discipline?8 Classical Greece occupied a complicated position in the Victorian historical imagination. On the one hand, the artistic, scientific, and political achievements of the ancient Greeks seemed to provide models and exemplars for modernity; and yet ancient Greece also seemed distant and inimitable. Greece hovered between timeless example and historical other. Symonds would have been made very aware of the debates about the historicity of ancient Greek culture from his classical education at Oxford, which included tutorials from Benjamin Jowett, the Regius Professor of Greek. In the 1850s, under Jowett’s authority, Oxford reorganized the Classics curriculum so that Plato’s dialogues became increasingly centralized on the syllabus. Socrates’ searching questions of his interlocutors were seen by Jowett as models of intellectual inquiry. The Platonic dialogues provided Jowett with templates for tutoring his students. But if Socrates offered the Victorian professor the model of what a teacher might look like, the dialogues also repeatedly featured beautiful youths and men. The relationship between philosophy and eros in the dialogues would become an object of much debate from antiquity onwards about the relationship between knowledge and desire, between pedagogy and pederasty: what should the relationship be between the teacher and the student? Socrates in Plato’s texts became emblematic for the nineteenth-​century reception of ancient Greece: on the one hand, his teaching was a timeless model; and, on the other, his homoerotic desires encapsulated the historical otherness of ancient Greek culture.9

88  Daniel Orrells Jowett suggested that any allusion to pederastic desire in ancient Greek philosophical texts featuring Socrates was ‘a figure of speech which no one interpreted literally’.10 For Jowett, Plato was such an important figure because his philosophy provided ideals to which Victorian men should aspire. Jowett was one of many Victorian intellectuals who looked back to ancient Greece for a philosophy of idealism. European philhellenism was deeply invested in dematerializing and spiritualizing ancient Greek culture. For Jowett, reference to ‘Greek love’ could not be physical; it was a metaphor for the dialectic of intellectual advancement between male teacher and pupil. But was ‘Greek love’ (only ever) just textual? Could it also be real(ized) again in the nineteenth century? Symonds was one of Jowett’s most brilliant students and his writings testify to the close attention he paid in his Oxford tutorials. And the issue of the ideality and reality of ‘Greek love’ in the nineteenth century was a central question for Symonds.11 The challenges ancient Greek sexual ethics posed for Victorian scholars and intellectuals who were interested in adjudicating on the relationship between antiquity and modernity were a theme throughout Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets. The relationship between teacher and student was also important in that Studies was a book designed to introduce the interested, educated public to ancient Greek literature, and it emerged out of a series of lectures Symonds delivered at Clifton College in Bristol in 1869. Symonds had been suffering ill health due to living under the strain of leading a double life, outwardly a married man with children but in private struggling over his sexual desires for boys and men. He and his wife, Janet Catherine, had moved to Bristol (where Symonds was originally from), and while teaching at Clifton he developed a relationship with Norman Moor, a student in the sixth form. Symonds’s Memoirs, which he penned between 1889 and the early 1890s, records the affair. The following is an extract, dated 28 January 1870, not long before Norman was to begin at Oxford, when Symonds describes having sex with his younger lover: Oh, the strain of those delicate slight limbs and finely moulded breasts—​the melting of that stately throat into the exquisite slim shoulders—​as of the Genius of the Vatican—​the στέρνα θ’ ὡς ἀγάλματος κάλλιστα [and his most lovely breast, like that of a statue]. I find it hard to write of these things; yet I wish to dwell on them and to recall them, pen in hand:—​the head that crowned all, pillowed with closely cut thick flocks of hair and features as of some bronze statue, sharp and clear—​the chiselling mouth […]. His hips are narrow, hardened where the muscles brace the bone, but soft as down and sleek as satin in the hollows of the groin. Shy and modest, tender in the beauty bloom of ladhood, is his part of sex κύπριν ποθοῦσαν ἤδη [now longing for passion]—​fragrant to the searching touch, yet shrinking: for when the wandering hand rests there, the lad turns pleadingly into my arms as though he sought to be relieved of some delicious pang […]. Norman is all in all and wholly μελίχλωρος [honey-​pale].12 Symonds opens the scene by referring to one of his own poems, ‘The Genius of the Vatican’, which he had written in response to his pleasure in gazing at the statue of the ‘Eros of Centocelle’ in the Vatican. Symonds imagines Norman as a beautiful Greek sculpture. This object also makes an appearance in Studies of the Greek Poets when Symonds is discussing the pervasive theme of ‘the fragility of human life’ in ancient Greek poetry:

J. A. Symonds’s Theocritus and the Homoerotic Idyll in Sicily  89 The tone of these elegies pervades a great many monuments of Greek sculpture. Standing before the Genius of Eternal Repose, or the so-​called Genius of the Vatican, we are moved to tears by the dumb sadness with which their perfect beauty has been chastened. Like the shade of young Marcellus in Virgil, they seem to carry round them a cloud of gloom, impalpable, yet overshadowing their youth with warnings and anticipations of the tomb.13 The coupling here of the image of beautiful youth with foreboding temporality is laced through Symonds’s representation of sex with Norman. Symonds’s focus on Norman’s youth expresses the fleeting ephemerality of love, gone as soon as it is kindled. The sex scene recalls the sense of loss that coloured nineteenth-​century erotic English poetry about boys.14 Symonds’s focus on Norman’s tender youth (‘delicate slight limbs’, ‘exquisite slim shoulders’, his ‘ladhood’, ‘the lad’) echoes the language used by pederastic poets such as the Eton Classics master William Johnson. The Greek ‘now longing for passion’ in Symonds’s sex scene is a quotation from the poet Anacreon, whose fragments repeatedly record the passions of pederastic desire. The sex scene stages Norman’s temporal transition from youth to manhood. From teacher and pupil to lovers, Symonds’s relationship with Norman crosses the line between pedagogy and pederasty: it is Symonds’s ‘intention to educate Norman and to stimulate his intellect’ (Memoirs, ed. by Regis, p. 383). Greek quotations from Plato and Euripides colour the scene. Norman is μελίχλωρος, ‘honey-​ pale’, a word used by Socrates in Plato’s Republic, when describing men’s love for even the imperfections of their boyish lovers: a true lover ‘feels affection’ for his beloved ‘as a whole’, just as ‘a philosopher’s passions are for wisdom of every kind.’15 Symonds’s map of the whole of Norman’s body (‘all in all and wholly’) is an erotic application of Socrates’ philosophy. And Symonds’s comparison of Norman to a Greek statue is a comment on Norman’s transition to adulthood and the temporal, fleeting nature of pederastic desire. The quotation comes from Euripides’ play Hecuba, when Talthybius the Greek messenger describes to Hecuba her daughter Polyxena’s beautiful statuesque breast just before her death at the hands of the Greeks, as a sacrifice to the dead Achilles.16 Symonds’s sex in Greek couches itself in ancient philosophical discourse, and yet his sexual conquest of Norman recalls Polyxena on the verge of stabbing herself to death. The moment of pleasure for Symonds results from his reading of Platonic philosophy and it violently marks the loss of Norman’s innocence. The eroticized Socratic tutorial is also a moment of saying goodbye to Norman’s body now that it is maturing into adulthood—​the death of youthful beauty. Several poems in William Johnson’s Ionica, a book of pederastic poems he privately and anonymously published while a master at Eton in 1858, had already mourned the maturation of a youth and the imminence of adulthood. One poem, ‘ΑΛΙΟΣ ΑΜΜΙ ΔΕΔΥΚΕ’ (‘The Sun Has Sunk for Me’), laments the separation of Johnson from his young lover, although he is consoled by the fact that ‘I play with those that still are here’ under his pedagogic care.17 The title is a reworking of a line in Theocritus’ Idyll 1, in a song where the shepherd Daphnis pines and dies for a lost love. Symonds also repeatedly cited Theocritus in his Memoirs. Looking back on the affection Symonds had for a choirboy when both were teenagers, he writes: I still possess a white anemone gathered on the spot of that first kiss. It marks the place in my Theocritus, where this phrase occurs: ‘there were men back then of the Golden Age, when he who was loved [that is, the beloved boy] returned one’s love’.18

90  Daniel Orrells Theocritus’ poem (Idyll 12) is about a man fast growing old who deludes himself that his love of a beautiful youth will one day be seen as a golden age of pederastic love by those in the future looking back into the distant past. These lines commemorating Symonds’s first kiss come from a poem which culminates with a desire to be a judge of boys’ kisses.19 If Symonds, then, looked back to the ageing lover in Theocritus’ poem, who anticipated a future reader looking back at him, he was all too aware of the irony of picturing his own boyhood as an irrecoverable past and he himself as that ageing lover. Nothing but an anemone connects him back to that place. Symonds’s subtle sense of the historical, then, deeply informed his sexuality. Even if his understanding of ancient Greeks seemed to provide Symonds with a secret erotic language, his desires also reminded him all the more sorely of the impossibility of knowing ancient Greece. Despite his attempts to locate an epistemology of his passions in the discourse of Platonic philosophy, which might resist the diagnoses of nineteenth-​century sexology, ancient Greek pederasty seemed to be stuck in an ancient, irrecoverable past. Symonds’s Greek was a Greek of fantasy and lyrical loss rather than a celebratory expression of sexual satisfaction: a ‘hyperreality’, to borrow Gideon Nisbet’s word for Symonds’s Greece, rather than a straightforwardly lived reality (Nisbet, pp. 117–​18). In 1889, then, Symonds looked back to a younger self in 1870, who had himself been looking back at a sex scene earlier that day, a scene which itself seemed like it had passed—​like it was in the past—​while it was happening. Symonds’s primal scene—​his first kiss of a boy, his first same-​sex encounter—​is both recorded and irrecoverable, and it was Theocritus’ poetry which expressed that temporal paradox for Symonds. Indeed Idyll 12, which Symonds quotes, begins with the older lover’s exclamation, ‘You have come, dear lad, after two days and nights, you have come; but those who feel longing grow old in a day’ (ll. 1–​2). On the one hand, just a single day seems like a lifetime for a lover. But, on the other, the speaker hopes that a messenger will visit him when he is long dead in the underworld to tell him that ‘your love and that of the handsome youth are still on everyone’s lips’ (ll. 20–​21). The lover wants his love affair to be a song that lasts forever, but it was an affair in which the lover felt the pain of longing and loss after just a couple of days. Idyll 12 highlights the complexities of its own reception, asking readers years after the death of its speaker what it means for their love to be on our lips still: can the reality of this love stay alive or was it always already an illusion? We can now turn to examine Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets, his book for the public, to consider how his sharp understanding of the historicity of Greek love underpinned his reading of Theocritus’ Idylls. The desire for nature and the nature of desire Symonds begins his chapter ‘The Idyllists’ with an intense description of Sicily, from where Theocritus came. For Symonds, Theocritus demands to be read today: he ‘deserves to rank among the most realistic artists of the nineteenth century on account of his simplicity and perfect truth to nature’. To read Theocritus, one must travel: We must take his volume with us to the scenes in which he lived […]. It is on the shores of the Mediterranean—​at Sorrento, at Amalfi, or near Palermo, or among the valleys of Mentone,—​that we ought to study Theocritus, and learn the secret of his charm. (Studies, p. 310)

J. A. Symonds’s Theocritus and the Homoerotic Idyll in Sicily  91 For Symonds, there is a perfect correspondence between words and things, between reading Theocritus and experiencing Sicily. Symonds paints a lush portrait of the fauna of the island taken from Theocritus’ vocabulary: ‘There is not a single detail which a patient student [of Sicilian botany] may not verify from Theocritus’ (p. 313). Scholarly study blurs into the pleasure of travel: going to Sicily, from the north to the south of Europe, was like travelling back in time for Symonds, who draws a highly eroticized picture of the landscape: Like the lines of the Sicilian idyllist, they [the shores of the Mediterranean] inspire an inevitable and indescribable πόθος [longing desire], touching our sense of beauty with a subtle power […]. Straight from the sea-​beach rise mountains of distinguished form, not capped with snow or clothed with pines, but carved of naked rock. We must accept their beauty as it is, nude, well defined, and unadorned […]. Valleys divide their flanks, seaming with shadow-​belts and bands of green the broad hillside, while lower down the olives spread a hoary greyness and soft robe of silver mist, the skirts of which are kissed by tideless waves. (p. 310) The nudity and nakedness of the landscape, its flanks and kissed skirts evoke corporeal forms: the Greek word pothos signifies longing or yearning for something and often someone absent or lost—​it also appears in Greek in Symonds’s description of sex with Norman quoted above.20 ‘In northern landscapes the eye travels through vistas of leafy boughs’, while ‘in the South, the lattice-​work of olive boughs and foliage scarcely veils the laughing sea and bright blue sky […]. There is no concealment and no melancholy here’ (p. 311). Symonds’s description of the landscape blurs into a celebration of its inhabitants: ‘a race of splendid men and women lived beneath the pure light of Phoebus, their ancestral god. […] The Greeks alone owned the gift of innate beauty and unerring taste’ (p. 311). If Symonds’s paragraph began with the ‘distinguished form’ of the mountains, it ends with ‘the human form upon those bare and sunny hills’ on which it ‘reached its freedom’ (p. 311). His philhellenic depiction of the beauty and the freedom of the Greeks was a common trope in the nineteenth century. Visiting places like Sicily offered northern Europeans the fantasy of travelling back to a time before the strictures of Christian morality.21 Sicily appeared to be an ancient land where the ancient past lingered on into the modern present: ‘On the Mediterranean shores too the same occupations have been carried on for centuries with little interruption. The same fields are being ploughed, the same vineyards tilled, the same olive-​gardens planted, as those in which Theocritus played as a child’ (Studies, p. 316). Crucially, it was the social and the erotic lives of Sicilians which had not changed since antiquity: Men remain unaltered. A little less careless, a little more superstitious they may be; but their joys and sorrows, their vices and virtues, their loves and hates, are still the same. Such reflections sound trite and commonplace. Yet who can resist the force of their truth and pathos? ‘Not for us alone, as we once thought, friend Nicias, did Love’s parent, whosoever among gods that was, beget Lord Erôs. Not for us did fair things first reveal their fairness; we who are mortal men, and have no vision of the morrow’.22

92  Daniel Orrells In the first edition of 1873 this quotation appears only in the ancient Greek, but in the second edition of 1877 it has been translated into English. Symonds is quoting the opening lines of Theocritus’ Idyll 13, to suggest that while ‘a man seriously in love is inclined to feel that no one can ever before have been so afflicted’, love is nothing new and it has not changed on Sicily.23 If reading Theocritus is like experiencing Sicily, that was, for Symonds, because of the visuality of the Idylls. Reading his poems is like looking at works of art. If, as Symonds reports, ‘idyll’ meant ‘a little picture’, Theocritus’ poems ‘should affect us in the same way as bas-​reliefs and vases of Greek art’, meaning that we should ‘approach the Idylls from this point of view, and regard them as very highly finished works of decorative art’ (p. 307). ‘When we read the Idylls of Theocritus […] we have but to recall the perfect forms of Greek sculpture’ (p. 314). At the end of the essay in the second edition, Symonds adds: ‘Nor would it be possible to carry a better guide-​book to the statue-​galleries of Rome and Naples’ than Theocritus’ collection, as ‘the cold marble, that seems to require so many commentaries, receives from their idyllic colouring new life’ (2nd edn, p. 355). If, when we read Theocritus, we must keep in mind famous examples of Greek sculpture, then looking at those sculptures only makes sense if we have read Theocritus. Image and text underpin each other in an endless circularity. Symonds was clearly writing under the influence of Walter Pater’s aestheticism which encouraged attention to beautiful and eroticized form over any moralizing content that the arts were meant to offer. Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) appeared in the same year as Symonds’s Studies and featured essays which Pater had already published in the previous few years.24 Symonds echoed Pater’s aesthetic celebration of the physical and the material. For Symonds, Theocritus’ text ‘tells with exquisite precision what he has observed’ (pp. 322–​23), and Symonds quotes the following lines from Idyll 3 (ll. 12–​14) in which a goatherd, mimicking the paraklausithyron (‘song in front of a locked door’), serenades his beloved Amaryllis who lives in a cave:          Would I were The murmuring bee, that through the ivy screen And through the fern that hides thee, I might come Into thy cavern! Symonds contrasts this with ‘the modern poet, [who] to use Shelley’s words,       “will watch from dawn to gloom The lake-​reflected sun illume The yellow bees in the ivy-​bloom; Nor heed nor see what things they be, But from these create he can Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of Immortality!” [and will endeavour] to look through and beyond the objects of the outer world’. (p. 323) Percy Bysshe Shelley celebrated Plato’s theory of the Forms as the inspiration for poetic creation which looks beyond matter and materiality in his poem ‘The Poet’s Dream’ (ll. 7–​13). Symonds, however, would emphasize how ‘Greek art remains upon the surface

J. A. Symonds’s Theocritus and the Homoerotic Idyll in Sicily  93 and translates into marble the humanized aspects of the external world’ (p. 322). While Shelley searches for divine pleasures and visionary joys, Symonds focuses his aesthetic gaze on empirical, altogether more fleshly delights. In Plato’s Republic Socrates had famously exhorted his listeners to escape from the cave of ignorance to see the light of truth, while Symonds’s Theocritus conjures up the image of the goatherd who seeks to enter Amaryllis’ cave, as the reader enjoys thinking about the relationship between learned textual reference and sexual penetration of the body in Theocritus’ poem. For Symonds, as we have been seeing, then, Theocritus’ poetry evoked a fantasy of travel to a highly eroticized landscape, which seemed to offer the natural pleasures of sexual satisfaction so often denied in the modern Christian world. As we discussed earlier, Jowett had argued that any mention of pederastic desire in Plato’s dialogues was ‘a figure of speech’ to represent the idealized scene of the older teacher in philosophical dialogue with his younger student. In response Symonds would emphasize the material, physical side of sexual desire. But would the situation be so simple when Symonds turns to reading some of Theocritus’ idylls? Desire in Theocritus’ Idylls In the second half of the essay, Symonds focuses on a selection of Theocritus’ poems. The erotic desires of Theocritus’ protagonists take centre stage in Symonds’s readings of Idyll 2, the song of the woman Simaetha who is cooking a love potion to attract her male lover Delphis, and Idyll 13, the story of Heracles and his beloved youth Hylas. Simaetha’s song is ‘a vivid and tragic tale of southern passion’. For Symonds, she ‘has no doubt many living parallels among Sicilian women’. And if Theocritus’ ‘picture of classical sorcery’ seems ‘curious’, then Symonds reminds his readers that ‘all the terrible or loathsome rites of magic were known to the ancients’ and witchcraft was no invention of the Middle Ages (p. 327). Symonds associates Theocritus’ poems with the medieval period again in his discussion of Heracles and Hylas in Idyll 13. In this poem the poet tells Nicias, another poet and a doctor, the tale of how Heracles lost his beloved squire Hylas to nymphs in a pool. Heracles goes in search of Hylas but only hears the boy’s cries in response to his calls. The ‘chivalry’ in this poem is, for Symonds, illustrative of ‘the heroic age of Greece’ (p. 328). The poem presents a vision of ‘the ideal of knighthood and knightly education’ (p. 329). And Symonds does not avoid discussion of Heracles’ passion for Hylas, translating lines 5–​15: ‘For even,’ says Theocritus, ‘the brazen-​hearted son of Amphitryon [Heracles], who withstood the fierceness of the lion, loved a youth, the charming Hylas, and […] sought continually to fashion him after his own heart, and to make him a right yokefellow with him in mighty deeds.’ (pp. 328–​29) The final clause can be more accurately translated as ‘the boy would be fashioned after his [Heracles’] own mind’. To say that Hylas was to become Heracles’ ‘yokefellow’ departs from the Greek. The word—​already old-​fashioned by the nineteenth century—​simply means ‘a person linked to or associated with another, especially in some work or activity’ (OED). It appears in Shakespeare’s Henry V with a military connotation: ‘Yoke-​fellowes in Armes, let us to France’ (I I . 3. 50). Symonds clearly saw Heracles and Hylas as a pair of brave, knightly warriors. But the word can also—​much more rarely—​mean ‘a person

94  Daniel Orrells joined in marriage to another’ as in a husband or a wife. And by diverging from the Greek text, Symonds does not shy away from this connotation: ‘Heracles was not merely the lover but the guardian also and tutor of Hylas’ (p. 329). Symonds underlines that ‘Heracles was the Eponym and patron of an order which existed throughout Doric Hellas’ (p. 329). The poem illustrates ‘the theme of Doric chivalry’. Heracles is ‘purely Dorian’ (pp. 328, 330). Symonds was alluding to the work of the influential German classicist Karl Otfried Müller who, in his book The Dorians, had posited an invasion of so-​called Dorian warriors from the north into the Aegean south in pre-​archaic times.25 This thesis proved very influential in nineteenth-​century classical scholarship. For Symonds, the heroes of Homeric epic were thought to represent this manly, martial culture of early Greece: ‘Achilles was another Eponym of this order. In the twenty-​ninth Idyll, the phrase Ἀχιλλέιοι φίλοι [“Achillean friends”, i.e. Achilles and Patroclus] is used, to describe the most perfect pair of manly friends’ (p. 329). The poem is a song of an older male lover addressing and tutoring a younger male beloved and concludes by saying that he ‘would fetch the Golden Apples for you or bring back Cerberus, guard dog of the dead’ (ll. 37–​ 38)—​ that is, re-​ enact Heracles’ labours—​ if the boy remains faithful. But there was no historical proof that such an ‘order’ of knightly warriors ever existed in archaic Greece. Symonds was clearly influenced by the Victorian idealization of the medieval period, as he himself says: Theocritus’ Idylls ‘may be compared to the Idylls of the King, for their excellence consists in the consummate art with which episodes from the legendary cycles of a bygone age are wrought into polished pictures by cultivated modern poets’ (p. 328). It is hardly surprising that Tennyson was in Symonds’s mind when writing this essay. Theocritus was one of Tennyson’s favourite poets and Tennyson’s Idylls were hugely popular in the mid-​nineteenth century. Tennyson especially admired Theocritus’ idyll about Heracles and Hylas. In the memoir of his father Tennyson’s son records a story told by Francis Turner Palgrave, the poet and critic, of an evening in 1857 when Tennyson read out the poem, dwelling in particular on the lines when the young beloved answers the calls of Heracles: ‘I should be content to die’, Tennyson said, ‘if I had written anything equal to this.’26 Symonds goes on to discuss Idyll 22 by Theocritus, in which the brothers Castor and Polydeuces have a boxing match with Amycus, the monstrous king of the savage tribe of the Bebryces. Symonds compares the brothers to Tennyson’s Tristram and Lancelot and juxtaposes the stories of Greek heroes slaying their enemies with the glorious contests recounted in Idylls of the King (pp. 330–​31). Symonds closes his essay by writing that Tennyson was ‘impregnated with the thoughts and the feelings of the poems I have been discussing […], the comparison of a strong man’s muscles to smooth stones under running water, which we find in Enid […] occur[s]‌in Theocritus’ (p. 340). The image is Theocritus’ description of Amycus’ muscular body in Idyll 22 (ll. 46–​50) and Tennyson uses it to describe Geraint’s chest as his new wife Enid gazes lovingly at him.27 But Tennyson’s poem is no straightforward paean to chivalric masculinity. His Arthurian idylls do not simply depict an idealized heroic code for their Victorian readers but rather a series of tales about the impossibility of living up to those heroic ideals. Geraint the knight is scoffed at and jeered in Arthur’s court because he was ‘a prince whose manhood was all gone, | And molten down in mere uxoriousness’ for Enid (ll. 59–​60). Tennyson’s vision of a ‘nobler time’ was a world where knightly manhood was already compromised and weakened by the influence of women.28 In Idyll 13 Heracles loses his beloved Hylas to nymphs in a pool.29 In Idyll 2 Simaetha plots to control the desires of her own beloved Delphis who seemed to prefer spending time with his

J. A. Symonds’s Theocritus and the Homoerotic Idyll in Sicily  95 male friend Eudamippus (ll. 77–​80). The idealized comradeship between males which Theocritus, Tennyson, and Symonds celebrate is disturbed by the presence of women. If Tennyson’s Idylls were meant to provide exemplars of masculinity for his Victorian readers, and if Symonds celebrated Theocritus’ heroes as ‘harp-​playing riders of horses, athlete poets’ for his own students and readers, how were Victorian men to relate to the protagonists of Theocritus’ poems? (Studies, p. 330). Symonds thought he was travelling back in time in Sicily and quoted—​as we saw above—​Theocritus’ lines about our feelings of love not being the first (‘Not for us did fair things first reveal their fairness’): love has never changed on Sicily. But we should remember these lines open Idyll 13, the poem about Heracles and Hylas. How, then, were Heracles and Hylas to be exemplary for Nicias, Symonds, and their other (modern) readers? The topic of Doric chivalric love would become a theme to which Symonds would return again and again in his writings about the history of sexuality. Symonds’s reading of Theocritus was to have an important impact on his accounts of the history of Greek love. Could Symonds travel back in time and experience Greek love himself? The historicity of Doric Greek love In 1873, the same year Studies was published, Symonds completed his draft of A Problem in Greek Ethics, which was then published in a tiny clandestine edition of ten copies in 1883. It was the first scholarly history of same-​sex desire written in the English language. Symonds posited an archaic period of Greek male eros when, ‘inspired by the memory of Achilles, and venerating their ancestor Herakles, the Dorian warriors had special opportunity for elevating comradeship to the rank of an enthusiasm’.30 Symonds’s depiction was influenced by Müller’s picture of idealized, martial pederasty in his book on the Dorians.31 But in the classical period in Athens, Symonds argued, a less noble Greek love developed which looked back to the idealized military ethos of the previous period and was characterized by a mixture of education and sensuality. The historical relationship between Homer and later, classical Greek readers was, then, a complex one: Homer stood in a double relation to the historical Greeks. On the one hand, he determined their development by the influence of his ideal characters. On the other, he underwent from them interpretations which varied with the spirit of each successive century. He created a national temperament, but received in turn the influx of new thoughts and emotions occurring in the course of its expansion. (A Problem in Greek Ethics, pp. 44–​45) Symonds’s history of Greek love reflected his low opinion of his own modernity: just as he looked back at wonder at ancient Greece, so the ancient Athenians had themselves already been in awe of the ‘Dorians’ before them. Around 1878 Symonds clandestinely produced a pamphlet containing two poems, the second called ‘Ithocles and Lysander: A Cretan Idyll’, written ‘in illustration of Müller’s Dorians’.32 The poem was a fictional rendering of the ‘ancient national custom’ of pederasty, which, Müller argued, ‘prevailed with still greater force in Crete’ (I I , 302). Müller recounts ancient evidence of a ritual kidnapping of male youths by older lovers, which Symonds turns into a queer Tennysonian medievalizing idyll of manly, martial eros (Müller, II , 302–​04). The poem opens with an epigraph quoting in ancient Greek the lines from Theocritus’ Idyll 12 that Symonds would again quote in his Memoirs: ‘there were men back then of the Golden Age, when

96  Daniel Orrells he who was loved returned one’s love.’ Symonds’s poem ends happily with Ithocles and Lysander in love. Müller’s discussion of pederasty ended by noting that there were even graves which commemorated Doric lovers such as that of an individual called Diocles the Megarian, who was mentioned at the end of Idyll 12. His grave, Theocritus wrote, became a place where young men gathered to compete in kissing. Müller turned poetic idyll into historical evidence: Diocles would be remembered beyond the grave, just as the speaker of the poem hoped his love affair would be a subject of song. While Symonds could be seen to have provided such a song, he turned classical scholarship back into a poetic idyll—​thereby turning supposed real-​life history into idyllic fantasy, emphasizing the chasm between ancient past and modern present. But the Labouchere Amendment (Section 11 of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act) made ‘gross indecency’ illegal, and it was most keenly applied to the behaviours and comportment of men who were sexually attracted to other men.33 Symonds, like other men in his position, was very aware of the impact of the new legislation. In 1891 he produced A Problem in Modern Ethics (again published in a very small edition of fifty copies), in which he revised his account of the historicity of Doric Greek love.34 This text sought to debunk numerous contemporary psychological, anthropological, and criminological theories of same-​sex desire. It culminated in a celebration of the comradely Dorians who offered for Symonds a model of socialist, democratic lovers for the modern Victorian polity. Symonds’s Doric Greeks went from being lost in the mist of time to becoming timeless exemplars for modern men. We have already seen how lines from Theocritus’ poetry would commemorate Symonds’s first kiss of a boy in his Memoirs: they both retained the memory and commented upon its disappearance into the past. The (un)reality of ancient Greek love was an issue which Symonds discussed in a letter dated 1 February 1889 which he wrote for his old teacher Jowett and which he inserted into his Memoirs. Symonds questioned Jowett’s argument that pederastic desire in Plato was ‘a figure of speech’ and said that ‘many forms of passion between males are matters of fact. […] Greek love was for Plato no “figure of speech”, but a present poignant reality’ (Memoirs, ed. by Regis, pp. 153–​ 54). For Symonds, Jowett’s teaching on the subject was detrimental to modern men who were attracted to other males. What lessons would Symonds then teach in his readings of Theocritus in Studies of the Greek Poets about the (un)reality of Greek love? If we turn back to Symonds’s discussions of Idylls 2 and 13 in Studies, we can ask how he might (not) have felt able to identify with and relate to the lovers in those poems. When talking about Simaetha the witch, in the second edition in 1877, Symonds inserted the following footnote: ‘How wonderfully beautiful is her description of Delphis and his comrade Eudamnippus [sic]: “their cheeks and chin were yellower than helichrysus”.’35 This is the moment where Simaetha remembers seeing her beloved Delphis out with his lover. But if Symonds made the effort of highlighting this moment, how might he have read it? Was he identifying with the witch Simaetha, an outsider, suffering unrequited love, looking longingly on at two male lovers? Or did he see himself as another Delphis, who would have preferred a Eudamippus but ended up being lured into a relationship with a woman? Symonds, after all, did get married. How the reader might relate to the lovers Heracles and Hylas is made explicit by the opening lines of Idyll 13, which, as we have seen, Symonds cites: ‘not for us did fair things first reveal their fairness.’ But in which mythical figure might Symonds have seen himself? He could, of course, have identified as another Heracles searching longingly for his younger male lover who is lured away by the nymphs. We will remember that Studies

J. A. Symonds’s Theocritus and the Homoerotic Idyll in Sicily  97 was delivered as lectures to students, among whom counted Norman, Symonds’s younger lover, and who, as we saw in his Memoirs, would grow up, go to Oxford, leave him—​ and get married. Or did Symonds see himself in Hylas, a boy who would be entangled by female desire and end up getting married? If the historicity of Symonds’s Doric Greek lovers oscillated between ancient others and timeless models, as we have been seeing, then Symonds’s experience of reading Idyll 13 reflects this complex temporality: the poem could be a scene from his youth as Hylas or his adulthood as Heracles. Symonds both is and is not a Doric lover. As Heracles listened to Hylas’ cries from the pool, the boy ‘though close seemed far away’ (l. 60). Theocritus’ poem voices both the alluring closeness and the frustrating distance between homoerotic lovers. We saw the complexity of the temporality of desire in his Memoirs above when he affixes the anemone beside those lines from Idyll 12: Symonds as an older man looks back to his younger self through a poem about a foolish old man looking back to the days when one’s beloved reciprocated one’s love. Symonds sees his younger self, suffering unrequited love, as if that younger self were already a foolish older lover. His reading of Theocritus, then, was crucial for his ensuing exploration of the (im)possibility of making ancient Greek sexual ethics a model for Victorian homoerotic lives. His 1873 essay on Theocritus’ Idylls was the catalyst for a continuous rumination on the historicity of homoerotic Greek love. If, in the nineteenth century, the idyll became a privileged form for exploring the relationship between fantasy and reality, then Theocritus provided Symonds with a corpus of poetry for exploring the possibilities and limits of realizing Greek love for Victorian men. He provided Symonds with a way of responding to the modern reception of Platonic idealism. Symonds and von Gloeden in Sicily We saw above how Symonds admired Theocritus’ description of a rustic lover who wished he could transform into a bee to enter the cave of Amaryllis. For Symonds, ‘Metamorphosis existed for the Greek poet as a simple fact’ (Studies, p. 323). But this provokes the question: what does it mean to say that a man can turn into a bee? Can myth become reality? Or, in what way can a goatherd be(come) an animal? What is the relationship between the man and ‘nature’, between the poet and the natural world? If Symonds wanted to see Theocritean man as completely embedded in his natural environment, modern critics have focused on the artificiality of the poem: it sounds like the performance of a magode, an ancient dramatic artist whose repertoire included a drunk man singing to his mistress.36 Theocritus’ poem is a parodic transposition of urban performance culture to a cave in a rustic setting outside of the city. The goatherd might be read as having fantasized the existence of a beautiful nymph in a cave: after all, he is not ‘locked out’ and could simply walk inside. Even if Symonds thought he could access the locus amoenus by travelling to Sicily with Theocritus in hand, his readings of Theocritus’ poems suggest that he too was aware that he cannot really travel back in time—​that there is indeed a wide temporal chasm between Symonds in the nineteenth century and the Greeks more than two thousand years earlier. Symonds quotes lines from Idylls 2 and 13 to show that Theocritus ‘presents us with a human portrait more than a phantom of the glamour of the deep’ (p. 322). But, as we have seen, his analysis causes us to ask how ‘human’ are these ‘portraits’; how like or unlike are Simaetha, Hylas, and Heracles to Symonds and his modern readers? In the second edition of Studies, during his description of Sicily, Symonds inserts a footnote. There he refers his readers ‘to the chapter on the Cornice in my Sketches in

98  Daniel Orrells Italy and Greece for a fuller treatment of this landscape’ (2nd edn, p. 324). Sketches, a collection of travel essays, had appeared in 1874 and the opening essay ‘The Cornice’ was a description of the Mediterranean coast in the south of France. The first scene describes how Symonds came upon a well: Then I knew the meaning of Theocritus for the first time. We found a well, broad, deep, and clear […]. This was just the well in Hylas. […] I recognised this fountain by his verse, as if he had showed me the very spot.37 Above, we wondered with whom Symonds might have identified when reading Theocritus’ idyll, a question which can again be posed here: who is Symonds meant to be, Heracles in search of his beloved or Hylas about to get lost? The scene also causes us to think further about Victorian travel to the Mediterranean. In the essay on Theocritus in Studies, Symonds had written vividly about erotic myth becoming reality in Sicily: ‘In landscapes such as these we are readily able to understand the legends of rustic gods; the metamorphoses of Syrinx, Narcissus, Echo, Hyacinthus, and Adonis. […] They lose their unreality and mythic haziness’ (p. 314). If reading Theocritus was (like) experiencing Sicily, then what did Symonds actually see when he visited the Mediterranean after reading the ‘human portraits’ in Theocritus’ poem? Could Symonds transform into a Greek lover? He notes in ‘The Cornice’ that modern scholars call Theocritus ‘a court poet, dead to Nature, artificial in his pictures’ (Sketches, p. 2). In Studies Symonds had himself suggested that Theocritus had been a court poet in reference to his ‘panegyrics of Hiero and Ptolemy’, the tyrant of Syracuse and the ruler of Alexandria (Idylls 16 and 17), but had turned away from court life to return to the countryside (p. 303). How authentic or how artificial Theocritus was, as a poet, was a question that dogged—​and continues to preoccupy—​his readers. Not surprisingly, then, Symonds goes on to discuss the authenticity of the Theocritean corpus of poetry: how ancient or how modern is it really? From the beginning of Symonds’s essay, then, there is a question of the antiquity of Theocritus’ poems: can you travel back in time with Theocritus in hand, a poet who himself was already disenchanted with city life and longed to return to a rustic past? Symonds’s experience of Sicily, as we shall now see, was mediated by the burgeoning medium of photography. The development of photography in the second half of the nineteenth century allowed for new sorts of visual representation. As archaeology became an increasingly respected academic discipline, photographs became an important tool for displaying archaeological data in excavation reports in journals and monographs. Photography supported the scientific claims of archaeology and made the past more material and real. The rise of archaeology, which appeared to offer access into lived realities, provided a challenge to the idealization of ancient Greece promulgated by scholars such as Jowett.38 Symonds had bought a Kodak in 1889, a new sort of portable camera whose film could be sent to the factory to be developed, thereby opening photography to middle-​class amateurs. Indeed, Symonds owned a huge photographic collection.39 He was especially attracted to a new genre of photography produced in Sicily which features portraits of boys, male adolescents, and young men, often nude or scantily clad and positioned beside classicizing props, in front of a classical ruin or the Sicilian landscape. ‘Nudes pour in on me from Sicily & Naples’, Symonds could boast in a letter in 1890 to friend and writer Edmund Gosse (who was also married but admired the male form): ‘I have a vast collection now—​ enough to paper a little room I think.’40

J. A. Symonds’s Theocritus and the Homoerotic Idyll in Sicily  99 Symonds particularly appreciated the homoerotic, classicizing photography of Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856–​1931), a German aristocrat living in Taormina. After his family wealth had run out, he made a business out of photographing Sicilian subjects, including nudes of boys and young men. Gloeden wrote: My wish was to do artwork through photography. Readings from Homer and Theocritus’ Sicilian poetry stimulated my fantasy. […] Greek shapes excited me, just like the bronze colour of the descendants of the ancient Hellenes, and I tried to resurrect ancient Greek life in these images. But how desire surpasses the means! Fortunately, I did not choose professional models, so I did not have to fight against academic poses and practiced positions. My models were peasants, shepherds, fisherman. I had to be intimate with them for a long time in order to be able to observe them later in scanty garments, to select among them, and to stimulate them spiritually with stories from Homer’s sagas.41 Gloeden was not the only artist to be drawn to the visuality of the idyll. Tennyson became the most illustrated and visualized English writer alongside Shakespeare in the second half of the nineteenth century and scenes from Idylls of the King attracted numerous artists, most famously the Pre-​Raphaelites.42 In 1896 John William Waterhouse painted Hylas and the Nymphs, looking back to Theocritus’ poem. But Gloeden’s attraction to both Homer and Theocritus brings us back to the questions we have already been asking: to what extent were his portraits of Sicilian male youths to be seen as representations of ancient heroes brought to life; or rather as self-​conscious, ironic visualizations of classical heroism? How Homeric or how Theocritean are these images meant to be? Gloeden’s employment of peasants, shepherds, and fisherman who need to be educated about Homeric epic suggests that there was a gap between Hellenic ideal and Sicilian reality. His photographs confront the viewer with the question of whether Dorian/​Homeric Greek love could really live on into the present or whether these are portraits of knowing, Theocritean yearnings for a lost world. If Symonds was continuously exploring these questions, it is not surprising to find him so interested in Gloeden’s visual illustrations of this issue. As Gloeden himself said, quoted above, ‘desire surpasses the means’ of photography. If Gloeden’s portraits seemed to provide classicizing idealizations of the subjects, the photographs also clearly display signs of poverty, malnutrition, and hard rural labour. His photographs reflect the image of Sicily in the northern European imagination as hovering between Hellas and the Orient, a site of the origins of, and ‘other’ to, European culture. If Gloeden worked with the young men he employed, thereby contributing to the local economy, he also turned those youths into objects of consumption for wealthier northern European—​mostly male—​collectors. Gloeden’s photographs were circulated as somewhere between artworks and ethnographic images, between objects of desire and objects of a colonizing gaze, between a vision of ancient Greece and a depiction of modern Italian poverty. If the question of the similarity and difference between the characters in Theocritus’ idylls and modern Victorian readers captivated Symonds, how were men like Symonds to relate to the youths in these images? Could they identify with Gloeden’s subjects or were these subjects racially othered objects of the northern European gaze? Symonds’s experience of Sicily was clearly complicated. In 1873—​the year he published Studies and completed the draft of A Problem in Greek Ethics, texts, as we have seen, which both celebrated Doric love and consigned it to the archaic past—​he went to Sicily,

100  Daniel Orrells first with his wife and then with a manservant.43 On the first visit he might have felt the historical distance from the Hellenic past; on the second he could have indulged in his fantasies of time travel. But if the essays in Studies and Sketches paint one picture of the Mediterranean, Symonds’s private letters present another. He found Taormina impressive but complained about the weather and ‘the annoyances of the heat—​fleas, bugs, and mosquitoes’.44 The people do not live up to his expectations: ‘The people of Sicily are ugly and repulsive and brutish.’45 In a diary entry he writes: ‘What a paradise this would be were it not for its inhabitants, and the climate!’ (Margaret Symonds, p. 134). When drafting Studies, Symonds turned the Theocritean text into a landscape, but in Sketches the year after, when he had come back from Sicily, he turned the real-​life landscape back into idealized text. Gloeden’s juxtaposition of the celebration of the Greek ideal and melancholy for its loss is represented in one genre of homoerotic image he produced, which must have had resonance for Symonds. Some of his photographs depict one youth mourning for a companion who looks dead. We might think of Homer’s Achilles and Patroclus, and we might recall Heracles’ bereavement for Hylas.46 Images like this one visualize the relationship between idyllic fantasy and grubby reality, between ideal desire and pornographic gratification, between health and decadence (Evangelista, ‘Aesthetic Encounters’, p. 97). As Goldhill has remarked about Theocritus’ idylls, to which we can apply Symonds’s readings and Gloeden’s photographs, ‘The bucolic masque always divides us from the picture it invites us to see ourselves in: a never-​never or always-​already land of sameness and difference’ (pp. 260–​61). Theocritus’ idylls ask their city-​dwelling modern readers whether they might identify with or desire longingly for the protagonists in the poems. Symonds and his contemporaries would have asked the same question about Gloeden’s images. In his Memoirs Symonds wrote that he was ‘a stifled anachronism’: neither ancient nor modern (p. 418). As we have seen in this chapter, his engagement with Theocritus’ Idylls was at the heart of his intense exploration of the history of male–​male desire. If the idyll provided Victorians with a form of escapism which also confronted them with the politics of their lived realities, then we have examined how Symonds operated across a range of discourses when writing about Theocritus, from scholarly lectures to poetic scholarship, memoirs, and travel writing. Theocritus’ poems provided Symonds with the opportunity to explore the boundaries between literary writing and historiography, between historical realities and idealizing fantasies. The Victorian reception of the ancient Greek idyll would be a crucial chapter in the modern history of same-​sex sexuality. Notes 1 On Theocritus’ Idylls, see Simon Goldhill, The Poet’s Voice: Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 223–​ 83; Richard Hunter, Theocritus and the Archaeology of Greek Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Theocritus: A Selection, ed. by Richard Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Mark Payne, Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 2 See Brill’s Companion to Theocritus, ed. by Poulheria Kyriakou, Evina Sistakou, and Antonios Rengakos (Leiden: Brill, 2021), which includes recent essays on the history of the reception of Theocritus. 3 From a letter to Wilfred Meynell, 10 April 1879, quoted in Mark Siegchrist, ‘Thematic Coherence in Browning’s Dramatic Idyls’, Victorian Poetry, 15 (1977), 229–​39 (p. 230). ‘Idyl’ with one ‘l’ was a very common spelling until the late nineteenth century.

