Victorian Turns, NeoVictorian Returns: Essays on Fiction and Culture 1847186629, 9781847186621

Citation preview

Victorian Turns, NeoVictorian Returns

Victorian Turns, NeoVictorian Returns: Essays on Fiction and Culture

Edited by

Penny Gay, Judith Johnston, and Catherine Waters

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Victorian Turns, NeoVictorian Returns: Essays on Fiction and Culture, Edited by Penny Gay, Judith Johnston, and Catherine Waters This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by Penny Gay, Judith Johnston, and Catherine Waters and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-662-9, ISBN (13): 9781847186621

To Margaret Harris, great Victorianist, in gratitude and celebration

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ........................................................................................................ xi Penny Gay Acknowledgement.................................................................................... xiii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Victorian Turns, NeoVictorian Returns Judith Johnston, Catherine Waters Part One: Victorian Turns Chapter One............................................................................................... 14 Two Disappointed Doctors: Keats and George Eliot’s Lydgate R. S. White Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 29 Jane Austen, Jane Fairfax, and Jane Eyre Jocelyn Harris Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 39 The Body of Language Dancing to the Music of Time: Mind, Body and Style in De Quincey Daniel Brown Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 50 “Thus far and no farther!”: The “Proper Lady” and the Ends of Melodrama Katherine Newey Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 59 Gaskell and Eliot on Women in France Joanne Shattock

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Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 68 Economies of Love and Law in A Tale of Two Cities Simon Petch Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 78 The Mill on the Floss: “more instruments playing together” Gillian Beer Chapter Eight............................................................................................. 91 George Eliot in Australia Elizabeth Webby Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 102 “It was now mistress and maid no longer; woman and woman only”: The Lesbian Menace in Victorian Popular Fiction Robert Dingley Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 113 French Realism Englished: the Case of M.E. Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife P.D. Edwards Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 124 The Rivals of George Eliot: French Fiction as Interpreted by Margaret Oliphant Joanne Wilkes Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 135 Gissing’s Italian Vision Roslyn Jolly Part Two: NeoVictorian Returns Chapter Thirteen...................................................................................... 148 From Picturesque to Palimpsest: Landscape and History in the Fiction of Walter Scott and Graham Swift John Rignall

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Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 158 “Trifling Deviation”: Stage and Screen Versions of Mary Shelley’s Monster William Christie Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 171 The Nice Work of Victorian Novels in Thatcher’s Britain Rosemarie Bodenheimer Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 182 Portable Property: Postcolonial Appropriations of Great Expectations Jennifer Gribble Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 193 The Message from Her: Anthony Thwaite’s Victorian Voices and George Meredith’s Modern Love Barbara Garlick Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 205 The French Lieutenant’s Woman: Goodbye to All That Joseph Wiesenfarth Contributors............................................................................................. 215 Index........................................................................................................ 221

PREFACE

This collection has been brought together in honour of Margaret Harris, Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney (2006-7), and the holder of a personal chair in Victorian Literature and Biography. The essays collected here reflect the richness of her research. Her published contributions to Victorian studies alone include two important scholarly editions of primary material by George Eliot and George Meredith; editions of novels by George Eliot, George Meredith, and Arnold Bennett; and essays in major reference works such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot, among others. Her published articles reveal her own scholarly turns and returns, at one time focusing on the journals of George Eliot, at another investigating stage and screen adaptations of the work of Eliot, Gaskell, and other Victorian novelists. Current projects include a major study of the lives and afterlives of the pseudonym “George Eliot” and editing George Eliot in Context for Cambridge University Press. Not included here, but an important scholarly contribution, is her extensive publishing in Australian literature, including key women writers of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Margaret Harris taught in the English Department at the University of Sydney from 1969 to 2007. Several of her former students, now distinguished academics themselves, have contributed to this book. Along with them, her Australian and international colleagues offer a collection of essays that represents the diversity of Victorian studies as they have developed over the period covered by Professor Harris’s career. While seeing literature as central, these scholars bring to bear on it the new perspectives created by a deeper awareness of the cultural context—in particular, dynamic social and technological change—and by the rich, continuing impetus towards the recycling and re-shaping of Victorian literature in modern culture. Penny Gay May 2008

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Editions by Margaret Harris The Journals of George Eliot, ed. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Repr. 1999; paperback (rev. edn.) 2000. Victorian Journalism: Exotic and Domestic, ed. Barbara Garlick and Margaret Harris (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998). The Notebooks of George Meredith, ed. Gillian Beer and Margaret Harris, Salzburg Studies in English Literature: Romantic Reassessment 73:2 (Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1983). A Checklist of the Three-Decker Collection in the University of Sydney Library (Sydney: Department of English and the Library of the University of Sydney, 1980). George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (London, Everyman Paperbacks, 1997). xxxiv + 814 pp. Arnold Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns, ed. Margaret Harris (World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 1995). xxviii + 227 pp. Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives’ Tale, ed. Margaret Harris (World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 1995). xxix + 644 pp. George Meredith, The Egoist, ed. Margaret Harris (World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 1992). xxxi + 578 pp. George Meredith, Beauchamp’s Career, ed. Margaret Harris (World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 1988). xxxix + 594 pp. George Meredith, One of our Conquerors, ed. Margaret Harris (Victorian Texts III, University of Queensland Press, 1975). lii + 514 pp.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The editors warmly thank Fergus Armstrong for his assistance with the preparation of this book for publication.

INTRODUCTION VICTORIAN TURNS, NEOVICTORIAN RETURNS JUDITH JOHNSTON AND CATHERINE WATERS

In the opening chapter of Great Expectations, Pip vividly recalls the childhood terror of an involuntary somersault that he is forced to perform by the desperate convict he encounters on the marshes: The man, after looking at me for a moment, turned me upside-down, and emptied my pockets. There was nothing in them but a piece of bread. When the church came to itself—for he was so sudden and strong that he made it go head over heels before me, and I saw the steeple under my feet—when the church came to itself, I say, I was seated on a high tombstone, trembling, while he ate the bread ravenously.1

Compelled to see his small world so suddenly inverted, Pip is ironically unaware just how formative this fearful experience of being turned upsidedown will prove to be for him. Both traumatic and comic at once, the episode is the first in a series of surprising turnabouts that the novel charts, the most significant of which will be Magwitch’s return from the antipodes, his pockets filled with the profits made from his colonial adventures in Australia. As Robert Hughes has written of the convicts transported to this place which he identifies as the “geographical unconscious” of empire, “[t]hey could succeed, but they could hardly, in the real sense, return.”2 Enacting, amongst other things, the return of the repressed plot of imperialism in Dickens’s novel, Magwitch is a destabilising figure who helps to make visible some of the moral and social tensions explored in this darkly comic mid-Victorian version of the foundling legend. These returns, both literal and symbolic, evoke another: as Pip recoils from the discovery of his unsuspected benefactor later in the novel, he complains that the “imaginary student pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me.”3 As a strange reworking of Frankenstein, Great Expectations demonstrates the form of return involved in writing

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back. Every age of course adapts, rewrites, transforms earlier works, and Dickens’s novel has had its own numerous afterlives on the stage and screen, and in the various postcolonial appropriations discussed by Jennifer Gribble later in this volume. The genealogies so formed are complex and fascinating. William Christie notes a curious but nonetheless significant coincidence in his study of stage and screen versions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: from portraying the Monster in Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 film with a lurking “potential for violence” derived from the character parts he had distinguished himself in elsewhere, Robert De Niro would go on to play the role of Magwitch—the figure who incarnates both the Monster and his maker in Dickens’s novel—in Alfonso Cuarón’s remake of Great Expectations (1998). Rosemarie Bodenheimer detects Magwitch, aka Provis, in the Australian uncle who leaves Robyn Penrose, the heroine of Lodge’s Nice Work, an inheritance. Such returns to the past necessarily “turn” it in new directions—whether in imaginative updatings, as Peter Carey rewrites Magwitch’s story in Jack Maggs (1997); or in scholarship, as contemporary critics recontextualise a novel like Great Expectations in new ways in an effort to better understand Victorian culture. The somersault that foreshadows the vicissitudes of Pip’s narrative suggests the turns in cultural perspective, and the preoccupation with historical change and reversal, that fascinated the Victorians and continue to compel our attention. If we were to choose just one example of this cultural preoccupation, and there are many, Jay Clayton’s exploration of Dickens and postmodernism (Charles Dickens in Cyberspace, 2003), in particular the chapter title in which he asks if Pip is postmodern, is one of the most dynamic.4 While the chapter provides an eclectic catalogue of Dickens’s various presences in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it is the conclusions drawn that capture the attention. Firstly, that Dickens’s own contemporaries welcomed Great Expectations as demonstrating the author’s return to his earlier popular comic style, but secondly that postmodernism itself turns to literary allusiveness and historical anachronism to shape multiple perspectives in which, to use Clayton’s terms, “allusion, parody, irony, and hyperbole” (164) create questions about the meaning of history but also demonstrate “that contemporary culture does know how to think historically” (165). Clayton’s approach helps to explicate a relatively new term, “NeoVictorianism,” a term which usefully categorises a vast range and variety of modern publications, from David Lodge’s Nice Work (1988) to later productions investing in the Victorian Age, either comically—Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair is a good example—or more generally in other genres such as detective

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fiction—D. J. Taylor’s Kept: A Victorian Mystery (2006) for instance—or more straightforward historically-nuanced fiction such as Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997).5 Similar turns and returns centred on Victorian culture form the focus for the essays gathered in this book. In the essay that closes our volume, Joseph Wiesenfarth sees the two endings of John Fowles’s NeoVictorian novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, reprising the two endings that continue to cause controversy in critical discussions of Great Expectations. The Victorian Age saw rapid social, political and cultural change in which innovative forms of transport and communication developed and modernised. In the long nineteenth century so began one of British culture’s great journeys. The Victorians themselves were conscious of these dramatic changes and engaged with them both in literature and art. In 1873 R. J. King in the Edinburgh Review celebrates, as a thing of the past, the last edition in 1840 of “Paterson’s Road Book” because roads have been superseded by rail and the journey is now so much cheaper and easier, and available to working class and aristocrat alike. By 1840, writes King, “the great lines of railway had nearly been completed. A change had come over travelling and travellers as well abroad as in this country.”6 The coming of the railway instituted modern journeying, travel and tourism, and an accompanying expansion of knowledge, a crossing and crisscrossing not only of geographic (and cultural and political) borders, but also those of gender and class. Daniel Brown’s essay in this collection reveals a post-Romantic Thomas De Quincey buoyed by the new age of communication in which swift railways generate the rapid spread of new words and ideas, a mid-century optimism in fascinating contrast to Virginia Woolf’s depiction in Orlando of a stultifyingly occluded nineteenth century. George Eliot is more cautious than either De Quincey or King in her references to the advent of the railway, in her two retrospective novels, Felix Holt (1866) and Middlemarch (1871-2), both set around the date of the First Reform Bill, 1832, that key marker for the beginning of the Victorian age. In the former novel, in a nostalgic turn, she expresses in the “Author’s Introduction” a preference for the stage coach, complaining that the “tube-journey can never lend much to picture and narrative; it is as barren as an exclamatory O!”7 The latter work, however, through her exemplary mouthpiece, Caleb Garth, acknowledges the inevitability of modernity and change: “you can’t hinder the railroad: it will be made whether you like it or not.”8 In an elegant essay focused on Felix Holt, Evan Horowitz has argued that for Eliot “the 1830s represent that moment when history escaped human control and politics emerged as the engine of

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restitution.”9 He formulates this argument metaphorically using the advent of the railway and its tragic incidents (the death of the politician Huskisson). Eliot’s returns to the past are always subtle manifestations of her Victorian present, but also move the reader ineluctably into the prospective future, enacting returns, and then a doubling back. At the end of 1877, despite feeling that her power to write was lessening, she could still note of that possible future “the number and wide variety of subjects that attract me, and the enlarging vista that each brings with it.”10 Gillian Beer, in her essay in this volume on yet another retrospective Eliot novel, and the one closest to autobiography, The Mill on the Floss (1860), locates in music just such an “enlarging vista” which, she argues, diverts meaning into new channels. Elizabeth Webby posits colonial Australian readers as another, possibly unexpected, conduit for Eliot’s writings. The railway helped to generate the other great communication industry of the Victorian Age: publishing. Smaller, cheaper books designed specifically for rail travel began to appear, as did that noted British institution, the railway bookstall. Perhaps the excitement of modernity emerges most pronouncedly in publishing, in writings where the exploratory thrust of the time, so neatly signalled by the journey (as in armchair travel), is evident. As the British empire evolved so did a burgeoning self-consciousness regarding what it might mean to be British in a modern world, both in fiction and in the periodical press. This essay collection attempts to capture the variety of ways in which the Victorians explored their new and very modern world in print, and how they responded to it, with a particular focus on fiction as a form in which engagement with the various ideologies of the day—gender, race, class, to name but a few—might best be managed. The expansion exponentially of the press accompanied the spread of education and the rapidly expanding numbers of readers. Publishing, in all its facets, was a mercantile project, which meant that literature was marketed in ways that it never had been before. The British Library provides graphs which reveal the way in which the numbers of the cheaper 3s. 6d. book had, by the end of the century, far outstripped the more expensive book (over 10s.) in publishing terms. In fiction alone the Library estimates the publication of approximately 60,000 titles and notes some 7,000 authors.11 Moreover, magazines, newspapers, and periodicals were available on a scale never hitherto dreamt of. Publishing, in a related outcome, also became a source of profession and income for middle-class women in particular. The emergence of women as professional writers in the Victorian period is reflected in the renowned figures on whom some of our essayists focus: George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë.

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The forces generated in the nineteenth century continued to impact on both British and related colonial lives and culture long after the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. The phenomenon of Victorian afterlives is most obviously located in present-day fiction, from Tom Wolfe claiming that his exploration of New York in Bonfire of the Vanities (1988) was inspired by the fictions of Dickens and Thackeray and their portrayals of London, to Maryse Condé’s brilliant re-writing of Wuthering Heights in Windward Heights (1995; English translation 1998), to Lloyd Jones’s appropriation of Great Expectations in Mister Pip (2006). Notably these three writers all hail from the “New World.” So do many of the contributors to this volume, with Australia, New Zealand and the United States all represented, along with noted scholars from the United Kingdom. This continual re-engagement with the Victorians in fiction, in film, in biography, in pastiche, suggests that the period’s social, cultural and political modernity continues to have a profound impact on subsequent generations. Victorian survival is remarkable given the attempts by the immediate post-Victorian generation, the modernists, to bury the age which had probably provoked their best and most radical work. In Virginia Woolf’s Orlando the nineteenth century is described as under a great cloud where damp penetrates every facet of life and mind: Thus the British Empire came into existence; and thus—for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork— sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes.12

Indeed George Gissing’s late Victorian travel book, By the Ionian Sea, addressed in Roslyn Jolly’s essay, is already showing signs of the kinds of disillusionment, especially regarding the popular Victorian ideology of progress which Woolf’s later work so evocatively dismisses. However, like Dracula the age would not stay interred; and late twentieth- and twentieth-first century writers are evidently still in symbiotic relationship with its compelling allure.

********************* Encompassing both new work on Victorian writers and subjects as well as their later readings, rewritings, and adaptations, the two-part arrangement of this collection gives point to our title, implying change and movement and journeying that involves pleasure, diversity and exploration, but also

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returns to various stages along the way. Understanding the significance of the Victorian period for contemporary practices and values involves continuing scholarly reinterpretation of its cultural forms alongside attention to their afterlives in later fiction, poetry, film and journalism. Part One: Victorian Turns engages with the culture as it is predominantly located in some of the nineteenth century’s most renowned fiction, but interweaves this with a consideration of non-fictional discourses to illustrate some of the ways in which the cultural questions that preoccupied the Victorians cut across disciplinary lines. Reflecting the diversity of debate in the period, it ranges across key topics of the day, including the “woman question,” sexuality, class relations, language, science, work, celebrity, and travel. It emphasises the turns in cultural perspective produced by new questions regarding the boundaries established by periodisation and new demonstrations of the ways in which historical contextualisation and close textual analysis may be most fruitfully conjoined in our effort to understand how the Victorians imagined themselves. Identified in a 2006 roundtable in the Journal of Victorian Culture as currently “one of the central issues that affects all specialists in nineteenthcentury studies,”13 periodisation has become an especially hot topic of debate in the wake of the 1999 publication of Richard Price’s British Society 1680-1880, which disputes the long-held view of the Victorian age as a period distinguished by change momentous enough to mark the origins of modernity. Ranging from Mary Wollstonecraft through to George Gissing, the essays in Part One of our collection trace cultural patterns across the boundaries conventionally held to demarcate the Romantic, Victorian and Modern, thereby sharpening our awareness of the limits, as well as the interpretative and organisational necessity, of such period designations. R.S. White opens with a challenge to assumptions of a sharp break between “Romantic” and “Victorian” periods, showing how differences in the respective careers of Keats and George Eliot’s Lydgate as “disappointed doctors” nevertheless reveal important continuities, as they share a common influence in the contested medical paradigms of the early nineteenth century. Jocelyn Harris questions the exclusion of Jane Austen from the “high-status club of Romanticism” effected by Charlotte Brontë’s notorious comment that “the Passions are perfectly unknown to her,” and in so doing uncovers something of Austen’s hitherto unrecognised indebtedness to Wollstonecraft. And Roslyn Jolly disputes the “neat timeline” which might see Gissing, in his disillusionment with a newly progressive Naples, turning away from the earlier vision of Italy offered by Dickens towards the later modernist discontent of D.H.

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Lawrence, arguing that this linear narrative fails to account for the curiously postmodern apprehension of tourist sensibility to be found in By the Ionian Sea. As well as testing temporal boundaries, a number of the essays in Part One investigate the national and linguistic borders between Britain and France traversed in Victorian fiction and journalism. While Peter Edwards analyses Mary Braddon’s indebtedness to French realism in The Doctor’s Wife, Joanne Shattock examines the impact of European intellectual life on Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot as illustrated in their reviews of Victor Cousin’s Madame de Sablé: études sur les femmes illustres et la société du dix-septième siècle, which had first appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes. Joanne Wilkes studies a neglected area of Margaret Oliphant’s periodical writing in looking at her treatment of French literature, primarily her reading of Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac, and Simon Petch’s analysis of A Tale of Two Cities shows how historical contrasts between English and French cultures of work were inflected by gender, class and language. Similarly, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, discussed by Katherine Newey, is set in a fictionalised Brussels, where English and French cultures clash (melo)dramatically. Such turns and returns across national borders reveal the enthusiasm with which Victorian writers engaged with questions of identity in part through the articulation of crosscultural differences between Britain and France. While national borders figured prominently in the way in which the Victorians demarcated their world, other salient boundaries are identified in the focus on intersecting discourses offered by a number of the essays in Part One. R. S. White begins by exploring the interrelations between science and literature in nineteenth-century culture. The gap between C.P Snow’s “two cultures” can be seen to have its origins much earlier, in a moment prior to disciplinary specialisation: in arguments pitting conservative, constitutional healing practice against experimental medicine that are evident not only in Keats’s abandonment of his medical studies, but in the unease associated with the professionalisation of medicine shown by later Victorian novelists like George Eliot. Daniel Brown also examines the relationship between literature and science in analysing Thomas De Quincey’s use of analogies from Newtonian physics to theorise language and style in his journalism. Simon Petch sets the intense attachment between Lucie Manette and Miss Pross in the context of A Tale of Two Cities’ intersecting “economies of love and law.” This mistress-servant relationship anticipates the pattern of romantic friendships between upper-class women and their female dependents in later Victorian popular fiction illustrated by Robert Dingley; and like most

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of the examples adduced by Dingley, it turns out to be part of an erotic triangle. Petch argues that this pattern has been masked by the celebrated doublings in A Tale of Two Cities, and he compellingly demonstrates its discursive significance not only in the bonds of rivalry and love that characterise the triangles linking Lucie, Miss Pross and Carton, or Lucie, Darnay and Carton, but also in the triadic structure of the legal trust. Dingley’s essay highlights the way in which discourses of sexual orientation, first formulated by the late nineteenth-century sexologists, have occluded the significance of other forms of difference in critical discussion of the representation of loving relationships between women in the Victorian novel. Like Petch’s account of the social complexities underlying the Lucie-Pross relationship, his caution against the privileging of sexual preference as the dominant defining characteristic of these relationships uncovers a disguised politics at work at the heart of the Victorian family depicted in these fictions. Katherine Newey also addresses family politics through the lens of melodrama, sensation’s forerunner. By examining the importance of theatricalised ways of seeing in Villette in relation to the “she-dramas” of the 1830s and 40s, she reveals the destabilising possibilities of the melodramatic form. In Part Two: NeoVictorian Returns, the rich afterlife of Victorianism is revealed in a variety of its literary, filmic, theatrical and historical contexts. We begin outside the formal date span of the Victorian age, 1837-1901, as in Part One, to recognise just how permeable such formal dates are and to signal that the “long” nineteenth century must be taken into account if readers are to understand the ongoing impact of Victorian excursiveness and vitality. As Barbara Garlick argues of this vitality, the “nineteenth century is no longer within living memory, but its artefacts and cultural treasures are still eminently accessible and will continue to provide us with material for critical and artistic exploitation well into this twenty-first century.” Film has proved a popular medium for Victorian afterlives from the 1930s on. In contrast to Dickens and Jane Austen, where the focus is as much on the author as the text, the considerable Frankenstein industry focuses on that name alone, which has become a by-word for monstrousness and the failure of science, and Mary Shelley’s name is all but forgotten. As we have shown, Dickens returned to the idea of Frankenstein’s monster (interestingly inverting it) to signify Pip’s abhorrence for the convict creature who had made him in Great Expectations. Earlier still Elizabeth Gaskell in Mary Barton (1848) invokes “Frankenstein, that monster of many human qualities” (and incidentally produces the almost inevitable inadvertent conflation of

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creator and creature) to render in an odd turnabout the flawed John Barton as an uneducated Chartist and Communist sympathetic to her readers.14 William Christie’s essay explores the ramifications of the varying return journeys to the Frankenstein site, focusing ultimately upon what the imaginative primacy of the Monster throughout its many subsequent reimaginings may tell us about Mary Shelley’s novel. There are over 75 film renditions of Shelley’s tale, often reflecting the social and cultural moment in which they are made: I was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957); Frankenstein Punk (1986); Frankenstein Unbound (1990), the latter based on Brian Aldiss’s novel of the same name. In a typical weft of NeoVictorian intertextuality, this film’s title plays on Shelley’s sub-title and recalls Percy Shelley’s poetic drama Prometheus Unbound (1820).15 While twentieth- and twenty-first-century film has played an everincreasing role in returning modern audiences to the Victorian Age, fictions which pastiche that past are both prolific and popular. Ever and again modern and postmodern directors, screen-writers, authors turn back to the plots of the Victorians, denounced by Woolf in Orlando as a “vocal, clamorous, prominent” mass (221). But their work first exposed the commercial and cultural nexus that is so neatly demonstrated by Rosemarie Bodenheimer in her essay on monetary versus cultural capital. Beginning with Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855)—another industrial novel located in Manchester like Mary Barton—Bodenheimer uncovers returns to Gaskell’s plot by E. M. Forster in Howards End (1910) and much later in the century by David Lodge in Nice Work (1988), finely demonstrating the precise neo-historicism with which Lodge revises his predecessors to mount a critique of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. Other essayists make similar return journeys in Part Two but choose different destinations: landscape, love, the very nature of fiction itself. John Rignall diverts critique of Walter Scott’s “exploitation of landscape” as James Reed would have it,16 to consider that same landscape as an historical palimpsest in the writing of Graham Swift, which may be much closer to Scott’s own treatment of the relationship between landscape and history than has previously been considered. Barbara Garlick addresses the historicising of the personal in George Meredith’s marriage breakdown poem-cum-novel Modern Love (1862), when Anthony Thwaite inverts both the fiction and the idea of romantic love by giving the silenced accused wife a poetic counter-voice to both deflect the venom of and reinterpret Meredith’s potent images. Both essayists are, of course, also questioning the nature of fiction. Joseph Wiesenfarth argues that John Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) takes a very direct road back to Victorian fiction by invoking Thomas Hardy (among other

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Victorians, including Darwin) in his novel. Fittingly, for a writer whose major fictions emerged from the fin de siècle, Hardy’s novels, especially Jude the Obscure, present, so Wiesenfarth argues, the end of romance, that mainstay of fiction, and the absence of a new order in which science and religion can be compatible. Fowles’s novel is not merely a “flashy imitation” of his Victorian predecessors, even though the hero “participates in a version of the great expectations story that fills Victorian fiction with wills, codicils, and disappointments,” but an attempt to give new life to the species novel so that it survives as a fit form in Fowles’s contemporary world. As Barbara Garlick argues of the shift away from twentieth-century views of our relation to the nineteenth-century past, “Now, in this new century, that interaction may be viewed more comfortably as a dialogue, rather than a confrontation.” Accordingly, this collection produces an informative dialogism demonstrating the continuing impact of the Victorian age on today’s literature and culture. In bringing together essays that address both Victorian writings and their afterlives, this volume differs from other recent collections devoted to Victorian afterlives alone.17 NeoVictorianism demonstrates an ongoing and productive engagement with an age which established the social and cultural directions of the Western world. As we have indicated, the Victorian Age continues to impact on thinking: politically, philosophically, socially and culturally. Other essay collections posit the Age as an artefact, isolated by time and distance; Victorian Turns, NeoVictorian Returns reveals a surviving and insistent cultural paradigm. This collection demonstrates how writers in the nineteenth century too took their own turnings in dealing with the ideologies of the day, and made their own return journeys to the ideas and creations that had preceded them.

Notes 1. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Edgar Rosenberg (1860-61; New York: Norton, 1999), 10. 2. Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding (New York: Knopf, 1987), 586. 3. Dickens 253-4. 4. Jay Clayton, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace. The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 146. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically within the text. 5. The term “Neo,” when used in conjunction with a political movement, implies a desire to return to the political beliefs of that movement’s past (for example, NeoFascism) and a desire for the reinstatement of earlier, and often conservative,

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values as opposed to more radical change. Margaret Thatcher’s NeoVictorianism—her call for a return to “Victorian values”—might be interpreted in this way. However, used in conjunction with a genre, the implication is rather a new, modified, or more modern style, as in Neo-Gothic for instance. 6. R. J. King, “Travellers and Handbooks,” Edinburgh Review 138(1873) 495-6; 483-510. 7. George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical (1866; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) 75. 8. George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-2; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994) 559. 9. Evan Horowitz, “George Eliot: The Conservative,” Victorian Studies 49.1(2006): 9; 7-32. 10. George Eliot, The Journals of George Eliot, ed. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 148. 11. Simon Eliot, Aspects of the Victorian Book, “Introduction: British Publishing 1800-1900” and “Novel,” http://www.bl.uk/collections/early/victorian (accessed 29 May 2007). 12. Virginia Woolf, Orlando. A Biography (1928; London: HarperCollins, 1977), 176. Subsequent page reference is given parenthetically within the text. 13. Rohan McWilliam, “Introduction,” Journal of Victorian Culture, 11 (2006), 146. 14. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton. A Tale of Manchester Life (1848; Oxford: Oxford Classics, 1987), 199. 15. Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099612 (accessed 30 May 2007). 16. James Reed, Sir Walter Scott: Landscape and Locality (London: Athlone, 1980), 1. 17. For example, John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff (eds.), Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century (2000), Christine L. Krueger (ed.), Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time (2002) and Miles Taylor and Michael Wolff (eds.), The Victorians Since 1901 (2004).

PART ONE: VICTORIAN TURNS

CHAPTER ONE TWO DISAPPOINTED DOCTORS: KEATS AND GEORGE ELIOT’S LYDGATE R.S.WHITE

This essay is intended to challenge gently our assumptions of a sharp break between “Romantic” and “Victorian” periods, and also to suggest a wider social perspective from which to analyse literature, by considering the influence of contemporary medical debates.1 From the 1990s onwards there has been a virtual haemorrhage of scholarly works on different aspects of literature and medicine in the nineteenth century.2 Janis McLarren Caldwell’s recent Literature and Medicine in NineteenthCentury Britain: From Mary Shelley to George Eliot suggests that during the early years of the century “several influential literary and medical writers were allied in one project, that of negotiating between two distinctly different ways of knowing—between, that is, personal experience and scientific knowledge of the natural world.”3 Such writers “tacked back and forth between physical evidence and inner, imaginative understanding” in a process of “dialectical hermeneutic” that created “tensions between the patient’s narrative and the evidence of the body,” in short between the apparently antithetical Romantic and clinical ways of viewing human beings. Stated at this level of abstraction, the proposition seems almost self-evident as a comment on the perennial debate between scientific method and the poetic imagination, but when we examine specific instances we discover more individual dilemmas confronting writers in a period when both literature and medicine were undergoing profound paradigm shifts. There may be something perverse in choosing to look closely at two failed or disappointed doctors, and even more idiosyncratic in comparing one “real-life” person, John Keats, and one completely fictional, George Eliot’s Tertius Lydgate in Middlemarch, but the circumstances of their respective career-choices are mutually illuminating in the context of debates in the first half of the nineteenth century. Keats abandoned

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medicine for poetry in 1816-17, while Lydgate’s fictional world is set in 1829, so they could be seen as part of the same generation in terms of the profession’s history (even though Middlemarch was written much later, in 1871-2). While there is no suggestion that Eliot had Keats in mind, she does present Lydgate as a kind of mirror image, a man who initially is romantically defined, but who chooses to become a doctor. Both Keats and Lydgate began their respective careers in medicine with idealistic hopes of doing the world some good and both were disappointed in their aspirations, for reasons that were different but lie equally in their responses to a debate within medicine at the time, between conservative, constitutional healing practice, and experimental medicine carried out in new, public hospitals. Both Keats and Eliot’s Lydgate found themselves in the middle of this dispute, though facing different directions. Although the changing medical paradigm in the nineteenth century was led from schools in Edinburgh and London, it was a European-wide phenomenon. It was, for example, evident in France in the nineteenth century, where physicians were involved in mystifying their profession by taking on an increasing hegemony depending on technical reliance involving microscopes, anatomical examinations and surgical intervention.4 As a gruesome image of this movement, the operation by Charles Bovary, who is presented by Flaubert as “a partisan of progress” and one who is particularly attracted to the theories of Dr Duval, is performed with ghastly consequences on the club foot of the boy at the inn, in the way that the poor were experimented on in public hospitals. The whole episode (Madame Bovary, ch. 11) is presented in mystificatory anatomical terminology of “strephopody” in a way that shows Flaubert clearly marking the “progressive” end of the profession as out of touch with human feelings and a true healing ethic. In some ways Bovary is the literary heir of the much more satirically presented Doctor Slop in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy almost a century before, ominously bearing his newfangled “squirt” to the delivery of a child and causing lifelong damage to the baby’s nose (as euphemism for penis) with his forceps. The creators of Bovary and Slop may encourage us to reject or laugh at their fictions, but we must pause and note that in fact these characters’ reliance on technologised and interventionist medicine was indeed considered “progress” to the extent that it led to the twentieth century’s dominant paradigm of surgery and to the hegemony of the public hospital and canonisation of surgeons as high priests. At the other end of the spectrum, considered professionally to be reactionary and benighted but more valued by humane writers, were the doctors whose practice depended on medicines, personal knowledge of the individual patient, and constitutional

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advice. Harriet Martineau’s Life in the Sick-Room5 emphasises the role of doctor in offering primarily “sympathy to the invalid” and paying as much attention to spiritual and psychological aspects of chronic suffering as to physical pathology. Similarly, English fiction’s first hero as physician, Tom Thurnall in Charles Kingsley’s Two Years Ago,6 is an old-fashioned and benign figure. While literature viewed such doctors as reassuring, competent, and individually personable, the nineteenth-century medical profession dismissed them as anachronistic quacks whose time had been abruptly terminated by surgeons in the closed shops of experimental hospitals. This is the dichotomy which John Keats and Tertius Lydgate, in their different ways, found themselves faced with. Both Keats and George Eliot were profoundly ambiguous about the whole area of contemporary medical advances, although their respective approaches were also very different.

Keats John Keats is not widely known for lines such as these: The Lower Jaw is frequently dislocated from receiving a slight Blow while the Mouth is open—it is thus indicated—the Condyles of the Jaw are thrown under the Zygomatic Arches sometimes the coronoid process projects beyond the Arch . . .

He wrote them as a student, taking notes in his Anatomical and Physiological Text Book,7 when he attended lectures given by Astley (later Sir Astley) Cooper, the most famous surgeon and medical lecturer in Europe, at Guy’s Hospital in 1815-16. Perhaps Keats’s attention wandered in this lecture, since there are little drawings of flowers in the inner margin of this page, suggesting his preference for his Botany lectures at the Chelsea Physic Garden over Anatomy. His internship in the public hospital came after five years’ apprenticeship to Mr T. Hammond, local doctor in Edmonton, and this gave Keats a full qualification to become what we would call a general practitioner. Lockhart’s sneering dismissal, “It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to ‘plasters, pills, and ointment boxes, &c,’” was a libel not only on Keats’s professional qualification but also on the credentials of “The Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London,” which in 1815 was licensed to administer tightly regulated examinations for the medical profession. The evidence is that Keats was a diligent medical student, and in fact so talented that he was one of the rare few chosen to be a dresser to Mr Lucas, a surgeon at Guy’s, a position

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which was expected to fast-track him into a senior position as surgeon and teacher at the hospital. As we famously know, and probably don’t question enough, he then decided to become a professional poet instead. The reasons why, I have argued at some length elsewhere,9 are quite complex and include among other things Keats’s own self-assessment as a fastidious but squeamish surgeon: It was my last [operation], and it consisted in opening a man’s temporal artery. I did it with the utmost nicety, but reflecting on what passed in my mind at the time, my dexterity seemed a miracle—I never took up the lancet again.10

And no wonder, given the conditions before anaesthetics (not introduced until the 1840s), antiseptics (1850s), sharp and sterilised surgical instruments, and indeed before awareness of the need for cleanliness. His friend Cowden Clarke reported that anatomy was the only part of the course Keats disliked, while his experience of surgery would not have been enhanced by proximity to his deaf mentor “Billy” Lucas, whom Cooper described as “neat-handed but rash in the extreme, cutting amongst most important parts as though they were only skin, and making us all shudder from the apprehension of his opening arteries or committing some other error.”11 Keats’s statements of his awareness of human illness such as “women have Cancers” and “Why should Woman suffer? Aye. Why should she? . . . ”12 seem to evoke not only his patients but also the corpses of the anatomy class, and moaning figures in hospital beds, everyday experiences for him. The ethos of the new public hospital system must have struck anybody coming from a quiet parish practice as being nothing short of horrific. The prevailing medical paradigm pushed mainly by Cooper himself, a disciple of the great John Hunter, was that exploratory anatomy, technological experimentation, and radical surgery pointed the way to the future of medicine, as against the training Keats would have had under Hammond as a constitutional and reassuring “bedside local doctor” in tending the mind and personality of the patient as well as the body. Keats’s anatomy classes were carried out in the small “theatre” still in existence at Guy’s (whose steep stairs I have queasily climbed myself), with little ventilation, without regular washing, and with rotting cadavers supplied illicitly by professional grave-robbers and even murderers. It was not until the Anatomy Act of 1832 (during Lydgate’s fictional period of practice) that the “Resurrection Men” were outlawed, and teaching hospitals like Guy’s could obtain legally a supply of licensed bodies for dissection. Even so, refrigeration of the bodies lay over a century in the future.

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This points, I believe, to the more profound factor in determining Keats’s decision, his prophetic antipathy to the direction in which public medicine was moving, in its increasing emphasis on experimentation and radical surgery as the solution to many health problems. Keats studied medicine in the very year when the Apothecaries Act was passed (1815), marking the exact intersection and divergence of two very different views of healing. His idealising of the profession of physician as healer, which in Hyperion he compared with the poet’s vocation, perhaps came from literary sources (one of his favourite books was Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy) and medical practice of the immediate past, in both of which the soul and spirit were placed at the centre of regeneration. No matter how much he may have admired Cooper’s uncanny surgical dexterity, he also must have glimpsed with apprehension a future in which the philosophy would prevail, “if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out”—or any other offending organ for that matter: a future in which soul and spirit were neglected in favour of probing, internal scrutiny of the body by a clinical mind like the teacher’s in Lamia, intent on demystifying and “cutting up” human bodies, an activity which had formerly been the preserve of barbers rather than doctors. Roy Porter has analysed this shift, as a movement from the Enlightenment to the modern world.13 Keats began his career at the dawn of this radical movement towards anatomy, surgery, public hospitals, and experimentation. If he had lived a hundred years longer he would have seen his fears realised, although he may equally have seen a partial return to mental pathology in Jung’s and Freud’s psychiatry, and if he had foreseen the late twentieth century he might have welcomed a partial return to holistic and herbal medicine (and even leeches, whose slimy saliva [hirudin] has been discovered to contain an anti-coagulant, a vasodilator and a prostaglandin which help reduce swelling, and a powerful antibiotic). As it was, all he had in his immediate experience were Cooper and Lucas whose surgery was built upon that of the pioneering Hunter brothers at the most famous British seat of medical training, Edinburgh, and a bleak, death-laden environment on the wards of Guy’s Hospital which, we are tempted to speculate, Keats came to describe obliquely in a different context: Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs . . . (Ode to a Nightingale)

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Shelley, in his “Essay on the Vegetable System of Diet” gives an eyewitness account: “Hospitals are filled with a thousand screaming victims; the palaces of luxury and the hovels of indigence resound alike with the bitter wailings of disease, idiotism and madness grin and rave amongst us.”14 The teaching ethos at Guy’s can be found recorded in a fascinating “prolegomena” which Keats would have been given during his period there. One of the unsung treasures of the Wellcome Institute in London, an introductory guide to the study of medicine issued to students from 1815 onwards was written by one who calls himself Aesculapius15—perhaps Cooper himself, given the high priority on anatomy and surgery and the democratic political references. The manual is enthusiastic about Anatomy, “the basis of every other [branch of study],” “a fundamental science” of dissection and surgery. Dissection is seen as “indispensable,” demanding every hour which the student can possibly spare in daily demonstrations and in “leisure hours,” both in London and, “if practicable,” “in the country.” Students are warned that they will meet with discouraging prejudice from relatives reluctant to condone “this delightful science.” There is something erotic and even necrophiliac about the account: “It is well known that the study of anatomy is calculated to awaken the passions” and the student is advised to assert his reason over the tyranny of an inclination, “already inflamed by study.” Anatomy is described as “a beautiful but seductive science” and defended against the charge of “leading its devotees to the vortex of Atheism” and its tendency to lure students into “amusements of the metropolis” such as the theatre and, even more decadently, into playing billiards (a game familiar to Keats, as we see from a famous reference in his letters). All this semireverie in the words of “Aesculapius” must have at least stirred the curiosity of a young man of poetic sensibility whose bent was towards the fleshly and sensual—even though one suspects the actual practice came to turn his stomach. John Keats’s choice of his future was made at the end of a full and successful medical training, and against its grain. It is possible to argue that he carried forward from his seven years of apprenticeship a conceptual continuity and a store of imagery. There is an intuitive truth, I think, in this continuity, and perhaps more so among poets like Keats whose material is richly eclectic and who in “Shakespearean” fashion built a personal philosophy upon synthesising discordances and resolving paradoxes. Two years after he gained his medical qualification he wrote, “Every department of knowledge we see excellent and calculated towards a great whole. I am so convinced of this that I am glad at not having given

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away my medical books, which I shall again look over to keep alive the little I know thitherwards…” The two spheres of his youthful experience, grim facts of hospital life and imaginative idealism of poetry, must have had equal immediacy, and he had good reason to see the dark and light sides of existence, the bitter-sweet, as equally valid poetic material. Keats never fully gave up the idea of practising as a doctor, falling back on it as recurrent “Money Troubles” intensified and the family’s guardian, Richard Abbey, remained unsympathetic to their hardship. But he made a very conscious decision just before he qualified in medicine to take the far riskier path of professional poet. His wavering began after Endymion was published in early 1818 to such hostile reviews. Then in March 1819, still smarting, he came to consider advancing his medical career in the direction of a higher qualification: I have been at different times turning it in my head whether I should go to Edinburgh & study for a physician; I am afraid I should not take kindly to it, I am sure I could not take fees—& yet I should like to do so; it is not worse than writing poems, & hanging them up to be flyblown on the Reviewshambles—Every body is in his own mess— (LJK vol. 2, 70)

On 26 May, 1819 he hints at new intentions to his sister Fanny: “Mind I do not purpose to quit England, as George [has] done; but I am affraid [sic] I shall be forced to take a voyage or two. However we will not think of that for some Months” (LJK vol. 2, 111). He is referring to the idea of becoming a doctor on an Indiaman ship (merchant boats destined for the West or East Indies), a choice of medical practice which, judging from the extreme hardships and distress endured by such practitioners, must have been a humanitarian choice of vocation rather than solely commercially motivated.16 It may be significant also that he had evidently chosen not to accept the invitation to pursue surgery as a career at Guy’s. Three days later he returned borrowed books to his publishers, Taylor and Hessey, apparently “clearing the decks” for an imminent departure (LJK vol. 2, 111 fn). Two days later (31 May) he was more explicit, if still turbulently undecided, about his intentions, when writing to Sarah Jeffrey: I have the choice as it were of two Poisons (yet I ought not to call this a Poison) the one is voyaging to and from India for a few years; the other is leading a fevrous life alone with Poetry—This latter will suit me best—for I cannot resolve to give up my Studies . . . I must choose between despair & Energy—I choose the latter— . . . I have not quite made up my mind . . . (LJK vol. 2, 113)

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He abandoned The Fall of Hyperion on 21 September 1820, and seems to have passed through some crisis of confidence in his decision to be a poet rather than a ship’s surgeon or apothecary. He wrote, “In no period of my life have I acted with any self will, but in throwing up the apothecaryprofession. That I do not repent of” (LJK vol. 2, 176), but contradicts himself in saying in June 1820 that if his book is not well received, “I shall try what I can do in the Apothecary line” (LJK vol. 2, 289). A letter two days later to his sister Fanny reports “a slight spitting of blood,” which was a sign of the beginning of the end for John Keats. It may be significant that there is no evidence he consulted any of his old teachers at Guy’s concerning his illness. Instead, when in Rome he accepted the kindly and attentive care of Dr James Clark who seems to have relied on traditional treatments like bloodletting and leeches, and who also seems, unlike Keats himself, to have been completely wrong in his diagnosis. Keats died in Rome on 23 February 1821, at 11 pm. In The Fall of Hyperion, Keats may have hoped and even intended to provide a solution to his personal oscillation between the two vocations as doctor and poet, the two functions of Apollo as god of healing and god of poetry, but this unfinished poem and its internal paradoxes show that the problems remained unresolved. He compressed the debate into the lines “sure a poet is a sage; A humanist, physician to all men,” but the description he offers is more appropriate to the medical world he left, in his envy of practical-minded physicians, Who love their fellows even to the death; Who feel the giant agony of the world; And more, like slaves to poor humanity, Labour for mortal good . . . (i.156-9)

The poem itself becomes a meditation on the efficacies and limitations of medicine and of poetry alike in affording consolation for suffering, since neither alone suffices. Hyperion is his most sustained and troubled debate about whether the poet is indeed as capable as the medical practitioner, of “doing the world some good.”

Lydgate G. H. Lewes had in his youth made a decision akin to Keats’s resolution to turn away from a medical career. He “actually began to walk the hospitals, and was only stopped in his course by an invincible repugnance at the sight of physical pain, a feeling which in his later life greatly narrowed his

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range of physiological experiment.”17 Later, he and George Eliot enthusiastically read Keats al fresco in Weimar in 1854, after lunch and a “small bottle of wine”: … we rested again and slept when we got among the trees, then took another stage, and sat down on the grass to read Keats. I read St Agnes’ Eve, and at another resting place, part of Hyperion.18

At some level of George Eliot’s mind, her fictional creation Tertius Lydgate seems to have stimulated a connection with at least one of Keats’s poems. Rather unkindly to both the literary doctor and his wife Rosamond, our final glimpse of the character is one in which his unfortunate marriage is described with a clear reference to Keats’s Isabella (which was in the same 1820 volume as St Agnes’ Eve and Hyperion): He once called her his basil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains. Rosamond had a placid but strong answer to such speeches. Why then, had he chosen her?19

The image fits Lydgate’s final, embittered state, in terms not only of marriage but of professional standing. He dies at the age of fifty, a medical practitioner specialising in gout, which Eliot tartly describes as “a disease which has a good deal of wealth on its side” (834). Lydgate later becomes quite wealthy and successful in professional terms, but even here his success is lined with disappointment: “His skill was relied on by many paying patients, but he always regarded himself as a failure: he had not done what he once meant to do” (835). Dorothea Brooke, having rescued Lydgate from a fatal dilemma of social embarrassment, puts the cause of his disappointment in a charitable light that links him empathetically with her own generous character: “Oh, it is hard!” said Dorothea. “I understand the difficulty there is in your vindicating yourself. And that all this should have come to you who had meant to lead a higher life than the common, and to find out better ways—I cannot bear to rest in this as unchangeable. I know you meant that. I remember what you said to me when you first spoke to me about the Hospital. There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that—to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail.” (764)

Lydgate is not so sanguine as Dorothea, and he chooses pessimistically to “rest in this [difficulty] as unchangeable,” claiming that he has lost his self-worth and cannot pursue his ideals.20 Most readers have felt that the

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specific reason for his abandoning the idea of setting up an experimental hospital, namely the inadvertently compromising taint attaching to its funding after circumstances in which Bulstrode gave money for the project, is insufficient to explain Lydgate’s abandonment of the scheme. Perhaps we feel his altruistic intentions were never fully sincere; or that they were too closely tied to an ambition for social respectability in Middlemarch, or, given his rakish past in France, calculated to give himself a romantic glamour that will attract a wife of his choosing. Conversely, Karen Chase has argued that the central cause of his failure “is his inability to acknowledge and to embrace the past,” discarding carelessly an aristocratic pedigree and family history and his own young, romantic infatuation in France, exemplifying “George Eliot’s version of Marx’s dictum, that those who ignore the past are condemned to repeat it.”21 Perhaps the point is not one which is fully revealed in the novel, but if so then it does seem an odd loose end for Eliot to leave, since it is well known that initially she had intended to build the novel around Lydgate. It looks like something made her replace him with Dorothea as central consciousness in the novel, in a way that makes Lydgate’s disappointment or sense of failure somehow also curiously the author’s. My suggestion is that this sense of authorial uneasiness reflects the tensions in the age surrounding medical advances, and Eliot is uneasily aware of problems similar to those which Keats had confronted. Her stance on the larger public issues of mid-century medicine, however, is different. Both Keats in real life and Lydgate in the novel are idealists who set out to “do the world some good” through the healing vocation, but whereas the former apparently concluded that the profession was not progressing in the direction he believed in and abandoned it for poetry, Lydgate finds himself believing something like the opposite, that the profession will not progress fast enough for him to fulfil his hopes. He feels thwarted by public unreadiness for change, a victim to the resistance to “progress” that Miriam Bailin observes in the profession as it then was: … although by mid-century changes in medical theory and professional organization were beginning to have an effect on the bedside practitioner, English doctors were highly resistant to specialization, diagnostic technology, and the application of the discoveries of the laboratory sciences to their practice.22

The conflict between the old and the new ideologies is set up fairly early in Middlemarch.23 Lady Chettam is characterised as one who believes in the medicinal approach, “attribut[ing] her own remarkable health to home-made bitters united with constant medical attendance”

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while her friend Mrs Cadwallader adopts a Galenic view based on “constitutions” and balance of the humours: “Everything depends on the constitution: some people make fat, some blood, and some bile—that’s my view of the matter” (90). Into this village world comes “the young Lydgate, the new doctor” (92) and he endears himself to the hale and hypochondriac alike by listening closely and dignifying their complaints with his attentiveness. His own commitment, however, is not to the old ways, but to the new medical model, as Mr Bulstrode at first sardonically recognises: “if you like him to try experiments on your hospital patients, and kill a few people for charity, I have no objection, but I am not going to hand money out of my purse to have experiments tried on me. I like treatment that has been tested a little” (92-3). The passage is heavily ironic. Lydgate has a private preference for treating the poor over the wealthy and privileged, while the view of public hospitals as places of “charity” where experiments were “tried on” the indigent was common24—and also Bulstrode will in fact “hand money out of [his] purse” to help Lydgate set up the hospital, and it is this morally tainted donation which eventually scuppers the project altogether. The ambiguity with which Lydgate’s new ideas, encountering the traditional, are viewed in Middlemarch, becomes evident later when Wrench’s diagnostic competence is in a “polite” manner challenged by Lydgate, who accurately observes infectious fever in the Vincy household: Country practitioners used to be an irritable species, susceptible on the point of honour; and Mr Wrench was one of the most irritable among them . . . for “in point of fact,” Mr Wrench afterwards said, Lydgate paraded flighty, foreign notions, which would not wear . . . He reflected, with much probability on his side, that Lydgate would by-and-by be caught tripping too, and that his ungentlemanly attempts to discredit the sale of drugs by his professional brethren would by-and-by recoil on himself. He threw out biting remarks on Lydgate’s tricks, worthy only of a quack, to get himself a factitious reputation with credulous people. That cant about cures was never got up by sound practitioners. (261-2)

The “flighty, foreign notions” of the upstart newcomer are based on his desire to “contribute to the reform of medical doctrine and practice” by setting up a New Fever Hospital in Middlemarch, following the experimental principles of “the historical personage,” Xavier Bichat (1771-1802), one of the major figures in the medical revolution that Michel Foucault has called “the birth of the clinic,”25 whose horrible legacy was Dr Bovary’s operation. Bichat originated the research into cellular structure of tissue which was made possible by improvements to

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the microscope, and Lydgate aims to develop the area into “a lasting benefit to medical practice” (440). He is said to have “studied in Paris, knew Broussais,” another experimental surgeon of the late eighteenth century (92), and according to Mr Brooke the young doctor “has lots of ideas, quite new, about ventilation and diet, that sort of thing” (92). Lydgate’s various progressive ideas provoke opposition from many characters ranging from the doctors (the “irascible” Wrench, the “polished moderation of Dr Minchin,” Dr Peacock and others) down to Mrs Dollop, landlady of the Tankard in Slaughter Lane who simply voices community prejudice (442). Amongst his provocative ways was Lydgate’s refusal to collude with dispensers of drugs which might be ineffectual placebos, “draughts, boluses, and mixtures”: “This was offensive both to the physicians whose exclusive distinction seemed infringed on, and to the surgeon-apothecaries with whom he ranged himself …” (444). As Mrs Mawmsey, who expects medicine from her practitioners, complains, “‘Does he suppose that people will pay him only to come and sit with them and go away again?’” (446). It is clear through the satirical tone that Eliot is satirising the older medical views and opposing them as based on superstition and corruption (as Eliot mentions (147), the commercial nexus between doctors and drug-makers was made illegal in the 1820s, though in subtle ways it re-entered in the twentieth century), while treating Lydgate seriously, if ambivalently, as a new breed of doctor who elevates medicine to a quasi-mystical status beyond the understanding of simple rustic souls. Lydgate himself had been just as clearly aware as Keats of the ideological tensions between the older and newer medical models, and he had hoped to reconcile them. Aware of the need to have “bread-winning work” as a country medical practitioner which required him to focus on individual “cases” (of “John and Elizabeth, especially Elizabeth”), yet he finds another attraction in the profession, namely that “it wanted reform” in what he and George Eliot perceive as “a dark period.” Thus enlightened, Lydgate determines to “resist the irrational severance between medical and surgical knowledge in the interest of his own scientific pursuits” and, comparing himself to Edward Jenner, to be placed amongst the immortal discoverers of new knowledge. His idealistic early belief lies in “the conviction that the medical profession as it might be was the finest in the world; presenting the most perfect interchange between science and art; offering the most direct alliance between intellectual conquest and the social good” (145). While practising as a diligent doctor who recognises that living conditions of the poor make them prone to illness, Lydgate has on the other hand moved philosophically away from the kind of healing which Keats seems to have preferred, involving “home visits,” medicine,

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and constitutional, psychological observational skills, and instead has embraced the emerging ethos manifested in the recent development of public hospitals: “Lydgate was ambitious above all to contribute towards enlarging the scientific, rational basis of the profession” (147, my emphasis). This approach emphasises close, anatomical observation of damaged organs, surgical intervention, accurate diagnosis of specific ailments, and scientific methods of experimentation that will, he hopes, “contribute to the reform of medical doctrine and practice” (439). Both John Keats and the fictional Lydgate were disappointed in their aims “to do the world some good” as doctors, and since Keats and George Eliot were arguably the two major literary figures who were most knowledgeable about medicine in their century, the ambiguous importance they accorded the subject is significant. In particular, the differences in the respective careers of Keats and Lydgate can tell us much about contested medical paradigms—whether constitutional and medicinal, or experimental and surgical—and also about the complex and uneasy ways in which the world of literature interacted with social realities in the nineteenth century.

Notes 1. For an admirably succinct account of the literary influence of social and cultural aspects of medical practices on literature in the early nineteenth centuries, see John Wiltshire, “Medicine, illness and disease,” in Jane Austen in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 306-17, more fully presented in Wiltshire’s Jane Austen and the Body: “The Picture of Health” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). See also John Wiltshire’s Samuel Johnson in the Medical World: The Doctor and the Patient (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 2. See for example Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, eds., The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Janet Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Later works may have been stimulated by the republication in 1994 of the English translation of Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of the Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), first published in 1973. See, for example, Miriam Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Alison Bashford, Purity and Pollution: Gender, Embodiment and Victorian Medicine (London: Macmillan, 1998); Catherine Judd, Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Victorian

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Imagination, 1830-1880 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998); John Salinsky, Medicine and Literature: the Doctor’s Companion to the Classics (Abingdon: Radcliffe Medical, 2002). 3. Janis McLarren Caldwell, Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From Mary Shelley to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1. 4. See Mary Donaldson-Evans, Medical Examinations: Dissecting the Doctor in French Narrative Prose 1857-1894 (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). 5. Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sick Room, ed. Maria H. Frawley (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2003). 6. Harold R. Gillespie, “George Eliot’s Tertius Lydgate and Charles Kingsley’s Tom Thurnall,” Notes and Queries, vol. 11 (June 1964): 226-7. 7. Reproduced in Maurice Buxton Forman, ed., John Keats’s Anatomical and Physiological Note Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934). 8. John Gibson Lockhart (signed “Z”), writing in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine August 1818, reprinted in Keats: The Critical Heritage, ed. G. M. Matthews (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 109-10. 9. See R. S. White, “Keats and the crisis of medicine in 1815,” Keats-Shelley Review 13 (1999), 58-75. There are others who have written on Keats’s medical training, particularly Robert Gittings, John Keats (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), Stuart Sperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974). Goellnicht, Donald, The Poet-Physician: Keats and Medical Science (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984), Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, and Hillas Smith, Keats and Medicine (Newport, Isle of Wight: Cross Publishing, 1995). Writing from a medical point of view, Timothy Ziegenhagen in “Keats, Professional Medicine and the Two Hyperions,” Literature and Medicine, 21 (2002): 281-305, provides information about medical practices in Keats’s time. 10. Charles Armitage Brown, Life of John Keats, ed. Dorothy Hyde Bodurtha and Willard B. Pope (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 43. 11. Quoted in Gittings, John Keats, 103. 12. The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1958), 292, 209. Subsequent volume and page references are initialled LJK and given parenthetically within the text. 13. See especially Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul (London: Penguin, 2003). 14. The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. E. B. Murray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 150; quoted in Sharon Ruston, Shelley and Vitality (London: Palgrave, 2005), 81. 15. White, R. S., “‘Like Esculapius of old’: Keats’s medical training,” KeatsShelley Review 12 (1998): 15-49. The booklet is catalogued as “Aesculapius,” Oracular Communications, addressed to Students of the Medical Profession (1816 edition), and “Aesculapius,” The Hospital Pupil’s Guide, Being Oracular Communications, addressed to Students of the Medical Profession (1818 edition).

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16. See for example Maria Jane Jewsbury’s poems, The Oceanides, published in the Athenaeum in 1832-3 (ed. Judith Pascoe, published on the “Romantic Circles” website at http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/oceanides/about.html (accessed 5 August 2007)); and more generally Robin Haines, Doctors at Sea: Emigrant Voyages to Colonial Australia (London: Palgrave, 2005). 17. Quoted by Rosemary Ashton, G. H. Lewes: An Unconventional Victorian (London: Pimlico, 2000), 14. 18. The Journals of George Eliot, ed. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 227. 19. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Rosemary Ashton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 835. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically within the text. 20. Judith Johnston points out the exemplary quality of Lydgate’s disappointment within the scheme of the novel: “Middlemarch centres on a common theme: failure, change and transformation”: George Eliot and the Discourses of Medievalism (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2006), 27. 21. Karen Chase, George Eliot: Middlemarch, Landmarks of World Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 7-8. 22. Miriam Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 3. 23. Patrick J. McCarthy in “Lydgate, ‘The New, Young Surgeon’ of Middlemarch,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 10 (1970): 805-16, gives much useful information about Lydgate’s class and literary antecedents. 24. Changing attitudes to hospitals can be traced, for example, in Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: HarperCollins, 1997) and Guy Williams, The Age of Miracles: Medicine and Surgery in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, Academy Chicago Publishers, 1987). 25. Josephine McDonagh, George Eliot: Writers and Their Work (Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers, 1997), 34.