J. A. Symonds’s Theocritus and the Homoerotic Idyll in Sicily  101 4 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘The Passing of Arthur’, in Idylls of the King, ed. by J. M. Gray (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 288–​300 (p. 299). 5 Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, ‘Twilight of the Idylls: Wilde, Tennyson, and Fin-​de-​Siècle Anti-​ Idealism’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 43 (2015), 113–​30 (p. 123). 6 Linda Dowling, ‘Ruskin’s Pied Beauty and the Constitution of a “Homosexual” Code’, Victorian Newsletter, 75 (1989), 1–​8. 7 H. G. Cocks, Classified: The Secret History of the Personal Column (London: Arrow Books, 2009). 8 See Daniel Orrells, Sex: Antiquity and Its Legacy (London: Tauris, 2015). 9 See Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Daniel Orrells, Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 10 Benjamin Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato: Translated into English with Analyses and Introductions, 3rd edn, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), I , 534. 11 See Stefano Evangelista, ‘Platonic Dons, Adolescent Bodies: Benjamin Jowett, John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater’, in Children and Sexuality: From the Greeks to the Great War, ed. by George Rousseau (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 206–​36. On Symonds, the ancient Greeks, and same-​sex desire, see John Addington Symonds: Culture and the Demon Desire, ed. by John Pemble (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); Alastair Blanshard, ‘Hellenic Fantasies: Aesthetics and Desire in John Addington Symonds’ A Problem in Greek Ethics’, Dialogos, 7 (2001), 99–​ 123; Orrells, Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity, pp. 146–​ 84; Orrells, Sex: Antiquity and Its Legacy, pp. 113–​ 24; Gideon Nisbet, Greek Epigram in Reception: J. A. Symonds, Oscar Wilde, and the Invention of Desire, 1805–​1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 115–​225; and Shane Butler, The Passions of John Addington Symonds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 99–​125. 12 The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: A Critical Edition, ed. by Amber K. Regis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 399. An abridged edition of the text was published in 1984 and edited by Phyllis Grosskurth. 13 John Addington Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets (London: Smith, Elder, 1873), p. 96. All quotations are taken from this edition unless otherwise stated. 14 Sometimes described as ‘Uranian poetry’, in reference to ‘Uranian’ or ‘heavenly’ eros between males celebrated by one speaker in Plato’s Symposium. See Timothy D’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English ‘Uranian’ Poets from 1889 to 1930 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970). 15 Plato, Republic, Books 1–​5, ed. and trans. by Christopher Emlyn-​Jones and William Preddy, Loeb Classical Library, 237 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), ll. 474d–​75b. All translations in this chapter are my own unless otherwise stated. 16 Euripides, ‘Hecuba’, in Children of Heracles, Hippolytus, Andromache, Hecuba, ed. and trans. by David Kovacs, Loeb Classical Library, 484 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 391–​519 (ll. 560–​61). 17 William Johnson Cory, Ionica (London: Smith, Elder, 1858), p. 86. 18 Memoirs, ed. by Regis, p. 158. The phrase is taken from Idyll 12, ll. 15–​16. 19 ‘Idyll 12’, in Theocritus, Moschus, Bion, ed. and trans. by Neil Hopkinson, Loeb Classical Library, 28 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 177–​81 (ll. 30–​37). 20 On pothos, see James Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007), pp. 12–​15. 21 See Sharon Ouditt, Impressions of Southern Italy: British Travel Writing from Henry Swinburne to Norman Douglas (New York: Routledge, 2014); and Chiara Beccalossi, ‘The “Italian Vice”: Male Homosexuality and British Tourism in Southern Italy’, in Italian Sexualities Uncovered, 1789–​1914, ed. by Valeria P. Babini, Chiara Beccalossi, and Lucy Riall (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 185–​206. On Symonds’s landscape painting, see Nisbet, pp. 138–​50, 162–​65.

102  Daniel Orrells 22 John Addington Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets: First Series, 2nd edn (London: Smith, Elder, 1877), pp. 331–​32. 23 Theocritus, Select Poems, ed. and intr. by Kenneth Dover (London: Macmillan, 1971), p. 181 on Idyll 13. 24 Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. by Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 25 Daniel Orrells, ‘Greek Love, Orientalism and Race: Intersections in Classical Reception’, Cambridge Classical Journal, 58 (2012), 194–​230. Müller’s book was originally published between 1820 and 1824 and translated into English in 1839. 26 [Hallam Tennyson], Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, 2 vols (New York: Macmillan, 1897), II , 495. See also, Angela G. O’Donnell, ‘Tennyson’s “English Idyls”: Studies in Poetic Decorum’, Studies in Philology, 85 (1988), 125–​44. 27 ‘The Marriage of Geraint’, in Tennyson, Idylls, ed. by Gray, pp. 76–​98 (p. 78, ll. 75–​78). 28 ‘The Coming of Arthur’, in, Idylls, ed. by Gray, pp. 21–​35 (p. 33, l. 456). 29 Heracles is compared to a ‘flesh-​eating lion’ (l. 62) in search of a fawn, as he looks for Hylas. The simile is a highly ironic allusion to the similes used to describe heroes in Homeric epic and underlines Heracles’ departure from Jason’s heroic quest with the Argonauts. It is likely that Theocritus was writing in the wake of Apollonius’ epic poem Argonautica. See Theocritus: A Selection, ed. by Hunter, pp. 262–​65. 30 ‘A Problem in Greek Ethics’, in John Addington Symonds (1840–​1893) and Homosexuality: A Critical Edition of Sources, ed. by Sean Brady (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 39–​ 122 (p. 59). 31 C. O. Müller, The History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, trans. by Henry Tufnell, 2nd edn, rev., 2 vols (London: Murray, 1839), I I , 300–​06. 32 [John Addington Symonds], ‘Ithocles and Lysander: A Cretan Idyll’, in Tales of Ancient Greece ([n.p]: [n. pub.], [c. 1878]), pp. 34–​48 https://​babel.hat​hitr​ust.org/​cgi/​pt?id=​uc1.ax000​2552​ 115&view=​1up&seq=​43 [accessed 13 June 2023]. 33 Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861–​1913 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 85–​88. 34 ‘A Problem in Modern Ethics’, in John Addington Symonds (1840–​ 1893), ed. by Brady, pp. 123–​208. 35 Studies, 2nd edn, p. 341. Symonds translates ll. 77–​78 from Idyll 2. 36 Theocritus: A Selection, ed. by Hunter, pp. 108–​09. 37 John Addington Symonds, Sketches in Italy and Greece (London: Smith, Elder, 1874), p. 2. 38 See Antiquity & Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites, ed. by Claire L. Lyons and others (Los Angeles: Getty, 2005). 39 See Stefano Evangelista, ‘Aesthetic Encounters: The Erotic Visions of John Addington Symonds and Wilhelm Von Gloeden’, in Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-​Century Literary and Visual Cultures, ed. by Luisa Calè and Patrizia Di Bello (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 87–​ 104; and Bryan E. Burns, ‘Classicizing Bodies in the Male Photographic Tradition’, in A Companion to Classical Receptions, ed. by Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 440–​51. 40 John G. Younger, ‘Ten Unpublished Letters by John Addington Symonds at Duke University’, Victorian Newsletter, 95 (1999), 1–​10 (p. 7). 41 Quoted in Robert Aldrich, The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 150–​51. On Gloeden, see Ulrich Pohlmann, Wilhelm von Gloeden: Sehnsucht nach Arkadien (Berlin: Nishen, 1987); Aldrich, pp. 143–​52; and Peter Weiermair, Wilhelm von Gloeden (Cologne: Taschen, 1994). 42 See Simon Cooke, The Moxon Tennyson: A Landmark in Victorian Illustration (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2021). 43 See Stefania Arcara, ‘Hellenic Transgressions, Homosexual Politics: Wilde, Symonds and Sicily’, Studies in Travel Writing, 16 (2012), 135–​47 (p. 139).

J. A. Symonds’s Theocritus and the Homoerotic Idyll in Sicily  103 4 Quoted in Margaret Symonds, Out of the Past (London: Murray, 1925), p. 128. 4 45 Letters and Papers of John Addington Symonds, ed. by Horatio F. Brown (London: Murray, 1923), p. 58. Symonds’s wife Catherine notably does not indulge in his fantasies. 46 See, for example, Beautés siciliennes, ed. by Nicole Canet (Paris: Canet, 2014), p. 70. This image can be viewed online at: https://​comm​ons.wikime​dia.org/​wiki/​File:Gloe​den,_​Wilhe​lm_​v​ on_​(1856-​1931)_​-​_​n._​02​81_​-​_​Be​aut%C3%A9s_​sici​lien​nes,_​p._​70,_​cm_​18​x24,_​con_​timb​ro_​ d​i_​D%27Ag​ata.jpg [accessed 13 June 2023].

Bibliography Aldrich, Robert, The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy (London: Routledge, 1993). Arcara, Stefania, ‘Hellenic Transgressions, Homosexual Politics: Wilde, Symonds and Sicily’, Studies in Travel Writing, 16 (2012), 135–​47. Beccalossi, Chiara, ‘The “Italian Vice”: Male Homosexuality and British Tourism in Southern Italy’, in Italian Sexualities Uncovered, 1789–​1914, ed. by Valeria P. Babini, Chiara Beccalossi, and Lucy Riall (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 185–​206. Blanshard, Alastair, ‘Hellenic Fantasies: Aesthetics and Desire in John Addington Symonds’ A Problem in Greek Ethics’, Dialogos, 7 (2001), 99–​123. Brady, Sean, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861–​1913 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). —​—​—​, ed., John Addington Symonds (1840–​1893) and Homosexuality: A Critical Edition of Sources (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Brown, Horatio F., ed., Letters and Papers of John Addington Symonds (London: Murray, 1923). Burns, Bryan E., ‘Classicizing Bodies in the Male Photographic Tradition’, in A Companion to Classical Receptions, ed. by Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 440–​51. Butler, Shane, The Passions of John Addington Symonds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). Canet, Nicole, ed., Beautés siciliennes (Paris: Canet, 2014). Cocks, H. G., Classified: The Secret History of the Personal Column (London: Arrow Books, 2009). Cooke, Simon, The Moxon Tennyson: A Landmark in Victorian Illustration (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2021). Cory, William Johnson, Ionica (London: Smith, Elder, 1858). Davidson, James, The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007). Dowling, Linda, ‘Ruskin’s Pied Beauty and the Constitution of a “Homosexual” Code’, Victorian Newsletter, 75 (1989), 1–​8. —​—​—​Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). Euripides, ‘Hecuba’, in Children of Heracles, Hippolytus, Andromache, Hecuba, ed. and trans. by David Kovacs, Loeb Classical Library, 484 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 391–​519. Evangelista, Stefano, ‘Platonic Dons, Adolescent Bodies: Benjamin Jowett, John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater’, in Children and Sexuality: From the Greeks to the Great War, ed. by George Rousseau (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 206–​36. —​—​—​‘Aesthetic Encounters: The Erotic Visions of John Addington Symonds and Wilhelm Von Gloeden’, in Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-​ Century Literary and Visual Cultures, ed. by Luisa Calè and Patrizia Di Bello (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 87–​104. Goldhill, Simon, The Poet’s Voice: Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Hunter, Richard, Theocritus and the Archaeology of Greek Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

104  Daniel Orrells —​—​—​, ed., Theocritus: A Selection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Jowett, Benjamin, The Dialogues of Plato: Translated into English with Analyses and Introductions, 3rd edn, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892). Kyriakou, Poulheria, Evina Sistakou, and Antonios Rengakos, eds, Brill’s Companion to Theocritus (Leiden: Brill, 2021). Lyons, Claire L., and others, eds, Antiquity & Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites (Los Angeles: Getty, 2005). Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn, ‘Twilight of the Idylls: Wilde, Tennyson, and Fin-​de-​Siècle Anti-​Idealism’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 43 (2015), 113–​30. Müller, C. O., The History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, trans. by Henry Tufnell, 2nd edn, rev., 2 vols (London: Murray, 1839). Nisbet, Gideon, Greek Epigram in Reception: J. A. Symonds, Oscar Wilde, and the Invention of Desire, 1805–​1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). O’Donnell, Angela G., ‘Tennyson’s “English Idyls”: Studies in Poetic Decorum’, Studies in Philology, 85 (1988), 125–​44. Orrells, Daniel, Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). —​ —​ —​ ‘Greek Love, Orientalism and Race: Intersections in Classical Reception’, Cambridge Classical Journal, 58 (2012), 194–​230. —​—​—​Sex: Antiquity and Its Legacy (London: Tauris, 2015). Ouditt, Sharon, Impressions of Southern Italy: British Travel Writing from Henry Swinburne to Norman Douglas (New York: Routledge, 2014). Pater, Walter, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. by Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Payne, Mark, Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Pemble, John, ed., John Addington Symonds: Culture and the Demon Desire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). Plato, Republic, Books 1–​5, ed. and trans. by Christopher Emlyn-​Jones and William Preddy, Loeb Classical Library, 237 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Pohlmann, Ulrich, Wilhelm von Gloeden: Sehnsucht nach Arkadien (Berlin: Nishen, 1987). Regis, Amber K., ed., The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: A Critical Edition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Siegchrist, Mark, ‘Thematic Coherence in Browning’s Dramatic Idyls’, Victorian Poetry, 15 (1977), 229–​39. Smith, Timothy D’Arch, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English ‘Uranian’ Poets from 1889 to 1930 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970). Symonds, John Addington, Studies of the Greek Poets (London: Smith, Elder, 1873). —​—​—​Sketches in Italy and Greece (London: Smith, Elder, 1874). —​—​—​Studies of the Greek Poets: First Series, 2nd edn (London: Smith, Elder, 1877). —​—​—​, Tales of Ancient Greece ([n.p]: [n. pub.], [c. 1878]) https://​babel.hat​hitr​ust.org/​cgi/​pt?id=​ uc1.ax000​2552​115&view=​1up&seq=​43 [accessed 13 June 2023]. Symonds, Margaret, Out of the Past (London: Murray, 1925). Tennyson, Alfred Lord, Idylls of the King, ed. by J. M. Gray (London: Penguin, 1996). [Tennyson, Hallam], Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, 2 vols (New York: Macmillan, 1897). Theocritus, Select Poems, ed. and intr. by Kenneth Dover (London: Macmillan, 1971). —​—​—​, ‘Idyll 12’, in Theocritus, Moschus, Bion, ed. and trans. by Neil Hopkinson, Loeb Classical Library, 28 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 177–​81. Weiermair, Peter, Wilhelm von Gloeden (Cologne: Taschen, 1994). Younger, John G., ‘Ten Unpublished Letters by John Addington Symonds at Duke University’, Victorian Newsletter, 95 (1999), 1–​10.

5 Ancient and Modern Attention and Environmental Change in the Victorian Pictorial Idyll Kate Flint

Frederic Leighton’s An Idyll, shown at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1881, is a pivotal work (Figure 5.1).1 One of numerous nineteenth-​century paintings that bear the title ‘Idyll’, it represents, in a loosely neoclassical manner, three seated figures at the top of a hillside. On the left, a muscular young man, wearing only a loin cloth and playing a rustic flute, is slightly turned away from two elongated women, casually draped in diaphanous garments, who are sprawled on the ground to his right. One, her relaxed pose and expression suggesting sexual satiation, rests her head on her companion’s lap, beneath her full and barely covered breasts; this second woman (modelled from Lillie Langtry), in turn, seems lost in reverie—​perhaps induced by the music; or perhaps occasioned by a combination of pipe playing and the golden sunset that illuminates the landscape. Framed by the overhanging branches of a tree—​which looks, from its leaves and shape, to be a holm oak, or Quercus ilex, native to the Mediterranean—​a pastoral landscape unfolds, complete with sheep that crop the grass into a meadow that declines gently towards the banks of a river meandering towards a tranquil bay. The painting’s emphasis on the affective, nostalgic elements of pastoral positions it alongside a growing number of contemporary scenes exhibited under the title ‘Idyll’ during the final decades of the nineteenth century.2 Even if logic tells us that the sun will set; the music will end; the flocks will need rounding up to protect them from wolves; the young women will have to rise and leave and negotiate whatever the dynamics may be between each other and the young shepherd, Leighton’s painting, like all works in a classical pastoral tradition, represents time suspended. In this chapter I will be investigating the possibilities inherent in this pause, seeing it not so much as a frozen moment in a narrative continuum than as something that offers the spectator a chance to enter into a sustained engagement with those elements of a painting that are easy to overlook; that contribute less to narrative action and interpretation than to the establishment of affect. We are invited to practise a reflective attentiveness. In turn I want to use this temporal space to direct our own attention to the elements of the natural world that the painting incorporates: that serve as setting, rather than subject. The deployment of an ecological gaze that I advocate makes use of that suspension of time on which a painted idyll depends, while also asking one to recognize how the vegetative world of a painting invites consideration of its relation to non-​human temporalities and futures. In doing so it opens up time in a different way. In what follows I bring out the potential for such interpretation in Leighton’s painting; consider how it might be positioned alongside the sudden proliferation of works with ‘Idyll’ in their title that appeared during the last two decades of the nineteenth century; explore how classical and contemporary notions of the idyllic interacted; and then DOI: 10.4324/9781003327998-6

106  Kate Flint

Figure 5.1 Frederic Leighton, An Idyll, c. 1880–​81, oil on canvas, 104.1 × 212.2 cm. Collection of Mr and Mrs Henry Keswick, USA. Wikimedia.

move to a more detailed discussion of two further paintings, John Everett Millais’s An Idyll: 1745 (1884) and Atkinson Grimshaw’s An Autumn Idyll (1885). Neither of these works, at first glance, entirely fulfil the expectations that tend, or tended, to be generated by the term ‘idyll’. But like Leighton’s classically derivative subject, both of them invite the spectator’s engagement—​provide a space, one might say, in which to look beyond whatever human narratives they contain. The treatment of this space was marked by a characteristic that contemporary critics readily termed ‘poetic’—​a quality that, as the critic Harry Quilter put it when writing about those English painters he termed ‘idyllists’, was produced by an artist ‘to whom all common things have meanings of mystery, and for whom beauty exists in the working out of the imagination, rather than in the faithful reproduction of beautiful things’.3 The classical idyll As nineteenth-​ century commentators were swift to point out, the very word ‘idyll’ embodies the idea of the pictorial, even when it is applied to the poetic. John Addington Symonds writes, succinctly, ‘The name of the Idyll sufficiently explains its nature. It is a little picture. Rustic or town life, legends of the gods, and passages of personal experience supply the idyllist with subjects.’4 Clearly expecting his reader to know that the term ‘idyll’ derives from the Greek εἰδύλλιον (eidyllion), or ‘little image’, he speculates that perhaps the plastic arts determined the direction of Idyllic poetry, suggesting the name and supplying the poet with models of compact and picturesque treatment. In reading the Idylls it should never be forgotten that they are pictures, so studied and designed by their authors. (p. 321)

Ancient and Modern  107 Symonds, in the chapter devoted to the writers he terms ‘The Idyllists’ in the Studies of the Greek Poets (1873, 1876), helps to consolidate many of the ideas concerning Theocritus that circulated in the nineteenth century, alongside discussions of other less well-​known Greek poetic idyllists. The Romantic poets and their Victorian successors turned enthusiastically to certain classical features, especially the foregrounding of ordinary working people—​often, but not invariably, rural inhabitants—​rather than the heroic protagonists of epic. They also often told stories (this is the sense in which Tennyson termed a number of his narrative poems ‘Idylls’), giving serious emotional weight to everyday dramas of desire and loss; they paused narratives both to add suspense and to give readers time to reflect on the weight of a situation; they often pivot around courtship, though rarely with the overt eroticism one finds in Theocritus. Almost always, the Victorian poetic idyll, like its predecessors, involves the construction of landscapes that incorporate both artificiality and simplicity; and is distinguished by an emphasis on the potential of nature as a force for renewal.5 As Elizabeth Helsinger writes, Poets from Bowles to Keats took inspiration from what they saw as the most suggestive feature of Theocritus’ Idylls: the poet’s imaginative proximity to the natural world. Later poets, of whom the most important were Tennyson and Landor, found in the Idylls supreme examples not of natural simplicity but of the artfulness by which it was achieved. (p. 30) Leighton’s Idyll is more notable for its exaggerated stylization of rural simplicity than for the probability of its situation, but it is also remarkable for the emphasis it puts on landscape itself, and on the ability of this vista to generate an emotional response in the spectator. This marked a real shift from the few earlier works exhibited at the Royal Academy that used the term ‘Idyll’, or that drew on Theocritus for their inspiration. Most notable among these were Henry Howard’s Hylas Carried off by the Nymphs. Theocritus, Idyll 13 (1826) in which the young man is swept into the deep azure sky by a bevy of adoring water nymphs. Below them lies the dark blue Sea of Marmara. Despite Theocritus’ detailed delineation of the vegetation around the pool where Hylas was gathering water (‘abundant reeds, | Fresh green maidenhair and dark blue celandine, | Carpets of wild celery, and creeping dogstooth grass’), the painting is devoid of greenery.6 Nor does landscape apparently play a major role in Leighton’s 1866 Syracusan bride leading wild beasts in procession to the temple of Diana. Subject suggested by a passage in the second Idyll of Theocritus. Although there are cypresses, stone pines (Pinus pinea), and a citrus tree in the background, they primarily serve to add vertical emphasis to this long canvas, in which noble Sicilian women lead some rather fine big cats in procession to Artemis’ grove. Although Leighton includes a male couple, presumably Delphis and Eudamippus, walking together in the far left-​hand corner, his painting completely ignores the jealousy that fuels the tormented speaker of Idyll 2 who sees the couple together.7 Likewise, the big oak trees and strewn blossoms in another long, processional canvas of Leighton’s, the Daphnephoria (1876)—​a Theban festival described by Proclus, not Theocritus—​are subordinated to the musicians and the chorus of women and young girls who follow the proud, nervous young man, crowned as a symbolic leader for this nine-​year cycle. William Blake Richmond, professor of painting at the Royal Academy, delivering a commemorative address for Leighton, Millais, and William Morris in 1896, called the Daphnephoria Leighton’s ‘most homogeneous and consummate performance’.

108  Kate Flint It is, he said, ‘an idyll, a lyric poem’.8 With its aura of contemplative stillness, the emotional register here—​as in An Idyll—​is close to a number of Richmond’s own paintings that drew on the features of the classical idyll as it blended with its near relative, the pastoral.9 This is exemplified in A Pastoral—​A Memory of the Valley of Sparta (1886), exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery. In this, two pairs of young women (clad in the same kind of diaphanous garments as Leighton’s couple) glide, barefoot, over a stony riverbed. Two carry baskets, as though they might have been fruit picking; another woman is playing a recorder-​like pipe, as is one of the two male shepherds who accompany them and a small flock of belled sheep. The second shepherd stretches upwards and backwards, his crook between his shoulders: this shows that he could use it, if necessary—​but this is labour at its most idealized, particularly since the strolling young people inhabit a pleasantly hilly landscape, edged with birch trees. A full moon rises behind them; the whole painting is infused with a warm hazy glow, with atmosphere pushing out definition and detail. The overall impression harks back to William Blake’s wood engravings illustrating Robert J. Thornton’s Pastorals of Virgil (c. 1821, printed 1830); and, depicting identifiably English settings, the work of Samuel Palmer and John Linnell. But around the time that Leighton exhibited An Idyll, a preponderance of the paintings that bore the title ‘Idyll’ started to show contemporary scenes. Certainly, Theocritus continued to provide the inspiration for a relatively small number of paintings, not least because, in fact, of the raunchiness of the Idylls: cloaking sexual sensationalism in the classical gave a painter much more latitude than a modern-​day setting would do. This was certainly the case with Maurice Greiffenhagen’s Idyll (1891), made highly popular through reproductions (Figure 5.2). In 1908 D. H. Lawrence wrote excitedly to his then girlfriend Blanche Jennings that ‘it moves me almost as much as if I had fallen in love myself. Under its intoxication I have flirted madly this christmas […] [It] has made me kiss a certain girl till she hid her head in my shoulder.’10 He painted at least three copies of it himself; he drew on it for a charged scene in his early novel, The White Peacock (1911). George comes upon the painting in a volume that Letty shows him:      ‘Wouldn’t it be fine?’ he exclaimed, looking at her with glowing eyes, his teeth showing white in a smile that was not amusement. ‘What?’ she asked, dropping her head in confusion. ‘That—​a girl like that—​half afraid—​and passion!’ He lit up curiously. ‘She may well be half afraid, when the barbarian comes out in his glory, skins and all.’11 For Lawrence the vegetation and flowers in the painting—​the poppies and the daisies—​ barely register, functioning merely as a fleeting marker of high summer. Despite the novel’s repeated invocation of the fecund and bucolic attributes of rural England, Greiffenhagen’s botanical details are completely passed over by Lawrence in favour of the passionate human drama taking place between the two figures standing in the field, the bare-​shouldered male figure pressing his body and face against his pale female companion. In one further example of classical pastoral’s inspiration, George Percy Jacomb-​Hood, seemingly following Greiffenhagen’s lead, exhibited a round panel, An Idyll of Theocritus, at the New Gallery in 1907: ‘a forcible full-​blooded painting of a dark-​skinned man endeavouring to embrace an unwilling maiden’, the Builder’s critic rather coyly termed it, before noting the temporal discrepancy displayed within the painting: ‘the woman is essentially modern, the man is rather a stage Pagan.’12 These are

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Figure 5.2 James Dobie, after Maurice Greiffenhagen, Idyll, etching, 33.02 × 22.86 cm, in Art Journal, 56 (1894), between pp. 226 and 228. Author’s collection.

terms that could have been applied equally well to Greiffenhagen’s canvas. Similarly, in Jacomb-​Hood’s work, the oak trees and ivy, carrying associations of Druidical worship, play a far more symbolic than environmental role, just as the proliferation of poppies in Greiffenhagen’s Idyll remind one, uncomfortably, of the drugged unconscious into which the woman may be transported. In general, by the final years of the nineteenth century, the time of the explicitly classical idyll in British painting had passed. To a large extent this is a result of the broadening of the art market (whether one is considering the purchase of original works, or growth in reproductions) and, with this democratization, a decline in the number of consumers for whom classical texts and allusions played a formative role in their cultural education. There are, of course, exceptions. Some are very generalized, like Albert Moore’s last completed work, An Idyll (1893), showing two young women sitting on a garden bench, one in a loosely draped silver gown comforting her ivory-​clad distressed friend. There are, too, a small cluster of sea idylls. The idyll, like the eclogue, is so frequently lumped together with the pastoral that it is easy to forget that Theocritus himself incorporates oceanic themes. In Idyll 11 Polyphemus ignores his flocks, who wander home alone, while he sings of Galatea from ‘some high rock’ above ‘the weed-​strewn shore’, begging her to leave ‘the grey-​green sea behind’ (pp. 33, 34); earlier, in Idyll 6,

110  Kate Flint Daphnis and Damoetas sing of how Galatea taunted Polyphemus on the shore, pelting his dog with apples; how he believed she kept ‘peering towards | My caves and flocks from her home in the sea’ (p. 24); and how the same sea reflected back to him—​or so he chose to believe—​his two handsome cheeks and his one handsome eye. Daphnis and Damoetas are not devoid of irony. But late nineteenth-​century painted sea idylls reference Theocritus only in the broadest terms, although they share common ground with him in their mingling of realism and fantasy. George Frederick Watts certainly indicates his adherence to the classical past in his title A Greek Idyll (1894): a disquieting piece of erotic whimsy (Figure 5.3).13 At the foot of a cliff, a blonde woman—​or mermaid, for the lower part of her body disappears beneath the waves—​gazes lovingly at a huge hulk of a male figure, while behind her, another sea nymph seems to be combing out her long hair (or removing a fish from it). They are surrounded by nine or ten small plump frolicking water babies. This, of course, harks back to a number of Italian baroque depictions of a two-​eyed Polyphemus splashing happily with his entourage of women and cherubic children, and as with so much of Watts’s work, the low tonal range adds to the sense that it pays homage to older artistic traditions. When it was exhibited at the New Gallery in 1894, George Moore, in the Speaker, makes this clear, writing, There is a good deal of old-​world dignity about Mr. Watts’s ‘Greek Idyll’. It is all composed in the golden note which came to him from Italy; and were the absurd little dolls—​I cannot call them Cupids—​which disfigure the foreground painted out, the picture would pass as a very creditable nineteenth-​century reminiscence of Titian.14 Fun, taking Watts much less seriously, complained that ‘we miss the bathing machine’, and supplied one in a cartoon thumbnail: ‘Greek family bathing party’.15 By contrast to Watts’s dark canvas, Rupert Bunny sets his Sea Idyll (c. 1891) at the sea’s edge, where, in the thin yellow light of evening, one woman sprawls decoratively on the damp sand (rather in the fashion of Alexandre Cabanel’s 1863 The Birth of Venus, as contemporary critics noted), while two younger children play around her. Another sits further out in the surf, and a foreground figure (possibly male; certainly androgynous) is positioned just in the water, their back to us, blowing on a conch shell—​the maritime equivalent of a shepherd’s flute. The only thing that is decidedly unusual is that all the people depicted have thick, functional, webbed fins, not feet. There is not a great deal to invite the ecological gaze in these latter-​day fanciful idylls. Moore’s young women, sitting on a garden bench, are both apparently oblivious to the proliferation of irises and lilies, roses and yellow poppies around them, even if the spectator can see in this springtime abundance an ironic counterpart to the scene’s human misery and, couched in horticultural terms, a more general allusion to the cultivated artificiality of the whole setting. There is no visible seaweed in Watts’s painting, although the baby figures have hair that might at first glance be confused with it; in Bunny’s work, the seaweed (as well as providing headgear) functions as a compositional device that leads the eye into the surf and helps, together with the shoreline, to provide the diagonals that stretch across the pristine sand to structure the painting. We can usefully expand on the implications of the cultivated Victorian garden, such as one finds in idealized form in Moore’s painting, in terms of the global movement of plants, say; or we can consider the significance of seaweed for our understanding of changing marine environments: either line of investigation opens up significant environmentalist readings. But a return to the

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Figure 5.3 George Frederick Watts, A Greek Idyll, 1894, oil on canvas, 91 × 125.7 cm. Manchester Art Gallery, UK © Manchester Art Gallery/​Bridgeman Images.

concept of the pastoral is especially useful in bringing out the pictorial idyll’s potential for the ecological gaze. The modern idyll In the final decades of the nineteenth century, many more of the paintings that are entitled ‘Idyll’ are set in the present day—​even if in an idealized, leisure-​filled version of the present—​than are based on classical or mythological subjects. So, what shifted? Why retain the term ‘idyll’—​and what work is performed by the carry-​over associations with the classical? The origins of the modern idyll lie relatively early in the nineteenth century.16 In 1836 the Birmingham artist Henry Harris Lines showed A Pastoral Idyll in his home city. It depicts a tranquil summer scene in the self-​evidently English countryside, with a middle-​ class woman drawn from contemporaneous life, two children and a dog sitting in the shade of tall elms; cows and sheep grazing around them; an old village church and some rustic cottages in the middle distance, and fells rising gently behind. Occasional examples of such idylls can be found over the next couple of decades, and then, from 1870, there is a notable increase in the number of paintings drawing on contemporary subjects which are exhibited at the Royal Academy and elsewhere under the title of ‘Idyll’.

112  Kate Flint The real acceleration of the modern-​day idyll came in the 1880s and, for about twenty years, what characterizes almost all the paintings that are so labelled is the sense of escapism into a sustaining, healing version of the countryside, or just occasionally an especially verdant garden.17 These are scenes in which the idyll occupies much the same space as the idyllic. They show bucolic, cultivated landscapes; rural life seen very much from the viewpoint of an urban spectator. This is the landscape that the middle classes came to think of as typifying rural ideals: fertile, undulating, full of copses and hedgerows and long-​established trees, with picturesque cottages (with well-​tended gardens) sometimes visible in the background; a landscape that, replicated in watercolours and prints and postcards, and increasingly celebrated in guides to the English countryside, could be found in innumerable suburban living rooms.18 These are also landscapes that, if one pauses to consider them, contain the unarticulated histories of the countryside’s appearance. In the later decades of the century, these included the unintended flourishing of those hedgerows, and of patches of uncultivated ground, that was one knock-​on effect of the agricultural depression that began around 1873, resulting from the dramatic fall in grain prices that followed the opening up of the American prairies, as well as of a succession of bad harvests in the second half of the 1870s. What might look charmingly free of the signs of modernity to an urban eye is also the landscape of accelerating rural depopulation.19 Not all the paintings that bear the title ‘Idyll’, however, have shaken off the mythological as thoroughly as their modern-​day settings would suggest. For a start, a contrast between city and countryside has always been a feature of the idyll: even if the dichotomy is not explicitly drawn, it is present in the implicit point of view. But we might also consider certain recurrent patterns in their non-​human subject matter. Strikingly, a number of these works feature large birds; so large, and so prominent, that they invite an allegorical reading rather than an ornithological one. In Arthur Wardle’s A Spring Idyll (1898), a precociously self-​aware naked toddler lies on his stomach in a field thick with bluebells, surrounded by peacocks—​of the same blue—​and peahens: is he learning to internalize beauty through an encounter with such a familiar avian touchstone of the Aesthetic Movement?20 Wardle, again, in An Idyll of Summer (1900) paints another, somewhat older and very skinny naked boy unwisely poking a swan with his foot, while two other swans stand by.21 If the first of these images of naked childhood belongs to a recognizable late nineteenth-​century sentimental genre, the second is stranger. Wardle certainly uses his talent in depicting the non-​human natural world when it comes to showing the swans’ dense white feathers, as well as the water lilies and yellow marsh flowers, but the overall atmosphere of this painting is hardly one of idyllic tranquillity. Swans had already made an appearance in the genre. Alfred East’s An Idyll of Spring (1897) shows a naked young woman kneeling in meadow grass, under blossoming trees, at the side of a lake, apparently welcoming at least six advancing swans. Swans copulating with women—​with a nod in the direction of Ovid’s brief mention of Zeus taking the form of this bird—​were a familiar Renaissance trope of representing sexual activity, and it is hard not to interpret these late Victorian birds as similarly importing an erotic charge into the painted idyll.22 Representing these birds may have provided late Victorians and Edwardians with an excuse for voyeuristic speculation, but, as with Wardle’s pond scene, they can introduce a note of predatory menace into the rural setting. It is not just that the natural world may be about to peck back, but (in Ovidian fashion), the question of what constitutes ‘natural’ behaviour is raised and the distinction between human and animal (or bird) collapsed.

Ancient and Modern  113 The presence of swans invites one to consider what is ostensibly a modern-​day painting, Val Havers’s A Cottage Idyll (1899), in the light of classical allusion (Figure 5.4). It shows an autumnal scene, with two young women sitting by a village pond; they are smartly, but not expensively dressed—​maybe in their Sunday best. One is sprawled on her back, her arm reaching behind the one who sits upright. They are not working, but they are far from relaxed; close friends or sisters, one may presume, but there is tension, rather than rapport, between them. Perhaps this is rivalry: the outstretched neck of one of the two swans on the pond, who is coming dangerously close to the sitting girl, helps provide a diagonal that reinforces the direction of her gaze: a man leans over a gate in the middle distance, observing the figures. Is his own look that of a suitor, or a voyeur? It is hard not to read into this scene the associations of swans with aggressive male sexuality that we find in classical texts and in their nineteenth-​century reinterpretation. Yet this is but one way to interpret the mythological associations of swans: if one moves away from the classical, and towards the transformation scenes featuring swans in fairy tale and legend, one could see those two birds as representing disguised princes—​one for each young woman.23 Sometimes a swan is just a swan—​or at the very least, a compositionally useful patch of white, and sometimes the word ‘idyll’ signifies no more than a pleasant scene. But if one gives classical weight to the term, the painting’s eroticism is heightened; if one takes it in a looser modern sense, the swans deepen the beauty of the autumnal moment. The question of what exactly is going on, and what will happen next, between the two women; between them and the man, let alone between them and the swans, links this, and many other idyll images to the paintings of the group whom Quilter termed the Idyllists: Frederick Walker, George John Pinwell, John William North, Cecil Gordon Lawson, Robert Walker Macbeth, and George Heming Mason. They combined figures with mostly rural settings and, in doing so, included the element of suspended narrative that is central to all idylls.24 Such a suspension issues an invitation not just to narrative speculation, but to reverie. This meditative mood was accentuated by their frequent use of soft brushwork and muted colours; by their choice of evening or early morning light; and by including figures who themselves seemed lost in contemplation. This characteristic was readily picked up by contemporary critics who endlessly repeated the ‘atmosphere of poetry’ they found in these scenes, infusing the paintings with a sense of ‘sentiment’. Furthermore, critical appreciation, tying their style to the ‘ideal’, also related it to classical precedent; so, for example, Macbeth is credited with ‘giving to his peasantry the simple dignity of movement and something of the antique nobility of form which we are accustomed to connect with the thought of Grecian sculpture’.25 This emphasis on Macbeth being able to bestow ‘something of the old Greek dignity of form and gesture to the tired labourer or stalwart maiden whom he is so fond of painting’, as the Times critic put it, is especially notable when one considers that in some of his works—​especially A Lincolnshire Gang (1876), Potato Harvest in the Fens (1877), and Sedge Cutting in Wicken Fen, Cambridgeshire (1878)—​he calls out the brutality of agricultural labour; the cruelty of child employment and whip-​wielding overseers; and the sheer exhaustion of elderly field workers.26 But a comparison between modern-​day idylls and the classical depends on a selective reading: one that emphasizes human form over narrative and social content, and that ultimately offers a critique of nineteenth-​ century paintings that over-​idealized a golden classical past. They gave back to the idyll a sense of the roughness and harshness involved in agricultural work that is sprinkled throughout the written texts, albeit in the spirit of realism rather than as a substantial commentary on working conditions.27 Macbeth was far from unique among his fellow

114  Kate Flint

Figure 5.4 Val Havers, A Cottage Idyll, 1899, oil on canvas, 38 × 51.5 cm. Private collection. Image courtesy Uno Langmann Ltd.

Idyllists in showing rural hardship and itinerant labour, including that of the Romani who looked to make a living from available resources, on the very fringes of ‘respectable’ society.28 One distinct itinerant type was the travelling musician, like the shabby fiddlers trudging down a lane in Pinwell’s Strollers (date unknown; before 1875), or crossing a river in Macbeth’s The Ferry (1881) (Figure 5.5). In Strollers three generations of a family who are passing by in a simple farm wagon look at the man with a combination of curiosity and suspicion. In The Ferry a group of respectable-​looking shepherdesses—​together with their sheep and dog, the quintessence of pastoral—​are intrigued by the fiddler and his family yet seem to be leaning as far away from them as possible. In each case the sense of social harmony that Leighton shows as pertaining between musician and listeners in a classical setting is depicted as unsustainable in contemporary rural society, as, indeed, is the tranquil, effortless, and escapist version of country life represented in so many of the paintings that bore the generalized title ‘Idyll’. The ecological idyll Explaining why he entitled some of his poems ‘idyls’, Robert Browning offered a compact definition: ‘An idyl, as you know, is a succinct little story complete in itself.’29 Thinking about the idyll as a compressed narrative—​or, in the case of painting, as offering a moment

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Figure 5.5 William Henry Boucher, after George John Pinwell, Strollers (date unknown), 1890, drypoint etching on paper, 31.6 × 41.5 cm. Published by Léon Henri Lefèvre © The Trustees of the British Museum.

of narrative suspension, inviting us to speculate about what led to this moment and what may be about to happen—​is something shared by both classical and present-​day themes. The emphasis on narrative, rather than idealism, helps one understand the titling of two paintings from the mid-​1880s: Millais’s An Idyll: 1745 (1884) and Grimshaw’s An Autumn Idyll (1885). Both stand out, in quite different ways, from the general run of paintings that bear that label. Millais’s Idyll is unusual in that it is set neither in the classical past nor in the contemporary world, but at a pivotal moment in Anglo-​Scottish history, during the Jacobite Rising, when Charles Stuart led a Scottish army to invade England, seeking to seize the Crown on behalf of his father, James Stuart. Millais depicts not a dramatic episode from this invasion, however, but a pause in the action: an English drummer boy entertains, or mesmerizes, three country girls on his fife (Figure 5.6). Behind him, his companion looks on, slightly smirking. In its composition—​the musician on the left, the listeners on the right—​it echoes, of course, Leighton’s Idyll.30 But it does not depict some vague, non-​ time-​specific classical landscape: against the hills is a British encampment with soldiers riding by. Instead of two elegant, adult Grecian women are three poor young Scottish girls, poised somewhere between adolescence and womanhood, half-​fascinated, half-​ uncertain. They are dressed in rough tweeds and plaids, which instantly proclaim their

116  Kate Flint nationality; the bare feet and torn clothes speak to their class origins, whereas those of the young men are obliterated by their uniforms. Ostensibly, the painting suggests the power of music and setting to create harmony, a figurative rapprochement of the two sides in the so-​called Jacobite Rising; a pointer to future amiable relations and understanding between England and Scotland. All the same, there is something very uncomfortable about the juxtaposition of the two groups and about the vulnerability of the young women. Millais’s son described the standing boy ‘watching with evident pleasure the innocent joy of the rustic audience’, but one can also read his expression as closer to an unpleasant leer, and the girls look as much apprehensive as enthralled.31 As Paul Barlow puts it in a discussion of the painting that emphasizes the theme of the borderlines it contains: ‘childhood to adulthood; safety to danger; control to surrender; innocence to sexuality’: Leighton’s Idyll is about relaxation and purity: the purity of experience denuded of cultural specificities, and the purity of the moment in which the characters subsist. Millais’s painting is about impurities of various kinds, portraying a moment of cultural and political confrontation: one in which Leighton’s Arcadian dream becomes highly problematic.32 Grimshaw’s Autumn Idyll, shown at the Royal Academy the following year, offered a different kind of challenge to the concept of the idyll (Figure 5.7). Unusually, like Grimshaw’s An Idyll of Old Chelsea (1893), it has an urban setting. This is probably a composite version of various lanes in the Leeds suburb of Knowsthorpe, south-​east of the city centre, where Grimshaw rented Knostrop Hall from 1870 to his death in 1893. The house on the right, in the middle distance, may well be based on the seventeenth-​ century hall itself, with a terrace of more modern villas on the left. A woman stands, alone, on the pavement: we are invited to imagine that she may be waiting for a friend, a lover—​or that she may simply be pausing on her way home after a long day’s work, admiring (as we are invited to admire) the yellowing evening sky of a November afternoon. The trees, with just a few lingering leaves, are silhouetted against this sky; the lane is thick with fallen leaves that cling to the muddy ruts. It seems almost formulaic in its subject matter and gentle autumnal tones; designed as it is to create melancholy affect in the spectator at the passing of a year, the passing of time, following the precedent Millais had created with Autumn Leaves (1856) thirty years earlier. Similarly, the autumnal setting of Havers’s Cottage Idyll brings home the inevitable transience of the girls’ youthfulness and fresh beauty. The sense of the formulaic is especially strong because Grimshaw painted numerous other very similar paintings during this period, most of them featuring solitary women in the same lane, and in the day’s—​and year’s—​ waning light. He faced financial challenges and this stylized, nostalgic urban melancholy sold well. The Victorian idea of the idyll, I have been suggesting, is one focused on the evocation of a state of mind. The temporary suspension of time may evoke, and may instil, pleasurable, languorous physical sensation, or at least repose—​even if, as in Millais’s Idyll: 1745, there is an edgy quality to this narrative pause. But it provides something else: not just speculation about narrative causation and outcomes, but a space for contemplation, for reflective attentiveness. In particular I am arguing for an active engagement not with the lives of the figures, but with the non-​human natural world in which these stopped moments are set. These natural environments contain histories that go

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Figure 5.6 John Everett Millais, An Idyll: 1745, 1884, oil on canvas, 140 × 191 cm. Lady Lever Art Gallery: National Museums, Liverpool.

both backwards and forwards. We see landscapes that are clearly directly imbricated with human activity and intervention: the ownership of fields and pasture; the origins of the capital that has sustained their cultivation; the types of agriculture and grazing and planting and husbandry that are represented. And we can also speculate about their potential ecological future, impacted, above all, by the repercussions on the environment of fossil fuels, pollution, and decreasing biodiversity. Idylls, in other words, invite a far more interrogative approach than their initial incitement to reverie might suggest. To foreground the importance of the non-​human natural world in the painted idyll is to read against the grain of almost all art criticism by Victorian writers. Commentary on the idyll goes out of its way to point out either the symbiotic relationship of figures and countryside or the subordinate position of landscape. The art critic Philip Gilbert Hamerton is writing of classical poets, especially Theocritus and Virgil, when he explains how they continually associate […] the material of landscape with the human life, which they paint in their little compositions, and so closely that if you cannot separate the landscape from the figures, so it is hardly possible, on the other hand, to separate the figures from the landscape.33

118  Kate Flint

Figure 5.7 John Atkinson Grimshaw, Autumn Idyll, 1885, oil on canvas, 74 × 61.5 cm. Russell-​ Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth.

His remarks are equally typical of one strand of contemporary writing in relation to painted idylls. Alternatively, painter Alfred William Hunt spells out what, for him, distinguished the ‘pictures of the idyllic class and their allies’ from landscape painters more generally:

Ancient and Modern  119 I maintain that, however important both in scale and in meaning, and however perfect in painting, the landscape portion of such pictures may be, that landscape portion is not felt, designed, and painted as it would have been if it had been brought into existence on canvas for the landscape’s own sake.34 Hunt’s criticism usefully points to a common challenge when faced with looking beyond human figures: in many Victorian idylls the landscape as a whole and its particularities are rarely painted with the clarity and distinctness that one finds in the works of painters who closely followed John Ruskin’s command to go directly to nature, to observe closely, and to translate what one sees into art. Some of this attention to detail is present in Millais’s work, of course, even if William Morris, in a particularly excoriating review of the whole 1884 Royal Academy exhibition, and of Millais’s capitulation to commercialism in particular, remarks that ‘it is now many years since Mr. Millais has painted flowers which have not injured his pictures instead of adorning them’.35 Certainly, the small flowers and what look like wild strawberries in the foreground are unremarkable, even if hardly visibly injurious, but other critics still detected a Pre-​Raphaelite emphasis on the closely observed. In the study of Millais that Marion Harry Spielmann brought out shortly after the artist’s death, he commented of his 1854 portrait of Ruskin that ‘with rare conscientiousness Millais has rendered every detail in the scene, so that the geologist cannot find a flaw in his rocks, or a botanist mistake lichen, plant, or flower.’36 This reference to lichen is telling, since it returns us to my suggestion that we look past the human figures in these images and consider precisely those very unremarkable, everyday elements in a landscape that are very easy to overlook, whether in a painting or, indeed, in real life. One barely notices, here, the lichen that grows on the tree trunk that supports the soldier boys and that flourishes on the boulder behind the girls. It contributes to the overall effect of damp boskiness, but it is not emphasized. But perhaps the idyll’s incitement to reverie may invite us to consider painted lichen beyond its function in establishing a sylvan setting, making it point to a different relationship between human and landscape from the very visible ones to which Hamerton and Hunt called our attention. For lichens are fascinating and complex growths, as has increasingly been recognized not just by organic biologists, but by commentators on our contemporary ecological crises.37 They have a particular value as markers of the slow violence of atmospheric pollution; they have been used as a means of monitoring air pollution since the mid-​nineteenth century. Around Victorian industrial cities, lichen was rapidly disappearing from stones and tree trunks as a result of sooty air. The paint is too thinly applied in Grimshaw’s Autumn Idyll to tell if the artist intended to represent any lichen on his trees or walls, although with Leeds’s urban expansion, one might well surmise that its presence was on the decline. Grimshaw’s work, depicting an affluent Leeds suburb, offers a particularly modern take on the idyll. It provides a reminder to consider urban ecology as well as rural sites. But as with rural scenes, the trees that tower over this cobbled lane provide strong verticals that, reaching into the sky, help give a sense of space that is conducive to expansive reflection and, like lichen, they have their own potential futures. They seem to be sycamores, since Grimshaw shows the few remaining leaves to be attached in pairs, not alternating on opposite sides of the shoot, as would be the case with the similar looking plane trees. In other Grimshaw paintings of the area, the trees look more distinctly like elms. Unfortunately, it is impossible to check, since Knostrop Hall was demolished in 1960 and the whole area is now the spectacularly ugly (and almost treeless) Cross Green

120  Kate Flint Industrial Estate. If they were elms, they would likely have succumbed to Dutch elm disease; if sycamores, they would be highly vulnerable today, above all to sooty bark disease (first detected in England in 1945), caused by a fungus, Cryptostroma corticale, which has conspicuous brownish-​black spores. The fungus spreads under the bark, and can lie dormant for years, until a tree becomes stressed—​as it is likely to do when, as now, there are higher temperatures, drier summers, and a dropping water table. Even if this disease is not as conspicuously devastating to the landscape (and to the landscapes of nineteenth-​ century paintings) as that caused by the Dutch elm beetle, its powers of destruction are latent in Grimshaw’s Leeds trees. And the arboreal backgrounds of Leighton’s Idyll and other Theocritean works are likewise vulnerable. To turn our attention to them gives the lie to the supposed timelessness of the idyll. To be sure, pests are not absent from Theocritus: in Idyll 5 Lacon exclaims how ‘I hate the fig-​eating beetles, whose squadrons | Swoop on the wind, and gorge on Philtadas’s fruit’.38 But at a time when Mediterranean trees, like those further north, are stressed by drought; and when warmer temperatures mean fewer cold winter nights that kill off beetles and help halt the spread of pathogenic fungi, the threat to central elements of iconic landscapes is stronger than ever. Throughout Mediterranean countries there has been an increase in mortality of the holm oaks that we see in Leighton’s Idyll. Earlier, when I noted the presence of stone pines in the background of his Syracusan Bride, I deliberately consigned them to the role of compositional device—​or at best I presented them as generic features of the Sicilian landscape. Yet the apparent suspended time of this moment in a ceremonial procession is challenged if we consider the vulnerability of stone pines in Italy today. Since 2015 they have been attacked by the aggressive sap-​sucking North American pine tortoise scale. As Stefano Pitrelli, writing in the Washington Post in August 2021, puts it: ‘These towering, umbrella-​shaped denizens are so deeply ingrained in the history and scenery here that it’s rare to find a photo or a painting of the city from any of its many eras that doesn’t show them in the background.’39 The yellowing needles on at least seventy per cent of these pines indicate that one cannot take such iconic trees for granted. So what kind of work are we doing if we read the painting in this way, deliberately, even perversely decentring visible human narratives for the sake of exploring broader, longer-​term ecological trajectories caused by invisible actions? This is a way, I argue, of bringing out latent implications in images: unintended implications, since I am making these environmental features speak to an unknowable future, but ones that point to very differently scaled and focused histories from those that immediately spring out from the paintings’ subject matter. And something further is at stake: a different way of thinking about the idyll. An idyll’s stopped moment is not just a narrative paused or a celebration of the rural. It is conducive to reflective attentiveness, and that attentiveness may profitably be turned to that which lies beyond the ostensible human drama. This pause gives us the time to pay attention to the slow forces of lichen or the future vulnerability of pine trees, just as much as to visible human activities. It invites us to let the suggestivity of ambience—​what Quilter termed ‘the mystery of vegetation: its wildness, delicacy, and strangeness’—​work upon us, to be sure, but it prompts us to go further in our understanding of non-​human natural settings, and to reflect on their own dynamics (p. 6). Nature, in such a future-​pointed reading, offers no escape from the effects of the human in the form of anthropogenic change, however much its greenery may offer solace. Ultimately, the idyll provides much more than a passive space of tranquil reverie. That idyllic pause is not an occasion for retreat; it is a provocation to active ecological

Ancient and Modern  121 thought. Both classical and modern idyll paintings point towards an environmentally precarious future. Notes 1 I would like to thank a number of people for their careful reading and important input into this chapter; in particular, Alice Echols, David Gillott, Thomas Hughes, Emma Merkling, and Clare Pettitt. 2 For classical-​subject painting in general during this period, see Joseph A. Kestner, Mythology and Misogyny: The Social Discourse of Nineteenth-​Century British Classical-​Subject Painting (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). 3 [Harry Quilter], A Catalogue of Pictures and Sketches by George Mason, A.R.A., and George Pinwell, A.R.W.S., exhibited at the Royal Society of Artists, Birmingham, to which is prefixed an essay by Harry Quilter, M.A. (London: Wyman, 1895), p. 11. 4 John Addington Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, First Series, 2nd edn (London: Smith, Elder, 1877), p. 320. 5 In assembling this rapid synopsis of the idyll’s characteristics, as understood and appropriated in the nineteenth century, I am enormously indebted to Elizabeth Helsinger’s chapter on the idyll, in Conversing in Verse: Conversation in Nineteenth-​ Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 22–​54. 6 Theocritus, ‘Idyll 13: The Story of Hylas’, in Idylls, trans. by Anthony Verity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 38–​40 (p. 39). Other works that were exhibited at the Royal Academy and that used the word ‘Idyll’ or drew on Theocritus include a drawing by J[ames] Taylor, Simæthea Invokes the Moon to Punish the Infidelity of Delphis (1812); Henry Fuseli, An Incantation—​See the Pharmaceutria of Theocritus (1820); George Arnald, The Boar that Killed Adonis Brought Before Venus (with a quotation from Creech’s translation of Theocritus) (1829); John Gibson’s sculpture A Group in Marble, Representing Hylas Surprised by the Naiades (1837); John Bell’s sculpture The Infant Hercules Strangling the Snakes, with lines from Chapman’s Theocritus (1837); William Frost, Hylas (1851), with lines from Fawkes’s Theocritus—​which stays closer to the Greek poet than did Howard, and shows the nymphs abducting Hylas into the sepia depths of the spring, with all vegetative details remaining vague; and Susan Durant’s sculpture The Negligent Watchboy of the Vineyard, Catching Locusts: Theocritus, 1st Idyll (1858). 7 Such downplaying of Theocritus’ homoeroticism typifies their Victorian treatment, although one might presume that this emphasis fuelled Symonds’s enthusiasm for Theocritus. 8 William Blake Richmond, Leighton, Millais, and William Morris: A Lecture Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy (London: Macmillan, 1898), pp. 19, 20. 9 For an extended and extremely useful treatment of pastoral as a genre, see Terry Gifford, Pastoral, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2020). 10 D. H. Lawrence to Blanche Jennings (31 December 1908), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. by James T. Boulton and others, 8 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–​ 2003), I : September 1901–​May 1913, ed. by James T. Boulton (2002), p. 103. 11 D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 29. For the importance of Greiffenhagen’s painting to Lawrence, see G. H. Neville, A Memoir of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 172–​80. 12 ‘The New Gallery’, Builder, 27 April 1907, p. 503. 13 This possibly owes something in its dominant brown tone and pyramidical composition to Arnold Böcklin’s Sea Idyll (1887), a family grouping of two mer-​adults, two amphibious human children, and a seal. 14 G. M. [George Moore], ‘The New Gallery’, Speaker, 12 May 1894, pp. 526–​27 (p. 526). 15 ‘Tableaux at the New’, Fun, 8 May 1894, p. 189.

122  Kate Flint 16 For a broad-​based understanding of the concept as commonly understood in the long nineteenth century, see Malcolm Andrews’s excellent A Sweet View: The Making of an English Idyll (London: Reaktion, 2021). He gives especial weight to the paintings of Samuel Palmer, Myles Birket Foster, and Helen Allingham, and to the writings of Richard Jefferies. 17 In, for example, Thomas Matthews Rooke, An Idyll (1881). 18 See Alun Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–​1920, ed. by Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1986), pp. 62–​98. Sometimes, a specific area (although not usually a specific location) is invoked—​as in A. Verey, A Kentish Idyll (1888); Émile Wauters, The Seamew’s Nest: An Idyll of Morocco (1889); or Arthur Lemon, A Tuscan Idyll (1896). Lemon’s work might possibly be classical, rather than contemporary: see his terrific The Wooing of Daphnis of 1881, now in the Tate, and based, of course, on Theocritus’ first Idyll. 19 Notably, in these idylls, where work is depicted, the season and setting is either idealized—​the milkmaid in Basil Bradley’s The Farmer’s Daughter—​A Jersey Idyll (1898) walks, with her milk pails, under blossom-​heavy trees, while her father continues to milk his placid Jersey cows in an orchard that slopes down to a turquoise-​blue sea—​or the labourers are placed at a slight distance, absorbed into the landscape whose appearance they are helping to create—​as in John R. Reid’s A Kentish Idyll, of the same year. 20 For a summary of the many appearances of the peacock in aesthetic decoration, see Wiener Museum of Decorative Arts, ‘Proud as a Peacock’, 10 July 2017 www.wmoda.com/​proud-​as-​a-​ peaco​ck2/​ [accessed 19 May 2023]. 21 Wardle was best known as a painter of wild animals in their natural settings and of domestic dogs. His capacity for close, accurate observation (contemporary reviewers remark that his style would have pleased Ruskin) was much remarked upon. 22 W. B. Yeats draws on this myth in what is probably its best-​known modern version, his 1923 poem ‘Leda and the Swan’. 23 For the mythological significance of swans and their transformational attributes across a range of cultural contexts, see Peter Young, Swan (London: Reaktion, 2008), especially pp. 62–​87. See also, Dan Keel, Swan: Portrait of a Majestic Bird, from Mythical Meanings to the Modern Day (Chichester: Summersdale, 2022); and Stephen Moss, The Swan: A Biography (London: Square Peg, 2021). 24 For the careers and work of this group, see Donato Esposito, Frederick Walker and the Idyllists (London: Lund Humphries, 2017), as well as Bethan Stevens’s chapter in the current volume. 25 ‘The Royal Academy (Fourth Notice)’, The Times, 27 June 1881, p. 12. 26 ‘The Society of Painter-​Etchers (Inaugural Exhibition)’, The Times, 12 April 1881, p. 4. Macbeth’s social commentary became, however, far less informative and pointed over the next few decades—​take A Summer Morning (1906) in which three naked women, who have clearly been for a dip in an inviting river, are happily sharing a snack with a couple of swans. 27 For an illuminating discussion of Theocritus’ treatment of the rural, and the balance between the artificial and the ordinary that he aimed at in language as well as in representation, see Viola Palmieri, ‘Theocritus and the Rural World’, in Brill’s Companion to Theocritus, ed. by Poulheria Kyriakou, Evina Sistakou, and Antonios Rengakos (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 473–​93. As Palmieri points out, that the apparent realism of the Theocritean countryside acts within the field of the fictional is, incidentally, further showcased by the recognition, by the modern as much as the ancient reader, of the historical reality of Sicily and Magna Graecia in the 3rd century BCE . This recognition inevitably undermines the interpretation of these poems as representative of the contemporary situation: by the time of Theocritus, the countryside of these areas had suffered from the devastations caused by Agathocles and Pyrrhus. (p. 476)

Ancient and Modern  123 28 See, for example, Macbeth’s Gipsies (1871) and Gypsy Girl (1875–​80), Frederick Walker’s The Vagrants (1868), or John William North’s Rushes (1873). 29 Robert Browning in a letter to Wilfred Meynell, quoted in W. M. [William Meynell], ‘ “Detachment” of Browning’, Athenaeum, 4 January 1890, pp. 18–​19 (p. 18). 30 See Leonée Ormond, ‘Leighton and Millais’, Apollo, February 1996, pp. 40–​44. 31 John Guille Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, 2 vols (London: Methuen, 1899), II , 165. 32 Paul Barlow, Time Present and Time Past: The Art of John Everett Millais (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 162. 33 Philip Gilbert Hamerton, The Sylvan Year: Leaves from the Note-​Book of Raoul Dubois, 2nd edn (London: Seeley, Jackson and Halliday, 1876), p. 186, emphasis in original. 34 Alfred William Hunt, ‘Turnerian Landscape—​An Arrested Art’, Nineteenth Century, February 1891, pp. 214–​24 (p. 216). 35 William Morris, ‘The Exhibition of the Royal Academy (by a Rare Visitor)’, To-​Day, July 1884, pp. 75–​91 (p. 80). 36 M. H. Spielmann, Millais and His Works (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1898), p. 98. 37 In part, this is because they are composite organisms, exemplifying the importance of cooperation and mutuality. They are extraordinarily adaptive to all kinds of environments; they are pioneer species—​among the first to emerge after a disaster; they are useful—​not just providing food for people and animals, but dyes, including for Scottish tartans. For an extended discussion of lichen, Victorian art, and ecological criticism, see Kate Flint, ‘Ruskin and Lichen’, in Ruskin’s Ecologies: Figures of Relation from Modern Painters to the Storm-​Cloud, ed. by Kelly Freeman and Thomas Hughes, Courtauld Books Online http://​doi.org/​10.33999/​2021.57. 38 ‘Idyll 5: Goatherd and Shepherd’, in Idylls, trans. by Verity, pp. 18–​22 (p. 21). 39 Stefano Pitrelli, ‘Rome’s iconic pines, hit hard by a nasty parasite, now face their own pandemic’, Washington Post, 21 August 2021 www.was​hing​tonp​ost.com/​world/​romes-​ico​nic-​pines-​hit-​ hard-​by-​a-​nasty-​paras​ite-​now-​face-​their-​own-​pande​mic/​2021/​08/​20/​1d2e0​424-​0035-​11ec-​ ba7e-​2cf​966e​88e9​3_​st​ory.html. For a nuanced consideration of the ecology of the Roman Campagna in relation to artistic representation, see Richard Wrigley, ‘The Roman Campagna Revisited: Art & Environment’, Tate Papers, 17 (2012) www.tate.org.uk/​resea​rch/​tate-​pap​ers/​ 17/​the-​roman-​campa​gna-​revisi​ted [both accessed 19 May 2023].

Bibliography Andrews, Malcolm, A Sweet View: The Making of an English Idyll (London: Reaktion, 2021). Barlow, Paul, Time Present and Time Past: The Art of John Everett Millais (London: Routledge, 2017). Boulton, James T., and others, eds, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 8 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–​2003). Esposito, Donato, Frederick Walker and the Idyllists (London: Lund Humphries, 2017). Flint, Kate, ‘Ruskin and Lichen’, in Ruskin’s Ecologies: Figures of Relation from Modern Painters to the Storm-​Cloud, ed. by Kelly Freeman and Thomas Hughes, Courtauld Books Online http://​ doi.org/​10.33999/​2021.57 Gifford, Terry, Pastoral, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2020). G. M. [George Moore], ‘The New Gallery’, Speaker, 12 May 1894, pp. 526–​27. Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, The Sylvan Year: Leaves from the Note-​Book of Raoul Dubois, 2nd edn (London: Seeley, Jackson and Halliday, 1876). Helsinger, Elizabeth, Conversing in Verse: Conversation in Nineteenth-​Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). Howkins, Alun, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–​ 1920, ed. by Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1986), pp. 62–​98. Hunt, Alfred William, ‘Turnerian Landscape—​An Arrested Art’, Nineteenth Century, February 1891, pp. 214–​24.

124  Kate Flint Keel, Dan, Swan: Portrait of a Majestic Bird, from Mythical Meanings to the Modern Day (Chichester: Summersdale, 2022). Kestner, Joseph A., Mythology and Misogyny: The Social Discourse of Nineteenth-​Century British Classical-​Subject Painting (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). Lawrence, D. H., The White Peacock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Millais, John Guille, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, 2 vols (London: Methuen, 1899). Morris, William, ‘The Exhibition of the Royal Academy (by a Rare Visitor)’, To-​Day, July 1884, pp. 75–​91. Moss, Stephen, The Swan: A Biography (London: Square Peg, 2021). Neville, G. H., A Memoir of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) ‘The New Gallery’, Builder, 27 April 1907, p. 503. Ormond, Leonée, ‘Leighton and Millais’, Apollo, February 1996, pp. 40–​44. Palmieri, Viola, ‘Theocritus and the Rural World’, in Brill’s Companion to Theocritus, ed. by Poulheria Kyriakou, Evina Sistakou, and Antonios Rengakos (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 473–​93. Pitrelli, Stefano, ‘Rome’s iconic pines, hit hard by a nasty parasite, now face their own pandemic’, Washington Post, 21 August 2021 www.was​hing​tonp​ost.com/​world/​romes-​ico​nic-​pines-​hit-​hard-​ by-​a-​nasty-​paras​ite-​now-​face-​their-​own-​pande​mic/​2021/​08/​20/​1d2e0​424-​0035-​11ec-​ba7e-​2cf​ 966e​88e9​3_​st​ory.html [accessed 19 May 2023]. [Quilter, Harry], A Catalogue of Pictures and Sketches by George Mason, A.R.A., and George Pinwell, A.R.W.S., exhibited at the Royal Society of Artists, Birmingham, to which is prefixed an essay by Harry Quilter, M.A. (London: Wyman, 1895). Richmond, William Blake, Leighton, Millais, and William Morris: A Lecture Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy (London: Macmillan, 1898). ‘The Royal Academy (Fourth Notice)’, The Times, 27 June 1881, p. 12. ‘The Society of Painter-​Etchers (Inaugural Exhibition)’, The Times, 12 April 1881, p. 4. Spielmann, M. H., Millais and His Works (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1898). Symonds, John Addington, Studies of the Greek Poets, First Series, 2nd edn (London: Smith, Elder, 1877). ‘Tableaux at the New’, Fun, 8 May 1894, p. 189. Theocritus, Idylls, trans. by Anthony Verity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Wiener Museum of Decorative Arts, ‘Proud as a Peacock’, 10 July 2017 www.wmoda.com/​proud-​ as-​a-​peaco​ck2/​ [accessed 19 May 2023]. W. M. [William Meynell], ‘ “Detachment” of Browning’, Athenaeum, 4 January 1890, pp. 18–​19. Wrigley, Richard, ‘The Roman Campagna Revisited: Art & Environment’, Tate Papers, 17 (2012) www.tate.org.uk/​resea​rch/​tate-​pap​ers/​17/​the-​roman-​campa​gna-​revisi​ted [accessed 19 May 2023]. Young, Peter, Swan (London: Reaktion, 2008).

6 Queer Pastoral Soundscapes and the Idyllic Voice Vernon Lee, A. Mary F. Robinson, and Lady Archibald Campbell Fraser Riddell And yet! ah me! How often we would break Through every fence, and overleap the walls, And link ourselves to some beloved soul, Hearing her answering voice […] Hearing sometimes across the garden walls A voice the wind brings over, or an end Of song that sinks like dew into my soul. —​A. Mary F. Robinson, ‘Personality (A Sestina)’ (1886)

In Mary Robinson’s ‘Personality’, a tentative promise of queer intimate connection with a desired other is offered in the sound of a voice which floats free on the wind ‘across the garden walls’.1 It is a voice that offers the solace of presence at the same time as being marked by absence: it manifests itself only ‘sometimes’; its lightness on the breeze signals its vulnerability and ephemerality; and it is rendered strangely impersonal by its separation from the body of its invisible speaker. This voice traverses a landscape of ‘high garden walls’, with ‘a road that never has an end’—​reminiscent, perhaps, of the countryside surrounding Florence, the home of Vernon Lee, Robinson’s lover when she wrote the poem.2 The poem’s interest in the fragile communicative potential of the voice as it moves through an imagined idyllic space points to a broader fascination in late nineteenth-​ century culture with how sound shapes queer subjectivities. In exploring the queer soundscapes of the Victorian idyllic imagination, this chapter turns to the work of Lady Archibald Campbell (Janey Sevilla Campbell, née Callander, 1846–​1923), Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856–​1935), and A. Mary F. Robinson (1857–​ 1944). A focus on these writers’ engagements with the idyllic mode functions to complicate our understanding of the queerness of the nineteenth-​century pastoral tradition. Far from being merely a naive retreat from modernity and its attendant troubles, the Victorian idyll in fact stages a dialectical oscillation between presence and absence, pleasure and sorrow, revelation and withdrawal—​a dynamic that in turn prefigures recent theoretical conceptualizations of queerness.3 Work examining the queer geographies of lesbian desire in late nineteenth-​century literature has often privileged the urban over the rural, typically focusing on how women’s strategies for reconfiguring public space in the Victorian city provided new opportunities for the articulation of same-​sex desire.4 At the same time, scholarship on the queer pastoral tradition in the Victorian period has tended to DOI: 10.4324/9781003327998-7

126  Fraser Riddell focus on a distinctly male literary tradition. The emphasis in such accounts is generally on how imagined pastoral spaces allow for the free expression of same-​sex desire as something natural, or facilitate cross-​class sexual liaisons between so-​called rustics and their middle-​class male lovers, or affirm the dignity of the desiring queer body.5 Examining the idyllic experiments of Campbell, Lee, and Robinson allows for a clearer sense of a distinct lesbian idyllic tradition to emerge: one that (often paradoxically) discovers desire between women in an atmosphere of idealized sexual innocence, anachronistic temporal displacement, and spatial dislocation. In this respect the idyllic mode participates in the tradition of what Terry Castle has called the ‘apparitional lesbian’, in which same-​sex desire between women is ‘excited only to be obscured, disembodied, decarnalized’.6 Keeping an ear out for the soundscapes of these Victorian idylls draws our attention to the ways in which these queer dynamics of disappearance manifest themselves through embodied sensory experience: in a preoccupation with the encoding of language in natural sounds; in the demarcation of proximity and distance in noises that resound, fade out, or disappear; in the fascination with vocal timbres, marked by androgyny or childlike purity. In attending to how these noises become resonant with cultural meaning, my chapter takes its lead from what Steven Connor has called ‘phonophenomenology’: ‘a meditation on the kinds of magical thinking attached to […] sounds’.7 In doing so I foreground quaintly pre-​modern sonic alternatives to the cityscapes, gramophones, and realist novels that have been the focus of most studies of sound in Victorian literature.8 While literary scholars have done much to explore the rich array of natural imagery drawn on by women to articulate their sexual desires, my interest here lies less in reassembling a specifically lesbian idyllic taxonomy, and more in thinking through how idealized idyllic spaces are used to shape queer subjectivities in sensory and embodied ways, namely through voice and sound. Recent work in queer theory has traced how marginalized subjectivities are formed through particular phenomenological spatial and temporal ‘orientations’.9 Elizabeth Freeman, for example, has explored the queerness of asynchrony: the feeling of not properly belonging to the time in which one lives.10 Her work has also called on scholars to think more carefully about how the ‘sense-​methods’ of nineteenth-​century culture ‘foreground[ed] time itself as a visceral, haptic […] way of feeling and organizing the world’.11 In this chapter the soundscapes of the Victorian idyll articulate a desire to retreat from modernity, while manifesting at a sensory level an urge towards lesbian intimacy that is delicately poised between material presence and idealized disembodiment. The first section of this chapter demonstrates the way in which Campbell’s outdoor staging of Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy As You Like It (1599) traces the presence and absence of queer desire in the movement of sounds that by turns echo affirmatively and poignantly die away. The second section explores the central place of sound in Lee’s response to Campbell’s production of John Fletcher’s pastoral tragicomedy The Faithfull Shepherdesse (1609), particularly in her articles ‘Pastorellerie Aristocratiche: Appunti di Londra’ (‘Aristocratic Pastorals: Notes from London’, 1885) and ‘Perigot: Random Notes on the Dramatic and Undramatic’ (1886).12 Here, the contrast between the sounds of urban modernity and those of the pastoral idyll point to Lee’s fascination with queer anachronism and temporal displacement. The final section takes as its starting point the way in which Lee praises Robinson’s lyric poetry through metaphors of an idealized (if nevertheless erotically charged) singing voice. It proceeds to trace the queer dynamics of this idealization as it informs the communicative possibilities of the singing voice in Robinson’s neglected pastoral novel, Arden (1883).13