CHAPTER TWO JANE AUSTEN, JANE FAIRFAX, AND JANE EYRE JOCELYN HARRIS1

Many years ago, I was struck by similarities between the Romantic weathers at the end of Jane Austen’s Emma (1816) and the beginning of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and wondered if Brontë chose “Jane” and Mr Rochester’s middle name “Fairfax” because of Austen’s character Jane Fairfax. But Brontë said that she didn’t read Emma until after Jane Eyre appeared on 16 October 1847,2 and her attack on its author is notorious. So did she re-write Emma in Jane Eyre? And if she didn’t, was she startled and even chastened to see that Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) permeates Emma almost as much as it does Jane Eyre? First, the similarities. To Emma, “The evening of this day was very long, and melancholy, at Hartfield. The weather added what it could of gloom. A cold stormy rain set in, and nothing of July appeared but in the trees and shrubs, which the wind was despoiling”: Jane Eyre wanders likewise in a “leafless shrubbery,” where “cold winter wind” brings sombre clouds and penetrating rain.3 As to the name “Fairfax,” that may refer to Thomas Fairfax, a Parliamentary general during the English Civil War. Even Charles I, whom Fairfax helped depose, called him a man who “ever kept his word,” while Milton begged him to use his “firm unshak’n vertue” to clear “the shamefull brand / Of Public Fraud.”4 Jane Fairfax resembles him in being honourable though sickly: “The most upright female mind in the creation,” she loathes her “‘life of deceit’” (E 437, 459). Emma thinks of Mr Knightley when she declares that Frank has “‘None of that upright integrity, that strict adherence to truth and principle, that disdain of trick and littleness, which a man should display in every transaction of his life’” (E 397), but Austen herself may recall Lord Fairfax. Although in her “History of England,” she included Fairfax in the “Gang” who “may be considered as the original Causers of all the

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disturbances Distresses and Civil Wars in which England for many years was embroiled,” perhaps she later changed her mind.5 Whether Brontë remembered the Puritan general or the potential governess, both Jane Fairfax and the Jane who loves Edward Fairfax Rochester subdue their appearance and their passions. Jane Fairfax’s grey eyes and reserve (E 167-9) anticipate the self-controlled, “Quaker-like” governess Jane Eyre, who rejects pink satin for sober black and pearl-grey (JE 103, 281). Frank flirts with Emma while secretly engaged, and Mr Rochester proposes bigamy. Marriage rescues Jane Fairfax from the Bragges, Smallridges and Sucklings (E 380), while Rochester’s proposal prevents Jane Eyre’s flight to the O’Galls of Bitternutt Lodge (JE 263). Mrs Churchill’s death allows Jane to marry Frank; the madwoman’s allows Jane to marry Mr Rochester. And if Mr Knightley is sixteen years older than Emma, but not a brother, no indeed (E 99, 331), Mr Rochester, who at twenty years older than Jane “might almost be your father,” becomes her ardent suitor (JE 277). It’s odd that a sexually suggestive charade occurs in both books, but odder still are the eyes, for if Mr Knightley admires Emma’s “‘true hazle eye—and so brilliant!’” (E 39), Mr Rochester praises Jane’s “radiant hazel eyes” even though, as she says, “I had green eyes, reader; but you must excuse the mistake: for him they were new-dyed, I suppose” (JE 270-1). As to possible “corrections,” is Jane Eyre poor and plain because Brontë objected to the beauty of Jane Fairfax? Austen’s Jane knows that though a “‘hasty and imprudent attachment may arise,’” only “‘weak, irresolute characters . . . will suffer an unfortunate acquaintance to be an inconvenience, an oppression for ever’” (E 373). But whereas Jane Eyre abandons Rochester, Jane Fairfax never manages to quit her oppressive suitor. If Frank’s uncle will give Jane all his aunt’s jewels (E 479), Jane Eyre rejects the jewels by which Rochester attempts to chain her (JE 271). And if Rochester enlarges Jane Eyre’s mind, Frank is no intellectual match for Jane Fairfax. Once Frank is rich, Jane marries him, but Jane Eyre marries Rochester only after all his powers are gone. Austen foretold that Jane Fairfax would not live long after her marriage,6 whereas Jane Eyre, once married, survives and bears a son. Did Brontë “correct” Austen once again when Jane Eyre proves far more outspoken than Jane Fairfax? Jane says that the governess-trade provides offices “‘for the sale—not quite of human flesh—but of human intellect . . . widely different certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on; but as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies’” (JE 300-1). But even that outburst may not have been strong enough for Brontë, for Jane Eyre refuses to let Rochester steal her wages, and once

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married, will earn her “‘board and lodging, and thirty pounds a year besides.’” Even more boldly, she threatens that if he behaves like a sultan, she will stir his harem to mutiny until he signs a charter, “‘the most liberal that despot ever yet conferred’” (JE 236, 282-3).7 If Brontë did indeed draw on Emma, three powerful reasons would prevent her from ever acknowledging it. The first was the Romantic theory of original genius; the second, professional jealousy; and the third, revulsion from contemporary memoirs of Austen. Since original geniuses rejected their predecessors, Brontë was understandably galled in December 1847 when George Henry Lewes praised Austen’s “correct representation of life [and] marvellous dramatic power.”8 On 12 January 1848, his advice to copy Pride and Prejudice further inflamed her Romantic ire. Although she promised to “endeavour to follow the counsel which shines out of Miss Austen’s ‘mild eyes,’” she called the novel an “accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefullyfenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy—no open country—no fresh air—no blue hill—no bonny beck” (L 10). When Lewes replied that Brontë “must learn to acknowledge her as one of the greatest artists, of the greatest painters of human character,” she stated that Austen, without sentiment, without poetry, “cannot be great.” Promising to “diligently peruse all Miss Austen’s works” (L 14), she did so only to find fault. On 18 March 1850, her publishers sent her Sense and Sensibility, Emma and Pride and Prejudice (L 361-2) but was this really the first time that she had encountered Emma? After 1818, Austen’s popularity declined, but Bentley’s Standard Novels of 1833 had made her work conveniently available.9 Whatever the truth of the matter, Brontë’s reading of Emma precipitated a vigorous response on 12 April 1850: anything like warmth and enthusiasm; anything energetic, poignant, heartfelt, is utterly out of place in commending these works: all such demonstration the authoress would have met with a well-bred sneer, would have calmly scorned as outré and extravagant. She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well; there is a Chinese “fidelity,” a miniature delicacy in the painting; she ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound: the Passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy Sisterhood; even to the Feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition; too frequent converse with them would ruffle the smooth elegance of her progress. Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet; what sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves

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Does Brontë recoil here not so much from Emma as from Henry Austen’s posthumous representation of a mild-eyed Saint Jane, faultless and accomplished, a modest miniaturist drawing on two inches of ivory?10 Alternatively, had she heard enough of Emma to appropriate both the name “Fairfax” and its discourse of governessing as slavery? Or, did she attack Austen to conceal what she made of Emma in Jane Eyre? If, however, Brontë told truth when she said she read Emma only after she wrote Jane Eyre, perhaps she then realised that Wollstonecraft’s Vindication plays as extensive a role in Austen’s novel as in her own. James Diedrick is right to argue that Jane Eyre dramatises Wollstonecraft’s appeal for women to be educated and use their reason, with Adèle Varens and Blanche Ingram showing how uneducated women turn into coquettes.11 Much more could in fact be said, for my copy of Wollstonecraft’s manifesto has “JE!” scrawled in almost every margin. I believe, however, that thirty-one years earlier, Austen drew on the Vindication for Emma. Wollstonecraft’s reputation may have scared away many women writers, but Austen was not so easily scared. Given Marilyn Butler’s influential thesis in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas that Austen was a Burkean conservative, Alison G. Sulloway was brave to argue in “Emma Woodhouse and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” that her novels read like commentaries on that radical document.12 Both authors, says Sulloway, want women to think rationally and morally, with Austen everywhere implying what Wollstonecraft states when she makes her clever but under-educated heroine fantasise about the sexual lives of others, shows the danger of substituting accomplishments for a genuine education, portrays governessing as slavery, exposes the condition of impoverished women, maintains the importance of equality and prioritises the education of children. Women’s “first duty is to themselves as rational creatures,” says Wollstonecraft, yet by “fits and starts, they are warm in many pursuits.” This warmth, “never concentrated into perseverance, soon exhausts itself.”13 Emma, though “‘meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old,’” never develops a “‘course of steady reading’” (E 37). And if Wollstonecraft argues that uneducated women are enslaved by “first

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impressions” that “give a sexual character to the mind” (VRW 220-1), Emma occupies herself by arranging everybody’s sexual destiny (E 413). She enjoys what Wollstonecraft calls “the pleasure of commanding flattering sycophants” (VRW 92), and relishes the “‘flattery’” of Harriet’s “‘delightful inferiority’” (E 38). But Mr Knightley too, says Emma, is “‘very fond of bending little minds’” (E 147). And if Wollstonecraft says that men attempt to keep women “always in a state of childhood” (VRW 101), he reminds Emma that he is sixteen years older, and she “‘a pretty young woman and a spoiled child’” (E 99). As Sulloway notes, Austen seizes upon Wollstonecraft’s vignette of a rich, idle woman insulting “a worthy old gentlewoman, whom unexpected misfortunes had made dependent on her ostentatious bounty, and who, in better days, had claims on her gratitude” (E 130): Emma, whom Miss Bates “‘had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honour,’” has “‘in thoughtless spirits, and the pride of the moment,’” laughed at and humbled a poor old woman “‘sunk from the comforts she was born to’” (E 375). Miss Bates and her mother, who rely on handouts of pork and apples from Mr Knightley and the occasional abstemious meal with Mr Woodhouse, confirm Wollstonecraft’s observation that single women necessarily become dependent. Thanks to Sulloway, many critics now agree that Wollstonecraft figures largely in Austen’s novels, and not just ironically.14 Thus Austen dramatises the Vindication in Emma, a woman handicapped by cleverness, lack of education, environment and wealth. She may be joking when she applies the word “vindicated” to a debate about the difference between men’s and women’s hand-writing (E 297), or when Emma believes she is “a better judge of such a point of female right and refinement” as Harriet marrying Robert Martin (E 65), or when a “private dance, without sitting down to supper, was pronounced an infamous fraud upon the rights of men and women” (E 254), but Wollstonecraft’s key words and ideas—understanding, fancy, mind, rational and reason—occur frequently and seriously throughout the novel. Echoes between Emma and the Vindication suggest that Emma is a veritable Mary Wollstonecraft wannabe. Despite her obvious faults, Emma calls herself “‘one who sets up . . . for Understanding’” (E 427), a noun which—unusually in Austen’s published work—is emphasised with a capital.15 “Understand” and its cognates occur a staggering 131 times in Emma. That word is as central to Wollstonecraft’s project as to John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, especially in his argument that the pursuit after truth pleases the understanding. As nature gave Emma understanding (E 462), she too enjoys the hunt for

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knowledge,16 but goes astray when instead of using her reason, she depends on the random association of ideas that Wollstonecraft argued was the inevitable consequence of being uneducated (E 220). As Mr Knightley remarks, Emma will never submit to a “subjection of the fancy to the understanding” (E 37). Though she mocks Miss Bates for flying off, “‘through half a sentence, to her mother’s old petticoat’” (E 225), she herself thinks in exactly the same associative way, being reliant on “instinctive knowledge” rather than reason (E 122). But she is not wrong to hope that the future “would yet find her more rational, more acquainted with herself,” for understanding comes finally to her aid: “How to understand it all! How to understand the deceptions she been thus practising on herself, and living under! . . . To understand, thoroughly understand her own heart was the first endeavour.” A “series of reflections” brings her to “knowledge of herself,” to an awareness of her affection for Mr Knightley (E 423, 411-12). No such “strength of understanding” can be expected of Harriet, who is naturally dull, with no information, no experience and little wit (E 26, 61). As Wollstonecraft put it, such women will “depict love with celestial charms, and dote on the grand ideal object” (E 168)—or as Austen shows in Harriet’s case, objects. Mrs Elton is even starker proof of Wollstonecraft’s warning about the dangers of women not being rationally and morally educated. When she declares “‘the greatest dislike to the idea of being over-trimmed—quite a horror of finery’” (E 302), she particularly recalls Wollstonecraft’s attacks on “finery” and “the whole mischief of trimmings” (E 151, 170). A woman with “a little beauty and a little accomplishment,” she shows her “little judgment” by saying that Mr Suckling is “‘always rather a friend to the abolition’” (E 281, 300), as though support of that partisan and passionate issue could ever be qualified. The word “mind” occurs ninety-eight times in Emma. Only “the play of the mind,” said Wollstonecraft, leads to “true grace and beauty” in women (VRW 223), and Austen praised a “delicious play of Mind” in Fanny Knight.17 Harriet, alas, has “many vacancies” of mind (E 183). In Emma as in the Vindication (E 134), mind is contrasted with beauty: if Wollstonecraft warns that men look first “for beauty and the simper of good-humoured docility” rather than rationality (VRW 222), Emma argues stubbornly that Harriet’s qualities of being “‘only pretty and goodnatured’” are “‘not trivial recommendations to the world in general,’” for until men “‘fall in love with well-informed minds instead of handsome faces, a girl, with such loveliness as Harriet, has a certainty of being admired and sought after’” (E 63-4). Wollstonecraft’s favoured word

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“rational” is significant right from the time that Mr Woodhouse cannot meet Emma in conversation, “rational or playful,” until the moment she realises that a Mr Knightley married to Harriet means the end of cheerful or of rational society at Hartfield (E 7, 422). It’s a fine jest that Emma is “fit for nothing rational” at the end (E 332, 475), as though love trumps reason after all. Jane Fairfax is closer to Wollstonecraft’s ideal, for nature has given her a “good understanding” and Colonel Campbell “an excellent education” (E 163-4). But even she cannot resist the “romantic wavering feelings” that Wollstonecraft warned against: “Women have seldom sufficient serious employment to silence their feelings; a round of little cares . . . frittering away all strength of mind and organs, they become naturally only objects of sense” (E 169). Jane loves Frank “‘excessively,’” says Emma; “‘Her affection must have overpowered her judgment’” (E 419). When Emma imagines that Jane “might have been unconsciously sucking in the sad poison, while a sharer of [Mr. Dixon’s] conversation with her friend” (E 168), did Austen remember Wollstonecraft’s Chapter Eight entitled “Morality Undermined by Sexual Notions of the Importance of a Good Reputation”? Here a man finds “the serpent’s egg in some fold of my heart, and crush[es] it with difficulty.” As he asks, “shall I not pity those who have stamped with less vigour, or who have heedlessly nurtured the insidious reptile till it poisoned the vital stream it sucked?” (VRW 246). Emma does come to pity Jane, eventually (E 421). Frank admires Jane not for her mind but for the beauty that leads to what Wollstonecraft called the legal prostitution of marriage (VRW 151): “‘Did you ever see such a skin? . . . with her dark eye-lashes and hair . . . Just colour enough for beauty.’” He calls her a “‘complete angel’” (E 478), whereas Wollstonecraft asks, “Why are girls to be told that they resemble angels; but to sink them below women?” (VRW 194). Frank is a coxcomb, a word used as contemptuously by Mr Knightley (E 150) as by Wollstonecraft, who believes that gallantry in men and coquetry in women can only be shut out by education (VRW 287-8). Frank is impudently gallant to Emma at Box Hill, but Mr Knightley, who like Wollstonecraft associates “gallantry and trick” with “disingenuousness and doubledealing,” has “little gallantry” in his manner (E 348, 369, 386). Wollstonecraft says that educated gentlewomen “are never designed for the humiliating situation which necessity sometimes forces them to fill” (E 261), and Emma believes that even five times the salary of a governess would be dearly earned (E 382). If Wollstonecraft recommends sexual equality, Emma and Mr Knightley clear away “the same degree of ignorance, jealousy, or distrust” (E 432). And if for Wollstonecraft

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friendship is “the most sublime of all affections,” because founded on principle, and cemented by time” (VRW 167), Mr Knightley and Emma have always been friends: he takes the child out of her arms “with the unceremoniousness of perfect amity” (E 98). Mr Knightley’s renunciation of his home brings Wollstonecraft’s ideal relationship to life: it makes “all right, all open, all equal. No sacrifice on any side worth the name” (E 4678). Mary Wollstonecraft’s precursor status to both Emma and Jane Eyre may then account for the similarities between them. But that does not explain the coincidence between the names Jane Fairfax and Jane Eyre’s husband Edward Fairfax Rochester—and more. Did Brontë prevaricate about when she first encountered Emma? I have suggested reasons that she might. I always ask my New Zealand students to check their attics for a hatbox full of Brontë’s letters. Her friend Mary Taylor came to Wellington, kept a cow, taught piano to support her brother Waring, and stayed in close touch with Brontë. Her letters survive, but not Brontë’s. Here is the letter I want to find: 18 August 1846 My dear Mary, In spite of my former prejudice against Miss Austen, I believe that she is well acquainted with the stormy Sisterhood of the Passions after all. I see many likenesses in Emma to Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Vindication I am even now dramatising in my new book. But I cannot agree that governesses such as Jane Fairfax must be delicate and powerless. Jane Eyre loves Edward Fairfax Rochester even though she is plain and a governess—she knows they are equal in souls. Women feel just as men feel—they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer—they desire incident, life, fire, feeling—even if their eventual fate be marriage and motherhood. In short, my dear, Jane Eyre will show what Jane Fairfax could and should have been. Your affectionate Charlotte.

I’m still looking.

Notes 1. Ever since Margaret Harris and I wrote our doctoral theses in sixties London, she has been an ideal friend and mentor: energetic, perceptive and above all, sane. I have admired her work on the Victorians, marvelled at the seamlessness of her creative, pedagogic, administrative and family life, and gone shopping with her. May this paper stand as a partial tribute to a remarkable woman.

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2. Charlotte Brontë, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Margaret Smith, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995-2004), 349. Subsequent page references are initialled L and given parenthetically within the text. Lyndall Gordon, Charlotte Brontë: Passionate Life (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994), 143. An earlier draft of this chapter appeared in Persuasions 29 (2007). I am grateful to Susan Allen Ford, the editor, for her permission to print this revised version. 3. Jane Austen, Emma, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 421. Subsequent page references are initialled E and given parenthetically within the text. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 7. Subsequent page references are initialled JE and given parenthetically within the text. 4. Charles I, “Speech to the Commissioners,” 3, cited by Ian J. Gentles, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004-8), http://www.oxforddnb.com; Milton, “On the Lord Gen. Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester,” The Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. H. C. Beeching (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 87. 5. Jane Austen, Catharine and Other Writings, ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 143. 6. William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters. A Family Record, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1989), 307. 7. The seventeenth-century poet and playwright Earl of Rochester was the archetypal penitent libertine: see Murray G. H. Pittock, “John Wilmot and Mr Rochester,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 41, no.4 (1987): 462-9. Brontë’s choice of the names Fairfax and Rochester may therefore suggest the two warring sides of his nature. Blind in one eye and with a mutilated arm, he also resembles Lord Nelson, created Duke of Bronte in 1799 by the King of Naples. Charlotte’s father identified so obsessively with Nelson that he changed his name from Brunty to Brontë (Gordon, Passionate Life, 6-7). 8. “Recent Novels: French and English,” Fraser’s Magazine (December 1847), xxxvi, 687; in B.C. Southam, ed., Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 124-5. 9. Southam, Critical Heritage, 22. 10. In 1833, Henry Austen cited in his Memoir of Miss Austen a critic who seems to anticipate Brontë’s negatives: “her portraits are perfect likenesses, admirably finished, many of them gems, but it is all miniature painting; and, satisfied with being inimitable in one line, she never assayed canvass and oils; never tried her hand at a majestic daub.” The “mind is never taken off the level surface of life”; she is “sparing in her introduction of nobler characters”; although her personages would “excite no interest” in real life, she induces “sympathy,” which, “if extended to daily life, and the world at large, would make the reader a more amiable person.” The editor of Bentley’s Novels also called her “emphatically, the novelist of home.” See J. E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 145-54. 11. James Diedrick, “Jane Eyre and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” in Approaches to Teaching Brontë’s Jane Eyre, ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Beth Lau (New York: MLA, 1993), 22-8.

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12. Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, repr. 1976); Alison G. Sulloway, “Emma Woodhouse and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” Wordsworth Circle, 7: 4 (1976), 320-32. Critics note parallels between Pride and Prejudice and Robert Bage’s Hermsprong, which often gestures to the Vindication, but I agree with Sulloway that Emma suggests a far more direct acquaintance. 13. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 257, 152. Subsequent page references are initialled VRW and given parenthetically within the text. 14. See, for instance, Lloyd W. Brown, “Jane Austen and the Feminist Tradition,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 28 (1973): 321-38; Margaret Kirkham, Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1983); LeRoy W. Smith, Jane Austen and the Drama of Women (London: Macmillan, 1983), 23-5; Alison G. Sulloway, Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), xvi; Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), 58-61; Diane Hoeveler, “Vindicating Northanger Abbey: Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Gothic Feminism,” in Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism, ed. Devoney Looser (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 117-35; Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (London: Viking, 1997), 1389; Clara Tuite, Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 123; Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000), 485 n10; Peter Knox-Shaw, Jane Austen and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 34; Lyndall Gordon, Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: HarperCollins, 2005); and Edward Copeland’s edition of Sense and Sensibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 438 n15. 15. To retain the capital, Austen must have over-ridden John Murray’s house style at the proof stage. See Jocelyn Harris, A Revolution Almost Beyond Expression: Jane Austen’s Persuasion (Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 71. 16. John Locke, “Epistle to the Reader,” Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Austen’s entire oeuvre is arguably based on Locke’s epistemology. See chapter one of Jocelyn Harris, Jane Austen’s Art of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, repr. 2003). 17. Jane Austen, 20-21 February 1817, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 329.

CHAPTER THREE THE BODY OF LANGUAGE DANCING TO THE MUSIC OF TIME: MIND, BODY AND STYLE IN DE QUINCEY1 DANIEL BROWN

The broad philosophical orientation with which the mature De Quincey approaches experience is indicated in his essay “Mrs. Hannah More,” which he wrote after the popular author’s death in 1833. He recalls having been asked by More to explain both Kant’s critical philosophy and Hume’s theory of causation, and congratulates himself for having “so dovetailed the two answers together, that the explanation of Kant was made to arise naturally and easily out of the mere statement of Hume’s problem on the idea of necessary connexion.”2 Hume observes that relations amongst things and ideas cannot be regarded as intrinsic to their terms, as held together by necessity, but that they are on the contrary external to them, superadded by experience through their repeated association together. Kant responds to Hume by trying to reinstate a form of necessary connection within and between thoughts through his principle of synthetic a priori judgements and the bureaucratic faculty psychology that facilitates them. De Quincey explains this relation between the two philosophers at some length in the account he gives in the Autobiography (1840-41) of his developing thought in 1805. Frustrated by Hume he looks hopefully to Kant for “the keys of a new and creative philosophy,” but after “six weeks study” finds it to be on the contrary “a philosophy of destruction.”3 “Mrs. Hannah More” shows that Kant’s importance for De Quincey has receded, as has the need he felt in 1805 for a “solution” to “Hume’s problem.” Instead the “problem” itself appears to have risen in his estimation, for he describes it here not only as “that famous discovery” but furthermore as “unquestionably the most remarkable contribution to philosophy ever made by man” (vol. 9, 355). Such high praise indicates De Quincey’s faith that, despite his disappointment with Kant’s response

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to it, the Humean idea could still furnish the basis for “a new and creative philosophy.” Distrustful of philosophical systematising, the mature De Quincey appears to have found Hume’s open question preferable to any complete answer to it. Hume’s radical recognition of contingency as prior to and foundational for mental activity attributes the mind with a creativity and freedom that the Kantian faculty psychology constricts in its imperative drive to secure the objectivity and necessity of synthetic a priori knowledge. As Gilles Deleuze observes, Hume’s epistemology replaces the model of knowledge with that of belief, so that mental life ultimately takes the form of a “delirium”4 in which impressions and ideas enjoy complete freedom of association. The freedom and creativity of thought that Deleuze’s account highlights provide the premise for De Quincey’s own theory of mind and a foundational presupposition for his diverse writings. The sixty-seven year old De Quincey offers a moving and lyrical account of the memory in his first essay on “Sir William Hamilton, Bart.” (1852). It sees thoughts to be mobilised and organised in part through the principle of association, which assumes a form here that suggestively prefigures Proustian involuntary memory: And as regards myself, touch but some particular key of laughter and of echoing music, sound but for a moment one bar of preparation, and immediately the pomps and glory of all that has composed for me the delirious vision of life re-awaken for torment; the orchestras of the earth open simultaneously to my inner ear; and in a moment I behold, forming themselves into solemn groups and processions, and passing over sad phantom stages, all that chiefly I have loved. (vol. 17, 146)

This “delirious vision” consequent upon the individual mind’s associations is like a dream or nightmare. The gothic tenor of his stories Klosterheim (1832), “The Avenger” and “The Household Wreck” (1838) allows De Quincey to describe and explore similarly liminal states of mind, principally those between waking and sleeping, in which the capacity for associative mental activity is unleashed. The “approach of sleep” (vol. 8, 252), and the state of “nervous apprehensiveness” that yields a “creative state of the eye,” cause the mind to shape images associatively from such sensory stimuli as fire, tapestries, and, more abstractly, “occasional combinations of colour, modified by light and shade” (vol. 9, 244) But it is the “unimaginable chaos” (vol. 9, 266) of the dream itself, rather than the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states that lead to and from it, that most strongly suggests the associative delirium that Deleuze attributes to the Humean model of mind. In “The Household Wreck” De Quincey

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describes the ways in which the conscious mind works creatively to reinstate order from such chaos in his account of the process of waking up, “when the clouds of sleep, and the whole fantastic illusions of dreaminess are dispersing, just as the realities of life are re-assuming their steadfast forms—re-shaping themselves—and settling anew into those fixed relations which they are to preserve throughout the waking hours.” Being subject to dispersal and shaping, mental images and thoughts are accordingly reducible to more fundamental elements. The “crisis of transition from the unreal to the real” (vol. 9, 234) as we come to consciousness and our thoughts become reliable, move from chaos to order, occurs as an a priori “re-shaping” of such elementary mental representations, a reinstatement of “fixed relations.” It is, De Quincey observes in “Style No. III” (1840), “most instructive to see how many apparent scenes of confusion break up into orderly arrangement, when you are able to apply an a priori principle of organization to their seeming chaos” (vol. 12, 57). Such a priori principles are for the mature De Quincey not Kantian but creative and often idiosyncratic. Even in writing a testimonial in 1852 for J. F. Ferrier, whose metaphysic of consciousness itself springs largely from German idealism, De Quincey repudiates such objectivist theories of mind, asserting instead that “Every man’s private impressions have an internal truth for himself— are self-lighted by an evidence which cannot be transferrred to another” (vol. 17, 252). The Proustian reverie contained in the essay on Hamilton cited earlier, where particular sounds summon up by association memories of dead loved ones, offers an example of this phenomenon. De Quincey’s sceptical appreciation of the contingent “self-lighted” “internal truth” of individual thought indicates a Humean epistemological model of belief rather than classical models of knowledge. He recognises another such epistemological principle of belief in prejudice, a consideration that he suggests threatens to undermine Descartes’ universalist project to establish a philosophy of consciousness. Finding it laughable that one of the “golden rules” with which Descartes begins his philosophical investigations is “that he would guard himself against all ‘prejudices,’” De Quincey argues in the “Philosophy of Herodotus” (1842) that prejudices are inevitable and, by definition, invisible to those who hold them: “Those are the true baffling prejudices for man, which he never suspects for prejudices” (vol.13, 106). The “prejudices” and “private impressions” that have such conviction for individuals suggest Hume’s principles of “custom and habit,” by which he sees relations to be formed amongst impressions and ideas. This governing principle makes the association of ideas, as Deleuze puts it, “a practice of cultural and conventional

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formations (conventional instead of contractual), rather than a theory of the human mind. Hence, the association of ideas exists for the sake of law, political economy, aesthetics, and so on” (ES ix). Hume wrote not only on philosophy but also on politics and history, fields of experience where the contingent “custom or habit” to which his philosophy traces our ideas of relation play decisive roles. De Quincey also implicates cultural life in epistemology, finding the medium and focus for the formal principle that Hume attributes to “custom or habit” in the great social convention of language. De Quincey discusses the containment and shaping of thought in his 1853 essay “Table-Talk” through an empiricist metaphor for language as “the mould, the set of channels, into which the metal of the thought is meant to run.” The “mould” is a principle extrinsic to thought, which is given form by it and figured here as either mercuric or, more probably, molten metal, which holds the implication that it can become set, formed finally by its mould, like lead type. The specific “mould” referred to here is a poetic form, an epigram on Milton by Dryden. De Quincey finds that in this case the perfection of the form has distracted readers from noticing the mere “accidental filling up of the mould” (vol. 18, 32), that is, that it has no content. The discussion suggests Lessing’s thesis in Laocoön, a work that De Quincey began to translate and abridge in 1827, which maintains that the peculiar forms of each art occasion its expressive possibilities. The power of language forms is discussed further in “Style [No. I]” (1840), again through the metaphor of the mould. Here, however, it is not poetry but the forms of everyday language that are seen to shape collective thought, and to in turn perpetuate such modes of expression and thought, a scourge of pedantry that he attributes to the widespread readership and emulation of newspaper style: “Pedantry, though it were unconscious pedantry, once steadily diffused through a nation as to the very moulds of its thinking, and the general tendencies of its expression, could not but stiffen the natural graces of composition, and weave fetters about the free movement of human thought” (vol. 12, 16). Style functions, in De Quincey’s example of journalism, as a principle of intellectual and social engineering. But as well as replicating itself, stamping its forms upon minds en masse in the manner of industrial machinery, language can also function as a generative machine that facilitates individual and creative thought. De Quincey uses the analogy of mechanics in “Style [No. I]” to explain two complementary aspects of style: Style may be viewed as an organic thing and as a mechanic thing. By organic, we mean that which, being acted upon, reacts—and which

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propagates the communicated power without loss. By mechanic, that which, being impressed with motion, cannot throw it back without loss, and therefore soon comes to an end. The human body is an elaborate system of organs: it is sustained by organs. But the human body is exercised as a machine, and, as such, may be viewed in the arts of riding, dancing, leaping &c., subject to the laws of motion and equilibrium. Now the use of words is an organic thing, in so far as language is connected with thoughts, and modified by thoughts. It is a mechanic thing, in so far as words in combination determine or modify each other. The science of style, as an organ of thought, of style in relation to the ideas and feelings, might be called the organology of style. The science of style, considered as a machine, in which words act upon words, and through a particular grammar, might be called the mechanology of style. (vol. 12, 24-5)

Language, De Quincey suggests, like the “human body[,]is exercised as a machine,” but as such depends upon an “organic” principle that articulates its mechanical parts, the words and grammar that correspond here to the body’s systems of the nerves and the muscles and the bones they lever.5 The “mechanology of style” recognises the mechanical body of the language system, “in which words act upon words, and through a particular grammar.” This machine is, however, presented as rather like the steam engine, which dissipates part of its capacity for work in unusable heat; “that which, being impressed with motion, cannot throw it back without loss.” Analogous to the human body, which “is sustained by organs,” the mechanics of style requires the idealised Newtonian economy of the organic principle, “that which, being acted upon, reacts—and which propagates the communicated power without loss.” The “organology of style” sees language to function “as an organ of thought”: it fulfils the a priori organising principle of “expressing all possible relations that can arise between thoughts and words—the total effect of a writer, as derived from manner.” The analogy of the body attributes to style an essential integrity, for as De Quincey puts it in “On the Present Stage of the English Language” (1850), in its highest form, “style cannot be regarded as a dress or alien covering, but . . . the incarnation of the thoughts. The human body is not the dress or apparel of the human spirit; far more mysterious is the mode of their union.” In contrast to mere rhetoric, the organic nature of imagery and other parts of style “absolutely makes the thought” (vol. 17, 67). De Quincey argues in this essay that the “offices of style,” namely “to brighten the intellegibility of a subject” and “to regenerate the normal power and impressiveness of a subject,” “are really not essentially below the level of those other offices attached to the original discovery of truth” (vol. 17, 66). Style is in its highest form seen to enhance the epistemological

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efficacy of language. Its mechanology facilitates the free association of ideas and impressions within the mind, much as classical Newtonian mechanics allows and theorises the interactions of all physical entities, while the organic principle, “that which, being acted upon, reacts,” creatively draws together relations amongst these ciphers according to the “ideas and feelings” that distinguish the individual “human spirit.” De Quincey’s coinages “mechanology” and “organology” demonstrate the creative potential of language they serve to explain, which facilitates the recognition by its practitioners of new relations. Neologism is explained in “On the Present Stage of the English Language” as the creative response of thought and language to the changing events and perceptions that in the extract cited earlier from “Logic” (which also dates from 1850) describe the “revolutionary character” of his own time: “Neologism, in revolutionary times, is not an infirmity of caprice . . . but is a mere necessity of the unresting intellect. New ideas, new aspects of old ideas, new relations of objects to each other, or to man—the subject who contemplates those objects—absolutely insist on new words” (vol. 17, 56). De Quincey’s principle of style effectively extends the thesis of Lessing’s Laocoön in a proto-structuralist manner to describe the artifice of the language system, recognising it as a great generative structure, a machine for facilitating and organising thought and experience. So, for example, he writes in “Style No. II” (1840) that “for the Pagan of twentyfive hundred years back, and for us moderns, the arts of public speaking, and consequently of prose as opposed to metrical composition, have been the capital engine—the one intellectual machine—of civil life” (vol. 12, 30). We can recall from the passage cited earlier from “Style [No. I]” that “The human body is exercised as a machine, and, as such may be viewed in the arts of riding, dancing, leaping &c., subject to the laws of motion and equilibrium,” a remark that echoes directly an earlier statement that De Quincey makes of Lessing’s thesis in a footnote to his translation of the Laocoön: “the freedom of a fine art is found not in the absence of restraint, but in the conflict with it. The beauty of dancing, for instance, as to one part of it, lies in the conflict between the freedom of the motion and the law of equilibrium which is constantly threatened by it” (vol. 6, 53). The mechanology of language that provides the conditions by which linguistic creativity can be realised is presented in “Style [No. I]” as analogous to the natural laws of the Newtonian physical world, which similarly facilitate the creativity of the dancer. He writes in his essay on “Conversation” (1850) that “an able disputant . . . cannot display his own powers but through something of a corresponding power in the resistance

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of his antagonist,” and he amplifies his point with the analogies of “playing at ball, or battledore, or in dancing” (vol. 17, 8). The metaphor of the dance is amusingly invoked in De Quincey’s Encyclopedia Britannica entry on “Pope” (1838-9), where, in glossing what he judges to be the decadent rhetorical exercises of eighteenthcentury “fine letter writing,” he nonetheless illustrates concretely the rather abstract analogy from “Style [No. I]” that describes style as like the human body: “To us, in this age of purer and more masculine taste, the whole scene takes the ludicrous air of old and young fops dancing a minuet with each other, practising the most elaborate grimaces, sinkings and risings the most awful, bows the most overshadowing, until plain walking, running, or the motions of natural dancing, are thought too insipid for endurance” (vol. 13, 255). The mechanics of the body, suited to “plain” walking and other such “natural” motions, are manipulated elaborately into the co-respondent stylised movements of the minuets, much as the letter-writers, “Every nerve . . . strained to outdo each other,” draw from the material of language and thought “a filagree work of rhetoric” (vol. 13, 254). While the letters of Pope and his peers are smeared with the taint of effeminacy, the countervailing principle of good prose style is for De Quincey epitomised by “the purity of female English” to be found in letters by certain women from his own age. In lauding these natural expressions of personal independence and dignity made by “the interesting class of women unmarried upon scruples of sexual honour” (vol. 12, 12-13), De Quincey expresses his enthusiasm for such purity and chastity rather jarringly with a direct appeal to the reader’s “desire” and an urgent entreaty that it be satisfied through rapacious acts of criminal violation: “Would you desire at this day to read our noble language in its native beauty, picturesque from idiomatic propriety, racy in its phraseology, delicate yet sinewy in its composition—steal the mail bags, and break open all the letters in female handwriting” (vol. 12, 12). The body of language here is exhibited in its “native beauty,” perfectly poised, “delicate yet sinewy in its composition”. In contrast to the foppish minuets of Pope and his peers,6 good prose is, as De Quincey observes in the “Philosophy of Herodotus,” again invoking the analogy of the body, the healthy but nonetheless accomplished natural exercise of language: “To walk well, it is not enough that a man abstains from dancing” (vol. 13, 85). The analogy that De Quincey draws of style to the body allows him to emphasise and explore language’s responsiveness to change, and ultimately to find in language the basis for an historicist epistemology. In contrast to objective uses of language he notes, such as those used by positivist science and for simple place names (vol. 12, 73, 10), in which

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matter prevails over manner, subjective uses necessarily demand stylistic creativity. De Quincey instances this with the case of classical Greece, which as a result of “accidents of time and place” was, he writes in “Style No. IV”, “obliged . . . to spin most of her speculations, like a spider, out of her own bowels” (vol. 12, 66). Like the spider’s web the Greeks’ speculations emerge a priori but apt for their immediate purposes in the outside world. Once again, creativity is seen to be demanded by changing circumstances and perceptions, a historical factor that makes the subjective employments of language, which largely describe style for De Quincey, necessarily less “durable” than the objective and external uses. As he observes in another essay from 1841, “Homer and the Homeridae Part III,” by “applying itself to the subtler phenomena of human nature, [the subjective use of language] exactly in that proportion applies itself to what is capable of being variously viewed, or viewed in various combinations, as society shifts its aspects” (vol. 13, 49). This presupposes a normative physicalist model of reciprocal forces, “that which, being acted upon, reacts,” a subtle responsiveness in “proportion” to societal change. Style is for De Quincey the body of language dancing to the music of time. The analogy of the human body and its pre-adaptation to the Newtonian physical world, which allows it to maintain a dynamic equilibrium with it, demonstrates De Quincey’s commonsense approach to language and the supple epistemological functions he sees it to serve. Just as the body negotiates the forces that the outside world subjects it to, happily heightening the conflict to exercise its own nature in such activities as walking and dancing, so style, the active body of language, similarly engages in the Newtonian reciprocity of action and reaction with both the objective world and subjective thought and experience. The metaphor of dynamic equilibrium that promotes the vivacity of language in De Quincey’s discussions of style is paralleled in his discussions of politics, ethics, and manners, where it tends toward conservative principles of moderation.7 He also applies it to the history of philosophy in a footnote to his 1852 essay on Hamilton, where he examines Zeno’s paradoxes as archetypal statements of the conflict between idealism and empiricism, the former of which, recognising “one among the many confounding consequences which may be deduced from the endless divisibility of space” (vol. 17, 165), discredits the principle of motion, while the latter credits it: “Metaphysics denied it as conceivable. Experience affirmed it as actual.” “The conflict depends,” for De Quincey, “upon the parity of the conflicting forces,” a “centrifugal force, which . . . corresponds to a centripetal force” and so forms an “equilibrium.” With these appeals to a favourite analogy from physics De Quincey cuts through

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the “Gordian knot” (vol. 17, 165) of Zeno’s paradox and the subsequent restless oppositional history of Western philosophy, of idealism and empiricism, that he sees it to anticipate. As he finds this dialectic entrenched in language itself he also argues his case by analogy with the integrity of the word: “But how is that antinomy, a secret word of two horns, which we may represent for the moment under the figure of two syllables, lessened or reconciled by repeating one of these syllables, as did Zeno, leaving the secret consciousness to repeat the other?” (vol. 17, 168). In contrast to the partisanship of the philosophical tradition, language is implicitly credited with facilitating balanced and complete acknowledgements of thought and empirical experience. Each of the syllables of philosophy’s devilish “secret word of two horns” is credited with an ontological reality and parity, much as reciprocally and more playfully the “four male guardians” of De Quincey’s childhood in the “Sketch from Childhood No. V” and VII, which also date from 1852, are similarly designated by their initials and treated as physical parts of speech: “the consonants, the vowel, and the hermaphrodite aspirate” (vol. 17, 142). De Quincey observes in “Style No. II” that Socratic dialectic, in contrast to the irresolvable antinomies of Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic, presupposes that truth reveals itself “by moments, (to borrow a word from dynamics)” (vol. 12, 39), the principle by which different forces combine as a third summary force, which is Hegel’s foundational metaphor for the process of aufhebung that impels his grand historical dialectic. Akin to Hegel, the foundational analogies that De Quincey draws from mechanics are rooted in romantic science, his familiarity with which is clear from his translation of one of Kant’s scientific essays under the title of “The Age of the Earth.” Such phenomena as combustion and electricity are theorised here as polar “forces of attraction and repulsion”, a principle that chimes in with his physicalist metaphors of dynamic equilibrium and also forms the basic principle for Mesmerism, which De Quincey champions in “Animal Magnetism” (1834). Mesmerism provides the bridge between “mineral magnetism” and the romantic value of sympathy, for which the compass accordingly becomes an exemplar in this essay: “Never was any natural agent discovered which wore so much the appearance of a magical device; nor even, to this day, has science succeeded in divesting of mystery that sympathy with an unknown object, which constitutes its power” (vol. 9, 359). Conversely, in “Style No. II” he attributes the national and historical schools of artistic creativity to a universal equilibrium of affect, a parallel to the magnetic forces that suffuse the physical world: “This contagion of sympathy runs electrically through

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society, searches high and low for congenial powers, and suffers none to lurk unknown to the possessor” (vol. 12, 53). Parallel to the polar powers of sympathy that he naturalises in his romantic science, De Quincey’s Sketches from Childhood looks back to his earliest formative experiences to describe complementary principles of sympathetic imagination. Through one of these capacities, an adjunct to the principle of memory introduced earlier through the extract from the “Hamilton” essay, he participates, helplessly and haunted, in the ultimate human realities of death and suffering. This is exemplified most poignantly by his recollection of some impoverished, deaf, scrofulous and mentally simple twin girls, who died of scarlatina: “The mother it was . . . that revived, by the altered glances of her haunted eye (at least revived for me), a visionary spectacle of twin sisters, moving for ever up and down the stairs—sisters born apparently for the single purpose of suffering” (vol.17, 138). However, in the case of his father, who died when De Quincey was eight, he knows him only “through a priori ideas” (vol. 17, 75), a facility for shaping reality that is suggestive for his later reflections on language and thought, and which he practises in games with his elder brother William, such as the wars between William’s imaginary kingdom of Tigrosylvania and his imaginary island of Gombroon, the inhabitants of which are rendered primitive and ineffectual by the brother’s decree that they instance Lord Monboddo’s evolutionary hypothesis. The Sketches begin with the death of Thomas’s older sister and, after many vivid and amusing accounts of William, close with the elder brother’s death, a few terse statements in helpless positivist language: “My brother separated from me for ever. I never saw him again . . . before he had completed his sixteenth year, he died of typhus fever” (vol. 17, 144). William was the boy who with “the vertiginous motion of the human top would overpower the force of gravitation” (vol. 17, 80), while the mature Thomas engages this mortal force of falling with correspondingly vigorous ideas and words, walks and dances performed by the more permanent body of language.

Notes 1. This essay draws upon material that was first published in a review essay on The Works of Thomas De Quincey, vols. 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 17 and 18, in Studies in Romanticism 44, no. 1 (Spring 2005). This material is published here with the permission of the Trustees of Boston University. 2. Thomas De Quincey, The Works of Thomas De Quincey, eds. Grevel Lindop and Barry Symonds (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), vol. 9, 355. Subsequent volume and page references are given parenthetically within the text.

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3. Thomas De Quincey, The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson, vol. 2 (London: A. and C. Black, 1897), 86. 4. Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 23, 83. Subsequent page reference is initialled ES and given parenthetically within the text. 5. This mechanistic understanding of the body was well understood by the early 1840s. See for example Sir Charles Bell’s Bridgewater Treatise The Hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design (London: William Pickering, 1833), 111-15. 6. Cf. “Pope” (1838-9): “the best of those later letters between Pope and Swift, &c. are not in themselves at all superior to the letters of sensible and accomplished women, such as leave every town in the island by every post” (The Works of Thomas De Quincey, vol. 13, 256). 7. See “A Tory’s Account of Toryism, Whiggism, and Radicalism, Part I” (The Works of Thomas De Quincey, vol. 9, 395); “On Reform as Affecting the Habits of Private Life” (vol. 8, 350); “Lord Carlisle on Pope [I]” (vol. 17, 208); “French and English Manners” (vol. 17, 44).

CHAPTER FOUR “THUS FAR AND NO FARTHER!”: THE “PROPER LADY” AND THE ENDS OF MELODRAMA KATHERINE NEWEY

Melodrama is often defined by its endings. It is seen to offer an unequivocal choice between opposing absolutes, in which action is uncompromising, final, and devastating, and the resolution inevitable and closed.1 This fatalistic pattern of response can end in triumph or defeat, but the melodramatic ending is constructed so as to admit of little doubt or ambivalence about the moral and emotional resolution of the plot, whatever complications or ambiguities may have been raised in the play. But what if meaning cannot be contained within this structure? And what if we want to interrogate this structure for what it represses, or for what it does with the excess of feeling it generates? An actor once asked me about the power of a melodramatic ending when we were working on a performance of the nautical melodrama Black-Ey’d Susan: “Does a happy ending mean that the audience forgets the suffering endured in the rest of the play?”2 Black-Ey’d Susan is famous for its ending, in which an innocent man is saved in the nick of time from being hanged. It is a melodrama typical of its time: neatly combining the popular character type of the stage sailor, the sentimentality of the beleaguered hard-working couple, and an ending which combines natural justice with the rule of law. Typically, it is a play which has to represent all that is felt to be clichéd and stereotypical of Victorian melodrama. However, a century’s dismissal of its sentimentality has perhaps overshadowed a much more politically-engaged and complex set of thematic concerns.3 And in this essay I want to explore some of those troublings of happy endings in the vogue for “she-dramas” in the 1830s and 40s before moving on to a discussion of the engagement with melodrama of Charlotte Brontë’s most guarded novel, Villette.

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In the “she-dramas”—a group of domestic melodramas mainly produced at the Adelphi theatre in the 1830s—the possibilities of ambivalent or oppositional readings of melodrama are well illustrated. In melodramas such as Agnes de Vere; or, the Wife's Revenge (by John Baldwin Buckstone),4 Jane Lomax; or a Mother’s Crime (Edward Stirling),5 Ellen Wareham, Wife of Two Husbands (versions by William Burton and Buckstone),6 and Isabelle; or the Life of a Woman (Buckstone), female characters are forced into wrong-doing by the very strength of their commitment to a properly “feminine” role. John Baldwin Buckstone’s 1836 melodrama Agnes de Vere is typical: Agnes de Vere marries Alfred de Vere secretly, against her family’s wishes. However, she is a devoted wife and mother, who is driven to criminal extremes by her husband’s gambling and adultery. The crisis happens after five years of marriage, when Agnes accidentally discovers an invitation to a masked ball in her husband’s pocket book. Agnes has not been invited, but stumbles onto the secret assignation her husband has made with the opera dancer, Lydia, and so determines to go to the masked ball dressed as Lydia, in a rose-coloured domino. In the next scene, Lydia is shown in conversation, admitting that she cannot love Alfred de Vere: “’tis a feeling that has long been dead within me” (AdV 20). We also learn that Lydia does not know that Alfred de Vere is married. In the way these things go, we are shown a scene at the masked ball in which Agnes, impersonating Lydia, tells her husband of his wife’s true devotion, while Alfred (thinking he is speaking to Lydia) falls on his knees and offers her all he possesses. Left alone after this declaration, Agnes soliloquises on her fate, and seeing a case of pistols, takes one to shoot herself. But she stops herself when she thinks of her child, and instead determines on revenge. She shoots at Lydia and de Vere, wounding Lydia in the arm. The result of this action is to make Agnes delirious and push her further into criminal behaviour. The audience is carried along with her emotional state through a long soliloquy: Why did I follow him? Why did I go to ball, seeking for misery that I too surely found, and which is now mine for ever? . . . 'twas in the hope to find that I had been deceived—in the mad hope to gain some knowledge that might have proved me to have been in error—but I was not; no, no! 'twas all truth—terrible, maddening truth. How did I escape? How came I home again?—I know not—I recollect nothing distinctly—cries of pursuit—the street filled with carriages—lights flashing to and fro, and no more. I found myself at home—at my drear, wretched home. I dread to think on what I might have done;— but I could not see him embrace her—I was frantic— mad—I knew not what I did—death was in my thoughts—its means were in my hand—as I think—as I reflect—I feel my mind changing. Am I

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This madness continues when Alfred and Lydia enter, and Alfred treats his wife as a servant; when Alfred asks for chocolate, Agnes gives him a poisoned cup of it, and then confessing all, she dies of a broken heart while her husband dies off-stage. Such a raw summary perhaps underlines all the old criticisms of melodrama: that it relies on unlikely events and coincidence, plays too much with unrealistically heightened emotions, and then gives us catastrophic conclusions. But a summary of the events does not really do justice to the play, as it contains some interesting subtleties and twists. The characterisation of the two women, Agnes and Lydia, is particularly interesting, as we are invited to read each in a slightly more complex way than simply as the opposing types of virtuous wife and immoral whore. Agnes, we learn, has Italian blood, which makes her passionate to a fault, and prompts the madness that leads her to murder. Lydia, on the other hand, is shocked to discover that Alfred de Vere is married and demands: Why did you bring me here?—had I known, had I dreamt, that ’twas to introduce me to your wife, I would have spurned you from me as a villain— (AdV 28)

So the ending of this play offers us the possibility of finding a moral villainess, and a wicked heroine. Certainly, the play offers, both to its contemporary audiences and to readers now, the opportunity to reflect on the role of masculine concupiscence and its effects on feminine behaviour, a gap in the moral economy of the Victorian domestic ideal which later sensation novelists exploited to great effect. While Agnes’ Italian blood can be blamed for her passion and its transformation into madness, in Edward Stirling’s play, Jane Lomax; or the Mother’s Crime, it is maternal feeling that drives Jane Lomax to crime. Jane forces her husband to forge the will of his sickly but wealthy employer, Hiedrick Hoffman, in order to benefit their son, and disinherit Hoffman’s absent and ne’er-do-well nephew. Jane justifies her scheme by the illness of her son and his need for medical attention, a change of air, and costly food (JL 10), calling on her “mother’s courage” to aid her in stealing the will from under the pillow of her sleeping employer. In a scene heightened by thunder and lightning, Jane forces her weak-willed husband to forge his employer’s signature to a false will endowing their son with Hoffman’s wealth. She urges him on by reminding him of his role as father and provider for his son. After a lapse of two years, we are

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shown Jane and her son William amid luxury and wealth, Jane’s main concern still for the health of her son. However, in spite of all her exertions, William dies; and Jane is overcome with mental suffering and guilt. Like Agnes de Vere, Jane too becomes mad, alternating between hallucinations of her son and wild laughter. In the final scene, Jane takes poison, and speeds towards her dead son: I’m coming, love! Yes, yes, in a moment! William is calling me—do you not see him?—there he stands! He’s robed in clouds! Farewell! Bless you— (JL 34) [and she dies centre stage with her husband kneeling by her].

Similar dire consequences spring from apparently proper feminine feelings and behaviour7 in Ellen Wareham; or, the Wife of Two Husbands, in which Ellen discovers that, through no fault of her own, she is married bigamously. Although he was confirmed dead in a foreign country, her first husband, Cresford, returns unexpectedly, and believes that Ellen’s second marriage was a plot to cheat him of her dowry. Cresford pursues Ellen for bigamy at the Assizes, and succeeds only in allowing her supporters to demonstrate her essential innocence. Ellen’s good character is further confirmed by her refusal to continue to live with her much-loved second husband when it is clear that they are not legally married. And yet, although Ellen behaves throughout as a thoroughly virtuous and modest woman, to the extent that she even refuses to speak in her own defence at her public trial, this play is unusually frank in its representation of sexual passion and sexual jealousy, and the way a woman’s actions can dominate and ultimately triumph over even the most tyrannical of men. It is as though Ellen’s goodness eventually wears down Cresford, and he dies literally of a broken heart, his dependence on Ellen continuing to his last words: One moment and ’tis done. My heart strings crack—I feel the tyrant’s grasp! Ellen! . . . centre of my life—let me die gazing on thy face!8

In all these plays melodramatic structure and style is strongly marked in plot, dialogue, characterisation, and scene-settings. But in spite of (or perhaps because of) the strength of their generic markers, all these plays also offer alternative readings, focused around the central female characters, which represent women as powerful and active. This dominance is usually punished—madness and death as feminine endings recur throughout the nineteenth century; yet, in an irreducible melodramatic paradox, these characters violate the boundaries of

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femininity primarily in order to fulfil their feminine roles as wives and mothers. It is their transgression that generates the plot interest and emotional punch of the plays, and it is their impassioned speaking out that drives the action. In the melodramas I have discussed (and many others like them), the fact that the women are controlled by the melodramatic ending—they die or are subsumed into normative heterosexual monogamy—is probably secondary to the sensational effects of their actions throughout the course of the play. A decade later, and after the high point of the she-dramas but before the appearance of their offspring, the sensation novels of the 1860s, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette is a novel which denies us a neat, happy ending, yet is fascinated by the vagaries of chance that form a pattern of coincidences which might lead to a happy ending. Villette is a contrary novel, in which Brontë appears to eschew both the easy sentimentality of melodrama, and its expressive passion, through her heroine’s attempts to deny her own passion. Yet fictional narrator Lucy Snowe’s powerful feelings constantly escape her control of her narrative, often through moments of actual theatre. Theatre and theatricality, held in some contempt by Lucy, paradoxically are used by Brontë as a means of projecting Lucy’s inner self, and the novel is marked by Brontë’s use of theatrical metaphors and coups de théatre. Theatre is one way in which Brontë reconciles female passion with middle-class codes of propriety identified by Mary Poovey as the realm of “the proper lady.”9 It is the romantic hero (if M. Paul Emanuel qualifies for such a title) who dies at the end of Villette; the heroine survives, her final comfort belying the passions of her life. But this prevarication is something we come almost to expect from Lucy Snowe, who is surely one of the more disingenuous fictional narrators of the nineteenth century. Lucy’s calm exterior cloaks her passionate nature, and her retirement covers her struggles to be seen and recognised by others throughout the novel. The quietness of the domestic, bourgeois ending she offers us would appear to reject both the catastrophe of the Adelphi she-dramas and the sentimentality of the domestic drama, such as Black-Ey’d Susan. Yet catastrophe and strong feeling (even sentimentality) pervade the novel, and often in the most theatrical of ways. Lucy’s way of seeing the world is through the clash of opposites, and this dialectical structure is used by Brontë to generate plot and create emotional resonance. Her use of a theatrical melodramatic style is most obvious in set pieces such as Miss Marchmont’s death, Lucy Snowe’s departure from England and her arrival in the town of Villette, and Brontë’s use of storms to signify disruption in Lucy Snowe’s life and material circumstances throughout the novel. In the

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“Malevola” chapter, Lucy Snowe’s description of Madame Walravens’ entrance could have come straight from the stage directions of a Gothic melodrama: Just as she turned, a peal of thunder broke, and a flash of lightning blazed broad over salon and boudoir. The tale of magic seemed to proceed with the due accompaniment of the elements. The wanderer, decoyed into the enchanted castle, heard rising, outside, the spell-wakened tempest.10

While this episode signals a deliberate and self-conscious use of the Gothic mode in order to warn readers of the dangers of succumbing to the theatricality of the scene too easily, other episodes in the novel invoke the melodramatic clash of opposites as a way of representing more deeply felt emotional states. Lucy’s account of her mental state on return from La Terrasse (in the chapter “Reaction”) is constructed as a dialogue performed by the diametrically opposed forces of Reason and Imagination, personified as “this hag, this Reason” and “This daughter of Heaven.” The obduracy of Reason and absolute nature of her demands—“she could not rest unless I were altogether crushed, cowed, broken-in, and broken-down” (229)—is contrasted with the “sphere of air of eternal summer” (230) brought by Imagination who “generously lent hope and impulse to paralyzed despair” (230). The excess of language and feeling in this passage, the crushing of the protagonist between two absolute and opposed forces in a struggle for her soul, is typical of the psychologised account of melodrama given by Peter Brooks. But what is not typical is the resolution of the battle, in which Lucy takes control by returning to her day’s work. This is an important point: in her use of the melodramatic, Brontë sets up the promise of spiritual transcendence over the prosaic details of life, but then deliberately denies these possibilities, preferring to concentrate on the increasingly successful liberation of Lucy from claustrophobic structures, both real and imaginary. Lucy moves from the enclosures and cloisters of Madame Beck’s school to the light and space and freedom of the Faubourg Clotilde, out of the city centre, with its views over fields and “still, mild, and fresh” air (488). By the end of the novel it is other people who undertake hazardous journeys to foreign lands, while Lucy maintains and indeed expands her own realm, making Villette her own city, where once it had been foreign and strange. As Lucy seemed to be directed by chance at the beginning of Villette, now it is Paul Emanuel who is at the mercy of Fate, and the elements, and he apparently does not survive as Lucy did. Actual performances within the novel focus our attention on

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theatricalised ways of seeing—of both the self and others. It is not a coincidence that it is at a public concert performance that Dr John sees the “real” Ginevra: she is on display, as are all the other members of the audience, in Lucy’s description of the concert in Chapter 20. In fact, the account of the actual concert is passed over very quickly: as Lucy says, “On the concert I need not dwell; the reader would not care to have my impressions thereanent;”—so whether we would care to hear about the concert or not, Lucy is not going to tell us—what is more important is the occasion for public sociability that the concert provides. Looking, and being looked at, are recurring activities of Lucy (and others) in the novel, even when most resisted. Although she declares herself to be suspicious of performance, theatre, with its serious play at reality, is used by Lucy as a tool to reveal truth, as, for example, in the vaudeville sequence where Lucy takes pleasure in portraying the romance between Ginevra and Dr John through the medium of the play. The authenticity of the “real” as discerned through its theatricalised other is constantly under question, yet it is the real—the truth—which Lucy seeks. The novel’s ambivalence over both spectacle and spectatorship is at its most acute in the episode of Vashti, the actress. And in this chapter important ideas about the position of women and the roles they must play as spectacle and spectators are expressed through examples of performance and observation. The sequence demonstrates the chaos which can result from female passion unable to be contained by a dramatic structure. Lucy’s reaction to Vashti is one of complete identification, resulting in extreme pain—as John Stokes argues, “Vashti serves Brontë primarily as a mirror for Lucy Snowe.”11 However, this mirror does not reflect a single response. Vashti is represented not only as an emblem of suffering, but also as a symbol of triumphant womanhood. Lucy says of Vashti: I have said that she does not resent her grief. No; the weakness of that word would make it a lie. To her, what hurts becomes immediately embodied: she looks on it as a thing that can be attacked, worried down, torn in shreds. Scarcely a substance herself, she grapples to conflict with abstractions. (258)

How much could this be description of Lucy herself, battling to survive her own life? Lucy’s description of the last moments of the play present performance as extreme exposure: when, as it seemed, an inordinate will, convulsing a perishing mortal frame, bent it to battle with doom and death, fought every inch of ground,

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sold dear every drop of blood, resisted to the latest the rape of every faculty, would see, would hear, would breathe, would live, up to, within, well nigh beyond the moment when death says to all sense and being— “Thus far and no farther!” (260)

The disastrous consequences of such public display are suggested by the fire which breaks out in the theatre. Sally Shuttleworth reads this through nineteenth-century arguments about female psychology which held that if women’s moral or religious principles are weakened or removed, the female mind becomes tempestuous; in John Bucknill’s words, “subterranean fires become active, and the crater gives forth smoke and flame.”12 Vashti’s performance has indeed come from Hell, and causes anarchy in the comfortable and bourgeois theatre in the comfortable and bourgeois town of Villette. We are made aware of the revolutionary potential of uncontrolled female expression, while at the same time, we are warned about the danger and damage which the female artist can cause herself, if she allows her control to slip. The Vashti episode is a picture of a woman at once vulnerable, but empowered by the revelation of her essential nature—her truth through play. To return, then, to the actor’s question about the balance between the contents and endings of melodrama: by paying attention to the excess of emotion and its spillage outside of generic controls in these domestic melodramas, we can open up possibilities for reading melodramatic form against the grain, enabling us particularly to challenge the power of the catastrophic or triumphant ending which tends to reinforce prescriptive and constraining gender roles. In the ending of Villette, Charlotte Brontë demonstrates how this might be done. In narrating the final storm (in a novel punctuated by them), Lucy again draws on the powerful and expressive vocabulary of melodrama, describing the event in terms which go beyond the material to suggest the metaphysical significance of the catastrophe. However, she pulls away from narrating the consequences of the storm and quite deliberately invites her readers to imagine the ending. While it is accepted that we should read through the indeterminacy of the second-last paragraph—“Trouble no quiet, kind heart; leave sunny imaginations hope” (496)—to assume Paul Emanuel’s death, I would argue that Brontë’s “little puzzle” as she called it, is a strategy to avoid closure, and particularly to avoid the neat placement of Lucy Snowe into the relational categories of either silent, happy wife, or sorrowing, bereft widow. And, I would argue, this is the final way in which Brontë appropriates the transgressive possibilities of melodrama to challenge the constraints of the “proper lady” in Victorian fiction.