Queer Pastoral Soundscapes and the Idyllic Voice  127 Over the course of the 1880s Lee and Robinson established themselves as among the leading figures in English aestheticism: the former was celebrated by Walter Pater for her aesthetic essays; the latter lauded internationally for her poetry, as the evident heir to the Pre-​Raphaelites.14 During this period, from 1880 to 1887, the women sustained a romantically intense lesbian relationship. This ended with Robinson’s sudden decision to enter into a platonic marriage with the French Orientalist James Darmesteter, leading Lee to endure a serious emotional and physical breakdown.15 Many of the most cherished moments of intimacy in their relationship unfolded against the backdrop of idyllic rural locales, far removed from the frenetic socializing that marked their time together in London: the village of Fittleworth, West Sussex, where they shared a ‘tiny cottage’ for the summer of 1882; the ‘damp fields’ around Epsom in Surrey, where they strolled in the autumn of 1885; the olive groves and vineyards near Lee’s home in Florence.16 A number of their works memorialize the times they spent together in the privacy of their own company: ‘Come, take my hands, and lead me out of doors’, Robinson implores Lee in one poem, ‘There in the fields let us forget our sorrow.’17 These rural spaces allowed them the freedom to share ideas—​the value of conversation and dialogue is a mutual perennial theme—​where they developed a relationship founded on the intimate erotics of intellectual exchange. Of the three women on which this chapter focuses, Campbell is likely to be the least familiar. Born into an aristocratic family in Stirlingshire in 1846, she was later adopted by George Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll, whose second son, Lord Archibald Campbell, she eventually married in 1869. She is now best remembered for her groundbreaking outdoor theatre productions with the Pastoral Players in the 1880s, many of which were staged in collaboration with the noted architect, designer, and director E. W. Godwin.18 ‘Lady Archie’ (as she was known to her friends) wrote articles on a variety of topics for newspapers and magazines throughout her life, ranging from health and hunting to spiritualism and drama, and published an aesthetic treatise on the arrangement of colour, Rainbow-​Music; or, The Philosophy of Harmony in Colour-​Grouping (1886).19 She was also a well-​known advocate for women’s rights in the 1890s, championing ‘rational dress’ and women’s participation in sports, from cycling to ice skating and tobogganing.20 In a series of outdoor theatrical performances in the 1880s, she donned masculine attire to play the leading heroic roles in plays that placed her androgynous beauty against the backdrop of idealized pastoral landscapes: Orlando in As You Like It (1884, 1885); Perigot in The Faithfull Shepherdesse (1885); Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1887); and Pierrot in Théodore de Banville’s Le Baiser (The Kiss, 1888). Campbell’s performances occurred at a historical juncture at which women were increasingly coming to articulate a distinct sense of modern lesbian identity through their playful experiments with male clothing.21 And while there was a well-​established Victorian theatrical tradition of women playing the parts of young boys and adolescents, including Romeo and Hamlet, her cross-​dressing performances of adult male leading roles were more unconventional.22 The London press was certainly titillated, ahead of Campbell’s first performance of As You Like It, by the ‘gossip’ that Orlando was ‘to be played by a lady “in tights” ’.23 Campbell’s own sense of her sexual identity is, of course, not directly available to us, and as scholars such as Emma Donoghue have taught us, historical expressions of same-​sex desire between women can be notoriously resistant to demands for incontrovertible ‘evidence’.24 Yet in Campbell’s case, we might nevertheless follow the example of her lesbian contemporaries, such as Vernon Lee, who was quick to recognize the queer fascination of ‘the most amazing woman [she had] ever set eyes on’.25 Indeed, Lee was

128  Fraser Riddell so struck by Campbell’s cross-​dressing performances that she took them as the starting point for a number of essayistic pieces in which the pleasures of the pastoral genre are closely bound up with those of lesbian theatrical spectatorship. Sounds natural: Lady Archibald Campbell and As You Like It Campbell’s first great theatrical success was her outdoor production of As You Like It which she staged in the woods at Coombe, near Kingston upon Thames, in collaboration with Godwin, who served as designer and stage manager. ‘The very Derby day of æstheticism’, as Max Beerbohm was later to describe it in The Yellow Book, was one of the great artistic events of its time, attended by many of London’s most fashionable artists, writers, and aristocrats.26 As John Stokes has shown, the production was notable not only for its novel open-​air setting, but also its careful attention to colour (the costumes, manufactured by Lasenby Liberty, were designed to ‘harmonize’ with the greens and browns of the woodland), and its commitment to theatrical realism: the mise en scène incorporated real sheep, real deer, and a real wood fire, smoke and all.27 The play’s other significant innovation was its unusual use of sound and space: the grove that formed the main acting area had open wings that revealed a meadow stretching into the distance, from which the audience observed groups of far-​off actors shouting and singing, as they gradually approached the stage. These sounds created a play of proximity and distance that evoked a lesbian eroticism at once embodied and immaterial, and which, in the words of Castle, gains ‘recognition through negation’ (p. 60). Shakespeare’s As You Like It delights in homoerotic suggestiveness and the subversion of normative gender categories. As Catherine Belsey has observed, its gender-​play offers an audience ‘the pleasure of a knowingness which depends on a knowledge of sexual difference’, while at the same time calling such sexual difference into question ‘by indicating that it is possible, at least in fiction, to speak from a position which is not that of a full, unified, gendered subject’.28 Yet Campbell’s choice of play also participates in a more specific queer literary tradition. As Oscar Wilde observed, she may have been partially inspired by Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), in which the play is staged in a French chateau by a group of amateur actors.29 Like Campbell’s productions, Gautier’s novel playfully revels in the queer suggestiveness of female-​ to-​ male cross-​ dressing (Danson, pp. 72–​80). Such was the novel’s notoriety that one reviewer of As You Like It hinted at its influence, only to add teasingly that ‘we would not for a moment suggest that Lady Archibald Campbell has ever read so very free-​and-​easy a romance’.30 The more immediate origins of Campbell’s production of As You Like It lie in her playfully suggestive idyllic experiments alongside the actress Eleanor Calhoun (1862–​ 1957) in the woods near her home in Kingston upon Thames, as captured in a photograph of the pair in cross-​dressed Shakespearean costume standing against a tree trunk (the taller Campbell has her arm around Calhoun; Calhoun holds Campbell’s hand) (Figure 6.1). Calhoun was well known for her performances of Shakespeare on the London stage in the early 1880s and was particularly celebrated for her portrayal of the cross-​dressing Rosalind in As You Like It at the Imperial Theatre. While scholars such as Kerry Powell have observed how these women’s use of an outdoor setting allowed them to innovate a form of theatre ‘beyond the reach of male actor-​managers and the theatres that they ruled’, less attention has been paid to the manner in which such idyllic locales also allowed for the imaginative exploration of idealized same-​sex desire.31 Stokes draws upon one contemporary account of the production’s origins, which suggested that the idea came to Campbell after she painted Eleanor Calhoun, while the latter was dressed in

Queer Pastoral Soundscapes and the Idyllic Voice  129 her boyish Rosalind (Ganymede) costume, with the Coombe Woods serving as an appropriately idyllic backdrop.32 Yet he overlooks another account, by Calhoun herself, which situates the production’s beginnings not only in the (homoerotic) gaze of Campbell as she frames the figure of her cross-​dressing friend, but also in the voices of Campbell and Calhoun as they play with the acoustics of outdoor space. Calhoun’s memoir, Pleasures and Palaces: The Memoirs of Princess Lazarovich-​ Hrebelianovich (1915), provides a notable account of the time she spent with her ‘rare and noble friend amid the tall green bracken’, dwelling on Campbell’s ‘high type of beauty, tall, slender, of elegant mold, fair of hair and skin’.33 In the early days of their friendship, Calhoun travelled to Campbell’s home at Coombe, bringing with her (at Campbell’s request) her Ganymede costume: ‘a combination of leathers and rough woolens in wood colors […] high leather boots and all’ (p. 70). This she would wear concealed under a long ulster overcoat during lengthy outdoor rambles with Campbell in the ‘fine old forest’ nearby, ‘far from the world of men’, where the women were free to enjoy their own company while they read aloud together the poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne

Figure 6.1 Lady Archibald Campbell and Eleanor Calhoun in As You Like It, from Eleanor Calhoun, Pleasures and Palaces: The Memoirs of Princess Lazarovich-​Hrebelianovich (New York: Century, 1915). Digitized by Internet Archive, original from Cornell University Library.

130  Fraser Riddell and Edgar Allan Poe (pp. 59, 70). Calhoun’s melodramatic account of her moment of inspiration is worth quoting at length: One summer day when the sun, a somewhat exclusive god in England, deigned to show forth in full power, and splash the forest with splendor […] it seemed to me that in such an English forest must the vision of Rosalind have first come to Shakspere [sic]. In an impulse at the thought, I threw off my wrap and began to speak Rosalind’s words. Lady Archibald stood far back as audience, while I acted through the scenes. As I heard the words I was speaking ringing through the woods, the idea flashed upon me, ‘Why not give the play so, here, on this very spot?’ I called out to my friend, ‘I want to act this play right here among these trees.’ (p. 71) The passage blends erotized exposure and queer spectatorship with an evocation of a distinctive idyllic soundscape. Inspired by her glorious natural surroundings, Calhoun spontaneously unveils her masculine attire so that she can be fully admired by her sole ‘audience’ of Lady Archie. Simultaneously, her recitation of Shakespeare’s verse is transformed by the acoustic properties of the idyllic space in which her voice resonates. Her experience of her voice ‘ringing through the woods’ sparks her ‘flash’ of inspiration to stage the play outdoors. Indeed, the passage further emphasizes Calhoun’s pleasure in her raised voice as she ‘call[s]‌out’ enthusiastically to Campbell through the trees. For Calhoun, it is the combination of Lady Archibald’s androgynous appearance, her unworldly demeanour, and her untrained speaking voice that make her perfectly suited for the role of Orlando in their production. She praises ‘her close-​cropped, curling hair’, and her ‘tall, lean […] figure’, which could ‘easily convey the figure and aspect of a slender youth of gentle lineage’ (p. 77). She makes a virtue of the ‘loud, uncontrolled tones’ that mark Lady Archibald out as a theatrical amateur in her first attempts at reciting Shakespeare: ‘her voice itself was rich, though harsh and blurting at that time, and there was plenty of it’ (p. 77). Significantly, in Calhoun’s conception of the play—​ ‘more poetic […] than any other’—​she insists that Orlando must be able to dispel any hint of (male) homoeroticism in his interactions with Ganymede: ‘the slightest instinctive flutter of sentimental response to his supposed boy play-​fellow would […] be grossly inadmissible’ (pp. 76, 77). Lady Archibald’s strangely ‘impersonal and detached’ disposition, Calhoun suggests, makes her perfectly suited to sustain this idealization of sexual desire in her performance of the role (p. 78). Calhoun’s fascination with how outdoor space transforms the resonance of the voice is similarly evident in Campbell’s production’s use of ‘offstage’ sounds. Here, voices that fade into nothingness become an emblem of the precarity of queer desire, their disappearance part of these productions’ broader stylistic interest in the disavowed but ever-​present eroticization of the ‘ideal’. In As You Like It, the voices of Duke Senior’s woodsmen would be heard at a far distance as they slowly approached the stage through the surrounding woodland. Only the sonic presence of their voices was recognized by the audience at first, while the semantic content of their conversations gradually came into sharper clarity as they moved closer. Similarly, when the woodsmen departed the stage, whether in the middle of a song or shouting boisterously, the sound of their voices would gradually fade out as they disappeared into the distance. The review of As You Like It from the Daily News gives a fine sense of the novelty of such theatrical sound effects, to which ‘the playgoer [was] wholly unaccustomed’:

Queer Pastoral Soundscapes and the Idyllic Voice  131 More strange still were the running exits, when Lady Archibald Campbell or some of her associates had to depart at the close of a scene, not by the convenient shelter of the ‘wings’, but into a patch of underwood some fifty yards away. The approach of the crowd of foresters in their varied attire, and their no less picturesque departure down the slope—​their noisy shouts fading as they went—​were in like manner strangely different from ordinary scenic arrangements. The soft dreamy sound of the chimes from some church supposed to be within the bounds of the forest had, again, a curiously pleasing effect.34 ‘Strange’, ‘strangely’, ‘curiously’—​terms that often point the way towards something queer in late Victorian aesthetic discourse.35 And the Daily News’s reviewer was not alone in being struck by the uncanny atmosphere of these emerging and departing voices. Another was enthralled by these ‘voices […] growing fainter and fainter, until at last nothing but the gentle rustling of the leaves, or the note of a bird, reached the ear’.36 In similar terms the theatre critic for the Era enthused that the way in which ‘the songs and choruses of the Duke’s huntsmen and attendants die naturally away as the singers recede into the distance […] is as charming as it is novel, and of itself worth a journey to Coombe House to enjoy’.37 A similar effect was given in other productions, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where groups of actors would continue speaking as they left the stage, ‘their voices dying away in the distance—​an element of realism […] quite unattainable in the abrupt entrances and exits at the narrow “wings” of a theatre’.38 Each of these reviewers was fascinated by the way that voices came and went, echoed and merged into the sounds of the natural environment, so that both meaning and human voice fade and disappear. Queer theory’s so-​called negative turn might help us make some sense of these theatrical soundscapes of disappearance. Work by scholars such as Heather Love has demonstrated how late nineteenth-​century queer subjectivities were built around experiences of loss and dislocation. Such scholarship makes us more alert to how queerness is figured in metaphors of withdrawal, refusal, and retreat.39 In English aestheticism, as Love demonstrates, it is Walter Pater’s ‘diaphanous types’ who become the archetypal figures of this self-​abnegation (pp. 58–​65). ‘Dying away’, ‘reced[ing]’, ‘fading’, ‘growing fainter and fainter’—​these function in Campbell’s productions as the sonic manifestation of this queer Paterian ‘diaphaneitè’.40 Marked in these fading voices is a lesbian desire that never quite achieves material presence, that is always displaced into the naive gracefulness of the idyllic mode’s insistent sexual innocence. While the disembodied voices of these actors seem to evoke a queer sense of loss, the sounds of the natural world in Campbell’s productions also become associated with the transmission of desire. In common with many reviewers, the poet Alfred Austin was particularly struck by the distinctive integration of natural sounds in As You Like It: the ‘twitter of birds’ and ‘distant bleating’ that formed an impression of ‘all things native and natural’ (p. 128). Another reviewer dwelt on ‘the tinkle of the sheep bell, and the distance-​softened bleating of its wearers for accompaniment’.41 The accompanying birdsong, an ‘incessant chirping and chattering’ from the ‘piping of the thrush and the flute-​like notes of the blackbird’, became at times ‘so loud […] as actually to interrupt the actors’.42 Campbell’s article ‘The Woodland Gods’ (1887)—​the first to be published in the Woman’s World under the editorship of Oscar Wilde—​affords this natural soundscape a queer form of communicative agency. The combined emotional effect of ‘the lisp of leaves’, ‘the song of birds’, ‘the murmur that springs from the growing of

132  Fraser Riddell grass’, she suggests, becomes akin to ‘the voice of the beloved, singing to one alone’.43 In paraphrasing Percy Bysshe Shelley’s fragmentary essay ‘On Love’ (1818), Campbell transforms these chance twitterings into an encoded expression of idealized desire, one that has the ability to speak with a powerful sense of both privacy and intimacy directly to an attentive lover. She locates a similar preoccupation with this encoding of meaning in natural sound in As You Like It, where the character of Duke Senior discovers ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, [and] sermons in stones’ (p. 4). Yet the language of these natural sounds remains one of articulate inarticulacy: they provoke in ‘the sensitive spectator’, Campbell suggests, ‘a delight that finds its expression in tears’. As words fade into indistinct sounds of voices and eventually into the sounds of the pastoral idyll, so too are individual emotion, intimacy, and desire rendered all the more intense through their disappearance into their surroundings. The ‘delight’ that Campbell discovers in this experience is a reminder that there is also a queer form of pleasure to be discovered in encountering the spectacle of loss, as Elizabeth Freeman’s exploration of what she calls ‘erotohistoriography’ has shown us (Time Binds, pp. 95–​97). This idyllic soundscape of idealized sexual innocence was also more specifically connected with the distinctive voice of Campbell herself. Oscar Wilde, for instance, in his review of As You Like It for the Dramatic Review in June 1885, praised Campbell’s Orlando as a ‘really remarkable performance’. While noting the lack of conventionally masculine ‘vigour’ and ‘robustness’ that he expected to find in the character of Orlando, he was nevertheless enthralled by her portrayal: ‘in the low music of Lady Archibald Campbell’s voice, and in the strange beauty of her movements and gestures, there was a wonderful fascination.’44 As Lawrence Danson has observed, Wilde’s evocation of a ‘strange beauty’ that elicits a ‘wonderful fascination’ clearly hints—​in its passing allusions to Pater, Gautier, and Swinburne—​at the queer sexual suggestiveness of Campbell’s performance (p. 77). Yet significantly, Campbell’s androgyny is also defined here by the peculiar timbre of her speaking voice. Her voice’s ‘low music’ suggests not only the lowered pitch that marks its breach of feminine expectations, but also suggests that the whispered ‘music’ of queer desire is perhaps audible only to those who are alert to sotto voce intimations of deviant sexuality. The fixation with the erotics of Campbell’s voice might be understood in the context of contemporary sexological discourses, which rendered vocal timbre as one of the many diagnostic markers through which newly emergent lesbian identities were articulated. Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds’s Sexual Inversion (1897), for instance, cited anatomical evidence that ‘inverted’ women typically possessed ‘a very decidedly masculine type of larynx’.45 Yet if Campbell’s voice intimates the promise of queer desire, it nevertheless does so within the context of an idyllic mode which, in its insistence on the natural purity and innocence of all that is presented, refutes the pathologizing impulse of sexology. Indeed, the idyllic soundscapes of disappearance and displacement in Campbell’s productions represent a retreat from the physical body into a space in which sexual desire is most powerfully felt in the gestures through which its material presence is insistently denied. Aural anachronism: Vernon Lee and The Faithfull Shepherdesse Campbell’s and Godwin’s production of John Fletcher’s The Faithfull Shepherdesse is similarly significant for its presentation of a queer pastoral idyll, likewise marked by soundscapes that speak of idealized desire between women. This comes into sharpest

Queer Pastoral Soundscapes and the Idyllic Voice  133 focus in Vernon Lee’s response to the play. Lee’s essays on the production and, in particular, on Campbell’s cross-​dressed performance in the lead role, provide a valuable account of lesbian spectatorship in Victorian theatre. For Lee, the play’s interest in a form of anti-​modern queer anachronism is most clearly evoked in the production’s soundscapes. This stylistic rejection of the modern is simultaneously bound up with the virtues of gracefulness, naivety, childishness, and sexual purity—​categories that, like the untrained voices and natural sound in As You Like It, favour ‘idealism’ over ‘realism’. The Faithfull Shepherdesse maintained many of the features that had distinguished As You Like It: a careful attention to the ‘harmonic arrangement’ of sound, music, and colour; a dedication to ‘archaeological’ principles of costume and stage design; and a cast that combined amateurs and professionals.46 Campbell played Perigot, the handsome young shepherd; the role of his lover Amoret was taken by another aristocratic amateur, Princess Helen Rundeer Singh Ahluwalia. The production’s most spectacular stage effect was the lovers’ first entrance, where they arrived on ‘a golden chariot drawn by two gentle heifers’.47 Incidental music by the Rev. A. W. Batson included a ‘softly-​swelling chorus of a hymn to Pan’, which was performed by a choir of around forty singers while they danced in a circle, following choreography modelled on Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, around a large herma.48 This statue of Pan was a replica, produced by Godwin, of an object held in the British Museum, and was engraved with a Latin inscription composed by the classical scholar and ‘eminent archaeologist’ Jane Harrison.49 Reviewers noted the production’s similarity to the visual language of ‘the pastoral idyllic school’, comparing its ‘series of living pictures’ to the canvases of Frederic Leighton and Frederick Hamilton Jackson.50 Most notably, Godwin and Campbell adapted and amended Fletcher’s play, shifting the tone of the work so as to sustain an idyllic atmosphere of idealized sexual innocence. As Godwin noted, to make Fletcher’s work ‘presentable to a modern audience […] it was necessary to exclude much that had belonged to the vocabulary of his time—​ unnecessarily strong for ours’.51 Some such changes were merely designed to lighten the mood of Fletcher’s self-​proclaimed ‘tragi-​comedy’: the opening of Godwin’s version replaces the long lament of Clorin over her dead lover’s grave, which begins Fletcher’s play, with a celebratory ‘Hymn to Pan’. Others reflected expectations of decorum on the Victorian stage: Perigot’s repeated violent onstage assaults on Amoret’s body, for instance, are expunged. Instead, rather than ‘wound[ing] her’, he merely ‘pushes her aside’ or chases her offstage (p. 22). Most striking is the excision of those passages which explicitly address sexual desire: the Sullen Shepherd’s rumination on his own lustfulness; Amaryllis’s embittered dispelling of the myth of female chastity; the public trials of the virginity of both Cloe and Amoret. Yet, conversely, this carefully styled vision of idyllic purity was intensely erotically alluring. Lee was fascinated by Campbell’s androgynous agelessness, her ‘mobile nervous face’, her short cropped hair, her ‘supple and graceful’ movement, her strange childlike simplicity.52 She first met Campbell after attending a performance of The Faithfull Shepherdesse in July 1885, where the pair were introduced by Lee’s close friend Alice Callander, Campbell’s sister-​in-​law. In a letter to Robinson, in which Lee reflects with frankness on her tendency to ‘always fal[l]‌a victim (rather amused) to some Siren’, she looked back with embarrassment on ‘the four days during which [she] was mentally dragged at Perigot’s Chariot wheels’.53 Yet she was otherwise upfront about the allure of Campbell’s theatrical cross-​dressing. In July 1886, when she saw her perform in the title role of Fair Rosamond—​adapted from Tennyson’s play Becket (1884)—​she found

134  Fraser Riddell her ‘such a falling off in women’s clothes’, tartly reflecting on the source of her earlier ‘rapturous enthusiasm’: ‘she had legs then instead of lilac skirts.’54 Like Wilde, Lee was also enthralled by the strangeness of Campbell’s ‘very slow, sweet […] voice’. When her friend, the singer Mary Wakefield, later attempted to teach Campbell to sing a song, for instance, Lee observed that she ‘persisted in crooning it out in a weird way of her own’.55 However, the sonic focal point of Lee’s interest in The Faithfull Shepherdesse is not Campbell’s distinctive voice, but rather how the production uses the sounds of the natural world to signal a queerly anachronistic withdrawal from modernity. This is most marked in Lee’s article in the Italian newspaper Fanfulla della domenica, ‘Pastorellerie Aristocratiche: Appunti di Londra’ (‘Aristocratic Pastorals: Notes from London’), published in Rome in August 1885.56 The article is typical of her aesthetic essays in its use of an unstable narrative voice, serving to insistently ironize the certainties of any overly dogmatic response to art. Its opening sections present the views of a pompous and self-​satisfied ‘modern’, who mocks pastoral drama—​covered as it is in ‘the dust of the past’—​for its ‘childish trifles’, and argues for ‘the infinite superiority’, for ‘we modern psychological […] people’, of contemporary realist drama (p. 79). The sections that follow call into question this ‘superiority’ by setting in contrast the physically and psychologically unsettling experience of attending such a ‘modern drama’ in a typical claustrophobic Victorian theatre, with the ‘charm[ing]’ and ‘lovely’ effect of the Pastoral Players’ open-​air production of The Faithfull Shepherdesse at Coombe (pp. 78, 85). Thus while the essay’s opening paragraphs insist that ‘[to] us moderns, it seems incredible that our forefathers were able to entertain themselves with such childish trifles’ (p. 78), by its conclusion Lee’s speaker has asserted playfully: ‘Who knows, perhaps our forefathers were right after all?’ (p. 85). ‘Aristocratic Pastorals’ focuses on the distinctive embodied experience of sound—​ often blended with smell, sight, and touch—​that marks these respective theatre-​going experiences. In the modern theatre in London’s West End, Lee’s speaker ‘drowns’ in an atmosphere of ‘vaguely nauseating closeness’ that spreads from so many human beings, or, we might better say, from so many well-​ dressed livestock, a stink of breath mixed with dyed cloth, clothes impregnated with tobacco, handkerchiefs infused with perfume, thoroughly mixed with all the imperceptible scents of these fine people. (pp. 79–​80) She feels a confused sense of malaise from many hours in confined seats, from the elbows of our neighbours, from the murmur of the voices, from the rustle of the dresses, from the sharp dry clicks of the fans opening and shutting, and from the effort of hearing and paying attention in the midst of that low rumble. (p. 80) Her eyes strain in the gaslights to make out the ‘flickering shape[s]‌’ of the distant faces on the stage, which are distorted—​in an image that enfolds the impressionism and Japonisme of James McNeill Whistler—​‘to become Japanese masks, round, confused blotches with wide-​open mouths […] blotches of white, or reddish, uncertain shapes, clumps of hair

Queer Pastoral Soundscapes and the Idyllic Voice  135 and whiskers’ (p. 80). Lee’s description evokes an intense bodily disgust, in which the sounds and smells of fellow theatregoers intrude into one’s personal space, distract from the stage action, and shatter theatrical illusion through the continual sonic reminders of narcissistic modern society, with its ‘murmur[ing]’ gossips, replete with noisy dresses and fans. In contrast to the sickening, polluted atmosphere of the London theatre, the idyllic setting for the performance at Coombe seems like a ‘thousand miles from the great city’ (p. 83). Lee’s speaker returns repeatedly to the natural sounds of this environment to characterize how the idyllic pleasure of Campbell’s production is felt by the body: the beneficent ‘open air’, in which the audience watch the play, with ‘the foliage of the elm trees rustling in our ears’; the wide sweeping theatrical space, re-​emphasized by the distant sounds of ‘sheep with barking dogs […] setting off through the woods’; the ‘joyful shouting of […] shepherds and shepherdesses’; the incidental music that ‘mixes with the birdsong and the rustling branches’ (p. 83). Unlike the Whistlerian ‘blotches’ of ‘uncertain shapes’ caught in the darkness of the theatre, here the visual effect is of the performers’ motley costumes ‘staining the green of the grass with the sort of vivid yellows-​blues-​reds that would drive [Lawrence] Alma-​Tadema or [Francesco Paolo] Michetti to despair’ (p. 83). For Lee’s speaker, the bright natural light which illuminates this colourful scenic tableau calls to mind the brilliance and sharpness of the Mediterranean light in these contemporary artists’ carefully composed scenes from classical antiquity and pastoral genre paintings. These idyllic soundscapes, explicitly set in contrast with the noise of modernity, evoke at an embodied sensory level the anachronistic temporal displacement that defines Lee’s queer response to The Faithfull Shepherdesse. In ‘Perigot: Random Notes on the Dramatic and Undramatic’, Lee playfully transforms the character of Perigot into an emblem of transhistorical gender deviance. In doing so she gently ironizes Campbell’s insistence on the ‘realism’ of her productions with the Pastoral Players—​a theme developed in a number of Campbell’s articles—​and instead asserts that the true value of her work in fact lies in its imaginative idealization: how it satisfies our ‘passionate craving for things as they are not’.57 For Lee, Campbell’s Perigot represents the latest manifestation of an eternal spirit of anti-​realism, which itself is coextensive with an androgynous refusal of normative gender categories: Perigot is still without even the first faint callowness of lip or chin; yet he is older by far than the oldest greybeard. He has flown with the winged sandals of Perseus over the blue seas and white cities of Greece; he has ridden with Oberon’s horn by his side through the mysterious pine-​woods, along the strangely winding rivers of the kingdom of the Grail King; he disappeared out of antiquity as the boy Hylas whom the green-​ haired nymphs dragged beneath the river bed; and he reappeared in the Middle Ages as the Provençal knight Aucassin, ‘Aucassin li Biax, li Blons, li Gentil, li Amoureux.’ He had appeared again in later times, a boy or a girl? A girl disguised as a boy, or a boy disguised as a girl? As Richardet in the clothes of his sister Bradamante, as Viola in the dress of her brother Sebastian, showing himself, all the while, to country folk, old women and children […]. And once more—​the last time, alas! we may fear—​he has shown himself in our own days, on the stage of turf and cut grass, between the side scenes of rustling elms, of the pastoral theatre at Coombe. (‘Perigot’, p. 240)

136  Fraser Riddell In a passage that perhaps consciously echoes Pater’s evocation of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘La Gioconda’ in The Renaissance, Lee presents Perigot as akin to one of Heinrich Heine’s ‘Gods in Exile’, a temporally dislocated remnant from an earlier historical period who sustains a set of values at odds with those of modernity.58 She traces Perigot’s presence from classical antiquity to medieval romance, to Shakespearean comedy, discovering his spirit in a plethora of queer figures from the past: Perseus, whose ‘winged sandals’ were granted to him by his lover Hermes; Oberon, who notoriously claimed possession of his ‘lovèd boy’ from Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595); Hylas, the drowned boy-​companion of Heracles; Aucassin, admired by Pater for his ‘slim, tall, debonair figure, […] with curled yellow hair’ (Pater, p. 15). Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516) presents similar figures of gender deviance: the knight heroine Bradamante, ‘who rode through the forests with a helmet on her head and a sword at her side’ (as Lee puts it in a similar passage in ‘Aristocratic Pastorals’, p. 84), and whose twin brother Ricciardetto (Richardet) disguises himself as his sister and claims that she had a miraculous transformation of sex, so that he might seduce the Princess Fiordispina. Lee’s ‘Perigot’ is not, it should be emphasized, simply a consciously encoded celebration of lesbian sexual possibility. Despite her writing’s perpetual fascination with gender deviance, Lee was typically uncomfortable with physical expressions of sexual desire, at least publicly.59 Rather, her Perigot occupies an idyllic space that allows for the expression of same-​sex desire only because that space is so insistently divorced from modernity, realism, and the normative structures of historical time. As Martha Vicinus has observed, the graceful beauty of such adolescent boys was a rich site of identification for lesbian writers in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Imbued with a sense of ‘preternatural understanding and spiritual purity’, the ‘chaste innocence’ of figures such as Perigot make them ‘representative of a special, lost quality of the modern world’.60 It is this peculiarly queer sense of loss, marked in both spatial and temporal displacement, that finds its sonic articulation, perhaps, in the distant offstage shepherd’s pipes in The Faithfull Shepherdesse or the fading voices of As You Like It. Soprano qualities: Mary Robinson’s disembodied voices In summer 1885, around the time she attended Campbell’s production of The Faithfull Shepherdesse with Lee, Mary Robinson composed her own idyllic tragicomedy in the style of John Fletcher, ‘Our Lady of the Broken Heart: A Garden Play’.61 She was later to look back nostalgically on the ‘happy afternoon’, when she ‘walked up and down the sunny Epsom garden’ with Lee and her sister Mabel, while they dreamt up plans for their own outdoor theatrical performance. Their ideas ultimately came to nothing—​‘The only real things, you know, are the things that never happen’, Robinson remarked to Mabel—​yet they nonetheless shared a similarly fantastic ambition to those of Campbell herself.62 At one point, plans were afoot to perform the play in the magnificent gardens of the Villa Rondinelli in Fiesole, described by Lee’s friend Carlo Placci as akin to ‘a living Paul Veronese’. The cast of amateurs was to include the Russian diplomat and poet Peter Boutourline, who insisted that the production’s mise en scène must incorporate not only ‘many hidden pots of violets’, but also a pride of specially procured peacocks.63 Campbell’s androgynous performance as Perigot stimulated the women’s theatrical imaginations in other respects too. Robinson fantasized about Campbell playing the role of Paris in ‘an old play of Green[e]‌’s, Paris and Helena’, for which Malcolm Lawson—​ the composer of the incidental music to Campbell’s As You Like It—​had ‘already set the

Queer Pastoral Soundscapes and the Idyllic Voice  137 delicious songs to music’. Meanwhile, Lee suggested to her brother, the poet Eugene Lee-​Hamilton, that he might write a play (‘something antique—​but fantastic & spectacular’) in which Campbell would perform the role of Orpheus, drawing its inspiration from Angelo Poliziano’s La Fabula di Orfeo (1480), a pastoral drama with musical accompaniment.65 It is significant that both Lee and Robinson are drawn to dramatic works that incorporate musical performance when they come to reimagine alternative theatrical vehicles for Campbell’s alluring cross-​dressing. For both authors, the singing voice—​especially when associated with pastoral landscapes and anachronistic idyllic modes—​becomes the conduit for idealized lesbian desire. While much excellent scholarly work has drawn attention to Robinson’s status as a poet of modernity—​urban, cosmopolitan, decadent—​ this has often overlooked her persistent engagement with an avowedly anti-​modern idyllic tradition that presents rural and pastoral subjects, often from a self-​consciously idealized perspective.66 It is in Robinson’s commitment to the ‘ideal’ that the queerness of her work is most evident: in its preoccupation, like the character of Susie in Robinson’s Arden, with ‘whatever is frail, graceful, delicate’ (I , 205); in its desire to sustain moments of intimacy in the face of loss and decay; and in its fixation with the voice as something which demarcates alternating feelings of presence and absence. Lee consistently draws upon metaphors of the singing voice—​in particular, those of women and children—​to characterize the qualities of Robinson’s lyric poetry. She describes the love sonnets in Robinson’s first collection, A Handful of Honeysuckle (1878), as giving an effect akin to ‘a duet sung by two sopranos’, setting this in contrast with ‘a duet sung by a soprano & tenor or bass’: 64

In the latter there is a frenzy and battering and ranting and ogling which is the absolute real brute passion; but in the former there is an emotion and pathos quite different, more beautiful, more fit to be given us as art.67 Here, the masculine aggressiveness of the male voice, as it subjugates the female voice both sonically and sexually, is juxtaposed with the feminine tenderness of two women’s voices of the same vocal type, whose sounding together implicitly evokes a queer alternative to the former’s heterosexual dynamic of phallic domination. Lee was fascinated by the quality of women’s voices singing together. She enthused to Robinson that the ‘Ave Verum Corpus’ for ‘three women’s voices’ from Luigi Cherubini’s motet Iste die observabilis est Domini (1816–​17), for instance, was ‘the most rapturous music I can conceive […] a perfect rapture of beautiful things, of spring, & birds, & Correggio angels’.68 In her fascination with such voices, Lee engages in what the musicologist Elizabeth Wood has identified as a long tradition of lesbian vocal ‘Sapphonics’.69 As Susan McClary has observed, the harmonic suspensions of such operatic duets and trios afford a quasi-​tactile sense of erotic intimacy: ‘two equal voices rub up against each other, pressing into dissonances that achingly resolve only into yet other knots.’70 Some years later Lee finds an identical ‘singing quality’ in Robinson’s poems in An Italian Garden: A Book of Songs (1886): [A]‌certain clearness, youthfulness, childishness—​a negation of all that is of the flesh & blood […]—​a quality of voice rare, aetherial, singing in an altogether higher stratum of atmosphere, coming out of what seems an immaterial throat—​I can only repeat a soprano quality, & bid you think of certain unearthly sweet boys’ voices.71

138  Fraser Riddell Lee’s characterization of the ‘peculiar pathos, more poignant than any others’ of Robinson’s verse as being akin to the idealized, disembodied voice of the soprano (or the boy chorister) is significant, for it draws attention to a central preoccupation of Robinson’s poetry: the desire to recover the presence of an absent or lost voice. ‘Ah no,—​ the heaven of all my heart has been’, as Robinson’s speaker puts it in ‘Tuscan Cypress, No. VII’, ‘To hear your voice and catch the sighs between’.72 Robinson’s novel Arden (1883) likewise turns to the idyllic mode to sustain an atmosphere in which the dynamics of the singing voice affirm the possibility of love between women. The novel recounts the story of its eponymous heroine (known also by her formal birth name, Sylvia), who leaves behind her blissful childhood in Rome to be adopted by distant relatives in the Warwickshire countryside. The central preoccupation of the text is with the rival claims of the rural and the cosmopolitan. Over the course of the novel, Arden navigates her shifting loyalties to the rustic farming tradition of the Williams family (‘narrow, local, energetic, strong of mind and strong of nature’) and the aesthetic, sophisticated, globally mobile Rose family (‘cultured, shallow, cosmopolitan’) (II , 54). The novel’s queerness is most evident in its portrayal of Arden’s emotionally intense relationship with Susie Williams, an intellectually frustrated country girl. In many respects the course of their friendship reflects what Sharon Marcus has identified as a common narrative structure in Victorian fiction: the text simultaneously presents Arden’s relationship with Susie as a conventional bourgeois preparation ground for her eventual marriage to Susie’s brother, Harry, while at the same time sustaining a space for the nurturing of same-​sex bonds between women.73 Indeed, the text ultimately eschews the traditional marriage plot to embrace forms of queer domesticity aligned with an idealized pastoral simplicity. Arden is ambivalent about the sacrifices that her marriage to Harry will entail; she insists, for instance, that the marriage can only go ahead if Susie and Mrs Williams are permitted to continue living with her in the marital home. Contemporary critics of Arden were particularly frustrated by the novel’s conclusion, in which it is ‘left untold’ whether Arden, following the untimely death of her husband, will ultimately accept the romantic advances of her childhood friend, the snobbish and self-​regarding aesthete Gerald.74 Robinson’s more astute readers may have been alert to the significance of the novel’s final image, in which Arden drops from her dress ‘a little bunch of violets she had laid upon her husband’s grave’ (II , 243). The violet’s symbolism here is most obviously one of faithfulness and humility, associated as it is with the Virgin Mary.75 Yet as Robinson’s poem ‘Thanksgiving for Flowers’ reminds us, it is also one that evokes the possibility of Sapphic love between women.76 The nature of Arden and Susie’s love for each other comes into focus in the novel in a central scene of music-​making, where Susie sings to her ‘Who is Sylvia?’, from Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona (1590): Susie sat down to the piano, and, with a quaint little glance at Arden in her shadowy nook opposite, she struck into a fine old air—​       Who is Sylvia, who is she,       That all our swains adore her? The fine deep voice thrilled through the quiet room, where the fading daylight and the flickering brightness of the fire were contending together. The last level sun-​rays fell on Susie as she sat in her light cotton gown, singing; her resolute head well poised;

Queer Pastoral Soundscapes and the Idyllic Voice  139 and now and then a fitful flame lit up, among the blackness of oak and shadows and mourning-​clothes, Arden’s sweet face and golden hair, her white swift hands moving among a lapful of gay striped roses. (II , 57–​58) Precisely which musical setting of Shakespeare’s text Susie sings here is unclear—​though it is perhaps most likely to be Franz Schubert’s ‘An Sylvia’ (1826), which was commonly performed by Victorian amateur musicians. Interestingly, Shakespeare’s text is misquoted here, so that Sylvia is ‘adore[d]‌’, rather than merely ‘commend[ed]’. The choice of song is one of teasing suggestiveness, pointing to the unarticulated mysteriousness of Arden’s own desires. The text dwells on the quality of Susie’s ‘fine deep voice’—​a preoccupation throughout the novel—​as it resounds in the rustic farmhouse they share. The narrator foregrounds the dynamics of the desiring gaze, moving from Susie’s ‘quaint little glance’ at Arden to Arden’s own fascination with Susie’s ‘well poised’ head, before returning again to Arden’s ‘sweet face’, ‘golden hair’, and ‘white swift hands’. In doing so the text presents this moment of singing, looking, and listening as one of a mutually shared intimacy. Like Campbell’s productions, and Lee’s responses to them, Robinson’s Arden turns to the idyllic mode to sustain an atmosphere of cherished innocence in which desire between women is articulated through tropes of distance and displacement. In this respect the queer idyll articulates a sense of loss or nostalgia within a space that nevertheless retains a paradoxical potential for pleasure and even playfulness. Elsewhere in their works, these writers distanced themselves from what they perceived to be the political naivety of the idyllic mode, whether in the brutal depictions of rural poverty in Robinson’s The New Arcadia (1884) or in the earnest dialogues on the relationship between art and morality in Lee’s Baldwin (1886). Yet at the same time the illusion of the idyll sustained their deepest intimacies. Graceful, childish, charming, delightful, fanciful, exquisite—​these are the cluster of qualities that Campbell and her contemporaries reach for to characterize the style of their experiments with idealized pastoral spaces. Far from representing a refusal of or retreat from the dynamics of queer sexual desire, these aesthetic categories in fact gesture to the tonal complexity of the idyllic mode, fascinated as it is with the simultaneously fetishized and disavowed spectacle of erotic innocence. Attending to the movement of sound in the Victorian idyll might help us listen out more carefully for how these fantasies of pastoral simplicity give voice to surprisingly non-​normative desires and identities. Notes 1 I am grateful to Sarah Parker, who generously shared her thoughts on an early draft of this chapter. 2 A. Mary F. Robinson, ‘Personality (A Sestina)’, in An Italian Garden: A Book of Songs (London: Fisher Unwin, 1886), pp. 97–​99. 3 For a thoughtful discussion of the (dis)continuities between Victorian theories of subjectivity and recent work in queer theory, see Dustin Friedman, Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). 4 See, for example, Kate Flint, ‘The “hour of pink twilight”: Lesbian Poetics and Queer Encounters on the Fin-​de-​Siècle Street’, Victorian Studies, 51 (2009), 687–​712. 5 David Shuttleton, ‘The Queer Politics of Gay Pastoral’, in De-​Centring Sexualities: Politics and Representations Beyond the Metropolis, ed. by Richard Phillips, Diane Watt, and David Shuttleton (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 125–​46.

140  Fraser Riddell 6 Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 34. 7 Steven Connor, Beyond Words: Sobs, Hums, Stutters and other Vocalizations (London: Reaktion, 2014), p. 15. 8 John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 9 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 10 Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 11 Elizabeth Freeman, Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), p. 8. 12 Vernon Lee, ‘Pastorellerie Aristocratiche: Appunti di Londra’, Fanfulla della domenica, 16 August 1885, pp. 1–​2; Vernon Lee, ‘Perigot: Random Notes on the Dramatic and Undramatic’, Contemporary Review, August 1886, pp. 239–​52. 13 A. Mary F. Robinson, Arden: A Novel, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1883). 14 See Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), pp. 60–​77; Patricia Rigg, A. Mary F. Robinson: Victorian Poet and Modern Woman of Letters (Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2021), pp. 54–​93. 15 The question of whether to characterize Lee and Robinson’s relationship as ‘lesbian’ has been the subject of considerable scholarly debate: see Sally Blackburn-​Daniels, ‘ “Struggling with the tempter”: The Queer Archival Spaces of Vernon Lee, Mary Robinson, and Amy Levy’, Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, 3.1 (2020), 92–​110. 16 Lee, Letter to Mary Robinson (13 July 1882), in Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 1856–​1935, ed. by Amanda Gagel and others (London: Routledge, 2017–​), I : 1865–​1884, ed. by Amanda Gagel (2017), p. 37; Letter to Mary Robinson (27 November 1885), in Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, II : 1885–​1889, ed. by Sophie Geoffroy (2021), pp. 140–​42 (p. 141). 17 Robinson, ‘Tuscan Cypress, No. IX’, in An Italian Garden, p. 43. 18 See Catherine Arbuthnott, ‘E. W. Godwin as an Antiquary’, in E. W. Godwin: Aesthetic Movement Architect and Designer, ed. by Susan Weber Soros (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 45–​70. 19 See Janey Sevilla Campbell, ‘Our Brothers, the Beasts’, Nineteenth Century, May 1907, pp. 808–​ 20; ‘Impressional Drama’, Nineteenth Century, August 1905, pp. 204–​13; Rainbow-​Music; or, The Philosophy of Harmony in Colour-​Grouping (London: Quaritch, 1886). 20 See Campbell, ‘Women and Muscle: A Plea for Physical Culture and Graceful Figures’, Western Mail, 21 May 1904, p. 41. 21 Martha Vicinus, ‘Fin-​de-​Siècle Theatrics: Male Impersonation and Lesbian Desire’, in Borderlines: Gender and Identities in War and Peace, 1870–​ 1930, ed. by Billie Melman (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 163–​92. 22 J. S. Bratton, ‘Irrational Dress’, in The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and the Theatre, 1850–​1914, ed. by Viv Gardner and Susan Rutherford (New York: Harvester-​Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 77–​91. For Sarah Bernhardt’s celebrated performance of Hamlet in 1899, and its relationship with nineteenth-​century debates about this character’s effeminacy, see Tony Howard, Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 98–​134. 23 Alfred Austin, ‘In the Forest of Arden’, National Review, September 1884, pp. 126–​36 (p. 128). 24 Emma Donoghue, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668–​ 1801 (London: Scarlet Press, 1993). 25 Lee, Letter to Matilda Paget (22–​23 July 1885), in Letters, II , 183–​85 (p. 184). 26 Max Beerbohm, ‘1880’, The Yellow Book, January 1895, pp. 275–​83 (p. 280). 27 John Stokes, Resistible Theatres: Enterprise and Experiment in the Late Nineteenth Century (London: Elek, 1972), pp. 47–​50.

Queer Pastoral Soundscapes and the Idyllic Voice  141 28 Catherine Belsey, ‘Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies’, in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. by John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 169–​93 (p. 180). 29 Oscar Wilde, ‘ “As You Like It,” at Coombe House’, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, The Oxford English Texts Edition, 11 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000–​2021), VI : Journalism, Vol. 1, ed. by John Stokes and Mark W. Turner (2013), pp. 57–​59. See also, Lawrence Danson, Wilde’s Intentions: The Artist in His Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 72–​80. 30 ‘Shakespeare “Under the Greenwood Tree” ’, Era, 26 July 1884, p. 8. 31 Kerry Powell, Woman and Victorian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 154. 32 ‘Our Omnibus-​Box’, Theatre, September 1884, pp. 148–​ 64, cited in Stokes, Resistible Theatres, p. 47. 33 Eleanor Calhoun, Pleasures and Palaces: The Memoirs of Princess Lazarovich-​Hrebelianovich (New York: Century, 1915), pp. 59, 60. 34 ‘The Open-​Air Plays at Coombe’, Daily News, 1 June 1885, p. 3. 35 See, for instance, Walter Pater’s exhortation to ‘strange’ and ‘curious’ aesthetic experiences in his notoriously suppressed ‘Conclusion’, in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. by Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 118–​21 (p. 120). 36 T. F. Thiselton-​Dyer, ‘Foresters at Home’, Art Journal, October 1885, pp. 301–​04 (p. 301). 37 ‘The Pastoral Players’, Era, 6 June 1885, p. 9. 38 ‘ “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Pope’s Villa’, Morning Post, 8 August 1887, p. 3. 39 Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 40 Pater, ‘Diaphaneitè’, in Renaissance, pp. 136–​40. 41 ‘The Pastoral Players’, Morning Post, 1 June 1885, p. 2. 42 ‘The Open-​Air Plays at Coombe’, Daily News, 1 June 1885, p. 3; ‘The Pastoral Players’, Era, 6 June 1885, p. 9. 43 Janey Sevilla Campbell, ‘The Woodland Gods’, Woman’s World, November 1887, pp. 1–​7 (p. 4). 44 Complete Works, VI , 58. 45 Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion: A Critical Edition, ed. by Ivan Crozier (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 176. 46 See Arbuthnott, ‘E. W. Godwin as an Antiquary’. 47 ‘The Pastoral Players’, Stage, 3 July 1885, p. 17. 48 ‘The Pastoral Players’, Morning Post, 29 June 1885, p. 3. For the music, see Arthur Wellesley Batson, The Music of the Faithful Shepherdess (London: Novello, Ewer, 1885). 49 ‘The Faithfull Shepherdesse’, Saturday Review, 4 July 1885, pp. 16–​17 (p. 17). For an account of the queer aspects of Harrison’s classicism, and the links between paganism and lesbianism in her works, see Yopie Prins, Ladies’ Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 209–​17. 50 ‘The Pastoral Players’, Morning Post, 29 June 1885, p. 3. 51 E. W. Godwin, ‘Note’, in John Fletcher, The Faithfull Shepherdesse, adapted and arranged in Three Acts for the Open Air by E. W. Godwin (London: Hill, 1885), p. 1. 52 Letter to Matilda Paget (19–​21 July 1885), in Letters, II , 67–​69 (p. 68). 53 Lee, Letter to Mary Robinson (27 November 1885), in Letters, II , 140–​42 (p. 140). 54 Lee, Letter to Matilda Paget (22 July 1886), in Letters, II , 199–​200 (p. 199); Lee, Letter to Isabella Stewart Gardner (16 December 1886), in Letters, II , 272. 55 Lee, Letter to Matilda Paget (22–​23 July 1885), in Letters, II , 183–​85 (pp. 184, 185). 56 Lee, ‘Pastorellerie Aristocratiche’. Translations are from Fraser Riddell, ‘Vernon Lee’s “Aristocratic Pastorals: Notes from London” (1885): An Introduction and Translation’, Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism, 7 (2023), 73–​86.

142  Fraser Riddell 57 See Janey Sevilla Campbell, ‘The Faithfull Shepherdesse’, Nineteenth Century, June 1885, pp. 1031–​42; ‘The Woodland Gods’. 58 See Pater, Renaissance, pp. 70–​71. For the significance of the ‘Gods in Exile’ motif, see Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 82–​83. 59 See Blackburn-​Daniels, ‘ “Struggling with the tempter” ’. 60 Martha Vicinus, ‘The Adolescent Boy: Fin de Siècle Femme Fatale?’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 5 (1994), 90–​114 (p. 100). 61 Robinson, ‘Our Lady of the Broken Heart: A Garden Play’, in Songs, Ballads and a Garden Play (London: Fisher Unwin, 1888), pp. 113–​42. 62 See Dedication to Mabel Robinson in Songs, Ballads and a Garden Play, cited in Letters, II , 160, n. 9. 63 Lee, Letter to Mary Robinson (8–​13 February 1886), in Letters, II , 158–​60 (p. 159). 64 A. Mary F. Robinson, ‘A Letter from Florence’, Literary World, 12 June 1886, p. 201. 65 Lee, Letter to Matilda Paget (15 August 1887), in Letters, II , 388–​89 (p. 389). 66 See, for example, Ana Parejo Vadillo, ‘Cosmopolitanism Aestheticism: The Affective “Italian” Ethics of A. Mary F. Robinson’, Comparative Critical Studies, 10 (2013), 163–​82. 67 Lee, Letter to Mary Robinson (19 November 1880), in Letters, I , 268. 68 Lee, Letter to Mary Robinson (21–​23 March 1881), in Letters, I , 285. 69 Elizabeth Wood, ‘Sapphonics’, in Queering the Pitch: The New Lesbian and Gay Musicology, ed. by Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 27–​66. 70 Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 37. 71 Lee, Letter to Mary Robinson (8–​13 February 1886), in Letters, II , 158–​60 (p. 158). 72 An Italian Garden, p. 41. See also, for example, ‘The Red Clove: To Vernon Lee’, in The Crowned Hippolytus (London: Kegan Paul, 1881), pp. 82–​103; ‘Tuscan Cypress, No. XI’, ‘A Ballad of Forgotten Tunes: To V. L.’, and ‘Personality (A Sestina)’, in An Italian Garden, pp. 45, 67–​68, 97–​99. 73 Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 74 ‘New Novels’, Graphic, 2 June 1883, p. 563. See also ‘Novels of the Week’, Athenaeum, 19 May 1883, pp. 632–​33 (p. 633). 75 See The Language of Flowers, illustrated by Kate Greenaway (London: Routledge, 1884), where the violet is associated with ‘faithfulness’, ‘watchfulness, and ‘modesty’ (p. 42). 76 Robinson, ‘Thanksgiving for Flowers’, in A Handful of Honeysuckle (London: Kegan Paul, 1878), p. 74. See Flint, ‘Lesbian Poetics’.

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Arbuthnott, Catherine, ‘E. W. Godwin as an Antiquary’, in E. W. Godwin: Aesthetic Movement Architect and Designer, ed. by Susan Weber Soros (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 45–​70. Austin, Alfred, ‘In the Forest of Arden’, Nation`al Review, September 1884, pp. 126–​36. Batson, Arthur Wellesley, The Music of the Faithful Shepherdess (London: Novello, Ewer, 1885). Beerbohm, Max, ‘1880’, The Yellow Book, January 1895, pp. 275–​83. Belsey, Catherine, ‘Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies’, in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. by John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 169–​93.

Queer Pastoral Soundscapes and the Idyllic Voice  143 Blackburn-​Daniels, Sally, ‘“Struggling with the tempter”: The Queer Archival Spaces of Vernon Lee, Mary Robinson, and Amy Levy’, Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, 3.1 (2020), 92–​110. Bratton, J. S., ‘Irrational Dress’, in The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and the Theatre, 1850–​1914, ed. by Viv Gardner and Susan Rutherford (New York: Harvester-​ Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 77–​91. Calhoun, Eleanor, Pleasures and Palaces: The Memoirs of Princess Lazarovich-​Hrebelianovich (New York: Century, 1915). Campbell, Janey Sevilla, ‘The Faithfull Shepherdesse’, Nineteenth Century, June 1885, pp. 1031–​42. —​—​—​Rainbow-​ Music; or, The Philosophy of Harmony in Colour-​ Grouping (London: Quaritch, 1886). —​—​—​‘The Woodland Gods’, Woman’s World, November 1887, pp. 1–​7. —​—​—​‘Women and Muscle: A Plea for Physical Culture and Graceful Figures’, Western Mail, 21 May 1904, p. 41. —​—​—​‘Impressional Drama’, Nineteenth Century, August 1905, pp. 204–​13. —​—​—​‘Our Brothers, the Beasts’, Nineteenth Century, May 1907, pp. 808–​20. Castle, Terry, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Colby, Vineta, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), pp. 60–​77. Connor, Steven, Beyond Words: Sobs, Hums, Stutters and other Vocalizations (London: Reaktion, 2014). Danson, Lawrence, Wilde’s Intentions: The Artist in His Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 72–​80. Donoghue, Emma, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668–​1801 (London: Scarlet Press, 1993). Ellis, Havelock, and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion: A Critical Edition, ed. by Ivan Crozier (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Evangelista, Stefano, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). ‘The Faithfull Shepherdesse’, Saturday Review, 4 July 1885, pp. 16–​17. Flint, Kate, ‘The “hour of pink twilight”: Lesbian Poetics and Queer Encounters on the Fin-​de-​ Siècle Street’, Victorian Studies, 51 (2009), 687–​712. Freeman, Elizabeth, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). —​—​—​Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). Friedman, Dustin, Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). Gagel, Amanda, and others, eds, Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 1856–​1935 (London: Routledge, 2017–​), I: 1865–​1884, ed. by Amanda Gagel (2017). —​—​—​Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 1856–​1935 (London: Routledge, 2017–​), II: 1885–​1889, ed. by Sophie Geoffroy (2021). Godwin, E. W., ‘Note’, in John Fletcher, The Faithfull Shepherdesse, adapted and arranged in Three Acts for the Open Air by E. W. Godwin (London: Hill, 1885), p. 1. Howard, Tony, Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 98–​134. The Language of Flowers, illustrated by Kate Greenaway (London: Routledge, 1884). Lee, Vernon, ‘Pastorellerie Aristocratiche: Appunti di Londra’, Fanfulla della domenica, 16 August 1885, pp. 1–​2. —​—​—​‘Perigot: Random Notes on the Dramatic and Undramatic’, Contemporary Review, August 1886, pp. 239–​52.

144  Fraser Riddell Love, Heather, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Marcus, Sharon, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). McClary, Susan, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). ‘ “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Pope’s Villa’, Morning Post, 8 August 1887, p. 3. ‘New Novels’, Graphic, 2 June 1883, p. 563. ‘Novels of the Week’, Athenaeum, 19 May 1883, pp. 632–​33. ‘The Open-​Air Plays at Coombe’, Daily News, 1 June 1885, p. 3. ‘Our Omnibus-​Box’, Theatre, September 1884, pp. 148–​64. ‘The Pastoral Players’, Morning Post, 1 June 1885, p. 2. —​—​—​, Era, 6 June 1885, p. 9. —​—​—​, Morning Post, 29 June 1885, p. 3. —​—​—​, Stage, 3 July 1885, p. 17. Pater, Walter, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. by Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Picker, John M., Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Powell, Kerry, Woman and Victorian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Prins, Yopie, Ladies’ Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 209–​17. Riddell, Fraser, ‘Vernon Lee’s “Aristocratic Pastorals: Notes from London” (1885): An Introduction and Translation’, Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism, 7 (2023), 73–​86. Rigg, Patricia, A. Mary F. Robinson: Victorian Poet and Modern Woman of Letters (Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2021). Robinson, A. Mary F., A Handful of Honeysuckle (London: Kegan Paul, 1878). —​—​—​The Crowned Hippolytus (London: Kegan Paul, 1881). —​—​—​Arden: A Novel, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1883). —​—​—​An Italian Garden: A Book of Songs (London: Fisher Unwin, 1886). —​—​—​‘A Letter from Florence’, Literary World, 12 June 1886, p. 201. —​—​—​Songs, Ballads and a Garden Play (London: Fisher Unwin, 1888). ‘Shakespeare “Under the Greenwood Tree” ’, Era, 26 July 1884, p. 8. Shuttleton, David, ‘The Queer Politics of Gay Pastoral’, in De-​ Centring Sexualities: Politics and Representations Beyond the Metropolis, ed. by Richard Phillips, Diane Watt, and David Shuttleton (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 125–​46. Stokes, John, Resistible Theatres: Enterprise and Experiment in the Late Nineteenth Century (London: Elek, 1972), pp. 47–​50. Thiselton-​Dyer, T. F., ‘Foresters at Home’, Art Journal, October 1885, pp. 301–​04. Vadillo, Ana Parejo, ‘Cosmopolitanism Aestheticism: The Affective “Italian” Ethics of A. Mary F. Robinson’, Comparative Critical Studies, 10 (2013), 163–​82. Vicinus, Martha, ‘The Adolescent Boy: Fin de Siècle Femme Fatale?’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 5 (1994), 90–​114. —​—​—​‘Fin-​de-​Siècle Theatrics: Male Impersonation and Lesbian Desire’, in Borderlines: Gender and Identities in War and Peace, 1870–​1930, ed. by Billie Melman (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 163–​92. Wilde, Oscar, ‘ “As You Like It,” at Coombe House’, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, The Oxford English Texts Edition, 11 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000–​ 21), VI : Journalism, Vol. 1, ed. by John Stokes and Mark W. Turner (2013), pp. 57–​59. Wood, Elizabeth, ‘Sapphonics’, in Queering the Pitch: The New Lesbian and Gay Musicology, ed. by Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 27–​66.

7 Plant Subjects, Plant Erotics Julia Margaret Cameron’s Creeping Idyll Emma Merkling

In August 1874 Alfred Tennyson invited his friend Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–​ 1879) to photographically illustrate a new ‘People’s’ edition of his Idylls of the King.1 Cameron accepted. With typical enthusiasm, she set about corralling friends, family, visitors, and household members to model for the 245-​odd exposures she claimed to have taken, illustrating scenes ranging from the Arthurian legends of Idylls to the subjects of Tennyson’s other poems to be included, such as Maud (1855).2 Deeply disappointed with the published results—​her large photographs reduced to cabinet-​sized prints, their characteristic soft-​ focus effects flattened into crisp woodcut engravings—​ Cameron determined to produce her own folio edition. The first volume, containing thirteen large photographs mounted on blue-​grey cardboard and bound in luxurious red half-​morocco, was published shortly before Christmas 1874 as Illustrations to Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’, and Other Poems (hereafter, Illustrations). The second volume followed in May 1875, depicting twelve other scenes. In both volumes each photograph was interleaved with a lithographed excerpt from the relevant poem, selected by Cameron and carefully copied out in her own hand, yet bearing Tennyson’s autograph. Maud (c. 1874) appeared on the final page of the second volume, preceded by two stanzas from the poem chosen by Cameron (Figures 7.1 and 7.2):3 There has fallen a splendid tear From the Passion-​flower at the gate, She is coming, my love, my dear; She is coming, my life, my fate; The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near’; And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late’; The lark spur listens, ‘I hear, I hear’ And the lily whispers, ‘I wait’. She is coming, my own, my sweet, Were it ever so airy a tread, My heart would hear her and beat, Were it earth in an earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat, Had I lain for a century dead; Would start and tremble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red.4 DOI: 10.4324/9781003327998-8

146  Emma Merkling

Figure 7.1 Julia Margaret Cameron, handwritten excerpt from Alfred Tennyson’s Maud (1855), lithograph, 43.6 × 31.7 cm. Reproduced in Illustrations to Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’, and Other Poems, 2 vols (London: King, 1874–​75), II (1875), unpaginated. Digital image courtesy of Getty’s Open Content Program.

In the photograph a young woman, loose hair swept back, leans in profile against a brick wall consumed by a tangle of passion flower leaves and blossoms. Her gaze is unfocused and her expression impassive, though Cameron herself drew attention to her model’s ‘pathos’ (‘Annals’, p. 184). The dark foliage seems to draw her in. She is fixed in a shallow, airless space between the wall and a leafy tendril which wraps across her body, pressing firm into the soft folds of her gown, its splayed black leaves flattened in relief against the white gleam of her classical robes. This bright glow is echoed in highlights at her temple, eye, nose, and lips, and in the fine details of the passion blossoms at left: the sharp edges of their petals; the hazy bright corona encircling a darker mass. Is this the soft daylight of the bower, or the light of the moon?—​we are offered no purchase on time or place; the photographic medium suggests the modern, but the classical gown and hazy, inconsistent focus suggest something more timeless. The woman is crowned by a living wreath of leaves in such close, even sensuous contact with her body that in some soft, dark places—​above her forehead, in the nape of her neck—​woman and plant shade into each other.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s Creeping Idyll  147

Figure 7.2 Julia Margaret Cameron, Maud, c. 1874, albumen silver print, 32.9 × 27.1 cm on mount (43.6 × 31.7 cm). Published in Illustrations to Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’, and Other Poems, 2 vols (London: King, 1874–​75), II (1875), unpaginated. Digital image courtesy of Getty’s Open Content Program.

148  Emma Merkling This chapter identifies Cameron’s Maud as an idyll and explores its particular deployment of the idyllic mode. The photographer herself, of course, selected Maud for inclusion alongside Tennyson’s other Idylls in her photobook, and there is indeed something markedly idyllic about her photograph’s central imagery—​the human subject removed to a responsive ‘natural’ realm (specifically, the familiar English garden)—​ and its ambiguous affective tone, suspended between the tender and the melancholic.5 Its tenderness stems substantively from Maud’s sensuous contact with her responsive environment, augmented by the hazy glow of Cameron’s soft-​focus effects. These effects are redoubled by the content of Tennyson’s Maud excerpted by Cameron. The two stanzas are plucked from the poem’s idyllic epicentre in which the narrator waits with breathless anticipation in his beloved Maud’s garden, willing her to come. In the passages comprising and preceding Cameron’s excerpt, narrative action yields entirely to desire and intense sensory description. ‘Nature’ speaks directly in multiple feminine voices (rose, lily), fears and desires dispersed among them: The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near’; And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late’; The lark spur listens, ‘I hear, I hear’ And the lily whispers, ‘I wait’. Cameron’s chosen excerpt speaks of deferred bliss and is characterized by the agonized temporality of waiting, the eager, driving rhythms of a pounding heart looping into a relentless tedium. There is a jumbling of proximity and distance, immediacy and delay—​ she is near, she is late; she is here (‘hear’), we must wait. This ambiguity is carried through in the photograph; the vital staccato pulse of the passion-​tendril across Maud’s breast lends a rhythmic beat to what is otherwise a scene of curious timelessness. In both photograph and excerpt the tedium of waiting gives onto a deathlike state of suspended animation: the narrator’s heart beating, though ‘a century dead’; Cameron’s Maud, glassy-​eyed and pale as a corpse and embedded in a shallow grave-​like void, yet marked animate by the living pulse of the vine. This chapter’s central focus is on the entanglements and ambiguities already gestured towards: plant agencies and subjectivities; strange, dispersed, and even ‘queer’ intersubjective relations and multi-​ species erotics; and peculiar temporalities of anticipation and deferral. Within these entanglements, it argues, Cameron’s idyll holds space for the pleasures and horrors of the ‘natural’ world—​especially the vegetal—​ in all its multiplicity, as envisaged in Victorian culture in the wake of the botanical writings of Charles Darwin in the 1860s and early 1870s. Central to the functioning of Cameron’s photographic idyll, I argue, is a profound ambivalence constituted by an unresolved oscillation between the sensuous possibilities of human–​plant entanglement and the precise sort of darkness from which the idyll is conventionally understood to be a retreat: creeping suffocation, the threat of violence, the horrors of ‘real life’. In Cameron’s photograph any ‘retreat’ is imperfect, saturated by the horror, morbidity, and dispersal of subjectivity which, in fact, characterize Tennyson’s Maud. This chapter looks also to Cameron’s photographic processes in relation to questions of agency, temporality, desire, and enchantment—​and what this can tell us about her idyll’s negotiation of the real and the ideal.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s Creeping Idyll  149 Plant subjects To understand the functioning of Cameron’s Maud we must first get a sense of the shape of its source material: Tennyson’s 1855 poem. Despite its idyllic episodes, like that from which Cameron drew her inspiration, the overarching character of Tennyson’s Maud is anything but idyllic, comprising instead a bleak and sweeping monodrama told through the distorted perceptions of its unstable narrator. Though interspersed with breathless episodes of redemptive love, mostly situated in the woods, fields, and gardens around the narrator and Maud, the poem is best known for its representation of madness. Tennyson called it his ‘little Hamlet’—​a monologic lyrical drama about ‘the unfolding of a lonely, morbid soul, touched with inherited madness’.6 Though his love for Maud offers brief reprieve, the narrator is driven deeper into misery and mania as the poem progresses, a madness from which he emerges only near its close when he leaves for the Crimean War. Maud is bookended by violence, closing on a vision of the ‘blood-​red blossom of war’ (3. I. 53) which echoes its ghastly opening stanza as it builds to the graphic description of the mangled corpse of the narrator’s father: I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood, Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-​red heath, The red-​ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood, And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers ‘Death.’ (1. I. 1–​4) The poem’s long monologue is characterized by a multiplicity of voice reflecting the instability of its narrator, structured as a series of erratic lyrical episodes which shift across verse forms and metres, rhythms and voices in accordance with his changing mental state or ‘passions’. For instance, when Maud first appears (as Scott Dransfield observes), the driving and disorienting hexameter of the opening lines—​appropriate to the narrator’s misery and rage—​breaks into a lilting ‘songlike’ trimeter/​tetrameter proper to Maud’s own voice: A voice by the cedar tree In the meadow under the Hall! She is singing an air that is known to me, A passionate ballad gallant and gay. (1. V. 162–​65) The poem’s fitful shifting was central to the criticism it attracted, yet defended by Tennyson as a deliberate reflection of his narrator’s fractious mental state, the erratic shifts between mania and depression which—​as Christopher Ricks has noted—​were linked to contemporary medical definitions of insanity.7 ‘The[se] things which seem like faults’, Tennyson insisted, ‘belong not so much to the poem as to the character of the hero.’ He identified this as Maud’s most salient feature: ‘the peculiarity of this poem […] is that different phases of passion in one person take the place of different characters’ (Poems, ed. by Ricks, I I , 517). In a few places, including the section selected by Cameron to accompany her photograph, these ‘characters’ are given discrete embodiment—​specific identities (red rose, white rose), direct voice, and feelings. The narrator, the singular subject, is

150  Emma Merkling dispersed, spread across a variety of sensible, other-​than-​human agents—​here, the plant subjects of the bower. A similar effect is at work in Cameron’s Maud; it is an effect also closely related, as we will see, to its idyllism. The very framing of Cameron’s photograph asks us to consider who, or what, is its true subject. One’s eye is drawn first to the female figure—​perhaps thanks as much to our impulse to seek out the human in any image as to any particular compositional feature. But nothing is so visually insistent as the dark vine creeping over her shoulder and unfurling across her chest. Its boldness and its graphic qualities—​the regular sequencing of its large, near-​stylized leaf forms so starkly relieved against her white gown—​cause it to persist in one’s field of vision no matter where in the photograph one looks. Compositionally, the human is pushed off centre, relegated largely to the photograph’s unfocused edge and taking up less than half the picture plane. The picture is instead dominated by the tangle of the passion flower (Passiflora caerulea) in its many iterations—​leaves, flowers, buds, and vines texturing the darkness with their swirling soft-​edged forms, coalescing occasionally into crisp, forensic detail. Plant is at least as much the work’s subject as person. Strikingly, at least one contemporary reviewer described this human figure herself as another iteration or manifestation of the plant: as ‘a sort of embodied passion-​flower’.8 The prick of light at her cheekbone is indeed legible as the ‘splendid tear’ falling from the passion flower in the excerpt’s opening lines. Cameron’s photograph does establish a curious equivalence between plant and person, though if anything the agencies we might usually ascribe them have been reversed. The human is passive, immobile; her gaze is distant and expression deadened, her body propped up entirely by the plant and wall. In her Grecian gown, her absolute stillness, and the curious truncation of her body (her arms seem strangely amputated: where her right forearm should be, a stump-​like form protrudes instead), she is cold and hard as a marble Venus. By contrast, the plant is living, active, mobile, and engaged; in places Cameron’s blurred focus generates a sense that it is moving. There is a deliberateness to the action of the vine where it reaches its tendrils out firmly across Maud’s body, splaying its five-​fingered leaves as if in embrace; likewise, where it fans out around her head in a caress. In a passage of Tennyson’s Maud preceding that excerpted by Cameron, the human narrator is lent agency by a vegetal subject: ‘the soul of the rose went into my blood’ (1. XXII. 882). Is some similar process at work here? Certainly, the pulsating rhythm of the passion flower’s vines suggests something like a heartbeat; at the very least, the plant seems to sense her presence and respond to it. Cameron figures the plant not just as photographic subject, but as a subject tout court—​ at least, as an agent in possession of some sensibility and even some directed will. Elsewhere in this volume, Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt have identified as typical of the 1860s’ idyll a similar dispersal of the subject across multiple identities, including in Tennyson’s 1864 Enoch Arden; clearly (Maud indicates), Tennyson had already begun exploring the idea the decade prior. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that it is in his Maud’s most idyllic moments—​most vividly in its central idyll depicted by Cameron—​that the ‘different characters’ across which the narrator’s subject is dispersed are figured most explicitly as discrete actors: specifically, as vegetal agents of the bower. Unsurprisingly for a lyrical poem, ‘nature’ is never far from its descriptive repertoire, and even in its darker episodes Maud draws on the other-​than-​human world. But as the poem builds slowly towards its centre, and the narrator’s feelings for Maud grow, Maud’s dominant bleaker passages are increasingly interspersed with more hopeful ones characterized by a stirring of the natural world—​by an environment slowly coming alive. Before Maud’s arrival in

Julia Margaret Cameron’s Creeping Idyll  151 the text, nature is a dead zone of pure horror: in its gruesome opening scene the environment (a woody hollow) is a gory corpse, red-​stained lips and exposed ribs dripping with blood. As Maud surfaces the natural world is slowly resurrected—​ specifically through association with her. First, it is a half-​silent, half-​screaming, colourless ghost: the narrator is woken from sleep by Maud’s image ‘growing and fading and growing upon [him] without a sound, | Luminous, gemlike, ghostlike, deathlike’ (1. III. 94–​95). He escapes to his ‘dark garden’ where he is met by a terrifying, banshee-​like nature: the ‘shipwrecking roar’ of the tide, the ‘scream’ of the beach ‘dragg’d down’ by the water (1. III. 97–​99). Maud is next described as a ‘milkwhite fawn’ ‘wander[ing] about’ (1. IV. 158–​60): the other-​than-​human world is spectral and pale but now living, breathing. And when Maud’s own, ‘wild’ voice intrudes for the first time, the vital world bursts through in joyous, glittering colour, her ‘feet like sunny gems on an English green’ in a ‘happy morning of life and of May’ (1. V. 168–​75). These colourful flashes ebb and flow along the narrator’s grey misery as he finds and loses and once again finds hope through Maud’s presence. The ‘finding’ comes always with a certain idyllism—​vivid descriptions of a vital world, pastoral images of green meadows and bird-​filled woods—​though without ever entirely losing the darker stain of violence, fear, or death: the living world of Maud echoes sadly in the grey and ‘morbid’ world of the narrator, while his ‘morbid hate and horror’ stain the living world around him (1. VI. 264). As the poem draws nearer and nearer its centre, the living world begins slowly to speak, singing out in non-​human voices. When we finally arrive at the poem’s central idyll, in which the narrator awaits Maud in her garden, the whole world is explicitly vitalized—​ ‘nature’ is a dazzling, responsive, sensitive multitude, loud with the chorus of living voices and suffused with myriad sensation. The narrator enumerates the sweet scents, sights, and sounds of the living subjects that constitute the idyllic sensorium of Maud’s garden: wafting woodbine spice and rose musk, whispering lilies and weeping passion flowers. There is a vital and sensuous interchange between the human and the other-​than-​human world: in anticipation of Maud’s arrival, the dust beats and earth trembles, alive and emotively charged. In his chapter in this volume Fraser Riddell identifies such a sensorium as a feature of the Victorian idyll. He draws attention, among other things, to the encoding of desire through the sounds of the natural world—​twittering birds, whispering leaves—​and the queer pleasures inhering in the finding and losing of such voices and desires, emerging from and dispersing back into their environments. In Tennyson’s Maud the sounds and sensations of the vital world and its inhabitants are likewise lost and found and lost again, as the poem finds and loses the idyll. Yet in its central idyllic episode these sounds cohere more explicitly as voices, the plants that speak them as subjects. Tennyson’s plants are sensitive, responsive agents, not only listening as the narrator addresses himself to them, but in fact ‘hear[ing]’, and speaking out in voices of their own (1. XXII. 862). (That the plant subjects expressing their desire for Maud in this section are coded feminine—​rose, lily—​likewise registers a queerness to which we will shortly return.) This particular idyllic articulation of ‘nature’—​especially in vegetal form—​as a sensitive, multisubjective spread finding articulation through a variety of distinct, non-​human agents, and responsive to the human in its midst, is shared by Cameron’s Maud. The passion flower is one such agent, multiply budding and sprouting and growing out into new forms and appendages which operate both independently and together. From within the plant’s tangled spread, a variety of distinct entities emerge into sharp focus or retreat into darkness and haziness—​tendrils, blossoms, leafy clusters, nodes. The photographic

152  Emma Merkling interpretation synthesizes and intensifies its source: if in the Tennyson a certain desire or subjectivity is given voice through or across a few separate actors (rose, lily), in Cameron’s interpretation it is dispersed across a single, powerful, wilful plant, spreading across the wall’s surface, the human subject, and the picture plane as a whole. Cameron, reflecting in or around the summer of 1874 upon a fitting photographic interpretation of Tennyson’s Maud, might well have settled on the theme of plant subjectivity or agency. She had photographed versions of Maud before, though not for many years and never previously in direct conjunction with Tennyson’s other idylls. Though her earlier efforts refer to the same episode in Tennyson’s poem as the later photograph, her 1874 iteration is markedly different. The Passion Flower at the Gate of 1866, for instance, quite plainly depicts a woman leaning forward onto a gate; her gown, with ruched sleeves and velvet detailing, is less timeless than the later Maud, and the gate with its sharp edges and regular, parallel poles feels manufactured and modern. Plant life is relegated to a hazy background blur, and though the title again suggests an analogy between woman and passion flower, the narrative force of the photograph is too strong and its composition too plain, too direct, to allow for the musings, meanderings, and dispersals of the later Maud. Speculation about the relationship between woman and plant, their subjectivities, is curtailed. The Rosebud Garden of Girls (1868), which depicts four women as embodied flowers in the garden of which Maud is ‘Queen’, comes closer to the idiom of the later Maud; the figures wear gowns that are more timeless and are pressed close against the vegetal tangle behind them, the girl second from left fingering its rough leaves (Figure 7.3). Another holds a blur of branches in her lap, while between the third and fourth figures a different branch seems vigorously to protrude. But the bush seems on the whole rather self-​contained and, despite their sombre expressions, these women are quite evidently—​and quite unlike the 1874 Maud—​more living, more vital, than the variety of plucked flowers and apparently dead branches they hold. Neither of the earlier works centres a vital, mobile, wilful plant so much as the later Maud, certainly not one so sharing in the subjectivity of the human(s) depicted.9 So what had changed by the mid-​1870s?—​the burgeoning of the idyllic mode identified in this volume, for one thing; the flourishing of Cameron’s friendship with Darwin and proliferation of his ideas about plant agency, for another. The pair first grew acquainted in the summer of 1868, when the Darwins rented a cottage from the Camerons at the idyllic retreat of Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, home also to the Tennysons. During this visit the three families frequently socialized together; Cameron took Darwin’s portrait and made a lasting impression. As the Darwins departed Freshwater and bid the photographer farewell, Darwin’s brother called after her: ‘Mrs Cameron there are six people in this house all in love with you.’10 Plants had always played an important role in Darwin’s theory, but it was in the 1860s and 1870s that his botanical research truly came to the fore. A central feature of this research was Darwin’s desire to ‘exalt plants in the scale of organised beings’—​to show, among other things, that the boundary separating plants and animals was not so absolute as usually assumed.11 In the 1860s Darwin became captivated with climbing plants—​including passion flowers—​describing them in his 1865 On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants as sensitive, responsive agents seemingly capable even of anticipation, their tendrils ‘plac[ing] themselves in the proper position for action’ as if preparing to climb.12 In the surprising sensibility and mobility of such plants lay evidence that they might possess the same basic faculties of intelligence as animals. Already in 1838 (Gillian Beer observes)

Julia Margaret Cameron’s Creeping Idyll  153

Figure 7.3 Julia Margaret Cameron, The Rosebud Garden of Girls, 1868, albumen silver print, 29.4 × 26.7 cm. Digital image courtesy of Getty’s Open Content Program.