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Notes 1. For the two most influential of these standard discussions, see Michael Booth, English Melodrama (London: Jenkins, 1965) and Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976). 2. I am grateful to Beverley Blankenship for first asking this question. 3. Jane Moody makes this argument in more detail in relation to Jerrold’s work in “The Silence of New Historicism: A Mutinous Echo from 1830,” Nineteenth Century Theatre 24, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 61-89. 4. John Baldwin Buckstone, Agnes de Vere; or, the Wife’s Revenge (London: William Strange, 1836). Page references to this edition are initialled AdV and given parenthetically within the text. 5. Edward Stirling, Jane Lomax; or a Mother’s Crime (London: Chapman and Hall, n.d.). First performed at the Adelphi Theatre, 4 February 1839. Page references to cited edition are initialled JL and given parenthetically within the text. 6. John Baldwin Buckstone, Ellen Wareham, Wife of Two Husbands. First performed at the Haymarket Theatre, 24 April 1833. William Burton, Ellen Wareham, Wife of Two Husbands. First performed at the Victoria Theatre, 12 December 1834. 7. For a discussion of the potential for representation of oppositional politics by working-class female characters in melodrama, see Daniel Duffy, “Heroic Mothers and Militant Lovers: Representations of Lower-Class Women in Melodrama of the 1830s and 1840s,” Nineteenth Century Theatre (Summer, 1999): 41-65. 8. William E. Burton, Ellen Wareham (London: Lacy’s Acting Edition, n.d.), 41. 9. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 10. Charlotte Brontë, Villette (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 389-90. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically within the text. 11. John Stokes, “Rachel’s ‘Terrible Beauty’: an Actress Among the Novelists,” ELH 5, no. 4 (Winter 1984): 779. 12. Cited in Sally Shuttleworth, “‘The Surveillance of a Sleepless Eye’: The Constitution of Neurosis in Villette,” in One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature, ed. George Levine and Alan Rauch (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 321.

CHAPTER FIVE GASKELL AND ELIOT ON WOMEN IN FRANCE JOANNE SHATTOCK

In 1854, the French philosopher Victor Cousin contributed an article on French women of the ancien régime to the Revue des Deux Mondes. The article was subsequently published as Madame de Sablé. Études sur Les Femmes Illustres et la Société du XVIIe Siècle (Paris: Didier, 1854). In the space of four months the book was reviewed by Elizabeth Gaskell and by Marian Evans, by the former in her article “Company Manners” in Household Words for 20 May 1854,1 and by the latter in the Westminster Review for October 1854.2 More than just an interesting coincidence, the two articles were written at significant points in the reviewers’ respective careers and are revealing of their authors in a number of ways. Gaskell was poised for a second major success as a novelist, her relationship with Dickens at its most intense and productive. The article was to be her last contribution to Household Words before the serialisation of North and South, which began on 2 September and which would alter her relationship with its proprietor irrevocably. Marian Evans was in Weimar with George Henry Lewes, at the beginning of what was part honeymoon, part working holiday, when she received a letter from John Chapman, the proprietor of the Westminster on 5 August inviting her to review the book. Both women had recently encountered European intellectual life at first hand, an exposure which had made a profound impression on them. The life and times of Madeleine de Souvré, marquise de Sablé (1599-1678), a celebrated seventeenth-century Parisian salon hostess, struck a chord with both. Gaskell had been contributing to Household Words for four years, beginning with her story “Lizzie Leigh” which was serialised in the first number, and alternating short fiction, including “The Well of Pen Morfa,” “The Heart of John Middleton,” and the tales which comprised Cranford, with discursive essays and informal book reviews.3 Dickens took a close interest in her stories, offering suggestions for the plots, and sometimes

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supplying the titles. He was less concerned with her non-fiction, usually writing after publication to express his approval. As was his custom, she was paid slightly above the standard rate for the article. Marian Evans and Lewes had left England for Germany on 20 July 1854, a momentous decision to begin their “marriage” away from friends and family. Her translation of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity was published shortly before they left. A practical reason for the trip was to gather material for Lewes’s life of Goethe. Marian Evans was working on a translation of Spinoza’s Ethics, and also translating material for Lewes. The gossip circulating in London following news of their elopement and the reactions of friends and immediate family had yet to reach them. Money was short. Lewes was sending the £20 per month he earned from articles in the Leader back to his wife.4 The offer of work for the Westminster was welcome. She ordered the book immediately from a Weimar bookseller, planning to include a discussion of Sainte Beuve’s Portraits des Femmes (1844) and Jules Michelet’s Les Femmes de la Révolution (1854) in her article. She finished reading Cousin on 13 August, and sent the review, which would be given the title “Woman in France: Madame de Sablé” to Chapman on 8 September. He sent her a cheque for £15.00 in return. The money was important, but the book’s subject was also intriguing, and it came at a propitious time. Both Lewes and Marian found social life on the continent more open and relaxed than in England. In Weimar they were received hospitably by the local intelligentsia and officials surrounding the court. “No one here seems to find it at all scandalous that we should be together,”5 she was later to write to Chapman. In an article on “Liszt, Wagner and Weimar” which she wrote for Fraser’s Magazine the following summer (July 1855) she noted how women were free to attend the theatre unescorted: “The ladies come alone, and slip quietly into their places without need of “protection”—a proof of civilisation perhaps more than equivalent to our pre-eminence in patent locks and carriage springs,”6 she commented. The person who most impressed her was Liszt. She had extensive conversations with him, in French (her spoken German at the time was hesitant) and memorably she heard him play. “For the first time in my life I beheld real inspiration”—she recorded in her journal.7 Liszt was living openly with the Polish-born Princess Carolyn SaynWittgenstein, the wife of a Russian aristocrat, who showed Marian a number of kindnesses. To the future George Eliot Weimar was both “liberated and liberating” as Margaret Harris, the co-editor of Eliot’s Journals comments.8

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Reading Cousin’s book during her first month in Weimar, and in a period of intense personal happiness, Marian Evans responded intently to its picture of seventeenth-century French intellectual life and to the role of women in that life. She begins the essay with an unflattering reflection on the imitative quality of English writing by women: “With a few remarkable exceptions, our own feminine literature is made up of books which could have been better written by men, books which have the same relation to literature in general, as academic prize poems have to poetry: when not a feeble imitation, they are usually an absurd exaggeration of the masculine style, like the swaggering gait of a bad actress in male attire,”9 in startling contrast to: [t]hose delightful women of France, who, from the beginning of the seventeenth to the close of the eighteenth century, formed some of the brightest threads in the web of political and literary history, wrote under circumstances which left the feminine character of their minds uncramped by timidity, and unstrained by mistaken effort. They were not trying to make a career for themselves; they thought little, in many cases not at all, of the public; they wrote letters to their lovers and friends, memoirs of their every-day lives, romances in which they gave portraits of their familiar acquaintances, and described the tragedy or comedy which was going on before their eyes. Always refined and graceful, often witty, sometimes judicious, they wrote what they saw, thought, and felt, in their habitual language, without proposing any model to themselves, without any intention to prove that women could write as well as men, without affecting manly views or suppressing womanly ones. (9)

In France alone, she continued, Woman has had a vital influence on the development of literature, in France alone the mind of woman has passed like an electric current through the language, making crisp and definite what is elsewhere heavy and blurred, in France alone, if the writings of women were swept away, a serious gap would be made in the national history. (9)

She then reflects on reasons for this. One possibility is physiological. The small brain and vivacious temperament of the Gallic race are more conducive to intellectual creativity than the larger brain and slower temperament of the English and Germans. A secondary cause of this achievement, she suggests tentatively, was “the laxity of opinion and practice with regard to the marriage-tie. It is undeniable, that unions formed in the maturity of thought and feeling, and grounded only on inherent fitness and mutual attraction, tended to bring women into more

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intelligent sympathy with men, and to heighten and complicate their share in the political drama.” (11) But the main source of “feminine culture and development” in France during this period was the influence of the salons, where men and women mingled freely, conversed as equals on all subjects, not just literature, but war, politics, religion, daily events. Madame de Sablé’s forte was not that she wrote herself, but that she stimulated others to write, Pascal and La Rochefoucauld, among them. The “absence of originality made her all the more receptive towards the originality of others” (30). She was “not a genius, not a heroine, but a woman whom men could more than love— whom they could make their friend, confidante, and counsellor; the sharer, not of their joys and sorrows only, but of their ideas and aims” (36). Eliot contrasts Madame de Sablé with the women in high society during the equivalent period in England, the reigns of James I, Charles I and Charles II, and then brings her discussion to the present day. The “superiority of womanly development” in France is not only of historical interest, it has a bearing “on the culture of women in the present day”: Women become superior in France by being admitted to a common fund of ideas, to common objects of interest with men; and this must ever be the essential condition at once of true womanly culture and of true social wellbeing . . . Let the whole field of reality be laid open to woman as well as to man, and then that which is peculiar in her mental modification, instead of being, as it is now, a source of discord and repulsion between the sexes, will be found to be a necessary complement to the truth and beauty of life. Then we shall have that marriage of minds which alone can blend all the hues of thought and feeling in one lovely rainbow of promise for the harvest of human happiness. (36-7)

That uncharacteristically lyrical ending to her review is undoubtedly linked to the period in which it was written, her happiness reflected in individual entries in her journal, and in the “Recollections of Weimar” which she developed from her journal, but did not publish. But it is also related to her own predicament, as often the sole woman in the Westminster Review and Chapman circles, surrounded entirely by intellectually able, even brilliant, men, but no female companionship. Weimar had begun to introduce other possibilities in society. Reading Cousin had persuaded her that circumstances had always been different in France, even during the present century, beginning with Mme de Stael, followed by George Sand, and their contemporaries. John Rignall, in a recent article on “George Eliot and the Idea of Travel” reminds us that for George Eliot the primary importance of travel

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was private and personal. It afforded opportunities for personal development, self-culture, and above all self-scrutiny. “I seem to have removed to a distance from myself when I am away from the petty circumstances that make up my ordinary environment,” she wrote on an earlier holiday in 1847. “I can take myself up by the ears and inspect myself, like any other queer monster on a small scale.”10 The same process was going on during her stay in Weimar. “Woman in France” is not a personal document in the manner of the Weimar journal or the “Recollections,” but it reflects the process of self-scrutiny and reflection of her travel writing. Moreover, it bears the same relationship to her developing career as a writer as the later, better known essays, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” and “The Natural History of German Life,” both published in 1856. In the reflections on women’s role in intellectual and cultural life, the perceived need for a recognised equality with men, the crippling effect of imitation or feigned masculinity, there are anticipations of “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” As in all her Westminster articles Marian Evans is writing for its welleducated, mainly male readers. The longer quotations from Cousin are in English, but they are interspersed with shorter ones in French, the assumption being that this will pose no difficulty for her readers. Reflecting on the demise of the salon, the product of a closed cultural coterie, she sees the modern, ever-widening public now served by journalism, rather than conversation: As the old coach-roads have sunk into disuse through the creation of railways, so journalism tends more and more to divert information from the channel of conversation into the channel of the Press: no one is satisfied with a more circumscribed audience than that very indeterminate abstraction, “the public”, and men find a vent for their opinions not in talk, but in “copy.” (15-16)

She wittily suggests that if technological changes continue, further development of the electric telegraph could “reduce us to a society of mutes” (16). Writing of Madame de Sablé’s attempt to insert a notice of La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes into the Journal des Savants only to have La Rochefoucauld edit out her negative comments, she adds, “In some points, we see, the youth of journalism was not without promise of its future” (33). That reference to “men find[ing] vent for their opinions” was deliberate. Marian Evans the journalist has no scruples about feigning masculinity. “We read the Athenaeum askance at the tea-table, and take notes from the Philosophical Journal at a soirée; we invite our friends that

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we may thrust a book into their hands, and presuppose an exclusive desire in the ‘ladies’ to discuss their own matters, ‘that we may crackle the Times’ at our ease” (16), she writes in characteristic Westminster mode. But in the rest of her review, and especially its emotive ending she projects an ungendered, indeed an almost personal voice, which undercuts her masculine persona. Eliot wrote a second article for the Westminster, “Memoirs of the Court of Austria” (April 1855) during the next phase of their travels, in Berlin. Contributions to the “Belles-lettres” section of “Contemporary Literature” followed in the July and October 1855 numbers, all published after their return to England. At Lewes’s instigation, possibly the earliest example of his conducting professional negotiations on her behalf, she wrote two pot-boiling articles for Fraser’s Magazine adapted from “Recollections of Weimar,” “Three Months in Weimar” (June 1855) and “Liszt, Wagner and Weimar” (July 1855) already referred to. The Fraser articles were the only occasions on which she published material from her travel journals. But of all the journalism written in 1854-5 her essay “Woman in France” stands out, the product of a period of personal fulfilment, a reflection on the role of women in the wider world of literary, political and scientific culture, and a self-conscious preparation for her future novel-writing career. Elizabeth Gaskell also warmed to her subject. Like Marian Evans she had begun to travel on the continent, firstly to Germany in 1841, and more recently, she made her first visit to Paris in the summer of 1853, followed by a second, with her daughter Marianne, in January 1854. Like Eliot and Lewes she was to make a habit of escaping to the continent after completing a book, notably her trip to Italy in 1857 before publication of The Life of Charlotte Brontë, and an extensive tour in France in 1862 after finishing Sylvia’s Lovers. Travel for Gaskell was not the intensely private process of self-culture that it was for George Eliot. She travelled with one or more of her daughters, occasionally with her husband, eager to ensure that they too had an enjoyable time. Immensely sociable, she enjoyed visiting friends, and extending her network of acquaintances. Her recent exposure to contemporary Parisian literary and cultural life made a profound impression on her. Through her friends the Schwabes she was introduced to and captivated by English-born Mary Clarke Mohl (1793-1883), one of the most celebrated women in Paris, and a nineteenthcentury equivalent of the salon hostesses of the ancien régime. The attraction was mutual, Madame Mohl pronouncing her “the most agreeable literary lady I have yet seen.”11 The unconventional Mary Clarke had had an intimate but platonic friendship with the polyglot scholar Claude

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Fauriel. After his death she married the German orientalist Julius Mohl. They knew everyone in French political, scientific and literary circles. Cousin was rumoured to have been one of her suitors. Guizot, Sainte Beuve, de Tocqueville, Renan, Hugo and Constant among others frequented the famous Friday evenings at their apartment at 120 Rue du Bac. Madame Mohl was credited with having revived the art of the salon in French cultural life. Some of this she had learned at the feet of Madame Récamier, the last of the great hostesses, in whose house she had lodged and about whom she later published a book, Madame Récamier: with a Sketch of the History of Society in France (1862). Gaskell was to help her publish an article on Récamier in Walter Bagehot’s National Review in 1860.12 Gaskell no doubt saw Mary Mohl in Cousin’s portrait of Madame de Sablé. She was also acquiring an interest in seventeenth-century French history and literature, an interest which would become focussed in a projected life of Madame de Sévigné (Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné 1626-96), a celebrated intellectual and letter writer and contemporary of Madame de Sablé, which she extensively researched in the early 1860s but never completed.13 “Company Manners” is a response to Cousin’s article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, but also to Mary Clarke Mohl, who is the “French lady” frequently quoted, along with her husband, the “French gentleman.” The contrast in style with Marian Evans’s formal book review could not have been greater, but Gaskell’s article, more essay than review, is equally serious. Her subject is the breath of fresh air brought by the French style of entertaining, as practised by the Mohls and their circle, following in the tradition of Madame de Sablé, in contrast to the stuffy formality of English middle-class dinners and evening receptions. Gaskell makes it clear that she is writing about entertainment designed to promote serious conversation, and notes ruefully how often, in her experience, excessive food and elaborate preparations stifled all spontaneity and sparkle. Like Marian Evans she tailors her material adroitly to the interests and capabilities of her readers. In her article there is no sprinkling of French quotations. She affects to wrestle with the translation of “tenir un salon.” “Receiving company,” or “holding a drawing-room” won’t do, “Shall we call it the art of ‘Sabléing’?”14 she suggests. She then regales her readers with stories of formal dinners gone wrong, the tedium of guests trying to be witty or imparting unnecessary information, digestions ruined by anxious hosts who provide too many courses. “No wonder I am old before my time,” she reflects ruefully over one such experience (308). The French alternative is so much more stimulating. To be a good hostess one

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needs to have “touches of the gipsy,” as she puts it, to relish the impromptu and unexpected. Madame de Sablé had it, she suggests. Madame Mohl certainly did. As Jenny Uglow points out, Mary and Julius Mohl’s voices are heard in this article, as in several others written at the same time. The “French lady” stresses the value of not inviting celebrities to one’s soirées: “Bah!” said the lady. “Celebrities! what has one to do with them in society? As celebrities, they are simply bores. Because a man has discovered a planet, it does not follow that he can converse agreeably, even on his own subjects; often people are drained dry by one action or expression of their lives—drained dry for all the purposes of a “salon.” The writer of books, for instance, cannot afford to talk twenty pages for nothing, so he is either profoundly silent, or else he gives you the mere rinsings of his mind. (298)

“Company Manners” is a tribute to Mary Mohl, by her new friend, in the flattering echoes of her conversations, and the detailed descriptions of her Friday salons. Her influence on Elizabeth Gaskell was to continue until the end of the latter’s life. She was to write about her again in her three part series on “French Life” published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1864. As Uglow notes, three women were to influence Gaskell’s thinking about women’s role in society, the clash of independence and domestic life, “the quest for purpose and the need for love”: Charlotte Brontë, whom she had already met, now Mary Mohl. Through her she would meet the third, Florence Nightingale.15 “Company Manners” is a review of Cousin’s work, but cast as an essay about entertaining. Like Marian Evans’s, her French was sufficiently fluent to make the task agreeable, and again like Marian Evans she had a grasp of the historical period. She slips in information about Madame de Sablé’s contemporaries, Madame de Rambouillet and other salon hostesses. She notes Cousin’s earlier book about de Sablé’s friend the Duchesse de Longueville published in 1853, and Molière’s famous ridicule of the salons (295). Madame de Sablé’s salons, she suggests, took place in rooms where books were being read, rather than ostentatiously put out for guests to see. In contrast to Madame de Sablé and her modern counterparts, the English have yet to learn how to inject mental stimulus into social occasions. She recalls an incident from her childhood when tea in the school-room, followed by adventure stories round the fire, told by a distinguished scientist, easily capped the formal dinner which was to follow downstairs. Gaskell could write straightforward book reviews. She had already published two in the Athenaeum; she would later review for

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the Reader. But professional journalist as she was, she knew what would suit Household Words readers and she adapted her material accordingly. The unexpected conjunction of these review essays by two major women novelists, one established, and one in the making, reveals much about their perception of women’s role in literary culture, the place of journalism in their developing literary careers, and their stratagems in adapting to the literary marketplace of the mid-nineteenth century.

Notes 1. Elizabeth Gaskell, “Company Manners,” Household Words 9 (20 May 1854): 323-31; reprinted in The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, 10 vols., gen. ed. Joanne Shattock, vol. 1, Journalism, Early Fiction and Personal Writings, ed. Joanne Shattock (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005), 293-310. 2. Marian Evans, “Woman in France: Madame de Sablé,” Westminster Review, o.s.,62, n.s., 6 (Oct 1854): 448-73, reprinted in George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and other Writings, ed. Antonia Byatt and Nicholas Warren (London: Penguin, 1990), 8-37. 3. For the range of her contributions, see The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, vols. 1 and 2. 4. Rosemary Ashton, G.H. Lewes: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 152. 5. George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols., vol. 8 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954-78), 124. 6. George Eliot, “Liszt, Wagner and Weimar,” Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 117. 7. George Eliot, The Journals of George Eliot, ed. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P. 1998), 21. 8. Margaret Harris, “What George Eliot Saw in Europe: The Evidence of her Journals,” in George Eliot and Europe, ed. John Rignall (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), 7. 9. George Eliot, “Woman in France: Madame de Sablé,” in George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, 8. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically within the text. 10. The George Eliot Letters, vol. 1, 239-40; quoted in John Rignall, “George Eliot and the Idea of Travel,” Yearbook of English Studies, ed. John Batchelor, 36, no.2 (2006): 145. 11. Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (London: Faber, 1993), 348. 12. National Review 10 (April 1860). 13. See headnote to “French Life” in Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, vol. 1, 357-8. 14. “Company Manners,” Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, vol. 1, 296. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically within the text. 15. Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, 343.

CHAPTER SIX ECONOMIES OF LOVE AND LAW IN A TALE OF TWO CITIES SIMON PETCH

“We all have our various ways of gaining a livelihood” says one of the ancient clerks of Tellson’s Bank to Jerry Cruncher,1 and like many of Dickens’s later novels, A Tale of Two Cities is very much interested in various kinds of work. The novel’s analysis of working relationship is grounded in its presentation of middle-class professional Englishmen, in particular the barristers Sydney Carton and Charles Stryver. The working lives of Charles Darnay and Dr Manette take us between England and France, and offer historical contrasts between French and English cultures of professionalism. In “Monsieur the Marquis in Town” (Book the Second, chapter seven), Dickens’s description of court life in the ancien régime includes a diagnosis of professional incompetence: “Military officers destitute of military knowledge; naval officers with no idea of a ship; civil officers without a notion of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics, of the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives; all totally unfit for their several callings, all lying horribly in pretending to belong to them, but all nearly or remotely of the order of Monseigneur, and therefore foisted on all public employments from which anything was to be got; these were to be told off by the score and the score” (110). The accumulating adverbs and repetition of sound generate a quasi-Swiftian energy that leaves the reader in no doubt about the score. This excoriating judgment is then gendered; for the extreme example of the disfiguring “leprosy of unreality” that sums up the world of the ancien régime, in which “work” is indistinguishable from parasitic and nepotistic inefficiency, is the perverse denial of the natural female activity of childbirth and childrearing. Among “the assembled devotees of Monseigneur” it was “hard to discover . . . one solitary wife, who, in her manners and appearance, owned to being a Mother . . . Peasant women kept the unfashionable

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babies close, and brought them up, and charming grandmammas of sixty dressed and supped as at twenty” (111). This repression of female labour by fashion is a mark of the radical dysfunctionality of French society before the revolution; but republican society’s main female representative in the novel, the childless Madame Defarge, is even less of a mother. Lucie’s appeal to her “As a wife and mother!” falls on stonily unmaternal ears, and her cry for mercy to a “sister-woman” would, in the context of what we later learn about Madame Defarge’s own sister, have to be provocative. Madame Defarge’s sense of relationship is clinically detached, as is her response to Lucie’s plea for mercy for her husband: “Your husband is not my business here . . . It is the daughter of your father who is my business here” (278). Lucie’s failure to understand what the French woman is talking about suggests that her own language of humanity and compassion is as foreign to Madame Defarge’s discourse of revenge as the English of Miss Pross, “a subject of His Most Gracious Majesty King George the Third” (300), is foreign to the French spoken by the citizeness of the Republic. This linguistic impasse between “subject” and “citizeness” intimates the later struggle between Madame Defarge and Miss Pross; so the clash of working cultures that the novel presents is both inflected and intensified by differences of gender, class, language and nation. Madame Defarge is a working wife, whom we see on duty in the wineshop: “Madame Defarge immediately took her post at her desk, counted the small moneys that had been taken during her absence, examined the stock, went through the entries in the book, made other entries of her own, checked the serving man in every possible way, and finally dismissed him to bed” (184). Dickens’s fascination with the power of this woman, which is usually characterised by eroticised horror, is here rendered as quasicomic admiration, suggested by the business-like efficiency with which the prose marshals so many verbs of agency for her to govern. Her pride of place in her ménage is validated by her sidelined husband who, as she secures the money for the night “walked up and down, complacently admiring, but never interfering; in which condition, indeed, as to the business and his domestic affairs, he walked up and down through life” (184). The triangulation of business woman, serving man, and husband suggests Madame Defarge’s crucial position, both politically and economically, in her domestic situation. That the novel should bring Lucie Manette and Thérèse Defarge into conflict is inevitable, for they are, as is often acknowledged,2 opposed models of feminine behaviour in this novel. Consequently the Manette home in London represents a very different domestic economy from that of the Defarge establishment.

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The tranquil Manette household in Soho is focalised for us through the eyes of the “smilingly observant” Jarvis Lorry on a Sunday afternoon visit (Book the Second, chapter six). The two floors of the household are isolated, if not quite insulated, from the trades that are pursued in other parts of the house. The three rooms on the first floor consist of the doctor’s bedroom, of a consulting-room which is also the dining-room (reminding us that Manette’s work puts food on the table), and of “the best room,” in which “were Lucie’s birds, and flowers, and books, and desk, and worktable, and box of water-colours” (98). Lucie’s domestic domain, which includes her “work,” is thus contiguous with her father’s professional space, and her work is symbolically functional in that it produces the domestic economy which it characterises; for just as the arrangement and disposition of the furniture are “expressive of their originator” (98), so Lucie’s work metonymically figures her feminine nature. This “delightful” distribution of her presence in the disposition of the household objects is central to the novel’s domestic politics,3 but the economic power of Lucie’s place in the household hierarchy is masked by the presence of her companion, Miss Pross. Miss Pross is paid for her position, although, as she tells Lorry: “I have lived with the darling—or the darling has lived with me, and paid me for it; which she certainly should never have done, you may take your affidavit, if I could have afforded to keep either myself or her for nothing—since she was ten years old” (99). The tortuously punctuated parenthesis works hard to equalise the relationship of mistress and servant by suggesting that employment is not an authentically feminine model of connection. Yet the payment which, in Miss Pross’s view, is incidental to her relationship with Lucie, is also evidently the reason for its existence: her brother “had stripped her of everything she possessed . . . and had abandoned her in poverty for evermore” (100). But the novel anxiously insists that her truly significant service is not that for which she is paid; rather, it is endorsed by the authoritative consciousness of Lorry as “the faithful service of the heart” (100). This quality is what Miss Pross shares with Sydney Carton, which is why she reacts so jealously to him. This emotional significance disguises Miss Pross’s socio-economic function. Taking charge of the lower regions” (103)—apparently additional to the “occupied two floors” (96)—she links the upstairs and downstairs worlds of the Manette establishment. To Lorry she is “a woman of business” (101),4 running the below-stairs domestic economy with such inventive efficiency that “the woman and girl who formed the staff of domestics regarded her as quite a Sorceress, or Cinderella’s Godmother” (103). There is some slippage here. Pross’s business

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efficiency is coded as feminine alliance, which disguises the fact that the domestic economy in which Lucie holds pride of place is the product of the labour of others as much as a reflection of Lucie; the menials who actually prepare the food get no more significant attention than the cook who prepares Monseigneur’s chocolate. The disguised politics of the Lucie-Pross relationship proleptically suggest Walter Bagehot’s celebrated distinction between the “dignified” and “efficient” aspects of the English constitution: Lucie as the “fountain of honour” gives the household an appropriately feminine dignity, while Miss Pross as “the spring of business” keeps things working efficiently.5 From this political basis the constitution of the Manette establishment represents the symbiotic relationship of masculine professionalism to a hierarchy of feminine work, for the doctor’s professional life both supports, and is sustained by, this hierarchy. And, as is so often the case in this novel, the symbiosis is triangulated: Lucie’s emotional dependency on Miss Pross is matched by her economic dependence on her father, who is in turn emotionally dependent on his daughter but whose work could not be carried out without the economically efficient running of the household by Miss Pross. Lucie herself is a largely passive figure in A Tale of Two Cities, and the novel’s perspectives are masculine in the sense that they are more concerned with how men relate to Lucie than vice versa. In their moon-lit conversation on the night before Lucie’s marriage, Manette tells his daughter of his thoughts, in prison, of the daughter growing up with no consciousness of him, and of “another and more real child” (197). Through these two images of the feminine, of the daughter who never existed and who therefore had no consciousness of him, and “another and more real child,” Manette claims that he tried to centre himself—to find himself through an exercise in imaginative triangulation.6 When Darnay declares his love for Lucie to Manette, he perceptively fleshes out the fantasy of composite femininity that Lucie fulfils for her father: “I know that when she is clinging to you, the hands of baby, girl, and woman, all in one, are round your neck” (138). These two conversations, between father and prospective son-in-law, and between father and daughter, both inspired by the forthcoming marriage of Darnay and Lucie, and both haunted by the dead mothers of Darnay and Lucie, are the locus of masculine-feminine relations in A Tale of Two Cities. “What is the magic secret, my darling, of your being everything to all of us, as if there were only one of us . . . ?” (221). Here, from the security of his marriage, Darnay gives voice to Lucie’s function in the novel as the fulfilment of various masculine needs. The professional man’s lack of, and

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consequent need for, values and qualities associated with the feminine is brought to the fore in a cluster of chapters concerning the courtship of Lucie Manette by Darnay, Stryver, and Carton (Book the Second, chapters ten through thirteen). Lorry’s dealings with Stryver as the barrister foreshadows his suit for Lucie Manette are central to the novel’s treatment of masculinity, for Stryver is blind to his needs even as he expresses them. The ironically titled chapter “The Fellow of Delicacy” (Book the Second, chapter twelve), consists of two interviews between Stryver and Jarvis Lorry, in which Stryver first declares his intention to pursue his suit for Lucie, and then claims to have thought better of it. These interviews mingle public, institutional space and private, personal discourse: the barrister visits the banker at Tellson’s, but announces himself as having come for “a private word” (148). Resenting the unsolicited confidence that Stryver imposes on him, Lorry responds with vigour “as an old fellow, who has carried Miss Manette in his arms” (152); and finding himself drawn into a triangular pattern, Lorry assumes the disinterested position of trustee that is his second nature—here, specifically, trustee of the feminine.7 It is now a legal conversation: Stryver’s suit is a case argued “on substantial worldly grounds,” he calls himself for the plaintiff, and as Chief Justice he is himself “satisfied that no plainer case could be” (147). Lorry responds to the barrister by stating his own principled position that “The young lady goes before all” (151), and advises Stryver not to proceed with his suit. Their second conversation takes place in Stryver’s chambers, which is also his home, suggesting that his identity is institutional. Certainly he does not leave legal ground, using “the art of an Old Bailey tactician” (153) to put everyone else in the wrong. His judicial summation of the case leaves everyone at a loss but himself, especially Lucie, who, he implies, may live to repent in poverty and obscurity. Stryver withdraws to his institutional position of “a worldly point of view” (154) by denying the feminine, by rubbishing it, and refusing to take it—or Miss Manette— seriously. This tactic turns his own emotional needs into Lucie’s worldliness: such devious rhetorical accounting, and such forensic backpedalling, leave the banker at a loss. Free to revert to type, Stryver eventually marries “a florid widow with property and three boys” (220), his stepsons giving him the power to patronise Darnay, and so Lucie. In contrast to Stryver, Sydney Carton—“The Fellow of No Delicacy”—admits his own need for the feminine through his love for Lucie Manette. This need is his authority to point Lucy’s symbolic status; for Carton, in his first, highly aggressive conversation with Darnay, specifically links femininity with sympathy and compassion: “Is it worth

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being tried for one’s life, to be the object of such sympathy and compassion, Mr Darnay?” (88). Beginning with this impertinently leading question (which Darnay does not answer), Carton throughout the novel draws out Lucie’s significance as a figure of compassion.8 Lucie’s qualities are shared by Darnay’s mother, of whom Manette had written that “she was a good, compassionate lady” with “a woman’s sympathy” (343). And when Darnay is imprisoned in Paris “soft and compassionate voices of women” (266) are conspicuous among the many voices that offer him encouragement. Thus the territory of proper feminine significance is charted by men, including the male narrator (and of course it excludes Thérèse Defarge). Sympathy and compassion configure a composite quality that signifies femininity; it is as if femininity and compassion are locked into a mutually dependent relationship of co-signification for which the novel holds only insubstantial referents. Pamela Hansford Johnson has said: “Compassion is the greatest of the virtues, yet the mere word has been so debased that it may be used to cover a multitude of sentimentalities.”9 Such is surely the case here, although in mitigation it might be said that Dickens’s perspectives emphasise the masculine needs to which compassion and sympathy answer. Carton presses his suit like a lawyer, although he does so in a far finer legal tone than “bully” Stryver. To Lucie, as she later tells her husband, Carton reveals a bleeding heart. His telling her that she is the last dream of his soul crucially precedes Darnay’s proposal to Lucie, although Carton suspects that she loves Darnay. Carton’s anticipation of Lucie’s impending betrothal is a powerful factor in formulating the leading questions10 that bring Lucie under pressure: “Will you let me believe, when I recall this day, that the last confidence of my life was reposed in your pure and innocent breast, and that it lies there alone, and will be shared by no one?” “If that will be a consolation to you, yes.” “Not even by the dearest one ever to be known to you?” “Mr Carton,” she answered, after an agitated pause, “the secret is yours, not mine; and I promise to respect it.” (158)

Lucie has reason to be agitated, for her promise instantiates a secret understanding between Sydney Carton and herself. Having extracted a promise from her, which has been voluntarily given, Carton has put Lucie under an obligation to him that is anterior to whatever promises she will later make at her marriage. As the ownership of the secret passes into trust, Lucie and Carton are bound by reciprocal obligation; and, compelled now

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to share some of Carton’s inscrutability, Lucie drifts into the “night shadows” of this novel’s most celebrated passage: A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. (14-15)11

The association of Lucie with the secretive shifts her from the secure status of feminine symbol into the complicated depths of an individual personality. Carton tells her, “within myself, I shall always be, towards you, what I am now, though outwardly I shall be what you have heretofore seen me” (184), and his commitment to a double life compels Lucie to a double perception of Carton which she can share with no-one but him. Throughout this conversation his language—“avowal,” “supplication”— and her “promise” are on the borderline of law and love; they invoke the legal concepts of trust and contract by transferring the law’s sense of enforceable obligation and condition to the personal.12 Lucie’s promise makes her the conscientious keeper of a secret which is the possession of another: by agreeing to keep the secret which Carton has entrusted to her, Lucie keeps it in her conscience for the benefit of its owner. Carton’s final supplication is appropriately reinforced by the invocation of his professional self: “If my career were of that better kind that there was any opportunity or capacity of sacrifice in it, I would embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you” (184). Such an opportunity of sacrifice does indeed present itself, and in honouring his commitment to their contract Carton fulfils both the ideology of professional service, and his more personal supplication, to the letter.13 That he does so, of course, makes Lucie an unwitting accessory before the fact to his death. After the marriage of Darnay and Lucie, Carton comes to the house for some man-to-man talk with Darnay. He dismisses the “great service” he performed at Darnay’s English trial as “mere professional claptrap”; but it is only because of this service that Carton is able to make his plea to Darnay that he “be permitted to come and go as a privileged person” in the household, that he “might be regarded as an useless piece of furniture, tolerated for its old service” (216). By dismissing his service only to reinvoke it, Carton plays his professional card from the back of his hand, and Darnay has little choice other than to grant his request. After Carton

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has left, Lucie extracts a promise from her husband, a promise that follows logically from the earlier promise she gave Carton, and that reminds us of the secret in her heart. “Will you promise not to press one question on me, if I beg you not to ask it?” She then tells her husband that Carton deserves “more consideration and respect” than was shown for him that evening, and when Charles asks why that is the case, she tells him that that is what he is not to ask her. Dickens negotiates the emotional implausibilities of this situation in such a way that it is resolved with another “supplication,” this time from Lucie to her husband: “remember how strong we are in our happiness, and how weak he is in his misery!” The narrator then propounds a further image of specular triangulation: “She looked so beautiful in the purity of her faith in this lost man, that her husband could have looked at her as she was for hours” (216-17). The triangular image (a refraction of the symmetrical image of Madame Defarge and serving man as observed by her husband) is apt: Lucie’s promise to Carton has required Darnay’s promise to Lucie, and Carton’s supplication to Lucie has engendered Lucie’s supplication to her husband. Carton is now in a position, not of weakness, but of strength, and behind his hopeless love can be seen a legal mind negotiating personal commitments and obligations in a semi-professional language. Stryver is the acknowledged legal bully, but here Carton runs him close. It is precisely at this narrative juncture that Carton acquires the potential to redeem himself, and so to become the romantic hero of this novel. He is also simultaneously established as the novel’s consummate legal professional. Dickens’s friend, the lawyer Thomas Noon Talfourd, offered this claim on behalf of the advocate’s profession: “Its soul is SYMPATHY. The chief excellence of the advocate is in proportion to the facility with which he can become a party in the most momentous concerns of strangers . . . and identifying his own existence, for the time, with the sharp and giddy crisis of alien fortunes.” Thus, Talfourd continues, “he lives in the lives of others,”14 and is involved in a “multitude of human affections and fortunes” as “not only the representative, but the sharer . . . even as those who have the deepest stake in the issue.”15 Talfourd’s words can be applied exactly to the position in which Carton stands in relation to the Darnay household from the moment of his agreement with Lucie until his death, and his sympathetically imaginative relationship to both Charles and Lucie, figured by the different agreements he has negotiated with them, is consistent with the professional life of the advocate as here described. But there is more to it than this. The celebrated doublings in this novel are mere stalking-horses for pervasive patterns of triangulation, figured most obviously in the

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Carton-Darnay-Lucie relationships, and most powerfully in the intensely configured triangle, modelled on the triadic structure of the trust, that is formed by the agreement between Lucie and Carton to keep Carton’s secret. The complexity of this arrangement is such that it hinges on yet another trust, for the preservation of the secret requires Darnay’s complicity: by agreeing not to ask a certain question, he consents to the form of an agreement with his wife, from the content of which he is explicitly excluded. Sympathy, in this novel, has been identified as both a specifically feminine quality, and a desirable attribute for an advocate: if Lucie has been drawn by her secret into Carton’s darkness, so some of the light etymologically associated with her name consequently shines forth from him. Her most authentic function in this novel is as the pretext for Carton’s sublimely self-redemptive doom. The double pressure of the logic of the plot, and of the exclusive loneliness by which Carton is defined, necessarily sidelines Lucie in the final stages of the action. But in the prison, in the tumbril, and at the guillotine itself, the seamstress is an appropriate stand-in for Lucie, whose ideological work in the novel is therefore to validate the professional lawyer as romantic hero.

Notes 1. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, ed. Richard Maxwell, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 62. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically within the text. 2. Hilary Schor dubs the novel “a Tale of two Daughters”: Dickens and the Daughter of the House (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 84. For an extended discussion of the opposition of Lucie and Madame Defarge, see Catherine Waters, Dickens and the Politics of the Family (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chapter five. 3. John B. Lamb’s claim that the Soho establishment “is not a home, but a caricature of a home, not a place of freedom but a place of moral discipline and social control” glosses over the fraught contingencies of the relationships among class, gender, and work in the household, which are the most telling evidence of its insecurities: see “Revolution and Moral Management in A Tale of Two Cities,” Dickens Studies Annual 25 (1996): 233. 4. “Business” is one of the novel’s key terms, introduced by the “man of business” Jarvis Lorry, cleverly manipulated by Carton in his interchanges with Lorry and Stryver, and disingenuously exploited by the mender of roads turned wood-sawyer. For a discussion of this term and its place is the novel’s analysis of professional culture, see Simon Petch, “The Business of the Barrister in A Tale of Two Cities,” Criticism 44 (2002): 27-42.

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5. Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution 2nd ed. (1872; repr., Portland, Oregon: Sussex Academic Press, 1997), 9. 6. For a useful discussion of how this passage works to establish Manette’s identity, see Tom Lloyd, “Language, Love and Identity: A Tale of Two Cities,” Dickensian 88 (1993): 162. 7. A Prospero figure who recalls holding Lucie in his arms “when the hail drifted heavily and the sea ran high” (21), Lorry also thinks of his work for Tellson’s as a “trust”: see the first paragraph of Book the Third, chapter three, “The Shadow” (274-5). 8. See particularly 156 and 217. 9. Pamela Hansford Johnson, On Iniquity: Some Personal Reflections Arising out of the Moors Murder Trial (London: Macmillan, 1967), 25. 10. Leading questions are succinctly characterised by Dickens’s contemporary James Fitzjames Stephen, barrister and judge, as “questions which suggest the desired answer”; see James Fitzjames Stephen, A History of the Criminal Law of England, 3 vols., vol. 1 (1883; repr., London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1996), 430. All uses of the term in this essay assume this meaning, which is of course not exclusively legal. 11. This opening paragraph of the third chapter of the novel, “The Night Shadows,” continues for a further six sentences. Many of this novel’s most perceptive critics have grounded their interpretations in its contentious significance: see, e.g., J.M. Rignall, “Dickens and the Catastrophic Continuum of History in Tale of Two Cities,” ELH 51 (1984): 575-87, and Cates Baldridge, “Alternatives to Bourgeois Individualism in A Tale of Two Cities,” SEL 30 (1990): 633-54. 12. For a concise exposition of promise as the core of contract law, see Donald Harris, “Contract as Promise—A Review Article Based on Contract as Promise: A Theory of Contractual Obligation” (Harvard University Press, 1981), International Review of Law and Economics 3 (1983): 69-77. 13. For the ideology of service in this novel see Petch. More generally, see Daniel Duman, “The Creation and Diffusion of a Professional Ideology in Nineteenth Century England,” The Sociological Review, 27 (1979): 113-38; and “Pathway to Professionalism: The English Bar in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of Social History, 13(1980): 615-28. 14. Thomas Noon Talfourd, “On the Principle of Advocacy as Developed in the Practice of the Bar,” The Law Magazine 55 (1846): 1-34, 19. 15. Thomas Noon Talfourd, “Lord Eldon and Lord Stowell,” Quarterly Review 75 (1844): 37.

CHAPTER SEVEN THE MILL ON THE FLOSS: “MORE INSTRUMENTS PLAYING TOGETHER” GILLIAN BEER

Music is important throughout George Eliot’s fiction, from “Mr Gilfil’s Love Story” in Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) right through to the contested talents of Mira and Gwendolen in Daniel Deronda (1876) and the insights of the very deliberately named musician, Klesmer. It is central, too, to two of her most telling poems, Armgart and Jubal (1874). But I want to present the case of her relatively early novel The Mill on the Floss (1860) because the work itself is poised on the brink of autobiography.1 It is also the novel where at the end she wrenches the fate of her heroine to stand in contrast to her own: this is what might have been—the trapped history of Mary Ann Evans had she not become George Eliot. Music is part of that transformation. The novel yields us some fresh understanding of the conditions of musical—hence social and psychological—life and the arguments of music theorists in the mid-nineteenth century. The issues at stake among theorists like Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin were not those of form but of origins: whence music? This is a novel about the emergence of identity, and music marks stages in its realisation. I shall return to those matters in the last part of my argument. I start my discussion with a passage from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves in order to mark difference. In The Waves (1931) as Rhoda grieves for the dead Percival she enters a concert hall, topographically the Wigmore Hall. Here she hears a singer and a string quartet. In an extraordinary passage Woolf combines social satire (the well-fed audiences “like walruses stranded on rocks”) with an extreme and minimalist figuring of the powers of music. Woolf adopts a more-than-metaphor of geometry to express what music achieves through its formal properties and how this releases the listeners. She sets what she calls “the thing” alongside and eventually at the verge of her own wave-like repetitions and accretions in this, her most linguistically experimental novel.

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Woolf emphasises that when form comes to the surface it may produce a sudden opening of understanding that is emotional as much as intellectual: “Then the beetle-shaped men come with their violins; wait; count; nod; down come their bows . . . “ ‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing? Now that lightning has gashed the tree and the flowering branch has fallen and Percival, by his death, has made me this gift, let me see the thing. There is a square; there is an oblong. The players take the square and place it upon the oblong. They place it very accurately; they make a perfect dwelling-place. Very little is left outside. The structure is now visible; what is inchoate is here stated; we are not so various or so mean; we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares. This is our triumph; this is our consolation. “The sweetness of this content overflowing runs down the walls of my mind, and liberates understanding. Wander no more, I say; this is the end. The oblong has been set upon the square; the spiral is on top. We have been hauled over the shingle, down to the sea . . . ”2

For Woolf, in the being of Rhoda, the perfect forms—square, oblong, spiral, and their juxtapositions—create a holding completeness. These spare lineaments control and, while experienced, absolve the listener from the mess and clutter of daily living. Both Woolf and Eliot were enthusiasts for music and Eliot was a proficient pianist. Both implicate music in the fabric of their fictions. But Woolf’s fascination with musical experience seeks homologies of form and rhythm. Eliot uses music, rather, to spin connection between reader and writer by means of allusion to specific composers and works. She makes it enlarge emotion, judge complicities, mark distances of time between reader and characters and of culture between characters and author. It has a variety of narrative functions.3 Music in George Eliot’s work enriches the hinterland of the written fiction through references taken to be available to the original reader, heard readily and silently. Not all those melodies or harmonies will start up for the present-day reader so readily, and nor will the cultural weight they are accorded in the books. Sometimes, moreover, the words of a song, barely referred to in the book, must be supplied by the reader in order for it to summon particular shifts of mood. Even then, there is a difference between our investigation and the original spontaneous knowledge tempered by the shared culture of writer and then-contemporary reader. Her heroine Maggie Tulliver, alone of the characters, does delight in the sheer bare concord of octaves without seeking other signification. That

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power of response without the need for narrative marks out Maggie as a creature of fullest sensibility. The novel seeks to evoke an earlier kind of country society and does so through the sounds of that society even more than through any music that may happen to be played there. We hear sounds at the start where the dreaming narrator barely wakes. As readers we are first led into the book visually, by the unnamed narrator, remembering his or her own past, across “a wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace” (7). The anthropomorphic meeting of river and tide is expressed as check, rather than as merging. Much later we will begin to understand the importance to the book of the myth of Acis and Galatea and of Handel’s two-act masque of that name, an allusion buried just beneath the surface of this very first sentence. In Ovid (and Handel), the shepherd Acis, grandson of a river-god but himself mortal, falls in love with a sea-nymph, Galatea, who returns his love, (“the loving tide, rushing to meet it”). But he is slain by Polyphemus in a jealous rage. Galatea turns his blood into a river and he becomes the immortal spirit of the river Acis. After the silent sweep of our initial point of view, moving freely across the entire landscape, the narrator addresses us directly, in present tense, with a sound image that is at once intimate and baffling: How lovely the little river is, with its dark, changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank and listen to its low placid voice, as to the voice of one who is deaf and loving. I remember those large dipping willows. I remember the stone bridge. (7)

The reader is momentarily thwarted: are we to be the living companion or is the river only? And the image of deafness is strangely placed so that it seems to be a block between the conjured scene and the memory-bank we are being invited to share. Who is deaf here? Who speaks? As we turn the page the invitation changes: the condition of deafness now is like the condition of concentrated reading in which the world around recedes. We are being invited to move inside the white noise of the mill and its waters to discover the inner place of the novel, and the remembered world held within the narrator’s head: The rush of the water, and the booming of the mill, bring a dreamy deafness, which seems to heighten the peacefulness of the scene. They are like a great curtain of sound, shutting one out from the world beyond. And

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now there is the thunder of the huge covered wagon coming home with sacks of grain. (8)

The sounds become specific to the place, speaking of its life and yet also of its distance from the narrator’s present: these vivid evocations are also memories under strain: Look at their grand shaggy feet that seem to grasp the firm earth, at the patient strength of their necks, bowed under the heavy collar, at the mighty muscles of their struggling haunches! I should like well to hear them neigh over their hardly-earned feed of corn, and see them, with their moist necks freed from the harness, dipping their eager nostrils into the muddy pond. (8)

“I should like well”—the conditional intrudes on the conjured scene that we have just been urged to look upon (“Look at their grand shaggy feet”). So from the start this is a world both present to the senses and yet locked in an irretrievable past, a dream world from which the narrator wakes with numbed arms, not resting them after all “on the cold stone of this bridge” but “on the arms of my chair.” His present body, and its discomfort, ends the dream but opens the narrative: “Before I dozed off, I was going to tell you what Mr and Mrs Tulliver were talking about” (9). So the story begins with conversation, while at its end, five years after the disaster of the flood where Maggie’s voice is lost in the roar of the elements, we are told that The fifth autumn was rich in golden corn-stacks, rising in thick clusters among the distant hedgerows; the wharves and warehouses on the Floss were busy again, with echoes of eager voices, with hopeful lading and unlading. (521)

Eager human voices form much of the sound world of The Mill on the Floss: family conversation, gossip, the tones of intimacy, indignation, complaint, pleasure, affection, and resistance occupy much of the book’s space. The cadences of regional voices in the generation of the parents and aunts are faithfully notated on the page and that notation serves to throw into relief the more neutral received pronunciation of the younger generation—even Tom speaks with less regional dialect than his forebears, while Maggie, Philip, Lucy, and Stephen have unmarked accents, suggesting that their education has given them at least a gloss of middleclass manners. (This is, of course, a convention among Victorian novelists; one may compare Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens: principal

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characters are positioned closer to the assumed or favoured speech style of the anticipated reader.) The sounds of conversation may indeed suggest a kind of proto-music. Readers may remember the scene in “Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould” where, eating in a greasy-spoon café, Gould listens to the polyphony (or hubbub) of numerous conversations, not for their content but for their overlapping rhythms. And gradually they are transformed on the film’s soundtrack into Bach’s counterpoint. In The Mill on the Floss talk is supplemented by music, and that music is related very closely to the conditions of social life in the Midlands in the 1830s. Speaking with Philip in the Red Deeps in Book V Maggie ardently wishes for more music, and more complex music: “I never felt that I had enough music—I wanted more instruments playing together—I wanted voices to be fuller and deeper” (328). This cry exceeds its overt meaning: Maggie reaches towards and yearns for a plenitude forever to be denied her. Music carries for her an expressive world that outgoes the constraints of her humdrum conditioned life. We need to be aware of the sound-world of music available to the inhabitants of this novel and to distinguish it from our own. Now we are at every moment able to conjure instruments playing together and full deep voices, through the technologies of radio, television, and recorded sound. Indeed, escape from music is often difficult now, in public places such as hotels and restaurants, as well as from the scrappy raspings that escape from other people’s ear-pieces on the train. What was available then? First, in this earlier nineteenth-century country setting if you wanted to hear music you almost always had to make it yourself, through whistling, humming and singing, as well as through piano and sheet music. The only other music, beyond church, that Maggie hears as a child is from the musical snuff box owned by Mr Pullet which plays “Hush, ye pretty warbling choir.” The melody is from Handel’s setting of John Gay’s Acis and Galatea.4 The compacting of this work of great sophistication into the gamut of a snuff box is full of painful humour as an emblem of the constraints on Maggie’s experience—as well as her capacity to enlarge it imaginatively: despite the “load on her mind—that Tom was angry with her” . . . by the time ‘Hush, ye pretty warbling choir,’ had been played, her face wore that bright look of happiness, while she sat immoveable with her hands clasped” (93). The particular movement is charmingly apt for reduction: the birdsong tinkles on the musical box. But for some readers, the remembered words of the song would evoke darker and more passionate stories to come: Hush, ye pretty warbling quire!

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Your thrilling strains Awake my pains, And kindle fierce desire. Cease your song, and take your flight, Bring back my Acis to my sight!

The scene proposes the question of ownership with some sly comedy: Lucy thought it was by reason of some exceptional talent in uncle Pullet that the snuff-box played such beautiful tunes . . . Mr Pullet had bought the box, to begin with, and he understood winding it up, and knew which tune it was going to play beforehand. (93)

Mr Pullet gains credit from owning and winding up the box, which contains other people’s creativity—but no voices sing in the snuff-box. Philip, the sensitive crippled son of Mr Tulliver’s enemy, is first introduced seated at a piano and his playing is one of the most powerful links between him and Maggie. Their shared musicality draws them together and expresses capacities that can find no other outlet, in Philip’s case because of his physical handicap and in Maggie’s because of her gender and class-position. Music becomes part of their secret life and breeds secrets between them. When Maggie enters her life of teen-age self-denial she bars herself from all music save that of the church organ and suffers greatly for it. So that when she encounters Philip in the Red Deeps, immediately after her crucial declaration that she longs for “more instruments playing together” she begs Philip to sing to her: “Do you ever sing now, Philip?’ she added abruptly, as if she had forgotten what went before. “Yes,” he said, “every day, almost. But my voice is only middling— like everything else about me.” “O sing me something—just one song. I may listen to that before I go— something you used to sing at Lorton on a Saturday afternoon, when we had the drawing room to ourselves, and I put my apron over my head to listen.” “I know,” said Philip, and Maggie buried her face in her hands, while he sang sotto voce, “Love in her eyes sits playing;” and then said, “That’s it, isn’t it?” (328-9)

Again the song is from Handel’s setting of Gay’s Acis and Galatea, like the melody in the musical snuff box. But now memory has enriched it and the human voice, though a sotto voce light tenor, expands its beauty, the singing breath in the open air expressing human contact. Maggie hides her

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face to intensify her listening, sight quite shut out. We are again within the white noise of memory, as at the outset of the novel. But here the burden of the song is passionate longing: Love in her eyes sits playing, And sheds delicious death. Love on her lips is straying, And warbling in her breath! Love on her breast sits panting And swells with soft desire, No grace, no charm it wants To set the heart on fire.5

The first sentence of the novel, with the wide plain and loving tide seeking to join together, proves to have a musical and mythic hinterland of meaning invisible at the time, and deflected into new channels in the novel itself. The story of Acis and Galatea is evocative of the emotions in play and yet it does not quite fit the narrative story that The Mill on the Floss will tell. The river Floss, the river Acis, lost love and suffering, death and longing: these are the elements that fold upon each other. The next book, Book 6, “The Great Temptation,” opens with the chapter “A Duet in Paradise.” Suddenly we are in the midst of young society, with Lucy more or less engaged to handsome Stephen Guest, Maggie staying with her on her return from a teaching position, and the reappearance of Philip Wakem to join the group. Their principal means of entertainment and sociability is music. Music now begins to take on a number of functions within the narrative. George Eliot makes allusion work as a succinct means of hinting to the reader the likely outcome as well as the inner feelings of her characters. The youthful energy and beauty of Maggie is set alongside the lucid charm of Lucy and their musical tastes differ just enough to mark their differing personalities. The group has a piano which all of them can play. They have sheet music from which they can read part-songs and duets, and Stephen Guest in particular has a fine bass voice. Part-song, with various voices intertwining, begins to reveal its erotic potential as voices yield and sustain each other, blending in intimacies impossible to name outside the music: The sense of mutual fitness that springs from the two deep notes fulfilling expectation just at the right moment between the notes of the silvery soprano, from the perfect accord of descending thirds and fifths, from the preconcerted loving chase of a fugue, is likely enough to supersede any immediate demand for less impassioned forms of agreement. The contralto

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will not care to catechise the bass; the tenor will foresee no embarrassing dearth of remark in evenings spent with the lovely soprano. In the provinces, too, where music was so scarce in that remote time, how could musical people avoid falling in love with each other? (368)

The tone of good-humoured raillery in the narrative gives the reader some assurance of happiness to come, but the choice of music offers a different narrative course. Stephen and Lucy in this opening scene are alone together, unfallen, perfectly content in Paradise, hymning each other in alternating voices that merge from time to time. In this case, the linnet-throated soprano and the full-toned bass, singing, “With thee delight is ever new, With thee is life incessant bliss,” believed what they sang all the more because they sang it. (368)

Stephen’s singing of Raphael’s aria from Haydn’s Creation, when all the submerged sea creatures come to life, sinuously suggests the unconscious, and its eerie chromaticisms warn of darker realms than Paradise. It also— and crucially—allows the reader to feel the sexual power of Stephen’s bass voice as he repeatedly sings “Be fruitful, and multiply.”6 The reader is put on guard by Philip’s reported sharp opinion of the Haydn as “sugared complacency and flattering make-believe,” while recognising the bitterness that tinctures his view. Maggie loves Handel and Purcell, those impassioned skirling and expressive composers whose characterisations of emotion move into extremes, even while they sustain the proprieties of musical form. Generous Lucy plans “a riotous feast” of music for Maggie, knowing how much she cares for it, and not only for high art music but for carol singing and glees and all those expressions of communality and pleasure that may seem humdrum or angelic, according to the listener: “I know what a wild state of joy you used to be in when the glee-men came round” says Lucy (375). (Gleemen or travelling minstrels are recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary from the time of Beowulf in Old English right through to the late nineteenth century.) The reader recollects Maggie’s childhood when the open air midnight singing of carols at Christmas time seemed to her “supernatural” and she “trembled with awe”: despite Tom’s scoffing and the workaday characters of the singers (153). That vibrancy of response moved without interruption into her deep religious period after reading Thomas à Kempis, whose thought seems to offer a higher pathway out of her miserably constrained life when her father has lost house and wealth and health together:

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Music becomes the instrument of memory and an expression of continuity and transcendence. But music has contradictory powers: assuaging and exacerbating longing, expressing holy self-denial and selffulfilment, communicating messages and also giving primal pleasure through sound alone. Maggie is peculiarly open to its influence: alone at the piano she sets to work to get the tunes she had heard the evening before, and repeat them again and again until she had found out a way of producing them so as to make them a more pregnant, passionate language to her. The mere concord of octaves was a delight to Maggie, and she would often take up a book of studies rather than any melody, that she might taste more keenly by abstraction the more primitive sensation of intervals. (401)

This profoundly somatic relation to music, in which the body itself seems to become the instrument, can give expression without blame to Maggie’s awakening sexual desire: “When the strain passed into the minor, she halfstarted from her seat with the sudden thrill of that change” (416). She loves Stephen’s bass voice, “his deep ‘brum-brum’” (no sotto voce middling tenor such as Philip owns but a full medium of life and masculinity). Stephen’s sexual gaze is here complicated by the duet with piano being performed by himself and Philip, the two men intertwined for the duration of the song. Philip says of playing and singing at once: “it is a way of eking out one’s imperfect life and being three people at once—to sing and make the piano sing, and hear them both all the while” (416). The piece they are singing comes from Auber’s then new and very popular opera Masaniello. The musical life among these young people suggests the capacities, unused or barely used, that they share. Their enjoyment of performance gives an impression of free-spirited unhampered life during those moments they are making music. Gaiety is here given rare expression, through the musical quotations from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, and a certain debonair freedom in the Purcell songs cited (“Shall I wasting in despair die because a woman’s fair?”). The setting of The Tempest, then attributed to Purcell, seems to have been a personal favourite of George Eliot herself: two years after finishing The Mill she wrote to Sara Hennell, asking for the loan of the voice parts (with her usual rather frugal approach she says she doesn’t want to buy them until her singers have experimented

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with them first). Ironically, The Tempest is now assigned to a consortium of composers, prominent among them Matthew Locke, Purcell’s predecessor, though some arias such as “Arise, ye subterranean winds” are credited to Purcell, seemingly purely on the grounds that they are so good.7 But music also has more pointed narrative roles in this section of the novel, in particular in tracking the growth of feeling between Stephen and Maggie. Stephen appears unexpectedly while Lucy is out, bringing “these things from the ‘Maid of Artois.’” Here Eliot begins to play on the associations of her contemporary readers, most probably lost now to us. The Maid of Artois was an immensely successful opera by the Dublin born composer, baritone, and conductor, Michael William Balfe, first produced at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on 20 June 1836. So this was very upto-the-minute music for the characters in the novel to be playing. The most famous piece in the opera was “The Rapture Dwelling in My Heart.” Eliot does not name it, or need to name it. Her first readers would have recognised the insidious words, inappropriate for Stephen to have uttered to Maggie though entirely respectable if addressed to Lucy. The piquant indecision as to who is to be the recipient of the music gathers up anxiety around the scene. Moreover, the form of the music becomes significant a little later in the plot, for “The Rapture Dwelling in My Heart” is a waltz. At the ball Maggie refuses to dance anything but a country dance, claiming that she does not know how to waltz. As a result this gives Stephen an opportunity to walk aside with her when a waltz is announced and to declare his feelings in the conservatory. The fashionability of the music he offers, and the unguarded knowledge it gives him of Maggie’s tastes, may also hint at Stephen’s imperfect integrity. In a rather different way the references to Bellini’s La Sonnambula suggest that Maggie, like the heroine of that opera, is sleepwalking into a false position, as Delia da Sousa Correa suggests.8 Philip first sings of his helpless love, continuing past rejection: “Ah! perche non posso odiarti” (417). And as he begins to interpret the secret signs of regard between Stephen and Maggie his jealousy distorts the sounds of Stephen’s bass voice: “Stephen’s voice, pouring in again, jarred upon his nervous susceptibility as if it had been the clang of sheet-iron, and he felt inclined to make the piano shriek in utter discord” (419). The heroine in La Sonnambula sleepwalks into a man’s bedroom and is therefore repudiated by her lover and all her society. Maggie, somewhat similarly, is described repeatedly as being in a “dim, dreamy state” in her responses to Stephen Guest. Unlike Bellini’s heroine there is no full retrieval of position for Maggie after her mesmerised floating away from

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the bounds of her life. Her passivity vis-à-vis Stephen is paralleled by her rapturous passivity under the sway of music, loving the “rush of sound.” Music is thus alluring and dangerous at once. It expresses the slackening of will, the willingness to yield to another’s play upon the senses. But it also gives voice to the power of a world beyond the narrow life within which Maggie is bound. Maggie’s loyalty to first bonds and memory is presented as painful but admirable in the novel. Her behaviour is the antithesis of her author’s. George Eliot broke bonds and suffered the consequences, as well as claiming the rewards. She left for London. She refused to concur with her father’s religious views. She preferred to elope with George Henry Lewes rather than sustain her relationship with her brother. She lived a free life. The awful sense of oppression in the novel derives surely from George Eliot’s contemplation of her other self, the life she almost certainly would have had to abide had it not been for her exceptional facility with language and her powerful imagination. Maggie has some of those capacities, but chastened by an integrity that will not allow her to grasp happiness at painful cost to others. George Eliot could not quite abide to see her suffer through humdrum years of rejection and offers instead a hyperbolic ending, something extreme, operatic, and demanding. The final scene of Tom and Maggie rushing upon the flood and weltering beneath it seems fitted to theatre. George Eliot’s own musical life was of a very different order from that she permits to the people in this novel—or, rather, one should say, that historical circumstances permit to the people. For she is entirely fair and realistic in showing both the small compass of musical possibility in 1830s provincial society and the ardent participation of the four young people in its powers. George Eliot on the other hand was a frequent visitor to the opera, a friend of Liszt, an early reviewer of Wagner, one of the first to appreciate Gregorian Chant, an accomplished musician with a grand piano and a loved partner George Henry Lewes, himself no mean music critic, with whom to play and sing at home. These were the fruits of her escape from a background similar to Maggie’s. She had known the pains too of that free life, and not only her estrangement from her brother. Her long-time friend, Herbert Spencer, was also her major disappointment in love in the decade leading to the writing of this novel. They shared an enjoyment of music and opera-going, but her feelings raced ahead of his and were never reciprocated. One agonising letter from Mary Ann Evans to Spencer expresses her passion and acknowledges its hopelessness, begging him at least to remain her friend and companion. The double use of sound—voices in conversation and

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musical allusion—in The Mill on the Floss reflects on and argues with Spencer’s essay on “The Origin and Function of Music” (first published in Fraser’s Magazine for October 1857), I would suggest. The novel itself was finished in 1860. Spencer writes: Not only may we understand how much more sonorous tones, greater extremes of pitch, and wider intervals, were gradually introduced; but also how there arose a greater variety and complexity of musical expression. For this same passionate, enthusiastic temperament, which leads the musical composer to express the feelings possessed by others as well as himself, in more marked cadences than they would use, also leads him to give musical utterance to feelings which they either do not experience, or experience but in slight degrees. And thus we may in some measure understand how it happens that music not only so strongly excites our more familiar feelings, but also produces feelings we never had before—arouses dormant sentiments of which we do not know the meaning; or, as Richter says—tells us of things we have not seen and shall not see. 9

Spencer sees music as intensified speech, derived from the rhythms of conversation: “All music is originally vocal.”10 But for him music does more: it gives vent not only to feelings that we have but to feelings that we cannot reach. This rational, thoughtful, unimpassioned man glimpses in music degrees of feeling that he cannot know and unconscious or “dormant sentiments of which we do not know the meaning.” Those extremes were known by Maggie Tulliver, and by George Eliot herself. The emphasis in the novel on the erotic powers of music casts a strong light back on the different experiences of Spencer and George Eliot. Spencer’s theory would later come under attack from Darwin who in The Descent of Man (1871) argued that the origin of music is essentially sexual and is crucial to the process of sexual selection, the male alluring the female with song. Darwin saw music as preceding speech and the flute as on a continuum with epic. The force of events in The Mill seems to concur with Darwin’s view of music as sexual expression and allure above all. Yet the texture of the book, in its fascination with the timbre of human voices—formed so fully by time and place—, and their interplay of cadences, inclines rather to Spencer’s emphasis on conversation as the prior ground of music. What Spencer experienced in “slight degrees” George Eliot and her heroine Maggie experienced fully, and the novel demonstrates the terrible difficulty of finding a secure language for emotion. Music here arouses and carries sexual passion, particularly in song—but it also carries experience that remains ineffable, imagined, beyond the scope of possible action in a life constrained. Maggie Tulliver, in Woolf’s words,

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persistently seeks “the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing” and finds it, fitfully, and only, in the concord of octaves and in “the more primitive sensation of intervals.”

Notes 1. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). The Clarendon Edition is used as the basis of the Oxford World’s Classics Edition (1996). Page references throughout this essay are to the Oxford World’s Classics edition. 2. Virginia Woolf, The Waves, ed. Gillian Beer, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 134. 3. For further discussion of George Eliot in relation to music see Delia da Sousa Correa, George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture (London: Palgrave, 2003) and Phyllis Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860-1900 (London: Ashgate, 2000). 4. G.F. Handel, Acis and Galatea: A Serenata or Pastoral Entertainment, Words by John Gay, Alexander Pope, and John Hughes (c.1718). Sound recording: Acis and Galatea, Norma Burrowes, Paul Elliott, Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Martyn Hill, Willard White, The English Baroque Soloists, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, Archiv Produktion, 4234062, 2 CDs, 1978. For full participation in this essay the reader will find the CDs referred to a great enhancement. In particular, Stephen’s bass voice and its sexual power for Maggie is realised when the timbre of the singing voice is heard directly in the quotations from Haydn. 5. Handel, Acis and Galatea, track 9. 6. Joseph Haydn, The Creation (1798). Sound recording: The Creation / Die Schöpfung, The Monteverdi Choir, The English Baroque Soloists, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, Archiv Produktion, 4492172, 2 CDs, 1997, CD 1 track 17 (booklet 35). 7. Henry Purcell, The Tempest. Sound recording: The Tempest, The Monteverdi Choir, The Monteverdi Orchestra, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, Erato, 4509965552, 1 CD, 1979, track 4. 8. Da Sousa Correa, George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture, 217. 9. Herbert Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative (London: Routledge / Thoemmes Press, 1996), 418. 10. Spencer, Essays, 403.

CHAPTER EIGHT GEORGE ELIOT IN AUSTRALIA ELIZABETH WEBBY

When one thinks of the literary links between major nineteenth-century English novelists and Australia, George Eliot is probably not the first name that comes to mind. Although Hetty Sorrel is transported to Australia at the end of Adam Bede, what happens to her there is of no interest to the novelist and, unlike Magwitch in Dickens’s Great Expectations, Hetty dies before she can return to England. As many critics have noted, in April 1853 Eliot suggested to her recently widowed sister Chrissey that she and her six children would be better off in Australia, offering to accompany them and help them get settled there, though she herself had no intention of staying.1 Nothing eventuated from this since, as Eliot was to report in her next letter, “Chrissey will never consent to go to Australia she says” (GEL 98). So George Eliot, unlike Anthony Trollope and other lesser names, never visited Australia. As Nancy Henry has recently demonstrated, however, Eliot had a financial if not a familial relationship with Australia, since between 1860 and 1880 much of the income from her books was invested, with almost half being in high-yield colonial stocks issued by companies in Australia, South Africa, India and Canada.3 Australian sales of her work also contributed to George Eliot’s income since, if she herself did not come to Australia, her novels certainly did. They came as serials—in both English and Australian periodicals and newspapers—as well as in volume form. Once established as a leading contemporary novelist, Eliot was able to command a good price for serialisation of her later novels in Australia. On 8 August 1872, John Blackwood informed George Lewes that Australian serial rights to Middlemarch had been sold for £200: “You owe this to Mr. [George] Simpson who by a series of masterly letters bought the Australians up to the point” (GEL vol. 5, 298). Middlemarch, published by Blackwoods in parts from December 1871 to December 1872,3 was serialised in

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Melbourne’s Australasian, a weekly newspaper associated with the Argus, from 3 September 1872 to 22 March 1873. Daniel Deronda, first published in parts in Britain between January and September 1876, was later also serialised in the Australasian, between 25 March 1876 and 31 March 1877. During the twentieth century, and especially after World War II, George Eliot’s novels regularly appeared on Australian school and university English courses. A number of Australian academics have also published important scholarly and critical works on Eliot. In addition to Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston’s edition of The Journals of George Eliot (1998), the two most recent general studies of Eliot’s fiction have been written by Pauline Nestor from Monash University in Melbourne and Tim Dolin from Curtin University in Perth.4 This essay, however, will focus on the nineteenth-century response to George Eliot, who was read with great interest by Australian writers such as Catherine Helen Spence as well as by many others with no literary aspirations of their own. Tim Dolin’s recent survey of holdings and borrowings of books from the library of Adelaide’s South Australian Institute during 1861-62 demonstrates George Eliot’s very rapid rise to popularity in Australia as elsewhere. As in all institutional libraries by this time, earlier opposition to the admission of fiction had been forced to give way in the face of readers’ demands for it. According to Dolin’s figures, novels were far and away the Institute’s most borrowed works, making up about forty percent of the loans. Remarkably, given that Eliot’s first work of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life, did not appear until 1857, by 1861 she was already the eighth most borrowed author, behind Dickens, Marryat, Mayne Reid, Bulwer Lytton, Lever, Trollope and Fenimore Cooper, almost all of whom had begun their publishing careers much earlier and so had many more titles to their name. Furthermore, as Dolin notes, with respect to the most borrowed individual titles, “all four of her books feature in the Adelaide top twenty, and only Waverley is more popular than Adam Bede.”5 Apart from Waverley in first place, and two titles each by Dickens and Marryat near the bottom of the list, all the twenty most borrowed novels had, not surprisingly, been published since 1855. George Eliot was, however, the only author to have more than two titles in the top twenty. In the absence of comparable borrowing records from libraries in other cities, it is difficult to know whether her works were equally popular across the country; Australian readers have, however, always been keen to keep up with the latest from overseas. It is certainly no surprise that Adelaide, the only Australian colony founded without the help of convicts, and one possessing strong

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evangelical and radical traditions was, as Dolin’s research suggests, full of readers primed to respond favourably to George Eliot’s works. One of these, Catherine Helen Spence, had begun her own career as a novelist some years before Eliot. Unlike Eliot’s sister Chrissey, the Spence family had chosen to migrate when faced with financial difficulties, arriving in Adelaide in 1839, three years after its foundation. In 1854, when she was twenty-nine, Spence’s first novel Clara Morison was published in England, followed by Tender and True (1856), Mr Hogarth’s Will (1865) and The Author’s Daughter (1868). As Bruce Bennett has noted, Spence was a precursor of Eliot in turning from romance to realism: “her literary manifesto might well come from George Eliot’s digression on realism in Chapter XVII of Adam Bede.”6 Like Eliot’s, Spence’s heroines also wish to do something more with their lives than make a good marriage and are frequently frustrated by society’s conventions and expectations about a woman’s role. While she did write some other novels later in life, Spence noted that she found journalism “a better paying business for me than novel writing”7 and so from the 1870s concentrated most of her energies on working for political and social reform, while also giving lectures and writing for newspapers and magazines. While in England in 1865-66, she had had a brief meeting with George Eliot but the experience was far from pleasant. As Spence noted in her autobiography, “I felt I had been looked on as an inquisitive Australian desiring an interview upon any pretext” (EY 91). Despite this unsatisfactory visit, Spence continued to read and admire Eliot’s work and subsequently was invited to lecture on it. Her lecture was later published in the second number of a new literary magazine, the Melbourne Review, in 1876. Spence sent a copy to Eliot, who replied on 4 September 1876, saying that she had been very unwell at the time of Spence’s earlier visit and inviting her to call again when next in England. Although, as Eliot explained, she did not read any criticism of her work, her husband, Mr Lewes, had commended Spence’s article as “excellently written” and “one which would do credit to any English periodical” (EY 92). By the time Spence had the opportunity and funds to visit England again it was 1894 and Eliot was dead. So Spence had to content herself with visiting places depicted in the novels, as well as a meeting with Mary Cash, an old friend of Eliot’s, “to have some George Eliot talk” (EY 2789). In her 1876 article, Spence acknowledged George Eliot as, in her view, pre-eminent among the great Victorian novelists: “No writer of fiction has called forth such wide sympathies, or has influenced my aims and my conduct as George Eliot has done.”8 Like many others, she first

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encountered Eliot’s work in the pages of Blackwood’s and reflects on her reading experiences: It is, I think, more than seventeen years since I felt that a new star had risen. Side by side in Blackwood’s Magazine with Bulwer’s “What will he do with it?” appeared a new work entitled “Scenes of Clerical Life,” and of them “Janet’s Repentance” showed unmistakable marks of the keenest worldly shrewdness and the deepest religious insight. (“GE” 147)

The strong impression this work made on Spence was confirmed when she read Adam Bede: I never had any doubt that it was written by a woman although the pseudonym and several touches in the book itself were evidently meant to mislead the public. The subtlety of the descriptions of the character of Dinah Morris, and still more of Hetty Sorrel, appeared to me to be beyond the power of man, and the minute knowledge of woman’s work and woman’s raiment was not likely to be acquired by any but a woman. (“GE” 149)

Despite her own intense admiration for George Eliot’s novels, Catherine Spence was forced to acknowledge that they were not as widely read by 1876 as they deserved: “It is an undoubted fact that George Eliot’s works have not so many readers, especially among the young, as the ephemeral sensation stories of the day” (“GE” 157).9 She consoled herself with the thought that Eliot’s novels were prized by discerning readers, so much so that they had managed to achieve canonical status during their author’s lifetime: “in intelligent households we find the books bought, cherished as classics, and referred to in conversation.” (“GE” 157) Of course, not everyone agreed with Spence’s high estimation of George Eliot. In the July 1877 issue of the Melbourne Review, its then editor, Arthur Patchett Martin, devoted much of an essay ostensibly on “Bret Harte in Relation to Modern Fiction” to lamenting the effeminisation of the novel, not exempting George Eliot’s from his criticism. For Martin, it was a matter of great concern that “Novel-writing as well as novelreading is becoming a feminine occupation.” For him, “the enormous popularity of Miss Braddon, Mrs. Henry Wood, Ouida, Miss Rhoda Broughton and Miss Muloch” could only lead to the novel’s decline and decadence as a genre.10 After trotting out some of the typical platitudes of the day relating to women having less “brain power” than men, fewer opportunities to observe “the affairs of the world” and no dramatic ability (“BH” 292-3), Martin turns to the case of George Eliot, though with a little trepidation it seems:

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That she has gained a great reputation, and appeals more directly to the cultured classes of English society than any imaginative writer of the day, except perhaps Tennyson, cannot be gainsaid. And it is always hazardous to criticise in any way adversely a writer of established fame. (“BH” 296)

Martin, however, feels that Eliot owes her success mainly to the fact that she “preaches conventional morality in an unconventional way” and is “the novelist of Protestant piety.” In his reading, “her delineation of character and her conception of life are feminine. She has no humour and humour is an essential of dramatic art” (“BH” 298). Of course, her work is still superior to that of “any of the other popular female novelists”: But when we are assured that she rivals Scott in power of description, Dickens in humour, Fielding in common-sense, and is second only to Shakespeare in comprehensiveness of genius, we recognise that fiction is now a feminine department of literature, and that the standard of excellence is materially debased. (“BH” 301)

Clearly, given Martin’s assumption that women were by definition inferior to men in brain power and humour, it would have been impossible for any woman to produce literature of true excellence. In her review for the Adelaide Registrar of The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), Spence made a point of stressing George Eliot’s humour and wit, perhaps in reply to Martin’s criticisms.11 Another commentating on what was being read in Australia at this time, though in a private rather than professional capacity, was the young William Archer, later to achieve fame as the English translator and champion of Ibsen. In 1876-77, having just graduated from Edinburgh University, he travelled to Australia to visit his family who a few years earlier had returned to live on their Queensland property, Gracemere. The journal Archer kept during his travels, eventually published in 1977, includes a description of a typical squatter’s library, filled with standard works by Shakespeare, Macaulay, Pope, Goldsmith, Byron and Carlyle. With respect to novelists, he notes that Trollope is to all appearances more popular than even Dickens or Thackeray, but that is probably because his recent visit to Australia has given an unnatural impetus to the sale of his books. Lord Lytton’s works are scattered broadcast over the colony. George Eliot is, I have observed, unpopular, but the same cannot be said of Wilkie Collins, Miss Braddon and even—alas! “Ouida.” Most popular of all, perhaps, are the Americans, Bret Harte and Mark Twain . . . 12

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It seems that many Queensland squatters shared Arthur Patchett Martin’s preference for more masculine literature. In her review essay of J.W. Cross’s The Life of George Eliot (1885), Catherine Spence began by recounting her one unsatisfactory meeting with Eliot, and reproduced Eliot’s letter in response to her 1876 essay. She also, however, revealed that, like many other readers at this time, she preferred Eliot’s earlier novels to her later ones: “Probably she never fully knew that her first books were in the eyes of her readers the most formidable rivals to her later productions.”13 It is also clear that, again like many others at the time, she did not much care for Daniel Deronda, which she thought “not half so alive and so human” as Eliot’s earlier historical novels (GELW 227). Records of what was being read and discussed by some Australian reading groups during the 1890s indicate that most members shared Spence’s preference for Eliot’s earlier work. While reading groups had existed in one form or another in Australia since the 1820s, they became especially common in the 1880s and 90s, fuelled by shorter working hours, economic prosperity and increased literacy. In 1892 at a meeting in Hobart of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, an attempt was made to give a more purposeful direction to what members of such groups were reading through the establishment of the Australasian Home Reading Union. This aimed to encourage the reading habit and direct it towards more educational ends, that is, away from the so-called “trashy novels” which now dominated library collections and readers’ borrowings.14 The new Home Reading Union was discussed at length by members of an existing reading group, the Hamilton Literary Society, established in Hobart in 1889 by Lady Hamilton, wife of the then Governor of Tasmania.15 At a meeting on 3 February 1892, members decided to “form a circle consisting of members of the Reading Class and a few others to the number of twelve.” As a pamphlet on the Reading Union now bound into the Society’s minute book shows, its suggested courses of reading, devised by professors from the University of Sydney, were more conventionally canonical and much less topical than the subjects usually discussed by the members of this and other literary societies. In “English Literature,” for example, members of the Reading Union were offered the choice of a modern or an Elizabethan course. In the modern course, there were some set texts—Tennyson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes’s The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858) and The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859)— along with a choice between detailed studies of the work of Walter Scott or George Eliot or of the essays of Macaulay, Ruskin and Carlyle. For those who chose to read George Eliot, the set titles were Mill on the Floss,

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Romola and Middlemarch, along with Oscar Browning’s George Eliot (1890), in Scott’s Great Writer Series. By the 1890s, then, despite the views of critics like Arthur Patchett Martin, Eliot had won academic recognition for her novels, even though only a limited amount of English Literature was yet being taught at Australian universities. A circle of the Australasian Home Reading Union was formed on 30 April 1892 by men associated in various ways with the Friends’ School in Hobart, including several who would play leading roles in the movement for Australian federation.16 They initially embarked on the suggested course on English essayists, though including the Americans Lowell and Emerson as well as Lamb, De Quincey and Matthew Arnold. At their first meeting, however, they began by discussing Frederic Harrison’s essay “The Choice of Books,” from his The Choice of Books and other Literary Pieces (1886), which was unanimously condemned, especially with respect to his “depreciation of modern work,” including even Tennyson and George Eliot. At the end of 1892, this group dispensed with the curriculum provided by the Reading Union, discussing “Our Favourite Poets” in January and February 1893 and gradually moving on to broader literary and social issues. At their meeting on 27 November 1894, the focus was on realism in fiction. The minutes record: W. H. D. [Dawson] introduced his subject by reading—with comments— sundry passages from Amiel’s “Journal Intime” bearing (more or less) on the question to be discussed. S.C. [Clemes] then read an amusing, but rather too long, paper from the “Yellow Book” on Modern Realism. This at the suggestion of J. H. [Hebblethwaite]—unfortunately not present. F.J.Y. [Young] then read some half-dozen pages from George Eliot’s Essay on “Riehl,”17 a very clear and satisfactory statement of the argument for judicious “Naturalism.” The discussion was interesting—and for a wonder, kept close to the points at issue. The conclusion unanimously arrived at was that G.E. had said the right thing on Realism, and said it very well.

As Martyn Lyons notes in his discussion of the Australasian Home Reading Union, the waning of initial enthusiasm for AHRU courses seen in this Tasmanian circle of readers was all too typical. By 1893, the AHRU had over 2000 members in Australia and New Zealand but a rapid decline followed and the movement was all but over by 1898 (“RMRC” 387-8). It appears that readers found the prescribed list of authors too confining and the approach too academic. Certainly, evidence from reading groups suggests that while George Eliot’s works were often discussed, Middlemarch and especially Romola were rarely mentioned,

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with Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner remaining favourites. A poem written by one of the members as a souvenir for the 1896 season of the Itinerant Literary Society indicates that this group of Hobart women also began as a circle of the AHRU: We first as a circle in embryo grew, Passed our chrysalis state in the A. H. R. U.; But in time, as the butterfly burst from the grub, From the circle evolved the Itinerant Club.18

This society was evidently formed in 1894 by women who had earlier belonged to the Hamilton Literary Society, though the reasons for their defection remain unclear. The minute books record a discussion on 5 July 1897 in which extracts were read from Silas Marner and The Mill on the Floss, but the discussion focussed mainly it seems on biographical issues: “Many present took part in the discussion, which touched on the questions of her morality, and of her influence on her time, as well as facts of her life and the nature of her religion.” Thirteen ladies from a similar background of comfort and education established the Women’s Literary Society in Sydney in August 1890.19 As with the Hobart groups, meetings were held every fortnight and members took it in turns to read papers. But in a radical move, meetings were held in the evenings rather than in the afternoons, and in rented rooms in the city to allow as many women as possible to take part. Records of meetings, including the minute book for 1892-93 only, reveal many similarities with the topics discussed by the Hobart ladies, again with a strong interest in George Eliot. As their choice of meeting place and time implies, the Sydney group included some women with more radical political and social views than their Hobart sisters. The Women’s Literary Society, whose use of “women’s” rather than “ladies” in their name was also clearly significant, is now remembered mainly for the fact that several of its members were also in 1891 among the founders of the Womanhood Suffrage League of New South Wales. A “George Eliot Evening” was held on 4 April 1891, with members reading extracts from her works and short criticisms of them. The minutes for 15 August 1892 record the result of the ballot for three subjects chosen by the members for inclusion in the next year’s program. While “Carlyle’s Life and Works” topped the poll with fifteen votes, “George Eliot’s Women” came second, with ten. The discussion on this topic, held a few weeks later, included papers on Mary Garth, “The Women in ‘Adam Bede’” and Dinah Morris. In her paper on Mary Garth, Edith McKenny

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“said that there was no very great hero among George Eliot’s men.” Miss Whitfield apparently disagreed, giving both Adam Bede and, more surprisingly, Lydgate as examples. Miss Ryrie’s paper on Adam Bede appears to have been devoted to pointing out that Dinah Morris “had been suggested to the author by her recollections of her Aunt.” Rose Scott’s paper on Dinah Morris evidently concentrated more on her virtues as a woman, “Alluding to her divine power of sympathy, her comforting of Lisbeth in her sorrow and her faithfulness to Hetty in her hour of need.” In the course of the discussion other members spoke on the keynotes of Eliot’s work; one thought it was self-sacrifice, referring especially to Middlemarch, another that it was failure. Other references to George Eliot were made during 1892 meetings of the Women’s Literary Society which focussed on other topics. In a paper on “Obscure Heroines” given on 15 August, Miss Mitchell cited Eliot’s reference to the “noble women who have stood at washtubs.” Edith McKenny, discussing Emerson on 22 November, quoted George Eliot’s remark that he was “the first man I have ever met,”20 describing this encounter as “the final force which drifted her out to the deep sea of Emerson’s divine thought, which had influenced her as no other literary work had done, having revolutionised her mind, and so moulded her life.” A paper given a few months later by Mrs Todd, highly critical of the bestselling novelist Marie Corelli, is particularly interesting as indicating that Adam Bede was still seen in some quarters as too shocking to be allowed on home bookshelves. Focussing on Corelli’s Ardath, Mrs Todd noted that this novel “finds its way into many a household in which ‘Adam Bede’ is forbidden.” If this was other than a rhetorical point, it indicates that by the last decade of the nineteenth century the works of George Eliot were seen in radically different ways by groups of Australian readers. Any banning of Adam Bede was probably motivated as much by disapproval of Eliot’s rejection of convention in living with a man to whom she was not married as by the content of the novel. Other readers, especially if male or young, clearly found Eliot’s novels tame and old-fashioned in comparison with the racy productions of contemporary writers like Corelli.21 For those interested enough in self-improvement to join reading groups, Eliot’s work, even if not often discussed in itself, was a given, forming part of the essential reading of any educated person.

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Notes 1. George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, ed. G. S. Haight, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 97. Subsequent page references are initialled GEL and given parenthetically within the text. 2. Nancy Henry, George Eliot and the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 97. 3. John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers (London: Macmillan, 1995), 104. 4. Pauline Nestor, George Eliot (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002); Tim Dolin, George Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 5. Tim Dolin, “The Mid-Victorian Novel in Colonial Australia,” Australian Literary Studies, 22, no. 3(2006): 286. 6. Bruce Bennett, “Contexts of Possibility–George Eliot and Catherine Spence,” in An Australian Compass: Essays on Place and Direction in Australian Literature (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1991), 147. 7. Susan Magarey, ed., Ever Yours, C. H. Spence (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2005), 118. Subsequent page references are initialled EY and given parenthetically within the text. 8. C. H. Spence, “George Eliot”, Melbourne Review, 1, no. 2 (1876): 146. Subsequent page references are initialled “GE” and given parenthetically within the text. 9. See also “Belles Lettres,” Westminster Review 86 (July 1866): 127: “whilst Miss Braddon’s and Mr. Wilkie Collins’ productions sell by the thousands of copies, ‘Romola’ with difficulty reaches a second edition.” 10. Arthur P. Martin, “Bret Harte in Relation to Modern Fiction,” Melbourne Review, 2, no. 2 (1877): 292-3. Subsequent page references are initialled “BH” and given parenthetically within the text. 11. Review quoted in Michele McFarland, “‘Kindred Souls’: Catherine Helen Spence and George Eliot,” Australasian Victorian Studies Journal 11 (2005): 100. McFarland gives an extended comparison of the work and thought of the two writers. 12. Raymond Stanley, ed., Tourist to the Antipodes: William Archer’s “Australian Journey, 1876-77” (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1977), 33. 13. C. H. Spence, “George Eliot’s Life and Works,” Melbourne Review, 10, no. 39 (1885): 226. Subsequent page reference is initialled “GELW” and given parenthetically within the text. 14. Martyn Lyons, “Reading Models and Reading Communities. Case-study: The Australasian Home Reading Union, 1892-97,” in Martyn Lyons and John Arnold, eds., A History of the Book in Australia, 1891-1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001), 386. Subsequent page reference is initialled “RMRC” and given parenthetically within the text. 15. Records of the Hamilton Literary Society are held at the Archives Office of Tasmania, NS106/1-3.

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16. Minutes of meetings and discussions held at Fairfield, New Town, Australasian Home Reading Union, Archives Office of Tasmania, NS256/1/1. 17. George Eliot’s review of work by Wilhelm Heinrich von Riehl was originally published as “The Natural History of German Life,” Westminster Review 66 (1856): 51-79. When collected in George Eliot, Essays and Leaves from a Notebook (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1884), it was retitled “Riehl.” 18. Records of the Itinerant Literary Society are held in the Archives Office of Tasmania, NS331/1-3. 19. The Women’s Literary Society Minute Book, 1892-93, is held in the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, ML MSS ZB693. 20. This comment, sourced from J.W. Cross’s George Eliot’s Life as Related in her Letters and Journals (which Edith McKenny was probably referring to), makes rather more sense in the original (quoting from a letter GE wrote to Sara Hennell July 1848): “I have seen Emerson—the first man I have ever seen. But you have seen still more of him, so I need not tell you what he is.” J.W. Cross, ed. George Eliot’s Life as Related in her Letters and Journals (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, n.d.), 104. 21. Marie Corelli is the only woman mentioned as among the favourite authors of Sybylla Melvyn, heroine of Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901).

CHAPTER NINE “IT WAS NOW MISTRESS AND MAID NO LONGER; WOMAN AND WOMAN ONLY”: THE LESBIAN MENACE IN VICTORIAN POPULAR FICTION ROBERT DINGLEY

In Part One, Chapter 6 of Desperate Remedies (1871), Hardy’s first published novel, the eighteen-year-old Cytherea Graye, architect’s daughter turned lady’s maid, is visited in her bedroom at between one and two o’clock in the morning by her forty-six-year-old employer Miss Aldclyffe. The two women have quarrelled during the evening and Miss Aldclyffe is now desperately anxious to re-establish their relationship on a new footing. Accordingly, she clambers into bed with her servant and at once frees herself, Hardy reports, “from the last remnant of restraint”: She flung her arms round the young girl, and pressed her gently to her heart. “Now kiss me,” she said. “You seem as if you were my own, own child!” Cytherea, upon the whole, was rather discomposed at this change of treatment; and, discomposed or no, her passions were not so impetuous as Miss Aldcyffe’s. She could not bring her soul to her lips for a moment, try how she would. “Come, kiss me,” repeated Miss Aldclyffe. Cytherea gave her a very small one, as soft in touch and in sound as the bursting of a bubble. “More earnestly than that—come.” She gave another, a little but not much more expressively. “I don’t deserve a more feeling one, I suppose,” said Miss Aldclyffe, with an emphasis of sad bitterness in her tone . . . “But I am a lonely woman, and I want the sympathy of a pure girl like you and so I can’t help loving you—your name is the same as mine—isn’t it strange?”

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Cytherea was inclined to say no, but remained silent. “Now, don’t you think I must love you?” continued the other. “Yes,” said Cytherea absently . . . “Why can’t you kiss me as I can kiss you? Why can’t you!” She impressed upon Cytherea’s lips a warm motherly salute, given as if in the outburst of strong feeling, long checked, and yearning for something to care for and be cared for by in return.1

The scene continues for several pages as Miss Aldclyffe (“jealous as any man could have been” (DR 95)) interrogates Cytherea closely about her love-life, and it ends with the lady’s maid being promoted to the status of companion and commanded to “Put your hair round your mama’s neck and give me one good long kiss”(DR 97). By the chapter’s end, it seems hardly surprising that Cytherea should feel “unnerved”(DR 96) or that her employer appears given over to “a luxurious sense of content and quiet”(DR 97). My synopsis of this ten-page episode has necessarily been a selective one and I have omitted the oblique clues which serve to locate Cytherea’s distinctly unusual relationship to Miss Aldclyffe within the overall narrative development of Desperate Remedies. Miss Aldclyffe, it later emerges, has been a former lover of Cytherea’s dead father and she is anxious both to sabotage her maid’s current engagement and to bring about a marriage between the girl and her own illegitimate son. I would suggest, nevertheless, that this nocturnal visit of a mistress to her servant’s bedroom is evoked in such insistently sensual language and at such disproportionate length that its effect exceeds any possible purpose it may retrospectively be seen to have served within the economy of Hardy’s plot. His protracted elaboration of the scene, that is, transcends (or transgresses) its narrative function and this has the result of temporarily distracting readerly attention from the complex web of heterosexual entanglements which the novel as a whole sets out to unravel, and of fixing it instead upon an intense and enigmatic encounter between two women. That, at all events, is how the chapter has been read not only by a number of Hardy’s critics2 but also by Lilian Faderman in her seminal historical study of lesbianism, Surpassing the Love of Men. Had he written of the encounter between Miss Aldclyffe and Cytherea fifty years later, Faderman dramatically conjectures, Hardy “would have found the pressure on him so uncomfortable that he would [have been] forced to take a night boat to the Continent.”3 Fortunately for the young novelist, however, “Not having the ‘knowledge’ of the French aesthetes or the German sexologists as a guide, writers could present the most passionate love scenes between two women and not be concerned that they were dealing with

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‘abnormality.’”4 Desperate Remedies thus becomes a confirming instance of Faderman’s central thesis—a thesis handily if sceptically summarised by Terry Castle as the “no-lesbians-before-1900 myth.”5 Prior, Faderman contends, to the naming of lesbianism by taxonomically-obsessed “scientists” in late nineteenth-century Europe, bonding between women was almost exclusively subsumed under the category of “romantic friendship,” in which a specifically sexual element is not generally recognised and in which physical consummation should not be assumed. Faderman’s position, of course, has been contested by a wide range of critics for a wide range of reasons, and there is little need to attempt here a comprehensive critique of her work.6 The central difficulty is that Faderman needs to assume that terms like “romantic friendship” have always to be understood as descriptive—and as descriptive in a limitingly transparent and literal sense—rather than as verbal markers for a generic category of relationship not otherwise catered for in public discourse: to put it simply, she wants “romantic friendship” and its cognates to signify identity rather than difference. Furthermore, her insistence on physical consummation as what crucially demarcates a relationship as homosexual tends both to preclude more flexibly inclusive definitions and to risk hypostatising lesbianism in ways all-too-familiar among the “sexologists” whose work she attempts to supersede. The danger is that women whose sexual orientation is towards other women become defined only by that orientation and to the exclusion of other determinants, their identity (and, indeed, their difference) subsumed in a crudely abstracting binary. Indeed, Faderman’s use of the section of Desperate Remedies with which I began precisely exemplifies the problematic nature of her thesis. For her, the sole question raised by the incident is whether it can properly be spoken of as a depiction of “lesbianism,” given Hardy’s historical position and his presumed—perhaps too readily presumed—lack of awareness.7 However, to propose that the status of the interaction between the two women is dependent solely on the extent of their (and Hardy’s) consciousness of its sexual nature is to occlude a range of other factors which might contribute to our evaluation of what takes place. Of these the most immediately apparent is, arguably, the gulf in class position between the two participants: what happens in Cytherea’s bed is not simply, that is, a sensual encounter between two women in a socially neutral space; it is an encounter initiated by a wealthy landowner with a young and vulnerable employee, an encounter which, transposed into heterosexual terms (Richardson’s Mr B., say, and Pamela), would appear unmistakably differentiated in its moral, psychological and social dynamics from a loving intimacy between equals. While not, therefore, seeking for a

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moment to deny the erotic, and homoerotic, resonances of the passage, I want rather to foreground the ways in which those resonances are embedded within, and are enabled and mediated through, a more familiar discourse of social difference. I shall have to return to this point later, but for the moment I want to extend my range of textual examples by supplementing Hardy’s Miss Aldclyffe with two other female bit-players from Victorian fiction who express passionate (though equally unrequited) love for other women. At the beginning of Social Sinners, a multiplot sensation novel by the prolific Hawley Smart, the heiress-heroine Ethel Clothele is invariably attended by her financially dependent companion (the niece of her former governess) Caroline Mangerston, whose invariable presence, we are told, is “rather a mystery to society at large.”8 When Ethel makes a new woman friend, the impeccably “county” Maude Riversley, Caroline’s “carefully masked” but “extreme jealousy” is excited: “She invariably viewed with dislike and distrust anybody who appeared likely to become a favourite with Miss Clothele”(SS 50). Her “devotion to the heiress,” we are told, “was as intense as her jealousy concerning it. She was continually tortured by Ethel’s new intimacies, and pictured herself as relegated completely to the background” (SS 50-1). From this point on, Caroline seeks every opportunity to alienate Ethel from Maude and Maude from her male suitor John Hainton, unable to “bear the idea of anybody sharing Ethel’s affection and confidence but herself” (260). When her machinations are at last exposed, Ethel sadly decides that she and her companion must part. “I can’t help it, Ethel, I cannot bear it!” exclaimed Miss Mangerston, bursting into tears; “you do not know how I suffer. I love you so very dearly, that to see anybody usurping my place in your confidence drives me to madness.” (SS 321)

In their final scene together, Caroline tells Ethel that “Others may love you better, but none will ever love you with the mad, passionate devotion that I have done” (SS 324), and, after seizing Ethel’s hand and covering it with “passionate kisses,” she finally “rushe[s]” from both the house and the novel (SS 325). Ethel’s fiancé, who has been a bemused observer of the scene, can only conclude that her head has been “a little turned” (SS 325), and the omniscient narrator appears either unable or unwilling to offer much advance on his character’s laconic verdict. Smart’s intermittent attempts to dredge up some mundane explanation for Miss Mangerston’s conduct (her obsessive malice towards John Hainton, for example, is said to have been generated by his forgetting to dance a galop with her at a ball) seem almost designed to draw attention to their own insufficiency,

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and his explicit analogies between her scheming and Iago’s (e.g., SS 140) suggest a “motiveless malignity” whose ultimate origin cannot be named or has to remain formally unrecognised. Social Sinners was first published in 1880; nine years later, Wilkie Collins, in his final, uncompleted novel, Blind Love,9 appears to offer a distinct advance on Hawley Smart’s baffled evasiveness about what, following Judith M. Bennett and Martha Vicinus, we might call “lesbianlike” affect.10 At the start of the book’s “Second Period,” the gormless heroine Iris Henley, who is shortly to contract a disastrous marriage with Lord Harry Norland, engages a new lady’s maid named Fanny Mere. At their first interview, Iris finds that it is “not easy to form a positive opinion” of Fanny from her appearance: Slim and well-balanced, firmly and neatly made, she interested men who met her by accident (and sometimes even women), if they happened to be walking behind her. When they quickened their steps, and, passing on, looked back at her, they lost all interest in Fanny from that moment. Painters would have described the defect in her face as “want of colour.” She was one of the whitest of fair female human beings.11

Quite apart from being practically an albino,12 moreover, Fanny admits to having been seduced and abandoned by a French language teacher, so it is understandable that she should repay Iris’s instinctive trust in her integrity with a passionate but guarded devotion: “She [Iris] is the one friend who held out a hand to me. I hate the men; and I don’t care for the women. Except one. Being a servant I mustn’t say I love that one. If I was a lady, I don’t know that I should say it. Love is cant; love is rubbish.” (BL 149)

Her self-repression, however, fails to deceive the novel’s villain, the machiavellian Dr Vimpany, whose fraudulent schemes Fanny sets out to foil. Vimpany remarks to Lord Harry: “Such a woman as this would like to absorb the whole affection of her mistress in herself. You laugh. She is a servant, and a common person. How can such a person conceive an affection so strong as to become a passion for one so superior? But it is true. It is perfectly well known, and there have been many recorded instances of such a woman, say a servant, greatly inferior in station, conceiving a desperate affection for her mistress, accompanied by the fiercest jealousy.” (BL 235)

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Vimpany’s diagnosis is unique among the three fictional instances I have examined in its open discussion of same-sex love as an exclusive preference, and since the speaker, however shady, is medically qualified, it is tempting to hail him (not to mention Collins) as a pioneer reader of early sexologists like Krafft-Ebing, whose Psychopathia Sexualis first appeared in 1886 and who both notes the “intense jealousy” common between female lovers and suggestively lists “the seduction of daughters by depraved servants” as a source of lesbianism’s contemporary prevalence, along with “excessive work on sewing-machines.”13 On closer inspection, however, Dr Vimpany’s emphasis, unlike Krafft-Ebing’s, turns out rather to be on the social anomaly of Fanny’s conceiving a passion for her mistress than on homosexual attachment per se. Indeed, so laboured is his stress on the gulf that separates a “common person,” a “servant,” a woman “inferior in station,” from a “mistress,” “one so superior,” that the impact of his acknowledgment of same-sex attraction among women is largely blunted. After all, to label as aberrant the love that a “mere” maid conceives for her employer can readily suggest the converse inference that such a “passion” between equals would be unremarkable. And it is here, of course, that the significance of social difference in the three fictional instances I have described becomes crucial. For within the relations conventional between mistresses and servants the language of “romantic friendship”—a language which can simultaneously speak of lesbianism and camouflage it—is simply not possible, and its use in such a context would only contribute to the appearance of anomaly. This point, indeed, is explicitly made by Fanny Mere herself (“Being a servant I mustn’t say I love that one”) and it is confirmed in the plot of Social Sinners. In Smart’s novel, Caroline Mangerston is not, in fact, the only woman to form a close emotional bond with Ethel Clothele: Maude Riversley is similarly inseparable from her friend (“strangely attracted” to her, as the narrator puts it (SS 113)), and both she and Caroline are referred to by their circle as Ethel’s “shadows” (SS 81) or as her “satellites” (SS 113). The difference between the two women, of course, is that Maude, unlike Caroline, is Ethel’s social equal and that their mutual affection can therefore be decorously subsumed within the familiar taxonomy of friendship (as in the more familiar example of Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways and Emmy Dunstane)14 rather than having to be categorised as abnormal. It is because passionate attachments between mistresses and maids can be seen to bear a generic resemblance to intimate relationships between women of equal status but cannot be described in the same terms—which are, in fact, among the few terms readily available—that they become a

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source of what Patricia Ingham usefully terms “contextual unease” in the novels I have been examining.15 I want to suggest, however, not that the sexual is somehow incompletely displaced (or, as Castle would put it, “derealized”)16 into the social in these texts but rather that a problematic sexual situation becomes visible only in and through the representation of a social anomaly. The mutual regard proper between employee and employer has generated a surplus in the form of desire which threatens to undo that very distinction, and the passionate love of one woman for another can thus present itself both as a moral or pathological problem and as a more familiar threat to class boundaries. Thus, Miss Aldclyffe’s nocturnal visit to Cytherea, Caroline’s insane infatuation with Ethel and Fanny’s adoring worship of her mistress, whether or not they testify to a conscious ambition on their creators’ part to explore female homosexuality (and that is undecidable), can also be construed as the secondary symptoms of an unresolved general contradiction in the relations between employers and their dependents in mid- and late-Victorian England. As various commentators have argued, an earlier (indeed, always earlier) understanding of the servant as part of an extended family group had very largely yielded, by the mid-nineteenth century, to the notion of servants as contracted employees—without, however, fully erasing a nostalgia for older, closer relations. In many precariously middle class households, the relatively slender social distinction between mistress and maid necessitated the jealous maintenance by the former of a sharply defined boundary separating “above” and “below stairs”; but alongside this potentially antagonistic relationship (the “servant problem” so repeatedly encountered in the work of Victorian humourists) subsists the yearning for a more affective bond—for servants who transcend their dependent condition in displays of selfless and unconditional loyalty.17 In this overdetermined situation, the degree of emotional attachment—of, in every sense, familiarity— which should properly exist between the servant and her employer becomes uncertain.18 If bonding between mistresses and maids is to be encouraged, then just how much is too much of a good thing? The point at which the mark is overstepped becomes indeterminate, not least because overstepping the mark is a logical, indeed almost inevitable, outcome of fostering relationships which move beyond the starkly contractual. Thus, for example, Fanny Mere’s love for her mistress is diagnosed by Dr Vimpany, with no hint of authorial dissent, in the terms appropriate to a pathological condition, but it is precisely that love which inspires Fanny to the untiringly heroic exertions which rescue Iris from the Doctor’s intrigues. Collins thus appears simultaneously to concede that the degree of Fanny’s affection is aberrant and to validate it as exemplary.

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Again, Miss Aldclyffe’s repeated and emphatic professions of quasimaternal concern for Cytherea seem at once appropriate to the benign interest commendably taken by a middle-aged mistress in a young and inexperienced maid and to a rhetoric of seduction which is shot through with tender imperatives and gentle reminders of power; the point at which the one shades into the other becomes blurred and it is largely because she is rendered unable to distinguish decorum from excess that Cytherea is “unnerved” by her employer’s advances.19 Cytherea’s reflection, therefore, at the beginning of the scene, that “It was now mistress and maid no longer; woman and woman only”(DR 89), is dramatically qualified as the chapter proceeds, and in retrospect its implication that class boundaries can be dissolved by feeling is revealed as naively (and perhaps also as dangerously) utopian. A passionate bonding of “woman and woman only” may be thinkable between equals, where it can be comfortably construed as companionship; between mistresses and maids it can prompt only the baffled questions addressed by Dickens’s Mr Meagles to Miss Wade and Tattycoram in Little Dorrit: “What can you two be together? What can come of it?”20 To those questions, public discourse cannot, in the mid1850s and for decades later, provide an answer, but the questions arise in the first place less because two women are living together than because, for all their shared orphanhood and resentment, Miss Wade has a private income sufficient for two while Tattycoram has been plucked from a foundling hospital and trained as a servant.21 What Sherrie Inness, in the title of her absorbing study of twentieth-century American popular culture, describes as “the Lesbian menace,”22 can become visible in midnineteenth-century England only because it has also been apprehended as a threat of another kind, a threat that “mistresses and maids” might indeed challenge the social and domestic order by claiming to be “woman and woman only.”

Notes 1. Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995), 89-90. Subsequent page references are initialled DR and given parenthetically within the text. 2. See, e.g., Richard H. Taylor, The Neglected Hardy: Thomas Hardy’s Neglected Novels (London: Macmillan, 1982), 14-16; T. R. Wright, Hardy and the Erotic (London: Macmillan, 1989), 39-42; Kristin Brady, “Textual Hysteria: Hardy’s Narrator on Women,” in The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy, ed. Margaret R. Higgonet (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 93.

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3. Lilian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981), 172. 4. Lilian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, 173. 5. Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 96. 6. See, for more extensive discussion of Faderman’s argument (which she has reiterated in subsequent studies), Sheila Jeffreys, “Does It Matter If They Did It?,” in Not a Passing Phase: Reclaimimg Lesbians in History, 1840-1985, ed. Lesbian History Group (London: The Women’s Press, 1989), 19-28; Martha Vicinus, “Lesbian History: All Theory and No Facts or All Facts and No Theory?,” Radical History Review 60 (1994): 57-75. 7. Hardy’s physical description of Miss Aldclyffe, it is worth noting, seems quite explicitly designed both to suggest her sexual indeterminacy and to associate her with the perverse practices of classical decadence: “She had clear eyes, a Roman nose in its purest form, and also the round prominent chin with which the Caesars are represented in ancient marbles; . . . There was a severity about the lower outlines of the face which gave a masculine cast to this portion of her countenance. Womanly weakness was nowhere visible save in one part—the curve of her forehead and brows” (59). For the attribution of same-sex female desire to gender inversion, see George Chauncey, Jr., “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: The Changing Medical Conceptualization of Female ‘Deviance’” in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons with Robert A. Padgug (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 87-117; Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 263-8. 8. Hawley Smart, Social Sinners (London: Ward Lock, n. d.), 36. Subsequent page references are initialled SS and given parenthetically within the text. While it may be objected that the status of paid companion is not precisely that of a servant, Cytherea Graye’s elevation suggests the continuity as well as the distinction between two dependent positions, and the employer-employee relationship can readily override any notional difference in status. Emily Watson, for example, in George Moore’s Vain Fortune (new edition (London: Walter Scott, 1895), 177) treats Julia Bentley as a loving friend and confidante until she suspects Julia of becoming a rival in love, whereupon she haughtily remarks that “she is only a paid companion.” 9. Collins completed the first eighteen parts of the novel (forty chapters) and left very detailed notes for its conclusion, which was written by Walter Besant; see Kenneth Robinson, Wilkie Collins: A Biography (London: Bodley Head, 1951), 318-22; Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins (London: Secker and Warburg, 1991), 428-30. 10. Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends, xxi. 11. Wilkie Collins, Blind Love (New York: Dover Publications, 1986), 95. Subsequent page references are initialled BL and given parenthetically within the text. Collins’s description of Fanny Mere echoes Walter Hartright’s of Marion Halcombe in The Woman in White: like Fanny’s, Marion’s appearance from behind

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is one of “rare beauty” and “unaffected grace;” it is only when he sees her face, with its “moustache” and “masculine mouth and jaw,” that Hartright loses interest in her as an object of desire; see Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, ed. Harvey Peter Sucksmith (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 25. 12. Limping Lizzie in The Moonstone, with her unrequited passion for the maidservant Rosanna, provides an earlier instance in Collins’s fiction of physical abnormality being associated with lesbianlike tendencies; see Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, ed. Anthea Trodd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), esp. 2067. 13. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis With Especial Reference to Antipathic Sexual Instinct, 12th ed., trans. Franklin S. Klaf (New York: Arcade, 1998), 406-7. Krafft-Ebing’s class-biased suspicion of depraved servants finds a contemporary echo in Hélène Cixous’s completely unsupported suggestion, in one of her dialogues with Catherine Clément, that the sexual initiation of Freud’s “Dora” was “probably the maid’s doing;” see Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 152. 14. For an account of the dynamics of this relationship, see Ruth Vanita, Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 136-46. 15. Patricia Ingham, Dickens, Women and Language (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 127. 16. Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian, 62. 17. For an examination of the changing ideological role of servants in eighteenthand nineteenth- century discourse, see Bruce Robbins, The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction From Below (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), esp. 111-12. The most celebrated Victorian comic account of the servant problem is Augustus and Henry Mayhew’s The Greatest Plague of Life, or, The Adventures of a Lady in Search of a Good Servant (1847; London: Routledge, n. d.), whose longsuffering paterfamilias finally tells his wife, after she has alienated by her officiousness a whole regiment of domestics, that “in the olden time” the servant grew old in the service of a single household because “he was looked upon, and treated, and loved like one of the family” (282). 18. Among the clues to Lady Audley’s essential indecorum, for example, is her close, and indiscreet, intimacy with her maid Phoebe. Although Braddon never hints at a sexual bond between the two, she takes pains to stress that Phoebe (“exactly the sort of girl who is generally promoted from the post of lady’s-maid to that of companion”) enjoys “perquisites such as perhaps no lady’s-maid ever had before” and this contributes to the suspect air of excess which begins to accrue about Lady Audley from her first appearance; see Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, ed. David Skilton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 104, 106. 19. See Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends, 109-42 for a discussion of the ways in which intimate relationships between women could be articulated in terms of mother-daughter bonding. Transposed from relationships between social equals to relationships between mistresses and maids, however, the assertion of maternal

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status by the former can connote authority but will inevitably appear transgressive if it is extended to express erotic desire. 20. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, Oxford Illustrated Dickens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 329. 21. I have omitted any fuller discussion of Little Dorrit here both for the obvious reason that Tattycoram and Miss Wade do not stand in the position of maid and mistress, or even of employee and employer, and because my own views are in substantial agreement with those of Anna Marie Jagose in her Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), 37-56. However, Jagose’s “historicisation” of the relationship (in Dickens’s description of which, it is worth emphasising, there is no reference whatever to love), fails to explore the issue of class-difference, which is why it has seemed appropriate to flag that issue here. 22. Sherrie Inness, The Lesbian Menace: Ideology, Identity and the Representation of Lesbian Life (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).