Darwin was privately mulling over plant consciousness, wondering whether plants possessed ‘any notion of cause and effect’—​or even (‘in some senses’) ‘free will’.13 In an 1863 letter to his son William, he wrote: ‘my hobby-​horse at present is Tendrils; they are more sensitive to touch than your finger; & wonderfully crafty & sagacious.’14 By the mid-​1870s and the second edition of Climbing Plants, published the same year as Cameron’s second volume of Illustrations, Darwin was writing publicly of plant agency—​ and even desire. Climbers, he asserted, moved ‘in manifest relation to their wants’, their tendrils behaving much like animal tentacles.15 Reviewers of the 1865 Climbing Plants had already picked up on such implications in Darwin’s text: ‘the language employed’, botanist Alfred Bennett remarked, ‘is everywhere suggestive of some hidden, sentient controlling power in the plant itself.’16 By the mid-​1870s Darwinian themes of plant consciousness and agency were being taken up in the popular sphere. Satires like Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) asked of the reaching tendril-​shoots of the humble potato—​a being ‘who knows perfectly well what he wants and how to get it’—​‘What is consciousness if this is not consciousness?’; while poems in Punch parodied carnivorous flowers attempting to eat the dinner ham.17 With its centring of such ‘newly active and unruly’ plants, Jim Endersby observes, Darwin’s botany had definitively ‘blur[red] the boundary between plant and animal’.18

154  Emma Merkling Whether Darwin discussed his work with Cameron is unknown, but during his visit to Freshwater he was very much still undertaking his experiments with climbing plants, and the shifts in Cameron’s interpretation of Maud after this date are remarkable. Particularly striking is her adjustment of Tennyson in her 1874 Maud: her shift from the girlish lilies and roses centred in the poem and her earlier Rosebud Garden of Girls to a sole emphasis on the climbing passion flower, now visually dominant, equal in scale to Maud, and exhibiting a sort of wilfulness—​especially through the action of its ‘crafty & sagacious’ tendrils. This action, suggested first by the blurry passages described earlier, is carried through in the dynamic compositional spiral which structures the picture. A visual loop beginning and ending with the plant tugs Maud inwards, starting with the paired passion flowers at left, sweeping down towards the vine embracing Maud and up to the edge of the composition, and curving around the top of her head and down again—​either towards the single passion flower aligned with her forehead (which points back towards the paired flowers), or along the neck of her gown, up along the sweep of hair by her ear, and around to her chin, ending with her eye. Such a spiralling path, as Darwin’s exhaustive studies and careful diagramming in Climbing Plants indicated, was precisely that taken by tendrils as they climbed (Figure 7.4).

Figure 7.4  Charles Darwin, Diagram showing the movement of the upper internodes of the common Pea, traced on a hemispherical glass and transferred to paper; reduced one-​ half in size, in ‘On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants’, Journal of the Linnean Society of London (Botany), 9 (1867), 1–​118 (p. 65). Digitized by Internet Archive, original from United States Geological Survey.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s Creeping Idyll  155 Cameron’s climbing plant is not only active, but even attentive, its various parts suggesting different states of liveliness or awareness—​underscoring both its sentience and the spread and multiplicity of its subjectivity. Its circular, eye-​or face-​like blossoms seem themselves to ‘look’, to attend, to turn their focus this way or that in varying degrees: the pair of blossoms near the centre are wide open, alert; those above them are swivelled inwards and downwards as if focusing their curious, engaged attention on the central pair. There is inattentiveness, lack of focus, too: between this pair hangs an unopened bloom, turned modestly inwards as if sleeping; beneath the central pair, a drooping frond contrasts starkly with the opened, leafy ‘hand’ reaching out to the right. Cameron’s own focus directs our attention to these various parts, the selective sharpness of her lens highlighting this or that flower or leaf. The busyness of the passion flower’s tangle throughout, texturing the black spaces of the photograph, likewise confers a certain vitality even to the flat ‘dead’ spaces of brick wall and shadow. Cameron’s iteration intensifies the plant agency of Tennyson’s Maud by extending the sensorial qualities of the bower he elucidates to include touch—​the passion flower’s manifold caress of Maud’s body is an active embrace, made all the more real, vital, and immediate by the photographic medium. Plant erotics This embrace, this touch, is eroticized, and in what follows I explore the strange erotics of Cameron’s Maud. Touch—​even as caress—​was important to Cameron’s photographic practice. She was unusual in pursuing the amateurish, handmade look and ‘unfocused’ effects for which she was often criticized. These effects were the deliberate product of her expanded exposure times and their registration of subtle motion over time, their handmade quality that of preserving in the final print such errors natural to photographic production as it was professional custom to efface—​hair and dirt in the wet collodion coating; cracks and scratches on the glass plate; fingerprints on the negative. Such blemishes are visible in Maud: dark flecks on her left sleeve; fine hairs or scratches on her hair; smudges in the print’s corners.19 Cameron valued these ‘un[re]touched’ effects precisely because they revealed her hand as artist, while shoring up her art’s unique purchase on the real—​driving home that her photography was ‘from life’ (as she insistently captioned Maud) without suggesting that it was therefore an unmediated reflection of reality.20 ‘The mistakes’, Carol Armstrong observes, ‘are what make it “real” ’, the fingerprints and other markers of bodily presence drawing attention to the indexical processes of photography itself.21 We can also understand this touch, everywhere at issue in Cameron’s practice, as eroticized. Cameron herself described it thus: ‘from the first moment[,]‌ I handled my lens with a tender ardour.’22 There is a distinct sensuousness—​even an eroticism—​to the entanglement of Cameron’s Maud and her responsive environment. They touch: Maud’s lips are softly parted; the plant caresses her hair; the passion-​tendril wraps its firm embrace across her chest and seems to loop her in towards the pert, breast-​like passion flowers at left. These elements echo and intensify the desire spread across the voice in Tennyson’s poem as excerpted by Cameron. I have already observed how the pulsing anticipation of Tennyson’s verse—​the pounding rhyme scheme and repetition of phrases (‘she is near, she is near’; ‘I hear, I hear’)—​is echoed in the sequencing of leaves on the vine embracing Maud, alternating between small round nodes or buds and the splayed leaves like the rhythms of a pounding heart. The extent to which the poem’s desirous yearning is resolved, in

156  Emma Merkling Cameron’s photograph, into a more explicit eroticism is an open question. Certainly, and in sharp divergence from the appended poetic excerpt, some sort of physical union has been achieved: Maud is already in the garden, entangled in the plant-​narrator’s longed-​ for embrace; the tendrils caress her face and body and reach down to the stumps where her hands should be; the flowers are erect and seem—​through their filaments—​to tremble with excitement. The soft-​focus effects of the camera also generate a hazy atmosphere of sensuousness punctuated by sharper points of excitement. Darwin had written extensively on plant sex and even erotics, following in the footsteps of his grandfather Erasmus, author of the 1791 erotic poem The Loves of the Plants.23 From the early 1860s the younger Darwin had been ‘seduced’ (in his own words) into writing extensively about plant self-​and cross-​fertilization.24 As Jonathan Smith has observed, these writings speak of ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ ‘marriages’ and ‘unions’ among plants, of plant ‘children’ and ‘offspring’; Darwin was entranced by the range of ‘sexual arrangements’ and ‘degrees of fertility’ in plants (Smith, p. 143). Beer, in turn, points to the erotic charge of Darwin’s writings about plants even where not specifically discussing sex and fertility. She singles out his description of climbing plants and their tendrils: The extremity of the tendril is almost straight and sharp. The whole terminal portion exhibits a singular habit, which in an animal would be called an instinct; for it continually searches for any little crevice or hole into which to insert itself. I had two young plants […] [whose] tendrils, by their own movement and by that of the internodes, slowly travelled over the surface of the wood, and when the apex came to a hole or fissure it inserted itself […]. The same tendril would frequently withdraw from one hole and insert its point into a second hole.25 Such eroticized ‘instinct’—​the tendril seeking and inserting itself into crevices—​is visible in a few places in Cameron’s photograph: at Maud’s breast, where it presses into the fissures of her pleated gown; at the shaded hollows where her arms should be. Beer notes how the erotic charge of the quoted passage is intensified by Darwin’s profound closeness to the plants; by virtue of observing them so intently over hours upon hours upon hours, Darwin himself becomes implicated, a participant in this eroticized exchange (Beer, pp. 30–​31). The cross-​ species erotics at work here—​ Darwin and his tendrils; Maud and her climbing passion flower—​are not only other-​than-​human, but also distinctly queer. By ‘queer’ I mean non-​heteronormative broadly, but also—​in some instances—​specifically same-​gendered.26 Darwin’s tendrils, for instance, are described in phallic terms, rigid terminals seeking and inserting themselves into holes while Darwin himself acts the voyeur; Cameron’s breast-​like flowers, entangled with Maud, are more feminine-​coded, not least because of the Victorian commonplace—​explicitly deployed by Cameron in both prior interpretations of Maud—​of analogizing women with flowers. Slippages of gender identity enabling same-​gendered desire occur in the source text excerpted by Cameron, where the floral assemblage of the garden manifests the narrator’s desires—​ both because the male narrator now speaks through feminine voices (lily, rose), and because these feminine voices themselves speak directly to the female subject Maud, expressing this desire as their own. These queer elements are amplified in Cameron’s interpretation. The male narrator is now nowhere to be found, not in the photograph—​ where the figure ‘waiting’ in the garden is, curiously, Maud herself—​nor in the part of the

Julia Margaret Cameron’s Creeping Idyll  157 poem selected to accompany it, written as it is in the first person. Cameron’s curious decision to handwrite the poetic excerpt further augments its queer eroticism, transforming the passage into a personalized love poem, in a woman’s hand, to another woman. That Cameron appended Tennyson’s (possibly forged) signature to the poem enacts yet another queer slippage: Cameron performs or ‘dresses up’ as Tennyson ‘dressing up’ as his male narrator ‘dressing up’ as feminine flowers, all directed to a young woman ‘dressed up’ for the photograph as Maud—​or possibly as a passion flower.27 In Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies Sam See elaborates upon the queerness of Darwin’s theories, centring on his defiance of ‘naturalized definitions of sex’ and denaturalization of ‘nature’ more broadly—​as well as on his refutation of a teleological view of ‘natural’ and evolutionary processes. For Darwin, See demonstrates, species—​and nature itself—​are always in a state of ‘unpredictable, perpetual’ change, one which incorporates and indeed relies upon the ‘adaptationally useless’.28 See does not deny the heterosexist binaries operating in works like Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871), but nevertheless points to Darwin’s own fascination with variations beyond this—​from hermaphroditism to non-​reproductive production (including both sexual feeling and aesthetic production) (pp. 23–​25). Such production was a central concern of Darwin’s research into plant sexuality—​especially his investigation of spontaneous budding, which enabled variation to occur without reproduction.29 On one reading of Cameron’s photograph—​in which Maud is indeed an embodied passion flower—​the eroticized entanglement she depicts is this sort of self-​touch, the passion flower lovingly entangled with (poised to fertilize) itself. On another, in which the plant and Maud are different species, what we witness is something closer to the plant seduction that for Darwin was so often part of successful cross-​breeding: the plant’s involvement of other unwitting (unwilling?) agents in its reproductive processes; that is, its use of deceptive, alluring, aesthetic markings and colourings to seduce third parties into carrying its pollen. Both options suggest sexual configurations in violation of Victorian parameters of appropriate conduct. But the latter, in particular, opens up a threat to which Victorian audiences were, in the 1870s, growing ever more attuned, and to which we will shortly return: the fantasy of violent entrapment, in which Darwin’s ‘crafty’ and wilful plants could enact a range of horrifying possibilities on human prey, from sexual violence to murder and carnivory. Cameron, for her part (and in typically idyllic fashion) leaves the issue unresolved: both possibilities are maintained, and so the looping structure—​the oscillations, the circuitous meanderings—​of Darwin’s non-​teleological vision of a nature which has no fixed destination is upheld. The result, in her Maud, is twofold. First, something of a block to progressive evolution is indicated, the erotic impulse tending towards a looping self-​involvement.30 Second, as in Tennyson’s poem, in which horror and violence seep always into the idyll, the horrifying possibilities of the scene are shored up, stained with a darkness inextricable from its point of greatest potential for pleasure, and indeed beauty: the plant–​human entanglement. Scholars like Barbara Barrow have demonstrated how Victorian audiences ‘recognized and magnified the queerness of Darwin’s ideas’, generating a ‘Darwinian poetics’ to explore markedly queer themes and desires centring wilful plant agents and an eroticized nature.31 In such a poetics loss and pleasure are bound up together.32 This dynamic is also true of Cameron’s Maud. Tennyson’s poem, Ricks observes, is about ‘losing someone whom you have never really had’, and there is indeed something curiously ‘absent’ about Maud’s presence in this photograph—​a sense that, despite the photograph’s insistence to the contrary, we are looking at a phantom or fantasy, that ‘luminous, gemlike, ghostlike, deathlike’ ‘image’ which grows and fades on the narrator earlier in the

158  Emma Merkling poem.33 The photograph maintains an eternal suspense between anticipation and realization, attainment and loss. For a Victorian audience primed to the symbolic resonances of the passion flower—​so named for its association with the crucifixion—​these effects would have been redoubled by their evocation of Christ’s death and resurrection, and the attendant themes of (bodily) loss and (spiritual) resolution. It is significant that the moment depicted by Cameron never actually occurs in the poem; at least, not in the part excerpted by her, and not like this. When Maud (we are told after the fact) finally comes into the garden, she is present only for an instant before her brother follows and narrative action ensues—​not for long enough to get so entangled with a plant, nor to engender the waiting suspension generated by Cameron’s photograph. Either the photograph protracts what in the poem is an instant—​the moment of Maud’s arrival—​or it enacts a sort of magical wish fulfilment, whereby Maud is willed into the garden by the force of the plant-​narrator’s longing alone. Both readings are encouraged by the context of Cameron’s photographic practice. Elsewhere in her Illustrations (as Armstrong has shown) Cameron analogized the processes of photographic creation with magic and even beguilement, and her purposefully extended exposure times lasting several minutes meant that what is registered is never a fleeting instant but an extended period (Armstrong, Scenes, pp. 373, 387–​93). Cameron described her own process as reliant on a sort of magic of the will—​not hers alone, but that of the many agents, human and non-​human alike, of whose collaboration the photograph was a result. Her (eroticized) description of her lens cited earlier marks it as a subject, an active agent—​‘it has become to be as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour.’ Elsewhere, she describes certain photographs as the result of intense, concentrated wishing, ‘almost the embodiment of a prayer’. And in her marvel at her first successful photograph, it is, in a curious reversal of expected influence, the photograph’s subject she credits with its summoning into being (‘Annals’, pp. 181, 186, 182). As with Tennyson’s phrase ‘the soul of the rose went into my blood’, or Cameron’s passion flower being the more lively agent—​or indeed the depicted reality (Maud’s presence) being a product of the desire for it—​what we have here is again a sort of inverse directionality of agency, generating a surprising equivalence between terms usually understood to operate hierarchically and the other way round. The same is true of the nature of Cameron’s photographic ‘illustrations’ more broadly, as Armstrong has observed, enacting a reversal of priority whereby the Tennysonian texts they supposedly illustrate come instead to serve as their ‘alibi[s]‌’ (Scenes, p. 365). In Cameron’s Maud, although the subjectivities of plant and person are not strictly or safely separable, the context of the poetic excerpt indicates that the relevant ‘subject’ here—​the one willing the reality inscribed by the photograph into being—​is the plant-​narrator. And it is the camera which, magically, makes this desire real, insisting indexically on Maud’s (or at least the model’s) real presence even as it makes her a ghost, a visual echo enduring long after the model’s actual death. And death is surely at issue in Cameron’s Maud. Present yet absent, immobile, glassy-​eyed, pallid—​is Maud a corpse? This possibility, more explicitly horrifying than the evocations of ‘loss’ explored by Barrow, is certainly maintained by Cameron. The last stanza of Cameron’s excerpt—​ and the closing cadence of the central idyll of Tennyson’s Maud—​is eerily haunted by an image of the narrator’s grave (albeit a curiously living one): Were it earth in an earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat, Had I lain for a century dead;

Julia Margaret Cameron’s Creeping Idyll  159 Would start and tremble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red. This imagery portends the horror of what is to come: in the very next stanza the idyllic suspense of the garden scene is shown to have resolved into pure violence; we have skipped forward in time, the narrator recounting what took place after Maud’s arrival in the garden (never itself directly depicted). Maud’s brother and the narrator duelled; the brother was killed. The account ends with Maud’s lingering, spine-​chilling ‘cry for a brother’s blood: | It will ring in my heart and my ears, till I die, till I die’ (a blacker version of the echoing and dying away of the voice typical of Riddell’s queer idylls) (2. I. 34–​35). Cameron’s photograph has more than a touch of the grave about it, and from this perspective its creeping dark forms and melancholy tone speak more to the violence which follows than to the desirous anticipation of the excerpt it illustrates. Its claustrophobic perspective, Maud’s tilt into the darkness behind her, the plants creeping over her, and the unfocused elements in the foreground suggest that we might in fact be standing above her, looking down on her shrouded body in a shallow grave choked with vines, the darkness that of rotted mulch and decay.34 Cameron stops short of allowing us to read the figure definitively as either living or as corpse, and we are pulled once more into the idyll’s endless looping, its insistence on having it both ways. What I am getting at is this: that the plant–​human erotics and queer entanglements of Cameron’s Maud, the dispersal of subjectivity and spread of agency (including its extension to other-​than-​human agents) are the source both of the work’s most sensuous, ‘idyllic’ pleasures and its most chilling horrors. The dynamics I have been outlining, erotic and otherwise, are constituted by a kind of equivalence or substitutability of one thing for another: plant for person, person for plant; male for female; death for life. In Cameron’s photograph, as in the poem, such dualities—​darkness and light, threat and reprieve, pain and pleasure—​are not only maintained together, but, like its human and other-​than-​human subjects, in fact interpenetrate and can be confused for one another. Such confusion has been identified by Arscott and Pettitt in this volume as a feature of the Victorian idyll; in Cameron’s Maud it is both a key constituent of the idyll and the site of its purest horrors. We need only think back to Tennyson’s explicitly horrifying poem to see the fuller implications here, Cameron’s interpretation again synthesizing a feature of its source text. Consider the dispersal of subjectivity in Tennyson’s Maud—​those manifold voices and ‘characters’ across which the identity of the narrator is spread, including the plant-​agents foregrounded by Cameron. This dispersal is at its most extreme in the poem’s idylls, but (Tennyson himself insisted) it is also the clearest marker of the narrator’s madness, a manifestation of the horrors of the disintegrating self—​the loss of personal, even human, identity. Similarly, the gender slippages and non-​heteronormative erotics present in the idylls of Tennyson’s poem elsewhere generate far more unsettling effects, including the horrifying breakdown of appropriate familial relations. Something is wrong with reproduction in Maud; certainly, the sort of cloning Arscott and Pettitt identify as part of the (re)productive logic of the Victorian idyll is at work: according to the narrator, Maud’s brother has genetically inherited only from his father, and Maud from her mother (1. XIII. 466–​86). Elsewhere, more horrifyingly incestuous and deviant configurations are implied. In the poem’s terrible opening lines the father is perversely swallowed back into a bloody, vaginal gash; the description of his body is eerily doubled by Maud-​as-​corpse in Cameron’s photograph, the narrator’s father switched out for the female Maud: ‘there

160  Emma Merkling in the ghastly pit long since a body was found, | His who had given me life […] | […] flatten’d, and crushed, and dinted into the ground’ (1. I. 5–​7). Tennyson’s poem is one in which the antonyms ‘hate’ and ‘love’ are often interchangeable.35 In Cameron’s photograph the indication of a potentially violent erotics is most visible at the site of its profoundest beauty: Maud, and the tangle suggestive of queer pleasures. Maud’s missing arms and marble immobility transform her into a sort of Venus; these same features, however, render her incapable of returning the plant’s caresses and so raise the very real possibility of sexual violence. The intimation of bodily mutilation conjures up not only violence in general—​including the tearing and maiming of bodies occasioned by the Crimean War referred to at the close of Tennyson’s poem—​but more specifically a range of visual and textual referents available to Cameron suggestive of sexual violence. These range from the shocking mutilation of Lavinia by her rapists in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1594) to the softer visual language of artistic interpretations of Apollo and Daphne (from Pollaiolo to Bernini) in which Daphne transforms into a tree to escape Apollo’s unwanted advances; the person–​plant interpenetration at Maud’s hollows visually evokes such transformation. For Victorian audiences the presence of the passion flower in Maud would further have evoked both intense violence and profound beauty or love. Like its root word ‘passion’, the plant had come by the 1860s to stand both for ‘acute suffering’ and its opposite, ‘tender love’: its ‘proper’, iconographic reading in which each part signified a different aspect of the brutalizing of Christ’s flesh (the central corona and spiny filaments, the crown of thorns; the anthers, the wound in his side; and so on) converged discomfitingly with its popular association with the ‘sentiment of Love’.36 This confluence of the physical and spiritual encapsulated by the God-​body befits Cameron’s famed insistence upon photography’s capacity, in all its insistent realism, to be an ‘art of the ideal’ and to give—​as Armstrong has put it—​material ‘evidence to the realm of the spiritual’ (Scenes, p. 362). Cameron’s highest ambition was (in her own words) to ‘secure for [Photography] the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and ideal and sacrificing nothing of truth by all possible devotion to poetry and beauty’.37 Accounts by those who knew her indicate that this ‘real’ could have a darker edge: the realities of Cameron’s photographic process were not without subtle horrors of their own. The generation of beauty was contingent upon the model’s body, and posing for Cameron—​because of the lengths of time involved—​could be so agonizing an ordeal that her friends referred to her sitters as her ‘victims’.38 As one model recalled: A minute went over and I felt as if I must scream; another minute and the sensation was as if my eyes were coming out of my head; a third and the back of my neck appeared to be afflicted with palsy […] the torture of standing for nearly ten minutes […] was something indescribable.39 Screaming, mutilation, agony, torture: these are not terms we readily associate with the idyll, and yet they comprise the real upon which Cameron’s generation of an ideal depended. Like the other terms I have raised—​darkness and light, death and life, hate and love, pain and pleasure, body and soul—​real and ideal are here co-​dependent; they interpenetrate one another. This is especially true of idylls like Maud. The reversals identified earlier enable us to clarify that in Cameron’s hands—​and in a final reversal of expectations—​the ideal can make things real just as much as the real can be a viable route to, even summon, the ideal. The subject can summon the photograph; desire can

Julia Margaret Cameron’s Creeping Idyll  161 summon a real human into tangible presence. This is the logic of enchantment or beguilement: wishing makes it so. Real and ideal merge, intermingle, can be confused for one another—​in Cameron’s words, they ‘combine’. What is produced is a beauty that does not flinch from the horrors from which it cannot be disentangled. Coda: plant time The horror texturing Cameron’s 1874 exploration of plant–​ human entanglement would bloom in the decades thereafter into a genre of its own, a phenomenon several scholars have linked to Darwin’s botanical writings on wilful, mobile plants.40 In the climax of H. G. Wells’s 1894 short story ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’, for instance, the protagonist is found unconscious in his hothouse with an orchid’s creeping tendrils wrapped tightly around his chin, neck, and hands, sucking the blood from him. In Cameron’s Maud, the passivity of the human contrasted with the wilful mobility of the plant suggests the possibility of a similar configuration.41 With the tendril drawing Maud into the plant tangle behind her, and the tug of the passion-​fronds at her head, she seems in the process of being sucked in. But at work here is something more ambivalent, perhaps more mutual, than in the plant horrors of the fin de siècle. The analogy—​ strengthened by the suggestion of Maud-​as-​corpse—​is of the looping energy transfers of decay, the work of the ecological microcosm: the body which once gained energy from feeding on the fruits of its environment transmuting back into available energy through its sweet and fertile rotting fluids, ready to sprout again into new life. More horrifying than the idylls of the 1860s, more ambivalent than the horrors of the 1890s: Maud’s is very much an aestheticist idyll.42 The temporalities of Cameron’s photograph are central to its idyllism. In its evocation of a waiting so endless it is almost a little death, in its suspension of human animation and action, Cameron’s photograph opens onto timescales that are decidedly non-​human. For the human agents of Maud, time creeps, slows down, expands: the narrator awaits Maud for what feels an eternity (he has ‘lain for a century dead’); Cameron’s model holds her pose so long each minute stretches into agony. This is the order of the vegetal—​the somnolent unfurling of a passion tendril; the slow ‘blossom[ing] in purple and red’ of a plant subsuming the human order of Maud’s body and the narrator’s grave. Agony seeds a flourishing beauty. Slowed down to the torpid rhythms of suspended human action, we are made capable of witnessing that to which we are not always attuned: plant motion, agency, desire—​and temporality. Darwin knew this temporality well, inhabiting it in the passage cited above as he traced the slow movement of plant tendrils over dozens of hours, enabling, in the process, the blooming of an erotic charge. So too did Cameron: it cleaves to her expanded exposure times, the agonizing slowing down of ordinary human time to a level more closely approximating the vegetal. Darwin, in recounting his observations, compressed this expanded timeframe into something more appreciable to us; Cameron’s photograph does the same. Here is her idyll: in the long period of waiting after the uncapping of her lens; in that magical, endless expansion of what ought to be a fleeting moment. The pulses, the meanderings, the subtle movements of those minutes are concentrated, synthesized, into a single image. Time is spatialized, its passage marked as the blurry, formal tangle which spreads across the picture plane, indexing the varied motion and stillness of bodies during exposure. Form and temporality work together to generate the loop, the spiral, I have been identifying. The temporal suspension at issue here is not that

162  Emma Merkling of escapism: it admits, even enables, the very real possibility of accessing the pleasures and horrors it encompasses. The suspension is that of enchantment, beguilement: the dangerous but also seductive operation of the will. The full culmination of this will is, in some ways, forever deferred. Maud, never really ‘had’ by us nor the narrator, does not return our gaze; she may or may not return the plant’s affections, may or may not be dead, may or may not even be present. It is a curious haunting, this—​not the spectral return of the past but the summoning of some desired future moment, expanded into the present. By virtue of indexing a model holding a pose for so long the photograph also depicts a very real suspended animation constituted by a very real will: that of Cameron—​but also the plant. Notes 1 I am grateful to Caroline Arscott, Thomas Hughes, and Clare Pettitt for their insightful feedback on this chapter in various stages. 2 Julia Margaret Cameron, letter to Sir Edward Ryan, 4 December 1874, quoted in Helmut Gernsheim, Julia Margaret Cameron (London: Fraser, 1975), p. 46. 3 Because it was copyrighted 1 May 1875 (corresponding with the date of publication of the second volume of Illustrations), Cameron’s Maud is often tentatively dated 1875, including in Julian Cox and Colin Ford, with others, Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2003), p. 481. Evidence in Cameron’s own ‘Annals of My Glass House’ (1874) and letters between Cameron and her publishers, however, suggest that a photograph of Mary Hillier in profile as Maud had already been taken by autumn 1874. See Julia Margaret Cameron, ‘Annals of My Glass House’, in Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, ed. by Vicki Goldberg (New York: Touchstone, 1981), pp. 180–​87 (p. 184); and C. Kegan Paul, letter to Julia Margaret Cameron, 30 October 1874, cited in Gernsheim, p. 44. 4 Alfred Tennyson and Julia Margaret Cameron, ‘Maud’, in Illustrations to Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’, and Other Poems, 2 vols (London: King, 1874–​75), II (1875), unpaginated. 5 Other scholars have puzzled over the sequencing of, in Jeff Rosen’s words, the ‘seemingly random’ collection of photographs in Cameron’s second volume of Illustrations, seeking the ‘principle or narrative coherence’ which holds them together. Several unifying themes have been proposed, from nationalism tempered by ‘moral guidance and restraint’ to extreme despair or death (and the redemptive elements of hope, joy, or peace). The idyllism of Cameron’s Maud is, I suggest, another; and indeed both the ‘random’ sequencing of the volume and its status as a luxury Christmas gift book are—​other chapters in this volume have shown—​typical of the Victorian idyll. See Jeff Rosen, Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘fancy subjects’: Photographic Allegories of Victorian Identity and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), pp. 257, 262. 6 [Hallam Tennyson], Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son, 2 vols (New York: Macmillan, 1897), I , 396; Tennyson, quoted in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. by Christopher Ricks, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Harlow: Longman, 1987), I I , 517. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Maud are taken from vol. I I of this edition and referenced by part, section, and line number. On Maud’s morbid reception, see Scott Dransfield, ‘The Morbid Meters of Maud’, Victorian Poetry, 46 (2008), 279–​97. 7 Christopher Ricks, Tennyson (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 249. 8 ‘Mrs. Cameron’s Illustrations of Tennyson’, Spectator, 29 May 1875, pp. 693–​94 (p. 694). 9 In addition to these three interpretations, Cameron made at least two more: Maud by Moonlight (1864–​65) and a second c. 1875 Maud produced for the later, miniature edition of her Illustrations. Neither, again, centres plant subjectivity so much as the photograph discussed in this chapter. 10 Charles Darwin, letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker, 23 August [1868], Darwin Correspondence Project www.darwin​proj​ect.ac.uk/​let​ter/​?docId=​lett​ers/​DCP-​LETT-​6327.xml [accessed 12

Julia Margaret Cameron’s Creeping Idyll  163 June 2023]. On the Darwins’ visit, see Emma Darwin: A Century of Family Letters, 1792–​ 1896, ed. by Henrietta Litchfield, 2 vols (New York: Appleton, 1915), II , 190–​92. 11 The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, ed. by Nora Barlow (London: Collins, 1958), p. 135; see also, Jim Endersby, ‘Deceived by Orchids: Sex, Science, Fiction and Darwin’, British Journal for the History of Science, 49 (2016), 205–​29. 12 Charles Darwin, ‘On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants’, Journal of the Linnean Society (Botany), 9 (1867), 1–​118 (p. 115). The paper was read at the society on 2 February 1865. 13 Gillian Beer, ‘Plants, Analogy, and Perfection: Loose and Strict Analogies’, in Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution, ed. by Joel Faflak (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), pp. 29–​ 44, quoting from Darwin’s unpublished Notebook N (1838), p. 13, and Notebook M (1838), p. 72 (both accessible at http://​dar​win-​onl​ine.org.uk). 14 Charles Darwin, letter to William Erasmus Darwin, [25 July 1863], Darwin Correspondence Project www.darwin​proj​ect.ac.uk/​let​ter/​?docId=​lett​ers/​DCP-​LETT-​4199.xml [accessed 12 June 2023]. 15 Charles Darwin, The Movement and Habits of Climbing Plants, 2nd edn, rev. (London: Murray, 1875), p. 202, emphasis added. 16 Alfred W. Bennett, ‘Spontaneous Movements in Plants’, Popular Science Monthly, 2 (1872–​73), 280–​93 (p. 286). 17 Samuel Butler, Erewhon; or, Over the Range (London: Trübner, 1872), pp. 193, 194; and ‘Flowers of the Future’, Punch, 19 December 1897, p. 255. For an excellent analysis of Butler’s text, see Elizabeth Chang, ‘Killer Plants of the Late Nineteenth Century’, in Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age, ed. by Lara Karpenko and Shalyn Claggett (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), pp. 81–​101 (p. 89). For a discussion of the Punch poem, see Jonathan Smith, ‘Une Fleur du Mal? Swinburne’s “The Sundew” and Darwin’s Insectivorous Plants’, Victorian Poetry, 41 (2003), 131–​50 (p. 142). 18 Endersby, p. 207. For a longer view of British botany’s investment in plant sensitivity and sensibility—​ including plants’ animalistic and even monstrous qualities—​ see Elaine Ayers, ‘Pitcher Plant: Drowning in Her Sweet Nectar’, in Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds, ed. by Mackenzie Cooley, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yıldırım (New York: Routledge, 2023), pp. 231–​61. 19 On Cameron’s process, including her manipulation of the plate, see Julian Cox, ‘ “To … startle the eye with wonder & delight”: The Photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron’, in Complete Photographs, ed. by Cox and Ford, pp. 41–​79. 20 As she wrote of the ‘spots’ peppering her Illustrations: ‘I am the only photographer who always issues untouched Photographs and artists for this reason amongst others value my photographs.’ Julia Margaret Cameron, letter to Sir Edward Ryan, 8 December 1874, quoted in Gernsheim, p. 47, emphasis in original. 21 Carol Armstrong, ‘Cupid’s Pencil of Light: Julia Margaret Cameron and the Maternalization of Photography’, October, 76 (1996), 114–​41 (p. 140). 22 Cameron, ‘Annals’, p. 181, emphasis added. Armstrong and Carol Mavor have both discussed the erotics of Cameron’s art: see Armstrong, ‘Cupid’s Pencil of Light’; and Carol Mavor, Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 23 See Beer for an extensive discussion of Charles Darwin’s engagement with his grandfather’s work. 24 Charles Darwin, letter to Alphonse de Candolle, 17 June [1862], Darwin Correspondence Project www.darwin​proj​ect.ac.uk/​let​ter/​?docId=​lett​ers/​DCP-​LETT-​3608.xml [accessed 12 June 2023]. 25 Darwin, Climbing Plants, 2nd edn, pp. 95–​96. 26 My definition of ‘queer’ here aligns with that used by Holly Furneaux in her work on Victorian sexualities—​namely, as ‘that which differs from the life-​script of opposite-​sex marriage and reproduction’. Holly Furneaux, ‘Victorian Sexualities’, Literature Compass, 8 (2011), 767–​ 75 https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​j.1741-​4113.2011.00834.x (p. 772). See also Sharon Marcus’s

164  Emma Merkling foundational Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 27 A queer note is also sounded in Cameron’s writings about photography. ‘Now that […] Annie is eighteen,’ she wrote of a young woman she wished to photograph, ‘how much I long to meet her and try my master hand upon her’ (‘Annals’, p. 182). As for Tennyson, Ricks observes that the poem is in many ways a continuation of In Memoriam (1850) with the male object of desire switched easily out for a woman (Tennyson, p. 247). Contemporaries also applied the gendered term ‘hysterical’ to Maud’s male narrator: see George Brimley’s 1855 essay on Tennyson’s poems, ‘G. Brimley on Maud [1855]’, in Lord Alfred Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, ed. by John D. Jump (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 191–​96 (p. 192). 28 Sam See, Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies, ed. by Christopher Looby and Michael North (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), pp. 25, 20, 24. 29 Elsewhere in this volume, Arscott and Pettitt also discuss the (Tennysonian) idyll in relation to this sort of budding. 30 In this respect it is interesting to note that there is no fruit in Cameron’s Maud. Is the passion flower sterile? Later in Tennyson’s poem, as Sue Edney has observed, the narrator remarks that Maud’s garden bore ‘only flowers, […] no fruits’ (2. V. 315). Sue Edney, ‘Presence and Absence in Tennyson’s Gardens of Grief: “Mariana”, Maud and Somersby’, in EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Phantoms, Fantasy, and Uncanny Flowers, ed. by Sue Edney (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), pp. 166–​83 (pp. 180–​81). 31 Barbara Barrow, ‘Queer Poetry and Darwin at the Fin de Siècle: Mathilde Blind, Constance Naden, and Laurence Hope’, Victorian Poetry, 59 (2021), 97–​118 (pp. 97, 99). See, especially, her analysis of Blind’s ‘Spring in the Alps’ (1895) and The Ascent of Man (1889), pp. 97, 100–​01. 32 Barrow, p. 110; and also, Riddell, Arscott and Pettitt. 33 Ricks, Tennyson, p. 252. See Carol Armstrong, Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–​1875 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 361–​421, for a spiritualist reading of the first volume of Cameron’s Illustrations which draws attention to their maintenance of such ghostly dynamics—​a convergence of the material and the spiritual. 34 In Tennyson’s poem, too, Maud is often rendered (Francis O’Gorman observes) ‘uncomfortably close to a corpse in a funeral parlour’ through the narrator’s descriptions. Francis O’Gorman, ‘What is Haunting Tennyson’s Maud (1855)?’, Victorian Poetry, 48 (2010), 293–​312 (p. 304). 35 On incestuous entanglements—​ and, more specifically, the Oedipal qualities of the poem’s climax—​see Jonas Spatz, ‘Love and Death in Tennyson’s Maud’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 16 (1974), 503–​10 (p. 508). 36 ‘The Passion-​Flower and its Associations’, Bow Bells, 12 July 1865, p. 579. 37 Julia Margaret Cameron, letter to John Herschel, 31 December 1864, quoted in Gernsheim, facing p. 15. 38 See Edith Nicholl Ellison, A Child’s Recollections of Tennyson (New York: Dutton, 1906), p. 74; A. G. Weld, letter to [Anonymous], May 1884, quoted in Henry James Jennings, Lord Tennyson, 1809–​1892: A Biographical Sketch (London: Chatto & Windus, 1892), p. 125. 39 ‘A Reminiscence of Mrs Cameron’, Photographic News, 1 January 1886, p. 3. 40 See Chang, Endersby, Smith. 41 Tennyson’s Maud also alludes to carnivorous plants feeding on the organ of love: ‘a morbid eating lichen fixt | On a heart half-​turn’d to stone’, like Cameron’s marble Maud (1. VI. 266–​67). 42 Maud fits within a subset of aestheticist art and literature which, in the 1860s and 1870s, was likewise investigating the pleasures and horrors of plant–​ human entanglements. See Smith on Algernon Charles Swinburne, Darwin, and the carnivorous sundew; and Arscott on Edward Burne-​Jones’s Briar Rose series and the scientific and horticultural contexts behind the painting: Caroline Arscott, William Morris and Edward Burne-​Jones: Interlacings (New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2008).