CHAPTER TEN FRENCH REALISM ENGLISHED: THE CASE OF M.E. BRADDON’S THE DOCTOR’S WIFE P.D. EDWARDS

Towards the end of 1864, when The Doctor’s Wife had nearly completed its serial run in Temple Bar, the editor, Edmund Yates, asked Mary Elizabeth Braddon for a new novel that he could begin serialising the month after it did so. Initially he did not stipulate that he wanted a sensation novel in the style that Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd had done more than any others to popularise, the style she had parodied in The Doctor’s Wife in Sigismund Smith’s descriptions of the penny dreadfuls he writes, and parodies again in her letter responding to Yates’s request. She had assumed, or perhaps only hoped, that he would want what she calls a social novel, something in the style of “the Balzac morbid-anatomy school” that is now her “especial delight.”1 The work she had offered him must have been The Lady’s Mile, which Robert Lee Wolff, the leading authority on her life and work, regards as the first of her “purely” social novels.2 But her letter strongly implies that she knew Yates would also recognise The Doctor’s Wife itself, which until well into the third of its three volumes is unmistakably modelled on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, as an example.3 Neither Madame Bovary nor all but four of Balzac’s fictions had been translated into English by the early 1860s. Balzac had always been considered unsuitable for English ladies and Madame Bovary had been prosecuted for obscenity even in France. But of course Braddon and other English students of fictional morbid anatomy, including Yates and their mutual friend George Augustus Sala, read them in the original. In correspondence with the elderly Bulwer Lytton, whose Zanoni is one of the novels that inflame the romantic imagination of the heroine of The Doctor’s Wife, and whom Braddon looked up to as a mentor, she had to

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disown Balzac (“Enlightened by your criticism . . . I seem to see the false flash and glitter”) and to pretend to recoil from the novels as “so many studies in morbid anatomy . . . always peering into the most hideous sores in the social body.” But she told another correspondent, less old-fashioned than Bulwer Lytton, that she agreed with Balzac’s view that Lucy Ashton and Scott’s realism in general were too tame and that she preferred the Balzacian alternatives, even alleging, with pardonable exaggeration, that Becky Sharp was simply “Valérie Marneffe in English dress” (quoted in SV 180, 182). Braddon had good reasons for her public caution and for maintaining strict sexual decorum in her own novels. Her first bestsellers, Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd, both aroused controversy because their heroines had married bigamously, and therefore adulterously, without remorse and without losing any of their sexual attractiveness. (The fact that Lady Audley was motivated solely by the desire for security, never by sexual passion, and that Aurora Floyd appears to have lost interest in sex totally and gladly after the moment of adolescent lust that swept her into the clutches of a mere ostler, was not a sufficient atonement in the eyes of strict moralists.) When it became known that Braddon was living with a man to whom she was not married (because he already had a wife), she naturally grew less inclined to risk such controversy again—just as George Eliot apparently did, in similar circumstances, after some reviewers took exception to the much bolder treatment of female sexual desire in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss. Braddon later told an interviewer that she read Adam Bede a dozen times and always wept for Hetty Sorrel, and in an unpublished article on Zola she stated, surprisingly, that “There was much affinity between Emma Bovary and Hetty Sorrel, and between Flaubert and George Eliot” (quoted in SV 262, 318).4 The heroine of The Doctor’s Wife, however, is innocence itself in comparison not only with Emma Bovary, her intended prototype, but also with Hetty Sorrel and, one might add, Maggie Tulliver. Although The Doctor’s Wife devotes itself to a sustained and certainly earnest examination of problems in relations between the sexes, both within and outside marriage, illicit desire is not one of these problems except in the mind of its counterpart to Flaubert’s Rodolphe. When she wrote to Yates, Braddon is not likely to have had Eliot in mind as a fellow member of the morbid-anatomy school. In another letter to him she had jokingly taken umbrage at his treatment of the unfashionable London neighbourhood in which she resided in his novel Broken to Harness. “Oh,” she had exclaimed, “is it not an act of meaness [sic], a cruel & dastardly deed, to live in a neighbourhood & study it from

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a pre-Raphaelite point of view, & then go away to fairer regions, & taunt & mock the unhappy lingerers on the night’s Plutonian shore . . . ”5 In this context “pre-Raphaelite” clearly connotes “minutely and unflatteringly detailed” and is virtually synonymous with what Braddon understands by “morbidly anatomical.” She had no doubt noted the references to both Balzac and Flaubert in Broken to Harness and enrolled Yates in her Balzac morbid-anatomy school on the strength of them. But it would have been their mutual friend George Augustus Sala, who had gone to the lengths of making Balzac’s most famous character, Vautrin, the protagonist of his first novel and giving Balzac himself a brief walk-on part in his last,6 that she would have regarded as the school’s most notable English alumnus— after Thackeray at any rate. That she did have Sala very much in mind in her letter to Yates is demonstrated by her subsequent inclusion, among the ingredients of her standard recipe for her “right down sensational” novels, of the “Sala-ic Duke who comes into the world with six and thirty pages of graphic detail & goes out of it without having said Booh to a goose.” There is no evidence, here or elsewhere, that she had also noticed Dickens’s apparent imitation of Balzac in the characterisation of the French convict Rigaud in Little Dorrit, or that she shared Geraldine Jewsbury’s view of Wilkie Collins’s earliest novels as “like a demonstration of morbid anatomy” in a “moral hospital,”7 and she is hardly likely to have enrolled George Eliot as a fellow disciple of Balzac solely on the strength of the title of her first book of fiction (or, subsequently, the subtitle of Middlemarch): Eliot did read Balzac but she considered Père Goriot a “hateful book,”8 and one imagines she may well have felt much the same about Madame Bovary. There is no inconsistency in Braddon’s inclusion of the “graphic detail” for which Balzac was proverbial—extended, minute descriptions of people, places and social rituals, replete with petits faits vrais9—among the ingredients of her “right down sensational” mixture, for both Balzac’s and Sala’s novels tend to be luridly sensational in spite of these, indeed partly because of them. For no particular reason as far as I can see, Braddon chose George Eliot’s Warwickshire, the “Loamshire” of Adam Bede, as the real-life original of “Midlandshire,” the setting of The Doctor’s Wife. But the pastoral delights that George Eliot had evoked for her readers are wholly lost on the heroine, Isabel Sleaford, just as those of Normandy are on Emma Bovary. Brought up in a shabby, barely respectable lower-middleclass household in Camberwell, then removed by a stroke of luck to a position as governess in the industrial town of Conventford, Isabel’s imagination responds only to novels, not to pretty landscape. Her employer in Conventford, Charles Raymond, a phrenologist, savant and

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philanthropist obviously modelled on Charles Bray, George Eliot’s Coventry friend,10 diagnoses her accurately as a case of “too much Wonder and Exaggerated Ideality” but also locates a “very decent moral region.” He observes too that her “big eyes” open only when she “talks of her favourite books.”11 Given that the novel is set in the early 1850s, most of these turn out, naturally, to be recent popular successes: Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, Dombey and Son, and David Copperfield. Prominent among the heroines Isabel identifies with in her imagination are Jane Eyre, Amelia Sedley, and Edith and Florence Dombey (in addition to Lucy Ashton, who of course is also a soulmate of Emma Bovary’s), while her favourite romantic heroes are in the dashingly or sternly seductive Byronic mould: for example, Zanoni, Rochester, and Steerforth (in addition to Edgar Ravenswood). Predictably, the few direct glimpses we are allowed of the daydreams her reading inspires are strictly literary: they are never accompanied by the faintest hint of individuality or originality, let alone of lubricity or any other kind of private emotion or sensation. The novel’s reticence about sexual desire, both male and female, is in fact extreme not only by the standards of the 1860s generally but even by Braddon’s own. And it leaves unanswered, and seemingly unanswerable, the obvious question how a heroine who supposedly empathises with Edith Dombey (not only Florence), and with Little Em’ly in her tragic preference for Steerforth over her faithful swain Ham, can be taken totally by surprise when her would-be seducer proposes that she elope with him. True she has already decided, while they are meeting in the countryside day by day—solely to talk about books and quote poetry to each other—that she “doesn’t want to be Edith Dombey any longer” (187-8), but this is because she expects, and believes she desires, no more from their relationship than she has now, not because she has any inkling that Roland hopes to persuade her to take the same fatal step as Edith took with Carker. Her invincible ignorance of his hopes, long after the whole neighbourhood and all his and her friends, apart from her husband, have accurately guessed them, doubtless offers a kind of confirmation of the “moral region” that Charles Raymond located and robs the author’s severest judgment of her—“I know that she was alike wicked and silly” (223)—of at least half its force. Emma Bovary’s imagination has been seduced by the tales of illicit passion she has read, long before either of her two lovers comes upon the scene, so that she knows exactly what she wants from them when they do; Isabel’s remains impregnably chaste. She never doubts, particularly when Roland is present in the flesh, that her love for him—though at one stage she actually calls it “passion” (237)—is purely “platonic” (262).

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Up to the point when Roland at last declares his intentions explicitly and she indignantly rejects them, it remains at least theoretically possible that her love-life will come to much the same end as Emma’s: we have even been told earlier that she has noticed which bottle in the room her husband uses as his surgery contains laudanum (226). But Isabel’s flirtation with Roland is palliated not only by its relative innocuousness— the lovers apparently never get as far as kissing—but also by the manifest shortcomings of her husband. Considering that he is the son of a doctor and thus belongs to the village gentry, George Gilbert often appears to treat his wife with an almost unbelievable lack of gentlemanly feeling. When he proposes to her he virtually deprives her of the chance to say no, or yes, and his determination not to spend more than ten days and £10 on their honeymoon makes it so miserable that she is reduced to bitter and open tears by the time she crosses her husband’s threshold and savours the ugly antiquated furniture and general dinginess of the home that is now to be hers. Charles Bovary at least courts Emma diligently and patiently and makes a proper proposal, and however ungentlemanly in some of his habits—he is only the son of a peasant—he refrains from yawning openly when his wife tries to engage him in conversation about books, as George does. Nor as far as we hear does Emma have to put up with the reek of spring onion on her husband’s breath every night at bedtime, as Isabel does (199): unlike Emma, Isabel never falls pregnant. Though she is conscious of “no special horror or aversion of her husband” and goes on assuring herself that he is “very good” to her (224), all the evidence suggests that once they are married he is as totally undemonstrative in his affection as she is in hers, and no less preoccupied with his own pursuits to the exclusion of hers. The achievement of Madame Bovary that Braddon emulates most effectively is the projection of the heroine’s disenchantment with her marriage on to her surroundings, both indoors and outside. (In Isabel’s jaundiced view the dusty grey lane outside her “square-built” home seems to remain dusty in all seasons.) But while Flaubert notoriously keeps his distance from all his characters, even those, like Emma, whose point of view his narrative gives most attention to, Braddon renders Isabel’s point of view so much more effectively, with so much more imaginative sympathy, than George’s (or any other character’s) that much of the blame for her scandalous flirtation is implicitly transferred from her to her unfeeling husband. If Isabel’s immediate termination of the flirtation when she at last sees what Roland believes must happen next were the dénouement of The Doctor’s Wife as a whole, the anticlimax would be as painful for the reader

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as it is for Roland. But fortunately it is quickly overtaken, and overshadowed, by two startling new developments. First George goes down with, and lingeringly dies of, a typhus infection that he has contracted and aggravated only because of his pig-headed conviction that he understands the disease better than the specialist who is called in to treat him. (Shades, here, of Charles Bovary’s disastrous over-confidence in his surgical skills.) Then Isabel’s criminal father, who has recently sought her out after his release from prison, kills Roland who has attacked him after taking him for Isabel’s lover (as nearly everyone else in the neighbourhood has), and whom he in turn fatally wounds upon recognising him as the toff who had hunted him down when he was on the run from the law and testified against him. The groundwork for all this— vintage Braddon—has of course been carefully laid in the first volume. But in spite of the typically sensational climax, most of the reviewers were willing to concede that in the novel as a whole she had made a more determined effort than usual to grapple with serious moral issues and had proved that she was up to the task. Two apparent exceptions were the anonymous columnists in the “two Illustrateds” who, she complained in another letter to Edmund Yates, “sneered” at Roland Lansdell, apparently because his world-weariness is attributed to his loss of religious faith. One of these lamented, without actually mentioning Roland by name, that “our old friend Miss Braddon [is] coming forward as a religious novelist, and inditing as unctuous and pretty insipidities as any of the sisterhood . . . ”12 To which Braddon responds with an appropriate display of offended righteousness: “Heaven knows I have written most sincerely, & do most fully believe there is no misfortune or misery greater than an inability to see or hope for anything beyond this lower world of white bait dinners . . . ” What the columnist might have had to say about Roland’s eventual recovery of his faith and exemplary Christian deathbed, to the accompaniment of a flurry of quotations from In Memoriam—and not till after he has had plenty of time to repent of his godless selfishness towards Isabel—hardly bears conjecture. By then of course he has had the violent shock of a criminal assault to bring him to his senses, but even so the columnist would probably have felt, with some justification, that his moral awakening is disproportionate to the actual harm that he has done anyone but himself or, given what we know of Isabel, has ever looked likely to do. True, his intentions do eventually prove to be as “wicked” as the narrator tells us. And she also paints lurid pictures of him letting his hair down in Paris in the traditional fashion of the English gentleman: “dispensing a small fortune in the Rue de la Paix and in the Faubourg St

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Honoré” on big bunches of flowers which he saw later “lying on the velvet cushion of an opera-box” or “withering in the warm atmosphere of a boudoir,” and being called “Enfant!” by pretty women in the “dim mysterious shades of lamplit conservatories” (201). We know too that he is a published poet who woos Isabel partly by reading samples of his work to her, and who shares her taste for Byron. But although she thinks of him as “a modern Lord Byron . . . walking by her side” she experiences “no consciousness of wrong or danger” (139), and the verses quoted in the novel accord better with Charles Raymond’s description of them, “a sort of mixture of Tennyson and Alfred de Musset,” than with Lady Gwendoline’s, “pretty drawing-room Byronics . . . anglicised Alfred-deMussetism” (129-30). At any rate, whatever his wickednesses abroad his reputation at home in Midlandshire has so far remained unblemished, and like Arthur Donnithorne he has eloquent mentors doing their best to ensure he doesn’t ruin it now, notably Charles Raymond. All of them assume, forgivably, that his amour with Isabel must have progressed much further than it actually has, not reckoning on either Isabel’s apparently invincible chastity or his continuing reluctance to put it to the test. Even by the standards of mid-Victorian fiction he is not a bold lover, and among poets his lovemaking appears to have much more in common with that of the Matthew Arnold of the “Marguerite” poems than that of any Byronic or Tennysonian hero who falls from grace, or is tempted to. When he does finally pluck up his courage and confess his passion to Isabel he takes it for granted—like George Gilbert earlier—that her wishes must surely be the same as his and that she will therefore acquiesce in his plans the moment he finally decides (in what order isn’t altogether clear) to act on them and confide them to her. The two reviewers who “sneered” at him can be forgiven if what they were really hinting at was that he comes across as too shilly-shallying and namby-pamby not only for such a coy mistress as Isabel but for any novel-reader. In a mainstream English novel of the 1860s Roland obviously could not have been a Rodolphe (or a Léon) any more than Isabel could have been an Emma Bovary, but there is clear evidence, even in Braddon’s next “social” novel, that they could have approximated much more to their Flaubertian counterparts had she wanted them to. The nearest Isabel comes to exhibiting anything like eroticism is in her fantasy about Mayfair and the Row just after she begins her married life in Graybridge (a little like Emma’s fantasies after the ball at La Vaubyessard): Mrs Gilbert thought of London—that wonderful West-End, Mayfair London . . . She thought of that holy of holies, that inner sanctuary of life, in which all the women are beautiful and all the men are wicked, in which

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The wicked prince subsequently sends for her on his deathbed when she is at a ball, to which she returns and dances the night away, the “gayest and most beautiful creature,” and is found in her bed the next day “—dead!” (Childishly silly stuff, of course, but she is still only nineteen or twenty.) And then the Row! She saw herself in the Row sometimes, upon an Arab—a black Arab—that would run away with her at the most fashionable time in the afternoon and all but kill her: and then she would rein him up as no mortal woman ever reined in an Arab steed before, and would ride slowly back between two ranks of half-scared, half-admiring faces, with her hair hanging over her shoulders and her eyelashes drooping on her flushed cheeks. (119)

In the 1860s the Row, otherwise known as the Lady’s Mile, was the notorious haunt of the “pretty horse-breakers,” the kept women whose prototype “Skittles” (alias Catherine Waters) had sat for Landseer’s equestrian portrait “The Taming of the Shrew” which caused a sensation when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1861. The Row was the place where London’s version of demi-monde and haut monde converged most publicly in broad daylight, and its pretty horse-breakers had already figured, openly or in disguise, in a spate of novels by the time Braddon wrote The Doctor’s Wife.13 Any of the original readers of The Doctor’s Wife would almost certainly have seen a tacit allusion to the phenomenon in Isabel’s fantasy. Braddon’s next social novel alludes to the Row much more openly, not only in its title, The Lady’s Mile, but also in its opening paragraph, a “Salaic” or would-be Balzacian description of the Row on a warm June afternoon which is put into the mouth of a sensation novelist whimsically observing the scene: The lives of the women of this present day are like this drive which they call the Lady’s Mile. They go as far as they can, and then go back again. See how mechanically the horses wheel when they reach the prescribed turning-point. If they went any farther, I suppose they would be lost in

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some impenetrable forest depth in Kensington Gardens. In the drive the rule has no exception; because, you see, the barrier that divides the park from the gardens is a palpable iron railing, which the stoutest hunter might refuse. But on the highway of life the boundary-line is not so clearly defined. There are women who lose themselves in some unknown region beyond the Lady’s Mile, and whom we never hear of more.14

The two heroines of the tale that follows are both for different reasons dissatisfied with their marriages and drift towards adultery. Like Isabel, both beat a hasty retreat as soon as they are faced with the immediate prospect of an illicit sexual relationship. And, also like her, neither has any sexual relationship with her husband as far as the reader can tell but neither feels the lack of it. Compared to the two heroines of Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?, which was published just before The Lady’s Mile, they appear all but sexless. But unlike Isabel in The Doctor’s Wife they are at least worldly-wise enough to recognise the threat of male sexuality before it is actually thrust upon them, and to understand that, implicitly at least, they are rebelling against the existing sexual code—if not why. In terms of Braddon’s ambition to establish herself as a social novelist in the Balzacian tradition, The Lady’s Mile is at any rate a little more daring than The Doctor’s Wife: at one point, in an unwonted moment of contrition towards her father, the “fast” minor heroine goes so far as to liken herself to Père Goriot’s daughters. And some of the social novels that followed The Lady’s Mile take a further small step forward. In Birds of Prey there is even a covert debate about the merits of Balzac between the heroine’s sweetheart, who is repelled by the “odour of the dissectingroom” that clings to the novels and sighs for “something better and brighter than [Balzac’s] highest type of womanhood,” and the villain who is “riveted by Balzac’s cynicism” and exults in the viciousness that enables Philippe Brideau to “bespatter his virtuous brother with the mire from his carriage-wheels.”15 And in Dead-Sea Fruit the sybaritic villain has distinguished himself in his youth by publishing a “study in morbid anatomy” that revealed his “utterly selfish nature . . . contemptuous and suspicious of his fellow-men,”16 while a showy and blousy female character who buys her way on to the West-End stage purchases her clothes in Paris from Madame Nourisson, alias Jacqueline Collin, Vautrin’s aunt. Clearly, Braddon gradually became a little more daring about her taste for Balzac as the 1860s went on, or perhaps the taste itself became less daring. But for all the allusions to Balzac in these novels, any resemblances between his plots and characters and theirs are at best incidental and superficial. None of them makes anywhere near as distinct and sustained

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an attempt to imitate one of his novels, to adapt it to English social conditions—to “English” it—as The Doctor’s Wife had made to English Madame Bovary. And given that so much of the reality of Flaubert’s novel is contained in or filtered through the consciousness of a single character it would obviously have been a far more difficult model to imitate, or even to allude to meaningfully, than any of Balzac’s, even if its central character had not been a double adulteress. But Braddon sensibly accepts the constraints within which any popular English novelist had to work in the 1860s and contents herself with little more than a discreet and mildly amusing pastiche of Madame Bovary. Working on the premise that in a novel set in bourgeois provincial England the mere contemplation of adultery by a young married woman might be at least as shocking as the thing itself in Normandy, The Doctor’s Wife turns out not so much an imitation of Madame Bovary as a rough English equivalent in the prevailing mode of domestic realism. As such, whether intentionally or not, it effectively lays bare the limitations of this mode, especially as a form of sex education for young women. In this sense it might even be said, tongue-in-cheek, that it deconstructs itself and its English forebears while ostensibly contrasting itself with, refining and correcting Flaubert’s French sexual realism.

Notes 1. The manuscripts of all three of the letters from Braddon to Yates cited in the course of this article are among the Edmund Yates Papers in the Fryer Library, University of Queensland. All are undated. A catalogue of the papers, edited by Peter Edwards and Andrew Dowling, was published as Victorian Fiction Research Guide 21, by the Victorian Fiction Research Unit, University of Queensland (1993). 2. Robert Lee Wolff, Sensational Victorian: the Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (New York: Garland Press, 1979), 169. Subsequent page references are initialled SV and given parenthetically within the text. 3. In an unpublished article on Zola, written thirty years later, Braddon distinguished Flaubert’s realism in Madame Bovary from Balzac’s chiefly in terms of its cold dispassionateness, the intensity of its analysis of its heroine’s vices. Both writers were analysts, physiologists, morbid anatomists of social evil and individual folly and villainy, though Flaubert was the more relentless “vivisectionist” (SV 318). 4. The interview was published in Edmund Yates’s paper The World but Yates himself was not the interviewer, as Wolff supposed. 5. The neighbourhood—“whilom known as ‘Mesopotamia,’” as Yates puts it in the novel—is that of Brunswick Square and Doughty St, which Braddon calls Great

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Dowdy St (elsewhere Dowdy St). Yates had formerly lived in Doughty St (like Dickens before him). Braddon lived in nearby Mecklenburgh Square. 6. P.D Edwards, Dickens’s “Young Men”: George Augustus Sala, Edmund Yates, and the World of Victorian Journalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 78, 79. 7. Jewsbury was reviewing Collins’s third novel, Hide and Seek, anonymously, in the Athenaeum, 24 June 1854. Reprinted in Norman Page, ed., Wilkie Collins: the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 55-6. 8. George Eliot, The Journals of George Eliot, ed. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 81. 9. Perhaps the most famous example is the description of the antiques shop in which Raphael de Valentin chances upon the magic wild ass’s skin, in La Peau de Chagrin. 10. Braddon’s biographer, Wolff, is unaware how and when Braddon came to know Bray (SV 488-9). On the evidence of the novel she must have spent some time in and around Coventry. 11. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, ed. Lyn Pykett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 66, 72. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically within the text. Sigismund Smith facetiously compares Isabel to the eponymous protagonist of Balzac’s The Girl with the Golden Eyes (30). 12. Illustrated London News 7 May 1864: 443. The other “Illustrated” Braddon refers to is probably the Illustrated Times. 13. The recent example that may have done most to inspire Braddon’s descriptions of the Row, in both The Doctor’s Wife and The Lady’s Mile, was Sala’s Quite Alone (1863). 14. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Lady’s Mile, 3 vols. (London: Ward, Lock and Tyler, 1866), vol. 2, 48-9. 15. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Birds of Prey, 3 vols. (London: Ward, Lock and Tyler, 1866), vol. 1, 240. The villain is quoting Vautrin in Père Goriot. 16. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Dead-Sea Fruit, 3 vols. (London: Ward, Lock and Tyler, 1868), vol. 2, 218-19.

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE RIVALS OF GEORGE ELIOT: FRENCH FICTION AS INTERPRETED BY MARGARET OLIPHANT JOANNE WILKES

In the last few years, Margaret Oliphant’s copious contributions to periodicals have begun to receive the attention they merit. Discussed at some length in Elisabeth Jay’s 1995 biography of Oliphant and in Valerie Sanders’ 1996 book on anti-feminist Victorian women novelists, they were in 1997 listed comprehensively in John Stock Clarke’s second bibliographical volume devoted to Oliphant in the Victorian Fiction Research Guides series.1 Given, too, the tradition of anonymous publication that affected most of her periodical writing, some of this attention has focused on the various voices Oliphant adopted, and especially the gendering thereof. As well as being discussed by Jay and Sanders, this was one emphasis in the articles by Ann Heilmann and Sandra Spencer in the special issue of Women’s Writing devoted to Oliphant in 1999, which examined her writings in Blackwood’s on the legal and political rights of women. J. Haythornthwaite, Joanne Shattock and Anne M. Scriven have explored the gendering (or lack thereof) of the voices in Oliphant’s journalism over her career as a whole, and Solveig C. Robinson has discussed the overtly masculine personae she adopted in her late-career Blackwood’s contributions as “the Looker-On” and the man in the “Old Saloon.”2 My concern here is with a kind of reviewing that was especially enabled for Oliphant by the option of using a masculine or an ungendered voice—the reviewing of French literature. Discussion of French literature was a significant strand of Oliphant’s criticism, and one which has not yet been examined in detail. She wrote occasionally on pre-nineteenth-century French writers, such as Voltaire and Molière, but mostly treated nineteenth-century figures. These included Alphonse de Lamartine and

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Alfred de Musset, known mostly for their poetry and verse-drama, and the fiction-writers George Sand, Alexandre Dumas père, Alphonse Daudet, Guy de Maupassant, Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo. It was Musset, Balzac and Hugo whose works she most commended, and on whom she commented most insightfully. Moreover, she identified, in Balzac and Hugo especially, strengths she did not find in leading Victorian English novelists such as George Eliot and Dickens. The most notable feature of Oliphant’s discussion of French writing is that she does not apply to it the same expectations and standards evident in her handling of English literature. There is a hint of this approach in her now-notorious attack on English “sensation” fiction, the article “Novels” published in Blackwood’s in 1867, which ostensibly criticises baneful French influences on English fiction. This review, of novels by M. E. Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, Annie Thomas and others, laments that such works break the tradition which saw English fiction habitually “pure from all noxious topics,” possessed of “a certain sanity, wholesomeness, and cleanness,”3 and thus safe reading for young people. This is because these “sensation” novels emphasise so strongly the sexual attractions of their characters, and especially the sexual feelings of their female protagonists. On account of this development, English novels are no longer free of what the article calls “that corruption which has so fatally injured the French school of fiction” (146). The essay acknowledges, however, that the (nowshattered) fetters on English novelists did mean that, by comparison with French fiction, English novels “might not reach the same perfection in art, which a craftsman utterly freed of all restraints, and treating vice and virtue with equal impartiality, may aspire to” (146). Avoiding certain subjects because of a strong moral slant, it implies, militates against great art. Oliphant also condemns what she sees as the very limited literary skill evident in the English novels she is castigating, and adduces French literature again, this time to strengthen the case against her targets: at least in France, she avers, “[a] wicked novel . . . may be very disgusting, but it is generally clever” (152). She then makes the point that a truly great novelist may make an offensive subject worth reading about: When the vilest of topics happens to fall into the hands of such an anatomist as Balzac, or under the more human touch of Victor Hugo, there is something of calm science in the investigation—a kind of inexorable and passionless dissection which renders even such studies impressive. (152)

French fiction in its own right is not Oliphant’s focus here, but the article does suggest that France and England have different literary expectations, such that their respective outputs should not be judged by the

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same criteria. A few years later, in reviewing a biography of Alexandre Dumas père by Percy Fitzgerald, her rhetorical stance is in defence of the French, as she criticises Fitzgerald for exemplifying a peculiarly British tendency to abuse everything about France in a smug and mindless fashion, to “sermonize” and to “sneer.”4 She goes on to declare that, “[n]owhere has fiction occupied a more important place than in modern France, or drawn to its development so many powerful intellects” (116). Again she points to the achievement of Balzac and Hugo, and this time also to George Sand, although she observes that they are none of them “moral writers”: No Englishman that we know of has drawn with pencil so keen and diamond-pointed the mysteries of human motive and thought, and the terrible gulf of human weakness, as Balzac has done, with a pitiless power and clear-sightedness which make us hate while we admire; and it would be impossible to give to the philosophical romance, the dramatic representation of sentiment and emotion, a more splendid development than it has attained in the hands of Victor Hugo and George Sand. (116)

For Oliphant, there are depths of the human psyche and of human experience that Balzac in particular has plumbed, which no English novelist would dare attempt to fathom. This last aspect of Balzac is also emphasised, and more strongly, in an article devoted specifically to him that Oliphant wrote in 1878, in response to the publication in France of Balzac’s letters and two memoirs of him. Here she claims that No other writer of fiction has sounded so profoundly and so persistently the lower mysteries of human nature; no man has descended so low in the subterranean ways of life, and revealed with so terrible a lustre the secret things that lurk in the darkness . . . Nothing is as it seems, in these pages, so often terrible, appalling in their pitiless pursuit of human nature through all its subterfuges.5

There is no sense here that these mysteries should be left unexplored, or these subterfuges remain uncovered, for the sake of innocent younger readers. Nor does Oliphant criticise Balzac for dealing with illicit sexual passion, since for him, she recognises, “immorality in the relations between men and women is nothing . . . at all,” since “it’s the usual state of affairs,” not intrinsically corruptive of the parties concerned: indeed, vice for him can encompass “a certain virtue.” Moreover, far from valuing sexual purity in either characters or readers, his novels show more sympathy “with the character to which a knowledge of the forbidden has

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given experience and depth, than with one that has remained borné and uninformed in the narrow circles of innocence” (533). Oliphant’s article does not condemn this aspect of Balzac’s fiction either. Oliphant’s references to what she considers Balzac’s “inexorable and passionless dissection,” “pitiless power and clear-sightedness” and “pitiless pursuit of human nature,” suggest that she sees his narrative stance as essentially disinterested, rather than as inflected by emotion or moral fervour, and she does comment that “[t]he moral conflict interests [Balzac] profoundly, but he looks on, upon both sides impartially, without favour” (532-3). This observation forms part of another comparison with English fiction, this time with the English novelist who was in the 1870s most noted for a combination of moral and intellectual seriousness— George Eliot. Oliphant argues that Eliot is “more moved by her own creations than Balzac is, and shows her hatred of her worst revelations with a vehemence and naïveté which is a very remarkable feature in her genius” (532): the attribution to Eliot of “vehemence and naïveté” here implies that the French writer is the greater artist. Some years later, writing of Guy de Maupassant’s novel Pierre et Jean in the same vein, Oliphant claims that “[t]here can be no more perfect example, apart from all that can please and soothe and touch the heart, of remorseless yet allaccomplished art.” It is “tragic and full of sombre passion . . . one of those complete and careful studies of life in which certainly the higher masters of the French novel are singularly successful.” Again there is a comparison with English fiction: what Maupassant has done is said to be “scarcely within the possibilities of English art.”6 I have claimed that the choice of a masculine voice, or one that was not obviously gendered, was enabling for Oliphant when dealing with French literature. It would have been harder, if writing overtly as a woman, to show close familiarity with the subject-matter of writers like Balzac and Maupassant, or to avoid condemning for immorality what she admitted to having read. The necessary difference of perspective is suggested if we consider the article from which the praise of Pierre et Jean comes, in relation to Oliphant’s famous review of Jude the Obscure and Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did: “The Anti-Marriage League.” The former is written from a male perspective, as one of the “Old Saloon” series, and the other from an overtly female viewpoint. Both are critical of some contemporary French fiction: the “Old Saloon” claims that many a French novelist is a “literary chiffonnier grubbing in the dust-holes,” drearily obsessed with illicit intrigue (420), while “The Anti-Marriage League” says that there could be “nothing so coarsely indecent as the whole history of Jude in his relations with his wife Arabella,” except perhaps in the work

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of Zola—but here, writing as a woman, Oliphant claims not to have read Zola.7 Oliphant’s female persona in the review of Hardy’s and Allen’s novels is strategic. She can claim to be deeply offended, as a woman, by what she presents as Hardy’s implication that male-female relations are governed by the sexual impulse alone, while the portrayal of Arabella Donn and Sue Bridehead seems to her aimed to “show after all what destructive and ruinous creatures [women] are, in general circumstances and in every development, whether brutal or refined” (139). Oliphant here is a woman on the warpath against a misogynist. On the other hand, in order to discuss the sexually explicit work of Alfred de Musset, Oliphant must give no hint that she is female. Musset’s play Rolla has in its final scenes a union, both carnal and spiritual, between a young debauchee and a teenage prostitute. Oliphant declares of this dénouement in a brothel: “We turn with a shudder from that appalling picture, which no manipulation could make fit to be regarded by innocent eyes.” Yet it is “the most powerful, as it certainly is the most tragical, of all De Musset’s productions.”8 A comment which Oliphant may not have risked making if writing openly as a woman. Of Musset’s plays in general, Oliphant observes that they are inspired by “[t]hose broken lights of life, those episodes that come to nothing, those breakings off so common in actual existence,” showing as they do “the fantastic irregularity of human affairs, the gleams of capricious meaning, the suggestions which are so often more interesting, more moving, than anything which is fully carried out” (376). This is an acute perception about Musset’s dramas, and especially the one Oliphant goes on to single out, Fantasio, which she calls a “pensive jest over the depths of human uncertainty” (376). In Hugo’s theatre, meanwhile, she finds something of the same focus on “uncertainty”: it deals with “the errings and mistakes of the half-enlightened human creature, ‘moving about in worlds not realised’, stumbling into paths discovered too late to be fatal, half seeing, not understanding, till time brings the terrible explanation.”9 As this last comment suggests, Oliphant sees Hugo as concerned with human beings’ struggle with forces they scarcely comprehend. Although she bracketed Hugo with Balzac in the passages I quoted above, she ascribed to him “a more human touch,” such that while praising Balzac’s “pitiless power and clear-sightedness,” she also highlighted Hugo’s (and Sand’s) “splendid development” of “the dramatic representation of sentiment and emotion” in French literature. Oliphant devoted three articles specifically to Victor Hugo’s works, as well as mentioning him in passing elsewhere. One was a review for Blackwood’s of his novel Les

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Travailleurs de la mer, where she also discussed in detail his previous novels Notre Dame de Paris and Les Misérables; the second a review, also in Blackwood’s, of his novel about the French Revolution, Quatre-vingttreize; and the last, from which the comments on Hugo’s theatre come, an obituary written for the Contemporary Review of July 1885.10 That Oliphant published three articles on Hugo, more than on any other French writer, reflects the prominence of his work in Britain from the 1860s till his death. He was a prolific and well-known literary figure, and his books were often treated in the major periodicals directed at an educated readership. Oliphant’s articles give the impression of a critic grappling with substantial works, especially in fiction, and striving both to comprehend them on their own terms, and to probe the ideas underpinning them. These concerns are particularly evident in the 1866 review of Les Travailleurs de la mer, where she situates this new novel in the context of Hugo’s two previous works of fiction. Early in the review, Oliphant acknowledges that Hugo’s novels “are full of the most capricious digressions, philosophies, and theories without end; neither probability nor consistency, nor any other of the gods of legitimate art, have been regarded in their construction.” Yet “they are instinct with life and interest, and bear their load of irrelevancies lightly as a flower”—and this is due to “the existence of the highest qualities in the writer—a power which defies criticism, and sets in its own right, except so far as may please it, every law and restriction aside” (745). Another reason for accepting Hugo’s works on their own terms is that English literary standards of judgment are not really relevant: their Frenchness, “[i]nstead of being a reproach to them . . . is their great glory” (746). She goes on: The words which the English journalist pronounces as a sentence of doom, are in fact the highest compliment that can be paid to M. Hugo. His works could not have been produced by an Englishman; many of his sentiments, uttered by English lips, would have been simply monstrous; but he does not pretend nor attempt to regard the world from an English point of view. His ideas, feelings, and convictions are all coloured by his nationality. He thinks as his countrymen think, sets forth their ideal, prefers their way of looking at everything, and not ours. (746)

This different perspective should, furthermore, benefit English readers: “If we could but see it, there might be in that manner of thought and ideal of goodness something which, by pure diversity and difference, would enlarge and correct our own” (746). This last point comes into particular focus in Oliphant’s discussion of Les Misérables. She takes issue with the English critics who find

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implausible the bishop Mgr Bienvenu, who, in a key sequence in the novel, offers hospitality to the convict protagonist Jean Valjean, is robbed of his spoons by the latter, and then, when the theft is revealed, claims that the spoons were a gift, and gives Valjean his valuable candlesticks as well. As a result, Valjean undergoes a spiritual conversion and devotes himself to self-abnegating benevolence. According to Oliphant, the bishop “has been denounced as a sentimental vision, a dream of impossible virtue,” but she argues that this view reflects English Protestant prejudice. The bishop is really “the kind of saintly soul which, let Protestant objectors say what they will, may, has been, and probably ever will be, in distant and highly exceptional cases, produced by the conditions of the Roman priesthood,” since his “is the goodness of a man detached from the world, deprived of all personal aims, and possessed by such a love of his fellow-creatures as his Master had.” Similarly, accepting as plausible Inspector Javert, the duty-driven police officer who relentlessly pursues Valjean and then commits suicide when the latter spares his life, requires English readers to expand their awareness of human possibilities: for them, “the genus of the irreproachable is seldom capable of anything tragical” (759). As well as praising Hugo’s representation of Jean Valjean himself, Oliphant lauds the novel’s portrayal of the verbal habits of his uneducated characters in general. In so doing, she compares them favourably with Dickens’s exemplars of the lower classes: Few people have set forth the wordy explanations, rambling, irrelevant, and confused, of the poor and ignorant, with such singular power and vividness, and few men have the same tenderness for the half-articulate speaker. It is worth while to contrast the explanations which Mr Dickens’s pet poor people make occasionally in correct provincial dialect and much to the point, with the long rambling speech, not the least to the purpose, which is now and then delivered by one of M. Hugo’s clients. (756-7)

Moreover, just as she had suggested that Balzac’s dispassionate treatment of his characters was artistically superior to George Eliot’s naïve castigation of her morally defective creations, Oliphant also, in her obituary of Hugo, declares that Eliot’s Romola, set in fifteenth-century Florence, was both indebted to Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, set in medieval Paris, and inferior in some ways to it. While the English novelist seems “tremulously anxious about the truth of fact in every detail,” she claims, the French one treats the circumstances surrounding his story with “a careless, almost contemptuous mastery, flooding a strong light upon them here and there as it pleases him, not taking the trouble to think of accuracy” (20-1). She observes in the 1866 article that even in what the

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English might see as Hugo’s “exaggeration and extravagance,” there exists “a sense of the real which seldom fails us” (759). For Oliphant, realism and documentable factual accuracy are not the same thing, and Hugo’s recreation of the past is more convincing than Eliot’s. The overall aim of the 1866 review is to trace the development of Hugo’s conceptions through his three novels to date. Oliphant does not accept Hugo’s own statement, in the preface to Les Travailleurs de la mer, that the three novels were part of a systematic plan to demonstrate man’s struggle against Religion, Society and Nature, respectively. Les Misérables may exemplify Valjean’s struggle against Society, and Les Travailleurs de la mer its protagonist’s struggle against Nature, but Notre Dame de Paris, published over thirty years before the other two, does not in her view illustrate man’s struggle against Religion (744). Not that this is a defect, however. This first novel was really about “the idea of Fate exercising an irresistible and capricious fascination upon a little circle of human victims,” and “it was the unerring instinct of the true artist, and not the judgment of the moral teacher, which led [Hugo] to discriminate and vary as he has done, its action upon the different personages of his drama” (752). Just as she had admired Balzac’s dispassionate treatment of his creations, Oliphant praises the way, in Notre Dame de Paris, Hugo intensifies the impression of an “inexorable, but a capricious and meaningless, Fate” at work, by his own lack of sympathy with his characters: “he is an historian, and impartial; there is no softening in his eyes to any of the personages of his drama; he loves none of them” (7489). In the case of Hugo’s first novel, the impartial tone, in Oliphant’s view, enhances the intended artistic effect. But in Les Misérables, which aims to arouse sympathy for the victims of society, a different narrative stance is apposite. Hence Hugo “has come to be a partisan, to take side with Jean Valjean against the world, to weep tears of fire” over the prostitute Fantine, and to love the street urchin Gavroche (759). With the latter in particular, he shows he can “enter into the mind which is barely intellectual at all, to gain its inexpressible meaning out of the confused soul of the wretched vagrant, to divine the depths of childish forlornness and desolation” (759). Meanwhile, in Les Travailleurs de la mer, the protagonist Gilliatt is not an obviously appealing character, but, in that his tragedy arises from being denied the love he had persuaded himself to expect, it is an experience that readers might identify with (762). Gilliatt overcomes powerful forces of Nature that would have defeated almost any other man—“but who can provide against, or account for, or make any successful struggle with, the fluctuations and caprices of the heart?” (762).

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In each of Hugo’s novels, then, the means is appropriate to Hugo’s ends, as Oliphant interprets them. Even the conception of womanhood that emerges from them, although Oliphant obviously finds it reductive, enhances the overall coherence of each work. Hugo, Oliphant opines, seems to think of woman as “a stepping-stone between the wild creatures of the wood and the rational man” (749): this notion is evident in the gypsy Esmeralda in Notre Dame de Paris, Cosette in Les Misérables, and Déruchette in Les Travailleurs de la mer. But in every case, the woman’s limitations contribute to the tragic dénouement of the novel. That Hugo’s outlook on human life is largely pessimistic, Oliphant cannot deny: it is clearly his conviction that, let a man struggle as he will, however stoutly, however bravely, with whatsoever patience and steadiness and long-suffering, he must be worsted in the end; by society in general leagued against him, by the treason of his nearest and dearest, by awful combinations and accident, by the blindness and petty souls of those for whom he has toiled and struggled—anyhow, every way, it is defeat that awaits him. (768)

She suggests too that, in offering such a perspective in his fiction, Hugo makes it truer to human experience than that of his English counterparts: it is certain that we in this country at least are apt to stray into incoherent fourth and even fifth acts, after the correct limits of the story, according to all true canons of art, have been reached. And this inartistic practical treatment of the question makes us all, more or less, optimists; and not only optimists in theory, but disposed to quarrel even with the artist who does not foist in a supplementary and postscriptal happiness into his picture of life. (768-9)

By contrast, “M. Hugo is too great an artist to suffer this natural prejudice to stand between him and the higher truth of life, which, after all, is a tragedy and not a comedy, all happier vicissitudes notwithstanding” (769, Oliphant’s emphasis). Yet Oliphant also suggests that, by appreciating Hugo’s own religious outlook, rather than interpreting his novels through the lens of doctrinaire English Protestantism, the English reader can discover that prospects for humanity, in Hugo’s view, are not entirely bleak. Throughout the article, she has championed Les Misérables as Hugo’s finest achievement in fiction, and at the end, she defends the view of life she sees it as articulating. The novel “contains few orthodox sentiments, and no special profession of faith,” while it is also the product of a man “whom many

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religious persons hold in horror.” But it demonstrates through Valjean’s experience that real and unspeakable force of Christian faith which is the only power capable of supporting a man through a long and tedious fight against evil and obloquy and injustice, and which, with its sublime and continual reference to a higher tribunal and a better life, is the only theory which puts true meaning into the world.

The demonstration is all the stronger in coming from “one of the richest imaginations and most mightily-endowed minds of modern days . . . by dint of long contemplation and much study of men and facts, and the actual phenomena of life” (769)—a novelist whose achievements, in Oliphant’s view, surpassed those of his English contemporaries.

Notes 1. Elisabeth Jay, Mrs Oliphant: “A Fiction to Herself” A Literary Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Valerie Sanders, Eve’s Renegades: Victorian AntiFeminist Women Novelists (Houndmills, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1996); John Stock Clarke (comp.), Margaret Oliphant (1828-1897): Non-Fictional Writings: A Bibliography (St Lucia, Queensland: Department of English, University of Queensland, 1997). See also Joan Bellamy, “Margaret Oliphant: ‘mightier than the mightiest of her sex,’” in Women, Scholarship and Criticism: Gender and Knowledge c.1790-1900, ed. Joan Bellamy et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 143-58, and “A Lifetime of Reviewing: Margaret Oliphant on Charlotte Brontë,’” Brontë Studies 29 (2004): 37-42; Barbara Onslow, Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Houndmills, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 2000); George Worth, “Margaret Oliphant and Macmillan’s Magazine,” in Macmillan: A Publishing Tradition, ed. Elizabeth James (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 83-101. 2. Ann Heilmann, “Mrs Grundy’s Rebellion: Margaret Oliphant between Orthodoxy and the New Woman,” and Sandra Spencer, “Words, Terms and Other ‘Unchancy’ Things: Rhetorical Strategies and Self-Definition in ‘The Laws Concerning Women,’” Women’s Writing, 6 (1999): 215-37 and 251-9; J. Haythornthwaite, “Friendly Encounters: A Study of the Relationship between the House of Blackwood and Margaret Oliphant in Her Role as Literary Critic,” Publishing History 28 (1990): 79-88; Joanne Shattock, “Work for Women: Margaret Oliphant’s Journalism,” in Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, ed. Laurel Brake et al. (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 165-77; Anne M. Scriven, “Margaret Oliphant’s ‘Marriage’ to Maga,” Scottish Studies Review, 8 (2007): 27-36; Solveig C. Robinson, “Expanding a ‘Limited Orbit’: Margaret Oliphant, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and the Development of a Critical Voice,” Victorian Periodicals Review 38 (2005): 199-220.

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3. Margaret Oliphant, “Novels,” in A Serious Occupation: Literary Criticism by Victorian Women Writers, ed. Solveig C. Robinson (Peterborough, Ontario and Orchard Park, New York: Broadview, 2003): 146. Article originally published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 102 (September 1867): 257-80. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically within the text. 4. Margaret Oliphant, “Alexandre Dumas,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 114 (July 1873): 113-14. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically within the text. 5. Margaret Oliphant, “The Correspondence of M. de Balzac,” Edinburgh Review 148 (October 1878): 531-2. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically within the text. 6. Margaret Oliphant, “The Old Saloon: French Novels,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 144 (September 1888): 440-42. 7. Margaret Oliphant, “The Anti-Marriage League,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 159 (January 1896): 138. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically within the text. 8. Margaret Oliphant, “Alfred de Musset,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 114 (July 1873): 368. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically within the text. 9. Margaret Oliphant, “Victor Hugo,” Contemporary Review 48 (July 1885): 22. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically within the text. 10. Margaret Oliphant, “Victor Hugo,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 100 (December 1866): 744-69. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically within the text; Margaret Oliphant, “New Books,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 115 (June 1874): 750-69.

CHAPTER TWELVE GISSING’S ITALIAN VISION ROSLYN JOLLY

Gissing’s Italian travel book, By the Ionian Sea (1901), stands between two traditions of British travel-writing about Italy. One of these it clearly rejects; the other it partly predicts. Gissing is a dissenter from the ideology of progress, which organised most Victorian views of “backward” Italy. His work exhibits the discontent with modern society, and nostalgia for a pre-industrial past, which characterise the responses to Italy of many twentieth-century travellers. Thus, By the Ionian Sea turns away from the values of Dickens’s Pictures from Italy (1846), and looks towards the concerns of D. H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia (1921). But this neat timeline does not account for the most distinctive aspect of Gissing’s book: its recreation of the classical past as a virtual reality, which foreshadows an even later, post-modern mode of tourist sensibility. By the Ionian Sea opens with regrets and complaints. Returning to Naples after a ten-year absence, Gissing finds the changes to the city “dispiriting.”1 Lo sventramento (the disembowelling) goes on, and regions are transformed. It is a good thing, I suppose, that the broad Corso Umberto I. should cut a way through the old Pendino; but what a contrast between that native picturesqueness and the cosmopolitan vulgarity which has usurped its place! “Napoli se ne va!” I pass the Santa Lucia with downcast eyes, my memories of ten years ago striving against the dulness of to-day. The harbour, whence one used to start for Capri, is filled up; the sea has been driven to a hopeless distance beyond a wilderness of dust-heaps. They are going to make a long, straight embankment from the Castel dell’ Ovo to the Great Port, and before long the Santa Lucia will be an ordinary street, shut in among huge houses, with no view at all. (19-20)

As well as bemoaning these material transformations, Gissing laments the passing of the old, noisy street-life of the city. The shouts of men with

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bullock carts “have nothing like the frequency and spirit of former days” (20); the streets now offer “but an echo of the jubilant uproar which used to amaze” visitors from the more sedate north (21). “When I first knew Naples one was never, literally never, out of hearing of a hand-organ,” he recalls. “Now the sound of street music is rare, and I understand that some police provision long since interfered with the soft-tongued instruments” (21). Gissing concludes that “the modernisation of the city” has “had a subduing effect upon Neapolitan manners” (21), and he predicts that “in a few more years spontaneous melody will be as rare at Naples or Venice as on the banks of the Thames” (22). According to Gissing, the “modernisation” of Naples has taken away its spirit, its music and its “native picturesqueness,” and he finds nothing in broad new roads, sea-walls or straight embankments to compensate for that loss. With this attitude, he sets himself against the current of progressive thought that carried the majority of English travellers through Italy in the nineteenth century, preaching the benefits of railways, industry, universal education and constitutional government—that is, of a national life modelled on their own. This progressive attitude valued social, economic and political reform above the aesthetic pleasures of the picturesque. Thus, Gissing’s unqualified enthusiasm for the old Neapolitan street-life contrasts with Dickens’s ambivalence, half a century earlier. Dickens appreciated the spectacle of “out-door life and stir, and macaronieating at sunset, and flower-selling all day long, and begging and stealing everywhere and at all hours” beside “the bright sea-shore, where the waves of the bay sparkle merrily.” “But, lovers and hunters of the picturesque,” he warned, “let us not keep too studiously out of view the miserable depravity, degradation, and wretchedness, with which this gay Neapolitan life is inseparably associated!”2 The social costs of economic underdevelopment constantly presented themselves to Dickens’s mind on his travels through Italy. Watching drivers cruelly abusing oxen as they struggled to pull loads of marble on ancient carts down the execrable road from Carrara, Dickens saw in the scene an epitome of “[t]he genius of the country, and the spirit of its institutions.” The same road, the same “clumsy carts,” the same suffering oxen, and the same fatalities to both men and beasts, had persisted for five hundred years, without improvement. The spectacle invited Dickens to satirise Italian conservatism from the perspective of English progressive liberalism: “But it was good five hundred years ago, and it must be good now: and a railroad down one of these steeps (the easiest thing in the world) would be flat blasphemy . . . I hailed, in my heart, the man who sat upon the heavy yoke, to keep it on the neck of the poor beasts—and who

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faced backwards: not before him—as the very Devil of true despotism.”3 At Tarentum, at the end of the century, Gissing observed similarly antiquated technologies and modes of labour, but interpreted them very differently. He watched a man and a donkey ploughing a field: Never have I seen man so utterly patient, so primaevally deliberate. The donkey’s method of ploughing was to pull for one minute, and then rest for two; it excited in the ploughman not the least surprise or resentment. Though he held a long stick in his hand, he never made use of it; at each stoppage he contemplated the ass, and then gave utterance to a long “Ah-hh!” in a note of the most affectionate remonstrance. They were not driver and beast, but comrades in labour. It reposed the mind to look upon them. (56-7)

It helps that the man did not abuse the donkey, as the drivers at Carrara did their oxen, but Gissing’s response to the scene is still remarkably free from the sense of superiority with which most travellers from industrial England regarded the ancient tools and trades of “unimproved” Italy.4 He does not judge the scene by the values of efficiency and productivity; rather, he finds the sight of “comrades in labour” an antidote to modern alienation. A pot market at Cosenza draws comments similarly favourable to old Italian ways, and this time explicitly disparaging of modern England: Pottery for commonest use among Calabrian peasants has a grace of line, a charm of colour, far beyond anything native to our most pretentious china shops. Here still lingers a trace of the old civilisation. There must be great good in a people which has preserved this need of beauty through ages of servitude and suffering. Compare such domestic utensils—these oil-jugs and water-jars—with those in the house of an English labourer. Is it really so certain that all virtues of race dwell with those who can rest amid the ugly and know it not for ugliness? (45-6)

The question aligns Gissing with a secondary, but still significant, tradition of nineteenth-century English travel-writing on Italy. Pushing against the orthodoxies of “improvement” and “reform,” dissenters from the ideology of progress used Italy as a vehicle for expressing their opposition to the values and material achievements of modern, industrial society. Gissing’s book voices many of the sentiments of this antiprogressive tradition. His distaste for the signs of encroaching modernity at Cosenza—a “squalid railway station, a hideous railway bridge”—and his quarrel with “the craze for building, which has disfigured and half ruined Italy” (46) recall Ruskin inveighing against the changes to his beloved Florence in the 1870s.5 His disappointment at seeing no local

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costumes at Paola, where “all wore the common colourless garb of our destroying age” (32), counterpoints Edward Lear’s relief at finding, a half century earlier, “real unmixed Calabrian characteristics, unspoiled by high roads and the changes of all-fusing and assimilating civilisation.”6 And his admiration for the fishermen at Tarentum looks ahead to the writer who would bring Victorian anti-progressivism to the high pitch of modernist discontent with modernity, D. H. Lawrence. Gissing’s fishermen were admirable figures, consummate in graceful strength, their bare legs and arms the tone of terra-cotta. What slight clothing they wore became them perfectly, as is always the case with a costume well adapted to the natural life of its wearers. Their slow, patient effort speaks of immemorial usage, and is in harmony with time itself . . . I could not gaze at them long enough; their lithe limbs, their attitudes at work or in repose, their wild, black hair, perpetually reminded me of shapes pictured on a classic vase. (55-6)

Lawrence’s description of traditional dress at Cagliari is similarly admiring, but raises the emotional stakes: And I see my first peasant in costume. He is an elderly, upright, handsome man, beautiful in the black-and-white costume . . . How handsome he is, and so beautifully male! He walks with his hands loose behind his back, slowly, upright, and aloof. The lovely unapproachableness, indomitable. And the flash of the black and white, the slow stride of the full white drawers, the black gaiters and black cuirass with the bolero, then the great white sleeves and white breast again, and once more the black cap—what marvellous massing of the contrast, marvellous, and superb, as on a magpie.—How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.—And how perfectly ridiculous it is made in modern clothes.7

Neither of these passages gives credence to Dickens’s warning that “depravity, degradation, and wretchedness” are inevitable components of the Italian picturesque.8 Indeed, both Gissing and Lawrence have moved beyond the category of the picturesque in their appreciation of traditional Italian peasant dress and deportment. In clothing “adapted to the natural life of its wearers” and labour “in harmony with time itself,” Gissing finds a “classic” sense of proportion and balance. For Lawrence, the “beautiful” costume and the dignity of its wearer make the human male as “right” in his self-expression as a bird in nature. Gissing finds his comparison in art (“shapes pictured on a classic vase”) while Lawrence finds his in nature (“a magpie”), but both value the ancient above the modern, thereby reversing the terms of nineteenth-century progressive thought.

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The politics of progressivism and anti-progressivism were, in the case of nineteenth-century Italy, very specific. Amongst English travellers and writers, Romantic enthusiasm for a more or less abstract notion of Italian freedom gave way, in the Victorian period, to a reasoned advocacy of economic modernisation and political liberalisation as mutually enabling forces within a single project of national improvement. In the 1840s Mary Shelley, Frances Trollope and Charles Dickens all wrote in this vein; they attacked Italy’s feudal and theocratic rulers for encouraging sloth and ignorance as the characteristics of a politically submissive populace and for crushing industry and education as harbingers of rebellion.9 English liberals argued that Italy must overcome such barriers to “the spirit of improvement” if it were to establish the “free institutions” that were the preconditions for material prosperity.10 Over the next quarter-century, the possibilities for “improvement” and enterprise in Italy became increasingly tied, in English minds, to the cause of national unification; an 1865 essay on “The Resources, Condition, and Prospects of Italy,” published in the Quarterly Review, shows how the establishment of a constitutional monarchy for a united Italy was approved in England as having produced a “commercial revival” and released “the vivifying influence of free institutions.”11 One of the most striking features of By the Ionian Sea is its disillusionment with the cause of Italian unification. Gissing’s running quarrel with the new Italy is first expressed in his annoyance at a gun salute sounded at Taranto to honour the Queen of Italy’s festa: “This barbarous uproar . . . struck me as more meaningless in its deafening volley of noise than any note of joy or triumph that could ever have been heard in old Tarentum” (54). Equally “meaningless,” to Gissing, were the sacrifices made to achieve the single monarchy now being celebrated. In Reggio, memorials to the national struggle of the 1860s lead Gissing’s thought, not forward to the future of enlightened “improvement” promised by liberals and progressives, but backward to “the wild-beast instinct of mankind,” which condemns human beings to endlessly repeated cycles of violence: An interesting feature of the streets is the frequency of carved inscriptions, commemorating citizens who died in their struggle for liberty. Amid quiet byways, for instance, I discovered a tablet with the name of a young soldier who fell at that spot, fighting against the Bourbon, in 1860: “offerse per l’unità della patria sua vita quadrilustre.” The very insignificance of this young life makes the fact more touching; one thinks of the unnumbered lives sacrificed upon this soil, age after age, to the wild-beast instinct of

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Gissing finds “no accent of hope” in the voice which seems “to speak from the stone in sad arraignment of tyranny and bloodshed” (216). Indeed, the inscription prompts a gloomy meditation on Italy’s, and Europe’s, future: In the days to come, as through all time that is past, man will lord it over his fellow, and earth will be stained red from veins of young and old. That sweet and sounding name of patria becomes an illusion and a curse; linked with the pretentious modernism, civilisation, it serves as plea to the latterday barbarian, ravening and reckless under his civil garb. How can one greatly wish for the consolidation and prosperity of Italy, knowing that national vigour tends more and more to international fear and hatred? They who perished that Italy might be born again, dreamt of other things than old savagery clanging in new weapons. In our day there is but one Italian patriot; he who tills the soil, and sows, and reaps, ignorant or careless of all beyond his furrowed field. (216-17)

England’s involvement in the Boer War, which Sharon Ouditt points out was the historical “backdrop” to Gissing’s Italian journey,12 may well have prompted his reflection “that national vigour tends more and more to international fear and hatred.” Gissing’s declaration that the “sweet and sounding name of patria becomes an illusion and a curse,” coupled with his consciousness of “unnumbered lives sacrificed upon this soil,” foreshadows Wilfred Owen’s war poetry. With regard to Italy specifically, the passage looks ahead to D. H. Lawrence’s post-World War I condemnation of Italy’s “war-makers,”13 and Carlo Levi’s pre-World War II insight into the southern peasants’ indifference to, yet victimisation by, the militarism of the Italian state.14 Musing on the “meaningless” fruits of the Italian struggle for unification (54, 216), Gissing identifies war as the inevitable product of the nineteenth century’s twin master-discourses of nation and progress. His advocated response to this, a retreat into agrarian tradition, posits as the “one Italian patriot” (217) a figure recognisable as a version of his ploughman of Tarentum, whose “primaevally deliberate” labour (56) sustains the rhythms of an ancient, static world. Although some nineteenth-century English visitors to Italy were prepared to participate in the agrarian life they saw as Italy’s greatest social good—Janet Ross, for example, immersed herself in Tuscan rural life in the 1880s15—Gissing lacked desire or capacity to accept the narrow world of the Tarentum farmer. Instead, he chose for himself a different kind of retreat from the modern world. “Every man has his intellectual desire,” he writes; “mine is to escape life as I know it and dream myself

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into that old world which was the imaginative delight of my boyhood” (22). By the Ionian Sea closes upon its author’s wish “to wander endlessly amid the silence of the ancient world, to-day and all its sounds forgotten” (224). Nothing is more striking about the book than its revulsion from the world of “to-day,” not just in Italy, but generally. Gissing appreciates the night voyage down the coast from Naples to Paola because it allows him to enter an ideal state of reverie, in which “[t]o-day seemed an unreality, an idle impertinence; the real was that long-buried past which gave its meaning to all about me, touching the night with infinite pathos” (25). Critical response to the book has emphasised the dominant notes of “disengagement” and “escape,” which are evident in this passage.16 But it is worth also pointing out the particular form of escape from the present that Gissing pursued on his Italian journey. It was an escape not only from the present into the past, but also from subjectivity into objectivity, an erasure of the self through an immersion in objects and images. “Best of all” in the night voyage from Naples, Gissing found, “one’s own being became lost to consciousness; the mind knew only the phantasmal forms it shaped, and was at peace in vision” (25). To be “at peace in vision” is the most intensely desired object of Gissing’s Italian journey. Steeped in the history and literature of Magna Graecia (the southern part of Italy colonised by the ancient Greeks), Gissing travelled in order to behold with his own eyes the places he had so long treasured in imagination. But his desire was not just to see the towns and landmarks as they appeared “to-day” (89); he wanted to see them as they had been at the height of their prosperity and significance. He wanted to see—not just imagine—the ancient world. This is his response to the view from Cotrone, formerly Croton, a citadel of Magna Graecia: We are told that the river Æsarus flowed through the heart of the city at its prime. I looked over the plain, and yonder, towards the distant railway station, I descried a green track, the course of the all but stagnant and wholly pestilential stream, still called Esaro. Near its marshy mouth are wide orange orchards. Could one but see in vision the harbour, the streets, the vast encompassing wall! From the eminence where I stood, how many a friend and foe of Croton has looked down upon its shining ways, peopled with strength and beauty and wisdom! Here Pythagoras may have walked, glancing afar at the Lacinian sanctuary, then new built. (89-90)

The tautology “see in vision” betrays the hallucinatory quality of the experience Gissing sought in Italy; one which was both “vision” and “a vision”: visionary. He was to achieve his desire only once, during a fever

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that prevented him from seeing a renowned landmark, the single column remaining from the ancient temple of Hera on the coast near Cotrone. Gissing’s account of this experience focuses at first on the vision denied—the literal sight-seeing of the tourist, which illness prevented him from experiencing. After I had put out the candle, I tormented myself for a long time with the thought that I should never see La Colonna. As soon as I could rise from bed, I must flee Cotrone, and think myself fortunate in escaping alive; but to turn my back on the Lacinian promontory, leaving the Cape unvisited, the ruin of the temple unseen, seemed to me a miserable necessity which I should lament as long as I lived. I felt as one involved in a moral disaster; working in spite of reason, my brain regarded the matter from many points of view, and found no shadow of solace. (114-15)

In semi-delirium, after a series of troubling dreams, the “unseen” temple is then displaced by a series of different “pictures.” Gissing describes falling into a visionary state which, whilst it lasted, gave me such placid happiness as I have never known when in my perfect mind. Lying still and calm, and perfectly awake, I watched a succession of wonderful pictures. First of all I saw great vases, rich with ornament and figures; then sepulchral marbles, carved more exquisitely than the most beautiful I had ever known. The vision grew in extent, in multiplicity of detail; presently I was regarding scenes of ancient life—thronged streets, processions triumphal or religious, halls of feasting, fields of battle. What most impressed me at the time was the marvellously bright yet delicate colouring of everything I saw. I can give no idea in words of the pure radiance which shone from every object, which illumined every scene. More remarkable, when I thought of it next day, was the minute finish of these pictures, the definiteness of every point on which my eye fell. Things which I could not know, which my imagination, working in the service of the will, could never have bodied forth, were before me as in life itself. I consciously wondered at peculiarities of costume such as I had never read of; at features of architecture entirely new to me; at insignificant characteristics of that bygone world, which by no possibility could have been gathered from books. I recall a succession of faces, the loveliest conceivable; and I remember, I feel to this moment the pang of regret with which I lost sight of each when it faded into darkness. (115-16)

The dream-vision is so much richer, more ample, detailed and various, than the single “sight” Gissing had missed, that he declares: “[t]he delight

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of these phantasms was well worth the ten days’ illness which paid for them” (117-18). The images of antiquity that Gissing beheld in his feverish state are not always morally neutral, although he regards them as if they were. One sequence of pictures is particularly disturbing: When Hannibal, at the end of the second Punic War, was confined to the south of Italy, he made Croton his headquarters, and when, in reluctant obedience to Carthage, he withdrew from Roman soil, it was at Croton that he embarked. He then had with him a contingent of Italian mercenaries, and, unwilling that these soldiers should go over to the enemy, he bade them accompany him to Africa. The Italians refused. Thereupon Hannibal had them led down to the shore of the sea, where he slaughtered one and all. This event I beheld. I saw the strand by Croton; the promontory with its temple; not as I know the scene to-day, but as it must have looked to those eyes more than two thousand years ago. The soldiers of Hannibal doing massacre, the perishing mercenaries, supported my closest gaze, and left no curiosity unsatisfied. (117)

Here, one might think, was a true “moral disaster” (115), rather than the factitious one of the tourist’s missed excursion. Yet Gissing seems uninterested in, or inaccessible to, the human and emotional dimensions of the scene. The cruelty and suffering elicit no sense of dread or revulsion, the physical violence no disgust; indeed, Gissing maintains that the sequence “puts light and warmth into my mind whenever I try to recall it” (117).17 The vision is cinematic, and Gissing’s interest in it is largely a matter of light, colour and composition. Strangely detached from the human experience enacted before him, he is nevertheless entranced by the clarity, detail and “indescribable brilliancy” (117) of the sun-drenched scenes. The dream-vision at Cotrone is the high point of Gissing’s journey through southern Italy. No other experience elicits from him such an intensity of response. It represents the satisfaction of a deeply held desire, to replace “the scene to-day” (117) with detailed, moving images of the ancient world: “I shall always feel that, for an hour, it was granted me to see the vanished life so dear to my imagination. If the picture corresponded to nothing real, tell me who can, by what power I reconstructed, to the last perfection of intimacy, a world known to me only in ruined fragments” (118). Archaeology as a mode of knowledge has given way to virtuality as a mode of experience, with fragments and remnants being replaced by a smooth-surfaced, radiant, seamless stream of images.