Julia Margaret Cameron’s Creeping Idyll  165 Bibliography Armstrong, Carol, ‘Cupid’s Pencil of Light: Julia Margaret Cameron and the Maternalization of Photography’, October, 76 (1996), 114–​41. —​—​—​Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–​ 1875 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). Arscott, Caroline, William Morris and Edward Burne-​ Jones: Interlacings (New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2008). Ayers, Elaine, ‘Pitcher Plant: Drowning in Her Sweet Nectar’, in Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds, ed. by Mackenzie Cooley, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yıldırım (New York: Routledge, 2023), pp. 231–​61. Barlow, Nora, ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (London: Collins, 1958). Barrow, Barbara, ‘Queer Poetry and Darwin at the Fin de Siècle: Mathilde Blind, Constance Naden, and Laurence Hope’, Victorian Poetry, 59 (2021), 97–​118. Beer, Gillian, ‘Plants, Analogy, and Perfection: Loose and Strict Analogies’, in Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution, ed. by Joel Faflak (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), pp. 29–​44. Bennett, Alfred W., ‘Spontaneous Movements in Plants’, Popular Science Monthly, 2 (1872–​73), 280–​93. Butler, Samuel, Erewhon; or, Over the Range (London: Trübner, 1872). Cameron, Julia Margaret, ‘Annals of My Glass House’, in Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, ed. by Vicki Goldberg (New York: Touchstone, 1981), pp. 180–​87. Chang, Elizabeth, ‘Killer Plants of the Late Nineteenth Century’, in Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age, ed. by Lara Karpenko and Shalyn Claggett (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), pp. 81–​101. Cox, Julian, ‘ “To … startle the eye with wonder & delight”: The Photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron’, in Julian Cox and Colin Ford, with others, Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2003), pp. 41–​79. Darwin, Charles, ‘On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants’, Journal of the Linnean Society (Botany), 9 (1867), 1–​118. —​—​—​The Movement and Habits of Climbing Plants, 2nd edn, rev. (London: Murray, 1875). Darwin Correspondence Project www.darwin​proj​ect.ac.uk [accessed 12 June 2023]. Dransfield, Scott, ‘The Morbid Meters of Maud’, Victorian Poetry, 46 (2008), 279–​97. Edney, Sue, ‘Presence and Absence in Tennyson’s Gardens of Grief: “Mariana”, Maud and Somersby’, in EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Phantoms, Fantasy, and Uncanny Flowers, ed. by Sue Edney (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), pp. 166–​83. Ellison, Edith Nicholl, A Child’s Recollections of Tennyson (New York: Dutton, 1906). Endersby, Jim, ‘Deceived by Orchids: Sex, Science, Fiction and Darwin’, British Journal for the History of Science, 49 (2016), 205–​29. ‘Flowers of the Future’, Punch, 19 December 1897, p. 255. Furneaux, Holly, ‘Victorian Sexualities’, Literature Compass, 8 (2011), 767–​75 https://​doi.org/​ 10.1111/​j.1741-​4113.2011.00834.x ‘G. Brimley on Maud [1855]’, in Lord Alfred Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, ed. by John D. Jump (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 191–​96. Gernsheim, Helmut, Julia Margaret Cameron (London: Fraser, 1975). Jennings, Henry James, Lord Tennyson, 1809–​1892: A Biographical Sketch (London: Chatto & Windus, 1892). Litchfield, Henrietta, ed., Emma Darwin: A Century of Family Letters, 1792–​ 1896, 2 vols (New York: Appleton, 1915). Marcus, Sharon, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

166  Emma Merkling Mavor, Carol, Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). ‘Mrs. Cameron’s Illustrations of Tennyson’, Spectator, 29 May 1875, pp. 693–​94. O’Gorman, Francis, ‘What Is Haunting Tennyson’s Maud (1855)?’, Victorian Poetry, 48 (2010), 293–​312. ‘The Passion-​Flower and its Associations’, Bow Bells, 12 July 1865, p. 579. ‘A Reminiscence of Mrs Cameron’, Photographic News, 1 January 1886, pp. 2–​4. Ricks, Christopher, Tennyson (New York: Macmillan, 1972). —​—​—​, ed., The Poems of Tennyson, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Harlow: Longman, 1987). Rosen, Jeff, Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘fancy subjects’: Photographic Allegories of Victorian Identity and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). See, Sam, Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies, ed. by Christopher Looby and Michael North (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020). Smith, Jonathan, ‘Une Fleur du Mal? Swinburne’s “The Sundew” and Darwin’s Insectivorous Plants’, Victorian Poetry, 41 (2003), 131–​50. Spatz, Jonas, ‘Love and Death in Tennyson’s Maud’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 16 (1974), 503–​10. Tennyson, Alfred, and Julia Margaret Cameron, Illustrations to Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’, and Other Poems, 2 vols (London: King, 1874–​75). [Tennyson, Hallam], Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son, 2 vols (New York: Macmillan, 1897).

8 Wondrous Transformation in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s La Ghirlandata Thomas Hughes

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s finest and most enchanting oil painting, La Ghirlandata (1873), is a significant example of the work produced by artists reimagining the Victorian idyll in the 1870s in light of the advent of aestheticism (Figure 8.1).1 Following the formal structure of the idyll, Rossetti suspends narrative and he disperses a sense of subjectivity across the forms depicted so that they become animated and take on agency. With this, Rossetti suggests a series of transformations between human and other-​ than-​ human forms. I argue that Rossetti takes up Darwinian accounts of matter and life in this painting, complicating distinctions between individuality and community. In deploying queer and trans* theory, my interpretation will suggest ways of seeing gender in Rossetti’s picture in terms of multiplicity and transformability. I will finally propose that later Victorian aestheticism should be understood to have emerged from a post-​Darwin entanglement of nature and culture. Within a shady bower, perhaps deep within a thick forest, a glowing red-​haired figure looks out at the viewer and plucks at a harp-​like musical instrument. In the bottom-​left corner we see the left hand reaching across to the right of the figure’s body. The fingers of this hand pull forward a taut sixth string counting from the left, catching and bending slightly other strings in the process. The figure’s right arm is lifted and the thumb and fingers—​we imagine—​pluck the strings on the other side of the tall back of the instrument, which has variously been identified as a kind of double psaltery known as an ‘arpanetta’ or as a triple-​ranked harp. In any case the strings are too close together to be playable in actuality and—​significantly, for my ensuing interpretation—​the instrument is backwards: Rossetti has reversed the usual orientation whereby the treble strings of an instrument of this kind would be positioned closer to the player’s head.2 The painting conjures an idea of music playing to paradoxically intensify its exploration of the pictorial possibilities of aestheticism, but in the sense that the musical instrument depicted is non-​functional this picture is not ‘about’ music at all. Its world is visual: imagining the fantastical chord held in a suspended pluck, the viewer of the painting might cast around for a visual substitute and could alight on the garland of honeysuckle and rose ringing the high back of the inverted harp, as though striking a high (pink and yellow) visual ‘chord’. It is at this point we come to see the garland named in the title and to recognize that the fantastical instrument is receiving this solemn honour. Musica or rather arte (both are gendered feminine in Italian) is the Garlanded One, La Ghirlandata. Art herself is being enwreathed, crowned with a garland. Angels appear to witness this exalted occurrence. In fact there is a magnificent series of not-​quite concentric garlands forming the surfaces of La Ghirlandata. At the smallest scale the clasps of the figure’s bracelet and the cuffs of the green dress re-​enact the looping and clinging action of a garland. At the DOI: 10.4324/9781003327998-9

168  Thomas Hughes

Figure 8.1  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, La Ghirlandata, 1873, oil on canvas, 124 × 85 cm, The Guildhall Gallery, London. Photo: City of London Corporation.

Transformation in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s La Ghirlandata  169 largest scale the viewer might ‘join’ the outermost garland organizing the composition at bottom left with the dark-​blue flowers of the larkspur, and follow it around the picture plane to the right, across the charged space between the larkspur and the curling-​down tendril—​both gently pointing to each other, straining to touch, as though plants conspire in the artistic contrivance and yearn to weave the wreath. We continue further up behind the figure’s left shoulder—​I will return to the curious effects of the figure’s swollen form—​disappearing again into the thickly grown walls of the verdant bower. Then we follow the outermost ‘garland’ up behind or perhaps onto the back of the energized chiffon collar behind the figure, which curves and flutters round behind the hair, forming a further garland around the top of the body. Remaining with the outer wreath, we now come to the blue bird—​we cannot say, for certain, whether it is in flight or sitting on a branch—​wings spread, beak slightly open, yet curiously still, and to which, again, I shall be returning. From the blue bird we then move up to the hand grasping the branch or twig of the bower hedge, past the head of the right-​hand angel, around above the red hair of the central figure and back down, behind the sculpted birds atop the instrument and through the almost fizzing concentration of the pink-​yellow garland itself, and then down through the pale glow of the figure’s right hand and wrist and into the deep-​green lustre of the sleeve, past the blue wing forms decorating the curve of the harp catching the light, to meet again the figure’s left hand and close the circuit. Within this garland are numerous other ‘garlands’. We could follow the figure’s left arm up and round, tracing a wreath formed by the figure itself. The figure’s body in some sense encircles—​enwreathes—​the musical instrument, just as the figure itself is encircled—​ enwreathed—​by the bower. The fluttering, chiffon collar that wreathes the figure’s upper body and thick neck emerging above the green robes, as mentioned, constitutes another garland, almost sepal-​like in marking the transition from greens of bower and dress to the white and red of flesh, lips, and hair; from ‘stem’ to ‘flower’. The three heads at the top of the picture (figure, two angels) form a garland of sorts (as though of red flowers with white centres) that hangs down into the central space of the bower, emphasizing—​ pointing to—​the figure at the centre. According to Rossetti’s letter to his brother William Michael, we can understand this central figure as ‘The Garlanded Lady’, or ‘The Lady of the Wreath’.3 In a larger sense, however, the picture itself is the garland, it is the garlanding. Agency all resides in the picture-​making: the painting both depicts a series of garlands and, in doing so, confers the solemn honour of the garland upon itself. In this painting, aestheticism, we might say—​returning to Rossetti’s metaphorics of music—​ strikes its final self-​chord. At the same time we are encountering here the temporal structure of the Victorian idyll, which distorts narrative with circularity and repetition. Ongoingness, circularity, and repetition are evoked by the magnificent composition as a whole and are encountered at every particular passage. In following the compositional garlands around the surface of the picture the viewer is made to encounter an almost bewildering variety of colours, shapes, and forms—​yearning foliage, animate fabric, hands, angels—​a wondrous series of revolving garlands of linked animate beings and effects. However, the enchanting result stops short of a complete collapse of reference. La Ghirlandata is not beyond all knowledge, it is not located in the productive realm beyond categories that Jack Halberstam has recently theorized as bewilderment.4 Unbecoming certainly threatens to overwhelm the viewer of La Ghirlandata. But something holds things back, keeps the forms containable and knowable—​up to a point. I suggest what contains things is the spatial logic of the idyll.

170  Thomas Hughes Although overcrowded and characterized by convolution, a centre of sorts holds in the painting, keeping the picture integrated. The jumbled units find a containment within the small scale of the bower. Rossetti evidently found the structure of the Victorian idyll creatively enabling. His poetic image of the idyll is the bower, drawn from English poetry, a textual site imagined as a covered space within a thicket or dense foliage, where desire is heightened. The bower could also connote an interior feminine space, and sometimes it conflated these associations.5 Rossetti’s ‘The Portrait’ (1869, pub. 1870), a bewitching poem telling of an artist and his enchanted painting of his dead lover, might describe La Ghirlandata: ‘In painting her I shrined her face | Mid mystic trees, where light falls in | Hardly at all; a covert place’.6 In this poem Rossetti’s bower is also a place where one can stray from the path and experience unknowing—​among ‘many a shape whose name | Not itself knoweth, and old dew’. But Rossetti’s bower is also where you might come across ‘your own footsteps meeting you’ (p. 128). A kind of artistic subjectivity is sustained in the poem—​the portrait is painted—​even while Rossetti’s subjectivity is dispersed among the objects of the shadowy idyllic bower, in the way that he might stumble across disembodied traces of self (his own ‘footsteps’ meeting him). The revenant image of the deceased beloved in the poem is key to the functioning of this imaginative structure, one obsessively returned to again and again by the painter-​poet. (The manuscript of this poem was among those Rossetti buried with his wife Elizabeth Siddall and later exhumed.7) Death is key to the vision of life presented in La Ghirlandata. Turning to the specifics of La Ghirlandata we see that, negotiating the dispersal of subjectivity across units, containing the effects, the painting is composed of sites of transition between forms. Transformation, I suggest in what follows, pervades La Ghirlandata. After further analysis of transformation in the picture I turn to a typically condensed description of transformation and gender in Rossetti by Walter Pater; this will enable me to fit my observations onto implications in Charles Darwin’s writings about organic form, available to Rossetti. In turn I propose a new way of seeing gender in this work and by extension Rossetti’s later phase. The personage of the wreath To turn first to the two angels, modelled by May Morris, perching at the top of the picture. The rightmost angel’s folded wings are just visible: the right-​hand wing curves down into the very top of the picture frame and the extremity of the folded left wing can be seen. There is considerable spatial confusion in this area of the painting, and the undeniable sense conveyed is that of crowding as the angel cranes into the bower space to attend to the garlanding scene. If we can in fact see the leftmost figure likewise as an angel, its wings are not visible within the picture frame. Curiously, each angel is accompanied by one hand. Top right, the hand clutches a stem as though holding it down better for the angel to see and hear the heady spectacle of art’s enwreathing; noticeably, this hand complements the dainty plucking left hand of the main figure. The position of the flopped hand next to the resting head of the angel on the left makes even less plausible sense than the configuration of hand and angel to the top right. Looked at one way, it is as though the leftmost ‘angel’ is merely a head while, separately, a hand emanates from another entity within the bower, or perhaps from the hedge itself, to offer support. In this light the top right hand might also be imagined as belonging to someone or something else concealed within, or even to be sprouting from the hedge. Seeing the bower itself as generating hands and digits means we see the bower hedges as animate with

Transformation in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s La Ghirlandata  171 subjectivity: they seem to cooperate with the visiting dignitaries or to mimic the plucking action of the central figure. There is clear evidence that Rossetti had before used ambiguity as to body-​part configuration and ownership within crowded compositions to heighten effects—​in the case of Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee (1858), erotic effects (Figure 8.2). In the pen-​and-​ink drawing Mary Magdalene’s male lover—​who speaks the first stanza

Figure 8.2 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee, 1858, pen and Indian ink, 50.8 × 45.7 cm, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

172  Thomas Hughes of the accompanying sonnet (pub. 1870)—​stalls her entry to the house of Simon the Pharisee. The lover implores the Magdalene to ‘be thou all a rose,—​wreath, lips, and cheek’ and return to the ‘banquet-​house’.8 Suggestively, another woman is flattened and fitted together with Mary Magdelene and her stalling lover in a complicated configuration in which the ownership and directionality of arms and legs, hands and feet, requires some pause and thought before the viewer can make sense of the drawing. It is Mary’s male lover, standing with one foot on the ground, who holds the foot of Mary, though this foot being held could also register to the viewer as the foot of the woman to the immediate left level with the male lover, whom we might read as crouching down. In fact this other woman seems to be ‘standing’ on the same ground as the male lover but on the other side of the apparently narrow steps; her body is concealed entirely behind the long dress of the somewhat enlarged Mary Magdalene, whose foot—​clutched by the lover—​rests on the step on top of the lover’s gathered cloak. Making things even more ambiguous, the woman between Mary and the lover has extended her bent right arm across Mary’s extended leg, almost all the way across Mary’s body, almost cutting her in half. For a moment it is also possible to read the arm and hand extending back from these closely packed figures and touching the wall to the right as belonging to the lover and, therefore, the hand on Mary’s knee directly above the other hand on Mary’s foot as belonging to the intervening woman. But it is the other woman who in fact extends across the wide space from the other side of Mary Magdalene all the way to the threshold of the Pharisee’s house. Taking in the drawing as a whole, there is the sense that Mary Magdalene has had to push through the noisy crowd that now gawks at her glamorous and perhaps unseemly beauty. Rossetti presents us, then, with a tangle of limbs to suggest an entanglement of lovers, from which Mary Magdalene’s fervour of faith will have no difficulty freeing her. We see that Mary will extricate herself from this jumble of bodies and lovers. Ignoring the stalling man and his female companion, and the scornful and foolish Simon the Pharisee, she lovingly locks the gaze of the intense, illuminated Christ within: her true ‘Bridegroom’. Attuned to bodily disjunction in Rossetti, we look now at the splendid curve of the inverted, carved wooden ‘harp’ frame in La Ghirlandata, beginning bottom-​left, and the row of elongating strings leading the viewer’s eyes into what depth there is within the crowded space of the bower. We would expect to find this depth matched by a sense of protrusion on the figure’s other, left-​hand side (our right), with the figure swivelling round to reach across the instrument, but this is not the case. Instead the viewer is presented with the strangely flat expanse of white flesh and the plateau of dark-​green velvety fabric catching the light. The recession of the green dress at the right into the shadowy depths of the bower is not as emphatically flat as the white flesh and green plateau, yet it seems to stretch and pull across to the right rather than curve round towards the figure’s notional back. Given this stretching and billowing of the figure within the warped space, can we not come to see the harp as taking the place of the right arm—​as if the top of the harp springs from the figure’s shoulder, just as hands might be said to spring from within the hedges of the bower? Beneath the shoulder area the harp-​arm then curves down and forward, the joint of the elbow has been stretched out into a smooth yet dramatic curve. The human lover enwreathes art, but also becomes the beloved—​becomes art itself. Art and human transform into one another, just as plants seem to assume human forms in the picture, suggesting the assembly of a single entity. The interpretation I have proposed is not stable or wholly sustainable: the illusionistic integrity of the harp as an object unattached to the figure’s body is strengthened by the

Transformation in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s La Ghirlandata  173 time we reach the top of the strings on ‘our’ side of the harp and the wooden frame is seen to extend up beside the figure’s face. However, seeing the harp and figure as amalgamated is possible when the viewer’s attention moves from that clarifying passage at the top onto the ambiguous way the body, especially beneath the neck, wraps around the large, inverted instrument. A human–​other-​than-​human entity, a harp–​human–​hedge, is present as one possible configuration of the forms assembled by Rossetti in La Ghirlandata. Human–​harp transformation is also suggested by the figure’s hairs that have been so comprehensively tangled with the strings of the instrument. An interweaving of iridescent strings and red strands, this is not an accidental tangling of a string and a strand or two. Although the hair falls in front of the harp, the golden strings are visible through many of the curls and swirls of red hair. Again, the possibility that what we are seeing is glimpses of the strings behind through the hair in front remains a ‘rational’ reading of the picture, but it is not a wholly satisfying view. To gather together what I have been pointing to, before turning to Pater. La Ghirlandata lacks a narrative momentum to resolve the disjunction of body parts, which are ultimately held suspended at the level of the surface of the canvas. The central figure lacks the purpose of Rossetti’s Mary Magdalene. The figure is the glowing centre of the picture, about which the multiple wreaths turn, but this figure is also hollowed out of presence and resolve, as subjectivity ebbs into the human–​plant–​technology assemblage. This is a strange, enchanting, horrific envisioning of an imperfect and misaligned integration of the categories of human, nature, and art. Rossetti seems to suggest that there is potential for immense beauty in this integration—​indeed, a joyous yet solemn beauty has arrived already in the form of the garland. To reiterate: we are witnessing not just an integration of two things, two values, human and art. Nature itself is very much part of this entanglement in the bower. We might go further and say that the hedges themselves pluck the harp (as they clutch the branch). Agency is distributed in this way and the picture’s transformations and assemblage produce strange effects centred, yet not quite centreable, on the figure. We might notice that the rose and honeysuckle garland is a dense area of colour and activity on the picture surface that rivals and maybe overtakes the figure’s head as a centre of gravity in the composition. The garland fizzes forth whereas the figure’s head curiously fails to emerge fully from the picture even as the figure’s large, glowing form dominates the viewer’s field of vision. It is as though the picture has two epicentres, two centres of subjectivity. At its edges the figure recedes into the hedges, the lustrous greens of the dress transforming into the green mysteries of the verdant bower. The figure belongs recognizably to Rossetti’s later Venetian ‘type’, albeit pushed further back from the picture plane than the up close and domineering—​swollen, yet curiously ‘absent’—​figures in Bocca Baciata (1859) or Venus Verticordia (1864–​68). Rossetti’s posthumous retrospective in 1883 at the Royal Academy—​in which La Ghirlandata and Bocca Baciata were hung—​provided critics the opportunity to sum up and reflect on his achievements. Turning to this criticism will bring me to Pater, and via Pater into nineteenth-​century literary and scientific accounts of transformation that I want to use as a lens through which to look again at Rossetti’s enchanting creation. In the Spectator, the art critic Harry Quilter wrote about the ‘strange physical peculiarities which many people find so trying in Rossetti’s women’, leaving it somewhat euphemistically at that. Quilter could have been alluding to Robert Buchanan’s much earlier criticism of the almost sub-​human ‘females who bite, scratch, scream, bubble, munch, sweat, writhe, twist, wriggle, foam’ populating Rossetti’s poetry, lamenting as he did—​not particularly convincingly—​that ‘one cannot help wishing that things

174  Thomas Hughes had remained forever in the asexual state described in Mr. Darwin’s great chapter on Palingenesis’.9 In 1883 Quilter goes on to reflect that Rossetti’s own artistic subjectivity came to be characterized in terms of a passivity in relation to his art, that his masculine creativity was compromised by an overbearing object that transgresses its secure feminine containment. Quoting the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, Quilter wrote: ‘If ever a “passive master lent his hand”, that master was Rossetti; and in looking at his work, one is chiefly possessed by the fact of its mastery over the man who executed it.’10 To paraphrase Quilter: Rossetti’s works, particularly we surmise the ‘Venetian’ pictures for which he became so famous, exerted an undue dominance over their passive creator, over the picture-​making, and—​through this—​over the viewers themselves (Quilter’s ‘trying’ is, we feel, intended as understatement). The Manchester Guardian was full of praise for the recently deceased Rossetti but, like Quilter, noticed that after Bocca Baciata the artist became more and more seduced by ‘certain elements of beauty by which his mind was almost morbidly possessed’, ‘to the corresponding neglect’, the critic added, ‘of those finer qualities of precise design which give so powerful a fascination to the earlier productions’.11 It is a nuanced if conventional distinction between masculine-​ gendered rational ‘design’—‘finer’ because more intellectually exacting—​and a ‘beauty’ that has taken on perverse priority in the creative formula. A passive creator is mastered, transfixed, and finally depleted by his own perverse creations. In his suggestive way Pater takes up this critical language in his own essay on the recently deceased Rossetti, first published in 1883 and collected in Appreciations (1889), and gives us extremely interesting ways of thinking about the entangled issues of transformation and gender in La Ghirlandata. Mysterious powers The opening of Pater’s essay takes in Rossetti’s ‘naively detailed’ Pre-​Raphaelitism, his ‘sincerity’, ‘transparency’ of style, and ‘definition of outline’. Soon in the essay, however, Pater introduces something else: Rossetti’s ‘visionary’ or ‘mythopoeic’ qualities. These are not abstract, Pater says; rather, they emerged alongside or from within Pre-​Raphaelite definiteness, with particular effect.12 A work Pater alights on several times, from the start, is ‘The Blessed Damozel’ (1846–​47), an early, much-​revised poem in which a deceased female lover yearns to rejoin her beloved still living on Earth, later accompanied by an oil painting (1875–​78) depicting a full-​featured female figure leaning out over ‘the gold bar of Heaven’, in the words of the poem, to look down at her lover below.13 Retaining a Pre-​Raphaelite investment in concrete substance, Rossetti offers us in such works, says Pater, a ‘definiteness of sensible imagery, which seemed almost grotesque to some, and was strange, above all, in a theme so profoundly visionary’ (p. 230). The other-​than-​human, scenes of landscape or dwelling, even moments of diurnal rhythm like noon—​‘lifeless nature’—​become infused with visionary, which is to say human, emotion in Pater’s criticism of Rossetti. Throughout Rossetti’s work Pater says, over and above the real, ‘everyday’ forces governing human life—​‘Youth and Death, Destiny and Fortune, Fame, Poetic Fame, Memory, Oblivion, and the like’—​‘it is the ideal intensity of love—​of love based upon a perfect yet peculiar type of physical or material beauty—​which is enthroned in the midst of those mysterious powers’ (p. 235). The manner in which Pater emphasizes ‘love’ in Rossetti’s mythopoeic iconography above the other ‘mysterious powers’ enables him to pursue a characteristically nuanced argument that Rossetti, to whom ‘life is a crisis at every moment’, weaves together and

Transformation in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s La Ghirlandata  175 combines matter and spirit, body and soul, perfect beauty and Gothic haunting. In fact, Pater says, Rossetti shows us that in ‘our actual concrete experience’ those things are not opposites at all (p. 236). Speaking generally for a moment, we must realize Pater’s word choice is not hesitant, it is deliberate. At the same time, however, it is ambivalent, studiedly ambiguous: ‘love based upon a perfect yet peculiar type of physical or material beauty’ (p. 235). The phrasing enfolds a whole decade or so of critical reception of Rossetti within it and takes it into new territory. The term ‘peculiar’ encompasses the derogatory conservative reactions of Quilter and others all the way back to Buchanan. But reading Pater’s essay (and his other essays) as a whole we also see that ‘peculiar’ is most decidedly a term of approbation in Pater’s delicate lexicon, connoting an enticing, hard-​to-​fix effect. The term occurs, in various forms, five times in the essay; the instance that I have just quoted is the fourth. In the first instance Pater writes that Rossetti’s pictures ‘had become an object of the same peculiar kind of interest’ as his poems (p. 228). This acts as an introduction to one of the key terms of the essay, preparing the way for the critical thickets to come. To return to the main quotation in question: in Rossetti’s art human love is given a physical, material, human body, a ‘peculiar’, hard-​to-​define yet fleshy presence, ‘perfect’ in its peculiarity. The other mysterious powers, Youth and Death, Memory and Oblivion, and lifeless nature itself, are all illuminated by—​take form in relation to—​the love radiating from this peculiar and perfect human physical presence. Reading this passage, one starts to see in one’s mind’s eye Rossetti’s pictures of fleshy, ample figures ‘enthroned’ amid fulsome floral, vegetable, and ornamental arrays. Such figures are sometimes mythological, as in Venus Verticordia, or they are historical, like Helen of Troy (1863), or they are anonymous, quasi-​allegorical figures like The Blue Bower (1865) and indeed La Ghirlandata. A few pages earlier Pater has an even more ambivalent and provocative characterization to offer. ‘And this delight in concrete definition’, Pater writes of Rossetti’s investment in physical form, is allied with another of his conformities to Dante, the really imaginative vividness, namely, of his personifications—​his hold upon them, or rather their hold upon him, with the force of a Frankenstein, when once they have taken life from him. Not Death only and Sleep, for instance, and the winged spirit of Love, but certain particular aspects of them, a whole ‘populace’ of special hours and places, ‘the hour’ even ‘which might have been, yet might not be,’ are living creatures, with hands and eyes and articulate voices. (pp. 231–​32) For the remainder of this essay, drawing on queer and trans* theory, I will be thinking through the radical possibilities of this description. With delicate ambiguity Pater’s passage flits between evoking specific works: Venus Verticorida (Love, perhaps), or Proserpine (1874) (maybe Death), and evoking qualities and effects of Rossetti’s work overall. With the phrase about the ‘perfect yet peculiar’ physical type in mind, the first part of this earlier passage takes on a startling series of significations. A Gothic edge turns what for the Spectator and the Manchester Guardian counts as a ‘trying’ perversity in Rossetti’s work into the very essence of its peculiar, transfixing power, its strange, above all ‘real’ blending of life and death, matter and spirit. To spell things out, Pater is suggesting that in emulating Dante’s creation of vivid characters—​including, ultimately, Beatrice herself—​Rossetti was in thrall to his own creations, imparting such vivid life

176  Thomas Hughes to them that they came to exert a power over him. Pater then establishes the analogy between this effect in Rossetti and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which describes how a revenant, reanimated assemblage of dead human and animal body parts haunted and ultimately destroyed Frankenstein’s existence. With Shelley, Pater gets around some of the heteronormative judgements propounded by Quilter and the Guardian but retains the thought-​provoking dimensions to their reactions. For those critics there is something ‘passive’ and frankly unmanly about an artist who so visibly lets himself be possessed by his ‘female’ creations. But in Pater’s imagery the creature is Frankenstein’s rival and even equal, another male (albeit a non-​human one), taking life from his creator and reflecting this life back.14 We must admit that Pater finally underscores Rossetti’s artistic subjectivity—​inflected with a masculine, if not heteronormative authority, in fact—​by ending his sentence with the pronoun ‘him’. All this allows Pater to present Rossetti, in his essay, not as the ‘passive master’ but rather as a singular and even heroic artist who has revealed to us the nature of the life we all live. The vivid personifications, The Blessed Damozel or the Lady of the Wreath, exert a terrible hold upon Rossetti, ‘when once they have taken life from him’, though their animation attests, ultimately, to Rossetti’s unique, if self-​destructive, ‘imaginative vividness’. Reading Pater’s words, casting our minds back over Rossetti’s paintings and poetry, we can imagine the artist losing and finding himself in his shadowy imaginative bowers, his figurative obsessions looming larger and larger in his mental field of vision; they peer at him—​grasp at him—​through the closely grown foliage, like the fleshy figures, swollen in their crowded canvases. This is the imagery Pater conjures. Pater’s imagery sets up a further series of allusions. Timothy Morton has pointed out that Mary Shelley’s creature actually typifies what becomes the post-​Darwinian conception of a life form. As Morton says, On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) are full of observations about ‘useless’ organs that appear as it were out of place, like the diminutive wings of some insects held within fused cases.15 In the context of such discussions, as in Chapter 13 of Origin on the ‘Mutual Affinities of Organic Beings’, Darwin often remarks on how the lung originated in—​and therefore retains the formal rudiments of—​the swim-​bladder of fish (p. 395). As he observes in Descent, ‘At a still earlier period the progenitors of man must have been aquatic in their habits; for morphology plainly tells us that our lungs consist of a modified swim-​bladder, which once served as a float.’16 Looked at one way, Darwin implies, all creatures are made up of organic components from creatures different to themselves; we are all assemblies, ‘all the way down’, as Morton puts it, ‘of other life forms’ parts’. In this way, Morton suggests, Darwin is led to admit that mutation and monstrosity are the same thing. As Morton says, there is ‘a haunting, spectral quality’ to our realization, reading Darwin, that nature essentially consists of deviational assemblage and reanimation, and that organic being therefore hovers between emerging life and death, monstrosity and reanimation (pp. 153, 155). As Sam See, following Morton, has also written, Darwin’s account is one in which nature is generating multiple natures, all equally strange and wonderful: for Darwin, ‘nature is non-​identical with itself’, and is characterized, at the fundamental level, by perpetual mutability and ongoing transformation.17 Looked at this way, there is no rigid ontological distinction to draw between flesh-​and-​blood Frankenstein and his creature, reanimated with electricity from ‘the unhallowed damps of the grave’, ‘bones from charnel houses’, and ‘materials’ from ‘the dissecting room and the slaughterhouse’ (Shelley, pp. 36–​37). Pater is suggesting that Rossetti arrived at this view of life in his ‘peculiar’ works.

Transformation in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s La Ghirlandata  177 Yet Pater’s description only gets us so far when looking at Rossetti’s enchanting picture. La Ghirlandata is clearly quite different to the blood-​curdling Romantic Gothic of Mary Shelley. Unlike Frankenstein’s gruesome and pitiful creature, Rossetti’s figure is rather ravishing, down to the rose-​red lips. Noticing the tangling of the figure’s hair and the strings of the harp, the viewer cannot really imagine the strings yanking at the hair and scalp to draw blood. What we see in this passage of entangling hair and strings is, arguably, the most exquisite manifestation of an ongoing transformation that is characterized everywhere in the picture by delicacy and the merging of forms. Pater’s description, however, resonates with Susan Stryker’s celebrated move to reclaim the idea of Frankensteinian ‘monstrosity’ from transphobia, in an article published in 1994 entitled ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix’. In the face of abusive charges from transphobes that subjects such as Stryker are ‘against nature’, the category of the ‘monstrous’ can be redeployed to subvert the distinction between natural and unnatural.18 With Stryker’s article in mind, and Pater’s description in full view, we come to see in Rossetti’s painting that the monstrous is in fact no such thing. The amalgamated entity transforms before our eyes, animated by an all-​pervasive wondrous creatureliness. Pater’s analogy, then, captures the animacy of the assemblage in La Ghirlandata and how this animacy speaks to Darwin’s account of life. Whereas the key word of Frankenstein is ‘animation’, I suggest the key phrase we might take from Darwin’s writings with which to look at Rossetti through Pater’s eyes is ‘wonderful metamorphoses’ (Origin, p. 186). Many of the attempts to explain the phenomenon of art along evolutionary lines suggest that art must serve some adaptational purpose in the struggle for survival. In post-​Darwinian Britain this became known as the discourse of evolutionary aesthetics.19 See argues that such efforts often proceeded from a misreading of Darwin. After reiterating Morton’s assertion that Darwin’s version of life is essentially deviational and transformational, See puts emphasis on Darwin’s many statements about nature’s generation of diverse useless traits—​apparently generated for the sake of diversity itself. Far from being teleological, nature will never produce perfect form. Rather, Darwin’s presentation of natural and sexual selection leads one to the conclusion, argues See, that aesthetic diversity is, quite simply, a principle of nature. Nature is moved to generate aesthetic diversity for diversity’s sake. In this way, See argues, certain currents in modernism were able to regard literature and art as outgrowths of a desire inherent in nature itself. In this view nature generates—​consists of—​aesthetic feeling: See’s sensational reading of Darwin is thought-​provoking, particularly for attempts to understand later Victorian aestheticism. To see aestheticism in this light would necessitate an upending of aestheticism’s alleged prioritization of culture over nature. Aestheticism might be said, on the contrary, to be emerging from a new-​found entanglement of the two. Rossetti seems conscious of this version of aestheticism in La Ghirlandata. Bower generates harp; figure, plant, and musical instrument integrate; nature, art, and the human are held together in an ongoing moment of transformational becoming. Seeing La Ghirlandata in this light gives the painting’s depictions a new-​found sense of ecological reality; they signify a view of animate matter and of desire taking shape in Victorian culture at the time. For all its ‘mysterious powers’, as Pater puts it, Rossetti’s work arguably has profound purchase on these modern conceptualizations of life. Although Pater’s own essay ends with emphasis on the ‘esoteric’, on Rossetti’s ‘creation of a new ideal’, a true-​to-​life quality and even a realism ground and structure Rossetti’s creativity for Pater (p. 242).20

178  Thomas Hughes Aestheticist idyll The line of thinking I have followed through Pater and Darwin can be extended back further into La Ghirlandata, as we return, one last time, to the figure. We have already noted how the figure’s form is swollen—​or rather how it billows out in multiple directions, blurring its edges. This is not just the case with the left shoulder area or the left back. In the bottom left the painting takes on an exquisite dynamism setting up indirections between fluttering chiffon (we now see that the sepal-​like collar may continue down the figure’s body hidden beneath hair and arm as a shawl) and the blue-​flowering larkspur. The musical instrument seems to disappear into the undulations of the chiffon and the green leaves, which echo the plucking hand in their folding wave form. In this passage it is barely possible to discern human from plant from musical instrument; the passage is all about setting up equivalences of effect between these forms, everything here moves to a green, imaginative rhythm. Turning to the figure’s features, now, we see, arguably, that these are also enlarged. The powerful neck of the figure modelled by Alexa Wilding at nearly life size (124 × 85 cm) dominates the centre of our view—​such a neck had been a feature of many of Rossetti’s depictions of female figures since those modelled by Elizabeth Siddall. There is (to echo Buchanan, Quilter, and the Manchester Guardian, for a moment) something ‘unwomanly’ in this powerful frame. Griselda Pollock has made the enduring argument that in his post-​1859 pictures Rossetti inscribes a phallic presence upon his fetishized female figures in alleviation of castration anxiety; they get overblown, take on a phallic dominance—​and even phallic shapes in the form of the thick neck—​just as they are objectified into empty signs.21 There is no doubt that this is how La Ghirlandata functioned in the discursive realms inhabited by Rossetti’s patron William Graham, Liberal MP and captain of industry; this is how the art critics of 1883, we feel, would like Rossetti’s paintings to have functioned for them. Pollock is partly responding to the strange coexistence in Rossetti’s figures of billowing substance and a sense of hollowness or absence. I have pointed to this in relation to the figure in La Ghirlandata and the rival centre of the garland. However, the line of thinking I have been drawing out through Darwin and Pater enables a reframing of the gendering of La Ghirlandata and, by extension, Rossetti’s later pictorial phase. I suggest that we should be reluctant to ascribe a secure gender to the figure, in so far as a figure can indeed be disentangled from the bower and the musical instrument. Of course it is true that Rossetti himself identified the figure as a ‘woman’ in a letter to William Bell Scott—​but we need not take the artist’s word (nor that of his oft-​quoted brother, William) at face value.22 Rather, I suggest, Rossetti envisions the transformability of human gender as the natural implication of the revelation in Darwin that nature consists of ongoing transformability driven by a feeling within nature itself for sexual and aesthetic diversity. Such a train of thought would have been tempting for readers such as Rossetti and Pater to follow over and above Darwin’s reinscription of the ideology of the gender binary. In the paragraph after the swim bladder observation in Descent, Darwin addresses the deduction, then circulating in evolutionary theory, that ‘some extremely remote progenitor of the whole vertebrate kingdom appears to have been hermaphrodite or androgynous’ and integrates it into his theory of sexual selection. ‘It is quite possible that as the one sex gradually acquired the accessory organs proper to it, some of the successive steps or modifications were transmitted to the opposite sex. When we treat of sexual selection,’ Darwin concludes,

Transformation in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s La Ghirlandata  179 we shall meet with innumerable instances of this form of transmission,—​as in the case of the spurs, plumes, and brilliant colours, acquired by male birds for battle or ornament, and transferred to the females in an imperfect or rudimentary condition. (Descent, pp. 208–​09) Darwin had noted ‘remarkable’ instances of such transmissions exhibited within particular individuals in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), such as a brown-​breasted red Game-​cock that moulted its ‘perfect masculine plumage’ and ‘became hen-​feathered in the autumn of the following year’, though retaining the masculine secondary characteristics associated with ‘voice, spurs, strength’ and ‘productiveness’. Darwin also notes the tendency of a celebrated strain of polecat Game-​fowl to produce ‘in nearly every brood a single hen-​cock’, and how a particular hen-​cock’s plumage went through seasonal transformations in its sexual characteristics.23 In Rossetti’s aestheticist thinking, the Victorian idyll provides the formal structure required to give Darwin’s ‘wonderful metamorphoses’ enchanting pictorial realization. What is perfectly natural about La Ghirlandata, as it were, is that its capacity for representing the multiplicity and transformability of human gender should emerge from an aestheticist re-​envisioning of the entangled relations of nature and art. At this point in the interpretation, however, we must acknowledge the potential for agony in Rossetti’s bower. La Ghirlandata is not a utopic image of infinite becoming. If his brother William is to be believed, Rossetti intended to depict the blue-​flowering, highly toxic plant monkshood instead of larkspur (p. 87). Rossetti painted the picture at Kelmscott in the aftermath of a severe mental health crisis exacerbated by substance abuse. This context gives a lurid resonance to the painting’s implications that the realm where nature’s transformational potential is revealed might have to be reached through treacherous terrains. Agony of a different kind is potentially smoothed over in Rossetti’s picture. The blue bird flying in or perhaps perching top right has been identified as a blue dacnis, a common, beautiful tanager from South America which would have been exotic in 1870s England, and which Rossetti and his sister Christina might have kept in their menagerie of exotic animals.24 As Charlotte Cary-​Beckett and Josephine McDonagh, and Caroline Arscott and Clare Pettitt argue in this volume, the Victorian idyll, for all its political potential, somewhat paradoxically tends towards a disavowal of racial difference and, arguably, we witness a similar process taking place in this painting. Rossetti’s male blue dacnis takes part in the subjectivity of the bower, it is part of the assemblage of figure, harp, angels, and plants. In partaking of subjectivity in this way, the bird might be said to signal an idea of human racial difference, given its appearance in an oil painting that is otherwise distinctly English or at most exclusively European in its depicted forms and poetic setting. If human racial difference is signalled in some way by the bird, we must admit this sense of difference is also partially disavowed as the bird is integrated into the shimmering, transformative bower.25 Nevertheless, any interpretation of this painting is compelled to keep on moving. The viewer actually encounters bird forms across the whole canvas. Forms relating to the bird, we feel, are somehow the key to La Ghirlandata. The blue wings on the harp frame recall the ‘living’ blue dacnis, which has thus been transformed and integrated into the composition far more extensively than, for example, in Venus Verticordia where the bird also appears. These blue wings in La Ghirlandata (almost as if they have been pinned to the harp) then take on new ‘life’ in the curious, rather fierce ‘sculpted’ birds (pelican-​like

180  Thomas Hughes in form except for the beaks) crowning the harp. The blue dacnis in particular, and the ornamental blue wing shapes on the harp, balance the blue of the larkspur bottom left. In this way bird forms transform between inlaid and sculpted ornament, the ‘living’ blue dacnis, and the feathery wings of the angel top right. In a more straightforwardly iconographic way, the blue dacnis arguably brings us back to Darwin and underscores how Rossetti’s engagement with Darwinian thinking on nature, aesthetics, and transformation might have informed La Ghirlandata.26 South America and life forms therefrom were connected in the Victorian imagination with Darwin’s famous account of his time on HMS Beagle during its mission to survey the coast of the South American continent and islands in the Pacific. In a passage in his Journal of Researches (1839), Darwin describes natural transformation in a way that encapsulates the view of life that I have been pulling out from his later writings. (Rossetti would not be as direct as to allude to a blue dacnis passage from Darwin even if a suitable passage existed.) Writing with an empirical and even aesthetic delight in the wondrous strangeness of organic form, Darwin observes ‘a zoophyte (I believe Virgularia Patagonica)’ found at Bahía Blanca, Argentina, consisting of ‘a thin, straight, fleshy stem’, ‘varying in length from eight inches to two feet’, and ending at one end with a ‘fleshy appendage’. At low water the other ends stuck out of the sand, and ‘when touched or pulled’, Darwin observed, they ‘suddenly drew themselves in with force’. As Darwin goes on to say, the puzzling creature defies categorization. Though united by circulation and sexual systems, ‘each polypus’ attached to the stem, ‘though closely united to its brethren, has a distinct mouth, body, and tentacula’.27 ‘Well may one be allowed to ask,’ Darwin reflects, ‘what is an individual?’ (pp. 99–​100). He furnishes his observation with another description of this organism relayed by a seventeenth-​century forebear, Captain Lancaster, on a voyage taking him to the ‘Island of Sombrero, in the East Indies’. Darwin quotes Lancaster coming across ‘a small twig growing up like a young tree’; ‘on being plucked up, a great worm is found to be its root’ (Darwin’s ‘fleshy appendage’), ‘and as the tree groweth in greatness, so doth the worm diminish’. ‘This transformation’, Lancaster writes, ‘is one of the strangest wonders that I saw in all my travels: for if this tree is plucked up, while young, and the leaves and bark stripped off, it becomes a hard stone […] much like white coral.’ Darwin lets Captain Lancaster’s words of wonder conclude the passage on this strange creature: ‘Thus is this worm twice transformed into different natures. Of these we gathered and brought home many’ (p. 100). Even as it speaks of a long, terrible history of English extractions of specimens, resources, and beings, the blue dacnis in La Ghirlandata speaks, too, of nature’s capacity to transform itself, to generate ‘different natures’. It is these different natures, and therefore human possibilities, that Rossetti finds in an aestheticist reimagining of the Victorian idyll. In evolutionary terms deviational assemblage is functional; in the wake of Descent, it can be beautiful. La Ghirlandata represents the promise of the aesthetic: that it can animate worlds. Twenty-​first century efforts to forestall planetary collapse might attend to Rossetti’s aestheticist idyll. Notes 1 I am very grateful to Emma Merkling, Caroline Arscott, Isobel Armstrong; co-​panelists and attendees at The Rossettis: In Relation, a conference at Tate Britain in June 2023; the students on the Cambridge ICE History of Art MST; and my students at The Courtauld for their insightful comments about my interpretation of La Ghirlandata.

Transformation in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s La Ghirlandata  181 2 Lorraine Wood, ‘Filling in the Blanks: Music and Performance in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, Victorian Poetry, 51 (2013), 533–​60 (p. 537). Although acknowledging no real instrument could have functioned in the way Rossetti has it appear here, Marte Stinis regards La Ghirlandata as a pictorial representation of the immersive experience of listening to music. See Marte Stinis, ‘Musical Experience in the Bower: D. G. Rossetti, Listening, and Space’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 27 (2022), 236–​51 (pp. 247–​48). 3 William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer (London: Cassell, 1889), pp. 86–​87. 4 Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), esp. pp. 66–​69. 5 ‘Bower’, in OED online; Stinis. 6 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘The Portrait’, in Poems (London: Ellis, 1870), pp. 127–​32 (p. 128). 7 Jerome J. McGann, The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 2008, ‘The Portrait’ www.ross​etti​arch​ive.org/​docs/​50-​1869.raw.html [accessed 23 May 2023]. 8 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee (For a Drawing)’, in Poems, p. 267. 9 Thomas Maitland [Robert Buchanan], ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr D. G. Rossetti’, Contemporary Review, August 1871, pp. 334–​50 (p. 343). 10 [Harry Quilter], ‘Rossetti at Burlington House’, Spectator, 6 January 1883, pp. 14–​15 (p. 15), quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Problem’, in Poems (Boston: Munroe, 1847), pp. 17–​20 (p. 19). 11 ‘Linnell and Rossetti at the Royal Academy’, Manchester Guardian, 5 January 1883, p. 8. 12 Walter Pater, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, in Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan, 1889), pp. 228–​42 (pp. 229–​34). 13 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘The Blessed Damozel’, in Poems, pp. 1–​7 (p. 1). The painting is now in the Fogg Museum at Harvard. Rossetti produced a different version for Frederick Leyland (1875–​79), now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight. 14 As the creature says to Frankenstein: ‘You are my creator, but I am your master; —​obey!’. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text, ed. by Marilyn Butler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 140. 15 Timothy Morton, ‘Frankenstein and Ecocriticism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein, ed. by Andrew Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 143–​ 57 (p. 153). See Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, ed. by William Bynum (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 394. 16 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols (London: Murray, 1871), I , 207. Here Darwin activates the tools of comparative anatomy, the analysis of human anatomy in relation to the anatomies of other species, to support his account of evolution. 17 Sam See, Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies, ed. by Christopher Looby and Michael North (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), Chapter 1, ‘Charles Darwin, Queer Theorist’. ebook. 18 Susan Stryker, ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix’, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, 1 (1994), 237–​54. In 2019 Stryker pointed out that this article remained the second-​most read article in GLQ, attesting to the continued generativeness of its terms (and also its generation of important critiques, for example in terms of racialization): see Susan Stryker, ‘More Words About “My Words to Victor Frankenstein” ’, GLQ, 25 (2019), 39–​ 44. This also attests to the strange ongoing power of Shelley’s tale to provoke poignant ontological reflections. Pater clearly felt this potential in the tale while looking at Rossetti. 19 For later nineteenth-​century British evolutionary aesthetics, see, for example (quoted by See), Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics (London: King, 1877). 20 I do not see the entity represented in La Ghirlandata as cyborgian in the tradition of posthuman enquiry. Rather, See, Morton, and the interpretation I propound here might be categorized as post-​natural enquiry. Partly this is a question of emphasis. Broadly speaking, post-​natural

182  Thomas Hughes enquiry seeks to expand the possibilities of human coexistence by discarding fantasies about ‘nature’. For a thoughtful introduction and series of essays in the posthuman vein, see Queering the Non/​Human, ed. by Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 21 Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 120–​54; see also, Chapter 5, ‘Woman as Sign in Pre-​Raphaelite Literature: The Representation of Elizabeth Siddall’, pp. 91–​119. Countering Pollock, Margaretta Frederick has recently argued that Rossetti’s female figures of the 1860s and 1870s constitute an ultimately ‘progressive’ investigation ‘of Womanhood with a capital W’. Margaretta Frederick, ‘Troubling Women: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Portrayal of Modern Beauty’, in The Rossettis, ed. by Carol Jacobi and James Finch (London: Tate Publishing, 2023), pp. 176–​201 (p. 178). 22 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Letter to William Bell Scott (26 August 1873), in The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. by Betty C. Fredeman and others, 9 vols (Cambridge: Brewer, 2002–​2009), VI : The Last Decade 1873–​1882: I: 1873–​18, ed. by William E. Fredeman (2006), 73.258. 23 Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, 2 vols (London: Murray, 1868), I , 253. From a very early stage in his career Darwin had studied barnacles and how they exhibit sex changes. See, for example, Rebecca Stott, Darwin and the Barnacle: The Story of One Tiny Creature and History’s Most Spectacular Scientific Breakthrough (New York: Norton, 2003), p. 109. 24 See Emma Mason, Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 126. Rossetti asked Henry Treffry Dunn in August 1873 for ‘that little blue bird there is at Chelsea’. This letter also shows Rossetti considered including a blue dragonfly in the picture. He asks Dunn to send two or three (presumably dead) dragonflies to him ‘set up in different positions’, ‘one with his wings spread upwards as they do when they fly or sometimes when they stand’. He also asks for ‘a few blue or blue-​grey butterflies’ (Correspondence, VI , 73.248). 25 Jordy Rosenberg has made powerful objections to Morton’s and See’s ‘collapse’ of ontology and ‘the “stuff” of the body’. To present everything as nature and everything as non-​normative transformational becoming is to make it harder to conceive of real inequality, particularly real racial inequality. See Jordana Rosenberg, ‘The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present’, Theory & Event, 17.2 (2014), Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/​article/​ 546470 [accessed 28 March 2023]. 26 John Holmes has recently presented the blue dacnis depicted in La Ghirlandata as just a prop chosen for its ‘sheer beauty’ and ‘the exoticism of that beauty in Victorian London’ (The Pre-​ Raphaelites and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), p. 178). In this way Holmes argues La Ghirlandata confirms Rossetti’s turn away from Pre-​Raphaelite commitment to ‘science’ towards an aestheticism that has little investment in or awareness of ecological realities. I have shown that a familiarity with Darwin was recognized by Pater as having structured Rossetti’s creativity and I mobilize this demonstration in a reinterpretation of La Ghirlandata that opens up Rossetti’s aestheticism to later Victorian scientific thinking. 27 Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H. M. S. Beagle Round the World, 2nd edn (London: Murray, 1845), p. 99.

Bibliography Allen, Grant, Physiological Aesthetics (London: King, 1877). Darwin, Charles, Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H. M. S. Beagle Round the World, 2nd edn (London: Murray, 1845). —​—​—​The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, 2 vols (London: Murray, 1868). —​—​—​The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols (London: Murray, 1871).

Transformation in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s La Ghirlandata  183 —​—​—​On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, ed. by William Bynum (London: Penguin, 2009). Fredeman, Betty C., and others, eds, The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 9 vols (Cambridge: Brewer, 2002–​2009): VI: The Last Decade 1873–​1882: I: 1873–​18, ed. by William E. Fredeman (2006). Frederick, Margaretta, ‘Troubling Women: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Portrayal of Modern Beauty’, in The Rossettis, ed. by Carol Jacobi and James Finch (London: Tate Publishing, 2023), pp. 176–​201. Giffney, Noreen, and Myra J. Hird, eds, Queering the Non/​Human (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). Halberstam, Jack, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). Holmes, John, The Pre-​Raphaelites and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). ‘Linnell and Rossetti at the Royal Academy’, Manchester Guardian, 5 January 1883, p. 8. Maitland, Thomas [Robert Buchanan], ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr D. G. Rossetti’, Contemporary Review, August 1871, pp. 334–​50. Mason, Emma, Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). McGann, Jerome J., The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 2008, ‘The Portrait’ www.ross​etti​arch​ive.org/​docs/​50-​1869.raw.html [accessed 23 May 2023]. Morton, Timothy, ‘Frankenstein and Ecocriticism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein, ed. by Andrew Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 143–​57. Pater, Walter, Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan, 1889). Pollock, Griselda, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988). [Quilter, Harry], ‘Rossetti at Burlington House’, Spectator, 6 January 1883, pp. 14–​15. Rosenberg, Jordana, ‘The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present’, Theory & Event, 17.2 (2014), Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/​article/​546470 [accessed 28 March 2023]. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, Poems (London: Ellis, 1870). Rossetti, William Michael, Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer (London: Cassell, 1889). See, Sam, Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies, ed. by Christopher Looby and Michael North (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020). Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text, ed. by Marilyn Butler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Stinis, Marte, ‘Musical Experience in the Bower: D. G. Rossetti, Listening, and Space’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 27 (2022), 236–​51. Stott, Rebecca, Darwin and the Barnacle: The Story of One Tiny Creature and History’s Most Spectacular Scientific Breakthrough (New York: Norton, 2003). Stryker, Susan, ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix’, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, 1 (1994), 237–​54. —​—​—​‘More Words About “My Words to Victor Frankenstein” ’, GLQ, 25 (2019), 39–​44. Wood, Lorraine, ‘Filling in the Blanks: Music and Performance in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, Victorian Poetry, 51 (2013), 533–​60.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italic refers to Figures. abolition movement 17–​18 Ackermann, Rudolph 15, 16 aestheticism 6, 112, 127, 131, 161, 167, 169, 177, 179, 180 ‘African, The’ (poem) 18, 21 African Sketches 21, 25, 27 Ahluwalia, Helen Rundeer Singh 133 Aldridge, Ira 18 Alma-​Tadema, Lawrence 135 Anacreon 89 ancient Greece 86–​88, 89, 90; heroism 93–​94, 99; as a nineteenth-century ideal 91–​92, 96, 98–​99, 100 ancient Rome 87, 114 Andrews, Malcolm 5 androgyny 126, 127, 130, 132, 133, 178 annuals (publication) 15–​17, 28 Anti-​Slavery Society 13, 14, 17 Apollo and Daphne 160 Apuleius 133 archaeology 98 Arden 126, 137, 138–​39 Ariosto, Ludovico 136 ‘Aristocratic Pastorals: Notes from London’ see ‘Pastorellerie Aristocratiche: Appunti di Londra’ Armstrong, Carol 155, 158 assimilation 71, 73, 76 As You Like it 126, 127–​28, 130–​31, 132, 133, 136 Autumn Idyll, An 106, 115, 116, 118, 119 Autumn Leaves 116 ‘Ave Verum Corpus’ 137 Bagehot, Walter 62 Bailin, Miriam 61, 75 Baldwin 139 ballad form 74–​75, 76; production and reproduction 75 Barlow, Paul 116 Barrell, John 3

Barrow, Barbara 157, 158 Batson, A. W. 133 ‘Bechuana Boy, The’ (engraving) 21, 22, 25 ‘Bechuana Boy, The’ (poem) 20–​21, 22, 25, 26 Becket (play) 8, 60, 76–​78, 79, 133 ‘Beckett’s Troth, A’ (illustration) 71 ‘Beckett’s Troth, A’ (poem) 70–​71, 73 Beer, Gillian 152, 156 Beerbohm, Max 128 Bell, Robert 55 Belsey, Catherine 128 ‘benevolence’, British 19 Bennett, Alfred 153 Bewick, Thomas 48, 52, 64 Birket Foster’s Pictures of English Landscape 37, 52–​56 Birth of Venus, The 110 Blake, William 52, 108 ‘Blessed Damozel, The’ (painting) 174, 176 ‘Blessed Damozel, The’ (poem) 174, 176 Blue Bower, The 175 Bocca Baciata 173, 174 bodily disjunction 171–​73 Boucher, William Henry 115 Boutourline, Peter 136 Bowditch Lee, Sarah 17 boxwood 36–​37, 39, 64; scarcity of 49, 51–​52, 55–​56; as a superior material 44, 48–​49 ‘Boxwood Forest on the Shores of the Black Sea’ 49, 50, 51 Boym, Svetlana 36, 39 Browning, Robert 85–​86, 114–​15 Buchanan, Robert 4, 8, 60, 70, 73, 173–​74, 175 Bunny, Rupert 110 Butler, Samuel 153 Cabanel, Alexandre 110 Calhoun, Eleanor 128–​30, 129 Callander, Alice 133 Calvert, William 52

Index  185 Cameron, Julia Margaret 4, 9, 145–​46, 148–​62; Maud 147; The Rosebud Garden of Girls 153 Campbell, George 127 Campbell, Janey Sevilla see Campbell, Lady Archibald Campbell, Lady Archibald 125, 126, 127–​35, 129, 136–​37, 139 Campbell, Lord Archibald 127 ‘Canadian Song, A’ 24 ‘Captive, The’ (poem) 18, 20, 21 ‘Captive Slave, The’ (engraving) 17, 22 ‘Captive Slave, The’ (painting) 17 ‘Captor’s Daughter, The’ 74 Castle, Terry 126 Chapman, Alison 61 Chatto, William Andrew 48 Cherubini, Luigi 137 Child’s History of England 73–​74 Christianity 76–​78, 158, 160 ‘Christmas Books’ 55 Clark, T. J. 6 Cocks, Harry 87 Coleman, William 45 colonialism 15, 17, 19, 79 colonization 14, 19–​21, 99; violence of 6, 20, 21, 27–​28 Connor, Steven 126 Constable, John 53 ‘Cornice, The’ 98 Cottage Idyll, A 113, 114, 116 Country and the City, The 3 cross-​dressing 127–​30, 133, 137, 157 Cruikshank, George 74 ‘Cry from South Africa, A’ 19 Dalziel, Edward 37, 41, 52; see also Dalziel Brothers Dalziel, George 37, 41, 52; see also Dalziel Brothers Dalziel, Thomas 37; see also Dalziel Brothers Dalziel Brothers 4, 7, 37, 39–​41, 40, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 53, 55 Dalziels’ Bible Gallery 56 Daphnephoria 107 Dark Side of the Landscape, The 3 Darmesteter, James 127 Darwin, Charles 3, 6, 9, 10, 167, 174, 180; organic form 170, 176–​77, 178, 180; plant agency 148, 152–​54, 156, 157, 160; sexual selection 178–​79 Darwin, Erasmus 156 da Vinci, Leonardo 136 de Banville, Théodore 127 deforestation 36–​37, 49–​51, 53, 55–​56 Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, The 157, 176, 178, 180

diaphanous types 131 Dickens, Charles 73–​74 Dobie, James 109 Donoghue, Emma 127 Doré, Gustave 64 Dorians, The 94, 95 Doric love 95–​96, 99; see also Greek love Dowling, Linda 87 Dramatic Idyls 85–​86 Dransfield, Scott 149 East, Alfred 112 eclogues 15 Ecological Form 4 ecology 3, 4, 110–​11, 117, 119–​21, 177 eidos 86 eidyllion 4, 15, 86, 106 Elixir of Love, The 71 Ellis, Havelock 132 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 174 ‘Emigrant’s Cabin, The’ (engraving) 26 ‘Emigrant’s Cabin, The’ (poem) 25 ‘Emigrant’s Song, An’ 24 Endersby, Jim 153 English Landscape see Birket Foster’s Pictures of English Landscape Enoch Arden (cover design) 64–​65, 65 ‘Enoch Arden’ (illustration in Leisure Hour) 62, 63 Enoch Arden (illustrations for volume edition) 63, 64, 65–​66, 66–​67 ‘Enoch Arden’ (poem) 8, 60–​66, 68, 70, 73–​74, 75–​76, 77, 78–​79, 150 Ephemerides 25 Erewhon 153 eros 95 ‘Eros of Centocelle’ 88 erotohistoriography 132 escapism 36, 56, 86, 100, 111 Esposito, Donato 5, 37 Euripides 89 evolution 177, 180 Fairfield, Arthur Rowan 62, 63 Fair Rosamond 133 Faithfull Shepherdesse, The 126, 127, 132, 133–​35, 136 Favret, Mary 21 Ferry, The 114 Finden, Edward 17 Fletcher, John 126, 132, 133, 136 ‘Flowering of the Strange Orchid, The’ 161 Forget-​Me-​Not 16 Foster, Myles Birket 52–​53, 54, 55 ‘Four Bridges, The’ (engraving) 47 ‘Four Bridges, The’ (illustration) 46 ‘Four Bridges, The’ (poem) 44

186 Index Frankenstein 176–​77 Frederick Walker and the Idyllists 5 Freeman, Elizabeth 126, 132 Friedrich, Caspar David 41 Friendship’s Offering 15–​19, 22–​23, 24–​25 Frost, Mark 55 Gautier, Théophile 128, 132 gender 86, 170; multiplicity of 167, 178–​79; subversion of normative categories 128, 135–​36, 156–​57, 159 General View of the Agriculture of the County of Surrey 48 Genius of Eternal Repose 89 ‘Genius of the Vatican, The’ 88 gift books 37, 52–53, 56 Gilbert à Becket’s Troth—​the Saracen Maiden Entering London at Sundown 70, 71–​73, 72, 75–​76, 77 ‘Gods in Exile’ 136 Godwin, E. W. 127, 128, 132, 133 Golden Ass, The 133 Golden Leaves from the Works of the Poets and Painters 55 Goldhill, Simon 85, 100 Gosse, Edmund 98 Graham, William 178 Greek Idyll, A 110–​11, 111 Greek love 85–​86, 88–​89, 93, 97, 98–​99; history of 95–​96 Greiffenhagen, Maurice 108–​9 Grimshaw, Atkinson 106, 115, 116, 118, 119–​20 Gummere, Frances 75 Halberstam, Jack 169 Hamerton, Philip Gilbert 117, 119 Handful of Honeysuckle, A 137 Harrison, Jane 133 ‘Hassan’ (illustration) 68–​70, 69 Havers, Val 113, 114, 116 Hecuba 89 Heine, Heinrich 136 Helen of Troy 175 Helsinger, Elizabeth 107 Henderson, Thomas Finlayson 75 Henry V 93 Hensley, Nathan 4 heroism 99 History of Mary Prince, The 13–​15, 22, 23, 24 Homer 95, 99, 100 homosexuality 86–​87, 95–​97, 100; codes 87–​88; legislation 96; see also queer; sexuality horror 148, 151, 158, 159–​61 Houghton, Arthur Boyd 37, 42 Howard, Henry 107

Hughes, Arthur 8, 60, 63–​65, 64–​67, 78–​79 Hunt, Alfred William 118–​19 Hylas and the Nymphs 99 Hylas Carried off by the Nymphs 107 idealism 86, 88, 99–​100, 115, 160–​61 Idyll: 1745, An 106, 115–​16, 117 Idyll, An (1880-​81) 105–​7, 106, 108, 115, 116, 120 Idyll, An (1893) 109 idyll and idyllist 1; adaptation of 15; as an ancient genre 14; of the bower 44, 77, 150, 167, 169, 170, 179; colonial 14, 15, 28; darkness of 6–​7; definition of 5, 86, 106; depicted in contemporary scenes 108–​9, 111–​14; depiction of birds 112–​13; folk 74–​75; formal structure of 167; history of 3, 4, 37, 85–​86, 92; of the migrant 24; nursing 20; pastoral 125–​26; pictorial 105–​6, 113; politics of 78–​79; as a practiced mode 5, 60–​61; visuality of 99 Idyllic Pictures 68 idyllic school, the 5, 36, 37, 44, 53, 133 Idyllists, The 113 Idyll of Old Chelsea, An 116 Idyll of Spring, An 112 Idyll of Summer, An 112 Idyll of Theocritus, An 108 Idyll (painting) 108–​9, 109 Idylls of the Hearth 60 Idylls of the King 4, 9, 68, 86, 94, 99, 145 Idylls (of Theocritus) 15, 85–​87, 107, 108; eleventh 109; fifth 120; second 93, 94, 96, 97, 107; seventeenth 98; sixteenth 98; sixth 109–​10; third 92; thirteenth 92, 93–​94, 95, 96, 97, 107; twelfth 90, 95–​96, 97; twenty-​ ninth 94; twenty-​second 94 Illustrated London News 49 Illustrations to Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King,’ and Other Poems 145, 153, 158 imperialism 21, 78 impressionism 134 incremental repetition 76 Ingelow, Jean 37–​40, 41, 44 Ionica 89 Islam 78 Iste die observabilis est Domini 137 Italian Garden: A Book of Songs, An 137 ‘Ithocles and Lysander: A Cretan Idyll’ 95 Jackson, Frederick Hamilton 133 Jackson, John 48–​49, 52 Jackson, Mason 49 Jacobite Rising 115–​16 Jacomb-​Hood, George Percy 108–​9 Japonisme 134 Jennings, Blanche 108

Index  187 Johnson, William 89 Journal of Researches 180 Journal of the Society of Arts 51 Jowett, Benjamin 87–​88, 93, 96, 98 Knight, Charles 17, 18 Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen 52–53 Labouchere Amendment 96 La Fabula di Orfeo 137 La Ghirlandata 9–​10, 167–​71, 168, 172–​73, 174, 175, 177, 178, 179–​80 ‘La Gioconda’ 136 Lancaster, Captain James 180 landscape 36, 38, 52, 56, 91; construction of 107; fragility of 39, 119–​21; interaction with human life 117–​19; rural ideals 112 Landseer, Charles 21, 22, 25 Lang, Andrew 74–​75 Langtry, Lillie 105 Lasenby Liberty, Arthur 128 Lawrence, D. H. 108 Lawson, Cecil Gordon 113 Lawson, Malcolm 136 Le Baiser (The Kiss) 127 Lee, Vernon 4, 9, 125, 126, 127–​28, 133–​38, 139 Lee-​Hamilton, Eugene 137 Leighton, Frederic 4, 8, 114, 133; An Idyll 105–​8, 106, 115, 116, 120 Leisure Hour 62, 63 Lincolnshire Gang, A 113 Lines, Henry Harris 111 Linnell, John 108 ‘Lord Bateman’ (ballad) 74, 76 Love, Heather 131 ‘Love’ (drawing) 45 Loves of the Plants, The 156 Lucas, David 53 Lyrical Ballads 20 Macbeth, Robert Walker 113–​14 Mademoiselle de Maupin 128 Marossi, Hinza 21, 22 Marshall, William 48 Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee (drawing) 171, 171–​72, 173 Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee (sonnet) 172 masculinity 87, 94–​95, 130, 178–​79 Mason, George Heming 113 Maud (photograph) 9, 145, 147, 148–​49, 151–​52, 154, 156–​60, 161; composition 146, 150, 155–​56 Maud (poem) 9, 145, 146, 148–​49, 150–​51, 154, 155, 157, 158–​59

Mazzeno, Laurence 39 McClary, Susan 137 Memoirs 88–​89, 95–​97, 100 metal engraving 56 Michetti, Francesco Paolo 135 Middlemarch 16 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 127, 131, 136 migration 14, 21, 28 Millais, John Everett 8, 106, 107, 115–​16, 117, 119 Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn 86 Mingay, G. E. 5 modernity 3, 4, 95, 126; noise of London theatre 134–​35 modesty 41 Montgomery, James 17, 19 Moodie, J. W. Dunbar 14 Moodie, Susanna see Strickland-​Moodie, Susanna Moor, Norman 88–​89, 97 Moore, Albert 109 Moore, George 110 Morris, May 170 Morris, William 107, 119 Morrison, Ronald 39 Morten, Thomas 8, 60, 68–​70, 69, 79 Morton, Timothy 3, 176, 177 Moxon, Edward 21 Müller, Karl Otfried 94, 95 music 167, 169, 178 ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix’ 177 Napoleonic Wars 21 narrative 1; suspension of 3, 113, 115, 158, 167 ‘Narrative of a Residence in South Africa’ 25, 27 ‘Narrative of Louis Asa-​Asa, a Captured African’ 23 natural world 3, 151; active engagement with 116–​17; as a setting 105 nature 73, 97, 119, 177; conceptualizations of 3, 5; outdoor theatrical setting 128–​31, 134–​35, 136; plant subjects 148, 150–​55, 157, 158, 160, 161, 172, 173, 179; see also subjectivity Nature 51 New Arcadia, The 139 New Forest, The 55 Nisbet, Gideon 90 ‘Noon-​Day Dream, A’ 19–​20 North, John William 7, 37, 44, 45, 52–​53, 113; ‘The Four Bridges’ 46, 47; ‘The Star’s Monument’ 39, 40, 41, 43 nostalgia 36, 39, 52, 56 Old Farm Garden, The 1–​3, 2, 6 Once a Week (journal) 70

188 Index ‘On Love’ 132 On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants 152, 153, 154, 154 On the Origin of Species 176 Orientalism 78–​79 Orlando Furioso 136 Orrin Smith, Harvey 49, 50 ‘Our Lady of the Broken Heart: A Garden Play’ 136 Ovid 112 Paget, Violet see Lee, Vernon Palgrave, Francis Turner 94 Palmer, Samuel 108 Paris and Helena 136 passion flower 146, 150, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156–​58, 160 Passion Flower at the Gate, The 152 Pastoral—​A Memory of the Valley of Sparta, A 108 Pastoral Idyll, A 111 Pastoral Players 127, 134, 135 Pastorals of Virgil 108 ‘Pastorellerie Aristocratiche: Appunti di Londra’ 126, 134–​35, 136 Pater, Walter 92, 127, 131, 132, 136, 170, 174–​77, 178 Payne, Mark 15 pederasty 87, 90, 95, 96 ‘Perigot: Random Notes on the Dramatic and Undramatic’ 126, 135–​36 ‘Personality’ 125 phonophenomenology 126 photography 98, 145, 158; composition 146, 150, 154–​55; homoerotic 98–​99; idyll 148, 159, 160, 161; retouching 155 Pictorial Press, The 49 Pictures of English Landscape see Birket Foster’s Pictures of English Landscape Pied Piper of Hamelin 71 Pinwell, George John 8, 37, 41, 44, 53, 60, 75, 79, 113; work of 70–​74, 71, 72, 114, 115 Pitrelli, Stefano 120 Placci, Carlo 136 plant: agency 152–​56, 161–​62; eroticism 155–​56 Plato 87–​88, 89, 92, 93, 96, 97 Pleasure and Palaces: The Memoirs of Princess Lazarovich-​Hrebelianovich 129 Poe, Edgar Allan 130 Poems 37, 39, 44, 149 poetic: as a description of painting 106, 113 Poetical Works of Thomas Pringle, The 26 ‘Poet’s Dream, The’ 92 Poliziano, Angelo 137 Pollock, Griselda 178 ‘Portrait, The’ 170

Potato Harvest in the Fens 113 pothos 91 poverty 99 Powell, Kerry 128 Pre-​Raphaelitism 99, 119, 127, 174 Prince, Mary 13–​15, 22, 23–​24, 28 Pringle, Thomas 13–​28 printmaking 36–​37 Problem in Greek Ethics, A 86, 95, 99 Problem in Modern Ethics, A 86, 96 Proclus 107 Proserpine 175 Punch 153 Purser, W. 26 queer: anachronism 126, 133; conceptualizations of 125; cross-​species erotics 156–​57, 160; pastoral idyll 125, 132, 137, 139; desire 9, 126, 130, 132; theory 126, 131, 167, 175–​76; vocals 132, 137–​38; see also gender; sexuality Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies 157 Quilter, Harry 106, 113, 120, 173–​74, 175, 176 race and racialization 6, 60, 71–​74, 75, 179; disavowal of 78–​79 racism 13, 14, 21, 28, 68–​70; polarization and 79 Rainbow Music; or, The Philosophy of Harmony in Colour-​Grouping 127 Ravilious, Eric 52 Renaissance, The 136; Studies in the History of the Renaissance Reports to the Board of Agriculture 48 Republic 89, 93 Richmond, William Blake 107–​8 Ricks, Christopher 149, 157 Ritchie, Leitch 17 Robinson, A. Mary F. 4, 9, 125, 126, 127, 133, 136–​39 Rosebud Garden of Girls, The 152, 153, 154 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 4, 9–​10, 41, 167–​73, 168, 171, 177–​80; critiques of 173–​77 Rossetti, William Michael 169 Roughing It in the Bush 26–​27 Royal Academy 105, 107, 116, 119 rural: hardship 112, 113–​14 Rural Idyll, The 5 Ruskin, John 3, 6, 16, 55, 119 ‘Sapphonics’ 137 Saracen Maid, The see Gilbert à Becket’s Troth-​the Saracen Maiden Entering London at Sundown Schubert, Franz 139 Scott, Patrick 68

Index  189 Scott, Walter 74 Scott, William Bell 178 Sea Idyll 110 Sedge Cutting in Wicken Fen, Cambridgeshire 113 See, Sam 3, 157, 176, 177 Sexual Inversion 132 sexuality 78, 86, 93, 108, 113; ethics 88; innocence 131, 132, 133, 136; plant 155–​57 sexual reproduction 61–​62, 75, 159 Shakespeare, William 9, 68, 93, 99, 126, 128, 136, 138–​39, 160 Shaw, Barnabas 19 Shelley, Mary 176–​77 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 92–​93, 132 Shields, Juliet 14 Shum, Matthew 16, 21–​22 Sicily 90–​92, 95, 97–​99, 100 Siddall, Elizabeth 170, 178 Simpson, John Philip 17 Sketches in Italy and Greece 97–​98, 100 Slave Grace (court case) 17 slavery 17–​19; abolition of 13, 14, 22–​23; homecoming and 17–​18, 23 Smith, Jonathan 156 social class 3, 5–​6; lower 27, 28; representational anxiety around racial and 27; upper 27; urban middle 5, 16, 27, 28, 41, 70, 98 Socrates 87–​88, 89, 93 ‘Songs of Seven’ (engraving) 42 Spielmann, Marion Harry 119 Spring Idyll, A 112 Starkey, D. P. 68 ‘Star’s Monument, The’ (engravings) 39, 40, 41, 43 ‘Star’s Monument, The’ (poem) 37–​40 Steer, Philip 4 Stevenson, William 48 Stewart, J. 22, 26 Stokes, John 128 Strickland-​Moodie, Susanna 13, 14–​15, 17, 22, 24–​25, 26–​28 Strollers 114, 115 Stryker, Susan 177 Stuart, Charles 115 Stuart, James 115 Studies in the History of the Renaissance 92; see also Renaissance, The Studies of the Greek Poets 85–​86, 88, 90, 91–​92, 95, 96–​98, 99–​100, 107 subjectivity 3, 4, 152, 155, 159, 167, 170, 171, 173–​74, 179; see also nature Suleri, Sara 15, 24–​25 Sweet View: The Making of an English Idyll, A5

Swinburne, Algernon Charles 129–130, 132 ‘Sylvia, An’ 139 Symonds, John Addington 8, 85–​100, 106, 132 Syracusan Bride Leading Wild Beasts in Procession to the Temple of Diana 107, 120 Taylor, Laura 53 Taylor, Tom 53 temporal displacement 126, 135, 136 temporality 88–​89, 90, 161, 169 ten Brink, Bernhard 75 Tennyson, Alfred 4, 6, 8, 9, 99, 107, 145, 158; Becket 76–​78, 133; ‘Enoch Arden’ 60–​65, 68, 73, 75, 78–​79, 150; Idylls of the King 86–​87, 94–​95; Maud 146–​49, 150, 151–​52, 154, 155, 159–​60 Thackeray, William 74 ‘Thanksgiving for Flowers’ 138 theatrical soundscapes 130–​32, 133, 134–​35, 136, 151; disappearance 131; singing voice 137–​38 Theocritus 4, 15, 100, 107, 117; as an influence of Symonds 86–​87, 89–​99; history of 85–​86 Thomas, Sophie 39 Thornton, Robert J. 108 Time Binds 132 Titus and Andronicus 160 transformation 170, 172–​73, 178–​79, 180 transgender theory 167; see also gender Treatise on Wood Engraving, Historical and Practical 48 Treble, Rosemary 5 ‘Tripe Skewer’ 74 Tuan, Yi-​Fu 36 ‘Tuscan Cypress, No. VII’ 138 Two Gentlemen of Verona 138 Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication 179 Venus Verticordia 173, 175, 179 Vicinus, Martha 136 Victorian Idyll 5 Virgil 15, 117 von Gloeden, Wilhelm 87, 99–​100 Wakefield, Mary 134 Walker, Frederick 1, 3, 4, 6, 37, 53, 113 Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer 41 Wardle, Arthur 112 Waterhouse, John William 99 Watts, George Frederick 110 Wells, H. G. 161 Western imperialism 4 Whistler, James McNeill 134, 135 white out 70, 79

190 Index White Peacock, The 108 ‘Who is Sylvia?’ 138–​39 Whymper, Josiah 37, 52 Wilde, Oscar 87, 128, 131, 132, 134 Wilding, Alexa 178 Williams, Raymond 3 Wise, John 55 Woman’s World 131 women’s rights 127 Wong, Edlie 17

Wood, Elizabeth 137 wood engraving 36, 48, 52; challenges 41, 44, 51; environmental costs 37, 44, 56; technique 64; see also printmaking ‘Woodland Gods, The’ 131 ‘Wood-​Wain, The’ (engraving) 53, 54, 55 ‘Wood-​Wain, The’ (poem) 53, 55 Wordsworth, William 20–​21 Yellow Book, The 128