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Gissing seems to have believed that he experienced, in his vision, a kind of time-travel—that he had actually witnessed scenes and events from history. Otherwise, “by what power” could he have reconstructed a vanished world? D. H. Lawrence suggests one possible answer to this question in the concept of race-memory, or what he calls “bloodfamiliarity.” Musing on the costume of the elderly, handsome man at Cagliari, Lawrence writes: But that curious, flashing, black-and-white costume! I seem to have known it before: to have worn it even: to have dreamed it. To have dreamed it: to have had actual contact with it. It belongs in some way to something in me—to my past, perhaps. I don’t know. But the uneasy sense of bloodfamiliarity haunts me. I know I have known it before.18

Gissing evokes a similar sense of a collective, inherited memory at one point in By the Ionian Sea: Listen to a Calabrian peasant singing as he follows his oxen along the furrow, or as he shakes the branches of his olive tree. That wailing voice amid the ancient silence, that long lament solacing ill-rewarded toil, comes from the heart of Italy herself, and wakes the memory of mankind. (132-3)

But this “memory” is different from the vision at Cotrone: it is general, not specific, in content, and it is a recollection of emotion rather than a reconstruction of material forms and physical sensations. Whereas the lamenting Calabrian peasant is a mythic archetype, Gissing understands his vision at Cotrone to have been “a glimpse of history” (117), distinguished by the kinds of details, “peculiarities” and “insignificant characteristics” (116) that Roland Barthes terms “reality-effects.”19 The ancient Italy Gissing is privileged to “see in vision” is a virtual world. Its “minute finish” and “definiteness of every point” (116) satisfy his “intellectual desire” (22) to see for himself people, objects and events from classical times. His pleasure in the pictured scenes of Magna Graecia that passed before his eyes during his fever at Cotrone is expressed in language that is almost erotic, as he lingers in memory upon images which “supported [his] closest gaze, and left no curiosity unsatisfied” (117), thereby offering “the last perfection of intimacy” with the world of his desire (118). Vision, not its interpretation, is what matters to Gissing, and his dreamimages need not mean anything in order to justify themselves. This indifference to significance sets him apart from all the traditions of British travel-writing to which we might compare his work: the Victorian liberals,

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with their belief in progress; the Victorian conservatives, with their nostalgia for the past; and the modernists, with their myth-making tendencies. Lacking the organising structures of both Victorian and modernist travel-writing, By the Ionian Sea has a strangely post-modern quality. It delights in images, not ideas; to “see in vision” (90), to collect a gallery of highly finished images, and, at best, to move amongst those sequenced images as in a virtual theme-park of the ancient world: this, for Gissing, constitutes the purpose and pleasure of travel, in his flight from the ugliness and banality of “to-day,” the first year of the twentieth century.

Notes 1. George Gissing, By the Ionian Sea: Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy (1901), introd. Virginia Woolf (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933), 19. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically within the text. 2. Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (1846), ed. Kate Flint (London: Penguin, 1998), 166. 3. Dickens, Pictures from Italy, 105. 4. See, for example, Henry Alford’s criticism of the pace of Italian railwaybuilding in The Riviera: Pen and Pencil Sketches from Cannes to Genoa (London: Bell and Daldry, and Alexander Strahan, 1870), 61-2; Anna Jameson’s unfavourable comparison of an Italian silk-mill with English industrial practices in Diary of an Ennuyée, new ed. (London: Henry Colburn, 1826), 86; and Frances Trollope’s mockery of Italy’s technological backwardness in A Visit to Italy, 2 vols., vol 1 (London: Bentley, 1842), 60-61. Sharon Ouditt points out that Gissing, despite his claim that “a wandering stranger has no right to nurse national superiorities” (Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, 132), often expresses a “sense of social superiority” to the people of the Italian south; “‘Elemental and Permanent Things’: George Gissing and Norman Douglas in Southern Italy,” Studies in Travel Writing 10 (2006): 132. Nevertheless, Gissing does not believe in the superiority of England’s technical and material culture to Italy’s, and throughout this book is a consistent critic of industrial civilisation. 5. John Ruskin, Mornings in Florence (London: George Allen, n.d.), 154-5. 6. Edward Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria (London: Bentley, 1852), 50. 7. D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia (1921) in D. H. Lawrence and Italy: Twilight in Italy, Sea and Sardinia, Etruscan Places, introd. Anthony Burgess (New York: Penguin, 1997), 61. 8. Dickens, Pictures from Italy, 166. 9. Mary Shelley, Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843, 2 vols., vol 2 (London: Edward Moxon, 1844), 243-7; Trollope, Visit to Italy, vol. 1, 63-4, vol. 2, 13-14, 162-3, 203-4, 240, 287-8; Dickens, Pictures from Italy, 65, 68, 10910, 219.

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10. The quoted phrases are from Shelley, Rambles, vol. 2, 243 and vol. 1, xi. “The economic development of Italy between 1815 and 1860 was a central issue in the liberal critique of Restoration government,” writes Lucy Riall, who argues that images of Italy’s economic backwardness were part of “Risorgimento rhetoric.” Lucy Riall, The Italian Risorgimento: State, Society and National Unification (London: Routledge, 1994), 50, 53. 11. “The Resources, Condition, and Prospects of Italy,” Quarterly Review 118 (1865): 395, 400. 12. Ouditt, “Elemental and Permanent Things,” 135. 13. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, 63. 14. Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945), trans. Frances Frenaye (London: Penguin, 2000), 134-5. 15. Janet Ross, Italian Sketches (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1887), 101-12, 12536. 16. John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 12; Annarita Del Nobile, “Travel and Writing: George Gissing’s Ideological Journey in Italy,” Gissing Journal 33,1 (1997): 20; Ouditt, “Elemental and Permanent Things,” 138. 17. Robert L. Selig discusses Gissing’s “surprising emotional reaction” to this scene and contrasts it with other historians’ representations of the same event; see “Gissing’s Vision of Cotron: De Quincey, Lenormant, Livy, and the Past Recaptured,” Gissing Journal 39, 3 (2003): 12-17. 18. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, 62. 19. Roland Barthes, “The Reality-Effect,” in French Literary Theory Today: A Reader, ed. Tzvetan Todorov, trans. R. Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 11-17.

PART TWO: NEOVICTORIAN RETURNS

CHAPTER THIRTEEN FROM PICTURESQUE TO PALIMPSEST: LANDSCAPE AND HISTORY IN THE FICTION OF WALTER SCOTT AND GRAHAM SWIFT JOHN RIGNALL

With his distinctive ability to see time in space, Walter Scott often reflects on history in terms of landscape. In a well-known passage of his introduction to The Fortunes of Nigel, he cites Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and draws a connection between the meeting of mountain and plains, “the most romantic region of every country,” and what he sees as “the most picturesque period of history,” when the rough manners of a barbarous age are beginning to be subdued by more enlightened and civilised behaviour.1 Such is the period of recent Scottish history that forms the subject of some of his finest novels, from Waverley through Rob Roy to Redgauntlet; and when he looks back on it in the Dedicatory Epistle to the first of his novels of English history, Ivanhoe, he again makes a connection between landscape and history, between the wild and desolate Scottish Highlands and the history they have witnessed, maintaining that an English reader who has visited those regions would be “fully prepared to believe the strangest things that could be told him of a people wild and extravagant enough to be attached to scenery so extraordinary.”2 As Marcia Allentuck observes, from early in his life “the tranquillizing congruencies and startling incongruencies of landscape became for Scott metonyms for history.”3 But it is not simply that landscape, with its juxtapositions of mountains and plains, wildness and cultivation, “supplied him with an image of the historical process,”4 for it is the layers of history embedded in the land that also seize his imagination. Although he admits in his Memoirs of 1808 to a conventional delight in romantic and picturesque scenery, it is clear that what engages his imagination as truly picturesque, as in the introduction to The Fortunes of Nigel, is not so much the landscape as the history, not the scenery itself,

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but the associations with human history that he can sense within it. Thus he recounts how once in his travels, when crossing Magus Moor near St Andrews, “the spirit moved me to give a picture of the assassination of the Archbishop of St Andrews to some fellow travellers,” frightening one of them out of a night’s sleep.5 The land, whether Scottish highland or lowland, or tamer England, is freighted with historical associations that his imagination seeks to bring to dramatic life. This sense of history as inscribed in the landscape is one of his legacies to later novelists. When George Eliot at the end of her career looks back at the familiar landscape of the English midlands in the second chapter of Impressions of Theophrastus Such, she relates the features of the countryside to the particular nature of English history in a manner reminiscent of Scott. The midland plains are marked for her by their “conservative spirit,” implying the slow and steady nature of the country’s historical evolution in the way that they have accommodated “some sign of world-wide change, some new direction of human labour” into “what one may call the speech of the landscape,” so that “every hovel and every sheepfold, every railed bridge and fallen tree-trunk” amounts to “a piece of our social history in pictorial writing.”6 This “sense of man’s shaping and penetration of the landscape through many generations” is widely shared in the nineteenth century by writers such as Carlyle, Hardy and Kipling among others.7 George Eliot’s association of the English countryside with an evolutionary historical process is particularly characteristic of the later part of the century when, as J. W. Burrow has suggested, the Whig version of history commonly manifested itself in “a cherished sense of the continuities of English life, witnessed by the land itself.”8 Thus in Puck of Pook’s Hill Kipling can derive a vision of England and English history from the Sussex countryside out of which the figure of Puck magically materialises. How that sense of continuity survives into the twentieth century but with a distinctively different inflection, is the subject of this essay, which will focus particularly on how a contemporary novelist, Graham Swift, exploits the historical layering of landscape in ways that contrast revealingly with Scott’s. Scott’s understanding of the historical construction of landscape informs his descriptions but does so unemphatically, as in the opening chapter of Ivanhoe where a glade in the great forest between Sheffield and Doncaster is shown to bear the traces of earlier generations: Hundreds of broad-headed, short-stemmed, wide-branched oaks, which had witnessed perhaps the stately march of the Roman soldiery, flung their gnarled arms over a thick carpet of the most delicious green sward . . . A considerable open space, in the midst of this glade, seemed formerly to

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Scott registers the different layers of the past in picturing the scene but is not disposed to explore them. His story unfolds horizontally in the stratum of the past he has chosen as his narrative present, in this case medieval England. The imaginative effort of digging down vertically into the past is not made part of his narrative, and it is significant in this context that he makes mild fun of archaeological excavation when it appears in The Antiquary and exposes the would-be excavator of buried treasure, Dousterswivel, as a charlatan. If the historical sedimentation of landscape is taken for granted in Scott’s fiction and not further examined, the same cannot be said of landscape’s picturesque appearance. He may not unpick the layers of the past but he does tend to dismantle the picturesque. The process by which he typically does this is a horizontal one, a movement from flattering distance to disenchanting close-up. In “The Highland Widow” Mrs Bethune Baliol begins her tale by describing the rocks and precipices around Ben Cruachan and providing Scott’s characteristic socio-historical detail in stating that the wood which once clothed them had latterly been felled to supply the iron foundries at the Bunawae: This made us fix our eyes with interest on one large oak which grew on the left hand towards the river. It seemed a tree of extraordinary magnitude and picturesque beauty, and stood just where there appeared to be a few roods of open ground lying among huge stones, which had rolled down from the mountain. To add to the romance of the situation, the spot of clear ground extended around the foot of a proud-browed rock, from the summit of which leaped a mountain stream in a fall of sixty feet, in which it was dissolved into foam and dew.10

To get closer to the tree Mrs Baliol has to make a lengthy detour but, when she draws near, the view changes: At length the promised turn of the road brought us within fifty paces of the tree which I desired to admire, and I now saw to my surprise that there was

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a human habitation among the cliffs which surrounded it. It was a hut of the least dimensions, and most miserable description that I ever saw even in the Highlands.11

The picturesque tree gives way to the miserable reality of highland life where the widow of a chieftain lives out an existence ruined by historical developments to which she is unable to adapt and in futile opposition to which she has destroyed her only son. The displacement of the picturesque by a darker reality in Mrs Baliol’s experience of the tree is mirrored in the larger structure of the story. The containing frame of the highland tourist’s narrative is overwhelmed by the tragic story of Elspat the highland widow, which ends with the woman disappearing into the mountainous landscape to die. That landscape is no longer the object of the visitor’s aesthetic appreciation but, rather, the topographical expression of the primitive highland past which Elspat cannot escape and in which she is finally subsumed. There are less dramatic forms of picturesque landscape than the Scottish highlands in Scott’s fiction, but they can be subjected to the same process of deconstruction. When Darsie Latimer in Redgauntlet looks across the Solway Firth to England, he cannot help comparing the dreary Scottish foreground with that more attractive shore: Advancing about a hundred yards from the brink of the glen, we gained a still more extensive command of this desolate prospect, which seemed even more dreary, as contrasted with the opposite shores of Cumberland, crossed and intersected by ten thousand lines of trees growing in hedgerows, shaded with groves and woods of considerable extent, and animated by hamlets and villas, from which thin clouds of smoke already gave sign of human life and human industry.12

The pleasing prospect of civilised English life turns out to be the deceptive product of distance, for when Darsie crosses the Solway he finds life in England to be as wild and lawless as life on the desolate northern shore. Scott often draws a contrast between English and Scottish landscapes, as when Waverley, after the defeat of the 1745 rising, returns to his ancestral home and experiences “that pleasure which almost all feel who return to a verdant, populous, and highly cultivated country, from scenes of waste desolation, or of solitary and melancholy grandeur,”13 but his characteristic use of a perspective that shifts from distant view to discomfiting close-up has the effect of penetrating the picturesque surface of both types of country.

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In the Dedicatory Epistle to Ivanhoe Scott, in the persona of Laurence Templeton writing to Dr Dryasdust, makes fun of the Englishman in his snug parlour who is smugly imperceptive to the meaning of the landscape around him, blind to the fact “that the shattered tower which now forms a vista from his window, once held a baron who would have hung him up at his own door without any form of trial.”14 Scott’s own ability to read the historical signs of the landscape and his readiness to disturb complacency are qualities he shares with certain modern novelists who, rather than celebrating the long continuity of English life in the manner of Kipling, disclose unsettling connections between the present and the past. Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton (1992), for instance, presents a history of an English village from 1650 to the present in a series of unconnected narratives each representing a different layer of the past. The presence of the buildings and the land provides the only real continuity; but, in the final episode, workmen digging the foundations for a speculative builder’s “executive homes” unearth the body of a murder victim, the man murdered in the first scene of the novel. The buried past comes thus to haunt the present. Similarly, Peter Ackroyd’s London is a haunted place, its streets and buildings peopled by the ghosts of its past inhabitants; and his novels typically oscillate between the modern metropolis and scenes from the buried past which erupt onto the surface of the narrative, creating a distinctive flickering focus between past and present. Where novels like Ackroyd’s Chatterton differ from Scott’s is in the way that the layering of the past is not just noted and assimilated to the picturesque scene but becomes a dynamic element in the narration. The interaction between the layers of the past and the present becomes the driving force of the narrative, which repeatedly shifts its focus between these different strata. The novels of Graham Swift are similarly structured. Characters, transfixed by the past, reveal it piecemeal, in fragments, snapshots and remembered moments rather than in the smooth unfolding of a chronological narrative in the manner of Scott. Rupture is intrinsic to this process of revelation: continuity and connection are sought rather than given, and may never be fully achieved. And if the meaning of the personal past is a problem, so too is the larger issue of history. The different implications of that term are most fully and explicitly explored in Waterland (1983), but one thread runs through the novels up until Last Orders (1996), the motif of English history as inscribed in the landscape. In Swift’s first novel, The Sweet-Shop Owner (1980), Willy Chapman, the “owner” of the title, broods over his life, passing in review the different stages of a quiet uneventful existence. There is no future, for this is to be the last day of his life, but only the past, to be uncovered layer by

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layer—unremarkable schooldays, a humdrum job, then a surprising marriage to a rich and beautiful but imperious, withdrawn and emotionally unreachable woman. After war-service in the safe role of armystorekeeper, he returns to the ownership of a suburban newsagent’s shop purchased with his wife’s money. A daughter is born who grows up critical and estranged, and his life consists of little more than the daily duty of running his business. There is a restrained sadness about this life, whose uneventfulness is both a private grief and a social symptom, suggesting something about the history of suburban middle-class England in the middle decades of the last century. At one point Chapman recalls his Dorset honeymoon in terms of a framed picture in which the comfortable emptiness of this history is implied in the landscape: And there, suddenly, were the country cottages, and the honeymoon hotel set back from the road, seen already as if in a frame, as if in a photograph in an album opened many years after; the downs of Dorset pillowy in the dusk, and, beyond, the sea, somewhere murmuring under cliffs. June, 1937.15

It is a picture of an idyllic pre-war world in the last years of peace; but, without the pulse of passion, “the picture was incomplete” (30). The picturesque beauty of the remembered moment is hollowed out and the incompleteness takes on both a personal and a socio-historical significance. In Out of this World (1988) the armament-manufacturer Robert Beech’s eighteenth-century house provides another image of a peaceful, changeless England: “a Queen Anne house with oak panelling and a gravel drive and a lawn with two cedar trees, and a walled garden with a pond and a yew-tree walk and an orchard and paddock, and a stable and stable yard.”16 The conventional elements of the English country house, though already exposed to irony by their breathless listing, summon up for the owner’s granddaughter a secure world of the English past, which is once again conceived as a framed picture, this time a painting in the manner of Gainsborough: Once upon a time in the reign of good Queen Anne . . . Can you picture it? The world is safe and small—it only stretches to the next hill! The sky is blue—of course it’s blue! But this pure, clear eighteenth-century blue, and the white clouds that float across it aren’t just clouds, they are time passing very slowly, the way time once used to pass. The apples are ripening in the orchard, the stooks are standing in the field. In the yew-walk, arm in arm, Mr and Mrs Hyde (but let’s call them Beech) are strolling, she in her

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But historical time impinges on this timeless image of English peace and order, and it is shown to be the anachronism that is indicated by the ironic tone of the passage when, in front of the same picturesque house, the owner is blown to pieces by an IRA bomb. In Waterland (1983) the landscape of the Fens offers a less seductive image of peaceful Englishness, not an apparent idyll but rather an image of the kind of uneventful reality endured by the sweet-shop owner: “To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great, flat monotony of reality; the wide, empty space of reality.”17 In this perspective “reality is uneventfulness, vacancy, flatness. Reality is that nothing happens” (34). Yet that monotonous landscape conceals a violent and disturbing history of murder and incest. In all of these scenes England is not what it seems, and the search for meaning has to be conducted vertically, cutting beneath the surface in the manner of archaeological research. This gives Swift’s novels their peculiar narrative structure, in which elements are aligned on a vertical axis rather than on the horizontal axis of chronological development that informs most of Scott’s fiction. Instead of straightforward narration in chronological sequence there is a constant movement back and forth between the present and different moments and episodes of the past. Wilfully digressive and teasingly garrulous, Swift’s typical narration discloses layer upon layer of the past in a freewheeling, apparently unsystematic way, and it does so without attaining any bedrock certainty of understanding. In Ever After (1992), the layering of the past is at one point made visible in the landscape as the narrator recalls the Berkshire countryside of his childhood in terms of a picture in a children’s encyclopaedia: Between Aldermaston Wharf and Midgham . . . I could look out on a vista which might have formed the model for one of those contrived scenes in a children’s encyclopaedia, depicting the theme of “Old and New.” River, canal, and railway line were all in view. At a single moment it would have been perfectly possible to see, in the background, the old water-mill on the Kennet, with a horse working the field before it; in the middle distance, a barge on the canal; and in the foreground a train racing for the cutting; while no less than three road bridges provided a fair opportunity for some gleaming motor-car (complete with an inanely grinning couple in the front seats) to be brought simultaneously into the picture. I must have seen it once—many times—that living palimpsest.18

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The scene restates the deceptive blandness and peacefulness of the English landscape in terms of a simplified image for the edification of children. This is a land of few visible scars, simply traces of what could be read as unproblematic historical progress, if the mildly ironic tone of the description did not warn against such a reading. In fact, in this novel, as in its predecessors, there are hidden traumas and secret griefs and conflicts waiting to be unearthed. The key term here is palimpsest, an appropriate image not only for the landscape but for the past itself and the text which explores it. The trajectory of Swift’s novels is towards disclosing what is more deeply inscribed, both in the lives of individuals and in the life of the culture at large, although it does so in a way that brings about not so much a saving enlightenment as a condition of ontological insecurity. As the nineteenth-century land-surveyor Matthew Pearce puts it in Ever After, “the picture we cherish of our familiar world may be a thin crust for all that” (130). In Out of this World the photographer Harry Beech has a similar perception from flying over the Wiltshire countryside: “I know this landscape is a lie. Skin deep, hedgerowed, church-towered, village-strewn England. Rub the map and civilization as we know it disappears” (194). What replaces it are the institutional signs of war-readiness, the fortifications of the past and the secret installations of the Ministry of Defence. In different ways Swift’s novels rub the map, or the living palimpsest, to throw disturbing light on the past and the present, and on the history that connects them. The implications of Swift’s dismantling of the picturesque surface of the English landscape reach further than Scott’s. The latter’s horizontal movement from far to near is simply a narrative device for bringing the reader face to face with social and historical reality, and it replicates in miniature the larger movement of his novels which, for all their romance elements, have a central commitment to realism. In Swift the vertical exploration of the layers of the past that lie lodged in memory or repressed in the unconscious implies a sceptical and questioning vision of history on both the personal and the national level. When he describes the Victorian surveyor in Ever After as a man who “sees himself as setting out to take his place in an advancing (if essentially unalterable) world” (98), he defines the kind of confidence that informs Scott’s fiction but that he can no longer share. His contemporary characters are not setting out into a world that is advancing but looking back at one that is, for them, fixed and unalterable since the defining events of their lives are already past. There is thus always a poignant sense of loss in Swift’s complex retrospects, yet whether they go so far as to project a bleakly pessimistic vision of a postmodern world that has lost confidence in its own future, is

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open to question. For John Goode, there is something characteristically postmodern in the way that texts like Waterland recompose the grand narratives of the collective past in space, and he argues that Swift’s spatialisation of history in terms of landscape in that novel implies a crucial loss of human agency in that it naturalises change.19 But that is to overlook the extent to which landscape for Swift, as it was for Scott, is still a human construct. The point is spelt out in Last Orders when Vince recalls a visit to the Kent countryside: There’s an old windmill on top of the hill, I remember that, and there’s a view below: fields and woods and hedges and orchards, a farmhouse, a church tower, a village. It’s spread out in different patches like someone’s pieced it together.20

And it is reiterated later in the novel when Ray describes the scene as they return to Kent with Jack’s ashes: We can see the full sweep of the view, like we’re standing on the rim of a big, crooked bowl. Down in the valley it’s all green and brown and patchy, woods marked off with neat edges and corners, hedges like stitching. There’s a splodge of red brick in the middle with a spire sticking up. It looks like England, that’s what it looks like. (145)

This typically English landscape is the product of someone’s piecing together, of human edging and stitching. The living palimpsest is also a patchwork. This corner of the Kent countryside may be the place where Jack and Amy fatefully conceived their brain-damaged daughter, but it is also a reminder of their youth and love. As Adrian Poole has wisely observed, there is a double sense of cheerfulness and desolation in Swift’s fiction;21 and one source of the cheerfulness lies in the human effort and persistence that is registered here in the landscape. It is the same kind of effort that informs the discourse of Swift’s narrators as they dig down into the past to compose their life stories. If landscape and text are interchangeably identifiable as palimpsests, then creative and productive labour can be seen to be at work not only in the piecing together of the patchwork countryside, but also in the unpicking and restitching of the layers of the past that constitute Swift’s narratives.

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Notes 1. Walter Scott, The Fortunes of Nigel (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1883), 3. 2. Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, A Romance (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1880), 14. 3. Marcia Allentuck, “Scott and the Picturesque: Afforestation and History,” in Alan Bell (ed.), Scott Bicentenary Essays (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973), 188. 4. Eric G. Walker, Scott’s Fiction and the Picturesque, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 108 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1982), 23. 5. Walter Scott, Scott on Himself, ed. David Hewitt (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981), 37. 6. George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, ed. Nancy Henry (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1994), 24-5. 7. J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 67. 8. Burrow, A Liberal Descent, 296. 9. Scott, Ivanhoe, 24. 10. Walter Scott, “The Highland Widow,” in The Two Drovers and Other Stories, ed. Graham Tulloch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 131-2. 11. Scott, “The Highland Widow,” 134. 12. Walter Scott, Redgauntlet, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 54. 13. Walter Scott, Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since, ed. Claire Lamont (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 329. 14. Scott, Ivanhoe, 14. 15. Graham Swift, The Sweet-Shop Owner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 29. Subsequent page reference is given parenthetically within the text. 16. Graham Swift, Out of this World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 65. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically within the text. 17. Graham Swift, Waterland (London: Heinemann, 1983), 15. Subsequent page reference is given parenthetically within the text. 18. Graham Swift, Ever After (London: Pan Books, 1992), 198-9. Subsequent page reference is given parenthetically within the text. 19. John Goode, “Is There Life after Postmodernism?,” in Collected Essays of John Goode, ed. Charles Swann (Keele, Staffordshire: Keele University Press, 1995), 475. 20. Graham Swift, Last Orders (London: Picador, 1996), 64. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically within the text. 21. Adrian Poole, “Graham Swift and the Mourning After,” in Rod Mengham ed., An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 162.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN “TRIFLING DEVIATION”: STAGE AND SCREEN VERSIONS OF MARY SHELLEY’S MONSTER WILLIAM CHRISTIE

You must excuse a trifling deviation, From Mrs. Shelley’s marvellous narration. —The musical Frankenstein; or, The Vampire’s Victim (1849)

I have in my possession a text that is characteristic of the omnivorous monster of modern corporate entertainment. It is a novel, published by Pan Macmillan, whose prominent title—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—is emblazoned on the cover in large letters and enveloped by storm clouds shot through with centrifugal veins of lightning. Beneath this, in smaller letters, is the name of the author—not Mary Shelley at all, it turns out, but Leonore Fleischer. Beneath this again is the description: “based on the screenplay by Steph Lady and Frank Darabont.” Leonore Fleischer, my research tells me, has also adapted the screenplays of Rain Man, Shadowlands, Annie, Flatliners, and Fame, though in none of these other cases is an historical and (now) canonical text brazenly rewritten and offered to the public with all the authority of the original author. (Leonore Fleischer is also the co-author, with the appropriately named Marilyn vos Savant, of the bestseller Brain Building in Twelve and a Half Weeks.) In 1993, Francis Ford Coppola invited Kenneth Branagh, flush with the very recent success of his film version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, to direct a film adaptation of Frankenstein as a companion piece to Coppola’s own Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), offering him a huge budget of $US 44 million.1 Having accepted the challenge, Branagh read the novel—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, that is, not Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—before collaborating with screenwriters Lady and Darabont to create a text, most of the emphases of which would be Branagh’s own. It was Branagh, for example, who insisted that Frank Darabont “include all those events and characters in Mary Shelley’s novel that hadn’t been

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seen together in film,” and Branagh who then self-consciously altered the original narrative by expanding and modernising the role of Victor’s foster sister/lover Elizabeth, intending to make her “as strong a presence in the Frankenstein story as Mary Shelley was in the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley.” (“This was something Frank [Darabont] was less keen on.”2) It was Branagh who had in mind “for the birth sequence,” not the anachronistic image of the laboratory and starched white lab coat of the twentieth-century scientist—“Throw the galvanic flux meter! Switch to level seven!,” as Branagh himself parodically put it3—but (in line with the post-1970s feminist preoccupation with Victor’s arrogating to himself the role of the mother) the image of human childbirth. The result is the first truly shocking innovation of the film: its creation story. Collecting the broken waters of women at the onset of labour, Branagh’s Victor creates an alternative womb/sarcophagus—one that resembles an early attempt at a submarine with the waters on the inside—which is fed by sperm-like electric eels (an ingeniously organic alternative to the traditional lightning rod) through a long tube issuing from a huge parachute-like scrotum. The afterbirth finds Frankenstein and his Monster sliding around his rooms in amniotic fluid as Frankenstein gropes clumsily at the oversized newborn in an effort to raise him to his feet: “The image I had in mind for the birth sequence is of a child being born to parents who then walk out of the delivery room and leave this bloodstained, fluid-covered thing to just crawl around on its own.”4 It was also Branagh who (rehearsing a production of Hamlet at the time) conceived the story as “essentially” about a man “resisting the most irresistible fact of all,” and made explicit the motivation behind Victor’s quest for reanimation in the premature death of his mother, Caroline.5 The further incestuous conflation of Victor’s mother with his “sister,” Elizabeth, as Victor frantically brings Elizabeth back to life after the Monster has torn out her heart and then dances with her in what is the second and perhaps most visually and conceptually shocking of all the innovations in the film, would seem unforgivably post-Freudian were it not for the precedent to be found in Victor’s post-natal nightmare in the novel itself: I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel.6

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In consultation with Branagh as the primum mobile, in other words, Steph Lady and Frank Darabont wrote a screenplay, most (though not all) of which features in the actual film.7 No one is likely to question the fact that Branagh went out of his way to restore aspects of Mary Shelley’s original story that had disappeared from popular adaptation—the characters receive their correct names for the first time in 170 years, for example, the Monster is articulate, and Frankenstein’s narrative is framed by Walton’s Arctic expedition. In spite of its title and its declared intentions, however, it still deviates in a number of vital ways from the novel. This is not in itself a criticism. (Indeed, far and away the most faithful of the cinematic versions—a telefilm directed by Kevin Connor in 2003, with a Monster carefully modelled on the illustration on the 1831 title page of the novel—has a lifeless, amateur quality to it.) It is simply a recognition that the film is Kenneth Branagh’s (and Steph Lady’s and Frank Darabont’s) Frankenstein, not Mary Shelley’s. The same screenplay was then converted into an entirely different novel by an entirely different author, Leonore Fleischer, with Mary Shelley’s authority retained in its title. Branagh’s and the screenwriters’ innovations survive into Fleischer’s novel, but Fleischer has her own novel to write. Just how different that novel is from both the film and the original can be seen in the meditation on “Life” that is its prologue, which begins some five billion years ago with the evolution of “single-celled organisms” out of “a primordial soup of organic chemicals”: And out of those primitive single-celled bacteria would one day arise Alexander the Great, Homer and Virgil, Leonardo Da Vinci, Mozart, Madame Curie, William Shakespeare, Lao Tzu, Jane Austen, Amelia Earhart, Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Isaac Bashevis Singer, a cricketer named Grace, and a baseball player named Willie Mays.8

(Fleischer might at least have had the grace to include Mary Shelley herself, if not her mother, in her hall of fame.) The vulgar evolutionism is then laid aside so that Fleischer can formulate the “big questions,” invoking the popular, theologically conservative understanding of the Frankenstein myth in ways that Mary Shelley and Branagh do not: “And what of the human soul, Man’s only immortal part? Can this, too, be recreated in the laboratory?”9 Fleischer’s novel is neither an isolated nor an extreme example of the kind of metamorphosis a literary text is likely to undergo once it enters the field of popular entertainment. Indeed, next to the haphazard construction of Universal Pictures’ Frankenstein (1931), the film in which Boris

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Karloff makes his first appearance as the Monster in Jack Pierce’s famous make-up, the evolution of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein through various hands presents a model of fidelity, simplicity, and directness. If we take Mary Shelley’s original novel as the ultimate cause of the famous 1931 film, and take as our effective cause Peggy Webling’s stage play of 1927, Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre, then no fewer than nine writers contributed significantly to the film’s gestation: John L. Balderston was the first to adapt Webling’s play for Universal, then came Robert Florey, Garrett Fort (who at this stage contributed only dialogue), and Richard Schayer. Then Garrett Fort submitted a whole screenplay, at which point James Whale entered the fray as director (Florey having been dumped), and began by modifying the screenplay, with John Russell also contributing some revisions. Finally, it was passed on to Francis Edwards Faragoh, who submitted a final screenplay on 12 August 1931 and, with Garrett Fort, was given the actual credit. (Florey demanded and received belated recognition, and the truth is that most of the action, in a film that rarely if ever defers to Mary Shelley’s original story, can be credited to him.)10 No doubt there were others who collaborated during production, cast members and senior crew, but the only other writer in serious contention as a contributor to Whale’s Frankenstein would be the author of the first and most famous nineteenth-century popular adaptation of the novel, Richard Brinsley Peake (1792-1847), whose stage melodrama Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein opened at the English Opera House in London on 28 July 1823. “There are,” as Albert Lavalley points out, “clear lines of transmission from the nineteenth-century stage presentations to the films,”11 not least being the ubiquitous laboratory assistant who made his first appearance in Peake’s play as the character Fritz (subsequent variations were Frizzy, Frightz, Strutt, Pietro, Igor, and many more).12 He is the garrulous, superstitious comic servant that Gothic fiction borrowed from Shakespeare and his presence in the laboratory socialises Frankenstein in subtle ways, distinguishing him from the isolated Romantic quester of Mary Shelley’s novel. He is Fritz again in Whale’s Frankenstein, and Karl in Whale’s famous sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), where he is attached to the sinister Dr Pretorius rather than to Frankenstein himself. Deviations from Mary Shelley’s story are many and various and sometimes extreme. Beyond a creator, a creature, a creation scene (offstage in the early versions), a triangular relationship with a peripheral fiancée (or lover), and the murder of at least one of those closest to Frankenstein (in Peake’s Presumption, the Monster slays Frankenstein’s

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lover, Agatha De Lacey, at the wedding of Clerval and Elizabeth), there is little that all the stage and screen versions of Frankenstein have in common. To the few ingredients they do share, and to the story in all its incarnations, it has been the unnamed Monster who has been the most central—just as the Monster is formally and ethically central to Mary Shelley’s narrative. This has only partly to do with the Monster’s sensational value. It is hardly surprising, that is, given the visual immediacy of stage and screen, that the success or failure of a popular version should depend to some extent on its special effectiveness in figuring the Monster. More than this sensationalism, however, it has been the characterisation of the Monster, in spite of wide differences in his physical presentation, that from the first has given continuity if not unity to the Frankenstein myth. And the most successful versions have been those where the sympathy of the audience, as well as its fear and curiosity, has been engaged. To that extent at least they have kept faith with Mary Shelley’s original.

I It was precisely the sensitivity and pathos of Thomas Potter Cooke’s representation of —————— (“this nameless mode of naming the un[n]ameable is rather good,” wrote Mary when she saw the long suspenseful dash in the Dramatis Personæ) that Mary Shelley recognised when on 29 August 1823 she attended a performance of Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein at the English Opera House and found herself famous: Wallack looked very well as F[rankenstein]—he is at the beginning full of hope & expectation—at the end of the 1st Act. the stage represents a room with a staircase leading to F[rankenstein’s] workshop—he goes to it and you see his light at a small window, through which a frightened servant peeps, who runs off in terror when F. exclaims “It lives!”—Presently F[rankenstein] himself rushes in [in] horror & trepidation from the room and while still expressing his agony & terror —————— throws down the door of the laboratory, leaps the staircase & presents his unearthly & monstrous person on the stage. The story is not well managed—but Cooke played ——————’s part extremely well—his seeking as it were for support—his trying to grasp at the sounds he heard—all indeed he does was well imagined & executed.13

James William Wallack might have “looked well” as Frankenstein, but it was the part of the monster that drew the attention of Mary and of the

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crowd, and helped earn a reputation for Cooke (1786-1854). Some of the attention no doubt derived from Cooke’s “bizarre” make-up: His eyes seemed bright and watery and made a weird contrast against the yellow and green greasepaint that coated his face. The black hair was very long and unkempt. The lips were black and usually held in a rigid position. The arms and legs were an ugly shade of blue and extended bare from the crude, shroud-like clothing.14

But it was the pathos of Cooke’s performance that Mary recalled (“The Monster looks at Frankenstein most intently, approaches him with gestures of conciliation,” reads Peake’s stage direction), as well as its ingenuity. Charged with impersonating an adult newborn, Cooke reached out for physical and emotional support and groped synæsthetically at noises. Cooke squeezed as much as he could out of his portrayal of the Monster, the more so because, like Boris Karloff in 1931, he was obliged to remain speechless (infans) throughout (as indeed would the vast majority of popular Monsters). In all, he performed the role 365 times, including 80 performances at the Porte St Martin Theatre in Paris in 18256, and became justly famous. Cooke was a distinguished pantomimist, a tall man with a fine physique who was capable of gymnastic exertion, excelling in both horror and nautical roles.15 He had joined the navy at the age of ten (lying about his age) and served as a general dogsbody and powder monkey on HMS The Raven. Later he would become famous for his dancing, particularly for his hornpipe, characteristically performed in one of his many roles as a sailor, like that of the patriotic English Coxswain Long Tom Coffin in Edward Fitzball’s 1825 adaptation of Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot (1823) and of “Sweet William” in Douglas Jerrold’s extremely popular melodrama Black-Ey’d Susan (1829). More interesting for our purposes, before starring in Presumption, Cooke had been a hit as Ruthven, protagonist of J. R. Planché’s The Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles (1820), an adaptation of the only other product of the ghost story competition held in the Villa Diodati on the banks of Lake Geneva in 1816 that was actually completed: John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819). In 1826, Cooke would go on to play the ghost Vanderdecken in Edward Fitzball’s melodrama The Flying Dutchman. When he had left the navy to take up a theatrical career in is early twenties, Cooke had first made his mark as Roderick Dhu, the fierce Highland chieftain in T. J. Dibdin’s adaptation of Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, part of a long literary, but especially theatrical, tradition of “wild men” or “primitive” characters. The only other actor to rival Cooke in

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reputation for his performance as the Monster was another “Wild Man,” Richard John Smith (1786-1855), known to his contemporaries as O. Smith. Smith played Frankenstein’s Monster in H. M. Milner’s Frankenstein: or, The Man and the Monster in 1824. A gigantic figure with a deep, reverberating voice, Smith earned himself the soubriquet “Obi” or “O.” for his performance in the title role of [Obi; or,] ThreeFinger’d Jack (1801), a serious pantomime by John Fawcett. Obi (from obeah, a Jamaican magician) is a runaway Jamaican slave who uses sorcery against the slave owners. Although monstrous in size and demonic in vengeance, Obi manifests a bravery and dignity and instinctive virtue that associates him with the figure of the Noble Savage (and, specifically, with the black rebel hero of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave, published in 1688 and dramatised by Thomas Southern in 1695).16 This establishes a literary genealogy for the stage Monster in the equivocal children of Shakespeare’s Caliban on the English stage. For some time criticism has acknowledged the influence of The Tempest on Mary Shelley’s own conception, but the melodramatic actor of the early nineteenth century had a more immediate model for the part of a grunting Monster, alternating between tenderness and ferocity, in the eighteenthcentury Wild Man.17

II By all accounts, Boris Karloff took a leaf from Thomas Potter Cooke’s book in his portrayal of the Monster for James Whale in 1931 and 1935. I have already discussed the chaotic evolution of the script of Frankenstein,18 one legacy of which is an unevenness in the narrative—of which there is very little, in fact, with arguably too much of the film occupied with the Monster’s creation, as Clerval, Elizabeth, and Waldman look on as a surrogate audience and crude chorus. Another legacy is a radical uncertainty about the status and function of the Monster, which Boris Karloff was able to overcome and even to exploit. One scene written by Robert Florey that survived into the final film has been a source of critical frustration ever since the film was made. The redoubtable Fritz, after assisting his master at grave-robbing, is sent to the lecture theatre of Dr Waldman in search of a brain. Clumsily dropping a beaker with “NORMAL BRAIN” prominently inscribed on the side and spilling its contents onto the floor, Fritz is obliged to steal its counterpart, “DYSFUNCTIO CEREBRI,” the brain Waldman has just described as “criminally moronic,” having belonged to a man who led “a life of brutality—of violence and murder.” Indeed, Florey’s conception of the

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Monster had been of just such a criminal moron, but when James Whale transformed the story and tried to recover something of the sensitivity and ambiguity of Mary Shelley’s original, he was content to keep a scene whose crude determinism is comprehensively contradicted by the subsequent action. From the moment of Karloff’s Monster’s classic entry—backwards, like a disoriented child, before turning to reveal a close up of Pierce’s startling make-up19—the Monster is a mixture of faltering child and caged beast, an innocent more sinned against than sinning. Teased by a jealous Fritz (who becomes another child of Frankenstein, competing with the Monster for his parent’s attention), the vulnerability inscribed in the haunted, hooded eyes is never far away, even when the Monster is at his most violent. “The pathos is irresistible and deep,” as Percy Bysshe Shelley had written in his unpublished review of Mary’s novel: Nor are the crimes and malevolence of the single Being, though indeed withering and tremendous, the offspring of any unaccountable propensity to evil, but flow irresistibly from certain causes fully adequate to their production. They are the children, as it were, of Necessity and Human Nature. In this the direct moral of the book consists, and it is perhaps the most important and of the most universal application of any moral that can be enforced by example—Treat a person ill, and he will become wicked. Requite affection with scorn; let one being be selected for whatever cause as the refuse of his kind;—divide him, a social being, from society, and you impose upon him the irresistible obligations—malevolence and selfishness.20

In neither of the two Whale films is it Frankenstein who is especially neglectful of his newborn, and in Frankenstein we find him attending to the Monster’s elementary education in ways that seem to reprove his original in Mary’s novel. (Perhaps in transposing Henry Clerval’s Christian name—from Webling to Whale, Henry is Victor and Victor, Henry—something of his temperament went with it.) Though not especially percipient—he literally pulls the blind down on a sensitive episode in which Karloff’s grateful Monster reaches smiling for the sunlight, as Cooke’s Monster had reached for sound—Frankenstein is neither indifferent nor hostile. It is the Monster’s treatment at the hands of the unthinking, like the sadistic Fritz and the lynch-mob of citizens, that drives him into murder and mayhem. Whale underlines the point in The Bride by having a crucifixion scene in which the Monster is captured, tied to a stake, and transported to the local gaol. In both films, critics have identified images of the Ku Klux Klan in crowd behaviour and burning crosses as the Monster, a generic anomaly and archetypal outsider, is

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abused, shot at, and hounded (to his death in Frankenstein, though he was resurrected in The Bride). Having been imprisoned by the angry townsfolk in The Bride, the Monster soon escapes, eventually pausing at the hut of a blind, violinplaying hermit in an episode that remains at the emotional centre of the film. A simplified and sentimentalised version of the Monster’s residence in the “hovel” adjacent to the De Lacey’s cottage in the novel (84ff.), the scene suggests utopian possibilities as the two outsiders find friendship and, in the Monster’s case, a rudimentary language with which to enjoy it. For the first time, the Monster has met someone who does not fear him, and over what we take to be a couple of weeks (though this is uncertain and the time scheme of the film in this episode is contradictory), the hermit teaches the Monster to eat with utensils, smoke cigars, and even speak a few words (his favourites are “friend” and “good”). This pastoral idyll comes to an abrupt end, as pastoral must, when two huntsmen burst into the hermit’s hut, recognise the Monster, and give chase again. But Karloff’s in other ways retarded Monster has also learned autonomy in this pivotal scene, for it is the Monster who will eventually decide the resolution of his own tragedy in the climactic scene. When the bandages are unwrapped from the bride the Monster has conspired with Dr Pretorius to create, the Monster’s efforts to ingratiate himself with his new mate are rewarded only with disgust and shrill protest. “She hate me,” he grunts, “Just like others!” In anger and frustration, the Monster begins to smash up the laboratory, before exclaiming “We—belong—DEAD!” while hitting a fatal lever, conveniently at hand, to destroy himself, the evil Dr Pretorius, and the newly created “bride” who has spurned him. Frankenstein and Elizabeth, on the other hand, he chooses to spare. Karloff’s Monster is a vastly different character from the articulate, intelligent, arguably manipulative Monster of Mary Shelley, but there are intimations in these and other scenes of the evolving, intellectually and morally discriminating consciousness of Mary Shelley’s accelerated autodidact. What the two Monsters share, and what necessarily complicates the horrific in a narrative of monstrous violence, is a basic innocence and vulnerability. Their actions, at times frightening and even brutal, are never vicious and they retain throughout the sympathy of their respective audiences.

III So, too, does Robert De Niro’s comparatively unspectacular, organic Monster (the Monster’s scars, a legacy of Frankenstein’s “workshop of

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filthy creation” (36), slowly heal in the course of the action). De Niro’s Monster is a genuine advance both on the Karloffian Monster that by the time Branagh made his version in 1994 dominated the popular imagination, and on the exaggerated grotesqueness of some of Karloff’s competitors, like Christopher Lee in Terence Fisher’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Nick Brimble in Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound (1990).21 To advance, Branagh had gone back to Mary Shelley’s novel. Inverting and parodying the clichés that Whale’s Frankenstein had introduced into the B-grade tradition—the question of whose brain was to be used had led to some inspired silliness—Branagh has De Niro in the early Ingoldstadt scenes play an Irish villain who is hanged for murdering Dr Waldman during a public inoculation. In its reconstruction and reanimation as the Monster, the body of the executed villain is rewarded with Waldman’s brain. Accordingly, the Monster is thoughtful, articulate, pathetic, persuasive. Yet for all this, we are still aware of a menace that the overhanging forehead and sad eyes of Karloff’s Monster lack. De Niro’s Monster’s fits of destructiveness seem not only understandable in the light of Frankenstein’s neglect, but also curiously inevitable. This potential for violence is, I suspect, less a legacy of his criminal body parts than a legacy of the character parts De Niro has distinguished himself in throughout his career. He is, after all, America’s Monster, its dark creature, a Methodacting incarnation of estrangement and violence and otherness (and the Monster is all these things). The psychotic ex-veteran Travis Bickle in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976); boxer Jake La Motta in the same director’s Raging Bull (1980); Al Capone in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987); a psychotic ex-con in J. Lee Thompson’s and Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991)—De Niro’s characters are the deformed children of that ambition or greed that America recognises as the dark side of its own irrepressible idealism. After Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, De Niro would play the part of Dickens’s version of Frankenstein’s Monster, Magwitch, in Alfonso Cuarón’s remake of Great Expectations (1998). Indeed, there is nothing that better enshrines the perversion of values involved in creating monsters than Hollywood itself, whose dreams are an elaborate simulacra of the world of technological enterprise (and “free enterprise”) with which it moves hand in hand. The Hollywood version of American idealism helps to create the monsters that terrorise its public places, as Karloff’s Monster terrorises the community in a frenzy to which he has been driven by its systematic abuse.22 Like Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, moreover, Hollywood has proved incapable of genuine selfcriticism or self-irony—let alone of self-denial; Victor Frankenstein’s

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occasional acknowledgement of his negligence is largely perfunctory and the end of the novel finds him blindly urging courage and enterprise regardless of the consequences. Mary Shelley’s attack on the monstrosity of Romantic idealism could hardly find a more appropriate modern target than the American dream. From Thomas Potter Cooke in the 1820s to Hamilton Deane in the 1920s, a string of stage actors built their reputations out of monstrosity, central to which were the roles of Dracula and of Frankenstein’s Monster—whom Cooke was already confusing with his creator and calling “Frankenstein,” incidentally, not only making up for Victor Frankenstein’s “deficient infant care”23 by giving the Monster a name, but also registering the imaginative primacy of the Monster. So in the cinema, not just Boris Karloff, but a string of film stars from Bela Lugosi and James Cagney to Robert De Niro and Arnold Schwarzenegger—all would make a reputation out of monstrosity of various kinds. The actors who played Victor Frankenstein, on the other hand, have tended to come and go. Peter Cushing’s many outings as Frankenstein for Hammer Films after The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957 offer a possible exception, though Cushing’s unremittingly evil Baron Frankenstein is a monster. Otherwise, it has been the creature, not his creator, who has carried the story. This is significant for our understanding of Mary Shelley’s novel. Where the typical Romantic parable of frustrated creativity focuses on the mind of the maker—the poet in Alastor, Prometheus, Manfred, The Fall of Hyperion—Mary Shelley’s narrative, uniquely, finds a way to explore and question creative authority by inhabiting and impersonating its consequences. From the opening epigraph from Paradise Lost, in which Adam protests his existential impotence—I did not choose to be created, he complains to his Creator, yet the burden of gratitude and obedience falls on me—the novel prepares us for the point of view of the creature. Its success in doing so is confirmed by the Monster’s most successful reincarnations.

Notes 1. This is the official figure: see Kenneth Branagh’s interview with Graham Fuller, November 1994, “It's a monster! Kenneth Branagh unveils his biggest creation yet.’” http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1285/is_n11_v24/ai_16423088 (accessed 19 January 2008). Unofficially, it may have been as high as $US50 million. Compare Arthur Joseph Lundquist, “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” in We Belong Dead: Frankenstein on Film, ed. Gary J. Svehla and Susan Svehla (Baltimore: Midnight Marquee Press, 1997), 285.

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2. Kenneth Branagh to Graham Fuller in “It’s a monster!” 3. Kenneth Branagh, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Classic Tale Reborn on Film (New York: Newmarket Press, 1994), 9. 4. Branagh, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Classic Tale Reborn on Film, 20. For speculation on the supervention of the male medical practitioner over the female midwife in the late eighteenth century and on the relation between Frankenstein and the professionalization of medicine, see Ludmilla Jordanova, “Melancholy Reflection: Constructing an Identity for Unveilers of Nature,” in Frankenstein, Creation and Monstrosity, ed. Stephen Bann (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 60-76. 5. See the interview with Graham Fuller. 6. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (text of 1818 edition), ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 39-40. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically within the text. 7. The screenplay is readily available in Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Classic Tale Reborn on Film. 8. Leonore Fleischer, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (London, Sydney and Auckland: Pan Books, 1994), 6-7. 9. Fleischer, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, 8. 10. See Paul M. Jensen, “James Whale,” in his The Men who Made the Monsters (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), 10-11. 11. Albert J. Lavalley, “The Stage and Film Children of Frankenstein: A Survey,” in The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: California University Press, 1979), 245. 12. A convenient critical history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century stage versions—including the complete text of Peake’s Presumption, four other nineteenth-century adaptations, and John Balderston’s 1930 Frankenstein (after Webling)—can be found in Steven Earl Forry, Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of Frankenstein from Mary Shelley to the Present (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylania Press, 1990). 13. Mary Shelley to Leigh Hunt, 11 September 1823, in The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 404-5. 14. Donald F. Glut, The Frankenstein Legend: A Tribute to Mary Shelley and Boris Karloff (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow, 1973), 29. 15. For details of the career of Thomas Potter Cooke, I am drawing upon Steven Forry’s Hideous Progenies and Michael Slater’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004-8), http://www.oxforddnb.com 16. Details of the career of O. Smith can be found in Forry, Hideous Progenies, Louis James, “Frankenstein’s Monster in Two Traditions,” in Frankenstein, Creation and Monstrosity, ed. Stephen Bann (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 848, and the entry on Richard John Smith by Joseph Knight (rev. Klaus Stierstorfer) in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 17. See James, “Frankenstein’s Monster in Two Traditions”.

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18. The unevenness of The Bride of Frankenstein can also be traced to its composite construction, further compounded by Whale’s ongoing battle with a censor he was determined to appease. See Paul Jensen, The Men who Made the Monsters, 41-2, and Alberto Manguel, Bride of Frankenstein, BFI Film Classics (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 13-15. 19. The scene required the conspicuous presence of nursing staff in all the American cinemas on its release, though this creative hype (women did faint in the aisles) may have been largely promotional. 20. Percy Bysshe Shelley, unpublished review of Frankenstein reprinted in Shelley’s Prose, ed. David Lee Clark (London: Fourth Estate, 1988), 307-8. 21. Universal and its derivatives have copyright over the Jack Pierce image of Frankenstein’s Monster, so other production companies have had to reinvision the Monster even if they did not especially want to. The proliferation of the Universal image in every commercial area gives a good indication of just how financially successful it has been for them. 22. The Frankenstein myth and its cinematic incarnations have influenced what has become a pop-culture archetype: the deeply damaged Vietnam veteran who cannot adjust to the society that created and neglected him, and snaps—like Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo, a fighting monster created by the American army and his Company Frankenstein, Col. Trautman, and openly abused by an ungrateful populace (like the mob in Whale’s two Frankenstein films). 23. The phrase is from a famous early feminist study of Mary Shelley and her novel by Ellen Moers, in her Literary Women (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 93.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN THE NICE WORK OF VICTORIAN NOVELS IN THATCHER’S BRITAIN ROSEMARIE BODENHEIMER

According to Robyn Penrose, the supremely confident literary theorist of David Lodge’s Nice Work, “The novelist is a capitalist of the imagination.”1 Her author, who builds his comedy on recycled material drawn from Victorian condition-of-England novels, would not disagree. He has a trick or two up his sleeve for his heroine, who recognises only belatedly that she is not just a cutting-edge 1980s critic but a character, “getting dragged into a classic realist text, full of causality and morality” (NW 218). All her vaunted theoretical distance cannot prevent her from acting out the roles and attitudes of heroines in the industrial novels she teaches, once she is paired with local factory manager Victor Wilcox in a “shadow scheme” during the Industry Year declared by the Thatcher government in 1986. Lodge’s first joke is to make the late-twentiethcentury English lecturer, bearer of cultural capital to the youthful masses, into the natural daughter of those serious-minded Victorian heroines who carry the moral imagination to the edges of the factory floor. It’s a serious joke, despite Lodge’s entertainingly parodic narrative art. Written just after he had retired from teaching duties at the University of Birmingham, Nice Work offers a somewhat wistful farewell to the idea of the university radically threatened by the Thatcher government which, the narrator asserts without irony, “had set about decimating the national system of higher education” (NW 29). Setting the university next to a similarly straitened manufacturing system, Lodge does not oppose town and gown so much as he surveys the overlapping economic problems of Rummidge University and a northern factory culture “embalmed in an earlier era, the late fifties or early sixties” (NW 135). Both Robyn Penrose and Vic Wilcox have brought up-to-date expertise to their respective workplaces, only to find themselves hovering on the edge of unemployment. As their fates become entwined, the novel revisits and

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updates many of the familiar condition-of-England questions, in particular the value and fate of liberal culture in its confrontations with the business mind. Lodge’s epigraphs advertise the mid-Victorian condition-of-England novels he draws on as Sybil, Shirley, North and South, Hard Times and Felix Holt, though the shape of Robyn’s relationship with Vic Wilcox is especially close to that of Margaret Hale and John Thornton in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South. Vic Wilcox’s surname, and a student T-shirt that appears late in the novel bearing the motto “Only Connect,” make further links with an intermediate text, E.M. Forster’s Howards End, in which the meaning and fate of liberal culture is a central concern.2 In The Art of Fiction, Lodge claims that he realised halfway through writing Nice Work that he had echoed the name of Forster’s businessman Henry Wilcox. “Rather than change my hero’s name,” he writes, “I incorporated Howards End into the intertextual level of the novel.”3 Perhaps disingenuous, perhaps not: unconscious connections might well have served to keep Forster’s rather tortuous cultural dilemmas both in play and at bay. Both consciously and not, then, Lodge imitates, parodies, and retrospectively lights up his predecessors through a meditation on the cultivated mind as it is defined by taste, money, higher learning, class, sex, and pastoral fantasy. In the Manchester novels of the 1840s and ’50s, descriptions of taste in clothing and home furnishing were definitive judgments of the gap between genteel culture and the arriviste excesses of newly made cotton lords. Writing in the mid-50s, Elizabeth Gaskell maintains the tradition in North and South, even though the novel acknowledges that the days of unregulated cotton lord mastery have passed. The difference between the Hale family drawing room, with its pretty, well-used furnishings, and the mirrored, bagged-up coldness of Mrs Thornton’s unused apartment of state leaves no doubt about where “culture” resides. Gaskell herself speaks through the thoughts of Margaret Hale as she contemplates the garish wallpapers of the Milton/Manchester house they will rent: “She had never come fairly in contact with the taste that loves ornament, however bad, more than the plainness and simplicity which are of themselves the framework of elegance.”4 John Thornton’s manly virtues are underwritten by his recognition of Margaret’s taste as a standard to which he bows—a detail that Lodge adapts for his own lovelorn manufacturer in Nice Work. Lodge’s narrator isn’t buying it. He’s well aware of the traps in the taste business; E.M. Forster might have served as an early warning. Howards End begins with a declaration of taste: the first line of Helen Schlegel’s letter to her sister Margaret, “It isn’t going to be what we

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expected,” refers to the difference between the sisters’ wry anticipation that Howards End would be a faked-up historical atrocity and the pastoral simplicity of the actual house (HE 3).5 Cultivation finds its proper home when the Schlegel furniture, saturated with fond family memory and the German Romantic tradition, is married to the authentic old Englishness of Howards End. Forster’s emphatically Victorian—if not entirely British— ideas of genteel taste are troubled, however, when he attempts to move downmarket, into the lower-middle-class dwelling of Leonard and Jacky Bast. Here the narrator’s voice flounders badly, his obvious revulsion trying to cover itself in jocularity: “It was an amorous and not unpleasant little hole . . . But it struck that shallow makeshift note that is so often heard in the modern dwelling-place” (HE 45). When Jacky enters, a similar discomfort sounds: “Her appearance was awesome. She seemed all strings and bellpulls—ribbons, chains, bead necklaces that clinked and caught—and a boa of azure feathers hung round her neck with the ends uneven” (HE 48). When Leonard “jingled out a little Grieg,” he shows effort—“badly and vulgarly” (HE 51). It becomes difficult not to feel that Forster himself becomes vulgar in his anxious snobbery about tastes that Gaskell simply took for granted. Try as they might, both the narrator and the Schlegel sisters manage to imply that the deliberate quest for a taste that does not come by birthright is itself in bad taste. Lodge begins Nice Work with a comic tour-de-force on comparative taste. Victorian drawing rooms give way to modern toilets: the Wilcoxes have four, the ensuite bathroom furnished with dark purple (“damson”) fixtures, a “kidney-shaped handbasin and goldplated taps and sunken bath” and a “shaggy pink nylon fitted carpet” (NW 4). Vic submits to his wife’s consumerist fantasies, but yearns for the chain-pulled wooden-seated toilet of his youth, while, across town, Robyn Penrose, dressed in a Laura Ashley white nightgown, waits to pull the chain on her toilet so that she can enjoy a hot shower in her nineteenth-century terraced cottage, and shivers a bit behind single-glazed windows left to ensure its architectural integrity (NW 23-4). Vic wakes to a digital alarm, Robyn to “a replica of an old-fashioned instrument purchased from Habitat, with an analogue dial and a little brass bell on the top” (NW 22); while Vic rides to work in his pride and joy, a British-made Jaguar with a sexy sound system, Robyn climbs into the six-year-old Renault Five inherited from her academic parents. Both upwardly mobile extravagance and academic retro are comedic and detached from moral emphasis: it’s all a matter of which consumer market serves the cultural fetishes of a particular slice of the middle class.

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Yet all three novels suggest that good taste is designed to suggest interior cultivation and downplay the modest inherited wealth that sustains their heroines, while the businessmen’s houses quite naturally display what money can do. As the outward sign of an inner relationship with money, taste signals more serious questions: what is the value of liberal humanism in a money economy, and how is it financially supported? Margaret Hale objects to John Thornton as “tainted . . . by that testing everything by the standard of wealth” (NS 87); both Margaret Schlegel and Robyn Penrose agree that living just to make money is not good enough. But the provenance of intellectual culture is puzzling in every case. Is it a natural part of being human, a commodity resting on wealth, an add-on of creative leisure? Is it what women bring to marriage, what men acquire with their brides? According to Gaskell, Milton manufacturers keep their sons out of universities in order to ensure that they stay in trade, “unsparingly cutting away all off-shoots in the direction of literature or high mental cultivation, in hopes of throwing the whole strength and vigor of the plant into commerce” (NS 68). The metaphor suggests a kind of maiming, yet Gaskell is ambivalent about the relation of higher learning to active life. Latin and Greek are useless for trade, John Thornton asserts; his dabblings in “dead people” with his tutor Mr Hale are an amusement he can afford during periods when his business is stable (NS 85). When Oxford fellow Mr Bell asks him “when you Milton men intend to live,” Thornton rejects the classical model of serene enjoyment for Teutonic “action and exertion” (NS 333-4). Bell himself, with his finicky eating habits and his insouciance, suggests a mildly decadent withdrawal from life—one that Forster deepens in his portrait of Tibby Schlegel. Both academic characters scorn business but are funded via Manchester: the Schlegel money comes from the Manchester-born mother, while Bell’s fortune, amassed through investments in Manchester businesses and buildings, is duly restored to its source when Bell’s heir Margaret invests in Thornton’s mill. Forster’s struggle with culture and money is more agonistic than Gaskell’s, and more personal to his own status as a university man with an independent family fortune.6 Bedazzled by the Wilcoxes’ energy, Helen Schlegel briefly sees her portfolio of liberal ideas as “cant” (HE 23), and though she quickly rejects the family, Forster’s own portrait of the London chattering classes with their rapidly formulated theories is always halfsatirical. Characters outside the circle of Schlegel talk—with the mystified exception of Mrs Wilcox—are treated even less tenderly, however: comical Aunt Juley knows that Schlegel girls need men who know about

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“Literature and Art” without having the faintest idea what that means, while Leonard Bast is alternately pitied and scorned for his hapless, unsupported aspiration to literature. Leonard’s case is the trigger for Margaret Schlegel’s recognition that high thoughts are only available to those who stand firmly on islands of money: “all our thoughts are the thoughts of six-hundred-pounders, and all our speeches” (HE 57). The recognition marks the high point of her theoretical understanding, but the Schlegels’ actual interventions in Leonard’s life bring nothing but harm. Margaret’s proto-socialist theory floats over a novel in which liberal culture is increasingly redefined as the ability to sustain emotionally honest relationships—a virtue that, it turns out, cannot be taught to the philistines who make the economy run. In the final retreat to Howards End, the main work of cultured middle-class women in the novel is, as Paul Delaney points out, “to prevent change, which in Forster is almost always for the worse.”7 It is an understandable position for Edwardian 1910, in a novel acutely aware that imperialist competition between England and Germany was becoming dangerous to prospects of peace. Although Lodge’s heroine is a wage earner and a feminist, she initially defines her university work in terms worthy of her culture-bearing Victorian foremothers. “Nice work,” according to Robyn, is “meaningful. It’s rewarding. I don’t mean in money terms. It would be worth doing even if one wasn’t paid anything at all” (NW 86). At the end of the novel Vic Wilcox, now schooled in Jane Eyre, Culture and Anarchy and half (the Leavis half?) of Daniel Deronda, is moved to agree: “it’s nice work if you can get it” (249). Getting it, under the Thatcher cuts, is the problem; Vic has already taught Robyn to wonder why the liberal arts should be supported at all. The old humanist arguments about maintaining the cultural tradition don’t feel right to her deconstructive mind, but she can’t think of others: “Why should people pay to be told people don’t mean what they say or say what they mean?” (NW 153). The mutual education of Vic and Robyn is Lodge’s mock-Victorian answer: her education in factory politics draws her toward realism, while Vic’s reading in nineteenth-century texts leads him to acknowledge that the liberal arts can stimulate his working mind. Nice Work solves the employment problems of both heroine and hero by reaching happily for the Victorian ending. Robyn is hard-working, productive and dedicated to teaching; thus she deserves the extra money that magically appears in the Rummidge English department to keep her on. Her uncle in Australia (Provis?) leaves her an inheritance; like a Margaret Hale clone she invests without a second thought in the small family business that Vic dreams of, once he loses his job as a corporate

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turn-around expert. Both of them, presumably, will work precariously ever after on the margins of late corporate capitalism. Meanwhile—in Lodge’s funniest move—Robyn’s bloodless boyfriend Charles jumps the sinking academic ship for the fascinations of high finance in the City. For him, the money business is a natural extension of the literary theory business: “It’s all on paper, or computer screens. It’s abstract. It has its own rather seductive jargon; arbitrageur, deferred futures, floating rate . . . I regard myself as simply exchanging one semiotic system for another, the literary for the numerical, a game with high philosophical stakes for a game with high monetary stakes” (NW 153, 225). Thus speaks the gambling villain, a latter-day James Harthouse. In Lodge as in Dickens, earnest and caring work defines the worthy character. Lodge also follows his Victorian predecessors into the murky thickets of interclass mediation. The social conscience of Margaret Hale is formed by the old-fashioned practices of village paternalism; that of Margaret Schlegel through the belief that personal relationships ought to transcend class barriers, that of Robyn Penrose through the excitement of 1960s student movements and the ideological theorising of the 70s and 80s. All the heroines attempt direct interventions between capitalists and workers, but in the end their cultivated consciences become handmaidens to the wellbeing of businessmen. The historical devils lie, of course, in the details. The early capitalism of Gaskell’s Milton/Manchester is characterised by energetic problem solving and new possibility, and by a gradual acquiescence to the respectability of unions and strike action. Gaskell’s profound dislike of hostile negotiation modifies that recognition: in her story striking easily collapses into violence, while enforced union membership bullies impoverished workers. Violence threatens, however, only when John Thornton brings in Irish scabs and calls the police to break up a strikers’ confrontation in his factory yard. Margaret’s theory—that masters and men should meet and talk as equals—challenges Thornton to face his striking workers in person; then, recognising that she has put him in physical danger, she rushes into the scene to protect his body with hers. That spontaneous shift of class sympathy is the first step in a prolonged romantic plot that leaves Margaret emotionally and financially committed to her businessman. Lodge’s variations on this scene offer a canny perspective on the condition of British industry in the 1980s, after the devastating miners’ strike had crushed the post-war expansion of union power. The strike has become largely an academic fantasy: Vic Wilcox is initially annoyed by Robyn because he has seen her picketing during a one-day strike called to protest against Thatcher’s cuts to the university. He scorns it as a

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“designer industrial action . . . the appropriation of working-class politics by middle-class style” (NW 78), and makes it clear to Robyn that the action places neither strikers nor government at risk. The factory, meanwhile, is a place of minutely calculated moves within the terrain marked out by decades of union-management negotiations—about such matters as the number of minutes allowed for workers to wash their hands before lunch. When the South Asian labourer Danny Ram jams a new machine, Vic wants to fire him. His colleagues remind him that he has no basis, unless Ram has been properly trained for his upgraded job. Vic wants to train him, in effect, so that he can be legally fired. Robyn, sitting in on the managers’ conference, brings on her Victorian outrage: “Do I understand that you are proposing to pressure a man into making mistakes so that you can sack him?” Sounding much like Margaret Hale, she defends her interference: “It’s the business of anyone who cares for truth and justice” (NW 98). Full of righteousness, she tracks down the worker on the factory floor and warns him. As she leaves the plant, she hears that there has been a walkout to protest against the treatment of Danny Ram. Later that night, Vic Wilcox appears at her house, demanding that she address his workers and retract her accusation, in order to prevent a strike that—as he presents it to Robyn’s left-wing mind—could bring both factory and workers to their knees. Robyn agrees, after getting his promise to train Danny Ram properly. Her conscience is a bit troubled: “As a piece of action in a Victorian novel she might have judged it harshly as a case of one bourgeois supporting another when the chips were down, but she had persuaded herself that it was for the greater good of the factory workers— not to save Wilcox’s skin—that she had lied” (NW 107). As abruptly as Margaret Hale, however, she has turned the corner of class sympathy; from now on her “nice work” in the shadow scheme will be to save Wilcox’s skin while she uses her influence discreetly to modify his managerial practices. Just as Margaret Hale gets Thornton to meet his workers as individual men with minds of their own, Robyn gets Vic to announce his new policies in a direct talk with his employees. Lodge’s treatment of the Danny Ram episode comically updates the tangled convergence of industrial and sexual tension in Margaret Hale’s impulsive physical defence of John Thornton. Sexually frustrated in midlife, Vic Wilcox is turned on by Robyn’s appearance in a bathrobe while he chews her out for her interference in his factory. Robyn tells the Danny Ram story to her boyfriend Charles while they are busy with the cool technologies of non-penetrative sex. By novel’s end Robyn is playing the role of “one bourgeois supporting another” to the hilt: she goes to Frankfurt in the sexually suggestive guise of “Personal Assistant” to Vic,

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her knowledge of German allowing her to spy on the ploys of the German managers from whom—shades of Howards End—Vic is buying a piece of the latest technology. Her cleverness combined with his gets him the deal he wanted; to celebrate, they wine, dine, and go to bed. For Wilcox, the event is life-bending: falling into the Victorian plot, he insists that sexual attraction can mean only love and marriage. In this case Lodge allows Robyn to stand firmly in modernity; she finally manages to fend off Vic’s advances by deflecting his romantic yearnings into Victorian novels, while Vic’s wife Marjorie, emerging from child-rearing and menopause, brightens up at the idea of becoming a partner in Vic’s new business. Thus, ironically, does post-modern Robyn play the moral role of saving a marriage and bringing a family together. As a whole, Lodge’s novel features sexual fantasy as a tired commodity: factory walls are decorated with fading pin-up calendars; Vic’s secretary Shirley proudly displays photos of her topless daughter; a female student does sex work to pay for her education. In their shared inner resistance to such goings-on, both Robyn and Vic, despite their one-night Frankfurt fling, come out looking oddly Victorian. If a certain nostalgia for the decency of Victorian realism circulates in Nice Work, Lodge is well prepared to connect it with the pastoral visions that carry nostalgia within the realist tradition. Margaret Hale idealises her childhood home at Helstone as “a village in a poem—in one of Tennyson’s poems”; she turns its greenery into eloquent literary pastoral when she describes it to Bessy Higgins, a factory worker dying from the inhalation of cotton fibres (NS 12, 100). Gaskell does not allow nostalgia to stand as a viable alternative to industry, however; when Margaret penetrates the myth and learns to think of the South as a place of work, she acknowledges—as if she had been reading Engels—that agricultural peasant life is brutal and deadening to the imagination (NS 306). Nothing in the novel is immune from change, including the Helstone rectory where Margaret grew up; losing the past is a necessary part of growing up and going on. Forster reaches back further to a country ideal, relying on the myth that Gaskell challenges. He imagines Leonard Bast as “grandson to the shepherd or ploughboy whom civilization had sucked into the town; as one of the thousands who have lost the life of the body and failed to reach the life of the spirit” (HE 108). Bast’s son, growing up in the hayfields of Howards End under the tutelage of Schlegels, is meant to restore that loss, as Margaret is meant to restore the loss of the first Mrs Wilcox, who belongs “to the house, and to the tree that overshadowed it” and holds “the instinctive wisdom the past alone can bestow” (HE 21). For Forster, seeing

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England whole in the pre-war twentieth century requires an archaic pastoral language. Seen from the Purbeck Hills, England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world’s fleet accompanying her towards eternity? (HE 163)

In this passage, as in the final triumph of the Schlegels at Howards End, the work of culture is virtually identified with the pastoral. Robyn Penrose’s literary education has also imparted a visionary gleam, though it is one that laughs directly back at Forster. On the plane to Frankfurt, “Robyn looked out of the window as England slid slowly by beneath them; cities and towns, their street plans like printed circuits, scattered over a mosaic of tiny fields, connected by the thin wires of railways and motorways.” Newly trained by Vic Wilcox, her imagination sees England whole as an immense network that allows a housewife to switch on her electric kettle: power stations, mines, refineries, machine shops, advertising agencies, wholesale and retail establishments create the interlocking grid. For all the modernity of her vision, she is like Forster’s Margaret in her puzzlement about how to interpret it: “It was difficult to decide whether the system that produced the kettle was a miracle of human ingenuity and co-operation or a colossal waste of resources, human and natural.” Dickens answers her: “’Tis aw a muddle” (NW 192-93). Robyn’s second vision attempts to sort out the muddle in a wonderfully romantic fusion of culture and industry. Her sun-drenched, nostalgic view of the university campus comes upon her as she anticipates losing her post there: “It seemed to Robyn more than ever that the university was an ideal type of human community, where work and play, culture and nature, were in perfect harmony, where there was space, and light, and fine buildings set in pleasant grounds, and people were free to pursue excellence and self-fulfillment, each according to her own rhythm and inclination” (NW 249). The passage gives us the university as pastoral, or the university as Howards End, safe yet threatened by imminent extinction—but Robyn doesn’t stop there. Blake-like, her vision welcomes the workers from the “satanic mills” that had filled her, during her first factory tour, with the profound and thrilling horror of Victorian ventures

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into hearts of darkness (NW 81). Her daydream now transports the entire workforce of the factories across town in buses, And the beautiful young people and their teachers stopped dallying and disputing and got to their feet and came forward to greet the people from the factory, shook their hands and made them welcome, and a hundred small seminar groups formed on the grass, composed half of students and lecturers and half of workers and managers, to exchange ideas on how the values of the university and the imperatives of commerce might be reconciled and more equitably managed to the benefit of the whole of society (NW 250).

Mixing biblical and political pieties, this wonderful parody speaks to the hopelessly idealistic yearning for connection that inhabits the long condition-of-England tradition. Lodge’s final farewell to Rummidge/Birmingham puts his own work squarely within that tradition, while correcting both Robyn’s and Forster’s wishful fantasies of a unified England reborn to pastoral culture. While Robyn decides whether to accept a renewal of her teaching contract, she watches the almost unconscious arrangement of students and young black gardeners on the sunny campus lawns. The students are not overtly arrogant, the gardeners not apparently resentful, but there is no communication between them. “Physically contiguous, they inhabit separate worlds” (NW 277). The names, skin colours, and habits of the actors in the class drama have changed, but Disraeli’s words about the unbridgeable gap between rich and poor enjoy a renewed relevance, as the novel’s epigraph from Sybil becomes Lodge’s epitaph for Thatcher’s England: “Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy, who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of separate planets.” Unlike most of his Victorian counterparts, Lodge is wary of rendering the underclass though a middle-class sensibility. His serious parody presents modest accommodations among different segments of the middle class, but Danny Ram and his compatriots are left in an unrepresentable country of their own.

Notes 1. David Lodge, Nice Work (New York: Penguin, 1988), 21. Subsequent page references are initialled NW and given parenthetically within the text. 2. Robert P. Winston and Timothy Marshall discuss Nice Work in relation to North and South, Culture and Anarchy, and Howards End. Their article points out the many similarities among the plots, characters and concerns of the three novels,

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though it downplays Lodge’s canny, historically grounded revisions of his predecessors, and tends to blur 1980s capitalism with that of the 1850s. Robert B. Winston and Timothy Marshall. “The Shadows of History: The ‘Condition-ofEngland’ in Nice Work,” Critique (Washington) 44, no. 1 (Fall 2002): 3-23. 3. David Lodge, The Art of Fiction (London: Penguin, 1992), 38. Subsequent page references are initialled AF and given parenthetically within the text. 4. Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 61. Subsequent page references are initialled NS and given parenthetically within the text. 5. E.M. Forster, Howards End (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2003), 3. Subsequent page references are initialled HE and given parenthetically within the text. 6. Paul Delaney writes about Forster’s privileged discomfort at living on the labor of others, his treatment of investment, and his resistance to social change, in “‘Islands of Money’: Rentier Culture in E. M. Forster’s Howards End,” English Literature in Transition (1880-1920) 31, no. 3 (1988): 285-96. 7. Delaney, “Islands of Money,” 291.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN PORTABLE PROPERTY: POSTCOLONIAL APPROPRIATIONS OF GREAT EXPECTATIONS JENNIFER GRIBBLE

“Most readings of Great Expectations situate it squarely within the metropolitan history of British fiction,” remarked Edward Said, “whereas I believe it belongs in a history both more inclusive and more dynamic than such interpretations allow.”1 At least two post-colonial readings of the novel in fact predate that comment of 1993, Michael Noonan’s novel Magwitch (1982), and Tim Burstall’s television mini-series Great Expectations: The Untold Story (1986). More recently, in 1997 Peter Carey published Jack Maggs,2 and in 2007, Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip3 was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. In the dynamic history to which these two novels respond, the baton of colonial power passes between Britain, Australia, Papua New Guinea, giving sharper focus to the question Said raises: how did “the body of humanistic ideas” represented in Dickens’s probing of the unjust social and administrative systems of Victorian England “co-exist so comfortably with imperialism?” (CI 97). Young men looking about them in Victorian England are caught up in their culture’s political unconscious, Dickens suggests—its unexamined conviction of “our having and our being the best of everything.”4 “‘I think I shall trade . . . to the East Indies, for silks, spices, drugs, and precious woods. I think I shall trade also to the West Indies, for sugar, tobacco, and rum. Also to Ceylon, especially for elephants’ tusks’” (GE 184). Herbert Pocket’s relish for the spoils of empire links romantic expectations with imperialism’s indiscriminate plunder and subjection of peoples and places. As he and Pip catch the full tide to row Magwitch down the Thames into exile, they join the clashing engines and festooned sails that carry abroad the nation’s military and mercantilist ambitions: “at Gravesend passing the floating Custom House . . . alongside of two emigrant ships, and under the bows of a large transport with troops on the forecastle looking down on us” (GE 438). Herbert and Pip will serve the carceral society as insurers of

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ships for Clarriker and Co., Magwitch will die a doubly-convicted felon and outcast. Pip’s story is inseparably linked, however, with the story of Magwitch and his “portable property”: in this “pivot” on which the novel’s plot turns, Dickens imagines feelings strong enough to transform a relationship conceived within and dominated by the cash-nexus. In this way, Great Expectations brings together the humanist idea of moral redemption inherent in Pip’s “fable of emergence”5 with a narrative of dispossession and exile. The reconciliation is equivocal to the extent that Dickens shares some of Pip’s and Herbert’s assumptions about the material aspects of self-improvement. Although Pip cannot grow rich on the profits of Magwitch the convict, he can maintain his class status as gentleman, and he is empowered to tell his own and Magwitch’s story. In an uncharacteristic flight of rhetoric about the exploitation of children, lawyer Jaggers surely voices a measure of authorial indignation. In exposing some of the unacknowledged human consequences of England’s commercial success, the novel effectively makes cause with a humanist discourse that gradually brings about the abolition of the slave trade, the eventual abolition of transportation, the progressive dismantling of the British empire itself. In the formation of colonial history, Said points out, narrative is crucial: “stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about the strange regions of the world: they also become the method colonized people use to assert their own individuality and the existence of their own history” (CI xiii). Intersecting with that history of contested ownership is postmodernism’s skeptical play with narrative authority, making a complex interpretative matrix for postcolonial texts. Peter Carey is candid about his adversarial relationship with the precursor text: Great Expectations is “a way in which the English have colonized our way of seeing ourselves: it is a great novel, but it is also a prison . . . Jack Maggs is an attempt to break open the prison and reconcile with the gaoler.”6 Carey creates an Australian way of seeing, but Australian ways of seeing are subjected to powerful indictment in Mister Pip. Carey’s challenge to Dickens’s way of seeing is signaled in a title which privileges the convict. It must be said that Dickens gives his Magwitch a compelling voice, not only at the outset, and in his autobiographical reflections in Chapter 42, but also in a plot which enables him to “own” a London gentleman and shape his destiny. In Jack Maggs, however, the convict holds centre stage. He continually “maggs” (in the vernacular, “chatters,” as well as “pilfers”). Essential to Carey’s heroising of his returned convict is that he is not only virile and cunning, but also literate, “writing back,” in a witty conceit, in mirror writing and invisible

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ink, a secret autobiography intended only for his “son” Henry Phipps, the gentleman he has made. In the battle of wits and stories that pits Maggs against Carey’s imaginative recreation of the young Dickens, Tobias Oates,7 the “true story” of Maggs is interleaved with Carey’s narrative and that of Oates. The canonised author is scrutinised by postmodernist eyes. And a bricolage of references, motifs, and themes drawn from the life and work of Dickens measures, by parody and pastiche, the distance between the world of Great Expectations and Carey’s late twentieth-century antipodean vantage point. A violent and filthy London is backdrop to the fragmented story of Maggs, foundling and mudlark, apprentice to masterthief and connoisseur of fine silver, Silas Smith, adopted “son” of abortionist and receiver of stolen goods, the aptly-named Ma Britten, lover of the tragic Sophina, transported felon licked into shape by the double-cat at Morton Bay. Yet it is a “dark underside” that proclaims its literariness, in which the power to shock is subordinated to the textual pleasure of refracting the precursor novel. As with character and setting, so with plot. A parodic version of the opening of Great Expectations surfaces belatedly to explain Maggs’s obsessive pursuit of his “son.” His fruitless surveillance of Henry Phipps’s fashionable mansion gives way to a trip across England with Oates, in search of the thief-taker Partridge, guaranteed by Oates to find the elusive Phipps. In the distinctive syntax and register in which Carey approximates nineteenth-century convict-speak, Maggs tells Oates of his first glimpse of the “orphing” boy: “My Henry had a pig’s trotter. That was how I noticed him. And, oh, how I wanted that pig’s trotter, Toby, I wanted it every bit as bad as you want your Lizzie. And I stared at him, doubtless, most fierce and wild. And what did he do? Why, first he ran away. But then, two shakes later, his little head appeared up amongst the baggage on the coach and he held out the very thing I might have stolen from him. When he saw my chains would not allow me to eat it without assistance, he did the holding for me, so I could gnaw each morsel off that bone.” “Very kind,” said Toby. “I’m much of your opinion,” agreed the convict, “and brave.” (JM 263)

Maggs’s appropriation of Magwitch’s “‘I’m much of your opinion’” has Oates momentarily playing Pip to Maggs’s convict, part of an extended riff on the pre-text: the pork, the desperate hunger, the animalistic devouring. The famous writer’s sympathy is seen as entirely perfunctory: “‘very kind,’” “‘poor little mite.’” In a journey that parodically reverses Magwitch’s escape down the Thames, Maggs, after murdering the thieving

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Partridge, evades the law by rowing down the Severn, with Oates as his unwilling accomplice and prisoner, his hands manacled as a sign of subjection and degradation. The rhetoric and conventions of Victorian melodrama are harnessed to show how his grand plan for the orphan Henry has its source in a weakened “emotional condition”: betrayed by my brother . . . my childhood sweetheart sentenced to be hanged. I also was to be cast out of my dear England on the very next tide . . . I would come back from my exile and take him from his orphanage . . . I would spin him a crown of gold and jewels . . . I would weave him a nest so strong that no one would ever hurt his goodness. I would clad him in a scholar’s robe and learn him his numbers and his letters, not only English, but Greek and Latin too . . . this boy . . . this boy has kept me alive these last twenty-four years, and I will not have him taken away from me . . . I am his da . . . He is my son. I will not abandon him. (JM 263)

And so Carey reads the pivot of Great Expectations as a humanist fiction ripe for debunking. Phipps does not learn gratitude. The “siren’s song” he writes to his benefactor is as false as the photograph he sends of himself, later identified by Oates as George the Fourth dressed as a commoner. Nor does Maggs die in the arms of his “son.” Instead, Phipps, dressed in his military uniform, a frightful representation of punitive system, attempts to kill the detested father. The dysfunctional relationships of the Victorian family, filtered through the conventions of the sensation novel, serve Carey as a metaphor of imperialism, as, indeed, they serve Dickens. Britain’s unwanted children, as Jaggers points out, are property to be disposed of at will: paternity is either disavowed, or conceived of as ownership. Oates, the son of an improvident father and a less than responsible father himself, is caught in the repeating cycle of exploitation that imprisons Maggs. In this economy, stories, like people, are up for grabs. Theft8 becomes the governing transaction in all human exchange. Burglary and blackmail shape the interconnected fable of emergence that links the relationships of Maggs and Phipps, Maggs and Tobias Oates, Mercy Larkin and her master and seducer, fishmonger-turned gentleman Percy Buckle. Oates’s intervention, as mesmerist, in the crisis of Maggs’s tic douloureux gives the writer access to the “treasure house” of the convict’s hidden story, “a memory I can enter, and leave. Leave, and then return to” (JM 87). Maggs learns that his money can manipulate Oates to confess his own hidden story of seduction, incest, abortion, a parodic reworking of Dickens’s relationships with Mary Hogarth and Ellen Ternan. The writer in the

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marketplace forfeits both his moral and his narrative authority as Carey fights out his postcolonial battle with the precursor text. How, then, does Carey’s novel reflect a distinctively Australian “way of seeing ourselves”? Although he gives his antipodean the upper hand, Maggs begins by insisting on his Englishness: “‘I am not of that race . . . the race of Australians’” (JM 312). He returns to the old country, he waggishly announces, “for the culture.” But in the end, the cultural cringe is abandoned, along with the quest for the English son. In creating a larrikin persona who outsmarts the system,9 Carey foreshadows the convict’s assimilation into the terra nullius of the infant colony. The bond with Phipps discredited, sexual dalliance proves the redemption of Maggs. He escapes with his fellow servant Mercy Larkin on the Portsmouth Mail, and returns to the sons he has left behind him in Australia. Oates appropriates Maggs’s story for his novel The Death of Maggs. But Carey contrasts Oates’s manacled and “hopping devil” with “the real Maggs” who lives to found an Australian dynasty, as patriarch and model citizen, owner of brick works, saw mill, hardware store, pub, grand mansion on Supper Creek Road, president of shire and cricket club. Carey’s ironic play with Victorian narrative conventions, the sensation novel, the happy ending, the death-bed scene (“his weeping sons and daughters gathered around his bed”), and with the claims of classic “realism” itself, is finally at odds with his privileging of Maggs the battler and the underdog. Maggs is celebrated for his honest labour and a success measured in terms of material reward. Caught in the novel’s generic conventions of closure, Carey appears to be committed to some familiar metanarratives. There is a sense in which he does, indeed, shake hands with the gaoler, inscribing the advance of nineteenth-century capitalism through the spread of empire. In the Australian way of seeing ourselves, the cachet of convict ancestry is underwritten by that other aspect of the national myth, “making good.” For Lloyd Jones, Great Expectations is not a gaol but a liberation from gaol. “Every teacher has a get-out-of-jail card. Mine was to read Great Expectations aloud,” confesses his protagonist, Matilda (MP 200). Writing back from the margins, Jones nevertheless values Dickens’s novel for its “humanistic ideas,” though he opens them to on-going discussion. Jones has spoken of his enchantment when, as a sick child, he was given a copy of Great Expectations by a traveling salesman. And as the novel is read, re-read, and reconstructed in a classroom on Bougainville, Jones recalls his introduction to the novel’s spellbinding power. Drawing as well on his experience as a journalist on the island during the civil war and blockade of the early 1990s, Jones imagines the novel as portable property: material

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object, source of story, moral and imaginative stimulus, bearer of cultural capital, in a postcolonial context of horrific violence and territorial ambition. No less aware than Carey or Said of the cultural work of story, he places his emphasis on narrative as an essential mode of moral enquiry. Like Jack Maggs, Mister Pip assembles a kaleidoscope of elements from the precursor text: the graveyard; the figure of the outcast (the children’s teacher, Mr Watts); the Dickensian mix of Christian eucharistic symbolism and animal devouring as Watts is sacrificed for the village and fed to the pigs; the journey down river; the emigrant’s story of leaving home; the loss of a never-to-be recovered pastoral world. In a joyless Christmas, babies die of malaria as food and essential medical supplies are cut off. The Rio Tinto copper mine, joint venture of Australia and Papua New Guinea, has annexed land and despoiled “one of the most fertile places on earth.” “Fishermen spoke of a reddish stain that pushed out far beyond the reef into the open sea. You only had to hate that to hate the mine” (MP 43). Matilda, named by her father’s Australian co-workers at the mine, recounts her fable of emergence in a way that recalls Pip’s first-person narration. Her simple directness of observation and inner communings are overlaid by adult understandings: “and there were other issues that took me years to grasp: the pitiful amount paid to the lessees by the mining company; and the wontok system of the redskins, who had arrived on our island in large numbers to work for the company, and who used their position to advance their own kind, elbowing the locals out of jobs” (MP 43). She experiences the shattering of family and community as her father joins the miners returning to Australia, and the village school teacher leaves on the last ship for Rabaul. She is eye-witness to the atrocities that follow when the “rambos” of the Bougainville Liberation Army blow up the mine and unleash the savage reprisal of the “redskin” soldiers of Papua New Guinea, and the bodies of the rebels are dropped out to sea from helicopters supplied by Australia. Homi Bhabha sees “the discovery of the English book” as the insignia of “colonial authority and colonial desire and discipline”: There is a scene in the cultural writings of English colonialism which repeats so insistently after the early nineteenth-century—and, through that repetition, so triumphantly inaugurates a literature of empire—that I am bound to repeat it once more. It is the scenario . . . of the sudden, fortuitous discovery of the English book. It is, like all myths of origin, memorable for its balance between epiphany and enunciation. The discovery of the book is, at once, a moment of originality and authority. It is, as well, a process of

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It falls to Thomas Christian Watts, last white man on the island, to teach the children. Yes, there is a text in this class, and it is his battered copy of Great Expectations, “the greatest novel of the greatest English writer of the nineteenth-century” (MP 18), Mr Dickens. For these indigenous children, this is their first English book, their first experience of hearing a book read, their first experience of anything like the accomplished theatricality with which Mr Watts replicates Dickens’s own legendary readings. Jones explores, with engaging immediacy, the infectiousness of story, the children’s struggle for still-elusive meanings, their provisional understandings, the role of the reader position in the cultural work of narrative. And just as the pivot of the plot of Great Expectations is dramatised in its opening encounter of child and convict, so Jones concentrates his fable’s unfolding power in an arresting opening: a bearded white man in a white linen suit and a clown’s red nose is pulling a trolley on which stands silently, proudly, his islander wife Grace, hair upswept like a crown. This enactment of the white man’s burden is seen even by the children as unbearably poignant and inexplicably carnivalesque. “Everyone called him Pop Eye,” Matilda begins, “because his large eyes in his large head stuck out further than anyone else’s” and “you found yourself looking away because you never saw such sadness.” Her mother Dolores reckons “his tribe has forgotten him. They wouldn’t have left behind a company man” (MP 10). It is as though he is “doing penance for an old crime” (MP 2). Imaged here is the novel’s interchange of stories: the emigrant’s story of Pip and Magwitch which has given the New Zealander Mr Watts permission to change his life; the meeting and mingling of cultures lived out with Grace and about to be replayed in the schoolroom, bringing these outcasts into community; the story of the Queen of Sheba, who sought “to match Solomon’s legendary wisdom with her own . . . She communed with him of all that was in her heart . . . and there was nothing hid”(MP 169). Matilda is gradually to discover the full meaning of this scene from Mr Watts’s thespian days, and why he should feel impelled to repeat it. The King James Bible and Handel’s “Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” come together to express the dawning in Mr Watts’s senses and imagination of the exotic and the queenly. Just as Herbert Pocket has attempted to transform Pip’s sense of himself by the nick-name “Handel” “as we are so harmonious and you have been a blacksmith” (MP 178), so Mr Watts, by giving Grace the name of Sheba, has attempted to give her a

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new identity that will dispel the depression that follows the death of their child. And just as the interaction of child and convict in the opening of Great Expectations unsettles conventional binaries, so the opening image of Mr Watts and his Grace overturns the characteristic binaries of colonialism. Mr Watts is a social outcast as well as a white man who sees the schoolroom, in Arnoldian terms, as “a place of light.” Grace the islander is his teacher as well as his cherished burden, the black woman is honoured for her traditional wisdom as well as for her emigrant’s story. The white man bears, leads, is led. “‘What’s it like to be white?’” the children want to know. “‘What’s it like to be black?’” replies Mr Watts. “‘Normal’ said Daniel, for all of us” (MP 81). The novel’s privileging of a young indigenous girl not only reverses Dickens’s privileging of the English boy, and contrasts with Carey’s privileging of a patriarchal Magwitch. It is a tacit recognition that on Bougainville land is passed on from mother to daughter. And Mr Watts honours matrilinear culture when he invites the mums into his classroom to interleave their stories with Pip’s, stories that celebrate the vanishing paradise of Bougainville: its plenitude, its selfsufficiency. Bougainville has its own story of migration, as told by Mabel’s mum: “What if I was to tell you that some gardens begin their lives in oceans.” Again she looked around the class, her gaze skipping over the desk where her daughter sat. Her smile was for us all. “I am here today to talk about the heart seed.” She told us that one day a heart seed floats on the water. The next day it has washed up on the beach. The next week the sea breeze and sun has dried it to something light as a husk. The next month sees a wind turn it over and over until it reaches soil. Three months later a sapling grows out of the earth. Nine months later its white flowers open and glance back at the sea whence it came. “Why am I telling you this, children? Because its stamen makes a fierce flame and keeps away mosquitoes.” (MP 26)

As Matilda’s mum reminds the children, “stories have a job to do”: “we heard you can sing a song to make an orange grow. We heard about songs that worked like medicine . . . Some stories teach you not to make the same mistake twice. These ones offer instruction. Look here to the Good Book” (MP 32). For Dolores the bible in pidgin is her sacred text, kept alive in the hearts and imaginations of the women’s prayer group long after the closure of the mission. Bible stories have blended with the island’s oral culture, as Great Expectations, itself a model of biblical and other

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narrative appropriations, will be blended. If the discovery of the English book “inaugurates a literature of empire,” what it inaugurates, in Mister Pip, is a process of mutual affirmation, a cross-fertilisation in which stories bring people and ideas together and empower them. Thomas Christian Watts is not a believer, but when, like Scheherazade, he uses story-telling to beguile the rambos and to stave off death, he composes an autobiography that weaves together the mums’ stories with Pip’s story and his own, and with the biblical story of creation. Dolores speaks in the name of each of these stories when she bears witness to the murder of Mr Watts. At that moment, for Matilda, her mother embodies Mr Watts’s redefinition of the outmoded Dickensian ideal of the gentleman. He has told the children that in these days gentleman means “moral person.” “My brave mum had known that when she stepped forward to proclaim herself God’s witness to the cold-blooded butchery of her old enemy, Mr Watts” (MP 181). No longer forced to choose between her mother and her teacher, her island heritage and Mr Dickens, Matilda sees how she has been shaped by both. As in Jack Maggs, theft has its part to play in Mister Pip. Dolores is quick to note that Great Expectations begins with the hero stealing his sister’s pork pie: “Pop Eye should be teaching you kids proper behaviour” (MP 23). When Matilda inscribes the name of Pip in the sand, making around it a shrine of shells and heart seeds, Dolores insists that she write next to it her own family tree. When Dolores, resentful of the power of Mr Watts and his book, steals Great Expectations from the schoolroom, the mysterious Mr Pip cannot be produced, and the redskins burn the village, take their machetes to Mr Watts, and then rape and dismember Dolores. Like the land grab represented in the Paguna mine, the coming of the English Book has fateful consequences. But it offers a model of interchange very different, as Jones sees it, from imperialism’s violation of lands, peoples, cultures. For Matilda, Great Expectations becomes her bible and her escape route: first, as she battles the flood that comes up “as if the gods were seeking to erase the wickedness that had taken place” (MP 183). Clinging to a log she thinks of as “Jaggers” “after the man who had saved Pip’s life,” she remembers as well the stories of the mums: “I was one of those heart seeds us kids had heard about in class” (MP 187). So begins her journey from margins to metropolis, via Mr Masoi’s boat, rescue by steamer, reunion with her father, and then an Australian education, followed by a postgraduate scholarship to London to write a thesis on “Dickens’s Orphans.” She is able to place her story of emergence within a wider history of exploitation, genocide and slavery. She discovers that

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stories are subject to interpretation, bearers of ideology: paintings at the old Foundling Hospital in Brunswick Square seem to suggest “how easy it is . . . to hand over your child” (MP 214). She learns that Great Expectations is larger than the version Mr Watts has “read,” and that Mr Watts might be a more complex character than he had first appeared to his adoring pupil. Was he preparing to leave the island without her? Was he, as his New Zealand wife declares, “a weak man”? What Matilda does know is that he has accepted the role of scapegoat, that he taught “every one of us kids that our voice was special” (MP 220), and that no one could steal from them their identity or their imagination. Mr Dickens, too, pursued through biographical sorting and sifting and tourism’s commodification, is now seen through the eyes of a more sophisticated reader: “the man who wrote so touchingly about orphans cannot wait to turn his own kin out the door” (MP 213). But there is no impulse to debunk: People sometimes ask me, “Why Dickens?” which I always take as a gentle rebuke. I point to the one book that supplied me with another world at a time when it was desperately needed. It gave me a friend in Pip. It taught me you can slip under the skin of another just as easily as your own, even when that skin happens to be white and belongs to a boy alive in Dickens’s England. (MP 200)

At Gravesend, “the emigrant ships are ghosts,” but it is still impossible not to think about departure: “Leave. Go. Get away. Make yourself new” (MP 215). As Mr Watts has done, Matilda makes Pip’s story her own. But she will try where Pip has failed: “I would try to return home” (MP 220). Reversing the top sheet of her thesis, she begins to write back: “Everyone called him Pop Eye.” In their different ways, Jack Maggs and Mister Pip perpetuate the canonical text. The English Book is “repeated, translated, misread, displaced,” to return to Bhabha’s inaugural moment. Yet our dialogue with history and its guilty conscience depends on “redemption and forgiveness of the past by the present.”11 For Lloyd Jones, the “humanistic ideas” of the precursor text become not adversarial, but accommodating. As Noel Rowe observes: Writing and reading take place not so much within one story as between many. This is simply because the ambitions of story are more convivial than imperial: story, as a work of analogy, likes company.

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And so Great Expectations is sent out for further dialogue, other custodians, for appropriation “as a way of giving back.”12

Notes 1. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus,1993), xv. Subsequent page references are initialled CI and given parenthetically within the text. 2. Peter Carey, Jack Maggs (London: Faber and Faber, 1997). Subsequent page references are initialled JM and given parenthetically within the text. 3. Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2007). Subsequent page references are initialled MP and given parenthetically within the text. 4. Great Expectations (London: Penguin, 1996). Subsequent page references are initialled GE and given parenthetically within the text. 5. The phrase is Robin Gilmour’s in The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981). 6. Interview with Peter Carey, www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0399/carey/interview.html. 7. Similarly, in Oscar and Lucinda, Carey’s earlier postmodernist dialogue with the Victorian novel, George Eliot makes an appearance as character, as well as provider of the precursor text, The Mill on the Floss, as Margaret Harris notes in “Eminent Victorians?,” Southerly 1 (1988): 109-113. 8. Two recent Carey novels, Theft (2006) and My Life as a Fake (2003) suggest how questions of appropriation continue to fascinate him. 9. See Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (London: Vintage, 2003), 586: transported felons “could succeed, but they could hardly, in the real sense, return.” 10. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1984), 102. 11.Brigid Lowe Crawford, “Charles Dickens, Uncommercial Space-Time Traveller: Dombey and Son and the Ethics of History,” Dickens Quarterly (December 2002): 187-219, argues for a “properly historicised and imaginatively flexible” negotiation of “the responsibilities demanded by history” instead of a “criticism of blame and defence.” 12. Noel Rowe, “‘Will this be your poem or mine?’: the give and take of story,” ASAL Conference for Elizabeth Webby, 2-3 February 2007, Department of English, University of Sydney.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN THE MESSAGE FROM HER: ANTHONY THWAITE’S VICTORIAN VOICES AND GEORGE MEREDITH’S MODERN LOVE BARBARA GARLICK

Anthony Thwaite’s Victorian Voices was first published in 1980. It was his seventh full-length book of poetry, a series of dramatic monologues spoken by fourteen less-than-eminent Victorians, and the only one of his published collections to be included in its entirety in the 1984 selection Poems 1953-1983.1 It is unique in his oeuvre in that every poem is “spoken” by a different voice, and an appendix, “Notes on Subjects and Sources,” elucidates the often shadowy figures he has recreated. Thwaite had frequently employed the device of a distinct speaking voice in previous collections, most notably in the 1974 New Confessions in which, taking St Augustine and his writings as a template, he has intermingled his own contemplative marginalia with the words and life of the saint in such a way that it is sometimes difficult to disentangle meditation—his own and that of St Augustine—from commentary. The lure of a voice not simply his own and the recreation of a temporally distant personality are again apparent in his next collection, A Portion for Foxes (1977), where he bases his thoughts on various people and historical items he has encountered which summon up for him past moments and lives. There is only one poem, however, in this collection in which he distinctly speaks in another’s voice: “Mr Warrener,” late-nineteenth-century painter, friend of Toulouse-Lautrec, who gives up the bohemian life of Paris to return to Lincoln and the management of the family coal merchant business. The poem ends “I feel my pulses leap and throb / Remembering art’s old disorders.” Of the fourteen monologues in Victorian Voices, nine of them engage with lives which may have felt those leaping and throbbing pulses of “art’s old disorders” with professed artistic leanings of one sort or another. These

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range from Ouida and Isabella Bird to Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edward Bingham, the industrialist-cum-potter whose bizarre, historically inspired (and anarchically copied) earthenware possibly owed something to his own perfervid strand of Evangelicalism. Of the rest, there are two colonial administrators who also have literary aspirations, the marine biologist Philip Gosse, father of Edmund Gosse, one imagined life of an Oxford don,2 and one Irish beggar based on an interview in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. The latter is one of the most humorous monologues and one that is tonally most comparable to the cynical discursiveness of Browning’s worldly clerics.3 What these monologues are not, however, are parodies, as the title of a 1981 London Review of Books essay appeared to indicate.4 Instead it is more productive to consider them in the light of Hilary Spurling’s comment when she chose Thwaite’s collection as one of her books of the year in the Observer of 7 December 1980 (it was also one of Peter Porter’s choices). She said: “Victorian Voices is part history, part impersonation, a powerful and wholly peculiar new instalment in the confrontation currently going on between our century and the last.” Spurling’s suggestion of an inter-century confrontation was enlightening and apposite when it was made in 1980 with, behind it, more than a half-century of flight from what were seen as the constraints of the nineteenth century and the acceptance in the last years of the century of the riches of Victorian character and plot available to modern writers (including television and screen writers) who wished to mine them.5 Now, in this new century, that interaction may be viewed more comfortably as a dialogue rather than a confrontation. The nineteenth century is no longer within living memory, but its artefacts and cultural treasures are still eminently accessible and will continue to provide us with material for critical and artistic exploitation well into this twenty-first century. One of the central (sequentially as well as stylistically) and most successful, monologues in Victorian Voices is number 8, “A Message from Her,” which purports to be a direct response from Mary Ellen Meredith to sonnet V in George Meredith’s Modern Love. In this monologue Thwaite literally enacts that dialogue as Mary Ellen responds to the first line of sonnet V, “A message from her set his brain aflame.” Her “message” consists of five poems to his fifty, which mimic Meredith’s 16-line sonnet with its four quatrains, each symmetrically rhymed in the first/fourth and second/third lines. Despite this superficial—and necessary—resemblance though, Mary Ellen’s voice is as spare as Meredith’s is prolix, a striking difference which cannot be solely ascribed to the difference in length of the two sequences.

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Meredith himself always called the separate parts of Modern Love6 “sonnets,” a label which contemporary reviewers appeared to have accepted uncritically, possibly in their haste to condemn the cycle as “clever, meretricious, turbid pictures . . . some trick of false ornamentation . . . wretched jocularity, as pointless as it is coarse”; “spasmodic indistinctness . . . abrupt and obscure style”; “an elaborate analysis of a loathsome series of phenomena . . . a grave moral mistake . . . To write of the rotten places of our social system as if they were fitting subjects for the Muse is just as reasonable as it would be to compose a sonnet to the gout or an ode to the small-pox . . . the sickly little peccadillo.”7 Such responses to the long poem which gave the title to the collection may initially have been provoked by the epigraph (not included in the 1892 reprint) which hints at Meredith’s difficult subject matter: “This is not meat / For little people or for fools. / Book of the Sages.” However, it is that chosen “sonnet” form which most forcefully underpins the complex arguments within the reviled subject matter. Meredith has adapted the sonnet cycle traditionally used to speak of love in elevated emblematic terms and praise the poet’s mistress, in order to depict a tale of disintegrating love. The expansion of the conventional fourteen-line sonnet to sixteen lines belies the possibility of both the glib couplet conclusion of the Elizabethan sonnet and the justificatory tone of the Petrarchan sestet, and it is clear that Meredith was not only aware of historical deviations from standard sonnet forms, but also saw his adapted form contributing largely to the latent irony of the sequence. His sonnets are symmetrically balanced in their perfect proportions of four-by-four time as if there can be no clear-cut resolution, only a presentation of event and weighing of argument in the futile attempt to paint a just picture of disintegration. The sonnet sequence proceeds towards the point where the protagonists “drank the pure daylight of honest speech” (XLVIII), an illusory conclusion which becomes the “fatal draught” placed at the central point, line 8, of sonnet XLVIII.8 The “Strange love talk” of the Louvre sonnet (XXXIII) and “my sonnet to your eyes” of XXX, the so-called evolutionary sonnet, which in the original manuscript was “my love-chant to your eyes” (PGM 135), illustrate clearly Meredith’s desire to allow the form to speak for him. Textuality becomes a weapon which enhances subject matter. Modern Love is a richly allusive and metaphoric poem in which familiar patterns of imagery slip and slide away from conventional ideological usages of the period in the narrator’s at times hectic analysis of culpability.9 While a great deal of critical attention has been given to the number of narrative voices in the poem, I find no difficulty in reconciling

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both a third- and a first-person voice as emanating from the main protagonist, that is, the husband who moves from the “discord-loving clown” of VIII to the “helmsman” who takes “the hap / Of all my deeds” of sonnet XX. The first five or six sonnets particularly present a narrative voice which is searching for an appropriate mode of utterance and which continues to oscillate between reluctance and a desire for anonymity and an almost masochistic but self-deluding honesty throughout the sequence: “And if I drink oblivion of a day, / So shorten I the stature of my soul” (XII). The “mad Past, on which my foot is based,” the “mocking Past,” of sonnet XII which confronts his urge to retrospection nevertheless dictates the fluctuating movement of the poem, seen clearly in the opening sonnet in the “vain regret scrawled over the blank wall.” Forty-nine sonnets later, the blank wall has been inscribed with the pain of that “mocking Past,” and the narrative voice once again assumes the attempted disinterest of the opening sonnets.10 By contrast, Nature is a recurring point of reference and imagery in the poem because She has “Scarce any retrospection in her eye” (XIII). The atemporality of Nature’s essence stands as a criticism of the human need to look backwards; moreover, the ambiguous linking of Nature with the wife, Madam, through being female, and through her associations with the various natural elements of the world about them emphasises the contrary and masculine trajectory of the sequence. The seasonal aspects of Nature such as birds, flowers, the diurnal cycle, even the stars, and the seasons themselves which have no need of retrospection are seen to possess an integrity that is lacking in the capitalised abstractions which emerge from the human intellect, and which loom large in the husband’s tortured questioning of culpability. The later attempt at intellectual reasoning, “The Promise in Disturbance” (PGM 115), written to preface Modern Love, A Reprint in 1892, is a “true” Petrarchan sonnet, although with a modified rhyme scheme, in its use of octave and sestet with a distinct and blatant turn at the volta, “But listen . . . ”; this historical formality, however, merely serves to emphasise the barely restrained emotions of the expanded sonnets of the earlier poem. It is a poor accompaniment to the long poem in its measured and somewhat factitious urge towards rationality, and it introduces an alien theological apology that was entirely absent from the 1862 publication. Nevertheless the Heaven-Hell motif in this later poem does represent a concern to account for and redeem the wife’s actions, as it plays with the idea of the fallen angel and the resultant discord on earth. An interesting comparison can be made here with Meredith’s Miltonic sonnet in the 1883 collection, “Lucifer in Starlight,” which has no volta

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and where the stars as “the brain of heaven” are ultimately the only proof of the “unalterable law” which is the nemesis of both Lucifer and Milton’s Satan (PGM 285). By contrast, “The Promise in Disturbance” indicates that discord and serenity are somehow given to us from on high, “the sacred mount.” While Love, like the fallen angel, can produce a “jangled strain” and, in a mixed metaphor, “make a mire where fruitfulness was meant” (from music to swamp, a descent indeed), a “newly-added chord” can lead “Life to an intelligible Lord.” It’s a strange, rather clumsy redemption, but it does resonate particularly with the description of the Raphael painting of St Michael Archangel in the Louvre sonnet (XXXIII) which is the apex of the husband’s bitterness towards Madam, significantly enough conveyed through the record of a conversation with his Lady which he hopes his wife may surreptitiously read, the “Strange love talk” referred to earlier. Here again equivocation is voiced through recognisable cultural references which range from Classical myth, Renaissance art and Shakespeare—Macbeth (II), Othello (XIV, XV), Antony and Cleopatra (XXXII)—to the contemporary evolution debate and iconic images of good and evil. Like the use of Nature mentioned above, these images of good and evil are not just in the poem for decoration. Metaphor charts the psychic journey of the protagonist, as he vehemently denies a clear-cut representation of good and evil in the recognition that the body will always betray even the most innocent. Man becomes “half serpent” in his contact with “Gross clay” (XXXIII), and the intellect is powerless against passion, a conclusion which comes at the end of the “Common Sense” sequence which begins with sonnet XXX.11 The two powerful and ambivalent symbols of both good and evil, the Deluge and the Fire, form the subject of the immediately following sonnet, XXXIV. Finally “Niagara or Vesuvius is deferred”: his wife declines to weep or express anger; there are no viable solutions or allocations of blame, and the rationality attempted in the “sonnet to your eyes” (XXX) is reinforced. Perhaps the most positive subversion of the good and evil stereotype is in the heavy irony of the French novel sonnet (XXV), which stands uneasily between the passion of “Pluck out the eyes of pride! Thy mouth to mine! / Never! Though I die thirsting. Go thy ways!” of XXIV and the eagle/serpent dichotomy of Love in sonnet XXVI. The concluding line of XXV, “And life, some think, is worthy of the Muse” is a descriptively apt moment at the midway point of the sequence. Within this densely metaphoric and claustrophobic world, Madam’s ambiguously fluctuating alignment with good and evil is charted predominantly through the Love/Sea of Life/serpent association. Her sobs

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are “little gaping snakes, / Dreadfully venomous to him” (I), a “gold-eyed serpent” (VII) dwells in her hair, she herself is a “Poor twisting worm” (VIII) in the early sonnets. Later it is Love itself that has become a “subtle serpent” in XXVI, mentioned above, and in defeat the husband asks “Who seeks the asp / For serpents’ bites?” (XXXII). His answer, an odd amalgam of evolutionary and conventional Christian imagery, comes through the contemplation of the Raphael painting and that “Strange love talk” with his Lady of sonnet XXXIII: “when men the Fiend do fight, / They conquer not upon such easy terms. / Half serpent in the struggle grow these worms. / And does he grow half human, all is right.” From here it is a small step to the equality of “Our eyes dart scrutinizing snakes” (XXXIV) and the recognition in XLIII that Life itself is culpable, in an image which has been prefigured in the “great waves of Destiny” of sonnet VI: Here is a fitting spot to dig Love’s grave; Here where the ponderous breakers plunge and strike, And dart their hissing tongues high up the sand . . . I see no sin: The wrong is mixed. In tragic life, God wot, No villain need be! Passions spin the plot: We are betrayed by what is false within.

It is almost impossible to read Modern Love without being also affected by its genesis. It is commonly seen as an exorcism of the pain and despair of Meredith’s first marriage to Mary Ellen Nicolls, although it was written over four years after she had first left him to go with Henry Wallis to Europe. It was begun very shortly after her death in October 1861, and Meredith records in a letter to his new friend William Hardman that her death “filled my mind with old melancholy recollections which I rarely give way to.”12 The result was the quite rapid composition of Modern Love, which, together with the earlier novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), may be seen, as Margaret Harris has pointed out, as creative cauterisations of the wound Mary Ellen’s betrayal had caused him.13 It was the central poem in the first volume Meredith had published since what he called his “boy’s book” (PGM xxxi), the Poems of 1851, to which he seems to allude in his pun “’tis beer” of sonnet XVIII of Modern Love. In no sense could it be said that Mary Ellen’s part in Meredith’s life has been neglected by his biographers, nor has she been excoriated for her actions or allocated the only blame for the separation; nevertheless she has been awarded a very limited range of reference: as Thomas Love Peacock’s brilliant and beautiful widowed daughter who was a good horsewoman, passionate older wife to the 21-year-old Meredith, mother to

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Arthur, lover of Henry Wallis the painter and mother of his child, and finally the emotionally unstable (sometimes spoken of as insane) and solitary dying wife who pleaded with Meredith to allow Arthur to visit her. From her death onwards, there was little mention of her except in relation to Modern Love. It was to be 111 years after Mary Ellen’s death before there was any significant re-evaluation of her life and importance, in a bizarre concoction of important original research, a non-academic approach to biography which relied on conditional tenses and hypothetical recreations of event, and a racy, rather sentimental style of writing that many readers found infuriating. It was called The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives by Diane Johnson, published in 1972.14 The story begins by the grave at Mary Ellen’s funeral to which, after the three mourners and the vicar have left, the ghosts approach: her “witless” mother, her grandmother Sarah Peacock, her drowned first husband Lieutenant Nicolls, and her father’s intimate friend Shelley. Somewhere also are a drowned Harriet Shelley, a one-armed unknown sailor with seaweed dripping from his hair, Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft. A formidable collection of shades. When Anthony Thwaite reviewed Lesser Lives in Encounter,15 he gave his review the title of “No Villain Need Be” from sonnet XLIII, which is the sonnet in which is found “a fitting spot to dig Love’s grave.” Despite the enjoyable irony of his title possibly induced by the rather Gothic opening of The True History, it was not a positive review. He stresses that Johnson is a novelist—she is in fact a multi-award-winning novelist whose 1997 novel Le Divorce was made into a popular film by James Ivory in 2003—and he criticises particularly her flouting of common biographical methods (a long and not always convincing justification of her new and eclectic approach to biography is given in the notes). He goes on to say that she “is so eager to break the dominance of the conventional ‘Life’ that she becomes arch, careless, and sometimes downright silly”; and again, “In general, Miss Johnson seems to have little sense of period, and is eager to diminish Victorian attitudes . . . incomprehension slides into facetiousness and fatuity . . . As for Meredith himself, he has been slandered and quite wrongly made to seem contemptible. That Diane Johnson provokes such indignation on my part is perhaps some measure of the passion her ‘lives’ can still arouse—though that is small justification for her methods.” Thwaite’s “passion” for Mary Ellen’s story gestated for a further seven years. When it did emerge in 1980 in Victorian Voices, the seductive idea of “lesser lives” had given birth to the fourteen monologues mentioned at

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the beginning of this essay. Mary Ellen had at last found some compatible companions. In his note to her monologue, Thwaite credits two main sources, the Siegfried Sassoon biography and Diane Johnson’s Lesser Lives which he states “has the advantage of drawing on some hitherto unpublished material” (VV 41). This “hitherto unpublished material” consists of various notes and notebooks, papers and letters, none of which has since been published with the possible exception of a Robert Browning letter, the George Meredith manuscript notebooks, now available, edited by Gillian Beer and Margaret Harris and published in 1984, and, most importantly, Mary Ellen’s Commonplace Book which is in the Beinecke Library at Yale. Thwaite acknowledges the value of this latter document, while also considering that Johnson “is far too heavily committed to treating it as a series of exhibits in the Case Against George Meredith and attaches to it a weight it won’t bear” (VV 73). Nevertheless the Commonplace Book and the other unpublished material remain handily available in Johnson’s book as another source and stopping point on that dialogic journey between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The five Meredithian sonnets which form “A Message from Her” are in fact, in their totality, a conventional after-death poem,16 which also explicitly explores the death in life that may precede corporeal death, in which “We learn to die / By living our own lives, leaving a room / Furnished like any self-respecting tomb, / The funeral bands disguising vacancy” (II). In the final sonnet of Mary Ellen’s self-vindication she questions her memorial: “How strange to be remembered in this way! / A set of almost-sonnets, crabbed yet rich . . . Forsaken, you set down / A set of tablets permanent as stone. / I was a wisp, a nothing, on my own, / Commemorated with an iron crown.” Here she is both in and beyond life. She is the Madam of Modern Love wearing the iron crown of his creation, and in her reincarnation by Thwaite she emerges from the tomb of history and biography to accept that crown. Her “Message” thus ramifies in a way that questions both incarnations: the open honesty of her version of the message, “‘He is in tears—I must / Go to him now’” (III), is qualified by the classic excuse of the husband’s version, “A world of household matters filled her mind, / Wherein he saw hypocrisy designed” (ML V) and by his paraphrase of two further letters in sonnet XV, one an early letter from Mary Ellen to the husband at a time when “no curb / Was left on Passion’s tongue” and the later letter also from Mary Ellen but to her lover in which “The words are very like: the name is new.” Her five-part “Message” liberates the lost words of Madam, which the husband chooses only to paraphrase from her letters in Modern Love, and which, thanks to the biographers, are subliminally present in the fictionalised ending of

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Meredith’s sequence. After death, Mary Ellen’s accusation is particularly poignant: “No word of me in letters . . . I stumbled into debt, wrote letters, bleak / Day after day” (IV). Thwaite’s recovery of Mary Ellen’s lost voice begins with her reinterpretation of one of the most potent of Meredith’s image patterns, that of vision: “So I dissembled: you dissembled too, / Striving to gain the fame you could not have. / . . . So we were wrong / In feigning each was only bent on each, / Eyes signalling to eyes, not needing speech” (I). Throughout Modern Love the husband focuses on the shifting glances and the difficulty of seeing clearly which he doesn’t recognise or accept as a language on its own. “I see not plain,” he says in sonnet XIX, and he is similarly blinded in the final sonnet when he realizes that they are both “Condemned to do the flitting of the bat” (L). His condemnation of Madam’s “glazed / And inaccessible eye, that has soft fires, / Wide gates, at love-time, only” (XXXVI) metamorphoses into a momentary recognition that “She sees through simulation to the bone: / What’s best in her impels her to the worst” (XLIV), that is, she refuses his overture because she sees through his pity. By contrast, Mary Ellen’s perception that Meredith’s persona has continually and possibly wilfully misread the language of the eyes is also a reinforcement of his obsessiveness, which manifests itself in his highly wrought final stanzas: “A ghastly morning came into her cheek, / While with a widening soul on me she stared” (ML XLVI). His unseeing or unfocused vision which is a necessary part of the obsessive narrative voice at this point inadvertently allows his Madam the integrity of her own language. The “guilty gates” (ML II), “slanted down” (VI) averted eyes, or even the “sparkling surface eyes” (XVII) when she is playing hostess, which he has simultaneously condemned and accorded too great a weight of meaning, are all indications of his inability to read the language of vision, so that he is only able to read her as mute as he laments her secretiveness: “O have a care of natures that are mute!” (XXXVI). Reading Thwaite’s “Message” beside Modern Love results in an intimate interleaving of the two voices, in which Mary Ellen’s voice, with all the postmortem power and authority it possesses, may qualify the obsessive tumult of Meredith’s husband persona and the bias of his memory whereby he is unable to contemplate with any extended rationality what she has seen as their “Mismatched endurances” (III). Most strikingly, Mary Ellen’s direct address to the husband contrasts with the lack of directness he has achieved in Modern Love through the poetic archaicising of the thee/thou/thy form which, in his narrator’s voice, he begins in sonnet I and continues throughout the sequence apart from his ambiguous accusation at the end of XXVI, the eagle/serpent sonnet. In

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contrast to this attempt at poetic distancing is the “modern” direct address he easily maintains with his Lady. Mary Ellen’s directness, moreover, confronts and individually interprets their joint memory: in sonnet III she directly refers both to the love idyll, “A Diversion Played on a Pennywhistle,” in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and to sonnet X of Modern Love, as she laments, My love—my once love—you were far away, Remembering some distant hallowed day When from my gown I let the loose bands go And I was Princess to your wandering prince, And all was fable, Land of Faery . . .

The reality for Mary Ellen was that she “Fled like a migrant bird / To climes unknown” (IV), once again completing in its exactitude a pattern of metaphor that had traced a random path through the sonnets of Modern Love, from the “small bird stiffens” of sonnet XXIII to the migratory swallows of XLVII, the “pilgrims of the year,” and the “rapid falcons in a snare” and the blind bats of the closing sonnet. Ultimately, of course, there must always be an element of instability in biography. Mary Ellen’s observation at the end of her monologue that “Art will remember us, not in the ways / That stretched and broke us through those racking days / But in the mode that’s apt and modish now: / Art for Art’s sake” acknowledges this instability, which is more reflective of “art’s old disorders” than of the ability of art to order a life. Biography implicitly relates to the time of its writing rather than the time of its subject matter. Neither Anthony Thwaite’s intervention into Meredith’s autobiographical long poem, nor indeed Diane Johnson’s attempt to revivify a “lesser life,” can significantly govern the path a reading of Modern Love might take. Rather “A Message from Her” brilliantly sets up a dialogue with that poem, initiating a shadowy double voice that is both exciting in a poetic sense and imaginatively rewarding for a modern consideration of the manifold stresses of Victorian marriage. Necessarily truncated by the blank page at the end of his novel, Richard Feverel’s “striving to image her [Lucy] on his brain,” is obviously doomed to failure. For the modern reader, however, authority exercised beyond the end-boards, rewritings, elaborations, playful riffs on old games, and reimaginings can all be part of a varied and productive engagement with the art and lives of our forebears.

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Notes 1. Anthony Thwaite, Poems 1953-1983, (London: Secker & Warburg, 1984). The notes to Victorian Voices were not, however, included in this selection. 2. “I imagine an elderly don in the 1860s and 1870s, ordained, but in many ways a survival from a period less given to religious searching and debate.” In his note to this poem Thwaite says that he drew on “several hints in (among other places) Jan Morris’s Oxford Book of Oxford (1978) and Mark Pattison’s Memoirs (1885).” Anthony Thwaite, Victorian Voices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 41. Subsequent page references are initialled VV and given parenthetically within the text. 3. Robert Bernard Martin, Times Literary Supplement, 23 January 1981, 81, bases his review, successfully I think, on the parallels he sees between Victorian Voices and Browning: “the smack of Browning is strong, and it is a source of energy in these poems.” 4. Barbara Everett, “Parodies,” London Review of Books 7, no. 20, May 1981, 1415. Everett also includes collections by Alan Brownjohn and John Fuller in her review which are more directly parodies. Her overall title though is misleading. 5. One of the earliest of these fruitful “confrontations” was John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman in 1969 and its subsequent filming with screenplay by Harold Pinter in 1981. Other notable examples are Antonia Byatt’s Possession in 1990 and Angels and Insects (1992), Victoria Glendinning’s Electricity (1995), Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988), and countless television adaptations of nineteenth-century novels and modern novels (like those of Sarah Waters) which frequently use the underbelly of the Victorian world in particularly flamboyant ways. 6. The 1862 collection was called Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads. The long poem of 50 separate poems or sonnets at the centre of the collection was simply called Modern Love. The title is italicised throughout this essay, even though it has never, to my knowledge, been published singly as a separate volume. The 1892 edition also included a long poem “The Sage Enamoured and the Honest Lady” together with a few short lyrics. All quotations from Modern Love are taken from The Poems of George Meredith, ed. Phyllis B. Bartlett, vol. 1 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), 115-45. Subsequent page references are initialled PGM and given parenthetically within the text. 7. Ioan Williams (ed.), Meredith: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 92-106. The examples are taken from reviews in the Spectator, the Athenaeum, and the Saturday Review respectively. R.E. Sencourt in his 1929 The Life of George Meredith (London: Chapman & Hall, 1929) also mentions a piece in the Westminster Review which, “though it complained of their frequent roughness and occasional obscurity, praised the poems for their freshness and vigour, for the sharp observation they showed and skilful analysis of human nature, [but] still lamented that the poems often dealt with a woman’s temptations and guilt” (81). See also Lionel Johnson, The Ordeal of George Meredith (New York: Russell & Russell, 1967), 112.

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8. Natalie M. Houston considers the ability of the amatory sonnet sequence to render authentic experience as a way by which some Victorian poets scrutinised “the romantic ideals of their own modern moment,” “Affecting authenticity: Sonnets from the Portuguese and Modern Love,” Studies in the Literary Imagination, 35, no. 2 (Fall 2002), 99-121. 9. It is interesting to recall here the dependence on metaphor of the eponymous heroine of Diana of the Crossways, published over twenty years later: “Metaphors were her refuge . . . The banished of Eden had to put on metaphors.” George Meredith, Diana of the Crossways (London: Virago, 1980), 231. 10. Cathy Comstock links the “contradictions and illusions of the narrator’s strategies of intelligibility” with the readers’ “submerged assumptions of our own methods of making meaning” through a close reading of the shifting nature of some of the image patterns (with reference to Dorothy Mermin’s work). “‘Speak and I see the side-lie of a truth’: The Problematics of Truth in Meredith’s Modern Love,” Victorian Poetry, 25 (1987), 129-41. 11. Meredith frequently extolled the virtue of common sense. See, for instance, a particularly appropriate example published seventeen years later than Modern Love: “Plain sense upon the marriage question is my demand upon man and woman, for the stopping of many a tragedy.” George Meredith, The Egoist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 543. 12. George Meredith, The Letters of George Meredith, ed. C.L. Cline, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 123. 13. Margaret Harris, “George Meredith at the Crossways,” in A Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. William Baker and Kenneth Womack (Westport and London: Greenwood, 2002), 344. 14. Diane Johnson, The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972). 15. Anthony Thwaite, Review of Lesser Lives, Encounter, 41, no. 3 (Sept 1973), 72-4. 16. Examples of this popular Victorian, particularly female, genre are Christina Rossetti’s “After Death,” “Seeking Rest,” “Remember” and some of her ghost poems; Emily Dickinson’s “I died for beauty” and “Because I could not stop for Death”; Emily Brontë’s “No coward soul is mine.” The seventh monologue in Victorian Voices, spoken by Horace Moule, the so-called “mentor” of Thomas Hardy, is also an after-death poem, which begins with a quotation from a Hardy letter about Moule’s suicide.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN: GOODBYE TO ALL THAT JOSEPH WIESENFARTH

At the end of chapter 35 of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles concludes his remarks on sexuality in the rural areas of Queen Victoria’s England by discussing Thomas Hardy as “the great novelist, who towers over this part of England of which I write.”1 The greatest novel of this great novelist is Jude the Obscure, which poses the principal problem that Fowles seeks to solve in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Hardy presents in Jude the end of any romantic possibilities that survived and thrived in earlier fiction. This, his last novel, projects a world from the inside out. Everything in it reflects a facet of Jude Fawley’s character. Sue, his mistress, is a projection of his mind; Arabella, his wife, of his body; and Phillotson, his teacher, of his soul. All are in conflict, one with the other. Christminster is his dream world while the world at large is God’s dream world. Both God and man awake to find everyday life hard and horrible. In a world that is a projection of himself, Jude is an alien. He is not Matthew Arnold’s alien, who is meant to give society a new vision and leadership in Culture and Anarchy. Jude’s vision for himself has collapsed utterly; consequently, he has no hope for anyone else. He is a would-be savior who cannot even save himself or his family. He cannot begin a Christ-like career at the age of thirty; he can only die a meaningless death at the age of thirty. Jude’s novel shows that all is hopeless for society at large because all is hopeless for every individual in it. He has no freedom of choice that is compatible with the demands of his mind and soul. He finds that “intellect at Christminster . . . and religion . . . stand stock still, like two rams butting each other.”2 This image aptly suggests the major problem of late Victorian society: the inability of religion and science to work together to fashion a new order that is conceptually and morally satisfying to individual men and women.

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Among other things, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a serious attempt to align intellect and religion in a way that has them complement rather than contradict each other. On the side of intellect Fowles invokes science and philosophy, and on the side of religion he invokes biblical mythology and dogmatism. His novel proposes to reconcile Darwinism and existential philosophy with a new interpretation of salvation history: of Adam’s fall, Christ’s redemption, and human salvation. Fowles makes clear to us that standard brands of religious practice in Victorian England are altogether demeaning. Mrs Poulteney is a new version of Trollope’s female bishop, Mrs Proudie. Dr Grogan’s Catholicism has given way to Darwin’s evolutionary science, and his now standard Anglicanism—vespers every Sunday—supports his business, not his soul. Charles Smithson’s flirtation with the Oxford Movement and his desire for priesthood were cured in a succession of Paris brothels. The religion that remains to him he renounces after a prayerful visit to a church. The Christian town of Lyme Regis will gladly dance on the grave of Mrs Poulteney, whom it describes with mounting distaste as abbess, pope, and God. Grogan’s and Smithson’s Christianity—what remains of it—is severely subverted by science. Not to put too fine a point on it, religion in Lyme Regis is completely bankrupt. The use of Darwin’s developmental hypothesis in the action of the novel suggests two possibilities for its hero and heroine. They can either become extinct or they can be selected to survive. They are presented as counterparts to each other in this perspective. Their only way of becoming naturally selected is to achieve a complete and total individuality that makes them unrepresentative of any class of society. They must therefore become whole and total human beings each in his and her own way. The only path to such a distinctly human individuality is deliberate choice and the responsibility it entails. Consequently, the action of the novel is marked by a series of choices that follow upon each enlargement of consciousness until a final choice can be made in light of as nearly a total knowledge of events as is humanly possible. What this structure suggests, then, is that human choice is a factor in natural selection. And since existential philosophy provides for Fowles the most complete exploration of human choice, he finds a place for choice in Darwinian theory. An existential philosophy of choice and a Darwinian theory of evolution are both products of man’s intellect. As such Fowles finds them compatible and creates an imaginative synthesis of them. If one could imagine, diagrammatically, the Darwinian theory of development and natural selection predicated on the survival of the fittest as a vertical line and an existential philosophy of choice as intersections of that line, one would

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have a crude delineation of the synthesis Fowles proposes in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. He shows, to wit, that choice influences natural selection; that the fittest choose and survive; that adaptation to one environment does not mean making one’s self like some subspecies (such as Charles the gentleman and Sarah the governess) but making oneself a totally individual person. What we have in Sarah Woodruff and Charles Smithson are members of two classes soon to become extinct. By 1969, when Fowles published his novel, they have all but disappeared. The few governesses and gentlemen that remain are only fossil remnants of once vital species. That is because species as such destroy individuality. And Sarah’s plight is imminently and gravely serious because the highest suicide rate in the England of her time was among governesses. What Sarah chooses to do is to stand apart from her respectable profession and survive by becoming disrespectable: “I married shame,” she tells Charles. She demands the attention of her society by becoming its outcast. She is an alien who quite deliberately chooses to dramatise her alienation to survive distinctly as Sarah Woodruff, no one else. The paradox of her situation is that the lie which she chooses to live as “the French Lieutenant’s Whore” (175) calls attention to her as different. Her living the lie allows her to find out just who she is and just where she belongs. Sarah’s lie becomes the catalyst of change in Charles’s life. The more he is drawn in by it, the more Sarah realises how different she is and persists in her lie. And the structure is dialectical for Charles too. The more he is drawn into the lie, the greater the truth he learns about himself. Charles is badly in need of such truth because he himself is on the verge of becoming an extinct member of his species: “one more ammonite caught in the vast movements of history, stranded now for eternity, a potential turned into a fossil” (333). As a gentleman Charles is by definition born to a specific bloodline and does not work for a living. He is an heir expectant and participates in a version of the great expectations story that fills Victorian fiction with wills, codicils, and disappointments. In the course of events, however, his Uncle Robert’s concern for the species disinherits Charles. Robert can no more resist a widow than Charles can resist a governess. Natural selection of a kind does Charles out of his inheritance. Uncle Robert’s choice forces Charles into a new series of choices because he is now clearly on the verge of extinction as a traditional gentleman: a gentleman without property is a contradiction in terms. Charles like the great bustard he shot is just about as extinct as a member of the species gentleman.

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Sarah and Charles, then, are characters who are forced to choose in order to survive. Their choices are complicated by the way that others see their predicament. Dr Grogan and Mr Freeman are representative outsiders who provide plausible suggestions to ensure Sarah’s and Charles’s fitness to survive. They are plausible because they are quasi-scientific extrapolations of evolutionary theory. Dr Grogan is sure that Sarah is suffering from an emotional disease that bears the label “obscure melancholia”: it is, in his words, “a cholera, a typhus of the intellectual faculties” (224). Sarah’s cure is as certain as her symptoms are clear to Grogan. Charles suggests to the doctor, however, that something may be going on in Sarah that a scientific hypothesis cannot explain—something essentially mysterious that formulas fail to describe: “There is something in her. A knowledge, an apprehension of nobler things than are compatible with either evil or madness” (226). Charles consequently chooses to ignore Grogan’s scientific explanation for the human mystery he vaguely discerns in Sarah. Her existence, like his own, is not satisfactorily understood in scientific terms alone. Just as he rejects Dr Grogan’s explanation of Sarah’s condition, Charles also rejects Mr Freeman’s explanation of his own situation. As Charles leaves his uncle’s house at Winsyatt after learning that Robert is to marry, Fowles refers to him as a “poor living fossil” (290). Mr. Freeman tells him that he need not be a gentleman fossil if he adapts and becomes a naturally selected middle-class businessman, like his prospective father-inlaw. Whereas “the abstract idea of evolution was entrancing,” its actual “practice . . . seemed fraught with ostentatious vulgarity” for Charles (288). Mr Freeman’s solution is as evidently reasonable for Charles as Dr Grogan’s solution is evidently reasonable for Sarah. Yet Charles rejects both of them. The admirable Grogan is famous for his grog, and Fowles’s naming of the doctor suggests a certain numbing of the senses of perception when he makes his diagnosis. Mr. Freeman’s name is equally suggestive; but Charles finds no freedom in the businessman’s offer of wealth and power. Charles is aptly named Smithson because he chooses to forge his own future. Both Grogan and Freeman propose practical methods of adaptation for survival. Both solutions they propose are interpretations of Darwin’s theory on a social level. But the one element that Darwin’s theory does not account for is human choice. The human organism will not adapt in a distinctly human way unless a human being chooses to change and adapt to his environment. Neither Charles not Sarah chooses to change. Sarah chooses to remain a melancholiac; Charles chooses to remain a gentleman. In Sartrean terms, they have a choice between a form of being (cure in a

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sanitarium; directorship of a department store) and a form of nothingness (melancholia; gentlemanlikeness), and they assert their radical human nature by choosing nothingness. Charles, says Fowles, “gained a queer sort of momentary self-respect in his nothingness, a sense that choosing to be nothing—to have nothing but prickles—was the last saving grace of a gentleman; his last freedom, almost” (294). As the phrase “saving grace” indicates, this choice to be nothing has a religious context: religious conversion is a process of becoming nothing so as to become something altogether different. Charles and Sarah, then, in choosing a form of nothingness find a more radical form of human existence. They are presented as a new Adam and Eve who lose Eden with its order and limitations and undergo rebirth by falling into a nearly total consciousness of self. In chapter 10 the religious imagery is introduced when the Undercliff is called “an English Garden of Eden” (67) and Charles and Sarah’s discovery of each other is described as a loss of a wilful innocence: “in those brief poised seconds above the waiting sea, in that luminous evening silence broken only by the waves’ quiet wash, the whole Victorian Age was lost” (72). And what that means is clearly explicated in chapter 48 by Charles’s fall into consciousness: “He seemed as he stood there to see all his age, its tumultuous life, its iron certainties and rigid conventions, its repressed emotion and facetious humour, its cautious science and incautious religion, its corrupt politics and immutable castes, as the great hidden enemy of all his deepest yearnings” (363). In chapter 38 Charles’s resistance to Mr Freeman’s offer of power and money, which will make him one with this “machine”-like age (363), is presented as an analogue to Satan’s tempting Jesus “in the Wilderness” (295). And in chapter 48, just after Charles and Sarah consummate their sexual relationship, he undergoes a conversion that is likened to St Paul’s on “the road to Damascus” (365). Biblical mythology in this way clearly provides an analogue for Charles’s and Sarah’s personal change in a loss, a temptation, a sin, and a redemption. Salvation history is presented as man’s coming to know God in a way that he hasn’t known him before; God is found to be “the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist” (97). This “one good definition of God” (97), as Fowles calls it, is vital not only for Sarah and Charles but for the author and the reader too. God as the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist governs Fowles and us. It allows him to define himself as Sarah defines herself. She hoodwinks Charles until he comes to so complete a sense of his own personal identity that he can make the final decisive choice that ends the novel. A dialectical process is established between Fowles and his reader similar to the one

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established between Charles and Sarah. We, like Charles, experience a greater definition of ourselves by our association with someone who forces upon us a series of choices. Fowles decides to become a character in his own novel and appears in chapters 55 and 61. In chapter 55, looking like a “successful lay preacher” (404), he boards the train that Charles is taking to London, stares at him, wonders “what the devil am I going to do with you?” (405), decides to write two endings to Charles’s story, flips a coin to see which he will write first, and gets off the train at Paddington station. In chapter 61 he appears again, this time looking like an “impresario” (462), and drives off down Victoria Embankment before the novel ends. In short, Fowles drops out of the novel before it ends, saying, “there is no intervening god” (466), and forcing the reader to choose his own ending to Charles and Sarah’s story.3 Just as the way that Charles reads the character of Sarah at Lyme Regis (differently, say, from the way that Dr Grogan or Mrs Poulteney or Ernestina Freeman reads her) leads him to a choice for which he becomes responsible, so the way that we read Fowles as author and character leads us to a choice of one ending or another. Should Charles actually have chosen, as he did imaginatively choose in chapter 43, not to stay overnight in Exeter, then the novel would have to end with the all-encompassing, Victorian-like conclusion that we have in chapter 44, where Charles and Ernestina go to the altar and Mrs Poulteney goes to hell: “she fell, flouncing and bannering and ballooning, like a shot crow, down to where her real master waited” (338). But we know from chapter 45 that Charles chose, in fact, to stay overnight in Exeter—and that choice requires another fifteen or sixteen chapters to work out its consequences. Fifteen chapters if Charles chooses as he does in chapter 60 and asks Sarah, in so many words, to marry him; sixteen chapters if he chooses as he does in chapter 61 not to ask Sarah to marry him and sets out alone, once again, upon life’s “unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea” (467).4 In chapter 55, when Fowles enters Charles’s compartment on the train to London, he is writing a fictionalised version of Virginia Woolf’s famous essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”—an essay in which Arnold Bennett is put on a train with Mrs Brown and tells her story from one point of view. Then Woolf herself gets on the train, having taken Bennett off, and tells Mrs Brown’s story from a totally different point of view. The Fowles of chapter 60 is the novelist demanded by the flip of the coin that comes up heads; the Fowles of chapter 61 is the novelist demanded by the underside of the coin when it comes up tails. We as readers are in effect asked to choose whether we want to accept Fowles-heads or Fowles-tails. The one we choose makes us responsible for the ending of the novel. If we like Fowles-tails better, we must walk with Charles “behind the invisible

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gun carriage on which rests his own corpse” in chapter 61. If we find this existential ending too stark and unrewarding, we can stop reading when chapter 60 is done and end the novel with father, mother, and child reunited in a family tableau. In the world of The French Lieutenant’s Woman the characters are free, the novelist is free, and the readers are free because God is the freedom that gives freedom to all. Existential freedom of this kind requires a reinterpretation of biblical mythology. Eden as a world of Victorian order is presented as an intolerable limitation of human freedom: “it was totally without love or freedom,” writes Fowles, “but also without thought, without intention, without malice, because the deception was in its very nature; it was not human, but a machine” (463). The Victorian Eden as a dehumanised order then requires a fall into consciousness and choice to humanise men and women. Redemption requires reinterpretation as a consequence of this fall into freedom. We are not to crucify ourselves with Christ—to die with Christ as St Paul urges in his letter to the Romans—rather we are to bring Christ down from the cross. One man has not saved us, but each of us must save himself and herself by saving that one man on the cross: To uncrucify! In a sudden flash of illumination Charles saw the right purpose of Christianity; it was not to celebrate this barbarous image, not to maintain it on high because there was a useful profit—the redemption of sins—to be derived from so doing, but to bring about a world in which the hanging man could be descended, could be seen not with the rictus of agony on his face, but the smiling peace of a victory brought about by, and in, living men and women. (363)

The effect of this kind of redemption is to make Christ alive and to deliver each individual from participation in his death and to participation in his life: “Charles walked slowly back into the nave, turning his back on the indifferent wooden carving. But not on Jesus . . . What he saw now was like a glimpse of another world: a new reality, a new causality, a new creation” (365). Religion becomes oriented to the future and life for Charles and away from the past and death. And Fowles’s radical reworking of biblical theology finally requires a break with established religion because it is seen as the final limitation on freedom by selfishly keeping Christ nailed to the cross: Charles, we are told, instead of being shriven by confession, “was shriven of established religion for the rest of his life” (367). Only a religion redefined in terms of existential freedom, Fowles argues in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (following, perhaps, in the footsteps of Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer),5 provides a

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theological position consonant with the nature of life itself: “life, however advantageously Sarah may in some ways seem to fit the role of Sphinx, is not a symbol, is not one riddle and one failure to guess it, is not to inhabit one face alone or to be given up after one losing throw of the dice; but is to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly . . . endured. And out again, upon the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea” (467). In choosing to immerse himself in the fiction and ethos of Victorian England, Fowles writes a novel that may seem nothing more than a flashy imitation of the novels of the period. After all, chapter 13 of The French Lieutenant’s Woman is like the celebrated chapter 17 of Adam Bede: Fowles and George Eliot stop their novels cold and discuss with the reader the theories of fiction that govern their compositions. Charles Smithson’s voyage to America is like Martin Chuzzlewit’s before him. The two endings of Fowles’s novel are like the two endings that still cause so much controversy in Great Expectations. And who can forget that Joe Gargery is a smith and Pip, by adoption, is a Smithson who must forge a new life when he finds gentility less than it promised to be? The gentleman scientist in love with the bourgeois water-nixie is the story of Tertius Lydgate and Rosamond Vincy of Middlemarch all over again. And no novelist has talked so much to his reader since Thackeray laid down his pen. In addition, Sarah is the femme fatale of Rossetti’s poetry and painting; Charles the alien of Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy; Mrs Poulteney the female bishop of Barchester Towers, and her fall from heaven’s gate is a page out of Byron’s Vision of Judgement. And one could go on and on until Fowles steps into his landau, instructs his coachman, and rides “briskly away” (463). Fowles makes explicit the premises of Victorian fiction by pretending to create a Victorian novel. He creates this form of fiction all over again to give us a novel that dramatises and discusses the hidden assumptions of Victorian life. But his purpose is purely modern. His hero moves from a Victorian world to a modern world by moving from a moralistic to an existentialist view of life. Charles Smithson changes from being an actor in a Victorian myth of concern as embodied in the religion of Mrs Poulteney and the economics of Mr Freeman to being an actor in a modern myth of freedom as embodied in Fowles, who extricates himself both from the Victorian ethos while writing about Victorian life and also from the modern form of fiction while writing a contemporary novel.6 In his excellent survey of British fiction, The English Novel from the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford shows how with Conrad and Henry James the novel reached its perfection in England by its insistence on a formal perfection that excluded the narrator’s interference

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with his story. “It is . . . an obvious and unchanging fact,” Ford writes, “that if an author intrudes his comments into the middle of his story he will endanger the illusion conveyed by that story—but a generation of readers may come along who would prefer witnessing the capers of the author to being carried away by the stories and that generation of readers may coincide with a generation of writers tired of self-obliteration.”7 That Fowles is capable of self-obliteration, The Collector and The Magus make clear. That he is tired of it, The French Lieutenant’s Woman makes clear. But I’d like to suggest as my final point that Fowles changed his form of fiction in The French Lieutenant’s Woman for the same reason that Charles changed from Ernestina to Sarah: because not only do human beings need to adapt to survive but so too does the novel. Fowles’s attempt to give new life to an old form is an attempt to produce a mutation in the species novel by making the form of Victorian fiction serve the purposes of life as it is now lived. For the novel like man is subject to the laws that govern the survival of the fittest. So far, at least, The French Lieutenant’s Woman has survived hundreds of best sellers and thousands of other novels that were too short-lived to be significant. So far, The French Lieutenant’s Woman seems fit.

Notes 1. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1969), 271. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically within the text. 2. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, ed. C. H. Sisson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 151. 3. It should be noted that Fowles’s wife did not like the first ending of the novel that he had written, which was one we find neither in chapter 60 nor in chapter 61: “an ending quite unlike anything in the published text,” writes David Leon Higdon in “Endgames in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” English Studies 66, no. 4 (August 1984): 350-61. Fowles indicates that his “sternest editor, otherwise my wife” (353) objected to the more sentimental ending that he had first written and made suggestions that led him to the endings we now have because, as she indicated, he needed to write a conclusion that was more consistent with the characters of Charles and Sarah than the ending she rejected was. Higdon discusses these changes at length in his analysis of the typescript of the novel, which is now in the Rare Books Room of McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. 4. These words form the last line of Matthew Arnold’s poem “To Marguerite— Continued,” which Fowles remarks is “perhaps the noblest short poem of the whole Victorian era” (426); he quotes it in its entirety on page 427 of the novel. 5. Hans KĦng writes, “Christianity claims to be more than simply ‘religion.’ Christian theologians following the example of Karl Barth and ‘dialectical

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theology,’ have protested vigorously against the conception of the Christian faith as ‘religion’ and even—like Dietrich Bonhoeffer—demanded a ‘non-religious’ interpretation of biblical concepts.” Hans KĦng, On Being a Christian, trans. Edward Quinn (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1976), 89. 6. Northrop Frye, The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 5-7, discusses the myths of freedom and concern. 7. Ford Madox Ford, The English Novel From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad (London: Constable, 1930), 141-2.

CONTRIBUTORS

Gillian Beer, Fellow of Girton College Cambridge (1965-1994) and from 1994 until her retirement King Edward VII Professor of English Literature and President of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Gillian Beer was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1998. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. Publications include Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Virginia Woolf: the Common Ground (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Forging the Missing Link (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983; 2nd edition Cambridge University Press, 2000; 3rd edition forthcoming); and George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester, 1986) among other books, articles and editions. Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Professor of English, Boston College. Publications include The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Knowing Dickens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), as well as numerous articles and studies. Daniel Brown, Associate Professor, English and Cultural Studies, The University of Western Australia. Publications include Gerard Manley Hopkins, New Writers and their Work Series (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2003); “Victorian Poetry and Science” in the Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Joseph Bristow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Hopkins’ Idealism: Philosophy, Physics, Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) among other studies and articles. William Christie, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Sydney. Publications include The Letters of Francis Jeffrey to Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Under Mulga Wood: A Play for Australian Voices (Sydney:

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Mumford & More, 2004); and numerous articles on Romantic literature, including 27 entries in the Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776-1832 ed. Iain McCalman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Robert Dingley, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of New England, from which he retired as a Senior Lecturer in English in 2002. His publications include an edition of George Augustus Sala’s The Land of the Golden Fleece (1995) and (with Alan Sandison) Histories of the Future: Studies in Fact, Fantasy and Science Fiction (2000). He has contributed to Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Review, Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, Nineteenth-Century Feminisms and Victorian Newsletter. P. D. Edwards, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Queensland. Publications include Dickens’s “Young Men”: George Augustus Sala, Edmund Yates and the World of Victorian Journalism (Aldershot: Scolar, 1997); Idyllic Realism from Mary Russell Mitford to Hardy (1988) and Anthony Trollope’s Son in Australia: the Life and Letters of F.J.A. Trollope 1847-1910 (1982) among other books and articles. Editor of Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He was Right (1974), Rachel Ray (1988) and Harry Heathcote of Gangoil: a Tale of Australian Bushlife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Mary Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1996). Barbara Garlick, formerly Honorary Fellow in English, University of Queensland. Publications include, as editor, Tradition and the Poetics of Self in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002); Victorian Journalism: Exotic and Domestic: Essays in Honour of P. D. Edwards (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998) co-edited with Margaret Harris; and Stereotypes of Women in Power: Historical Perspectives and Revisionist Views (New York: Greenwood, 1992) coedited with Suzanne Dixon and Pauline Allen, among numerous other studies and articles. Penny Gay, Professor in English Literature and Drama, University of Sydney. Publications include Jane Austen and the Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); As She Likes It: Shakespeare’s Unruly Women (London: Routledge, 1994); and The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Comedies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008),

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as well as essays on Shakespeare and on English literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jennifer Gribble, Honorary Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Sydney. Publications include Christina Stead (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994); The Lady of Shalott in the Victorian Novel (London: Macmillan, 1983) and as editor George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1998) as well as numerous articles on Victorian fiction. Jocelyn Harris, Professor Emerita, University of Otago. Publications include Jane Austen’s Art of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Samuel Richardson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); A Revolution Almost Beyond Expression: Jane Austen’s Persuasion (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), and as editor, Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972, 1986, 2001). Judith Johnston, Associate Professor, English and Cultural Studies, The University of Western Australia. Publications include George Eliot and the Discourses of Medievalism (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols and Sydney Studies in Medievalism, 2006); Gender and the Victorian Periodical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) with Hilary Fraser and Stephanie Green; The Journals of George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) edited with Margaret Harris; and Anna Jameson: Victorian, feminist, woman of letters (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997). Roslyn Jolly, Senior Lecturer in English, University of New South Wales. Publications include Henry James: History, Narrative, Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) and as editor, Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Sea Tales (1996) and Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson’s The Cruise of the “Janet Nichol" (2004), as well as articles on nineteenth-century travel literature, and American and Australian film. Katherine Newey, Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts, University of Birmingham. Publications include Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (Sydney: Sydney University Press, in association with Oxford University Press, 1993), and numerous essays on nineteenthcentury theatre. Editor (with Viv Gardner and David Mayer) of the journal Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film (Manchester University Press).

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Simon Petch, Honorary Associate, Department of English, University of Sydney. Publications include The Art of Philip Larkin (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1981), Browning: Centenary Essays (coedited with Warwick Slinn: AUMLA 71, 1981), articles on law and Victorian literature, and on the Western film. John Rignall, Reader, English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick. Publications include, as editor, The Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); George Eliot and Europe (Aldershot: Scolar, 1997); and Realist Fiction and the Strolling Spectator (London: Routledge, 1992), among numerous other articles and editions. Editor with Beryl Gray of The George Eliot Review. Joanne Shattock, Professor, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Director, Victorian Studies Centre, University of Leicester. Publications include as General Editor, The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, 10 volumes (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005-6); as editor The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1830-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Women and Literature in Britain 1800-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 3rd Edition, Volume 4, The Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and numerous other books, articles and editions. Catherine Waters, Senior Lecturer in English, University of New England. Publications include Dickens and the Politics of the Family (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2008); and articles on Victorian fiction and journalism. Elizabeth Webby, Emeritus Professor of Australian Literature, University of Sydney. Member of the Order of Australia and numerous other honours for services to Australian Literature. Publications include as editor, The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Reconnoitres: Essays in Australian Literature in Honour of G. A. Wilkes (Melbourne: Oxford University Press in association with Sydney University Press, 1992) co-edited with Margaret Harris; Colonial Voices (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989), literary histories, anthologies and scholarly editions. Editor of the journal Southerly for twelve years.

Contributors

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R. S. White, Professor, English and Cultural Studies, The University of Western Australia. His most recent book is Pacifism and English Literature: Minstrels of Peace (London: Palgrave, 2008). Other publications include Natural Rights and the Birth of Romanticism in the 1790s (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Joseph Wiesenfarth, Professor Emeritus of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has written extensively on the English novel, publishing monographs on Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James, and more than a hundred articles and reviews. His most recent books are Gothic Manners and the Classic English Novel (1989) and Ford Madox Ford and the Regiment of Women: Violet Hunt, Jean Rhys, Stella Bowen and Janice Biala (2005), both published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Joanne Wilkes, Associate Professor in English, University of Auckland. Publications include Lord Byron and Madame de Staël: Born for Opposition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999; winner of the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, 2000); Jane Austen’s “Persuasion” (Melbourne: Oxford University Press in association with Sydney University Press, 1991); an edition of Geraldine Jewsbury’s Half Sisters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) and an edition of Mary Barton (Vol. 5) in The New Complete Edition of the Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, ed. Joanne Shattock (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005).

INDEX

Ackroyd, Peter, 152 Chatterton, 152 adaptation and imitation, 2, 29-32, 158-70, 171-81, 182-92, 193-204, 212 Allen, Grant, The Woman Who Did, 127 Allentuck, Marcia, 148 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, 194 Archer, William, 95 Argus, The, 92 Arnold, Matthew, 97, 119 Culture and Anarchy, 175, 205, 212 Ashton, Lucy, 114 Athenaeum, The, 63, 66 Auber, Daniel Masaniello (La muette de Portici), 86 Augustine, Saint, 193 Austen, Henry, 32 Austen, Jane, 29-38 Emma, 29-36 The History of England, 29-30 Pride and Prejudice, 31 Sense and Sensibility, 31 Australasian, The, 92 Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, 96 Australasian Home Reading Union, 96, 97 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 82 Bailin, Miriam, 23 Balfe, Michael William The Maid of Artois, 87 Balzac, Honoré de, 113-15, 121-2, 125, 126, 128 Père Goriot, 115, 121 Barth, Karl, 211

Barthes, Roland, 144 Beer, Gillian, 4, 78-90 The Notebooks of George Meredith (edited with Margaret Harris), 200 Behn, Aphra Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave, 164 Bellini, Vincenzo La Sonnambula, 87-8 Bennett, Arnold, xi, 210 Bennett, Bruce, 93 Bennett, Judith M., 106 Bentley’s Standard Novels, 31 Beowulf, 85 Bhabha, Homi, 187-8, 191 Bible, the, 188, 189-90, 209, 211 Bichat, Xavier, 24-5 Bingham, Edward, 194 biography and autobiography, 60, 62, 63, 78 Bird, Isabella, 194 Blackwood, John, 91 Blackwood’s Magazine, 94, 124, 125, 128 Blake, William, 179 Bodenheimer, Rosemarie, 2, 9, 17181 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 211 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 95 Aurora Floyd, 113, 114 Birds of Prey, 121 Dead-Sea Fruit, 121 The Doctor’s Wife, 113-22 Lady Audley’s Secret, 113, 114 The Lady’s Mile, 113, 120-21 on Zola, Flaubert and Eliot, 114 Branagh, Kenneth, 2 Hamlet (stage production), 159

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Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (film), 158-60, 166-8 Much Ado About Nothing (film), 158 Bray, Charles, 116 Brontë, Charlotte, 4, 66 Jane Eyre, 29-32, 36, 116, 175 Shirley, 172 Villette, 50, 54-7 Brooks, Peter, 55 Broussais, François, 25 Brown, Daniel, 7, 39-49 Browning, Oscar, George Eliot, 97 Browning, Robert, 194, 200 Bucknill, John, 57 Buckstone, John Baldwin Agnes de Vere; or, the Wife’s Revenge, 51-2 Ellen Wareham, Wife of Two Husbands, 51, 53 Isabelle; or the Life of a Woman, 51 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 92, 95 What will he do with it?, 94 Zanoni, 113-14 Burnett, James, Lord Monboddo, 48 Burrow, J. W., 149 Burstall, Tim Great Expectations: The Untold Story (television mini-series), 182 Burton, Robert Anatomy of Melancholy, 18 Burton, William Ellen Wareham, Wife of Two Husbands, 51, 53 Butler, Marilyn, 32 Byron, George, 95, 119 The Vision of Judgement, 212 Cagney, James, 168 Carey, Peter Jack Maggs, 2, 3, 182-7, 190, 191 Carlyle, Thomas, 95, 96, 98, 149 Cash, Mary, 93

Castle, Terry, 104, 108 Chapman, John, 59-60 Charles I, 29 Chase, Karen, 23 Christie, William, 2, 9, 158-70 Clarke, John Stock, 124 Clark, Mary (Mary Clarke Mohl), 64-5 Clayton, Jay Charles Dickens in Cyberspace, 2 Collins, Wilkie, 95, 115 Blind Love, 106-8 Condé, Maryse Windward Heights, 5 Connor, Kevin Frankenstein (film), 160 Conrad, Joseph, 212-13 Constant, Benjamin, 65 Contemporary Review, 129 Cooke, Thomas Potter, 162-4, 165, 168 Cooper, Astley, 16-18 Cooper, James Fenimore, 92 The Pilot, 163 Coppola, Francis Ford, 158 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (film), 158 Corelli, Marie Ardath, 99 Corman, Roger Frankenstein Unbound (film), 167 Cousin, Victor Madame de Sablé. Études sur Les Femmes Illustres et la Société du XVIIe Siécle, 59-61, 65-7 Cross, J. W. (John Walter) The Life of George Eliot, 96 Cuarón, Alfonso Great Expectations (film), 2 Cushing, Peter, 168 Darabont, Frank, and Steph Lady (screenwriters), 158-60 Darwin, Charles, 206

Index The Descent of Man, 89 Daudet, Alphonse, 125 De Niro, Robert, 2, 166-8 De Palma, Brian The Untouchables (film), 167 De Quincey, Thomas, 3, 39-49, 97 (translation of Kant’s) “The Age of the Earth,” 47 “The Avenger,” 40 “Homer and the Homeridae Part III,” 46 “The Household Wreck,” 40 Klosterheim, 40 (translation of Lessing’s) Laocoön, 42, 44 “Mrs Hannah More,” 39 “On the Present State of the English Language,” 43 “Philosophy of Herodotus,” 41, 45 “Pope” (Encyclopedia Britannica), 45 “Sir William Hamilton, Bart.,” 40, 41, 46 Sketches from Childhood, 46, 47 “Style [No. I],” 42-5 “Style No. II,” 44, 47 “Style No. III,” 41 “Style No. IV,” 46 “Table Talk,” 42 De Quincey, William, 48 de Sévigné, Madame (Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné), 65 de Souvré, Madeleine, Marquise de Sablé, 59, 63, 65 de Staël, Madame (Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein), 62 Deleuze, Gilles, 40, 41-2 desire, 51-4, 71, 73, 84, 86, 89, 1029, 116, 125-7 Dibdin, T. J. The Lady of the Lake, 163 Dickens, Charles, 59-60, 81-2, 92, 95, 125, 130 David Copperfield, 116

223 Dombey and Son, 116 Great Expectations, 1-2, 8, 91, 167, 182-92, 212 Hard Times, 172, 176, 179 Little Dorrit, 109, 115 Martin Chuzzlewit, 212 Pictures from Italy, 135-7, 138, 139 A Tale of Two Cities, 68-77 Diedrick, James, 32 Dingley, Robert, 7-8, 102-12 Disraeli, Benjamin Sybil, 172, 180 Dolin, Tim, 92 Dryden, John, 42 Dumas, Alexandre, 125, 126 Edinburgh Review, The, 3 education, 32-5, 96-9, 171-80 Edwards, P. D., 7, 113-23 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans; Marian Evans), xi, 3-4, 59, 125, 127, 130 Adam Bede, 91-4, 98-9, 114, 115, 212 Armgart, 78 Daniel Deronda, 78, 92, 96, 175 (translation of Feuerbach’s) The Essence of Christianity, 60 (translation of Spinoza’s) Ethics, 60 Felix Holt, 3, 172 The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 95, 149 Journals, 60, 62, 92 The Legend of Jubal, 78 “Liszt, Wagner and Weimar,” 60 “Memoirs of the Court of Austria,” 64 Middlemarch, 3, 14-16, 21-3, 91, 97, 99, 115, 212 The Mill on the Floss, 4, 78-90, 96, 98, 114 “The Natural History of German Life,” 63 “Recollections of Weimar,” 62

224

Victorian Turns, NeoVictorian Returns

Romola, 97, 130-31 Scenes of Clerical Life, 78, 92 Silas Marner, 98 “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” 63 “Three Months in Weimar,” 64 “Woman in France: Madame de Sablé,” 59-64, 66 and Australia, 91-101 and Catherine Helen Spence, 92-4, 96 and music, 78-90 travel in Germany, 59-64 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 97, 99 empire and imperialism, 1, 182 Engels, Friedrich, 178 evolution, 160, 206-8, 213 Faderman, Lilian Surpassing the Love of Men, 103-4 Fairfax, Thomas, 29 Fauriel, Claude, 64-5 Fawcett, John Three-Finger’d Jack, 164 feminism, 29-38, 124, 128, 159 Ferrier, J. F., 41 Fforde, Jasper The Eyre Affair, 2 Fielding, Henry, 95 film, 8, 158-70 Fisher, Terence The Curse of Frankenstein (film), 167 Fitzball, Edward The Flying Dutchman, 163 The Pilot, 163 Fitzgerald, Percy, 126 Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary, 15, 113-18, 119, 122 Fleischer, Leonore Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, 158, 160 Ford, Ford Madox

The English Novel from the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad, 212-13 Forster, E. M. Howards End, 172-80 Foucault, Michel, 24 Fowles, John The Collector, 213 The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 3, 205-13 The Magus, 213 Fraser’s Magazine, 60, 64, 66, 89 French literature, 59-67, 113-23, 124-34 Freud, Sigmund, 18 Friend’s School (Hobart, Tasmania), 97 Garlick, Barbara, 8, 9, 10, 193-204 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 4, 59, 81-2 “Company Manners,” 59, 65-7 Cranford, 59 “French Life,” 66 “The Heart of John Middleton,” 59 The Life of Charlotte Bronte, 64 “Lizzie Leigh,” 59 Mary Barton, 8-9 North and South, 59, 172-8 Sylvia’s Lovers, 64 “The Well of Pen Morfa,” 59 Gay, John The Beggar’s Opera, 86 gender, 6, 68-73, 76, 124, 127 Girard, François Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould (film), 82 Gissing, George, 135-45 By the Ionian Sea, 5, 135-43 Goldsmith, Oliver, 95 Goode, John, 156 Gosse, Edmund, 194 Gosse, Philip, 194 Gould, Glenn, 82 Gregorian Chant, 88 Gribble, Jennifer, 2, 182-92 Guizot, François, 65

Index Hamilton Literary Society (Hobart, Tasmania), 96, 98 Handel, George Frideric, 85, 188 Acis and Galatea, 80, 82-4 Hardman, William, 198 Hardy, Thomas, 149 Desperate Remedies, 102-5, 108, 109 Jude the Obscure, 127, 205 Harris, Jocelyn, 6, 29-38 Harris, Margaret, xi, xii, 60, 92, 198 The Notebooks of George Meredith (edited with Gillian Beer), 200 Harrison, Frederic The Choice of Books and Other Literary Pieces, 97 Harte, Bret, 94, 95 Haydn, Joseph The Creation, 85 Haythornthwaite, J., 124 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 47 Heilmann, Ann, 124 Hennell, Sara, 86 Henry, Nancy, 91 Holmes, Oliver Wendell The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, 96 The Professor at the Breakfast Table, 96 Horowitz, Evan, 3-4 Household Words, 59 Hughes, Robert, 1 Hugo, Victor, 65, 125, 126, 128-9 Les Misérables, 128-32 Notre Dame de Paris, 128-32 Quatre-vingt-treize, 128-32 Les Travailleurs de la Mer, 12832 Hume, David, 39-40 Ibsen, Henrik, 95 Ingham, Patricia, 108 Inness, Sherie, 109 Itinerant Literary Society (Hobart, Tasmania), 98 Ivory, James

225 Le Divorce (film), 199 James, Henry, 212-13 Jay, Elisabeth, 124 Jenner, Edward, 25 Jerrold, Douglas William Black-Ey’d Susan, 50, 54, 163 Jewsbury, Geraldine, 115 Johnson, Diane Le Divorce, 199 The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives, 199-200 Johnson, Pamela Hansford, 73 Johnston, Judith, 1-11 Jolly, Roslyn, 9, 135-46 Jones, Lloyd Mister Pip, 5, 182, 183, 186-91 Journal des Savants, 63 journalism, 42, 59-67, 93, 124-34 Jung, Karl, 18 Kant, Immanuel, 39-40, “The Age of the Earth,” 47 Karloff, Boris, 160-1, 163, 164-8 Keats, John, 14-22, 26 Anatomical and Physiological Text Book, 16 Endymion, 20 “The Eve of St. Agnes,” 22 The Fall of Hyperion, 18, 21, 22 Isabella, 22 Lamia, 18 Letters, 20-21 “Ode to a Nightingale,” 18 King, R. J., 3 Kingsley, Charles Two Years Ago, 16 Kipling, Rudyard, 149 Puck of Pook’s Hill, 149 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von Psychopathia Sexualis, 107 La Rochefoucauld, François de Maximes, 63 Lady, Steph, and Frank Darabont (screenwriters), 158-60 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 124-5 Lamb, Charles, 97

226

Victorian Turns, NeoVictorian Returns

landscape, 141, 148-57 Lavalley, Albert, 161 law, 68-77 Lawrence, D. H., 138, 140 Sea and Sardinia, 135, 138, 144 Leader, The, 60 Lee, Christopher, 167 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, 42, 44 Lever, Charles, 92 Levi, Carlo, 140 Lewes, George Henry, 21-2, 31, 5960, 64, 88, 91, 93 travel in Germany, 59-60 Liszt, Franz, 60, 88 Locke, John An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 33-4 Locke, Matthew, 87 Lodge, David The Art of Fiction, 172 Nice Work, 2, 171-80 Lowell, James Russell, 97 Lugosi, Bela, 168 Lyons, Martyn, 97 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 95, 96 Marryat, Frederick, 92 Martin, Arthur Patchett on George Eliot, 94-5, 96 Martineau, Harriet Life in the Sick Room, 16 Marx, Karl, 23 Maupassant, Guy de, 125 Pierre et Jean, 127 Mayhew, Henry London Labour and the London Poor, 194 medicine, 14-28, 208 Melbourne Review, The, 93, 94 memory, 40, 48, 144 Meredith, George, xi Diana of the Crossways, 107 Modern Love, 193-202

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, 198, 202 Poems, 198 Meredith, Mary Ellen (Mary Ellen Nichols), 194, 198-202 Michelet, Jules Les Femmes de la Révolution, 60 Milner, H. M. Frankenstein: or, The Man and the Monster, 164 Milton, John, 29, 42, 196-7 Paradise Lost, 168 modernity, 135-41, 145, 178, 212 Mohl, Julius, 65 Mohl, Mary Clarke (Mary Clarke), 64-5 Madame Récamier: With a Sketch of the History of Society in France, 65 Molière, 66, 124 Montagu, Mary Wortley, 148 music, 78-90, 136 Musset, Alfred de, 125 Rolla, 128 Fantasio, 128 National Review, The, 65 Nestor, Pauline, 92 Newey, Katherine, 7, 8, 50-58 Newton, Isaac, 43-4, 46 Nichols, Mary Ellen (Mary Ellen Meredith), 194, 198-202 Nightingale, Florence, 66 Noonan, Michael Magwitch, 182 Oliphant, Margaret, 124-33 “Novels,” 125 “The Anti-Marriage League,” 127 Ouditt, Sharon, 140 Ouida (Marie Louise Ramé; Marie Louise de la Ramée), 95, 194 Ovid Metamorphoses, 80 Owen, Wilfred, 140

Index parody and pastiche, 2, 5, 9-10, 193204, 212 Paul the Apostle “Epistle to the Romans,” 211 Peacock, Thomas Love, 198 Peake, Richard Brinsley Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, 161-3 Petch, Simon, 7-8, 68-77 Petrarch, 195 Philosophical Journal, The, 63 picturesque, 135-46, 148-57 Pierce, Jack, 161, 165 Planché, J. R. The Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles, 163 Polidori, John The Vampyre, 163 Poole, Adrian, 156 Poovey, Mary, 54 Pope, Alexander, 45, 95 Porter, Peter, 194 Porter, Roy, 18 Price, Richard British Society 1680-1880, 6 progress, 15-19, 23, 135-42 Proust, Marcel, 40-41 Purcell, Henry, 85, 86 Quarterly Review, The, 139 Raphael “St. Michael” (painting), 197, 198 Reader, The, 67 realism, 93, 97, 113-23, 124-34, 155, 178, 186 Récamier, Madame, 65 Registrar, The (Adelaide), 95 Reid, Mayne, 92 religion, 130-3, 205-12 Renan, Ernest, 65 “The Resources, Condition, and Prospects of Italy” (Quarterly Review), 139 Revue des Deux Mondes, 65 Richardson, Samuel Pamela

227 Rignall, John, 148-57 “George Eliot and the Idea of Travel,” 62-3 Robinson, Solveig C., 124 Ross, Janet, 140 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 212 Rowe, Noel, 191-2 Ruskin, John, 96 Said, Edward, 182, 187 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 65 Portraits des Femmes, 60 Sala, George Augustus, 113, 115 Sand, George, 62, 125, 126, 128 Sanders, Valerie, 124 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 208 Sassoon, Siegfried, 200 Sayn-Wittgenstein, Princess Carolyn, 60 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 168 science, 14, 43-4, 46, 47, 158-70, 205-6, 208 Scorsese, Martin Cape Fear (film), 167 Raging Bull (film), 167 Taxi Driver (film), 167 Scott, Walter, 95, 96, 114, 148-56 The Antiquary, 150 The Fortunes of Nigel, 148 “The Highland Widow,” 150-51 Ivanhoe, 148, 149-50, 152 The Lady of the Lake, 163 Redgauntlet, 148, 151 Rob Roy, 148 Waverley, 92, 148, 151 Scriven, Anne M., 124 sensation and sensationalism, 54-7, 142-5 servants, 70-71, 102-9, 161 Shakespeare, William, 95, 161 Antony and Cleopatra, 197 Macbeth, 197 Othello, 197 The Tempest, 164 Shattock, Joanne, 7, 59-67, 124 Shelley, Mary, 139, 162, 199 Frankenstein, 1, 8, 158-70

228

Victorian Turns, NeoVictorian Returns

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 165, 199 “Essay on the Vegetable System of Diet,” 19 Shuttleworth, Sally, 57 Simpson, George, 91 Smart, Hawley Social Sinners, 105-8 Smith, Richard John (O. Smith), 164 Snow, C. P., 7 Socrates, 47 Sousa Correa, Delia da, 87 South Australian Institute, Library of Adelaide, 92 Spence, Catherine Helen, 92-4, 96 The Author’s Daughter, Clara Morison, Mr Hogarth’s Will, Tender and True, 93 on George Eliot, 93-4, 96 Spencer, Herbert 88-9 “The Origin and Function of Music,” 89 Spencer, Sandra, 124 Spurling, Hilary, 194 Sterling, Edward Jane Lomax; or a Mother’s Crime, 51, 52-3 Sterne, Laurence Tristram Shandy, 15 Stoker, Bram Dracula, 168 Stokes, John, 56 Sulloway, Alison G., 32-3 Swift, Graham, 149, 152 Ever After, 154-5 Last Orders, 152, 156 Out of this World, 153-4, 155 The Sweet-Shop Owner, 152-3 Waterland, 152, 154 Talfourd, Thomas Noon, 75 Taylor, D. J., Kept: A Victorian Mystery, 3 Taylor, Mary, 36 Tempest, The (musical setting; Matthew Locke; Henry Purcell), 87 Temple Bar, 113

Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 95, 96, 97 In Memoriam, 118 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 95, 115, 212 Vanity Fair, 116 Thatcher, Margaret, 9, 171, 175 theatre and theatricality, 50-57, 159, 160-64, 168 Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, 87 Thomas à Kempis, 85-6 Thompson, J. Lee Cape Fear (film), 167 Thorpe, Adam Ulverton, 152 Thwaite, Anthony, 9 New Confessions, 193 “No Villain Need Be” (review of Diane Johnson’s Lesser Lives), 199-200 Poems 1953-1983, 193 A Portion for Foxes, 193 Victorian Voices, 193-4, 199202 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 65 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 193 travel, 3-4, 59-65, 135-46 Trollope, Anthony, 91, 92, 95 Barchester Towers, 206, 212 Can You Forgive Her?, 121 Trollope, Frances, 139 Twain, Mark, 95 Uglow, Jenny, 66 University of Sydney, 96 Vicinus, Martha, 106 Voltaire, 124 Wagner, Richard, 88 Wallack, James William, 162 Wallis, Henry, 198, 199 Walter Scott’s “Great Writers” series, 97 Waters, Catherine, 1-11 Webby, Elizabeth, 91-101 Webling, Peggy Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre (stage play), 161 Wellington (New Zealand), 36

Index Westminster Review, The, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64 Whale, James The Bride of Frankenstein (film), 161, 164, 165-6 Frankenstein (film), 160-1, 1648 White, R. S., 6, 7, 14-28 Wiesenfarth, Joseph, 3, 9, 205-14 Wilkes, Joanne, 7, 124-34 Wolfe, Tom Bonfire of the Vanities, 5 Wolff, Robert Lee, 113 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 199 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 29, 32-6

229 Women’s Literary Society (Sydney), 98-9 Woolf, Virginia “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” 210 Orlando, 3, 5, 9 The Waves, 78-9, 90 and music, 78-9, 90 work, 14-28, 32, 68-71, 136-7, 17181 Yates, Edmund, 113, 114, 118 Broken to Harness, 114-15 Zeno, 46-7 Zola, Émile, 114, 128